Category: Rich Hoffman

Under New Management: The difference between the back of the train and the front

It was a good accident while I was shooting the video for this article, when a train came by.  I tried to wait for a previous, huge train to go by, but about 10 minutes later, another came, almost as if the trains wanted to help me make my point.  Because I was discussing the Metaphysics of Quality, a favorite topic of mine from Robert Persig’s famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think it’s one of the most important books that the human race has ever produced because it puts its finger on a very allusive idea, which is why some people are better than others, especially in the field of business management.  And these days, now several years out of Covid, and a world obviously not prepared for Trump to be in the White House, a lot of companies are flat-footed on this current economy.  There was an assumption during the COVID pandemic, and all the way up to last week, that different rules would govern the world, a kind of socialist administrative state where work was bent to the preferences of the workers instead of the needs of the business.  And people are shocked by these very capitalist rules.  All over my town, signs are going up to let the public know that their companies are under new management.  Most of them are restaurants that have been too slow and understaffed for too long. Many people thought they would be able to work from home to stop the spread of COVID, which, in retrospect, was a laughable endeavor.   Yet the entire world tried to think it and actually put it into practice, which was one of the dumbest things ever.  To my point, which is why I can say that our COVID response, even as it was artificial, was really dumb. That train helped me make the point right on time, leaving a perfect demonstration of what the heart of the problem is with all these restructurings. 

What the world needs, especially from every company and every family, is a leader who leads from the front, where all the action happens.  Using a train metaphor, the front of the train, at the cutting edge, is where all the critical decisions are made. For instance, how fast should the train be going? Does it need to turn onto a different track in case something falls across it, posing a danger to the entire train?  Operating the train needs to happen from the front, where all the controls are, and the leader can see what’s coming before anybody else.  However, most leadership cultures, and I can say this after dealing with many tens of thousands of people, most of whom have advanced degrees and extensive experience in high-tech sectors, are behind-the-scenes people.  People who sit in the caboose collect data and report the contents of the train as it moves along.  The information they process can be helpful, but by the time they see it, the front of the train, especially on a very long one, has already passed the point where something was observed.  For exemplary leadership, by the time the people in the back of the train see it, it’s too late to do anything different.  Most management in the world, whether it’s a small company like a private restaurant, or a large company, or a government, functions from the back of the train because that’s where it’s safest, and people generally don’t like danger.  That is why good leadership, let alone outstanding leadership, is so rare in any industry.  It takes a lot of guts to run things from the front of the train. 

When people say they are under new management, they are trying to tell their customers that things are different and that they’ll get more responsive service from the organization, and they allude to this leadership quality.  As if to say that their management is new, and therefore the opportunity to be better is in the future.  But to be honest, the ownership is usually just throwing darts in the dark, and they don’t know the difference between good leadership and bad, because they are too afraid of the cutting edge at the front of the train to make decisions there.  It’s scary at the front, and most people in the world, more than 99% of them, would rather be in the back of the train.  I have literally dealt with consultants at every level who proclaim to know a lot about these things, who are in that consulting business because they are afraid of life at the front of the train, where all the scary stuff happens.  They don’t want scary things in their lives, so they do what many people do who aren’t very good at life: they teach.  Nothing is safer than putting the train on pause and studying its contents while it’s not moving, in a classroom environment where there are no dangers of driving through day-to-day life.  And this isn’t some fluke opinion; it’s actually a flaw in the way we teach generations of people in a classroom environment, and why those who survive the schools of hard knocks are actually better prepared for authentic leadership.  Leadership isn’t taught as much as it is learned in the challenging places that the world presents. 

The problem with all the COVID protocols and the obsession with moving the world into an administrative state management condition, where people could sit in their living rooms in their pajamas and tell others things from a Teams call, was absurdly stupid.  Yet, that is why so many companies are now struggling to meet customer demands.  The marketplace did not go the way it was expected to, and virtually everyone is struggling to catch up.  Many organizations are seeking new management to replace the old one, and they are posting signs to let their customers know that they are trying to find effective leadership, even if the kind of leadership they are looking for is actually one of the rarest commodities in the world.  Good leadership thrives at the front of the train while most of the world desires to hide in the back.  They might make a lot of noise back there and bark out commands, but on a fast-moving train, by the time they see them, the train has already moved well beyond the point of decision-making.  And that is the core of the problem; it takes courage to run things from the front of the train.  And our schools don’t and can’t teach courage.  They teach people to be in the back of the train, where the bootlickers and con artists reside. They are that way because they lack courage and have to fake it to make it.  They learn to appease the teacher in a static classroom, and once in the world, they do the same from the back of the train.  And that is why most management in the world is ineffective.  But then we marvel when we see individuals who have great success at almost everything they do.  This is why it’s called “Metaphysics of Quality” by Robert Pirsig, and it’s one of the most outstanding books on the subject of business that has ever been written or thought about.  I’ve read numerous books on business, including some of the most popular titles on Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.  All that means nothing if your organization doesn’t have a leader at the front of the train.  And you can put all the signs out about new leadership, but it doesn’t matter if all that leadership is where most leadership is in the world today – at the back of the train, hiding, where it’s safe.  Leaders need to love danger and to make decisions unafraid as they face it moment by moment.  That is the difference between success and failure.

Rich Hoffman

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

It’s All About Family: Why Michael Ryan is Right for Butler County Commissioner

It was a successful fundraiser for Michael Ryan on the West Side of Hamilton, Ohio, where he has served as a vice mayor for several years.  Ryan is running for Butler County Commissioner, so a fundraiser was held at the Shooter’s Event Center, which was very well attended and well represented among donors, showing a great early sign for his campaign.  Under normal conditions, a person like Michael Ryan would be an easy one to vote for.  However, this campaign represents a significant shift in direction for the Republican Party, as two incumbent candidates are running for the same position.  Cindy Carpenter is already a commissioner, and it’s her seat that is up for election.  There are some serious issues with her that we’ll address specifically.  But as to who is best for this commissioner seat, Michael Ryan is the easy favorite.  Then there is the latecomer to the race, Roger Reynolds, whom I have supported a lot in the past.  For him, this is the wrong seat at the wrong time for a lot of reasons.  Things I’d rather not discuss, but he put himself out there for a public seat, so it’s going to get uncomfortable.  As for the Michael Ryan fundraiser and why he is the best pick for the seat, as well as the future of the Butler County Republican Party being best represented by him, there is no question.  The task will be to show the average voter the differences between those three Republicans in name.  It really comes down to how we define what the “Grand Old Party” is, and I would say its economic viability as best represented by the MAGA movement and political figures like J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and locally, Michael Ryan.  They are all around the same age, and the young Republicans, who were well represented at Michael’s event, are looking toward the next generation.  Not the over-50 crowd.  Many people are seeking Republicans for a fresh start, and that is why Michael Ryan is the best candidate for consideration.

Lots of great options on High Street in Hamilton, Ohio

As I met Michael’s parents and his wife Amanda’s, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern in the kind of politician I most support, in virtually all cases.  They are good families with working relationships with their spouses.  One thing that really stands out about Michael is that his wife, Amanda, is very engaging, and they make a strong political couple, working together as a team to meet the needs of a political office.  For instance, there is a lot that goes into a political job that goes well beyond the function of doing the job itself.  Being a representative means talking to a lot of people all the time, and it is best when there is a supportive spouse to help with that task as a team.  And Amanda fits right into that role very well.  However, what’s also noticeable is that they both have very supportive and intact parents who are deeply involved in the process.  That’s great when it comes to Michael and Amanda, but it’s something I notice among all the political people I support.  They all have strong families that help them in the background, and for me, that is the first ingredient for success in a political position.  How can you offer yourself as a manager of the public trust if you can’t work with the trust within a family unit?  That is certainly the case with George and Debbie Lang, a compelling political couple who are supporting Michael Ryan’s campaign very early in the process.  George was supposed to attend the fundraiser, but was held up in Columbus and was running late. 

There were other notable couples present as well. Mark Welch has been very supportive, as a West Chester Trustee.  And Nancy Nix, who has a great relationship with her husband, Bob, ended up covering for George’s absence.  But what they all have in common, which I think a lot of, is that they have functional relationships with their spouses, which I would say is the foundation of any political office.  If you can’t work well together with your spouse, how can you work together with other people in the party, or the community as a whole?  Even more than that, I had a chance to talk to the Butler County Young Republicans, who were there to support Michael from Miami University, all dressed up in suits and ties. All of them were inclined toward that kind of life, including a healthy marriage, good personal decisions, and taking responsibility for themselves. Ben Nguyen, a very young man running for the Lakota school board, was there to support Michael Ryan as one of those young Republicans. He represents the new generation of hopeful people joining the Republican Party, which is very family-oriented. I am very encouraged by meeting them; they are part of the party that has emerged from Charlie Kirk’s efforts at Turning Point USA.  Gone are the days when the public would support scandalous figures who used a powerful political office to nurture sexual affairs and financial despondency by abusing the public trust.  No, these were all people who expect the best from those running for public office, and they are being judged on how well they handle their affairs, starting at home.

Downtown Hamilton is Thriving These Days

And whether it’s fair or not, for people to know what a good family is, it starts with having a good family, so it’s no surprise that Michael and Amanda Ryan both had their parents at this event, and they were very engaging.  They actually reminded me of a younger version of George and Debbie Lang, in terms of a couple who work well together.  When you deal with the public, you really need a good partner in life to help keep everything sorted out. Typically, that’s what I look for when supporting a political person: how well they maintain a relationship with their spouse.  If they are bouncing around between girlfriends or boyfriends and wearing gold rings on their pinky fingers, I likely won’t be endorsing them because, in my experience, those types of people don’t fare well in politics.  And ultimately, the measure of a good office holder is in what they have done, and for Michael, because he has a happy home life, that has translated into being an outstanding city council member who has helped build a good team that has brought excellent economic value to a city that has needed it.  Hamilton, Ohio, is on the uptick economically largely because Michael Ryan has been very effective at attracting investment interest to the town, and it all starts with being a good person who doesn’t get swept away by the tides of influence that often accompany such activity.  Having a good spouse to help keep everything grounded is a key to being successful when those pressures are applied.  And they are usually the difference between success and failure.  And upon meeting the family of Michael Ryan, it becomes obvious very quickly that the headlines that emerge from his public life will lean in the positive direction, rather than the negative, as people who lean into an office to fill a void inside them often do.  In my experience, to run a successful public office, you need a good private life with a supportive spouse as a partner.  And Michael Ryan certainly has that.

Rich Hoffman

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

The FBI Has Been Caught Manipulating the J6 Protests: Hiding crime behind more crime

So it’s no longer speculation, the FBI had 274 plainclothes operators in the crowd for the J6 attack on the Capitol, as we have long suspected.  And they intended to provoke an angry crowd into doing something that would capture the attention of the general public.  So if these FBI agents were not at the J6 speech, where Trump was encouraging people to hold strong while one of the most significant crimes in the world was taking place, election fraud on a mass government scale, that same government placed employees in that crowd with the intention of causing trouble that would otherwise conceal the crime of election fraud.  On the day that the certification process took place, January 6th, 2021, the FBI operated to stir up the crowd and create a cover story that was designed to hide election fraud, which is why people were so upset in the first place.  They were watching a government steal away their pick for president right out of the White House.  And we’ve seen how this government operates, we’ve seen several other assassination attempts against Trump since then, numerous court cases, and we’ve seen the assassination of Charlie Kirk on a college campus.  And there are all kinds of strange activities around these acts of violence that are part of a general enforcement policy at the FBI.  That they were caught over January 6th, where lots of people were harmed and their rights were violated horribly, in the J6 prisoners, who were only let out of jail because Trump won re-election, we can’t forget what we saw, nor ignore the amount of bad behavior we have witnessed here.   We can only discuss it now because Trump was so resilient that he outlasted the attempts against him, thanks to his substantial financial resources. Most people with that kind of wealth tend not to fight as hard for anything.  However, we now have the proof we needed.  The question is, what do we do with it? 

With all the recent shooters, we see the same kind of operation as we saw on January 6th, 2021, especially the Charlie Kirk assassination.  The killer, Tyler Robinson, was part of a discontent gamer community filled with transsexual actions and furries.  And like the J6 crowd, we were already upset at several things.  Breathing on a fire of discontent and pushing them to commit a crime is something that happens too often and appears to have a direct connection to the FBI and how they have learned to operate.  They are not what they are supposed to be, which is an investigative body.   We even have a MAGA guy in Kash Patel running the FBI, but these career types know the game and clearly plan to outlast their bosses.  And they intend to get away with everything, because essentially, they control the courts and the entire legal process.  As long as they don’t have their hands directly on the murder weapons, they think they can get away with things.  Even if they get caught, as they did with J6 in putting people in the crowd to encourage them to storm the Capitol and cause trouble, trouble that would hide the government’s crime of election fraud, they expect to get away with it.  With Tyler Robinson, we know he was the killer.  But there is a lot of strange behavior that points to circumstances where a disconnected kid felt he needed to throw his life away to kill a political figure that the FBI didn’t like.  Where did Tyler Robinson get the idea to kill Charlie Kirk with his grandfather’s gun? 

In the case of the Charlie Kirk shooting, it was a Discord chat room that the gaming community was using to discuss their opinions.  And when the people who routinely participated in that chat room are discussed in investigations into why Tyler Robinson did what he did, the story cools off really fast, just like the J6 prisoners.  And what’s alarming about that is that this appears not to be unique, but is a way to manage society.  When the FBI, as a group of career administrators, wants to shape the world to their liking, they use their grip on power to push other people into violence that serves their cause, while they hide in the background.  And they even got caught in this case, hiding critical information from their boss, who had to drag it out of them.  Ultimately, the indictment of James Comey, the former FBI Director, tells the whole story.  He has been charged with crimes, the same kind of crimes that Peter Navarro was prosecuted for, but the FBI has yet to pick him up and arrest him because he’s one of their own.  I’ve seen this kind of thing before in the various teachers’ unions that hide the bad behavior of teachers from the public.  For the FBI, numerous government unions operate independently, operating as their own kind of government without oversight. Among these, the FBI Agents Association exists as a kind of brotherhood that transcends the scope of government oversight and administrative management.  And as their actions have revealed, they see themselves as a fourth branch of government that rules through fear and their ability to manipulate the conditions of law and order from the shadows.  We have been suspicious of them for years, wondering whether they could be trusted with that kind of power.  But now, we know the truth, and the J6 incident was so extreme and involved so many people that they got caught. 

But if we hadn’t won that last election by putting Trump back in the White House with overwhelming support, and if he hadn’t offered himself in the very tenacious way that he did, we wouldn’t know any of this.  The FBI would have gotten away with literal murder, and the investigation would have gone cold a long time ago, just as it has with the inquiry into Charlie Kirk’s murder.  There are still all kinds of things wrong with the kid who tried to kill President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.  The crimes are happening so quickly that before the evidence of the previous crime cools, another one occurs, which is part of the cover-up.  That is part of the problem.  And when the FBI is the lead agency in all investigations, they can clearly avoid investigating themselves.  We have a real problem here that defies oversight, and most of the agents involved value their brotherhood to each other and the power they have been given through manipulation more than in the actual election process of maintaining administrative oversight through a democratic process of maintenance through elections.  They can rig elections and murder people who get in their way, and nobody will do anything about it.  And even if challengers to their order do get into office, such as Trump has, and Kash Patel actually runs their efforts, they will ignore them and work against them, waiting out their term in office as career politicians.  They are a lot more loyal to their brotherhood in the FBI Agents Association than they are to the people’s pick for president who sits in the White House.  And will they abuse their power over law and order to conduct crimes if they can get away with it?  Yes, they have been caught doing so, and their disrespect for the human race outside of their association is grotesquely apparent.  They are guilty of much worse than just murder and election fraud.  And it forces us to deal with them accordingly. 

Rich Hoffman

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

What Women Hate The Most: Nobody wants to see a slug too lazy to work

There is a recent survey where women have indicated that the periods where they experience the most stress are when their men, the people they pick to share a life with, raise a family, and build something, are lying on the couch doing nothing but watching TV or playing video games.  Now I say all this after years of experience in employing people, many thousands of them, and after raising two daughters and being married for 38 years to the same woman.  What I’m going to say is politically incorrect in lots of ways, but it’s the result of terrible things that we have taught our society when we tried to implement feminism into a biological experiment that has essentially destroyed people at a very foundational level.  We have a laziness problem, and it came from people who wanted to socially re-engineer society by attacking men and toxic masculinity, to empower women to play a larger role in the workplace, and in spending less time raising families, because the idea of a family was under attack by radical leftist ideas.  So most of what men have come to believe about what they should be doing in the world has come from people trying to destroy them, purposefully by rotting their minds with social fashions that were never healthy for them or society.  But that doesn’t change the biology of people, where women expect a man to be strong and to take care of them so they can raise a nice family.  No matter what society has said about the subject, when a woman sees a man lying on the couch not doing anything, it brings her great stress.  It doesn’t matter who the woman is; it just doesn’t sit well with them because it makes it evident to the woman that her man is useless. 

Oh, the man might be good at something here and there, but if he won’t work, it makes him pretty much a slug, a detriment to the creation of the family.  And women were told by that same society that they could replace all those emotions with a career of their own and their own paycheck.  And that the public schools would teach their children everything they needed to know, so they shouldn’t worry about any of it.  But for women, there is always something going on, a bill that needs to be paid, oil that needs to be changed, grass that needs to be cut.  The grim reality for a woman when she sees that her man wants to sleep on the couch all the time without doing the work it takes to build a family is that she is doomed to a life of misery.  Once a woman trades sexual favors to a man to launch a family, which all women experience, like trout returning to the spring of their birth, if a woman fails to get a guy in her life who will help her build a family, the disappointment starts to really eat away at her, and everything starts to fall apart.  She may raise her kids in a somewhat reasonable way, but what she is left with in the aftermath is major disappointment and resentment.  Kids don’t stay young very long.  What is a couple supposed to do together once they have come together and raised kids?  Especially if the men are lying around sleeping while there is a lot of work to be done?  Chances are their marriage will end, or the woman will grow very resentful and start hating the man for all the disappointments he brought her during that key time in her life.  If a family isn’t working together towards a common goal, everything falls apart. 

I’m not joking when I talk about AI being more reliable than people.  I love the idea of being productive with AI because, based on my experience, people are often unreliable.  They have too much emotional baggage from the numerous decisions they’ve made over the years, which have led to personal destruction.  As I have watched many people grow up and go through this cycle, I have always thought of it as an artificial problem created by social values that were all wrong.  A lot of men were taught that hard work led to heart attacks and an unhealthy life.  So they think that eating potato chips all day while earning new merits in a video game environment will satisfy them.  All it really does is entertain them until the next revision comes out and they have to start all over again.  The idea of buying a house, keeping the cars running, and caring for their children with strong emotional foundations is someone else’s problem, doesn’t excite them as it should.  Someone will eventually pick up the slack.  They have been taught that the excuse for their lack of work is to maintain stress so they don’t die from being overworked.  But in that process, their wives secretly hope they’ll die and free them of the misery and embarrassment that so many men these days bring to their marriages.  People have been taught that hard work is bad for them, and that not working at a job and spending their leisure time trying to do less work is somehow beneficial.  And it is at that source that all the problems start.  I’m thrilled that we’re at a time when AI can begin to do what many young men won’t do: work in a productive environment. 

I’ve always worked a lot, at least 60 to 80 hours a week.  And I fix all kinds of things, all the time.  Growing up, most of the people I knew were farmers, who always worked hard.  And when people worked hard, they were happier people.  And that is certainly true of me, I’m a happy person.  What makes me unhappy is witnessing laziness, people who work hard to avoid working hard.  My experience suggests that they are bringing misery upon themselves in a rebellion against logic.  And they aren’t even curious about the poison they have been given through their learning, from people obviously trying to sink America by destroying its workforce.  After World War II, America demonstrated its industrial capacity through the hard work of its free people. Many people around the world then sought to undermine the American work ethic for various malicious reasons.  And as we look around today, they have been all too successful.  Many men, young and old, are wasting their lives lying around doing nothing, then complaining when they are expected to pull their own weight.   And the women who match up with them are miserable, because they only get a few short years in their lives to get it right, when their flowers bloom, and they can pick whoever they want in the world through sexuality, to build a family with.  And if they get a dud, it brings misery to them for the rest of their life.  They might raise their families and make the best of things.  However, nothing makes them more stressed out than learning that their men don’t want to work while the bills pile up and the family’s needs are not being met.  And the young girls turn into bitter women as their windows close.  Sure, they could get a divorce, but for what purpose?  To find a harder-working man?  There aren’t many out there; chances are, the next one will be a dud too.  And as women raise their families and are stuck with an uninteresting slug sleeping on the couch every day and won’t keep the cars running, or the bills paid, women slowly die inside with the grim reality that it’s all over way too fast.  And if only hard work had been at the core of their marriage, life would have been a lot better for everyone.  Life is about hard work, and the more you put into it, the happier you will be.  The definition of a happy life never comes from leisure.  We are meant to work, and to work a lot.  The last thing a woman wants in her life is a slug that is like another child she has to feed and change all the time, who doesn’t help her have a happy life because he is too lazy to work.  The woman wants to work to raise her family, and if he is just another parasite in her life, taking from her instead of her having to give everything to the creation of a family, of course, she’s not going to be very happy when he’s sleeping on the couch.

Rich Hoffman

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

We Are Not Better Together: The illusion of leadership

Let’s clear some things up right now, because I’m tired of hearing the term.  We are not better together.  More minds do not make something better.  These are dumb, communist ideas by outside influencers who have tried over time to slide dumb ideas about how society should be structured under the door and have left us with a lot of garbage like that term to muddle through.  I receive numerous emails from people, and someone sent me one of those LinkedIn links to a statement from a consultant group about leadership, as if to refute my position on the matter. I had to give that person a healthy dose of reality.   More is not always better.  More administrative minds do not improve processes. Instead, you often get the opposite; usually, you end up with more of a mess than any improvement.  If you want to improve something, identify your leader and then listen to them.  But don’t think that a bunch of useless people meandering through life can come together and improve something.  It never works.  The concept of teamwork has been grossly misused to incorporate elements of Marxism over the years through our public education system, and it was always a flawed idea. I think the reason for this was best captured in books like Robert Persig’s ideas on the Metaphysics of Quality.  His metaphor of people who sit in the back of a moving train is a particularly apt one that accurately reflects the truth in this matter.  Good leaders are at the front of the train where things can be seen as they are happening.  But most of the world sits in the back, where it’s safe, and analyzes data that has already passed.  It can be helpful information, but that’s not leadership.  And the communist societies of the world have tried to sell cowardice that way to make the timid feel like they were equal to good leaders.  And they are not. 

That is where most consultants get things wrong, and LinkedIn is full of those types of people who attend all the business seminars and listen to all that “team building” nonsense, such as the idea that no one person has all the answers and that more minds are better than just one.  What causes trouble in cultures that need leadership is the presence of committees, where administrative types try to lead an organization from the back of the train, rather than from the front, where they belong.  And often up front, where things are scary and coming fast, most people don’t have the guts to live there.  They always pick where it’s safe and build their 9-to-5 lives around the value of analysis, often from the caboose of a train, complete with lots of spreadsheets and graphs, but without the voice of leadership to guide the timid toward greatness.  Good leaders are listened to, not debated with.  So, any culture that wants to succeed needs to hear more than hold hands in the back of the train while the world outside moves quickly.  Leadership is not safe; it’s usually hazardous, and it requires a lot of toughness that most people never develop in their lives.  That doesn’t make those people useless.  However, they are unable to lead because they never developed the stomach for the rigors of the leadership task.  They have come up with all kinds of excuses why failure is best elevated in group consensus rather than the responsibility of leadership at the front of the train, where things are much more dangerous.

I’ve heard every excuse in the book as to why most people prefer the back of the train as opposed to where leadership lives, at the front.  They say, people, say dumb things like, “I don’t want the stress and want to avoid a heart attack.”  Or they will point to the need for time to decompress after work.  All they are doing is telling the world that they aren’t tough enough to be a leader of an organization and that they prefer the back of the train, where things are safe, and where they can share the experience with others holding hands for safety and security.  And it’s those types of people who want to believe that more is better and that no one mind is better than a collective whole.  This is the kind of flawed thinking that assumes the United Nations is better as a one-world government than the individual results of leadership that come from the United States, for instance.  You don’t see that the United Nations has accomplished much over the years to bring the kind of peace it has always intended.  It takes a strong individual country like the United States to provide that leadership.  And that same mentality could be applied to every organization; if a strong leader isn’t leading it, it is, to some degree, inefficient and destructive.  The only real way to pull off the illusion that more is better is to stop the train, which is impossible in day-to-day life.  But for the fantasy to work, the trains of life can’t be moving so that all those in the back can analyze data and make decisions in time to do something about it, which is unrealistic.  Trains are constantly moving, and they require sharp, focused minds to be at the front of the train, leading everyone at the cutting edge. 

I’m usually nice to people who send me stupid ideas like this one, the LinkedIn warriors who buy into all the corporate placations created by consultants who are leeching off the profitability of the few.  Consultants like teachers do what they do not because they are good or the best in their field.  Occasionally, you find an exception, but not very often, certainly not often enough to alter the statistical analysis.  What you get are people who lack the courage to lead an organization and try to sell companies on a scam that more analysis from the back of the train will help a struggling company.  However, as soon as the consultant leaves with their misguided ideas of ‘better together,’ the organization falls back into its previous state because it failed to identify its leaders and place them in the correct positions to succeed.  And success is usually found by shutting up and listening to a leader, not in building consensus with a bunch of people in the back of the fast-moving train who are too timid to do what it takes to lead people.  To conceal their timidity from the world, they have adopted these misguided notions about leadership, none of which are accurate.  And they have made a mess out of the world at every level.  So, if you really want to fix anything, figure out who you are: either a back-of-the-train analysis cruncher who likes things safe and secure, or a daring, cutting-edge type who will go it alone and make decisions where they matter, and tell people behind them what to do and when to do it.  If you find a good leader, you’ll find a successful organization.  However, once that leader is gone, the people are left without direction and powerless to improve their lives, and this is the case in almost every circumstance.  We are not better together.  We are better when those people shut up, and listen to the leader among them.  And then, and only then, does everything get better for everyone.

Rich Hoffman

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

Too Much Compliance Will Destroy Your Business: When they put a gun to your head, don’t follow their rules

One of the most foolish things anyone can be is too compliant.  It’s one thing to follow the rules, as everyone agrees to them.  However, compliance for its own sake is a misguided approach.  People should question reality more, and they certainly should question the kind of people who make the rules by considering the cost of those rules.  Many individuals in the world create rules that primarily benefit themselves and rely on a group of people who are too compliant to question those rules, thereby fueling a great deal of evil in the world.  I interact with many people in high-compliance industries, so what I’m talking about is based on a lot of personal observation that is a serious impediment to productive enterprise, and it’s such a problem that it deserves a topic of its own.  Something that doesn’t get dealt with nearly enough.  When a robber holds a gun to your head and says, “stick ’em up.”  And then proceeds to rob you of everything you’re worth, leaving you entirely at the mercy of the villain; that’s a bad thing.  Then, once the robber has robbed you and you have complied with everything they said, hoping that they would then reward you by letting you live another day, everything you gave up would be expected to pay that price.  But the robber shoots you in the head anyway.  We could point to many times in history where this kind of thing happens, nice, compliant people end up dead and thrown away like dogs, just because they did what they were told to do by people making rules intentionally meant to get control over masses of people for malicious purposes.  And as much as it’s uncomfortable to hear, many of the rules we have in society were made by people with bad intentions. 

So in high-compliance industries, like finance or the legal profession, doing what you’re told to do is a bad idea.  Because the rules never favor the person with a gun to their head.  So if you do what they ask you to do, don’t be surprised when they shoot you after they’ve robbed you blind.  As I have said many times and have made it quite clear in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, the rules in the world are often made by the losers so that they can have a world that makes them competitive to their betters, people who actually know what’s going on.  Many people in the world are not very intelligent, and they want to feel equal to those who are exceptionally skilled. To achieve this, they often enter professions that involve creating rules, thereby feeling more equitable.  And if allowed, which they have been in America to far too great an extent, they will ruin society as a whole.  And people, most people are too lazy to question the rules that are made for them, so they fall on the crutch of compliance to justify their laziness.  “I was just doing as I was told,” as if to justify evil with the merit of following directions.  This isn’t the kind of rule following that would make it logical not to go out and kill people, or not to speed down a sidewalk with a motorcycle that is crowded with people as a reckless operation.  This is an overly litigious society full of know-nothings who hide their cowardness behind too many rules and regulations to the point of personal destruction that they use to feed off the very few in life who actually do anything. 

The way to win against those who count on compliance to rule the world is to do what they don’t expect you to do.  Do not let the hoop setters dictate the battlefield, as they intend to impress observers by setting them on fire as you jump through them.  Do not be compliant with the rules that those types of people make, and allow them to rule over you with the fake value of compliance.  Because once the show is done, they will do away with you, as people have always done through history, and that is, they’ll shoot you in the head anyway.  After they’ve taken everything you’re worth.  The people holding a gun to your head are not ever going to be your friends.  They aren’t concerned about your well-being.  You can appease them with niceness and hope to be given a break.  You must reclaim from them what you have given away through compliance.  You need to break the rules they have set up to trap you by being defiant and forcing them out of their comfort zone if you genuinely want to win at life.  You will never win if you follow the directions of those who wish to destroy you.  Playing by the rules that evil people come up with will only lead you to your own destruction, because these are the kind of people who live off the lives of others.  They are ruthless beyond logic, and they exist in the multitudes.  So don’t be a sucker, and certainly don’t be compliant.  To me, being a sucker and being compliant mean the same thing.  Nothing good comes from it, and your eventual destruction is all those rule makers really care about. 

Obviously, I’m speaking to a lot of people here.  I’m thinking of several things at once that are equally applicable, involving many hundreds of people directly and many thousands indirectly. I take opportunities like this to speak to them all at once.  And when you take the gun out of the hands of the bad guys and turn it on them to pull the trigger ruthlessly, everyone will understand why.  But as a general practice, it’s worth pointing out that you can’t make America Great Again if those who aren’t very great are making rules that punish good people from doing good things in the world.  If bad people are making the rules, we will have a bad society.  We enjoy Trump in the White House because he understands how to turn these rules against the perpetrators, and he has made a lot of money over the years by exploiting the systems that bad people have created against them, which is what everyone should be doing.  Don’t follow the rules that bad people have made.  Do not be compliant with fools.  The world needs more good people to push back against stupidity.  And that is far more valuable than following directions when someone puts a gun to your head.  Remove that gun before they get too comfortable, and turn it back on them.  And use that gun to save yourself, and the goodness you have in you to make the world better.  The world can always lose a few more parasites, and most of the rule makers in the world are nothing more.  We’d all be better off with fewer of them.  So, don’t feel bad about taking their evil intentions and turning them against them.  And be ruthless in the process.  They deserve it.  They asked for it.  And for God’s sake, don’t listen to their cries for mercy.  Destroy them, because that’s what is best for the world. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Truth Kamala Harris and All Democrats, Can’t Handle: In ‘107 Days,’ every day only eroded support

There is more that has been exposed than just the rise of the MAGA movement against a backdrop of authority figure Marxism.  And that was a theme that kept coming to me as I read Kamala Harris’s new book, 107 Days.  Yes, it is garbage, but I’ll read anything, just as I’ll listen to just about anybody, so I can make reasonable conclusions about things, even if it’s from people I don’t like or agree with on much of everything.  And her book is complete with the worst kind of fiction; it’s presented as a fact when the actual content is blisteringly fantastical in its scope.  And this is true of everything from the radical political left, where they think something and can make it so with the power of their observing it.  Such as deciding one day that a man is a woman.  That anal sex is just as natural as vaginal intercourse, that the rest of the world is equal, when in reality, they struggle to make bubble gum wrappers.  And that all facts and figures can be manipulated until reality is forced to agree with them at the point of mass authority rule over a docile and complicit society that has never grown up and away from their parents, and wants an overwhelming government power to rule over their perpetual insecurities. What has fallen apart most devastatingly for the Marxist left, for which the world’s socialist and communist governments have emerged to various degrees, is the sting of reality.  And that is what Kamala’s book most clearly conveys: the degree to which they have lied to their own faces, denying the nature of reality itself, which they are at war with.  The political left despises the truth about the world, and they have been at odds with it; if there is anything that is most devastating to their movement, it’s that all their fantasies have fallen apart under the scrutiny of reality. 

So let’s revisit this notion that I talked about extensively at that time, and which is the essential theme of Kamala Harris’s book, which she has said while on her media tour, giving the whole thing away under press questioning, there is nothing Kamala could have done with more time to run that could have helped her.  Her entirely fictional premise was that if only she could have run a regular campaign, she could have performed better in the 2024 election.  She could not have done better than she did; in fact, for every day she was in the presidential race, she bled support.  She didn’t gain it.  The more people heard from Kamala Harris, the less they liked her.  She wouldn’t have been able to build any support; her campaign was a complete fabrication created by people who thought they controlled the entire narrative and could autopilot her into office, just as they had been running Joe Biden’s campaign all along.  Kamala was not very likable; she came across as someone who had slept her way to the top, and people didn’t like her.  Her best support was the day she announced she was running, once Joe Biden had been pushed out.  Before many people heard her talk, there were a certain number of not very well-informed people who would vote for her because she was a woman of color, and nothing else.  Her most popular day in the campaign was the first day.  On day 107, as the book attempts to erase, her support had eroded as more people heard her talk and got to know her a bit.  The more she opened her mouth, the less people liked her. 

Kamala Harris, in her book, repeatedly mentioned that the 2024 election was the closest in history, which is another example of Democrats seeking something to rally behind.  Trump won 312 electoral votes to Kamala’s 226.  Most of the states where Harris won were states with very loose election laws, such as those allowing mail-in ballots and not requiring voters to show ID at the polling booth.  So when we talk about Trump having a landslide, 312 is a pretty significant number these days, given that things are so heavily leveraged to favor Democrats, at least until President Trump came along.  That’s also why Democrats want to get rid of the Electoral College so they can mass manipulate the way we count votes so that a few states with loose laws can win.  As I say all the time, if Democrats don’t cheat, they can’t win, because they are the seriously minority party in America, and they have only kept things close through election fraud.  In the popular vote, Trump had 77,302,580 million votes to Kamala’s 75,017,613.  That is out of 155,238,302 total voters, which is a very high number.  But lets just call it as they say it is, out of all the voters that there are in America, with a population of 342,034,432 million including all the people who are under 18 and can’t yet vote, where would Democrats close that gap of the 2 million that they fell short on, assuming you had a clean election with no election fraud whatsoever?  And that is the real problem that planners faced when making the decision to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris.  They had that plan all along, and they used that June debate with Trump to set up the real story.  It was a desperation shot to put in a woman at the last minute and hope that the math worked in their favor.  But they knew the truth all along.

In 2020, Trump received 74,216,154 votes, just three million fewer than his 2024 total, which was 77,223,615, while Joe Biden received 81,268,924.  Where were all those voters in the 2020 election?  The answer is, of course, that roughly 10 million, likely more, of the votes for Democrats were produced illegally by mail-in ballots cast under the new Covid rules, and the election was rigged entirely from the top down.  The FBI knew it because they assisted with the effort at the Capitol Building on January 6th, when people arrived extremely angry that Trump was being pushed out of office.  The FBI planted over 274 people into the audience to provoke them into violence so that the narrative of the election fraud could shift to some made-up insurrection and put people on their heels to the massive reality that the election had been stolen.  And we can prove it because Democrats were caught not being able to duplicate the numbers of the 2020 election when the rules had returned to normal in 2024.  And if states that voted for Kamala over Trump had to play by more rigorous rules, with voter ID and much more restricted mail-in balloting, they would have lost even more voters than they actually did, which is likely overstated by more than 5 million votes.  Because there aren’t that many people dumb enough to vote for Democrats, and they know it.  The illusion they have lived with through election fraud and a media that sold their socialist fantasy as a reality has been eradicated from the public scene, and they have no means of stopping that process.  And Kamala’s book only spells it out grotesquely for them, rather than changing the nature of reality in the way they wish it would be.  More time for Kamala Harris would have eroded her numbers even more.  But they couldn’t afford to have Joe Biden run again and come nowhere close to his original 81 million with a performance 10 million less.  People would have been outraged by the obviousness of it all.  So their best shot, Democrats, of concealing the election fraud of 2020 was to hope that Kamala would change the numbers because she was a woman and because she was a person of color, which gave her a few throwaway votes.  But the more people heard from her, the less they liked her, and there was nothing she could have done to change that.  And that is the truth of all future elections. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Arrest of James Comey: Bring a sword, don’t turn the other cheek

I feel like spiking the football on the James Comey indictment and arrest that occurred just shy of his statute of limitations expiring after five years, at the end of September 2025.  His crimes are actually far more extensive than the obstruction of justice and lying to Congress that they put his way.  And once again, I think one of the best experiences I have ever had in life was the period I spent as the foreman of a grand jury, so I know very well what kind of cases prosecutors bring forth and how the evidence is presented and discussed.  And how a grand jury handles multiple cases, not just one.  You get a chance to talk to a lot of legal people and see how different prosecutors react to other cases.  So I can understand why there was reluctance to prosecute James Comey.  There is a whole Deep State of career political people who could make life very difficult for future administrations, because in their minds, Trump will come and go.  Many of these individuals believe they will have entire careers in government and will last through many future presidents, so they approach them with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, as if our system of management from the White House were an inconvenience that they sneer at.  And they treat the rest of us the same, as if the power of the Administrative State was far superior to the voters whom they are supposed to serve.  James Comey and the government workers like him think they are superior to the basic intellect of the average American and that they can lie to our faces and not face any punishment for the deceit.  And with James Comey, I called him out a long time ago, in May 2017, just a few months into Trump’s first term, where I was one of the first people in the country to call him a liar.

CNN was looking to dislodge Trump supporters from the new president at the time, so they came to Butler County to speak to a hard-core group of Trump advocates.  We met at a local sports bar and watched live on television, with CNN producers, as Comey testified after Trump fired him from his role as FBI Director.  This was an all-day event, and later that night, we would gather on Anderson Cooper’s show to share our reactions to the testimony.  CNN hoped that Butler County would start to doubt their support for Trump with the horror of firing Comey, who at the time was thought of as America’s squeaky-clean Boy Scout, beyond refute.  But what I said shocked the producers, and they let me know it after the cameras were off and the live feed had concluded.  I said when asked on the air that I thought James Comey was more like Eliot Ness from the famous Al Capone mob cases in Chicago.  But what he turned out to be was more like Ian Fleming, the James Bond novelist.  And that the FBI Director was more inclined to fiction, which I thought was a nice way of saying that he was a liar.   Well, at that time, that was a shocking statement, and that was one of the last television interviews that I ever did.  Before that, I appeared frequently on radio and television; producers would seek my opinion on various topics, and I would offer it.  But after that, things changed dramatically.  I didn’t care because my own media efforts were much more potent.  I found it much more rewarding to express my thoughts than to try to fit into a producer’s narrative.  However, that fracture indeed occurred that night after the CNN segment.

That was 8 years ago, and the information was self-evident.  It took that long to reach justice in indicting James Comey.  And like most deceitful people who get caught in these terrible scandals, he sought mass collectivism to shield himself from personal judgment.  To show what a manipulative loser he really is before this indictment, which he knew was coming, he put out a video attempting to get support from Taylor Swift’s audience, hoping to manipulate pop culture soothsayers to his side, and to pit them against Trump.  This is actually a much more dangerous trait that indicates a deeper problem at the FBI and how they handle cases in a mass society.  We’ll talk about the way the FBI planted 274 agents into the J6 crowd to accelerate activism and cause trouble.  The FBI has been picking winners and losers for a long time, grossly abusing its authority in multiple cases.  Which is why they thought they’d get away with this Russian story on driving Trump out of office.  So yes, I saw it well in advance and I said so on national television, and I turned out to be right about everything, even when the world took a hard turn toward regime suppression just a few years later in 2020 with Covid and election fraud to throw Trump out of office.  It seemed that the bad guys truly had the kind of control that James Comey thought shielded them from reality.  And that he and the FBI could abuse their power to maintain a political order that they thought was more appropriate, a Taylor Swift kind of progressivism, they were going to impose on us whether we liked it or not.

So this is actually a grave crime, not just an FBI Director who went bad and abused his power to throw out an elected official from the White House that he disagreed with.  This is about a fourth branch of government that thinks it exists beyond voter approval, and this goes back to the killing of JFK and the getting rid of Richard Nixon.  And that’s why it was so absurd to everyone when Trump was elected that he would actually last, let alone serve a second term.  The CNN guys that night told me in the parking lot that we were all living in a bubble with our support of Trump, and that it was a regional issue.  That the rest of the world would disregard us as backward and out of touch.  And it made me so angry that I stopped answering calls from media producers and participating in their shows, because they all pretty much thought the same way as these people at CNN.  And after eight years, they all turned out to be very wrong, and I was right.  And they are all on the way out, and my position is stronger than ever, and it all feels pretty redeeming.  So I’m thrilled to see bad things happening to James Comey, and I want to see even more happen to people who are just as bad as he is.  Those who believe that an unelected form of government should be allowed to hold power need a reality check, and that’s what’s happening now.  It’s not revenge for what these same people did to Trump and many of us who supported him.  Although revenge is very appropriate, I would encourage people not to turn the other cheek, as Jesus said in Matthew 5:39, but to do as Jesus said in Matthew 10:34: ‘Do not bring peace, but a sword.’  We must fight evil wherever we find it, and James Comey was a facilitator of evil, hiding behind a deceitful façade.  And he has to be made an example of, and I am thrilled to see that day arrive.

Rich Hoffman

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

Violent Video Games and Furry Culture: Why so many trans kids are becoming killers

I would probably never know about this “furry” culture of sexual deviants if it weren’t for my grandchildren.  My oldest grandson came across them online while researching video game information.  Furries, as they are called, are people who like to dress up in animal costumes in public.  And that’s important because the killers of Charlie Kirk and his boyfriend were participants in this culture, as they would dress up for conventions and play video games that involved anthropomorphic animals having sex.  And of course, as the furry condition is a tremendous psychological concern for public health, we are dealing with a homosexual relationship with a couple of guys who had built up so much hate for the godly purity of Charlie Kirk that they made a move to murder him on a college campus.  And we are seeing a trend among many killers who are going through the same problem, killing people, as video games have desensitized them to killing without any genuine concept of consequences.  If you have read the text messages between Tyler Robinson and his boyfriend, Lance Twiggs, who is in the process of trying to convert to a woman, you will find that they were bizarrely out of touch.  So much so that people naturally think it was a fake narrative created by the deep state to hide the real killers, because it seems so outlandishly coherent, considering this kid just committed one of the most memorable assassinations the world has ever seen.  So a transsexual element is at play yet again, in addition to the furry culture obsession.  The killer of the Minneapolis church attack was a trans kid, and we know now that the assassination threat against Bret Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court was a man trying to become a girl.  So what’s going on here, and how is the gaming culture producing all these young killers?  It’s a question that goes way beyond free speech. 

I’m far from a person trying to reform the video game industry, but we’re no longer talking about Pac-Man here when we talk about video games and how they try to stand out from a very harsh crowd in the marketplace.  I saw the recent Wolverine preview for an upcoming video game, and it’s really very violent.  I have been alarmed at the level of violence in video games as developers have gotten away with more and more violence; there is no question of a desensitizing effect.  The popular game of Fortnite has more cartoon violence, but Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and now this Disney-owned Marvel game, Wolverine, are very violent, where bones are ripped from the bodies of victims ruthlessly.  It is not a stretch to think that a small percentage of the population that plays these games is being desensitized to violence and is losing touch with reality.  I’ll repeat it, I used to write screenplays and I would submit them to studios and agents in the 1990s.  And I had a lot of mainstream people tell me that my screenplays were too violent for a mainstream audience, which Hollywood was a part of at that time.  They had a responsibility to the public good, that’s what they told me.  They would say to me I was a talented writer, but that resorting to so much violence took away from that talent, and they had a responsibility to the public not to be so graphic.  Then I saw Kill Bill and other Tarantino movies, and I mentioned to them that my work wasn’t any more violent than Tarantino’s.  And there really wasn’t an answer except that they said Tarentino’s violence was more comic book, and not as realistic as mine.  So, a line was being drawn, and watching that preview for Wolverine certainly was the result.  The self-censorship in the entertainment industry was ending about the time I mentioned, and it has devolved into what we see today, which is a very violent entertainment culture. 

For young people without strong father figures or good family structures, video games can distort reality.  And this Tyler Robinson supposedly came from a loving family.  Once he developed a sexual relationship with another young man, and they started crossing lines that society would judge them harshly over, they retreated into the violent world of video games, and we know that because those traits were marked on the shell casings from the gun used to murder Charlie Kirk.  We should be all over these traits because they keep repeating, the mode of operation for many of these killers is that they are involved in transexual practices and spend their free time on violent video games.  And when you spend many hours playing violent video games like Lance Twiggs did, there is a desensitization toward violence that ultimately becomes a psychological problem.   When kids delve into this rabbit hole, a trait emerges from this furry culture: the idea that people can be anything they want if only they wish it.  It’s consistent to make mistakes in a video game, where, if you wish, you can change the avatar of your character into anything you want to be.  And that is without question happening in these trans cases, where people make mistakes their families might look down on them for, and they turn to furries or trans sex to change their public image from mistakes they are ashamed of.  When society has opinions about those mistakes, they retreat into the world of video games, where you can be anything you want, you can change your name, and you can hide from society behind mass violence.  Given the frequency of these occurrences, this is a significant problem. 

This is one of those cases where treacherously evil acts are hiding behind conservative values, such as limited government oversight of the video game industry, allowing market forces to work out the problems.  Or to have a libertarian approach to sexuality.  We are told by those creating vile content that more oversight of these industry norms is intrusive.  Therefore, the attacks are occurring behind the values we advocate as businesspeople and conservative, market-driven economic values.  We’re not supposed to have an opinion on this topic because we support free markets, and in the free market, people want violence.  Just as we are supposed to accept that people want to smoke dope, or do other detrimental behaviors, that do not suit healthy mass psychology.  But that’s the thing, and it goes back to my days of writing scripts, when I was told that something was too violent, the standard was to go back and make the scenes less so, but just as impactful.  Violence is often used to make a point forcefully.  It can be necessary, but it can also serve as a creative crutch to avoid the details of actual artistic integrity.  Just like grotesque sex, violence is lazy in trying to appeal to our animal instincts.  And killing is a primal instinct we all have.  But we are expected to overcome that violent trait for something better.  And when we have artistic expression that feeds the fears and anxieties of a young generation with various insecurities, bad things can and do happen.  This video game culture is feeding them in a very negative way, and some of them are turning to actual killings.  And they are becoming desensitized to the world, especially once they start really embarrassing themselves with sexual practices they could never get their families to accept, and changing their public image like a video game avatar never solves their insecurities.  And before they turn to suicide, they are turning to mass social violence, which video games helped fuel their fantasies.  And we are now seeing a whole generation turning to violence and perversion to hide their mistakes, which they have never learned to deal with.  And it’s a really big problem that won’t go away on its own.

Rich Hoffman

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

Nancy Nix and I Discuss Friendships, Corruption, and the Future of Politics: Why we can’t support Roger Reynolds for Butler County Commisioner

Nancy Nix and I have strong feelings about Roger Reynolds’ decision to run for Butler County Commissioner.  We have been very supportive of Roger after he found himself in a lot of trouble with a court case that accused him of abusing his office.  While we believe what happened to him was not fair, and we have both worked to help him restore his name, we have been surprised by his behavior, especially his attempt to return to public office in the way he is.  Politically speaking, we have moved on to the next generation of consideration and have selected Michael Ryan to be the next Butler County commissioner in a race that presents some challenges.  It involves an incumbent, so support for a challenger needs to be focused and have the backing of the party.  And now that Roger Reynolds, aware of these difficulties, has decided to split the vote even further, making it even harder for Michael Ryan, it has a personal aspect to it that Nancy and I chose to discuss in front of a camera, rather than on the sidelines somewhere.  Nancy had stood by Roger throughout his court case and was really the only friend he had left in county politics.  So when he turned around to sue her for his old job back, after she had stepped in as Butler County Auditor to make sure his old office didn’t fall off the rails, the hurt was quite defined.  We both wanted to see good things happen to Roger, but the way he was going about trying to restore his name was an all-too-grotesque reminder of what had gotten him in trouble to begin with.  Because, in truth, even though we feel that what happened to Roger was unfair, the cause of the problem in the first place was a personality issue that was now manifesting itself, working against the people who had tried to help him the most in the first place, and it was alarming to discuss.

Roger is not a political newcomer.  He understands what he’s doing by joining the commissioner race this late in the process, which is the same kind of self-centered action that got him into trouble in the first place.  Even if you have political enemies within the Republican Party, how you deal with that problem says a lot about the kind of person you are.  And that personality trait is what now has Nancy and me talking as an answer to the many people who think that we should automatically support Roger Reynolds because he decided to run for public office, due to our previous support.  While our opinions about the case didn’t change, the court case process did reveal elements of Roger’s character that give us pause.  I can promise I would never find myself in the situation that Roger Reynolds did.  I have a lot of enemies who are always looking for me to stumble upon something, and that is part of the cutthroat world we live in.  And when it comes to the testimony that was most damaging to Roger Reynolds in his dispute against Sheriff Jones and Ohio Attorney General David Yost, it was his personality that ultimately turned out to be his downfall.  The love of seeing his name in lights after winning a political seat and the feeling of redemption that such an office brings with it.  Obviously, the need to run for public office is mainly for Roger Reynolds, not for the benefit of the seat.  Because Nancy Nix stepped into his old auditor role and has done an excellent job, the job performance in that position actually improved, and the people of Butler County were well served in the exchange. 

And that is where things start getting nasty in this commissioner race.  Nancy and I have been thinking about the next generation, the kind of politicians who have a clean slate and many years ahead of them.  And we endorsed Michael Ryan because of the extended runway he has ahead of him, which doesn’t have court cases and corruption charges attached to it.  And honestly, as cutthroat as politics can be, I doubt Michael Ryan will ever find himself in the kind of trouble that Roger Reynolds did, because he knows how to work with people instead of against them.  One thing that got Roger in trouble, which is why Nancy and I decided to take a pass on him for an endorsement for the commissioner job, is that he seems to like the titles that politics gives him too much.  That certainly came out in the trial.  The testimony that Jenni Logan, the former treasurer of Lakota schools, showed in his trial was embarrassing to me.  As it turned out, I still supported Roger, but with considerably less enthusiasm.  Knowing Jenni as I have for many years, there are elements of that conversation that should have never happened.  I would never find myself in that same trouble, that is for sure.  And that is a sign of a deeper problem that Roger Reynolds needs to work out.  Private sector work is a good place to do that kind of thing.  Getting back into party politics in a helpful way would be another.  However, attempting to emerge with a crash-and-burn strategy to recover name recognition was the kind of bad decision that made the trial, with Jenni Logan’s testimony, so damaging. 

For Nancy, as we discussed on camera, the breaking point came when Roger sued her to regain his old job and decided to turn against her.  It deeply hurt her.  As we were talking, her eyes welled up as she fought back tears.  It took a lot of courage for her in the height of that political situation to go against the logic of self-preservation and to stay by Roger’s side during that complex court case, as a friend.  Because that same arrogance that got him in trouble in the first place was now being turned on her, because the title of a job that doesn’t pay that much was much more important to him.  And now, as she was trying to build a team in politics that actually got along and worked together for the benefit of voters in elected offices, Roger was seeking redemption by tearing it all apart for his own purposes.  And while we can certainly understand wanting to restore a name, we don’t understand burning down positive things as a means to do it, which is why he found himself in court in the first place.  We all have political enemies.  Some of them are vicious.  I have a lot of nasty enemies who would love to bring significant harm to me if they could.  But it’s up to me not to fall into those traps.  Nancy Nix is a very popular and influential character.  She has the Vice President of the United States just a phone call away, as well as Vivek Ramaswamy and many other national figures of great significance.  The chance to make the kind of mistakes that Roger made is frequent, yet she avoids them and maintains a good reputation, despite the desires of her political enemies to see her downfall.  And that begins with being a good person in all phases of life, not in seeking a public position to hide personality flaws at the expense of taxpayers and voters in general.  And that is why Nancy and I had a conversation about why we couldn’t support Roger Reynolds for this Butler County Commissioner position.  There are steps that he could have used and teams he could have been a part of building.  But instead, he went for the kind of slash-and-burn strategy that got him into trouble to begin with, which was a decision he clearly made on his own, regardless of the cost.

Rich Hoffman

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