Category: Book Review

The Michael Ryan Solution: Why its great that he is running for Butler County Commissioner

Out of my most recent articles, the one that has received the most attention is the one I did on sky taxis, specifically the products that Joby Aviation, right up the road in Dayton, Ohio, has ready to go straight from the concept of the Jetsons to practical applications now in 2025.  There are places in the world right now, within a few months of this writing, that will take delivery of these sky cars and make them part of their expanding economy as a new transportation option.  This is not science fiction, but indeed the next generation in personal transportation, and I have proposed that it should be Butler County, Ohio, the home of perhaps two future presidents very shortly, that should be leading the way on this exciting new technology, because honestly, someone in the United States is going to do it, and do it soon leaving everyone else to catch up later.  It is much better to be a leader in something new than to be a come-lately, especially in the way that Butler County, Ohio, is evolving as one of the tremendous technical centers of the world.  I talked to Vivek Ramaswamy recently about his plans as governor, and these eVTOL aircraft concepts will be a natural extension of what he wants to do in the state.  New economies form around new technology, and probably there is nothing newer than these air taxis.  Soon, they will be everywhere; most people will use them just as commonly as people use cell phones, and the world will be much more interesting and faster.  At the State of the State speech from Governor Mike DeWine this year, 2025, even he mentioned what Joby Aviation was doing in Dayton, so this is very much a technical reality waiting for some bold people to be the first, and I have been trying to encourage people in Butler County to be those first bold people.

While I was at a recent fundraiser for Nancy Nix, I was carrying around a plate of food, looking for somewhere to sit down.  I had been talking too much and didn’t have a place to sit as Nancy was trying to prepare everyone for some entertainment she had for the evening.  My wife couldn’t attend that event, so I was alone and didn’t consider taking a seat.  So I was in a pickle now that everyone was sitting down.  So there I was with my plate full of food, needing a seat when Vice Mayor of Hamilton Michael Ryan and his very nice wife Amanda encouraged me to sit with them.  So, I did, and for dinner conversation, we had an excellent talk where I learned that he was planning to run for commissioner of Butler County, which is good because recently, Cindy Carpenter had been caught campaigning for Democrats in Middletown, leaving many people very angry.  So, for the upcoming Republican primary ahead of the 2026 election cycle, people were looking for alternatives, and it sounded like Michael Ryan could be it.  I have come to know him somewhat well; we pass each other at many events, and he has enjoyed my social media over the years. I have seen him stand tough in the pocket on more than one occasion, even for a pretty young person, young to my eyes.  He’s over 40 now, but I have a habit of referring to people in his age group as young, which I do to many people I deal with who are his exact age.  But when it comes to some of these new political positions, I would love to see someone with a good 20 years of work history in front of them, with lots of fresh ideas and ambition to do them.  So it didn’t take me long to get interested in his statement about running for county commissioner.

But he wanted me to sit with them mainly because he was interested in my articles on new transportation methods like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop system, which I proposed should be built in Monroe, Ohio.  Then, this Joby Aviation alliance I was talking about for West Chester, Ohio.  While Michael has been on the Hamilton City Council and has been doing a great job there, which has plenty of challenges, running for commissioner of one of the three seats requires a much larger vision for a community like Butler County, which comes with some lofty expectations.  We have had pretty good commissioners, and I had been thinking for a while that there is great potential if only we could get T.C. Rogers a second vote.  T.C. is a free market advocate, thinks right about many things, and could use a good partner as a commissioner.  Don Dixon has been pretty good, too.  They know how to make the spaghetti in the kitchen but could benefit from a fresh, youthful vibrancy.  Cindy Carpenter is listed as a Republican with the other two, but she behaves like a Democrat and has for a long time, leaving people hungry for an option.  So, Michael Ryan came across to me during this discussion as someone who might fit perfectly into the needs of Butler County.  So, given all the elements, it seemed like an opportunity to talk about some of the exciting things that could be possible if we put someone like Michael Ryan onto the seat of Butler County commissioner.

Michael and I met at a spot I think is the perfect property for a Joby air taxi service port.  There are lots of places in Butler County for something like this as a hub, where people visiting at CVG downtown could fly straight to Butler County to shop at Ikea for the day or to conduct business and stay at one of the many hotels that are within walking distance to this proposed location.  However, even within Butler County’s 400,000 residents, it is a quick way to get to Miami University, downtown Hamilton, and even Butler Regional and Middletown airports.  An air taxi service would see immediate good business and be economically viable right out of the box.  So Michael Ryan and I talked, and I filmed it so people could listen in and get to know him a bit.  It would take investors with vision to make anything happen.  It would take technical expertise to set it all up.  There are plenty of achievable challenges.  However, the most important thing to me is setting up the political infrastructure to achieve it.  Given where the Trump administration is on these kinds of things, I am confident that there would be lots of encouragement at the federal level.  This economic boon could help Middletown a lot, and J.D. Vance would like to see that happen.  His personal friend, Vivek Ramaswamy, will be the next governor of Ohio, and I know he’s excited about it.  The proposed location of Butler County, Ohio is mainly in Senator George Lang’s district, the current Majority Whip at the Statehouse.  I know a friendly trustee in Mark Welch in West Chester who could get on board with something like this.  What was missing was a county commissioner who could connect all the dots and remove the barriers so the business people could make the investments.  And after the talk Michael Ryan and I had, it should be obvious why I’m endorsing him and why I was so happy that he invited me to sit with him and his wife at the Nancy Nix fundraiser.  We had a great discussion that could grow into something truly special, which is very exciting. 

Rich Hoffman

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

George Lang Tried to Tell Them: Woke politics is why Lakota is losing money

To answer the question that was asked at the March 12th special meeting of the Lakota school board, why were they losing around 9 million dollars out of their quarter of a billion dollar budget to Ed Choice vouchers and could they sue the state for money they assumed was guaranteed to them, a little fog has to be removed from the subject.  I was in Columbus for Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech, and there were education protesters in the rotunda making a lot of noise and looking horrible doing it.  Legislators were working on the new budget, and the fear was that public schools would lose money, which is the trend across the country.  Now, I warned everyone this day was coming, that Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education would be dismantled, and education funding would be built in a more competitive direction.  What we have been doing has not been working.  People worried about the future should be happy that Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be the next governor of Ohio, wants to pay teachers more.  He is a lot nicer on the issue than I am.  And for that matter, my personal friend Senator George Lang is too.  They believe that public education can be saved in some way, whereas I do not.  I think institutional learning is beyond help, but that’s why there are debates in government and education. Employees should at least be happy that Vivek and Lang are of like mind and want to preserve public education somehow.  Yet the protesters at the Statehouse were not the kind of people that made you want to dig deep into your pockets and give them more money.  They all looked pretty ragged and as though they needed to skip a few meals.  They sounded like entitled losers demanding more money in the budget from Ohio taxpayers who have not been given a good product that makes society better. 

So I was outside the Representative’s Chamber talking to several of our area politicians of Butler County and they were asking me if I was going to the emergency Lakota meeting where the plan was for them to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit against the state because Lakota was losing funding due to parents choosing to use the voucher programs already in place to give education options to their children.  When they asked me, I was already thinking about it; my phone had been lighting up for the previous 24 hours from people asking me to go because it was an emergency.  Lakota was already trying to build the foundations for a tax increase to pay for a facility project they were planning to vote for soon, for many millions of dollars for what was turning out to be a pretty crappy product.  And the kind of people who plan to work against that tax increase wanted me to see for myself just how ridiculous Lakota schools had become.  I was reluctant; I have not paid much attention to Lakota schools since they ran off just the latest conservative school board member the previous year.  I have worked to give Lakota a school board of reasonable people to deal with the coming education challenges, and their reaction was more radicalism like the idiots I saw in the rotunda, so I wasn’t too keen on the idea.  I was talking to Representative Jennifer Gross and Thomas Hall, among other people who were equally concerned about the invite they had to join in this special meeting.  And as we discussed in Columbus, my comment was that it was a hit job by the school board to set up our representatives so they could have an excuse to blame them for why they had to join the lawsuit.  I will credit them: Senator George Lang, Representative Thomas Hall, and Representative Jennifer Gross all attended the meeting by phone because they were either still in Columbus or, in George’s case, out of the state.  But they lent their voices in surprisingly effective ways.  I decided to return from Columbus and attend the meeting in person because it seemed like a good chance to see the new school board and administrators.  After all the mess over the former superintendent, Matt Miller and a purge of personnel since then my attitude toward public funding of schools was that Trump was going to be re-elected, he was going to dismantled the Department of Education and all education issues were going back to the states where people like Vivek Ramaswamy was going to have to figure out how to compete against other states.  The teacher’s union-run public education system was a thing of the past.  I tried to warn everyone, but they didn’t listen. 

And I was right about the meeting.  Our area representatives did a nice job providing comments about whether or not school vouchers were here to stay in public education or whether it was a fad that would fade away.  After the remarks were given, the school board did what they went there to do: they voted to join the lawsuit to get money from taxpayers they had not earned.  It’s the case that will lose in court a few years down the road because people can’t be compelled to purchase a bad product, and public education has shown itself to be deficient in every way it is measured.  The school board’s plan was to blame the politicians who had not secured funding for their bottomless pit approach to school budgets.  However, the representatives did so well that it wasn’t easy to blame them for the existence of school vouchers such as the Ed Choice program. 

George Lang told them that the cause of parents wanting to leave Lakota schools through a voucher was the fault of the school itself for accepting woke politics that those parents didn’t want their kids exposed to.  It was a blunt statement, but it was given with as much love as could be provided in that circumstance.  And the large audience attending, representing the teacher’s union mentality, the same kind of people protesting at the Statehouse rotunda earlier that day laughed and heckled George with boisterous sentiment.  As Doug Horton wanted to put on a show to fight George, as did another school board member and the new superintendent, the comment was the truth behind the matter.  Increasingly, Lakota schools would have to compete for every kid enrolled there, and their funding approach was dependent on their ability to be an education destination instead of funding attached to the zip code.  And the bottom line was that people who wanted to take their kids out of Lakota schools and drive them across town to another school was because more and more parents didn’t want to share space or time with the kind of people who were giggling at George Lang.  We just watched that same school board run off Darbi Bobby, the previous school board member representing a percentage of the Lakota population.  And she was just the recent.  This has been the practice of Lakota’s school board, to control the message by eliminating dissenting opinions because the system isn’t designed to deal with actual management.  And if only 4 to 12% of the total Lakota population found they didn’t want to deal with transgender politics, or essentially the Democrat party platform which comes with just about all public education enterprises, then given a choice, which is only going to expand under President Trump and future governor Vivek Ramaswamy, parents would take their kids out of Lakota so not to deal with people like Doug Horton and the rest of the school board.  Their desire to fight George Lang over the truth that he tried to give them, bluntly, was the same thing driving away the dollars they thought they were entitled to have in the form of a budget.  Just a preview of that court case: the courts will not favor these collective schools joined under the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit because you can’t compel people, such as taxpayers, to buy a bad product.  And public education has become a lousy product over time with gross mismanagement everywhere.  We also saw examples of bad management at that Lakota school board meeting with clueless people and their very liberal politics.  Parents don’t want to share space with people who don’t share their values, and they are picking up and moving to other options because of woke politics.  The blame for that falls on the people who dug in and retained that system, which never worked—and instead insisted on throwing more money at a failed approach.  Rather than looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for the issue, they tried to blame everyone else for why they were being rejected under a competitive approach.  And that of course, won’t solve the school funding problem.  You can’t pave over the problem with more money.  You have to actually solve the problem, which are the people in public education themselves.  Parents want to reject having to deal with people who don’t share their values.  And if Lakota wants to survive into the future, it is going to have to make itself more competitive in attracting dollars, like everyone else in the world has to.

We have a great senator in Ohio

If you listen to the school board meeting from March 12, 2025, included here, you will hear the audience get into an uproar whenever George Lang spoke, as he became the target of the teacher union types due to his opening statements about wokeness in Lakota schools.  George was speaking his opinion on the matter, and those people in the audience, and some of the school board members themselves, fed into that communication.  So for Doug Horton and the rest of the mystified cast of characters at Lakota schools, that is your answer as to why parents are looking for School Choice options.  Think of the soccer mom who voted for Trump at a Friday night football game. Or a Republican is at an art show for their child at school, and they are interacting with these liberal radicals advocating for transgender bathrooms. Do you think they want to be made fun of like that audience did to George Lang?  Senator Lang is a professional who is used to that kind of thing and likes it. But does the average family attending schools at Lakota want to deal with people like this?  Of course not.  Do they want to fight with people like that?  They saw what they did, including that school board, to Darbi Boddy and other conservative school board members from the past.  Rather than fight those people, they look for a school voucher and take their kid to a school they think is nicer and better for them and their children.  That is why people are fleeing the Lakota district, and George was trying very nicely to tell the Lakota school board that to survive in the future, they need to make it so people want to attend Lakota.  But not that people who have different ideas about things are going to be beat over the head with Democrat politics and that they have to take it because there are no other education options.  Parents want options and don’t want to deal with political radicals who do not share their fundamental social values.  That’s why Lakota lost that 9 million dollars out of their budget and why they are projected to lose a lot more than that.  It’s because they have mismanaged the district with the assumption that the children were theirs and not managed by the parents who want the best opportunity for their children.  And by choice, parents have reasoned that Lakota is not it for them.  It’s Lakota’s job to convince them otherwise. Not to sue for money they did not earn. 

The trend of today, with D.O.G.E. and the massive cuts to the Department of Education, and the election of Trump and others to office positions, George Lang included, as well as the future of Vivek Ramaswamy, are because the employees of government, such as Lakota schools, failed.  Protesting against voters’ choices will not solve the problem of how people came to feel the way they did.  Government employees, including school teachers and administrators, did not provide a good product, and people have come to admit that their service was not worth the money.  That is the environment in which Lakota schools and many other school districts find themselves.  And it won’t get better for them.  They thought that the politics of guilt would last forever and the entire levy structure of using children to acquire more tax revenue to feed greedy, liberal unions would always continue.  But the truth is, as we know it today, public education is a thing of the past, and it’s never coming back.  People, if given a choice, will not choose to spend their time around people who are hostile to them.  The way these radicals shut down opposition at school board meetings in general is why the Trump administration is opening up School Choice options and sending their management back to the states.  The radicals had five decades to figure it out, and what they gave us is embarrassing at best and certainly not worth the money we’ve spent on it.  So, who is to blame?  Attend a school board meeting and witness the quality of the people screaming for more money, and the answer will quickly become apparent.  The current school structure, where money is attached to a zip code rather than the child, is like the Berlin Wall trying to kill people attempting to escape to the West.  The mentality is the same, and the more the teachers’ unions dig in, the more people want to be as far away from them as possible.  And the people they vote for in office are those who will give them options away from those radical government employees.

Rich Hoffman

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

DeWine’s State of the State Speech: Lakota schools plots their own demise

Oddly enough, while I was in Columbus to attend the Governor’s State of the State speech, it was Lakota schools that everyone was talking about, and they wanted to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit.  But in many ways, that wasn’t surprising, and it was confirmed again in Mike DeWine’s speech that day.  Years and years of kicking the can down the road in all these public schools were catching up to them, and the bill was due, and nobody knew what to do about it.  Governors like DeWine have done for decades what they were now doing at Lakota schools around 91 miles to the south in Butler County, Ohio, they were writing tax payer checks for a product and service that fewer and fewer people wanted, and now with Trump in the White House, the warnings I have been giving everyone about what was going to happen are coming true.  Instead of getting out in front of these funding problems, Lakota schools dug in and became more woke.  Senator Lang tried to tell them on a call later that day after the Governor’s speech, but the school system had dug in the opposite direction.  Others and I have tried to give Lakota conservative board members a chance to deal with this issue, and their response as a school board was to run them all off, and that extends beyond Darbi Boddy, the most recent that they found some way to push out of management.  And like things are where liberal types run things, everything costs too much money, and now Trump was cutting back the Department of Education and gubernatorial candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy was talking about significant reforms in education with merit pay, leaving schools like Lakota to join lawsuits with other schools having the same problem, hoping that some sixties flowerchild protest might recover for them a silly little 9 million dollar loss that has come out of their budget due to students utilizing Ed Choice vouchers that are now expanding under the Trump administration and flowing down through the states.  For perspective, Lakota schools in Butler County, Ohio, has a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and that’s still not enough money to fund education the way they want to.

And you know what makes me the angriest about all this? I didn’t get any of Fran’s cookies this year. Fran is Mike DeWine’s long-time and very dedicated wife, who typically gives them out to attendees of her husband’s speech in the rotunda.  This year, activists were there chanting for more money as they felt the pinch from a social disconnect from the standard old traditional funding model of public education.  To avoid the activists, DeWine was ushered away underground to safety, leaving the rest of us to watch their bizarre and out-of-touch rituals with curiosity. The Lakota situation was the topic of conversation because they are one of the largest districts in Ohio, and so went them, so went everyone.  And that was kind of a proper metaphor for DeWine’s State of the State speech.  A do-gooder Governor tosses money at public education and hopes that everything will work well for the kids.  But its these crazy labor unions with woke politics that have screwed up the funding model because people don’t like the product.  And school vouchers, much less restricted these days and growing more so, are giving parents the choice away from their zip code schools where they pay enormous property taxes to fund a political movement they hate essentially.  And Lakota schools were right in the middle of the spectacle leaving DeWine to give just another empty speech about the value of education, and sending books in the mail to students to help with literacy, when the real problem was significant and ominous, and far beyond at this point just passing out cookies in the Statehouse Rotunda to ease tempers.  Legislators were in the middle of the budgeting process for public education at the time of this speech, but the government unions want to cry and protest for money that just isn’t there and aren’t willing to deal with the reality of the coming changes.  And those legislators were mad at what Lakota was thinking of doing then, which they did later that evening.  So it wasn’t a good move by the Lakota School Board.  But I tried to warn everyone, and they didn’t listen.  Much more on that to come.

The main thing in DeWine’s speech was that the Governor came to the speech like an old grandpa that went out to dinner the night before to eat barbeque ribs and still had on a bib from that experience the next day when he thought he was showing up for dinner in a nice suit and tie.  DeWine was out of step and slightly behind the rest of the world for his sixth year in office, most of which had not been very good, especially during the COVID-19 years.  But watching him speak, I thought of him as a nice guy who has been constantly suckered by the same kind of losers who protest education funding, like the people who greeted him upon leaving the State of the State peech.  The old flowerchild strategy of crying like some baby bird until mother government drops a worm in its mouth has long been exhausted, and DeWine never understood it.  He’s a good man from a political generation that caused all these problems and doesn’t know what to do about it.  We have to wait another year or so before we get Vivek Ramaswamy and tackle some of these key issues because just throwing money at problems is not what voters will do in the future. 

The best thing about DeWine’s State of the State speech was the expansion of business enterprise in Ohio, specifically the Andruil factory just south of Columbus and the Intel facility to the north.  There was a lot to talk about, and for DeWine’s credit, many people have been working in the background to make Ohio a much more business-friendly state.  At least DeWine hasn’t stood in the way of those efforts; he’s been willing to tag along.  We’ll get a lot more with Vivek Ramaswamy as Governor, but since DeWine was able to part ways with Amy Acton, the stringy haired hippie who used to be the Health Director during Covid, Ohio has grown more business friendly to make up for their position of lockdown politics that so crippled just about everyone.  Over the last couple of years, DeWine has at least not shut the door to companies like Intel, even though it has largely been members of the Senate that paved the way.  That’s how government works, and it’s very fascinating.  But once the good news was talked about regarding Ohio and DeWine’s speech, the topic went back to the tired old view of the world, and the chants outside could be heard in the chamber, and the reality of places like Lakota schools was coming to fruition.  The days of easy money stolen from taxpayers to fund woke causes were over.  And many people at the State of the State speech in the Ohio Statehouse were struggling with the ramifications of decades of trying to appease the screams of the teacher union types.  But reality has a lot more in store for them than they realize.  The result will be more anger at the people running public education and politicians like Mike DeWine ending their terms dismayed while much more innovative people replace them with reforms that will change all the rules.  The Lakota School Board, in its current form, is just not prepared to deal with it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Capitol Hill is the Most Intelligent Place on Earth: Correcting humanity where they fell short in the Book of Judges

For the first time in my life, I was ready to give Washington D.C. a fair shake, only because Trump was in the White House, and Republicans now controlled the House and the Senate, and the Supreme court has a general 6 to 3 majority toward the thinking I think is necessary in our American Republic.  And I would say at no point before this precise moment would I say otherwise, because there has always been something wrong with our system of government which I affiliate with George Washington himself and his attachment to the Bible’s Book of Judges and the character of Gideon.  With those political conditions fulfilled, I wanted to return to Washington with a fresh perspective and allow myself to see it the way it was designed to be, not to the level that humans failed to live up to the lofty expectations that established the capital of America to begin with.  We typically view these kinds of things by how people fall short of the goals to achieve high honor.  But looking at Washington D.C. from the perspective of centuries, not days, weeks, months, or decades, I saw something coming together with Trump that I think our young nation was designed from the beginning to achieve, and now we have arrived at that moment.  So, with that in mind, my wife and I allowed ourselves to see Washington from a scholarly perspective and to love it.  To come to terms with it.  And to help lead it to this next phase of America’s fascinating story and in what I would say was the purpose all along, to restore to humanity the intention established in the Book of Judges to create the kind of government God wanted for the world, from the beginning. 

So before my wife and I could do what we intended to do, which was go and spend a few days specifically on Capitol Hill in the legislative corridors itself, then the Library of Congress, as well as a whole day at the Supreme Court, I needed a few days at the Museum of the Bible, and a day a George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  We spent significant time on the Mall just reading and thinking and getting away from the noise of the current world and dug deep into the Masonic references that were all over the layout of the city that Pierre L’Enfant had intended with all of George Washington’s Master Mason friends from Alexandria just to the south.  To step beyond the conspiracies that have not understood the purpose from the very beginning, which had come into fulfilment through a lot of blood and sacrifice, to what kind of government we now had, with Elon Musk and President Trump up Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, past Ford’s theater where Lincoln was shot, past the Trump hotel that has the steeple of the Old Post Office that points to celestial references on August 12th from the vantage point of the Capitol steps, to the truth of the matter.  And I mention those names, President Trump, and Elon Musk who are new best friends in all sincerity, only America could have produced people like that to do what they are doing now.  To see it, I needed to dive deep into Washington D. C’s history, to walk and touch things myself.  Over a couple days I bought 56 new books and read most of them by the middle of the following week in a fury because I was looking for an answer and upon visiting Capitol Hill with a fresh perspective and the context of 5000 years of human history, I felt I understood it in the way it was always intended.  And I can honestly say that I love the place for all its lofty ambitions. 

I was standing outside Speaker Johnson’s office with Steve Scalise when they recessed due to the disruptions in the Well during the censor of Al Green, for the mess he and other Democrats made of themselves during Trump’s State of the Union speech just a few days prior.  And I was thinking of that even in the context of the history I referenced.  The place itself, Capitol Hill, was dedicated to the best and most intelligent perspective that human beings could strive to unleash, and that was the point of the censor.  It wasn’t political as much as an insistence on a specific level of sincerity as a representative republic.  As I stood there, I thought of the J6 protestors overwhelming the security and what they were rightfully angry about.  The place had failed to live up to the expectations of “The People,” and they were letting the political characters know that they had failed and weren’t entitled to the gifts of Capitol Hill by default.  I had been to Washington D.C. on other occasions, but this was the first time with this perspective. After much research, I could honestly say that I understood it as intended.  To that point, I had never been to the Library of Congress, even though I’ve had a lot of interactions with it over the years.  I was impressed with the Capitol building, but I was astonished at the beauty and splendor of the Library of Congress once we took the tunnel from the Capitol cafeteria after eating some lunch down there with many recognizable characters that are on television all the time, and emerging directly into the basement of the Library of Congress.  My first thought was that this was a place intended to be Heaven on Earth, which is what my idea of Heaven would be.  The foyer was laced with gold and high ceilings of white marble, which was a purposeful statement about lofty American ambitions.  Why isn’t this place promoted more to the outside world? It was every bit as impressive as anything they have in Europe.  I would have to say that the Library of Congress is my favorite place on Earth because I love books so much. It is such a collection of intelligence placed into the context of Heavenly ambitions that seeing it in person, then going into the reading room, was as good as Heaven. I could spend an eternity there and never get tired of it. 

From there, my wife and I spent the day at the Supreme Court, next door.  I asked a lot of questions, so many that we were able to get into places that visitors aren’t typically allowed to go, and of course one of those places was the courtroom itself.  But I wanted to see the world the way members of the Supreme Court did.  Thinking of the Bible and the laws that successfully made their way into the creation of all Western Civilization, and were the foundations of the American Constitution, here was a place in the Supreme Court that was trying to do what the Israelites couldn’t in the Book of Judges, and that is have a prosperous self-governed society without screaming for a king to rule over them.  We sat on the Supreme Court’s steps after much reflection and looked over at the Library of Congress, then the Capitol building right in front of us.  I was thinking of Steve Bannon doing his famous podcast behind me over on A Street and all the intelligence happening on that little hill in Washington D.C., and it was the most intelligent place on Earth.  Many people don’t live up to that expectation, but the place was built to evoke in people the best they could utter.  From my perspective, I could see that it was working, and working better than any place in the world.  And finally, after many years of striving, it is evident that the American experiment in republic government, meant to correct humanity where they had failed in the Book of Judges, was succeeding in ways that were always intended.  But that it had taken a few hundred years to come into bloom.  And it was wonderful to see. 

The spot where Trump gave his Inauguration speech

Rich Hoffman

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

Trump is Pardoning Pete Rose: Rewarding risk takers in our society is part of Making America Great Again

Making America Great Again is about more than President Trump waving a magic wand and suddenly making everything better.  It’s about an attitude and how Americans should feel about themselves that matters most, and breaking this terrible spell given to the world through the administrative state through woke policy making.  To that point, there has been a very silent killer lurking in the background of all our lives that has been looming over the fine line between success and failure, and that is the management of risk and rewards in a society and understanding how important those things are to a healthy culture.  So, for me, especially living in Cincinnati, I was not surprised by President Trump’s statements about Pete Rose and how he planned to pardon him ahead of the 2025 baseball season.  Pete Rose died in the fall of 2024, just ahead of the Trump election, ending a long battle with Major League Baseball, who had banned him for life for breaking a few laws the commissioners thought were important.  Rose had been caught betting on baseball games and had some tax problems with the IRS. The combination of those things effectively pushed out of the game the most popular player, and certainly one of the best, the hit king, out of the MLB and out of the Hall of Fame.  But the problem is, if Rose wasn’t in the Hall of Fame, then who should be?  Over the last forty years, it has been argued that banning Rose from the Hall of Fame of baseball cheapened it for everyone because if the best players weren’t there, why even have it?  Of course, there is more to the story, which is why Trump is getting involved.

Pete Rose isn’t the only sports figure to have something like this happen to them.  One of my favorite all time coaches for the NFL was Jon Gruden, who was kicked out of the NFL because some leaked emails about him talking disparagingly about the commissioner and other people got out to the public and with the new woke rules that administrative minded people everywhere thought would protect them from critical analysis, the NFL and my favorite football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers took Gruden down off the Ring of Honor at Raymond James Stadium and the world was looking pretty grim.  Only this past week, at the start of March 2025, did the Buccaneers start to rethink things and put Gruden’s name back up.  I personally like the Glazers; they run a good football organization.  You can find head coaches and position coaches all over the NFL who got their start in Tampa Bay because they have a winning culture.  But they have been anti-Trump and pro-Joe Biden much like the Murdoch family at Fox News has been, and they thought they understood where the world was going when they jumped all over the commissioner’s desires to remove Gruden from the NFL as punishment for violating unsaid woke rules limiting free speech dramatically.  The same traits that made Jon Gruden a great coach, full of risk-taking and passion, were also the same kind of thing that was harming him off the football field among polite society where the incompetent were protected from critical judgments by unsaid rules of conduct that protected Roger Goodell from opposing opinions.  Gruden had called the commissioner a homosexual reference, and Goodell didn’t like it, so he used woke rules to punish the Superbowl-winning coach, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers followed like cowardly sheep, licking the boots of a corrupt shepherd. 

This is nearly identical to what happened to Pete Rose, the hit king of MLB Baseball.  It takes a unique mindset to be a great player like Rose, to take the kind of risks he did to stand in front of a crowd and hit a ball the pitcher is trying to keep you from making contact with.  Or stealing a base under pressure to score a run and diving into third base headfirst, as Pete Rose did, often obtaining the nickname, Charlie Hustle.  Pete Rose was rewarded for his risk-taking antics in sports, which is how people with such personalities are usually rewarded.  Fans love people like that in sports. It’s one of the best parts of cheering on a sports franchise because most audience members don’t have the guts to take big risks like we see in sports themselves.  So they enjoy watching sports heroes do it.  In the MLB, Pete Rose was getting old and was a manager of several teams, and he was fading, and it was hard for him not to be a player all the time.  So he transferred that energy into gambling, and he bet on himself when he did place bets.  It was a way for him to keep his player instincts alive and be an aggressive manager of his teams.  But that set up a revenge tour for the jealous administrators who had been watching Rose for years and looking for an opportunity to knock him down to size once his name was no longer filling the stands with fans.  So they used an early version of the woke rules to destroy Rose and throw away the key as a message to other players about who the King of Baseball was.

It was a mystery to many why commissioners like Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent, Bud Selig, and Rob Manfred were so against Pete Rose when other players did far worse over their careers.  It all comes down to capitalism essentially and the goals of an administrative state to use Marxism to limit competitive enterprise.  Pete Rose had all the hot women, fame, and fortune and was celebrated wherever he went.  And administrators like the old and crusty Bart Giamatti could write and enforce rules to show that he has power over such characters which to his mind might bleed off some of that power and influence and get people to lick his boots the way many in a position like his hope for.  They hate people like Pete Rose and Jon Gruden, and I would even put Warren Sapp in there for good measure because of their risk-taking attitudes, which administrators like those mentioned commissioners don’t have.  How do you get the hot chicks to like you if you are afraid of risk?  Show them you have power over the people they like more, so that they’ll like you.  Administrative types adhere to rules to hide their timid natures and their lack of personal courage from the world.  So, they used the rules to destroy Pete Rose because they were jealous of him.  That is one prominent example of why regulations made by an administrative state have been, and are, so dangerous to society, even if we are talking about sports.  That same attitude could be said to be holding back significant industries in America right now, and Trump sees it from the front of the train.  And one way to break that spell is to reward Rose, even if he isn’t around anymore to see it.  Because the world sees it, we want to reward our risk takers in American society.  Even if it is just a baseball game, or stealing a base for just one game of the season that took a lot of guts and pain to attempt, risk takers are the key to Making America Great Again and taking away the power of the administrative state that might regulate them out of existence is a key part to our future success.  And now that times are changing, because we have another big risk taker in the White House that understands these things, worthless administrators who are timid of personal risk are losing power, and people who are good at risk, even addicted to it, are regaining respect.  This is the key to the future of our nation and a great sign of many good things to come.

Rich Hoffman

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

Revenge is the Right Word: We deserve a Resurrection for what our government did to the J6 Prisoners

We are not obligated to take the edge off our speech when it comes to the preponderance of evil that was on full display against American reformers during the Biden administration.  We witnessed a government that did not feel it had to report to the American voter perform a coup against a popularly picked president, our representative in government, which was a significant crime.  An unforgivable crime.  In every way possible, the protestors, known now as the J6 prisoners, had a right to storm the capitol and water the tree of liberty with the blood of the deceivers.  History under any other consideration would not frown upon it.  We had a case on January 6th 2021 where our government had become so big and bloated that they could hide their crimes behind their ability to make laws up as they went, and could ignore the rules we had on the books, so in many ways, the government in my view got off lucky that a very small percentage of Trump supporters came uncorked and stormed the Capitol to show the government who was boss.  As I have said, I would have done things differently, and I did. There are other ways to handle those kinds of situations legally.  But the government needed to feel the sting of a slap in the face, and the J6 protestors did a crucial job.  They needed to let the government know that they weren’t in charge, that it was the people who were.  And I think what happened that day scared the government in a way that makes all the good things happening now possible.  Trump and all of us have earned the right to rip the scab off the wound that the government created for the preservation of the government at our expense.  So let’s start there with that premise of authenticity. 

Washington D.C. is a much better place with Trump in the White House. He made a great decision to have the Inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda. Almost on the same spot that my wife is standing

On day one of President Trump’s I return to the White House, he signed pardons for most of the J6 prisoners who were arrested for their involvement in storming the Capitol four years earlier and not given any kind of due process.  Their Constitutional rights were violated grotesquely up to that point, so it was good that Trump did the right thing and signed an executive order letting them out of prison.  I watched those ceremonies with some satisfaction because it was the result of a minor miracle.  The reform movement needed people like the J6 prisoners to shake up the comfort level of an out-of-control government.  And it also took the massive work of people like I know, who work things out legally behind the scenes, and was able to prove election fraud way beyond a reasonable doubt during the 2020 election.  The culmination of all those events led to a miracle in many ways, such as Trump getting back into office after winning the election of 2024, way beyond a reasonable doubt, and putting law and order back on the side of the Constitution.  It was a razor’s edge that we had all been walking on, too much one way or the other, and we probably wouldn’t have had a country left.  We had to play by the law to enforce the law, and that was the only way that the J6 prisoners were ever going to get out of jail.  They had been detained for years and had lost all their personal freedom just for protesting a government that had grown out of control and turned into a menace against its own people.  And here was Trump, probably the most tormented soul of them all who had been tossed into exile, returning on the strength of our law and order to turn the tables on the bad guys without violence, but with the rule of law.  And I thought it was quite extraordinary. 

The Supreme Court and the Library of Congress next to each other in the back of the Capitol building. Probably the smartest place on Earth. And it belongs to the American people. Not politicians who come and go.
The Supreme Court
View from the steps of the Supreme Court

So much so that my wife and I, early in 2025, went to Washington, D.C., to heal a bit.  These last four years have been difficult, especially for my family.  I live these issues full time, so it makes it impossible for my family to escape them.  So, going to Washington D.C., the Imperial Capitol as they call it, and reclaiming it as our own was a big step for us.  For many years, I have seen Washington, D.C., as a separate place owned and operated by the globalist opposition, which it was never supposed to be.  It is considered to be the stronghold of self-government.  So for our needs, my wife and I visited Washington D.C. and the Capitol Building as a kind of resurrection exercise to put everything in context.  We were there for Trump’s magnificent speech and to witness the town as a place dealing with the inevitable turn of tables on the day that J6 happened, when our President had been removed from office, cast away, and rejected by an administrative state that thought it had the power to do it.  It never did; we had to go back to the crime scene knowing what we do now to see how the future would be built in the context of history.  It’s nice to see everything and reflect on the Constitution’s importance.  And to see Trump back in the White House with Elon Musk running up and down Pennsylvania Avenue using D.O.G.E. to make permanent spending cuts to that same bloated government.  We all did a lot to get this chance at an American resurrection, and for us, it felt like we were planting the flag of victory onto a vile enemy and were retaking our Capitol from hostile foreign insurgents who have been plotting our demise for centuries, and it felt good.  But that doesn’t change what happened and what we must do about it.  The crime of election fraud that was done to us was far worse than whatever crimes were tossed at the J6 protestors, and the correct terminology regarding it can only be revenge.  Revenge was needed, not just retribution. 

The Library of Congress, an astonishingly intelligent place!

Now that they are free from prison, the J6 prisoners are telling about their experiences, and many were tortured while they were in jail.  They didn’t know if President Trump would return to the White House.  They were staring down a bottomless well of injustice, with correctional officers spitting in their food and treating them horribly in solitary confinement.  Many of them endured horrible conditions in prison, abused by a system that thought it was untouchable from justice.  And revenge is the only word we can use to keep it from happening again.  These prisoners had their 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments violated severely, and we can’t just look away and forget about it.  We took back our capital from those holding it hostage for our entire lifetimes.  Never before did someone like a Trump get a chance to address with the authority of being a resurrected survivor the hellhound revenge that is perfectly justified now and will continue for many years.  We must never forget what the bad guys did to us.  Revenge is the only justifiable remedy for what they did, and we walked that thin line to enforce it.  Everyone involved on the bad side should consider themselves lucky that we are willing to stick by the law and give them their due process because they don’t deserve it.  They deserve everything and worse for what they did, and now they will have to pay for it.  But what’s different for us is that we do respect the law, and we will use the law to get revenge on those who broke it and tried to destroy our country and all of us with it. 

Rich Hoffman

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

I Like the FBI A Lot More Today: With Kash Patel in charge, we’re a lot better off

This is another one of those spike-the-football moments that I usually don’t do.  But when it comes to the FBI, they deserve it.  I have not been a big supporter of them all this time, so they are lucky to have Kash Patel as their director.  The FBI has too often abused its power and shown that it cannot be trusted, and I thought the only way to deal with it was to let it go, dismiss the entire department, and start over with something else.  After they were caught doing this multiple times, having someone like Kash Patel run them was the only way to keep them around.  It wasn’t that long ago that I did a piece on CNN that dealt with James Comey at the height of his career. Once President Trump fired him a few months into his first administration, I accurately described the former FBI Director as a bad person.  I’ve done a lot of media over the years, but that CNN spot is one that I am proud of because of the circumstances under which it occurred.  Trump had just fired Comey, I think it was May of 2017, just a few months into the first term of President Trump, for mishandling the illegal email case of Hillary Clinton.  But deeper than that, Comey was leading a series of coups against Trump, especially regarding the Russia hoax that would become the central issue of his entire first presidency.  So CNN came to Cincinnati to talk to hard-core Trump supporters about whether or not they still trusted Trump after firing the Boy Scout image of James Comey.  The bet at the time was that people would turn on Trump because they liked Comey so much.  But the CNN broadcast ran into a buzz saw in Butler County politics for Anderson Cooper’s show live on the air when the camera and question was on me, did I think that Comey lied about what he had done and I had essentially told them yes, using a spy novelist metaphor.  Comey was more fiction than fact. 

After the cameras were off and we were all in the parking lot where the interview had been shot, which was a sports bar that was very popular in Fairfield, Ohio, I had some hard talks with the producers that they found astonishing.  These CNN producers were friendly people; we had gotten to know them well because before that, they had given us a kind of party where we watched the James Comey hearings together before the interview later that night, which they thought was going to be a slam dunk against Trump’s corruption.  Over that duration, they had taken a particular liking to me and wanted to know what I thought about many things.  As I usually do, I was more than happy to give them plenty of answers.  So we were talking after the interview, and they were stunned by what I had said, which is that I thought Comey lied in his testimony and was an open activist against Trump in trying to perform a coup against him.  Also at that time was the thought that the Russian dossier was accurate and that Trump had been caught with prostitutes allowing them to urinate on him while staying in Russia on business.  I told them that no way that story was true, which turned out to be accurate, because Trump would never allow himself to be urinated on by dirty prostitutes.  He’s way too clean for something like that.

And this was before we learned what we did about Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the two senior FBI employees working directly for Comey who had an illicit affair and comforted each other with a series of text messages assuring the young woman that the FBI had the power to stop Trump, no matter what.  So what I was saying to these CNN producers in this parking lot was mind-blowing stuff for them.  They had complete trust in our American institutions and thought it was impossible for a career appointment like Comey, leading one of our most important institutions, to show himself untrustworthy.  They couldn’t understand it but liked me and thought I said many brilliant things.  So, they couldn’t understand how I could feel the things I did about the FBI.  Well, I was right about everything, as I usually am.  And everyone learned some hard lessons.  But the important thing was that I was right about it when it was very unpopular to suggest such a thing.  We are in a different world now, 8 years later.  And I would say that I certainly did my part to get that truth out and to start turning some of these noes into yeses regarding the issue of trusting Trump.  We had to go through some actual cleansing, and ultimately, it was good that we’ve now had Trump for eight years and are going for four more, essentially.  Otherwise, the Director of the FBI would be a much more conventional pick.  However, only someone like Kash Patel could reform the FBI as it has been needed for decades.  Trump appointed Christopher Wray to replace Comey, but he wasn’t much better.  And he would turn out to lead the FBI to further try to destroy Trump after he left office in raiding his home at Mar-a-Lago and taking the classified documents that Trump had kept for himself after his first term, which he had every right in the world to do. 

One of the first things that President Trump did upon winning the White House for the third time was to get back the documents that were taken from him in the Mar-a-Lago raid of his home in 2022.  From the time that I gave that CNN interview, to the time that the boxes taken from Trump were restored to him just a few days ago, we saw enough out of the FBI to see that they had become a fourth branch of government that had drifted away from voter oversight and had become highly corrupt and power hungry.  And the only way to save them was to put Kash Patel in charge so that he could reform them completely.  I had thought they were beyond reform, but even I like the FBI now that Kash Patel is in charge and Pam Bondi is running the Justice Department.  I have never been an anti-government person.  But I expect my government to be run by good people, and institutional preservation is not warranted when good people are hard, if not impossible, to find.  So, for the FBI’s sake, they are lucky that Trump won.  They get a chance to live again under Kash Patel.  And with him in charge, I like the FBI much more than I did before Kash was sworn in.  Now that he has been sworn in, I can get behind the FBI in ways I haven’t in over four decades.  But the lesson here is that you should listen when I tell you something, even if it sounds pretty wild and unbelievable.  And if you do, you’ll find that life is a lot easier for you, no matter what it is.  Lessons learned is wisdom gained.

Rich Hoffman

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

Firefly Lands on the Moon: Another step toward a space economy

Never forget that at 3:34 AM on March 2, 2025, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon’s surface.  It’s the second time a private company achieved a soft lunar landing, indicating many good things to come.  The first was Odysseus from Intuitive Machines almost a year ago.  I know several people at Firefly and know how significant their company is growing in the right direction, and this landing was an important historical marker showing that a smaller commercial company can pull off something like this in a partnership with NASA.  It would take NASA decades to do these launches, and now we see these private companies in a profoundly competitive undertaking, and they are doing so successfully.  There will be many more good things to come from Firefly, which is very exciting, and this goes along with what I have been saying about space.  This landing occurred one day before SpaceX sent Starship 8 into space, and just ahead of Blue Origin, a ship full of women, like celebrity Katy Perry, going into space as if it were just another day at the office.  Space is becoming routine, which is what we want to see happen.  And the moon has needed much more attention than it has received; we should have never stopped going.  I don’t care if aliens were on the moon to scare off Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, pushing us never to return.  NASA moved into the Space Shuttle program after the Apollo missions, but we have never since the early 70s dared to return to the moon.  Now, we have private companies doing the job that governments were too slow to do themselves.  And it’s all very exciting.  Firefly is a great new company, and it will play a significant role in the expansion of a space economy that I have been talking about for quite some time now.

And while discussing it, I’ll make a few predictions.  Just as Elon Musk is pushing for humanity to get into space and settle on Mars, to ensure that humans survive, I would dare say that this isn’t the first time our species has encountered this problem.  I think we will find that the relics on Mars are from our history and that our move to Earth was for many of the same reasons that we want to now return to Mars.  Not to discover it for the first time but to return there and complete a story that began for us many thousands of years ago.  Elon Musk is simply fulfilling the hard-wired desires that are built into human consciousness to ensure the continuation of the species, in the same way a sperm knows to penetrate the egg within a woman.  We must penetrate space to move our species as a thinking consciousness into the universe, as we were meant to.  On earth as it is in Heaven.  We are meant to ascend into Heaven, to the kingdoms we know from our past, which are in the sky. Mark it on your calendar and remember who told you all this.  Once we move into space and start checking things out, that’s when we are going to learn about ourselves.  The proof is coming.  I would say that it is all around us, hidden behind our institutionalized history.  But that won’t last very long; the evidence is abundant and will be confirmed with a space economy.  I could go into quite a long discussion about hidden lifeforms behind a curtain of Dark Matter made of neutrinos and cold fusion.  But let’s save that for other times.  Instead, let’s talk about the excitement of this growing economy brought to us by commercial-driven space utilization.

At a recent Vivek Ramaswamy governor announcement event at CTL Aerospace, I must have had more than 100 people ask me why I love aerospace.  And I tell them that the future is there.  It’s been like panning for gold in a little mountain stream during the Gold Rush.  I get a lot of offers to make a lot of money doing many things, especially in communications.  But I like to stay close to where the gold is, and I like knowing people like the cool cats at Firefly and other companies.  I get very excited every time SpaceX puts up a new rocket.  From all I know about history and science, I see aerospace as the ultimate gold nugget, and I’ve been committed to it for over four decades.  To use a Western metaphor, I’d rather dig for gold in aerospace than sit in a comfortable job in town as a lawyer or communications expert.  It’s not the money that excites me; the growth of human intellect and what adventure can bring us is the ultimate treasure.  But that doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter.  But on a scale that I think is better than just some average well-paying job.  The growth of the space economy will far outpace any technical time humans have ever experienced, whether it be steamships, early airplanes, trains, or automobiles.  The space economy will likely contribute hundreds of trillions of dollars to the first to utilize it.  And that, to me, is the best of the big gold nuggets.  But this time we should have learned some critical lessons, to keep the Marxists out of this business, as they dramatically crippled every modern industry that humans have invented.  The Firefly launch is more vital than past attempts when Trump is in office and cheerleading on all these efforts.  So, the resolution rate is much higher than at any other time in history.

I watched Brit Hume on Fox News the other night stumble around perplexed about how Trump thinks he will go into all these tariff wars, cut taxes, and still expand the economy.  As everyone was, he spoke about an economy that they think has seen the climax of its days and that all government management has to be wrapped around managing those fixed assets.  But that’s not where Trump is as he is facing down what we all are, a 36 trillion dollar deficit that is out of control.  If you want to fix that without touching the Social Security and Medicare concept, something dramatic has to happen.  And as I have been pointing out, it’s in this space economy.   With Firefly putting their lunar module on the moon after a drought of 50 years, a half a century.  Our economy has been held back by a lot of Marxist parasites who moved into administrative positions at NASA and the Pentagon and held back human civilization in a very catastrophic way.  However, the more private people have grown more powerful, and the more that government has lost it, the more companies like SpaceX and Firefly have grown and are now doing the big things.  And that is where the future treasures are.  And that is the only kind of treasure I care about in the long line of treasures in any economy.  The best to my mind is in space, and the adventures to come.  And when I see scrappy companies like Firefly have success, I am more than happy for them.  These are fascinating times! 

Rich Hoffman

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

Dave Yost Has No Chance: Calling me a fraud won’t make an unlikable person appealing

I support Vivek Ramaswamy for the Governor of Ohio in any way possible.  I was all in before I had a chance to talk to him the other day, and after spending some time with him, I’m more convinced than ever.  For me, he’s like getting Trump to run Ohio.  But Vivek is great on his own, and he is what I would call the next generation of MAGA political candidates.  I have liked Dave Yost, the current attorney general.  But there are a lot of reservations that put him in the clear RINO category.  In a head-to-head matchup between Yost and Ramaswamy, I see it coming out like it did in 2016 with Trump against Jeb Bush.  And in the end, I think a political fight with Vivek Ramaswamy will destroy the career of Dave Yost, and I didn’t want to see that, at least until they sent me a nasty letter the other day complaining about my support of Vivek through a video I did.  I usually get a lot of hate mail, and I never come close to answering them all, but this one was different due to the content of the political fight to come, and it changed any sympathy I had for Dave Yost into primal aggression and a desire to see him destroyed.  I have been keeping thoughts about Dave Yost and what he did to the former Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds tucked away, and this whole event resurrected it for me as a primary concern.  I’m not running for office, so I don’t have to be as nice as Vivek wants to be to his political enemies.  And as good as he is, he’s going to win the governor race of Ohio without too much difficulty.  But as I have done in regard to Trump, reporting things in context so people can feel good about voting for Ramaswamy when critics say otherwise is something I will certainly do for the future Governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy.  

So the Yost Campaign insinuated that I’m some fraud for the video I did discussing the announcement of running for governor by Vivek Ramaswamy a day before the event occurred.  They thought that was a misleading tactic because I couldn’t have possibly known that the event would be packed with supporters on the day before the event occurred.  Now, I have a lot of experience with the media, and if I wasn’t good at so many other things, I would probably have carved out a career in media myself.  But to be truthful, and I know this from many friends in the media that I have who were major superstars, the pay isn’t that great.  So I do a lot of other things; media for me is for the good of it.  Not the pay of it.  But it’s common practice to pre-write articles before a deadline and even to shoot a promo video ahead of an event when you want the material to reach audiences near or right after the event you are discussing.  And that was the case here.  In West Chester, Ohio, at CTL Aerospace, we had a big announcement rally for Vivek Ramaswamy that ended around 6:30 PM.  My blog is read daily by many people who want to know my thoughts on the latest topic. It goes up every day at 7 PM.  So I had to have most of it ready to go to beat my deadline.  I could adjust any changes to the reporting beforehand.  But for that article and video, I talked about the things that I knew were going to be true.  And I would know because I was one of the organizers of the event.  

A pretty dumb idea on their part. But it’s a free world.

Before the weekend of Vivek’s announcement on the following Monday, the 24th of February, I knew that there were 1200 RSVPs who had gone online to indicate they were coming and to be put on the list.  I also knew the space we had set up for Vivek was only supposed to hold 500 people.  So, doing the video announcement I did for the event, I knew it would be very crowded.  And as it turned out, it was worse than I said.  There was a line down and around the building and as people were trying to get in I had more than 500 text messages and phone calls between the hour of 4 PM and 5 PM, which I couldn’t take, because I was talking to Vivek Ramaswamy along with a few other people about what was going to happen during his speech.  It took me two days after the rally to answer most of them.  I never got to some because I wasn’t sure who they all were. But the ones I did know, I eventually, at least, answered.  I was at the Dave Yost announcement for Governor when he did it at the Elks Club near my home in Liberty Township, and it was nothing like this.  Dave had difficulty getting more than seven or eight people to stand in line to get a picture with him.  There may have been a few hundred people who came; honestly, I felt sorry for him. To support him, which I planned to do until Vivek came along, I knew that Dave Yost would have a significant enthusiasm problem.  He just wasn’t very exciting.  He acted like an out-of-touch politician who put on a cowboy hat to appeal to the meat-and-potato people, but he had an assumption of doing the time and a pretention of entitlement that he deserved to be Governor and that the Republican party owed it to him.

Senator Lang, and Secretary of State Frank LaRose endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy at CTL Aerospace

There is a lot of good stuff to discuss regarding Vivek Ramaswamy, and I certainly will.  I’ve met him several times, and at this event, he had a good memory of some of our history together.  The reason he chose CTL Aerospace is because of a story he shares with me, and Nancy Nix, George Lang and a few others at the start of his decision to get into politics, which I knew before his speech, was why he was coming back to start his run for governor at that location.  So we had a good talk, and I got to know his wife a bit more than in the past, and let me say, she is solid goodness in every way you can imagine.  She is sharp and very friendly.  I like the Ramaswamys as a family and as people, and it is those kind of people, if they want to, who should be in tough jobs like the Governor of Ohio.  Vivek is the kind of political figure I have been looking for in these positions for years, so I’m going to get fully behind his campaign, and that’s why I was one of the event coordinators and venue providers.  I personally liked Vivek before his announcement, in a very personal way.  And I am more supportive after hearing his speech if possible.  And to my way of thinking, Vivek is a lot nicer than I am.  And I would say a lot more forgiving; anybody who gets in the way of him running Ohio must be destroyed.  And if Dave Yost wants to go there, or his not very smart people, then that’s on them.  They can deal with the aftermath. 

Not to get into personal details, I normally don’t talk about things I say in private with people, but this is probably important in regard to Vivek Ramaswamy.  When we were talking, he asked me, “Rich, what do you want from me?”  I said to him, “I want 16 years out of you.  8 years as governor of Ohio.  And 8 years as President of the United States.  And at the end of it, you won’t yet be 60.  That sounds like a pretty good life to me.”  And he said, “Yes it does, let’s see how all this goes.”  And to all that, I will do my part to help see that it all goes well.

Rich Hoffman

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

Under Jerusalem: Why Trump has a right to build wonderful hotels over the Gaza Strip

I have a mild obsession with the city of Jerusalem, so there is a lot to talk about regarding the modern Middle East policy where that ancient city is concerned.  The claims that Islam has over it are very recent, and it’s a simple math problem to work out as far as territory rights.  The Arabs of Islam didn’t come along until about 600 A.D., after the fall of the Roman Empire, so claims to the area had long before been erased by the Greek and Roman Empires over a thousand years before.  But before Islam indicated any claim to the area, especially around the Temple Mount, the most hostile piece of real estate on planet earth, the Hebrew people were in the region over three thousand years ago, 1600 years before the creation of Islam as a religion.  I believe there was a very technological civilization in the area before any of them, including in North America, as it was global, and the only remnants of it are in our modern understanding of astrology. These people were large- what we call giants and had a very advanced civilization before and during the Ice Age. They used an astrology-like scientific approach to conduct a society that our history books do not yet understand.  And they were at the Mount Moriah area for tens of thousands of years before the Jews considered settling it.  One of their obvious artifacts of reference is Rujm el-Hiri, or Gilgal Refaim, “The Wheel of Giants,” which is so big you can see it from space, and it’s just west of the Sea of Galilee in the Golan Heights.  When we talk about Goliath and his family of giants, who King David killed in battle, we are talking about the last of their ancient species, which is how Jerusalem was founded to start with, as David built his city there and started the location that would eventually become the temple of his son, Solomon. 

I have a very nice map that shows the small mountain range that runs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and all these mountain peaks that are now covered by three thousand years of human history, built one on top of another, take up those high lands.  The caves under the Temple Mount and Jerusalem were there long before anybody else.  There are biblical kings, and others, who added a human touch, but there is a lot going on under Jerusalem that is very ancient, and doesn’t get talked about much at all.  And is at the heart of the dispute in the Middle East.  Do the Palestinians have any claim to the land?  What is behind the aggressive talk Trump has put forth about making the Gaza Strip into an American free enterprise zone?  Should the nation of Israel have ever been created after World War II?  The argument is that we are violating the indigenous claims of the Arabs in the area, and they use the aggressive stance of Islam to drive away legitimate claims to history that the Jewish and Christian people clearly have a right to.  More than that are the even more ancient cultures that we should be studying, but we can’t because of modern religious territorial squabbles that have no relevancy in the context of things.  The history of understanding isn’t on a scale of acceptable criteria.  Buried under all this religious history is a truth that is earth shattering and is at the heart of the whole problem.  And it’s in those caves under the Temple Mount where Mount Moriah held significance long before Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac there on that Foundation Stone, or from Islam, Ishmael.

I had the rare privilege of reading the book Under Jerusalem by Andrew Lawler, The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City.  I’m not one who constantly complains about how dumb archaeologists are and how they deliberately cover up the past with their discoveries.  I get the game. They have to hustle to get funding, and the people giving them money want specific validation discovered with the digs.  So, there is a lot of politics in archaeology.  My favorite thing in the world is my Biblical Archaeology Review magazines, which I have been getting since childhood. I love reading about what archaeologists discover in the Holy Land.  It is stunning how many feet of earth have been built up after three thousand years of people walking the streets of Jerusalem, and just how far under the modern city are the remains of the walled City of David.  In some cases, we are dealing with 30 to 40 feet of ancient dirt, sewage, and garbage that has built up to become the modern ground.  City streets in Jerusalem are not at the same level as they were during the time of David or earlier.  And to get to the foundation layers of Solomon’s Temple, you would have to dig deep.  The Second Temple period by Herod was 1000 years later, and many feet under even that period.  Dirt comes in off people’s shoes over time, and it builds up slowly.  And that’s just how old these sites are.  But I’m saying that even with all those considerations, there are tens of thousands more years of history in that area.  So we should be digging a lot more, giving archaeologists a lot more respect and money, and we should be openly prepared for what we learn during the adventure of discovery. 

As to the Islamic claim of the Temple Mount and their abuse of the Jewish people who had the first claim on the land after they conquered it from the pagan worshipping Canaanites, they are just the most recent culture to claim it for themselves.  They won’t let archaeologists dig under and around the Temple Mount to provide proof of the Jewish heritage.  But then they claim that there is no proof of that Jewish heritage because it’s buried under 40 feet of soot because their time on Mount Moriah is so ancient that nearly two thousand years had to pass before Islam became a religion.  The conflict and claims over the territory are entirely based on historical perspective, not a pursuit of the truth that is buried under layers of history on a range of small mountains that have been occupied for tens of thousands of years and of which the proof is in those caves under the Temple Mount.  What we know about Derinkuyu, just to the north in Turkey, is that that underground city was dated to the same period as Solomon’s Temple and even much older in some layers of it.  And, of course, the nearby Gobekli Tepe, dated in the 10,000 BCE range, has the same kind of math technology as the Rujm el-Hiri at the Golon Heights to the south.  So what does all this mean?  Well, Islam doesn’t have a legitimate claim to the area, not where they can demand that their heritage is more important than all this ancient history.  And when they say, show me the proof, they can’t play games by denying dig permits and funding for the truth to be found.  I would say that under the Mount Moriah complex is all the proof anybody needs.  But Islam doesn’t want to know because then it would erode their political claims in the area and destroy their modern aggressions.  Because they don’t want to see the truth.  As many don’t because they are afraid of what they suspect to be the case. Giants ruled the earth and had a technology that was far more sophisticated than what we are achieving in a modern way.  It was a different technology but undoubtedly very sophisticated and global.  Eventually, we must admit to it if we want to advance. 

Rich Hoffman

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