Category: Nature

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

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

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

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

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

We have a great senator in Ohio

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

The spot where Trump gave his Inauguration speech

Rich Hoffman

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

Why the Museum of the Bible: To understand good government you have to understand what “good” is

Why the Museum of the Bible?  Well, that’s a long story, but as I always say about good government, whether managing a family, a business, a community, or a country, you have to understand what good is.  And there has been no more extraordinary human achievement than the Bible emerging out of Western Civilization to define goodness as it applies to mass society and personal integrity.  I’ve read all the significant works of the world’s religions and studied them in some detail, and I am pretty confident in saying that the Bible and its history have achieved more along the lines of defining good government than any other work to emerge from human culture.  So, once Trump was elected back to office, my wife and I wanted to return to Washington, D.C., and give it another chance with fresh, knowledgeable eyes.  I have never been a no-government guy or an anarchist in any way.  I would say that I have always loved government.  But what I didn’t like were the people who were drawn to it.  And years ago, during the Clinton years, I took my family to a literary conference at the Smithsonian, where I was a big part of their presentation, and the trip was a disaster.  Everywhere we went, there was some horrendous evil that ruined the trip for my wife and kids.  So any interactions I have had with Washington, D.C. over the years had to be without her because she refused to give it a chance after the city let her down so badly in the past, which was unfortunate for me. After all, once I saw the Museum of the Bible open in 2017, during Trump’s first term, I really wanted to go and check it out.  But I did not have a cooperative spouse willing to go and see it. 

But once Trump won in 2024, before his speech was done acknowledging his election victory late on election night, my wife turned to me and said that we should celebrate by going back to Washington D.C.  That’s all I needed to hear, so I started planning and we decided to go once the weather broke in early March of 2025, so we could walk around in comfort.  Since that first Washington trip, we have been to some of the world’s biggest cities and seen plenty of evil in all of them.  But what hit home regarding Washington, D.C. was that it was our city and our government, and we couldn’t stand to see how corrupt it all was.  So it was a lot more personal; other cities were other people’s places.  But with Trump back in office, a key constitutional element had been fulfilled: we did have a Republic that could correct evil by merit of votes, and the system could work and did.  Looking at the city itself from a long perspective, we see that it had the mechanisms to do everything it was designed to do, and we had survived a significant challenge never yet achieved within the human race.  And that deserved a celebration.  So for me, that means something that involves lots of books and time to read about topics many people find boring.  But I get very excited about it, which is the foundation of all law and order.  Specifically, one of the Bible’s main themes is how government should be set up. In the Book of Judges, the Israelites were supposed to have self-government, but the judges kept letting everyone down, leaving the people to cry out for a king.  So God eventually gave them one, and they let everyone down too.  And God became so angry with them that he allowed their destruction by their enemies.  A lot like what had occurred in the American city of Washington D.C. 

The Founding Fathers, especially Washington himself, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, a whole host of characters were trying to create in America a restoration of the Book of Judges, in my view based on the reportings of their voluminous studies, which I think is a very noble effort and one that does take many thousands of years to figure it out.  I felt that the election of Trump during this second term was the first real opportunity for that lofty idea to take hold.  And I think the Green family had a sense of this early in the last decade as Trump was still doing The Apprentice television show and thinking about running for President when they were looking for a place to put their idea for a museum dedicated to the Bible.  The place for it to be would be Washington D.C. along with all the other fantastic museums they have there.  But this one would be the most important because the Bible is the foundation of all Western civilization and the pursuit of good government.  The Bible is the foundation of all law and order, starting with the Ten Commandments.  Such a concept has been successful, and Washington, D.C. was the direct result of that long-established pursuit.  So, if you are thinking about such things, which I do very frequently, when there is a Museum of the Bible, I must see it.  So, upon our visit to America’s capital city, we made the Museum of the Bible our first stop for a long week, and we ended up spending two days there because there was so much to see.

I’ve been to many museums, including some of the best in the world, such as the British Museum and the Louvre in Paris, and I consider the Museum of the Bible to be among the best there is.  It’s right around the corner from the Capitol building itself and was exceptionally well done.  The whole place was put together with much love and passion for the topic.  It was very scholarly and was the perfect way to start a trip to Washington D.C. because once you understand what our government is supposed to be doing, you can’t avoid the Bible in that discussion.  So, a museum dedicated to the history and value of the Bible in human culture is the first criterion for understanding the need for good government at any level.  I could write an entire book about the value of the Museum of the Bible, but to sum things up as concisely as possible, I knew it was a special place when I entered a traveling exhibit they had called the Mosaic of Megiddo which came straight from Israel and was a large floor found in an early Roman building acknowledging Christ as a god around 200 A.D, over 100 years before Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  To see something like that outside of Israel and so significant only established how vital the Museum of the Bible was in the scheme of things.  As I always say, my favorite thing in the world are my Biblical Archaeology Review magazines I have read since I was a little kid.  And going to the Museum of the Bible was like stepping into that quarterly magazine and living in that world three dimensionally.  It is an incredible place, and I don’t think it will be the last time I go there.  My wife and I are members and must find more reasons to return.  It is a fantastic place worth multiple visits, and a lot of time spent there each time.  It is undoubtedly one of the world’s best and most significant museums on a topic that is the foundation of all good government, and because of that, it is infinitely important to the human race. 

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

Trump Endorses Vivek Ramaswamy: Dumb things Dave Yost and Amy Acton said

Again, I don’t want to see Dave Yost embarrass himself because I like the guy, the current Attorney General of Ohio.  But one of his biggest problems that was obvious to me when I went to his governor run announcement event was that he’s out of step with a skipping record, just a little too late on everything and slightly off-kilter with the flow of reality.  Under normal conditions, he might be able to run for governor and win, especially against the person the Democrats are going to put up, Amy Acton.  But these aren’t regular times.  I’m supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of Ohio, and the GOP should get behind him and make it happen.  Vivek is going to be governor no matter what any opposition tries to do to prevent it.  On the same day that Vivek announced he was running from West Chester, Ohio, President Trump came out immediately and endorsed Vivek to settle the issue and let all the other GOP contenders know where the President’s heart was on the matter.  And the person who wins in Ohio, no matter how good Vivek Ramaswamy is, will be the person President Trump picks.  The Trump endorsement is crucial because voters will rally to whoever that is. And for the Governor race of Ohio in 2026, it is Vivek Ramaswamy.  And to make sure nobody gets any funny ideas, Vivek Ramaswamy will be all over the media and state in an overwhelming fashion to make sure that he gets a chance to meet everyone he could possibly meet along the way.  He has been doing media on television almost every day since his announcement, which shows that he will work hard to win people’s votes.  Vivek will not take anything for granted, and he will win the election and be Ohio’s next governor. 

Vivek/Lang has a nice ring to it, I think

But upon hearing that Vivek was running, Dave Yost said some foolish things that won’t help him and actually make that skipping record syndrome much worse, and I have to warn him that if he wants a political future, he needs to not say such dumb things.  Among these was his attack on Vivek and trying to paint him as someone who starts a lot of projects but never finishes them, such as dropping out of the Presidential race, dropping out of D.O.G.E. with Elon Musk, and moving his company STRIVE to Texas because Ohio costs too much to do business in.  Yost is trying to portray Ramaswamy as a quitter.  But instead, Yost showed himself grotesquely out of touch as he didn’t get the GOP memo.  I learned about Vivek Ramaswamy’s running for governor with an early morning phone call two weeks before Christmas of 2024.  Something of a deal was made, and Trump wanted Vivek Ramaswamy to be Ohio’s governor because the goal was for the Trump economy to turn a Rust Belt state into one of the world’s tech leaders.  It’s the home state of J.D. Vance, who many in the MAGA movement would like to see carry the torch of the next four years of Trump.  Vivek is the right guy to bring all those elements together in Ohio.  Yost pointed out that Vivek dropped out of the presidential race after a fourth-place showing in Iowa, as if that said everything.  But the reality was that Vivek, while running for President, never went after Trump but was loyal the entire time.  So, Vivek wasn’t an either-or candidate but was a continuation of the MAGA movement, and if that were the criterion, people would have rather had Trump finish what was started during the first term.  Vivek instead ran on a MAGA platform to build on the issue rather than try to corrode it away with debate.

Most people who are affiliated with the GOP know about this Trump arrangement.  I asked my sources if I could talk about it, and they said I could, so it wasn’t super secret.  Mike DeWine, Ohio’s current governor, was then called to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.  He and Jon Husted did this, and the deal was made.  DeWine would appoint Husted to the vacant senate seat left behind by Vance so that he wouldn’t be destroyed by Vivek becoming governor because Husted wanted to run too.  Trump is the party’s leader and will likely remain that way for the rest of his life.  He is the one who won that right, and people need to follow that vision.  Vivek Ramaswamy also had to do that to run for governor of a state when he wanted to be president.  That’s how you build successful teams, and all these guys played their part in creating a bigger vision of what the MAGA movement would be like after Trump was no longer in the White House.  But to make the most of it while he was there.  Time is short, opportunities are limited, and Dave Yost, to be wise, should hitch his wagon to one of these Trump strategies and not stick himself on the outside looking in.  Because once the window closes, it will close forever.  The Ohio GOP doesn’t need a media-driven mess for the upcoming primary.  It requires a unified party with the hands of Trump on it, and Dave Yost needs to find a place in it, not out of it, for his own good.  That’s the only warning shot I’ll give. If he didn’t know that Vivek was running, then that’s even worse because everyone else did, and it only shows how out of step he is, made even worse by every day that he does not get behind Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Then there is the Democrat Amy Acton and her dumb comments about Vivek as if she knows how to run against him.  I’ll make a prediction: She is going to be crushed by the debate skills of Vivek Ramaswamy.  Acton is the former Health Director of the State of Ohio appointed by DeWine, which caused all kinds of problems with COVID-19.  Amy Acton shut down Ohio as one of the leaders of all states to be the first to lockdown, which was standard of all the Democrat led states.  Only Ohio was supposed to be a red state.  DeWine allowed himself to be suckered by the stringy hair hippie style of Yellow Springs politics that Amy Acton represents, and it won’t go well for her.  I’m looking forward to it because Vivek can tell a story about her that has not been told yet.  She would have been wise to stay under a rock for what she did to Ohio during COVID-19, but she’s the best Democrats have, which says a lot about them.  She is running, but I don’t think the Democrats have any idea of what kind of buzz saw they are going to run into with this one.  Trump has his ideas about it because Ohio did lockdown during his last year in office, making it much harder for him to keep the nation together during that crisis.  So he will support Vivek vivaciously; let me just put it nicely.  Once everyone is done with Amy Acton, there won’t be a rock in the world to hide under, and she will not be able to hide her shame for the rest of her life, which she deserves.  And that’s just how it’s all going to go down.  So plan accordingly. 

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

Apoorva Ramasway is a Really Good Person: One of the big reasons to support Vivek Ramaswamy for governor of Ohio

There was never any question about supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of the State of Ohio.  But after meeting with him at his launch ceremony in West Chester, Ohio, I feel even better about it.  Of course, he is a great talent that can speak the peel off an orange.  But so can a lot of con artists.  The question everyone always wants to know about these kinds of things is how can they know they can trust him?  What makes a person trustworthy, even if they have the gift of gab?  After all, there are a lot of salespeople out there who can sell you just about anything who aren’t worth 2 cents as people.  So what makes Vivek Ramaswamy a good person, good enough to be made Governor of the State of Ohio?  Well, I have a proven tactic that I use to qualify people, especially adult people, that has worked for me over the years: I measure a person’s worth based on what kind of spouse they have.  They can sell pretty words to the public all day, but if they partner with a terrible person as a spouse, you should always question the person’s validity.  As a general rule, good people tend to attract other good people.  And bad, toxic people tend to do the same.  You don’t often find a toxic person choosing to be married to a high-quality person.  They are attached to them for a reason.  So judging a person based on the worth of their spouse is quite good as an accurate measurement, and I am thrilled to say that Vivek Ramaswamy’s wife is top-class and a very good person. Upon meeting Apoorva Ramaswamy, I found that I liked Vivek even more.  They are a nice couple who work well together in ways that are bigger than the jobs they do in life.

I don’t mind saying it, and there are certainly more that I can think of, but at this Vivek Ramaswamy event were some very good friends of mine who were part of setting up everything in the background.  And we are friends for a reason that goes beyond political considerations.  I know a lot of people, but I put more trust in these people for a lot of reasons, most of which start with their spouses.  For instance, when people ask me, “How can you trust George Lang?  He’s a RINO establishment figure.”  I can say to them that I can trust him in ways I wouldn’t trust other people, largely because of what I know him that is different from other people, especially people in a decisive Senate role.  Why George?  He has a wonderful wife in Debbie, who is just as solid as a person can get.  They are a good couple, and they are at an age where they travel a lot, and the fruits of a lot of hard work are emerging, and they are living a good life.  They work well together, and things were not always as good as they are now.  I remember when the political left was trying to throw George in jail just for knowing John Boehner.  Even in the toughest of times, Debbie has always been loyal to George, and as a couple, they are always trying to do the right thing, and I have come to know both of them pretty well over the years in ways that far exceed politics.  If George Lang had never been a senator and never was again, he and his wife would still be friends with me and my wife.  They are good people to know.

And why do I like her so much? People always ask me about Nancy Nix.  Well, what’s not to like?  She is as good as they get.  She comes across as a good person as a politician due to her many sincere desires for the world to be a better place, and I have come to know her over the years as a person with profound convictions toward biblical goodness.  But I’ll say that her husband Bob Leshnak is perfect for her.  Sometimes, it takes a while to find people who can work with them instead of against them.  When you are a person like Nancy who is naturally attractive and has a very outward projecting personality, you can attract a lot of bar flies.  But as a naturally good person from a good family, she knows how to sort through all that to find a great spouse in Bob.  He is good for her and doesn’t work against her, and they just come out as a good couple when you talk to them in any setting.  How can people be expected to manage your government financially or ethically if they can’t manage their own homes?  I could say that I know Fran DeWine a bit, enough to see that she makes the current governor of Ohio a far better person than he would otherwise be.  They are childhood sweethearts, which makes him a person that can at least be brought to reason because he has managed a long marriage to a good person.  I have met Melania Trump on several occasions and always said she is the key to why President Trump has become the kind of good person he is at this stage.  Spouses say a lot about the people we know, publicly. 

At Vivek’s West Chester event, I got to talk to him in great detail, but that wasn’t new.  I could also walk around with his wife and talk to her one-on-one.  And I found it interesting that she had a good relationship with Representative Jennifer Gross, who is too Tea Party for many people.  It says a lot about Apoorva in a good way and about Vivek with the doors closed.  Apoorva was a very classy woman, full of life and spirit, and I kept thinking she would be an ideal First Lady of Ohio.  She comes across well in all the right ways.  But what is most apparent is that she and Vivek are a power couple that feeds off each other.  We’re not talking about a couple of people climbing through social power to achieve a status through won elections.  These people are personally good and want to share that with others in a leadership way.  This is a much different set of standards than the traditional power couple that only share their desire for public power, and once that is not in their lives through a lost election or bad financial times, their relationship breaks apart.  Spouses aren’t helping each other if they plot divorce behind their spouses’ backs and are always jealous of the other people in their lives because they are insecure in the foundations of their relationship.  When you meet people who have people in their lives that they are building families with and who are willing to walk through all the fires of life together, you can know that there are unique qualities you can trust in them as public servants.  And that is undoubtedly the case for Vivek Ramaswamy and his wife, Apoorva.  They will still be a good couple once the days of politics are done, a few decades from now.  They will be defined by what they do together rather than what they convince people to give them in the form of trust and social management.  They are good because they are good, and they work together, which is the best trait of all.

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

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Zelenskyy Should Have Been Thrown Out of the White House Just for Dressing as a Slob: J.D. Vance exposed the scam, and they hate him for it

Zelenskyy should have worn a suit to the Oval Office.  His grunge band look is disrespectful to the White House, and I’m not a fan of ever showing up to any professional engagement without wearing a tie.  I can’t recall ever doing anything professional with anybody where I didn’t wear a tie and jacket.  Especially during a dinner meeting where you know professional discussions will take place.  A jacket and tie show respect for the work that needs to be done.  And when Trump greeted the Ukrainian President upon arriving at the White House, he joked a bit about Zelenskyy’s dress-down approach to politely warn him of the American expectations.  But it’s part of Zelenskyy’s begging gig for Ukraine and is part of a much larger issue of globalism playing down any individual achievement over collective salvation.  It’s a Marxist thing to reject professionalism and respect and to lean in favor of the pointless nature of expectation.  And it didn’t take long for it all to blow up in Zelensky’s face when he was confronted by a reporter who asked the beggar why he didn’t come to the White House with a suit and tie.  And Zelenskyy gave a sarcastic answer, which J.D. Vance was done with.  The sparks started to fly about how disrespectful Zelenskyy was to the Trump administration.  Trump wasn’t going to have any of it, and he then proceeded to dismantle Zelenskyy, the former comedian, and kick him out of the White House without accomplishing the mineral deal that the Ukrainian President was there to sign.  Don’t show up to meetings unprepared, and don’t be disrespectful, especially when the entire campaign of resistance depends on the United States to fund the war against Russia.  When you are playing with other people’s money, you don’t have any leverage, so just shut up when you are told.

I am not a supporter of Ukraine.  As far as I’m concerned, Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union just a few years ago and became its own country when the fall of communism forced several breakaways from the former superpower.  Ukraine is a creation of globalism and a political fight between a one-world order run by the United Nations and any concept of nationalism.  Vladimir Putin of Russia, as a former KGB manipulator from their glory days, wants to restore Russia to its previous borders, so there are parts of his nationalism approach that we share in the United States as we are moving away from a borderless world and back to protecting our borders from globalism.  It was never a fight we should have been in, but Russia was pushed to act by the Biden administration, doing what globalism wanted, which was to overextend Russia so that American money would support Ukraine to destroy the nationalism status of Putin and force his people to reject him after a failed enterprise.  That hasn’t happened, and Trump ran on getting American money out of Ukraine, so time is over for sympathy toward  Zelenskyy’s begging-for-money campaign toward objectives that seem endless and without a point.  People are dying in the war, but what does more money do? Make more people die?  That was Trump’s point, and when Zelenskyy essentially tried to scare Trump into believing that we couldn’t afford to take a casual approach because we have a big ocean protecting us, that was the end for Trump.  And he lacerated Zelenskyy as he was supposed to and kicked him out of the White House with no deal.  Zelenskyy should have at least shown up with a jacket and tie to show the appropriate respect.

And it’s not so safe in America as Zelenskyy insinuated.  We have Russia right off our coast in Alaska.  We have socialists in the north, with Canada.  And we have communists in Cuba and outright hostile Marxists in Mexico, which have all contributed to our border crises.  Most of the central and South American countries have some Marxism in their approach, so many hostilities are threats to America.  We don’t have an ocean to protect us from harm.  And anybody who says that America should be funding Ukraine’s fight against Russia doesn’t understand the real drivers of the war, which are pretty layered and ominous and have very little to do with the actual war itself.  We’re not all in this together.  There are good decisions and bad decisions, and we aren’t chained to people who make bad decisions just as we aren’t chained to brothers and sisters or even parents who make bad decisions in our families If people behave foolishly, there is a payment for that, and its not up to the American taxpayers to rescue every fool from bad decisions they made.  When he was kicked out of the White House, Zelenskyy got on a plane and took off for England, where they foolishly gave him 2 billion dollars as a loan to essentially one-up America.  But Trump doesn’t care, and Americans get it, which is why they voted for Trump.  Ukraine must understand that America is their domestic policy and should be much more respectful.  We don’t owe them anything, which was how Zelenskyy approached his meeting with Trump, as if we did.  Trump supporters put him in the White House just for that kind of meeting, and it’s what we expect him to do representing us.  And J.D. Vance did a great job as well.  There was much to be proud of regarding that meeting with Zelenskyy last Friday of February 2025. 

But there is more to the story. It’s this casual dress that Zelenskyy is always wearing; he wears this pajama outfit all over the place as if he is in such a beggar mode all the time that he can’t afford a suit.  I despise this approach to any business meeting.  It’s something we see all over the world and is part of a Marxist push that has seeped into every aspect of our culture.  This casual Friday approach to professionalism is a trend that we need to reject.  I hate it.  I always wear a suit and tie to professional engagements to show respect for the work we intend to do.  I don’t like casual Fridays.  I don’t like dress-down Mondays.  Even in high school, I wore a jacket and tie every day.  And I do the same now for every professional engagement.  And when they run into dinner after important meetings, I usually never take my tie off until the day is over, even after others have removed theirs and opened up a few buttons to relax with some drinks.  To me, this is sloppy, and I don’t do it.  I think the world should return to professional attire for all business meetings; the trend to dress down and be a slob has not worked out well.  I know Elon Musk is part of this new technology group that dresses down for everything, but that includes him.  If you go to the White House, show respect and dress appropriately.  When discussing money in any regard, everyone should wear professional attire, especially in the case of Ukraine.  And for just that reason alone, Zelenskyy deserved to be kicked out of the White House, just as anybody else should have been.  And based on J.D. Vance’s performance regarding all this, I’m ready for him to be president in 2028. He’ll be a great continuation of the Trump administration.

Rich Hoffman

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