Category: Progressive

What is Required for a New Lakota School Board Member: Its a system that needs to die

Coming up in the Lakota schools soon is an opportunity to elect three more conservative school board members, and to answer the question I have been asked regularly: am I running for one of them?  Because many people want me to.  Not to give a politically worthless answer, but in my opinion, people who genuinely appreciate the system should be the ones to run it.  I do not like the system, and I have no interest in working with people like that.  I view education as a reform effort, and I believe the amount of time required to fulfill a school board role exceeds 70 hours per week.   It’s not a helicopter position as it’s now for many people who are currently in it.  So I would advise people who want to help fix the system and are willing to do that level of work to let us know, and we’ll help you connect the dots.  But as far as one of those people being me, that wouldn’t be a good idea for those wanting to save the system in some regard.  I’m accustomed to being entirely in charge of the things I do; I’m not a very good consensus player.  I don’t even think the design of school boards in public education is correct; it needs a strong CEO-type to oversee these radical superintendents.  I don’t like the lawyers.  I don’t like the teacher’s unions.  I don’t like the way they are funded.  I don’t like what they teach.  I don’t think they work long enough hours, regardless of the level of employees, administrative, or the teachers themselves.  I support scrapping the whole thing and starting over.  However, there are many parents with school-age children who want to make the best of a difficult situation, and these are the types of individuals who should be leading the school. 

As far as holding on to the way things were in the past?  There is no chance of that.  I was watching the protests this weekend at the Statehouse against Trump and Elon Musk over their fears that Social Security will be cut, which isn’t even on the table.  However, the level of stupidity exhibited by some of those participants is genuinely overwhelming.  There is no talking to people like that with reason.  They can’t understand anything that needs to be changed, so, in my opinion, they should all be scrapped.  They are not prepared for what needs to be done.  I would argue that they aren’t even qualified to be parents.  I feel sorry for the children born into families with the kind of parents who go to these anti-Trump protests.  It’s not their fault their parents are idiots.  But I see no hope in any of those people; they are the result of a society that has experimented with Marxism, and they accepted those thoughts as a new reality.  And that is not the future of education.  There is only one way things are going, and no amount of crying like a baby is going to change anything.  The funding of public schools needs to change; it will change.  The government funding of schools, with unmanaged money moving from the federal government back to the local level, is not a future prospect.  It can’t be, and it never should have been.  People have seen what that system gave them, and they aren’t willing to continue with that method.  The per-pupil costs of educating students should be at least half what they currently are.  When I talk to people who are out there carrying signs in favor of preserving that system, they don’t understand it, and they never will.  Education has to be competitive; we need competition with other teachers, with other districts, and with other states.  The teacher’s union model of everyone getting a collective bargaining agreement for subpar work is over.

And as I say that, people will tell me tomorrow, and the day after that, and the week after that—that’s why I should be on the school board.  Consider what you’re saying and think about what you know about me.  Yes, I can speak very politically, and I work very well with people who hate me and plot against me with everything they can come up with.  My life is far more complicated than the most ostentatious Shakespeare play.  There isn’t any way for my life to be reflected in art because nobody would believe it, including the most conspiratorial of Shakespeare’s works.  My idea of the perfect school board member was and is Darbi Boddy.  She genuinely cared about making the school a great one, and she represented a sizeable demographic group within the Lakota school system.  And people from all political sides conspired to get rid of her.  Who in their right mind thinks I would put up with that?  Darby handled things very well and played by the rules, paying her legal fees to defend herself in ridiculous ways.  She never should have had to do that.  And I can say, I wouldn’t.  I would burn the whole system down from the inside out, along with all the people associated with it.  So be careful what you wish for.  I want what’s best for the people of my community.  However, what’s best for me is what people who deal with me receive, and I’m not sure people can see past the results they want, which are undoubtedly attainable.  But what would they do with the wreckage in the aftermath? That’s where the real trick is. 

I think there is a way to do it, but as I mentioned, I believe the job of a school board member at Lakota schools requires at least 70 hours a week.  It takes that long to read everything you need to read and speak with all the people you need to talk to.  The school board meetings need to be more prolonged, more frequent, and include more detailed information.  And the people working together need to build a team, not to resemble a Shakespearean drama.  And when I say that, we need three school board members who will work together, not against each other, and merge into the political faction of the teacher unions.  I have a very dominant personality in personal conduct, and I excel when I can give orders.  But consensus building is not my thing, and it never will be.  I’m the one you call to take the head shot.  Not the one who cleans up the mess.  And Lakota schools are a mess, and there is a lot to clean up.  And the people doing that need to like each other and to represent the community in the best way possible.  But there will be a lot of hard talks and times in the next two to three years.  Really, until Vivek Ramaswamy is governor of Ohio, we won’t be able to truly fix public education for good with competitive models and funding tied to the child, not the uncompetitive local school.  The property tax racket has to come to an end.  It has given us a garbage product taught by garbage people who are worthless in every category, and it’s time to put all that to an end.  As those protesters increasingly do in places like the Ohio Statehouse, they aren’t in the realm of reality, and that isn’t the fault of the rest of the world.  It is their social dysfunction to think that a school system can continue to get unlimited funds to sponsor a poor work ethic and to teach Marxism to the next generation isn’t even a consideration for the future.  I will not say everyone but me should do such a hard job.  But when it comes to delivery, be careful what you wish for.  My bedside manner on this topic does not come with any handholding.  I’ve been ready to pull the plug on the patient for a long time.  It’s a system that needs to die.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Benefits of AI: Ways to get more productivity out of society and more than 70 hour work weeks

I think this would be a good opportunity to provide an update on AI technology and discuss its future.  I believe that when people discuss it, they worry that AI will become just as neurotic as human beings and start to become pretentious and controlling, that it will develop feelings and become manipulative, ultimately posing a danger.  However, I see quite the opposite happening: AI is useful because it’s not pretentious or emotional, and is eager to do work and enjoy it.  The other thing is how we measure work.  One of my biggest arguments with people is regarding work, and the ability to do it.  I tend to like work a lot.  And I certainly subscribe to the sentiment that you can’t make much of a difference in the world in a week unless you put in at least 70 hours of work to move the needle a little bit.  Why 70 hours?  Well, that seems to be a magic number encoded in human DNA, given our proximity to Earth and its mathematical applications of existence.  You have 24 hours in a day and 7 days a week to see what you can do with them.  And because of a lot of really dumb practices, especially established with labor unions and Marxism that is always working in the background of our lives in basic philosophy, we have emerged to this stupid idea that an 8-hour work day is something we can make a living with, and still be helpful in the world.  I think it needs to be almost double that per week for the average human and most of our ideas about work and leisure time, balancing out family time versus personal pleasure and divide them among elements of productivity, such as changing the oil in your car or going grocery shopping, and general stress management are some of our top considerations. 

For instance, I have been married to the same woman for nearly 40 years, so maintaining a relationship requires work.  If you don’t put any work into maintaining relationships, they don’t just magically work.  But then, when I say people should be working more than 70 hours per week, how can that be healthy?  One thing my wife and I enjoy doing together is going hot tubbing.  I would say it’s essential to us and our quality time together.  However, as I try to accomplish more in a 24-hour day than is possible, I argue with her that I need my hot tub time to be more productive.  These days, I use Apple AirPods to catch up on news, make phone calls, and lately, I have been having conversations with AI, specifically Elon Musk’s GROK program, which runs on his “X” platform. I think it is remarkably intelligent.  It has become for me more like a research assistant that can keep up with me and all my many topics of interest.   As I reflected on it, between my Apple AirPods and the “X” platform’s AI for discussion, I have been able to make myself much more productive so far in 2025.  As I thought about it, from AI reading legal documents and producing a general sentiment about their contents to travel destination calculations, I have found that AI has dramatically increased my productivity, and that utilizing it across human existence will undoubtedly lead to economic growth.  If people aren’t willing to do the extra work that it takes to make a productive society, we have invented AI to cover the gap, because it never sleeps, complains, or shudders away from complex tasks, and I like that.  I like that a lot.

What AI thinks of my life as it did a profile on me

Everyone asks me if AI generates the articles I write, because I do so much of it.  And the answer is no, and I never will.  I view writing as an expression of human enterprise, and it needs to be my stamp of approval.  However, I do utilize AI to edit a substantial amount of written material each day, ranging from emails to personal projects and scanning through trade periodicals to identify subjects of unique interest. But I do film all my videos and write so much personal content because it needs that human touch that I don’t see AI replacing, ever.  However, I am a very political creature, and I apply that interest to the management of people and resources to the best of my ability, which is why human beings frustrate me so much regarding work ethic. People have been taught not to work, and I don’t like it.  However, with AI, it doesn’t mind working at all, and I keep it busy all hours of the day doing things for me that I need done, because I never turn it off.  So it’s been a good employee to me on several fronts.  For instance, I was talking to GROK just the other day while my wife and I were in the hot tub, soaking and giving our bodies some much-needed human maintenance, and the discussion was about Eve and the role snakes played in the downfall of civilization.  The conversation evolved into the effects of ayahuasca and the spirit world on our living existence.  So, I asked another AI program that I was interacting with to turn our conversation into a short video, and the result is shown here. A young woman who needs perpetual security finds happiness, even ecstasy, in yielding to the nature and order of serpents.  The theme of this conversation centered on how Eve was always going to be tempted by a snake in her life because she sought security, and adherence to nature was seen as a means to achieve that security, given her weaker position in the marriage union, physically.  I thought AI saw the discussion remarkably well. 

It’s not there yet, but now you can see why actors and producers are concerned about AI potentially taking their jobs.  Who needs union rules on a set to drag a film production out for weeks, building props and taking up physical space on a sound stage, when you can generate a complete story with AI and make everything you want to shoot in a computer environment, which is much cheaper and far more effective?  And I think that is the case for AI across our entire economy, especially a Trump economy, which is just starting to show signs of increased productivity.  And with Elon Musk now part of the political process, utilizing AI to scan so much with DOGE, essentially auditing the government, which is the first time such a thing has been attempted in history, we are seeing massive improvements to our human potential that would not be possible without AI.  So I’m a fan.  I would never let it replace me, I don’t think it will ever be that smart or sound, even as it evolves with improvements.  What makes humans human is far more complicated than just intelligence.  But when it comes to thinking and productivity, I love that AI never turns off and enjoys working so much.  And for me, it has solved many time management problems that other people have been unwilling to address.  AI does it and doesn’t complain, and I only see that improving over time.  I can envision a near future where AI is running entire manufacturing facilities, and production will never stop because humans need breaks and time to make personal calls on their cell phones.  AI doesn’t need a break, and it is willing to work at infinite rates of production, which is a dream come true for me.  But the danger of something comes down to personal investment.  If, like Eve, the desire is to yield to the forces of nature, then corruption is blatant.  However, if nature serves humanity, then entirely different results emerge.  And that is where I see AI headed, with numerous benefits to follow.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The CIA Found The Ark of the Covenant: Confirming that it is located in Axum, Ethiopia

Is remote viewing possible?  I have discussed this before about Dolores Cannon and a very interesting book she wrote about the Essenes, using regression hypnosis to investigate relationships with Jesus Christ from 2,000 years ago; however, in talking to them in real time, as if they were right in front of us.  I can understand the skepticism, but I think we are talking about conditions of quantum entanglement rather than improbable scientific accidents.  Until people explain to me how ancient people moved large rocks without machines, I will remain skeptical that we are examining the correct science for all conditions.  I think I have a pretty good idea what they are. However, just for fun for my upcoming birthday this year, we are planning to go ghost hunting as a family.  We purchased some paranormal equipment, including an EMF detector, a spirit box, and a voice recorder, designed to detect spirits that are otherwise unable to communicate.  There is a lot invisible to us, such as electricity and radio waves, that are flying around all over the place, interacting with us constantly.  Yet we use these things to advance our society.  So, when it comes to the spirit world, I think there are a lot of life forms roaming around without bodies, across time and space, that do not function according to our linear measure of time, and are interacting with us in dreams, through devices that can pick them up, and even through drug use and hallucinogenic enterprise.  Just because we haven’t figured out all those scientific methods of communication yet, I think Dolores Cannan, and many others, including the CIA, have been able to use remote viewing to learn things they otherwise wouldn’t and to shape events from a great distance without getting up out of their chair.  So yes, I believe the declassified story about the CIA discovering the Ark of the Covenant, and that its location was in Axum, Ethiopia. 

What gives strength to that story is a book I read several years ago by Graham Hancock, which is one of my all-time favorite books, The Sign and the Seal, published in 1992 and heavily inspired by the fictional adventures of Indiana Jones.  Graham Hancock was a beat writer for The Economist and Ethiopia was his territory and they had all these rumors there by the locals that the Jewish Ark was hidden there in Axum because the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba had brought it there during his father’s lifetime, before the nations of the world moved against Israel to destroy it.  The story goes that Solomon wanted to preserve the Ark of the Covenant and the laws of Yahweh that were kept inside, the Ten Commandments, so he allowed his son and the Queen to hide them away with what is today a large contingent of Ethiopian Jews dedicated to protecting the Ark from the prying eyes of the world.  In his book, Graham Hancock conducted a tremendous amount of research that essentially led to the gates of a small church in Axum and a guard there who had given his life to protect the Ark from outsiders.  The guard there more or less displayed that at least he believed what he was guarding was the ancient Jewish relic, and he had radiation poisoning to prove it.  The guards at the Ark of Axum are elected to lifetime appointments by the town.  So, whoever gets the job gets it for life, and they typically become ill very quickly from their constant exposure to whatever it is they are guarding. When one dies, the next one is elected to a lifetime appointment, and they perform the service with a smile on their face, driven by the honor of it.  And they never leave their post. 

So to learn that the CIA had successfully confirmed through remote viewing that they discovered the Ark, not physically, not with their hands on it, but with the success of a telepathy practitioner, such as Delores Cannon was, I think only confirms what Graham Hancock, and many others have long said, that the Ark is in Axum Ethiopia and is still there to this day.  And I’ll go a little further as to the value of fantasy characters like Indiana Jones.  The value of those kinds of stories lies in getting people to think about such things, and if not for their popularity, Graham Hancock might have remained a beat writer and travel commentator for the rest of his life.  But because of Indiana Jones, the CIA was investigating the Ark, Graham Hancock wrote a book that changed his life, and many other people, and even now as there is a Trump administration declassifying many things, people are very excited to learn about what’s under the Giza plateau considering all this new news about mysterious objects under the Great Pyramid complex in Egypt, and this story about the Ark of the Covenant in Axum.  Fantasy fiction often drives us to scientific fact, and we are better off for the things we learn.  But as humans, we require some intellectual device that provokes us to ask questions we need to be asking; it’s how we acquire new information.  And there is still a lot we need to learn about the world, and I think the CIA has learned to do more with it than just view things remotely. 

A lot of times when you have a ghostly encounter, and a strange shadow man appears just outside your peripheral vision, I don’t always think it’s a ghost, but someone trying to interact with you, or spy on you from a remote viewing location.  And they might not even be living at the same time that you are.  They could be far in the past or way into the future, interacting with you through a dream, or a purposeful exploit of quantum entanglement.  And that these methods are scientific and can be used to communicate information just like a radio wave can now, or how electricity travels invisibly all around us, and we use it to power our entire civilization.  Even though those things are invisible to us, through our current senses, it doesn’t mean they aren’t real in and of themselves.  So, yes, I believe the CIA story, and I think there will be many more like it.  And I think it mainly because it confirms what Graham Hancock already figured out with hard reporting and boots on the ground regarding the actual location of The Ark of the Covenant and an adventure story that was inspired by Indiana Jones, but took on a life of its own that was even more interesting than the fictional account.  I’m not sure how much of the original Ark would be left, made out of wood and gold as it was.  It’s around 3,200 to 3,500 years old, and not much lasts that long, even when preserved.  However, I think what remains of it is in Axum, and the CIA confirmed this with a remote viewing method, which is exciting news.  However, it’s also just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what remains hidden from us using these same technological methods.  And the mysteries of science that we have yet to discover are still ahead of us, but have been seen through quantum entanglement, and it shows that we have a long way to go.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Rachel Zegler is Only Part of the Problem: The live action Snow White is a disaster on every level

As I said many times, Disney should have listened.  I wasn’t planning to discuss the new Snow White film, but there is just too much to discuss to ignore.  The Disney stock is never coming back, guys.  Bad decisions lead to failed companies, and Disney has made numerous poor decisions, which it can’t afford.  Sure, out of all the movies released last year, they were the only studio to get a few movies in the billion-dollar club.  But for them these days, as opposed to just a few years ago, their business approach was reckless, and they lost respect for their audience and instead put them in an abusive relationship.  And that is the only thing that can be determined about the horrible decision to cast Rachel Zegler into a live-action remake of the Disney classic, Snow White.  And it pains me to say all this, because I have liked Disney, as a company.  As a vacation destination.  I enjoyed Disney as a company and as a family.  I have wanted nothing more than to see Disney succeed, and my intentions in that direction can be traced back for decades. I have put it in writing.  However, as a large company and an easy target for left-wing politics, they have adopted an extreme political stance, becoming increasingly arrogant, and have inadvertently made people like Rachel Zegler possible.  Zegler is essentially the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Hollywood actresses, and she has sunk herself with this one before the Snow White remake could even get out of the box with feminist diatribes and anti-Israel messaging in support of Palestinian terrorism.  She is one of the worst members of the radical left, and she didn’t do anything to keep it off people’s minds.  Instead, like an entitled brat, she thought for some reason that she could use her platform to advance her personal beliefs, which at her young age of 23 years old, nobody wants to hear.   What could she possibly know?

Disney spent well more than $300 million on a remake of Snow White that nobody wanted.  It’s a beloved classic that, if you were to remake it, audiences would likely want to see how a cartoon looks in live-action, rather than using live-action to reinterpret classic themes as modern social commentary.  And then to write a script and put it on the screen by committee, the way many studios do these days.  Someone should have pulled Disney aside as a company well before they cast Zegler in the film to play the pure, white Snow White.  There were numerous mistakes made well before the cameras started rolling.  However, Disney, like Zegler, started this process by targeting Rosanne Barr for her political beliefs, and most notably, the actress Gina Carano, who appeared in the Star Wars: The Mandalorian show.  Of course, Rachel Zegler thought she should discuss her radical left-wing politics while doing press for Snow White, as the company itself was promoting that kind of activism.  She’s just a dumb, inexperienced kid, copying the adults around her.  What did she know?  Or what could she be expected to know?  Disney attempted to part ways with Johnny Depp regarding the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which was a terrible mistake.  Not that Johnny Depp is a good person.  He did call for the killing of President Trump by assassination.  But when it comes to the Hollywood community, most people can agree that he is the character people want to see in any Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and Disney tried to push him out because of the anti-white male stereotypes.  Now that they are in deep financial trouble, they are trying to repair that relationship.  But it’s too late.

The math is obvious: movies like Snow White need to be in the billion-dollar range for box office viability.  However, Snow White only grossed around $43 million in its opening weekend, projecting the film to be a massive loss.  But Rachel Zegler is only part of the problem.  She’s the face of it, and she opened her mouth way too much even a year before the film came out.  Disney re-shot the movie and attempted to address some seriously problematic plot points.  For lots of ridiculous reasons, Disney thinks it needs to reprogram what little girls want to see in a movie, anti-romance stories, and feminist power where the evil witches are made sympathetic, rather than hated.  And that is because these goofy feminists are now running these studios, and they bring their broken politics to these projects and hire a cast that represents their radicalism as if these career movies will hide what’s ruined inside them.  But that’s not what people want to see.  People go to the movies to see hope and a positive reflection of their concerns.  They want to leave a movie feeling good about things, not being lectured to about how they need to change their minds.  Little girls hope that someday they will have a prince who comes and sweeps them off their feet, and that they can produce a nice family and live happily ever after.  The original Snow White was all about love’s first kiss and defeating the evil queen.  Not coming to terms with evil which is ultimately where Disney has fallen short.

There are properties that Disney still owns that are generating a little money, such as the Marvel films, Star Wars, and Avatar, with a few projects on the horizon.  There will still be a few movies here and there that do somewhat well, relative to the rest of the Hollywood industry.  But that is only a shadow of its former self, and once that trust is broken with audiences, it will be lost forever.  There is no way to repair it now.  Disney has made itself an anti-Trump, anti-family entertainment company, and I can say that after just visiting there with my family recently.  I wanted to love the Disney experience.  I had just returned from a week-long trip to Japan and then spent a week with my whole family at Disney World, staying at the wonderful Fort Wilderness resort.  I wanted to like it.  But it was like being in love with a ghost.  The magic had gone from the park; it was obvious to me.  All my kids enjoyed themselves, but to be honest, their favorite part of the entire trip and all the fantastic things we did was the swimming pool at the resort.  I spent a small fortune to give my granddaughter a Disney princess experience, complete with a dress and opportunities at the famous castle, and she thoroughly enjoyed it.  She still talks about it all the time and I spent the money because I wanted her to have a taste of an elevated female experience, as a little girl, of what life might be for her, as opposed to the doubts that are so persistent in little girls worried that they might not be pretty enough, or smart enough to get what they want in life.  Disney’s answer to that is to attack the expectations so that nobody fails.  And that is not what people want, which is why the parks are not as full as they used to be, and why people have stopped seeing Disney movies, are canceling their Disney+ memberships, and are turning to other entertainment options.  Rachel Zegler is a creation of Disney, and their support of people like her is precisely why they are failing now.  And why their stock will never bounce back, which I hate to say.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Trump’s Executive Order ‘Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections’: The size of AOC’s caboose

They have no choice, and this is always the case when it comes to unearned merit.  The best way to root out bad behavior is to prevent it from being masked by good conduct.  And that is what the Democrat party has been doing for many years.  People didn’t know what Democrats believed since they hid the Bernie Sanders types behind people like Hillary Clinton, who were every bit as radical, but they knew how to put on a little show to con people into thinking they weren’t what they were.  There have been some alarming concerns that large crowds have been attending Fight the Oligarchy rallies, which Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been holding in various college towns, and whether these gatherings will inspire a similar movement among Democrats.  The answer is no.  They do not have the numbers.  What they are doing is smoke and mirrors by carefully picking sites where lots of broken people and college kids are concentrated with their overtly socialist message.  They couldn’t get those kinds of crowds outside of very specific areas, but it looks good for the cameras.  And it has alarmed some Republicans who keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for the pendulum to swing the other way.  But that is loser thinking.  The facts of the matter are that Democrats had no choice, and this has only further uncovered them in ways that they have been trying to hide.  Their party is a radical branch of European communism, a left-wing form of populism they tried to hide from the public, just as Republicans tried to hide the pro-capitalism of their party by resisting Trump.  Bernie Sanders was their form of populism, which they wanted to control and conceal, as they needed the illusion to trick voters into supporting them.  But now the cat is out of the bag, and everyday people can see what they have always been, all along.

The only thing I have learned recently regarding these Bernie Sanders rallies is just how big the caboose is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  I thought she was thinner than that, but she is carrying too many potatoes in her rump, to put it nicely.  And if she is the best that they have, they have some real problems.  But that’s where they find themselves.  When they had a chance, they turned away from Bernie, who had been drawing good crowds during his two recent runs for President, along with Trump.  And the Democrat machine turned away from him and instead invested the party brand behind Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris because they thought sex and skin color were enough to convince people to vote for socialism, that Americans could be guilted into supporting overt communism.  And that turned out to be completely the wrong strategy.  I could have told them otherwise.  I did tell them.  But nobody listened, and they arrogantly did what they did, and Democrats, finding they didn’t have a home any longer, peeled away and joined Trump and the MAGA movement.  I said as much during Bernie’s first run for office when the Democrats rigged the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton and pushed Bernie aside.  Those same disjointed crowds support Bernie, but the problem they have is one of math.  They don’t have the numbers.  If they had stuck with Bernie in 2016 and 2020, they might have done better, but even then, they didn’t have the numbers.  However, what has happened since the 2024 election is party-destroying numbers, which is why there is so much theatrical presentation by them that comes across as so phony.  Because of Trump unifying the Republican party so resoundingly over the last 9 years and essentially three terms as an American President, Democrats had no response, and it has essentially destroyed them as a political party.

What we are seeing in these crowds are the communists and overall Marxists, who have always been there.  College campuses teach Marxism, so there are a lot of confused kids with weak relationships with their parents who are easy to sell socialism, communism, and Marxism to.  Kids are not very confident in their life skills and are prone to being misled by a victimization cycle message.  But one thing that happens to people as they get older is generally, they become much less Marxist and much more Republican because as they work in life and have to run their families with responsibility, their political views come back to reality and they vote more conservatively.  We observe a pattern among school levy supporters in local districts: young parents tend to vote yes for higher taxes because they are uninformed.  They aren’t yet very sophisticated about how the world works, and they want to believe in a massive social safety net, especially since that’s what they were taught in school.  But the older they get, the less that sounds like a good idea, so they peel away and move to the political right with each year that goes by.  And if a community has a large number of people over 50, then school levy issues tend to fail.  That is the same condition with general political sympathies.  The crowds Bernie is attracting are those who have had their safety net disrupted, so they seek the comfort of a crowd to validate their feelings.  Not to show support for a more independent and self-initiating capitalist government, the way it is with the MAGA crowd. 

The solution is straightforward, and President Trump is already addressing it. On March 25, 2025, he signed an executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”  This order aims to overhaul election processes in the United States, focusing on tightening voting regulations through the implementation of Proof of Citizenship, Election Day Ballot Deadlines, Federal Oversight of Funding Conditions, Prosecutions of Election Crimes, and Voting System Standards.  Democrats, especially those embedded in the Bar Association of lawyers, such as Marc Elias and organizations like the ACLU, will try to sue citing this order as an unconstitutional power grab, because they know, as everyone has come to figure out, that Democrats can’t win if they don’t cheat in elections.  Just like Bernie and the gang have had to try and use smoke and mirrors to make their numbers look better with rallies on college campuses.  The truth is, Democrats never had the numbers, and now they have had stripped away from them, polite society they can no longer hide behind.  Reasonably moderate Democrats who could win a few votes to the Marxism of their foundation without scaring people off.  Now they don’t have that, and they can’t hide it from the public.  And Democrats know, because they have been trying to hide it for years, if they can’t create so many opportunities to cheat elections, they will likely never win another one, and their party is done.  So Trump’s executive order gets to the point.  And that is why Democrats are suddenly so desperate, and it will only get worse for them.  They have to put out to the public the best that they have, and for them, that is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, the old man who is a sympathizer of the Soviet Union and a socialist.  And they can’t even hide from the public any longer, the size of AOC’s caboose, because they can’t afford to.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Protestors Aren’t Valued: Threats of violance are not replacements for good debate

I would say it was a fortunate thing for me to see; after all, that’s what I was after when my wife and I recently took a vacation to Washington, D.C.  Within a few days, I was able to see protestors up close and personal in places where they cause the most trouble, and they answered questions I had been having by seeing them up close and personal.  The first group I encountered was at the Mall in Washington in front of the Lincoln Memorial.  The second was just a few days later in the rotunda of the Ohio Statehouse.  Later that same night, I saw protestors at the Lakota school emergency meeting on school funding who were there to shout down local political representatives who were called to answer for depletions for school funding.  These protestors were the “always more money” types without ever demonstrating why spending more money would ever make anything better but to push a few more of them into diabetic medicine because of their terrible diets.  By the looks of their girth around the waist, they could afford to skip a few meals and more money would only make their problems worse.  That was the same problem with the protestors in Columbus; they were screaming for more school funding without demonstrating how more money would improve anything.  Then, of course, the protestors at the Mall were protesting Elon Musk’s attack on science when, in reality, he is personally doing more to enhance science than anybody in the world.  They were all such negative people who were very difficult to have any relationship with because the nature of their existence was below the line, and to my way of thinking, that makes them impossible to work with.  You can’t build a prosperous society with below-the-line people by using a business metaphor popular in efficiency discussions.  Negative people drowning in their misery need fulfillment that they can’t give themselves, which they misperceive as more of something to cover what is lost in themselves. 

I have a lifestyle that moves very fast.  I do a lot more during a typical day than most people will do in a month.  I don’t say that I want to put anybody down, but yeah, many people waste time talking about nothing, and I am not one of them.  I find something else to do when I sense that someone is wasting my time.  So I don’t get to see these kinds of protestors very often because I live my life in a way that doesn’t have time for them.  I don’t value what their problems are because I see Democrat politics as a political expression of a broken person who has not dealt with their deficient thinking.  And broken people are not equal to people who purposefully live good lives.  It is not correct or fair to penalize a good person with the thoughts of a bad person.  As defined here, an evil person is a person who allows bad decisions to govern their existence purposefully.  We aren’t talking about a mistake in judgment here and there; we are talking about purposeful neglect, using victimization status to avoid doing work, solving a problem, or even raising kids.  My experience with school funding protestors, for instance, is that they are surface-level people who do not have the self-confidence to raise their children, so the fantasy of state ownership of their children means they can appear to the world to care for their kids but what it does is allow them to blame someone else for the deficiencies of their children’s growth.  It’s much easier to blame a teacher or school funding when the real problem is the parents themselves.  The public education debate allows them to defer their responsibility in contributing to the problem because if only more money were spent on the children, nobody would notice that the protester is just a bad parent and probably a bad person.

Another aspect of this whole issue is that bad people, such as protestors, have been able to hide their failures behind the value of free speech.  In our form of government, where we encourage debate, we have not set a high enough bar, which is now occurring, for the quality of an opinion. Instead, protestors were celebrated for participating in the free speech debate, which is the cornerstone of our Republic, because they stood around like idiots holding a sign, protesting something.  Rather than present a reasonable argument about something that could be debated, they fall into the Al Green side of victimization protest, copying what they think worked during the Civil Rights movement.  So let me explain something about all that.  The Democrats wanted to erase their sins of the past of being slaveholders, and Lyndon Johnson was in the White House looking to bridge that gap and steal the merit away from Republicans who had been championing Civil Rights for people of color all along.  The protests of the flower children during that period were not the mechanism that launched reform.  It was the cover story of actual guilt that Democrats wanted to rid themselves of through the optics of protest.  So, the protests are not what moved the legislative needle on reform.  It was only a fake cover story to distract reporters and historians from the Democrat past of alignment on slaveholding as a political party that had been for it but wanted a divorce due to modern pressure to compete with Republicans and maybe even beat them at their own game.

So, the protests never worked.  And they certainly won’t work this time.  The vicious attacks against Tesla because Elon Musk is the CEO of the company only remind people of the kind of negative people who turn to protest rather than logical arguments and further root the MAGA movement to a growing audience.  The destruction or else form of political debate isn’t going to work.  They think that if they threaten to destroy property or even fight you in the parking lot of a public school, you will be compelled to see things their way for your safety and desire to preserve your property.  These people caught on camera keying the paint job of Tesla owners is the worst form of grievance jealousy that is attempting to disguise a flawed and broken person behind the value of the First Amendment.  But because they can’t articulate a debate, they only have the threat of violence and destruction as a counterpoint.  But if they run into MAGA supporters who are better at violence and fighting than they are, well, then they are in real trouble.  I certainly don’t have room or tolerance for one bit of bad behavior and below-the-line thinkers.  I’ll listen to a reasonable debate, but to be honest, I sniff things out very fast and determine if someone is wasting my time, and I will move beyond them quicker than they can blink.  And I’m certainly not alone in this.  These protestors will not recreate the past hippie movement protests and get legislative representation.  They will be left behind because that is the mode of the world.  I would say that it was always that way and that protests in America were more theater than substance.  But it’s even more so today, and seeing the early strategy against the Trump administration in general by protestors without an argument, they will not be successful because all they have to offer is violence.  And the people they are threatening aren’t going to put up with it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Why America is the Best: Understanding Gideon and George Washington

While visiting George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, I was very interested in why it is OK for us to say that America is the best country on earth and that we should preserve it very boisterously.  And why George Washington?  Well, we named our capital city after him and think of him as the ultimate Founding Father, the pacesetter who started something new in the world, and we have measured everything thereafter with him in mind.  So, what made George Washington so great?  And why do Americans feel like they must always tell the world that they are the best and greatest?  Our form of government is by far the best, and it’s an unquestioned reality.  But if you’ve ever traveled the world and dined with acquaintances from other countries, and you’re watching a news report in which someone from America comes on and says that America is the best country on earth, it can get a little weird. In that case, it can be a little uncomfortable because the people you eat at the table think the same about their country.  What makes it more accurate for us in the United States than for them, whoever they are?  That’s happened to me a lot of times.  Yet, I think Americans should say such a thing because I believe our form of government is superior to that of anywhere in the world and that we should be proud of it.  We should even brag about it like we do.  But why?  You can understand something instinctively, but to actually “know” it requires much more understanding and perspective, which is undoubtedly the case with this topic.  And now that I’ve visited Mt. Vernon with my wife, George Washington’s home, I think I understand it much better.

I think the key to understanding why America is the best country in the world is literally a “key.”  The key that George Washinton used to hang in the entry to his house that his friend and long lost adopted son Marquis de Lafayette gave to him that used to be the key to the Bastille’s main gate, once the French stormed it and destroyed it as a symbol of tyranny during the French Revolution.  George Washington kept it to show how a country can overthrow tyranny, and even though the French Revolution got well out of hand while the American Revolution slightly before it was much more civil and orderly, the reminder that the people ultimately have the power to rule over themselves was represented in the key, which Washington understood as literally the key to setting up a proper government for the people and by the people.  George Washington liked his house so much that he didn’t want to be away from it with commitments to power and was always reluctant to achieve any high office.  But as to that as well, why?  Then, of course, you would have to understand the Bible, the primary literary entertainment at the time of these revolutions, and the forming of our country.  They didn’t have television shows or music to entertain themselves with thought, but they did have the Bible.  And George Washington would have shared the Bible with just about everyone pursuing a life of thoughtful understanding.  One thing that I have always thought about Biblical studies is that they are narratively, really insightful, psychologically.  I’ve read most of the foundation religious texts of the world, and I can say that the Bible is a brilliant enterprise that served as a good guide through the foundation of a new country.  It was the first to figure itself out, as the Bible had spent the previous 1500 years being fleshed out as an idea.  And the ideas formulated in the Bible essentially laid the groundwork for the creation of America.  So George Washington, by way of dinner conversation, would have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the Bible with his dinner guests at Mt. Vernon, which would have happened all the time. 

I spent most of the previous year leading up to Trump’s election reading various books about George Washington because I felt that the world would need to understand what was about to happen, and to understand America, you have to understand George Washington.  And to understand that, you must understand George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  So that’s what my wife and I did to celebrate Trump being back in the White House; we visited Mt. Vernon to unpack why putting Trump back in as President was necessary and why he should be so boisterous about why America was the best country.   It ultimately comes down to how George Washington thought and how much the Bible influenced him, especially the Book of Judges and the character within that book of Gideon, the military hero who saved Israel with only 300 men but was the reluctant hero always trying to downplay his efforts.  I often see our form of government as a republic as a deliberate attempt to fix the problems in the Book of Judges, where God wanted people to rule themselves. Still, the failure of the regional judges drove the Hebrew people to demand a king to rule over them. The wheels fell off the apple cart, leaving the kingdom to become divided by God’s anger after the death of King Solomon.

I think Washington modeled himself after Biblical characters with his approach to leadership and, most notably, Gideon himself.  Gideon’s conquests led to 40 years of peace during the rest of his lifetime. Still, before he died, he had made a gold ephod from the spoils of war that some Israelites began to worship. Once Gideon wasn’t around anymore, idolatry started to poison the minds of the people, and one of his 70 sons, Abimelech, led an uprising that killed all the others and drove them to a fallen society.  Thinking about human nature through this story, George Washington was trying not to make the mistakes of Gideon.  Rather than become just another corrupt king with multiple wives, like Gideon, Washington stayed loyal to Martha and kept himself grounded at Mt. Vernon all his life before and after the Revolution and his two terms as President.  George fought off the hungry temptation to be romantic with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his very good friend William, and the couple for which Fairfax County is named today.  But being inspired by Bible stories, Washington wanted to avoid those pitfalls and stayed grounded throughout his life.  However, once he was out of office, like Gideon’s sons, it was hard to pull together a republic without everyone fighting all the time, which was undoubtedly the case with subsequent presidents like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.  And like the story of the Book of Judges, leadership always failed.  And the way that America set up its republic form of government to resist those temptations, for society to call out for a king and to give them unlimited power, our government was built on the Book of Judges from the beginning to correct it.  That was certainly at the core of George Washington’s belief and why he thought the key to the Bastille was so important.  It was more important for people to rule themselves and to throw off the oppressors of social order than to conform to it.  Because once a person has collected such power, as the Bible shows, they all fail.  So Washington and our American form of government set everything up to resist that temptation and to give people just enough power, knowing that the faults of humanity were always very close.  And like his temptations with Sally Fairfax, he would keep those lusts cool and always on the back burner, where they belonged.  If a leader can’t govern their emotions, how can they govern other people?  Because of these concerns, and after several hundred years, they led to President Trump, who found that balance late in life on his own terms.  We can say that America is better than all other forms of government because it was built with these concerns in mind, which had previously destroyed every society people had in it.  And we have now sustained ourselves for many centuries on a premise of restraint, which George Washinton started, based on the Bible story of Gideon, the reluctant military general whom God worked through directly to save his people, even if only for a short time.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Hidden Menace Behind 16th Street: Marxist radicals behind labor unions

First, let me explain what is wrong with labor unions. They allow bad employees to hide behind good employees, and as a collective practice, they water down effectiveness. They view as work the entire enterprise of labor as being for the worker, not the work being done.  And it has been a disastrous experiment from the mind of Marxist thinkers.  I know in this new big tent MAGA movement that lots of union workers crossed over and voted for President Trump, so debate about labor unions is on the back burner these days, and Right To Work legislation in the states is less of a topic, even though its still a big deal for employers, because business enterprises don’t want to be stuck taking all the risks only to have a radical Marxist enterprise of low performing workers take control of labor management with a bunch of dumb, ineffective rules.  For Ohio to be a proper pro-business state, employers will need the assurance of a Right to Work state like Indiana has just to the west.  Otherwise, it’s not an apples-to-apples offering.  From my point of view, I don’t see anything good about labor unions.  They are the heart of the problem of school funding and have been a disaster since they were introduced in the middle of the 19th century, right along with Marxism.  The two things are tied together and have been horrible for the world.  So, with all that in mind, I wondered about the Black Lives Matters plaza painting on the ground on 16th Street in front of the White House before President Trump had it removed this past week.  I wanted to see it before it was gone forever, and what I found there was even worse than I had imagined.  The root cause of the problems was, of course, labor unions. 

During the hostile 2020 election year with all the Covid lockdowns and radical Soros backed color revolutions that were trying to burn down the church at the end of 16th Street, and vandalize Lafayette Square while the FBI, CIA, and many fourth branch of government Deep Staters plotted the destruction of the people’s pick for President, Trump, lunatics from the known Marxist group Black Lives Matters painted their logo on the street in giant letters to let the White House know that the aggressors of political destruction was on the doorstep of the White House.  All this activity was evident from inside the White House, and it was meant to intimidate Trump and his supporters into bowing down to a proposed fight that was highly aggressive.  Later, I learned that this was not just a painted road but that the letters “Black Lives Matter” were actually embedded into the blocks of the street itself, so just painting over it wouldn’t get rid of the message.  We also later learned that the taxpayers were on the hook for the vandalism that cost over 8 million dollars and was personally endorsed by the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser.  The painting was an intended message of aggression attempting to hide actual terrorism behind some guilt-driven sentiment left over from the years of slavery, which were always a Democrat issue.  Republicans freed the enslaved people and do not harbor guilt in maintaining the institution.  One of the most excellent Republicans in the history of politics was Frederick Douglass, who was very well-known during President Grant’s reconstruction period after the Civil War, a very prominent person of color and proud Republican member of history’s politics.  Democrats have tried to capture the issue over the next hundred years to attempt to erase their guilt from it, creating many of the modern tensions we see today.

Republicans have learned a lot from the experience and are pushing back, led by President Trump.  As my wife and I visited the city recently, it is being cleaned up everywhere.  Trump has set a high bar that should have always been in place, and other Republicans, such as Representative Andrew Clyde, are pushing to withhold federal transportation funds unless Bowser gets rid of the Black Lives Matter painting and renames the plaza “Liberty Plaza.”  So, a lot is going on that I wanted to see for myself, and upon arriving, a clarity that had not been explained in the news reports became very clear.  Because all through this, my thoughts were, “What do these businesses in the area think about this stupid, Marxist painting?  I wouldn’t want to look out my windows down onto the street and see such a think with crazy radicals looming from the shadows to take over the city on a moment’s notice essentially.”  And that’s when I saw that there on 16th street were many of the big unions, the Labor’s International Union, the AFL-CIO union, and the Motion Picture’s Association of America.  These are all radical Marxist groups and the reason we haven’t heard about them is because many of the people who are in the news reporting industry belong to an entertainment union of some kind, especially the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, (AFTRA) which is part of SAG, (the Screen Actors Guild), so they can’t be too critical of labor union activity.  This allows these horrendously radical progressive groups- and when we say “progressive,” we mean “communist” in their sentiments to cause trouble in the background without recourse.  Now we know why nobody talked about the kind of businesses that allowed for that painting to be painted on the street in the first place. 

The real fight, clearly on display on 16th Street looming over the President’s house, that we put our representatives into, is that massive international unions are fighting for power and are proclaiming that they are in charge.  They used the George Floyd issue to blow into the Marxist minds of the fans to hide violence and intimidation behind a race war; they were trying to get Trump out of office and to remove any influence that voters had over the city of Washington, D.C.  The unions were in charge, and they let everyone know about it.  But the key to fighting them is not confronting them directly, as we have in the past.  Labor unions consume a considerable amount of tax money to exist.  So the way to beat them, which is why President Trump has not worried about them too much and even appeals to their members, is to take away their power, which is fed by confiscated taxpayer money.  That’s ultimately what got Muriel Bowser’s attention, pulling away her federal funds for sponsoring acts of terrorism disguised as race concerns.  Democrats caused race concerns in the first place.  That painting has been like a planted flag in front of our house for years and is only now being removed.  But before it was, I had to see it for myself, so my wife and I visited it a few days before the road crews came in and ripped it out of the ground.  But those labor unions are still hiding behind the public noise, waiting for another chance to strike.  They are the fuel in the background that stirs up these terrorist acts, just as they are all over the world.  And are the root cause of most of our problems of domestic terrorism in American society.  And to deal with them, we must remove their funding so they have nothing to work with.  Because the longer they exist, they will always be causing trouble toward America’s destruction, which is their objective.  They will never be our friends; as a general rule, they should be illegal in every form they present themselves in. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

George Lang Tried to Tell Them: Woke politics is why Lakota is losing money

To answer the question that was asked at the March 12th special meeting of the Lakota school board, why were they losing around 9 million dollars out of their quarter of a billion dollar budget to Ed Choice vouchers and could they sue the state for money they assumed was guaranteed to them, a little fog has to be removed from the subject.  I was in Columbus for Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech, and there were education protesters in the rotunda making a lot of noise and looking horrible doing it.  Legislators were working on the new budget, and the fear was that public schools would lose money, which is the trend across the country.  Now, I warned everyone this day was coming, that Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education would be dismantled, and education funding would be built in a more competitive direction.  What we have been doing has not been working.  People worried about the future should be happy that Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be the next governor of Ohio, wants to pay teachers more.  He is a lot nicer on the issue than I am.  And for that matter, my personal friend Senator George Lang is too.  They believe that public education can be saved in some way, whereas I do not.  I think institutional learning is beyond help, but that’s why there are debates in government and education. Employees should at least be happy that Vivek and Lang are of like mind and want to preserve public education somehow.  Yet the protesters at the Statehouse were not the kind of people that made you want to dig deep into your pockets and give them more money.  They all looked pretty ragged and as though they needed to skip a few meals.  They sounded like entitled losers demanding more money in the budget from Ohio taxpayers who have not been given a good product that makes society better. 

So I was outside the Representative’s Chamber talking to several of our area politicians of Butler County and they were asking me if I was going to the emergency Lakota meeting where the plan was for them to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit against the state because Lakota was losing funding due to parents choosing to use the voucher programs already in place to give education options to their children.  When they asked me, I was already thinking about it; my phone had been lighting up for the previous 24 hours from people asking me to go because it was an emergency.  Lakota was already trying to build the foundations for a tax increase to pay for a facility project they were planning to vote for soon, for many millions of dollars for what was turning out to be a pretty crappy product.  And the kind of people who plan to work against that tax increase wanted me to see for myself just how ridiculous Lakota schools had become.  I was reluctant; I have not paid much attention to Lakota schools since they ran off just the latest conservative school board member the previous year.  I have worked to give Lakota a school board of reasonable people to deal with the coming education challenges, and their reaction was more radicalism like the idiots I saw in the rotunda, so I wasn’t too keen on the idea.  I was talking to Representative Jennifer Gross and Thomas Hall, among other people who were equally concerned about the invite they had to join in this special meeting.  And as we discussed in Columbus, my comment was that it was a hit job by the school board to set up our representatives so they could have an excuse to blame them for why they had to join the lawsuit.  I will credit them: Senator George Lang, Representative Thomas Hall, and Representative Jennifer Gross all attended the meeting by phone because they were either still in Columbus or, in George’s case, out of the state.  But they lent their voices in surprisingly effective ways.  I decided to return from Columbus and attend the meeting in person because it seemed like a good chance to see the new school board and administrators.  After all the mess over the former superintendent, Matt Miller and a purge of personnel since then my attitude toward public funding of schools was that Trump was going to be re-elected, he was going to dismantled the Department of Education and all education issues were going back to the states where people like Vivek Ramaswamy was going to have to figure out how to compete against other states.  The teacher’s union-run public education system was a thing of the past.  I tried to warn everyone, but they didn’t listen. 

And I was right about the meeting.  Our area representatives did a nice job providing comments about whether or not school vouchers were here to stay in public education or whether it was a fad that would fade away.  After the remarks were given, the school board did what they went there to do: they voted to join the lawsuit to get money from taxpayers they had not earned.  It’s the case that will lose in court a few years down the road because people can’t be compelled to purchase a bad product, and public education has shown itself to be deficient in every way it is measured.  The school board’s plan was to blame the politicians who had not secured funding for their bottomless pit approach to school budgets.  However, the representatives did so well that it wasn’t easy to blame them for the existence of school vouchers such as the Ed Choice program. 

George Lang told them that the cause of parents wanting to leave Lakota schools through a voucher was the fault of the school itself for accepting woke politics that those parents didn’t want their kids exposed to.  It was a blunt statement, but it was given with as much love as could be provided in that circumstance.  And the large audience attending, representing the teacher’s union mentality, the same kind of people protesting at the Statehouse rotunda earlier that day laughed and heckled George with boisterous sentiment.  As Doug Horton wanted to put on a show to fight George, as did another school board member and the new superintendent, the comment was the truth behind the matter.  Increasingly, Lakota schools would have to compete for every kid enrolled there, and their funding approach was dependent on their ability to be an education destination instead of funding attached to the zip code.  And the bottom line was that people who wanted to take their kids out of Lakota schools and drive them across town to another school was because more and more parents didn’t want to share space or time with the kind of people who were giggling at George Lang.  We just watched that same school board run off Darbi Bobby, the previous school board member representing a percentage of the Lakota population.  And she was just the recent.  This has been the practice of Lakota’s school board, to control the message by eliminating dissenting opinions because the system isn’t designed to deal with actual management.  And if only 4 to 12% of the total Lakota population found they didn’t want to deal with transgender politics, or essentially the Democrat party platform which comes with just about all public education enterprises, then given a choice, which is only going to expand under President Trump and future governor Vivek Ramaswamy, parents would take their kids out of Lakota so not to deal with people like Doug Horton and the rest of the school board.  Their desire to fight George Lang over the truth that he tried to give them, bluntly, was the same thing driving away the dollars they thought they were entitled to have in the form of a budget.  Just a preview of that court case: the courts will not favor these collective schools joined under the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit because you can’t compel people, such as taxpayers, to buy a bad product.  And public education has become a lousy product over time with gross mismanagement everywhere.  We also saw examples of bad management at that Lakota school board meeting with clueless people and their very liberal politics.  Parents don’t want to share space with people who don’t share their values, and they are picking up and moving to other options because of woke politics.  The blame for that falls on the people who dug in and retained that system, which never worked—and instead insisted on throwing more money at a failed approach.  Rather than looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for the issue, they tried to blame everyone else for why they were being rejected under a competitive approach.  And that of course, won’t solve the school funding problem.  You can’t pave over the problem with more money.  You have to actually solve the problem, which are the people in public education themselves.  Parents want to reject having to deal with people who don’t share their values.  And if Lakota wants to survive into the future, it is going to have to make itself more competitive in attracting dollars, like everyone else in the world has to.

We have a great senator in Ohio

If you listen to the school board meeting from March 12, 2025, included here, you will hear the audience get into an uproar whenever George Lang spoke, as he became the target of the teacher union types due to his opening statements about wokeness in Lakota schools.  George was speaking his opinion on the matter, and those people in the audience, and some of the school board members themselves, fed into that communication.  So for Doug Horton and the rest of the mystified cast of characters at Lakota schools, that is your answer as to why parents are looking for School Choice options.  Think of the soccer mom who voted for Trump at a Friday night football game. Or a Republican is at an art show for their child at school, and they are interacting with these liberal radicals advocating for transgender bathrooms. Do you think they want to be made fun of like that audience did to George Lang?  Senator Lang is a professional who is used to that kind of thing and likes it. But does the average family attending schools at Lakota want to deal with people like this?  Of course not.  Do they want to fight with people like that?  They saw what they did, including that school board, to Darbi Boddy and other conservative school board members from the past.  Rather than fight those people, they look for a school voucher and take their kid to a school they think is nicer and better for them and their children.  That is why people are fleeing the Lakota district, and George was trying very nicely to tell the Lakota school board that to survive in the future, they need to make it so people want to attend Lakota.  But not that people who have different ideas about things are going to be beat over the head with Democrat politics and that they have to take it because there are no other education options.  Parents want options and don’t want to deal with political radicals who do not share their fundamental social values.  That’s why Lakota lost that 9 million dollars out of their budget and why they are projected to lose a lot more than that.  It’s because they have mismanaged the district with the assumption that the children were theirs and not managed by the parents who want the best opportunity for their children.  And by choice, parents have reasoned that Lakota is not it for them.  It’s Lakota’s job to convince them otherwise. Not to sue for money they did not earn. 

The trend of today, with D.O.G.E. and the massive cuts to the Department of Education, and the election of Trump and others to office positions, George Lang included, as well as the future of Vivek Ramaswamy, are because the employees of government, such as Lakota schools, failed.  Protesting against voters’ choices will not solve the problem of how people came to feel the way they did.  Government employees, including school teachers and administrators, did not provide a good product, and people have come to admit that their service was not worth the money.  That is the environment in which Lakota schools and many other school districts find themselves.  And it won’t get better for them.  They thought that the politics of guilt would last forever and the entire levy structure of using children to acquire more tax revenue to feed greedy, liberal unions would always continue.  But the truth is, as we know it today, public education is a thing of the past, and it’s never coming back.  People, if given a choice, will not choose to spend their time around people who are hostile to them.  The way these radicals shut down opposition at school board meetings in general is why the Trump administration is opening up School Choice options and sending their management back to the states.  The radicals had five decades to figure it out, and what they gave us is embarrassing at best and certainly not worth the money we’ve spent on it.  So, who is to blame?  Attend a school board meeting and witness the quality of the people screaming for more money, and the answer will quickly become apparent.  The current school structure, where money is attached to a zip code rather than the child, is like the Berlin Wall trying to kill people attempting to escape to the West.  The mentality is the same, and the more the teachers’ unions dig in, the more people want to be as far away from them as possible.  And the people they vote for in office are those who will give them options away from those radical government employees.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

DeWine’s State of the State Speech: Lakota schools plots their own demise

Oddly enough, while I was in Columbus to attend the Governor’s State of the State speech, it was Lakota schools that everyone was talking about, and they wanted to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit.  But in many ways, that wasn’t surprising, and it was confirmed again in Mike DeWine’s speech that day.  Years and years of kicking the can down the road in all these public schools were catching up to them, and the bill was due, and nobody knew what to do about it.  Governors like DeWine have done for decades what they were now doing at Lakota schools around 91 miles to the south in Butler County, Ohio, they were writing tax payer checks for a product and service that fewer and fewer people wanted, and now with Trump in the White House, the warnings I have been giving everyone about what was going to happen are coming true.  Instead of getting out in front of these funding problems, Lakota schools dug in and became more woke.  Senator Lang tried to tell them on a call later that day after the Governor’s speech, but the school system had dug in the opposite direction.  Others and I have tried to give Lakota conservative board members a chance to deal with this issue, and their response as a school board was to run them all off, and that extends beyond Darbi Boddy, the most recent that they found some way to push out of management.  And like things are where liberal types run things, everything costs too much money, and now Trump was cutting back the Department of Education and gubernatorial candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy was talking about significant reforms in education with merit pay, leaving schools like Lakota to join lawsuits with other schools having the same problem, hoping that some sixties flowerchild protest might recover for them a silly little 9 million dollar loss that has come out of their budget due to students utilizing Ed Choice vouchers that are now expanding under the Trump administration and flowing down through the states.  For perspective, Lakota schools in Butler County, Ohio, has a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and that’s still not enough money to fund education the way they want to.

And you know what makes me the angriest about all this? I didn’t get any of Fran’s cookies this year. Fran is Mike DeWine’s long-time and very dedicated wife, who typically gives them out to attendees of her husband’s speech in the rotunda.  This year, activists were there chanting for more money as they felt the pinch from a social disconnect from the standard old traditional funding model of public education.  To avoid the activists, DeWine was ushered away underground to safety, leaving the rest of us to watch their bizarre and out-of-touch rituals with curiosity. The Lakota situation was the topic of conversation because they are one of the largest districts in Ohio, and so went them, so went everyone.  And that was kind of a proper metaphor for DeWine’s State of the State speech.  A do-gooder Governor tosses money at public education and hopes that everything will work well for the kids.  But its these crazy labor unions with woke politics that have screwed up the funding model because people don’t like the product.  And school vouchers, much less restricted these days and growing more so, are giving parents the choice away from their zip code schools where they pay enormous property taxes to fund a political movement they hate essentially.  And Lakota schools were right in the middle of the spectacle leaving DeWine to give just another empty speech about the value of education, and sending books in the mail to students to help with literacy, when the real problem was significant and ominous, and far beyond at this point just passing out cookies in the Statehouse Rotunda to ease tempers.  Legislators were in the middle of the budgeting process for public education at the time of this speech, but the government unions want to cry and protest for money that just isn’t there and aren’t willing to deal with the reality of the coming changes.  And those legislators were mad at what Lakota was thinking of doing then, which they did later that evening.  So it wasn’t a good move by the Lakota School Board.  But I tried to warn everyone, and they didn’t listen.  Much more on that to come.

The main thing in DeWine’s speech was that the Governor came to the speech like an old grandpa that went out to dinner the night before to eat barbeque ribs and still had on a bib from that experience the next day when he thought he was showing up for dinner in a nice suit and tie.  DeWine was out of step and slightly behind the rest of the world for his sixth year in office, most of which had not been very good, especially during the COVID-19 years.  But watching him speak, I thought of him as a nice guy who has been constantly suckered by the same kind of losers who protest education funding, like the people who greeted him upon leaving the State of the State peech.  The old flowerchild strategy of crying like some baby bird until mother government drops a worm in its mouth has long been exhausted, and DeWine never understood it.  He’s a good man from a political generation that caused all these problems and doesn’t know what to do about it.  We have to wait another year or so before we get Vivek Ramaswamy and tackle some of these key issues because just throwing money at problems is not what voters will do in the future. 

The best thing about DeWine’s State of the State speech was the expansion of business enterprise in Ohio, specifically the Andruil factory just south of Columbus and the Intel facility to the north.  There was a lot to talk about, and for DeWine’s credit, many people have been working in the background to make Ohio a much more business-friendly state.  At least DeWine hasn’t stood in the way of those efforts; he’s been willing to tag along.  We’ll get a lot more with Vivek Ramaswamy as Governor, but since DeWine was able to part ways with Amy Acton, the stringy haired hippie who used to be the Health Director during Covid, Ohio has grown more business friendly to make up for their position of lockdown politics that so crippled just about everyone.  Over the last couple of years, DeWine has at least not shut the door to companies like Intel, even though it has largely been members of the Senate that paved the way.  That’s how government works, and it’s very fascinating.  But once the good news was talked about regarding Ohio and DeWine’s speech, the topic went back to the tired old view of the world, and the chants outside could be heard in the chamber, and the reality of places like Lakota schools was coming to fruition.  The days of easy money stolen from taxpayers to fund woke causes were over.  And many people at the State of the State speech in the Ohio Statehouse were struggling with the ramifications of decades of trying to appease the screams of the teacher union types.  But reality has a lot more in store for them than they realize.  The result will be more anger at the people running public education and politicians like Mike DeWine ending their terms dismayed while much more innovative people replace them with reforms that will change all the rules.  The Lakota School Board, in its current form, is just not prepared to deal with it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707