Tag: MAGA

Capitol Hill is the Most Intelligent Place on Earth: Correcting humanity where they fell short in the Book of Judges

For the first time in my life, I was ready to give Washington D.C. a fair shake, only because Trump was in the White House, and Republicans now controlled the House and the Senate, and the Supreme court has a general 6 to 3 majority toward the thinking I think is necessary in our American Republic.  And I would say at no point before this precise moment would I say otherwise, because there has always been something wrong with our system of government which I affiliate with George Washington himself and his attachment to the Bible’s Book of Judges and the character of Gideon.  With those political conditions fulfilled, I wanted to return to Washington with a fresh perspective and allow myself to see it the way it was designed to be, not to the level that humans failed to live up to the lofty expectations that established the capital of America to begin with.  We typically view these kinds of things by how people fall short of the goals to achieve high honor.  But looking at Washington D.C. from the perspective of centuries, not days, weeks, months, or decades, I saw something coming together with Trump that I think our young nation was designed from the beginning to achieve, and now we have arrived at that moment.  So, with that in mind, my wife and I allowed ourselves to see Washington from a scholarly perspective and to love it.  To come to terms with it.  And to help lead it to this next phase of America’s fascinating story and in what I would say was the purpose all along, to restore to humanity the intention established in the Book of Judges to create the kind of government God wanted for the world, from the beginning. 

So before my wife and I could do what we intended to do, which was go and spend a few days specifically on Capitol Hill in the legislative corridors itself, then the Library of Congress, as well as a whole day at the Supreme Court, I needed a few days at the Museum of the Bible, and a day a George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  We spent significant time on the Mall just reading and thinking and getting away from the noise of the current world and dug deep into the Masonic references that were all over the layout of the city that Pierre L’Enfant had intended with all of George Washington’s Master Mason friends from Alexandria just to the south.  To step beyond the conspiracies that have not understood the purpose from the very beginning, which had come into fulfilment through a lot of blood and sacrifice, to what kind of government we now had, with Elon Musk and President Trump up Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, past Ford’s theater where Lincoln was shot, past the Trump hotel that has the steeple of the Old Post Office that points to celestial references on August 12th from the vantage point of the Capitol steps, to the truth of the matter.  And I mention those names, President Trump, and Elon Musk who are new best friends in all sincerity, only America could have produced people like that to do what they are doing now.  To see it, I needed to dive deep into Washington D. C’s history, to walk and touch things myself.  Over a couple days I bought 56 new books and read most of them by the middle of the following week in a fury because I was looking for an answer and upon visiting Capitol Hill with a fresh perspective and the context of 5000 years of human history, I felt I understood it in the way it was always intended.  And I can honestly say that I love the place for all its lofty ambitions. 

I was standing outside Speaker Johnson’s office with Steve Scalise when they recessed due to the disruptions in the Well during the censor of Al Green, for the mess he and other Democrats made of themselves during Trump’s State of the Union speech just a few days prior.  And I was thinking of that even in the context of the history I referenced.  The place itself, Capitol Hill, was dedicated to the best and most intelligent perspective that human beings could strive to unleash, and that was the point of the censor.  It wasn’t political as much as an insistence on a specific level of sincerity as a representative republic.  As I stood there, I thought of the J6 protestors overwhelming the security and what they were rightfully angry about.  The place had failed to live up to the expectations of “The People,” and they were letting the political characters know that they had failed and weren’t entitled to the gifts of Capitol Hill by default.  I had been to Washington D.C. on other occasions, but this was the first time with this perspective. After much research, I could honestly say that I understood it as intended.  To that point, I had never been to the Library of Congress, even though I’ve had a lot of interactions with it over the years.  I was impressed with the Capitol building, but I was astonished at the beauty and splendor of the Library of Congress once we took the tunnel from the Capitol cafeteria after eating some lunch down there with many recognizable characters that are on television all the time, and emerging directly into the basement of the Library of Congress.  My first thought was that this was a place intended to be Heaven on Earth, which is what my idea of Heaven would be.  The foyer was laced with gold and high ceilings of white marble, which was a purposeful statement about lofty American ambitions.  Why isn’t this place promoted more to the outside world? It was every bit as impressive as anything they have in Europe.  I would have to say that the Library of Congress is my favorite place on Earth because I love books so much. It is such a collection of intelligence placed into the context of Heavenly ambitions that seeing it in person, then going into the reading room, was as good as Heaven. I could spend an eternity there and never get tired of it. 

From there, my wife and I spent the day at the Supreme Court, next door.  I asked a lot of questions, so many that we were able to get into places that visitors aren’t typically allowed to go, and of course one of those places was the courtroom itself.  But I wanted to see the world the way members of the Supreme Court did.  Thinking of the Bible and the laws that successfully made their way into the creation of all Western Civilization, and were the foundations of the American Constitution, here was a place in the Supreme Court that was trying to do what the Israelites couldn’t in the Book of Judges, and that is have a prosperous self-governed society without screaming for a king to rule over them.  We sat on the Supreme Court’s steps after much reflection and looked over at the Library of Congress, then the Capitol building right in front of us.  I was thinking of Steve Bannon doing his famous podcast behind me over on A Street and all the intelligence happening on that little hill in Washington D.C., and it was the most intelligent place on Earth.  Many people don’t live up to that expectation, but the place was built to evoke in people the best they could utter.  From my perspective, I could see that it was working, and working better than any place in the world.  And finally, after many years of striving, it is evident that the American experiment in republic government, meant to correct humanity where they had failed in the Book of Judges, was succeeding in ways that were always intended.  But that it had taken a few hundred years to come into bloom.  And it was wonderful to see. 

The spot where Trump gave his Inauguration speech

Rich Hoffman

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

Why the Museum of the Bible: To understand good government you have to understand what “good” is

Why the Museum of the Bible?  Well, that’s a long story, but as I always say about good government, whether managing a family, a business, a community, or a country, you have to understand what good is.  And there has been no more extraordinary human achievement than the Bible emerging out of Western Civilization to define goodness as it applies to mass society and personal integrity.  I’ve read all the significant works of the world’s religions and studied them in some detail, and I am pretty confident in saying that the Bible and its history have achieved more along the lines of defining good government than any other work to emerge from human culture.  So, once Trump was elected back to office, my wife and I wanted to return to Washington, D.C., and give it another chance with fresh, knowledgeable eyes.  I have never been a no-government guy or an anarchist in any way.  I would say that I have always loved government.  But what I didn’t like were the people who were drawn to it.  And years ago, during the Clinton years, I took my family to a literary conference at the Smithsonian, where I was a big part of their presentation, and the trip was a disaster.  Everywhere we went, there was some horrendous evil that ruined the trip for my wife and kids.  So any interactions I have had with Washington, D.C. over the years had to be without her because she refused to give it a chance after the city let her down so badly in the past, which was unfortunate for me. After all, once I saw the Museum of the Bible open in 2017, during Trump’s first term, I really wanted to go and check it out.  But I did not have a cooperative spouse willing to go and see it. 

But once Trump won in 2024, before his speech was done acknowledging his election victory late on election night, my wife turned to me and said that we should celebrate by going back to Washington D.C.  That’s all I needed to hear, so I started planning and we decided to go once the weather broke in early March of 2025, so we could walk around in comfort.  Since that first Washington trip, we have been to some of the world’s biggest cities and seen plenty of evil in all of them.  But what hit home regarding Washington, D.C. was that it was our city and our government, and we couldn’t stand to see how corrupt it all was.  So it was a lot more personal; other cities were other people’s places.  But with Trump back in office, a key constitutional element had been fulfilled: we did have a Republic that could correct evil by merit of votes, and the system could work and did.  Looking at the city itself from a long perspective, we see that it had the mechanisms to do everything it was designed to do, and we had survived a significant challenge never yet achieved within the human race.  And that deserved a celebration.  So for me, that means something that involves lots of books and time to read about topics many people find boring.  But I get very excited about it, which is the foundation of all law and order.  Specifically, one of the Bible’s main themes is how government should be set up. In the Book of Judges, the Israelites were supposed to have self-government, but the judges kept letting everyone down, leaving the people to cry out for a king.  So God eventually gave them one, and they let everyone down too.  And God became so angry with them that he allowed their destruction by their enemies.  A lot like what had occurred in the American city of Washington D.C. 

The Founding Fathers, especially Washington himself, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, a whole host of characters were trying to create in America a restoration of the Book of Judges, in my view based on the reportings of their voluminous studies, which I think is a very noble effort and one that does take many thousands of years to figure it out.  I felt that the election of Trump during this second term was the first real opportunity for that lofty idea to take hold.  And I think the Green family had a sense of this early in the last decade as Trump was still doing The Apprentice television show and thinking about running for President when they were looking for a place to put their idea for a museum dedicated to the Bible.  The place for it to be would be Washington D.C. along with all the other fantastic museums they have there.  But this one would be the most important because the Bible is the foundation of all Western civilization and the pursuit of good government.  The Bible is the foundation of all law and order, starting with the Ten Commandments.  Such a concept has been successful, and Washington, D.C. was the direct result of that long-established pursuit.  So, if you are thinking about such things, which I do very frequently, when there is a Museum of the Bible, I must see it.  So, upon our visit to America’s capital city, we made the Museum of the Bible our first stop for a long week, and we ended up spending two days there because there was so much to see.

I’ve been to many museums, including some of the best in the world, such as the British Museum and the Louvre in Paris, and I consider the Museum of the Bible to be among the best there is.  It’s right around the corner from the Capitol building itself and was exceptionally well done.  The whole place was put together with much love and passion for the topic.  It was very scholarly and was the perfect way to start a trip to Washington D.C. because once you understand what our government is supposed to be doing, you can’t avoid the Bible in that discussion.  So, a museum dedicated to the history and value of the Bible in human culture is the first criterion for understanding the need for good government at any level.  I could write an entire book about the value of the Museum of the Bible, but to sum things up as concisely as possible, I knew it was a special place when I entered a traveling exhibit they had called the Mosaic of Megiddo which came straight from Israel and was a large floor found in an early Roman building acknowledging Christ as a god around 200 A.D, over 100 years before Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  To see something like that outside of Israel and so significant only established how vital the Museum of the Bible was in the scheme of things.  As I always say, my favorite thing in the world are my Biblical Archaeology Review magazines I have read since I was a little kid.  And going to the Museum of the Bible was like stepping into that quarterly magazine and living in that world three dimensionally.  It is an incredible place, and I don’t think it will be the last time I go there.  My wife and I are members and must find more reasons to return.  It is a fantastic place worth multiple visits, and a lot of time spent there each time.  It is undoubtedly one of the world’s best and most significant museums on a topic that is the foundation of all good government, and because of that, it is infinitely important to the human race. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Steve Hilton For Governor of California: With Trump, state competition is the key to Making America Great Again

It’s not just Vivek Ramaswamy, or Byron Donalds who are Trump endorsed candidates running for governor of their respective states in 2026, but I learned at Vivek’s West Chester event from Vivek himself that the Fox News personality Steve Hilton was also planning to run for governor of California once Gavin Newsom terms out after this current term.  Steve Hilton is best known for his show, The Next Generation, which he had on the 9 PM time slot on Sunday nights and was popular; it ran from 2017 to 2023.  But I hadn’t heard what Steve was doing since then, other than showing up here and there as a guest on various shows.  He’s a very positive person and is part of the next generation of political commentators that I have been talking about lately, and that is certainly the case here.  Once Vivek arrived at CTL Aerospace to speak about his announcement to run for governor, I learned that Steve Hilton was flying out from California to speak for two minutes to give Vivek Ramaswamy a warm announcement.   I realized that a very positive pattern was emerging, leading straight out of the Trump White House.  Trump was building a brand in politics that would carry others to succeed him, and once he put his name on that person, the Trump machine would get behind that person and take them to victory.  Steve Hilton has become good friends with Vivek Ramaswamy, and now that Vivek has put his hat in the ring, Steve told us all at that West Chester event that he was planning to do the same in California, which provoked a long conversation with me backstage after he concluded his speech for Vivek. 

If you haven’t noticed Fox News lately, even they can’t ignore the world trend that eluded them for the previous decade as they wanted to turn more to the center and not be known as a right-winged network once Roger Ailes died.  The Rupert Murdoch kids are not conservative at all, and the wives of the boys wanted to take the station toward New York high society politics rather than conservative populism that was put forth by personalities like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson, and it hurt them.  Then, their position against President Trump was outrageously radicalized.  Again, when discussing left/right politics, the “left” represents Karl Marx’s ideas.  The “right” represents capitalism.  So, being called one or the other is a more profound indication on the political scale of right and wrong, and Fox News was trying to move to the “left” while Roger Ailes had built the network toward the right.  It was not something Rupert Murdoch was politically inclined to, but it was popular, so he went with it as long as the channel made money.  But the kids don’t care so much about making money; they were more concerned with social status, so they made a bad business decision, parted ways with top talent at Fox News, and drove a wedge with Trump himself that they thought they could survive.  They falsely believed that they were the news, not that they reflected their audience, a common mistake everyone is learning from now that Trump is back in the White House.  Woke is out, and common sense is back in.  Even in NFL football, my favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have reinstated their old coach, Jon Gruden, back into their Ring of Honor.  They took him down after a fake scandal was invented to drive him out of football over leaked emails Gruden had written.  The whole premise was that Gruden could be kicked out of the NFL just for thinking and saying something, and that trend has gone the other way, leaving the Buccaneers under this Trump administration to get with the program and to reinstate Gruden to their Ring of Honor. 

That’s kind of what has happened with Fox News, many of the people who were frequently on Fox News are now in Trump’s cabinet and are doing very well, and it has been good for Fox as a business and they are having to make decisions to step away from their commitment to left winged politics.  The Trump family was pushed away from the network before the election, but now they can’t get enough of Trump, leaving Lara Trump to have her own show on the weekends like Steve Hilton did.  So Steve, always an upbeat personality, talked to me about all this as Vivek was speaking in West Chester, and we talked about this trend, the kind of people Trump was building to extend his government beyond the reach of any critics and to destroy conventional politics on its face.  And specifically with California, everyone thought that Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be a good Republican governor, but he turned out to be a RINO loser who could never stand up to the unions and ended up disgraced.  And at that point, California turned radical left and is currently miserable.  A prime time for someone like Steve Hilton to run and win the state and bring the fifth largest economy in the world back to sensibility.  Trump had a plan to make America Great Again, and that started by decentralizing the presidency and moving things back to the states where his hand-picked people would be running those states two years into this current administration, and through state competition, Trump was going to change the political landscape forever.

Remember when NBC tried to replace Trump on The Apprentice with Schwarzenegger because they thought the whole success of that show was a tough guy telling people they were fired?  Well, Schwarzenegger bombed, just as he did as governor because he was an actor, not a leader.  Trump is a battle-hardened leader who learned how to be successful in show business.  And these picks for governor positions are similar; they were privately successful but have learned to master the media to convey authentic leadership.  And Steve Hilton could do what Schwarzenegger or Gavin Newsom could never do in California.  Those personalities knew how to manipulate an audience behind the camera but were paralyzed regarding real-world activities.  And Democrats don’t have any other personality that can step forward and explain the massive failures that the people of California have suffered under Gavin Newsom.  So, another endorsement of Steve Hilton by Trump could easily carry him into a win there, too.  The world is changing for the better, and as I told Steve, you can see a pattern emerging that he is undoubtedly a part of.  And he would be great in California.  Like Vivek Ramaswamy, Steve Hilton is an excellent public speaker who can convey a message.  But more than that, he understands how to identify problems, which he always did on his Fox show.  And like many of the successful personalities on Fox, they need a chance to show their stuff on a political stage.  So, California won’t be left behind in all the fun regarding governor races in 2026.  I think it’s excellent, and the radical political left of Karl Marx won’t have a way to deal with it.  Trump endorsements are a new brand in politics that Democrats have no plan for, especially in states they have ruined, like California.  Once he announces, Steve Hilton is poised to win there in a big way. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Trump Endorses Vivek Ramaswamy: Dumb things Dave Yost and Amy Acton said

Again, I don’t want to see Dave Yost embarrass himself because I like the guy, the current Attorney General of Ohio.  But one of his biggest problems that was obvious to me when I went to his governor run announcement event was that he’s out of step with a skipping record, just a little too late on everything and slightly off-kilter with the flow of reality.  Under normal conditions, he might be able to run for governor and win, especially against the person the Democrats are going to put up, Amy Acton.  But these aren’t regular times.  I’m supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of Ohio, and the GOP should get behind him and make it happen.  Vivek is going to be governor no matter what any opposition tries to do to prevent it.  On the same day that Vivek announced he was running from West Chester, Ohio, President Trump came out immediately and endorsed Vivek to settle the issue and let all the other GOP contenders know where the President’s heart was on the matter.  And the person who wins in Ohio, no matter how good Vivek Ramaswamy is, will be the person President Trump picks.  The Trump endorsement is crucial because voters will rally to whoever that is. And for the Governor race of Ohio in 2026, it is Vivek Ramaswamy.  And to make sure nobody gets any funny ideas, Vivek Ramaswamy will be all over the media and state in an overwhelming fashion to make sure that he gets a chance to meet everyone he could possibly meet along the way.  He has been doing media on television almost every day since his announcement, which shows that he will work hard to win people’s votes.  Vivek will not take anything for granted, and he will win the election and be Ohio’s next governor. 

Vivek/Lang has a nice ring to it, I think

But upon hearing that Vivek was running, Dave Yost said some foolish things that won’t help him and actually make that skipping record syndrome much worse, and I have to warn him that if he wants a political future, he needs to not say such dumb things.  Among these was his attack on Vivek and trying to paint him as someone who starts a lot of projects but never finishes them, such as dropping out of the Presidential race, dropping out of D.O.G.E. with Elon Musk, and moving his company STRIVE to Texas because Ohio costs too much to do business in.  Yost is trying to portray Ramaswamy as a quitter.  But instead, Yost showed himself grotesquely out of touch as he didn’t get the GOP memo.  I learned about Vivek Ramaswamy’s running for governor with an early morning phone call two weeks before Christmas of 2024.  Something of a deal was made, and Trump wanted Vivek Ramaswamy to be Ohio’s governor because the goal was for the Trump economy to turn a Rust Belt state into one of the world’s tech leaders.  It’s the home state of J.D. Vance, who many in the MAGA movement would like to see carry the torch of the next four years of Trump.  Vivek is the right guy to bring all those elements together in Ohio.  Yost pointed out that Vivek dropped out of the presidential race after a fourth-place showing in Iowa, as if that said everything.  But the reality was that Vivek, while running for President, never went after Trump but was loyal the entire time.  So, Vivek wasn’t an either-or candidate but was a continuation of the MAGA movement, and if that were the criterion, people would have rather had Trump finish what was started during the first term.  Vivek instead ran on a MAGA platform to build on the issue rather than try to corrode it away with debate.

Most people who are affiliated with the GOP know about this Trump arrangement.  I asked my sources if I could talk about it, and they said I could, so it wasn’t super secret.  Mike DeWine, Ohio’s current governor, was then called to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.  He and Jon Husted did this, and the deal was made.  DeWine would appoint Husted to the vacant senate seat left behind by Vance so that he wouldn’t be destroyed by Vivek becoming governor because Husted wanted to run too.  Trump is the party’s leader and will likely remain that way for the rest of his life.  He is the one who won that right, and people need to follow that vision.  Vivek Ramaswamy also had to do that to run for governor of a state when he wanted to be president.  That’s how you build successful teams, and all these guys played their part in creating a bigger vision of what the MAGA movement would be like after Trump was no longer in the White House.  But to make the most of it while he was there.  Time is short, opportunities are limited, and Dave Yost, to be wise, should hitch his wagon to one of these Trump strategies and not stick himself on the outside looking in.  Because once the window closes, it will close forever.  The Ohio GOP doesn’t need a media-driven mess for the upcoming primary.  It requires a unified party with the hands of Trump on it, and Dave Yost needs to find a place in it, not out of it, for his own good.  That’s the only warning shot I’ll give. If he didn’t know that Vivek was running, then that’s even worse because everyone else did, and it only shows how out of step he is, made even worse by every day that he does not get behind Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Then there is the Democrat Amy Acton and her dumb comments about Vivek as if she knows how to run against him.  I’ll make a prediction: She is going to be crushed by the debate skills of Vivek Ramaswamy.  Acton is the former Health Director of the State of Ohio appointed by DeWine, which caused all kinds of problems with COVID-19.  Amy Acton shut down Ohio as one of the leaders of all states to be the first to lockdown, which was standard of all the Democrat led states.  Only Ohio was supposed to be a red state.  DeWine allowed himself to be suckered by the stringy hair hippie style of Yellow Springs politics that Amy Acton represents, and it won’t go well for her.  I’m looking forward to it because Vivek can tell a story about her that has not been told yet.  She would have been wise to stay under a rock for what she did to Ohio during COVID-19, but she’s the best Democrats have, which says a lot about them.  She is running, but I don’t think the Democrats have any idea of what kind of buzz saw they are going to run into with this one.  Trump has his ideas about it because Ohio did lockdown during his last year in office, making it much harder for him to keep the nation together during that crisis.  So he will support Vivek vivaciously; let me just put it nicely.  Once everyone is done with Amy Acton, there won’t be a rock in the world to hide under, and she will not be able to hide her shame for the rest of her life, which she deserves.  And that’s just how it’s all going to go down.  So plan accordingly. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Story of the Card: When people do good things for all the right reasons

Interestingly, just a few weeks after Vivek Ramaswamy announced he was running for Governor of Ohio at CTL Aerospace in West Chester, we both found ourselves at the Library of Congress, for different reasons, on the same day.  Vivek is all in and doing media interviews every day on the prime-time Fox News shows and other places, and he was at the Library of Congress to celebrate Ohio’s birthday for statehood, which is a pretty interesting story.  And that, too, is interesting: since President Trump has returned to the White House, where he was rightfully supposed to be, many of my close friends have suddenly had a lot of business in Washington, D.C.  But one of the aspects of all this that I get asked about the most is that when Vivek came to West Chester to make his big announcement, people wondered why Vivek and I seemed to know each other and what was it with that card I showed him when he arrived.  The truth is, I didn’t know if he would remember me after all he had been through since the last time I saw him.  But he seemed to upon sight once he arrived and met with a small group of people responsible for the event at CTL Aerospace.  When it came time for him to greet me, his wife was already speaking with me. I wanted an ice breaker.  After all, he has met many people over the last couple of years and spent his time helping campaign for Trump, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, and creating D.O.G.E. with Elon Musk.  So, to start our conversation, I showed him a card he gave me four years ago, which everyone has been asking about.  And when he saw it, he laughed.  He and his wife instantly knew what it was, and it kicked off a nice conversation about his personal political journey, which started at CTL Aerospace five years earlier. 

The card in question was a little promo thing he did for his book Woke Inc, which went on to be a game-changing bestseller, as I thought it would at the time.  Vivek was really one of the first in the country to figure out just how dangerous woke politics was, and the great Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix invited me to come to a special launch of his new book at the Middletown Republican Party Headquarters.  Vivek was trying out his messaging for a national campaign that would encompass Fox News, specifically Tucker Carlson, so he was trying out his platform to a kind of test showing in his hometown of Butler County, Ohio.  But that isn’t where the story started, as Vivek told me the same story he said at the governor’s announcement and why he wanted to return to CTL Aerospace to make his big pitch.  A year earlier, from the book launch, where all he had to give out was that card, because the book hadn’t officially come out for another three months at that point, I had set up a rally in support of President Trump.  He was in his last year in office and was starting to run again for a second term.  And Democrats were entrenched in impeaching him and trying to use the Russian story to knock him off.  So I, along with several other prominent Butler County Republicans set up a rally to support Trump during a very dark period, and the rally was at CTL Aerospace which many thought was bold, to politically stick their necks out to show open support for President Trump when everyeone else in the world was running away.

J.D. Vance was still coming off his popular book The Hillbilly Elegy and was getting attention wherever he went, and he already knew Nancy Nix, who of course was coming to the rally I was putting on.  And as the story goes, the future Vice President wanted Nancy to introduce a friend of his, Vivek Ramaswamy, to the world of politics because he was stepping away from a CEO job he had been doing at the time and was looking for something new to wrap his brilliant mind into next.  So he came to the rally, got a good taste of politics, and saw an anti-woke company that was not afraid to tell the world at the time.  Vivek told me a year later that the rally helped him define a virus he and his wife had been considering curing.  Not a disease of the body, but one of the mind, wokeness.  After that CTL rally, he sat down and refined those ideas into the now famous book, Woke Inc. There were many people in the audience that day at that rally, so I didn’t know Vivek from any other face in the crowd.  But a year later, as he explained, he had written his book and was pitching it to a hometown crowd before going nationwide with a more extensive campaign.  But my joke to him then was that he was doing a book launch without a book because it wasn’t out yet.  But he did bring little cards with the cover printed on it.  I sat in the front row, because I love new books, and he gave me one of those cards and signed it.  And I looked at it and joked, “Is that it?”  Because I wanted an actual book to read, not just a silly little card. 

Well, it was a pretty good story, and I kept that card as a bookmark in some of my other books in my library.  A year after the Middletown event, I saw Vivek again at a Lincoln Dinner, and we were all in the VIP section as he was scheduled to speak that night.  Mike Pompeo was back there too, with a bunch of my personal friends, so it was a festive environment.  But I didn’t forget about the joke between Vivek and me, so I brought a copy of his book, Woke Inc, that I had long since read.  I got it for him to sign, which he did, and we joked about that card.  So now fast forward to three years after that, and Vivek was coming back to CTL Aerospace to make his governor announcement, and I pulled out that card for our greeting, curious as to whether he would remember all those events.  I didn’t want it to be weird for him to wonder, after seeing so many faces on his journey of running for President and traveling all over the United States, to see me and wonder how he knew me.  So I showed him that card before we even shook hands, and our conversation picked up exactly where it had last resided, and we had a lot of fun with the topic.  People watching and seeing all the pictures have been wondering what the story of the card was, how Vivek Ramaswamy stepped into politics to contribute his massive brain to the cause of freedom along the trajectory of the MAGA movement.  But I was there initially and played a part in his journey and was happy to see him doing good things with it.  You never know who might be in the audience when you host a rally or write articles like these daily.  But I have found many Vivek Ramaswamys out there thinking about doing something significant with their lives; sometimes, they need someone to hold the flashlight in the right direction so they can find their way to it.  And things cascade from there, so doing things is always important.  Vivek will be a great governor in Ohio and, undoubtedly, a great president after that.  He will do a lot of great things in the years to come.  And it will be because he is good and is willing to do all the hard work.  But sometimes great things happen just because of a little card and a story that grows with it.  That is the story of the card I have kept and the movement it launched, with the efforts of many people brought together with the common bond of just wanting to do the right thing. I’m very proud of Vivek Ramaswamy; he’s the right guy at the right time for all the right reasons and when you see things like this you can see the hidden hand of God working from behind a veil with a yearning for good things to happen with little miracles that make no sense under any other condition.  And I wouldn’t say that anything in this story is a miracle.  But what it is only happens when people refuse to bend the knee to darkness, and people so inclined to resist come together under a common cause and change the world, one little card at a time.

Rich Hoffman

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

Apoorva Ramasway is a Really Good Person: One of the big reasons to support Vivek Ramaswamy for governor of Ohio

There was never any question about supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of the State of Ohio.  But after meeting with him at his launch ceremony in West Chester, Ohio, I feel even better about it.  Of course, he is a great talent that can speak the peel off an orange.  But so can a lot of con artists.  The question everyone always wants to know about these kinds of things is how can they know they can trust him?  What makes a person trustworthy, even if they have the gift of gab?  After all, there are a lot of salespeople out there who can sell you just about anything who aren’t worth 2 cents as people.  So what makes Vivek Ramaswamy a good person, good enough to be made Governor of the State of Ohio?  Well, I have a proven tactic that I use to qualify people, especially adult people, that has worked for me over the years: I measure a person’s worth based on what kind of spouse they have.  They can sell pretty words to the public all day, but if they partner with a terrible person as a spouse, you should always question the person’s validity.  As a general rule, good people tend to attract other good people.  And bad, toxic people tend to do the same.  You don’t often find a toxic person choosing to be married to a high-quality person.  They are attached to them for a reason.  So judging a person based on the worth of their spouse is quite good as an accurate measurement, and I am thrilled to say that Vivek Ramaswamy’s wife is top-class and a very good person. Upon meeting Apoorva Ramaswamy, I found that I liked Vivek even more.  They are a nice couple who work well together in ways that are bigger than the jobs they do in life.

I don’t mind saying it, and there are certainly more that I can think of, but at this Vivek Ramaswamy event were some very good friends of mine who were part of setting up everything in the background.  And we are friends for a reason that goes beyond political considerations.  I know a lot of people, but I put more trust in these people for a lot of reasons, most of which start with their spouses.  For instance, when people ask me, “How can you trust George Lang?  He’s a RINO establishment figure.”  I can say to them that I can trust him in ways I wouldn’t trust other people, largely because of what I know him that is different from other people, especially people in a decisive Senate role.  Why George?  He has a wonderful wife in Debbie, who is just as solid as a person can get.  They are a good couple, and they are at an age where they travel a lot, and the fruits of a lot of hard work are emerging, and they are living a good life.  They work well together, and things were not always as good as they are now.  I remember when the political left was trying to throw George in jail just for knowing John Boehner.  Even in the toughest of times, Debbie has always been loyal to George, and as a couple, they are always trying to do the right thing, and I have come to know both of them pretty well over the years in ways that far exceed politics.  If George Lang had never been a senator and never was again, he and his wife would still be friends with me and my wife.  They are good people to know.

And why do I like her so much? People always ask me about Nancy Nix.  Well, what’s not to like?  She is as good as they get.  She comes across as a good person as a politician due to her many sincere desires for the world to be a better place, and I have come to know her over the years as a person with profound convictions toward biblical goodness.  But I’ll say that her husband Bob Leshnak is perfect for her.  Sometimes, it takes a while to find people who can work with them instead of against them.  When you are a person like Nancy who is naturally attractive and has a very outward projecting personality, you can attract a lot of bar flies.  But as a naturally good person from a good family, she knows how to sort through all that to find a great spouse in Bob.  He is good for her and doesn’t work against her, and they just come out as a good couple when you talk to them in any setting.  How can people be expected to manage your government financially or ethically if they can’t manage their own homes?  I could say that I know Fran DeWine a bit, enough to see that she makes the current governor of Ohio a far better person than he would otherwise be.  They are childhood sweethearts, which makes him a person that can at least be brought to reason because he has managed a long marriage to a good person.  I have met Melania Trump on several occasions and always said she is the key to why President Trump has become the kind of good person he is at this stage.  Spouses say a lot about the people we know, publicly. 

At Vivek’s West Chester event, I got to talk to him in great detail, but that wasn’t new.  I could also walk around with his wife and talk to her one-on-one.  And I found it interesting that she had a good relationship with Representative Jennifer Gross, who is too Tea Party for many people.  It says a lot about Apoorva in a good way and about Vivek with the doors closed.  Apoorva was a very classy woman, full of life and spirit, and I kept thinking she would be an ideal First Lady of Ohio.  She comes across well in all the right ways.  But what is most apparent is that she and Vivek are a power couple that feeds off each other.  We’re not talking about a couple of people climbing through social power to achieve a status through won elections.  These people are personally good and want to share that with others in a leadership way.  This is a much different set of standards than the traditional power couple that only share their desire for public power, and once that is not in their lives through a lost election or bad financial times, their relationship breaks apart.  Spouses aren’t helping each other if they plot divorce behind their spouses’ backs and are always jealous of the other people in their lives because they are insecure in the foundations of their relationship.  When you meet people who have people in their lives that they are building families with and who are willing to walk through all the fires of life together, you can know that there are unique qualities you can trust in them as public servants.  And that is undoubtedly the case for Vivek Ramaswamy and his wife, Apoorva.  They will still be a good couple once the days of politics are done, a few decades from now.  They will be defined by what they do together rather than what they convince people to give them in the form of trust and social management.  They are good because they are good, and they work together, which is the best trait of all.

Rich Hoffman

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

I Like the FBI A Lot More Today: With Kash Patel in charge, we’re a lot better off

This is another one of those spike-the-football moments that I usually don’t do.  But when it comes to the FBI, they deserve it.  I have not been a big supporter of them all this time, so they are lucky to have Kash Patel as their director.  The FBI has too often abused its power and shown that it cannot be trusted, and I thought the only way to deal with it was to let it go, dismiss the entire department, and start over with something else.  After they were caught doing this multiple times, having someone like Kash Patel run them was the only way to keep them around.  It wasn’t that long ago that I did a piece on CNN that dealt with James Comey at the height of his career. Once President Trump fired him a few months into his first administration, I accurately described the former FBI Director as a bad person.  I’ve done a lot of media over the years, but that CNN spot is one that I am proud of because of the circumstances under which it occurred.  Trump had just fired Comey, I think it was May of 2017, just a few months into the first term of President Trump, for mishandling the illegal email case of Hillary Clinton.  But deeper than that, Comey was leading a series of coups against Trump, especially regarding the Russia hoax that would become the central issue of his entire first presidency.  So CNN came to Cincinnati to talk to hard-core Trump supporters about whether or not they still trusted Trump after firing the Boy Scout image of James Comey.  The bet at the time was that people would turn on Trump because they liked Comey so much.  But the CNN broadcast ran into a buzz saw in Butler County politics for Anderson Cooper’s show live on the air when the camera and question was on me, did I think that Comey lied about what he had done and I had essentially told them yes, using a spy novelist metaphor.  Comey was more fiction than fact. 

After the cameras were off and we were all in the parking lot where the interview had been shot, which was a sports bar that was very popular in Fairfield, Ohio, I had some hard talks with the producers that they found astonishing.  These CNN producers were friendly people; we had gotten to know them well because before that, they had given us a kind of party where we watched the James Comey hearings together before the interview later that night, which they thought was going to be a slam dunk against Trump’s corruption.  Over that duration, they had taken a particular liking to me and wanted to know what I thought about many things.  As I usually do, I was more than happy to give them plenty of answers.  So we were talking after the interview, and they were stunned by what I had said, which is that I thought Comey lied in his testimony and was an open activist against Trump in trying to perform a coup against him.  Also at that time was the thought that the Russian dossier was accurate and that Trump had been caught with prostitutes allowing them to urinate on him while staying in Russia on business.  I told them that no way that story was true, which turned out to be accurate, because Trump would never allow himself to be urinated on by dirty prostitutes.  He’s way too clean for something like that.

And this was before we learned what we did about Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the two senior FBI employees working directly for Comey who had an illicit affair and comforted each other with a series of text messages assuring the young woman that the FBI had the power to stop Trump, no matter what.  So what I was saying to these CNN producers in this parking lot was mind-blowing stuff for them.  They had complete trust in our American institutions and thought it was impossible for a career appointment like Comey, leading one of our most important institutions, to show himself untrustworthy.  They couldn’t understand it but liked me and thought I said many brilliant things.  So, they couldn’t understand how I could feel the things I did about the FBI.  Well, I was right about everything, as I usually am.  And everyone learned some hard lessons.  But the important thing was that I was right about it when it was very unpopular to suggest such a thing.  We are in a different world now, 8 years later.  And I would say that I certainly did my part to get that truth out and to start turning some of these noes into yeses regarding the issue of trusting Trump.  We had to go through some actual cleansing, and ultimately, it was good that we’ve now had Trump for eight years and are going for four more, essentially.  Otherwise, the Director of the FBI would be a much more conventional pick.  However, only someone like Kash Patel could reform the FBI as it has been needed for decades.  Trump appointed Christopher Wray to replace Comey, but he wasn’t much better.  And he would turn out to lead the FBI to further try to destroy Trump after he left office in raiding his home at Mar-a-Lago and taking the classified documents that Trump had kept for himself after his first term, which he had every right in the world to do. 

One of the first things that President Trump did upon winning the White House for the third time was to get back the documents that were taken from him in the Mar-a-Lago raid of his home in 2022.  From the time that I gave that CNN interview, to the time that the boxes taken from Trump were restored to him just a few days ago, we saw enough out of the FBI to see that they had become a fourth branch of government that had drifted away from voter oversight and had become highly corrupt and power hungry.  And the only way to save them was to put Kash Patel in charge so that he could reform them completely.  I had thought they were beyond reform, but even I like the FBI now that Kash Patel is in charge and Pam Bondi is running the Justice Department.  I have never been an anti-government person.  But I expect my government to be run by good people, and institutional preservation is not warranted when good people are hard, if not impossible, to find.  So, for the FBI’s sake, they are lucky that Trump won.  They get a chance to live again under Kash Patel.  And with him in charge, I like the FBI much more than I did before Kash was sworn in.  Now that he has been sworn in, I can get behind the FBI in ways I haven’t in over four decades.  But the lesson here is that you should listen when I tell you something, even if it sounds pretty wild and unbelievable.  And if you do, you’ll find that life is a lot easier for you, no matter what it is.  Lessons learned is wisdom gained.

Rich Hoffman

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

Firefly Lands on the Moon: Another step toward a space economy

Never forget that at 3:34 AM on March 2, 2025, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon’s surface.  It’s the second time a private company achieved a soft lunar landing, indicating many good things to come.  The first was Odysseus from Intuitive Machines almost a year ago.  I know several people at Firefly and know how significant their company is growing in the right direction, and this landing was an important historical marker showing that a smaller commercial company can pull off something like this in a partnership with NASA.  It would take NASA decades to do these launches, and now we see these private companies in a profoundly competitive undertaking, and they are doing so successfully.  There will be many more good things to come from Firefly, which is very exciting, and this goes along with what I have been saying about space.  This landing occurred one day before SpaceX sent Starship 8 into space, and just ahead of Blue Origin, a ship full of women, like celebrity Katy Perry, going into space as if it were just another day at the office.  Space is becoming routine, which is what we want to see happen.  And the moon has needed much more attention than it has received; we should have never stopped going.  I don’t care if aliens were on the moon to scare off Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, pushing us never to return.  NASA moved into the Space Shuttle program after the Apollo missions, but we have never since the early 70s dared to return to the moon.  Now, we have private companies doing the job that governments were too slow to do themselves.  And it’s all very exciting.  Firefly is a great new company, and it will play a significant role in the expansion of a space economy that I have been talking about for quite some time now.

And while discussing it, I’ll make a few predictions.  Just as Elon Musk is pushing for humanity to get into space and settle on Mars, to ensure that humans survive, I would dare say that this isn’t the first time our species has encountered this problem.  I think we will find that the relics on Mars are from our history and that our move to Earth was for many of the same reasons that we want to now return to Mars.  Not to discover it for the first time but to return there and complete a story that began for us many thousands of years ago.  Elon Musk is simply fulfilling the hard-wired desires that are built into human consciousness to ensure the continuation of the species, in the same way a sperm knows to penetrate the egg within a woman.  We must penetrate space to move our species as a thinking consciousness into the universe, as we were meant to.  On earth as it is in Heaven.  We are meant to ascend into Heaven, to the kingdoms we know from our past, which are in the sky. Mark it on your calendar and remember who told you all this.  Once we move into space and start checking things out, that’s when we are going to learn about ourselves.  The proof is coming.  I would say that it is all around us, hidden behind our institutionalized history.  But that won’t last very long; the evidence is abundant and will be confirmed with a space economy.  I could go into quite a long discussion about hidden lifeforms behind a curtain of Dark Matter made of neutrinos and cold fusion.  But let’s save that for other times.  Instead, let’s talk about the excitement of this growing economy brought to us by commercial-driven space utilization.

At a recent Vivek Ramaswamy governor announcement event at CTL Aerospace, I must have had more than 100 people ask me why I love aerospace.  And I tell them that the future is there.  It’s been like panning for gold in a little mountain stream during the Gold Rush.  I get a lot of offers to make a lot of money doing many things, especially in communications.  But I like to stay close to where the gold is, and I like knowing people like the cool cats at Firefly and other companies.  I get very excited every time SpaceX puts up a new rocket.  From all I know about history and science, I see aerospace as the ultimate gold nugget, and I’ve been committed to it for over four decades.  To use a Western metaphor, I’d rather dig for gold in aerospace than sit in a comfortable job in town as a lawyer or communications expert.  It’s not the money that excites me; the growth of human intellect and what adventure can bring us is the ultimate treasure.  But that doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter.  But on a scale that I think is better than just some average well-paying job.  The growth of the space economy will far outpace any technical time humans have ever experienced, whether it be steamships, early airplanes, trains, or automobiles.  The space economy will likely contribute hundreds of trillions of dollars to the first to utilize it.  And that, to me, is the best of the big gold nuggets.  But this time we should have learned some critical lessons, to keep the Marxists out of this business, as they dramatically crippled every modern industry that humans have invented.  The Firefly launch is more vital than past attempts when Trump is in office and cheerleading on all these efforts.  So, the resolution rate is much higher than at any other time in history.

I watched Brit Hume on Fox News the other night stumble around perplexed about how Trump thinks he will go into all these tariff wars, cut taxes, and still expand the economy.  As everyone was, he spoke about an economy that they think has seen the climax of its days and that all government management has to be wrapped around managing those fixed assets.  But that’s not where Trump is as he is facing down what we all are, a 36 trillion dollar deficit that is out of control.  If you want to fix that without touching the Social Security and Medicare concept, something dramatic has to happen.  And as I have been pointing out, it’s in this space economy.   With Firefly putting their lunar module on the moon after a drought of 50 years, a half a century.  Our economy has been held back by a lot of Marxist parasites who moved into administrative positions at NASA and the Pentagon and held back human civilization in a very catastrophic way.  However, the more private people have grown more powerful, and the more that government has lost it, the more companies like SpaceX and Firefly have grown and are now doing the big things.  And that is where the future treasures are.  And that is the only kind of treasure I care about in the long line of treasures in any economy.  The best to my mind is in space, and the adventures to come.  And when I see scrappy companies like Firefly have success, I am more than happy for them.  These are fascinating times! 

Rich Hoffman

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

Zelenskyy Should Have Been Thrown Out of the White House Just for Dressing as a Slob: J.D. Vance exposed the scam, and they hate him for it

Zelenskyy should have worn a suit to the Oval Office.  His grunge band look is disrespectful to the White House, and I’m not a fan of ever showing up to any professional engagement without wearing a tie.  I can’t recall ever doing anything professional with anybody where I didn’t wear a tie and jacket.  Especially during a dinner meeting where you know professional discussions will take place.  A jacket and tie show respect for the work that needs to be done.  And when Trump greeted the Ukrainian President upon arriving at the White House, he joked a bit about Zelenskyy’s dress-down approach to politely warn him of the American expectations.  But it’s part of Zelenskyy’s begging gig for Ukraine and is part of a much larger issue of globalism playing down any individual achievement over collective salvation.  It’s a Marxist thing to reject professionalism and respect and to lean in favor of the pointless nature of expectation.  And it didn’t take long for it all to blow up in Zelensky’s face when he was confronted by a reporter who asked the beggar why he didn’t come to the White House with a suit and tie.  And Zelenskyy gave a sarcastic answer, which J.D. Vance was done with.  The sparks started to fly about how disrespectful Zelenskyy was to the Trump administration.  Trump wasn’t going to have any of it, and he then proceeded to dismantle Zelenskyy, the former comedian, and kick him out of the White House without accomplishing the mineral deal that the Ukrainian President was there to sign.  Don’t show up to meetings unprepared, and don’t be disrespectful, especially when the entire campaign of resistance depends on the United States to fund the war against Russia.  When you are playing with other people’s money, you don’t have any leverage, so just shut up when you are told.

I am not a supporter of Ukraine.  As far as I’m concerned, Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union just a few years ago and became its own country when the fall of communism forced several breakaways from the former superpower.  Ukraine is a creation of globalism and a political fight between a one-world order run by the United Nations and any concept of nationalism.  Vladimir Putin of Russia, as a former KGB manipulator from their glory days, wants to restore Russia to its previous borders, so there are parts of his nationalism approach that we share in the United States as we are moving away from a borderless world and back to protecting our borders from globalism.  It was never a fight we should have been in, but Russia was pushed to act by the Biden administration, doing what globalism wanted, which was to overextend Russia so that American money would support Ukraine to destroy the nationalism status of Putin and force his people to reject him after a failed enterprise.  That hasn’t happened, and Trump ran on getting American money out of Ukraine, so time is over for sympathy toward  Zelenskyy’s begging-for-money campaign toward objectives that seem endless and without a point.  People are dying in the war, but what does more money do? Make more people die?  That was Trump’s point, and when Zelenskyy essentially tried to scare Trump into believing that we couldn’t afford to take a casual approach because we have a big ocean protecting us, that was the end for Trump.  And he lacerated Zelenskyy as he was supposed to and kicked him out of the White House with no deal.  Zelenskyy should have at least shown up with a jacket and tie to show the appropriate respect.

And it’s not so safe in America as Zelenskyy insinuated.  We have Russia right off our coast in Alaska.  We have socialists in the north, with Canada.  And we have communists in Cuba and outright hostile Marxists in Mexico, which have all contributed to our border crises.  Most of the central and South American countries have some Marxism in their approach, so many hostilities are threats to America.  We don’t have an ocean to protect us from harm.  And anybody who says that America should be funding Ukraine’s fight against Russia doesn’t understand the real drivers of the war, which are pretty layered and ominous and have very little to do with the actual war itself.  We’re not all in this together.  There are good decisions and bad decisions, and we aren’t chained to people who make bad decisions just as we aren’t chained to brothers and sisters or even parents who make bad decisions in our families If people behave foolishly, there is a payment for that, and its not up to the American taxpayers to rescue every fool from bad decisions they made.  When he was kicked out of the White House, Zelenskyy got on a plane and took off for England, where they foolishly gave him 2 billion dollars as a loan to essentially one-up America.  But Trump doesn’t care, and Americans get it, which is why they voted for Trump.  Ukraine must understand that America is their domestic policy and should be much more respectful.  We don’t owe them anything, which was how Zelenskyy approached his meeting with Trump, as if we did.  Trump supporters put him in the White House just for that kind of meeting, and it’s what we expect him to do representing us.  And J.D. Vance did a great job as well.  There was much to be proud of regarding that meeting with Zelenskyy last Friday of February 2025. 

But there is more to the story. It’s this casual dress that Zelenskyy is always wearing; he wears this pajama outfit all over the place as if he is in such a beggar mode all the time that he can’t afford a suit.  I despise this approach to any business meeting.  It’s something we see all over the world and is part of a Marxist push that has seeped into every aspect of our culture.  This casual Friday approach to professionalism is a trend that we need to reject.  I hate it.  I always wear a suit and tie to professional engagements to show respect for the work we intend to do.  I don’t like casual Fridays.  I don’t like dress-down Mondays.  Even in high school, I wore a jacket and tie every day.  And I do the same now for every professional engagement.  And when they run into dinner after important meetings, I usually never take my tie off until the day is over, even after others have removed theirs and opened up a few buttons to relax with some drinks.  To me, this is sloppy, and I don’t do it.  I think the world should return to professional attire for all business meetings; the trend to dress down and be a slob has not worked out well.  I know Elon Musk is part of this new technology group that dresses down for everything, but that includes him.  If you go to the White House, show respect and dress appropriately.  When discussing money in any regard, everyone should wear professional attire, especially in the case of Ukraine.  And for just that reason alone, Zelenskyy deserved to be kicked out of the White House, just as anybody else should have been.  And based on J.D. Vance’s performance regarding all this, I’m ready for him to be president in 2028. He’ll be a great continuation of the Trump administration.

Rich Hoffman

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Dave Yost Has No Chance: Calling me a fraud won’t make an unlikable person appealing

I support Vivek Ramaswamy for the Governor of Ohio in any way possible.  I was all in before I had a chance to talk to him the other day, and after spending some time with him, I’m more convinced than ever.  For me, he’s like getting Trump to run Ohio.  But Vivek is great on his own, and he is what I would call the next generation of MAGA political candidates.  I have liked Dave Yost, the current attorney general.  But there are a lot of reservations that put him in the clear RINO category.  In a head-to-head matchup between Yost and Ramaswamy, I see it coming out like it did in 2016 with Trump against Jeb Bush.  And in the end, I think a political fight with Vivek Ramaswamy will destroy the career of Dave Yost, and I didn’t want to see that, at least until they sent me a nasty letter the other day complaining about my support of Vivek through a video I did.  I usually get a lot of hate mail, and I never come close to answering them all, but this one was different due to the content of the political fight to come, and it changed any sympathy I had for Dave Yost into primal aggression and a desire to see him destroyed.  I have been keeping thoughts about Dave Yost and what he did to the former Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds tucked away, and this whole event resurrected it for me as a primary concern.  I’m not running for office, so I don’t have to be as nice as Vivek wants to be to his political enemies.  And as good as he is, he’s going to win the governor race of Ohio without too much difficulty.  But as I have done in regard to Trump, reporting things in context so people can feel good about voting for Ramaswamy when critics say otherwise is something I will certainly do for the future Governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy.  

So the Yost Campaign insinuated that I’m some fraud for the video I did discussing the announcement of running for governor by Vivek Ramaswamy a day before the event occurred.  They thought that was a misleading tactic because I couldn’t have possibly known that the event would be packed with supporters on the day before the event occurred.  Now, I have a lot of experience with the media, and if I wasn’t good at so many other things, I would probably have carved out a career in media myself.  But to be truthful, and I know this from many friends in the media that I have who were major superstars, the pay isn’t that great.  So I do a lot of other things; media for me is for the good of it.  Not the pay of it.  But it’s common practice to pre-write articles before a deadline and even to shoot a promo video ahead of an event when you want the material to reach audiences near or right after the event you are discussing.  And that was the case here.  In West Chester, Ohio, at CTL Aerospace, we had a big announcement rally for Vivek Ramaswamy that ended around 6:30 PM.  My blog is read daily by many people who want to know my thoughts on the latest topic. It goes up every day at 7 PM.  So I had to have most of it ready to go to beat my deadline.  I could adjust any changes to the reporting beforehand.  But for that article and video, I talked about the things that I knew were going to be true.  And I would know because I was one of the organizers of the event.  

A pretty dumb idea on their part. But it’s a free world.

Before the weekend of Vivek’s announcement on the following Monday, the 24th of February, I knew that there were 1200 RSVPs who had gone online to indicate they were coming and to be put on the list.  I also knew the space we had set up for Vivek was only supposed to hold 500 people.  So, doing the video announcement I did for the event, I knew it would be very crowded.  And as it turned out, it was worse than I said.  There was a line down and around the building and as people were trying to get in I had more than 500 text messages and phone calls between the hour of 4 PM and 5 PM, which I couldn’t take, because I was talking to Vivek Ramaswamy along with a few other people about what was going to happen during his speech.  It took me two days after the rally to answer most of them.  I never got to some because I wasn’t sure who they all were. But the ones I did know, I eventually, at least, answered.  I was at the Dave Yost announcement for Governor when he did it at the Elks Club near my home in Liberty Township, and it was nothing like this.  Dave had difficulty getting more than seven or eight people to stand in line to get a picture with him.  There may have been a few hundred people who came; honestly, I felt sorry for him. To support him, which I planned to do until Vivek came along, I knew that Dave Yost would have a significant enthusiasm problem.  He just wasn’t very exciting.  He acted like an out-of-touch politician who put on a cowboy hat to appeal to the meat-and-potato people, but he had an assumption of doing the time and a pretention of entitlement that he deserved to be Governor and that the Republican party owed it to him.

Senator Lang, and Secretary of State Frank LaRose endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy at CTL Aerospace

There is a lot of good stuff to discuss regarding Vivek Ramaswamy, and I certainly will.  I’ve met him several times, and at this event, he had a good memory of some of our history together.  The reason he chose CTL Aerospace is because of a story he shares with me, and Nancy Nix, George Lang and a few others at the start of his decision to get into politics, which I knew before his speech, was why he was coming back to start his run for governor at that location.  So we had a good talk, and I got to know his wife a bit more than in the past, and let me say, she is solid goodness in every way you can imagine.  She is sharp and very friendly.  I like the Ramaswamys as a family and as people, and it is those kind of people, if they want to, who should be in tough jobs like the Governor of Ohio.  Vivek is the kind of political figure I have been looking for in these positions for years, so I’m going to get fully behind his campaign, and that’s why I was one of the event coordinators and venue providers.  I personally liked Vivek before his announcement, in a very personal way.  And I am more supportive after hearing his speech if possible.  And to my way of thinking, Vivek is a lot nicer than I am.  And I would say a lot more forgiving; anybody who gets in the way of him running Ohio must be destroyed.  And if Dave Yost wants to go there, or his not very smart people, then that’s on them.  They can deal with the aftermath. 

Not to get into personal details, I normally don’t talk about things I say in private with people, but this is probably important in regard to Vivek Ramaswamy.  When we were talking, he asked me, “Rich, what do you want from me?”  I said to him, “I want 16 years out of you.  8 years as governor of Ohio.  And 8 years as President of the United States.  And at the end of it, you won’t yet be 60.  That sounds like a pretty good life to me.”  And he said, “Yes it does, let’s see how all this goes.”  And to all that, I will do my part to help see that it all goes well.

Rich Hoffman

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