Tag: Darbi Boddy

The Psychology of the Silent Majority: Measuring engagement with President Trump, Joe Biden and Darbi Boddy

Understanding the silent majority is the key to comprehending many elements of modern politics. This came up recently as antagonists of Darbi Boddy at Lakota schools were poking around, observing that my sites don’t typically have a lot of comments. My readers tend to read, observe, and think about what they engage with. They don’t usually feel that they should write down their thoughts for all to see. This is also true of polling; when a pollster calls members of the silent majority, they are much less likely to answer the phone or interact with the established organization because they are much more guarded about their thoughts and actions to the public. This tendency has given the political left a sense of power that they never had. RINOs, too, have misread the tea leaves over the years, believing that their task has been to appease the noisy minority. And there was a considerable amount of panic when within a week of the pro-union elements of radicalism at my local district of Lakota couldn’t use social pressure to force Darbi Boddy off the Lakota school board, the liberal controls over conservatives were losing their grip. When some of those same elements brought their value system to me, hoping to invoke the same concerns, “you don’t have much engagement in the form of comments,” one of them said to me, looking for a way to invalidate the content by the way they measure. That is because the silent majority stays silent on issues, and the political left never had control over them. It was just an illusion created by the small minority who do care about such things. When I say that liberalism is a mental illness, this is what I mean by it. The Conservative silent majority types do not need the validity of their existence acknowledged by others for their happiness and actions in life. Liberals do need the validation of their peers. They are the epitome of classic philosophy; if a tree falls in the forest and nobody witnesses it, did it fall? Well, for the silent majority, of course, it did. To the liberal, they need acknowledgment of its falling to believe that it fell. They need social validation. 

Just the recent Trump rallies in Nebraska, then the one in the pouring rain in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, will show the evidence that provides some sort of measure on this condition. Back to the Darbi Boddy case at Lakota schools in Butler County, the belief by the radical lunatics is that if 100 to 800 of them make noise on a Facebook page and speak at a school board, then that is enough to observe that she should be removed from the school board and replaced with someone they like as liberals better. But the silent majority lives in Butler County, Ohio, in numbers that are around a half a million. Every officeholder in Butler County is a Republican, and the biggest fight in politics isn’t between Democrats and Republicans but between real conservatives and RINOs. So regarding Darbi, the liberals are grossly outnumbered at the ballot box. Still, they believe they are in the majority because they gauge their reality off peer engagement like-minded insanity. On the same day that Trump went to the Greensburg rally in the rain to a massive crowd that waited all day to see him give the same essential speech he provides every week, Joe Biden came to Butler County to visit a metal plant that specializes in 3D printing to try to affiliate himself in a manufacturing sector in a positive way. Well, I was within feet of that obviously inserted President. Nobody cared; everyone went about their business as if he wasn’t even there. The motorcade on the way in and out was uneventful. If it had been Trump, the traffic would have been backed up for miles. For Biden, it was a few missed traffic lights. He came and went as if he were never there. Without cameras and some CEO cheerleading, nobody would have otherwise known Joe Biden was even the President of the United States. Yet hours later, in Pennsylvania, standing in a steady spring rain covered in mud for over six hours, Trump supporters waited for the former President, who has been gone for 15 months from high office, to talk to them about supporting his next round of endorsements. 

The problem used to be getting the silent majority to engage in politics because they never wanted to support people like George Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. I remember the challenge in 2012 when Kid Rock came to West Chester, Ohio, to do a big rally for the Ohio GOP, including John Kasich. I was supposed to go to it and do my usual behind-the-scenes stuff. But I had better things to do than meet all the Republican celebrities that year, which nobody but the extreme insiders was excited about. If you want to go to the zoo to see RINOs, that was the event. But most people like to see other things in the political zoo, so attendance was light. A few years later, when I was involved in helping secure a location for the future President Trump during the primaries of 2016, we booked him in the Savannah Center just a few feet from where Kid Rock had been playing for the 2012 GOP, and it was a madhouse. Trump wasn’t even the nominee for the Republican Party at the time, and it looked like he never would be. But people were parking everywhere. West Chester turned into a madhouse as no traffic management could have managed people’s desire to see Trump. Most of the people who came to see Trump at the Savannah Center never got into the building. That was the silent majority. They don’t feel they need to validate their existence on message boards like Facebook or engage with pollsters. But when you see they all want to be in the same place to do the same thing, that’s when you can begin to see them and understand the political movement that is upon us. 

We’ve learned a lot about the silent majority over the last ten years since that 2012 event. Back then, the GOP managed to fill the field by the clock tower in West Chester, but it certainly wasn’t close to the madhouse of Trump’s visit to the Savannah Center. And the crowds are much larger now, and he’s not even President. The recent rally in Nebraska was supposed to be on a Friday night, but they had terrible weather, so they canceled and rescheduled for Sunday. People waited all weekend for Trump to arrive at the rescheduled time. And they’d do it again. So why is Trump so popular, whereas Joe Biden is not? Why is Darbi Boddy making so many liberals upset by being on the school board, yet their protests are falling on deaf ears?

Darbi knows what many are just now learning about the silent majority. They are where America has always been, yet they weren’t represented in politics or even the entertainment industry. Every so often, there would be a movie like American Sniper that would catch their interest, and you could see them.   But without a person who represented them in public, evident for all to see, nobody knew they existed who measure these things because the measurement was wrong. Engagement was being used to measure sentiment. But the silent majority was silent for a reason; they were not stimulated by the measures of engagement being presented to them, so their passions went unrecorded.   And they didn’t participate in the measure. The insanity of the political left to feel unchecked and validated while the silent majority disengaged and stayed to themselves. They might talk to each other over grilling in the backyard and ooze about the corruption of politics. But they wouldn’t otherwise interact with the established world. They certainly didn’t go to school board meetings to make themselves seen. But when there is an issue they can get their teeth into or a person they feel represents them, they vote and do so enthusiastically. And they don’t need anybody to acknowledge that they did it, which terrifies the mental depravity of the political left because, without validation, they have nothing in the world. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Support Darbi Boddy More than Ever: How education costs get blown out of control and why Matt Miller is not worth $200K per year

Part of the entire problem with public education was on full display this past week at Lakota schools, where the school board voted to urge a fellow board member, Darbi Boddy to resign. Darbi made a mistake that many quarterbacks make in sports, which is the point of the sport, to apply pressure to the passer and see if you can force an error. The pro levy, big government, Joe Biden “mask-wearing even in their car with the windows rolled up” type of supporters who think they run the school has hated Darbi Boddy since she was elected. They have been trying to get rid of her since the election. For the first time in their lives, the public beat the pro-union supporters when Darbi Boddy won, whom I supported and continue to support emphatically. They were reminded that they do not run the school; it’s the people who pay the taxes.   And Darbi started off her job on the school board after being sworn in during a January meeting, asking lots of questions and being what the other board members thought of as disruptive. So that same radical labor union side of the Lakota business that makes everything cost so much and really has any kind of management crippled to do anything positive, set in their minds to put a lot of pressure on Darbi Boddy, and she got wrapped up in reacting to that pressure when she accidentally placed a link on her Facebook site that led to pornographic material. It was the kind of mistake that even a good quarterback throwing an interception with pressure from linemen trying to sack him could have made. That’s the point of the pressure, to pressure their target into making a mistake. Darbi was trying to point out how vulnerable kids are to sex in schools and the kind of grooming that goes on through liberal textbooks, like what they have found in Florida. And that’s how she ended up making a mistake with the link and how the pressure applied could then be used to make a case for her removal.   The masked parents and other union-supporting radicals could care less about the link. They want to get rid of Darbi Boddy, which the school board then obliged for their own reasons. Thankfully, Darby Boddy is tough and is refusing to step down. Because she shouldn’t, I would say that the Lakota school board needs four more members just like her, and after this event, it’s clear that we should be working to make that happen. 

The main problem in public education is that an expert class runs it, and that was indeed the case here. The board likely referred to “legal” over the Darbi Boddy incident. They recommended that the board distance themselves from the controversy with some legal pronouncement of advising her to resign. This is the same woke advice they would give any human resource department and has been just another corrosive element to American culture for many decades now. A woke administrative class that runs things behind the scenes throwing logic out the window and paying tribute to some progressive form of chaos, hides the fact that none of these people know anything about anything. Since she has been on the school board, Darbi Boddy has been excellent at questioning those very types of issues. She has been giving Matt Miller a hard time at every meeting, not so much on purpose, but to wrestle power back away from his position and to apply it back to the school board where it always belonged. Before Darbi Boddy was elected to the board, all five of them would punt every decision to the school superintendent, and he would answer as the head of the administrative state. Almost everything he reports to the school board is the judgment of the administrative state which has really spun out of control since Covid started. The teacher’s union tells Matt what to say. The CDC tells Matt what to say, as does the local health department, which never had any authority to tell anybody what to do. Then they punt all this administrative opinion to legal, who then ultimately controls everything with liability worry. The” experts” say something. Now it becomes pre-court testimony that everyone just throws more money at to avoid. And in that way, logic gets thrown out of the window, and everything costs a fortune just to do basic things. 

That’s also why Matt Miller is not worth the $200K a year we pay him. I think he’s a nice guy. But he’s not worth that much money. And neither are the teachers who use him as their spokesperson. The whole game is rigged against the taxpayers, and the only school board member I see doing the work the way school boards should operate has been Darbi Boddy, which is why they want to get rid of her because she asks too many questions that they can’t answer. We could get a parrot to repeat whatever some “expert” says, pay them in birdseed, and save the $200K. I’ve been watching several of the meetings by the Lakota school board because I keep hearing how out of control Darbi has been, how disruptive. I saw a person asking the kind of questions I wanted to know and a person doing the job correctly. But the labor union side of government schools doesn’t want the job done correctly. They want to support the administrative state because it’s big, easy money for them. And they don’t want any change, no matter how needed it may be. The parents want the free babysitting service and to believe that if they send their kids to Lakota, all their crappy parental skills won’t screw up their kids growing up. The school officials want low expectations that are easy to achieve and won’t expose how incompetent they are as people. And the teachers, of course, want to continue to be overly paid and do as little work as possible, which was the case during the eternal pandemic they never want to end. Nobody is showing any leadership except for Darbi. 

The moral outrage was laughable that the pornographic link Darbi accidentally posted was something detrimental to the education of students at Lakota. At that very minute, 3:15 PM on a Wednesday afternoon, teachers were likely trying to get naked pictures of students on their phones, there was porn being watched in the back row of several classrooms, and even the school board members themselves had much more salacious stories to tell that weren’t accidents, but deliberate acts of stupidity and poor judgment that have gone unpunished for the most part. (click the links for examples over the years) Fake moral outrage toward Darbi to hide the vast amount of real trouble that is just under the surface. I found the whole episode disgusting and very disingenuous. Many of the people who pushed for the resignation of Darbi Boddy have been telling the media that they have 1500 signatures gathered to push her off the board. Well, news flash, Darbi just won an election where she had gained around 7000 votes from the public, and that public generally likes the job she has been doing. In a community as large as Lakota, 1500 names are a small minority. They do not represent the kind of people who live in the district. Darbi won more votes than even the incumbent on the ballot. And that’s how elections work; if people don’t like the performance of the people they elect, they can be voted out for the next term. What the people showed who pushed Darbi to resign for this really minor mistake is that they wished to remove their vote from the public, which is about as disingenuous as it gets. That lack of respect is the real problem, and it was quite clear in what Lakota schools did to Darbi Boddy on April 27, 2022. They owe her and her voters an apology at the bare minimum. And they also need to figure out if they can live with the high standard they have now set for themselves. Because I already know the answer.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lakota Cancel Culture Tries to Fire Darbi Boddy: My 10-year anniversary and the blueprint to Ron DeSantis and President Trump

I am proud of a lot that I see these days. Fighting against years and years of entrenched establishment politics isn’t easy. I am very proud of Ron DeSantis in Florida for standing up to Disney the way he has and all the woke actions that have been leveraged against him. And I’m proud of how Darbi Boddy in Lakota has been fighting for parental rights in my school district. But you make enemies when you fight back against the established way of things, and it can be challenging. This afternoon, April 27, 2022, the Lakota school board pressed to force Darbi to resign when she made a posting on her Facebook page that accidentally referenced a pornographic site. It was an easy mistake to make. Darbi had been trying to reference concerns over pornography in the public school curriculum, but she got the spelling wrong, and it ended up linking to pornographic material. Of course, Darbi’s enemies pounced on this misfortune and are now pushing her to resign. I can say I’ve been where Darbi is now, and some of the people on the current board at Lakota played their part in it. I could name many things that the current board members have done that are far worse than what Darbi did, so watching them take the moral high ground during an emergency board meeting on a Wednesday afternoon was reprehensible. But, I will say that I am very proud of Darbi, as I am also of Ron DeSantis and President Trump. And many others who have had to deal with cancel culture, which is what is going on at Lakota. The exploitation of a well-intentioned mistake for purely political reasons is a pretty low blow. That’s OK. Hey, if they want to set the bar that high for themselves, well, then they can live with it. 

Ironically I had just been through several meetings with people that reminded me that at the end of April of this year, it had been ten years since I went through an excruciating process that I am still angry over. The Lakota school board worked with the Cincinnati Enquirer and all the established media in Cincinnati to cancel culture me before anybody knew what that was. The event happened on March 12, of 2012. I will never forget it, it was one of the most challenging days of my life, and the cause of it was essentially that Lakota wanted to pass a tax increase. We had defeated three previous attempts, and they were ready to go for a fourth, and they had in mind to get rid of me so they could do it. Many of the levy radicals had gone to an area Kroger and conducted a survey disparaging my name very publicly, and I expressed my feelings about what I thought about them. It was fair game in my way of thinking. But because these were women and because they represented levy supporters, I was an early version of the angry white man progressive attack that we would see years later. Before Trump, nobody on the conservative side ever fought back over anything. In all the graphic details I expressed, the print media and broadcast companies all over Cincinnati picked up the story and published what I wrote about some of these levy supporters. And this prompted an interview on the Scott Sloan Show on WLW, which I did. It was tough, but I punched through it. Privately in my life, the whole world came down on me, trying to cancel me out of existence in every way they could. They went for the jugular. They wanted me obliterated. And I knew that while I was talking to Sloan on that interview, which I’ve included here. 

Slone wanted more than anything to get an apology from me, which was how all conservatives were treated back then. Later, President Trump would show that by standing up to the left-winged mob and not apologizing that the curse Saul Alinsky exposed against conservatives in Rules for Radicals could be beaten. That is the same formula that Ron DeSantis is using now in Florida and that state is turning redder by the day. It used to be a toss-up. Now it’s moving firmly to MAGA red. And now, locally, we have a mom elected as a school board member in one of the largest districts in Ohio. Of course, the establishment types don’t want her around. They have been plotting and scheming way before today to get rid of her. And they were waiting for her to stub her toe just once so they could pounce. That’s the way the game is played. It takes tough people. But before there was ever a game plan, I was there. I know how much pressure these people feel. Trump was good at it. DeSantis certainly has learned. Darbi is learning. But one thing I learned that people still remind me of, and why people were coming to me with the 10th-anniversary talk, was that they wanted to thank me for standing up to the bad guys, as they call them. Before anybody knew how the game plan worked, when I refused to apologize on the air to half a million people, under tremendous pressure, people recognized what that effort meant in the world politically. People really appreciated it. 

It was the end of that April of 2012 when I had counted 100 people who went out of their way to thank me at gas pumps, at the grocery store, out to eat with my wife for standing up to the mob at Lakota. They were thrilled that someone from the conservative side of things finally stood up to what they saw was happening from the left. That was a time when being a RINO was just being talked about. Conservatives were always expected to turn the other cheek. They were never to fight back. But because I did and I didn’t apologize for it, the people of my community were thankful. After that, I stopped doing radio or television and just published my blog. And I became much more popular as a result. I gained a lot more power. And it turned out to be much better for me as a result. That terribly hard day on the Scott Sloan Show turned out to be one of the best days that ever happened to me. And that is how it is for all conservatives who find themselves on the chopping block due to cancel culture. If you aren’t afraid of them and their silly woke rules, they have no power over you. Ultimately, voters make the decisions on who they want to represent them. Not a bunch of silly rules of fake conduct in public while some of those same board members have shown terrible judgment in private. But the lesson of the day is that when they try to cancel you, stick by your guns and make them fight you directly. Which as liberals, they will never do.

Because liberals and RINOs rely on institutionalism to save them from public judgment, they don’t know how to stand up to strong people.   When people have a representative as president, governor, or school board member who they feel is fighting on their behalf, they will support them eternally. Voters will crawl over broken glass naked to support people they know are fighting for them. I learned that lesson firsthand. Not apologizing on that WLW show was one of the best things I ever did. And it showed all who came after that taking that approach was the best way to beat Saul Alinsky’s liberal playbook. And it is the way that we take our country back one school district at a time. Never apologize to a liberal, ever! Or……………..a RINO.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trick or Treat in February at Lakota: Darbi Boddy wants to remove masks and give parents freedom of choice, the LEA wants to impeach her over it

The Union Wants to Impeach the School Board over Mask Freedom

I watched the school board videos from January’s Lakota meetings several times, and I still think they are very good. But apparently, the mask police at Lakota is so insulted by Darbi Boddy’s proposal to remove mask mandates from the Lakota school culture and give parents the right to choose has caused the LEA union to begin proposing talk of impeaching the young school board member. During the last meeting, you would think it was trick or treat at Lakota as the mask lovers got up and left while Darbi was talking, obviously meaning to show her disrespect. But none of that is a surprise. This has been a problem for a long time at Lakota, where the inmates run the asylum. Actually, that’s how it is in most public schools, the unions run everything, and the school boards get sucked into believing their goal in life is to show uniformity. I would argue that the point of having five members on a board is to fight it out and debate to convince two other voters to either approve or deny a resolution. The goal of a school board is not to get along but to run the business of a local school the way our “republic” was designed. And to me, that’s what I see happening. This was Darbi’s second meeting, and she’s very passionate. There are a lot of high expectations behind those who went door to door for her to win, and she feels the need to get there and get something done instead of just being another bobblehead on a school board. She ran on getting rid of masks in the schools, as other schools have done around the state of Ohio. So short of getting more comfortable with the rules of school board business and not feeling like a sell-out for doing so, I am more than happy with how the Lakota school board is functioning for the first time in three decades. 

I know people are wondering, especially the sweat bees from the teacher’s union, what my relationship is with all this. Just remember what some of those same people who are all stirred up over Darbi, what they did to me about ten years ago in the parking lot of Kroger by Lakota East. Julie Shaffer played her role in that along with Joan Powell and many other tax increase supporters back then. So now is not the time to play innocent. I’ll stay mad over that forever; I will never forget. But that isn’t the fault of the current crop of kids moving through Lakota or many of the characters who are now involved that want to make the public school work for the benefit of the area’s parents. It took Lynda O’Conner more than a decade to win me over to believing that she was a Republican. I know her to be a very good one now. But I used to be so angry at the Lakota school board that everyone on it was what I thought were scum bag liberals. It took seeing Lynda at many GOP events over the last several years that I learned that Lynda was one of the good people. We have very different ideas about the worth of public education. She really believes in Lakota and is hopeful about public schools’ role in all our lives. I personally want to blow it all up, metaphorically, as a concept given to us by the significant progressive loser, John Dewey. I had been asked to run for school board many times, but that just wouldn’t be fair. We all pay taxes to the school, right or wrong; I’m happy to not get in the way if people like Lynda who want to fix it to the best of their ability. I’m also happy to offer solutions or help people who want to be part of the solution find their way to the school board by helping connect all the right dots. But for me personally, I’m all about getting rid of the Dewey system completely. 

Lynda and I usually agree to disagree on education, and when we see each other, we talk about other things besides school board business. Usually, we have a shared interest in GOP-related topics locally and nationally. If we talk about school board items for too long, I quickly blow it all up intellectually, while she desperately wants to save it. I tell that little story to those who are wondering, which are quite a few people these days. And I can also relate to the problems that new school board members like Darbi and Isaac Adi are feeling now that they are inside. It’s empowering to help be a part of the solution. The rules of the game are there to make it something of a functioning republic, and most of the time, no single person gets it their way all the way.

In Darbi’s case over this mask resolution issue, it’s her job to get two other votes on the board to support her. Many people backing her might think it’s a sell-out to work with people on the board. But they aren’t on the board. It’s tough, at best, to represent so many people and still do what you think is right. I have a policy that I do not pick up the phone, or text anybody ever, like Sheriff Jones might do, to never put my hand on the scales and threaten people to vote a certain way. I would never call up Lynda and tell her that I wouldn’t like her anymore if she didn’t vote the way I wanted her to. I believe firmly in finding people who want to do a job correctly and putting them in power to do that job. I may not always like what they do, but they should know more than me about it in a republic, which is why they are my representative there. You must trust the people you vote for to do the ultimate right thing and always keep the big picture in mind. If they don’t, then you vote them out. That’s the way the game works. 

But for the teacher’s union at Lakota, they already don’t like Darbi because they can’t imagine how they might get her under control and intimidated by their presence. That is something they have been doing for years, threatening school board candidates first with the offerings of friendship but then taking away that civility if they step out of line. That was what was implied by them walking out on Darbi in the second meeting of the year while she was speaking. I can understand not liking what Darbi was saying. It may not be their politics. But if they really wanted to understand what’s going on in the district, they would know that Darbi represents people in Lakota who think worse of public education than I do. I’m a moderate on the issue, believe me, there are lots of people who hate it far worse, and to them, Lynda might as well be Satan incarnate because she doesn’t put everyone on trial and burn them at the stake. Nobody will ever make everyone happy, but what we want is for good people to do good work on behalf of the kids and taxpayers who are stuck paying many thousands of dollars a year for this ridiculous product. And there isn’t a lot of tolerance for these teachers’ union shenanigans. As Issac and Darbi get more acquainted with the conduct of these school board meetings and the agreed rules of the game, they will get better. But so far, these meetings are what I think all school boards should look like. They may be a little bumpy. But I’ve never liked a lot of hand-holding, especially when millions of dollars are at stake and many lives are impacted. And for those who are used to bullying their way into a one-sided argument, well, those days are over.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Sheriff Jones Sides with DeWine Liberals on Masks in Schools: Finding the corners of the political puzzle pieces

Sheriff Jones Flip Flops, But Why?

Here is how politics works, and even though Sheriff Jones probably won’t admit it, the timing of the Butler County health alert from the Sheriff’s Office says everything we need to know about the situation. Sheriff Jones often goes out of his way to contribute himself to the politics of the Lakota school system; he has done it against Thomas Hall’s H.B. 99, which would arm teachers in the classroom; he did it again in 2013 by siding with the tax increase the teacher’s union wanted. He certainly did it again recently as Darbi Boddy initiated a proposal to remove mask mandates in the public school even as Sheriff Jones announced his endorsement of the mask governor, DeWine struggling with a primary election. Puzzles like this can be hard to figure out until you put them together a few times, but with this one, the edge pieces were easy to spot, so the rest of the thing goes together very quickly. To help out the teacher’s union position on mask mandates, which they want to keep going infinitely, Sheriff Jones, who made international headlines with his former position on not forcing people to wear masks concerning Covid, has now reversed his position just enough to help with the upcoming vote in February on providing mask options to parents in the Lakota school district, or to impose mandates for further unforeseen durations, supposedly until Trump is in the White House again. Because the Biden administration will keep the mask mandates going as long as they can get political capital out of them, and the teacher’s union, all teacher’s unions, support the Biden presidency and mask mandates to hide that political incompetency. So this business of using kids to force a political message is exceptionally negligent, and all the participants are guilty in their own ways. Look at who is at the top of the list in endorsing Mike DeWine for re-election, who started all this mess in the nation to begin with. Remember, Ohio is #1 in the country for corruption under Mike DeWine’s first term. Does that sound like the kind of person a law and order politician would support?

Here is the List of RINO Republicans Who Have Empowered Governor DeWine to Destroy Ohio with Corruption.

Just as a criminal couldn’t break into a house and claim ignorance of the law once caught to avoid going to jail, the case for Covid now is well known. Just because many people have not come to terms with the reality that much of Covid has been purely political and points to political schemes extending beyond America’s nation, that doesn’t mean ignorance is an excuse for the further perpetuation of sheer stupidity. This is what all mask mandates are at this point. Just as we proved during 2021 that CRT was moving into all our public schools, and Lakota picked up new school board members because the blatant Marxist intrusion was well known before school officials could attempt to slide it back under the rug, the mask mandates are another progressive policy that has more to do with politics than safety, by a lot. For the actual situation on Covid and the political players involved, I would refer everyone to read the book by Kennedy, The Real Dr. Fauci. Kennedy is a Democrat, but he tells the story of Covid and who the players are and why they are. For those who are claiming ignorance as to why Covid is here and what we should be doing about it, I would refer to that starting point for reference. But for those who do know what’s going on want to return to life before March of 2020, which was the proposal that Darbi Boddy put forth for a February vote. 

Well, we knew this would happen once Darbi and Isaac Adi were elected to the school board. We had to have an election to bring some sanity to Lakota schools and all public schools, for that matter. And this mask issue was on the ballot in November, and Darbi is moving forward to fulfill an issue she ran on. Of course, the previous school board members and management team that has been in place during the Covid mess want to cover up for their complicity in the matter. And it is not surprising that Sheriff Jones is coming to their defense. He advertises himself as a Republican, but he has a soft spot for teachers’ unions.

The game goes like this, Darbi puts forward a controversial resolution. Kelly Casper immediately said that the resolution to lift the mask mandates went against the legal counsel of Lakota. She and Julie Shaffer have been pro mask for the kids since the beginning of Covid, for all the reasons that some people still think that Dr. Fauci is a nice guy they see on T.V. and not the snarling rat that most everyone else sees. To attempt to break up a possible 3 to 2 vote, Sheriff Jones comes out on Friday, January 21st appearing to have had a change of heart about Covid. However, for the last two years, Sheriff Jones has led the nation and the world to stand up against mask mandates in many cases. He has stated that he would not be the mask police even on foreign television. So why the change of heart? Well, you can ask him. I’m not sure he’d give a straight answer. Instead, we should listen to what people do, not necessarily what they say. 

I first noticed the Sheriff’s attempts to sway the newly elected Lakota school board on WLW in November of 2021, right after the election. His concern then was Thomas Hall and the proposal he sponsored to give teachers the option to carry weapons in class as first responders to potential school shooters. Sheriff Jones mentioned Lakota several times on his broadcast on the Bill Cunningham Show out of all the public schools in Butler County. Obviously, he was sending a message to Lakota, and knowing something about the political theater of Butler County; it’s not hard to find the edge pieces on this one. Several liberty candidates were newly elected in Butler County, and the Sheriff is known for asserting himself as the kingmaker in politics.   Many politicians won’t say anything to him because they want an endorsement from him when it comes time to go through the next election process. And like Sheriff Jones will say, “I’m just the Sheriff,” meaning he intends much more than what he indicates in most everything. That’s OK, I always say, politics is a blood sport, and I think that’s all fair in love and war. But all too often, these big government types, they believe that the rules are for everyone else but them and that they control the dictates, which everything always comes back around to where they should be, which is happening now, in Lakota. Julie, Kelly, Sheriff Jones, and the teacher’s union activists should have learned some hard lessons over the years. If they didn’t, they can’t claim ignorance now.

Meanwhile, the kids are genuinely suffering from the political theater that has gone on with Covid. They have been caught in the crossfire, and they have no idea what to make out of these things. The adults have let them down. Society has let them down. And now that we know better about Covid and the political motives, we have an obligation to do the right thing. Someone must take leadership, and that is what Darbi Boddy is proposing with her resolution to take the school safety measures back to pre-March 2020 normality. The tricks of scaring school board members who are typically more like Kelly Casper, who will take the advice of the experts over her own intellect, are not going to work forever. It’s disrespectful to see this game play out, where lawyers advising Lakota will point to Sheriff Jones and say about the Covid danger, “see, even the conservative sheriff is supporting masks.” Obviously, Darbi is very passionate about this mask situation and she wants a quicker resolution than the school board process typically allows. But she’s only on her second meeting. I think over time, things will smooth out. Passions are wonderful, but the game is the game and everyone has to play it to win within the rules.

All that theater is meant to sway a vote in February, hoping to scare off one of the three conservatives. If we haven’t seen this game play out many times in the past, it might not be so obvious. But unfortunately, we have. The teacher’s union even has Republicans to manipulate to their cause. Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, they all share a common problem; they are government employees who make their livings off taxpayers. And fear keeps taxpayers paying and not looking through the puzzle box to figure out how the pieces go together. This mask policy is crucial to them for many political reasons that go far beyond safety for students or teachers. It requires ignorant people to follow them or people too scared to think. So don’t think for a second that Sheriff Jones just woke up and changed his position on masks overnight. No, it has to do with politics and not caring one bit about the kids of the district, but the strength of the teacher’s union to win their first battle against an incoming conservative administration. And like they do at levy time, and the Sheriff is playing his part, they use children as their vehicles for political destruction to fulfill their member’s desires for selfishness. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Darbi Boddy’s Pre-Covid Proposal at Lakota: Making masks the parents’ choice, not a political imposition

Removing Masks from Kids at Lakota, Freedom of Choice

The first thing that everyone must understand is that wearing masks as protection from Covid or to spread Covid to others is 100% emotional, containing 0% logic. There isn’t one scientific study that rules in favor of masks being a preventative measure at all in relation to Covid, and over time, since March of 2020 when health departments in an initial act of helplessness wanted to take steps to slow the spread of the virus as it was unleashed on the world to do something, even if it was symbolic, not to incite a public panic as their worlds came undone with Mike DeWine lockdowns and closure of the American economy during a presidential election year. After two years of this behavior, some people are naturally timid and want to believe they can do something to control the various virus spawns that have come from Covid, and their fears have taken over their rationality. In a school system like Lakota with over 17,000 students in the population, there are lots of people who believe lots of things, but when it comes to the wearing of masks and imposing that belief on children who are supposed to be learning to think and not just take orders, this issue of mandating masks in schools has been detrimental to the learning culture of all public schools. Thankfully, the newly elected school board member Darby Boddy has made a motion to add a resolution to the agenda of the January 24th school board meeting to reset the health measures established before March 20th of 2020. In other words, to be rid of the mask mandates and the additional Covid standards that spawned from much irrationality as Covid was unleashed into our society and opinions about how to deal with it evolved strictly down political viewpoints, not around scientific logic. Darbi is proposing for Lakota to take leadership on the mask mandate issue and show the rest of Ohio what a logical management approach to the issue should look like, which is a wonderful thing that essentially took a new election even to put on the table. And thank God she has.

Now naturally, all the people who have been standing in the way of addressing this mask-wearing issue in public schools had their faces melt as Darbi proposed pages and pages of information supporting her position toward the safety resolution. But logic was never the factor in making children wear masks. What essentially happened was that all the really timid people in the world who seek government jobs in the health departments, the Governor’s office in Ohio, school administration jobs, people afraid of lightening, of wind, of sunsets, suddenly Covid gave them power over all the scary risk-takers in the world and they became addicted to the power like a drug addict on Heroin. And after two years of the behavior, they do not want to give up that power over others. They certainly don’t want to go back to normal before March 2020. For them, which is many of the employees in the Lakota school system, the lawyers who they employ, all the surrounding public employee unions, even the police unions, Covid has given them the cover story of their dreams, and they have no desire to return to “normal.” Roughly 5% of any work culture always want a doctor’s note to get them out of work whenever they want. Covid is far better than FMLA or any regular doctor’s note if they should be inclined to take a day off work excused. All you have to do with Covid is say that you were next to someone who was next to someone, who was next to someone who had Covid, and “poof,” you must stay in quarantine for some CDC recommended days. No doctor’s note, no logical approach, just perceptual reality. Covid has been a dream come true for the lazy in any workforce. 

Therefore, the fight to continue the mask-wearing mandates extends beyond political parties and descends into the cover of the less inclined employees. They spend a lot of time in their lives looking for reasons not to work. And that makes the management of any workforce a nightmare to conduct. That is certainly true in the private sector, but in a large school district like Lakota with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and administrators, a 5% call-off rate is a nightmare to cover. To follow all the ridiculous CDC rules is irrational at best. But that’s what has been happening. The medical tyrants have had their way, and everyone has danced to their tune, including most legal representation. For lawyers, the easy thing for them to do is to recommend full compliance to CDC recommendations, even though there is no legal authority for the CDC or any local department of health to impose mandates of any kind on anybody, anywhere. Outside of government work, which public schools are, much life is returning to normal, such as in the NFL, where stadiums are open. People are enjoying the games as they did before March of 2020. Of course, the CDC recommends other behavior, but fans of the NFL experience are done with Covid and are returning to “normal,” and we do not see mass deaths. We hear alarming reports about case spikes, but as history shows, these cases aren’t any different from common colds in the past, and people have learned to live their lives anyway. They get the virus, get over it, and return to their lives as they always did. That same approach needs to be applied to all public schools as well. Covid protocols have gone on too long, and it is now having an impact on children in a negative way, which Darbi included evidence of in her proposed resolution, which will be voted upon in February 2022. 

For life to return to normal, which needs to, people like Darbi need to show leadership in political opposition. At this point, any scientific consideration about Covid isn’t a factor. There is nothing in science to support that masks do anything rational to help with Covid in any way. Instead, it’s purely political. It’s political for the teacher’s union. It’s political for the health departments. It’s political for the CDC connected to the Biden administration. It’s political for the law firms who see this Covid issue as easy money. But for those who must lead others and show courage to the world, it’s time to return to a normal life. To stop being afraid of Covid. And to start managing it proactively. It’s OK to support timid people who have real fears about Covid created for them in countless news reports rooted in politics and not rationality. But the purpose of a public school is to teach children, and it is the task of our society to ensure that they have the best opportunity at a good life while in that school experience. The authority figures might not want to surrender the controls they’ve enjoyed during Covid. But we owe it to children everywhere to take that leadership and show them that life goes on and that they don’t need to be afraid of every little thing in the world. The only thing dangerous about Covid is the perception that a government alliance with media has created. Legally, there is nothing to take action on. There is no liability to irrational fears. There is no constitutional enforcement. Governors have tried, and they have learned that the Supreme Courts of the states and the Federal level have no stomach for this nonsense. It’s time to take all that power back away from those who have become so addicted to all this Covid abuse. And to give kids a chance at a normal life, once again. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Best Thing I Received for Christmas: Todd Minniear in Liberty Township

I Got Todd Minniear for Christmas

Another question that comes up always after Christmas, mainly out of obligations of small talk, is what did you get for Christmas?  Was it all worth it?  Did you have a good Holiday?  Well, for me, this year, I did have a great Holiday.  But it wasn’t just family gift exchanges that I enjoyed.  Just a few days before Christmas, at the Liberty Township Building just down the road from my house, Todd Minniear was sworn in as my next trustee, one of three.  He is the product of a series of off-year elections where constitutional conservatives were targeted for election to either replace liberals or offer a more conservative candidate aside from the ones traditionally provided.  For me, it was quite a nice Christmas present to have Todd give me a call and invite me to his swearing-in, which I went to and was greeted there with a kind of class reunion from the various campaigns of 2021, and it was nice to see all that hard work come to some positive culmination.  I say it all the time, if you want a good government, then put good people in it. Don’t just sit on the couch and hope things work out alright.  Either run yourself for an office locally or support someone who wants to.  After the Trump presidency, that was certainly my story where obvious political shenanigans to remove him from office took place.   The audacious behavior of the national establishment is something I’ve seen plenty of times locally, over thirty years.  And the election of Todd Minniear, a constitutional and freedom-minded purist, was a significant achievement in my community and was a sign of things to come nationally. 

Another thing I say all the time to just about everyone I speak with is, “don’t be a victim.” Never allow yourself to be a victim in the story of your own life.  Those people we put into elected positions in our republic are never supposed to be our “betters” or some useless member of an aristocracy.  They are there to represent us.  But that’s not the way the political class views that relationship.  Often, they get into public office for the attention of it and the power that follows by having their hands on the levers of rules and regulations that govern our lives.  In the case of a local trustee, the question is often, “can I build a new pole barn on my property to hold my classic car.” The politicians usually will reply, “but think about the lowered property values of the community.  They don’t need to be penalized because you want to protect some gas-guzzling old car that should be on the junk heap, according to the United Nations.” They don’t say that they often work to protect the interests of those who give them campaign donations to keep them in power instead of representing all the community’s people all the time. I’ve been involved in politics in some way or another all of my adult life, and I have seen all the kinds of corruption that can come out of it, all the ugly stuff.  And I understand entirely how that corruption comes about and how to fix it.  The solution is to follow the Constitution of the nation and our state.  If everyone did that, things would work pretty well.  When politicians get away from the constitutions and bring their personal desires or biases to an issue, that’s where corruption starts.  

I don’t think any politician gets into a public office with the idea of becoming corrupt.  They get that way because they lose their way while solving problems.  Corruption starts to eat away from them once they get off the constitutional script.  For instance, I have several very close personal friends who are politicians.  People like George Lang. I’ve known George for a long time since he was a trustee in West Chester, well over a decade ago.  We bonded over Tea Party ideas of small government and the novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.  George has a habit of giving that novel out as a Christmas present at Christmas time.  He believes in the ideas in every aspect of his life.  Even though now he is an establishment figure, he is still the same person.

Because he is a big-time senator within the state, many people assume that politics has made him corrupt.  But I know personally, it hasn’t changed him at all. He’s still the same Atlas Shrugged-giving guy.  We might remember when Paul Ryan was also an Atlas Shrugged fan, but when Mitt Romney wanted him to be his VP, all that Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand stuff was tossed away so that they could become the next power player in congress, eventually becoming Speaker of the House.  Some people can handle the pressure of public scrutiny, and some can’t.  George can; Paul Ryan couldn’t.  Power has a way of altering people into the most profound things in their hearts.  George, for instance, at this Todd Minniear event, was pressed about several projects that involved tax money distribution.  His answer was a classic George Lang line, and he didn’t just say it because I was there.  It’s what he says all the time to everyone, “don’t give the government or me any more tax money. We’ll just spend it.  Keep your money. Our job is to take the barriers out of your way to living a good life.” 

I’ve watched several good politicians like George Lang get elected into more and more positions over the years.  And at that Todd Minniear swearing-in, several of our Lakota school board members newly elected were there as well, more parts of a future solution.  Locally, I’ve always looked to West Chester to ensure more small-government ideas found their way to the trustees.  My friend Mark Welch and others there have done a great job of keeping the government’s small and business engagement very high.  It is the model of what should be happening all over Ohio.  And if we can primary Mike DeWine as governor of Ohio and replace him with Jim Renacci, we’ll be able to do great things in Ohio.  But Liberty Township is where I live, and the trustees there have always been Republican, but more of the Paul Ryan type, and not so much that of George Lang.  At the start of the election in 2021, I didn’t think a freedom candidate like Todd Minniear could find his way on a Republican Party that was still much more like the Republican Party nationally of 2012 and not so much like the Trump Republican Party of 2020.  But Todd won with a solid majority, and he had a tremendous amount of people show up to support him, which is unusual at these kinds of events.  And as I stood there watching Jennifer Gross, our member of the Ohio House, swear in Todd, I could see where our country was headed.  And it made me very happy to see.  All the hard work that goes into these kinds of things was certainly worth it.  For those wondering about it, I would say that doing such things is some of the best Christmas presents you could give yourself.  Often there isn’t much personal satisfaction in politics but putting the right people in the correct positions at the right time through a vote is one of the most rewarding things anybody can do in a healthy republic.  And in Liberty Township for Christmas of 2021, I can say that seeing Todd Minniear sworn in for public office was the highlight of my Holiday season. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lakota Gets a New ‘Conservative’ School Board: Isaac Adi, Darbi Boddy, and Todd Minniear win despite all odds

Great Election Results in 2021

After the election results within West Chester, Ohio, and Liberty Township for the 2021 school board races, the first thing my daughter said to me was, “well, that’s nice, but all public schools are still a dumpster fire.  Thanks, but no thanks.” That’s not just because she’s my daughter, but she represents a significant number of moms who are in their thirties and have watched the lunacy of our government over the last decade where they have decided that they want nothing to do with it.  Both she and my other daughter are homeschooling their kids.  My other daughter pulled her other child out of Monroe schools to homeschool just a few days ago because of the mask mandates and threat of vaccine rules.  Kids don’t need all that politics in their life, and my kids want nothing to do with any of it.  They want their kids to be educated, do the math, read, and adjust to critical thinking.  However, for me, to see Darbi Boddy and Isaac Adi win school board seats at the Lakota public schools was a fascinating thing to witness.  Bad, liberal management of Lakota, in general, has been a problem for decades. Finally, some reasonable people could manage the district in the way many of the Republicans in the county of Butler have needed by representation.  Adding these new names to the board with Lynda O’Conner is an excellent opportunity for sanity to come to Lakota for the first time in my lifetime, which at this point, is a long time.

Nobody can take anything away from Isaac and Darbi.  They worked very hard and were completely sincere in their efforts.  At no time in the process were they phony politicians.  Even when it came to fundraising, shaking hands, and going to political events, they were completely authentic and invested in running for school board and doing good things when they arrived there.  I will have to add a little name that many won’t know; Kristi Ertel worked behind the scenes very effectively and professionally to help make all this happen, as did other people who supported these candidates in unique ways.  This election was very much a team effort extending into the Republican party of Butler County in very positive ways.  None of us just woke up a few months ago and put our efforts into this achievement without a lot of work.  It started many months ago, well before the presidential election of 2020, as a way to figure out how to turn off the insane spending at Lakota, which was going to demand a levy increase by 2022.  It was names like Darbi and Isaac who stepped forward to become part of the solution.  Others helped in other ways.  And some of that group ran but wanted to be independent of a party nomination.

Looking at the results of this 2021 election, Vanessa Wells was one of the originals in these meetings.  I was rooting for her, but I understood well everyone’s problem with her in the race.  The LEA union had three candidates, and two of them were incumbents.  The other represented an incumbent, so it would be hard to beat them  on a good day.  Starting this process, I reminded everyone that the union candidates would get at least 5000 votes if the turnout were around 20%.  So there wouldn’t be much extra to divide among all the other candidates, Vanessa being one of them.  With the union endorsing the school board, which they always do informally, it would take the Republican Party endorsement to compete.  As it turned out, both Darbi and Isaac broke 8000 votes each which put them in first and second place comfortably over the other candidates.  By the way, things looked to me, there were thousands of hits on my blog site in favor of all the conservative candidates, so I felt it was safe to support Vanessa Wells even though she had selected to run as an independent.  I respect that kind of decision, so as it turned out, she gained a respectable 5000 votes all on her own, which is the magic number I pointed out at the start of the process.  While it’s true, those 5000 votes took away from Darbi and Isaac among a conservative base, knowing the minds of Butler County, I wasn’t worried that it would keep them from winning.  Of course, some races are coming, and Vanessa is an excellent talent to apply if she wants.  The same with Karine Chausse, who is a wildly independent person whom I like quite a lot.  She gained 1,400 votes with almost no resources to apply, which I thought was particularly strong.  I wanted to see how they’d do, and I was impressed. 

But it was scary for many people leading up to the election.  They couldn’t see what I did, the analytics from my blog site showing an enormous interest in the conservative school board candidates.  What I didn’t know was how would all that enthusiasm equate on election day.  As it turned out, everything came out exactly as we had war-gamed the election 18 months earlier in one of our earliest meetings.  Fear of the unknown taken into account, the people of Liberty Township and West Chester, won on election night.  Our job was to give them options, and they showed up and voted for them.  And it came out exactly like we thought it would.  Not a blowout margin, but voters would do the rest of the work with the suitable candidates, Isaac and Darbi, good sincere people who were in the race for all the right reasons.  The union always gets their base who want easy union contracts to negotiate against.  But their base runs out quickly.  When Isaac and Darbi went over the 7000 voter mark, I knew they were going to win.  Especially in an off-year election.  They exceeded that number more than that, which is a stunning blow to the previous status quo. 

Overall, all my endorsed candidates for the various races came out on top, which shouldn’t be a surprise.  The media does not give coverage to conservative options the way they should, so the blog site at least lets voters know who the good guys are.  It certainly helped in the school board race.  But it also helped in several trustee races. Mark Welch, of course, held his seat in West Chester, but Todd Minniear won as the top vote-getter in Liberty Township.  He was surprised to learn how quickly links to my site died on Facebook.  I explained to him that I was heavily shadowbanned on all internet providers and platforms.  So viral marketing is not possible when it comes to my site.  But, specific searches do work, so my blog site and name recognition, such as signs voters see on the side of the road, will add up to thousands and thousands of views, which is better media coverage than the local papers and tv market provide.  In races like these, it adds up quickly and can make a big difference.  But just as in the case of Darbi and Isaac, Todd worked his ass off on this race, and ultimately people saw that and voted for him.  If anything helped with the blog, people saw Todd campaigning, saw his signs, and looked him up to learn more.  Then they could read more about him, which earned a vote.  So I feel good about my role in helping out.  But that takes nothing away from all those who won.  They did a fantastic job, and I am proud to see each one of those victories manifest into something meaningful and hopeful.  The future is a little bit brighter today because of election night 2021.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

LEA Endorses Current School Board: More reasons to vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi

The LEA is wanting to Pick their Own Boss

News flash, the LEA, the Lakota Education Association have endorsed their three picks for the school board.  They endorse Kelley Casper and Michael Pearl, incumbents, and support the Brad Lovell replacement, Doug Horton.  No surprise there, as I’ve always said, those are all the liberals on the school board and why it has never functioned correctly.  The labor union puts its own kind of people on the board, so it’s no wonder that union contracts get approved without a whimper, transexual bathrooms are something to even talk about, and Critical Race Theory is infesting the hallways of all the schools.  When you let the teacher’s union pick their bosses, you naturally get a disaster, which is precisely why public education all across the country right now is in a crisis.  But I think it’s good to see these endorsements because now the union is saying the quiet part out loud.  For so many years, they have hidden their intentions beyond a bipartisan mask that they used to hide the politics of these candidates. This year, because of the pressure, the LEA had to show their cards, and once they did, every voter is now armed with a truth that wasn’t there for them before.  I’ve always said it, but now people can see for themselves.

Two Republican endorsed candidates created the pressure I support emphatically, Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi.  There are other challengers as well, but it was the Republican endorsement that made the faces of the LEA melt and decry how unfair it was for them.  They expected everyone to keep playing by the rules of impartiality. At the same time, they put their people in the office in the background and destroyed the Lakota budget with union nonsense and progressive politics.  If there is ever a hope of fixing government schools, the priority is to get the politics out of them.  And there is nothing about labor unions that isn’t about politics, especially the teacher’s union.  As in the case of Lakota, the LEA is a subsidiary of the OEA, the Ohio Education Association.  Then, of course, the OEA is a subsidiary of the NEA, the National Education Association.  You end up with a massive political action group of members who are soldiers for progressive politics, and the money we pay them off property taxes is taken and used to fuel the Democrat Party.  These unions do not give money to Republicans.  They are purely a radical political arm of the Democrat Party.  And in Butler County, Ohio, where Lakota is located, many people would be surprised to learn that. 

I always thought it was common knowledge of the connection between labor unions and the Democrat party.  A decade or so ago, I dealt with this issue often, but to me, that felt like just yesterday.  There is a whole new generation of parents now who were little kids themselves back then, and they don’t know about these kinds of things.  They want their kids to have a shot at a decent life, and they think by dropping those kids off at a government school, that somehow their kids will get the support and education they need for life.   They’d love it if politics were not such a dividing line, and they glaze over when these kinds of topics come up.  But the truth of the matter is, even if Republicans just sat in a faraway office and did not play the game, the kids in all public schools would continue to be harassed into converts of progressive causes, the kinds of things that Democrats care about.  Just as the gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said in Virginia recently, he didn’t believe parents should be telling schools what to teach. You see the same attitude among the teacher unions across the country.  They think they own your children and that they are a shared resource among us all for consumption as the collective sees fit. 

The game works like this; labor unions need an army to advocate for their future progressive causes.  And teachers specifically use the chaos of liberalism to drive change, making school boards throw endless amounts of money at them, spiking their payrolls to extraordinary levels.  When you hear the stories that teachers don’t make very much money, you hear union nonsense.  Many teachers at Lakota make six figures.  They aren’t going to go hungry in this century or the next.  And of course, their union contracts always get approved because, as you can see in Lakota, they advocate for their people to be on the board, union stooges who will lay down and give them anything they want.  Just as the incumbents at Lakota have over this past year, all three of the names the LEA has endorsed have worked essentially on behalf of the LEA union and not the community in general.  When we elect a school board, we are supposed to be putting in place a management team that will work with all the elements to make a successful school.   As things have been for decades, everything has been tilted away from the families and their children and leveraged toward the power of the labor unions and building up the Democrats as a national party. 

Well, at Lakota, we wanted to change that, and there are several good picks to choose from to replace Kelley Casper, Michael Pearl and keep Doug Horton from becoming a problem in the future.  The Republican endorsed candidates Darbi Boddy, and Issac Adi could work well with the current Republican board member Lynda O’Conner to gain a three-vote majority, and that by itself would dramatically help the situation at Lakota.  But people would have to show up and vote.  There are far more Republicans in Butler County than Democrats.  But on off-year elections with these kinds of races, most of the Republicans stay home.  Usually, there aren’t such good people to pick from, but this year there is.  We know that the union picks will show up to vote; they have their steady stream of supporters who always drink the Kool-Aid.  They will get a lot of votes, as they always do, from pro-union radicalism.  That would mean that many Republicans would have to show up on election night and vote for the school board, who usually would sit home that night.  The LEA is worried about it, and for a good reason.  We want them to worry about it.  They shouldn’t control our school board, and they want to keep it that way.  But for the first time that I can think of, voters finally have a choice. 

We don’t have to accept this premise of the labor unions running our schools and taking endless amounts of money from our tax base to stuff their faces and greedy hearts.  And in a not so indirect way, fueling a Democrat party seeking to destroy our country, starting with our children.  If nothing else got voters to go out into the night and cast a vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi, it would be the chance to right wrongs we can all see.  But for once in our community, to do something about it.  We don’t have to sit around and take it anymore.  For a change, we can change that corrupt system for the better with a simple vote and set an example that the rest of the nation can follow.  We can lead in Butler County, Ohio and take back our schools and our kids, and beat back the power these labor unions have over our lives.  Once and for all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote No by Saying Yes: How Great Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy are for Lakota

Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy for Lakota School Board

I could tell you many stories about politics that are dire and would make you want to climb under a rock and never get involved again.  But sometimes, some stories are fantastic, and that is the case with the two endorsed Lakota school board candidates, Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who are running to replace incumbent Democrats in November of 2021.  Every event I have been to with these two has been good; a few examples are shown below.  The video might be a little rough, but it’s what they say that matters.  Darbi and Issac work well together and are as unselfish as I’ve ever seen in politics, in any position. I’ve said from the beginning that I supported four candidates for the school board, but in this race this year, the Republican endorsement is what matters.  In the past, liberals have infected the school board, so critical race theory and transexual policies became part of the dominant conversation. They have managed to hide their intentions by calling the school board “nonpartisan.” Well, we know that nothing in politics is “nonpartisan,” especially the Lakota school board.  But when this idea of supporting school board members for Lakota came up, I never thought that two of them who would win the endorsement would like each other so well. That’s when the “can you imagines” started coming to my mind, where the school board represented the conservatives of Butler County, Ohio truly, and that they worked well together.  It’s one thing to have conservative votes on the board to manage things the way voters expect, but that they would perform functional management is a bonus that didn’t seem possible. 

Vote for Darbi Boddy

For instance, Issac Adi went door to door in my precinct, letting people know who he was and when to vote for him.  My wife noticed him in our neighborhood, and they struck up a conversation at the end of my driveway.  Issac recognized her immediately, which I thought was remarkable considering the number of people he has met over several months, including big names like Jim Jordan.  I would imagine his head is spinning with all the people he’s had to shake hands with, so it did impress me that he remembered my wife.  That is one thing about Issac Adi; he is one of the most sincere people I’ve ever met in politics.  He truly cares and is a good person.  So he remembers people and cares about them long after the handshake.  Of course, he wanted to know where I was which my wife told him I was babysitting my grandkids inside the house.  So he came up to see me and talk for a bit. 

After talking and catching up, I noticed that Issac wore Darbi’s campaign sticker on his shirt.  He was doing the hard work of going door to door on a pretty hot day, full of enthusiasm after talking to many hundreds of people personally, and he was promoting Darbi along the way.  Now I know that they are both endorsed and are part of the same team.  But the way the vote occurs, they very much have to run individually.   The top vote-getters are the ones who win in these kinds of elections, and it’s always hard to beat an incumbent.  The union vote and latte-sipping liberals always show up on election night, making it hard for conservatives to get a lot of votes.  But here was Issac promoting Darbi just as much as he was promoting himself.  And as I understand it, Darbi has been doing the same.  She was out promoting her and Issac as a team, not just individual candidates.  For any election, that is a pretty unique concept that doesn’t have a lot of historical precedents. 

Adding their votes to that of the current Lynda O’Conner would be a game-changer at Lakota.  I have been to other events where I have seen the three of them talking, and the chemistry is just there.  You can see it from a long way off. I’ve been dealing with school board issues in many districts around Ohio for twenty years, and I have never seen such a good combo.  Seeing Issac that day took some of my natural cynicism toward politics into a place it had never been before.  It seemed possible that at Lakota, something good had a chance to happen.  They are both so much better than the other alternatives, and if people had an opportunity to see that for themselves, these two could get elected.   There are still very significant obstacles, but as hard as they have worked throughout September and into October, it seemed like more than a fantasy and more of an eventual reality.  Usually, when I think of the Lakota school board, I typically think of severe dysfunction and people who do not know what they are doing with the money.  But here were genuinely competent and hard-working people who actually liked each other, at least as much as I’ve ever seen in politics, and there was a chance for great things to happen at Lakota for the first time in forever. 

Vote for Issac Adi for Lakota School Board

Issac had to eventually leave and return to the campaign trail from my house, but it took a while.  I enjoyed his company so much that it took us a long time to say goodbye that day.  I can say that I have been talking actively with many of the old No Lakota Levy people preparing ourselves for levy fights in the years to come.  The current school board has been trying to find the time to put one up for a vote to satisfy the out-of-control spending the teacher’s union expects.  This was an election year. Otherwise, the current board would have proposed a tax increase this year.  Likely, they’ll wait until next year now that they’ve agreed to give all those teachers sitting home on Covid excuses a raise that they’ll have to pay for next year.  But a levy fight is so damaging.  It’s much better to support a new school board that would manage the money that we already give them, which is a massive 200 million-plus budget.  If you can’t teach 17,000 kids on that, you have problems.  But the school board has never listened. Instead, they have attacked businesses for more money, like trolls always looking for a shakedown of tax revenue to pay for their reckless and infinite spending ultimately. Lakota’s school board has been deficit spending for their entire existence; no matter how much money we’ve given them, they never find a way not to spend more than they take in.  When they did have a surplus for a bit because of declining enrollment, they couldn’t wait to waste it on something new.  With this prospect of an actual conservative school board to replace the majority of liberals, great things can happen.  Issac and Darbi have done the work to get people to know who they are.  Now it will be up to the voters.  For the first time in many of their lifetimes, they have a great choice as the Lakota school district residents.  They can vote for the same old tax and spend liberals that have screwed up so much at Lakota.  Or, they can vote for Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who enjoy each other, work hard, and care to give the board a conservative majority for the first time.  If voters don’t vote for them, then when the tax increases come, people won’t be able to complain about it because they had a chance to say no to those tax increases by saying yes to Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi. 

Rich Hoffman

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