Tag: Tea Party

What President Trump’s Tax Returns Say About Him: He took millions and millions in losses to serve as President and to save America from looting liberals

For several years now, Democrats have promised to get a hold of President Trump’s tax returns and reveal them to the public, as if that would change how people feel about him. Well, on the last business day of 2022, they finally did, and it was like a firework dud that never went off. You know, you get one of those fancy fireworks for the Fourth of July and hype up as a great climax to a backyard firework display. Then once you light the fuse, it just never goes off. That is what happened with the tax return issue, with Democrats releasing them with great fanfare thinking that something would happen that never did. As it turned out, Trump paid the taxes he owed, and primarily through his political years, he lost many millions of dollars of losses, which allowed him to take deductions, which he deserved. With all the hype, there was no smoking gun, nothing that showed wrongdoing. The only thing that was revealed with the insanity of liberal views on tax policy, income, and the merit of wealth, was how bad the progressive policy is for American sentiment. The assumption is that everyone in society has a “fair share” that they owe to a government that is obviously out of touch and wastes too much money. Their assumption, reflected in all “progressive tax policy” since 1913, has been that the more you have, the more you owe as if the government made it so that you could have that money. That’s the attitude. They are like mobsters who want their cut for not destroying your life. 

The truth about the Trump taxes, which says a lot about him, is that he spent many years of his life building up a reasonable amount of wealth the traditional way. He’s not like these mindless tech billionaires who made a lot of money riding the wave of a new technology. Trump, the way he was in the 80s and 90s, would have had to make hundreds of billions of dollars to compete. But in those days, becoming a billionaire was a lot harder than today, so he was in unique territory. Trump was considered one of the wealthiest men in the world during those years when he had The Apprentice television show on NBC. I’ve said it for a long time when Trump met Melania, and it took a couple of things for him; he needed to get older and less interested in parading women around to show how powerful he was because that used to be a thing in the 90s. And Trump has changed while married to Melania, the supermodel wife who has obviously been very smart. I’ve met her, and I think a lot of her. She’s a sharp personality and clearly has the attention of Trump, who goes out of his way to ensure she’s happy. I don’t think Donald Trump would have ever run and won the presidency without Melania Trump. He might have talked about it as he did back in the Reform Party days, which I remember well. I was involved in the Reform Party during the Ross Perot days, so I remember precisely what was going on and why. The values for Trump changed; he was no longer concerned about making the most money in the world, but about using the money he had made to leave something behind that people would remember forever, something better than any building, any hot supermodel wife, or even a really great family. He wanted to save the country from the obvious intrusions against it that he became aware of. It looks like 9/11 was a big deal for him that changed him as a person, along with that television show, and slowly in the decade that followed, as his relationship with Melania grew, his focus changed a lot. 

That bit of backstory is significant because Trump became President without thinking of making money for the first time in his life. The combination of being married to Melania Trump, becoming the head of the Republican Party, and actually living in the White House for the first time made him a better person. I always liked Trump as a business guy, but I never liked his failed relationships with women. That was what kept me from supporting him during the Reform Party period. But like everything they do, liberals have been targeting wealthy people for years with their Karl Marx hatred of all management positions. By the time Trump ran for President, they had assumed among themselves that they had destroyed such notions among the wealthy that they had an obligation toward altruism and not the opulent showing off of that wealth. The value was in how much you could make, then give away to the needy. By the time this assumption had taken hold during the Bush administration and the first administration of Obama, the open socialist, the stage was set for Trump. Many of us from the Reform Party migrated into the Tea Party movement to protect America from the erosion of wealth that was obviously occurring as a perception of anti-America sentiment, which was always a full-scale assault on wealth creation and the nature of America in the first place. Then the Tea Party became the MAGA movement, led by Trump, bringing us to our current period.

By looking at Trump’s tax returns, it’s evident that the plan for his companies was to take a long view and to become President, give back his salary, take his losses and claim those losses in filing with the IRS to stop as much bleeding as possible. But to be in the hot seat as President with all the investigations and harassment that came with it, Trump was prepared to lose a lot of money. But it wasn’t the kind of loss that the political left had set the stage for. It was more of an Atlas Shrugged activity where Trump denied his wealthy input into the world of politics through donations and instead took up the job himself to show how easily it could all be done. Which considering the opposition, which was literally everyone in the establishment from the top down, Trump was enormously successful. His value was in actual production instead of some mindless commitment to a “fair share,” as defined by the same looting government that wanted to steal the money from all his hard work and then distribute it among themselves for the growth of more big government. I always thought it took a lot of guts for Trump to change his lifestyle, and it really took a lot for Melania to go through it with him. She could have chosen many things to do in her life as one of the most beautiful women in the world. But she has stuck with Trump, she has committed herself as a mom to her son, and she is deeply committed to the American experience, far more than many people realize. And she has Donald Trump’s heart enough to convince him to take these massive losses revealed in the tax returns to save his country from the terrors of liberalism. And that was a story that the political left didn’t want to see. But ultimately, that was shown to the world by revealing those returns, which is why nobody is discussing the story, because it didn’t do what Democrats want. Instead, it further validated Trump’s position and articulated quite well why he’s the perfect person for the job of President even more.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What a Dumb Idea Parading Barack Obama Was: As a domestic terrorist, he has only reminded people why they need to vote for Republicans

I knew this day would come eventually; the Chess game had been going on for a long time, and now it was time for the “checkmate.” Democrats are getting ready to get trounced in the 2022 midterms, but this isn’t a “come lately” thing. It’s been going on for a long time, going way back to 2009 with the start of the Tea Party movement. Parading Barack Obama around to try and help Democrats in key states indicates that the professional pinheads have no idea what they are doing or what forces are truly at play politically in the United States. The Democrats have put themselves in a terrible position because they failed to listen to the lessons that went wrong along the way, and now it’s time to pay for those mistakes. Barack Obama, at best, is a used car salesman who used his skin color to attempt to sell socialism to America. But worse than that, he was a creation of domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground. I must remind everyone that Barack Obama’s political career started in the living room of Bill Ayers and other Chicago radicals of progressive Saul Alinsky intent. He’s not a miracle; he was an inserted terrorist plot intent to undo America. And yes, his birth certificate had all kinds of problems which Sheriff Joe Arpaio pointed out quite well with a private investigation that showed the document to be made in modern times digitally with layered graphics. Back when Barack Obama would have been born in Hawaii, that kind of technology wasn’t around yet. So they got caught lying about the birth of Barack Obama and just about everything else to insert Obama in place to undo America from within, and this Joe Biden presidency, which was stolen by the same kind of personalities, radicals who have embedded themselves in our Republic form of government, is the third term of Barack Obama.   Obama isn’t a savior; he’s the cause of all the problems. 

I remember what it was like in 2009 when the Tea Party movement was starting. We then learned to what extent George Soros was tampering with our election system to overthrow America. He was an early form of today’s Desecrators of Davos, and those success stories of using money as a military weapon to undo the most powerful country in the world started the resistance that led to this precise moment in time. And the attackers were so full of themselves that they didn’t see the writing on the wall from the begging. Before we could stop terrorists like Obama, we had to stop the bleeding from our own political party, the Republicans. From 2009 to 2012, we started to purge the RINOs from the party with the admission that they were more Democrats than Republicans and that they were the controlled opposition that Democrats wanted, which allowed them to make moves to attack the nature of America from the inside and rot it away beyond our control. Politicians like John McCain, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Mitt Romney were what allowed terrorists like Bill Ayers and George Soros to believe they could get away with the greatest crime in the history of the world, the destruction of America and the theft of all its wealth to redistribute to the United Nations and their progressive intentions of doom. Through the Tea Party, we started to challenge members of our own party, which has taken a while, culminating in this 2022 election. But first, we had to change the nature of the party from what it was, a Republican Party made up of rich white guys, and turn it into something much better, a party for women, a party for immigrants, a party for all people of color, and that is precisely what has been done and is reflected in the wonderful candidates we have now in 2022. It took a long time to get there from 2009 and, in many cases, earlier. I’ve been doing this kind of thing since 1992, when I worked very hard for the Ross Perot campaign in the Reform Party. I knew even back in those good ol’ days that changes were needed. 

From that critical 2012 election where Mitt Romney just rolled over and died for Barack Obama and played the nice little Republican pushover, we saw the same thing happening to Governor Kasich in Ohio, who misread the tea leaves and became much more Barack Obama-like. Notice you don’t see him around anymore. That was when Trump, from the Ross Perot Reform Party, made a move to be president, and people like me saw a golden opportunity. Over the next decade, Trump would spend billions of dollars of his own money to win the presidency, and that was just the way to defeat the controlled opposition that had been working against us all along. So the Tea Party morphed into the MAGA branch of the Republican Party, and the process of pushing out RINOs accelerated dramatically. Probably the best thing that could have happened was that the election was stolen in 2020 when the global forces desperate to prevent another term of Trump after he won in 2016 made all kinds of mistakes under pressure to reveal the kind of corrupt government the Tea Party had been trying to point out for many years. Before that, conspiracy theory writers like Jim Marrs had been pointing out all the corruption in our government. I would point them out also, in more direct and implacable ways, with millions and millions of words written to send out the signal to an unsuspecting public that needed time to absorb what was happening behind the media circus they were fed through broadcast entertainment. The Trump presidency forced all that to the surface for all to see, and it only strengthened the MAGA movement.

In the end, we will end up with 12 years of Trump influence before he rides off into the sunset and a whole new generation of Kari Lake Republican Party members can then manage our government for the next several decades with the Democrat Party utterly destroyed. Given the nature of just how corrupt everything was, returning to how Barack Obama was inserted into the White House behind a mask of racism and guilt meant to keep us from looking at the terrorist roots behind him. Obama’s brother tried to tell us. Reverend Jerimiah Wright told us all we needed to know. But we didn’t listen because Obama was a person of color. And now, with Herschel Walker in Georgia running against another government communist, we see just how phony the racism thing for Democrats always was. They only wanted women and minorities if they were Democrats. If they were Republican, they attacked even more viciously, which forced people to admit to themselves what a rigged game it always was. Now they have seen it for themselves, and the payday is upon us. And parading Barack Obama around, or Oprah Winfrey isn’t going to resurrect their insurgency of America. Their terrorist act of progressive destruction has been revealed to the American people, who now see what they must do, which wasn’t so obvious when the Tea Party first started. Then only a few of us saw what had to happen. But now, more than ever, they see it and are joining the Republican Party for solutions. We have removed many of the old losers who kept the Republican Party from winning, and now it’s a party that can do some real good in the world. And there is nothing Barack Obama, or anybody else, can do about it. Obama was the cause of the problems; he will never be the solution.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Evil of Staying in Your Lane: How bad behavior stays hidden and active

For all those people who are saying, “if I ever see Rich Hoffman out somewhere, I’ll give him a piece of my mind.” Well, I’m out and about a lot, and I talk to a lot of people. And when I do, nobody talks very tough to my face. So if you want the chance, I am at the Back Porch Saloon in West Chester a lot. And on one such occasion this past week, I was having lunch with a person going for their Ph.D., and he told me about the process and all the things he had to do to get into that elite club. And, in essence, that’s what it was, a club. The other Ph.D. panel members decide what the candidate must do, and if the applicant wants to be in the club, they’ll do it. The criteria differ from school to school and peer group to peer group. So really, getting a Ph.D. is similar to the rigors that are undergone to pass the BAR exam or any number of higher education gateways to an elite order. And socially, going to the college itself in our society is seen as one of those gateways, and the goal isn’t always what was taught but that the applicant endured the experience. All this came to my mind while I was listening to this guy list all the frustrating hurdles he had to jump over to achieve his goal. I thought about the situation at Lakota schools, where it was quite evident that people were having trouble confronting evil at face value. Most people privately had an opinion on it, but socially, they felt they had to stay in their lane and that they weren’t qualified to pass judgment on anybody, lest they be judged themselves. But why was this the case?

Well, most people go through something in their life where they must be initiated into some kind of group order. Usually, it starts in high school. And if it doesn’t happen there, it happens in college or the military. Hazing rituals for all group behavior are common experiences for people, even in religious groups, to some extent. All groups of people have barriers to entry, and to become part of it; people have to surrender a part of themselves to join the power of the group.   A homeowner’s association is a form of this. They may require you to keep your garage doors closed when not using your garage to maintain street face value. You can’t have boats in your driveway. You must keep your grass cut—those kinds of things. Very few people are indeed free to think what they want, about what they want, and when they want. They must do what groups tell them to do through their memberships because we are all taught early in life that acceptance by our peers is of utmost importance, whether it’s obtaining a Ph.D. for our career path or being selected in a local Mason lodge to advance to the higher degrees. And the truth of the matter is, most people stop intellectually growing at age 15, likely much lower than that these days and they put as a priority not fighting for truth, justice, and the American way but in “staying in their lane,” as people who don’t like to be challenged like to say all the time. And there just aren’t enough adults who make it through all these gateways of group associations to stand up to evil when it presents itself. They might have personal feelings about evil when they go to vote; so long as nobody is looking, they’ll express it. But in front of other people, they have been taught to stay in their lane, and that makes them trustworthy to all the slugs who accept them into their group associations who want to trust that smarter and better people won’t come along to knock them off their perch, which is what the group associations are really about, no matter what level they are pursued. People think there is power in groups and are willing to trade away personal value to gain access to that power without having to really do anything themselves. 

I remember my college days; I had friends in all the local schools who would invite me to house parties at the various fraternities and sororities at Ohio State, Miami University, and the University of Cincinnati. One I remember well occurred in Cincinnati, where I arrived to meet my friend, and I broke all kinds of rules that the fraternity brothers were distraught with me over. First of all, I walked across the emblem on the sidewalk outside without paying homage to all the ritualistic ways they required all people to do. So we got off to a rough start that didn’t improve as the night wore on. The party’s purpose was that the fraternity had hired a stripper to have sex with one of their newer members, a kid who was very shy with girls, so the fraternity brothers hoped that a really outrageous experience with this stripper would cure him of his shyness. So he had sex with the girl in front of everyone right there in the living room. Then once he was done, the rest of the fraternity members took turns with her, and this all went on in full view of a window where I could see police walking around down the sidewalk.

Additionally, the stripper was managed by her husband, who watched as if his wife was selling lemonade or Tupperware. It was awkward, I couldn’t wait to leave, and I did so at the earliest possible moment once it was clear I had satisfied all the reasons that my friend had invited me. It took a few years, but gradually, I stopped being friends with that person because we simply lost common attributes. Once he stepped over that line, there was no going back, and we had very little to talk about. That was the case with many people from that time, friends who turned into compliant people happy to stay in their lane in exchange for an easy job that they were well paid to essentially not challenge anybody in authority. 

Understanding that, it’s not hard to understand why people turn into turtles when they are confronted with evil. And evil knows it. They know that group associations are more important to most people they deal with, so they conduct evil right in front of everyone’s faces audaciously because they expect everyone to stay in their lane and never challenge them. Because they have their own skeletons in their closet, and who are they to judge anybody? That is the danger of becoming compromised. It might be fun at the moment. It might be nice to have the herd’s protection and rely on that protection to get jobs in life and financial security without having to work too hard or display much bravery. There are plenty of people in the world who are happy to pay people to stay in their lane, and that is ultimately achieved by joining group associations, whether a Ph.D. or a fraternity, where the brotherhood becomes more important than your own family. And that is why when bad things happen, there aren’t enough people around to stand up to it and to fight evil when it presents itself. Because once people participate in evil to be accepted into a group association, they are tainted for life and never feel once again that they have a right to pass judgment on anything. And they cower in fear when evil is so audacious that they end up feeding it with their complacency instead of doing what must be done to defend the world from the mechanisms of tyranny and the schemes of the stupid. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Beating the Bad Guys: The members of the “A Team” continue to have success, and for good reason

I was having a bad day, as some days sometimes go and I received a very nice text from a friend who showed me a photo of her sister reading my book in her backyard.  I really appreciated it, and it didn’t take long to smooth out that bad day into what I often say, wrestling alligators and making boots out of them.  But at a time when things were pretty tough, it was nice to see someone send me something that was positive.  I appreciated the gesture.  And it also reminded me of what I had done a year prior with that book and how significant it has been to improving the world in ways that aren’t typically measured.  Around August and September of 2021, I had given out 100 copies of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to those I considered part of the “A Team,” various members in politics, business leaders, legal people, and in the trench freedom fighters I thought had a chance to do good things, and wanted to.  I couldn’t give books to everyone I knew, but I did to those who showed the most promise of doing big things on a war front that the mainstream news was ignoring.  While they wanted us to look at everything but what was important, I had been pointing out with greater frequency that real fight that we are all involved in, and I knew I needed to do something to help facilitate that effort in our war time epic that we are living through presently. 

Prior to the book coming out in August of 2021 I was pulling into the parking lot of the World’s Largest Truck Stop in Iowa when I received a call from another very good friend, a VIP known statewide.  He was upset that I had changed the name of my blog site from Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, to The Gunfighter’s Guide.  For over a decade he had come to rely on my blog site for the kind of news that he couldn’t get anywhere else, and he wasn’t happy with the name change.  I explained to him that we were in a different world now.  I felt that there was a real need to provide people with a guide to fight and defend themselves in this increasingly hostile world, a world that desired to commit election fraud to remove a president, a world that was clearly fine with committing treason against the United States of America and to sell away all our assets to syndicates of global criminal enterprise.  And a world that would French kiss evil happily then spit in our face and call us the bad guys.  A lot of people were lost in how to deal with those elements and I had a background that had some strategy that might help them, so I was planning to focus my intentions on doing just that.  He seemed somewhat satisfied with that answer, even if he protested the change.  But now, a year later, what I was up to has been quite clear and I am happy to report that the world is moving in the right direction.

For instance, one of those copies of the book I gave to the controversial Venessa Wells from Lakota schools.  I saw her as a bright new voice in the fight for constitutional preservation and thought she might make good use of it.  But I didn’t give a book to the Lakota school board president Lynda O’Conner.  Even though she and I were attached at the hip at that time, I felt she was just using me to gain power on the school board and to become its president.  I didn’t care because if she gained power, then there would be a 3 to 2 vote against another levy on the ballot, so it was a mutual relationship kind of thing.  But I didn’t see her as someone who would make use of the strategies outlined in my book.  But Venessa was.  Its one thing to talk about the news, as I had been doing on my blog site for years.  Its quite another to come up with unique strategies that could heavily leverage wins to those who follow the outlines of my book.  And that was what was needed.  I often talk about the paralysis that most people have when confronted with evil.  Most of society suffers from this condition.  And those who aren’t afraid to fight often feel the system is so against them that they can be identified and destroyed once they are singled out.  So they often find themselves running from the bad guys instead of fighting them.  That was what had to change which I had to explain to my VIP friend.  I was talking to someone just a few days ago who felt they were targeted to be killed, and they felt they only had a short time to live to do some of the good whistleblowing work that needed to be done, before they were killed.  In my personal background, not only do I have a long history with Lean techniques, and all kinds of business improvement techniques and psychological analysis, but I have a background with various mobs and criminal elements.  I have known very well various judges and hit people, so I know the underbelly of society thoroughly.  And I don’t want people to feel that they will be killed just for doing the right things in life.  That’s why I wrote the book, to help those people feel they can do their work, and not worry about such things. 

A year later, after giving out those 100 books, and then the many others who have bought the book for themselves and made good use of it, there have been some very good victories against detrimental odds that now show a path to success, just as I knew it would.  But sharing that with others isn’t so easy.  People get inundated by information coming at them from all sorts of directions.  But the track record is unmistakable and it makes me happy to see.  I appreciate all the great feedback, but more than that, I enjoy more seeing people win at life, at whatever they are trying to do.  On the freedom movement side, if they win, then I’m happy.  But in business too.  It’s a hostile world out there and people need some way to get an advantage.  And if the concepts in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business are followed in regard to international trade and intercontinental relationships entire nations could be brought down, such as China, or groups of hostile nations such as the Desecrators of Davos.  They are much weaker and more vulnerable than many think they are, they aren’t so scary, if you know how to beat them.  And that was the point of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business all along, and why I changed the name to my blog site, to help people learn how to beat those scary forces out there that want to control the world, whether its locally, statewide, nationwide, or internationally.  There is no reason to be scared, or powerless in this world.  If you know how to beat the bad guys, in whatever field, then I want to see people free to do so.  Good people should never worry about being killed or destroyed for doing the right thing.  And after a year of strategy outlined in that book, the track record is obvious, and there are many more victories to enjoy before its all said and done.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trump Can’t Ride Off Into the Sunset: There is a reason for all the political anger, and it must be expressed

I generally like Elon Musk, but his comments about Trump and how he should ride off into the sunset were misguided and foolish. I hope Elon Musk accomplishes his goals with Space X. But I think Tesla will be headed for rough waters mainly because of how government has tampered with the electric car market. They are saturating the industry with assets that nobody wants, creating competition where there wasn’t demand, and making buying regular gas cars a taboo that will last for decades. Before the Biden administration stuck its nose into the electric car market, Tesla was a pretty cool option for people looking for a vehicle alternative. Tesla could support its own network infrastructure, complete with charging stations. They didn’t need government. But government has now interrupted that market and made electric cars something people hate. So Elon Musk has some trouble coming because of government tampering. And with that said, without government, Elon Musk would not be so wealthy and gained so much prestige. Elon Musk’s place in the world is very much a creation of government. Like most people who strike it big, Elon Musk made a good bet, and in his case, several, and he became wealthy. He’s not a magnificent genius beyond our comprehension that knows a bunch of things that we don’t as a species. He played with house money and came up big. But in his case, that house money was from the government. Without government subsidies, Elon Musk would be just another computer geek trying to buy expensive coffee at Starbucks. So his comments about Trump have been extremely misplaced. His political advice is worthless because he has too many government tentacles in him and foreign nations to have a proper opinion on the matter. I hope he has continued success. But his political advice is worthless. If anything, we don’t have enough drama from Trump. The world is angry, and for a good reason. The last thing we need is a tool from China telling us what to think, and because Elon Musk needs China so much, we can’t trust a thing that he says about political opinion.

We are living in a world where Hunter Biden has put so much of himself on video with known prostitutes smoking crack that it’s beyond comprehension. This is the President’s son, who is seen by the world committing serious crimes, and nothing is being done about it. Forget for a moment the many other scandals that are out there or what anybody might think about Joe Biden as a person politically. To have a direct member of the President behaving so badly is enough to justify profound anger at the world’s injustice. If there were never a Trump, never a Tea Party, never any opposition from political parties, the behavior of Hunter Biden would be enough to justify a revolt of the American population against the Biden administration for the embarrassment that it has brought to our nation. But then consider all the crimes of Covid by government imposed on the American people. Consider the inflation rate. The war on fossil fuels that have pushed up the cost of gas to unforgivable standards. The impact of the stolen election in 2020 which is now apparent. After the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision on drop boxes, it’s clear that there is a trend in America that is finally figuring out that Joe Biden should have never even been inaugurated. People have a right. Actually, they are obligated to be upset about the crimes committed in 2020 between the government-created Covid pandemic and the election fraud that followed. If people weren’t outraged, it would be weird. It’s perfectly justifiable for people to express themselves with anger at the Biden government, the people who put him in power, and the governments of the world that have imposed themselves on everyone’s lives in such destructive ways. Trump represents that anger in a manageable way, and everyone should be happy that there is a Trump out there to discharge all pent-up anger.

This anger in the world, in general, didn’t just happen during the Trump administration. The Trump administration was a creation of that anger. The lead-up to it occurred for many decades. Most noticeably during the 90s, when the political left tried to cram down America’s throats a liberal view of the world that was revenge for the eight good years of Ronald Reagan. Reaganomics was revenge for what America saw during the Carter administration. Ford was destroyed because of his association with Richard Nixon. Nixon was destroyed because he was a threat to the administrative state. Kennedy was killed because he was a threat to that same administrative state. Bobby Kennedy was killed because he was a disruption to that partnership with the administrative state and the façade of organized crime that ultimately could be traced back to government. This has been a political fight that has gone on for a long time, and it was evident to conservatives that after 2003 the media would not give George Bush a fair shake. Bush was hated, and the political left pushed that anger to launch Barack Obama, a terrorist candidate from Bill Ayers launched in the living room of a Weather Underground radical. They lied about it to our face even though we had the evidence. They lied about his birth certificate. They lied about Benghazi. They lied about everything, and those stories mounted to the point where people lost trust in everything. Mitt Romney in 2012 was another loss for conservatives who had been burnt by losers like John McCain over the years, moderates who wanted to play by the rules while the political left broke the law and rubbed our faces in it. By the time Trump offered himself in 2015, people were ready to fight back, and they elected him despite the administrative state’s goals to stop it. 

Things were good under Trump; the country worked. We discovered that a lot could be fixed in the world if only we had someone in the White House who wanted to solve problems. The administrative state wants perpetual problems because that’s how their funding works. They never wanted to fix anything, and Trump showed what a scam everything they said really was. Then they took Trump away and expected people to just put up with it. No, that’s not how it works. All that has happened was that the political left represented in America by the Democrats stole away the natural sentiments of what America wanted and imposed on them the desires of an administrative state they didn’t want or support. In more polite times, they might have held their nose and put up with it, but after all the years of disrespect by the left toward the right, things finally broke. Trump was the discharge of that anger, but now that anger is far greater than it was just a few years ago. America is not a centrist nation. The media has all the wrong terms for left and right. When they talk about the political left, they are talking about communists and socialists.

Nazis were socialists; they were not the “far right.” America has its own definitions for conservative thought, and most of the nation is conservative. They are not “centralists” as the Beltway defines them. The way America is was always determined by the flyover states, not the crazy lunatics who live on the coasts. So the more crimes the left commits, the more lies they impose on America, and the more bad behavior disrespecting America will only lead to more anger. That anger isn’t going to go away. It’s only growing; until it is dealt with, there will be lots of “drama” in politics. And that drama will continue until respect is given to those who actually run the country, Trump supporters, and the person they picked for President, President Trump.

Rich Hoffman

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They Have Already Eaten the Pie: Steve Bannon and Titus Andronicus

“It’s too late; the bad guys have already eaten the pie.” That’s the message I left for Steve Bannon, whom I like, respect, and have been talking to a bit through text messages and on Gettr.  Steve had been reposting some of my contributions, and we have had discussions about the ground game of the populist movement. As he gets raked over the coals for the phony trial in Washington D.C., intent on destroying the populism that put Trump in the White House the first time, I am proud of what he has done. And happy to say publicly I support him and still would despite the mudslinging from CNN, who published a documentary about Bannon at 8 PM on the 17th in an obvious attempt to taint the jury in the case against the popular Warroom host. I thought the documentary fascinating. I often pay a lot of attention to the enemy’s thoughts and where they get their information. I try to see the world from the enemy’s perspective, walk in their shoes metaphorically, and understand their motivations. And with CNN, they were clearly lost as to why Steve Bannon was so popular. They were looking desperately for some way to stop Trump from running again in 2024, and their obvious hope was that perhaps if they took out Bannon, that Trump would be left dead in the water. But, the situation is much bigger than that, much bigger than Steve Bannon. And as the Bannon case for contempt of Congress goes to court and the Biden Justice Department attempts to stop the strategy of the populist movement across the world, it looks like the light is going out of their eyes as they begin to realize that Steve was just a tiny drop of water in a massive ocean of red that is coming at them from all directions. The rejection of the administrative state, the Liberal World Order, and the dreams of progressivism most expressly conveyed in the 1988 book Looking Backward were coming apart. And there was nobody to blame but themselves. 

To understand Steve Bannon, you would have to understand the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus. It is by far my favorite play by the famous English playwright, and Steve translated it to movie screens in the 90s with his Anthony Hopkins effort, Titus, which featured a whole cast of Hollywood heavyweights who told what many consider the bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays. I loved the movie when I first saw it and when I found out that Steve Bannon had been the executive producer, I was a fan of him, even when he took over at Breitbart before the first Trump term. Bannon would have to really understand the role of Titus to do what he is now in the world, and I would argue that he is the real-life embodiment of the famous character. For a quick review, Titus Andronicus was known throughout Rome as their hero general. He brings to the emperor the captured queen of the Goths, whom Titus had killed her son. The emperor then marries the captured queen making her superior to Titus now as a head of state. She vows revenge against Titus. She uses her remaining sons to torture and rape the daughter of the great general.  Titus falls into despair and goes mad. The emperor gives him a job in the court kitchen out of respect for his depleted condition. But Titus was only pretending to be crazy. He traps the queen’s sons, hangs them upside down in the kitchen, and slits their throats in front of his disgraced daughter. Then he slices up the boys and makes a pie out of them. Then he invites the emperor, the queen, and the rest of the court to a fine dinner he has prepared for them and feeds them the pie, which they eat happily. Revenge is a wonderful dish served cold. 

CNN was very upset that Steve Bannon’s Warroom has connections to populist movements worldwide. Bannon has been involved in Brexit, the uprisings in Hong Kong, the populist revolts in Europe, and of course, the Ulta-Maga posse in America that is poised to put Trump back in office with even more votes than he had in 2020, which officially was 75 million. He likely had much more than that, and the election fraud story just won’t go away from those who committed the biggest crime in the history of the world. Now, after two years of a failing Biden administration, the fantasy from the insurgents, who gained the power of the White House through illegal activity, believe that if they can shut down people like Bannon, they just might get away with it. And in so doing, they might send a message to the rest of the populist movements around the world to put away their mechanisms of rebellion and to fall in line. They intend a crucifixion of Bannon on the largest stage possible. And many of the same people involved in the election fraud scandal are involved in this attack against Bannon. The crime is one thing, the coverup is far worse, and we are into the coverup now. That’s what the contempt of Congress charge is all about, and only about that. 

Yet like the queen in the great Titus story, they have already eaten their own. Bannon has already made the pies with over a decade of leadup to the present day. And if Bannon hadn’t done it, someone else would have. There is a vast network of freedom fighters out there who will always refuse the tyranny of the globalists. The only reason this fight hadn’t happened sooner was that those attackers of America were hiding their intentions behind charities and tax shelter foundations with globalist intentions. And with his crazy hair and disheveled appearance, Bannon has been playing the cook, Titus, and has been busy making pies in the kitchen to feed to the globalists the flesh of their own kind. And they have been eating it with smiles on their faces. They thought he was crazy. They thought he was done and destroyed politically when Trump released him as the White House strategist. But now you know the rest of the story. Steve Bannon is the real-life Titus Andronicus, and to do what he needed to, with the forces that were against him and the MAGA movement, he put the sword away and went into the kitchen to fight the battle in a way that the enemy would never suspect. And now that they are at the table and presented with fine pies to eat, they had no way of knowing that all their progressives’ schemes from the last century were cooked within it. And now they have eaten it and turned the whole thing into digestive interest. And now comes the time when Titus gets to tell the world what was in the pie.

The midterms are coming; the red wave can’t be stopped now. Europe is turning to populism. So is Hong Kong against China. Japan will strengthen its constitution to take the passivism out of it. And Brexit is such a real thing that Boris had to step down because he failed to stand up to globalism. And to the Desecrators of Davos, they are learning that they aren’t safe in the mountain town any longer. The world is on to them, and they want their scheming antics in the next pie they intend to eat. The sentiment goes way beyond Steve Bannon. He was just the cook. The hunger for pie was already there.

Rich Hoffman

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A Million New Voters for Republicans: Learning to be winners, and making “playing nice” a thing of the past

First of all, if a political party like the Democrats continue to point to “the popular vote” as a measure for election victory, then you will continue to see the intent to cheat in elections. The popular vote is not how we elect people because it was determined early in America’s foundation that it was too easy to stack up voters in isolated, controlled areas that did not represent the country as a whole. And this is what Democrats have built their entire political party around, the concept of cheating with the popular vote, with blue city giveaways, illegal immigration, allowing anybody to vote without voter I.D. so that they could artificially prop up the voting numbers in places like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City. That is why when you look at a map of the United States where Republicans are represented in Red and Democrats in Blue, you will see that the blue areas are relatively small and are concentrated in the dense city areas. Republicans have run away from Democrats for a long time and filled in the states in the rest of the country, leaving vast areas of red in much less populated areas. So when election time comes and all the voting impropriety is thrown in for consideration, Democrats appear to have more voters when they have been illegally consolidated into small areas where Democrats control the voting process. It is not an honest way to conduct elections, which is precisely why there is an electoral college. When the attackers of the American idea conjured up their schemes of election fraud and representational dishonesty, they assumed that they could lobby on behalf of the popular vote in the same way they lobby against constitutional limits on government. America has backstops in its legal system to quell the enthusiasm for criminal conduct that other countries don’t have, which is evident in the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college. 

But there is more bad news for Democrats, which they deserve, which is an accurate measure of their overall effectiveness. This is important to those who worry that Democrats have some magic power to continue winning elections. Much of what they have done for many years is artificially prop themselves up to look like they had more support in America than they really had. They are overly represented in the media culture, arts and entertainment, fashion, and the visible things people see on television. But those views are not represented in what people actually believe, especially away from the very blue cities on the coasts of North America. As I say all the time, if it weren’t for deceitful practices, such as election fraud and the desire to hide this reality from even themselves by stacking the vote with illegal aliens, ghetto giveaways by Democrat politicians to bottom feeder types looking for a free ride in life, and downright fake votes like we saw for Joe Biden in 2020 where the people counting the votes just made up around 40 million votes to give him the win and expected everyone to just take their word for it and call it a certified election, Democrats would never win elections at all. Americans aren’t that liberal in nature. They aren’t even “just right of center.” I’ve been all over the country, and Democrat politics are not in their hearts. And now, in the days after Trump has left the White House and Democrats have given the world Joe Biden, the loser in chief, Republicans have gained over a million new voters, according to The Associated Press, which is hardly a conservative outlet. 

A million voters switched to Republican over the last year. According to the Associated Press, those people had been sitting on the fence all along or voted Democrat because of the Never Trumper sentiment. These scared suburban moms thought Trump’s mean Tweets were “unprofessional” and “beneath the high office of the President.” But now they are paying 100 bucks at the gas pump to run their kids all over town to be with their friends, and maybe those mean Tweets don’t look so bad anymore. And this brings up something I explained to the Ross Perot family in their company’s parking lot the night before the election in 1992, that most voters will crawl through broken glass for a winner. If a political candidate can show wins to their voters, then voters will always tend to vote in favor of them. Trump knew this early on through his television work on NBC and his work with the WWE. People will put aside personal flaws in character if wins are the result. We see it in sports all the time, and now we certainly see it in politics. As bad as the world has been politically, all the wins come from the Republican side. All Democrats have are protests and riots in the streets. They have nothing else, and now that the bandaid has been ripped off the scab, Democrats showed their ugliness in 2020 with lockdowns, riots, and election fraud to the point where America is now rooting against them as the villains in the play. And there is no plan for Democrats to repair that image. They are the party of big government, open borders, drag queens, drugs, and crime. Like Trump would say, other than that, they are very nice people. 

Republicans have become the party of victory, and new politicians like Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Lauren Boebert have learned from Trump that spiking the football is something that voters want to see.   This notion of keeping politics in the realm of polite society is the way to allow the Democrats to continue pretending the nation is with them with the popular vote because they have convinced the other side to stay home, and they call that a win. I call it cheating, and that’s the context of what I told the Perot family the night before the 1992 election, where he was a third-party candidate who pulled 19% away from the establishment candidates the next day. That is how we ended up with Bill Clinton, but that’s also how we learned the truth about our politics over the next few decades. Perot became the founder of the Reform Party. By the end of that decade, Donald Trump was thinking of running for president against Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party ticket, which never gained enough steam to make it official. So, this discussion didn’t just pop up out of nowhere in 2015.

Instead of starting a third party, Trump and many others learned that the way to win elections was to give voters what they wanted most, representative victory. Not fake numbers and propped up population centers to make an argument against the electoral college with a popular vote illegally obtained. The Democrats have only been able to make themselves viable by splitting the Republican Party and hiding scandal behind polite society. If the voters started to get restless and angry, then Democrats would never have a chance, and they know it, as does the media. This news of over a million people switching their voter sentiments to Republican is devastating to Democrats. Because it reveals a secret that has been long suppressed, that our nation is not a 50/50 country, as it’s been sold to us. And suppose Republicans get to the point where they start embracing winning. In that case, nobody will beat them, and they will gain vast majorities in the House, Senate, and Executive Branch for many decades because voters don’t vote on policy arguments. They vote on who wins and loses and who sells those wins to the public with a spiked football. And it looks like, finally, that understanding isn’t regulated to a third-party position, but the mainstream Republicans are poised to win everywhere and often for perhaps the next century to come. Liberalism has failed in every way we can measure things, and without the ability to conceal that fact, Democrats are doomed and deserve all the losses coming their way.

Rich Hoffman

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Joe Biden, the Hapless Loser: A physical manifestation of failure

They didn’t talk about it much when it happened that President Biden fell up the stairs on his way to the Jimmy Kimmel Show while boarding Air Force One for the second time. Then while riding his bicycle in Delaware, he actually fell off his bicycle, as if he were a child just learning to ride and forgot to put his foot down when coming to a stop. It looked terrible and incompetent. But as many were pointing to the obvious physical decline of an inserted president, someone that people didn’t pick for president but an administrative state that has so little respect for individual ability that they thought they could just stick a “yes man” into the office and turn him loose, it reminded me of a constant element to any competitive endeavor, pressure and what it can do to a mind not prepared to meet it.   Over this span of time, Biden has been complaining that the Republican Party of today is not that of our fathers and grandfathers. He has been yearning for the days when Republicans were easy to beat by Democrats when the Saul Alinsky playbook held true, and Republicans could be destroyed just by calling them a bad name. No, those days are over, Joe, and he is feeling the pressure. The people who put him in office led him to believe that if he just stood here, and stood there, he would be propped up and respected. But that’s not how it is in this new Republican age of the MAGA movement. People got a taste from Trump of what a real president could do, and this artificial mess of the Biden presidency is putting pressure on all Democrats that they are not prepared to deal with. Biden is showing that pressure with these constant mistakes he makes in public. He is the physical manifestation of failure, and it is showing itself in his daily actions.

The mainstream news outlets, particularly Fox News, thought the ten loser Republican senators who showed they were willing to compromise on gun legislation were doing what was expected in politics. For them, it looked like they could talk about “bipartisan” activity on the topic of gun legislation. But they really wanted the typical Republican response to reports lately that there has been gun violence and, therefore, a political push to further erode the Second Amendment and, thus, the Constitution itself. By watching ten senators like Mitt Romney and Rob Portman buckle under the constant media pressure, some hoped that this meant the old tricks would work, where Republicans always caved to the name-calling of the Democrats and that “compromise” could be found and that legislation could be bipartisan. But concern erupted when those ten senators were left on an island by the Republican Party, and MAGA supporters condemned their compromise aggressively. No, this was not the Republican Party of our fathers, the one that loses all the time and is always up for a compromise while Democrats stand together and give up nothing. They are the party of take, take, take, and they never bend to compromise. To them, that has been what the Republican Party has been to politics, the party of compromise, and if they resisted, they would be called names until they did compromise. It’s been a one-sided game that conservative people have become sick of, and they have been seeking new types of Republicans for years, creating the MAGA movement in America.

I have been watching and participating in this process for years. First, we could see it in the various central committees at the local level, where the topic of RINOs was brought up in the early Tea Party days. In my area, I knew Rob Portman when he was first getting started, and John Boehner is one of my neighbors, so he always comes up. When he was Speaker of the House, he thought he was one of the most conservative people on planet earth, and his most significant accomplishment was in bringing the Pope to Congress. He was stunned to learn that area people were calling him a RINO starting around 2012, along with Governor Kasich at the time, who was too prone to compromise with Democrats over just about everything. After all, to them, that’s what politics was all about, compromise. Well, people were getting tired of losing, and this was before there was ever a Trump on the national stage in politics. At that time, he only had a television show and wrote best-selling books. People wanted Republicans to fight back, not to compromise with evil. Not to compromise with people who obviously wanted to destroy American life in every way that we know it. Compromising with evil was giving it power. I was with a senator at the time who was called a RINO to his face by people he thought respected him. He was a good guy playing by what he thought were the rules of politics, to be the bigger person and lead by example. The expectation was that if we gave a little, then the other side would give a little, and in that way, progress would get done. But, in truth, Democrats just kept taking, and taking, and taking. They never gave up anything. So that made the RINOs look like fools, and voters were tired of fools who didn’t win. So they voted for President Trump and have stuck with him no matter what because he has been the only politician in their memory who promised them victory. And for a win, they will put up with a lot to get it, and they sure have.

As Biden fell off his bicycle, he was obviously playing way over his head. This was not the job they had promised him. The administrative state has lost control, and Biden is the puppet left on the stage without a hand to guide it. So, he’s making mistakes all over the place. He can’t handle the pressure because he was never meant to. And he’s constantly complaining because he’s craving the “old-fashioned” Republicans who used to let Democrats win all the time. If only they could get back to those days. The fact that he’s complaining about it as much as he is says everything about the public pressure behind the scenes. He’s a hapless old man who has lost his political savvy and often repeats what his 20-something political radicals in his administration say. They don’t know what to do, they are losing to Republicans in every way it can be measured, and their party isn’t built for any of it. Democrats are built to use the Saul Alinsky playbook to harass conservatives into making all the compromise, while the Democrats spread vast evil across the world and call it “bipartisanship.” Voters are sick of that deal and have been for a long time. Trump is the leader of the MAGA movement for now, but slowly these Democrats are starting to learn, people want winners in the Republican Party. And other Republicans like Ron DeSantis are figuring out that formula, and the cat is out of the bag. I’ve been watching the process for a long time, and I can say it’s not going back to those RINO compromises. Instead, destroying the Democrat Party is what voters want, especially after what happened in the events leading up to 2020. And the pressure on Democrats is tremendous, and they are showing that the pressure is getting to them in all kinds of little ways, particularly in crashing bicycles and falling down just going up steps. 

Rich Hoffman

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Public Education is Over: It’s a nationwide change that isn’t going away

It’s not just the actions at Lakota schools in Northern Cincinnati that brought me to where I am now. I have spoken to dozens and dozens of people over the last few weeks regarding the Darbi Boddy school board drama, and I feel really sorry for the people who have been hoping that public education could be saved somehow. But as I have said to all those people and more, I just don’t see the controversy at Lakota. I see personality problems, but as I’ve said, whenever you get a clash of change agencies crashing into a very static institution, things are bound to get pushy. I never thought otherwise of the school board at Lakota. Instead, there are national trends that are forming in the background that are very much part of the Lakota story. What is about to happen at Lakota, with major resignations coming up due to the pressure of the changes, is going to happen in all public schools. I hoped to be wrong about it and hoped that with a decent school board, some form of public education for the people who do love it might last. But it’s quite clear to me that public education is impossibly broken and that the role of a modern school board is to manage the decline. Long gone are the days when Friday Night Football would rally behind the great local quarterback who threw 400 yards and four touchdowns to unite the community behind the sports page on a Saturday morning. And college recruits were in the stands handing out scholarships like Halloween candy. No, those days are over, forever. The people I have talked to as fall out from the controversies at Lakota are all well-intentioned. But they do not see the obvious because it’s simply too painful for them. They do love public education, and they really don’t have the heart for what’s coming.

Of course, you do want to know what’s coming and why now is such a pinnacle time. Well, institutions are collapsing along with the economy, which is overall the net result of over a century of failed progressive philosophy. They have gone all in, and the public has not been with them. All this became exposed during Covid, the progressive teacher unions, and the highly paid superintendent class that sort of functioned as a barrier between the radicals and the elected school board members. Once the rhythm was broken in the public education cycle, and people learned to live without it, there was no way ever to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. At best, public schools were going to be fragments of their former selves. But then parents learned just how radical the government schools really were. It used to be that many people, including Glenn Beck, were put off by my position on public education at the height of the Tea Party movement.    I was saying that public education was doomed to fail back in 2012 and 2013 when Beck and I had a mutual friend, Doc Thompson, who was trying to broker talk between us to do some radio work on The Blaze, as I used to do on Clear Channel Radio. I was too much of a rock thrower for Glenn Beck at that time of his life, and all avenues between The Blaze and me were cut after President Trump was elected. Soon after, Doc Thompson was mysteriously killed by a train while working directly for Beck in Texas. I was indifferent to Beck. He was a never-Trumper then, and of course, I was all about Trump, so there hasn’t been an opportunity to reconcile. Well, I had Beck’s show on in the background the other day, and he was telling everyone what I said a decade ago, “take your kids out of public schools; they are dangerous for your children. Do it now!” Just ten years ago, it was fringe when I said such things. Now it’s a mainstreamer conservative talk show host with many millions of people listening to him daily saying it. Times have changed a lot, and people are finally starting to listen. 

As I said during the Trump administration, if Covid hadn’t been set loose to destroy the fourth year of the president and hopes for re-election by destroying the American economy, the Department of Education was poised to be dismantled. States were preparing to apply a new funding model to the public school systems, where the money follows the child, not to the school. This would force the unionized institutions to compete for effectiveness. Lakota certainly wasn’t happy about that, and in many ways, Covid saved them from that eventuality. With Joe Biden in the White House, public education won’t see changes, but that’s not saying much. Biden, as of this writing, is at 28% approval. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules has shown serious proof of direct election fraud funded by Facebook, and institutional politics is trying desperately to keep it all undercover.

Meanwhile, more and more mad moms are getting elected to school boards, moms like Darbi Boddy at Lakota. Even if the school board convinced her to resign, there are hundreds just like her who are winning seats all over the country, and all want the same thing. They want to protect their kids from what they have come to see as an institutional menace to their children where school boards stand between them to keep the peace, to keep those Friday night football games something the community continues to do. But that all came to a crashing end with Covid, and parents found other things to do. 

In the last election, I supported school board members to help bring solutions, people I knew who liked public education more than I did. So a part of me really wanted to be wrong. I knew I wasn’t, but I wanted to be. As they are now, public schools will not survive the transition to a system where the money travels with the student, which will eventually happen. That gives the school boards the task of keeping that managed decline as good as possible so that the failure of public schools does not destroy entire communities. The communities around Lakota have much more going on than being destroyed by a school. Add to the high gas prices, the sudden shortages of items that people used to take for granted, and a political system at the federal level that people didn’t support to begin with; all the old progressive institutions are going to fail, just as the Biden administration is failing. Now that they have their dream candidate in the White House with both houses of Congress under their control, they went too far. They used Covid to grab for powers that terrified many parents who had been on the fence for their entire lives only to come face to face with their greatest fears, the pincushion, rainbow-haired LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ teachers who wanted to turn their tomboy daughters into a Tom and to cram it down their throats and demand that they like it. Well, people are tired of government ramming things down their throats, and they will take it out on their local communities, specifically their public schools. If they can’t get to Joe Biden, they’ll get to the local school board, who they see as just as much of a menace. And more and more, the moderates will be pushed off and replaced by mad moms seeking to protect their children the way angry mommas do. And there is no putting that anger back in the bottle now that people have admitted it to themselves. Public education is over. What we are seeing now is just the beginning. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Lakota School Board Created the National Circus: They want short meetings, and Darbi Boddy asks too many questions

There is a big difference between making mistakes and purposeful maliciousness. What Darbi Boddy did as a Lakota school board member was make a few mistakes. At the last meeting, I pointed this out to the board by giving a brief history of mistakes the Lakota school board had made, precisely one that resulted in an embarrassing lawsuit last year that cost many thousands of dollars. As a new board member, Darbi has been asking lots of questions. Still, the radical element has been aggressive toward her, primarily since she worked immediately to remove mask mandates at the school. Darbi Boddy was targeted right out of the gate, which wasn’t unexpected. But what was surprising was the level of activism that the school board would take to use whatever mistakes Darbi Boddy made as a new school board member to create a public circus just to get her to resign. Darbi, I think, has been a good school board member, and it was the job of the rest of the board members to reach out and to build a team with her instead of plotting behind the scenes to get rid of her because she didn’t fit a mold they saw as being on their school board membership. The voters picked the board, and the school board, along with Matt Miller, the superintendent, became activists to remove Darbi Boddy with a classic trick of social ostracization and peer pressure to force her to resign for a mistake only six months into the first term. The result was a national spectacle that was grossly unfair to Darbi. It was a level of activism that told many stories, but the worst of all was in its doing and the lack of responsibility that anybody utilized in the aftermath. The school board itself acted as if Darbi brought all this negative attention to Lakota when they tried to use the media and the radical element churned up for blood to destroy Darbi Boddy in every way they could. 

For me, what started years ago to simply fight school levies to keep the costs down of tax burdens in our school district, I have grown to hate Lakota schools over the years. I don’t think Lakota does anything well for the kids. I would argue that even the sports programs are unhealthy for the kids and their future culture once they’ve graduated. The more I have learned about public education, the more I hate it. So after the last election, I felt that Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi, the two newest board members, did care about public education. A lot more than I did, so they might be able to make Lakota the best it can be for the taxpayers who are forced to contribute small fortunes to essentially a progressive institution that works against them politically.   I heard at that last meeting Issac’s statements about not wanting to be on the news, and all his experience as a program manager with Master’s Degrees in college, because he was struggling to understand what a school board member at Lakota was all about. I felt sympathy for him, Issac is a very good person, and he means the best for all lives he touches. I think he and Darbi make the school board better, and maybe they’ll actually help some kids along the way. I was happy with their elections, so I stayed out of Lakota business because I personally find the whole thing sickening. Everything about public schools is political, and they aren’t my kind of politics. So I’m not eager to waste my time at their stupid meetings. All they have is a parade of complaints of below-the-line thinking from a unionized mindset that projects that more money is always needed to solve their problems. And to get that money, kids are always used as hostages to move public sentiment. So if I can put Lakota out of my mind and forget about it as much as possible, I’m a happy guy. If they drag me into their mess, well, then I’m not so happy. 

Politics is a blood sport, which I say all the time. Nobody really likes each other about much of anything. Politics, then, is a game where people use each other to achieve whatever objective they find bounces around in their minds. It is those skills specifically that I think Darbi Boddy has that make her better than most in school board business.   The greatest weakness in any school board culture is the Ohio School Board Association which turns the whole effort more into a country club mindset than anything practical for the business management of a district. What ends up happening is that the OSBA runs cover for the radical elements of progressive public schools, focusing on damage control of public image over the substance of actual management of resources united through political friendships and peer pressure. Darbi went into the school board without needing to have the illusions of friendships and being free of peer pressure. She has a nice family at home, a husband she enjoys, and is a dedicated mom, which is good enough for her. Going into the election, I thought that she had the potential to actually be helpful as a school board member at Lakota because of those traits. But she didn’t feel a need to maintain illusionary friendships aimed at group consensus, and this was a problem for the traditional way of running a school board, so things got off to a rough start from minute number one. Perhaps when Matt Miller gave Darbi and Issac their fruit baskets as a gift at the beginning of the year, they all would have gotten along better if they had given Darbi something she actually wanted. Whatever the case, the board would have done better to make political friends with Darbi than they did. Instead, they looked to destroy her because the value system was featured on cooperation and politics than on actually doing the job for the school.

The result of the school board approach with Matt Miller playing his role of passive-aggressive assassin was to use the media and the mob to push Darbi Boddy off the board with scandal, like a Shakespearean play. They could have used some of Darbi’s rookie mistakes to bond with her and do team building which is how such things are done in the professional world. Everyone would have understood, after all, the board as a body had made more than its fair share of serious mistakes over the years. Nothing that Darbi had done was malicious. There is a hostile political element in Lakota that the board should be fighting as members of management. Not yielding to. That radical element seeks to take away the management ability of the board at every juncture, and the net result of that is always more money.   At that last school board meeting, the seeds were certainly being planted for a future tax increase. The cost of diesel was going up, so busing was getting too expensive.

Teachers weren’t feeling safe in a post-Covid world; what would Lakota do to prevent teachers from leaving for other districts? The subtext of all the conversations was “more money.”  And what always costs more money is a lack of management which the political radicals at Lakota purposely interject always to keep the school board on its heels. And when they can get the board fighting each other, as they were baited into doing against Darbi Boddy, well then, of course, the result is continuously increased costs and unregulated monstrosities. The excuse that while the board was focused on shoving Darbi Boddy off the board, one of the schools needed an extended parking lot for increased busing, which would cost more money and create a need for another tax levy. All the while, to cover up the hard decisions with obvious indecision, Darbi Boddy made a convenient punching bag. The superintendent and other board members who aren’t getting paid want to go home. They don’t like long marathon meetings, and Darbi won’t shut up about her questions.   So they attacked her to push her off the board so that perhaps they could get back to 45-minute meetings again, or even 20 minutes. But from what I heard at that last meeting, the Lakota school board needs the questions that Darbi has been asking even more. When you are managing many millions of dollars, those meetings should be every bit of 4 to 5 hours. And if they take 12 to 15 hours, then that is what should be done if managing all those schools, all those progressive employees, and all the variables in between is required not to have to ask the public for more money. At that May 9th meeting, I heard that the superintendent and the board wanted to be lazy, and they wanted to get rid of the person who wanted to work the hardest so that they wouldn’t have to.   And they created the embarrassing national circus so they wouldn’t have to do the work that the taxpayers expected.

Rich Hoffman

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