No New Taxes Means No Relief: Lakota is at it again

I have been saying no to Lakota tax increases for a long time. People who dislike that fact have a ready-made story about me. They say I will never be for anything. They say I hate schools. They say I would rather buy a television than teach a child. That last one is a joke I make myself, and I will make it again before we are done, because I would rather keep my money than subsidize a system that lectures families about everything except the marketplace those children will enter. I am not against education. I am against the public-education trick: lose at the ballot box, split the package, dress it up as a renewal, and come back until the people who write the checks get tired.

Last November the district asked this community for more than half a billion dollars. Voters answered with 61% no. That was not a polite disagreement. That was a verdict. Eight months later, the same board put a two-hundred-twenty-three-million-dollar, thirty-seven-year bond on the November 3, 2026 ballot and called it Phase One. They say it is not a tax increase. They say it merely replaces a bond that expires in 2028. They say seventy-seven dollars a year on a hundred-thousand-dollar home is what you are already paying, so why not keep paying it?

Here is what that sentence actually means. You have been making a mortgage payment to the school district. The mortgage is almost paid off. Instead of celebrating the payoff, they want you to sign a new note for thirty-seven more years and call the signing a favor. That is no new taxes. That is no tax relief. And tax relief is the thing this community has earned.

The Mortgage They Do Not Want You to Pay Off

Imagine a family in Liberty Township that bought a house in the early nineties. They paid the bank. They paid Lakota. They raised children who left the system twenty years ago. They kept writing the check because that is what property owners in Ohio do. They did not get a parade when the old bond schedule wound down. They got a brochure.

The brochure says the same thing every brochure says. Our buildings need work. Our classes are too large. Our enrollment is about to explode. If you vote no, you are against children. If you vote yes, your bill stays the same. Status quo. Responsible. Community.

I have watched this language for two decades. It is professional consent-building. The school board does not know how to say no, and the superintendent’s office is not hired to manage scarcity. It is hired to keep the train on the tracks after the train has already gone over the hill. When the train leaves the rails, they do not ask why the engineer was cheering. They ask the passengers for a new train.

Voting yes does not keep your taxes the same in any moral sense. It prevents the cut you were about to receive when the old debt died.

That is the whole argument, and everything else is scenery. The district is not wrong that buildings age. The district is not wrong that some classrooms are crowded. The district is wrong to claim that those facts entitle it to another generation of extraction without ever letting the burden fall on the people who already paid.

What Is Actually on the November 3 Ballot

Let us be precise, because the district is precise when it helps them and foggy when it does not.

On June 9, 2026, the Lakota Board of Education voted to place a bond issue before every elector in the district. The principal amount is $223,483,492. The maximum term is thirty-seven years. The Butler County Auditor certified an estimated average annual levy of 2.20 mills, which the resolution states amounts to $77 for each $100,000 of the county auditor’s market value. Collections would begin with tax year 2028 and first come due in calendar year 2029, timed to the death of the existing roughly 2.23 mill bond. [1] The election is Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

The money is not operating cash. It cannot legally be dumped into teacher salaries. It is debt service for facilities: renovating and improving existing schools, constructing facilities, safety work, furniture and equipment, site work, and land. Phase One of the Master Facilities Plan is estimated at $300 million. The Ohio Facilities Construction Commission would put up about seventy-seven million. Local taxpayers would carry $223 million.

If it passes, the district’s current sketch looks like this. Grade bands are being rearranged to reduce transitions: preschool at Liberty Early Childhood; K-5 in the remaining elementary plants; grades 6-8 at East Freshman and Plains Junior after additions; and grades 9-12 at East and West high schools after additions. Three schools will close: Adena Elementary, Ridge Junior, and the West Freshman / Creekside / Central complex. Twenty-one buildings become eighteen. [2]

That is the product. Now look at the price tag they put in the window.

The Seventy-Seven-Dollar Illusion

Every piece of official copy leads with $77 per $100,000. That number is not a lie. It is a costume. There is not a representative owner-occupied house in Liberty Township or West Chester listed on the tax duplicate at $100,000. Liberty’s recent median sales have been in the low-to-mid-500s. West Chester’s typical values sit in the low-to-mid-four hundreds.

Auditor market value / Annual cost of 2.20 mills / What the brochure calls it $100,000 / $77 / The headline $350,000 / About $270 / A modest house here $450,000 / About $347 / Common West Chester $530,000 / About $408 / Common Liberty Township $650,000 / About $501 / Plenty of roofs in this district

Figures are the bond’s stated $77 per $100,000, scaled. They do not include other school, township, or county levies.

Three hundred to four hundred dollars a year is not a Friday-night blowout at Liberty Center, though I have heard that comparison from people inside the system. It is a 65-inch television. It is several trips to Ford’s Garage. It is the difference between a household that just finished paying for someone else’s children and a household that gets to keep the last chapter of the old bond. The district calls it no increase because the new millage is almost identical to the old millage. I call it locking the extraction in place until most of the people voting today are dead.

Last Year They Asked for Half a Billion

November 4, 2025, was not a close call. The package failed 60.81 percent to 39.19 percent. The bond alone sought $506.4 million. There was a permanent-improvement levy riding along. Ballot language looked like nearly six mills. The district insisted the net would be 2.66 mills, or about $93 per $100,000, if collections waited until 2029 and old debt rolled off. Voters did not buy the complexity. [3]

I was not surprised. The 2025 plan was ostentatious. Tear-downs. New elementaries. A district-wide redesign sold as inevitability. When a community that has already funded a quarter-billion-dollar annual operation looks at a half-billion construction dream and says no, a healthy institution would ask whether the dream was the problem. Lakota asked how to slice the dream so it would fit through the door.

Phase One is the slice. Grades six through twelve first. Elementaries later. Same philosophy, smaller first bite, friendlier slogan. The public-education trick is to keep putting it on the ballot until compassion and confusion outvote memory. I do not think the memory of last November is that short. We will find out on November 3.

The Enrollment Story They Need You to Believe

The pitch depends on a spike. Maintain seventeen thousand students for years, then warn that apartments and new housing will deliver two thousand more children, nineteen thousand by 2033, hundreds already over capacity, nearly twenty-five hundred over by the end of the forecast if you use the aggressive numbers. Build or drown. That is the emergency.

The district’s own September 2025 slides said enrollment had reached 17,348, OFCC capacity was 16,577, and the system was already 771 students over. They projected 19,074 by 2033. [4] I do not dismiss crowding where it exists. I dismiss the habit of treating the high case as destiny and the housing pipeline as an act of God.

FutureThink Was More Cautious Than the Brochure

In March 2026, FutureThink delivered an enrollment study to the district. The total for 2025-26 in that report is 16,913. The ten-year path does not march to nineteen thousand. It drifts downward toward the mid-sixteen thousands by the mid-2030s. [5] The consultants, to their credit, tell the district to monitor births, housing, community school enrollment, and open enrollment. That is what a serious projection does. It does not convert every apartment proposal into a permanent crisis.

Two stories can be true at once. Some buildings feel tight today. Some grade levels bulge. And the long-run student count may not justify a thirty-seven-year debt service schedule sold as if the spike were already signed into law. If the independent study is closer to reality than the campaign slide, Lakota would be borrowing against a future that is not arriving.

This is why I keep dragging housing policy into a school argument. Enrollment is not weather. Enrollment is the residue of planning decisions made by trustees, zoning boards, and developers along the corridors we all drive. When those decisions load the district with children whose households do not share the same property-tax skin as a longtime homeowner, the school office declares an emergency, and the homeowner discovers another levy.

Apartments, Renters, and Who Pays the Bill

I like Costco. I like Liberty Center. I like development that looks like a place you would take your family on purpose. I do not like the psychological trick of county and township government, which is to look at empty dirt, imagine bodies, and call the bodies success. Bodies consume services. Bodies send children to school. Bodies vote. Bodies in apartments do not sit on the tax duplicate the way a paid-off house does.

The owner of the apartment building pays property tax once. The families inside pay rent. They use the schools, the roads, the deputies, the parks. On election day they are citizens, as they should be. The structural mismatch is still real. The coalition that benefits from the spending can grow faster than the coalition that writes the largest checks. School districts understand that math even when they pretend the conversation is only about children.

Renters vote for the services. Homeowners pay the bill. That is not a slur. It is the system’s design.

Todd Minniear saw this coming. He is a Liberty Township trustee, a small-government guy and not my Siamese twin. We do not agree on every topic. We agree on the load-bearing ones. When apartment proposals stacked up near new commercial toys, Todd’s warning was simple. You cannot recklessly add households that demand a school system and then act shocked when the school system sends the invoice to the people who already paid the taxes for it for thirty years.

Two years ago, in the hearings around those proposals, the answer from too many planners was that we would cross that bridge when we came to it. We are on the bridge. Lakota is the tollbooth. The district says there is a spike; therefore, you must keep paying. I say the spike, to the extent it is real, is the bill for yes votes that should have been no votes.

Ford’s Garage Instead of Another Stack of Balconies

If you want a picture of the difference one trustee can make, drive to Liberty Center and eat. During COVID, the place struggled. Condos were hard to move. The playground sat dark after the rest of the country had taken off their masks, because nobody wanted to call the health department to ask permission to let children play. I texted Todd from lunch. Why is this still closed? He made calls. The playground opened. My grandkids used it. That is government doing a small thing that actually matters.

There was also a temptation to drop an apartment complex onto the pad where Ford’s Garage sits now. Another trustee might have taken the bodies. Todd helped kill the apartment idea. A year and a half later, a theme restaurant arrived, the kind of room you expect in Orlando or Las Vegas, except you can go on a Thursday after a movie at the theater across the little park. On the menu there is a Sheriff Jones burger and a Todd Minniear burger. The Todd burger is the one I order. It is messy. It is also a tax base that turns over every night: people come, spend, leave, and do not enroll a child at 7:45 in the morning.

That is the contrast to consider. Commercial vitality throws off sales and property revenue without parking a permanent pupil in a classroom. An apartment complex throws off one owner’s tax bill and a precinct full of service demand. When Lakota says the enrollment spike requires a new thirty-seven-year note, they are describing the second model and mailing the statement to the first.

A Quarter-Billion Operating Budget, Already

Facilities are the ask this year. Operations are the ocean the ask floats on. Lakota’s general-fund operation is in the neighborhood of $226 million for the current fiscal year, with recent actual spending already north of two hundred million and climbing. [6] Call it a quarter of a billion dollars a year for one suburban district. Salaries and benefits eat most of it, as they do everywhere the public-sector union model still sets the clock.

On a student count near seventeen thousand, that is roughly thirteen thousand dollars per pupil from the operating side alone, before you count capital dreams. Ohio, as a state, spends near $17,000 per pupil. The national current-expenditure figures sit higher still, depending on the year and the accountant.

I can already hear the reply. See? We spend less than the average. We are efficient. Give us the bond. That is a category error. Below-average unit cost does not grant a moral claim on thirty-seven more years of debt if the outcomes are mediocre and the administration’s reflex is always expansion. A factory can spend less per widget than its competitors and still ship a product nobody wants to buy. The customers in this case cannot easily leave, because the tax is bolted to the house.

This community has not been stingy. The last bond was 2005. The last operating and permanent-improvement levy was in 2013, sold as a five-year bridge and extended through 2028. That stretch is the part the district likes to advertise as thrift. I read it as evidence that the last yes vote was larger than the brochure admitted, and that the institution learned it could live on the leftover air. Now that the air is thinning, they want the next yes before you notice you were about to breathe.

Outcomes Are the Part the Brochures Skip

Nice buildings do not automatically mean prepared adults. Lakota has had serious money for decades. Too many graduates still walk out unready for work or for a college that is not a remedial waiting room. I have talked to hundreds of people inside this system over the years. Plenty of them are decent. Plenty of classrooms are trying. The institution, as an institution, has drifted toward ideology and away from the marketplace.

I do not want Pride Month as a substitute for literacy. I do not want sexual politics smuggled in under social-emotional wallpaper. I do not want a free babysitting service that congratulates itself for equity language while employers quietly wonder what the diploma means. When district people tell me three hundred dollars a year is a small price to teach kids, they are asking me to pay my fair share of their mistakes and their curriculum. Fair share is the phrase you use when you have already decided the number and only need a sermon.

Saying no to the bond is not a curriculum veto by itself. Bond money is concrete and steel. But it is one of the few remaining levers a property owner has when the board will not say no, the superintendent class will not manage, and the next operating levy is already a rumor for 2028. They split the cost. Facilities now. Operations later. Teachers’ union step increases forever. If you keep saying yes to the split, you never get to the conversation about living within the two hundred twenty-six million.

Nancy Nix and the Math Problem of Property Taxes

I am going to say something that confuses the people who think I only throw rocks. I like competent government. I fought to put competent people in office. When they run the numbers in the black, I say so. Nancy Nix has been that kind of fiscal adult in Butler County. She does not enjoy the compliment. She has earned it. The county has operated with a seriousness about headcount and cash that you cannot take for granted anywhere in America.

I sat with her long enough to hear what a good auditor has to say, even when activists want a simpler hymn. There is a growing movement in Ohio to repeal property taxes outright. I hear from those people constantly. Many of them read me. They are tired of paying for schools after their children have been gone for twenty years. They look at a five-hundred-thousand-dollar house and see three or four hundred dollars a year of government clinging to the siding. They want the money back.

Nancy is not the enemy of that instinct. She is the person who has to make arithmetic survive contact with a government that was built on the assumption that the property-tax river never dries up. You cannot pull the plug on every district, every township, every county function on a Tuesday and call it a finished symphony. You also cannot keep telling seventy-year-olds that the river is sacred. The model is ancient; it is tied to ZIP codes instead of children, and young buyers are not lining up to inherit the millage with a smile.

That is the larger war. This levy is a local battle inside it. If Ohio ever funds students instead of geography, districts like Lakota will have to compete. Competition is the only force that brings per-pupil cost down without a speech. Until then, the only language the cheerleaders understand is a lost election.

What Voting No Actually Does

If the bond fails, the old millage still expires. That is the point they dance around. Failure is a tax cut in 2029, not a freeze in amber. The district will still have a massive operating budget. The buildings will still stand. The state co-funding window may shift. They will tell you that you left free state money on the table. State money is not free. It is a matching grant that requires you to indenture your own duplicate for a generation.

If the bond passes, you will be told nothing changed. Your bill looks familiar. The familiar bill is the trick. You just refinanced a house you had nearly paid off and congratulated yourself for keeping the payment flat.

I am a huge no. I will say it in rooms where it is unpopular. I will say it to people in the district who think I am cheap. I will say it to the professional consensus-builders who punish dissent until the dissenters get tired. I do not threaten anyone. I do not need to. I put facts in front of people who still own their own minds.

Good Government Is the Art of the Timely No

Todd saying no to apartments is why Ford’s Garage exists. A school board saying no to a superintendent’s monument is how you stay inside two hundred twenty-six million dollars. Voters saying no in 2025 is why this year’s ask is smaller. Voters saying no in 2026 is how you force the next conversation: manage the district you have, stop using development mistakes as a hostage note, and stop treating property owners as an ATM with a mascot.

People have asked me to run for the school board. I have always said no, because commentary requires independence. I may not say no forever. The board needs members who can stand in public, explain a refusal, and live with not being invited to the Friday wine tasting. Most people want to be liked. The system is built on that weakness. Liked people vote yes. Adults vote no and then do the hard work of living with the no.

Until that board exists, the taxpayer’s tool is the ballot. Not a riot. Not a smear. A no. Then another no if they come back in 2027. They will come back. They always come back. The only way the chaos model ends is if someone on the inside learns to stay within means, and someone on the outside keeps the lights on long enough for that lesson to hurt.

The Ask, Without the Perfume

Lakota wants you to authorize two hundred twenty-three million dollars of new bonded debt for thirty-seven years, collected at about seventy-seven dollars per hundred thousand of auditor value, beginning in 2029, to rebuild the secondary side of a district that already spends more than two hundred million a year, after voters crushed a five-hundred-six-million-dollar version of the same philosophy last fall.

They want you to believe enrollment is racing toward nineteen thousand even though a study sitting in their own files is far more cautious. They want you to treat apartment-driven growth as an act of nature. They want you to accept that a paid-off bond is a crisis rather than a reward. They want you to call that stewardship.

I want the money back. Not because I think children are disposable. Because I think a system that cannot live on a quarter-billion dollars a year, cannot tell a straight story about its own headcount, and cannot resist the next housing fad has lost the right to call the next thirty-seven years inevitable.

Vote no on November 3. If they bring an operating levy next, vote no again. Hire managers instead of cheerleaders. Put people on the board who can say the word. Keep the Todd Minniear instinct alive in the townships: better a restaurant that turns tables than a balcony that turns ballots. And when the old bond dies, do something radical in American public life. Keep the savings.

Notes

The numbered references in the essay correspond to the following sources. They are starting points, not a claim that any official agrees with my conclusions.

[1] Lakota Board of Education, Resolution to Proceed, June 9, 2026: bonds in the principal amount of $223,483,492; estimated average annual levy of 2.20 mills, certified as $77 per $100,000 of county auditor market value; election November 3, 2026; collections commencing in 2028, first due in calendar year 2029.

[2] Journal-News, July 6, 2026, and WCPO: Phase One would take Adena Elementary, Ridge Junior, and the Lakota West Freshman/Creekside/Lakota Central complex offline; reduce the building count from 21 to 18; add buildings at East Freshman, Plains Junior, and both high schools.

[3] Cincinnati Enquirer and Journal-News, November 2025: the November 4, 2025 bond and permanent improvement package failed 60.81 percent to 39.19 percent. The 2025 bond request was $506.4 million, plus a 0.95-mill PI levy.

[4] District presentations, September 2025: enrollment reported at 17,348 as of late September 2025; OFCC capacity listed at 16,577; district claimed it was already 771 students over capacity and projected 19,074 by 2033.

[5] FutureThink enrollment study for Lakota Local School District, March 11, 2026: 2025-26 total 16,913; projection declines toward approximately 16,555 by 2035-36. The study itself warns the district to watch live births, housing, and open enrollment.

[6] Lakota five-year forecast materials, Treasurer Adam Zink: FY2026 general-fund operating investment listed near $226 million; FY2025 general-fund expenditures in the low $221 million range before other financing uses.

Congratulations to Ben Nguyen To the Lakota School Board: What would it take for me to support public schools

There’s a lot to say about the recent Lakota school board election, and I want to start by congratulating Ben Nguyen on his historic win. At just 18 years old, he’s now the youngest person ever elected to the Lakota Board of Education, and he achieved this with a clear, conservative message that resonated with voters in Butler County. Nguyen earned 18.61% of the vote, joining incumbent Kelley Casper and newcomer Alex Argo on the five-member board. His victory wasn’t just symbolic—it was a direct response to the district’s failed $506 million levy, which voters rejected by a 61% margin. That levy, which would have demolished nine buildings and built four new ones, was a bloated attempt to reinvent the district with taxpayer money. Nguyen’s campaign stood firmly against it, and his win signals that the community is tired of being asked to fund ideological experiments disguised as infrastructure upgrades. However, there is much more to all this. The questions that arose during this campaign and election season, in general, concern my support of Lakota schools, which school board member Doug Horton brought up in a video he posted just before the election. In short, if Lakota management wants to know what it would take to get my support, I would say to them to stop destroying the kind of school board members that I support. And I would be a lot less critical. But when the school board pushes away good people and lobbies to keep the kind of people who glaze over sex scandals, horrendous Democrat strategies in the school to teach young people, and ask for tax increases, especially the most expensive in the history of Ohio, then I’m going to be very critical, and I will provide that criticism in voluminous detail so much so, that the anti tax movement in Butler County will continue to grow, as it has over these years since 2013, and even earlier.

Ben Nguyen is a start, not a solution to what I would call a detrimental school board full of liberal losers. The real problem is systemic. For years, we’ve seen conservative school board members pushed out by coordinated efforts from union-backed liberals and their media allies. Darbi Boddy is a prime example. Elected in 2021, she was removed in 2024 after a civil protection order filed by fellow board member Isaac Adi—once her political ally—barred her from attending meetings for over 90 days. The board declared her absence “insufficient,” and just like that, she was gone. Her removal wasn’t about functionality—it was a matter of political theater. Boddy had challenged DEI programs, opposed transgender policies, and criticized the district’s hiring practices. That made her a target. The board censured her, demanded her resignation, and ultimately replaced her with Christina French, a longtime district insider. It’s a pattern: elect a conservative, stir up controversy, isolate them, and replace them with someone more “manageable.” I know all the characters of that conservative board very well, and I know what was done to pit them against each other, and when a school system plays that game, and expects to get away with it, well, they have another thing coming. I’m not in the business of putting up with that, and I never will be. I was in the district long before many of these people were even born, and I will be around long after they all leave to buy condos in Florida to escape the high taxes they leave behind. Darbi is just one example of this kind of radical school board behavior; therefore, when asked what it would take to win my support for Lakota schools, the answer is easy. Don’t run off school board members whom I support. Radicalism can go both ways, ladies and gentlemen.

This is why I’ve been so critical of Lakota Schools over the years. It’s not that I hate education—I would say my track record shows where my heart is; there are few people anywhere who love education more than I do. I respect people who read books and work to sharpen and utilize their intelligence. I do not trust institutionalized education because it’s often populated by less-than-great individuals, which is reflected directly in the product. And with public schools, I don’t respect the system that’s been built on a century-old foundation of progressive ideology. Public schools, as they exist today, are more about managing perception than delivering results. When you fill school boards with people like Julie Shaffer and Kelley Casper—both endorsed by the Butler County Democrat Party—you get a culture of spending, secrecy, and suppression. They don’t want scrutiny because scrutiny threatens their funding. They don’t wish to be judged because judgment exposes their failures. And when scandals happen—whether it’s inappropriate teacher behavior, administrative misconduct, or ideological overreach—they bury it. That’s why I created my own media platform: to report what they won’t. If you want to know what’s really going on in Lakota, you won’t find it in the district’s press releases. You’ll find it in the stories they try to silence.

So here’s the deal: I’ll support Lakota when Lakota supports the community. That means electing people like Ben Nguyen—people who understand the value of education without being beholden to the liberal establishment. It means rejecting levies that ask for hundreds of millions without accountability. It means standing up for parents, taxpayers, and students—not just the union’s comfort level of lazy labor desires, such as short workdays, fewer students to teach, summers off, and high pay for doing very little. I’ve seen good people try to make a difference on the board, only to be run off by political manipulation; it’s all well-documented. I’m encouraged that Nguyen, with his sharp mind and diplomatic personality, can navigate those waters and bring real change. If we can recruit two or three more like him, we might finally see a board that genuinely reflects the community’s values. But given the election cycles, it’s going to take a while unless we push off some of these losers the way they have pushed away our conservatives, like Darbi, and Todd Parnell—even Lynda O’Connor. And with Lynda, I know exactly how that game unfolded; she became so deeply involved in the liberal Lakota movement that she essentially had to adopt its values to attend the meetings. I don’t think strong personalities like Ben Nguyen will be pushed away, because he has that extra gear that is so needed in these kinds of controversial political environments. He, like Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be Ohio’s next governor, is part of a new generation that will play these old political games better than they have been played in the past. We have tried to play it straight with these current school board members, and all they have given us are Antifa like union tactics of left-wing radicalism, and many people in the district simply aren’t going to put up with it. I’m certainly not going to, under any conditions. And until there are more options on the school board, I’ll continue to call it as I see it. If you want me to stop criticizing Lakota, stop putting bad people in charge. Put in people I can respect. But asking, even demanding respect when Lakota hasn’t earned it, is a ridiculous proposition that only losers would even think of. And until there are more people like Ben Nguyen involved in Lakota schools, I will criticize them extensively because they deserve it.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota’s Levy is the Most Expensive in Ohio’s History: Meet Ben Nguyen who is a solution for the future

After I met Ben Nguyen and endorsed him for the Lakota school board for the upcoming November 2025 election, the business of why he was running evolved into a community priority. Ben is a young man who wants to stay in the school district, but with the loan amount that is looming with the approval of this massive levy from Lakota, the easy math is projecting the debt burden alone to be an imposition of $1.2 billion onto the economy of the Lakota school district, which is outrageously too much. The amount of economic growth that the community would need to generate to offset the cost of this levy is unrealistic, and it would certainly set the course for the kind of decline that most affluent areas experience over their lifetimes. Things have been relatively good in West Chester and Liberty Township for several decades, mainly because we have had a strong political commitment to prevent excessive taxation. That has kept things somewhat affordable, but it’s a delicate balance that requires constant political pressure to maintain low taxes. Butler County itself has a lot of Republicans in it, and republicans don’t like taxes for big, ballooning government. It has been a significant number of years since the Lakota school district attempted to put a levy on the ballot, mainly due to the brand damage that the school itself would have incurred, as we have maintained a sharp resistance to excessive taxation within the school district. However, Lakota has been waiting until it had a four-member majority of Democrat-minded big spenders, and it now has that, and it is taking its shot with the most expensive school levy attempt in Ohio history. And what they want now isn’t all. If they can pass this levy, they have an operations levy in mind that will also be enormously expensive. So Ben and I discussed all this on camera, because people want to know some of these details that newspapers and yard signs never get to tell the complete story.

Even though Ben has just graduated from Lakota, he had a great experience at the school. He loves his community and wants to stay in it, attending college at Miami University. And start a family in his hometown. However, the problem is a math problem: at the current rate of inflation and interest rates, the already average cost of a home in the Lakota school district is around $450,000. By the time Ben graduates and wants to start a family in his mid-20s, those exact costs will be in the $ 600,000 range, and the math doesn’t work out. And that will all be without the price of this Lakota levy. Adding that $ 1.2 billion debt liability to the community would be the end for many residents who are fixed-income types, and it would significantly shorten the list of people who could afford to buy into the community. And as we drive around cities with former opulent homes and wonder how they become crime-ridden slums, this is how that process begins. A good place to live is started. People get comfortable with things and stop monitoring costs, and they elect Democrats. Democrats get on school boards and city councils, and start voting for excessive spending, wrap their communities in debt obligations, and poof, a slum is born. The economy collapses. The values drop. And everyone loses a lot of money, and the only opportunities people see for themselves are crime. It’s essentially the story of Middletown, Ohio, just to the north of the Lakota school district. There are numerous examples throughout the city of Cincinnati. However, due to the kind of people in Butler County who lean towards Republican politics, we have managed to prevent that cycle up to this point. But the danger is looming.

So as Ben and I sat down together to shoot a video so we could talk about all these things, one of his key reasons for running for the school board is to keep the taxes low so that he can afford to stay in the school district and to raise a family here, as he grew up. As a young man with natural political gifts, he wasn’t trying to overachieve; he was trying to save his community from excessive taxation. And in my opinion, that is a very noble quest that is mature well beyond his years. As I spoke to him, it was clear that his intelligence is precisely what the Lakota school board needs. We discussed a variety of topics, including the support of current school board member Isaac Adi and past board president Lynda O’Connor. Many believe those endorsements are liabilities to him, suggesting that we need to present a completely fresh start as a Republican Party approach. But when you’re dealing with these kinds of issues, you have to be able to unite people of drastically different levels of Republican politics. In a two-party system, 50% of anything will have people very wide apart on most political matters. However, on things they can agree on, the political system must be able to rally people toward a shared objective. And high taxes and the defense against them is one that most Republicans can relate to.

Ben and I covered a lot of topics that should make it very easy for voters to get behind him. With him on the school board, there is a chance to really shape the future with some reasonable management. However, it will take more than just Ben Nguyen; there will need to be more people to join him, otherwise, he will be outvoted by the same individuals who have just proposed the most significant tax increase in Ohio’s history. And even if this one is defeated, Lakota will try again and again until it passes with spring votes, summer votes, or anything it takes, until they catch people off guard and can manage to extract more taxes from the community. And once they do that, the impact on the community will start its decline. So this isn’t just a fight to elect a very young man, Ben Nguyen, to the Lakota school board. This is a fight to keep the cost of living low enough for people to afford it, so that our community won’t follow so many others into their decline due to over taxation. If left alone, Democrat types who end up in these political offices over time will do as they are in Lakota, asking for outrageous amounts of money with no end in sight. And if we want to manage that process, we have to have people like Ben Nguyen on the school board. He needs to get elected, and our community needs a plan to elect two or three more like him, so that there is a clear majority that can vote and prevent tax increases. Ben isn’t against school funding. However, as we discussed, Lakota has a $250 million yearly budget, which should be sufficient to operate a school that teaches children. The community well supports Lakota schools as they currently are. The purpose of this levy and the tax burden that comes with it is to facilitate more wasteful spending, including building new schools that will require more staff to run, and that means more people on payroll, inflating an already high budget. So, Lakota needs to hear from the community, no more taxes. And they need a school board that can work with what they already have. And Ben Nguyen looks to be a first step in that direction. And after speaking with him, I can’t wait to vote for him. And after you hear him talk, I think you will feel the same.

Rich Hoffman

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Lipstick on a Pig: Is it fair to refer to the Lakota school board as swine?

Since I wrote about the ridiculous levy request from Lakota schools to build a bunch of new schools while tearing down the old ones, to the cost of 500 million dollars, people have been suggesting to me that maybe I was being too hard on the perpetrators, the Lakota school board by referring to them as pigs, that they were no better than swine. However, I think that is the polite word for them, and the proper way to say it. People who tend to have moral bankruptcy, as a group, tend to think that cosmetic improvements will hide the horrendous decisions they make in their lives, which often end up costing a lot of money. This is precisely why Democrats, when elected, tend to run their communities into the ground. And yes, all these people on the Lakota school board are Democrats. It will be a lot better for people in the future when school board people have to run through the filter of a political party, so people know who they are voting for. However, they currently hide behind a façade of neutrality. Four out of five of the Lakota school board members are very liberal, and they spend money the way that liberals always do. But that’s not the worst of it. Now, the fifth school board member, Isaac Adi, I haven’t been too crazy about him, even though he’s considered a Republican. What he did to Darbi Boddy was unforgivable. But he and I talked for a long time in Senator Lang’s office, and we can at least work together. So I’m not surprised that he voted no on this latest Lakota boondoggle. However, referring to what they want to do as putting lipstick on a pig, because the pig will still be a pig, is the correct way to describe this situation.

And I wish them luck; I hope they can find voters for their tax increase as effectively as they find their clothes after a night of hard drinking at education conferences. Everyone knows the stories; there is nothing secret about it. These aren’t very high-quality people, and that showed itself during the last school superintendent drama, where he got caught offering his wife on Craigslist while they were traveling out of town to music concerts, for group sex parties. That superintendent had to resign because the community was upset about it, and this school board could only look at those of us who were upset about it and declare that we should have kept it all a secret, so people never found out, for the good of the children, of course. We went through a lot of drama over that issue because, essentially, the superintendent and his wife talked about sexual fantasies with students who went to Lakota, where he was supposed to be in charge, and that is a major no-no. And I wouldn’t say that we were getting all this information second-hand through rumors, but from the ex-wife herself. It was never a question as to whether her husband, the Lakota superintendent, had an overly sexualized lifestyle. He did. It was whether or not he was allowed to have such a private life as a public figure. Like a lot of really radically liberal people, he thought he could be one thing in public and be something completely different in private, but that’s not how things cook in the kitchen. People in leadership roles are judged based on the entirety of their lives, and even if you are talking about little kids as sexual objects in just “pillow talk,” it still shows intent.

I did talk to prosecutors about the Lakota case and why there was reluctance to go after him for child endangerment, because the ex-wife was reliable testimony, and there was a police report where he admitted it. So it was pretty clear-cut. And the answer I got would melt your face with anger. Because the truth is, we have a very pornographic society, and this Lakota administrator isn’t the only one doing this kind of stuff. It’s a common behavior, the overly sexual lives of people who have too much personal income, so that they can indulge in porn addictions. And Lakota schools, as do most schools with high population densities, have a lot of bored employees who think too much about sex. And it’s just a dangerous combination to put coming-of-age kids in passive roles with adults thinking way too much about sex. As it turned out, nobody cared about the former Lakota school superintendent because most people didn’t see that he was doing anything wrong. Because they were either doing it too, or they were thinking about it. I have never been a big fan of public schools, but after the Lakota school superintendent case and the behavior of this same school board, which tried to cover it all up as best they could, I’m a hard no on anything they propose. We can’t trust anything they say. At best, building new schools for these types of people is just putting lipstick on a pig, and in many cases, that pig is already at the slaughterhouse with a severed head, because of the school choice expansion that came out of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. These same people want to invest this much money in an education system that will have to undergo significant changes in the coming years.

But people will say that all the buildings they want to tear down are old and outdated. For Lakota to recruit the right kind of future employees, they need better buildings that can accommodate comfortable class sizes. If Lakota wants to have the best employees, we must provide better buildings for them to work in. Well, that is the lipstick on the pig talking. They have no idea what makes education work with kids. They are teaching kids all the wrong things for a society with changing priorities, and they are way behind the curve, out of touch at best. On a good day, they are teaching progressive social values, such as transgender bathrooms, and the 1619 Project, which is all over their website. That isn’t the kind of thing a community that voted for President Trump by overwhelming margins wants its children learning. The world is changing in ways they don’t like, and now they want to spend half a billion dollars to counteract it. They are out of their minds. And at the core of it, knowing many of the school board members personally, I wouldn’t trust a word they said if they were giving me directions to a highway while standing on the on-ramp. How can we believe them when they say that we need to spend all this money on new schools when they have spent years screwing up the old schools? I think it is very polite to refer to them as swine, so the lipstick on a pig metaphor is the right one for people of such low quality. They think that some fresh paint and new plaster will present them in a more favorable light to the public. But to accomplish that, a billion dollars wouldn’t be enough. Because a pig is still a pig, no matter how much lipstick you put on it.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The RINOs Who Helped Pass Issue 1 and Issue 2 in Ohio: Freedom of choice to hide the real evil hiding in the background

After more than 24 hours of review on why Issues 1 and 2 passed in Ohio, the right to kill babies and the pot head legalization measures that were passed by essentially the same margins on Election Night, November 7^th, 2023, a clear pattern emerges which is wonderfully represented in the picture below. A guy I call Skippy, who has always loomed in the background of our county politics like a lot of people who think similarly, felt entitled to let me know after the election that he was a “freedom” Republican and that my view of the world was authoritarian. And that he voted for “freedom of choice.” And, of course, my response is that with Republicans like him, who needs Democrats? I live in a very conservative area, but I go to plenty of events, some with that guy, and they drink and smoke openly like a bunch of derelicts and quite honestly, it has always bothered me. I don’t encourage drinking and I certainly don’t smoke, anything. I don’t even take aspirin when I get a cold. I despise drugs and those who use them. So I’m not surprised by those kinds of comments, but it certainly isn’t a rationalization for why Issue 2, the legalization of marijuana in Ohio, passed. There are a lot of weak people in the world, and a lot of people who abuse various drugs, alcohol included who I think make the world a much worse place because of their weak politics. The people who put the abortion issue forward, the attackers of our state of Ohio with a lot of outside money reflecting progressive causes, knew the attack vector, and they know people like Skippy here will vote in their direction because they like their drugs. So they attached it to the baby-killing law and snuck it across the finish line. Sure, the Democrats are vile and evil. But so are many who call themselves Republicans because they have their vices, and the bad guys are always able to exploit them for the perpetuation of evil.

Freedom of choice is actually presented as the right to make bad choices that impact other people with the degradation of the aftermath

I warned everyone prior to the election, quite a few weeks ahead, that Issues 1 and 2 would pass with around 56% to 57% of the vote, which is exactly what happened. It was essentially the same margin as we saw in August when we tried to raise the threshold of the constitution to 60% over what it is now at 50+1 to add amendments to the Ohio Constitution. Outside radicals, after they lost Roe v. Wade, turned their progressive intentions toward the states and saw that Ohio had a weak threshold, so they attacked, and now we know the result. By the time Republicans noticed the vulnerability it was already too late. The bad guys put marijuana on the same ballot as abortion purposely in the same way that candy is placed along the checkout line, encouraging temptations for last-minute purchases. If Republicans weren’t so busy smoking and drinking, they might have noticed a long time ago the threat. But they got suckered and played because there are way too many liberals in the Republican party who are soft on all issues, so they water down the defense of truly ethical problems, keep their minds focused on business only, and maintain a socially soft stance on morality which lets vast amounts of evil flourish in the back door of our society. And they are quite proud of it, even haughty. But when it is wondered why abortion passed in Ohio, and how attackers of our state were able to gain so much support, thank your local RINOs for being lured to the dark side and helping evil seed itself into our great state, which is now an embarrassment.

Generally, my favorite places in the state voted my way; they did not support Issue 1 or 2 in the northwest, Midwest (such as Darke County), and all of southwest Ohio flowing over into the east. But Dayton, Columbus, and all of Cleveland and Akron flowing over to the Pennsylvania border and along the coast of Lake Erie voted to smoke dope and kill babies, and that’s not surprising. There are a lot of RINOs in those areas and certainly plenty of scum-bag Democrats who tend to run those liberal cities. And that’s how the margins became what they were, which voter turnout was higher than usual. If Trump had been on the ticket, the ratio might have been better for real conservatives. But as it was, it didn’t surprise me and was a shame to watch. Anyone pushing drugs in a culture of any kind is causing the degradation of intellect and the destruction of your society from within. It has nothing to do with “freedom” of choice. Such things are hidden behind popular sentiments to hide their intentions, which is essentially a military attack to destroy us from within. History is filled with compliant fools who drank their way toward personal destruction, and now can Cheech and Chong laugh at the social degradation that they have now let into our culture to be, as the Pink Floyd song says, “comfortably numb.” Meanwhile, while everyone is numb, they expect you to walk compliantly into a slaughterhouse with a smile on your face because you have your drugs to numb any thoughts you might have about your actual condition. Drugs are poison that are intended to destroy the enemy with evil; that is why they are encouraged in any society that the bad guys want to kill.

I would remind everyone upset about these baby killers and pot smokers that the best way to defeat them is not to follow the rules they create to frame the argument. I say it to people dozens of times a week, and it certainly applies here: never let your enemies define the rules you live by. Laws, often as they are put forth, are constructed for people with bad intentions to perpetuate some ill will behind government power. The abortion issue isn’t about whether or not a baby is a baby at 12 weeks or nine months. A killing is a killing and evil, the same evil that caused God to give Canaan to Abraham, and abortion is murder, and pot and other drugs are inventions to numb the guilt people feel when they live immoral lives and make bad choices. And that’s what RINO Republicans did when they joined vile Democrats to pass both Issue 1 and Issue 2. They have the right to choose, even if those choices are wrong. They want the right to be diabolical scumbags if they so choose, and they use ballot language to hide their narrative of choice behind the real intention of vice for the sake of sin. That’s always why these same types of people didn’t have moral convictions when it came to the Lakota problems, where administrators were displaying a tendency to have sex with children or teach students alternative sexual lifestyles. It’s all the same moral depravity, and there are plenty of Republicans who live lives filled with bad choices. And when you combine them with diabolical Democrats, you get 57% who will vote to kill babies and do drugs without fear of prosecution. Because they want “freedom of choice,” as some vile libertarian argues it. The choice to be a scumbag, the choice to be child molesters or sexual swingers desecrating their marriage covenant in the eyes of God, or dope addicts stoned to Pink Floyd songs. And if such bad decisions produce a baby with some unwanted sexual union, they want the ability to kill that baby to erase the mistakes they made so they are free to smoke, drink, and be wastes of human flesh in a world in solid need of intellect.

Rich Hoffman

It’s Not About Unity in the Community or the Power of a Vocal Minority: But entirely a standard of right and wrong

This will be a nice yard sign for Trump supporters who can’t wait for next year to vote for, or against some anti-American political enemy.

Because I, like many people involved, I must at least provide fair warning. Enjoying people is one thing; agreeing with them is an entirely different matter. This was grotesquely obvious while driving by Lakota West in West Chester, Ohio, on August 8^th, 2023, where the special election was a significant focus. As far as the eye could see from the road were Vote No signs, a blatant reminder that the progressive government school there is a factory of liberal politics intent to convert confiscated wealth from property owners and to turn it into Democrat activism. And many Republican-leaning people have been suckered into the game, even to support it against conservative, traditional values. Even on issues like Issue 1, which would have made it more difficult to change the Ohio Constitution, Lakota schools are aggressive in favor of change. That’s the purpose of their existence, to change our traditional American culture into some monstrosity of liberalism. And that election day was just a reminder of that sentiment and the genuine catastrophe of the upcoming fall election in November. Lynda O’Conner is up for re-election, and many people close to the matter have been hoping that she wouldn’t run because the opposition against her is on a crusade that has not been seen at Lakota in all the years of its existence. Before things get too messy here, I would call to mind a few monumental memories of the past, such as when the Tea Party had to take a stand against John Kasich after he turned into a progressive after his loss with the state labor unions. They turned him into a progressive pretzel, and many of us worked hard to destroy him because we had to. In a few short years, you don’t see him around anymore. And many of the people who are now pushing for Lynda O’Conner to be re-elected this fall, after all that’s happened, went after Speaker of the House John Boehner and essentially knocked him out of the Republican Party because he was too much of a RINO.

It’s an old game; we all get it. Friendships are made with people who are politically dangerous so that they can be controlled and perhaps worked against their original positions. And that certainly has been the case with the Butler County Republican Party. It’s always tempting to be invited to the cool kids’ table just so they can control you, not because they really like you. I just spoke about an excellent event with Nancy Nix where some of us have had some cantankerous hostilities toward each other. But at that event, we put a lot of that aside and had a nice evening together and enjoyed the comedians who were performing. It was a nice story. But all that is about to go sideways with Lynda O’Conner, which is fine. But the belief that friendships and private meetings would turn the resistance against her into captured assets of compliance with party sentiments was ill-advised and has only stirred up the hornet’s nest. The people involved with this next generation’s fight against the progressive objectives of Lakota schools will not be enamored with the shiny keys of friendship and gaining a seat at the table with the cool kids of power. The people I know standing against Lynda O’Conner for this upcoming election have a moral problem with her. It goes far beyond even calling her a RINO. They are not interested in Unity for the Community or coming together as a Republican party; this is all about right and wrong and standing up to the intrusions of a progressive political machine that works against conservative values in every way possible. And the passion is much greater than in those days of Governor Kasich and John Boehner. Many of the people involved in those old battles are now part of the cool kid’s club, and they like it, and they are supporting Lynda for the upcoming election and have been whispering in her ear and thinking that little secret meetings and emails of consensus building might work as it had on them in the past. I heard about some of these attempts while driving by Lakota West on that August election day, and I feel compelled to warn everyone that this is different, and there will be severe brand damage in the aftermath. This is unlike anything yet experienced in politics, which says a lot. And I don’t think many people understand.

There is a really graphic version of this one that will be used later

The advice that I have been giving to people is that this is a throw-away election. If a new school board will not work with a three to two majority to eliminate excessive administrators to save runaway cost losses at the government schools, then what’s the point of any of it? Cutting 20 or 30 equity and inclusion administrative hires could save many millions of dollars, which Lakota needs to do. But there are a lot of soft-shelled tacos out there, some in the GOP who would be running as Democrats if it wasn’t Butler County who want to feel good about themselves by supporting a big government school. The trans issue has been a challenge forcing people’s real politics to emerge along those lines. I would say that because of the way everyone has treated Darbi Boddy as a school board member to let them choke on it. Let the rope go and let Lakota destroy itself; let the liberals have their way. Let them do what Biden has done to the country because then and only then will people wake up. The campaign to fight them will become more apparent when people see what they are about and can’t focus their union efforts of progressivism against someone like Darbi. And for the soft-shelled types who want to support Lakota under Lynda’s leadership, the tax levy they have in mind will change their sentiments quickly. And we’ll be back to fighting tax increases instead of legitimately trying to control the costs.

The people I have been talking to who are thinking of running and don’t think they have much of a chance, I have told them the same thing I’ve said to Lynda in the past. The union threshold is around 7000 voters. That is a baked-in number. If you want to beat them, you must get over 8000 voters, however possible. Lynda hopes to blend that a bit with GOP support, and enough RINO types are willing to cross that line because they don’t want more of a fight than what we have seen so far with Darbi on the board. Yet Lynda’s role against Darbi has woken up something new in the Lakota school district that goes far beyond typical political disagreements. Something that traditional politics has no way of dealing with. This is a battle over ethics and the essence of right and wrong, and the way Lynda handled the superintendent issue and the protection of children at Lakota is a deeply emotional issue that there is no compromise on. This isn’t like the days when the Tea Party wanted John Boehner out, and a more Tea Party type like Warren Davidson was put in, and everyone shook hands and ate a sandwich together. This is more of a civil war, casualties included. Many Lyin’ Lynda types have been waiting for this opportunity, and it’s only fair to warn everyone involved. Because I generally like everyone involved. But right and wrong are not negotiable. That’s certainly always been my position. If people wanted to be friends, okay, I’ve been willing. But I’ve never been willing to compromise right and wrong as determined by conservative, Republican politics. I’ve never been some dope-smoking libertarian. I’ve always been a traditional Republican party supporter. However, some of this new generation are perfectly willing to abandon any pretense of friendship to defend traditional, conservative values. And they are far more interested in doing what is suitable than compromising with what’s wrong to have unity in the community and an intact Republican party. And I provide that warning with sincerity for the good things in the past that have been done and the good memory of them.

These are the kind of teachers Lynda, Julie and Doug want teaching your kids at Lakota. Here is a recently hired teacher at Endeavor Elementary

Rich Hoffman

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Picasso and Darbi Boddy in Lakota: The power of Leadership and temptations of blue pill politics

Like all good art, I think it reaches beyond the obvious world and articulates a core problem in the Lakota school district. And it’s pretty good, a work of art that was supposedly done by a student that an angry mom put on Darbi Boddy’s webpage after a school board meeting on Monday, the 17th of July, 2023. Darbi had once again made news, or rather Lakota did. I watched what I could of the meeting in small segments, and one thing that was clear to me was best represented in that Picasso-like painting, a caricature of Darbi Boddy, one of the most controversial school board members in the entire United States, and how kids have come to think of her. Art often says all the things that a complicated subject can’t say in an obvious way, and this artistic rendition of Darbi certainly does, despite its obvious negativity. This time the controversy that made the news was that Darbi mentioned “blood libel,” which is a very real thing. And that caused quite a stir that the media in Cleveland, Ohio, was talking about, and it provoked a reaction out of school board member Kelly Casper that was quite astonishing. The school board had been talking about the recent Supreme Court case where affirmative action was struck down for college entry. And when Darbi mentioned that Lakota should also drop those types of hiring requirements, Kelly Casper said that Lakota never practiced that type of conduct. But immediately, the most recent diversity tzar comes to mind, a person who clearly was assigned the job because of the color of their skin. To me, this is a normal meeting. To the pro-public-school people, this was a devastating conversation because what they want is a blue-pill life where nobody knows anything; they just live their lives oblivious to the outside world. They certainly don’t want to talk about affirmative action as it relates to human resource issues or blood cults that might infiltrate the school’s culture and destroy all the children.

Yet what struck me while watching all this wasn’t just the defensiveness of Kelly Casper, who has a friend in school board president now in Lynda O’Conner, but in the role reversal that Lynda now played against Darbi in public that was quite ostentatious. I’ve known Lynda for a long time and remember when she felt that the other school board members were picking on her continuously just a few years ago. The previous school board president, Brad Lovell, singled Lynda out because she was supposedly the only conservative member on the board, and things were pretty contentious. Now in that exact same role, as Brad used to have, Lynda has essentially become Brad. I know how it made her feel, so I can certainly understand and sympathize with how it made Darbi feel. And this started before Darbi became such a controversial figure. If Lynda had treated Darbi fairly, as she had throughout that last election, Darbi would have been a much different person in office. Instead, when the election was over, Lynda moved to ostracize the newly elected member, who never misrepresented herself as anything but a Tea Party candidate. And once elected, she stayed true to the type of people who had just elected her, which is a significant portion of the very conservative region we all live in within the Lakota school district.

Fantastic Interview that explains the magnitude of the problem

Of course, the students see all this, and they form their opinions and based on the way that Lakota has treated Darbi, led by Lynda O’Conner in this case; it’s no wonder that if a young person reporting what they saw through art would make such a picture of Darbi as was put forth in the summer of 2023. In the picture, Darbi looks like some patriotic witch with the words “America” cast in a condescending way in the background. When we wonder why many kids these days become Democrat activists, here is a case where it’s happening right in front of our faces within one of the most prestigious public schools in the country. If it was happening there, it was happening everywhere. The leadership at Lakota, which is something that transferred from one person to another in the seat of President, had shown students that conservative opinions were not welcome and that people who expressed them would be punished and made fun of. Watching that Monday meeting, it’s quite clear that Lynda despises Darbi and doesn’t respect the voters who put her there. It was Lynda who changed political positions. Darbi is doing what Darbi was always going to do. Voters want someone who represents them in public, not people who fall in love with job titles and will do anything to have them. That is what has caused many of the problems in public education, and it’s not a mystery why students come to believe what they do about politics. The big question is why did Lynda O’Conner essentially become Brad Lovell when all that changed was the name of the person who was the school board president. And as to a bigger question, because apparently, Isaac Adi turned hard left after the election too, what makes people who were supposed to be Republican representatives turn into RINOs? Why is it so important to them to be accepted by their peers? Why aren’t they more like Darbi Boddy and fighting for the voters who elected them? Why do they think it’s acceptable to behave one way during elections, but an entirely other way, a much more Democrat way, once they are sitting in the president’s seat on a lowly school board for a public education system that is an obviously dying model socially.

FBI arrests 17 Jewish Rabbis in New Jersey charged with trafficking human organs, baby parts and money laundering. pic.twitter.com/X9RxBYtuYu
— Project TABS (@ProjectTabs) July 21, 2023

I love the Jewish people; without them, a Bible wouldn’t exist. Yet like all people, bad things do happen when they lose their way. In the past, they have fallen to Baal worship, and these days, the temptations toward evil are all too easy. And they are just as tempted as anybody.

All that adds up to the painting of Darbi Boddy by a student who had a parent put it on Darbi’s website as if to say it all with a simple visual. The poor leadership that runs these schools all over the country and are not supposed to be about politics at all are actually all about politics, liberal politics. Democrat social positions. And there is only one acceptable viewpoint. Conservatives are not allowed, not real ones, anyway. Public schools want to waste tax money on nonsense, and what they want to teach is unamerican and destructive to conservative values. And the only reason this is a clash is because Darbi is refusing to change her beliefs under the pressure of the group consensus on the board. At a point where I wanted to help her because I don’t like to see people being picked on, Lynda was Darbi, and Brad Lovell went well out of his way to treat her terribly from the seat of the president. And it looks like Lynda wanted so much to turn the tables that she worked hard to become the president, only to become Brad? This conflict is clear in that artistic rendition of Darbi. It shows how Democrats who run these public schools see opposition to their strategies for children, and it’s quite an honor for them to feel that way. But the more mysterious quandary is in how Lynda became what she used to hate. Or did she ever hate that treatment at all? Whatever the case, the students see what’s going on, their opinions about life are being formed, and the slant of their political beliefs are being shaped. And what they see is a fault of leadership as it exists and the power it provides to people who are obviously ill-equipped to handle it.

Rich Hoffman

Isaac Adi Gets Violent Again: An Interview with Darbi Boddy

It has been interesting to watch the trajectory of two school board officeholders who essentially started at the same place but took two different paths upon being elected to satisfy the parameters of accomplishment. Obviously, there is more to the conflict this past week between Isaac Adi and Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board, where the police investigated a condition of assault, where Isaac, yet again under pressure, lashed out at someone trying to record his public behavior. Darbi is a tough young lady who can handle conflicts just fine. But what’s interesting is how RINOs are created because once elected, Isaac went into an appeasement mode of the very kind of people he was supposed to be engaging with, whereas Darbi has stayed faithful to her campaign promises. I talked to Darbi about all this while we were both at a March for Children rally in downtown Hamilton, Ohio. Darbi never advertised herself as anything but a fighter for children’s rights, whereas the same was expected from Isaac. But once elected, what was witnessed was an instant barrage of influencers who often inject themselves into the newly elected person’s life, and the temptation to appease these new faces is powerful, and most people never develop resistance to it. When I see these clips of Isaac Adi acting violently toward people who put cameras on him to record aggressive behavior, I see that conflict in his actions. Isaac is not alone in this problem. Being authentic has a freedom of its own which was quite apparent when I was able to talk to Darbi on camera about her first few years as a school board member at Lakota. You can see freedom of conscience in her because she has stayed true to herself. But others have not, and that often leads to the kind of obvious frustrations on the face of Isaac Adi in the footage of him lashing out at Darbi.

I worked with both Isaac and Darbi during their campaigns because many of us wanted to help Lynda O’Conner have conservative votes to work with on the Lakota school board. We felt sorry for Lynda and tried to help her. Isaac and Darbi essentially ran together as a package during the campaign, and they won their elections easily. But as soon as the election was over, Lynda started talking about controlling the school board members in ways that didn’t sound very Republican. And immediately, the OSBA (Ohio School Board Association) started to do its work; it’s like a club. They invite new school board members into the warm embrace of friendship, and it doesn’t take much for that type of romance to entice lonely people or people with a natural personality to want to please others. Admittingly, that was a concern I had about Isaac during the campaign; he was so friendly and so outgoing that I was concerned that he would find the desire to appease the other school board members too lucrative when conflict was the best approach. One thing that we did talk about that didn’t make it on camera was Darbi’s support network, with Kelly Kohls at the National Leadership Council (NSBLC), which offers an alternative to the support of the more labor-union-controlled OSBA. Lynda O’Conner and I have talked specifically about the OSBA; she thinks it’s a good organization. I think along the lines of Darbi and Kelly on the matter. But the obvious results are in the influences that led to Darbi doing what voters expected on the Lakota school board and Isaac looking to appease all these new friends, which is the game of politics that happens at every level.

As I explained to Darbi, I am proud of her, as many are. I’ve been doing this kind of thing, supporting candidates in many ways, for many years, and most of the time, it results in a dud. It’s like going to the fireworks store for the Fourth of July and buying a bunch of fireworks that never blow up. You have great expectations, but they just fizzle out when you light the fuse. Whereas with Darbi, she has exploded in all the right ways that were very satisfying and surprising. Every now and then, your hopes and expectations are met, which is the case with Darbi. She was not seduced by all the forces that have taken public education in the wrong direction, and that has been great to see. The ratio for me is about 10 to 1. Of every ten candidates I have worked with over the years, you occasionally get one Darbi. Of course, I knew when such an honest person like Darbi, who simply wanted to do an excellent job as a school board member, confronted a system with so much bad behavior in it, and that bad behavior was hidden from the public through friendships that were designed to conceal it; then there would be conflict. I get emails from people all over the country from people who are political moderates who are jealous that they don’t have someone like Darbi Boddy on their school board. I am very proud of her and would love to have three or four more like her, people who could resist the temptations of group consensus at the expense of voter responsibility.

I brought this up during our talk, how one player for the Reds inspired many others to get better. In many ways, Darbi has been that person for Lakota

We don’t elect people into politics to get along, which is becoming more evident in national politics. We don’t expect physical altercations either, but one of the problems that lead to so much corruption is the appeasement of peers, which is at the heart of the problem at every level. At Lakota, at the fundamental community level, we can see two people who started in the same place and quickly went in entirely different directions. From both perspectives, they had good intentions, yet during our talk, Darbi hit the nail on the head; much of the evil that starts in the world of politics doesn’t come from some pitch-forked devil; it’s often the friendly face who wants to buy you dinner and treat you like a king or princess. Of course, they expect something in return. But it’s often hard to see because it feels good to be liked. Some people will do anything to be liked; once others know that about you, they own you. And at that point, elected representatives often go bad when they fall in love with being loved because, just like a manipulative spouse, once they start jerking around your feelings, you lose the authenticity of why people voted for you in the first place. And at the heart of the conflict between Darbi and Isaac, two people who ran for office together and had been friends, is this villain of appeasement. The lucrative nature of being accepted in the warm embrace of friendship within institutional confinement is a nector all its own. And thankfully, in our community, Darbi didn’t fall for it, much to the frustration of those who wanted to seduce her into it. That’s why people tell me they are jealous of us in Lakota because they see the clear value in elected representatives like Darbi Boddy. The controversy only comes from those who want to steer her in a different direction. But she has stayed with the voters authentically, and people appreciate that, as they do with all people who do so. And with Isaac, it’s frustrating when you can’t please everyone, and that comes out in these outbursts caught on camera twice now. As Darbi said to me, she gets tired of how people talk behind closed doors and speak in public. That duality is the source of the problem because an honest person would be the same in any format.

Rich Hoffman

Eating Ice Cream and Defending Lawsuits: Lakota should have never tried to use the China model of social communism to drive a narrative

I was vacationing on Mackinac Island in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, having a nice ice cream with my grandchildren as a horse and buggy strolled by, the scene looking like a Norman Rockwell painting from a century ago when my peeps from my home district of Lakota were ringing up my phone with new information on the superintendent problems we were having there. The report was that I was going to be sued by that very progressive public employee and that I had big legal trouble on my hands. A group stoking the flames was “Rinos for Lakota,” who were throwing my name around as a blowhard who had it all coming. They hoped the superintendent would sue me into oblivion, destroying me once and for all. The people telling me all this were obviously people who cared for me and wanted to give me a heads-up. At the same time, my granddaughter wanted to show me a cool picture of a horse she had just drawn on the ice cream store napkin. I noted the information and quickly resumed enjoying my family and the island itself. It was a world away, and I was enjoying it. I pushed down my anger for that moment and would deal with the trouble when I returned home. And as is always my practice, I never forgive a transgression. Even if it takes decades, when someone shows ill will toward me, I make it my mission in life to make a footstool off their metaphorical carcass. But I also never let those ill intentions ruin my life. At this point, I’ve heard all this before; I am very used to ill intentions. But like most things in life, intentions and execution are different things, and a lesson that should be learned by now, especially at Lakota, is that ill intent pushed in my direction doesn’t go well for them. And that would undoubtedly be the case with this very political situation in 2022.

When I returned, I had good memories of that ice cream with my grandchildren and was in a good mood. Then, of course, history tells the rest of the story and for all those people who wished bad intentions on me, to see me destroyed in court and have my life turned upside down because they decided to move into my neighborhood, then bring with them all these dumb, liberal ideas from all the garbage dumps they moved from, and expected to change me. Well, life has dealt them some much-deserved blows. I don’t get upset about those kinds of legal threats or the postings of a bunch of RINOs because we have this little thing called the Constitution that I know holds up very well in court. And so long as you follow the Constitution, you will win your court cases. People who don’t understand the Constitution, the Bill of Rights specifically, make dumb statements like those in the Rinos (Conservatives) for Lakota had been making regarding the devastating situation that Matt Miller had put himself in as a public figure, paid for with taxpayer money to perform a very public role. We have a First Amendment to provide a check on power and the abuses that often happen. It’s critical to the maintenance of good government, and clearly, Lakota had bet everything on a public relations-controlled show that was not rooted in sound legal merits, which is why they get sued a lot themselves, and they lose or settle those cases. They assume that the rest of the world is as legally ignorant as they are, so they think that threats like what was made to me might have some impact. For me, I didn’t even pause in eating my ice cream. The news was as worthless as the ice cream I was eating, as it would soon be melted and at the bottom of my stomach. The only good thing to come from the ice cream was in the joy of me eating it. And as it would turn out, because of their ill intentions toward me, all the bad news that has happened to Lakota and continues to happen is a joy for me, just as consuming that ice cream was.

My kids are grown, and my grandkids are being homeschooled. The only reason I care about Lakota is because they are an institution of liberalism that is paid for with my property taxes. It disgusts me that I have to give one dollar to them. I would just as soon give that dollar to a homeless person shooting up drugs on a street corner. I don’t see anything good coming out of public schools, especially Lakota. I warned them years ago about the Chinese exchange program they had by sending teachers and administrators to China to “learn” from a communist country. They didn’t listen, of course, because they thought they knew better. And here we are in 2023 with the entire government school and all their ignorant supporters assuming that the media can be controlled just as they do in China. And they hate that a pesky blogger is reporting on the bad things they do, and that I likely know more about the law than most of the lawyers they could hire. But all of them have forgotten that “they” are not in charge. They never were in charge. And they owe the public openness so we can see what they are wasting our hard-earned money on. And what exactly they are teaching these kids in our community, and why. What they are learning now, too late, is that the courts support such positions. Just because the government schools and their loser supporters assume a reality to be something, it doesn’t mean that it is.

This is not China, America will never be China, free speech will continue to be protected, and all the methods that the government school of Lakota has used to attempt to intimidate people into submission were illegal, just as they are going to learn in the coming months as they try to use public forum debates as a way to limit opposition opinion and shape for public relations a fake community dialogue. When they hire bad employees who bring bad values to our community and intend to teach bad things to our young people, that’s on them. Then to hope that some kind of social peer pressure by very stupid people will alter the course of public life in the district is an assumption built on ignorance. It might work in communist China but not in freedom-loving Liberty Township. And I was in Liberty Township before anybody was in this debate. And I think knowing all that is more attractive to new residents than a deterrent. The Rinos of Lakota can all pack up and leave and take all their Latte Sipping Prostitutes with Asses the Size of Car Tires and Diamond Rings to Match with them, and Liberty Township will still sell its half-a-million-dollar homes to people fleeing broken, liberal areas seeking refuge. The truth of the matter, a lesson they are learning now, is that they are a small minority. This upcoming election will show them the truth, just as it did when Darby Boddy was voted in. They may have won over Isaac, which made them think everyone lacked resolve equally. But all it’s done is strengthen the opposition’s determination, which wasn’t a very smart idea on their behalf. They brought all this on themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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Tag: Lakota

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It’s Not About Unity in the Community or the Power of a Vocal Minority: But entirely a standard of right and wrong

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Picasso and Darbi Boddy in Lakota: The power of Leadership and temptations of blue pill politics

Isaac Adi Gets Violent Again: An Interview with Darbi Boddy

Eating Ice Cream and Defending Lawsuits: Lakota should have never tried to use the China model of social communism to drive a narrative