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.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio Campaign for Governor is all About Family First: Getting rid of red tape in Liberty Township

Vivek Ramaswamy discussing taking the red tape out of a red state!

It was good to see Vivek Ramaswamy again. Mark and Leslie Williams had a nice, private event for him to talk about the campaign status and the going-forward steps and probably the best thing I have heard in politics so far was what Vivek said about Ohio, that it was a deep red state, but that it would not be the state of red tape. That his run for governor was committed to restoring Ohio to the nation’s greatest status in wealth generation among all the states. And given his understanding of things and personality, I think it is very much possible. The moment I found out that he was running for governor, I was excited about it. And since he launched his campaign just a few months ago, he has turned his efforts into a nice running machine that will cascade into many exciting opportunities that many have never thought possible. Vivek Ramaswamy understands, and as I have watched these GOP events develop over the years, there was something very different going on that was exciting —a festivity to it that was not politics as usual. But before we get into all that, I have to say, Mark and Leslie did a great job with the event, including the fantastic food table set up with finger foods that they had in the middle of the gathering space, established for this meet and greet for Vivek. I took a picture of what was left of it after a few hours, but it was quite something to see. All the little things in the event were done with just a little extra flair that makes spending time with people on a Saturday night of political talk more enjoyable. And once Vivek gave his speech, took pictures with people, and had to get on to the next thing, people stayed around talking and catching up because they didn’t want to leave such a wonderful occasion.

When this started it was quite an exhibition. It was a lot of food!

I was one of them, I was happy to see so many people I like to talk to all in the same place. I enjoyed seeing most of Nancy Nix’s family there, mom, sister, aunts, grandchildren, her husband Bob, we all like each other naturally, and it was nice to catch up under those conditions. Everyone knows I love Nancy Nix; she is one of the best for a reason, and a lot of it is that she has a nice and loving family, which is evident to everyone who can see. I had just spent time with one of my favorite trustees, Todd Minniear, a few nights before. With his wife Jamie, they are a couple of my absolute favorite people and they were there. Thomas Hall and his family were there too. His mom and dad are good, solid people, and if you haven’t noticed, there is a pattern to my accolades. I often judge the value of people by the kind of families they come from and are creating for themselves, and for me, it was a great evening because I had a break from the broken dysfunction that often comes with associating with a lot of people from diverse backgrounds and social structures. Here, almost everyone shared the same strong family values that I greatly appreciate, making it a great evening for me. My wife doesn’t always get to come to all these events. When we launched the campaign event for Vivek a few months prior, she had to miss it due to other family commitments that we had. However, this time we were able to coordinate things in a way that allowed her to attend, and she enjoyed herself as well.

As usual, I always enjoy seeing George and Debbie Lang when they are in a place where things go as well as the Williams event allowed. Where the accommodations are set up thoughtfully, so that people can easily discuss essential political matters. As a critical Senator in Ohio, everyone wants to talk to George, so my time with him is often spent with me looming in the background to discuss as many important things as possible. However, in a large group like that, it’s not easy to convey everything in brief statements, as time may not allow. But when people wonder why I like George and Debbie so much, it’s that core value system again. They are a great family that really loves each other, and I value their sincerity, both with each other and with the world around them. When people wonder why George Lang is good at his job, a common theme among those who have come out in early support of Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of Ohio is that they see the state in the same way they see their families, with love and care. And those are their primary political motivations. No matter what personal success they have had in life, and I know that is the case with Mark and Leslie Williams too, who hosted the event, they want to put that same effort into making Ohio the top state in the country, and the world, for people to live in and raise good families. If you are a family-first kind of person, knowing these kinds of people makes sense. And I enjoyed myself for all those reasons. One of the primary values that everyone I knew shared at this event was a love of family, and they all did just a little bit more than average to have good families.

I enjoyed catching up with Darbi Boddy. People have been wondering about her since her time as a Lakota school board member concluded in legal gymnastics. People have asked me a lot why I like Darbi so much. She is a good mom who talks to God frequently. And since she left the Lakota school board, she has been hanging out with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. My wife noticed the pin she was wearing, and it was the same one that she had. Let me say, Darbi is doing some great things that will manifest into goodness in a few years. She is more deeply engaged in politics than ever, and I am very happy and proud of her for all that she has accomplished. A common theme I have been discussing is that many people are unaware of Darby: she loves her family, and her involvement in politics is aimed at helping more families emerge in the world. I have a lot of respect for her hard work in this regard. I like her kids, and I like her husband. I want to see people like that succeed in the world. I also enjoyed catching up with Bob Hutsenpiller. We have a long history together. Similarly, he and his wife have been together for a long time, and his business has been a family affair throughout his long career. And he’s just a good person trying to make things just a bit better in the world. My joke with Bob is that he usually comes to these political events with work shoes because he is always on construction sites and has worked hard all the years I have known him. And I would say that was the common theme among all the people I mentioned, and many more that there isn’t enough time to discuss. But Vivek Ramaswamy makes it easy, just as President Trump has; these are all people who value family, and they are treating their state and country with the same love they pour into their families. And it shows. I met Vivek’s parents and got to know his wife at the event we had at CTL Aerospace, and I was happy that he recognized me out of all the people he has spoken to over the last several months. But Vivek loves his kids. He loves his wife. He loves his parents. And anyone who is that caring about the people in their life can show the same love to the state they are running. And for me, that’s why I care so much about the people who were at that event. The common theme was family first, even if nobody explicitly stated it. You won’t catch any of the people I mentioned in some sex scandal where they are cheating on their spouses for power and prestige. In most cases, everyone at that Vivek event already had power and prestige. But what they were fighting for was something much more important: the power of family and the values that come from it, and carrying that attention over into political office, where it can genuinely make a significant impact. And for me, being around such people is the best evening I could hope for. I’m very much looking forward to Vivek Ramaswamy being the governor of Ohio. That will be a good day!

Rich Hoffman

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Re-Elect Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee: The untold story of Ford’s Garage

Many people are unaware of the story, but it’s one of those great examples of how some politicians in the world do good things in the background that nobody knows about, but that greatly enhance people’s lives. And we’re talking about Todd Minniear, the highly regarded Liberty Township Trustee, who is about to complete his first term and is up for re-election this year, 2025. When he was first elected, I considered it one of the most fantastic Christmas presents I could have hoped for. We needed a constitutional conservative in Liberty Township in a position like that because Liberty Township had a significant problem. It’s always been a great place to live. I’ve lived in Liberty Township most of my life. I’ve traveled extensively around the world, and when my wife and I were first married, we tried to live in various places. But we moved back to Liberty Township many years ago because it simply was the best place to live. We had been living in Mason, and the school system was so bad back then that we had to homeschool our kids. Lakota, as a public school, wasn’t much better, but everything else about the community was just so good. But like all good communities, it’s hard to provide good political leadership because all these special interest groups start making suggestions that are often beyond the wheelhouse of most people’s professions, and they get hoodwinked into making bad decisions. And that’s what happened with zoning in Liberty Township. Word got out that it was a great place to live, and everyone wanted to move to the land north of Cincinnati, with its abundant farmland and white picket fences. So, a lot of property was bought up, and many homes were built, but along the way, very few commercial areas were created to help alleviate the taxation problem.

So Liberty Township needed a trustee who could say know to the right things, and that is all the Agenda 21 goofy stuff that came from the United Nations sustainability plans that were flowed down through university training and into the minds of the college kids who were being trained to be the next generation land use planners. And they have been a disaster, because along with all the ridiculous roundabouts, which are an entirely European design that we mindlessly inherited, like a bunch of little brothers appeasing an older brother who picks on us, we adopted all those methods into our community planning, and it has degraded the living experience predictably. And to stay great, Liberty Township needed to develop a mind of its own, and Todd Minniear has been that kind of trustee. When you are the best place to live in the world, quite literally, you don’t let yourself get picked on by anybody, especially a bunch of socialist trained community development planners. The private sector knows a lot more about these things, and competition should sort out the good from the bad, and be allowed to do that. Recently, under Todd’s leadership, the Trustees in Liberty Township removed the high-density housing requirements from future building projects, which is a significant development. The news reporting took that move as building fences to the outside world to keep out the poor and disadvantaged. However, logic suggests that to protect value, you must keep away people who have less of it. Otherwise, they bring their problems to your doorstep, and that requires value judgments that might hurt the feelings of people who have not made very good decisions in their lives. To maintain a good community, you need to reward people who make good decisions and keep the bar high, so that those who didn’t aren’t living in the same space.

As I met Todd Minniear at Liberty Center to discuss some of these high-density housing issues, my daughter was with me, and we were talking about Japan and how people we know who have traveled there and have tattoos were ridiculed in some places for having them. In some cases, businesses will refuse to serve people who have tattoos, because they see it as a detrimental element to social interaction, and they ridicule it in their society. I had just recently returned from Japan, which is what I wanted to discuss with Todd about Liberty Center. Japan’s cities are very clean, and their work ethic is excellent. Even in their downtown areas, they have nice, convenient stores that are open 24/7. There is a nice one near a hotel I often stay at in Kobe, and I thought something like that would be perfect for the current location at Liberty Center, across the street from Cooper’s Hawk and the new Flats that have been built, where many people are currently living. To maintain a good community, you must have high standards and hold others accountable for living up to them. And that is the challenge, because Liberty Township is such a great place to live, but the housing costs are very high, the temptation to bring in more affordable housing, as the land use sustainability plans all address in the same European socialist way, more high density living which allows people who have made bad decisions in their lives and do not have the financial means to move into Liberty Township, to move into an apartment or an attached single family unit.

One of my favorite places to eat in Liberty Township is the new Ford’s Garage at Liberty Center, where Todd Minniear has a signature hamburger named after him, which I order every time I visit. In the location where the restaurant was built, Todd was the trustee who said no to an apartment complex design intended for that area when the mall could not find commercial businesses to fill that very valuable square. There was a lot of complaining at the time, but eventually, Ford’s Garage restaurant moved in, and that solved many of the problems. It was great that the apartments did not get built there, as the restaurant is far more valuable as a land use option. It does a lot more for the mall than just bringing in more people who don’t pay enough in taxes to accommodate their presence, whereas a business does. And Liberty Township needs more businesses that bring in more people from a 25-mile radius who spend money in Liberty Township, then go home. So that the taxpayers in Liberty Township aren’t on the hook for all the infrastructure. And it’s decisions like those that Todd Minniear has made that have greatly improved Liberty Township and preserved its value, rather than letting mindless land use plans destroy it. These decisions don’t represent what’s good and original about the community—sometimes saying no leads to a better yes eventually. And that is certainly the case with Ford’s Garage. There was considerable pressure to approve high-density housing projects and accommodate the influx of investment dollars into the area. However, by saying no, Todd Minniear was able to inspire a much better ‘yes’ in the future, which is precisely why we want Todd to serve for many more years as a trustee. He’s been great, and there is room to do a whole lot more with the Millikin interchange project. But to set a high bar, you have to live up to it, and often, that means saying no to disreputable social elements, to socialist land use plans, and political sentiments that come from other places, and people bring that garbage with them wherever they go. We need good political leadership to sort it all out, and Todd Minniear has been just the right touch, and we could use a lot more of him in the years to come.

Rich Hoffman

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

Todd Minniear and the Liberty Township Trustees: Protecting a great area from bottom feeders and other social parasites

It was always a disaster in the planning to guide development to include apartment and attached single-family homes. That was a ridiculous Agenda 21 sustainable living idea that does not stem from American needs, but rather from the United Nations, and it’s good to see that Todd Minniear, the great trustee of Liberty Township, is fighting back against this ridiculous trend. Because it’s all about value and the quality of living, and even if it comes out sounding mean and not very equitable, those are not values that can build a good society. You can’t put too many apartments into a community full of people who don’t own property and expect everything to go well. The population density is one thing. However, the kind of people who live in apartments is quite another matter. When a township like Liberty puts together a comprehensive plan, as I have explained over the years, the kind of people who are hired to make those plans are trained in universities to make Agenda 21 and 2030 from the United Nations a priority, and within those constructs is the notion that the most sustainable living is to stack humans on top of each other and prevent them as much as possible from getting in their car and driving somewhere. Because the goal is to lower the carbon footprint of people with all kinds of hippie thoughts about protecting the planet and taking away individual development in favor of collective surrender to the common good as defined by the parameters of communism, exported from Europe. And it ends up in communities like Liberty through the comprehensive plans that their building planners implement. It’s one of those things that often slips under the radar when elected trustees review their comprehensive development plans for approval, and the context of what’s in them isn’t well understood. We tend to think that people who write comprehensive plans are smart, but what often happens is that they learn too late that they were trained to be radicalized liberals taught on a destructive, anti-American agenda.

Everyone wants to live in Liberty Township, and when the area Journal News newspaper reported what Todd Minniear and the other trustees had done, they picked up on the sentiment correctly by stating, “Liberty Twp. Is closing its borders to future developments that include apartments or attached single-family homes, as trustees approved changes in its 2020 comprehensive plan and future land use map – which guides development.” Most of the time, trustees in their positions across the country think they are hiring good people with excellent college credentials when they bring in individuals to write their land-use plans. And their lives have not prepared them for the shell game that comes with such land use planners. But it’s an industry full of parasitic communists trained in their colleges to implement extreme liberal politics into everything their careers touch. Remember, it’s not where people went to school, but the kind of garbage they learned there that’s so dangerous. And in Liberty Twp’s case, the value comes from the type of property people can buy, and how it restricts many people without shared values, bringing them together unnaturally, which eventually lowers the area’s value. The kind of people who end up living in apartments and attached single-family homes tend to be people who didn’t make very good decisions in life, and when you start stacking those kinds of people into dense property use, they vote that way at the ballot box and pretty soon you have all their bad decisions changing the politics of your community into something else, often destructive. And not protecting property values because parasitic tendencies were allowed to permeate.

Of course, the implication made by the Journal News is that Liberty Twp is moving toward exclusivity by closing its borders to outsiders, when the socialist trend is to make everything more equitable. With Liberty Township being such a nice place to live, the goal of the trustees, as defined by radical leftist community planners who teach the values of Marxism in colleges, is to make valuable places to live more accessible to everyone. Because everyone deserves to live somewhere nice. And if you’ve looked around Liberty Township, you now see apartments going up everywhere. And what goes into them are apartment-dwelling people who vote, and they vote with the kind of values that come with people who don’t have profound roots in property ownership. I like the proposed type of living at the Liberty Center development, which combines mixed-use shopping and living, creating a big city environment that gives kids growing up in the area a reason not to move to New York City or Los Angeles to experience that kind of life in their post-college years. However, the downside is that more apartments mean more voters, as opposed to the wealthy homeowner of a property worth more than $400,000 who wants to keep it that way. All over the country, when you study why communities fail, it’s because they didn’t protect what made them valuable in the first place. And once you start letting bottom feeders move into your area, you’ll run into them at gas stations and the grocery store, and they bring down a positive living experience everywhere they go. And while that doesn’t sound fair or equitable, it’s the truth. Values decline, whether they are property or social, when we fail to protect them.

Making it too easy for people who are not very good or wise to live in your area will only bring trouble. People who make poor decisions in their lives are likely to reflect that in their voting behavior when we invite them to join our communities and live in an apartment, just to be fair to them. They bring with them trashy kids, destructive lifestyles, and disastrous extensions of their families who visit them in a condition of dereliction. And attacking that premise of value is baked into the background of all Agenda 21 and 2030 land use plans. When you speak to these kinds of people, DEI policies, specifically equity and inclusion, are their primary concerns. And builders end up following those ridiculous concepts in their architectural plans, and before you know it, you have a mother of five with three different fathers of those kids, all of whom visit her, coming and going, living next to a property worth more than a million dollars. And they are all shopping at Kroger together and regretting it. And when it comes time to vote, they disregard the million-dollar property owner vote because there are more of them, and because of the terrible decisions they have made in life, they are now voting for more government services, as they are never going to own a million-dollar property of their own. And soon thereafter, you have a community in decline as people with value pick up and move away, where they don’t have to be around losers in life in their leisure time. Thankfully, there are people like Todd Minniear who are finally standing up to this kind of nonsense. Yes, suppose Liberty Township wants to maintain its value. In that case, just as the United States is learning to do, we must hold people accountable for earning their place in the community by working hard and making good decisions that live up to the high standards of value that make communities great. However, when you make good things available to everyone, whether through comprehensive land use plans that stack property density on top of each other mindlessly, or through more government services that cost taxpayers a lot of money, social decline is not far behind. When that value isn’t protected, of course, a community will move into decline. And once that happens, nobody is happy. This is a good position for the Liberty Township Trustees, as they are protecting a great community from the erosion of outside influences, which are certainly not in the best interest of the future.

Rich Hoffman

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

Homeland Security Invades Butler County, Ohio: How federal government seeks to undermine local law enforcement for strategic growth of centralized authority

I’m going to cry foul on the raid by Homeland Security into my community where agents from them, and the IRS went door to door on charges of financial crimes and labor exploitation. Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s loser of a Secretary of Homeland Security, looks to be making some election-year posturing, and it was his policies that brought in so many illegal aliens even to make such a raid possible. The four homes in Liberty Township and other homes up the highway into Dayton are just the tip of the iceberg. But who let the iceberg into the country? It was Mayorkas and the lazy and inefficient Homeland Security people who have made America far more dangerous. As is consistent with many federal agencies, such as the CIA and FBI, they are picking a white-collar crime to get some news splash to look like they are doing something. Usually, with such theatrics, they have money on their mind as they are looking for Congress to renew their budgets, and dazzling headlines like this raid are their method. But honestly, it’s too little too late. Many of the illegals who are being “exploited” were allowed in by the policies of the Biden/Harris White House and the antics of Homeland Security. From the way it looks, the entire raid from Homeland Security was a pure PR stunt, and they targeted a Dayton company, Fuyao Glass, which happens to be a Chinese outfit, so there is a lot wrong going on here. However, the problems are mainly under the water, and what Homeland Security did with their exhibition of home-to-home raids, complete with search warrants, is an abuse of authority and a shell game of smoke and mirrors that cannot be tolerated. Because they caused the problem in the first place, they used their power and authority to disrupt our community even more, using a show of useless force to establish that the federal government has power and that people should hide in their homes and yield to it.

I’ve never endorsed shows of force like this by federal authorities. They are corrupt at best and detrimental at their core. However, before my recent experience as the foreman of a grand jury in Butler County, Ohio, the same county where a lot of this Homeland Security business happened, I would have my opinions shaped by skepticism, but not experience. Now, I have some knowledge, which I very much wanted as I have heard from many prosecutors, police officers, and persons of all kinds about evidence, crimes, and the day-to-day function of law enforcement. Now, let’s get one thing straight: I love law enforcement, and I love law. I love our state legislature. I love our judges in Butler County. And I think a lot of our Sheriff. I love our prosecutor. I love establishing a law-and-order society built on biblical context as a natural extension of our American Constitution and the state-revised code and criminal law that spawns directly from it. So, I was happy to say yes to an opportunity to be a grand jury foreman. For me, that’s like giving Ralphie, the kid from the Christmas Story movie his first Red Ryder BB gun. I would express my time on the grand jury as one of the best things I have done this year because it satisfied an itch I have had for a lifetime. I have seen all these cases and read all the indictments in the paper prior, and I want to know why and how cases get prosecuted and how the process works from the top down. And when you are on the grand jury, you get to be the top cop of your community for your term. And when you understand the 10^th Amendment, that makes you the top cop in the land of the free, and I like that, to say it mildly.

Yet I could walk any cop or prosecutor straight to the home of many drug sellers and abusers. I could go around my community as a vigilante like Batman and uproot many sex trafficking cases and drug busts to fill many newspapers, so it is very frustrating to me to see all the cases that don’t get busted. And it’s been a mystery to me. I have speculated a lot about why things happen the way they do, but now that I have experience as the grand jury’s foreman, I understand very well what’s going on. Even if the police themselves aren’t allowed to say it, and let me tell everyone, I will put this experience to good use for years. To say it mildly.

Holy Sh*t

New footage from July 13th shows police had the building surrounded for over a minute before the shooter opened fire!!!

Why didn't they take Trump off stage?

Why didn't they get to the shooter faster?

WERE THEY ORDERED TO STAND DOWN?

Agents also already had texts… pic.twitter.com/TYPvgpsnZ7
— Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) July 29, 2024

While I can’t talk about specific cases, I can talk about the generalities of the overall experience, and one question I have always had is, if we know there is a drug house selling lots of drugs and poisoning our community, why don’t we storm in and get all the punks and lock them up and throw away the key? Well, based on many hours of testimony by police who do these kinds of things every day, a clear picture emerges that is part of a larger pattern of concealment for which they are powerless to do anything. One such hypothetical is a drug enforcement group that knows a drug house is selling, and they are about to make their move for a bust. They have spent months collecting evidence, getting their warrant, and are about to take action. But then the Feds come in, such as the FBI, and they beat them to the punch. In one scenario that I’m thinking of specifically, the Feds kicked in the door, and the local drug enforcement guys lost visibility on the occupants for over 30 minutes, plenty of time to flush all the drugs down the toilet and destroy a lot of evidence ahead of the official investigation. The Fed then throws their investigation into perpetual bureaucratic hell; the local guys lose their evidence and can only arrest possession of little bits still in the pockets of the perpetrators. The big picture is never dealt with because Federal investigations often destroy the strings linking them to prosecution, such as what that Homeland Security raid was. And that’s essentially why prosecutions don’t go further to the drug cartels themselves, and our local agents can only get indictments on the pushers they catch on the street, isolating the big guys from the higher crimes. The crimes are covered up by purposeful negligence and federal agents trumping local ones with jurisdiction infractions that keep the story of crime from ever being told. And they count on little raids like this one in Butler County with Homeland Security to hide the significant crimes they are guilty of allowing to happen in the first place. It’s the same kind of negligence that was seen with the Secret Service that allowed a sniper shooter onto a roof in Pennsylvania to kill President Trump. It’s a game that federal agencies, very politically motivated, have been playing for a long time. And it is they who cause most of our troubles. And our local people in law enforcement are continuously being disrespected by this process. And I know how and why it’s happening now more than ever because I have seen it up close. And I’m not happy about it. So yeah, I’m not keen on what Homeland Security did in my community with their exhibitions of force in raiding homes and taking evidence so that neighbors would see the federal government at work trying to clean up a mess they caused but seeking public adulation for crimes they allowed to happen in the first place, for purely political monstrosities of doom and malice designed to topple our nation from within for enemies both foreign and domestic. And anything attached to Alejandro Mayorkas should be viewed as a threat to the American way of life, including going door to door to impose federal power on innocent people for a show of force meant to suppress freedom and prosperity among free people just minding their own business. I would say, based on my experience, those illegal aliens were let into the country to create the opportunity to get a warrant so that the federal government could impose power over local authorities and attempt to diminish local law enforcement in a grab for power and stronger centralized power in government that has as its goal a much more sinister plot unfolding as we speak.

Rich Hoffman

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

When Government Causes the Problems They Want to Protect You From: Frock Cameras are dangerous

I’ve had many people try to convince me that the upcoming Liberty Township Police Levy, which will be voted for in the March primary election, is something I should support. I have a lot of friends who are in government who really think things like police are essential to the viability of a community, and the more police you have, the better your community. My argument is that I have seen too much abuse from this local group, and I don’t see them with enough to do. When I see the police in my community, they are sitting in their cars because there isn’t much to do on radio calls. My argument is that I can understand a few police officers for a community our size, but that the 30-40 they propose, along with a lot of administrative staff, is too expensive and isn’t worth the money. But that’s not even the worst of it. I have seen enough over these last few years to give me a lot of pause on any government expansion, especially after Covid. When the police say they are there to help and to keep our community safe, we have found that the most dangerous element we deal with is government radicalism. And during Covid, we came close to checkpoints of health enforcement and door-to-door raids for nongovernment compliance. And when you have some loser like Biden in the White House, I’m not too keen to hire the people who would be most likely to harass me. And yes, on Christmas Day this year, I came close to a swatting situation where police had gathered in front of my home, looking like they were preparing for a raid until I went out and engaged them, which was when they drove off. In this political environment, especially, more government workers do not make sense.

The corruption of law enforcement is horrendous

And with the same kind of zeal that communities are always asking for more police, we have had frock cameras imposed upon us, always with good intent. But that’s how it always starts: the need for safety and security. In case you haven’t noticed, and I have, cameras are all over our communities these days, especially in Fairfield, even in West Chester, and areas outside of the I-275 loop around Cincinnati. The cameras we are told are there for our safety, to record the comings and goings of cars in our neighborhoods that can track them in case something happens. And who doesn’t want an always eye in the sky to record a license plate number for a hit and run? The argument for the cameras is that they are always watching and will keep us safe from criminals who roam around at night looking for soft targets to harass. Yet all that sounds good until you realize that all this nonsense is code words for lazy police work and the building of an extensive government network that can track everything you do at all hours of the day. I have been involved in fighting back against these cameras in a couple of different places since about a decade ago when they were first introduced. One argument in Lincoln Heights was in partnership with WLW radio, where police were giving people tickets in the mail for speeding along that corridor of I-75. And again, at the toll bridge in Louisville, Kentucky, toll fines were mailed to people just for driving across the bridge. There were no toll booths to pay; they just took a picture of your license plate and sent you the bill in the mail. It was pretty scandalous then, but it has become common practice over the years. That’s how they do it in Florida, around the Orlando area. I tried to pay the toll at a toll booth, and the stupid cameras still sent me a bill. Technology has been introduced to cover up lazy police work and employee engagement.

It’s a trick being used more and more against political enemies

It always starts with the pitch from some tech firm that has a new technology or a vaccine for a virus that the government hasn’t yet made in a lab in China under the direction of Dr. Fauci and other expert class malcontents. And good-intentioned people like local trustees start nodding their heads yes to the promise of more security for their communities. That is until you realize that many of the dangers in our communities are caused by government, such as the current lousy border policy by the Biden administration, which has allowed criminals and cutthroats of all kinds from drug cartels to roam freely and violate our safety. The government causes problems with terrible political policy, and then they turn to more government intrusion to cover up all their mistakes. We end up paying for all of it and, in the process, lose vast amounts of our freedoms. And they sell it to us by saying, “We would never abuse our power,” and one day, you are getting a bill in the mail for that traffic light you went through as it turned from yellow to red a bit too quickly. The frock cameras give police a chance to enforce the law from some rec room somewhere doing even less because A.I. and these cameras are doing most of the work for them. It always starts with good intentions and ends in more tyranny and abuses of power.

Do you really want people like this watching your every move, where you go and when, and with whom?

It’s not hypothetical; we saw it happen when an out-of-control government panicked by some global health police decided to shut down our communities and “shelter in place.” When DeWine did that in Ohio, I ignored him and conducted my life. Luckily, at that time, I knew the sheriff of my community and knew he was not in agreement with the governor and wasn’t going to enforce the unjust lockdown policies, which came straight from a globalist loser by the name of Richard Hatchett, who started that mess. A lot of political figures were suckered into enforcing unconstitutional laws. If such a thing happened again, the cameras that were set up for our security would be there to tell on us every time we left our driveway, making it all too easy for a centralized authority to punish us for violating the mandate of a prominent government governor out of control and power hungry. What started as good intentions for safety and security has become an ominous tyrant we can never turn off or escape. Our local law enforcement suddenly isn’t the cops we know in our community but is A.I. in some data bank at the NSA who is plotting our every move and reporting it to our foreign and domestic enemies who are openly trying to overthrow the Constitution of the United States with international law. And it all starts with more police levies and politicians who get suckered into saying yes to frock cameras. It all sounds fine until you have to pay for it all, and you lose your freedoms for some greater good, as it’s determined by communists in the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization, which directly created our policies at the CDC and were enforced with authority by the Biden administration. By putting up the cameras, the loss of local control of your law enforcement goes away, and soon, outside forces are watching your every move from any place on the planet. And if you violate some policy they come up with on the back of a napkin, they’ll have the evidence that you did so for them to prosecute. And at that point, you are a slave to their system of vile tyranny. Yeah, no thanks. I’m not supporting the Liberty Township Police Levy or their stupid frock cameras. I think many people will be unfortunately suckered into voting for it. And I’m sure everyone will regret it later.

Rich Hoffman

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

Tom Farrell of Liberty Township Has it all Wrong: The silent majority is not a vocal minority

There has been a lot of talk since the superintendent of Lakota schools resigned due to pressures revealed by his wild sexual lifestyle after a messy divorce. Many in our community have been saying that a vocal minority ran him off, and they believe there is this vast support for what they think conservative values are out there who have been disenchanted in the process, and ultimately those who had strong opinions of morality and justice are very few. These are the same types of people nationally, and even members of the Deep State who have done extensive psychological analysis on the global human population, all get it wrong. This has been the position of the RINOs in politics, and it has evolved for many years, and it’s all wrong. So let me explain the truth to all those who need to hear it. I’ve explained this in person to people in politics who should know better. But this information is contrary to their belief system, and they just can’t bring themselves to realize it consciously. That is undoubtedly the case of Tom Ferrell of Liberty Township, who has been one of the most vocal political voices which the media gravitated to in the wake of the Matt Miller resignation. From his point of view, Miller, the superintendent, checked all the boxes for success; he was nationally recognized and well-connected. And he was popular in all the progressive circles. Tom calls himself a Republican. I generally support him and like him as a person. But I’ve never thought of him as conservative. And situations like this show the lines of politics people reside on.

The media gravitated to Tom’s comments about Lakota from a Republican perspective. They hoped that coming from such a person, all the other Republicans would just shut up, be quiet, get back in line, and behave. That has undoubtedly been the belief nationally with the Fox News position of anybody but Trump running for president, whether its Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence, or anybody but Trump, so that the political order doesn’t fall apart entirely, and descend into chaos, which Trump represents. We see the same motivation at Lakota schools, where our version of Trump has become the very popular school board member Darbi Boddy. The conventional political belief is that society is more sophisticated than voting for Trump. If given a choice, they would prefer a more moderate candidate, like Haley, or in our local community, Tom Farrell. The media certainly wants to believe that because they picked up Farrell’s comments as if they actually represented reality and ran with it, presenting the comments as fact even though the truth was far from Tom’s position and all those who thought the way he did about politics in general. People do not want RINOs. They only voted for them when given no other options. And in such a culture, it makes it all too easy for liberals to mask themselves as conservatives and end up in office, which pulls the Overton Window radically to the left along the political spectrum. That is how we ended up with the problems we have had and, ultimately, why Lakota schools made the assumptions of value that they did regarding the hiring of a school superintendent. The real voters in the community want someone representing real values and ideas that reject progressive institutionalism. They want a leader who will push back against liberal politics, not bring it into our community disguised as a snake giving an apple to Eve that will destroy the entire next generation.

Since I have explained it to many people before, but this Tom Farrell position shows that many of them just don’t get it because their minds just aren’t written that way; the truth is that the silent majority is much larger than a lot of people realize. The Fox News audience isn’t that big and has never been. People across America are much more conservative than any political measure I have seen has managed to capture, and I verified this myself with several trips across America to see it for personally, visiting most states in the wake of the 2020 election where I wrote a book to figure it all out. To understand what happened to us and to propose a plan to fix it. As it turns out, most people are like those in a classroom setting where the teacher asks a question, an easy question that everyone knows the answer to. Yet, only a few hands go up to provide the answer. The rest of the class keeps their hands down until they see it’s safe to express themselves. And when the few do put up their hands to answer boldly, then great relief comes to those silent voices that they were right all along and that their representatives holding up their hands validated their knowledge. In this large classroom of modern politics, people like Trump and locally like Darbi Boddy represent most of a classroom who know the same answers and believe the same things. But the established order is only counting the hands that engaged the question, assuming that those few hands represented a few vocal voices. That it was the voice itself that represented the contents of a political movement. Fox News is betting on this for the 2024 election, which I have vastly different thoughts on, which I will break down in the coming months. What we have seen in Lakota is just the tip of the spear. There is a lot more to come.

The truth of the matter is that those few but vocal voices trigger validation for that silent majority who do express themselves in the voting booth. And the priority over the last fifteen years or so has been to run the RINOs out of the Republican Party now that people have seen the difference for themselves. Years ago, people would have thought of Tom Farrell as a radical right-winged Republican as measured by some wife-swapping progressive school superintendent and his Democrat friends who think teaching the values of A Brave New World is a value people will grow to like if only they were presented with no other option. Yet people, in general, are very conservative, and the hope has been that by denying them a voice or ignoring their voice through deception, where Democrats put an “R” next to their name and sell themselves as Republicans, over time, people would change and embrace this Karl Marx view of the world embodying globalism communism, Chinese style with strong central governments ran by dishonest and corrupt people. But people have rejected that in Lakota when given a choice, and Darbi Boddy has been that choice. There may have been some bumps and bruises along the way, but people are quick to forgive those because they know they have a representative who isn’t afraid to stick up their hands and ask the hard questions everyone is already thinking. But when it comes time to vote, whether by a rigged election or boots on the ground attending a rally where the true numbers of the silent majority can be seen, the honesty of politics, which all the established systems are trying to avoid noticing, is that people are much more conservative than they were taught to be through institutionalism. And that truth will shatter politics as we know it locally and nationally. This will surprise many people who thought they had this all figured out.

Rich Hoffman

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Matt Miller Resigns and Blames Everyone But Himself in the Process: Darbi Boddy is far more valuable for Butler County real estate value than Sheriff Jones

I wasn’t planning to say much on the Matt Miller resignation. Obviously, he just wasn’t a good fit for our community, and like it happens to a lot of people, his divorce essentially destroyed his life. Many people have false beliefs about the importance of what a superintendent does for a community and the changing nature of public education. Included in this article is a good piece by Jesse Watters on Fox News about CRT in Ohio schools and just how much radicalism we are dealing with. As a former teacher and an obvious supporter of left-winged radicalism in public schools, Matt Miller was a prominent progressive politically, and that came out during his tenure little by little. In the beginning, he did a pretty good job of hiding it, but during Covid, he showed himself to be precisely what many of us worried he was. The mask mandates were a disaster; he pushed conservatives off the school board, then finally what we learned about his personal life through divorce records, the community had to take a stand, which they did, and he had to resign. But before he left, he dropped a media bomb, essentially attempting to set up a lawsuit against the school board and anybody else they could drag into the issue for creating an unsafe workspace for him, which was evident in an article from the Cincinnati Enquirer that made its way to Yahoo News by his attorney setting up the litigation indicating playing himself a victim and that all his problems are someone else’s fault. He took a job within Butler County for much less money.

I give people a lot of advice, free of charge because I want to see them have good lives. I even very recently gave some excellent advice to Matt Miller himself through his attorney, Elizabeth. My advice to the school board is not to settle any lawsuit with Miller and to take him to court. What everyone knows about the case, including the school board, which can be seen on ProtectLakotaKids.com, is that there isn’t any path for litigation once the discovery process is revealed in court, so there is no reason to settle anything. Just a few months ago, when Matt Miller threatened everyone with lawsuits, including me, I told him with written documentation that he could solve all his problems if he only worked with Darbi Boddy. He had gone way too far in trying to remove her from the school board, and to destroy her life, just as he did with Todd Parnell and several other very liberal school board members. It didn’t work; he should have tried to call off all the radical dogs who were petitioning to remove Darbi and make her life a living hell. If anybody should be filing lawsuits, it’s Darbi. I think she has a great case against a lot of people. But that’s not her nature. She’s tough and respects toughness. If only Matt Miller had offered peace, he wouldn’t have had to resign. All he had to do was work with her. He didn’t have to like her. But of course, he didn’t listen; his legal counsel ignored the good advice as well, and now they find themselves where they are. And it’s nobody’s fault but their own. Matt Miller’s career wasn’t destroyed by Darbi, Darbi’s friends, the Tea Party members of Lakota, or even conservatives in general. His ex-wife destroyed his career for the way he managed his family in his interactions. And what he did was not reflective of someone who should be managing anybody, anywhere. Once people learned in his own words through a Butler County Police report the details of his marriage and divorce, they couldn’t work with him any longer, and they certainly didn’t want to pay him the amount of money he was making as a Lakota superintendent.

Yet there is much more to the story that obviously Tom Ferrell and other area Republicans reflect when they showed concern that Matt Miller was leaving Lakota schools because of a political upheaval that pushed him away. Tom is a trustee for Liberty Township. I know him; I think he’s a good guy. But he thought Matt Miller was like the second coming of Christ, like many do, and they worry that with some national figure like Matt Miller gone, that Lakota will suffer. So rather than make fun of all those people for their beliefs, I’ll give a little more free advice that is actually worth a lot of money. But it shreds a popularly held misconception that government schools drive real estate value and that if Lakota doesn’t have an excellent grade card by some expensive superintendent, people will move away and destroy our real estate industry, and our community will be destroyed. The radical union element created those beliefs, just as they have secretly pushed CRT and generous progressive lifestyles on Americans for years. They have told us that zip codes get funding, and any interruption of that will destroy our entire society. But it won’t. It’s time to call that bluff and let reality tell the rest of the story. Don’t get suckered by the progressive playbook, and that’s clearly the condition of Liberty Township Trustee Tom Farrell and likely most of the Lakota school board, and many parents who drank the Matt Miller Kool-Aid and think the sky will fall just because he resigned. The sky is just fine. Here’s the hard truth of reality.

I’ve lived in Liberty Township most of my life. I’ve traveled all over the world, and I have come to realize that it’s one of the best places on earth, so I have stayed in the same area most of that time. But I have watched several regions, like Fairfield, Princeton, Middletown, and Hamilton, rise and fall as real estate destinations. And do you know why people move and what makes real estate value occur, which no realtor wants to admit to in public? It’s running from liberalism. When any area starts getting too many liberals on their school boards or as trustees, city councils, and mayors, when liberals begin running the show, conservative money moves to where they aren’t. It has nothing to do with the quality of the schools but the degree of liberalism. Even though many of the Matt Miller supporters moved from liberal areas to be recruited by a liberal public school, Lakota and those pretentious types are now crying like babies because what they want out of Lakota is more liberalism, and they filled the houses that were built for them. Yet, they could all move away, and their homes would be sold to more conservative people who do want to live in the area because they don’t want to live where liberals are ruining their zip codes. If you study the matter all over the nation, from New York to Los Angeles or to Seattle, Washington, you’ll find the same truth; people leave areas where liberals are in charge. Butler County, Ohio, has thrived not because of Lakota schools. Lakota schools has thrived because of the people who moved there, despite the liberalism that came from the employees. Butler County has always been a haven from liberals, and that is its actual value. I should know; I have watched it grow over many years. I used to have cows next to my house. Now it’s a bunch of crybabies, Matt Miller-supporting losers. I would be happy to see them leave and to take their liberal voting record with them. I could put my dog in charge of Lakota schools, and our community would still be a valuable place to live, a destination for most of the world. The school and its employees are a hindrance, not a help.

Back to Tom Farrell, and politicians like him, the best thing that could have happened was Darbi Boddy. Having peaceful school board meetings is not a value; it’s a lazy approach to management. But when people hear people like her defending conservative values from liberal invasions, that helps real estate value more than any other criteria. There is nothing better to show concerned parents that they are moving to a safe community than Darbi Boddy fighting to keep their children safe from the evils of liberalism, CRT, genderless bathrooms, and pushing gay lifestyles on young children, not even before they enter puberty. A few years ago, Jesse Watters’s piece would never have appeared on Fox News. Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes would have laughed it off as a conspiracy theory, just how radical these public schools really were. Today, people generally understand that these public schools threaten their families and their lives. And they are terrified of the effects of liberalism, and they ultimately do vote with their feet. I would recommend that people like Tom Farrell update their understanding of what makes a great community. I would also suggest that Tom update his Facebook photo. Times do change, and we need to reflect that in our assumptions. And in this new world, Darbi Boddy is much more valuable to the Republican Party and to regional politics that drive real estate values than Sherriff Jones and a well-known police department. Darbi has done more to keep kids safe, and that’s what most moms care more about than anything. And people won’t leave Lakota because of Matt Miller. But they will flock to Lakota because of Darbi and her crusade to keep kids safe and to provide a good education environment by fighting off a liberal progressive agenda, which is the primary concern of this new real estate market.

Now there is one more thing to discuss, and again I wasn’t going to talk about it because it sort of falls in the realm of soap opera gossip. But Matt Miller made it the centerpiece of his exit statements and the accusation against Darbi that her supporters may have broken into his home. This also plays into Karin Johnson from Channel 5 News, who wanted to clarify to Darbi after my video started circulating that she did not coordinate her video profile of Matt Miller serving trespassing notifications to Darbi at her home in front of her child, as a coordinated effort with the school. Karin says it was a pure coincidence. However, this is where the story gets a little wild. Karin Johnson was also involved in publishing the video of Darbi Boddy taking a picture of a young student in the halls of Lakota, dressed below the dress code standards, which again looks like a very coordinated event from the school to the media. It turns out that the young person photographed by Darbi was the daughter of Matt Miller’s housekeeper, and she is the one who has made the statements about a break-in at Matt’s home. This same person also claims to have adventurous relationships with Matt Miller himself, as she has bragged about it to several people. When I learned all this I didn’t believe it. But then I read the police report, so nothing would surprise me now. And these people think they are going to last two seconds in court? The media was worried about lawsuits because of these people? Give me a break. Lazy media, lazy lawyers, lazy school board, lots of lazy people let this whole thing spin out of control. The story gets pretty bizarre from there. Apparently, this is the same person who was charged with domestic violence, knowingly causing physical harm on the 16^th of January, 2023. So let’s do some basic math here; Karin Johnson is involved in all these Darbi Boddy hit pieces, this housekeeper gets into trouble with the police on Monday the 16^th, and Matt Miller resigns on Wednesday the 18^th. And by the 20^th, Matt Miller puts out his exit letter talking about how Darbi Boddy destroyed his life and may have even broken into his home, according to the testimony of his housekeeper, who happens to be the mother of the person Darbi took a picture of in the hall as a dress code violation, that was used by Channel 5 to attempt further to pressure Darbi to resign from the school board. Hmmmmm, I don’t think we need Sherlock Holmes here to smell what is cooking in the politics of Lakota. And you know what, if Darbi hadn’t taken any pictures and didn’t just show up to see what was really happening in the halls of the school, we wouldn’t know anything. Imagine just how much is still hidden. The only reason we know any of this is because we had a school board member who went to look for herself, and through the coverup, we learned a lot about what is really going on in our public school and their media friends who help conceal things the tax paying public would otherwise be very concerned about.

Truth is always stranger than fiction, and as far as legal challenges are concerned, Darbi Boddy has a lot to be very angry about regarding her treatment by lots of characters. And her case of advocating for much more transparency among school board members policing the schools for radical elements that are usually hidden from the public has a lot more merit. As I always say, don’t judge people by what they say but by what they do. And many people are doing a lot of things, and we wouldn’t know any of it if not for Darbi Boddy.

Rich Hoffman

The New Costco in Liberty Township, Ohio: Small government and guns make communities great

For around two years, I had been looking for a PlayStation 5. Unfortunately for PlayStation, the company released its newest video game console during Covid. Who would have ever thought that the economy of the world would shut down entirely when planning for such a new release? In many places in the world, supply chains have not returned to normal due to massive government interference and their stupid support of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. That has been particularly true of computer chips, which make the new PlayStation 5 so powerful. So it’s been very difficult to get a new PlayStation 5. Our family has continued playing our old PlayStation 4 over that duration like many people have had to. But I’ve been on the lookout for one for several years and have not been able to find one. There are usually long waiting lists you have to get on to have a chance to buy one. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and all the usual places have been unable to keep them when they do come in, and what they get has usually been a very limited supply. So I was quite shocked when I went to the new Costco in Liberty Township to meet my family on the opening day of November 2022 and saw at the entrance a pallet of PlayStation 5s stacked high for people to grab as they came into the new and wonderful store. I arrived before my family did, and it took me less than a fraction of a second to see the obvious. I grabbed one as people were plucking them from the stack as quickly as they came in, and we bought it that day and have enjoyed it profusely.

Yes, I’m a fan of Costco, even though they are not exactly conservatives. They are known Obama supporters, but they provide excellent service, so I haven’t held that against them. Costco does a lot of great things, and I have been a frequent visitor to the one in Tri-County, Ohio, for many years. When I found out that they were going to build a new Costco in Liberty Township, Ohio, I was very happy because I feel like a lot of people do about Tri-County, Ohio, located between the cities of Sharonville and Springdale, that big government has destroyed the former economic boom town and left it a husk of desperate value. I used to think of Tri-County as one of the greatest economic centers in the United States. I worked there several times in my life, so I know the area’s character well; it’s been a part of my life most of my life. So I’ve seen it in better days. But over the last 10 to 20 years, the progressive policies that came from big government woke policies have left the reputation to be one of crime. To describe it simply in one word, when I think of Tri-County, I think of MTV. The youth have been allowed to run wild and take over the character of the area, and wherever youth go, like mindless locusts, they destroy everything in their path. Older people don’t want to deal with a bunch of slack-jawed kids dressed inappropriately and constantly catcalling women while trying to shop and spend time with their families. But kids don’t have money, but moms who run families do, and those types of moms made Tri-County great.

That is why Costco built a store in Liberty Township, which is everything that Tri-County isn’t, very conservative and safe, and people who live there have money and care about things. It’s not to say that Liberty Township couldn’t become like Tri-County at some point, but the differences couldn’t be more obvious. In Butler County, Ohio, where Liberty Township is, there are over 400,000 residents, most of whom have guns. They either have guns in the home or carry them, and crime is not tolerated the way it has been 6 miles to the south in Tri-County and Sharonville. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Costco realizing that their Tri-County store was being held back because people just didn’t want to be in an area known for crime to shop at their store. So they built a new one, and people were hungry for it. For the first few weeks, there has been a line to get into the store, and people have been flocking to it just to buy goods and services and enjoy the Costco experience. And this new Costco has had everything, a lot more than the Tri-County store had, like PlayStation 5s. As I bought our new PlayStation in the long lines that went to the back of the store, I realized that if the Tri-County store did try to carry the type of items that the new Liberty Township store did, that theft would be the likely result. In Tri-County, with their progressive governments and their big-city attitudes, crime is much more permitted. In Liberty Township, crime isn’t permitted at all. And there are a lot of guns carried by good people who won’t hesitate to use those guns to defend property and persons, which was always the point of the 2^nd Amendment.

This is precisely why many of us in the Butler County area have fought the temptation to allow West Chester and Liberty Township to become a city like their neighbors in Sharonville, Springdale, and Forest Park. Bad government happens when it gets too big, and once there are city councils and mayors involved, woke politics starts to attach itself to the decision-making process, and things get out of control. So we have fought for small government in Butler County, and the results are obvious. Butler County communities run much better than communities within the I-275 loop that have fallen for the big government temptation. I could tell stories about my experiences in Mason, where they have a city too, but over time they have had to become much more nibble on their feet to adapt to the pressure exerted by Sycamore Township to their south and Liberty Township to their west. The struggle to keep the government small is hard, but it’s obvious where they manage because when the government is small, there is less bureaucratic nonsense, allowing companies to invest without all the additional trouble. And when you go to the new Costco in LIbety Township and see the lines from people hungry to get in, you can see the obvious quickly. I happened to listen to a few older men standing outside the new Costco, bewildered as to why people were going so crazy over this new store, even days later after it initially opened. And the answer was that a lot of these shoppers were simply sitting at home waiting for something to open near them because they didn’t want to go into Tri-County to deal with the mess there, all the kids with their pants walking around half down, the nasty language, the cars with rap music pouring through closed windows but being so loud that it vibrates the fillings out of people’s teeth. When there is too much government and too much progressive policy, it ruins communities. When there is less, it makes communities better because the kind of people who shop and start businesses can then have a relationship without the government messing it up. And guns help a lot. Where there are lots of guns by private hands, there is much less crime. Where there are less guns, there is a lot more bad behavior. And put simply, that is why the new Costco at Liberty Township is so much better and why communities like Tri-County, Ohio, are failing.

Rich Hoffman

Vote for Thomas Hall for the 46th House District in Ohio: Setting the bar high, too high for political rivals

It’s never been an option from my perspective; after the remapping of the Ohio House Rep districts, Thomas Hall has always been the clear favorite. That’s not because Matt King, who is running against him in the primary that voters will decide on August 2^nd of 2022, is a bad candidate. But just that Thomas Hall is that good. He checks all the boxes you’d want for a Representative seat in the new 46th district, which now includes Liberty Township, Ohio, and traditional districts from the north, such as Middletown. Recently at a West Chester Tea Party meeting, Thomas and Matt spoke to the audience to make their pitch as to why voters should vote for them, and I present those videos here, which comes down to one key attribute that decides the issue. In Thomas Hall’s case, he has a lot of experience and has been very successful during his first term in Columbus. He has done all the right things, including passing blockbuster legislation across Governor DeWine’s desk for H.B. 99, which makes schools safer in the case of a mass shooting. Matt King just doesn’t have the experience, and it showed as he presented himself. Both are nice young men, but in the case of Thomas Hall, he’s just an exceptional political representative who has done such a good job that no challenger would do well against.

To Matt’s point, he did the best he could, and he’s right about the Founding Fathers being very young when they were involved in the revolutionary business of starting a new country. He’s been a guy from the business world, not a politician like Thomas Hall, who has two terms as a trustee in Madison Township to add to his resume even as young as he is. And typically, we might say that not being in politics is more attractive than voting for the incumbent. In most races, that would be true. But Thomas Hall is such an exceptional young man who has faced the hottest fires of controversy and done so with great poise; you get the feeling from him that he’s just getting started. Thomas Hall has already shown that he can go up to Columbus and work with people who do not agree with him and work on legislation in a productive way to get their support. And he knows how to navigate the rough waters of politics without being a sell-out to his district. Of course, that has made Thomas Hall a target for those jealous of his success. For instance, Sheriff Jones has endorsed Matt King because the Sheriff is on the record being angry at legislation Thomas sponsored, like H.B. 99. But Thomas has managed to pick up the enthusiastic endorsement of Butler County Sheriff’s Office Police Union, which Sheriff Jones is a member. He also has the support of the NRA, Buckeye Firearms, Ohio Right to Life, and the Middletown Police Union. Sometimes when you are too good, you do make enemies. In my opinion, Thomas Hall has made the right kind of enemies and he made those enemies because he had done his job too well.

Some of those jealous forces have thrown their support behind Matt King simply because they don’t want to live up to the high bar that Thomas has set for them. Matt is a blank sheet of paper, making it much easier to live up to. The hope that a fresh set of eyes as a House Rep might turn out well is the same kind of reasonable hope that someone who purchases a lottery ticket might expect. You can’t win if you don’t buy one. But in buying one, you accept that the outcome is uncertain. In my experience, a person with a business background like Matt has will have a tough time because when you run a business, you can hire who you want, and if you need money, you just go to the bank and make your pitch. The tricky thing about Columbus is that it already has people there whom you have to work with who have their own ideas about things, so it is difficult at best to get anything done and to do so with your authenticity intact—and even saying that of course Democrats who enter the Republican Party as Trojan Horses would like to see an end to Thomas Hall. You can see that clearly in the upcoming fundraiser mysteriously sponsored by the Republican Party of Butler County that has the Super Bowl trophy of Spencer Ware on it. They even put the trophy in Matt’s name. When you see this kind of thing, its always an indication that the candidate doesn’t have their own record to stand on, so they try to evoke the records of other people, like the Super Bowl exploits of a person who was on Super Bowl-winning teams, or Sheriffs with a long history of service, but a history of wanting to be a kingmaker and knock off political rivals at the party level.

But the most convincing case for Thomas Hall came when he was pressed during the meeting by a critic of H.B. 218, which was a reaction to the impositions of the vaccine mandates. The critic in the audience was pressing Thomas for his support of the bill, which she did not feel went far enough in protecting employees from their employers during Covid. Thomas was front and center with all that activity, so he has a track record to criticize. But I think he handled that emotional question very well, which shows how much grace under fire he can handle, so I offer it here. Many political personalities would have stumbled through this kind of criticism, but Thomas did all he could at the time, so he could confidently answer the question. There was undoubtedly a time limit being imposed on H.B. 218, and Thomas wanted to get something done, even if it didn’t go as far as the person asking the question wanted it to go, which was complete protection from mandatory vaccines. When the Biden administration put forth their Executive Order in September of 2021, it was essentially a race against time, putting politicians like Thomas Hall between a rock and a hard place on purpose. There is a fine line between individual rights and the rights of a company to require employees to comply with the needs of a workplace. That caused a lot of trouble for Columbus in reacting to the pressure; Thomas showed outstanding leadership during this challenging situation and was very respectful to his critic when asked the question. Of course, many of the Biden mandates have been found unconstitutional, as many thought would be the case all along. H.B. 218 tried to do something in a really tough time, so there wasn’t much more Thomas could do, but his reaction to the criticism is telling because it shows how he can handle pressure, even when it’s critical. Matt King couldn’t be asked any questions because he didn’t have a record to defend. And ultimately, that’s what this race comes down to; one of the candidates for the newly created 46^th District in Ohio has a lot of experience and has been very successful. The other guy is hoping to use other people’s reputations to knock off a political rival who has set the bar too high for other politicians to live up to. That makes it a pretty clear case. Ultimately it’s up to voters, but the logic favors Thomas Hall greatly.

Rich Hoffman

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