Category: Progressive

The Line in the Sand: Sheriff Jones holding Ayman Soliman in the Butler County Jail

It is probably the most crucial topic in the world at the moment: the question of police and their impact on a prosperous society.  It just so happens that I had an excellent example of the effects of good police work in my own backyard with Sheriff Jones and the Butler County Sheriff’s department, as they were the center of controversy, as the very controversial inmate, Ayman Soliman, was being held at the Butler County Jail awaiting his trial date for his asylum case.  Radical groups have pressured Governor DeWine to have Soliman released from the Butler County jail.  Soliman has been the cause of considerable controversy, and it’s interesting to see who has rallied to his cause.  Rioters tried to shut down a bridge in downtown Cincinnati over Soliman’s arrest.  And at the Butler County jail, there have been protestors attempting to block roads, which has led to the arrest of several stringy-haired socialist types from the radical left.  Soliman himself, as Sheriff Jones told me when I sat down with him to discuss this case, indicated that a significant amount of pretension about Ayman Soliman has emerged while he has been in jail, a self-importance that has led to trouble, inspiring disciplinary action.  Soliman had been a Muslim chaplain from Egypt at the Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati, where he was arrested during a routine check-in.  Soliman had his asylum revoked in early June 2025, and on July 9th, after 3 hours of questioning by ICE officials, he was arrested and put into the Butler County Jail under an ICE contract.  Homeland Security, under the new enforcement guidelines of Kristi Noem, confirmed that Soliman was on the FBI terror watchlist for a direct connection to the Muslim Brotherhood.  And that this background was triggered years earlier when he tried to get a job at the Oregon Department of Corrections in Umatilla. 

When Sheriff Jones and I spoke, his understanding of his job is to follow the law, not to make it.  And based on Soliman’s past, there was a lot in it that was very sketchy.  He might be innocent.  It might be unfair.  At best, the case looks to be that the Obama administration and that of Biden were very loose on crime and allowed for controversial immigrants like Ayman Soliman to live in America illegally as a Muslim religious leader, where he holds an MA in Islamic Studies from Egypt and has pursued advanced degrees, including an MDiv in Islamic studies and Muslim Chaplaincy and a PhD in Islamic Studies.  During the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, Soliman participated in student protests and worked as a freelance journalist, during which he was arrested multiple times by the Egyptian authorities.  After being beaten and tortured in custody in Egypt, he fled to America seeking asylum and had been living in the background for many years, leading up to that questioning in Blue Ash, Ohio, before landing in the Butler County Jail.  The point of the matter is that under Trump’s administration, specifically the much-improved Homeland Security under Kristi Noem and the ICE enforcement of Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar,  Ayman Soliman was high on the list of cases to deal with for a reason.  And from Sheriff Jones’ perspective, he has to trust the federal law that put that inmate in his jail.  He can’t allow a mob to persuade him in his police work, and since the arrest of Ayman Soliman, that has been the clear intention of the radical left to lobby Governor DeWine in the hopes of putting pressure on Sheriff Jones to release the Muslim spiritual leader. 

So, the topic is why good police work is important.  Why federalizing the police in Washington, D.C. was a good thing and why Chicago needs to do the same.  Why is it great that the Trump administration blew up a drug trafficking boat from Venezuela?  And why Sheriff Jones was all that stood between chaos and law at the Butler County Jail in holding this suspicious person that the Trump administration flagged on a terror watch list because of his background with the Muslim Brotherhood front group Al-Gam’iyya al-Shar’iyya, an Egyptian nonprofit providing medical aid and charity services.  Recently, a letter was presented to Governor DeWine with 1,100 signatures on July 25, 2025, urging his intervention in the Butler County jail. However, Jones was quick to dismiss any executive orders that DeWine might attempt to initiate, with an open refusal to listen to the governor.  Jones instead stated that he worked for the people of Butler County, who could re-hire or fire him at their discretion.  And that they were the highest authority, not a state governor, which has shocked many people.  But Sheriff Jones, and this isn’t the only occasion, has stood firm under tremendous pressure.  So this was indeed a powerful story that needed to be examined.  And why was Butler County at the center of this international incident?  I personally attribute this to the six terms in office that Sheriff Jones has had, as well as the stability of law enforcement that has existed under his leadership.  The Butler County Sheriff’s department, I think, is one of the best in the country, and Sheriff Jones is undoubtedly one of the best that there is anywhere, and because of that fabulous police presence, Butler County as a region has thrived in ways that are unique in the world. 

I consider the Butler County Jail to be a well-run business.  I’ve visited there several times, I’ve toured the jail, eaten the food, and observed the booking process.  It’s undoubtedly one of the best jail systems in the state of Ohio and is clearly one of the best in the country.  And saying all that, it’s one of the best in the world.  Ayman Soliman should consider himself fortunate that he’s in the Butler County Jail until his next immigration court date set for December 15, 2025, and there are other legal challenges to be pursued in October.  There are numerous complications, but what it has all revealed is the kind of people working in the background to undermine U.S. law. If not for strong figures like Sheriff Jones, chaos would be running rampant.  Having him at the center of this international story is very beneficial for the overall Trump administration’s objectives of cleaning up America from the kind of people trying to destroy it in the background.  Seeing the liberal groups and the communist organizations that have rallied to the defense of an Islamic holy man attached to a third-tier terror watch list has been unnerving because Sheriff Jones’ adherence to law and order has forced those voices to reveal too much about themselves.  And to show the rest of the world how hostile to peace and Western civilization that they really are, including popular publications as Rolling Stone magazine.  Knowing Sheriff Jones as I do, I know he shares with me a genuine desire to have a law-and-order society, especially on the topic of illegal immigration.  He and I have been advocates for better border security for over 20 years.  And finally, with the Trump administration, there is someone committed to the cause.  And Sheriff Jones is undoubtedly ready to step in and do what he can to make that border security successful.  And it was great that he drew that line in the sand under tremendous pressure from the Governor’s office in Ohio to push chaos away and hold the line.  This has a lot to do with why so many people enjoy success in Butler County, because there are great police officers there who keep the evil people hiding in the shadows.  And under the Trump administration, they are finally willing to enter those shadows and arrest the characters hiding there.  And there will be a lot more good to come.  However, for now, Sheriff Jones has Ayman Soliman in the Butler County Jail, which is beneficial for all of us, including him. It’s much better than the treatment he will get in Egypt for reasons they understand best.

Rich Hoffman

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

Trump Should Go To Moscow: Keeping Putin from pulling the rug out from under peace

I think President Trump should visit Moscow and meet with Putin ahead of any other meetings they might have, to demonstrate that he has done everything possible.  There are a lot of villains at work; Ukraine is surely not innocent as a maniacal globalist power, and when a very sketchy former KGB agent invites you to come to his country to talk, I think Trump could get a ceasefire out of the deal in exchange, because Putin would have to do something big in response. Regarding the Alaska 2025 meeting, which was productive, I thought it was over the top to conduct the flyover and escort Putin down the red carpet to view the stealth fighters.  It also wasn’t good for Trump, a much larger man, to walk next to Vladimir Putin for such a long time in the open, because it made Putin look small.  Putin handled things well, but what he did was demonstrate his willingness to go to America and make a deal, even if it meant appearing vulnerable in the process.  Observing his body posture, there was a significant amount of KGB manipulation involved.  And Trump knows what he is doing on these kinds of things.  It was mostly a show, and the world was watching intently.  And it will likely lead to an end of the war because all sides have already talked about everything proactively.  Putin has lost over a million people in this war with Ukraine, 100,000 just this year.  I’d say he feels like a sucker the way that the Biden administration coaxed him into the conflict as a cover story to all the Russian strawman efforts of the European Union and the Democrat Party in general.

I heard a lot of dumb stuff from the media during the whole meeting with Trump and Putin.  You can see who the cheerleaders are for global conflict and who profits from it.  Nothing Trump could have done would have made them happy because they only want war and conflict to be a cover story for major corruption in this whole process.  Putin, no matter what people think of him, is very popular in Russia because he has in his mind a restoration of the Russian borders before 1991, when communism fell and the country fell apart under that weight.  There were numerous United Nations problems with the entire process during the 1990s, particularly between global governance and sovereign nations.  But Putin is willing to throw away millions of Russian lives to retake Ukraine from what he sees as globalist conspirators.  And we would be just as upset if we lost parts of Florida and California to Mexico or Spain.  Russia, as the Soviet Union, was the American enemy during the Cold War, so we are not suddenly sympathetic to a communist cause.  But all the characters in this story are pretty evil and manipulative.  Ukraine is a creation of globalism and is a power grab from that direction, so before anybody can talk about anything, you have to know where everyone is coming from.  And for Putin, he wants his borders back and to help guide his country to its former glory, when he was a much younger man.  Trump was brilliant to let Putin speak first after their three-hour talk.  There were many master class moments from people who have mastered the art of communication, which much of the world completely missed while it was happening.  However, when Putin said in English at the end of his comments to the press that Trump should meet with him next time in Moscow, Trump needs to consider it. 

It’s great to bring all these world leaders to convenient places in the United States.  But imagine how the media would go crazy over Trump going to Moscow.  And how bold it would make Trump appear to the world.  As a former Cold War enemy, having an American president in Moscow with all the pomp that Russia could put on would win over the Russian people and give Putin a straightforward off-ramp from the war.  To have an American president come to his doorstep would be quite an accomplishment for him, and the Russian media would have the story of the century.  They would support Putin in almost anything he did thereafter, even if Russia didn’t regain as much land as they originally wanted.  When we have global media that wants, like nothing else, to decide who talks to whom and when, the best way to stick it to them would be to take the entire meeting out of their hands by holding it in Russia under a grand ceremony, ahead of any other talks with Ukraine or the EU.  It’s always good to get people to talk to each other, rather than adhering to false contentions, and those who have a desire for political outcomes that do not align with America First.  To give Putin that kind of attention would put him on a path to earn respect once again on the world stage and would be a great follow-up to Melania’s letter to Putin, urging him to save the children in this conflict.  There needs to be a mediating step, and when Putin suggested it, he understood the difficulties and set the stage to say he at least suggested it. 

But if Trump doesn’t go to Moscow, under these specific circumstances, Putin will have an excuse to withdraw from everything.  He went to America and made himself vulnerable for his motherland, and the Russian public well received him.  And he invited Trump to continue talks in Russia.  If Trump doesn’t go, it seems like the American president is only happy to talk on American soil with minimal risk to himself.  That was the KGB in Putin as he walked boldly next to a much larger American president, while a B-2 flyover was taking place overhead.  Putin wanted to convey to the world that he had done all he could for peace by meeting with Trump in America.  But he’s winning the war and could easily throw away a million more lives to take back all of Ukraine and topple the country.  It’s a waiting game that he can afford to play.  But Zelinsky and the European Union can’t.  So before Putin pulls the rug out from under everyone, Trump should go to Russia and advance talks of at least a ceasefire while these other details are worked out.  Because if he did, Putin wouldn’t be able to pull out of this deal, because the peer pressure of his country wouldn’t let him.  Nobody thinks Trump would go to Moscow to make a peace deal, including Putin, when he said it.  So the most extraordinary thing that Trump could do would be to take his show on the road and address the Russian people directly, with the same courtesy that was shown to Putin.  Many good things would happen as a result.  The media would have a meltdown, as would all the globalist types.  However, it would prevent Putin from undermining the efforts, save a lot of lives, and be monumentally historic.  And if I were speaking with Trump, I’d encourage him to do it this upcoming week, while the opportunity is still available. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Trying to Make Padro Pascal the New Sexiest Man: But you can’t fake it

The new Fantastic Four movie was pretty fantastic.  I’ll do a review on it, which it deserves later.  However, for now, we must discuss the promotional activities taking place in Hollywood, so that people can understand how they are manipulated by mass PR culture, which is currently in transition and at the forefront of a rebellion.  Hollywood is distancing itself from woke culture, yet still trying to fulfill its former commitment to it, which lies at the heart of a fascinating problem that Hollywood has with leading men.  They do not have people like Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and Clint Eastwood to drive box office numbers because they went woke a long time ago and have seen value into the Hollywood product decline ever since.  So they need a leading man, but it can’t be a white man from America, as is traditionally the case.  So Pedro Pascal as a Latino man kind of gives them that and they have been trying to milk him for all they can.  I think he was pretty good in the Star Wars television show, The Mandalorian.  And he’s been in other things since the success of that show launched him into fame.  But, he’s not quite the package that PR firms would like him to be.  He’s missing some things that normal “sexy” men usually have.  Hollywood would love Pedro to be the next Harrison Ford.  But in a kind of woke way, so it’s interesting to watch how the press handles him.  And that has certainly been the case, as Pedro Pascal has been doing press for The Fantastic Four alongside his co-star in the film, Vanessa Kirby.

You might have heard about how affectionate Kirby and Pascal have been with each other during interviews.  And I think much of it is natural.  As much as actors want to say “it’s just acting,” the truth is that actors fall in love with each other all the time.  Case in point, the recent discussion about Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson from The Naked Gun set, where they were spotted kissing at the movie premiere.  For years now, we have been told by Hollywood that men could be women, and women, men.  And that romance was overrated, and even showing romantic scenes in movies was a downward trend, because behind all this was a very anti-family agenda.  And it has cost Hollywood a lot, and continues to do so, because movie fans like romance and seeing the people they watch in movies like each other.  It has been quite interesting to see how Vanessa Kirby has been playing up her role in promoting Pedro Pascal as a romantic figure that women can’t keep their hands off.  Because Pedro is safe, because he’s not a white male, Hollywood thinks it’s OK to promote him as the new sexiest man, because it still checks off their woke box within the culture itself.  I believe there is some genuine affection between Kirby and Pascal, but with all the romantic touching that they have been doing, with her pregnant with another man’s baby and Pedro dating someone else, they are trying to start rumors of an affair so that people believe more in their film’s character’s relationship, and this is a new strategy for Hollywood, as they are trying to repair their anti-family, anti-romance reputation with a public that has decided to move on without them.  Despite these efforts by Kirby and Pascal, The Fantastic Four has been pretty flat at the box office.  Not because it’s a bad movie, but because the public has lost faith in Disney as a film producer.

I don’t think actors are ever really actors, and I’ve known quite a few very well.  I’ve shared a trailer on movie sets with a few and can report that they are very human people behind the PR stunts.  And I was personally invited to the home of Jennie Garth from Beverly Hills 90210 and her husband at the time, Peter Facinelli who was doing the Twilight movies then, and it’s a tough life to essentially be a 24/7 PR relations billboard.  The pressure that is put on relationships is crushing, and I don’t think any actor in that business ever really figures it out.  I believe Vanessa Kirby loves the guy she’s engaged to the best she can.  And I think Pedro Pascal loves everyone in a kind of metro sexual way.  But the MAGA loving public doesn’t like the woke stuff so there is no real way to dress it up.  My reference to Jennie Garth essentially is to point out that I think the PR people behind The Fantastic Four, and the agents involved have told these two to act in the press as they would in the movie, and if that means acting like they are sleeping together to get the public excited to see them in a film together, then do it.  Usually, actors are told to refrain from that kind of public affection.  But with Hollywood out of ideas and trying to win back a jaded public, they are trying everything.  And one thing that actors do is act.  It’s hard to tell when they are sincere about anything, including things to themselves.  They are often not very grounded in reality because they always serve someone’s PR machine. 

To explain it away, as people have been talking about the possible reality that Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby are cheating on their significant others with each other, it has been leaked to the press that Vanessa knows Pedro so well that she knows he suffers from anxiety and that he requires physical contact to maintain himself.  Well, that sounds like a cheesy pickup line to me, but it’s not very sexy.  So either way all this goes, it’s not the kind of appeal that audiences are looking for.  Right now, The Fantastic Four will be lucky to break even at the box office for a whole lot of reasons that Disney is unsure how to deal with.  It will take a lot more than rumors of affairs to win people over to their leading actors and actresses.  And when it comes to whether an actress would continue to act long after the cameras are off, well, of course, they would.  And I’m sure with Vanessa Kirby, she is acting when it comes to playing Pedro Pascal up as the next, sexiest, leading man in Hollywood.  I often feel sorry for actors because at the Hollywood level, the job never goes away.  I saw in Jennie and Peter a genuine attempt to be a real family, but the cracks were certainly there in trying to balance a private life with the pressures of PR needs for their entertainment projects.  People see romance between actors and want to believe it’s real.  As a last-ditch effort to save themselves, PR specialists and their agents are advising their clients to show affection for their co-stars in public, thereby fueling speculation and promoting film sales.  But what nobody has figured out is that what the public wants is authenticity, not more phony relationships.  Instead of fixing the problem, Hollywood is making it worse.  And woke is not going to work with the movie going public.  Hollywood can’t have a leading man who is also woke.  There are certain things that a sexy man is, and Hollywood won’t be able to define them for their use.  They either provide a product that people want.  Or they don’t.  The market is, and has always been, in charge.  Not the PR people. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Making Parents into Children: When motherhood becomes destructive

It’s something most people have to deal with at some point in their lives, and I think we don’t do it very well.  However, it’s one of those things that doesn’t have many good answers, and that is the care of elderly people.  As our parents age, what do we do when they struggle to care for themselves and lose independence?  For me, I think death is worse than losing freedom and independence, quite literally.  And as I look at medical costs as a government offering, keeping sick people alive longer as they lose their freedoms with more government dependence is the worst kind of sickness of them all, and I think people are better off no longer living.  But, we have a lawyerly society that is way too litigious and a snoopy medical industry that is full of cosmetic do gooders who have created policies and rules that pay a lot of money and give medical expenses quite an income, so there is a lot wrong with the entire industry and the problems come down to just a few basic human assumptions that are more emotional than practical.  And most of us would rather not think about it, but what cost is the nursing home industry to our society for the services they provide when the litigious decision making process puts the burden of care judgement on people not prepared to deal with an emotional crises, making a lot of the wrong kind of people rich off the process, feeding a parasitic health care industry with a demeaning end of life trajectory that the courts find acceptable, but on scale of human need, is dramatically lacking.   And it takes lives once well lived, and essential, and makes them into uneventful closures of forgetfulness and an almost vile hatred for the perpetuation of the human race that has vast evil wrapped all around it.

I usually don’t associate with many people in the healthcare industry, especially those involved in care for older people, for all the reasons mentioned.  However, I did run into Commissioner Dixon and his son, Brent, at a recent event, and we had a good discussion about this very topic.  I hadn’t seen Brent for many years, even though we live in the same general area, and I knew he had managed a nursing home facility, so we hadn’t seen each other since we were ten years old and racing together in a soap box derby event in Hamilton that was the talk of the town back then.  So it was fun to see him again and talk about what has happened over the last four and a half decades.  And I like Don Dixon quite a lot, so we had fun catching up.  But nearby, because of some nursing home talk, a couple of women caught on to our conversation, and it provoked in them discussions they were having about a father in their lives. One of the women was the direct daughter, the other one was a sister-in-law.  And they were talking about how their dad had fallen and hit his head, and they were worried about him and thought he was losing the ability to be the caregiver to his wife, who is in an entirely dependent state.  So, for the discussion with these two women, they were determining that their dad needed to go to a home before he hurt himself and let something bad happen to their mom.  And as I was listening to this conversation, it was getting more revolting by the moment because there were a lot of psychological things wrong with it. 

So, for clarity, I think it would be better for the dad they were talking about to pass away of natural causes at peace in his own home, on his own terms as much as possible.  But the decision was a legal one; if the kids knowingly allow the father to care for the mother and something happens to him, it would provoke something to happen to her, and then they would be found guilty of elder abuse in the eyes of the court.  But even worse than that was a social neurosis that involved the women regarding the decision-making process of how to manage their dad.  Here was a man who had lived his whole life doing things that were important to both society and himself.  And had raised a family and done many things, and now all that was coming to a close with the impending doom of losing personal freedoms to the point where he was just a fetus entirely dependent on the parental figures of society at large.  And this was not the way human beings should be planning their exit from life.  The women I noticed were very animated about this topic for unusual reasons, and it was not by accident that they both had kids who had just recently grown up and moved away from them; emotionally, they were looking for a new baby to care for.  Being middle aged women without the prospect of a baby to have, to give them the feeling of meaning that motherhood often does, they were instead taking that emotional baggage and looking to apply it to their parents, to make their elderly parents into incapable toddlers unable to care for themselves to satisfy the lack of importance they were feeling as aging mothers. 

It wasn’t hard to see how many terrible decisions were being made, which had enormous social costs and were destructive to the individual lives of the parental figures.  And baked into the rule-making process was a desire to humiliate older people and their personal lives into dependent toddlers who ended their life the way they started it, wetting the bed, having their diapers changed, and needing help even to feed themselves.  And there are a lot of women like these two talking who are feeling old, thrown away by their husbands and kids, and they gravitate to their elderly parents to turn them into dependents to give meaning to their lives, which is losing value by the day.  And, of course, a significant amount of money is invested in this process to generate something from it for a very parasitic industry.  In my opinion, I would say let the parents have their independence for as long as possible, because it’s better than losing it.  And if the dad passes away tripping on a pebble on the sidewalk, he is better off than a much slower death while in a nursing home.  And the lawyers should stay out of it.  And the emotional children who have been trying to give meaning to their own lives by making their parents into replacement children for their own grown children have created a real mess.  The costs associated are more parasitic to the burdens of those who define care than to the values of a life well lived, and to protect that meaning from life to death.  A few years in a nursing home and turning once strong people into complete dependents, in my eyes, is far worse than death.  And it is something we should completely reconsider.  Because the emotional children of older people are not in positions themselves to make decisions for their parents because they are dealing with their own sense of value as their children grow up and away from them leaving everyone feeling empty and useless in the process, and no amount of money can solve the problem in the way that human beings require it to be solved.  However, what we can be sure of is that we should not make our parents dependents to avoid dealing with our lack of security once our child-rearing days are behind us.  There is more to life, and adults need to figure that out, rather than putting their parents in homes to satisfy their selfish needs to care for somebody in an infinite state and quell the whims of motherhood once it has been unlocked in them for the perpetuation of the human race, for which they are no longer needed. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Lakota’s ‘Rumor Has It’: Government schools are run by expensive lawyers and PR firms

I’d rather not think of Lakota schools, ever.  However, they are in my community and serve as a great example of everything that’s wrong with the public education system.  And they’ve had it for a while, but recently they’ve updated it with some content that many people have pointed out to me as a reaction to me personally.  I have to address it, even though there are many other things to consider in the world.  The biggest problem with government schools is that they assume they have the moral authority to collect property tax money because they have been given, by law, the expectation to provide for the upbringing of children in our society.  So they presume to have a moral foundation that defies criticism from the public, much like a parent might say to a child that they must do as they say, not as they do.  Meaning their authority is not to be questioned, and that is certainly the premise of their “Rumor Has It” section on the school website, which seeks to address rumors that might damage the image they want to nurture with the public.  My suggestion to them is that if they want to maintain a lofty image with the public, they should live a life befitting that image.  And don’t attend education conventions and get drunk, making fools of yourselves.  Or, cover up for bad behavior once you discover it because you fear that the public won’t want to give you tax money from their very valuable real estate transactions.   Be good, do good, and provide a positive role model for kids, and there wouldn’t need to be a damage control page on their website.  But when they act as they do, then try to control the narrative that gets out to the public, they leave themselves wide open to criticisms because they suck a quarter of a billion dollars out of our local economy to advance essentially Democrat political platforms that the rest of the community find reprehensible, such as transgender bathrooms, and woke social policies.

https://www.lakotaonline.com/resources/community-resources/rumor-has-it

I’m certainly not the only one; there are many more people these days who are critical of public schools than when I first started discussing these issues three decades ago.  And for really good reasons.  Public schools are going to change dramatically over the next few years, as I have explicitly warned everyone during that period.  And that is because people no longer find the value in them the way they used to, as a free babysitting service for their children while they are busy at work doing adult things.  That whole experience is something that this most recent generation of moms is dealing with, including the lack of fulfillment in their careers and the social implications of being paid the same as a man, for instance.  That is something that Democrats care about politically.  But biologically, women want a man to be a man, and women don’t want to do the jobs of everyone just to justify some government assumption about dual-income families that they can generate even more tax revenue from.  Many people are rethinking everything, including how schools should teach children and what they should teach.  And many of the people who have chosen to work in the public school system are far behind the curve on the direction education is taking early in the present century.  But what it has been has not given us a society of bright intellects.  It hasn’t produced many Thomas Edisons or Albert Einsteins. Instead, it has given us people who can barely put two sentences together and balance their family budgets.  And they have no moral authority to lecture anybody about anything. 

In the video provided here, I address many of the Rumor Has It bullet points with some context.  The essence of the issue is that there are two main problems with government schools, such as Lakota. One issue is that they have too many lawyers who make excessive profits from the system, and a properly functioning school board is not possible under the current conditions.  The second problem is that PR firms are too heavily involved in their communication process, including the Rumor Has It page.  They are much more interested in controlling the narrative with the community than in listening to and acting on it, and that, over time, has significantly eroded any trust that anybody had in them.  And they did that to themselves.  I think one of the most interesting statements that they make on their Rumor Has It page is the first item, “Lakota Local Schools is committed to being transparent and providing factual information to our community.”  Then immediately after it, they say, “Some of the loudest and most misleading rumors can taint even the strongest of school districts.”  There is a lot said there, but in essence, they have an impression of their social role that they don’t want to be challenged, and they are intent on pushing away any contrary opinions that might not give them the social respect they are seeking.  And to maintain that illusion, a significant amount of money is wasted in the process, including the money spent on PR firms to create a social illusion about the value of government schools, when reality tells an opposite story. 

Ultimately, what it always boils down to with the kind of people who support the John Dewey Public Education utopian vision, which the Democratic Party has built its platform on, is psychological validity in terms of the meaning of life, as well as an assumed parental role.  And parents want to be the parents to their children; they don’t want shared custody with a government school system, and that is at the heart of all education issues and how much we are willing to pay for that service.  Busy parents need someone to watch their kids while they are at work.  Teachers want to think that they can bring meaning to other people’s lives through the education process.  Most administrators are relatively empty individuals and seek to fill that void with social engagement built on big government ideas that earn them community respect they couldn’t obtain any other way.  The creators of public education had socialism and communism from Karl Marx in mind when they attacked property tax as a way to fund a new generation of social indoctrination among the youth, and destroy the concept of private property as the foundation of our entire country.  And once the smoke clears on all that, government schools like Lakota aren’t proud of their American heritage; they are intent on progressive politics that normal people find repulsive.  And the more criticism they have experienced, the deeper they have dug in, making the problem even worse.  I did find one thing very interesting on their Rumor Has It page, where they were backtracking on the proposed levy increases that they had been discussing for the fall election.  They say on their Rumor Has It page that the bond issues to fund the Lakota Master Facilities Plan have not yet been determined.  And I’m sure they said that because of some of my very popular articles on the matter.  Well, I knew they were trying to find an open window to put these levies on the ballot, and they announced it through Michael Clark, their staff reporter, who happens to work for the Journal News.  And he announced the $506 million sweeping facilities plan, which would be issued with two levies on July 1, 2025.  So, like a lot of things on their Rumor Has It page, it’s not a rumor.  However, instead of a PR document trying to control a narrative they don’t like, due to the public reaction to their actions, the article Clark wrote, which typically comes straight from Julie Shaffer’s mouth on the Lakota School Board, indicated two tax hikes on the fall ballot. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Beat the Hell Out of Them: Crushing the socialist protestors at the Roebling Bridge in Cincinnati

As I said, the ICE agents who had rocks thrown at them in California, detaining illegal aliens from that pot farm, should have shot them.  They had every right to do so.  So I was thrilled to see that the Covington, Kentucky police physically bloodied a bunch of stringy-haired protestors as they tried to close the Roebling Suspension Bridge over a protest of Ayman Soliman, the former Cincinnati Children’s Hospital chaplain, detained by ICE on July 9th, 2025.  For some ridiculous reason, someone has told these loser socialists that shutting down highways and bridges was a thing they could do to express free speech.  It is not.  And certainly not in my town. I use that bridge all the time, and it should not be closed down by a bunch of protestors cheering on illegal activity.  I have no tolerance for it.  We hire law enforcement to enforce laws.  And when the protestors dug in and started getting pushy, the Covington Police beat the hell out of those protestors and arrested them like the scrappy losers that they are.  It’s one thing to see these things happening in some far away place like California, where their politics has fallen off the edge of the earth with liberalism.  It’s quite another to see something like that happen in the heartland city of Cincinnati, not in my town.  I want to see our highways, bridges, and sidewalks open at all costs, despite the impediments of protestors.  They do not have the right to shut down anything in protest, and it’s about time they are taught a lesson about impeding traffic.  When it comes to using violence to maintain law and order, I’m 100% for it.  As the videos of this violence at the bridge went viral, I was very proud of the Covington, Kentucky, police department. 

The protestors crossed the line when they tried to stop a black SUV driven by an out-of-town tourist, as the insurgents were banging on the hood and vandalizing the vehicle as it attempted to push through the crowd.  Police issued warnings and tried to be as kind as possible, but they ended up arresting 15 of the 100 or so protesters at the site, including two CityBeat journalists, Madeline Fening and Lucas Griffith.  The charges include felony rioting, unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, obstructing a highway, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.  The Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America claimed that the police “violently broke up” the protest, alleging some of the arrestees were beaten and required medical treatment.  An attorney for the miscreants, Benjamin Pugh, argued that the police escalated the situation and did not give sufficient time to disperse.  So that is the cast of characters involved, and I have no sympathy for the CityBeat journalists.  As I have said about them for many decades, they exist to breed these kinds of losers in our youth culture, so they are as guilty of why those protestors thought they could get away with this kind of thing in the first place, as anybody.  There’s plenty of bad to go around, and it’s good that the Covington Police did not allow these individuals to embarrass our city of Greater Cincinnati in front of the nation.  The message we want to send to all these socialist and communist sympathizers is zero tolerance for their view of the world.  That’s where we are these days, as I have been saying for a long time.  These aren’t just Democrats with differing political views.  These are people who want to overthrow our society, which is why they are upset at the ICE deportations, because all those illegal immigrants are part of their strategy to destroy our law and order society.

However, here is a statement for attorneys like Mr. Pugh, who involved himself in this case: the public’s right to free egress exceeds the right of one individual to express their free speech.  People can say and hold whatever opinion they want about anything.  But they don’t have the right to force someone else to have that opinion.  And stopping traffic is an expression of a free speech opinion by force.  The protesters are saying, ‘Join me in my opinion; otherwise, I’m not going to let you use this bridge or travel down this highway.’  Time is an essential thing, and people in a free society cannot have others impose restrictions on their movement to coerce their opinions politically.  The protesters could have written an article, or spoken on YouTube or TikTok about the deportation of the Egyptian Ayman Soliman.  However, they did not have the right to block traffic to get attention or put their hands on the car of someone trying to cross the bridge.  This Marxist notion of damaging private property to communicate political opinions just isn’t going to fly.  We are a private property country.  A mob of losers does not get to override every principle of personal freedom that we have in our society, and one of the fundamental rights that we have is the right to egress.  The right to move around unimpeded and the freedom to enjoy our lives.  That’s why the bridge exists, so that people can travel from one place to another.  That’s why the roads exist.  A protester does not have the right to take that freedom away from people to force their opinions on an issue, due to having no other option but violence to get their point across. 

Once the protestors made a move to close the road, the Convington Police had a right and obligation to remove them and restore that freedom of egress.  There is no group sentiment, such as the Ignite Peace Cincy group, that has the right to close down any roads or even make someone walk around them on a sidewalk.  Any imposition on the personal freedoms of anybody warrants a violent removal of that impediment.  There is no right to Free Speech, which means people who don’t share those opinions have to be inconvenienced by any method.  People ultimately have a choice, and if that choice is removed from them, including the option to listen to socialist protestors or not, or to read that socialist social magazine, CityBeat, or not, the frustrated advocates of a political position don’t get to threaten free people and their private property in any way at all.  Especially trying to stop them from crossing a bridge and vandalizing their property, as if the group mob decided what was valuable socially, or what was acceptable.  And in this case, Ayman Soliman might have been a nice guy who fled persecution in his homeland in 2014 for his work as a freelance journalist covering the Arab Spring.  He was granted asylum in 2018, but that was revoked in June of 2025, leading to his arrest by ICE on July 9th.  He was a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s and a board member at the Clifton Mosque, so a lot is happening with him that aligns with the profile of the Democrat Party and the way they want to shape our country politically.  But when people don’t want to hear what they have to say, they don’t get to take away choice from people, so that they do.  Any attempt to do that warrants violence against the protestors attempting it.   And no compassion for individual circumstances justifies anything done at the Roebling bridge, other than the police shutting it down and arresting with violence the perpetrators.  And I would have fully supported much more violence.  Because when I want to use that bridge, which happens often, I don’t want stringy-haired hippie socialists blocking the way.   Get them off the road, by any means necessary.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Firing Squad is the Only Suitable Punishment: Crimes Obama and his intelligence administration committed that were treasonous and knowing seditition

So now is the time we have all been dreading, which has been building for a long time.  We can’t just let Obama, a former president, live and let live.  We have to arrest him, and prosecute him for treason, and execute him by firing squad in a public square—at a minimum.  And we have to come to a reckoning with all the devices in our minds that have told us such an idea is radical and even primal.  And that we are a more sophisticated society, we should never think of doing such a thing, especially to a person of color.  But Obama was always a terrorist; never forget that he was put into place in politics in the living room of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago, the former members of the domestic terrorist group The Weather Underground.  And that the Obama birth certificate was never resolved, they never did produce one that showed that he was born in Hawaii.  What they did produce after a lot of pressure, which President Trump was one of the advocates, was a digital document that had layers of information embedded in the birth certificate that Sheriff Arpaio of Arizona uncovered as a fraud.  There was no ability in 1961 to digitally layer a PDF file of any kind, so a level of corruption and manipulation from a Deep State that wanted domestic terrorist organizations like the Weather Underground to show themselves in ways we had never thought possible, was well at hand.  Then there are the claims that Obama made as an international student when he attended Columbia University, so you can’t be both—a citizen born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, and an international student from Jakarta, Indonesia.  Regardless of who he was or what he is, Obama attended school from the ages of 6 to 10 in Jakarta, Indonesia, which is a highly unusual way for an American president to have been educated. 

There shouldn’t be any conspiracies about Obama’s origins, which have not been cleared up to this day.  And the problem with that is the charges that were dropped against Bill Ayers, as well as the continued denials that Ayers and Obama knew each other, which never sat well with people, leaving many to believe that Obama couldn’t be trusted on anything.  He was a creation of the Deep State to do the business of them in running American politics.  And he was imposed on America because of the color of his skin to turn the United States into Cuba, essentially.  And once he was put in power, he never wanted to go away, leading to the monstrosity of intelligence manipulation that went on with the Russian Dossier to destroy President Trump, once free people elected him to undo the mess that Obama had put us all in.  And now we know through Tulsi Gabbard that there was never an ability by the Russians to tamper with the American election the way that Comey, Clapper, Brennan and many others tried to advance and what emerges is a very sinister plot to rule over Americans from a Deep State perspective ran by intelligence agencies, and not a representative republic who maintains their government through elections.  The elections have been rigged for a long time, and during all this Obama activity, and the cover-up of how he emerged into politics, we have learned the actual depth of the monstrosity.  Obama and his administration, running all these intel agencies at the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, all of them, were willing to commit treason against America to maintain a Deep State control over what was supposed to be free people in charge of their government.  The actions of Obama and others intended to suppress that assumption at every opportunity.

Let’s never forget how they funneled the Steele Dossier into America through John McCain after the senator had dispatched his associate, David Kramer, to London to meet with Steele and bring a copy back to America to give to James Comey on December 9th, 2016, after Trump had just been elected.  All parties knew at the time that the whole thing had been fabricated, and their purpose was to undermine the kind of government the country’s people had just elected.  And they were using John McCain as a Never Trumper to build bipartisan support in the Republican Party toward a coup against the new President.  This is the same level of intelligence manipulation that assassinated President Kennedy and drove Nixon out of office.  They were intent on demonstrating their authority at every opportunity.  And they were ruthless.  Never forget what they did to General Flynn, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and many others.  Especially President Trump and his entire family.  Remember the perp walk of Steve Bannon in handcuffs as he showed defiance against the January 6th committee that failed to recognize his rights as a member of the former Trump White House.  Then add to all that the very little that we know about the people who did try to assassinate Trump literally, especially the questionable circumstances leading up to the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania.  It all started in a lot of ways from Obama himself not wanting to leave office, or recognize that people were so angry at the socialist direction he had turned our country to, that he openly used the powers of government to hold power and drive away the people’s pick for president. 

Never forget that the Ukraine war was started as a cover story for this Russian complicity that the Obama administration entirely made up.  Once they had made a bad guy out of Russia, they had to destroy Putin so this story would never get out, so they drew him into a conflict with Ukraine, knowing that NATO was the hot button that would do it.  And that hasn’t worked out as planned either.  But think of the number of people who died in the process.  And then there is Dr. Fauci and what his relationship was to the DOD weapon created in Wuhan, China, to infect America so that they could rig an election in 2020 with emergency rules that would allow them to get rid of Trump finally.  Millions of people have died because of Obama and a Deep State that put him in power, and wanted to keep him in power, for their own interests.  And it has been a not-so-silent war that has gone on for six to seven decades.  And now that we know, we have not just to punish these people.  We have to make an example of them.  They cannot be allowed to exist after committing these grave crimes against our nation, a set of ideas rooted in the cause of justice for all, and the rules to build a civilized society.  So when we say that Obama and members of his intelligence community administration need to be prosecuted and executed for treason and sedition at the highest level, and with the most deadly intent, we aren’t kidding.  It’s not a political statement of anger, but a country’s position on the foundations of law and order.  We cannot allow this mess to continue, and it has to be punished with death.  And not just some lethal injection that painlessly puts the executed to sleep.  No, it needs to be a violent public execution, similar to what the Italians did to Mussolini.  People need to express themselves correctly, and from as bad as things are with this case, death by firing squad only begins to get us there.  These are some of the worst and most violent criminals in the history of the world.  And we need to treat them that way.

Rich Hoffman

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

There Will Be No Amnesty Deal: The robot that cleans my pool does a better job than a human

No, we’re not doing amnesty for all the illegal aliens that Joe Biden let into the country, by the millions and millions.  Some say it was more than 10 million, and that the assumption was that they would be allowed into the country and would be gradually given amnesty.  Those policies are over, and they needed to be years ago.  So, for everyone worried that people are going to pull Trump aside and get him to give amnesty to all these illegals, they just aren’t living in the realm of reality.  It’s going to be tough to deport the mess of illegals that Biden and others allowed into the country, but that’s what’s going to happen by millions per year.  The mask of compassion is over, and the plan of globalism working through the Democrat Party in America is finished.  It was never in our best interest, and to hear some of the dumb remarks by Democrats justifying the plight of illegal immigration, I think for me, the pot farm in California was the final straw on the matter.  We don’t want or need the kind of jobs that come from illegal immigration.  They do not make our society better.   And that’s what we’re talking about here: the quality of life decisions in how we manage border policy.  I have to say it because the people in the world who know me best know that I do love labor from other places, I admire the work ethic of people who have strong family relationships and come into the country the correct way, and do great things with the opportunities America provides.  I don’t like lazy people, so I’m not a “they took our jobs” person.  I want to see the best people getting the best jobs, not a job given to someone who is a dope smoking loser over someone who looks at a 16-hour day and wants more.  However, the value of citizenship is what has been targeted here, and we must preserve that value as a fundamental concern.

Again, I don’t wake up in the morning looking for ways to hurt people’s feelings.  I don’t write all these details for my health, I am trying to help people see the world that is coming and to be prepared for it.  And when it comes to this amnesty issue, losing 10 million workers out of the system of our expanding economy won’t be noticed as a labor shortage.  Our economy, with all the jobs that are coming back to America, will grow just fine without low-quality employment built on illegal immigration.  I’ve had a robot for the last couple of years that cleans my pool far better than any human help ever did.  This year, there is no dirt in my pool, unlike in past years, so many of the jobs we previously relied on for illegal immigration, such as pool cleaning, basic construction, car cleaning, and cooking in restaurants, can be replaced with automated assistants.  I heard Karen Bass, the current mayor of Los Angeles, say that because of all the deportations, people were struggling to get their cars cleaned.  What a joke.  Most car washes are now completely automated and don’t require a person to clean the vehicles.  Democrats do not have a labor excuse for filling a needed job with the body of an illegal alien.  Nobody does, including cutting the grass and doing landscaping.  People will always do that work, and they don’t need unlawful immigration to perform the task.  Only companies like that pot farm in California are built on illegal immigration labor, and we don’t want companies like that operating in America.

However, this also ties back to what I have been saying for years about A.I. If you have 5 million available workers, you don’t necessarily want them doing all the traditional work that an expanding economy needs.  Because you’ll run out of capacity quickly.  We are going to have more jobs than people to do them by the millions.  So, ten million or 100 million illegal aliens won’t make much difference in the kind of economy that we are watching emerge under the Trump administration.  That same mentality has to be applied to the federal government.  I told everyone that the Department of Education was going to be shut down.  We don’t need thousands of mindless slugs sitting around all day playing on Facebook, telling us how to educate children into socialism.  Those jobs need to be eliminated, and the workers need to do something more productive.  That same approach needs to be applied to almost everything.  In the end, if you have a workforce of availability in the hundred million range, the actual jobs necessary will be in the half a billion range in truth.  A few million here and there won’t be but a drop in the bucket.  That’s also why I think automated self-driving cars are so helpful, because human beings will still be in high demand for the kind of work that only humans can do well, which is think with imagination in the realm of problem-solving.  And people, real workers, are going to have to work longer hours and make better use of their commutes to keep up.  However, wherever possible, AI and automation will be the key.

We’re talking about intelligence when we discuss a job and what intelligence entails.  Is it some illegal immigrant stuffed into a one-room bedroom with 25 other family and friend members who have some under-the-table job by some low-life employer, to help a Democrat get elected?  Or is it to perform a necessary human task?  The jobs at the Department of Education, for instance, were made-up jobs; they are high-paying jobs that don’t do anything and were created to give power to the administrative state.  Not to accomplish great intellect in children.  To do all the work that America will need to be doing under Trump’s expanding economy, humans will have to spread themselves out as much as possible.  A.I. and machines will have to take over from there.  There is no reason to put up with illegal immigrant labor.  We don’t need underage children to groom pot plants in California.  And we don’t need the noise from that industry running cover for illicit drug and sex operations.  We don’t need that kind of garbage in our society.  Even A.I. is doing a better job in those kinds of relationships, in ways that are far superior to humans.  A.I. girlfriends are emerging rapidly.  I wouldn’t say that’s a good thing, but it’s certainly a human thing.  The A.I. girlfriend doesn’t talk back, she tells you all the good things you want to hear about yourself, and you don’t have the mess of human relationships to get in the way.   Many people would prefer an AI relationship over a human one, any day, because the communication is much less complicated.  So on all fronts, illegal immigration is a thing of the past, and there won’t be any amnesty deal with soft taco Republicans to allow many millions to stay.  We’re going to have tight border security.  We are going to have mass deportations.  And we are going to toss out people who won’t fly the American flag high and proud.  We don’t necessarily want everyone to think alike, but everyone will need to agree to the same set of rules. Those who burn the American flag are essentially saying to the world that they aren’t interested in playing by the rules in America.  So we need to deport them too for un-American activities.  And we don’t need to put up with them, so we can get our cars cleaned or keep our pools maintained.  We have robots for that, and as I said in the case of my pool, the robot does a much better job than a human ever did.  And I’m a big fan. 

Rich Hoffman

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

I Would Have Shot Them: No protestor has a right to throw rocks, under any conditions

I would have shot them, the protestors who were throwing rocks at the ICE vehicles leaving the illegal immigration raid on the pot farm in California.  Rocks are considered a deadly weapon, and any federal agent who is hit by a rock is no different than having some lunatic lunge at them with a knife, or to fire a shot from a gun.  And throwing rocks into the driver’s side window of a Federal vehicle, shatter-resistant or not, is solid enough ground to use deadly force to stop.  With shatterproof glass, once a window starts to become compromised, and some of those vehicles were, continued impacts in the same area could allow the rocks to get through, and those could have been deadly.  The ICE agents did not have an obligation to flee, which they were trained to do, and that is part of the problem.  We are a stand-and-fight country, especially when it comes to law enforcement.   Those agents were just doing their jobs, and those rock-throwing ICE protestors were crossing the line with encouraged violence.  And part of that encouragement was that they did not think that the ICE agents would fight back, which encouraged the violence in the first place.  The reason many of these protests are so violent and dangerous is that there has grown an expectation that all government employees have been trained to flee rather than fight, and this has caused unwarranted aggression to grow with the expectation that violence would only flow one way.  And it would be far healthier for society to understand that impeding government operations with deadly force opens the door for a deadly response.  And as hard as those protestors were throwing those rocks at those fleeing vehicles, their deadly motivations couldn’t have been presented more obviously. 

I know it’s a pain in the neck to fill out the forms when you do shoot someone, but this California case called for it.  And it would have made future protestors think twice before doing it again.  All they would have had to do upon a rock impact striking the driver’s side window was to get out of the car and open fire into the nearest perpetrator, shooting to kill.  The paperwork processing would have been fine.  I know that the bosses of the ICE agents, trained under years of progressive understanding, have been taught to use non-lethal force and to play patty cake with these kinds of people, and none of them want to kill protestors on their watch.  So they put these ICE agents out knowing that the environment is more dangerous because of their policy decisions, because they encourage violence by not meeting it when it presents itself.  And now an entire generation of protestor types believe they can exert deadly force without having it turn back on them, and nobody takes it seriously any longer.  Nobody should think that throwing a rock at anybody is appropriate under any condition.  And at some point, ICE agents need to fight back.  Rubber bullets and stun guns just aren’t enough to use against stringy-haired socialists and radical left-wing America haters.  Before a protester arrives on the scene to throw a rock, they need to be aware of the potential consequences.  And these kids in California had no such fear, even to the point of running right up to the passenger’s side window of fleeing vehicles and tossing big rocks with all their force into windows they didn’t know were shatter-resistant or not.  At the least, they cause a lot of property damage that taxpayers are on the hook for, and the preservation of their mangy lives wasn’t worth it.  Once they decided to throw a rock, all consideration for their preservation was no longer relevant.

And is this what we’re talking about preserving, as far as the jobs illegal immigration performs, to work as underage pot pickers on a farm that provides marijuana to an already sketchy market?  I love the work ethic of immigrant labor.  I always appreciate hard workers.  But we’re supposed to believe that we have to accept tens of millions of illegal immigrants to cover jobs like this pot farm in California?  These are the kinds of jobs that I find personally useless, and if that’s what it takes to bring down the price of pot in legal states, then let the prices fall off the rocker.  Clean operations that are financially solid wouldn’t need illegal immigration to perform basic tasks.  And now watching some of the ridiculous comments from some of these ICE protestors, such as the current L.A. Mayor, are grotesquely overstated.  Even going so far as to say that we won’t be able to get our cars washed if we deport all these illegals.  If we deported tens of millions of illegals, it’s evident that legitimate businesses would be just fine, and people would not notice.  But what would be impacted are all the illegitimate businesses that are operating under the table, and that sounds like a good thing, not a bad thing.  Eliminating under-the-table labor would force many companies to clean up their current employment practices, which the California facility was found to be guilty of.  And defending that way of life was why rocks were justified in being thrown?  I don’t think so.  This isn’t a free speech issue; it’s an insistence on breaking the law issue, and ultimately comes down to law enforcement and whether everyone respects the basic premise of law and order. 

So I would have shot those protestors on the spot after the first rock had been thrown.  Granted, my profile type would likely keep me from any kind of federal employment.  I am a very aggressive concealed carry individual.  I openly walk around ready for violence all the time, and everyone knows it.  I would prefer not to shoot people, but I am always prepared to do so as soon as danger presents itself.  And my thinking on that is to call a spade what it is, and not to feed the perpetuation of violence with passive presentation of my livelihood.  And if everyone had that attitude, there would be a lot more respect for federal agents than we currently have.  However, the kind of administrative personnel we put in these jobs do not hire people like me; they have made a lot of DEI hires who would prefer not to blame people when bad things happen.  So that’s certainly part of the problem.  But until we do start seeing people shot for perpetuating violence into an otherwise peaceful society, we’ll see increases in violence that we just can’t tolerate, such as in the ICE raid on that California pot farm, a place of business that shouldn’t have been operating on a good day.  To keep a company like that alive is only making society worse upstream by producing the product it does.  So it would have been good for the government ICE agents to stand and fight, rather than flee and retreat as rocks were being thrown at their vehicles.  The moment a rock struck a car, the entire engagement changed, and deadly force should have been used.  We have to stop playing nice with these anti-American forces.  I would even go so far to say that lethal force should be used upon the burning of the American flag because such a jesture isn’t a free speech right, it’s a purposeful display that the laws of America are being cast aside, which makes the people doing so very dangerous, and in need of removal to maintain the peace.  And those are the discussions we need to be having.  And if I were driving those cars, there would have been less rock throwing, because those protestors would have been shot where they stood.  I would have gladly filled out the paperwork and still been home in time for dinner without a second thought.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Only Way A New Indiana Jones Movie Would Be Successful: Consultants and corporate looters can’t copy success, it never works

There is a way to do it, to make more Indiana Jones movies.  There have been at least seven different people who have played Indiana Jones at some point in time, everyone from George Hall, to Corey Carrier, to Sean Patrick Flanery—even River Phoenix.  Then, of course, there are all the video games and commercial appearances where an Indiana Jones-like character is seen doing something, from amusement park rides and Coke commercials to cameos in other movies.  Unlike other franchise characters, however, Indiana Jones is different in that Harrison Ford created a particular kind of character with a timeline expectation that society will hold Disney to.  There is a nice period in the character’s timeline, from age 25 to 35, where a new actor who resembles Harrison Ford could tell all-new stories that the public would love.  Most of the best Indiana Jones movies take place within a specific 3-4 year timeline that centers on Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones in the iconic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film that revolutionized the way stories are told and movies are presented.  I personally think it was the best movie ever made and that changed the value of the character created for the public forever.  The chances of doing something like that again with the same character but a different actor is impossible. I think it’s possible to make more movies after seeing how Disney and Bethesda, the video game maker, produced the latest Indiana Jones video game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  It was a great game and a lot of fun, and it didn’t try to “reboot” Indiana Jones; it respected the timeline that people had come to know and trust.  And many actors contributed to that effort, and those are the rules of engagement.  There is a lot of talk now, halfway through 2025, that Disney wants to reboot the Indiana Jones movies.  They own the property and want to make money from it.  However, there are rules they must follow; otherwise, they will cause all kinds of social problems, just as they did with the Star Wars movies.  If they want Indiana Jones to remain valuable to the public, they’ll listen and stay respectful.

But if they think they are going to retell Raiders of the Lost Ark with a woke actor like Pedro Pascal, or even a woman, then they are out of their minds, and another Indiana Jones movie would be a disaster.  Indiana Jones is not something that can be ruined in the way that studios often do with Batman movies or James Bond stories.  There has been over 40 years of story telling from books, television, comics, video games that for that entire time held to a stringent canon timeline, and that trust has been built across many generations of fans, from kids today to their grandparents who saw the movies in the theater when they were kids.  I love the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular in Orlando, Florida, the stunt show that has been performed for years at Hollywood Studios. It has featured several different actors portraying Indiana Jones in that stage play.  However, the difference was that all content creators were very respectful of the original idea.  During the period I mentioned, numerous exciting stories could be told about a younger Indiana Jones as he establishes his excellent and famous reputation, which people would love to see depicted in movies.  However, those movies would require directors, producers, and musical talent as passionate about making the movies as were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Williams, originally.  Disney thought they would get away with a reboot of Star Wars by ignoring the story canon and essentially retelling A New Hope with The Force Awakens, and people have never forgiven them for it.  They might have made some short-term cash, but they destroyed the brand, and that has cost Disney a lot.  

This is important because the character of Indiana Jones has likely been the single most valuable narrative device that has advanced the arts and sciences in the world today.  There are many people who have become scientists because of Indiana Jones and the inspiration they received from him as children, which has been very beneficial.  The value of the Indiana Jones property lies in this social motivation.  And unless Disney respects that sentiment, it will harm them in very detrimental ways, and erode the character it currently holds socially.  Indiana Jones is more than just Harrison Ford, and unless a new production is presented with the same level of commitment as those original films were, it will be rejected at the box office, just as the Star Wars movies have been.  There is an arrogance that comes from the consultant class in society, who often con their way into the motion picture studios, never figuring these things out.  And those are the voices at Disney who think they could make a movie as good as the originals were, without understanding the social consequences of destroying the public’s love of the property.   The Indiana Jones timeline is unique in that it spans from his infancy in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to his portrayal by a 93-94-year-old man with an eye patch.  Within that timeline, there is room to make movies just as exciting as Temple of Doom and Raiders of the Lost Ark, if the stories deal with the post-college years.  However, suppose they recast and retell the stories for modern audiences with music by different composers, cinematography that fails to capture the spirit, and scripts that don’t adhere to the formula. In that case, the project will be a disaster.

I think Disney should leave it all alone and let it be what it is.  They’ll make more money off Indiana Jones if they allow it to stay valuable in people’s consciousness.  However, Disney is not filled with creative people; it is essentially run by consultants who choose to live by copying what they think is successful and trying to pass it off as their own.  And it never works well, and it certainly won’t work with Indiana Jones.  So, with all the talk about Disney developing another actor to play Indiana Jones in a new movie, I would advise them to proceed with great caution.  I’d see the film if they were respectful to the established timeline.  But if they want to put a minority character in the role instead of a white guy, and change elements of Indiana Jones for a more modern audience, then it will be a disaster.  And I’m only writing this now in the hope of keeping them from making that big mistake.  But I don’t have much faith that they’ll listen, and will destroy this as they have so many other things in life, and the impact of that in the world is very significant. It matters more than people think it does; we’re talking about the way that humans create reality for themselves through story and narrative devices, and Indiana Jones emerged as a necessity for human consciousness that was more than entertaining.  Disney has been warned, so we’ll see what they do.  I’d like to see it work.  I think there is an actor out there who could carry the torch of Indiana Jones during an exciting period that audiences would accept.  However, short of that, it would be best to leave it alone, as the social impact of changing the value with new content would be devastating in ways that most people cannot measure.  What I have said is the only way that it could be done because all other methods would be very destructive and unnecessary. People are pretty forgiving as long as they know they can trust a story not to change on them. And that’s true with everything in life. People can come and go, but people want to know that the story stays the same.

Rich Hoffman

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