Tag: Josh Mandel

I Support Josh Mandel for the Ohio Senate: It’s all about making elevator rides uncomfortable

I Support Josh Mandel for Ohio Senate

The upcoming senate race for Ohio to replace the Rob Portman seat is coming up fast.  There were some good elections in 2021, but that’s all behind us now.  It’s time to go or get off the pot for endorsing someone for the Ohio Senate Race of 2022.  I like many of the candidates; I think they all have some great attributes.  The key to something like this, which still has many months of campaigning, is to pick the person who will best serve that seat a few years from now, not necessarily where politics is presently.  And I think, especially after reading The Nixon Conspiracy by Geoff Shepard and The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that the political world of tomorrow will be much different than what it has been over the past decade.  Picking candidates for the climate we are coming into is essential because the political terrain will be robust with political stunts, media hype, and the ability to shame candidates on the senate floor and still ride the elevator back to the parking garage after.  It’s not going to be for the political lite but rather those who can most withstand betrayal and scandal and support the Trump America First Agenda without hesitation. And my pick to be that guy is Josh Mandel. 

I like Jane Timken a lot, but after meeting with her a few times and watching her campaigning now for several months, she’s too conventional. She’s a bridge-builder, and we’re talking about a senate that needs to get rid of people like Mitch McConnell in the leadership and who will instantly harass Chuck Schumer right out of the gate.  Even sitting in the bathroom stall, they need to shame all the comfortable senate members like Lindsey Graham.  Retaking the Senate as a Republican majority is a war, including even the RINOs who are there now who have not been protecting the American Constitution the way they need to.  Jane talks about herself being a fighter, and I think she is, perhaps for some time in the past or the future.  But not for the 2022 race extending past 2025. She’s just too nice for that environment, for what has to be done.  I have nothing against her, she has done an excellent job with the Republican Party in Ohio, and I think she can work the Trump endorsement that she no doubt would get once the primary is over. Still, she’s just too conventional to excite people into action.  

The other guy I had been rooting for whom I was happy to meet is J.D. Vance.  His problem is that he was a Never Trumper, and in a Trump-heavy election, that is coming back to bite him.  He has a lot of money pouring in to support him, a lot of the big conventional money would rather have a Trump hater than a Trump copy, so J.D. Vance is raising a lot of money and has a shot to keep things close.  But what it comes down to is he’s too nice of a guy.  Like Jane, he might make a great senator in a different time when people played nicely together, and a legislative agenda was more important.  But these are not those times; what matters is America First and nothing else, and the ability to fight with peers on the senate floor the way Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in the House.  Radicals have overtaken the Democrat Party, I would say for the last 40 or 50 years. 

The masks of communism are off now, but the radicalism is deep in their culture, especially as it extends into the media and global investment brokers.  To undo all that, it will take a lot of political theater and members on the Hill who will write legislation endorsed by the Trump White House and fight for it on the floor, perhaps even physically.  It’s not what you see on TV that anybody must worry about; it’s what happens in the halls, the offices, and during the commute that requires aggression and boisterousness.  The Democrats are the enemy, and the fight has to be taken to them.  J.D. Vance is a nice guy who does pretty well on Tucker Carlson and can come up with some one-liners.  But when it comes to fighting, he’s not the guy for the battlefield.  Like I said, maybe during a different time.    

The rest of them in the field, such as Mike Gibbons, are to the left of J.D. and Jane, and I don’t consider them relevant in this race.  They may make some noise, but they don’t have what it takes for this Senate seat that essentially needs to pressure Sharrod Brown’s supporters to fall off the earth.  None of this hand-holding that Rob Portman has started with the Brown camp is what Ohio voters have been wanting.  Democrat progressives need to be destroyed.  There were three things that Josh Mandel did that solidified my opinion about him.  He worked with Darby Boddi at Lakota in gaining the support of the growing number of angry moms there, and he did a fantastic job on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas to talk about it. I personally spoke to Josh at a Republican event privately and on stage in front of a really big audience with big-time Republican members in the audience such as Jim Jordan and Frank LaRose, about his commitment to the election fraud that robbed Trump of the Executive Branch in 2020.  And the third thing was an event at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe where he had the Tea Party religious right showing great support.  He appeared on stage with Jena Ellis from the Trump legal team and was very evangelical.  Now, that particular assemblage of the electorate is only about 30% of the total conservative vote, but they are passionate, and when they are winning, they are contagious.  When Trump gives out endorsements in the summer of 2022 after this primary race is over, it’s going to be Trump for Renacci for governor and Mandel for Senate, and these people will be the ground troops who fill the crowds. 

When people wonder if Josh Mandel can win the general election, as he obviously can win the primary, the answer to that will be yes.  Even though he will come across as weak and vulnerable in a general election to Democrats and media members, the people who actually vote will put everything on the table for a hard-core Trump supporter, especially as Trump does many campaign stops in Ohio during that election season.  Any scandal that follows Josh Mandel around, as he is a little on the wild side, won’t matter just as it hasn’t for Trump.  Mandel will have the evangelicals, and they will be his foot soldiers to success.  People in Ohio will vote for someone attached to Trump’s hip, and none of the candidates in this race has more openly embraced Trump than Josh Mandel by sticking to the election fraud issue more.  Trump will reward Josh with an open endorsement as he will be campaigning for Renacci anyway.  At that point in the race, the other candidates would be nowhere near as exciting to Ohio voters as someone who isn’t afraid of political stunts and sticking to them when the pressure is most significant.  And when it comes to taking the fight to the Senate floor in Washington D.C. I asked Josh the same thing. I asked the other candidates how prepared they were for the battle to come.  Only Josh Mandel gave me the correct answer about actually showing light in his eyes when the talk of fighting liberals personally and directly came up.  And I’m convinced that with Josh Mandel, there will be many uncomfortable elevator rides for the opposition in the years to come.     

Rich Hoffman

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Thank Goodness for Jennifer Gross’ H.B. 248: Fighting Joe Biden’s Vaccine Mandates

It’s the question everyone who has a job or employs people are asking.  What are they supposed to do about the Biden executive order that makes government workers, contractors, or any business with more than 100 people mandating that everyone get vaccinations?  Worse even than that, it is how Biden’s plan pawns off all the work onto human resource departments to do their dirty work by using OHSA as an enforcement agency.  So now, several days after the initial executive order notification, most of the political commentary has reacted to how audacious the order was, how un-constitutional, how incredibly tyrannical it was.  But few have broken down the path to solving the problem which businesses and people want to know.  There are quite a few people indifferent to the vaccination, they don’t like hearing the government ordering people around, but they have the vaccination and are indifferent to the order.  Many people, a high percentage of most workforces, 10% to 20%, aren’t going to get the vaccination and would go to war with the government if any attempt at coercion is attempted.  It’s one thing for an out-of-touch communist-driven Biden administration to write some order on a piece of paper and give a little speech about it.  Doing it is quite something else, and it appears that Biden and his handlers want to provoke violence from that demographic.  They are almost asking for it.  So, what are any of us to do about it?  Here I offer some thoughts and direction that will help, especially relevant to the state I live in, Ohio.

As I said in the video above, I had a chance to talk to many people from the time I wrote this to when Biden made his announcement on Thursday, September 9th.  In that video, I mentioned the Ohio Attorney General David Yost was joining several other states in a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the executive order. Still, I was thinking of a talk I had in the presence of the Secretary of State Frank LaRose and was surprised how unified the state Republicans were against Biden.  Even DeWine was not supportive, which given the political situation, he doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room anyway.  But what was encouraging was that several direct actions were already hot in the statehouse to protect the people of Ohio from a mandatory vaccination and businesses from being imposed to do the work that the federal government couldn’t with forced compliance.  Hanging OSHA out to dry the way that Biden had, it was evident by the people I spoke to that the legal hurdles were ominous against the executive order, especially with the flow down of official procedures that OHSA would have to use to measure any compliance.  For instance, companies who deal with routine ISO audits understand how complex these things can be, and for OSHA, Biden had just signed them up for a nightmare that likely would never get settled between the White House and the agency itself. 

Aside from months and months of red tape in defining what OSHA would be doing as a compliance officer of forced vaccinations, Jennifer Gross, the House rep from my district, already had House Bill 248 cooking on the stove.  That bill is a total ban on forced vaccinations in Ohio.  There are some amendments that are needed, and the House has some idea how to get them applied to make everyone somewhat happy.  Thank goodness Jennifer had that process already started so that passage can be accelerated to match the language of this recent executive order.  That is the first path to providing exemptions that will further complicate what Biden’s people want to do with forced compliance.  From my understanding of the amendments, it will essentially give the people who presently don’t want to get the jab a means to preserve that right.  The trick is in getting businesses off the hook in doing the dirty work of government compliance.  There is also a Vaccine Nullification bill moving through the Senate that will go even deeper, especially now that the executive order’s language is known.  George Lang has been working on this one. It will further provide protections for businesses in Ohio to separate them from the burden of forced work demanded by the federal government onto businesses who don’t have such work as part of their business model, such as the obligatory testing requirement.  Who does that and keeps up with it, an already taxed human resource department?  Things like that will emerge as the legalisms get applied that the Biden administration either didn’t think of, or they hoped that businesses would jump offsides off a hard count.  I think they knew this executive order wasn’t going to fly, but they tried to spook Americans into jumping anyway. 

All those mechanisms will be working in the background for the next several months, but I offer a more direct path to push back on.  I thought of the idea while speaking with Josh Mandel at a GOP event.  We were both in line to get some food, and they had run out of green beans, so we had a moment to chat about this topic. He’s running for the Rob Portman Senate seat, so I was surprised how much he was willing to make the election fraud that went against President Trump a campaign issue.  I was impressed with his ability to speak about it clearly and with conviction.  It’s something that more and more establishment GOP types have been willing to discuss openly.  Mandel might take that establishment tag personally, but he has been in some respectable GOP seats. He is running for the Senate, so it’s like I say, eventually, when you throw rocks, you win and find yourself in the establishment.  And that is precisely what’s happening with the admission of election fraud in the 2020 election.  Fox News might be afraid of lawsuits from Dominion for even discussing the possibility of election fraud.  Mitch McConnell may not want to shake up the system that has enriched him so much to take a moral stand against fraud even though it’s obvious and in front of our face.  But the trend among current officeholders now that they’ve seen the information coming out of Maricopa County in Arizona and Fulton County, Georgia, was that there was enough fraud to overturn the election, so the effort is picking up steam, politically.  Much more so now than there was eight or nine months ago.  And in another year, election fraud will be the talk of everyone. That’s where all this is headed, and the smart money knows it.

So rather than attacking Biden’s unconstitutionality with the forced vaccine mandates, and other terrors he has been a part of in such a short period, the best way to hit Biden, where he and the Democrats are weakest, is with election fraud.  They can’t defend election fraud, and many of them are guilty of being a part of it, even if they only have third-person knowledge and didn’t ask questions about the matter, hoping to benefit from the chaos.  By all accounts, we will find out that Biden should never have been president.  We will question everything he ever did while in the White House.  Yes, it will be a legal mess, but mixed in with this forced vaccination issue.  If you want to beat Biden on his audacity with the forced vaccine mandates, then the way to hit him and the Democrats, in general, is not to take the eye of the ball of election fraud.  I think they are trying to hide anyway because there is lots of evidence of election fraud.  The media is still making fun of the premise that Arizona and other states are exploring the idea of decertifying their elections.  For many in the establishment, this is an incomprehensible idea.  Yet, it is gaining steam.  The report that will come out of Arizona soon will make the case, and several states are talking about following them.  This won’t be laughable when Josh Mandel and the other senate candidates have their election.  It will be everyday talk.  So, we might as well start that process now and hit the Biden people where it hurts most.  Not so much in what latest unconstitutional imposition they throw at us, but in what they are trying desperately to hide.  Because that is where they are most vulnerable.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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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