Tag: Lakota Schools

The Lakota School Board is Not in Charge: Lawyers and public relations officials are, elected representatives are just a mask

The school board meeting for Lakota on December 12th, 2022 was unique for several reasons, most of which was the obvious realization that our elected members are not in charge; the lawyers are. As I listened to comments about the new Senate Bill 178, which will take away much of the power of the Ohio Department of Education and give it to a director reporting to the governor for direct accountability, it was quite clear that even with all our work in Lakota of electing a conservative board, that no matter what we did, the system hid itself behind a veil of lawyers and public relations personalities. The school board itself was just a ruse, and you could hear it in Isaac Adi’s voice in that meeting in the way he spoke to Darbi Boddy. I had spoken to both of those personalities extensively before the election of 2021, and to hear Isaac talk, it was like a completely different person, shaped by the system itself, to fit the mold of corruption that resides behind all of public education. It caused me to reflect on the ten previous years that Lynda O’Conner worked hard to prove to me directly that she was one of the good school board members. And after all the many hours of conversation, the moment we delivered a conservative majority to her, she became obsessed with controlling Darbi Boddy, which was never my intention, and the power of the seat obviously went to her head. Ultimately, the truth is that the only value of the school board was ceremonial, not in real management decisions, and these people understood that which is why the titles of their positions were so crucial to them. Because the lawyers were really in charge and always residing behind a veil that the school board showed the public, and behind that veil, so much bad action occurred, which conceals the reality of public education today in America. 

And part of the veil was what we saw from Matt Miller himself, the current Lakota superintendent who got himself in trouble with a messy divorce, then sought to harass witnesses in the community with legal threats to keep his actions from being discussed in public. As an example of the legal firewall they utilize, included here is a copy of the investigation into Matt Miller by the school board. Notice how much of it is redacted? So much for the transparency that Lynda O’Conner talks about. For some who received those intimidation letters, it was a scary experience. But I am proud of those who continued on unafraid of the obvious intimidation tactic and proceeded to make a national story out of the content that was learned about the sexual lifestyles of Lakota administrators and the various mechanisms that had been exposed during the process. Over the last few weeks, the Libs of Tik Tok picked up the story and several radio stations. Charlie Kirk has carried it, as did Louder with Crowder, who works for Glenn Beck’s Blaze news network. I thought most effective was Kristi Ertel’s interview with Brian Thomas on 55 KRC. Because Kristi is a very conscientious Christian woman, a rock-solid character, she represents what’s best about the Lakota community. When people like her can’t accept the nonsense that the Lakota school system was trying to feed the public, you know something is really wrong. I have a long history of opposition. So when I say something, people tend to refer to it in the context of a long-standing opponent. But when nice people like Kristi Ertel are on a big radio station in Cincinnati talking about how she can’t accept the moral dilemma that Lakota employees have imposed on our community, then it becomes clear that this is a different kind of time we are living in, where the veil of the lawyers isn’t working any longer. The school doesn’t know what to do about it, because the school board isn’t in charge, and they never were. 

The tactics used to derail the public from public opinions into the ostentatious liberal lifestyle of the Lakota superintendent and the general administrative culture have only exacerbated the suspicions that were always there. I remember the many meetings we had early in 2021 to identify possible school board candidates, which were organized by Lynda, who obviously always wanted a conservative majority so they would nominate her as the school board president. It was always odd to me how once Lynda knew she had the vote of Issac and Darbi to appoint her as the new president, then Isaac as the VP, Lynda quickly turned on Darbi to see her removed from the board, which essentially started all this trouble. That is how the information about Matt Miller got out to the public. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have been very interested in the superintendent’s sex life. For the sake of context, it looks like things worked out for the best because now people have seen the teeth of Lakota and the actual quality of the employees, not the garbage that the public relations firms present through tricks and nonsense. At those early meetings, Darbi was there, organized by Lynda. So were Vanessa Wells, Kristi Ertel, and many of the kinds of people who have come out very upset about the Matt Miller behavioral problems. And it’s clear what Lynda was after during those meetings in hindsight. In all her conversations with me, she knew the school board wasn’t really in charge. It’s the lawyers who run the school. The school board has no value at all other than to provide a mask for all the garbage that was going on behind the scenes. So when there are protests about S.B. 178 removing our vote from a Board of Education, the truth is, that vote is worthless because our elected representatives aren’t in charge of doing anything anyway. The lawyers do everything, and all these school boards constantly punt all the hard decisions to them along with a hefty legal bill, which then provides cover for the multitudes of bad behavior that the employees of public schools engage in.

I’ve told everyone concerned about legal action from this experience with Lakota that frivolous lawsuits are often viewed by the courts harshly, and this one is a clear case of frivolity. Most First Amendment cases are. As many who have nationally picked up on the story know from experience, reporting on a story isn’t a violation of slanderous behavior. Once a story is a story, it’s a story. And the police report in which Matt Miller was interviewed in a public context made this a story.   From my perspective, the divorce records didn’t make it a story. It became a story once the Lakota superintendent admitted to the contents of the police interview, which then turned all this into a crisis instead of a messy divorce from poor decisions on his part and became a community problem. Whether or not Matt Miller is one of Sheriff Jones’ “boys” protected by the sheriff’s department is irrelevant. The criminal element is just another consideration. The moral representation of what is expected from public employees in a school full of children is essential. And it has been good to see that people like Kristi Ertel and many others have not allowed themselves to be intimidated into shutting up when voices are needed to undo the many wrongs of this case. It’s obvious the school board won’t do it, and they never had the power to. And knowing that it’s up to the community to do the work that we had trusted the media, the police, and our elected officeholders to do. What we have learned is that we’re on our own.    

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Public Schools are Dens of Evil: They are anti-Family, and anti-American

It has been nice not to talk about Lakota schools much over the last several years. As a public school in my community, I think it would be fair to say that I hate them. I see them as a massive waste of time. Their employees are detriments to our community, and the institution itself is an infusion of liberalism into an otherwise very conservative community. I tend not to pay much attention to them so long as they don’t ask for money by way of increased taxes. But, over this past year, I have had my fill of their bad management, wasted money, and perverse lifestyles, and it has reminded me of why I have hated the concept of public schools for much of my life. Lakota had been experiencing declining enrollment in a community that has been aging. But the property values have been going up, so the revenue at Lakota was good and kept them from asking for more money for many years now. But they recklessly spent their surplus and have been behaving like drunken sailors and living the lifestyle of it as well. Now, much of that bad behavior has come to the surface and been a grim reminder of precisely what is bad about public education. And for me, it’s that public schools, all public schools, are anti-family. 

No matter how much history you study, how much sociology is explored, and what the contents of philosophy are, there is nothing more important to a good society than the quality of individual families. Without the concept of a good family, people are doomed, and countries are sure to fall. Speaking with the benefit of hindsight, which I have been saying for more than four decades, those who have advocated easy divorce, free babysitting in public schools for parents too busy for their children, and reckless sexual lifestyles, a culture of intoxication, and gay relationships as marriage alternatives have had the malicious intent to destroy our country, by destroying our families. It’s obvious now to most people. It wasn’t always so straightforward because it used to be that families were so strong that people took good ones for granted. And these progressive lifestyles have been slowly introduced to us over a long time through our governments, our legal system, and specifically through public education to erode the concept of the American family. For me, family has always been the most important thing in life, and I have made great sacrifices to have a good one. My wife and I homeschooled our kids when they were little in spurts. We had no family support, and socially it was very difficult. By the time my kids were seniors in high school, they were finishing off their time with computer classes and spent their senior years living in Europe to complete their educations. I always gave them the kind of education I knew they were not getting from public education or society. They are in their 30s now, and they are great kids. They are so much better because they didn’t get destroyed in public education. Looking back on it, I wish I could have kept them entirely out of public education because all it did was harm them; it certainly didn’t help.

The public education concept of letting very liberal strangers babysit and raise a family’s children has been horrible for our country. At the same time, the parents live messed up lives putting their careers, and their sexual desires ahead of raising their children in a healthy lifestyle were bad from the beginning. A marriage is a man and a woman who get together and have children. Then they fight it out for many decades together no matter what happens to provide for their children a good and stable life. Being married isn’t about your feelings or your sexual desires. It’s not about getting attention from someone outside the marriage. You get married, stay true to your spouse, and work together to raise good children in a healthy and intellectual environment. You talk as a family. You make decisions as a family. And you stick together and make a great country by being a good family.

Public education seeks to make a menace out of that concept and is a vehicle for local distribution of liberal values that are anti-family in nature. When we hear transgender discussions or sexual alternatives being introduced to kids, we see the arrogance of a public school embedded in our communities, living off taxpayers’ property values and seeking to undo the community from within with anti-family values. And they have smiles on their faces while they do their deeds. And the proof of that arrogance comes out in the lifestyle of the progressive employees. We have certainly seen the evidence at Lakota schools more than we ever wanted to know. But worse, they are intent on justifying their bad behavior with the overall mission of public schools in general, an attack on the American family and the desecration of all that stands behind the value of a mom and a dad working hard to raise good kids to make a good world and a good country. We often find with public schools that the employees themselves openly seek to destroy this concept in everything they do. Over the years, their behavior has led to the destruction of our society in all the ways we can see today. 

The idea that children belong to the state is the central premise. Of course, they never come out and say what they are thinking because if they did, the public school ruse would fall apart, as it has in Lakota. Their assurance to the busy parents is that their children are cared for by the public school and that the shared partnership of the children is something the parents can rely on. From there, over the years, the parents feel that they can do what they want and live out whatever they desire without consequences to their family because the good public school has the raising of children taken care of. But often, all too late, they realize that the public school is the cause of their problems and without the leadership of a good mom and dad and the protection of decades of long-lasting love and affection, the children end up destroyed in the process. They grow up and vote for big government to replace the parents they never had. This poor education took advantage of them like some pervert dressed in a Santa suit. They ended up empty in a wasteland of possibilities that never came to them, making them ill-prepared to have their own families. And this mess all starts with the garbage we teach our kids in public education and the losers who teach them in those horrible places. I would call them the dens of evil because their purpose is the undoing of the American family, which is the key to any great society. And their purposeful destruction of the family concept is all the evidence anybody needs of their actual intentions. Their lifestyles are only the evidence of such a dark and maniacal device, intent on the complete destruction of our way of life and putting in place a mother government that seeks to rule us all with a jealous zeal to satisfy an insatiable and corrupt heart. 

Rich Hoffman

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Remember When Lakota Paid $175,000 to an Employee over Ethical Violations: The cost of mismanagement of public employees is extraordinarily high

For the quick answer that is being talked about because of the Lakota superintendent’s lawsuit threat letters, the response to them would, of course, be frivolous litigation aggressively pursued based on The New York Times v. Sullivan case of 1964. In that well-known case, criticism of public officials protected by the 1st and 14th Amendments ensures that legal recourse is off limits for pursuing damages. The price for a life in public office and the comforts that come with living off public funds is that criticism is healthy for an honest exchange of information. No matter how crazy the information may be, which hasn’t been the case with this Lakota superintendent case, it is protected under the American Constitution. There is consistent case law that resolves the issue to the extent that any challenge to it would perfectly justify a knowingly frivolous abuse of litigation and the time of the courts themselves. And with that known, the aggressive attack on the public by sending out threatening letters to around ten community members just because they expressed themselves about the kind of private conduct that Matt Miller has utilized in his life has only caused a lot more anger. Because of this aggressive act, and what has been learned about what the school board knew and when, now there have been explorations of class action litigation against Lakota schools themselves for the reckless spending of taxpayer funds that have gone on not just in the actions of protecting their superintendent from public judgment, but in several other instances as well. Currently, a group of people are adding up all the costs and instances so that a coherent story can be pieced together by the evidence, and further action is pending in those assemblies. 

Yet, along the way, it has been noticed that a lawsuit filed by former teacher union leadership member Emily Osterling won her $175,000 in 2019 for wrongful termination back in 2017. At that time, Matt Miller put forth an 11-page resolution that listed a series of allegations, none of them criminal, pertaining to Osterling’s dealings with students and their parents. The resolution illustrated behavior that was willful and persistent violations of board policy pertaining to staff ethics as well as Ohio’s code of professional conduct for educators. And federal laws govern how she educates and serves the students. Well, that got some people’s attention since we had all just been told that any of the Lakota superintendent’s actions revealed from his very explicit divorce records that his conduct wasn’t illegal. And that morality wasn’t a consideration of employment. Upon learning about all this behavior, many people in the Lakota district were shocked that Lakota didn’t have a “morality clause” in the superintendent’s contract like other schools do. And in that oversight, they have allowed a very aggressive, a very progressive activist and an unwelcomed figure into our community at a high cost, with no way to get rid of him. And that has brought up the excessive cost of keeping that employee with indirect costs that go far beyond his actual salary and benefits. By the time his cost to Lakota is added up due to lawyer fees, public relations firms, and other burdens connected to other instances of similar mismanagement, it looks to be in the many thousands of dollars. Even millions if we go back to all the circumstances since his hiring in 2017 when that Emily Osterling case occurred. Now I’m not suddenly a supporter of teacher union members. But the point of this matter is how Emily Osterling could be held to some standard of values and even terminated from her job when Matt Miller was not held to the same standard as a superintendent for essentially doing much worse. 

Matt Miller was always nice in my presence, so I was shocked to learn that several school board members thought Matt would sue the district over his contract for a lot of money if he were terminated over the revelation of his divorce revelations in 2020. I had my doubts about this until I saw how he behaved toward the community who learned about his private life and expressed themselves as to why they didn’t like it. The letter I received was very aggressive, and my policy on that kind of thing was to hit back many times harder. That’s when discussion about a class action case started to take root in gathering up all the facts and the timeline. And after reading that letter, it was obvious that the school board’s worries were justified. However, to understand the law, it would have been better to settle the issue in court than to dig deeper into the trouble with attempts to cover it all up with PR firms and lawyers. Understanding the constitutional limits of legal recourse, it would have been perfectly justified to counter any such attack with frivolous litigation given the context of his contract concerning community reputation, which was his burden to maintain healthily. 

With the standard set by the Emily Osterling case, it’s evident that a community precedent had been established in removing her as an employee. It didn’t hold up in court, and they ended up paying her out a lot of money. Add her case to the many others out there and we have a serious case of mismanagement at the school board level over a long period of time. The job has been too big for them to handle since they give everything to some professional class to take care of, which ends up costing a lot of money. Of course, there will be justifiable legal costs, with legal firms and PR outlets, but what we are seeing is a massive amount of waste, waste we wouldn’t have noticed unless Lakota’s superintendent decided to attack members of the community in these bizarre ways as if he were entitled to employment, no matter what his personal conduct revealed. Much of this he has done to himself through his own mismanagement of his own life. Then Lakota, as a district, has had to spend a lot of money to protect him from his own actions. Then when you add up all those costs to all other similar disputes with other employees and public relations problems, you get quite a large number. And that large number results from massive mismanagement by a public-school culture that is out of control and not aligned with the community that pays for it.

And in many cases, the only correction we have for such bad behavior on a massive scale is the constitutional protections of The New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964. No wonder progressives everywhere want to shut down free speech. But all the law of our country is built around constitutional law, not the protection of public employees by a judgmental public. Without those judgments, there is literally nothing to keep public employees honest. And what is such an insult with this case at Lakota, despite learning that the very things that are happening now and being justified as correct were the same things that same superintendent did to get rid of other employees, for ethical standards. And to keep people from talking about it, he sent out nasty threats to people hoping to crush criticism which in his case, the criticisms are more than well justified. The best advice anybody could give him would be that he shouldn’t be making news if he doesn’t want to be in the news. And threatening the community for their anger at his actions is making news, not the kind Lakota would like to have. But it’s just the latest in a long history of mistakes that have cost a fortune and have nothing to do with funding education for children. 

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota Schools Picks a Fight: Government schools are part of the problem of destroying our country

I will just have to remind everyone in the wake of the disappointing report regarding the Matt Miller investigation at Lakota; you can’t rely on a government to investigate itself regarding its out-of-control employees. Everywhere that there are government employees attached in some way to labor unions, we will see the kind of bad conduct brushed under the rug that we have seen in Lakota over Matt Miller being found cleared of wrongdoing in his role as superintendent, making more than $200,000 a year with benefits. His good friend, the treasurer Jenni Logan obviously knew that all this was going to blow up, so she left the district in August of 2022 to take a job across the river in Butler County at Ross to get out of the way of the onslaught that the school board was going to face once the public found out about the reckless sexual escapades of its public superintendent. Everyone knew that the investigation the school board paid for would let Matt Miller off, even after all the evidence was revealed. The essential point of the case, which Miller’s lawyer stated after the Wednesday, November 2nd meeting shown below, was that he was cleared of all charges, yet again. And that there was going to be some revenge. Spoken like a typical public employee who feels that they are entitled to a job and that anything they do should not be held against them, a typical progressive political position consistent with all teacher union associations and their culture. Miller has undoubtedly been a defender of the Lakota teacher’s union, and when pressed, he sounds like the typical political radical that comes from their community impositions. Here is what Miller’s attorney Elizabeth Tuck said after the meeting:

“Mr. Miller has been cleared once again of these outrageous and defamatory accusations; we hope the witch hunt is over; we are considering consequences for the individuals who initiated and perpetuated these lies; the damage to Mr. Miller’s career has consequences, people shouldn’t be permitted just to make things up to drown someone out of a career.” 

The media and others were wondering where all the people were for this meeting; the attendance wasn’t very good. Well, they were across town at another meeting where like-minded people were gathering to figure out what to do about this Matt Miller news. They knew hours before the Lakota meeting that Lakota was going to let Matt Miller off and keep him employed and that the public employees thought they had some kind of right to fight back for bringing such a hostile workplace to their sensitive little minds. Matt Miller started all this by running conservative school board members that the voters picked for the board away and trying to destroy their lives. So nobody has any sympathy for him and his lawyer when they start yacking about “defamation” and “lies,” Darbi Boddy can claim the same was done against her, and you don’t see her crying about it. And many people at that cross-town meeting also could claim the Lakota school board has abused them over the years. And that they had been “defamed,” “lied to,” and abused by the labor union members over many issues. Their attitude to Miller’s statement by his lawyer was, “welcome to the club.”  The school and public employees could certainly be found liable for the lack of safety that there is within the institution. Once they open that door, there suddenly are lots of avenues for recourse. Just think of who could be deposed.

People generally have the feeling that the Lakota school board doesn’t work, the school doesn’t work for the community, and they spend way too much money, so they turn toward themselves to figure out what community actions come next. That meeting was planned before the Lakota school board announced that they would have a special meeting to discuss letting Matt Miller off the hook, which was inconceivable to most people who have seen all the evidence at Protect Lakota Kids.com. A lot of people have tried to work with this school board to help make it better. I certainly did. For the last several years, I worked with Lynda O’Conner directly to help make it better. She is the president now of the board, and after all the work we have done, many people are disappointed to see where the board has gone in just a few short months. By working with me directly, I didn’t feel like talking about all these crazy things going on behind the scenes. Because if we only elected her and gave her some help, that a conservative board would improve things. But obviously, we only ended up with 1 out of 5 board members who committed to conservative values, and Lynda wasn’t one of them. After all those Tea Party meetings, and all those private meetings, this is what we ended up with, and now people are mad at her beyond repair. That makes me angry because it feels like a wasted effort. Only Darbi wouldn’t have been found any other way, and she has been fantastic; I’m so glad we found her. Now we just need to go out and get four more of her. 

But the government schools are not in charge of the community. If the school is shown not to report to the community, then the community will gather where they control the meetings; they control the door-to-door knocking, the pending actions in the courts, and the kind of activism that forces change. I warned Lynda years ago about the engagement problem, and I guess she has done a good thing by waking up those people with this Matt Miller story. I don’t think she meant to unleash this action, but the result of this past year is waking up all those voters I explained who were otherwise disengaged from the process because they believed their actions wouldn’t matter. But now that they’ve seen what voting for Darbi has brought them and how the school system tried to destroy her with smiles on their faces, they are learning what was being hidden from the public regarding the superintendent. For an extended period of time, now they are activated, and they aren’t showing their cards to the Lakota school system. They aren’t limiting themselves to the tightly controlled 3-minute speeches at the school board. They are going to places where they can talk as much as they want to as many people as possible, safe and away from the purple-haired progressive radicals and their liberal desires to use Lakota to bring Democrat policies into a very Republican Butler County. And everything that Lakota wanted to hide, they have only awakened those voters I told Lynda were pent up and isolated in their homes waiting for a cause to rally to. And now, this Matt Miller issue is it. And it started by letting him try to destroy Darbi Boddy with every kind of vicious attack that Matt Miller’s lawyer claimed he was suffering from. But the teeth of the public are something they haven’t accounted for. And when they are lied to, as they have been, and are told there is no evidence, yet they can see all that evidence at Protect Lakota Kids.com, natural anger has resulted. Now that people know what kind of game has been played against them and can see the proof beyond speculative utterances, they are mad, and that anger has to go somewhere. And in this case, it’s across-town meetings that the school does not control to figure out what to do about this liberal menace that is embedded in our schools for the destruction of our lives, liberty, and honor. Very little good ever comes out of government, certainly not out of the government schools. And to see just how bad it is, visit Protect Lakota Kids.com and learn for yourself.

Rich Hoffman

Protect Our Lakota Kids

The Truth About Vanessa Wells: Crawling through the mud is where the bad guys hide their crimes

According to the media narrative that Fox 19 in Cincinnati has tried to establish, and many of the liberal losers within the Rinos for Lakota group, they think the revelation of the bad things that Lakota superintendent Matt Miller has done, which Vanessa Wells revealed, was out of revenge because she was not elected to the school board during the last election. Such a suggestion is really ridiculous, especially when the real story is known. I speak with Vanessa Wells a lot, sometimes every few hours during a day, so I have a pretty good understanding of what she is doing and why she does it. I also understand why people didn’t want me to work with her and tried to convince me that she was dangerous and out of control. I wasn’t born yesterday. Usually, people don’t like someone because they don’t want to live up to the measure that a harder-working person applies to others. Or, their value systems just aren’t compatible. In Vanessa’s case, it’s likely both; she has a high moral value for how things should work, making political people very upset. And she is sharp as a tack, more intelligent than many lawyers that I know. It is not surprising that she has so many lawyers in her orbit right now because they are attracted to her intelligence and sense of justice. And I said to Vanessa recently what I thought about those election results last year where she fell short of winning.

There is a story to that, which I’ll get into shortly, but I’m glad she isn’t on the school board. She is far more influential behind the scenes than she ever would have been in an “official” role. I think Darbi Boddy has done a great job on the school board. I’d love to have more people like her on the school board. But you also need people like Vanessa Wells to work in the trenches, crawl through the mud where all the bad stuff is hidden and where the radical union elements conduct all their malice. I’m a big fan of Vanessa Wells, and I’m glad she is doing what she’s doing. Lakota is far better off because of her.

I remember when Lynda O’Conner introduced me to Vanessa Wells as a proposed school board member. Lynda is now the Lakota school board president, and I wanted to help her get more conservative votes on the school board that more adequately represented the actual residents of Butler County, Ohio. Vanessa was sharp and willing to learn all she could. But as we got closer to the election, and we had to do fundraising for the candidates, and she had to appear at events to get on the Republican Party slate card, Vanessa’s people were not happy with her. They were worried she would go from a rag-tag freedom fighter and concerned mom to a sell-out politician from their perspective, just like all the other sell-outs in the world. I assured Vanessa that wouldn’t be the case, but she was having doubts as the election drew near. And after she won a lawsuit against Lakota schools, Lynda started pushing Vanessa away, so things were getting rough for everyone to be in the same room together. We gave Vanessa a campaign manager to help her with the tasks of winning an election, Bruce Jones, the outstanding fiscal officer of West Chester, and the guy Sheriff Jones wanted to replace Roger Reynolds with as the Butler County Auditor, but the more structure we gave Vanessa, the less authentic she felt her ambitions for the job were, and she was becoming miserable. 

Vanessa approached me several weeks before the November election because she wanted out and to drop off the slate card for the Republican Party of Butler County. She was worried that I would be very angry. But I understood. She worried that if she dropped off, it would make me look bad to the eyes of all the movers and shakers. I told her I understood, that everyone involved had seen more than a few rough elections and that I didn’t care. I told her I wanted her to feel good about what she was doing and that, ultimately, she had to do what she thought was right. So, she dropped off the Republican slate card and ran independently. Of course, I heard about it from just about everyone, but I didn’t try to talk Vanessa out of her decision. Without the slate card inclusion, Vanessa won 5000 votes when the election came around. Darby Boddy and Isaac Adi, who stayed on the card, were the top vote-getters, and if Vanessa had stayed with it, she would have easily have beaten Kelly Casper. The radical union element just didn’t have enough gas to get much more than 7000 votes, so many of our thoughts about voter engagement and turnout, if given conservative options, turned out to be true. Vanessa, without party identification on election day, did exceptionally well. So, there is no shame in what she did or her performance. And there certainly isn’t any desire for revenge. We were all surprised she did as well as she did without the Republican endorsement. Without endorsements, she might have won anyway because she performed so strongly. Any thoughts anybody might have about Vanessa Wells wanting to get revenge on Lakota schools because she didn’t win the school board race simply don’t understand the situation. 

Yet, I’ve always said there needs to be leadership behind the scenes and on the board. It takes a lot more than a few public statements to manage a district full of radical left-winged loons and the union money extracted from property owners with essential threats to their children as the means to get it at play. And I told Vanessa recently that she has been far better for Lakota in the role she is in now than if she was in a straitjacket on the board where all the crazy union rules and the Ohio School Board Association creates methods to regulate the management, not the employees of the far-left political faction who want unencumbered access to our children. With Vanessa on the outside, she is free to act as she needs to, and she has managed to rally lots of good people to the cause, far better than if she was just another nameplate sitting at a desk talking into a microphone. And when she first told me she didn’t want the Republican endorsement, I thought about these possibilities, which have turned out to be very beneficial. I would go on to say that if there were no Vanessa Wells, then when a public employee did get caught doing bad stuff, there would have been nowhere to go with the information. Vanessa did what needed to be done with that information and handled it correctly and legally. And without her, nobody would know anything about this Matt Miller story. It would have been covered up and swept away like so many other issues are, right in front of our faces because the rules control the conduct of the school board. And there never are the kind of good people working in the mud to discover what they’ve been hiding. And the truth is, if Vanessa Wells had won that school board seat, it’s quite clear that many of the good things that are happening now wouldn’t have happened at all. 

Rich Hoffman

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Why the World Needs Many More Darbi Boddys: Without Dynamic Intellectualism the Quality of Static Order cannot be known

There have been a parade of angry emails and comments sent my way by people upset that I support Darbi Boddy, the newest Lakota school board member, so emphatically. They say about her that she is evil, unprofessional, reckless, disruptive, and diabolically a menace to our community. And to those comments I must laugh.  Evil to evil of course is evil, and I can live with that. But to the rest of the assessments, those are all values that I have which are essential to keep the Static Quality of society in its proper balance. Darbi Boddy should be hated by the static order of a corrupt orthodox, and that was always the point.  And obviously, we need a lot more disruption of that condition to get a properly functioning government school, if there could ever be such a thing. But more broadly considered, this is exactly why Steve Bannon is so hated in society, and President Trump. I am quite used to this reaction because I spend most of my time dealing with it, in all aspects of life.  I see great value in what disrupters to a static order provide in keeping corruption in check, but unfortunately many don’t understand why its so necessary.  They enjoy what a Static Quality provides to their life and once they know the rules of that static order, they are comfortable to find their place in it. But the values I’m speaking of come from outside that order.  I use a number of business techniques from well written books over the years, and I’ve incorporated my own version of my experience into my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, to make it easier for people to bring some of these positive elements into their own process improvements.  But personally, I have some special weapons that I draw on often that have been with me for many decades and one of those is the work of Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality as outlined in two books, the first, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the second, the sequel to the first, Lila.  Understanding those books will explain why people like Darbi Boddy and Steve Bannon are necessary in the world, and why they are so hated by all static orders.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author Robert Pirsig defines what the meaning of quality is.  His problem as a teacher which instigated this question and answer was why do we give kids good grades? Is it to evaluate their knowledge, or reward them for a standard correct answer, even if that answer was constructed to protect insane notions of reality.  Looked at another way, when a psycho analyzer might ask a patient what an inkblot means to them, do we get a correct answer as to the condition of the mind being asked, or do they select their answer based on a socially acceptable criterion.  Robert Pirsig found himself to identify most with the philosopher William James who had an IQ of 250 to 300.  I too find William James books enjoyable, but like the work of Robert Pirsig, they are mostly rejected by static order society because they are out of reach for common experience, which cares very much what their peers think of them, which keeps them chained to static order thinking.  Pirsig took his quality concept from Zen and further broke down the concepts into two primary categories, Static Quality and Dynamic Quality. I for my own use rename these terms Static Intellectualism and Dynamic Intellectualism because people find the word “intellectualism” more accommodating than “quality” which requires some baseline understanding of measure which many people lack. What is good quality, telling society what they want to hear, or understanding the contents of a problem and reporting it without fear of what that definition causes.  Both could be true depending on the value system of the culture.

Static Intellectualism are the rules of society, and its value system.  In the movie the Matrix, this is referred to as a “blue pill” existence.  Its football on weekends, good restaurants to eat at.  Saving up money to send your kids to college. Mowing your grass once a week.  Things that society values and lives to.  Dynamic Intellectualism are influences that might be called a “red pill” existence by the Matrix, they are influences outside the static order which challenge the assumptions of value.  In the magnificent book Lila, Pirsig’s characters find themselves on a round the world sailboat trip.  The owner of the boat picks up a crazy woman on his way down the Hudson River to pick up royalty checks in New York before heading out into the open sea for a trip around the world.  The boat captain is a particular man, highly organized and methodical.  But when he picks up a middle-aged woman to go with him on part of the journey, he finds her to be radically different than he is.  She has a very promiscuous life, she’s very random and challenging about everything and it drives him crazy as he’s locked on a small boat with her for several days.  This is where he tries to apply his Metaphysics of Quality on her and finds he must provide more detailed answers to these kinds of questions.  He determines that even though the woman drives him crazy, her challenging of his static order has provided valuable insight into his own state of quality, and his life is therefor much better off.  And generally, it is always determined in any culture that the relationship between corruption in a culture is its lack of Dynamic Intellectualism to test the Static Intellectualism of a culture.  Because without challenges, there are also going to be elements of that society that will seek to leverage conditions to their desire to cheat the system by rigging it in their favor.  Dynamic Intellectualism prevents this from happening by providing a measure that reveals corruption where it otherwise wouldn’t be seen.

When looking at an inkblot poured onto a piece of paper and folded over once, what does it mean?  Well, to the progressive psychoanalysis investigator asking a patient wanting very much to get a good grade and provide a compliant answer might say that it looks like a heart and that it reminds them that the world should be full of love. That would make the institutionalist and protector of that static order very happy, and they would record the answer with great enthusiasm.  But if one were to ask William James, or Robert Pirsig that same question, they would say, “it’s an inkblot folded over where the ink smeared.”  To the Static Intellectualism of that culture that would be the wrong answer and that would inspire the analyzer to give the patient a bad grade, and maybe even to declare the test taker, “insane.”  This is exactly what happened when the governments of the world tried to shut down our lives with Covid or told us that there was no election fraud.  It was the inkblot test, and the Static Intellectualism of the current order wanted an unchallenged answer to the question, what is a threat and who decides it is. By experience, the Static Quality of something cannot measure itself. It must be challenged by Dynamic Intellectualism in order to determine its “quality.”  And that is in essence the Metaphysics of Quality as defined by Robert Pirsig.  A lot of people have trouble with Pirsig’s books.  But they are worth reading and I can promise positive results if you do read them, even if it’s after 20 times. It is because of Dynamic Intellectualism that I value Darbi Boddy at Lakota schools. Why I value President Trump in the White House. And why people like Steve Bannon are so important to keeping checks on the media. Without Dynamic Quality, static systems quickly become corrupted and out of control. And without a measure, you can never know if something is good or not. Which is exactly why the world needs more Darbi Boddys. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Public Education Scam: It’s all about protecting an image to sell tax increases no matter how bad the behavior of the employees is

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

This is how they contain stories and keep things from the public. Most people don’t understand the law or their rights and are easily intimidated. But not Venessa Wells. With the amount of information that has come out about this client, discovery would be a good thing, and would put everything in a public record where people could then learn much more. When I saw this, I took it as a bullying tactic, and I don’t like bullies. Especially after what we learned after the police report. The response to this notice resulted in legal action going the other way, and the lawsuits against the school that have been occurring. This employee of Lakota schools is their responsibility, and bad conduct will not be tolerated. They should have dealt with him in 2020 when they first learned of this vile behavior.

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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