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