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
The Gunfighter's Guide: 