Tag: tax

Teachers Making Zombies in Lakota Schools: The ICE protests reveal a deeper, darker problem

The recent student protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Lakota Local Schools in Butler County, Ohio, exemplify a broader and deeply troubling pattern in American public education. On February 12, 2026, students at Lakota East and Lakota West high schools walked out of classes during school hours, marching and carrying signs in opposition to ICE’s immigration enforcement actions and the treatment of immigrants. Reports indicate that at Lakota East, the walkout began around 1 p.m., with students leaving classrooms to demonstrate. These events were part of a wave of similar student-led demonstrations across the Tri-State area and nationwide, often framed by media and school officials as spontaneous expressions of youthful concern over federal policies.

Yet a closer examination reveals questions that demand answers: If these were truly student-initiated movements driven by genuine adolescent passion for immigration issues, how did high schoolers—many too young to vote or fully grasp complex policy debates—come to adopt such uniformly radical left-wing positions? Where did they acquire the ideological framework to view ICE enforcement as inherently unjust, to chant against law enforcement, or to equate border security with oppression? The evidence points overwhelmingly not to parental influence or organic self-education, but to a systemic infusion of progressive ideology within the public school environment itself, facilitated and encouraged by teachers, administrators, and union-aligned staff.

Public schools, funded by taxpayer dollars, are legally and ethically obligated to remain politically neutral. School boards are intended to be non-partisan, and classrooms should present balanced perspectives on history, government, and current events. Instead, what we observe in districts like Lakota is a pattern where left-leaning views dominate. Teachers, often represented by powerful unions with progressive platforms, shape curricula, discussions, and even extracurricular activities to emphasize one side of the political spectrum. Students hear repeated narratives praising figures like Barack Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Bernie Sanders, while conservative viewpoints—rooted in rule of law, national sovereignty, or traditional values—are marginalized or absent. History classes may highlight speeches from Democrat leaders but rarely balance them with opposing arguments from figures emphasizing constitutional limits on federal power or the importance of secure borders.

This ideological imbalance is not accidental. It reflects broader trends in teacher preparation programs, hiring practices, and professional development, where progressive ideologies are normalized. Administrators, to advance in their careers, often align with these prevailing views; dissenting voices risk being labeled as disruptive or “right-wing.” In such an environment, vulnerable adolescents—navigating identity formation, peer pressure, family conflicts, or rebellion against authority—become receptive to messages that position teachers as enlightened alternatives to “strict” or “outdated” parental guidance. A student grounded at home for misbehavior, resentful of church attendance, or frustrated with family rules finds validation in a classroom where authority figures affirm that systemic injustices (like immigration enforcement) justify defiance.

The Lakota ICE protests illustrate this dynamic starkly. Students carried pre-made signs and marched during school hours, actions that typically require coordination and tacit approval. Reports suggest teachers permitted or even facilitated sign-making in classrooms, despite principal statements denying involvement. No widespread punishments followed for truancy or disruption—administrators cited free speech protections under Supreme Court precedents like Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), which allows student expression unless it substantially disrupts the educational process. Yet the absence of meaningful consequences speaks volumes: it signals endorsement or at least tolerance from a workforce insulated from accountability. When students feel entitled to leave class for political activism without repercussions, it reveals a culture where progressive causes trump academic priorities.

This is not isolated to Lakota. Nationwide, similar anti-ICE walkouts have occurred, with varying degrees of adult facilitation. In some districts, teachers openly encouraged participation; in others, parents or organizers aided logistics. The pattern echoes historical efforts to use youth as proxies for ideological agendas, from the KGB-influenced campus protests of the 1960s hippie movement to color revolution tactics employing young activists as shields. Adults—particularly those in positions of influence over impressionable minds—hide behind “student-led” rhetoric to advance views they cannot openly espouse without professional risk.

Compounding this is the erosion of trust in the teacher-student relationship. Public schools have seen too many cases of boundary violations, including sexual misconduct. In Lakota itself, a former Lakota East teacher, Justin Daniel Dennis, pleaded guilty in early 2026 to attempted sexual battery after an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old student during the 2021-22 school year. Such incidents, while prosecuted when reported, occur with disturbing frequency across districts—often underreported or quietly resolved. If a teacher can manipulate a vulnerable student into a sexual relationship through grooming and authority, it is not a stretch to see parallel manipulation in the political realm: filling ideological voids with radical views, turning students into unwitting advocates for defunding ICE, police reform, or other left-wing priorities.

These vulnerabilities stem from broader societal and familial factors. Many students come from homes with inconsistent structure, where parents may lack confidence in imparting values or face their own stresses. Progressive teachers exploit this void, presenting themselves as allies against “oppressive” conservative norms. The result: a minority of activated students become mouthpieces for adult agendas, protesting on behalf of causes like open borders or sanctuary policies—issues far removed from typical teenage concerns like sports, dating, or social media.

Critics may argue that youth naturally gravitate toward idealism and social justice. Yet the uniformity of the messaging—always left-leaning, rarely balanced—suggests curation rather than spontaneity. True education equips students with facts from all sides: the economic costs of unchecked immigration, the rule of law’s role in sovereignty, historical precedents of secure borders benefiting societies. Instead, one-sided exposure fosters entitlement and division, pitting children against parents, communities, and lawful institutions.

This dynamic mirrors historical socialist movements. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) and Benito Mussolini’s fascism drew from left-wing collectivism, emphasizing state control over individual rights—far removed from classical liberalism, Christianity, or Bill of Rights conservatism. Modern equivalents appear in calls to “defund” agencies like ICE or police, echoing Bernie Sanders or AOC-style democratic socialism. Teachers aligned with these views use public institutions to propagate them, often at odds with the conservative-leaning communities funding them, such as Butler County’s Republican-leaning voters.

Parents who entrust their children to public schools expect neutral education, not indoctrination. When students return home echoing radical slogans, it signals a betrayal: taxpayer-funded employees turning children against family values and community standards. The media, often left-leaning itself, amplifies these “organic” protests while downplaying adult involvement or lack of consequences.

Change requires accountability: transparent curricula audits, balanced instruction mandates, consequences for unauthorized activism, and greater parental oversight. Without it, public education risks becoming a vehicle for ideological capture, eroding trust and fueling the very divisions it claims to heal. Students may one day reflect on these experiences as youthful folly, crediting strong family foundations for pulling them back. But for those without such anchors, the damage lingers—zombified into perpetual activism, detached from reality.

The Lakota protests are a microcosm of this crisis. They were not child-led revolutions but symptoms of adult manipulation in a system that has strayed far from its mission. Until we confront this, public schools will continue losing credibility, funding, and purpose.

Bibliography and Footnotes

1.  WKRC Local 12, “Students at 2 Tri-State schools protest against ICE, treatment of immigrants,” February 12, 2026. Details the walkouts at Lakota East and West during school hours.

2.  Journal-News, “Some local students are organizing protests, campus discussions about ICE enforcement,” February 12, 2026. Covers student emails and planning.

3.  WLWT Cincinnati, “Ex-Lakota East teacher accused of having sexual relationship with student pleads guilty,” January 29, 2026. Covers Justin Dennis case.

4.  Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). Supreme Court ruling on student free speech.

5.  Butler County Sheriff’s Office reports on Dennis case (2025-2026 filings).

6.  Historical references to Nazi and fascist socialism drawn from standard sources like William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), and Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (2008).

7.  Various reports on nationwide anti-ICE student walkouts (e.g., Guardian, EdSource, 2026 coverage).

Rich Hoffman

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The Tyranny of Digital Monitoring: There is no greater threat to freedom than centralized bank’s control over your digital footprint

There have been videos showing a young woman either buying goods at a market, such as a shelf check out, who has a chip in her hand, or the reader is scanning her palm print and using that to approve her transaction in her account.  And she’s smiling and is excited about it, as if it’s the next great thing for the human race.  The belief is that the technology is terrific and can be trusted. We should all put our faith in centralized bankers committed to communism, who will then gain power over us regarding whether we are allowed to have a business transaction.  I have been on the other side of the world more than once, where my account was turned off because someone at the credit card company flagged me for “unusual behavior.” After all, I didn’t notify them of my travels the way they wanted me to.  It’s a real problem putting our lives in the hands of these pinheaded bureaucrats, especially as a cash supply.  Turning off our access to the things we need and converting everything to digital is dangerous.  It might appear convenient, but the goal of the centralized financial institutions and the communist governments behind them, such as the intentions of the World Economic Forum, is to get us hooked on convenience so that they can gain power over us.  Some easy ones that come to mind are calibrations on the stupid smart meters on our homes that can be cranked up to read more usage than is happening, jacking up your price because they tag some ESG requirement onto your bill that you don’t support.  Because the reader is not mechanically driven but is digital, it can be changed at will, just like they want to do with a digital currency, where they can decrease or increase the value of it depending on who is using it. 

I recently had a significant problem with the monopoly company that supplies water to my home.  It’s so bad that I’m about to dig a well and get off the grid.  Whenever you call them, they give you nonsense and act like you are wasting their time.  There is no customer service because they don’t have to; they are a government monopoly, essentially just like Duke Energy is.  I had some $200 water bills because the meter misrepresented my usage.  Since they converted to a digital water meter, it has been a problem and a constant fight.  Technology did not improve my life; it has wasted vast amounts of time talking to stupid people who could care less and has surrendered thoughts to technology.  This is not “smart” technology; it is bringing us tyranny.  It is giving people power over us who don’t deserve it, and they want more of it.  Letting them see what we are doing all the time and trusting them to give us access to things like power, water, or currency, which they can turn off if we don’t behave the way the ruling government wants us to, is a horrendous mistake.  In all the examples I have provided, the honest answer is never to trust technology and to use a more traditional form of exchange, such as in some faraway countries where your credit cards get turned off.  Good ol’ fashion cash is still the best option and is what I used to get out of that situation until the stupid banks in New York figured out that the problem was on their end. 

I get so tired of hearing stories about “national security,” whether it’s China spying on us, Trump taking home souvenirs from his time in the White House, or some justification for giving money to Ukraine for corrupt politicians to money launder their interactions with illegal activity.  Or aliens landing on Earth and threatening to take over the world.  Nothing is more critical to national security than digital currency, smart meters, and centralized control over our digital accounts without other options to provide freedom from companies that suddenly have more power over us than they ever should.  What they did to gain that power, in using Covid as a bioweapon that killed people and harmed many others to steer society in this digital control direction, should be part of a war crimes commission, and people must be prosecuted.  These are people assaulting free people worldwide, and their dangerous partnerships with our representative governments are diabolical and highly illegal.  But most people haven’t caught on to just how bad all this is.  Forget about sending troops off to some faraway place to fight a war that governments told us was important, killing innocent people and saying they are doing it for “freedom” when they are allowing these communist corporations to have so much power over our daily lives, and letting them get away with murder.  No wonder support for military action is declining everywhere.  We can’t trust the government that starts these wars, and we certainly can’t trust them to defend our rights and freedoms from the real enemy, these terrorists in finance who control these companies who then control our digital footprint. 

I always find some alternative to these companies, even the monopolies.  The way to hurt them most is to get off their grid–financial system, power, water, and internet networks.  I can live quite happily without any of their stuff.  I remember life before the internet; the world was much better.  Convenience is not worth surrendering freedom to; that is the deal all these companies want to make with you.  That’s why they want a chip in your hand to complete every transaction, so they can track you with AI and develop an account that gives them ultimate control over you no matter where you are.  And if you don’t behave as they want, they’ll turn you off.  I am grateful that I could live just fine without their stuff.  Camping a lot has shown me that plenty of technology, such as solar-powered generators and water purifiers, can still give you the comforts of modern life without being a part of their digital controls.  I can live a great everyday life in my RV without being a part of any government-controlled grid. I recommend that everyone use that competitive option whenever possible to fight against all this tech tyranny.  The way to hurt them most is to take away their power over you.  There are plenty of options, and you should use them whenever possible.  In truth, this is one of the reasons I have traveled so much in 2023.  I have wanted to be off the internet grid, away from the water supply, and away from all the hidden ESG penalties with Duke Energy and other companies that BlackRock has hijacked to impose climate change standards.  All while a bunch of dumb politicians cheers on some war with Ukraine like some brain-dead seal clapping for a fish.  I like to get away from their grid and read many books not connected to the internet.  It is an excellent vacation to be away from incompetent people who have suddenly been given too much control over our lives with digital monitoring that will eventually be completely controlled by Artificial Intelligence programmed to do the bidding of communist governments like China.  Digital monitoring is the greatest threat to national security, and until people start dealing with it in that regard, they’ll keep getting away with it.

Rich Hoffman

The Brain Dead Losers at the IRS: And those idiots want to hire 87,000 more of them and give them guns to kick down doors to confiscate more wealth for a bloated, out-of-control government

Of course, there should always be a concern when we are talking about putting 87,000 dumb and inefficient people onto a government payroll and encouraging them to go door to door with guns to extract more money from the American population. It’s a plea by stupid people in the administrative state to feed the beast they have created. They can’t get tax increases passed in government, so they are looking to extract more money from the public to fund their gross inefficiencies with force. But they do so without dealing with their previous inefficiencies. Instead, they insist on creating a larger government with proportionally more lackluster effort without a care in the world to the incredible cost it would bring across our economic engine to society. From my experience, IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks on a good day. In my life, I keep things very simple, not for my sake, but because in my previous involvement with the IRS, I find them such a stupid class of people that have difficulty understanding basic things if I can’t show my incomes on simple W2s then its simply not worth doing. I get investment offers for crypto, real estate, and business opportunities of all kinds several times a day, all days of the week. But I turn them all down because the opportunity cost of doing them likely would never exceed the pain in the ass required to deal with the IRS and the set-up for the audits that require hours and hours of time spent with some of the dumbest people on earth. I’d rather give up making millions and millions of dollars so that I could gain the riches of not having to talk to a box of dumb rocks who took a government job so they could be paid well to mask their lazy life and still have authority over other people as a representative of big, out of control, inefficient, government.

The audacity of the proposal to hire 87,000 more IRS agents is that the government is already grossly inefficient. Adding this many more inefficient employees to the government payroll is only pouring gas on an already blazing dumpster fire. Government employees of all kinds are some of the worst in the world regarding lazy economic generators. I have always talked about how horrible it has been to pay public school teachers what we pay them only to get the horrendous work performance that we get out of them, not to mention the political activism. When they ask for tax hikes to pay for their bloated services to the community, it is always my default mode to require them to lay off some of that inefficiency because that should always be the goal.   Efficiency is the first thing anybody dealing with money should be thinking about. But government always throws money at inefficiency to achieve their stated objectives. In this case, they want more money to operate the administrative state, so they throw more money at the same inefficiencies that caused the problems to begin with. So not only have they compounded those inefficiencies and now connected more labor to those inefficiencies, making the situation considerably worse, but they failed to deal with the root cause of their inefficiencies in the first place seeking to mask it with ominous authority rule. That has always been the joke of public education. But you can see it most notably at your local BMV, where slow, horrible service has become the accepted norm. If you want to drive a car, you have to deal with these slow-minded losers who show up for work brain dead and end their days comatose.   All government employees become some representative of a brain-dead lifestyle by the nature of their tasks. So the greater expansion of government services, the more zombies that we put into society and pay them way too much to achieve way too little.

Because government never wants to admit what a burden it is to society, they never measure anything in opportunity cost. Instead, their goal is to leech off effort and fuel their disgusting lifestyles off the opportunity of others. With the expansion of 87,000 IRS agents, the government intends to fuel itself off the efforts of others. But as I said, there is a cost to inefficiency; it can’t be hidden on balance sheets. It emerges in undesirable ways frequently. When employees show up for work at 8 in the morning and are ordering their lunch by 9 am. It arrives at noon. Then after eating it, they are done for the day and ready to go home. So rather than work the rest of the day, they play on the internet sending messages of nothing to each other until 5 when they go pick up their kids at daycare, then meander home to die a little bit each day in front of the television too tired from their day’s activities to lift a hand to do much of anything else. Then when they finally get to their weekend, they waste it complaining about how tired they are from the previous week. That is the life of the typical government employee who has lost the ability to think because they aren’t paid to think; they are paid to waste time, money, and intellectual effort, which is precisely what the government gets in exchange for their overvalued employment. 

I remember how it was in 2010; I was on the IRS target list for Lois Lerner’s targeting of conservatives by direct order from the Obama terrorist organization that had occupied the White House. They confiscated some of my videos and other Tea Party material as evidence, and I will admit to having some fun watching them view the material. It was like watching dogs turn their heads to some invisible dog whistle, contemplating things beyond their comprehension to grasp because they didn’t have the mental capacity to do so. It was beyond their range of understanding. I’m probably being too nice when I say that IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks. They are actually worse than that, and that’s because the mismanagement of those resources starts at the top and flows down to all the field agents. So when we add to those numbers, of course, proportionally, we will get much more inefficiency when employees are added because we did not make a leadership change. That is just dry wood on an open fire regarding the administrative state. Adding more employees to an already inefficient government agency is a useless and more costly gesture. What they cost alone is excessive but minor when added to the opportunity cost that the IRS imposes on the culture at large, the many trillions of dollars of money that could have been made if government was just out of the way. Regular hard-working people would be free to do their tasks unimpeded. And that is the cost of the additional IRS agents. The shakedown of regular people is just the beginning of the problem. The real burden comes from things that don’t happen, ultimately worsening the world. It’s bad enough to think that giving such lazy and stupid people so much government power might be a solution the administrative state values, but it’s in what doesn’t happen that holds the real costs of their incursion. And that is what the brain-dead losers of the administrative state never consider because they don’t have the minds to think it. What they want, all they want is to consume off the efforts of others. And by expanding the IRS, they are just looking the squeeze the orange a bit more for a spoonful of juice in all the inefficient ways that have become the norm of government activity.    

Rich Hoffman

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