At the last Lakota school board meeting, approval on the payout of a lawsuit for $15,000 had to be voted upon over the procedural misconduct to remove public comment from an October meeting that had occurred. It was an easy victory for the person who filed the legal action; everyone knew it at the time, just as there are many explorations into further actions due to the actions of the board. I remember when this whole story about the superintendent of Lakota schools broke and his messy divorce, and his personal behavior that clearly didn’t align with the values of the community he worked in as a public figure, I was curious how the information would flow through the known communication channels of our community. After all, I knew all the characters involved at every level, so I was curious if the dye was poured into the cave water, where it would come out on the other end. Would it be where we expected, or would it duck and dive only to come out someplace surprising? And in the process of these many months, it looks like as the dye moved through the Caves of Lakota, through the various government bodies of our community, we ended up with a new decision, what to do about the obvious case of “intimidation of witnesses” as defined by the “intent to coerce a witness not to report information.”  And perhaps the most audacious exchange at that meeting was not the sudden revelation about financial stability through 2025, suddenly, but the lashing out of board member Kelly Casper toward Darbi Boddy about who board members represent and who they don’t. Darbi got it right, and Kelly had it all wrong when Darbi said of herself that she represented members of the community who had elected her for the purpose of board business in so many words or less. Kelly disagreed and stated that Darbi was elected to represent everyone in the community. And in that simple disagreement, we could clearly see the misunderstandings that had been costing Lakota schools so much mismanagement, expensive mismanagement. And why bad things happened in the first place that taxpayers were always on the hook for fixing. Darbi Boddy was sent to the board by the public to get control of the school board. Not to get along with the people who traditionally screwed everything up. 

In the case of Lakota, the bad, expensive things that have happened to support the antics of their superintendent, who has mismanaged his life and then turned on the community with hostile threats to suppress the information, the most significant faults were in the desire for people in the process to follow the directions that were written by liberalism and that there value system was in obeying the rules, not in deciding if the rules were applicable, or needed to be challenged. We see this in trustee meetings all the time when they rubber stamp the latest Agenda 21 roundabout or a bike path meant to prevent cars from burning fossil fuels just to get a loaf of bread at the grocery. Community planners are all trained at the same liberal sources baked into everything they do; all over the country, progressive policies are then approved by conservative politicians who believe their job is to be good administrators of the rules and to follow instructions. They never seem to understand or question whether liberals or conservatives wrote the rules and if they should be following them. Not that I was surprised, but I watched with great curiosity at every level how all the people I knew, from the police department to the school board, and the media, followed strange liberal rules and procedures right into a situation that escalated everything into a public menace that only enraged the public, and did nothing to quell the original problems. 

And it was that pesky problem again, which always comes up when the rule of law is applied to mass society in the wake of so much progressive influence over several years now, decades, really. As the Bible has been removed from being a foundation of law and order, the values that built America, to begin with, we have seen bureaucratic pinheads stepping in as the administrative state to replace the Biblical concepts of God in society, and therefore all sense of value for what a community can agree on. No wonder Nancy Pelosi could lie to our faces during a press conference about her crazy husband, that keeps getting into all kinds of trouble, or the mass media conspiracy regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. Or that there was no evidence of election fraud, even though the evidence, like this case in Lakota, was dripping everywhere with plenty of things to consider. The liberal denial of a fact was proposed because logic had been surrendered to the values of process control. Value wasn’t based these days on the judgment of an individual mind; it was built entirely in progressive processing around compliance with what was created by controls. Therefore, the value wasn’t in thinking about what was happening, but it was complying with the rules which were created to follow. So long as everyone followed the rules written for them, they could feel that their actions were moral and fulfilled a sense of justice from their point of view. But those in the community who expected community values to be conservative and to respect at least the foundations of Biblical understanding, the glue that holds western civilization together, found the decisions reprehensible.  More and more these days, these Biblical references come up as the source of the solution to our many social problems. I had always considered that everyone, regardless of their politics, functioned from that basic premise. However, I started to notice when I was in a hotel in 2014 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that it was missing the Bible in the hotel room and that more courtrooms, school systems, and even swearing-in ceremonies were going in the direction of the sports players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. There was a real progressive push to remove western civilization from the practice of any value judgments. At the heart of that was the Bible, essentially 1400 years of establishing laws that built western civilization. And once those values were removed from the decision-making process, even conservative people, or people who think they are conservatives, found that value judgments were reduced to just following the rules of a process. And if liberals wrote the processes, then it didn’t matter if the people participating in those decisions were liberals or conservatives; they would all act the same if the path to resolution centered on compliance with a process instead of the judgment of the parties involved. And in that way, we learned that there were many hidden chambers where the dye went before it came out of the cave in strange places. And that information is extremely valuable. Then, looking back at how the community has divided over this issue makes a lot more sense. The compliance track thinks it is permissible to punish the community for deviating from the process that allows public officials to game the system at significant taxpayer cost. While the public functioning from traditional value judgments of right and wrong as established Biblically, as the foundation of our entire society, found the proposals reprehensible. The good news is that while functioning at the Supreme Court level, our court system still lives by such Biblical ideas and that the rule of law is our Constitution. Even while the progressive-minded would like that not to be the case and would love to throw their political enemies in jail, or take them to court over frivolous litigation, the truth of the matter is that in those places, the Bible still matters.   Because if people don’t believe in that, then you can’t have the basic tenants of civil society. And under that view of the law, harassing the public for discussing evidence is witness intimidation, which opens a whole new can of worms.

Rich Hoffman