Tag: Police

Thank Goodness for the Predator Poachers: The world needs more people like Alex Rosen

The December 2025 arrest of a Christ Hospital scheduler in Cincinnati, following a filmed confrontation by the citizen group Predator Poachers, has become a focal case for debating how modern communities should respond to the immense scale and evolving dynamics of child sexual exploitation online and offline. In the incident, local coverage documented that a 31‑year‑old employee, Benjamin Naylor, was charged with three counts of pandering sexually oriented material involving a minor and one count of illegal use of a minor in a nudity‑oriented performance after police intervened following a videotaped encounter outside a hospital facility; the hospital confirmed immediate termination and cooperation with law enforcement. 1 In companion reporting, Predator Poachers’ founder, Alex Rosen, described how his team tracked online activity, confronted Naylor at the workplace, elicited admissions on camera, and then contacted police; local court documents referenced the regional electronics investigations unit, underscoring the role of formal multi‑agency coordination once a citizen tip triggers official action. 23

The case illustrates the messy frontier where citizen “predator‑hunting” content intersects professional criminal investigations. On the one hand, watchdog groups can function as high‑visibility tip generators, producing leads that law enforcement may otherwise not receive as quickly; on the other hand, police departments have repeatedly warned that unsanctioned stings can create safety risks, contaminate evidentiary chains, and imperil prosecutions. This tension was evident in the 2025 Branson, Missouri episode, where Rosen himself was arrested during a restaurant confrontation and later received probation for a disturbance; police emphasized the primacy of trained investigators, lawful procedures, and prosecutable evidence, even while acknowledging that some private groups are dedicated to protecting victims. 45 There is nothing less safe than in letting predators get away with the crimes even if the professionals paid to do the job can’t get to the cases in time to save kids.  If not for people like Rosen, how many kids would have been saved because he and his organization do the work that the professionals don’t have time for?  The Cincinnati arrest thus points to a practical equilibrium: citizen content may catalyze attention and yield tips, but sustainable enforcement rests on institutional capacity, formal task forces, and prosecutorial standards that will withstand judicial scrutiny. 3  And that may not be the desired outcome, because based on my own grand jury experience on these matters, we don’t have time to wait for professional institutions to expand their capacity to the enormity of the problem.  We need more Rosens in the world, for sure.

To understand the enforcement backbone, it helps to map the architecture that operates primarily out of public view. The Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program—funded and coordinated by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention—supports 61 task forces and more than 5,000 federal, state, local, and Tribal agencies nationwide. In fiscal year 2024 alone, ICAC task forces helped conduct approximately 203,467 investigations, led to more than 12,600 arrests, and trained roughly 46,000 criminal justice professionals. 6 These numbers, staggering as they are, capture the organizational scale needed to process the torrent of digital evidence and to convert leads into lawful warrants, forensic examinations, and prosecutable cases. They also suggest why any model that relies only on citizen stings, rather than specialized units, will be outmatched by the complexity of technology‑facilitated offending.

Parallel infrastructure operates on the reporting side. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline received 20.5 million reports in 2024—adjusted to about 29.2 million distinct incident submissions once bundled events were de‑duplicated—and these figures remain deeply concerning given recent statutory expansions of mandatory reporting to cover online enticement and child sex trafficking. 7 Such volume escalations reflect how offenders adapt to encrypted platforms, decentralized networks, and rapidly advancing generative tools; they are precisely the kind of workload for which systematized triage, investigative handoffs, and specialized forensics are essential. Enforcement outputs, such as the Department of Justice’s Operation Restore Justice—an FBI‑led nationwide crackdown conducted over five days in May 2025 that resulted in 205 arrests and 115 rescues—show what concentrated, interagency campaigns can achieve when intelligence, victim services, and prosecutorial resources are aligned. 89

Sentencing data illuminate the gravity of production‑ and distribution‑related offenses and the judicial response. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s FY 2024 Quick Facts, sexual‑abuse offenses have increased by 62.5% since FY 2020, with an average sentence of 221 months; production of child pornography cases averaged 273 months, and those involving mandatory minimum penalties averaged 305 months of imprisonment. 10 Beyond the raw years, these figures communicate policy priorities: that federal courts treat the creation and dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as among the most severe crimes short of direct contact offenses. The scale, technology, and interstate elements common to such cases make them well-suited to federal prosecution, reinforcing why lasting outcomes depend on the rigor of official investigative processes rather than the drama of public confrontations.  But the problem remains: there are not enough jails to hold all these offenders, and their cost to society is enormous, given the prison terms provided.  And we aren’t coming close to catching them all, not by a long shot.  There aren’t enough law enforcement officers available to perform the task to match the enormity of the problem.

Still, enforcement statistics do not occur in a vacuum. The geography of victimization and offending has long been associated with socioeconomic conditions, a link that modern data reiterate and refine. Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey (2008–2012) shows that individuals in poor households experienced more than double the rate of nonfatal violent victimization compared to those in high‑income households; firearm‑involved violence was also higher among the poor. 11 A foundational meta‑analysis by Hsieh and Pugh pooled 34 aggregate studies and found that 97% of the zero‑order correlations between violent crime and either poverty or income conditions were positive, with homicide and assault more closely associated than rape or robbery. At the same time, the precise effect sizes vary by covariates, the overall pattern confirms the persistence of the relationship. 12 Complementing that, Pratt and Cullen’s macro‑level meta‑analysis concluded that indicators of concentrated disadvantage (poverty, family disruption, heterogeneity) are among the strongest and most stable predictors of area‑level crime. At the same time, get‑tough variables have comparatively weak and inconsistent effects once structural conditions are considered. 13

The time‑series evidence adds nuance. A review of 17 studies by Rufrancos and colleagues indicates that property crime tends to increase with rising income variation, and specific violent crimes such as homicide and robbery display sensitivity to social standards over time; aggregated violent‑crime measures show inconsistencies likely driven by reporting differences, but the signal remains strongest for offense types with clearer opportunity structures. 14 Policy‑oriented synthesis by Brookings similarly argues that public safety and economic opportunity are intertwined across urban, suburban, and rural America, recommending investment in youth, family supports, and neighborhood revitalization alongside law enforcement. 15 Critics have cautioned against deterministic readings of poverty‑crime relationships by pointing to heterogeneity across demographic groups and cultures, yet the caution itself supports a more granular philosophy: crime does not rise because a single variable shifts but because a constellation of social and situational conditions permits opportunities and reduces guardianship. 16

Situational criminology offers a complementary lens. Routine Activity Theory (RAT), first articulated by Cohen and Felson, proposes that crime occurs when three elements converge in time and space: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardianship. In their seminal 1979 analysis, the authors linked postwar social change to increased dispersion of daily activities away from the home, thereby increasing opportunities (targets) while reducing guardianship, even as many socioeconomic indicators improved—a sociological paradox. 17 Contemporary crime‑science research emphasizes spatio‑temporal rhythms—hours of day, seasons, school days versus non‑school days—as crucial dimensions for understanding and preventing offenses, urging analysts to disaggregate crime by time and place to identify high‑risk windows where motivated offenders and unguarded targets are most likely to coincide. 18 Recent empirical work indicates that unstructured spare time, particularly out of home, is a robust predictor of adolescent offending—often rivaling or exceeding traditional predictors—while structured activities and effective place‑management reduce opportunities. 1920  I would add that substantial income paired with too much leisure time is a significant contributor to the problem and is why we find so many sexual perversion cases common among high-income earners with shorter worker hours per week. 

Against this secular framework, many communities also appeal to moral, religious, and cultural narratives to motivate vigilance and civic responsibility. The biblical tradition contains several motifs relevant to civic idleness and social decay without resorting to graphic description. Ezekiel’s diagnosis of Sodom faults the city for pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, coupled with neglect of the poor—an image of complacent affluence that tracks closely with modern concerns about idle time, conspicuous consumption, and weakened neighborly care. 23 The wisdom literature warns of the slow ruin that flows from idleness: Proverbs exhorts the sluggard to observe the ant who prepares in season, while Ecclesiastes observes that negligence leads to a sagging roof and leaking house; in the New Testament, Paul admonishes early Christian communities not to enable chronic idleness, insisting that others should not subsidize those unwilling to work. 242526

Situating the Cincinnati case within this dual framework—professional enforcement and civic guardianship—points toward practical synthesis. First, jurisdictions should continue strengthening the official channels for reporting and triage, including the CyberTipline and ICAC Task Forces, since the sheer torrent of suspected exploitation demands coordinated investigative capacity and rigorous evidentiary standards. 67 The episodic spectacle of citizen stings may momentarily galvanize public outrage, but without chain‑of‑custody integrity, digital forensics, and lawful interviews, outcomes may falter in court; even advocates of citizen engagement concede that lawful interviews and case construction are non‑negotiable. 4 Second, prosecutors and judges should continue deploying sentence lengths proportionate to the harm involved in production and distribution, endorsing the pattern seen in federal data as a deterrent and as an expression of seriousness aligned with victim rights. 10 Third, city governments and school systems can translate situational theory into design and schedule: expand structured evening and weekend programming for adolescents, target guardianship to high‑risk time blocks, and apply place‑management strategies to venues where exposure and anonymity co‑exist. 18 Fourth, civic leaders should recognize the empirical linkage between disadvantage and victimization without succumbing to fatalism or simplistic causation; invest in youth, family supports, and neighborhood revitalization as partners to enforcement, since both reduced opportunity and strengthened social ties weaken the conditions that exploitation preys upon. 1513

None of this precludes a role for citizen vigilance, but that role must be channeled wisely. The Cincinnati episode demonstrates how citizen video can surface a lead and prompt police response; yet it equally explains why the decisive act—the arrest, charges, and eventual adjudication—belongs to sworn officers and courts. 13 As police advisories note, confrontations can escalate unpredictably, bystanders may be endangered, and suspects may be alerted prematurely; even when the target is arrested, procedural missteps can weaken a case. 4 A safer ethic encourages watchers to collect publicly accessible information, preserve it carefully, and deliver it to authorities, then allow specialized units to conduct interviews, obtain warrants, and secure devices for forensic examination. Such collaboration honors both the community’s desire to protect children and the criminal justice system’s duty to prosecute with integrity.  But even with those legal statements to consider in prosecutions of cases, there is nothing more dangerous than inaction.

The broader crime environment provides context for urgency and hope. Multi‑city analyses indicate violent crime declined across many U.S. cities through mid‑2025, with homicides down about 17% compared to the first half of 2024 in the Council on Criminal Justice sample, and key property offenses also falling; trends are not uniform, and some places remain above 2019 baselines, but the direction suggests that sustained policing and community strategies can move the needle. 2122 The implication for exploitation cases is twofold: first, neither victory nor defeat is foregone, and second, the most effective strategies weave together many threads—rapid interagency action, prevention programs, civic vigilance, and economic opportunity. 15

If one reads Ezekiel’s admonition against prosperous ease alongside Routine Activity Theory’s emphasis on guardianship, a striking consonance emerges. The ancient critique is not a rejection of prosperity or leisure per se, but of complacency that neglects the vulnerable and allows the roof to sag. 2325 The modern theory similarly warns that unstructured spare time and poorly managed spaces constitute opportunity structures that invite harm. 1719 In concrete terms, this means that while we rightly prioritize arresting and sentencing those who produce, trade, or consume CSAM, we also need to rebuild the social and temporal architecture of guardianship: parents, mentors, teachers, coaches, community workers, and place‑managers who ensure that the hours and places where children move are watched, equipped, and purpose‑filled. The Cincinnati case, unsettling as it is, can therefore be read as a summons to strengthen both the formal machinery of justice and the informal networks of neighborly care.

Turning citizen outrage into lasting protection requires reframing the debate. The drama of a cell‑phone confrontation is not the whole of justice, just the start; the hard work of forensic analysis, interagency coordination, and courtroom proof is. 8 The moral energy that motivates citizens is not wasted; it is most helpful when directed through lawful channels that enable the ICAC network and prosecutors to do what they are designed to do at scale. 6 The correlations between disadvantage and victimization are not destiny; they are instructions to policymakers to counteract concentrated risk through economic opportunity and structured guardianship, especially at specific times and places where routine activities and reduced supervision coincide. 1318 And the theological warnings against idleness are not antiquated; they are invitations to cultivate diligence, hospitality, and care for people experiencing poverty, which, in civic practice, look like programming, mentorship, and watchfulness over those who are most exposed. 2426 The lessons reach beyond one hospital’s perimeter and one city’s court docket. They teach that when a community aligns citizen vigilance with professionalized enforcement, when it pairs strategy against opportunity structures with investment in families and neighborhoods, and when it roots its energy in a moral vision that rejects complacency, exploitation becomes harder to commit and easier to prosecute. The path forward is not glamorous, but it is clear: keep the tips flowing to the CyberTipline and local task forces; sustain interagency actions like Operation Restore Justice; maintain sentencing severity for production and distribution; expand structured leisure and guardianship; and attend to the economic and cultural conditions that alter daily routines.  Socialism makes more poor people for instance.  Capitalism builds more wealth, which gives society as a whole more upward mobility and expectations of good conduct. 78101915 If Cincinnati’s unsettling episode is to yield anything more than outrage, it should be this disciplined integration—one that honors both the call to protect children and the rule of law that ultimately secures them.  But ultimately, if it hadn’t been for the Predator Poachers extra work, this child predator case in Cincinnati would have gone unpunished. 13

Footnotes:

1. Cincinnati Enquirer: Predator Poachers says sting led to arrest of Christ Hospital worker (Dec. 9, 2025). https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/crime/2025/12/09/predator-poachers-says-sting-led-to-arrest-of-christ-hospital-worker/87686900007/

2. WCPO: Court docs—Cincinnati man charged after child sexual abuse material allegedly found on phone (Dec. 9, 2025). https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinnati/court-docs-cincinnati-man-charged-after-child-sexual-abuse-material-allegedly-found-on-phone

3. WCPO: National predator-catching group says it helped lead police to Cincinnati man arrested on child porn charges (Dec. 10–11, 2025). https://www.wcpo.com/news/crime/national-predator-catching-group-says-it-helped-lead-police-to-cincinnati-man-arrested-on-child-porn-charges

4. Police1 / Merced Sun-Star: Online vigilante group leader arrested; Branson PD statement on risks (Mar. 30, 2025). https://www.police1.com/arrests-sentencing/articles/online-vigilante-group-leader-arrested-trying-to-take-down-alleged-pedophile-mo-officers-say-XcWQJz8z0qXGTS3f/

5. OzarksFirst: ‘Predator Poachers’ leader sentenced for Branson disturbance (Aug. 26, 2025). https://www.ozarksfirst.com/news/predator-poachers-branson-court/

6. OJJDP ICAC Task Force Program (FY 2024 overview, training, and investigations). https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/programs/internet-crimes-against-children-task-force-program

7. NCMEC CyberTipline Data (2024 report). https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertiplinedata

8. DOJ Press Release: Operation Restore Justice (May 7, 2025). https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-results-operation-restore-justice-205-child-sex-abuse-offenders

9. USA TODAY: Over 200 alleged child sex offenders arrested nationwide after 5-day FBI crackdown (May 7–8, 2025). https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/07/child-sex-offenders-arrests-fbi/83504362007/

10. U.S. Sentencing Commission: FY24 Quick Facts—Sexual Abuse Offenses. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/quick-facts/Sexual_Abuse_FY24.pdf

11. BJS Special Report: Household Poverty and Nonfatal Violent Victimization, 2008–2012 (Nov. 2014). https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf

12. Hsieh & Pugh (1993): Poverty, income inequality, and violent crime—meta-analysis (Criminal Justice Review). https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1994-33910-001

13. Pratt & Cullen (2005): Assessing macro-level predictors and theories of crime—meta-analysis (Crime and Justice). https://www.jstor.org/stable/3488363

14. Rufrancos et al. (2013): Income Inequality and Crime—time-series review. https://rufrancos.org/1.pdf

15. Brookings Metro (Mar. 11, 2025): The path to public safety requires economic opportunity. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-path-to-public-safety-requires-economic-opportunity/

16. City Journal (Feb. 21, 2025): A critique of poverty-crime explanations. https://www.city-journal.org/article/brookings-institution-crime-report-poverty-race-violence

17. Cohen & Felson (1979): Social Change and Crime Rate Trends (American Sociological Review). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2094589

18. Crime Science editorial (2015): Crime patterns in time and space—Newton & Felson. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-015-0025-6

19. Buil-Gil (2025): The Structure of Unstructured Time and Crime (British Journal of Criminology). https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaf035/8128661

20. CrimRxiv preprint (2025): Unstructured Spare Time as an International Predictor of Adolescent Crime. https://www.crimrxiv.com/pub/13s4t4td

21. Council on Criminal Justice: Crime Trends in U.S. Cities—Mid-Year 2025 update. https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-mid-year-2025-update/

22. Stateline (July 24, 2025): Violent crime continues to drop across U.S. cities (summary of CCJ). https://stateline.org/2025/07/24/violent-crime-continues-to-drop-across-us-cities-report-shows/

23. Ezekiel 16:49 (OpenBible topical). https://www.openbible.info/topics/idleness

24. Proverbs 6:6–11 (ESV—BibleGateway). https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%206:6-11&version=ESV

25. Ecclesiastes 10:18 (BibleHub). https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/10-18.htm 26. 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (ESV—BibleGateway). https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Thessalonians%203:10&version

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Federalizing the Police is a Great Thing: We can trust Trump to give power back

With all the talk about federalizing the police in cities with excessive violent crime, an underlying flaw in thinking is revealed.  Chicago is a creation of liberal politics that is out of control.  Over Labor Day weekend 2025, 58 people were shot across 37 separate incidents with eight fatalities.  And that has become all too normal in that progressive city, where crime has been incentivized and police are hard to find.  Washington, D.C., was just as bad before Trump federalized the police force there and put National Guard troops on the streets to supplement the police, and crime has been driven down to nearly zero.  In the District of Columbia, Trump can do that, and even the very Democrat mayor Muriel Bowser has enjoyed the results.  She has not been a Trump supporter and has instead worked against him in the past.  But even she can see the noticeable results.  So we’re dealing with a shell game that is consistent among many other topics, but it has been exposed here because Trump was able to control the situation in the District of Columbia, as opposed to the theory of putting ground troops into other cities in the nation.  That some evil people are trying to destroy the United States by using our own laws and terminology against us, which is being exposed in Chicago by the resistance to do in that violent city what Trump has done in Washington, D.C.  Democrats don’t want to solve the problem of crime in places like Chicago.  They want the crime, and that is what emerges from the resistance that J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has been caught up in as he violently opposes Trump sending the National Guard to reform the streets of Chicago as well.  With crime levels at the rate that they are, a national emergency is more than justified, which gives Trump a clear path to send in the troops. 

Should we be cheering on such an effort?  After all, I’m very suspicious of police powers.  Based on the Constitution, should we even have a standing army? I would be inclined to say no.  However, here is a situation where we already have policing forces on the payroll, and they aren’t doing much else.  And we have police unions that restrict the recruiting and retention of current police forces, which are obviously not enough to deal with the crime incentives in big cities.  And you have criminal elements who use the potential of violence to gain control over other people.  And when people are afraid, traditionally, they vote for big government Democrats to save them.  That’s the theory anyway, that’s what political people believe.  So there are hostile, anti-American forces working behind an assumption of constitutional protections who want to use the rules to bring down American society.  And where they can, they use crime as a destabilizing force to undo everything legally, even to the point where lawyers seek to protect the criminals and the criminally minded, rather than a peace-loving society that is thriving.  In the case of Trump sending troops into Chicago, the governor is furious and is utilizing legal retaliation to stop it.  For his politics, and those of the Democrat party, they need 58 people shot over Labor Day weekend.  They want eight people to die every weekend.  To stay in power within political orders, they need trouble so that people vote for them to save them from that trouble.  And once you understand that, you will see that open borders are meant to overwhelm voting opportunities, that drug policy is there to deliberately poison Americans to the point of killing them.  And violent crime is a direct attack against a society that values private property over state-controlled assets.  If people have to turn to the government to protect their property, a communist dream is then realized, which is the point.

I would go several steps further and take away the gun-free zone status of cities like Chicago and let good guys with guns shoot bad guys with guns, and things would straighten up really fast.  But short of that, something has to be done, and when you have National Guard troops and other military units always ready to engage violence somewhere in the world, then why not send them in to these dangerous cities to clean up crime?  Is federal independence more valuable than those 58 lives?  That is the question that has been imposed on us.  Should we have independence when the cost of that independence is lives that fall victim to violent crime?  That is the question that we are tasked with behind the criminal conspirators who want the crime to shatter our society.  J.B. Pritzker wants to run for president and position himself as everyone’s dad, a parental government figure.  So he needs the crime so that he can have a reason to run on a political platform of saving people.  But if they are already saved and self-reliant, then why would anybody vote for Democrats?  That is their problem, and Trump exposes it by taking away the crises and fixing them, leaving Democrats exposed in ways they can’t handle.  But should we federalize our police forces by eroding states’ rights?  Once they take such power, then why would someone like Trump ever give it back? 

Same interview on YouTube

If the same question were posed during Obama’s administration or Biden’s, I would not trust federal forces to do anything in any community.  It would be a power grab that would be unacceptable.  But in Trump’s case, he has earned a level of trust that only hard knocks could provide, and it is different.  I think it’s the only way to solve the crime problem, and I want to see federal troops in every crime-ridden city, putting an end to all crime problems.  I also want to see the military ending the drug trade and specifically the power drug cartels have in all American cities.  They should all be eradicated, and we should invade other countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Peru and clean up all crime organizations involved in the drug trade and in human trafficking.  And once the world is cleaned up, we can talk about separating federal powers from states’ rights issues.  I am confident that Trump will respect constitutional limits and return power to the states and cities once the issue is resolved.  But, if it were up to Democrats, federal police forces would only be strengthened because their ultimate aim is to give the government the power over private property.  So when J.B. Pritzker complains about Trump overstepping his authority, it’s actually the plan that Democrats hope to have by supporting crime, to push society into just this kind of concession.  Only under Democrat rule does that kind of authority become tyranny.  But under Trump, it’s freedom.  Freedom from crime.  Freedom to own and maintain private property.  Freedom to not be killed while walking down a city street.  The crime is there to tempt society into giving big government control over to private ownership and to have people applauding as it is ushered in.  But what’s different with Trump is that he can resist the temptation to make such policies permanent once the problem is solved, and that is what Democrats really fear.  Trump will address the issue and restore that power once the task is completed.  Which Democrats can’t afford to see happen.  Yes, Democrats are willing to see people die to make their point.  And if those people don’t die of violent crime, then why would anybody vote for any Democrats, ever?  That’s what we are dealing with.  

Rich Hoffman

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

The Child Pornography of 73-Year Old Howard Saal: You can’t trust professionals, anywhere

The study of institutional failure is fundamental to a proper society, and it’s vital that everyone understands the inherent failures, especially in the case of Howard Saal, the 73-year-old former geneticist and dysmorphologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.  He was recently indicted and arrested on federal charges for possessing and transporting child sexual abuse material as investigators found 153,000 images and 470 videos on his electronic devices, with some of the victims being as young as newborns.  The Children’s Hospital doctor admitted that he photographed children during exams as “glamour shots.”  Saal surrendered his medical license in July of 2025 and is currently out on bond, facing up to 20 years in prison.  The hospital itself has tried to distance itself from the doctor, but this has rattled people’s trust in the process because they usually think of doctors as being wiser and above such matters.  So understanding how and why people would do something like this is essential, especially when we are dealing with sexual perversion that migrates into children.  We see this kind of thing way too often to ignore, and this isn’t some loser hiding in his mom’s basement.  But was a very mature person of elderly years working in a very responsible position at a well-respected hospital.  People need to trust these kinds of authority figures, and this case is proof that nobody can really be trusted.  The best solution to this kind of situation is always to be a little cautious when dealing with everyone.  And don’t give out trust like candy.  We often trust professionals and experts because we are too lazy to do the work ourselves, and the unsettling element is that there are many Howard Saals out there looking to take advantage of people, especially children. 

I learned more about child pornography and sex abuse than I’ll ever care to know recently as I was a foreman for a grand jury in Butler County, Ohio.  And let me tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed that job.  I enjoyed indicting bad guys and convincing the other jury members to move toward aggressive resolutions.  It was a very satisfying job, and I could have done it every day of my life, finding significant meaning in the experience.  But before that experience, child pornography was something I had heard about, but didn’t think much of it.  It seemed to me like something impossible to do, where grown adults were involved in sexual activity with children because of the apparent size difference.  But for several cases, as a grand jury, we had to watch evidence of child pornography by people prosecutors were trying to indict.  Regarding Butler County, I would like to mention that some truly dedicated prosecutors had their hearts in the right place for the job.  It would be challenging to sift through thousands of these images and still maintain sanity.  I saw just a fraction of what they did to prepare these cases, so as I watched my fellow jury members crying over what they saw, imagine how the prosecutors felt having to look at that stuff all day long, preparing for these indictments.  Most of the people on my jury, about half of them, were moms, and seeing kids sexually abused on video was too much for them, and they broke down quickly at the grim reality of the abuse they had to watch.  There’s not much that rattles me about anything.  Watching those videos was tough.  But seeing how much child pornography is out there, it is even worse.  These were not isolated cases by a few degenerates.  These were common and were getting worse as our society loosened its sexual predilections. 

One way this harsh reality is concealed in our society is that nobody feels they can express an opinion about it unless they are a professional.  That is the first problem, where we surrender logic to authority figures like Howard Saal, and they find they can abuse that power for their own distorted thinking, keeping it concealed from society at large.  However, I have many opinions on various subjects.  And I know enough about everything to be a professional in hundreds of different professions.  And I’m happy to argue with any psychologist on the deterioration of the human mind that descends into child pornography any time anybody wants to.  Chances are, I know more about psychology than people working in the industry.  Sexual perversion is a dangerous path to take.  As teenagers emerging from puberty, it’s pretty simple.  Find a member of the opposite sex that you want to procreate with.  Get married.  Have children.  When nature selects you for termination, take it like an adult and die quietly as the world lives on.  When you step away from that path and make sex a recreational activity that increases in sign stimuli as adults move into their 20s and 30s, things get complicated.  To keep the things that provoke arousal, constantly recreating that initial stimulation, more and more perverse acts have to be accepted by the mind.  And by the time people get into their 50s, 60s, and 70s, natural sex has long left the mind, and a very diabolical thought process has to take place to carry sexual thought into an arousal state that satisfies the urge.  The danger lies in people who don’t develop hobbies as they age, such as model trains or flying airplanes, during their leisure time.  If they are still pursuing sexual satisfaction, they are likely going to engage in behavior that is illegal or diabolical.   

Socially, we recognize the danger of a 50-year-old having sex with a 20-year-old.  Or even an 18-year-old.  Our 18-year-old daughter couldn’t or shouldn’t ever bring home a boyfriend who is 60 years old.  We don’t like to see such things, even if they may be legal, because they are destructive to our minds and can’t bring anything good.  So, to further step outside the boundaries, sex with children of any age is the ultimate power trip for an adult who wants domination over people in a weak intellectual condition.  Human beings often struggle with power over others, and the role of an adult over a helpless child can be particularly perilous.  And we should never assume that because someone is a professional, they have learned to deal with these emotional temptations.  And based on my experience with that grand jury, this appears to be a common occurrence.  It’s not just a random occasion here and there.  The more sexual our society has become, the worse sex with children has emerged as common, and not unique.  It appears that adults often seek to exert power over others, which is why they tend to target the most vulnerable.  So while people are shocked to learn that a respected doctor at Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati has a serious addiction to child pornography, and that they took their own children to him under an understanding of trust, and that trust has now been shattered, this isn’t the only guy doing this.  It’s a common occurrence in our schools, among medical professionals, and in every professional class.  And trusting any of those professional types was a dumb idea.  Leaving us to figure out the future without them having nearly the kind of power they have today.  Trust is something that everyone needs to earn.  We should not give it away so cheaply because we are too lazy to protect the innocent from the diabolical hiding behind professional titles like wolves in sheep’s clothing.  Because the minds of many of these people are not functioning correctly.  And this case with Howard Saal is just a small glimpse into that ominous, dark world of child sexual predators. 

Rich Hoffman

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Sheriff Jones is Right about Security at Liberty Center: The Mall needs to hire big, tough guys to bust scum bags and criminal losers

Before we get too far along on this one, just remember the management of the Liberty Center complex in Butler County, Ohio—you had to be told to reopen the playground after COVID.  You didn’t do it alone; you had to be talked to.  There were a lot of moms who wanted to take their kids out to the mall, and there were lots of moms who wanted to talk to other moms and enjoy the benefits of the excellent food court there.  But for almost a year too long, after the rest of the world came back on after all the dumb Covid lockdowns, Liberty Center still had the lights out at the playground and marked it off as closed because of fear of the local health agencies getting angry over it.  So, the management of the Liberty Center Mall complex is not the brightest in the world; they are following the same destructive woke policies as everyone else.  What makes Liberty Center great is its location, and the people who have fled all the blue-run areas in Cincinnati settled in the region around Liberty Center because they don’t want to be impacted by a bloated, intrusive government.  I love Liberty Center; we always go there as a family.  I think it’s a wonderful thing to have in our community.  But it could be vastly improved if management was better.  Just think of how much lost money occurred because they were too slow to open the playground.  I didn’t say anything about it at the time or my role in it because I didn’t want to embarrass them.  However, regarding this recent Sheriff Jones story, there is some history of woke management practices from corporate firms getting their marching orders outside of our community, and that is a problem we need to discuss. 

You might have heard, and I agree with him absolutely on this one, Sheriff Jones is charging Liberty Center for the reward money that ended up capturing a couple of shoplifters who were caught by some excellent police work done at Dick’s Sporting Goods.  Based on the evidence presented, a couple of women look to have taken several thousands of dollars in theft.  And this is a national trend everywhere these days, especially in communities particularly impacted by the rhetoric of Marxism that believes private property should be abolished, and one of their methods of social destruction is to find suckers who will then turn to the streets and rob property owners of their goods and services.  Sheriff Jones has to send a message that Butler County is not open for crime because it isn’t.  I have noticed that there are a lot of gang bangers and criminal thugs who have been flocking from regions around to the glory and sentiment of Butler and Warren Counties due to this same Marxist trend.  These criminal-minded types believe that if affluent people have something, then they have a right to take it.  So, if we don’t crack down on even the most minor infraction, word will get out that Butler County is an excellent place to go and commit crime.  And we can’t have that.  So these women had to be arrested for being caught doing what they did at Dick’s Sporting Goods.  Sheriff Jones needed to make an example of them.  And he knows it because I’ve told him.  It’s not because we don’t have enough police to cover the job.  We do, and then some.  But if he needs help, I have my hand way up.  There was a gun store near my home that was recently hit with a break-in, and I would like to see that kind of behavior discouraged intensely.  Civilian oversight is the ultimate backstop on these kinds of things.  So it’s not just this recent theft at Liberty Center; there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that indicates a larger crime spree brewing by the actions of Democrat policies from everywhere.  And we have to meet it with aggression; otherwise, it will just get worse.

Sheriff Jones is sending the bill for his police work to Liberty Center to pay, and I think that is a good idea, given the situation.  I would advise the Liberty Center management to drop all the woke garbage and get on to the Make America Great Again plan.  That’s where the rest of the world is heading after this next election, and it will be very costly to cling to any form of wokeness very shortly.  I would get rid of the skinny pants mall cops who are allowing too much riff-raff to form there.  The Mall is private property, so they can tell people to leave.  Failure to do that will result in the same fate as Tri-County Mall to the south and Forest Fair Mall to the west along I-275.  People stopped going to those malls because of the thugs and crime that occurred.  Mall management was slow and reluctant to draw the line because they didn’t want to end up in court over profiling issues, which is not something that will hold up to legal scrutiny.  If the security at Liberty Center intends to break up a group of three or more dangerous-looking teenage kids from just looking stupid, they can.  And they should.  If Liberty Center security does not protect the moms who like to go to the mall with their children, then what happened to other malls in the country will occur to Liberty Center, too. 

I would suggest hiring the kind of security guards at the GOP Lincoln Day Dinner a year or so ago when Ron DeSantis came to speak.  To get into the event, they had huge, muscle-bound tough guys between 6’2” to 6’5”.  They were huge and menacing, which I thought was too much for that kind of event.  But they were trying to make a point for a person running for president.  Anthony Munoz from the Cincinnati Bengals was right behind me, and he looked like a baby being patted down by these guys to go through security.  They were too much for that event, but I would hire them to do the same security at Liberty Center.  They may cost more for wages, but they will more than make up their worth in added lease space and dollars generated.  If people don’t feel safe, they won’t go to the mall, and moms set the family schedule.  To avoid criminal scum bags and those looking like they want to be those types, moms will stay home with their kids and order from Amazon.  So mall security must protect those who go on a limb to invest in a brick-and-mortar store.  That is their first and most important function, not in being fair to everyone and not profiling losers and bums but creating an atmosphere that makes moms feel safe.  I would hire serious, tough guys who project confidence and will back it up with action.  And if Liberty Center Mall security punts to the local police departments, then they should pay for the cost of good police work.  I would encourage Sheriff Jones to get rich by doing so because it is worth the money to crack down on crime.  Otherwise, and this is the Marxist political plan by encouraging all these dumb people to commit crimes in the first place, there won’t be any money left to steal.  Petty crimes and significant crimes need to be prosecuted aggressively.  Otherwise, society will fall apart quickly, especially at Liberty Center in Butler County, Ohio.  It’s OK to be mean to scum bags and criminals.  And I’d suggest that Liberty Center listen to Sheriff Jones and do their jobs as required.

Rich Hoffman

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The Police of Butler County, Ohio: One of the most important jobs in the world

Many excellent experiences came from my grand jury tenure during the summer of 2024.  As the foreman, I had the additional benefit of swearing in all the witnesses, and because of that, I was able to get to know a lot of the police officers of Butler County, Ohio, and pick up on a few trends that are not so obvious unless you get a chance to talk to a lot of them at the same time.  I’ve known a lot of cops in the past, but it’s a different perspective when they are in their professional capacity and providing evidence and testimony under oath.  And there’s that radical concept again, an “oath” where a person’s integrity is weighed against the judgment of eternity and God’s wrath.  Without that, what worth is a swearing-in?  After doing it hundreds of times now, it made it pretty clear to me that the true value of our culture resides in the ability to derive honesty out of a temptation to provide fiction.  Yet, it was good to see police officers from all different backgrounds and working shifts show who they really are, and in the case of Butler County, I felt a lot of pride seeing that admirable traits among them were not unusual.  My feelings about police don’t mean that we can spend infinite amounts of money on their jobs through police levies and other increased taxes.  If society throws its values into bed with the teaching profession, I’ll have to take a pass because they are different.  Police work is dangerous and complicated.  It takes a special kind of person to do it.  Many would say that is the same argument for public school teachers, but I wouldn’t.  I value police in a much different way than teachers.  There are alternatives to public schools that can provide a child with a much better education method.  But with police, if you don’t have them, and good police at that, then society quickly drops into the gutter as the riff-raff becomes emboldened and strives to consume society with crime.

One undeniable thing is that most of the police officers I met in Butler County, Ohio, were under thirty and had a lot of tattoos, especially on their arms.  That was surprising, as it’s an obvious war code among cops, even with women.  All of them spoke very well while providing testimony.  People who want to be cops are wired differently; we should be thankful they are.  Whatever their private behavior has been when they let their hair down and converse among friends, their professional demeanor is more than respectable, and it gives hope that with such people maintaining that thin blue line, there is hope for social reform that is productive, normally when we experience police officers, it’s under some sort of tragedy.  It’s probably under the circumstances of one of the worst things to ever happen to us, even if it’s a minor traffic infraction.  But from the perspective of a grand jury, where the top sentiments of law and order are presented to be reviewed by civilian oversight, the value of a reasonable police force is unmistakably apparent.  You can appreciate that the world is much better because we have law enforcement as a job.  Without law enforcement, who is there to ensure a community’s laws are followed?  From the legislature that writes the law under civilian elections and representation to the prosecutor’s office, which has to take legal infractions and prosecute them in court.  Without the police there to do the work and separate the lawbreakers from the multitudes trying to function freely under the rule of law, chaos is quickly the outcome. 

I felt sorry for many police officers I heard that presented testimony and evidence.  The legal system has become a very fussy occupation due to an abundance of lawyers and political pressures that have migrated into the Bar Association, which is tied to many hostile political forces.  Police officers put themselves at risk when engaging with a public on the fringes of sanity and social order.  And under those conditions, they (the police) have to tiptoe around the individual rights of every citizen when it would be much easier to bust people because you know they are up to no good.  It’s a slippery slope in how evidence and cases go to court, and if a police officer slips up while collecting and witnessing proof, the case will be tossed out by a prosecutor’s office for lack of evidence.  Most prosecutors are people who get jaded about what can survive a jury trial, and crafty con artists’ defense attorneys will punch holes into any evidence gathered, even if it’s obvious.  I was able to deal with some cases where the police were put in danger of functioning as cops, only to have the prosecutors dispute how the evidence collected was submitted for further processing.  Maybe there was a glitch in the body cam footage. Perhaps the police officer didn’t think to pull the street cameras that verified a timestamp on criminal activity.  You quickly get a sense that there is a lot of crime out there, but the only stuff that makes it to a grand jury and the result of a lot of police work is the terrible cases where the evidence is obvious. 

I was able to meet a lot of investigators as well, people who are older and have been around a while.  A pattern quickly emerges: anybody over 40 is a bit tired; they have presented evidence to many prosecutors over the years, and there is a lot of civilian oversight that often has a lot of trouble separating emotion from the law.  And they are skeptical of the process. Yet they are very well-spoken and generally love the idea of an American Constitution protecting individual rights.  But, from their perspective, at what expense are those rights protected?  Why should a child molester, a drug dealer, or a murderer be given individual rights when it is obvious to the officer that people are up to no good?  People who don’t respect their authority should be punished. When people don’t respect the rule of police, additional charges of failure to respect a lawful investigation can put the case center stage. A prosecutor will be reluctant to move a case forward because it is obvious the police officer was upset at the lack of respect they were getting while interacting with the criminal community.  After seeing all that, I was glad to see we had enough people in society who wanted to do the job because it was crucial.  It may not pay that much, and they work many erratic hours.  And you don’t see too many old cops on the beat these days because it’s a young person’s game.  It takes a lot of tenacity not to become disgruntled with the process.  But it is a process we need, and police are crucial to maintaining a civil society.  And I can say now that I’ve met so many of them in Butler County, Ohio, that we have a lot of good ones.  And I am glad they do what they do. 

Rich Hoffman

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Visiting the Butler County Jail: What it takes to maintain a free society

It was great for me to get a chance to tour the Butler County Jail.  I have had a lot of questions about it and its use, how much it costs, and what its helpful role in society is.  The Butler County Jail is one of the most expensive in the state, and it’s certainly significant, with around 1000 inmates being held at any particular time.  As part of the obligation of a grand jury where I was the foreman, the prosecutor’s office in Butler County arranges for everyone to see where the people in the cases considered for indictment are going or being released.  For me, it was important to have context on several fronts.  And, of course, you can’t go to the jail without seeing Sheriff Jones.  Overall, my experience was very good, and I think in regards to Sheriff Jones, it has been a rough couple of years.  But I have seen in him a lot of seriousness in establishing himself as one of the biggest MAGA supporters in Southern Ohio.  We might have disagreements that have significant consequences on people we mutually know.  But I have seen him work hard to establish himself as an unquestioned supporter of justice and order.  Seeing him in his natural habitat, the jail, was also good for me.  And get a sense of what it’s like living in his shoes.  And why his appearance with Hulk Hogan at the Liberty Township Kroger significantly benefited the big picture of law and order in Butler County.  I’ve had a chance recently to see Sheriff Jones at his best, and I certainly have an appreciation for good work, which he has displayed with seriousness.  The whole experience was very beneficial in that I have an excellent understanding of what it takes to run a prosecutor’s office, what their challenges are, how it relates to the inmate system, and what it takes to essentially maintain the criminal conduct of a small percentage of a population of over 400,000 people.  Competition is good for everyone, and some people step into the challenge while others crumble under pressure.  And to that point, I am glad that Butler County, Ohio, hasn’t lost its way and has some of the country’s best people when the pressure is applied.  Politics is a blood sport.  It’s good to never get to a point where you can’t at least be friendly with people.  Because, in the end, it’s all about serving a public need.  And once the rubber hits the road, we can all be proud of our Butler County Jail.

The reality of any free society, especially when there are so many people in it, is that there will always be 1-2% who fall off the rocker and can’t live in a free society.  For whatever reason, they can’t function in a world where free people need to be free.  Crime threatens that freedom and has to be dealt with.  This means you either have capital punishment and get rid of those people, or you lock them up so they can’t hurt anybody and perhaps hope to reform them.  But if you do that, you must feed and house them.  And doing that with other people who are also on the fringe of society is difficult.  I’ve been to the Butler County Jail several times but only seen Sheriff Jones’ office, the conference room, and their press conference area.  I’ve never been past those front office areas into the booking area and the general population, which is a vast complex.  It doesn’t look like a county jail; it resembles a prison system on a large scale.  After visiting the jail, it is easy to see why the federal grants are essential and why the operation would cost over 80 million dollars.  It’s a prominent place with a lot of moving parts.  And you have to have it.  Police work is not like a school where you can debate the merits of education and what it provides to society.  When you have criminals who can’t be roaming around causing trouble, you must put them somewhere.

So, as I was walking around with the jail staff, I was thinking about how many people it takes to staff a place like that, three shifts a day, seven days a week.  I did tour the cell pods, specifically a cell within the pod where a couple of inmates were removed from their daily routine and placed in the laundry room to see how they lived.  Their cell was not much larger than a closet.  It had a little sink and a toilet, with a bunk bed beside it.  There was a tiny television and a little table where two people could sit and play a game or talk.  There is little room to walk around and do anything else.  And to imagine being in there for more than a few hours would be devastating to a human mind.  And there are many cell pods for as far as the eye can see.  Each of them has to have at least one officer to maintain the population of that triangular pod.  In each pod is a shower, a rec room, and a place where they can make phone calls to the outside world or receive visitors, all of which must be monitored by jail staff.  One thing that surprised me, and I was curious about, was the recreational areas attached to the jail pod.  They have a little screen window that allows fresh air into a half-court basketball court.  But there isn’t any accurate indicator as to the outside world.  An inmate could go for a long time without seeing if the sun was out or the day was sunny. 

Touring the jail, you could feel the hatred of the inmates.  They see you coming and going, but they have lost that freedom and hate you for it.  While I was touring, the inmates were placed in their cells, and they gazed out at the inspection with ruthless hunger.  It’s hard not to feel sorry for them, for everyone, even the jail employees.  It’s a rough job, but yes, somebody has to do it, and for the staff there, everyone I talked to, it takes a unique person even to want to do a job like that.  It’s not like they can call off work.  Somebody has to be there to deal with so many inmates, who are always just a fringe moment away from chaos and mayhem.  It does help that Sheriff Jones has such a big personality because it does take that to pull all those elements together.  Human beings and emotions can be messy, but intent goes a long way.  And to run the Butler County Jail and the criminal justice system so that ordinary people, the rest of the 400,000 people of Butler County who expect to roam about freely without impediment, without the Butler County Jail and a system of prosecution, there is no mechanism to have a free society.  If anything, the jail should be more prominent and have more employees because running a place like that takes a lot of time to hold so many people who have fallen off the rocker in society.  I spent a lot of time talking to the guards and getting my mind into their shoes, and I appreciate their work.  It takes money and personality to bring attention to these things.  I would like to see a lot more people going to jail.  But you can’t put everyone there.  And I’m glad people who want to do it work at the jail.  It’s essential work that is taken for granted all too often.

Rich Hoffman

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Why the Police Tend to Molest Kids: We can never trust people in authority positions, they need to be watched carefully

I went to get a Chester’s Pizza the other day and went to pick it up, and there were a couple of corrections officers there doing the same.  So obviously, the discussion about the Butler Tech kid who had formed sexual relationships with inmates at the Butler County jail while working as a 17-year-old intern came up.  We were making small talk and discussing pizzas.  They were dressed up in the uniform, and one thing led to another, so I had to ask them, “How could a kid like that get along with the inmates?  How is that possible?”  They answered that there were so many bad things out there that nobody could stop them.  “If people want to do something, they’re going to do it.”  We all grabbed our pizzas, said our “See ya’ laters,” and continued our day.  However, their comment is undoubtedly applicable to many people who look at these public servants; whether it be the police or a superintendent of a government school, we see a massive disconnect between unionized employees of any kind and direct responsibility.  And when pressed, all the adults in the room shrug their shoulders and say, “What do you want us to do?”  This lack of care for the well-being of children bothers many people.  They don’t understand it, especially mothers who instinctively will lay down their very lives for the protection of a child.  And a 17-year-old girl under the adult care of a school of any kind is still a child.  This media story has caused a lot of people to tell stories about their lives and experiences with the police and what their expectations of law enforcement are.  One that struck me over the last several weeks mentioned expertise with law enforcement Explorer posts from many years ago, which gives insight into this massive problem.

When I was a kid, from 13 to around 16, I was in a High Adventure Explorer Post, a coed division of the Boy Scouts of America designed to give the participants lifelong skills in leadership and adventure.  I have made great use of it over the years, and it’s a program that should be available to as many kids as possible.  The whole thing ended for me when, on a warm Friday night in February, I was scheduled to meet a bunch of kids for a fight in the middle of nowhere.  One of them ended up getting killed by gunfire.  And my squeaky clean public persona went under serious scrutiny.  Just that very day, I gave a speech at GE Aviation in Evendale to future Explorers and was elected Vice President of the Dan Beard Council.  After the killing, my time on that board had lasted less than 24 hours, but it was good while it lasted.  I loved the Explorer groups, and every year at Camp Friedlander in August, all the area Explorer Posts would get together to compete in a kind of Olympics, and it was always exciting.  It allowed us to get to know other kids in other explorer posts and learn what they did.  I looked forward to those competitions every year and could tell many stories.  However, one thing that I did know was that the members of the Police and Fire Fighting Explorer Posts always had troubled people in them.  That fine line between being a personality drawn to power and authority and one that will abuse that relationship with other people was common regarding the kids in those groups.

Before we go down that rabbit hole, though, I can also say I was very active in my church.  And I was very close with our local pastor.  So much so that I would sleep in his tent when we went on youth camping trips; now, this guy was average in all aspects of life by outward appearance.  And he was, of course, smart when it came to scripture.  But when I was in a tent with him, he couldn’t stop himself from being nude in front of me—all the time.  If I was just a fraction less cynical than I am naturally, I’m sure there would be stories of molestation.  But my personality repeals those types of things, and it always has.  So there was never any of that.  But that Pastor wanted there to be.  And that went on until my adult life, as he ended up marrying my wife and me.  And his overtly sexual behavior carried on whenever we’d meet.  At the church’s Passion plays, he always wanted us to dress authentically like Jesus and the criminals in just a little towel.  If the towel fell off, we’d be nude to the audience, but he wanted authenticity.  Over the years, I have learned the hard way, between my church and the Explorer Post dealings, that people in power and authority usually have problems with sexual depravity because sex requires a dominator and a domination receiver during the shared experience.  So abuses happen often, and this leads to permissive behavior as if they want to yell at the world, “well, you want cops; this is what cops do.”  They abuse their authority as studs in the barn.  What else would they do? 

Well, while we’re telling old stories, I can say that I have personally employed several personalities who went on to be police officers.  I know the personality type very well.  One couple that I was very good friends with was not shy about being swingers, and they very much wanted to be friends with my wife and me.  So much so that I had parties at my house, and they would attend.  But in their relationship as a married couple, they were in open marriages.  She slept with anybody who wanted to in the Springboro police department.  And he moved on from me to become a cop in Hamilton.  He was a good-looking young man who was very smart.  And brutal.  He was an early version of the cage fighters we see in the MMA today.  But I liked him, even though I knew he and his wife, and most of the cops in Hamilton and Springboro, as well as Mason, were very sexually active.  That guy got himself into a lot of trouble as he and his friends were pulling over carloads of girls and having them perform sexual favors to get out of traffic tickets.  He got fired once the story got out because it was too overt for the union to protect him.  And when he called me for a job referral from Florida, I couldn’t give him one.  My opinion about all this now is that sexual deviancy is so prevalent, especially among authority figures, that people are numb to it.  They accept that it happens, so it continues to happen often.  And we should expect it to be a problem, not something that should surprise us.  This is dangerous because once a society accepts something, it becomes normalized.  And that is what has happened to all our government unions who are in power positions over other people.  The temptation to abuse that authority is just too great, and their collective bargaining units keep them from ever taking responsibility for bad behavior once they get caught.  When the outside world sees this, they get agitated because people generally want justice.  They want to trust these people.  But I have learned enough over the years to say you can’t trust them.  You can expect them to do their job but don’t take your eye off them.  The moment you do, they will be trying to climb into the backseat of a car with a 14-year-old girl with ill intentions on their mind.  We need cops.  We need people in authority positions.  But my advice would be to never turn your back on them.  And never put a 17-year-old girl in jail as a piece of meat dangled before a bunch of lions.  Those correctional officers were well aware of what would happen and created a permissive environment for detriment to occur.  And when they were all caught, they looked at you dumbfounded as if to say, “What do you expect us to do?”  They generally don’t have it in them to do the right thing.  And we should never expect them to do so without careful checks on their power by the media and public, forcing them to live up to a higher standard.  They won’t do it on their own. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Trouble with a Police State: A “swatting” strategy designed to test the fences

Over the last few years, there have been several times that I thought it was time for a very unpleasant experience involving the police. This started around the time of the lockdowns in Ohio, where I was one of the only people still behaving normally as it looked like road checkpoints might be a genuine concern to keep people off the roads and complying with a corrupt governor’s insane mandates. I lived my life mostly normal generally during the Covid lockdowns, and for a few weeks, it wasn’t clear if, at any moment, there might be some shootout with corrupt forces trying to impose on society a direct violation of the Bill of Rights. I kept playing the mistakes made by the FBI at Ruby Ridge and Waco through my head and considered how I might approach that problem differently. And probably because of the region and the type of people in it, that checkpoint problem never happened, and everyone eventually lived happily ever after. But those same concerns returned on Christmas Day this year as reports of swatting were being reported everywhere, where someone calls the police against a political target and reports that person as being dangerous. It has happened to Steve Bannon on the Warroom several times, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Laura Loomer, and on Christmas morning, it looked like it was happening to me. As my children were coming over to have Christmas at my house, two police vehicles sectioned off my road in front of my house with their noses of their squad cars blocking the road, pointing into traffic, and it looked like that was going to be it. So, figuring that to be the case, since I am on several “political enemy” lists, I did what I did. As it turned out, a few minutes later, they were leaving, which I was not unhappy about. They indicated they were looking for a place to hang out because it was Christmas Day, and they had nowhere else to go. Well, hanging out in front of my house wasn’t a good idea. So we parted ways for that day.

As we get further into 2024, I think this will become a much more prevalent problem as very desperate political characters turn to the police, who serve whatever administration is in power, and use this swatting strategy to harass political opponents.  There have been increased incidents between both Republicans and Democrats of this “swatting” strategy, and they have certainly become more aggressive since the days of Covid, where the apparent problems of a massive police state showed us just how dangerous it is to have too many police on the payroll reporting to corrupt politicians not following the Constitution and honoring our American Bill of Rights.  The Bill of Rights explicitly limits what a government can and cannot do, and for me, there is no compromise, especially regarding the Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  I did a radio show many years ago over this topic on WLW with Darryl Parks about the dangers of the newly written NDAA that Congress passed back then and how the military could be weaponized against the people who were supposed to control it.  I have a pretty good relationship with my local law enforcement.  I will always say that we need law enforcement.  But I am always weary of their power and the tendency to abuse it.  I call it the “mall cop” syndrome.  Even the best-intentioned people can turn into maniacs once they gain the ability to carry a gun and kick in someone’s door for the “safety of society.”  This policy idea that your Bill of Rights is suspended until they determine that you are not a threat is completely wrong as far as I am concerned.  And when someone “swats” you, the assumption is that the police then have a constitutional breaking mandate to violate your rights until they prove to the contrary, which is at the heart of the problem.   

I would go even further and discuss this as a strategy of sheer evil that steps beyond the veil of conscious reality, which is why I have been writing a lot lately about the hostility of the spirit world and those occult practices that seek an alliance with help from the quantum realm.  My interest is in what makes people do bad things and why they think the things they do, especially under a crisis management scenario.  I took the incident on Christmas Day at my house as the raptors testing the fences to see what they could and couldn’t get away with.  But what made them want to try?  Those are the things I spend a lot of time thinking about.  Behind that concern is this push to continuously expand the reach of government with more police with prominent stories that we hear about all the time, where police brutality causes race riots, and it forces society to pick one side or the other.  The Democrats come up with a “defund the police” strategy to decrease police killings of innocent people.  Republicans want to fund more police and “back the blue.”  But the real menace is the political characters, both spiritual and terrestrial, who want to play these forces against each other with the result of getting people screaming for more police protection and submission of their Bill of Rights over to a police state of massive government expansion so that when they do come and arrest you in the middle of the night by kicking down your door and you suddenly have to “prove you are not guilty” before they let you go, you won’t expect anything else.  You’ll want police brutality so that you can be “safe” when the real bad guys are out there causing the trouble to begin with.

This isn’t, after all, a conspiracy strategy; we have seen lawfare applied to President Trump, a former president, so the blueprint is out.  Big governments run by corrupt people expect that they can raid your home, go through your wife’s underwear drawer, and push your face into the ground with your hands behind your back whenever they decide to.  They might apologize later, but they genuinely do intend to embarrass you in front of your friends and neighbors to show that they have domination over you.  They don’t care about the arrest; they care about letting people see how much power they have so that you’ll be ready to submit if they decide to use it.  And when they want to go after political targets, one way to diminish them in the eyes of their followers is to show the world how little power they have.  This is why conservatives have been getting swatted a lot lately.  And I think it will continue to increase as the insanity of the communist left realizes they are losing power and that crimes they have been involved in will now have to be paid for.  While they can, they plan to abuse their power for all its worth.  So we should expect to deal with these things accordingly.  No matter what party you are affiliated with, this is a problem for everyone because it is a strategy of the Deep State that has no respect for the American Constitution, and they intend to cause trouble that we beg for more police so that the police can then become an extension of government power who then give them the right and ability to violate your rights with just a phone call and to take out political enemies so that the state can grow and gain public power as a net result.  We saw during COVID-19 that this is a real problem; the bad guys were testing out what they could and could not get away with regarding massive abuses of authority.  And since then, this swatting strategy has become much more frequent.  And on Christmas Day of 2023, I thought my knowledge of the Constitution would be tested.  Which everyone knows there is no compromise on.  We live in that world, and I advise everyone not to take the bait.  Keep government as minimal as possible, including the amount of local police you have.  Because with just a phone call, they can indeed become your enemy at a moment’s notice.

Rich Hoffman

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

‘Magnum Force’ is the Best Movie to Understand in 2024: No, you aren’t crazy, it was the world that went in that direction

It wasn’t always how it is now; there used to be good movies, and they were far from woke.  And it surprised me when Steve Bannon brought up one of my favorite movies on his podcast, the Warroom, at the end of the year in 2023 because I don’t hear many people who even know what it is.  But it reminded me of several things, one of which is the answer to all the woke options out there.  Going into 2024, the best movie ever made that deals specifically with the 2024 election is Magnum Force, with Clint Eastwood from the five-movie Dirty Harry series.  It is a unique plot that deals with police corruption, crime and punishment, and doing the right thing while society is trying to drag you into doing all the bad stuff.  It also reminded me of how I raised my children; every year on New Year’s Eve to bring in the new year, we would watch the Dirty Harry marathon, where we watched three of the movies on New Year’s Eve, then two more on New Year’s Day.  But among them all, my favorite of the five, was Magnum Force, and still is.  So it certainly got my attention when Steve Bannon recommended the movie on the Warroom.  Magnum Force is about that fine line between right and wrong and features a group of cops who go rogue to eradicate the bad guys, which has evolved into real life dramatically in the current FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies as discussed through the Trump administration’s exposure of their various antics.  It’s much worse in real life than in 1974 San Francisco when the movie occurred.  But the problems are the same and people can watch those movies and see how things have gone wrong today because those movies were warnings all those years ago of what was coming. 

When people ask me, which happens every week, why I’m not in the movie business, the answer is that I wanted to make movies like Magnum Force, and Hollywood isn’t built to accommodate those movies anymore.  I think it’s great that there was a period when movies like Dirty Harry movies were made, and they certainly provide a quick check that we are not all crazy compared to how things are now.  I used to show the film to my kids and their boyfriends, then spouses, every year, not just for entertainment but to show them how values have evolved and that America was once a place that made movies like Magnum Force to express ideas through entertainment that were valuable to the audience.  When we look at what San Francisco has become, the warning signs were always right there, and they were apparent to me when the world was still good and made sense.  I was showing my kids these movies to close out a year and usher in the new one to teach them values, which looks to have worked.  They are emotionally solid people even now, even the tag-alongs who emerged from those relationships.  They might have thought of me as old fashioned at the time, a dad showing them old Clint Eastwood movies that were much slower than the quick-cut movies of today filled with woke messaging.  But they watched them to appease me and to spend time with me.  And even now that they are in their 30s, it’s become a running joke in our family that they still remember and value. 

What’s so special about Magnum Force, directed by Ted Post and written by excellent writers, is that it deals with corruption and how it happens, either by the side of the criminals or the cops who are supposed to enforce the law to keep society together.  Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character finds himself locked in a vice between those two forces, representing the very fine line that often presents itself in these cases that is more than realistic.  When I was growing up, I wanted nothing more than to make my movies using Magnum Force as an example.  But I was so frustrated with the business because it had changed so much that I moved to other things.  My brother lived in California for a while and has some producer credits, so we know what we are talking about when we say it; they don’t make movies like Magnum Force anymore for many reasons.  One big one is that movie writers are too busy getting lattes on the Santa Monica Pier rather than living life and letting that experience show in their art.  Most of these young people don’t even know how to shoot a gun because they have grown up in such a woke period.  They don’t have the experience to write a gritty crime drama like Magnum Force because they don’t understand the complexities of life, so how can they write about it?  But compared to what’s being made today, Hollywood is way off the mark.  But it wasn’t always that way.  If you want to see great movies, they used to make them.  You don’t have to put up with the crap they make now.  You can always watch the old films about real problems unfolding way ahead of their time. 

I did run into someone who knew about these old movies, even though it’s a mild influence.  But someone noticed that one of my carry guns is a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum, the most powerful production handgun in the world.  It used to be the .44 Magnum by S&W back in the days of the Dirty Harry films, and I always found his reasoning for using such a large weapon for police work compelling.  I carry an S&W .500 Magnum with the extra long barrel, over 8 inches, because so many of the bad guys these days are wearing Call of Duty body armor they can get off Amazon, and they can get armor for their cars, so it makes sense.  You don’t want bullets bouncing off windows and off of people, even in populated areas where people could be hurt subsequently.  You have to hit what you aim at, which is a theme of the Dirty Harry movies in general, which are about so much more than movies made now are.  But for a sanity check, most of America used to think in the way that the Dirty Harry movies are represented, and I would argue that they still do.  Watching them now, they are much better than the garbage produced in Hollywood.  And I would say that you have options if you are looking for entertainment and a way to understand the themes and actions coming at us in 2024.  Watching Magnum Force will be far more valuable than the nightly news.  And you may learn something.  It had warnings that people scratched their heads at in the past, including John Wayne, who thought Clint Eastwood’s character was too cynical and not “pro-American” enough.  But as we have learned over the next 50 years, what the Dirty Harry movies were all about is what we see now.  And it can be scary unless you know how to walk that fine line, which is the point of the movies entirely.   

Rich Hoffman

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

A German Nurse Walks Free After Refusing Covid Vaccinations: Using The Doctrine of Lesser Magistrates to regulate out of control governments

A Red Cross nurse who injected 8,600 elderly patients with saline solution instead of the experimental COVID jab has walked free from court with only six months probation. 39-year-old Antje T. had administered the saltwater solution “vaccines” at the Schortens jab center in Friesland, Germany, telling patients they were the Pfizer jab. She was found guilty of six counts of intentional assault by Oldenburg District Court, Lower Saxony state, on November 30. Police told the court that she was able to introduce the saline solution undetected because she was in charge of vaccine and syringe preparation during her shift at the vaccination center. Many people were upset that she didn’t go to jail and suffer more punishment than losing her nursing license, but in truth, the Germans couldn’t prosecute her for something that wasn’t a law; the government didn’t have a right to force an alliance with Pfizer to force medicine on people under the standards that were created with Covid because the imposition of public safety as a means to undermine personal rights had not been worked out in their legal system. Therefore, there wasn’t any real merit for the case to begin with. And in America, there is even less of a premise for such a case. This is a good story for a number of reasons, but it ultimately shows the power of the excellent book The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates and how it can bring governments to their knees when they grab for power and abuse their authority such as was the clear case under Covid. Local officials were obliged to push back against the tyrannies of the state. Joe Biden never had the authority to mandate vaccines of any kind, which is just how those court cases turned out. And the best way to undermine such corruption is by following the basic ideas established in that great book.

I knew of many nurses and pharmacists during Covid who behaved much the way that German nurse did, and there is even less of a prosecutorial standard in America for them to be punished for their actions. I see what they were doing as patriotic, we had a power grab by the government from the Biden administration trying to flex some first-term muscle, and people ignored it, which they should have. There was no authority by the government to do so; I told everyone that at the time. It was a bluff by the government that had no enforceability or justification, and the Biden executive order needed to be ignored. For example, a president can set some parameters for vaccine passports, such as international travel. Corporations can have policies for flying on their equipment as well. It’s their planes, their rules. But saying that people wouldn’t be allowed to work if they didn’t take some government-mandated medicine was insane at best. And I was encouraged during Covid by how many rebels emerged using The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates to destroy the tyrannical grip governments had over industry. I knew quite a few people who were issuing vaccine cards to people who needed them for employment mandates, and I thought it was fine. I knew that none of this executive order action would hold up in court, so it was good to see people putting a check on that power from the outset, which occurred from September of 2021 to around January of 2022 when the court cases started falling apart under scrutiny. I was happy to be right about all of it, but it was pretty scary for people to realize that government had way overstepped its authority and that people might lose their jobs as a result. It took guts for people to take a stand and use their positions to help people get vaccine cards, even if those people didn’t want to get the vaccine.   Under those conditions, where the government is not acting in accordance with the Law of the land, the American Constitution, people have an obligation to ignore the mandates of an out-of-control government. 

The situation was so bad that I knew a few legislators, one in particular, who was immune from the mandates because they were law makers themselves, but they had a scheduled trip to the Virgin Islands and had to have a vax card to make the trip. But they were very much against the government-mandated vaccination. So I helped everyone talk to each other so they could get what they needed, but I still applied the concept of The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates. Rules created by an abusive government should be ignored and even defeated at the local level. Otherwise, the government will never stop imposing itself on the innocent. The method of using a crisis to impose under unconstitutional emergency laws had been debated for years; one of the worst scenarios was the Hurricane Katrina crisis in New Orleans years ago. Martial Law was imposed there, which had disastrous effects on the population. Thinking back on it, people would have been better off ignoring the authorities and functioning from a constitutional law foundation. Just because something is an emergency doesn’t mean you have to rearrange your entire legal system.

And even in Germany, which hardly has anything close to an American Bill of Rights, the courts couldn’t prosecute the young nurse and her convictions against the vaccination shots. Legally they had much more power there than in the United States. It wasn’t an apples-to-apples kind of analysis. But what the authorities couldn’t afford to have happen was that by prosecuting this nurse, they upset the population and gave birth to a thousand more. When the government sees that people are so willing to break their dumb rules, they are less motivated to issue them in the future, knowing that in the long run, they’ll simply overplay their hand, and people will stop listening to them. And for powerful governments, that is their greatest fear. A population that has no reverence for them and calls their bluff on exerting authority. If people fear compliance more than government power, governments are exposed as worthless in their endeavors if they simply lose the public, which is always a risk. I am personally very happy that so many people refused in the United States to take the vaccine. The government needed to make a better case for its position than it did, which was even worse than many feared. And at no point in the future can government believe that it has that kind of power over people. The World Economic Forum people also, who fancy themselves as having control over governments through their campaign contributions, have to learn the hard lesson as well, that they cannot control the Law through emergency bioweapons.   Seeing people refuse to play the game, by whatever means they had to, was a good warning to those tyrannical forces. The centralized government will not have the power they fantasize about over mass populations because The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates promises that people will rebel against abusive laws, even if power at the top is captured through election fraud or some other maniacal method. Obviously, the only laws that are good and can work are those regulated by voters through a representative government. And through that method, the Lesser Magistrates always keep the Upper Magistrates from gaining too much power and making themselves the tyrannies of our day. And in that regard, the best thing to keep society honest is the willingness to say no when given an unjust order and to force the government to think seriously about their demands before they say a word.

 

Rich Hoffman

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