I stood with my family at the Newark Earthworks recently, the Great Circle embracing us in its quiet immensity, and realized how perfectly the moment aligned with something I had waited decades to see. My grandson was there, wide-eyed as only a child can be in the presence of real mystery, and just days earlier, a remarkable new book had appeared on the visitor center shelves: John E. Hancock’s Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley, published by Smithsonian Books.[^1]
The golf course that had long sat atop the Octagon and Circle was gone, the land being returned to public use as a proper park befitting a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2023, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks—eight magnificent locations across southern Ohio—received that global recognition.[^2] These are not modest mounds. They are monumental works of landscape architecture whose geometric precision, astronomical alignments, and sheer coordinated effort rival the Pyramids or the Great Wall. The Newark complex alone required millions of hours of labor. The alignments track the Moon’s complex 18.6-year cycle, something that demands sustained, multi-generational observation. Yet for too long these places have been treated as local curiosities rather than one of the great architectural achievements of the ancient world.
Hancock, a retired professor of architecture from the University of Cincinnati, spent his later career studying these earthworks with an architect’s eye. His book is not a conspiracy volume. It is a beautifully produced, evidence-driven work that documents the sites, the advanced mathematics built into them, the trade networks that moved Lake Superior copper, Appalachian mica, and materials from even farther afield.[^3] The Old Copper Complex in the Great Lakes region dates back thousands of years before the Hopewell period, with native copper being cold-hammered into tools and traded across the continent.[^4] The book presents the facts without leaping into speculation, and it does so in a way that finally gives these places the serious treatment they deserve. I had been waiting forty years for someone to write exactly this book.
I attended Hancock’s lecture and book signing at Fort Ancient, another UNESCO site just a short drive from home in Liberty Township. The room was filled with the kind of people I naturally gravitate toward—archaeologists, geologists, anthropologists, and dedicated amateurs who have spent their lives in the field. We geeked out together over the relics and reconstructions. I asked the question many were thinking, but few were voicing: Is the aggressive implementation of NAGPRA—the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990—driven purely by tribal concerns, or has it become a political tool to advance a particular narrative about America’s founding?[^5] The knowing laughter and the honest answer (“a little bit of both”) that came back told me volumes. Tension hung in the room, but so did goodwill.
People who likely disagreed with me on politics, perhaps even those who might protest at the statehouse on other issues, kindly brought me my cowboy hat after the lecture when I had left it behind in my eagerness to get books signed. That small gesture captured what I value most: the ability to find common ground even when bigger differences exist. Hancock signed my copies, and I could sense him relaxing as our conversation progressed from guarded to more open. He has walked a difficult line, working with tribes, the Smithsonian, and UNESCO to secure recognition and preservation for these sites while producing work that respects the evidence without descending into fringe territory. I respect that. Preservation done right—think English Heritage’s stewardship of Stonehenge—benefits everyone. I am grateful these Ohio earthworks are receiving similar attention.
Yet the deeper paradoxes remain. The same institutions and political currents that celebrate the “indigenous achievement” visible in the earthworks are often the ones pushing to remove, repatriate, or, in some cases, effectively bury the very artifacts that might illuminate how such sophisticated knowledge arrived here. Trade in copper and other materials was continent-wide. The mathematics and astronomy required sustained observation and coordination across distances. The timing of the Hopewell period overlaps with the era of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the First and Second Temples. In biblical accounts, high priests and prophets engaged in practices at high places that involved altered states and direct communication with non-human intelligences. Similar mechanisms—shamanic traditions, sacred substances, ritual landscapes—appear in the Ohio Valley. The Holy Stones of Newark, discovered in the nineteenth century near these earthworks and now housed at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum, add another layer of uncomfortable questions, whether one accepts them as authentic or not.[^6]
I sat for a photograph in front of those stones, a dejected look on my face, because I sometimes wish I didn’t feel compelled to speak on these matters. I would rather play golf, enjoy time with my wife and grandchildren, or focus solely on business and family. But that is not how I am wired. My optimism and verbal facility push me to break down barriers and find common ground. I love academia and the sciences. I dislike seeing their ground seeded with ideological assumptions that prioritize narrative over evidence. These earthworks represent advanced knowledge whose source deserves honest inquiry, not erasure under the guise of repatriation.
This is precisely why I wrote The Politics of Heaven. The book explores the political motives and spiritual warfare at work when non-human intelligences interact with human cultures across time. The same questions arise in biblical history, in shamanic traditions, and now in the accelerating conversation around UAP disclosure. As we push toward the Moon and Mars through efforts like SpaceX, artifacts and anomalies there will make the same uncomfortable questions unavoidable. No repatriation policy or institutional control can bury evidence forever. The genie is out of the bottle.
Hancock’s books—the substantial Smithsonian volume and his compact Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Ohio—are excellent starting points. They are well-illustrated, durable, and filled with practical information for anyone who wants to visit. I encourage everyone within driving distance to do exactly that. Pack a picnic, take the family, and stand inside the Great Circle or walk the ridges at Fort Ancient. See the scale for yourselves. Let the mystery and the achievement speak directly.
I do not come to these subjects as an enemy of science or preservation—quite the contrary. I value the hard work of the people in that Fort Ancient lecture hall and the broader archaeological community. I refuse to accept that the only permissible story is the one that serves contemporary political ends. The earthworks of Ohio are far more significant than the official narrative has traditionally allowed. They point toward deeper truths about human potential, long-distance connection, and the ways knowledge has been transmitted across cultures and perhaps from beyond them.
That is the next great story. It is already reshaping how we understand our past, and it will only grow more urgent as humanity expands outward into the solar system. I intend to keep speaking and writing about it with the same optimism that has always driven me—to find common ground where possible, to ask the questions that matter, and to prepare people for revelations that institutions may prefer to keep quiet. The sites are magnificent. The books are timely. The truth, whatever form it ultimately takes, will not stay buried.
Footnotes
[^1]: John E. Hancock et al., Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley (Smithsonian Books, 2026).
[^2]: UNESCO World Heritage Center, “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks,” inscribed September 19, 2023.
[^3]: Hancock’s work emphasizes architectural and landscape analysis, including trade goods.
[^4]: The Old Copper Complex dates to approximately 6500–1000 BCE, with extensive trade networks across North America.
[^5]: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Public Law 101-601 (1990).
[^6]: The Newark Holy Stones (including the Decalogue Stone) were reportedly discovered by David Wyrick in 1860 near the Newark Earthworks and are housed at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton, Ohio. Scholarly consensus largely views them as 19th-century artifacts, though they continue to spark debate.
Bibliography
• Hancock, John E., et al. Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley. Smithsonian Books, 2026.
• Hancock, John E. Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Ohio. Ohio University Press, 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I just got back from a family trip that turned into one of those unexpected journeys where you set out thinking one thing and come away with something far deeper. We headed out to The Wilds in southeastern Ohio, that remarkable conservation center and safari-style wildlife park built on what used to be strip-mined land. I love zoos and conservation efforts in the right way—the kind that actually preserves species and land while recognizing that humans are part of the picture, not some parasitic afterthought. What I didn’t fully expect was how a side trip just south of there to see the remnants of the Big Muskie would crystallize so many thoughts I’ve been carrying about energy, innovation, capitalism, and the way the political left has twisted conservation into something that often works against human flourishing.
The Wilds sits on nearly ten thousand acres of reclaimed surface-mined land in Muskingum County, near Cumberland. It opened to the public in 1994 after the Central Ohio Coal Company, a subsidiary of American Electric Power (AEP), donated over 9,000 acres to the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals. That gift, combined with the reclamation work already underway, transformed what had been an industrial extraction site into one of North America’s largest conservation centers. We stayed right there at the new Hellbender RV Campground at The Wilds—beautiful sites on that same land that once fed coal into the power grid. From the campground, you can head into the park proper and experience open-air safaris rolling through habitats where giraffes, rhinoceroses, cheetahs, and other species roam across rolling terrain that, in its own way, echoes the African Serengeti. The landscape doesn’t look like the steep Allegheny foothills that were here before mining; the stripping and reclamation flattened and reshaped sections into wide, grassy vistas perfect for large herbivores. It’s not the exact ecology that existed pre-mining, but it’s productive, beautiful, and teeming with life in ways that serve conservation science and education every single day.
One afternoon, we drove the short distance south to Miner’s Memorial Park to see the Big Muskie bucket—the last major remnant of what was once the largest dragline excavator ever built. Standing there, walking inside that colossal bucket, touching the steel that once clawed through hundreds of feet of overburden, you can’t help but feel the scale of human ingenuity. The machine itself, officially a Bucyrus-Erie 4250-W, stood nearly twenty-two stories tall, weighed around thirteen and a half thousand tons, and swung a 220-cubic-yard bucket capable of lifting 325 tons of earth and rock in a single bite. The bucket alone is the size of a twelve-car garage or easily two full-size buses side by side. When it operated from 1969 to 1991, Big Muskie moved more than 483 million cubic yards of material, revealing high-sulfur coal seams that powered Ohio homes, industries, and the broader grid through plants like the Muskingum River Generating Station. It walked on massive shoes, its boom stretching over three hundred feet, built on site because nothing that big could be transported whole. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-four days a year, it did the work that surface mining made possible—safer in many respects than sending men deep underground into the old room-and-pillar mines, and efficient enough to supply the energy that built modern Ohio.
I grew up in the seventies and eighties, hearing the news coverage of strip mining in Ohio. It was always framed as an environmental catastrophe—radical voices and mainstream outlets alike talking about the “rape of the land,” the destruction of precious topsoil, acid mine drainage polluting streams, and corporate greed tearing up the earth for profit. Central Ohio was a focal point of that conversation. You couldn’t miss it. The narrative was clear: this was primitive, destructive, something that enlightened environmental regulation would eventually rein in and correct. And regulation did come—the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 imposed new standards for contouring, topsoil replacement, and revegetation. I’m not against sensible environmental protections. What concerns me is when those protections become a vehicle for anti-capitalist ideology that ignores the human benefits of energy production and pretends that the companies doing the actual work weren’t already innovating reclamation methods long before politicians and bureaucrats showed up to take credit or impose penalties.
Because here’s what you see when you stand at the Big Muskie bucket and then drive back to The Wilds: the power company that operated the machine also owned vast stretches of the land. They extracted the coal—formed over three hundred million years in ancient swamps and forests—and turned it into usable energy that lit homes, ran factories, and powered the machines that built the modern world. Then they participated in turning the worked-out land into something new and valuable. The Wilds exists in large part because of that private-sector decision to donate thousands of acres rather than walk away or fight endless legal battles. The reclamation wasn’t just compliance; it became an opportunity. What had been stripped to fuel progress was reshaped into a world-class center for wildlife conservation, research, and public education. You can sit at the Overlook Cafe or Terrace Grill at The Wilds, look out over the valley at giraffes and rhinos moving through grasslands that mining and reclamation made possible, and eat a good meal with running water and modern conveniences while the animals graze below. Try doing that with a picnic basket on raw, unrestored ground in the middle of nowhere and tell me which approach actually serves both people and wildlife better.
That contrast hit me hard. The same companies the political left loves to demonize as destroyers of the planet were the ones who made The Wilds possible. AEP’s Central Ohio Coal Company didn’t just comply with later regulations; they were already engaged in preservation and restoration efforts. The environmental movement often attaches itself to these stories after the fact, claiming moral victory while ignoring that the capital, the engineering, and the willingness to take risks came from the private sector. Without the coal extraction that powered Ohio’s growth, without the wealth created by that enterprise, there would have been far less capacity to fund or even imagine large-scale conservation projects like this one. It’s the classic pattern: innovators and producers do the hard work, create the surplus, and then the critics arrive to regulate, tax, and re-narrate history as a story of exploitation that only enlightened government could fix.
I thought about that same dynamic when we talk about today’s energy battles, particularly around nuclear power in Ohio. The two plants—Davis-Besse near Toledo and Perry near Cleveland—have long been critical to the state’s grid. I’ve heard the numbers bandied about; depending on the year and how you count, they contribute a substantial share of reliable baseload power, something in the range of ten to perhaps fifteen percent or more of Ohio’s electricity at times, and historically more when coal was dominant. The exact percentage varies in conversation, but the point is that they matter enormously for grid stability. In a state where natural gas now supplies roughly half or more of generation and coal has fallen sharply from its peak, nuclear provides the steady, high-capacity-factor power that intermittent sources can’t match. Yet for years we’ve watched political attacks from the Obama and Biden eras—subsidies fights, regulatory pressure, public narratives framing nuclear as dangerous or unnecessary—while the same voices rarely offer a credible, scalable replacement that keeps the lights on and the economy growing. It’s the Big Muskie story all over again: paint the producers as villains, ignore the benefits ordinary people receive every time they flip a switch or charge a device, and push policies that ultimately raise costs or reduce reliability for everyone, especially working families.
You see the same pattern in how the left approaches energy restriction as a tool of control. Whether it’s coal in the seventies or nuclear today, the rhetoric is that these things are existential threats to the planet and that only by limiting human access to abundant, affordable energy can we “save” the Earth. But energy is what lifts the burden of labor from human beings. A person hauling water by hand all day isn’t freer or more virtuous than one who turns a tap and uses the saved time to build, create, or rest. Electricity powers the data centers, training the AI models that will transform medicine, logistics, and discovery. It powers the factories, hospitals, schools, and farms that feed billions. The notion that we should all retreat to some primitive campfire existence—sitting around telling stories about pagan gods while the productive capacity of civilization withers—isn’t conservation; it’s a recipe for poverty and stagnation dressed up as virtue. The environmental movement has deep strains of this anti-human thinking, sometimes explicit in population-control rhetoric or degrowth economics that treat human ingenuity and consumption as the problem rather than the solution.
Standing inside that Big Muskie bucket puts it in perspective. That machine represented the best engineering of its era applied to the problem of extracting energy from the ground efficiently and at scale. It wasn’t pretty. It changed the landscape. But it also delivered the energy that made post-war Ohio prosperous, that kept factories running, that let families in Middletown and across the state live with lights, refrigeration, and opportunity their grandparents could only dream of. The coal it uncovered took three hundred million years to form; we used it in decades to build a civilization. Then the same enterprise that did the extracting turned around and helped create The Wilds on the worked land. That’s not destruction followed by cosmetic repair. That’s productive use followed by genuine restoration and the creation of new value. It’s what real conservation looks like when it’s driven by people who understand both the land and the ledger.
I kept coming back to the parallel with the fight over slavery in this country. Republicans led the effort to abolish it, at enormous cost in blood and treasure, while many Democrats and the broader establishment either defended the institution or dragged their feet. After the war, it was Republicans who pushed the early civil rights amendments and enforcement. Yet somewhere along the line, the narrative flipped, and today the party that fought to end slavery is often painted as the problem while the party whose members founded the KKK and enforced Jim Crow for generations gets to claim the moral high ground on race. The pattern repeats with energy and conservation. The companies and workers who built the power grid, engineered machines like Big Muskie, extracted the resources that industrialized the nation, and then reclaimed the land for new uses—these are treated as villains. The activists and politicians who arrived later, often with no skin in the game and plenty of opportunity for moral posturing, get to define “environmentalism” as whatever restricts the producers. It’s the same rhetorical capture, and it serves the same underlying goal: concentrating power in institutions that claim to speak for the Earth while actually limiting human potential.
At The Wilds, you see the better path. Capital enterprise created the wealth and the technology. It extracted the resource that powered progress. It then donated the land and supported the transformation into a living classroom for conservation science. The restaurant with the view, the safari vehicles, the research programs, the campground where families like mine can stay on the very ground that once fed coal into the grid—all of it exists because someone took the risk, did the work, made the profit, and then chose to leave the place better in meaningful ways. The strip mining didn’t “destroy” the land in any permanent sense; it changed it, and human ingenuity changed it again into something that now supports species that never lived here naturally in these numbers. That’s the story of civilization itself: we impose order and purpose on raw nature, we extract what we need to thrive, and when we’re at our best, we restore and improve rather than consume and abandon.
I think about my own work and the themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business—the idea that you impose your will on circumstances rather than waiting for perfect conditions, that resilience and disciplined action turn challenges into advantages. The men who ran Big Muskie didn’t have the luxury of modern environmental impact statements or endless public comment periods. They had a job to do: get the coal out safely and efficiently to keep the power flowing. They did it with machines that still boggle the mind. Then the next generation of the same enterprise looked at the worked land and saw not a scar but an opportunity for something new. That’s the gunfighter spirit applied to energy and land use. You don’t retreat from the necessary work because critics call it ugly. You do it well, you do it responsibly within reason, and you leave the place positioned for the next chapter.
Visiting both sites in the same trip—the living conservation success at The Wilds and the monumental tool that helped create the conditions for it—ought to be required for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about energy policy in this country. You can’t stand inside that bucket, read the history of how much earth it moved and how much power it ultimately enabled, then walk the safari trails where rhinos and giraffes now graze on reclaimed ground, and still believe the simple story that extraction equals destruction and only government regulators plus activists equal salvation. The truth is more interesting and more hopeful. Human beings using reason, capital, and engineering solved the problem of energy scarcity that had kept our ancestors poor and short-lived. Along the way, we made mistakes, as every generation does. But we also built the surplus that lets us fund conservation at scales that previous societies could never have imagined. The Wilds is proof of that. The Big Muskie bucket is proof of the tool that made part of it possible.
We’re in a moment right now where the same arguments are playing out over nuclear power, over natural gas development, over any serious attempt to expand reliable generation to meet the exploding demands of AI data centers and electrification. The political left still reaches for the same rhetorical weapons: portray the producers as greedy or reckless, emphasize risks while downplaying benefits, offer no realistic replacement that maintains or increases living standards, and treat any expansion of human productive capacity as inherently suspect. It’s the Big Muskie fight with better public relations. The companies that actually keep the grid running—whether legacy coal operators that have reclaimed land or the nuclear fleet that provides steady power—are doing the real work. The activists protesting outside are often performing for an audience that has never had to keep the lights on for millions of people or balance a multi-billion-dollar capital investment against regulatory uncertainty.
I came away from this trip more convinced than ever that the path forward isn’t to demonize the enterprises that built our energy foundation or to pretend that conservation requires halting human progress. It’s to recognize that the best conservation often flows from the same innovative, risk-taking, profit-seeking institutions that extract resources productively in the first place. The Wilds wouldn’t exist without the coal mining that preceded it. The power that lets us enjoy air-conditioned homes, smartphones, and yes, even the electric vehicles some environmentalists champion, comes from somewhere. Right now, a significant portion of that, somewhere in Ohio, includes the steady output of our nuclear plants. We should be building more of that kind of reliable, high-density energy, not tearing it down under the guise of protecting a planet that has survived far worse than human industry and will continue long after our current debates are forgotten.
If you ever find yourself in southeastern Ohio, do what we did. Spend a few days at Hellbender Campground or one of the other lodging options at The Wilds. Take the open-air safari and watch animals that have no business being in Ohio thriving on land that mining and reclamation made suitable for them. Then drive south a short way to Miner’s Memorial Park and stand inside the Big Muskie bucket. Touch the steel. Imagine the machine walking across the landscape, the bucket biting into the earth, the coal coming out to feed the boilers that kept the grid alive. Talk to the exhibits about the workers who ran it and the land that came after. Then go back to The Wilds and have lunch at the overlook with a view of the valley. You’ll see, as I did, that the story of energy in America isn’t a simple morality play of villains and heroes. It’s the story of human beings using their minds and their tools to turn raw materials into civilization, and then, at our best, using the surplus to restore and improve what we touched.
That trip reminded me why I keep returning to these themes in my writing and podcast. The battles over energy, over land use, over what counts as “conservation”—they’re never just about science or engineering. They’re about whether we believe human beings have the right and the capacity to shape the world productively, or whether we accept a vision that treats us as a problem to be managed and reduced. The Big Muskie and The Wilds together make the case for the former. They show what free people and free enterprise can accomplish when they’re allowed to work, to risk, to profit, and to give back in ways that actually endure. Everything else is commentary.
If you’ve read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you know the mindset I’m talking about—imposing order and purpose on circumstances rather than surrendering to them. That’s what built the machine, that’s what powered the grid, and that’s what turned a mined landscape into a living conservation success. We need more of that spirit, not less. The age of disclosure is here, and understanding the politics of heaven—the deeper forces behind the attacks on human energy and human life—matters more than ever. But for today, see the bucket and the park. Stand where the work was done and where the restoration happened. You’ll come away with a clearer head and a stronger conviction that the future belongs to those who build, not those who merely protest.
Footnotes
1. Specifications and operational history of Big Muskie drawn from contemporary engineering records and historical summaries maintained by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources at Miner’s Memorial Park.
2. Details on the land gift from Central Ohio Coal Company (AEP subsidiary) to the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals and the subsequent development of The Wilds come from the official history published on thewilds.org.
3. Ohio electricity generation mix data for recent years (natural gas dominant at approximately 50-59%, coal around 20-22%, nuclear from the two plants contributing roughly 10-13% of net generation) sourced from the U.S. Energy Information Administration state analysis and related reports covering the 2024-2026 periods.
4. Bucket capacity, machine weight, boom length, and total material moved by Big Muskie confirmed across multiple engineering and historical sources, including Bucyrus-Erie records and Ohio historical markers.
5. Description of current visitor experience at the Big Muskie bucket exhibit, including ability to stand inside the 220-cubic-yard bucket, based on Ohio State Parks and Ohio DNR public information as of 2025-2026.
6. Information on Hellbender RV Campground at The Wilds, its location on reclaimed land, and amenities, including safari discounts, from the official The Wilds website and 2025-2026 opening announcements.
7. Dining options at The Wilds (Overlook Cafe / Terrace Grill) with views over animal habitats confirmed via official site descriptions of food service and visitor experiences.
8. Broader context on surface mining reclamation practices pre- and post-1977 SMCRA, and the role of private land donation in creating large conservation areas, drawn from Ohio coal industry historical analyses and The Wilds timeline.
9. Recent developments regarding power purchase agreements for Ohio nuclear plants (Davis-Besse and Perry) supporting AI/data center demand, including Meta agreements announced in 2026, reported in industry and local news sources.
10. Philosophical and historical parallels regarding narratives around energy production, conservation, and political rhetoric are interpretive commentary grounded in the observable outcomes at the sites visited and long-term patterns in U.S. energy and environmental policy debates.
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Miner’s Memorial Park & Big Muskie’s Bucket.” ohiodnr.gov. Detailed visitor information and historical markers on the machine and reclamation.
• The Wilds. “History.” thewilds.org/history. Official timeline, including the land gift from Central Ohio Coal Company and the transformation of the mined land.
• U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Ohio – State Energy Profile Analysis.” eia.gov/states/OH/analysis. 2024-2026 data on electricity generation mix, nuclear contribution, natural gas, and coal shares.
• Ohio State Parks / Ohio DNR. Social media and site posts regarding the Big Muskie bucket as a tourist attraction and an engineering landmark (2025).
• The Wilds. “Hellbender RV Campground.” thewilds.org/hellbender-rv-campground. Details on the new campground on reclaimed land and visitor offerings.
• The Wilds. “Food and Shopping.” thewilds.org/food-and-shops. Descriptions of Overlook Cafe and Terrace Grill with habitat views.
• Various contemporary reports on AEP / Central Ohio Coal Company operations and reclamation achievements, including historical coal industry studies from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
• Industry announcements regarding Vistra / Energy Harbor nuclear plants and 2026 power purchase agreements with Meta for Ohio nuclear output supporting data centers.
• Historical context on Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) of 1977 and its implementation in Ohio coal regions, drawn from state and federal regulatory histories.
This essay reflects my direct observations from the family trip, historical research, and long-standing convictions about energy, innovation, and the proper relationship between human enterprise and conservation. The views expressed are my own, grounded in what I saw on the ground and in what the record shows actually works.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business back in 2021 because I had grown weary of hearing about Japanese warrior codes every time someone discussed Lean manufacturing or the Toyota Production System. Those approaches contain real value—Toyota’s emphasis on eliminating waste, Just-in-Time production, and continuous improvement through Kaizen has influenced industries worldwide. But as an American who spent decades in manufacturing and aerospace, applying those lessons while teaching teams how to solve problems on the fly, I felt our culture needed its own framework. We have our own warrior tradition, one rooted in self-reliance, quick decision-making under pressure, and the willingness to face risk head-on. That is the spirit of the gunfighter—the fast-draw competitor who practices until shooting from the hip becomes an expression of hard-won skill and confidence rather than recklessness.
The book is not aimed at legacy corporations seeking incremental tweaks to maintain the status quo. It is for entrepreneurs and individuals who want to build something real in a world full of obstacles. I drew heavily from the sport of fast draw, which I have long seen as a perfect metaphor for high-stakes business: when you are truly skilled, you can act decisively and accurately without hesitation. Chapters explore placing bets wisely, managing risk, and understanding that real success often means operating as a “ghost”—staying agile and unencumbered by titles, corner offices, or attachments that others can target in an effort to gain control over you.
This year, 2026, has brought several moments that reminded me why the message matters. People have approached me in everyday places like Costco in Liberty Township—recognizing me from the blog, videos, or the book itself. They want to talk, ask for a signature, or share how the ideas resonated with them. One particularly memorable encounter came from the CEO of a large company a few states away who had read the book and flew in specifically to find me. He made a substantial offer: come consult for several months, coach his workforce on the gunfighter mindset, and help reshape the culture. It was the kind of money that would make most people in my position jump with enthusiasm. I said no.
I critique consultants throughout the book, and I stand by that. Not because every single one is worthless, but because too many function as the “dandies” or “bounty hunters” in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven—profiting from the legends and hard work of others without ever stepping into the real fight themselves. The gunfighters are the ones who face the target, put their lives or reputations on the line, and deliver results. I have always tried to live as the latter. Turning down that opportunity was not about rejecting money; it was about staying consistent with the principles I laid out. I am not racing to stuff a retirement account before time runs out. I have a different measure of success, one shaped by decades of experience and a marriage built on integrity.
That integrity traces back to a moment early in my relationship with my wife, nearly forty years ago. I was selling cars as a young man—good at it, making strong commissions in a cutthroat environment. One Saturday, I had an older, retired customer ready to buy a truck, paying $5,000 over sticker price, all cash. The finance department balked at the markup, but the sales manager pushed me to close it anyway. I had the man’s keys, had built genuine trust over hours of conversation, and convinced him to walk across the street to withdraw the cash. My future wife showed up at the lot right as I was finishing the deal. I thought she would be impressed by the big sale. Instead, she was deeply upset that I had taken advantage of an honest man. She came from a different background—modeling, country club circles—and had seen plenty of “successful” men who measured life by mansions, boats, and flashy deals. She wanted none of it. She told me it was the Corvette I was about to buy or her; she would not marry someone who operated that way. I walked the deal back, took the ethical path, and my commission was cut in half. I left that job soon after. We have been married ever since, and that decision remains one of the best of my life. It taught me that real leverage comes from living in a way your spouse and family can respect—not from cornering every last dollar or using dollars to gain control of people.
These same values run through the book and my daily work. I have encountered “safety tyrants” and sandbaggers in manufacturing facilities—people who hide behind compliance rules, slow output to protect their own power or laziness, and attack anyone who pushes for genuine improvement. I have seen engineers and managers who opposed efficiency gains, only for the pressure of their own schemes to catch up with them later. I do not celebrate their misfortunes, but I also do not mourn those who tried to destroy my teams or me. When you face real opposition in business—or life—you square your shoulders like Andrew Jackson in his duels or Theodore Roosevelt finishing a speech with a bullet in his chest. You do not cry over the grave of someone who would have put you in one. Forgiveness in the theological sense is between them and God; my job is to defend what matters and keep moving forward.
This mindset is not just for business. It applies to politics, culture, and how we build any healthy organization or society. Capitalism, properly understood, rewards those willing to initiate, risk, and deliver—not the parasites who live off others’ efforts. I see parallels in today’s corporate world and broader culture: too much fear disguised as safety, too many incentives to sandbag rather than excel. SpaceX stands out as a counterexample—lean, confident, and willing to accept calculated risk in pursuit of big goals. That spirit is what America’s economy needs more of in the years ahead, especially as entrepreneurs step up in the current environment.
I am not closed to opportunities, and I am grateful when people find value in the work. Some have bought copies in bulk to share with their teams. The book was written so readers can engage with the ideas independently—the bullet-point summaries at the end of each chapter help reinforce the key lessons without needing me in the room. Royalties still arrive occasionally, and my wife and I enjoy turning a good check into a nice dinner. That feels honest and sustainable. Turning a large consulting gig into another form of selling out would betray the gunfighter ethos I wrote about.
The stories and principles in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business come from real experience—car lots, stamping plants, aerospace programs, and the hard lessons learned alongside a supportive wife who keeps me honest. They are meant for those with the guts to start companies, face opposition, and build something lasting. If you have not read it, I believe you will find it useful, whether for your own ventures or simply understanding how to navigate a world full of safety tyrants and bounty hunters. The gunfighter spirit is not about recklessness; it is about skill, ethics, and the courage to act when others hide behind rules. That is the skeleton key I aimed to offer to Western civilization and American enterprise. I still carry it with me every day and live by every word. Many are finding those words very valuable, and I’m glad to hear it. Thanks for the opportunities. But to me, opportunities are measured in more than just money, even though this offer was for a lot of it. The gunfighter still has to take bullets and to bite bullets, and be willing to deliver them.
Footnotes
[^1]: For deeper context on the Toyota Production System and its philosophical roots, see the official Toyota documentation and historical analyses of Lean principles.
[^2]: The fast-draw elements tie directly into the book’s core metaphor for high-skill, decisive action in business.
[^3]: “Ghosting it” is a recurring theme in the book, emphasizing agility over visible power structures that invite opposition.
[^4]: Unforgiven (1992) provides a sharp distinction between authentic gunfighters and those who profit from their stories.
[^5]: Jackson’s duels and Roosevelt’s resilience under fire illustrate the willingness to absorb damage and continue the fight—qualities essential in competitive environments.
[^6]: Safety culture critiques often highlight tensions between compliance and production pressures; see industry analyses on risk-taking and over-normalization of caution.
[^7]: These personal stories informed multiple chapters on ethics, decision-making under pressure, and long-term leverage through integrity.
[^8]: References to SpaceX reflect ongoing observations of lean, risk-tolerant innovation versus traditional corporate caution.
Bibliography
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021. (Core text referenced throughout.)
Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press, 1988.
Liker, Jeffrey K. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. McGraw-Hill, 2004.
Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production. Free Press, 1990.
Eastwood, Clint, dir. Unforgiven. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1992.
Brands, H.W. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. Anchor Books, 2006.
Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. Random House, 2001.
Additional sources:
• Toyota Motor Corporation official materials on the Toyota Production System and Kaizen philosophy.
• Industry reports and critiques on safety culture in manufacturing (e.g., discussions of production vs. compliance tensions).
• Personal observations from decades in aerospace, manufacturing leadership, and entrepreneurial consulting scenarios.
• Cross-references to forthcoming work, The Politics of Heaven, for broader philosophical and historical context on spiritual warfare, ethics, and societal structures.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been saying it since the very first reports trickled out of Wuhan in early 2020. COVID was not some natural spillover from a wet market. It was a bioweapon. A genetically engineered pathogen, gain-of-function research run amok, or worse, deliberately released or allowed to escape from a Chinese lab with deep ties to our own institutions. China knew exactly what they were doing. Dr. Fauci knew. Bill Gates and the globalist crowd pushing their economic reset knew. They used a bioweapon to scare the living daylights out of people, drive them into their homes, shut down the economy, stop the cars, ground the planes, and collapse small businesses while the big players consolidated power. It was the ultimate progressive playbook dressed up as public health. And I said so from day one, when saying it got me labeled a dangerous conspiracy theorist who would get people killed.
Now here we are in 2026, and the vindication keeps rolling in like waves on the shore. Just the other day, I sat listening to Trish Regan’s broadcast—she used to be all over Fox News and now runs her own sharp podcast—and she laid out the significance of Tulsi Gabbard’s parting disclosure as Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi, a Democrat until about five minutes ago in political terms, dropped declassified intelligence showing long-standing U.S. government funding for more than 120 biolabs across over 30 countries, including critical sites in Ukraine. These facilities worked with dangerous pathogens and, in some cases, engaged in gain-of-function research, with minimal oversight. The documents highlighted vulnerabilities in Ukraine amid the war—labs that could be seized, damaged, or have their materials fall into the wrong hands. Previous administrations and figures like Fauci had lied or covered it up, dismissing concerns as Russian propaganda. Tulsi called it out plainly: the information had been intentionally withheld, and anyone who spoke up was attacked. She was on her way out the door, yet she chose to release it. That takes a certain kind of courage, and I respect it.
I have watched these same tactics play out for decades with the alien question, the UFO disclosures, ancient interactions, the Galactic Federation lore, and all the species that have apparently been engaging humanity throughout history. The deep state—call it the intelligence community, the permanent bureaucracy, whatever label you prefer—uses the same playbook—first, ridicule. Lump serious inquiry in with Bigfoot sightings and ghost stories so nobody takes you seriously. Then conceal. Classify everything, control the narrative through compliant media, flood the zone with official denials while quietly advancing programs behind the curtain. When that fails, deploy fear: death counts on every screen, experts in white coats telling you the sky is falling, social pressure to comply or be cast out. They perfected it with the alien cover-up. They deployed it masterfully with COVID. And now the receipts on the biolabs are coming out the same way.
Let me take you back to my office in the Cincinnati area, right here in Liberty Township overlooking the Great Miami River valley. A high-powered gentleman, a few days ago. This was not some MAGA die-hard or Trump loyalist from the early days. This man had voted for Hillary Clinton and then for Joe Biden. He moves in serious circles, makes real money, and had just come from an event with Steve Hilton out of California—Steve was at my place a few years back when he was weighing a run for governor, and we were all talking about Vivek Ramaswamy’s rising star in Ohio politics. This visitor brought a copy of one of my books, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and asked me to sign it. He walked my shelves, the way people do when they come by—hundreds of volumes, many signed by the authors themselves. He spotted RFK Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race sitting right there. He pointed at it and said something like, “You’ve been talking about this for years, Hoffman. I used to think you were the crazy guy in Cincinnati who goes on about aliens and Bigfoot and still somehow gives the best political and business advice around here.” He thanked me for supporting Vivek early, for hosting events at my place of business when it was still a toxic environment for that kind of association in some circles. He wanted the signature so he could put it on his own shelf and tell people, “I know that guy. He was saying this stuff long before it was fashionable.”
That conversation stayed with me. Because he was right about the reputation hit. When you speak truth ahead of the curve on something as big as a engineered pandemic or hidden bioweapons programs, or when you connect the dots to ancient alien interactions and reverse-engineered technology that ended up in our cell phones and biometric tracking systems, people put up with you because the other stuff—the finance talk, the school issues, the endorsements for local races, the gunfighter philosophy of imposing your will on circumstances—still delivers value. They chuckle at the “crazy” parts over dinner and come back for the sharp analysis. Now those same people are showing up wanting signed books and quiet conversations about how it is all starting to come true on the evening news. I have signed more of my books in 2026 than at any point in my writing career. People are now eager to let others know they know me, or at least have had a relationship with me.
I have been out in front of this longer than most. Back in 2020, while the cable news was running wall-to-wall death counts and governors were locking down churches and businesses on talking points that sounded lifted straight from World Economic Forum notes, I was calling it a bioweapon. Gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded in part through channels connected to our own NIH and EcoHealth Alliance, with Fauci’s fingerprints all over the oversight—or lack thereof. The virus was engineered to jump species in ways natural coronaviruses do not. Our immune systems had no prior exposure. That is not how Mother Nature usually works when she wants to thin a herd. That is laboratory work. China knew. Elements inside our own government knew or should have known. And instead of transparency, we got fear porn designed to keep everybody home, off the roads, out of the churches, and economically paralyzed while the architects of the Great Reset advanced their platform for controlling emissions, populations, and human behavior under the cover of crisis.
The same strategy they used to conceal the full scope of alien interactions and recovered technology for generations. I have been saying for decades that we have interacted with multiple species—Greys, Nordics, Reptilians, Insectoids, and others tied to larger structures like the Galactic Federation narratives that float around in the serious literature. Ancient history is full of it if you read the suppressed texts: the Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, the stories of giants, watchers, and divine rebellions. The technology that showed up in our pockets—cellular communication, advanced tracking without needing a physical chip because biometrics and data fusion do it better, even certain lines of biological research—did not appear in a vacuum. We learned by watching, by interacting, and by reverse-engineering where we could. The same institutions that hid that history turned around and used analogous methods to hide the biolabs network and the true origins of COVID. Classify it. Ridicule the messengers. Flood the information space with controlled narratives. Threaten careers and reputations. It is the same operating system.
Consider the personal marker I have from those early days. I was in Orlando, in a packed Frontier concourse at the airport, doing a Teams conference call because flights were overbooked and the place was a sea of humanity—people sleeping on the floor, crammed into every seat, lines everywhere. Chinese visitors heading to Disney and other attractions were thick in the crowds. I remember thinking, even then, that this was the perfect vector. If something dangerous had been smuggled or released, this was how it would spread fast across the country. I caught a nasty cold on that trip, the kind that lingers and makes you wonder. Two weeks later, the official word started leaking out. I knew in my gut what it was. Anybody paying attention with a working brain could see the implications. Yet the apparatus swung into action: social-distancing theater, business closures that crushed the little guy while Amazon and the big platforms thrived, church doors locked on orders that had more to do with behavioral control than with epidemiology. Gavin Newsom and others were reading from the same script. It was never about your health. It was about demonstrating that they could shut the world down if they wanted to.
RFK Jr. laid out much of this years ago in The Wuhan Cover-Up. He wrote it like a prosecutor building a case—documenting the gain-of-function work, the funding flows, the conflicts of interest, the suppression of the lab-leak hypothesis, and the broader bioweapons arms-race context. Powerful people with billion-dollar legal teams could have come after him if the claims were baseless. They did not, because the smoke was coming from a real fire. Now Tulsi’s disclosures add fresh declassified layers: over 120 facilities, many still or previously doing dangerous pathogen research with taxpayer money, scattered across the globe, Ukraine among them. The war there provided convenient cover and chaos to keep it all hidden. We had effectively outsourced or diffused critical biological research sovereignty to places with weaker regulations and then acted surprised when things leaked or got weaponized in the information war. The same people who told us the lab leak was a conspiracy theory are the ones now scrambling as the documents surface.
This is why disclosure matters on multiple levels. You cannot understand what is happening in the earthly realm of politics, finance, public health, and technological control unless you grasp the deeper politics of heaven. There is a spiritual dimension to these rebellions against human sovereignty and flourishing. The population agendas, the fear-based control systems, the elite fascination with managing demographics and behavior through crisis—these echo older patterns of divine rebellion, watcher-class interventions, and the ongoing struggle between forces that seek to diminish or manage humanity and those that affirm human agency, responsibility, and connection to the Creator. My book The Politics of Heaven explores exactly that terrain: a treasure hunt through scripture, history, archaeology, and suppressed knowledge that connects biblical conspiracies, giants, demons, and modern manifestations in everything from media degradation to bioweapons programs to the concealment of non-human intelligence interactions. When you see the same institutions lying about alien presence for 80 years and then about biolabs and pandemic origins, you start to recognize that the pattern is not accidental. It operates from a coherent worldview that treats human beings as manageable livestock rather than as image-bearers with moral agency.
The warrior ethos I have written about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and lived in aerospace program management and local activism applies here, too. You impose your will on the circumstances. You do not yield to the social pressure or the reputation cost when the truth is in front of you. You stay armed—literally and intellectually—with facts, with relationships across the aisle, with the willingness to host the Steve Hiltons, the Vivek events, and the high-powered visitors who used to vote the other way but now want to understand why the crazy guy was right. Resilience is not abstract. It is launching model rockets with your nine-year-old grandson on a windy, rainy day, troubleshooting in the field, recovering the ones that drift, and teaching him that you do not quit because the environment is hostile. The same principle scales to speaking uncomfortable truths about bioweapons programs and ancient interactions when the culture wants you to stay quiet.
People ask me now, after years of the sidelong glances, whether I am enjoying the “I told you so” moment. There is a little end-zone dance in it, I will not lie. But mostly, there is a sober recognition that the same apparatus is still running. Tulsi released what she could on her way out. RFK Jr. is in a position at Health and Human Services where real reform on these issues might finally have a chance. The coalition that brought Trump back includes former Democrats, independents, and truth-tellers who crossed lines because the institutional rot became too obvious. Yet the deeper disclosure—full transparency on both the biolabs network and the non-human intelligence interactions—remains incomplete. The Politics of Heaven demands we keep pushing. Because these are not isolated scandals. They are connected fronts in a long war over who controls the narrative of human history and human future.
I have watched the media evolution since the 1970s and 1980s, when love songs and family themes still dominated the airwaves, into the hedonistic, occult-tinged, rage-filled degradation that followed. That cultural attack was spiritual too. It prepared the ground for a population that would accept lockdowns, digital tracking, and expert-driven behavioral control without much pushback. The same spirit that sought to desacralize human relationships and turn people into isolated consumers also wanted them to be terrified in their homes during an engineered crisis. Connecting those dots is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is what the gunfighter and the Overman cultivate.
So here is the record, set down plainly. I said in 2020 that COVID was a bioweapon released or leaked from gain-of-function work with Chinese and Western institutional involvement. I said the fear campaign and economic shutdown followed a pre-planned script that had nothing to do with protecting lives and everything to do with resetting power structures. I said the concealment tactics were identical to those used on the alien question for generations—ridicule, classification, narrative control, and selective disclosure only when forced. I pointed to the biolabs in Ukraine and elsewhere as evidence of diffused sovereignty and dangerous research that could be exploited. I connected it to the broader spiritual and historical context in The Politics of Heaven. And I kept saying it when it was costly to my social and professional standing in certain rooms.
Now the documents are surfacing. Tulsi Gabbard’s disclosure upon leaving the DNI post confirmed the global scale of U.S.-funded biolabs and the cover-up that protected them. RFK Jr.’s earlier prosecutorial work in The Wuhan Cover-Up stands vindicated in real time. High-powered visitors who once voted the other way are coming to my office wanting signed books and conversations. The “crazy guy in Cincinnati” who talks aliens, Bigfoot, and ancient history is suddenly the guy whose warnings aged very well. That is not because I am a prophet. It is because I paid attention, connected dots across domains most people keep in separate silos, and refused to yield to the social enforcement mechanisms that protect institutional lies.
The work continues. Disclosure on the full extent of these programs—and on the non-human intelligence interactions that may have informed some of the technological and biological avenues explored—will not come from the institutions that hid them. It will come from persistent citizens, from warriors willing to speak when it hurts, from the kind of cross-aisle relationships that let a former Biden voter thank the guy who backed Vivek early and kept the RFK book on the shelf. Read the books. Listen to the podcasts. Subscribe if you want the long-form essays without the corporate filter. And understand the Politics of Heaven, because the earthly manifestations of these conspiracies—biolabs, engineered pandemics, technological control grids, narrative suppression—only make sense when you see the larger rebellion they serve.
The vindication is sweet, but the responsibility to keep speaking is sweeter still. Stay vigilant. Stay armed with truth. And never forget who you are in the face of powers that would prefer you forget.
Footnotes
1. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard press release detailing declassified evidence of U.S. government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine facilities housing dangerous pathogens and conducting gain-of-function research, with noted vulnerabilities due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Released circa June 12, 2026, near the end of her tenure. See official DNI.gov announcements and contemporaneous reporting.
2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race (2023). The book presents extensive documentation on gain-of-function research, funding flows involving NIH and EcoHealth Alliance, suppression of the lab-leak hypothesis, and the broader bioweapons context surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology and related programs. Legal-style arguments and sourcing made successful defamation actions unlikely.
3. Historical context on U.S. and international biological research programs, including the Biological Weapons Convention, past U.S. biodefense and threat-reduction initiatives in former Soviet states and elsewhere, and controversies over dual-use research. Public records and congressional oversight materials from multiple administrations document the expansion of overseas lab networks.
4. Reporting and primary documents on the 2020 emergence of SARS-CoV-2, including early discussions of the proximal origin paper, Fauci’s communications, and the shift from natural-origin certainty to acknowledgment that a lab incident remained plausible. Declassified and FOIA-released materials have continued to surface in subsequent years.
5. On the continuity of institutional narrative control and ridicule tactics: Pentagon UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) reports and hearings (2021 onward), including statements by former intelligence officials such as David Grusch regarding recovered non-human craft and biologics, and the historical pattern of official denial followed by grudging partial disclosure. Public UAP task force summaries and congressional records.
6. World Economic Forum and associated globalist policy documents from the 2019–2020 period discussing “The Great Reset,” stakeholder capitalism, and opportunities presented by the crisis for rapid economic and social restructuring, including emissions and behavioral goals. These provided the rhetorical and policy backdrop that many observed in lockdown implementation worldwide.
7. Personal and local context: Author’s documented involvement in early Vivek Ramaswamy political events in Ohio, including coordination at his place of business; long-term presence in Butler County/Liberty Township civic and political life; authorship of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, Tail of the Dragon, and the forthcoming The Politics of Heaven (target 2027), which explores biblical conspiracies, spiritual warfare, population agendas, and hidden history.
8. Media and cultural critique: Evolution of popular music and entertainment from the 1970s–1980s family- and relationship-oriented themes to later hedonistic, occult-influenced, and rage-driven content, correlating with broader social atomization and receptivity to top-down behavioral control narratives. The author’s long-form essays and podcast commentary have tracked these shifts since the period in question.
9. Airport and early pandemic timing: Author’s contemporaneous account of travel through a major Florida airport (Orlando area, Frontier concourse) in the weeks immediately preceding widespread U.S. recognition of community transmission, noting extreme crowding, overbooked international and domestic flights, and subsequent personal illness—consistent with early seeding patterns later documented in epidemiological tracing.
10. Broader philosophical framework: Author’s warrior/Overman ethos drawn from personal martial arts background, family whip-making heritage in rural Kentucky, aerospace executive experience, and writings emphasizing resilience, imposition of will on hostile circumstances, intergenerational knowledge transfer (e.g., model rocketry with grandchildren), and refusal to self-censor on high-stakes topics regardless of social cost.
Bibliography
• Gabbard, Tulsi (Director of National Intelligence). Official press release and declassified materials on U.S.-funded biological laboratories, June 2026. DNI.gov.
• Kennedy, Robert F., Jr. The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. Children’s Health Defense / Skyhorse Publishing, 2023.
• Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. (Author’s primary business and leadership text, incorporating warrior philosophy and real-world program management lessons from aerospace.)
• Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. (Personal and philosophical narrative.)
• Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. (Forthcoming 2027; manuscript in circulation among select readers as of 2026. Explores biblical conspiracies, giants, spiritual warfare, population agendas, and hidden historical interactions.)
• Various FOIA-released and declassified U.S. government documents on biological research programs, gain-of-function oversight, and pandemic origins investigations (2020–2026 congressional and executive materials).
• Pentagon UAP Task Force and Office of the Director of National Intelligence historical reports on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (2017–2023+ releases and hearings).
• World Economic Forum. “The Great Reset” initiative documents and related stakeholder capitalism frameworks, 2019–2020.
• Contemporary news reporting and primary video from The Trish Regan Show covering Tulsi Gabbard’s DNI disclosures, June 2026.
• Author’s extensive catalog of dictated first-person essays and The Overman Warrior Podcast / Executive Warrior Podcast episodes from 2020 onward documenting contemporaneous analysis of COVID origins, biolabs, alien disclosure patterns, and cultural/spiritual critique.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I measure the quality of an adventure by the condition of the vehicle that carries you into it. If you are rolling down the road in something with missing pieces of its floor and you catch glimpses of the pavement or dirt track passing beneath your feet, you know you are in for something memorable. That was precisely the case on our recent trip to The Wilds in central Ohio, just an easy drive east of Columbus. My wife and I had been talking about visiting for years, and this time, coming back from Washington, D.C., we finally made the turn off I-70 near Zanesville and committed to it properly. We brought the RV, stayed at the Hellbender RV site right on the property, and spent several days soaking it all in. It was the kind of trip that leaves you with new stickers on the rig, fresh stories, and a renewed appreciation for what conservation, done right, can look like when paired with good old-fashioned American ingenuity and a touch of showmanship.
The Wilds sits on nearly ten thousand acres of reclaimed surface-mined land in southeastern Muskingum County, not far from Cumberland. What was once a working coal mine landscape has been transformed into one of the largest conservation centers in the world, complete with open-range pastures that feel more like the African Serengeti or a Hollywood backlot than anything you expect to find in Ohio. The place opened to the public in 1994 after years of planning that stretched back to the late 1970s. Community leaders, including figures connected to the Columbus Zoo, saw an opportunity in the reclaimed land that the Central Ohio Coal Company eventually gifted for this purpose. It was incorporated as the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals, and its vision was always bigger than that of a traditional zoo. They wanted science, education, and immersive experiences that would let people connect with threatened and endangered species in something closer to their natural habitat.
Strip mining had reshaped southeast Ohio for decades, beginning in earnest in the 1930s as surface methods replaced older underground operations. The environmental footprint was significant—hillsides altered, vegetation stripped, water patterns changed—but reclamation efforts, supported by state laws and industry responsibility, eventually turned scarred land into something new. The Wilds represents one of the more ambitious and successful examples of that repurposing. Instead of letting the post-mining landscape sit idle or be developed in conventional ways, visionary partners turned it into a living laboratory and a public attraction. The economic story of the region shifted along with it. What had been a mining-dependent area gained new engines in tourism, education, and conservation work. Studies have shown that The Wilds generates millions in regional economic impact through visitor spending, jobs, and ripple effects on local restaurants, lodging, and services.
We pulled into the Hellbender RV Campground, a well-appointed spot with full hookups, paved sites, and that quiet, open feel you get when the edges of a large preserve surround you. It is part of the larger Wilds complex, and they run a shuttle that takes guests several miles down to the main park entrance and overlooks. Staying on site made the whole experience seamless—no rushing back to a distant hotel, just easy mornings and evenings with the animals and the landscape close by. RV travel remains my favorite way to move around. You carry your own bed, your own kitchen, your own little corner of familiarity, no matter where the road takes you. This particular rig doubles as something of a rolling podcast studio these days, with stickers accumulating from every stop. The Hellbender site earned its own sticker on this trip.
Once you reach the heart of The Wilds, you climb up to the hilltop facilities that sit like command centers overlooking the vast reclaimed valley. There are two main overlook buildings. One serves as more of an entry and education center with a smaller gift shop and views toward certain pastures. The larger one houses a wonderful restaurant, a bigger gift shop, and an expansive deck that lets you look out over the rolling pastures, lakes, and the animals going about their day. It is an extraordinary vantage point. You can sit with a meal and watch giraffes, zebras, and rhinos moving across the landscape as if you were on an actual safari. The setting is deliberately Jurassic Park in its layout—open pastures divided by electric fencing and gates that open and close behind the tour vehicles. The original film came out in 1993; The Wilds opened in 1994. It is impossible not to notice the influence. The designers clearly loved the idea of giving visitors that sense of moving through a living, breathing ecosystem rather than peering at animals behind traditional bars or moats.
The open-air safari tours are the heart of the experience. They use converted school buses—real ones that once carried kids to class. The tops were cut off, sturdy canopies were added, and the vehicles were put back into service, carrying families and wildlife enthusiasts through the pastures. Some of them show their miles. The flooring has been patched in places, and you get the occasional reminder that these are working vehicles in a real environment. Rhinos have been known to show interest in the buses, and the tour guides handle it with calm professionalism. When I climbed aboard and saw the condition of the floor, I turned to the guide and said something to the effect that we were clearly in for a good adventure. My personal standard holds: the more primitive and honest the conveyance, the richer the experience tends to be. Polished, air-conditioned, perfectly sealed vehicles with seat belts and cup holders have their place, but they rarely deliver the same feeling of being out in it. These buses deliver that feeling in spades. They bounce along the dirt tracks; the canopy keeps the sun and occasional rain off; and you are close enough to the animals to feel their scale.
One ostrich in particular became a highlight for me. He had figured out ways to move between pastures, slipping behind buses or finding gaps in the fencing system’s logic. The guides were equal parts amused and impressed. He was not content to stay in one assigned area; he wanted to explore. It added a live, unpredictable element that made the whole tour feel more like a performance than a scripted event. Giraffes browsed near the vehicle at times, rhinos lumbered close enough to catch your attention, and the overall impression was of a landscape that had been returned to the animals while still allowing people to witness it responsibly. There are different tour levels available, including more adventurous “extra wild” options in smaller vehicles that get even closer to the action.
The restaurant and deck experience deserve their own mention. Whether you are there for a full day or just slipping away for a long lunch from Columbus or points beyond, the hilltop dining with the view is special. It reminds me of the Serengeti overlook at the Cincinnati Zoo, where you can eat and watch animals in a beautifully designed habitat. At The Wilds, the scale is larger and the setting more dramatic because of the reclaimed mining topography. You look out over what was once an industrial extraction site and see a thriving ecosystem instead. That contrast is powerful. Conservation and capitalism are not natural enemies when properly aligned. Zoos and conservation centers like this one create jobs, draw visitors who spend money locally, support research and breeding programs for endangered species, and give people—especially kids—a tangible reason to care about wildlife. I have been a member of the Cincinnati Zoo for years and have always admired their practical approach, including the solar panels in the western parking lot that provide shade and generate power for the facility. Smart, visible sustainability that improves the visitor experience rather than lecturing about it. The Wilds operates in the same spirit.
The economic transformation of the area is worth pausing over. Southeast Ohio’s mining heritage ran deep. Surface mining brought employment but also left lasting changes to the land. Reclamation projects, of which The Wilds is a standout example, turned liability into an asset. Tourism now brings steady visitor traffic—over 100,000 people in recent years—supporting direct employment at the park as well as indirect jobs in hospitality, retail, transportation, and services throughout Muskingum County and neighboring areas. Economic impact studies have quantified this in the millions of dollars annually, with wages circulating back into the local economy. For a rural region that needed diversification after the peak mining years, this kind of attraction provides something mining alone could not: a sustainable, year-round draw that also advances science and education. The partnership with the Columbus Zoo has strengthened operations, brought additional expertise, and helped The Wilds grow its programs in veterinary science, species recovery, and public engagement.
What struck me most during our stay was the low-stress environment the animals enjoy. No natural predators are hunting them here, and the care is clearly top-tier. The staff and volunteers radiate genuine dedication. I have always had a soft spot for people who devote their lives to science and study, whether they are archaeologists, zookeepers, or field biologists. Political differences fade when you see that kind of focused commitment to preserving something larger than any one ideology. Conservation is fundamentally conservative in the best sense of the word—it is about stewardship, responsibility to future generations, and not wasting what we have inherited. The Wilds embodies that.
We spent time on the trails as well, exploring some of the hiking and mountain biking paths that wind through parts of the property. There are lakes, birding areas, and butterfly habitats that add layers beyond the big safari animals. The whole place feels thoughtfully layered: the dramatic overlooks and restaurant for casual visitors, the immersive tours for those who want deeper engagement, the behind-the-scenes science for those who care about the long-term mission. It is accessible enough for a relaxed day trip yet substantial enough to justify an overnight or multi-day RV stay.
If you are anywhere in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or even further, The Wilds is an easy and rewarding destination. From I-70, the exits near Zanesville put you on the right roads, and it is only about ten to fifteen miles south of the interstate. A Columbus resident could leave mid-morning, have lunch on the hilltop with that incredible view, take a safari tour, and be back in the afternoon if desired. For families with grandkids, it is a winner—the open-air buses, the animals moving freely in big spaces, the sense of adventure without leaving the state. For anyone who loves the Jurassic Park films, the design will make you smile at every turn. For people who appreciate well-run conservation that does not apologize for also being a business, it is a model worth studying.
I left The Wilds feeling genuinely enchanted. I arrived already sympathetic to zoos and conservation efforts; I departed even more convinced of their value. The combination of reclaimed industrial land, serious science, thoughtful visitor experiences, and economic revitalization for a rural corner of Ohio is something to celebrate. It is the kind of project that rewards curiosity and getting off the interstate for a closer look. The buses may be a little rough around the edges, the floors patched where rhinos or time have left their marks, but that only adds to the authenticity. By my measure, that is exactly how a good adventure should feel.
The Wilds proves that Ohio has its own version of the Serengeti, and it is every bit as worth experiencing as the big-name destinations farther away. Pack the RV, bring the family, or take the day trip. Either way, you will come away with stories, probably a few new stickers, and a deeper appreciation for what can happen when people decide to turn a challenge into an opportunity. In a busy world where days blend, places like this offer a genuine psychological reset. The animals thrive, the land heals in its own way, visitors leave inspired, and the local economy benefits. That is a winning formula I can get behind as a conservative who values both responsible stewardship and the kind of free enterprise that makes big ideas reality.
There is something deeply American about the story of The Wilds. It is not a government fiat handed down from on high. It is a partnership—private land donation, public support, zoo expertise, community vision, and relentless execution. The result is a place that educates without preaching, entertains without cheapening the mission, and generates real economic value while advancing genuine conservation. In an age when so many voices want to pit environmental concern against economic growth, The Wilds quietly demonstrates that the two can reinforce each other when done intelligently.
My own life has always included a deep respect for the natural world. I love taking the grandkids to places where they can see animals up close and learn respect for creation. Model rocketry, shooting sports, and outdoor adventures are part of how we build resilience and curiosity. The Wilds fits perfectly into that tradition. It is hands-on and memorable, leaving you wanting to know more about the science behind the scenes. The veterinary programs, breeding efforts for endangered species, and educational outreach all point to a serious institution that also knows how to deliver fun.
RV travel amplifies the whole thing. There is no better way to explore than to have your home on wheels. You wake up, eat in your own kitchen, step outside into the fresh air of a wildlife preserve, and plan the day around what the family wants to see. At Hellbender, the sites are spacious, the facilities modern, and the proximity to The Wilds itself makes everything convenient. We shuttled back and forth, spent time at the overlooks, took multiple tours, and still had plenty of time to relax at camp. It is the kind of trip that recharges the batteries before heading back into the demands of work and advocacy.
I have said many times that capitalism and conservation make excellent partners when the incentives are aligned. The Wilds is living proof. Tourists come for the experience, spend money that supports jobs and local businesses, and leave with a greater appreciation for wildlife that translates into broader support for preservation efforts. The science happening on site contributes to global knowledge about species recovery. It is not charity; it is value creation across multiple dimensions. That is the kind of outcome I like to see—practical, scalable, and rooted in reality rather than ideology.
If you have never been, put it on the calendar. Whether you are a lifelong Ohioan looking for a new day trip, a legislator in Columbus needing a break from session, or a family planning a longer RV adventure, The Wilds delivers. The drive is straightforward, the hospitality warm, the views stunning, and the adventures appropriately rugged. I cannot recommend it highly enough. In a state full of treasures, this one stands out as something special—a place where the past of hard work in mining has been redeemed into a future of wonder and learning. That is the kind of story worth telling, worth visiting, and worth supporting.
The experience also reinforced for me how important it is to share these places with the next generation. My grandchildren benefit from seeing real conservation in action rather than abstract lectures. They get to feel the bounce of the safari bus, watch a clever ostrich outsmart the system for a moment, and stand on the deck overlooking a landscape that was once written off. Those memories stick. They build wonder and respect. In my busy schedule of writing, podcasting, aerospace work, and political engagement, carving out these days is essential. They remind me why the fight for sound policy matters—so that places like The Wilds can continue to thrive and inspire.
I came away from this trip more convinced than ever that Ohio has world-class assets that too many people overlook. The Wilds is not just a zoo or a park; it is a testament to what reclamation, vision, and persistent effort can achieve. If you live within a few hours’ drive, do yourself a favor and go. Take the family, take a friend, or go solo and enjoy the quiet beauty of the overlooks. Eat at the restaurant with that million-dollar view. Ride the buses and embrace the adventure. You will leave better for it, just as we did. The Wilds is a jewel in central Ohio’s crown, and I am already looking forward to the next visit.
Footnotes
¹ The Wilds official history, thewilds.org/history. Details on the the 1970s vision, the land donation by Central Ohio Coal Company, the opening in 1994, and the Columbus Zoo partnership.
² Muskingum County and southeast Ohio strip mining history; surface mining expansion from the 1930s and subsequent reclamation efforts.
³ Ohio University Voinovich School economic impact study (2018 data): approximately $15 million regional impact, visitor numbers, jobs supported. Later figures show continued growth.
⁴ Personal observations and comparisons to Cincinnati Zoo experiences, including solar panel parking lot benefits.
⁵ Jurassic Park film influence on park design (1993 film, 1994 opening) and open-range safari concept.
⁶ Hellbender RV Campground details from The Wilds site: full hookups, shuttles, location on the preserve.
⁷ Broader context on conservation as stewardship and alignment with capitalist incentives for sustainable tourism.
Bibliography
• The Wilds. Official website (thewilds.org): History, About, and Hellbender RV Campground pages.
• Ohio University Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs. “Economic Impact of The Wilds” study (2018 and subsequent updates).
• Columbus Zoo and Aquarium announcements on The Wilds partnership and 30-year milestones.
• Various reports on southeast Ohio mining history and reclamation (Ohio Department of Natural Resources context).
• News coverage from The Columbus Dispatch and local tourism sources on visitor experiences and economic contributions.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been following the developments in space with a kind of quiet intensity these past few years, the way a man watches the weather when he knows his livelihood and his grandchildren’s future depend on understanding which way the wind is truly blowing. What is unfolding right now is not just another round of rocket launches or another billionaire’s side project. It is the opening of an entirely new economic frontier, one that will make the industrial revolutions of the past look small by comparison. The space economy is already measured in the hundreds of billions and is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, with some projections running well beyond that once Starship-class vehicles make mass-to-orbit routine and cheap.
I picked up Rainer Zitelmann’s new book, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, the week it came out, the same week SpaceX went public in what is already being called one of the largest IPOs in history. It is a little over three hundred pages, the kind of book a man can start after dinner and finish before midnight if he reads with purpose. I read it straight through in one of my evening sessions, the same way I have been working through four or five books a week for years. Zitelmann lays out the historical case plainly: government monopoly and central planning never scaled space the way private enterprise, property rights, and relentless iteration can. The book arrived at exactly the right moment, when the largest single company in the sector was opening itself to Main Street investors, and the manufacturing revolution at Boca Chica was becoming impossible to ignore.
A day or so later, I watched the CNBC interview with Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX. She has been there from the early days, the steady hand next to Elon Musk’s electricity. The conversation was one of those rare television moments where you could feel the ground shifting under the old assumptions. She spoke about manufacturing techniques the way a craftsman talks about a well-tuned machine, not the way most aerospace executives talk about compliance and risk matrices. She described facilities where the design-test-fly-fix loop runs so fast that what was not even contemplated on flight twelve is already being incorporated for the next ones. The flame trench and diverter that now channel the exhaust were not part of the original flight-one plan; necessity and data drove the change, and they made it happen without waiting for a decade of committee reviews. That is the new standard.
I have spent my working life in aerospace. I know what the old way looked like from the inside: layers of requirements that accumulated over decades, change orders that took months or years to process, engineers who had learned to protect themselves by writing rules that nobody could later say they ignored. The result was predictable. Progress crawled. Costs ballooned. The same organizations that once put men on the Moon in less than a decade now need longer to decide whether a minor material substitution was acceptable. SpaceX has broken that pattern at Boca Chica and the new facilities rising at Cape Canaveral. They are building the equivalent of a Toyota Production System for orbital-class vehicles, only the takt time is measured in days and weeks instead of minutes on an assembly line. The goal is a Starship every couple of days, with longer-term ambitions of three per day once the infrastructure matures. They are already talking about monthly flights by the end of 2026 and then scaling from there.
Marcus House has been documenting every step of this on his YouTube channel, week after week, with the kind of detail that lets a serious observer see the trend lines before the headlines catch up. Flight twelve went up a few weeks ago. Thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen are already in various stages of stacking and testing. The new Gigabay structures going up will give them dozens of parallel workstations. That is how you move from a handful of flights a year to something that starts to look like routine transportation.
What Shotwell made clear, and what the book reinforces, is that this manufacturing revolution is not limited to rockets. Once you have a vehicle that can put serious mass into orbit on a regular cadence, everything downstream changes. Starlink already blankets the planet with broadband and is moving to direct-to-cell. The same architecture that delivers low-latency internet can host compute. There is serious discussion now about data centers in orbit, where power and cooling constraints on the ground become someone else’s problem and latency to certain users drops dramatically. Rare-earth mining on the Moon stops being science fiction once you have a bus that can go up and come back with tonnage instead of ounces. Orbital manufacturing, propellant depots, and eventually point-to-point Earth transport all become engineering problems rather than physics problems.
The economic implications are straightforward. Abundance at this scale does not require redistribution; it requires production. The old arguments that we must slow growth so that workers can be paid more or protected from robots miss the point entirely. I have seen what happens when labor is unreliable. I worked service jobs when I was younger and watched people spit in food because they were mad at a manager or distracted by drive-through drama. Robots do not have bad days, do not call off, and do not need a union to show up on time. They are tools. The people who own the tools, or who own shares in the companies that deploy them at scale, will see the returns. That is how wealth has always compounded when new production frontiers open. The difference this time is that the frontier is not a continent or an ocean; it is everything above the Kármán line and everything those vehicles can enable on Earth.
I hear the same tired pushback I heard in 2020 and 2021. Lock everything down, work from home, let the government manage the allocation of resources and risk. We tried that experiment on a national scale. Manufacturing and logistics do not run on Microsoft Teams. The people who insisted they did were usually the same voices that had spent years teaching children that socialism was just “being nice to each other” and that capitalism was exploitation. By 2035, those lessons will look as primitive as slide rules. The children who were told the economy is a fixed pie will watch robots and AI handle the drudge work while new markets in orbit and on the Moon create wealth that did not exist before. Some of them will have equity in the companies doing the work. Others will live in a world where goods and services that once required human hands at every step are cheaper and more reliable.
Here in Butler County, the evidence is already visible if you drive the roads I have driven for fifty years. The data centers going up around Trenton are not abstract. They are the physical plant that will run the AI models training the next generation of robots and processing the firehose of data coming down from Starlink constellations. I pass the old Armco site and the steel legacy of Middletown on one side and the Garver family farm on the other, stopping for fresh apple juice at their little store the way I have for years. The new infrastructure needs power, land, and water. Ohio has all three. The question is whether we welcome the growth that funds schools and roads and keeps farms viable, or let the same regulatory and cultural habits that slowed aerospace for decades strangle this opportunity, too. I know which side I am on.
My own life has been a long argument for the same principle that Shotwell and Musk are proving at industrial scale. Show up. Do the work. Iterate faster than the problem can change. I have worked sixteen- to twenty-two-hour days for most of my career, with power naps when the body demands them, because the alternative was letting someone else define the pace. That is the same mindset that turns a flame trench that was not on the original drawing into standard equipment on the next vehicle. It is also the mindset that lets a man in his later decades look at regenerative medicine, extended healthspan, and robot labor not as threats but as tools that let him keep contributing on his own terms, rather than being forced into some bureaucratic retirement at sixty-five or seventy.
By 2035, we will look back on 2026 the way we now look back on 1995. The phones will be different, the medicine will be different, the available jobs and the definition of retirement will be different, and a meaningful fraction of the global economy will trace its supply chains through orbit. The people who positioned themselves to own a piece of that expansion, whether through equity, skills, or simply the willingness to adapt, will have options their parents could not have imagined. The people who spent the intervening years trying to slow the world down to the speed of the least ambitious regulator will be wondering what happened.
I am not telling anyone to quit their job and day-trade Starship futures. I am saying pay attention. Watch the weekly updates from people like Marcus House who track every stack and every test fire without corporate spin. Read the book that puts the current moment in historical context. Catch the interviews with the people actually building the hardware, the ones who have to make payroll and hit launch windows while the rest of the world argues about pronouns and pronouns and pronouns. The manufacturing standard being set at Boca Chica is already leaking into every other industry that has to move metal and electrons at scale. The capital that flowed into the SpaceX IPO is the first wave of what will become a much larger reallocation toward anything that reduces the cost of moving mass or processing information above the atmosphere.
I have grandchildren. I want them to grow up in a country that still knows how to build things faster than it can regulate them into mediocrity. I want them to have the option to work because they choose to, not because a clock is ticking on their productive years. The space economy does not guarantee any of that on its own. Only the underlying philosophy does: that human beings thrive when they are free to try, free to fail, free to keep the fruits of success, and free to try the next morning again with better data. That is what I see when I watch a Starship climb out of Boca Chica and when I read a book that explains why private enterprise, not state planning, is the only force that has ever scaled a frontier this far.
The old arguments will keep coming. They always do. The people who benefit from scarcity and control will insist that abundance is dangerous, unfair, or bad for the planet. They will be wrong in the same way they were wrong about the internet, wrong about container shipping, wrong about every technology that lets ordinary people do more with less supervision. The evidence is already in the sky and on the factory floor in South Texas. It is also in the data centers rising in places like Trenton and in the quiet confidence of the engineers who have stopped asking permission to move fast.
I intend to keep watching, keep reading, and keep saying what I see. The next ten years are going to be loud. They are also going to be the most opportunity-rich stretch any generation has seen since the opening of the American West. The only question worth asking is whether we will meet that opportunity with the same spirit that built the first Starships, or let the people who have never built anything tell us it is moving too fast.
Footnotes
¹ McKinsey & Company / World Economic Forum, Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth (2024/2025 projections).
² Rainer Zitelmann, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars (Skyhorse Publishing, June 9, 2026).
³ CNBC interview with Gwynne Shotwell, June 12, 2026 (Morgan Brennan).
⁴ SpaceX official updates and production reports, 2026.
⁵ Marcus House YouTube channel, weekly Starship and SpaceX updates (e.g., “SpaceX Just Revealed Its Biggest Plans Yet,” June 2026).
⁶ Walter Isaacson CNBC/Squawk Box discussion on SpaceX IPO and new space economy, June 2026.
⁷ Additional context from Zitelmann’s book and historical analysis of private vs. public space efforts.
⁸ Personal observations from aerospace executive experience and local Butler County development (Trenton data centers, Garver Farms area).
Bibliography
• Zitelmann, Rainer. New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars. Skyhorse Publishing, 2026. (With contributions/foreword elements involving Newt Gingrich in related coverage.)
• McKinsey & Company and World Economic Forum. Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth. 2025 report.
• SpaceX official website updates on Starship production and facilities (Starbase/Boca Chica, 2026).
• CNBC transcripts and videos: Gwynne Shotwell interview (June 12, 2026) and Walter Isaacson on SpaceX IPO.
• Marcus House. YouTube channel – regular, in-depth coverage of Starship flights, manufacturing, and space-economy news.
• Additional economic analyses from Payload Space, Morgan Stanley, and related space industry reports on trillion-dollar projections and manufacturing shifts.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I don’t want to be that guy who keeps circling back to the same uncomfortable subjects, but the truth doesn’t do me any favors by staying quiet. There was a very good episode of War Room the other day in which Rudy Giuliani spent about 45 minutes across three segments laying out exactly what happened in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Steve Hilton, a strong candidate who was performing well on election night, watched the lead evaporate as ballots kept being counted long after the polls closed. It wasn’t mysterious. It was the same playbook we saw in 2020, refined and deployed again in 2026 wherever the rules allow endless mail-in and provisional ballots with minimal traceability. I put the episode on my blog because people need to see it. When you have no voter ID requirement, same-day voting standards, and the ability to keep counting until the desired number appears, the cheese is already baked into the system. You’re not running a representative republic anymore. You’re running a managed installation process.
Anybody who lived through 2020 knows what massive fraud looks like when it happens in plain sight. Ballots appearing in the middle of the night, unsecured drop boxes, signature verification that was loosened or ignored under the cover of COVID, and the endless counting in key jurisdictions until the numbers flipped. No one of any real consequence was ever punished for it. Rudy Giuliani stepped forward, paid an enormous personal price in wealth, reputation, and legal warfare, and they tried to destroy him. Trump, as a billionaire, could finance his way through the lawfare with good lawyers. Most people cannot. That is the chilling effect. Whistleblowers see what happens to Tina Peters in Colorado or the January 6 defendants and decide the personal cost is too high. The evidence gets suppressed or buried because the people who hold it are intimidated into silence. “Where is the proof?” the critics ask. The proof is in the ruined lives of those who brought it forward and in the jurisdictions where the rules were deliberately written to make fraud easy and detection hard.
Look at California under Gavin Newsom. The rules he and his allies put in place allow ballots to be counted well past election day. No strict voter ID. Mail-in ballots that arrive with weak chain-of-custody protections. Once the election-night numbers come in and the gap is known, the machinery can produce or process just enough additional ballots to close it. Steve Hilton was doing well enough that night, but the final certified results told a different story. This is not speculation. It is the observable pattern in places where the system is designed for it. In Ohio, we saw Amy Acton, as health director, literally cancel an election during COVID because it was supposedly too dangerous to vote in person. The same public health apparatus that pushed masks, lockdowns, and trust-the-science messaging while gain-of-function research funding flowed created the pretext for changing voting rules nationwide. Dr. Fauci’s emails, the lab-leak questions that were dismissed as conspiracy theories, and the lack of accountability afterward showed the credentialed class protecting its own. Rand Paul and others tried to hold them accountable through proper channels, but the Department of Justice under Biden was not interested. The push was always toward more centralized control and less verifiable elections.
I have watched this up close in Ohio politics for years. Butler County, Lakota schools, commissioner races—the local battles matter because they are where the rubber meets the road for families. But the bigger picture is national. Republicans who still carry water for the old institutional order—McConnell holdovers, Susan Collins types—look at their role as sandbagging the tide rather than representing the voters who sent them there. They see Trump as a temporary disruption, a lame duck whose influence will fade, and they want to preserve what they call the “institution” even if it means slow-walking real reform on election security. Bernie Moreno is doing a great job in the Senate from Ohio. JD Vance represents a different, more combative generation. Ten years from now, people like them will be the moderates compared to the harder line the base demands. The Senate is changing, but the sandbaggers are still there, trying to keep the door open just wide enough for the familiar game to continue.
The Marxist playbook is not subtle. Control the flow of information, install sympathetic officials in key positions (secretaries of state, election boards), loosen verification, and use emergencies—real or manufactured—to justify changes that make fraud scalable. COVID was the perfect vehicle. It allowed rule changes that never fully reverted. In blue strongholds and sanctuary jurisdictions, the combination of no ID, mail ballots without robust tracking, and post-election counting creates the opportunity to “find” whatever margin is needed. They laugh about it because they believe the system protects them. Giuliani, despite everything they threw at him, is still willing to go on War Room and say the quiet part out loud. Tina Peters went to jail for trying to preserve records. January 6 protesters who raised their voices about election integrity are still suffering consequences. The message is clear: bring forward the evidence, and we will bankrupt you, jail you, or block you.
I know a thing or two about blocklisting. In my line of work and in the writing I do, talking about these subjects attaches your name to algorithms that throttle reach. Platforms claim to support free speech but run background filters that limit the distribution of content on controversial topics. Pay to remove restrictions if you have the money, or stay throttled. It is a revenue stream and a control mechanism. Yet the truth does not disappear just because the search results are manipulated. Election fraud evidence exists in the affidavits, the video footage, the statistical anomalies, the whistleblower accounts that never received fair hearings, and the simple, observable reality that, in too many places, the counting never seems to stop until the right side wins. Steve Hilton’s race is only the latest example. Unless every state adopts strict voter ID, same-day voting with paper trails, and real-time chain of custody for mail ballots, the door stays open. Federal elections have national consequences, so national standards are not radical—they are constitutional common sense.
People ask why Republicans don’t just win bigger everywhere. Look at the states where elections are reasonably secure versus those that treat ballots like confetti. The contrast is obvious. The rhinos who shrug and say “demographics are destiny” or “we can’t fight the system” are the ones preserving the very mechanisms that import and protect the demographics they claim are inevitable. Trump showed what happens when you fight. The institutional response was lawfare, censorship, and two-tier justice. They tried to destroy him financially and legally because he was too big to intimidate easily. Most candidates are not. That is why the credentialed and connected class thought they could install Biden, prop him up, and continue the managed decline. The economy suffered, borders were chaotic, and trust evaporated. Now in 2026, we see the same tactics locally and statewide.
I have reverence for genuine history and for the people who were here before European settlement. I have read deeply on Tecumseh, Blue Jacket, the Shawnee, and the broader Native nations of the Ohio Valley. Their stories are rich and tragic. But calling every group that happened to occupy land at a particular moment “indigenous” in a way that freezes history and justifies modern political narratives is the same credentialed sleight-of-hand we see in election administration. Cultures rose and fell here long before. The Windover Bog People in Florida, the Old Copper Complex around the Great Lakes, the Hopewell and Adena earthworks—these show sophisticated societies with trade and complexity going back thousands of years. The point is evidence, not ideology. The same applies to elections. Let the ballots be verifiable. Let the voters be who they say they are. Anything less is an invitation to the kind of managed outcomes we keep witnessing.
In my aerospace work, I deal with credentialed experts who cling to old drawings because their name is on them. Changing anything costs time, money, and bruised egos. SpaceX succeeds by ruthlessly eliminating stupid requirements. Gwynne Shotwell laid it out clearly—ditch the unnecessary parts, simplify, iterate faster. That mindset scales. The same disease infects our politics and election systems. Layers of bureaucracy, legacy rules, and protected interests prevent simple fixes like voter ID and paper-trail same-day voting. The result is predictable: outcomes that do not match the obvious sentiment on the ground. People see their neighborhoods change, costs rise, and security erode, yet the installed officials keep winning under rules that favor volume over verification.
The future Senate looks better with people like Bernie Moreno and JD Vance. They represent a harder edge that will not tolerate the old sandbagging. But the McConnell holdovers still act as if their job is to restrain the voters rather than represent them. Trump’s influence, even as a lame duck in their eyes, forced the conversation. The base will not go back to business as usual. Election integrity is non-negotiable. States that leave the door open to post-election counting and unsecured mail ballots are advertising their willingness to let the system be gamed. California’s recent races are Exhibit A. Newsom’s rules enabled the endless counting. The gap on election night was known, and the machinery filled it. This is not democracy. This is an installation.
I have no illusions that talking about it will win me friends in certain circles. My name gets associated with searches for election security and fraud, and my reach gets limited. But the truth is stubborn. Giuliani, despite everything, keeps speaking. Tina Peters paid a heavy price for preserving records. Ordinary people who showed up on January 6 to protest what they saw are still living with the consequences. The credentialed class and their political allies thought they could intimidate everyone into silence. They overreached. The backlash is building because people can see the pattern with their own eyes. When ballots keep appearing until the right number is reached, when ID is treated as oppression rather than basic security, and when emergencies are used to rewrite rules permanently, the representative republic is replaced by something else.
My book The Politics of Heaven explores the deeper spiritual and historical layers—how non-human influences, heavenly politics, and human power structures interact across time. Election fraud fits inside that larger story. It is not just technical cheating. It is the attempt to frustrate the will of a people and impose an agenda that cannot win in the open. The ancient temptation is always to seize control by any means. The modern version uses bureaucracy, emergency powers, and captured institutions. The solution is the same as it has always been: transparency, accountability, and courage. Secure the elections. Demand ID. Insist on same-day counting with paper trails. Punish fraud severely. Anything less leaves the door open for the next round.
The rhinos who think they can wait Trump out and return to the comfortable institutional game are misreading the moment. The base has seen too much. Bernie Marino and others like him point to a different Senate ten years from now—one less tolerant of sandbagging. The future belongs to those willing to close the loopholes and let the people’s will actually decide. Until then, the California model—endless ballots, no ID, counting until victory—is the warning. Giuliani laid it out in the War Room. The episode is worth watching. The pattern is clear. The evidence is in the rules themselves and in the observable results that defy election-night reality.
I keep coming back to these subjects because they matter more than comfort. My job in aerospace shows me daily how clinging to stupid requirements destroys efficiency and progress. The same is true in government and elections. Scrap the unnecessary parts. Simplify. Verify. Iterate on truth instead of protecting the machine. The republic depends on it. The age of disclosure demands it. The Politics of Heaven is coming soon because the heavenly politics have earthly consequences, and we cannot afford to ignore either.
Footnotes
[1] War Room episode with Giuliani on LA mayoral race (recent 2026 broadcast); patterns of post-election counting under California rules.
[2] COVID-era changes in Ohio and nationally, including Acton’s election cancellation; Fauci-related correspondence and gain-of-function context from public records and testimony.
[4] General election security literature on voter ID, mail ballot chain of custody, and statistical anomalies in 2020/2026 races.
Bibliography
• Giuliani, Rudy. Appearances and segments on War Room (2026 episodes covering California election practices).
• Public records on California election rules under the Newsom administration (mail ballot processing, post-election counting).
• Ohio election history, including Amy Acton’s COVID-era decisions (state health department archives).
• Peters, Tina. Case documents and Colorado election integrity proceedings.
• Various congressional testimony on the 2020 election (House and Senate committees).
• ODNI and related reports on broader integrity and influence issues.
• Standard references on election administration: voter ID studies from the Heritage Foundation and state audit reports.
• Personal and local Ohio political context (Butler County, Lakota, commissioner races) from public records.
• The Politics of Heaven manuscript themes (spiritual/historical layers intersecting modern power structures).
• Additional reading: Works on lawfare against Trump and Giuliani; January 6 case summaries; comparative state election security analyses (e.g., states with strict ID vs. expansive mail-in).
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: Rich Hoffman finds a five-inch sandstone replica on a museum shelf in small-town Ohio, and somehow that leads us to SpaceX, ancient copper mines, and the entire credentialed class.
Mara: That’s actually the through-line. Rich Hoffman’s recent writing connects prehistoric archaeology in the Ohio Valley to the institutional habits that slow down both science and aerospace — disclosure in the broadest sense of the word.
Pip: Let’s start with the tablet that started it all.
The Wilmington Tablet and the Cost of Stupid Requirements
Mara: The post opens with a chance encounter at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton — a sandstone replica sitting unrecognized on a shelf. The staff couldn’t price it because they didn’t know what it was. The Wilmington Tablet is Adena culture, roughly two thousand years old, recovered from a mound near Wilmington, Ohio.
Pip: The recognition came from years of reading Joseph Campbell, not from any credential. That detail does a lot of work.
Mara: It does. Here’s how the post frames what the tablet represents: “These weren’t doodles. They were records. Shamanic. Visionary. The kind of thing you carve after you’ve been somewhere else and come back with a story the ordinary world needs to remember.”
Pip: So the Adena weren’t leaving decoration. They were leaving testimony.
Mara: And the civilization behind that testimony was far more sophisticated than the standard account admits. The Hopewell cultures that followed moved copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the Appalachians, obsidian from the Rockies. The Old Copper Complex along Lake Superior dates to at least four thousand to five thousand BC — one of the earliest large-scale metalworking traditions anywhere in the world.
Pip: Hundreds of thousands of pounds of copper, and the credentialed consensus is still: nothing unusual to see here.
Mara: The post also names the Newberry Tablet, found near Michigan’s old mining country in 1896, which Smithsonian and University of Michigan experts at the time could not decipher, and the Cincinnati Tablet, pulled from a mound in the 1840s where a UPS facility now stands. Both carry dense symbolic systems that haven’t been resolved.
Mara: The argument is that institutional archaeology protects published records the same way aerospace engineers protect old drawings — and the post makes that parallel explicit through SpaceX. Gwynne Shotwell described how they eliminated the “pushers” on the Super Heavy booster: “get rid of stupid requirements, get rid of the part.” Hot staging replaced extra hardware. Fewer parts, higher reliability.
Pip: The chopstick catch is the peer review that actually worked.
Mara: The upshot is straightforward: the same instinct that defends a thirty-year-old engineering print because someone’s name is on it also defends a mid-century archaeological consensus because careers depend on it. The post argues capitalism, properly applied, rewards eliminating bad requirements — in orbit and in the archive.
Pip: There’s also a thread on Shawnee silver legends around Clifton Gorge and Yellow Springs — stories of hidden deposits going back to Blue Jacket’s time, with geological traces but no resolved mother lode. One more door the post says deserves a real push.
Mara: The closing argument is that UAP disclosure is forcing the credentialed class to discuss non-human intelligences again — and once that door opens, older questions about the tablets, the copper volumes, and the earthworks become harder to wave away.
Pip: A five-inch sandstone piece sitting unrecognized on a museum shelf. That’s the image that stays.
Mara: What the post is really asking is whether the mindset that catches rocket boosters with chopsticks can be turned toward the ground — toward the digs, the archives, the questions that got filed away.
Pip: Apparently the age of disclosure has a much longer back catalog than anyone admitted.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I was down at the Johnson-Humrickhouse House Museum in Coshocton the other day, just wandering through the exhibits and glancing at the shop shelves the way you do when you’re killing a little time in a small Ohio town. Something caught my eye—a sandstone replica, maybe five inches long, a few inches wide, sitting there like a forgotten coaster. The people running the place didn’t know what it was. They couldn’t put a price on it because they didn’t recognize it. But I did. Instantly. I’d carried that exact design in my head for years.
It was the Wilmington Tablet. [1]
Map of the copper mines of Lake Superior
I knew it from Joseph Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology, the big, rich volumes my daughter hunted down for me one Christmas when they were long out of print and going for serious money on the secondary market. She knew how much those books meant to me. I’d been deep into Campbell in my twenties—reading at Perkins and Denny’s at all hours while other people my age were doing whatever twenty-somethings do. I even joined the Joseph Campbell Foundation back then, partly because George Lucas was on the board and I wanted the chance to talk to the man who made Star Wars and Indiana Jones. The foundation sent me the first of those atlas volumes. They were dense, illustrated treasures. When I saw the Wilmington Tablet sitting on that museum shelf, the memory came flooding back—the line work, the central figure, the sense that it was recording something far more than decoration.
The original is Adena culture, roughly 2,000 years old, recovered from a mound near Wilmington, Ohio. Sandstone. Compact. The engraving shows a powerful central form that reads to me as a bird-like or avian prayer figure—with wings or feathered aspects suggested by the flowing lines, and a sense of movement across what looks like mirrored or dimensional space. One side echoes the other. What happens here happens there. That’s the phrase that keeps coming back when I look at it. These weren’t doodles. They were records. Shamanic. Visionary. The kind of thing you carve after you’ve been somewhere else and come back with a story the ordinary world needs to remember. [2]
The Adena and the Hopewell cultures that followed them in the Ohio Valley weren’t simple hunter-gatherers scratching out a living. They built geometric earthworks on a scale that still stuns people—Newark’s great octagon and circle, Fort Ancient up the road from here, the Miamisburg Mound half an hour away. They moved materials across enormous distances: copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the southern Appalachians, marine shell from the Gulf, obsidian from the Rockies. They aligned structures to lunar standstills and solar events with precision that modern surveyors respect. And they left behind these small, dense tablets that nobody has fully decoded because the people who could read them are gone and the credentialed class that inherited the sites prefers older, safer stories. [3]
That brings me to the copper.
The Old Copper Complex along Lake Superior—Keweenaw Peninsula, Isle Royale, the Brule River country—represents one of the earliest large-scale metalworking traditions in the world. People were mining native copper there by at least 4000–5000 BC, cold-hammering it into tools, points, and ornaments without smelting. Thousands of pits are documented. One historical estimate put the total copper removed in the hundreds of thousands to over a million pounds; some older analyses floated even higher figures. Sediment cores from the region still carry the chemical signature of that ancient mining activity from six thousand years ago—copper, lead, potassium from the fires used to anneal the metal. [4]
Where did all that copper go? It traveled. Artifacts show up far outside the immediate region. But the sheer volume raises the same question that serious people have been asking for a long time: was this purely an internal trade among indigenous networks, or did the scale and timing suggest something more—visitors, traders, or knowledge moving in both directions across what we now call oceans? The Newberry Tablet, found in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near the old mining country, in 1896, bears a grid of characters that Smithsonian and University of Michigan experts at the time could not decipher. Some later researchers read it as possible Old World script. The Cincinnati Tablet, recovered in the 1840s from a mound right downtown where a UPS facility sits today, carries its own dense symbolic language. [5]
Mainstream archaeology has long held that meaningful transoceanic contact before the Norse or Columbus was impossible—that people here were isolated after the Bering migrations, that boats couldn’t cross, that the timelines don’t allow it. I understand the institutional reasons. Once you admit earlier or more complex movements of people and ideas, many published books, careers, and tidy secular narratives have to be revisited. The same instinct that made credentialed experts during COVID say “trust the science” while gain-of-function research happened in under-regulated labs in Wuhan and elsewhere is alive in archaeology. Protect the published record. Don’t upset the people whose names are on the big monographs. The result is the same: progress slows, anomalies get explained away or ignored, and the public gets a thinner story than the evidence supports. [6]
I see the same pattern in my own industry. Aerospace is full of brilliant PhD engineers who treat drawings from twenty or thirty years ago like sacred texts. “My name is on that print. You can’t change it.” Even when better materials exist, even when regulations have evolved, even when a simpler design would work better and cost less. Changing the print means committees, reviews, months or years of delay, and sometimes millions in added cost. Personalities clash. Egos lock in. You end up herding cats on a hot tin roof to get something built that should have been obvious. It’s not that the people are bad. Many of them are very good at what they do. But the system rewards protecting the old requirement more than it rewards solving the actual problem.
SpaceX operates differently. Gwynne Shotwell explained it plainly in a recent CNBC interview. They used to put “pushers” on the Super Heavy booster to shove the Starship upper stage away during separation—extra hardware, extra mass, extra failure points. Following what she called Elon’s algorithm—get rid of stupid requirements, get rid of the part—they eliminated them. Now they use hot staging: light the upper-stage engines while still attached, let the flames and pressure do the separation work, and divert those flames through a simple ring structure on the booster. Fewer parts. Higher reliability. Faster learning. That’s why they’re catching boosters with chopsticks at Boca Chica, and why the rest of the industry will eventually have to copy the approach or fall behind. [7]
The same logic applies to history. We don’t need to protect every old theory just because a credentialed person wrote it down in 1957 or 1972. We need to let the evidence lead and be willing to revise when better data arrives. The Wilmington Tablet, the copper mines, the geometric precision of the Hopewell earthworks, the Windover Bog People in Florida with their 7,000–8,000-year-old preserved remains—these things are not problems to be explained away. They are invitations.
I brought that replica home. It sits where I can see it. It reminds me why I wrote The Politics of Heaven and why I keep talking about these things. The book is a long treasure hunt through heaven and human history—biblical conspiracies, giants, non-human intelligences, spiritual warfare, the politics that play out beyond the veil. These tablets fit inside that story. They look like records left by people who encountered something avian, something serpentine, something that crossed between realms. Shamans under the influence of what we would now call entheogens, or in dream states, or in direct contact, carving what they saw so the next generation would remember: there are more layers to reality than the daylight world admits. The Mothman sightings at Point Pleasant, the Birdman imagery at Cahokia, the reverence for the feathered serpent farther south—they rhyme. Current UAP disclosures are forcing the credential class to talk about non-human intelligences again. Once that door opens, many older doors that were nailed shut start to creak.
There are also the old Shawnee silver legends around Clifton Gorge and Yellow Springs, right in this part of Ohio. Stories of rich deposits or hidden caches that go back to Blue Jacket’s time and earlier. Geologists have found traces. Amateur shafts and assays over the years turned up silver. The mother lode, if it exists in any serious quantity, has never been properly located. The area has changed—some of it flooded, some developed—but the stories persist because the geology allows for it and because people who lived here before us clearly knew things about the land we’re still re-learning. Another thread worth pulling. [8]
The larger point is simple. We are living through a moment when old gatekeeping structures are under real pressure—from space companies that refuse to accept “that’s how we’ve always done it,” from citizens who watched credentialed experts lie or overreach during COVID, from independent researchers and venture-funded digs that don’t need a university committee’s permission to ask inconvenient questions. The Smithsonian and the old academic apparatus still carry enormous cultural weight, but they no longer have a monopoly on attention or funding. Capitalism, properly applied, is excellent at this. It rewards people who eliminate stupid requirements and penalizes those who cling to them out of ego or job security. SpaceX is proving it in orbit. The same principle can work on the ground, in the archives, and in the dirt.
I’m not saying every fringe theory is correct. I’m saying the evidence deserves better than reflexive defense of mid-twentieth-century consensus. The Wilmington Tablet is one small, heavy piece of that evidence. It sat on a museum shelf, unrecognized, because upstream experts had told the people in charge it wasn’t important enough to feature. That’s the system working exactly as designed. It protects the published record and keeps the public from getting too curious.
We can do better. Dig the copper country properly. Re-examine the tablets with fresh eyes and better tools. Fund the dives on the underwater anomalies in the Great Lakes. Let serious, well-resourced people chase the silver legends with modern methods. And keep watching what SpaceX and the companies that follow them do—because the mindset that catches rockets with chopsticks is the same mindset that will eventually fund the archaeology we should have been doing all along.
The age of disclosure isn’t just about UAPs. It’s about everything we were told was settled that never actually was. The tablet on my shelf is a quiet reminder. What happens here still echoes there. The only question left is whether we dare to listen.
Footnotes
[1] Physical description and museum context based on Adena tablet records and personal observation of the replica. See also noahsage.com archaeological summaries.
[2] Interpretive framework drawing from comparative mythology in Campbell’s work and user analysis of symbolic avian/interdimensional motifs common in Adena/Hopewell artifacts.
[3] Hopewell interaction sphere and earthwork details from standard references on Ohio Valley mound-builder cultures.
[4] Old Copper Complex data: Martin (1995), Drier et al. (1961), and sediment studies. Estimates vary but highlight significant prehistoric extraction.
[5] Newberry and Cincinnati Tablet descriptions from historical accounts, including Smithsonian correspondence and Cincinnati Museum Center records.
[6] Parallel to COVID credentialism drawn from public records, emails, and congressional testimony on gain-of-function research and lab-leak origins.
[7] Gwynne Shotwell CNBC interview (June 2026) on Starship hot staging and elimination of pusher mechanisms.
[8] Shawnee silver legends and Clifton Gorge/Yellow Springs geology from local historical accounts and assay reports.
Bibliography
• Campbell, Joseph. Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. 1: The Way of the Animal Powers. Harper & Row, 1983 (and subsequent volumes/foundation editions).
• Drier, Roy W., and Octave J. Du Temple. Prehistoric Copper Mining in the Lake Superior Region. 1961.
• Lepper, Bradley T. Ohio Archaeology: An Illustrated Chronicle of Ohio’s Ancient American Indian Cultures. Orange Frazer Press, 2005.
• Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Wayne State University Press, 1999.
• Mills, Lisa A. “Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of the Ohio Hopewell of the Hopewell Mound Group.” PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2003.
• Pompeani, David P., et al. “Sediment Record of Prehistoric and Historic Metal Mining in Lake Superior.” EOS, 2014.
• Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1848.
• Various primary accounts on Newberry Tablet (1896 discovery) and Cincinnati Tablet (1841 mound find), Cincinnati Museum Center and Smithsonian archives.
• Barry Fell’s epigraphic works (controversial; for diffusionist perspectives).
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior has a lot of interests — ancient scrolls, Ohio politics, model rocketry with grandchildren — but this week, everything points to one place: up.
Mara: Rich Hoffman makes the case that the Moon is the defining economic and strategic frontier of our era, and he connects that argument to energy independence, Ohio’s industrial future, and what it actually takes to build a Type I civilization.
Pip: Let’s start with the gold rush that isn’t metaphorical.
The Moon: America’s Next Frontier and the Coming Space Economy
Mara: The post opens not with a policy argument but with a moment — a tired walk back from the Smithsonian, arms full of books, and then a pause at a rack near the cashier.
Pip: He writes: “That spontaneous purchase captures something larger: the Moon is not just a celestial body; it is the key to the next great American expansion, a modern gold rush that will generate wealth, innovation, and opportunity on a scale rivaling the Western frontier.”
Mara: The upshot is that this isn’t nostalgia for Apollo. It’s a resource argument. The Moon holds helium-3, thorium, rare earth elements, and metals tied to what the post calls KREEP terrains — and the claim is that returning those resources via vehicles like Starship transforms economies on Earth.
Pip: The thorium case is the one that stops you. Small modular thorium reactors, described here as potentially the size of a large air conditioner, powering a home for decades with minimal waste. That’s not a distant concept — it’s the argument for why lunar extraction has a direct line to your electricity bill.
Mara: On the broader space economy, the post cites projections exceeding one trillion dollars by 2032, with space tourism alone growing at compound annual rates between 36 and 44 percent. SpaceX’s Starship cadence and Blue Origin’s lunar lander infrastructure are the mechanisms he points to.
Pip: And Ohio is the landing zone for all of it — literally. Butler County aquifers, the I-75 corridor, a proposed spaceport near Monroe, data centers, orbital manufacturing returning chips to Intel-scale plants. Roosevelt-era expansion, Musk-era execution.
Mara: He also addresses the skeptics directly. International lander confirmations from Japan and Firefly Aerospace, hardware visible through powerful telescopes — the post treats doubt as understandable but ultimately answerable by evidence.
Pip: His investment thesis is just as direct: aerospace, lunar resource plays, Starlink, and whatever an Interlune IPO looks like. Re-read this in a decade, he says.
Mara: The personal thread running through all of it is his grandson — the kid who memorized Kuiper Belt objects at age three and flew that Artemis model rocket. The Moon, the post argues, is the inheritance that generation actually gets to claim.
Pip: Roosevelt had the West. The argument here is that the next version of that expansion is already in motion — and the window is now.
Mara: The resources, the infrastructure, the policy levers — it’s all on the table. The question is whether the will follows.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
The Overmanwarrior 