Category: Book Review

I Feel Sorry for Elon Musk: CEOs build culture, and are extremely important

I do feel sorry for Elon Musk. I would say to him, the government is a very negative experience, full of losers.  And that fixing it will take a lot more work than he can give in short spurts.  People who choose to work for the government are quite different from those drawn to the private sector.  Government is filled with entitled losers who want to make a lot of money off taxpayers without the risk of earning it themselves.  Therefore, it will require significant reform, which is just getting started with the Trump administration.  But it will take decades to unwind the mess that has been given to us.  And I can see that Elon Musk began his DOGE campaign with a lot of bright ideas.  But making the cuts permanent that he has identified isn’t as easy as it would be at one of his companies.  The government is full of parasites, and you have to play the long game with them.  Elon Musk can do the world a great deal of good if he focuses on what made him great to begin with.  He needs to be back at SpaceX every day, sending Starships into space every three weeks.  It has been evident that he has been absent from those companies; they have been experiencing a decline.  The job of a CEO is often not well-defined; they create the culture.  It’s not the work they do but the culture they make in their wake.  And SpaceX has slipped significantly since Elon has been frequenting the White House daily since Trump’s return to office.  It will take more than CEO stunts to save the government.  However, some business success on the frontier of innovation is the best way that Elon Musk can make the world a better place and establish a civilization to save by going to Mars. 

I thought it was astonishingly short-sighted for Disney-run ABC to characterize the Starship 9 mission that launched this past week as a series of failed missions.  The process SpaceX uses for data collection involves launching these Starships to see what works and what doesn’t, so that every configuration of the problem can be witnessed and designed, modified in real-time.  Drawing on extensive experience with this very issue in the aerospace industry, the world is fundamentally flawed in its approach to manufacturing processes.  And SpaceX has taken a noticeably different approach, one that is much more akin to the Skunkworks at Lockheed Martin many years ago.  The world has learned the wrong lessons and incorporated them into its management systems, and the entire industry is in desperate need of an overhaul.  And if Elon Musk wants to change and save the world, he can do it most effectively with Tesla and SpaceX.  The big secret is that you can’t put engineers in a room and get everything right the first time, which is the assumption in aerospace that began with NASA and the need to avoid any accidents that would become public relations nightmares.  When you can automate flights, you can afford to have launches to measure cause and effect, and approach the whole process of technology development much more aggressively.  Even though Starship 9, which launched at the end of May 2025, burned up during re-entry, as did the booster rocket, much of what SpaceX needed to achieve was successful, leading to the technical adjustments that need to be made at the engineering level. 

However, the way the industry operates now is very risk-averse, and, of course, the least risky thing to do is to do nothing, which is why things are so slow in aerospace and why cost overruns are so common.  And when ABC says that the previous SpaceX missions were failures, they are speaking from the vantage point of the administrative state —the kind of world that the government has created for us, with over-regulation and a world shaped by insurance industry lobbyists.  From that world, exploding Starships are a bad thing.  For the innovative SpaceX world, they provide a lot of information, and when you look at the rate of innovation that is needed to build Starships, you need to collect a lot of data to get repeatability outside of engineering tolerances, because until you see all those inventions working together, there is no way to know how stable a process is.  When it came to the NASA approach, you get lucky with a design and then never deviate from it, fearing the unknown, and that is essentially how they built the space program.  SpaceX is seeking complete, automated redundancy that remains reliable after thousands of trips.  To achieve that, SpaceX needs to be launching a new Starship every week, which is why Elon Musk has been so crucial.  Since he has been at the White House, doing good work that often goes unappreciated, SpaceX has been addressing engine bay leaks that have compromised spaceflight, and the Starships have been exploding.  Not a great way to have a space program.  However, the best thing about this most recent Starship 9 mission was that much of it had become so commonplace now.  The Starship was able to undergo stage separation and space flight, solving many of the problems it previously had, so now the other lingering issues can be addressed. 

The best engineering is to do things and fix things as you see problems emerge.  And for something as complicated as Starship, it will take Elon Musk to foster a productive culture among the many great people at SpaceX, guiding them toward corrective actions to address the numerous problems that must be solved for stable space flight.  It’s fantastic that we’ve had only 9 Starship missions and that they’ve made getting them into space so routine.  Now, getting re-entry right, with stable space flight, will be the key, and it will take a full-time Elon Musk to pull it off.  However, when it comes to cutting the deficit, given the current state of affairs, the first step in fixing the American economy is to achieve magnificent growth through new market sectors.  The SpaceX Starship is the best way to reach that point.  China, in their wildest imaginations, won’t be able to copy SpaceX, because they don’t have a person like Elon Musk to act as the CEO.  Just like other considerations of the administrative state, people cannot be swapped out.  Great people are irreplaceable; when they take vacations or are absent from work, things don’t run smoothly.  Exceptionalism comes from unique people.  Not process controls that allow losers in life to be just as good as winners.  Exceptionalism matters, and Elon Musk needs to stay on the cutting edge at SpaceX for it to continue its success.  And if he wants to save the world, he can do it best in the private sector.  DOGE will still be a good idea that will do good work.  But it’s going to be a slow boil.  What we need most is Starship, and missions going to space so routinely that people take it for granted, as usual.  And with the recent Starship 9 mission, that is becoming the standard.  Normal is launching the biggest rocket humanity has ever produced into space, routinely.  Now, getting it to do what we need it to do time and time again is the next challenge, which is very close to being completed. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Don’t Ever Turn the Other Cheek: Seeing and knowing everything

I would say I’m an easy person to get along with.  As long as you don’t smoke pot, drink too much, cover yourself in tattoos and body piercings, don’t cheat on your spouse, don’t live off the government as a welfare recipient, aren’t a Democrat, didn’t compromise yourself in college hazing rituals, aren’t a sexual deviant, aren’t a godless heathen, aren’t a lazy loser, if there are any people left in the world at that point, I’m very easy to deal with.  But love is not promised, it’s earned, and if people abuse their relationship with me, I hold it against them.  And I have to say that because over the Memorial Day weekend, I heard at least three times that I’m a controlling lunatic who is too difficult to deal with.  I wouldn’t say that. Instead, the people complaining, from friends and family who expected something out of me over the holiday weekend, were unhappy at my lack of appeasement of their wishes.  And that comes down to my very rigorous schedule and people who clearly don’t respect it.  I don’t make time for people who have let me down.  And when I get to that point with people, I don’t even care enough to explain it to them.  I drop them, never to look back, and many people find that unsettling.  But to answer the statement that was brought up to me, that I am so hated that when I die, nobody will come to my funeral, I say, that is fine.  I don’t lower my standards for anybody, and if nobody comes to my funeral, which I have no plan to attend anytime soon, I’m okay with that.  I don’t think it’s important to be liked in the world because to do so, you have to compromise to the weaknesses of others.  I’d rather be alone in the world and have nobody come to my funeral than to lower my standards in any way. 

And to that point, I have instructed my wife that should such a day ever occur, to burn my body and disperse it somewhere so people can’t spit on my grave and have access to me in any compromised way.  I don’t talk about it much.  People wonder what it’s like to be as opinionated as I am, and how it works out.  I would say it isn’t easy at best.  But it all comes down to expectations, how people manage their lives, and whether I choose to make time for them when they want me to.  But here’s the thing: nothing is done in the world that I don’t understand, especially regarding people.  I know all the causes and effects of why people do what they do.  Nothing surprises me.  I see through every scheme, deceit, and misplaced non-verbal communication.  I know everything they try to hide from the world, every wart on a person.  Call it a gift I have from God.  To what purpose can I use it to some good enterprise? It would be easy to abuse that talent.  It takes quite a lot of discipline to keep a skill like that pointed toward justice.  But when you have that ability, people can’t snowball you.  And when it comes to family engagements, where many people just haven’t lived very good lives, and as a result, they aren’t very good people, I see and understand why they do everything they have done and they shouldn’t expect a free pass from me. 

I genuinely let people live their lives the way they want to.  But when they show me they don’t care what their actions do to my loyalty, I show them that I care so little for them that I’ll drop them off the earth without a second thought.  That is a long-standing policy I have, and it wouldn’t bother me if it resulted in nobody coming to my funeral or inviting me to do things.  However, that is not the case; I have too many people in the world who want me to do things with them, and my phone never stops receiving text messages and emails from someone wanting something from me.  But the same thing has been happening to my immediate family, and the kind of advice I give them about people in the world.  When my family members ask me what I think of this and that, I tell them.  I tell them everything, and it turns out to be painfully right every time.   And that makes people trying to do bad things in the world very upset that they can’t operate in the shadows, because I so easily shine light on everything.  And when they can’t manipulate people I care about easily, they get angry with me for removing the illusion they have built their lives around.  I don’t go out of my way to do it.  But if I’m asked, I tell it all.  And it’s always right.  Call it a gift from God.  And I use it effectively and in the way that God designed a skill like that.  But saying that, I’m not like Jesus, I don’t turn the other cheek on anything.  I carry grudges for decades and never get over things when bad things have been done to me.  And I’m not about to start doing so. 

There is a long line of very parasitic people.  I would say most people are.  And when people I care about ask me what I think, and I warn them to watch out for people who want to associate with them because they want to loot off their essence, because they are good people and those looters aren’t good people, to beware that they don’t take your soul away from you.  Always manage the eternal component of yourself with the understanding that you can’t undo a compromised self.  And when people try to control people I care about, and my advice keeps it from happening, there will be a lot of anger.  Tough tootles.  If you don’t want the ramifications of that behavior, don’t do the behavior.  But there is nothing I don’t know about human nature.  And I have no cell in my body that seeks to appease people who have done bad things.  So if that upsets people, I don’t care.  I never forget.  I do hold things against people.  And I don’t turn the other cheek only to have it slapped again.  And if that makes me a bad person, I would say that the value system of the people who feel that way is all messed up.  Of course, a log being burned in the fire thinks the fire is evil.  I can live with that because there are a lot of people who have made themselves worthless so that they can easily be tossed into the fire to be burnt up and disposed of without a thought in the world.  And that might upset them.  But I genuinely don’t care.  People who have done bad things to themselves, I don’t forgive.  And I don’t ignore it when they’ve done it to me and people I care about.  Too many people have lived bad lives, made bad decisions, and wished to hide those things by associating with good people to keep their conduct concealed with mass collectivism.  But that doesn’t work with me.  Never forget, I see everything.  I can read the contents of people’s souls, and I know what’s really there and I use that information with great success in life.  That might make people very angry that I can do that.  But they can only blame themselves for being bad people.  You can’t hide it with money.  With community service.  Or snacks at a family gathering.  I don’t have a tolerance for bad people, and yes, I do judge and judge often.  I never signed up for this stupid notion of not judging people.  That is a dumb political position created by bad people to hide their conduct from the world.  I have the opposite view.  I judge and hold it against people forever.  And that might seem unfair to people who are too far gone. But they should have thought about that before they went there.  Don’t be a bad person, and we’ll get along just fine.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Mexico is a Dump: Where is the arrest of the killer of Valeria Marquez

So, where are the arrests? The killer showed his face on the livestream on TikTok when he killed the 23-year-old Mexican beauty influencer on May 13th, 2025.  The Mexican government promised justice, so where is it?  With all the face recognition software there is in the world, why haven’t they gone to his home and arrested him spectacularly for such a horrendous crime?  Because they can’t, because the drug cartels run Mexico and the token government there, just like globalists were trying to do to the United States, won’t allow it.  In Mexico, it’s a dump, and the government facilitates that kind of violence.  Valeria Marquez was trying to escape her drug cartel boyfriend, be a good girl, and turn her life around as a social media beauty consultant.  And when her old boyfriend saw that men were sending her gifts because she was very popular and had quite a large audience, he decided to send a hit man into the salon, right in front of everyone, and while the livestream was running, assassinate her while she clutched a cute little stuffed animal.  And in those moments where her life was stolen from her, she looked like a little girl who, just ten years prior, would have been a little girl thrilled to get such a stuffed animal from a trusted adult.  But she was brutally murdered because she wanted independence from a personal tyrant, and it has turned out to be a terrible story.  But you know what is most sad about it?  You would have never heard about this story if she weren’t a popular social media star.   Because they happen all the time, and in Mexico, they happen every few minutes.  Mexico is a dump, and the criminal elements who run these governments in the world want to keep it that way, because it gives them power over the degradation.

Violence in Mexico is so bad that the other day I saw a Family Guy episode where Peter Griffin made a joke as his head had been cut off and stuck on a pike, bleeding profusely.  And he said, “I took one step away from the resort,” meaning that’s how it is in Mexico.  The drug cartels leave the resorts alone most of the time to give the illusion that things are safe enough to have a tourist economy.  But if you step out of the lines they give you, it’s anything goes, and tourists end up dead all the time.  But more than that, young women like Valeria Marquez know they have no choice.  Once they hit puberty, if somebody sees them and they look reasonably attractive, the cartels will take them away from their families, and there isn’t much they can do about it.  When people wonder why she was dating a gang banger, she had no choice.  If she wanted to live, she had to play the game; her family could do nothing about it.  If you have a pretty daughter, in places in the world where crime rules, which is most places, the world will take her and use her until they are done with her.  And at that point, they might let her return to an everyday life.  But in the case of Valeria Marquez, she was just too pretty.  At 23 years old, her shelf life for sexual exploitation was expiring.  It’s the young girls that these drug dealers want, and at that point, they are starting to get old.  So she tried to turn her life around with a social media account that took off, and hoped that the high profile would save her.  But her ex-boyfriend figured if he couldn’t have her, nobody else would, so he had her killed.

The problem in Mexico is so bad that not even the latest Rambo movie dared to deal with the situation as we needed to.  In the last Rambo movie with Sylvester Stallone, even the famous movie star bent the knee to the cartels’ power.  Otherwise, Mexico wouldn’t have considered allowing that production company to film there.  The Mexican government pretends that it wants to put an end to cartel violence when, in truth, it wants the world to know just how bad it is so that it will be afraid and be very compliant.  Rambo in the movie I’m talking about, Last Stand, went to Mexico to save a young girl, much like Valeria Marquez, from the cartels, and he ended up getting beaten up pretty bad, which is not the way the Rambo movies were supposed to go.  Rambo, in true American fashion, should have gone to the stronghold of the cartel members and killed every last one with a spectacular gunfight.  But instead, he had to barely escape Mexico with his life to retreat to his home in America, where the cartel came to kill him on his home turf, to show the power and control they have even in America.  And Rambo managed to live as they destroyed his home.  But the whole movie was flat because it failed to solve the problem.  What the movie did show accurately, even if it’s really what the Mexican government wanted out of the deal, was to show how the grooming process works for young women, and what the substructure of the organized crime was really like.  And not even John Rambo was strong enough to confront it.

The power of these drug cartels even extends into our Supreme Court, where they have refused to get behind Trump’s war against the cartels, because there is real fear that some hit man will come to their homes and kill them, just as they did Valeria Marquez.  And that’s the point.  Not everyone has the kind of security that President Trump has, and they don’t want to be killed for fighting back against the drug cartels.  These criminals want to make a product that poisons its targets, and we are supposed to let them do it, which is what the Supreme Court decided in its attempt to stop Trump from deporting criminal thugs.  The people Trump has been deporting were the kind of people who killed Valeria Marquez.  And they terrorize the world, especially in socialist countries like Mexico, where the government exists to facilitate organized crime.  There is no concept of private property, so there is no reason to defend it, even if it’s a daughter.  If you have a pretty daughter, you aren’t allowed to have a gun to protect her from criminal thugs.  Instead, you are supposed to surrender her over to them and let them have their way.  And if you don’t, you will be killed too.  It’s so common that it’s even joked about on the popular show, Family Guy.  It’s not even a secret; everyone is in on it.  And the bad guys in the world, many who find themselves in government and getting kickbacks from allowing the crime to occur, facilitate the violence to keep the easy money coming, because they are too lazy and stupid otherwise to earn an honest living.  That is the truth of Mexico.  They don’t want to catch the killer of Valeria Marquez because they want the fear of such killings to keep people under their power and dependent on the government for their safety, which has only perpetuated the problem into the mess we see now.  There are a lot of young women like Valeria Marquez.  And there aren’t enough good people in the world to save them.  And that is a shame. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Hitting the Lottery: My feelings about family are closer to the Amish

This is going to sound bad, but I don’t care.  I’m not humble, and I have no plans to be.  When I say that my fourth grandchild was lucky to be born into the family she was, I mean it for how it sounds.  I always like to see little kids born into the world. And as far as I’m concerned, nothing in the world is more important than family.  Our job as human beings is to emerge from the void and to fill it with consciousness.  And long after the shell of a living body dies away, the spirit that emerges lives eternally for all kinds of purposes.  And even though that spirit has its characteristics and is immortal in its conduct, the experience of a physical existence profoundly shapes the content of that eternal character. As I visited one of my daughters in the hospital giving birth to my fourth grandchild, that was what I was thinking as I visited the hospital wing full of optimism, as other families were giving birth also.  And it was a generally happy floor full of hope for the future, and I enjoy places like that.  But as I was holding this new baby, I couldn’t help but think that she had hit the lottery relative to the other families on the floor.  Out of all the random chances of landing in a body that gave birth in such a family as she had, she was one of the luckiest creatures in the universe.  And it made me sad for the other little kids who will never get such an opportunity.  I wish I could be a parent or grandpa to more kids.  Because most of them have terrible families that cripple them usually before life ever starts to get going and its just not fair to them.

I say that because I don’t spend much time slowing down.  I live a fast-paced life full of high stress and chaos.  So a moment alone with family to talk to each other doesn’t come often.  But for us, a couple of holidays are the best; the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving give us great moments that carry us through the rest of the year.  There are many more throughout the year, but those two are benchmarks that we value more than others.  And they are usually very positive experiences.  But when a new child is born, of course, that is an even rarer occurrence, and we take those kinds of things very seriously in my family.  Because we like life and all the opportunities that come with it.  I want kids more than the average person, and I like them a lot until they start showing signs of becoming adults, and if they start taking on the signs of becoming just another loser in the world, then I lose my enthusiasm for them.  I can’t say I like people, so when kids trade away their childhoods for adult behavior, I think they give away a fortune, and the rest of their lives are wasted.   But with kids, those dumb decisions haven’t been made yet, so knowing them is usually full of optimism.  And for my daughter and her new little daughter, there are many very supportive people in their family, and no matter how bad life gets, there is always room to grow and recover in our family activities.  But compared to the rest of the world and their approach, it almost feels like we are an Amish family.   I can relate to them much more than a normal family these days, because we have similar beliefs about the value of family. 

As I was pushing my granddaughter around the hospital floor to keep her entertained while her mother recovered a bit from birth, I had a good look at the other families also having babies.  Especially the dads.  And by their look, they weren’t ready to have a baby.  You could see the fear in their eyes as they held their newborn children at the tremendous responsibility they suddenly found themselves in.  Most of the dads having new babies were going to let down their families in some way, and they would never get the chance to understand what I’m talking about.  Most people probably won’t.  But to see that fear in the faces of people during such an optimistic time in their lives is sad to see, and I instantly feel sorry for the kids born into such a weak family with bad dads who aren’t up to the rigors of the task.  Most moms at least get a connection to a child who grows with them during the pregnancy.  But the men don’t get to have a baby or bond with it during the pregnancy.  So they aren’t so flat-footed when the baby is born; they have made at least some psychological transition that has prepared them for having a baby.  But the men must go deeper to get there, and most never do.  And the kids end up without a positive primary influence.  I am pretty standoffish with most people because I find them insulting that they don’t take the parenting process more serious, and I know that if they screw that up, then most things they do in their lives will also be screwed up and the kids will grow up to be bad people.  And most of those kids being born with my granddaughter don’t have a chance at a happy life, just by looking at their parents’ faces. 

I wouldn’t say it’s challenging to be a good parent or a grandparent, but unfortunately, most people fall short.  I was thinking about this recently during my birthday in April, when we were all at Hocking Hills doing a ghost hunt at Old Man’s Cave with the grandkids.  It was a lot of fun, and as we were doing it, it was nice to see the lights of discovery light up on the little kids’ faces, and many of those memories with family will shape them for a lifetime in everything they do.  And I enjoy my role in that process, and I always give as much as possible so they get the best opportunities out of it.  But most kids are born randomly into life, and they get the parents they get, which is usually not very good.  And most of the time, they are doomed before they ever get started, and that was certainly the case with all the kids born with my granddaughter.  There are always exceptions, of course.  But for the most part, most kids born that day were born into families where the adults raising them would disappoint them greatly.  And I feel sorry for the lack of chances they will have in life because of it.  I don’t think there is a better or more important job than being an adult mentor for a little, emerging child.  But what’s sad is that so few adults feel that way.  And when I have to see and talk to them, it just reminds me how few there are, and I feel sorry for the kids.  I want to help them all, but unfortunately, I can’t because of how families work.  But for my new grandchild, she hit the lottery. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Hard Costs of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill: Healthcare costs too much and does all the wrong things

As President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill passes through its steps, with budget hawks jumping rope with reality, it’s worth talking about some of our expectations on fixed cost maintenance, things that people have come to expect the government to provide, such as Social Security and Medicare.  I hate those programs; they were part of a growth of government that started essentially in the 1930s and has communist sweat dripping from them in horrible ways.  I’d rather have the money that goes into Social Security to invest myself because the government doesn’t do a good job of making money.  And the cost of health is horrendously out of control, so throwing more bad money at a bad system is just ridiculous, with Medicaid expansion as has been done over the years, especially in reaction to Obamacare, the takeover of a fifth of our national economy.  Unfortunately, healthcare is directly attached to big government, and it’s fair to say I despise it.  I have several family members who work in healthcare, and I try hard to keep my opinions to myself, for their sake.  But our meetings end with dramatic tension because I hate healthcare so much at its foundational principles.  Few things make me angrier than when someone gives me a doctor’s note for not attending their professional occupation, as if the doctor has some exclusive management rights over me.  In my family, the discussion of healthcare is a significant problem that sets me off like a bomb quickly.  And I try very hard to avoid confrontations for the sake of the people I care about.  But I think we should be performing regenerative medicine and not just maintaining declining conditions, which our entire healthcare costs are built around.  And ultimately, that’s where the costs are. 

I was reminded of just how much I hate the healthcare industry recently when one of my daughters was having her second baby, my fourth grandchild.  Of course, as she was having the baby, we gathered at the hospital to welcome the little girl into the world, and it was a generally happy occasion.  Most of the time, birthing is a happy time to go to the hospital, as opposed to all the other times, where someone you care about is stuck there over some physical health issue for which they seldom ever fully recover.  Our healthcare system is about maintaining declining conditions.  Where birth is about growth and opportunity.  So I hate hospitals.  I hate their parking lots.  I hate their receptionist desks, their elevators.  I hate their bathrooms.  I hate hospitals because they are primarily about declining conditions, where the authority over individual lives is surrendered to an administrative state.  So as we were parking to see our new grandchild, my eyes were wide awake to the massive costs associated with the social venture of a hospital culture.  It was a busy place full of people living off the healthcare industry.  And from where we are now, there is no good way to reform anything in healthcare because, in doing so, you would eliminate so many jobs where people serve some small, bureaucratic function in the managed decline of civilization.  What’s broken in our current model is our expectations of what healthcare is and what it should cost.  For our society, it’s one of the things we encourage our children to invest their lives in, like being lawyers, school teachers, and doctors.  We expect those are good, well-paying jobs, and deep down inside, we are committed to preserving them even if they aren’t the best way to approach the growth of a civilization.  So changing it would take a lot of time, gradually.  Not suddenly.

But the waste was evident to me everywhere as we visited our daughter, giving birth to a wonderful young grandchild with her whole life ahead of her.  I felt sorry, though, for all the people at the hospital stuck in that horrible system, either as employees or as victims of some health ailment that could easily be cured by regenerative medicine.  It was hard for me to listen to the conversations about the placenta disposal that were taking place as we welcomed a new baby into the world, because there are enough stem cells in that placenta to fix a lot of the people in the hospital of their health problems.  But fixing them would mean that many of the employees at the hospital would be out of a job, and essentially, a vast majority of our economy would be torpedoed.  So we are a long way away from fixing the horrible problem of healthcare, and Obamacare was never the answer.  But these days, even President Trump is taking credit for helping to keep the socialist approach to healthcare provided by the government somewhat functional, which means people have some medical coverage to throw at this ridiculously wasteful system of health maintenance.  It’s a two-problem condition, the system itself is built to keep people sick and employees employed.  And where the money comes from comes from sources outside of private insurance because the costs are so out of control that only the government can afford to sustain the ridiculous enterprise.  So our expectations of what medical care should be are at the heart of the problem, and we have come to look at the government as a way to keep us alive, which was the goal of communism all along.

President Trump has brought a lot of Democrats over into the GOP and made it a huge tent party.  So, to the budget hawks, trying to drive down the spending in this Big Beautiful Bill of Trump’s, this is a fight for another time.  We need to attack healthcare expectations before we can peel away funding for it, much like education debates.  We have to get the government out of education and healthcare before we can reform them and make these things better.  Because too many people are wrapped up in the system itself, they make their living off the decline of other people.  That’s why I don’t even bring it up to my family members who work in healthcare and its maintenance.  I’m at the scrap the whole thing level and don’t want to spend one cent on it.  Regenerative medicine is the way to go, nobody should ever die of cancer.  And people should be able to live into their hundreds, and keep working as long as possible.  So, all the Social Security processing and health insurance talk infuriates me at the basic level.  And seeing my new granddaughter, it was nice to welcome her into the world, but it reminded me of how much I hate hospitals.  The people there reminded me of hamsters running on the hamster wheel, pointlessly, aimlessly, and only to provide incomes to people for jobs they shouldn’t even have.  There are many better things to do besides health maintenance of declining conditions.  And the authority we have given doctors over our economy, which was most notable during Covid when they made a power grab through the World Health Organization to take over the global economy.  I am proud of Trump for standing up to those losers, but that’s where the fight is, in the social construction of the current healthcare system.  People aren’t ready to cut the funding to a failed model yet, because they work for that system with comfortable jobs that they like too much.  But the time for that discussion is coming, and I can’t wait for it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Joe Biden’s Presidency Was Illegal: They are using the cancer diagnosis to hide the crime behind sympathy

Just remember, when people say that my topics are too wild to be believed, because lately I have been talking a lot about Atlantis and the origins of ancient civilizations, remember that most of the time, if not every single time, I am right about the things I say.  There is a reason by choice that I do not write for significant publications and flaunt academic credentials as part of a byline.  That is because I don’t trust institutionalism because of what I understand psychologically about the people who make it up, and the limits it places on society.  And I sometimes pick some of those complex and wild topics to stretch my legs.  Because when the rubber hits the road, I am always there to say, “I told you so.”  And that was certainly the case when it came to the origins of COVID-19.  I would say I was the very first person out of all the media in the world to call it what we now know it was, which includes some of the wildest so-called “right-winged media” out there.  And I was among the first to call the election fraud of 2020 what it was, and I turned out to be right about everything.  I have covered many very controversial, far-reaching topics that seem insane at the time, but once the facts all come in, I turn out to be right.  So I am having a little fun with the Joe Biden topic after the tapes captured by Robert Hur made their way into the mainstream media.  I found it astonishing that news commentators like Laura Ingraham were shocked by what they heard, which was that Joe Biden was utterly unable to function in a mental capacity and was essentially a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency, propped up by handlers to appear to be in charge.  It was all a complete deception, and once those tapes hit the news cycle, they announced that he had a ten-year-old prostate cancer diagnosis, hoping to use compassion to get the former president off the front pages.  The Hur tapes bring up a much more catastrophic problem that few people can handle.  But I will.

She knew, among many who did

Joe Biden was illegally inserted and was never in command of the White House, leaving unelected personalities running his presidency completely in the background, and now many of those people have been caught.  Now, the good thing is that this break in trust is healthy for people to experience.  Society has been suckered by a group that we call “elites” who hold the power in our offices outside of elected representation.  And it’s a hard learned lesson that will forever change the Democrat Party.  I think they are destroyed forever, but we’ll see.  I don’t see them ever returning from the damage they have inflicted on themselves over these last five years, starting with the Covid cover-up, and ending with the truth about the Biden presidency.  They lied about everything, including his cancer diagnosis.  It’s possible they even lied to Biden himself to keep him smiling for the cameras and standing at a podium with a stick up his backside to keep him from falling over.  We are witnessing a grand deception on an epic scale that was massively illegal in the process, and people will never forget it.  So as we hear the stories of the media sacrificing themselves now hoping to win back trust, and the Jake Tapper’s of the world come out with their books and are getting raked over the coals for what they knew but didn’t say about the matter, and Jim Comey is getting embarrassed in public at book signings by an angry public, and he smiles and takes it, because he has no other option, remember who told you first about all these things……….I did. 

Trump may want to give Biden a pass, but the former president played right along with the plan, knowing the people behind it.

I run the blog because it gives me a chance to express trustworthy independent journalism, and because of how I live my life, it is free of outside influence.  I can afford to do things almost no other journalist in the world can do.  And that is a very valuable asset in a free speech environment.  And people ask me all the time why I do it.  Well, it’s for cases like this, the Joe Biden case, that I do what I do, even though many of the things I said were ridiculed extensively right out of the gate.  Just as the things I am speaking about, like Atlantis, might seem too wild to seriously consider.  When something is so far outside of a mainstream narrative, people have a hard time with it.  But when that state of disbelief is part of the crime, to use that nature against people to perpetuate a knowing deception on the world, we should all have a significant problem with that type of conduct.  And I certainly do, and that’s why I choose to produce the kind of media I do, in the form that I decided to do it.  And the sum of the whole Biden story is that everything Biden signed as president is invalidated because of this massive cover-up, which is the real reason that the cancer diagnosis came out when it did, to use sympathy to hide the crime.  These people have been caught in a major crime against the United States of America, which is all of us who are citizens of this country, and there is no forgiveness for that transgression.  All the people involved in the Biden cover-up committed a significant crime that must now be punished. 

I had to remind a few good friends I have in the media, who are very close to the White House, when the story broke over a mid-May weekend in 2025 that Biden’s cancer story was a ruse, and not to fall for it.  He’s an old man, and most men will eventually get prostate cancer of some kind.  There is no surprise by that diagnosis, so don’t go soft on Biden because he’s a dying man.  I’ve been warning for a long time that when the crapola hit the fan with Biden, they would try to use a funeral to take people’s minds away from the seriousness of the crime.  And that’s what they tried to do with the cancer diagnosis.  Don’t be a sucker and fall for it.  The real story is that everything Biden touched was illegal, including his nomination of a Supreme Court member in Ketanji Brown Jackson, the extremely liberal trainwreck that should be nowhere near a courtroom.  But it wasn’t Biden who picked her, but rather Barack Obama, and Alex Soros, along with his terrorist father, George Soros.  People we did not elect and had no legal right to the office of the Executive Branch. That means every bill signed was signed under illegal conditions and is invalid.  Everything that Biden had been doing for four years was unlawful.  And how do we know? We know they put him in place with election fraud.  And if that story is too wild for you, then now you have the proof that the people behind Biden lied about his health.  He had this cancer before he was elected president, and they lied about it to put him in office so they could essentially run him as a puppet in the background.  They rigged the entire process to get a compromised puppet in the White House so that they could steal that power away from voters.  Just let that sink in.  This is a bigger story than most anybody could wrap their minds around.  But there it is.  And the damage from this will never allow things to return to what they were before.  And a lot of people are in deep trouble for it.  Jake Tapper and Jim Comey are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.  And the Democrat Party has hit that iceberg, and is sinking very fast. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

My Committment to Atlantis and Its Technology: A problem we have to solve before we get to Mars

It’s only fair to take a minute from all the political coverage to make an official statement that I don’t think is new.  But that I intend to contribute a significant amount of my time to in the years to come, and that is to prove that the fabled civilization of Atlantis was real, and that the contents of it, the proof of its existence became the original Native Americans, settling in the Americas and what is left of them is what we have in the mound cultures of the world.  In Atlantis, as Plato described, they had fallen to sorcery and witchcraft and declined well before they were destroyed by catastrophe, and I think the proof of that technology is what we see in the mound-building culture, especially in the Ohio Valley along the Ohio River.  Mounds are worldwide, and I think they are evidence of a society thriving globally around 50,000 BC until around 9500 BC.  And it’s one of the greatest conspiracies ever to be perpetrated against the human race for all kinds of political reasons.  This isn’t something I just woke up thinking about, but something that has bothered me for decades.  I grew up around the mound cultures of southern Ohio, and it started for me when, as a young person, I was given some inadequate explanations about them being burial methods. Instead, as it looks to me after looking at a lot of evidence, which I’m putting together for a new book project called, The Politics of Heaven, I am ready to put a stake in the ground on Atlantis being represented on earth by the destruction of their survivors through the mound building culture and the revelation of their celestial technology which I attribute to occult utilization as a science to perpetuate their society forward, best represented to our historic eyes in Egypt and expressed in the conflict of God with Pharaoh when Moses came to free his people and there was a kind of dual with the magicians of Egypt, the Hermetic order that were the remains of the previous long standing civilization of Atlantis.

The most significant resistance to such a proposal is transportation; the current lazy science understanding about the Clovis culture, of how humans came into North America through a land bridge through Alaska, hasn’t held up under further scrutiny.  Now, with LiDAR technology, we can see under the canopy of the Amazon, for instance, and all over South America, formations of mound-building that are just like what we see popularly in North America.  And that Pythagorean geometry in a very occult way are consistently utilized everywhere, for the same reasons.  This very sophisticated culture used positive relief geometric shapes to communicate with spiritual planes of reality, for which they had full knowledge.  Some aspects of this technology are revealed to us through the Bible, so it doesn’t take much to expand that understanding to this broader conception.  Most eerily, we see the evidence of this kind of ritual technology at Portsmouth, Ohio, where, just like at Stonehenge, they have a series of mound structures that are intended to communicate beyond terrestrial concerns with an avenue that extends from Ohio across the river into Kentucky.  The purpose and location of this construction defy logic, for its location is a glimpse into a much deeper technology that spoke to the spirit world in much the same way that we use electrons to turn on a light.  There are many more of these mysterious sites all over, but the site at Portsmouth is bewilderingly overlooked for its relevance to a profound understanding of a specific astrological technology used as an everyday level of culture descended from great sophistication. Indeed, not primitive hunters and gatherers who could barely rub sticks together to make fire or catch food for the day.

The most obvious evidence of this global trade, which descended from Atlantis and Mu, a raised area in the Pacific Ocean, is the evidence in Egyptian mummies of tobacco and cocaine, which we know were only grown in the Americas.  So any traces of these things would have come from knowledge of trade with society in North America for tobacco and South America for the coca plant.  And specifically to those items, it also shows the obvious connection with drug stimulants to the creation and use of religion, and to communicate in a hyper mind state with assistance from the spirit world.  But it all started in America and not in other places.  That’s not to say that places like Antarctica were not once tropical paradises when the Earth’s poles were otherwise shifted, and those plants weren’t in other places, according to a record of known botany.  But as we understand the modern world, post Ice Age, those plants only came from North America and South America and when traces of them show up in mummies from around the world, you know they had contact with what we call the New World, many thousands and thousands of years before Christopher Columbus rediscovered for Europe, the concept of a new place.  We find more truth in this kind of global population in stories like the Tower of Babel that we think of as regionalized in the Mesopotamian Valley, but likely has roots in a much larger tapestry. 

So why is this important?  Well, institutionalism has been lying to us.  And new characters in the world seek to use this kind of Atlantean technology to have power over others.  Keeping people disjointed and on their heels as rulers keep challengers from attacking their power base through deception.  We see that happening in American politics, and when you study how institutionalism has processed information and used it to control mass populations, a much clearer story begins to emerge.  That is why I have recently been talking a lot about the book by David Price called Weaponizing Anthropology. Anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists, botanists, all the sciences have shown a delineation of logic in saying whatever they have to based on the source that is giving them money.  And by that method, a vast conspiracy has been concealing the truth of human origins, which we need to understand to plan our future.  And so far, we are finding ourselves victims of a power base of politics hiding the past so they can have power in the present.  So I see it as a significant, engaging, and technologically practical consideration.  The secrets of the Lost Continent of Atlantis are not buried under the Atlantic Ocean.  They are in the mounds of North America, at places like Portsmouth, Ohio, Serpent Mound, and hundreds of other places.  And their technology wasn’t mechanical the way we see it, but occult-driven, and completely different.  We see whispers of it everywhere, especially in astrology horoscope readings.  And that doesn’t make that technology superior to what we have today.  Just different, and a method of approaching problems working in the background that reflects our politics of the here and now.  Why do people believe what they do about things?  That is why studying these things is important and extends beyond psychology or history.  But the hows and whys of a culture long suppressed.  A current political order that uses hints of that technology to stay in power today can do so because people don’t even know it exists. After all, the evidence has been hidden.  Even though, as Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, “the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”  Jesus wasn’t talking about the tiny part of the Near East where he lived, but he meant the whole earth, as it was well known from a long and deep history at that time.  Well, we see it, and it’s time we have a serious discussion about it and take that power away from those who seek to abuse it at the expense of all civilization’s past, present, and future.  And we have to do it now before we find ourselves on Mars and facing a harsh reality about ourselves, that we find there archaeology of a past that existed long before Atlantis appeared on earth.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

A Wonderful Expereince: Playing the new Indiana Jones game on PS5

I wasn’t going to play the new Indiana Jones game on PlayStation 5, but after much encouragement from my wife, I did, and I’m glad.  Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was an excellent experience with a great story, and was a throwback to the kind of entertainment I think we need a lot more of.  I was skeptical of Lucasfilm doing anything with Indiana Jones these days under the ownership of Disney.  I like the character and the kind of science spawned from those movies over the years.  But I wasn’t sure if they could pull off a good story without George Lucas.  But my wife has been pressing me to play more video games with the grandchildren, because that’s what they like to do.  But my life is so busy, I don’t have time to hang out online like most video games require, with a very social experience.  These days, video games are a way for kids to interact socially.  Games like Fortnite and Call of Duty put you in contact with thousands of people daily.  Kids who play these games for hours will interact with thousands of people in real time, so video game playing these days is a very social experience, and I’m not at all crazy about that.  I talk to way too many people throughout the week to want to spend my downtime talking and playing with more people.  So I haven’t been playing video games very much, and my wife thinks I need to do more for stress management.   So I listened to her, wives can be good for many things, and when the new Indiana Jones game came out in April of 2025 on the PS5 console, I thought I’d try it. 

Because I’m a fan of the character and raised my kids on the optimism of those movies, as a baseline for other things, I bought the Collector’s Edition of the game, which came with all kinds of neat stuff.  But once I started playing the game, I enjoyed the story as it takes you through the character of Indiana Jones to Peru, the Vatican, Giza, the Himalayas, Thailand, Shanghai, and Iraq.  It’s not an online game, so you can play it without interacting with others and have a nice story-driven experience.  And much to my surprise, this game was very much in line with the Indiana Jones movies, and it had a tone similar to the most recent one, the Dial of Destiny.  So it was true to the original character and didn’t have the woke stuff, which is such a problem these days.  There were a few things, but not enough to tarnish the game.  It was a good adventure story that was much longer than a typical movie.  I spent 60 hours playing the game, with about 12 hours of that time just doing the story itself, so it turned out to be a long movie experience that took place for me during April 2025, which was a good break from all the other things I typically do.  And it was good for the grandkids to see me doing something besides reading books, as I’ve said before, I read 4 to 5 books a week.  Some weeks, more than that, so I cover a lot of content that is very personal.  You can’t share the content you read with your family very well because reading is such a private thing.  But ironically, there is a scholarly element to this Indiana Jones game that was very refreshing.  

The game itself is about the “giant” controversy, which I think is the most important in the world right now, the idea that an ancient race of giants who lived before Noah’s flood inhabited the earth and had a very advanced culture.  I read a lot about this evidence, and it was a surprise that the modern debate drove the game’s plot.  We live in a time when people ask tough questions, and authority figures in authority positions have been caught lying to us, right to our faces.  At the center of this Indiana Jones story are many problems that played out during the Second World War.  Playing the Indiana Jones character you get to deal with actual historic characters such as Bonito Mussolini and the obsession with the occult that the Nazis were investing in and when you put the biblical narrative of the Fallen Angels of God, the Nephilim at the heart of a massive modern conspiracy theory, you have all the contents of a fascinating story, and it was.  Because I read so much about many different topics, the story of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle felt like it was produced and made just for me, including all the items that came with the Collector’s Edition.  I spend a lot of time thinking about these things through books and online lectures.  So it was a pleasure to play a video game about that kind of storyline.  And to have the material compelling, educational, and entertaining.  The game makers really loved the story, and it showed.

They first announced this game in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis.  I wanted to like the news, but I was so down on Disney and Lucasfilm for what they had done to Star Wars that I would have rather they just left Indiana Jones alone.  As a literary character in our culture, Indiana Jones does so many good things that I figured Disney would only damage that character, as they have so many other things they’ve mishandled.  For instance, the pressure seen on a recent Joe Rogan Podcast with the Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass probably wouldn’t have happened without an Indiana Jones character in popular, mainstream literature and filmmaking laying the foundation to apply the pressure.  So many people have been inspired by the character that they have correctly challenged established norms in a very healthy, academic way.  And when a game like this comes out and a mainstream audience plays it in such a mass way, good things tend to happen, and you see that with the questioning of independent investigators, questioning the institutional narrative of things to evoke the truth, which is what we should all be concerned about.  Stories like this light intellectual fires and usually have great significance for those who experience them.  So a game format, as opposed to a movie or a book, was very appropriate.  And I had a lot of fun with the game.  I’m glad I listened to my wife.  I like playing video games, but don’t think I’ll play them often.  But I am so happy to have taken the time to play this one, and it ended up being a positive thing for my entire family.  And I wish it could have gone on forever in many ways.  But playing through the whole story was an enjoyable experience that was a nice break from my day-to-day.  And I look forward to similar experiences to come along that kind of storytelling frontier.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

A Teacher of the Year Getting 30 Years in Jail: Another cover-up case at Lakota Schools

It should be shocking, but it isn’t, as news of the San Diego Teacher of the Year Jacqueline Ma pleading guilty to sexually grooming two of her students, one 11 and the other 12 for an extended period, that Lakota schools had another incident, which was quietly wiped away from the news cycle.  Where is Karin Johnson from Channel 5?  And with that, San Diego teacher, what gave her away as a young 36-year-old prototype that was given their highest honor?  She was the kind of teacher they wanted to say to the world that she was the best, and that parents could feel safe sending their kids to her with all their trust.  Was it the nose rings?  At Lakota, about a month before Jacqueline Ma cried like a baby in front of the judge, throwing all her guilt on the table, Lakota schools had plain clothed police officers escorting out a male teacher from the East Freshman building because the mother of a young girl caught the guy watching porn with her daughter.  And previously, that same teacher had a series of complaints trying to get into the girls’ locker room, to the point that they had to move him somewhere else once people knew what he was up to.  But to keep the story out of the news and to protect the school’s image, especially with this recent lawsuit in Columbus, where Lakota, along with 300 other plaintiffs who have joined the EdChoice lawsuit, want to pretend that they are something they aren’t.  So they can keep the trust of tax-paying parents, instead of admitting what they really are, a breeding ground for Democrat politics with serious sexual deviancy issues.  The media never reports on the issue until there is a confession, which is rare.  And before action is ever taken, as in the case of the Lakota case and the San Diego case, it takes a nosy parent to ask questions and insist on an investigation, which then turns up diabolical behavior discovered too late.

It should be evident by now what is going on; these public schools only care about their reputations so they can continue to steal money from taxpayers to fund their monstrous meat factories of sexual molestation and disastrous grooming of innocent kids.  These cases are so common that, statistically speaking, if you look at those who aren’t getting caught, it’s an astonishingly high number, so much so that all students would be able to report some creepy teacher they have to interact with who has boundary problems.  The schools cannot detect it through their teacher union contracts because they don’t ask for or tell about concealment policies.  Jacqueline Ma was given everything and had an incredibly bright future if only she could keep her shirt on.  Yet she had such bad judgment that she was taking her clothes off in class to show the young boys her boobies and was sending them text messages with all kinds of incriminating content because when people, any people, get into authority positions, it is very difficult not to abuse that relationship.  Obviously, for teachers of the year like Jacqueline Ma, it was tough to keep her clothes on, and her mind out of the gutter when she had a class full of students under her power, not to abuse it.  And back to the EdChoice case in Ohio, or Trump’s position to strengthen School Choice and eliminate centralized education methods, favoring more competitive approaches, it’s because of these stories that no public schools in the country can say that they are efficiently teaching children. Instead, they are abusing them sexually and ruining them for the rest of their lives, in many cases. 

I pick on Karin Johnson because I have a history with her.  She’s always there too late and supports the public school experience with blinders on.  I know her from my WLW days, when she was friends with Scott Sloan, the radio host.  I talked a lot about public school problems on his show until Scott got in trouble with his wife, a real estate agent, and those segments on a big radio station were what she thought was damaging to the real estate value of the school districts where she was selling.  So things went south, and Karin Johnson showed herself as a former cheerleader using the news as a pro-school advocate.  Only when a story completely collapses does she do a story on these dangerous public schools.  Instead of digging up the problems, they turn their attention to the people trying to bring all this to the surface, to protect the public schools for many of the reasons that were behind WLW radio getting out of that business.  The advertisers want to think well of these schools, whether they are good or not.  And now people hear too many of these stories that they want to pull their kids out of the schools and send them somewhere private.  And they want choices in education because the public option is far from reform-worthy.  Many people who have pushed these terrible stories under the radar want the public option to work for one reason or another, psychological or financial, and it’s hard for them to face the facts.  However, parents are sick of having to do all the work, and if it were not for them, the school would never admit to these transgressions.  And everything would continue to be swept under the rug.

It’s a problem in every workplace: the abuse of power by those who have authority over others, whether students or employees.  You cannot have a system of efficient teaching when a school system in San Diego gives a teacher like Jacqueline Ma a Teacher of the Year award, because they are measuring all the wrong values.  I would have told them that the nose ring should have been a disqualifying attribute.  You can’t be Teacher of the Year with a nose ring.  And if you take your clothes off in front of your students and send them pictures of you in sexual conditions, you can’t work as an authority figure in the school.  Or like in Lakota, where these cases are pretty much daily, if you watch porn with your students, grooming them, you are fired.  And if this young girl’s mom didn’t stick her nose into the situation, that teacher would still be employed, even though the other teachers know all about the problems.  They don’t say anything because they care more about the school’s reputation.  Not in actually being good and performing well.  The public school experience is inefficient, expensive, and corrosive because it has bad teachers instructing students in vulnerable positions, doing all the wrong things.  And it’s out of control because the checks on that power are more interested in keeping the stories from the public to hide it, because of some financial or emotional interest, that they have made the problem far worse.  It’s so bad that whistleblowers, like that girl’s mom at Lakota, are viewed as troublemakers, instead of the teachers caught doing the dirty deeds.  The assumption from the public school supporters is that we should all keep in mind the greater good of public education, even if that good is only in bad teachers continuing to get a paycheck stolen from property owners for a service that is horrible in general to an entire generation of kids.  And when it comes down to it, nobody but a few parents who care are looking out for the kids.  Not the news, not our politicians, not our business world, nobody.  Not even our churches.  Nobody cares because the evil under the rug is so vast and horrible that people would rather not find out about it until some tenacious parent catches someone guilty, and they cry like a baby, hoping to get a plea deal to cut 30 years of jail down to a lesser sentence.  By that time, their lives are already ruined. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Public Schools Are Going To Lose on EdChoice: Free legal advice on how to beat this case in court

In early May of 2025, oral arguments for the joint lawsuit by over 300 affiliates attached to public education funding made their pitch for why school vouchers harmed them and needed to be made unconstitutional.  Lakota schools in my district have recently joined this lawsuit with some horrendous legal advice from their counsel, but here’s the deal, and it’s quite clear after listening to the plaintive side of the case.  I had friends who went to provide testimony for the defense, for the position of the state to continue with the expansion of the school voucher program, in this case specifically, EdChoice.  I don’t think there was any question going into it how it was going to evolve.  But the position of the presenters, the public school argument, was incredibly weak.  Pathetically weak, and I guess you would expect them to be better prepared.  Here’s the deal: Public schools have left people wanting something better because they have performed terribly over a long period.  And parents want choices for their kids.  We’re not talking about not having education here.  We are talking about better education made that way through competition.  These pathetic public schools run by these ridiculously lazy teacher unions have destroyed the public education prospect as it was initially conceived.  Because most parents need the free babysitting service, they hold their noses and just put up with it.  But increasingly, parents don’t want to send their kids to public schools, and they want access to private schools, so they look for options like EdChoice to do so.  For many parents who currently send their kids to private schools, the system is really unfair to them.  They already pay property taxes to a local school attached to their zip code, and the full tuition for the private alternative.  Now, more people want the same option; they only wish that the tax money they pour into the system would be used to help give them an option instead of wasting it on a poorly managed local school they have no choice in.  Other than picking up and moving somewhere else.  It’s an evil system that is in deep need of reform. 

This is a common occurrence in public education institutions, and is why in Ohio, they can’t meet the ‘efficiency’ standard. This is a recent case out of state, but shows the system itself is broken and Ohio has plenty of their own cases.

I’m happy to do it. I usually do it twenty times a week for somebody somewhere, and I’ll give everyone some free legal work in this case.  This is an easy case without much drama because of the wording in the Ohio Constitution, which I think is a remarkable document.  I love the Ohio Constitution.  For fun, I read it at least once a week.  But for the plaintiffs in this EdChoice case, they are way off the rails on their argument.  And for the defense, here is how you win this case with an end zone dance.  The Ohio Constitution from 1851 says, “the General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”  The problem with the teacher union-run public schools with an operating management system straight off the pages of the Democrat Party is that they have let their costs get away from them, and that nobody manages the efficiency of the product they produce, no matter how you manage “efficiency.”  We could measure efficiency by the output, student quality, and ability to navigate adult lives.  Or get jobs that they are well prepared for.  Or we can measure efficiency by the cost per pupil, how much money it takes to produce a good student, “efficiently.”  In all the cases, the public school presentation of their point of view falls short because of the wording, “efficiency.”  They want and expect an exclusive monopoly of state funds, which has caused them to be wildly inefficient.  And it is in this failure that there is a court case at all.  Public schools, six at this Columbus hearing, but a lot more in the background, are trying to stave off what they caused for themselves. 

People want choice from the public school system because it has proven itself to be incredibly inefficient in allocating funds to the proper education of Ohio students.  So the burden of proof in this case is on the plaintiffs to show how they have presented an efficient product worthy of state money, rather than their assumption that they are promised state money just for existing.  They have not met the minimum Constitutional threshold for their base argument.  That’s why the Supreme Court has found the Ohio school funding model unconstitutional up to this point and why it has lingered in indecision.  That word “efficiency” is a real problem for how public education evolved, and the writers were wise to put it there.  You could also say the same about the word “thorough.”  How can public schools say they provide a “thorough” education when the evidence shows that they do only what they have to do to get state money and use it to pay overpriced labor markets ridiculous amounts of money for perpetually poor performance?  The plaintiffs really sounded foolish in this constitutional regard at the Columbus oral arguments.  Even I was embarrassed for them.

I know it, the public school types claim that they are held to different standards than the private schools are not held to, and there is money in that compliance.  But that is again part of the problem of inefficiency, even if government standards have made the public school experience less efficient.  It contributes through their argument of the facts that the public school experience is unreasonably inefficient because of the standards the state has put on them to make the use of the money they get less effective.  Which only makes it worse for them.  This kind of back and forth is why more and more parents want an off-ramp to the public school experience.  Parents wish to choose whether it’s in a private school or to homeschool their kids so they don’t have to send their kids to a factory of Democrat politics, which is what modern education has evolved into.  Public schools are not teaching kids to grow up and become Republicans, which would make sense if it were fair both ways.  But they are actively trying to teach kids to grow up and become Democrats.  And what parent wants to pay for that if they don’t want to lose their kids to radical politics?  Which happens a lot in the public school experience.  And when you go to school board meetings to complain, and the school board cuts off the mic to shut everyone up, what do they expect to happen?  People will want to pull their kids out of those schools and will not want to waste their money on an inefficient school just because it happens to be in their zip code.  The public schools have shown that they waste the money and continue asking for more.  Because they are a bad product made that way through a monopoly status.  And the best thing for them, to make them Constitutionally viable, is to force them to be more efficient in a competitive marketplace, which is why EdChoice and many other voucher programs will increase in number in the years to come.  The teachers’ unions will not win this case, because they can’t show that they contribute an efficient and thorough product.  And with that, the case is over.

Rich Hoffman

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