Category: Education

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

Steve Hilton For Governor of California: With Trump, state competition is the key to Making America Great Again

It’s not just Vivek Ramaswamy, or Byron Donalds who are Trump endorsed candidates running for governor of their respective states in 2026, but I learned at Vivek’s West Chester event from Vivek himself that the Fox News personality Steve Hilton was also planning to run for governor of California once Gavin Newsom terms out after this current term.  Steve Hilton is best known for his show, The Next Generation, which he had on the 9 PM time slot on Sunday nights and was popular; it ran from 2017 to 2023.  But I hadn’t heard what Steve was doing since then, other than showing up here and there as a guest on various shows.  He’s a very positive person and is part of the next generation of political commentators that I have been talking about lately, and that is certainly the case here.  Once Vivek arrived at CTL Aerospace to speak about his announcement to run for governor, I learned that Steve Hilton was flying out from California to speak for two minutes to give Vivek Ramaswamy a warm announcement.   I realized that a very positive pattern was emerging, leading straight out of the Trump White House.  Trump was building a brand in politics that would carry others to succeed him, and once he put his name on that person, the Trump machine would get behind that person and take them to victory.  Steve Hilton has become good friends with Vivek Ramaswamy, and now that Vivek has put his hat in the ring, Steve told us all at that West Chester event that he was planning to do the same in California, which provoked a long conversation with me backstage after he concluded his speech for Vivek. 

If you haven’t noticed Fox News lately, even they can’t ignore the world trend that eluded them for the previous decade as they wanted to turn more to the center and not be known as a right-winged network once Roger Ailes died.  The Rupert Murdoch kids are not conservative at all, and the wives of the boys wanted to take the station toward New York high society politics rather than conservative populism that was put forth by personalities like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson, and it hurt them.  Then, their position against President Trump was outrageously radicalized.  Again, when discussing left/right politics, the “left” represents Karl Marx’s ideas.  The “right” represents capitalism.  So, being called one or the other is a more profound indication on the political scale of right and wrong, and Fox News was trying to move to the “left” while Roger Ailes had built the network toward the right.  It was not something Rupert Murdoch was politically inclined to, but it was popular, so he went with it as long as the channel made money.  But the kids don’t care so much about making money; they were more concerned with social status, so they made a bad business decision, parted ways with top talent at Fox News, and drove a wedge with Trump himself that they thought they could survive.  They falsely believed that they were the news, not that they reflected their audience, a common mistake everyone is learning from now that Trump is back in the White House.  Woke is out, and common sense is back in.  Even in NFL football, my favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have reinstated their old coach, Jon Gruden, back into their Ring of Honor.  They took him down after a fake scandal was invented to drive him out of football over leaked emails Gruden had written.  The whole premise was that Gruden could be kicked out of the NFL just for thinking and saying something, and that trend has gone the other way, leaving the Buccaneers under this Trump administration to get with the program and to reinstate Gruden to their Ring of Honor. 

That’s kind of what has happened with Fox News, many of the people who were frequently on Fox News are now in Trump’s cabinet and are doing very well, and it has been good for Fox as a business and they are having to make decisions to step away from their commitment to left winged politics.  The Trump family was pushed away from the network before the election, but now they can’t get enough of Trump, leaving Lara Trump to have her own show on the weekends like Steve Hilton did.  So Steve, always an upbeat personality, talked to me about all this as Vivek was speaking in West Chester, and we talked about this trend, the kind of people Trump was building to extend his government beyond the reach of any critics and to destroy conventional politics on its face.  And specifically with California, everyone thought that Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be a good Republican governor, but he turned out to be a RINO loser who could never stand up to the unions and ended up disgraced.  And at that point, California turned radical left and is currently miserable.  A prime time for someone like Steve Hilton to run and win the state and bring the fifth largest economy in the world back to sensibility.  Trump had a plan to make America Great Again, and that started by decentralizing the presidency and moving things back to the states where his hand-picked people would be running those states two years into this current administration, and through state competition, Trump was going to change the political landscape forever.

Remember when NBC tried to replace Trump on The Apprentice with Schwarzenegger because they thought the whole success of that show was a tough guy telling people they were fired?  Well, Schwarzenegger bombed, just as he did as governor because he was an actor, not a leader.  Trump is a battle-hardened leader who learned how to be successful in show business.  And these picks for governor positions are similar; they were privately successful but have learned to master the media to convey authentic leadership.  And Steve Hilton could do what Schwarzenegger or Gavin Newsom could never do in California.  Those personalities knew how to manipulate an audience behind the camera but were paralyzed regarding real-world activities.  And Democrats don’t have any other personality that can step forward and explain the massive failures that the people of California have suffered under Gavin Newsom.  So, another endorsement of Steve Hilton by Trump could easily carry him into a win there, too.  The world is changing for the better, and as I told Steve, you can see a pattern emerging that he is undoubtedly a part of.  And he would be great in California.  Like Vivek Ramaswamy, Steve Hilton is an excellent public speaker who can convey a message.  But more than that, he understands how to identify problems, which he always did on his Fox show.  And like many of the successful personalities on Fox, they need a chance to show their stuff on a political stage.  So, California won’t be left behind in all the fun regarding governor races in 2026.  I think it’s excellent, and the radical political left of Karl Marx won’t have a way to deal with it.  Trump endorsements are a new brand in politics that Democrats have no plan for, especially in states they have ruined, like California.  Once he announces, Steve Hilton is poised to win there in a big way. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Story of the Card: When people do good things for all the right reasons

Interestingly, just a few weeks after Vivek Ramaswamy announced he was running for Governor of Ohio at CTL Aerospace in West Chester, we both found ourselves at the Library of Congress, for different reasons, on the same day.  Vivek is all in and doing media interviews every day on the prime-time Fox News shows and other places, and he was at the Library of Congress to celebrate Ohio’s birthday for statehood, which is a pretty interesting story.  And that, too, is interesting: since President Trump has returned to the White House, where he was rightfully supposed to be, many of my close friends have suddenly had a lot of business in Washington, D.C.  But one of the aspects of all this that I get asked about the most is that when Vivek came to West Chester to make his big announcement, people wondered why Vivek and I seemed to know each other and what was it with that card I showed him when he arrived.  The truth is, I didn’t know if he would remember me after all he had been through since the last time I saw him.  But he seemed to upon sight once he arrived and met with a small group of people responsible for the event at CTL Aerospace.  When it came time for him to greet me, his wife was already speaking with me. I wanted an ice breaker.  After all, he has met many people over the last couple of years and spent his time helping campaign for Trump, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, and creating D.O.G.E. with Elon Musk.  So, to start our conversation, I showed him a card he gave me four years ago, which everyone has been asking about.  And when he saw it, he laughed.  He and his wife instantly knew what it was, and it kicked off a nice conversation about his personal political journey, which started at CTL Aerospace five years earlier. 

The card in question was a little promo thing he did for his book Woke Inc, which went on to be a game-changing bestseller, as I thought it would at the time.  Vivek was really one of the first in the country to figure out just how dangerous woke politics was, and the great Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix invited me to come to a special launch of his new book at the Middletown Republican Party Headquarters.  Vivek was trying out his messaging for a national campaign that would encompass Fox News, specifically Tucker Carlson, so he was trying out his platform to a kind of test showing in his hometown of Butler County, Ohio.  But that isn’t where the story started, as Vivek told me the same story he said at the governor’s announcement and why he wanted to return to CTL Aerospace to make his big pitch.  A year earlier, from the book launch, where all he had to give out was that card, because the book hadn’t officially come out for another three months at that point, I had set up a rally in support of President Trump.  He was in his last year in office and was starting to run again for a second term.  And Democrats were entrenched in impeaching him and trying to use the Russian story to knock him off.  So I, along with several other prominent Butler County Republicans set up a rally to support Trump during a very dark period, and the rally was at CTL Aerospace which many thought was bold, to politically stick their necks out to show open support for President Trump when everyeone else in the world was running away.

J.D. Vance was still coming off his popular book The Hillbilly Elegy and was getting attention wherever he went, and he already knew Nancy Nix, who of course was coming to the rally I was putting on.  And as the story goes, the future Vice President wanted Nancy to introduce a friend of his, Vivek Ramaswamy, to the world of politics because he was stepping away from a CEO job he had been doing at the time and was looking for something new to wrap his brilliant mind into next.  So he came to the rally, got a good taste of politics, and saw an anti-woke company that was not afraid to tell the world at the time.  Vivek told me a year later that the rally helped him define a virus he and his wife had been considering curing.  Not a disease of the body, but one of the mind, wokeness.  After that CTL rally, he sat down and refined those ideas into the now famous book, Woke Inc. There were many people in the audience that day at that rally, so I didn’t know Vivek from any other face in the crowd.  But a year later, as he explained, he had written his book and was pitching it to a hometown crowd before going nationwide with a more extensive campaign.  But my joke to him then was that he was doing a book launch without a book because it wasn’t out yet.  But he did bring little cards with the cover printed on it.  I sat in the front row, because I love new books, and he gave me one of those cards and signed it.  And I looked at it and joked, “Is that it?”  Because I wanted an actual book to read, not just a silly little card. 

Well, it was a pretty good story, and I kept that card as a bookmark in some of my other books in my library.  A year after the Middletown event, I saw Vivek again at a Lincoln Dinner, and we were all in the VIP section as he was scheduled to speak that night.  Mike Pompeo was back there too, with a bunch of my personal friends, so it was a festive environment.  But I didn’t forget about the joke between Vivek and me, so I brought a copy of his book, Woke Inc, that I had long since read.  I got it for him to sign, which he did, and we joked about that card.  So now fast forward to three years after that, and Vivek was coming back to CTL Aerospace to make his governor announcement, and I pulled out that card for our greeting, curious as to whether he would remember all those events.  I didn’t want it to be weird for him to wonder, after seeing so many faces on his journey of running for President and traveling all over the United States, to see me and wonder how he knew me.  So I showed him that card before we even shook hands, and our conversation picked up exactly where it had last resided, and we had a lot of fun with the topic.  People watching and seeing all the pictures have been wondering what the story of the card was, how Vivek Ramaswamy stepped into politics to contribute his massive brain to the cause of freedom along the trajectory of the MAGA movement.  But I was there initially and played a part in his journey and was happy to see him doing good things with it.  You never know who might be in the audience when you host a rally or write articles like these daily.  But I have found many Vivek Ramaswamys out there thinking about doing something significant with their lives; sometimes, they need someone to hold the flashlight in the right direction so they can find their way to it.  And things cascade from there, so doing things is always important.  Vivek will be a great governor in Ohio and, undoubtedly, a great president after that.  He will do a lot of great things in the years to come.  And it will be because he is good and is willing to do all the hard work.  But sometimes great things happen just because of a little card and a story that grows with it.  That is the story of the card I have kept and the movement it launched, with the efforts of many people brought together with the common bond of just wanting to do the right thing. I’m very proud of Vivek Ramaswamy; he’s the right guy at the right time for all the right reasons and when you see things like this you can see the hidden hand of God working from behind a veil with a yearning for good things to happen with little miracles that make no sense under any other condition.  And I wouldn’t say that anything in this story is a miracle.  But what it is only happens when people refuse to bend the knee to darkness, and people so inclined to resist come together under a common cause and change the world, one little card at a time.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Library of Congress, an astonishingly intelligent place!

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

A D.O.G.E. Savings Clock: Telling the story as the level of corruption seen in government employment continues to be uncovered

The Department of Government Efficiency will be known as one of the most important things ever done in government.  The amount of money wasted through government employment has been staggering.  And it has been so corrosive that it has set the bar entirely too low for the rest of the world, regarding expectations of what a job is supposed to be.  When Elon Musk sent emails to government workers asking them to name five things they did last week, many couldn’t. You can see a hint of the waste paid out for very little work.  I’ve been screaming about this for years, and people have been interested but very slow to react.  Only now that a Trump administration is willing to save money, and making money a theme of their administration, has something like a D.O.G.E. been an option.  Then, it would take a unique personality that was good at both digging up the dirt and selling it to the public, which is what Elon Musk is all about.  Of course, Trump let Elon Musk speak at his first cabinet meeting, where everyone at the table was excellent in their own right.  But for all of them, what Musk was doing with D.O.G.E. was the most important thing because it captured and controlled the narrative.  Nobody can defend the worthless nature of the average government worker, and now that so much waste is evident, we can see why many of them vote Democrat in elections: only Democrats are dumb enough to rubber-stamp so much waste and corruption.  Just in this first month of D.O.G.E., the numbers have been staggering.  For me, this was not surprising, but for many, there was an assumption that government workers were busier than this.  And when they can’t even report five things that they did that were useful, you know you could eliminate their positions, save the money, and not ever miss them.

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

However, we are at a saturation point.  At first, the reports were shocking.  But there is so much of it that everyday news of the amount of waste is starting to glaze over in the public’s eyes.  And I think there needs to be a D.O.G.E. clock, which is the opposite of the well-known Debt Clock that we are all familiar with, that shows the amount of debt America is racking up by the second, minute, hour, and day.  We need a D.O.G.E. clock that displays the savings stacked up in the opposite direction. Otherwise, people might forget or grow numb to it.  They need to see the big picture, and it should be on a sidebar on the X platform and Truth Social.  People need entertainment value in the reporting because the engagement level needs to be high.  While D.O.G.E. can’t actually control the amount of money being spent, Congress needs an easy understanding of what is going on to control the purse strings.  People need to quickly understand what their representatives need to be doing to control costs. Without a proper context, much of the waste that is being discovered will blend into the background noise.  What is needed is a D.O.G.E. clock that is easily referenced so people can see the score of savings as it is discovered and measure the length of the voluminous problem.  It’s one thing to shock people, and D.O.G.E. has, but it’s another to create information that substantiates permanent change.  Once the shock of something like this wears off, keeping that momentum going is a tough challenge unless people can be fed the information in quantities and formats they can digest quickly. 

I was talking to an old friend who was hardly a wild conspiracy theorist or crazy lunatic of political ideology the other day.  This friend, Susan Mclaughlin and I were at a political event talking about old times, the early days of the Liberty Township Tea Party where another old friend, Katy Kern had just passed away, and we were reminiscing about her and all the old times when the IRS came after us specifically in 2010 under the Obama administration.  And we were pinching ourselves that such a day 15 years later where something like a D.O.G.E. would even be possible.  I had been doing what D.O.G.E. is doing now with my blog site, but on a much smaller scale.  Now, there was Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, empowered by President Trump to expose government waste on such a massive scale after all he had been through.  It was everything we wanted out of the Tea Party all those years ago, and we joked that Katy would have never believed it.  In those days, even today, I played the Elon Musk role, and people hated me and wanted to eliminate me.  Hearing Elon Musk talk about this issue recently on the Joe Rogan Podcast was interesting because I know what it feels like.  However, on a scale such as this, there needs to be a proper narrative because raw data will water down the effectiveness of the information.  There must always be a little show business to these things, and D.O.G.E. needs some daily glitter to help sell the story.

But as Susan and I continued to talk, neither of us ever thought there would be a day where all this government cost would be exposed on such a mass scale.  It was a dream many of us had but couldn’t see a path to get there.  I stepped away from the traditional GOP types several times over the years, and I was hoping through Trump back in 2015 that some of this might have been possible.  But what we see ten years later, in 2025, wasn’t on the radar.  However, Trump has earned the right to turn someone like Elon Musk into the point person for government waste.  And as the wealthiest person on earth who doesn’t care about his social status because he wants to live on Mars anyway, there couldn’t and wouldn’t be a better person who could deliver such a D.O.G.E. message.  And that’s what it was going to take.  The government had grown too big and too corrupt, and that started with low expectations of what government employment meant.  It should be an honor to have a government job, but it had grown into a monstrosity of horrendously wasteful spending where the value of money was thrown entirely out the window.  And now we have a mass culture of this kind of thing that has had to be dramatically reduced.  However, as this continues in the coming months, people need an easy way to measure the success of D.O.G.E. hour by hour, day by day, and month by month.  A D.O.G.E. clock would help people see the value of the savings narrative and drown out the crying voices of government workers who are losing their cushy positions with such low employment expectations.  Most government positions must be eliminated, and we will have a better government.  Those workers must be in the private sector and learn to compete.  To keep everything going, people must watch success easily and measurably.  Because regarding the amount of waste there is, we are only scratching the surface. 

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

Women Are Flying the Planes: What we have learned about the pilot who crashed the plane in Toronto

It’s not that women can’t fly airplanes.  I’m sure many can fly better than men.  But like the joke that women can’t drive cars, the assumption comes from somewhere, and it’s for a reason.  Men and women are different and have different priorities in how they live life.  Remember the experiment when NASCAR tried to make a driver out of Danica Patrick to satisfy some woke perception about the world?  She was a good driver, but there is a reason that more women aren’t in NASCAR.  There is a reason that girls play with Barbie dolls and boys play with cars and army men.  They are wired differently, and Danica never cracked into the championship column for sustained periods.  These days, she is an excellent conservative podcaster.  But even though NASCAR tried to make her into a star by following some ridiculous woke agenda, it was never successful. And she didn’t create a glass ceiling in NASCAR where suddenly there were a bunch of women driving in the sport.  We don’t have women quarterbacks for similar reasons.  The NFL has tried to find a role for women in the rough and tumble-NFL for all the wrong reasons.  But it has never worked out, and fans of football would never put up with it, including many women.  The attempts on most employment frontiers to defy biology and insist that there was no difference between men and women regarding social roles have been a disaster, and people aren’t happy with it.  So why would Delta make a decision to staff one of their airline divisions with mostly, if not all, women?  What evidence do they have that such a thing would work under any conditions? 

We should always seek to hire the best people for our positions, especially positions as important as flying airplanes.  We want pilots flying planes who have wanted to be pilots since they were fetuses, not going from an Easy Bake Oven and buying dresses for prom to flying people around in airplanes if you can provide a choice for yourself. Now we know from people close to the situation that the Delta pilot who crashed the plane in Toronto was Kendal Swanson, a 26-year-old without much experience.  Delta has been reluctant to release the names of the crew in that plane that day when a hard landing in Toronto busted the landing gear, shearing off a wing and sending the airplane over on its back in a flaming mess.  Luckily, nobody on the flight was killed.  They had a rough ride, but they made it to Toronto anyway, which says a lot about the planes’ safety.  The flight, operated by Endeavor Air (a Delta subsidiary), flipped upside down during a landing attempt at Toronto Pearson International Airport amid snowy conditions and strong winds. All 80 people on board survived, with 21 injured. Social media and some news outlets have linked the 26-year-old pilot named Kendal Swanson to the incident, alleging she was the first officer (co-pilot) to fly the plane. She reportedly joined Endeavor Air in January 2024, completed training in April, and received her Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certification on January 9, 2025. Claims suggest she had around 1,500 flight hours—meeting the federal minimum for an ATP—but her relative inexperience has sparked debate, with some speculating she struggled with the challenging landing conditions.  Delta and Endeavor have not officially confirmed her identity or role. Delta has stated that the pilots were experienced, with the captain hired in 2007 and the first officer exceeding federal flight experience requirements. The captain, said to be named James Henneman, was reportedly handling communications while the first officer flew the aircraft, though this remains unverified by the airline. Delta has also pushed back against what it calls “false and misleading” social media claims, insisting both pilots were fully qualified and that no training failures occurred.

So here we have a case where Delta, as an airline, got caught trying to put a square peg in a round hole and create job fulfillment for people who should not be flying people around due to her lack of experience.  The passengers were made to do a social experiment to fulfill some DEI worldview, which made that flight much more dangerous than it needed to be.  They dug in and denied the reports when they were caught, hoping they could contain the story.  But the flying public needs to know how many pilots are out there who are just like this young girl, Kendal Swanson.  It’s not just because Kendal is a woman. This has been a problem worldwide, and airlines are trying to make pilots out of people who have not spent all their lives as pilots.  In the United States, we have had a good military program where post-retirement pilots could make a pretty good living flying for airlines after they spent decades flying planes in the military.  And countries that don’t have the kind of military that we do struggle to find pilots for their airlines because they don’t have cultures that produce many pilots.  They go from Uber drivers to airline pilots because manufacturers try to make the planes as easy to fly as possible.  So, it’s hard enough to satisfy the market need under optimal conditions.  Putting 26-year-old girls in the cockpit to tell the world that the employer hired females becomes a big problem.  And that Endeavor Airlines themselves were seeking to hire women over men because they wanted it to be known that they were putting women in planes purely over gender politics. 

I always tell people that airplane pilots are the best examples of stress management.  When flying in a plane and bouncing around in turbulence, you don’t want a panicky pilot who shows panic on the intercom.  You want an incredible, calm voice even when the world is burning around you.  And that level of stress management comes from experience.  Inexperienced people panic, and as passengers on airplanes, we never want to hear panic in the voice of the person flying us around.  We like when we leave the plane to see an older man sitting in the seat that looks like he has landed on aircraft carriers in bumpy seas thousands of times.  Not a kid that looks like they are in a hurry to cash in a Target gift card.  And crashes like this, even though Delta has tried to cover it up, come when we lower the standards of employment to satisfy some ridiculous DEI political movement.  The result is many of the crashes of airplanes that we have been seeing, and they are happening now because, under Joe Biden, DEI was a priority.  They were undoubtedly mistakes, but now that there is pressure from an economy wanting to thrive under Trump, people are flying and doing things again.  The airlines weren’t prepared for it, and they are putting people like Kendal Swanson in the cockpits of their planes when, in truth, she probably needs another ten years of hard flying to qualify to fly other passengers.  And that hiring policy is blowing up in their face, and they tried to hide it. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Governor Rally at CTL Aerospace: Over a thousand people showed up to see Trump’s pick for Ohio

There’s a whole story on this, that is worth telling on its own.

It was never a question for me if Vivek Ramaswamy was running for office; now that Trump has regained the White House, I’m all in.  He is a unique talent and part of what I consider a new generation of political class.  He’s been close to Trump for several years now and as an original D.O.G.E. founding member, he is driven by the same kind of concern for American preservation as Elon Musk.  So when I got a call to help connect the dots for Vivek’s announcement for governor, I was immediately supportive and excited to lend that support.  When I was showing Vivek’s coordinators possible sites to host an announcement rally, I took them to a spot that would hold around 2000 people, which they thought was ambitious.  They were looking for something more intimate, for around 500 people.  After all, this was just a governor’s announcement race for a state.  How many people could show up?  Before Vivek got into the gubernatorial race, I had supported David Yost, the current Attorney General.  Yost is a good guy and, under normal conditions, would be a good pick as an office holder.  However, these are not normal conditions, and we are looking for an exceptional officeholder because George Lang’s Business First Caucus has planted the seeds for Ohio to become the number one economy.  And knowing what I do about Trump, he has put eyes on Ohio to go from a rust belt state to a tech giant quickly.  So, many things are lining up to unleash greatness that isn’t being discussed on the nightly news.  And I knew before he did it that Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to run for governor of Ohio and would be stepping away from D.O.G.E., from people at Mar-a-Lago who told me in early December of 2024. 

So, I wasn’t surprised to get the call from Vivek Ramaswamy to make his big announcement at CTL Aerospace.  There’s a backstory to it that could fill a book, but when my phone rang, I was somewhat expecting it.  So we settled on a spot with his coordinators to hold around 500 people because that would be considered a good crowd for something like this.  But within a few days, my thoughts about 2000 people suddenly got much more attention.  The RSVP for the event quickly shot to over 1000 people; by the time everything started at 4:30 PM, there were people everywhere.  It was more like a Trump rally than anything else.  Seeing all this, I instantly felt a little sorry for David Yost, the only GOP challenger to Vivek for that governor seat.  When I was at his launch announcement, it was hard even to set up a photo line because there weren’t many people.  I attributed it to being too far out; Yost wanted to stake his claim early to ward off possible challengers.  But with Vivek in the race, Yost doesn’t have any chance.  Without question, Trump wants Vivek Ramaswamy to run for governor of Ohio, so any endorsements going to anybody will go in that direction.  Yost is holding on to hope that because Trump was supportive of him in the past, he would support him for a run for governor.  No, Vivek is Trump’s guy, and he has the support of the MAGA crowd, who showed up to a spillover event to put their excitement toward an exciting opportunity.  And it turned out to be quite a media spectacle that traveled quickly around the world.

I don’t talk about it much; my approach to all these things has been to put my head down, push through the opposition, and defeat my political enemies.  I’ve been doing these things for a long time, and as I was telling old war stories to the organizers of Vivek’s event because it was all about the backstory of when Vivek came to CTL Aerospace five years before when almost nobody knew who he was, and I was very involved in the Tea Party, Trump didn’t always get these massive crowds.  I would see Trump here and there as a member of the Reform Party, and he’d have a decent crowd at those events because he was on television and had written a few books.  But it was nothing like what we saw with his GOP presidential run in 2016, 2020, and 2024.  And I was seeing the same kind of trajectory for Vivek Ramaswamy.  We’re not discussing just four years of Trump in the White House representing the MAGA movement.  We’re looking at those four years, plus another 16 years between Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance, who could easily make all the Executive Orders that Trump has been signing into law.  This was all about momentum and planning for the future.  Not a short-term pop, Vivek would apply what he would do as a future president to the State of Ohio to show the world what it could look like.  At this point, he had written four great books about economic health in society in general, and he was eager to put all that into practice.  And that was being announced at CTL Aerospace in West Chester, Ohio, for the world to see. 

As I talked to people a few nights earlier at the Nancy Nix fundraiser, I was given a hard time because I wasn’t wearing my cowboy hat—especially from Sheriff Jones.  Usually, at those kinds of events, two people wear cowboy hats: Jones and myself.  But this time, people noticed I just showed up in my suit, not some ostentatious gunslinger outfit.  And they wanted to know why.  Well, that’s because we are winning, and when you are in such a condition, you don’t have to sell ambition to people; they are already there.  It is fun for a change to see all these great things happening, with Trump every day, with Elon Musk, and now with Vivek Ramaswamy essentially being governor of Ohio, where all of George Lang’s challenging work will finally pay off for the people of the formally known rust belt state.  As I explained my lack of a hat, I offered everyone a feeling of contentment with where our nation was going.  The woke monsters of our world have not gone away, but they have been defeated, and people are showing that they have no desire to return to their ominous tyranny.  And I think that people like Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio Statehouse, then in the future White House, will take what Trump has done and expand on it for a goodness nobody can yet see.  But I see it.  I had significant time with Vivek at this West Chester event, and I can see it in his eyes.  Yes, we have many good things coming, and people see them.  It showed up in the massive crowd at the West Chester announcement, and I feel content for the first time in years as if all the work everyone puts into these kinds of things was suddenly worth it.  And as to my lack of a hat, it’s not that I will change my appearance publicly.  But sometimes, I want to enjoy myself, which I did at Nancy’s event and Vivek Ramaswamy’s announcement rally.  Great things are coming, and it feels good to witness them up close and personally, and to just take it all in and enjoy the journey.

Dave Yost, Amy Acton, or anybody, would not get a line like this. Vivek is the runaway favorite. The crowd was very Trump like.

Rich Hoffman

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