Tag: progressive

Lakota Schools Never Learns: New Superintendent Ashley Whitely is more of the same past failures–ask for more tax money, and teach kids Democrat politics

Public education in the United States stands as one of the most entrenched institutions of modern civilization, yet its fundamental design reveals a profound misalignment with human nature and family sovereignty.[^1] For centuries, the transmission of knowledge, values, and skills occurred primarily within the family unit, reinforced by community and society as supportive extensions rather than replacements. Compulsory schooling, modeled after 19th-century Prussian systems and imported into America through reformers like Horace Mann, shifted this dynamic dramatically. Children were removed from the familial hearth—where organic, personalized mentorship could flourish—and placed into centralized social hierarchies designed to enforce conformity, pecking orders, and state-approved narratives. This model, while promising universal literacy and opportunity, has instead fostered dependency, ideological indoctrination, and fiscal inefficiency. As John Taylor Gatto argued in his seminal critique The Underground History of American Education, the system was never primarily about empowerment but about social control and workforce standardization.[^2]

Nowhere is this misalignment more evident than in suburban districts like Lakota Local Schools in Butler County, Ohio—the largest suburban public school system in southwest Ohio, serving approximately 17,887 students across 22–23 schools in West Chester and Liberty Townships.[^3] Located in the greater Cincinnati area, Lakota exemplifies the carbon-copy problems plaguing districts nationwide: escalating property tax burdens, bloated administrative layers, union-driven wage spirals, and a progressive ideological tilt that often prioritizes social engineering over academic excellence and parental authority. Residents like those in nearby Middletown, Ohio, witness these issues firsthand, as similar patterns repeat across Hamilton and Butler Counties. The district’s recent leadership transition and repeated levy defeats offer a microcosm of why the public education model is fundamentally broken—and why resistance through low-tax advocacy and school choice represents the path forward.

At its core, effective education marries parental responsibility with societal support, not the reverse. Removing children from the family for seven to eight hours daily, five days a week, severs the natural bonds of mentorship and moral formation. Teachers, once envisioned as extensions of the home, have become agents of a bureaucratic “social order” where students navigate artificial pecking orders—cliques, grade-point competitions, and now identity-based hierarchies—rather than real-world apprenticeships. This detachment has proven devastating: declining test scores, rising mental health crises, and generational alienation from parental values. Progressive education, amplified since the 1960s, has accelerated the divorce of children from family, promoting platforms that emphasize state-defined equity, gender fluidity, and partisan activism over timeless skills like reading, math, and critical thinking rooted in heritage.[^4]

Critics across the political spectrum—from libertarian school-choice advocates to traditionalists—note that U.S. public schools consume over $800 billion annually nationwide yet produce outcomes inferior to many peer nations, especially when adjusted for per-pupil spending.[^5] Ohio’s model, heavily reliant on local property taxes (supplemented by state aid), exacerbates inequities tied to ZIP codes. Funding follows geography, not merit or parental demand. The result? Districts like Lakota operate as monopolies, insulated from market pressures. True reform demands detaching funding from residence: vouchers, education savings accounts, open enrollment, and charter expansion. Parents, not bureaucrats, should direct resources to institutions that deliver value—whether traditional public, private, homeschool, or hybrid. Lakota’s story illustrates why clinging to the status quo fails both fiscally and culturally.

Lakota’s fiscal narrative is one of repeated tax extraction attempts met with growing taxpayer fatigue. The district’s last successful operating and permanent improvement levy passed in 2013, intended as a five-year measure but stretched to 15 years through pressure management and economic conditions.[^6] It funded operations amid post-recession recovery, but by the 2020s, escalating costs—driven by union contracts, inflation, and administrative bloat—necessitated more. Earlier attempts tell a cautionary tale. In 2011 alone, voters rejected Lakota levies three times in 18 months, reflecting early resistance to millage hikes amid economic uncertainty.[^7] Fast-forward to November 4, 2025: The district placed one of Ohio’s largest school levies ever on the ballot—a $506.4 million bond issue (4.99 mills) paired with a 0.95-mill permanent improvement levy for its Master Facilities Plan. The proposal aimed to demolish, renovate, and consolidate 21 buildings into 16 (including four new elementary schools), promising operational savings, smaller class sizes, enhanced security, and fewer grade transitions.[^8]

Financial details were layered with optimistic projections: State co-funding via the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission would cover 32 percent (roughly $200 million), reducing the effective bond collection to 3.99 mills. An existing 2.28-mill bond roll-off in 2028 would offset much of the hike, yielding a net increase of just 2.66 mills—or roughly $93.10 annually per $100,000 of auditor-appraised home value ($208 gross, delayed collection to 2029). Seniors and low-income disabled residents would see even less (about $68.71).[^9] District leaders, including Treasurer/CFO Adam Zink, framed it as a “last resort” to avoid deeper operating cuts and redirect savings to classrooms. Yet voters delivered a decisive rejection: 61 percent “no” (approximately 60.81 percent to 39.19 percent), one of the starkest defeats in recent memory.[^10]

This was no anomaly. The district’s 12-year streak of balanced budgets (because of declining enrollment through FY2024) masked underlying pressures: staffing costs (predominantly wages and benefits under union contracts), enrollment fluctuations, and state funding volatility.[^11] The 2013 levy’s longevity proved temporary; without new revenue, forecasts warned of shortfalls by FY2028–2029. Superintendent Dr. Ashley Whitely, in a January 2026 interview, conceded another levy is “a matter of when, not if,” signaling plans for a revised, perhaps scaled-down proposal after community input sessions and a ThoughtExchange survey.[^12] This “shell game”—big ask first, retreat to smaller—has become predictable, eroding trust.

The 2025 levy push occurred under new leadership installed amid crisis. Former Superintendent Matt Miller resigned in January 2023 after a tumultuous year. Board member Darbi Boddy and others highlighted allegations stemming from his divorce, detailed in police records: Miller admitted arranging and participating in group sexual encounters with his ex-wife.[^13] A private investigation cleared him of on-the-job misconduct or legal violations, but the public spectacle—coupled with claims of board hostility—doomed his tenure. Miller had positioned himself as a progressive exemplar, yet the revelations shattered that image.[^14]

In May 2024, the board hired Dr. Ashley Whitely as Superintendent/CEO, effective August 1, 2024. A former Lakota East English teacher and department chair (five years in-district), plus assistant superintendent at Wyoming City Schools, Whitely brought local roots and a “proven track record” in professional development and community partnership.[^15] Her vision, outlined in district messages and the “Let’s Go Lakota!” video series, emphasizes “Building OUR Future…One Piece at a Time,” the E + R = O performance pathway (Events + Responses = Outcomes), a staff-co-created Culture Blueprint, and over 100 listening sessions. She champions the Master Facilities Plan for safety, programming, and efficiencies.[^16]

Initial hopes for reform—perhaps embracing competition via open enrollment or market-driven efficiencies—faded quickly. Whitely’s role evolved into levy cheerleader, promoting the 2025 ballot as essential for “redirect[ing] dollars toward academics.” Post-defeat, she solicits input on facilities but insists on future tax measures.[^17] This aligns with the district’s pattern: Administrators for administrators. National Center for Education Statistics data shows 5 district-level administrators, 49 school administrators, 76 administrative support staff, and total FTE staff of roughly 1,988 (including about 729 teachers) for 17,500-plus students.[^18] Total headcount exceeds 2,061. Salaries reflect this top-heaviness: Former Superintendent Miller earned $199,639 (2023 peak); current structures project assistant superintendents up to $165,000-plus.[^19]

Critics, including new board member Benjamin Nguyen (elected 2025 alongside incumbents), highlight the mismatch with private-sector accountability. Unlike CEOs who scale operations amid market shifts, Lakota’s leadership maintains escalating wages, refuses workforce reductions despite declining enrollment trends in some areas, and layers bureaucracy. The “famous” salary transparency reports (local analyses comparing Lakota admins to regional peers) have long shown disproportion—often exceeding governors’ pay or comparable private roles—yet little reform follows.[^20]

Lakota’s budget—predominantly staffing (teachers and classified unions under contract)—grows unchecked. Five-year forecasts assume wage hikes, new programming for state report cards, and no scaling despite efficiencies promised in the failed Master Facilities Plan.[^21] Too many administrators oversee administrators; summer-heavy schedules (nine-month operations for many) yield high per-day costs. Property taxes fund this while state models collapse under pension liabilities and mandates.

Worse, cultural drift compounds the issue. Public schools nationwide increasingly insert progressive curricula—gender ideology, pronoun policies, CRT undertones—divorcing students from parental authority. While Lakota has removed some problematic materials and adopted neutral policies under board pressure, the broader model recruits youth toward statist loyalty rather than family-centric independence. Teachers’ unions, dominant in negotiations, prioritize compensation over innovation. The “free babysitting” value proposition of yesteryear—drop kids off, secure college/job outcomes—has evaporated amid rising costs, ideological conflicts, and mediocre proficiency (69 percent in core subjects per state metrics).[^22]

Voters recognize the scam: Levies no longer “invest” but subsidize inefficiency. The 2025 defeat echoed taxpayer weariness after decades of escalation. Economic illusions of endless growth once masked the burden; now, with inflation, remote work, and housing costs, resistance grows. Low taxes foster community vitality—business attraction, population retention—far more than shiny facilities. As one analysis notes, districts failing levies often thrive via market adaptation; Lakota’s monopoly mindset persists.[^23]

True CEOs innovate. Lakota should pursue open enrollment aggressively, attracting students (and per-pupil state aid) from underperforming districts. Detach funding from ZIP codes via Ohio’s expanding voucher/EdChoice programs. Embrace hybrid models, reduce admin layers (target fewer than 40 total), benchmark salaries privately, and cut non-essential staff. Competition would force excellence: Lower “prices” (effective tax cost per outcome), higher value.

School board members like Nguyen offer glimmers of accountability. Anti-levy organizations and citizen groups—doing the oversight boards often neglect—have proven more valuable than cheerleaders. Ohio’s property tax reliance is unsustainable; broader reforms (income-based or choice-driven funding) loom.

Nationally, districts adopting choice outperform monopolies. Florida and Arizona models demonstrate gains without endless bonds. Lakota could lead by proving smaller government yields better education.

Dr. Ashley Whitely’s tenure, like predecessors’, risks perpetuating the cycle: Cheerlead taxes, ignore marketplace realities, double down on bureaucracy. The 2025 defeat and her “matter of when” stance confirm no learning occurred. Yet community pushback—rejecting the $506 million ask—signals maturity. Low taxes and fiscal restraint build stronger neighborhoods than lavish, ideologically captured schools.

Public education’s inception promised uplift; its execution delivered dependency. Lakota proves the thesis: Family teaching, societal backup, and competitive choice outperform removal and regimentation. Voters must sustain resistance until leaders adapt—or parents exit via choice. The next levy attempt will test this resolve. History suggests defeat again, until the model evolves. Residents owe it to future generations to demand better: Not more spending, but smarter, freer education.  And the new superintendent at Lakota schools is just more of the same failure-based education approach that nobody likes, and is poised to change dramatically in the times to come.

Over the past decade, the consistent rejection of new school levies in the Lakota Local Schools district has functioned as an informal tax‑stabilization mechanism. When a district of Lakota’s size goes twelve-plus years without a new operating levy, the cumulative savings for homeowners and businesses become enormous. A single failed levy—typically in the range of 5–7 mills—can represent millions of dollars per year that remain in private hands. Spread across more than 110,000 residents and tens of thousands of parcels, the avoided tax burdens since 2013 likely total hundreds of millions over the decade. For most families, that means thousands of dollars that stayed in their household budgets; for businesses with larger property footprints, it means tens of thousands saved per year that could instead be invested in hiring, equipment, or expansion.

The opportunity cost dimension may actually be the most important. Property‑tax‑resistant communities often grow faster because stable taxes encourage residential investment, business development, and long‑term homeownership. West Chester and Liberty Township have repeatedly been cited as among the fastest‑growing and most competitive economic corridors in Ohio—not in spite of tax restraint, but largely because of it. Keeping levy pressure low increases disposable income, which boosts retail, construction, restaurants, and small business dynamism. Over a decade, that economic flywheel compounds: more residents, more businesses, more payroll, and more value creation than would have existed under a heavier tax regime.

There’s also a governance value created by tax resistance. When levies fail, districts are forced to prioritize, modernize operations, and seek non‑tax solutions to structural problems. Lakota’s delayed levy cycle has pushed administrators—Miller previously, and now Dr. Whitely—to be more transparent, more financially innovative, and more accountable to the public. That pressure often leads to leaner operations, better auditing, and a clearer articulation of needs versus wants. From a community perspective, that’s a form of economic value too: it disciplines public institutions to behave more like private ones, where efficiency isn’t optional.

Taken together, the anti‑tax presence in the Lakota district hasn’t just saved residents money—it has shaped the character of Butler County’s growth. Lower tax burdens helped produce one of the most economically vibrant suburban regions in the state, attracting investment and stabilizing property markets even during volatile national periods. The savings are measurable, but the long-term community value—strong growth, predictable tax environments, and a business‑friendly climate—is the larger legacy.

Footnotes

[^1]: Based on historical analysis of Prussian compulsory education models adopted in the U.S. during the 19th century.

[^2]: John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2000).

[^3]: Lakota Local School District official enrollment data and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) district profile, 2024–2025.

[^4]: See critiques in progressive education history, including works by Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch Jr. on curriculum shifts since the 1960s.

[^5]: U.S. Department of Education and OECD PISA comparative spending/outcome reports, latest available cycles.

[^6]: Lakota Local Schools historical levy records and Ohio Department of Education financial reports.

[^7]: Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio) coverage of 2011 levy elections.

[^8]: Lakota Local School District Master Facilities Plan documents and ballot language, September 2025.

[^9]: Lakota “Financial Facts Behind the 2025 Ballot” publication and auditor’s office millage calculators.

[^10]: Official election results from Butler County Board of Elections, November 4, 2025, reported by WLWT and Cincinnati Enquirer.

[^11]: Lakota five-year financial forecasts submitted to Ohio Department of Education, FY2024–2029.

[^12]: Cincinnati Business Courier interview with Dr. Ashley Whitely, January 2026.

[^13]: Police records and board meeting minutes referencing Miller’s resignation, January 2023.

[^14]: Cincinnati Enquirer and Journal-News reporting on the investigation and public fallout.

[^15]: Lakota Local Schools board announcement and Cincinnati Enquirer, May 4, 2024.

[^16]: District “Let’s Go Lakota!” communications and superintendent message archive on lakotaonline.com.

[^17]: Post-election statements and ThoughtExchange survey updates from Superintendent Whitely.

[^18]: NCES Common Core of Data, Lakota Local School District staffing tables, 2024–2025.

[^19]: OpenPayrolls.com and Lakota salary schedules, 2023–2025 data.

[^20]: Local salary comparison reports circulated in Butler County media and taxpayer analyses.

[^21]: Lakota five-year forecast assumptions and board budget documents.

[^22]: Ohio State Report Card metrics for Lakota Local Schools, latest proficiency data.

[^23]: Comparative studies on levy-failure districts by EdChoice and Ohio Auditor of State performance audits.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Cincinnati Enquirer. “Lakota Local Schools names Ashley Whitely as its superintendent.” May 4, 2024.

Journal-News. Coverage of 2011–2025 levy attempts and Miller resignation.

Lakota Local School District. Master Facilities Plan financial documents and superintendent messages (lakotaonline.com).

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Lakota Local District Detail, 2024–2025.

Ohio Department of Education. School district financial forecasts and report cards.

WLWT / WVXU. Election results and levy coverage, November 2025.

Cincinnati Business Courier. Whitely interview on future levies, January 2026.

OpenPayrolls.com. Lakota employee salary database.

Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education.

EdChoice.org and Ohio Auditor of State reports on vouchers, choice, and district audits.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an independent writer, philosopher, political advisor, and strategist based in the Cincinnati/Middletown, Ohio area. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, he has worked professionally since age 12 in various roles, from manual labor to high-level executive positions in aerospace and related industries. Known as “The Tax-killer” for his activism against tax increases, Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

He publishes the blog The Overmanwarrior (overmanwarrior.wordpress.com), where he shares insights on politics, culture, history, and personal stories. Active on X as @overmanwarrior, Instagram, and YouTube, Hoffman frequently discusses space exploration, family values, and human potential. An avid fast-draw artist and family man, he emphasizes passing practical skills and intellectual curiosity to younger generations.

‘Not in Our Town’: Standing against evil as it intends our complete destruction

Sometimes, you run into something special, which continues to be the case with the books from Chilidog Press, following what I considered a wonderful experience with the book by Karen Holcomb on the Ruppert Murders.  That might not sound like good reading, but it was because it captured a time that now seems like a long-forgotten period, only captured by literature.  I had a chance to talk to Michael Gmoser recently, who is the prosecutor for Butler County now and worked on the case back then, which was so obvious, and I have a lot of respect for what a conservative prosecutor has to go through to get a case to court, let alone successfully prosecuted.  It’s not easy; evil has been working in the background for a long time and continues to this day, the forked tongue of many devils, and they have been attacking us over a long period at a rate that human lifetimes typically don’t measure.  Yet their impediment is no less ruthless, and prosecutors have their work cut out for them.  I liked the book on the Rupert Murders so much that I turned to another one that had long been on my list, that also turned out to be a dramatic treasure, and that is Not in Our Town: The Queen City vs. The King of Smut by Peter Bronson.  I don’t think a lot of people realize how important Cincinnati has been in fighting evil on a national stage, but this book by the former Cincinnati Enquirer reporter and editor captured it all very well, from the mob infestation that started a dark path for one of the world’s cleanest cities, to what it is today, a borderland haven of cutthroats and nefarious criminals unleashed by progressive politics for the destruction of all civilization, as presented in the efforts of modern prosecutors Joe Deters and his assistant at the time, the very excellent Juvenile Court Judge Melissa Powers.  And the superb work of another famous prosecutor and sheriff, Simon Leis. 

We’re talking about the beginning attacks from a global progressive movement that hid behind organized crime and moved through policy and our courts into polite society as a menace always lurking in the background, and the efforts of reporters, police, and prosecutors to stop it as it thrived in Newport, Kentucky and migrated over into the clean image of Cincinnati to destroy the concept of families and conservative politics essentially.  There was a lot of money to be made off evil and the destruction of good community values, so there were many groups that sprang up to take advantage of such an imposition over time, whether it be outright organized crime, or corrupt government officials organizing the killing of American presidents and destroying the lives of media figures like Charlie Keating because they were all American poster boys and had to be brought down.  Just as they tried to with the former NFL star turned sheriff, George Ratterman when they drugged him and tried to ruin his squeaky clean image by drugging him and taking pictures of him in compromising positions with a hooker.  What worked and didn’t work became a playbook of the political left over the years, and much of it happened in Cincinnati, Ohio, because that was the target of much mischief.  And behind all the efforts was a mob-placed hit man of a different killer nature, Larry Flint, who was so evil and vile that he meant to lead a personal crusade of destruction against family values as he draped himself in the First Amendment to temp us all into abandoning the Constitution, just to stop him.  He went so far as to devise plans to blow up the Supreme Court. 

But Cincinnati stopped many of these attacks, which I see as the template for what is happening nationally against the same evil.  It’s not the classic mobs that we know now from movies, but globalists who have taken over, only on a much larger scale.  I always liked Peter Bronson as a reporter, but I’ll admit that I stopped reading it after their hit piece against me in 2012, and I determined to do my reporting for people to take the place of what classic newspapers used to provide with editorials and opinion pages with letters to the editor.  But Peter’s book answered many questions for me regarding what happened to The Enquirer after it was purchased by the Gannett group and lost its local flavor.  It makes a lot more sense to me now what happened, as I had a front-row seat to all this over the last forty years.  Peter Bronson managed to capture it all in that excellent book Not In Our Town, which was quite a trip down memory lane and a perspective that defines the fights of our current age.  Evil is at work in the world in all the ways that it was in the land of Canaan under biblical consideration.  And Cincinnati was the battleground that remains a hedge against its vile menace.  Cities like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago have long fallen to progressivism.  But Cincinnati has resisted thanks to prosecutors like Simon Leis and many others and a public who saw through the smoke and kept electing those kinds of representatives to fight those fights. 

I was able to see Sheriff Jones at a recent event where Attorney General Yost was there putting together a run for the next governor of Ohio shortly after I was able to read these excellent books with regional intentions, but very much defined the fight we are fighting nationally and internationally and I was feeling very reverent.  Not just in Peter Bronson for doing what he couldn’t do at the Enquirer, and that is reporting this whole truth in this battle against Larry Flynt and the way sex and pornography are used as weapons against our Constitution to destroy American society, but in the thin line that prosecutors and sheriffs utilize to fight on behalf of those who elected them.  We might not always agree on every little thing and personal issues creep in and erode the trust it takes to fight crime and prevent an insurrection against our values by vile characters always lurking in the background.  Larry Flynt was a solitary character put in place by the mob to use sex businesses to provide cover for their many other crimes, and to use that cover to keep law enforcement busy while organized crime made a killing with the results.  It worked so well that they took the game internationally, and it’s the mess we see today.  But that doesn’t mean we have to put up with it.  We can and should fight it.  We should put our differences aside and find what does join us, and that is a fight for America to be great because the people who make it up strive to be so.  And are not lured away from the task of pornography and acceptance of crime from a lawless bunch of losers who want to corrupt the world with their evil menace.  It’s the same temptation that was captured in the Bible, to fight for God or not and yield to the forces of evil whenever they corrupt, whether it be Sodom and Gomorrah or the Land of Canaan in general.  The book Not in My Town by Peter Bronson tells the authentic story of how good people fought to keep Cincinnati clean and accessible—and stood against evil when it counted most, which is a blueprint for the world to follow. 

Rich Hoffman

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

‘Godzilla Minus One’: The best movie in the world

Simply stunning

Before you think to yourself, oh, there are so many things going on in the world, why do I care about a movie review for a new Godzilla movie? Well, this is something different, this Godzilla Minus One movie. It makes quite a statement, and it is currently destroying the rest of the films being produced in the world, from Bollywood to Hollywood, all places where the World Economic Forum financing has influenced movie content. I’ve been asked several times this year why I’m not out there producing and making movies, as I have wanted to most of my life. And my explanation was that the whole machine is messed up, it costs too much for unionized labor, so the budgets are wrecked. To get funding for the movies, you must have progressive messages in them. The entertainment media has been filled with more progressive political activists who set limits as to the kind of messages that get out to the public, and the theater owners’ associations are often too sensitive to all these politics to back releases. But then there are times when the market is desperate, theater owners are drowning for good content and Hollywood hasn’t given them the kind of movies that people want to see. Online streaming content is eroding the enthusiasm for in-theater distribution. So a foreign film like Godzilla Minus One gets made under the radar and gets into theaters with great passion and enthusiasm, and people get surprised. This is exactly what Godzilla Minus One is: a magnificent surprise, and what I think is the best movie in the world presently, and certainly one of the best to come along in recent memory. On a budget of only 15 million dollars, it’s everything a movie should be, and audiences are reacting to it in very positive ways, for good reason.

I wasn’t exactly planning to see the movie in theaters, I was going to catch it on Apple+ or whatever streaming service was carrying it around Christmas time.  But my grandchildren love Godzilla; it’s been a big part of their childhoods. They were talking to me about the new Godzilla/King Kong movie by Legendary Studios coming out in 2024, probably in March, and they were very excited about it.  That’s when I said, “Well, you know, kids, there is a Godzilla movie playing at Liberty Center right now.  Do you guys want to go see it?”  And I was surprised that my oldest grandson knew everything about it, and yes!  He wanted to see it right away.  So off we went to watch a movie that I thought might have some cool monsters in it.  But it would be filled with subtitles, and I didn’t know if they’d like it much.  But, being Godzilla fans, they could at least say they saw it.  Well………………what a surprise we were in for.  This wasn’t just a great movie, it was a masterpiece.  It reminded me of the many past films I have loved, particularly Yojimbo, the great Akira Kurasawa classic.  This wasn’t just a movie about Godzilla destroying Tokyo once again.  This was a very emotional film about the state of the world and the perseverance of human civilization to overcome the mistakes of governments and live their lives honorably, nobly, and without fear.  Godzilla served as the device that brought this out in people and it was Biblical in scope and magnificent in its execution.  When the movie ended, I just sat there, stunned by what I had just witnessed.  My grandchildren were thrilled, of course, but this was undoubtedly a benchmark in history that I fully realized.  Wow!

Now, I get to go to Japan, and I like to share as much of that experience with my family as possible.  I love Western culture for all its variety, but I love going to Japan because the Japanese are honorable people with self-confidence and a spirit of perseverance.  No matter how many different people I interact with from Japan, that is a foundation assumption about them.  When I need to go to the grocery store to get food and snacks while traveling, the people I deal with bow deeply when doing business and treat the meeting like it’s the most important thing they’ll ever do.  Even at the airports, everyone you deal with is highly respectful.  Walking around Tokyo or any big city, there is no crime, and everything is spotless.  The world could learn a lot from their culture, which I talk about occasionally.  Japan is a good country with good people who are persistent and honorable.  And I enjoy dealing with them on their turf.  Godzilla Minus One is a uniquely Japanese film about their culture and the value of honor as an individual.  The entire point of the movie was about living up to honorable expectations and being a good person, which has been missing so much from all modern movies filled with progressive political messages imposed by the influence of the World Economic Forum.  All that was removed entirely from Godzilla Minus One, and the film had a wonderful sense of freedom that was jaw-dropping in its relief.  I didn’t care that the entire movie was in subtitles.  It was delightful to watch. 

The main character is a Kamikaze pilot who lacked the killer instinct to fulfill his mission, so he ducked out of a fight just as the war ended.  He felt tremendous guilt about this, and it haunted him deeply.  In the aftermath of the war, he ends up moving in with a young lady and her adopted little girl, all war orphans.  None of them are related.  But the girl and the guy sleep in the same house but in separate beds.  And there is no sex.  They lived like this for over three years.  That’s not to say there wasn’t love; they grew to love each other deeply.  But no sex.  In a World Economic Forum-financed film, the girl would have left the guy after three months of no sex, which would have been the dumb plot of the entire movie.  Godzilla Minus One is about much more than sex and relationship problems.  It’s about overcoming self-doubt, becoming great, and earning the right to lead a family by conquering personal demons.  This was great stuff; people lost in the world are soaking up this message like a dry sponge.  And you know what’s best about the film?  The filmmakers had the guts to give it a happy ending, a real happy ending in every way that an audience could hope for.  The movie is undoubtedly about Godzilla, but he served almost like a godly figure, much like Job’s story from the Bible.  Without Godzilla, Job would have had no reference point.  But because of that reference, greatness had an opportunity to grow, and it brought people together as individuals to achieve beautiful things.  What a great message in a world filled with failure.  Along comes this little ray of light that is turning out to light the way for the world in ways nobody thought was possible.  Yet, there it is.  I can’t recommend it enough!

Rich Hoffman

Tipping the Scales Toward Equity for All: The legal strategy to destroy Darbi Boddy who stands in the way of those tipped scales

I have people tell me a lot of things. A lot of things. You should see my email inbox, and regarding notifications on my cell phone, my battery life usually only lasts for a few hours because the screen stays on so much with people sending me texts, calling me, or notifying me that I have a new email on one of my three accounts that average over 300 new emails per day each. I try to answer as much as possible, but it’s impossible. I must pick what I listen to, and out of all that information traffic, I have a lot of very well-connected people who give me a lot of valuable information every day, all days of the week. That’s how I know what is really going on behind the scenes at Lakota with Darbi Boddy and the phony prosecution of her by essentially the same kind of people who have been using the same legal gymnastics to go after Trump. For instance, Sheriff Jones has been coming up a lot lately because of the Butler County Republican Party’s desire to pull together after the defeat of Lynda O’Connor on the Lakota school board, who has her fingerprints all over this talk of sending Darbi to jail for six months and a fine of $1000 just for showing up at a school board meeting. We’ll get into that more in a moment. But the details are pretty explicit, and these people are well placed, and they aren’t slack-jawed, dope-smoking losers. But very responsible, and respected VIPs. And their comments would hold up in court with no problem. Anyway, these sources told me the story of three of them who asked Sheriff Jones directly how he could support a candidate to run against Thomas Hall, and against the nomination of the Republican Party, where he became very defensive and told them all to “bring it.” He was questioned why he thought he could be a leader in the Republican Party and behave against the endorsed candidates. He didn’t care what the Republican Party thought and was audacious to throw his weight around. And by itself, that is not a very exciting story. But it does lend value to what I’m about to say regarding a conspiracy by the Lakota school board to remove an elected representative in Darbi Boddy, which has all kinds of things wrong with it. Details matter, and I get plenty of them that add up to the kind of stories you don’t get from the local press.

The real villains behind the RINO political philosophy is behind this door

I know the law firm’s name and the person who told Lynda O’Connor how to remove Darbi Boddy from the school board by making Isaac Adi the vehicle. At this point, the name isn’t as important. However, lots of people already know about it. I’m interested in the intent. This is not a story about Darbi Boddy going to jail for violating some bogus court order controlled by Judge Lyons and all the Butler County network of hive-minded bureaucrats; this is about judicial activism by one of the area’s most respected law firms to destroy every way possible the life of an office holder elected by the public to do community business. And their deliberate tampering with that effort maliciously is where the real meat and potatoes are. I was livid when I found out that another attorney was being introduced to Darbi’s legal defense before her November 29th hearing to answer a citation given to her just for attending a school board meeting, and this guy wanted a $5000 retainer. The goal is obviously to put Darbi on her heels, destroy her economically, and consume her supporters with a rat race that the real bad guys were controlling. So I was just a little angry about it, let’s say that politely.

These law firms are very politically manipulative. Here is a screenshot of a big one in the Lakota area. Their words, their actions.

I had heard for weeks this revelation from many sources, well-placed sources who are close to all these people, how this law firm got involved and schemed with Lynda O’Connor to essentially override the voters by destroying the life of a fellow school board member.  And this is what lingers in the background with all these cases.  These law firms are very progressive and lean far left of center most of the time.  So if you are trying to manage a school district and they essentially own the minds of the school board, which is the case here, then you can elect all the school board members you want or put up elected representatives to handle our business, but it won’t matter.  Because in the background, these lawyers think they are in charge.  We see that with these multiple cases against Trump, and in Butler County, Ohio, Darbi Boddy is our local Trump, and they have pulled out all the legal stops to destroy her in all ways possible.  But why?  Well, teacher union contract negotiations are coming up next year, and the school board will want everyone to get along and not go on strike.  And guess who negotiates those contracts?  They brag about how many labor contracts they negotiate successfully, but many times, they take the position of labor against the taxpayers, and the best way to make that work is to get rid of those who oppose labor.  The taxpayers have plenty of money to give; they need to figure out how to take it from them and give it to the radical labor element.  So having a loose cannon like Darbi Boddy on the school board isn’t in their best interest, to be polite about it.  Based on what people have been telling me.

History is good to study because it explains the actions of the present

Now, I’m not at all impressed with this. I argued with several of their people during the Covid lockdowns about the correct course of action, and they turned out all to be wrong. Lawyers seldom give good advice; they usually only give answers that drag the clock out for another six minutes and line their pockets with gold they steal from you with a comprehension of Latin that they think you don’t understand. I was right then about the Supreme Court cases defeating all the lockdowns, and they were grotesquely wrong. So, as I hear this story about Darbi Boddy’s attackers, the unelected types who hide in the background all the time and destroy the Republican Party from the erosion that takes place in those types of relationships, I know we aren’t dealing with people of intellectual superiority. This scam of using Isaac as the fall guy while all these insiders pave the way for easy future labor negotiations makes perfect sense to me. It sounds like what lazy people on cruise control in life would do. And to mask it all, they have turned Darbi into the vehicle of collaboration. There’s an old Metallica song about this very kind of transference. I told Darbi personally to drop all these losers and let Lakota die on the vine. I don’t want her to be hit by friendly fire in the coming months. But she told me that she wants to help the kids and was elected to do a job, so she is dug in to do the right thing, which I admire. But for her to defend herself by this constant stream of court cases that these bad guys keep throwing at her is not the right strategy. The fight has to go where it belongs, where the real trouble is up to no good, to the real influencers controlling everything from behind a fragile curtain. We don’t need Toto to pull back the curtain to see them or what’s happening. Plenty of people know. They don’t know yet how to do something about it. But admitting to the problem is the first step, and after the conversations, I have had with people, talking to me about it has been part of that first step of admission, something they never thought they’d have to do.

For many in the world, they find safety in collectivism. It’s too scary to be an individual.
Sad but true, mass collectivists are at war with individualism in Butler County, Ohio

Rich Hoffman

Fox News Cutting Tucker Carlson: Corporate structures failing everywhere and trying to hide why

It was no surprise to me that Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox News, even as the number one guy. I’ve been saying it for weeks; it’s almost as if Tucker was trying to get them to fire him so that he could be free of that corporate structure. We are all getting ready to go through a highly unusual period in world history that was a long time coming. There is a belief, especially among the communist-minded, that they could be as rulers, the center of all thought and activity. And that if only they captured the corporate structure, they would always capture economic flow. But the truth was that corporations existed to fulfill market needs and that invention was only part of that discovery. The condition always existed; people needed food, recreation, security, and social and intellectual advancement, so it was the problem of corporate structure to fulfill those market needs as they presented themselves through the measurements of money. Money, particularly capitalism, was the best measure of this incentive-based economy, so corporations would rise to meet those needs and attempt to make a profit from those efforts. Since America had the capitalist system, it obviously made more money than the rest of the world, leaving other economies struggling to figure it all out. But there was a problem; it was getting harder and more complicated year by year for CEOs to stand before shareholders and explain a lack of quarter-to-quarter increases. Because if an economy doesn’t continue to expand, such as in America, where our 19 trillion dollar GDP continues along an upward spike, then CEOs can’t tell shareholders where those subsequent profits will come from. 

Over the last several years, CEOs and corporations, in general, have turned toward globalism to reach new global markets and continue to expand that upward trajectory of profit-based reporting. But the problem was, the rest of the world didn’t think like America. They were struggling with some balance between outright communism, complete centralized control of their governments, and socialism, where the “state,” a collection of mindless bureaucrats who have yet to prove anywhere in the world that they can do anything right, is going to control the means of all production. So there has been a collision that most in America haven’t noticed too much because they only really care that they can get a Happy Meal from McDonald’s at will when they want it. So long as they could do that, they didn’t care much about globalism, communism, the World Economic Forum, or what John Kerry said latest about worshipping his long lost mother, Earth, with a sacrifice of our capitalist economy to the gods of communism. And along this process grew the belief among corporate circles that they controlled social fulfillment and not the other way around, where market forces were determined by social need. Communists have always gotten it wrong. Yet more and more, our colleges, our board rooms, and our CEOs have read all the wrong books, listened to all the wrong people, and have turned more and more inward to share the belief that it was corporations that decided the fate of economies. Not something they had to work with to find their place in it. And that’s what has happened to Fox News. They started their organization as an alternative to corporate media, dominated by CNN and the mainstream outlets that leaned politically left at the time. Fox offered a center-right option that Americans were hungry for. They put on some attractive news anchors and turned loose a market need that was much in demand, and they had success until they tried to change that formula. 

That formula really began to change when Glenn Beck was removed from his 5-6 slot over ten years ago, mainly because the billionaire tycoon George Soros was tired of Beck doing stories that showed what he was trying to do to America through finance. Fellow billionaire and progressive pal Rupert Murdoch listened to Soros and the New York Society of upset progressives sent Beck packing. A few years later, they would do the same to Bill O’Reilly, another number one talent that they removed essentially because they felt that Bill legitimized Donald Trump by allowing him to announce his presidential campaign on his show. Then from there, the ball really started rolling, whether it was Dan Bongino, Rudi Guiliani, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Ed Henry, the list goes on and on. The more effective the MAGA movement was, the more desperate progressive radicals who always intended to spread communism worldwide and into corporate structures became. Like self-centered children who believe the world centers around them, they thought that Fox News had created Donald Trump, and it was Trump’s sales of capitalism that were interrupting the plans of globalism most, and they had to destroy that means of communication. 

That government beast serving globalism is very attractive to the American intelligence agencies who were caught allowing election fraud in the 2020 election, so they had to do something to attempt to bury their complicity in that massive crime, so they blew on the mind of Ray Epps to provoke an insurrection on January 6th. But people saw it for what it was, and Epps has been well hidden from the public since that January 6th event in 2021. After Tucker Carlson did some excellent reporting on Ray Epps and the general condition of government activism around January 6th, it was evident that Fox News would cut him too. They didn’t care if he had the number one show. They had fallen into the belief that they “Fox News” had made Tucker Carlson. Not that Tucker—and those like him—made Fox News as is usually the case of market-driving influencers. Then Fox News had to settle the Dominion lawsuit because they were actually all complicit in the election narrative, which would have been exposed in court, so they settled a massive payout to keep the case private and not released under the lens of public exposure. Remember when Fox News called Arizona for Biden when people were still in line voting for Trump in 2020? Yeah, there’s that and much more. So 60 Minutes doing the work of the Deep State, globalists who are terrified that Trump will win the Republican nomination played their part in resurrecting the Ray Epps story so to set up the next lawsuit against Fox News, which showed itself to be willing to settle lawsuits making it a prime target for everyone who has an ax to grind to get a little money in their pockets, so the rest was history.

The next day after the 60 Minutes story, Tucker was released, and the political left cheered, thinking they had done something substantial. They had eliminated the voice of the MAGA movement, and now they would be one step closer to keeping Donald Trump from winning the nomination. But that only shows how stupid they all really are. I’ve said it and said it over and over for many months now; Fox News was holding back Tucker Carlson. Tucker would be better off away from Fox. Fox was lucky to have a guy like that. But Murdoch knows he’s not going to live very much longer. His kids are radical New York lefties who will destroy Fox anyway. So now is a chance to sell off Fox News before they screw it all up. Likely Murdoch has in mind Larry Fink’s group at BlackRock because through Fed activism, BlackRock, Vanguard, and StateStreet own most of all the corporate boards that are out there, and they are all equally failing to meet market trends versus the imposed ESG measures. So Fox is ripe for buying, primarily if they can protect themselves from another lawsuit, this one coming from Ray Epps, and sell the company while it still has value before the kids destroy it anyway. And the progressive radicals, like Larry Fink, can hang the head of Fox News over their fireplace. And they all think they will have then stopped the MAGA movement. Yet, in reality, all they will have done is decentralize that MAGA movement, which will then make it much more powerful and less restricted. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Lakota Education Association Shows Their Radical Political Agenda: Teacher unions are the biggest danger to kids

It used to be controversial, to tell the truth about labor unions. All of them are the works of Karl Marx. Participating in a labor union is an acceptance of the basic premise of communism. Even four years ago, saying such a thing in public would have received snickers from an unsuspecting public; since the mid-1850s, labor unions have been around. They don’t predate our constitutions in America or the basic philosophy of the country’s founding, which is best summed up by the rival philosophy of Adam Smith and his excellent book The Wealth of Nations. The alarm bells of the communist movement by socialist sympathizers emerged with immigration into America during the late 1880s aggressively. Those rivals brought with them the assumption that European socialism, represented by the labor movement, the federal “Department of Labor,” was intent on carrying on the work of the poor loser, Karl Marx, who was a fool in his lifetime, and a weapon of global governments in his death. Everywhere that there is a labor union, we are dealing with some form of communism. In the 1920s, alarm bells sounded in books like The Richest Man in Babylon. Then in the 1940s and 1950s with, Ayn Rand’s uniquely American books addressed the matter. The idea of wealth creation and social organization were under attack by these recent communist assumptions, and over many decades they wore the mask of patriotism, confusing their members into believing that by espousing communist ideas, that they were somehow being patriotic. 

And the destructive effects of the labor movement were never more obvious in the teaching profession, as the radical progressive John Dewey imagined the role of public education. No matter how much money is spent with confiscated tax money from property values, all socialist schemes that predate all our lifetimes, public education will fail because it has been built on the progressive fantasies of John Dewey and his supporters in government and the communist labor union ideas of the various teacher unions. But things are different now; we’ve grown up in a lot of ways from the kind of world we were before President Trump was in office. Many things that were said about labor unions, and even the communist scares of the McCarthy hearings, turned out to be more true than anybody wanted to admit. Now, as we look at the trash heap of our political landscape, people are now admitting to the obvious. Labor unions don’t represent American values, and they have no place in the education of our children. Too many people listened to the labor union diatribes that have embedded themselves into many of our government institutions, and the collision of ideas was always bound to happen. It’s no longer about good wages for teachers, and smaller classrooms, as they have disguised their movement for years from public judgement; what it was always about, which I have warned people over three decades, is blue-haired losers who want to teach kids about sex in kindergarten, and convince them to embark on perverse sexual lifestyles at the earliest age possible. The results of the labor movement’s political escapades have devastated families, and the evidence has mounted up into a modern admission where people are finally willing to say the quiet stuff out loud. No labor union in a public school is good. They aren’t good for the kids. They aren’t good for the community. And they are anti-America at their very foundations and never should have been included in anything “public.” When people cry out that public schools should never be about “politics,” they simply have ignored that teacher unions are 100% about politics, and if they are not dealt with “politically,” then they will continue to erode away the basic hopes of anything good happening with tax money helping children learn the basics of an education. 

And that is the context of the battle raging in Lakota schools these days, where the Lakota Education Association, without a thought in their head, published to their members an antagonizing memo, shown here, trying to get their members to show up at a school board meeting and harass the first year school board member Darbi Boddy. Darbi, for her part, has made public admissions that she feels about the labor union, similar to my position, where she sees them as an impediment to the education of children, which is well founded. And the union responded by saying regarding a recent meeting, “You were under attack at this January 9th meeting by Ms. Boddy. She stated that she did not want to work with the LEA. We need to continue to show our union is strong, and it is not her choice that we have a voice!” Their activism resulted in a loud meeting with the threat of violence looming over everything obvious, meant to intimidate any supporters of Darbi Boddy who might dare to speak. And when many did, the union members didn’t have anything to offer but implied violence as a result. There is no logical debate that they can have because the foundation of their movement is communism straight out of The Communist Manifesto. So, they have violence and intimidation to support their claims of existence. But Darbi represents the voters of the community, who are in charge of everything, and that right predates anything Karl Marx ever wrote. So she is right to have an opinion on the matter, where the union has a mentality of changing it or getting rid of her. With that mindset, obviously, things were going to get pushy at the meetings. Finally, we are uncovering the real problem in these public schools because Darbi has had the guts to expose it by finally representing the public in public. And the LEA labor union hates it.

Labor unions are the primary danger to Lakota’s kids and all public schools. Their progressive mentality is corrosive to all efforts the human race might attempt to utilize, and years of their conduct are easily seen with history to support a destructive opinion of their foundations in philosophy. Follow the teachings of the labor union members, and you’ll get destroyed families—dangerous sexual lifestyles. You’ll raise corporate stooges who put money above family creation and will end up lost and destroyed as mature adults. You’ll end up with the kind of government we see today, ineffective, too expensive, and unaccountable. To be fair, I can’t think of one possible good thing that ever came out of a labor union, and the kind of society they are teaching to kids are promises of personal destruction. So their assumption that they have a right to exist is only a parasitic promise to steal wealth from hard-working property owners and use that money to destroy the community by destroying the kids in the process. I wouldn’t want any kids to be taught by the losers who attended that January 23rd school board meeting. I am glad that Darbi Boddy is a school board member who is willing to stand up to those hostile forces. And for the sake of the children attending Lakota schools, I would like to see at least two more school board members like Darbi Boddy, perhaps more aggressive than she is, there to govern that mess. The more who do, the more desperate the union members will become, showing the world what they are really made of. If left alone, they will continue to hide their liberal radicalism behind a façade of politeness. But when pressured, as they have been with Darbi Boddy, they show their true nature, which is wonderful for voters to see, and people will be able to see for themselves what the truth of the issue always has been. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Woke Politics is Killing Disney: We are not “global citizens” we are Americans–the world follows

You can’t kill Indiana Jones. But that is the word from test screenings or previews that are coming out of rough cuts of the movie. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they would try. In this new ESG world for which Disney is offering itself as a leader, killing off an 80s representative of toxic masculinity with a time travel story that ends with Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to the next generation female woke hero is consistent with everything that Kathleen Kennedy has done since she became president of Lucasfilm in 2013. I’m sure George Lucas had good intentions, but he never expected this from his former company and the brands he worked hard to build over many years. For all the reasons he hated corporate filmmaking while trying to finish his famous film, THX-1138, now he is seeing that, left in the hands of corporate control, they could screw up anything. Filmmaking is not a collaborative enterprise, even though that’s what they tell everyone in film school. It is a top-down driver of unique minds who tell other people what to do to obtain a strong vision that audiences can then enjoy. The previous Indiana Jones movies were all from the mind of George Lucas, and that’s what people wanted to see. And what will be interesting about Indiana Jones 5, which is getting some press with about six months until the release in June of 2023, is how different it will be without George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. You can put the same actors, music, and color pallets into a movie, but it won’t be Indiana Jones without George Lucas. And clearly, Kathy Kennedy didn’t understand anything; she thought these popular movies would be vehicles for woke politics and would hold up. But ultimately, audiences will reject them.

I thought the trailer preview looked pretty good, but the problem was it confirmed all the rumors that also indicate that Indiana Jones dies at the end. So like the ESG values of BlackRock have indicated, the way to give audiences a last look at an 80s icon of heroics and toxic masculinity is to erase him from history and to replace him with a woman. Without question, Kathy Kennedy would sign up for that. Whether they stick with that ending after the terrible online reaction is left to be determined. Are they that radical at Disney these days? Well, of course, they are! They are crazy, so I don’t have much hope for the new movie, just as I don’t for the new Avatar film coming up. People don’t want to go to the movies to see woke propaganda and gay rights messages. They want to be free of that, which is one of Indiana Jones’s appeals throughout movie history. But the ESG values of stakeholder capitalism are all about social governance, and Disney has dedicated itself to that leadership, and it is showing in their stock. They have brought back Bob Iger as the CEO to help them make the transition from value-driven content to the traditional way to make good movies; they earn a lot of money at the box office, and Disney is rewarded with a lot of cash. But over the last few years, those values have changed, at least on the corporate side. Driven by Larry Fink and the Klaus Schwab types at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder capitalism is the new value system and a global currency. And Disney expects Bob Iger to navigate that new world in a beneficial way to show other corporations how the stakeholder model will work. So there is much more going on here than Disney killing off one of the most beloved screen heroes of all time. It’s about replacing the value system that western civilization has for this new global view of the world.

But people are people, and what they value won’t change. As Disney has learned with its release of Strange World, which feature a gay plotline for the primary characters, and the weak showing for Black Panther II Wakanda Forever, wokness doesn’t excite people. There was a lot made of Bob Iger’s statements about taking politics out of Disney to repair the brand a bit, but what didn’t get talked about much was that he went on to say that he didn’t believe that Disney was very political. Rather, he saw much of what they were doing as the responsibilities of a “global citizen.” He said that Disney has been telling stories for over 100 years and takes its responsibility to be good global citizens very seriously. And to the ESG values of the World Economic Forum, gender-bending is much more important than box office votes. So Disney is deep into it now. They are off on their projections, and stockholders still measure value in dollars, not ESG scores. And that will continue as we move into 2023, and they find out Avatar won’t make the kind of money they are hoping because nobody wants to waste more than 2 hours on a climate change lecture about nature being more powerful than imagination and productivity. And if Disney sticks with the previews of Indiana Jones that have him being killed, that will kill Disney in ways they can’t even imagine right now. They thought Crystal Skull damaged the Indiana Jones brand. Killing Harrison Ford and replacing him with a woman just isn’t going to work. 

Oh, I wouldn’t mind a female type of Indiana Jones story. I loved Lara Croft until they gave her a stupid bow and arrow instead of the double guns she used to shoot. There is nothing wrong with strong female characters but much wrong with wokeness. And Lara Croft went woke years ago. And yes, the people who want to bring down western civilization and big media companies who have told lots of great stories selling western civilization to the world want to see it all come to an end. Disney these days is a woke company that has permanently damaged its brand. Of course, China and its partners at the World Economic Forum are happy to have that competition removed. But the world is truly at a loss. Yet, people will get over it and move on. They won’t care if there is never a Star Wars movie again. They can live without Indiana Jones. If this movie Indy 5 goes woke the way reports say it is, it will fail, and Disney will further slide down the ESG pit of doom. And Bob Iger won’t be able to save it. Disney was already slipping when he left as CEO just a few weeks before the Covid lockdowns hit in 2020. He knew all about it from the role-playing that went on at Event 201 at the end of 2019. Disney was always built on a house of cards of value that depended entirely on the public sentiment to enjoy the movies. And if Disney isn’t making movies people want to see and instead is committed to woke politics that nobody wants to see, then everything will dry up for them, and their stock will tank. And ESG isn’t going to catch, leaving Bob Iger and the gang holding all the losses for history to remember. People will paint this Indy 5 from their minds, just as many have Crystal Skull. And they’ll live their lives. But Disney will not survive, and Bob Iger looks like he’s going to dig in, much to his own demise. The preview confirmed the rumors, and that has already damaged the brand.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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