Tag: conservative

The Miracles of Free Market Capitalism at Put-in-Bay: When the market seeks to satisfy customers, good things happen

My wife and I have a great appreciation for the RV life. With our fast-moving lifestyle, it is the method that works best for us, and it’s uniquely American in that we have as part of our lifestyle an expectation of freedom that is certainly dominant with RV travel. We like taking part of our house with us when traveling, which we do extensively throughout the year. It is great to have your own bathroom, your own refrigerator, tools, and storage. And as far as camping, I prefer it to the static existence of hotel life where you depend on everyone else for everything, from food to rest. My camper has my own pillows and sheets that my wife keeps very clean. It makes travel much less stressful when you have your own stuff while staying in places far away. And that’s how we found ourselves up near Put-in-Bay, Ohio. I was at a competitive fast draw competition near that area, so my wife and I camped in our RV for a few days to participate. Then in our downtime, we went over to South Bass Island, where Put-in-Bay is, to look around. I wanted to go to the Perry Museum because I love the Oliver Hazard Perry story of stopping the English during the War of 1812, so because we were camping, we had the flexibility to do that kind of thing while in the area. Plus, there was a really nice campground over on South Bass Island that we have been thinking about as a family trip, as a way to explore all the area islands in the near future, so we wanted to see how the ferry system worked for taking RVs over to the island. 

Of course, Put-in-Bay is very nice, they call it the Key West of the North, and as everyone knows, I like Key West for the audacious independence that it expects, as related to other island lifestyles elsewhere in the world. What’s astonishing about Put-in-Bay is that it’s so close to the border of another country, yet it’s in Ohio, and it has all the island vibes of Hilton Head Island and Key West all wrapped up into a kind of Charleston presentation. It’s a very unique place, and my wife and I enjoyed our visit after doing well in the competitions. For me, it was a rare down day that I greatly appreciated. But what was most impressive to me was the Miller Ferry system itself. I have had the benefit of traveling worldwide and have seen many ferries, many of them creatively stuffing as many people as possible onto their boats to make as much money as they can. But the Miller Ferry had the added complication of maintaining a high American lifestyle. South Bass Island has cars and, as I said, RVs. There is a really nice campground where you can RV camp, and people take their big rigs over to the island routinely. While going over and coming back, I watched the Miller Ferry crew completely load up one of their craft with many millions of dollars in personal RVs, and I couldn’t help but think of the complexity of insurance risk. Most places in the world, especially communist countries, would discourage such travel, where people expect to haul their own personal property over to a tiny island with such an expectation of freedom. That expectation is a particular trait that you find at RV campsites all over the United States and is very consistent as opposed to the type of people who stay at hotels and are dependent on that type of entertainment structure.

Those elements came together nicely on the Miller’s Ferry, where dozens of RVs, many of them over 53 feet long, loaded onto the ferry quickly and traveled across the lake as casually as people ride an elevator up a skyscraper. It was astonishingly competent to watch the ferry crew, which are all very good, load and unload the many millions of dollars of personal equipment so casually. Most organizations and countries that govern them would be much slower and more regulatory-bound. But within moments of landing, the ramp came down, and giant RVs of great worth were leaving the ferry to resume their journeys wherever they intended to go. I found it an astonishing display of competence driven by high personal expectations of customer service based on a lifestyle of freedom. It was audacious to have the ability to take your house to an island to stay for an extended period. Most places in the world would have a lot of regulatory burdens to overcome, and by the time they did, the option would have just been thrown out the window. Why do all that just so people could take their RVs over to a little bitty island? Why couldn’t people just rent a hotel room or stay in a condo? Why did people have to haul their RVs over to a place for such audacious expectations of freedom that were clearly the core of the lifestyle? The island is so tiny, only a few miles across in any direction, that golf carts are the most dominant form of travel. People do drive their cars around, but golf carts are the way to go. The exhibition displayed the difference between government-run facilities and private ones.

The Miller Ferry organization, a private one that has grown to meet the market demand, had no trouble handling even the most complicated loads they did all day without incident. People loaded onto the ferry without crashing and causing other people any trouble, and they did it day in, day out all day, well into the evening. The crew wasn’t overly regulatory and panicked, as you see in many government facilities when they have to deal with crowd management. With the Miller Ferry and the culture of South Bass Island, the expectation is to take care of the customer experience as well as possible, which certainly is not the case with any government-run endeavor. The market serves the consumer and doesn’t seek to control the consumer. If the consumer wants something, then the market finds a way to satisfy that market need, even if it’s as audacious as taking your own home over to a remote island for a day or two so that the traveler can enjoy the comforts of home in their own private way. The amount of cost and investment needed for that experience to happen is ostentatious. Yet they facilitate that life at South Bass Island with the option of the Miller Ferry. As we were experiencing all this, I had to think of where in the world such a display was shown in this way, the level of competence, the expectation of delivery with such a large payload, and people’s private homes. Europe and Asia do not facilitate lifestyles that even have those options as tangible. Their roads aren’t big enough for our RV lifestyle in America. Let alone have a ferry that can take those big vehicles over to an island for vacation. And if the governments were in charge of the ferry, it would take all day to just run through all their regulatory checklists. But at the Miller Ferry, everyone loads up in minutes. They are off just as fast. Nobody crashes. Nobody fights. Nobody worries. People just do what they do and enjoy doing it, which is a wonderful example of how it should be everywhere in the world if only free market capitalism were as vital as it is at South Bass Island.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What Happens Next At Lakota: Let the labor union strike, quit, and take their six-figure paychecks with them–then hire better people

At Lakota schools, people have tasted what fighting for the right things can provide. With the community support that decided that they couldn’t deal with Matt Miller’s behavior as superintendent of Lakota schools ending with him resigning under tremendous pressure, there is a feeling of victory that, for many, feels pretty good. A few months prior, everything seemed pretty bleak; the system was rigged against the taxpayers, and we would be forced to put up with bad behavior while our kids were held hostage by the teacher’s union. But the community behind the efforts of their representative, Darbi Boddy, the first-year school board member, had a high standard that the employees like Matt Miller found they couldn’t live up to or simply refused to. So he turned in his resignation letter and complained about a hostile work environment, hostile because there were community members who just couldn’t deal with the sexual lifestyle he exhibited during a messy divorce, and against significant opposition, they could taste victory. So what happens now? We all hear the threats from the Matt Miller supporters, the threats that the teachers are all thinking of quitting. That Matt Miller’s friends and staff at Lakota are going to soon be joining him and leaving the district, and of course, the worry there is that nobody will want to work at Lakota schools, and the report card will be devastated from the state and if the school district goes down, so will the community’s real estate. If the school isn’t any good, then people won’t want to move to the area, and everything will fall apart, and it will all be Darbi Boddy’s fault! That’s what they are saying, anyway. So what do we do now?

Well, I’ve heard all this before, and all those fear tactics are labor union strategies that they worked out a long time ago when their pal John Dewey came up with the progressive idea for public education to begin with. They never intended to just teach kids about reading and writing; they were purposely intent on social engineering. They wanted to get kids away from their parents and reteach them how to be liberal-minded activists. They used to hide it more than they do these days, but that is what Critical Race Theory is all about, and why suddenly, sex education is so important to them as early as possible. Anybody who thinks about sex as much as these educators do has serious mental problems, and they shouldn’t be teaching anybody anything. But people in a community believe after years of propaganda that a public school is a key to their real estate value, so they turn a blind eye to these crazy liberal losers who run these palaces of deceit and mistrust and roll the dice hoping that everything will turn out OK. Well, I have totally different ideas about these kinds of things and how to manage them, and it’s taken a while for enough people to have the desire to try something different and they want to have more success, leaving them hungry for what’s next. To that point, I would say that electing Darbi Boddy to the Lakota school board was a great success for the kind of parents who want what’s best for their kids and want a really high standard for their community. Not some fake PR campaign that hires some radical leftist superintendent who gets a bunch of awards and national recognition for the same reason that Sam Smith got a Grammy for performing a devil-worshipping ceremony on a broadcast sponsored by Pfizer because they advance a liberal radical agenda that wants to support mask mandates and openly gay lifestyles in public school. I think people want real quality in their schools, and perhaps, for the first time in their lives, they can get a taste of what that might look like. 

Believe Sam Smith when he says he’s not here to make friends. Trying to be their friend is a waste of time.

To that point, we first need to elect more school board members like Darbi Boddy. I have learned about Darbi over this past year, aside from any political viewpoints, that she really cares about the kids of all families. Every time I have spoken to her, that’s the first thing she always talks about, no matter how crazy the events around her have been. She cares about our community’s children and wants what’s best for them. If only we could get a few more school board candidates like that, then I think we could get the band back together and run a campaign like we did when Darbi was elected the first time. But of course, the most significant opposition to that will be the LEA labor union. They have been very hostile toward Darbi. If there are more school board members like her, there will be trouble, a lot of staff and administrators will leave, and there will be drama. I would say to everyone that it would be great if they left. If they did, there would be room for better employees to join Lakota who genuinely wants to work for a quality district, and that quality starts on the school board. When a culture of quality is established, then the employees follow, and there are a lot of teachers and administrators who are forced to hide their conservative values, and they would love to work for a school board that reflects their personal values. So I think we’d end up with the opposite situation to the fears espoused by the union. 

Without question, there will be a standoff with a truly conservative school board during the next contract negotiation. The union will strike. They don’t care at all about the kids of Lakota schools; for them, it’s all about politics and a paycheck. They are not like Darbi Boddy and any board members that might be able to join her in a future election. I’ve been down this road many times professionally, and the roadmap for dealing with it is quite clear. Let the teachers strike and show who they really are. We’ve already had work stoppages due to Covid, so the parents will support the school board if they push the union into a strike. The most radical employees will leave and take their six-figure paychecks with them. That would be great. That would allow Lakota to hire younger teachers who make half as much money and don’t have all the liberal radicalism built into them after years of union activism. And Lakota could recruit truly better people who want to live in a conservative area run by a conservative school board and have teachers teaching the basics of education like math, science, and real history instead of how to put a condom on a banana in the first grade and how to be a gender-neutral satan worshipper jamming to Sam Smith in class while they should be learning things. Failure to do things like stand up to the Matt Miller types in the world will just destroy kids anyway, so there is no harm in shaking things up a bit and making a public spectacle of it so that word gets out across the country about what kind of place Lakota is, and the right employees will be drawn to it. And that’s what happens next. By getting more school board members like Darbi Boddy, Lakota could truly become an outstanding school instead of a fake one on paper while swinging lifestyles are taught to the children by the administrators who have loose sexual desires and a social value system that is in all actuality, reprehensible. Running liberals off won’t destroy the school; it will make it far more desirable than any zip code in the nation. Because the little secret that nobody talks about in real estate in the open is that the primary driver of all real estate transactions is due to politics, not schools. People move away from liberals and to areas of conservative value 100% of the time. And they’ll do it at Lakota once the line is drawn in the sand with a firmly conservative school board. It will help the school and community. It certainly won’t hurt it.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What is a Right-Winged Radical: If I’m one of them I am very proud to be, and I’m not changing

I don’t know how you defend anybody who thinks about sex with little kids or even jokes about it. But because of the Matt Miller mess at Lakota schools, and my opinions about it, and leading up to it, I have been referred to as a “right-winged radical” more recently than normal. Part of the reason is that Democrats are poised to lose big on November 8th of 2022, and anybody on the side of MAGA (Make America Great Again) is being called derogatory names. The term “NAZI” is even being applied to anybody who is right-winged, as opposed to those on the “left wing,” which is most of the media, the political class, and all public schools to their core. But once again, the people doing the name-calling have a warped view of the world and clearly don’t understand how things work in the world. The projected bad election results are coming up because people are rejecting the Liberal World Order and its many failures.   The bottom line, which has apparently been their strategy all along, was to cheat in elections and gain power they didn’t deserve. If you keep liberals from cheating and disputing illegal votes so they aren’t counted, and that kind of thing, then Democrats can never win. There just aren’t that many liberals out there to have even the balanced power they appear to have now. Democrats and the Liberal World Order behind them stole the 2020 election with all kinds of mechanisms, electronic voting machines that could change votes and Covid to make mail-in ballots much easier to cheat, which they did in both cases. The proof is abundant, and we’ll talk about how they did it for the next hundred years. Americans will never forget what happened in 2020. And the cheaters will pay for what they did during several elections to come, starting with this one in 2022. 

But regarding right winged radicals, I have never moved my political position from the one I recognized from my grandparent’s generation. I have asked the right questions as to whether I needed to adjust what I was taught or modify it based on the projections of modern education. In cases where I might not have thought they were right, I asked those questions. But I quickly learned that it was the world that was wrong. The traditional America of my grandparents and beyond was the one I wanted to defend, and I have been that kind of Republican my entire life. I grew up with television shows like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Eddies Father, Little House on the Prarie, and many others, which showed a kind of America that was successful and brought many hopes and dreams to the world. The screwups, such as fighting World Wars and America being the police of the United Nations in places like Iran, Vietnam, Korea, and all other places of socialist, communist, and far-left instability, are the fault of the new political left that reinvented itself as progressives after their failures during the Civil War in America. The liberals were represented by the South, who wanted to maintain a European aristocracy. The Industrial North wanted a complete divorce from Europe and the rest of the world in general and to become an example to the world of how things should be. Not a follower. The America of Buffalo Bill, of American Expansion, and the great westerns of John Wayne, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, and Disney’s Davy Crockett is my America. The big difference is that I have stayed right with that America while many felt the pressure to move further to the left because they didn’t want to be called names by radicals from the left and were forced through taunts to adopt Karl Marx’s ideas to keep the peace. I have viewed this procedure as an invasion, not political discourse. I am where I have always been. It’s the rest of almost everyone else who moved to the left and expected that to become the new political center. 

Since the Matt Miller thing broke, I have heard the tactics of many of these far-left lunatics, people who obviously don’t know me very well. They are learning many hard lessons. I’m never going to move from my spot, and I’ll fight anybody anywhere, anytime, over it, in any fashion, they want to fight. That is kind of my standard policy. But I’m never moving to the left of where I am. Nazis, as I’ve said many times are inventions of the pollical left. They are a problem of European thought. Fascism, such as Musullini projected, is another leftist concept. They are all far to the left of where I am and not even close to the gun-slinging gunfighters of America with a whole new Biblical take on morality in a nation not run by an aristocracy but by hard work, innovation, empowered risk takers, and a desire to win as opposed to make a master happy with licked boots and professional titles. Anybody suggesting that is wrong for the kind of America that we have always been is out of their minds. But some of those Matt Miller fans have sent me lots of nasty messages, such as one I received making fun of my cowboy hat and referring to my right-winged view of the world with the famous Jim Carrey video he did called Cold Dead Hands. One of the shows that I always did like when I went to my grandparents’ house on a Saturday night at 7:30 PM was Hee Haw, and in the Jim Carrey video, he was recreating a Hee Haw episode to make fun of the kind of America that used to like it. Well, I still like it, and I reminded that person that Jim Carrey’s career never recovered from when he did that video. He and the Hollywood left thought it was cute, but America rejected Carrey thereafter, and his career has tanked ever since. 

What they call the “hard political right” is really where America has always been. I think the father in Little House on the Prairie, Charles Ingles was what every man should strive to be. I think the father in Eddie’s Father is the kind of dad every kid wants in their life; of course, they want a mom too. The wise old gunslingers from Bonanza who always had the right answer when a young person asked a question is what America has always strived to be. And what the political left has offered to America is a destruction of that. And to kiss the feet of an Administrative State run by Europe and the United Nations. I grew up wanting to be like those people, and I am. And I’m never going to move off that spot. I’ll hand out bottled waters to the wore out people who gave lefty ideas a chance and want to return to sanity in the new MAGA Republican Party. But there is nothing in the world that will move me off my position. The attempts recently have been humourous, but more than a laugh at them, it has illustrated where all the political divisions have sourced themselves. It’s in the push by politics, the media, corporate culture, and globalism in general to adopt the methods of Karl Marx, and America is about rejecting everything about Karl Marx. Anything that moves in that left-leaning European direction is garbage that must be fought, and fight it we will. The process has already started. But after this upcoming election on November 8th, things will start moving America back to the kind of America I have talked about here. Because to me, that is the only America, and I’m not going to leave it no matter how many losers scream that I should.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Police Report: Zero tolerance for liars and bullies

As I said in the video, the two things I have zero tolerance for are liars and bullies, whether individually or through institutions. And this whole case with Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota schools, is the result of both. And since trouble was first announced in August of 2022, the worst in people and those traits has only escalated the problem to the result of this police report, which is available through a public record request with the Butler County Sheriff’s Department. And given the pressure and emotion of a situation like this, I am impressed with the investigation and report. I wanted Matt Miller to be innocent; I didn’t want to believe what kind of information that a small army of friends connected to his ex-wife was reporting about his behavior during his marriage to her. They had all been triggered by watching how Matt was treating the school board member Darbi Boddy and what came from them to a friend of mine, Vennessa Wells, a former Lakota school board candidate, which I explain in detail in the video, were things that nobody wants to think about. When I saw it, because of the seriousness of it, I instantly recommended sending it to the police because this wasn’t tabloid stuff about who was sleeping with whom and for what salacious reason. This is an admission that sent their marriage into counseling and eventual termination because of its audaciousness. And when it comes to public employees, like Matt Miller is, who is the spokesperson for Lakota schools as a public figure, and everything is paid for with public money, the behavior in a bedroom when it deviates from standard husband/wife activities becomes everyone’s business, especially when it involves the kind of behavior that the officers interviewing both his ex-wife and Matt Miller himself revealed. 

The whole report is bad for the way I see things. It shows a history of a reckless sexual lifestyle that culminated in the point of the entire report, which the Lakota school board chose not to discuss with the public. They received this report on September 9th and have been reporting to the public that it cleared Matt Miller of any wrongdoing. When referring to the activities reported during an interview with the Lakota superintendent, initially, he said to the investigators that the activities he participated in did not involve minors but that they, as a couple, did participate in sexual encounters, as alluded to elsewhere in the report. Then, as the investigation continued, he admitted that they had “pillow talk” about role-playing, drugging, molesting, and recording on video sex acts with three juveniles. The police report also references the possession of images of underage nude children that could easily be obtained by correlating his phone at the time or through the carrier. This part of the report was odd because Matt Miller admitted to talking about sex with underage children with his wife as if “pillow talk” gave him the excuse of any liability. But as all child pornography tends to assume, the downloading of it, the planning of it, or the act of it tends to inspire very severe penalties. Yet under pressure from the investigators, he rationalized this behavior as acceptable social conduct, behavior we wouldn’t have known if his ex-wife and her friends had not come forward with information that they were inspired to through the treatment of the board of current school board member Darbi Boddy. It’s not like people were looking for dirt on Matt Miller’s lifestyle. It came forward through his social interactions and the power of his position.

When I first read all the Craigslist information and the many text messages between Miller and his wife, as she was feeling bad about everything, and he was not denying that anything she was saying had happened, I saw it immediately as a case for the authorities. They needed a chance to do the right thing and provide a proper investigation. I wanted this case to be about a messy divorce where an ex-spouse wanted to bring down her husband out of further vengeance for a marriage gone wrong. With the mention of children and their own child involved in “pillow talk,” I was hoping it all just to be salacious nonsense. But during the interview, Matt Miller admitted that they had talked about it as part of their fantasy talk in the bedroom, and that was it for me. All this occurred in 2019, and as of this writing, this is 2022. The only reason we know any of this is because of his ex-wife and her many friends who feel she was an abused person and wanted to defend her publicly. The superintendent’s actions against Darbi Boddy were their trigger mechanism to do so. But now we have to question what don’t we know. I would certainly hope that sexual fantasies with underage children are not common. A mind that allows itself to think such things are broken and needs help. They certainly don’t need to be in charge of 17,000 students behind locked security from the outside world that the superintendent controls exclusively. That doesn’t sound like a very “safe” environment. If little kids are the subject of “pillow talk,” Matt Miller probably shouldn’t have eyes on children under his care. 

Even worse is the school board’s reaction to this report. They read the same thing, yet they punted everything to a third-party investigation, just as they have for CRT. And from the teacher’s union at Lakota came a steady stream of denials that there was any evidence, even as everyone had this police report in their hands. They claimed that anything said against Matt Miller was unsubstantiated before they even knew that there was a police report. I received lots of hate mail from community activists who attacked Venessa and me and continued to spread all kinds of misinformation on various social media platforms trying to do damage control without knowing anything about the facts. I was bewildered as I saw some of these while holding pages and pages of evidence in my hand. I considered much of that evidence hearsay until the police did their investigation. I expected Matt Miller, when interviewed, to say something to the effect, even if he was lying, “no, no, I would never think of doing anything sexual to children.” I may not care much for the guy, but on a level of basic human decency, I would hope that he would at least not cross that line. But instead, he said it was “pillow talk.” For the police, is pillow talk illegal when it involves children? Possession of nude photos of children certainly is, and that would seem easy enough to get. We just saw that the Butler County Prosecutor’s Office had a family member sent to prison for the rest of his life because of child pornography, so we can only speculate why the words “at this time” concluded this report. I would agree with Lindsey Sheehan on the evidence; so far, it was a one-sided conversation that would need cross-referencing with carrier data, an inspection of Matt Miller’s computer, and further interviews with more witnesses. And who has the stomach for all that, especially on such a large and public case? And who needs all that when you have the superintendent himself admitting to what he did to the officers? That was bad enough. But worse, so many adults supposed to care anything for children were more concerned about protecting Matt Miller than what might be best for children. That certainly wasn’t their first priority, as shown by their actions.

Rich Hoffman

Where is the Sheriff Jones Press Conference: Just ask your friendly Neighborhood Lakota School Board Member

Matt Miller of Lakota schools has been very open about trying to get rid of political enemies as he did Todd Parnell over woke politics during bad conduct among the student population, then again with Darbi Boddy when she showed up unannounced to take pictures on the walls of CRT teachings reported there. In both cases the Lakota superintendent, Matt Miller took action to force resignations, which was an insult to the people who voted for those representatives. He acted in a way that showed disregard for what damage might occur to those personalities and what it might cost them professionally or personally. That might seem fair in love and war, but when he stumbles on things, he shouldn’t expect people to treat him lightly. After a messy divorce, some of the documents from that divorce have been revealed by his ex-wife, and many within the Lakota school district have now seen what those documents say. He might say she’s crazy, as a lot of men do about their ex-wives as they try to move on after a previous marriage, but from what she has said about him, it’s clear that we need as a community to check it out. At the very least, the superintendent owes the tax-paying public an explanation that explains away what she has been saying with written testimony. I’ve never been a big fan of Matt, and always thought his $200,000 salary was too much and thought a less expensive person could quickly replace him. That evidence reported by his ex-wife was turned over to the police because it went well beyond politics and community gossip but straight to matters that only law enforcement should be dealing with. There were text messages which came from his phone with entire conversations on them where really bad things were talked about. They were screenshots taken by his spouse. The Lakota school board now has possession of much of this material in addition to many more items that are now public record and are available upon request. Could they be fake, perhaps, that was for the police to correspond through an investigation, which they have been conducting? I reminded everyone involved, which was a growing list of angry people made that way by the way Matt Miller dealt with his political enemies, that everyone had the right to due process. He might be innocent, and all this evidence could be made up. But as things have matured, it looked less likely, so it was all turned over to the police and the Lakota school board, and now that school has started, people are frustrated that the investigation was taking too long. Because based on previous actions and the safety of kids considered as the priority, the lack of urgency by all involved has left many questions. Questions, after all, are perfectly logical, especially after what we learned about the Jason Gmoser child pornography case. I personally like Mike Gmoser, the Butler County prosecutor. But his relationship to that case which carried with it life imprisonment, indicates to the community that when we hear of cases that might be unbelievable otherwise, we have an obligation to investigate at a minimum.

And for good reason, after all, there is a six-count indictment against Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds over just a real estate transaction that led Sheriff Jones and the Attorney General, David Yost, to give press conferences about, and that entire case was built on hearsay, where one party said something about another party that was in the public eye. Many people think that the case against Roger Reynolds is entirely political. Still, if that is the level of criteria we are using to measure legal cases, then there is a lot more hearsay involved in the Matt Miller divorce where his ex-wife is saying in writing much, much, much worse. I again would offer that Matt might be innocent, but when there is that much smoke, there is fire to stir it up. Why wasn’t Sheriff Jones standing in front of his emblem at his office and giving a press conference announcing all he and the police were doing to protect kids from the potential danger of the superintendent at Lakota, according to a reliable witness, his ex-wife? Do we just take his word for her credibility? As a community that pays his salary and counts on him to sell Lakota to the world as a safe and reliable place to send children, are we supposed to ignore what she is struggling to say because it’s inconvenient or that we might personally like the superintendent? It would be one thing if the accusations were just spoken, but these were written in text messages, confirmed by police interviews, and court documents from the divorce corresponded with the conversations. So, there is more than enough evidence to take caution on the matter and find out what’s going on. But after several weeks, and school starting with many upset who know about the matter looking for some acknowledgment of justice, the cold reality of a perceived cover-up was beginning to take hold.

The media wasn’t camped outside his home the way they were with Darbi Boddy when Matt Miller served her with trespassing papers on a school she is supposed to be managing as a board member. Matt took it so far that her story made the national news, and it was very embarrassing for her. Wasn’t that a purposeful defamation of her character? She was only a few months on the job after being newly elected, and obviously, Matt Miller was doing to her what he had done previously to Todd Parnell. He might have thought that a good idea, but he made a lot of political enemies by doing it, and shortly after that came a barrage of whispers about his sex life. You would expect a person who makes as much money as he does to show better discretion than all this. He should have never picked fights like this unless he was squeaky clean, and I mean eat off the glass clean. He might have a good explanation for the behavior of his ex-wife, and he should explain it, instead of digging in and avoiding the problem publicly. His lack of direct response to these issues has fed the fears in the people who have seen the text messages. And for those he has made political enemies out of, they are looking for anything to hang him on. And if he gave them the rope, that’s on him.

One of those six indictments against Roger Reynolds is a statement by Jenni Logan, who surprisingly left her job as Lakota’s treasurer on August 1st of, 2022, just a few weeks ago. Given the timing of this information and how it has been brewing for much of the previous school year, we must now look at who knew what and when and how involved they were in all this, if at all. But first, we must allow due process to do its work. The evidence must be validated, and explanations are mandated. For people to regain trust in Lakota as a school system, an investigation is necessary because this erosion of trust has brought us to this place and was created by Lakota management. Trust is earned; it isn’t just given away by title and by the way Matt Miller has actively worked to get rid of political rivals, as he did with Todd Parnell, and has tried to do with great fanfare Darbi Boddy, there was going to be a cost to it. The anger created by him has caused people to talk, and evidence was bound to come forth. But this isn’t just some community gossip. It’s a family member and a network of mad moms provoked by a long history of Matt Miller’s community interaction. At the very least, he has shown really bad judgment. At the worst, that’s for the police investigation to determine. Based on how the Sheriff’s department went after Roger Reynolds over much less evidence, we should expect the police to confirm or deny the results of their investigation. Doing the right thing is sometimes very hard, but we all have an obligation to justice. Otherwise, we will just get a lot more bad behavior in the future. 

I would have preferred to just see what comes from the police investigation, but after the events that occurred on Monday the 22nd of August 2022 some understandings must be met. I watched the school board meeting to see how this issue would be addressed, knowing the contents of the email that was sent to the school board earlier that morning. The same email ended up in all of the media by the afternoon sent by the person who wrote the board her concerns. Yet the reaction by the superintendent was a threat that would open up a whole can of worms with witness testimony and submitted evidence, police interviews–and mostly silence by Lakota generally, except for massive amounts of gossip. What started as a concerned parent reporting what was told to her that was very much a police matter; the public employees don’t get to go on the attack against their boss, the voters of Lakota. Explanations are the burden of the superintendent, it’s his life, his mess, and it’s up to him to explain all this to people for continued employment. The institution of Lakota is not more important than the individual people involved. And as to the superintendent’s reputation, he has to be able to manage all these things as part of his job. He owes us, the taxpayers, a lot of answers. But he doesn’t get to boss around members of the community for things he has himself opened the door to. He is not the victim, he is the responsible party, and the burden of explanation falls on him.

Rich Hoffman

Without the First Amendment, Government Schools Would Have Nothing to Fear: The problem with a liberal education is it’s full of “liberals”

The problem with government schools, specifically liberal education, is that it is full of liberals, and until very recently, conservatives just dropped off their kids and wondered why later their children wanted to attend gay rights parades suddenly. More conservatives, real conservatives, are starting to get involved in school boards, and there is some hope out there that Republican values will guide public schools away from the runaway train that always follows Democrats. And when I say Republicans, I’m not talking about softies like Charlie Crist, formally a Republican, now a Democrat, or Mitch McConnell, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney types of RINOs. To be Republican and considered conservative, in the way we are talking, you need to be resolute in your values and not willing to yield to the whims of Democrats. In politics, you might not always get what you want, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it. You can push back and fight for what’s right, even when you are outvoted in a government body. The conflict has a value all its own. But too often, conflict is avoided in public education, starting on school boards. They hide hard decisions behind lawyers, who are progressive disasters of an occupation all their own, and a whole topic for many other days. And they hire radically progressive superintendents who can make the teacher unions happy and create a façade of management by giving them the keys to the car and then wondering why they don’t come home at midnight as promised. Then to hide all the bad behavior that evolves when the rooster running the henhouse starts showing signs of corruption, the school boards go on lockdown on virtually everything because it’s their only move. On the one hand, they look permissively incompetent; on the other, they look publically ineffective. 

As more and more conservatives start entering the school board business, unlike how it has been in the past, especially in Florida, where under Ron DeSantis, we are seeing a real coalition of education reform occurring, school systems are actively looking to gain control of the media to control the narrative, which often isn’t good by default. The problem is you can’t put that many liberal people in one institution and then expect them to all behave. So many bad things start happening, leaving the school system, putting all their efforts into trying to keep those bad stories from the public. That’s why they want to get control of the media, then try to hide behind a façade of lawyers to protect them from public opinion. But that’s why there are so many laws in favor of transparency. Whenever a government body does the work of taxpayers, that is why precisely there are so many records kept meticulously on everything. Because traditionally, we can’t trust public officials to do the right thing without vast amounts of oversight. It drives liberals crazy because they want to operate with supreme authority and hide their bad behavior behind social status and professional titles. But history shows that it is precisely the seeds of corruption that we must always be cautious of. That conflict is why the Biden White House wants very much to have a disinformation board of some kind to regulate what people can say about government institutions and to limit free speech dramatically. Governments, by their nature, are prone to corruption without oversight, and liberals simply don’t like that much scrutiny because they know they can’t live up to the expectations. So now that more conservatives are getting on school boards across the country, governments increasingly want to limit free speech by any means necessary because they can see the writing on the wall, which means an end to their way of life. 

There is an assumption by liberals that if they capture an institution, such as journalism, just like in the game of chess, they win the game by gaining control of the pieces. But that’s not the reality; citizen journalism has proven to be much more effective than the mainstream sources, who aren’t part of the game. Those chess pieces aren’t even on the board of play to capture, so in the world of the liberal education view of things, they don’t know how to fight this whole First Amendment thing or the concept of a Second Amendment to defend the First. Or a Fourth Amendment that prevents government authorities from imposing themselves on a population by force to control what they think and what they say to others. This whole Bill of Rights is a disaster for the corrupt who seek jobs in public education to hide their bad behavior from the world and apply it to the safety of like-minded people who gravitate to the public education profession. I’ve been covering bad behavior in public schools for a few decades now, and I’ve seen and heard absolutely disgusting things, leaving contemplation to wonder if any of it is worth it. Public education, because most of the participants lean liberal politically, has a lot of bad characters in it who should not be teaching children anything. I don’t come close to reporting every story I know about because if I did, I’d have time literally for nothing else. Public schools are such negative places with so much bad conduct occurring that I personally find them revolting. But if not for citizen journalism, certainly not the lazy losers in the mainstream outlets, public schools would be so much worse than they are. If not for people poking around in meeting minutes and occasionally speaking at the school board meeting, mostly complaining, but for a good reason, public schools would be much worse than they even are now. 

I would recommend often calling the bluff on those pinheaded liberals who want to control the flow of information with threats that might end up in a courtroom. These people can’t afford such situations because there are public records. After all, there are witnesses, and there is usually lots of evidence. Public schools want more than anything to shut people up and keep things contained because so many laws force them into transparency.   One thing they can’t do is afford to have people talking in more public forums, like courtrooms or at Friday night football games. Because of free and open communications and the flow of information and people’s opinions on that information, it’s really the only check that keeps behavior under control in the public schools. Otherwise, there would be many more stories of sex with students, abuses of power, and sheer crime that is often present wherever community oversite isn’t present with the First Amendment. Liberals would like to have supreme control of social circumstances where expectations are never set to limit their bad behavior, but thankfully that is not the world we are living in. Instead, we are going in the opposite direction, as more conservatives get on school boards and start to bring those values to public education. Maybe then, and only then, will there be a chance for government schools to work. But less free speech, less oversite, more centralized control from a Biden White House of what can be said and how it’s defined is simply not an option and never will be. Because that causes deviant behavior, not enough oversite, and people are afraid to speak up when it’s required. The way to keep things honest is to say something when you see something and keep things from being shoved under the carpet, so innocent people are none the wiser.

Rich Hoffman

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More Conservatives Win School Board Seats in Florida: We need more Darbi Boddy types at Lakota

Just because the conservative experiment at Lakota has not turned out well doesn’t mean it’s a failure across the country. I would say the problems we have at Lakota are natural and part of the transition process. Not the result of failed intentions. When I signed up to help elect a conservative school board at Lakota with a 3 to 2 vote on issues, that, of course, assumed that we were getting conservative candidates. But through the rigors of the day-to-day operations, sometimes people find out they aren’t so conservative. They may have thought they were conservative in the safety of GOP meetings, but when the rubber hits the road, and process bureaucracy starts to take effect, people learn a lot about themselves that they may not have known. And people fall off the wagon. In that case, we just need to look for more candidates and keep putting them on the school board. I signed up for a Darbi Boddy type of school board, not a bunch of softies who would let the superintendent rule the world. I expect the school board to be in charge, not to let radical employees rule the day, and so far, in 2022, that is what has happened. Once things started to get tough, we discovered that Darbi was the only one showing up for work. And that is why we have a lot of the problems that are going on at Lakota now. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure of an effort as much as we are learning what kind of people make good school board members, and we are getting a definition of conservative values that is challenging people’s belief systems in themselves, which will ultimately be good for the community, even if it’s painful now. And as usual, what goes on in Lakota, a big government school in Northern Cincinnati, in the community where I live, so goes much of the rest of the nation. 

In the recent elections in Florida, Republicans showed up to vote for school board members 3 to 1. The more states in America that start to run their states as Ron DeSantis does, the more this trend will continue. Ohio isn’t quite there now. There are a lot of RINO Republicans who still think of themselves as Bush conservatives and Reagan admirers. But Trump is a bit too much “solution” for them, and when the pressure is on, they crack like eggs over an omelet. School boards should never have been considered “politically” neutral. The goal in politics isn’t for everyone to get along.

Public schools are radical institutions conceived by liberalism for teaching liberal arts. They have not produced children that grew up into happy Americans, quite the opposite. Many parents are seeing that they are unhappy with the product of public schools and are finally inserting themselves into possible solutions. For years people have asked me to be a school board member at Lakota for several decades now. Over time, the idea of public school has absolutely made me sick. I don’t think they are good at anything they do. But I have offered my help, especially these last few years, to help make them into a solution. I was quite aware that the people I was dealing with were professional community conversation types who befriend you to win you over, like a timeshare salesman. But I helped anyway because the school of Lakota was already in my home district. I personally pay thousands of dollars a year into that mess. So, I was open to the idea if it could be saved somehow. So, I helped where I could to see what might happen. It was worth a shot.

Other Darbi Boddy types are out there, and school boards across America have elected them by popular vote. It’s part of the trend of populism that is migrating to form the modern political movement that is going to sink all the mistakes of the administrative state finally, as it was conceived by communist and utopian socialists like John Dewey when they came up with the dumb idea of public education in the first place. Sure, it’s been a good free babysitting service for busy parents, but it has raised disasters in people who are failures of the 7 liberal arts in every way they could be measured. Even the best students of the public education system have turned out to be disasters of people and what is bad about the whole institutional approach is that public schools led by liberal-leaning school boards have developed the habit of protecting the bad conduct that goes on in the schools, rather than managing those problems for the betterment of the children involved. It’s all been a disaster from top to bottom, and finally, people are starting to admit to it and are offering themselves as options to get elected and help the way Darbi has been in Lakota. Even if the vote count at Lakota isn’t as conservative as it should be, it’s still better than what we had before. And future elections can certainly smooth that ratio out and will naturally match the national trends toward populism. 

Ultimately, however, my opinion hasn’t changed, even with this trend toward conservatism on school boards. Public education as a concept is doomed. It’s too expensive, inefficient, and doesn’t produce good people. It’s just a trainwreck in the best of cases. It certainly has not been a replacement for good parenting. After the behavior I have witnessed so far in 2022 regarding school board behavior and how the big liberal administrations behave toward it, it’s obvious to me that public education is doomed to complete failure. Suppose they think Darbi Boddy is bad and that the only acceptable Republican on a board is some wishy-washy RINO who will go way out of their way to get along in a “nonpartisan” kind of way, always bending the knee to radical liberals empowered through the teacher’s unions. In that case, there is no hope for them. If they are having trouble now, what will they do in the next elections when more Darbi Boddy types get elected and replace the stale old establishment types who covered up way too much bad behavior just to protect the school from outside opinion? They aren’t going to make it. I remember in April when the news story was all about Lakota might lose their superintendent over the radical school board member, Darbi Boddy, as if we needed to get rid of her to keep him and his $200,000 salary. Well, I don’t think he’s worth it, especially after watching his performance through Covid and recently over several things. We would do better with a much more engaged and less progressive person. I know they fear teacher shortages and bad state report cards, and the public relations of the superintendent are meant to put rosy glasses on all that for the illusion of goodness. But when a district is garbage, it is garbage. You can’t put perfume on it to make it smell better. The fact that the public employees of Lakota want so badly to get rid of the best school board member, Darbi Boddy, says that they aren’t ready to deal with the national trend in public education that is happening everywhere. And that fault is their own for failing to adjust to a changing world and holding on to a failure from the progressive past. 

Rich Hoffman

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Senator Jeanne Shaheen Threatens Revolution: What happens when a death cult gains power

Jeanne Shaheen Calls for Violence over Abortion

We were all having a nice time at Kings Island’s Winterfest, enjoying the Christmas decorations, my family, and making plans for the Holidays.  My daughters, who are now in their 30s, were reminiscing on what we used to do as a New Year’s ritual, and they were thinking about wanting to bring it back.  For most of their late childhood and teenage years, every New Year’s Eve, then flowing over into the next day, we would watch all five of the Dirty Harry movies by Clint Eastwood.  We called it the Dirty Harry marathon.  It was my way of teaching my kids about the dangers of progressivism forming in San Francisco during the 70s and 80s and what needed to be done about it.  Well, now, 50 years later, we all see what happened to San Francisco and how progressive politics destroyed it and California in general.  And instead of Dirty Harry, we elected Donald Trump, a person from that time and still thinks right about things.  Our ritual lasted until my girls were married essentially, and now they have kids of their own, so it’s been well over a decade since we had a Dirty Harry marathon.  But after seeing how messed up the world is, my girls were thankful that I took the time to teach them right, steer them away from drinking on New Year’s Eve, and instead spend time together safe and sound as a family.  And they want to resurrect that ritual again soon.  Maybe not this year because their kids are too young for that.  But certainly, in the near future, which I, of course, am happy to oblige. 

And I see that trend everywhere, really.  It’s not just my kids reminiscing over their childhood and my unique rituals that are so appealing.  All people are going through it; they feel they have been suckered by progressivism and want a redo.  That is most obvious in the Supreme Court cases of late and the very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned due to the Mississippi law banning abortions to a large degree.  The Supreme Court took up the case early in December of 2021, which will have a decision in June of 2022.  All indications based on the presentation of the case to the court by observers indicate that the Mississippi law will be upheld and that Roe v. Wade will be overturned, which has the political left apocalyptic.  It’s really something that the left views abortion as a human right to such a degree that they think of it as a benchmark of their entire philosophy.  For them, it’s like gun rights for conservatives, which of course, is absurd.  It’s basing a political philosophy on the premise of a death cult.  The killing of babies.  And they are willing to go to extremes to preserve it.  Now, all this was forecast in the Dirty Harry movies, made in a different time.  Watching those movies and comparing them to our current times is a message in a bottle and warnings of this kind of thinking.  People who want to get back to the basics notice that what progressivism has led us to is not what we want.  That is one of the reasons people voted for Donald Trump, and 75 million people at that because they did not like what progressives have sold the country.  And instead of seeing that, they are digging in harder, which is a massive mistake for them. 

Just like in the Dirty Harry movies, the political left has made most all their gains, including Roe v. Wade, by threatening violence against the courts if they do not rule in their favor.  The communist-oriented left did this by social unrest and riots during the 60s and 70s, and the courts were intimidated.  The Supreme Court back then ruled on Roe v. Wade entirely on false interpretations of the Constitution as the ruling was made through force and fear.  Not the way to win people over to your way of thinking, by threatening to kill them for the right to kill off the next generation.  Do you want to live now, or do you want to live in the future is essentially what the political left said to everyone?  The Supreme Court did what they have done recently due to election fraud; they appeased the mob so that the anarchists didn’t come to their homes to rape them, rob them, and perhaps kill them at the end of a rope.  That is the only reason that Roe v. Wade happened.  It was not a law out of logic; it was done out of fear. That’s why Senator Jeanne Shaheen came out this week as things were looking bad for them and threatened that there would be a “revolution” if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.  It was an astonishing threat, especially given the fact that people like her are trying to make a big deal out of the January 6th protests over the election certification.  What this liberal senator is doing is following the playbook that caused Roe v. Wade in the first place, the public pressure of a mob to incite violence to influence the legal system.  Threatening judges, harassing juries, inspiring criminals to burn down cities if they don’t get their way, its all illegal and is a strategy built on force, not logic, and it was always wrong.  People put up with Roe v. Wade when it happened, but logic says that once people have had time to think about it, they will change their minds. 

If there is violence that results from the overturning Roe v. Wade, it will be the fault of people like Senator Jeanne Shaheen.  People are people, and that law was bad in the beginning.  It was always going to be a states rights issue; the federal government does not have that kind of authority.  It never did, just like the federal government doesn’t have the right to impose vaccine mandates.  The political left turned to violence; then, when that violence was turned against them during the January 6th protests over election fraud, it scared them.  Yet, they should have always known that if they didn’t win people’s hearts and minds over to their culture of death, that cult would eventually be overcome with logic.  People generally understand that abortion is murder.  They might participate in the killing of babies out of convenience.  But that doesn’t stop them from feeling bad about it.  And those guilty feelings won’t result in positive legislation.

Abortion is murder, and those who support it essentially argue that it’s a human right to conduct murder.  And the only way they have been able to gain public approval is through threats of violence.  That is what Senator Shaheen was turning to when she could see where the Supreme Court was heading with its opinions on the Mississippi case. If it wasn’t Mississippi, it would be Texas, Ohio, or several other states which will come up with their own version of protecting life.  The flimsy case of Roe v. Way was a time bomb from the beginning because the opinion wasn’t based on thoughtful law, it was an appeasement of the mob, and those fears have not held up over time.  The political left should have never expected it to.  So any violence that does happen because of it is on their heads, and their’s alone.  Death is death, and what they propose is murder.  Their only counterpoint is either now or later.  But it’s still all about death in the end. 

Rich Hoffman

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