I was at an event just a few days after the election of 2023 for Bernie Marino.  He was at Lori’s Roadhouse with J.D. Vance, ahead of the upcoming Republican primary, for a pitch session, and I saw a lot of great area Republicans who had come out to support him, which was great.  It was the first time since Lynda O’Connor had suffered such a massive defeat for another term on the Lakota school board and tempers were still pretty hot that I had worked with the “No Lynda” people to keep her from winning.  And it was the first time we all had a chance to talk, which we did.  Many people thought that I had created a monster by keeping a conservative off the school board, and now a liberal monstrosity had been unleashed with an overtly Democrat school board that was going to take Lakota school’s quarter of a billion-dollar budget and bring about doom and despair.  I explained to them that the excuses were now gone. Let’s see what they do over the next six weeks at Lakota. No more elections. No more motivation for the politics of personal destruction. It has been my opinion that Lynda O’Connor was never a conservative but was only pretending to be one to win support. When she had control of the board and the votes, she attacked Darbi Boddy to avoid proper district management. Now that she has lost re-election, she can work with Isaac and Darbi to implement real conservative ideas into Lakota. Let’s see how they behave. If they really care about the community and the Republican Party, they’ll put their differences aside while they still can. But I don’t think they will because it was never a conservative school board in the first place.

That idea of unity came to me after Isaac Adi approached me to tell me that he forgave me for all the disparaging things I had said about him.  He wondered why I didn’t reach out to him more to get the truth of the situation, and he explained to me that as an insider, things look much different than they do on the outside and that I was an outsider.  So I couldn’t understand everything clearly and his feelings were hurt.  I reminded him I had sat down with him previously, and the meeting didn’t go well.  And we haven’t spoken ever since.  If I spent time sitting down with everyone I had an issue with, I would never get anything done.  With me, once you lose me, you lose me pretty much forever.  I’m not such an outsider as many would like to comfort themselves.  I know pretty much something about everything, and when it comes to the Lakota school board, I know all the characters and the situation very well.  I have over 30 years of experience, so I know what’s going on, I also understand what’s going on in executive session.  Lynda O’Connor and I used to work quite closely together and while we’re talking about hurt feelings, it bothers me that she thought I was a sucker like she clearly thought of everyone else, that she could con me into believing she wanted to do conservative things on the school board, and that her relationship with me was purely to neutralize my strong opinions.

I’ll talk to anybody who wants to talk, so I spent more time with Isaac than I intended to because he wanted to give his side of the story.  I had just spoken to Darbi Boddy, who was also there, but she saw Isaac sitting next to J.D. Vance at this spectacular event, and she had to leave because of the court order that Judge Lyons got suckered into because of Lynda’s provocations, and I could see the pain on her face.  Everyone had ganged up on her and treated her as an outcast for doing her job on the school board in the way that people elected her to do it.  I don’t like to see people treated the way she has, and it wasn’t easy to listen to Isaac talk about his role in trying to destroy her.  But as he was speaking about peace and forgiveness, I thought it would be a good idea if all three of them could pull it together for the next several weeks to do excellent conservative work for the Lakota school board before the next session comes into play.  If the liberals want to undo it all, let them, and let them own the results.  I listened to Isaac talk; he’s a likable person.  But I have also known a lot of salespeople over the years, and much of our conversation was similar to that of a time-share salesman who wanted a commitment to buy.  And I was just there for the free orange juice.  Once I saw the place he was selling, I couldn’t help but think of the cat urine in the corner that smelled the site up and distracted me from the palm trees outside.  I was a hard pass on working with any of these people anymore, except for Darbi.  But for the good of all those friends of mine who were hurt by the election results, it’s always good to come up with ideas everyone can be happy with if you can. 

I think the best way to prove to everyone that we never had a conservative Lakota school board was to encourage everyone to work together for the remainder of the year.  Put the differences aside and do what they should have done that first month when Isaac and Darbi were sworn in and handed the board’s presidency to Lynda.  From there, Lynda went on a path of personal destruction against Darbi for reasons many people don’t understand.  I think it’s because she had to hide the fact that she was never a conservative and was hiding that from her supporters by playing the victim.  But instead of embracing that role like a kid who couldn’t wait to get that Red Ryder BB gun on Christmas Day only to open it and find out that they suddenly didn’t like guns, she instead moved on to the next shiny object, a Barbi dream house of progressive liberalism. I want to keep my enemies in front of me, so Julie Shaffer and this Doug Horton Dr. Seuss guy are at least what they advertised.  I may find their politics despicable, but it’s essentially the same as Lynda without the pretend conservatism.  But I’d love to be wrong.  There is no reason to fight now; the election is over, and Lynda will be gone from the school board.  So, if she genuinely wanted to leave a conservative mark, what’s stopping her now?  She is still the board president.  She still has three votes to do good things while it lasts.  Why not do it?  My offering to all those who have talked to me about it is that Darbi was her excuse for not doing anything.  After getting to know her, she purposely pushed Darbi so that she could always point to a distraction so she didn’t have to show the other school board members, Kelly Casper and Julie Shaffer, that she wasn’t one of them.  And the Darbi distractions kept the mask on Lynda so that fellow Republicans would never see who she was.  And I say that based on the contents of the last conversation I had with Lynda, something she told me that she probably didn’t intend to.  But prove me wrong; I’d love to be.  However, as history usually points out, I’m not.

Rich Hoffman