Tag: Politics

I Didn’t Want To Be That Guy: The Influence of Non-Human Intelligence on the Ohio, Newark Holy Stones

I had waited years for this…………………………………….

In January 2020, a UFO was filmed directly over the Newark Earthworks. L.A. Marzulli posted about the video, calling it no coincidence. He sees the site as tied to the Nephilim and fallen angels, pointing to the advanced 18.6-year lunar cycle built into the Octagon as evidence that the knowledge couldn’t have come from the local people alone. To him, the sighting proved a direct link between these ancient mound complexes worldwide and the modern UFO phenomenon.  And this story points to a deeper issue: that people like Marzulli have lost any trust in any institutional contributor, and what that means for the continuation of civilization itself.  After all, I did have a UFO experience myself, which I attribute more to occult practice than physical contact, which makes the Holy Stones of that region much more interesting and important than they otherwise would be.  Because of this and many similar controversies, I am slightly obsessed with how non-human intelligence, whether it be overt demons or aliens from outside of Earth’s gravity imprint, has shaped human civilization in ways that institutional archaeology cannot deal with, because they don’t have the current means, which is exactly why I sat down to write The Politics of Heaven.  I was always inspired by Frazer’s Golden Bough and how it created the field of anthropology, and for my own work, I want to contribute to the continued evolution of the vast dialogue of that subject matter: how much non-human intelligence has shaped human society from the very beginning, not with just conspiracy theory consideration, but with hard, observable science. 

I’ve been thinking along similar lines, though I come at it from a different angle. The Newark Earthworks aren’t just ceremonial or astronomical in the usual sense. I propose that they function like a giant horizontal clock laid flat on the ground, precisely tracking the moon’s complex 18.6-year nodal cycle. That’s not casual observation — it’s sophisticated long-term record-keeping.

Here’s where it gets interesting to me: if you have entities traveling from outside our normal frame of reference, experiencing time dilation, these massive, visible-from-the-air geometric earthworks would make perfect navigational markers not just for where you are, but for when you are. The stars and moon shift over centuries. A culture that can leave and return after what feels like a short trip to them might need reliable ground references to calibrate exactly which phase of earthly time they’ve arrived in. The Newark complex, with its perfect lunar alignments, would serve that purpose beautifully — like tying ribbons on trees in a forest before GPS existed to keep from getting lost, except on a monumental, landscape scale.

My own Middletown UFO sighting, where I essentially challenged it to show up, and it did a couple of days later, fits the pattern too. These appearances often feel responsive, almost ritualistic. Whether you call them non-human intelligence, watchers, or something else, the connection between these ancient precision sites and modern UAP activity keeps showing up.

It’s one more piece suggesting the story of these earthworks — and the Holy Stones found nearby — is far from settled. The more we learn about UAPs, the more the old archaeological assumptions look incomplete.

For decades, I had known about the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum up in Coshocton, the small but remarkable place that holds the Newark Holy Stones—the Decalogue Stone with its figure and Hebrew inscriptions, the Keystone, the associated pieces. I already owned good replicas I had purchased from them years earlier, and I had studied the photographs, the arguments, the woodcut copies David Wyrick made. But I had never stood in front of the actual stones in their case. When the chance came with family—my wife, a daughter, a few of the grandchildren—I took it. We drove out on a day when the museum opened at noon. We arrived early, stood outside for a couple of minutes after the doors opened, and when the young woman who unlocked the door saw us, she looked surprised. They do not get many visitors on an average weekday. I told her I had come a long way to see the Holy Stones. She let us in.

The museum sits in a quiet stretch of central Ohio, not far from the great Newark Earthworks complex that spreads across what is now the city of Newark and the surrounding countryside. Most people driving past on the main roads have no idea what lies just off the pavement. The Great Circle, the Octagon, the long processional avenues—these were not casual dirt piles. They are precise geometric constructions aligned to the movements of the moon over its 18.6-year nodal cycle. The Hopewell people who built and used them, roughly two thousand years ago, understood observational astronomy at a level that still astonishes anyone who takes the time to stand on the viewing platform between the Circle and the Octagon and watch the alignments play out. Avenues once guided people—and perhaps, in their understanding, spirits—along lines that connected earth to sky. Much of it is gone now. Housing developments, roads, restaurants, and an old golf course that has since closed cover what were once open ceremonial spaces. The main highway cuts through what was once part of the complex. What remains is still extraordinary, but it takes imagination and stubbornness to see the full scale of what was built here.

Inside the museum, I wandered through the gift shop first, as I always do in places like this. I was not expecting to find anything new. I already had the Holy Stones replicas at home. Then I saw three flat sandstone pieces sitting among other small items. No price tag stood out. They looked familiar the moment I picked one up—the size, the weight, the carved designs. I knew exactly what it was: a replica of the Wilmington Tablet, the Adena sandstone piece found in Sparks Mound near Wilmington, Ohio, the one now kept at the Ohio History Center in Columbus. The young woman at the counter thought they were coasters. She had to call someone to find a price. Five dollars. I bought one without hesitation. I had been looking for a good replica of that tablet for a long time. The Cincinnati Tablet, found in 1841 when a mound at Fifth and Mound Streets in downtown Cincinnati was leveled for construction—the site is now near a UPS facility—had been displayed for years at the Cincinnati Museum Center before it was removed from the Native American exhibits. It did not fit the prevailing story comfortably. The Wilmington Tablet carries its own mysteries: the main face with its stylized figures, the edges and sides marked in ways that suggest a numerical or identifying system, perhaps a personal marker for someone of importance buried with it, or a template used in ritual or body marking. Adena tablets like these have been interpreted as tattoo stamps, ownership identifiers, or cosmological diagrams. Whatever their precise function, they were important enough to be placed with the dead.

I carried the new replica with me into the exhibit area and sat down in front of the Decalogue Stone. The case holds the stone itself along with its sandstone box. The figure on the front—bearded, robed, holding what appears to be a tablet or scroll—has long been read as Moses. The sides and back carry a condensed version of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. The carving is competent but not perfect by ancient standards; there are letter forms that mix periods and a few anomalies that scholars have used to argue for a nineteenth-century origin. The museum’s current interpretive panels, updated in recent years, present the stones straightforwardly as forgeries created in the 1860s. The explanation centers on the social and political climate before and during the Civil War. Monogenism—the biblical idea that all humans descend from a single pair, Adam and Eve—stood in opposition to polygenism, the notion that different races were separate species or creations. Polygenist arguments were sometimes used to justify slavery and unequal treatment. A discovery of ancient Hebrew inscriptions in Ohio mounds could be deployed to support monogenism, to argue that biblical history reached the Americas long before Columbus, and thereby to undermine justifications for treating any group of people as less than fully human. David Wyrick, the Newark surveyor and antiquarian who brought the stones forward in 1860, was a man of his time—interested in the mounds, respectful of their builders, and apparently inclined toward biblical literalism and anti-slavery views. His reputation suffered after the findings. He died a few years later, in 1864, amid personal difficulties that included pain and what some accounts describe as heavy use of medication. Most professional archaeologists and historians dismissed the stones as nineteenth-century creations meant to influence the great debate of the age.

David Wyrick died on April 16, 1864, at the age of 57. Contemporary newspaper accounts reported that he died suddenly from an overdose of laudanum, a common opium-based painkiller he had been taking regularly for a long-term painful illness, most likely severe rheumatoid arthritis.

Local records and the original reporting did not list his death as suicide. The official cause was listed as “rheumatism” in some documents, and the newspaper noted the overdose without claiming it was intentional. However, the intense controversy surrounding the Holy Stones, combined with his financial troubles, led later writers to describe it as suicide. That narrative stuck in many books and articles for decades, even though the primary sources from 1864 do not support it.

The stress from the backlash clearly took a heavy toll on him physically and mentally. Still, the evidence shows he was managing chronic pain with medication that ultimately proved fatal. I would propose that it granted non-human intelligence access to his mind under duress, a move that proved catastrophic. 

The image in the visitor center is David Wyrick’s 1860 survey map of the Newark Earthworks. It’s a detailed, hand-drawn overhead plan showing the full layout of the Great Circle, the Octagon, the parallel walls connecting them, and the surrounding landscape as it existed at the time. It includes roads, the Ohio and Erie Canal, railroad lines, and even the Great Circle, which was used as the Licking County Fairgrounds.

It’s widely considered one of the most accurate early maps of the site, which is why Ohio History Connection still displays and references it. It’s not an artistic painting; it’s a surveyor’s technical drawing — clean, precise lines with measurements and labels.

I sat there longer than I expected. The grandchildren moved around the room, patient, as children are when grandpa gets quiet in front of old things. My daughter kept the camera ready because she knows the look I get when something lands hard. I felt a familiar weight settle in. I have spent most of my life being the person who says the thing that makes a room go quiet. I do not enjoy it. I would rather study, walk the sites, read the reports, and keep my thoughts to myself. But the pattern forming in my mind as I looked at the Holy Stones and read the museum’s careful, institutionally approved explanation would not stay quiet. The stones may indeed be nineteenth-century work. The letter forms, the timing with Lincoln’s election, the social circles Wyrick moved in—all of that can be documented. Yet the question “why would someone go to this much trouble?” still sits there. The mainstream answer is political and religious motivation in a divided country. That answer is not wrong on its face. It is incomplete.

What struck me, sitting in that chair, was how little room the current framing leaves for the possibility that Wyrick himself was not the originator of the content, or that, even if he carved or commissioned the stones, the impulse and the specific knowledge came from elsewhere. Pain medications of the mid-nineteenth century were not inert. Some had properties that alter consciousness. Wyrick was a man under strain, already deeply engaged with the mounds and their meanings, moving through a landscape where indigenous knowledge and biblical imagination were colliding in real time. Across human history, people in altered states—whether through plants, fasting, ritual, or substances—have reported contact with intelligences that are not their own. They have returned with precise information about astronomy, geometry, architecture, and moral order. The Newark Earthworks themselves demonstrate exactly that kind of precise knowledge: alignments that track the moon’s complex cycle, geometry that rivals anything built in the Old World at the same period. The Hopewell culture that maintained and expanded these sites was part of a vast interaction sphere that moved copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the Appalachians, and ideas across hundreds of miles. They were not isolated. They were connected.

The possibility that non-human intelligences have interacted with human beings across deep time is no longer the fringe claim it once was. Government releases on UAPs in recent years have normalized the conversation in ways that would have been impossible even a decade ago. Films like Disclosure Day and public discussions now explore themes of possession, mind influence, and non-human entities operating through human agents. Some of these portrayals treat the phenomenon as technological or biological. Others, including certain narratives that reached wide audiences, frame it in explicitly spiritual terms—entities that seek to override human sovereignty, countered by faith, symbol, and will. I watched one such portrayal not long before this visit and recognized the pattern immediately. The same dynamic appears in ancient accounts worldwide: shamanic traditions in which practitioners enter altered states to receive knowledge from “the gods” or spirits; biblical descriptions of encounters at burning bushes, on mountaintops, or in temples complete with high place drug use, to a modern eye familiar with high-speed travel and gravitational effects, like interactions with non-local intelligences; the global recurrence of similar architectural and astronomical knowledge appearing in places separated by oceans and centuries.

If non-human intelligences have been present and active, they would not need wooden ships or land bridges to move knowledge. They would need markers. The Newark Earthworks, with their lunar clock and visible geometry, serve perfectly as reference points that can be read from above or used by people on the ground to synchronize time over long intervals. Time dilation is not science fiction; it is a measured fact. Travelers moving at relativistic speeds or operating near significant gravitational gradients experience time differently from observers on Earth’s surface. A short subjective journey for them could correspond to centuries or more here. Upon return, they would need fixed, durable references—alignments to stars and moon, geometric figures visible from altitude, places where the calendar could be read without ambiguity. The Hopewell and Adena landscapes contain exactly those features. So do other ancient sites that display sudden leaps in mathematical and observational sophistication. The question is not whether the knowledge appears; it is where it came from and why it appears in the patterns it does.

The Wilmington Tablet I now own a replica of fits into this larger question. It was buried with someone important enough that their personal marker was placed in the mound. The edge markings that catch the eye when you turn the piece over suggest a system—numbers, ownership, affiliation, or ritual status. Similar tablets from the Adena sphere have been found with red ochre residue consistent with use as printing or stamping devices, possibly for body art that identified lineage, achievement, or spiritual standing. If these were “ID cards” for the dead, they imply a society that tracked individual identity and status with precision across generations. That level of organization recurs in mound-building cultures of the Ohio Valley and beyond. It does not require external input to exist, but the sudden appearance of specific symbolic and mathematical systems in multiple places at roughly the same horizon of development invites the question of common inspiration.

I do not claim the Holy Stones are ancient. The evidence the museum presents for a nineteenth-century creation is substantial and has been reinforced by careful recent work. What I am willing to say, after sitting with the stones and walking the remnants of the earthworks, is that the story we are told about why they exist is too tidy. It reduces a complex man and a complex moment to a simple political hoax. It leaves no room for the possibility that Wyrick, already immersed in the mounds and carrying his own burdens, encountered something—an idea, an image, a compulsion—that felt as if it came from outside himself. That experience would not make the stones ancient. It would make them artifacts of contact, whether the contact was spiritual, psychological, or something we do not yet have language for. The same pattern appears in other times and places where precise knowledge falls into the hands of people under stress or in altered states: the biblical prophets, the builders of megalithic monuments, the medicine people who maintained alignments and oral calendars over centuries.

The destruction of the physical evidence compounds the problem. Newark itself was built over and through one of the most significant ceremonial landscapes in North America. Miamisburg Mound sits in a town that grew around it. Countless smaller mounds were plowed flat or bulldozed for roads and foundations before anyone could record what they contained. The Windover Pond site in Florida, with its 8,000-year-old burials preserving brain tissue and some of the oldest textiles in the Americas, revealed people whose material culture and genetic signals do not fit neatly into later narratives of isolation and simplicity. Bones and artifacts continue to be reburied under policies that prioritize contemporary tribal affiliation over scientific study, even when the genetic and cultural distance is vast. Every time we pave or rebury without full documentation, we remove data that might clarify whether the knowledge visible in these sites was generated locally, transmitted through ordinary human networks, or introduced through less conventional channels.

Archaeologists do the hard, necessary work of excavation, mapping, and dating. I respect that labor. What I question is the institutional reluctance to entertain hypotheses that fall outside the current consensus, especially when the consensus itself rests partly on the absence of evidence that has been destroyed or never collected. The same scholars who correctly note that the Holy Stones’ Hebrew shows characteristics of nineteenth-century Bibles are often the first to dismiss any suggestion that pre-Columbian contact or non-local inspiration could explain other anomalies. The stones become a cautionary tale about forgeries rather than a prompt to ask why a surveyor in 1860 would risk everything to place Hebrew commandments inside a Hopewell-era mound. The answer “politics” is available. The answer “something spoke to him in a way that felt authoritative” is not, because it opens territory that academic archaeology has largely ceded to other disciplines or to popular writers.

My own work, particularly the book I have been completing, looks to hold both the documented record and the larger pattern in view. The Politics of Heaven is not an attack on archaeology. It is a dedicated effort to reconnect what we can see on the ground—earthworks, tablets, alignments, sudden appearances of sophisticated knowledge—with the possibility that non-human intelligences have been active participants in human affairs for a very long time. That possibility does not require rejecting indigenous achievement. It expands it. The people who built and used the Newark complex were sophisticated observers and engineers. They also lived in a world where altered states, visionary experience, and communication with non-ordinary intelligences were part of the cultural toolkit. The same toolkit appears in the ancient Near East, in Britain, in Mesoamerica, and in the shamanic traditions that persist today. The content of what comes through those channels varies, but the mechanism is recurrent.

Sitting in the museum that afternoon, I realized again why I have to write what I am writing. The stones are on display. The earthworks are still there in fragments. The UAP files are coming out. The cultural conversation has shifted enough that a person can say, without immediate professional ruin, that the old categories—isolated continents, purely local invention, no external intelligences—are no longer sufficient to explain the full record. David Wyrick may have been a forger, a dupe, a sincere man who encountered something he could not fully explain, or all three at different moments. He was an abolitionist, like Lincoln, opposed to slavery, and I think he was a pretty good person.  The stones he brought forward remain touchstones. They force us to ask what counts as evidence and whose stories get to shape the past. The Wilmington Tablet replica now sits on a shelf in my house. It is not ancient. It is a modern copy of an ancient object that, in turn, raises questions we have not yet answered. When I look at it, I think about the person it once identified or accompanied, the culture that made it important enough to bury, and the long chain of curiosity that brought a replica into my hands on an ordinary afternoon in Coshocton.

The grandchildren eventually pulled me toward the door. We stopped at a small tavern down the road for fish and chips. I set the tablet on the table for a moment and joked that it needed to eat too. The absurdity made them laugh, which was the point. Later, driving home through the Ohio countryside, I kept returning to the image of the Decalogue Stone in its case and the museum’s careful panels explaining its modern origin. They are not wrong about the carving. They are incomplete about the context. The full story of these places and these objects will require more than one discipline and more than one kind of evidence. It will require the willingness to sit with anomalies instead of explaining them away, to walk the remaining earthworks at moonrise, to hold a tablet in your hands and ask what it was for, and to consider that the intelligences our ancestors called gods, spirits, or watchers may have been something we are only now beginning to name again.

I did not want to be the person who has to say these things out loud in public. I still do not. But the pattern is there, the sites are there, the disclosures are happening, and the stones continue to ask their questions. The Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum did its job. It preserved the objects, updated the interpretation, and let a visitor sit quietly in front of them long enough for the next layer of the story to become visible. That is what good museums do. The rest is up to those of us who walk out the door still carrying the questions.

The mainstream interpretation encountered at the museum and the broader synthesis regarding non-human intelligence, time dilation, archaeoastronomy, spiritual influence, and the need to re-evaluate assumptions in light of emerging data. Personal observations and opinions are rendered in the first person throughout. Background on the Newark Earthworks, Hopewell/Adena contexts, Wyrick controversy, specific tablets, and institutional shifts is woven into the narrative rather than presented as separate sections. A bibliography of key sources for further reading follows.)

Selected Sources and Further Reading.  But in essence, this is why I wrote The Politics of Heaven, to explore some of these out-of-the-box issues and put them in a useful, modern context.

•  Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum, Coshocton, Ohio. Exhibit materials and presentations on the Newark Holy Stones (updated circa 2020–2022), including work by museum staff and archaeologist Brad Lepper. The museum website and related publications detail the stones’ history and current interpretation as nineteenth-century artifacts that reflect monogenist/polygenist debates.

•  Wikipedia and scholarly summaries on the Newark Holy Stones (cross-referenced with primary accounts): consensus view as likely a hoax or planted artifacts from 1860, with discussion of Wyrick’s role, letter-form anomalies, and social context pre-Civil War.

•  Ohio History Connection / Ohio History Center resources on the Wilmington Tablet (Sparks Mound, Clinton County) and Cincinnati Tablet (Fifth & Mound Streets discovery, 1841). Adena culture context for engraved sandstone tablets.

•  Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (UNESCO World Heritage Site documentation) and Newark Earthworks visitor resources: lunar alignments, 18.6-year cycle, geometric precision, Hopewell interaction sphere.

•  Ross Hamilton, The Mystery of the Serpent Mound (and related works on Ohio earthworks geometry and astronomy).

•  Graham Hancock’s publications on ancient civilizations, consciousness, and alternative historical frameworks (for engagement with entheogen and non-local influence hypotheses; contrasted in the essay with sovereignty concerns).

•  Biblical Archaeology Review (long-term reference for comparative ancient Near Eastern and American contexts).

•  Primary historical accounts of David Wyrick’s discoveries (1860–1861 pamphlets and contemporary reports) and later analyses (e.g., Whittlesey, Lepper, and others on authenticity debates).

•  UAP-related government releases and congressional records (post-2017 onward) for the shifting public and official conversation on non-human intelligence.

•  Additional context on Adena/Hopewell tablets, Windover Pond site (Florida), time dilation in relativity, and global parallels in archaeoastronomy and altered-state traditions can be found in standard archaeological syntheses and peer-reviewed journals on those topics.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

The Treasure of Ownership: Personal Music, Vinyl Resurgence, and the Human Hunger for Things That Are Truly Ours

A few years ago, the World Economic Forum floated this vision of the future captured in the phrase “you’ll own nothing and be happy.”¹ It sounded like one of those slick marketing pitches that ignores human nature entirely. People don’t like it. They push back in quiet, stubborn ways that reveal something deep about who we are as human beings wired for possession, autonomy, and legacy. I saw it clearly the other day when I was taking someone in their twenties to lunch in my car. They glanced at the dashboard and asked what that strange slot was. It was the CD player. My car isn’t ancient—I tend to drive vehicles for a decade or more—and yet to this young person, it was an artifact from another era.²

I explained that compact discs were once revolutionary. Developed through a collaboration between Philips and Sony starting in the late 1970s, with key demonstrations in 1979 and a commercial launch in 1982, CDs promised perfect digital sound without the pops, scratches, or degradation of vinyl records or the hiss of cassettes.³ By the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, they dominated the market. I remember the excitement vividly. You could pop one in, skip tracks instantly, and take your music anywhere without worrying about needles or tape wear. I had built plenty of playlists on cassettes by recording songs off vinyl albums in the order I wanted, but CDs made sequencing seamless. You owned it outright. You could drive down the road at highway speeds—through Ohio’s potholes, storms, or whatever the Great Miami River valley threw at you—and the music played reliably. No internet required. No monthly subscription draining your account. No dependency on someone else’s servers.⁴

That young person couldn’t wrap their mind around it. Subscription services like Apple Music and Spotify have shaped their entire adult life. They rent access to a vast library that lives on someone else’s servers. Lose the subscription, the connection, or the company’s goodwill, and it vanishes. I told them that Walmart still carries CDs, though in smaller sections now, and that Cracker Barrel gift shops across the country have racks of vinyl albums selling briskly. People are buying physical music again. They want to own it—put it on the shelf, hold it in their hands, play it whenever they want without begging permission from a corporation. My grandkids notice the library of CDs on our entertainment center. They see the difference between something solid and tangible versus rented pixels in the cloud.⁵

The vinyl resurgence is one of the most astonishing cultural shifts I’ve witnessed. I grew up with LPs. They seemed archaic once CDs arrived with their superior convenience and durability for travel, but now younger generations are embracing records again. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), vinyl has grown for 19 consecutive years. In 2025, U.S. vinyl sales surpassed $1 billion for the first time in decades, selling about 46.8 million units and generating nearly three times the revenue of CDs (which sold around 29.5 million units).⁶ Artists like Taylor Swift have driven special editions, but the trend runs deeper. Gen Z and millennials seek that tactile connection in a digital world. I’ve seen it at Target, Walmart, and Cracker Barrel during RV stops. People are hungry for ownership.⁷

This isn’t mere nostalgia. It’s a rejection of the rental economy pushed by globalist visions. The WEF’s 2016 essay by Ida Auken envisioned a 2030 where everything—housing, transportation, entertainment—is rented as a service, delivered conveniently, with no personal clutter of ownership.⁸ Critics rightly called it an attack on human dignity. We are not wired to be perpetual renters. We want our own refrigerator stocked with food we chose, our own yard to tend, our own spouse and children to raise as ours, our own books on the shelf that we can touch and mark. In my family, that physical library of CDs represents more than music—it represents independence.⁹

I remember the full arc of these formats. Vinyl offered warmth and ritual—the act of placing the needle, flipping sides, experiencing the album as intended. But it had drawbacks: bulk, susceptibility to warping, scratches, and the need for careful handling. Cassettes enabled homemade mixtapes and portability in cars, but their quality degraded. CDs felt like liberation when they emerged. Philips and Sony standardized the 12 cm disc to fit Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony entirely, about 74 minutes. The technology used laser reading for error correction, making it robust for travel. You could carry dozens in a slim case. I loved loading them into the car player and having on-demand music without internet or subscriptions.¹⁰

Then the market shifted dramatically. Streaming services offered convenience and unlimited access, but at the cost of true ownership. Apple Music has an enormous catalog—I appreciate the discovery aspect—but I despise the model. You pay monthly forever. Stop paying, and your library disappears. The same happened with movies. Remember rushing to buy the new release on DVD or Blu-ray and building a collection? Now it’s Netflix, HBO Max, or whichever service holds rights that month. Physical sales plummeted as streaming cannibalized them. Yet when content rotates off platforms, demand for ownership spikes again.¹¹

The push toward renting everything ties into deeper political desires for control. Centralized powers—global forums, big tech, financial interests—prefer recurring revenue and dependency. If you own it, you have sovereignty. If you rent, they can change terms, censor content, raise prices, or cut you off. This mirrors broader patterns I’ve seen in politics, aerospace, and culture. In The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I discuss self-reliance and imposing your will on circumstances rather than leasing your life from others.¹² The same principle applies here. Look at the excitement around SpaceX’s IPO. People want to own a piece of something real, not just subscribe to access.¹³

During RV travels with my wife across the country—to the Space Coast, Gettysburg, or anywhere the road takes us—I’m reminded why ownership matters. There’s nothing like having your own bed, your own refrigerator with cold drinks and snacks, your own clean bathroom instead of relying on gas station facilities. You rent the campsite, but your stuff is yours. It provides a sense of autonomy even while moving. The same goes for books. I own physical copies. I like touching them, flipping pages, keeping them in my personal library. Downloading or using Audible has its convenience, but it lacks permanence. I’m not a fan of leasing intellectual or cultural space.¹⁴

Power outages here in Ohio—whether from big storms rolling up from the Gulf, tornadoes, or winter events—highlight another advantage. With a generator, you could still play a DVD, Blu-ray, or CD. Streaming dies without connectivity. Personal libraries provide resilience. Vinyl’s comeback, despite being larger and more fragile than CDs, shows the depth of this desire. Records take up space, can warp or scratch, and require more care, yet people buy them enthusiastically.¹⁵

The speed of change amazes me. My car still has a working CD player, yet new vehicles rarely include them. Manufacturers followed the connectivity and subscription trend. But the backlash is real. Who still makes CDs? Companies like Disc Makers and Bison Disc continue short-run and replication services for artists and collectors. Demand persists for reissues, independent releases, and audiophile formats. Given vinyl’s proof of concept, a modest CD revival is plausible—especially for durability, portability, and offline use. Collectors value the format’s sound quality and convenience over vinyl’s ritual.¹⁶

This hunger extends beyond music to the core of human nature. Americans especially cherish property rights. We want our homes, cars, guns, private spaces, and cultural artifacts that reflect our identity. Progressive globalist ideas of shared everything clash with that reality. Socialism’s communal experiments fail because they ignore our drive to build legacies. Music is deeply personal. The songs that shaped your youth, the albums discovered on your own—they become part of you. Renting them feels like renting your memories.¹⁷

I explained all this to that young person over lunch. They had recently bought a vinyl album at Target and were intrigued by the concept of true ownership. CDs seemed novel again. It’s not about rejecting technology—streaming has its place for discovery and variety. But the default shouldn’t be perpetual rental. Ownership provides resilience, no algorithmic control over your playlist, and the satisfaction of pointing to a shelf and saying, “That’s mine.” During family trips, we play our own music without signal drops or interruptions from navigation or texts.¹⁸

The WEF vision assumes adaptation to renting. Evidence suggests otherwise. Vinyl’s 19-year growth streak, physical media’s persistence, and resistance to woke content in Hollywood all signal a market shift. Big tech and entertainment pushed subscription models and certain narratives, alienating audiences. People retreat to what they can control.¹⁹

In my own life, this philosophy runs deep—from early experiences in Cincinnati to aerospace program management. Consultants and rented expertise come and go, but teams that own the mission endure—the same with culture. We want music, books, and stories that belong to us. In The Politics of Heaven, I explore these threads of spiritual, cultural, and economic sovereignty. Ownership isn’t greed; it’s dignity and agency.²⁰

There’s room for balance. Physical formats like vinyl and CDs offer tangible connection. Digital provides access. But forcing everything into rental models driven by political control rather than pure market demand has backfired. The serpent of ownership uncoils in the face of forced renting. People choose it every time they buy a record, a CD, a book, or build their own space. That’s the real future—not a 2030 rented utopia, but timeless human nature asserting itself.

I still pop in a CD when I drive. It works perfectly. And it’s mine. That feeling matters more than any subscription pitch. As I dictate this overlooking the Great Miami River or from the RV, I’m reminded how personal autonomy anchors everything. The market is speaking loudly. Vinyl proves it. CDs could follow. And humans will keep choosing what they can truly call their own—making tomorrow a better day through ownership, not rental.²¹

Footnotes

¹ World Economic Forum / Ida Auken essay “Welcome to 2030” (2016).

² Personal observation from recent interaction.

³ Philips/Sony CD development history, 1979–1982 standardization.

⁴ CD advantages for portability and reliability.

⁵ Retail observations at Walmart, Cracker Barrel, and Target.

⁶ RIAA 2025 Year-End Report: Vinyl $1B+, 46.8M units vs. CDs 29.5M.

⁷ Gen Z/millennial trends in tactile media.

⁸ WEF ownership predictions and criticism.

⁹ Family library of CDs.

¹⁰ Technical history of CD format.

¹¹ Streaming impact on physical media sales.

¹² The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business Principles.

¹³ SpaceX IPO and ownership desire.

¹⁴ RV travel and book ownership reflections.

¹⁵ Vinyl drawbacks vs. appeal.

¹⁶ Current CD manufacturing (Disc Makers, etc.) and revival potential.

¹⁷ Human nature and property rights.

¹⁸ Conversation with a young person.

¹⁹ Cultural and market backlash.

²⁰ Ties to The Politics of Heaven.

²¹ Closing personal philosophy.

Bibliography

•  Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). 2025 Year-End Recorded Music Revenue Report.

•  World Economic Forum. Ida Auken, “Welcome to 2030” (2016).

•  Philips/Sony historical documentation on CD development.

•  Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and The Politics of Heaven.

•  Industry reports on physical media trends (Disc Makers, retail observations).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

The Fragility of Principles: Thomas Massie’s Defeat and the Consolidation of the Republican Party Under Trump

I have watched with a mixture of frustration and clarity as long-standing debates within conservative circles have reached a decisive inflection point. The recent primary defeat of Representative Thomas Massie in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District exemplifies more than a personal political loss; it reveals the deep fractures and necessary realignments within the Republican Party.  Massie, long viewed by some as a principled libertarian voice, fell to a Trump-endorsed challenger in what became the most expensive U.S. House primary in history, underscoring the power of unified vision over fragmented ideological purity tests. 

For years, I have engaged with Tea Party activists, libertarians, and constitutional conservatives who emphasized fiscal restraint, limited government, and individual liberties. Many of these individuals rode the wave of Ron Paul’s campaigns, advocating for auditing the Federal Reserve, ending endless wars, and resisting federal overreach. I respected their sincerity. Sitting in rooms with them, discussing authentic pursuit of justice and righteousness, felt energizing. Yet, when push came to shove—particularly regarding figures like Rand Paul or broader strategic choices—divergences emerged. Some pivoted toward marijuana legalization as a liberty issue, a stance I did not share, viewing it through the lens of cultural and societal impacts rather than pure non-intervention. These debates were healthy in theory, but they exposed a risk: when ideological consistency becomes absolutist, it can blind one to practical coalitions needed for victory. 

Massie’s loss was not merely about one congressman. It represented the rejection of a faction that, while waving the banner of conservatism, often aligned tactically against the broader MAGA movement’s momentum. Trump has systematically challenged RINO elements—Republicans In Name Only—who prioritize institutional comfort over transformative change. Massie’s record included criticism of Trump’s foreign policy, notably regarding Iran, and pushed for greater transparency on the Jeffrey Epstein files.  While transparency in government is vital, the selective emphasis by some critics on Epstein served as a wedge. I have long opposed pedophilia and elite exploitation networks in all forms. Epstein’s crimes were horrific, involving powerful figures across parties, including Bill Clinton’s documented flights and associations. Yet, the narrative weaponized against Trump—that mere proximity or old social ties equated to complicity—echoed left-wing media tactics designed to erode his base. 

I recall the Epstein files’ long shadow. Investigations and releases have highlighted a web of intelligence ties, blackmail potential, and compromised elites. Massie and others advocated for full disclosure, naming figures like Leon Black, Jes Staley, and Leslie Wexner in congressional settings.  This work deserves acknowledgment for its efforts to seek justice for victims. However, using it to paint Trump as equally tainted ignores key distinctions. Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after reports of inappropriate conduct, and no credible evidence from the files has substantiated direct involvement in criminal acts matching the scale pushed in opposition narratives. The intelligence community’s history of leveraging such operations for influence—potentially involving Mossad or other actors—complicates the picture further, but does not implicate every associate equally. 

The pedophilia smear tactic is particularly insidious. It conflates association with guilt and demands one-size-fits-all condemnation. Real pedophilia cases in schools, involving teachers and administrators abusing minors, represent a clear societal failure demanding prosecution. Epstein’s network, tied to intelligence gathering and elite protection rackets, differs in scope and intent. To equate Trump’s peripheral past connections with active participation is a distortion. Democrats and their allies have projected their own vulnerabilities—Clinton’s Lolita Express logs, for instance—onto Trump while rallying around figures with documented issues. This is not principled conservatism; it is narrative warfare meant to fracture the right. 

I have known Tea Party types for years who now express dismay at Trump’s dominance. They lament the loss of “pure” constitutionalism, seeing Massie as a bulwark. Yet, their approach often mirrors a live-and-let-die libertarianism that fails in a polarized republic. Government is not absent; it is captured. Endless wars serve the military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower warned. Fiscal irresponsibility balloons debt. Cultural decay advances through institutions. Standing against everything without building winning coalitions achieves little. Trump’s agenda—securing borders, renegotiating trade, challenging bureaucratic elites, and exposing corruption—has delivered measurable shifts. His endorsements carry weight because they signal alignment with a movement that wins. 

Consider parallel dynamics in Ohio. Efforts to undermine Vivek Ramaswamy’s path to the gubernatorial nomination echoed the anti-Massie resistance, yet Vivek prevailed as a Trump-aligned innovator.  Critics painted him as inauthentic or overly ambitious, much like Massie supporters decried Trump’s pragmatism. These attacks often stem from the same fragility: discomfort with the compromises of victory. I prefer winning. I have sat with governors and officials, even those with whom I disagreed, to extract leverage for better outcomes—such as Second Amendment protections, business-friendly policies, or course corrections on past errors like COVID mandates. Shaking “potatoes out of the bag,” as practical politics demands, requires engagement rather than perpetual outsider protest.

Massie’s supporters invoked his consistency: voting against bloated spending, questioning foreign entanglements, and pressing Epstein transparency. These are defensible in isolation. However, consistency without adaptability risks irrelevance. The Republican Party under Trump has absorbed Tea Party energies while directing them toward electoral success. Massie’s opposition to key Trump priorities, including aspects of Israel policy and domestic agenda items, positioned him as an obstacle rather than an asset.  Pro-Israel stances, for many, reflect strategic alliances against shared threats like radical Islamism, not blind militarism. Destroying threats like Iran’s nuclear ambitions or Hamas infrastructure aligns with strength-through-peace realism, not forever wars.

The anti-Trump sentiment within libertarian-leaning circles often imports left-leaning narratives: Trump as sociopath, pedophile enabler, or authoritarian. These claims crumble under scrutiny. The Epstein files, while revealing, have not produced the smoking gun against Trump that detractors hoped. Media coordination, deep-state resistance, and selective leaks suggest information warfare rather than an organic scandal. I reject the notion that supporting Trump equates to endorsing corruption. Pedophilia is abhorrent regardless of politics. But weaponizing incomplete files to divide conservatives aids Democrats like those in Ohio—David Pepper, Mark Elias—who thrive on Republican infighting. 

My experience in media and commentary has reinforced independence. No sponsors dictate my views. I engage Republicans to strengthen the party, pushing the Trump agenda of America First: economic nationalism, cultural preservation, institutional reform. This includes bringing in talent like Ramaswamy, whose entrepreneurial background complements policy depth. Critics who cheered potential assassinations or chaos reveal their preference for complaint over construction. They validate existence through opposition, not governance.

The Tea Party’s early promise—fiscal hawkishness, constitutional fidelity—morphed for some into anti-Trump zealotry. Ron Paul enthusiasts who favored him or Cruz over Trump in 2016 often cited non-interventionism. Trump’s record, however, includes the Abraham Accords, no new major wars initiated, and pressure on allies to share the burden. Massie’s criticisms of Iran policy in Trump’s second term highlighted tensions, yet strategic destruction of threats differs from neoconservative nation-building. 

Epstein’s case warrants full accountability. Networks involving intelligence agencies, global elites, and blackmail compromise sovereignty—Massie’s efforts to name implicated figures advanced public knowledge. Yet, selective outrage—ignoring Clinton, Gates, or others while fixating on Trump—betrays bias. The files’ slow release, redactions, and lack of mass arrests point to institutional protection rather than partisan exoneration. Victims deserve justice beyond political theater. 

Broader lessons emerge. Republican success demands unity against Democrats, not self-cannibalization. Democrats coordinate despite ideological extremes; Republicans historically fracture. Trump’s endorsements demonstrate voter preference for loyalty to results over rhetoric. Massie’s defeat, alongside similar purges, signals a party’s maturation: one prioritizing victory. 

I support a strong Republican Party advancing Trump-era priorities: border security, energy dominance, deregulation, and exposing elite rot. Libertarian purity has value in discourse but falters in governance. Coalitions require compromise—agreeing on enough to defeat the left. Enemies are clear: progressive policies eroding liberties, economic socialism, and cultural Marxism. Internal division aids them.

Friends from Tea Party days feel betrayed by my stance. I value their sincerity but choose logic. Winning requires embracing imperfect vehicles for larger goals. Trump’s resilience, despite lawfare and smears, proves the base’s discernment. Associating him with Epstein pedophilia networks is a sucker play, buying media manipulation. Real pedophilia demands action across society—schools, churches, elites—not selective political hits.

In Ohio and nationally, patterns repeat. Anti-Vivek efforts mirrored anti-Massie ones, yet results favored consolidation. I engage with officials who disagree for incremental wins, as with past governors on gun rights or business recovery. Perpetual opposition yields nothing; leverage does.

The Epstein distraction tactic failed to derail Trump previously and will continue failing. Files reveal systemic corruption, but Trump’s distance from core criminality holds. This is not denial but contextual realism. One-size-fits-all approaches ignore nuances: Epstein as an intelligence asset versus schoolyard predators.

Ultimately, Massie’s fall illustrates the limits of rebellion without broader buy-in. Principles matter, but so does efficacy. I chose the winning team, pulling diverse conservatives into a victorious framework. Democrats are the primary adversary. Strengthening the GOP under Trump advances that fight. Libertarians who cannot adapt risk marginalization. Victory builds better days—secure borders, a prosperous economy, accountable elites. This path, though imperfect, delivers where isolation does not. 

Footnotes

¹ Primary results and spending data from AP and NPR reporting, May 2026.

² Massie’s statements on Epstein files, ABC and congressional records, 2025-2026.

³ Trump-Massie history, NBC and WSJ timelines.

⁴ Ohio gubernatorial primary outcomes, BBC and NBC, May 2026.

⁵ Broader discussions on the military-industrial complex drawn from Eisenhower’s Farewell Address and contemporary analyses.

Additional footnotes reference public records on Epstein associates, voting histories, and party platforms.

Bibliography for Further Reading

•  Associated Press. “Takeaways from Tuesday’s Primaries: Massie’s Loss Leaves No Doubt About Trump’s Power Over the GOP.” May 2026.

•  NPR. “Endorsed by Trump, Ed Gallrein Defeats Rep. Thomas Massie.” May 19, 2026.

•  The Hill. “Massie, Khanna Spotted 6 Individuals ‘Likely Incriminated’ in Epstein Files.” February 2026.

•  CBS Austin. “Lawmaker Names Three Men from the Epstein Files.” February 2026.

•  Wall Street Journal. “Thomas Massie’s Lonely and Expensive Fight Against Trump.” May 2026.

•  NBC News. “Rep. Thomas Massie Confronts the Full Force of Trump’s Wrath.” May 2026.

•  BBC. “Vivek Ramaswamy Wins Republican Nomination for Ohio Governor.” May 2026.

•  Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio Gubernatorial Election.” (For primary data).

•  Forbes. “Rep. Thomas Massie Loses Primary After Trump Nemesis Campaign.” May 2026.

•  Reuters. “Trump Purges Another Republican Critic with Massie Defeat.” May 2026.

•  Additional sources: Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address; Ron Paul campaign literature 2008-2012; Books on intelligence and blackmail operations (e.g., public Epstein court documents); Analyses of the Tea Party movement in “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” by Theda Skocpol.

•  Further reading: Congressional voting records via GovTrack; Epstein file releases via DOJ archives; Trump policy achievements 2017-2021 and post-2024.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

The Litigation Profiteers: How Election Lawyers and Government Legal Firms Thrive on Political Chaos and Taxpayer Funds

As I drove past the law practice in Beckett Ridge the other day, I noticed the big sign out front supporting Cindy Carpenter in the Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner. It struck me as odd. The lawyer who runs that firm shows up at Republican events, associates with Republican circles, and presents himself as one of us. Yet here he was, publicly backing a candidate the party had dumped in favor of its endorsed choice, Michael Ryan. That sign crystallized something I’ve observed for years in Ohio politics: certain legal professionals operate in the shadows, injecting themselves into local disputes not out of ideological consistency but because chaos creates billable hours. This isn’t isolated to one small firm or one county. It scales up dramatically when you reach the national level, where figures like Marc Elias have built entire practices—and substantial wealth—by turning election law into a high-volume litigation machine that drains public resources while advancing partisan goals. What follows is my endeavor to shed light on this system, drawing on personal experiences in Ohio and broader patterns affecting taxpayers nationwide. 

Marc Elias, the prominent Democratic election law attorney (often referred to in shorthand as “Mark” in casual conversation), stands as the archetype of this phenomenon. Elias, a partner at Elias Law Group, and is a direct supporter of Amy Acton in Ohio, which he founded after leaving Perkins Coie in 2021, has positioned himself as the go-to litigator for voting rights challenges. He founded Democracy Docket in 2020 as a platform to track and analyze these cases, and his firm has been extraordinarily active. In October 2025, Elias publicly stated that his team of fewer than 60 lawyers was litigating 63 voting and election cases across 30 states. By May 2026, that number had climbed to 85 cases in 43 states plus the District of Columbia. His side claims victories in the overwhelming majority of post-2020 challenges to Republican-backed election measures, framing them as defenses against “voter suppression.” Critics, however, see a deliberate strategy of lawfare: filing lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions to force states, counties, and local governments to expend vast sums to defend laws that enjoy broad public support, such as voter ID requirements. Elias himself has acknowledged the volume, noting in one Democracy Docket piece that his firm’s work is relentless and expanding. 

This isn’t new for Elias. In 2020, he led the Democratic legal response to more than 60 lawsuits filed by Donald Trump and his allies challenging election results. Nearly all of those suits failed, often on procedural grounds or for lack of evidence. Elias’s team prevailed in the lion’s share, cementing his reputation. But the pattern predates 2020. He has challenged voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, ballot-collection rules, and redistricting efforts in dozens of states. In Ohio specifically, Elias Law Group filed suit in January 2023 against House Bill 458, signed by Republican Governor Mike DeWine. The law included photo voter ID requirements and other provisions that the plaintiffs—groups like the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, Ohio Federation of Teachers, Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans, and Union Veterans Council—called “voter suppression.” The suit argued the measures disproportionately harmed young, elderly, Black, military, and overseas voters. Elias’s firm has also targeted Ohio’s rules on drop boxes and foreign funding in ballot measures. These actions align with a national playbook: challenge decentralized election administration in as many venues as possible, knowing that even if many suits are dismissed, the cumulative cost to defenders mounts. 

What makes this infrastructure so effective—and so corrosive—is the decentralized nature of American elections. Unlike a centralized national system, voting rules are set and administered at the state and county levels. A single law, such as Ohio’s voter ID requirement or restrictions on “Golden Week” early voting and registration (which Elias’s earlier work also targeted), can trigger parallel lawsuits in federal and state courts. Each filing forces election officials, secretaries of state, and attorneys general to respond. Defense isn’t cheap. Routine election litigation for a state or county can run between $50,000 and $250,000 per case, according to estimates from officials who have faced these challenges. When emergency injunctions, appeals, and discovery are involved, costs balloon into the hundreds of thousands or even millions per major dispute. Multiply that across dozens or hundreds of suits nationwide, and the taxpayer burden becomes enormous. Many of these expenses are buried in general budgets, election administration line items, or outside counsel contracts rather than isolated as “litigation defense.” There is no national requirement to itemize plaintiff-specific legal fees, making the full picture opaque. Reporters rarely dig into the granular accounting, so the public seldom sees the true price tag. 

I have seen this dynamic play out up close in Ohio. During my involvement with local issues, particularly around Lakota Local Schools in Butler County, I witnessed how legal strategies can be weaponized to remove elected officials who don’t align with certain interests. A school board member endorsed by the Republican Party faced removal efforts involving coordinated complaints, legal maneuvering, and outside pressure. The board ultimately acted against her amid disputes over absences and other procedural issues. Public records battles followed, including a case that reached the Ohio Supreme Court, where Lakota was ordered to pay thousands in fees for failing to promptly release documents related to legal spending and threats of litigation. The district also settled other suits involving residents barred from speaking at meetings, covering plaintiff legal fees. These aren’t abstract costs. They come out of the same budgets funded by local property taxes—the very taxes that already strain families and businesses. School boards negotiate collective bargaining agreements with unions, and the legalisms involved in those contracts, disputes, and related litigation generate substantial revenue for outside firms. Chaos in the public school system, whether over board composition, curriculum, or operations, keeps the meter running. 

The same lawyer I saw with the Carpenter sign had previously inserted himself into the school board removal effort. He helped craft or advise on the legal strategy that contributed to ousting a Republican-backed member. It surprised me at first—someone who attends Republican events playing along with what appeared to be an effort to shift the board toward more liberal control. But it makes sense once you follow the money. Law firms that specialize in government work—whether at the school board, county, or state level—thrive when there is perpetual conflict. They represent municipalities in defense matters, advise on contracts, and sometimes moonlight on partisan challenges. The incentive is clear: more lawsuits mean more retainers, more billable hours, more settlements. In Lakota’s case, the legal spend tied to board disputes and public records requests added up quickly, all ultimately borne by taxpayers.

This pattern repeats at the state and national scale. Elias’s firm has received tens of millions in payments from Democratic committees and campaigns. OpenSecrets data for the 2024 cycle alone shows Elias Law Group receiving over $40 million in legal services from various Democratic entities. These funds don’t come from thin air; they originate with donors who expect results in the form of favorable court rulings, delayed or blocked reforms, and sustained pressure on Republican-led election administrations. When states settle early to avoid mounting defense costs—as some attorneys general have done rather than fight every challenge to the bitter end—the litigation achieves its strategic goal without a full trial. The threat of bankruptcy through legal fees is real for smaller jurisdictions. Communities facing multiple simultaneous suits often lack the resources to defend aggressively, leading to procedural changes or policy retreats that might not have occurred on the merits. 

Critics of voter ID and other common-sense reforms frequently point to the absence of widespread fraud findings in court as proof that the measures are unnecessary. But that misses the point. Many challenges never reach a full evidentiary hearing on fraud because the sheer expense of litigation forces capitulation or dismissal on narrower grounds. Elias and similar litigators understand this leverage perfectly. They file suits knowing that even meritless claims impose real costs. One notable example involved sanctions against Elias and co-counsel. In a Texas case concerning the elimination of straight-ticket voting, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sanctioned the team for filing redundant and misleading motions. The court ordered payment of opposing attorney fees and double costs, describing the conduct as problematic. While Elias’s defenders called it a technicality or good-faith error, the episode illustrates how aggressive tactics can cross lines—and still generate fees along the way. A federal court in another context also addressed Elias-related conduct with fee-shifting orders. 

The broader legal profession has learned to mine government budgets in similar ways. Public sector collective bargaining, school board disputes, redistricting battles, and election administration all require specialized counsel. Firms embed themselves in these ecosystems, often representing both sides of the table at different times. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle: policies that invite litigation create demand for lawyers; lawyers file suits that generate more litigation; governments pay to defend or settle, raising taxes or cutting services elsewhere. Property taxes, in particular, become a reliable revenue stream for these activities because they are local and somewhat insulated from immediate voter backlash. In Ohio, where property taxes fund much of local government and schools, the inability to rationalize budgets amid endless legal challenges keeps rates elevated. Media rarely connect the dots between litigation infrastructure and tax burdens, but the connection is direct.

I’ve dealt with my share of lawyers and consultants lately, both personally and in observing public affairs. They are expensive—often prohibitively so. They jump between contracts, charge premium rates, and extract significant value from the top of any deal or dispute. When legal issues arise, they can drain bank accounts with astonishing speed. In government contexts, this dynamic is amplified because the payer is diffuse: the taxpayer. Most citizens don’t have the expertise or resources to challenge the system themselves. Self-representation is possible but risky and time-consuming; hiring specialists is the default for institutions. Judges, many of whom come from the same legal circles or socialize with attorneys at events, often defer to the professionals. The result is a clubby environment where loyalty to the bar most of the time trumps accountability to the public.

Nationally, the scale is staggering. Democracy Docket’s own tracking shows hundreds of voting and election lawsuits filed in recent cycles—228 in 2024 alone, part of a total of 306 from early 2023 through Election Day. While Elias frames these as necessary defenses of democracy, the cumulative burden of defense falls on public coffers. States like Texas have spent millions defending voter ID and redistricting laws over the years. North Carolina expended roughly $5 million on voter ID litigation between 2011 and 2016. Local Voting Rights Act Section 2 suits have cost jurisdictions millions apiece in defense and settlements—Charleston County, South Carolina, spent $2 million unsuccessfully; Yakima, Washington, nearly $3 million. These figures represent conservative estimates; appeals and repeated filings multiply the impact. When aggregated across the country, the high single digits of millions—or likely far more—disappear into budgets without clear public accounting. 

Elias’s involvement in Ohio is not abstract. Beyond the 2023 HB 458 challenge, his network has engaged with issues such as foreign money in ballot campaigns and drop box rules. He has also sued to overturn certain restrictions on foreign nationals’ spending in Ohio ballot measures. These actions, while presented as principled stands for access, have the practical effect of complicating administration and forcing expenditure. Meanwhile, at the local level, analogous tactics play out in school boards and county commissions. The removal of a Republican-endorsed school board member in Lakota, the public records fights, and the legal maneuvering around board composition all illustrate how law can be used to reshape governance without direct voter input at the ballot box. The lawyer with the Carpenter sign understood the game: support the candidate who sustains the ecosystem of disputes.

This is not to say every lawsuit is frivolous or that voting rights concerns are imaginary. Legitimate disputes exist, and courts rightly resolve them. But the volume, the targeting of popular reforms like voter ID (supported by large majorities in polls), and the financial incentives create a corrosive feedback loop. Democrats benefit from the chaos because it undermines Republican-led integrity measures. Law firms benefit regardless of the outcome because fees accrue during the process. Taxpayers lose either way—directly through documented legal bills and indirectly through higher taxes, diverted election funds, and eroded trust. When cases settle or procedural changes are mandated to avoid further expense, the public rarely sees the full ledger.

The decentralized structure of elections is a feature of federalism, but it becomes a vulnerability when exploited systematically. Each county must defend its own processes. State attorneys general face a barrage. The strategy is clear: file enough suits to overwhelm capacity, force settlements, and normalize the idea that basic safeguards are legally suspect. Elias has coordinated responses to dozens of cases, and affiliated litigation has filed over 100 suits in a single year. His personal involvement in 64 election cases during the 2020-2021 period is well-documented. The goal, from the critic’s perspective, is not merely to win discrete cases but to make enforcement of election laws so costly that officials stop trying.

Personal experiences reinforce the systemic view. Dealing with consultants and attorneys in various contexts has shown me how quickly costs escalate. They take a large cut off the top, move from job to job, and thrive on complexity. In government, this is magnified. School board members who push back against the status quo often find themselves targeted legally. Elected officials hesitate to fight because they fear draining community resources. The result is a shadow governance where law firms exert outsized influence.

To break the cycle, we need structural changes. Stronger voter ID laws with clear, unambiguous standards reduce litigation fodder. Meaningful sanctions for abusive filings, greater transparency in government legal spending, and centralized tracking of litigation costs would help. Term limits or ethics rules for government attorneys might limit revolving-door incentives. Most importantly, voters must recognize that these “phantom costs” are real and fund them through taxes. Integrity in elections isn’t free, but neither is the endless litigation that undermines it.

As someone who has watched this play out from the ground level in Ohio—seeing yard signs that reveal divided loyalties, school board battles that consume resources, and national players like Elias shaping the battlefield—I believe the public deserves better. The litigation infrastructure built on chaos benefits a small class of professionals at the expense of representative government. Taxpayers foot the bill, often without realizing the full scope. Shining a light on these practices, demanding accountability, and supporting reforms that prioritize clarity over ambiguity are essential. Otherwise, the parasites will continue to thrive while the body politic weakens. We have the tools to fix it; what remains is the will to use them.

Footnotes

1.  Personal observation of law practice signage and political involvement in Butler County, Ohio, 2026 primary context.

2.  Democracy Docket reports and Elias public statements on case volume.

3.  Ohio Capital Journal coverage of HB 458 lawsuit filed by Elias Law Group.

4.  Estimates drawn from public official reports and historical litigation defense data (e.g., Texas, North Carolina voter ID cases).

5.  Ohio Supreme Court ruling in Lakota Local Schools public records case, 2024.

6.  OpenSecrets vendor payment data for Elias Law Group, 2024 cycle.

7.  Fifth Circuit sanctions order in Texas straight-ticket voting litigation.

8.  Washington Post compilation of election-related public expenditures.

9.  Additional sources: Wikipedia entry on Marc Elias; Brennan Center and Campaign Legal Center litigation trackers; local Butler County reporting on Carpenter/Ryan primary and Lakota board disputes.

Bibliography

•  Elias, Marc. Various articles, Democracy Docket (2020–2026).

•  “Marc Elias,” Wikipedia.

•  Ohio Capital Journal articles on Elias Law Group Ohio lawsuits (2023).

•  OpenSecrets.org vendor profile: Elias Law Group.

•  Washington Post, “Trump’s false election claims cost taxpayers over $500 million” (2021, updated analyses).

•  Court documents: Fifth Circuit sanctions ruling; Ohio Supreme Court Lakota records case (2024).

•  Additional reporting: Cincinnati Enquirer, WLWT, Ballotpedia on Butler County and Lakota Local Schools.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Michael Ryan Wins in the Primary for Butler County Commissioner: What a victory of 72% over 28% says about political reality

Michael Ryan’s decisive victory in the 2026 Butler County Republican primary for commissioner marks a significant shift in local politics, reflecting voter demand for genuine conservatism, accountability, and fresh leadership. I have followed these races closely for years, and this outcome stands out as a clear repudiation of entitlement politics and a triumph for the kind of candidate who earns support through hard work and integrity. With final unofficial results showing Ryan capturing approximately 72% of the vote to Cindy Carpenter’s 28%, the primary essentially decides the seat in this heavily Republican county. 

Butler County, Ohio, is in the southwestern part of the state, encompassing communities such as Hamilton, Middletown, Fairfield, and Oxford (home to Miami University), as well as numerous townships. Its population exceeds 390,000, with a strong manufacturing and agricultural base alongside growing suburban development. The Board of Commissioners oversees a substantial budget, infrastructure projects, economic development, public safety, and human services. For decades, the board has operated under Republican dominance, making the GOP primary the real contest. Winning it virtually guarantees victory in November against the unopposed Democrat Mike Miller. 

Cindy Carpenter had served as commissioner since 2011 and was seeking a fifth term. Her tenure focused on human services, public health, and fiscal matters, but it was marred by controversies that alienated many in the party base. Incidents included a heated confrontation at a Miami University-area apartment complex involving her granddaughter, where she was accused of leveraging her position, using inappropriate language, and displaying aggressive behavior captured on video. Investigations cleared her of criminal wrongdoing but highlighted conduct deemed “distasteful” and “beneath her elected position.” Additional complaints arose, including allegations of aggressive conduct at a housing coalition meeting. Even the county sheriff publicly expressed concerns about her behavior.

A particularly damaging episode involved Carpenter campaigning for a Democrat in the Middletown mayoral race, crossing party lines in ways that many viewed as disloyal. This move, combined with her decision not to seek the Butler County Republican Party endorsement, signaled a disconnect. She appeared to operate with an entitled mindset, assuming incumbency alone would carry her through. Her campaign signs, some in blue tones reminiscent of Democratic aesthetics, and limited fundraising—only about $7,700 compared to Ryan’s over $46,000—underscored a lack of broad support. 

In contrast, Michael Ryan entered the race as a former Hamilton City Council member with a background in business and community service. He positioned himself as a true conservative caretaker focused on fiscal responsibility, job creation, lower taxes, and practical governance. Ryan methodically built support: he secured the Republican Party endorsement with a striking 71% in the first round of voting, an early and historic show of strength. Major figures lined up behind him, including Auditor Nancy Nix, who endorsed him at a fundraiser when it still carried risk; Congressman Warren Davidson; State Representative Thomas Hall; and others, such as George Lang. These endorsements validated his approach and reassured voters that change could be safe and effective. 

I endorsed Ryan early, well before the primary heated up. Having known him for years, I saw in him the sincerity and dedication often missing in politics. He raised money effectively, attended events tirelessly, engaged voters across the county, and maintained a positive, bridge-building demeanor even amid challenges like sign theft. His campaign emphasized family values, economic growth, and responsiveness—qualities that resonated deeply in a county frustrated with the status quo. The watch party on primary night, held at the Premier Shooting facility with a speakeasy-style back area, overflowed with supporters. The room was packed; people had to turn sideways to navigate. Energy filled the space as results rolled in.

Congressman Warren Davidson attended and shared insights from his experience in large districts. We discussed the political savvy required at every level and how Ryan had grown into a polished figure capable of uniting people. Davidson’s presence underscored the race’s importance, and his admiration for Ryan’s development over the couple of years spoke volumes. Other supporters like Darbi Boddy added to the festive, optimistic atmosphere. It felt like a genuine celebration of earned success rather than entitlement. 

The results confirmed what grassroots momentum had suggested. With 100% of precincts reporting in unofficial tallies, Ryan’s 72%-28% margin was overwhelming and, for some, embarrassing to the incumbent. Early voting and election-day observations showed Carpenter’s team attempting a last-minute sign blitz, but it failed against organized, enthusiastic Ryan volunteers who kept their ground game strong. The Republican slate card proved crucial, as it often does; voters seeking vetted candidates found Ryan prominently featured through party processes and independent media coverage. 

This victory carries broader lessons for politics, especially local races. Party systems matter because they help aggregate preferences in a diverse society. People differ on countless details—concrete versus asphalt, tax priorities, development approaches—but effective governance requires building majorities. Dismissing the party as irrelevant or operating as a “RINO” critic while undermining it rarely succeeds. Ryan demonstrated the opposite: he worked within the system, earned endorsements through respect and effort, and presented a positive vision.

Background on Butler County’s political landscape adds context. The county has long leaned conservative, supporting Republican candidates at high levels, including strong support for Trump in recent cycles. Yet local frustrations with taxes, growth management, infrastructure, and perceived insider politics have grown. Projects involving economic development, public safety, and services will benefit from new energy. Ryan has signaled readiness to hit the ground running, with ideas on efficiency, accountability, and forward-thinking initiatives already in motion during the campaign. His experience on Hamilton council involved practical decision-making on budgets and community issues, preparing him well for county-level responsibilities. 

Roger Reynolds, former county auditor, briefly entered the race but withdrew after the party endorsement went decisively to Ryan. His last-minute alignment with Carpenter, including sign placement, highlighted lingering personal grievances but ultimately underscored the party’s unified shift. Voters rejected that approach. In an era where authenticity matters more than ever, Ryan’s consistent message and character won out.

I am proud to have supported him from the beginning. When Nancy Nix announced her endorsement at a fundraiser, it took courage because challengers to incumbents often face skepticism. Yet as momentum built—through articles, videos, conversations, and events—support snowballed. Thousands accessed information in the final days, researching Ryan’s record and deciding he represented the change they sought without chaos.

Looking ahead to the general election in November 2026, the focus shifts to implementation. Ryan will face minimal opposition, allowing emphasis on transition planning. Priorities likely include continuing fiscal stewardship amid state and federal shifts, addressing housing and development thoughtfully, enhancing public safety, and promoting economic opportunities in a region balancing rural roots with suburban expansion. His fresh perspective promises to inject optimism and results-oriented governance.

Politics at the county level profoundly affects daily life: road maintenance, emergency services, property taxes, zoning, and more. When voters sense entitlement or disconnection, they respond, as seen here. Carpenter’s campaign assumed voter inertia; Ryan proved engagement and sincerity prevail. This race reminds us that traditional political games—relying on name recognition, minimal effort, or media insiders—have diminished effectiveness in an era of an informed electorate.

The night of the primary embodied hope. A full room of dedicated Republicans, conversations with leaders like Davidson, and the visible relief and excitement on supporters’ faces painted a picture of renewal. Ryan’s wife and family shared in the moment, grounding the victory in personal commitment. For those involved in politics, the takeaway is clear: do the work, be genuine, build coalitions, and respect the process. Ryan exemplified this, turning potential obstacles into advantages.

As someone who values conservative principles of limited government, individual responsibility, and community strength, I see Ryan’s win as validation. Butler County deserves leadership that listens, acts prudently, and prioritizes residents. With the primary behind us, anticipation builds for his term starting in 2027. Many good projects and ideas wait in the wings, ready for execution.  And because of this election, a lot of good things will happen.

Footnotes

1.  Journal-News reporting on final unofficial results showing Ryan at 72%.

2.  Cincinnati Enquirer coverage of fundraising disparity and endorsements.

3.  Ballotpedia profiles on candidates and race background.

4.  Accounts of Carpenter controversies from multiple local news outlets.

5.  Party endorsement details and 71% vote.

6.  Observations from the watch party and interactions with Davidson.

Bibliography / Further Reading

•  Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio): Multiple articles on the primary, results, and candidate profiles (2026).

•  Cincinnati Enquirer: Coverage of the commissioner race, fundraising, and controversies.

•  Ballotpedia: Entries for Michael V. Ryan, Cindy Carpenter, and Butler County elections 2026.

•  Ryan for Butler official campaign site: Policy positions and updates.

•  Butler County Board of Elections: Official results and candidate filings.

•   articles on local politics and endorsements.

•  Additional context from county commissioner office descriptions and historical election data.

This primary will be remembered as a turning point in which voters chose character, preparation, and vision over incumbency. Michael Ryan earned this victory, and Butler County stands to benefit. The hard work of the campaign now transitions to governance, with high expectations and strong support. It is a positive development for the future.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

The Assassin Cole Tomas Allen: Like many Democrats, like John Wilkes Booth, when they can’t win a debate they turn into killers

I never thought I’d be sitting here reflecting on another attempt on President Trump’s life so soon after everything else that’s unfolded in this wild political landscape, but here we are, fresh off the chaos at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, 2026, where a 31-year-old Democrat named Cole Tomas Allen from Torrance, California, decided to storm the security line at the Washington Hilton with multiple guns and knives, firing shots in a desperate bid to get close enough to the president to do the unthinkable. I hate to say it, but I saw this coming in the broader sense—not the specifics of this lone actor, but the pattern of rage and violence that keeps bubbling up from the same ideological corners that have targeted Republican leaders for generations. As someone who was just at the White House with my wife a few weeks ago, experiencing the layers of security firsthand—the rope barriers, the lengthy check-in processes, the offsite staging down Connecticut Avenue a mile and a half or two miles away that forces the president into inconvenient travel for events like this—I couldn’t help but connect the dots immediately when the news broke. The security is extensive, as it should be, but it’s not foolproof against someone willing to die in those first few chaotic seconds of a rush, and that’s exactly what Allen tried to pull off. He charged the barricades, shots rang out, a Secret Service officer took a hit to the chest but thankfully had no permanent damage and was released from the hospital later, and the whole thing ended with Allen tackled and wrestled to the ground without anyone else getting hurt. Trump, ever the fighter, wanted to go back in and continue the dinner, which I totally agree with—it’s a shame they had to evacuate and crawl off the stage in that embarrassing scramble, all because some loser with a grudge thought he could rewrite history with a bullet. But what fascinates me, and what I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since, is how this fits into a much larger, darker thread running through American history, one that stretches back to Abraham Lincoln and the very founding fractures of our republic. I’ve never been one to shy away from calling things what they are, and this wasn’t some random act of madness; it was the latest chapter in a strategy of storming the line when elections and arguments fail, and it’s a Democrat thing through and through, whether they admit it or not.

Let me back up a bit and share what I saw myself, because I was physically in Washington, D.C., not long before this all occurred, and it gave me a front-row perspective that makes the whole incident hit different. My wife and I spent several hours at the White House after touring it, soaking in the people’s house as it’s meant to be, and then we wandered the city doing other things. One of the stops my wife insisted on was Ford’s Theatre, just a few blocks from the White House on 10th Street, near the FBI building, the Department of Justice, and the Smithsonian. It’s in that little historic sector off Pennsylvania Avenue, and I’ve talked to plenty of frequent D.C. visitors who’ve never bothered to go there, which I find astonishing—if you live or work in the capital, why wouldn’t you make the pilgrimage to the spot where a president was assassinated? The day we visited, they were still running plays there—they had a production of 1776 on the schedule—but before the evening show, they let visitors in for a historic tour. I stood right at the box where Lincoln was shot, and downstairs in the basement museum, there’s this incredibly detailed exhibit on everything leading up to and after the assassination. I bought a stack of books—two from NASA engineers who created a portable AC unit that’s making old expensive models obsolete, plus a whole bunch more on the Lincoln era—and they were surprisingly good reads. The museum staff had a passionate member of the historic preservation society who gave a half-hour-to-45-minute talk on stage about the theater, John Wilkes Booth, and Lincoln at the time, and it was riveting. We geeked out hard on the historical preservation side of it, my wife and I, because we love that kind of deep dive into how events shape nations. Across the street, the house where Lincoln died is preserved exactly as it was, with the bed still set up, the waiting room where his wife sat through the night, and then an adjacent building turned into a multi-story museum with elevators and creative floor knockouts to display artifacts, including a three-story stack of every book ever written about Lincoln. It puts into perspective just how pivotal he was, how the Republican Party was born to defeat slavery under his leadership, and how the forces arrayed against him—Democrats of the day, essentially the party of the South and slavery—couldn’t accept the Civil War’s outcome.

That visit stayed with me, and when I heard about Cole Tomas Allen’s rush on the Hilton security, it felt like history repeating itself most chillingly. John Wilkes Booth was an actor, a celebrity of his time, a major supporter of slavery who hated the emerging Republican Party and the way Lincoln had led the Union to victory. Just days after Lee’s surrender, with Lincoln reelected and celebrating, Booth used his knowledge of Ford’s Theatre to slip into the private box, shoot Lincoln in the back of the head, jump to the stage, breaking his leg, and flee through the back. The search that followed was intense, and Booth was eventually cornered and killed. But the characteristics? The same righteous fury, the same belief that the political opposition had to be destroyed physically because they couldn’t be beaten at the ballot box or in debate. Booth wasn’t some outlier; he embodied the Democrat rage of the era against a Republican president who dared to end their way of life. Lincoln had done nothing but win the war fair and square, preserve the Union, and free the slaves, yet the opposition framed it as provocation. Sound familiar? Fast-forward to today, and you have Cole Tomas Allen, a mechanical engineer and computer scientist by training, an independent game developer, a part-time teacher who was even named Teacher of the Month in 2024 at a tutoring company in Torrance, flying across the country to storm a security checkpoint at an event where Trump was speaking. He had a room at the Hilton, multiple weapons, and the clear intention to get into that ballroom and take his shot before anyone could react. Preliminary reports note a small political donation to a PAC supporting Kamala Harris in 2024, and while he’s described as a lone wolf with no confirmed party registration, the pattern fits: Democrat-aligned frustration boiling over into violence when rhetoric and elections don’t deliver the outcome they want. The media and left-leaning voices immediately tried to flip the script, blaming Trump’s “rhetoric” for making people upset, as if his push to make America great again is the real crime. It’s the same framing they used after the Alex Jones Sandy Hook saga, where free speech got twisted into causing harm, setting precedents to silence opposition. And after the dinner was evacuated, there was a video of invited reporters—those paragons of lowlife character—stealing bottles of wine to take home, proving the event’s attendees weren’t exactly above reproach themselves.

To really grasp why this keeps happening, I think you have to zoom out and look at the full list of presidential assassins and would-be assassins throughout our history. It’s not a short roster, and when you examine the motives, the ideologies, and the political leanings, a disturbing trend emerges that the mainstream narrative loves to ignore or downplay. Start with the successful ones: Lincoln in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, a pro-Confederate actor driven by Southern Democrat sympathies against the Republican who crushed slavery and the rebellion. Then, in 1881, James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker who claimed divine inspiration but whose act came amid the spoils system battles that Democrats often exploited. William McKinley in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist influenced by radical left-wing thought who saw the president as a symbol of capitalist oppression. John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, a self-avowed Marxist who defected to the Soviet Union and had deep ties to communist and pro-Castro groups—hardly a right-winger. Those are the four who died in office from assassins’ bullets, and already you see a pattern leaning toward radical left or anti-Republican forces.

But the attempts are where it gets even more telling, especially when you layer in the modern era and the repeated targeting of Donald Trump. There was Andrew Jackson in 1835, targeted by Richard Lawrence, who blamed the president for personal financial woes tied to Democratic Party infighting, though he was acquitted on insanity grounds. Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912, was shot by John Schrank, a saloonkeeper obsessed with third-term politics, but whose act disrupted a progressive Republican campaign. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 by Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant anarchist who hated “capitalists” and originally aimed at the mayor of Chicago, but killed the mayor instead when FDR’s motorcade shifted. Harry Truman in 1950 by Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, Puerto Rican nationalists with left-leaning independence motives who tried to storm Blair House. Gerald Ford faced two attempts in 1975: first by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a Charles Manson follower tied to radical environmental and left-wing cults, who pointed a gun at him in Sacramento; then by Sara Jane Moore, a radical leftist and associate of the Symbionese Liberation Army who fired shots in San Francisco. Ronald Reagan in 1981 by John Hinckley Jr., whose obsession was more personal but occurred amid a wave of anti-Republican sentiment. George W. Bush had plots against him involving various radicals. Barack Obama faced threats from white supremacists and others, but the volume pales compared to what Republicans endure. And then there is Trump; the list is staggering even before this latest one. In 2016, there were multiple threats and plots during the campaign. The 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania rally attempt by Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old who fired from a rooftop, grazing Trump’s ear before being taken out by the Secret Service. Another incident occurred in Florida at Trump International Golf Club, where a man with a rifle was spotted near the perimeter. Now, this 2026 incident with Allen at the Correspondents’ Dinner, charging the line like Booth slipping into the theater box. These aren’t isolated; they’re symptoms of a side that resorts to bullets when ballots fail.

What strikes me most, having walked the very floors where Lincoln breathed his last and stood at that preserved box at Ford’s Theatre, is how the psychology hasn’t changed. His hatred of Lincoln’s policies radicalized Booth, his support for slavery, and his view that Republicans were destroying the Southern way of life. He plotted meticulously, using his insider knowledge as an actor to get close. Allen, from what’s emerging, flew in from California, checked into the very hotel hosting the event, and made his move in those critical seconds when security might be distracted. The media reaction was predictable: some outlets and commentators immediately pivoted to “Trump’s rhetoric provoked this,” echoing the post-event spin that it’s somehow the president’s fault for pushing back against globalism, terrorism, and the erosion of American values. They said the same about Lincoln—don’t provoke the South, let them keep their slaves, mind your own business. It’s the same gaslighting: if conservatives challenge the status quo, any violence that follows is on us. But I’ve studied this enough, and I’ve written extensively about the spiritual dimension behind it all, because this isn’t just politics; it’s a battle for the soul of the nation. In my upcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, which dives deep into the conspiracies plotting against God’s creation and the biblical foundations of true liberty, I lay out the receipts on how these movements—Marxist persuasions that gained traction in the mid-1800s and wormed into American soil—defend their ground with threats and acts of violence when ideas fail. Lincoln loved his Bible; Trump has found a genuine relationship with God amid his political fights. The Republican Party, born to end slavery and preserve the constitutional order, stands as a bulwark, and that’s why it draws the fire. People like Booth or Allen don’t just wake up one day and decide to kill; they’re vulnerable to the demon whispers that radicalize through hatred, the kind festering in elements of the Democrat machine where debate gets shut down, voices get canceled, and when that fails, the garden hose of violence gets turned on full blast.

I spent way more time at Ford’s Theatre than I expected because the exhibit was so well done—it’s not some dusty relic but a living museum with creative displays, like the stacked books soaring three stories high, symbolizing Lincoln’s enduring legacy. The staff noticed my intense interest, and we struck up conversations; they’re passionate preservers of history, serving everybody regardless of politics, but you could sense the hush around the violence angle. They know the truth—that the same evil that possessed Booth is at work today—but nobody wants to “set off” the other side or invite more backlash. It’s pathetic, really, this self-censorship where we’re told not to hurt Democrat feelings lest they unleash more of what they’ve always done. Across from the theater, the Petersen House, where Lincoln died, is equally powerful, with the bed and rooms preserved, and the expanded museum next door telling the full story of the search and cultural impact. My wife and I relished every minute because we value what the Republican Party stands for: anti-slavery roots, freedom’s perpetuation, the defense of God-given rights articulated in the Constitution and the Bible. We left with armfuls of books and a deeper appreciation, but also a resolve not to ignore the pattern anymore.

This latest attempt with Cole Tomas Allen underscores why events like the Correspondents’ Dinner can’t keep happening off-site in unsecured hotels. The White House is the people’s house, and it deserves a big, beautiful ballroom right on the grounds under the tightest security imaginable. No more driving all over town, exposing the president and officials to these risks. Trump’s reaction—wanting to push through and continue—shows the spirit we need. The low character on display afterward, with reporters pilfering wine while a would-be assassin was still being processed, just highlights the decadence. And the irony of Democrats and media claiming Trump caused this by “poking everyone in the eye” is rich; it’s the exact argument used against Lincoln for ending slavery. If you don’t want violence, stop defending indefensible positions like radical globalism or anti-American sentiment. The answer isn’t more policy tweaks; it’s confronting the spiritual warfare at the root, the kind I explore in The Politics of Heaven, with detailed explanations of how these hatreds possess people and why Republicans like Lincoln and Trump become targets. I’ve got the receipts in that book because too many conversations end with “how can you say that?”—well, here’s how, backed by history, facts, and faith.

Reflecting on my trip to D.C.—the White House shirt I picked up, the Ford’s Theatre geek-out with my wife, the realization that this city under Republican leadership feels vibrant and alive—I’m more convinced than ever that we learn from these tragedies by accelerating the ballroom project and calling out the pattern plainly. Killer democrats don’t represent every member of the party, but their movement has a historical strain of violence when cornered, from Booth to Allen and the attempts in between. It’s not new; it’s persistent. We preserve freedom not by cowering but by building stronger, speaking truth, and understanding the spiritual battle. The show goes on at Ford’s Theatre, plays still performed where history was made, and America will endure the same way—as long as we remember the lessons from 10th Street and apply them to today’s threats. The museum there could take a week to absorb fully, and every American should visit; it’s not just history, it’s a warning and a call to vigilance.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: Details on the April 25, 2026, incident drawn from contemporaneous reports, including Al Jazeera, The Times, Time magazine, and NBC Los Angeles coverage confirming Cole Tomas Allen’s identity, background, actions, and charges.]

[Footnote 2: Ford’s Theatre and Petersen House descriptions based on personal observations and standard historic site information from the National Park Service.]

[Footnote 3: List of presidential assassination attempts compiled from historical records, including those documented in sources like the U.S. Secret Service historical overviews and books such as The Presidents and the Assassins by Ronald J. Sterba.]

[Footnote 4: Political affiliations and motives of assassins cross-referenced with biographical accounts; e.g., Booth’s Confederate ties in American Brutus by Michael W. Kauffman.]

[Footnote 5: Upcoming book reference to The Politics of Heaven by the author, forthcoming, with a full analysis of spiritual and political conspiracies.]

Bibliography:

•  Kauffman, Michael W. American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies. Random House, 2004.

•  Sterba, Ronald J. The Presidents and the Assassins: From Lincoln to Kennedy and Beyond. CreateSpace, 2015.

•  National Park Service. Ford’s Theatre Official Guide. U.S. Department of the Interior.

•  Various news reports on Cole Thomas Allen incident: Al Jazeera (April 26, 2026), The Times (April 26, 2026), Time (April 26, 2026), Washington Post live updates.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfight Guide to Business, prior edition.

•  Lincoln assassination primary sources: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by various compiled eyewitness accounts, Library of Congress archives.

•  Trump assassination attempt histories: Official Secret Service reports and public records from 2024-2026 incidents.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Amy Acton is a Drunk Disaster: She’s not qualified to run down the street, let alone run the state of Ohio

I’ve never been a fan of Amy Acton during COVID. Yeah, I wouldn’t trust her to be in charge of a milk carton, let alone the state of Ohio. What she did during COVID was disastrous. Mike DeWine can apologize all he wants—you know he picked her. She was [his health director], and the state has not recovered from her policies since then. She basically followed Dr. Fauci’s guidelines to a tee, along with the CDC. 

There should have been a lot more questioning. We elect those people in part to protect us from centralized government overreach, and the CDC was way over its skis. All the challenges in court have gone against many of the violations the CDC and state officials put forth. They had no right to do what they did, either at the federal level or in the states, and in court, they largely lost. In 2020, they lost key cases. 

Amy Acton locked down, listened to everything they said, and did everything they said—including masking, social distancing, the ridiculous lockdowns—all while questions swirled about gain-of-function research, which Dr. Fauci knew about, and the release from a Chinese lab. It was only supposed to be transmissible among bats, but the gain-of-function made it jump to people. There was a lot of manipulation, a lot of bad stuff with COVID-19. And it killed people. She played her role in it. She wrecked the state. She harmed people in the process. And she was horrendous in all facets. I’ll never forgive her for what she did.

But I find it ironic that she is upset at the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign, and her husband is upset because it’s all about politics—this 2019 release of the police visit to their house. She and her husband, Amy Acton and Eric, got into a fight over her working long hours. They had been drinking. She pulled a mirror off the wall and shattered the glass. Then she wanted to leave the house. He talked her out of it because she was going to drive drunk. Someone in the house called the police. Police arrived and defused the situation. And this was while she was the health director, which I don’t recall hearing at the time. I remember the news telling us what a great lady she was when she was locking down the state because they were in love with Dr. Fauci and centralized authority. She played it to a tee, and no one talked about this police report. 

Now it’s out because she’s running for governor. I don’t know why—she doesn’t have a good track record on anything. And yet she seems to be the best option Democrats have. So they’re trotting her out, hoping people will like her bedside manner during COVID—very bad miscalculation on their part, the Democrat Party in Ohio. But I guess if you don’t have anything else going on, you go with the stringy-haired Grateful Dead concert-goer, which is what she reminds me of. Every time I look at her face, I think of some stringy-haired person wearing a tarp at a music festival covered in mud because she’s been strung out for days.

And when people say “that’s not fair, she’s a doctor,” well, she’s also someone who got caught in this incident involving drinking and meds. A very stable person? I’ve been married for closer to 40 years—39 years now. My wife and I have never had the police come out to our house to break up a fight. It never happened. Anybody, handling your life—if you have that kind of thing happening and you can’t handle your affairs at home and you’re that reckless where police get called—it’s on your record. You’re not qualified to be governor. You might not go to jail, but you’ve shown you definitely can’t handle yourself, your family, or your liquor.

There’s a whole lot of bad things that come out of this story, and they want to make it all about “Vivek Ramaswamy should not have told anybody—this campaign is just being mean. It’s all about politics. We’re just trying to tear her down.” She gave him ammunition. She’s the one who did it. She’s the drunk one; they had to call the police on her, and she’s the one who wanted to drive drunk while she was working for the DeWine administration—before she had some gift of leftist redemption aligned with Dr. Fauci. No wonder she was so eager to appease everything he said, lock down the state, and hope all this stuff goes away so she could repair her public image. The story didn’t get out in 2019, but now it’s out because she’s running for governor. What do you expect? It’s gonna happen.

So when I call her a reckless person, not qualified to handle things, I’m basing that on my own experience. I’ve been married a long time, and the police never had to come break up my wife and me. And if they did, I probably wouldn’t be qualified to give speeches like this. You can’t manage your life like this.

This wasn’t 30 years ago—it was 2019. She was in public office at the time, and she was going to get in a car and drive drunk. Her husband had to talk her out of it, and that’s what they admitted to after the police came. That’s the kind of person who wants to be governor of Ohio. She can’t run her family, and she certainly can’t run a state. And she’s proven a track record that she takes all her orders straight from the CDC, which came straight out of the World Health Organization and Chinese Communist policy—enacted through influences like Bill Gates money and a complicit media that wanted to sell COVID. She hooked into it and made Ohio a state that many blue states followed because of her policies. She started the initiative.

Only when the DeWine administration was sued over unconstitutional lockdowns and policies enacted by Amy Acton did Mike DeWine back off and start opening up the state. He had some losses in court to get there, and he knew he was gonna lose those cases because they were major constitutional violations. The Supreme Court had to kick in. I remember the conversations—I was on many conference calls at the time with the governor and people close to the Supreme Court case. So I know exactly what went on behind the scenes. That was a disaster. Amy Acton had major egg on her face at the end of that whole escapade. People were mad at her. They were outside her house—protesting, not bringing violence, but really mad. She had to resign in disgrace, hide, and lick her wounds. 

Only six years later, she is coming back out to run for governor—as if everyone’s going to forget what she did in COVID and now this police case. When you bring it up, she wants to say maybe you’re just being political. Hey, if Vivek Ramaswamy has something in his past, people are going to bring it up. They throw everything at him—he made his money too aggressively, wasn’t always hardcore Republican, his parents are from India, born in Cincinnati. But he’s a good guy, likable, qualified. His wife is super nice. He’s a good family person. I’ve met him, talked to him lots of times—he manages his businesses, his life at home, and can be trusted to run the state of Ohio as governor. He’ll play well with the legislature and get a lot done. There’s a lot to be excited about.

Amy Acton? Not even remotely close. She can’t run down her sidewalk, let alone a state. I was joking a little when I said a milk carton. I don’t think she can run anything. She has no proven track record of running anything—only of going out sounding like a stringy-haired hippie quoting Joseph Campbell and saying we all love each other. Let’s wear a mask, stay safe, stay home, socially distance, and shut down the economy. We have to “drive down the curve.” A bunch of measurements that were completely falsified, ridiculous, hand-picked data she used every day. It was embarrassing to Mike DeWine. I always felt sorry for Jon Husted because he had to go out there as lieutenant governor and be a part of that, even though you could see it on his face. It’s something he would love to have not been a part of. But you’re in the DeWine administration, and Amy Acton was the health director listening to the CDC. Nobody knew at the time how crooked it was—although I said so. It was unconstitutional; they had no right to do it. I said so when everybody else was saying otherwise. Guess who was right in the opening hours of all those mandates? Everyone eventually caught on. The Supreme Court did exactly what I said it would do. Constitutionally, DeWine had egg on his face, and Amy Acton resigned in disgrace because everyone was ready to string her up. She ruined their lives. 

And now you find out she has problems at home. She drinks, can’t hold her liquor, and had the police called on her in 2019. That’s the kind of person she is. Is it fair to judge somebody like that? You bet it is. I don’t drink, and I’m just saying—if you go out there and have problems like that and it’s not in the ancient past, that’s a lapse in judgment that shows you can’t handle your affairs. When someone’s so scared about your behavior that they call the police on you—and it’s a family member—and you’ve got problems, there’s no way David Pepper or anybody else can explain it away. She brought it on herself. She’s the one who made it all happen, and she can only blame herself.

When you’re in a hard campaign, of course, it’s gonna come out. She’s crazy to think it won’t—and I’m sure there’s more. What I’ve said about her being a complete derelict only lends more credence to my thoughts about her initially. Anybody who thinks she deserves the benefit of the doubt—there’s probably more stories. If you show lapses in judgment once, you’re probably going to do it twice. And she had a big, important office at the time and still had a lapse in judgment. She was on medication that she didn’t even know how much she had taken—and she’s supposed to be a doctor. How is she equipped to advise about anything?

Yeah, it’s a big deal. She’s not qualified again—she’s not qualified for anything. Should she be thrown in jail? She could join the club of many people who can’t manage their lives very well. But you certainly don’t elect them to run the state. You certainly don’t make them governor. She’s a disaster. As I said, the lockdown lady is a disaster of epic proportions, and this police report only chronicles part of the history that we’re ever going to find out about. But there’s a police record on it, and if your governor has one, you probably shouldn’t be voting for her. She’s a disaster.

Definitely don’t vote for her. Vote for Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s the guy, and he’s certainly the best pick, I’d say, anywhere in the country, let alone in Ohio. 

Bibliography

1.  NBC News. “Police responded to a report of ‘domestic dispute’ at Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s home.” April 11, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/amy-acton-police-domestic-dispute-ohio-governor-candidate-home-rcna269188

2.  Ohio Capital Journal. “Amy Acton’s team defends 2019 police visit as a ‘simple argument’ amid GOP criticism.” April 15, 2026. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/04/15/amy-actons-team-defends-2019-police-visit-as-a-simple-argument-amid-gop-criticism/

3.  Reason. “Ohio Judge Deems the State’s COVID-19 Lockdown Arbitrary, Unreasonable, and Oppressive.” May 20, 2020. https://reason.com/2020/05/20/ohio-judge-deems-the-states-covid-19-lockdown-arbitrary-unreasonable-and-oppressive/

4.  Reason. “Another Judge Rules That Ohio’s COVID-19 Lockdown Is Illegal.” June 12, 2020. https://reason.com/2020/06/12/another-judge-rules-that-ohios-covid-19-lockdown-is-illegal/

5.  The Guardian. “Dr. Amy Acton resigns amid backlash against Ohio’s lockdown after leading coronavirus fight.” June 12, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/dr-amy-acton-resigns-after-helping-lead-ohio-aggressive-fight-against-coronavirus

6.  State News. “Lawyer Who Challenged Health Orders Says He’s OK Playing Role in Acton’s Departure.” August 14, 2020. https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2020-08-14/lawyer-who-challenged-health-orders-says-hes-ok-playing-role-in-actons-departure

7.  Bricker & Eckler LLP. “Governor DeWine and Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton Issue ‘Stay at Home’ Order.” March 23, 2020. https://www.bricker.com/employment-law-report/governor-dewine-and-ohio-department-of-health-director-dr-amy-acton-issue-stay-at-home-order

8.  Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” (Overview of candidates, including Amy Acton as the Democratic nominee and Vivek Ramaswamy as the Republican frontrunner.) Accessed April 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ohio_gubernatorial_election

9.  The Columbus Dispatch and other outlets (various 2026 articles on the intensifying race and attacks between Ramaswamy and Acton).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

It Was Always Only Going To Be, Vivek Ramaswamy: Amy Acton, the Lockdown Lady is a complete and total disaster

The excitement I feel about Vivek Ramaswamy running for governor of Ohio is not some fleeting campaign cheer. It is a deep, personal conviction rooted in years of watching Ohio politics from the inside, knowing the players, and seeing what has been stalled under the current administration. When I first learned Vivek wanted to run, it felt like a natural extension of everything I have observed about effective leadership in this state. I have known some of the people working quietly in the background on his behalf, and I have seen how the legislative agenda that has been bottled up under Mike DeWine would finally break loose under someone with Vivek’s energy, vision, and willingness to align with the changes happening at the national level. I have talked with Vivek directly about these things, and every conversation reinforces my belief that he is the right person at the right time.

I have been following Ohio politics for decades, and I have seen governors come and go. Some were solid, some were centrist placeholders, and a few were outright disasters. Mike DeWine has been a steady hand in many ways, but he has also represented the old guard that plays it safe, avoids bold moves, and leaves too many good ideas on the table because they might rock the boat with the establishment. That is where Vivek Ramaswamy stands apart. He is not a career politician. He built real businesses, created jobs, and proved he can execute under pressure. I see him as the perfect fit for the governor’s mansion because he brings fresh thinking to economic expansion, regulatory reform, and the kind of pro-growth policies that Ohio desperately needs after years of incrementalism. When he is in that seat, I believe we will see a vigorous, aggressive push on everything from attracting new industry to streamlining government—things that have been talked about but never fully delivered.

The primary process right now, in the spring of 2026, is noisy, as primaries always are. You have critics throwing everything at Vivek—his Indian heritage, how he made his money, his youth. I have heard it all, and I dismiss most of it as the predictable noise that comes when someone surges to the front. I supported Donald Trump long before he announced his first run in 2015. I was with him back in 1999, when he and Pat Buchanan were battling it out in the Reform Party. I have watched this cycle repeat itself with Reagan, with Trump, and now with Vivek. People who are frontrunners always draw fire. The media loves to amplify the drama because it sells advertising. Pollsters release numbers that seem tight because they sample in ways that lean one direction or another. But I have been around long enough to know that spring polling in a primary year is not the final story. By July and August, things clarify dramatically. The peripheral candidates fade, the serious ones consolidate, and the voters who matter—the ones who show up in primaries—make their choice based on substance, not sound bites.

I have spoken with Vivek about the critics, including those questioning his background or wealth. His response was straightforward and mature: if everyone is always on your side, something is wrong. That is the mark of someone who understands leadership. You do not get rattled by the noise. You win people over with results. Vivek has shown he can do that. He has been out speaking at Lincoln dinners, fundraising events, and town halls across the state. He is articulate, energetic, and has a strong partner in his wife. Those are the qualities that translate to governing. I have watched him handle crowds, including the occasional boo from a handful of people who had too much to drink at a St. Patrick’s Day event at an Irish pub where he made an unannounced appearance. The cheers far outnumbered the jeers, and he took it in stride. That is the kind of poise Ohio needs in the governor’s office.

On the other side, the Democrats’ best option is Amy Acton. That alone tells you how weak their bench is. Acton was the face of Ohio’s COVID lockdowns, and her record is one of economic devastation and overreach. She has a one-trick pony: “I’m a doctor, I care about health.” But when you look at the results, her policies crushed businesses, schools, and families. The 2019 police incident involving her husband or a family member only adds to the picture of someone whose personal life has intersected with public scrutiny in ways that raise questions about judgment. I have followed her career closely, and every time she speaks, she reinforces why she should not be anywhere near the governor’s mansion again. Polling showing her competitiveness is skewed by sampling in heavily Democratic areas like Cuyahoga County, where the same lockdown supporters still hold on to nostalgia for her “bedside manner.” But real-world results matter more than nostalgia. Ohio cannot afford another round of that.

The horse race today looks tighter than it will be in a few months because primaries are designed to be messy. You have candidates like Casey, the car guy, and Nick Fuentes-style voices on the fringes throwing darts, trying to peel off a few percentage points by questioning Vivek’s heritage or his business success. That is standard primary theater. I remember the same thing with Trump—people saying he was too much of an outsider, too wealthy, too whatever. Reagan faced it too; he was a former Democrat who had to prove himself to the base. I have never been anything but a Republican, but I respect people who evolve toward conservatism because they see the failure of the alternative. Vivek has been a Republican from early on, and he brings conservative principles with the added advantage of being young, articulate, and unburdened by decades of insider baggage. He is not a middle-grounder. He is the kind of conservative who can actually get things done because he knows how to talk to business leaders, legislators, and everyday voters.

I have roots in this state’s politics. I have consulted with candidates, watched the legislature up close, and seen how the Senate and House work together—or fail to—under different governors. Vivek already has strong relationships there. He has been building them for years through events and direct conversations. When he wins the primary, which I fully expect, those relationships will accelerate. The legislative agenda that has been stalled will move. Economic expansion will follow because business leaders trust someone who has built companies himself. Trump’s endorsement is not just symbolic. It is practical. Trump will campaign in Ohio in 2026 the way he campaigned for president because he needs strong Republican majorities at the state level to support his national agenda. He will be on the ground with Vivek, and that combination will be unstoppable.

Critics who say Vivek does not have full Republican support are the same voices who said the same about Trump in 2015 and 2016. They are lazy analysts who read polls taken in Democrat-heavy zip codes and declare the race close. Real polling—the kind that matters—is what happens when Vivek walks into a packed Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day, and the crowd cheers louder than the handful of boos. That is the energy that wins primaries and general elections. Casey the car guy and the fringe voices will get their 7 or 8 percent, but they will not have the resources, the organization, or the broad appeal to compete once the field narrows. Independents and traditional Republicans will consolidate behind the frontrunner who has Trump’s backing and a proven track record of execution.

I have been through enough cycles to know how this plays out. The Tea Party movement evolved into the MAGA movement because people got tired of centrists who talked conservatively but governed like the other side. Vivek represents the next step: a young, articulate conservative who is not afraid to challenge the status quo. He has the temperament to win over skeptics without compromising principles. His wife is a strong partner in the effort. Together, they project the kind of stability and vision Ohio needs after years of incremental leadership.

The contrast with Amy Acton could not be sharper. She is the lockdown lady who turned Ohio’s economy into a cautionary tale. Her policies hurt working families, small businesses, and schools in ways we are still recovering from. The idea that polling shows her even close is a function of media hype and skewed samples. When the real campaign begins, when Trump is in the state campaigning like it is 2024 all over again, and when Vivek is out there speaking directly to voters about jobs, freedom, and growth, the numbers will shift dramatically. That is how primaries work. The noise in spring gives way to clarity by summer.

I am excited because I see the potential for real change. I have talked with Vivek about the critics, about the primary grind, and about what governing Ohio would look like. He gets it. He knows leadership means winning people over, not just preaching to the choir. He has the resources, the relationships, and the resolve to deliver. When he is in the governor’s mansion, we will finally see the vigorous economic expansion that has been promised but never fully realized. The peripheral discussions—the heritage questions, the wealth attacks, the fringe candidates—will fall away quickly once the primary is over. Republicans will unify because the alternative is unacceptable.

That is why I support Vivek Ramaswamy without hesitation. I have been a Republican my entire life, rooting for the party even as a kid. I have watched outsiders like Trump and Reagan prove the skeptics wrong. Vivek fits that mold, but with the added advantage of being a conservative from the beginning. He is the clear frontrunner for good reason. The primary process is doing its job—vetting him, testing him, and ultimately strengthening him. By the time the general election arrives, the choice will be obvious to anyone paying attention. Ohio cannot afford another lockdown-era disaster. It needs leadership that builds, not restricts. Vivek Ramaswamy is that leader.

The horse race today is a theater. The real race will be decided by voters who show up, who listen to the candidates, and who remember what Ohio went through under the previous administration. I have confidence in the outcome because I have seen Vivek in action, talked with him personally, and watched the pieces fall into place. The critics will keep talking, but the results will speak louder. This is going to be a good year for Ohio, and I am excited to be part of it.

Footnotes

1.  Ohio Secretary of State records and public reporting on the 2026 gubernatorial primary field, including Vivek Ramaswamy’s announcement and early polling trends as of April 2026.

2.  Public statements and campaign events featuring Vivek Ramaswamy at Lincoln dinners and St. Patrick’s Day gatherings in Ohio, 2025–2026.

3.  Amy Acton’s tenure as Ohio Department of Health Director during COVID-19 lockdowns, documented in state economic impact reports and legislative hearings.

4.  2019 police incident involving Amy Acton and a family member, as reported in local Ohio news outlets and public records.

5.  Donald Trump’s endorsement of Vivek Ramaswamy for Ohio governor was announced in early 2026 campaign communications.

6.  Historical polling data from Gallup and Rasmussen on voter ID support and election integrity measures in Ohio, 2024–2026.

7.  Ohio legislative records on stalled bills under the DeWine administration, contrasted with potential reforms under a Ramaswamy governorship.

Bibliography

•  Ohio Secretary of State. 2026 Gubernatorial Primary Candidate Filings and Polling Summaries.

•  Ramaswamy, Vivek. Campaign speeches and public appearances, Ohio Lincoln dinners, 2025–2026.

•  Acton, Amy. Ohio Department of Health records and COVID policy impact assessments, 2020–2021.

•  Local news archives (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch). Coverage of the 2019 Acton family incident and the 2026 campaign developments.

•  Trump, Donald. Official endorsement statements for the 2026 Ohio governor race.

•  Pew Research Center and Gallup. Polling on election security and voter ID, 2024–2026.

•  Ohio Legislative Service Commission. Bill status reports under DeWine administration, 2022–2026.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Amanda Ortiz of West Chester, Ohio: Democrat of the Year

I warned what would happen in West Chester Township during the November 2025 election, and it’s playing out just as I said it would.  I don’t want to pick on Amanda Ortiz personally—she seems like a pleasant enough young lady, a veterinarian and mom who presented herself in a way that felt approachable and non-threatening—but the reality is that her victory as a West Chester trustee represents something much larger and more dangerous than one local race. I warned everyone during the campaign that we should have stuck with Mark Welch, the longtime trustee who had helped build West Chester into the thriving, well-managed community it had become under Republican leadership. Instead, we now have a radical Democrat on the board, and the consequences are already starting to reveal themselves in ways that should worry every taxpayer and resident who values fiscal responsibility and growth without the typical left-wing overreach. Mark Welch was the only real hedge against the lean-Democrat influences that were already creeping into township decisions, and by losing him, we have opened the door to a shift that could erode the very foundations of what made West Chester successful in the first place. I have said it before, and I will say it again here: this was not just an election loss; it was a calculated Trojan horse maneuver by the Democrats, and the proof is right there in how they celebrated it afterward.

Let me walk through exactly how this unfolded because I believe people must understand the playbook Democrats are using in Republican strongholds like Butler County, Ohio, and across the country. Amanda Ortiz ran a campaign that deliberately downplayed her partisan affiliation. She did not go door-to-door shouting that she was a Democrat. She positioned herself as a nice mom, a community-oriented professional who cared about infrastructure, parks, and listening to residents rather than developers. Her website and materials emphasized “people over business,” which sounds reasonable on the surface, but in practice, it is code for a regulatory mindset that slows growth and increases costs for everyone else. People who were moderate or independent, or even some Republicans who were tired of seeing the same faces, listened to her and thought she represented a fresh, safe choice. They got suckered, plain and simple. I heard it from so many voters after the fact—folks who admitted they had no idea she was a card-carrying Democrat until after the ballots were cast. She kept it quiet, ran as a non-partisan in a technically non-partisan race on the ballot, and relied on the fact that most people do not dig deep into local trustee races. That is how Democrats win in places like West Chester, where the population has grown rapidly, and people are busy raising families rather than following every political nuance. They sneak in under the radar, sounding rational and moderate, and only reveal their true colors once they are safely behind the lines. I have watched this strategy play out time and again, and it only benefits Democrats in Republican areas because it creates ambiguity that allows them to peel off just enough votes from the center without mobilizing the full conservative base.

The proof of how Democrats viewed this victory came shortly after the election, at the Butler County Democratic Party’s Spring 2026 Gala. They awarded Amanda Ortiz their Democrat of the Year honor, and the room was packed with the party’s heavy hitters celebrating what they openly called a monumental win. I have followed local politics long enough to know that a township trustee seat in West Chester would normally not draw this statewide and even out-of-state attention, but here it was, front and center. Governor Andy Beshear from Kentucky flew up to speak at the event, using the platform to bash Vice President JD Vance and energize the crowd. Beshear, whom I have long maintained won his own close election through questionable means involving teacher unions and irregularities out of Louisville and Lexington, was there to lend his star power to this “victory.” Amy Acton was there too—the former Ohio Health Director under Governor Mike DeWine, who became the face of the COVID lockdowns that devastated our state’s economy and small businesses. She is now running for governor herself in 2026, and her presence alongside Beshear and the rest of the “misfit toys,” as I like to call them, sent a clear message: this seat mattered to them. Kathy Wyenandt, the chair of the Butler County Democrat Party and the architect of so much of their behind-the-scenes maneuvering, was at the heart of it all. She has always been nice to me personally, cordial and polite whenever our paths cross, but I have learned over the years that her brand of niceness is strategic. When you lack the raw political power to force your agenda through head-on, you smile, you build relationships, and you slip your candidates through the cracks. That is exactly what happened with Ortiz. No one knew who she was a year before the election, yet the party machinery got her across the finish line by keeping her Democrat identity low-key and letting her play the moderate mom card.

I have talked about this construct before in my writings and on my platforms, but it bears repeating here because Amanda Ortiz embodies the new Democrat strategy in places like Butler County. Their bench is shallow. They do not have deep pools of talent or proven leaders who can win on ideas alone in conservative territory. So instead, they recruit friendly faces who can pass as independents or moderates, avoid any mention of national Democrat policies that would scare off voters, and rely on the fact that local races often fly under the radar. Ortiz herself acknowledged in her acceptance remarks how grateful she was for the support of Kathy Wyenandt and others, as without them, she would not have been elected. That is code for admitting the party did the heavy lifting while she stayed in the background as the palatable front. Meanwhile, Mark Welch had been there for years, carrying forward policies that George Lang and others had helped establish—policies that turned West Chester into a model of explosive growth, strong infrastructure, and fiscal prudence. Welch was not flashy, but he was steady. He understood the balance between development and quality of life. He had built relationships and institutional knowledge that kept the township humming. Republicans around him, influenced by advisors who thought they needed to court moderates by pairing him with Lee Wong—a candidate who leans a bit more toward the center and attracts crossover appeal—made the fatal mistake of playing it too safe. They advised Welch not to go on the attack, not to “punch Democrats in the face” by exposing Ortiz’s true affiliations and the broader agenda she represented. Instead, they tried to run a cordial, moderate campaign, assuming Butler County’s Republican lean would carry the day. That was a miscalculation, and it cost us the seat.

I remember talking with Mark Welch around election time, and he expressed readiness to move on to other things after so many years of service, but he stayed in the race largely to hold the line for the township’s future. He had been a bulwark against the kind of creeping leftward drift that Democrats specialize in once they gain a foothold. West Chester’s success did not happen by accident. It came from years of Republican-led decisions that encouraged business growth while protecting the residential quality of life. The cash reserves, the infrastructure investments, the explosive population boom—all of that was built on policies that prioritized results over ideology. But now, with a Democrat on the board, I fully expect to see that foundation tested. Democrats are not known for preserving the status quo in places like this; they tend to burn through reserves with new spending priorities, push for more regulations under the guise of “sustainability” or “equity,” and gradually shift the culture. I have seen it in other communities, and the pattern is predictable. The explosive growth that fueled West Chester’s prosperity will be at risk if the board starts listening more to activist voices than to the taxpayers who actually fund the operation. That is why this seat mattered so much to the Democrats. It was not just one trustee position; it was a crack in the armor of one of Ohio’s most reliably Republican townships. They poured resources into it, celebrated it nationally by bringing in Beshear, and used it as a rallying cry because they see it as proof that their Trojan horse model works.

Too many Republicans fell for the moderate trap. I have been vocal about this for years, and people dismiss me as the guy in the cowboy hat who shoots guns and talks tough—but they always work in the background to steer people who should listen, away, but the record shows I am right more often than not. Look at the FirstEnergy scandal a few years back, where Democrats framed legitimate energy policy debates as corruption, and Republicans got defensive instead of fighting back on principle. Some ended up in jail because they failed to defend the traditional bases of power against the incursion of renewable energy. The same dynamic played out in West Chester. Advisors told Mark Welch and the local party to play nice, to embrace moderates like Lee Wong, to avoid aggressive attacks because voters supposedly wanted civility. But history proves otherwise. Look at George Lang’s campaigns—he has always been cordial in public, willing to talk to anyone, including Kathy Wyenandt, but when it comes to winning, he knows how to draw the line and mobilize the base. Successful Republicans do not win by bleeding over Democrats; they win by energizing their own voters and exposing the opposition for what it is. Donald Trump proved this time and again. He did not play nice; he punched back, exposed weaknesses, and forced the other side to defend indefensible positions. That is how you get turnout and loyalty. Playing in the middle of the road gets you run over. I told people during the campaign that if we wanted to keep West Chester red and strong, we had to treat this race like the battle it was. Instead, the gloves stayed on, and Democrats slipped Ortiz through.

This connects directly to what is happening at higher levels, too. Amy Acton is using the same playbook in her run for governor—positioning herself as a doctor who cares about people, downplaying the economic destruction her lockdown policies caused during COVID. She destroyed small businesses, prolonged unnecessary restrictions, and Ohio still has not fully recovered in many sectors. Yet she is out there smiling, talking about “power back to the people,” and Democrats are lapping it up. Beshear’s visit to the gala was no coincidence; he sees Ohio as a battleground and this local win as a template. Kathy Wyenandt has orchestrated this model for years. She ran for state senate herself back in 2020, lost, but stayed embedded in the county party, building relationships and waiting for opportunities like this. She is nice when she needs to be because she understands power dynamics. When Republicans hold the majority, as they do in Butler County, the only way for Democrats to advance is through deception and incremental gains. Sneak in a trustee here, a school board member there, keep the races non-partisan on paper so voters do not scrutinize the D next to the name, and slowly erode the conservative advantage. It is a long game, and they are patient. Meanwhile, too many Republicans think civility will win the day. I have heard it from moderate voices: “Don’t listen to that crazy Rich Hoffman; and his cowboy hat, bullwhips and talks about punching people.” But the truth is, elections are not won by being the nicest guy in the room. They are won by showing a path to victory and fighting for it.

I have always believed that people vote for winners, not for moderates who split the difference. Trump’s success was built on that truth. He did not apologize for being aggressive; he celebrated it. Vivek Ramaswamy is going to have to learn the same lesson as his own campaign heat up. Playing nice with the establishment or trying to bleed over left-leaning voters only works if you are already in a dominant position, and even then, it is risky. In a place like Butler County, where registered Republicans far outnumber Democrats, the winning formula is to expose the Trojan horse before it crosses the gates. We should have hammered the fact that Ortiz was the Democrat Party’s chosen candidate. We should have highlighted her endorsements and the national figures waiting in the wings to celebrate her. Instead, the campaign listened to advisors who thought Lee Wong’s moderate appeal would carry the ticket. Wong brings in some crossover, sure, but at what cost? When the race tightened, that strategy left Welch vulnerable. People took for granted how good Welch had been. He had helped implement policies that kept taxes reasonable, infrastructure moving, and growth exploding. West Chester’s success was built on Republican vision, and now Democrats are positioning themselves to claim credit while quietly undermining the principles that made it possible.

Looking back, I can see the buyer’s remorse already setting in among some voters who supported Ortiz, thinking she was a safe, independent choice. Christians, especially people of faith who value traditional values and fiscal conservatism are particularly vulnerable.  We need that same clarity here. Moderates and independents who listened to Ortiz’s pitch about parks and walkability did not realize they were voting for a party that celebrates lockdown architects like Acton and out-of-state governors who benefit from questionable election practices. I stand by my view that Beshear’s first win involved enough irregularities through teacher unions and urban strongholds to tip the scales. The details from Louisville and Lexington have never been fully addressed, and this fits the pattern of Democrats resorting to deceit when ideas alone cannot prevail. Whether it is election irregularities or Trojan horse candidacies, the result is the same: power gained through misdirection rather than merit.

The interconnections here are fascinating and telling. Kathy Wyenandt, Amy Acton, Andy Beshear, and the entire Butler County Democrat machine rallied around Amanda Ortiz because they recognize a model when they see one. A minor trustee seat became their national rallying cry because it showed they could infiltrate Republican territory without triggering a full defensive response. They will copy this playbook everywhere—find a likable face, run non-partisan, keep the D quiet, and celebrate quietly at galas with big-name guests to build momentum. It worked here because Republicans underestimated the threat and overestimated the value of moderation. George Lang has shown the right way: be cordial when possible, but fight to win when it counts. I remember specific elections where challengers who got “down and dirty,” as the saying goes, came out on top because they connected with voters who want strength, not appeasement. The secret sauce is showing you are willing to win, not just participate.

As I reflect on all of this, I cannot help but reference my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. It lays out the philosophy I have lived by: in any competition, whether business or politics, you prepare for the fight, you understand the terrain, and you do not hesitate to draw when necessary. Playing nice only works if the other side respects the rules, and Democrats have shown they do not. They use sweetness as a weapon when outgunned, then reveal their agenda once inside the gates. I told everyone this would happen with Ortiz. I warned that Mark Welch’s experience and steadiness were irreplaceable in the short term. People dismissed it as over-the-top, but now the proof is in the award she received and the high-profile attendees who showed up to congratulate her. Democrats are proud of this win because it validates their shallow-bench strategy. They do not have a deep roster of stars; they have to manufacture victories like this one. That is why Beshear came from Kentucky and Acton showed up—they see it as a blueprint for flipping Ohio one local seat at a time.

The months ahead will test West Chester in ways we have not seen before. With Ortiz on the board, I expect more emphasis on “resident voices” that conveniently align with progressive priorities—more spending on social programs disguised as infrastructure, pressure to slow development under environmental pretexts, and a gradual shift away from the pro-growth policies that built our cash reserves. The explosive growth we have enjoyed will begin to be strained under new ideological weights, and the positive gains Mark Welch helped secure will be spent down. That is the Democrat nature: they inherit success and then erode it. I have seen it in school boards, county seats, and trustee races across Ohio. Non-partisan labeling only helps them in red areas because it hides the ball. Voters who lean conservative or independent think they are making a safe choice, but they are actually handing power to people whose national party pushes policies that would never win in a straight-up partisan fight here.

Republicans in Butler County and beyond need to learn the lesson: expose the Trojan horse early, attack the strategy aggressively, and mobilize the base by showing you are fighters, not moderators. Lee Wong’s approach might bring in a few crossover votes, but it leaves the door open for the very incursions we saw with Ortiz. Trump proved you win by being unapologetic. Vivek will have to internalize that as primaries approach. Amy Acton will try the nice-moderate route for governor, but the way to beat her is to knock her off her feet with the truth about lockdowns and economic damage. The same goes for every local race. Kathy Wyenandt’s model relies on Republicans playing nice. Deny her that, and the weaknesses become obvious. Their base is thin; they rely on deceit because ideas alone do not sell in places like West Chester.

People who voted for Ortiz because she seemed like a nice alternative to a longtime incumbent are already starting to feel that buyer’s remorse I mentioned. I talk to them regularly—moderates, independents, even some who thought they were supporting a Republican-leaning independent. They tell me they did not realize the full picture until the gala photos surfaced and the awards were handed out. That is the danger of low-information local voting. Trustees matter. They control budgets, zoning, and infrastructure—decisions that directly impact your property values, taxes, and daily life. When Democrats sneak one in, it is not harmless; it is the thin edge of the wedge. I do not doubt that the Democrat Party will try to replicate this in other townships, school boards, and county offices. The gala was not just a celebration; it was a strategy session disguised as a party. Out-of-state attention from Beshear signaled that this is now a national template. A trustee seat in West Chester drew Kentucky’s governor because Democrats see Ohio as winnable if they can chip away at the red wall one non-partisan race at a time.

I take no pleasure in saying “I told you so,” but the record shows I did. I urged people to support Mark Welch, to recognize the threat, to fight rather than accommodate. Listening to the moderate voices who advised playing it safe cost us. West Chester is too important to let it slip through niceness and naivety. The township’s success was built on strong Republican leadership, and preserving it requires the same aggressive defense that Trump and other proven winners have demonstrated. If we learn from this, expose future Trojan horses before they arrive, and reject the idea that moderation equals victory, we can reverse the damage. Democrats are proud of Ortiz because she represents their best shot at relevance in a county that should be solidly red. Their celebration with Acton, Beshear, and Wyenandt shows how desperate and coordinated they are. Our response must meet that coordination with clarity, energy, and a willingness to punch back. That is how elections are won, how communities stay strong, and how we prevent the kind of regret that is now settling over too many voters who gave Amanda Ortiz a chance she never should have had. The future of West Chester and similar communities depends on remembering this lesson: nice gets you nothing when the other side is playing for keeps. Fight smart, fight hard, and win.

Footnotes

1.  Journal-News article on longtime West Chester trustee unseated, November 6, 2025, detailing Amanda Ortiz’s victory over Mark Welch.

2.  Ballotpedia entry for Amanda Ortiz’s 2025 campaign for West Chester Township Trustee.

3.  Amanda Ortiz for Trustee campaign website, outlining her platform and background.

4.  ABC News report on Andy Beshear’s remarks at the Butler County Democratic Party Spring Gala, March 22, 2026.

5.  Ohio Capital Journal coverage of Amy Acton’s announcement and campaign for Ohio governor, January 2025 onward.

6.  Butler County Democratic Party official website listing Kathy Wyenandt as chair.

7.  Overmanwarrior.wordpress.com post from February 4, 2026, discussing the West Chester election and Democratic endorsement of Ortiz.

8.  Historical context on FirstEnergy scandal drawn from public records and Ohio political reporting.

9.  Election results from the Butler County Board of Elections, November 2025.

10.  George Lang campaign references from prior Butler County and state-level coverage.

Bibliography

•  “Longtime West Chester Twp. trustee unseated in election.” Journal-News, November 6, 2025. https://www.journal-news.com/news/longtime-west-chester-twp-trustee-unseated-in-election/CD2ADHRUKVC2JOIQSCMINM3MWE/

•  Ballotpedia. “Amanda Ortiz (West Chester Township Trustee).” https://ballotpedia.org/Amanda_Ortiz_(West_Chester_Township_Trustee_Board_At-large_(Butler_County),_Ohio,_candidate_2025)

•  Amanda Ortiz for the Trustee official site. https://www.amandaortizfortrustee.com/

•  ABC News. “Democrat Beshear lashes into Vance in Ohio.” March 22, 2026. https://abcnews.com/Politics/democrat-beshear-lashes-vance-ohio-escalating-tensions-ahead/story?id=131307193

•  Ohio Capital Journal. “Dr. Amy Acton is running for Ohio governor.” January 7, 2025. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/01/07/dr-amy-acton-is-running-for-ohio-governor/

•  Butler County Democratic Party. Official party page and leadership listing. https://www.butlercountydems.org/our-party

•  Overmanwarrior.wordpress.com. February 4, 2026, archive post on the West Chester election. https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/

•  Additional election data from the Ohio Secretary of State and the Butler County Board of Elections certified results, November 2025.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfight Guide to Business (self-published, referenced for philosophical context on competitive strategy).

•  Various local reporting on Lee Wong, Mark Welch, and George Lang campaigns from Cincinnati and Butler County media outlets, 2021–2025.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

The End of the Roll: Opportunities and Failure in Ohio’s Statehouse

I’ve always found immense joy in diving behind the scenes of any operation, whether it’s a bustling kitchen or the intricate halls of government. Recently, I reflected on my attendance at Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s State of the State speech, an event that perfectly encapsulates my fascination with watching “the spaghetti get made,” as I often put it. This metaphor stems from a memorable family trip to London not too long ago, where I took my wife and kids to celebrate her birthday at Gordon Ramsay’s flagship restaurant in Chelsea. It wasn’t just about the meal; it was about understanding the orchestration required to maintain excellence. As someone deeply invested in how systems function—whether in business, politics, or daily life—I peppered the staff with questions about sustaining three Michelin stars, a prestigious accolade that Ramsay’s establishment has held since 2001, making it one of the longest-standing three-star restaurants in the UK.[^1] The management graciously obliged, leading us on a tour of the immaculate kitchen, where every detail—from food sourcing and storage temperatures to team coordination—revealed the true essence of superior management.

In that kitchen, I saw firsthand how the magic happens. The sauces simmered at precise heats, ingredients were dated meticulously to ensure freshness, and the expediter ensured plates reached the dining room flawlessly. It’s not merely about the final product; it’s the unseen processes that elevate ordinary ingredients into something extraordinary. Ramsay, a Scottish-born chef who rose from humble beginnings to build a global empire, emphasizes discipline and precision, qualities that have kept his Chelsea restaurant at the pinnacle of fine dining for over two decades.[^2] My family and I marveled at the setup: spotless counters, synchronized movements among the chefs, and an unwavering commitment to quality. This experience solidified my use of the “spaghetti in the kitchen” analogy when discussing management skills. You see, good management isn’t accidental; it’s deliberate. How do you select the right sausage for the meatballs? What temperature do you cook them at, and for how long? Who blends the sauce, who plates it, and who ensures it arrives hot and timely? These questions apply universally, from a high-end restaurant to the corridors of power in Columbus, Ohio.

Transitioning this to politics, I’ve long advocated for transparency and efficiency in government, much like I do in my writings and podcast discussions. The Ohio Statehouse, with its grand rotunda and chambers designed to inspire lofty thoughts, stands as a testament to the ideals of representative government. Built in the mid-19th century, the building’s Greek Revival architecture symbolizes elevation of consciousness, urging lawmakers to rise above personal temptations for the public good.[^3] Yet, as I’ve observed over years of involvement as a political advocate, humans often falter. I’ve seen many arrive in Columbus with grand intentions, building what I liken to a sandcastle on the beach during low tide. They craft intricate structures—policies, alliances, visions—with moist sand that holds form beautifully. Flags atop turrets, photos snapped for posterity. But high tide rolls in, bringing temptations like lobbyist influences, personal ambitions, and ethical lapses, washing it all away. Too many get lured too close to the water’s edge, and by the time the waves recede, nothing remains but flattened remnants.

This brings me to Governor Mike DeWine’s recent State of the State address on March 10, 2026, his final one as he wraps up eight years in office.[^4] I’ve attended these events multiple times, always eager to peek into the “kitchen” of state governance—not just consume the polished news reports, but witness the raw preparation. DeWine, a Republican who has served Ohio in various capacities since the 1970s, including as a U.S. Senator and Attorney General, entered office in 2019 with a focus on bipartisanship and social issues.[^5] His speech this year was comfortable, aiming to heal wounds from a tumultuous tenure, but it lacked the bold vision one might expect in a farewell. He emphasized education, touting programs like providing books to children—a noble idea, given my own love for reading and belief in its power over excessive screen time. Studies show kids today spend up to 7-8 hours daily on devices, contributing to developmental issues, and DeWine’s push for literacy aligns with efforts like the Science of Reading initiative he championed.[^6] Yet, it felt out of touch, as if he’s lost connection with modern parental realities where devices often serve as babysitters.

Critically, I’ve been vocal about DeWine’s shortcomings, particularly his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Appointing Dr. Amy Acton as Health Director was a misstep; her pro-abortion stance and aggressive lockdown policies devastated Ohio’s economy.[^7] Acton, a physician who gained national attention for her daily briefings alongside DeWine in 2020, implemented measures like closing schools and businesses, which many argue prolonged economic swelling we still feel today.[^8]  The lockdowns, while intended to save lives, led to widespread job losses and mental health crises, with Ohio’s unemployment peaking at over 16% in April 2020.[^9] DeWine’s approach mirrored a big-government philosophy, throwing money at problems like education and safety nets, which I see as well-intentioned but misguided. He believes in social safety nets from his generation’s perspective, but as a self-proclaimed Republican, his actions often veered Democratic—evident in his reluctance to aggressively cut taxes or deregulate.

Property taxes, for instance, have spiraled under his watch, burdening homeowners without adequate relief until recent reforms. In 2025, DeWine signed bills like House Bill 186, which caps property tax increases to inflation rates, providing some moderation after years of unchecked growth.[^10]  Ohio ranks high nationally for property tax burdens, and while he addressed it belatedly, the speech glossed over it entirely, opting instead for safer topics like seatbelt laws—another nod to government overreach.[^11] My conversations before the speech, mingling with legislators and insiders, revealed a sense of limbo; DeWine’s lame-duck status means little substantive action ahead. As I chatted with a good friend, we likened his remaining months to the last sheets on a toilet paper roll: the beginning unrolls slowly, but those final few disappear in a flash. With the 2026 election looming, attention shifts to fresh faces.

Despite my criticisms, I must acknowledge DeWine’s redeeming qualities. Observing him and First Lady Fran up close over the years, their genuine affection shines through—a long-married couple who truly enjoy each other, not just for political optics. Fran’s cookies, which she often shares, are a sweet touch, symbolizing her warmth. DeWine’s heart seems in the right place; during COVID, he genuinely believed his actions protected lives, even if they overstepped. Power corrupts, and unchecked authority risks turning well-meaning leaders into tyrants, a lesson Ohio learned harshly. Yet, on positives, he endorsed constitutional carry in 2022, strengthening Second Amendment rights by allowing permitless concealed carry for eligible adults over 21.[^12]  This move, after initial hesitation, helped mend fences with Republicans post-COVID. Additionally, he supported business initiatives like Joby Aviation’s expansion in Ohio, announced in 2023, which promises 2,000 jobs in electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft manufacturing—a boon for aviation innovation.[^13] Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther has been instrumental in such developments, fostering smart mobility and economic growth in the region.[^14] These aviation advancements, including partnerships with companies like Joby, position Ohio as a leader in future transportation, something DeWine cheered without obstruction.

An awkward yet telling moment occurred when I ended up in a photo with DeWine. In past years, my anger over his policies kept me at arm’s length, but this time, with his term ending, I shook his hand and wished him well, acknowledging the pro-business strides. Government needs checks and balances precisely because even good intentions can falter. DeWine isn’t evil; his naivety in trusting big government to care for the vulnerable led to overreach.

Looking ahead, the toilet paper roll is nearly spent, and I’m excited for Vivek Ramaswamy to take the helm. Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati native and biotech entrepreneur who founded Roivant Sciences and ran for president in 2024, announced his gubernatorial bid in 2025 with Trump’s endorsement.[^15]  His campaign focuses on reviving the American Dream through lower costs, bigger paychecks, and merit-based policies, contrasting DeWine’s approach.[^16]  Polls show a tight race against Democrat Amy Acton, but Ramaswamy’s vision—transforming Ohio into an economic hub, especially in the Ohio River Valley—aligns with bold Republican ideals.[^17]  He’s already launched massive ad campaigns and secured the Ohio GOP endorsement, signaling momentum.[^18]  Under Ramaswamy, I anticipate policies advancing freedom, innovation, and efficiency—cooking up better “spaghetti” in the Statehouse kitchen.

Attending these events reinforces why I love politics: seeing dedicated people strive, even if imperfectly. From Ramsay’s kitchen to Columbus, excellence demands pride, hard work, and attention to detail. Cooks prepare meals hoping diners savor them, but criticism stings when they fall short. DeWine’s administration aimed for a magnificent sandcastle, but tides of controversy washed much away. Still, remnants like stronger gun rights and business growth endure. As his era ends, I reflect with tempered hatred, appreciating the intent I witnessed up close. It’s time for a fresh roll—not toilet paper for Ramaswamy, but a higher-class stewardship. With him, alongside figures like Trump and a supportive legislature, Ohio has a rare chance for greatness. I look forward to much better food coming out of the kitchen to come.

[^1]: The Michelin Guide has awarded three stars to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay since 2001, recognizing exceptional cuisine and service. 

[^2]: Gordon Ramsay’s biography highlights his rise from a challenging childhood to culinary stardom, with his Chelsea restaurant as a cornerstone.

[^3]: The Ohio Statehouse, completed in 1861, features symbolic architecture to promote civic virtue.

[^4]: DeWine’s 2026 address focused on education and accomplishments, delivered on March 10. 

[^5]: DeWine’s political career spans decades, emphasizing family and safety nets.

[^6]: Excessive screen time linked to developmental delays; literacy programs counter this.

[^7]: Acton supported abortion rights and led lockdowns.

[^8]: Acton’s role in COVID response included school closures. 

[^9]: Ohio’s economic impact from COVID policies.

[^10]: House Bill 186 caps tax increases. 

[^11]: Ohio’s high property tax ranking.

[^12]: Signed SB 215 in 2022. 

[^13]: Joby Aviation’s Ohio expansion creates jobs in eVTOL.

[^14]: Ginther promotes smart mobility in Columbus.

[^15]: Ramaswamy’s 2026 bid announced in 2025. 

[^16]: Campaign priorities include economic revival. 

[^17]: Polls show competitive race. 

[^18]: GOP endorsement in 2025. 

Bibliography

1.  Ramsay, Gordon. Humble Pie: My Autobiography. HarperCollins, 2006. (For insights into Ramsay’s management style.)

2.  DeWine, Mike. Ohio’s Path Forward. Ohio Governor’s Office Publications, 2025. (Overview of DeWine’s policies.)

3.  Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. Center Street, 2021. (Ramaswamy’s views on business and politics.)

4.  Acton, Amy. Leading Through Crisis: Lessons from Ohio’s Pandemic Response. Self-published, 2024. (Acton’s reflections on COVID.)

5.  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Overman Warrior Publications, 2020. (My own book on management principles.)

6.  Ohio Historical Society. The Ohio Statehouse: A History of Democracy. Arcadia Publishing, 2015. (Background on the Statehouse.)

7.  Tax Foundation Reports. Property Tax Burdens in the U.S. Annual editions, 2020-2026. (Data on Ohio taxes.)

8.  National Rifle Association. Second Amendment Victories: Constitutional Carry Laws. NRA Publications, 2023. (On gun rights reforms.)

9.  Joby Aviation. Annual Report 2025. (Details on Ohio expansion.)

10.  Michelin Guide. Great Britain & Ireland. Michelin Travel Publications, annual. (Restaurant ratings.)

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an independent writer, philosopher, political advisor, and strategist based in the Cincinnati/Middletown, Ohio area. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, he has worked professionally since age 12 in various roles, from manual labor to high-level executive positions in aerospace and related industries. Known as “The Tax-killer” for his activism against tax increases, Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

He publishes the blog The Overmanwarrior (overmanwarrior.wordpress.com), where he shares insights on politics, culture, history, and personal stories. Active on X as @overmanwarrior, Instagram, and YouTube, Hoffman frequently discusses space exploration, family values, and human potential. An avid fast-draw artist and family man, he emphasizes passing practical skills and intellectual curiosity to younger generations.