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 10^th-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