Category: Tea Party

Where is the Sheriff Jones Press Conference: Just ask your friendly Neighborhood Lakota School Board Member

Matt Miller of Lakota schools has been very open about trying to get rid of political enemies as he did Todd Parnell over woke politics during bad conduct among the student population, then again with Darbi Boddy when she showed up unannounced to take pictures on the walls of CRT teachings reported there. In both cases the Lakota superintendent, Matt Miller took action to force resignations, which was an insult to the people who voted for those representatives. He acted in a way that showed disregard for what damage might occur to those personalities and what it might cost them professionally or personally. That might seem fair in love and war, but when he stumbles on things, he shouldn’t expect people to treat him lightly. After a messy divorce, some of the documents from that divorce have been revealed by his ex-wife, and many within the Lakota school district have now seen what those documents say. He might say she’s crazy, as a lot of men do about their ex-wives as they try to move on after a previous marriage, but from what she has said about him, it’s clear that we need as a community to check it out. At the very least, the superintendent owes the tax-paying public an explanation that explains away what she has been saying with written testimony. I’ve never been a big fan of Matt, and always thought his $200,000 salary was too much and thought a less expensive person could quickly replace him. That evidence reported by his ex-wife was turned over to the police because it went well beyond politics and community gossip but straight to matters that only law enforcement should be dealing with. There were text messages which came from his phone with entire conversations on them where really bad things were talked about. They were screenshots taken by his spouse. The Lakota school board now has possession of much of this material in addition to many more items that are now public record and are available upon request. Could they be fake, perhaps, that was for the police to correspond through an investigation, which they have been conducting? I reminded everyone involved, which was a growing list of angry people made that way by the way Matt Miller dealt with his political enemies, that everyone had the right to due process. He might be innocent, and all this evidence could be made up. But as things have matured, it looked less likely, so it was all turned over to the police and the Lakota school board, and now that school has started, people are frustrated that the investigation was taking too long. Because based on previous actions and the safety of kids considered as the priority, the lack of urgency by all involved has left many questions. Questions, after all, are perfectly logical, especially after what we learned about the Jason Gmoser child pornography case. I personally like Mike Gmoser, the Butler County prosecutor. But his relationship to that case which carried with it life imprisonment, indicates to the community that when we hear of cases that might be unbelievable otherwise, we have an obligation to investigate at a minimum.

And for good reason, after all, there is a six-count indictment against Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds over just a real estate transaction that led Sheriff Jones and the Attorney General, David Yost, to give press conferences about, and that entire case was built on hearsay, where one party said something about another party that was in the public eye. Many people think that the case against Roger Reynolds is entirely political. Still, if that is the level of criteria we are using to measure legal cases, then there is a lot more hearsay involved in the Matt Miller divorce where his ex-wife is saying in writing much, much, much worse. I again would offer that Matt might be innocent, but when there is that much smoke, there is fire to stir it up. Why wasn’t Sheriff Jones standing in front of his emblem at his office and giving a press conference announcing all he and the police were doing to protect kids from the potential danger of the superintendent at Lakota, according to a reliable witness, his ex-wife? Do we just take his word for her credibility? As a community that pays his salary and counts on him to sell Lakota to the world as a safe and reliable place to send children, are we supposed to ignore what she is struggling to say because it’s inconvenient or that we might personally like the superintendent? It would be one thing if the accusations were just spoken, but these were written in text messages, confirmed by police interviews, and court documents from the divorce corresponded with the conversations. So, there is more than enough evidence to take caution on the matter and find out what’s going on. But after several weeks, and school starting with many upset who know about the matter looking for some acknowledgment of justice, the cold reality of a perceived cover-up was beginning to take hold.

The media wasn’t camped outside his home the way they were with Darbi Boddy when Matt Miller served her with trespassing papers on a school she is supposed to be managing as a board member. Matt took it so far that her story made the national news, and it was very embarrassing for her. Wasn’t that a purposeful defamation of her character? She was only a few months on the job after being newly elected, and obviously, Matt Miller was doing to her what he had done previously to Todd Parnell. He might have thought that a good idea, but he made a lot of political enemies by doing it, and shortly after that came a barrage of whispers about his sex life. You would expect a person who makes as much money as he does to show better discretion than all this. He should have never picked fights like this unless he was squeaky clean, and I mean eat off the glass clean. He might have a good explanation for the behavior of his ex-wife, and he should explain it, instead of digging in and avoiding the problem publicly. His lack of direct response to these issues has fed the fears in the people who have seen the text messages. And for those he has made political enemies out of, they are looking for anything to hang him on. And if he gave them the rope, that’s on him.

One of those six indictments against Roger Reynolds is a statement by Jenni Logan, who surprisingly left her job as Lakota’s treasurer on August 1st of, 2022, just a few weeks ago. Given the timing of this information and how it has been brewing for much of the previous school year, we must now look at who knew what and when and how involved they were in all this, if at all. But first, we must allow due process to do its work. The evidence must be validated, and explanations are mandated. For people to regain trust in Lakota as a school system, an investigation is necessary because this erosion of trust has brought us to this place and was created by Lakota management. Trust is earned; it isn’t just given away by title and by the way Matt Miller has actively worked to get rid of political rivals, as he did with Todd Parnell, and has tried to do with great fanfare Darbi Boddy, there was going to be a cost to it. The anger created by him has caused people to talk, and evidence was bound to come forth. But this isn’t just some community gossip. It’s a family member and a network of mad moms provoked by a long history of Matt Miller’s community interaction. At the very least, he has shown really bad judgment. At the worst, that’s for the police investigation to determine. Based on how the Sheriff’s department went after Roger Reynolds over much less evidence, we should expect the police to confirm or deny the results of their investigation. Doing the right thing is sometimes very hard, but we all have an obligation to justice. Otherwise, we will just get a lot more bad behavior in the future. 

I would have preferred to just see what comes from the police investigation, but after the events that occurred on Monday the 22nd of August 2022 some understandings must be met. I watched the school board meeting to see how this issue would be addressed, knowing the contents of the email that was sent to the school board earlier that morning. The same email ended up in all of the media by the afternoon sent by the person who wrote the board her concerns. Yet the reaction by the superintendent was a threat that would open up a whole can of worms with witness testimony and submitted evidence, police interviews–and mostly silence by Lakota generally, except for massive amounts of gossip. What started as a concerned parent reporting what was told to her that was very much a police matter; the public employees don’t get to go on the attack against their boss, the voters of Lakota. Explanations are the burden of the superintendent, it’s his life, his mess, and it’s up to him to explain all this to people for continued employment. The institution of Lakota is not more important than the individual people involved. And as to the superintendent’s reputation, he has to be able to manage all these things as part of his job. He owes us, the taxpayers, a lot of answers. But he doesn’t get to boss around members of the community for things he has himself opened the door to. He is not the victim, he is the responsible party, and the burden of explanation falls on him.

Rich Hoffman

More Conservatives Win School Board Seats in Florida: We need more Darbi Boddy types at Lakota

Just because the conservative experiment at Lakota has not turned out well doesn’t mean it’s a failure across the country. I would say the problems we have at Lakota are natural and part of the transition process. Not the result of failed intentions. When I signed up to help elect a conservative school board at Lakota with a 3 to 2 vote on issues, that, of course, assumed that we were getting conservative candidates. But through the rigors of the day-to-day operations, sometimes people find out they aren’t so conservative. They may have thought they were conservative in the safety of GOP meetings, but when the rubber hits the road, and process bureaucracy starts to take effect, people learn a lot about themselves that they may not have known. And people fall off the wagon. In that case, we just need to look for more candidates and keep putting them on the school board. I signed up for a Darbi Boddy type of school board, not a bunch of softies who would let the superintendent rule the world. I expect the school board to be in charge, not to let radical employees rule the day, and so far, in 2022, that is what has happened. Once things started to get tough, we discovered that Darbi was the only one showing up for work. And that is why we have a lot of the problems that are going on at Lakota now. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure of an effort as much as we are learning what kind of people make good school board members, and we are getting a definition of conservative values that is challenging people’s belief systems in themselves, which will ultimately be good for the community, even if it’s painful now. And as usual, what goes on in Lakota, a big government school in Northern Cincinnati, in the community where I live, so goes much of the rest of the nation. 

In the recent elections in Florida, Republicans showed up to vote for school board members 3 to 1. The more states in America that start to run their states as Ron DeSantis does, the more this trend will continue. Ohio isn’t quite there now. There are a lot of RINO Republicans who still think of themselves as Bush conservatives and Reagan admirers. But Trump is a bit too much “solution” for them, and when the pressure is on, they crack like eggs over an omelet. School boards should never have been considered “politically” neutral. The goal in politics isn’t for everyone to get along.

Public schools are radical institutions conceived by liberalism for teaching liberal arts. They have not produced children that grew up into happy Americans, quite the opposite. Many parents are seeing that they are unhappy with the product of public schools and are finally inserting themselves into possible solutions. For years people have asked me to be a school board member at Lakota for several decades now. Over time, the idea of public school has absolutely made me sick. I don’t think they are good at anything they do. But I have offered my help, especially these last few years, to help make them into a solution. I was quite aware that the people I was dealing with were professional community conversation types who befriend you to win you over, like a timeshare salesman. But I helped anyway because the school of Lakota was already in my home district. I personally pay thousands of dollars a year into that mess. So, I was open to the idea if it could be saved somehow. So, I helped where I could to see what might happen. It was worth a shot.

Other Darbi Boddy types are out there, and school boards across America have elected them by popular vote. It’s part of the trend of populism that is migrating to form the modern political movement that is going to sink all the mistakes of the administrative state finally, as it was conceived by communist and utopian socialists like John Dewey when they came up with the dumb idea of public education in the first place. Sure, it’s been a good free babysitting service for busy parents, but it has raised disasters in people who are failures of the 7 liberal arts in every way they could be measured. Even the best students of the public education system have turned out to be disasters of people and what is bad about the whole institutional approach is that public schools led by liberal-leaning school boards have developed the habit of protecting the bad conduct that goes on in the schools, rather than managing those problems for the betterment of the children involved. It’s all been a disaster from top to bottom, and finally, people are starting to admit to it and are offering themselves as options to get elected and help the way Darbi has been in Lakota. Even if the vote count at Lakota isn’t as conservative as it should be, it’s still better than what we had before. And future elections can certainly smooth that ratio out and will naturally match the national trends toward populism. 

Ultimately, however, my opinion hasn’t changed, even with this trend toward conservatism on school boards. Public education as a concept is doomed. It’s too expensive, inefficient, and doesn’t produce good people. It’s just a trainwreck in the best of cases. It certainly has not been a replacement for good parenting. After the behavior I have witnessed so far in 2022 regarding school board behavior and how the big liberal administrations behave toward it, it’s obvious to me that public education is doomed to complete failure. Suppose they think Darbi Boddy is bad and that the only acceptable Republican on a board is some wishy-washy RINO who will go way out of their way to get along in a “nonpartisan” kind of way, always bending the knee to radical liberals empowered through the teacher’s unions. In that case, there is no hope for them. If they are having trouble now, what will they do in the next elections when more Darbi Boddy types get elected and replace the stale old establishment types who covered up way too much bad behavior just to protect the school from outside opinion? They aren’t going to make it. I remember in April when the news story was all about Lakota might lose their superintendent over the radical school board member, Darbi Boddy, as if we needed to get rid of her to keep him and his $200,000 salary. Well, I don’t think he’s worth it, especially after watching his performance through Covid and recently over several things. We would do better with a much more engaged and less progressive person. I know they fear teacher shortages and bad state report cards, and the public relations of the superintendent are meant to put rosy glasses on all that for the illusion of goodness. But when a district is garbage, it is garbage. You can’t put perfume on it to make it smell better. The fact that the public employees of Lakota want so badly to get rid of the best school board member, Darbi Boddy, says that they aren’t ready to deal with the national trend in public education that is happening everywhere. And that fault is their own for failing to adjust to a changing world and holding on to a failure from the progressive past. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Caves of Lakota Schools: An email and another attempt to divert attention to Darbi Boddy from where the real problems are

I keep getting asked why I haven’t reported on the big Lakota story. Well, for all the reasons that we saw at the last school board meeting, one of the most intense emails that could be sent to a government body was sent that very day. But in the end, the board was OK with Channel 5 doing a story about a mad mom complaining about fellow board member Darbi Boddy again, who compared her to a school shooter. That was the news at 11 after a day of very interesting information. I received the same email that the board had, so I knew the content of it, and based on that, then the meeting started with a strange executive session; another hit piece by Lakota against Darbi Boddy was hardly a concern. Instead, watching the behavior of everyone involved has been interesting. As I say all the time, don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do, and you’ll learn the truth. Or, in this case, “don’t say.” I am watching how the authorities deal with this email. They have the information, and the clock is ticking.

The silence has been revealing. Everyone in town had this email. I had communicated with Karin Johnson from Channel 5 earlier that morning, so the buzz was……buzzing. Yet the story they chose to do was one against Darbi Boddy, again, about the same trespassing in the halls story they have been pushing. And that story was one that Darbi Boddy could easily say was slanderous, character defaming, and intentionally misleading. It is one thing to have an embarrassed mother of a girl who ended up in the Channel 5 story speaking at a school board meeting. It’s quite another giving school support behind it, and the way the board reacted was almost in relief that the news was talking about something else except what was in that email. 

The email was unbelievably bad, so to answer that question properly, I think it belongs in the hands of authorities to deal with quickly. But at this point, I am more interested to see how all the participants behave, which unfortunately goes well outside the government school of Lakota. So, I have not been eager to report all the details because on this one; it’s more important to see where all the insects go when the light is turned on. Turning the light on too fast will only scare them into hiding, where they stay all the time. One way or another, this email situation was much more significant and demanded that the light be turned on differently. I am more interested in seeing how everyone behaves rather than seeking justice for the few involved. Because what’s at stake is the heart of all public education and the mechanisms of the Liberal World Order. Every vestige of the Administrative State, of government built by the foundations of the Seven Liberal Studies, taught to us from our earliest memories, was at work. The media was at that school board meeting because they were looking for acknowledgment on the contents of that email and what management planned to do about it. Instead, the behavior revealed things about their collective strategy that was very surprising, to say the least. They were fine to sacrifice Darbi Boddy as a fellow school board member as they have been from the beginning with the defamatory rhetoric of a community member. But they were uncomfortably silent on the real matter that everyone was there to hear, and they certainly didn’t come to the defense of Darbi when such an accusation was leveled at her. They seemed to welcome it.

One of the ways you can trace the flow of water in underground caves is to pour colored dyes into the water upstream and see where those colors come out of the cave and into an outside creek or river—doing that gives the study an understanding of how water flows through the complicated crevasses and mazes within the cave that wouldn’t be obvious while crawling through the mud and tight corridors. Sometimes the best thing when you can see that crawling through underground caverns isn’t the best way to understand complicated problems; a different approach is needed. Well, the same thing is true in complex social and political issues that emerge in society. When you want to know the who, what, when, where, and how, you won’t find out that information by crawling in the mud with them. You need to see how information flows through their networks and how they react to it. And then, only then, will you understand the nature of the problem. When it comes to emergencies, I think everyone did what they needed to do. The email itself might be so unbelievable that it would turn out to be complete fiction. There are witnesses, and professional medical staff who are available to cross reference, so there are ways to validate the email. At that point, a small press conference about it would be appropriate, and a cautionary tale, no different than the mom who accused Darbi Boddy of being a school shooter would have transpired. After all, we are dealing with public figures here, and everyone involved should be able to endure a bit of scrutiny for the safety and security of the children in the schools of Lakota. If they are innocent of wrongdoing, they should get in front of a camera and say it. Then move on to the next thing.   But that’s not what we are seeing with this email. We see the lights being turned on; the cockroaches are scattering to their hiding places, only this time we are observing the actions with night vision, and can see the difference between light and dark, and can then trace where our bug problem really is, by first admitting that we have one.

So to all those concerned out there who are looking for justice and information, I would caution you to value information above all else. This is obviously a much larger problem that requires a complete understanding of what we are dealing with. So I have been in no rush to turn on the light for all the reasons mentioned. Rather, I would prefer to see how the colored water moves through the complicated politics of our community and to what walls it bounces off of so that a greater understanding of friends and foes can be established. Because when it comes to schools, their whole point is to provide a safe environment for kids. Schools are not a playground for the adults to make large wages and have an easy time making a living. If the adults involved are more interested in the politics of getting rid of school board members they don’t like or protecting a teacher’s union, then their priorities are all wrong, and they need an adjustment. If the media is more interested in the gossip of local politics rather than protecting children, then we have big problems. And if law enforcement is as corrupt as many people fear it is, then we’ll have to address that as well. But we will never know if we just turn on the light. We need to study the flow of information and see what people do with it. Even knowing how serious that information is, it only gives credibility to the data collected through observations made. It’s not acceptable just to have fears and speculations about the motives of the politics of government schools that are attached to tax dollars, radical leftist labor unions, and global political sentiment intent for the destruction of America. Facts and information are far more critical, and what we are learning is infinitely more valuable. So be cool and watch where the bugs run once the lights are turned on. And you’ll have your answers.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Snake and the Mouse: How to defeat the Liberal World Order

I was asked a few times during the North Coast Gunslinging Championships off of Lake Erie where I got my rattlesnake skin grips on my Ruger Vaquero and why I had them. It’s not enough to just say they are cool, for me, as there usually is a backstory. I explained that it was good to be a snake in life, which raised some eyebrows because we often think of snakes as maniacal devilish creatures that are the embodiments of Satan. So as a crowd gathered around my story, I explained that the Liberal World Order designed for snakes to be seen that way in our society because that’s how they see themselves. They get their ideas from Plato’s Republic regarding their ability to be the philosopher kings who rule all of society. One of their big concerns in life is to gain enough social prestige to be considered to be in that category, which is one of the primary aims of government, to be among the ruling class the way Plato envisioned it. They are fine for the rest of society to be scared of snakes because they are like the snake in the Genesis story, the possessors of knowledge of all good and evil who trick Eve into defying Adam and God to eat from the fruit of that tree and bring down the whole kingdom of everlasting life with the knowledge of good and evil, as defined by that ruling class. As I’ve explained many times about John Dewey and even going back to classics like the socialist propaganda book from 1888, Looking Backward, public education itself was designed around using peer pressure to control all the inhabitants of society to do as they are told and to be fearful of the opinions of the ruling class so not to fall out of favor. That is the purpose of the ruling class over all others, which is created for us very young in public education and politics. 

As I continued the story, I mentioned that I recently had watched a snake being groomed as a pet, eating a mouse thrown into its little aquarium enclosure, which I have seen many hundreds of times over the years, but it has always bothered me. Of course, the snake wants to eat. The mouse just wants to live. They are doing what nature designed them to do, one to eat the other. But it is troubling always that humans insert themselves into that process by capturing the snake and being an intermediary. The snake is now dependent on a human to feed it. And the mouse, once put into the cage, has no defense. When the snake decides it’s going to eat it, the mouse has no option but to accept its fate. It’s always a sad thing to watch. The poor little mouse, once thrown into the aquarium, knows it’s over the moment its placed there, and the creature will do everything it can to avoid the inevitable; it will try to dig its way under a water bowl or some other aquarium feature to survive, but there essentially is nothing it can do but wait for the snake to eat it. The only defense it has is to attempt to ignore the snake and live its life normally, hoping until that last moment that it will live life as long as possible. Thus, its only defense is to ignore the problem and pretend that its crisis is not a doomsday scenario.    

My life in this grooming process was never what the Liberal World Order expected. I never developed a care for what other people thought about me going way back to 2-3-and 4 years of age. Therefore, my public education experience was utterly divorced from Dewey’s purpose for it, which was to break down members of society into their various social groups, ultimately to be led by the philosopher kings, those with the highest liberal level of education in society, and to be like the mouse in life, to live in the aquarium of their own making and to accept our fate when the snake decides to eat. Of course, the philosopher kings of Plato see themselves as the snake and the rest of the world as their next meal. That is the purpose of all monarchies, secret societies, every bureaucratic organization, even sports. But what was unique about my life is that I never accepted such an absurd concept as a little kid, and of course, that caused a lot of consternation as I got older and didn’t fit into the socially constructed categories. I never accepted the liberal world order aquarium we were all thrown into. Several times in my life, this relationship with the established order and its expectations of it rattled the participants. In the video above, I tell a few personal stories that are comical where the people trained by the Liberal World Order were disarmed entirely as to how to deal with me. One was a 5-year class reunion for the public school I went to. The other was a big presentation I was a part of with the mayor of Cincinnati, city council, all the big media at the time, and all the powerful money people for what to do with the Banks Project back in the 90s. In both examples, I represented life outside the aquarium, and the rulers didn’t know what to do with me, so they ignored me as best they could, which is a typical reaction. To them, it’s earth-shattering because they think of themselves as the snake, but when they meet someone who does not follow their liberal world order rules, they realize that they are actually the mouse in life, and they freeze and try their best to pretend that their end is not near. And it’s terrifying to them.

The purpose of me telling that story to that small group of Trump flag-waving gunslingers on the shores of Lake Erie was to assure them that the Liberal World Order is not scary. They are easy to beat; all you have to do is not care what they think of you. And once you do, you will gain all the power in the relationship. They have been taught by the Liberal World Order that they are the snake in life and that everyone else is food for them. But when you do not care about their controls, they are powerless to do anything to control you, and in that way, the roles become reversed, and they become the food. Watching them go through their cycles of paralysis when they realize such things is always funny. And when it is wondered about what will happen next in the political world of our current life, that is the ultimate fate for them. They were never the snake but were always the mouse, and they are food to be consumed at our leisure. And now we’re hungry, so it’s only a matter of time. And that is what I told that group who asked about my gun grips. That is how I see myself, and my work with the guns is my own reminder of that fact and the vulnerabilities of the Liberal World Order. Like the snake in the aquarium, we can eat when we see fit, and that reality of the Liberal World Order is the most terrifying aspect in the world. They have trained all their lives that their role was the other way around, that they could use peer pressure to control all of existence. But the moment they run into someone who doesn’t care about their opinions and actually sees them as food, they lose all their power, which is the inevitable fate for them all in the months and years to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Brain Dead Losers at the IRS: And those idiots want to hire 87,000 more of them and give them guns to kick down doors to confiscate more wealth for a bloated, out-of-control government

Of course, there should always be a concern when we are talking about putting 87,000 dumb and inefficient people onto a government payroll and encouraging them to go door to door with guns to extract more money from the American population. It’s a plea by stupid people in the administrative state to feed the beast they have created. They can’t get tax increases passed in government, so they are looking to extract more money from the public to fund their gross inefficiencies with force. But they do so without dealing with their previous inefficiencies. Instead, they insist on creating a larger government with proportionally more lackluster effort without a care in the world to the incredible cost it would bring across our economic engine to society. From my experience, IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks on a good day. In my life, I keep things very simple, not for my sake, but because in my previous involvement with the IRS, I find them such a stupid class of people that have difficulty understanding basic things if I can’t show my incomes on simple W2s then its simply not worth doing. I get investment offers for crypto, real estate, and business opportunities of all kinds several times a day, all days of the week. But I turn them all down because the opportunity cost of doing them likely would never exceed the pain in the ass required to deal with the IRS and the set-up for the audits that require hours and hours of time spent with some of the dumbest people on earth. I’d rather give up making millions and millions of dollars so that I could gain the riches of not having to talk to a box of dumb rocks who took a government job so they could be paid well to mask their lazy life and still have authority over other people as a representative of big, out of control, inefficient, government.

The audacity of the proposal to hire 87,000 more IRS agents is that the government is already grossly inefficient. Adding this many more inefficient employees to the government payroll is only pouring gas on an already blazing dumpster fire. Government employees of all kinds are some of the worst in the world regarding lazy economic generators. I have always talked about how horrible it has been to pay public school teachers what we pay them only to get the horrendous work performance that we get out of them, not to mention the political activism. When they ask for tax hikes to pay for their bloated services to the community, it is always my default mode to require them to lay off some of that inefficiency because that should always be the goal.   Efficiency is the first thing anybody dealing with money should be thinking about. But government always throws money at inefficiency to achieve their stated objectives. In this case, they want more money to operate the administrative state, so they throw more money at the same inefficiencies that caused the problems to begin with. So not only have they compounded those inefficiencies and now connected more labor to those inefficiencies, making the situation considerably worse, but they failed to deal with the root cause of their inefficiencies in the first place seeking to mask it with ominous authority rule. That has always been the joke of public education. But you can see it most notably at your local BMV, where slow, horrible service has become the accepted norm. If you want to drive a car, you have to deal with these slow-minded losers who show up for work brain dead and end their days comatose.   All government employees become some representative of a brain-dead lifestyle by the nature of their tasks. So the greater expansion of government services, the more zombies that we put into society and pay them way too much to achieve way too little.

Because government never wants to admit what a burden it is to society, they never measure anything in opportunity cost. Instead, their goal is to leech off effort and fuel their disgusting lifestyles off the opportunity of others. With the expansion of 87,000 IRS agents, the government intends to fuel itself off the efforts of others. But as I said, there is a cost to inefficiency; it can’t be hidden on balance sheets. It emerges in undesirable ways frequently. When employees show up for work at 8 in the morning and are ordering their lunch by 9 am. It arrives at noon. Then after eating it, they are done for the day and ready to go home. So rather than work the rest of the day, they play on the internet sending messages of nothing to each other until 5 when they go pick up their kids at daycare, then meander home to die a little bit each day in front of the television too tired from their day’s activities to lift a hand to do much of anything else. Then when they finally get to their weekend, they waste it complaining about how tired they are from the previous week. That is the life of the typical government employee who has lost the ability to think because they aren’t paid to think; they are paid to waste time, money, and intellectual effort, which is precisely what the government gets in exchange for their overvalued employment. 

I remember how it was in 2010; I was on the IRS target list for Lois Lerner’s targeting of conservatives by direct order from the Obama terrorist organization that had occupied the White House. They confiscated some of my videos and other Tea Party material as evidence, and I will admit to having some fun watching them view the material. It was like watching dogs turn their heads to some invisible dog whistle, contemplating things beyond their comprehension to grasp because they didn’t have the mental capacity to do so. It was beyond their range of understanding. I’m probably being too nice when I say that IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks. They are actually worse than that, and that’s because the mismanagement of those resources starts at the top and flows down to all the field agents. So when we add to those numbers, of course, proportionally, we will get much more inefficiency when employees are added because we did not make a leadership change. That is just dry wood on an open fire regarding the administrative state. Adding more employees to an already inefficient government agency is a useless and more costly gesture. What they cost alone is excessive but minor when added to the opportunity cost that the IRS imposes on the culture at large, the many trillions of dollars of money that could have been made if government was just out of the way. Regular hard-working people would be free to do their tasks unimpeded. And that is the cost of the additional IRS agents. The shakedown of regular people is just the beginning of the problem. The real burden comes from things that don’t happen, ultimately worsening the world. It’s bad enough to think that giving such lazy and stupid people so much government power might be a solution the administrative state values, but it’s in what doesn’t happen that holds the real costs of their incursion. And that is what the brain-dead losers of the administrative state never consider because they don’t have the minds to think it. What they want, all they want is to consume off the efforts of others. And by expanding the IRS, they are just looking the squeeze the orange a bit more for a spoonful of juice in all the inefficient ways that have become the norm of government activity.    

Rich Hoffman

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$950,000 From DeWine Won’t Make Lakota Schools Safer: The teachers and administrators are the real danger, we need more school board oversight, not less

I think it’s actually bad news that Governor DeWine is issuing $47 million in public school security measures, $950,000 which is going to Lakota schools in my area of northern Cincinnati. That is like putting a lot of nice icing on a car tire, calling it a cake, and telling people to eat it. There is a lot wrong in public schools, one of which is the kind of school security that is needed to stop school shooters. I think Ohio addressed that issue best with H.B. 99, which will give training parameters to teachers who want to be first responders in case of a crisis in public schools. The false belief that kids are safe with teachers, administrators, and other paid employees continues to be the biggest concern that nobody has a stomach to discuss. But in truth, the extra security that DeWine was providing to Lakota schools and other public schools, with extra cameras and increased resource officers to keep outsiders on the outside, will only make it possible for the real threats to children to expand their malice behind that security. The problem is in continued belief that public employees can be trusted with our children implicitly, where I would argue that they need more oversight from a public that needs to be more engaged in their children’s lives. Having less engagement only allows public employees who have serious mental deficiencies to further dominate the time and attention of children in destructive ways, because the extra security keeps away the eyes that likely need to check out what’s going on more. 

This whole problem was exacerbated by the Darbi Boddy situation at Lakota, where the superintendent, Matt Miller, charged her with trespassing for showing up unannounced to take pictures of artwork on the walls of Lakota to see for herself what had been going on regarding CRT. Darby didn’t believe the teachers when they spoke at a school board meeting and said there was no CRT in the schools. Matt wanted to have an administrative state kind of audit. Darbi wanted to see for herself and leave the bureaucratic opinions at the door, which is what she was recently elected to do. As a result, Darbi was plastered all over the news and shamed for essentially doing her job. The behavior of Matt Miller toward Darbi made many people who supported Darbi very angry. Soon after, people started telling lots of stories about Matt Miller and how dangerous of a person he has been and how hypocritical his actions toward Darbi were. And now, a whole can of worms has been opened, and there is some very serious discussion going on that looks bad for everyone involved. It didn’t have to be personal the way it is. Still, all the parties should have known that it was a bad idea to attempt to make Darbi Boddy the scapegoat for much more serious trouble that continues to be a problem among administrators and the paid teaching staff. 

I have been neutral on Matt Miller, the superintendent at Lakota because there are people I trust on the school board who like him. So, I have put my feelings about paying him over $200,000 per year aside due to their opinions.   However, the reality of highly paid administrative types of government employees is consistent in many occupations, when they have lots of expendable income, which teachers at Lakota do. They don’t have heavy work schedules, they have summers off, and 7-hour work days of real productive time, then bad things are poised to happen because their minds are not occupied with positive things. And the stories of the cell phones with naked pictures between administrators and teachers are abundant. A bored adult mind that tends to be politically progressive often turns to pornography to fill their time, which opens the door to lots of terrible behavior, much of it illegal.

And regarding Matt Miller, he just went through a rough divorce, and some bad behavior revealed that he should have lost his job over, at a bare minimum. So, to my mind, he’s lucky to have his job still. But he’s certainly not in a position to place a value judgment on Darbi for doing her own investigation into bad conduct that voters have notified her is happening in the hallways of Lakota to the eyes of the students. And now, the hypocrisy of his position to Darbi and the purposeful intent to destroy her in the media and within the community has spurred on a lot of intense anger that has cracked open reports of a lot of very vile conduct that Matt Miller is in the middle of, and it’s not good. What they say about glass houses and not throwing rocks, Matt has been throwing rocks in a wet paper bag. It has turned out to be a terrible idea.

As I say all the time, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Just because people say things about you doesn’t mean a person is truly guilty. If it did, there would be a SWAT team at Matt’s house immediately. We must examine the reports and the evidence and let law enforcement figure out what’s what. There is a process, and we must let the process do its work. However, in relation to this school safety money from DeWine, trapping kids in schools where these Lakota administrators and teachers have more protection from the opinions of the outside world is not a good idea. It makes kids not safer but puts them in much more danger. Because school shootings are just one danger kids face. In the sexually charged world, we live in now, where so many adults suffer from porn addiction and seek to act out their fantasies in real life, there is a lot of mental illness going on in the lives of people with expendable income and time to spend it. And giving those people protection from spontaneous visits from the school board or even cautious parents who want to know what’s happening with their children is a terrible idea. It protects the sex abusers from those who need to check their behavior with frequent audits. The employees and administrators cannot be trusted at face value. They need oversight, a lot of oversight. I’m not going to suggest we throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. I don’t think public schools are good for kids in many ways at all. To me, it’s only a free babysitting service for busy parents. But for those who need it, we are fools to trust these people with our kids unchecked and behind tight security, which protects them from the public. Which is precisely what this $950,000 will do; it will give those most guilty of committing sexual crimes in public places more protection to do much more of it. I hear many reports of this behavior going on among the teacher population and that it is led by leadership. There is so much evidence that a lot of it is written down with text messages from reliable witnesses. So, there is too much smoke for there not to be fire. How much fire is the real question? And where there are fires to put out, we would be fools to lock out the firefighters with added security. That is precisely what more security means. It won’t make kids safer; it makes them much more vulnerable. 

Rich Hoffman

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Kari Lake Wins in Arizona: McConnell is wrong–America is not a 50/50 country

It was a bit of a cliffhanger during the election night, August 2nd, 2022, and I was up and stayed with the story when Kari Lake finally pulled ahead of Karrin Taylor Robson, her closest rival for the Republican primary, to face off against Katie Hobbs in November. Before Kari could take on that challenge, she had to get through a multitude of RINO money poured into the Arizona primary to attempt to derail her Trump-like campaign for the MAGA movement. Everyone knew that it would be a fist fight election. But this time, people were ready for the evidence of election fraud; the fraud from 2020 is now well known, so people voting for Kari knew what to look for, and it wasn’t easy for the cheaters to push Robson over Kari. Early in the night, it looked like Kari Lake wouldn’t win the election, but as the evening progressed and the same day voting totals came in, the MAGA challenger pulled ahead and was poised to be the winner. The same disgusting cheating that had stolen the election from Trump just two years before was much harder to perform this time. Even though it took days to count all the ballots, the counters were desperately looking for ways to steal the election. The math just didn’t work in their favor, and no matter what happens in the future, everyone knows that Kari Lake won the election. Her lead a few days later was two percentage points above her rivals, with 82% of the vote counted; there just isn’t any way, except for cheating and counting a bunch of made-up mail-in ballots, that anybody will overtake Kari Lake. I thought it was remarkable; I stayed up and watched the whole thing pacing around my living room just as anxious as everyone else was. Because we all knew that Arizona had a cheat machine built into it that the RINOs were trying to keep alive so they could control elections, and it would take a lot of momentum to defeat it. Because of same-day voting in Arizona it did not allow for many opportunities to steal the election this time. They certainly tried, but the momentum of the MAGA movement didn’t allow it.

It’s quite clear, based on what we observed in 2020 and then a year and a half later in 2022, is a pattern of behavior where elections have been routinely manipulated. Not everywhere, but states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona obviously have election cheating built into their voting counting ability. I recently spoke to our Secretary of State in Ohio, Frank LaRose, about how he went about providing election security. I believed him when he said he thought they were very secure. I think LaRose is a good guy, and I think he knows what he’s talking about. But not every state has a great Secretary of State, and even in Ohio, not all administrations are as ethical as previous ones or future ones. As I was voting, I paid careful attention to our voting machines, and the kind we use has a digital interface. But ultimately, it has a paper ballot that you can verify your vote with a receipt, and it’s that which gets counted. So, I don’t think every state always has election fraud by party politics. But I do think, based on what we’ve observed, that every election has fraud in it. Some states are worse than others. Ohio is pretty good right now because Frank runs a good ship. But in places like Georgia, where Kemp was able to fend off Trump challengers, it’s evident that voter behavior was not consistent as it was elsewhere in the country and that cheating was still very much a problem. And going into Arizona, with all the controversy of election fraud that we knew happened there, the big question was whether or not Kari Lake would have a real chance. We knew people and polling favored her, but when it came to who counted the votes, everyone was very wide-eyed for election shenanigans. I wasn’t pacing around my living room at 3 AM in the morning because I trusted the officials counting the votes. 

It’s clear that the establishment types who have control of enough election systems that they can manipulate elections to their favor have been assigning Mike Pence to states that look to deep dive into the election fraud from 2020 with actual decertifications. Mike Pence by himself has no chance to overtake a Trump endorsement. But with Fox News obviously very invested in portraying the illusion that America is a 50/50 country and that they prefer RINOs over Trump conservatives, you can begin to see a pattern emerge where election fraud is most obvious where they are putting Pence to challenge Trump endorsements. I don’t think Pence is savvy enough to play an essential role in the fraud. He is a nice guy who does what the boss tells him to, whether that boss is Trump or the people who want to take over, leading the Republican Party back to the controlled opposition. These election fixes have been going on for a long time; it wasn’t just the 2020 election. But because of the ground game in Arizona from MAGA supporters, they just couldn’t pull it off. Then when Kari Lake proclaimed victory, it took all the air out of the media story. That’s the game we are playing, folks. 

I was watching a Fox News segment the day after the election when Brett Baier had on Mitch McConnell during his 6 PM show to talk about the state of politics and the future of the Republican Party. There was a subtext to the story, which obviously Fox News, guided by Rupert Murdock, was trying to plant “the narrative,” but it wasn’t sticking. When Mitch McConnell told Baier, “we are a 50/50 country,” he was trying to fit the story to the Fox News position. Murdock and his sons and their wives want to think that they are the kingmakers of the Republican Party, and they have made it their mission to get rid of Trump from the public stage. Only what Rupert didn’t understand, it was Trump that helped make Fox News what it was. And it was people like Roger Ailes, and Bill O’Reilly who understood the people better than the Murdocks outside the New York and Washington D.C. markets. Sure, they still have Jesse Watters, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham on their primetime coverage, which is all very good. But all other hours of the day, Fox News has become much more like CNN, unwatchable to the people who really care about their country. And Fox News has only hurt themselves with the activism against Trump. Trump and Kari Lake are the future; they just can’t accept that reality. Election fraud to them is a necessary evil to keep the illusion that America is really, like McConnell stated, a 50/50 country. In truth, it isn’t, not even close. And when elections are held where the controlled opposition can’t cheat, we see that people like Kari Lake will win every time. Even when the deck is stacked against good people, they will win if election fraud is taken away as an option. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Elephant in the Room: Why the new ‘Top Gun’ movie is so successful and what it means to ESG scores in corporate America

I have always looked at box office results as a kind of vote for what the temperature of the political world truly is. As we know now, elections are often rigged, especially regarding the digital machines and ballot stuffing efforts that have been common in big American cities for years. So political votes don’t often reflect what people really desire culturally. But when a person is willing to get out of their chair and go out into a darkened theater and share a movie experience with perfect strangers, which is a discomfort of its own, the kinds of choices people make reflect a lot about their true character. So I have always looked toward box office numbers to understand what’s happening worldwide and the kinds of mythologies the human race responds to. Knowing all that, I was not surprised that Top Gun: Maverick did well at the box office; it looks like it will come in over 1.2 billion dollars for the summer of 2022. It has been remarkably strong for what I consider a typical 80s movie. I grew up in the 80s, so I remember when there was a movie like Top Gun coming out every weekend, and then when you got back in the car to drive home, there was a new top 40 hit on the radio. We had a thriving culture back then mainly because Ronald Reagan, as an actor, knew how to sell America to America, and people felt good about their country. Hollywood rushed to make movies that appealed to them, which was reflected in the movie-making industry. 

Obviously, I loved the new Top Gun movie, but as I said, I don’t think the film is a technological masterpiece. It will likely win some awards because the kind of people who pursued careers in movie making are happy that finally there is a movie out there that reflects why they got into the business in the first place, the way Hollywood used to make movies before all the woke ESG rules took over and ruined everything for everybody. While Top Gun has been doing well, another film franchise from Disney, Thor: Love and Thunder, came out over a similar summer season release. It died on the vine by the second weekend because it embraced all the woke ESG garbage injected into corporate America, and the voting movie audience decided they didn’t want any of it. For a film with big intentions to gain a billion dollars at the box office from a global audience, Thor: Love and Thunder quickly fell out of favor, while Top Gun: Maverick continued to be in the top 10 even after two months in theaters. Because of this behavior, there is a massive elephant in the room to talk about that I have heard nobody in the commentary business from entertainment or politics nail down, which is worth discussing because of what it means. What we see with movie audiences is a total rejection of the globalist push for ESG values that will undoubtedly be reflected in society in general, and what has been happening in the movie business will ultimately be reflected in society in general, with restaurants, business commerce, and populist politics. The only way the ESG system was ever going to work was to take away all people’s options for what they really wanted. Top Gun: Maverick shows just how successful breaking the ESG formula can be for anybody who dares to, and now that people have seen the benefits, the ESG attempts will fail miserably.

Considering that Top Gun: Maverick was entirely filmed before Covid came along to destroy its original release date for the summer of 2020, the film was not a conscious effort to push back against the globalist trends toward ESG. It was able to get funding because it had been in the works for many years and had Tom Cruise attached to it, so the movie got made. But the global sabotage with Covid, as I said in the beginning, was more of an attack against American culture in every way and the intent was to destroy American capitalism. Small businesses were meant to be destroyed. Amusement parks bankrupted. And the American film industry was targeted to be choked off, even though the political lefties in Hollywood were kissing the ring of the globalists most aggressively. Those market sectors were intended to be destroyed before the year of 2020 ran out, which was the goal of the World Economic Forum members behind the Covid virus, using China to be the face of the disruption. The world was going to have a Great Reset, and America would come out of it under the fold of global socialism run by health agencies controlled by the United Nations, and that was the end of the story. Paramount Pictures was shrewd to wait out the storm and hold Top Gun: Maverick for another two years to hope the American movie industry would survive and that theater owners would not all go bankrupt. Along the way, Paramount listened to its potential audience, and they decided to tweak the film toward a domestic market and ignore China completely, which many considered to be suicidal. But once the movie was released and movie theaters finally opened into something resembling normal, great things happened, and people were hungry for a non-woke movie without ESG goal posts that told a pro-American story that people could feel good about. And the rest is history.

It’s not that Top Gun: Maverick is a great movie. But it offers a non-ESG story that people are starving for, and they have voted with their feet. There are so many other options now with streaming services that people could easily have just stayed home and watched hundreds of other options. So it says something any time people are willing to go to the theater to see a movie of any kind. But what we are seeing happening with this particular movie is that people are voting against the ESG world that is being imposed on them, and the first real offering of American patriotism since President Trump was removed from office through political upheavals is the true sentiment of the voting public. You can’t fake personal choice. Ballot stuffing and other forms of fraud can manipulate results to look like more people than really do support progressive causes. But the tickets bought for a darkened theater in direct competition with other offerings, like Thor: Love and Thunder, show the true sentiment of the public when choice is the deciding factor. With most movies these days being produced for a global audience, especially from Disney, it had been considered suicide to focus on a domestic release, which is what Top Gun: Maverick boldly did. And the result was that the world came to the doorstep of the movie because they wanted to experience American life with their movie purchase. Not to see the same old ESG political nonsense that all the other films were offering, the same homosexual propaganda, the soft stories without defined heroes, and the noticeable lack of patriotism that was clearly part of the plan for a post-Covid world. Top Gun: Maverick broke all the rules and returned to what worked for years. And because of that success, many other industries and political movements will follow. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Abuse of Power in Butler County: And it’s not Roger Reynolds doing it

I’ve talked about it before; I sympathize with the Steve Bannon contempt of congress case that is happening at the end of July 2022 more than other cases because it’s personal for me. I don’t communicate with him a lot, be we occasionally do. He has shared some of my articles on social media, and we have exchanged text messages on occasion, so it’s more personal to me to see what is happening to him than it would be if I didn’t know something about the person himself. As I watch him go to federal court every day and the judge lecture the defense about not making a circus out of the case, it is bewildering to think that Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress in 2012, yet no punishment ever came his way. But because Bannon is a member of the Trump White House, he is being treated like a criminal, guilty before proven innocent, just by association. And all this has made me think of the case of George Lang several years ago, who was facing jail time just for knowing John Boehner, who was poised to be speaker of the house, and the Democrats wanted to sink him through his friends. George, of course, was found innocent, but it was scary for sure. We could all point to misconduct in court proceedings that were purely politically motivated and shake our heads. But we often don’t say much about it because we fear that injustice being turned in our own direction, so we just move along and try to ignore it. Yet, I see the same thing happening to Roger Reynolds in Butler County, where political rivals are accusing him of corruption in his office. And I just don’t see it in any of the indictments, for which a 6th came out just recently to add to the pile, intent on knocking him out of office. It’s an election year, some rivals want Roger out as a political character, and they’ll do what they must do to sink him. 

Believe me; I’d rather talk about a million other things than this case, which I’ve discussed in detail. I’d prefer to leave all this mess to the courts to decide but based on a ridiculous article by Jennifer Edwards Baker from Fox 19 about the details of the 6th indictment against Roger Reynolds, which now involves Lakota schools, the issue is so preposterous that we just can’t ignore it. Obviously, the prosecution in the case against Roger, much like the case against Steve Bannon, doesn’t have much to go on, so they are prosecuting the case in the court of public opinion through reporters who might sway public sentiment ahead of upcoming elections. And that is the entire goal of the proceedings. And we can’t ignore the case because it could be any of us falsely accused. It’s not that I love Roger Reynolds. I think he has been an excellent auditor. But he’s made political enemies over the years, which is all part of the blood sport of politics. I think he could handle many things better regarding social interactions, but I recognize that he’s an A-Type personality, as is Sheriff Jones, and a clash among those types of people is bound to happen. I see it as more of a human resource problem than a legal one. If those two people have problems, they should resolve them in some other way than in political tricks ahead of elections and wasting the time of courts for personal vendettas, which is clearly the case with this indictment against Roger involving Lakota schools.   

The Fox 19 article says many things that could easily be misconstrued, leaving out all the relevant factors, such as all the axes to grind among public employees, especially those who handle money. The indictment indicates that Lakota schools were due to get back $750,000 from the auditor’s office. Roger suggested to the treasurer Jenni Logan that they spend that money on the Four Bridges Golf Course in a partnership. A whole series of emails between Jenni and the school attorney show an interest in Roger’s proposal. Ultimately, they decided it probably wasn’t a good idea, so the concept was rejected. That was back in 2017, a long time ago. So why is this story coming out now? Jenni is retiring on August 1st, 2022, and this is something for the road that fits into the motivations of Sheriff Jones and his political needs regarding putting someone else in the seat of the Butler County Auditor. So, they completely made up the word “coercion” in the indictment and tried to build a case that forced Roger to prove he wasn’t guilty of it due to pressure from public opinion, rather than proving that Roger actually used coercion in any way during the proposed spending of the money. When people see $750,000, they might think that’s a lot of money, but in reality, within the budget of Lakota, it’s much less than 1% of their expenditures and is actually about 11 or 12 teachers. Teachers make a lot of money, despite what the unions say about compensation. I can easily see how Roger would suggest that Jenni spend the money on something more useful, like an elevated lifestyle for the students of Lakota, rather than just blowing it on more activist teachers. Jenni must have thought the idea a good one because she pursued it through emails which are part of the case. But she did so voluntarily. That is not coercion; it’s a discussion among professional adults. 

All this doesn’t change my opinion of Roger Reynolds. As I indicated, I could tell stories all day long about court cases that were purely intended to destroy a political rival and had nothing to do with actual justice. I mentioned a few here based on personal experience. But it’s quite common as a practice. I’m all for law and order, but justice should be blind. What is going on with Roger Reynolds is that laws are being applied against a political rival instead of uniformly applied. It’s an abuse of authority, but it’s not Roger doing the abuse. It’s the accusers, not the recipient. I’ll still be voting for Roger Reynolds in the upcoming election. All the people participating in the investigation against him should be trying to work with Roger instead of getting rid of him over their personal problems they might have. Destroying people’s lives is not the way to solve a problem. It might be common, but it’s certainly not right.

The courts are not private playgrounds to bully people into fight resolution that might have been settled on a playground when everyone was kids. As adults, judges, attorneys, and media bottom feeders are not replacements for fists to the face. When the courts are abused, as they are clearly being abused in this Roger Reynolds case and the case of Steve Bannon, that gives politics and our justice system a bad name, and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves, as far as I’m concerned, all six of these indictments against Roger Reynolds are political witch hunts. If I had been Roger, I would have handled things differently, where there was no question as to blurred lines. But social mistakes aren’t against the law. Intent to commit a crime is, and to assume intent where there clearly isn’t any evidence, just for the political theater of altering an election is despicable at best and gross abuse of authority at the very least. 

Rich Hoffman

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What Makes George Lang So Good: Leadership and one of the reasons Butler County is Debt Free

George Lang, whenever he gives a public speech, especially in Butler County, Ohio, where he is the Senator of the 4th District, will quickly remind everyone that Butler County is the only county in Ohio operating debt-free. It is one of the best-run counties in the entire nation, fiscally speaking, and that is to the credit of Nancy Nix and many others who work as the treasurer and support staff. It’s also a credit to the Republican Party of Butler County, and you will always find George Lang somewhere near someone who has been successful behind many of the success stories. George Lang is the kind of person who builds people up wherever he goes, and his best work is often in the background. He’s not very ostentatious about letting everyone know about the good work he does, but given the trend of pointing out every flaw people in politics have that there are, I thought it was an excellent idea to let people know of one of the best examples of what a good politician is that I know, and point out some of the traits that make him that way. While it’s true, I consider George a friend, I’ve known him since the early Tea Party days, and I like his family quite a lot. But I’ll also say that we don’t always agree on everything or support the same kind of people in every situation. Yet, as I always say, there is only one correct answer, and I can say that in the context of our relationship, George is a tireless advocate for whatever that right answer is, and he pursues it aggressively. And if new information comes up along the way that might change his view on the right answer, he doesn’t let anything get in the way of modifying his thought process to accommodate it. And that might be his best trait and why he is so successful, not just in the things he does, but in how he builds people up around him toward the ultimate correct answer. 

I was at a few events recently and heard the same kind of stories, that George Lang is an establishment Republican and that he is part of the problem, not a solution. In the context of those sentiments, I can say that they are common among anybody who has had success and are not rooted in reality. One of the reasons I’ve been able to be friends with George Lang for so long is because he is a high-quality person who can handle the heat in the kitchen well. So, if he were anything less than great, I wouldn’t have maintained a friendship with him all this time. Usually, when we talk, it’s not about politics ironically, but the big things, like ancient civilizations and what lessons we could learn from them that could improve the legislative agenda of America as a republic. We never get hung up on the small stuff, the whims of political tides that come and go like an ocean current.   From my perspective in knowing how George is every day, I know the things some people say about him are because he’s been successful. All successful people get hen-pecked behind their backs. The critics are primarily built on jealousy or to hide their own ineffectiveness in the world and would rather blame a corrupt system that never listens to their own failures. George is the kind of person who can sit down with anyone under any type of contentious condition and work with them. And he stays honest during it all and can go home to his family with a clean mind because everything he does is done with good sentiment on his part. I’ve watched many people attempt this in life, and they usually get beaten down into an unrecognizable person within a few years. But George has managed to keep himself great for many years, working as a trustee, then a State Representative, until this most recent position as a State Senator.   George could do anything politically that he wanted, which would always draw criticism from the fans in the stands. Yet when it comes to wins, George is always nearby those victories even if he isn’t the one who takes the heroic shot in the end but was the person who set all the success up behind the scenes. 

This came to my mind because I have been getting asked many questions about what might happen in the fourth quarter, during the next election in America, if the Democrats try to use another version of Covid to implement shutdowns and change voting rules as they did in 2020. In Ohio, DeWine was terrible with Covid, and it cost the state a lot. Well, George all along worked behind the scenes to ensure that what happened in 2020 would never happen again in Ohio. George has a business-first political platform that understands that if there is no business in Ohio, then there aren’t jobs and things to do with a good economy. So George puts his political efforts into ensuring that the economy of Ohio is outstanding so that all other good things will follow. And over the last several years, George has passed legislation that greatly limited what a governor can do under emergency conditions. For instance, if there were another pandemic, a governor would be unable to shut down small businesses while keeping the large ones open. Everyone would have to follow the same safety protocols, but the government would not pick winners and losers as they did during Covid 2020. Also, the Senate led an effort with George among the leaders to drive the issue that would keep any governor from overreacting and taking authority control over the entire state. So those days are gone forever, and George Lang is the one to thank for it. 

A lot of the best legislation that gets done in Columbus isn’t very sexy. It doesn’t make great splashes on the nightly news. Few likely know about S.B. 246, which allows for small businesses to utilize similar tax advantages that large companies have access to, which might not sound like a big thing, but if you are a business of any size, tax burdens are one of the most significant concerns that there is. With George’s bill, it will attract investment to Ohio which is desperately needed. Ohio has been suffering from a depopulation crisis for a long time. It’s been so bad that it only has 15 congressional representatives due to that condition. As jobs have fled the state due to previous bad government policy, there wasn’t anywhere for the kids of previous generations to work, so they left for places that looked more attractive.   George is working to rebuild that business base of Ohio and is looking to turn that all around, and so far, he’s been very successful. Like the example George gives about the great Butler County treasurer Nancy Nix and how it is operating as the only county that is debt free, it takes a lot of leadership behind the scenes to manage everything correctly, and it also takes a willingness not always to be the point person where a single point failure can significantly limit what good leadership can do. But to build up others in ways that the public never sees. And if someone didn’t point out that good work every now and then, nobody would ever know. And that is why I value George Lang so much and think despite the negative news stories that we hear every day on the news, there are some great politicians out there doing outstanding work. And George Lang is one of them for sure. 

Rich Hoffman

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