Tag: public education

Darbi Boddy Gets the Sam Adams Award: What people want out of school boards

It was ironic to attend the Patriot Awards at the historic 20th Century Theater in Oakley, Ohio, to see Darbi Boddy get the Sam Adams Award for constitutional preservation and outstanding patriotism while the radical elements of Lakota schools were petitioning a judge in Butler County to remove her from the Lakota school board. Two different views of the world couldn’t be further apart. Since Darbi entered her first term as a school board member at Lakota, activated due to her concern for the way things had been going in public schools, the politically left-leaning elements of the union-controlled Lakota were irate toward her very existence. And they have been pushing to have her utterly destroyed. Yet, there are lots of people happy to see Darbi Boddy fighting on their behalf, and here they were on a Saturday night during Memorial Day weekend, giving her an award for doing exactly what was making the radical elements of Lakota so angry. Darbi received her award and gave a nice little speech that clearly indicated she wasn’t about to resign from the school board, as the school administration was pushing for her to do. At the heart of the matter was a battle for who really controls public schools, elected officials or hired administrators. And the hired administrators were obviously fighting to maintain their assumption that they were in control and that the elected members of the school board were just token sentiments. So the battle lines were drawn up in Lakota schools for an issue that had emerged to be a national one most clearly expressed in the newly elected Darbi Boddy.

The teacher unions have established themselves as being in charge of all public schools. There has evolved a kind of mutual understanding that nobody questioned so long as parents had the free babysitting service of public education. A superintendent would be inserted to be a mediator between the progressive radicals of the union and the school board elected by the public. As soon as school board members were elected, they’d join the Ohio School Board Association and would learn the rules of conduct that the public would see. And the labor unions would then advocate for a more progressive political world shielded by the superintendent, who would take over the management tasks from the school board. While the school boards worried about all the rules of their endeavor, the radical progressives in the labor unions were putting the focus on pay, benefits, and whether or not there were gay rights celebrated at the school, and all references toward God and country removed from the instruction of the children. I’ve been pointing these things out for several decades, and it’s taken people a while to accept these conditions as a reality. I knew at some point there was going to be a wall that the whole thing would hit; I figured it would happen during the Trump administration. But really, it took Covid to bring it out, as mad moms saw what was really going on in the classrooms because the lockdowns broke the cycle of free babysitting that had been occurring. Parents had time to think about how serious the problem really was in public education. 

For all those who hate Darbi Boddy, I can report that there are many like her out there. Darbi is one of the best that I’ve run across who may be able to save some aspects of public education because she genuinely cares about the school and the kids in it. And their parents. But the fight to go back to what labor unions used to have, a superintendent who would run cover for all their bad conduct and continue to ask for perpetual raises regardless of performance, is over. Getting rid of Darbi Boddy won’t put that mess back together; it was always destined to hit the wall of public perception. Darbi is just the first brick in that wall they’ve come in contact with. Like bell-bottoms and disco attire were come-and-go fashions from the 70s, this period of union control of public schools will be viewed as archaic and embarrassing in hindsight. The future of public education is not in the union’s control of them. Like all institutions that labor unions have controlled, they have driven them out of business because they insist on the organization’s management control. But they do not make management decisions; they make emotional ones, so their efforts fail everywhere they are tried, especially in public education. To hide their failure, they use the superintendent to hide their incompetence behind high wages and get the school boards to chase their tails through rules and regulations—something I call “procedural camouflage.” Well, that’s no longer acceptable, and taxpayers are finally figuring out the story with public schools; they aren’t worth the money, aren’t teaching kids the right things, and are open sores in their communities for progressive politics. While the school boards try to play by the rules, the crimes of public schools are hidden behind the rules. 

That is why there was so much anger at Darbi Boddy for immediately going around the rules to get to the heart of the matter, in challenging the power structure of the superintendent and his protection over his flock of unionized teachers. Within the culture of Lakota, of course, Darbi was hated. And voters cast in her favor because they wanted her to do that particular job. They wanted her to seek media attention to get the story out so that it couldn’t be contained within the structure of institutionalism and concealed from the view of voters. And while she was being vilified at school board meetings and in the halls of the schools the way most bosses are by incompetent employees, at the Patriot Awards, Darbi was getting applause for patriotism under fire and doing what many didn’t have the guts to do, stand up to the corrosive elements of public education and dare to ask questions that nobody wanted to answer. I tend to see Darbi Boddy as the best thing that has happened to Lakota schools. Public education, in general, is undergoing major changes. The labor unions will not be able to remain in control as they have been. Soon, the public money that the schools divide up like pirates after a robbery on the high seas will go to the kids. It will only take the next Republican presidential administration with a Republican-controlled House and Senate that will take the power of the Department of Education away completely, as Ronald Reagan had promised back in the early 80s. His failure to do that has caused much of the trouble we see today, which new politicians like Darbi are coming forth to challenge. Soon, it will gain national steam, and the political capital will be present to change the entire structure. There are already 1.5 million kids who stepped away from public education because of Covid. That number is increasing due to the obvious CRT teachings and the transgender politics that so many parents find objectionable as a public policy. Public schools have done it to themselves. Lakota will be glad that they had these disputes with Darbi early in the future. Maybe they can use this conflict to get in front of the inevitable, and Lakota can find a way to be relevant in the ways of the future. Holding on to the past where the unions ran everything, and the superintendents ran cover for the unions is over. And that wasn’t the fault of Darbi Boddy. She’s doing what the voters want.   Lakota schools were the ones caught going in the wrong direction.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Hypocrisy of Democrats and Global Progressives: They love to kill kids as babies until they want to use death as a way to get gun control

It’s not even about the obviously disturbed kid who shot up young students and a teacher in a school in Uvalde, Texas. Salvador Ramos was an obviously disturbed 18-year-old kid who shot his grandmother in the face and then went on a rampage to the nearby school for all kinds of bad reasons, which we’re learning more and more about by the day. It is about whether an administrative state in the form of government can stop violence like this from happening. While it is my argument that they are the cause of it. And to disguise their complicity, they seek gun control to hide their obvious social failures. Ramos was a product of progressive society; immigration is undoubtedly part of his story especially living right on the border with Mexico and Texas. He had turned toward the “EMO” life as described by others. There isn’t much talk about a stable parental structure for him, certainly not a strong father figure. And he was projecting warning signs toward violence that the authorities, who are supposedly watching every one of us all the time with every keystroke on a computer, failed to pick up on. It almost looks as if progressive politics wanted this kid to snap, so they could exploit the carnage to advance their agenda. Ramas bought his guns right after his 18th birthday, put pictures of them online, and sent messages directly to a recipient talking about what he wanted to do with them. The FBI was watching, and they should have picked him up. Yet they didn’t. They either wanted him to commit the acts, or they were just stupid and lazy. Or a combination of both. The mass killing was a complete creation and failure of progressive politics, the John Dewey view of the world. 

But only within a few hours of the murders Joe Biden and many from his political caucus were exploiting the violence to support their gun-grabbing agenda as if they really thought that this tragedy was justification for advancing their long-established plans, the disarmament of society in general, so that they could rule everyone through an administrative state with even more power. Looking at the situation clearly, if the administrative state was at fault for this shooting, which it is, then why would anybody in their right mind give them more control? It was an absurd notion, yet we saw Beto O’Rourke attempt to do that very thing, pushing for gun control legislation which the communist left desperately wanted so they could implement their Marxist plans for America without even hiding it. Smartly, President Trump will give his speech to the NRA on Friday anyway, as he should. This exacerbated the gun grabbers even more because Americans see the game, as I’ve talked about many times before. They are losing feeling to these mass casualty events because they understand that the government is far more dangerous to their lives than the crazy Salvador Ramos types. So, they aren’t responding to the wall-to-wall news coverage. They are buying more guns, and they still support the NRA, even more after these tragedies, not less. So when Joe Biden gave his little speech talking about how “they” need to stand up to the gun lobby, he’s essentially forgetting who the gun lobby is. It’s not some administrative state competing with them for power; it’s the people who are really in charge who have decided that the government is more of a risk than the next government-produced lunatic.

You can see the hypocrisy in the abortion argument; the same people who are pointing to the murdered young kids in a school are advocating for the murder of kids just 9 or 10 years younger while they are babies in a mother’s womb. For some reason, murder while a child is in the birthing process is a mother’s right to choose, but when progressives advocating for a strengthened administrative state want to value life, they use school shootings to push for removing guns from society. The liberal television commentator Whoopi Goldberg actually went on a rant about confiscating all the assault weapons of Americans as if that were an option. Without considering that by doing so, we would surrender our lives over to be managed by lunatics like her? Meanwhile, there are mass shootings every day in Chicago, and nobody seems to care. There are cries to defund the police and restrict their ability to establish law and order. Mexico’s drug cartels have been empowered like never before to bring murderous drugs into America to eradicate our population with intoxication and mayhem. Nobody cares about the lives destroyed by drugs from the illegal cartel trade or the many murders and beheadings that occur along our border to maintain their “turf.” All of those are creations of a progressive administrative state. Yet, the assumption is that we are all so stupid that we might be pulled into a sad story of even more incompetence, the failure of that system to teach Ramas properly. Instead of becoming a productive member of society as a member of the immigrant community, he became an emotionally fragile killer. And gun control legislation will do what exactly, Whoopi? 

America is a society of guns; they represent protection not just from gangs of thugs and delusional killers but from the administrative state’s failures that are currently grabbing for power in maniacal ways. And no amount of emotion will change how Americans view that situation. Other places in the world may have gone along with the gun control scheme, but they have miserably paid the price. Most notably in places like New Zealand and Australia during the lockdowns from Covid, where the police state grew into all the frightening realizations of a dystopian novel. When Joe Biden asked the question as to why these school shootings are only happening in America and no place else, well, that’s because America hasn’t been stupid enough to give the government that much power. After all, as we can see throughout the world, they will abuse it. Other countries, like China, have killed off their political rivals, and people know not to stand up to authority; otherwise, they will be destroyed. Other countries also don’t have such open cultural standards as we do in America.

No place on earth does so many nationalities interact with each other with all kinds of religions so well. There are always bound to be tensions, but most countries don’t have close to the type of diversity that America does culturally. So there are shootings that happen, and there is violence. But in our media culture that reports every bug killed crossing the road, other countries in the world have control of their media conduct, and the world never hears about the killings, the political sabotage, and the many different ways that violence is conducted upon the citizens. For instance, they don’t have their version of Salvador Ramos in China because they would have locked him up the first time he put on a dress and posted it online. He would have just “disappeared” from society. And that is the kind of world that progressive Democrats like Joe Biden want in America with gun confiscations. And the sick part about it is that they only care about the lives lost of children when it gives them some political victory. But not before. Otherwise, they are the party of death, and they produce people like Salvador Ramos by the bucketloads. And they will kill again, and often. But those killers are nowhere near of a threat as the blunders of the centralized administrative state.   Americans are onto it, and they aren’t falling for the scam.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Public Education is Over: It’s a nationwide change that isn’t going away

It’s not just the actions at Lakota schools in Northern Cincinnati that brought me to where I am now. I have spoken to dozens and dozens of people over the last few weeks regarding the Darbi Boddy school board drama, and I feel really sorry for the people who have been hoping that public education could be saved somehow. But as I have said to all those people and more, I just don’t see the controversy at Lakota. I see personality problems, but as I’ve said, whenever you get a clash of change agencies crashing into a very static institution, things are bound to get pushy. I never thought otherwise of the school board at Lakota. Instead, there are national trends that are forming in the background that are very much part of the Lakota story. What is about to happen at Lakota, with major resignations coming up due to the pressure of the changes, is going to happen in all public schools. I hoped to be wrong about it and hoped that with a decent school board, some form of public education for the people who do love it might last. But it’s quite clear to me that public education is impossibly broken and that the role of a modern school board is to manage the decline. Long gone are the days when Friday Night Football would rally behind the great local quarterback who threw 400 yards and four touchdowns to unite the community behind the sports page on a Saturday morning. And college recruits were in the stands handing out scholarships like Halloween candy. No, those days are over, forever. The people I have talked to as fall out from the controversies at Lakota are all well-intentioned. But they do not see the obvious because it’s simply too painful for them. They do love public education, and they really don’t have the heart for what’s coming.

Of course, you do want to know what’s coming and why now is such a pinnacle time. Well, institutions are collapsing along with the economy, which is overall the net result of over a century of failed progressive philosophy. They have gone all in, and the public has not been with them. All this became exposed during Covid, the progressive teacher unions, and the highly paid superintendent class that sort of functioned as a barrier between the radicals and the elected school board members. Once the rhythm was broken in the public education cycle, and people learned to live without it, there was no way ever to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. At best, public schools were going to be fragments of their former selves. But then parents learned just how radical the government schools really were. It used to be that many people, including Glenn Beck, were put off by my position on public education at the height of the Tea Party movement.    I was saying that public education was doomed to fail back in 2012 and 2013 when Beck and I had a mutual friend, Doc Thompson, who was trying to broker talk between us to do some radio work on The Blaze, as I used to do on Clear Channel Radio. I was too much of a rock thrower for Glenn Beck at that time of his life, and all avenues between The Blaze and me were cut after President Trump was elected. Soon after, Doc Thompson was mysteriously killed by a train while working directly for Beck in Texas. I was indifferent to Beck. He was a never-Trumper then, and of course, I was all about Trump, so there hasn’t been an opportunity to reconcile. Well, I had Beck’s show on in the background the other day, and he was telling everyone what I said a decade ago, “take your kids out of public schools; they are dangerous for your children. Do it now!” Just ten years ago, it was fringe when I said such things. Now it’s a mainstreamer conservative talk show host with many millions of people listening to him daily saying it. Times have changed a lot, and people are finally starting to listen. 

As I said during the Trump administration, if Covid hadn’t been set loose to destroy the fourth year of the president and hopes for re-election by destroying the American economy, the Department of Education was poised to be dismantled. States were preparing to apply a new funding model to the public school systems, where the money follows the child, not to the school. This would force the unionized institutions to compete for effectiveness. Lakota certainly wasn’t happy about that, and in many ways, Covid saved them from that eventuality. With Joe Biden in the White House, public education won’t see changes, but that’s not saying much. Biden, as of this writing, is at 28% approval. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules has shown serious proof of direct election fraud funded by Facebook, and institutional politics is trying desperately to keep it all undercover.

Meanwhile, more and more mad moms are getting elected to school boards, moms like Darbi Boddy at Lakota. Even if the school board convinced her to resign, there are hundreds just like her who are winning seats all over the country, and all want the same thing. They want to protect their kids from what they have come to see as an institutional menace to their children where school boards stand between them to keep the peace, to keep those Friday night football games something the community continues to do. But that all came to a crashing end with Covid, and parents found other things to do. 

In the last election, I supported school board members to help bring solutions, people I knew who liked public education more than I did. So a part of me really wanted to be wrong. I knew I wasn’t, but I wanted to be. As they are now, public schools will not survive the transition to a system where the money travels with the student, which will eventually happen. That gives the school boards the task of keeping that managed decline as good as possible so that the failure of public schools does not destroy entire communities. The communities around Lakota have much more going on than being destroyed by a school. Add to the high gas prices, the sudden shortages of items that people used to take for granted, and a political system at the federal level that people didn’t support to begin with; all the old progressive institutions are going to fail, just as the Biden administration is failing. Now that they have their dream candidate in the White House with both houses of Congress under their control, they went too far. They used Covid to grab for powers that terrified many parents who had been on the fence for their entire lives only to come face to face with their greatest fears, the pincushion, rainbow-haired LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ teachers who wanted to turn their tomboy daughters into a Tom and to cram it down their throats and demand that they like it. Well, people are tired of government ramming things down their throats, and they will take it out on their local communities, specifically their public schools. If they can’t get to Joe Biden, they’ll get to the local school board, who they see as just as much of a menace. And more and more, the moderates will be pushed off and replaced by mad moms seeking to protect their children the way angry mommas do. And there is no putting that anger back in the bottle now that people have admitted it to themselves. Public education is over. What we are seeing now is just the beginning. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Lakota School Board Created the National Circus: They want short meetings, and Darbi Boddy asks too many questions

There is a big difference between making mistakes and purposeful maliciousness. What Darbi Boddy did as a Lakota school board member was make a few mistakes. At the last meeting, I pointed this out to the board by giving a brief history of mistakes the Lakota school board had made, precisely one that resulted in an embarrassing lawsuit last year that cost many thousands of dollars. As a new board member, Darbi has been asking lots of questions. Still, the radical element has been aggressive toward her, primarily since she worked immediately to remove mask mandates at the school. Darbi Boddy was targeted right out of the gate, which wasn’t unexpected. But what was surprising was the level of activism that the school board would take to use whatever mistakes Darbi Boddy made as a new school board member to create a public circus just to get her to resign. Darbi, I think, has been a good school board member, and it was the job of the rest of the board members to reach out and to build a team with her instead of plotting behind the scenes to get rid of her because she didn’t fit a mold they saw as being on their school board membership. The voters picked the board, and the school board, along with Matt Miller, the superintendent, became activists to remove Darbi Boddy with a classic trick of social ostracization and peer pressure to force her to resign for a mistake only six months into the first term. The result was a national spectacle that was grossly unfair to Darbi. It was a level of activism that told many stories, but the worst of all was in its doing and the lack of responsibility that anybody utilized in the aftermath. The school board itself acted as if Darbi brought all this negative attention to Lakota when they tried to use the media and the radical element churned up for blood to destroy Darbi Boddy in every way they could. 

For me, what started years ago to simply fight school levies to keep the costs down of tax burdens in our school district, I have grown to hate Lakota schools over the years. I don’t think Lakota does anything well for the kids. I would argue that even the sports programs are unhealthy for the kids and their future culture once they’ve graduated. The more I have learned about public education, the more I hate it. So after the last election, I felt that Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi, the two newest board members, did care about public education. A lot more than I did, so they might be able to make Lakota the best it can be for the taxpayers who are forced to contribute small fortunes to essentially a progressive institution that works against them politically.   I heard at that last meeting Issac’s statements about not wanting to be on the news, and all his experience as a program manager with Master’s Degrees in college, because he was struggling to understand what a school board member at Lakota was all about. I felt sympathy for him, Issac is a very good person, and he means the best for all lives he touches. I think he and Darbi make the school board better, and maybe they’ll actually help some kids along the way. I was happy with their elections, so I stayed out of Lakota business because I personally find the whole thing sickening. Everything about public schools is political, and they aren’t my kind of politics. So I’m not eager to waste my time at their stupid meetings. All they have is a parade of complaints of below-the-line thinking from a unionized mindset that projects that more money is always needed to solve their problems. And to get that money, kids are always used as hostages to move public sentiment. So if I can put Lakota out of my mind and forget about it as much as possible, I’m a happy guy. If they drag me into their mess, well, then I’m not so happy. 

Politics is a blood sport, which I say all the time. Nobody really likes each other about much of anything. Politics, then, is a game where people use each other to achieve whatever objective they find bounces around in their minds. It is those skills specifically that I think Darbi Boddy has that make her better than most in school board business.   The greatest weakness in any school board culture is the Ohio School Board Association which turns the whole effort more into a country club mindset than anything practical for the business management of a district. What ends up happening is that the OSBA runs cover for the radical elements of progressive public schools, focusing on damage control of public image over the substance of actual management of resources united through political friendships and peer pressure. Darbi went into the school board without needing to have the illusions of friendships and being free of peer pressure. She has a nice family at home, a husband she enjoys, and is a dedicated mom, which is good enough for her. Going into the election, I thought that she had the potential to actually be helpful as a school board member at Lakota because of those traits. But she didn’t feel a need to maintain illusionary friendships aimed at group consensus, and this was a problem for the traditional way of running a school board, so things got off to a rough start from minute number one. Perhaps when Matt Miller gave Darbi and Issac their fruit baskets as a gift at the beginning of the year, they all would have gotten along better if they had given Darbi something she actually wanted. Whatever the case, the board would have done better to make political friends with Darbi than they did. Instead, they looked to destroy her because the value system was featured on cooperation and politics than on actually doing the job for the school.

The result of the school board approach with Matt Miller playing his role of passive-aggressive assassin was to use the media and the mob to push Darbi Boddy off the board with scandal, like a Shakespearean play. They could have used some of Darbi’s rookie mistakes to bond with her and do team building which is how such things are done in the professional world. Everyone would have understood, after all, the board as a body had made more than its fair share of serious mistakes over the years. Nothing that Darbi had done was malicious. There is a hostile political element in Lakota that the board should be fighting as members of management. Not yielding to. That radical element seeks to take away the management ability of the board at every juncture, and the net result of that is always more money.   At that last school board meeting, the seeds were certainly being planted for a future tax increase. The cost of diesel was going up, so busing was getting too expensive.

Teachers weren’t feeling safe in a post-Covid world; what would Lakota do to prevent teachers from leaving for other districts? The subtext of all the conversations was “more money.”  And what always costs more money is a lack of management which the political radicals at Lakota purposely interject always to keep the school board on its heels. And when they can get the board fighting each other, as they were baited into doing against Darbi Boddy, well then, of course, the result is continuously increased costs and unregulated monstrosities. The excuse that while the board was focused on shoving Darbi Boddy off the board, one of the schools needed an extended parking lot for increased busing, which would cost more money and create a need for another tax levy. All the while, to cover up the hard decisions with obvious indecision, Darbi Boddy made a convenient punching bag. The superintendent and other board members who aren’t getting paid want to go home. They don’t like long marathon meetings, and Darbi won’t shut up about her questions.   So they attacked her to push her off the board so that perhaps they could get back to 45-minute meetings again, or even 20 minutes. But from what I heard at that last meeting, the Lakota school board needs the questions that Darbi has been asking even more. When you are managing many millions of dollars, those meetings should be every bit of 4 to 5 hours. And if they take 12 to 15 hours, then that is what should be done if managing all those schools, all those progressive employees, and all the variables in between is required not to have to ask the public for more money. At that May 9th meeting, I heard that the superintendent and the board wanted to be lazy, and they wanted to get rid of the person who wanted to work the hardest so that they wouldn’t have to.   And they created the embarrassing national circus so they wouldn’t have to do the work that the taxpayers expected.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Darbi Boddy is Exposing Sexual Grooming at Lakota Schools: Only 6 months on the job, the radicals are trying to get rid of her just as they did Todd Parnell

It’s not even entertaining anymore, the constant attacks against Darbi Boddy, the newly elected school board member at Lakota schools, which is in my home district. The latest media circus advocated by school leadership, specifically the superintendent, Matt Miller, has been to cite a trespassing order against Darbi because she went to two of the schools to take pictures of gay pride artwork that was on the walls as evidence in her endeavors to discover the extent of sexual grooming that is going on in public schools. Of course, the school rules are meant to protect the teacher’s unions from inquiry. The rules don’t exist to protect the children from intruders; it’s intended to give the radical leftist teachers in the union a platform to project their progressive agenda onto the students while their parents are away from them. Darbi recently got into a lot of trouble trying to point out how this is happening in Lakota and public schools in general. So she went to gather evidence which provoked Miller to send the police to her house to issue a trespassing violation, and of course, the major news organizations were camped out in front of Darbi’s house to record it all. The story made national headlines and even ended up in The New York Post. So Lakota has declared war on Darbi Boddy and the people who elected her, and they weren’t trying to hide it. But why would they? This has been their mode of operation for years. Darbi was just the latest target of their radical, progressive agenda. 

A few years ago, Todd Parnell was forced to resign from the Lakota school board because he let it be known how he felt about some students who had been involved in criminal activity which happened to be minorities. Of course, Superintendent Matt Miller and other board members saw this as an opportunity to get rid of a conservative school board member that disagreed with them often, so they leaked the email and blew it out of context. It was a page out of the woke playbook. Todd Parnell said something that most people were thinking, but the woke rules of conduct that we now find uncomfortably in every level of our society held him to a public standard that was crippling, and he saw no way out but to resign. That’s precisely what progressives have wanted for years, to paralyze judgment from those most suited to have an opinion about it and to use that frozen reality as a way to control the people themselves with woke policies. And when someone like Todd, or now Darbi, violates those woke rules, they can then get rid of them by canceling the candidates that the voters had elected for those positions. Once Parnell left, the board selected a replacement board member of their choosing and tried to run him on the ballot in November, where he lost. Darbi Boddy beat that incumbent and many others by gaining over 8000 votes. So that school board and Matt Miller specifically are looking to cancel culture Darbi Boddy who was just elected, and force her into hiding as they saw worked with Todd Parnell. Only Darbi isn’t having any of it. She’s doing what conservatives should have been doing for decades; she’s fighting back. 

The school board meeting on Monday, 5.9.22, was a circus. The pro-union mob of mask-wearing malcontents whom the superintendent represents like a parrot who should be fed in crackers instead of the $200,000 we pay him with property taxes that range from $5000 per year to $10,000 tried to have a flash mob before the meeting to push Darbi into hiding. But it turned out to be a few losers that are in the far minority of the typical Butler County voters. Voters had just sent Darbi to the school board of Lakota, and here were these radical progressive elements who wanted to invalidate the voters with radicalism and woke rules. Of course, at the heart of the matter is the debate of whether or not sexual grooming is going on in Lakota, which of course, Matt Miller says, isn’t happening. Yet one of the radicals from the anti-Darbi crowd sent me a t-shirt design that said otherwise. I brought it to the meeting to demonstrate the culture we are dealing with. We can’t trust what Lakota says, so we elected Darbi to get on the board and get control of the mess. But the t-shirt shows who the anti-Darbi, pro unionized teacher supporters really are. The shirt proudly displays all the gender-neutral pronouns in the news these days, illustrated in rainbow colors, intended to provoke sentiment toward gay pride. The intent of the shirt, which says, “We are Lakota” at the bottom of it, advocates for alternative homosexual lifestyles. The rainbow doesn’t mean anything but sex. It’s not supportive of building rockets or learning how to operate an easy bake oven. It intends to bring to the minds of students, teachers, and parents at Lakota the issue of alternative sexual lifestyles. Much of this exposure happens to kids who aren’t even in puberty yet. So the progressive playbook that is a national problem with public schools sees their access to children as a way to loosen the parameters of sexual lifestyles culturally, which is a big problem. The voters of Lakota voted for Darbi Boddy to stop that kind of behavior. Not to play nice with it. And in her first six months, she has managed to make all those vile elements of public education upset, which means she’s doing a great job as a school board member. 

I’m over 50, so when I see the gay pride rainbows, even if it’s at Disney World or Target, I think of a couple of misguided losers with a jar of vaseline in the back of a rusty Pinto wasting the night away to a tape in the tape deck playing Queen’s greatest hits. When I was younger, gay day at Kings Island was not a day anybody went because you didn’t want to be associated with gay activity. Obviously, progressives have sought to change that sentiment, and their goal is to make the gay pride rainbow colors mainstream. To make people see it as “normal.” And that is what they want from their access to children in public schools, to groom them into alternative sexual lifestyles. Many people don’t like having these homosexual messages stuffed in their faces, and there has been backlash at Disney, and Target has felt its wrath. And so too should Lakota. But what is going on at Lakota is that the rules of conduct are created to keep people like Darbi from discovering just how bad the sexual grooming is in schools. Superintendents like Matt Miller representing the radical teacher’s union types, don’t want elected members of the community digging through their progressive, safe space, so they tried to punish Darbi into submission and force her to resign just six months into her first term when she was the most popularly elected official on the board. It’s not just an attack on Darbi Boddy, but it’s an attack on the voters who elected her. And it’s a pattern of behavior that is consistent with the overpriced leadership of the school itself. The attempt to run off a second board member who is at odds with the woke progressive agenda is not acceptable. Todd Parnell didn’t feel like fighting it, and that was a shame because I thought he should have stayed on the board and made them look at him every day for what they did to him. I am very happy that Darbi is willing to stay and fight. And for that, we should all be thankful. It’s not just the voters who benefit, but someone has to fight for the right of kids to be as innocent and intelligent for as long as possible. And by the actions of the teaching staff and leadership of Lakota schools in Butler County, Ohio, they intend to groom children into sexual alternatives as young as possible.   That is why they don’t like Darbi Boddy because she is exposing it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lakota Cancel Culture Tries to Fire Darbi Boddy: My 10-year anniversary and the blueprint to Ron DeSantis and President Trump

I am proud of a lot that I see these days. Fighting against years and years of entrenched establishment politics isn’t easy. I am very proud of Ron DeSantis in Florida for standing up to Disney the way he has and all the woke actions that have been leveraged against him. And I’m proud of how Darbi Boddy in Lakota has been fighting for parental rights in my school district. But you make enemies when you fight back against the established way of things, and it can be challenging. This afternoon, April 27, 2022, the Lakota school board pressed to force Darbi to resign when she made a posting on her Facebook page that accidentally referenced a pornographic site. It was an easy mistake to make. Darbi had been trying to reference concerns over pornography in the public school curriculum, but she got the spelling wrong, and it ended up linking to pornographic material. Of course, Darbi’s enemies pounced on this misfortune and are now pushing her to resign. I can say I’ve been where Darbi is now, and some of the people on the current board at Lakota played their part in it. I could name many things that the current board members have done that are far worse than what Darbi did, so watching them take the moral high ground during an emergency board meeting on a Wednesday afternoon was reprehensible. But, I will say that I am very proud of Darbi, as I am also of Ron DeSantis and President Trump. And many others who have had to deal with cancel culture, which is what is going on at Lakota. The exploitation of a well-intentioned mistake for purely political reasons is a pretty low blow. That’s OK. Hey, if they want to set the bar that high for themselves, well, then they can live with it. 

Ironically I had just been through several meetings with people that reminded me that at the end of April of this year, it had been ten years since I went through an excruciating process that I am still angry over. The Lakota school board worked with the Cincinnati Enquirer and all the established media in Cincinnati to cancel culture me before anybody knew what that was. The event happened on March 12, of 2012. I will never forget it, it was one of the most challenging days of my life, and the cause of it was essentially that Lakota wanted to pass a tax increase. We had defeated three previous attempts, and they were ready to go for a fourth, and they had in mind to get rid of me so they could do it. Many of the levy radicals had gone to an area Kroger and conducted a survey disparaging my name very publicly, and I expressed my feelings about what I thought about them. It was fair game in my way of thinking. But because these were women and because they represented levy supporters, I was an early version of the angry white man progressive attack that we would see years later. Before Trump, nobody on the conservative side ever fought back over anything. In all the graphic details I expressed, the print media and broadcast companies all over Cincinnati picked up the story and published what I wrote about some of these levy supporters. And this prompted an interview on the Scott Sloan Show on WLW, which I did. It was tough, but I punched through it. Privately in my life, the whole world came down on me, trying to cancel me out of existence in every way they could. They went for the jugular. They wanted me obliterated. And I knew that while I was talking to Sloan on that interview, which I’ve included here. 

Slone wanted more than anything to get an apology from me, which was how all conservatives were treated back then. Later, President Trump would show that by standing up to the left-winged mob and not apologizing that the curse Saul Alinsky exposed against conservatives in Rules for Radicals could be beaten. That is the same formula that Ron DeSantis is using now in Florida and that state is turning redder by the day. It used to be a toss-up. Now it’s moving firmly to MAGA red. And now, locally, we have a mom elected as a school board member in one of the largest districts in Ohio. Of course, the establishment types don’t want her around. They have been plotting and scheming way before today to get rid of her. And they were waiting for her to stub her toe just once so they could pounce. That’s the way the game is played. It takes tough people. But before there was ever a game plan, I was there. I know how much pressure these people feel. Trump was good at it. DeSantis certainly has learned. Darbi is learning. But one thing I learned that people still remind me of, and why people were coming to me with the 10th-anniversary talk, was that they wanted to thank me for standing up to the bad guys, as they call them. Before anybody knew how the game plan worked, when I refused to apologize on the air to half a million people, under tremendous pressure, people recognized what that effort meant in the world politically. People really appreciated it. 

It was the end of that April of 2012 when I had counted 100 people who went out of their way to thank me at gas pumps, at the grocery store, out to eat with my wife for standing up to the mob at Lakota. They were thrilled that someone from the conservative side of things finally stood up to what they saw was happening from the left. That was a time when being a RINO was just being talked about. Conservatives were always expected to turn the other cheek. They were never to fight back. But because I did and I didn’t apologize for it, the people of my community were thankful. After that, I stopped doing radio or television and just published my blog. And I became much more popular as a result. I gained a lot more power. And it turned out to be much better for me as a result. That terribly hard day on the Scott Sloan Show turned out to be one of the best days that ever happened to me. And that is how it is for all conservatives who find themselves on the chopping block due to cancel culture. If you aren’t afraid of them and their silly woke rules, they have no power over you. Ultimately, voters make the decisions on who they want to represent them. Not a bunch of silly rules of fake conduct in public while some of those same board members have shown terrible judgment in private. But the lesson of the day is that when they try to cancel you, stick by your guns and make them fight you directly. Which as liberals, they will never do.

Because liberals and RINOs rely on institutionalism to save them from public judgment, they don’t know how to stand up to strong people.   When people have a representative as president, governor, or school board member who they feel is fighting on their behalf, they will support them eternally. Voters will crawl over broken glass naked to support people they know are fighting for them. I learned that lesson firsthand. Not apologizing on that WLW show was one of the best things I ever did. And it showed all who came after that taking that approach was the best way to beat Saul Alinsky’s liberal playbook. And it is the way that we take our country back one school district at a time. Never apologize to a liberal, ever! Or……………..a RINO.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trick or Treat in February at Lakota: Darbi Boddy wants to remove masks and give parents freedom of choice, the LEA wants to impeach her over it

The Union Wants to Impeach the School Board over Mask Freedom

I watched the school board videos from January’s Lakota meetings several times, and I still think they are very good. But apparently, the mask police at Lakota is so insulted by Darbi Boddy’s proposal to remove mask mandates from the Lakota school culture and give parents the right to choose has caused the LEA union to begin proposing talk of impeaching the young school board member. During the last meeting, you would think it was trick or treat at Lakota as the mask lovers got up and left while Darbi was talking, obviously meaning to show her disrespect. But none of that is a surprise. This has been a problem for a long time at Lakota, where the inmates run the asylum. Actually, that’s how it is in most public schools, the unions run everything, and the school boards get sucked into believing their goal in life is to show uniformity. I would argue that the point of having five members on a board is to fight it out and debate to convince two other voters to either approve or deny a resolution. The goal of a school board is not to get along but to run the business of a local school the way our “republic” was designed. And to me, that’s what I see happening. This was Darbi’s second meeting, and she’s very passionate. There are a lot of high expectations behind those who went door to door for her to win, and she feels the need to get there and get something done instead of just being another bobblehead on a school board. She ran on getting rid of masks in the schools, as other schools have done around the state of Ohio. So short of getting more comfortable with the rules of school board business and not feeling like a sell-out for doing so, I am more than happy with how the Lakota school board is functioning for the first time in three decades. 

I know people are wondering, especially the sweat bees from the teacher’s union, what my relationship is with all this. Just remember what some of those same people who are all stirred up over Darbi, what they did to me about ten years ago in the parking lot of Kroger by Lakota East. Julie Shaffer played her role in that along with Joan Powell and many other tax increase supporters back then. So now is not the time to play innocent. I’ll stay mad over that forever; I will never forget. But that isn’t the fault of the current crop of kids moving through Lakota or many of the characters who are now involved that want to make the public school work for the benefit of the area’s parents. It took Lynda O’Conner more than a decade to win me over to believing that she was a Republican. I know her to be a very good one now. But I used to be so angry at the Lakota school board that everyone on it was what I thought were scum bag liberals. It took seeing Lynda at many GOP events over the last several years that I learned that Lynda was one of the good people. We have very different ideas about the worth of public education. She really believes in Lakota and is hopeful about public schools’ role in all our lives. I personally want to blow it all up, metaphorically, as a concept given to us by the significant progressive loser, John Dewey. I had been asked to run for school board many times, but that just wouldn’t be fair. We all pay taxes to the school, right or wrong; I’m happy to not get in the way if people like Lynda who want to fix it to the best of their ability. I’m also happy to offer solutions or help people who want to be part of the solution find their way to the school board by helping connect all the right dots. But for me personally, I’m all about getting rid of the Dewey system completely. 

Lynda and I usually agree to disagree on education, and when we see each other, we talk about other things besides school board business. Usually, we have a shared interest in GOP-related topics locally and nationally. If we talk about school board items for too long, I quickly blow it all up intellectually, while she desperately wants to save it. I tell that little story to those who are wondering, which are quite a few people these days. And I can also relate to the problems that new school board members like Darbi and Isaac Adi are feeling now that they are inside. It’s empowering to help be a part of the solution. The rules of the game are there to make it something of a functioning republic, and most of the time, no single person gets it their way all the way.

In Darbi’s case over this mask resolution issue, it’s her job to get two other votes on the board to support her. Many people backing her might think it’s a sell-out to work with people on the board. But they aren’t on the board. It’s tough, at best, to represent so many people and still do what you think is right. I have a policy that I do not pick up the phone, or text anybody ever, like Sheriff Jones might do, to never put my hand on the scales and threaten people to vote a certain way. I would never call up Lynda and tell her that I wouldn’t like her anymore if she didn’t vote the way I wanted her to. I believe firmly in finding people who want to do a job correctly and putting them in power to do that job. I may not always like what they do, but they should know more than me about it in a republic, which is why they are my representative there. You must trust the people you vote for to do the ultimate right thing and always keep the big picture in mind. If they don’t, then you vote them out. That’s the way the game works. 

But for the teacher’s union at Lakota, they already don’t like Darbi because they can’t imagine how they might get her under control and intimidated by their presence. That is something they have been doing for years, threatening school board candidates first with the offerings of friendship but then taking away that civility if they step out of line. That was what was implied by them walking out on Darbi in the second meeting of the year while she was speaking. I can understand not liking what Darbi was saying. It may not be their politics. But if they really wanted to understand what’s going on in the district, they would know that Darbi represents people in Lakota who think worse of public education than I do. I’m a moderate on the issue, believe me, there are lots of people who hate it far worse, and to them, Lynda might as well be Satan incarnate because she doesn’t put everyone on trial and burn them at the stake. Nobody will ever make everyone happy, but what we want is for good people to do good work on behalf of the kids and taxpayers who are stuck paying many thousands of dollars a year for this ridiculous product. And there isn’t a lot of tolerance for these teachers’ union shenanigans. As Issac and Darbi get more acquainted with the conduct of these school board meetings and the agreed rules of the game, they will get better. But so far, these meetings are what I think all school boards should look like. They may be a little bumpy. But I’ve never liked a lot of hand-holding, especially when millions of dollars are at stake and many lives are impacted. And for those who are used to bullying their way into a one-sided argument, well, those days are over.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Darbi Boddy’s Pre-Covid Proposal at Lakota: Making masks the parents’ choice, not a political imposition

Removing Masks from Kids at Lakota, Freedom of Choice

The first thing that everyone must understand is that wearing masks as protection from Covid or to spread Covid to others is 100% emotional, containing 0% logic. There isn’t one scientific study that rules in favor of masks being a preventative measure at all in relation to Covid, and over time, since March of 2020 when health departments in an initial act of helplessness wanted to take steps to slow the spread of the virus as it was unleashed on the world to do something, even if it was symbolic, not to incite a public panic as their worlds came undone with Mike DeWine lockdowns and closure of the American economy during a presidential election year. After two years of this behavior, some people are naturally timid and want to believe they can do something to control the various virus spawns that have come from Covid, and their fears have taken over their rationality. In a school system like Lakota with over 17,000 students in the population, there are lots of people who believe lots of things, but when it comes to the wearing of masks and imposing that belief on children who are supposed to be learning to think and not just take orders, this issue of mandating masks in schools has been detrimental to the learning culture of all public schools. Thankfully, the newly elected school board member Darby Boddy has made a motion to add a resolution to the agenda of the January 24th school board meeting to reset the health measures established before March 20th of 2020. In other words, to be rid of the mask mandates and the additional Covid standards that spawned from much irrationality as Covid was unleashed into our society and opinions about how to deal with it evolved strictly down political viewpoints, not around scientific logic. Darbi is proposing for Lakota to take leadership on the mask mandate issue and show the rest of Ohio what a logical management approach to the issue should look like, which is a wonderful thing that essentially took a new election even to put on the table. And thank God she has.

Now naturally, all the people who have been standing in the way of addressing this mask-wearing issue in public schools had their faces melt as Darbi proposed pages and pages of information supporting her position toward the safety resolution. But logic was never the factor in making children wear masks. What essentially happened was that all the really timid people in the world who seek government jobs in the health departments, the Governor’s office in Ohio, school administration jobs, people afraid of lightening, of wind, of sunsets, suddenly Covid gave them power over all the scary risk-takers in the world and they became addicted to the power like a drug addict on Heroin. And after two years of the behavior, they do not want to give up that power over others. They certainly don’t want to go back to normal before March 2020. For them, which is many of the employees in the Lakota school system, the lawyers who they employ, all the surrounding public employee unions, even the police unions, Covid has given them the cover story of their dreams, and they have no desire to return to “normal.” Roughly 5% of any work culture always want a doctor’s note to get them out of work whenever they want. Covid is far better than FMLA or any regular doctor’s note if they should be inclined to take a day off work excused. All you have to do with Covid is say that you were next to someone who was next to someone, who was next to someone who had Covid, and “poof,” you must stay in quarantine for some CDC recommended days. No doctor’s note, no logical approach, just perceptual reality. Covid has been a dream come true for the lazy in any workforce. 

Therefore, the fight to continue the mask-wearing mandates extends beyond political parties and descends into the cover of the less inclined employees. They spend a lot of time in their lives looking for reasons not to work. And that makes the management of any workforce a nightmare to conduct. That is certainly true in the private sector, but in a large school district like Lakota with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and administrators, a 5% call-off rate is a nightmare to cover. To follow all the ridiculous CDC rules is irrational at best. But that’s what has been happening. The medical tyrants have had their way, and everyone has danced to their tune, including most legal representation. For lawyers, the easy thing for them to do is to recommend full compliance to CDC recommendations, even though there is no legal authority for the CDC or any local department of health to impose mandates of any kind on anybody, anywhere. Outside of government work, which public schools are, much life is returning to normal, such as in the NFL, where stadiums are open. People are enjoying the games as they did before March of 2020. Of course, the CDC recommends other behavior, but fans of the NFL experience are done with Covid and are returning to “normal,” and we do not see mass deaths. We hear alarming reports about case spikes, but as history shows, these cases aren’t any different from common colds in the past, and people have learned to live their lives anyway. They get the virus, get over it, and return to their lives as they always did. That same approach needs to be applied to all public schools as well. Covid protocols have gone on too long, and it is now having an impact on children in a negative way, which Darbi included evidence of in her proposed resolution, which will be voted upon in February 2022. 

For life to return to normal, which needs to, people like Darbi need to show leadership in political opposition. At this point, any scientific consideration about Covid isn’t a factor. There is nothing in science to support that masks do anything rational to help with Covid in any way. Instead, it’s purely political. It’s political for the teacher’s union. It’s political for the health departments. It’s political for the CDC connected to the Biden administration. It’s political for the law firms who see this Covid issue as easy money. But for those who must lead others and show courage to the world, it’s time to return to a normal life. To stop being afraid of Covid. And to start managing it proactively. It’s OK to support timid people who have real fears about Covid created for them in countless news reports rooted in politics and not rationality. But the purpose of a public school is to teach children, and it is the task of our society to ensure that they have the best opportunity at a good life while in that school experience. The authority figures might not want to surrender the controls they’ve enjoyed during Covid. But we owe it to children everywhere to take that leadership and show them that life goes on and that they don’t need to be afraid of every little thing in the world. The only thing dangerous about Covid is the perception that a government alliance with media has created. Legally, there is nothing to take action on. There is no liability to irrational fears. There is no constitutional enforcement. Governors have tried, and they have learned that the Supreme Courts of the states and the Federal level have no stomach for this nonsense. It’s time to take all that power back away from those who have become so addicted to all this Covid abuse. And to give kids a chance at a normal life, once again. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Avoid Electing Panicky Liberal Parents to School Boards: Brad Lovell makes threats at Lakota to Lynda O’Conner

The Danger of Liberal Panicky Parents

It is always dangerous to put a panicky parent in charge of the money, and that is just what has been going on at the Lakota school district in Northern Cincinnati.  We just had an election, and two conservative new members will be joining the Lakota school board in January.  They will inherit positive income to work with, and it should be very manageable with conservative votes on the board.  But first, we had to get off the board, at least a majority vote that they did have from liberal panicky parent types who have grossly distorted views of what’s suitable for a child and how much responsibility society must pay for that neurosis.  The meeting shown within this article was the first since the election and one of the last of the year, and it displays at around the 1 hr and 5-minute mark why it is so dangerous to have panicky parents elected to a school board. That’s when Brad Lovell went on several long diatribes about why spending money was good for his kid’s future which left many wondering about his sanity.  Regardless, we can all be thankful that voters in Lakota replaced him and other progressive candidates with logical, conservative replacements because there is so much wrong with this school board meeting that we could write books about it.  But the essence of it all is that politicians like Brad Lovell make all politics bad.  They get into the endeavor for all the wrong reasons and expect the world to pay for their view of reality, which is often too distorted to live functionally with everyone else. 

I don’t go out of my way to spike to football on anything.  I would be OK just to let the election results tell the story and move on.  But Brad, in all his liberal-infused diatribes, chose to make a fool of himself at the Lakota board meeting after the election.  He had set in his mind that Lakota had surpluses in the budget. The money needed to be spent on more liberal programs, more buildings for liberalism to be conducted, and he wanted to raise funds for the school with tax increases.  He called out the only current conservative board member, Lynda O’Conner, by name at the meeting by saying to her face that he wasn’t going away from the board but would return as a concerned parent to hold the board accountable if they didn’t put a tax increase on the ballot.  Lynda suggested that if the school was operating at a surplus, and she has said this many times, Lakota should give the money back to the community.  And it is over that concept that Brad was obviously disturbed. 

When I talk about liberals, I often talk about mental illness.  I don’t mean that in a tongue-in-cheek way; it’s quite a profound statement.  Liberals are the type of people who build their whole political philosophy around living off other people’s efforts.  Self-reliance is not a priority at all. Instead, they seek to hide their vast insecurities behind social causes and collective salvation.  They are the deranged parents who are so terrified of their little kids getting hurt that they strap them up with knee pads and helmets just to ride a bicycle in the driveway but will surrender those kids to a college campus to end up face down drunk and naked on a Saturday night after a football game to be defamed for the rest of their lives in embarrassment just ten years later.  They are insane and crippled with a lack of logic, and they need treatment, not to be in charge of millions of dollars.  At Lakota, Brad came in as a board member four years prior.  People had a taste of his big-spending habits, and there were many calls for his removal.  Smart on his part to take a job as a “business development” guy at Sycamore schools because he was in trouble at Lakota, and his reputation was taking on water.  He got out of Dodge while he could.

Yet, he stated to Lynda O’Connor about the election results of 2021 that he didn’t see the removal of two of the three incumbents as a referendum on spending and his general tax and spend philosophy.  Like most liberals, he talks only to his types of people, and he doesn’t hear the talk at Waffle House or Frisch’s from coffee drinkers who think people like Brad are idiots and detriments to society.  The teacher’s union loves Brad because he gave them what they wanted, money and attention.  But the public at large isn’t all that happy with public education. It’s not just me.  I can put words to what people are thinking, but people think what they think.  And they spoke through the vote.  It wasn’t just CRT or transexual bathrooms.  Ultimately, it’s about conservative representation on the school board, and with that comes fiscal responsibility.  Do more with less, and like it.  Most of the multitudes of Lakota voters do not have kids in the school system, so the amount of tax money they are willing to spend on other people’s kids is a diminishing objective.  Brad Lovell sounded just like every liberal Keynesian economist in the school board meeting, and ordinary people who don’t pad their kids up in helmets and knee pads just to ride a bicycle don’t like that kind of talk.  For the liberal, if there is extra money, spend it on something stupid and call it investment without ever questioning the original cost.  No thanks.  If Brad had stayed in the Lakota race, he would have been defeated because he was very unpopular among the non-Keynesian crowd, most ordinary people.

But this video and article are helpful to everyone who is dealing with these kinds of things in their local community.  Every school district has its own version of Brad Lovell.  Just look for the kids wearing masks afraid of the Omicron or the Delta variant, who are protesting in favor of communist Black Lives Matters at the expense of traditional America.  Look for the children who are afraid of lightning and who can’t ride a bicycle without safety equipment.  Then look for politicians like Brad nearby who are terrified of life and expect society to pay for their lack of security, and you’ll begin to see the problem.  And that is where most of the money in these school systems gets wasted, on the perception of value instead of experience and diligence.  With danger and the efforts of living life, knowledge is gained, which understands that spending money often doesn’t solve insecurity.  No amount of money can make people like Brad Lovell feel safe.  No matter how many programs Lakota pays for as options for children, it will never replace the faults of lousy parenting, which every college campus displays nightly in their bars and fraternities.  Children are so precious when they are 5 to 15, but when they are 18, we can just throw them to the sidewalk and let them be taught by institutional failure and wipe our hands clean of all the money wasted in the past.  No, if we have a school for a fancy babysitting service for busy parents, fine.  But there are limits to what that’s worth to a community.  And as Brad and many others learned in this last election, there are limits to that value. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Its Not About Justice in the Oxford School Shooting: The war against parents, and guns, continues with gross overreach

It’s About Destroying the Family, and Taking Their Guns

I really feel bad for the shooter’s parents in the Oxford school killings in Michigan.  The prosecutor in the case set the stage for what really is a rush to judgment and gross violation of innocent until proven guilty assumption when Karen McDonald essentially stated that she was a mom, and that was supposed to be the reason she destroyed the lives of a married couple already suffering through the loss of their son.  Yes, their son was the shooter who killed four other students in the hallways of their school and wounded seven others. There’s no question it was a tragedy, and upon hearing of the case, the first thing that jumps out is that much of the damage could have been averted if teachers had been armed to stop the 15-year-old kid.  There is plenty of blame to go around for the tragedy, but what the public school and the prosecutor are looking for is easy blame for really the process failures that most government schools are suffering from.  The question of why the kid felt he had no other option but to kill other students is what needs to be dealt with.  But Karen McDonald expects to glaze over all that and instead seek to throw red meat at the situation by prosecuting the parents for buying the shooter the gun he used for the crime, which makes this case something else entirely.  This case is no longer about bringing justice to the shooter, but who essentially is the parent of a child and sending out the message to gun owners that they could be prosecuted just for buying a gun.  There are apparent politics at play which has much more far-reaching ambitions that make this a unique imposition for all of us.

When we hear of these school shooting cases, the kids are usually from broken homes and often have lifestyles that embody heavy marijuana use.  In this case, however, we don’t know about the drug use, but it’s about a father and mother married trying to help their son.  We don’t know the circumstances for which they bought him the SIG as a Christmas present on Black Friday of 2021, but it likely had some motive of empowerment.  Based on the social media postings by the kid and the parents in general, they obviously were trying to overcome some family issues.  Was the kid bullied and the parents trying to help the child feel empowered?  Based on my experience, I would say that will turn out to be the case.  Buying kids guns and teaching them how to use them is an American tradition.  And public schools have made it clear they seek to eliminate that ritual.  Public schools are anti-family, anti-gun, and all about centralizing the management of children.  The school was too quick to blame the parents for not making their recommendations. I could list hundreds of cases right now where schools put themselves in a tug of war with the parents over power with children, so I can see why the parents might not be inclined to listen to what the school was telling them, including not believing that the drawing depicting a mass school shooting was even authentic.  Based on the parents’ reaction in their comments before and after the shooting, it is evident that they viewed the school as intruding on their rights as parents.  Of course, anger often distorts reality, and in this case, it likely prevented them from seeing just how damaged their kid was in the matter leading up to the shooting.

Imagine what it would be like for them to find out they have lost their child forever now that he shot up a school.  It was likely very traumatic, and now the media is outside covering everything you are doing. Of course, they would want to console each other and seek refuge somewhere where they could think the situation through.  Now, not only have they lost a child, but they are now the targets for a manhunt which the media fanned the flames into a national story.  They were hunted down, arrested, and separated when they needed to help each other.  They were paraded around in front of the cameras as criminals, guilty, and must prove themselves innocent from behind a jail cell.  What was the message to the world? If you buy a gun for someone, you could be prosecuted, and the state will destroy every aspect of your life, starting with your family.  It’s for the greater good in this new Soviet-style media culture, which is directly connected to our state and federal government. That’s not to say that the people who lost their kids in the shooting aren’t terribly sad as well, and they surely want justice.  But the government, in this case, was quick to partner with the public school to make a strong case for something much deeper, who controls the child.  Is it the parents or the school?  We already know how the left views the matter; it’s been a national story this year.  And in this case, the prosecutor, because she’s some kind of panicky mom, assumes that all the Bill of Rights for the parents can be suspended and that the state has ultimate power over the American family. 

By the time this case is heard in court, I’m sure we’re going to learn that the pressures of the school on the kid were one of the most significant contributing factors to the violence.  And tug of war between the school and the parents over who controls a growing child’s life will prove to be the smoke of the actual fire.  The state and its government schools view their role as co-parents of all children. They’d like more authority than that, but when they call the parents at home over every little panic, they expect the parents to listen to their “expert” class opinion.  If the parents reject those opinions, as they often do, of course, the state finds this alarming.  In this case, the parents truly missed the mark, and the school and prosecutor have an easy time crying foul.  The parents should have never let their child have access to that newly bought gun.  Part of purchasing a gun and giving it to a child is to have a managed teaching moment with them that they grow in to.  You can’t just give them a gun to make them feel empowered without major instruction.  The gun should have been locked up in the home and only taken out to take the kid shooting, to learn how to use the weapon.  So the parents clearly made a mistake in the management of buying a gun and owning it.  But again, I could rattle off dozens of cases that I know of right now where schools mess up the lives in detrimental ways of their students all the time, and they don’t get prosecuted like this, treated this way by the media.  It often gets covered up when they get caught, especially when a teacher molests students in perverted and destructive ways.  Some students threaten to kill other students that schools miss all the time, and usually, it doesn’t happen.  But because this time it happened to the parents and the school had put out the alarm ahead of time, the prosecutor, the state, and the government ran media, in general, wanted to throw the book at the parents when in fact, it was likely the school that caused the original problem.  And in that way, this is an attack on all of us.  The state has all the power and authority, and if they say we are guilty, we can have our whole lives overturned instantly.  We can be thrown in jail, separated from our loved ones, and isolated from logic.  Then, and only then, can we start the path to prove our innocence, which for these parents may take the rest of their lives.  The state and the school have ruined their lives because they bought a gun for their child.  The actions against the parents’ behavior aren’t about justice; it’s about attacking America’s gun culture and implementing their progressive plan that states that the school is the real owner of the children, and if we get in the way, we will have our own lives destroyed.

Rich Hoffman

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