Marijuana Use at the High Place of Tel Arad, Israel: The problem with legalizing communication with inter-dimensional entities

I promised more context for why I hate the legalization of marijuana so much, and in the case of mass society, intoxicants. It’s not enough to say that drugs should be illegal; people need to understand why. And for me, it’s a battle of consciousness and who controls your thoughts. How can people, for instance, fight for small government and the benefits of an intelligent republic, but then surrender all thought through intoxication over to other forces that invade your personal sovereignty, and the most important at that, our minds and the thoughts that those minds produce? When smoke filled the air of an inner sanctum, it was never accidental. It was engineered. In the eighth century BCE, at the Judahite fortress shrine of Tel Arad, roughly thirty-five miles south of Jerusalem, two limestone altars stood before the threshold of the “holy of holies.” Laboratory analysis of the charred residue on those altars has now told us plainly what ancient worshipers were inhaling: on one, frankincense blended with animal fat to volatilize its perfume at higher temperatures; on the other, cannabis mixed with animal dung to slow‑burn at lower temperatures, releasing a psychoactive aerosol sufficient to induce altered states. The compounds identified—THC, CBD, CBN, terpenes, and terpenoids—leave no doubt that the cannabis inflorescences were burned not for fragrance but for ecstasy.¹ ² ³ ⁴ 1 2 3 4

That is the kind of hard, physical evidence that strips away modern euphemisms. At Tel Arad, cannabis was a ritual technology. It was the apparatus by which priests or officiants crossed the threshold from sober perception to trance, much as frankincense, sourced via Arabian trade routes, made the sanctum smell like heaven even as cannabis smoke tuned human minds to hear it.¹ ³ ⁵ 1 3 5 The shrine’s use window, ca. 760–715 BCE, places it squarely in Judah’s political and religious turbulence, between the First Temple’s glory and the Assyrian pressure, when competing cults and high places dotted the land. The Arad altars stood not in a marginal folk‑site but in a fortress on the southern frontier—a liminal place in geography and consciousness.² ⁵ 2 5

The broader archaeology of Canaan corroborates that mind-altering substances were embedded in ritual. In the Late Bronze Age cemetery at Tel Yehud, archaeologists recovered imported Base‑Ring jugs shaped like poppy heads whose residues test positive for opium—likely associated with funerary rites and the cult of the dead, whether to raise spirits or ease the passage.⁶ 6 Across the Near East, ecstasy was not a fringe practice; it was a cultivated technique. Tel Arad’s twin altars memorialize that technique at the threshold of the inner sanctum, where incense regulated the smell and cannabis regulated the state of mind.¹ ³ 1 4

From that ancient record, one conclusion emerges that remains relevant today: cannabis was used to override sober cognition in a sacred framework. It did not sharpen judgment; it sought communion—voices, visions, feedback from a realm beyond ordinary waking life. Whether you interpret those experiences as genuine encounters with non-human intelligences or as products of hyper-stimulated neural circuitry, the public‑policy implication is the same. Normalizing marijuana enshrines altered consciousness as a cultural good. The more potent the product and the wider the adoption, the more a society tunes its public square toward ritualized disinhibition.

You can see the continuity of this logic in India’s long bhang tradition. Bhang, a paste made from cannabis leaves, has been woven into festivals like Holi and Maha Shivaratri for centuries, with references in Vedic literature and Ayurvedic lore and with colonial observers documenting its ubiquity.⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ 7 8 9 10 Contemporary estimates run in the millions of annual consumers around major festivals, placing cannabis within a sacred calendar rather than on the margins of culture.⁸ 8 In visual culture, the art that issues from such states is strikingly consistent across continents: charged neon geometrics, entity‑forms, fractal mandalas—repertoire that echoes shamanic cosmologies from Siberia to Amazonia and now saturates modern psychedelic aesthetics. The continuity of motifs suggests a continuity of effect: the same kinds of altered states produce the same types of visions.

But where ancient priests burned cannabis to induce ecstasy within a small, controlled ritual community, modern legalization scales that effect to whole populations. That is where archeology’s lesson collides with public health. If cannabis is a portal, the portal’s throughput matters. Epidemiology repeatedly associates heavier or earlier cannabis use with increased risk of psychotic outcomes, observing dose‑response effects: meta‑analysis finds the heaviest users have odds ratios near 3.9 for schizophrenia or related psychoses compared with non‑users.¹¹ 11 A 2025 synthesis applying Hill’s criteria argues there is a high likelihood cannabis contributes to schizophrenia development overall, with a pooled OR ≈ 2.88 and roughly two‑fold greater risk for adolescent users.¹⁴ 12 More granular clinical work shows that in diagnosed schizophrenia, cannabis use is tied to increased positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions) and higher excitement, even as negative symptom patterns can vary; no causality is claimed, but the association is robust.¹³ 13 And among people with schizophrenia, cannabis use is significantly associated with some suicide‑related outcomes, including elevated odds of attempted suicide and increased hazards for suicide death.¹⁵ 14

Jurisdiction-level studies add a societal lens. After U.S. recreational legalization (2009–2019), modeling shows +5.8% injury crash rates and +4.1% fatal crash rates in the aggregate, controlling for factors like unemployment, speed limits, seat‑belt use, rural miles, and alcohol trends—effects vary by state, but the direction is worrisome.¹⁶ ¹⁷ 15 16 Systematic reviews converge on negative road‑safety impacts in most studies, and national surveys now find 4–6% of drivers self‑report driving within an hour of cannabis use, with risk perceptions conspicuously more lenient than for alcohol.¹⁸ ¹⁹ 17 18 None of this proves that every consumer will suffer harm; it demonstrates that scaled access increases measurable externalities—most acutely among young men, high‑potency users, and those who combine cannabis with alcohol.¹² ¹⁸ 19 17

So why invoke Tel Arad in a twenty-first-century legalization debate? Because it reveals what cannabis was for in a culture that canonized sacred space: it was for ecstasy, for crossing boundaries, for letting something else participate in one’s thinking. If you grant the metaphysical possibility that those “somethings” are genuine non-human intelligences, then mass legalization looks like opening a wide conduit into a population’s decision-making machinery. If you deny that and call the entities neural artifacts, the conclusion hardly changes: repeated entry into states that mimic external agency undermines habituated sovereignty and clarity—what a civilization requires for law, craft, and self-government.

There is also a moral claim at stake. Cultures thrive on lucidity—on earned competence and honest accountability. We do not need to romanticize intoxication because it looks antiquarian. Tel Arad was not quaint. It was precise. One altar perfumed the sanctum; the other hijacked cognition. Judah’s priests were innovating in ritual engineering, not engaging in harmless herbalism. The residue composition—the dung matrix, the cannabinoid profile, the deliberate temperature control—shows purposeful design to modulate consciousness.¹ ² ³ 1 2 3 That is the legacy modern marijuana culture inherits: techniques to create porosity. Legalization, commercialization, and age-neutral marketing scale porosity to a level ancient officiants never imagined, and the data on psychosis and road safety tell us the cost.

For these reasons, I reject marijuana as a cultural good. The Tel Arad shrine is a fossilized warning: cannabis has been a conduit into ecstasy in high places for a very long time, and cultures that survive do not hand their sovereignty to smoke. The way forward is not to sacralize intoxication, but to honor clarity—frankincense is fragrant; cannabis is psychoactive. The former perfumes a room; the latter reprograms it. Tel Arad did both. We should do neither.

David Jay Brown and Sara Phinn Huntley’s The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities: Machine Elves, Tricksters, Teachers, and Other Interdimensional Beings (2025) brings this conversation into sharp modern focus. Structured like a naturalist’s handbook for hyperspace, the book catalogs 25 distinct entity types encountered in DMT and ayahuasca experiences—from self-transforming machine elves and mantis insectoids to reptilians, gray aliens, fairies, nature spirits, and divine forms like Grandmother Ayahuasca and the Virgin Mary. Each chapter includes encounter narratives from trip reports and scientific studies, rich descriptions of behavior, appearance, and the messages or teachings they impart, accompanied by visionary artwork from artists such as Alex Grey and Sara Phinn Huntley herself 1 2. The field guide poses a profound question: Are these beings mere constructs of the human psyche, or are they independent intelligences inhabiting other dimensions? That question lies at the heart of every cross-cultural psychedelic tradition, from Tel Arad’s cannabis altars to global shamanic rites.

The guide has not only attracted readers interested in visionary art or entheogens but has also gained credibility through endorsements from figures like Graham Hancock and through guest appearances by Brown and Huntley on platforms like the “Rebel Spirit Radio” podcast 3. Meanwhile, mainstream voices like Joe Rogan regularly revisit “DMT astronauts”—individuals who deliberately seek these entities for spiritual insight or practical guidance—and discuss whether contemporary governments and institutions might align with such interdimensional “high priests” to influence mass consciousness 4 5. This book is a frontier consideration into a new science of analysis and reinforces the core argument: humanity’s engagement with psychoactive smoke—from ancient altars to modern DMT breakthroughs—is not benign. It is a politics of consciousness intervention, where the line between personal sovereignty and external mental imposition is perilously blurred. And it’s very dangerous, and should under no rational endeavor, should ever be legalized in a serious society.

Footnotes

1. Arie, Rosen, Namdar (2020), GC‑MS identification of THC/CBD/CBN; animal dung/fat matrices; dating and functional interpretation. 1

2. Science News coverage of the shrine context, the cannabis–dung mixture, and THC levels consistent with altered states. 2

3. Taylor & Francis newsroom summary highlighting frankincense chemistry (boswellic acids) and deliberate psychoactive use of cannabis. 3

4. Times of Israel report: cannabis “to stimulate ecstasy” and implications for Temple ritual analogs. 4

5. Sci. News overview of shrine chronology, fortress border function, and compositional findings. 5

6. Biblical Archaeology Society: Tel Yehud opium residues in Base‑Ring jugs; cult‑of‑the‑dead context. 6

7. Wikipedia (summary with sources) on bhang as an edible cannabis preparation and festival use. 7

8. Firstpost explainer on Holi and bhang’s historical embedding; contemporary practice estimates. 8

9. IndiaTimes feature with Vedic/Ayurvedic references and colonial documentation of bhang. 9

10. SAGE review on the historical context and research state of cannabis use in India. 10

11. Marconi et al. (2016) meta-analysis: dose‑response; OR≈3.9 for heaviest use vs. non-use. 11

12. JAMA Network Open invited commentary (2025) summarizing evidence and Ontario cohort demographics; rising PARF after medical legalization. 19

13. eClinicalMedicine IPD meta-analysis (2023) associating cannabis use with higher positive and excitement dimensions in schizophrenia. 13

14. Biomolecules (2025) systematic review applying Hill’s criteria; overall OR≈2.88; doubled adolescent risk. 12

15. Psychological Medicine (2025) meta-analysis: cannabis use in schizophrenia linked to attempted suicide and suicide death hazards. 14

16. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (2022): legalization associated with +5.8% injury crashes and +4.1% fatal crashes in aggregate. 15

17. IIHS bibliography summary of the same study’s methodology and state heterogeneity. 16

18. MDPI systematic review (2023) concluding negative impacts of legalization on road safety in most studies; risk profiles. 17

19. AAA Foundation (2024) fact sheet on DUI‑C prevalence (~4–6%), risk perceptions, and sex differences. 18

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Bibliography

Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad. Tel Aviv, 47(1), 5–28. 1

Bower, B. (2020). An Israeli shrine may have hosted the first ritual use of marijuana. Science News. 2

Farmer, C. M.; Monfort, S. S.; Woods, A. N. (2022). Changes in Traffic Crash Rates After Legalization of Marijuana. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 83, 494–501. 15

Marconi, A., et al. (2016). Meta-analysis of the Association Between the Level of Cannabis Use and Risk of Psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 42(5), 1262–1269. 11

Argote, M., et al. (2023). Association between cannabis use and symptom dimensions in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. eClinicalMedicine, 64, 102199. 13

Pourebrahim, S., et al. (2025). Does Cannabis Use Contribute to Schizophrenia? Biomolecules, 15, 368. 12

Mulligan, L. D., et al. (2025). Cannabis use and suicide in schizophrenia. Psychological Medicine, 55, e79. 14

González Sala, F., et al. (2023). Effects of Cannabis Legalization on Road Safety: A Literature Review. IJERPH, 20(5), 4655. 17

AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety (2024). Cannabis Use, Public Health, and Traffic Safety (Fact Sheet). 18

Biblical Archaeology Society (2022). Narcotics used in Canaanite Cult: Opium in Late Bronze Age Graves. 6

Firstpost (2025). The Big ‘Bhang Theory’: Why Indians drink bhang on Holi. 8

IndiaTimes (2023). On Holi, a look at the tradition of using bhang and its legality. 9

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

It All Comes Down to Sullivan: Live by the Legal Sword, die by it too

These people never learn. When you are the front runner in a serious commissioner election in Butler County, Ohio, as Michael Ryan is, the dirty tricks trying to prevent his momentum are just the kind of thing that give politics a bad name. What starts you on the road to good health in politics isn’t kale or cardio, it’s truth without legalese, straight talk without a billable hour attached. I deal with lawyers all the time—good ones, bad ones, and the “print this from the shelf and scare them” variety—and my general opinion, even conceding that the profession began with noble intentions, is that far too much of it has drifted into a uniform intimidation racket. You’ve seen the type: the form-letter cease-and-desist that looks like an astrology reading for defamation, except the fortune costs you a retainer and the outcome is a long, nervous wait for a judge who usually tosses it after you’ve lost sleep and savings. The trick is the tone, not the law: it’s written to make you believe you must respond with a lawyer, because only priests of the temple may interpret the runes. I don’t like the practice and personally think it should be destroyed, and that the perpetrators of such legal manipulation should be thrown in jail and punished with career-ending justice, just for applying the kind of abuses of power that are all too common.

This is why the old play of lawfare against rivals—especially in local races where reputations are accessible targets—needs to be called out. We’ve watched how it stains the process in Butler County. Roger Reynolds, who was convicted on a single count in late 2022, later saw that conviction overturned on appeal in May 2024 for “insufficient evidence,” with the appellate panel ordering an acquittal and discharge. The case centered on the golf academy idea tied to Lakota Schools and Four Bridges; the court noted that the proposal never matured, that the school board held the authority, and that the key witness’s legal counsel ended the discussion before any contract could be secured. 1 2 3 4 In September 2024, the Ohio Supreme Court declined to restore him to the auditor’s office immediately (the seat had been filled due to the bar against felons holding office at the time of his conviction) but clarified he remains eligible to run in the future. 5 That’s the landscape: facts matter, timelines matter, and our politics should run on open argument, not legal intimidation.

Then there’s Cindy Carpenter. She recently walked into a student housing office in Oxford to resolve back rent tied to a family member. A surveillance camera caught her flipping off the counter during the exchange; staff alleged racist language and abuse of office. The Butler County Prosecutor investigated and concluded that her conduct, while “unseemly,” did not rise to the level of misconduct or abuse of power. 6 7 It’s all on tape and all public now; the gesture happened, the allegations were made, and the official finding closed the matter without charges. 8 6 You can dislike the behavior—I do—but voters deserve a campaign where candidates fight this out in daylight, not by hiring attorneys to stuff the mailbox of a rival.

Enter Michael Ryan. He’s a Hamilton City Councilman turned countywide candidate, and he’s collected a long list of conservative endorsements—state senator George Lang, multiple township trustees and councilmembers, and county auditor Nancy Nix among them—because he’s making the case for generational leadership and a forward-looking county agenda. 9 He launched his commission bid in May 2025, framing it around growth, jobs, and fewer distractions—promising to fight for every city, township, and village, and to recruit the next-generation workforce. 10 Ryan’s pitch has resonated in part because people are tired of courthouse drama and lawfare theatrics; they want a debate about budgets, infrastructure, and living standards, not another stack of demand letters mailed in bulk from counsel. And he’s not alone—the GOP field is crowded, with Reynolds and Carpenter in the mix for the May 2026 primary—but the voter mood described by local reporting is unmistakable: they’re weighing future capacity, not re-litigating yesterday’s trials. 11

Now, when the intimidation letter lands—as it did from Reynolds to Ryan—you don’t have to swallow the premise that only a lawyer can answer it. You can answer it yourself, plainly and legally, because the guardrail is still the Sullivan standard from 1964. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan was a 9–0 Supreme Court decision that put a constitutional backbone into defamation law for public officials: to win, a public official must prove “actual malice,” meaning the speaker knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth, and must do so with “convincing clarity.” 12 13 The case grew out of a civil rights-era advertisement that contained factual errors; a local jury hit the Times with $500,000 in damages, but the Supreme Court reversed, explaining that debate on public issues must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” even when the attacks are “vehement” and sometimes “unpleasantly sharp.” 14 15

If you want numbers: the jury’s original $500,000 damage award (an enormous sum in 1960) was wiped away; the final holding established a higher burden that has, for six decades, made defamation claims by public officials very hard to win without proof of knowing falsity or reckless disregard. 15 14 In practical terms, that means campaign statements, press releases, and political commentary about public officeholders are protected—unless the speaker crosses the line into deliberate falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth. 13 16 The standard is why you don’t need to hire a lawyer to say, “We disagree, and our statements are protected political speech,” and it’s why cease-and-desist letters are so often theatre: they depend on the recipient’s fear, not on an actual path to winning under Sullivan.

So let’s put it together. Reynolds’ single-count conviction was reversed; whatever lessons he took from the ordeal, sending form-letter threats at a rival to police campaign commentary is the wrong takeaway. 1 2 Carpenter’s apartment-office incident was embarrassing but not criminal; voters can judge her temperament, but the prosecutor closed the file. 6 Ryan, meanwhile, has stacked endorsements and is running an argument-heavy, growth-forward race; that’s where the energy is. 9 Let them debate. Let voters see who can build coalitions and deliver results without resorting to legal cudgels. And when the legal cudgel shows up anyway, answer it with Sullivan—because in American political life, the First Amendment demands a high tolerance for hard speech about public officials, and the courts have enforced that by design. 13 15

In the decades since Sullivan, the Supreme Court clarified and extended the actual-malice requirement through several landmark decisions:

Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974)

This case distinguished between public officials, public figures, and private individuals. The Court held that the actual‑malice standard does not apply to defamation claims by private individuals. Instead, states may allow recovery with a lower standard of fault—such as negligence—when proven, and plaintiffs are limited to actual damages unless actual malice is shown 1 2.

• Outcome: Private individuals need not meet the high threshold; states can define fault and damages within constitutional bounds 2 3.

Curtis Publishing Co. v. Wally Butts (1967)

Extending Sullivan, the Court held that public figures (like former coach Wally Butts) must prove actual malice to prevail in libel suits. The investigation in question fell short of reasonable journalistic standards, leading to damages after the Court found reckless disregard for truth 4 5.

Philadelphia Newspapers v. Hepps (1986)

When private individuals sue over speech on matters of public concern, the Court ruled they must bear the burden of proving falsity—not leave it to the defendant. This ensures truth holds primacy in public discourse and avoids chilling speech 6 7.

Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell (1988)

This case affirmed that even intentional infliction of emotional distress torts related to offensive parody do not evade the actual‑malice rule when a public figure is involved. Religious leader Jerry Falwell could not recover without proving that Hustler knowingly published false statements or acted with reckless disregard 8 9.

• Result: Political satire and parody targeting public figures are constitutionally protected—even if deeply offensive—absent false statements made with actual malice.

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Together, these rulings illustrate how Sullivan’s actual‑malice standard has been reinforced and nuanced:

• It does apply to both public officials and public figures (Butts, Falwell).

• It does not apply to private individuals (Gertz), though they must still show fault and harm.

• Plaintiffs challenge private or public speech tied to public concern must prove falsity (Hepps).

These cases bolster the legal shield for political speech—underscoring that public dialogue outpaces legal intimidation unless clearly false and malicious.

We’ve seen it too often, when candidates in politics can’t make a good argument, they turn to lawfare and hope that the public perception of expensive lawyers will do the work for them of winning an office they otherwise don’t deserve. In Roger Reynold’s case, he is the one who got himself into trouble in the first place, and nobody wants to see that kind of trouble in the office of the Butler County Commissioners, just to repair the reputation of a person looking for respect that he lost during the process. There are other ways to win respect, and this isn’t how you do it. Showing leadership is the way to restore party integrity, not to make more rifts that cost more than reputations. And hiring expensive, pin-headed lawyers to send out form letters of intimidation on a case they know is phony as they sent it, is why there are problems in politics to begin with.

Footnotes

1. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan set the “actual malice” standard for public officials, requiring proof that the defendant knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard, and emphasized “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate on public issues. 13 14

2. The original jury verdict in Alabama awarded L.B. Sullivan $500,000 in damages; the U.S. Supreme Court reversed unanimously in 1964. 15

3. Former Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds’ 2022 unlawful-interest conviction was overturned for insufficient evidence in May 2024; the appeals court ordered acquittal and discharge. 1 2

4. The Ohio Supreme Court, in September 2024, declined to restore Reynolds to office mid-term but affirmed his eligibility to run in the future. 5

5. Butler County Prosecutor Michael Gmoser cleared Commissioner Cindy Carpenter of misconduct after the Oxford apartment incident, noting the gesture was “unseemly” but not unlawful. 6

6. Michael Ryan launched his commission bid in May 2025 and lists numerous Republican endorsements on his campaign website. 10 9

7. Local reporting describes a crowded May 2026 GOP primary field for the commission seat and outlines competing narratives about experience versus future focus. 11

Bibliography

• New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case summaries and analyses: LII / Cornell Wex; First Amendment Encyclopedia (MTSU); Wikipedia overview; FindLaw case history; Encyclopaedia Britannica.

• Reynolds appellate decision and related coverage: Twelfth District opinion (PDF); WCPO; Cincinnati Enquirer; WLWT; Ohio Supreme Court case update.

• Carpenter incident and prosecutorial review: Journal-News; Local 12 WKRC; Cincinnati.com video clip.

• Michael Ryan campaign and endorsements: Ryan for Butler County website; Journal-News launch story; Primary field coverage.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Jim Cameron Has Lost It: Democrat movies are bad for theatre owners and very irresponsible

I’m not rooting for this new Avatar film to be a bust. I want the theaters breathing; I want popcorn machines humming; I want the marquee lights on for people who built these auditoriums and stuck it out through shutdowns, strikes, and the great experiment of “day‑and‑date” streaming. I’ve always liked the filmmaker; I’m not rooting for him to fail. But I can read a marketplace, and I can listen to what regular moviegoers tell each other—at the concession stand, online, at church, at work—and they’ll forgive almost anything except being lectured when they paid to be entertained. If the third one—this Fire and Ash one—lands, I’m happy for every exhibitor who cashes tickets and sells a few extra souvenir cups. If it stumbles, the reason won’t be the craft; Jim Cameron still builds technical worlds like few others. It will be the message mismatch in a market that has shifted under his feet. And that shift isn’t in our imaginations; it’s in the numbers. Opening weekend? $345 million globally, $88–89 million domestic—second‑largest global debut of 2025 behind Zootopia 2, but materially softer than The Way of Water’s $435 million holiday launch in 2022. The third film’s premium formats carried a heavy share—IMAX alone did $43.6 million, and 3D/IMAX accounted for 66% of grosses—proof that the draw remains “event tech” even when general interest cools a bit. 1 2

And yes, Jim Cameron knows exhibition math, over the years, he’s been the best at it; these films play for legs, not for a single weekend spike. The first one opened to $77 million domestically but camped at No. 1 for seven weeks and marched past $2.9 billion lifetime—still the all-time champ after reclaiming the crown via China re-release. The second one opened bigger—$134.1 million domestic—and legged out to $2.343 billion worldwide. So “Fire and Ash” starting below Way of Water doesn’t predetermine the finish line, but it does announce the current climate: domestic ticket buyers are more selective; they save their premium formats for must-see spectacles and otherwise wait for streaming. 3 4

Cameron bets that Fire and Ash can give Pandora a human core the audience bonds with again. He’s been telling the press that family—love, bonds, empathy—moved to the forefront after Way of Water’s reception, and that the “Ash People” show a different angle on the Na’vi. The studios pushed all of that: ABC’s primer explains the arc and the 197-minute run; USA TODAY walked folks through the romance pivot with Spider and Kiri; People and the official Avatar site laid out the December 19 release, cast, and creative. It’s all there if you want the meta‑story of the franchise’s evolution and Cameron’s tinkering to tune it to audience reaction. 5 6 7 8

But I’m going to say the part people mutter in the lobby: Avatar is FernGully in space, Dances With Wolves in space, hippie parables in space. Beautiful, yes. Bioluminescent, yes. But the heart isn’t the creature; it’s the ride. You can see it at Disney’s Animal Kingdom—Pandora is a marvel of engineering; Flight of Passage is a technical knockout. People queue for hours, glow under the blacklight, and walk out saying, “That was cool.” Then they turn left and head for Everest or the safari. The land is loved; the Na’vi dolls are not driving retail like Marvel or Star Wars. Pandora is foremost an experience of tech and design. 9 10

That’s the sore truth Cameron wrestles with: he won the world by selling a technical spectacle and then tried to use that platform to teach environmentalism and human restraint to a culture whose purchasing habits—phones, trucks, streaming subscriptions—declare that they want harmony with technology, not a scolding about it. If you can make the metaphor land without the wagging finger, you’re in business. But modern audiences, especially domestic ones, have tuned their ears to “message movies,” and they pick them carefully. When they don’t like yours, you feel it in the Friday night cash drawer. Ask the theater managers: they’ll tell you that premium‑format demand spikes when the spectacle is undeniable—and the rest of the release slate lives or dies by word of mouth about fun, action, and escape, not the righteousness of the lecture. 1

And since we’re talking about keeping theaters alive, let’s talk economics. The domestic yearly box office has clawed back to $8.2 billion as of mid December 2025—up from pandemic lows but still well below the $11+ billion of pre-COVID years. Ticket sales around 726 million and an average price in the $11 range (with premium surcharges pushing the “effective” average higher for event weeks) tell you how fragile attendance remains even when tentpoles overperform. Zootopia 2 blasted the family corridor and crossed $1 billion in just 17 days—the fastest PG film ever to the milestone—demonstrating that when a title hits, America still shows up with kids and grandparents. But the recovery is uneven; mid-budget adult films continue to crater, and exhibitors need reliable pipelines of four-quadrant hits to pay the rent. 11 12 13 14

Operating a theater is unforgiving math: payroll, lease, utilities, insurance, and the studio’s cut, which is heaviest in the opening weeks. Concessions are the lifeline—popcorn and soda can carry margins north of 80%; ticket revenue shares may be 70–90% to studios in week one, easing toward 50/50 later. So the survival instinct for exhibitors is simple—give them blockbusters frequently enough that the concession engine runs hot, and use subscription programs to smooth the demand curve. That’s how you pay the $83K monthly OpEx and keep the HVAC humming. When tentpoles slide, and streaming conditions lead audiences to wait, that cash‑flow logic breaks down. 15 16

Industry analysts tracked closures: roughly 5% of U.S./Canada screens gone between 2019 and 2022; AMC closed 106 net theaters through 2023; Regal/Cineworld shed dozens through bankruptcy. Foot traffic dropped by double digits across major chains in late 2023–mid 2024 because strikes delayed releases. Even with 2025’s steadier slate, domestic totals were still hovering in the low eighths by December, threatening fatigue if the holiday anchors didn’t deliver. That’s the context in which exhibitors watch Avatar 3: if it has legs, the end-of-year swing can push totals toward $9B; if it behaves like a front-loaded blockbuster without the legs, the last two weeks don’t bail out the ledger. 17 18

Meanwhile, the streaming battlefield grew sharper. Households averaged 2.9 paid streamers, spending ~$46/month, with Netflix the most used; Amazon introduced default ads unless you pay to remove them; Disney tightened windows on high‑performers like Zootopia 2, stretching theatrical exclusivity into 2026. Consumers say inflation bites their entertainment budget, but they don’t cancel streaming easily; ad-supported tiers make the price stickier. All of that pulls casual theatergoers away from opening weekends—unless the title is a true “you gotta see it on the big screen” phenomenon. That’s the point: theaters remain vital for communal spectacles; streaming dominates convenience. 19 20 21

So where does Cameron’s messaging collide with that behavior? Hollywood’s data on “woke” communication is complicated: some research finds inclusive advertising drives sales and engagement; other research warns consumers may perceive “woke‑washing,” eroding brand trust. In exhibition terms, the American audience isn’t a monolith—some will welcome explicit themes on environment, identity, or politics; others recoil if they feel preached to. When a movie becomes the avatar of a social crusade, it risks trading broad escapism for factional passion. That can be commercially fine when the target demos are wide (family animation, for instance). It’s harder when the film expects legions of repeat adult viewers to sustain $400M budgets. 22 23 24

Technically, Cameron is still a master. The franchise’s premium format share proves that—audiences paid more than the average to see the images in the best way possible. Guinness World Records still catalogs the original’s mountain of achievements: the highest-grossing 3D film at the time, the fastest to a billion at the time, and global king. Way of Water reinforced that technical leadership, but here’s the 3D lesson of the last fifteen years: outside of Avatar (and a handful of bespoke releases), 3D became a surcharge for middling conversions. Audiences noticed; the novelty wore off. When Avatar returns, people remember, “Oh, this is what 3D is supposed to feel like,” and they show up in IMAX. But it doesn’t rehabilitate 3D as a default; it just says “this franchise is the exception.” That’s both a badge of honor for Cameron and a ceiling he can’t escape: as long as the brand’s primary hook is visual immersion, the story has to be world-beating to keep legs beyond the tech hit. 25 26

You can ride that tech wave into theme parks. Pandora at Animal Kingdom opened in 2017 and became a crown jewel; it did exactly what the films do best—make you feel like you’re inside a place. But again, the halo is experiential. People gush about the floating mountains and Flight of Passage. They don’t fill shelves with Na’vi figurines the way they do Marvel characters. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s a merchandising truth that tells you what audiences connect to: the ride and the view. 10

Now, to the box office chessboard of 2025. Zootopia 2 became the highest-grossing American film of the year, blowing past $1 billion in record time for a PG title, with China acting as a rocket booster—over $430–$ 447 million there, second only to Endgame among MPA releases. Family content remains the most reliable play in a jittery market; inside Disney’s slate, you can see the split personality—animated juggernauts on one end, adult mid-budget dramedies like Ella McCay face-planting on the other. Exhibitors need the former to keep the concession margin pumping through the holidays, and they will take any Cameron-sized spectacle that keeps teens, dads, and gearheads buying premium tickets. 27 13 14

On that score, Fire and Ash didn’t exactly bomb, initially—it managed to gain a $345 million worldwide opening and posted more assertive China than Way of Water’s first frame. But domestically, it’s under the sequel’s pace. Not the kind of performance that a film like this needs, given how many resources went into making it. They are expensive to make and market. And this kind of performance doesn’t come close to what the industry needs. Analysts called out the new reality: three years after Way of Water—without the thirteen-year nostalgia gap—brand saturation and the streaming habit create a ceiling. Cameron is competing against his own legacy. The question is legs: holiday weekdays that behave like weekends, repeat viewings in premium formats, and the overseas skew that has always been Pandora’s ally. If the film holds like the first two, the break-even—reported budgets of ~$400 million plus $150 million in marketing—demand $1B+ to be comfortable. Disney’s decision tree on parts 4 and 5 will look at those legs, not the Friday surge. 28 29

But let’s say the worst happens and domestic audiences shrug after two weekends. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean theaters are doomed. It means studios must feed exhibitors with a genre spread that respects what Americans actually buy: action they can cheer, family movies they can share, comedy that feels “earned” not sermonized, and adult thrillers that find urgency beyond streaming. The market is proving it will sprint for the right reasons—look at 2025’s slate: Minecraft, Wicked: For Good, Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth—all fueled weekends over $90–160 million. The domestic total we saw in Box Office Mojo’s year page—low eights as of Dec 22—can still jump if the holiday corridor behaves and Cameron’s legs show up. But the macro trend is stubborn: we’re not at $11 billion, and we won’t be until release pipelines and consumer habits align. 12 11

A word for the owners who lasted this long: your business is still, fundamentally, concessions powered by event content. Subscription passes (AMC Stubs A-List, Regal Unlimited) cushion attendance; laser projection, PLF screens, and dine-in service lift per-patron revenue. But your fixed costs don’t care about critical scores; they care about whether Friday brings teenagers who buy buckets of popcorn and dads who add an IPA. So when a Cameron tentpole arrives, you pray for the old magic: repeat viewings, premium surcharges, and a “must see on the big screen” vibe. That’s why, regardless of anyone’s politics, I want Avatar to do well enough to float the end of the year for the exhibitor class. 30

And the politics—since we’re being honest—matter in a way studios underestimated. The 2016–2025 period trained Americans to see media as partisan signaling. Some studies say inclusive marketing drives sales; other data points to backlash when consumers smell inauthenticity. The Bud Light saga, Target backlash, Disney controversies—they taught brand managers to avoid overt culture‑war stands unless they can carry the consequences. Films became lightning rods. When a blockbuster’s press tour tilts into liberal advocacy—it can polarize the chatter that would otherwise be “did you see that set piece?” Cameron seems to have steered Fire and Ash toward grief, family, and character, perhaps as a recalibration. But if the audience has already filed Avatar under “lecture about environment,” you need months of word‑of‑mouth to prove you’ve delivered a narrative they can feel passion for. 22 31

Cameron at his peak was never “woke” in the modern meme sense; he was a master of romance in catastrophe (Titanic) and man‑versus‑machine (Terminator), of Marines versus xenomorphs (Aliens). Those are universal frames you fill with craft, pace, and heart. Avatar’s universalism is visual; its message is particular. The bigger the individual, the narrower the net. Maybe Fire and Ash, with Lo’ak’s POV and Neytiri’s grief, has found the core that makes Pandora feel like a home family fights for rather than a lecture on planetary stewardship. Reviews and audience scores suggest the gap between critics (67%) and audiences (91%) is real—if the crowd likes it, the legs can happen. That’s the best-case path: the people drown out the pundits and get their friends to go. 32

As for me, I’m still walking into Pandora at Animal Kingdom and grinning at the floating mountains. I’m glad the tech exists, but my wish this holiday is practical: give exhibitors enough cash flow to survive. Give them Zootopia 2 numbers every Thanksgiving and Cameron-sized legs every Christmas, and then scatter a year with mid-range hits that fill Tuesdays. Give the owners who survived a marketplace with streaming siphons and political crossfire a break. They’re the stewards of a civic experience—strangers laughing together in the dark—that no algorithm can replace. If Fire and Ash ends up short of the Way of Water’s heights, I hope it’s still long enough to keep the box office humming while studios recalibrate toward stories that are fun first, message second, and always worth buying a large popcorn for. And when the exhibitors tally the year—$8.2B domestic, maybe a late surge to $9B if the holiday miracles stack—they’ll know the path forward. Audiences haven’t disappeared; they’ve become choosier. Earn the trip. Earn the concession upsell. But a fair warning for Cameron and the rest of the Hollywood lefty types, when you find out that people don’t support your fantasy messaging for a Democrat platform at the movies, don’t be surprised that people reject you. 33 11

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Footnotes

1. “Box Office: ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Powers to $345 Million Globally… Premium formats accounted for 66%; IMAX $43.6M.” Variety/Yahoo syndication (Dec 21, 2025). 1

2. Box Office Mojo: Avatar: The Way of Water totals and opening; franchise legs. 3

3. Wikipedia: List of box office records set by Avatar; regaining #1 worldwide via 2021 China re-release. 4

4. ABC News: “Everything to know about ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’” including runtime and Dec. 19 release. 5

5. USA TODAY: Cameron’s emphasis on relationships; Ash People context. 6

6. People.com: Fire and Ash overview; Ash People framing; Dec. 19 release. 7

7. Avatar.com: official runtime, cast, awards notes. 8

8. Walt Disney World: Pandora – The World of Avatar land overview. 9

9. Pandora – The World of Avatar (Wikipedia): acreage, attractions, opening history. 10

10. Deadline: Domestic box office crossed $8B in 2025; holiday expectations tied to Fire and Ash. 33

11. Box Office Mojo: Domestic Yearly Box Office (historical totals). 12

12. Deadline/Hollywood Reporter/Variety: Zootopia 2 crosses $1B in record time for PG; China lift. 13 34 27

13. Variety: Ella McCay opening; mid-budget adult titles struggling. 14

14. eFinancialModels: Concession margins and opening‑week revenue shares, typical breakdown. 15

15. Financial Models Lab: Example OpEx profile (payroll, lease, utilities) for a theater. 16

16. IndieWire/Yahoo: NATO/Cinema Foundation report—average ticket price $10.53 (2022) and ~5% screen decline 2019–2022. 17 35

17. RetailStat industry outlook: chain closures, strike impacts, foot‑traffic declines. 18

18. Forbes Home: 2025 streaming habits—average subs and spend; Netflix share. 19

19. Inside the Magic: Zootopia 2 theatrical window held into 2026. 20

20. Nielsen Consumer Survey (2023): inflation concerns; ad-free streaming preference stability. 21

21. Kantar Brand Inclusion Index (2024): Inclusive advertising drives purchase decisions. 22

22. Journal of Brand Management (2023/2024): “woke” brand communication engagement; polarization nuance. 23

23. International Journal of Advertising (2024/2025): woke‑washing risks to brand trust. 24

24. Guinness World Records: Avatar records; 3D/IMAX dominance; analysts projecting Fire and Ash domestic potential. 25

25. ScreenRant (Oct 14, 2025): 3D boom and decline context; post‑conversion fatigue. 26

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Bibliography & Further Reading

• Brueggemann, Tom. “The NATO Annual Report… Average Price of a Movie Theater Ticket.” IndieWire, Mar. 9, 2023. 17

• Rubin, Rebecca. “‘Zootopia 2’ Crosses $1 Billion Globally…” Variety, Dec. 12, 2025. 27

• Tartaglione, Nancy. “‘Zootopia 2’ Crosses $1 Billion… Fastest Hollywood Animation Ever.” Deadline, Dec. 12, 2025. 13

• “Avatar: The Way of Water – Box Office Mojo.” boxofficemojo.com. 3

• “List of Box Office Records Set by Avatar.” Wikipedia. 4

• “Pandora – The World of Avatar.” Walt Disney World Resort. 9

• “Pandora – The World of Avatar.” Wikipedia. 10

• “Economic Contributions of the US Movie Theater Industry (2019).” Ernst & Young for NATO (Cinema United). Aug. 2021. 36

• RetailStat. “Movie Theater Industry Outlook.” Sept. 12, 2024. 18

• Forbes Home. “2025 Media Streaming Stats You Should Know.” Nov. 27, 2025. 19

• Nielsen. “2023 Consumer Survey Report.” Nov. 2023. 21

• Kantar. “Brand Inclusion Index 2024.” July 15, 2024. 22

• Journal of Brand Management. “How persuasive is woke brand communication…” Dec. 21, 2023 (Vol. 31/2024). 23

• International Journal of Advertising. “Is woke advertising necessarily woke‑washing?” 2025 (accepted 2024). 24

• Guinness World Records. “Unbelievable amount of records Avatar has broken…” Dec. 19, 2025. 25

• ScreenRant. “The Rise and Fall of 3D Movies: Avatar’s Unfulfilled Promise.” Oct. 14, 2025. 26

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Building the Third Temple: The cause of most trouble in the world

For those who want to know why tensions these days feel so elevated—why headlines keep circling Jewish identity, Islamic claims, Christian end‑times talk—the short answer is that Jerusalem’s Temple Mount sits at the junction of theology and sovereignty, where small shifts can echo like earthquakes and often do more and more these days. Since 1967, Israel has retained overall security control in East Jerusalem while delegating day-to-day religious administration of the Mount to the Jordanian-backed Islamic Waqf—the long-standing “status quo” under which Jews may visit but overt Jewish prayer has been restricted, and Al‑Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock remain under Waqf management. That arrangement has been incrementally eroded and repeatedly contested, with some Israeli politicians openly praying on the Mount and advocacy groups pressing for expanded Jewish worship, while Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and others warn that changes risk broader violence. Over time, there has been so much violence involved with that piece of real estate that, regardless of the threats, the Jewish people are preparing to retake the Temple. 1 2 3 4 This isn’t just some fringe group in Jerusalem making these plans; it has operated in the background for hundreds of years. Everyone in Masonic circles knows about Hiram Abiff, the architect of the first Temple, and that Sykes-Picot was always behind this story, and that the creation of the state of Israel after World War II was this intention to rebuild the Temple and get back into the sacrifice cycle that the Temple performed for over a thousand years. There is a lot of effort behind this momentum that is colliding at this particular moment in history, and there really isn’t anything Muslims can do to stop it. The Jewish people are the oldest known people in the world to have remained intact, and they believe that to be close to God, they must restore his house so he can literally reside on Earth in his home, and must be fed through sacrifice the contents of a voracious appetite of animal blood.

Within parts of Orthodox and evangelical circles, preparatory efforts linked to a future Third Temple—from crafting ritual vessels to interest in the red heifer purification rite described in Numbers 19—regularly attract media attention. Most people in the media, in politics, and even in theology don’t understand the scope of this situation and how it translates into the United States. When the Jewish people are accused of all that they are, and for being in control of so much of our modern world, especially economically, the end goal for them is the rebuilding of the Temple. And a partnership with the United States gives them the scale and weight to execute their long-term plans. In 2025, organizers publicized a practice run of a red‑heifer burning (not the formal rite required by traditional rabbinic standards), and there have been conflicting claims about whether any heifers currently meet halakhic criteria; some religious institutions have trained would-be priests and reconstructed implements, while others emphasize the legal, halakhic, and geopolitical barriers. The ritual itself—rare, exacting, and historically attested in rabbinic sources—remains halakhically complex and politically explosive given the Mount’s Islamic sanctuaries. Right now, out of five red heifers bred in Texas, Jewish authorities believe they have two. 5 6 7 8 9 10

On the militant front, Hamas has explicitly framed the October 7, 2023, attack (“Al‑Aqsa Flood”) in religious‑national terms, repeatedly declaring Jerusalem and Al‑Aqsa as the conflict’s core. Its official documents claim the assault was a “necessary step,” emphasize Al‑Aqsa’s Muslim sanctity, and deny intentional targeting of civilians—statements contradicted by extensive evidence and casualty counts; the movement continues to cast any shift on the Mount as existential. Whatever one’s view of prophecy or politics, the practical reality is that any perceived move toward “Jewish sovereignty” on the Mount—whether expanded prayer or talk of Temple reconstruction—triggers immediate backlash from Hamas, the PA, Jordan, and others, with regional and global reverberations. 11 12 13 What all this means is that there is no scenario in which Islam maintains control over the Temple Mount, and the time is very near when the Jewish people are planning to move back onto it, which means everything that is there now will be erased away. So the spill-over conflicts, such as the hostile terrorist attacks in the United States, and the efforts to build mosques in Texas for Islam, are to erode what they think of as the Big Satan, by supplying Israel with the military power to defend itself from further attacks. A lot of people are saying that Trump is the anti-Christ who is ushering in peace in the Middle East, and is taking away the leverage that Hamas has through fear over the region. By making peace, they lose the Temple Mount because it only emboldens the Jewish people to reclaim their sovereignty over it. It has only been the threat of violence that has kept the Jewish people from rebuilding the Temple up to this point. So there is no scenario where there is peace for all parties involved. Regulating the Jewish people to only pray at the Wailing Wall has been ridiculous and was always poised to a spillover point.

Historically, even emperors were singed by this terrain—Julian’s 363 CE attempt to rebuild the Temple is recorded in both pagan and Christian sources, with reports that fires erupted near the foundations, halting the works. Whether natural phenomena or theological messaging, those accounts underline how fiercely charged the site has been for centuries. Today, polling on a Third Temple is fragmentary and politically inflected, but the legal and diplomatic constraints—from status-quo understandings to security controls and international reactions—are heavy. Any durable path forward will be less about end-times scripts and more about clear legal frameworks, de-escalation mechanisms, and credible guarantees of access for all faiths—because the place where prophecy meets police lines is where small changes become significant crises. 14 15

Many would even go so far to say, in Masonic circles, that the creation of the United States, the New Jerusalem was made to enable all this to happen, the re-creation of the State of Israel, the acquisition of the greatest military in the world, so that war in the Middle East could efficiently be utilized to fight the Islamic forces practicing their caliphate over the region. Everyone has played nicely together for over a thousand years, but the Crusades never stopped, and there are very dedicated efforts behind finance, politics, and religion to make a move for Temple restoration once and for all. So this debate that we are having, this anti-Israel position, the anti-Jew talk, the utterings of anti-Christ emergence, it all falls on deaf ears because the momentum is moving in the direction of rebuilding the Temple for the third time, and even Jesus was reluctant to say when and where. But to fulfill the Messianic promise, the Temple has to be rebuilt, and it is the story, behind the story, behind the story of our modern news cycle. And there is nothing that Islam will be able to do to prevent it from happening. And that is why all the deterioration is happening now, on every front. And the fight between Christians and Jews is that the Jewish people refuse to accept Christ as the Messiah because, unless he rebuilds the temple, he cannot be the Messiah. But for Christ, the body was the Temple, and for that to be true, it ruins thousands of years of carefully constructed plans to feed literal blood to the deity Yahweh and maintain an ancient order rooted in sacrifice. Yet Jesus, through his acts, took away the need.

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Sources

Temple Mount status quo/prayer restrictions

• Miami Law review of Israel’s Protection of Holy Places Law and the status‑quo arrangement (overview; prayer limits). 1

• INSS paper on risks of altering the Mount’s status quo; notes gradual changes and political pressure. 2

• Jerusalem Institute study on the erosion of the status quo since 1967. 3

• Times of Israel coverage of a senior minister praying openly on the Mount (Aug. 3, 2025), and regional condemnations. 4

Third Temple and red‑heifer debates

• Religion News Service: practice run of a red‑heifer ritual (July 1, 2025) publicized by organizers; context on Numbers 19 requirements and controversy. 5

• Charisma/Prophecy Watchers reports on disqualification claims and disputes over location and rabbinic standards (Aug. 8, 2025). 6

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, My Jewish Learning, and Sefaria: Numbers 19 and classical sources on the red‑heifer rite and halakhic constraints. 9 16 17

Hamas framing of “Al‑Aqsa Flood” (Oct. 7)

• Al Jazeera coverage of Hamas’s “Our Narrative” document (Jan. 21, 2024) describing motives and denials. 11

• Asharq Al‑Awsat summary of the same Jan. 2024 document and context. 12

• JustTheNews recap of Hamas statements tying the conflict to Jerusalem/Al‑Aqsa. 13

• GlobalSecurity hosts the PDF of Hamas’s “Our Narrative” pamphlet. 18

Late‑antique attempt to rebuild the Temple

• JSTOR/Brill scholarship compiling sources on Julian’s 363 CE project and reported fire phenomena near the foundations. 14 19

• BAS Library overview of Julian’s motives and the Christian reaction. 15

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=2070

A Mask of Radicalism: Somali policies in Ohio and the Trojan Horse Democrats are using to overthrow America

One of the biggest blind spots in government workforce planning is the tendency to treat people as raw numbers—bodies that fill a statistical need—without considering the cultural and ideological factors that shape behavior. When policymakers focus only on headcount, they ignore the reality that ideas matter. Religion, values, and worldview are not incidental; they influence how communities adapt to laws, civic norms, and workplace expectations. If those dynamics are overlooked, the result isn’t just inefficiency—it’s instability. And to that point, religions that start with an angel talking to one person, then that person writes down everything that the rest of society accepts as a religion, such as Mormonism, Scientology with L. Ron Hubbard, or Islam with Muhammad who had the angel Gabriel show up at his cave every Monday to give him sections of the Quaran over a long period of time, that would become the Islam of today, we should always behold some logical scrutiny, which is certainly missing from third world politics. Islam has shown that it has a desire to overthrow Western civilization, so in that intention, we have to take them at their word and deal with the situation appropriately—as a hostile intention, not a doctrine of peace and prosperity.

Ohio’s approach to immigration illustrates this risk. In the push to attract labor for manufacturing and logistics, politicians like Mike DeWine and this ridiculous Democrat Mayor of Columbus have often prioritized quantity over quality, assuming that any influx of workers will strengthen the economy. But history shows that cultural adaptation is not automatic. Communities arriving from regions with vastly different governance traditions—especially those rooted in rigid ideological systems—face steep challenges adjusting to the norms of a constitutional republic. When adaptation fails, the gap doesn’t just affect productivity; it can foster resentment, isolation, and, in rare but dangerous cases, radicalization.

This isn’t about denying opportunity. It’s about acknowledging that importing large populations without a clear integration strategy can introduce third-world social patterns into first-world systems. When those patterns persist—whether through insular neighborhoods, resistance to civic norms, or ideological rigidity—they undermine the very conditions that make economic growth possible. A workforce strategy that ignores these realities is not a strategy at all; it’s a gamble with public safety and long-term stability.

A statistical and policy analysis of Somali-linked issues in Ohio requires precise demography, a clear account of recent federal immigration enforcement in Columbus, and rigorous scrutiny of crime correlations. Evidence from American Community Survey (ACS) rollups, Ohio administrative refugee data, municipal statements, and peer-reviewed/official crime research indicates: (1) Franklin County and Columbus anchor Ohio’s Somali population; (2) municipal policy in Columbus separates civil immigration status from local criminal policing while acknowledging federal arrest authority; (3) immigrant crime rates—documented and undocumented—are consistently lower than those of U.S.-born populations in the best-identified state-level datasets; and (4) citywide violent-crime trends in 2024–2025 declined markedly, complicating claims that heightened federal presence is necessary for local safety. I would argue that these stats are down because law enforcement has not occurred as it should because of the politics involved. The Biden administration did not do its job and allowed these cells to grow on purpose. Just because law enforcement doesn’t do its job, because it wants a political disturbance to occur, doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. Only that it was ignored.¹²³⁴⁵

ACS-derived demographic summaries attribute approximately 26,402 residents of Somali ancestry to Ohio, with approximately 22,899 within the City of Columbus and approximately 24,432 in Franklin County overall; concentration thus clusters in central Ohio rather than being evenly distributed statewide.¹² Language-use indicators from Franklin County’s HealthMap show Somali and other Afro‑Asiatic language speakers rising from 25,051 (2019) to 27,074 (2022) in Columbus, situating the metro among the nation’s highest concentrations and frequently described as second only to Minneapolis–St. Paul by press accounts referencing ACS compilations.³

Refugee intake to Ohio has been concentrated in five counties, including Franklin. State administrative records document ongoing arrivals by nationality, with Somalia among recent cohorts. In 2024, records show 326 Somali refugee arrivals statewide, with roughly 301 in Columbus, reflecting federal resettlement pipelines and secondary migration toward existing community networks. And in regard to their assimilation into general productive culture, I can say that recently I was leaving the Statehouse in Columbus and just one block south along a major roadway with thousands of people going by, there was a Somali man standing on the corner without his pants, his penis in full view of everyone driving by. He made no attempt to cover himself, but just looked at everyone going by like he was on another planet.⁴

Columbus policy—initiated by executive order in 2017 and codified thereafter—directs city resources not to assist federal immigration enforcement based solely on civil immigration status. Local policing remains engaged for criminal conduct and public‑safety incidents, but civil-status enforcement is explicitly outside the municipal scope. Public reaffirmations in December 2025 by the mayor, police chief, and city attorney emphasized that the Division of Police does not investigate residents solely based on immigration status.567, which is why the crime statistics are down. Because they just don’t do the job, such as arrest that person I mentioned for indecent exposure. There was a police car in front of me as I drove by, and they did nothing about the indecent exposure that was obvious. During mid‑December 2025, city officials verified increased activity by federal immigration agents. Rights guidance highlighted warrant requirements, non‑obstruction, and legal-aid resources; contemporaneous reporting noted limited operational transparency from federal authorities to local agencies.⁶⁷

In late May–early June 2025, a federal list of so‑called ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ briefly included Columbus and Franklin County. Following cross‑jurisdiction pushback and accuracy challenges—including objections from jurisdictions that actively support federal enforcement—the Department of Homeland Security removed the list within days; Associated Press summaries and local outlets documented misspellings and unclear criteria. Subsequent Justice Department publications (August 5, 2025) did not enumerate Columbus/Franklin among listed cities, underscoring definitional volatility across federal communications.^89101112

Claims that immigration elevates crime often rely on anecdote or single‑case salience. High‑integrity state-series recording of immigration status in arrest data provides more probative value. A National Institute of Justice–funded analysis of Texas arrest records (2012–2018) found undocumented immigrants arrested at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens for violent and drug crimes and roughly a quarter the rate for property crimes; homicide arrest rates among undocumented immigrants were the lowest across the series.¹³ National syntheses explain persistent gaps in incarceration and prosecution. Migration Policy Institute’s 2024 explainer details lower incarceration rates among immigrants, including unauthorized residents, and the absence of a consistent positive relationship between immigrant presence and violent crime in state and city studies. Historical comparisons of Census-linked incarceration (Northwestern University, 2024) show immigrants never exceeding U.S.-born incarceration rates over 150 years, with modern periods reflecting approximately 60 percent lower incarceration among immigrants. That says more about the point that police don’t do the job, than that there aren’t crimes from these communities. If a tree falls in the forest and people don’t see it, did it really happen? Well, of course. The crimes happen, but the police are often too busy at the coffee shop getting a donut because they know there is no political support from the political order to arrest hostile immigrants and their abundance of crime.¹⁴¹⁵

Citywide violent‑crime metrics declined markedly. Public briefings and media coverage reported homicides down ~35 percent year‑over‑year, felonious assaults down ~22 percent, non‑fatal shootings down ~26 percent, and car thefts down ~18 percent by December 18, 2025. Year‑end counts indicated ≈81 homicides, the lowest annual number in a decade; mid‑year reporting documented substantial reductions in homicides, felony assaults, and shootings relative to 2024 benchmarks. This could largely be attributed to the incoming Trump administration federally, compared to the policies of Joe Biden’s White House that ignored crime from immigrant communities.^5161718

Manufacturing, logistics, health care, and service sectors in central Ohio draw from multilingual labor pools that include Somali‑origin workers. Predictable, rights‑respecting enforcement climates strengthen stability in attendance, safety compliance, and neighborhood trust. Municipal non‑cooperation on civil status—paired with a commitment to investigate criminal conduct—preserves emergency calling and witness cooperation while acknowledging federal arrest authority.⁵⁶ Education administrators disseminated protocols reiterating visitor control, warrant verification, and student release rules; these messages stabilize operations during periods of heightened federal activity reports and curb rumor‑driven disruptions to essential services.¹⁹

Minnesota hosts the largest Somali‑origin population in the United States. Recent reporting places statewide estimates at 61,000–80,000, with a concentration in Minneapolis–St. Paul and a majority of residents holding citizenship or permanent residency; Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals covers only several hundred nationwide. Allegations linking social‑service fraud to terrorism lacked prosecutorial material‑support charges at the time of reporting, indicating the need to separate rhetoric from chargeable facts.²²⁰²¹

Federal authority encompasses deportation orders, criminal‑alien priorities, and visa‑overstay enforcement; municipal discretion in Columbus allocates police resources toward criminal matters rather than civil status while maintaining emergency response and public‑safety duties. If safety is the stated rationale for escalated civil‑status operations, downward violent‑crime trajectories before and during federal surges complicate attribution, absent transparent arrest composition and case outcomes. Public records of ICE detention holds provide volume hints but lack disaggregated origin and offense detail necessary for robust inference.⁵¹²²²

Ohio’s Somali population is predominantly concentrated in Franklin County and Columbus, with measurable language‑use growth and documented refugee arrivals. Municipal policy delineates a boundary between civil immigration status and local criminal policing. The strongest available arrest/incarceration evidence indicates lower offending rates among immigrants relative to U.S.-born populations, and Columbus’s 2025 violent‑crime reductions challenge assertions that broader status‑driven enforcement is required to secure local safety. Transparent metrics and risk‑weighted priorities constitute the appropriate framework for enforcement policy.

The Somali issue in Columbus is a case study in this tension. What began as a resettlement initiative to meet labor needs has evolved into a demographic shift with political and cultural consequences. When enforcement agencies raise concerns about radicalization risks, and local officials respond by shielding entire communities from scrutiny, the conversation gets framed as discrimination instead of security. That framing prevents honest debate about how to balance compassion with accountability—and how to ensure that immigration policy strengthens, rather than erodes, the foundations of a free society. You can take third-world ideas about religion, obedience, economy, and social values and inject them into a first-world, law-driven utopia. In some cases, it might work, depending on the religious affiliation of the people involved. But in cases such as we have seen from Somali refugees in Minnesota and in Ohio, we have to take action proactively. All things, all people, and all religions are not equal, and dumb politicians need to learn the difference to have a properly functioning society. There are a lot of forces in the world that want to use the radicalized religion of Islam as a weapon of destruction against the Western world. And for that reason, we have to have ICE raids to remove those elements for the security of our nation.

Notes

1. Neilsberg, ‘Somali Population in Ohio by City: 2025 Ranking & Insights,’ updated October 1, 2025, https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/lists/somali-population-in-ohio-by-city/.

2. Neilsberg, ‘Somali Population in Franklin County, OH by City: 2025 Ranking & Insights,’ updated October 1, 2025, https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/lists/somali-population-in-franklin-county-oh-by-city/.

3. Samantha Hendrickson, ‘Non-English languages are increasing in Columbus, recent data show,’ The Columbus Dispatch, June 27, 2025, https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2025/06/27/non-english-languages-are-increasing-in-columbus-recent-data-show/84332788007/.

4. Ohio Department of Job & Family Services, ‘Refugee Arrivals,’ 2024 table, https://jfs.ohio.gov/cash-food-and-refugee-assistance/refugee-services/refugee-arrivals/refugee-arrivals.

5. WBNS 10TV, ‘Mayor, police chief address reported ICE operations in Columbus,’ December 18, 2025, https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/mayor-police-chief-release-video-addressing-ice-operations-columbus/530-84a4b4f4-aefb-43e4-81a6-0b8a1633566f.

6. WOSU, ‘Reports of increased ICE activity spark response from Columbus city officials and police,’ December 18, 2025, https://www.wosu.org/politics-government/2025-12-18/reports-of-increased-ice-activity-spark-response-from-columbus-city-officials-and-police.

7. WCMH/NBC4, ‘Columbus mayor, police chief respond to ICE deployment,’ December 18, 2025, https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/columbus-mayor-police-chief-release-statement-regarding-ice-deployment/.

8. USA TODAY / The Columbus Dispatch, ‘Mayor says ICE operations in Columbus won’t turn city into “vehicle of fear”,’ December 18, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2025/12/18/ice-raids-in-columbus-ohio-mayor-police-chief-respond-to-claims/87813200007/.

9. USA TODAY (Cincinnati Enquirer), ‘DHS removes “sanctuary jurisdictions” list that included Columbus,’ June 2, 2025, https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2025/06/02/dhs-removes-sanctuary-jurisdictions-list-that-included-columbus/83990702007/.

10. WOSU (AP), ‘List of “sanctuary jurisdictions” removed from federal government website following criticism,’ June 2, 2025, https://www.wosu.org/politics-government/2025-06-02/list-of-sanctuary-jurisdictions-removed-from-federal-government-website-following-criticism.

11. Spectrum News 1 (AP), ‘List of “sanctuary jurisdictions” removed from U.S. government website,’ June 1, 2025, https://spectrumnews1.com/oh/columbus/politics/2025/06/01/list-of–sanctuary-jurisdictions–removed-from-u-s–government-website.

12. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, ‘Justice Department Publishes List of Sanctuary Jurisdictions,’ August 5, 2025, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-publishes-list-sanctuary-jurisdictions.

13. National Institute of Justice, ‘Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate,’ September 12, 2024; congressional copy: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD004.pdf.

14. Migration Policy Institute, ‘Immigrants and Crime in the United States (Explainer),’ October 2024, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/mpi-explainer-immigration-crime-2024_final.pdf.

15. Northwestern Now, ‘Immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born,’ March 12, 2024, https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/03/immigrants-are-significantly-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-the-us-born.

16. WOSU, ‘Columbus homicides down mid-way through 2025 as U.S. expects steep drop nationwide,’ July 1, 2025, https://www.wosu.org/news/2025-07-01/columbus-homicides-down-mid-way-through-2025-as-u-s-expects-steep-drop-nationwide.

17. Bailey Gallion, ‘Columbus homicides drop to historic levels in early 2025,’ The Columbus Dispatch, May 4, 2025, https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/crime/2025/05/04/columbus-homicides-murders-drop-to-historic-levels-in-early-2025/83406673007/.

18. Shahid Meighan, ‘Homicide total in Columbus falls below 100 for 2025,’ USA TODAY / The Columbus Dispatch, December 17, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2025/12/17/homicide-victims-momcc-columbus-2025/87814313007/.

19. Cole Behrens, ‘Columbus schools issue warning amid heightened concern over possible ICE activity,’ The Columbus Dispatch, December 18, 2025, https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/education/2025/12/18/columbus-schools-warn-parents-about-possible-ice-activity/87830542007/.

20. OPB/NPR, ‘How Minnesota became a hub for Somali immigrants in the U.S.,’ December 4, 2025, https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/04/minnesota-somali-population/.

21. PBS NewsHour (AP), ‘5 things to know about the Somali community in Minnesota after Trump’s attacks,’ December 3, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/5-things-to-know-about-the-somali-community-in-minnesota-after-trumps-attacks.

22. The Columbus Dispatch, ‘What is ICE doing in Columbus? What we know as of Friday Dec. 19, December 19, 2025, https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2025/12/19/what-is-ice-doing-in-columbus-what-we-know-as-of-friday-dec-19/87844272007/.

Bibliography

Hendrickson, Samantha. ‘Non-English languages are increasing in Columbus, recent data show.’ The Columbus Dispatch. June 27, 2025.

Migration Policy Institute. ‘Immigrants and Crime in the United States.’ October 2024.

National Institute of Justice. ‘Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate.’ September 12, 2024.

Neilsberg. ‘Somali Population in Ohio by City: 2025 Ranking & Insights.’ Updated October 1, 2025.

Neilsberg. ‘Somali Population in Franklin County, OH by City.’ Updated October 1, 2025.

Ohio Department of Job & Family Services. ‘Refugee Arrivals.’ 2024.

OPB/NPR. ‘How Minnesota became a hub for Somali immigrants in the U.S.’ December 4, 2025.

PBS NewsHour/AP. ‘5 things to know about the Somali community in Minnesota after Trump’s attacks.’ December 3, 2025.

USA TODAY / The Columbus Dispatch. ‘Mayor says ICE operations in Columbus won’t turn city into “vehicle of fear”.’ December 18, 2025.

WBNS 10TV. ‘Mayor, police chief address reported ICE operations in Columbus.’ December 18, 2025.

WOSU. ‘Reports of increased ICE activity spark response from Columbus city officials and police.’ December 18, 2025.

WOSU. ‘Columbus homicides down mid-way through 2025 as U.S. expects steep drop nationwide.’ July 1, 2025.

The Columbus Dispatch. ‘Columbus homicides drop to historic levels in early 2025.’ May 4, 2025.

USA TODAY / The Columbus Dispatch. ‘Homicide total in Columbus falls below 100 for 2025.’ December 17, 2025.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=2070

There’s Not a Lot of Compassion for Rob Reiner: Hollywood has made itself the enemy of America

The December 2025 killings of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, and the subsequent charging of their son Nick Reiner, ignited polarized reactions across news and social platforms. The recent tragedy has sparked intense debate—not only about the crime itself but about the cultural backdrop that shaped this family. Critics have noted that President Trump’s response lacked overt compassion, but this reaction must be understood in context. Rob Reiner was not just a filmmaker; he was a leading voice in Hollywood’s anti-Trump activism, often positioning himself against traditional American values. For years, Hollywood has distanced itself from the everyday realities of most Americans, creating a cultural divide that has eroded public sympathy for its employees. Hollywood has made itself the enemy of traditional America, and in that regard, Rob Reiner was considered an immoral slob that nobody should feel sorry for.

The contrast between Trump’s family values and Hollywood’s permissive lifestyle is stark. Trump famously raised his children with strict rules—no drugs, no drinking, no tattoos—reinforcing accountability and discipline. Hollywood, by contrast, often fosters environments where excess and indulgence are normalized. This permissiveness has consequences: many children of Hollywood figures struggle with addiction and instability. In Nick Reiner’s case, reports of substance abuse and personal turmoil underscore a broader pattern—liberal culture rarely emphasizes personal responsibility, and the fallout can be devastating.

Examples abound. From Sean “Diddy” Combs’ recent court revelations of grotesque excess to Charlie Sheen’s own admissions of destructive behavior, the Hollywood lifestyle often spirals into dysfunction. These stories are not isolated—they reflect an industry that glamorizes extremes while neglecting the foundations of family and morality. When tragedy strikes in such a context, the expectation of widespread public compassion becomes complicated. Americans increasingly view these outcomes as the predictable result of choices and values that run counter to the principles most families hold dear.

This is not about piling on during a tragedy; it is about recognizing the cultural divide. Rob Reiner championed a worldview that sought to undermine traditional norms, and the consequences of that worldview are now painfully evident. While no one justifies violence, the reality is that Hollywood’s broken culture produces broken lives. When those lives implode, the public’s reaction—muted sympathy at best—reflects a growing rejection of the values Hollywood promotes.

The timeline:

• Discovery and identification: On December 14, 2025, Los Angeles authorities found Rob Reiner (78) and Michele Singer Reiner (70) dead in their Brentwood home. The L.A. County Medical Examiner later listed the cause of death as “multiple sharp force injuries,” manner: homicide. 1 2 3

• Arrest and charges: Police arrested Nick Reiner (32) hours later, and he was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, with special‑circumstance allegations that could carry life without parole or the death penalty; he is being held without bail. 4 5 6

• Court appearances and schedule: Nick appeared in court on Dec. 17; his arraignment was set for Jan. 7, 2026, after his counsel waived speedy arraignment. 7 8 9

• Family statements: Siblings Jake and Romy Reiner issued a statement calling the loss “horrific and devastating” and asking for privacy and compassion. 7 10

Medical Examiner determinations and arrest/charging information are consistent across CBS News, Deadline, USA TODAY, and ABC reports. The dates (Dec. 14–17, 2025) and charging language (“first‑degree murder” with exceptional circumstances) appear verbatim or in close paraphrase across those outlets. 1 2 5 4

• In contrast, documented coverage after the killings focused on President Trump’s own posts, in which he mocked Reiner and attributed the deaths to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Mainstream outlets, not fabricated screenshots, reported these remarks. 14 15

Snopes (Dec. 17 & 19) and Lead Stories (Dec. 17) show no record of Reiner endorsing political violence; USA TODAY and Axios document Trump’s remarks following the homicide. 12 11 13 14 15

• Nick Reiner’s publicly discussed struggles with addiction date back to his teens, including multiple rehab stints, homelessness, and collaborative work with his father on Being Charlie (2015/16), a film loosely inspired by those experiences. 16 17

• After the killings, reporting highlighted Nick’s longstanding challenges, with sources and past interviews noting volatility and non-linear recovery—common in chronic substance‑use disorders. None of these reports. 18 5

USA TODAY and PEOPLE provide direct quotations from earlier interviews/podcasts, situating addiction history in a verifiable record while avoiding speculative causation. 16 17

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1. Celebrity activism and partisanship: Rob Reiner’s role as a high-profile critic of Trump and supporter of Democratic causes shaped how political audiences perceived him—before and after his death. 14 15

2. Media dynamics: The Reiner case drew wall-to-wall coverage, but notable outlets also ran fact‑checks to counter false claims (e.g., fabricated posts, conspiracy theories about “secret tunnels”). The effect: a fractured information environment in which audiences pick narratives that fit their priors. 20

USA TODAY/Axios frames Reiner’s political profile; Snopes/AFP/AllSides documents rumor‑correction cycles that coexist with breaking news coverage. 14 15 11 19 20

• Responsible inferences: It is fair to conclude that political identity and celebrity status influence public reaction, that false quotes altered perceptions of Reiner’s character, and that addiction history was part of Nick’s public narrative before 2025. Those quotes that were attributed to Reiner were in the spirit of the way he projected himself, leading people to draw their own conclusions past the clean public relations efforts that actors often use to hide their true feelings which they utter to other people in private. 12 14 17

• Where we should not refrain: this family’s tragedy is a sweeping indictment of entire political or cultural communities in regard to Hollywood as a culture. And we must make claims of definitive causation without court findings because the courts as we have seen recently no longer represent the kind of justice Americans expect, and we don’t have time to wait on them. Nick Reiner’s case is ongoing; presumption of innocence applies even as the blood drips from the weapons he used to conduct the killings. 5

While in the past a story like this might have sparked weeks of discussion and reflection on Rob Reiner’s life, as an artist most people knew something about. But in the wake of his political statements and his attempts to steer people away from supporting Trump, he has essentially angered most of the country. And when something bad happens in Hollywood culture now, people have much less compassion and are ready to move on from the story much more quickly. Forgiveness of these terrible Hollywood families and the lifestyles they live, and produce children out of, is not on the table any longer. And Trump represents that evolution in his comments after the murders. Because it’s not Trump that leads the nation, it’s Trump who is a creation of that nation and their sentiments. And Hollywood, clearly, didn’t respect that process, and they took advantage of the power they did have within the entertainment desires of American culture.

Footnotes

1. L.A. County Medical Examiner cause of death: “multiple sharp force injuries,” homicide; Dec. 17, 2025. 1 2

2. LAPD and DA timeline; arrest, charges, special‑circumstance allegations. 4 5

3. Court appearance and arraignment scheduling. 7 8

4. Family statements requesting compassion and privacy. 7 10

5. Debunked quotes attributed to Reiner about the Trump shooting attempt. 11 12

6. Documented coverage of President Trump’s remarks after Reiner’s death. 14 15

7. Nick Reiner’s publicly discussed addiction history; Being Charlie context. 17 16

8. Rumor‑correction cycle (fabricated posts; conspiracy content). 19 20

—

Bibliography & Further Reading

• CBS News — “L.A. County medical examiner releases Rob and Michele Reiner’s causes of death.” Link

• Deadline — “Rob Reiner’s Official Cause Of Death Revealed By LA Medical Examiner.” Link

• ABC News — “Rob Reiner’s son, Nick Reiner, charged with 1st‑degree murder with special circumstances.” Link

• USA TODAY — “Rob Reiner’s son Nick charged with murder in parents’ deaths.” Link

• CBS News — “Nick Reiner, Rob and Michele Reiner’s son, appears in court; arraignment set for Jan. 7.” Link

• Snopes — “Rumor claiming Rob Reiner said he wished would‑be Trump assassin ‘hadn’t missed’ is unfounded.” Link

• Snopes — “Did Rob Reiner say ‘too bad he turned his head’ about Trump assassination attempt? There’s no proof.” Link

• USA TODAY — “What did Rob Reiner say about Trump? POTUS called it ‘derangement.” Link

• Axios — “Trump mocks Rob Reiner after death. Here’s what Reiner said about Trump and Charlie Kirk.” Link

• PEOPLE — “Rob Reiner’s Son Nick Previously Spoke About His Struggles with Drug Addiction and Homelessness.” Link

• USA TODAY — “Rob Reiner’s son Nick once ‘wrecked’ his parents’ guest house” (podcast recollections). Link

• AllSides (Snopes reprint) — “False claim of secret tunnels beneath Rob Reiner’s home spreads online.”

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=2070

Nick Fuentes Picked a Fight with the Heavyweight, Vivek Ramaswamy: And he’ll get his teeth knocked out and his jaw broke, just like Jake Paul–but he’ll be rich

Jake Paul’s recent fight with Anthony Joshua is the perfect illustration of what happens when spectacle replaces substance. Paul, a YouTube celebrity with millions of followers, stepped into the ring against a world-class heavyweight—a man with Olympic gold and years of professional dominance. The pre-fight theatrics were designed to sell the drama, but anyone who understood boxing knew the outcome was inevitable. Paul fought briefly, suffered a broken jaw in two places, and left the arena humiliated in front of tens of millions of viewers. Yet, for him, the payday—reportedly $92 million—made the beating worthwhile. It was never about winning; it was about monetizing attention, even at the cost of personal dignity.

In many ways, that’s exactly what Nick Fuentes is doing with his attacks on Vivek Ramaswamy and, by extension, the MAGA movement. Vivek is the Trump-endorsed candidate for Ohio governor, a heavyweight in political terms, and Nick is trying to build his brand by picking a fight he cannot win. The goal isn’t policy or principle—it’s clicks, donations, and notoriety. Like Paul, Fuentes is willing to take a beating if it means short-term gains. But compromising integrity for a few bucks is a dangerous trade. Real influence comes from credibility, not shock-jock theatrics, and when the dust settles, Vivek will be fine. Nick, on the other hand, risks being remembered as the guy who sold his future for a viral moment.

Before we get lost in the weeds on Nick and the “war” he’s trying to gin up against Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio, the first thing to understand is that this is a publicity grab, a brand‑building exercise in the attention economy dressed up as a crusade. Tucker Carlson’s long sit‑down with Nick dropped late October 2025 and lit up the right for weeks—not because Nick said anything new, but because platforming him without hard pushback sparked a visible fracture among conservatives: Shapiro condemned the interview as “normalizing” a Hitler apologist, Heritage’s president defended Tucker as a free‑speech stand, and even Senate Republicans openly rebuked the tone and content. That intra‑movement rift is real, it’s documented, and it tells you what lane Nick is driving in: controversy converts to cash. 1 2 3 4 5

When Nick went on Piers Morgan Uncensored in December 2025, he doubled down—“Hitler was very f***ing cool,” he said, shrugging off historical atrocity with aesthetic fanboy talk about uniforms and parades. That wasn’t clipped speculation; it aired, it was challenged in real time, and it produced the predictable outrage cycle. He also conceded “at least six million” Jews were killed, but framed Holocaust memory as a mechanism to browbeat white Christians—a rhetorical move that’s been part of his pattern: push past decency, trivialize mass murder, court the shock. The point isn’t whether he “means” it; the point is that publicly saying it pays in a donor‑driven creator market. 6 7 8

And sure, people will ask how a 27‑ or 28‑year‑old ends up with this microphone. There’s a timeline: Unite the Right 2017, Groyper wars harassing mainstream conservative events in 2019, deplatforming cycles from YouTube for hate speech, and then re‑ascendance on platforms willing to host him; he even turned up at Mar‑a‑Lago in November 2022 when Ye (Kanye) brought him to dinner with Trump—a fiasco the former president later said he didn’t foresee. That dinner is a hinge in the public memory; it proved how oxygen flows to extremism when spectacle meets lax vetting. 9 10 11 12 13

Now, does Nick hurt Vivek in Ohio? No—he helps him by contrast. Ohio 2026 is shaping up as Ramaswamy vs. Acton, and the fundamentals are what they are: Vivek’s cash advantage, statewide endorsements, and consolidated GOP backing set the terrain; Acton’s own story is COVID‑era and compassion‑branded, but even Gov. DeWine has publicly said those shutdown decisions were his, not hers—undercutting the “Lockdown Lady” moniker his party uses. Because, DeWine is really a Democrat, and Amy was his girl. On balance, the race is competitive in public polling but leans Republican in a red‑trending Ohio; when the smoke clears, voters will choose jobs, affordability, and competence over influencer theatrics. That’s why a shock‑jock swipe from Nick won’t move the needle—it hardens a tiny niche while most Ohioans tune out the performative nihilism. 14 15 16 17 18 19

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: this is a business model. The pundit economy rewards dopamine spikes—outrage, taboo, transgression—because creator monetization has shifted from legacy ad rails to direct fan funding. Platforms like Rumble now integrate Bitcoin tipping (with Tether) so audiences can spray micro‑payments across controversial content in seconds. You don’t need brand safety; you need attention. That’s why “Hitler is cool” becomes an economic lever: it draws fire, it drives views, it pulls in tips from an aggrieved subculture that feels ignored by institutions. In this incentive structure, “being unhinged” is not a bug; it’s a feature. 20 21 22

So, the math here is straightforward. Nick’s short‑term revenue maximizes by attacking Trump‑aligned figures like Vivek; it creates a pseudo‑rebellion narrative (“I speak the truths your gatekeepers won’t”), harvests donations, and inflates his standing with under‑30 males who see no path in a culture saturated with porn, atomized dating markets, and collapsing family formation—all frustrations he riffs on. But that same strategy destroys long‑term trust and any real governing coalition. Tucker’s interview gave Nick oxygen; Shapiro’s response—and the broader backlash—marked the boundary lines of mainstream conservatism. Vivek will do well to stay above it, keep on policy‑first, and connect with Ohio’s economy and families, and let the theatrics burn themselves out. That contrast, in the end, will decide everything. 3 23 5

I’ll add one more note because I’ve lived this choice set: taking money and chasing the algorithm means someone else owns your argument. Independent voices who refuse the pay‑to‑play goose—whether that’s bot‑inflated follower counts or crypto tip farms—give up the easy ego pop in exchange for credibility with serious people who need facts, not theatrics. In Ohio, facts look like campaign filings, union endorsements crossing over, county‑by‑county organizing, and policy planks about taxes, education, and industry. That’s where Vivek is playing. That’s where this race will be decided. 15 16

While Vivek Ramaswamy will be fine in Ohio—his strategy is solid, his Trump endorsement is strong—he could easily swat away Nick Fuentes by pointing to the Jake Paul fight as a metaphor. Picking a fight with a heavyweight when you’re clearly outmatched is reckless, and Nick’s attempt to derail Vivek’s campaign is no different. It’s a stunt, not a strategy, and it will fail.

But here’s the deeper truth Nick is tapping into: the rise of a disenfranchised generation. Under‑30 men are angry, disconnected, and increasingly unwilling to pursue marriage or family because they see the culture as broken—porn saturation, hookup norms, and progressive narratives have eroded trust. Nick speaks to that frustration, and that’s why his voice resonates even when his tactics are self‑destructive. This is the future of media and politics: decentralized, unfiltered, and without institutional guardrails. Legacy platforms can’t contain it, and the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Even when Vivek wins and MAGA thrives for now, the next wave will be shaped by these angry young men who feel robbed of a normal life—and commentators like Nick will only grow louder in that vacuum.

—

Footnotes

1. Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes published Oct. 27, 2025; episode listings and YouTube analytics confirm timing and reach. 1 2

2. Coverage of the interview’s fallout and intra‑GOP rift (Heritage defense; Shapiro’s critique; Senate Republicans’ reactions). 3 4 5

3. Piers Morgan interview (Dec. 8–9, 2025) where Fuentes said “Hitler was very f***ing cool”; additional reportage on his Holocaust remarks. 6 8 7

4. Fuentes background and extremism timeline: Unite the Right, Groyper wars, deplatforming, ideological positions. 9

5. Mar‑a‑Lago dinner (Nov. 22–25, 2022) with Ye and Fuentes; Trump’s later statements on not recognizing Fuentes. 10 11 12 13

6. Ohio 2026 overview: Ramaswamy’s fundraising and endorsements; Acton’s profile; DeWine clarifying COVID decisions. 14 15 16 17 18 19

7. Creator‑economy monetization and Rumble’s Bitcoin tipping integration (Tether partnership; rollout timing). 20 21 22

8. Shapiro’s extended takedown of Tucker/Fuentes; the boundary between mainstream conservatism and the groyper fringe. 23 5

—

Selected Bibliography

• Tucker Carlson x Nick Fuentes: “Tucker Carlson Interviews Nick Fuentes” (Podchaser listing, Oct. 27, 2025); “Tucker Carlson Interviews Nick Fuentes” (YouTube). 1 2

• Intra‑movement rift: USA TODAY analysis of interview fallout; POLITICO on Shapiro’s critique and Heritage backlash; Fox News coverage of the AmericaFest sparring. 3 4 5

• Piers Morgan interview: The Independent, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and The Forward reports on Fuentes’ Hitler comments and Holocaust remarks (Dec. 2025). 6 8 7

• Mar‑a‑Lago dinner (2022): USA TODAY, NBC News, ABC News, POLITICO accounts and Trump’s statement. 10 11 12 13

• Ohio 2026: Cleveland Scene and Columbus Underground on fundraising and endorsements; Acton campaign site; NBC4 on DeWine’s COVID responsibility remarks; Ohio Capital Journal profile. 14 15 24 17 18

• Creator monetization: Cointelegraph and industry reports on Rumble’s Bitcoin tipping rollout and Tether partnership. 20

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=2070

The Problems with the Brown University Shooter: MKUltra killers and why we can’t trust the intelligence community

You want the switch flipped in the storage locker, the last light turned off, and the chain of events made to click—clean, audible—like a bolt sliding home. So here’s the Brown shooter case, the way I see it, the way the case sounds when you’ve done the hard part and need the paperwork to catch up to the conclusion, but it never does, because that’s the nature of conspiracy. So, let’s start at Brown University, finals week, Barus & Holley—the engineering building, a first-floor classroom, kids huddled into a study session—and an assailant who walked in with a 9mm and fired around forty rounds, killing two, wounding nine, and triggering a search that ran across states and ended in a New Hampshire storage unit with a body, two pistols, body armor, phones, and the kinds of IDs and thumb drives that investigators comb for motives that never quite appear. The suspect: Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, Portuguese national, former Brown physics grad student circa 2000–2001, withdrew by 2003, last known address in Miami. Claimed alone; matched by ATF/FBI ballistics; found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound; autopsy timed his death likely two days before discovery. The police narrative is linear, methodical, and, to their credit, supported: surveillance, a rental car, a license plate reader, a tip originating on Reddit from “John,” a mysterious witness who cracked the case open, tracing a grey Nissan with Florida tags to an Alamo rental, anchoring the suspect’s name to paperwork and video frames—then running the string to Salem, New Hampshire, where the locker doors were breached and the search ended. 1 2 3 4 5

“Okay,” you say, “but MIT? How does Brookline link into Providence?” That’s where it gets tight: Professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 47, was shot in his home two days after Brown. Federal prosecutors say the suspect previously attended the same Portuguese university as Loureiro; classmates recall the suspect as brilliant but volatile. The U.S. attorney connected the rental car movements from Boston to Providence and back, and later to New Hampshire. ATF and FBI say two 9mm pistols recovered with the body correlate—one to Brown, one to Loureiro. Rapid DNA preliminarily matched the suspect to Brown-scene evidence. Motive? Unclear. But the official chain is stitched: a single offender acting alone, two crimes linked by ballistics, travel records, and surveillance timelines. 6 7 3 5 8

I’ve seen neat narratives before—too neat, there are a lot of problems with this case. Homeless tip, locker, suicide, no interview, gun matches, case closed. We’ve been here many times before. San Bernardino had the ‘terrorism-or-not’ dance before the bureau put a label on it.” In 2015, the FBI designated San Bernardino as a terrorism homegrown violent extremist, self-radicalized. It took days; the public memory often compresses the sequence. But the record shows Comey’s official framing and the FBI’s documentation of the radicalization indicators, alongside caution that the attackers weren’t part of a larger network. That’s all in the transcripts and the DOJ-COPS incident review that dissected command and communications. I’ve covered this case extensively over the years, and the FBI clearly contaminated the crime scene with the media to shake the case into an easy conclusion where they controlled the narrative. 9 10 11 This kind of behavior would later be revealed in Comey’s handling of the incoming presidency of Trump.

I’ve been around rooms where hit men get green lights and walk out with tacit immunity. I know the feeling of a case that’s been pre-sorted. I hear ‘MKUltra’ in the pattern of this Brown University shooting. Operation CHAOS ran domestically even when the charter said otherwise. Drugs. Leverage. Control. Charlie Manson—how do we not see it?” And this is where disciplined skepticism meets documented history. MKUltra happened. It was clandestine, unethical. Gottlieb ran it; LSD and other substances were tested on unwitting subjects; much of the paper trail was destroyed. That’s not “theory”—it’s recorded, investigated, and widely sourced. Operation CHAOS existed: inter-agency projects surveilling domestic movements amid Cold War paranoia, overlapping with the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Those programs are in official histories and journalism. Where the debate sharpens is the degree to which MKUltra or CHAOS tangibly shaped specific criminal acts or assassinations, and whether Manson was an instrument rather than merely a manipulative sociopath who exploited a drug-saturated counterculture. Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS pushes hard on those linkages; Errol Morris’s 2025 Netflix doc explores O’Neill’s material while stating on camera he isn’t entirely convinced. Reason’s review captures that tension: dogged reporting, provocative connections, and a frank admission about what’s not proven. People Magazine and The Standard recapitulate the operation’s history and O’Neill’s framing. Wikipedia’s CHAOS entry, while tertiary, anchors dates and publication context. All of that gives you a scaffold: MKUltra and CHAOS are real; the “Manson-as-mind-control asset” remains a hypothesis with intriguing circumstantial roads and contested conclusions. 12 13 14 15 16

Intelligence programs did pursue capabilities that, left ungoverned, warp into precisely the abuses I’m describing. In 2025, Brown/MIT investigators found no writings, no cohort, no direct ideological manifesto—no Islamist tie, despite early rumor fog. The autopsy nails suicide—the ballistics match. The timeline is complete with the standard drudgework—video canvases, LPR hits, rental contracts, financial traces, and an eyewitness who chased the suspect on foot and recorded enough detail to triangulate the car. If there’s an invisible hand, it left no fingerprints in the evidence boxes presented to the press, which is why controlling the narrative is so important in these cases, and is at the heart of the conspiracy, and the cover-up. These are authority figures who have lost the trust of the public because of their vast past incompetence. 1 2 3

Like the Brown killings and the Manson case, the Charlie Kirk hit has the smell of trained escalation. The record on Kirk is, tragically, public and detailed: shot on Sept. 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University, an outdoor event, a single lethal shot, a search, a strong consensus describing the act as a political assassination, with subsequent reporting documenting the suspect’s surrender and charges. Across mainstream outlets—PBS/AP live updates, USA TODAY analysis on rising political violence, ABC News coverage of the search, Fox’s timeline, and even Britannica’s digest—the event is treated as targeted political violence. No credible outlet has publicly substantiated an MKUltra-style control narrative here; the official storyline is a sniper attack amid a documented rise in politically motivated threats and violence across the spectrum. The timeline of the killer in that case, engineered radicalization through online interactions, the Furry culture, and likely drug use among the peers produced evidence of orchestrated programming that we’ll never learn about, because the same investigators who set up the scenario are the same ones doing the investigation. As long as they can put a logical ribbon on the story, the details will be lost to the whims of chaos. The present, verifiable truth is that assassinations “work” in the brutal arithmetic of power vacuums and coalition fragmentation; Matt Walsh’s comments on that point echo a centuries-old grim reality: kill one leader and you often create chaos rather than a million martyrs. 17 18 19 20 21

We have a long history of the intelligence state learning to steer populations. Drugs are the lever; compromise is the clamp. Here, the record is mixed but consequential. MKUltra’s intent included behavior control. The technique set—psychoactive dosing, sensory manipulation, psychological breaking—was documented, condemned, and dismantled in public view. Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO surveilled and infiltrated domestic groups. It’s fair—and historically supportable—to argue that those programs sought influence over mass behavior. It’s also fair to say that the cultural legacy—mistrust, prosecutorial skepticism, and persistent fear of engineered radicalization—survived well beyond the programs’ official end dates. O’Neill’s book treats Manson as a possible node in a larger pattern; Morris’s film examines but does not authenticate every link. That is the present epistemic posture. 12 13

Now, let’s stitch the Brown/MIT narrative into cohesive, investigative, clean of rumor, clearly flagged as such, and consider the story under the lens of history. Start with the site: Barus & Holley, Providence, Dec. 13, 2025, 4:05 p.m. Shelter-in-place; grainy surveillance; early misidentifications; a person detained and later released Sunday; FBI announces a $50,000 reward Monday; a public map showing movements near campus; a “John” in the footage that police seek to identify. By Thursday, a breakthrough: a Reddit post about a grey Nissan with Florida plates, believed to be rented; “John” identifies himself; police find the rental company, pull the contract, and get the suspect’s name, plus video stills matching the clothing worn by the shooter. Then the license-plate readers point to the vehicle’s path; the car is seen intermittently around Brown from Dec. 1–12; the suspect travels, swaps plates to an unregistered Maine tag, and heads north; FBI SWAT executes warrants and finds the suspect dead in Salem, NH, at 9 p.m. Two firearms. A satchel. Body armor. Phones. Thumb drives. The autopsy on Friday calls suicide; estimates death occurred Dec. 16. ATF/FBI match the guns—one to Brown, one to Loureiro—and report preliminary rapid DNA linking the suspect to Brown-scene evidence. Press conferences at Providence and Boston lock the conclusion: one offender, two related crimes. No manifesto. No accomplices. Motive unknown. 1 22 2 3 4 23 5 The main question that arises, who is John from Reddit?

And now we had a mass shooter and an immigrant program intersecting at the podium, enough meat to wave away critics of the case with a shiny new toy. Within twenty-four hours, Homeland Security announces a pause on DV lottery-linked green card cases, the State Department pauses diversity visas, and the political layer lights up—evidence that the suspect entered on DV1 in 2017. Policy, blame, deterrence—the usual sequence. This is how a hidden hand remains so in these cases, how public bandwidth is used to conceal the real story; it is proof of the political reflex to attach immigration architecture to tragedies involving foreign nationals. That reflex is its own story. 7 24

The Brown/MIT case can be laid out in verifiable terms that contradict early social media claims about Islamist motives or campus cover-ups, because the ballistics and autopsy are hard facts, and the investigative timeline is coherently documented across outlets, conveniently, both guns were at the scene, set out nicely to remove all doubt. But we have a historical record: MKUltra’s existence, Operation CHAOS’s framework, COINTELPRO’s domestic operations, and the known ways agencies pursued behavioral leverage via drugs, surveillance, infiltration, and disinformation. From there, we can and should argue that modern patterns still exhibit the signatures of chaos management: misinformation storms, rapid political pivots, and neat closures that evade deep motive accounting.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a wound in the nation’s nervous system added to an already long list; the Brown/MIT chain is a wound in a university community; San Bernardino was a wound that aged into a permanent scar on policy and practice. In every case, the first narratives are unstable, and the final narratives may be incomplete. Reading back through O’Neill and Morris, through FBI releases and DOJ reviews, through PBS/AP live logs and USA TODAY retrospectives, you can say: America’s institutions have proven they can both investigate well and fail spectacularly; the intelligence state can both protect and overreach; and the line between manipulation and enforcement remains the most dangerous seam in our civic fabric. Drugs, kompromat, pressure—those are tools. The question is who wields them now and to what documented effect. And the crimes of concealment are in erasing the evidence before anybody can uncover it, such as witness statements indicating that the shooter yelled an Islamic reference during the killings, which turned out in the end to be reported, “he barked like a dog.”

What makes the Brown University case so unsettling isn’t just the violence—it’s the speed and neatness of the official narrative. A suspect identified, a body found, a motive declared “unknown,” and the story sealed before the public could even process the contradictions. If you’ve studied the history of covert influence—from MKUltra’s mind-control experiments to Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO—you know these patterns aren’t new. They rely on complexity that exceeds the average person’s ability to digest, then offer a simplified explanation that satisfies curiosity without exposing the machinery behind it. That’s how power protects itself: by controlling not just events, but the interpretation of those events.

The lesson is bigger than one crime. When institutions learn they can steer perception, they will—whether through media framing, selective disclosure, or outright fabrication. Oversight exists for a reason, because unchecked authority becomes a self-perpetuating system of manipulation. Today, those same psychological levers pioneered in the Cold War are embedded everywhere: politics, advertising, entertainment, and yes, intelligence operations. The Brown case is a reminder that truth often hides behind the curtain of “closure,” and unless we demand transparency, the cycle will continue—quietly shaping the world while most of us accept the story we’re given.

—

Supplemental Notes & Footnotes (by topic)

Brown University shooting & MIT professor killing (Dec. 2025):

• Suspect identified as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48; former Brown physics grad student; found dead by suicide in a Salem, NH storage unit; linked to both crimes via ballistics/DNA; motive unknown. 1 3 5

• Investigative breakthrough came via eyewitness “John” and a Reddit post about a grey Nissan with Florida plates; rental contract and surveillance confirmed ID; Flock Safety LPRs helped track the vehicle. 2 7

• Evidence recovered from storage unit: two 9mm pistols, ammo, body armor, multiple phones, thumb drives, IDs; FBI analyzing for motive. 4

• Autopsy: self-inflicted gunshot; estimated date of death Dec. 16; body found Dec. 18. 23

• Policy reaction: DHS and the State Department pause DV lottery-related processes after confirmation that a suspect entered via DV1 in 2017. 24 7

San Bernardino (Dec. 2015) for historical comparison:

• FBI officially designated the attack an act of terrorism, citing indications of radicalization and attempted destruction of digital evidence; emphasized no larger directed network. 9 10

• DOJ COPS Office critical incident review details response complexities and lessons learned. 11

MKUltra / Operation CHAOS / COINTELPRO / Manson:

• MKUltra: CIA mind-control experiments (1950s–’60s), led by Sidney Gottlieb; documented use of LSD and other methods; evidence partly destroyed; later investigations and bans. 12

• Operation CHAOS: CIA domestic surveillance/infiltration of antiwar/counterculture movements; referenced in O’Neill’s CHAOS. 14

• Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS (2019) argues alternative linkages among Manson, MKUltra, and intelligence programs; Errol Morris’s 2025 Netflix documentary explores, but with measured skepticism. 13

• Pop and press summaries of MKUltra’s history and claimed Manson connections provide accessible context but are not dispositive proof. 15 16

Charlie Kirk assassination (Sept. 10, 2025):

• Live updates and mainstream reporting document the assassination, search, suspect surrender/charges, and political reverberations; no verified evidence of MKUltra-style programming made public. 17 18 19

• Commentary on the political impact and the grim efficacy of assassinations in creating leadership vacuums. 21

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Bibliography & Further Reading

Primary/current-event reporting (Brown/MIT 2025)

• Boston Globe/Boston.com live coverage: “Man suspected of Brown University shooting, MIT professor slaying found dead in N.H. storage facility” (Dec. 18–19, 2025). 1

• ABC News: “What investigators know about suspected Brown, MIT shooter and hero tipster” (Dec. 19–20, 2025). 2

• USA TODAY: “What we know after authorities find Brown shooting suspect dead” (Dec. 19, 2025). 3

• NBC News live blogs (Dec. 19, 2025): suspect found dead; ballistics/DNA updates. 6 5

• CBS News live updates: motive sought; DV program pause. 7

• WPRI Target 12: storage unit evidence (Dec. 19, 2025). 4

• Fox News Digital: autopsy details; DV program reaction (Dec. 18–20, 2025). 23 24

• Providence Journal live updates and recap: timeline synthesis, local impacts (Dec. 18–19, 2025). 22 25

Historic references (San Bernardino 2015)

• FBI timeline/releases: “FBI Will Investigate San Bernardino Shootings as Terrorist Act” (Dec. 4, 2015). 9

• GBH/NPR coverage summarizing FBI statements and social media indicators (Dec. 2015). 10 26

• DOJ COPS Office: Bringing Calm to Chaos (2016 critical incident review). 11

MKUltra / Operation CHAOS / Manson (contextual background)

• People Magazine explainer: “What Was Project MKUltra? Inside the CIA’s Mind Control Experiments” (Mar. 8, 2025). 12

• Reason review: “Was Charles Manson Carrying Out a CIA Experiment?”—Errol Morris’s Netflix documentary (May 23, 2025). 13

• Wikipedia entry on O’Neill’s CHAOS (publication/context). 14

• The Standard (London): documentary overview and historical background (Mar. 2025). 15

• All That’s Interesting: summary of O’Neill’s claims linking Manson and MKUltra (Mar. 7, 2025). 16

Charlie Kirk assassination (Sept. 2025)

• PBS/AP live updates and associated coverage. 17

• USA TODAY: “Charlie Kirk murder the latest in political violence…” (Sept. 10–11, 2025). 18

• ABC News: “Manhunt for shooter continues after Charlie Kirk killed…” (Sept. 10, 2025). 19

• Fox News: “Charlie Kirk’s assassination latest case…” (Sept. 10, 2025). 20

• RealClearPolitics: Matt Walsh interview discussing assassination effects (Dec. 19, 2025). 21

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=2070

The Cause of the Affordability Crisis: Managed economies and political interventions have destroyed cost structures

The truth about affordability, because that’s the tired drumbeat the Left will pound all the way into 2026: “prices are high, blame the billionaire.” It’s the same old class-war script—paint the rich guy as out of touch, pretend the pain at the pump and the grocery store fell from the sky, and hope voters forget who built the scaffolding for that pain. The truth is, affordability has roots—deep, structural roots—in policy choices that take years to unwind. Unwinding is slow; rebuilding competitive markets is slower; letting innovation breathe is slower still. But it happens. And when it happens—especially around energy and health care—you feel it first in the path of prices, then in the path of opportunity. That’s the meat and potatoes of the issue that everyone needs to understand as we go forward.

Starting with health care because it’s so grotesquely obvious—the Democrats’ favorite talking point and, paradoxically, their favorite controlled market. What the public senses as “expensive care” is really an industry whose cost structure is defended by regulation, protected monopolies, and financial engineering that prioritizes jobs and margin over cures. Just look at the macro: national health expenditures reached roughly $4.9 trillion in 2023—17.6% of GDP—and blew past $5 trillion in 2024, with CMS projecting the health share of the economy could hit 20.3% by 2033. That’s not me speculating; it’s the official actuaries. They estimate spending growth of 8.2% in 2024 and 7.1% in 2025—outpacing GDP—driven by rising utilization and coverage levels. 1 2 3 4 You don’t need a PhD in economics to hear what that says: health care, as currently constituted, is set on an upward cost glide path that eats the economy.

Dig beneath the top line, and you find what patients feel: hospitals posted double-digit spending growth in 2023; physician services accelerated; prescription drugs jumped more than 11% in 2023 alone. 1 These are not isolated blips—they’re part of a financing machine that has learned to monetize chronic decline. It’s the difference between maintaining weakness for revenue and making patients truly well, which would shrink the revenue base. That philosophical choice drives both policy and practice.

Layer in the private‑equity wave. In health care, PE ownership has expanded rapidly across hospitals, specialty practices, nursing homes, and ancillaries. Systematic reviews in BMJ and updates from Wharton’s HMPI synthesize dozens of empirical studies and repeatedly find what clinicians and patients suspect: PE ownership is most consistently associated with higher costs to patients or payers and mixed-to-harmful impacts on quality. Staffing skews downward, administrative pressure increases, and the exit horizon is 3–7 years, with debt piled onto the acquired entity. 5 6 Even JAMA’s coverage of the evidence lands in the same place: higher costs, quality concerns. 7 Now, to be fair, not every PE hospital outcome is catastrophic; a late‑2025 research brief found no excess closures and cost-cutting concentrated in admin rather than core medicine, though patient satisfaction dipped. 8 But the through‑line is unmistakable: financialization has bridged into care delivery, and the pass-through is inflationary for payers and patients. When you lace debt service, management fees, and rapid roll-up incentives on top of already rising unit costs, affordability dies by a thousand cuts.

And we haven’t even touched the bigger affordability architecture—consolidation and financialization across supply chains. Ten years ago, lean shops squeezed costs by owning their processes and competing in open markets. Today, in many sectors—manufacturing, food processing, distribution—the playbook is add-on acquisitions, platform roll-ups, and fee-driven intermediaries. Private equity has poured roughly $262 billion into U.S. manufacturing firms since 2020, explicitly to consolidate and “unlock value at speed,” while debt financing has been layered into an already fragile logistics environment. 9 10 The National Economic Council’s 2021–2024 Quadrennial Supply Chain Review lays it out in sober terms: critical chains—from energy components to pharmaceuticals and agri‑food—were brittle, policy‑distorted, and subject to non-market practices that amplified shocks. 11

Why should voters care about that alphabet soup of capital and supply chain policy? Because the price on your shelf has a genealogy. COVID made that visible; economists at Brookings argue that the inflation shock was largely supply-driven, with long lags as delivery times normalized and margins reset—proving that what breaks upstream ripples downstream for years. 12 The Richmond Fed estimates that about half of a disruption’s total effect comes from amplification through the supply network; shocks abroad propagate into U.S. GDP and inflation, and re-shoring, redundancy, and inventory carry real cost. 13 Translation: if you replace diversified mom‑and‑pop networks with concentrated platforms, then hit those platforms with a once-in-a-century shock and policy friction, you get sticker shock that doesn’t vanish overnight.

Then there are the minimum wage mandates, which I warned about a decade ago when Democrats pushed for them and which, mainly, got what they wanted during Covid—the bottom-up piece of the affordability puzzle. The Left sells them as “free money,” then acts surprised when menus and price tags jump. The CPI tells a straightforward story: food away from home rose 3.6% in 2024, outpacing grocery inflation, and industry groups show menu prices still rising into late 2025. 14 15 CNBC put a fine point on limited-service meals: almost 28% price growth from 2019 to 2023—well above the overall CPI—driven in part by labor cost increases that chains passed on to customers, especially in high-mandate states. 16 The academic literature fills in the mechanism. Recent meta-analysis estimates a 0.03–0.11 price elasticity to minimum wage changes—meaning a 10% hike produces roughly 0.3–1.1% price increases, bigger in labor-intensive sectors like restaurants. 17 NBER and Upjohn surveys show mixed employment effects but clear evidence of slower job growth and hours adjustments over time, with price pass-through in narrow industries. 18 19 And when wage floors leap in gig delivery, the “unintended consequences” are no longer theoretical; a 2025 NBER working paper tracking Seattle’s 2024 ordinance found base pay doubled per task, but tips and order volume fell, netting out the gains for most active drivers within a month while delivery costs popped and idle time rose. 20 All that flows straight into the affordability experience at the counter. If your value meal used to be $5 and now feels like $10, it’s not imaginary—the chain is absorbing higher mandated labor costs, higher input volatility, and a consolidated middleman layer that taxes every step. The macro data confirm the sting: food prices rose 2.5% overall in 2024, but restaurant inflation was higher, and eggs, beef, and insurance were outliers. 14

The other pillar in the affordability conversation is energy—because it feeds trucks, ships, harvesters, ovens, and heat. Here’s some good news: U.S. oil production set records through 2024 and 2025, with the EIA projecting record crude and gas output in 2025, and AAA reports December 2025 gasoline averages around $2.89 nationally—the cheapest December since 2020. That’s not partisan; that’s a supply reality. 21 22 23 The EIA’s Short‑Term Energy Outlook expects Brent to settle near $55/bbl through 2026 as inventories rise, while dry gas production continues climbing. 24 In plain English: drilling and efficiency gains—especially in the Permian—have kept domestic supply high and prices stable, muting one of the biggest drivers of household pain. 25 So when we say a pro‑production posture affects affordability, this is the line we draw: more barrels and cubic feet, fewer spikes at the pump, cheaper freight, easier input cost for food and goods.

Affordability isn’t “high versus low prices in a vacuum.” It’s the architecture of how costs stack up: energy feeds logistics; logistics feed input prices; input prices feed menus and store shelves; health care premiums drain the checking account regardless. If your cost stack is built on regulated scarcity, consolidated intermediaries, debt‑service layers, and mandated wage floors, you’ve engineered inflation. If you reverse the stack—by increasing supply (energy), rebuilding distributed ownership (manufacturing and ag), and unleashing cures (health)—you engineer disinflation. And yes, it has a lag because capital redeployments and networks re-route over quarters, not weeks.

Now, about health care’s future—the part that sounds disruptive because it is. The frontier is not the following billing code; it’s gene editing, cellular regeneration, and targeted micro‑devices that fix the plumbing without cracking open the chest. CRISPR-based therapies have already crossed the FDA threshold for specific indications, signaling that programmable biology isn’t science fiction anymore, though current price points are eye-watering and regulatory guardrails are tight. 26 Stem cell advances proceed unevenly under FDA frameworks, but the pipeline is real, and the durability of regenerative approaches changes the calculus on chronic disease costs. 27 As for “nanobots in arteries,” let’s be scientifically precise: at present, that’s experimental vision—nanotechnology for targeted delivery and plaque management is under research, but widespread, approved deployment in the U.S. is still a few years away, as in 2030. The trajectory, however, is toward minimally invasive, programmable interventions that obviate today’s expensive, labor-intensive procedures. If you strip the hype and ask, “What happens to costs if cures replace maintenance?” the answer is radical deflation in medical services that today require giant physical plants, armies of staff, and recurring billing. The only things stopping acceleration are policy acceptance and risk-tolerant frameworks that protect patients while allowing innovation to scale.

That leads to the tricky question: do we design a system that keeps people sick slowly—so the machine gets paid—or do we create a system that heals fast, and then reallocates labor to growth sectors like space, advanced manufacturing, and AI-enabled industrials? We can’t flip that switch in two months. If you liberated regenerative and gene therapies tomorrow without adjusting reimbursement and licensure, you’d displace millions of jobs and crash legacy revenue streams. But over a decade, with clear lanes for innovation and targeted transition support, you can migrate human capital to sectors that compound prosperity—what I call the “space economy” and adjacent fields—so people live longer, healthier lives and earn across extended productive spans. Morgan Stanley and others project trillion-dollar trajectories in space-enabled services, manufacturing, and communications; the point isn’t the exact number, it’s the labor shift: from managing decline to building frontiers. 28

Affordability also lives in the home. Property taxes are the most visible local lever, and they’ve been creeping up. ATTOM’s national analysis finds the average single-family property tax bill rose about 5–6% in 2024 to roughly $4,300, while effective rates ticked slightly down as home values rebounded. The press summary in early 2025 pegged average bills around $4,172 and highlighted regional variance, with Northeast/Midwest rates higher. Different methodologies, same lived experience: homeowners feel the pinch. 29 30 AAA talks about gas as one side of the ledger; property taxes are the other, especially in school-heavy budgets. The Lincoln Institute’s state-by-state comparison shows effective rates are a function of reliance on property tax, home values, and spending levels, with Detroit at the high end and Honolulu at the low end for homestead effective rates. Assessment limits can shift burdens onto new buyers—a silent affordability killer. 31 Economists even argue that higher property taxes can—counterintuitively—reduce entry prices and reallocate homeownership toward younger families by capitalizing the tax burden into lower upfront costs, though that shifts pain onto older and low-income owners. 32 My point isn’t that one tax tweak fixes affordability; it’s that you can’t jack up wages, ignore supply, and raise local levies without squeezing families from three directions. If wages must rise for entry-level dignity, then energy, health, and taxes must fall—or the squeeze is intolerable. That’s arithmetic.

Ask yourself: who broke the affordability architecture? Food-at-home inflation cooled in 2024—USDA pegs it at around 1.2%—because some inputs normalized after supply shocks, yet restaurants remained pricier because labor and overhead didn’t normalize. Eggs spiked again on disease resurgence; beef rose on low cattle inventories. 33 Meanwhile, gasoline trended down year‑over‑year into late 2025; the national average sat below $3 by December. 22 23 None of that aligns with the “blame the billionaire” slogan. It aligns with policy levers: energy supply, wage mandates, consolidation rules, and the health care financing model.

So when critics sneer, “What does a billionaire know about affordability?” the answer is: affordability isn’t about your bank account, it’s about whether you understand the machine. In 2017-2019, we saw what pro-production energy, plus regulatory breathing room, can do—pump prices stabilized, and freight costs fell. In 2024‑2026, EIA projections show strong domestic output and soft global prices—potential tailwinds if you don’t throttle drilling or overregulate pipelines. 21 24 In the next three to five years, health innovation could begin to bend the cost curve—but only if you let it. And over the same window, you can chip away at consolidation by encouraging distributed ownership, limiting fee extraction, and restoring competitive procurement in sectors like aerospace and ag.

Agriculture is instructive. USDA reports 1.89 million farms in 2023—down slightly—with land in farms also down and acreage concentrating in high‑sales classes. In 2023, farms with $500,000+ in sales operated roughly half of all farmland—a consolidation pattern built over decades. 34 ERS’s historical work shows crop acreage shifting persistently toward larger operations; livestock consolidation has been episodic but dramatic in some lines. 35 36 Production expenditures climbed to about $482 billion in 2023, with feed, labor, and services dominating the cost share. 37 That’s not a mom-and-pop landscape; it’s an industrial farm economy whose cost base moves with energy, labor, and finance. If you push mandates and taxes up while tolerating monopolized inputs, you get $6 milk and $10 burgers.

Affordability doesn’t fix itself in a quarter. It takes enthusiasm and patience—years, not months. In a MAGA-style agenda, you’d do three things at once: push energy to keep gasoline, diesel, and electricity stable; open lanes for regenerative medicine and gene therapy with reimbursement and safety frameworks that accelerate cures; and de-financialize chokepoints in supply chains by favoring private ownership, competition, and transparency over fee-stacked intermediaries. The lag effect is real. CMS projects health’s share of GDP rising, not falling, through 2033 under current assumptions; turning that curve requires more than rhetoric. 38 But you can feel affordability improve in the interim if energy and freight stay tame and food inflation stays cooled—as the 2024 numbers did. 14 33

The choice at the center of health care affordability, because it’s moral as much as economic: do we maintain people’s weaknesses to preserve a sprawling, union-protected, fee-protected medical services empire, or do we make them strong again—knowing we must redeploy those workers into frontier industries? If you want the second outcome, embrace innovation and plan the transition. The space economy, industrials, AI-enabled maintenance, precision manufacturing—those aren’t sci-fi; they’re labor sinks ready to absorb talent. 28 You don’t solve affordability by berating billionaires; you solve it by designing an economy that doesn’t require families to hemorrhage cash for energy, food, and maintenance of decline.

Today’s gas is under $3 in many regions. 22 Food-at-home inflation cooled to near 1%. 33 Health spending is still climbing because we feed the maintenance machine. 1 Minimum wage hikes push menus higher, especially in limited‑service. 16 17 Consolidation and financialization tax every step of the supply chain. 11 10 Property taxes squeeze homeowners even as effective rates wobble with valuation cycles. 29 If you want affordability, you have to unwind the stack that made it scarce—and that takes leadership, authentic leadership that is very hard to get and takes a lot of guts to utilize.

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Footnotes

1. National health expenditures and projections: CMS NHE Fact Sheet and analyses indicate $4.9T in 2023 (17.6% GDP); projected 8.2% spending growth in 2024 and continued gains through 2033 to ~20.3% of GDP. 1 2 3

2. 2023 component growth: hospital (+10.4%), physician services (+7.4%), prescription drugs (+11.4%). 1

3. PE in health care—cost and quality impacts: BMJ systematic review (2023); HMPI update (2024); JAMA coverage (2023). 5 6 7

4. PE hospitals: no excess closures; admin cost cuts; patient satisfaction decline. 8

5. Supply-driven inflation and lagged normalization: Brookings commentary (2024). 12

6. Supply chain shock amplification: Richmond Fed Economic Brief (2025). 13

7. Restaurant price dynamics: BLS CPI (2024 review); National Restaurant Association menu price notes (2025). 14 15

8. Limited‑service price increases vs CPI: CNBC analysis (2019–2023). 16

9. Price pass-through elasticities from minimum wage hikes: meta-analysis (2025). 17

10. Seattle gig delivery minimum wage outcomes (2024–2025): NBER working paper coverage. 20

11. Energy production and prices: EIA STEO (Dec 2025), projections of record crude/gas; AAA national average ~$2.89 in Dec 2025; EIA weekly regional gasoline data. 24 21 22 23

12. U.S. oil production highs in 2025 (EIA/Reuters round-ups). 25

13. CRISPR therapy approvals and trajectory: FDA‑tracked approvals in 2023–2024; cost and regulation context. 26

14. Stem cell therapy/regulatory status: overviews and policy context. 27

15. Space economy outlooks and manufacturing metrics: NIST manufacturing report (2024) for macro context; industry projections. 28

16. Property tax trends: ATTOM 2024 analysis; Mortgage Professional America summary (2025); Lincoln Institute 50-state comparison; Minneapolis Fed analysis on property taxes and home prices. 29 30 31 32

17. Agriculture consolidation and expenditure trends: USDA NASS Farms and Land in Farms (2023); ERS “Three Decades of Consolidation”; AEI policy slides; NASS production expenditures (2023). 34 35 36 37

18. Food‑at‑home inflation easing in 2024; category specifics and 2025 outlook: USDA ERS Charts of Note. 33

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Bibliography & Further Reading

• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). “NHE Fact Sheet.” 1

• American Hospital Association summary of CMS projections (June 2025). 2

• Peter G. Peterson Foundation on health share of GDP. 3

• American Medical Association Policy Research Perspectives on NHE 2023. 4

• BMJ (2023). “Evaluating trends in private equity ownership…” 5

• HMPI (2024). “Update on impacts of PE ownership in health care.” 6

• JAMA (2023). “Private Equity Ownership in Health Care Linked to Higher Costs…” 7

• Cato Institute (2025). “Private Equity in the Hospital Industry.” 8

• Brookings (2024). “Lagged effects of COVID-19 supply chain disruptions.” 12

• Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (2025). “Supply Chain Resilience and Shocks.” 13

• BLS. “Consumer Price Index: 2024 in review.” 14

• National Restaurant Association. “Menu Prices,” Dec 2025. 15

• CNBC (2024). “Why fast-food price increases have surpassed overall inflation.” 16

• NBER Working Paper (2024/2025 meta & surveys). 18 39

• Jorge Pérez Pérez (2025). Meta-analysis on minimum wage and prices. 17

• Reason (summarizing NBER Seattle delivery study) (2025). 20

• EIA Short‑Term Energy Outlook (Dec 2025). 24

• Offshore Technology (Mar 2025). “EIA forecasts record US crude and gas production…” 21

• AAA Fuel Prices Newsroom (Dec 2025). 40

• EIA Gasoline & Diesel Update (Dec 2025). 23

• Pipeline & Gas Journal (Aug 2025). “U.S. Oil Production Hit Record High in June.” 25

• FDA-related coverage and analyses of CRISPR therapies (2023–2024). 26

• Health journalism on stem cell regulatory landscape (2025). 27

• NIST (2024). “Annual Report on the U.S. Manufacturing Economy.” 28

• ATTOM (Apr/Jul 2025). “2024 Property Tax Analysis.” 29

• Mortgage Professional America (Apr 2025). “US property tax bill jumped again in 2024.” 30

• Lincoln Institute (Jul 2025). “50-State Property Tax Comparison Study.” 31

• Minneapolis Fed (Nov 2024). “How higher property taxes increase home affordability.” 32

• USDA NASS (Feb/Jul 2024). Farms and Land in Farms; Production Expenditures. 34 37

• USDA ERS (2018). “Three Decades of Consolidation in U.S. Agriculture.” 35

• AEI (Feb 2023). “Farm Consolidation: Three Implications for Farm Policy.” 36

• USDA ERS (Jan 2025). “Retail food price inflation subsided across most categories in 2024.” 33

Rich Hoffman

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Ohio is Not Moving Away From Trump: People who buy lottery tickets aren’t going to flip a Red State

(I wrote this before Trump signed that stupid pot executive order. I won’t write any more support for Trump, or speak favourably of him in any more videos. This article is still true, and is the case with Ohio in general. People can do what they want. For me, this is where I step off the Trump train. It was fun while it lasted. He said people from my side didn’t call him to warn him away from making that really dumb decision. Well, I warned him, and he did it anyway. So I’ve cooled off a lot on Trump and don’t feel like defending him any longer, as it’s a waste of my time. With that said, the facts of this article still hold. The Democrats are offering worse people, with even dumber ideas about pot and civilization in general. So the facts are the facts. But because of Trump’s all talk and no action on the essential things, and his alignment with pot, I am done with his administration. I took down all my Trump signs and got rid of all my Trump collectibles. I didn’t throw them away; I put them away and out of sight. They are part of history. But I am no longer as proud of Trump as I have been for 10 years. Needless to say, between him and the Democrats, Ohio will still pick him.)

Ohio didn’t suddenly sour on Trump because one online poll said so, and the breathless headlines that tried to turn a three-month, opt-in web survey into a pronouncement on the Buckeye State’s political soul tell you more about the media’s incentives than about voters. The story making the rounds came from Morning Consult’s December state-level approval tracker, which rolled up interviews from September through November and reported Ohio at 49% disapprove, 48% approve, 2% don’t know—net −1, same as Iowa. That is the entire basis for the “Ohio flips negative” narrative. It’s wafer-thin, within the plausible margin for any nonprobability sample, and it relies on online panel responses that are later weighted to look representative. If you know how Ohio votes, and who actually shows up on Election Day, the “flip” reads like a media convenience, not a signal. 1 2

Start with what the poll is, not what people pretend it is. Morning Consult’s state approval series is an online, quota‑- and sample-tracking program; they interview registered voters every day via a network of web panels, then weight those respondents to government benchmarks and past vote, and publish a three-month rolling average for each state. They’re transparent about it: a July 2025 methodology primer spells out the quota sampling, ranking, and the +/-1 to +/-6 point state-level margins, depending on population. In other words, these are not random samples drawn from a known frame of all Ohio voters; they are scaled, modeled estimates built from opt-in online interviews, aggregated across a quarter. That matters when the “movement” being hyped is a one-point net change. 3 4

If you want to understand why these numbers gyrate month to month, look at how they’re constructed. Nonprobability online panels can be excellent for speed and topic tracking; they also introduce two significant vulnerabilities in politics: coverage and self-selection. Every serious polling standards body has wrestled with this. AAPOR’s task force reports—one classic from 2013 and another extensive update in 2022—explain that opt-in online samples don’t give you known selection probabilities for respondents, so you rely on weighting and modeling to back into representativeness. That’s defensible for many uses, but it’s also where nonresponse and selection biases can sneak in, mainly when partisan participation differs across modes. The reports also catalog quality metrics to diagnose panel drift and response attentiveness; the punchline is that online panels can be made useful, but you must keep their inferential limits in mind. None of that supports turning a −1 net in a rolling average into “Ohio abandons Trump.” 5 6

It’s not just theory. The lived reality in Ohio has been three straight presidential cycles of double-digit rightward lean relative to the country and consistent Trump wins. In 2024, Trump carried Ohio by about eleven points—roughly 55% to 44%—adding more raw votes than he had in 2020, even as total turnout dipped slightly. That outcome reinforced the long glide from swing‑state status to reliable red terrain, with the GOP broadening margins across most counties. Anyone living here saw the on-the-ground coalition: working-age voters in exurbs and small industrial towns whose politics are shaped by affordability, energy, and cultural stability—not by who answers online surveys on their phone during lunch. That’s the fundamental disconnect between online approval tracking and honest Ohio elections. 7 8 9

Media framed the December tracker as a “flip” because it fits a larger storyline about Trump underwater in swing states and a blue wave threat in 2026, but step back and you see the core fact the headlines buried: even Morning Consult’s own map shows Trump net‑positive in 22 states, with Ohio and Iowa moving to net −1 inside an error band. When your method can swing a couple of points on panel composition changes or weighting updates, you don’t declare reversals—you caution readers. The Cincinnati Enquirer piece, which repeats the 49/48/2 figures, at least notes that margins vary by state and are derived from a three-month roll-up; it still presented the “flip” as a dramatic change without grappling with how fragile a one-point net is on an online panel. That’s precisely how suppression narratives work: take noisy readings, build a doom arc, hope the mood sticks. 1 10

Iowa and Ohio were singled out, but notice how the same tracker had Florida at 50/46 approval for Trump—net positive—and Pennsylvania at 47 approve/50 disapprove—basically what you would expect from a purple state. If you are trying to tell the story of collapsing support in former GOP strongholds, Florida’s numbers don’t help that narrative, so they get footnoted, while the two net −1 states get the spotlight. That’s selection by headline, not by method. And again, we’re talking about slim differences inside modeled margins: it’s a map designed for trend reading, not knife-edge pronouncements. 11

Now, to the core critique: online panels systematically underrepresent the kind of “silent majority” MAGA voters most common in Ohio. You can hear it in any shop floor breakroom: people who work fifty or sixty hours a week aren’t clicking survey invites, and they’re not keen on sharing opinions with strangers for points or coupons. AAPOR’s work on nonprobability sampling and online panels acknowledges the coverage problem and the dependence on weighting to correct for it. Pollsters like YouGov defend their panels as high‑quality with strong fraud detection and advanced weighting; they also admit that recruitment tilts toward the more digitally connected. Even when you calibrate to census and voter file benchmarks, you’re still correcting a nonrandom, volunteer sample. When the political signal you’re measuring is heavily driven by turnout and preference intensity among people who aren’t panel joiners, you can miss a lot of real-world support until ballots are counted. 12 13 6

There’s also the “shy” question. In 2016 and 2020, analysts argued about social desirability creating a hidden Trump vote. The academic record is mixed: a Yale list experiment found no evidence that Trump support was under-reported; FiveThirtyEight suggested shy voters weren’t the main driver of error. On the other hand, the USC Dornsife team showed systematic differences across modes, with self-administered polls showing higher Trump support than live interviewer surveys, consistent with a discomfort effect. The newest work on social pressure finds cross-pressured partisans on both sides, with the aggregate bias likely dampened. Put all that together, and I’d call the shy effect situational, not universal—more relevant where stigma is high, less relevant in places where Trump is a social norm. In Ohio, especially outside a handful of urban neighborhoods, there’s not much stigma in saying you’re for Trump. The bigger bias here is availability: who answers at all—online, by phone, or at the door. 14 15 16 17

When the media reach for “approval” to make a case about electoral strength, they also conflate two different animals. Approval is a temperature check about job performance; elections are about choice under constraints—issues, opponents, down-ballot dynamics, mobilization, and rules. Look at Emerson’s December 2025 Ohio survey: it used mixed mode (cellphone text/IVR plus an online panel), and found Trump approval 46/48 among Ohio voters—again a slight net negative—, but in the same poll, Democrats gained some ground in governor and Senate horse races as women consolidated for Amy Acton while men stayed with Vivek Ramaswamy. That’s not a collapse; it’s issue sorting. It tells you that campaign narratives and mobilization matter more than a two-point swing in approval. And even Emerson’s series acknowledged that, since August, Trump’s approval fell by three points while disapproval rose by six—but the economy remained the top issue (44%), immigration (8%), and education (7%)—a profile that has historically favored Republicans in Ohio. 18 19

There’s an additional wrinkle: turnout validation. When researchers link surveys to voter files, they consistently find that self-reported voting overstates actual turnout, and that this bias is disproportionately among the more educated and politically attentive—precisely the groups who are more likely to complete online polls. Harvard’s Kosuke Imai and UNC’s Ted Enamorado showed that once you validate against the voter file, inflated turnout claims drop, and the sample’s voting behavior looks more like the real electorate. If your online panel tilts toward habitual survey‑takers who also overreport civic activity, no amount of ranking thoroughly fixes the difference between “people who like to answer surveys” and “people who actually vote.” This is one reason approval and intention measures in opt-in panels can underperform in high‑salience elections—turnout composition swamps neat demographic weights. 20 21

So what can you actually learn from the Ohio “flip” month? Two things: first, the national mood in late fall 2025 went sour around affordability and government dysfunction; national aggregates showed Trump underwater at the end of the shutdown, with Gallup at 36% approve, NBC/YouGov, and Quinnipiac similarly negative. That atmospheric dip can tint state panels—even red ones—for a few weeks. Second, you should watch trajectories across methods, not a single three-month roll-up. Emerson’s Ohio series put Trump’s approval in the mid-40s; Morning Consult’s national tracker had him in the mid-40s, too; RealClear’s compilation showed a spread across outlets from the high 30s to the mid-40s. All consistent with a choppy environment, not with Ohio turning blue. 22 23

The media hook—“Ohio flips negative”—also ignores a simple, durable counter‑fact: elections here continue to break for Republicans, even when national approval wobbles. The 2024 map showed GOP dominance across nearly all counties, and state certification confirmed that Trump netted more votes than his 2020 Ohio total despite slightly lower turnout. That doesn’t happen in a state “flipping away”; it occurs in a state consolidating. 8 9

Let’s talk method faults more directly, because that’s the part that actually teaches you something worthwhile. Nonprobability online polling faces four recurring problems in U.S. electoral work:

First, coverage error. Not all likely voters are reachable or inclined to join web panels. Internet access is high, but panel participation has its own skews: time availability, digital comfort, and willingness to trade opinions for incentives. AAPOR’s reports and YouGov’s own methodology notes acknowledge this and lean on active sampling and propensity scoring to compensate. In practice, compensation helps; it does not erase differences in contactability. The working-age, shift-based voters who anchor Ohio’s GOP strength are precisely under-covered by panel culture. 12 5

Second, selection and nonresponse. Even if you invite a demographically balanced slice of your panel, the people who respond to political surveys at a given moment are not random. During periods of partisan enthusiasm, one side may “show up” more in surveys; during periods of disgust or cynicism, response rates fall unevenly. AAPOR’s 2022 task force walks through how response quality metrics can improve detection, but it doesn’t change the fact that in high‑polarization cycles, panel response is a mood-weighted sample. When affordability becomes the top issue—as it did in late 2025—people irritated with politics may be less inclined to answer; that alone can shift approval by 2 points without any underlying change in vote intent. 6

Third, mode effects. In political polling, live‑caller phone, IVR, text‑to‑web, and online panel surveys can produce different distributions, especially on sensitive questions. USC’s 2016 work showed online self-administered surveys yielded higher Trump support than interviewer-administered phone polls, consistent with social comfort patterns. In Ohio, where “Trump talk” is everyday in many communities, the mode effect probably flattens, but nationally, when media storms frame a narrative of controversy, online samples can absorb more activism from the left—people who like surveys and like being heard. That can tilt a short‑window tracker. 16

Fourth, translating approval to a vote. Approval is not a ballot. Ohio voters have repeatedly separated “job rating” judgments from vote choice, prioritizing affordability, energy prices, border policy, and cultural guardrails. Emerson’s December Ohio poll confirmed the issue stack: economy at 44%, then “threats to democracy” at 13%, healthcare at 11%, housing at 9%, immigration at 8%. That landscape, coupled with historic vote margins, suggests Republicans will remain favored unless they become complacent. A one-point net approval drift in a web panel doesn’t rewrite that reality. 18

Now, some readers will push back with other online trackers. Civiqs, for instance, had Ohio at 51% disapprove/44% approve of Trump in early December after the shutdown, and local coverage highlighted the dip among younger voters and college-educated respondents. That’s a data point; it shows how shifts in subgroup composition can affect approval. But even that report noted the split by age—50+ approve, 18–49 disapprove—and the gender gap. Translate that to turnout and geographic distribution—older voters vote more, and Ohio’s GOP strength is outside the big metros—and the electoral consequences look less dire than the topline suggests. 22

If you want Ohio-specific reassurance that the fundamentals haven’t changed, look at actual 2024 results and how they mapped across counties: red strength intensified almost everywhere; Democrats tightened only in a few suburban counties like Union, Clermont, and Delaware. The new coalition here is anchored in places the media rarely visits, and it shows up when it matters—not in online panels, but on paper ballots. That’s the silent majority phenomenon people talk about—not “shy,” just disinterested in surveys. 24

Two practical lessons for reading polls as we head into 2026:

First, weigh the method, not the headline. An online three-month tracker is useful for trend sense; don’t treat a one-point net as a regime change. Check whether other modes—mixed IVR/text, live‑caller statewide polls—show the same movement. In December, Emerson’s mixed-mode Ohio survey clocked Trump at 46/48 approval, consistent with Morning Consult’s national mid-40s; RealClear’s national batteries ranged from 39–46 approve, depending on the house effects. That triangulation tells you the mood was softer, not collapsing. 18 23

Second, remember the reality of turnout and election timing. Polls measure talking; elections measure doing. Pew’s “validated voter” work makes this plain: the people who say they vote are not always the ones who do, and compositional differences matter more in midterms. The Ohio electorate that shows up in 2026 will look more like 2024 Ohio voters than like a national online panel. That means more weight on the working class and the 50+ cohort, less on the disengaged younger respondents who fill out online surveys between classes. 25

Gas will be under $2 going into the next election cycle. What matters politically: perceived affordability. Voters judge by weekly spend—fuel, utilities, groceries—and by whether they feel their community is stabilizing or fraying. Trump’s rallies have leaned hard into affordability and border policy precisely because those resonate in Ohio. Even the USA Today roundups that touted the “flip” acknowledged that Florida remains net‑positive on Trump and that national averages ticked up slightly after the November low. If energy stays cheaper and wages steady, approval will follow—but more importantly, votes will hold. 11

Is the left trying to plant suppression narratives through poll headlines? Of course, that’s politics. The tactic is as old as Gallup: shape mood, depress the other side’s excitement, declare inevitability. The antidote is local reality: county maps, early vote patterns, precinct work, and actual field operations. Ohio Republicans have a structural advantage here; if they keep “same‑day, paper, ID” as a rallying cry and focus on precinct captains instead of Twitter fights, they’ll out-organize online sentiment. The 2024 map already proved the coalition is resilient. 8

For readers who want receipts—the footnotes that help you judge the robustness—here’s a compact reference set you can use whenever the following “flip” headline drops:

• Morning Consult’s tracker and its state-level methodology primer, detailing the three-month roll-up and weighting to CPS benchmarks. 2 3

• The Cincinnati Enquirer and USA Today write-ups that summarized the December update (the 49/48/2 Ohio figure and the context of 22 net‑positive states) are useful to see how reporters framed the same dataset. 1 11

• Emerson College Polling’s December 2025 Ohio survey, showing mixed‑mode data for gubernatorial and Senate matchups and Trump approval at 46/48 with issue salience led by the economy. Local TV and NBC4 coverage of that same poll adds clarity on sample size (n≈850, MOE ±3.3). 18 19

• Civiqs-based local coverage indicating a post-shutdown approval dip (Ohio 51 disapprove / 44 approve), with subgroup splits by age and education—worth reading but always weighed against turnout patterns. 22

• The election result confirmations: NBC News Ohio 2024 live results (55–44), county breakdowns from NBC4, and certification notes from Cleveland.com on turnout and vote totals. These ground everything. 7 8 9

• AAPOR’s nonprobability sampling reports (2013; updated task force on online panels and data quality metrics in 2022/2023). These are the “how the sausage is made” documents for opt-in online surveys. 5 6 26

• Mode‑effect and shy‑vote literature: Yale’s list experiment (no shy effect), FiveThirtyEight’s skeptical analysis, USC’s 2016 mode comparison, and recent work on social pressure showing cross-pressured partisans on both sides. Use these to push back when someone waves “shy voters” as either a cure-all or a fantasy. 14 15 16 17

• Turnout validation studies: linking surveys to voter files to debias self-reported voting, which underscores why online samples overrepresent habitual survey‑takers. 20

If you collect those sources, you’ll see how flimsy the “Ohio flips negative on Trump” headline is in methodological terms. It’s a cautious tracker’s small net move during a rough national month, not a realignment. And even inside the tracker’s own series, Florida and other GOP states remained net‑positive, with the number of above-water states still exceeding similar points in Trump’s first term. The narrative breaks under its own weight. 11

What should Ohio Republicans do with this? Treat it as a lesson in media jujitsu. When a web panel drifts two points, smile and keep organizing. Push precinct-level turnout plans, show up in the workplaces and churches where surveys don’t go, and keep beating the drum on affordability with receipts: local gas averages, utility bills, grocery basket comparisons over six months. You don’t need a poll to tell you what the checkout line tells you. And if you want a poll, prefer mixed‑mode, registration-based samples connected to the voter file (SSRS’s Voter Poll methods statement is a good model). Those designs reduce the self-selection bias of pure opt-in panels and tend to track the actual electorate more accurately. 27

Ohio didn’t flip. It yawned while national pundits tried to turn a rounding error into prophecy. The people who will decide 2026 are not filling out online “approval” pulse checks; they’re making shifts, fixing machines, and then voting. And when you look past the headlines to the county maps and the validation studies and the complex math of turnout, the story is the same one you’ve seen for three cycles: Ohio is MAGA country, not a trending blue lab experiment. Polls will keep trying to tell a different story because it sells. But the ballots—paper, same day, with ID—are what count. Those who have told the truth about Ohio for years now will continue to do so. 7 Ohio won’t turn away from Trump in exchange for the kind of people who buy lottery tickets and fill out online polls.

—

Sources for further reading (a handy set to clip under the essay body for footnoted context):

• Morning Consult state tracker and methodology: “Tracking Trump” and “Methodology Primer—State‑Level Tracking (July 2025).” 2 3

• Local coverage of the December Ohio/Iowa net‑one reading: Cincinnati Enquirer; USA Today overview. 1 11

• Emerson College Polling—Ohio (Dec. 6–8, 2025) plus NBC4/WLWT write-ups. 18 19 28

• Civiqs/Ohio coverage (Canton Repository). 22

• Ohio 2024: NBC News live results; county breakdown (NBC4); certification (Cleveland.com). 7 8 9

• AAPOR reports on nonprobability sampling & online panel quality. 5 6

• Mode effect & shy voter literature: Yale list experiment; FiveThirtyEight; USC Dornsife; Acta Politica social pressure paper. 14 15 16 17

• Turnout validation: Imai & Enamorado on linking surveys to voter files. 20

• SSRS Voter Poll methodology as an example of multi-frame, verified voter sampling. 27

Rich Hoffman

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Notes

Bibliography

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