Tag: Butler County

Never Turn the Other Cheek to Evil: The sexual groomers and CRT teachers at Lakota don’t have the gas in the tank the media wants you to believe they have

There were a lot of important lessons that people should have learned from the Lakota school board meeting on May 9th, 2022, which I’ve talked about elsewhere. It was intended by the media, the radical progressives, and the institutionalized school board to be an assassination of Darbi Boddy for daring to come back to the meeting and not allowing herself to be forced to resign, which all those elements wanted more than life itself. The calls for her to be destroyed and publicly sacrificed were sickening. I’ve heard all the stories about her, that she doesn’t get along with the other members on the board, that she doesn’t follow the rules. That she doesn’t care about the image of Lakota. I will say that Darbi Boddy represents me best of all the school board members who have served at Lakota over the years. I may have liked some of the other board members, but they often don’t come close to representing my position. Yet Darbi does, and I think she has been as professional as she can be, considering that the foundation of all public schools is radical progressivism. School boards often get caught trying to mask the effects of progressivism in the schools, so the taxpayers don’t feel so bad about the many thousands of dollars each they are forced to contribute against their will only to churn out more kids with purple hair who live their lives like a perpetual Pride Parade participant. School boards spend too much of their time trying to make a bad system work instead of dealing with some of the vast evils that are being manufactured in these institutional corruptions proposed by John Dewey from the beginning. My position specifically about public education is that it has been a failure from the start. People would be better off without it. It does nothing to prepare kids for the workplace, which is evident in our post-Covid economy. And public schools have been committed to one primary objective over the decades: to prepare the child for a liberalized political outlook on life and remove the role of the parents in the child’s lives as much as possible. School boards and superintendents have learned to mask those effects to the public while hiding the fact that they played nice with the progressive teacher unions hoping to hold the whole thing together just long enough to pass the next levy to throw at the mob to keep them quiet and coming to work every day. 

Since the last election, I haven’t paid too much attention to Lakota schools. I liked that two Republican-endorsed candidates were elected. I like the current school board president, so I figured they’d go do the business of the school and leave us all alone for a while. I generally don’t like thinking about Lakota schools for all the reasons stated. I think it does nothing to help kids, so my hope with a school board is that a really good board might help mitigate the damage to children. But I am certainly not on board with institutionalized learning. The evidence of how bad it has been is all around us in the world. So I contain my rage about it most of the time until those public schools start asking for more money, or they pick on people I see wanting to do a good job the way a good job is defined, with lots of questions and a sincere dedication to solving problems, instead of trying to cover them up. And Darbi Boddy has been a school board member who has been doing an excellent job in my mind. I don’t want the school board to mask the progressive elements from the public so that the public doesn’t see how those losers waste our money, vast amounts, to be specific. And with so many bad people gunning for Darbi Boddy, I was determined to go to this particular school board meeting, even though I knew it would be a huge waste of time. She didn’t deserve all those extremist elements trying to destroy her, and her supporters needed to make their opinions known.

Leading up to the meeting, I received lots of antagonizing text messages, Tweets, and other forms of communication berating me for still supporting Darbi despite the “group consensus” displayed by the school to get rid of her. And with each one I received, I was more resolute to engage these attackers. I have been saying for many years to conservatives, do not run from these people. When they engage with you, stand and fight them. Punch them back into the holes they live in. Do not give them social validation by boosting their confidence by turning the other cheek. Most conservatives do turn the other cheek about most everything in their lives. That’s what God tells them to do in the Bible, so they do it. But they shouldn’t. When a purple-haired sexual groomer who wants to teach that America is bad through CRT and they want exclusivity to your children, you have to fight to protect your children from them.

Failure to do that is contributing to evil. So I wasn’t particularly happy about going to a Lakota school board meeting anyway, but I was expecting a fight. I wanted a fight as I pulled into the parking lot because I personally hate these people, the progressives who are employees and supporters of those employees at Lakota. However, I was surprised by what I found at the school when I arrived. For days ahead of time, I had screenshots of a Facebook page that the sexual groomers at Lakota were planning an anti-Darbi Boddy rally to demand her resignation. By the talk of the community and the hundreds and hundreds of comments that were left there, it looked like 1000 people might show up, so I was expecting a challenging evening. But you know what I saw? Two people standing out front. Now those two people looked like the typical Pride Parade types, the sexual groomers who want to introduce to children alternative sexual lifestyles when they should be learning math, science, and reading. But they had no support when the rubber hit the road, which is the lesson everyone should learn from this experience. 

Most of the people who packed that room at the meeting were anti-Darbi types. But if all the conservatives I know who were concerned about Darbi and this particular meeting specifically had shown up, they would have dwarfed the anti-Darbi people. I reminded people at that meeting during my speech that more than 8000 people had just voted for Darbi just six months ago, and nobody had a right to erase that vote away with these theatrics. But this is what progressives do; we see them doing it right now with the Supreme Court. Of course, the liberal media makes those crowds look big, so it scares away the conservatives from participating in these kinds of events because they don’t want to have to fight. They don’t want to deal with these evil elements of society, these sexual groomers, and anti-American radicals. They stay home. They do vote, but they are quiet about it. They don’t want to deal with the radicals, they don’t want the radicals coming to their house to harass them, and they fear it because the media has perpetuated that myth to feed that fear. But as was evident at that meeting, the progressives and radicals have no gas in the tank. If they could have had thousands of people outside the school board, they would have. Instead, they had just a couple of crazies demanding Darbi’s resignation. And they had a bunch of disrespectful malcontents in the board meeting being very disruptive, hoping to alter the course of the evening with discontent. But to no effect. All it did was prove a point I have been making to conservatives for three decades, stop pandering to these idiots. Throwing money at them to make them be quiet has not been a good strategy; it has only empowered them to believe that they have a majority they clearly don’t have. They are not as powerful as they pretend. And when they confront you, don’t turn the other cheek. When they attack your representatives, don’t abandon them to the mob. Don’t pick Barabbas. Stand up for what’s right and help them live another day. The real fight is how entrenched the public schools’ progressive elements really are; CRT is the most obvious problem. Nobody wants to see it, yet the evidence is clear to see, specifically in the participants of the campaign against Darbi Boddy for trying to expose it and how the institutional assassins lined up to destroy her. That is all the proof anybody needs. Yet, despite all their efforts, to stop them was pretty easy because they don’t have as much support in the world as the television cameras want you to believe they have.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Psychology of the Silent Majority: Measuring engagement with President Trump, Joe Biden and Darbi Boddy

Understanding the silent majority is the key to comprehending many elements of modern politics. This came up recently as antagonists of Darbi Boddy at Lakota schools were poking around, observing that my sites don’t typically have a lot of comments. My readers tend to read, observe, and think about what they engage with. They don’t usually feel that they should write down their thoughts for all to see. This is also true of polling; when a pollster calls members of the silent majority, they are much less likely to answer the phone or interact with the established organization because they are much more guarded about their thoughts and actions to the public. This tendency has given the political left a sense of power that they never had. RINOs, too, have misread the tea leaves over the years, believing that their task has been to appease the noisy minority. And there was a considerable amount of panic when within a week of the pro-union elements of radicalism at my local district of Lakota couldn’t use social pressure to force Darbi Boddy off the Lakota school board, the liberal controls over conservatives were losing their grip. When some of those same elements brought their value system to me, hoping to invoke the same concerns, “you don’t have much engagement in the form of comments,” one of them said to me, looking for a way to invalidate the content by the way they measure. That is because the silent majority stays silent on issues, and the political left never had control over them. It was just an illusion created by the small minority who do care about such things. When I say that liberalism is a mental illness, this is what I mean by it. The Conservative silent majority types do not need the validity of their existence acknowledged by others for their happiness and actions in life. Liberals do need the validation of their peers. They are the epitome of classic philosophy; if a tree falls in the forest and nobody witnesses it, did it fall? Well, for the silent majority, of course, it did. To the liberal, they need acknowledgment of its falling to believe that it fell. They need social validation. 

Just the recent Trump rallies in Nebraska, then the one in the pouring rain in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, will show the evidence that provides some sort of measure on this condition. Back to the Darbi Boddy case at Lakota schools in Butler County, the belief by the radical lunatics is that if 100 to 800 of them make noise on a Facebook page and speak at a school board, then that is enough to observe that she should be removed from the school board and replaced with someone they like as liberals better. But the silent majority lives in Butler County, Ohio, in numbers that are around a half a million. Every officeholder in Butler County is a Republican, and the biggest fight in politics isn’t between Democrats and Republicans but between real conservatives and RINOs. So regarding Darbi, the liberals are grossly outnumbered at the ballot box. Still, they believe they are in the majority because they gauge their reality off peer engagement like-minded insanity. On the same day that Trump went to the Greensburg rally in the rain to a massive crowd that waited all day to see him give the same essential speech he provides every week, Joe Biden came to Butler County to visit a metal plant that specializes in 3D printing to try to affiliate himself in a manufacturing sector in a positive way. Well, I was within feet of that obviously inserted President. Nobody cared; everyone went about their business as if he wasn’t even there. The motorcade on the way in and out was uneventful. If it had been Trump, the traffic would have been backed up for miles. For Biden, it was a few missed traffic lights. He came and went as if he were never there. Without cameras and some CEO cheerleading, nobody would have otherwise known Joe Biden was even the President of the United States. Yet hours later, in Pennsylvania, standing in a steady spring rain covered in mud for over six hours, Trump supporters waited for the former President, who has been gone for 15 months from high office, to talk to them about supporting his next round of endorsements. 

The problem used to be getting the silent majority to engage in politics because they never wanted to support people like George Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. I remember the challenge in 2012 when Kid Rock came to West Chester, Ohio, to do a big rally for the Ohio GOP, including John Kasich. I was supposed to go to it and do my usual behind-the-scenes stuff. But I had better things to do than meet all the Republican celebrities that year, which nobody but the extreme insiders was excited about. If you want to go to the zoo to see RINOs, that was the event. But most people like to see other things in the political zoo, so attendance was light. A few years later, when I was involved in helping secure a location for the future President Trump during the primaries of 2016, we booked him in the Savannah Center just a few feet from where Kid Rock had been playing for the 2012 GOP, and it was a madhouse. Trump wasn’t even the nominee for the Republican Party at the time, and it looked like he never would be. But people were parking everywhere. West Chester turned into a madhouse as no traffic management could have managed people’s desire to see Trump. Most of the people who came to see Trump at the Savannah Center never got into the building. That was the silent majority. They don’t feel they need to validate their existence on message boards like Facebook or engage with pollsters. But when you see they all want to be in the same place to do the same thing, that’s when you can begin to see them and understand the political movement that is upon us. 

We’ve learned a lot about the silent majority over the last ten years since that 2012 event. Back then, the GOP managed to fill the field by the clock tower in West Chester, but it certainly wasn’t close to the madhouse of Trump’s visit to the Savannah Center. And the crowds are much larger now, and he’s not even President. The recent rally in Nebraska was supposed to be on a Friday night, but they had terrible weather, so they canceled and rescheduled for Sunday. People waited all weekend for Trump to arrive at the rescheduled time. And they’d do it again. So why is Trump so popular, whereas Joe Biden is not? Why is Darbi Boddy making so many liberals upset by being on the school board, yet their protests are falling on deaf ears?

Darbi knows what many are just now learning about the silent majority. They are where America has always been, yet they weren’t represented in politics or even the entertainment industry. Every so often, there would be a movie like American Sniper that would catch their interest, and you could see them.   But without a person who represented them in public, evident for all to see, nobody knew they existed who measure these things because the measurement was wrong. Engagement was being used to measure sentiment. But the silent majority was silent for a reason; they were not stimulated by the measures of engagement being presented to them, so their passions went unrecorded.   And they didn’t participate in the measure. The insanity of the political left to feel unchecked and validated while the silent majority disengaged and stayed to themselves. They might talk to each other over grilling in the backyard and ooze about the corruption of politics. But they wouldn’t otherwise interact with the established world. They certainly didn’t go to school board meetings to make themselves seen. But when there is an issue they can get their teeth into or a person they feel represents them, they vote and do so enthusiastically. And they don’t need anybody to acknowledge that they did it, which terrifies the mental depravity of the political left because, without validation, they have nothing in the world. 

Rich Hoffman

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Todd Minniear Seeks to Protect Liberty Township: When progressives are angry it means that the right thing is happening

I said it when he was overwhelmingly elected in November of 2021, and I’m still saying it, I love Todd Minniear as the new trustee of Liberty Township, Ohio. He ran on a freedom platform, and he’s living up to it by proposing a resolution at the May 3rd, 2022, trustee meeting to make Liberty Township a “constitutional township,” with a written promise. However, for some reason, the sweat bees of Lakota are going crazy over the idea, which is very interesting.   When I first heard about the resolution, I thought it was a great idea but wondered why it was needed. After all, isn’t all townships supposed to be “constitutional townships?” Well, yeah, of course. So why was something like this proposal needed at all? In 2020, when the government made lots of mistakes over Covid, it was up to the local governments to step in and challenge the governor’s actions. In this case, the governor took on emergency powers and bypassed the legislature to assume powers that Governor DeWine did not have. The lockdowns and mask mandates that destroyed so many businesses were unconstitutional. None of them could be defended in court, and so far, all the cases have been lost and looking back on what went wrong, it’s clear that local trustees should have pushed back against the governor. One person can’t be allowed to ruin the lives of so many people with a bad decision. That’s why we have a republic and not some flea-bitten democracy in America. We have a local government that is accountable to the people instead of some top-down kingship, which is how Mike DeWine behaved. Joe Biden crossed those same lines with vaccine mandates and mask requirements, built entirely off misinformation and science in the pocket of big pharma. 

Yet, the same people who have been giving Darbi Boddy of the Lakota school board a hard time for trying to remove the mask mandates in the school as one of her first official duties newly elected are now going after Todd. Notice how arrogant they are and how condescending in their online postings. These are the same people who think that mask mandates should be forever, that sexual indoctrination of our kids in grade school should be normalized and that Joe Biden should be president. These people have had control of the political process for far too long because they make so much noise, but they are actually a small minority. In a community like Liberty Township, they can find a few thousand people who think the way they do. But Todd Minniear and Darbi Boddy were elected by many more thousands, both gaining the most vote totals in the last election. So plenty of people want to see these kinds of challenges to federal and state power. People did not like the way things happened with Covid and how vulnerable they were to an out-of-control government, and they wanted to see these new politicians representing their interests. Of course, these progressive lunatics don’t want to lose control of the process. They love to harass people into doing what they want to see done with threats and public attacks, which is why it’s so wonderful that we finally have some politicians who are willing to do the hard work. When I heard Todd wanted to make this resolution, I didn’t think it was a big deal at all. But he knew that there would be those same opposing voices who would come armed with their name-calling and arrogant slanders. 

So why is something like this resolution for a “constitutional township” needed. Investors in the community, including homeowners, need to know that the trustees can provide a stable environment from intrusive government. Mike DeWine wasn’t accountable to people in Ohio, but their local representatives were. When a governor like DeWine takes action on his own to cut out our elected representatives in the legislature, we must have some mechanisms to resist the intrusion. For Todd Minniear, he looks to the great book The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates for how our constitutional republic is supposed to function. The book is a proper resistance to tyranny and a repudiation of unlimited obedience to civil government. The example given in the book is about a church leader who is taking money from the collection plate and should expect their congregation to question them should they skim from the pot. Human beings can fail, especially in intellect, and the purpose of our government is to keep innocent people free of those mistakes as much as possible. And as a trustee, Todd ran on a platform to keep Liberty Township free of those kinds of failures in government. Such a declaration like what Todd proposed is necessary so that the people of Liberty Township can feel some sense of protection from the government by their local representatives since our state and federal governments have failed us so obviously. 

The sweat bee progressives of Liberty Township are so upset because they have in mind the complete desecration of our republic and a merge into the chaos of a democracy which would then propel us into the Vico Cycle, which has destroyed so many civilizations over the years. The Vico Cycle is a theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, then anarchy. So if they are upset by this “constitutional township” resolution, that means it’s a great thing. When these people hate what you are doing, you know you are on the right side of history and doing what voters elected people like Todd Minniear to do. Traditionally, they have attacked people like Todd and Darbi, who have only been on the job for a few months. In Lakota, they already have a petition to get rid of her because she pushed for removing the mask mandates. And you see by their comments about this “constitutional township” resolution that they find it a threat to go back against centralized control. Because as liberals, that’s what they want, and for far too many years, politicians have given them the benefit of the doubt.   But we’ve seen where that takes us, and Covid showed us too much of what we didn’t want to know. Those same people felt the power of a centralized government that was out of control, and they liked it. They never want it to stop. And now that people are returning to normal and are electing people like Todd Minniear to represent them, instead of the classic politician of least resistance, they are worried about losing their power. 

All the noise aside, our task in Liberty Township is to provide stability for business investment and residential ownership. And to give that stability, we must remove the intrusive elements of government from some faraway land that is not accountable to us, who can then destroy our community with just the swipe of a pen. A mask mandate here, a lockdown there, a created crisis to hide bad inflation numbers, Liberty Township deserves to be free of the kinds of corruption we always see in centralized governments because accountability is often missing. Todd Minniear and the other Liberty Township trustees are accountable to their neighbors, which is how it should be. And the next time some government overreach occurs, we need to know that our trustees will follow the Ohio and federal constitutions. They didn’t in 2020. Nobody knew what to do because we had never seen such a thing before. But now we do know. We know all about Covid and how the government made it and managed it. And we saw what it did to all our lives. So, we deserve to be free of those intrusions in the future. And the more that the political left screams about it, the more of that kind of thing we should do because it just validates why it was so important in the first place. 

Rich Hoffman

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Butler Country Republican Party Endorses Jim Renacci for Governor: President Trump is coming to Delaware, Ohio on April 23rd, get your tickets

It was quite remarkable that the Butler County Republican Party endorsed Jim Renacci for Governor of Ohio during the upcoming primary vote. Butler County isn’t the only endorsement for Renacci; he is picking them up at an increasing pace as the stretch toward election day has come closer. However, the Butler County Republican Party is one of the strongest conservative forces for good in the nation. Every officeholder in Butler County, which has over 400,000 people, is a Republican. Butler County likes its Republicans, and to turn away from the current governor and political heavyweight Mike DeWine is quite a public statement. It shows the tremendous Republican strength of Jim Renacci, but it also indicates to what degree Mike DeWine has lost the conservative base, and deservedly so. DeWine has operated as a Democrat. He was horrible during the Covid crisis. In many ways, he led all the blue states in lockdowns and has been a complete embarrassment to the Republican Party. If there were a picture of what a RINO looked like (a Republican in name only), Mike DeWine’s face would be their despicable example. But an endorsement from the Butler County Republican Party was no easy thing to give to Renacci. The DeWine name has been in politics for a long time, and in a less turbulent time, an endorsement of the incumbent governor would be assured. However, the times are turbulent, and Mike DeWine has led disaster straight to all our doorsteps by letting global oriented health experts tie Ohio to the sinking ship of lockdowns and mask mandates destroying businesses and people’s lives ruthlessly as the grips of authoritarian power seized all rational thought and turned DeWine into a modern version of the insane Roman emperor, Nero. Jim Renacci was a chance to start over, and when the Republican Party of Butler County was ready to make that change, it’s quite clear that the rest of Ohio was too.

I have loved Jim Renacci from the beginning and spoke to him personally during his campaign several times. He is poised to bring a Jim Renacci version of Florida’s Ron DeSantis to Ohio. I think Jim can be better than DeSantis, who has set a very high bar in many ways. Just a few days ago, I had a chance to talk to Jim Renacci again, this time for a long time in a somewhat private setting, and we talked about Trump. He didn’t want to say if he would get a Trump endorsement at that time. We talked about how tough it would be for Trump to pick anybody as an endorsement because if the other guy won, Trump would have to work with the loser when he returns to the White House in 2024 after the shellacking that is planned for the insurgent Democrats after this upcoming 2022 election. Jim Renacci was undoubtedly part of the puzzle in retaking America from the grips of Democrat activism. But again, DeWine has been in politics for a long time and has worked with the Trump administration before. In public, the relationship was workable, but behind the scenes, not so much. At one of the last campaign events Trump held in Ohio when DeWine tried to get on the stage with the president, the public booed him off, embarrassing DeWine tremendously. Trump supporters had not forgotten what DeWine did to Ohio during Covid, and they let him hear about it. A few weeks ago, I had a chance to meet the governor in Columbus, and it was evident that he was a shell of his former personality. He knew he was in political trouble. He screwed up Ohio under his first term, and he would have to pay for it. So to answer the question of endorsements, Trump is coming to Ohio on April 23rd to Delaware, just north of Columbus. Renacci will be at that event to meet with his old friend, Donald J. Trump. Get your tickets and witness history. 

So now is the time for Joe Blystone and others who are also running for governor to put their name behind Jim Renacci. They are polling at 20% or less and are not picking up endorsements, which is an early indicator of people’s voting in the primary. Joe Blystone might be a good guy with conservative policies, but he doesn’t have the depth that Renacci brings to the table, and he’s not going to get it a month before the election. Instead, he could hurt the sizable lead that Renacci does have over DeWine by staying in the race. There is undoubtedly a home for good people like Blystone in a state run by Jim Renacci. He would essentially be an extension of the Trump administration, just as Florida is presently. But splitting up that Republican vote by skimming away 20% off the top would serve only one purpose, the chance that Mike DeWine might squeak in under the door due to a split-up conservative movement. That is undoubtedly the situation with the top four candidates for the Senate, one of the primary reasons Trump is coming to Ohio on the 23rd to settle a tight race so the party can unite behind his pick. Voters want to know who Trump wants to work with within the coming days, so the need to clarify things just a few weeks ahead of the primary election is necessary. Of course, it’s risky for President Trump to put his name behind anybody since all four of the candidates are running on a Trump platform of America first. But Trump isn’t afraid of risks, and this visit to Delaware shows it and the kind of leadership that a real leader brings to politics.

That is the same situation for candidate for governor Ron Hood and his running mate Candice Keller. I think they have value, and I’d hate to see them waste it fighting against Renacci for some slice of the Trump vote when the real villain in the race is Mike DeWine. Everyone needs to unite to ensure that Mike DeWine is defeated, especially with an upcoming Trump visit to back candidates and endorsements like Jim Renacci has with the Republican Party. There are still plenty of Never Trumper RINOs in the Republican Party who will show up and vote for Mike DeWine. Even though Blystone and Hood have no chance of catching up to Renacci before the election, if they were ever going to, it would have been before now; being in the race forces Renacci to have an unreasonable lead over DeWine to win the election. Without them in the race, Renacci would win for sure. So there could be only one reason they would stay in the race because they secretly want to help DeWine, which would then destroy their brand for any hope of a political future. It’s time for them to pick sides and back a winner. In this case, it’s Jim Renacci. It really shouldn’t be hard for them; whether the issue is constitutional conservativism or abortion rights, Renacci is so much like Trump policy-wise; he will listen to people who are further in the conservative movement than he is. But DeWine isn’t. So it should be an easy decision if those candidates genuinely want what’s best for Ohio. Once the Republican Party of Butler County makes their pick, it’s a good indication of what Ohio is going to do. And they have great things to offer the Republican Party; they should be involved once Jim Renacci is elected governor, and Ohio can then become much more of a MAGA state than it is now. We can then become the Florida of the north and perhaps do even better.

Rich Hoffman

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The Lincoln Day Dinner of 2022: Battles coming, going, and brewing

It’s always good to talk about nice things, and the Lincoln Day Dinner for 2022 for the Butler County Republican Party was undoubtedly something good to talk about. Like I say all the time, politics is a blood sport. People aren’t always supposed to get along. So it’s not the function of a prominent Republican gathering at the Savanah Center in West Chester to just have everyone get along, even though they did. The goal of politics is to get the best people into public offices that can be obtained. Often the best management of any resource involves pressure applied to individual vision to draw it out for the public’s benefit. In Butler County, with Todd Hall as the party’s Chairman, it has undoubtedly been a success story. Butler County is a large, wealthy county in Ohio; it has over 400,000 people and a major national university. And every officeholder position in the county is held by a Republican. That is something to say and provides a good indication of what the people of Butler County are really like. But it’s not easy to manage all the ‘A type” personalities who get into politics for their communities. The people who run for office don’t tend to be the shy types, so managing all those personalities, especially when they sometimes get cross with each other, is quite a challenge, and Todd Hall does the job well, which culminated in the evening at that dinner which was nothing short of magnificent. 

Mike Pompeo came in to speak at this Lincoln Day event, along with the nationally bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, who managed to find time between Fox News media appearances to give a rousing speech to a hungry room of freedom fighters. Warren Davidson, of course, was there and was instrumental in bringing Mike Pompeo in, fresh from the Trump administration, where we all had the feeling of reloading for the next round of political battles that were coming next. I had a chance to talk to Jim Renacci a lot as he came down from his campaign for governor of Ohio, which is going well. There were many people from all over the state of Ohio who came to this Butler County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner, which filled the Savannah Center into every crevasse. It was great to see so many friends in one place simultaneously. The battles that everyone fights for are worth it, especially on evenings like that one. During primary season, like the one we have this year where there are so many contentious races, such as the governor race where Mike DeWine is running for re-election, and Jim Renacci was challenging him, it would be easy to have factions of discontent which wouldn’t even be able to shake hands. But the event’s mood, led by Todd Hall and guided by the diligent hands of hundreds of volunteers who worked behind the scenes for the party’s best interests, provided an atmosphere that felt more like Mar-a-Lago from Trump’s Florida home than just another political gathering. Every last touch had behind it a love of country and an intention to do good in the world. Different people, of course, have different ideas about what good is, but the pursuit of it was apparent for all to see. 

It’s not like the Butler County Republican Party was playing things easy; they recently endorsed Jim Renacci for governor over the incumbent. In the audience was Justice Pat DeWine, the son of the governor.  Jane Timken was in the audience, and Mike Gibbons, who are both running for the hotly contested Senate seat soon to be vacated by Rob Portman. There were literally hundreds of contentious side stories that could fill novels that interacted in the halls of that grand event, but what impressed me was the candor with which it was all presented. Todd Hall’s management style with all these unique personalities allows for hotly contested debate and personal battles that still celebrates the achievement voters get in the end, and that is something special. Politics is tricky under the best of circumstances, but routinely pulling off successes like what Butler County enjoys is quite an accomplishment. Of course, behind the scenes come the unifying elements of Ann Becker, whom I’ve known for many years now, going back to the Cincinnati Tea Party, which she led. Debbie Lang who always brings energy to everything she’s around. Joe Statzer and Mark Murphy work on all the details. There is a long list of people behind the scenes who make the Republican Party of Butler County, such a great organization. I single out Todd Hall because it takes a unique person to give all these diverse personalities autonomy and to trust that people will find common ground and build from that position rather than break out in fistfights from the many different perspectives that so many officeholders have. Guided by a less skilled hand, everything could turn out to be a disaster rather than the success story that it continues to be. 

Ultimately, the Lincoln Day event is a good team builder, and they are always nice to go to when the people putting them on so much love what they do. But what the public gets is a strong party that represents them where it matters most. Contention in politics is good; it forces the best people and best ideas to the surface to manage on behalf of the voters, and Butler County is an example of how it should be done everywhere in the country. The Butler County Republican Party is the example that everyone should be following, especially in the newly Trump-led Republican party. The management style it takes to unify so many diverse personalities is the stuff success seminars are built on. To have an evening in the height of election season just to take a breath of fresh air is nice. But the reminder of why so many people get into public office and how an army of volunteers behind the scenes contribute their time and energy without ever thinking about pay tells a story that is worth recognizing. If not for them and the tireless hours of work that go on behind the scenes, there would not be a great Republican Party of Butler County. There would not be a Republican in every Butler County political office. The strength of the party is because of all the effort that countless people put into it, and by the leadership of Todd Hall to have just enough guiding force to keep people together just enough but not to impose on them any dictates which might threaten their unique gifts for which voters could then select as representatives. The whole evening was just as impressive as the Butler County Republican Party is itself. It reflected many thousands of hours of hard work and an ambitious eye toward tomorrow; whereas bad as things look on the national horizon, in Butler County, Ohio, all is great and getting better. If such a formula could project itself nationwide under the next Trump presidency, there is a lot to be excited about in the years to come. Because ultimately, politics is there to serve the Republic for which we all fight to make a stand, and the voters are in charge and respected by the guiding light of hard-working people who genuinely understand how to do it right.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jennifer Gross Endorses Jim Renacci: The Overton Window in Ohio Politics

I’ve never been a “no government anarchist.” My thoughts on government management have always been a small but active legislature that is contentious, honorable, yet tenacious. Those who have read my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business know I view most group-oriented behavior as a competitive match, not an opportunity for back-slapping and friendship. Our republic form of government has been unique globally, and now that we understand the nature of the attack against our country, we can better understand the threat that has always been there. I have thought about this kind of thing a lot over the last year, especially while visiting Mt. Rushmore. I found that place to be a temple of intellect, and the bookstore they have there is better than a gold mine of infinite wealth. My thoughts on the matter have matured up to the present with this visit to the Statehouse of Ohio. The challenge has been to create as open a market as possible for business and individual rights while still defending the sovereignty of our states and nation from foreign aggression. Which, of course, is hard to do in an open market global economy. The hostile forces to the United States have attacked not the concept of any nation-states but the essence of our very economy. This corporate board room government within a government type of thinking is challenging the very nature of our Republic form of government. Understanding the nature of that attack is precisely why I have been pointing out Ohio politicians I know who are doing the job correctly, in their own unique way, so that we can see examples of how our republic government should look. And a fine example of how government should look can be found in my State Representative Jennifer Gross, whom I recently had a chance to visit at the Statehouse. 

It’s taken me a while to warm up to Jennifer Gross. During a rough election, she ran against my pick for that seat that Mike DeWine had screwed up with emergency power Covid rules. But in the short time Jennifer has been in the seat of the 52nd District; she has brought more of the Tea Party to Columbus than I would have thought possible. When I recently found her after Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech, she was very bubbly and enthusiastic, working the floor and talking to many different people. I know that many members of the House and Senate and many other politicians view Jennifer as a disruptive force and find her unsettling. I’ve heard lots of negative talk about her by several in the political class, but I have some other ideas about her that I wanted to confirm. So we spent some time together talking about the Overton Window and its role, which she more than understood. And we also talked about the challenger Jim Renacci whom she is one of the only official members of the Statehouse to endorse openly. I know there are a lot more, but I could see the pressure up close. At this event, where Jennifer and I talked, Governor DeWine walked around talking to people. People in the House and Senate know they need DeWine to sign bills they are working on. And DeWine needs them to, to look like he’s in charge. DeWine wants to take credit for the big Intel chip manufacturing plant coming to Ohio, announced just ahead of the primary for 2022. And he recently signed a controversial Constitutional Carry bill he would never have signed otherwise, except for Republican pressure to act more “conservative.” But the trade-off has been to show public support for DeWine in a very tight race against Renacci and other challengers. So there is a lot of double talk going on around the Governor. But Jennifer is not one of those double-talkers. She is right out in the open about it, and the Governor is well aware. 

And that is the value I see in Jennifer; she openly embraces that role of a disrupter, someone who will challenge the Overton Window on the political spectrum and yank it hard right away from the communism that has seeped into the process over the years. Back to the constitutional republic, we have needed and expected. Politics is not about friendships, it’s about doing the job correctly, and there is a real hunger from Jennifer to do a great job. She intends to represent all the people honestly in her district, including the people who didn’t vote for her, and that was the general vibe I picked up on as she showed me around where her desk was and other features of the House chamber. Things got pretty heated in Columbus as Jeniffer was on the front of legislation to prevent mandated vaccine requirements imposed by the Biden administration. We all learned a lot from that experience. It was a balancing act between a Chamber of Commerce view of the world, allowing corporate environments to impose rules on their workforce for their own needs and the individual’s rights. The workers have their own sovereignty. Jennifer represented the raw Tea Party small-government perspective against forces that didn’t want to be bothered with contentious debate during a government-imposed pandemic. But in hindsight now, after watching Klaus Schwab at the World Government Forum in Dubai recently, we see those vicious bandits plotting the demise of America out in the open. Their mode of attack has been through the corporate boardroom, our Chambers of Commerce, and our mom-and-pop businesses, dancing to ridiculous rules and regulations imposed by unconstitutional commerce clauses. If we ever needed a functioning republic to sort all these things out, it was now. And I have been increasingly happy that there is someone like Jennifer Gross who will ask the hard questions and force people to think out of the box without making it unnecessarily contentious. Jennifer walks that line quite well, I think. 

So how to put businesses first in Ohio and give corporations the autonomy to locate in our state and do great things is the problem of those lofty halls in Columbus. It’s why I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and started passing out copies of it to people I talk to in the political world. We have to defend business and commerce, uphold law and order, and stand by our government and boardroom politics. We have to stand for executive-level leadership in business and politics. But we must also stand for individual freedom and to force the scum and villainy out of our lives without killing the host. Not an easy thing to do, and that is what that book is about, a guide on how to tell good from bad, right from wrong, and unprofitable activity from the driver of all things, profit and value. And to perform that task well, especially in organized government, I find great value in disruptive forces like Jennifer Gross. She will uncomfortably keep everyone honest without turning the dispute into a personal fight. Playing along to get along is not what makes any republic form of government great. But asking the right questions, most often the ones you don’t even know you need to ask, is the key to keeping a government working correctly. And in the world we have today, where the bad guys have been hidden behind the rules and regulations of corporate America and international partnerships, there is a significant need for more disruptive Overton Window types like Jennifer Gross in our grand Statehouse. I am glad to have her there, and I feel proud to have such an engaged representative with plenty of fire to fight the forces at work in our state for duplicity and malice. The need for good government is genuine, more so now than ever. And Jennifer Gross keeps honesty at the front of all conversations for the betterment of everyone. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ohio’s Thomas Hall: The Man of Law Enforcement

It’s not hard now to know what we do about Sheriff Jones, why he dislikes the Ohio Representative of the 53rd District so much. I still tell all the people who now dislike the good Sheriff that he has done many good things over the years, and his brand has been good for the Republican Party and the first Trump term. Whether or not he continues to hold that lofty position is up to him. So far, he is turning hard left and headed for Mike DeWine country. But that’s his decision. Politics is a blood sport, and blood does get spilled. And that’s certainly the case with the feud between Thomas Hall and Sheriff Jones. Learning what I have, this problem goes far beyond just disagreements over sponsored bills or even kissing the ring by the youth to the elderly. Instead, it looks like insecurity that many older people go through when they realize a younger generation is replacing them. It can be hard to look in the mirror and acknowledge that you are no longer that guy. And for a guy with an ego the size of Sheriff Jones, of course, getting to the end of a long career in law enforcement will stir up emotions. After endorsing Thomas Hall for his next election, where Jones is trying to primary him out of contention, I stopped by the Statehouse in Columbus to see how Thomas was holding up. It’s been a rough campaign. Like many politicians, they have no idea really when the primary will happen. It’s set for May, but it might change to August. And in Thomas’s case, he doesn’t even know what district he’s running for because the Supreme Court might change it based on district mapping disputes. Yet, when I found Thomas in his natural habitat, I noticed that he was calm, cool, and sure of himself. And he quickly mentioned to me that Sheriff Jones’ labor union had endorsed him. 

Thomas told me all the measures he was taking to get re-elected, including all the door-to-door campaigns he had, regardless of how the districting broke down. We also talked strategy about the negative hits by Sheriff Jones. But now that the smoke had settled from the WLW incident back in November, where Jones went way out of his way to attempt to disparage Thomas in detrimentally belittling ways, the report from the outskirts of Butler County was that the Sheriff was losing his support. People in the rural parts of the county were always skeptical of Jones. They see him as more of a bully than a good cop, and that perception was already in place before Thomas Hall came into politics. The Sheriff is popular with the levy supporting Lakota moms and the big-government liberals, but not so much the rugged self-doers. When Jones supported Trump with them, they liked him. Now that he’s supporting Governor DeWine and is much more on the left than they are, they look at him with squinted eyes of skepticism. And in that way, most of Thomas Hall’s district falls under that category, so the attempts by Jones to disparage Hall have actually seemed to help the young congressman because he provides a protest vote to Jones.

Thomas and I spent quite a lot of time catching up, walking through the rotunda and eventually down into the atrium with the giant Greek pillars standing as testaments of law and order. We took a few pictures and continued to talk about the campaign and his goals for his second term. But along the way, the Governor was walking around in the rotunda, taking pictures with whoever wanted them, so there was a significant police presence everywhere. While we talked, Thomas Hall stopped by each one along our path, thanked them for their service, and showed them how much he appreciated them. They were highly appreciative and receptive. This went on with a frequency that stopped our conversation about every 30 seconds. My thought at the time was that Thomas was doing this for my sake, so I wondered if he did that kind of thing all the time. After taking a few pictures, he had to run off for a session, and we parted ways. But my curiosity wondered if, even in a bit of a hurry and without me around, he would continue to shake hands with all the officers on his way back to his office. 

It was a formal occasion that day, so I was dressed in a suit like everyone else. It was easy for me to hang way back and follow Thomas Hall to his office. He didn’t know I was following as I blended into the crowd. And sure enough, he stopped by every officer, not the same ones as before, of course, and shook their hand and showed them how much he appreciated them. Now Thomas Hall is the son of the old cop who stopped the shooting at Madison Schools a few years prior. Hall grew up with a love of law enforcement and public service, which is why as such a young man, he is already moving toward another term as a House Rep after a past as a trustee in his community. But this reverence for the police was not fake. He didn’t know I was watching him, yet he was very sincere about it. Like I say all the time, don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do. The police of Butler County know what kind of young man Thomas Hall is, and they like him. And that looks to be the problem Sheriff Jones has with him. It’s more a problem that Jones has than what Thomas has. And when the Sheriff’s own police union supported Thomas Hall despite of the activism of Jones, the direction of the campaign was clearly headed in a direction favorable to Hall. The police can see where the future is, and Thomas Hall is their guy. And deservedly so. 

I always enjoy learning these kinds of things about people. We live in a world full of fake people and broken promises. There are few people out there who actually exceed expectations. I already liked Thomas Hall before our meeting at the Statehouse of Ohio, in those grand chambers of intellect and the pursuit of justice. But after watching him work with people and his behavior when he didn’t know anybody was looking, I knew that there was a lot special about Thomas Hall. It’s a shame that Sheriff Jones is trying to put a rift in the Butler County Republican Party the way he is. I understand that fear of becoming irrelevant. I would even think of it as a forgivable situation. Nobody wants to see the memory of the Sheriff be like that old dog that bit some little kid at the end of its life, erasing all the good things that had occurred over its lifetime. But that is for the Sheriff to work out for himself. The police and voters where it matters were clearly happy with Thomas Hall, and he was certainly willing to do whatever it took to defend his House seat. And he was confident the way unbeaten people in life usually are. And when you are as good and sincere as Thomas Hall is, it looks clear that he will remain unbeaten for the foreseeable future. Thomas Hall is the man of law enforcement, and the police know it and will reward him accordingly.    

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Watergate of Butler County: When politicians try to get rid of other politicians by abusing the law

There have been many problems with the Roger Reynolds case in Butler County, Ohio since Fox 19 did a story during the 2021 election season featuring several prominent Republicans in a corruption scandal. One of which was a guy I have known for a long time to be an excellent auditor for the county in Roger Reynolds. Reviewing some of the details of the case, I considered it a simple land dispute among long-time neighbors. Reynolds has lived in Butler County much of his life, and sometimes, relationships like Thanksgiving dinners can get wobbly. And when you have family involved and emotions, and you are trying to be a public servant still, sometimes the gray areas can blend in the lines a bit. But as I said, when I think of Roger Reynolds, I think of high quality, competent public service, the best that government can offer. I have always been and continue to be very proud to have Roger Reynolds as the auditor for my county. I am proud of how the public officials generally conduct themselves in Butler County. I understand everyone doesn’t get along all the time, but for government, I think the public officials in Butler County are some of the best in the country, so I took exception to the hit piece by Fox 19 in Cincinnati. And how that real estate case ended up with charges from a grand jury of three felony indictments and two misdemeanors related to corruption, which could lead to 7 years in jail, was baffling. That is until I read a fantastic book by Geoff Shepard about Watergate called The Nixon Conspiracy. 

We all know Watergate, the breaking in of the DNC headquarters by G. Gordan Liddy and others on behalf of President Nixon to do opposition research. As it turned out, Nixon was innocent of the whole thing. In documents released in 2018 finally by Geoff Shepard, who worked on the case for 50 years trying to defend President Nixon from the embarrassment pushed upon him, we have learned that the prosecution didn’t like Nixon. They conspired with the law to get rid of him. Nixon never knew what the prosecution had given by way of a “road map” to the Grand Jury. And that forced him to react in all kinds of ways that looked guilty, leading the court of public opinion to put so much pressure on Nixon that he just resigned for the country’s own good. And after getting to know the situation involved in this Roger Reynolds case, that is precisely what has been going on against him. The law has been abused by many political rivals, the mushy Republicans who just don’t like Roger for several reasons, which I’ll get into. But they have taken the complaint of someone and blown it out of proportion to fulfill a politically motivated manipulation of the law and gross abuse of power that really is unforgivable. How do I know? Well, I know the players on all sides. I generally like them all. I view the situation more like a human resource problem than a legal one. But the abuse of power and manipulation of the legal system to be weaponized is another matter. This one goes all the way up to the Attorney General of Ohio, David Yost. The pressure campaign coming out of Yost’s office was essentially the same applied to Nixon. 

I wouldn’t have let myself think any of that was possible until I found out about the Grand Jury submission by the prosecutors in the Nixon case that was completely fabricated. We all would hope that journalism would have figured all that out a long time ago. It shouldn’t have taken 50 years to figure it all out. But it makes you wonder how often that kind of thing goes on, especially by those who knew they got away with destroying a president. They tried it again with President Trump. And apparently, that tactic is used all over the United States by politically motivated prosecutors and law enforcement that think it’s their right to override the voters’ opinion by destroying the lives of the politicians they elect, just because they don’t like them. In Roger’s case, he’s really good at his job, which certainly makes politicians who don’t want to work that hard to be upset. Roger is a total disclosure guy who opens his books to show all how he spends money. And many don’t want to open their books up in such a way.

Additionally, politics can be friendly. Everyone shakes hands at the picnics. They hire each other’s family members out of kindness. That is until Covid comes along and re-wrote the attendance rules. Roger’s office let go some of those family members because they stopped showing up for work, and of course, that upset other elected officeholders who decided that they’d get Roger back. Now to me, that’s an easy problem to solve. People can shake hands and smooth things out. But things get out of control when they take the law into their own hands to try to destroy people’s lives out of pure meanness. Clearly, David Yost and his advocates wanted to force Roger Reynolds out of office just as Nixon had been pushed. Roger has done the right thing and stayed on the job to fight this out. And this past week, the Supreme Court supported him.

At the heart of these accusations of corruption is an audiotape, which I have included here. On it, Roger supposedly asked for a 200K consulting fee to help navigate the developers through this real estate endeavor. I’ve listened to that recording many times, and I only hear a very astute professional talking business with businesspeople. Now for some career politicians who want to destroy the life of a guy who is a pain in their neck, I think they heard what they wanted to hear. When you read the paper trail of the case against Roger Reynolds, it becomes quite clear that there are a lot of “feelings” articulated in the accusations. This is what courts are for, and without all the political tampering that has been injected into this case, resolutions would smooth out on their own. But what has happened is that the case was taken over by political activism in how rival employees try to sabotage each other in the workplace. And it is not reflective of the Butler County Republican Party. Instead, the pressure of an outstanding elected representative in Roger Reynolds has challenged many who aren’t so good and don’t like it and have plotted his demise. And that’s not how things are supposed to work in politics. Aside from the pending case, which is Roger’s business with the other parties involved, he is also up for reelection, making this recording all the more critical. I’ll be voting for Roger Reynolds again. I think he has done a fantastic job. I like his rival in this election, Bruce Jones. I have a lot of good history with Bruce. But on this election, the guy on the recording included here is the kind of guy I want doing the business of auditing in Butler County. And if he makes other politicians mad with the pressure of his greatness, then that’s all the better and a job very well done.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Indictment of Roger Reynolds: Is it the pursuit of justice, or a political hit

I brag all the time about how great the Republican Party is in Butler County, and with the corruption indictment of Roger Reynolds that is the hot story this week, I still feel that way. Yet, I’ve known Roger for more than a decade, and I know him to be an excellent auditor for the people who elected him. As I said before, I view the land story that Channel 19 covered back in September of 2021 as a hit piece by Jennifer Edwards, who looks to target Republicans often in stories pitting people against each other to make news, not just reporting it. Her hit piece against Roger and other members of the Liberty Township trustees was obviously political, to attack the Republican brand ahead of the November election. Essentially as I see it, the Roger Reynolds story is one where old family entanglements can get mushy with the duties of an elected office. I find much of it hard to believe, and I think the story is mainly about emotions than logic. But for me, it doesn’t erase all the good work Roger has done over the years. And as I always say, the law is the same at 9 AM as it is at 9 PM or any other day of the week or year. If Roger broke the law, then the law should apply. However, watching Sheriff Jones’ face glow with glee during the indictment announcement made me think of some hypotheticals. Jones was too happy about the indictment, and some of the ways he said words in his presentation triggered questions that are worth consideration since what we are all talking about here are the ethics of an elected office and whether or not Roger Reynolds actually broke any laws, or that the case is a legal dispute between two parties over land. Did Roger abuse his office? Well, if we conclude that he did, doesn’t it open up a whole lot of questions about Sheriff Jones?

I’ve often thought of Sheriff Jones as a great asset to Butler County. But, since Trump left office and Joe Biden has been in the presidency, Jones has turned more into a Democrat than the guy who plays a Republican on TV and at public speeches. The way that Jones went after Congressman Thomas Hall over a voting record, with name-calling and sheer intimidation in public, comes to mind as an abuse of power of an elected office. Voters picked Thomas, yet the Sheriff made quite a public spectacle out of destroying his credibility on WLW radio to many thousands of people. I thought Thomas defended himself well, but the question remains about Sheriff Jones, what was he thinking in doing so? Was he trying to intimidate an officeholder, to exert power over the Republican Party of Butler County in ways that didn’t represent the voters? Surely not. But based on the kinds of things that Jones said in his press conference about the indictment of Roger Reynolds, doubt was indeed cast on the situation. Why would Sheriff Jones be so happy to bring about an indictment of a fellow Republican? His glee sounded as if he were a Democrat about to put a Republican in jail over some bogus charge, an allegation anybody could make against anybody. Given how the Sheriff treated Thomas Hall, might it not be logical to conclude that the Sheriff took a particular interest in the Reynolds case for some strategic move? For a local land dispute to make it to the Attorney General of Ohio directly, some political investment would have to be involved, raising eyebrows. 

Then there was the strange action on Sheriff Jones’ mask politics, where he had been leading the country against mandates. Suddenly, a few weeks ago, as the new school board at Lakota was getting set to vote to remove mask mandates, and the teacher’s union was all upset about it, Sheriff Jones flipped his position. It was an extraordinary move for him. What was going on? Well, I know more than I’m letting on here. But for the sake of the hypotheticals of this evolving case, questions are good to ask, especially in public figures who are declaring injustice among long-time Republicans in the team-building of party politics. I remember years ago when I published the pay rates of the local police departments, and I was shocked by how many family members Sheriff Jones had in many townships. It brought a question to my mind about Sheriff Jones himself and his relationship with members of Congress, senators, and area trustees. What was he really saying when he bragged about beating down some politician like Thomas Hall on city-wide radio? “Don’t get on my bad side. Or the same thing will happen to you.”  Whether or not that was the intention, I can say that I know many politicians who feel that way. Was that feeling created on purpose by the Sheriff? Is that part of his brand within the party? And is he really a Democrat trying to infiltrate the Republican Party with liberalism disguised as good ol’ fashion police work? 

Watching Jones stumble over the word “start” in his press conference, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was getting stuck trying to justify to himself how the investigation into Reynolds even started. By the way, I watched his body language. He acted like a guy who knew he was doing something wrong yet was trying to hide it behind justice. Thinking of all these things, I couldn’t help but wonder if some family member of Jones had worked in the office of Roger Reynolds and maybe had a falling out like many employees do with their bosses. With so much family on the government payroll, it would certainly be a conflict of interest if Jones was out in the county intimidating public officials into behaving the way he wanted them to, to protect his family members employed by some of those politicians. And if that were the case, which it may or may not be, how would it be different from what Jones was accusing Reynolds of doing, based on a Channel 19 report, meant to smear area Republicans and refer the investigation up the food chain to the Attorney General’s office, and smear the headlines all over the national news? It comes out looking like a lot of “unlawful use of authority” to me and many spoonfuls of “conflict of interest.”

If the law was broken, everyone should pay for their incursions. If Roger is guilty, then he is guilty. I would be surprised if he were, but I’ve seen plenty of railroad cases before, and this whole issue has the smell of a political hit. It looks like some kind of revenge scheme that is being hidden behind some token law and order façade. I hope that’s not the case. But if Roger is guilty, then where do we draw the line between public life and protecting family concerns? Roger might have made mistakes with his case because of family entanglements, things that he wouldn’t usually find himself involved in. But couldn’t the same be said when an officeholder, such as a sheriff, intimidates officeholders who employ family members? And what happens if there is some termination of employment? Would the Sheriff get personally involved? Would he retaliate? Well, he has shown the signs of that behavior. I’m sure we’ll find out. For now, I feel I need to defend my political party in my hometown from this embarrassment that the Sheriff has communicated to the world. Should we be mad at Roger? Or should we be angry at the Sheriff? Well, I want to see all wrongdoers get punished for their crimes. But are we talking about crime here, or are we talking about revenge? Time will tell, but politics is a blood sport, and to my way of thinking, I think these kinds of debates are necessary to make the best party possible under the most divisive circumstances that may emerge. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Sheriff Jones Endorses the Governor of the Most Corrupt State in America: A solution to the stupidity of Mike DeWine

Another Reason Corruption is Good to See

This is precisely why I value the measurement of corruption, which I talk about extensively in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. For the last several weeks, people around me have been asking, “what is going on with our great Sheriff Jones” the Butler County figure that is internationally known for his support of President Trump. Suddenly he has thrown his support to Governor Mike DeWine and made a whole lot of other flip flop decisions that seem ultimately at odds with the MAGA movement. So there is a bit of a panic on the matter, which I have explained as a form of corruption that must be accounted for to understand the decision-making process of Sheriff Jones. Corruption isn’t always just about money, but in the case of Jones and DeWine, without a Trump in the White House, many in the Republican Party are drifting back into the cave of power for the sake of it, and that is why we are seeing rifts forming ahead of the Ohio primary coming up in May of 2022. Unless we have a way of understanding the nature of corruption, we would otherwise have no other means of comprehending these strange behaviors. Trump has at least three more years before he’ll have a chance to be back in the White House. Naturally, Jones must align himself to the world between now and then. Yes, he is perfectly willing to adjust his beliefs to the power void that has formed in Trump’s wake, and from his point of view, the smart money points at the current governor of Ohio, the most corrupt state in all of the United States, Mike DeWine. 

As all this is going on, the challenging governor and my pick for the upcoming primary, Jim Renacci, is up 8 points over the incumbent DeWine. I had the opportunity to listen to Mike DeWine on many conference calls during the Covid mishap that his administration unleashed on Ohio. I have seen behind the veil just what an idiot DeWine was. I voted for him in the last election because he called himself a Republican. What I heard during the government-imposed shutdowns was a complete fool out of touch with reality. One moment in particular that impacted me was when I had to listen to Cedar Fair Amusements in May of 2020 try to explain their problem to DeWine about the trouble with not knowing when they could open their amusement parks because they had to hire, prepare their parks, and take all kinds of measures to get ready for a summer season that government had destroyed, and couldn’t give any guidance going forward. As a right-to-life governor, DeWine had put the pro-abortion Obama activist Amy Acton as head of his Health Department. She was running the state the way a stringy-haired pot-smoking hippie would run it, which was costing the business community billions of dollars during a lockdown over Covid that nobody could see the end of, especially Cedar Fair Amusements who ran a seasonal operation in two Ohio locations. It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and DeWine wouldn’t commit to anything to help them out. That was pretty much what DeWine said to everyone on those many teleconferences concerned over their businesses. His message was, we’re the government, and we’ll tell you when and what you can do and how long you can do it, and you’ll like it. Mike DeWine showed himself to be just as bad as the worst of Democrats during his first three years in office, and what he has done to Ohio will take decades to fix. So for me, it’s easy; Jim Renacci is the answer to the Mike DeWine debacles of the first term in office as governor.  DeWine has been a disaster.

Sheriff Jones has been something of a thorn in DeWine’s side while Trump was in office. DeWine was one of the first in the country to attempt mask mandates leading all other governors to the mandate first, just as he did with lockdowns. Without DeWine, many other governors only fantasized about it. DeWine was the first to do it. He was also the first to unconstitutionally alter election laws which would then pave the way for massive cheating that the Democrats would perform later that year with mail-in voting to remove Trump from office before the courts could even process the assault. Sheriff Jones, who advertised himself as a “pro Trump” member of law enforcement, suddenly endorsed DeWine for governor after all that DeWine had done to Ohio. Why? Well, the first thing is that the DeWine money machine is kicking in. Corruption and DeWine are never far from each other, and Sheriff Jones is always attracted to a kind of power. I’ve known Sheriff Jones for several years and what’s most valuable to him is his brand. For instance, when his brand is aligned with the Trump White House, it’s a wonderful thing. But I’ve seen it negatively align with big government union business, especially in 2013 when he backed the Lakota school tax increase, which he put his name behind to get it to pass by the most narrow of margins. So the Sheriff isn’t always a hard conservative; he just plays one on TV and in public appearances. And with Biden in the White House for the foreseeable future and Jones up in years himself, he needs to protect his brand while the political world sets itself in a new reality. 

What does Sheriff Jones like to do with his brand? Well, we have seen what he did to Thomas Hall, an Ohio Representative from Middletown who didn’t vote the way that the Sheriff wanted him to vote in Columbus, so the Sheriff used his name to berate the young man on WLW radio to thousands of people, personally attacking Thomas. Nobody elected Sheriff Jones to control other members of congress that we have elected to vote on our behalf. The Sheriff is supposed to take care of law enforcement concerns, not to dictate the terms of how other Republicans vote in our community by bullying them to his will. As a reaction to Thomas, the Sheriff went out of his way to put a primary candidate up against the Ohio Rep by dragging Matt King into the race, which naturally was pitting Republicans against Republicans on purpose for the intention of getting his way and making his point as being the “king maker” of the party, which put all kinds of people into a difficult position. Sheriff Jones didn’t care. He just wanted to show who had the power and what they had to do to kiss the ring to appease him, to hell what the voters of Butler County thought about the matter. That is why Jones had to align with Mike DeWine. Even though the governor is known to be attached to corruption, that power overflow gives Sheriff Jones the power to his brand that feeds his need to stay relevant as a man coming to the end of his career. Jones doesn’t have time to wait for Trump to be back in the White House. The need for power is always present, and DeWine is the quickest way to keep it. 

Now, of course, Jones would never admit to any of this. I’ve spoken to dozens and dozens of people affected by this situation, and they don’t know what to think about it. They feel betrayed and don’t have the words to put to the matter. That is why I like corruption so much, because if we didn’t have some way to measure corruption, no matter what form it exists, we wouldn’t have a way to explain this behavior. From his big labor union perspective, everyone thinks they are doing right; Jones thinks he’s doing what’s right for the Republican Party. He’s a moderate at best, and Thomas Hall has turned out to be way too Trump for his taste, so he is taking action. DeWine loved the way Amy Acton’s hair smelled after she took a shower, so he gave her the keys to Ohio and let her destroy it. As a long-married guy who is a closet Democrat, DeWine thought Acton knew what she was doing, so he defended her against all those evil business leaders who were outraged that DeWine and Acton had closed them down over Covid. DeWine showed himself to be an idiot who thought he was doing right. That’s why we have elections so that when we learn these things about people, we can get rid of them with an option, in this case, Jim Renacci. But honestly, there is only one right, not the right that Sheriff Jones comes up with, or his new buddy, Mike DeWine. But in our Republic, for it ever to really stand, it takes the taxpayers and respect for their vote. If they pick Thomas Hall, it’s not for Sheriff Jones to decide otherwise. Or for DeWine to attempt to hide four years of horrible management of Ohio behind one deal from Intel worth 20 billion dollars and to ride it like a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Corruption seeks to hide its misdeeds behind a façade that, if you know what you are looking at, can tell you the truth about the matter and allow voters to understand who they are getting involved with. And that is why corruption is a lot better to understand than to pretend like it doesn’t exist at all.

Rich Hoffman

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