Tag: Butler County Republicans

Vote for Mark Welch as Trustee of West Chester, Ohio: The island of misfit toys wants to ride the success of good politics

Mark Welch, the long-standing trustee of West Chester, Ohio, has undoubtedly been one of the main reasons that the northern Cincinnati community is one of the best places to live in the world.  And that’s not just me saying that because I like West Chester, Ohio.  Years ago, some effective policies were implemented to limit government overreach and foster a free enterprise approach to the growing community. This was achieved through a collaborative effort, led by then-trustee George Lang, with Mark Welch subsequently elected to provide a much-needed second vote.  It used to be that George was always outvoted two to one, and he needed someone who could share his vision with him. The result was a period of prosperity in West Chester, Ohio, which has made it unquestionably one of the best places to live anywhere in the world.  As a result, many people have moved into the area, bringing with them political ideas reflective of their origins, which have evolved.  George is now Senator Lang of Ohio, representing the 4th District.  However, Mark Welch remains a trustee who is now up for re-election in 2025.  With his excellent track record, he should have an easy re-election to his seat.  But we don’t want to take anything for granted.  Another long-time holdout, Lee Wong, who is very sympathetic to Chinese causes, is also up for re-election.  He is the kind of person who a lot of Democrats vote for, so he tends to get support from the many moderate Republicans, and the Democrats so there is some concern that in a race that is introducing the long term police chief to the mix Joel Herzog, that if Republicans don’t work together, that damage could be done to the seats in West Chester. 

Most of the time, there aren’t many people who run for these spots, and it could be assumed that Mark would win his seat back and that there would be room for Joel Herzog to join him.  Lee Wong, under all considerations, is vulnerable for many reasons, but he plays nicely enough with Republicans to avoid drawing too much hate, which is part of his strategy.  In a three-way race for two seats, it can get tricky.  The ideal situation would be for Republicans to show up and support Mark and Joel, thereby putting Lee in third place.  However, as I mentioned earlier, Lee will likely draw Democrat votes without needing to do much campaigning.  And the way these elections work is that it’s the best of the candidates who get the highest vote count.  Therefore, the top two vote-getters will win the seats.  And if it were just between these three, I would say Mark Welch would have no problem retaining his seat.  Joel Herzog is a good guy who comes highly recommended by everyone who knows him.  I have mentioned that, as a former police chief, it would be challenging for him to negotiate police contracts as a trustee with impartiality.  But most people agree that the good stuff with him is so good that that’s not a concern in his regard.  To regain the support of two conservative West Chester trustees, it will require a coordinated effort to retain Mark and help Joel win without one of them losing to Lee Wong.  The current belief is that Lakota schools will attempt to put a levy on the ballot, which is expected to attract many big-spending Democrats, making the math for Lee much more favorable than in previous years.

Then there is the issue of Ann Becker. A couple of other prominent Democrat challengers, affiliated with the Kathy Wyenandt area Democrats, who are certainly in the minority, are also running. Still, they are organizing to tag-team their efforts with the Lakota school levy push, so they hope to have higher than normal voter turnout to capture some advantage.  Ann Becker is the third trustee who was formerly a Tea Party conservative, serving as president of the Cincinnati Tea Party and the West Chester Tea Party.  She used to have a show on 55 KRC to discuss Tea Party topics, but Ann Becker is long gone these days.  She used to be a good tag team vote with Mark Welch, but she has changed quite a lot over the years, to the point where she might as well be a Democrat.  Therefore, electing Joel and retaining Mark become that much more critical.  When I first met Ann, whom I have been good friends with for a long time, she was associated with the levy supporters of Lakota, and we were at odds politically.  However, I always liked Ann, and she made a transition into the Tea Party movement, where we saw many things eye to eye.  People would warn me that she used to be a Democrat.  But I liked her anyway.  I also like Kathy Wyenandt, too, as a person.  However, Democrats are not adept at handling money or policy, and the needs of West Chester require a particular kind of mind. Unfortunately, Ann has lost her way and reverted to the person she was before I met her, before the Tea Party movement.  These individuals might be friendly, but they shouldn’t be in government. 

The other two candidates stepping into the crowded race for those two trustee seats are both Democrats: Alyssa Louagie and Amanda Ortiz.  I don’t think either one of them has a chance, but they think they do because they plan to tag-team the Lakota levy, which many are counting on Ann to lend her support as well.  So, we suddenly have a lot of Democrats taking a calculated leap into the mix, hoping that something will stick.  There is also a risk of losing what made West Chester great and falling into the same trend that muddles so many other communities, which assume that their success stories can survive with Democrats moving into positions of leadership.  People see things going well, so they give the misfit toys a chance, out of the luxury of success.  Then democrats ruin everything, and they want to attach themselves to the success story of West Chester, and the game for the rest of us is to preserve that success by re-electing Mark Welch and adding Joel Herzog.  However, the Democrats want to capitalize on the success to fund their social engineering projects, which will then alter everything great about West Chester, turning it into just another typical community that has seen its success fade because it was taken for granted.  And if we let the Democrats have a greater share of the seats at the table, we could easily end up with three Democrats as trustees, which would be detrimental to the interests of the other parties. That provides some early math to put the situation in perspective.  I think it will be good for Lakota to put out their ridiculous school levy because it will bring out more MAGA, Trump-voting Republicans, who will only help Mark hold his seat.  I think the math works in Mark’s favor to pick up votes this year, given the anger at Lakota schools over their proposed tax increases.  But we’ll see.  What we do know is who is running, and it’s now that the strategies for preserving West Chester need to be developed, before it’s too late.  And taking a long view, Joel would be great, but the more strategic seat comes up in a few years. To protect West Chester, we need a strategy and a lot of players willing to support the long view, especially in a crowded field.

Rich Hoffman

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

Harvard Does Not Have the Right to Federal Money: Rethinking College Completely

Harvard is making a fool of itself with its legal action, or intent, against the Trump administration for withholding federal dollars over progressive policies being taught at that institution.  Remember, he who owns the gold rules.  The beggars in need of money do not have the leverage to command policy.  They must do what is required to get the money if they want it.  They don’t get to set policy.  Those are the rules, and they will be now, and forever.  Harvard University does not have the right to federal money.  They must do what the federal government requires to obtain that money.  And that’s the end of the story.  But let’s have an honest conversation about colleges in general, as we should be cutting off federal funding to all of them.  We should not be funding the education of people with federal dollars, which goes for all public education in general.  Education has not given us an enlightened society.  Rather, they have been recruiting centers for Democrat policies that damage kids badly in the critical years of their lives, generally.  Some kids escape into adulthood if they have good family support at home.  But most have their minds destroyed for the first twenty years of their adult lives because of our education system and we are at a point where we need to ask questions like the one at Harvard, why are we spending federal money on such a waste of money, and should we continue to use the college system as a form of higher education.  Or should education be obtained in other ways?  Because the way it is now is a complete waste of money, and kids are learning all the wrong things.  Not only would I call it a worthless experience, but it’s damaging to people the way it has been set up, and we need to change it if we want to fix what’s wrong at the core of our society.

I don’t discriminate against college-educated people.  But I have found that our current education system teaches people to think in a box when learning to think out of one is most needed.  I would point to Robert Persig’s Metaphysics of Quality for a really solid philosophical and psychological analysis of our current education system from top to bottom.  To use his metaphor, we teach people to live in the caboose of life, not to be in the engine room at the front of the train of leadership.  And that’s where we need all people to be.  Trump clearly gets it, and he doesn’t care at this point in his life if people get mad at him by protestors from Harvard or any other legacy school.  The question we have before us is whether or not a college education is effective, and the evidence shows that it’s not.  And a lot of people are functioning as adults with crippled intellects because they had their intelligence robbed from them during their college experiences.  To succeed in the college environment, they have to learn to think in a structured box of information when the real problems are out of the box, and require people to solve problems there.  People who do not have college backgrounds can get into a useful state quicker than those with a lot of college.  But those critical years up to age 22 set people up for most of their lives, and mistakes made at that point in their lives usually last a lifetime.  I have seen people reform themselves by their late 40s and 50s.  But the amount of pretentious time they spend as entitled in the box thinkers, usually cripples them for life.  And it is a real problem.  Just having education funded by the government is not the question.  It’s what people teach, at the heart of Trump’s withholding federal funds from Harvard over DEI policies.  In our culture, as it should be, you pay for what you value.  You shouldn’t have to pay for it if you don’t value it.  Harvard, or any other educational institution, is not promised money for producing a bad product. 

This came up as I was at another one of those lunch meetings, with some people who would call themselves very powerful, and we were talking about this topic and people specifically and one of these people said that so and so was a Man from Purdue University, as if that said everything that needed to be said.  This person had a predisposition to hire applicants who came out of Purdue University, which I think is profoundly dumb.  But it’s what he believes as an employer.  And his comment sparked quite a debate.  I am usually polite about my thoughts, so we had a good conversation.  But to compress two hours of talk into a few sentences here, he maintained a completely irrational hiring practice of hiring people from a university system that produced bad results that he constantly complained about.  And when I suggested that maybe he should hire from the University of Cincinnati, Dayton, or Ohio State, he acted like I was asking him to put on a rival team’s jersey on NFL Sunday.  His belief system was part of the problem in why he couldn’t find good recruits to fill his job requirements.  And when I told him for his technical positions, he would do better to hire 12-year-old kids who hadn’t been taught to fail than kids who have spent the next 10 years of their lives learning to appease liberal college professors, because they would bring those same practices into the work place, which would make them useless, he thought it was the craziest idea he had ever heard and was quite animated by the suggestion.  But it was true and he knows it.

And that’s how it is for most people.  We fund education on hope and beliefs built on feelings rather than facts.  We like our favorite college sports teams, so we support the entire institution teaching Marxism to the next generation. We don’t say anything about it because we might have won some money on a March Madness bracket.  And that is part of the shell game.  We root for college sports, which entertain us.  But we ignore what they are teaching until we find our kids coming back from college as unrecognizable Democrat ground soldiers for liberal social policies that they spend the rest of their lives trying to unlearn.  And a lot of parents save up a lot of money to throw their kids away, essentially into a system that is broken and addicted to federal taxpayer money.  Trump has every right to withhold those funds, and no lawsuit can force the public to pay for its own demise, which is what that Harvard issue will come down to.  It’s the same problem for every college education system and public school.  We have to have an intelligent discussion about what education should be, and what we should do to pay for it.  Not just unthinkingly throw money at it and hope everything works out OK.  Because it hasn’t been working, and in the state it’s in now, the best thing we could do for education is to stop funding failure.  And force education institutions to compete to see what works and what doesn’t.  Because as long as they are fat, dumb, and happy off federal dollars, Harvard and the rest of them have no incentive to change.  And they need to change a lot!

Rich Hoffman

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

Don’t Talk About Party Loyalty: Lynda O’Connor lost because she was disloyal to her base support

They keep saying we are a small, but loud minority of radicals, as if to say, critics aren’t important. But all that did was fuel the opposition against Lynda.

It wasn’t a surprise that Lynda O’Connor had an embarrassing defeat on the Lakota school board. She shouldn’t have run for another term after the mess she caused over the last few years. Her brand was down in a big way and instead of trying to right the ship, she dug in and alienated all the people she should have been working with. The voter turnout was unusually high for a Lakota school board race, but that is largely due to the increased interest from the scum bags and pot-smoking losers who voted to kill babies and legalize drugs, who went in the direction of Julie Shaffer and Doug Horton. During the election, I saw all of them as the same, but it was Lynda who I felt had personally betrayed me, and I couldn’t support her. This hold your nose, and voting for someone who has done a lousy job isn’t an excellent way to conduct elections. Lynda deviated from the original plan and decided to move to the hard left and work against Darbi Boddy, and after two years of mismanagement, the results were evident in the election. Unfortunately, Lynda dragged Russ Loges down on the ticket because the GOP was split and not united behind the candidates. When you don’t have the Central Committee lined up with the desired outcome, it’s never a good thing. And it’s even worse to tell them to deal with the party leadership picks and to accept bad behavior. Lynda O’Conn0r was horrible as a school board president, especially after all the support that was thrown her way. She used people to get power, then abused that power overtly to destroy a popularly picked school board member in Darbi Boddy and cause problems between her and Issac Adi. And the results were evident well before voters cast a vote on how election night was going to turn out.

This is why Lynda O’Connor Lost the Lakota School Board. The Republican Party doesn’t run the voters. The voters run the party. The RINOs aren’t in charge.

I was in Japan, far away from Ohio when it became apparent to me what the cost of Lynda seeking re-election was going to have on Butler County politics. Over the previous two years, we had seen a couple of incidents where party leaders had abused their power to attack upcoming talent or long-standing respected leaders. Such a case was what Sherrif Jones did to Roger Reynolds, essentially sticking the label of a felon onto the former auditor for entirely personal reasons, which then of course alienated the base of the Republican Party. Then, of course, Darbi was a popular pick, and Lynda went on a campaign of personal destruction against her, which resulted in two years of bad branding. I told Lynda on a phone call about a year ago how to fix it, and she ignored the advice. She dug in and name-dropped a few people she thought was important then continued to support horrendous behavior on the school board and aligned herself closer to Julie Shaffer and Kelly Casper. And in the process, she made herself indistinguishable. People who don’t understand these things so well put their support behind her believing they had control of the party and the people in it like some kingly aristocrat and they resorted to a lot of pushing and shoving to get everyone aligned, which was not going to work with the Tea Party types in the Republican Party. Then, to make matters worse, they sought to destroy the Tea Party of West Chester to make their point more vocal, which essentially sealed the fate of Lynda O’Connor in politics. She had used the West Chester Tea Party to advance herself as a brand for the Lakota school board. And when she turned against those values, she lost the only real support she ever had.

After I returned, I attended a Central Committee meeting in Liberty Township after there were some political shenanigans in West Chester with their Central Committee, and it was obvious that the establishment types were going to screw everything up. The RINOs wanted appeasement, and the MAGA types wanted authenticity, so there was going to be an impasse, and it was just going to have to play out. Republicans everywhere, locally and nationally, have gotten into a lot of trouble trying to appease evil, and it has caused them to work with Democrats on all kinds of Marxist issues and has essentially pulled the country away from its foundation and more toward socialism and Marxism all because they wanted to “hold their nose and support the party.” For the preservation of a party that only wanted to live, not actually to represent voters’ values. That has left people who have values and want to see those values supported in politics hungry for accurate representation. That’s why Trump is running for president as opposed to all the other Republican offerings they have tried to give us over the last few decades. And with all the excellent work that has been done, a lot of people in the Republican Party didn’t get it. I explain it to them voluminously, but they don’t have the mind to listen. They think they know better, and the best they can give you is to hold your nose and put up with what your “betters” can provide you. They emphasized that they knew better what that was, and everyone should get in line and deal with it. Support Lynda because she didn’t want to challenge Ann Becker for the open West Chester trustee position because Ann was in trouble over trans rights, so Lynda screwed up and ran again after two years of serious mistakes, and everyone thought it was going to work out great?

A political party either represents voters, or it doesn’t. There have been times that I have loved being affiliated with the Republican Party and have been very proud of what we have had in Butler County. But then, after these last few years, since Trump has been out of office and everyone has snapped back into their true natures, we have seen a lot of embarrassment that reminds me of the old Bob Shelly days with Michael Fox. Party politics, arm twisting, deception, all the kinds of things that made people run to Ross Perot or Donald Trump. And they will continue to run because they don’t want to support the politics of the machine. I’m not interested in politics to hold my nose and vote for some loser, all for the “party.” I want to see things run well with constitutional value. But don’t lecture anybody on supporting the endorsed candidates as a base of loyalty to the Republican Party. Lynda went after Darbi, and the party should have helped the “Republican Endorsed” person. And Sheriff Jones worked to destroy the life of a very popular Republican in Roger Reynolds, and nobody stepped in to help him. And nobody stepped in to save the West Chester Tea Party when a media campaign went against them and essentially destroyed them for the time being, at least their meeting venue. When the RINOs decide to fight the actual base and future of the party, nobody should have expected good results for Lynda. Lynda had to earn those votes. Instead, she went on a crusade of personal destruction and acted as if she were entitled to the position purely off the backs of party affiliation. And some of the back-bending endorsements from people I know were concerned that they would be cut off from the money machine, were reprehensible. And the results reflect just how bad it was. When the approach to an election was filled with such ridiculously stupid behavior, the results should surprise nobody.

Rich Hoffman

Vote for Thomas Hall for the 46th House District in Ohio: Setting the bar high, too high for political rivals

It’s never been an option from my perspective; after the remapping of the Ohio House Rep districts, Thomas Hall has always been the clear favorite. That’s not because Matt King, who is running against him in the primary that voters will decide on August 2nd of 2022, is a bad candidate. But just that Thomas Hall is that good. He checks all the boxes you’d want for a Representative seat in the new 46th district, which now includes Liberty Township, Ohio, and traditional districts from the north, such as Middletown.   Recently at a West Chester Tea Party meeting, Thomas and Matt spoke to the audience to make their pitch as to why voters should vote for them, and I present those videos here, which comes down to one key attribute that decides the issue. In Thomas Hall’s case, he has a lot of experience and has been very successful during his first term in Columbus. He has done all the right things, including passing blockbuster legislation across Governor DeWine’s desk for H.B. 99, which makes schools safer in the case of a mass shooting. Matt King just doesn’t have the experience, and it showed as he presented himself. Both are nice young men, but in the case of Thomas Hall, he’s just an exceptional political representative who has done such a good job that no challenger would do well against. 

To Matt’s point, he did the best he could, and he’s right about the Founding Fathers being very young when they were involved in the revolutionary business of starting a new country. He’s been a guy from the business world, not a politician like Thomas Hall, who has two terms as a trustee in Madison Township to add to his resume even as young as he is. And typically, we might say that not being in politics is more attractive than voting for the incumbent. In most races, that would be true. But Thomas Hall is such an exceptional young man who has faced the hottest fires of controversy and done so with great poise; you get the feeling from him that he’s just getting started. Thomas Hall has already shown that he can go up to Columbus and work with people who do not agree with him and work on legislation in a productive way to get their support. And he knows how to navigate the rough waters of politics without being a sell-out to his district. Of course, that has made Thomas Hall a target for those jealous of his success. For instance, Sheriff Jones has endorsed Matt King because the Sheriff is on the record being angry at legislation Thomas sponsored, like H.B. 99. But Thomas has managed to pick up the enthusiastic endorsement of Butler County Sheriff’s Office Police Union, which Sheriff Jones is a member. He also has the support of the NRA, Buckeye Firearms, Ohio Right to Life, and the Middletown Police Union. Sometimes when you are too good, you do make enemies. In my opinion, Thomas Hall has made the right kind of enemies and he made those enemies because he had done his job too well. 

Some of those jealous forces have thrown their support behind Matt King simply because they don’t want to live up to the high bar that Thomas has set for them. Matt is a blank sheet of paper, making it much easier to live up to. The hope that a fresh set of eyes as a House Rep might turn out well is the same kind of reasonable hope that someone who purchases a lottery ticket might expect. You can’t win if you don’t buy one. But in buying one, you accept that the outcome is uncertain. In my experience, a person with a business background like Matt has will have a tough time because when you run a business, you can hire who you want, and if you need money, you just go to the bank and make your pitch. The tricky thing about Columbus is that it already has people there whom you have to work with who have their own ideas about things, so it is difficult at best to get anything done and to do so with your authenticity intact—and even saying that of course Democrats who enter the Republican Party as Trojan Horses would like to see an end to Thomas Hall. You can see that clearly in the upcoming fundraiser mysteriously sponsored by the Republican Party of Butler County that has the Super Bowl trophy of Spencer Ware on it. They even put the trophy in Matt’s name. When you see this kind of thing, its always an indication that the candidate doesn’t have their own record to stand on, so they try to evoke the records of other people, like the Super Bowl exploits of a person who was on Super Bowl-winning teams, or Sheriffs with a long history of service, but a history of wanting to be a kingmaker and knock off political rivals at the party level.  

But the most convincing case for Thomas Hall came when he was pressed during the meeting by a critic of H.B. 218, which was a reaction to the impositions of the vaccine mandates. The critic in the audience was pressing Thomas for his support of the bill, which she did not feel went far enough in protecting employees from their employers during Covid. Thomas was front and center with all that activity, so he has a track record to criticize. But I think he handled that emotional question very well, which shows how much grace under fire he can handle, so I offer it here. Many political personalities would have stumbled through this kind of criticism, but Thomas did all he could at the time, so he could confidently answer the question.   There was undoubtedly a time limit being imposed on H.B. 218, and Thomas wanted to get something done, even if it didn’t go as far as the person asking the question wanted it to go, which was complete protection from mandatory vaccines. When the Biden administration put forth their Executive Order in September of 2021, it was essentially a race against time, putting politicians like Thomas Hall between a rock and a hard place on purpose. There is a fine line between individual rights and the rights of a company to require employees to comply with the needs of a workplace. That caused a lot of trouble for Columbus in reacting to the pressure; Thomas showed outstanding leadership during this challenging situation and was very respectful to his critic when asked the question. Of course, many of the Biden mandates have been found unconstitutional, as many thought would be the case all along. H.B. 218 tried to do something in a really tough time, so there wasn’t much more Thomas could do, but his reaction to the criticism is telling because it shows how he can handle pressure, even when it’s critical. Matt King couldn’t be asked any questions because he didn’t have a record to defend. And ultimately, that’s what this race comes down to; one of the candidates for the newly created 46th District in Ohio has a lot of experience and has been very successful. The other guy is hoping to use other people’s reputations to knock off a political rival who has set the bar too high for other politicians to live up to. That makes it a pretty clear case. Ultimately it’s up to voters, but the logic favors Thomas Hall greatly. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business