There is, of course, more to the story.  I certainly heard the exasperation in the Louder with Crowder team as they investigated the horrendous story of the massive mishandling of a Butler Tech intern at the Butler County jail, which led to sex and the corruption of a minor in really disastrous ways.  As the story unfolded and all the adults involved pointed at each other for the blame, I saw on people’s faces and could hear in their words that they were exasperated by the lack of responsibility provided by the adults.  And here’s the thing: just a few days before this story broke, I had a chance to talk to Sheriff Jones quite a bit, and I am sure he and I agree on much more than we disagree with.  If we watched a bunch of old westerns on a Saturday afternoon, we would likely like the same things about them and share a sense of justice that would be enjoyable.  As people, as it is with most people, we agree on most things.  If we had a Thanksgiving dinner together, along with a bunch of other random people, I know there would be a lot more in common than not.  Differences occur when individual people try to bend themselves toward group-oriented consensus, where they toss their values out the window in trade for the power of group rule.  And that is what is going on with this Butler County case and why all the adults are complicit.  And why is the little girl being prosecuted while all the adults slither into the background to hide behind their labor unions and collective bargaining agreements?  This is why they are in labor unions so that the power of the group can leverage responsibility away from them in case something goes wrong, which it certainly did in this case. 

Probably the most guilty person in all this is the Butler Tech teacher, Aaron Fitzgerald, who ran the criminal justice program and was responsible for putting that 17-year-old girl unsupervised into a jail with a bunch of criminals and murderers, so often that she established sexual relationships with them.  Even more, some of the inmates were claiming her as a wife and were trying to “lock her down,” so we aren’t talking about a casual mistake that happened once or twice.  It happened repeatedly, systemically, and it was how Aaron Fitzgerald ran his program and the dangers he put the kids in with his permissive attitude. I would further blame the board at Butler Tech for their permissive, progressive attitudes about sex and their behavior in public, such as Julie Shaffer from the Lakota school board has shown to all the adults in charge, and the breadcrumbs of the blame certainly fall at their doorstep.  The Louder with Crowder crew went to Aaron’s house to talk to him about this case, and he freaked out.  But what was revealed was that he had a nice home in a very nice neighborhood.  That in itself isn’t uncommon in Butler County, Ohio.  But his sense of entitlement is something we had just witnessed on the whole Lakota schools superintendent issue, where reckless sexual lifestyles destroyed that guy once the public learned just how bad they were.  These are unionized employees with a sense of entitlement that is common in most labor union activity, where they want to be paid top dollar for some of the worst results that come from any labor activity.  They want all the money without any responsibility.  And when they get into trouble, as they certainly have in Butler County, Ohio, they circle the wagons and blame everyone who isn’t in the union.  In this case, the only person without a labor union relationship is the little girl. 

Over the years, I have argued this point extensively, and the impact of the disaster hasn’t changed.  I think it should be illegal for any labor union to be connected in any way to a taxpayer dollar.  We went down that path in 2012 when we thought we had a good governor in Kasich before everyone got a hold of him and destroyed him into just another progressive.  Sheriff Jones and I were on opposite ends of that issue, and they managed to hang on to their government unions for a while longer.  These days, President Trump has the labor union vote, so everyone is in a big Republican tent these days on the issue.  But it doesn’t change what labor unions are.  And what you get with them is too expensive, and the performance is terrible.  In this Butler Tech case, the measure of success is whether they have kids to put in the program.  Not what they learn or what happens to them along the way.  Unionized labor attached to government has been a disaster, and what you get from them is a horrendous performance with a perpetual sense of entitlement, like they are owed their jobs.  And they don’t feel they have to compete with anybody else to have them.  Then, when something goes wrong, they collectively circle the wagons and protect each other from the results.  Their goals are not in performance but in concealment and protection from expectations in results. 

Sheriff Jones, the same guy who talks to me about law and order and not putting up with terrorists coming into our community, took the union position on this Butler County jail case, saying that their prosecution of the girl was based on her admission.  And that all the kids sign a waiver (I don’t think sodomizing kids was on the sheet) and that she was almost 18, so that’s close enough.  She could be hired into the jail in a few months anyway.   And he said these things to reporters, thinking they were perfectly acceptable statements in a sane world.  And I know he doesn’t believe any of those things, yet he was saying them, as all brotherhood members do when one of them gets into trouble.  That’s why those kinds of people seek union membership.  And labor unions aren’t just a disaster in government occupations.  In the private sector, if you call up a supplier looking for your thing, and the person you are talking to can see it on a shipping dock through a window, waiting for someone to put it on a skid to be loaded onto a truck.  But they can’t load it themselves because they need a union guy to do it, so they have to wait for him to come off his 4-hour break, watching Loony Toons on his cell phone to load the truck.  That is how it is with all unionized labor and why they aren’t competitive in the world marketplace.  They cost too much, do too little, and when you need to know who’s responsible, they never admit to anything.  When they get into trouble, they rally behind their brother and sisterhoods to protect each other from judgment.  And that is why everyone involved gets away with horrendous behavior.  The only people who pay are those who are not in the union.  The union members, or those who directly benefit from the unionized labor, get away with everything because it’s part of their collective bargaining strategy.  If you try to pin them down on something then they take the labor away completely, making enforcement of policy nearly impossible.  So everyone just avoids punishment and discipline from bad decisions.  And it’s so disgraceful that it takes logic and good people and turns them into grotesque monsters who perpetuate evil to get easy and unearned paychecks, as is the case with Aaron Fitzgerald and many others.   

Rich Hoffman

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