Category: Progressive

Trump’s Executive Order ‘Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections’: The size of AOC’s caboose

They have no choice, and this is always the case when it comes to unearned merit.  The best way to root out bad behavior is to prevent it from being masked by good conduct.  And that is what the Democrat party has been doing for many years.  People didn’t know what Democrats believed since they hid the Bernie Sanders types behind people like Hillary Clinton, who were every bit as radical, but they knew how to put on a little show to con people into thinking they weren’t what they were.  There have been some alarming concerns that large crowds have been attending Fight the Oligarchy rallies, which Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been holding in various college towns, and whether these gatherings will inspire a similar movement among Democrats.  The answer is no.  They do not have the numbers.  What they are doing is smoke and mirrors by carefully picking sites where lots of broken people and college kids are concentrated with their overtly socialist message.  They couldn’t get those kinds of crowds outside of very specific areas, but it looks good for the cameras.  And it has alarmed some Republicans who keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for the pendulum to swing the other way.  But that is loser thinking.  The facts of the matter are that Democrats had no choice, and this has only further uncovered them in ways that they have been trying to hide.  Their party is a radical branch of European communism, a left-wing form of populism they tried to hide from the public, just as Republicans tried to hide the pro-capitalism of their party by resisting Trump.  Bernie Sanders was their form of populism, which they wanted to control and conceal, as they needed the illusion to trick voters into supporting them.  But now the cat is out of the bag, and everyday people can see what they have always been, all along.

The only thing I have learned recently regarding these Bernie Sanders rallies is just how big the caboose is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  I thought she was thinner than that, but she is carrying too many potatoes in her rump, to put it nicely.  And if she is the best that they have, they have some real problems.  But that’s where they find themselves.  When they had a chance, they turned away from Bernie, who had been drawing good crowds during his two recent runs for President, along with Trump.  And the Democrat machine turned away from him and instead invested the party brand behind Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris because they thought sex and skin color were enough to convince people to vote for socialism, that Americans could be guilted into supporting overt communism.  And that turned out to be completely the wrong strategy.  I could have told them otherwise.  I did tell them.  But nobody listened, and they arrogantly did what they did, and Democrats, finding they didn’t have a home any longer, peeled away and joined Trump and the MAGA movement.  I said as much during Bernie’s first run for office when the Democrats rigged the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton and pushed Bernie aside.  Those same disjointed crowds support Bernie, but the problem they have is one of math.  They don’t have the numbers.  If they had stuck with Bernie in 2016 and 2020, they might have done better, but even then, they didn’t have the numbers.  However, what has happened since the 2024 election is party-destroying numbers, which is why there is so much theatrical presentation by them that comes across as so phony.  Because of Trump unifying the Republican party so resoundingly over the last 9 years and essentially three terms as an American President, Democrats had no response, and it has essentially destroyed them as a political party.

What we are seeing in these crowds are the communists and overall Marxists, who have always been there.  College campuses teach Marxism, so there are a lot of confused kids with weak relationships with their parents who are easy to sell socialism, communism, and Marxism to.  Kids are not very confident in their life skills and are prone to being misled by a victimization cycle message.  But one thing that happens to people as they get older is generally, they become much less Marxist and much more Republican because as they work in life and have to run their families with responsibility, their political views come back to reality and they vote more conservatively.  We observe a pattern among school levy supporters in local districts: young parents tend to vote yes for higher taxes because they are uninformed.  They aren’t yet very sophisticated about how the world works, and they want to believe in a massive social safety net, especially since that’s what they were taught in school.  But the older they get, the less that sounds like a good idea, so they peel away and move to the political right with each year that goes by.  And if a community has a large number of people over 50, then school levy issues tend to fail.  That is the same condition with general political sympathies.  The crowds Bernie is attracting are those who have had their safety net disrupted, so they seek the comfort of a crowd to validate their feelings.  Not to show support for a more independent and self-initiating capitalist government, the way it is with the MAGA crowd. 

The solution is straightforward, and President Trump is already addressing it. On March 25, 2025, he signed an executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”  This order aims to overhaul election processes in the United States, focusing on tightening voting regulations through the implementation of Proof of Citizenship, Election Day Ballot Deadlines, Federal Oversight of Funding Conditions, Prosecutions of Election Crimes, and Voting System Standards.  Democrats, especially those embedded in the Bar Association of lawyers, such as Marc Elias and organizations like the ACLU, will try to sue citing this order as an unconstitutional power grab, because they know, as everyone has come to figure out, that Democrats can’t win if they don’t cheat in elections.  Just like Bernie and the gang have had to try and use smoke and mirrors to make their numbers look better with rallies on college campuses.  The truth is, Democrats never had the numbers, and now they have had stripped away from them, polite society they can no longer hide behind.  Reasonably moderate Democrats who could win a few votes to the Marxism of their foundation without scaring people off.  Now they don’t have that, and they can’t hide it from the public.  And Democrats know, because they have been trying to hide it for years, if they can’t create so many opportunities to cheat elections, they will likely never win another one, and their party is done.  So Trump’s executive order gets to the point.  And that is why Democrats are suddenly so desperate, and it will only get worse for them.  They have to put out to the public the best that they have, and for them, that is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, the old man who is a sympathizer of the Soviet Union and a socialist.  And they can’t even hide from the public any longer, the size of AOC’s caboose, because they can’t afford to.

Rich Hoffman

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

Protestors Aren’t Valued: Threats of violance are not replacements for good debate

I would say it was a fortunate thing for me to see; after all, that’s what I was after when my wife and I recently took a vacation to Washington, D.C.  Within a few days, I was able to see protestors up close and personal in places where they cause the most trouble, and they answered questions I had been having by seeing them up close and personal.  The first group I encountered was at the Mall in Washington in front of the Lincoln Memorial.  The second was just a few days later in the rotunda of the Ohio Statehouse.  Later that same night, I saw protestors at the Lakota school emergency meeting on school funding who were there to shout down local political representatives who were called to answer for depletions for school funding.  These protestors were the “always more money” types without ever demonstrating why spending more money would ever make anything better but to push a few more of them into diabetic medicine because of their terrible diets.  By the looks of their girth around the waist, they could afford to skip a few meals and more money would only make their problems worse.  That was the same problem with the protestors in Columbus; they were screaming for more school funding without demonstrating how more money would improve anything.  Then, of course, the protestors at the Mall were protesting Elon Musk’s attack on science when, in reality, he is personally doing more to enhance science than anybody in the world.  They were all such negative people who were very difficult to have any relationship with because the nature of their existence was below the line, and to my way of thinking, that makes them impossible to work with.  You can’t build a prosperous society with below-the-line people by using a business metaphor popular in efficiency discussions.  Negative people drowning in their misery need fulfillment that they can’t give themselves, which they misperceive as more of something to cover what is lost in themselves. 

I have a lifestyle that moves very fast.  I do a lot more during a typical day than most people will do in a month.  I don’t say that I want to put anybody down, but yeah, many people waste time talking about nothing, and I am not one of them.  I find something else to do when I sense that someone is wasting my time.  So I don’t get to see these kinds of protestors very often because I live my life in a way that doesn’t have time for them.  I don’t value what their problems are because I see Democrat politics as a political expression of a broken person who has not dealt with their deficient thinking.  And broken people are not equal to people who purposefully live good lives.  It is not correct or fair to penalize a good person with the thoughts of a bad person.  As defined here, an evil person is a person who allows bad decisions to govern their existence purposefully.  We aren’t talking about a mistake in judgment here and there; we are talking about purposeful neglect, using victimization status to avoid doing work, solving a problem, or even raising kids.  My experience with school funding protestors, for instance, is that they are surface-level people who do not have the self-confidence to raise their children, so the fantasy of state ownership of their children means they can appear to the world to care for their kids but what it does is allow them to blame someone else for the deficiencies of their children’s growth.  It’s much easier to blame a teacher or school funding when the real problem is the parents themselves.  The public education debate allows them to defer their responsibility in contributing to the problem because if only more money were spent on the children, nobody would notice that the protester is just a bad parent and probably a bad person.

Another aspect of this whole issue is that bad people, such as protestors, have been able to hide their failures behind the value of free speech.  In our form of government, where we encourage debate, we have not set a high enough bar, which is now occurring, for the quality of an opinion. Instead, protestors were celebrated for participating in the free speech debate, which is the cornerstone of our Republic, because they stood around like idiots holding a sign, protesting something.  Rather than present a reasonable argument about something that could be debated, they fall into the Al Green side of victimization protest, copying what they think worked during the Civil Rights movement.  So let me explain something about all that.  The Democrats wanted to erase their sins of the past of being slaveholders, and Lyndon Johnson was in the White House looking to bridge that gap and steal the merit away from Republicans who had been championing Civil Rights for people of color all along.  The protests of the flower children during that period were not the mechanism that launched reform.  It was the cover story of actual guilt that Democrats wanted to rid themselves of through the optics of protest.  So, the protests are not what moved the legislative needle on reform.  It was only a fake cover story to distract reporters and historians from the Democrat past of alignment on slaveholding as a political party that had been for it but wanted a divorce due to modern pressure to compete with Republicans and maybe even beat them at their own game.

So, the protests never worked.  And they certainly won’t work this time.  The vicious attacks against Tesla because Elon Musk is the CEO of the company only remind people of the kind of negative people who turn to protest rather than logical arguments and further root the MAGA movement to a growing audience.  The destruction or else form of political debate isn’t going to work.  They think that if they threaten to destroy property or even fight you in the parking lot of a public school, you will be compelled to see things their way for your safety and desire to preserve your property.  These people caught on camera keying the paint job of Tesla owners is the worst form of grievance jealousy that is attempting to disguise a flawed and broken person behind the value of the First Amendment.  But because they can’t articulate a debate, they only have the threat of violence and destruction as a counterpoint.  But if they run into MAGA supporters who are better at violence and fighting than they are, well, then they are in real trouble.  I certainly don’t have room or tolerance for one bit of bad behavior and below-the-line thinkers.  I’ll listen to a reasonable debate, but to be honest, I sniff things out very fast and determine if someone is wasting my time, and I will move beyond them quicker than they can blink.  And I’m certainly not alone in this.  These protestors will not recreate the past hippie movement protests and get legislative representation.  They will be left behind because that is the mode of the world.  I would say that it was always that way and that protests in America were more theater than substance.  But it’s even more so today, and seeing the early strategy against the Trump administration in general by protestors without an argument, they will not be successful because all they have to offer is violence.  And the people they are threatening aren’t going to put up with it. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Why America is the Best: Understanding Gideon and George Washington

While visiting George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, I was very interested in why it is OK for us to say that America is the best country on earth and that we should preserve it very boisterously.  And why George Washington?  Well, we named our capital city after him and think of him as the ultimate Founding Father, the pacesetter who started something new in the world, and we have measured everything thereafter with him in mind.  So, what made George Washington so great?  And why do Americans feel like they must always tell the world that they are the best and greatest?  Our form of government is by far the best, and it’s an unquestioned reality.  But if you’ve ever traveled the world and dined with acquaintances from other countries, and you’re watching a news report in which someone from America comes on and says that America is the best country on earth, it can get a little weird. In that case, it can be a little uncomfortable because the people you eat at the table think the same about their country.  What makes it more accurate for us in the United States than for them, whoever they are?  That’s happened to me a lot of times.  Yet, I think Americans should say such a thing because I believe our form of government is superior to that of anywhere in the world and that we should be proud of it.  We should even brag about it like we do.  But why?  You can understand something instinctively, but to actually “know” it requires much more understanding and perspective, which is undoubtedly the case with this topic.  And now that I’ve visited Mt. Vernon with my wife, George Washington’s home, I think I understand it much better.

I think the key to understanding why America is the best country in the world is literally a “key.”  The key that George Washinton used to hang in the entry to his house that his friend and long lost adopted son Marquis de Lafayette gave to him that used to be the key to the Bastille’s main gate, once the French stormed it and destroyed it as a symbol of tyranny during the French Revolution.  George Washington kept it to show how a country can overthrow tyranny, and even though the French Revolution got well out of hand while the American Revolution slightly before it was much more civil and orderly, the reminder that the people ultimately have the power to rule over themselves was represented in the key, which Washington understood as literally the key to setting up a proper government for the people and by the people.  George Washington liked his house so much that he didn’t want to be away from it with commitments to power and was always reluctant to achieve any high office.  But as to that as well, why?  Then, of course, you would have to understand the Bible, the primary literary entertainment at the time of these revolutions, and the forming of our country.  They didn’t have television shows or music to entertain themselves with thought, but they did have the Bible.  And George Washington would have shared the Bible with just about everyone pursuing a life of thoughtful understanding.  One thing that I have always thought about Biblical studies is that they are narratively, really insightful, psychologically.  I’ve read most of the foundation religious texts of the world, and I can say that the Bible is a brilliant enterprise that served as a good guide through the foundation of a new country.  It was the first to figure itself out, as the Bible had spent the previous 1500 years being fleshed out as an idea.  And the ideas formulated in the Bible essentially laid the groundwork for the creation of America.  So George Washington, by way of dinner conversation, would have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the Bible with his dinner guests at Mt. Vernon, which would have happened all the time. 

I spent most of the previous year leading up to Trump’s election reading various books about George Washington because I felt that the world would need to understand what was about to happen, and to understand America, you have to understand George Washington.  And to understand that, you must understand George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  So that’s what my wife and I did to celebrate Trump being back in the White House; we visited Mt. Vernon to unpack why putting Trump back in as President was necessary and why he should be so boisterous about why America was the best country.   It ultimately comes down to how George Washington thought and how much the Bible influenced him, especially the Book of Judges and the character within that book of Gideon, the military hero who saved Israel with only 300 men but was the reluctant hero always trying to downplay his efforts.  I often see our form of government as a republic as a deliberate attempt to fix the problems in the Book of Judges, where God wanted people to rule themselves. Still, the failure of the regional judges drove the Hebrew people to demand a king to rule over them. The wheels fell off the apple cart, leaving the kingdom to become divided by God’s anger after the death of King Solomon.

I think Washington modeled himself after Biblical characters with his approach to leadership and, most notably, Gideon himself.  Gideon’s conquests led to 40 years of peace during the rest of his lifetime. Still, before he died, he had made a gold ephod from the spoils of war that some Israelites began to worship. Once Gideon wasn’t around anymore, idolatry started to poison the minds of the people, and one of his 70 sons, Abimelech, led an uprising that killed all the others and drove them to a fallen society.  Thinking about human nature through this story, George Washington was trying not to make the mistakes of Gideon.  Rather than become just another corrupt king with multiple wives, like Gideon, Washington stayed loyal to Martha and kept himself grounded at Mt. Vernon all his life before and after the Revolution and his two terms as President.  George fought off the hungry temptation to be romantic with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his very good friend William, and the couple for which Fairfax County is named today.  But being inspired by Bible stories, Washington wanted to avoid those pitfalls and stayed grounded throughout his life.  However, once he was out of office, like Gideon’s sons, it was hard to pull together a republic without everyone fighting all the time, which was undoubtedly the case with subsequent presidents like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.  And like the story of the Book of Judges, leadership always failed.  And the way that America set up its republic form of government to resist those temptations, for society to call out for a king and to give them unlimited power, our government was built on the Book of Judges from the beginning to correct it.  That was certainly at the core of George Washington’s belief and why he thought the key to the Bastille was so important.  It was more important for people to rule themselves and to throw off the oppressors of social order than to conform to it.  Because once a person has collected such power, as the Bible shows, they all fail.  So Washington and our American form of government set everything up to resist that temptation and to give people just enough power, knowing that the faults of humanity were always very close.  And like his temptations with Sally Fairfax, he would keep those lusts cool and always on the back burner, where they belonged.  If a leader can’t govern their emotions, how can they govern other people?  Because of these concerns, and after several hundred years, they led to President Trump, who found that balance late in life on his own terms.  We can say that America is better than all other forms of government because it was built with these concerns in mind, which had previously destroyed every society people had in it.  And we have now sustained ourselves for many centuries on a premise of restraint, which George Washinton started, based on the Bible story of Gideon, the reluctant military general whom God worked through directly to save his people, even if only for a short time.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Hidden Menace Behind 16th Street: Marxist radicals behind labor unions

First, let me explain what is wrong with labor unions. They allow bad employees to hide behind good employees, and as a collective practice, they water down effectiveness. They view as work the entire enterprise of labor as being for the worker, not the work being done.  And it has been a disastrous experiment from the mind of Marxist thinkers.  I know in this new big tent MAGA movement that lots of union workers crossed over and voted for President Trump, so debate about labor unions is on the back burner these days, and Right To Work legislation in the states is less of a topic, even though its still a big deal for employers, because business enterprises don’t want to be stuck taking all the risks only to have a radical Marxist enterprise of low performing workers take control of labor management with a bunch of dumb, ineffective rules.  For Ohio to be a proper pro-business state, employers will need the assurance of a Right to Work state like Indiana has just to the west.  Otherwise, it’s not an apples-to-apples offering.  From my point of view, I don’t see anything good about labor unions.  They are the heart of the problem of school funding and have been a disaster since they were introduced in the middle of the 19th century, right along with Marxism.  The two things are tied together and have been horrible for the world.  So, with all that in mind, I wondered about the Black Lives Matters plaza painting on the ground on 16th Street in front of the White House before President Trump had it removed this past week.  I wanted to see it before it was gone forever, and what I found there was even worse than I had imagined.  The root cause of the problems was, of course, labor unions. 

During the hostile 2020 election year with all the Covid lockdowns and radical Soros backed color revolutions that were trying to burn down the church at the end of 16th Street, and vandalize Lafayette Square while the FBI, CIA, and many fourth branch of government Deep Staters plotted the destruction of the people’s pick for President, Trump, lunatics from the known Marxist group Black Lives Matters painted their logo on the street in giant letters to let the White House know that the aggressors of political destruction was on the doorstep of the White House.  All this activity was evident from inside the White House, and it was meant to intimidate Trump and his supporters into bowing down to a proposed fight that was highly aggressive.  Later, I learned that this was not just a painted road but that the letters “Black Lives Matter” were actually embedded into the blocks of the street itself, so just painting over it wouldn’t get rid of the message.  We also later learned that the taxpayers were on the hook for the vandalism that cost over 8 million dollars and was personally endorsed by the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser.  The painting was an intended message of aggression attempting to hide actual terrorism behind some guilt-driven sentiment left over from the years of slavery, which were always a Democrat issue.  Republicans freed the enslaved people and do not harbor guilt in maintaining the institution.  One of the most excellent Republicans in the history of politics was Frederick Douglass, who was very well-known during President Grant’s reconstruction period after the Civil War, a very prominent person of color and proud Republican member of history’s politics.  Democrats have tried to capture the issue over the next hundred years to attempt to erase their guilt from it, creating many of the modern tensions we see today.

Republicans have learned a lot from the experience and are pushing back, led by President Trump.  As my wife and I visited the city recently, it is being cleaned up everywhere.  Trump has set a high bar that should have always been in place, and other Republicans, such as Representative Andrew Clyde, are pushing to withhold federal transportation funds unless Bowser gets rid of the Black Lives Matter painting and renames the plaza “Liberty Plaza.”  So, a lot is going on that I wanted to see for myself, and upon arriving, a clarity that had not been explained in the news reports became very clear.  Because all through this, my thoughts were, “What do these businesses in the area think about this stupid, Marxist painting?  I wouldn’t want to look out my windows down onto the street and see such a think with crazy radicals looming from the shadows to take over the city on a moment’s notice essentially.”  And that’s when I saw that there on 16th street were many of the big unions, the Labor’s International Union, the AFL-CIO union, and the Motion Picture’s Association of America.  These are all radical Marxist groups and the reason we haven’t heard about them is because many of the people who are in the news reporting industry belong to an entertainment union of some kind, especially the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, (AFTRA) which is part of SAG, (the Screen Actors Guild), so they can’t be too critical of labor union activity.  This allows these horrendously radical progressive groups- and when we say “progressive,” we mean “communist” in their sentiments to cause trouble in the background without recourse.  Now we know why nobody talked about the kind of businesses that allowed for that painting to be painted on the street in the first place. 

The real fight, clearly on display on 16th Street looming over the President’s house, that we put our representatives into, is that massive international unions are fighting for power and are proclaiming that they are in charge.  They used the George Floyd issue to blow into the Marxist minds of the fans to hide violence and intimidation behind a race war; they were trying to get Trump out of office and to remove any influence that voters had over the city of Washington, D.C.  The unions were in charge, and they let everyone know about it.  But the key to fighting them is not confronting them directly, as we have in the past.  Labor unions consume a considerable amount of tax money to exist.  So the way to beat them, which is why President Trump has not worried about them too much and even appeals to their members, is to take away their power, which is fed by confiscated taxpayer money.  That’s ultimately what got Muriel Bowser’s attention, pulling away her federal funds for sponsoring acts of terrorism disguised as race concerns.  Democrats caused race concerns in the first place.  That painting has been like a planted flag in front of our house for years and is only now being removed.  But before it was, I had to see it for myself, so my wife and I visited it a few days before the road crews came in and ripped it out of the ground.  But those labor unions are still hiding behind the public noise, waiting for another chance to strike.  They are the fuel in the background that stirs up these terrorist acts, just as they are all over the world.  And are the root cause of most of our problems of domestic terrorism in American society.  And to deal with them, we must remove their funding so they have nothing to work with.  Because the longer they exist, they will always be causing trouble toward America’s destruction, which is their objective.  They will never be our friends; as a general rule, they should be illegal in every form they present themselves in. 

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a great senator in Ohio

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

DeWine’s State of the State Speech: Lakota schools plots their own demise

Oddly enough, while I was in Columbus to attend the Governor’s State of the State speech, it was Lakota schools that everyone was talking about, and they wanted to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit.  But in many ways, that wasn’t surprising, and it was confirmed again in Mike DeWine’s speech that day.  Years and years of kicking the can down the road in all these public schools were catching up to them, and the bill was due, and nobody knew what to do about it.  Governors like DeWine have done for decades what they were now doing at Lakota schools around 91 miles to the south in Butler County, Ohio, they were writing tax payer checks for a product and service that fewer and fewer people wanted, and now with Trump in the White House, the warnings I have been giving everyone about what was going to happen are coming true.  Instead of getting out in front of these funding problems, Lakota schools dug in and became more woke.  Senator Lang tried to tell them on a call later that day after the Governor’s speech, but the school system had dug in the opposite direction.  Others and I have tried to give Lakota conservative board members a chance to deal with this issue, and their response as a school board was to run them all off, and that extends beyond Darbi Boddy, the most recent that they found some way to push out of management.  And like things are where liberal types run things, everything costs too much money, and now Trump was cutting back the Department of Education and gubernatorial candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy was talking about significant reforms in education with merit pay, leaving schools like Lakota to join lawsuits with other schools having the same problem, hoping that some sixties flowerchild protest might recover for them a silly little 9 million dollar loss that has come out of their budget due to students utilizing Ed Choice vouchers that are now expanding under the Trump administration and flowing down through the states.  For perspective, Lakota schools in Butler County, Ohio, has a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and that’s still not enough money to fund education the way they want to.

And you know what makes me the angriest about all this? I didn’t get any of Fran’s cookies this year. Fran is Mike DeWine’s long-time and very dedicated wife, who typically gives them out to attendees of her husband’s speech in the rotunda.  This year, activists were there chanting for more money as they felt the pinch from a social disconnect from the standard old traditional funding model of public education.  To avoid the activists, DeWine was ushered away underground to safety, leaving the rest of us to watch their bizarre and out-of-touch rituals with curiosity. The Lakota situation was the topic of conversation because they are one of the largest districts in Ohio, and so went them, so went everyone.  And that was kind of a proper metaphor for DeWine’s State of the State speech.  A do-gooder Governor tosses money at public education and hopes that everything will work well for the kids.  But its these crazy labor unions with woke politics that have screwed up the funding model because people don’t like the product.  And school vouchers, much less restricted these days and growing more so, are giving parents the choice away from their zip code schools where they pay enormous property taxes to fund a political movement they hate essentially.  And Lakota schools were right in the middle of the spectacle leaving DeWine to give just another empty speech about the value of education, and sending books in the mail to students to help with literacy, when the real problem was significant and ominous, and far beyond at this point just passing out cookies in the Statehouse Rotunda to ease tempers.  Legislators were in the middle of the budgeting process for public education at the time of this speech, but the government unions want to cry and protest for money that just isn’t there and aren’t willing to deal with the reality of the coming changes.  And those legislators were mad at what Lakota was thinking of doing then, which they did later that evening.  So it wasn’t a good move by the Lakota School Board.  But I tried to warn everyone, and they didn’t listen.  Much more on that to come.

The main thing in DeWine’s speech was that the Governor came to the speech like an old grandpa that went out to dinner the night before to eat barbeque ribs and still had on a bib from that experience the next day when he thought he was showing up for dinner in a nice suit and tie.  DeWine was out of step and slightly behind the rest of the world for his sixth year in office, most of which had not been very good, especially during the COVID-19 years.  But watching him speak, I thought of him as a nice guy who has been constantly suckered by the same kind of losers who protest education funding, like the people who greeted him upon leaving the State of the State peech.  The old flowerchild strategy of crying like some baby bird until mother government drops a worm in its mouth has long been exhausted, and DeWine never understood it.  He’s a good man from a political generation that caused all these problems and doesn’t know what to do about it.  We have to wait another year or so before we get Vivek Ramaswamy and tackle some of these key issues because just throwing money at problems is not what voters will do in the future. 

The best thing about DeWine’s State of the State speech was the expansion of business enterprise in Ohio, specifically the Andruil factory just south of Columbus and the Intel facility to the north.  There was a lot to talk about, and for DeWine’s credit, many people have been working in the background to make Ohio a much more business-friendly state.  At least DeWine hasn’t stood in the way of those efforts; he’s been willing to tag along.  We’ll get a lot more with Vivek Ramaswamy as Governor, but since DeWine was able to part ways with Amy Acton, the stringy haired hippie who used to be the Health Director during Covid, Ohio has grown more business friendly to make up for their position of lockdown politics that so crippled just about everyone.  Over the last couple of years, DeWine has at least not shut the door to companies like Intel, even though it has largely been members of the Senate that paved the way.  That’s how government works, and it’s very fascinating.  But once the good news was talked about regarding Ohio and DeWine’s speech, the topic went back to the tired old view of the world, and the chants outside could be heard in the chamber, and the reality of places like Lakota schools was coming to fruition.  The days of easy money stolen from taxpayers to fund woke causes were over.  And many people at the State of the State speech in the Ohio Statehouse were struggling with the ramifications of decades of trying to appease the screams of the teacher union types.  But reality has a lot more in store for them than they realize.  The result will be more anger at the people running public education and politicians like Mike DeWine ending their terms dismayed while much more innovative people replace them with reforms that will change all the rules.  The Lakota School Board, in its current form, is just not prepared to deal with it.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

Steve Hilton For Governor of California: With Trump, state competition is the key to Making America Great Again

It’s not just Vivek Ramaswamy, or Byron Donalds who are Trump endorsed candidates running for governor of their respective states in 2026, but I learned at Vivek’s West Chester event from Vivek himself that the Fox News personality Steve Hilton was also planning to run for governor of California once Gavin Newsom terms out after this current term.  Steve Hilton is best known for his show, The Next Generation, which he had on the 9 PM time slot on Sunday nights and was popular; it ran from 2017 to 2023.  But I hadn’t heard what Steve was doing since then, other than showing up here and there as a guest on various shows.  He’s a very positive person and is part of the next generation of political commentators that I have been talking about lately, and that is certainly the case here.  Once Vivek arrived at CTL Aerospace to speak about his announcement to run for governor, I learned that Steve Hilton was flying out from California to speak for two minutes to give Vivek Ramaswamy a warm announcement.   I realized that a very positive pattern was emerging, leading straight out of the Trump White House.  Trump was building a brand in politics that would carry others to succeed him, and once he put his name on that person, the Trump machine would get behind that person and take them to victory.  Steve Hilton has become good friends with Vivek Ramaswamy, and now that Vivek has put his hat in the ring, Steve told us all at that West Chester event that he was planning to do the same in California, which provoked a long conversation with me backstage after he concluded his speech for Vivek. 

If you haven’t noticed Fox News lately, even they can’t ignore the world trend that eluded them for the previous decade as they wanted to turn more to the center and not be known as a right-winged network once Roger Ailes died.  The Rupert Murdoch kids are not conservative at all, and the wives of the boys wanted to take the station toward New York high society politics rather than conservative populism that was put forth by personalities like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson, and it hurt them.  Then, their position against President Trump was outrageously radicalized.  Again, when discussing left/right politics, the “left” represents Karl Marx’s ideas.  The “right” represents capitalism.  So, being called one or the other is a more profound indication on the political scale of right and wrong, and Fox News was trying to move to the “left” while Roger Ailes had built the network toward the right.  It was not something Rupert Murdoch was politically inclined to, but it was popular, so he went with it as long as the channel made money.  But the kids don’t care so much about making money; they were more concerned with social status, so they made a bad business decision, parted ways with top talent at Fox News, and drove a wedge with Trump himself that they thought they could survive.  They falsely believed that they were the news, not that they reflected their audience, a common mistake everyone is learning from now that Trump is back in the White House.  Woke is out, and common sense is back in.  Even in NFL football, my favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have reinstated their old coach, Jon Gruden, back into their Ring of Honor.  They took him down after a fake scandal was invented to drive him out of football over leaked emails Gruden had written.  The whole premise was that Gruden could be kicked out of the NFL just for thinking and saying something, and that trend has gone the other way, leaving the Buccaneers under this Trump administration to get with the program and to reinstate Gruden to their Ring of Honor. 

That’s kind of what has happened with Fox News, many of the people who were frequently on Fox News are now in Trump’s cabinet and are doing very well, and it has been good for Fox as a business and they are having to make decisions to step away from their commitment to left winged politics.  The Trump family was pushed away from the network before the election, but now they can’t get enough of Trump, leaving Lara Trump to have her own show on the weekends like Steve Hilton did.  So Steve, always an upbeat personality, talked to me about all this as Vivek was speaking in West Chester, and we talked about this trend, the kind of people Trump was building to extend his government beyond the reach of any critics and to destroy conventional politics on its face.  And specifically with California, everyone thought that Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be a good Republican governor, but he turned out to be a RINO loser who could never stand up to the unions and ended up disgraced.  And at that point, California turned radical left and is currently miserable.  A prime time for someone like Steve Hilton to run and win the state and bring the fifth largest economy in the world back to sensibility.  Trump had a plan to make America Great Again, and that started by decentralizing the presidency and moving things back to the states where his hand-picked people would be running those states two years into this current administration, and through state competition, Trump was going to change the political landscape forever.

Remember when NBC tried to replace Trump on The Apprentice with Schwarzenegger because they thought the whole success of that show was a tough guy telling people they were fired?  Well, Schwarzenegger bombed, just as he did as governor because he was an actor, not a leader.  Trump is a battle-hardened leader who learned how to be successful in show business.  And these picks for governor positions are similar; they were privately successful but have learned to master the media to convey authentic leadership.  And Steve Hilton could do what Schwarzenegger or Gavin Newsom could never do in California.  Those personalities knew how to manipulate an audience behind the camera but were paralyzed regarding real-world activities.  And Democrats don’t have any other personality that can step forward and explain the massive failures that the people of California have suffered under Gavin Newsom.  So, another endorsement of Steve Hilton by Trump could easily carry him into a win there, too.  The world is changing for the better, and as I told Steve, you can see a pattern emerging that he is undoubtedly a part of.  And he would be great in California.  Like Vivek Ramaswamy, Steve Hilton is an excellent public speaker who can convey a message.  But more than that, he understands how to identify problems, which he always did on his Fox show.  And like many of the successful personalities on Fox, they need a chance to show their stuff on a political stage.  So, California won’t be left behind in all the fun regarding governor races in 2026.  I think it’s excellent, and the radical political left of Karl Marx won’t have a way to deal with it.  Trump endorsements are a new brand in politics that Democrats have no plan for, especially in states they have ruined, like California.  Once he announces, Steve Hilton is poised to win there in a big way. 

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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