Category: The Symposium of Justice

‘The Richest Man in Babylon’: Real wealth creation in Ohio won’t be possible until it’s a ‘Right to Work’ state

Whenever I go to Columbus, Ohio, I have a few bookstores that I go to every time. I consume a tremendous number of books, about three large books a week. If they are smaller, under 200 pages, I read five or six. It’s probably my favorite thing to do in the world, and I often read very early in the morning, between 3 AM and 6, and after the hours of 7 to 11 PM. Between those hours, I work hard, really hard. And reading settles my mind and keeps everything from fragmenting. On the weekends, I usually read for around 8 hours daily, starting around the same time and ending around noon. Then I spend the rest of the day with my family doing whatever comes up in those engagements. But it had been quite a few years since I last read The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926. I read it in my twenties, so I thought it was odd that while I was talking to people at the Capitol during the Governor’s State of the State speech for 2023, I was sitting in the gallery waiting for everything to start when a person made a great effort to sit next to me and ask me to sign a copy of that book. It was a nice paperback copy that  was a miniature version that could fit easily in the jacket of a nice suit. This person told me he was a fan of my blog, recognized me because of my big white hat, and wanted me to sign his copy of the old George Clason book. So I signed it, and he was very happy about it. He sat down near me, and before we all left after the speech was over, he came over to shake my hand again enthusiastically before departing back downstairs, where all the members of the Representatives and Senate were gathering in the rotunda to have lunch with Governor DeWine. 

I’ve signed many books over the years, but they are usually the ones I have written; it’s not usual to sign other people’s books. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense as I talked to various legislators at the after-event. Once I left the Ohio Statehouse later that day and visited my bookstores, I bought a modern copy of that book and reread it later that evening to connect with that enthusiastic personality. After my talk with everyone that day, it all made sense. If you have not had exposure to that very famous book, The Richest Man in Babylon, it’s typically found in the business section of a bookstore and is a foundation for how wealth is created. It takes place in Babylon to take the edge off any modern references, but the idea is that wealth is created by effort, and it is beneficial not just to the people who have the wealth but to their community as well. If we have a society of many people who have created wealth for themselves, we will have a better society. It is very much the opposite of this “tax the rich” culture that we get from the various socialists and communists embedded in our American culture these days, which has become much worse under the economic policies of Joe Biden and Democrats in general. And when you get behind the scenes, away from the cameras and newspaper reporters who never cover significant political events correctly like a Governor’s State of the State speech, wealth creation is the number 1 concern because it’s the thing that makes everything in society go. 

One of the big topics that emerged from Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech was the effort to bring businesses and jobs to Ohio and that there would be spending investments to do so. But on the checkered floor of the Statehouse were lots of discussions about how exactly to do that. And I love these kinds of discussions. Some people see lobbyists, corrupt politicians, and maniacal lunatics when they talk in those places. Yet, I generally see the kids all these adults grew up to be trying to do something good from their own perspectives with the same enthusiasm that kids build new things with Lego toys. No matter the political ideology, I find everyone eager to conduct some version of a childhood dream of saving the world one law at a time. And you don’t get that unless you get the chance to be behind the scenes and talk to people who are actually making the sausage. I usually come away from those events encouraged. But the efforts typically fall short because the real problems never get dealt with.

And regarding Governor DeWine’s efforts to bring more business to Ohio, the truth is that we can spend all the money we want. But until Ohio is a Right to Work state, the big multi-billion-dollar investors will not bring their big corporations to Ohio because of their fear of labor unions taking over the management of their facilities. Ohio will continue to lose opportunities to South Carolina and other places until we join them in becoming the Right to Work states that protect business investment from the socialist encroachment of the labor union movement, which never should have been allowed in American politics. To understand these basic economic truths, I would recommend everyone to read The Richest Man in Babylon and come to your own conclusions. But until people have a basic understanding of wealth creation, it’s a pointless debate with the kind of communist labor union advocates who think that the value of labor unions is in more sick time, the 40-hour work week, and weekends and holidays off. All those things mean less productive work, less output, and more paid time off for a company trying to make things.  

The sum of many conversations on that topic was that Right to Work was dead in Ohio until President Trump returned to the White House, and likely longer because Trump likes labor unions. In his big MAGA party, labor union members have been voting for Trump. So suddenly, we have friends in the Republican Party from the labor movement, and nobody was going to dare push those friends away at the expense of dividing voters away from Trump. And Governor DeWine, for all those reasons, had no stomach at all for Right to Work discussions. But eventually, and not decades away, but just three or four years, Ohio will have to be a Right to Work state if it wants to be the next Silicon Valley in a 21st-century economy, which I think is entirely possible. Ohio is a great place to live and work. The business corridors between Cincinnati and Columbus, and Columbus to Cleveland, especially on the east side, and even all the way up from Cincinnati and Toledo, are some of the best in the world. There is room for plenty of country living and rock-and-roll businesses that create vast wealth for everyone involved. But what’s preventing that investment isn’t a lack of input from the state to develop the infrastructure to do it; it’s the protection of investment from those looking to do so from the greedy hands of the communist labor movement. Nothing kills wealth-building faster than a labor union. It might get union members paid off days where they don’t have to work, but it doesn’t help a country be competitive while the rest of the world in Asia is working seven days a week, 24 hours a day, for a rice cake. And that is what we are competing with. Ohio needs to be a Right to Work state, and the sooner it is, the quicker real investment into Ohio can begin. Until that happens, speeches like the Governor’s State of the State are just enthusiastic dreams that are held back by reality. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

MAGA is a Big Tent Party: Understanding Republican Party Politics in Butler County, Ohio

There seems to be a lot of confusion from liberals who thought they understood the political landscape and who have learned recently they didn’t understand anything about it, especially regarding the Republican Party of Butler County, Ohio, where the Lakota drama unfolded during the presidency of Joe Biden. After all, they see pictures of politicians they know, watch their behavior, and think they understand politics. But their assessments have been all wrong. For instance, they think Darbi Boddy, the first-year school board member at Lakota schools, represents the fringe extreme right-wing politics that is so scary to the purple-haired people eaters of the communist LEA labor union. When, in fact, all those sympathetic to the labor movement from the police unions, the teacher unions, the electrical union down the road, all the moderates, the RINOs, and the many, many Democrats who run for office in our very conservative county who put an R next to their name because a D would get them thrown out of their local Target while buying socks if people knew. The political landscape can be pretty confusing to the latte-sipping prostitutes I’m always talking about who are out there trying to save one child at a time with screams for more safety, vaccination status, and bicycle helmets worn to get the mail out of the mailbox. The confusion comes from the scope of the political movement, not its limits, and that is where all the mistakes are made, which for Democrats is catastrophic.

When we were vetting candidates for the Lakota school board, I knew that Isaac Adi had some liberal sentiments. We had a campaign event at Jags Steakhouse, where it came out several times while he sat beside me. But I thought Isaac would be great on the Lakota school board anyway. He was softer-shelled than I am, but I thought it would be much better than the liberals we had been dealing with at that point. So I put my differences aside and got behind him anyway. For me, it was about presidential politics instead of the local disputes that I was after. MAGA is a big tent party, much bigger than traditional Republicans, who were thought of as rich white guys represented in the past. MAGA is all about women, diversity, immigration, and people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs. At that time, Isaac would say to me that he was “MAGA,” and I was okay with that. I still am, even though the confusion is apparent, such as at the Republican Christmas Party, where Isaac took a picture with the black-hatted villain himself, Sheriff Jones, who was at the center of the Matt Miller controversy. Jones who has been a big supporter of President Trump especially over immigration issues played his part in assisting bad behavior at Lakota schools while trying to destroy members of the Republican Party for personal reasons.  We call people like Sheriff Jones people playing Battleship with political rivals rather than chess, and it sends the wrong message to actual political enemies, that is very confusing for them.  Those labor union brothers stick together, even when they do the wrong things. But Isaac is honest and believes what people say to him because he isn’t a person to mislead himself. I look at the picture of those two guys and see voters and supporters for President Trump. But I also see a Democrat and a person thinking about being a Republican. They are about as conservative as Joe Manchin from West Virginia. Relative to the rest of the Democrat Party, they look conservative. But compared to the Tea Party types who are really behind Republican Party politics at the grassroots level, the politics aren’t even close to being consensual.    Now liberals trying to figure out who are Republicans and Democrats in the county would look at that picture and think they have the Republican Party all figured out, and those two are what they are dealing with. So, of course, their lives will be shattered when they find out that just referencing them as MAGA Republicans isn’t the same as legislating as a conservative.

Another good example was a recent photo of West Chester Township Trustee Lee Wong at a Chinese New Year type of event getting a selfie of himself with Joe Biden, giddy as a schoolgirl. Lately, because the political sentiment has demanded it, Lee has voted more conservatively, more along the lines of my friend Mark Welch than toward the liberal leanings of the past. I would not call Lee a Republican, ever. But he has voted more conservatively than another friend of mine who is another fellow trustee, Ann Becker. I’ve known Ann for a long time as she was president of the Cincinnati Tea Party and openly campaigned against John Boehner for being too much of a RINO while he was the third most powerful person in the country as Speaker of the House. These days, however, next to Lee Wong, Ann looks like the liberal. So that gives a little perspective to how things can change over time as the political tides roll in and out. But then you learn what a person is really about when they get a chance to meet President Biden. I wouldn’t be caught under any circumstances shaking his hand under any condition. Biden represents the worst in politics. But you can see from the picture that Lee was enchanted to have a picture with Biden, which says everything about his political motivations. 

People only casually concerned with politics to preserve their wild sex lives and extracurricular social nonsense wanted to think that Lee Wong, Isaac Adi, Sheriff Jones, and others represented the Republican Party because they see them at the same kind of events, so they misplaced their strategies. Many real conservatives in Butler County never go to social events because the people are too liberal for them. If they get a candidate to vote for like Darbi Boddy, they will show up on election day, the same as they will for Trump. But if they get just another RINO, they will probably not vote. And when it came time for the rubber to hit the road with the Matt Miller drama at Lakota, there was a surprising level of support for Darbi, who is considered a radical right-winged Republican as opposed to the much more moderate Isaac Adi. Liberals looked at the situation and thought they could work with Isaac. But not Darbi, so they endeavored to get rid of her and made quite a show of it. But they didn’t understand that much of what they thought was the Republican Party was an illusion. They were looking at the big tent MAGA party with all kinds of people coming to it because MAGA means wins. Being associated with President Trump means winning in politics. Obviously, people thinking of running want to be associated with MAGA politics, despite what the liberal news media wants to believe. But when it comes down to personal beliefs, people are generally conservative; they lean much more toward Darbi Boddy than toward Isaac Adi. And Democrats, to them, is a very dirty word. So is working with them. While the moderates, the RINOs, and the communist union supporters all talk about working together, what the voting public wants is a fight. They want fighters who will sort out all the nonsense and represent them in government. Darbi Boddy certainly does that, and so does President Trump on a national level. But the mushy middle is what gives politics a bad name because politicians who claim to be more conservative than they really are just to get elected end up disappointing everyone. And in a world of lies and misleading action, those are unforgivable sentiments. It might win a vote under the big tent of MAGA. But it certainly doesn’t win the hearts of the public. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Nazis in Antarctica, Aliens, Secret Societies, and the World Economic Forum: Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex

After watching the 2023 Davos coverage of the World Economic Forum, the only thing that kept popping up in my mind was Holloman Air Force Base with President Eisenhower stepping off Air Force One in the New Mexico desert sun and into a couple of UFOs parked on the runway for a critical meeting. The occupants of the UFOs are more controversial than the unique craft themselves; they could have been beings from another world or an off-shoot colony of Nazis who never went away after World War II and had simply moved underground, literally in Antarctica, where many volcanic caves have produced underground chambers only accessible by submarine in a comfortable 70-degree environment all the time. The talk has been persistent over the years that nobody won World War II. We simply wiped out the Third Reich in Germany, created the United Nations, and then hired some of the Nazis as our own scientists and created NASA with occult leaders like Jack Parsons and Alister Crowley leading the charge in rocket design, along with the Nazi Warner Von Braun. Meanwhile, a Fourth Reich, which had long been planned by the creation of the Nazis in the first place by a couple of secret societies, the Thule Society and the Vril Society, claiming to have contact with aliens from other worlds, escaped with the help of American corporations, such as the Ford Motor Company and many other sympathizers to the Nazi cause. They set up shop in Antarctica, using Argentina and other areas of South America as a new base of operations. There are pictures that show Adolf Hitler in Argentina, as well as other prominent Nazi officials, and that the United States helped all this along because they wanted a space program of their own, and the Nazis were the way to get it. 

Of course, the story gets even more colorful than that. There was a conflict off the tip of South America close to Antarctica and the superior technology that the Nazis had been working on all during the war. American forces were easily beaten, and the event rattled the intelligence community profoundly. It was obvious to all involved that the Nazis had been developing lots of unique technologies, UFOs being one of them. They were openly working with characters from other worlds, species of visitors who had been coming to Earth for more than 10,000 years and were part of our human history from the beginning. And the Nazis, as other secret societies had been doing for a long time, were trading information and advancing in a way that national countries could not keep up with. To flex their muscle after the conflict in South America that embarrassed further the American Navy, those same Nazis used their high technology to harass Americans over Washington D.C. in 1952, just to prove they could. Of course, the incident was the famous UFOs over the American Capitol story. It got plenty of attention, which led to Eisenhower meeting with them for a treaty in 1955 at Holloman Air Force Base. If America couldn’t beat them, we could join them. And it’s at that moment that many point to where America became a corporation instead of a republic, and all Americans became a captured serial number asset to this invisible corporate conglomerate who had actually caused all the World Wars and was now entirely in control of Earth behind the veil of the world’s governments. In the 1960s, as he was going out of the door of the Presidency just before Kennedy stepped in, President Eisenhower gave his famous speech about the Military Industrial Complex and warned us of the dangers they possessed. People scratched their heads at the time, but now it all makes much more sense. 

Watching the trajectory of history over the last seven decades has only made this crazy story seem more plausible. I’ve known about these events as kind of fun facts for much of my life, but I sort of laughed it off as a bunch of interesting information that didn’t have much validity in reality. I have been to Roswell and done my own research into the UFO phenomena there, and my conclusions were that the UFO crash that happened there was likely perpetuated by a dying town, destroyed by a flawed foreign policy that sucked away the jobs there and gave them to China and Mexico. All the town had to draw people to it was talk about aliens and government cover-ups. Yet, there is more to the story, just beyond the veil. And much of this has been confirmed by President Trump’s Presidency that nobody would have believed before. That the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies were not working for the voters of America but for some mysterious force that was not accountable to the American public. The war in Ukraine suddenly was evident for what it was, a way to change the boundaries of the world, using the American military as the primary mover in the chessboard, and it was being done for mysterious reasons that had nothing to do with the American Constitution, or the will of the American people. These intelligence agencies did much of their work by hiding the obvious in plain sight and keeping people from noticing by layering conspiracy theories in front of the truth to keep anybody from discovering or admitting it. After the events of Covid, the coup against President Trump, and the antics of the World Economic Forum led by Klaus Schwab and the gang, suddenly all that crazy stuff of Nazis in Antarctica, alien interactions with secret societies, and the selling out of America by an American president for the good intention of protecting the people from superior technology and accepting those Nazis into partnerships with the American government in trade for a space program suddenly takes on all new meetings. 

From my point of view, the bottom line of the matter is that I don’t care about all the crazy stories. I don’t care if aliens are running the world and they have technology far superior to anything human beings have managed to create so far. I don’t even care if those alien beings actually had a hand in building the human race from the ground up for their own needs. And that, in truth, many species of aliens are fighting it out on Earth and other places all the time. And that the Nazis reached out to them first and benefited in ways that gave them and their corporate partners leverage over all the nations of the world in the 20th century. Now those same people have formed the World Economic Forum, which was nothing more than another secret society cult worshipping Mother Earth with climate change. What we do know and can prove without a doubt is that none of these World Economic Forum people respect the American constitution, and neither does American intelligence or our military. Their behavior gives credence to these vast conspiracy theories, which may not prove to be so crazy after all. The Davos characters, the Desecrators of Davos as I like to call them, as other people call them the “elites,” do not have respect or reverence for American sovereignty, and they act like it’s already a conquered nation. And that Eisenhower’s speech about the military-industrial complex was something we should revisit and take notice of. Because it looks like the little dog from the Wizard of Oz has pulled away the curtain, and we can see who and what has been behind the smoke and mirrors. And what we have learned because of the Trump presidency is that the conspiracy theories were more than fiction. What we know now requires us to act accordingly. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Biden Classified Document Dump: A purposeful diversion from the real problems they’d love to hide

Once you know the tricks these people use to conceal the truth or mislead the public in a direction you don’t want to go, you will find they use the same playbook for everything. Even if the truth is that President Eisenhower met with aliens on the runway of Holloman AFB in 1955 and sold-out American sovereignty into a corporate conglomerate of globalists, ultimately losing World War II and everything we thought we fought for, the diversions that are used to conceal the information from the public are all the same. And that is what I think about the sudden classified documents coming out from the Biden administration initially. Joe Biden knows he’s not a legitimate president; he was elected by China essentially through a rigged system by globalists who wanted a friendly face to implement their Great Reset. If you’ve been watching the coverage at Davos, you’d see just how crazy they all are, and that ties into the Eisenhower deal that I’ll talk about a lot more later. None of these aggressors think they can beat the United States directly, so they have methods of deception that they use to undercut us all by way of war, but by methods of dishonesty, they have become quite overconfident. They put Biden in place and thought people would be gullible enough to accept it, but it hasn’t been working. Biden has serious economic problems. He is allegiant to a phony war in Ukraine, and his boy Hunter is in all kinds of trouble with that laptop. We know that President Biden even showered with his daughter, and the FBI tried to cover that up. Biden is a disaster in every way a president could be, and the anger toward him is much worse than the mainstream polling cares to indicate. 

The Biden classified documents that we have been hearing about over the last week were a purposeful leak meant to soak up people’s minds over a couple of issues. First, it’s safe for Biden to look for a diversion to defer to classified document leaks to get people talking about what is preferable to all the disasters that Biden is enduring presently. There is a lot of really bad stuff we could be talking about in the news, especially concerning the deaths that are directly connected to the government-mandated vaccines and the people who lost their jobs because they defied Biden’s illegal executive order from September 2021. Covid was an attack, a bioweapon from China that many of the World Economic Forum people were directly involved in, and it’s one of the most embarrassing things that have ever happened to the United States. Much of it happened during Biden’s watch. Once he realized the situation, Trump tried to walk back out of the mess, but liberals would not allow it, and they made a mess of the economy and health policy that was embarrassing at the time. But now we see that it’s been killing people. The vaccine didn’t save lives; it has been taking them, and for those who have lived, it’s resulting in lower birth rates and all kinds of side effects that people are just now realizing. If you have to pick a catastrophe, a leaked classified document is much preferred to all the other news that would otherwise be discussed. 

Biden’s people know that people don’t care much about classified documents. Even though Hillary Clinton should have been disqualified from running for president because of her destroying 30,000 emails on her server, the way the FBI handled the story, people became numb to the whole issue. Then when the political left tried to use the classified document issue in revenge against President Trump by raiding his home and taking items he clearly had a right to possess because, as president, he could. People didn’t care. Anybody with half a mind can relate to a president wanting to take home some memories of their time in office. That’s how President Nixon got into so much trouble, tape recording himself for his memoirs later when he was out of office. There was no official need for him to have any recordings; he did them to remember his time in office. So this classified document game has been going on for a long time; people are numb to it and generally don’t care. When they can’t buy eggs at the grocery store, they are thinking about a lot more than what President Biden has in his garage sitting next to his corvette. So what they did, was the Biden people and lawyers purposely leaked this information to soak up the news cycle so nobody would talk about the serious problems because they know from history that Americans are forgiving about such things and really don’t care. In the end, they could throw a bone to the DOJ and let Trump off the hook just as they’ll let Biden off the hook, and much of that controversy will go away. They are admitting to these documents because it gives them cover for the other very serious things that are going on in the news that people won’t be so forgiving about. 

Now there is no question, now that the news is out, that there are people within Biden’s own party who would like to replace him with Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom for the 2024 presidential race. They would like to use this classified document dump story as a way to convince Joe to step away from the race. Of course, because the Biden presidency has been such a disaster, Democrats are looking for someone who might actually do better in an actual vote since the next election will be more difficult to cheat in. Statistically, I have my doubts that Biden obtained 60 million votes and that the election fraud was so out of control because of all the loose Covid rules that he may not have had 40 million people voting for him. Most Democrats know that or at least suspect it heavily, and they know if they are going to run against Trump, yet again, they’ll need some way to break 70 million votes, which will be hard for anybody in the Democrat Party to do. So they are hoping to do to Joe Biden what many wanted to see happen to Hillary Clinton. But it won’t work in the end because people generally don’t care about classified documents. But they do care about a whole lot of other things. I would say to everyone distracted by the classified document story they keep finding around Biden that it’s a preferred story that everyone prefers to talk about so that nobody talks about the things that really matter. The problems of the Biden crime family are much worse than having some moments from his years in politics sitting in a garage. Yet, predictably, that’s all anybody has talked about for a good part of January 2023. And that tactic is common where truly bad people conceal their actions behind a narrative that soaks up attention away from much more serious topics. And it is used heavily in our media culture to disguise many horrible things. They have been doing it for many decades, since mass media’s invention, anything more complicated than newspapers. And the human race has never entirely caught up because they are too trusting. Which is why the tactics are used the way they are. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

After A Year of Darbi Boddy as Lakota School Board Member, Was it Worth It: Lawyers have had too much power and wasted entirely too much money

It’s been about a year now since Darbi Boddy was sworn in as the new Lakota school board member, and we have to ask, was it worth it? Was it worth all the trouble, the news coverage, the hard feelings, lawsuits, threats, scandal, petitions, and civil war with the rest of the board?   Well, of course, it was worth it. Darbi Boddy has turned out to be precisely what was needed, and because of her, we are seeing many good things that would have never happened any other way. When Lynda O’Conner and I set out to have a conservative majority on the school board of Lakota schools, Darbi Boddy was precisely what I had in mind. Lynda obviously had other ideas, and we ultimately disagreed with the final result. In management, my philosophy is obvious and well-known; I like conflict because it gets people to the root cause of a problem. And many people in Lakota, not as conservative as I am, are sick of the government school system always taking too much money from the community and wasting vast sums of money only to teach children progressive politics that is detrimental to the human race. At the start of the year, we were all worried about Critical Race Theory and same-sex bathrooms at Lakota, and with my kind of management philosophy, Darbi Boddy was just the kind of firecracker that needed to be thrown into the hornet’s nest to flush out all the bad guys who were causing so much of the trouble. Darbi was worth the investment of the Republican Party, and the fundraising, and all the negative media coverage. Because she did what all good managers do, she used the conflict to root out the trouble and force everyone to live up to a performance standard, and that requirement has crushed the weak elements of the public education façade that were too expensive and brought liberalism into a very conservative community.

We will hear something of a purge from Lakota; many resignations will be notable, which will be excellent. In a liberal world, which is typical in government, they classify quality as in hiring more useless people to perform a task. So a value to them is in paying too many employees too much money to perform a needed task. And leading up to the last school board election, Lakota as a school system was pushing for another school levy, which had many people extremely upset. As expensive as Lakota schools are presently to the taxpayers, and for what they are teaching, which is all the crazy progressive garbage that we hear about negatively on the nightly news, the idea that Lakota would try to obtain a tax increase to pay for more wasteful employees was simply a horrendous enterprise. In truth, what too many wasteful employees provide any organization is inefficiency and corruption. We have seen plenty of that at Lakota, which was hiding behind a compliant school board that lawyers ran. One thing I learned during all this was how much lawyers have their hands in everyone’s pockets, and they are turning out to be a significant problem not just locally but nationally and internationally in politics as well. They operate without a political party to shape political activity in devastating ways and suck off way too much taxpayer money as a result. Looking at some of the invoices from legal work over just the last couple of months at Lakota shows all that needs to be known on this topic. The amount of corruption that lawyers were covering up and diffusing from the public was enormous and expensive. So when we were asking questions about where all the money was going, it wasn’t just on high-priced administrators advocating for progressive politics at taxpayer expense; it was in a more devastating way going to lawyers who have the sole purpose of covering up scandals and employee misconduct and preventing the public from having an opinion on that conduct. The result has been a loss of free speech, which is a significant violation of the constitutional parameters between the public and their employees of elected representatives, and the financial burden, as a result, was enormous. 

It’s a shame that the other school board members on the Republican majority weren’t as good as Darbi. The other two turned out to be RINOs, John Boehner-type RINOs. The Republican Party isn’t as unified as it was when we had that last election, so it’s not clear how endorsements for the next election will happen. Based on the previous election’s results, it might not be needed. There is a power struggle in the Butler County Republican Party that was unified a year ago, which goes back to my management method of using conflict to identify weak spots. We have indeed found weak Republicans behind all the smiling faces of campaign mode. I was very proud of Isaac Adi when I took a picture of him with Jim Jordan at a GOP event not that long ago. I still think Isaac is a good person, even though he has worked against Darbi Boddy since the moment she was sworn in. A lot of people have learned over the last year just how conservative, or not, they actually were, and that will make this next election an interesting one now that the cards are on the table. It will be a different kind of election, and there will be a chance to get two more Darbi Boddy types on the school board, which will be a great opportunity. 

Yet to the question, was it all worth it? Well, the answer is yes because the obvious thing that everyone is fighting for is a good education for kids, and taxpayers throw money into a pot to accomplish that task. And many parasites obviously want to suck up that money to support their often lazy and maniacal worldview. Just because Lakota will be peeling away a lot of employees doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. The best thing is to do more with less, let the trouble leave, and not replace them with more expensive employees. Just because Democrats had an insurrection in the Ohio House to essentially protect their extensive government views regarding the Backpack Bill, education is changing, and only good management will prepare Lakota for what is happening. Eventually, the money will go to the child, not the zip code. Lakota will have to be competitive and not just sit around with their mouth open and have lawyers shovel in vast sums of money and keep the public from interrupting the process. So far, after years on the school board, only Darbi Boddy has been a good school board member who has truly given the public what they have been needing, proper representation under a great deal of duress. Many people in Darbi’s position would have fallen apart, but she has been challenging and lived up to all the rigors I knew she would have to face going in. It has been bloody, ugly, and treacherous. But she is doing a great job and is poised to have another great year. Meanwhile, those most unstable under the pressure of performance are jumping ship, and for the taxpayers paying for all this mess, that’s a wonderful thing that we need a lot more of. 

As we reflect on this past year and plan for the upcoming one, remember in April of 2022, Matt Miller and the school board chose to run the newly elected Darbi Boddy off the school board, just as they had previously with Todd Parnell the year before. There was a radical push by activists encouraged by superintendent Matt Miller to remove by force Darbi from the board. There were media hit pieces orchestrated by many of these same people who went way out of their way to publically embarrass Darbi; they were camped outside her home with the media cameras focused on her, and her child as Matt Miller sent a trespassing order to her for a school she was supposed to be managing. The radical unfairness started with Matt Miller and the current school board. But Darbi held tough and stayed sincere through all the pressure. She showed what could be possible if one good school board member asked the hard questions and challenged the management of millions and millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. The radical leftist elements openly harassed supporters of Darbi Boddy and threatened them with lawsuits and other forms of intimidation, attempting to publicly shame them into hiding. But people stood up for themselves, and good things did happen as a result. Now, just think about how good the school board could be if Darbi had some support. And for those who are upset about all this, take some notes. Don’t play the game unless you plan to lose. Everything started with a vote and people picking their representation, then politics stepped in to try and erase that vote. The same methods can and will be applied to any office holder, no matter where or what they do, or how long they have been doing it. Remember that the voters are in charge of their political representation, which a government school certainly is. Politicians don’t decide fates, voters do.

Rich Hoffman

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The Psychological Warfare About a Fake Moon Landing: Neil Armstrong’s search for the ancient library in Cueva de los Tayos

In an information age, it should be expected that psychological warfare would be the primary strategy for all hostile agents worldwide. And social media, of course, will be a vehicle for it, as are all forms of mass media. And not all the hostile characters are governments. Governments are undoubtedly hostile, but technology has provided an even playing field for even the most maniacal character who knows how to use psychological warfare on a gullible public for nefarious objectives. And this strategy has been in place since the beginning of mass media, for the entirety of the last century, and has been on overdrive so far in the 21st. It’s not hard to understand why so many people believe so many things, even ridiculous things, such as the conspiracy theory that the moon landing was a fake. I would think of that conspiracy theory as an example of psychological warfare because the hostile agents who started it were not happy with what was learned with the actual moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as when they landed on the surface, cut off communications with NASA which amateur radio operators picked up, for around 2 minutes where Armstrong revealed that there were other ships on the crater of the moon and that other lifeforms were there watching them. That, too, is considered a conspiracy theory, so what are we to make of any of it? Who do we believe? Can we trust anybody anymore? Well, the ultimate goal of psychological warfare is to erode that trust so that there is nothing but desperation among people and a hunger to believe what they deem safest. And the world’s governments position themselves as that “safety” option, and from that, they plan to gain much power. 

It was always odd to me that we never returned to the moon after those six Apollo missions. The rumor was that NASA was told by the lifeforms watching the moon landing to pick up a few rocks, fly around and take some pictures. But otherwise, stay away. And NASA and the American government did just that for the next 40 years. I sort of watched all this strange behavior by our government with knowing skepticism because I read everything and, as I say all the time, don’t judge people by what they say because they will lie. Judge them by what they do. I was very happy with President Trump’s statements during his inauguration speech, where he said, “we stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries, and technologies of tomorrow.” Who in their right mind wouldn’t like that? Well, governments who want to be in control didn’t like that, and by returning to space, it was going to reopen all the secrets of the Apollo missions, such as why we never dared go back to the moon or other planets for that matter. We had been waved off by something. Well, I make no apologies about it; I think the human race was filled with interactions with beings from all over the galaxy. I think there is highly compelling evidence that migrants from the planet Sirius gave ancient cultures a jump start and that Indian mounds all over the world play a part in helping space travelers know where and when they are in time while traveling around large distances that don’t behave consistently with time. I don’t think everything from Ancient Aliens the television show is correct, but I think they are knocking on the right door. But unlike those speculations, I don’t think those interactions ever went away, but that they still occur to this day, and governments and occultists are still working to have relationships with many species of living beings from all over the place.

When Neil Armstrong returned from his trip to the moon, he was never quite the same. He lived near me, and my wife and I looked to buy some property near his farmhouse outside Lebanon, Ohio. And people would run into him around town, and he would tell them things. He worked as a professor at the University of Cincinnati and eventually moved to Indian Hill. But I watched him for a long time and was always curious about him. As a kid, I was very moved by the museum dedicated to him in Wapakoneta, just up the road along I-75, a few hours or so. So I found his trip seven years after he walked on the moon to Ecuador looking for the reported ancient library there, supposedly built by giants and hosting 40-pound books made of gold in a secret library left behind by the visitors from other planets, compelling. The cave where this library was rumored to be located was Cueva de los Tayos near the Santiago River, and it was Armstrong who put together a small expedition there to see what he could find. As it turned out, they saw some strange things and mapped the cave but didn’t find the library. Some artifacts indicated there was certainly more to the story, but the fact that a very logical and respected figure such as Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was interested in such a thing, added to his behavior for the rest of his life, indicates that he was clearly rattled by what he saw on the moon and was looking for answers, behind the veil of what governments and power-hungry despots conceal behind what we perceive as reality. Based on Armstrong’s behavior and conversations he had with locals, off the record, I believe what a seasoned test pilot and astronaut says more than a corrupt government with all kinds of illicit intentions and those powers do use psychological warfare to hold power over people. If people learned the truth about things, governments wouldn’t have the power they do. And even though Armstrong knew he was more afraid of the powers of our governments and the promises he had to make to them to get the opportunity to go to the moon, he spent the rest of his life essentially thirsty for the truth. 

The psychological warfare that was employed in this case was that the truth may have been that characters from some other planet were on the moon watching us land in our primitive little capsule and that the confidence we had in going there, to begin with, was because of our relationship with those same characters. People assume that contact with a civilization from anywhere but earth would lead to hostilities, but I would argue against that theory. Likely, they have been with us from the beginning and have been the gods of our myths from the beginning of time. And they fight among each other, are not unified in their endeavors, and we have just as much leverage over them as they do us, philosophically. They may have more and better technology than we do, but that doesn’t mean they are more innovative. I tend to think, based on their behavior, that they need us as much as we need them, and we have a lot of power-hungry corrupt people, just as are reported in the Bible, and every ancient book, who want to put themselves between them, and mass society. And to play that psychological warfare with the public, they started the conspiracy theory that Stanley Kubrick, the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, faked the moon landing so that we could show the Russians that we beat them to the moon, when in fact we never left the ground. And in that way, they could hope to keep anybody from knowing the real truth, the thing that haunted Neil Armstrong for the rest of his life, that there is a lot more to the world than just what we are told in the news and from our governments. We have caught our governments lying to us about election fraud, the conditions of wars around the world, and of course, the conditions of Covid and what it did to all of us. And knowing all that, you can bet they would lie to us about much “bigger” things. Yet we can know that we landed on the moon because we have telescopes, and we know where we landed and what we left behind. Because the evidence is right there for all to see, we just need to look at it.

Rich Hoffman

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What’s Most Wrong in Politics: Consensus building and “getting along”

It was a national embarrassment to have Joe Biden come to Cincinnati and give a speech on bipartisan support to waste 1.4 billion dollars building a new bridge for the vital I-75/71 corridor, bringing with him a whole parade of RINOs and Democrats. That bridge should have been built long ago for a lot less money. The speech by the illegally elected Joe Biden was too late and about all the wrong subjects. I happen to know several of the characters who were with Biden that day in January 2023, well, so I have some perspective on what “bipartisanship” means when Biden says it. Essentially, Biden is in trouble politically. His son is a disaster. The Chinese who have put him in place through election fraud are struggling to put behind them the scam of Covid which they manufactured, distributed, and perpetuated to gain power in the world far more effectively than any military would have, and of course, there’s a new Congress controlled by Republicans who are going to have a chance to conduct many new investigations into Biden’s criminal family and all the sins of the past now that a “Trump Standard” has been set, which no Democrat will be able to live up to. Biden has no other choice but to show up in Ohio with a bunch of boot lickers and try to take the edge off things by showing something that needed to be done, finally getting done. And it was not impressive. To do it, Biden had to sign another 550-billion-dollar infrastructure bill with all kinds of progressive garbage in it. This project is projected to cost another 3.6 billion dollars in the end, likely more, as union cost overruns take a toll and the bureaucrats realize how much they left out of their projections. Instead of being something positive, it was a gross display of everything that was wrong in government. And everyone there looked just pathetic. 

I couldn’t help but think of the irony, and I’ve spoken about Rob Portman quite a lot this year, especially concerning the campaign of J.D. Vance who was just elected to be his replacement. I’ve been hard on Mike DeWine, who was there and I have said the only thing good about him is his wife’s cookies, who, upon meeting them earlier in 2022, she is hard to dislike. And Mitch McConnell from Kentucky has been shown to be a RINO anti-Trumper from the beginning. Sherrod Brown, the other senator from Ohio, is a joke, and another cover-up from the media regarding his messy divorce, which I became involved with while campaigning for Jim Renacci. I had a chance to meet Brown during that story at Miami University, which the media helped him get through, much like they have covered up so many stories with Joe Biden. And then there is Andy Beshear, governor of Kentucky, his election was so close that what we know about election fraud and the methods of his election was very similar to what happened in Arizona this year with Kari Lake. The Democrat Machine cheated to get him elected; only an eternity ago, in this very real war, we didn’t ask those kinds of questions because we didn’t know we needed to. Biden put up on that stage a collection of political misfits on the Ohio River banks across from Longworth Hall, where the popular bridge edges past, and it brought back distinct memories of my life with Rob Portman as he was starting his political career, just how far people fall in life. And knowing all the dreams of Portman from his beginnings, the only thing I could see standing with Biden were political failures using massive amounts of money to save a government that had grown too corrupt to trust. 

During the early 90s, I was very active in Ross Perot’s Reform Party, and Rob Portman was campaigning for a suddenly open congressional seat that had come up in Cincinnati. He was a little older than me at the time, but we got along well and I wanted to help him, so I set up a Sunday night debate on 700 WLW with Portman and a bunch of other candidates for people to hear, which Portman clearly won.  During that campaign, I spent a lot of time with Rob Portman talking about all the reasons he wanted to get into politics and how he wanted to emulate Ross Perot in the Republican Party. Many of our meetings and events occurred across the river from where Biden spoke at Longworth Hall. I could tell many stories about those days involving a reformed Penthouse model married to a wealthy developer and a rag-tag group of political activists who would eventually become the Tea Party 15-16 years later. Along with some of my friends, there are still people who talk about the giant American flag that we hung from the top of Longworth Hall to all who could see it traveling southbound across the Brent Spence Bridge that hung all the way to the ground from the top. Rob Portman was a part of that group of reformers, so I have had high hopes for him over the years. But to see him broken and beaten over the years was sad and pathetic. For him to end his political career essentially sucking air for Joe Biden tells you everything wrong with politics. 

And what is wrong with politics? Well, it’s consensus-building. Once people like Rob Portman accept that getting along with bad people like Joe Biden, Sharrod Brown, Andy Breshear, and China Mitch, rather than actually standing for things, is the start toward expensive political destruction. And Joe Biden, on that day, was actually supporting that flawed premise by showing off all the losers who had been politically beaten and were “working together” in wasting money that should have gone to a project twenty years earlier. The only reason they were all there on that day was that a major political storm was brewing. With all their attempts to get rid of Trump, people still loved and supported Trump, just as people loved Ross Perot many years earlier. And back then, Rob Portman at least said he understood. But once he got to congress for a few terms and then ran for the Senate, the values of Washington D.C. clearly changed Portman. He went from that bright-eyed political reformer who would hang around my rag-tag friends on many political adventures to this washed-out husk of the flesh who propped himself up to an illegal president, showing support for him because the institution of the Senate was more significant than the value of any of them, and that’s where things always go wrong. And it starts with the value of consensus building, with concessions of value where people of good value and bad value compromise with each other, and what people end up with is watered-down, expensive garbage that comes too late and not often enough. All that was on display regarding the bridge announcement in Cincinnati is how corrupt, and costly everything is that a government of criminals can provide only when people are about to throw them all out of power with pitchforks. Ironically, it all started for Rob Portman across the river from where he ended it. And in the end, he was a shell of the person he once had been, and it was very sad but revealing to see it up close, as I had. 

Rich Hoffman

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It is Joe Biden’s Fault that there Isn’t .50 A.E. ammunition at Cabela’s: Democrat Party communist tampering destroys supply chains from eggs to ammunition

There is an old Ronald Reagan joke, which I will include with this article, that talks about how ridiculous buying a car in Russia was during the open days of communism. Because of the tight government controls on the means of production, the joke went that it took ten years to get on the waiting list to buy a car. But that a person would have to know whether the car would be ready in the afternoon or morning because the plumber was scheduled in the morning, which might pose a conflict. The essence of the story is that government tampering with the marketplace causes production delays, and no matter where in the world it is tried, communism and socialism slow down production. But wait, what about China, you might say, or Vietnam? They are very productive and are the fastest-growing economies in the world. Well, two things are happening there; first, they are very industrious people, not afraid of hard work in most Asian countries, and they have a lot of people to overwhelm the inefficiency of government bureaucracy. The other thing is that the World Economic Forum has artificially propped up all Asian countries through corporate manipulation, so the money they enjoy and investments they see coming in are a direct result of market tampering by hostile forces hell-bent on taking over the world. So the value of Chinese manufacturing at all levels is smoke and mirrors. Communism is the pick of the Desecrators of Davos investors at the World Economic Forum because they like it, and banks like centralized control. So despite the realities of President Reagan’s jokes about Russia, there has been a global push to outspend reality and force the world into communism anyway.   

And there is a reason those same forces felt they had to steal the American election, just as they did the one obviously in Brazil. The world is on fire, and there are protests everywhere, Paris, London, Mexico, and just about anywhere that large populations are struggling to reclaim their capitalism from global commitments from finance into socialism and outright communism. And Joe Biden represents the Democrat’s deep desire to install Chinese communism in America and to rot away Americans’ expectations about production and market value. Now we are seeing the effects of this Democrat Party push for Chinese-style communism everywhere, whether we are talking about baby formula, gas prices, or the latest crisis, the price of eggs. Something many of us take for granted, eggs, which are easy to get in large numbers in America, are now rising in price to dangerous levels because the Biden administration policies have tampered with the market to such an extent that they have interrupted production and delivery which can’t keep up with demand. But for me, this is a much more serious issue going much further than the price of eggs. I see the destruction of the Biden administration differently every time I go to Cabela’s to buy ammunition. I have had through Covid thousands of rounds of ammunition for my .50 A.E. Desert Eagle, which is my carry gun, and it has taken me a while to burn through them. It hasn’t been an issue in a few years, but I used to be able to go to Cabela’s in West Chester, Ohio, and buy all the .50 A.E. ammunition I could want. It was just as easy to buy .500 Magnum S&W ammunition, my other carry gun I take with me everywhere I go. But on this particular day, I couldn’t find them, so I asked the store clerk if they had any, and he just laughed as if what I had said was the funniest thing in the world. “I haven’t seen any of that kind of ammunition in over three years,” he said as if me asking for it was the most absurd thing in the world. 

Now, I can make all aspects of ammunition on my own. I don’t need an ammunition manufacturer to do it for me. Most of the time, ordering all the components, I can assemble my own ammunition by reloading at my home. But I could just as well do it in the middle of the woods with no power grid. The government has obviously done what it can’t do with gun laws; tamper with the supply of ammunition by making it hard for manufacturers to produce it, and they have tampered with the supply chain. The result is that Cabela’s, which is one of their core competencies, has had a hard time getting any ammunition. For a long time during Covid, they struggled to get some of the most common ammunition in the world, 9MM. As I looked at the shelves, I thought they had managed to get most ammunition from .22 through .45 caliber, and equally rifle ammunition as well. But the really big stuff, the exotic stuff I like to use, has dropped off the radar and is likely interrupted forever. You could tell by the way the clerk talked that he had already accepted the limits of global communism and had made himself a victim to those lowered expectations. Whereas, under President Trump, during the year of 2019, the year before Covid, I would have asked for .50 A.E. ammunition, and he would have proudly said something like, “right over, there are six boxes of 20. And if you want, you can get a free hamburger and a 2-litter of Coke for free if you buy five boxes today.” Excesses are expected in American culture, which makes things cheaper.

But for the global market tampering schemes of communists, they want what is happening at Cabela’s. They can’t pass laws to get rid of gun rights, but they can make it hard for people to get ammunition to use. So they have attacked that sector of the economy for personal activism. I’ll still shoot my guns, but they have made it harder and much more expensive to get, and the efforts have been on purpose, clearly. It’s part of the overall communist philosophy of why the Biden administration was put in place, to begin with. Unlike the store clerk at Cabela’s, I don’t accept these ridiculous restrictions that have been artificially imposed on us by out-of-control, stupid government and their tampering desires. I expect to live in a country where I can buy a chicken sandwich at Chick-fil-A and stop by Cabela’s, which is right next door, and buy up several boxes of .50 caliber pistol ammunition all in about 10 minutes so I can get back to doing other things in my life rather than looking for ammunition. The real reason that communist countries have less productivity is that people waste time waiting on the government to do things, and that gives them less free time for personal pleasures. I don’t waste time in my life, so it is quite insulting to waste time looking for things like ammunition that should be easy and quick to get. It’s bad enough when these market restrictions start to emerge with common items like eggs. But you can best see the effects of globalism and the Biden administration’s communist philosophy on luxury items, which are always the first targets of attack by overly centralized governments. When the store clerk laughs at the assumption that we live in such a competent world that .50 caliber ammunition would just be sitting on the shelf, you know you have a big problem on the supply side of an economy. And it was made worse by government not by accident but by purposeful activism that is part of a global strategy. And it’s far worse than many people realize. 

Rich Hoffman

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A Coup in the Ohio House: Lessons to remember about Democrats, treat them like raccoons always digging through your garbage

There is an important lesson that everyone needs to take notice of regarding the Democrat coup in voting for Jason Stephens as Speaker of the House in Ohio. Republicans who hold a substantial majority in the Ohio House thought they had the Speaker role all mapped out, and it was going to be Derek Merrin. Being outnumbered the way they were in the newly elected body, RINOs and Democrats decided under the chaos of the Holidays to join together to “stop far-right policies.” The communist left sees them precisely as education issues centering around the “Backpack Bill” which allocates funding per child, not per district, which is a terrifying concept for education people. So while Republicans were busy with Christmas, the New Year, and family emergencies, 32 Democrats were convinced to vote for the moderate Republicans Stephens for the Speaker position, while 22 Republicans joined them to give them the majority. The drama over the incident was lost behind the national Kevin McCarthy debates, and it was too late when everyone found out what was going on. Republican Representatives in the Ohio House had been suckered and found themselves caught looking, just as a baseball player batting against a good pitcher stands at the plate expecting a slider or a curve ball and were planning their approach exclusively for those pitches. Then came a 90-mile-an-hour fastball right over the plate, the last thing that was expected. And the Democrats suddenly found themselves in power to protect their education policies and other big government union goodies extorted through years of bad government. For more details on this, you can hear from my good friend Jennifer Gross, a current Representative in Ohio, talk about it on the Brian Thomas show on 55 KRC. It’s a really good interview.

I’m sure Jason Stephens can be worked with, but it will make it much harder to do what many of the Republicans in the Ohio House had intended to do. The issue that remains, it will take several more sessions of Representative leadership to remove the premise of the 22 Republicans who are prone to be RINOs and work with Democrats who are essentially the same thing. They call themselves Republicans because they come from districts where people wouldn’t vote for Democrats strictly because of the name. So they pretend to be Republicans when, in fact, they are Democrats philosophically aligned. And the big union position has crossed many lines over the years; most people have friends or family who has benefited from union extortion, so it’s difficult for them to make a logical statement about them now. President Trump is a union supporter, which further complicates things for many RINOs. Suddenly the Republican Party in Ohio had in President Trump a person union members could vote for, so in the wake of his presidency, the old union problems are still problems, and they are doing everything they can to push reality off as far as possible. And by scheming to get Stephens in the Speaker role, the union types, especially the public sector unions, like those in the teaching profession, feel they can protect the money basket, that funding will continue to go to the wreck of the schools that we currently have, which don’t work and are filled with liberal propaganda. These people are going to fight to keep what they have extorted over the years, and when they saw how things were lined up with Merrin, it terrified them. 

Many from that side of things are calling anything to the political right of Karl Marx “far right,” when in truth, the facts are that everything else has been put in place through deception. Most of what Democrats have done over the years, including their relationship with public unions, has involved deception. And my distinction about union representatives is that all union concepts are socialist and communist in their positions, politically. I have known a lot of people, including family members, who were big union supporters. BIG union supporters, specifically because they worked at the Norwood car plant and Fisher Body in Fairfield, Ohio. Those manufacturing plants couldn’t deal with the unionized labor, and they never should. The Department of Labor’s position of being friendly and advocating for unionized labor penalizing companies who make big investments in communities only to have those investments controlled by union slugs talking about Karl Marx phrases as “workers of the world, unite” to always bring extortion to labor production unless the workers got what they wanted. That was always the radical left position, and they sold it to the public wrapped in the American flag as patriotism. But it was always a communist scam, and anybody who spoke against it was considered radical right winged. I’m okay with that, even with family members and their children who grew up thinking unions were “all-American enterprises.” I have always told them to read a book, then they would know better. Unions are not American and are hostile to capitalism. That makes them an enemy of the American economy and is detrimental to any concept of small government. 

And they have one play in the playbook, radicalism, deception, and cheating to keep any power they have acquired over the years. Once companies realize they won’t be able to run their own investments, that unions will, they shut down and leave, which is precisely what happened in Norwood, Ohio, Fairfield, Ohio, and many other Ohio facilities that watched the industry leave the state because of union activity. But that can’t happen in public education because it’s all attached to government jobs, and government never leaves. You can only make it smaller. And the issue in the Ohio House involving the Backpack Bill was a bridge too far for the radical union types. Once education funding starts going straight to the kids, and performance for that money is measured in the success of the end-use product, it’s over for the big union types who own and operate government schools. So they had to do something to protect themselves from reality.   And they did; under cover of chaos, they elected the RINO Republican Jason Stephens to snatch up the Ohio House Speaker position in a surprise upset while people watched the last Ohio State game and made New Year’s resolutions. I don’t think it’s the end of the world, but it was certainly a lost opportunity. Eventually, that opportunity will come around again because that is the trajectory of politics. Many of those 22 RINOs are only in those positions through some form of deception, and people are getting tired of it. They will be replaced with more conservative members in upcoming elections; that is the trend. Critics might call it “far-right,” but I would call it the America we have always loved and are working to get back to. Any other thought on the matter comes from people lost in the definitions created by the radical left anyway and has no merit in reality. Name-calling and deceit is no way to run a political movement, yet that’s all Democrats have. So they played their hand this time and won because nobody took them seriously. Well, take them seriously; they will do anything for power, and understand that while dealing with them. Don’t play nice with Democrats; treat them like the raccoons digging through your garbage late at night and assume they all have rabies. They are not your friends; they are diabolical representatives of Karl Marx and nothing else. 

Rich Hoffman

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I Don’t Want Any Part of “The Club”: If Butler County Republicans aren’t serving the taxpayers, then they are serving corruption

Since the very corrupt prosecution of Roger Reynolds in Butler County, I have had more than a few people trying to rationalize it to me, “that the club likes musical chairs,” meaning they want a change in blood. And the sleight of hand that is going on with assigning Joe Statzer to the auditor role as a “temporary” assignment with a wink and a nod indication that after a short time, the Butler County Commissioners will just make that appointment permanent, is the kind of behavior that people have grown sick of. The media reporting on the matter made it quite obvious what was going on. The establishment types, I would go as far as to call them RINOs, lost now that Trump isn’t in the White House, are fighting for power and control. They don’t want people like Roger Reynolds looking through their books, and they have old scores to settle that go back to the David Kern days. It’s the kind of disgusting power people are afraid of in Congress presently, with the debate to not vote for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House. People don’t trust these establishment politicians; in this case, I know most of them personally. They don’t see themselves as dangerous; they think of themselves as good people. But like the kind of horrible things we have seen come from abuse of power on the national level, we have certainly seen it applied to Roger Reynolds and to prevent Nancy Nix from being appointed that job by the Butler County Republican Party to keep the continuity of some very good work done at the auditor level, and rearranging the chairs that fit the party, not the voters who are supposed to be in charge. And people keep talking to me about this “club” idea as if it should matter to me. So let me just say I don’t work with politics to be part of the Club, to be invited to all the VIP events. I do it because I want to see good government in my town and for people to get what they expect for their taxpayer dollars. I personally like Joe, and I like the people around Joe, but he’s Sheriff Jones’ direct guy. It was Jones who wanted to push Roger Reynolds from his auditor’s office for all kinds of reasons, so this notion that two commissioners voted to appoint Joe Statzer as auditor of Butler County with a wink and a nod of making it a permanent position is not a good thing. 

Out of the three Butler County Commissioners who voted for Joe to step into that auditor role, two of them are what I’d consider hard Democrats, just as I consider Sheriff Jones a Democrat, a big union slug that is too expensive, and love to use power and force to intimidate political rivals into submission. And that kind of stuff works for people who want to be in the Republican Party “Club.” I am aware that people are only nice to me at social events because they’d like to invite me into the Club to have some control over my behavior. They certainly aren’t nice to me because they like me. I’ve been in business for many decades now and have dealt with a lot sharper tacks in the box than local politicians. Even national politicians. There are smart people out in the world, and these guys are not among them. I have sometimes played along because that’s what you do in all business meetings. You look for common ground and focus on that to build relationships. It’s my hope that those relationships end up working out well for the taxpayers, so it’s worth doing. But sucking up just to be in some stupid club, no thanks. I don’t need or want more friends, and I certainly would never put myself in a position to get a call late at night telling me how to think or feel so I could remain a member of a “club.” And it’s the “club” mentality that the commissioners were clearly protecting with the appointment of Joe Statzer to the auditor job. Only TC Rogers voted against Joe’s appointment; he understands what’s happening. The other two, Cindy Carpenter, might as well be the belt holding up Sheriff Jones’ pants, voted to protect the “club.” Take that belt away, and the Sheriff’s pants fall right off. And Don Dixon was the other one. Everyone keeps telling me what a great guy Don is as if I didn’t know him. As I say all the time, I love all Republicans until they aren’t. And for those who decide they are Republican all of a sudden, I welcome them. But it must be remembered that Democrats who become Republicans always have some Democrat still in them, and that is certainly the case with Don Dixon, who was a Democrat until 2000 when he switched parties during a time when it was obvious how things were going in Butler County, Ohio politically. 

I’ve known the Dixon family for a very long time. I see Don here and there, and I think he’s a pretty good guy. I don’t rush over to shake his hand for many reasons. I’ll always think of him as the guy who cost me the championship in the Soap Box Derby race in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1979, when I was around 10 or 11 years old. I was racing for the championship against Brent Dixon, Don’s son and the races were so close over three tries to determine a winner that the event judges just gave the win to the Dixons because of their political influence. That was told to my parents and me unofficially because that’s how the “club” works. That’s why many of these people want political power, so they can tilt the table in their favor when needed. In that Soap Box Derby race, we should have continued racing until a winner could be determined. But the judges were tired in the June sun and wanted to go home. So instead of another race, they just decided that the Dixon kid won. And I developed a hatred for “club” politics that would last the rest of my life. That next year Ronald Reagan ran for president, and I was the campaign spokesman in the 7th grade for our school and have been involved in politics ever since. My hatred for “club” politics likely started that day and still persists over 40 years later and will likely continue for another 40 years. (CLICK HERE to read more of this story.)

And that is what’s wrong with politics in general and why all the fuss over Kevin McCarthy. I live in a town where I have a lot of mutual friends who know John Boehner personally. I did not like John Boehner when he was the third most powerful person in the world, and I don’t like him now as a pot spokesman. It wasn’t personal, but I hated the “Club” as it was back then. And now, with Trump out of the White House, the bottom feeders have lost focus and are resuming their desire for corruption, to tilt the tables of power in their favor and with any means necessary, and they think that people will just put up with it. And I’d warn them otherwise. I have been watching this stuff for a long time, and people are much smarter about these things than they used to be. They don’t like corruption; this is why they voted for Trump because they want someone to stand up to this kind of behavior instead of just putting up with it. And on the local level, politics was never, and should never be, membership into a “club.” The only thing good about politics is what it can do for the people. The golf games, the fundraisers, and the “club” activity are all bad things in politics, and for my part, I have much better things to do with my life than to get my picture taken next to Sheriff Jones so that I can show people that I’m in “the club.” Butler County Republicans can keep their Club. They need to be worried about whether what they do serves the taxpayers. And if it doesn’t, such as this whole business of destroying lives just to protect “the club,” then they are doing the wrong things willingly.

And regarding that soap box derby race, even though I didn’t win the championship that day, I’d say because my family wasn’t in the “club,” I was very proud of what I did. I still have that car hanging in my garage, and I see it every day. My parents were proud of me; it was a fun day. My mom, who isn’t doing so well these days, brought it up as she was traveling down memory lane, and it was one of her good memories. And the lesson about the whole thing is that the Club might do everything to win. But people know who wins in life, and I’d rather live like that than be beholden to a bunch of corrupt people just to get the trophy. There are many kinds of winning in the world, and I view winning without the help of “the club” to be much more valuable than anything else in the world. Only weak losers need a “club” to help them along, which is precisely what we are seeing emerge in the Butler County Republican Party. And when those people are no longer with us, and the hearse goes by with their bodies headed to the graveyard, people won’t say, “look, there goes a great person who lived a great life.” They’ll say instead, “there goes a member of the “club” and one less corrupt person in the world who looked to politics to save their lazy selves from the scrutiny of public opinion.” Membership in the “club” disguises that reality from their minds, but when it is known what people really think, that is the reality that tyrants and the corrupt are hiding from with the illusion of social protocol. 

Rich Hoffman

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