I wouldn’t say that Thom Fladung of Hennes Communications is the example of evil in the world, but it would be quite sufficient to define him and his partners as bricks in a vast wall of evil meant to destroy the First Amendment and ruin the foundations of American government. Whenever you see a message on some news report, such as, “we are not in a recession” or “the sex allegations are unproven,” you are likely seeing the work of some version of Thom Fladung working the media behind a veil of manipulation that would make William Shakespeare blush. In a clear case of child pornography possibilities, such as the Matt Miller case at Lakota schools, where the school superintendent was interviewed by police admitting to pillow talk about drugging, molesting, and videotaping the abuse for sexual gratification, and the kids weren’t random, but kids who went to the school he manages, the lack of concern for the children involved has been stunning. Rather than disciplining the superintendent or finding a new one, once this information got out in 2020 the school board called up Thom Fladung, a managing partner at Hennes. They advertise for just such crisis management. For them, a crisis is meant to be repaired to maintain reputations. And the reports are that Lakota schools were willing to spend over $300 per hour to make the Matt Miller story go away. They weren’t concerned about the behavior; the school board determined that what Matt Miller did in his private life had no impact on his job, even though in Matt’s ex-wife’s police interview, she indicated that there were naked pictures of kids on both of their phones which the superintendent had sent her and that during the divorce, there was a lot of effort to hide his online dating profiles with Ashley Madison, which were on his school computer. Logic would say that hearing such a thing, there would be an investigation to learn the truth, which would be vital if the school’s priorities were the students’ safety. Instead, they called Thom to come in and provide “reputation, crises management.”

Apparently, Matt Miller is listed as one of the top superintendents in the country and is scheduled to speak at the ASU+GSV Summit at the Manchester Grand Hyatt from April 17th  through April 19th in San Diago, 2023. To protect that reputation, built over a long period of time, Lakota was willing in 2020, when they first learned about the problem, to pay to make it go away. The work of Thom kept local media from getting into the story and concealed the details from the public in general as if the public never had a right to know what kind of people they were hiring at Lakota with taxpayer money. The goal was concealment and protection of a reputation that was meant on paper to prop up the superintendent in progressive circles and get awards like a dog for doing what his master told him to do. According to the ASU bio, it says of Miller that he was one of only two superintendents in the country to lead the League’s Real-World Challenge Collaborative, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Yes, that “Zuckerberg,” the progressive owner of Facebook, and his Zuckerbucks program to illegally steal elections with mail-in ballots tampered with during the 2020 election. Those are the kind of people who think that Matt Miller has been doing a good job. Miller has since gotten into a lot of trouble by essentially being the Dr. Fauci of Lakota schools and strictly enforcing the mask mandates for Covid, which made many parents angry. And when Miller dug in and became more combative, people started digging into his personal life and found this messy divorce which Thom has been paid to cover up. And now it’s out in the open, and everyone through public records who wants that information can have it.

And, of course, the reaction of Lakota to all this information, which is clearly terrible for the superintendent, was to cover it up. They tried to find a way to prevent massive amounts of evidence from coming out in public requests, text messages, dating profiles, emails, and all kinds of very serious allegations. But the information got out through the local sheriff’s department as it should have, leaving Lakota obviously uncovered about their methods. They had been caught covering up the actions of Matt Miller in 2020, and now they were paying more legal clean-up people to continue to cover it up. The media all had the information, of course, but by the rules established by people like Thom, who has experience as the managing editor of the Cleveland Plains Dealer and the Detroit Free Press, nobody was going to run with the story for fear of legal action. And in that way, crisis management professionals keep valuable information away from the public when they need it most. When bad things happen, and government schools or other institutions can hire someone like Thom Fladung to keep the information from the public, how can justice of any kind be utilized?   And it worked at Lakota with a story that should have been national news. A big-time school superintendent was caught in sexual conduct involving children, at the very least, thinking about sex with specific children, and there was proof from the police. It wasn’t hearsay and irrelevant or gossip talk. It came from Matt Miller’s own mouth during a police interview that is clearly indicated in the police report. 

The terrifying thing about this case is that everyone was caught red-handed. We know what Thom did and when; we know what the school board did and who knew what and when. We know what Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota schools, did because of a messy divorce that shows a very different person from the one who is supposed to be a featured speaker at ASU+GSV Summit, where they give you rewards for masking kids and following the progressive rules that Mark Zuckerberg is pushing on society. When those kinds of people like what you are doing, it only supports those who say government schools like Lakota are incubators of liberal politics meant to reprogram our children away from their parents and into a progressive nightmare that is unraveling all over the country currently. But to hide that evidence, Lakota would rather pay Thom Fladung to perform “reputation management” than to deal with the bad conduct that harmed the reputation in the first place. It’s a phony system built on lies and manipulation. And the media is obviously controlled by public relations and legal manipulators who keep things concealed behind the scenes in the hopes that the managing public who pays for everything will never find out. And when they do, they just grab the ball and hope to run out the clock by denying everything until people get tired of asking. The government plays a little game to protect its own; the police play along by not charging the target, which keeps it from being a story. Lawyers use threats of legal action to keep everyone on the fence.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg and his progressive friends give out rewards to people like Matt Miller for their work toward liberal politics on a mass scale; and the local government school uses that reputation to help sell more tax increases to the public. But lucky for the people of Lakota, there was a lot of citizen journalism that people like Thom Fladung didn’t control who did report the story, and people know what they need to now despite the efforts to cover it up. And now we see all these characters for what they are, what they did, and when. And we are far better off as taxpayers because of the bold actions of many people who just want their kids safe in public schools.

Rich Hoffman