Tag: MAGA

Why America is the Best: Understanding Gideon and George Washington

While visiting George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, I was very interested in why it is OK for us to say that America is the best country on earth and that we should preserve it very boisterously.  And why George Washington?  Well, we named our capital city after him and think of him as the ultimate Founding Father, the pacesetter who started something new in the world, and we have measured everything thereafter with him in mind.  So, what made George Washington so great?  And why do Americans feel like they must always tell the world that they are the best and greatest?  Our form of government is by far the best, and it’s an unquestioned reality.  But if you’ve ever traveled the world and dined with acquaintances from other countries, and you’re watching a news report in which someone from America comes on and says that America is the best country on earth, it can get a little weird. In that case, it can be a little uncomfortable because the people you eat at the table think the same about their country.  What makes it more accurate for us in the United States than for them, whoever they are?  That’s happened to me a lot of times.  Yet, I think Americans should say such a thing because I believe our form of government is superior to that of anywhere in the world and that we should be proud of it.  We should even brag about it like we do.  But why?  You can understand something instinctively, but to actually “know” it requires much more understanding and perspective, which is undoubtedly the case with this topic.  And now that I’ve visited Mt. Vernon with my wife, George Washington’s home, I think I understand it much better.

I think the key to understanding why America is the best country in the world is literally a “key.”  The key that George Washinton used to hang in the entry to his house that his friend and long lost adopted son Marquis de Lafayette gave to him that used to be the key to the Bastille’s main gate, once the French stormed it and destroyed it as a symbol of tyranny during the French Revolution.  George Washington kept it to show how a country can overthrow tyranny, and even though the French Revolution got well out of hand while the American Revolution slightly before it was much more civil and orderly, the reminder that the people ultimately have the power to rule over themselves was represented in the key, which Washington understood as literally the key to setting up a proper government for the people and by the people.  George Washington liked his house so much that he didn’t want to be away from it with commitments to power and was always reluctant to achieve any high office.  But as to that as well, why?  Then, of course, you would have to understand the Bible, the primary literary entertainment at the time of these revolutions, and the forming of our country.  They didn’t have television shows or music to entertain themselves with thought, but they did have the Bible.  And George Washington would have shared the Bible with just about everyone pursuing a life of thoughtful understanding.  One thing that I have always thought about Biblical studies is that they are narratively, really insightful, psychologically.  I’ve read most of the foundation religious texts of the world, and I can say that the Bible is a brilliant enterprise that served as a good guide through the foundation of a new country.  It was the first to figure itself out, as the Bible had spent the previous 1500 years being fleshed out as an idea.  And the ideas formulated in the Bible essentially laid the groundwork for the creation of America.  So George Washington, by way of dinner conversation, would have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the Bible with his dinner guests at Mt. Vernon, which would have happened all the time. 

I spent most of the previous year leading up to Trump’s election reading various books about George Washington because I felt that the world would need to understand what was about to happen, and to understand America, you have to understand George Washington.  And to understand that, you must understand George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  So that’s what my wife and I did to celebrate Trump being back in the White House; we visited Mt. Vernon to unpack why putting Trump back in as President was necessary and why he should be so boisterous about why America was the best country.   It ultimately comes down to how George Washington thought and how much the Bible influenced him, especially the Book of Judges and the character within that book of Gideon, the military hero who saved Israel with only 300 men but was the reluctant hero always trying to downplay his efforts.  I often see our form of government as a republic as a deliberate attempt to fix the problems in the Book of Judges, where God wanted people to rule themselves. Still, the failure of the regional judges drove the Hebrew people to demand a king to rule over them. The wheels fell off the apple cart, leaving the kingdom to become divided by God’s anger after the death of King Solomon.

I think Washington modeled himself after Biblical characters with his approach to leadership and, most notably, Gideon himself.  Gideon’s conquests led to 40 years of peace during the rest of his lifetime. Still, before he died, he had made a gold ephod from the spoils of war that some Israelites began to worship. Once Gideon wasn’t around anymore, idolatry started to poison the minds of the people, and one of his 70 sons, Abimelech, led an uprising that killed all the others and drove them to a fallen society.  Thinking about human nature through this story, George Washington was trying not to make the mistakes of Gideon.  Rather than become just another corrupt king with multiple wives, like Gideon, Washington stayed loyal to Martha and kept himself grounded at Mt. Vernon all his life before and after the Revolution and his two terms as President.  George fought off the hungry temptation to be romantic with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his very good friend William, and the couple for which Fairfax County is named today.  But being inspired by Bible stories, Washington wanted to avoid those pitfalls and stayed grounded throughout his life.  However, once he was out of office, like Gideon’s sons, it was hard to pull together a republic without everyone fighting all the time, which was undoubtedly the case with subsequent presidents like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.  And like the story of the Book of Judges, leadership always failed.  And the way that America set up its republic form of government to resist those temptations, for society to call out for a king and to give them unlimited power, our government was built on the Book of Judges from the beginning to correct it.  That was certainly at the core of George Washington’s belief and why he thought the key to the Bastille was so important.  It was more important for people to rule themselves and to throw off the oppressors of social order than to conform to it.  Because once a person has collected such power, as the Bible shows, they all fail.  So Washington and our American form of government set everything up to resist that temptation and to give people just enough power, knowing that the faults of humanity were always very close.  And like his temptations with Sally Fairfax, he would keep those lusts cool and always on the back burner, where they belonged.  If a leader can’t govern their emotions, how can they govern other people?  Because of these concerns, and after several hundred years, they led to President Trump, who found that balance late in life on his own terms.  We can say that America is better than all other forms of government because it was built with these concerns in mind, which had previously destroyed every society people had in it.  And we have now sustained ourselves for many centuries on a premise of restraint, which George Washinton started, based on the Bible story of Gideon, the reluctant military general whom God worked through directly to save his people, even if only for a short time.

Rich Hoffman

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

Why the Trump White House is Better: For most, they step up into the famous mansion, for the President, it was a step down

With Trump in the White House, Washington, D.C., is a much different and much better place.  But the reasons why went well beyond my personal preference politically.  The way Trump treated some of these rogue district court judges who were corrupt beyond measure into thinking that they could control the Executive Branch has been long needed.  Even with Trump serving as chairman at the Kennedy Center and complaining about how poorly constructed and managed the place is and how dysfunctional the union rules were some of the next layered attributes that I found personally very refreshing.  I have been thrilled that Trump is in our White House, but to understand how and why, I needed to visit it again.  I’ve been to the White House before, back in the 90s.  And since then, I’ve just driven around it.  But only recently did I take the time to walk around it and spend significant time there, which my wife and I did.  We spent a whole day going to the Visitor’s Center of the White House, getting into the details from a tourist standpoint, and understanding how the White House saw itself.  We walked all around the surrounding area, spent a lot of time at the Mall, and ended up at the end of the day at the McDonald’s just off Pennsylvania Avenue just west of the White House front gates.  I knew that was the McDonald’s that White House aides would go to for Trump, and I wanted to see how it looked and get a feel for even how the guard shack interacted with White House employees and the media as they came and went.  And I think I found the answer I was looking for at the Visitor’s Center with the short 15-minute film they show there, which hadn’t been updated with any of the modern presidents, but it certainly captured the crises as Washington D.C. saw it, and why people like me were happy Trump is now there.

The film had voice reflections of former presidents, such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, and their wives talking about life in the White House, and there was a common theme between them all.  They remembered their time in the White House as a stepping up into a role that they all missed once it was over.  Unlike other leadership positions in the world, the People of America granted power through elections to their Chief Executive, and up until President Trump, those people were put into elevated positions represented by the White House.  However, if you go through the history of the White House, Europeans thought that the President’s residence was too small and not filled with enough grandeur to represent the most powerful country in the world.  After all, just a few months after it had been built and commissioned, Thomas Jefferson was the first to occupy it thoroughly, and he was never entirely comfortable with its presence of power, being an anti-federalist as he was.  The British burnt the White House during the Madison administration, right after Jefferson’s time there, during the War of 1812.  The world did not want America to get its foot into the seat of power, and they were eager to destroy the growing country before it could become too big for itself.  So, the White House was never built to be too lofty and ambitious.  It was a gift from the American people to the person they voted for to run the country on their behalf.  But it was never built to give anybody any fancy ideas of being too assertive or kingly, which was always the point. 

As a self-made billionaire, Trump lives in places much better than the White House.  And we all knew it before we voted for him.  And I think we understood why we wanted that subconsciously.  It’s evident by the White House Visitor’s Center film that the kind of people we have had as President was too enamored by the power of the White House to do what we needed them to do with it genuinely.  They were too caught up in the titles and world respect that came with the office, while Trump had all that before becoming President.  Stepping back into the White House for his second term, it’s a step down for Trump.  When you don’t care about the social aspects of a job, it allows you to be much more critical and practical. What does Trump have to prove to anybody?  He’s already achieved everything, so the White House doesn’t make him anything special.  For him, it’s just an office where he performs executive functions.  He isn’t made by the place the way other presidents were.  It was obvious that the White House Visitor’s Center was unsure how to present Trump’s first term there because their selling point was to present it as luxurious and ceremonial.  And Trump’s attitude is more of a sacrifice in living than being consistent with other past presidents who felt elevated by the power of the office, and once it was gone from them, they missed it forever.  Obama had serious problems, based on his interviews in the short film, with giving power back at the end of his term, which we now know he clung to a third shadow term through Joe Biden.  And it was all very shameful because the office made him who he was.  He wasn’t a very important person without the White House or its status.  Trump, on the other hand, was the same person no matter where he was.

And that’s what I wanted to see, and it was almost funny to watch the human struggle with this strange power arrangement.  There was virtually no reference to Trump near the White House, especially at the Visitor’s Center.  Trump has been affiliated with the White House for at least 8 years, with this new first term being the 9th, so it has been almost a decade.  So everyone has had plenty of time to show the Trumps as part of the Executive Mansion on Visitor’s Center updates.  The way they sold the White House to the public was a story of how ordinary people were made more significant by the title of the Office, and once their term was over, they returned to being the very ordinary people they were before.  However, as voters, we have not been happy with this process, so we wanted to put people of exception and accomplishment in the White House.  And Trump offered himself after living a good and successful life.  So we put him in the office now with three election cycles.  His story and approach do not match the official narrative of past presidents.  But it was their lack of loftiness that we wanted to avoid.  We can’t trust politicians who are made who they are by the efforts we give them.  We want accomplished people who already have all the money in the world and the treasures of living at their disposal so that they can manage our affairs honestly and with the same lack of fear that made them successful in the first place.  Even if for Trump, that means stepping down into the White House to give back to his country.  This is in contrast to all the past presidents who were made valuable because they lived in the White House for a small part of their lives.  For them, that was their most significant accomplishment.  And once it was over, they were sad.  However, the White House was just another day at the office with Trump.  And over the years, he’s had many of those kinds of offices, which were better and more luxurious than the one at the White House.

Rich Hoffman

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

Showing Respect for the Capitol Building: The difference between censoring Al Green, and the J6 protestors

I was standing next to Speaker Johnson’s office door with Steve Scalise when they had departed from the Well due to the censoring of Al Green.  And their strategy, the low-life Democrats, was to sing in protest in solidarity for their fallen friend, the leftist radical who protested at Trump’s State of the Union speech just a few days prior.  Without a doubt, I would not have been standing in front of that same door just a few months earlier while Nancy Pelosi was in charge of being a speaker in that same position.  With Republicans in charge of the House and Senate, I liked the Capitol building a lot more.  And I was proud of Republicans for censoring Green for being disruptive and disrespectful.  I think nobody should even enter the Capitol building without a jacket and tie, so his goofy ponytail is not something I have any tolerance for.  And as I stood there, I thought about the difference between what the Democrats had done to protest Trump and what Trump supporters had done on January 6th of 2021, and I felt more resolved than ever in the differences.  In the case of Al Green, Speaker Johnson showed respect for the voters’ decisions and protected the conduct within the People’s House, where the “people’s” business was to be done.  While on the January 6th protests that Democrats tried to paint as an “insurrection” against our government where people were harmed and killed through violent actions, the government was working against the people and showing them disrespect in insisting that a process be altered that would have prevented election fraud, and remove the people’s pick for representation.  So they were not the same things at all, even though they were both a form of protest.  So when Johnson put down the gavel to declare a recess, the protestors were cleared out after the censor vote of Al Green. I was proud of him and his fellow Republicans for protecting civility so good work could be done in that magnificent building. 

I do a thing that I think is helpful on a quantum level: when President Trump gives vital and specific speeches that are life-changing, I like to backtrack his steps so that I can absorb the neutrinos that fly through that area and still carry information from the event itself through quantum entanglement.  This means that even if years have passed since the event, standing in the same spot where Trump gave a speech can still have information residue from that event, and for me, it helps me see the world the way that Trump saw it when he gave the speech.  I have done that at Mt. Rushmore with the big speech Trump gave in South Dakota during the last year of his presidency during the first term.  It was a very dark time when I visited the spot where he spoke then, and it helped me to walk in the shoes of Trump and measure the courage it took to deliver that groundbreaking, patriotic speech.  And, of course, there was this visit to the Capitol building, which I felt I had to do: stand in the Rotunda where Trump gave his magnificent Inauguration speech for 2025.  My wife and I found the place on the floor where he spoke, and we looked out into the room the way that Trump would have seen it, full of people packed tightly together.  It looked great on camera, but in person, it was a tight space with incredible historical meaning.  And it lived up to the lofty ambitions of the Capitol itself. 

Time is not as linear as we would like to think it is; time folds over and reoccurs through particle science, even over thousands of years.  The thought is that neutrino particles travel faster than the speed of light and bounce all over the universe constantly, and information is carried quantumly outside of dimensional space that may be located in specific places relative to time.  In ghost hunting, we call those hauntings where a person’s spirit or the recording of an event in time still resides on that quantum wave carrying just the shadow of the event itself.  But even in places like the Capitol building, where many things have happened over the years, most pass by uneventfully and don’t carry much weight in the scheme of things.  But these days, since Trump’s inauguration, there has been a lot happening, and much of it has been considerable and meaningful, and you can feel that overlap of quantum science if you are tuned into it a bit, and it carries with it extra meaning and information.  With that said, I enjoyed visiting the Capitol with my wife.  We watched the censor activities and looked around in the crypt where George Washington was supposed to be buried, but he abandoned the enterprise, preferring to be buried on his property instead upon his death, which is more of that particle science that I was talking about, something that the Egyptians thought an awful lot about.  And we enjoyed the grandeur of the place built to carry human efforts to maximum output.  The building was fantastic, but people often don’t meet its lofty expectations.

The spot where Trump spoke during his inauguration

We spent the day at the Capitol, getting to know it the way I thought it deserved to be understood, especially in the context of history.  I believe that America is just getting started and that all the intentions of building that building were getting underway instead of what they tell you on the tours, discussing the history of the place.  It has taken America a few hundred years to figure out what we should be doing with places like our Capitol building. Closing the doors and prosecuting J6th protestors was not one of them.  But censoring the pony-tail hippie protestor, Al Green, was.  As my wife and I grabbed a hamburger in the Capitol cafeteria, with other elected officials running around doing the same, many of the people we see on television all the time, the world was a much better place with Republicans controlling the House and Senate.  The Capitol building was built to carry America to lofty, ambitious ideas of law and order.  Of serious philosophic consideration and historical significance.  And Democrats were trying to avoid those lofty concepts with flower child protests and victimization politics, which was disrespectful to the building itself.  Speaker Johnson and the majority of the Republicans were paying respect to the process of doing business in our Capitol building, and all was good.  But in J6, the people were there to remove those disrespecting the place with physical force.  And in many ways, because of that, the Capitol was living up to its historical significance.  The Trump speech in the rotunda probably never would have happened, but because it had, the people’s business was getting done, and the tolerance for villainy, and disrespect was very low these days, which I wanted to see for myself and was confirmed.  I love our Capitol building and would encourage all who enter there to be lofty and have high expectations for themselves and the business conducted there.  You are lucky to have the chance, so live up to it, and do not cry about silly things.  And don’t go there looking like a slob with a ponytail to protest whether or not Trump had a mandate by the people to do their work.  History will never forget it, but long after many of those protestors are long gone, they and their lack of ambition will carry nothing to be remembered and their lives will be thrown away worthlessly toward ambitions not worthy of such a grand place as the U.S. Capitol building.  And for anyone who goes, wear a suit or tie while doing business there.  Show respect!

Rich Hoffman

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

The Hidden Menace Behind 16th Street: Marxist radicals behind labor unions

First, let me explain what is wrong with labor unions. They allow bad employees to hide behind good employees, and as a collective practice, they water down effectiveness. They view as work the entire enterprise of labor as being for the worker, not the work being done.  And it has been a disastrous experiment from the mind of Marxist thinkers.  I know in this new big tent MAGA movement that lots of union workers crossed over and voted for President Trump, so debate about labor unions is on the back burner these days, and Right To Work legislation in the states is less of a topic, even though its still a big deal for employers, because business enterprises don’t want to be stuck taking all the risks only to have a radical Marxist enterprise of low performing workers take control of labor management with a bunch of dumb, ineffective rules.  For Ohio to be a proper pro-business state, employers will need the assurance of a Right to Work state like Indiana has just to the west.  Otherwise, it’s not an apples-to-apples offering.  From my point of view, I don’t see anything good about labor unions.  They are the heart of the problem of school funding and have been a disaster since they were introduced in the middle of the 19th century, right along with Marxism.  The two things are tied together and have been horrible for the world.  So, with all that in mind, I wondered about the Black Lives Matters plaza painting on the ground on 16th Street in front of the White House before President Trump had it removed this past week.  I wanted to see it before it was gone forever, and what I found there was even worse than I had imagined.  The root cause of the problems was, of course, labor unions. 

During the hostile 2020 election year with all the Covid lockdowns and radical Soros backed color revolutions that were trying to burn down the church at the end of 16th Street, and vandalize Lafayette Square while the FBI, CIA, and many fourth branch of government Deep Staters plotted the destruction of the people’s pick for President, Trump, lunatics from the known Marxist group Black Lives Matters painted their logo on the street in giant letters to let the White House know that the aggressors of political destruction was on the doorstep of the White House.  All this activity was evident from inside the White House, and it was meant to intimidate Trump and his supporters into bowing down to a proposed fight that was highly aggressive.  Later, I learned that this was not just a painted road but that the letters “Black Lives Matter” were actually embedded into the blocks of the street itself, so just painting over it wouldn’t get rid of the message.  We also later learned that the taxpayers were on the hook for the vandalism that cost over 8 million dollars and was personally endorsed by the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser.  The painting was an intended message of aggression attempting to hide actual terrorism behind some guilt-driven sentiment left over from the years of slavery, which were always a Democrat issue.  Republicans freed the enslaved people and do not harbor guilt in maintaining the institution.  One of the most excellent Republicans in the history of politics was Frederick Douglass, who was very well-known during President Grant’s reconstruction period after the Civil War, a very prominent person of color and proud Republican member of history’s politics.  Democrats have tried to capture the issue over the next hundred years to attempt to erase their guilt from it, creating many of the modern tensions we see today.

Republicans have learned a lot from the experience and are pushing back, led by President Trump.  As my wife and I visited the city recently, it is being cleaned up everywhere.  Trump has set a high bar that should have always been in place, and other Republicans, such as Representative Andrew Clyde, are pushing to withhold federal transportation funds unless Bowser gets rid of the Black Lives Matter painting and renames the plaza “Liberty Plaza.”  So, a lot is going on that I wanted to see for myself, and upon arriving, a clarity that had not been explained in the news reports became very clear.  Because all through this, my thoughts were, “What do these businesses in the area think about this stupid, Marxist painting?  I wouldn’t want to look out my windows down onto the street and see such a think with crazy radicals looming from the shadows to take over the city on a moment’s notice essentially.”  And that’s when I saw that there on 16th street were many of the big unions, the Labor’s International Union, the AFL-CIO union, and the Motion Picture’s Association of America.  These are all radical Marxist groups and the reason we haven’t heard about them is because many of the people who are in the news reporting industry belong to an entertainment union of some kind, especially the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, (AFTRA) which is part of SAG, (the Screen Actors Guild), so they can’t be too critical of labor union activity.  This allows these horrendously radical progressive groups- and when we say “progressive,” we mean “communist” in their sentiments to cause trouble in the background without recourse.  Now we know why nobody talked about the kind of businesses that allowed for that painting to be painted on the street in the first place. 

The real fight, clearly on display on 16th Street looming over the President’s house, that we put our representatives into, is that massive international unions are fighting for power and are proclaiming that they are in charge.  They used the George Floyd issue to blow into the Marxist minds of the fans to hide violence and intimidation behind a race war; they were trying to get Trump out of office and to remove any influence that voters had over the city of Washington, D.C.  The unions were in charge, and they let everyone know about it.  But the key to fighting them is not confronting them directly, as we have in the past.  Labor unions consume a considerable amount of tax money to exist.  So the way to beat them, which is why President Trump has not worried about them too much and even appeals to their members, is to take away their power, which is fed by confiscated taxpayer money.  That’s ultimately what got Muriel Bowser’s attention, pulling away her federal funds for sponsoring acts of terrorism disguised as race concerns.  Democrats caused race concerns in the first place.  That painting has been like a planted flag in front of our house for years and is only now being removed.  But before it was, I had to see it for myself, so my wife and I visited it a few days before the road crews came in and ripped it out of the ground.  But those labor unions are still hiding behind the public noise, waiting for another chance to strike.  They are the fuel in the background that stirs up these terrorist acts, just as they are all over the world.  And are the root cause of most of our problems of domestic terrorism in American society.  And to deal with them, we must remove their funding so they have nothing to work with.  Because the longer they exist, they will always be causing trouble toward America’s destruction, which is their objective.  They will never be our friends; as a general rule, they should be illegal in every form they present themselves in. 

Rich Hoffman

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

DeWine’s State of the State Speech: Lakota schools plots their own demise

Oddly enough, while I was in Columbus to attend the Governor’s State of the State speech, it was Lakota schools that everyone was talking about, and they wanted to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit.  But in many ways, that wasn’t surprising, and it was confirmed again in Mike DeWine’s speech that day.  Years and years of kicking the can down the road in all these public schools were catching up to them, and the bill was due, and nobody knew what to do about it.  Governors like DeWine have done for decades what they were now doing at Lakota schools around 91 miles to the south in Butler County, Ohio, they were writing tax payer checks for a product and service that fewer and fewer people wanted, and now with Trump in the White House, the warnings I have been giving everyone about what was going to happen are coming true.  Instead of getting out in front of these funding problems, Lakota schools dug in and became more woke.  Senator Lang tried to tell them on a call later that day after the Governor’s speech, but the school system had dug in the opposite direction.  Others and I have tried to give Lakota conservative board members a chance to deal with this issue, and their response as a school board was to run them all off, and that extends beyond Darbi Boddy, the most recent that they found some way to push out of management.  And like things are where liberal types run things, everything costs too much money, and now Trump was cutting back the Department of Education and gubernatorial candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy was talking about significant reforms in education with merit pay, leaving schools like Lakota to join lawsuits with other schools having the same problem, hoping that some sixties flowerchild protest might recover for them a silly little 9 million dollar loss that has come out of their budget due to students utilizing Ed Choice vouchers that are now expanding under the Trump administration and flowing down through the states.  For perspective, Lakota schools in Butler County, Ohio, has a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and that’s still not enough money to fund education the way they want to.

And you know what makes me the angriest about all this? I didn’t get any of Fran’s cookies this year. Fran is Mike DeWine’s long-time and very dedicated wife, who typically gives them out to attendees of her husband’s speech in the rotunda.  This year, activists were there chanting for more money as they felt the pinch from a social disconnect from the standard old traditional funding model of public education.  To avoid the activists, DeWine was ushered away underground to safety, leaving the rest of us to watch their bizarre and out-of-touch rituals with curiosity. The Lakota situation was the topic of conversation because they are one of the largest districts in Ohio, and so went them, so went everyone.  And that was kind of a proper metaphor for DeWine’s State of the State speech.  A do-gooder Governor tosses money at public education and hopes that everything will work well for the kids.  But its these crazy labor unions with woke politics that have screwed up the funding model because people don’t like the product.  And school vouchers, much less restricted these days and growing more so, are giving parents the choice away from their zip code schools where they pay enormous property taxes to fund a political movement they hate essentially.  And Lakota schools were right in the middle of the spectacle leaving DeWine to give just another empty speech about the value of education, and sending books in the mail to students to help with literacy, when the real problem was significant and ominous, and far beyond at this point just passing out cookies in the Statehouse Rotunda to ease tempers.  Legislators were in the middle of the budgeting process for public education at the time of this speech, but the government unions want to cry and protest for money that just isn’t there and aren’t willing to deal with the reality of the coming changes.  And those legislators were mad at what Lakota was thinking of doing then, which they did later that evening.  So it wasn’t a good move by the Lakota School Board.  But I tried to warn everyone, and they didn’t listen.  Much more on that to come.

The main thing in DeWine’s speech was that the Governor came to the speech like an old grandpa that went out to dinner the night before to eat barbeque ribs and still had on a bib from that experience the next day when he thought he was showing up for dinner in a nice suit and tie.  DeWine was out of step and slightly behind the rest of the world for his sixth year in office, most of which had not been very good, especially during the COVID-19 years.  But watching him speak, I thought of him as a nice guy who has been constantly suckered by the same kind of losers who protest education funding, like the people who greeted him upon leaving the State of the State peech.  The old flowerchild strategy of crying like some baby bird until mother government drops a worm in its mouth has long been exhausted, and DeWine never understood it.  He’s a good man from a political generation that caused all these problems and doesn’t know what to do about it.  We have to wait another year or so before we get Vivek Ramaswamy and tackle some of these key issues because just throwing money at problems is not what voters will do in the future. 

The best thing about DeWine’s State of the State speech was the expansion of business enterprise in Ohio, specifically the Andruil factory just south of Columbus and the Intel facility to the north.  There was a lot to talk about, and for DeWine’s credit, many people have been working in the background to make Ohio a much more business-friendly state.  At least DeWine hasn’t stood in the way of those efforts; he’s been willing to tag along.  We’ll get a lot more with Vivek Ramaswamy as Governor, but since DeWine was able to part ways with Amy Acton, the stringy haired hippie who used to be the Health Director during Covid, Ohio has grown more business friendly to make up for their position of lockdown politics that so crippled just about everyone.  Over the last couple of years, DeWine has at least not shut the door to companies like Intel, even though it has largely been members of the Senate that paved the way.  That’s how government works, and it’s very fascinating.  But once the good news was talked about regarding Ohio and DeWine’s speech, the topic went back to the tired old view of the world, and the chants outside could be heard in the chamber, and the reality of places like Lakota schools was coming to fruition.  The days of easy money stolen from taxpayers to fund woke causes were over.  And many people at the State of the State speech in the Ohio Statehouse were struggling with the ramifications of decades of trying to appease the screams of the teacher union types.  But reality has a lot more in store for them than they realize.  The result will be more anger at the people running public education and politicians like Mike DeWine ending their terms dismayed while much more innovative people replace them with reforms that will change all the rules.  The Lakota School Board, in its current form, is just not prepared to deal with it.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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