The West Chester Tea Party Does Not Endorse Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board: And neither do I

For clarity, the West Chester Tea Party has not, and will not endorse Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board.  There has been some rattling around from several people that they would, but they have told me personally that those rumors were untrue and they do not support her.  And neither do I.  We all have long friendships with Lynda and other candidates who these days call themselves Republicans but have drifted way to the political left.  But friendships or past relationships don’t make a good candidate.  Whether or not they represent our values to earn a vote is the issue at hand.  Too often, endorsements are given out because of friendships, not actual performance.  Lynda O’Conner has been the school board president for a while now, and she has attended Tea Party meetings in West Chester for over a decade and has formed relationships with many of us over the years.  However, based on her performance and what she did to Darbi Boddy as she begged us all to give her a conservative school board, the moment she had it, she essentially turned into the progressive governor that Ohio had, John Kasich, and betrayed us openly, even recklessly.  I tend to move on when I experience people like that.  I’ll give them a chance once, and once they show who they are, I don’t get too kinked up about it.  It’s always worth a try to give someone a chance.  Then, once they show who they are, you make decisions and move on.  Knowing she has betrayed many people in the Liberty movement within the Lakota school district and is running again, she is seeking endorsements for the upcoming election.  I had some reason to believe the rumors that the West Chester Tea Party might endorse Lynda, but quickly, they set the record straight and wanted to make sure they screamed from the mountaintops that they would not support Lynda O’Connor for the Lakota School Board and based on what they have learned about her, they never would. 

I wouldn’t usually talk about something that happened that was confidential, but looking back on it as I have, those privileges are meant within the context of friendly trust.  Yet after what happened with the previous Lakota school superintendent and the behavior against free speech that Lynda led against the incoming school board member Darbi Boddy, it’s clear what was going on, and I’m still insulted that she thought so little of me to try it.  I mean, she should have known better.  I spent hours and hours with Lynda O’Conner on the phone, meeting her in person, trying to help her.  But from her side, all she was doing was consensus-building in the classic sense against someone she had targeted as a political rival in the community.  And that didn’t become clear until the days after a specific meeting in the basement of some of our mutual Tea Party friends in May of 2022.  I should know what she was up to because I have covered these modern versions of The Delphi Technique for years.  It’s one of the most corrosive tools used in all public schools.  After a contentious school board meeting where I spoke in favor of Darbi Boddy, it was clear Lynda was trying to run her off the school board over minor issues.  Lynda had recruited Darbi to give her a majority on the board, along with Isaac Adi, and I did what I could to smooth out the edges and give credibility from the freedom movement side of things.  If I were on board with the effort, it would help the conservative base. 

I didn’t see a need to be overly cautious with this relationship with Lynda.  She had just spent the previous decade trying to win my trust, so I figured getting a functional, conservative school board in charge of Lakota schools was worth a shot.  Even that day I met with her and several other people, it became pretty clear what she was doing; I still wanted to give the effort a chance at working.  But she was looking for compliance out of Darbi Boddy to some liberal view of authority that was shocking to many of us, especially the West Chester Tea Party.  We all found ourselves in the basement of one of the leading members, with Isaac Adi and some school board mentor of his from Monroe schools pushing a sheet of paper in front of me, asking me what I wanted out of Lakota schools, which made me angry because of the amateur effort.  It was an apparent consensus-building exercise, much like the Lakota community conversations had been trying to win over opposition to school policy for a while.  And Lynda sat across from me with a smile, thinking all this was acceptable.  She had surrounded me with people I had trusted, especially in the Tea Party, and she felt that the peer pressure might win me over and away from the continued support of Darbi Boddy.  After all the years and everything I had written over all the time we had known each other, she thought I was that stupid. 

The meeting didn’t go well.  My wife and I left that day, never to speak to any of them personally again, because, within a few months, we had all the drama over the school superintendent.  Everything got worse after much further erosion in the community led by Lynda’s tampering with everyone’s political sentiments and wanting to pull everyone to the left, and lawsuits became a significant issue.  I had to explain to the attorney for the superintendent that if he had just apologized to Darbi Boddy for his role in trying to do what Lynda wanted, which was to remove her from the school board after many of us had spent the previous year trying to get her elected, then a lot of the trouble he found himself in wouldn’t have been such an issue.  But now that people knew and learned how much Lynda knew about it all along, those were self-inflicted problems that ultimately cost a lot of money in the district.  Through it all, I hadn’t talked to any of them in that basement meeting, so when I heard that the West Chester Tea Party was thinking of endorsing Lynda, it wouldn’t have surprised me after all the other people who had fallen off the wagon over the last year.  But if there is anything good that did happen, as a result, they did let me know that they felt the same way about Lynda as I did and that they would not support her or any of the other candidates who have gone over to the dark side of politics.  That’s certainly the case with Ann Becker, who is running for another term as trustee in West Chester.  She used to be president of the Tea Party for both West Chester and Cincinnati, but she has moved well away from those good old days now, more toward the political left.  Watching that kind of thing is painful, but it always happens.  And when it does, you always must wonder what people believe.  But happily, it is good to see that the West Chester Tea Party has not waivered, as others have, and they will not be endorsing Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board.  And neither will I.

Rich Hoffman