Category: George Lang

The Best Option for Dry Fire Practice: Having a great relationship with your firearm

Not to take anything away from one of the most incredible people in the world, Tommie, the owner of Premier Shooting in West Chester, but I am excited to report on a great new dry fire technology that many people may not know about. I mention Tommie because she told me about her exciting new dry fire range at Premier, the latest craze in shooting, for a good reason. Much of the time, dry firing involves a laser in the gun instead of a bullet and can be measured against a target by some electronic method. It’s becoming more common to use a smartphone for dry fire action. More sophisticated dry fire can be utilized like they do at Premier. There is still nothing like live fire with a real bullet striking a real target. But dry fire can be a great way to stay proficient with a gun without all the expense of firing live ammunition and can be every bit as enjoyable. Well, I have found that practicing for my Cowboy Fast Draw events a wonderful invention sold by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association called the Gunslinger Mark IV laser targeting system that I finally treated myself to, and I’m in love with it. It has been around in the fast draw community for several years but has only recently been perfected to a near-perfect system, as shown in the video above. I can’t think of anything better than this as a dry fire option for people looking for a home dry fire solution to their shooting needs. Practicing with one of these dry fire systems makes the range time much more valuable. I’m certainly not saying gun enthusiasts should replace range time for dry fire time. But that dry fire will make that range time much more useful. 

As I say all the time, especially these days, it’s essential to have a relationship with our Constitution, specifically the Second Amendment. Some people lose touch with the Constitution because they live in areas where they get used to concessions to utilize Constitutional rights in favor of collective need. For instance, in urban areas where it’s almost impossible to shoot every day in the backyard, it’s hard to maintain a relationship with your favorite firearms because they stay locked up all the time. One of the things that I like most about Cowboy Fast Draw is that it allows me to have a wax firing range in my workshop that makes it possible to shoot every day. When I want to fire real lead bullets, I go down and see Tommie at the range. But it’s not possible to shoot every day for me, because of time really, so having a range in my home makes it that much more practical. For many years now, I have enjoyed going into my shop and shooting at my strike plate range. But, for me, that wasn’t enough. I want to shoot while sitting in my reading chair and watching movies and football games. So I had been looking to get one of these Mark IV laser targeting systems, which essentially does everything my strike plate range does, except fire actual primers. Firing live fire rounds in the house and having wax bullets explode all over the living room just was not possible. But with a laser, I can shoot all day and all night long, as much as I want without the expense of using up rounds of ammunition. 

This particular unit is unique because it was invented by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association for the specific problem of fast fire and the need to register the hit in thousands of a second. Much dry fire activity is specific to just hitting a target and seeing how you do from shot to shot. The added element of speed is something special. Whenever the laser hits within the 8″ circle on the target system, it picks up a hit and measures it within fractions of a second. The light blinks three times in practice mode to let you know that your shot is coming. Then the light comes on solid and counts the time it takes you to hit the target. I not only use my target system for fast draw for all types of target shooting. I shoot from 30′, 21′, 15′ down to 5′ like I did in the video, up close so that the camera could pick up the gun and the hit in the same frame and still see the indicator. Even better, the unit is free from an internet connection, so nobody is snooping around on you while you are target shooting. It’s free of internet control, leaving target shooting the personal relationship between you and the practice and nobody else. Other types of dry fire where the smartphone is involved are giving vast amounts of information on all of us to some data collection company. So while convenient and neat, there is a cost to the technology. The Cowboy Fast Draw Association people make the Mark IV advance the sport. So, it’s a trusted source of shooting applications that makes using the Mark IV a much better experience. 

Best yet, the Mark IV Laser system allows shooters to have that daily relationship with their guns. It takes away a lot of the taboo that politics has placed on guns over the years and will enable users to use their firearms more for sport than just self-defense. Practicing with dry fire lasers has the feel of shooting baskets in the driveway. Shooting is a sport just like basketball or football—even golf. But until dry fire technology evolved to the level it is now; it wasn’t possible to practice with firearms virtually anywhere at any time of day. With the Mark IV, as I showed I was using inside my RV, shooting can be done anywhere. Even in a McDonald’s parking lot in Vail, Colorado, while you are waiting for the grandkids to get a Happy Meal and use the restroom. And the system is so reliable that it works perfectly every time. Once you have one of the Laser Training Cartridges that ignite the laser and allow the shot to fire down the barrel, you can shoot all the time, with the only cost being batteries for the cartridge. The total cost of the whole setup is around $800 for the laser and the targeting system and can all be purchased from CowboyFastDraw.com. I buy from them all the time, and they are always good about delivering high-quality items. I even recently ordered from them on New Year’s Eve, and they fulfilled the order that very night. They are like dealing with the way America used to be, always attentive to the customer’s needs, and competent. So overall, I can’t recommend one of these dry fire units more for all the reasons I mentioned and more. The best thing about it is that it takes shooting into the realm of every day and allows shooters to become much more proficient with copious amounts of practice than they could get otherwise. And making better shooters with much more handling only helps everything, from Constitutional consideration to the advancement of shooting sports, because more people can now participate. There is no downside, and for shooters everywhere, knowing that something like this is out there is something that could be life-changing in a good way.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Justin Trudeau Runs and Hides: Socialists are easy to beat, all you have to do is confront them

I don’t know that it was a big secret, but if there was any doubt about how to defeat socialists in general, what has been going on in Canada is the recipe that will work everywhere. Truckers protesting the vaccine mandates of Justin Trudeau, the socialist prime minister there, gathered outside his home. It scared him so bad that he suddenly came down with Covid and fled to an undisclosed location to avoid the mob. At times, it had the feel of the French Revolution, even though it never descended into actual violence or even the January 6th incident in Washington D.C. One true thing about all socialists is that they became that way out of their timid natures. As liberals, they seek the protection of what they think of, like a big, parental government. And from behind the leg of that parent, they lash out at their siblings as if suddenly empowered with strength. But when they realize that the parental government can’t protect them, it is the scariest thing in the world to them. That is how American politicians reacted when they realized that President Trump was not the leader of the MAGA movement, he was the result of it, and that the people who protested their corrupt government on January 6th, 2021, were not shackled to the rules of society when angered, it was terrifying to them. That is the same kind of fear that Justin Trudeau was reacting to when a mob of protestors took their action to his front door. The Prime Minister got into politics as a form of protection from the real world, and this was not how the script was supposed to read. So he retreated and lashed out in predictable ways, which showed the world, just how little power these little tyrants really have when things start getting tough. Only through deceit can socialists have power; once people are on to them, the house of cards falls apart rather quickly.

I warned everyone about Justin Trudeau back in 2015 when he was first elected as Prime Minister of Canada. I told everyone here and everywhere that I spoke that the kid was a socialist and was part of this global script to remake the world into a socialist one, as indicated by Socialist International at the time. Over the years, of course, that group of globalists who have that script written in the Carroll Quiggly book Tragedy and Hope so blatantly has changed their names many times. These days that whole effort has migrated over into the World Economic Forum, which meets in Davos each year to plot the destruction of the world by controlling governments like Wild West train robbers from beyond a country of their own, all to bring them down into the control of the United Nations, which they manipulate through banking. At the time, Barack Obama was their guy in America, and Justin Trudeau was the outright member of the socialist party in Canada who was put there to do their deeds. I pointed it out; many thought it was a vast conspiracy unrooted in reality. But of course, it turned out to be all true.

Additionally, most of the similar leadership positions in all of Europe were like the socialist Justin Trudeau. Justin’s hook was that he was a nice-looking young man who made women feel safe supporting him. Men had to go along if they didn’t want to alienate their women, and in that way, Canada adopted socialism ever so subtly. I immediately noticed the turn toward authoritarian government behind the smiling face at the border at Niagra Falls, which I like to visit every so often. Suddenly the border went from a popular tourist spot to a pretty cold check of authoritarian control, a preview of what was to come when the United Nations and the Great Reset crowd unleashed Covid to the world for the purpose of a complete socialist takeover of the world behind the shared threat of a virus outbreak, hatched by Dr. Fauci through the Department of Defense in direct partnership with the Chinese government. 

Yet, you won’t hear me talking about how scary any of these losers are. Socialists become socialists because they are weak. They are timid people, which is why they were so quick to adopt mask mandates from out-of-control governments. As liberals, they are conflict-averse and always look for that big parental leg to shield them from their actions in the world. And it’s straightforward to defeat them. Just confront them and watch them wither away like the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. The real secret to stopping socialism and communism in the world is to confront the bullies hiding behind those parental legs of government. Once socialists like Justin Trudeau realize that government can’t protect them from bad decisions and people angry at authority, they can do nothing. There will come the point where the Chinese people figure this out about their communist government, the overly parental figures there where the few rule the many quite tyrannically. It is not like the Chinese to think for themselves. Still, once unemployment can’t overcome the nanny state problems of an economy built entirely on looted wealth, people will be mad, just as they were in Canada, Washington D.C. and many other places in the world erupting in anger over an authoritarian government more interested in telling people what to do than actually solving problems. When people realize this, the socialists and communists always fall. Because that delicate balance between fear and lack of opportunity quickly takes over reason, social collapse is always imminent. 

What is happening in Canada can and will happen everywhere. I wish people would have listened to me six or seven years ago about Trudeau. It was about that time that I put my support behind Trump because I could see how things were stacking up. Many people like me saw what the socialists and communists in the world were doing, and we wanted to make our own declaration in defense of capitalism; what better way to do it than to elect a guy who fully embraced capitalism and lived in a golden tower that he built in New York City with a beautiful supermodel wife. That was who we wanted to run our government; we didn’t want these Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau socialists that the world wanted to give us. Looking back on it now, isn’t it obvious why they had to get rid of President Trump? He wasn’t part of their script. The world didn’t recognize the American concept of self-government. They had it in their mind that they’d give us someone, and we would like it, just as they did in Canada. But when things don’t go well, and people want recourse for the injustice done to them, like the vaccine mandates in Canada, then when people do rise up, and Trudeau doesn’t have a script that tells him how to solve that problem, the great fear emerges for everyone involved. Socialists and communists do not know what to do. And it is there that they always fail, time and time again, and always will. People always have leverage over the administrative masses, and when the socialists realize that there is no parental leg to hide behind, it is the worst thing in the world. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Old Yeller: The fight between Thomas Hall and Sheriff Jones

Why Is Sheriff Jones Going After Thomas Hall

Sheriff Jones decided to go on 700 WLW and speak disparagingly about Thomas Hall, the current House Representative of the 53rd District. I like Sheriff Jones, I hope he runs and wins a few more terms, but nobody in their right mind could support the way he attacked Thomas Hall on those radio waves to hundreds of thousands of people. Long-time readers here know that I used to be a frequent contributor on WLW, like Jones. Over time, many of my people who used to work there moved away, were fired, or otherwise changed their point of view. We separated like some kind of divorce, and I have not had much of an idea of reconciliation. I have more freedom in media with this site, so I have not returned in several years. But Jones does go on WLW quite a lot, so because I don’t pay much attention to what goes on there these days, I did not hear the original airing where Sheriff Jones disparaged Thomas Hall in many negative ways calling him a 12-year old “goof,” not just once, but many times. Still, I have often heard from many Republicans who want to defend Hall but are scared of retaliation from Jones, and I think that’s a shame. Hall certainly isn’t 12-years old. I said in the video that he was in his early thirties, but actually, he’s in his mid-twenties and is the youngest member of the current Ohio House. However, the young man is an overachiever by all measures, and his age certainly isn’t a hindrance. He has had two terms as a Madison Trustee, and now he’s in his first term as a congressman seeking a second term. 

Sheriff Jones Goes After Thomas Hall over H.B. 99

Another thing I said about Thomas is a couple of times in the video, I referred to him as Thomas More, because for a lot of reasons, I think of the writer of Utopia whenever I think of Thomas Hall. It’s been that way for a while just because of my own reading habits. There are a lot of Thomas’ in English literature; another is the character of Thomas Becket from The Canterbury Tales, who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by his friend Henry the II. It’s one of my favorite books, and this story keeps coming to my mind when I think of Thomas Hall and his friend and mentor, Sheriff Jones. Jones had endorsed Thomas and was mentoring him until a few things happened. Apparently, Jones didn’t like Hall’s voting record. The Sheriff had a confirmed case of heartburn over H.B. 99, Hall’s bill in congress, which set definitions for minimal teacher training to carry firearms in public schools. Jones uncharacteristically turned on Thomas Hall and made quite an exhibition about it on WLW right before Thanksgiving in 2021. I hadn’t heard it until I did an endorsement video for Thomas Hall, and he mentioned it. I had heard from several very prominent Republicans, some very close to the Sheriff, that something had gone on really bad. As I said in the video, one of them was not Senator Lang. I never put people in positions where they get caught in crossfires with each other and given the mean streak that many fear in crossing Jones, many don’t want to be a part of it. Yet many more than ten contacted me to let me know what was going on between Hall and Jones, and they weren’t happy about it.

Thomas Hall Responds to Sheriff Jones

I listened to the Jones interview with Willie, included here; then I listened to the response from Thomas Hall the next day. I played them for my wife, who loves Sheriff Jones. We talked about the interviews and thought Thomas Hall did a fantastic job. He certainly won the argument. But Jones came across as petty and even childish. My wife offered that maybe he was hurting about something else, totally unrelated. Perhaps that’s true. Whatever it is, I would suggest a few thoughts regarding the excellent Sheriff. I’ve been sideways with him a few times over things, particularly school things and union business. I still blame him for the Lakota levy passing in 2013. He has a liberal streak in him that I can’t stand, but we have buried the hatchet since then. What he did for Butler County during the Trump years has been great. A person’s body of work can’t be defined by just a few years here and there or by the grumpy old dog that starts biting people who step on a porch to sell Girl Scout cookies. I hope that Jones runs and wins more terms for as long as possible. But perhaps my wife was right about him, that something else is bothering him. 

In my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I deal with this very issue of an older generation coping with the young people biting their heels. The chapter is called “The Skill of Developed Intuition” on pg. 181. You spend your whole life getting somewhere, making yourself into the person people put on T.V. Getting invited to the White House. Where you can’t go into public without people wanting to get a picture taken with you. And suddenly, here is some 25-year-old whiz kid who suddenly does more in one year than most state reps do in a lifetime. And he’s confident and won’t kiss the ring. Deep down inside, nobody would want to see such a young person broken, but consciously, the older person wants respect because he gave it when he was younger. The aging process isn’t fair. When you can start to see the end of the tunnel, and you know it’s going to be over soon, it is painful to see intelligent young people with their whole lives in front of them getting the attention it took you a lifetime to build. Sometimes, you might be tempted to crush the young competition, show them all they don’t know yet and teach them obedience. But I would caution you not to do that. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is encourage the young people, not tear them down, but build them up. 

Old Yeller

Listening to Thomas talk about the WLW incident, I was amazed he wasn’t more upset. I would be. I carry grudges for a long time, for decades. I would not have been able to say all the nice things that Thomas said about Sheriff Jones when I did my endorsement video with him. I would have been plotting revenge and embarrassment. But obviously, Thomas Hall has had a lot of good mentors in his life, his father being one. But several other politicians for another, including Sheriff Jones. So, there are a lot of lessons here that should be observed. I would hope that Sheriff Jones wouldn’t spend all the years of his excellent branding on petty nonsense that will overshadow all the good things he has done. There are people concerned about just that very thing by many of the calls I received. But Thomas isn’t that way; he understands that politics is a blood sport, and he plays to win without getting hung up on stupid stuff. And in his mind, he already defended himself on WLW the next day. But people were confused as to why the Sheriff went after Thomas, and I would suggest that it shouldn’t ruin the reputation of the Sheriff. I don’t think we are dealing with an Old Yeller situation here. Maybe just an old dog that would love to run around like the youth do but can’t anymore. There is still good to do, and from the point of view of Thomas, he’s willing to do good wherever possible.    

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Ohio Jim and Joe Show: For governor, in the May 2022 primary it’s all about Trump

Jim Renacci picks Joe Knopp as a Running Mate in Ohio

I didn’t know much about Joe Knopp when I attended the special press conference of Jim Renacci on Thursday, December 2nd, 2021.  I knew I liked Jim Renacci and supported him emphatically to run for governor of Ohio.  The current governor, Mike DeWine, had not shown that he was a conservative during his first term, and his Covid response was a disaster against the Constitution.  He was the first governor in all of the nation to attempt to alter election laws and shut down our economy, and we have all seen enough.  He had to go, and Jim was the best replacement.  But this particular event was a bit of a surprise.  Jim was going to announce his Lt. Governor.  Naturally, I was thinking of the apparent picks; it would have to be a conservative woman of some kind because that’s what everyone does these days.  But no, instead, Jim was thinking outside the box when he announced that he was putting Joe Knopp on the ticket, another privately successful person.  The more I thought about it and got a chance to meet Joe, the more I liked him.  He was, after all, the producer of the Trump movie, The Trump I Know.    

About halfway through the Joe Knopp introduction, I started putting everything together.  Joe was the guy who produced the movie showing all the great Trump women who came out right before the election in 2020.  It told the story that nobody covered about Trump, all the little things he does behind the scenes that made him such a great president, and how he treated women in his campaign and organizations.  It all came to an excellent little focus during the press conference, especially during the question and answer session where reporters asked what Renacci planned to do about Ohio being the number 1 state in all of America for corruption.  Sometimes we all start accepting dysfunction to such an extent that we think of it as reality.  But the reason the media hated Trump, as the Swamp itself does, was because of these independent business guys, people like Trump, and his friend Jim Renacci.  Joe Knopp wanted to eliminate the dark money cookies that all the Swamp creatures get to eat off of.  Columbus, Ohio was every bit as much of a swamp as Washington D.C., Just on a different scale, and essentially, Governor DeWine is like the Joe Biden in the executive branch.  A deeply compromised person who has become rich off dark money hated people who challenged that structure.  From the media to the politicians, it was all an addiction to dark money that they considered such a threat.  So much so that they would have destroyed President Trump if they could.  But the Trump women that Joe Knopp captured in his film so beautifully told the absolute truth, which is what voters saw.  And in Ohio, we were going to get to make the same kind of decision in favor of the Jim and Joe Show. 

This is a different kind of race for the governor.  As Renacci will say, he’s not running against Mike DeWine; he’s running for Ohio.  But this is a primary race that would generally be protected from challengers because they are typically low turnout elections. The people who show up are usually inspired by dark money. That’s how people like Mike DeWine get power and keep it.  And it’s everything that’s wrong with Ohio.  So to run against Mike DeWine is running for Ohio.  But we’re talking about swamp creatures who are the only benefactors.  We need in Ohio essentially what Trump was able to do at the federal level, and it takes people who are independent of that dark money to make it happen.  Playing a conventional game of politics that sets up a specific media narrative would not make Ohio any less corrupt.  It’s essentially the media that is in on it all, they set the parameters of the dark money game, and they all feed off each other.  No, what we want in Ohio is freedom from those kinds of people.  Jim Renacci is independently successful and is personal friends with President Trump.  And so is Jim’s pick for Lt. Governor. 

Of course, the media narrative of the Joe Knopp announcement was that he was a Christian filmmaker, which is true.  But that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story of who Joe Knopp is.  It’s like saying that Steven Spielberg is a liberal film director.  That may be an aspect of who Steven Spielberg is, but it can’t be argued that Spielberg films generally reach out to all audiences.  And that was certainly the case with Joe’s movie, The Trump I Know.  The media doesn’t like people who make Christian movies that are every bit as good as Academy Award-winning films made in Hollywood.  Joe is very much a product of Hollywood and a realization that the political left has, which makes them very uncomfortable, that they don’t control the entire movie-making industry.  So to emphasize that Joe is a Christian for them is an attempt to limit his reach not only in the primary but also in the general election.  Yet, all this conventional thinking forgets is that for the first time in the history of America, especially under the DeWine administration, churches were closed while abortion clinics were open.  And DeWine put the abortion activist Amy Acton on his staff to essentially run Ohio for an entire year.  Voters have had some cold water thrown in their faces, where the government interrupted their religion and showed the fangs of the state’s power.  Ohio voters are primed to vote for an honest Christian crusader who loves President Trump and pledges to attack corruption without becoming consumed himself.  Yes, picking Joe Knopp was an intelligent move for Jim Renacci.  It’s not business as usual, and that’s the point. 

I left the Renacci event happy.  Finally, we would have a positive choice in Ohio by a few really good people who were independently successful and beyond the corruption of dark money.  And to have a chance to remove DeWine and replace him with Renacci with such staff, people like Joe Knopp start to repair what has been broken in Ohio after the Covid shutdowns by DeWine.  The best justice for all the bad things DeWine did would be to replace his place in the Swamp with the drain of Renacci and Knopp.  These are people that real conservatives in Ohio can truly cheer for and feel good about voting for.  Many of the years in the past when the voter turnout has been low, partly because the candidates are always swamp creatures like DeWine, which nobody gets excited about, options like these didn’t seem possible.  But Renacci and Knopp, well, there’s something that people can get excited about.  It’s great to have a choice finally, and in meeting Knopp, I can only say that he is one of the nicest people I have met this year.  Such a good person, and such a nice family.  To have people like that to vote for in an election is truly a treasure, and I think Ohio will enjoy the option.  True, the dark money monster is out there, but I think these guys have a good chance of getting new voter turnout activated.  And for that to be an option is a huge opportunity that will make 2022 a year of justice to remember.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote No by Saying Yes: How Great Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy are for Lakota

Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy for Lakota School Board

I could tell you many stories about politics that are dire and would make you want to climb under a rock and never get involved again.  But sometimes, some stories are fantastic, and that is the case with the two endorsed Lakota school board candidates, Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who are running to replace incumbent Democrats in November of 2021.  Every event I have been to with these two has been good; a few examples are shown below.  The video might be a little rough, but it’s what they say that matters.  Darbi and Issac work well together and are as unselfish as I’ve ever seen in politics, in any position. I’ve said from the beginning that I supported four candidates for the school board, but in this race this year, the Republican endorsement is what matters.  In the past, liberals have infected the school board, so critical race theory and transexual policies became part of the dominant conversation. They have managed to hide their intentions by calling the school board “nonpartisan.” Well, we know that nothing in politics is “nonpartisan,” especially the Lakota school board.  But when this idea of supporting school board members for Lakota came up, I never thought that two of them who would win the endorsement would like each other so well. That’s when the “can you imagines” started coming to my mind, where the school board represented the conservatives of Butler County, Ohio truly, and that they worked well together.  It’s one thing to have conservative votes on the board to manage things the way voters expect, but that they would perform functional management is a bonus that didn’t seem possible. 

Vote for Darbi Boddy

For instance, Issac Adi went door to door in my precinct, letting people know who he was and when to vote for him.  My wife noticed him in our neighborhood, and they struck up a conversation at the end of my driveway.  Issac recognized her immediately, which I thought was remarkable considering the number of people he has met over several months, including big names like Jim Jordan.  I would imagine his head is spinning with all the people he’s had to shake hands with, so it did impress me that he remembered my wife.  That is one thing about Issac Adi; he is one of the most sincere people I’ve ever met in politics.  He truly cares and is a good person.  So he remembers people and cares about them long after the handshake.  Of course, he wanted to know where I was which my wife told him I was babysitting my grandkids inside the house.  So he came up to see me and talk for a bit. 

After talking and catching up, I noticed that Issac wore Darbi’s campaign sticker on his shirt.  He was doing the hard work of going door to door on a pretty hot day, full of enthusiasm after talking to many hundreds of people personally, and he was promoting Darbi along the way.  Now I know that they are both endorsed and are part of the same team.  But the way the vote occurs, they very much have to run individually.   The top vote-getters are the ones who win in these kinds of elections, and it’s always hard to beat an incumbent.  The union vote and latte-sipping liberals always show up on election night, making it hard for conservatives to get a lot of votes.  But here was Issac promoting Darbi just as much as he was promoting himself.  And as I understand it, Darbi has been doing the same.  She was out promoting her and Issac as a team, not just individual candidates.  For any election, that is a pretty unique concept that doesn’t have a lot of historical precedents. 

Adding their votes to that of the current Lynda O’Conner would be a game-changer at Lakota.  I have been to other events where I have seen the three of them talking, and the chemistry is just there.  You can see it from a long way off. I’ve been dealing with school board issues in many districts around Ohio for twenty years, and I have never seen such a good combo.  Seeing Issac that day took some of my natural cynicism toward politics into a place it had never been before.  It seemed possible that at Lakota, something good had a chance to happen.  They are both so much better than the other alternatives, and if people had an opportunity to see that for themselves, these two could get elected.   There are still very significant obstacles, but as hard as they have worked throughout September and into October, it seemed like more than a fantasy and more of an eventual reality.  Usually, when I think of the Lakota school board, I typically think of severe dysfunction and people who do not know what they are doing with the money.  But here were genuinely competent and hard-working people who actually liked each other, at least as much as I’ve ever seen in politics, and there was a chance for great things to happen at Lakota for the first time in forever. 

Vote for Issac Adi for Lakota School Board

Issac had to eventually leave and return to the campaign trail from my house, but it took a while.  I enjoyed his company so much that it took us a long time to say goodbye that day.  I can say that I have been talking actively with many of the old No Lakota Levy people preparing ourselves for levy fights in the years to come.  The current school board has been trying to find the time to put one up for a vote to satisfy the out-of-control spending the teacher’s union expects.  This was an election year. Otherwise, the current board would have proposed a tax increase this year.  Likely, they’ll wait until next year now that they’ve agreed to give all those teachers sitting home on Covid excuses a raise that they’ll have to pay for next year.  But a levy fight is so damaging.  It’s much better to support a new school board that would manage the money that we already give them, which is a massive 200 million-plus budget.  If you can’t teach 17,000 kids on that, you have problems.  But the school board has never listened. Instead, they have attacked businesses for more money, like trolls always looking for a shakedown of tax revenue to pay for their reckless and infinite spending ultimately. Lakota’s school board has been deficit spending for their entire existence; no matter how much money we’ve given them, they never find a way not to spend more than they take in.  When they did have a surplus for a bit because of declining enrollment, they couldn’t wait to waste it on something new.  With this prospect of an actual conservative school board to replace the majority of liberals, great things can happen.  Issac and Darbi have done the work to get people to know who they are.  Now it will be up to the voters.  For the first time in many of their lifetimes, they have a great choice as the Lakota school district residents.  They can vote for the same old tax and spend liberals that have screwed up so much at Lakota.  Or, they can vote for Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who enjoy each other, work hard, and care to give the board a conservative majority for the first time.  If voters don’t vote for them, then when the tax increases come, people won’t be able to complain about it because they had a chance to say no to those tax increases by saying yes to Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trent Emeneker is a Liberal in West Chester: Relative to Butler County, Ohio, the trustee challenger is a Democrat in disguise

Trent Emeneker Wants to Be a Liberal Trustee in West Chester, Ohio

Not a surprise; I’m a Mark Welch guy in West Chester.  Of course, I’m supporting Mark Welch for re-election to the West Chester trustees. He’s had that job for a while and has done a fantastic job.  West Chester, Ohio, is one of the greatest places to live in all of America.  As I said in the video above, I have recently returned from Jackson, Wyoming, which is per capita one of the wealthiest places in the United States.  I love Jackson Hole, Wyoming; I enjoyed shopping there with my family.  It was all very nice.  But it’s not nicer than West Chester, Ohio.  Not by a long shot.  I’ve been all over the United States and seen a lot of nice areas to live in.  When people vote for West Chester to be one of the best places anywhere to live, they aren’t kidding.  And Mark Welch gets a lot of credit for making it that way.  The process started long ago when Senator George Lang was a trustee and implemented a small-government philosophy, which the trustees still adhere to currently.  Small government anywhere, minimal, competent, government leads to prosperity.  A big, bloated government, especially filled by incompetent people, leads to corruption, disaster, and high costs to maintain that government.  In this upcoming race for re-election in November of 2021, Mark Welch is the small-government guy with a proven track record.  End of the story, vote for Mark and enjoy another term in office to keep West Chester great.

But there are always challenges to these kinds of positions, and this year is no different.  Liberals are always trying to replace conservatives as trustees, representatives, commissioners, everywhere.  And to do that, they have to pretend to be Republicans when, in fact, they are Democrats, relative to the kind of politics that we have in Butler County, Ohio.  The challenger this time is a guy by the name of Trent Emeneker, a recently laid-off employee at GE who needs something to do, so he decided to run for West Chester Trustee.  Now on paper, Trent will say that he’s a former Marine and a registered Republican.  However, the Democrats had a recent fundraiser for Trent hosted by the old Lakota school levy supporter Kathy Wyenandt at the AC Hotel at Liberty Center.  I was at the Roosevelt Room across the street around 5:30 PM on the Tuesday of that fundraiser and learned all about it from some little birdies who came to that back table complaining about the $10 drinks at the cash bar.  I didn’t know Trent much but thought it was strange that a so-called “fiscal” conservative was having a fundraiser with a Democrat, even if only a few people showed up.  I didn’t pay much attention to the guy until that point, but the fundraiser was enough of suspicion to inspire some research.  After all, who would question a former Marine?  Well, maybe people should ask those with a military record more often and not just assume they will be good officeholders.  That is how we ended up with General Milley.  In today’s military, many progressives are coming out of that system, so we can’t take anything for granted, which looks to be the case with Trent Emeneker.

The biggest problem with Trent is that he wants to hold a vote in West Chester to make the township into a city, which has long been a progressive plan wanted by people who attended Kathy Wyenandt’s fundraiser.  Do you know why they want to make West Chester into a city?  It’s not to better pay for roads and other social services.  We do well now with partnerships with Butler County to operate a great community with low crime, high service value, and without an income tax.  Liberals want to make West Chester a city to create more office positions for people who wish to sit in and get attention. I’m thinking of old-school levy supporters like Joan Powell, who has pushed for this city thing in West Chester for a long time.  With a city comes city council seats like what they have in Middletown and Mason.  Then, of course, there are significant positions such as mayors, vice mayors, and other offices.  Government expansion is what we are talking about, and for liberals, it’s a chance to do something progressive and raise taxes to pay for everything.   Right now, West Chester is run by essentially three trustees and a fiscal officer.  Parts of Butler County that are cities do not run better than West Chester.  The track record is unavoidable. 

Yet that is pretty much the campaign of Trent Emeneker.  Somebody that not even GE thought was worth having around since they let him go as part of their Covid-19 resizing. He wants to get on West Chester’s Board of Trustees and push to become a city so that more liberals can have some office to sit on and create more bureaucracy, such as what happens everywhere that government expands.  With West Chester interacting with hundreds of thousands of people in the residing area, providing services to them all efficiently and with a budget surplus most of the time, what else is there for Trent to do but complain about making government bigger?  This is where the “fiscal” conservative on his signs comes into play.  If he was a real conservative, not just somebody who might have voted for George Bush in the past or every other RINO like John Kasich, he does not think like a conservative.  It’s not enough to complain that the current Trustees spent millions of dollars on landscaping at the new exit off the highway.  Hey, when you manage your money, you can do that.  I like coming off that exit and seeing it look classy.  The amount of money that is generated off the Union Center exit in West Chester is enormous.  Planting a few flowers doesn’t make the current trustees fiscally reckless. Instead, they respect the great businesses camped out in West Chester because the trustees have protected them from the overly intrusive government Trent wants. 

These kinds of campaign theatrics used to work when people didn’t know better, but in West Chester, everyone can look at a track record of success.  Then to propose that government is what makes something great, which most liberals believe and what gives Trent away as a liberal, is to slap away everything successful in West Chester.  And that’s what would come with a vote for Trent Emeneker.  He can sell himself as Goose from Top Gun because he spent ten years in the Marines in the back of a Navy fighter.  I might like Top Gun, but I don’t know if I’d want Goose managing the money in my home township. I’d need more than that.  What matters to me is that he was so invaluable that he ended up on the lay-off list at GE when they decided they needed to reduce their workforce after Covid hit.  Why would he make a good trustee again if an employer didn’t even want him?  And when Democrats are pushing to get you elected, what does that say about the person running?  Yeah, I’m sure Trent is a nice fellow.  He probably is a nice husband and father.  But keep that guy away from money.  Because he’s a liberal in disguise, and he wants to expand government and change what has been working for us all very well already.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Issac Adi: The Superstar of Lakota

Issac Adi for Lakota School Board

I’ve been a fan of Issac Adi, the very bright star within the Lakota school district running for the school board. He’s talented, smart, hardworking, extremely likable. He’s just a beautiful person in all the ways anybody could hope.  But I was wondering if it was just me who thought that way.  After all, I’ve been hoping for good conservative candidates to run for the Lakota school board for years.  And when we did get them on the school board, the current board would assassinate them in radical ways to get rid of them.  However, I learned just how well-liked Issac Adi was at a recent GOP event where many top-level office holders attended to speak and celebrate the fall ahead of the upcoming election.  Usually, when these kinds of big GOP events start, current officeholders are announced for recognition, and when they called out Issac’s name, the whole crowd erupted into applause.  People knew Issac and were cheering him on for a position that may be one of the most demanding offices to penetrate with Republican representatives in the state, the Lakota school board.  Issac was doing well, and people see that he is one of the brightest hopes yet of properly managing Lakota’s school board that we’ve had in years. 

Issac Adi with Jim Jordan

The GOP has endorsed candidates before, but mainly in the past, school boards were considered non-partisan as schools were supposed to be above and beyond politics.  Schools were always supposed to be for the children, and the school board members ideally would always put kids first and their family’s needs as priorities.  I know many administrative roles in public schools, and they aren’t blatant Marxists looking to overthrow America.  But the teacher’s unions are, and they run the schools, all public schools.  And by default, when one side tries to play nice, and the other side wants to play with every dirty trick in the book to win, guess who has the advantage?  I was at a recent school board meeting with Lakota’s board, and I listened with great pain at the excuses for Covid quarantines causing work stoppages and how intrusive the masks were.  The superintendent at Lakota isn’t a crazy radical. Still, he does try to make everyone happy, and there is no other way to make anybody happy because of the teacher’s union’s demands.  They want progressive causes like mask mandates implemented, and if they don’t get their way, they will make life miserable for everyone. 

A Grand GOP Event in Monroe, Ohio

I was thinking of what a positive person Issac is after watching him getting his picture taken with Jim Jordan of Ohio.  Jordan is an international celebrity because of some of the disputes he has been involved in over the years, and oddly as it might seem for a school board candidate, but Issac looked very much at home with Jim Jordan.  It was easy to see Issac in a dispute with the LEA union without things getting to the point where everyone left that evening angry at each other.  Jordan has a skill where he is a likable person even when he’s arguing with someone.  That is a skill missing on the Lakota school board since I started paying attention to it decades ago.  Issac has the presence of a superstar, and his likability personally rubs off on everyone.  Issac would be uniquely qualified to ease tensions instead of exacerbating them when dealing with some of these problematic school business issues.  It was apparent when Issac was around high-profile politicians that he had the same skills, which is something to get excited about.

A Very Large Crowd Cheering on Isaac and other Big Names

As ugly as politics can sometimes get, that event where Issac Adi and Jim Jordan were both at was a friendly reminder of what is possible in politics.  Regarding Lakota, the teacher’s union has made doing any business with the public school such a miserable experience.  But when you take a break from the arena and take some time to have a nice meal together and enjoy a sunset, the GOP in Butler County is such a tremendous asset to the community.  Most of Butler County, where Lakota schools are located, is populated with Republicans.  The goal of the teacher’s union is to take all they can for their members and to turn more children of Republicans into Democrats, which is why they want to mask mandates, same-sex bathrooms, and start sex education in the 3rd grade.  Then they want infinite amounts of money spent on their unionized employees and impose more tax on properties to pay for it.  Only the best of any person could have the will to deal with them.  Yet it is because of events like the GOP gathering we had recently in Monroe, Ohio, that puts in place so many good officeholders, and it’s exciting to see that Issac Adi will be one of them. 

When I talk about politicians, I often talk about their shelf life, the amount of time it takes the system to grind people down from hopeful managers into spit out garbage.  Then, term limits should remove them from office, but all too often, we will get another two decades out of officeholders that stay in those positions.  But in Butler County, we’ve managed to get many good officeholders through a lot of community engagement. I’ve watched them come into the office and do great work for a long time while still having shelf life left in their lives.  Issac has quickly found a home among the GOP and has embraced it so authentically that it will only continue the great reputation that the Butler County GOP already has for a track record.  People like Jim Jordan don’t and can’t come to every event they are invited to.  Neither can Frank LaRose.  But that they come to Butler County often says so much about how important the region is on the stage of national politics.  People like Issac Adi keep that prospect fresh on everyone’s minds as the GOP grows into the future. 

Best of all, Issac is not a phony, and there isn’t any temptation of him becoming one.  That is another trait of Butler County office holders that is a recent trend.  I wouldn’t have been able to say the same thing ten years ago, but I can say it today.  I can’t think of many politicians in Butler County who are phonies, and I would attribute that top to bottom to the structure of the Republican Party.  From the donors to the ground walkers.  When everyone gets together as we did on that night Issac Adi and Jim Jordan took a picture together, the world is easy to see that it’s worth fighting for.  And when so many good people get together in one place, the problems are much easier to see in all their purity.  Once the conflict with a teacher’s union starts making things murky, at least we can know that people like Issac won’t be pushed off by themselves to be ridiculed by the union activists.  He has a support system that is a relatively new thing and combined with his great personality; he will help make that Lakota school board something special instead of the monstrosity it is today.  But it all starts with a rising new star, and for all our benefit, Issac Adi is there, shooting across the sky, and I look forward to what the future that comes from him shows to the world. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfigher’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Thank Goodness for Jennifer Gross’ H.B. 248: Fighting Joe Biden’s Vaccine Mandates

It’s the question everyone who has a job or employs people are asking.  What are they supposed to do about the Biden executive order that makes government workers, contractors, or any business with more than 100 people mandating that everyone get vaccinations?  Worse even than that, it is how Biden’s plan pawns off all the work onto human resource departments to do their dirty work by using OHSA as an enforcement agency.  So now, several days after the initial executive order notification, most of the political commentary has reacted to how audacious the order was, how un-constitutional, how incredibly tyrannical it was.  But few have broken down the path to solving the problem which businesses and people want to know.  There are quite a few people indifferent to the vaccination, they don’t like hearing the government ordering people around, but they have the vaccination and are indifferent to the order.  Many people, a high percentage of most workforces, 10% to 20%, aren’t going to get the vaccination and would go to war with the government if any attempt at coercion is attempted.  It’s one thing for an out-of-touch communist-driven Biden administration to write some order on a piece of paper and give a little speech about it.  Doing it is quite something else, and it appears that Biden and his handlers want to provoke violence from that demographic.  They are almost asking for it.  So, what are any of us to do about it?  Here I offer some thoughts and direction that will help, especially relevant to the state I live in, Ohio.

As I said in the video above, I had a chance to talk to many people from the time I wrote this to when Biden made his announcement on Thursday, September 9th.  In that video, I mentioned the Ohio Attorney General David Yost was joining several other states in a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the executive order. Still, I was thinking of a talk I had in the presence of the Secretary of State Frank LaRose and was surprised how unified the state Republicans were against Biden.  Even DeWine was not supportive, which given the political situation, he doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room anyway.  But what was encouraging was that several direct actions were already hot in the statehouse to protect the people of Ohio from a mandatory vaccination and businesses from being imposed to do the work that the federal government couldn’t with forced compliance.  Hanging OSHA out to dry the way that Biden had, it was evident by the people I spoke to that the legal hurdles were ominous against the executive order, especially with the flow down of official procedures that OHSA would have to use to measure any compliance.  For instance, companies who deal with routine ISO audits understand how complex these things can be, and for OSHA, Biden had just signed them up for a nightmare that likely would never get settled between the White House and the agency itself. 

Aside from months and months of red tape in defining what OSHA would be doing as a compliance officer of forced vaccinations, Jennifer Gross, the House rep from my district, already had House Bill 248 cooking on the stove.  That bill is a total ban on forced vaccinations in Ohio.  There are some amendments that are needed, and the House has some idea how to get them applied to make everyone somewhat happy.  Thank goodness Jennifer had that process already started so that passage can be accelerated to match the language of this recent executive order.  That is the first path to providing exemptions that will further complicate what Biden’s people want to do with forced compliance.  From my understanding of the amendments, it will essentially give the people who presently don’t want to get the jab a means to preserve that right.  The trick is in getting businesses off the hook in doing the dirty work of government compliance.  There is also a Vaccine Nullification bill moving through the Senate that will go even deeper, especially now that the executive order’s language is known.  George Lang has been working on this one. It will further provide protections for businesses in Ohio to separate them from the burden of forced work demanded by the federal government onto businesses who don’t have such work as part of their business model, such as the obligatory testing requirement.  Who does that and keeps up with it, an already taxed human resource department?  Things like that will emerge as the legalisms get applied that the Biden administration either didn’t think of, or they hoped that businesses would jump offsides off a hard count.  I think they knew this executive order wasn’t going to fly, but they tried to spook Americans into jumping anyway. 

All those mechanisms will be working in the background for the next several months, but I offer a more direct path to push back on.  I thought of the idea while speaking with Josh Mandel at a GOP event.  We were both in line to get some food, and they had run out of green beans, so we had a moment to chat about this topic. He’s running for the Rob Portman Senate seat, so I was surprised how much he was willing to make the election fraud that went against President Trump a campaign issue.  I was impressed with his ability to speak about it clearly and with conviction.  It’s something that more and more establishment GOP types have been willing to discuss openly.  Mandel might take that establishment tag personally, but he has been in some respectable GOP seats. He is running for the Senate, so it’s like I say, eventually, when you throw rocks, you win and find yourself in the establishment.  And that is precisely what’s happening with the admission of election fraud in the 2020 election.  Fox News might be afraid of lawsuits from Dominion for even discussing the possibility of election fraud.  Mitch McConnell may not want to shake up the system that has enriched him so much to take a moral stand against fraud even though it’s obvious and in front of our face.  But the trend among current officeholders now that they’ve seen the information coming out of Maricopa County in Arizona and Fulton County, Georgia, was that there was enough fraud to overturn the election, so the effort is picking up steam, politically.  Much more so now than there was eight or nine months ago.  And in another year, election fraud will be the talk of everyone. That’s where all this is headed, and the smart money knows it.

So rather than attacking Biden’s unconstitutionality with the forced vaccine mandates, and other terrors he has been a part of in such a short period, the best way to hit Biden, where he and the Democrats are weakest, is with election fraud.  They can’t defend election fraud, and many of them are guilty of being a part of it, even if they only have third-person knowledge and didn’t ask questions about the matter, hoping to benefit from the chaos.  By all accounts, we will find out that Biden should never have been president.  We will question everything he ever did while in the White House.  Yes, it will be a legal mess, but mixed in with this forced vaccination issue.  If you want to beat Biden on his audacity with the forced vaccine mandates, then the way to hit him and the Democrats, in general, is not to take the eye of the ball of election fraud.  I think they are trying to hide anyway because there is lots of evidence of election fraud.  The media is still making fun of the premise that Arizona and other states are exploring the idea of decertifying their elections.  For many in the establishment, this is an incomprehensible idea.  Yet, it is gaining steam.  The report that will come out of Arizona soon will make the case, and several states are talking about following them.  This won’t be laughable when Josh Mandel and the other senate candidates have their election.  It will be everyday talk.  So, we might as well start that process now and hit the Biden people where it hurts most.  Not so much in what latest unconstitutional imposition they throw at us, but in what they are trying desperately to hide.  Because that is where they are most vulnerable.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Matt Huffman Understands Good Government: Conflict is critical to a properly run republic

People like the Title to my New Book, for good reason

First, I have to say that I appreciate all the kind words I’ve received over the title of my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  As I said in the video above, they have been whispering to me their enjoyment, almost as if they were afraid to say it in public because the word “gun” is in it.  Yet, that is entirely on purpose.  A lot in The Gunfighter’s Guide will challenge previous assumptions, the most of which is the nature of conflict in business and why we as a culture need to embrace that conflict more as we have in years past.  For a long time now, where we have been going has led to so much corruption because the value systems have not been on success, but in getting along.  Strangely enough, I was at an event with Matt Huffman, the President of the Ohio Senate, and he gave an excellent speech that displayed his understanding of this very need for conflict in any civil exchange.  Politics is a blood sport and was always intended as such.  They fight so that we don’t have to in general society.  But this is also the expectation in business as well.  If there isn’t conflict in a discussion, then why have the conversation.  All the consensus-building efforts that we have seen coming out of our academia are out of step with the American way of doing things.  It’s like telling us that American football shouldn’t be about putting on pads and hitting the other guy as hard as you can to stop them from scoring a touchdown, but that we should all play flag football, and that scoring isn’t all that important.  The title of my book evokes a truth that many people understand, and I appreciate that this early in the process, people already understand the need for a philosophic presentation of this very American concept.

Matt Huffman has done great in Ohio as President of the Senate

I had wanted to tell Senator Huffman how proud I was of him and the Ohio Senate in general for passage of Senate Bill 22, which took away Governor DeWine’s health directives over Covid-19 and future overreaches with legislative control.  If Huffman, George Lang, Terry Johnston, and much of the senate body had not moved to pass S.B. 22, Ohio would have been impeded by the recent Biden push for mass closures and mask mandates over the recent Delta Variant.  I thought it was a big deal when the Senate did what they did, and the House followed quickly.  DeWine had cut the entire legislature out of any covid protocols allowing the Governor to become a ruthless dictator over rights of health decisions which put white coat bureaucrats entirely in charge of all our lives.  And it went on for way too long, essentially because nobody wanted to have a conflict with the Governor.  Yet nightly at the Ohio capital, on other things, there were riots and vandalism over social causes that nobody wanted to deal with, and times were looking very bleak.  Trump was being pushed out of office by a group of radicals who were not afraid of conflict. Conservatives were not being met in the same fashion, allowing activists to roll over logic and goodness without fear of reprisal.   You might remember around Christmas of 2020 going into 2021 when I mentioned that Matt Huffman might be the next president of the Senate and that Governor DeWine’s powers would finally be quelled after a year of behaving like a complete tyrant off the rails and out of control. That’s what happened, Huffman was sworn in during the early months of 2021, and he went right to work doing what the legislature had been hoping to do for a long time, stand up to DeWine and return Ohio to civility with a proper government. 

Huffman told his story a bit of how contentious it was standing up to Governor DeWine, who did not want a fellow Republican senate to override his veto of S.B. 22.  DeWine tried to use the necessity of a single point of action to manage emergencies, which was always part of the poison pill of Covid-19.  It was presented as beyond legislative control where the Dr. Fauci types would manage our lives instead of our elected government because of an emergency health crisis.  But our constitutions do not indicate that liberty and freedom are only temporary factors of our daily life.  Even during an emergency such as tornado impacts, hurricanes, or health crises, all people still have their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And sometimes, we have to fight to maintain those rights.  This is what Huffman, Lang, and the rest of the Senate did when they told Mike DeWine to pound sand and suck it up.  They were going to override the Governor’s veto and take away his health directives.  DeWine had abused his power, and he needed a slap down.  It was an example of how proper government should look. It was the suitable alternative to open warfare with people storming the capital to retake their rights over the Covid restrictions.  In every state, the House and Senate must fight like that on our behalf, and in Ohio, it happened.  Fighting is not a bad thing.  When fighting turns to permanent damage, that’s another story, but people who enter the bloodsport of politics should understand that’s the nature of the game.

That is, after all, the theme of my book and why people are saying under their breath that they like the title so much.  It alludes to the American understanding that conflict is at the heart of our “republic.” When the law wasn’t present in times past of western expansion, the gunfighter’s brought some form of order to those far-flung regions.  Many people were killed in cold blood and drunken violence, but the presence of conflict was the first foundation for law and order.  If someone did something to someone, the threat of a gunfight was a genuine menace, and people thought twice about it.  And if they were caught killing in cold blood, the community often hung people right there on the spot, killing them.  Many times, innocent people were hung.  But people did think twice before engaging in destructive behavior because people were not afraid of conflict as they are today.  In so many ways, you have to look at our academic approach to conflict during the last century and question whether or not we have all been poisoned with the pill of globalism so that our republic would fall under those same conditions.  So it is certainly my goal with The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to resurrect the sentiment that conflict is good and healthy for maintaining a proper republic.  Not necessarily with violence, but in how Matt Huffman, George Lang, and others did with S.B. 22 in 2021, which has saved Ohio from a tyrannical Biden administration looking for ground cover for their many scandals.  Without the conflict with DeWine, Ohio would still be imprisoned by the white coats of bureaucracy.  It seems rare these days to see such conflict and courage, but it does happen; there are Matt Huffman’s out there who understand good government and utilize it to the proper effect.  And people understand that in my title, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, something important has been missing in our business and political cultures that need to be dusted off and resurrected to full effect.  And then, and only then, is when America is back and will sustain itself for the world well into the future.   

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ohio is Number One in Corruption: Jim Renacci wants to be the Ron DeSantis of the state to fix that

Wind Turbans in Ohio, part of the progressive push to change the state into Green Energy

It’s not murky for me at all.  Mike DeWine screwed up as governor of Ohio. He must go. He needs to be primaried, and the Republican brand in Ohio restored to honor before a general election where a Democrat will have to be defeated at the ballot box for control over our state.  The behavior of Democrats in the House and Senate indicates that they have a plan.  That plan is to exploit Ohio as the number one state in the category of corruption and to use that to implement their changes toward even more progressive agenda desires, which ironically has caused most of the problems so far.  DeWine has been hiding his vast incompetence behind the Covid crises, like many in government have, and now it’s gotten Ohio Republicans in trouble, and that situation needs a fast solution.  And one of the first Republicans to offer that solution and throw his hat in the ring has been Jim Renacci.  I was happy to have a chance to talk to Jim Renacci a bit this past week one on one. It’s the first time I’ve had that chance since his run for Senate against Sherrod Brown a few years prior.  Renacci has an exciting story which I touch on in the video above, and I had thought for a while, well before he announced that he would officially run for governor, that Jim would be suitable for it.  His pitch is essentially to be the Ron DeSantis of Ohio, open up markets and opportunities, and bring to the state good management that is no-nonsense and productive.  But more than anything, he wants to clean up the corruption and repair the Republican brand tainted by Mike DeWine and John Kasich, both progressives who opened the door to all this corruption, to begin with. 

I thought Jim was joking when he told me that Ohio was the number one state out of all 50 states in corruption.  That didn’t seem possible to me, but sure enough, I went home and looked it up, and that is the case as of 2021.  When DeWine was running for governor, many Tea Party groups were already saying that DeWine would be a corrupt governor, but people were willing to give him a chance.  As it turned out, they were right, and DeWine has essentially run as a Democrat most of the years that he’s been in office.  To hide his many missteps, he has turned to Covid to rescue him as many blue-state governors have, and that was, of course, to conceal the underlying corruption.  That is the obvious problem when a governor who is supposed to drive on the right side ends up on the left.  A collision with oncoming traffic is inevitable, and that’s what happened with the FirstEnergy debacle in Ohio that Mike DeWine has his hands all over.  The net result is that Democrats are currently planning to exploit these collisions and take seats in the House and Senate because of the corruption and capture the governor race with a damaged DeWine.  So Democrats currently aren’t willing to make any deals with Republicans as they wait out the next election because they can smell the blood in the water. 

I’ve said it before, House Speaker Larry Householder and other Republicans did wrong when they allowed FirstEnergy to pour a lot of money into the Republican Party.  That allowed the FBI to make a bribery case out of the tragedy involving a few nuclear power plants being pushed to shut down.  But things are not always the way they seem.  FirstEnergy was fighting for its life as the Obama administration targeted traditional forms of energy such as coal and nuclear in favor of solar and wind.  I found a few of those ridiculous wind power turbans in Greenville, Ohio, in the video above.  I had seen them all over the United States this year, and it was insulting to see them in Ohio.   A more significant push is going on that is far more corrupt than FirstEnergy trying to buy off politicians like Larry Householder for their survival.  Jim Renacci understands that kind of corruption because he’s been a victim of it himself.  He got into politics as a businessman who had lost his Chevy dealership by that same administration who tampered with the markets to create a change state at GM.  The collapse of General Motors into bankruptcy meant that the government could help restructure them into producing eco-friendly cars, which is what they are presently doing.  The bailout they received from the government was just as corrupt as anything FirstEnergy was involved in.  The difference was that the Obama administration controlled the DOJ.  And when Trump was president, the same radicals were still running the DOJ because he refused to act in such a corrupt way and call them out on their activism.   So now the FBI, run by those prominent government activists, wants to destroy companies like FirstEnergy unless they embrace these new wind and solar Obama initiatives.  They are picking winners and losers, which led to the corruption that eventually involved the many Republicans caught taking money from FirstEnergy so that they could keep their nuclear power plants open. 

I would say that this kind of corruption is going on in all states, and all their legislators are involved in some way or another.  But in Ohio, it’s a Trump state, and it has a target on its back for progressives that go way beyond reasonability.  That means we have to take a stand with this governor race and clean things before the general election vote for governor takes place.  Republicans have to take that step with a governor prospect that can rebuild the party behind an anti-corruption platform, and for me, Jim Renacci is just the right kind of guy for the job.  President Trump likes Jim quite a lot, and a Jim Renacci ticket that is pro-business, anti-corruption, and knows how to stand up to progressive tricks is just the ticket for the current challenges. I’m against corruption of any kind.  I don’t want my state tarnished with any corruption, let alone being number one in the entire country.  That is just embarrassing.  Not acceptable.  So when Jim Renacci sat across the table from me and looked me straight in the eye and told me what he wanted to do with being the Ron DeSantis of Ohio, I was just a little encouraged.  Ron DeSantis is the new gold standard for which all Republican governors should aspire, and if Renacci has that kind of scope for the governor job in mind, well, then that’s something I can get excited about.  So far, other candidates haven’t announced themselves for the governor race, but I don’t think this is something we need to fool around with.  Republicans need to understand the battle plan.  We need to retake the House at the Federal level, and we need a leader to do that.  We need to unite behind that cause and the people who can make that happen.  And we have to repair the corruption problem left in DeWine’s wake.  That will take someone like Renacci, who is dedicated to the cause, can get Trump behind the effort, and is willing to do the job in two steps, repairing the Republican Party, then defeating the Democrat challenger.   It helps when you can talk to someone like Jim to see if they are up for such a big job, and based on my experience, he is. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business