Tag: Lockdowns

The Columbus Dispatch’s Liberal Meltdown Over Bernie Moreno: Why Harsh Language Is the Only Justice Left Against Fauci’s COVID Catastrophe

I watched the clips. I read the outrage. And I am not embarrassed by Senator Bernie Moreno. I am proud of him.

When the Columbus Dispatch and its liberal opinion machinery clutched their pearls over Moreno dropping F-bombs on Dr. Anthony Fauci during that July 29, 2026 Senate hearing, they revealed exactly who they serve. They do not serve the Ohioans who lost jobs, businesses, childhoods, and years of life to policies Fauci championed. They serve the narrative that still treats Fauci as a secular saint who must never face real anger, even after he pleaded the Fifth more than one hundred times. 

The Hearing That Triggered the Dispatch’s Righteous Indignation

Moreno did not whisper. He asked Fauci, “Who the f*** do you think you were for doing that?” He was talking about the mask mandates, the school closures, the arrests of ordinary people—including a mother at an Ohio middle school football game—and the broader lockdown culture that Fauci’s guidance helped justify. Moreno told the hearing that the arrest of that woman was the moment he decided to sell his businesses and run for the Senate. Six years later, he sat across from the man he holds most responsible and refused to play nice. 

https://x.com/berniemoreno/status/2088972718649524720?s=46

He also asked whether Fauci felt he was “in deep s***” for showing up with a team of lawyers. Later, outside the hearing, when asked why Fauci took the Fifth so many times, Moreno answered without filter: because he’s a piece of s***. 

The Columbus Dispatch opinion page, through Amelia Robinson, called this “deeper in the gutter than even Jim Jordan.” She compared it to childhood bullying, said it embarrassed Ohio, and wondered whether Senators Jon Husted, Sherrod Brown, Rob Portman, or Mike DeWine would ever sink so low. She defended Fauci’s record, framed the hearing as a “witch hunt,” and demanded apologies from the senators. 

That is the liberal press in Ohio in miniature. They can lecture us about “decorum” while the economic and human wreckage of the policies they once cheered goes largely unexamined and unpunished.

The Real Bill: What COVID Lockdowns Cost Ohio and America

Are we supposed to be polite about this? Nationally, serious estimates of the total economic cost of COVID and the response range from roughly $14 trillion to $16 trillion and higher when you add lost output, premature deaths valued in economic terms, long-term health damage, mental health costs, and educational losses. One major analysis put the figure above $16 trillion—about 90 percent of a year’s U.S. GDP. Another put pure GDP losses on a path to $14 trillion over four years. A Heritage-linked commission later put the broader figure near $18 trillion. 

In Ohio, the damage was concrete and brutal. The state’s unemployment rate exploded from the low single digits to a peak of 16.4 percent in April 2020—the highest on record in modern tracking. Ohio lost more than 800,000 jobs in that single month. Payroll employment collapsed by roughly 16 percent from February to April. Real GDP for the full year 2020 came in about 2.3 percent lower than 2019. The second-quarter contraction was far steeper—more than 10 percent on an annualized basis in some measures. Sectors like leisure and hospitality were gutted. Small businesses closed. Kids lost years of normal schooling and social development. Families were stressed to the breaking point. 

I do not need a perfect spreadsheet to know the human cost in Butler County, across the Miami Valley, and throughout this state. People I know lost businesses. Kids I care about lost childhoods. The long-term damage to learning, mental health, and trust in institutions is still with us. And the same voices that now lecture Moreno about manners spent 2020 cheering the very policies that produced this wreckage.

Lab Origin, Gain-of-Function, and the Accountability Vacuum

We also know more than we did in 2020 about the likely origin. The virus almost certainly emerged from research-related activity in Wuhan. Gain-of-function work that made animal viruses more transmissible to humans was the context. Fauci and the public health establishment spent years downplaying or denying the lab-leak possibility while defending the research funding pathways. He has now repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and how the messaging was shaped. 

In a healthier republic, that combination—policy catastrophe plus origin questions plus stonewalling—would produce serious consequences. In the actual America of 2026, the man most associated with the response gets to plead the Fifth a hundred times while the Columbus Dispatch frets about a senator’s language.

Why Moreno’s Anger Is Not a Bug—It Is the Point

I voted for disruptors. I did not vote for people who would sit politely while the architects of the damage smile and take the Fifth. Moreno is doing exactly what a large share of Ohio voters sent him to do: refuse the script. The liberal press and the Democratic establishment prefer senators who speak in carefully measured tones that never threaten the permanent administrative class. That is why they prefer the old style. That is why they are so offended by Moreno.

Jon Husted is a different kind of politician—more institutional, more measured. I would still rather see him hold the other Ohio Senate seat than watch Sherrod Brown claw his way back. But I am not looking for two of the same. Moreno’s willingness to use the language of ordinary frustrated Americans is a feature. When the system refuses to accept real accountability, harsh language at a hearing is one of the few remaining pressure points. Public executions are no longer on the table. Perjury prosecutions seem unlikely. So voters get a senator who will at least look the man in the eye and say the quiet part out loud.

The same media complex that now scolds Moreno spent years treating dissent on lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates as moral failure. They platformed the experts who got major things wrong and sidelined those who got them closer to right. Now they want the anger to stay within polite bounds. I reject that demand.

The Columbus Dispatch Is Not a Neutral Referee

Let’s drop the pretense. The Columbus Dispatch has long operated with a left-of-center editorial culture, even if its news pages sometimes maintain more balance. It broke a century-long pattern to endorse Hillary Clinton. Its opinion pages lean liberal on cultural and institutional questions. Amelia Robinson’s column is a piece of that tradition: defend the public-health establishment, pathologize Republican anger, and treat institutional “decorum” as the highest value even when the institutions failed spectacularly. 

When the paper and its allies frame Moreno as the problem, they are protecting a status quo that inflicted real harm on Ohio and then largely escaped consequences. That is not neutrality. That is advocacy.

Looking Ahead in Ohio Politics

Amy Acton is the Democratic nominee for governor. She was the public face of Ohio’s early COVID response under DeWine. The same networks that once celebrated her now want to elevate her further while treating any residual anger at the policies of that era as vulgar. Meanwhile, Bernie Moreno sits in the Senate doing the opposite of playing patty-cake. I prefer the latter.

I want Jon Husted to hold his seat against Sherrod Brown’s comeback bid. Two strong Republicans in the Senate are better for Ohio than a return to the old Democratic hold. But I am under no illusion that measured institutionalists alone will deliver the accountability many of us still want. Moreno’s approach is the necessary corrective.

Final Word

I am not interested in lectures about Senate decorum from outlets that spent years amplifying the very policies that cost this country trillions and this state hundreds of thousands of jobs and years of normal life. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. The economic damage is measured in the tens of trillions nationally, and there is real suffering in every Ohio county. The origin questions remain serious. In that context, a senator who refuses to soft-pedal his contempt is representing the people who hired him.

I am proud of Bernie Moreno. Keep it up.

Footnotes

1.  Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, July 29, 2026; multiple contemporaneous reports of Moreno’s language and Fauci’s repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment.

2.  Amelia Robinson, “Bernie Moreno mortified Ohio with profane attack on Fauci,” Columbus Dispatch, July 31, 2026.

3.  Ohio Department of Job and Family Services / BLS data: Ohio unemployment rate peaked at approximately 16.4–16.8 percent in April 2020; job losses exceeded 800,000 in that month alone.

4.  Ohio GDP: 2020 annual figure approximately 2.3 percent below 2019; sharp second-quarter contraction.

5.  National cost estimates: Cutler & Summers (~$16 trillion total including health losses); USC/related GDP-loss projections approaching $14 trillion; Heritage Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (~$18 trillion broader estimate).

6.  Lab-origin discussion and gain-of-function context: extensive public record from 2021–2026 congressional inquiries, intelligence assessments, and scientific literature.

7.  Media bias assessments of the Columbus Dispatch: AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check ratings placing it Left-Center to Lean Left on editorial/opinion content; historical endorsement shift in 2016.

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

•  Cutler, David M., and Lawrence H. Summers. “The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 Trillion Virus.” JAMA, 2020 (and subsequent updates/discussions).

•  Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly employment and unemployment releases, 2020.

•  Ohio Development Services Agency / BEA data on state GDP, 2019–2021.

•  Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Report on economic and human costs (2024).

•  Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Hearing record and transcripts, July 29, 2026.

•  Robinson, Amelia. Opinion columns, Columbus Dispatch, July–August 2026.

•  AllSides Media Bias ratings and Media Bias/Fact Check profiles of the Columbus Dispatch.

•  Primary reporting from The Hill, Washington Examiner, Fox News, and local Ohio outlets on the Moreno-Fauci exchange.

•  Additional reading on lab-origin hypotheses, gain-of-function research funding, and pandemic policy trade-offs available in the public congressional record and scientific literature from 2021 onward.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

The Milgram Experiment: Covid was worse, but this time, on a global scale–what did we learn?

We know one thing for sure about the massive government takeover experiment of Covid-19, they attempted to throw the entire world under a rule by authority, and it failed along the same lines as the Milgram Obedience Experiment indicated in the 1960s. The reports have been out there for a long time; the governments of the world and all the power players who want to use governments for their own aims of global domination know what Stanley Milgram, the psychologist, intended to demonstrate, that a dangerous percentage of any society is willing to obey orders even if those orders go against their own self-interest. That was what the dumb lockdowns were all about and the social distancing; it was the Milgram Experiment on a massive global scale. When Stanley Milgram wanted to know to what degree and percentage a sampling of men he had brought in to conduct his experiment would perform under pressure, he was unveiling a riddle that authority types would salivate to and abuse for their own evil intentions in the years to come. Corporations and governments would often use the Stanley Milgram Experiment in the future but never had anybody witnessed the entire world attempting to perform the experiment on such a mass scale. The guilty parties would be the usual suspects, the Desecrators of Davos, so to unleash Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset. But why they thought it would work was based on those initial test results that nobody in academia would ever get away with today. Although, as I say it, the entire world, based on the activism of Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci almost exclusively, performed the same test hoping for a different result. So for those who say that the Milgram Experiment could never be done in modern times, we just lived through it with Covid. 

Milgram hired an actor to pretend to receive an electric shock from several participants who would respond to instructions from an authority figure, the person giving the test. If the actor got a question wrong, the test administrator would instruct the participant to administer various degrees of electric shock to the actor. Of course, the participants had no idea that the shocked recipient was an actor. They believed that they were genuinely administering electric shock and that the screams they heard from the actor were real. So when told to administer a shock, the participant would turn a dial-up to conduct the pain. The shocks would start at 15 volts, then increase to 150, 330, then ultimately go all the way up to 450. The astonishing aspect of the experiment was that out of all the participants, 65% of them administered the lethal amount of 450-volts even as they could hear the pain of the actor screaming from concealment. In some of the cases, the actor went so far as to pretend to have died, but the participants did as they were told by the administrator anyway. The experiment proved something terrible about people. Even though they knew better, if told to do something, most people would do it because their need to comply with orders was more substantial than their free will to think for themselves. 

Well, those in the world who love to have power over other people salivated over this news. And since the experiment, they have been taking advantage of that 65% of the population ever since. Now there has been some debate about the validity of the study. For instance, all the original participants were men because it was the 60s, and that’s how it was then. So it could be argued that women would have had more empathy toward their screaming victim and perhaps would have been less inclined than 65% to administer the shock. Or perhaps women were more willing to follow orders, and the percentage might have been higher. Many say we will never know, but as the results of Covid show, we do have a better understanding. Out of all the earth’s population, the final numbers look to be in the 40% range of all people who will follow orders in society even to their own detriment. We can base that on the reaction of people who adopted masks when the CDC told them to wear them. We can see who took the vaccine shot in the opening days of administering them. We can see who complied with the stay-at-home orders, chose to work from home during the pandemic, and toughed it out, and ignored social distancing and other mandates. The gamble that Gates and Fauci and their many conspirators within the world’s governments made was that the percentage would be higher for the compliant, more like the Milgram Experiment from the 1960s rather than what they ended up in reality. Many people complied to the government’s face but did what they wanted when they thought nobody was looking. This is important because of what China just did to Shanghai. China had, over the years, killed off many of their non-compliant types, so the experiment there was to see how many people they could lock in their homes to the point of starving to death, only patrolled by a little dog-sized robot in the streets telling them to stay put. In America and places in Europe, the population proved to be way too independent for that kind of control. 

So, what did we learn? Well, I think the news is good. America was founded on far less a percentage of people, somewhere between 15% and 30% of the population. We know that if a movement can gain that much of a following, there will always be between 40% to 60% of any given population that will follow the orders of the minority, even if they disagree. That is how corporations have been ruling over their workforces for years, but they haven’t been able to change the nature of the people themselves. Only their social behavior. That same problem arose during the Covid mass experiment and international execution by denying hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to Covid patients even though it would have saved lives. By allowing people to take medicine, it would have been the same as letting the participants of the Milgram Experiment know that the person receiving the shock was only an actor. And the scam wouldn’t have worked, which was, in this case, a massive power grab by the Desecrators of Davos for a global Great Reset of all economies into communist-controlled centralized planning, that, of course, they would oversee through the United Nations. Yet not the correct percentage of the global population fell for it, and two years into the scam, there were way too many non-compliant and even angry people. They always knew that a certain percentage of the population would do whatever an authority figure told them to do. After all, we start as babies being told what to do by a parent. Then we are told what to do by our teachers in public schools. By our church. All kinds of authority figures. Most people never grow out of that mode and learn to think for themselves. But what is that percentage? Well, the experiment of Covid, which was a massive Milgram Experiment on a global scale, showed that not enough people would fall for it, and for those who want to rule the world through fear and anxiety, that was terrible news. Which, for the rest of us, is very good. 

Rich Hoffman

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No More Lockdowns: Unlike before, people now know that government doesn’t have the power

No More Lockdowns

I have been asked by many dozens of people over the last week of December 2021 whether or not we would have lockdowns again due to the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus.  What made things considerably worse for people was the decision of the Sixth Circuit Court to overrule the Fifth Circuit over the OSHA decision on Biden’s Executive Order making vaccines mandated.  All that happened around the same time that Biden had a nationwide address to talk about what the administration was doing about Covid spreading, panicking everyone into wondering if we were going to go through 2020 again.  So I’ll say here what I’ve told all these other people personally, no, we won’t be going through lockdowns again.  Now, if you live in a blue state or a blue city with some radical progressives making the decisions, you will see them try.  Democrats are polling terribly everywhere they are these days because they have been forced to pull off the masks they have been hiding behind for many years.  Now that people see what they are up to, they are running in the opposite direction.  The greatest thing to have come from the Trump presidency has been this pressure on progressives to show what they have always been about against a backdrop of pure capitalist endeavor.  I think people needed that lesson, and we are all better off for it.  But the most significant thing that happened, which I have watched happen over a great many years, but never better than with Trump, is that our population has learned about the American Constitution and its powers to limit government.  Now that people can see why that is important, they are fans of the Constitution in ways that will prevent further Covid lockdowns over a sustained period.

Just for review, there is no legal authority for a centralized government, even under emergency powers, to lock down our American society.  The planners of Covid assumed that people would trust their doctors more than they trusted the government, so they came up with Covid to attempt a global Great Reset of all capitalist economies into centrally planned ones, and many governors in America fell for it hook, line and sinker.  They weren’t exactly what you might call “constitutional scholars.” Hence, it was easy for communist health directors to take what the World Health Organization said, run by China essentially, and apply it in a centralized way in their states.  We certainly saw that behavior in Ohio with Mike DeWine.  He led the way for all the other states in America to go total authoritarian and break constitutional limits, all in the name of an emergency.  The government is not allowed to do any of that, even under a crisis.  Over the years, the government has abused this premise several times under provisions of the “greater good,” such as the New Orleans hurricane from several years ago, where the door-to-door arrests and gun confiscations were conducted under the umbrella of “safety.” So naturally, since it worked back then and these government tyrants took note, they were going to try it on something more significant and more far-reaching, convincing people to give up their constitutional rights under emergency conditions.  That is how the Covid approach was formed, and when they were able to trick President Trump into buying into the concept during an election year, they were sure they would have success, which they did get. 

But they only had success because people didn’t know their rights.  People could have told the government to go to hell from the very outset of Covid, but people gave the government the benefit of the doubt.  But I said it back then, and I continued to say it through the government made “plandemic” that there was no constitutional construct that government had to tell businesses when they could open or close or shut down.  The government made a move to centralize its authority, suspend constitutional rights, and attack elements of capitalism outright without having to justify themselves to the public. They were in love with this new ability.  And people followed for a while because they really thought they might die of Covid and that the CDC might actually know what it was talking about.  It turned out they didn’t know what they were doing, or if they did, it was malicious intent from the start.  No attempt by the government to stop the virus with therapeutics.  Their only remedy was a vaccine or nothing and to social distance for some ridiculous period to supposedly alleviate the pressure on local hospitals, which was never a problem, even in the height of the lockdowns.  Every court case that went to court in Ohio challenging DeWine’s lockdowns of the state economically were defeated in court, and they will continue to be defeated because they were never constitutional to begin with.  But the trend was seen by all; the government never did have the authority to go door to door and arrest people, like they have been doing other places in the world that don’t have a constitution as we have in America where the government has limited rights.  So the government has attacked our businesses through rules and regulations that they have controlled to show power over the Constitution, which is precisely what the OSHA challenge is all about over vaccine mandates. 

Biden’s timing was meant to put pressure on the Sixth Circuit Court panel of three to punt the case to the Supreme Court in the wake of the Omicron variant that was ravishing the news ahead of the Holidays.  But people are not biting on it.  The news has been hitting the public flat.  People are tired of the Covid talk, the masks, the lockdowns, and the nonsense, and they are finally pushing back because now, unlike before, they know their rights and just what government can actually do to them, which is nothing.  The government has already overstepped their authority and are in trouble of their own.  Not immediate trouble because many of these court cases take a long time to settle.  But ultimately, they will look foolish in court, and the rulings will go against the tyrants, as they have with Government Mike DeWine in Ohio.  But even more than before, companies are reluctant to follow government mandates because it kills their labor force.  A company of any kind isn’t much of a company without a workforce, so now that people leave their jobs and go to other places to work, the government has much less control over the companies themselves.  Before, companies only listened to the government out of fear of breaking the imposed rules.  But the greater fear that companies have is losing their workforce to another company that doesn’t have so many stupid rules. In that way, government power, even sidestepping the Constitution, has been ripped away from them, which is a good thing. It’s been scary to see that they would even try, but the results have shown us all that our Constitution works very well if only people would follow it.  It’s better late than never, I suppose.  But to answer the question of whether we will go back to 2020 lockdowns, I would answer again, no.  The government cried wolf, and people learned the nature of the threat, and they will never listen again.  And that may be unfortunate because trust with the people has been broken forever in this little insurrection by the medical community connected like crack addicts to government funding.  And they will never see that level of trust from the public, again, which I think is ultimately good for us all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business