I am in an unusual spot, and I know some of this is going to be hard to hear. I have a voice, and I can articulate a thing better than average. In 2026, I have also sat on both sides of the employee discussion. For years I talked about hiring as an academic problem. Now I have the experience. I was a vice president. I hired people — tens, hundreds, at times the kind of volume where you need a hundred bodies in a couple of weeks — and I never had a recruiting problem. If I needed 10, 20, 100, or 1,000, I could get them. What I could not get was the human-resources department to do what I told them. They sandbagged. They pushed back. I used to wonder why. In 2026, after the job changes, after sending out hundreds of résumés from the other side of the desk, I stopped wondering. I had my answer provided.
This is not written for a mass audience. A few hundred views are fine. It is written for the point of the spear, the fraction of a percent who actually lead and do the work. Social communism cannot survive contact with that fraction, which is why it spends all its energy trying to flatline them. President Trump’s people watch my work, and this is intended for them. I am glad they do. I am not calling the White House. I am putting the field report where the people on the pointy end can use it.
What Starmer Said Out Loud
On 26 September 2025, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, announced a digital-ID scheme and said the quiet part in plain English: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” Downing Street later said the check would not be retrospective and would apply when you applied for a job after the scheme went live, aimed at the end of Parliament. Darren Jones, his chief secretary, called a working digital ID “the bedrock of the modern state.” A petition against it drew nearly three million signatures. In January 2026, the Telegraph reported that Labor had backed off compulsory digital ID for right-to-work checks — the eleventh U-turn, by their count — while keeping “mandatory digital checks” in the conversation. Read the retreat as politics. Read the sentence as the plan.
In the United States, “right to work” means you do not have to join a union to hold the job. Indiana has it. Ohio has fought over it. In the United Kingdom, the same words are being turned around: the state decides whether you have the right to work at all. That is not a translation error. That is the Labor Party, the old Socialist International habit, and the Chinese administrative model wearing a London suit. Arrests over posts. Meeting you at the gate when you fly home because of something you wrote overseas. A compliance society that still has not accepted it is no longer in charge of an empire.
I say that with a family interest, not as a tourist. I have a grandson whose father is an English citizen, goes back all the time, loves England, lights up for a soccer match, and still came to America because he loves the idea of America. England is a structured society. The empire did not fall only because someone else built a bigger navy. It fell because the rules were rigid, the power was abused, and the culture could not survive contact with a looser world. I have used the Mutiny on the Bounty for years as the picture: the articles of war work until the men see a different life and a little wine, and then the whole officer class is shocked that the lash was not a theory of government. Globalism keeps trying to put the lash back, digitally.
Covid Was the Dress Rehearsal
I was the employer trying to keep a place alive during COVID. Hire, recruit, stay open. The HR people would slide a memo across the table and tell me this is what we do. I would ask where they got it. I had just talked to people around the Ohio Supreme Court fights. Amy Acton was Mike DeWine’s, Dr. Fauci. He owned the decisions; she ran the apparatus. I thought the behavior was wild, and I was not guessing from a couch. I was on the point of the spear as an employer, and I knew people were challenging the orders as unconstitutional under the Ohio Constitution. What the Court people were telling me and what the CDC memo said were not the same thing. The memo trail ran to the World Health Organization, and the WHO trail ran toward Beijing. The same people who wanted you cashless wanted you compliant. I said no. A lot of HR departments said the memo is the memo.
That was the first taste. The big taste came when I was the applicant.
The Other Side of the Desk
I have a strong résumé. I say that as a benchmark, not a boast. Upper end of the pile—long operating experience, P&L responsibility, references that hold up. I am not trying to get hired in high heels. I am the profile companies describe when they say they want to make money. I sent out hundreds of résumés in 2026. That’s why my own HR people had always been strange.
A lot of corporations are not really hiring. They are feeding a centralized applicant-tracking system. I would tell a recruiter, as I used to tell my own staff: I want this person here in two days; have them fill out the form; I will sit with you in the morning while you clear it. The answer now is that the system has to eat the application, and the person who clears the system is working from home, and the person working from home may be on a long parental leave because someone in the household has discussed getting pregnant. When I asked whether they could approve it from the kitchen table, they said their time was their time. That is a union attitude that has captured the management system without winning a union election.
The people in those seats, across a lot of companies, look the same. Progressive. Tattooed in a way that used to be a shop-floor mark and is now a credential. Minority-preference as the default sort. College-trained in HR programs that talk to each other on the same chats and read the same handbook. The handbook always “came down from the university.” Nobody in the chair wrote it. Nobody in the chair will defend it past “that’s the process.” If the applicant is a white man over 50, without a disability box, without the right sex or color box, the software drops the résumé before a human being who needs the work ever sees it. I have been the executive who needed the work done. I have been the résumé in the chute. I’m the only one saying this from both chairs.
The college-degree gate was the earlier version of the same machine. Force the job through the university, and the university will liberalize the kid on the way through. Digital ID is the same gate with a better lock. Scan the hand, open the bank, open the job, open the pub. A mark on the file — a post about Amy Acton, a flag in the garage, the wrong politics — and the light goes off. Not a law saying you are banned. A system that cannot find you and ostracizes you from society without ever firing a shot; suddenly you can’t even turn on your TV, open your Apple Music account, or ride a subway because you have the wrong politics. These days, the government of China, Iran, or Great Britain isn’t much different; they rule by authority.
Paperless Is the Point
If the file is paper, I have a receipt. If the file is digital, the digits can be late, lost, or disqualifying. Modern monetary theory already told you the trick on the money side: no gold constraint, edit the number, call it policy. The HR file is the same trick aimed at a person. DEI needs a reason. The paperless system can manufacture one. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard sit atop a market Trump wants to brag about, and he is not wrong that the economy should be the envy of the world. He is exposed, though, if the scoreboard depends on easy Federal Reserve money and index funds that punish companies that won’t file the forms. Years of activism built the rate mess and the hiring mess. He can be right about growth and still be playing on a field those people lined.
I watched the vinyl records with my oldest and youngest grandsons in the gift shop at Cracker Barrel. In the 1980s, I thought the album was dead, and the CD had won. They were surprised a dead format could come back. It came back because people wanted to own the music instead of renting it from Apple or Spotify. The vinyl is worse than the CD. It scratches. The regulatory and manufacturing path back to it is clumsy. It is in the gift shop anyway, because ownership is the point. Download culture is the opposite: the PlayStation game is a license, the console dies, the game is gone, and they may let you download it again if you are still in their memory, if you continue paying your subscription. That is the model. Rent everything. Own nothing. It started as a convenience. It is a control surface.
AI Is Why They Are Nervous
Trump has struggled in public to explain artificial intelligence as a superior intelligence and as the end of a certain kind of war. The war it ends is the cornered market. HR could corner labor because every résumé had to pass their screen. Unions could corner a shop in a state without right-to-work. A digital ID corners the entire right to apply. AI does the work without asking the screen for permission. That is why a technology that should read as productivity reads, in London and in the HR chat, as a threat. If the employee is stuck at home waiting on a digital ID, the party controls the paycheck. If the model does the work, the paycheck lever breaks. They will try to regulate the model until the lever works again. They need every other economy to accept the same constraint, or the United States outruns them. That is the competitive ask underneath the speech. Cripple yourselves the way we have crippled ourselves, so we do not have to compete with you.
Companies that are actually growing already cheat the rule. I always did. I asked the HR people why they were doing the stupid thing. They said the handbook. Scrappy outfits and fast growers cannot afford the compliance cost. I have watched the cost of compliance put places out of business. The man in London still gets his check. He can stifle England and call it fairness. The smaller American firm that ignores him is the reason the plan will not fully land here. GDP does not come from the people the screen prefers. It comes from the people the screen was built to drop.
Submission, Again
Islam means submission. I have said it until I am tired of saying it, because it is the cleanest word we have for the maneuver. You submit without asking who wrote the rule. Digital ID is the same maneuver with a Labor Party accent. Government replaces the God you were supposed to submit to, then demands the same unasked obedience. Jonathan Edwards, in the 1750s, before there was a United States, already described the rival systems that swallow a civilization when it will not rally to the biblical account of how a civilization is built. I have told people in the Trump orbit and people in the Ohio legislature the same thing. The Bible is how you beat the socialist. Do not let them split you with a separation clause that was never a ban on a biblical people governing themselves. Rally to that narrative, and the majorities hold in the states and in Congress. Bernie Sanders is not a lonely mood. The Socialist International is a real lineage. A lot of those people loved Castro. A lot of them rooted for the takeovers in Central America. Canada and Mexico run socialist governments and call them normal. China’s current leadership is openly of that family. Trump and Xi can look friendly on a rope line. That is business talk. I have talked to people I do not agree with. It is not a marriage.
The Flag in the Garage
I have a friend near the house. Don’t Tread on Me in the garage. He and his wife probably make around $150,000 combined, and they want to keep it. They are afraid the employer will find the flag. They will post a child at a football game. They will not post the thing they actually think. That is the global speech code enforced by payroll, not by a cop. You can talk about the First Amendment all day. If I control the paycheck, you do not have personal freedom of opinion. You can put a flag on the Jeep on Saturday. You will not make the payment on the Jeep if the politics are wrong on Monday. Draw the mustache on Waldo, march in Pride Month, accept the less qualified hire who checked the box, and the handbook will pat you on the head.
Public schools spent three or four decades training that reflex with peer pressure. Laugh when they walk in. Point at the shoes. Find your place in the order and stay there. “Above my pay grade” is the graduate slogan. Most of the world already lives this way. Arranged marriages are not a quirk of one region I happen to know people from. They are the human default: you marry who you are told, you do what your parents say, you do not ask why, you just do what you are told. Once you take that from your parents, you take it from a ministry. The American claim was the opposite. Anybody can become the boss if they are right and they get smarter than the room. The digital-ID mind hates that claim, because it cannot pre-clear it.
What the Numbers Are Hiding
Trump’s policies have produced real growth. I am not taking that away from him. The question I brought back from both sides of the desk is what the unemployment rate and the expansion would look like if companies were allowed to hire the people who can do the job, instead of clearing a DEI list to stay eligible for the easy-money ecosystem. Labor is short, and HR is artificially shortening it. Housing in a constrained country gets expensive because you limit who can build, who can lend, and who can work, and then you call the price a market. It is not supply and demand. It is a screened supply. More competition would break a lot of the gouging. The handbook is holding back the competition. Government is making everything more expensive by creating less competition.
You can buy every missile and tank you want. I am not against the military. If they control the hiring stack, they already have a hand on the economy that pays for the military. I have an unusual experience of it now: the executive who hired thousands, and the man who sent the hundreds of résumés. The war is over the paycheck. It comes to the house as a rejected application. Most of the victims will not say it at the soccer game, because saying it is how you lose the job.
The Bible is still the exit. Not as a slogan. As the counter-authority to a state that wants to be submitted to. Edwards knew it before we had a country. I have had a harder year than I planned on, and I am more convinced of it than I was when I only knew the HR problem from the boss’s side.
Notes
1. Keir Starmer, 26 September 2025, announcing the digital-ID scheme: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” BBC, “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK,” 26 September 2025; BBC explainer, updated 23 October 2025. Darren Jones called a working system “the bedrock of the modern state.” A petition to scrap the scheme approached three million signatures.
2. The scheme was described as an app on the phone, carrying name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and a photograph, mandatory for proving the right to work by the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029), not required to be carried, and not retrospective for people already in a job. BBC, 23 October 2025.
3. On 14 January 2026, the Telegraph reported that Labor had dropped compulsory digital ID for right-to-work checks, describing it as the eleventh U-turn, while sources still spoke of mandatory digital checks as distinct from a compulsory card. The September sentence remains the clearest statement of intent.
4. U.S. “right to work” statutes bar compulsory union membership or dues as a condition of employment. Indiana is a right-to-work state; Ohio is not. The British phrase in Starmer’s announcement means the opposite: state permission as a condition of employment.
5. Amy Acton was director of the Ohio Department of Health during the 2020 orders. Subsequent litigation tested those orders against the Ohio Constitution. My employer-side account here is based on operating through the orders while those cases were being built.
6. Applicant-tracking systems and automated résumé screens are standard in large U.S. firms. The disparate-impact and DEI sorting layered on those systems expanded after 2020 and has been contested in federal policy since 2025. My 2026 job search is the field report; it is not a national census.
7. Real ID and passport-level identity checks for employment eligibility (Form I-9, E-Verify) tightened the document set employers will accept. I was required to produce a passport repeatedly in 2026 hiring processes.
8. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are the dominant U.S. index complexes. Their proxy and ESG policies in the early 2020s were a transmission belt from asset-manager politics into corporate HR. Political and legal pushback since 2023 has narrowed, not ended, that belt.
9. Vinyl’s return is a measured market, not a metaphor only. RIAA data through the mid-2020s show vinyl as the majority of physical music revenue, driven by ownership rather than by audio quality. The Cracker Barrel gift-shop scene is mine, with my grandsons.
10. Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, on the papal and Mahometan kingdoms as the two great rival orders that swallowed the Roman world.
11. Socialist International membership and the historic sympathies of Western socialist parties for the Cuban revolution and for Central American insurgencies are a matter of public record. Canada’s and Mexico’s governing models are social-democratic and corporatist respectively; neither is a classical liberal republic.
Bibliography
BBC News. “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK.” 26 September 2025.
BBC News. “What are digital ID cards, how will they work and will they be mandatory?” Updated 23 October 2025.
BBC News. “No digital ID checks until you change jobs, says No 10.” 23 October 2025.
Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, 1941.
Edwards, Jonathan. A History of the Work of Redemption. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 9, edited by John F. Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, completed 2026; publication targeted 2027.
Mises, Ludwig von. Bureaucracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism. 1922. English edition, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Murray, Charles. Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. New York: Twelve, 2020.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.
RIAA. Year-end music-revenue reports, 2020–2025.
Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge and Decisions. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
The Telegraph. “Labor scraps plans for compulsory digital ID for workers in latest Starmer U-turn.” 14 January 2026.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Form I-9 instructions and acceptable documents list, current edition.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
Rich Hoffman
More about me
Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707
About the Author: Rich Hoffman
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.
