Tag: western arts

The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi and Domestic Violance Case of Sherrod Brown: Understanding the media agenda on big news stories

So who cares if Jamal Khashoggi went to pieces, literally. The former Muslim Brotherhood reporter for the Washington Post disappeared in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey several weeks ago and after being pressed on it his murder had been admitted to. Immediately 18 Saudis connected to the situation were arrested and the Crowned Prince has denied direct involvement, but who cares? It’s very strange that with all the violence in the world that this particular story has been front page news all week. I mean nobody wants to see people being killed, but don’t be naïve, it happens everywhere all the time. Why would this one guy, who has been buddies with Osama bin Laden and is certainly not a friend to peace in the world, be so important? Well, part of the answer comes from an article published Friday just ahead of the Saudi admission to the murder shown below. The only reason that anybody cares about Jamul Khashoggi is that he was a reporter, and reporters want to believe that they are part of a ruling class that has some immunity to the violence of the world, that they can cover stories without actually being connected to them, and without fear of becoming the story itself such as Jamal did.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/conservatives-mount-a-whisper-campaign-smearing-khashoggi-in-defense-of-trump/ar-BBOA6kY?ocid=spartandhp

Yet there is something even more fishy about this story of murder that has taken the world’s imagination by storm. Reporters knew a lot about it early in the process even down to the grotesque details of the torture of Khashoggi finger by finger as his body was cut up into little pieces and taken off site for who knows what next. And reporters have personally made President Trump connected to the story as if he had something to do with the actual murder himself by his friendly association with the Crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia. It was Turkish officials from Istanbul who leaked the story of Khashoggi’s dismemberment while his fiancé Hatice Cengiz waited over four hours outside before finally raising the alarm. There was a price on the head of the anti-reformist reporter who was at odds with the regime of the Crowned Prince’s administration, that is the number one purchaser of American military equipment in the world. Saudi Arabia is also the number one ally against the aggression of Iran and the efforts of Israel, so Jamal Khastoggi was hardly just another beat reporter covering news stories in the Middle East. He was an activist and he wanted to marry Cengiz, so he was there to pick up the papers that would allow him to do so, but he never came back out. He had walked into a place he knew would be dangerous for him almost daring his rivals to take action, and they did. So how is it President Trump’s problem?

This is a very similar story to the one that is taking place in Ohio where Sherrod Brown is a three-term senator that suddenly finds himself under scrutiny for domestic violence that occurred early in his life, but under the #METOO movement is suddenly a problem for him. Only the media doesn’t want to touch the story because they want Brown to win the election against his challenger Jim Renacci. The media is willing to put on blinders to the actions of a Democrat but if it involved a Republican, the story would be plastered all over the news. In the case of Sherrod Brown, the obvious bias is clear which makes it relevant to this murder story of Jamul Khashoggi. The media isn’t just reporting news, they are trying to make it.

What the media as an entity is trying to do is cause a disruption between the relationship President Trump has with Saudi Arabia ahead of the November elections hoping that the economy will be torpedoed and voters will be angry with Trump instead of enamored with him which will help with this mythical “blue wave” they keep talking about, which is turning out to be a mere ripple in a kid’s pool. Gas prices are low going into the election and people are enjoying the benefits of a very strong economy, and Saudi Arabia plays their part by keeping prices on barrels of oil low. They also help by keeping Iran on their heels bringing a period of peace to the Middle East that is unprecedented. But nobody has illusions that all the elements of the world are a kid’s game. To maintain that level of peace in one of the most hostile regions anywhere violence does occur—often.

The media is certainly fanning the flames of this murder to hurt President Trump and to put him in a position that would cause harm to the relationship he has with the Saudis. Trump has made great ground around the world eliminating threats and befriending just about everyone, and the media can’t stand it, because they want violence and turmoil. They want North Korea testing nuclear weapons, not thinking of building condos on their beaches. They want Iran strong and powerful, not withering under the feet of a U.S. backed Saudi Arabia. The media as an organization doesn’t want a successful President Trump, they want stories of discontent and rebellion so that they can inspire a socialist takeover of the American capitalist system. They want the midterms to knock Trump out of power and they will do anything to achieve it, even if it causes an international incident.

We often say on the conservative side of things that The Washington Post is the official blog of Jeff Bezos who is very much an anti-Trump activist. Jamal Khashoggi did some work for The Washington Post so his politics fell very much on the side of the average radical reporter that has been beating on president Trump since his inauguration. None of these reporters are interested in just reporting the news as it happens, they are activists employed by news organizations taking big liberal money to reshape the world. We aren’t talking about freedom of the press here, we are talking about aggressive action to overthrow regimes and inspire Marxist ideas to destabilize entire regions, if not the entire world. Trump and the Saudis are the enemy to such strategies, so the media is using the death of this Jamal Khashoggi as a sacrificial lamb to the media’s greater cause.

So what should President Trump do, or the United States for that matter? Well, the big picture must always stay in focus. Khashoggi, the Washington Post, CNN and many others pushing this story of murder were anti-Israel, pro Iran radicals who need to understand what kind of game we are playing here. In that game sometimes if you go into the consulate of a sovereign nation you have been provoking, you don’t come out, even if your soon to be wife is waiting outside. That’s just the way the ball bounces. And nobody should be afraid to say that, because it’s the truth. We aren’t playing patty cake here; the world is a dangerous place and the media isn’t interested in peace. They are trying to stage an overthrow of power on many levels by hiding behind their press passes and using the justification of their cowardice to declare a freedom of the press. The evidence is quite clear, we can see such massive coordination on easy cases like the Sherrod Brown situation in Ohio, where the media work well together to bury a story so they can achieve a greater political objective. Yet on something more obscure such as this case with Jamal Khashoggi, the pattern of behavior is just as predictable. Nobody in the media cares about the dismembered body of a murdered member of the Muslim Brotherhood and Washington Post reporter. All they care about is stopping Donald Trump any way possible. And if they can cause an international incident to derail the confidence of the President with allies he has worked hard to build—for which are helping fuel a great American economy, then so be it. They don’t care how many people die so long as the media gets their revolution of Marxist ideas out into the public, and that is the real truth behind this dangerous matter.

If I were President Trump I wouldn’t send sanctions to Saudi Arabia, I’d send them something better, a gift to show how strong our friendship still is, like maybe a free subscription to Amazon Prime. Or a poster of Jeff Bezos to hang on their palace wall. Because let’s face it, the world is at war. This won’t be the last death. What matters is that the right-side wins, and this time around, the Saudis are helping America bring stability to the Middle East. And if being friends with them makes that happen, then we shouldn’t let some little issue like this Khashoggi murder stop anything. And we should stand by those who are willing to do the dirty work where the rest of us would rather not be.

And while we are waiting for the body of this Washington Post reporter to turn up, remember, we are still waiting to see the body of Osama bin Landen.  We were told to just trust the Obama administration about the burial.  How is this any different?

Rich Hoffman

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Sherrod Brown Must Step Down: The Rules of #METOO dictate so

It really became apparent for me during the first debate between Jim Renacci and Sherrod Brown for the highly contested senate seat in Ohio, that it’s really a one-person race. Sherrod Brown, who is currently the three-time senator and its his seat that the battle is over, is effectively not qualified to run. It’s not even a political issue, it has nothing to do with any “dog” bills that Brown worked on to help Ohio residents with their “pets,” it has nothing to do with jobs, or Medicaid expansion. It has everything to do with the rules that we all now live under with the #METOO movement. Because Sherrod Brown was involved in a domestic violence case where his ex-wife had to file a restraining order against him, the Ohio Senator must step down. Sherrod Brown must step down. That’s all there is to it. It’s not dirty politics, its by the rules that his party have helped manifest, and under those guidelines, which were presented in the Judge Kavanaugh hearings as the established criteria it doesn’t matter how long ago an offense against a woman took place, or even whether or not the woman forgave the man—it only matters that the man did something and if a woman says such a thing from her lips. And in this case its more than an accusation, there are court documents which present the case beyond speculation of innuendo. Sherrod Brown was involved in a domestic violence situation for which he was the aggressor and that now disqualifies him for public office.

Before the Judge Kavanaugh hearings where a girl from high school, a woman named “Dr. Ford” came forward with allegations of rape during a drinking party when she was something like 15 years old, we might say that something that occurred that long ago would be purely political in motivations to bring up during a campaign. But Democrats did just such a thing to block the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s second pick to the Supreme Court. And they were more than willing to destroy the good name of Brett Kavanaugh to keep him off the court—and the entire media played along. Lucky for the courts there were enough votes to nominate Judge Kavanaugh to the high court anyway, but the Democrats opened up a lot of cans of worms in the process and introduced them as methods of appraisal for the future. They made a very strong case against Kavanaugh and were willing to stick by them even to the point of having their supporters scratch at the doors to the Supreme Court like cats trying to get inside from a freezing snowstorm outside. They made quite a spectacle of themselves all in the name of the #METOO movement.

Yet Sherrod Brown is trying to hold a critical senate seat against a worthy opponent and the debates between the two are good showing two paths for Ohio voters. Both men are distinctly different giving Ohio a real choice between two options. But after the Kavanaugh hearings and the methods of appraisal that the Democrats introduced, they essentially torpedoed their own candidate in Sherrod Brown. The rules had changed and under those new rules Brown was expected to step down immediately. All that mattered was that sometime within the past thirty years Sherrod Brown was involved in domestic violence. That is the end of the story, he is immediately disqualified. Even if he were to win his seat back, it would be illegitimate due to his documented history as a volatile male aggressor. The proof is in the court documents that his ex-wife filed against him.

Obviously, the Democrats are crying foul, and so is Sherrod Brown. They are used to throwing these kinds of things out there and making political monstrosities out of little issues, but they are not used to those things being applied to them. The media itself looks at the Sherrod Brown case and wants to cry political foul, but they were silent when Democrats were doing much worse to Brett Kavanaugh. We were supposed to believe that this straight-laced judge was a drinker and rapist when all he was ever doing was following the rules of a popular kid in high school. The standard that Democrats were trying to paint on Judge Kavanaugh not a single Democrat would ever be qualified for elected office for the rest of their lives, but they went for broke anyway. Now they must live with the consequences. They introduced the standard that they now have to live with.

Democrats can’t have it both ways, either we are to consider what women say about men and take their word for it 100% or we use other considerations such as a person’s actual record to judge them. Under the terms of the #METOO movement it doesn’t matter how many dogs Sherrod Brown has saved over his career, or how much he worked with the fellow Democrat John Kasich to expand Medicaid, what matters is what he did and how those rules apply to the sentiments of our day. Sherrod Brown was involved in domestic violence and that means that he must step out of public office. It would have been nice if they could have done all this well before the election so that Democrats could have found someone else to do that job but as it stands, timing is irrelevant according to the #METOO movement. We were to believe that the introduction of Dr. Ford’s testimony days before Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote was to occur was out of compassion for the women involved in the case. Well so too is the court documents of Sherrod Brown’s ex-wife. It doesn’t matter that she has come out stating forgiveness because the act of violence occurred regardless of her opinion about it. We all know that at the time of the domestic violence Sherrod Brown was a nobody. Since then he has spent the rest of his years in public office and has accumulated a lot of money as a top donor of lobby investment, so money has a way of inspiring forgiveness and Brown’s ex-wife has now seen the benefits of his public life and what it could do for her and her children. So she has come out and forgiven her ex-husband for the kind of violence that inspired her to seek a restraining order against him. But in the context of #METOO, the act itself is all we are to consider even if the action occurred over 30 years ago. Those are the rules.

If Democrats don’t hold Brown to the rules, then they can never use them against Republicans for any future election. By letting Sherrod Brown slip by, Democrats give up the opportunity to use the #METOO rules in any future election. While that may seem like a good idea today to preserve one senate seat, Democrats may want to consider the long-term options. As it stands, Republicans are going to pick up seats in the senate. They aren’t going to lose them. So what’s one silly little seat in the scheme of things? Is it really worth protecting Sherrod Brown and giving up their #METOO leverage? I say either way Republicans will end up winning. But for those who really think that the Judge Kavanaugh case was about women being abused, how can you really let Sherrod Brown off the hook? The answer is you can’t.

Rich Hoffman

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What a V.I.P. Pass Means: The refusal of the press to understand Trump supporters

I am always grateful when someone gives me a V.I.P. pass to some event, whether its political or some sporting endeavor—or the opening of some new restaurant. When I do something, I like to get up close and personal with it, but I do not have the time to wait in lines. I am not a line kind of person largely because it’s a time management issue. I have too much going on all the time to really spend too much time on one thing. So, When I get the opportunity to be a V.I.P. at an event I take it very seriously and am always very appreciative. Usually if it’s a political event, like the Trump events always are, if I go it’s because somebody thought enough of me that they offered me a V.I.P. experience. Such a way of attending allows a person like me the time to do what I do without making it into an entire day’s event. So it was in that context that I saw the fangs of the national media at the Trump rally in Lebanon in a way I wouldn’t otherwise have, and it was obvious.

Usually at these kinds of political rallies there is a general entrance and there is a V.I.P entrance that is usually near where the media enters. In fact, the last three or four times that I had been to a Trump event, the V.I.P. entrance was in the same place as the media entered. So it was only logical as we parked in Lebanon, Ohio and came to the entrance to the Trump rally that I notice the media sign-in table, so I asked them where the V.I.P. entrance was. The girl who answered me was about a year shy of 30 and was pretty smug. She repeated what I had said like some puppet and pointed at the long line that was about a quarter-mile long that everyone else was standing in waiting to get into the event. I paused on her face because I wasn’t sure if she was challenging me to a fight or was trying to be helpful. An older man who was standing next to her and was much more reasonable pointed around a chain link fence just to the other side of their position and told me that the V.I.P. table was there.

We stepped around the fence avoiding the long line and got to the table where some really sharp young ladies were doing the check ins, so I felt that whatever that was I encountered with that bizarre lady was over. Another thing I like about V.I.P. lines is that the security is usually less intrusive. They figure that you wouldn’t have a V.I.P. pass unless you knew someone important so they treat you differently, as not a potential terrorist posing as a Trump supporter, so security is usually much smoother, and in this case, it was. Not less stringent, but more respectful for sure. Once we were through I was immediately thankful for our passes. I had brought my daughter on this particular event because out of all my family, she hadn’t yet had a chance to see the president yet, so this was going to be a treat for her. Even though we had the passes we still showed up three hours early and it was a good thing that we did because the place was already stuffed with people. Under the big roof of the main stage the entire floor was packed and there wasn’t a seat to be found. It was astonishingly crowded.

But the event organizers were very nice when they saw we had the badges and they directed us to our seats in the bleachers just behind where the president would be speaking. I was thinking about what the media lady had said as we approached, it was obvious that she thought anybody coming to a Trump rally with a V.I.P. pass was pretentious and that it was violating some unwritten rule she lived by that was very much the way Democrats view the world. Nobody was more important than anybody else so how could someone coming to a Trump rally be more important? Well, as they showed me to our seats the bigger picture was obvious. I saw people there I knew from other events and the necessity for V.I.Ps was obvious. Trump could be assured that the people directly behind him knew what to do with the cameras on them, and they were all safe people who were good for security. Mostly the people sitting around us were all either big political players or major donors, so they were invested in the safety of the president, and we were part of the show. In my own way I give a lot more to the plight of the president than people who one or two times in their life wait all night to get a seat in the arena. We all do what we do and all those things were needed for this type of show. So I didn’t feel guilty about being taken to a nice seat while the people in the pit were stuck standing for up to six hours. And they didn’t seem to resent us, we all understood the larger context. Everyone was just happy to be there.

But as the media started doing zoom checks of the crowd from their position some of the organizers caught what was going on around the media area and discussions were brewing about the bright yellow badges that the people in the V.I.P area had around their necks. And the media was talking about it in a negative way. Apparently other media types were just as appalled by the signs of a V.I.P area as that girl was that I encountered. So the event staff came by and asked us to conceal our badges and to stay in our seats. The venue was too packed to get up and move around anyway. There was no way to really go use the restroom or to get some food so the only thing we could do is stay put. That is when it really became clear to me why the media hated Trump so much, he was making even political rallies cool again by breaking down norms the press had long accepted, basic rules of practice. V.I.P. passes certainly aren’t a new thing, and Democrats have those types of things at their events as well, but the media had in their minds that Trump supporters were still a subspecies of political activism and that Trump’s people couldn’t be that organized as to have a V.I.P. base to draw from. It is a denial of their own making, but it did have an impact on the way they covered the Trump events.

It was a fascinating observation and a new level of hatred that I hadn’t seen before, but the disdain was quite clear. Perhaps at other events the thoughts were that Trump would never make it to the presidency or that if he did, Democrats would knock him out of power. So there wasn’t much consideration about different status levels of Trump support from his base. But now everything was a little more real for them, the media was getting tired of covering Trump every night and having him berate them. But they had to go because their media bosses needed the ratings of covering Trump and they were becoming very resentful. And to make matters worse were the obvious evidence of Trump’s ground game, the financiers, the provocateurs, the political support that became the members of the V.I.P. section. The media had been wanting to think that we were all playing political house, and some people still refused to believe that what they were seeing was real. But it was quite real, and even more than that—it was better than what was going on with the other side. Wherever there are V.I.P. passes that are as valuable if not more so than a back-stage pass to a rock concert, there is value that justifies them. I appreciate that value immensely. But the media obviously had a hard time accepting the obvious. They weren’t the only ones with special access, or in the case of that rally, limited access. They were able to be in the press area, but they weren’t able to get to where we were and that seemed to bother them. And that is a very subtle sign of winning that doesn’t get talked about very much. But it is one of the biggest bits of evidence of these changing times and it makes me even more proud of that little souvenir that I will never forget. It meant more to me than just being able to get a decent seat. It was the evidence of some changing times that are getting better by the day. And I’m looking forward to those continuous improvements.

Rich Hoffman

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What Makes President Trump So Special: A magic night in Lebanon, Ohio

There were some deeply touching moments in the Trump rally in Lebanon, Ohio which I partially expected. But we’re talking about a sitting president stumping for some midterm candidates here, politics is not supposed to be this exciting and people normally don’t show up five, six and seven hours early to stand in the cold and in the rain to watch a 72-year-old man talk. This is a human phenomenon that is unsurpassed in the history of the world, I don’t even think the great Winston Churchill could have brought out the crowd that greeted President Trump at the Warren County Fair Grounds on Friday October 12, 2018. I was just a little stunned by the event. I had a feeling that there would be a large crowd, but the sheer magnitude of it was just jaw dropping. There was a collision of Americana present that was obvious and inspiring and I thought John London from Channel 5 News in Cincinnati put his finger on it perfectly in his summation of the night.

There is a lot to unpack from this event and it will certainly take more than one article to cover it all but for the sake of brevity here I have to thank the people who gave my daughter and I the opportunity to witness this spectacle from the comfort of the V.I.P. section. Yes it was freezing cold and we got rained on and we did stand most of the time. But at least we had a seat and a good vantage point to watch this unusual moment in history.

I always feel sorry for people who don’t have that kind of access to these big Trump events, but as I looked at people’s faces on the floor, many who had been standing under the roof for more than four hours—before President Trump even arrived—they were happy people just willing to be near the star of the show if even for a moment. People were packed everywhere that people could put themselves for as far as the eye could see and it was quite something to witness. It was inspiring to say the least. If these people were willing to show up in the cold and rain of an October in Ohio, they would surely show up to vote for Republicans Trump endorsed in the upcoming election.

This was my oldest daughter’s first time to go to one of these events with me and she was very touched by it. She is a professional photographer and shares with me a tendency to like to view the world through big picture vantage points. The event organizers couldn’t have put us in a better spot for that particular venue, we had the top row of the bleachers just behind the president. I’ve watched President Trump speak many times so it was good to be behind him because my interest was mostly the crowd. The media never does justice to what the crowds look like from Trump’s point of view and we were fortunate to see the whole thing more from the president’s perspective even watching the motorcade role in to drop him off, and turn around all the vehicles to take him back to Lunken afterwards. President Trump does many very subtle things that only a polished pro like him can do on such large operations with many moving parts coming together seamlessly. He is super smart, from where I was standing I could see him staging up his entry onto the stage to match perfectly the various cable news top of the hour broadcasts, and he ended everything right on time like such a seasoned performer. But he’s of course juggling much more than that just in the complexities of his job. Yet while Steve Chabot was talking the President could get a sense that the crowd was drifting. People not under the roof of that magnificent structure on the fairgrounds were getting soaked, including my daughter and I. People next to us were starting to head for the exit. Trump was watching and he ever so subtly tapped Steve in the middle of the back to change things up a bit. Chabot took the cue and sped up his speech and Trump seamlessly changed gears and held the audience to his next twenty minutes of oration. Most people might not even see the value in such a thing, but that is one of the very raw distinctions that Trump has over everyone else in the world. He is literally a master communicator and he knows exactly what he is doing all the time. I continue to be impressed by President Trump every time I see him live, I don’t think I’d ever get sick of it.

After the event was over and people headed out to the parking lot, which used to be the old horse racing track that was moved to Miami Valley gaming several miles to the west my daughter and I lingered around watching the press. I literally stood next to an AP writer and watched her write the news feed of the event, which she mostly got all wrong. But she was shivering and tapping her feet viciously trying to stay warm. For people who haven’t been to these types of things before the media are always given a spot near the back of a rally to photograph from, and behind that raised camera platform is usually rows of tables so that writers can get their stories out. Mostly these reporters are like anybody else, they just want to get their jobs done and get home. Once the Trump supporters had left for their cars the reporters could relax a bit and get their stories out to their employers to meet their deadlines. Most of those reporters didn’t go to the trouble that John London did at Channel 5. They see hundreds of these types of rallies so there is no magic in them that they can see, they only care about the surface stuff. But one thing that everyone missed from a reporter’s standpoint that was very clear to me was how Trump handled the weather.

Remember when Obama had to have a military official hold an umbrella over him while he gave a speech in the Rose Garden? Well in these times of high insurance rates and overly cautious appraisals of everything I didn’t think Trump’s people would let him take the stage because it had been raining so long. The stage was soaked. Part of the stage entry was raised and ran outside of the roof that most of the rally was under, so it was exposed to the weather. Rain had clearly soaked it after many hours. But Trump did the right thing when he arrived. Some of his security wiped off the platform with towels and Trump walked out across it without any concern for his safety which these days was highly unusual. Lesser people would have called the whole thing off, but not this president.

Trump shows up to talk to his supporters under any condition, and that is part of his appeal. But when he left the rain had been coming down even harder. The safe thing would have been for Trump to take the steps down into the pit and stay under the roof, but no, he went back out the way he came in and the ramp wasn’t dried off at all. Trump walked across it like a seasoned pro not even worrying about slipping and falling. Trump isn’t afraid of little things like that and that is part of what distinguishes him from everyone else. It’s a subtle little thing, but those add up and they make Trump and all those he endorses that much more appealing.

Trump has made the Republican Party much, much better. I’ve always identified myself as a Republican, but I have never been prouder to be affiliated with it. Trump is a superstar, he was before he ever ran for president, yet he’s not so pretentious that he’s afraid of rain, or hard work. And nobody works harder than President Trump.

These rallies may cost a fortune to put on, and may be traffic nightmares, but one thing that comes out of them is that Trump talks directly to people who support him. He doesn’t hide out in the White House enjoying the luxury of the office. He works, and he works hard—and he’s willing to endure the cold and the rain if his supporters are. And that is what makes Donald J. Trump special, and why the Republican Party has a new life because of him. The Democrats don’t have anybody even close and they likely never will.

Rich Hoffman

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The Power Behind the Trump Name: Democrats are in real trouble

Just for perspective when news coverage of something like President Trump’s visit to Lebanon, Ohio occurs network news always feels they have to cover equally the Democratic response. I suppose they think it avoids the optics of appearing to lean to one side instead of the other. But with something like Trump coming to a Northern Cincinnati suburb of great historic value, so many people showed up that it essentially shut down the city as people poured into the fairgrounds of Warren County just a few miles north of the famous Golden Lamb profusely. In fact dear reader, as you are reading this, I am at that event and as far as you can see its Trump Republicans who have swarmed in from all over the countryside. Yet the news coverage of this massive rally featured a kind of Democrat response, a rally of their own called “We Deserve Better” which had about four people and a cat show up. I didn’t think there were any Democrats in Warren County, but a few showed up, and their rally looked pretty pathetic in comparison. Not even on the same level of politics which I thought said a lot about the reality of the upcoming midterms.

As I’ve said from the beginning of this latest political season, it’s going to come down to voter turnout of course. Democrats are energized, but honestly, I think we are seeing what’s left of their party on the news every night. They are fluffing themselves up to look relevant, but in all actuality, they aren’t. Just as the Channel 9 people in Cincinnati felt they had to cover the Democrat response to the Republican rally–truthfully there aren’t enough people in the Cincinnati market who even care anymore to justify the airtime. That is why Trump is able to draw these huge crowds who are more than a little enthusiastic to show up on a chilly October night in Ohio to watch a president two years into office give a stump speech for fellow Republicans. There isn’t anybody like that in the Democrat Party now or in the foreseeable future and that has further coalesced Republicans around Trump. I think it’s quite clear that the amount of people who showed up to see Trump exceeded expectations. Meanwhile, the Democrats were trying to fluff up their feathers to appear as an equal party offering alternatives to the Republican proposals, but people know now what they are really about, it’s socialism and now that they cat is out of the bag, most Americans just aren’t comfortable supporting such a concept on American soil. And it shows with the support of the Democratic Party.

Yes, you can tell a lot about enthusiasm from the population by the size of their rallies. For instance, when I wrote about this very topic two years ago as Trump was looking to be knocked out of the presidential race by the Access Hollywood tapes I was at the rally at U.S. Bank Arena which filled up to the luxury boxes. Hillary had come the week before and had a hard time filling up the little space just a few blocs down the road in downtown Cincinnati between the Ohio River and the Banks development. There is a little park there and Hillary gave a speech and they had to push everyone in tight to make the crowd look bigger on television. I could see then that nobody cared about the Access Hollywood tapes. Trump was different and he was re-writing the rules of politics, rules that the Democrats had controlled for nearly 100 years. Trump had changed them all for the better in just a few months on the campaign trail as president.

I’d like to say that you can believe polls, but here’s the problem with them, pollsters have to call many thousands of people in order to get a statistical sampling of a few hundred, because most people they call don’t want to participate. Of that percentage it is well-known that Republicans don’t answer their phone whereas Democrats are more prone to do so. Democrats are very social creatures, that’s why they lean toward collectivism and political socialism. Conservatives are self-reliant and are often busy with something productive, so they don’t take calls from phone numbers they don’t recognize. Pollsters under pressure to get constant results to the networks that buy them have to produce the results they can get rather than wait for a proper number of Republicans to answer the phone, and that’s how all these polls get screwed up. I don’t think most of the races around the country are as close as they try to make them sound. Networks do with all the races just as they did with the Trump rally, they try to make Democrats look like a viable competitor. But in all actuality the Democrats aren’t even a blip on the map.

I continue to be impressed with Donald Trump, he knows his stuff and nobody outworks him, that’s for sure. This past week he did a rally almost every day and on Thursday before this event in Lebanon he had Kenya West at the White House which really gave some positive media coverage.  It is good marketing to show access to this president, and it was very smart of event organizers to have the wherewithal to string these events together in this way. But Trump gets the credit for having the stamina to pull it all off. The guy just never stops working and it shows. The desperation that the Democrats are now showing is that they don’t have a way to match that energy and they are getting frustrated.

Granted the Lebanon Trump rally is in very conservative country, I’m not sure there are any Democrats who live in the surrounding area. But Trump has shown time and time again that he can pull the same kind of numbers in inner cities and in places where Democrats are running things. In this case, Trump was stumping for so many politicians it made sense to have a rally in the middle of all their districts to accommodate everyone. But to even make a decision like that you have to have the power behind the name to most utilize the President’s presence. Lebanon was a perfect place to have a rally, and it’s a good thing too, because they needed the room for all the people who showed up. Seeing the crowd up close and the energy that was coming from them it is very obvious that things aren’t nearly as close as the media would like to make things appear. That doesn’t mean that Republicans can afford to stay home on election night, but that if they show up Democrats won’t be winning anything. They are a tired party selling an old message of socialism that isn’t very exciting and they are getting torched politically by Donald J. Trump. Even with everything Trump has been through over the last couple of years, he has endured the worst of it and the storm clouds are finally starting to break and his supporters are still there, which was quite obvious in Lebanon, Ohio on October 12, 2018. It looks to me after this next election that Democrats won’t be looking for a president to run against Trump. They will be looking for candidates just to run for local positions, and they won’t be able to find them, because the party itself is about to become extinct. The media won’t say that because they want the ratings of a perceived race between them and Republicans. But I’ll say it.

Rich Hoffman

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Eric Holder and Michael Avenatti want to Fight: I say, great–just tell me when and where, sounds fun!

So Michael Avenatti wants to fight does he? He has challenged Donald Trump Jr. to an MMA match of three rounds in the octagon. If Trump doesn’t want to do it, I’d be happy to take his place. It would be really fun to smash Avenatti’s face into a bleeding husk of disorganized flesh. Anytime Michael, anytime you New York softy. And Eric Holder is talking tough too, he said that when we “Republicans” go low, that they “Democrats” will kick us. Sounds like a threat to me. Hey, it’s not Republicans who are shooting up baseball games, or blocking off roads in protest, or are scratching at the doors to the Supreme Court throwing fits like a baby because they didn’t get what they wanted. Basically, all I have to say to these advocates of violence is that they don’t want to go there. There is nothing to be afraid of from some stringy haired leftist. If the political left thinks they are going to win anything with violence, they have already lost everything. I can say that I’m not going to put up with it. If one of these losers gets in my face, that will be the end of them. Generally, Republicans have been good about not provoking violence, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Republicans still believe in the rule of law, so they leave those kinds of acts to the authorities. But if you take away that option, I wouldn’t put any bets on Democrats to be the more aggressive. If they want to fight, I personally would welcome that approach. I’d much rather fight than talk.  They are incorrect when they say the way to earn Republican respect is to get “tough.”  From my perspective, it just pisses me off, and if they think that challenging conservatives to a fight is smart, they need a forceful education it would seem.

Violence and the threat of it is one of the most primal emotions for human beings and it is the way that collectivist-oriented people mean to enforce their solidarity. Without the threat of violence, the political left really has nothing to negotiate with. It’s interesting that they have now revealed these strategies openly. But they were always there, violence and bullying is what Democrats have always done to advance their cause. Without their ability to evoke fear in people, they have no way to get people to accept their goofy philosophies. However, that doesn’t work so well in real life. Its one thing to talk tough within your own circles of influence, it’s quite another to challenge people who are actually tough and are not inclined to being pushed around.

As a Republican I’m a bit old fashion, if someone hits me in the face or insults me in some way, I have no problem dishing it back out to them. I don’t go around looking for fights, but if someone brings one to me, I do enjoy fighting. I don’t think Avenatti, Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton understand what the real people who make up the flyover states are all about. Empty threats lose their luster really fast. It’s one thing to threaten violence to a bunch of millennial latte sippers at Starbucks, it’s quite another to step up to a shooting range in Ohio and start rattling off their mouths. This is essentially why Democrats are for gun control, they understand that for their way of governing to work, people can’t have the ability to defend themselves. But in my own case, I would never turn to the gun first with those people. Fists and stamina would be all that would be required.

The best thing when it comes to conflict is to be able to have discussions, and to be able to articulate your position. You should never have to turn to violence, because if you do, you have already started to lose. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy fighting. Personally, I love fighting. I have some conflict with someone somewhere every few weeks. These days they don’t end up being physical altercations where fists are thrown. When I was younger and untested that kind of thing happened a lot more, but these days the fights are usually verbal, and they get intense—and nobody beats me. I have what many would call a “vicious” temper. And I don’t stop once I get going. Some punk like Michael Avenatti wouldn’t stand a chance. The loser Eric Holder wouldn’t even break a sweat. I could turn him into a screaming girl within a minute. If these people want a fight, I would love to give it to them. We aren’t the ones asking for it, but we sure as hell can finish it.

I think such a system of settling issues is good, there are worse things in life than fighting. By not fighting it allows wimpy people like Avenatti and Holder to believe themselves to be tough, because nobody calls their bluff. But one way to have a more honest society is to be able to distinguish between illusion and reality. When someone challenges you to a fight, there is almost a moral responsibility to call them out on it in the name of honesty, otherwise the aggressor is allowed to advocate a falsehood of threatening content for the aims of evil. We aren’t so civilized in life that we have outgrown the need for fighting. These people in the Democratic Party are the mainstream and they are calling for fights, so we have an obligation to set the record straight. Eric Holder won’t be kicking me let me make that clear, nor will anybody else. It will never happen.

I’ve managed most of my life to live with a good, moral disposition. Sometimes challenges come along, and you have to do what you have to do. Sometimes fights are fast, sometimes they last decades, but it is always my focus to win every one of them. There is nothing wrong with having a never surrender attitude, it can help in all aspects of life. But when challenged like these leftist insurgents are prone to do these days, we have to let them know that such threats are not permissible. It doesn’t matter obviously to them that physical threats of violence toward others is illegal. So is drug possession, and many other things that liberals do. But they truly believe that the rules do not apply to them and that they can run around our streets harassing good people with threats of violence. Protestors do not have a right to shut down roadways, they put themselves at risk of being run over. They do not have a right to punch Trump supporters in the back of the head without being destroyed in retaliation. If they aren’t going to live by the laws of our land, then why should we?

There is no higher path–taking the “high” road when it comes to conflict–it is not the best option. What is, is to crush your enemies with verbal and or physical violence. It is best to avoid such circumstances, but if the former attorney general of the United States wants to evoke violence, then he can deal with the mess. But compliance is not an option. Yielding to a bully isn’t either. Threats against us cannot go uncontested and speaking for myself, I really do hope one of these losers tries their aggression with me. It would be fun to deal with it—kind of a free pass legally to decimate them completely, because they started it. So I say to them, bring it on.

Rich Hoffman

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Be Proud of the Cowboy Hat: It is alright to be proud of western culture

I took it more than a little personal, the abandonment of Columbus Day and the way the media belittled Melania Trump’s choice of hats while on tour in Africa. Both of those issues were blatant attacks on western culture for which I happen to love, and I don’t take attacks on them lightly. On Melania’s hat several in the media stated that it looked too “colonial” and that she should have been more sensitive to blacks and their plight. And regarding Columbus Day, it was the attack of the Europeans that ruined the utopia of the Indian tribes that were encountered during 1492 and beyond. All things in western culture we have been told by modern-day academia was to cast aside and think of as a sickness. Well, to my observation, it is the opposite way of looking at things, it was western culture that has created opportunity for improvement for people of all races and is the best thing to ever have happened on planet earth. And nothing represents western culture more than the cowboy hat which I have worn all of my life. Anybody who wears a cowboy hat is making a bold statement about their appreciation of western culture, its inescapable. For instance, watch the following video of Sheriff Jones from Butler County, Ohio wear his hat on the way to the microphone to give a little speech. The addition of the cowboy hat says a lot about him and the culture he is functioning from.

I have worn a cowboy hat of some kind since my early days of grade school. I grew up on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns and I thought everyone in the world wore them, until I went to school and learned otherwise. At that time some of the big progressive pushes that we know now were just getting started. It was out of fashion for a housewife to stay home with her children, they were made to feel bad if they did so. It was stunning how badly other women treated my mom because she was still a stay-at-home mom in the late 70s and early 80s. There was a great push by progressive society to get both parents out of the house and to turn over the raising of children to the state. My mom was one of the last hold outs and most of the kids in my classes wished she had been their mom, because they were children and wanted attention—and the public school couldn’t give it to them the way they wanted it. She volunteered at school a lot and all the kids knew her and wanted her to be their mother because she could give them attention.

Obviously, I was a very observational kid. The direction of society didn’t make much sense to me so I continued to wear my cowboy hats as a little kid just about everywhere I went. The more kids made fun of me over it the more I did it. I was always aware enough to understand that their behavior toward my hats were to put pressure on me to change my style of dress. It came to a point that I was determined to make a fashion statement all on my own, and I wore some form of a cowboy hat from my teenage years well into adulthood, actually up to the present. Those hats to me always represented a distinction, my vote for the sanctity of western culture. I never saw the cowboy with their guns and hats mounted on a bucking bronco to be the oppressors of the Indian. I never saw the headdress of some tribal leader to be equal to the cowboy and their big hats. The hat represented progress and human fulfillment, the Indian headdress the worship of nature and the limits of mother earth. The two sides were never meant to live together, their ideas were just too different from each other. For centuries the west and the east ran from each other until they collided in North America in the early 1700s ultimately and went to war over their differed philosophies.

My attire cost me, more than a few dates. Women are always the pace setters of social norms and even though I was dipping my feet into the waters of being a male model right out of high school my attractiveness could not erase the uncomfortable social pressure that dates felt when going out somewhere with me. I could have easily alienated the pressure by not wearing the hats and dressing more normally for what was expected in the late 80s, but I felt that would be selling myself out, so I never did it. I was most comfortable when wearing a cowboy hat so that’s what I did most of the time. I can say that as a young guy of about 24 to 25 when I was meeting with engineers and investors with some of Cincinnati’s most high-profile characters at the time I wore a brown western style trench coat and a very stylish cowboy hat all the time—to the point that it made people feel very uncomfortable. I had to work extra hard to get them to take me serious with that kind of attire which looked like it belonged in a 1870 western than in 1993—but it felt authentic so I kept doing it. I lived on the campus of the University of Cincinnati at the time and I dressed that way everywhere I went around that college. It was certainly out of pace with the rest of the world.

It took another twenty years before people stopped looking cross-eyed at me when I’d wear my cowboy hats into public. When you get to a certain age people stop caring what you do or how you dress. Once you are too old to run around with women, people no longer view you as a rival for their affections, so if you wear a cowboy hat out in public they just overlook you. But to me they were worth wearing and the pressure that came with them because I always had the feeling that it was my way of supporting western culture. And why not support western culture? If you didn’t accept the premise that all that came from Christopher Columbus was death and mayhem rather than the flowering of a new kind of society, then what else would you do? The Indian never built a railroad, they didn’t make guns or build buildings. They were superstitious nature lovers and what was great about that? Didn’t mankind have a mind to take the world and invent new things to expand life in unique ways? And who did that better in the history of the world but the western culture that founded North America as a free country with the idea of self-rule? And from that came this marvelous economy!

I still proudly wear my cowboy hats and I never regretted it. Hats are a purposeful statement about the values that the individual has. When you are the only one wearing one, it can feel awkward because it certainly sticks you out in a crowd, which is why most people don’t wear them. But at various periods of American development hats spoke about the kind of society we had and they were fashion statements that represented distinct values. And I don’t think any other form of fashion says more than when a person wears a cowboy hat. Doing so states that the person wearing it is proud of their western culture and that they reject the idea that eastern philosophies should take precedence in the realm of value. The criticism of Melania and Christopher Columbus has at its root the premise that western society should be abandoned—but for me and many others, it is the other way around. And the way to vote that sentiment is to wear the hat of western culture proudly and without apology. History knows the truth.

Rich Hoffman

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Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Understanding the progressive push toward tribal behavior and worship

I agree with America hating progressives, Christopher Columbus did not discover America. What he did do was bring western civilization to North and South America and ultimately a sharp rise over time in lifestyles and personal freedom. Yet this year there was a sharp increase in cities around the United States, Cincinnati included that are no longer recognizing Columbus Day and instead are calling it Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This is where things started going wrong because there is a vast history in North America that shows that the people we have called Indians for many centuries came to North America in much the same way that Christopher Columbus did, by boat from someplace oversea, from another continent. When the Europeans eventually came in the form of Columbus in 1492 the people they found were remnants of many decaying societies. Europeans didn’t take anything away from those people, the Indians gave it away themselves.

I had a commenter on my blog site get upset with me a week or two back due to my thoughts about tattoos and body piercings, which are quite common in our modern society. I think tattoos and body piercings are very corrosive to a dignified life because essentially, they are a revolt against the DNA that parents give to their children. There is nothing much more insulting from a child to their parents than to alter their appearance which is a combination of the parents brought together to make a child. When the child reverts to tribal behavior it is saying to their parents that they want to destroy what the parents gave them in an individual way by defacing themselves. Now modern society has sold this behavior off to rebellious youth by proclaiming it as an act of individual assertion. But in reality, it is a disrespect of the parental role in the child’s life and an affirmation into tribal rebellion intended to undo the society for which the conduct was popularized.

Progressives for many years have made this reversion to tribalism a key strategy for them—they have no intention to progress as a society toward a society that is always looking forward, but backwards toward the sacrificial sentiments of ancient societies that came before rockets and microchips. The best way to do that was to separate the child from the parental roles which build society then to adopt those children as spawns of mother government. By pressuring youth through popular culture into defacing themselves of their parental influences, progressive political strategists meant to undo the basic concepts of American civilization. That is the purpose behind gay rights, so that children will not be born of traditional parents, that is the purpose of drug laws to promote a loss of thinking individuals, and that is the purpose of body mutilation among young people—to destroy what their parents gave them and call it a declaration of independence when it is in fact a separation of the child from the mother to be cared for by the state instead.

So it should come as no surprise that the same people advocating tattoos, drugs and careless sex are the same people advocating for Indigenous Peoples’ Day across the nation removing Columbus Day as the observed Holiday and changing the name. But those same people are lying to the people of modern times in insisting that indigenous people where living in harmony for thousands of years happy and wise until the Europeans brought western culture to their oriental sensibilities destroying them with disease and violence. It is pretty obvious based on what we are learning archaeologically that North America had witnessed the rise and fall of many cultures well before the Maya and Aztecs of Central American interacted with Mississippian Culture at the time Christ was roaming the Holy Land. North America had its own kind of empires that were not so different from the Romans well before the Temple of Solomon was built in Israel. And those cultures rose and fell for a reason and what was left of them was not a happy people, but the castaways of times more civilized and enlightened. The reversion to the primitive is a human default code that occurs whenever societies expand and contract, like the cycle of life itself. A society is born, it goes through its teenage years of rebellion and war, then it settles down and starts to spawn children and becomes productive—before old ages starts weakening it into eventual death. The Indians of North America were the remnants of death, of cultures long gone—Christopher Columbus didn’t take away their society—they did it to themselves.

The progressive strategy these days is to get people to forget about the successes of western culture and to put them in a reversion state back to their primitive origins. Every time you see a person with a tattoo or a body piercing you are seeing the creation of a progressive mentality intended to shake off the sanctity of their biological roots and to remake them into soldiers of the state dependent and loyal to their political overlords instead of their parents. They will profess that such an act is to proclaim their independence from their parents, but in reality it is to take the mind away from the biological origins of the individual and to initiate them into a collective society with the newly shared parents of the state as their guardians, wither its CareSource as insurance, or Medicaid—Social Security, or just a welfare check—the ritual is about the death of parental roles and the rebirth of shared state parentage. That same mentality is at work with the removal of Columbus Day and the advent of Indigenous People’s Day. We are to forget about the advent of Western Civilization and to push away its influences while honoring the time that came before when people dressed half-naked in the forests of Ohio and worshiped the stars and moon.

As all this was going on this week the United Nations released their scientific research on climate change indicating that the world only had 10 years to reverse its course to prevent a 2 degrees spike in temperatures that would flood places like Miami, Florida by 2030. Failure to act they told us could result in mass destruction and much human misery. But what was really happening was that the same mentality that fueled the medicine men of the many North American tribes and the tribes all over Europe and Russia and present-day Africa were attempting to keep their people from straying too far from the village which they controlled with superstition and ignorance. In such a society they keep people unified by the tattoos and bodily defacement of mutilation instead of putting their attention on what really causes rain or the change in seasons. 10 years will come and go and nobody will notice because western civilization has the means to actually leave earth, so who cares? Not that anything the United Nations is saying is correct, it’s just irrelevant and not even worth the question. Yet progressives desire to sell such fantasy as fact and to do that they have to destroy western civilization or any reference to it. That is the cause of progressives desiring to ignore Columbus Day and to switch it to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, as if the primitives of our cultures knew something we didn’t. They of course don’t. Celebrating Christopher Columbus Day isn’t about discovering America, it’s about bringing western culture to those indigenous people and giving rise to a society that is better and more productive. And that is what progressives don’t want to acknowledge. In the end we find out that our parents weren’t so bad and that the collective parentage of the state is an abasement on intelligence, and it should be defeated in every way possible. Ultimately the society that had the best ideas survived, and that is for the benefit of all. Columbus coming to America may have brought with it lots of war and misery, but with it came the notion of independence and self-rule which has set the world afire with fresh ideas and economic concepts. And for that it would be worth doing all over again thousands of times over, because the benefits far outweigh the downside.

Rich Hoffman

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The Most Beautiful Woman in Africa: Setting the bar high for those too lazy to reach for it

In any other year in any other administration Melania Trump’s trip to Africa climaxing at the pyramids of Egypt would have been a world stopping event of high praise and elegance. Just the pageantry of one of the world’s most beautiful women going on safari in Kenya or standing boldly in front of the Great Sphinx would have filled every magazine cover in the fashion industry with her grace. And as physically stunning in her beauty as Melania is she’s smart and gracious as well representing America in the best way possible in every category. There isn’t much to criticize about her, and there is a whole lot to like. But back home with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, and an unemployment number that was historic all on its own, her husband’s big news overshadowed what was one of the most spectacular trips a First Lady ever conducted in America to foreign soil and it’s a shame that most people missed it. But astonishingly the attention Melania did get was roundly negative because some of the outfits she chose to wear were just too good for average people in the media to withstand.

What’s important about the reaction that most reporters, and liberal internet trolls had about Melania’s visit to some of Africa’s great places was that it revealed the essential hate that has fueled the Democratic Party for years. Part of that hate you can find in any junior high school when the first girl of a sixth or seventh grade class starts showing breast development or other signs of a blooming flower that will start to attract he attention of boys. Personally speaking, I’ve always felt that wearing hats were stylish and were respectful to the society for which you represented, and I’ve done it all my life. I used to wear a cowboy hat everywhere when I was in grade school from fifth grade all the way up to and past my graduation and people would say the meanest things. The more they did it, the more I wore the hats and more often. Essentially anytime individuals show themselves to be apart from the herd either through personal beauty or chosen attire, the mob mentality that is part of our animal makeup wants to beat it down into submission to let everyone know that standing out is not a desired trait.

The hatred that comes from people toward those of exception and independence comes from not wanting any individual to raise a bar that others might feel the pressure to live up to. The true meaning behind the name calling and social banter is to make those exceptional people feel the pressure to come back down to earth with the rest of the world and not to raise the level of performance expectation too high. You can actually see this behavior at work in just about every industry on planet earth. Average performance will get you a seat at the table with the cool people. Society calls people cool who are the pace setters for everyone else, and all people are supposed to stay under the bars that they set. Today the “cool people” are marijuana smoking hip hop artists like Snoop Dogg or tattooed freaks and body pierced losers like those seen in typical pop music bands. The not so subtle message to their followers is to revert toward tribalism and collective unity through shared pain and personal mutilation. From the cool people of establishment society these days it is good to mutilate your individual bodies and to seek redemption in collective associations. Melania’s message to the world while touring Africa was the opposite, and that is what set the criticism of her afire.

In America many in the media and in entertainment industries have tried to lower the outward image of the average American into something that low intelligence, lottery buying, gambling addicts would feel comfortable with. Forget about Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, instead show the world Jack Black farting on stage. People have an easier time living up to the low standard as opposed to aspiring to the high one so over time the expectation has drifted into recess with the losers of the world becoming the cool people—and the cool people are always the trend setters. Only Melania Trump was one of those trend setters who built a career well before she met Donald Trump as a top fashion model in the industry selling images which people were fine with so long as it stayed in the realm of sex. But now that she is a First Lady with policy influence, it was a real threat to the status quo to have her running around Africa looking like she strolled off the pages of GQ inspiring people to greatness. But for Melania she was promoting her “Be Best” campaign and how best to achieve that but by looking and acting exceptional.

The hatred from the left essentially comes from any reference to exceptionalism where people are expected to behave at a level of excellence. After all the political left has attempted to remove all examples of goodness from our society by stripping away any level of expectation. The result is what we are now seeing among millennials who are suddenly mystified why people don’t just love them because they stepped into a room. Liberals did everything they could to push fathers out of the home and to marry the mothers of children who suddenly looked to government as the home care provider. A scheme that was more than just a little obvious, because instead of loving a father the children would grow up loving government and would keep politicians in power who were all to happy to be that parental role in their lives all their lives.

But Melania broke more than a few rules when she dressed to match her enthusiasm for a unique country and all its ancient mysteries instead of being sensitive to the lazy and lackluster with less than a sensational presentation of herself. She was supposed to be sensitive to the needs of the weak and those not as gifted physically as she was. She was expected to cut her hair short and to put on a few pounds to make average people not feel inferior. She was expected to stuff her breasts up tight against her body and not wear pants that showed the curves of her fuselage. Most of left leaning people wanted to see a Mrs. Potato head, not a fashion model working from the White House. These kinds of trips were supposed to be reserved to people like Taylor Swift and Angelina Jolie from the Hollywood crowd, not a sitting First Lady. How could anybody in the future ever compete with Melania Trump?

Yet that was the point of the trip, the “Be Best” tour of Africa, to inspire the world to be better. And Melania did that. In retaliation the media reluctantly covered the trip with a kind of stubbornness that a child refusing to eat might display. But nobody could say she didn’t represent America well. From the perspective of liberals, she did too good. Yet that’s exactly what we want from a representative to the White House that we elected to conduct our business. We want the people of Africa to be successful and to be inspired. If they want to learn from our economic system, we are happy to teach them. But Melania didn’t go there to put on a tribal headdress and bow to some tribal king who still thinks the moon is going to help his crops grow. She went there to show them that prosperity was there for all to partake in and if they wanted to look like her and act like her then America could show them the way. Pandering to the cultures of the past is fine but humans should never limit themselves to such restrictions. And Melania Trump showed the world that the way to escape those limits is to “be Best” and that all starts by the way we conduct ourselves in public. And in that regard Melania Trump was “The Best” and most beautiful that Africa had ever seen. True, beauty is only skin deep, but what Melania showed was even deeper than that. She was the whole package and she represented America wonderfully.

Rich Hoffman

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The Grim Reality for Democrats: Kathy Wyenandt loses steam in a local election which reflects the national implications for her party

I couldn’t help but notice that Kathy Wyenandt’s campaign sign was gone from the billboard she had been renting near my home on RT.4 in Liberty Township where she is running against George Lang for the 52nd District House seat. The old billboard was nice, and expensive and she started with her message early in September 2018. She thought like a lot of Democrats did that this whole thing was going to be easy. After all her experience told her that the 2013 Lakota levy had passed and she had led that tax increase. In reality I had to break her heart on the matter when we spoke privately later after a debate. The Lakota levy of 2013 didn’t pass by just 1% because people all of a sudden wanted to raise taxes on themselves. It was because a large portion of the resistance who was working with me wanted to play nice with the other side, so the no vote side was less inclined to show up to vote on election night. It was a simple numbers game, it was my job to evoke people’s passions to get them to the polls, even if I had to call people names. The Lakota levy didn’t pass because of anything Kathy did, but because of what the tax fighters didn’t do. She only benefited, and we had that talk personally. People are often surprised when they meet me that I’m actually a very nice person, not some crazed lunatic. But clearly after that night where she and George Lang debated her behavior changed as did that of her supporters. Sure you can still see a sign for her here and there but the energy had gone out of her campaign. Her premise from the beginning was wrong, she was a moderate running in a conservative area as a Democrat. She was a woman running against a white man and Democrats thought that was enough. Her levy supporting friends at Lakota had been treating her as a celebrity since 2013 for a levy victory when in fact it wasn’t anything they did to secure a victory, other than convince my supporters to play nice and reunite the community under the flag of Lakota. George Lang in the debate had done well with her and after the depth of just how hard it was going to be to win the 52nd District seemed to have dawned on her. And now with just a few weeks ahead of the election the money was hard to come by to renew her billboard until the election. Now it’s gone leaving only a tattered empty place with peeling paper in its place and every time I see it now I think of how it is a good metaphor for the Democrat Party.

Recently Vennessa Enoch caught me in a parking lot asking for my vote. She was a nice black woman running as a Democrat against Warren Davidson, and she obviously didn’t know who I was. Of course I was polite to her but she could see by my face that it was a mistake to hand me any campaign literature. She seemed like a nice enough lady but it was clear she didn’t know the game she was playing. The Democrats in Southern Ohio and up into counties past Columbus really thought that women were so stupid as to vote as a collective association—that girl power was a viable political strategy. Since Trump had been elected Democrats continued to think that they’d split up the women vote by offering women as candidates, such as Vennessa Enoch and Kathy Wyenandt. I don’t think Vennessa had been told by her Democratic friends that people weren’t going to like her just because society said they had to like a black woman. That voting for a person for congress in Warren Davidson’s district was going to take a lot more than that. We weren’t so stupid to vote for a liberal just because they were women or black. Those are not traits that effectively win elections, they never have been and they certainly aren’t now. Women love Trump and they specifically like the kind of Republican Party that is forming under the Trump umbrella. For examples just go to Instagram and do a search for Babes for Trump or God Guns and Freedom and you’ll see what I mean. A new kind of sexual expression is taking place where suddenly its cool for women to wear bikinis and use their bodies as billboards for Trump and Republicanism in general. Women were not doing this for John McCain, Mit Romney, or George Bush, this is a very new thing and it comes as a byproduct of having a winning approach to elections in general. There are a lot of women who love the kind of men that are emerging from the Trump administration and the Democrats are not on that wagon.

I noticed a tremendous difference in Republican attitudes at a recent event at Premier Shooting and Training where they had a Second Amendment celebration night there. For one, it was unusual to have all those top-level Republicans in the same place at the same time where fundraising wasn’t the primary objective. Some of the guys there had been around for a while, but there was something very different about them now that Trump was the head of the Republican Party. There was a swagger present that I hadn’t seen before in all the many years that I had been doing these kinds of things. Back at that Lakota levy period that Kathy Wyenandt was so proud of we had a meeting after the third attempt that went down in flames in the fall of 2011 that we should lighten up, that we had too much Tea Party in our No Lakota Levy campaign. Of course, everyone knew I wanted to punch harder than we had been. The district was not respecting voters with continued attempts at a tax increase. My friends who were all top Republicans in Butler County wanted to mend fences for the sake of business. Back then the leader of the Republican Party in Butler County was John Boehner and he was a very moderate Republican who wanted to play by the rules that Democrats established. I tried to tell them what was coming, but nobody wanted to hear it then, and only now are they seeing it. The energy that put people into voting for key elections was swagger, and confidence—not compromise and conciliation.

As I watched Republicans rejoice at a hard-fought victory over the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation I could see that finally what I had been saying for years was starting to really sink in. Trump’s election and the results of success that have followed have won over most of the key Republicans I knew in Ohio. They had adopted to this new leader of the Republican Party and were seeing success. Meanwhile Democrats were still playing an old game of identity politics that only appealed to a small minority of voters. People hadn’t voted for Hillary Clinton just because she was a woman and they weren’t going to vote for Kathy Wyenandt just because she was attractive and pleasant. Republicans for the first time in their lives could go on Instagram and see lots of mostly naked Republican women in red white and blue bikinis hold guns and Bibles all too happy to show their support for President Trump and its that kind of energy that wins elections. People over politics or some other socialist message isn’t going to work. The world had changed and Democrats were too stupid to see it. That is the reason they threw everything they had at Brett Kavanaugh and why with only a few weeks left to close the deal their campaigns in local races like the ones in Southern Ohio are running out of gas—because they didn’t understand the situation they were getting into.

Republicans should win most of their races easily around the country. There will be some surprises here and there but in essence if Republican voters show up and vote, they will easily outnumber the Democrats. There just aren’t that many Democrats, they are a minority party with a sloppy message of old socialism that only lazy people like. The new Trump Republicans are much cooler all of a sudden and if that energy fuels voter turnout, Republicans will gain seats in the House and Senate, not lose them. And I predict that there will be many more billboards going vacant for Democrat candidates in the near future. They didn’t learn from the mistakes of the past even when the evidence was quite clear. I could tell in my conversations with Kathy and Venessa that nobody on their side had talked to them the way I was which isn’t good. It’s not that I was mean or anything, but just to frame the situation they were stepping into, obviously nobody had done that for them. Because the Democrats thought all they needed was women to vote against men and their ticket to the future would be punched. What they didn’t calculate was that there were many, many women more than willing to take off their clothes and use their bodies for billboards for Trump’s Republicans and that would prove to be the deciding factor for the upcoming midterms. And it wasn’t crusty old men providing that energy, it was women, young and vivacious and looking for winners. And those winners are not in the Democratic Party, that’s for sure.

Rich Hoffman

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