Tag: Jane Timken

The Good Guy J.D. Vance: There’s a long way to go, but he’s certainly one you’d like to see get there

A Good Guy, J.D. Vance

Nancy Nix continues to be a great example of influence leadership in Butler County, Ohio.  I attribute the success of any endeavor, whether it’s a successful business or a political community, to the strength of its influence leadership, which I spend a lot of time talking about in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Influence leaders are not the ones who put a spotlight on themselves; but instead, they work as leaders in ways that aren’t traditionally measured for the success of any enterprise.  And that’s what Nancy does, and how I finally was able to meet J.D. Vance after many other opportunities to do so came up short.  I had wanted to meet J.D. since he is running for the Rob Portman senate seat.  I had been writing about how much I like Jane Timken in that role.  I had liked Josh Mandel because I know him as a Tea Party guy.  But I’m not crazy how he has managed the pressure once he did get essential seats.  Timken just picked up an endorsement of Kristi Noem, which meant a lot to me, but the big drawback there is that she’s too close to Mike DeWine.  When I have talked to her personally, she is quick to explain the complexity of that relationship.  I give her some room there because everyone has to have some representation as a party leader even if she doesn’t agree with everything they do.  But the question is, to what effect would other things be accepted in accepting a few screwballs here and there?  Some other candidates for this Rob Portman Senate race are not viable, likely under 10%ers who just muddy the water.  But J.D. Vance is one whom I’ve wanted to like because I liked his book Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out, and I have thought he did a great job in the media covering that book and talking about Trump’s White House.  Yet he seemed too good, so I have had questions for him that you could only tell upon meeting someone, and until Nancy managed to get us together, I would have never otherwise known. 

When reading the Hillbilly Elegy, I had thought that it was precisely people like J.D. Vance who should be managing our affairs in government.  After all, he checked all the boxes; he was a lawyer trained at Yale, worked in the tech industry, was a Marine, and rose from the ashes of Middletown, Ohio, which is literally in my back yard to move into great things of personal achievement. They made an interesting Netflix movie about his life and family based on the book, and I wondered if his wife was as sweet and understanding in real life as she was in the book and movie.  As it turned out, she was.  And when meeting J.D., you can tell without a shadow of a doubt that he is a good guy.  A very good person and the reason for it is that he had a good family.  Sure, the Hillbilly Elegy was about severe dysfunction at certain levels. Vance’s mother is now known so well for her history of substance abuse.  He had a wild childhood that crushes most kids in most families, most of the time.  As J.D. says in his book, he is astonished to come from his childhood and into this new life as a normal person.  I don’t think I am too surprised that J.D. is such a good person because even with all the dysfunction with his mother, he had a very good family otherwise.  Many people inside the Beltway politics don’t know that those from the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, on down into Tennessee and Virginia, are pretty intelligent.  They have been ridiculed and made fun of in every way that society can make fun of a people.  But I’ve known them all my life, and I have had family members go through the same kind of thing as J.D. has.  Luckily my parents were rock solid, but I have cousins and aunts and uncles who were every bit as troubled as J.D. Vance’s mother was.  It often comes from being too smart for their own good, which gets them into trouble, and they turn to drugs to shut out the voices of logic that run counter to a crazy world.  Reality is just a little too real for them, and they collapse on themselves.  But in J.D. Vance’s story, his strong and deep family is pretty standard among the people I know, and yes, they are Trump voters.  They listen to Alex Jones in the garage through a rebel radio network.  I have family, in fact, that still lives down in the areas of Kentucky, such as Slade and Buckhorn, who are so suspicious of census workers that often those government workers disappear, never to be heard from again. 

I had a few copies of the Hillbilly Elegy; I bought the updated paperback when it came out after the Netflix film was released, and J.D. had added the new afterword at the back of the book.  There he explains that he took his book proceeds and bought the property down in Jackson, Kentucky, where his grandparents were buried, and stated that he wanted to preserve the land so that his kids could enjoy it as he did.  I brought that book with me for him to sign at our meeting, which he did.  Yes, J.D. Vance is a really good and sincere person.  He is the real deal.  But my concern was how would he hold up under the pressure of politics once the honeymoon was over and his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment was over.  After all, it’s not a question as to whether he can get elected.  J.D. has some great campaign people.  He has great fundraising and support.  He is great at television and other forms of communication.  He has a supportive wife.  You can check all the positives.  Is he tough? Well, he had to be to come out of childhood without being a mess.  Can he stand up to corruption?  I think he has no tolerance for corruption and can afford to stand up to it, knowing that he has a good family to lean on no matter what happens in his life.  So, I asked him the question I wanted to ask, why I needed to meet him. “So what will make you different than Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, other Mr. Smith Goes to Washington types who get into the Senate with great intentions only to get buzz-sawed in that corrupt culture?” And he said the only thing that could be the correct answer; he said, “well, it’s going to take a coalition of about 8 or 9 people, and from there, we can begin to turn the tide.” It was good to hear that he understood that beyond just campaign talk.  Everyone has great ideas when they are trying to get elected.  But very few know what to do once they get there.

J.D. Vance on the Warroom

J.D. Vance was ready for the buzz-saw.  His wife was there, and I could see her look; it was the look of a supportive wife who would have enjoyed being anywhere but there because all the handshaking was not her thing.  But in her was that same kind of unconditional and dependable love that J.D. had with his Mamaw.  How do I know, because I have a wife like that, and I had a grandmother much as J.D. did.  Appalachia women from the mountains and the wild men they married and tamed.  It’s a Middletown, Hamilton, Ohio kind of thing.  And when you find a wife who understands, then it can make a person nearly invincible.  And for those reasons and more, J.D. Vance is a good option for that much-needed Senate seat. There’s a long way to go in the race yet. Still, I would love for a person like J.D. Vance to fill such a seat when the world is desperately hungry for those kinds of people to manage our government with influence leadership and a tremendous personal foundation for truth and justice for all.  I want to see how all these candidates hold up under the pressure in the upcoming months, but I can at least say now, I am cheering for J.D. Vance.  I hope to see him intact at the finish line.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Best Protection Against Corruption: Jane Timken and a good family

Yes, I’m very old-fashioned.  There was a point in time where things worked pretty well for all people of all sexes and colors, and that was before the progressive era came along infused with the corruption of Karl Marx and screwed everything up.  And I’m especially old fashioned with my politics; when I can, I like to shake hands and meet people one on one, or at least in an intimate group setting.  But with this new media culture that we are in today, we tend to look at everyone through the lens of media filtration, which is dangerous because we have seen what many of us always suspected about the media.  We shouldn’t have been surprised; they were all trained in the same kind of places and are owned by corporations looking to expand their markets through globalism, ready to abandon America and the Constitution along the way.  Yet, I still make most of my decisions about politics based on meeting as many candidates personally as possible before deciding to rally on their behalf.  That includes President Trump; I met him several times in 2015 and 2016, with very few cameras and people around.  Before he could command a $10,000 donation to shake his hand and get a picture for a desk, he already had celebrity, but few took him seriously in politics.  I like to look a person in the eyes and see what is going on in there.  It takes that for me to feel good about a candidate at any level.  For the upcoming senate seat in Ohio that Rob Portman is leaving behind, I’ll admit that Jane Timken was about third on my list to consider.  But I did get a chance to meet with her in a small group setting which I appreciated being invited to very much, and the result for me was a lot more respect for Jane than I had before the meeting.  I always liked her and respected what she did in Ohio for the Republican Party and uniting that party behind Trump in a hostile political setting.  Yet upon meeting her in a closed environment with the media far away, I learned some great things about her, particularly what motivates her. I came out feeling excited for her inclusion into the senate race, which will be a big part of recapturing the Senate not just with a GOP majority but with America First advocates and strategic influencers.  That last part for me is the most important. 

Before I say what I’m about to, I know many people who had not benefited from a great family experience when they were growing up.  One of my best friends is something of an immigrant, being raised in foster homes and had been given every opportunity to fail that you can imagine.  He could have given up hundreds of times over the years, and nobody would have blamed him.   However, today he’s very rich, very powerful, and a very good person untouched by corruption, and I love him to death.  But his success says a lot more about him than it does about how people arrive at success in life, no matter how success is measured.  His story is a rare exception. For most people, without a good upbringing, without good parents, grandparents, and a functional family structure, people are doomed in life often before they ever get out of middle school in their formative years.  Its not always their fault, but it is a failure of social structure, political philosophy, and radical insurgents over time in their priorities for social well-being.  As a general rule, young men grow up and marry women like their mothers, and young women grow up and form their lives around their fathers, and those sentiments last a lifetime, from the cradle to the grave.  That makes it reasonably confident that they will likely be pretty good adults to work with if a person had a good family life.  If they didn’t and are always looking for things in their adult life to bury the pain of their childhoods, you can bet that corruption isn’t far behind for them.  Who a person ends up being in life is often dependent entirely on how good their childhood was and whether or not they had a functionally good relationship with their moms and dads. 

I’ve liked Kristi Noem since she arrived on the political scene because she got into politics for many reasons involving her family. All people should get involved in politics to make it better.  After her dad died, her family was hit with massive death taxes that threatened to destroy everything they had built together.  So she became politically active, which has been good.  She is an influential person to her core and can handle the meat grinder of corrupt politics very well.  I recently traveled through South Dakota, and you could feel her leadership style there as she was one of the first governors to stand up to the Dr. Fauci types using Covid as a Kotter change state to bring Marxism to American culture.  It has been a war not with tanks and guns but with health directors intent on torpedoing a healthy economy in an attempt to knock Trump out of office.  I would point to Kristi Noem’s dad expressly and say that today’s strong woman fighting against all odds started with her relationship with her dad.   And with many of these strong new women in the Republican Party leading from the front, with congressional and Senate seats, we are finding that to be the repeated case.  Fathers have massive impacts on daughters leaving them to preserve like mothers the product of the family happiness, a country that the family can grow in and bring opportunity to the future.  But their first swipe at that dream comes from a father holding the hand of a young daughter and teaching her how to be a good person, set goals in life and not compromise themselves to corruption and apathy, and preserve the conditions of those bonding moments forever. 

This past week, meeting Jane Timken running for the Senate seat of the outgoing Rob Portman, I saw in her eyes what I see in Kristi Noem’s eyes.  Jane is a person who loves her dad and her family.  And when asked questions about why she wanted to get into politics, she was not murky about it.  Her dad was her motivation.  And this part she didn’t say, but she didn’t need to.  Like most young people who had positive family experiences, they become adults wanting to preserve their parents’ world for the future to preserve the happy thoughts of tradition.  And that for Jane, it wasn’t a power trip to ride the America First agenda to a big office in Washington D.C. with a line of lobbyists outside to lick the dust off her shoes.  Jane was in politics to preserve the vision of a father whom she loved, and that told me she was a fighter against corruption and the forces behind it that we are all facing today.  Learning all this, Jane Timken was suddenly a lot more viable than she was before I met her.  That is essentially why our children are attacked in schools, why we are being poisoned with drugs from illegal immigration, pornography by the tech companies, from every direction essentially.  The war against the family wasn’t just personal.

When divorce lawyers were promoted in the 60s, 70s, and 80s as freedom from an unhappy life and putting a career in front of a family was introduced as noble, they intended to destroy America.  Not to preserve it.  And so the way to fix that problem is to make families first, and the nation will follow.  But to do that, we need people running the country who function from that happy place of family and can withstand the riggers of public opinion so long as they can go home at night and have a family that loves them.  With Jane Timken and others who are emerging, I see a lot of hope for America.  The decline we are experiencing was purposeful and strategic.  The American dream is not dead now or in the future.  So long as there are fathers who inspire their daughters to run for Senate and win to preserve those memories of long walks and hand-holding that comes with a good parent inspiring a child with the goals of a lifetime—we have a fighting chance.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Meeting Jane Timken: The best way to implement Trump’s America First agenda

Why to Vote for Jane Timken

The day my phone lit up with many Republicans across the state of Ohio, I remember it well, who let me know that Matt Borges, as Chairman of the Republican Party, was openly harassing supporters of soon-to-be President Trump.  In reaction to the Access Hollywood tape that Democrats thought would sink Trump in the October surprise of him talking about women in a sexually provocative way, the campaign looked to be over.  Things were much more innocent then, on that October of 2016, during a Saturday of pleasant weather, the leaves were gently falling off the trees, and from what I was hearing, the split in the Republican Party was wide.  Like Borges, the Governor Kasich people were not going to accept that Trump was the official nominee to run for President, and they were not working to help Trump win the state.  They were trying to sabotage the Trump campaign so that Kasich would have another chance to run for President the next time around.  Of course, nobody cared about the Access Hollywood tapes, just as they haven’t cared about the countless attacks since then to prevent a Beltway outsider and a billionaire with the means to fight these battles from entering public office, especially the White House.  What we saw back then was just the beginning.  We knew that people like Borges had to go, Kasich had to go, and so would many of the other RINOs who were standing with Democrats to keep what needed to be done to save our country from happening.  In came Jane Timken to challenge Borges for the Republican chairman job, and she beat him.  Jane then turned quickly to unite the Republican Party, which she did so quickly, making Ohio one of the most vital states in support of the new President. Trump went on to win against all odds to usher in a new age of politics that few saw possible on that October in 2016.  On a Saturday where all looked to be lost just a few weeks before the election.

I have been thankful to Jane for the way she united the Republican Party under tenuous conditions.  In just a few short years, people I had known as staunch Never Trumpers were suddenly VIP ticket holders at Trump campaign events, and they were enjoying themselves more than I had seen in years.  Part of that, of course, was that Trump had been doing a good job.  People saw through the media and political attacks.  Trump quickly fulfilled his campaign promises and did what all sound executives do when they lead their organizations; he showed people what success looked like and made it easy for Republicans to unite behind him within the Republican Party.  It wasn’t lost on people how John Kasich had similarly sold himself, but within a few years as Governor of Ohio, he showed he couldn’t live up to the media hostility, and he turned soft.

On the other hand, Trump had everything, including the kitchen sink, thrown at him, and he was still getting things done every day, and he never slowed down.  He forced the opposition to unload every trick in the book for all of us to see, and he survived it all.  But along the way, as the new Chairman of the Republican Party, Jane Timken brought together Ohio Republicans in a very skillful way that showed the rest of the nation what a strong GOP looked like.  Considering the personalities involved, what Jane did was remarkable.  I had wanted to tell her that at an appropriate time, which I finally did have recently, in a private setting as she was gearing up her run for the senate seat that Rob Portman is retiring from.  I had seen her at events in Butler County a few times but did not get a chance to speak to her personally.  But I did get to talk with her one-on-one and with a small group of intimates, and I had one specific question for her that concerned me regarding her platform as an America First candidate.

As a party leader, Jane had shown support for Anthony Gonzalez, who voted twice to impeach Trump.  She supported his right to an opinion on the matter as the party leader, which is tricky when the MAGA movement wants to run people like Gonzalez out of the party because he voted against Trump.  Jane has been and continues to sell herself as an America First candidate, so I needed to hear from her without a media filter what her decision-making process was on the Gonzalez issue, and she answered it to my satisfaction.  I understand the difficulty for her, and I’m sure Trump understands as well.  The way to solve the matter is to get rid of Gonzalez in the primary and replace him with another America First candidate, Max Miller, a member of Trump’s inner circle.  One thing that came up during this private meeting with Jane was that being a fighter for freedom and America First is terrific.  But at some point in time, you go from being the rebel to being the new establishment.  And a lot of people struggle once they are the new leader because all their energy went into the fight of getting there.  Once they are there, they often don’t know what to do. That’s the case for school boards, political parties, management takeovers, everything that humans involve themselves in.  It’s one thing to campaign on ideas.  It’s quite another to apply those ideas to real-life situations.  Jane showed me that she could make that transition from freedom fighter to the establishment without losing herself along the way as she handled the Chair position of the Ohio Republican Party.  And she understood what fights were worth fighting and which were not.  Trump himself showed that he could make that transition too, as a disrupter to a great executive in the White House.  It was only five years ago since that Matt Borges incident, but so much has changed, and Jane, in so many ways, had helped lead a lot of people through the fog of that time to a real opportunity to build a senate at the federal level that is America First.

There is still a long way to go in the primary race, and this process is crucial because we need to see what kind of shelf life these candidates for Portman’s senate seat have.  But any concerns I had about Jane Timken were certainly alleviated by my meeting with her.  I wasn’t the only one there; many very good people were at this meeting for the same reasons.  As far as Jane Timken being able to take an American First platform to the Portman senate seat, building a team of Republicans that would function from that platform.  I’ve seen Jane do it before, and she is hungry to do it again, only this time on a bigger stage.  I think Jane would not only fight Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the AOC socialists, the Bernie Sanders communists, but Jane would win as she has won before.  The person I met was more intelligent and tougher than those characters. If Jane were to be in that senate seat, I could see clearly that Trump’s agenda would be implemented not just for show but for the longevity of the future in ways many today can’t imagine. I’m not ready to endorse anybody yet for that seat, but Jane certainly didn’t disappoint.  I think she could win but that she might become a leader in the Senate quickly.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business