Category: Drama

Defund the Deep State: Why does the CIA need black budgets over a trillion dollars a year

The situation is out of control; it’s not patriotism to allow entire branches of government, such as the CIA and the FBI, to operate independently of public oversight. They have been using the scam of safety for too long, the same tired argument that was used to mask the bad behavior of school teachers behind a union firewall, power-hungry radicals have infested these branches of government, and they need to be regulated back to civilian authority, as they always should have been. It used to be assumed that these branches of intelligence agencies were red, white, and blue unquestionable patriots, but no longer. They have shown, especially after the Trump presidency, that they do not work for the flag-waving efforts of America or the idea of free people governing themselves. But they work on behalf of globalists, centralized control of government to rule over everyone, and they intend to use force and the fear of it to control society. Their recent activity was bad enough, but since they were created, the FBI and CIA, and other such intelligence agencies, it is obvious that as organizations, they cannot govern their own behavior, and the power has gone to their heads, and they are willing to kill to preserve that power. Recently classified documents show that the CIA was involved in killing JFK, for instance, which is no longer a conspiracy theory. They were involved in the Nixon impeachment, which was a less bloody way of getting rid of a popular American president. Then, of course, we saw what they did to Trump right in front of our faces. So these days, I’m all about defunding them. Suppose there are things in the world that America needs safety from most of the time. In that case, they are less dangerous than these American intelligence agencies’ power over private citizens; we would be better off without them.

In these days of out-of-control alliances with Big Tech and ballooning national debts of 34 trillion dollars, it has been reported often that the CIA by itself has over 1 trillion per year in black budget spending , and we know this because of respectable declassified reports released from the fiscal years of 1998, 1999, and 2001. Remember the 9/10 speech by Donald Rumsfeld when he said that trillions of dollars went into the DOD that nobody could account for? Yeah, well, neither does anybody else because on the very next day, 9/11 happened, and everyone turned their focus to global terrorism in Afghanistan. And when they finally did kill the terrorist Osama bin Laden, his body was dumped at sea, and all the American people heard about it was a news report. There were no photos or videos. We were just supposed to take their word for it. And speaking of taking their word for it, what was the report for the cause of Benghazi? Remember, Mrs. “What Difference Does it Make Now” It was an insulting YouTube video. And on 9/11, why did Building 7 fall down? Back to those black budgets for the CIA, which were granted to them by Congress in 1949, for the years specified, it was 1.7 trillion in 1998, 2.3 trillion in 1999, then 1.1 trillion at the end of 2000, right before Bill Clinton left office. Where did all that money go? Those are in dollars from over twenty years ago. Imagine what those black budgets look like now. Most budgets, such as the one for the Director of National Intelligence, DNI, are 85 billion, or in that ballpark. How does the CIA have over a trillion dollars? And what do they spend that money on? 

I’ve been skeptical about the CIA most of my life. I have viewed them like many people do, as necessary for the defense of our country. But if they are only causing trouble that causes problems around the world and are killing people out of national security, when we see that we have open borders, spy balloons floating across our country, and we have members of Congress getting caught sleeping with Chinese spies, and nothing is done about it, then why do we need a CIA? Why do we have an FBI? Especially if they see the evidence on the Hunter Biden laptop and then provide disinformation to the public to help rig an election, such as they did in 2020.  51 members of intelligence, including top-level CIA people, lied to the American people and blamed the entire laptop on Russia, hoping to start a war to cover up for other things? It kind of makes you look differently at other events in the past and wonder with new eyes. It makes me realize that we don’t need those people because they are making America more dangerous than less. I think it’s beyond time to consider what these people do for us, and is it really worth the money. What does having a CIA really do for us if they are going to rig elections and support an out-of-control Deep State? What good is the FBI if they will arrest Trump supporters in airports and kick down their doors but let China have its way with our intellectual property and let spy balloons spy on people hot tubbing in the backyard? 

I hear it all the time, “if they will kill an American president, don’t you worry? Don’t make yourself a target.” And that is precisely why nobody calls these losers out on their behavior, because they are afraid of them. But, just a reminder, this is why we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights and why during the foundation of this country, there were serious concerns about having a standing military that would spiral out of control with too much power. We created the FBI during a wave of big progressive government and did the same with the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. And they never have been effective in making America better. Instead, it’s obvious they’ve made it worse, and that includes people at the top, to the bottom, the people who push the brooms. And they need to be defunded, they need their black budgets removed, and America needs to focus on getting out of debt spending. What we don’t need are big government branches that work against America, and what we’ve seen from the FBI and CIA is that they are as worthless to an optimistic America as a rock on the beach. They aren’t worth millions of dollars, let alone trillions! And it’s not like we have to go to war with them using the Second Amendment to protect our rights from them. All we need to do is put them out of business. Get fiscal oversight of their work, and manage it. Get rid of the black budgets, and defund them. Take away the money that feeds them and let them shrink out of existence. Because of those actions, we will find out that the world is a lot safer place. And we will likely finally solve the War on Drugs pouring in from the Mexican border. The CIA has been involved in that business for a long time. How much of their trillions of dollars have poured into Mexican drug cartels? I would bet a lot. And if you want to put an end to all these bad characters, then take away the money that feeds them. That would be a lot more effective than a physical confrontation with a government force that has lost civilian oversight. And the effects would be much longer lasting.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Train Derailment in Ohio: The fire behind the smoke politically that is very dangerous for the Biden Administration

I wasn’t going to say much about it because I think there’s a lot more to the story that hasn’t been uncovered yet, but the train derailment in New Palestine, Ohio, has taken on a unique political perspective that has all kinds of things wrong with it. Personally, I think the deeper problem is that we have a modern version of the Weather Underground terrorist group going around the country and sabotaging infrastructure purposely. Burning down food processing plants, destroying power plants, using complicated electronics to shut down power systems on helicopters, and of course, multiple train derailments, such as the really bad one in New Palestine, which was unique because it’s Trump Country and in the wake of the tragedy the Biden administration clearly targeted them as a purposeful victim. These are the kind of people the Biden administration and globalists, in general, want to destroy. So if a train derails in their community and poisons them all with toxic fumes, there are members of society who would be happy about that, including many in the media who hate Trump, hate his supporters, and would love to destroy all these little towns and force people to move into blue cities where Democrats can control everyone. Other than those elements, however, I viewed the tragedy as a basic catastrophe, much the way a tornado or hurricane would be viewed, and didn’t think there was much of a story to consider until reporters on Fox News and other places started making everything about a contrary argument against environmentalism. The victimhood is a trap that Republicans always fall for, such as why are all the globalists so worried about climate change flying around in private jets? Or, in this case, why is a massive chemical spill that could cause cancer in the entire town not a concern of the liberals so concerned about environmentalism, yet they will destroy entire economic projects to help a turtle cross the road in California to protect the little creature from extinction? These political activists act like they want the people of New Palestine to go extinct.

Well, of course, they want the people of New Palestine extinct, we are witnessing a government that knew all about Covid before it was released, and they allowed people to die ruthlessly to drive home a political narrative, one about climate change and the other about government-controlled health care that would rule over everyone’s life. They had to kill people to scare them into submission, to get them to wear the mask. So, of course, Biden isn’t going to visit New Palestine and will avoid emergency relief to the town even though the entire world has been watching the news coverage of the purposeful burning off of the spilled chemicals by the rail company. The optics looked horrible, yet the Biden White House showed its contempt for the Trump voters there in ways that certainly didn’t surprise me. But it apparently did for everyone else. DeWine is not MAGA country Republican, I don’t consider him a Republican in any way, but there wasn’t much he could say to convince people that the drinking water was safe when obvious evidence of chemical residue was seen in the local creeks and the local pets were dying from some mysterious airborne killer, that might just be slowly killing off everyone in the town. DeWine tried to assure everyone that the water was safe to drink; their local processing plants could make it so. J.D. Vance was there to support the town, as he should be. President Trump is committed to a visit because they are his people. The train company itself has done a pretty good job cleaning things up. In the end, they are inspired to leave things better than they found them. There is plenty of criticism to go around, but in a few months, nobody will remember anything about this train derailment, and it will pass into history quickly. 

But yet, there is more to the story. Quickly the people of the town went from being normally compliant to being ostentatiously vocal about their condition, which we don’t normally see from people in MAGA country. If this had been a police shooting in a blue city, there would have been riots in the streets over something much less severe, as the locals would complain about police violence taking full advantage of the media coverage. Normally Republicans don’t say much when bad things happen to them, but this time they did. And nothing the government offered to do, or the train company would be good enough for them. They would voice their opinions about their dissatisfaction, which is something different. The news coverage took on a whole new meaning in the wake of the Biden classified documents, the Chinese spy balloons, the inflation rates, and the attempts by Covid to make a political comeback as a terrorist weapon of the global left. There was something new present in all this that was dangerous for the established order of things.

The level of defiance from New Palestine was clear; these were people who were not over all the lies of election fraud they had been exposed to. And the massive lies and cover-ups regarding Covid were still on their minds. And instead of taking the tragedy the way they might have in the past, not complaining about the drinking water, and trying to move on the best they could, now they were deeply skeptical of anything the government had to say, no matter who was saying it. It didn’t matter if it was Governor DeWine or the Biden administration; there was a general assumption that everyone was lying to them, and they were going to talk about it. Before the government cried wolf on Covid just a few years prior, these same people likely would have said very little about the train derailment. But in the wake of the mandatory lockdowns, the forced vaccinations, and the known election fraud, we are living in a completely different world, and the government has lost all credibility on just about everything. And the open war is not such a secret anymore. Trump voters do not like Biden’s administration, and the Biden insurgents don’t like them either. If anything new was revealed in this massive tragedy, it’s this inconvenient information that the normally peacefully compliant are no longer so peaceful. They aren’t happy, and they are going to let everyone know it. People are tired of being victims of government problems. When the EPA didn’t act quickly on the matter, people quickly noticed the difference in behavior and exploited it in political ways that were damaging to Biden’s administration. It’s not just a level of incompetence that we are talking about here. It’s a purposeful intent to destroy traditional America small town from small town, and these people of New Palestine weren’t going to go quietly in the night. Again, I think the train derailment was an act of sabotage, and time will prove it out. An overheated bearing is being blamed now, but there are just too many of these things happening for them all to be an accident. But something different happened this time, people made their voices heard in ways they haven’t before, and the established order of things wasn’t sure what to do about it. There is an uneasy volatility brewing, and the political class will find they don’t have the tools to fix it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Review of ‘Rise of the Fourth Reich’: Dealing with the worst holocaust in the history of the world

I’ve been looking forward to this book for a long time, Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again, by Steve Deace and Daniel Horowitz. It came out on Valentine’s Day, 2023, and it did not disappoint. There are many powerful chapters, mainly Chapter 19, where David Martin’s statements about the plandemic are precisely the type of talk we should be having two years after the worst bioweapon attack in the history of the world was unleashed. We have to answer the aggression. Otherwise, it will happen again, and the next time will be worse. Martin names the direct perpetrators of a known crime were Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Anthony Fauci, the former secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, and many others knowingly committed multiple crimes understanding that death would result. They are the four with the most blood dripping from them. But then you have the organizations that funded the mess, such as Welcome Trust, the Gates Foundation, the Open Philanthropy Foundation, and EcoHealth Alliance.   Then there is the WHO, where Harry Truman signed an executive order that gave the WHO the directive to control the surgeon general of the United States. That needs to be removed immediately. We have a lot of work to do, and a lot of people will have to be punished severely, very severely. Google knows what role it played in preventing information on treatment from getting to the public. So did Facebook, which continues to this very day. They expect to get away with literal murder. I would immediately propose trust-busting hearings on them, far worse than what Teddy Roosevelt did over a hundred years ago to the railroads and other monopolies that needed to be broken up. Or what the government had to do with Microsoft during the 1990s. Trust busting is the least of what needs to happen next due to gross complicity of Big Tech, the media in general, and their unholy relationship with Big Pharma as their personal PR firms. What was done with Covid is now an irrefutable attack on the world by an unseen enemy who hides in finance and the medical industry and is still a threat to us all. Covid was a test for them, and now they’ve seen what they can get away with and how exactly to go about it. I consider the contents of that book by Deace and Horowitz to be the most important topic in the world right now, and I would recommend everyone read it for themselves. 

Now, my position on Covid has not changed from the beginning. You can go back in searches on this site and see that from day one, early in 2020, as Covid was becoming known as a threat, that I called Covid a bioweapon meant to instill climate change values upon the overly trusting masses. Even Rush Limbaugh at the time thought it was a conspiracy theory to say such a thing. But I knew these people who were involved from my own personal research, and I saw a coup against President Trump, and the enemy was desperate to remove him from office during an election year. They had tried everything else, and Covid for them had been in development for over 20 years, so if they were going to unleash it on the world, 2020 was the time to do it. I knew what this was from the beginning, and it has been frustrating to see it take two additional years for the world to catch up. But I knew Steve and Daniel were writing this book, and there are others, especially by Robert Kennedy; some have already been written, but that the research into what happened was going to happen, and those books would come out, and people would start getting the proof they needed to make major changes in their lives. And when it comes to our government, they have been seduced into a new kind of corporate communism based on the China model of society management, and they have attacked us militarily with terrorism through our corrupt government, not with tanks and troops, but with white coat bureaucrats and a takeover of our health care system to essentially threaten all our lives unless we do what they say. Rise of the Fourth Reich provides plenty of testimony to this situation, and it is backed by actual voice recordings of the witnesses who could easily be brought in for congressional testimony.

It is not too much to call what happened with Covid a Holocaust or to draw conclusions about it regarding comparisons to what Hitler did to the Jews. I have been thinking that very thing since I watched Fauci and Gates trick President Trump into shutting down our entire economy with stay-at-home orders and use Operation Warp Speed to roll out a Pfizer and Moderna vaccine that was already secretly in development; that was the real killer. The manufactured Covid virus under American influence in a Chinese lab in Wuhan was just the delivery system. It was the excuse to put innocent people into a gas chamber to exterminate them. And our government played a role in this terrible mass murder all around the world. We’ve seen these kinds of aggressions in history before. But never before was it attempted in such a significant way and indiscriminately to so many innocent people. It is so evil that most people do not have context to what happened. They are happy that Covid is over to some extent, that they have returned to their lives in many ways. But the effects are already in place around the world. The government policies driven by Covid have already destroyed much more than economies that have never really been restored. And the aggressors have gone unpunished because they think they are immune to prosecution. They control the wealth of the world. They control our governments in the world. And they run the media through many corporate connections and have been very audacious about it. 

I had been on the preorder list for Rise of the Fourth Reich since the summer of 2022 when I first learned that these guys from Glenn Beck’s media group, The Blaze, were putting it together. Surprisingly the book arrived in my hand on the same day it was released to the world on February 14th, 2023. The Amazon truck literally put it in my hand as I was standing in the driveway to receive it. I opened the delivery box and literally started reading it as I walked back to the house. I have since read it twice and listened to the audio version once, and I’m not done. The book does a great job laying out the case of how this massive crime should be handled congressionally. I’m in a bit of a hurry because I know there are a lot of very influential people who read this blog. They are looking for answers too, and there so far has not been a better case for indictment of many characters connected to this Covid crime. It needs to happen fast before someone like Bill Gates gets a chance to try it again, which he clearly plans to do now that he’s seen, and his partners have as well, just how people will react and how information flows through governments, the media, and to the people. Covid was just step one; they have many planned steps in mind, so there is some urgency on our part to meet the challenge. And by reading this well-researched book, Rise of the Fourth Reich, we can begin to accept what happened to us and just how evil some of these people were from the start, and they don’t even hide it any longer. Even a few months ago, a lot of this kind of discussion would be considered tin foiled hat conspiracy, but the facts tell a different story. We witnessed with Covid a holocaust, and we lost a lot of innocent people in the process. It was the danger we all feared most when Nancy Pelosi said about government healthcare that we had to pass the bill to read the bill. Now we are seeing the start of why these kinds of tyrannical people wanted government healthcare so much. Because they had mass exterminations in mind for the human population for all kinds of crazy climate change reasons. And now, there is proof of their activity, and this book is a foundation for doing something about it. Of course, we must not fall into a false sense of security that the threat has been averted and we can all return to normal life again.   We, of course, can’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Most Powerful Weapon in the World: Yahweh as a rebel and representative government as opposed to dictatorships

I enjoy reading the Bible for reasons that aren’t typically discussed, primarily because it exposes what the enemies of America miss every time, which is our form of government. It’s common for us to complain about our government, which is part of its appeal because in America, government is a necessary tool, not a part of some ruling class, and it’s unique in that regard. I sometimes get invited to events at the Ohio Statehouse. I never get tired of thinking about the many hidden meanings displayed there for the various politicians who find themselves as part of a class to conduct the people’s business and witness the ornate décor that is part of the ceremonial structure of its Greco-style architecture. It’s a republic that all the statehouses around America represent, and our federal government in Washington is just a further expression of a lot of mythology and occult practices but a purposeful dedication to the purpose of government in America, something that started with the advent of western civilization and is the best weapon we have against tyrannical governments around the world, and that is our representative government as it evolved along the lines of biblical understanding and is without question the best in the world. Our government is meant to put on the breaks to hot ideas from those most power-hungry, and in that way, it frees up the ambitions of people to produce the most productivity. And whenever I am at the Ohio Statehouse, I am reminded of this very unique aspect of government from the American perspective. 

I was in the gallery for the State of the State speech for Governor DeWine early in 2023. Some people had gathered around me to hear a conversation I was having about the history of the Statehouse and what some of the symbolism meant. It seemed like a good thing to share with this audience, especially when every night we turn on our televisions, we hear only bad things about it. There is quite a push around the world to frustrate the American people with their form of republic government and to tempt them to abandon it in favor of corporate communism, which is the latest threat coming out of China and the World Economic Forum, who want strong CEO types of leaders to rule everything and for countries like America to get frustrated and give up their republic. That strategy was most apparent during Covid where the design of the bioweapon attack was clear, to strengthen central government, make dictators out of all the state governors abandoning the legislatures, and to use an emergency to completely change our government into communism because communism was quicker and more decisive. As I told my witnesses in that gallery that day of the 2023 State of the State speech, the ornate symbolism in the Representative chamber was purposeful to remind the participants that this form of government was there before they arrived. It would be there long after they were gone. And the place itself was a stark reminder to them to do good work, to elevate their game in the name of the law and the constitutions of our republic, and it’s just such a beautiful thing. 

The Bible is key to America in how forms of government evolved over time in purposeful ways, distinguished from the many failures at the time. As God picked his chosen people to be freed of slavery from Egypt, the rest of the world worshipped some form of Baal, which we can see is still happening. Those who were not the chosen people whom Moses freed by the hand of God from the clutches of Pharaoh in Egypt are today just as jealous and cantankerous toward the teachings of the rebel Yahweh. The Bible became a rebellion against many thousands of years of a failed government. Various societies ended up with strong kings or Pharaohs, such as Ramses, or Nebuchadnezzar, or Xerxes, but their influence was always top-heavy and prone to failure once they died, leading to a social collapse in their wake. What Yahweh did against the other religious influences at the time; specifically the long lineage of Baal worship that goes back tens of thousands of years, and was most recently spotted in Hollywood with the Grammys, both from the audience and from the Sam Smith performance, was rebel against that tendency. Behind those efforts is a real push to have centralized rule. But what Moses learned in the wilderness from his father-in-law Jethro was a new way of government that God tried to get everyone to commit to, a representative republic. Jethro explained to Moses that the way to rule so many people was to create judges and regional governors to represent him so that he wouldn’t have to hear the personal complaints of many thousands of people. That way, people could more easily get their needs met while distributing the responsibilities for leading people across many helpers, where Moses could then be a kind of supreme court and only deal with the subjects that could not be satisfactorily met regionally. America is unique in that it has worked to fulfill the biblical goals of a republic rather than a dictatorship, which is at the core of the Bible. 

You can always tell a culture that is choking on too much liberalism when they complain about supply chains and being too busy because everything is funneled through them. Moses had that problem too, until his father-in-law helped him develop a new kind of government. God provided the Ten Commandments to create a legal foundation for judgment, then judges and regional governors would divide up the labor of adhering to justice. And in that way, something new was formed that the Greeks and Romans touched on, but it was only the United States who successfully implemented it, a representative government that solved the needs of the people but kept tyrants from becoming single-point failures over their respective societies. That is the primary problem in China; after all, so much runs through their communist dictatorships that the capacity for social development is limited to the ability of just a few people at the top, which makes the people miserable and suppressed. This is a problem in every culture with too much of a top-down management style, and it’s the only thing our modern media understands because they have all been taught the wrong values. But in America, our greatest weapon against the world that has not made such an evolution themselves and is very jealous of how things are done in America, the Bible and its success is the best blueprint for good government, and those influences are evident at the Ohio Statehouse and other statehouses all across the country. I never get tired of visiting them and thinking about how different America is from other places that have not unlocked that unique form of government. The concept that in the Ohio Statehouse, or any statehouse for that matter, has personal representatives for the people of those states and that local government is so respected is a hedge against tyranny that has set America apart in the world in a way that no other country has yet figured out. And we take it for granted because we’ve always had it. But as we also saw with Covid and anywhere that we use the Constitution as the basis of our law, the best way to defeat our attackers is through the rule of law and, precisely, our republic form of government. Because the pressure on our rivals is forced through the constraints of their dictatorships, and it always proves too much for them to handle, and they collapse in the process. America’s greatest weapon against the world is in its government and not in its military power, which is why it is so attacked in the way it constantly is by those who don’t understand it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why Hollywood is so Liberal: Selling vaccinations knowing how dangerous they are

Covid, for all practical purposes, is long over. And to say it was a plot to change the way authority is distributed worldwide through the white coat administrative class is evident at this point. Yet it’s clear that the plan never considered American sovereignty of any kind and that Constitutional protections from an out-of-control government would not be a factor. It’s obvious the vaccine given as a result of Covid has significant problems and is far from harmless. There is quite a lot of evidence that it’s dangerous for some people, maybe all people. And most people allowed themselves to be convinced through government pressure to take medicine they otherwise would not have considered, and there is a lot of guilt about it now that people don’t want to talk about it because it’s embarrassing for them. But we are seeing young people dying all the time, especially in sports, from heart-related failures, and the statistics are mounting up across the world from pre-covid analysis. Knowing all that, you’d think that the push for further vaccinations would be going away to some extent. Instead, we are seeing all the same menacing characters, like Klaus Schwab, almost in a panic to convince people to go out and get vaccinations to protect them from Covid. Now we know much more about Covid than we did during that first year in 2020, when the media was telling us how deadly it could be, and we all hid in our homes like cowards because the government told us to in order to stop the spread. And we happen to know that Covid was created in China by human hands for obviously menacing purposes, so there is still all that to deal with. But we know now that other medicines treat Covid much better than the vaccine. Yet, nobody still is talking about them in the media circles or from the obvious attackers of American sovereignty. 

I had a friend look me up a few years ago, right before Covid hit, who asked me when I would start making movies as a producer and director, something I have talked about doing my whole life. I had come close to getting into that business several times and have, at times, been able to work with bit-time actors, producers, directors, and finance people, in ways that most people never are exposed to. And I found it disheartening to learn not only how liberal they are, as a culture, way before woke politics showed itself to be so corrosive to the corporate world, but from a business side, it just was not a viable model. The movies I loved growing up were not going to be made for a long time in Hollywood; the industry would have to collapse completely, and the unions would have to implode as they did in the automobile industry, where upstarts could function without unionized labor. And now, with streaming services being what they are, making movies for theater productions isn’t viable as a business model where you get investors and can promise a payback. The movie business, more than ever, is a gambling endeavor. Sure, some people hit it big, but most fail miserably. I explained to my friend that I was going to wait out the storm and see how the market matures. That was, of course, before Covid, and in the aftermath, Hollywood is worse than ever or more unstable than when I explained those market conditions to my friend. I have several projects that would be interesting, but the release to a theater is just too unpredictable, and the streaming revenue doesn’t make sense to me. So at this time, I’m a hard pass. There are many more things to do in the world than make movies. 

But the exposure I had to the inside mentality of Hollywood was very valuable in understanding why actors and other Hollywood types are still pushing the vaccinations. I once shared a trailer with a young lady fresh off the set of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and I thought she was very nice. It was an awkward arrangement as the producer had not brought in enough trailers for their production, and we were asked to share, which is something you just don’t do in Hollywood culture. But we shared a trailer, and I was able to hear from her just how desperate most actors are for their next project. They stress about it constantly, even the big A-listers. Choosing to be an actor is a very hard thing to do, and integrity is not a value producers have regarding actors. Actors are paid to do what other people tell them, and personal traits are not valued. I saw from Hollywood that finance and the producer class were captured by woke culture years ago and they simply did not hire actors with strong personal opinions about anything that was unimportant to those producers. Everyone is a pretty face in acting, so it’s easy to trade one out for another. Women know that if they want to work as an actress, they will have to take off their clothes at some point to make the producers happy; otherwise, they won’t get a job for anything. And men learn quickly that the best way to get their next job is to take on liberal causes and attract attention for them. That’s how they get a call to be in a new film because of their social activism.   Hollywood went full ESG years ago, even if Wilshire Blvd took a while to catch up among the agents. 

So it’s not surprising to see actors still trying to sell the Covid vaccination to the public, which comes across as odd at this late date when the rest of the world wants to move on from Covid. To have them talking about Covid still indicates the deeper plot that is so much attached to this origin and how it connects to Hollywood liberals from the finance class who are plugged straight into the Desecrators of Davos strategies for a Great Reset from Covid panic. It was a strategy they had all invested in heavily, and they just can’t bring themselves to the conclusion that it was a failure and that the vaccination has significant liability concerns. But to answer why Hollywood celebrities are still trying to pressure the public into getting the vaccination, it’s because they have to; otherwise, they won’t work in Hollywood at all. It’s the same reason many people believed the media and got the vaccination under Biden’s illegal executive order. They wanted to work. The Hollywood I came to know was not the place of my youth where imaginative people made movies and got rich doing so. It was a radical place captured by extreme leftists, and the actors in those projects only survived by doing precisely what they were told and checking their personal beliefs at the door. Who controls what those beliefs are then becomes the hidden menace, which then is more evident under pressure, which we are seeing now. The malicious intent from the beginning is easy to see now that rational minds have survived the Covid push. Yet the brain-dead utterances coming from actors to get the vaccination of an obviously dangerous medicine shows that the perpetrators went all in on Covid. And they will likely never admit to themselves their complicity in the ordeal, which is why everything they say cannot be trusted. Actors say what they are told to say, just as it is when they do an acting project. Real-life emulates fiction much more than most people realize.

Rich Hoffman

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Nancy Nix is the New Butler County Auditor: Roger Reynolds files a Brady Motion that should prove his innocence from political theatrics and State activism of procedural misconduct

There is good news out there worth discussing, specifically that Nancy Nix is going to be sworn in on February 13th for the recently opened auditor job; she is undoubtedly the most qualified to provide a professional continuity to the great work that Roger Reynolds has done in that role for years. Nancy Nix is outstanding in her own way, which is why she was so easily picked to fill that vacancy after a recent trial against Roger Reynolds found him guilty on one of the charges, meaning he needed to step out of the job that voters had just popularly picked him for, knowing that there was a court case trying to establish that he had shown an unlawful interest in a public contract. Thinking back on the trial, which took place right before Christmas in 2022, there were seven charges in total, the seventh one came on during the summer of 2022, and that was the one that he was found guilty of, and it involved Lakota schools. Yes, the same Lakota schools that has had all the Matt Miller controversy, so there is plenty to talk about regarding that one. Once the trial started, Roger’s defense was able to get a charge waived, so this Lakota schools charge ended up being Count Six, and it specifically alleged that Roger Reynolds suggested a partnership between Lakota Schools and the Four Bridges Golf Club to expand an indoor golf training facility for the Lakota golf teams. Jenni Logan, the Lakota treasurer at the time, gave a testimony that the defense did not have adequate time to prepare for; they were caught by surprise by a number of things, which occurred because it was a late charge tossed on by the Sheriff’s office and the unique activism of the Attorney General, David Yost inspired procedural misconduct that left a one sided testimony that the jury sided with in the wake of further corresponding evidence to the contrary. 

Now I know all the characters in this story, and from my perspective, it was 100% politically inspired. You can tell by how the court case was either pushed out to accompany election results or rushed to prevent the defense from obtaining all the information they needed to argue everything in court. Of the original five counts, which were the bases of the case investigated by Sheriff Jones and his department, as reported by Channel 19 news, Roger Reynolds was found innocent on all those counts. This Count Six was added later, right before this case was set to go to court in the summer of 2022, as Jones and David Yost were trying to pressure Roger Reynolds to step down from his auditor role. Based on how things looked, and again, knowing some of the situation personally, it looks like they wanted to put overwhelming public pressure on Roger to avoid court since the system was stacked against him and open up that auditor seat for a pick more favorable to their political desires. That last part is my statement based on knowledge of the case. But it’s not hard to connect the dots; the trial was pushed back to a date after the 2022 election to see if Roger would win re-election, which he did. So the trial was used as a backstop to force him to be removed from office with one of those seven charges. And of those, only one stuck, the one that the defense had the least amount of time to prepare for, not surprisingly. 

However, after the trial, the defense obtained one of the Four Bridges emails that they indicated in a recently filed Brady Motion asking for a new trial just for Count Six that directly contradicts the testimony provided by Jenni Logan. The motion indicates that the prosecution knew of these emails, which weren’t revealed until after the trial because the State suppressed them. Not a surprise, given the political nature of this entire endeavor. I’ve read the Brady Motion filed by Roger’s defense team, which is consistent with what I thought about the case from the start. If the thousands of pages of documents and emails obtained by the State were applied, which they were fully aware of during the trial, but kept from the defense so they wouldn’t have time to prepare a proper defense, then that Count Six would have had a different resolution. One particular email referred to in the Brady Motion as the “Powell Email” directly contradicts the testimony of Jenni Logan, who was the sole witness by the State in support of Count Six. That specific email would have provoked the defense into calling testimony that would have inspired an innocence declaration based on the content, which is different from the Lakota treasurer’s memory of the case, which was quite old to begin with. As it turns out, Logan was interested in the proposal and was undoubtedly not pushed into any considerations.

The Brady Motion indicates that the State withheld material it knew to be exculpatory evidence, violating all kinds of laws. Now for context, the investigators in this trial are the same people who found Jenni Logan’s partner at Lakota schools, Superintendent Matt Miller, innocent of criminal wrongdoing when he admitted in a police report during this same period of time that the same people were prosecuting the Roger Reynolds case, that Miller’s police admission that he fantasized about “drugging, molesting, and video recording three kids from Lakota schools” was not criminal conduct. But Roger Reynolds, a respected Auditor of Butler County, abused his position by just thinking of a partnership between Lakota schools and the Four Bridges Country Club to help kids have a golf academy. To say the least, there is some procedural inconsistency, and that is being extremely polite. And both Jenni Logan and Matt Miller were offered jobs by mysterious forces to get away from the limelight at Lakota schools while things played out as a direct reaction to that Matt Miller police report. If this were not a political case, there likely would have never been a Count Six, let alone all the direct influence of the Attorney General’s office anyway. This case, from the beginning, was political and desired to abuse the control of the law to eliminate political rivals, which worked primarily regarding the suppression of evidence that looks to be intentional by the procedural renderings observed along the timeline. I think Roger has a good argument for a Brady Motion, and it would be well worth the effort and cost to ensure that a person found guilty of a felony has an opportunity at fairness. Not just for his sake but to repair the bad reputation that the court is now carrying because of this case. We want to show that the law cannot be used as a weapon, but as an arbiter of justice for everyone, no matter the political pressures.

Yet the biggest concern was that out of all this, Butler County taxpayers would lose the great work that had come out of the Auditor’s office. And now that Nancy Nix is stepping into that role, at least good government is returning to them, as Nancy has worked closely with Roger for a long time. Political turmoil is a constant hazard, especially when you do a good job and some people don’t want such a good job done. Roger Reynolds has undoubtedly been a target for political inspiration against him due to his high level of competence. And Nancy Nix as her own great person is great for that role. She will face many of the same forces, of course, but she is certainly skilled enough to navigate those dangers in her own way. But ultimately, we must make sure our courts work. In Roger’s case, if there is evidence that would find him innocent because right now he has a felony on his record that will last his entire life, and if he doesn’t deserve it, which based on the evidence suppressed by the State, appears to be the case, well then he should have a proper day in court to defend that charge, and not to be a victim of misconduct that uses the courts as a political weapon, rather than a defender of justice and honor. 

Rich Hoffman

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Darbi Boddy is Right Again: The SAVE Students Act seeks to separate students from their parents

When I was watching the Lakota school board meeting from February 6th, 2023, on video, I heard the statement from Darbi Boddy regarding the suicide watch program that was being proposed and didn’t think there was anything controversial about it. I also listened to some of the public debate and the counter statement by Julie Shaffer, who is up for re-election this year, and I would expect those types of big government types to find what Darbi was saying disturbing. In the wake of the meeting, there were apparently a lot of people confused about why the topic was even brought up, which in my view, was just a regular topic for a typical school board meeting where the Matt Miller drama was no longer the centerpiece. Then toward the end of that same week, I heard a constant barrage of negative articles in the media done on the story, Darbi’s position on mental health initiatives by Ohio’s SAVE Students Act on suicide watch. She had really hit a nerve because the stories just kept coming. And on Friday of that week, there were top-of-the-news discussions on Clear Channel radio stations discussing it and how there was a petition to remove Darbi from the board again with a signature drive. Several people approached me and said, “your buddy Darbi Boddy is in trouble again; it doesn’t look like she’s going to survive this one. What’s with her?” My reply to them is the same one I’ll address here, “she’s fine. This is the kind of topic they should be talking about in school board meetings, and she brings up a great point, how much parental involvement should there be in these programs, and what role should a school have in the personal lives of the children who attend?” 

Regarding Julie Shaffer, the fellow school board member who offered a counter comment to Darbi’s statement on the SAVE Students Act, I learned about her a long time ago that she represents all the things I personally hate. She and I had debates on WLW radio many years ago about the nature of education in general, and she and I agree on pretty much nothing. And since it’s an election year, there will be time to tell lots of stories about her personal conduct that shows why she thinks the way she does about things.   But the bottom line is that she represents the kind of parents at Lakota who do not have much confidence in their ability to raise their own children, and they want to lean on the crutch of a big public institution to help them deliver good kids into adulthood. I don’t get freaked out about it because she represents a portion of the Lakota population with the same issues with their personal parenting power. And Darbi also represents a significant portion of the Lakota population that believes in old-school parental roles and that the debate they had in a school board meeting regarding the SAVE Students Act was a healthy exchange of ideas which Darbi put forth as a concern from her point of view. Darbi’s argument was that nowhere in the proposal for suicide watch was there a protocol for calling the parents. The fundamental assumption was that the school knew best what to do with the kids, and the parents were thought of as a kind of nuisance or perhaps even the cause of suicide concerns. And by Darbi pointing all that out, it ripped the scab off a concern that all those big government school types have about everything, and that’s the security blanket they all have in the back of their minds. Can they be bad parents and still raise good children if institutionalism can come in like Superman and save everyone? It’s a liberal fantasy that most Democrats have about big government, and essentially what Darbi said popped that bubble of a fantasy in a very public way, and people reacted very violently to it. 

I listened to Darbi’s comments several times and put them here for others to listen to. Darbi is simply saying that the SAVE Students Act should have as a priority a relationship with the parents. As its written, it assumes that parents are part of the problem, which is implied in the text, and she was concerned about the direction it was going, and she brought it to everyone’s attention during the meeting. Her references to the Salem Witch Trials and to Nazis are historical in context and weren’t mentioned just to be an eye-popping revelation. The way that public schools view parental relationships is very much in line with mistakes from history which she pointed out, in separating parents from their children through institutional controls. We have well-recorded incidents of those mistakes from the past, which is why she mentioned them. The fact that we can never talk about Nazi behavior in public unless it is referenced to conservatives is a topic all its own for many other articles. But for this one, the state sponsored the Hitler Youth movment historically and those same sentiments were clearly present in the SAVE Students Act as it was proposed. Parents were not at the center of suicide watch concerns, and they should be. In terrible situations where kids want out of a bad situation so severely that they are thinking of taking their own life, their school relationships would likely be the cause, and parents should know about it. Not to be assumed that bad parents were the cause. Darbi simply wanted to point out that mental health conditions in public school atmospheres should involve a relationship with the parents. The parents might cause the depression, and the school may help those kids. But often, and likely, the situation would be the other way around, and such conditions should trigger parental involvement to provide resolution. Not castigation. 

The violent reaction to Darbi from those on the liberal side of things makes perfect sense; again, I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Obviously, there are strategic reasons for their violent reaction. We just went through six months of drama where the school superintendent admitted in a police report that he had sexual fantasies of drugging, molesting, and videotaping kids who went to the school he managed, and nobody had any problem with that. But their faces melted when Darbi suggested that the parents be the center of any public school interaction with children. It’s obvious what’s going on. There is a political push behind all this to separate children from their parents, with the government stepping in as a kind of gooish blob of liberalism and taking over the parental role. That was the warning Darbi was making, which is perfectly valid. People who want that transfer of power don’t want any opposition to that transaction for whatever reason they think that way.

In many cases, in their own lives to be fair, they lack confidence in their ability to be good parents, and they hope and dream that a taxpayer-funded school will bridge the gap in their parental abilities. They love their children; they just don’t have the confidence in themselves to be a “super parent.” But that is the topic for a school board debate, which is all I saw it to be. Healthy and fruitful. All the rest was political revenge for what happened to Matt Miller. And to those negative participants, I think they will learn that making such a big deal over little issues will only bring forth more like Darbi Boddy, who will want to run for school board and join her on a much-needed crusade to restore parental rights in public education, which is obviously in short supply and in much need of change.

Rich Hoffman

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What Happens Next At Lakota: Let the labor union strike, quit, and take their six-figure paychecks with them–then hire better people

At Lakota schools, people have tasted what fighting for the right things can provide. With the community support that decided that they couldn’t deal with Matt Miller’s behavior as superintendent of Lakota schools ending with him resigning under tremendous pressure, there is a feeling of victory that, for many, feels pretty good. A few months prior, everything seemed pretty bleak; the system was rigged against the taxpayers, and we would be forced to put up with bad behavior while our kids were held hostage by the teacher’s union. But the community behind the efforts of their representative, Darbi Boddy, the first-year school board member, had a high standard that the employees like Matt Miller found they couldn’t live up to or simply refused to. So he turned in his resignation letter and complained about a hostile work environment, hostile because there were community members who just couldn’t deal with the sexual lifestyle he exhibited during a messy divorce, and against significant opposition, they could taste victory. So what happens now? We all hear the threats from the Matt Miller supporters, the threats that the teachers are all thinking of quitting. That Matt Miller’s friends and staff at Lakota are going to soon be joining him and leaving the district, and of course, the worry there is that nobody will want to work at Lakota schools, and the report card will be devastated from the state and if the school district goes down, so will the community’s real estate. If the school isn’t any good, then people won’t want to move to the area, and everything will fall apart, and it will all be Darbi Boddy’s fault! That’s what they are saying, anyway. So what do we do now?

Well, I’ve heard all this before, and all those fear tactics are labor union strategies that they worked out a long time ago when their pal John Dewey came up with the progressive idea for public education to begin with. They never intended to just teach kids about reading and writing; they were purposely intent on social engineering. They wanted to get kids away from their parents and reteach them how to be liberal-minded activists. They used to hide it more than they do these days, but that is what Critical Race Theory is all about, and why suddenly, sex education is so important to them as early as possible. Anybody who thinks about sex as much as these educators do has serious mental problems, and they shouldn’t be teaching anybody anything. But people in a community believe after years of propaganda that a public school is a key to their real estate value, so they turn a blind eye to these crazy liberal losers who run these palaces of deceit and mistrust and roll the dice hoping that everything will turn out OK. Well, I have totally different ideas about these kinds of things and how to manage them, and it’s taken a while for enough people to have the desire to try something different and they want to have more success, leaving them hungry for what’s next. To that point, I would say that electing Darbi Boddy to the Lakota school board was a great success for the kind of parents who want what’s best for their kids and want a really high standard for their community. Not some fake PR campaign that hires some radical leftist superintendent who gets a bunch of awards and national recognition for the same reason that Sam Smith got a Grammy for performing a devil-worshipping ceremony on a broadcast sponsored by Pfizer because they advance a liberal radical agenda that wants to support mask mandates and openly gay lifestyles in public school. I think people want real quality in their schools, and perhaps, for the first time in their lives, they can get a taste of what that might look like. 

Believe Sam Smith when he says he’s not here to make friends. Trying to be their friend is a waste of time.

To that point, we first need to elect more school board members like Darbi Boddy. I have learned about Darbi over this past year, aside from any political viewpoints, that she really cares about the kids of all families. Every time I have spoken to her, that’s the first thing she always talks about, no matter how crazy the events around her have been. She cares about our community’s children and wants what’s best for them. If only we could get a few more school board candidates like that, then I think we could get the band back together and run a campaign like we did when Darbi was elected the first time. But of course, the most significant opposition to that will be the LEA labor union. They have been very hostile toward Darbi. If there are more school board members like her, there will be trouble, a lot of staff and administrators will leave, and there will be drama. I would say to everyone that it would be great if they left. If they did, there would be room for better employees to join Lakota who genuinely wants to work for a quality district, and that quality starts on the school board. When a culture of quality is established, then the employees follow, and there are a lot of teachers and administrators who are forced to hide their conservative values, and they would love to work for a school board that reflects their personal values. So I think we’d end up with the opposite situation to the fears espoused by the union. 

Without question, there will be a standoff with a truly conservative school board during the next contract negotiation. The union will strike. They don’t care at all about the kids of Lakota schools; for them, it’s all about politics and a paycheck. They are not like Darbi Boddy and any board members that might be able to join her in a future election. I’ve been down this road many times professionally, and the roadmap for dealing with it is quite clear. Let the teachers strike and show who they really are. We’ve already had work stoppages due to Covid, so the parents will support the school board if they push the union into a strike. The most radical employees will leave and take their six-figure paychecks with them. That would be great. That would allow Lakota to hire younger teachers who make half as much money and don’t have all the liberal radicalism built into them after years of union activism. And Lakota could recruit truly better people who want to live in a conservative area run by a conservative school board and have teachers teaching the basics of education like math, science, and real history instead of how to put a condom on a banana in the first grade and how to be a gender-neutral satan worshipper jamming to Sam Smith in class while they should be learning things. Failure to do things like stand up to the Matt Miller types in the world will just destroy kids anyway, so there is no harm in shaking things up a bit and making a public spectacle of it so that word gets out across the country about what kind of place Lakota is, and the right employees will be drawn to it. And that’s what happens next. By getting more school board members like Darbi Boddy, Lakota could truly become an outstanding school instead of a fake one on paper while swinging lifestyles are taught to the children by the administrators who have loose sexual desires and a social value system that is in all actuality, reprehensible. Running liberals off won’t destroy the school; it will make it far more desirable than any zip code in the nation. Because the little secret that nobody talks about in real estate in the open is that the primary driver of all real estate transactions is due to politics, not schools. People move away from liberals and to areas of conservative value 100% of the time. And they’ll do it at Lakota once the line is drawn in the sand with a firmly conservative school board. It will help the school and community. It certainly won’t hurt it.   

Rich Hoffman

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What the Spy Ballon from China Meant to America: The menace behind the curtain, the little dog has pulled back for us all to see

Early last year, I explained the sphere of influence people lived within and showed how they are manipulated along those assumptions. Most people live in their little bubbles of experience and never step beyond them. This is why lately, I have been talking more about various conspiracy theories, even some of the more outlandish ones, because there are enough facts now to demonstrate the real problem in our modern age and what needs to be done about it. We just watched a spy balloon from China float completely across our North American space, only to be shot down once it was over Atlantic Ocean airspace. Just a few years ago, such a thing would not have even made it from the Pacific into American airspace.   There is a militant attack against us all that is obvious, has been concealed behind the bubbles of reality we all live in, and the threats have hidden in the background only to provide a menace from that concealment which they feel empowered to perform. And the answer to this threat isn’t in basic politics and its analysis. Our political realities are just another level of bubbles that we all live in, and the forces that shape those bubbles continue to operate unchallenged because the human race does not have the mind to see them or deal with them. Then knowing all that, the conduct of our American government, the push, for instance, from the FBI to keep Democrats in power, to preserve at all costs the swamp of Washington D.C. and general CIA operations, the NSA, and its many tentacles into our lives, it is clear that none of them are working for the American Constitution. They are reporting to something else and to understand that we must look at the situation beyond the bubbles of influence we spend all our time residing in. Seeing how the game has been played against us all, it’s time to pop those bubbles and get control of our lives again, and avoiding complex and controversial topics is not the way to achieve success, and from my point of view, success is the only option.

The game we are dealing with, turning back to the silly spy balloon from China, is that we are meant to experience these little provocations from China and to be in awe of them. China is at war with America but not in the way we typically measure it. They are working hard to rot us from the inside out, with poison from the drug culture, from undermining our form of government with financial influence, and stripping away every aspect of our culture with woke politics meant to destabilize our basic philosophical foundations. But behind that bubble of concern is a much more sinister villain: the group of global financial investors and corporations that are the Desecrators of Davos, the members of the World Economic Forum. It has been their money that has put China on the map. Without them, China would not have the financial means to conduct war. It’s very similar to how the NAZI party was created by the Thule Society, which had a definite occult foundation. This method of building up an international bad guy has been occurring since mass communication started over a century ago. Of course, there would be powerful forces who would try to use it to their own advantage. As a human species, we have not figured out how to deal with it because the answers fall outside our sphere of influence. But at this point, we see all these secret societies working to control the world beyond the limits of national governments, and they’ve been doing it for a long time. Then to deal with that threat, we have to pull back even further to the root cause of their behavior, their occult beliefs that are the foundation of their very existence. 

I personally don’t care about aliens and space travel. I’ve said it many times; I would treat them the way I’d treat anybody. I don’t care if the lifeforms I’m dealing with are from the star system Sirius or if they are from Kansas, I don’t care at all. There is nothing god-like about people from someplace else other than the fact that they likely have the technology developed along a different path of understanding from our present civilization. Now that we know that our own biblical history is just a recent human experience, it all starts to make sense. There have been intelligent lifeforms trying to make a go at it on earth for many thousands of years. Evidence in a book I have called Forbidden Archaeology shows intelligent influence on earth goes back millions of years, and much of their previous civilizations have crumbled away into dust just as the current Great Pyramids are now. A few tens of thousands of years from now, those great monuments will ultimately erode away, leaving nothing at all behind of their history. And future people will wonder where the stories of their culture came from because they will only be looking at the situation from their personal perspective and historical reference in time. Yet, what is evident among those in our world who want so much power so they can hope to influence all the unknown forces in the world is to have relationships with that past to control the future. And those types of people have infested themselves in our government not for our benefit but for their own silly insecurities. And you learn a lot about them from the unconstitutional interactions that always surround investigations into UFOs and interactions with space-fairing civilizations that are at the heart of most occult practices in the secret societies connected to our current global commerce. 

The bottom line is that our various government branches, especially the intelligence agencies, do not work for the American Constitution or us in general. They exist for other reasons that are not to the advantage of American sovereignty, and they think they know best what is suitable for a self-governing people. And they don’t have a right to do what they have been caught doing. We’ve caught them unleashing viruses that have killed massive amounts of people in the world and watched our government become drug pushers for the big pharma companies, resulting in more death. We have watched our government perform a coup of an elected president because they didn’t want him. The FBI alone has been caught in so much political insurgency with Trump that what we have learned has been horrible, beyond most people’s comprehension. And they started this abuse of power with UFO investigations, where much of it has been covered by “Above Top Secret” classifications. Once that premise was set, our governments believed they had a right and obligation to hide things from people they deemed too dangerous to know. This has opened the door to many other manipulations that have been vastly unconstitutional and subject to severe punishments for doing them. Knowing what I do about the matter, and the various secret societies and their dumb beliefs in supernatural powers, earth worship, and the foundations of civilization in general, I wouldn’t trust them to carry a bag of groceries across a parking lot, let alone decide what information is good for the public in a free society, and what isn’t. And this brings us back to China and why they have been propped up by all these incompetent government forces worldwide. Because communism keeps governments in control and allows a corporate alliance from Davos to rule in the shadows and to protect their own religious fevers based on their occult practices, which have always been a problem against self-rule. The spy balloon was meant to show how low America had fallen, how we needed a more decisive government so that we abandon our republic and join the Chinese into a communist, decisive ownership to protect our own survival. But the real menace is just out of reach, protected by our intelligence agencies, and they never had a right to that position.   And it’s time to stop giving them that kind of unchecked power.

Rich Hoffman

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‘The Richest Man in Babylon’: Real wealth creation in Ohio won’t be possible until it’s a ‘Right to Work’ state

Whenever I go to Columbus, Ohio, I have a few bookstores that I go to every time. I consume a tremendous number of books, about three large books a week. If they are smaller, under 200 pages, I read five or six. It’s probably my favorite thing to do in the world, and I often read very early in the morning, between 3 AM and 6, and after the hours of 7 to 11 PM. Between those hours, I work hard, really hard. And reading settles my mind and keeps everything from fragmenting. On the weekends, I usually read for around 8 hours daily, starting around the same time and ending around noon. Then I spend the rest of the day with my family doing whatever comes up in those engagements. But it had been quite a few years since I last read The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926. I read it in my twenties, so I thought it was odd that while I was talking to people at the Capitol during the Governor’s State of the State speech for 2023, I was sitting in the gallery waiting for everything to start when a person made a great effort to sit next to me and ask me to sign a copy of that book. It was a nice paperback copy that  was a miniature version that could fit easily in the jacket of a nice suit. This person told me he was a fan of my blog, recognized me because of my big white hat, and wanted me to sign his copy of the old George Clason book. So I signed it, and he was very happy about it. He sat down near me, and before we all left after the speech was over, he came over to shake my hand again enthusiastically before departing back downstairs, where all the members of the Representatives and Senate were gathering in the rotunda to have lunch with Governor DeWine. 

I’ve signed many books over the years, but they are usually the ones I have written; it’s not usual to sign other people’s books. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense as I talked to various legislators at the after-event. Once I left the Ohio Statehouse later that day and visited my bookstores, I bought a modern copy of that book and reread it later that evening to connect with that enthusiastic personality. After my talk with everyone that day, it all made sense. If you have not had exposure to that very famous book, The Richest Man in Babylon, it’s typically found in the business section of a bookstore and is a foundation for how wealth is created. It takes place in Babylon to take the edge off any modern references, but the idea is that wealth is created by effort, and it is beneficial not just to the people who have the wealth but to their community as well. If we have a society of many people who have created wealth for themselves, we will have a better society. It is very much the opposite of this “tax the rich” culture that we get from the various socialists and communists embedded in our American culture these days, which has become much worse under the economic policies of Joe Biden and Democrats in general. And when you get behind the scenes, away from the cameras and newspaper reporters who never cover significant political events correctly like a Governor’s State of the State speech, wealth creation is the number 1 concern because it’s the thing that makes everything in society go. 

One of the big topics that emerged from Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech was the effort to bring businesses and jobs to Ohio and that there would be spending investments to do so. But on the checkered floor of the Statehouse were lots of discussions about how exactly to do that. And I love these kinds of discussions. Some people see lobbyists, corrupt politicians, and maniacal lunatics when they talk in those places. Yet, I generally see the kids all these adults grew up to be trying to do something good from their own perspectives with the same enthusiasm that kids build new things with Lego toys. No matter the political ideology, I find everyone eager to conduct some version of a childhood dream of saving the world one law at a time. And you don’t get that unless you get the chance to be behind the scenes and talk to people who are actually making the sausage. I usually come away from those events encouraged. But the efforts typically fall short because the real problems never get dealt with.

And regarding Governor DeWine’s efforts to bring more business to Ohio, the truth is that we can spend all the money we want. But until Ohio is a Right to Work state, the big multi-billion-dollar investors will not bring their big corporations to Ohio because of their fear of labor unions taking over the management of their facilities. Ohio will continue to lose opportunities to South Carolina and other places until we join them in becoming the Right to Work states that protect business investment from the socialist encroachment of the labor union movement, which never should have been allowed in American politics. To understand these basic economic truths, I would recommend everyone to read The Richest Man in Babylon and come to your own conclusions. But until people have a basic understanding of wealth creation, it’s a pointless debate with the kind of communist labor union advocates who think that the value of labor unions is in more sick time, the 40-hour work week, and weekends and holidays off. All those things mean less productive work, less output, and more paid time off for a company trying to make things.  

The sum of many conversations on that topic was that Right to Work was dead in Ohio until President Trump returned to the White House, and likely longer because Trump likes labor unions. In his big MAGA party, labor union members have been voting for Trump. So suddenly, we have friends in the Republican Party from the labor movement, and nobody was going to dare push those friends away at the expense of dividing voters away from Trump. And Governor DeWine, for all those reasons, had no stomach at all for Right to Work discussions. But eventually, and not decades away, but just three or four years, Ohio will have to be a Right to Work state if it wants to be the next Silicon Valley in a 21st-century economy, which I think is entirely possible. Ohio is a great place to live and work. The business corridors between Cincinnati and Columbus, and Columbus to Cleveland, especially on the east side, and even all the way up from Cincinnati and Toledo, are some of the best in the world. There is room for plenty of country living and rock-and-roll businesses that create vast wealth for everyone involved. But what’s preventing that investment isn’t a lack of input from the state to develop the infrastructure to do it; it’s the protection of investment from those looking to do so from the greedy hands of the communist labor movement. Nothing kills wealth-building faster than a labor union. It might get union members paid off days where they don’t have to work, but it doesn’t help a country be competitive while the rest of the world in Asia is working seven days a week, 24 hours a day, for a rice cake. And that is what we are competing with. Ohio needs to be a Right to Work state, and the sooner it is, the quicker real investment into Ohio can begin. Until that happens, speeches like the Governor’s State of the State are just enthusiastic dreams that are held back by reality. 

Rich Hoffman

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