Category: President Trump

‘Return of the Gods’: The kind of evil explored in ‘Lord of the Rings’ is upon us now, but on a much larger scale than people can relate to

I had read the new Jonathan Cahn book Return of the Gods when it first came out in September of 2022, and I liked it a lot. But the content at even that time seemed a bit too obscure for mainstream politics. But now we are just a few months into 2023, and not even eight months have passed, but the trans movement has exploded, the government has been caught lying to us about many things, especially the proxy war with Russia, and virtually everywhere we look where the government is involved in an out-of-control level of evil that people are perplexed with, we see a vast maliciousness that most just can’t get their minds around.   It doesn’t surprise me, but I spend a lot of time thinking about these things in all kinds of out-of-the-box ways. Then I happened to be listening to the Glenn Beck radio show right around Easter of 2023, and he was talking about the Jonathan Cahn book. Cahn is most known for his Harbinger books, but this was different, this Return of the Gods, because it dealt with something that was very much aligned with my way of thinking, that the ancient gods from Sumerian culture and the early Bible were making their way back into the world from times long past, and that their influence explained a lot about the vast level of evil that we are seeing presently. Who are these gods they are talking about? Well, I’ve been leading up to this kind of discussion for most of the last year because if you really want to solve the problem, you have to go to where the problem is, and in this case, its spiritual enemies who live likely in the realms of quantum mechanics, and originally were living creatures that probably didn’t even come from earth, but settled in the Middle East area to start off as gods among the people they interacted with. And that’s where things get too weird for most people to deal with, and the narrative quickly falls apart. But even that is by design.

Jonathan Cahn is a rabbi who specializes in scriptural interpretation, and when reading the Bible, especially as a grown adult with lots of life experiences, it becomes very clear that Yahweh, the God of the Bible, the only God that Christian people were to worship, was extremely vengeful of the gods of the land of Canaan and that the creation of the people of Israel for him was a kind of modern Tea Party movement or MAGA. He gave the people of Israel the Ten Commandments and promised those who followed them a great life. And history shows us that when the Ten Commandments were used to construct of society, good things did happen. But God, the Yahweh of the Bible, was constantly frustrated that his people kept “cheating” on him with other gods, which are the gods that Jonathan Cahn talks about in his book as if they were not long dead, but were making yet again a comeback into the world of the living. Which I am certain is true. Are these the same gods and entities from such a long time ago? I think it’s actually much more complicated than just the three gods covered in the book Return of the Gods, which are Baal, Ishtar, and Molech, the pagan gods who were the primary villains of the Bible. This would mean to the masses that all the gods of the Bible were not fictional characters but were likely, through quantum entanglement, to be with us today on a global scale and were shaping the movement behind globalism in general. These were the gods of the Desecrators of Davos, the World Economic Forum, the efforts of communism, and the many wars that have occurred over the last century or more. And that concept to most people is extremely unsettling because we sort of think about events in the Bible over and done with, from a time well before ours. But when the efforts of Baal, Ishtar, and Moleck, or as I think of him (Marduk) is understood, we can see that the same battle for the souls of mankind is well underway and never left us, and over time has only gained in strength. 

Dealing with this kind of evil was what J.R.R. Tolkien did best with his Lord of the Rings books, which Peter Jackson made into the very popular movies. They are fantasy stories, but they have a lot of Christian concepts in them that obviously Tolkien was wrestling with as a metaphor for World War I and how global politics works. Ultimately, it wasn’t just the deceit of mankind by the ever-present spirit world where even the dead are never really gone and are always trying to make their way back into the living world. In the Lord of the Rings story, the dark, evil character Sauron is re-manifesting thousands of years after his defeat as a conqueror of the known world. And in the new stories, he is manifesting again to bring evil into the world. In a simplified way, with one bad guy to consider with all the efforts that made up the massively popular books, I think Tolkien touched on more reality than fiction when he contemplated how evil moved through people over vast periods of time. And what Jonathan Cahn was doing with his Return of the Gods was explaining that we were living our own version of Lord of the Rings; only what we were going through was much worse but vastly less obvious. The bad guys came to us not as dark, vile characters that were easy to identify due to their corrosive nature, but they came to us as friends, family, corporate logos, and in politics, and our minds weren’t ready to deal with such an evil. Yet, here it is. 

I’ll spend a little time on this topic because it is complicated. I am very impressed with Jonathan Cahn’s work, and now that Glenn Beck and other media outlets are giving the book a chance, it’s worth a bit of a deep dive into this subject. The Return of the Gods is a very popular book within Christian circles. It’s the kind of thing that people who visit Cracker Barrel or Chick-fil-A would feel right at home with. If you go to a bookstore and ask where it’s at, usually, the employees know exactly where it’s at because it’s one of their hottest-selling authors, even though it’s in the Christian book section. But this is a mainstream problem, this evil, and even people who don’t spend much time thinking about Christian issues, more than casually, are going to have a challenge wrestling with this one. But to solve the problems we are seeing today, the Bible is actually the mechanism for defeating this evil on the battlefield because that’s what Yahweh had done before, even though he was personally frustrated by the results.

We like to think that Jesus came along by his father, God, and made fighting evil to be more like an easy bake oven. Jesus died for our sins. All we had to do was acknowledge Jesus, and we would be saved because that’s why God sent him to us. He couldn’t keep people from falling to the pagan gods in the masses that they were, so Jesus came along and solved the problem with a kind of ransom for the type of evil we see all about us, and it’s been there since the beginning of time. And it’s with us now. It never really went away, and when we contemplate the events of our modern news cycles, it’s the root cause of most of our problems.   And if we want to understand those problems and have a chance to fix them, we must factually deal with that evil and face it with an epic battle that has become the responsibility of our age. We aren’t just reading about things that happened a long time ago before we were born. But this is our own history in the making, and it will be up to our resolve to defeat this evil, which I think is our destiny. Yet, before we can do that, we must understand what we are fighting, which is why Jonathan Cahn’s book is so important. I can’t recommend it enough; as quickly as you can get it, and read it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Attack of the Billionaires: It’s like treating alcoholism with a keg of beer

Like the sons of the queen from the great Shakespeare play Titus, the sons of George Soros intend malice and destruction for America by many of the same manipulations expressed in a microcosm within that famous play. With these frequent visits to the White House under the mask of a Biden presidency, illegally secured by globalist forces through massive election fraud brought on by Covid regulations, by the sons of George Soros give a window into what Americans have discovered about their government. They aren’t in charge of it, and we have allowed these billionaires to get in behind the scenes and shape policy in ways that voters have lost control of. And if Trump had never become president, we would likely have never discovered it. And as bad as George Soros and his sons have been, the reach of their ill intent goes much further than just them. When we look at a wide selection of billionaires, such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, and many others, it is quickly realized that we have a lot of whores in our government who will do anything for easy money and these billionaire types have been caught using their excessive power through finance to essentially destroy the concept of America through a lot of easy money. In some cases, like with Peter Theil and Elon Musk, their activism has been beneficial toward restoring the Constitutional Republic, which America was designed to be. But then, in the case of Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, George Soros, Bloomberg, and many others, the plan by them has been to secure their political position in the world by using their finance as a weapon of war to change the country into their vision, not the one represented by popular vote. 

The 2024 election was never going to be about policy, as the RINOs want, the Never Trumper types who keep trying to throw these soft-shelled Republicans into the field to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. It’s almost funny to watch their childish attempts. Who in their right mind thinks that Asa Hutchinson is going to do anything positive for Republicans? It’s like treating alcoholism with a keg of beer. Only one Republican is offering himself into the presidential race with any serious chance of beating the kinds of menaces that are actually controlling America, and that is President Trump because he’s a billionaire and can afford to play the game the way the other billionaires are playing it against our country. We’re not talking about easy Republican positions such as cutting taxes and having a firm stance on abortion. We are dealing with a kind of evil in politics that far extends into the kind of manipulations only explored most effectively in our lives through the art of Willian Shakespeare. It’s not a surprise that Alexander Soros, one of the most active sons of George Soros and his globalists friends, has visited the White House so much. They have been caught in more ways than one and likely wouldn’t even be talked about if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. But they have been caught, and people see what the problem is, and Trump is their champion to get it back under control.    So no matter what the news has stated on the matter, no matter what the influences have been against President Trump, people know that at this point in history, Trump offering himself to the White House is the best way to beat this influence of the billionaires from their purposeful destruction of America. 

Do Ray Dalio and people like Larry Fink intend the destruction of America? I’ve read all their books, especially Ray’s, and the literature of Larry Fink’s friends in the World Economic Forum, and I would say they have an insane view of the future that does not incorporate the United States and capitalism in any way. They want a micromanaged future where governments they control through finance manage the entire global population. And that they don’t see what they are doing as destructive. They view themselves as helpful, as an insane person might view “help.” They don’t like the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; they want the centralized authority of Karl Marx, which is how so many corporations have been scammed into globalism.   It’s hard for them to trust that innate nature of people, as has been the case in America. So the attacks toward the moral premise of the country’s foundation have been to erode away that “invisible hand” with financial influence in a way that destroys the way a Republic is supposed to function. And these billionaires continue to throw wood on that fire with a scam that is perpetuated by the media because many people in the media are the same kind of whores as is common on a K-Street corner. They perform different tasks to get it, but whoring out integrity for the exchange of easy money is the primary driver of much of this evil and deceit that we have witnessed over a long period of time, and the Republicans have failed to meet that evil until President Trump came along late in his life with all his power of brand to fight it. And people gravitated to him, understanding what the real problem was. We didn’t have enough mean tweets in our culture to fight the real villains because the billionaires were spreading around too much money to the donors, and all the regular politicians who were struggling to raise enough money to even run for office weren’t free enough as people to have their own opinions on things. 

I know I am glad that President Trump is willing to even put himself out there at this stage of his life. That he’s a fighter and is so well revered when he shows up at cage fighting exhibitions to thunderous applause shows that the folks out there get it. They understand what this fight is all about. But the billionaire class out there thinks falsely that the world of globalism will be a new version of aristocracy, which they will be in charge of because of their wealth. They may have had success in life that made them very rich, but they have lost their minds on how they could or would use that wealth to control others. In America, there is an expectation that government would get out of the way of ordinary people, and work in the background, whereas European socialism takes center stage. And that is the vision of these billionaire influencers. They want the China model, which they have helped prop up. China didn’t get all its power from being the smartest on the planet; they have the finance from the World Economic Forum to spread parental communism to all the nations of the world like some overly concerned parent might not let a child ride a bicycle without a helmet. The kid just wants to ride the bike, but the neurotic parent is afraid of every scratch and dent that might occur along the way. So it is the neurosis of the billionaires that is the real problem, their insecurity in protecting what they think makes them so unique, which is their wealth. In an aristocracy, they have more meaning because of it. In a free society, they are only as important as the next person. They may be able to buy more toys, but their influence is just the same as the beer-drinking MMA fighter, and they find that appalling. But Trump supporters get it and are looking to him as a billionaire to fight off those corrupt influences. And the political world should be glad that Trump is their champion. Because if people didn’t have that hope, they would turn to more aggressive methods, and the billionaires wouldn’t like those. And no trips to the White House would be able to do anything to prevent the inevitability. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

We Need More Capitalism in Healthcare: The government ruins everything and they need to stay away from trying to fix people

Another thing that has come up a lot lately is the condition of our American healthcare system. Now I have a special relationship with this topic, too; some unusual perspectives that I think are humorous, as I have been warning about this industry much like I have been warning about the public education system. I have several family members who work in the healthcare industry. One of my sons-in-laws came from England, where their healthcare industry was already worse than we see in America now, with long waiting lines for operations and selective care. All kinds of really stupid rules collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy. He was with me when I had to get ACL surgery; the entire family went to the hospital because seeing me in such a vulnerable condition was pretty tragic. I have always had a “don’t go to the doctor unless it’s an absolute emergency” policy, so it was hard for them to see me go into an actual operation that involved anesthesia.   But it was the only way to repair my ACL. I had torn it during an intense basketball game. I worsened the situation during an entertaining stunt where I jumped through a wall of fire with my bullwhips slinging, one in each hand. When I landed, the grass was wet, my footing slipped, and my thigh bone ultimately came out of the knee socket and drove itself deep into the dirt. I popped everything back together using my MCL to hold my leg in one piece so I could limp away. But a lot of damage had been done, so I went to an outstanding surgeon who worked on Cincinnati Reds players to fix my knee. 

I’ve had hundreds of stitches, so going to the doctor has been common. But every time I have hated the experience so much, I have taken extreme measures to avoid going to the doctor because the service in the healthcare industry is so bad. When I have been cut really badly, my policy has always been to Super Glue everything back together, literally. I’ve been doing that for my entire adult life.   I used to work in a hazardous metal stamping factory, and it was common for people to lose fingers. I had a lot of bad cuts, and whenever I could, I used Super Glue rather than getting stitches to get right back to work. Even with bad injuries, I never missed work. And when my kids had really bad cuts, my policy was to glue them together. There were a few times when they were bitten by animals, both times in the face. Particularly a nose injury where a good part of it had been ripped away. Another time an ear. In both cases, I was concerned that the stitches would pull the skin together in hard ways that would leave a terrible scar, and these were girls; they would need their faces as pretty as possible. So I glued them together, and everything healed nicely, with very little scarring.

In the aftermath, people can barely tell. It comes to my mind because I recently had a birthday, and the family was gratefully joking about these kinds of things. My approach was certainly unorthodox and, ironically, way ahead of its time. It was interesting during that ACL repair to hear my son-in-law talk about the horrors of the English healthcare system because he was amazed at how efficient ours was in America. But I hated it. I hated the assembly line feel of surgery, and I had the best that Cincinnati had to offer. But to me, it was garbage. Our health care should be so much better, and I know it can be.

My extreme measures are born from my hatred of it. My wife just broke a bone in her hand the other day, and she was asking me what to do about it because it hurt. She fell and hit the ground hard after playing with the grandkids in the way that kids under ten typically play. She plays with them, and that usually involves falling. When you are a kid, and the bones are still rubbery, they can generally get away with hard falls into the concrete. But the bones get brittle when you are over 50, so she broke a bone in her hand while bracing for a fall. I reminded her of a recent motorcycle accident I had where someone ran into me at a high rate of speed while I was just sitting there, merging into traffic. The accident totaled my very expensive motorcycle. The driver who hit me wasn’t looking for motorcycles and hit me at full speed. I watched her closely in my mirrors and determined that she would hit me, so I jumped off the bike head first just in time. I would have lost my legs from the impact if I hadn’t jumped off my bike. I broke my wrist just below the pivot joint to the hand when I hit. I instinctively popped it back into place because I couldn’t stand to look at it. And once the paramedics and all the police left the scene, the woman who hit me was crying in a massive panic. I assured her I was going to be alright. Her lawyer called me immediately to offer whatever assistance they could, and so did her insurance company. Nobody denied anything. They wanted to take care of me. I told them just to pay for the bike, and we’d call it a day. 

I probably could have obtained a lot of money for that accident because there was significant damage, and the lady who hit me was dangerously complicit. But I had a critical overseas conference call that I was late for with Spain, so I did the call, took care of the people I was working with, and I told the insurance people about my broken wrist but that I would wave any medical care on it. I would just fix it myself. I didn’t want any further delays to my life; I was busy and wanted to return to it. Once you enter the medical system, they want to live off your life, and I want nothing to do with what they offer. Anywhere the government has gotten involved in anything, it turns to crap. And health care is terrible. We could do so much better. I think we should have medical care as common as fast food restaurants, where if you want a hamburger, you can get one from McDonald’s instead of a 50-dollar hamburger at a nice restaurant, But you ultimately have a choice. Now with all the government interference in health care, it’s all garbage. Medicare is a scam, the pharma companies have the economics all rigged as fancy drug dealers, and it has ruined the entire industry by making people sick who otherwise would be healthy. Anything that involves the double snakes of the medical industry is something I avoid to the extreme because I consider going to them far worse. So when people say, “We need more government health care,” I say, “No, I’ll just do the care myself because those idiots working in it are dumb, slow, and incompetent, and I want nothing to do with them.” Just like everything else the government does, from public school to license bureau work. There is too much socialism and communism in health care and not nearly enough capitalism, and until they change that ratio, it will always be terrible. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Beer Drinkers and Wine Tasters: A reality in politics that the Never-Trumpers haven’t figure out yet

A stark contrast was evident to me during a very expensive dinner I was at with many very smart people from all kinds of political backgrounds. The people who were trying to argue for Ron DeSantis being a good alternative to Trump were also the same people claiming to be experts on red wine, white wines, and their various vintages. I’m not a drinker at all, by any means. There is a running joke in my family that I enjoy only three kinds of beverages; the first is water. The second is milk. And the third is Mello Yello, my favorite soft drink. In many ways, I have never grown up to think of adult beverages as something I value. I still drink like a pre-teen, and I have no desire ever to change that. But at social occasions, I will sip on a beer or wine to experience life as its presented. I’ll do that to some extent with alcohol, but when it comes to other things, such as marijuana, in any shape or form, I have a lifelong policy against it, and I will never join in the behavior. I have never done that kind of thing privately or in a group setting, and never will. But I’ll try what they offer with beer and wine and listen to people tell me why one wine is better. Yet I don’t know the difference between vintage wine or new wine from Kroger that was plucked from grapes last week. It all tastes the same to me. And to that point, I’ve never been a small fork, big fork kind of person either. Which fork do you use for your salad, and which for your main meal? My sophistication on these kinds of things is to pull out my pocketknife, which I always have on, even when wearing a $1000 suit, and stick it into my food to eat as if I were at a campfire. 

That’s when a very smart and highly educated guy who was trying to help me told me that I was drinking my red wine in the wrong glass as one of our waitresses wanted to pour me some from the most recently opened bottle. I put a wine glass in front of her to pour; she hesitated as this guy explained to me why. “You are supposed to use the wide-rimmed glass, not the narrow one; the red wine likes to breathe.” I then looked and noticed a difference, so I put the bigger glass in front of her and she poured away, and everyone at the table giggled at my expense, which I played up. I have no desire to know those kinds of things, and I think it’s funny that people think those kinds of things are important, and to them, it is. I prefer to think about really big things, and those kinds of topics seem small to me. But jokes caused by the circumstances are opportunities to find common ground, so we were all having the costly dinner dressed in our best attire, and we had a little fun at my lack of knowledge on these things. In my world, I am happy to offer other people some emotional leverage on me because it makes all the other discussions easier. My thoughts are rigid, so a social perspective concession helps make hard conversations more digestible. But because of the news of the hour, I noticed something about this event, which was paramount to the trouble with politics.

Even after all the trouble Trump is in, the RINOs and Never Trumpers are mystified as to why people still support him. The wine-drinking Democrats who locally can be found in my area at Cooper’s Hawk but generally are found at wine tastings at Martha’s Vineyard, Mackinac Island, and other highbrow places are mystified as to why Trump is leading in the polls and he actually gained in strength after the Alvin Bragg indictment. With the same skill that they put into worrying about what silverware to use during dinner or which glass the wine goes in, they are making decisions about politics that do not represent the beer-drinking public, the general people out there who actually vote. The same people who will drink a warm Bud Light out of the back of a pickup truck on a night at the local demolition derby. People do not want aristocrats who understand the difference in wines when the world is falling apart. People don’t want to be ruled by some dumb rules as to which fork to use during dinner. Most people will never have a chance to attend one $500-a-plate dinner in their lives and think about the difference between white wine and red wine. And they certainly don’t want to be ruled by people who do, and when you peel back the layers of the “hate Trump at all cost” movement, they haven’t yet figured out that people don’t like them because of their aristocratic wealth or access to the finer things in life. People want a government that works for them, which is what Trump has offered. And they’ll crawl through broken glass to get it. 

It’s the beer drinkers who decide elections. And in a world where people work hard to be elite so that they can work their way into social respect because they know what fork to use or what glass the wines go in, they expect some kind of payoff, which has been ingrained in us from thousands of years of evolution. But that’s not what people want out of their elected representatives, and much of our political class has never figured it out, and realizing that destroys assumptions they have had about life their entire lives. It’s not that the finer things in life aren’t fine, or shouldn’t be enjoyed. I enjoy them when I get a chance to experience them, even if my idea of eating a finely cut steak is to punch it with my pocket knife and to stick it in my mouth like a skewer. The key to political victory is in the beer drinkers who are just as happy with a warm beer out of the back of a pickup truck as with a fine bottle of white wine. Or maybe not even drinking at all, and would prefer a glass of water to intoxication of any kind. The masses are not running for a path in life to aristocracy. And they don’t want to worship people who are so pretentious. There will always be people who will want to take those extra steps in life, but that is on them, not on a social respect that they expect will come with their knowledge of fine wines and cheese.    Even though he is very rich and can afford the best things in life, Trump is just as happy with a bucket of chicken as he is with a great steak from an expensive restaurant. And that’s why no matter what the aristocrats of society throw at Trump, people will vote for him anyway because he has shown a disdain for those pretentious types, not a reverence. And that is ultimately why those who have spent much of their life thinking about such things, like James Comey and many others, hate Trump so much. Because Trump represents a rejection of everything they value as a civilization. And Trump is a reminder that that is what voters value as well, and that realization hurts their feelings and dictates their political persuasion as RINOs and Never Trumpers who will never understand until it’s too late for them.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Tommie’s Place in West Chester: A super secret treasure hidden in plain view

It’s not such a well-kept secret that I have been using the VIP room at Premier Shooting as my super-secret meeting place for political activity for a number of years. It was great for me; I could shoot at the magnificent range they have at Premier, which is in West Chester near Port Union. Then I could meet with various political figures without worrying about strange people snooping in on our conversation. When I meet people for lunch, this is often the problem, which I still do. But going to Premier, anybody who went into the VIP room would have to badge in, which greatly limited the variables which might come by and provide a security risk. And additionally, it was just a nice, convenient location with a beautiful view of the lake. It had a country club feel to it, but it was still a center of combat training. They taught a lot more than just shooting at Premier. But you could learn a lot regarding lethal and non-lethal combat scenarios. I’ve loved Premier since Tommie and her family built it, and I consider it one of the great treasures of West Chester. So it was my favorite place to do the kind of clandestine work that I do behind the scenes to make cake, political cake, which can sometimes be very tricky business. I tend to get a lot of attention when I get out and about, so minimizing that curiosity was very beneficial until some of the meetings started getting quite large, with ten people at a time and more. So over the last year or two, I have had to move those super-secret meeting locations to other places. I had heard about their plans for the VIP room from the family but hadn’t had a chance until recently to see the construction updates.

Tommie had told me that she was planning a bar at the shooting range, which seemed an exotic idea to me then. I know other luxury ranges around the country were discussing experimenting with the concept because guns and drinking are generally not good partners. But I was certainly interested. Even more so, the tone of the bar was going to be more like a speakeasy from the 1920s, kind of a backroom kind of thing that was secret to the world. Well, that made sense because that is precisely how I had been using the VIP room for quite a while. That was actually the appeal. Shortly after I changed my secret location meeting place, Premier began constructing their new idea, just as the new Harley Davidson dealership went in next door to the shooting facility. It was quite something to admire, that little corner of West Chester right off 747, which has heavy traffic. People could come and shoot, learn martial arts, buy motorcycles, guns, go fishing, hike around the really nice lake, that area really represented the best of government from the trustees in attracting these kinds of investments for the public to enjoy and it was all very beneficial to people who enjoy those kinds of things. But to add a night spot, a speakeasy with a full bar on the upper scale of things. That was certainly interesting. Recently that construction was completed, and they are calling the effort Tommie’s Place, with a speakeasy slant to it and to announce its opening to the public; we had a super-secret meeting there with some very high profile politicians where everyone could talk, sip on a beverage and conduct a conversation with a large group of people that we couldn’t have had if we rented a room at a local restaurant.

As I arrived for this event, Jim caught me in the parking lot and showed me where the parking for the speakeasy was; it was behind the building near the Harley dealership. From there, you could get into the place through a special back door they had just built where you could badge in from there. Or, you could go through the front, cross the lobby of Premier itself, and they had just built a special entrance to the speakeasy where the old VIP door used to be. I went into the back entrance and immediately noticed they had added a lot to the back of the building. And in going in, there was a small hallway with a desk where they checked to ensure you didn’t bring firearms into the bar area. I could see how they had rearranged the VIP area to incorporate this new feature. They still had a badge access VIP area where people could get away and relax with the same country club feel. But this time, it was all in glass so the public could see what was happening. And the speakeasy itself was built where the outside porch used to be, but now it was all enclosed into a very exotic bar that likely no speakeasy in America was so luxurious. But it had a fantastic view of the lake and felt like it was a million miles from everywhere. Yet 747 was still only a few feet away. You’d never know it. It reminded me a lot of the lounge area of Jags and certainly had a touch of class to it. 

We had a great meeting, good people all wanting to do good things. The drinks were great. The atmosphere was just fantastic. And this place is open to the public. I can’t think of a better place to catch an after-work drink or even a during-the-day stopover with friends and partners. It was very private but could accommodate a crowd. You could make it part of your shooting experience, or you could just stop by, park in the back, walk from your car to the speakeasy without many complications, and step away from the noise of life for a bit. It was very clever how they set it all up. The lake and the parking in the back are the fundamental tricks to removing you from the pressures of the outside world, then entering through a back door that takes you into the warm embrace of elegant surroundings where you could be social, or not, as you’d like to be. If you just wanted to get away and have a quiet drink, this was the place to do it. It all told a good story of remembering a period of American history where the law was too much, and people wanted to get away from the far-reach of the law with a speakeasy. Yet this was a safe place from the world’s concerns and was designed to keep the ugliness of a bad day from contaminating a good evening. It had all the elements I enjoyed from all those super-secret political meetings, but now it had the added elegance of the best West Chester had to offer, all in one place. And I was very impressed with the new addition to the Premier Shooting facility offerings. It was classy, convenient, and practical and a real treasure to those who have come to know about it. 

 Tommie’s Place – A Prohibition Era Cocktail Lounge (tommies.place)

Rich Hoffman

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Jeff Sikkenga of Ashbrook College: Protecting America through real education

I promise you, dear reader, if you follow the American Constitution, all the scary stuff you see coming out of the media culture can be defeated. I read it often, for fun, The Federalist Papers and my favorite, The Anti-Federalist Papers, which were the foundations of the American Constitution which, I consider it one of the greatest works of philosophy the world has ever attempted, and I can say that it was designed to withstand times like we are going through now. What we see may be terrifying because we aren’t used to being challenged to the kind of globalist fight we are in presently. But if you follow the Constitution and develop a relationship with it, we will come through this better than we were when we went in. And I will say this; there are enough people who have shown loyalty to the Constitution that all the impediments of global communism will fail, even if they have a 90% majority. The small minority who use the Constitution to withstand the tides of a global mob intent on spreading communism to every corner will be defeated.   I am 100% sure of it. By sticking to the Constitution and specifically the Bill of Rights, all tyrannies that might otherwise overwhelm our great nation will fail. The bad guys out there have only one hope: to make Americans blink on their reliance on the Constitution. They have purposely dumbed down our society through a terribly corrupt public education system, a media machine that is filled with communist sympathizers, and a political class that has largely sold out to China. But to defend against all those efforts, the Constitution provides limits on government that will save our nation if only people understood their rights. 

Knowing all that, my personal relationship with the Constitution and the Second Amendment as I carry both the Constitution with me everywhere, all the time, but I also am always well armed in case some insurgent wants to impose mob rule on my free existence, and I would have to defend myself. I always consider carrying a firearm my obligation to protect the Constitution from those hostile toward it. It is, to me, a preservation of the rule of law. I sometimes get to meet others out there who are very dedicated to the preservation of the Constitution, and that was an occasion I had at the new hot spot in West Chester, the speakeasy called Tommie’s Place, where I met Jeff Sikkenga from Ashbrook College, which is dedicated to the Freedom Business since 1983. I’m a person who loves education, and the kind of teaching they do at Ashbrook College is what I think all colleges should be like. They are dedicated to an America First agenda. They are working aggressively to make sure that teachers understand real American history. I would say that there has been enough work by them to stop the trend toward communism that the American Democrats have been planning for during the entire last century up to this point. Other colleges like Hillsdale and Liberty University are also doing similar great work. But the work they are doing at Ashbrook is worth noting for their intense focus on American goodness and spreading that message to the rest of the population during this current crisis. I was able to talk to Jeff a bit, and I’m happy to report that people like him and the other executive staff at Ashbrook are doing this kind of work, even if it appears to be thankless most of the time. It was intimate in the setting I was in with Jeff and his staff. All the people there were power players from our community and elsewhere in the state. And seeing that group, it is evident that the enemies of America would lose. The media wasn’t covering the work that was going on at that meeting, so most people don’t know that there is even an Ashbrook College out there, but there is, and they are very successful and very dedicated to the American Constitution and because of that, much of the evil we see in the world today, will fall away to the efforts of goodness. And that will happen because there are people like Jeff Sikkenga in the world, which is what I told him at the end of his presentation, shown here. 

As far as I’m concerned, what they teach in all the state colleges and government schools is not education; it’s propaganda. It’s the communist China model, and I’ve talked about it for many years. But there are plenty of alternatives out there where if just 2% of society utilizes them, the push to turn America into China will fail. Jeff gets it, and he said as much during his talk with my group. If 30% of the population is committed to the cause of continued liberty in America, the tyrants on the other side will fall, which was the ratio of the American Revolution. Most people were not supportive of leaving the English colonies, and if we were with George Washington at Valley Forge freezing just outside of Philadelphia while all the English officers were partying it up with the majority of residents of that city, things looked a lot more hopeless than we are seeing today. The Trump MAGA movement is enough to stop communism dead in its tracts because they don’t have a plan B. 

The plan of Democrats representing the efforts of global communism was to capture 100% of society through a dumbed-down public education system and media culture they controlled. But they have been unable to do that and now have had to show too much of what they were up to. The Trump presidency forced them to accelerate their insurrection of America entirely too fast, and now they have spooked most of the population and are looking for answers. That is where colleges like Ashbrook come in. With the work, they are doing, giving out free Constitutions to people who are looking for a new relationship with it, and teaching people who want to know America’s true history, the long-established plans of the communists will ultimately fail. So long as there are options, communism always fails, so they try to eliminate competition wherever they experience it. As long as there are places like Ashbrook College out there and people like Jeff Sikkenga who run it, and many thousands of students attending, America will hold through these trying times. Remember, the Constitution provides limits on government power, which we are in the process of utilizing presently. Our media culture has no idea what’s in the Constitution, and many of the attempts we see today will be destroyed in the courts. So stay with the Constitution, know that places like Ashbrook College are actually teaching people the right things, and in the context of history, what we see now will only be a footnote. I know that when I read the Constitution personally. But when I meet people like Jeff and others who share in my understanding, it provides a refreshing certainty. We tend to think that the whole world is what we see on television, but in truth, there are a lot more people interested in Ashbrook College if they know it’s out there than in the failed education system that the government has endorsed for the purposes of more government power. The Constitution takes much of that power away, which is why they don’t want people to know about real education institutions like Ashbrook. But enough people know to stop the radical left’s plans, and that is very good news and a welcome reminder. 

Rich Hoffman

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George Lang: The Morality of Money

I get asked often why I like George Lang, the Ohio senator for the 4th District, so much. I cover a lot of topics, and having so much respect for an establishment politician doesn’t often seem like they are elements that are conducive to each other. I think it’s the same kind of anxiety that is often witnessed when showing respect for Ayn Rand while still having great reverence for the religious right, the hard biblical conservatives. How can you serve the God of money and still serve God because we think of those things as opposed to one another? Yet, while Ayn Rand was an atheist, she was able in her work to cut through the true value of the measurement of money in a culture in very beneficial ways that are well represented in great American novels like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. And few people in the world understand the morality of money more than George Lang, not in serving it as a deity of its own, but as a measure of good human conduct. It’s a side of politics that not many people get to see, especially translated by a media culture that has no way to express such a topic to the public, because they don’t understand it themselves. However, an economic report coming out will show Ohio in a very favorable way. The time of improvement is when George Lang has been in Columbus as first a representative, then as a senator. I see his fingerprints all over the detailed findings showing the state of Ohio becoming quite an economic powerhouse. I’m not allowed to talk about it yet, not in detail. But I was quite impressed with it, and it points to some not-so-well-known attributes that come directly from George Lang’s Business First Caucus, where he has stayed very focused, along with a handful of other politicians in Columbus. And that is very unique among any political class because if they don’t understand the “morality of money,” they quickly become the detriments often talked about in the Bible who lose their way and get distracted by every shiny thing. And by walking that tightrope, George Lang has done some extraordinary things as a senator that is making Ohio much better off than the federal government as a whole that is suffering significant hardships under Joe Biden and the other looters of the Beltway culture. 

You may have to turn up the volume, but this room paid great reverence to Senator Lang, which was well deserved.

A few things happened recently, I was in a meeting with a bunch of people from Columbus who expressed themselves with great respect to George Lang, and they wondered if the people of Southern Ohio knew how good he was behind the scenes when people weren’t looking. Of course, the answer is yes; most people do know. And I was also recently up in Columbus at the Statehouse talking to many people, and the running joke about “Georgie” is that he doesn’t want to talk about anything but a business-first agenda for Ohio. And it wasn’t a derogatory reference, but one of respect for being able to go to Columbus and, with all the pressure from various factions, to stay focused on the real measure of success for any state or federal government, and that is its financial health. Without financial health, society really can’t be moral. People can function morally independently. But society can’t function without revenue and healthy businesses to provide jobs for people; a society really can’t function without wealth. I’ve known George for many years, well before he was going to Columbus as a politician. I remember him well as a trustee in West Chester, Ohio, where the business first policies were well laid as a foundation for the greatness that is seen there today. George Lang has always had the idea of getting the government out of the way of the creative output that makes businesses happen, and that has translated to tremendous growth wherever his attention has been applied. And now, as a Senator for the 4th District, his influence has been rubbing off on other politicians very favorably, even into the Governor’s office. I have seen up close and personal that Governor DeWine and his Lt. Governor Jon Husted have significantly benefited from George Lang’s focus on business first and supporting infrastructure as an administration that has made business much more of a priority than it has been previously. 

Usually, when we talk about business, politics, and money, the first thing that pops into our minds is corruption. You can’t serve the two gods, God, and money, equally. That is the way that we have been taught incorrectly as a civilization. By doing good things, by having the means to work and be productive, the measure of morality is often in money. Good people tend to find that money is a direct measure of their personal morality. The many socialists who have been trying to infect American culture for more than a century now will apply that money is the root of all evil and that only collective wealth redistribution can establish morality. But actually, the opposite is true. Money directly measures moral conduct when it represents productivity, innovation, and strength of character. When money is corrupted, it comes from those most lazy who seek to align the power of government to get as much of it as possible without having to do work. So the government is used as a wealth extractor to redistribute wealth to the unearned. Behind most bad economic reports in state and federal governments all over the world, this is how corruption occurs. 

Yet, when government is applied to remove the barriers to morality toward the creation of businesses in which families can build lives around as job creators, then great things happen, and the morality of that good conduct directly translates into the health of a state government. I’ve seen George Lang perform in very good ways morally under tremendous pressure without ever compromising himself in the process, and that’s not easy to do in such a high political position. It would be very easy to stumble a toe under such pressure, but George Lang handles it always with great care and grace because he understands those basic Ayn Rand rules of money as a measure of morality. Rather than empowering those who would do anything to get it without the productivity that makes it, George empowers the kind of Adam Smith economic value that should be at the heart of every economic policy throughout the world. This is why the rest of the country is currently struggling and will continue to do so as long as Democrats continue to pervert the relationship between business and government. But Ohio is making a dramatic turnaround economically into something that is very respectful and is on its way to becoming one of the best states to live in America, which is saying something. George Lang has been in Columbus long enough to have rubbed off on the culture there, and they reflect his eternal optimism and industrious spirit. So, when people wonder why I love George Lang so much, it’s for all these reasons and more. He is the real deal, and he understands the morality of money and the need for the goodness that is represented by wealth creation. And for the very few who truly understand that unique ratio, the world is always a better place. 

Rich Hoffman

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Voter Integrity in Ohio with Frank LaRose: How Republicans win everywhere, and not just with swing voters

It’s not really a big secret, but it’s probably the most important thing in the world regarding elections. Yes, Ron DeSantis did wonderfully in Florida the second time around; the first time, he could barely squeak out a win. But after an excellent first term, DeSantis was awarded with re-election by a very wide margin. Yet as much as he may have deserved it, the massive voter turnout in his favor didn’t just happen. What the real cause of it was that DeSantis worked on the election laws in Florida and made it harder to cheat so that in that next election, some of the old Democrat tricks that are applied all over the country weren’t so easy to perform. And that resulted in more votes for him being counted against an essentially rigged system. Our elections have not been secure for a very long time, and the little talked-about secret is that the powerful know about it and have allowed it to continue because it keeps them in power. Yet, if elections were tightly controlled in America, unbiased, of course, Republicans would win a majority of the time everywhere, in state races, in federal races, both House and Senate, governors, and especially presidents. A lot of professional pundits will say that we are a 47 – 53 country where either Republicans or Democrats will trade those bottom and top numbers every time, that there will never be any more blowout elections because we don’t have that kind of country, we are split down the middle with independents determining election outcomes. That is hogwash; that’s what the cheaters want you to think. The reality is that election fraud makes us look like a 50/50 nation while we are a conservative-leaning nation quite dramatically. The Florida example is just one of them, and DeSantis, not through performance but through election reform, turned it from a purple state to a solid red MAGA state for Republicans. 

Ohio is another state that had been trending purple but has been heading solidly toward a bright red state. And as much as I’d like to say that candidates like President Trump and J.D. Vance were great, it’s not that they won over a bunch of swing voters to win; it’s that Ohio has a fantastic secretary of state in Frank LaRose, who has made it very hard to cheat during elections. I had a chance to listen to him directly talk about election integrity in Ohio, and I put some of the videos on this site to review. I’ve met Frank LaRose many times, but this latest time was interesting because what Ohio has been doing regarding election integrity is quickly becoming the template for the rest of the country going into the 2024 election. Republicans would be wise not to worry about the issues so much on this one because that’s not what is going to win elections. What will win elections, and give the House a supermajority in Congress, and give control back to the Republicans in the Senate and, of course, the White House, is more election security.  Frank LaRose has put his hands around this election integrity problem, and it has been showing. And he’s done it by pushing photo I.Ds on election day. Voting machines that have a paper receipt for cross verification, and by making it illegal to have any machine connected to the internet. And on early voting, which Frank LaRose has testified to in Pennsylvania, where they have had a trainwreck there, Ohio logs the entries as they come in, whereas, in places like Pennsylvania, they don’t touch them until after the election, which is why they are still counting ballots well past election day and can no longer give those results on election day. 

A great example of the difference in election integrity by having a great Secretary of State could be seen in recent supreme court elections. Wisconsin just lost a Republican seat to a Soros-backed radical. The same thing was brewing to happen in Ohio, but because of election integrity in Ohio, Sharon Kennedy was able to win as Chief Justice and avoid progressive interference on the bench the way it has now happened in Wisconsin. Because of loose election laws in Wisconsin, the extreme progressive Janet Protasiewicz was able to win, giving liberals the new majority, which many think could be dangerous in establishing better election laws for better voter integrity. That is the real game that is going on out there, and the best way to deal with it is by investing in good Secretaries of State who can do as Frank LaRose has in Ohio, and that is get control of the voting system and make it as fair as possible, and secure. And by doing that, the truth of American elections will become obvious quickly. Republicans will win almost everywhere and by a wide margin. Where election chaos is allowed, or even promoted, then, and only then, will Democrats be competitive. America is not a 50/50 country determined by swing voters. It’s more of a 60/40 country in favor of Republicans, and that becomes obvious when you force voting machines to be off the internet and have voter photo I.D. Once Frank LaRose became Secretary of State, we saw in Ohio that Ohio was no longer purple. It wasn’t just Trump; the margins were consistent for other races, with very similar results. And in Florida, it used to be that certain counties were always late in reporting, so they could see how much they had to cheat to push the Democrats over the top. But DeSantis made that action much harder; since then, we have seen better election day results. Not just because of the candidate but because it was more reflective of the vote totals of the actual demographics. Everywhere that better election laws are reformed to prevent cheating, it will quickly become evident that Republicans will perform far better everywhere than the previous national trends have indicated. And that’s the lesson for all the swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

It should be noted that even with all the debate in Georgia between Brian Kemp and Stacy Abrams after Kemp enacted better election methods making it harder to cheat, his election against Abrams wasn’t even close. The same could be said in Texas with Beto O’Rourke. Many thought that Texas was turning from red to purple, but with some tightening of the election methods to make it more fair for voter representation and security to protect the integrity of the voter, a lot of these liberal radical challengers have fallen away. And that is a little secret that nobody has really been talking about on the nightly news. And the same trends would be seen all over the country, even in places like California and New York. People just aren’t that liberal, and Democrats have only been able to gain power because of election fraud, whether its illegal aliens voting, Democrat cities stuffing ballots without supervision, early voter tampering with Facebook manipulation, bad voter rolls where dead people are still voting, several times,  it has only been through cheating that Democrats have been able to keep election results close in their favor. But if states give themselves a great Secretary of State like we have in Ohio, like Frank LaRose, they will all see a margin swing in the Republican direction of around 12%. And by doing that simple thing, Republicans will win most of their races in head-to-head matchups with any Democrat; it doesn’t matter who it is. Voter integrity is the key, not so much the policy discussion. Before 2024, states need to follow what Frank LaRose has been doing in Ohio, and if they do, Republicans will win big everywhere. 

Rich Hoffman

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A Good Friday To Remember: Anti-MAGA forces missed it completely

I have loved Good Friday for many years since I had a unique experience in Mexico, right in the middle of the Yucatan Peninsula. I don’t know that it was a life-changing moment so much as it was an affirmation of a lot of work on my part to learn something new. I had spent more than twenty years reading voraciously a number of subjects, and during one particular Good Friday, I happened to be at Chichen Itza in Mexico, a destination I had wanted to see for myself since I was a teenager. Prior to this trip, I never cared for Good Friday, the idea of Christ being killed by institutionalism has always bothered me, and it was not something I wanted to celebrate. I certainly didn’t like the Bible story that I was born a sinner, weak and meek by heritage, not by my own design, and that Christ needed to die for me so that I would not be locked into eternal persecution by a wrathful god, for all of existence. I always felt sorry for Jesus and had an intimate relationship with him after playing many roles in the Passion Play at my Church as a kid.   I felt I had a unique understanding of what Christ went through, and it never seemed fair to me. I always wanted the version of the story where Christ escaped from the cross and killed all his enemies and fed their flesh to the dogs while their harems of lovers cried over their dead carcasses. The idea of sacrifice was never OK with me, not in Christianity, and certainly not in other cultures, which is why my wife and I were in Chichen Itza studying the ruins there of a Mayan culture that had human sacrifice at the center of it, all day, every day. I had many questions, and I needed to visit the site to set things right in my mind about them.

After, my wife and I swam in a local cenote near the Chichen Itza complex, as it was very hot, and the cave water in the cenote felt great. It was crowded, it seemed as if everyone from the local town had the same idea since it was an impoverished region where people lived in literal thatched huts, so nobody had swimming pools. I had put some of the video from that trip into a little promo video I did for Sheriff Jones at the time dealing with illegal immigration for the Liberty Township Tea Party that shows some of the sights from this trip, referred to here. We got to know the Mexican people very well on that trip, well beyond the media cameras, and saw how those people lived, and it was interesting. I couldn’t help but respect how hard they worked and how much they loved their families. Later, after we had cooled off, we stopped by a tiny town for lunch, and we were stunned by a flash parade recreating the Passion Play, where the entire village came out to watch or participate. There were thousands of people involved; it was quite astonishing. Now I respected the Passion Play a lot because I had been in many of them myself, playing all the main characters, from Jesus to Pontius Pilot to Roman soldiers. So, I had seen more than my fair share of Passion Plays, and this one was magnificent. They had great costumes; they had a Mexican Jesus stripped nearly naked with blood covering him, carrying a cross, with very authentic Roman soldiers surrounding him, and mobs of people crying after the suffering of Jesus. The entire town had come to a stop to witness this epic occasion. Because we were in the process of getting food, we happened to be on a street corner with a front-row seat to witness the whole thing. And we really couldn’t move until it was over, so we watched respectfully.    

I never forgot that Passion Play on that particular Good Friday in Mexico, pretty far away from America and the news of the night. A collision had occurred with me regarding personal experience regarding the Church, many millions and millions of words that I had read about these topics, my keen interest in politics, which I was thinking about intensely since the terrorist Barack Obama had just been elected under very suspicious methods, and the Republican Party was trying to figure out how to win over people from Mexico and Central America to vote their way as conservatives rather than liberals. According to the Koch brothers, they had a plan, which we now understand as RINOs, moving more toward liberals than holding tight to conservative values. And I was far enough away from my regular everyday life to think about all these things on that street corner, watching a very real Passion Play in Mexico by people who had given up their previous worship of Mayan and Aztec gods for the gods of the conquering Spanish, Catholicism, and the worship of Jesus Christ which they embraced with great vigor. Until then, I had always thought of foreign immigrants who wanted to come to America as often more American than those born in the world’s greatest country but took it for granted. I found that foreign immigrants shared my Passion for America more than the native people, so I have always had a great relationship with people from all over the world who came to America for the Constitution and the opportunities that come with it. Specifically in Mexico and most places considered “third world” I found the people in those places still had a very close relationship to religion and their families, and I love that about them.

With all that in mind, just the other day, I saw a report indicating that Democrats were perplexed why so many Latinos were supporting President Trump and the MAGA movement and not coming to America and voting for Democrats the way that the political class in Washington, D.C. thought they would. And the answer is easy; Democrats had presented themselves as a bunch of godless heathens, which was not attractive to immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Seeing many of those people as I did on Good Friday should have been evident to everyone. But the professional pundits had got it all wrong, and President Trump showed himself to be respectful of strong families and religion. So, of course, once Mexicans immigrated to America, once they learned the various politics would support the MAGA movement. They didn’t want a free lunch; they wanted the respect of good work and a government that would get out of their way so they could raise their families, which they cared about intensely. It’s for all those reasons that even now, I get along much better with people from foreign countries than I do from my own backyard because the immigrants have a romantic idea of America that I share with them. Whereas the dope-smoking losers from the American education system have created a bunch of lazy, entitled babies that look to the Democrat Party to feed them without having to get up off the couch. And the Democrats seem surprised by all this. But I’m not. If you look at the political scene today, it is not a surprise that Latinos are moving toward Trump; the MAGA Republicans are now filled with people of color, and there are lots of very strong women who are just as tough as Trump. There is a lot of diversity that the RINO Republicans missed the boat on wholly, which is now the core of the party. And those are demos that the Democrats lost because they simply presented themselves as the kind of communists that many of those immigrants were running from. And when Democrats presented themselves as antagonistic toward religion, that was the end of that. That’s why this particular Good Friday in 2023 is special and unique. A long-hatched plan is finally coming together, and where the rubber hits the road in politics, religion is at the core of what the future will bring. And the anti-MAGA forces missed it completely. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Alvin Bragg of Butler County: Roger Reynolds was only guilty of trusting people too much

It’s a local issue, but I’d say it’s common around the country. It’s not just in the case of Alvin Bragg, the New York District Attorney paid for by George Soros, who abuses their power for purely political purposes. The case where I live in Butler County, Ohio, of Roger Reynolds is just as malicious an example of abuse of the law as the one leveled against President Trump. I’ve talked about the Roger Reynolds case before, he’s the former auditor for Butler County who was just sentenced to 30 days in jail after being found guilty of an improper interest in a public contract, and his sentencing came around the same time as the big public spectacle of the Democrats throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Trump to attempt to destroy his next run for President. I know more about the Roger Reynolds case than what Fox 19 News, who pushed the case along by blowing on it with the help of Sheriff Jones, will say in public. From the beginning, the case against Roger Reynolds was political. It was about two alpha political types who were fighting for supremacy within the Butler County Republican Party, and it was over family disputes more than anything. All the parties involved could be said to have an improper interest in public contracts with all the cross-pollination of family members that goes on in these cases, so what Roger did with his interest in a golf academy partnership with Lakota schools shouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Most reasonable people wouldn’t have given the matter a second look.

But Sheriff Jones obviously by his actions wanted to keep Roger Reynolds from running for another term and support another person for that auditor position, so he and David Yost, the Attorney General in Ohio, all of who consider themselves Republicans, decided to use the law to their advantage and knock off a political rival by applying it against Roger Reynolds. At first, they started with a number of allegations that caused the initial court case, all of which Roger was found innocent on. But at the end, right before the case went to trial, Sheriff Jones added another charge from way back into the last decade involving Lakota schools, which is always the source of some level of corruption in our community, and they added it to the prosecution’s pursuit of anything against Roger Reynolds to get him out of office. It was precisely the same kind of behavior that we witnessed from Democrats against President Trump, especially coming out of the office of Alvin Bragg. Legal analysis of the Bragg case has been laughable and is obviously all about abusing the law to knock off a political rival and to put them in jail to keep them from running for political office. Well, it’s not just Alvin Bragg or the Biden DOJ who are abusing their authority; we see the exact same thing going on in Butler County, Ohio, among Republicans fighting for power and abusing the law to do what they couldn’t do at a ballot box, destroy a person so they don’t have to deal with them within party politics. When it comes to Sheriff Jones, this behavior doesn’t surprise me. But the Attorney General of Ohio, David Yost, was pulled into it, which was very disappointing. Because you’d like to think that, as Republicans, they wouldn’t get themselves involved in that kind of behavior. Yet, here they were, throwing charges at a political rival until something sort of stuck. And that last charge involving Lakota only stuck because they didn’t give the defense much time to prepare for it. They arrived in court to listen to the witness from Jones, who has been close to the Sheriff for many years and were surprised by her testimony. I know all the characters very well, including the witness.   She was involved closely with the Matt Miller superintendent controversy and had just indicated that she was leaving Lakota schools as the treasurer because that story was about to explode. The Sheriff put his arms around all of them and helped them out in ways that could be scrutinized in the same way that Roger Reynolds was in court. But needless to say, the defense team for Roger Reynolds was put on their heels a bit, and a guilty verdict by the jury was applied because of the ambiguity left in the wake. It was an odd situation that left room for doubt. 

If the Roger Reynolds defense team could do it over, I think they would love to, but a judge batted away the request. The political pressure was too great to mount up any charge possible to ruin Roger Reynolds politically, and the court system wanted to move on. There was no pursuit of justice, as Sheriff Jones indicated, with many haughty comments in the wake of the sentencing. The Sheriff was gloating about his ability to destroy a political rival in the same way that Democrats have been in using the law to attempt to destroy President Trump. There was no pursuit of justice; it was all about destroying other people for purely political purposes. I see the fault in all these cases as more of a sporting problem. People trust the refs too much in these kinds of things, and there are always going to be malicious characters who take advantage of a gullible public to rig these games because they know people won’t pursue recourse because they want to trust the legal system, often to their own detriment. 

However, all too often, just like in sports, we see occasions where the refs rig the game for lots of reasons. It’s not the skill of the players in those games who win and lose; it’s how the game is called by the referees who do. Refs are only human; they have problems too. And they can get caught rooting for one team or another, and those calls for justice may not be equal depending on the players. As a society, we play sports as kids and learn team sports concepts, which I would argue ruins many people’s minds with the wrong values. But more than that, we learn to trust what the referees say, even if we don’t agree. And we take that malfunction into our adulthoods and then apply that same level of respect to the legal arena. We don’t typically question what a judge says or a sheriff. And we like to think that our state Attorney General would be above picking sides out of political alliances. But the truth is that they are not above such corruption. They are human, and when they have too much power, they are going to be tempted to abuse it. And that is clearly what happened with Roger Reynolds; he was the victim of an abuse of power by a political rival that wanted to knock him off the stage. And he probably trusted everyone involved in the process too much, ethically, which is an important lesson. He’s still the great guy that people voted for, and if he could run again, people would vote for him again. People see through this kind of phony prosecution, just as they do with Trump. But corruption is a very real thing, and it happens all too often. Just because they call themselves Republicans in Butler County, we have the same kind of thing going on that we find so objectionable with Alvin Bragg in New York. It happens more than people want to admit, and while it’s on everyone’s minds, it would be an excellent time to consider whether or not we want to trust what the refs say without more scrutiny. Because they are prone to human frailty, and if we trust them too much, they could ruin our society beyond repair. 

Rich Hoffman

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