A Coup in the Ohio House: Lessons to remember about Democrats, treat them like raccoons always digging through your garbage

There is an important lesson that everyone needs to take notice of regarding the Democrat coup in voting for Jason Stephens as Speaker of the House in Ohio. Republicans who hold a substantial majority in the Ohio House thought they had the Speaker role all mapped out, and it was going to be Derek Merrin. Being outnumbered the way they were in the newly elected body, RINOs and Democrats decided under the chaos of the Holidays to join together to “stop far-right policies.” The communist left sees them precisely as education issues centering around the “Backpack Bill” which allocates funding per child, not per district, which is a terrifying concept for education people. So while Republicans were busy with Christmas, the New Year, and family emergencies, 32 Democrats were convinced to vote for the moderate Republicans Stephens for the Speaker position, while 22 Republicans joined them to give them the majority. The drama over the incident was lost behind the national Kevin McCarthy debates, and it was too late when everyone found out what was going on. Republican Representatives in the Ohio House had been suckered and found themselves caught looking, just as a baseball player batting against a good pitcher stands at the plate expecting a slider or a curve ball and were planning their approach exclusively for those pitches. Then came a 90-mile-an-hour fastball right over the plate, the last thing that was expected. And the Democrats suddenly found themselves in power to protect their education policies and other big government union goodies extorted through years of bad government. For more details on this, you can hear from my good friend Jennifer Gross, a current Representative in Ohio, talk about it on the Brian Thomas show on 55 KRC. It’s a really good interview.

I’m sure Jason Stephens can be worked with, but it will make it much harder to do what many of the Republicans in the Ohio House had intended to do. The issue that remains, it will take several more sessions of Representative leadership to remove the premise of the 22 Republicans who are prone to be RINOs and work with Democrats who are essentially the same thing. They call themselves Republicans because they come from districts where people wouldn’t vote for Democrats strictly because of the name. So they pretend to be Republicans when, in fact, they are Democrats philosophically aligned. And the big union position has crossed many lines over the years; most people have friends or family who has benefited from union extortion, so it’s difficult for them to make a logical statement about them now. President Trump is a union supporter, which further complicates things for many RINOs. Suddenly the Republican Party in Ohio had in President Trump a person union members could vote for, so in the wake of his presidency, the old union problems are still problems, and they are doing everything they can to push reality off as far as possible. And by scheming to get Stephens in the Speaker role, the union types, especially the public sector unions, like those in the teaching profession, feel they can protect the money basket, that funding will continue to go to the wreck of the schools that we currently have, which don’t work and are filled with liberal propaganda. These people are going to fight to keep what they have extorted over the years, and when they saw how things were lined up with Merrin, it terrified them. 

Many from that side of things are calling anything to the political right of Karl Marx “far right,” when in truth, the facts are that everything else has been put in place through deception. Most of what Democrats have done over the years, including their relationship with public unions, has involved deception. And my distinction about union representatives is that all union concepts are socialist and communist in their positions, politically. I have known a lot of people, including family members, who were big union supporters. BIG union supporters, specifically because they worked at the Norwood car plant and Fisher Body in Fairfield, Ohio. Those manufacturing plants couldn’t deal with the unionized labor, and they never should. The Department of Labor’s position of being friendly and advocating for unionized labor penalizing companies who make big investments in communities only to have those investments controlled by union slugs talking about Karl Marx phrases as “workers of the world, unite” to always bring extortion to labor production unless the workers got what they wanted. That was always the radical left position, and they sold it to the public wrapped in the American flag as patriotism. But it was always a communist scam, and anybody who spoke against it was considered radical right winged. I’m okay with that, even with family members and their children who grew up thinking unions were “all-American enterprises.” I have always told them to read a book, then they would know better. Unions are not American and are hostile to capitalism. That makes them an enemy of the American economy and is detrimental to any concept of small government. 

And they have one play in the playbook, radicalism, deception, and cheating to keep any power they have acquired over the years. Once companies realize they won’t be able to run their own investments, that unions will, they shut down and leave, which is precisely what happened in Norwood, Ohio, Fairfield, Ohio, and many other Ohio facilities that watched the industry leave the state because of union activity. But that can’t happen in public education because it’s all attached to government jobs, and government never leaves. You can only make it smaller. And the issue in the Ohio House involving the Backpack Bill was a bridge too far for the radical union types. Once education funding starts going straight to the kids, and performance for that money is measured in the success of the end-use product, it’s over for the big union types who own and operate government schools. So they had to do something to protect themselves from reality.   And they did; under cover of chaos, they elected the RINO Republican Jason Stephens to snatch up the Ohio House Speaker position in a surprise upset while people watched the last Ohio State game and made New Year’s resolutions. I don’t think it’s the end of the world, but it was certainly a lost opportunity. Eventually, that opportunity will come around again because that is the trajectory of politics. Many of those 22 RINOs are only in those positions through some form of deception, and people are getting tired of it. They will be replaced with more conservative members in upcoming elections; that is the trend. Critics might call it “far-right,” but I would call it the America we have always loved and are working to get back to. Any other thought on the matter comes from people lost in the definitions created by the radical left anyway and has no merit in reality. Name-calling and deceit is no way to run a political movement, yet that’s all Democrats have. So they played their hand this time and won because nobody took them seriously. Well, take them seriously; they will do anything for power, and understand that while dealing with them. Don’t play nice with Democrats; treat them like the raccoons digging through your garbage late at night and assume they all have rabies. They are not your friends; they are diabolical representatives of Karl Marx and nothing else. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Attack of our Judiciary: How evil works in the background of the Bar Association

One undeniable way that evil moves through the world is in penetrating our society through rules and regulations, making compliance the value of morality while the act itself might be sheer evil. And that is often where our judiciary finds itself. If they follow the law, they often find that it has been corrupted by evil and malice, yet they are compelled to stand by it by law. This was the fatal flaw of the Israelites in what I think is one of the most important lessons of the Bible, in the Book of Judges, where the people of Israel want a king like every other nation and beg for Saul. God rebels against his own people and plucks King David out of the crowd, undermining King Saul for most of his life. Saul becomes a kind of bumbling, jealous figure who, as the first king of Israel, is disgraced by his very existence because, as God tells Samuel, the people wanted Saul; I gave them the God they wanted, which was God’s way of punishing the people for violating his vision for them. Until that point, Israel did not have a king and would not have a king; regional judges managed the affairs of the people, leaving it so that there would be no other God before Jehovah, not on earth or in heaven. It was this notion that was built into our own Constitution, a society that would have a judiciary to balance out the tendency of mankind to be corrupt with equal power over the other branches of government. Such a concept is a slap in the face of the lazy tendency that humanity has had to have a king, something of a representative of God on earth. 

I’ve had the benefit, likely guided by some divine logic, of getting to know a lot of judges over the years, starting with my teenage life. I’ve often talked about the get-out-of-jail-free card I had in some very wild and violent days of my teenage years. A judge offered himself as a mentor to me as I was surrounded by crime and malice. That judge was very much what the kind of people from the Bible had in mind, wise, composed, and a bit defiant against tendencies of social power. He understood my rebellion and didn’t want to see me in jail over it. So, he was there to help keep the doors for my life propped open instead of being thrown in prison for the rest of my life when obviously there was a lot of good life to live. And since that time until just yesterday, I have had judges in my life and have had the opportunity to know them as people; whether it’s a supreme court chief justice or a regional municipal judge, I have a value for them that is unique based on my experience, and the understanding of what the Founding Fathers wanted to do with them while starting America, taking lessons from the Bible on how to start that ideal society. Judges were to be established as protectors of philosophy in a civil and strong society, and it was a great concept.  One of the greatest things President Trump did during his term in office was appointed many conservative judges. But in doing so, he revealed a much more sinister plot that became obvious, the destruction of our judiciary at the level of the Bar Association, where liberalism has been taught for a very long time and has been injected into the concepts of law and order at the start of many judges’ careers. 

The mechanisms of evil we are talking about here have been around for a long time, and it indeed showed itself when the Israelites first founded their country. Human beings are terrified of self-government and want to be ruled, whether by a god, by some regional religion, or by a king. The tendency of the lazy is to allow something to tell them what to do, and for the lazy, they don’t care if that mind is focused on justice or evil intent. So the malice that we find today against a judiciary is the same malice that the people of Israel found when they tried to run their country without a king. Then once kings were established, then we saw a parade of historical references where kings abused their power because power was too focused. The story of King David taking the young woman Bathsheba, getting her pregnant, then sending her husband to the front lines of war to have him killed by circumstance is a good example of how a good person was corrupted by evil and the temptations to abuse his power and authority over innocent lives. God eventually punishes David with even more violence and mayhem, but obviously, the cycle never improves after that, cycling through all kings and emperors around the world until you get to the United States, where our presidency has a check on their power designed to eliminate just this very kind of problem. Yet the enemies of America want that problem to exist, so they have baked into the procedures to judges’ frustrations through the Bar Association that will ultimately get the people of America to give up their judiciary. It is much easier for evil to influence one person in a kingly role than a series of people following the rule of law to protect high society. But if they are stuck following such restrictions, then the second best thing is to corrupt the laws that such a body of government follows, the legal profession itself. 

This has been most obvious regarding election fraud; whether the case was the Trump case in 2020 or the Kari Lake case in Arizona in 2022, judges find themselves in the strange position of not protecting the individuals involved, as they should be, but in following corrupt laws as established by the rules of wokism coming out of the Bar Association.   I have had discussions with many more lawyers during 2022 than in most past years. This issue has come up often, were following the process was more important to those lawyers than the righteousness of the entanglement itself. And the evil of a matter resides behind the processes. It’s the same trick I have explained to various trustees in rubber stamping United Nations Agenda 21 and 2030 policies at the local level because zoning is filled with progressive planners who learned to be that way in the various liberal colleges. The needs of evil are to frustrate the population in general with their systems of government, whether it’s trustees, judges, or general politicians, and to direct them to the desire for a king, a regional king, a national king, or a king of the world. And in that way, evil would be much better positioned to control that one person. We see this problem in just about every workplace where people don’t like their overpowering boss. The abuse of authority over a population is a continued problem that flourishes where there aren’t checks and balances. And I can promise that the local McDonald’s has all the same issues, and the sentiment is exacerbated by the corporate policies that don’t teach leadership but submission to a process where evil hides its signature. In so doing, the tempers of the population are rallied to the causes of malice. That can take the form of a worker’s revolt crying for communism to make everything fair against the greed of corporate profits. Or in the local judge, who finds themselves rubber stamping election fraud because the pressure from their own progressive Bar Association may never forgive them if they don’t follow the unwritten rules of voting certification challenges that, if utilized, would topple the entire political system. Rather than do what’s right, they help evil conduct its affairs, just as the people did when they begged God for a king. And that’s where the downfall of any civil society starts when the judges can’t judge but are controlled through their fraternal affairs toward the work of malice disguised as justice.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Atlantis Giants in Butler County Ohio: The Hilltop Earthwork of the Constellation Aries at Pyramid Hill, from 5000 years ago

I can’t tell you how happy I was to walk into the office at Pyramid Hill as I was asking about the status of the project that has been going on for a few years now and to get the look of concealment that I did. The workers that day were young people who weren’t sure how to answer the question, so they referred me to the Ancient Sculpture Museum, which is concealed deep in the woods down a large hill in a place that feels like it’s not even on this earth. It’s one of those little secrets in Butler County, Ohio, and is a treasure within a treasure. Noticing their cryptic reference, my wife and I proceeded to the museum and stepped into the first room and noticed immediately that finally, since 1836, when the site was first surveyed, finally the Butler County Hilltop Work was getting the attention it has always deserved. I’ve looked at that strange mound, which is around 250 ft tall and sits across from Joe Nuxhall Way on the west side of the Great Miami River, about 3 miles from downtown Hamilton, and always marveled at it. The museum staff already had an excellent display set up for an early 2023 opening that will connect the Pyramid Hill complex to this new massive ancient mound they plan to call the Fortified Hill. Sounds better than Butler County Hilltop Work. The staff person on hand that day told my wife and me that they were planning to open everything in January of 2023 if everything went well, which explained the cryptic looks at the main office when I mentioned it. There are very few people in the world who even know that the strange hill that looms large in Butler County, with thousands and thousands of people living around it, and driving by it every day, that it’s one of the most mysterious lost, ancient works of an advanced culture on earth. And yet, it’s been there before Christ was born as if dated celestially; it’s around 5000 years old. 

What makes it so exceptional in the world is that it essentially is dedicated to the constellation Aries that through stellar precession, shows a specific movement from the constellation Taurus through the Pleiades and into the age of Aries at a time when we have previously thought only of Indians marching in a steady stream toward civilization from hunters and gatherers and into city dwelling humans. I’m not one to disparage scientists, even the bureaucratic nonsense that often trails behind academia like the tail of a doomsday comet, because if not for them, there wouldn’t have been an attempt to preserve the Butler County Hilltop Work and opening it as a park would never have been possible. But science has been slow to acknowledge who these people really were who settled in Ohio as the center of a very advanced culture, who had an obsession with the stars and built all over southwestern Ohio many copies of earthworks that mimicked the constellations in the heavens on earth. These works are every bit as mysterious as the Nazca lines from Peru or even the Pyramids of Giza. Primarily, the reason for the big mystery is that they didn’t just build one of these sites that so accurately reflects an advanced knowledge of astrology. Still, the evidence is pointing increasingly to this same region, and that specific mound location, along with Serpent Mound off to the east, as the basket of an advanced culture that was eradicated likely during the Younger Dryas cataclysm, around 11,600 years ago. And what was left of these people who were interacting globally with all countries before the cataclysm is what we see during this late archaic presence in the Ohio Valley, which ended up a larger part of the Mississippi culture. These were the survivors of that cataclysm, and they marked the ground with a star map of the heavens with these massive depictions of, in this case, a wild boar, which they associated with the Aries constellation. 

Further, on top of the hill is where things get really interesting because the entrance to the effigy, to the north, has a maze that forces the participant to navigate it much the way that the spring equinox had to navigate the Pleiades constellation on its journey from the constellation Taurus into Aries. While on top of the earthwork, which you can see for miles in every direction, it becomes very obvious how difficult it was to shape that natural hill into the shape of a boar to match their celestial observations of the zodiac character of Aries. This was no small effort by any means. It was a massive undertaking, and for what purpose? Well, as I say a lot, remember Plato’s references to Atlantis, where the first god/king of their land was Atlas. And we all know from myth and mystery that Atlas was the creator of Astrology. And here was an obviously advanced culture that had enough leisure time not just to hunt, gather, and reproduce but to build all these magnificent earthworks all over Ohio. They seemed to connect into one grand mythology meant to be seen from the sky. A society obsessed with astrology, obsessed with an equatorial procession along the heavenly zodiacal belt where ages move by overhead every 2,160 years for a total zodiac year of 25,920 years. Society would have to be around for a long time to understand those kinds of time movements of the stars in a reliable way, to understand that their movements were not just coincidental, but over that length of time, were as reliable as a clock. These people did not spend their entire day trying to hunt a deer so they could eat by dinner time.  We have all had an image given to us by Hollywood and the progressive history of what an Indian is, a Native American or even an “indigenous person.” In truth, the reality is far more complicated, and by referencing the many books on Atlantis by Lewis Spence, a respected commentator on such things, or Giambittisto Vico of the great Vico Cycle, or the Bible, we know that very large people that smaller people called giants roamed the earth everywhere. We know Norse mythology had them, the Greeks called them Titans, the Bible referenced to them often living in the land of Canaan, and large people were everywhere dating back to the precise period of the earthworks in Ohio, precisely the one in Butler County formerly known as the Butler County Hilltop Works. Burial mounds all up and down the Great Miami River have reported the bones of people from 7 feet tall up to 10 feet many times, which can be found in Ross Hamilton’s outstanding academic paper called A Tradition of Giants: The Elite Social Hierarchy of American Prehistory which is available for free online. Just look up that title and print it out for yourself. It’s well researched and corresponds to the reports mentioned above about large people buried in the earthworks of Ohio, not just occasionally, but abundantly. I know of a case of a 7-foot person buried in a mound in downtown Hamilton as it was being built. It has been said in many of Spence’s reports on Atlantis that they were a large people and that once the Greeks and Egyptians inherited many of the myths of the lost Atlantis, their concept of the gods was forged in their cultures. Yet, those myths also talk of the Atlanteans coming from the west, and with them, they brought the pagan gods of astrology. There are mounds on the Butler County Hilltop Work site, just off from the top. In them, indeed, just as there is in the Middletown Mound up the river a few miles, then again at Miamisburg, even a few miles more up the same river, there are giant skeletons in them, and science has had a tough time dealing with the knowledge. Because it doesn’t fit our perceptions of who lived in America before America was what it is today. Instead, it looks like those who did live here moved all over the earth and took with them a massive religion of astrology to the far corners of the planet. And they did so long before Europeans were even thinking about building boats. And the natives of America that we call them today were likely global citizens 10,000 years ago, and the proof of their culture is there looming over Butler County like a ghost that is no longer invisible to the casual spectator, thanks to the great scientists and volunteer efforts to open it to the public with a great spectacle finally. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Lakota 5-Year Forecast: What do I think of it?

Since the most recent five-year forecast by the Lakota school system just before Thanksgiving 2022, I have been asked hundreds of times what I thought about it. I’m happy that the government school doesn’t plan to ask for more money until 2025. There are elements of the radical teacher’s union background who think that we haven’t had a tax increase since 2013, and before that, there were a lot of fights on three previous attempts to stop the school from taking more money from the public, so the push has been that its time to extract more money from the community. Before we elected three board members that are supposed to be conservative to the board, the previous school board was very liberal and wanted to take the surpluses that we had and spend that money on new facilities projects. There is this belief that is built into the progressive mentality, which believes that Lakota is the largest employer in our region of Butler County and that they deserve to be treated with respect and always have new things, like state-of-the-art school buildings, and nice amenities for the staff to work in, because if we want to recruit the best teachers to the area, that we have to do those things in order to stay competitive. In reality, the unionized teachers go where it’s good for them financially, and as we have learned, there are quite a few of them who are swingers and alternative sexual lifestyles participants, so access to other such people is as big of a decision for them as anything else. Access to bars to pick up 22-year-old kids and younger is a significant benefit for them and part of their decision-making process. Communities with block parties happening often and providing plenty of socializing are very attractive to new Lakota staff recruits. They really don’t care about a nice new building; they care about access to other people who are just as deranged as they are. This is why there hasn’t been a mass exodus after all the drama about the current Lakota school board superintendent. Instead of being a detriment, it has been a recruiting tool because it advertised to the world what Lakota is really about, which has been far more enticing than anything taxpayers could spend money on.

Yet, the Lakota school system has a large tax base; if anything, Lakota should be looking to lower taxes. There are a lot of residents who support 17,000 students with valuable property that is much higher than other school districts. And that’s before all the commercial real estate is taxed. That revenue is only increasing, especially by the Liberty Center part of the community where a new Costco and many new wonderful developments are emerging, so with Lakota operating at a surplus for much of the last decade, that is because student enrollment really hasn’t increased, but property value and commercial opportunities have increased dramatically. So we are talking about millions of dollars that Lakota has benefited from and wasted on employee raises for essentially a terrible product, a free babysitting service to the community. But even with all those benefits, we had a previous school board that wanted to spend, spend, spend into oblivion so that they could ask for more money with a tax levy. And that was the talk from 2020 until 2022. That the Lakota school board felt they hadn’t asked for money for a long time, and it was time to do so, regardless of whether anybody really needed it. And that assumption comes from a unionized workforce that wants all the benefits of employment without any downside of management control. They want facilities; they want fewer students in the classroom. They want unionized bus drivers who call off work for every sniffle they have and blame it on Covid. Lakota has mismanaged itself into a complete disaster of an organization, with poor report card showings happening since Matt Miller took over as superintendent. So on the performance side, Lakota has been a disaster, and they don’t deserve a dime in addition to the many hundreds of millions that their budget currently is. They get enough and should be giving back a lot of that money by lowering their current costs. 

When I heard the 5-year forecast and saw the PowerPoint they presented, it made me sick because of a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that few people know about. While I’m happy that Lakota announced that they had enough money to stay solvent until the year 2025 and had to gag at the school board praising the treasurer for a presentation that should be expected, not praised, I could see clearly that a lot of Lakota’s assumptions on money is built into their lack of preparation for a professional world. Like all progressive institutions, they have a presumption of entitlement and don’t expect to be judged by performance, and that is clear in their 5-year forecast. Contained within it are all the assurances I wanted that there wouldn’t be further pushing for a tax levy from Lakota as the radical liberal types had been wanting. I know that Lynda O’Conner didn’t want to deal with a tax increase, and only a few months ago, she and Issac Adi met with me in a super-secret location in someone’s basement to talk about the problems at Lakota. At that time, we were working out their problems with Darbi Boddy, who I continue to think is the best school board member I have seen in decades. I want four more of her over the next few years because if we do have more like her, Lakota will be forced to live within its very generous budget and not ask for more money. They wanted to talk me away from Darbi; I wanted to find out why they didn’t like her suddenly. But at that meeting, I told them, as I tell everyone who asks, I generally don’t care about Lakota until they ask for more money. I think the product is garbage, too expensive, and that they teach radical leftist concepts to the next generation in my community is reprehensible. And in that 5-year forecast, they addressed all my concerns that we talked about in that private meeting. 

But why? What had changed over these last few months when it looked like a tax increase was the only thing the school board wanted to discuss? Well, they chained themselves to a sinking ship in their superintendent, who had gotten himself into a lot of trouble, and once he brought all that brand damage to Lakota, he threatened the public like some entitled, spoiled brat, all to hide his terrible performance since he was hired in 2017, and obviously the school system itself needs time to recover. Their former treasurer Jenni Logan, Matt Miller’s partner for a long time, suddenly left in August to become one of the seven indictments against Roger Reynolds in an upcoming trial. And that same month, all the crap literally hit the fan regarding the superintendent’s bizarre sexual lifestyle, which was revealed because he decided to pick a fight with school board member Darbi Boddy and her supporters. So there has been a bloody battle, and Lakota has brand damage because of it. If Lakota tried for a levy now, it would take more than three attempts to get it passed, and they know it. So they have to wait for a while for things to cool off and for the politics to change in a more favorable direction for them. They hope that if the people of Lakota just go back to sleep, they will be able to return to the good old days when nobody wanted to come to school board meetings, and they could have fantasies about tax increases for their progressive lifestyles. Jenni Logan didn’t leave a good job for a couple of bad ones at the commissioner’s office and at Ross schools for her health. There is a lot of bad behind the scenes, so when I see a report like this, it says Lakota needs time to recalibrate and repair its public perception. But it doesn’t change a thing about their internal management; they are a disaster with out-of-control employees who are too expensive and, most of the time, should not be around children. And no public relations firm in the world will be able to hide that pile of garbage by 2025. That’s what I think of the new 5-year forecast.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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 2nd 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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trying to Find Something Nice to Say About Mike DeWine: Are Fran’s cookies enough?

Obviously, I’m not a Mike DeWine fan. He blew it during Covid by leading the nations into the lockdowns and open tyranny that the rest of the blue-state Democrats followed to ruin our lives. I know people who had their lives utterly ruined during the Mike DeWine lockdowns and even died. The social isolation, the separation of family members, and the attempts to shut down social gatherings such as churches over some ridiculous government tampering with the medical industry were reprehensible, and Mike DeWine led the way. My kids absolutely hate Mike DeWine; his dumb behavior set back their lives by likely seven years at least and personally cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it was no small feat when a person I know who is very close to the DeWine administration asked me if I could think of something nice to say about the guy ahead of the Midterm elections on November 8th, 2022. I can usually think of something nice to say about anybody. But on Mike DeWine, he has essentially been a Democrat, and I don’t like anything about Democrats. Just because he put an “R” next to his name doesn’t make him a Republican. As we have seen at many levels of politics, an “R” isn’t enough. Suppose a politician doesn’t act like a Republican. In that case, I think worse of them than if we are just dealing with a Democrat because we are dealing with another level of dishonesty, and DeWine sold himself dishonestly when he proposed that he was a Republican. Yet the person running against Mike DeWine for this 2022 governor race is even worse as a Democrat, so the question is, do you vote for the Democrat who is pretending to be a Republican, or do you deal with the radical socialist who calls herself a Democrat but might as well be the secretary of Karl Marx? These are tough choices and not very good for a world of free and fair elections. 

So I have been digging deep, trying to find something I like about Mike DeWine. My friend knows I represent a lot of Republican voters who just will never put their name next to Mike DeWine because of how he behaved during his first term. But a few nice words from me might encourage others who feel the same way to maybe hold their nose and vote for DeWine anyway, for the good of the party. So this has been a tough one for me, and I have had to work hard at it for several weeks now, trying to find anything good about Mike DeWine, and the thing that jumped out most to me was that his wife, Fran, makes good cookies. I had a chance to meet with Mike DeWine a few months ago at an event, and his wife gave me some cookies, and they were really good. Were they good enough to elect him governor again? Well, maybe. Ruin people’s lives, kill them with lockdowns by putting the liberal disaster Amy Acton in charge of Ohio Health Care, but Fran’s cookies…………………… it’s kind of like weighing an Egyptian heart against a feather to see if you can pass into the Duat during death. 

But then I had to think of some more things if I could, and I can say with a straight face that during the last two years of Mike DeWine’s term, he has worked well with the Republican Reps and Senate on gun legislation. DeWine has been good on gun control measures and pro-Second Amendment concerns. He even signed H.B. 99, which my local state rep, Thomas Hall, sponsored, which provided standards for teacher training to be armed in public schools to fight back against the risk of school shootings. So, those are a few real things that Mike DeWine has done in his first term that was very positive. Sure, he wouldn’t have done them at all unless he was way underwater with Republican voters because of what he did during Covid. But it’s way better than what we would have had under Nan Whaley. Mike DeWine has signed real law proposed by the Ohio legislature that provided constitutional carry and Stand your Ground law that has undoubtedly made Ohio much better from a Second Amendment perspective. And that’s kind of what politics is, a give and take, and if it took so many people to hate Mike DeWine to make him strong on Second Amendment issues, then maybe that’s a good thing.

Then there is an issue that I care about quite a lot, and that is the election of Sharon Kennedy to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I know Sharon, and she is fantastic. I would love to see her become the Chief Justice, which is very possible. The Supreme Court, for a long time now, has been in a balancing act between liberalism and conservative value. If Sharon wins the Chief Justice position, then her replacement would then be appointed by Mike DeWine. And in that way, like the gun control legislation, DeWine would pick a strong conservative, which would certainly help secure the Supreme Court with much more conservative representation. Ultimately, we must have a conservative Supreme Court. We have a strong presence of conservatives among the State Reps and the Senate, but the Supreme Court has been weak. A lot of people have called themselves “Rs,” but in reality, they have been very liberal by their voting record. DeWine, in other years, might have picked a liberal for the Supreme Court nomination, but he’s not dumb. He sees where things are going in this MAGA Republican Party, so he would be very inclined to appease Republicans with a strong pick.

So there are three things I thought of nice to say about Mike DeWine. See, I can find something nice to say about anybody, even him. He has been good for the last two years on Second Amendment issues. He has a good chance of doing very well on the Supreme Court by picking a conservative replacement for the Chief Justice. Based on what DeWine has done with gun rights, this particular year would likely be a more conservative choice than in other years. Then there are the cookies. Should we vote for Mike DeWine because of his wife’s cookies? Maybe it does all come down to that.

Sometimes you get governors who are so out of touch that you can’t even talk to them when you see them. Fran was always so personable when I was at that event with the DeWines. Mike asked me if I wanted a picture; I, of course, said that I was good. I didn’t want a picture. He didn’t make any strange faces; he just moved on to the next person. But Fran made sure I had some cookies, and they were very good. Even though I think of the DeWine family as a bunch of Democrats, I can at least say that they mean well. That was DeWine’s excuse after Covid; he thought he was doing the right things and just following the orders of the CDC. And that is always the danger of following government; they usually don’t know what’s best. But they have the power to impose their view of reality on people, which makes them dangerous. But Fran DeWine’s cookies were good. All voters will have to make that hard choice on November 8th. Are Fran’s cookies enough? 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

“Timmy” Ryan from Ohio: The only real vote is for J.D. Vance

Tim Ryan has been a House of Representatives member from Ohio before now running for senate. He is taking on J.D. Vance for that old Rob Portman seat and is attempting to make himself look as moderate as possible to bleed away votes from the MAGA Republicans. But outside his liberal incubator, as he has been trying to appeal to voters across the state, his efforts have increasingly looked foolish and even desperate. And after a barrage of commercials trying hard to look better than J.D. Vance, Tim Ryan has instead made himself look like the popular character from the animated series South Park, the little handicapped kid Timmy. The funny thing about Timmy from South Park is that he is so audaciously over the top because he’s too handicapped to know where the limit is. And people let him be because they figure he’s handicapped, and it would be politically incorrect to say anything to him. So they just let him go, which is the root of all the comedy. And that is the same thing for the Tim Ryan campaign; someone should have told him that he’s being ridiculous. But like the handicapped kid from South Park of the same name, Timmy, who wants to run for the Ohio senate seat based on the handicap of his own progressive politics, is making a fool of himself, but nobody will tell him because they fear it might be politically incorrect. Not even the media will do it; who is saying that the race is essentially tied and that J.D. Vance is fighting for his life with this one? Based on watching the many Tim Ryan campaign ads, I don’t think J.D. Vance has anything to worry about. 

The polling likely has more to do with the need of the media to keep the drama of the horse race in politics interesting rather than being reflective of any actual voters. It’s a common problem with polling, liberals pick up the phone, and Republicans, especially MAGA Republicans, don’t answer unless their smartphone tells them who is calling. Whoever is running the poll takes down the samplings of whoever picks up the phone, and that’s how the poll results are created. Meanwhile, there are a lot of unrepresented voters out there that nobody knows about on election day who show up and vote quietly, keeping their intentions to themselves. By then, it doesn’t matter to the media sources because they have sold a close race to the public for as long in the election cycle as they could have. And that means good ratings because people watch their programming keeping ad revenue up during the election cycle. When they are surprised with the election results, and someone like J.D. Vance turns out with a six to eight-point victory, they get some additional media interest in talking about the surprise for a few weeks after the election so that ad investment doesn’t just bleed off. That is the name of the game and clearly what is going on in Ohio with the Senate race. Tim Ryan is a big-time liberal, to the left of Karl Marx in a lot of measures. And Ohio voters aren’t that far left. 

That reality has pushed Tim Ryan to come across as overly enthusiastic about his chances leaving rational minds to giggle to themselves over the matter. But Timmy is like that handicapped kid from South Park. Nobody wants to do the politically incorrect thing and tell him what a fool he is making of himself. Nobody wants to tell him how ridiculous he sounds. And how stupid it is that they think enough people will forget how liberal he has been in Congress and that he is suddenly like a MAGA Republican on trade policy. Or that he’s some kind of tough guy. He can throw footballs at televisions, including images of J.D. Vance himself, and knock them down with a coy smirk on his face as if that subtle message was going to convey strength instead of a reminder of just how hostile the modern political left is. Then when you add up the efforts of Tim Ryan and compare them to the other losers running in this election as well, such as Fetterman in Pennsylvania, we are getting a collection of some of the most handicapped people ever to run in an American election, who have made their entire platform based on feeling sorry for them. It’s one thing to feel sorry for them and their intellectual handicaps in life. It’s quite another to let them run our lives, which is their proposal. They really think that voters are as handicapped as they are, and they are functioning along with that assumption, which has a comedic element to it. 

I would say that pressure from the MAGA Republicans has caused this handicap among progressives to become so obvious. Tim Ryan is trying so hard to overcome it that his efforts end up looking distinctly phony. And they are all desperate; in most campaign years, no political party would attempt to put up a guy like Fetterman with his hoody and tattoos, not to mention his lack of speech in the wake of his recent stroke. Add the Georgia race to the mix along with others, and the Democrat Party under the old fool Joe Biden looks like a demolition derby of handicapped underachievers from misfit island, and that’s the best that they can do. Democrats have no platform, they have lost their victimization positions, and their track record is abysmal. The first priority for all voters is economic well-being; on Biden’s watch, he has wrecked the economy. It took a few months into his first term after the controversy of a stolen election to destroy the economy, but we are now going into many consecutive quarters of negative growth and are headed for a depression. People feel it even if the media isn’t wanting to talk about it, to prop up the horse race to make things look closer than they really are. But because of the media involvement in making things look better than they really are, we now have all these handicapped politicians like Timmy Ryan who really think they have a chance to win. I would remind voters that cheating is still part of the strategy of all Democrats, and there will be cheating in this election, especially in places like Philadelphia, where there will likely be more voters voting for Fetterman than there are actual, registered voters. Democrats are going all in on this election because they know they are a party that is being completely rejected by the American public, especially after that stolen election in 2020 and their anger at the Biden administration destroying their 401K plans. Republicans still can’t take anything for granted. They have to go and actually vote, especially on election day itself. But understanding all that, Timmy Ryan in Ohio doesn’t have a chance, and it’s almost cruel to let him continue to make a fool of himself for the purpose of ad ratings on cable news. Intellectually he doesn’t measure up to J.D. Vance, the Trump-endorsed candidate in the Ohio Senate race and the only person who can do anything to Make America Great Again.  Tim Ryan, well, he’s just always going to be “Timmy.” 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Beetlejuice and the Head-Shrinker: Standing and fighting instead of getting up and leaving

What’s going on with conservatives? Aren’t they all like Mitch McConnell asks the modern progressive loser working in government, bowing to the feet of the United Nations, and has always had globalism as the sovereign idea for the future of humanity? No, they were never like Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, or Liz Cheney. The Cheney family, the Bush family, the McCains, the Portmans, and other similar political figures have been propped up to represent the conservative side without actually representing anybody but liberals. And there aren’t that many real liberals in the world; not once people started really talking to each other. Instead, Republicans are more like the witch doctor at the end of the great, funny movie from the 80s, Beetlejuice. You might remember when Beetlejuice was in the afterlife at the end of the movie, and he had a long wait in the receptionist lobby for his appointment with the everlasting. But next to him is a head-shrinker who will be called next. So Beetlejuice steals his number by tricking him into cutting in line. The behavior of Beetlejuice in that movie is how I see Democrats, takers, ostentatious imposers of time and money upon the world around them. And Americans, real Americans, are tired of them and want to do to them what that head-shrinking witch doctor did to Beetlejuice upon realizing that the guy had just stolen our ticket. The witch doctor simply sprinkles some dust over Beetlejuice’s head; just like that, his head shrinks to close out the movie with a funny ending. That’s where America is with globalism and the sorry, loser Republicans who have helped it along.

This issue hasn’t been addressed before in America because conservatives have always responded to liberalism by moving away. You can see the trend clearly if you have watched real estate values over the years. Where liberals move to, conservatives move away to get away from them. It’s even more evident in crowded movie theaters. You might notice that few people ever choose to sit next to someone else if they don’t have to. Americans like their space and their personal freedoms, so when given the option to turn the other cheek and leave, they usually do. Conservatives never choose to sit down next to a heavily tattooed, blue-haired liberal covered in body piercings and to start conversing with them. Instead, they’ll do what they need to do to be as far away as possible from them. When those types of people start moving from one place to another, conservatives pack up and leave. Only now, we live in a time where there really isn’t any place to go. Traveling a lot around the country, you can see this condition  most apparent in places like Austin, Texas. Liberals have been encouraged by radical progressives like George Soros and many like him to invade conservatives in their home areas and attempt to convert them to liberalism or make them move away so that liberals can take over the local government in those areas. Those areas then become blue areas, states, or cities, and then start the process of personal destruction because Democrats take over those governments. 

Now there isn’t anywhere to go. People have moved, turned the other cheek, and are now red with the slaps. And Republicans have not represented them the way they sold themselves. Real Republicans are tired of having Beetlejuice continuously stealing their number and cutting in line, playing them for suckers. So they are fighting back; they are turning toward Trump, who fights back the way they want conservatives always to do. And that is why voters are picking Trump-backed candidates in the upcoming election over traditional offerings. That’s why political machine families like Liz Cheney are suddenly ineffective. They never represented conservatives, but Democrats knew if those people were in government, it would be easy to destroy conservatives any time they wanted.

For many years people just tried their best to ignore politics and its influence over their lives. But eventually, it was just Beetlejuice and the witch doctor sitting alone in that lobby of the afterlife, and everything was going to come to a head, which is where we find ourselves now. Republicans want their party back. They don’t want to keep moving and avoiding Democrats wherever they appear. Aside from moving into space, there isn’t anywhere in the world anymore to get away from the globalist goals of Democrats, so finally, the idea of standing and fighting is part of the conservative view. Ten years ago and beyond, conservatives might have said about their liberal instigators, pray for them, wish them well. Then they would go to their homes in rural America and give themselves space to deal with Democrats, and it worked so long as they could get away from them. But not anymore. Now the Democrats are moving all over the country like the disease they are, destroying healthy tissue in government whenever possible. It’s what they do; it’s all they do.

Fortunately, there really aren’t that many Democrats, which will become very obvious if America moves to paper ballots and a one-day election as they have in France. All the early voting that Democrats want and the mail-in considerations have only opened the door for massive cheating, which has obviously been going on for a long time, and in giving the impression that Democrats were even with Republicans in real numbers among the population density. In actuality, there is only one Beetlejuice in a roomful of Republicans. There really aren’t that many loser liberals out there, which becomes apparent when you see a voting map of America where only a few blue areas show concentrated in large cities and their surrounding counties, while the rest of the nation is overwhelmingly red. In the past, conservatives would just sell their property and move to leave behind their homes to incoming Democrats. They’d move to Florida or wherever liberals weren’t and hoped to avoid dealing with Democrats in any way possible, just as they do in crowded movie theaters. But a point comes where people realize there is nowhere to go, so they are turning their need for change toward the Republican Party as a whole and replacing the kind of candidates that represent them. And that is what is at the heart of the MAGA movement. People are tired of their own version of Beetlejuice and want retaliation for Democrats always stealing their stuff. And they want to fight back, finally and fully. That means Fox News has lost its audience. The Chamber of Commerce’s view of the world has lost its grip on mass populations. And publishing is obviously making a turn; the books that are selling are not the memoirs of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as they used to be. It’s The Great Reset by Alex Jones and news about the Trump White House by Jarad Kushner. And people will go wherever Trump is on social media because they want the head-shrinker who will retaliate against Beetlejuice and defend conservative values instead of always being a sucker to liberals. Sure, there is panic among traditional media and the leaders of political parties. It’s scary to have their head shrunken by an angry conservative. But it’s the wave of the future and will just get more intense as people stop doing what they have done for years, and that is to get up and leave. When there is nowhere to go, standing and fighting are the only and next option.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

$950,000 From DeWine Won’t Make Lakota Schools Safer: The teachers and administrators are the real danger, we need more school board oversight, not less

I think it’s actually bad news that Governor DeWine is issuing $47 million in public school security measures, $950,000 which is going to Lakota schools in my area of northern Cincinnati. That is like putting a lot of nice icing on a car tire, calling it a cake, and telling people to eat it. There is a lot wrong in public schools, one of which is the kind of school security that is needed to stop school shooters. I think Ohio addressed that issue best with H.B. 99, which will give training parameters to teachers who want to be first responders in case of a crisis in public schools. The false belief that kids are safe with teachers, administrators, and other paid employees continues to be the biggest concern that nobody has a stomach to discuss. But in truth, the extra security that DeWine was providing to Lakota schools and other public schools, with extra cameras and increased resource officers to keep outsiders on the outside, will only make it possible for the real threats to children to expand their malice behind that security. The problem is in continued belief that public employees can be trusted with our children implicitly, where I would argue that they need more oversight from a public that needs to be more engaged in their children’s lives. Having less engagement only allows public employees who have serious mental deficiencies to further dominate the time and attention of children in destructive ways, because the extra security keeps away the eyes that likely need to check out what’s going on more. 

This whole problem was exacerbated by the Darbi Boddy situation at Lakota, where the superintendent, Matt Miller, charged her with trespassing for showing up unannounced to take pictures of artwork on the walls of Lakota to see for herself what had been going on regarding CRT. Darby didn’t believe the teachers when they spoke at a school board meeting and said there was no CRT in the schools. Matt wanted to have an administrative state kind of audit. Darbi wanted to see for herself and leave the bureaucratic opinions at the door, which is what she was recently elected to do. As a result, Darbi was plastered all over the news and shamed for essentially doing her job. The behavior of Matt Miller toward Darbi made many people who supported Darbi very angry. Soon after, people started telling lots of stories about Matt Miller and how dangerous of a person he has been and how hypocritical his actions toward Darbi were. And now, a whole can of worms has been opened, and there is some very serious discussion going on that looks bad for everyone involved. It didn’t have to be personal the way it is. Still, all the parties should have known that it was a bad idea to attempt to make Darbi Boddy the scapegoat for much more serious trouble that continues to be a problem among administrators and the paid teaching staff. 

I have been neutral on Matt Miller, the superintendent at Lakota because there are people I trust on the school board who like him. So, I have put my feelings about paying him over $200,000 per year aside due to their opinions.   However, the reality of highly paid administrative types of government employees is consistent in many occupations, when they have lots of expendable income, which teachers at Lakota do. They don’t have heavy work schedules, they have summers off, and 7-hour work days of real productive time, then bad things are poised to happen because their minds are not occupied with positive things. And the stories of the cell phones with naked pictures between administrators and teachers are abundant. A bored adult mind that tends to be politically progressive often turns to pornography to fill their time, which opens the door to lots of terrible behavior, much of it illegal.

And regarding Matt Miller, he just went through a rough divorce, and some bad behavior revealed that he should have lost his job over, at a bare minimum. So, to my mind, he’s lucky to have his job still. But he’s certainly not in a position to place a value judgment on Darbi for doing her own investigation into bad conduct that voters have notified her is happening in the hallways of Lakota to the eyes of the students. And now, the hypocrisy of his position to Darbi and the purposeful intent to destroy her in the media and within the community has spurred on a lot of intense anger that has cracked open reports of a lot of very vile conduct that Matt Miller is in the middle of, and it’s not good. What they say about glass houses and not throwing rocks, Matt has been throwing rocks in a wet paper bag. It has turned out to be a terrible idea.

As I say all the time, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Just because people say things about you doesn’t mean a person is truly guilty. If it did, there would be a SWAT team at Matt’s house immediately. We must examine the reports and the evidence and let law enforcement figure out what’s what. There is a process, and we must let the process do its work. However, in relation to this school safety money from DeWine, trapping kids in schools where these Lakota administrators and teachers have more protection from the opinions of the outside world is not a good idea. It makes kids not safer but puts them in much more danger. Because school shootings are just one danger kids face. In the sexually charged world, we live in now, where so many adults suffer from porn addiction and seek to act out their fantasies in real life, there is a lot of mental illness going on in the lives of people with expendable income and time to spend it. And giving those people protection from spontaneous visits from the school board or even cautious parents who want to know what’s happening with their children is a terrible idea. It protects the sex abusers from those who need to check their behavior with frequent audits. The employees and administrators cannot be trusted at face value. They need oversight, a lot of oversight. I’m not going to suggest we throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. I don’t think public schools are good for kids in many ways at all. To me, it’s only a free babysitting service for busy parents. But for those who need it, we are fools to trust these people with our kids unchecked and behind tight security, which protects them from the public. Which is precisely what this $950,000 will do; it will give those most guilty of committing sexual crimes in public places more protection to do much more of it. I hear many reports of this behavior going on among the teacher population and that it is led by leadership. There is so much evidence that a lot of it is written down with text messages from reliable witnesses. So, there is too much smoke for there not to be fire. How much fire is the real question? And where there are fires to put out, we would be fools to lock out the firefighters with added security. That is precisely what more security means. It won’t make kids safer; it makes them much more vulnerable. 

Rich Hoffman

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