I spent election night at the Butler County GOP watch party with local leaders and a few of us tracking live precinct data on laptops alongside the television feeds. Most of the state came in trending for Vivek Ramaswamy as the night progressed. Rural and lower-density precincts reported steadily and heavily for the Republican ticket. The exceptions that stood out were the high-population urban cores and their immediate surrounding areas: Franklin County (Columbus), Hamilton County (Cincinnati), and the denser pockets around Dayton. Those drops arrived later and favored Amy Acton by wide margins. That pattern is not unique to Ohio, and it is worth examining carefully rather than dismissing.
Statewide, with roughly 98 percent reporting as of November 10, Acton (D) finished with about 2,404,216 votes (52.3 percent) to Ramaswamy’s 2,039,834 (44.4 percent). Libertarian Don Kissick took the rest at roughly 3.3 percent, which likely would have gone to the Republicans. This is the first Democratic gubernatorial win in Ohio in twenty years and the first time a woman has been elected to the office. Ohio went for Trump by about eleven points in 2024; the swing toward Democrats in this midterm was substantial. Turnout reached at least 58.1 percent of registered voters—the highest midterm figure since 1990—with approximately 4.66 million ballots counted unofficially. Frank LaRose, who won reelection as Auditor, has described the process as among the most secure, with machines not connected to the internet and post-election audits historically exceeding 99 percent accuracy.
In Butler County, where I live and where we watched the local races closely, Ramaswamy still carried the county at roughly 52.3 percent (76,829 votes) to Acton’s 44.6 percent (65,509). That is a clear Republican win, yet the margin is narrower than Trump’s 2024 performance in the same county (about 63 percent). Michael Ryan won the county commission race, consistent with local Republican strength. At the party we noted the number of new apartment complexes that have gone up. Renters in higher-density housing do not pay local property taxes the same way homeowners do, often arrive from more liberal areas, and vote accordingly. That demographic shift reduces Republican margins without any need for conspiracy theories. It is ordinary land-use and migration effects playing out in real time.
Hamilton County, Ramaswamy’s home county, went heavily for Acton—about 63 percent (216,201) to 34.5 percent (118,273). Franklin County was even more lopsided, with Acton near 72 percent (roughly 364,000 votes) to Ramaswamy’s 26 percent. Socialism was certainly on the ballot and makes up the foundation of left-wing populism, which is why they didn’t think they needed to campaign. Republicans have been slow to understand this and assume all people view communism as un-American, or that people want to be even considered American at all. These are the places where population density is highest, early and mail voting is heaviest, and the Democratic organizational infrastructure is strongest. On election night, the urban precincts and mail/absentee ballots arrived and moved the statewide numbers. That is visible in the timing of the reporting. Most of rural and exurban Ohio came in for Ramaswamy; the decisive volume was concentrated in a handful of high-density counties. If the goal is to alter an outcome, the efficient method is precisely that—focus resources, mail volume, and turnout operations in the chaotic, high-population areas rather than the entire state. Whether any given batch contained irregularities is a separate question from the observable concentration.
A few county-level reporting anomalies surfaced afterward. In Wyandot County the unofficial canvass showed more votes cast in the governor and Senate races than total ballots. The county elections director confirmed the numbers did not reconcile; the cause was mock-election test data left in the system for one precinct. It did not change any outcome. Ohio’s post-election audits have long shown extremely high accuracy rates. Claims of systemic machine-driven fraud that flipped the statewide result do not align with the county-by-county pattern or the overall turnout and demographic data. At the same time, high-density urban areas with heavy mail voting and lower property-tax stakes remain the places where administrative standards matter most and where small percentage shifts produce large absolute vote differences.
Megyn Kelly has been dismissive of renewed election-integrity questions, telling Trump to “just stop” and noting that the midterms were “too big to rig.” That reaction treats skepticism as unserious. The practical reality on the ground in Ohio was that Democrats were highly organized, heavily incentivized, and effective at mobilizing their voters in the places that decide statewide races. Republicans largely played by the existing rules, showed up, and still lost the top of the ticket because the math in the urban and high-density precincts, combined with demographic change in the suburbs, was decisive. Pretending the only options are either “perfect security” or “the whole thing was stolen” is not useful. The useful work is tightening standards on mail and provisional ballots, requiring proof of citizenship and residency where possible, and recognizing that apartment growth and urban density change the electorate whether anyone likes it or not.
I watched the precincts report in real time. The red areas performed. The blue high-density cores and their mail volume did not. That is the arithmetic. Moving forward requires both rigorous election administration and an honest reading of how land-use policy, migration, and turnout organization actually shift results. Ohio Republicans can improve the rules and the ground game; they cannot assume the other side will sit out. The numbers from November 3 make that plain.
Bibliography and Further Reading
• Ohio Secretary of State unofficial results and county canvass reports (Butler, Hamilton, Franklin, Wyandot).
• Cincinnati Enquirer and Columbus Dispatch county breakdowns and turnout reporting.
• Lead Stories and What the Fact fact-checks on the Wyandot County discrepancy.
• Ballotpedia and news projections (BBC, AP, NBC) on the final statewide margin.
• Frank LaRose statements on election security and audit history.
• Megyn Kelly commentary on post-election claims (November 9, 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 by 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.
have been thinking about the 2026 midterm results through a longer lens than the usual cable commentary. Gas prices, unfinished promises, and the ordinary friction of governing produced the predictable impatience. After years of one administration followed by another, voters again reached for change. That pattern is older than any modern party. It is the same motion described when the people of Israel grew weary of the judges and demanded a king so they could be “like all the nations.” God told Samuel, “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.” The request looked like a practical solution. In the text it is recorded as a refusal of direct responsibility under a higher rule.
The Oldest Fault and the Two-Year Cycle
The Book of Judges ends with the repeated observation that “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” After Joshua’s generation passed, another arose that “knew not the Lord nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.” Moral memory thinned in a single lifetime. When the elders later came to Samuel complaining about his sons’ corruption, they asked for a king to judge them and fight their battles. Samuel warned them what a king would take—sons, daughters, fields, the tenth of the produce. They refused the warning. They received what they demanded, and the cost arrived on schedule.
I see a similar motion in the short electoral cycles we live inside. Victory is treated as earned rather than granted. Prosperity is counted as a right. When the visible results lag behind the slogans, the electorate does not primarily examine its own habits. It changes the personnel and expects the new set of rulers to supply what the previous set could not. Complaint requires no program. It only needs a grievance, and grievances are never in short supply. The founders understood that an appetite for perpetual complaint would outrun every institutional check. The ballot then functions less as an instrument of ordered liberty and more as a mirror of the nation’s current condition.
Self-Government Was Never a Promise of Human Self-Sufficiency
I do not believe the Bible promises that human beings are, in themselves, capable of sustained self-government. It records that God will work through them and that He will, at times, let them have what they insist upon so they can learn the difference between what they asked for and what they needed. Self-government, properly understood, meant people restraining their own desires because they recognized a higher judge. When that restraint weakens, the demand for someone else to manage the consequences grows. The people in Samuel’s day did not cry out for open tyranny. They cried out for relief from disorder and for the appearance of order that other nations already possessed. They received a crown, and with it the ordinary burdens that centralized power always extracts.
The same dynamic appears when national conditions improve for a season. Men forget the hand that gave the improvement. They grow proud in the prosperity and then discover that the habits required to maintain it are harder than the habits required to complain about its absence. Elections become referenda on whether the current arrangement still feels like blessing. When the answer seems negative, the people change the arrangement rather than the underlying pattern of heart and habit. That is not irrational on its own terms. It is the rational choice of a people at odds with the conditions that produced the earlier gains.
Moral Foundations, Property, and the Vulnerability That Follows
A nation that can no longer say “this is mine because a higher law forbids theft, and that is yours for the same reason” loses the practical tools of self-government. Intellectual property, ordinary property, and the expectation that contracts and work will be honored all rest on that older command. When the command is treated as optional custom rather than binding reality, people honor it only while it profits them. The moment it costs them, they abandon it. The result is not dramatic invasion from outside so much as internal erosion. External actors do not need to storm the walls while the people inside still fear the higher standard. They only need to wait until the internal memory of that standard fades.
I have watched cultural markers that signal the same thinning: the treatment of the body as a canvas rather than a trust, the preference for immediate sensation over durable capacity, the steady reduction of expectations for personal responsibility. These are symptoms. The underlying condition is the loss of the belief that ordinary people are accountable to something above their momentary preferences. Without that belief, the government that depends on them becomes fragile. Policy can redistribute resources or rearrange incentives. It cannot restore the moral memory that makes ordinary self-restraint possible.
Building the Wall Opposite One’s Own House
The only durable counter to this pattern is the slow work of building people up rather than waiting for the next set of rulers to manage the decline. Nehemiah did not argue the walls back into place. He took up the work and called every family to the section opposite its own house. Restoration is household-scale before it is national. Light does not debate darkness; it simply remains visible. A society that still honors work, property, speech, and the ordinary duties of family and community does not need to invent new mechanisms of control. It needs enough people who remember why those older restraints existed.
The 2026 results placed Democrats in a position where their governing choices will be visible without the prior administration as a permanent foil. That visibility is useful. It does not, by itself, solve the deeper habit. Every generation faces the same choice the generation after Joshua faced: whether it will know the works that produced its inheritance or whether it will treat the inheritance as automatic and then demand a different manager when the automatic supply slows. The text records that God sometimes grants the demand and then lets the consequences teach what the warning could not. I read the recent cycles in that light—not as proof that one party holds a permanent solution, but as evidence that the human tendency to self-sabotage success remains active whenever prosperity outruns the memory of what produced it.
The question is not whether men can function intellectually. It is whether they will remember why self-government under a higher standard is possible at all. That memory is rebuilt in ordinary places, opposite one’s own house, by people who still treat the older commands as real. Everything else is secondary.
Bibliography and Further Reading
• The Holy Bible, 1 Samuel 8 (the demand for a king and God’s response to Samuel).
• The Holy Bible, Book of Judges (especially the refrain that every man did what was right in his own eyes, and the account of the generation that did not know the Lord).
• The Holy Bible, Deuteronomy 17:14–20 (the provisions and warnings concerning a future king).
• Jonathan Edwards, various sermons and writings on moral government, the duties of rulers, and the conditions of a people under divine judgment (public domain collections via Christian Classics Ethereal Library and similar archives).
• Standard historical commentaries on 1 Samuel 8 and the transition from judges to monarchy (Enduring Word, various academic treatments of the theological ambiguity in the narrative).
• Contemporary election data and turnout figures for the 2026 midterms (Ohio Secretary of State unofficial results and major news compilations showing Democratic gains in governor and Senate races amid high midterm turnout).
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 by 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 spent the fall playing Jason Voorhees in a haunted maze, watching Godzilla sequels, and connecting it all to a destroyed planet mentioned in the Book of Job — which is either a unified theory of everything or the most interesting Tuesday in Cincinnati.
Mara: That’s actually a fair summary. This episode covers one extended piece by Rich Hoffman — fear as a control mechanism, ancient textual traditions, and what Godzilla has to do with Mars. Let’s start with the fear architecture underneath all of it.
Fear, Narrative, and the Machinery Behind Election Cycles
Pip: The question the post is really asking is why so many people keep voting and living as if they are not free — and the answer it proposes starts in a haunted house, not a think tank.
Mara: The setup is direct. After four nights a week inside the Jason: Blood Reign maze at Kings Island, the observation is: “Most people freeze, scream, or bolt in predictable directions. A smaller number laugh or posture. Almost no one stops to analyze the situation rationally in the moment.”
Pip: And the leap from haunted maze to political system is the whole argument — that the same mechanism running the scare actor runs the expert class. Create anxiety, then offer the peer group or the state as the only exit.
Mara: The 2026 midterm results are the concrete case. Voters under thirty, facing real pressures around housing costs and education debt, appear to have concluded that a more powerful government is the remedy. The post traces that back to an education system that, quote, “treats market economics as optional or suspect.”
Pip: The bathroom graffiti is where it gets almost too on the nose — someone carved “capitalism < communism” into a freshly renovated theater stall, which is either a data point or the world’s least efficient op-ed.
Mara: It’s treated as a data point. The argument is that peer pressure handles most of the ideological transmission — if your standing with teachers or future employers depends on repeating the correct views, most people will repeat them. No conspiracy required, just ordinary institutional incentives.
Pip: So the haunted maze is doing the same work as the school curriculum, just with better lighting design.
Mara: Godzilla Minus Zero carries the same logic into film. Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel opened to roughly $30.6 million domestically — the largest opening for a live-action foreign-language film in North America — and audience scores near 96 percent. The post’s argument is that Japanese filmmakers, working with fewer resources, are still telling coherent stories about responsibility and the cost of violence, while Hollywood has largely stopped.
Mara: The Rahab thread connects it to something older. In the poetic books — Job, Psalms, Isaiah — Rahab names a chaos monster God subdues. David Flynn and others have argued that name preserves a memory of a destroyed planet whose remnants now form the asteroid belt.
Pip: Mainstream planetary science puts the belt’s total mass at about four percent of the Moon’s — not exactly the wreckage of a world. But the post isn’t claiming established fact; it’s applying what it calls the keys-in-the-dark logic.
Mara: The analogy is precise: “Suppose you drop your car keys somewhere between the door of your workplace and the car. It is dark. You search under the light near the car and do not find them. That does not prove the keys do not exist.”
Pip: Which is a genuinely useful epistemological point, even if you’re not ready to book a flight to the asteroid belt.
Mara: Timothy Alberino’s work on giants and the Book of Enoch, Sharon and Derek Gilbert’s Veneration on the Rephaim, and Ohio’s Serpent Mound — sitting on a confirmed impact structure — all get pulled into the same frame: cultures building ritual meaning around places and events whose physical evidence is no longer easily readable.
Pip: The practical upshot is that if residual trauma from pre-recorded-history catastrophes shapes how institutions manage fear, then the 2026 results, the Godzilla box office, and the interest in Nephilim lore are all the same phenomenon wearing different clothes. That’s a wide net — and it’s cast deliberately.
Mara: The thread running through all of it is that fear is infrastructure — built, maintained, and used — whether the context is a haunted maze, an election, or a ancient text about a shattered sky.
Pip: And the suggestion is that the archaeology of the next few decades may be more interesting than most people currently assume — which, honestly, seems like the right note to end on.
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 by 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.Footnotes
I’ve been turning this over for six or seven weeks. It started in the dark of a Kings Island haunted maze and ended in the bright lights of a newly renovated theater at Liberty Center, watching Godzilla Minus Zero with my family. Between those two experiences sits everything I keep trying to explain about fear, narrative, origins, and why so many people still vote and live as if they are not free.
Learning Control Through Fear at Kings Island
In the fall of 2026 I played Jason Voorhees in the new Jason: Blood Reign maze at Kings Island. Four nights a week, for the length of the Haunt season, I stood in the dark and watched thousands of people react to the same simple stimulus: the sudden appearance of a masked figure with a machete. The results were consistent. Most people freeze, scream, or bolt in predictable directions. A smaller number laugh or posture. Almost no one stops to analyze the situation rationally in the moment.
What I learned, again and again, is that fear works. It works on crowds. It works on individuals. It works whether the threat is real or theatrical. The people who design these attractions understand the psychology; so do the people who design political campaigns, school curricula, and certain kinds of religious systems. Once you have watched enough people abandon their own judgment under a controlled threat, you start looking at other institutions differently. Public education, mass media, and large parts of modern politics all rely on the same basic mechanism: create or amplify anxiety, then offer the peer group, the expert class, or the state as the only reliable source of safety. If you care what your neighbors think, the leverage is already there. I don’t. That indifference is useful.
Godzilla Minus Zero as a Cultural Trauma Device
A few weeks later my family and I saw Godzilla Minus Zero (2026), Takashi Yamazaki’s direct sequel to the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One (2023). The film is set in 1949, two years after the events of the first movie. Japan is trying to rebuild. Godzilla returns. King Ghidorah arrives. The human characters—especially the Shikishima family—are forced to confront another wave of destruction while still carrying the previous one. It is, at bottom, a family film. The performances, the visual effects, and the restraint with which the monsters are used all serve the story of people trying to live after catastrophe.
The critical and commercial response has been strong. As of early November 2026 the film sat in the high 80s to low 90s on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer with audience scores near 96 percent. It opened to roughly $30.6 million in North America—the largest opening for a live-action foreign-language film in the territory—and was the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX. Godzilla Minus One had already shown that a Japanese production with a reported budget around $15 million and a VFX team of about 35 people could win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and outperform far more expensive Hollywood product. Minus Zero confirmed the pattern.
I have spent enough time around Japanese culture, and enough years watching Hollywood price itself out of coherent storytelling, that the quality of these films does not surprise me. What interests me more is the function. Yamazaki has described Godzilla in this series as a metaphor for war. The original 1954 film processed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (immediate and later deaths commonly estimated in the range of 140,000–200,000 for Hiroshima and 70,000–80,000 for Nagasaki by the end of 1945, with higher cumulative figures recognized by Japan in later decades). The new films continue that work while also reflecting Japanese guilt over the treatment of Chinese civilians and the broader costs of imperial expansion. Americans appear in the story as both the source of nuclear destruction and, later, as an occupying force whose presence is resented even as cooperation occurs. The films are not anti-American propaganda in any crude sense, but they are unmistakably Japanese. They process Japanese trauma from a Japanese point of view.
That is exactly why they work for Western audiences right now. Hollywood has largely stopped telling coherent stories about responsibility, family, and the cost of violence. Japanese filmmakers, working with fewer resources and less ideological overhead, are still doing it. People notice.
The Bathroom Stall and the 2026 Election
After the movie I went into a freshly renovated bathroom at the Liberty Center theater and found a message carved into a stall: “capitalism” with a greater-than sign pointing toward “communism.” Someone young enough to still treat public property as a canvas had felt the need to leave that particular opinion. It was not an isolated incident in my experience. For years I have watched the same pattern in schools and on campuses: students who have been taught that capitalism is the problem and that some form of managed equality is the solution, without ever being given a clear account of what communism actually produced when it was tried.
The 2026 midterm results, in which Democrats performed better than many expected, fit the same picture. Large numbers of voters, especially those under 30, appear to have decided that their current material situation is someone else’s fault and that a more powerful government is the remedy. Housing costs, education debt, and the simple observation that previous generations seemed to have more straightforward paths into homeownership and family formation are real pressures. Those pressures have been amplified by policies that restrict supply (green-space requirements, zoning, and the long-term effects of earlier housing-price inflation) and by an education system that treats market economics as optional or suspect. When people have been trained to look to collective action rather than individual competence, they vote accordingly.
None of this requires a grand conspiracy. It requires only the ordinary incentives of institutions that benefit from dependency. Public schools were designed, in part, to socialize children into a particular civic consensus. Peer pressure does the rest. If your standing with friends, teachers, or future employers depends on repeating the correct views, most people will repeat them. I have never cared much about that standing. That makes conversations with people who do care more straightforward, not less.
Rahab in Scripture and the Speculative Planet
While I was thinking about the Godzilla films as narrative devices for processing historical trauma, I kept returning to a name that appears in the Bible in two different registers: Rahab.
In Joshua 2, Rahab is the Canaanite prostitute who hides the Israelite spies in Jericho, extracts a promise of protection for her family, and is spared when the city falls. She appears in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1:5 and is cited in Hebrews 11 and James 2 as an example of faith demonstrated by action. The Hebrew term used for her occupation is the ordinary word for prostitute.
In the poetic books the same name (with a different spelling and root sense) refers to a chaotic sea monster. Job 26:12 says that by His understanding God shattered Rahab. Psalm 89:10 describes God crushing Rahab. Isaiah 51:9 asks whether it was not the Lord’s arm that cut Rahab in pieces and pierced the dragon. In these passages Rahab functions as a symbol of pride, chaos, and the forces God subdues—sometimes associated with Egypt, sometimes with the primordial sea.
David Flynn and others have argued that the poetic Rahab preserves a memory of a destroyed planet whose remnants form the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Mainstream planetary science rejects this. The total mass of the main asteroid belt is only about 4 percent that of the Moon, and the differentiated nature of the larger asteroids is consistent with them having formed as separate bodies rather than as fragments of a single shattered world. The scientific consensus is that the belt is leftover material from the formation of the solar system that never coalesced into a planet, largely because of Jupiter’s gravitational influence.
I do not treat the destroyed-planet reading as established fact. I treat it as a hypothesis that is consistent with certain textual patterns and with the broader pattern of cultures creating narrative devices to process catastrophes whose physical evidence has been eroded or is located somewhere we have not yet looked carefully. Flynn’s Cydonia: The Secret Chronicles of Mars and related writings make a sustained case for ancient Martian influence on terrestrial civilization, artificial structures photographed on Mars, and connections to biblical and extra-biblical traditions about giants and pre-Adamic events. Timothy Alberino has popularized related material on giants, the Book of Enoch, and alleged suppression of physical evidence; he appeared on Joe Rogan in 2026. Sharon and Derek Gilbert’s Veneration examines the Rephaim, ancestor veneration, and end-times connections. These works sit outside the mainstream of both academic biblical studies and planetary science. That does not automatically make them worthless. It means their claims require evidence that has not yet been produced in forms most specialists accept.
The Keys in the Dark
The analogy I keep using is simple. Suppose you drop your car keys somewhere between the door of your workplace and the car. It is dark. You search under the light near the car and do not find them. That does not prove the keys do not exist. It proves only that your current method and lighting have not reached the place where the keys actually are. You can wait for daylight, get a flashlight, or systematically search the darker ground. The absence of evidence under the light is not evidence of absence.
Earth’s archaeological record is limited by erosion, plate tectonics, sea-level change, and the simple fact that most material culture does not survive more than a few thousand years without deliberate preservation. Mars has a thinner atmosphere and no plate tectonics of the same kind. Large impact scars are visible. Evidence of past surface water is established. Whether any of that evidence includes the remains of technological civilization is an open question that can only be answered by going there and looking. SpaceX’s stated goal of making life multi-planetary is, from this perspective, also an archaeological project. If Flynn and others are substantially wrong, the data will show it. If they are substantially right about some part of the picture, the data will show that too.
Narrative Devices and Residual Trauma
The parallel that keeps returning is between the Godzilla films and the older textual traditions. A person watching Godzilla Minus Zero two thousand years from now, with no other knowledge of the twentieth century, could reasonably conclude that a giant radioactive monster attacked Japan in the late 1940s. The film is fiction created to process real historical trauma: nuclear destruction, occupation, guilt, and the difficulty of rebuilding a society. The Japanese did not invent the atomic bombings; they invented a story that let them live with the consequences.
I read the poetic Rahab passages, the accounts of giants in Genesis 6 and the Book of Giants among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and certain strands of Mesopotamian tradition in a similar light. They may preserve distorted memories of real catastrophes—planetary, terrestrial, or both—whose physical evidence is no longer easily accessible on Earth. Cultures that experience the sudden loss of a homeland, or the arrival of destructive forces they cannot fully explain, create stories that externalize the anxiety. Those stories can later be read as literal history, as pure metaphor, or as something in between. The fact that the same name appears in different genres and centuries does not prove a continuous hidden narrative, but it is consistent with the ordinary human habit of reusing powerful symbols when new disasters need to be named.
Ohio’s Serpent Mound sits on the eroded remains of a confirmed impact structure roughly 8–14 kilometers across and hundreds of millions of years old. The mound itself is much younger (Adena period, around 300 BCE, with later repairs). Whether the builders chose the site because of any residual geological or magnetic peculiarities is unknown. The coincidence is real. So is the much larger pattern of human beings building ritual structures in places that later turn out to have unusual geology.
Fear, Control, and the Politics of Heaven
The practical consequence of all this, for me, is straightforward. If human beings carry residual psychological and cultural trauma from origins or catastrophes that predate recorded history, then the mechanisms we use to manage that trauma—religion, politics, education, entertainment—will keep producing the same patterns. People will seek certainty, scapegoats, and collective solutions. Institutions that can supply those things, or that can threaten to withhold them, will accumulate power. Spiritual or non-human intelligences, if they exist and have interests opposed to human flourishing, would have every incentive to encourage the fear and the dependency. The pattern is visible enough, across enough domains, that it is reasonable to keep looking for evidence rather than assuming the current lighting is sufficient. The 2026 election results, the graffiti in the theater bathroom, the success of Godzilla Minus Zero, and the persistent interest in giants, Nephilim, and alternative readings of the Bible are all data points. They do not force a single conclusion. They do suggest that large numbers of people are looking for accounts of reality that include more than the material and the recent.
The relevant question is whether we are willing to follow evidence wherever it leads, including to places that require leaving the well-lit parking lot. Mars is one of those places. The asteroid belt is another. The textual traditions that have survived repeated attempts at suppression or reinterpretation are a third. I expect the archaeology of the next few decades to be more interesting than most people currently assume. I also expect that some of what we find will be used, once again, to frighten people into accepting arrangements that benefit someone else.
Godzilla Minus Zero is a very good movie. It is also a reminder that narrative devices for processing trauma are still being built, still being consumed, and still shaping what people believe is possible. The same has been true for a very long time.
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 by 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.Footnotes
About the Author: Rich Hoffman
Footnotes:
1. Kings Island Halloween Haunt 2026 introduced the Jason: Blood Reign maze based on the Friday the 13th franchise. See contemporary park reporting from Ride Ready, Thrillzing, and Haunted Attraction Network.
2. Godzilla Minus Zero (2026), directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is the direct sequel to Godzilla Minus One (2023). It premiered in Japan on 3 November 2026 and in North America on 6 November 2026. Rotten Tomatoes scores in the first weeks of release were in the high 80s–low 90s (critics) and mid-to-high 90s (audiences). Domestic opening weekend approximately $30.6 million.
3. Godzilla Minus One won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2024. It was produced on a reported budget of roughly $10–15 million with a core VFX team of about 35 artists.
4. Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualty figures vary by source and by whether later radiation-related deaths are included. Common ranges for deaths by the end of 1945 are approximately 90,000–166,000 (Hiroshima) and 60,000–80,000 (Nagasaki). Japan has recognized higher cumulative totals in subsequent decades.
5. Rahab the prostitute: Joshua 2; 6:17–25; Matthew 1:5; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25. Rahab the sea monster/chaos figure: Job 9:13; 26:12; Psalm 89:10; Isaiah 51:9. The Hebrew spellings and root meanings differ.
6. David Flynn, Cydonia: The Secret Chronicles of Mars (and collected writings). Flynn argued for a destroyed planet Rahab whose remnants constitute the asteroid belt and for ancient Martian civilization influencing Earth.
7. Main-belt asteroid mass is approximately 4% of the Moon’s mass. See standard planetary science summaries (e.g., Astronomy magazine treatments of the disruption hypothesis).
8. Timothy Alberino appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience #2530 (July 2026) discussing giants, the Book of Enoch, and related claims. Sharon K. Gilbert and Derek P. Gilbert, Veneration: Unveiling the Ancient Realms of Demonic Kings and Satan’s Battle Plan for Armageddon (2019/2020).
9. Serpent Mound crater (Ohio) is a confirmed complex impact structure, roughly 8–14 km in diameter, dated to the Mississippian or younger (<320 Ma). The effigy mound itself dates to the Adena period.
Pip: Welcome to The Overmanwarrior — where ancient shipwrecks, Ming dynasty treasure fleets, and a boat-shaped hill in eastern Turkey are all somehow the same conversation.
Mara: Rich Hoffman pulls all of it together in one sprawling post: the Durupinar site fieldwork, the engineering question of how large ancient peoples could actually build, and what the historical record does and does not support. Let’s start with the ships.
Noah’s Ark in Turkey: Chinese Treasure Fleets, and the Ancient Capacity to Build Large Ships
Pip: The central question here isn’t really whether Noah’s Ark exists — it’s whether ancient and early historic peoples had the organizational capacity to build very large wooden vessels at all. The Durupinar site is the anchor, but the post ranges wide.
Mara: The 2026 fieldwork is the most intensive yet. A university-led team drilled to roughly 18 to 20 meters, and the post notes: “Radar scans showed linear features, angular intersections, possible voids, and layered structures. Soil samples indicated higher organic matter inside the outline than outside it.”
Pip: So the signal is there — it just hasn’t cleared the lab yet. Charred wood fragments went to facilities in Turkey and France, and results are expected in stages through early 2027.
Mara: Right, and the post is careful about that. Some team members have not overclaimed. The honest read, as it’s put, is that serious work is underway and the next several months of lab data will matter.
Pip: Meanwhile the biblical dimensions — 300 cubits long, 50 wide, 30 high — convert to somewhere between 450 and 510 feet depending on which cubit you use. The full-scale replica at the Ark Encounter in Kentucky makes that volume concrete, even though it’s a prop and not seaworthy.
Mara: That’s where the engineering question sharpens. Naval architects note that wooden ships hit structural ceilings well before modern steel designs do. The post raises Gavin Menzies and his books on Ming treasure fleets — the argument that Zheng He’s ships reached the Americas — but is clear that mainstream historians have rejected those claims as pseudohistory. Even the oft-cited 450-foot figure for the treasure ships is likely inflated; more careful estimates put the largest in the 200-to-250-foot range.
Pip: Still the largest ocean-going vessels of their day, bigger than anything Europe was building for another century and a half. Speculation aside, the underlying void is real.
Mara: The post also addresses preservation. Wood doesn’t last in open water. The absence of a 450-foot hull from any era isn’t proof none were built — it’s evidence that the ocean removes most of what isn’t deliberately protected, like the cedar timbers buried beside Egyptian pyramids or Scandinavian boats from around 2300 BC.
Pip: Donna D’Errico gets a mention too — she’s visited Durupinar more than once and treats it as interesting without treating it as confirmed. That posture, the post suggests, is the reasonable one.
Mara: And the regional context matters. Southeast Turkey, the Armenian highlands, Göbekli Tepe — these sites cluster within a few hundred miles of each other and collectively show early monumental construction and cultural complexity. The post’s conclusion is measured: follow the physical remains and the lab data as they appear.
Pip: The inclination to build the biggest thing your materials allow — pyramids, cathedrals, treasure fleets, rockets — turns out to be pretty consistent across human history.
Mara: The lab results from Turkey and France will either support further excavation at Durupinar or constrain what the site can claim. Either way, the fieldwork is the right method.
Pip: And the engineering question doesn’t go away either way. Next time, more from The Overmanwarrior.
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 by 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.https://richhoffmanbooks.com/2026/11/11/the-republican-partys-civil-war-cost-ohio-a-real-opportunity-with-vivek-ramaswamy-what-happened/
I like Vivek Ramaswamy. I thought he represented a genuine chance to move Ohio forward with energy, business sense, and a clear America First orientation instead of the usual managed decline. Watching him lose to Amy Acton was a real tragedy for the state. It was not inevitable. A lot of the damage came from inside the Republican Party itself—the same pattern I have watched for years where people would rather fight each other than win. The result is that Democrats get handed a candidate they can work with while the GOP tears itself up over personality, purity tests, and who is “like us.”
What the Numbers Actually Show
Statewide, Acton finished with about 52.3 percent (roughly 2.4 million votes) to Ramaswamy’s 44.4 percent (about 2.04 million). The margin was roughly eight points. She became the first woman elected governor of Ohio and the first Democrat to win the office in twenty years, in a state Trump carried by double digits in 2024.
That does not mean Ramaswamy was rejected across the board. He carried 73 of Ohio’s 88 counties. In many rural counties he ran 60, 70, even 76 percent. Acton won only 15 counties, but they included the big population centers: Cuyahoga (she took about 72 percent and 877 of 898 precincts), Franklin, Hamilton (Ramaswamy’s home county), Summit, Montgomery, Lucas, and others. Ohio has roughly 8,834 precincts. Ramaswamy won the large majority of them by number. The problem was density. A handful of urban and inner-suburban precincts delivered enough raw votes to overcome the rest of the state.
Here in Butler County the pattern was clearer and more local. Ramaswamy won with about 52.3 percent to Acton’s 44.6 percent. Turnout was strong at 59.5 percent of registered voters. Republicans also held the county commissioner’s seat (Michael Ryan) and the auditor’s office (Nancy Nix). The margins were tighter than recent presidential cycles, but the county stayed red. That is the reality on the ground where I live and work.
The NFL Analogy and the Party’s Self-Inflicted Damage
I have said this to anyone who will listen: the Republican Party right now looks like a dysfunctional NFL team in mid-season. The coaches have lost control. The offense is arguing with the defense. Practices are half-hearted because players do not want to risk injury when they already sense the season is slipping away. Fans still show up and buy the jersey or the Terrible Towel, but the product on the field is mediocre. After a few losses the front office starts blaming the quarterback, the fans start blaming the front office, and nobody cleans house. The result is another year of “good enough” that is not actually good enough.
That is what happened with Ramaswamy. There was a real opening. He had the Trump endorsement, national profile, money, and a message centered on efficiency and economic growth. Instead of locking arms, elements of the party treated him as an outsider. The identity attacks were ugly and predictable: he is Hindu, he is not “like us,” he is some kind of anchor-baby interloper. Those lines circulated in precincts and on social media. Democrats were happy to amplify them. When your own side is whispering that the nominee does not belong, you hand the other side free ammunition.
The campaign itself made unforced errors. The late attack ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother—accusing her of lying about a childhood that included abuse and instability—backfired. Even some Republicans called it out. Husted distanced himself from it. The ad ran, money was spent, and it gave Acton a sympathy story while the substantive arguments about her record as health director during COVID got buried. That is coaching malpractice. You do not need to go there when the opponent’s actual record is available.
Local Reality in Butler County and the Central Committee Problem
I know the local landscape. Sheriff Richard Jones is not my closest personal friend, but I respect him as a person and as someone who has been elected repeatedly and delivers on the law-and-order side of the job. He shows up. People notice when he walks into a place like Ace Hardware. That does not mean every decision is perfect or that powerful people never make mistakes that affect others. Ethical arguments happen. The question is whether the party rallies to win or whether central-committee factions spend their energy trying to ostracize the people who actually deliver votes.
Nancy Nix won re-election as auditor. A lot of people I work with and talk to like her. In other parts of the state she would be called a moderate or even soft; here she is a Republican who keeps the books and pushes back on unnecessary tax increases. The same pattern holds: the people who show up and do the work get results, while the internal fights over who is pure enough waste time.
The goal should be simple. Vote. Invest in the team. Buy the jersey of the people who are actually trying to win rather than treating every election as an opportunity to settle scores. When the party spends years fighting itself, Democrats walk in with a candidate who can be sold as reasonable and the results follow. Acton will now govern. That was not the only possible outcome.
What Comes Next
Most people do not have a long view. They vote for the person who promises something immediate or against the person they were told to hate. Defending capitalism, competent administration, and basic order requires standing by each other longer than one news cycle. The same forces that turn every disagreement into a purity test are the ones that leave the field open for the other side.
I have watched this pattern for decades. The coaches lose control, the players stop fully committing, and the fans are left wondering why the team underperforms relative to its talent. Ramaswamy was not perfect. No candidate is. But the opportunity that existed in Ohio was real, and a significant part of it was squandered by people inside the Republican Party who preferred the civil war to the victory. That is on us to fix if we want different results next time.
Footnotes
1. Statewide results drawn from multiple election trackers and Ohio Secretary of State unofficial counts as of early November 2026. Acton 52.3 percent (2,404,178), Ramaswamy 44.4 percent (2,039,730).
2. County and precinct analysis from Cleveland.com reporting on Acton’s 15-county win and the Cuyahoga precinct breakdown (877 of 898).
3. Butler County figures from local Journal-News coverage and Board of Elections reporting: Ramaswamy ~52.3 percent, turnout 59.5 percent.
4. Campaign controversy details from contemporaneous reporting on the mother attack ad and reactions from both parties.
Bibliography
• Ohio Secretary of State unofficial 2026 general election results and county summaries.
• Cleveland.com: “How Amy Acton won the Ohio governor’s race: A look behind the numbers” (November 2026).
• Journal-News (Butler County): coverage of local results and turnout.
• Multiple national outlets (BBC, USA Today, Dispatch, CNN) on the Acton-Ramaswamy contest and the mother-ad controversy.
• Local Board of Elections precinct-level reporting for Butler, Cuyahoga, and other counties.
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 by 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 followed the work at the Durupinar site near Doğubayazıt in eastern Turkey for some time. A university-led team under Professor Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University, working with partners including Andrew Jones of Noah’s Ark Scans, conducted the most intensive fieldwork there in 2026. They drilled inside and outside the boat-shaped formation, reaching depths of roughly 18 to 20 meters. Radar scans showed linear features, angular intersections, possible voids, and layered structures. Soil samples indicated higher organic matter inside the outline than outside it. Charred wood fragments recovered from about 30 feet down were sent for species identification and carbon dating to laboratories in Turkey and France. Results are expected in stages through early 2027, with a fuller report planned later. No laboratory confirmation has been published. Some team members have been careful not to overclaim; others have spoken more strongly about non-geological signals. The honest reading is that serious work is underway and the next several months of lab data will matter.
Large Ships in Antiquity and the Question of Capability
The biblical dimensions in Genesis 6—300 cubits long, 50 wide, 30 high—convert to roughly 450 feet on a short cubit or about 510 feet on the royal cubit used for the full-scale model at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. I have stood near that structure. It is enormous. It does not have to be seaworthy; it is a prop. A real vessel of that size would have faced wave stresses, flexing, and the practical limits of timber. Naval architects note that wooden ships encounter structural ceilings well before modern steel designs. Still, the existence of the biblical description and the later Chinese examples raise a straightforward engineering question: could pre-Bronze Age and early historic peoples organize the timber, labor, and knowledge to build very large hulls?
Gavin Menzies argued in 1421 and 1434 that Ming treasure fleets under Zheng He were far larger and ranged much farther than standard histories allow—reaching the Americas, Australia, and even Europe. I first encountered the idea of Chinese junks in an old tabletop game called Pirates and later read the books. They are adventure volumes with photographs and maps. Mainstream historians across China, Europe, and the United States have rejected the central claims as pseudohistory. Contemporary Chinese records detail the known Indian Ocean voyages in detail and do not mention the Americas or a 1434 fleet in Italy. Robert Finlay in the Journal of World History described the evidence handling as reckless. A PBS documentary with Chinese historians examined the major assertions and found none holding. The oft-cited 450-foot figure appears to derive from later compilations rather than contemporary descriptions; more careful estimates place the largest treasure ships in the 200- to 250-foot range or smaller. Even at those reduced sizes they were the largest ocean-going vessels of their day, bigger than anything Europe was building for another century and a half. The books fill a void with speculation. That does not make the void disappear.
What Survives and What the Ocean Removes
Wood does not last. The strongest physical evidence of early large timber construction often comes from protected contexts: cedar timbers buried beside Egyptian pyramids, Scandinavian boats from roughly 2300 BC, and other finds that escaped water worms and ordinary decay. The absence of a 450-foot wooden hull from any era is not proof that none were built. It is evidence that the ocean and time remove most of what is not deliberately preserved. The same logic applies to claims of early transatlantic crossings. Passive drift simulations from Japan to North America or northern Africa to South America run on the order of 80 to 90 days. A purposeful voyage with sails and navigation would be longer and riskier, but not impossible in principle for a seaworthy hull. The problem is the lack of artifacts or wrecks on those routes before the Columbian era. Imagination fills the silence. Evidence has not yet done so.
Donna D’Errico has visited the Durupinar site more than once and produced YouTube material that treats the location as interesting without treating it as confirmed. That posture is reasonable. The formation may prove geological. It may contain organic layers and anomalies that reward further study. Either outcome advances the conversation about what ancient people could organize.
Regional Connections and the Broader Pattern
Southeast Turkey, the Armenian border region, Göbekli Tepe, and related sites sit within a few hundred miles of one another—regional by the scale of the Earth’s circumference, yet concentrated enough to show early monumental construction, timber use, and cultural complexity. The Windover site in Florida preserved brain tissue, wood, and textiles in wet conditions because of unusual sealing, demonstrating that 8,000-year-old organic material can survive under the right circumstances. The archaeological trail from Anatolia toward the Americas, if it exists, would most likely run through smaller craft, coastal movement, or land bridges that have not been fully mapped, rather than through a single class of 400-foot vessels. Large ships remain part of the possible toolkit. They are not required to explain every cultural contact.
Human beings have repeatedly organized to build the biggest thing their materials and social systems allowed—pyramids, cathedrals, treasure fleets, and later rockets. The inclination is consistent. Whether the Durupinar formation contains the remains of a vessel described in Genesis, a different ancient structure, or a natural feature with interesting anomalies, the fieldwork underway is the correct method. Lab results on the wood and organic samples will either support further excavation or constrain the interpretation. In the meantime the scale model in Kentucky makes the engineering brief concrete. Seeing the volume of timber required, even for a non-seaworthy replica, clarifies what any real project of that size would have demanded.
I tend to think the evidence of early large-scale timber construction, wherever it survives, will continue to push the timeline of organized seafaring earlier than many textbook summaries allow. That does not require accepting every speculative voyage. It requires following the physical remains and the laboratory data as they appear. The next several months of results from the Turkish and French laboratories on the Durupinar samples will be part of that record.
Footnotes
1. 2026 Durupinar fieldwork under Sivas Cumhuriyet University (Prof. Cenker Atila) and partners: core drilling to approximately 18–20 m, radar surveys showing linear and angular features, elevated organic matter inside the formation, and recovery of charred wood fragments sent for carbon dating. Results pending; no peer-reviewed confirmation published as of early November 2026. Reporting from Jerusalem Post, Daily Sabah, Anatolian Archaeology, and related outlets.
2. Genesis 6 dimensions and Ark Encounter conversion: 300 × 50 × 30 cubits; Answers in Genesis uses a 20.4-inch royal cubit yielding a 510-foot-long structure in Williamstown, Kentucky.
3. Gavin Menzies, 1421 and 1434: widely classified as pseudohistory by professional historians. Contemporary Chinese records do not support the extended voyages claimed; see Robert Finlay, Journal of World History (2004), and the 2004 PBS examination.
4. Wooden-ship structural limits and surviving early timber finds (Egyptian cedar, Scandinavian boats ca. 2300 BC) are standard points in maritime archaeology. Transatlantic drift estimates appear in oceanographic modeling literature.
5. Windover archaeological site (Florida) and Göbekli Tepe provide well-documented examples of early organic preservation and monumental construction in their respective regions.
Selected Bibliography / Further Reading
• Contemporary reporting on the 2026 Durupinar / Noah’s Ark Scans season (Jerusalem Post, Daily Sabah, Anatolian Archaeology, Ancient Origins fact-checks).
• Genesis 6 and standard cubit conversions; Ark Encounter technical descriptions (Answers in Genesis).
• Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World and 1434; critical reviews by Robert Finlay (Journal of World History), PBS “1421” documentary materials, and Sinological responses.
• Maritime archaeology surveys of early watercraft (Egyptian, Scandinavian, and Mediterranean timber vessels).
• Site reports on Göbekli Tepe and the Windover burials.
• Naval architecture literature on the practical size limits of traditional wooden hulls.
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 by 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 is not a site that asks small questions. Today Rich Hoffman takes on roughly three thousand years of institutional Christianity, the biblical text underneath it, and whether those two things are even the same animal.
Mara: They are not, according to him — and that distinction drives everything. We will get into the text itself, the historical record of empires using the cross, and what it means to defend Christianity when the alternative is not neutral ground.
Pip: Let’s start with the gap between the gospel and the institution built around it.
Biblical Context Versus Institutional Christianity
Mara: The core tension here is one that gets collapsed constantly: the biblical text as a document making specific claims, and the centuries-long institutional history of what men did with those claims once power was available.
Pip: The post puts it plainly. The setup is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s sweeping history of the faith, and the argument is that MacCulloch’s chronicle is useful precisely because it documents the second thing, not the first. The line from the post is this: “The goodness was never the purity of the institution. It was the gospel leaking out despite the empire, like water through stone.”
Mara: That image carries real weight. The claim is not that the institutional church was secretly fine — it is that the text kept producing hospitals, literacy, and restraints on power even when the institution was corrupt, because the idea itself kept reasserting.
Pip: MacCulloch, described as a candid friend of the faith who is more interested in how humans used the narrative than in whether the narrative is true, becomes a useful witness precisely because he is not a cheerleader. A biased witness can still point at the wound.
Mara: And the wound is documented. The Salem witch trials get named directly as a case where accusation substituted for proof — righteousness as a costume for the same old human appetite. The Crusades and the inquisitions follow the same pattern: the name of Christ pressed into service for conformity and conquest.
Pip: Empire after empire — Roman, British, French, Spanish — each baptized its ambition in the name of the Lamb. That is the post’s phrase, not mine, and it is doing real work.
Mara: The post also makes a specific textual claim worth sitting with. The Hebrew word mishpat, meaning justice or judgment, appears roughly 400 to 421 times in the Old Testament alone. The argument is that no other major ancient document — not Confucius, not Plato, not the Quran — centers justice as a sustained, personal claim the way the biblical text does.
Pip: Confucius taught order under the emperor. The Quran speaks of justice under submission to one law and one sword. The Bible, as the post frames it, shows justice wounded in Job and satisfied at the cross. That is a different structure entirely.
Mara: Which brings the argument to its sharpest edge: defending Christianity is not optional when the practical alternative is a system with a documented record of expansion by conquest and no mechanism for dissenters to leave. The post quotes Ephesians 6:12 — “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
Pip: So the warfare is real, but the sword points at the darkness, not the neighbor. The moment it turns toward the neighbor, the text has been misread — which is exactly what every empire in the chronicle did.
Mara: The closing argument is that the ballot and free speech are available weapons, and refusing to use them is not piety. Peter and John were told to stop speaking and went away rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer. The defense is people who will not stop speaking.
Pip: The distinction between the institution and the text is not a convenience for skeptics. It is the only way to hold the historical record honestly and still take the original claim seriously.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is that the text and the institution are not the same thing, and confusing them is how empires get built and how the original claim gets lost.
Pip: Three thousand years of that confusion, and the water is still coming through the stone. Next time, we will see what else is breaking through.
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 by 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’m tired of Barack Obama. When he returned to the campaign trail in Ohio for Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, it reminded many people of everything they wanted to leave behind. He remains the public face of a socialist approach smuggled into American politics with the help of old underground networks and cultural figures who treated the country as something to be remade rather than built. Voters got tired of that project. They chose the ultimate capitalist instead.
Obama Campaigning for Acton and Brown in Cleveland and Across Ohio
Obama still draws a crowd. He is one of the few Democrats who can fill a room and make the old arguments sound fresh. In the final stretch, he was out making the case for Acton in the governor’s race and for Brown in the Senate contest. The message was familiar: government will protect you from high costs, from Trump, from the consequences of earlier policies. People can vote for whoever they want. No widespread evidence of the kind of systematic tampering some claimed in prior cycles emerged. Voters made a choice. In Ohio, they chose Acton and Brown. Nationally, the picture was mixed, but the local and statewide results showed that the free-stuff appeal still works when prices are high, and the alternative is framed as indifference.
I have already written about the gas prices and the cost of bread at the grocery store. Democratic policies created or worsened most of those costs by shrinking the margin for people who actually make things. Environmental rules, spending that outruns revenue, and a regulatory climate that treats producers as the problem all raise the price of everyday goods. Obama and the people around him spent years building that structure. When the bills came due, the same voices blamed the people trying to reverse it. That is why Obama had to get back on the trail. No deep bench of Democrats can make the argument the way he can.
Trump as the Capitalist Alternative: Gold, Towers, and High-Value Things
We picked Trump because he represented the opposite set of instincts. He has always liked gold. The towers, the lettering on the book The Art of the Deal, the interiors—gold has been the consistent color. It signals value rather than the bare minimum. I own several of his ties. They are silk, made in America, and they were expensive when I bought them. I wear them when something matters. They are not cheap. When you want to think about good things as high value, you don’t reach for a coupon. You reach for something that lasts.
Trump’s White House renovations fit the same pattern. The ballroom is needed. The original White House was deliberately kept modest so the new republic would not look like it was challenging Europe’s monarchies. They built it a little too small on purpose. You can walk around it in a short time. For the kind of security, diplomacy, and large gatherings that now take place there, more space is practical. I visited the White House recently. The changes look good. I support them. Critics treat gold and scale as vanity. Many voters saw them as a sign that someone still believed in making things better rather than managing decline.
The contrast with Obama is not subtle. Obama’s political coalition includes people who treat high taxes and big government as the way to extract money from those who create value and redistribute it. A lazy segment of society prefers the coupon and the handout. Socialism is marketed to them because it improves their relative position without requiring them to produce more. Those voters turned out for Obama and for the candidates he supported. There are still more people who prefer the Trump approach—visible value, private production, and the refusal to treat government as the primary engine—but they have to show up.
The Old Networks and the Cultural Invasion
Older radical circles helped Obama’s rise. Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground types were never mainstream, but they were part of the broader left infrastructure that treated American institutions as targets rather than inheritances. The same cultural current included the old hippies who rejected ordinary work, ordinary family life, and ordinary ambition. That was an invasion of American ideas, not a representation of them. Obama knew how to speak to the destitute and the resentful without sounding like he was asking them to do the hard part. He could make government expansion sound like compassion.
Trump’s background was different. The Apprentice was popular because it showed people competing, building, and being judged on results. Many viewers recognized the format. They had been to places like the Cheesecake Factory for family celebrations. It costs real money. The atmosphere is ornate. People like it because it feels like a reward for work rather than a subsidy. That preference showed up in the votes. Voters who wanted the gold and the ballroom and the visible success chose Trump. Voters who wanted someone else to cover the cost chose the other side.
High Prices, Policy, and the Midterm Lesson
Prices are high because of the structure Obama and his allies spent years constructing. Democrats have spent the intervening years managing the consequences rather than reversing the causes. When Trump’s administration tried to restore margins for producers, those same voices blamed him for the results. Obama’s return to the trail was an attempt to keep that political enterprise alive. He is still better at it than most of the people who followed him. The midterms showed the limit. Democrats did not have a deep roster of figures who could carry the argument without reaching back to Obama. That reminds voters of what many wanted to get away from.
Republicans cannot sit on the couch and wait it out. Presidential-year energy does not automatically appear in the midterms. If people who prefer value, production, and smaller extraction do not vote, those who prefer handouts and expanded government will set the terms. Obama on the trail is useful in one respect: he makes the choice clearer. The two ideas of what America should be are still in conflict. One treats gold, scale, and private success as legitimate. The other treats them as problems to be managed or taxed away. Voters picked the first option when they had the chance. They will have to keep picking it.
Footnotes
1. Ohio 2026 results (Secretary of State and major outlets as of early November): Amy Acton (D) defeated Vivek Ramaswamy (R) for governor; Sherrod Brown (D) won the U.S. Senate race. Obama campaigned in the state for both in the closing weeks.
2. National and Ohio gas-price and grocery-cost context: Post-2026 Iran-related disruptions and longer-term regulatory and spending policies contributed to elevated energy and food prices. Multiple analyses linked affordability concerns to midterm voting patterns.
3. White House physical history: The original Executive Mansion was intentionally modest relative to European royal residences. Modern security, diplomatic, and event requirements have repeatedly raised questions about capacity; Trump-era renovations, including ballroom plans, addressed those practical limits.
4. Historical background on Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground, and their limited but real connections to later Democratic networks is documented in contemporary reporting and subsequent histories of the 1960s–1970s radical left and its institutional afterlife.
5. Cultural and voting observations draw on consistent patterns in Ohio and national exit data: higher support for candidates emphasizing production and visible private success versus candidates emphasizing expanded government services and redistribution.
Selected Bibliography / Further Reading
• Ohio Secretary of State unofficial and certified results for the 2026 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests.
• Contemporary reporting on Obama’s 2026 campaign appearances in Ohio (Cleveland and other stops) for Acton and Brown.
• Energy Information Administration, AAA, and related data on 2025–2026 gasoline and household energy costs.
• Architectural and historical accounts of the White House’s original scale and subsequent modifications.
• Standard histories and journalistic accounts of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, and the broader 1960s–1970s radical milieu and its later political influence.
• Exit polls and demographic analyses from the 2024 and 2026 cycles on economic voting, cultural attitudes toward success and redistribution, and turnout differences between presidential and midterm elections.
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 by 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 always had trouble with the way people mix biblical context and the long history of institutional Christianity. The two are not the same thing. One is the text and the claim it makes. The other is what men have done with it across centuries of power, conquest, and the ordinary human habit of turning a useful idea into a weapon. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years is a useful chronicle of the second part. It is a big book written by a careful historian who describes himself as a candid friend of the faith. I do not think he is an Islamic sympathizer in any simple sense, but he writes with the detachment of someone who left formal orders and who is more interested in how humans have used the narrative than in whether the narrative is true. The book holds up as history. It shows how the biblical story has been interpreted, expanded, and sometimes distorted to serve earthly purposes. That distinction matters more than ever when Islam continues its long effort to spread by various means and when many people treat any strong defense of Christianity as off-limits for emotional or liberal reasons.
Separating the Biblical Text from the History of Empires
The Bible stands as a text. Much of what became the canonical Old Testament is supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early witnesses. The process of deciding the canon can be debated, and it has been. Councils and authorities recognized writings they believed already carried authority; they did not invent them. Over time, material was added, emphasized, or sidelined in ways that suited the needs of power. Romans, British, French, Spanish, and others each took their turn turning Christianity into a support for empire. They baptized ambition in the name of the Lamb. That is not the gospel. The gospel is a kingdom not of this world, purchased by blood rather than by conquest.
I have imagined how Jonathan Edwards might respond if asked about this. He would say the early church spread by witness and by willingness to die, not by the sword. When Islam advanced by the blade, the truest answer was not a matching blade but a life that would not stop speaking. Liberal critics often miss the distinction: one faith conquers by force and submission; the other conquers by witness, even when it costs. Empires forged the cross into a sword. The British and the French did the same. Each nation used the name of Christ to justify its reach. That is human pride wearing religious language. It is not the original claim.
MacCulloch’s Chronicle and the Useful Invention Argument
MacCulloch’s volume is a strong chronicle of how Christianity rose and how humans interpreted the biblical narrative to serve their purposes. I have not read every page cover to cover in recent years, but the overall shape is clear. He starts a thousand years before Christ to show the Jewish and Greek soil. He follows the institutional story through councils, schisms, reformations, and modern accommodations. Some readers find him too kind to certain heresies or too ready to note Christian intolerance. Others note his preference for a secular frame. None of that erases the value of the historical record he assembles. Empires and crosses have their own colors. A biased witness can still point at the wound if he does not hide the blood.
Christianity has been extremely beneficial as a constructive force for civilization. Hospitals, universities, the dignity of the poor, and the eventual movement against slavery all grew in soil shaped by the biblical text. The Spanish confrontation with the Aztec system under Montezuma is one hard case. The Aztec religion practiced large-scale human sacrifice. Christianity, carried by Spanish power, ended that particular horror. You can view the encounter as a surgeon’s knife cutting out disease, even while the surgeon’s hand trembled with fever and ambition. The same pattern appears in other places. The goodness was never the purity of the institution. It was the gospel leaking out despite the empire, like water through stone. Men remain faulty in their interpretation. The presence of the text still made the world better because it kept introducing the idea that justice and mercy are not optional.
Abuses, Witch Trials, Crusades, and the Flesh in Religious Dress
The record also contains clear failures. The Salem witch trials show how a society that claims righteousness can turn accusation into proof. Anyone disliked could be labeled a witch and destroyed. That is not justice. That is the flesh dressed in religious language. The Protestant Reformation, the Crusades, and various inquisitions all produced versions of the same problem: using the name of Christ to eradicate those who did not conform. Islam has done the same in its own spheres. A free society cannot be built on the rule that accusation equals guilt. A righteous people may defend themselves from real threats, but they must prove the threat before they strike. When they stop proving and start assuming, they become the thing they claim to oppose.
Puritans were wrong when they treated every troublemaker as a threat that could be removed by accusation alone. The same error appears whenever any group claims the right to silence or destroy dissenters in the name of purity. The Bible gives a vehicle for study and a standard for justice. It does not authorize the shortcut of calling every opponent a witch.
The Bible as the Document That Defines Justice
The Bible is the only major document in the world that truly centers justice as a sustained, personal claim rather than a subordinate idea. The Hebrew word mishpat appears roughly 400 to 421 times in the Old Testament alone. Amos cries that justice should roll down like waters. Micah asks what the Lord requires: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. In the New Testament the language of righteousness is tied to Christ. Whether the English word “justice” appears dozens or hundreds of times in a given translation, the concept saturates the pages. Other ancient texts reach toward justice. Confucius taught order under the emperor. The Quran speaks of justice under submission to one law and one sword. Plato and Aristotle explored justice as a principle. The Bible shows justice wounded in Job, satisfied at the cross, and still standing. That is different.
Most of the Old Testament material predates Plato. The New Testament was written after him. Islam arrives roughly six centuries after Christ. The idea that justice is a social judgment rooted in a personal God who acts in history is specific to the biblical stream. Men did not invent a God who dies for his enemies. Every instinct of pride and power runs the other way. The claim is revelation breaking in on a world that had exhausted its own wisdom. Every heresy, crusade, and inquisition is a later attempt to make that claim serve human ends. The danger was never that Christ was too weak. It was that men were too proud to leave him as he was.
Defending Christianity Against Replacement Religions: Why the double standard
A defense of Christianity as a religion is essential, especially when the practical replacement on offer is Islam or some other system of submission. Islam has a long record of expansion by conquest, law, and demographic pressure. Liberal habits that treat any strong Christian response as illegitimate do not change the historical pattern. Christianity’s truth claims and its record of producing hospitals, literacy, and restraints on power are worth defending. The alternative is not neutral space. It is a different set of rules about who may speak, who may leave, and what happens to dissenters.
When people come after you for reading the Bible, carrying it, or having a relationship with its claims, the response is not to stop. Peter and John were told to stop speaking. They went away rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer. The defense is not primarily armies or laws. It is people who will not stop speaking. The old hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” captures an instinctual sense of the battle. The warfare is real. Ephesians 6:12 makes the distinction clear: we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers. The moment the sword points at a neighbor instead of at the darkness, the text has been misread. Spiritual warfare is not an excuse for political laziness. Many Christians sat out recent elections and let others fight the battles. That is not faith. It is laziness dressed in robes. The ballot and free speech are available weapons. Refusing to use them is not piety.
Religion as Unifier Versus the Biblical Relationship
There is a fine line between people who take over a religion because it unifies large numbers of people and those who want a relationship with the text. MacCulloch’s history shows the institutional side of that line across three thousand years. Empires saw Christ as a useful heart for order. Institutions asked for obedience. Those two masters cannot be served at once. The biblical narrative keeps breaking through the crust of human pride. The historical record of the church is full of corruption and compromise. That record should not be confused with the text itself. One is what men built. The other is what the text claims was given.
I recommend the MacCulloch volume to anyone who wants the long historical view. Read it as a chronicle of how the narrative was used, not as a substitute for the narrative. Study the Bible itself. The distinction between institutional Christianity and the biblical claim is not convenient for empire-building. It is necessary if the claim is to remain anything more than a tool.
Footnotes
1. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009/2010). The author, a former Anglican deacon and Oxford historian, describes himself as a “candid friend” of Christianity. Reviews note both the book’s comprehensive scope and its secular-leaning or liberal academic frame; some critics find it too ready to question uniqueness or to treat certain historical actors with detachment.
2. Dead Sea Scrolls and related manuscript evidence support the antiquity and substantial stability of much of the Hebrew Bible text that later formed the Old Testament canon. Canon formation involved recognition and debate rather than pure invention.
3. Hebrew mishpat (Strong’s H4941) occurs approximately 400–421 times in the Old Testament, frequently in contexts of judgment, ordinance, and justice (e.g., Amos 5:24; Micah 6:8). Related terms for righteousness appear extensively as well.
4. Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
5. Historical patterns of Christian institutional expansion (Roman, medieval European, Spanish in the Americas) and Islamic expansion by conquest are extensively documented in standard histories. Aztec sacrificial practices and the Spanish confrontation are part of that record. Salem witch trials and various inquisitions illustrate the recurring problem of accusation substituting for evidence.
6. Plato’s major works predate the New Testament writings. Islam emerges in the seventh century, roughly six centuries after the events surrounding Jesus.
Selected Bibliography / Further Reading
• Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking/Penguin, 2009/2010).
• Standard treatments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and textual transmission of the Hebrew Bible.
• Concordance and lexical studies of mishpat (H4941) and related justice/righteousness vocabulary in the Old and New Testaments.
• Primary and secondary sources on the Crusades, Spanish conquest of Mexico, Salem witch trials, and comparative histories of Christian and Islamic expansion.
• Ephesians 6 and related New Testament texts on spiritual conflict.
• Reviews of MacCulloch’s volume from both sympathetic and critical perspectives (academic, Anglican, Catholic, and secular outlets).
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 by 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.
