“Escapades of Doom”: Kristi Ertel’s Interview with Brian Thomas on 55 KRC

I’m very proud of Kristi Ertel of Protect Lakota Kids.com for her really good interview on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas. She was there to talk about the latest information on Matt Miller, the controversial superintendent from Lakota, and the trouble he has put himself into with his reckless personal life. Many in the Lakota district, over 800 people, have signed the petition to force Miller to resign. Miller and his radical union members at Lakota did the same thing to the new school board member Darbi Boddy just a few months before, having a petition to force her to resign essentially because they didn’t like her. Supporters of a conservative school board took exception and found out what kind of crazy sexual lifestyle Miller thought was normal, and it became public information at that point. So now the shoe is on the other foot, and I thought Kristi did an exceptional job representing the many people in the Lakota school district who have found how the school board has dealt with the issue reprehensible. And some people like Kristi, who is a fantastic Christian woman with very high standards, can’t deal with the level of morality exhibited by the Lakota administration and its school board. Even with the threats of lawsuits that the superintendent has lashed out at toward his critics, Kristi is the type of person who can’t turn away from a dilemma, which is asking the community to look the other way when reprehensible moral circumstances are imposed on everyone. And she’s not alone. But good for her to stand up for what’s right even when so much is wrong and horrible, and that has been threatened by the public employees as if they were ultimately in charge. When I read the cease-and-desist letter from Matt Miller’s attorney, and Kristi talked about this on the radio interview, I thought some alien from another planet had written it. It clearly didn’t consider any Constitutional provisions regarding free speech. And to the point discussed on 55 KRC, all the information was based on Matt Miller’s own words. But my conclusion reflects the microcosm that is essentially the macrocosm of global politics these days. 

It wasn’t just this interview with Kristi that had spawned a lot of attention on this story over the past week; Libs of TikTok was talking about it, which cascaded into it being covered by the very popular Louder with Crowder show, and Charlie Kirk. The story was always going to get out; when a very public employee exhibits such bad behavior, it was bound to. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s the cover-up of that information that has presented itself as far worse, as if all the participants involved, the media, the school board, the police, the prosecutor’s office, a whole bunch of lawyers, its as if they believed that if they denied that anything happened, then sent out threatening letters to harass the public into submission, that they could somehow change the nature of reality itself. And if they believed that, then no wonder they thought they could do anything and get away with it. That is, after all, what we are seeing in international and national politics, that characters like Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, or even the fact that Covid was made in a lab in Wuhan, China, and so long as the communist country pretended that nothing happened, then they could literally get away with murder. Or that election fraud never occurred in 2020 or 2022, even though Katie Hobbs in Arizona was caught certifying her own election by pushing all the complaints of voter irregularities past the certification date forcing constitutionally protected fraud in the process. What we saw happening at Lakota was essentially the same type of crazy, extremely liberal behavior. 

Yet the thing that gets missed in all these cases is that no matter what the administrative state does to contain information with public relations officials, lawyers, or open harassment through violence or other means, people are still going to have an opinion on the matter. Unlike in China, where they control every aspect of people’s lives, people in America still have free will and the ability to think independently. Just because authority figures say something is red or yellow when we can see it’s blue, we are not obligated to accept what those authority figures say just because they are authority figures. What’s fascinating about this Lakota cult of liberalism is that they really thought they were going to be able to contain the bad behavior of their superintendent and force good people like Kristi Ertel to act against her conscience, her strong belief system in goodness and the good of God, and accept evil right in front of her face, and that there was nothing she, or anybody could do about it. It’s as if Matt Miller and his army of wife-swapping administrators thought they were in charge of the whole community or something instead of employees within it. And that they could literally do anything, say anything, and push any kind of agenda onto the taxpayers, and they would be obligated to accept their reality without question. It was essentially the China Model but without the controls of a totalitarian regime controlling over a billion people in every way, shape, and form, upon fear of death.  It has been a head-scratcher because I know many of the characters involved. It has been bizarre to see them so consumed with the process and willing to accept outright evil because of some misplaced fear that the law was working against us all and that the big bad administrative state could destroy us at any time. Hey, read a book sometime, and get smart. Lakota schools, their public employees, lawyers, PR people, and the media tag alongs who have helped cover some really detrimental behavior have all contributed to making our community worse, making things more dangerous for children, and thumbing their noses at the community in general.  Lakota was already declining in quality before Matt Miller came along, and since he stepped into that superintendent role, the grades for Lakota have continued to drop. So why all these people would seek to protect a bad employee with a bad track record is beyond logic. But yet, what we have seen come out of all these liberal institutions is an assumption that so long as they control information and how people perceive it, they can hide their poor performance behind this strange veil of corruption. And that people wouldn’t form their own opinions on things. Well, people do have opinions on things, and free minds have arrived at the opinion that what has been going on at Lakota and public schools, in general, does not reflect what taxpayers want. And they are angry about it. I am very happy to know that many people like Kristi Ertel are free-thinking enough to form their own opinions and defend them when challenged by such nonsense as we have witnessed in this Lakota case. If not for free speech and people like Kristi, there would be a lot more corruption in the world, and now we see why things are so screwed up everywhere because there haven’t been enough Kristi Ertels in the world standing up for what’s right, and teaching children how adults should behave by condemning bad behavior when we do see it. And if more people did call out such bad behavior, it would at least force the perpetrators to keep it hidden from public view. But when bad people don’t fear the judgment of the public because they think the system will hide them from the guilt of their actions, well, then you get what we have seen at Lakota, and other places, wherever liberalism is out of control, and a war against God and goodness has been unleashed as if the pages of the Book of Revelations were manifest on the earth and the Devil himself were in charge of everything, and everybody. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke Politics is Killing Disney: We are not “global citizens” we are Americans–the world follows

You can’t kill Indiana Jones. But that is the word from test screenings or previews that are coming out of rough cuts of the movie. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they would try. In this new ESG world for which Disney is offering itself as a leader, killing off an 80s representative of toxic masculinity with a time travel story that ends with Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to the next generation female woke hero is consistent with everything that Kathleen Kennedy has done since she became president of Lucasfilm in 2013. I’m sure George Lucas had good intentions, but he never expected this from his former company and the brands he worked hard to build over many years. For all the reasons he hated corporate filmmaking while trying to finish his famous film, THX-1138, now he is seeing that, left in the hands of corporate control, they could screw up anything. Filmmaking is not a collaborative enterprise, even though that’s what they tell everyone in film school. It is a top-down driver of unique minds who tell other people what to do to obtain a strong vision that audiences can then enjoy. The previous Indiana Jones movies were all from the mind of George Lucas, and that’s what people wanted to see. And what will be interesting about Indiana Jones 5, which is getting some press with about six months until the release in June of 2023, is how different it will be without George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. You can put the same actors, music, and color pallets into a movie, but it won’t be Indiana Jones without George Lucas. And clearly, Kathy Kennedy didn’t understand anything; she thought these popular movies would be vehicles for woke politics and would hold up. But ultimately, audiences will reject them.

I thought the trailer preview looked pretty good, but the problem was it confirmed all the rumors that also indicate that Indiana Jones dies at the end. So like the ESG values of BlackRock have indicated, the way to give audiences a last look at an 80s icon of heroics and toxic masculinity is to erase him from history and to replace him with a woman. Without question, Kathy Kennedy would sign up for that. Whether they stick with that ending after the terrible online reaction is left to be determined. Are they that radical at Disney these days? Well, of course, they are! They are crazy, so I don’t have much hope for the new movie, just as I don’t for the new Avatar film coming up. People don’t want to go to the movies to see woke propaganda and gay rights messages. They want to be free of that, which is one of Indiana Jones’s appeals throughout movie history. But the ESG values of stakeholder capitalism are all about social governance, and Disney has dedicated itself to that leadership, and it is showing in their stock. They have brought back Bob Iger as the CEO to help them make the transition from value-driven content to the traditional way to make good movies; they earn a lot of money at the box office, and Disney is rewarded with a lot of cash. But over the last few years, those values have changed, at least on the corporate side. Driven by Larry Fink and the Klaus Schwab types at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder capitalism is the new value system and a global currency. And Disney expects Bob Iger to navigate that new world in a beneficial way to show other corporations how the stakeholder model will work. So there is much more going on here than Disney killing off one of the most beloved screen heroes of all time. It’s about replacing the value system that western civilization has for this new global view of the world.

But people are people, and what they value won’t change. As Disney has learned with its release of Strange World, which feature a gay plotline for the primary characters, and the weak showing for Black Panther II Wakanda Forever, wokness doesn’t excite people. There was a lot made of Bob Iger’s statements about taking politics out of Disney to repair the brand a bit, but what didn’t get talked about much was that he went on to say that he didn’t believe that Disney was very political. Rather, he saw much of what they were doing as the responsibilities of a “global citizen.” He said that Disney has been telling stories for over 100 years and takes its responsibility to be good global citizens very seriously. And to the ESG values of the World Economic Forum, gender-bending is much more important than box office votes. So Disney is deep into it now. They are off on their projections, and stockholders still measure value in dollars, not ESG scores. And that will continue as we move into 2023, and they find out Avatar won’t make the kind of money they are hoping because nobody wants to waste more than 2 hours on a climate change lecture about nature being more powerful than imagination and productivity. And if Disney sticks with the previews of Indiana Jones that have him being killed, that will kill Disney in ways they can’t even imagine right now. They thought Crystal Skull damaged the Indiana Jones brand. Killing Harrison Ford and replacing him with a woman just isn’t going to work. 

Oh, I wouldn’t mind a female type of Indiana Jones story. I loved Lara Croft until they gave her a stupid bow and arrow instead of the double guns she used to shoot. There is nothing wrong with strong female characters but much wrong with wokeness. And Lara Croft went woke years ago. And yes, the people who want to bring down western civilization and big media companies who have told lots of great stories selling western civilization to the world want to see it all come to an end. Disney these days is a woke company that has permanently damaged its brand. Of course, China and its partners at the World Economic Forum are happy to have that competition removed. But the world is truly at a loss. Yet, people will get over it and move on. They won’t care if there is never a Star Wars movie again. They can live without Indiana Jones. If this movie Indy 5 goes woke the way reports say it is, it will fail, and Disney will further slide down the ESG pit of doom. And Bob Iger won’t be able to save it. Disney was already slipping when he left as CEO just a few weeks before the Covid lockdowns hit in 2020. He knew all about it from the role-playing that went on at Event 201 at the end of 2019. Disney was always built on a house of cards of value that depended entirely on the public sentiment to enjoy the movies. And if Disney isn’t making movies people want to see and instead is committed to woke politics that nobody wants to see, then everything will dry up for them, and their stock will tank. And ESG isn’t going to catch, leaving Bob Iger and the gang holding all the losses for history to remember. People will paint this Indy 5 from their minds, just as many have Crystal Skull. And they’ll live their lives. But Disney will not survive, and Bob Iger looks like he’s going to dig in, much to his own demise. The preview confirmed the rumors, and that has already damaged the brand.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A UFO Over My House: The Secret Society Hung League and the ancient religion of astrology and intersteller time travel

Well, of course, I believe in UFOs. There are way too many of them that occur too often not to notice them and to take note of our government’s reaction to them or the response of other countries. I’ve seen them before; I can tell many stories, especially when my daughters were growing up when we experienced paranormal activity, largely because we went looking for things, and unexplained events occurred. I tend to think of “unexplained” as needing more science. When you don’t have science to explain something, we call it paranormal because it exists outside of “normal.” And the governments of the world rule from within the safe confines of what is “normal.” But these are also the same governments who have lied to us about the reasons for getting into the Gulf Wars, who made Covid and unleashed it from China, then tried to force all people to take medicine from their political donors and lied to us about how to treat the virus because they wanted people to get sick with it so that they could control us. These are also the same people who have been telling us that there wasn’t any election fraud, even though we know by now that there was lots of it. So if the government says there aren’t UFOs, or they attempt to say they aren’t in contact with an alien species trading technology for peace, or something else, I don’t believe them. I have seen enough to know that there is something to the whole UFO discussion and that there is far more of it going on than anyone wants to admit. Most people, if taken out of a social setting, will acknowledge that they have experienced paranormal activity of some kind, but because of the social ostracization that comes with admitting it in public, just another form of control that governments use against people, taught to us in those dirty, rotten public schools, that is how these mysterious things stay hidden from the public. Isolating people from talking about their experiences helps keep secrets, secrets. 

I have two daughters, and over the years, hanging around me, they have had their fair share of paranormal experiences. Often we check these out as a family to prove they aren’t real. But too often, there has been something to the reports, and we end up with more questions than answers. One of my daughters has developed a keen eye for UFOs over the years, and she sees them quite a lot. They are often hidden in plain sight because people don’t tend to look up; if they do, UFOs are hard to see. UFOs are hidden in the procedure for airline pilots and military members. They exist outside our process controls for maintaining a pilot’s license. So the reports are often ignored or not mentioned for fear of sounding like a lunatic. But if you look up, anything above 1000 feet, even the big airliners, it’s hard to see. With that said, I wasn’t surprised the other day when my daughter came over to my house with fresh video she had taken from her front porch of a UFO right over my home. The craft was moving too fast to be a small plane and too low to be a big airliner, even coming in for an approach into Dayton or Cincinnati, which we see all the time. This was different; it was fast, and in the 4-second video, it can be seen moving behind a cloud before blending into the sky to disappear. The video was short because it took a moment to see it, pull out her camera, then zoom in on it to get enough of an image. And that’s how these things usually go. The video ended up a little fuzzy because she had to zoom in on it to get it to appear on camera. This was a pretty good one, but she sees lots of UFOs in her life because she has learned to look at things in ways that maybe other people have trained themselves to expect as “normal.” She, nor I, expect normal. I would say that we expect unique things to be hidden behind the expectation of normal, which is why many people don’t see these things. 

As I looked at her video and went outside to look at the spot over my home where the UFO had been, I thought about the various secret societies and their initiation rituals, such as those passed down from the Knight’s Templars into the modern Masons, and in this case specifically the ultra-secret Hung League in China. Because China has been in the news a lot lately over Covid lockdown protests, I always attribute planned crises, such as political positions to these secret societies and consider how much they are behind it. And when it comes to UFOs, it’s the initiation rituals that many of these secret societies have that give away their great interest in the stars and the life forms that come from them. As I’ve said before, many Indians, especially in America, when you get into their belief systems, believe that the earth was populated by Star People from the binary star system Sirius who settled ten planets, earth being just one of them. Hey, if the Indians say to worship the earth, liberals are ready to shut down our society over climate change. But if they say there are Star People who have settled earth and come back often to maintain our life here, they call it “crazy.” Yet, that’s what is said about travel from Sirius and other star systems. When you see the various motives behind secret societies toward astrology and processional interest in the constellations over time, it’s clear that knowledge is power, and the point of the secret societies is to keep that knowledge a secret so they can have power over people in general—the oldest motive in the world. Below is part of an initiation ritual into the Hang League that is typical of these secret societies, and you’d be surprised who is in them and why. I would say that the efforts behind politics make these kinds of beliefs normal:

The Hung League, considered by many the oldest religion of the Chinese, well before Confucius ever came along; these are questions of an initiate. And, of course, in the answer are the coded messages that let the secret society know that the initiate can behold the concepts of astrology. 

Q.           What did you see on your walk?

A.           I saw two pots with red bamboo.

Q.           Do you know how many plants there were?

A.           In one pot were 36, and in the other 72 plants, together 108.

Q.           Did you take home some of them for your use?

A.           Yes, I took home 108 plants.

Q.           How can you prove that?

A.           I can prove it by a verse.

Q.           How does this verse run?

A.           The red bamboo from Canto is rare in the world. In the groves are 36 and 72.

               Who in the world knows the meaning of this?

               When we have set to work, we will know the secret. 

The number 12 is the number of constellations in the zodiac. 30 is the number of degrees allocated along the ecliptic to each zodiacal constellation. 72 is the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a processional shift of one degree along the ecliptic. 360 is the total number of degrees in the ecliptic. 72 X 30 = 2160, the number of years required for the sun to complete a passage of 30 degrees along the ecliptic, to pass entirely through any one of the 12 zodiacal constellations. 2160 X 12 = 25,920, which is the number of years in one complete precessional cycle or Great Year and the total number of years required to bring about the great return. You can also get to the number 25,920, which is the number of the Great Year from a Zodilocal perspective with 360 X 72.

I tend to think of astrology as the science of mapping time as it occurs on earth so that interstellar travelers will always have a reference for where they are relative to where they came from. We think of astrology as the horoscope we read in the paper, online, or in the Farmer’s Almanac, where star power influences us based on when we were born and during whatever period of time during the Great Year, which followers of astrology known as 25,920 years of processional time that our sun moves through all the houses of the zodiac. For instance, during the time of Moses and the Biblical Exodus, we were in the time of Aries, and goats were the offerings to God that were part of the appeasement process. By the time Jesus came along, it was the age of Pisces, the fish that people identifying as Christians put on the back of their cars. It takes 2,160 years to get from one age to another; the next one on earth is the age of Aquarius, etc. But to what effect does all this math matter? Well, if you travel from star system to star system, you have to know what time it is. So each planet will have its unique position relative to other celestial bodies, and any computer calculating space and time will have to understand that relationship. It looks like over time, people living on earth and interacting with these characters from Sirius or wherever else have associated astrology not as a clock for telling time but with its own religion, and that religion is at the center of most of our secret societies. As I’ve said before, Washington D.C. is loaded with a deep commitment to star alignments and the zodiac because it was built by Mason’s deeply committed to this stuff. 

So part of keeping that power over people occurring is the maintenance of secret societies and their true motives. Whenever I see a UFO, like the one in the video over my house, or hear about them, I think of this religion of astrology and the secret of government interaction with interplanetary influences. I don’t think of such concealed truths as scary; it’s just science and the quest to get more science to understand what’s happening in the world. But when members of those secret societies tell you that there is nothing to see, that’s when I say to look harder. And when the things they tell you aren’t real are flying right over your house, and you can see it, well then you know they are lying for many reasons that are important to them. But the truth looks to be far beyond most of their understandings. For them, such knowledge is power over their human competitors for knowledge. But for society in general, the truth is far outside our accepted reality, and to understand it, you must first be willing to look up and say, “hey, it’s a UFO.” And I’ve seen enough over a long period of time to see the connections between government, power, lies, and mass manipulation to maintain that power.

Meanwhile, there are many visitors to earth, and most are just doing their thing. And astrology looks to be their means of programming whatever travel computers they use to figure out where they are and what time it is at home because time moves at different rates depending on where you are in space and how that space is bent by gravity and other quantum forces. And much to the detriment of the secret societies, their secrets aren’t such secrets anymore.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Public Toilet that Lakota Schools Is: We tried a conservative board, but they are just as bad, except for Darbi Boddy

Recently someone from Lakota schools attempting to defend the horrible behavior of the adult staff and administrators there sent me a list of Republicans and conservatives who have been caught in sex trafficking and the widespread abuse of children as if to justify the massive failures going on in the public school system. My thoughts on it are that it’s much easier to make a list of conservatives who commit such terrible acts against children because if liberals were included, we wouldn’t have enough time in the history of the world to complete such a list because there are so many. But regarding Republicans, I had just been thinking about how disappointed I have been in trying to play things right and what we ended up with on the Lakota school board. But there were good stories, too; one thing you can count on in life is that Darbi Boddy will never be accused of accepting evil and contributing to young people’s delinquency. But for all the work that was put into getting a new conservative school board in the Lakota school system, the board is just as bad as when the liberals ran it with the majority, back when Brad Lovell and Joan Powell were the ring leaders. Suppose a political body, such as the prosecutor’s office, the sheriff’s department, and all the other characters involved, cannot protect children as the most serious element needed in a public school. In that case, there is absolutely no hope for them. At least I can say that I tried to work it out with a social solution working within the rules, even if I doubted from the beginning that a conservative school board at Lakota schools would work at all. I wouldn’t say I will stop trying, but the results have been garbage. It didn’t matter if we had a conservative majority on the school board or a bunch of sex-crazed liberals; the results were the same. The system itself is broken and is left resolute to allow progressive politics to seep into all communities and work at destroying conservative values wherever they reside. There is no hope for public education to work. 

As that same person pointed out, the recent student teacher at Lakota who has found a lot of trouble for trying to have a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old kid in one of the junior schools had attended Liberty University, a traditionally Christian school. My reply was that she was picked as a target of investigation, likely because she attended that school, so the corrupt administrators could point to someone and say, “see, they want to have sex with kids too.” I’m against anybody who wants to do such a thing, and if conservatives turn their backs on children and fail to do the right thing for their well-being, then I hate them just as much as liberals who do it. It doesn’t change my anger toward them because they call themselves conservatives. What do I say all the time, “I love Republicans until they show me that they aren’t.” And it might be recalled that I recently pointed out that the Republican Party leadership of Butler County needs an oil change so that newcomers who want to do good can. Instead of letting some Boss Hogg characters run things with the level of corruption that was typical on the television show, The Dukes of Hazzard. If I don’t get invited to the Christmas Party this year because of it, I think I’ll live. It will just be one less thing for me to worry about. If people don’t have the guts to do the right, basic things in their life, I’m not impressed with them, and I generally won’t waste my time with them. If people turn bad, no matter what political party they are in, I scrap them, move on, and never look back. So with that said, Darbi Boddy and others who have risen to support her in the face of terrible radical teacher union protests and out-of-control superintendents who pick fights and then cry when people accept those challenges like a little baby have been worth knowing and supporting. But the efforts at the Lakota school board have been horrible; I’d say it’s much worse than when the liberals ran things in the past.

.So when I say that public education is no better than using a public toilet, there is some context to go by. I tried to be part of a solution to bring proper management to the Lakota school system. I prefer not to think about public education; I have a long history of showing all the problems with it. They are institutions of liberalism that seek to embed themselves into a community and to sell destructive progressive ideas to the residents who are forced to pay for the product with the value of their properties. It’s a horrible deal; I’d prefer not to deal with them at all. I only do because they are in my community and do not represent the conservative values of my community. Another person wrote me recently and stated they were considering moving because they only moved to Lakota because of the schools. I say to those people, leave. Move away and take all your stupid liberal ideas with you. If you want to live in a great community, then do so. But don’t move to a liberal school and bring a bunch of liberal east coast ideas with you and expect everything to work out well. I lived in the area when most of the neighborhoods that are built today contained cows and vast open fields. And the cows were much better neighbors. The pigs you could smell when you drove down the road smelled far better than the smell of today and what comes out of Lakota schools. If those losers who moved here to leech off the Lakota public school system for the free babysitting service want to move to a more liberal area, then I would be fine with that. It would not hurt my feelings at all to bulldoze all those homes back into dust and to put the cows back. They were much higher quality lifeforms than the supporters of Superintendent Matt Miller and his administrators of doom. The kids of the community would be a lot better off.

But it’s not just Lakota; it’s all public schools, government in all its various manifestations. The bigger government is, the more corrupt it presents itself. And if conservatives are fighting to preserve a big government approach, then they cease to be conservatives in my way of looking at things and are just as worthless. I remind people also, all the time, that we are not a democracy. We have a democratic way of establishing who manages our government, but we are not a flee bitten democracy where popular sentiment rules the day. As is the case in Lakota, if most people think that child abuse is OK or open sexual lifestyles are permissible because the sheriff, the prosecutors, the media, and a bunch of crybaby residents believe it’s OK, that doesn’t make it OK. Leadership is where one person stands up against a tide of bad decisions alone and under great ridicule and does the right thing anyway. That is what we expect in our republic form of government. That’s what Darbi Boddy has been doing. But as to the rest of the characters have been typical, and what is typical leads to the conclusion that all government schools are no better than public toilets and the content that gets flushed down them. I wouldn’t send a kid to a public school if the school paid me to do it instead of the other way around. It’s a worthless product run by terrible, horrible people who are dumb as rocks. And it’s irresponsible to consider them teaching anybody, anything. Ever. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Another Example of How Government is More Dangerous Than Mass Shooters: Without guns, the American government would have already used the “China Model” to rule over all of society

We’ve been through this before with all these mass shootings. This Walmart shooting in Virginia recently, where an overnight lead person named Andre Bling opened fire on the same workers that worked for him, killing six and injuring several others, isn’t unusual these days. But it’s not a question of gun control, as the Biden administration would like, nor the elements of our intelligence community who work for the Liberal World Order would want you to believe. There is far too much evidence that through various means, certain types of people can be pushed psychologically into committing violent acts by third parties, and we have seen that this Biden administration and its structural support of globalism will do anything to gain power and to hold it, including election fraud. Or manufacturing deadly viruses and exploiting their release to control mass populations. It’s not even worth a debate at this point because they have been caught in the act too many times over the last five years to deny it. I would always point to the Las Vegas shooter, one of the biggest mass shootings on record that killed many people in one of America’s most reckless and visited tourist spots. Notice how there are no documentaries on the shooter; his memory just went away along with the Jeffery Epstein jail cell cameras during his “suicide.” The government talks about disinformation and their obsession with the “China Model” are not going to work in the United States, and that panic is starting to set in with some of these big government globalist groups. Therefore it’s not unusual that people like this shooter, Andre Bling, at the ripe age of 31, we’re talking about government dishonesty. More and more people are because the government has proven itself to be far more dangerous than some of these young people who crack under the pressure of modern expectations and commit mass shootings, whether they were pushed into it by some clandestine government agency hungry for news stories in their favor, or whether or not people can manage their personal concerns. Once the smoke clears on the subject, every mass shooting is sad. But a society without guns is even worse because what we know now, which we didn’t admit to ourselves prior to President Trump becoming president, is that the government is far more dangerous than the potential for mass shooters.

The solution I always say to mass shootings is for more people to carry. There should have been armed people in the breakroom to shoot Andre Bling when he opened fire. Nobody should be a sitting duck anywhere, at any time. In a free society, gun ownership and Constitutional carry are critical to its maintenance. This notion that there is a government control solution to any episodes of violence is ridiculous. There are no law enforcement officials in existence that can take away the intent of a criminal to do harm. And the government simply cannot be trusted with the safety of its citizens. The best way to deal with the corruption of government, which this shooter was concerned with, which contributed to his desperate state, is to keep it small and decentralized. To take away their monopoly power over social maintenance. We need government for critical things, but it should not be so big that it can control our very lives. Finding that balance has been an interesting bit of social history, and without question, the modern ratio is way too high. Government to be less corrupt, must be dramatically scaled back, and that doesn’t mean adding more government workers to the payroll to prevent mass shootings. Too often, we find that those police officers and armed security do not engage a threat in the way we expect, and people still end up getting killed when a shooter decides to snap and open fire on mass society who are innocently minding their own business. I carry a gun every day, everywhere I go, and I participate with a lot of people who are gun owners. In my community, there are over 400,000 people, most of whom own and carry many guns. And nobody shoots each other.

Guns themselves are not dangerous; people are dangerous, especially when they have bad ideas. It used to be that we recruited police and security from the military, where our government would train people to be reliable killers under pressure to prepare for wartime engagement perpetually. But this new military is more interested in transvestite rights, gays showering together, and how many women they can train alongside the men than in actually preparing people to deal with pressure under difficulty and put their own lives on the line when threats matter most. So naturally, we are seeing significant failures in our nation’s security and defense both with foreign threats and domestically. We are not making tough people anymore due to government policy. In the process, we are creating millions of potential young people who can snap at any moment and become tomorrow’s mass killers. The best solution to that is less government and more personal responsibility to diffuse mass shootings wherever they occur. Whether it’s in the classroom, or as a person sitting in a Walmart breakroom, wherever lots of people gather, there is always the potential that one or two of them will be prone to psychological distress and find themselves the next mass shooter. The liberal approach is to eliminate the guns themselves and to have gun control which the crooked Biden administration immediately tried to implement. But that is giving the government power it doesn’t deserve and obviously can’t handle, and it is not a solution worth consideration in any way.

If not for private gun ownership, the government, which is far more dangerous than any mass shooter, would have already made its move toward the China Model of complete control over society. We see in Brazil mass protests of millions of people because of the recent election where their presidential pick was stolen from them. In China, we see the same mass protests in the big cities, like Shanghai, where the government is trying to impose phony Covid lockdowns to get political control of their mass population. In hindsight, they tried the same thing here, and people obeyed for the first few months. But because of gun ownership, the government knew it could not go door to door for enforcement, which forced the courts and legislators to rely on the Constitution for an answer to the problem, for which there wasn’t a big government solution to be found, nor should there have been. The Covid push was an attempt by the world’s governments and their financiers in the World Economic Forum to commit a Great Reset behind the chaos, which is the real threat to society. Not some young person who can’t handle the pressures of life and committed violence against his peers in a moment of crisis. The solution would have been for Walmart to have an open carry policy that would have stopped the kid from shooting as soon as he showed “intent.” Many fewer people would have been killed and injured. But even worse than that potential crisis is the goals of government that have demonstrated its intent, which is to remove guns from society so that they can get administrative control over it and take Americans to places they don’t want to go on the chessboard of globalism. Instead, I’d recommend, in reaction to that government intent, that you buy a new gun today and let them know you are buying it. Because that is a vote, they can’t steal from you, and it allows the real bad guys no that domination of America won’t be easy and done behind the desk of some pinhead. But people can defend themselves from the threats of violence resulting from government policy and are free to live their lives despite the failures of big government and its minions of ignorance, malice, and doom.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Lakota 5-Year Forecast: What do I think of it?

Since the most recent five-year forecast by the Lakota school system just before Thanksgiving 2022, I have been asked hundreds of times what I thought about it. I’m happy that the government school doesn’t plan to ask for more money until 2025. There are elements of the radical teacher’s union background who think that we haven’t had a tax increase since 2013, and before that, there were a lot of fights on three previous attempts to stop the school from taking more money from the public, so the push has been that its time to extract more money from the community. Before we elected three board members that are supposed to be conservative to the board, the previous school board was very liberal and wanted to take the surpluses that we had and spend that money on new facilities projects. There is this belief that is built into the progressive mentality, which believes that Lakota is the largest employer in our region of Butler County and that they deserve to be treated with respect and always have new things, like state-of-the-art school buildings, and nice amenities for the staff to work in, because if we want to recruit the best teachers to the area, that we have to do those things in order to stay competitive. In reality, the unionized teachers go where it’s good for them financially, and as we have learned, there are quite a few of them who are swingers and alternative sexual lifestyles participants, so access to other such people is as big of a decision for them as anything else. Access to bars to pick up 22-year-old kids and younger is a significant benefit for them and part of their decision-making process. Communities with block parties happening often and providing plenty of socializing are very attractive to new Lakota staff recruits. They really don’t care about a nice new building; they care about access to other people who are just as deranged as they are. This is why there hasn’t been a mass exodus after all the drama about the current Lakota school board superintendent. Instead of being a detriment, it has been a recruiting tool because it advertised to the world what Lakota is really about, which has been far more enticing than anything taxpayers could spend money on.

Yet, the Lakota school system has a large tax base; if anything, Lakota should be looking to lower taxes. There are a lot of residents who support 17,000 students with valuable property that is much higher than other school districts. And that’s before all the commercial real estate is taxed. That revenue is only increasing, especially by the Liberty Center part of the community where a new Costco and many new wonderful developments are emerging, so with Lakota operating at a surplus for much of the last decade, that is because student enrollment really hasn’t increased, but property value and commercial opportunities have increased dramatically. So we are talking about millions of dollars that Lakota has benefited from and wasted on employee raises for essentially a terrible product, a free babysitting service to the community. But even with all those benefits, we had a previous school board that wanted to spend, spend, spend into oblivion so that they could ask for more money with a tax levy. And that was the talk from 2020 until 2022. That the Lakota school board felt they hadn’t asked for money for a long time, and it was time to do so, regardless of whether anybody really needed it. And that assumption comes from a unionized workforce that wants all the benefits of employment without any downside of management control. They want facilities; they want fewer students in the classroom. They want unionized bus drivers who call off work for every sniffle they have and blame it on Covid. Lakota has mismanaged itself into a complete disaster of an organization, with poor report card showings happening since Matt Miller took over as superintendent. So on the performance side, Lakota has been a disaster, and they don’t deserve a dime in addition to the many hundreds of millions that their budget currently is. They get enough and should be giving back a lot of that money by lowering their current costs. 

When I heard the 5-year forecast and saw the PowerPoint they presented, it made me sick because of a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that few people know about. While I’m happy that Lakota announced that they had enough money to stay solvent until the year 2025 and had to gag at the school board praising the treasurer for a presentation that should be expected, not praised, I could see clearly that a lot of Lakota’s assumptions on money is built into their lack of preparation for a professional world. Like all progressive institutions, they have a presumption of entitlement and don’t expect to be judged by performance, and that is clear in their 5-year forecast. Contained within it are all the assurances I wanted that there wouldn’t be further pushing for a tax levy from Lakota as the radical liberal types had been wanting. I know that Lynda O’Conner didn’t want to deal with a tax increase, and only a few months ago, she and Issac Adi met with me in a super-secret location in someone’s basement to talk about the problems at Lakota. At that time, we were working out their problems with Darbi Boddy, who I continue to think is the best school board member I have seen in decades. I want four more of her over the next few years because if we do have more like her, Lakota will be forced to live within its very generous budget and not ask for more money. They wanted to talk me away from Darbi; I wanted to find out why they didn’t like her suddenly. But at that meeting, I told them, as I tell everyone who asks, I generally don’t care about Lakota until they ask for more money. I think the product is garbage, too expensive, and that they teach radical leftist concepts to the next generation in my community is reprehensible. And in that 5-year forecast, they addressed all my concerns that we talked about in that private meeting. 

But why? What had changed over these last few months when it looked like a tax increase was the only thing the school board wanted to discuss? Well, they chained themselves to a sinking ship in their superintendent, who had gotten himself into a lot of trouble, and once he brought all that brand damage to Lakota, he threatened the public like some entitled, spoiled brat, all to hide his terrible performance since he was hired in 2017, and obviously the school system itself needs time to recover. Their former treasurer Jenni Logan, Matt Miller’s partner for a long time, suddenly left in August to become one of the seven indictments against Roger Reynolds in an upcoming trial. And that same month, all the crap literally hit the fan regarding the superintendent’s bizarre sexual lifestyle, which was revealed because he decided to pick a fight with school board member Darbi Boddy and her supporters. So there has been a bloody battle, and Lakota has brand damage because of it. If Lakota tried for a levy now, it would take more than three attempts to get it passed, and they know it. So they have to wait for a while for things to cool off and for the politics to change in a more favorable direction for them. They hope that if the people of Lakota just go back to sleep, they will be able to return to the good old days when nobody wanted to come to school board meetings, and they could have fantasies about tax increases for their progressive lifestyles. Jenni Logan didn’t leave a good job for a couple of bad ones at the commissioner’s office and at Ross schools for her health. There is a lot of bad behind the scenes, so when I see a report like this, it says Lakota needs time to recalibrate and repair its public perception. But it doesn’t change a thing about their internal management; they are a disaster with out-of-control employees who are too expensive and, most of the time, should not be around children. And no public relations firm in the world will be able to hide that pile of garbage by 2025. That’s what I think of the new 5-year forecast.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The War on the Mexican Border: Ukraine is a fake diversion to bring America down from within with 5 million invaders

Another scam we have been dealing with in the United States is the war with Ukraine. Thanks to the Trump Administration, it is now fair game to look back on all these foreign wars, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, and many others, and understand that America has become the police force for the Desecrators of Davos ideas for collapsing borders and giving the United Nations world domination from the perspective of a centralized, administrative state. If you understand history and politics, it’s as obvious as a blue sky on a sunny, cloudless day. China was propped up and built by these same forces, and it is that model that the World Economic Forum proposes to utilize to gain control of every person on planet earth. The tools have been put in place, and they are making their move. And as they always have, a diversion is created while the real effort goes on somewhere else. This is clearly the case with the fake war in Ukraine, where globalist forces provoked Vladimir Putin’s sense of nationalism with threats of NATO membership with Ukraine to attack and defend his perception of border security.   And the United States suddenly is sending over 54 billion dollars to Ukraine to protect its border, while in the United States, the border to the south is wide open, and an open war is occurring as we speak. It’s a bloody and terrible war meant to topple America from within. The assumption is that defending that border is racist while defending the Ukraine border with infinite amounts of money is morally justified. Yet it’s all the same characters provoking both circumstances. 

Margorie Taylor Green was correct when she brought up this discrepancy in the middle of November 2022. I’ve been covering events on the American border with Mexico for many years, and I remember seeing lots of bloody pictures of severed heads that often happen in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from drug cartels sending messages to homeowners there to keep their mouths shut otherwise the same will happen to them. The violence on the border between America and Mexico is a tragedy of violence, rape, and murder, which is going largely unreported. It’s a purposeful attack on America by hostile forces, and the Biden administration knows full well what they are doing there. Since Biden took office, over 5 million illegal aliens have crossed over into America. That’s a lot of people. For perspective, there have only been 82,000 people from Russia who have attacked Ukraine. Yet we are sending billions of dollars to Ukraine to defend their border, but the Biden administration is operating with an open border policy with Mexico. Can you smell what’s cooking? We are being lied to and purposely invaded for our own destruction. 

And if we point it out, the political left will call us names like “racist.” Hey, I was at Costco the other day looking at books. It was a busy day, and I was at their book display with about 30 other people. My wife and I were the only “white” people at that table. There were lots of people from India, China, and of course, Mexico there bargain hunting. But there were no other white people. Now in my life, I am far from a racist; few people deal with people from all over the world more than I do. I greatly respect the work people from other countries do because they often outwork traditional Americans.   I find that their countries of origin still have a good work ethic.

In contrast, in the United States, through labor unions and other liberal activities, Americans expect too much money for doing too little work. I greatly admire the work ethic of people from other countries and have a long history of supporting them. So for me to say that I was the only white guy at the Costco book table isn’t racist. It’s a statement of fact. The Americans were probably too lazy to read a book, which would explain why they weren’t there as much as anything. But that so many people of different backgrounds could assimilate into the United States under a common flag is nothing short of a miracle. From the way I see things, the invasion wasn’t working because many of the people were fleeing other countries to come to the United States to get away from the kind of garbage that the Biden administration and his partners at the World Economic Forum wanted to bring to America. So when it came to voting, they were more likely to vote for Trump than any Democrat, which wasn’t the plan. The belief in the attack was that all the illegal immigrants would vote for Democrats and that the nation would be changed into some third-world country through the Cloward-Piven collapses of our population and financial system. 

The media was apocalyptic when Margorie Taylor Green even questioned Ukraine instead of the Mexican border. The television pundits on MSNBC were appalled that anybody who had seen the dead bodies in the streets in Ukraine could not be moved to send endless amounts of money to the corrupt country run by a comedian who was best known for playing a piano with his penis before becoming president of the United Nation’s next conquest. And yes, the pictures are terrible of the dead bodies in the city streets of Kyiv and other places. But they are mainly staged; what about a society that purposely kills people so that they can send the media in to take pictures and exploit those pictures so that billions of dollars of foreign aid would be sent to Ukraine? The intentional murder of people is even worse. It’s not like Putin has been acting alone; the war between Russia and Ukraine is more about destroying Russian sovereignty and questions of nationalism than it is about sentiments of post-Cold War strategy. If the media showed the violence on the American border with Mexico, the violence would be far worse; it’s even worse than in the days of ISIS cutting off people’s heads on television. The drug cartels run Mexico and are a military threat to the people of America who live along the border. And the Biden administration knowingly allows violence to advance a globalist political agenda, and many innocent people are being harmed along the way. Yet nobody is talking about spending money on the American border to defend it from an obvious foreign invasion. The situation is so bad that the Biden administration will be viewed as an impeachable offense. That is another reason that Democrats are so prone to cheating in elections to hold senate seats because they must maintain the votes to prevent the Republican-controlled house from impeaching Biden over his handling of the border war that is far more dangerous than anything happening in Ukraine. There are far more examples of violence, beheadings, rapes, and terror along the Mexican border than anything the media could show us from Ukraine. But they won’t show that violence in the media which tells you who is advocating for that American invasion and who is against it. That is the real fight, and the guilty parties are the ones who don’t want to look at it but instead want us to look to Ukraine. The war isn’t there, it’s here, in America, and the intent is our complete destruction and nothing less. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The New Costco in Liberty Township, Ohio: Small government and guns make communities great

For around two years, I had been looking for a PlayStation 5. Unfortunately for PlayStation, the company released its newest video game console during Covid. Who would have ever thought that the economy of the world would shut down entirely when planning for such a new release? In many places in the world, supply chains have not returned to normal due to massive government interference and their stupid support of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. That has been particularly true of computer chips, which make the new PlayStation 5 so powerful. So it’s been very difficult to get a new PlayStation 5. Our family has continued playing our old PlayStation 4 over that duration like many people have had to. But I’ve been on the lookout for one for several years and have not been able to find one. There are usually long waiting lists you have to get on to have a chance to buy one. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and all the usual places have been unable to keep them when they do come in, and what they get has usually been a very limited supply. So I was quite shocked when I went to the new Costco in Liberty Township to meet my family on the opening day of November 2022 and saw at the entrance a pallet of PlayStation 5s stacked high for people to grab as they came into the new and wonderful store. I arrived before my family did, and it took me less than a fraction of a second to see the obvious. I grabbed one as people were plucking them from the stack as quickly as they came in, and we bought it that day and have enjoyed it profusely. 

Yes, I’m a fan of Costco, even though they are not exactly conservatives. They are known Obama supporters, but they provide excellent service, so I haven’t held that against them. Costco does a lot of great things, and I have been a frequent visitor to the one in Tri-County, Ohio, for many years. When I found out that they were going to build a new Costco in Liberty Township, Ohio, I was very happy because I feel like a lot of people do about Tri-County, Ohio, located between the cities of Sharonville and Springdale, that big government has destroyed the former economic boom town and left it a husk of desperate value. I used to think of Tri-County as one of the greatest economic centers in the United States. I worked there several times in my life, so I know the area’s character well; it’s been a part of my life most of my life. So I’ve seen it in better days. But over the last 10 to 20 years, the progressive policies that came from big government woke policies have left the reputation to be one of crime. To describe it simply in one word, when I think of Tri-County, I think of MTV. The youth have been allowed to run wild and take over the character of the area, and wherever youth go, like mindless locusts, they destroy everything in their path. Older people don’t want to deal with a bunch of slack-jawed kids dressed inappropriately and constantly catcalling women while trying to shop and spend time with their families. But kids don’t have money, but moms who run families do, and those types of moms made Tri-County great. 

That is why Costco built a store in Liberty Township, which is everything that Tri-County isn’t, very conservative and safe, and people who live there have money and care about things. It’s not to say that Liberty Township couldn’t become like Tri-County at some point, but the differences couldn’t be more obvious. In Butler County, Ohio, where Liberty Township is, there are over 400,000 residents, most of whom have guns. They either have guns in the home or carry them, and crime is not tolerated the way it has been 6 miles to the south in Tri-County and Sharonville. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Costco realizing that their Tri-County store was being held back because people just didn’t want to be in an area known for crime to shop at their store. So they built a new one, and people were hungry for it. For the first few weeks, there has been a line to get into the store, and people have been flocking to it just to buy goods and services and enjoy the Costco experience. And this new Costco has had everything, a lot more than the Tri-County store had, like PlayStation 5s. As I bought our new PlayStation in the long lines that went to the back of the store, I realized that if the Tri-County store did try to carry the type of items that the new Liberty Township store did, that theft would be the likely result. In Tri-County, with their progressive governments and their big-city attitudes, crime is much more permitted. In Liberty Township, crime isn’t permitted at all. And there are a lot of guns carried by good people who won’t hesitate to use those guns to defend property and persons, which was always the point of the 2nd Amendment. 

This is precisely why many of us in the Butler County area have fought the temptation to allow West Chester and Liberty Township to become a city like their neighbors in Sharonville, Springdale, and Forest Park. Bad government happens when it gets too big, and once there are city councils and mayors involved, woke politics starts to attach itself to the decision-making process, and things get out of control. So we have fought for small government in Butler County, and the results are obvious. Butler County communities run much better than communities within the I-275 loop that have fallen for the big government temptation. I could tell stories about my experiences in Mason, where they have a city too, but over time they have had to become much more nibble on their feet to adapt to the pressure exerted by Sycamore Township to their south and Liberty Township to their west. The struggle to keep the government small is hard, but it’s obvious where they manage because when the government is small, there is less bureaucratic nonsense, allowing companies to invest without all the additional trouble. And when you go to the new Costco in LIbety Township and see the lines from people hungry to get in, you can see the obvious quickly. I happened to listen to a few older men standing outside the new Costco, bewildered as to why people were going so crazy over this new store, even days later after it initially opened. And the answer was that a lot of these shoppers were simply sitting at home waiting for something to open near them because they didn’t want to go into Tri-County to deal with the mess there, all the kids with their pants walking around half down, the nasty language, the cars with rap music pouring through closed windows but being so loud that it vibrates the fillings out of people’s teeth. When there is too much government and too much progressive policy, it ruins communities. When there is less, it makes communities better because the kind of people who shop and start businesses can then have a relationship without the government messing it up. And guns help a lot. Where there are lots of guns by private hands, there is much less crime. Where there are less guns, there is a lot more bad behavior.   And put simply, that is why the new Costco at Liberty Township is so much better and why communities like Tri-County, Ohio, are failing. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why People Are So Angry at Lakota Schools: The attempt to edit public comment over a fight they started by trying to force Darbi Boddy to resign

I offered Matt Miller, the much-talked-about superintendent of Lakota schools, a way to fix everything. Through his lawyer, I offered some friendly advice which it was obvious that he chose to ignore by the way the Lakota school board meeting on November 21st, 2022, went. I told him that many of the problems he finds himself in could be solved by restoring his relationship with Darbi Boddy. After all, he and his conspirators started all the anger. I know Darbi Boddy; she wanted to join the school board and work well with everyone there. But liberalism doesn’t work, and when she joined, there was still goofy talk of mask mandates and other Covid nonsense that came straight out of the crooked Biden administration, and people in my community were sick of it. And when Matt Miller went after her to push her into resignation, he opened up a whole can of worms, and he greatly angered the community, as did the rest of the school board who stood behind the effort. If that same school board is upset that all they have been able to do at meetings for much of 2022 is talk about community anger, they can only blame themselves. They brought all the politics into the matter and tried to destroy our newly elected school board member. Darbi is a fighter, and she wasn’t going to take that. Nobody should have expected her to. All this happened before anybody knew much of anything about the Lakota superintendent’s personal life. Once people realized what kind of guy he was, for the conservatives in the Lakota district, that was a final straw. But it all started with Matt Miller picking a fight with Darbi Boddy, then several other community members with what can only be called, “witness intimidation” which absolutely won’t be stood for, it could only be solved if he reached out and tried to work with her in some productive way at this point. Instead, he dug in even more, which was ultimately the wrong move. I tried to tell him. 

Over the previous weekend, I had been involved in a Twitter discussion with Sheree Paolello, the news anchor at Channel 5. The topic was over why the media wouldn’t cover the Matt Miller story at Lakota with the assumption that they had a moral obligation to protect children from indications that showed parents they should worry about it in the district. Sheree surprisingly defended her station. She answered that the police chose not to prosecute, so there was nothing illegal to pursue. The Lakota school board took no action to penalize the superintendent. And the media ultimately bought the school board’s report without question, even though a lot of information indicated otherwise. And there was so much anger from community members because all their safety nets had let them down.

For many people, the anger was that all these institutionalized systems had no interest in protecting the kids from the strange lifestyles of the Lakota administrators, but their complete concern was in protecting the institution itself from the judgment of the community. This is a strange case for me because I literally know everyone involved. I’ve met Sheree several times over the years, and I certainly know the reporter she referred to, Karin Johnson, who covered the Lakota story. I have a pretty good understanding of why everyone took the positions they did regarding Lakota schools.   It’s all about damage control and what they perceive that damage to be. For them, the school and its reputation are more significant than the individual kids and their families who attend the school. But the school itself, and institutionalism in general, is very progressive and ultimately anti-family, and that is the biggest takeaway from this ordeal. The parents want to believe that the school has the best interests of their children when they send them to school. But the school is essentially a liberal playground for progressive politics, and the kids serve as a shield against the bad behavior of the adults. And to Sheree’s point, none of that is illegal. It may be wrong, but it wasn’t a news story because it wasn’t illegal, as determined by a police representative who has a reputation for abusing the law for personal power reasons—for instance, the case of Roger Reynolds, which is happening in that same school district presently.

I remember the good ol’ days when if a public official, like a school superintendent, is, had an affair and got caught in a divorce, that it would have been enough to cause a scandal. This separation of personal behavior from professional roles is a new thing within the last decade. Most people in the Lakota district never accepted it and haven’t had much experience dealing with it. So they naturally assume that bad behavior would equal a bad report card professionally and that everyone would take it seriously.   But that’s not the kind of liberalism that is taught in all public schools these days. Progressive politics is all about a job as a right and mandatory pay without regard to performance. In the eyes of the typical liberal, they believe they should be able to do anything in their personal lives and still be looked at professionally by the title over their door, not the individual behavior they conduct. This is the source of much trouble across the nation right now at just about every level of government occupation, and it’s a value system that just isn’t going to work. This trouble started in the 90s when Bill Clinton tried to tell the nation he could still be president even though he had an affair with an intern. After all, it was just sex. He could still be president, right? And when progressive activists started protesting the removal of the Ten Commandments from courtrooms. The problem is, if you remove the Bible from society’s values, then no law and order have any meaning, leaving it to lawyers to define the words on paper, not the value behind them. And that’s how we get to the mess we are in now.

Most of the people who are outraged at the Lakota story of protecting their superintendent from the obvious bad behavior he created for himself are those who still look to the Bible for their fundamental value behind the rule of law. Suppose there isn’t a foundation of essential value. In that case, you can’t have a society, which is just another aspect of failed progressive philosophies taught in public schools to the detriment of the children involved, which is a major problem in our modern times. And those people expect that the people they are dealing with, the police, the media, and the school board itself, are functioning from basic understandings of value, and what reality presented to them is a point of view where values weren’t even a consideration. Instead, they get interpretations of the law that is not rooted in any Biblical frame of reference, so if the words aren’t explicitly written down to say something is bad or criminal, then even an average lawyer feels they can relieve a client of guilt under such circumstances, even if they know them to be extremely guilty by all other social measures. And so it goes and will continue. School board meetings will continue to be dysfunctional because the community has a much higher standard than what the institution of Lakota, the police, or the media are willing to represent. They accepted these new progressive values for social discourse, and that is not where the community is or will ever be. The core of our nation is the decision to move away from a Biblical foundation for value systems behind law and order. We all know progressives want to destroy that concept, but people are not ever going to accept that, just like they were never going to accept progressive mask mandates over a government-created crisis which Covid turned out to be. So, we have the clash that we are seeing in Lakota and other school districts across the nation. And that fissure is very real. It won’t be fixed by ignoring the problem or hiring a public relations firm to clean it up. People have standards, and they will apply them to the world around them, and they have been let down by the characters involved in this Lakota story, and they are furious because of it. 

Rich Hoffman

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Making The Butler County Republican Party Great Again: People don’t want to think of Boss Hogg when they think of politics

At first, I thought of the complaints as leftovers from contentious issues that have divided the party, such as the Thomas Hall battle with Matt King and the obvious rift with Sheriff Jones and Roger Reynolds. I tend to view those kinds of things as family squabbles within a household. Usually, people get over things and move on, which was happening with that nice event for Thomas Hall. But when people who don’t usually deal with the Butler County Republican Party are complaining, they don’t know about the details, only their experience with it. And that experience has not lived up to the reputation of the past, where Butler County had a lot of volunteers, high engagement, and the kind of national reputation that made President Trump want to come and campaign in the area. But the reputation that was developing, because of all the rifts from leadership that was flowing out into state and federal politics, was not a good one. For a community of over 400,000 people, small-town politics was back in fashion where a few party leaders had turned the wonderful Butler County Republican Party into something that would make Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard blush. And that was embarrassing to hear. I had been hoping that after the 2022 election, many of those trends would level out and that much of the problem had been not having the unifying factor of Trump to rally behind. Without Trump, the party has reverted back to the differences that it had during the early 2000s. But now that Trump was running again, my hope was that the party would unite again behind him. However, this time there appeared to be a different kind of problem. Many older people in leadership now are in the way of younger and hungrier personalities, and those elements feel restricted in their ambitions, which is not a good thing for future growth.

This problem reminded me of the Cincinnati Bengals and how the Brown family just can’t get out of their own way for success. Sure, they have had some good players over the years, but they just have not been able to put together a successful string of seasons to show fabulous organizational presence. They went to the Super Bowl last year and had a pretty good season. They had the whole off-season to get better and improve on the previous year with essentially the same players. The Bengals invested in a new offensive line, but the results were not good. The quarterback, Joe Burrow, has been sacked more than any other NFL quarterback. So the Bengals didn’t get better because the problems with the Bengals were in their coaching and front office. Not the players on the field. So if leadership was always the problem, the Bengals didn’t help themselves by investing in an offensive line; if they didn’t have the kind of coaches who could take advantage of those improvements, then, of course, the problem would still present itself as a problem. Obviously, the Butler County Republican Party was having the same issues. Many new talents are coming into the party who can network and connect with the world. There are lots of MAGA Republicans across the state who are newly engaged in politics and are looking for jobs to do. But then, when they interact with Butler County, we have this Boss Hogg image that people have of our elderly leadership, and it turns them off, and it’s starting to show to the outside world. 

It was good to see a nice GOP event in Butler County dedicated to a victory celebration for Thomas Hall at the Majors Barn. It was a tough election season, and some hard feelings emerged during that race, which clearly split the Butler County Republican Party in half. But several people supported Matt King, who ran against Thomas for the 46th Representative Ohio seat. They were there to congratulate Thomas and to show leadership in coming together as a party now that the election was over. There were people there that I could speak with where things got pretty heated, and we had some nice conversations, and everyone made up. I know everyone couldn’t come, people were busy, but you could tell a lot about Republican Party leadership by who was there and who wasn’t. I can tell you someone, who was there, Roger Reynolds, was, and we had a nice conversation about the horrendous problem that was happening to him. I asked him if Sheriff Jones was going to pay for all his massive legal bills for the phony trial coming up for him in December of 2022, which to me looks like a complete political hit job. That is not the kind of thing that makes the Republican Party better, but something that has made it worse. Roger kind of smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders. He’s one of the good guys, and his only focus was on getting that mess behind him so he could live his life again. And Thomas and I spoke about the new Speaker of the House and what an excellent relationship those two had together, which was encouraging. Good things were happening. But I also received reports from some of the state people and the federal people who deal with Republican parties all over the country. Their impression of the Butler County Republican Party was not a good one. There were a lot of complaints about engagement, phone calls, appreciation letters, and just basic organization, and while I kept up a happy face inside, I was pretty mad. I am proud of the Butler County Republican Party and don’t like hearing people say bad things about it. 

Hey, I get it; we all get older. You look in the mirror and what looks back is a person falling apart. Age can be cruel. And when the dog doesn’t respect you, and your wife is complaining about you leaving your socks in the corner by the bathroom, and nobody thinks you’re all that special, it can feel great to go to a Party meeting and have everyone worship you for all the things you have done in your life. It’s hard to be big enough to get out of the way and let younger people step in and show their ambitions.   That has always been the Bengals problem; the Brown family has always gotten in the way of its own success. And that is what is happening with the Butler County Republican Party. It’s not just from the direction of the police, but there are commissioners, trustees, and many others who are holding positions as placeholders, then getting mad at the youth for nipping at their heels. And my advice to them, the elders, is if you really love the Republican Party, you would want to do the right thing, and that is to get out of the way and let those with the most ambition and freshest eyes step into leadership positions. Sometimes being a great leader is in getting out of the way. And hanging on to the past and living off a reputation to hide the aging process from your own eyes isn’t love. It’s selfish, and the only result is that you become the latest Boss Hogg in the world and become known not for good deeds but for corruption and ill-advised political fights that ruin everything a lifetime took to build.

Rich Hoffman

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