Matt Dolan is a Great Guy: Sadly, we don’t have a political system that can appreciate him

I had a chance to have a personal meeting with Matt Dolan, who is running for Senate in Ohio, Rob Portman’s seat. He is one of many running for that seat; it’s a very tight field. He’s from Northern Ohio; his family is owners of the Cleveland Indians, who have just changed their name to the Guardians under a lot of pressure from the woke politics that are entangled in our sports these days, so going into the meeting with him, I wasn’t too excited. He wasn’t a particularly Trump type of candidate either, so to my mind, there wasn’t much to get excited about. The meeting was with a small group, Warren Davidson was part of it, so I went into it with the most open mind possible. Ultimately, I’m glad I did because it turned out that Matt Dolan was a really ethical guy. After meeting him, my impression was that it was a shame that we didn’t have a political system that could appreciate him. A vote for Matt Dolan was undoubtedly a good one, an honest one. After talking with him for a while, I came away thinking that he was one of the most honest and least corrupt people I had ever met in politics. He is currently working well with George Lang, whom I respect greatly as a Senator in Ohio, and has a proven track record of doing good, hard things in legislative practice. He’s a guy who will get down to work and pound out what is needed with always an eye to the constitutions of Ohio and the Federal Government in all the ways people hope politicians would. He is putting over 10 million dollars of his own money into the race and doesn’t need to do the job for power and finance. He already has access to both. Yet he wants to be a senator for all the right reasons, which left me liking him quite a lot. I wish we had a republic filled with people like Matt Dolan.

However, that wish is a wish for a reason because we don’t have that kind of political system. At least, not at this point of history. I am encouraged that we may have at some point in the future. But currently, the values of honest work alone are not conducive to our political environment, which is a shame. It would be great indeed if there were more places for people like Matt Dolan to work in politics, people who have done well for themselves and want to move into the public sector to give something back in making the world better. Too often, political people get into the business for all the wrong reasons, yet here was Matt Dolan, who wanted to be involved for all the right ones. But those right reasons are not sexy enough for the political world we are in these days. As a senator, one of the essential requirements would be to go on Fox News and other entertainment outlets and talk up legislation and convince people that what he was doing was good and beneficial. As a federal senator, there are only 100 of them, so every seat counts, and in Ohio, Rob Portman has wasted his seat for quite a while now. Portman had turned much more liberal over the years valuing team building more than getting things done, which many politicians fall into. And with the environment we are in now, where Democrats actually have shown they want to sell out our country and destroy our sovereignty to the United Nations under a Great Reset, we just aren’t in the kind of world where good legislation is valued. We are essentially at war, an undeclared war, but it’s war nevertheless. If we don’t meet that ruthlessness in congress, in the senate, on television, radio, and in the streets, then we can’t hope to have a chance to win that war, and that is unfortunate.

As I said, Warren Davidson was there too, and there were some excellent discussions within the small group about ethics in politics and actually getting things done. Warren Davidson, I would say, is a highly ethical and intelligent member of the House. He is by far one of the good guys in congress. But as he will report, even when Republicans had the House and Senate for some time when Trump was in the White House, conservatives were still weak on border security. There were still many Lindsey Graham types who were war hawks worldwide and wanted to stir up trouble wherever they could, much as the Bush administrations had been. There wasn’t a lot of interest in doing the right things in government, even if Warren Davidson wanted to do them. Not getting more people to join him was a constant problem. And the way to build those alliances was through the theatrics of television, where boring topics could be made sexy and build support from people who might not otherwise pay attention. But with all the victimization that is going on now, where Democrats have stolen the House, the Senate, and the White House through Covid rules on elections, with only a bit of a whimper from Republicans on the matter, at the level of Mitch McConnell, Republicans had shown that they couldn’t do much better when they had the power to do so. That leaves good people like Matt Dolan and Warren Davidson trying to do good in a cesspit of scandal where good values are turned on their heads and distorted every which way that can be imagined. 

When Trump was running, and throughout his term, I often said that the most qualifying aspect of the celebrity billionaire was not his experience on television with the popular show, The Apprentice. He was in the Hall of Fame for the Worldwide Wrestling Federation. Trump understood the theatrics of television, and he knew how to sell usually boring ideas to a public with the attention span of a nat. And it was that skill that allowed him to do so much in such a short time. It is also why people in the business hated him so much because he simply made the money machines that center in politics worthless. Because try as they might, nobody could out brand Trump on anything. Trump’s ability to build a brand was simply better than anybody else in politics, and people could see that and vote for him. And when they needed to go to war for him, as they are doing now, they do and will. Theatrics in politics is absolutely necessary; it’s not optional. And unfortunately, Matt Dolan presents himself as a person who hates that system. Probably as much or more than the rest of us. But it is the system we have in a culture that progressive politics have shaped for over a century. We might deep down inside want other options and a more stable republic. But we are not socially there now, nor will we be in the immediate future. Theatrics and sexy selling legislation are very much necessary for any politician who wants to do good in the world. Being a good person just isn’t enough. With all that said, I couldn’t blame anybody who wants a good person to vote for Matt Dolan in the upcoming primary. He’s undoubtedly a good person, and I do wish we had a whole lot more like him. But the reality remains, we don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

China’s Attack of America Through the Tyranny of Safety: Most of Cincinnati called off work over a little snow

I always hate to see mass call-offs of work when there is a significant storm or some other weather emergency. To me, it’s a distinctly American thing to work hard, work more than eight silly little hours a day, and work weekends. I have worked well over 24 hours per day when it’s called for, and I’ve spent many years working seven days a week. Of course, I have slept when needed, but I have never understood people who don’t get going when the going gets tough. There is something very un-American about calling off work and sitting around in your pajamas when productive things need to be done. When I was a kid, I was the one who had perfect attendance in school. And as an adult, I am always the one who never calls off. I have worked through severe injuries, including three times when I had bones sticking out of my hands. I always finished my shift and got stitched up later. I superglued my skin together to get through the rest of the work period to stop the bleeding. When I’ve had major surgeries that I was told would keep me in bed for months, I returned on the next available workday after and pushed myself to recover within a few weeks completely. When it has snowed too much to drive a car, I have ridden motorcycles and bicycles to work, whatever worked. And if I got to work and felt it better to stay until the weather cleared, I always have done so, as long as it takes, so the work that needed to get done always got done. So, on February 3rd, 2022, a snowstorm hit the Cincinnati area. Most of the city decided to call off work based purely on what the weather people said on television; it made me sick and reminded me of the real meaning of the war we are in with China. 

One of my favorite chapters in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the chapter titled “The Tyranny of Safety.” When I wrote that book, I felt some things needed to be addressed in American business that was being ignored. Yet, every company everywhere wanted to know the secret sauce to success and how to unlock it within their work cultures. I am a practitioner of all the trade’s modern Lean tools and process improvement tricks. But due to my long experience and work history, even plowing through injuries to get a competitive advantage over a rival, whether they be domestic or some foreign power, nobody wants to deal with the elephant in the room that China set out years ago to destroy the West. They mean to do it by attacking us through every little measure of safety protocol that can be imagined. They don’t follow their own safety initiatives, which have flowed down through WHO, the UN, and into the CDC. Just as they don’t follow climate initiatives, they push us to follow them to commit economic suicide in their favor. The Chinese have intended to get us in the West to play by different rules than they do, and they have done so by getting us to fall for Wokeness, Climate Change, and Workplace Safety. They have spent a lot of money buying up politicians that would sell these attitudes to the public, in media that would strike fear in all who watch and listen to their programming over every little snowstorm.   Their goal has been to get us to work less so that China could catch up to American GDP and eventually overtake it within this decade. That is the emphatic goal of China and the world in general. Whenever I see massive call-offs over snowstorms and other weather-related issues, it makes it very apparent that China is attacking us in a worse way than with the use of any military. 

When I say that all labor unions are communist organizations, I mean it—every single one of them. Labor unions trace back to the start of Karl Marx and all his followers through the early 20th century, and we can’t help but talk about Chinese communism as we see the impact of their strategy of work stoppages. Communists everywhere want to see less work to leverage the money generated. The current supply chain problems in the United States are caused by China restricting its supply and the labor unions at the shipping ports refusing to work harder and longer to unload what’s coming in. Why, well, Covid is the new global snowstorm that communists have used to get people to call off work and stay home. And remember, China made the virus, and they did so for this very reason, to slow the world down to catch up economically. It wasn’t so much to kill people but to kill economic activity. I was at Kroger right before the snowstorm came through Cincinnati, and the shelves were mostly wiped out. Add to that the problem of supply chain issues on imports, and what we have are communist unions and communist countries who are trying to slow down the engine of our country for their own benefit. 

After two years of Covid, people have become used to calling off work over everything, making this 2022 snowstorm different from past snowstorms. This time, the media culture that had been scaring everyone to death over Covid had their ear when they cried about ice and snow hitting the Midwest, and people were calling off work before they even got up and gave it a try to get to their employers. They just gave up without much of a whimper, and that is the work of the powers against productivity that are well at war with America’s can-do spirit and have been for centuries now. The way to beat America is to convince it to stay home and not be productive while the rest of the world works and churns out their widgets at a maddening pace. China is making a show of playing lockdown with Covid, but you can bet they won’t sacrifice a dollar of GDP to it. But America has found itself crippled by the value of safety over productivity as a new measure. Productivity is now viewed as reckless, while staying home, staying safe, and staying unproductive is now promoted by our governments as a virtue. The terrible governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, was quick to announce on the news that people should stay off the roads, let the government workers do their jobs, make it easy for them to keep the roads clear, to hell with the production needs of our society. Whether it’s snow or Covid, the message from the government is, all the same, it’s an act of God, and we don’t control God. So yield to the more powerful powers than us, including the almighty centralized government.

Nobody is saying that we should have an unsafe society. That is the point in my book.   But safety is not about staying home and hiding; it’s about being skilled and competent. And if people don’t have those skills, they need to work hard to get them. That is the American way. But this “safe” way preached in our industrial compliance culture these days does not come from our need for safety. Still, foreign desires to slow down America and ultimately control our output with many communist tentacles that ultimately extend back to China in almost every way imaginable, where money flows in the bloodstream of an unseen monster, is a real threat to all that is good. Yes, China’s war machine is “safety,” and it flows down to us through our bought and paid for governments for the strategy of stopping American productivity. Every time people stay home from work over conditions of concerned safety, that is what is happening. We see the actions of war and our inability to meet the foe where they live and strike back. Because too many people are hiding from the snow, the rain, and every cut finger because they believe the experts without knowing who really controls those experts. It’s war from China for sure, just not the kind of war people expect to see. The way to beat western capitalism from the view of the orient is to convince them to stay home, not to work, and get used to a big government check, while the communist Chinese surpass America in every way imaginable.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Dark Money Tries to make the Pig DeWine Look Good: But Renacci is 8 Points up on the governor, and growing

As I was listening to 55 KRC recently, an ad by Free Ohio, a Super PAC for Ohio’s lost stooge, Mike DeWine attempting to show the troubled governor in a contrasting light to Joe Biden, let me know that after all these years, these political insiders haven’t learned a thing.  After all that Republicans should have learned regarding the Trump presidency, it is evident that these dark money professionals still didn’t understand modern politics.  Mike DeWine has been a disaster for Ohio.  When he runs for office, he always runs as a conservative, but when he’s in office, whether as a senator, Attorney General, or a governor as he is now, he becomes overnight a liberal.  And if Ohio had elected Joe Biden as Governor of Ohio himself, we wouldn’t have done any worse.  So, it was laughable that there was an assumption among the professional political class out there that just a few months before the primary in May of 2022, money spent on ads like the ones Free Ohio is putting out would shape public opinion enough to change minds.  People were there to see how badly DeWine managed the state, especially during Covid, in which he led the nation in lockdowns, being the first to do so and to change election laws which led to the massive corruption of the 2022 election.  DeWine was the first in the country to change election laws during a primary, opening the door to all the other states that did similar things with mail-in ballots, all in the name of “maintaining social distancing during the Covid Plandemic.” 

I had a chance on several occasions during those terrible days of lockdowns in Ohio where members of the business community were on mass conference calls with Governor DeWine to attempt to work out concessions to the rules he and the liberal Obama activist Amy Acton came up with that were costing everyone millions and millions of dollars, by the day.  I have met Mike DeWine at a few events here and there but never really had a chance to talk to him.  Let me just say, DeWine is one of the dumbest people I have ever heard speak.  Under those conference call environments, he had no clue what to do and punted everything in Ohio to the CDC and the Dr. Fauci types, which was scandalous even then.  Now in hindsight, we know that to be even worse advice.  But even when few people really knew the severity of Covid was, DeWine sounded like a complete idiot giving the keys to Ohio over to a bunch of bureaucratic health department types to run all our affairs the way some pot-smoking, stringy-haired hippies might only fantasize about.  I always wondered how DeWine ever called himself a conservative coming from Yellow Springs, Ohio—certainly not my favorite place.  You can almost always smell the pot smoke in Clifton Gorge from Yellow Springs when visiting.  It’s not likely many Republicans would be able to put up with such an environment.  And obviously, getting to know Mike DeWine a bit over these last several years, he’s not a conservative, but the very definition of RINO that there is in the world. 

The Super PAC plans to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars on this attempt to paint DeWine as a contrast to Biden.  Unfortunately, like many have tried over the last several years, thinking of Mike Bloomberg in Florida against Trump and the Bush money machine against Trump in 2016, they could never move the needle in a significant way in those races.  It is unclear why they would think they could move any opinions in Ohio when the people living in the state have very recent memory and pain over how DeWine ran the state.  Without question, Fox News and traditional outlets like Clear Channel radio corporate advertising are all too happy to take the money of this Super PAC.  For them, that’s what politics is, a chance to sell ads and pay for their content.  But reality shows that DeWine and Joe Biden have been aligned on just about everything over the last four years.  Even topics that don’t involve Covid.  It would be impossible to tell Joe Biden and Mike DeWine apart on paper by voting record.  And to think that money can change people’s memory of these things is pretty insulting, really.  Without question, some people don’t know much about these issues and might fall for such ornamental hype.  But in a primary, which is very surgical in nature, it’s a different kind of voter.  Primary voters are very engaged on the topics and not so easily fooled. 

As I’ve said many times, it’s hard to beat someone in a primary, especially with the corrupt money machine behind DeWine.  He has his voters who profit off the way he has done business over many years in politics.  But with an above-average primary turnout, someone like Jim Renacci could easily beat him in the primary.  Even with all this dark money flowing into traditional media, Jim Renacci is 8 points over DeWine going into February of 2022, which is horrible news for the current governor.  This is good news for those who want to see a more conservative governor in the general election this fall.  But that’s a steep hill for changing opinions no matter how much money is spent.  I suppose it’s worth trying from their perspective, but do they really think that the voters in the upcoming primary are watching Fox News?  I would say most of those people have moved over to other options, more Trump-friendly options.  And Trump is still the kingmaker in Ohio, and of the two candidates that are most in consideration in the primary, Renacci is the Trump guy.  DeWine is about as far from Trump as a Republican can get.  The last time DeWine was on stage with Trump in Ohio, he was booed for being there because of his role in the Covid lockdowns.  Trump is an executive and can get along with anybody.  But he’s certainly not going to go out of his way to support DeWine.  And an endorsement of any kind by Trump can erase away millions and millions of dollars spent by dark money to attempt to change opinions in traditional media. 

More than anything that has been exposed here is the distance between perception and reality.  Fundraising and what can be done with that money is part of the problem in politics.  The money machine creates leverage; that’s how DeWine was able to get many politicians to endorse him for the primary.  If they don’t support the money candidate, which DeWine certainly is, then they would find themselves short during their next election fundraising cycle, which all politicians dread.  One of their biggest problems is picking up the phone and raising money for their campaigns; no matter how good they might be at it, it’s something none of them likes to do.  But listening to this ridiculous Super PAC of DeWine unroll their 2022 primary strategy reveals just how archaic the current system truly is.  Traditional media has lost a lot of power over the last few years, and Trump showed that money in politics couldn’t beat a good message or a great candidate.  And that is certainly the case between Renacci and DeWine.  Renacci is an excellent candidate.  DeWine is a really corrupt and terrible one.  And no amount of money in the world can make the lipstick on that pig look good.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trick or Treat in February at Lakota: Darbi Boddy wants to remove masks and give parents freedom of choice, the LEA wants to impeach her over it

The Union Wants to Impeach the School Board over Mask Freedom

I watched the school board videos from January’s Lakota meetings several times, and I still think they are very good. But apparently, the mask police at Lakota is so insulted by Darbi Boddy’s proposal to remove mask mandates from the Lakota school culture and give parents the right to choose has caused the LEA union to begin proposing talk of impeaching the young school board member. During the last meeting, you would think it was trick or treat at Lakota as the mask lovers got up and left while Darbi was talking, obviously meaning to show her disrespect. But none of that is a surprise. This has been a problem for a long time at Lakota, where the inmates run the asylum. Actually, that’s how it is in most public schools, the unions run everything, and the school boards get sucked into believing their goal in life is to show uniformity. I would argue that the point of having five members on a board is to fight it out and debate to convince two other voters to either approve or deny a resolution. The goal of a school board is not to get along but to run the business of a local school the way our “republic” was designed. And to me, that’s what I see happening. This was Darbi’s second meeting, and she’s very passionate. There are a lot of high expectations behind those who went door to door for her to win, and she feels the need to get there and get something done instead of just being another bobblehead on a school board. She ran on getting rid of masks in the schools, as other schools have done around the state of Ohio. So short of getting more comfortable with the rules of school board business and not feeling like a sell-out for doing so, I am more than happy with how the Lakota school board is functioning for the first time in three decades. 

I know people are wondering, especially the sweat bees from the teacher’s union, what my relationship is with all this. Just remember what some of those same people who are all stirred up over Darbi, what they did to me about ten years ago in the parking lot of Kroger by Lakota East. Julie Shaffer played her role in that along with Joan Powell and many other tax increase supporters back then. So now is not the time to play innocent. I’ll stay mad over that forever; I will never forget. But that isn’t the fault of the current crop of kids moving through Lakota or many of the characters who are now involved that want to make the public school work for the benefit of the area’s parents. It took Lynda O’Conner more than a decade to win me over to believing that she was a Republican. I know her to be a very good one now. But I used to be so angry at the Lakota school board that everyone on it was what I thought were scum bag liberals. It took seeing Lynda at many GOP events over the last several years that I learned that Lynda was one of the good people. We have very different ideas about the worth of public education. She really believes in Lakota and is hopeful about public schools’ role in all our lives. I personally want to blow it all up, metaphorically, as a concept given to us by the significant progressive loser, John Dewey. I had been asked to run for school board many times, but that just wouldn’t be fair. We all pay taxes to the school, right or wrong; I’m happy to not get in the way if people like Lynda who want to fix it to the best of their ability. I’m also happy to offer solutions or help people who want to be part of the solution find their way to the school board by helping connect all the right dots. But for me personally, I’m all about getting rid of the Dewey system completely. 

Lynda and I usually agree to disagree on education, and when we see each other, we talk about other things besides school board business. Usually, we have a shared interest in GOP-related topics locally and nationally. If we talk about school board items for too long, I quickly blow it all up intellectually, while she desperately wants to save it. I tell that little story to those who are wondering, which are quite a few people these days. And I can also relate to the problems that new school board members like Darbi and Isaac Adi are feeling now that they are inside. It’s empowering to help be a part of the solution. The rules of the game are there to make it something of a functioning republic, and most of the time, no single person gets it their way all the way.

In Darbi’s case over this mask resolution issue, it’s her job to get two other votes on the board to support her. Many people backing her might think it’s a sell-out to work with people on the board. But they aren’t on the board. It’s tough, at best, to represent so many people and still do what you think is right. I have a policy that I do not pick up the phone, or text anybody ever, like Sheriff Jones might do, to never put my hand on the scales and threaten people to vote a certain way. I would never call up Lynda and tell her that I wouldn’t like her anymore if she didn’t vote the way I wanted her to. I believe firmly in finding people who want to do a job correctly and putting them in power to do that job. I may not always like what they do, but they should know more than me about it in a republic, which is why they are my representative there. You must trust the people you vote for to do the ultimate right thing and always keep the big picture in mind. If they don’t, then you vote them out. That’s the way the game works. 

But for the teacher’s union at Lakota, they already don’t like Darbi because they can’t imagine how they might get her under control and intimidated by their presence. That is something they have been doing for years, threatening school board candidates first with the offerings of friendship but then taking away that civility if they step out of line. That was what was implied by them walking out on Darbi in the second meeting of the year while she was speaking. I can understand not liking what Darbi was saying. It may not be their politics. But if they really wanted to understand what’s going on in the district, they would know that Darbi represents people in Lakota who think worse of public education than I do. I’m a moderate on the issue, believe me, there are lots of people who hate it far worse, and to them, Lynda might as well be Satan incarnate because she doesn’t put everyone on trial and burn them at the stake. Nobody will ever make everyone happy, but what we want is for good people to do good work on behalf of the kids and taxpayers who are stuck paying many thousands of dollars a year for this ridiculous product. And there isn’t a lot of tolerance for these teachers’ union shenanigans. As Issac and Darbi get more acquainted with the conduct of these school board meetings and the agreed rules of the game, they will get better. But so far, these meetings are what I think all school boards should look like. They may be a little bumpy. But I’ve never liked a lot of hand-holding, especially when millions of dollars are at stake and many lives are impacted. And for those who are used to bullying their way into a one-sided argument, well, those days are over.  

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Robbery Of Klaus and the World Economic Forum: Dr. Fauci complains about free speech at Davos

The Crime of Klaus

My take on the health care system is that most of it is a scam. It feeds off old people who are dying off and promises to keep them alive just a little bit longer instead of returning them to health. That purchase of just a few more years is what generates a tremendous amount of wealth for the pharma companies. It ultimately is the scam that the World Health Forum uses to rob many of their wealth, gain control of the world’s governments, and eventually run everything on earth as a kind of Wild West gang that used to rob trains and banks for the same purpose. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, has been talking about these things for a long time and has the ear of the United Nations and many in the billionaire class for a new kind of robbery in the world that uses the health care system in the same way that Butch Cassidy and Jesse James robbed the wealth of an emerging economy to stuff their pockets, but in the process call it a kind of Robin Hood enterprise, where they “take from the rich, and give to the poor.” In the case of Klaus Schwab and his fellow robbers, they steal from rich countries and propose giving what they steal to poor countries, and they profit from the transaction. For instance, a character like George Soros fancies himself as an architect of collapsed economies. Then he buys assets low, then profits off the rebuild. He calls it social justice, but in reality, it’s all just theft and hunger for acquired power. We’ve seen this before in America with criminal outlaws who do their injustice without a country to call their own, as renegades of antagonism. And Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum are no different than the looting gangs of Butch Cassidy and Jesse James from the American West. They are all criminals, and they must all find the cold reality of justice because of what they have done.

The Davos Summit of the World Economic Forum just concluded a few weeks ago, and I watched every published minute of it. I watched all their clips, live streams, and subcategory interviews from the various players, so my opinion about them is based on knowledge. Essentially, when they talk about Social Justice and the aims of the Great Reset, it wouldn’t be any different than in listening in on Jesse James and his brother Frank talking about the honor of continuing the Civil War by striking back at the Union while robbing their banks and selling themselves as soldiers of fortune, not scum bag thieves and bandits trying to get rich off the sentiments of a hard-fought war. The giving to the poor what is stolen from the rich is as bad today as it was from the famous Robin Hood story, the profit of stealing from one power and gaining power by giving it to those who don’t have it. The goal is always power, and those members of the World Economic Forum that were run by what I call the fish from American Dad, Klaus, are villains and thieves of our American Constitution, and they must be brought to justice. When we talk about the pain of Covid and what it has done to the world, its beginnings start at Davos and are always intended as a kind of mass-scale train robbery. And to prove it, they invited our own Dr. Fauci to speak at Davos, and the rat sure loved the opportunity to talk to his own kind on a stage that reassured him that they existed far beyond the law and order of American sovereignty. So Dr. Fauci spoke freely and complained to Klaus and the gang that the biggest impediment in the United States to the goals of Davos was social media, which they must get control of if their plans of theft are to be successful. 

Klaus of the World Economic Forum

Going back to my experience at the hospital recently, I live pretty much Covid free. I don’t go to many places where people have been suckered into following Covid protocols. But having to go to a hospital to visit a loved one, you can’t help but see how brainwashed many people have become on the matter. However, you can’t help but feel sorry for them because they have no idea where Covid came from. They believe the experts. They live in their little bubbles and don’t view the world beyond their Truman Show existence. They certainly don’t watch the Davos coverage of Klaus and the World Economic Forum that resides around the world and makes governments dance to their threats of capital collapse. Butch Cassidy, after all, when he robbed stagecoaches, was often friendly when he did the deed. But it was still against the law and a crime against humanity, just as the World Economic Forum has been doing. They smile while they steal, and they justify it as Social Justice. But it’s still a crime that essentially goes unnoticed by the masses because they are too busy trying to be compliant with their masks at the hospitals, where logic has been tossed out the window. The value is not in solutions but in complying with their authority figures in life. So they never see Klaus and the real villains; they just see the impact of their looting scandals. 

Dr. Fauci at Davos

The good news is that they were worried about America at the World Economic Forum and Dr. Fauci, instead of running and hiding from his involvement in creating the virus in a Wuhan Lab and helping China release it to the world to help the powers that wanted to remove Trump do so under cover of an invented “pandemic,” knows that if they can’t get control of social media and ultimately free speech, that this modern form of mass robbery won’t be successful.   The Great Reset is in trouble because the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the Big Tech Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google do not have the monopolies on information flow they thought they would have at this stage. Instead, Trump is getting ready to unleash his own social media platform, Truth Social, and Gettr and Rumble are already showing themselves to be aggressive alternatives where the message about what’s really going on at Davos is getting out, despite their best efforts to put a smiling “Butch Cassidy” face to the theft. And there was panic in the meetings that hadn’t been there before. Many people call these Klaus followers the social “elite,” but I call them scum bags and criminals who must be brought to justice. I watched them how we would bank robbers, murderers, and general criminals hiding away in the American West. Except these criminals hide in Davos and behind Social Justice causes, they hope they will disguise their true intentions. But they aren’t fooling anybody. This year, despite all their efforts, there is a concern that hasn’t been there in the past, and it was Dr. Fauci who was most transparent. There are many members in our government like Dr. Fauci who are in on the scam, the Biden administration being one of them. Still, they know that if people have alternatives to the information flow they control, the heist will not work, and they will be exposed for what they have done to us, especially in the crime of Covid. And like all villains in the world who know they are caught, they are acting guilty and afraid of justice coming to them. 

Rich Hoffman

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Sheriff Jones Endorses the Governor of the Most Corrupt State in America: A solution to the stupidity of Mike DeWine

Another Reason Corruption is Good to See

This is precisely why I value the measurement of corruption, which I talk about extensively in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. For the last several weeks, people around me have been asking, “what is going on with our great Sheriff Jones” the Butler County figure that is internationally known for his support of President Trump. Suddenly he has thrown his support to Governor Mike DeWine and made a whole lot of other flip flop decisions that seem ultimately at odds with the MAGA movement. So there is a bit of a panic on the matter, which I have explained as a form of corruption that must be accounted for to understand the decision-making process of Sheriff Jones. Corruption isn’t always just about money, but in the case of Jones and DeWine, without a Trump in the White House, many in the Republican Party are drifting back into the cave of power for the sake of it, and that is why we are seeing rifts forming ahead of the Ohio primary coming up in May of 2022. Unless we have a way of understanding the nature of corruption, we would otherwise have no other means of comprehending these strange behaviors. Trump has at least three more years before he’ll have a chance to be back in the White House. Naturally, Jones must align himself to the world between now and then. Yes, he is perfectly willing to adjust his beliefs to the power void that has formed in Trump’s wake, and from his point of view, the smart money points at the current governor of Ohio, the most corrupt state in all of the United States, Mike DeWine. 

As all this is going on, the challenging governor and my pick for the upcoming primary, Jim Renacci, is up 8 points over the incumbent DeWine. I had the opportunity to listen to Mike DeWine on many conference calls during the Covid mishap that his administration unleashed on Ohio. I have seen behind the veil just what an idiot DeWine was. I voted for him in the last election because he called himself a Republican. What I heard during the government-imposed shutdowns was a complete fool out of touch with reality. One moment in particular that impacted me was when I had to listen to Cedar Fair Amusements in May of 2020 try to explain their problem to DeWine about the trouble with not knowing when they could open their amusement parks because they had to hire, prepare their parks, and take all kinds of measures to get ready for a summer season that government had destroyed, and couldn’t give any guidance going forward. As a right-to-life governor, DeWine had put the pro-abortion Obama activist Amy Acton as head of his Health Department. She was running the state the way a stringy-haired pot-smoking hippie would run it, which was costing the business community billions of dollars during a lockdown over Covid that nobody could see the end of, especially Cedar Fair Amusements who ran a seasonal operation in two Ohio locations. It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and DeWine wouldn’t commit to anything to help them out. That was pretty much what DeWine said to everyone on those many teleconferences concerned over their businesses. His message was, we’re the government, and we’ll tell you when and what you can do and how long you can do it, and you’ll like it. Mike DeWine showed himself to be just as bad as the worst of Democrats during his first three years in office, and what he has done to Ohio will take decades to fix. So for me, it’s easy; Jim Renacci is the answer to the Mike DeWine debacles of the first term in office as governor.  DeWine has been a disaster.

Sheriff Jones has been something of a thorn in DeWine’s side while Trump was in office. DeWine was one of the first in the country to attempt mask mandates leading all other governors to the mandate first, just as he did with lockdowns. Without DeWine, many other governors only fantasized about it. DeWine was the first to do it. He was also the first to unconstitutionally alter election laws which would then pave the way for massive cheating that the Democrats would perform later that year with mail-in voting to remove Trump from office before the courts could even process the assault. Sheriff Jones, who advertised himself as a “pro Trump” member of law enforcement, suddenly endorsed DeWine for governor after all that DeWine had done to Ohio. Why? Well, the first thing is that the DeWine money machine is kicking in. Corruption and DeWine are never far from each other, and Sheriff Jones is always attracted to a kind of power. I’ve known Sheriff Jones for several years and what’s most valuable to him is his brand. For instance, when his brand is aligned with the Trump White House, it’s a wonderful thing. But I’ve seen it negatively align with big government union business, especially in 2013 when he backed the Lakota school tax increase, which he put his name behind to get it to pass by the most narrow of margins. So the Sheriff isn’t always a hard conservative; he just plays one on TV and in public appearances. And with Biden in the White House for the foreseeable future and Jones up in years himself, he needs to protect his brand while the political world sets itself in a new reality. 

What does Sheriff Jones like to do with his brand? Well, we have seen what he did to Thomas Hall, an Ohio Representative from Middletown who didn’t vote the way that the Sheriff wanted him to vote in Columbus, so the Sheriff used his name to berate the young man on WLW radio to thousands of people, personally attacking Thomas. Nobody elected Sheriff Jones to control other members of congress that we have elected to vote on our behalf. The Sheriff is supposed to take care of law enforcement concerns, not to dictate the terms of how other Republicans vote in our community by bullying them to his will. As a reaction to Thomas, the Sheriff went out of his way to put a primary candidate up against the Ohio Rep by dragging Matt King into the race, which naturally was pitting Republicans against Republicans on purpose for the intention of getting his way and making his point as being the “king maker” of the party, which put all kinds of people into a difficult position. Sheriff Jones didn’t care. He just wanted to show who had the power and what they had to do to kiss the ring to appease him, to hell what the voters of Butler County thought about the matter. That is why Jones had to align with Mike DeWine. Even though the governor is known to be attached to corruption, that power overflow gives Sheriff Jones the power to his brand that feeds his need to stay relevant as a man coming to the end of his career. Jones doesn’t have time to wait for Trump to be back in the White House. The need for power is always present, and DeWine is the quickest way to keep it. 

Now, of course, Jones would never admit to any of this. I’ve spoken to dozens and dozens of people affected by this situation, and they don’t know what to think about it. They feel betrayed and don’t have the words to put to the matter. That is why I like corruption so much, because if we didn’t have some way to measure corruption, no matter what form it exists, we wouldn’t have a way to explain this behavior. From his big labor union perspective, everyone thinks they are doing right; Jones thinks he’s doing what’s right for the Republican Party. He’s a moderate at best, and Thomas Hall has turned out to be way too Trump for his taste, so he is taking action. DeWine loved the way Amy Acton’s hair smelled after she took a shower, so he gave her the keys to Ohio and let her destroy it. As a long-married guy who is a closet Democrat, DeWine thought Acton knew what she was doing, so he defended her against all those evil business leaders who were outraged that DeWine and Acton had closed them down over Covid. DeWine showed himself to be an idiot who thought he was doing right. That’s why we have elections so that when we learn these things about people, we can get rid of them with an option, in this case, Jim Renacci. But honestly, there is only one right, not the right that Sheriff Jones comes up with, or his new buddy, Mike DeWine. But in our Republic, for it ever to really stand, it takes the taxpayers and respect for their vote. If they pick Thomas Hall, it’s not for Sheriff Jones to decide otherwise. Or for DeWine to attempt to hide four years of horrible management of Ohio behind one deal from Intel worth 20 billion dollars and to ride it like a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Corruption seeks to hide its misdeeds behind a façade that, if you know what you are looking at, can tell you the truth about the matter and allow voters to understand who they are getting involved with. And that is why corruption is a lot better to understand than to pretend like it doesn’t exist at all.

Rich Hoffman

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Justice is Coming: We are one election away from Impeaching Joe Biden, and others

Justice is Coming

It’s a clear warning for those who are fighting against our Constitution. The time for justice is coming. Many of the crimes that the political left has deliberately committed over the years assumed that they would overthrow the Constitution before we arrived at this point. But the beauty of our Constitution, as I saw all the time, is that it is built for just this kind of justice. It takes time, but it’s better than the chaos of armed insurrection. But conflict is a natural part of all order, and when we are attacked, order, justice, and personal satisfaction are certainly expectations we are more than warranted to expect. And the crimes are mounting in 2022 for a massive groundswell of Republican gains in the House and Senate at the federal level and many state races that will purge the genuine socialism and communism emerging from the Democrat party. With Biden getting caught trying to stoke war between Russia and Ukraine alone is far worse than what the Nancy Pelosi-led House did to impeach President Trump. With that bar of impeachment lowered, the House will move to impeach Joe Biden in 2023 over several issues, and they will be more than justified in doing so. My purpose for this particular article is to lay out the case ahead of time for all those liberals who will certainly cry about how unfair it is. Well, they had their chance to swing the bat, and we saw what they did with it. They went for all our heads, and they played to kill. Thankfully our Constitution has held, and now the momentum will shift in the other direction, and there won’t be a lot of room for sympathy. I would say the impeachments, the investigations, and the general aggression that will have to come from Republicans in the House and Senate is better for Democrats than the violence that would otherwise be justifiably due. And when it does, the crying in the media won’t help them. It is time to pay and pay they will.

As I write this, the mail-in ballots from the Pennsylvania election in 2020 have been deemed unconstitutional, meaning the election results there were illegally counted. Democrats in that election pushed for the counting of all ballots, illegal or otherwise, and knowingly committed election fraud in order not just to win the presidency but many down-ballot races that have put in place many unlawful representatives. The most significant justification for a Biden impeachment is his handling of the border with Mexico. The Biden administration took an oath to the American Constitution that required him to protect the border. Still, instead, the Biden people have adopted an Open Border Society approach advocated by George Soros to poor millions of illegal aliens into our country essentially to vote and keep Democrats in power illegally. Biden has knowingly broken the law to commit election fraud by flying these illegal aliens into targeted population zones to affect the upcoming election. That is why Democrats generally do not want voter I.D. because they knowingly participate in this type of election fraud. And that is the key part of the case in Pennsylvania; how do you know that a mail-in ballot is the vote of a real person? You can’t; it’s too much of an opportunity to commit election fraud, which obviously did occur in Pennsylvania.

Additionally, that same type of fraud occurred in all the contested states, which struggled to find 45,000 votes to put Biden up over Trump in the 2020 election. Logic can only conclude if we were just looking at this one form of election fraud, using illegal aliens to prop up Biden in the last election, that this practice is typical, not unusual. The apparent attempt to do the same for the 2022 election, and forever forward until our country is destroyed as a Republic and crushed by a mob ruled Democracy that impeachment of Biden by a new House and Senate majority would be getting off easy. 

But more than that, to turn to Ukraine, which has been at the center of the Biden family corruption, and attempt to point the world’s attention to a much-needed war there with Russia, while Russia plays bad cop to the Chinese good cop in diplomacy is far beyond a crime of intention. Based on what the Democrats in the House did to Trump over his Ukrainian call, the call between Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky on January 28th was impeachable because it was an American president trying to stoke war for the prime purpose of political distraction domestically. With several Supreme Court losses centered around Executive Orders to force mandatory vaccines to fight Covid, which was created by Dr. Fauci in a Chinese lab and unleashed to the world—again during an election year to tamper with the results of that election, the actions of Biden just on this incident rise to the level of impeachment from office. Just this one thing. But of course, we know many things will come to investigation in 2023 that the Biden people will not be prepared to deal with because their assumption all along was that the American people would throw out the Constitution by the time we arrived at this next election. But, as we can clearly see, if the Constitution is intact and the rule of law applied, the Democrat Party will essentially be done for, and there will be a lot of cries about unfairness and tyranny. But the cries will fall on deaf ears because this time, people saw what the villains of our country intended, and they can’t hide their eyes from what they saw and experienced.

For those who are more soft-hearted and might be inclined to listen to the cries of unfairness that will come from ABC owned Disney, and CNN, MSNBC Bill Gates, and the billionaires at Davos consider yourselves lucky that Americans have waited and turned their need for satisfaction to the justice of our Constitution. I have said from the start of all this, even though the crimes were evident and terrible, that before we grab our guns and start a real war of violence against a grossly incompetent and malicious government domestically, and lots of foreign actors who have been given a key to our back door and have intended to destroy us all, what is coming from our replacement government Constitutionally principled, is getting off easy. They might think of it as the worst thing in the world as it’s happening, but history will measure us all by the justice of a Republic, led by law and order. And when those laws were broken, as they have been, the remedy was within the Constitution all along, and that makes it different from any other period in human history, which is magnificent. Sure, we could slay all these tyrants in a bloodbath, and for many, it has been tempting. But what we have coming will be much better than that. And as it’s happening, there is no reason to cry for the criminals in our government who will have to pay. They brought it upon themselves and can only look in the mirror as to whom to blame. We didn’t choose for them to do all these things, they did them intentionally and corruptly, and now they will have to pay. 

Rich Hoffman

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Sheriff Jones Sides with DeWine Liberals on Masks in Schools: Finding the corners of the political puzzle pieces

Sheriff Jones Flip Flops, But Why?

Here is how politics works, and even though Sheriff Jones probably won’t admit it, the timing of the Butler County health alert from the Sheriff’s Office says everything we need to know about the situation. Sheriff Jones often goes out of his way to contribute himself to the politics of the Lakota school system; he has done it against Thomas Hall’s H.B. 99, which would arm teachers in the classroom; he did it again in 2013 by siding with the tax increase the teacher’s union wanted. He certainly did it again recently as Darbi Boddy initiated a proposal to remove mask mandates in the public school even as Sheriff Jones announced his endorsement of the mask governor, DeWine struggling with a primary election. Puzzles like this can be hard to figure out until you put them together a few times, but with this one, the edge pieces were easy to spot, so the rest of the thing goes together very quickly. To help out the teacher’s union position on mask mandates, which they want to keep going infinitely, Sheriff Jones, who made international headlines with his former position on not forcing people to wear masks concerning Covid, has now reversed his position just enough to help with the upcoming vote in February on providing mask options to parents in the Lakota school district, or to impose mandates for further unforeseen durations, supposedly until Trump is in the White House again. Because the Biden administration will keep the mask mandates going as long as they can get political capital out of them, and the teacher’s union, all teacher’s unions, support the Biden presidency and mask mandates to hide that political incompetency. So this business of using kids to force a political message is exceptionally negligent, and all the participants are guilty in their own ways. Look at who is at the top of the list in endorsing Mike DeWine for re-election, who started all this mess in the nation to begin with. Remember, Ohio is #1 in the country for corruption under Mike DeWine’s first term. Does that sound like the kind of person a law and order politician would support?

Here is the List of RINO Republicans Who Have Empowered Governor DeWine to Destroy Ohio with Corruption.

Just as a criminal couldn’t break into a house and claim ignorance of the law once caught to avoid going to jail, the case for Covid now is well known. Just because many people have not come to terms with the reality that much of Covid has been purely political and points to political schemes extending beyond America’s nation, that doesn’t mean ignorance is an excuse for the further perpetuation of sheer stupidity. This is what all mask mandates are at this point. Just as we proved during 2021 that CRT was moving into all our public schools, and Lakota picked up new school board members because the blatant Marxist intrusion was well known before school officials could attempt to slide it back under the rug, the mask mandates are another progressive policy that has more to do with politics than safety, by a lot. For the actual situation on Covid and the political players involved, I would refer everyone to read the book by Kennedy, The Real Dr. Fauci. Kennedy is a Democrat, but he tells the story of Covid and who the players are and why they are. For those who are claiming ignorance as to why Covid is here and what we should be doing about it, I would refer to that starting point for reference. But for those who do know what’s going on want to return to life before March of 2020, which was the proposal that Darbi Boddy put forth for a February vote. 

Well, we knew this would happen once Darbi and Isaac Adi were elected to the school board. We had to have an election to bring some sanity to Lakota schools and all public schools, for that matter. And this mask issue was on the ballot in November, and Darbi is moving forward to fulfill an issue she ran on. Of course, the previous school board members and management team that has been in place during the Covid mess want to cover up for their complicity in the matter. And it is not surprising that Sheriff Jones is coming to their defense. He advertises himself as a Republican, but he has a soft spot for teachers’ unions.

The game goes like this, Darbi puts forward a controversial resolution. Kelly Casper immediately said that the resolution to lift the mask mandates went against the legal counsel of Lakota. She and Julie Shaffer have been pro mask for the kids since the beginning of Covid, for all the reasons that some people still think that Dr. Fauci is a nice guy they see on T.V. and not the snarling rat that most everyone else sees. To attempt to break up a possible 3 to 2 vote, Sheriff Jones comes out on Friday, January 21st appearing to have had a change of heart about Covid. However, for the last two years, Sheriff Jones has led the nation and the world to stand up against mask mandates in many cases. He has stated that he would not be the mask police even on foreign television. So why the change of heart? Well, you can ask him. I’m not sure he’d give a straight answer. Instead, we should listen to what people do, not necessarily what they say. 

I first noticed the Sheriff’s attempts to sway the newly elected Lakota school board on WLW in November of 2021, right after the election. His concern then was Thomas Hall and the proposal he sponsored to give teachers the option to carry weapons in class as first responders to potential school shooters. Sheriff Jones mentioned Lakota several times on his broadcast on the Bill Cunningham Show out of all the public schools in Butler County. Obviously, he was sending a message to Lakota, and knowing something about the political theater of Butler County; it’s not hard to find the edge pieces on this one. Several liberty candidates were newly elected in Butler County, and the Sheriff is known for asserting himself as the kingmaker in politics.   Many politicians won’t say anything to him because they want an endorsement from him when it comes time to go through the next election process. And like Sheriff Jones will say, “I’m just the Sheriff,” meaning he intends much more than what he indicates in most everything. That’s OK, I always say, politics is a blood sport, and I think that’s all fair in love and war. But all too often, these big government types, they believe that the rules are for everyone else but them and that they control the dictates, which everything always comes back around to where they should be, which is happening now, in Lakota. Julie, Kelly, Sheriff Jones, and the teacher’s union activists should have learned some hard lessons over the years. If they didn’t, they can’t claim ignorance now.

Meanwhile, the kids are genuinely suffering from the political theater that has gone on with Covid. They have been caught in the crossfire, and they have no idea what to make out of these things. The adults have let them down. Society has let them down. And now that we know better about Covid and the political motives, we have an obligation to do the right thing. Someone must take leadership, and that is what Darbi Boddy is proposing with her resolution to take the school safety measures back to pre-March 2020 normality. The tricks of scaring school board members who are typically more like Kelly Casper, who will take the advice of the experts over her own intellect, are not going to work forever. It’s disrespectful to see this game play out, where lawyers advising Lakota will point to Sheriff Jones and say about the Covid danger, “see, even the conservative sheriff is supporting masks.” Obviously, Darbi is very passionate about this mask situation and she wants a quicker resolution than the school board process typically allows. But she’s only on her second meeting. I think over time, things will smooth out. Passions are wonderful, but the game is the game and everyone has to play it to win within the rules.

All that theater is meant to sway a vote in February, hoping to scare off one of the three conservatives. If we haven’t seen this game play out many times in the past, it might not be so obvious. But unfortunately, we have. The teacher’s union even has Republicans to manipulate to their cause. Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, they all share a common problem; they are government employees who make their livings off taxpayers. And fear keeps taxpayers paying and not looking through the puzzle box to figure out how the pieces go together. This mask policy is crucial to them for many political reasons that go far beyond safety for students or teachers. It requires ignorant people to follow them or people too scared to think. So don’t think for a second that Sheriff Jones just woke up and changed his position on masks overnight. No, it has to do with politics and not caring one bit about the kids of the district, but the strength of the teacher’s union to win their first battle against an incoming conservative administration. And like they do at levy time, and the Sheriff is playing his part, they use children as their vehicles for political destruction to fulfill their member’s desires for selfishness. 

Rich Hoffman

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Darbi Boddy’s Pre-Covid Proposal at Lakota: Making masks the parents’ choice, not a political imposition

Removing Masks from Kids at Lakota, Freedom of Choice

The first thing that everyone must understand is that wearing masks as protection from Covid or to spread Covid to others is 100% emotional, containing 0% logic. There isn’t one scientific study that rules in favor of masks being a preventative measure at all in relation to Covid, and over time, since March of 2020 when health departments in an initial act of helplessness wanted to take steps to slow the spread of the virus as it was unleashed on the world to do something, even if it was symbolic, not to incite a public panic as their worlds came undone with Mike DeWine lockdowns and closure of the American economy during a presidential election year. After two years of this behavior, some people are naturally timid and want to believe they can do something to control the various virus spawns that have come from Covid, and their fears have taken over their rationality. In a school system like Lakota with over 17,000 students in the population, there are lots of people who believe lots of things, but when it comes to the wearing of masks and imposing that belief on children who are supposed to be learning to think and not just take orders, this issue of mandating masks in schools has been detrimental to the learning culture of all public schools. Thankfully, the newly elected school board member Darby Boddy has made a motion to add a resolution to the agenda of the January 24th school board meeting to reset the health measures established before March 20th of 2020. In other words, to be rid of the mask mandates and the additional Covid standards that spawned from much irrationality as Covid was unleashed into our society and opinions about how to deal with it evolved strictly down political viewpoints, not around scientific logic. Darbi is proposing for Lakota to take leadership on the mask mandate issue and show the rest of Ohio what a logical management approach to the issue should look like, which is a wonderful thing that essentially took a new election even to put on the table. And thank God she has.

Now naturally, all the people who have been standing in the way of addressing this mask-wearing issue in public schools had their faces melt as Darbi proposed pages and pages of information supporting her position toward the safety resolution. But logic was never the factor in making children wear masks. What essentially happened was that all the really timid people in the world who seek government jobs in the health departments, the Governor’s office in Ohio, school administration jobs, people afraid of lightening, of wind, of sunsets, suddenly Covid gave them power over all the scary risk-takers in the world and they became addicted to the power like a drug addict on Heroin. And after two years of the behavior, they do not want to give up that power over others. They certainly don’t want to go back to normal before March 2020. For them, which is many of the employees in the Lakota school system, the lawyers who they employ, all the surrounding public employee unions, even the police unions, Covid has given them the cover story of their dreams, and they have no desire to return to “normal.” Roughly 5% of any work culture always want a doctor’s note to get them out of work whenever they want. Covid is far better than FMLA or any regular doctor’s note if they should be inclined to take a day off work excused. All you have to do with Covid is say that you were next to someone who was next to someone, who was next to someone who had Covid, and “poof,” you must stay in quarantine for some CDC recommended days. No doctor’s note, no logical approach, just perceptual reality. Covid has been a dream come true for the lazy in any workforce. 

Therefore, the fight to continue the mask-wearing mandates extends beyond political parties and descends into the cover of the less inclined employees. They spend a lot of time in their lives looking for reasons not to work. And that makes the management of any workforce a nightmare to conduct. That is certainly true in the private sector, but in a large school district like Lakota with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and administrators, a 5% call-off rate is a nightmare to cover. To follow all the ridiculous CDC rules is irrational at best. But that’s what has been happening. The medical tyrants have had their way, and everyone has danced to their tune, including most legal representation. For lawyers, the easy thing for them to do is to recommend full compliance to CDC recommendations, even though there is no legal authority for the CDC or any local department of health to impose mandates of any kind on anybody, anywhere. Outside of government work, which public schools are, much life is returning to normal, such as in the NFL, where stadiums are open. People are enjoying the games as they did before March of 2020. Of course, the CDC recommends other behavior, but fans of the NFL experience are done with Covid and are returning to “normal,” and we do not see mass deaths. We hear alarming reports about case spikes, but as history shows, these cases aren’t any different from common colds in the past, and people have learned to live their lives anyway. They get the virus, get over it, and return to their lives as they always did. That same approach needs to be applied to all public schools as well. Covid protocols have gone on too long, and it is now having an impact on children in a negative way, which Darbi included evidence of in her proposed resolution, which will be voted upon in February 2022. 

For life to return to normal, which needs to, people like Darbi need to show leadership in political opposition. At this point, any scientific consideration about Covid isn’t a factor. There is nothing in science to support that masks do anything rational to help with Covid in any way. Instead, it’s purely political. It’s political for the teacher’s union. It’s political for the health departments. It’s political for the CDC connected to the Biden administration. It’s political for the law firms who see this Covid issue as easy money. But for those who must lead others and show courage to the world, it’s time to return to a normal life. To stop being afraid of Covid. And to start managing it proactively. It’s OK to support timid people who have real fears about Covid created for them in countless news reports rooted in politics and not rationality. But the purpose of a public school is to teach children, and it is the task of our society to ensure that they have the best opportunity at a good life while in that school experience. The authority figures might not want to surrender the controls they’ve enjoyed during Covid. But we owe it to children everywhere to take that leadership and show them that life goes on and that they don’t need to be afraid of every little thing in the world. The only thing dangerous about Covid is the perception that a government alliance with media has created. Legally, there is nothing to take action on. There is no liability to irrational fears. There is no constitutional enforcement. Governors have tried, and they have learned that the Supreme Courts of the states and the Federal level have no stomach for this nonsense. It’s time to take all that power back away from those who have become so addicted to all this Covid abuse. And to give kids a chance at a normal life, once again. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Good Government of Lakota Schools: Yes, elections do have consequences

Lakota is Off to a Great Start

Sometimes we get to talk about good things, which this article is one of them. The first Lakota school board meeting of 2022 was an excellent example of a good government. Over the years, I’ve watched thousands of hours of school board meetings, not just at Lakota, but from all over the states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and I will have to say that this particular meeting which is included below, is perhaps the best one that I have seen. It was good, of course, to see that Lynda O’Conner was again President of the Board. But what made the meeting so good, aside from how smoothly Lynda transitioned from topic to topic, was the additions of the newly elected Republican endorsed members, Isaac Adi, who was designated already as the Vice-President, and the freedom representative Darbi Boddy. I was very impressed with those two new additions and the kind of questions. As they learn the job, if they can keep up with that level of engagement, Lakota will be very successful in the years to come. That is precisely how government should work. Not everyone will get along. But I will say that the attention to everyone in the room was outstanding, constructive, and conducive to conversation that leads to problem-solving, and that is fantastic. In all these government schools, chaos has been ruling for a long time, and those elements of chaos are indeed circling the campfire of that Lakota board meeting, waiting for everyone to go to sleep so they can feast. But I have a feeling, especially knowing the personalities of these new school board members, that the chaos will wear out before they do. Good to see!

Of course, most of these meetings are never very sexy. For instance, a school board member like Darbi, that ran on a platform of national concern and parent transparency, will find that she might only get to spend 5% of her time on the topics she cares most about. Most of the meetings will be votes on boring issues, like application fees for substitute teachers or the latest call-offs of the bus drivers. These may seem like small, inconsequential things, but there is good work to be done on all of them, and that is usually where school board candidates get bored and start to tune out. But in watching Darbi and Isaac, it is clear that they are going into the job with the right frame of mind. They are keeping their important campaign promises in focus while they also indulge themselves in the job’s nuances and extract value out of the tiniest little bits. It’s not always the big sexy things that determine the success or failure of a school district; it’s the thousands of little things that lead up to the big things, and if those get dealt with, with the enthusiasm that Isaac and Darbi showed on this first meeting, the 20th meeting will be much, much better and so will Lakota and all the participants in the district. 

For instance, as an example of tiny details that are of paramount importance, Superintendent Matt Miller gave an update to the Covid situation, the bussing call-offs, and the general below-the-line problems of managing hundreds of employees, where generally 5% of any work culture will use any excuse to call off work, excused. Covid has created a situation where those types of people are empowered to call off perpetually, without any recourse. Of course, the teacher’s union loves this problem because it benefits them, and Matt gave his summary in a manner where he felt like a victim of circumstance. The district’s management had been taken out of the Board’s hands and placed at the alter of the  Butler County Department of Health, and the union had a free pass to call off work as much as they could. Obviously, the way to break up this labor impasse would be to have plenty of substitute teachers ready to call at a moment’s notice to keep classes moving. But as we learned, there is a government fee within the county of more than $125 just to apply to be a substitute teacher. This was revealed in the meeting by a bright personality named Alicia Davis, who wants to be part of a solution to the staffing shortages but needs help getting through the bureaucracy of government to get to where the need is. There are likely thousands of young women just like Alicia who are willing and able to cover that 5% call-off ratio. However, obviously, the fee is a problem, a discouraging one. If anybody wanted to solve the problem, it would be wise for Lakota to find a way to cover the fee, get the applicant, and ultimately the resource. That may seem like a little thing, but little things lead to big things. 

For instance, the next time a labor contract comes up for a vote. Teachers want to be collectively paid more money and are threatening to walk; if Lakota has a bunch of sharp-witted volunteers waiting to be called into class to teach to keep the schools open, then that network would already be established. When I talked about chaos ruling these schools, this is one of the ways it happens. A superintendent like Matt is trying to navigate all the rules and regulations and finds himself reacting to everything over time. The Board needs to give him proactive solutions to these problems that also pave the way for possible labor strikes from the teacher’s union at the slightest provocation. If they decide to leave work and management has the task of keeping the school open, what else could be done. The chaos is caused by the high cost and bureaucracy of becoming a substitute teacher; the $125 usually scares off most applicants because they couldn’t afford to pay it for a part-time job they may not get much return on the investment from. So, the vacancies go unfulfilled, and solutions are never presented to the labor problem leaving the school a victim to the labor force that can be very politically active at times.   I would say that Lakota is a great place to live because of people like Alicia, not because of any measure of labor that might be employed at any given time. Good parents make good kids, and good kids make a good school. The purpose of government, in this case, is to remove those barriers, not to throw $125 roadblocks up to feed chaos. But to remove chaos from the management process because in chaos is where many lost dollars disappear.

But there will be time for more of that kind of talk for later. For now, I’m just happy to see an actual, functioning school board that has the look and feel of real management. I’m sure there will be trouble, but the measure of good management is how well that trouble is handled, and by the looks of Lynda, Darbi, and Isaac, everything is off to a great start, and it is very encouraging to start the year off. This school board meeting was the kind of school board I have been hoping for, for over 30 years. And although it’s only one, the obvious signs of future success are there for all to see. There is an excellent reason to be excited, and I am. Perhaps things will get better, and that all starts with elections because they have consequences.   

Rich Hoffman

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