Category: Novel

What Does Jumping the General Lee Say About Americans: Self government is more important than safety

It was exciting to watch the General Lee, the famous car from the television show, The Dukes of Hazzard, jump over and through the fountain in the middle of town in Somerset, Kentucky.  What makes people want to jump a perfectly good car in such an ostentatious way, essentially destroying it in the process?  I enjoyed the event at the end of June, 2025 quite a lot, but as I watched everything unfold, I had to ask, why?  Why any of it?  Why jump in a classic car that is essentially an antique in the middle of town, and why did everyone come out to watch it?  And how did the stuntman Raymond Kohn even manage to organize the event during the Somernites Cruise, where the car would be jumped and land on roads that everyone uses, scratching up the pavement?  There were so many unsafe elements to the jump.  Usually, they do these kinds of things at a racetrack or at fairgrounds.  But this was in the middle of a busy town.  And it’s not lost on us that only a few short years ago, Nikki Haley, as governor of South Carolina, was removing all traces of the Confederate Flag from government property.  General Lee, as a car, has a Confederate Flag painted on it, and many of the vehicles at the car show openly display Confederate Flag license plates and decals. Here was an event that the world was covering.  This was international news.  It was all very haphazard and reckless, but people loved it.  But why?  What is in human nature that makes us love such things, and this extends beyond political sentiment?  Reverence for the Confederate Flag means rebellion for many people.  I appreciate the Union Army’s efforts during the Civil War and have always been an anti-slavery person.   However, I understand the rebellion the Confederate Flag represents, and it serves as a warning to self-governed people not to overreach with too many rules and regulations.  If I had to sum up the effort, that’s what this car jump was all about.

It was pretty interesting leading up to the jump, as the car was parked on the ramp in town, allowing people to walk up and touch it.  They could feel the ramps.  Anybody could have sabotaged the event, but everything was pretty loose, even right up to the jump, where people lined the sides of the street.  A lot of things could have gone wrong, and at the end of the jump, the wrecked General Lee almost hit a cameraman.  However, nobody got too emotional about anything, and the whole town showed up to see the jump, with everyone having a really good time.  The stunt team performing in the show was the Northeast Ohio Dukes, and they put on these shows quite frequently.  However, this was different because it occurred in the middle of a functioning town, which could result in real damage and injury.  However, people felt they needed to do this stunt, disregarding caution, to perform it. Afterwards, the Northeast Ohio Dukes sold off pieces of the wreck to people who wanted a piece of history.  So what would make someone want a piece of the General Lee hanging in the garage?  Well, a lot of people did.  The entire event also had significant sponsorship from notable companies, including Coca-Cola, G&L Refrigeration, Citizens National Bank, and Don Franklin Dealerships.  Thirty-five thousand people showed up to pay $10 a ticket to watch history being made.  What was noticeable to me was that nobody seemed to care about woke politics.

When The Dukes of Hazzard television show aired every Friday night, people loved it.  In every episode, the Duke boys, who were always running away from the law, would jump the General Lee during one of the many car chases that occurred throughout the series.  I loved it; I had the high-flying General Lee on my school notebooks, on t-shirts. I had lots of toy cars that I would jump with myself.  I performed many stunts and would jump my bike over numerous dangerous obstacles.  It was all very exciting, and obviously, I am not the only one.  After all that we’ve been through as a culture, where the administrative state has tried to make us a more safe society, here we were in 2025, during the first year of the Trump presidency in his second term and a General Lee complete with an ostentatious Confederate Flag was jumping through a town fountain just like on the television show.  Hollywood has tried to recapture that magic in other kinds of shows, but people still love a 40-year-old show because of its lack of political correctness.  People do not want to live safe lives under the thumb of too much government regulation, and jumping a perfectly good car, and an expensive one such as the General Lee, destroying them each time they do it, is the sign of a very affluent society that can afford to do such things as an expression of personal sentiment. For many of the same reasons, we celebrate the 4th of July with fireworks.  At the core of our society is a need for rebellion and to throw caution to the wind, and the General Lee car from the television show has become a symbol of that in our culture. 

The jump itself was 150 feet high at a speed of 50 MPH, and with people lined up all along the street, a lot of things could have gone wrong.  However, having the event itself, with all the loose caution, was more important than safety, and that was what was important here.  And since that show was on television, there hasn’t been anything like it.  People still crave that kind of entertainment because there is an extreme need for danger in people’s lives.  They don’t want the safety of the administrative state.  They want to jump cars through fountains in the middle of town, crashing them on the other side, then buying pieces of the car as a trophy for their garage.  You wouldn’t see something like this, General Lee jumping in different places in the world, because it’s uniquely American. This is interesting, considering we are only five years out from when the World Health Organization tried to make a power move with COVID and shut down the entire world.  People played along for a little while, but slowly, a rebellious nature emerged, one that led to not wearing masks or getting vaccinated, undoing all the over-the-top regulations.  And here was a car with a Confederate Flag launching through the middle of town in ways that pushed safety to its limit, and people were pleased about it. What does that say about us?  We are a defiant people who intend to have self-government, and the Dukes of Hazzard television show is all about defying progressive attempts to turn America into something much less desirable.  And after all these years, with all the technological advancements we’ve experienced, the act of jumping a classic car through the middle of town with a dangerous stunt is still something most people enjoy.  And because they do, they won’t sign up for more centralized regulations coming from the United Nations any time soon.  People like danger and a car culture of excess.  So much so that they not only want to own cars like the General Lee, but they want to wreck them in an act of defiance whenever possible.  Because it’s in our nature to do so. 

Rich Hoffman

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

What Zohran Mamdani Means in New York: Democrats were always open socialists, communists, and Marxists

The victimization role that Zohran Mamdani is trying to utilize against President Trump isn’t going to work.  I know many people are worried about Mamdani and that he is a sign of things to come, and he is.  But not in the way that people fear.  Zohran Kwame Mamdani is an American politician born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda. He is a member of the New York State Assembly, representing the 36th district in Queens since 2021. He is a Democratic Socialist and a member of the Democratic Party. Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City in the 2025 primary, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. If elected, he would be the city’s first Muslim and Indian American mayor.  Trump is right to discuss arresting and deporting communists.  America has gone to war to fight communism, and when political people try to infuse communism into our political structure, they deserve the ridicule that they get.  Trump has no obligation to play nice with socialism and communism.  Mamdani is a Democrat who does not shy away from the socialist label, as most do, because he is making a move that Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have paved the way for.  I’ve been talking about it for a long time. The communists, Marxists, and socialists in America reside behind the disguise of the Democrat Party, and it is built into their policy-making.  So knowing that, we have no obligation to play nice with them.  Democrats are not equal at the table in a capitalist country if socialism is what they are really about, which it is and always has been.  We cannot discuss with Democrats if that is what they are.  Those ideologies are just too far apart, and Trump is right to indicate playing rough with them.

I’m not surprised that Mamdani won a primary election.  I’m not sure he wins in the general election.  There are a lot of people in New York City who have considered themselves capitalists, but have adopted Democrat ideas to prove to their leftist friends that they are not mean people.  That argument is so “pre-Trump,” and it’s not going to work now for Mamdani.  The politics of meanness is over; it took our country to a place we didn’t want to go, and that fever broke during the summer of 2024 with that assassination attempt against Trump, and he stood up and pumped his fist in the air, declaring we should all fight.  Before that, there were many people, perhaps most people, who loved capitalism, but they adopted elements of socialism to prove to left-leaning political types that they were not what they were being called.  Name-calling was a political tactic employed by the Democrat Party as it evolved into power.  And as long as it worked, they were going to keep doing it.  Mamdoni thinks that he is going to run a victimization campaign and that people will respond to him because they feel sorry for him.  And that’s not how all this is going to emerge.  Socialism is not going to make an open takeover of our political system.  Now that people are forced to see the Democrat Party for what it is, they will reject those political candidates.  And they won’t be able to win just because they are people of color, or that they are Muslim, or that they are nice-looking kids who can make TikTok videos.  Victimization politics have given us many miserable politicians, and we have learned a hard lesson that the Trump administration is giving us relief from.  And now that people know what they are picking, Democrats are going to get much different results than they have had in the past.

It’s not that people accepted Marxists, socialists, and communists.  But people did not like President Obama and his socialist behavior, sold to us by his skin color.  The kind of world that we have did not make people feel good.  That wasn’t a platform for success for Bernie Sanders, Cortez, and Mamdani to utilize in the future.  Instead, the same kind of Marxists are always there, but the Democrats lost their cover story.  So it’s much harder for them now.  Regionally, in places like New York, where high-density populations typically vote for Democrat ideas, these socialist candidates can perform well.  However, in general populations across the rest of the country, they won’t do well at all because people are no longer voting out of guilt.  Trump has shown people that they can vote for their self-interest and get much better results than voting for someone because they are Muslim.  Or a person of color.  Those are trends that are going out with the tide, not coming in.  And everything that Mamdani is saying assumes that the victimization politics is the wave of the future.  And that’s just not the case.  It is not advisable to base your political platform on the ability to win a vote simply because people feel sorry for you.  You want people to vote for you because you make them feel good about themselves.  And that is what Trump has unlocked in politics: the ability to vote for candidates because they want to achieve a better standard of living and solve real problems.  Not because they feel guilty about slavery or economic inequality.  And in the end, in New York, it’s a capitalist town that has had an identity crisis, finding more confidence in itself with Trump in the White House. 

Keep in mind that we have been teaching kids socialism in public schools for more than three decades now, so people have wide-ranging feelings on the topic.  What a teacher’s union-controlled socialist sentiment has taught them does not represent their instincts toward self-interest.  I am often stunned by how uninformed people can be, not because they are unintelligent. Still, when you talk to them, you get to hear such contrasts in their behavior that the totality of their utterances evolves into substandard assumptions. They don’t know what they think about anything, nor do they have the confidence to articulate their thoughts publicly, because they have been taught in school to suppress their opinions.  Not to express them, but to advance socialist enterprises in America.  But for anybody who wants a house, or a car, or a family, socialism is the enemy to those things, and people have a natural revulsion to anything that might prevent happiness along those lines.  So, even if they are taught socialism, their instincts often run counter to it. In America, where people have a perpetual choice, they will not choose the limits of Marxism and its umbrella political ideas, such as socialism and communism.  They have picked Trump once the peer pressure was cast away, and they were alone in the voting booth.  And that is how it will be in New York as well as the rest of the country.  The trend is not moving toward socialism, but rather away from it, as we consider that the schools have failed us.  And we aren’t happy about it.  And Zohran Mamdani might be good at TikTok videos that all but the most naive suckers enjoy. Still, when it comes to economic policy, people have learned many hard lessons from the mistakes of the Obama administration. They don’t want them in the future of politics, so while some might be shocked that a socialist beat a mainstreamer in a primary election, they shouldn’t be, because socialism is where the Democrat Party is.  But it’s not where the rest of the country is.  Republicans are poised to win by even larger margins because people are finally feeling free to express themselves more openly, and that doesn’t do well for politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani. 

Rich Hoffman

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

China Got Caught Tampering with the 2020 Election: How communism takes over countries

Well, it’s official now.  During June of 2025 FBI Director Kash Patel declassified documents showing the Chinese Communist Party scheme to interfere in the 2020 election to mass produce fake U.S. driver’s licenses and ship them to the U.S. to facilitate fraudulent mail-in ballots in favor of Joe Biden, these fake IDs were intended to create voter identities for Chinese residents in the U.S. to cast illegal votes.  The documents are now in the hands of Chuck Grassley in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and it is also noted that former FBI Director Christopher Wray recalled the initial report, as he was aware of the implications.  That means that when we look at the margins of victory of Joe Biden in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the total votes that Biden won by were less than 45,000. Biden won by only 20,682 in Wisconsin, by 154,188 in Michigan, and by 11,799 in Georgia.  Arizona was won by only 10,457 votes.  So that’s how close it was.  In Pennsylvania, the winning amount was 80,555.  And that’s obviously why Christopher Wray didn’t want that report out, because it shows with evidence what the Chinese were up to in order to get just enough votes over the top to elect Joe Biden.  We are now aware of several other methods of voter fraud that involve the use of mail-in ballots.  But this driver’s license scam is complex, irrefutable proof of how China planned to install Biden over Trump for their self-interest.  And looking back on it now, the reason the election took weeks to resolve is that those swing states were allowed to continue counting mail-in ballots until Joe Biden had just enough votes, as shown, to be declared the winner.  This raises numerous significant legal issues. 

Even worse, this same method of election tampering has also occurred in presidential and congressional races.  Most of the close races that we have been watching over the last decade could be attributed to the same kind of election tampering.  Even in states like Kentucky, between Matt Bevin and Andy Beshear, the total vote difference was 5,136 out of over 704,000 votes, less than 0.37 percentage points in 2019.  And when they got away with it, the opposition parties connected to communist governments around the world, for which China is, they expanded it in a mass way during the 2020 election using the bioweapon of Covid as the cover story for mass election fraud.  Everyone needs to get this through their thick skulls.  The 2020 election cycle was a major crime against the United States that killed people and installed a puppet government from a hostile foreign actor, and many accomplices.  So, as we go out and buy fireworks for American freedom and celebrate all the significant military engagements that were put forth to make America victorious in the fights for freedom, understand that our elections have been under attack by lots of foreign actors who have been quite explicit in funding our destruction.  And in 2020, they were successful, and they got caught.  And they have to be punished.  It’s not a question of if, but to what degree.  Additionally, what this means is that Joe Biden’s entire presidency was illegal, meaning that everything he signed, or that others signed for him with an autopen, was also unlawful, including the DEI hire of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court in 2022.  A lot of people were asleep at the wheel, and the bad guys in the world were tampering with our elections, putting Democrats in important seats, in the Senate, in Governor roles, in the House, and certainly in the White House.  The government we have today is essentially not the government we voted for; it’s the constructs of election fraud on a mass scale, with this Chinese scam being just one of them. 

In the first half of 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized nearly 20,000 counterfeit driver’s licenses coming from China and Hong Kong with the apparent intention of laying the foundation for election fraud.  Given the size of this discovery, the operation was much larger than what they actually caught and easily falls within the voter total that Biden won the election by in 2020, all by itself.  When you add all this to the other known election fraud methods, it is easy to see why Joe Biden won in 2020, and that once election fraud was more difficult to conduct in 2024 because everyone was watching carefully, Democrats could not repeat the 2020 performance.  Because many of the election fraud methods were incredibly frustrating.  In 2024, Trump received 77.3 million votes, while Harris received only 74.9 million after many weeks of counting, falling short of the 2020 totals by 7 million votes.  Simply put, the crackdown on the mail-in illegal votes was the difference in the gap.  Add to that all the voting machine irregularities, that also traced back to China, and we have significant problems in our elections, and it would not be hard to prove that many of the tight races that made the House and Senate so close along party lines are that way through similar forms of election fraud, in all close races where Democrats won by a slim margin, election fraud, like the election between Matt Bevin and Andy Beshear in 2019 took place. 

The reluctance to admit it, and the reason the declassification of the report by Kash Patel is so essential, is that it reveals the complicity of many people domestically in facilitating the tampering of a foreign government in American elections, as they benefited from the chaos.  So they let it happen, and those same idiots will be out buying fireworks and flying the American flag on July 4th just like everyone else, even though what they did was treasonous and overt acts of legal sedition.  And they were caught with hard evidence.  No, don’t kid yourself, America has also participated in election tampering through the CIA and other means in other countries around the world.  So when China does it, they do so for their own interests, and we were the dummies who let them do it to us.  We should expect hostile countries to try to topple us.  We are not all friends.  The lesson here is that many of our elections have been tampered with, and that the government we have had was not the one we chose through free elections.  The kind of House and Senate majorities that we have had were not actually as close as we have been led to believe.  And this evidence is very inconvenient to those who have allowed it to happen, because the blood is literally on their hands.  As we approach the next election in 2026, we need to tighten our election laws and make it significantly harder for China and other countries to exert influence over our elections.  If we do that, many Democrats will not be able to beat their Republican rivals because Americans do not like communists.  And communism is what the left has on the menu.  And they want to infiltrate the world in any way possible.  For them, stealing elections is much less violent than military engagement.  It’s what just happened in South Korea, where we fought against the spread of communism there half a century ago.  And now, people just had an election where the communist party sunk deeper roots into running that country.  And they want to do it in America, and have been getting away with it, until now.  Now we have the proof.  But what we do with it will decide the fate of all our futures, for better or worse.

Rich Hoffman

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

In Florida, You Can Run Protestors Over: Fighting communists rioting against ICE deportations

You did notice that there are no mass protests in Florida, where communists trained in our colleges take to the streets in one of these anti-ICE deportation mobs to block traffic with their bodies.  In Florida, if people throw their bodies in front of your car to stop you, you are allowed to run them over.  There are some technical and legal gymnastics involved, but in essence, protesters are not allowed to block traffic in Florida.  Because drivers won’t be prosecuted for driving over their scummy, dirty, communist bodies, and that’s how it should be in every American state.  It’s nice to have Free Speech, but that speech cannot impose itself on other people and cause them discomfort or even harm.  And blocked traffic is reprehensibly disruptive.  But there’s more to it than that, even.  We are not obligated in America to tolerate enemies of our nation.  And to hide hostile, treasonous intent behind any form of Free Speech.  And this is what the social Marxists, communists, and open socialists want to do by working against the values of America while using the values of Free Speech to attempt to undercut the foundations of society itself.  We must recognize what is truly happening with these individuals. Suppose they show up to a rally outside of Sheriff Jones’ jail in Butler County, for instance, as they have been doing, wearing a t-shirt indicating membership in a socialist organization. In that case, they are openly declaring war against the United States and the self-governed people of that nation.  And actions worse than legal prosecutions are more than justified.  Those people are declaring war on our way of life, and we need to treat them that way.  We have no obligation to be accommodating to people who are trying to overthrow our country, and these protestors against the ICE deportations are with their stated intent.

There is a lot to unpack behind the supporters of these protestors who have blocked traffic in Los Angeles and made themselves into a menace to society.  Having different opinions on a matter and expressing them openly in the marketplace of ideas is one thing.  Impeding people’s lives with those opinions, with the explicit intention of using force and inconvenience to convey their point, is not acceptable.  And for the people who are financing these protests, there is a lot of action that we must take against them.  Everyone needs to stop thinking of the government as something separate from themselves, done by some mysterious people in power.  Self-government means we elect people into positions that need to be filled, and they work on our behalf to accomplish the tasks assigned to them.  So we must protect that government from attack when it does happen.  In this case, Trump was elected to do our work.  And we must preserve his ability to do that work on our behalf.  That work cannot be stopped by a bunch of lifetime appointed judges with both feet into Marxist causes as they have been lured into that political philosophy during their Friday night wine tasting social gatherings, and they have learned to drink the brew with their pinky out to disguise from their spouses detrimental elements of porn addiction and diabolical life choices they want to hide behind collectivist living.  The people who are attacking our country are attacking us, and they use these mindless, dumb kids right out of college, and the old hippies of the Flower Child generation who are still alive to provoke them into antagonisms against all things American.  Even in some of these protests, the American flag was burned while the Mexican flag was hoisted with reverence as if domination over occupation were a forgone conclusion. 

Most of the wars that Americans have fought over the last century were against socialist, Marxist, and communist forces and their attempts to overthrow our capitalist system of economics.  We have gone to war, for instance, to prevent Korea from being overrun by communism.  We did the same in Vietnam.  What’s left of the Soviet Union, which Vladimir Putin is trying to unite Ukraine back under the home country from its fall from communist power, is at the heart of the modern conflict.  China is a communist nation that is exporting communism all around the world, including providing financial backing for many of the ICE protests.  The conflicts in Central America have been over the spread of communism.  Communism took over and ruined Cuba, creating a lot of trouble for the United States.  And the military action of choice by these communist groups has been to change their tactics from open aggression to legal challenges.  For instance, rather than go to war again with the United States in Korea recently, the communists just penetrated society to the point where they rigged elections so they could steal the government as they just did in South Korea, and took over the country without firing a shot.  They have tried to do the same thing in America.  The Joe Biden presidency was a good example of that very intention.  A presidency was stolen and given to a communist supporter, which Joe Biden was.  They did the same thing in Brazil with Bolsonaro.  They used election fraud to remove him from office, then lawfare to strangle him in court.  This is how the communists, who are the enemies of humanity, work in the world.  They have changed their approach, and in America, they attempt to conceal themselves behind free speech, expecting not to be identified as hostile agents of the American way of life.  And when they show up to a protest wearing socialist membership t-shirts, they are making it easy to identify who they are and what needs to be done to them.

There has been considerable debate about the role of communism in a free society.  For a long time, people on the left assumed they had an equal right to express their opinions in that free society.  But Democrats, socialists, and communists of Marxist thought are a political party that is hostile to American values.  When we discuss the political right and the political left, we are referring to support for Adam Smith’s economics on the right and Karl Marx’s on the left.  One is hostile to the other, and they can’t all coexist in the world, which is the moral of the story behind all the conflicts we have had up to this point and the blood that has been spilled, defining those parameters.  And that is what they are protesting with the immigration issues, open supporters of overthrowing America are trying to import communist ideas into the nation to change the voting standards of a free country, so that they can topple the nation with the pressure of the policies.  So, illegal immigration is an invasion of our country by hostile agents trying to hide their radicalism behind loopholes in the law, which think only countries can declare war on our nation, and that we can’t fight them if a nation hasn’t openly declared war.  But Mexico has come pretty close to it by supporting illegal immigration into America and all the violence and chaos it brings.  But to the protestors themselves, who were taught in our public education system and colleges to become agents of Marxism, we have been too friendly and accommodating to them.  We should be openly hostile and even violent when they show up in our communities with t-shirts showing an affiliation with socialism, communism, and Marxism.  And if they block our road with their communist bodies uttering Marxist values and expect to stop our progress from point A to point B, we should run them over and not look back for a second at their broken bodies and hippie rantings.  It is more valuable to acquire our gallon of milk from the store than to consider for a moment the fractured lives of those hostile protestors and their ill intent toward our great nation.  Their destruction would be an improvement to the quality of our country, and we should defend it accordingly.  We aren’t required to put up with communists in our society under the guise of free speech.  When we see them and they identify themselves as such, we should always be at war with the basic premise of their diabolical existence.

Rich Hoffman

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

Being Replaced by AI: If you have time to play on the internet all day, you are in a job that can easily be replaced by new technology

Let’s take the concerns about AI replacing jobs seriously for a minute.  Here’s a good measure that I use to determine the value of a job.  If you have time to play on the internet and are ordering your lunch at 9 AM, you are probably working a job that AI could replace. We don’t create jobs just for people to have.  You need to be doing something with that job.  So, if you have a lot of time to do other things while you’re at your job.  Or you are doing a job that people think can be done from home while you are in your pajamas, your job can be done by AI. I have explained that I don’t worry about AI taking away jobs from people. Instead, I think AI will expand our economy where it’s applied and make humans more efficient.  Our economy will grow proportionally.  And when we are talking about GDP growth of more than 3%, human jobs just aren’t going to get you there.  There are not enough people, and there are not enough births.  There aren’t enough people in the world to fill all the jobs that we currently have.  Measuring a country’s success in job creation is a thing of the past and has been for quite some time.  I understand the anxiety, but really, and you know who you are, if you aren’t very busy at your job, then you are doing a job that AI can replace, one that doesn’t show up late or call off.  Or bring in a doctor’s note looking for an excused absence.  AI works all night and doesn’t require overtime.  It doesn’t get out of focus on the topics being worked on.  It simply does work, and that is essentially what economic value is measured by: the amount of work required to drive economic activity. 

It is baffling to hear what people who are supposed to be smart think would happen with the new administrative state’s view of the world.  Even this past week, I have heard some ridiculous comments from people who are supposed to be experts on labor practices.  The notion that the world should stop because so-and-so has called off is a preposterous idea.  And the general idea is that work is something that should be regarded as valuable.  I continue to hear what I’ve listened to all my life about Mondays, when people say stupid things like, “can’t wait to Friday.”  Or, “TGIF,” associating sadness with Monday mornings, where people have to return from time off and report to jobs that they hate.  And they rebel against those jobs with frequent call-offs and expect their job to be there for them once they’ve done all their leisure activities, as if we are supposed to build our lives around being off work.  Hey, AI never complains.  It does work, and a lot of it, and is, in general, far better than humans doing those same jobs.  It is much more reliable.  So, are we supposed to avoid using AI and insist on using a human being who is much less efficient at a task, to preserve the feelings of some lazy slug who is on their third marriage and has kids by all different spouses, who call off work every time the sun is out?  Because that’s the reality of the labor market.  However, it’s not just the typical slugs we’re talking about.  It’s just as common for white-collar jobs.  And you can see it while visiting any city.

It is astonishing to visit places like Washington, D.C., where traffic is heavy from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m.  Everyone is going to work, and the parking garages fill up fast.  But by noon, those parking garages start to open up because people are not working full 8-hour days.  They are going home after just a few hours in the office, and in many cases, they are not working even five days a week.  We saw this mentality clearly during COVID, where medical professionals insisting on government-imposed lockdowns had no connection to the amount of work that needed to be done globally.  Labor being a measure of productivity, most of the COVID planners thought that the world could all stay home and only communicate with each other via Teams meetings.  And we’re talking about people we think of as brilliant.  They believed that the way to get to a zero-emission world was for all humans to stay home and not drive anywhere.  If you have ever attended one of these climate conferences, such as those held in Rio or Davos, you will hear these same types of people microplanning mass society with the belief that humans could all stay home and visit parks built in their backyards, rather than traveling across the nation to visit a place like Yellowstone.  The same people who are now complaining that AI is going to take away human jobs are the same people who have tried to keep human beings from leaving their houses. I say that, knowing a great deal about the Agenda 21 goals of sustainability and how those misguided ideas infiltrated community planning. 

I have a lot of political friends who have to deal with Agenda 21 fantasies straight from the messed-up minds of the United Nations.  These kids learn a variety of skills in school, then they get hired into a township planning office, where they bring with them designs to build parks, roundabouts, and bike paths.  I live in an area where all these things have happened in abundance, and I look at them in wonder.  Why should people have so much free time to spend in all these parks and have the time to ride a bike on a bike path?  Where do the people who frequently visit there work?  Even with online gaming, many kids are playing those games 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, when they should be learning skills at the local McDonald’s drive-thru.  However, we have many people who have been running our society, teaching it all the wrong things about work.  So if you have time to walk on a bike path all the time, or sit around in a park looking at nature.  Or, you order lunch three hours early, and you have time to play on the internet all day at a white-collar job. You are working in a job that could and should be replaced by AI, which can do it better because it has no time for leisure.  When traveling through Europe, it’s always a source of amusement to observe their work ethic, which is characterized by very few hours per week, excessively long vacations, and an abundance of them.  When dealing with a large company these days, they often adopt a European view of work, which can be devastating to productivity.  I’d rather not waste my time trying to get someone to come to work and convince them to be productive while they’re there.  I’d rather replace their job with AI so that the things that need to be done can get done.  We don’t create jobs for people’s convenience.  We do it because we need work done, and people should work hard to do it, rather than complaining about it.  And we must admit to ourselves that most of the opinions people have had about work were incorrect.  And they led our society down the wrong path, introducing all the bad ideas about it.  To correct that behavior while expanding the economy, AI is a valuable asset, and I find it very useful because it is always available and never complains.  There are many things that I do that AI could never replace.  So I don’t look over my back at it, worried it will replace my value. Instead, I see it as helpful because it allows me to do the kinds of things that I’m good at, and to do more of them.  Rather than waste time on stupid stuff.  But if you are looking over your shoulder at AI replacing you.  Then that’s probably because you aren’t doing anything important enough to be replaced so easily.  And that is your problem. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Rich Hoffman Derangement Syndrome: Solving problems people don’t want solved

This has arisen recently due to the fallout between Elon Musk and President Trump, during which he discussed Trump Derangement Syndrome.  However, I understand why people dislike President Trump.  And here’s the deal: it’s not his job to change the opinion of those who hate him.  I know that hate all too well because it’s a personality thing.  There are a lot of people who hate me; they have Rich Hoffman Derangement Syndrome for sure.  And I know why people have it.  So I get Trump, and I understand why Elon Musk self-sabotaged his relationship with the President.  I see it all the time, every single day.  And there isn’t anything anybody can do to change that status.  People are going to feel what they are going to feel, and that’s just the way it works.  In Trump’s case, there are many people, including Elon Musk, who fall out of favor with the President due to the factors that contribute to the development of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  And the burden for change is on the people who hate, knowing that people like Trump set a bar too high for weak people to live up to, and they hate the person who sets that high bar because they are too lazy to live up to it.  That is the start of the hatred, but of course, it runs deeper than that.  But for some dumb reason, people have been taught that society owes them some unearned merit, to make them feel less bad about themselves, and when people don’t give them that, they grow to hate the targets of their anxiety.  And that relationship often descends into hatred.  One of the reasons President Trump has been as successful as he has in life is that he developed the ability to not care about changing his status against him, but to embrace it and live with it.  And once that happens, a certain freedom is experienced which allows for exemplary leadership and personal virtue. 

The Rich Hoffman Derangement Syndrome, which is a very real thing, is completely unprovoked by me.  I am about as friendly to people as anybody could be.  Yet I have a list of people who hate me for a reason.  And I understand it all too well, and I can therefore see it in other people with the same ease, such as in President Trump.  I don’t go out of my way to harm people at all, yet there is no shortage of people every day, at a different level than President Trump, of course, who lose their minds just by hearing my name.  And to maintain your level of happiness, you have to develop the ability not to care what people think of you.  President Trump has certainly created that over the years, which is why he can be such a good President.  But the same could be said of the head of any company or a family.  If someone had to pinpoint the most essential ingredient in any successful enterprise, I would say that it resides in Trump Derangement Syndrome, and how he deals with that derangement as a person.  Most human beings have an innate desire to be liked.  So they find themselves going out of their way to appease those around them, which gives people who don’t deserve it unearned merit, more power than they deserve to have, because they get to decide whether or not they like you.  And if you want to be liked, then you give people who don’t deserve that power, power over you, because you want something from them. 

It’s a psychological problem from people who have significant, destructive personality traits that they desire to hide from the world through this little game of popularity.  One thing that people, for the most part, do is introduce problems into the world so they can hide their insecurities behind them.  It’s a deep psychological problem that most people have in their lives to some extent.  So, when you bring someone into their life who likes to solve problems, and they solve those problems easily, of course, for those with the problems, that’s the worst thing in the world.  Because they want to hide behind problems with no prospect of ever being solved, those types of people dislike individuals who solve problems, as they want the problems to persist so they can conceal deeper issues within themselves that they seek to hide from the world.  That is why there is, and always will be, Rich Hoffman Derangement Syndrome.  Solving problems comes very naturally to me, and I do it everywhere I go.  I see through people to who they are, and when I see problems, I solve them.  And people hate me for it.  And since I don’t give them unearned merit just for breathing, as they have been taught, society should not be structured that way. As a result, they have no barrier to reality to insulate themselves from the truth. So they hate me.  And they hate anybody who shows an inclination to solve their problem because they want the problems to exist so they can hide behind them.  We’re talking about the kind of people who create problems in the world so they can hide their insecurities behind them, protecting themselves from needed reforms, and putting pressure on them to be good people.  To avoid that fate, they create problems as a barrier to the pressures of judgment.

So if you are a problem solver who sees easily through these smokescreens of issues, you will be hated.  Just as a child wants to hide under the covers to avoid the monsters that they think are in their closet, they will hate the person who rips away the covers and forces them to see what is hidden in their room.  And when you show them that there is no monster, they will not be happy, but sad, because they liked to hide under the covers, as it simulated a primal desire they have to be back in the womb of their mother, all cozy and warm, and cared for.  Because life is tough, and they aren’t adamant, or smart, and they fear most of all the world knowing that about them.  And with me, I see everything, I know everything, I can read a person just walking down the sidewalk and tell you just about everything you need to know about them.  Solving problems comes naturally to me.  And when I do, some people want the issues to remain, for their own needs of concealment.  And over time, if you want to be successful with such a talent, you learn not to care what other people think.  Because you don’t give those people the unearned merit to leverage friendship for compliance, people who don’t deserve it don’t get to use their control over relationships to keep problems intact as an extortion strategy.  And when that doesn’t work, as seen with Elon Musk maintaining a relationship with President Trump to gain leverage over a NASA administrator, or some EV mandate in the new Big Beautiful Bill, you find out real fast who your real friends are and what they want out of a relationship with you.  And when you couldn’t care less what they think, of course, they will develop a hatred for you and will suffer from a Derangement Syndrome.  And there is nothing you can do to help them.  I have certainly learned not to get pulled into other people’s problems.  But to solve them, regardless of their feelings about it.  And when they learn they can’t use friendship to retain their problems.  Of course, they will hate you for it, so if you want to be a successful person, you need to solve problems.  You have to learn not to care when people develop a hatred for you. Instead, you learn to accept and even embrace that hatred.  There is nothing I can do about Rich Hoffman Derangement Syndrome.  Except learn not to solve the problems people want to hide behind.  And we all know that’s not going to happen. 

Rich Hoffman

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

I Feel Sorry for Elon Musk: CEOs build culture, and are extremely important

I do feel sorry for Elon Musk. I would say to him, the government is a very negative experience, full of losers.  And that fixing it will take a lot more work than he can give in short spurts.  People who choose to work for the government are quite different from those drawn to the private sector.  Government is filled with entitled losers who want to make a lot of money off taxpayers without the risk of earning it themselves.  Therefore, it will require significant reform, which is just getting started with the Trump administration.  But it will take decades to unwind the mess that has been given to us.  And I can see that Elon Musk began his DOGE campaign with a lot of bright ideas.  But making the cuts permanent that he has identified isn’t as easy as it would be at one of his companies.  The government is full of parasites, and you have to play the long game with them.  Elon Musk can do the world a great deal of good if he focuses on what made him great to begin with.  He needs to be back at SpaceX every day, sending Starships into space every three weeks.  It has been evident that he has been absent from those companies; they have been experiencing a decline.  The job of a CEO is often not well-defined; they create the culture.  It’s not the work they do but the culture they make in their wake.  And SpaceX has slipped significantly since Elon has been frequenting the White House daily since Trump’s return to office.  It will take more than CEO stunts to save the government.  However, some business success on the frontier of innovation is the best way that Elon Musk can make the world a better place and establish a civilization to save by going to Mars. 

I thought it was astonishingly short-sighted for Disney-run ABC to characterize the Starship 9 mission that launched this past week as a series of failed missions.  The process SpaceX uses for data collection involves launching these Starships to see what works and what doesn’t, so that every configuration of the problem can be witnessed and designed, modified in real-time.  Drawing on extensive experience with this very issue in the aerospace industry, the world is fundamentally flawed in its approach to manufacturing processes.  And SpaceX has taken a noticeably different approach, one that is much more akin to the Skunkworks at Lockheed Martin many years ago.  The world has learned the wrong lessons and incorporated them into its management systems, and the entire industry is in desperate need of an overhaul.  And if Elon Musk wants to change and save the world, he can do it most effectively with Tesla and SpaceX.  The big secret is that you can’t put engineers in a room and get everything right the first time, which is the assumption in aerospace that began with NASA and the need to avoid any accidents that would become public relations nightmares.  When you can automate flights, you can afford to have launches to measure cause and effect, and approach the whole process of technology development much more aggressively.  Even though Starship 9, which launched at the end of May 2025, burned up during re-entry, as did the booster rocket, much of what SpaceX needed to achieve was successful, leading to the technical adjustments that need to be made at the engineering level. 

However, the way the industry operates now is very risk-averse, and, of course, the least risky thing to do is to do nothing, which is why things are so slow in aerospace and why cost overruns are so common.  And when ABC says that the previous SpaceX missions were failures, they are speaking from the vantage point of the administrative state —the kind of world that the government has created for us, with over-regulation and a world shaped by insurance industry lobbyists.  From that world, exploding Starships are a bad thing.  For the innovative SpaceX world, they provide a lot of information, and when you look at the rate of innovation that is needed to build Starships, you need to collect a lot of data to get repeatability outside of engineering tolerances, because until you see all those inventions working together, there is no way to know how stable a process is.  When it came to the NASA approach, you get lucky with a design and then never deviate from it, fearing the unknown, and that is essentially how they built the space program.  SpaceX is seeking complete, automated redundancy that remains reliable after thousands of trips.  To achieve that, SpaceX needs to be launching a new Starship every week, which is why Elon Musk has been so crucial.  Since he has been at the White House, doing good work that often goes unappreciated, SpaceX has been addressing engine bay leaks that have compromised spaceflight, and the Starships have been exploding.  Not a great way to have a space program.  However, the best thing about this most recent Starship 9 mission was that much of it had become so commonplace now.  The Starship was able to undergo stage separation and space flight, solving many of the problems it previously had, so now the other lingering issues can be addressed. 

The best engineering is to do things and fix things as you see problems emerge.  And for something as complicated as Starship, it will take Elon Musk to foster a productive culture among the many great people at SpaceX, guiding them toward corrective actions to address the numerous problems that must be solved for stable space flight.  It’s fantastic that we’ve had only 9 Starship missions and that they’ve made getting them into space so routine.  Now, getting re-entry right, with stable space flight, will be the key, and it will take a full-time Elon Musk to pull it off.  However, when it comes to cutting the deficit, given the current state of affairs, the first step in fixing the American economy is to achieve magnificent growth through new market sectors.  The SpaceX Starship is the best way to reach that point.  China, in their wildest imaginations, won’t be able to copy SpaceX, because they don’t have a person like Elon Musk to act as the CEO.  Just like other considerations of the administrative state, people cannot be swapped out.  Great people are irreplaceable; when they take vacations or are absent from work, things don’t run smoothly.  Exceptionalism comes from unique people.  Not process controls that allow losers in life to be just as good as winners.  Exceptionalism matters, and Elon Musk needs to stay on the cutting edge at SpaceX for it to continue its success.  And if he wants to save the world, he can do it best in the private sector.  DOGE will still be a good idea that will do good work.  But it’s going to be a slow boil.  What we need most is Starship, and missions going to space so routinely that people take it for granted, as usual.  And with the recent Starship 9 mission, that is becoming the standard.  Normal is launching the biggest rocket humanity has ever produced into space, routinely.  Now, getting it to do what we need it to do time and time again is the next challenge, which is very close to being completed. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Mexico is a Dump: Where is the arrest of the killer of Valeria Marquez

So, where are the arrests? The killer showed his face on the livestream on TikTok when he killed the 23-year-old Mexican beauty influencer on May 13th, 2025.  The Mexican government promised justice, so where is it?  With all the face recognition software there is in the world, why haven’t they gone to his home and arrested him spectacularly for such a horrendous crime?  Because they can’t, because the drug cartels run Mexico and the token government there, just like globalists were trying to do to the United States, won’t allow it.  In Mexico, it’s a dump, and the government facilitates that kind of violence.  Valeria Marquez was trying to escape her drug cartel boyfriend, be a good girl, and turn her life around as a social media beauty consultant.  And when her old boyfriend saw that men were sending her gifts because she was very popular and had quite a large audience, he decided to send a hit man into the salon, right in front of everyone, and while the livestream was running, assassinate her while she clutched a cute little stuffed animal.  And in those moments where her life was stolen from her, she looked like a little girl who, just ten years prior, would have been a little girl thrilled to get such a stuffed animal from a trusted adult.  But she was brutally murdered because she wanted independence from a personal tyrant, and it has turned out to be a terrible story.  But you know what is most sad about it?  You would have never heard about this story if she weren’t a popular social media star.   Because they happen all the time, and in Mexico, they happen every few minutes.  Mexico is a dump, and the criminal elements who run these governments in the world want to keep it that way, because it gives them power over the degradation.

Violence in Mexico is so bad that the other day I saw a Family Guy episode where Peter Griffin made a joke as his head had been cut off and stuck on a pike, bleeding profusely.  And he said, “I took one step away from the resort,” meaning that’s how it is in Mexico.  The drug cartels leave the resorts alone most of the time to give the illusion that things are safe enough to have a tourist economy.  But if you step out of the lines they give you, it’s anything goes, and tourists end up dead all the time.  But more than that, young women like Valeria Marquez know they have no choice.  Once they hit puberty, if somebody sees them and they look reasonably attractive, the cartels will take them away from their families, and there isn’t much they can do about it.  When people wonder why she was dating a gang banger, she had no choice.  If she wanted to live, she had to play the game; her family could do nothing about it.  If you have a pretty daughter, in places in the world where crime rules, which is most places, the world will take her and use her until they are done with her.  And at that point, they might let her return to an everyday life.  But in the case of Valeria Marquez, she was just too pretty.  At 23 years old, her shelf life for sexual exploitation was expiring.  It’s the young girls that these drug dealers want, and at that point, they are starting to get old.  So she tried to turn her life around with a social media account that took off, and hoped that the high profile would save her.  But her ex-boyfriend figured if he couldn’t have her, nobody else would, so he had her killed.

The problem in Mexico is so bad that not even the latest Rambo movie dared to deal with the situation as we needed to.  In the last Rambo movie with Sylvester Stallone, even the famous movie star bent the knee to the cartels’ power.  Otherwise, Mexico wouldn’t have considered allowing that production company to film there.  The Mexican government pretends that it wants to put an end to cartel violence when, in truth, it wants the world to know just how bad it is so that it will be afraid and be very compliant.  Rambo in the movie I’m talking about, Last Stand, went to Mexico to save a young girl, much like Valeria Marquez, from the cartels, and he ended up getting beaten up pretty bad, which is not the way the Rambo movies were supposed to go.  Rambo, in true American fashion, should have gone to the stronghold of the cartel members and killed every last one with a spectacular gunfight.  But instead, he had to barely escape Mexico with his life to retreat to his home in America, where the cartel came to kill him on his home turf, to show the power and control they have even in America.  And Rambo managed to live as they destroyed his home.  But the whole movie was flat because it failed to solve the problem.  What the movie did show accurately, even if it’s really what the Mexican government wanted out of the deal, was to show how the grooming process works for young women, and what the substructure of the organized crime was really like.  And not even John Rambo was strong enough to confront it.

The power of these drug cartels even extends into our Supreme Court, where they have refused to get behind Trump’s war against the cartels, because there is real fear that some hit man will come to their homes and kill them, just as they did Valeria Marquez.  And that’s the point.  Not everyone has the kind of security that President Trump has, and they don’t want to be killed for fighting back against the drug cartels.  These criminals want to make a product that poisons its targets, and we are supposed to let them do it, which is what the Supreme Court decided in its attempt to stop Trump from deporting criminal thugs.  The people Trump has been deporting were the kind of people who killed Valeria Marquez.  And they terrorize the world, especially in socialist countries like Mexico, where the government exists to facilitate organized crime.  There is no concept of private property, so there is no reason to defend it, even if it’s a daughter.  If you have a pretty daughter, you aren’t allowed to have a gun to protect her from criminal thugs.  Instead, you are supposed to surrender her over to them and let them have their way.  And if you don’t, you will be killed too.  It’s so common that it’s even joked about on the popular show, Family Guy.  It’s not even a secret; everyone is in on it.  And the bad guys in the world, many who find themselves in government and getting kickbacks from allowing the crime to occur, facilitate the violence to keep the easy money coming, because they are too lazy and stupid otherwise to earn an honest living.  That is the truth of Mexico.  They don’t want to catch the killer of Valeria Marquez because they want the fear of such killings to keep people under their power and dependent on the government for their safety, which has only perpetuated the problem into the mess we see now.  There are a lot of young women like Valeria Marquez.  And there aren’t enough good people in the world to save them.  And that is a shame. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Hitting the Lottery: My feelings about family are closer to the Amish

This is going to sound bad, but I don’t care.  I’m not humble, and I have no plans to be.  When I say that my fourth grandchild was lucky to be born into the family she was, I mean it for how it sounds.  I always like to see little kids born into the world. And as far as I’m concerned, nothing in the world is more important than family.  Our job as human beings is to emerge from the void and to fill it with consciousness.  And long after the shell of a living body dies away, the spirit that emerges lives eternally for all kinds of purposes.  And even though that spirit has its characteristics and is immortal in its conduct, the experience of a physical existence profoundly shapes the content of that eternal character. As I visited one of my daughters in the hospital giving birth to my fourth grandchild, that was what I was thinking as I visited the hospital wing full of optimism, as other families were giving birth also.  And it was a generally happy floor full of hope for the future, and I enjoy places like that.  But as I was holding this new baby, I couldn’t help but think that she had hit the lottery relative to the other families on the floor.  Out of all the random chances of landing in a body that gave birth in such a family as she had, she was one of the luckiest creatures in the universe.  And it made me sad for the other little kids who will never get such an opportunity.  I wish I could be a parent or grandpa to more kids.  Because most of them have terrible families that cripple them usually before life ever starts to get going and its just not fair to them.

I say that because I don’t spend much time slowing down.  I live a fast-paced life full of high stress and chaos.  So a moment alone with family to talk to each other doesn’t come often.  But for us, a couple of holidays are the best; the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving give us great moments that carry us through the rest of the year.  There are many more throughout the year, but those two are benchmarks that we value more than others.  And they are usually very positive experiences.  But when a new child is born, of course, that is an even rarer occurrence, and we take those kinds of things very seriously in my family.  Because we like life and all the opportunities that come with it.  I want kids more than the average person, and I like them a lot until they start showing signs of becoming adults, and if they start taking on the signs of becoming just another loser in the world, then I lose my enthusiasm for them.  I can’t say I like people, so when kids trade away their childhoods for adult behavior, I think they give away a fortune, and the rest of their lives are wasted.   But with kids, those dumb decisions haven’t been made yet, so knowing them is usually full of optimism.  And for my daughter and her new little daughter, there are many very supportive people in their family, and no matter how bad life gets, there is always room to grow and recover in our family activities.  But compared to the rest of the world and their approach, it almost feels like we are an Amish family.   I can relate to them much more than a normal family these days, because we have similar beliefs about the value of family. 

As I was pushing my granddaughter around the hospital floor to keep her entertained while her mother recovered a bit from birth, I had a good look at the other families also having babies.  Especially the dads.  And by their look, they weren’t ready to have a baby.  You could see the fear in their eyes as they held their newborn children at the tremendous responsibility they suddenly found themselves in.  Most of the dads having new babies were going to let down their families in some way, and they would never get the chance to understand what I’m talking about.  Most people probably won’t.  But to see that fear in the faces of people during such an optimistic time in their lives is sad to see, and I instantly feel sorry for the kids born into such a weak family with bad dads who aren’t up to the rigors of the task.  Most moms at least get a connection to a child who grows with them during the pregnancy.  But the men don’t get to have a baby or bond with it during the pregnancy.  So they aren’t so flat-footed when the baby is born; they have made at least some psychological transition that has prepared them for having a baby.  But the men must go deeper to get there, and most never do.  And the kids end up without a positive primary influence.  I am pretty standoffish with most people because I find them insulting that they don’t take the parenting process more serious, and I know that if they screw that up, then most things they do in their lives will also be screwed up and the kids will grow up to be bad people.  And most of those kids being born with my granddaughter don’t have a chance at a happy life, just by looking at their parents’ faces. 

I wouldn’t say it’s challenging to be a good parent or a grandparent, but unfortunately, most people fall short.  I was thinking about this recently during my birthday in April, when we were all at Hocking Hills doing a ghost hunt at Old Man’s Cave with the grandkids.  It was a lot of fun, and as we were doing it, it was nice to see the lights of discovery light up on the little kids’ faces, and many of those memories with family will shape them for a lifetime in everything they do.  And I enjoy my role in that process, and I always give as much as possible so they get the best opportunities out of it.  But most kids are born randomly into life, and they get the parents they get, which is usually not very good.  And most of the time, they are doomed before they ever get started, and that was certainly the case with all the kids born with my granddaughter.  There are always exceptions, of course.  But for the most part, most kids born that day were born into families where the adults raising them would disappoint them greatly.  And I feel sorry for the lack of chances they will have in life because of it.  I don’t think there is a better or more important job than being an adult mentor for a little, emerging child.  But what’s sad is that so few adults feel that way.  And when I have to see and talk to them, it just reminds me how few there are, and I feel sorry for the kids.  I want to help them all, but unfortunately, I can’t because of how families work.  But for my new grandchild, she hit the lottery. 

Rich Hoffman

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Michael V. Ryan is Running for Butler County Commissioner: There is no reason to put up with wilted flowers

It was a surprise that so many people attended the Michael V. Ryan press conference at the Courtyard by Marriott in Hamilton, Ohio.  The current Vice-Mayor of the city and city council member announced that he was running for Butler County Commissioner, and it was good to see such a diverse group of people coming out to show him support on a Monday afternoon.  There were people of all ages and a nice, even number of men and women from all kinds of backgrounds, which showed broad support early in the process.  When I first heard about it, I thought it was a great idea that someone from the group of anti-liberal rebels on the City Council would migrate into the commissioner seat that is coming up, where the incumbent, Cindy Carpenter, is up for re-election.  Recently, she had been caught in Middletown, Ohio, campaigning for Democrats, and that pretty much sealed her fate among the many who have been unhappy with her over the years and have been calling her a RINO.  Well, now people had more than speculation on the matter, and they were looking for alternatives.  And Michael Ryan was making himself available, and people were excited about it.  It was also surprising that several officeholders also showed up to lend their support.  When you see Bruce Jones at a political event, you know something significant is brewing, because he tends to associate with emerging vigilance over the years that I have come to trust for several decades now.  And as I peeked around the crowd to the back of the room, I saw Mark Welch, the West Chester trustee there, whom I wanted to talk to.  It was a good crowd that had run out of seats, leaving many standing in the background and doorways to hear the future commissioner speak.

After the announcement, I took the chance to speak with Mark because I knew he was also thinking of running for commissioner, so it showed some significance that he was willing to come out and support Michael Ryan running.  The other two seats for the commissioner have a few years left on them, so for Mark to show public support this early in the process was very admirable.  And as we discussed, he has challengers for his trustee seat, which is up for re-election this year.  And he is committed to protecting that seat, which I thought showed great teamwork by the GOP to help in several races, which I’d like to see more of.  West Chester has been great because it has had some significant policies from the trustees over the years, which worked best when George Lang and Mark Welch served in West Chester simultaneously.  The best path forward, which has made West Chester one of the best places to live in the world, occurred during this period.  But since then, George has moved on to become State Senator, leaving Ann Becker to fill that void, which we all thought was going to be a good thing, as she used to be the President of the West Chester Tea Party, and the Cincinnati Tea Party, and she was a good friend.  She was on 55 KRC all the time announcing on the radio Tea Party events and was a key to implementing fiscal small government ideas back into the Butler County Republican Party.  But time has a way of eroding at people, and the person she once was isn’t quite so much anymore, and she has been siding with Democrats a lot these days, which has been a concern.  Because the other guy, Lee Wong, is a known Democrat.  So the trustees have moved more toward the Democrat side of things in dangerous ways.

Mark knows the situation, and he doesn’t feel like he can step away from the West Chester Trustee race because he needs help, so things don’t get out of control.  At a minimum, Mark needs to win one of the two seats this year, with Lee also up for re-election.  So while everyone is excited about Michael Ryan running for commissioner, the Republican Party needs to protect some of the best spots, which in West Chester is how the MAGA movement evolved in the Butler County area and set the foundation for what a prosperous community with good politics should look like.  Ann Becker and I used to be close during all this, and I was very supportive of her in that other Trustee spot George left behind.  And back then, we all planned to keep West Chester conservative by tag-teaming who would run and maintain a two-vote majority.  It meant a lot that Mark was doing that with this Butler County Commissioner race because that’s how you get good management at these positions.  It doesn’t do any good for everyone to beat each other up in primaries only to wonder why some knuckle-dragging Democrat ends up winning in the end, pretending to be a Republican, such as what we had for a long time in Cindy Carpenter.  I can say that in Ann Becker’s case, she didn’t start badly.  She and I parted political ways a bit when Trump came into the picture, and I was in full support of him early, while it took others a while to get there.  Ann eventually did, but over the coming years, it got increasingly complex to hold the same Tea Party political philosophy, as life has a way of chipping away at our foundational beliefs.  And at times like that, political challengers are healthy and needed.  But knowing when to work together and when to challenge for the betterment of a party that serves the needs of a representative government can be tricky, and takes good people to do things for the right reasons. 

Many great things are happening where Michael Ryan, as a commissioner, could be inspiring, especially given that Vivek Ramaswamy will soon be the governor of Ohio.  Butler County is one of the biggest counties in Ohio, with high population density, so having Michael Ryan as one of the commissioners is a rare opportunity.  Trump in the White House setting economic policies flowing down into all levels of government is showing great promise, which Vivek’s future administration will take full advantage of.  Then, having an enterprising commissioner like Michael Ryan engage in that excitement is a great opportunity.  What he has done with the City Council of Hamilton has been fun to watch; they have done things that have brought life back to the city that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.  And he could do so much more as a commissioner.  But we don’t want to lose the West Chester seats, because that would be a step backward.  So it was good to see some teamwork at key positions, covering each other with support where it counted.  Elections are always opportunities.  It’s rare to have such good people running for politics simultaneously in the same room, but that was certainly the case here.  Michael Ryan and his very nice wife, Amanda, are good, solid people who bring a lot of pride to Republican politics and have a very bright future that is well deserved.  But authentic leadership doesn’t just come in election wins; it comes in setting the table for victory on many fronts.  It was also good to see that happening in the background at the Michael Ryan announcement for County Commissioner on a bright day in May 2025 was unfolding a new strategy, where so many opportunities were blooming everywhere.  And in the Republican Party, several flowers have lost their luster and are wilting.  Cindy Carpenter is one of them, and she needs to go.  There is no reason to put up with wilted flowers who are Democrats in disguise when we have so many good, solid Republicans who are aligned with the MAGA movement.  But everyone will need to support each other in these efforts. 

Rich Hoffman

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