Tag: Todd Minniear

Re-Elect Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee: The untold story of Ford’s Garage

Many people are unaware of the story, but it’s one of those great examples of how some politicians in the world do good things in the background that nobody knows about, but that greatly enhance people’s lives.  And we’re talking about Todd Minniear, the highly regarded Liberty Township Trustee, who is about to complete his first term and is up for re-election this year, 2025.  When he was first elected, I considered it one of the most fantastic Christmas presents I could have hoped for.  We needed a constitutional conservative in Liberty Township in a position like that because Liberty Township had a significant problem.  It’s always been a great place to live.  I’ve lived in Liberty Township most of my life.  I’ve traveled extensively around the world, and when my wife and I were first married, we tried to live in various places.  But we moved back to Liberty Township many years ago because it simply was the best place to live.  We had been living in Mason, and the school system was so bad back then that we had to homeschool our kids.  Lakota, as a public school, wasn’t much better, but everything else about the community was just so good.  But like all good communities, it’s hard to provide good political leadership because all these special interest groups start making suggestions that are often beyond the wheelhouse of most people’s professions, and they get hoodwinked into making bad decisions.  And that’s what happened with zoning in Liberty Township.  Word got out that it was a great place to live, and everyone wanted to move to the land north of Cincinnati, with its abundant farmland and white picket fences.  So, a lot of property was bought up, and many homes were built, but along the way, very few commercial areas were created to help alleviate the taxation problem. 

So Liberty Township needed a trustee who could say know to the right things, and that is all the Agenda 21 goofy stuff that came from the United Nations sustainability plans that were flowed down through university training and into the minds of the college kids who were being trained to be the next generation land use planners.  And they have been a disaster, because along with all the ridiculous roundabouts, which are an entirely European design that we mindlessly inherited, like a bunch of little brothers appeasing an older brother who picks on us, we adopted all those methods into our community planning, and it has degraded the living experience predictably.  And to stay great, Liberty Township needed to develop a mind of its own, and Todd Minniear has been that kind of trustee.  When you are the best place to live in the world, quite literally, you don’t let yourself get picked on by anybody, especially a bunch of socialist trained community development planners.  The private sector knows a lot more about these things, and competition should sort out the good from the bad, and be allowed to do that.  Recently, under Todd’s leadership, the Trustees in Liberty Township removed the high-density housing requirements from future building projects, which is a significant development.  The news reporting took that move as building fences to the outside world to keep out the poor and disadvantaged.  However, logic suggests that to protect value, you must keep away people who have less of it.  Otherwise, they bring their problems to your doorstep, and that requires value judgments that might hurt the feelings of people who have not made very good decisions in their lives.  To maintain a good community, you need to reward people who make good decisions and keep the bar high, so that those who didn’t aren’t living in the same space.

As I met Todd Minniear at Liberty Center to discuss some of these high-density housing issues, my daughter was with me, and we were talking about Japan and how people we know who have traveled there and have tattoos were ridiculed in some places for having them.  In some cases, businesses will refuse to serve people who have tattoos, because they see it as a detrimental element to social interaction, and they ridicule it in their society.  I had just recently returned from Japan, which is what I wanted to discuss with Todd about Liberty Center.  Japan’s cities are very clean, and their work ethic is excellent.  Even in their downtown areas, they have nice, convenient stores that are open 24/7.  There is a nice one near a hotel I often stay at in Kobe, and I thought something like that would be perfect for the current location at Liberty Center, across the street from Cooper’s Hawk and the new Flats that have been built, where many people are currently living.  To maintain a good community, you must have high standards and hold others accountable for living up to them.  And that is the challenge, because Liberty Township is such a great place to live, but the housing costs are very high, the temptation to bring in more affordable housing, as the land use sustainability plans all address in the same European socialist way, more high density living which allows people who have made bad decisions in their lives and do not have the financial means to move into Liberty Township, to move into an apartment or an attached single family unit. 

One of my favorite places to eat in Liberty Township is the new Ford’s Garage at Liberty Center, where Todd Minniear has a signature hamburger named after him, which I order every time I visit.  In the location where the restaurant was built, Todd was the trustee who said no to an apartment complex design intended for that area when the mall could not find commercial businesses to fill that very valuable square.  There was a lot of complaining at the time, but eventually, Ford’s Garage restaurant moved in, and that solved many of the problems. It was great that the apartments did not get built there, as the restaurant is far more valuable as a land use option.  It does a lot more for the mall than just bringing in more people who don’t pay enough in taxes to accommodate their presence, whereas a business does.  And Liberty Township needs more businesses that bring in more people from a 25-mile radius who spend money in Liberty Township, then go home.  So that the taxpayers in Liberty Township aren’t on the hook for all the infrastructure.  And it’s decisions like those that Todd Minniear has made that have greatly improved Liberty Township and preserved its value, rather than letting mindless land use plans destroy it. These decisions don’t represent what’s good and original about the community—sometimes saying no leads to a better yes eventually.  And that is certainly the case with Ford’s Garage.  There was considerable pressure to approve high-density housing projects and accommodate the influx of investment dollars into the area.  However, by saying no, Todd Minniear was able to inspire a much better ‘yes’ in the future, which is precisely why we want Todd to serve for many more years as a trustee.  He’s been great, and there is room to do a whole lot more with the Millikin interchange project.  But to set a high bar, you have to live up to it, and often, that means saying no to disreputable social elements, to socialist land use plans, and political sentiments that come from other places, and people bring that garbage with them wherever they go.  We need good political leadership to sort it all out, and Todd Minniear has been just the right touch, and we could use a lot more of him in the years to come.

Rich Hoffman

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

Todd Minniear and the Liberty Township Trustees: Protecting a great area from bottom feeders and other social parasites

It was always a disaster in the planning to guide development to include apartment and attached single-family homes.  That was a ridiculous Agenda 21 sustainable living idea that does not stem from American needs, but rather from the United Nations, and it’s good to see that Todd Minniear, the great trustee of Liberty Township, is fighting back against this ridiculous trend.  Because it’s all about value and the quality of living, and even if it comes out sounding mean and not very equitable, those are not values that can build a good society.  You can’t put too many apartments into a community full of people who don’t own property and expect everything to go well.  The population density is one thing.  However, the kind of people who live in apartments is quite another matter.  When a township like Liberty puts together a comprehensive plan, as I have explained over the years, the kind of people who are hired to make those plans are trained in universities to make Agenda 21 and 2030 from the United Nations a priority, and within those constructs is the notion that the most sustainable living is to stack humans on top of each other and prevent them as much as possible from getting in their car and driving somewhere.  Because the goal is to lower the carbon footprint of people with all kinds of hippie thoughts about protecting the planet and taking away individual development in favor of collective surrender to the common good as defined by the parameters of communism, exported from Europe.  And it ends up in communities like Liberty through the comprehensive plans that their building planners implement.  It’s one of those things that often slips under the radar when elected trustees review their comprehensive development plans for approval, and the context of what’s in them isn’t well understood.  We tend to think that people who write comprehensive plans are smart, but what often happens is that they learn too late that they were trained to be radicalized liberals taught on a destructive, anti-American agenda.

Everyone wants to live in Liberty Township, and when the area Journal News newspaper reported what Todd Minniear and the other trustees had done, they picked up on the sentiment correctly by stating, “Liberty Twp. Is closing its borders to future developments that include apartments or attached single-family homes, as trustees approved changes in its 2020 comprehensive plan and future land use map – which guides development.”  Most of the time, trustees in their positions across the country think they are hiring good people with excellent college credentials when they bring in individuals to write their land-use plans.  And their lives have not prepared them for the shell game that comes with such land use planners.  But it’s an industry full of parasitic communists trained in their colleges to implement extreme liberal politics into everything their careers touch.  Remember, it’s not where people went to school, but the kind of garbage they learned there that’s so dangerous.  And in Liberty Twp’s case, the value comes from the type of property people can buy, and how it restricts many people without shared values, bringing them together unnaturally, which eventually lowers the area’s value.  The kind of people who end up living in apartments and attached single-family homes tend to be people who didn’t make very good decisions in life, and when you start stacking those kinds of people into dense property use, they vote that way at the ballot box and pretty soon you have all their bad decisions changing the politics of your community into something else, often destructive.  And not protecting property values because parasitic tendencies were allowed to permeate. 

Of course, the implication made by the Journal News is that Liberty Twp is moving toward exclusivity by closing its borders to outsiders, when the socialist trend is to make everything more equitable.  With Liberty Township being such a nice place to live, the goal of the trustees, as defined by radical leftist community planners who teach the values of Marxism in colleges, is to make valuable places to live more accessible to everyone.  Because everyone deserves to live somewhere nice.  And if you’ve looked around Liberty Township, you now see apartments going up everywhere.  And what goes into them are apartment-dwelling people who vote, and they vote with the kind of values that come with people who don’t have profound roots in property ownership.  I like the proposed type of living at the Liberty Center development, which combines mixed-use shopping and living, creating a big city environment that gives kids growing up in the area a reason not to move to New York City or Los Angeles to experience that kind of life in their post-college years.  However, the downside is that more apartments mean more voters, as opposed to the wealthy homeowner of a property worth more than $400,000 who wants to keep it that way.  All over the country, when you study why communities fail, it’s because they didn’t protect what made them valuable in the first place.  And once you start letting bottom feeders move into your area, you’ll run into them at gas stations and the grocery store, and they bring down a positive living experience everywhere they go.  And while that doesn’t sound fair or equitable, it’s the truth.  Values decline, whether they are property or social, when we fail to protect them. 

Making it too easy for people who are not very good or wise to live in your area will only bring trouble.  People who make poor decisions in their lives are likely to reflect that in their voting behavior when we invite them to join our communities and live in an apartment, just to be fair to them.  They bring with them trashy kids, destructive lifestyles, and disastrous extensions of their families who visit them in a condition of dereliction.  And attacking that premise of value is baked into the background of all Agenda 21 and 2030 land use plans.  When you speak to these kinds of people, DEI policies, specifically equity and inclusion, are their primary concerns.  And builders end up following those ridiculous concepts in their architectural plans, and before you know it, you have a mother of five with three different fathers of those kids, all of whom visit her, coming and going, living next to a property worth more than a million dollars.  And they are all shopping at Kroger together and regretting it.  And when it comes time to vote, they disregard the million-dollar property owner vote because there are more of them, and because of the terrible decisions they have made in life, they are now voting for more government services, as they are never going to own a million-dollar property of their own.  And soon thereafter, you have a community in decline as people with value pick up and move away, where they don’t have to be around losers in life in their leisure time.  Thankfully, there are people like Todd Minniear who are finally standing up to this kind of nonsense.  Yes, suppose Liberty Township wants to maintain its value. In that case, just as the United States is learning to do, we must hold people accountable for earning their place in the community by working hard and making good decisions that live up to the high standards of value that make communities great.  However, when you make good things available to everyone, whether through comprehensive land use plans that stack property density on top of each other mindlessly, or through more government services that cost taxpayers a lot of money, social decline is not far behind.  When that value isn’t protected, of course, a community will move into decline.  And once that happens, nobody is happy.  This is a good position for the Liberty Township Trustees, as they are protecting a great community from the erosion of outside influences, which are certainly not in the best interest of the future.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Great Leadership of Todd Minniear on 55 KRC: Standing up for good Republican government voters can be proud of

You might have heard the fantastic Liberty Township Trustee Todd Minniear on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas talking about the overwhelming vote from the Butler County Central Committee to censor 22 Republican representatives for working with Democrats to elect a much more moderate Speaker of the House, which in many ways was political sabotage. As it turned out, the BCCC voted to censor those Republicans by a tremendous margin, which joins many other central committees across the state and will help start the path of removing those representatives from office. The next time they want to run, this censorship will make it more difficult for them to seek office. And this is how it has to be in these RINO hunting days where Democrats simply put an “R” next to their name and misrepresent themselves to the public who thinks they are voting for Republicans. I’ll put that radio interview here for everyone to listen to again because it’s an important political step and shows outstanding leadership on behalf of Todd.

Additionally, I am including the letter I read in my own video podcast on the matter, which Todd Minniear sent to the Butler County Central Committee ahead of their meeting to vote on behalf of censor, laying out the arguments. It was a windy day and a tough thing to read, so I also include it here as an example of how good government looks and taking a bold stand in favor of a position and sticking with it. It is wonderful to see area Republicans standing on integrity, but even better, it’s great to see a Butler County politician, especially in Liberty Township, Ohio, showing such leadership when it would be easier just to keep his head down and hope to get an invite to the latest wine tasting ceremony and be a popular guy with the locals. It’s much better to express courage, judgment, and integrity, which benefits our community more than just another baby-kisser in ways that are measured best when leadership is sought and appreciated. 

To: Butler County Central Committee Representatives

From: Todd Minniear – Liberty Township Trustee and Liberty 21 Central Committeeman 

I am writing to encourage you to vote yes this Thursday to censure 22 Republican representatives who voted in favor of Speaker Jason Stephens, and to commend Representatives Creech, Gross, and Hall for voting to support the Republican caucus nominee Derek Merrin.   

I am a novice in politics.  Embarrassingly, I didn’t get serious about protecting our conservative values until Governor DeWine violated my constitutional property rights by shutting down my business during Covid.  In response, I sued the Governor and the Ohio Department of Health/Amy Acton.  My suit was successful in enabling my business to open fully and saved many businesses across OH. 

The Covid attack strategy also highlighted the fact that the number 1 job of ALL levels of government is to protect our freedom.  This greater awareness inspired me to run for Liberty Township Trustee in November of 2021.  Thanks to hard-working conservative campaign supporters (several of them on BC Central Committee) I was elected.    

I share that background as context for why I am motivated to send you this note today.  As you know, we need our Republican representatives to protect our lives and life by moving conservative values forward and fighting against Democrats who continue to move further Left. 

The 22 out of 67 House Republicans who partnered with all 32 House Democrats to elect the speaker preferred by Democrats betrayed the conservative Republicans of Ohio, severed the Republican supermajority, and most certainly made deals with the Democrats that will greatly limit the fantastic opportunity we had to move conservative legislation forward. 

Thanks to the Butler County Republican Women’s Club, I had a chance to sit in on their last meeting where House Representatives Carruthers, Creech, Gross, and Hall answered questions on this topic.    

Here are the headlines driving my support to censure.

·       The Republicans went into caucus and agreed to vote to select a new speaker.  There were several House Representatives in the mix and Derek Merrin won.  Merrin should have received all Republican votes and been the new speaker.  However, in a shocking move, 22 Republicans partnered with all Democrats to elect Stephens.  When two of our Butler County representatives were asked at the Women’s Club meeting if this was “dishonest on the part of the 22” they said “yes” – the agreement was to unite to elect Merrin, but they reneged.  You can see how this has divided our party.

·       It is clear, and our Butler County representatives confirmed, Merrin is significantly more conservative than Stephens who was elected by the Democrats and the 22.  Having a less conservative speaker, one the Democrats supported, means certain conservative agendas will not move forward. 

·       Stephens understands he will need these Democrat votes again to be reelected two years from now.  He must stifle the conservative agenda to earn the Democrat votes.    

·       Why do you think all 32 Democrats voted for Stephens?  The specific deals made with the Democrats will become known.  Three of our four Butler County Representatives said, “deals are always made.”

·       The State Central Committee properly censured the 22 and the last list I saw showed ~20 other counties in Ohio censured, I believe Warren County’s Central Committee had a unanimous 100% vote to censure.  Butler County should be known as one of these leading conservative counties.

·       The vote for speaker is not a piece of legislation where reasonable minds can vote differently.  It was mission-critical for our party to be united and put a conservative speaker in place.  The 22 wanted a more moderate speaker and they sacrificed the strength of our supermajority, literally handing power to the Democrats to get their moderate speaker. 

·       Most importantly we must send a formal message to 1) the 22, that they made a tremendous error, 2) the 45 Republicans who stood for the party, including Rodney Creech, Jennifer Gross, and Thomas Hall that we commend them, and 3) any future representative, that they must stay true to the conservative principles of the party and don’t ever make this same mistake.

I have great respect for the Butler County Central Committee.  We are one of the few political bodies that consistently stand and vote based on conservative principles – principles over all else.   

Todd Minniear – Liberty Township Trustee

Many people don’t know that Todd was one of the most courageous people when it counted most who sued the State of Ohio and the DeWine administration for the Covid lockdowns. He was successful and was able to reopen his business in the heat of Amy Acton, the Health Director at the time, trying to shut down all businesses on the latest CDC policy of mass social distancing as a means of treating Covid 19 which was being spread from China to mass populations to harm them, likely purposefully, during an election year to implement the World Economic Forum Great Reset. I’ve read enough about the situation to see that the evidence for such statements is more than abundant. But at the time, it wasn’t so clear, and it took a lot of guts for Minniear to climb out on a limb like that, challenge the DeWine administration in court, and win. But that should be a lesson to all others. If you stand by the Constitution, you will find that our entire court system is built around it, and you will win most of your court challenges. That is the case with Lakota schools. That is the case with Covid restrictions. That is the case overall of Free Speech cases such as the one recently where a magistrate won a judgment against a Butler County Judge, which will be a topic for another article all its own. The Constitution works, and it is great to see people in politics who understand that basic premise. But it takes leadership and courage to stand behind law and order sometimes, and under tremendous pressure, Todd Minniear has done so and continues to. His leadership was evident in the Central Committee vote and continues to express itself in ways that greatly benefit the residents of Butler County’s Liberty Township residents. I wish there were more like Todd Minniear out there. But I’m happy to see that there is just one. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Liberty Township Trustees Pass Resolution NO 2022-062: Taking leadership to preserve constitutional guidance based on what we learned from Covid

It’s good to talk about positive stories and the excellent work by the Liberty Township Trustees, Tom Ferrell, Steve Schramm, and Todd Minniear, to pass Resolution NO. 2022-062 (the Reaffirming Our Commitment to Constitutional Principles) on June 7th, 2022. It was something unique and memorable. It was good to see government on the local level taking proactive action that was meaningful. And as I pointed out in speaking in favor of it, after Covid and the many government failures in reaction to it, the investment world needed something to reassure everyone that should something as disastrous as Covid ever happen again, there was a plan to deal with it. We, at this point, have to plan for some form of that eventuality in the political world we live in, that at the very least, local government will work on behalf of the people of their community to at least ask constitutionally based questions on the merits and legality. It was a horrible circumstance that all our laws and regulations were turned away from our systems of elections and were turned entirely over to health officials in Ohio and Butler County, which were unconstitutional in many tragic ways. So it took a considerable amount of leadership from the Liberty Township Trustees to take a proactive measure to reassure the public that local government was still in charge and would be in the future.

https://gettr.com/vision/p1dcmfd6b99

At first, when this idea of talking about making Liberty Township something of a Constitutional Zone it sounded to me like a redundant message. After all, all public officials take an oath to the Constitution, both federal and state, so by saying that they were a Constitutional Township was like saying the sun was out on a sunny day at the beach. That is until I went to Liberty Center to have lunch and noticed that the playground there was still shut down after two years of Covid protocols. Many of those protocols look ridiculous in hindsight. Still, when the playground was shut down, there had been movies about pandemics and various zombie apocalypses that had satisfactorily terrified the public, which health officials exploited for global gains of political power, which is a subject that we could write books on. Those books are emerging to tell those stories of deceit and corruption. But as to kids and the playground at Liberty Center, it’s a nice place in what I consider one of the best shopping destinations in America. Parents have enjoyed taking their kids there to let them play indoors and in air conditioning. The food court is right there, so it is a nice place for the community to come and interact with each other. But after two years of Covid, it was still shut down, even as most of the rest of society had gone back to normal. As I ate my food, the lights were mostly out, many of the upstairs portions of the mall were vacant of store activity, and it looked like a pretty sad situation. 

So I called up Todd Minniear, who is one of the newest Liberty Township Trustees, and asked him what was going on with the mall. Were Covid protocols still keeping these guys from opening up their play area? As it turned out, mall management wasn’t sure how to proceed. They were waiting on someone from the government to come and tell them that it was alright to reopen. But of course, nobody was ever going to come from the government to do so, so the poor playground was left in limbo, leaving that whole upstairs portion of the mall to have very little social activity.   I couldn’t help but add up in my head how many potential investors who might want to open a store in the mall saw this sad sight and moved on. If they had seen kids playing and parents enjoying talking and eating from the food court, they might have made a few million dollars of investment into a new store at Liberty Center, which it needs. Brick and mortar stores are a challenge under great economic conditions. So under a Biden economy, that only gets trickier. After some telephone tag that went on for a few weeks, Liberty Center found it was able to reopen its play area to the public, so it’s open now. Shortly before attending the Constitutional Resolution for the next Liberty Township meeting, I had lunch there again. This time it looked like I remembered it: kids playing, parents enjoying watching them, and having a nice place to sit and have some food. The lights were on, and things looked alive again. There was some exciting new construction on the second floor, somebody had made some investments, so it was a good story. One that should have never been bad in the first place, but it would be good to see something good happening that people could now enjoy. 

For many, it is a terrifying prospect to have to go through something like Covid again. I have several copies of the state and federal constitutions that I refer to often, and by reading them, there is no reason to be concerned. I felt that way during the entire Covid shutdowns in Ohio and across the nation; every case that was put before the courts challenging the health directives was losing. We should never have done half the things that were done in reaction to Covid. The real science shows that there were medicines available at the time that could have easily contained it as a public menace. The problem was in the new way that we allowed health experts to gain control through an emergency, the management of our country. We had never seen something like that happen before, and it certainly wasn’t the fault of Liberty Center in following the orders that flowed down to them from the state.   But in the aftermath, no leadership from those same experts came out in public and said, “it’s safe again.” Or, “sorry, there was never really a danger; we overreacted. Sorry if we destroyed lives and cost everyone billions of dollars, trillions of dollars nationally. We’re sorry.” No, they just stayed in their offices and left everything to the rest of the world to figure out. So Liberty Center was in limbo until Todd Minniear started making phone calls and asking questions. From the mall management side of things, they would expect someone from leadership in the community to ask those questions and get the answers, which is how the playground reopened. And the story ended up being a good one. 

Resolution No. 2022-062 passed with a surprisingly large crowd clapping, and all the Trustees seemed to enjoy a positive thing for a change. After the meeting, I was able to talk to Steve Schramm and Tom Farrell, who were eager to tell me about all the things that go on behind the scenes where they fight for the Constitution and the protection of Liberty Township all the time. The trouble is that the public doesn’t see all those phone calls and questions. All they know is that Covid shut down the world once, and they needed to know that someone who represented them would be able to ask questions and challenge health directives in the future should something like that happen again. Because without that guidance, those investment dollars might just stay someplace safe and not flow into some new project. As we saw with Covid, the uncertainty of medical tyranny might just return. Only this time, the Trustees had proclaimed that they were there to help and would ensure that the rules of the Constitution would prevail in Liberty Township. Which, for many people, was a reassurance they desperately sought from somebody offering leadership after two years of scary indecision and protocols that were abruptly un-American.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Todd Minniear Seeks to Protect Liberty Township: When progressives are angry it means that the right thing is happening

I said it when he was overwhelmingly elected in November of 2021, and I’m still saying it, I love Todd Minniear as the new trustee of Liberty Township, Ohio. He ran on a freedom platform, and he’s living up to it by proposing a resolution at the May 3rd, 2022, trustee meeting to make Liberty Township a “constitutional township,” with a written promise. However, for some reason, the sweat bees of Lakota are going crazy over the idea, which is very interesting.   When I first heard about the resolution, I thought it was a great idea but wondered why it was needed. After all, isn’t all townships supposed to be “constitutional townships?” Well, yeah, of course. So why was something like this proposal needed at all? In 2020, when the government made lots of mistakes over Covid, it was up to the local governments to step in and challenge the governor’s actions. In this case, the governor took on emergency powers and bypassed the legislature to assume powers that Governor DeWine did not have. The lockdowns and mask mandates that destroyed so many businesses were unconstitutional. None of them could be defended in court, and so far, all the cases have been lost and looking back on what went wrong, it’s clear that local trustees should have pushed back against the governor. One person can’t be allowed to ruin the lives of so many people with a bad decision. That’s why we have a republic and not some flea-bitten democracy in America. We have a local government that is accountable to the people instead of some top-down kingship, which is how Mike DeWine behaved. Joe Biden crossed those same lines with vaccine mandates and mask requirements, built entirely off misinformation and science in the pocket of big pharma. 

Yet, the same people who have been giving Darbi Boddy of the Lakota school board a hard time for trying to remove the mask mandates in the school as one of her first official duties newly elected are now going after Todd. Notice how arrogant they are and how condescending in their online postings. These are the same people who think that mask mandates should be forever, that sexual indoctrination of our kids in grade school should be normalized and that Joe Biden should be president. These people have had control of the political process for far too long because they make so much noise, but they are actually a small minority. In a community like Liberty Township, they can find a few thousand people who think the way they do. But Todd Minniear and Darbi Boddy were elected by many more thousands, both gaining the most vote totals in the last election. So plenty of people want to see these kinds of challenges to federal and state power. People did not like the way things happened with Covid and how vulnerable they were to an out-of-control government, and they wanted to see these new politicians representing their interests. Of course, these progressive lunatics don’t want to lose control of the process. They love to harass people into doing what they want to see done with threats and public attacks, which is why it’s so wonderful that we finally have some politicians who are willing to do the hard work. When I heard Todd wanted to make this resolution, I didn’t think it was a big deal at all. But he knew that there would be those same opposing voices who would come armed with their name-calling and arrogant slanders. 

So why is something like this resolution for a “constitutional township” needed. Investors in the community, including homeowners, need to know that the trustees can provide a stable environment from intrusive government. Mike DeWine wasn’t accountable to people in Ohio, but their local representatives were. When a governor like DeWine takes action on his own to cut out our elected representatives in the legislature, we must have some mechanisms to resist the intrusion. For Todd Minniear, he looks to the great book The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates for how our constitutional republic is supposed to function. The book is a proper resistance to tyranny and a repudiation of unlimited obedience to civil government. The example given in the book is about a church leader who is taking money from the collection plate and should expect their congregation to question them should they skim from the pot. Human beings can fail, especially in intellect, and the purpose of our government is to keep innocent people free of those mistakes as much as possible. And as a trustee, Todd ran on a platform to keep Liberty Township free of those kinds of failures in government. Such a declaration like what Todd proposed is necessary so that the people of Liberty Township can feel some sense of protection from the government by their local representatives since our state and federal governments have failed us so obviously. 

The sweat bee progressives of Liberty Township are so upset because they have in mind the complete desecration of our republic and a merge into the chaos of a democracy which would then propel us into the Vico Cycle, which has destroyed so many civilizations over the years. The Vico Cycle is a theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, then anarchy. So if they are upset by this “constitutional township” resolution, that means it’s a great thing. When these people hate what you are doing, you know you are on the right side of history and doing what voters elected people like Todd Minniear to do. Traditionally, they have attacked people like Todd and Darbi, who have only been on the job for a few months. In Lakota, they already have a petition to get rid of her because she pushed for removing the mask mandates. And you see by their comments about this “constitutional township” resolution that they find it a threat to go back against centralized control. Because as liberals, that’s what they want, and for far too many years, politicians have given them the benefit of the doubt.   But we’ve seen where that takes us, and Covid showed us too much of what we didn’t want to know. Those same people felt the power of a centralized government that was out of control, and they liked it. They never want it to stop. And now that people are returning to normal and are electing people like Todd Minniear to represent them, instead of the classic politician of least resistance, they are worried about losing their power. 

All the noise aside, our task in Liberty Township is to provide stability for business investment and residential ownership. And to give that stability, we must remove the intrusive elements of government from some faraway land that is not accountable to us, who can then destroy our community with just the swipe of a pen. A mask mandate here, a lockdown there, a created crisis to hide bad inflation numbers, Liberty Township deserves to be free of the kinds of corruption we always see in centralized governments because accountability is often missing. Todd Minniear and the other Liberty Township trustees are accountable to their neighbors, which is how it should be. And the next time some government overreach occurs, we need to know that our trustees will follow the Ohio and federal constitutions. They didn’t in 2020. Nobody knew what to do because we had never seen such a thing before. But now we do know. We know all about Covid and how the government made it and managed it. And we saw what it did to all our lives. So, we deserve to be free of those intrusions in the future. And the more that the political left screams about it, the more of that kind of thing we should do because it just validates why it was so important in the first place. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Best Thing I Received for Christmas: Todd Minniear in Liberty Township

I Got Todd Minniear for Christmas

Another question that comes up always after Christmas, mainly out of obligations of small talk, is what did you get for Christmas?  Was it all worth it?  Did you have a good Holiday?  Well, for me, this year, I did have a great Holiday.  But it wasn’t just family gift exchanges that I enjoyed.  Just a few days before Christmas, at the Liberty Township Building just down the road from my house, Todd Minniear was sworn in as my next trustee, one of three.  He is the product of a series of off-year elections where constitutional conservatives were targeted for election to either replace liberals or offer a more conservative candidate aside from the ones traditionally provided.  For me, it was quite a nice Christmas present to have Todd give me a call and invite me to his swearing-in, which I went to and was greeted there with a kind of class reunion from the various campaigns of 2021, and it was nice to see all that hard work come to some positive culmination.  I say it all the time, if you want a good government, then put good people in it. Don’t just sit on the couch and hope things work out alright.  Either run yourself for an office locally or support someone who wants to.  After the Trump presidency, that was certainly my story where obvious political shenanigans to remove him from office took place.   The audacious behavior of the national establishment is something I’ve seen plenty of times locally, over thirty years.  And the election of Todd Minniear, a constitutional and freedom-minded purist, was a significant achievement in my community and was a sign of things to come nationally. 

Another thing I say all the time to just about everyone I speak with is, “don’t be a victim.” Never allow yourself to be a victim in the story of your own life.  Those people we put into elected positions in our republic are never supposed to be our “betters” or some useless member of an aristocracy.  They are there to represent us.  But that’s not the way the political class views that relationship.  Often, they get into public office for the attention of it and the power that follows by having their hands on the levers of rules and regulations that govern our lives.  In the case of a local trustee, the question is often, “can I build a new pole barn on my property to hold my classic car.” The politicians usually will reply, “but think about the lowered property values of the community.  They don’t need to be penalized because you want to protect some gas-guzzling old car that should be on the junk heap, according to the United Nations.” They don’t say that they often work to protect the interests of those who give them campaign donations to keep them in power instead of representing all the community’s people all the time. I’ve been involved in politics in some way or another all of my adult life, and I have seen all the kinds of corruption that can come out of it, all the ugly stuff.  And I understand entirely how that corruption comes about and how to fix it.  The solution is to follow the Constitution of the nation and our state.  If everyone did that, things would work pretty well.  When politicians get away from the constitutions and bring their personal desires or biases to an issue, that’s where corruption starts.  

I don’t think any politician gets into a public office with the idea of becoming corrupt.  They get that way because they lose their way while solving problems.  Corruption starts to eat away from them once they get off the constitutional script.  For instance, I have several very close personal friends who are politicians.  People like George Lang. I’ve known George for a long time since he was a trustee in West Chester, well over a decade ago.  We bonded over Tea Party ideas of small government and the novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.  George has a habit of giving that novel out as a Christmas present at Christmas time.  He believes in the ideas in every aspect of his life.  Even though now he is an establishment figure, he is still the same person.

Because he is a big-time senator within the state, many people assume that politics has made him corrupt.  But I know personally, it hasn’t changed him at all. He’s still the same Atlas Shrugged-giving guy.  We might remember when Paul Ryan was also an Atlas Shrugged fan, but when Mitt Romney wanted him to be his VP, all that Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand stuff was tossed away so that they could become the next power player in congress, eventually becoming Speaker of the House.  Some people can handle the pressure of public scrutiny, and some can’t.  George can; Paul Ryan couldn’t.  Power has a way of altering people into the most profound things in their hearts.  George, for instance, at this Todd Minniear event, was pressed about several projects that involved tax money distribution.  His answer was a classic George Lang line, and he didn’t just say it because I was there.  It’s what he says all the time to everyone, “don’t give the government or me any more tax money. We’ll just spend it.  Keep your money. Our job is to take the barriers out of your way to living a good life.” 

I’ve watched several good politicians like George Lang get elected into more and more positions over the years.  And at that Todd Minniear swearing-in, several of our Lakota school board members newly elected were there as well, more parts of a future solution.  Locally, I’ve always looked to West Chester to ensure more small-government ideas found their way to the trustees.  My friend Mark Welch and others there have done a great job of keeping the government’s small and business engagement very high.  It is the model of what should be happening all over Ohio.  And if we can primary Mike DeWine as governor of Ohio and replace him with Jim Renacci, we’ll be able to do great things in Ohio.  But Liberty Township is where I live, and the trustees there have always been Republican, but more of the Paul Ryan type, and not so much that of George Lang.  At the start of the election in 2021, I didn’t think a freedom candidate like Todd Minniear could find his way on a Republican Party that was still much more like the Republican Party nationally of 2012 and not so much like the Trump Republican Party of 2020.  But Todd won with a solid majority, and he had a tremendous amount of people show up to support him, which is unusual at these kinds of events.  And as I stood there watching Jennifer Gross, our member of the Ohio House, swear in Todd, I could see where our country was headed.  And it made me very happy to see.  All the hard work that goes into these kinds of things was certainly worth it.  For those wondering about it, I would say that doing such things is some of the best Christmas presents you could give yourself.  Often there isn’t much personal satisfaction in politics but putting the right people in the correct positions at the right time through a vote is one of the most rewarding things anybody can do in a healthy republic.  And in Liberty Township for Christmas of 2021, I can say that seeing Todd Minniear sworn in for public office was the highlight of my Holiday season. 

Rich Hoffman

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Vote Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee: Getting to know the candidates in Liberty and West Chester Townships.

Vote for Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee

Like I did for the school board candidates at Lakota for the 2021 election, I have clips of the various candidates to help make decisions.  Like the school board candidates, I support some and recommend changing some of the incumbents in Liberty Township.  These clips deal with trustee candidates in Liberty Township and West Chester, two of the most affluent and great places to live in the United States.  And they are examples of just how great a small government is when you have just three trustees managing things.  So, of course, for this next election, the goal is to keep the government small, effective, and accountable.  I say all that because we do have some significant government types who are running.  Trent Emeneker calls himself a fiscal conservative but had a “meet and greet” at Liberty Center with a known Democrat.  You can see by the video clips that he’s not worth a vote so that I won’t waste much time on him.  In West Chester, the choice is clear.  Mark Welch is a personal friend of mine not because he’s a politician, but because over time, and common ways of looking at things, it just evolved that way. He’s many reasons West Chester has been so successful, and we certainly want to keep things that way.  There are two seats open, so the second should be Lee Wong.  Lee and I have not gotten along over the years, but in this case, he’s working well with Mark and Ann Becker as a trustee, and we want to keep that going.  So the trustee race in West Chester is easy.

However, Liberty Township is more complex; it’s far more complicated.  I live in Liberty Township.  I have lived in Liberty Township for about 45 years of my life.  I spent nearly a decade living in other places worldwide, but my wife and I returned to Liberty Township after the 1990s and loved it very much.  Yet, I have paid a lot more attention to West Chester than Liberty for a good reason.  In West Chester, I was involved in the Tea Party there; Ann Becker was the president of the Cincinnati Tea Party, a pretty big position.  George Lang, a senator now, was a trustee who was getting voted against during every meeting.  We worked hard to put Mark Welch in the second spot to help George get the votes he needed, and it worked very well.  And we went to work to fill the West Chester trustees with all those Tea Party types of candidates.  History will show how smart that was.

Tea Party people are not crazy radicals.  They are fiscal conservatives, small government-minded, and rooted in American traditions.  So I enjoyed the experiment in a small government that was going on in West Chester that has produced magnificent results.  Because of the population density of West Chester, there have been lots of Democrats who have tried to push for a city designation.  The latest is Trent Emeneker.  They want to be a city because it creates more jobs for the government, which drives up costs, bureaucracy, and the overall feel of the community.  Between those three names, George Lang, Mark Welch, and Ann Becker, West Chester has managed to stay lean and sharp, making for a wonderful place to live and work.  Better than just about any other place in the country. 

In Liberty Township, there have always been these Agenda 21 Comprehensive Plans that liberals write and conservative trustees have then followed which has been highly unsatisfying for a guy like me, a long term resident who knows what Liberty Township was like before all the tag-alongs moved in from other places and brought all their big government ideas with them.  And now there is the Agenda 2030 plan that the United Nations has put out, and if you read it and also read the 2020 Comprehensive Plan for Liberty Township, you’ll see that the same person might have as well written them.  Of course, they weren’t, but the ideas are the same.  This is what you get when you hire many kids trained in good, liberal colleges who have been taught that the United Nations would rule the world and that any interpretation of sustainable development must come from those socialists and communists on the world stage.  When any trustees commission a plan like the Comprehensive Plan for 2020 or any previous revisions, you essentially get a bunch of liberals who decide what your community will look like.  I can say that George Lang had quite a challenge when he pushed back against this trend in West Chester.  I know some of the personal stories, and thank goodness George did push back in constructive ways.  But in Liberty Township, even though the trustees are usually what everyone considers “rock-ribbed Republicans,” they get pulled into the Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 game of serving the United Nations instead of the real history of Liberty Township and the reasons people moved to the area, to begin with.

Every time I have to navigate one of the many dumb roundabouts in Liberty Township, it reminds me what suckers our local government has been toward this United Nations strategy.  I know all of them and have over the years.  They consider themselves conservatives and don’t think of the United Nations game.  Only people who do some research into the matter would know the strategy of how the United Nations embedded itself into all local zoning to lay the groundwork for a future of sidewalks, roundabouts, electric energy, and an eventual carless society.  It was a plan from the United Nations that sought to turn capitalism on its head to implement its objectives. They got away with it because people generally don’t look for the United Nations fingerprints on these kinds of Comprehensive Plans that the trustees follow in their decision-making processes.  Because of this adherence to a United Nations comprehensive plan, I have not been interested in Liberty Township politics at the same level as West Chester.  The frustration with them is just too much a pain in the ass.  They are good people; I like my trustees, two running for November, Tom Ferrall and Buck Rumpke.  But they are big government guys who have philosophies that lean towards development and not personal freedom.  For instance, many local developers want to know that someone is following some comprehensive plan to understand what property to buy and how to invest in the future.  But, to make a good community, there are many more factors to consider, and in Liberty Township, they often don’t come to light. 

To make matters worse, one outstanding trustee that Liberty Township had was David Kern, who recently died.  He was a Tea Party guy, and an influential Republican before the world fell into a tailspin.  But he was old when I was a little kid in Liberty Township, and my brother used to play with their kid at their nursery off Millikan Road.  Once David Kern was no longer a trustee, the government of Liberty Township moved much more toward the United Nations than the personal liberty and sovereignty of the United States.  David used to like to poke sticks in these kinds of comprehensive plans.  He might eventually vote on them, but he at least would argue the matter to see how strong they were.  It was a good balance to have someone like David Kern on the Liberty Township Trustees for many years.  Yet since his death, a guy like him has been missed. 

So when it comes to this election, I was pretty bored with it until I met Todd Minniear at the West Chester Tea Party forum recorded in these videos.  I like Buck Rumpke as a candidate and Republican, but he’s coming over from zoning. As I said, most zoning people have been saturated over the years through their educations with this massive United Nations plot to “Make Europe Great Again.” I have written voluminously that one of the great insecurities of America is the lack of history and culture that we have as a young country, compared to Europe.  So we assume that Europe, the mother country, is the way to emulate, and many of the Liberty Township residents have evolved into thinking the same way.  A wine purchased from Europe has a much higher value than a wine purchased from a vineyard by the Rumpke landfill.  They may be just as good, but it’s the stigma that people care about.  When I hear Buck talk, it’s evident that he’s been saturated with this global way of thinking. He’s a small-town guy who worked hard all his life at the family garbage business, and he wants to show how cultured he is by adopting all these woke, globalists’ points of view. He’s a super nice guy, but he thinks wrong about the big things.  And I would put Tom Ferrall into that same category.  Big government guy who wants to show how cultured he is by supporting all these dumb roundabouts and other European features. I’ll end up voting for one or the other, but my first pick will undoubtedly be Todd Minniear in a two-seat race. 

So Todd and I have met each other on several occasions.  I didn’t know it at the time, but Todd was on the front line protesting against what DeWine was doing during the Covid lockdowns. He’s smart, and he gets it. He’s a Tea Party type which excites me because of the success that we have seen in West Chester.  To have a guy like Todd in Liberty Township might help take things in a more successful direction.  Todd Minniear challenged the DeWine administration in court and won over the Covid lockdowns, and he is extremely intelligent.  Talking to him reminded me of David Kern.  What an excellent opportunity to get a great trustee onto the Liberty board.  People like Todd Minniear do not come along often.  Clearly, by watching the videos included here, you can see my two picks by how well they spoke.   Todd was by far the most articulate of the evening, and he’s willing to do that extra work that is often necessary.  When we talk about “liberty” in Liberty Township, we are not talking about blind compliance to some United Nations Comprehensive Plan or other dumb rules that hold us back.  Sometimes we need people we put into such positions to push back against the rules because the people making the rules may not have our best interests in mind.  That is the case with the United Nations.  They want Liberty Township to look like Europe, not America, and if you follow their ideas, that’s exactly what we’ll get.  Todd has a history of challenging the rules, which is precisely what we need in Liberty Township.

After the forum, I spoke to Todd a bit, along with other very smart people in the room, and had questions for the bright young mind.  I noticed that Todd had the great book that I value quite a lot, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates.  That is a book that describes the moral obligation of leadership lower in the pecking order of life to push back against authoritarian rule.  The book proposes several instances where it is the moral obligation to lash back at a higher authority for corrupt regulations and edicts.  For example, in this case, we should have had more trustees, state reps, and senators who openly fought the unconstitutional vaccine mandate.  For Joe Biden to issue an executive order demanding that all federal employees take medicine or lose their jobs, we needed more local officials to reject the premise.  Instead, most everyone has caved from lawyers to human resource departments for fear of drawing attention to themselves.  When Governor DeWine issued the mask mandates of last year, Butler County’s Sheriff Jones was one of the first in the country to say no, we’re not going to do that.  We need many more politicians in prominent positions who will behave this way when pressed, and Buck Rumpke and Tom Farrell are certainly not those guys.  They will be the first to put on the mask and follow the rules, like good Republicans who care more about adherence to the law than whether the laws are correct and just.  Todd Minniear cares about what’s truly right or wrong, and for me that sets him into a stratosphere all his own. He’s a lot better than the other two guys, and I will be voting for him. 

Like most of them, this election season proposes good things for those with the guts to say yes to them.  It takes courage to try something different, but sometimes it takes courage to stick to what’s working.  In West Chester, it takes guts to keep things solid as they have been.   To resist the tide of corruption that wants to open the door to a bigger government, to loot off the efforts of what made West Chester great, to begin with.  Yet, in Liberty Township, it would take guts to vote for Todd Minniear and take a great community and make it noticeably better.  Liberty Township has enjoyed a cascade effect from West Chester for years.  But now, there is an opportunity to make Liberty Township its unique kind of good truly.  That won’t happen with Buck Rumpke or Tom Farrell by themselves.  It would take a truly smart intellect and a person willing to do the extra work in Todd Minniear to pull it off, which is a fascinating prospect. 

Rich Hoffman

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