There will be, of course, a lot of hard feelings over the next decade or so.  People like Paul Ryan, who thought they understood the world, arrived at power as Speaker of the House in the wake of John Boehner, only to learn that it was all a ruse for them.  Everything they knew was wrong, and they had built their entire lives on falsehoods.  Such revelations come hard to soft minds, and to protect themselves from the inevitability of reality, they build up political beliefs to protect themselves from the truth as the universe knows it.  And that was never more clear than when former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan went on CNN early in 2023 to talk about what a loser President Trump was, from his point of view, and attempt to establish his platform of political philosophy that now shapes the Fox News Channel as one of its advisors.  The Murdoch kids at Fox News are looking to make their own mark, unlike their father, who was never exactly a “conservative.” Roger Ailes was the mastermind of Fox News when it was best.  Now it is a husk of its former self.  It has good reporters like Tucker Carlson still doing good work, but the days of Bill O’Reilly are long gone, and with it, its reputation as a conservative network.  They have aligned themselves with the Paul Ryan types of Never Trumper, thinking that they could see the future but what they have bought into was a realization that many figured out many years before the start of the Tea Party movement.  People like Paul Ryan were being pushed out of office, and Trump was just the start of it. 

It was obvious that Paul Ryan went on CNN to attempt to sell his view of the world to the public despite of the evidence when he said that “Trump was a loser; he cost them the House in 2018, then again in 2020, and cost them the Senate in 2022.” That statement was the fantasy of a delusional person who failed to see the political world as it was happening.  The House was lost in 2018 because Ryan was a Never Trumper who failed to get behind Trump’s agenda.  In 2020 it was lost because, partially under the advisement of Ryan at Fox News, that network played a part in the election fraud that occurred on a massive scale, as many Never Trumpers joined Democrats to protect the SWAMP from an outraged and very conservative public.  Americans are much more conservative than many want to admit in the political world, especially those concerned with turning America into an element of a one-world order.  And Paul Ryan has found himself outside of that movement essentially from the beginning.  He lost his Speaker job because he ran away from conservative ideas; he listened to John Boehner regarding protecting the “institution” of the Speaker job, as the crying John Boehner left his office in disgrace because the pressure was getting too hot.  I should know, the former speaker, Boehner, is a neighbor of mine, and we have many mutual friends.  I know why he left his Speaker job and handed it over to Paul Ryan, who also found he couldn’t hack the pressure coming from the Tea Party element of the Republican Party.  These are people who couldn’t take the heat, and they left the kitchen.  And now they are angry at the source of the heat.  People don’t want their kind of global conservativism.  They want constitutional sovereignty, and they want American exceptionalism.  Paul Ryan and John Boehner, along with many current holdovers, want the institution’s protection as a mainstay of the SWAMP and all the corruption that comes with it.  And they are as surprised as anybody at how wrong they were all along. 

I was a fan of Paul Ryan when Mitt Romney picked him to be his Vice President in 2012.  I thought Ryan would be a great Ayn Rand economic mind because he was very much a supporter of Atlas Shrugged.  That was encouraging.  But as soon as the Romney people got a hold of Ryan, he abandoned Ayn Rand’s ideas of objectivism and adopted the progressive Romney platform without much of a fuss.  As soon as he did that, I didn’t have a lot of hope for him or Mitt Romney.  I had an invitation to hang out with Romney, Ryan, John Kasich, and many other prominent-name politicians when they came to West Chester, Ohio, along with Kid Rock, to do a big shindig.  I was offered a VIP opportunity, but I turned it down.  I had a lot going on, and I wasn’t going to go out of my way to meet a person who abandoned Ayn Rand’s ideas just to fit into a RINO Republican version of global politics.  I wanted Romney and Ryan to win.  I hoped everyone would come together and do good things for conservative values, but I was really let down by Ryan, and I didn’t want to bring my wet blanket of skepticism to the event, which would have soured it for everyone else.  I was hoping to be wrong about Ryan and the gang.  Of course, I turned out not to be, but I wanted to be.  Instead, we found out that all those RINOs who were at that West Chester event would find themselves on the political out just a few years later because they did not represent the Tea Party movement that was quickly emerging due to the obvious socialism of the Obama administration.  The national debt had just hit 10 trillion, and people were furious.  They were going to push out these kinds of politicians, and it was apparent even back then that Paul Ryan was playing for the wrong team.     

Now the national debt is 31 trillion dollars, just 12 years later, and Paul Ryan, thinking he’s the smartest guy in the room, represents that inflated number.  The game works like this, Republicans play nice and work on bipartisan legislation with Democrats.  Democrats work their progressive agenda toward destroying America as a sovereign country, and they feed the fires of globalism.  And everyone is just supposed to sit around and be happy about it.  So people picked Trump in 2015 because they didn’t like Paul Ryan and the other RINOs.  And the more people pushed for Trump, the more election fraud had to be committed to hide all the RINOs behind the curtain playing the globalism game.  And by 2022, people realized that there wasn’t much difference between Paul Ryan, John Boehner, and Mitt Romney than even the most radical Democrats.  So we are fighting all of them, which is why we don’t have representation in the House, the Senate, and the White House.  But we are getting there, and Paul Ryan keeps setting himself up as the vehicle of stupidity because he’s exposing himself not to be the smartest guy in the room.  He has only been able to project himself that way because he surrounds himself with losers who don’t understand these things and use ideological ideas to mask reality.  Ryan plays well to a crowd like that.  But years ago, I knew better, as did many Tea Party types.  So much so that we did other things when we had a chance to meet them personally.  And we didn’t miss him when a few years later, he was no longer Speaker of the House.  We didn’t lose anything politically when Nancy Pelosi took over from him.  But what was lost was the mask he wore which she didn’t.  And at that point, we could see what was really going on, which is where things are presently, politically.  Paul Ryan was just as bad as Nancy Pelosi.

Rich Hoffman