Despite all the terrible news in such great abundance these days, I see a lot of positives worth talking about because people are becoming smarter every day. Many people are oblivious to how much public relations firms run everything in their lives. For instance, it has been quite clear that our own government has become a public relations firm for Big Pharma and that the entire notion of government medicine was simply guaranteed product sales using the government to enforce market stability for the firm they represent. And if you want representation, you don’t get it with votes; you hire lobbyists, you pay to play, and only then can you get the power that government offers. But it does all start locally, and now that so many discussions about government schools are on the top of everyone’s mind, a recent example at Lakota schools in my home district of Butler County, Ohio, showed the story better than any other means. Here we had a school superintendent involved in a messy divorce who admitted in a police report that he had fantasies of drugging, molesting, and video recording three students with whom he was in charge, but the media in town would not move on the story. They pretended it never happened and that the whistleblowers were the villains. It was a bizarre case that shows just how deeply public relations firms shape the reality that a voting public understands. And at Lakota schools, we had a wild example of the worst that could be learned about a public administrator, and they spun the story through public relations in a way to cover it up. And most of the news media in Cincinnati, print and television, worked hard to suppress the story to the favor of the public relations representatives at Lakota, who insisted to the public that the story was not real and that the whistleblowers were simply political activists who wanted to get rid of the superintendent.
Those same public relations personalities then tried to spin everything around on the first-year school board member, Darbi Boddy, whom the community has rallied around to uphold a standard of morality in the crazy government school, and school systems, in general, to provoke her into being removed from the school board. This was all before the superintendent had to resign due to his actions, leaving the standard teacher union thugs irate and looking for revenge. On the way to record the video for this article, I had heard on the radio’s top-of-the-hour news report that the community was seeking signatures to remove Darbi Boddy from Lakota schools because having her on the school board was going to make it difficult, if not impossible, to find a new superintendent. That was on a big Clear Channel radio station in Cincinnati reading essentially off a press release directly as it was given to them, and that was out of all the topics in Cincinnati media, a news story. Ironically I had at that moment in my hand a report from Channel 12 news, Cincinnati, talking about the challenges of finding a good superintendent in the very contentious environment of Lakota schools. All of that was the work of just a few public relations people hired by Lakota schools to manage the district and the voting public. And none of it was real as we would consider facts part of reality. Rather, the reality was being completely shaped by public relations right in front of everyone’s faces who knew better.
Many of the people who had been involved in the school superintendent’s story and found his sexual lifestyle learned about in the wake of his divorce reprehensible, were stunned that for over six months prior, the public school denied the existence of reality and stuck completely to their tactic of shaping their image completely around public relations tools, the media, press releases denying what was learned even when police testimony was quite clear, and using legal firms to establish a fake precedent with bizarre interpretations of legal definitions as to what moral behavior was and criminal intent. Even the law from the level of the police was shown to fit into the public relations game completely, playing along as the story was shaped not by truth but by PR statements given to the press, for which they ran with completely. And during that entire time, from when the public learned about the police report admission from the superintendent to the time he resigned, around six months, the media was cold on the story to the point where they could get away with it. They had to cover what the public was outraged about, but their tactic was to take the edge off the story hoping that people would forget about it and those telling the story would be terrified by legal threats to their very lives. It was all very ominous and corrupt beyond reason. Yet the moment the superintendent resigned, suddenly, there was an avalanche of stories from all the news outlets about the Lakota school’s situation. Even Channel 9 was doing Lakota stories suddenly on a variety of topics. It was stunning; all the news stations were reporting the events of Lakota and, of course, the newspapers. But their subject wasn’t the exploits of the superintendent and the danger it might pose sexually to the student population like rational people might expect; rather, the entire efforts were to get rid of Darbi Boddy as the school board member the community had rallied around to stand up to the public relations efforts.
Prior to this Lakota story, people had a kind of perception of this hidden menace. But only when the machine had been turned on to such a ridiculous level with such stark contrasts could anybody see what the problem always has been. Lakota schools didn’t have a leg to stand on in defending their very progressive pick for superintendent with such rock-solid evidence that did exist, and so many people knew about it. And the story got out to the public through all the methods that public relations couldn’t manipulate, citizen journalism, social media, and a billboard campaign in the community. But all the places where public relations could touch with their press releases, we saw a news culture that essentially read the statements without any investigation and carried the message to an unsuspecting public. The example was perfect, and it shows a deeper problem in many government endeavors at all levels, from local to national to international. The same game was being played everywhere and for the same reasons. Somehow at Lakota schools, a story about a superintendent of the student population having fantasies about kids in a sexual way was turned completely around to the danger of the school board member who represented the community in showing disdain for that information. It was a clear case of morality that anybody should have been able to agree with. Yet the public relations machine dug in and tried to defend the absurd, and the desperation of their lack of effectiveness forced them to go way over the top and reveal their hidden manipulations in a very educational way. And in so doing, we all learned how this business is done everywhere else, from election fraud to Covid vaccination status to the inflation numbers of an economy that has obviously been in recession. The same methods were applied in all those cases, and reality was shaped not by facts but by public relations mechanisms to the detriment of all representation and disrespect of all people in a society of free voters.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 