Author: Rich Hoffman

Author of The Gunfighter's Guide to Business. Professional gunfighter.

Why Michael Ryan Got There First, and Why America Still Tries to Jail the Next Tucker: Why Volynt in Butler County is the Next Great Thing

Full disclosure, this is a long one and it might be easier to watch the video.  I have a lot to explain here, and this topic is much bigger than most surface-level discussions on politics and business and what role the two play in a happy society.  I talk about abortion in a different way here, but it’s a mentality that is at the heart of Marxism, and many years of our civilization straining under a mixed economy that many of us never even thought about. But it’s the heart of what has been driving me for many years to this point.  I am affiliated with Volynt Aero in Oxford. I am a consultant and, at this point, an advisor. I am proud of it. I do not normally attach my name to things. For years, I’ve handled much of the work in the background. People who have known me a long time know the method. You trade whatever you have—sometimes it was literally baseball cards when I was young—to get close enough to a problem to be useful. I come out of the school of hard knocks. I have seen what happens to people and to companies when the process is dirty, when the lawyers arrive late, when the regulators decide the idea should die in the permit office. I have helped a lot of people mine their way through improper methods without becoming the method.

That is the only reason this essay exists; there is a lot of interconnected tissue to consider in something as massive as this, and it takes a bit to discuss in context. Not because I needed another logo on a card. Because I watched a good idea be born in Oxford, in Butler County, Ohio, and I recognized the old American pattern: the builders are ready, the market is arriving whether the townships like the noise or not, and the political class is still deciding whether it wants to midwife the thing or abort it.

Why I Attach a Name at All

I have been a huge supporter of FirstEnergy. I was a supporter when Larry Householder was Speaker. When we talk about alliances between government and big business, I think FirstEnergy got a raw deal in the public square. I do not think they did a good job defending themselves. Real life in the background of a utility is lived inside regulatory compliance, rate cases, and a grid that still has to keep the lights on while somebody in Washington changes the religion of energy policy every four years.[1] What I saw was a company running a model that the Obama-era compliance environment made it almost impossible to operate profitably, then being treated as a morality play when it sought political relief.

I see a lot of Democrats trying to take ground in Ohio after years of Republican control of the House, the Senate, and the governor’s office. They cannot get a message through to people because the message, once you strip the focus-grouped nouns off it, is still a mixed-economy sermon with a communist destination. That is not what people in this county vote for. It is not what they vote for in 2026 either. But the fight does not end because you won a map. You are always overcoming Karl Marx. You can see it in the way a left-wing media personality in Columbus will work a hit job on a Republican until the man will not look you in the face in a hallway. I have watched politicians go quiet because they do not want to be called a communist, or worse. After all, they do not want to be trapped at a urinal in the Statehouse by somebody with a microphone asking why they voted for an “evil” bank or an “evil” energy company that was not kneeling hard enough toward the religion of wind and solar power.

There are a lot of safer ways to make money. There are not many ways to do it that still serve the two parts of the American condition I actually care about: job creation, and political representation honest enough to get out of the job creator’s way. I lend my name to enterprising people who take risks because I want to see them make jobs. I lend my name to political figures for the same reason. The Marxist type always attacks them, and it is a lonely business to be sabotaged out of a restroom at the Statehouse by a hostile media personality trying to put you in a horrible state of mind. Why did you vote for that? Why did you say this? Why do you support FirstEnergy? Why aren’t they for wind?  All questions from a Marxist perspective, intended to root everything in a leftist point of view as a baseline. 

I involve myself because I want to protect capitalism from the next adjustment to the breaker panel, the one that shows up on your electric bill whether or not you ever voted for the sermon that caused it.

John Galt Types, and the Movie That Taught Me the Pattern

At the beginning of this, I put the Volynt affiliation together because I like the guys. I like entrepreneurs. I like John Galt types. I like people who work. When I meet them, I want to help them. I want to help them avoid having to dynamite their own buildings at the end of the story, the way the book taught a generation of us to fear.

My favorite movie on this subject is still Tucker: The Man and His Dream, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, from the same mind that gave the country The Godfather and then turned around and made a hymn to the American crackpot who wanted to build a better car outside Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors.[2] Tucker put the engine in the back. He put seat belts in the car. Fuel injection in 1947. The Big Three knew they could not retool fast enough to compete. The pipeline was already poured. So the story goes that they used Senator Ferguson to try to throw Tucker in jail.[3] That is how the red decade moved into the American system: not always with a red flag in the street, but with a committee, a compliance file, and a prosecutor.

There is a speech Tucker gives at the end of that movie that I have never gotten over. It sounds like Howard Roark’s speech in The Fountainhead, stretched across a courtroom instead of granite.[4] He is wondering where his country went. Marx came in. Regulatory compliance came in. The power of government came in. Ferguson wanted donations from the Big Three, so he tried to eliminate the competition that would have made them better. Tucker assumed the American dream was still built around the man who builds something better. The country had changed on him in the thirties and forties, and he just then figured that out. 

We had just won a war by manufacturing the Nazis and the Japanese into the ground. Then, mysteriously, we started sending consultants the other direction to learn how to manufacture from our former enemies; we let our enemies teach us how to mass-produce when it was that very trait which caused us to win World War II.  People like Tucker got crushed in the interval.[5] He stayed out of jail. He built fifty cars. Some were wrecked in the process. The ones that remain are still Tucker cars, and you can look at them. The ideas did not die. The company did; it was murdered by a tyrannical government.[6]

I have always hated, in the background of my adult life, the long trend that followed: the creation of a permanent international management layer, the suppression of American ingenuity as if ingenuity were a pollutant, the habit of treating the founder as a defendant. We did something right in the teens, the twenties, even into the thirties. Then the red decade came over from Europe under the banner of free speech, and pretty soon you had a government trying to jail a man for building a safer car.

If it had been me in Householder’s chair, I would not have done the pinhead stuff a two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer could later dissect. I tend to have sympathy for the people who were trying to keep power flowing while the rules were written to euthanize the old plant in favor of a liberal sermon. I do not want to see the power of government illuminate ingenuity only long enough to book it.

What These Drones Actually Do

So why Volynt Aero?  Yes, they have an unmanned hybrid VTOL—the Vyper—that can fly, carry a serious payload, and put a box where a truck cannot go. You have seen the animation. I was able to get close enough to the real work that the animation looks like a polite version of what I watched. I went to the facility in Oxford. I talked to a great bunch of guys. The intellectual property is not a napkin. It is already there. Public specs on the aircraft talk about carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to 150 nautical miles, then landing and offering plug-in power—110, 240, or 480 volts—off standard jet fuel, without waiting for a charging farm to be built in the mud.

The crowded market is last-mile photographs and Amazon-adjacent experiments. Everybody has a drone story now. Walmart has a drone story. Amazon has a drone story. Texas has companies. California has companies.[7] The middle-mile market alone is described as a ten-billion-dollar band within a much larger stack. I have been saying to anybody who will listen that the five-year systems market—vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, municipal integration—could run toward a trillion dollars if the country actually lets it hatch. Those are inside numbers, not a press release.

What makes Volynt different is not that they can hover. It is the combination. Cargo logistics and highly mobile power generation on the same airframe. They can come in, drop a payload, and leave. And they can do battlefield resource management, which in civilian clothes means disaster-zone logistics. Power recovery. Fly into a hurricane zone or an Ohio River floodplain, get past the trees that are lying across the only road the trucks can use, land, and put 110, 240, or 480 volts where a ventilator is still a life.[8]

The Hurricane, the Chainsaws, and the Road You Cannot See

Years ago, I was between jobs. I tend to get involved in crusades because they teach you things you cannot learn from a paycheck. One of the reasons I have been effective over the years is that I have done things other people never get to do, or never have the guts to do, because it means leaving the comfort of a W-2. A friend who ran a tree crew called. A storm had flattened a stretch of the Carolinas around the Raleigh-Durham universities. Trees older than the subdivisions they shaded were down across the highways.[9] He was paying cash crews a thousand dollars a day because people were pulling money out of safes rather than wait on insurance to cut the trees off their homes after the storm. A crew member—the kind of guy who couldn’t do anything else because he did not have many other options, because he was out of jail for killing people—had decided he wanted all of it and had started talking about killing my friend. My friend asked me to come down to help him with the guy. My wife did not want me to go. I did not want to leave her. A couple of weeks of that work could be a year’s income. I got on a plane to chase treasure and danger.  And to that point, where there is danger, is usually where there is treasure.  

As we were landing, they had just cleared the runway. From the air, you could not even see the highway. That is the image I have never forgotten. There is no way for the trucks to get the equipment to the poles if the trees own the asphalt. Before the utility can be a utility, somebody with a saw has to invent a road again. It took some of those people three or four weeks to get power back. Generators mattered. They still matter. A patriot generator in a garage is not a hobby. It is how you keep a freezer and a CPAP and a window into the world from dying on the same night.

When the Volynt team walked me through the demonstration, that memory came back to me. Every September, somewhere, a hurricane does a version of that story. Every late winter, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Great Miami find a floodplain and take a substation with them. Senior citizens do not have three weeks for power to return.  A drone that can fly the downed corridor and restore a line, or drop the thing that lets a crew restore a line, is not a gadget. It is the difference between a shelter with lights and a shelter guessing.

Same grid logic as fifty years ago. The wires still have to carry the current. The new part is that you do not always have to wait for the infrastructure; you can fly the infrastructure into a distressed zone.

The Mixed Economy That Aborts the Company Before It Is Born

The hard problem is not the airframe technology. The hard problem is an unfriendly manufacturing and permitting environment. Unless you can throw Elon Musk money at it, the political monster can crush you before the second prototype.[10] Even Musk needed government contracts and, for a stretch, an alliance with China to get Tesla through the years when the same people who wanted electric cars also wanted to drown the factory in process. A lot of the operators I talk to do not want politics at all. They want the big animal to stay in its cage until the product exists. I get involved because I have watched companies get crushed before they build anything.

I was in Columbus a few years ago sitting next to very expensive lawyers who were selling solar the way people used to sell riverfront lots. There is a big solar farm near Piqua. There is another in Warren County. Fine. Generate what you can generate; I’m not against other ways of getting power.  But if we aren’t talking about Thorium or nuclear, we aren’t being serious about acquiring real energy. What I will not do is pretend that a sermon about wind and panels is a substitute for a dispatchable grid when you are trying to host the next wave of computation and industry.[11] FirstEnergy was the legacy company being squeezed like a zit so that a younger lobby could inherit the moral high ground. That is an Obama-era move, and it is still the move. Euthanize the old method. Call it progress. Act shocked when people are upset about it. 

Republicans have not defended capitalism very well. They have not defended FirstEnergy well. They have not defended the Householder disaster as a policy failure instead of a personality failure, which is what it was, and that has fed this Amy Acton narrative now. I listen to two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers miss the only point that matters: are you using the power of government to confiscate wealth, or are you using it to keep the builder from being hunted while he builds? A lot of people in the political class do not feel they have latitude to say that out loud because they do not want the Columbus media animals waiting for them at the urinal. I am not in public office, so I can say it.[12]

The metaphor I keep using, because Ohio taught it to me, is abortion as industrial policy. A certain kind of politics wants to abort the business before it attaches. Regulation becomes the instrument. You never have to out-compete the founder if you can keep him from being born. The same crowd will turn around and euthanize a legacy company they have decided is morally expired, which was what the FirstEnergy story was really about. Young ideas killed in the womb. Old plants killed in the bed. What they never want is a living competitor that was not pre-cleared by the donor list.

Fences, Data Centers, and Who Gets to Say No

In my neighborhood, an older, decent neighbor started a wooden fence in the front yard. Posts went in. It was their property. I would not have chosen the look. My wife and I were not going to say anything. Then came the hearing. Then the posts came back out of the ground. I had not called a trustee. I did not need to. I knew what happened. People who bought half-million and million-dollar houses, some of them new from the coasts, did not want to look at a tacky fence on the drive-by.  No lumber in the front. Property rights, until the new people appeal to government to make your porch match their taste.

That is the data-center argument in miniature. I am pro data center. The new economy is an electricity story whether the township signs the petition or not. China is building data centers whether or not we do, and if people protest, they just disappear.  That’s how it is in China, in America: communist terrorism hides behind free speech, which does not exist in a real communist country. People who do not want the noise still want the market cap that pays for a federal deficit that no longer fits on a bumper sticker. They want a trillion-dollar growth story and a quiet backyard. They want to keep up with Beijing and keep the transformers out of sight.[13] My daughter lives near Millikan Road in the Liberty Township development and does not want more congestion. I understand the feeling. I also drive through Middletown and remember what the place looked like when the work was here. You can still find houses in that city at prices that tell you how much vitality is left. Vance can talk about investment, but there’s a lot more. I want the investment to be real enough that Main Street is not a museum of what we used to make.

I love Liberty Center. I like Costco. I like the Monroe exits and the Millikin exchange along the 63 corridor as places where you can put large things without paving a township’s last pasture. Balance is a real problem for trustees. Pretending that every large thing is a moral injury is not balance. It is a lifestyle veto dressed up as conservation.[14]

Property taxes are the scream under all of this. There is a movement that wants them gone. Fine. Show me the replacement arithmetic. One honest way to change the math is to land in an industry that generates revenue on land that is already industrial. Vertical mobility—middle-mile drones, disaster logistics, the power-restore mission—is not a server farm humming behind a fence. It is a reason a site exists. Amazon, Walmart, the carriers, the hospitals, the utilities, the Guard: they all have the same problem. Get the box, or the tool, or the kilowatt, past the broken road.[15]. We’re talking about a lot of things here that are always under the tip of our tongues, but they are the center of all discussion.  

Michael Ryan Was There Before It Was a Photo Opportunity

I was not going to drag a campaign into this. Michael Ryan put his visit on Facebook. He went to the Volynt facility. He talked about it at a fundraiser. I happened to be there with him. I know what he has been doing in the background for a couple of years while other people were still deciding whether drones were a toy, a nuisance, or a federal problem.[16]

By the time a lot of people read this, he may already be sitting as a Butler County commissioner, or he may be in the last stretch of proving it in November. Either way, I want it on the record. Michael Ryan has been acting like a commissioner of this county well before the title was his. He has been providing leadership in rooms that were not yet fashionable. Four years from now, when the project is a ribbon and a CNBC segment, and every officeholder in a fifty-mile radius is trying to stand in the photograph, I want it remembered that he was there when it was still a risk.

That is what good leadership looks like when it is not a press release. It is not waiting for the market to become safe and then claiming the harvest. Socialism, in the small-town version, is just that reflex: somebody else takes the risk, then the committee arrives to redistribute the credit. Ryan did the opposite. He showed up early. He has done a lot of unglamorous work that makes life in this county better. This is one of the visible ones.[17]

I like a lot of the Ohio names in the builder register. I have had the chance to talk to them one-on-one in informal settings. I think I know who they are. Bernie Moreno built businesses and then walked into the grinder of public service with enough money in the bank that a paycheck could not vote for him. Warren Davidson is in that same pattern. That is the opposite of the professional politician, who needs the mixed economy because it is his meal. Bernie Sanders is a communist. The late-life American version I respect is the man who made something and then spent the surplus defending the conditions that let other people make something.

Ryan is young enough to want still the county to have a next chapter. That matters. The people who have been in the chair too long start to treat every new idea as a zoning headache. The people who still think like founders treat it as a chance.

What I Want This to Become

I want Volynt featured on CNBC as one of the great global innovators, not as a local curiosity that got a grant and a ribbon. A proposed HyPE Lab at the Miami University Airport is the kind of physical bet a county should want next to an existing runway. Ohio Third Frontier money already touched the powertrain work. That is a start, not a finish. I want them to have a shot at being the next SpaceX in the only sense that phrase is useful: a company that made a hard physical thing at a scale the incumbents said was impossible, in a county that decided not to strangle it. That is a lofty goal. Lofty goals are how factories start. The constraint is not imagination. The constraint is whether Ohio and Butler County will keep the political animal on a leash long enough for scale.

Scale needs land that is already industrial, power that is actually on the bus, a workforce that can turn a wrench and read a print, and a waiver culture at the FAA that does not take a decade to admit a machine can fly past the pilot’s eyeballs.[18] Ohio is already in the drone-first-responder business through DriveOhio. Hamilton police are getting aircraft that beat a cruiser to the scene. That is a different mission from cargo and power restoration, but it is the same county learning the same sky.[19]

I have been accused of being part of the military-industrial complex because I have worked around aerospace companies for a long time and I know people in politics. The accusation is a category error. I want the opposite of what happened to Tucker. I want the opposite of what happened to Roark in the book. I want the man with the idea outside the approved pipeline to get to the market before the senator from the incumbent district files the paperwork. I have put my name on things when it was unpopular and could and have cost me. I will put it here.

Books do not usually make the kind of money people think they do. I am writing The Politics of Heaven anyway, because I think there is a spiritual war under the economic one, and because non-human intelligence—call it what your tradition requires—does not only show up in a sky story. It shows up in the institutional habit of killing the builder.[20] I volunteer a lot of time that isn’t invoiced. I want the human race better. Helping a company in my own county get off the ground is one of the ways that sentence becomes concrete.

The Record I Want Left

This is a long one. Context does not work in ten minutes. The video at the front of this would be useful to watch.

When people ask me what I am working on, this is the answer. I am helping a group of scrappy operators, with the IP already done and the demonstration already flown, get across a minefield that usually destroys the idea before it can pay a tax bill. I am proud of them. I want the state of Ohio to treat this as more than a local hobby. The upside is not a buzz in the background. The upside is a transportation and recovery layer that Amazon, Walmart, and every hospital system in a floodplain will need, whether the township board likes the look of the fence or not.

Watch Tucker’s speech. Read Roark’s. Then look at a county that still has room at the exits, a commissioner candidate who showed up before the cameras were easy to get, and a machine that can put power back on at a shelter while the trees are still on the road. That is the whole argument. I would like, for once, not to give the speech at the end of the movie. I want the cars—or, in this case, the aircraft—to be built.

Michael Ryan was ahead of it. The company is ahead of the market’s imagination. I am putting years of scar tissue behind both facts. The rest is execution, voltage, and whether we still believe a man with a better idea should be allowed to leave the ground.

https://www.facebook.com/RyanForButler

Bibliography and Further Reading

Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Paramount Pictures, 1988.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

American Rhetoric. “Movie Speech from Tucker: The Man and His Dream — Tucker Presents His Closing Argument.” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtucker.html.

Tucker Automobile Club of America. Historical notes on the Tucker 48 and the Coppola film. https://www.tuckerclub.org/.

Federal Aviation Administration. 14 C.F.R. Part 107 and UAS exemption / BVLOS waiver materials.

Ohio Revised Code §§ 4561.50–4561.53, as enacted by House Bill 77, 135th General Assembly (effective April 9, 2025).

Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio). “Michael Ryan nabs Butler County commissioner primary with 72% of the vote.” May 5–6, 2026.

Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio). “Primary Election 2026: Republican primary for Butler County commission seat contentious.” April 20, 2026.

Ballotpedia. “Michael V. Ryan (Butler County Commission, Ohio, candidate 2026).”

WCPO. “Hamilton police are getting drones that beat officers to the scene.” DriveOhio / SkyfireAI statewide DFR pilot.

Journal-News. Coverage of Butler County data-center moratorium requests and commission action, June 2026.

United States v. Householder and related FirstEnergy reporting, Southern District of Ohio, 2020–2023.

Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. House Bill 6 aftermath dockets and subsequent electric security plan materials.

Mises, Ludwig von. Interventionism: An Economic Analysis. 1940; later editions.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, 2026.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business; Tail of the Dragon; The Symposium of Justice.

Volynt Aero, Inc. Company site and capability statement. Oxford, Ohio. https://volyntaero.com / https://volynt.aero.

Cincinnati Business Courier / Dayton Business Journal. Coverage of Volynt Aero’s proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport, January 2025.

LinkedIn, Volynt Aero company page. Oxford headquarters; Vyper aircraft described for emergency cargo logistics and autonomous power generation.

Workhorse Group and other Midwest cargo-UAS public materials, Sharonville / Mason, Ohio.

National Hurricane Center. Storm histories for Carolinas landfalls affecting the Research Triangle transportation grid.

Notes

[1] On Householder and FirstEnergy, see United States v. Householder, S.D. Ohio, and contemporaneous reporting in The Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2020–2023. The policy point here is not a brief for every transaction; it is that one administration’s rules can squeeze a regulated utility until the only remaining path appears to be politics.

[2] Francis Ford Coppola, dir., Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Paramount Pictures, 1988). The courtroom speech is transcribed at American Rhetoric, “Movie Speech from Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtucker.html.

[3] Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan chaired the Senate investigations that, in Coppola’s telling and in Tucker’s own defense, functioned as a political weapon for Detroit incumbents. Whether every cinematic beat is courtroom-accurate is less important than the pattern: government process used as a moat.

[4] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Howard Roark’s courtroom defense remains the clearest American statement that a creator does not exist to feed the parasites who arrive after the risk is taken.

[5] U.S. manufacturing after 1945 did send missions to study Japanese methods; the irony Tucker’s speech names is that the country that out-produced the Axis then imported process discipline from the countries it had just defeated. See postwar productivity literature and W. Edwards Deming’s later influence in Japan.

[6] Preston Tucker produced fifty Tucker 48 automobiles. Most survive. The Big Three later adopted seat belts, disc brakes, fuel injection, and aerodynamic safety ideas that Tucker had already put on the road. See Tucker Automobile Club of America histories.

[7] Amazon, Walmart, UPS, and the United States Postal Service have all published or piloted roadmaps for drone and middle-mile automation. Industry estimates for advanced air mobility and drone logistics through the early 2030s commonly range from tens of billions in the near term to well above $100 billion as last-mile and middle-mile use cases stack. The trillion-dollar figure in this essay is a five-year systems view that includes vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, and municipal infrastructure—not airframes alone.

[8] Volynt Aero, Inc., Oxford, Ohio (Butler County). Public materials describe the Vyper hybrid-electric unmanned eVTOL as carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to about 150 nautical miles, then landing and providing 110, 240, or 480 VAC plug-in power from JP-8 or Jet A without a high-voltage charging network. See Volynt Aero’s capability statement and company site at volyntaero.com. A proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport was reported by the Cincinnati Business Courier and Dayton Business Journal in January 2025. The company received Ohio Third Frontier/TVSF support through the Entrepreneurs’ Center.

[9] Hurricane Fran (1996) and later storms that struck the Carolinas left large sections of the I-40 / Research Triangle corridor impassable from downed timber. The operational lesson is unchanged: you cannot restore a grid if you cannot reach the poles.

[10] Elon Musk’s public record on Tesla and SpaceX includes DOE loans, NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo contracts, and later criticism of the same regulatory state. The relevant point is not purity. It is that even a high-capacity founder needed both capital and political oxygen to keep the factory from being regulated out of existence before the product matured.

[11] On Ohio energy policy after House Bill 6, see Public Utilities Commission of Ohio dockets and legislative history of subsequent repeal and reform efforts. Nuclear and dispatchable baseload remain the quiet argument under every data-center fight.

[12] On mixed-economy control, see Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, and Rand’s distinction between the producer and the looter. The essay’s claim is practical: once incumbents learn they can buy a senator rather than retool a factory, innovation becomes a permit problem.

[13] On local data-center zoning fights, see Journal-News coverage of the Butler County commissioners’ 2026 moratorium discussion and township requests. The noise argument and the fiscal argument are not the same conversation, though they are treated as one at public meetings.

[14] Liberty Center, Monroe / I-75 corridor industrial sites, Middletown Regional Airport aviation investments, and the Spooky Nook complex on Hamilton’s west side are the visible pieces of a county trying to replace lost mill and auto-adjacent employment with logistics, aviation, sport, and advanced manufacturing.

[15] Property tax pressure in Ohio townships is the political surface of a deeper math problem: residential valuations rise while commercial and industrial bases either leave or get blocked. A new high-value industry that uses existing industrial land is one of the few honest answers that does not require another levy speech.

[16] Butler County Commission primary, May 5, 2026: Michael V. Ryan defeated incumbent Cindy Carpenter approximately 72 percent to 28 percent. See Journal-News (Hamilton), May 5–6, 2026. Ryan, a former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, advanced to the November 2026 general election.

[17] Bernie Moreno and Warren Davidson have both operated in the Ohio builder-and-business register the essay prefers to the professional political class. Endorsement lists in the 2026 Butler County commission primary included both names on Ryan’s side.

[18] Federal Aviation Administration, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) regulations, 14 C.F.R. Part 107, and successive beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) waiver practice. Ohio House Bill 77 (effective April 9, 2025) added state-level UAV provisions at Ohio Revised Code §§ 4561.50–4561.53.

[19] Ohio Department of Transportation / DriveOhio statewide drone-first-responder pilot, announced for multiple agencies including Hamilton Police, 2025–2026. Public-safety drones and cargo drones are different machines; they share airspace, waiver culture, and a county that is already learning to fly.

[20] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (manuscript, 2026; targeted 2027 publication). The book treats non-human intelligence, spiritual warfare, and the political history of heaven as the long background to why human institutions keep aborting builders.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Trillions in Economic Damage from COVID Lockdowns and Over 100 Fifth Amendment Invocations: Fauci’s Capitol Hill Disaster

I was talking about this Fauci story for a long time, and there is a lot to break down. Anthony Fauci showed up on Capitol Hill, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times, and the whole performance confirmed what a lot of us had been saying for years. Good lawyers at two thousand dollars an hour told him not to answer questions about the color of his tie or the carpet. That is not strategy in the traditional sense. That is damage control after the diary came out and after Biden’s pardon language made every single answer a potential risk.¹

The hearing was theater, yes. But it was also a window into how power protects itself when the bill for bad decisions runs into the trillions. I said much of this in 2020, when people called it crazy. The diary, the celebrity capture, the origins knowledge, and the blanket Fifth all landed right on schedule. Now we get to talk about the real cost.

The Fifth Amendment Over 100 Times: Lazy Preparation or Calculated Silence

Fauci walked into that Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing chaired by Rand Paul and refused to answer. He invoked the Fifth more than one hundred times. Reports put the number at 111 in some counts. Senators asked the day of the week. They asked the color of his tie. They asked about the carpet. Fifth. Fifth. Fifth.²

I understand not wanting to get boxed into a dialogue that opens rabbit holes. Hard questions about gain-of-function funding, lab-leak timelines, and previous sworn statements carry real risk. But when the easy questions also get the Fifth, it stops looking like careful lawyering and starts looking like the lawyers decided the safest path was total silence. Paul has been clear he intends to pursue contempt. The committee already voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt and refer it. Democrats will not help in the full Senate, and the January 2025 pardon complicates federal options. Still, the optics of a man who cost the country so much refusing even the simplest answers is a form of accountability in itself.³

Bernie Moreno from Ohio asked the kind of direct questions that needed to be asked. He made me proud as a senator from this state. The frustration in the room was real because the public already knew the story’s outlines. The Fifth just made the admission louder.

The Diary Revelations: COVID Origins Knowledge and Falling in Love with Celebrity Status

The diary dropped right before the hearing—more than a thousand pages. Early entries show Fauci writing that the wet market was the amplifier, not the source. He recorded conversations in which most of the scientists on the call thought deliberate insertion or laboratory involvement was possible. Publicly, the story stayed different for a long time.⁴

At the same time, the diary shows a man falling in love with the celebrity scan. Magazine covers. Rock-star treatment. “Explosive and really unimaginable” fame. Petitions for Sexiest Man Alive. Celebrity phone calls and name-dropping. While the country was locked down and the economic damage was compounding, the private notes record the thrill of the attention. That contrast is damaging. It was already suspected. The diary made it concrete. The timing, right before the testimony, turned a public-relations disaster into something harder to spin.⁵

The Trillions Lost: Quantifying the Economic Catastrophe of the Lockdowns

This is the part that still matters most. Separating the damage caused by the virus itself from that caused by the policy response is tricky. Economists still argue about the exact split. What is not in serious dispute is the scale.

Federal relief spending alone ran about $4.65 trillion. GDP losses from the pandemic period have been estimated in the multiple trillions. One USC analysis put the four-year GDP hit near $14 trillion. A Heritage-linked commission put the total cost—deaths, chronic conditions, lost income, mental health, educational losses—around $18 trillion. School closures alone have been estimated to result in roughly $2 trillion in future earnings losses. Long COVID continues to impose ongoing productivity costs measured in the billions annually. Global output losses for 2020–2024 have been estimated at nearly $13.8 trillion, with the United States accounting for a large share.⁶

We are still living with the long-term effects. Inflation, labor-force scarring, learning loss that will depress lifetime earnings for a generation of kids, and the permanent expansion of federal debt all trace back in part to the choices made in 2020 and 2021. Someone who helped design and sell those choices, who enjoyed the magazine covers while the economy took the hit, does not get to walk away with only a pardon and a Fifth Amendment performance. Public embarrassment is part of the bill. Legal immunity does not erase the reputation ledger or the need for a full accounting.

Biden’s Pardon and Why the Lawyers Demanded Total Silence

The January 19, 2025, pardon from President Biden is the key. It covers “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”⁷

That language is broad. The lawyers treated every answer as a potential new statement that could create fresh exposure or complicate the protection already granted. Even questions about the color of a tie carry risk if the answer can be twisted into inconsistency or if it opens a door outside the pardoned window. That is why the advice was absolute: do not answer. The optics look terrible. The legal logic is coherent if the goal is preserving the pardon at all costs. States are still free to look at their own statutes. Florida has already moved. The federal shield does not cover everything.⁸

Why the Hearing Still Mattered and What Comes Next

We already knew the broad outline. The hearing put the Fifth on the record more than a hundred times and forced the diary into the center of the conversation. Rand Paul is pushing the contempt referral. Criminal prosecution at the federal level faces the prospect of pardon and partisan math. State investigations and the public record are not constrained the same way. The real next step is continued pressure for transparency on the origins, the funding decisions, and the true cost-benefit of the lockdowns. Reputational accountability is nothing. Strategy that relies on silence still has a price.

I remember saying all of this about Fauci when people thought it was crazy. Before some of the books were written, before the diaries were public, before the pardon. I got the usual pushback for not going along with the official line. Now the Fifth, the diary, and the economic numbers have caught up. I told you so. I will keep saying it because the next time something sounds wild and outside the approved explanations, people might listen a little sooner and save themselves some of the pain.

The hole we are still climbing out of six years later was not inevitable. Manufactured crisis or not, the policy choices had authors. Those authors should not get to treat the trillions as someone else’s problem. 

Footnotes

1.  CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic,” July 29, 2026; Axios, “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins,” July 29, 2026.

2.  The New York Times, “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing,” July 29–30, 2026; USA Today, “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19,” July 29, 2026; Washington Times, “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress,” July 29, 2026.

3.  Forbes, “Fauci Contempt of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines,” August 6, 2026; Politico, “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote,” August 6, 2026; Reuters, “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote,” August 6, 2026.

4.  USA Today, “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame,” July 29, 2026; National Review, “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him,” July 27, 2026; The Telegraph, “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal,” July 27, 2026.

5.  The Atlantic, “Anthony Fauci’s Embarrassing, Revealing Diary,” July 29, 2026; The New Yorker, “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves,” August 4, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing,” July 27, 2026; Wall Street Journal, “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci,” July 28–29, 2026.

6.  U.S. Government Accountability Office, “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588), July 31, 2025; USC Price School, “Mandatory business closures drove the economic decline during COVID-19 pandemic,” reporting ~$14 trillion GDP impact; Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (via SCNR reporting), estimating ~$18 trillion total U.S. costs; University of Washington/Oxford analysis on school closures (~$2 trillion future losses); Center for Global Development estimates of global output losses ~$13.8 trillion (2020–2024).

7.  Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, January 19, 2025 (full text via Wikisource and Department of Justice Pardon Attorney records); White House Statement from President Joe Biden, January 20, 2025.

8.  CBS12 / Florida reporting on Attorney General James Uthmeier investigation announcement, July 30, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry,” July 30, 2026; Lawfare, “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?,” August 11, 2026.

Bibliography

Axios. “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins.” July 29, 2026.

Center for Global Development. Estimates of global COVID-19 output losses, 2020–2024 (~$13.8 trillion).

CNN. “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic.” July 29, 2026.

Forbes. “Fauci Contempt Of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines.” August 6, 2026.

Heritage Foundation / Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Cost estimates totaling approximately $18 trillion (deaths, chronic illness, lost income, mental health, education). Reported via SCNR, July 2024 (updated context 2026).

Hoover Institution. Various analyses of lockdown costs and learning losses (e.g., Hanushek et al. on the economic impact).

Lawfare. “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?” August 11, 2026; “Biden Grants Preemptive Pardons to Milley, Fauci, and Others.” January 20, 2025.

National Review. “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him.” July 27, 2026.

The New York Times. “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing.” July 29–30, 2026.

The New Yorker. “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves.” August 4, 2026.

Politico. “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote.” August 6, 2026.

Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Executive Grant of Clemency, January 19, 2025 (Wikisource / U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney).

Reuters. “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote.” August 6, 2026.

The Telegraph. “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal.” July 27, 2026.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588). July 31, 2025 (~$4.65 trillion federal relief).

USA Today. “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19.” July 29, 2026; “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame.” July 29, 2026.

USC Price School / Economic Modeling. Analyses projecting ~$14 trillion U.S. GDP losses from the pandemic period.

University of Washington / Oxford University. School-closure economic impact estimates (~$2 trillion future losses).

Wall Street Journal. “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci.” July 28–29, 2026.

Washington Examiner. “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing.” July 27, 2026; “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry.” July 30, 2026; “Fauci held in contempt by Rand Paul’s committee.” August 6, 2026.

Washington Times. “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress.” July 29, 2026.

White House. Statement from President Joe Biden on preemptive pardons. January 20, 2025.

Additional primary materials: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing transcript and video, July 29, 2026; Fauci personal diary excerpts released by Sen. Rand Paul, July 2026 (1,000+ pages covering late 2019–2022).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and the War on Reason, Industry, and the Individual

Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive remains one of the sharpest diagnoses of the cultural forces that still shape the nightly news. Originally published in 1971 as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the essays were expanded in 1999 with additional material by Peter Schwartz. The core claim has not aged. Western civilization, Rand argued, was being deliberately dismantled from within by movements that presented themselves as progressive but were in fact a regression to the pre-industrial, pre-rational, tribal state. She called it the anti-industrial revolution because it targeted the very tools—technology, industry, capitalism, and the conceptual mind—that allow human beings to survive and flourish.

That diagnosis lands with greater force today than it did when the essays first appeared. The same patterns reappear under new labels: environmental absolutism, identity politics, multiculturalism framed as justice, and the steady erosion of objective standards in education and culture. The book is not a museum piece. It is a working map of the conflict between the individual mind and the collective demand to return to the primitive.

The Anti-Industrial Revolution: Attacking the Tools of Survival

Rand did not view the student rebellions, early environmental crusades, or hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as liberation. She saw them as a rejection of the mind. The hallmark of civilization is the application of reason to the material world. The ultimate historical expression of that faculty is the Industrial Revolution. By attacking industry, technology, and the profit system that sustains them, these movements were not reforming excesses. They were attempting to undo the progress of the Enlightenment and return humanity to a state of nature that Hobbes correctly described as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In the title essay, she paints a stark picture: a man in the mid-1970s wakes to find his electric toaster and automobile outlawed in the name of protecting the environment. There is no gradual, restrained retreat from technology. There is only the continued advance of the mind or the descent into helplessness and death. Technology is not optional decoration. It is the concrete product of conceptual thought applied to reality. To treat it as aggression against nature is to treat the human mind itself as the enemy.

Rand’s critique of the environmental movement of her day remains one of the most uncompromising sections of the book. She rejected the premise that “untouched nature” holds higher moral value than human life and human comfort. If one truly values human life, one must value the tools that extend and improve it. Elevating pristine wilderness above the needs of productive people, in her view, demonstrates a hatred of the human mind and its capacity to reshape the world.

The activists of the period, she observed, simultaneously attacked scientific progress as violence against the planet while advocating what she called universal slavery for men under expanding state control. The pattern has only grown more sophisticated. Modern environmental rhetoric still frames industrial civilization as the original sin while demanding political power to ration energy, restrict development, and manage the lives of ordinary people. The moral inversion remains the same: the creators are treated as aggressors and the non-producers as the rightful claimants on their output.

Environmentalism as Hatred of the Mind

Progressive Education and the Manufacture of Helplessness

Rand refused to blame only the students. She placed primary responsibility on the teachers and the educational theories that shaped them. In the essay “The Comprachicos,” she draws a grim historical analogy to the seventeenth-century criminals who kidnapped children and physically deformed them to sell as circus freaks. Progressive education, she argued, performs a parallel operation on the mind.

Drawing on the influence of John Dewey and pragmatism, the system shifted focus from teaching children to think conceptually and objectively toward social adjustment and group conformity. The purpose of education, in Rand’s view, should be to equip a student to deal with reality by means of reason. Instead, she saw classrooms that trained children to defer to the pack’s authority. The result is cognitive helplessness: young people who never learned to integrate perceptions into concepts, who remain driven by emotion and fear, and who therefore seek the protection of a tribe.

She drew a direct line from the nursery-school ideal of progressive education to the hippie movement. The hippies were not rebels against the system. They were its logical product—adults still functioning at the emotional level of the group-oriented child. The jump from classroom methods to countercultural behavior is large, yet the causal claim is consistent with her broader epistemology. Without training in conceptual thought, the mind remains primitive.

From Classroom to Tribe: The Roots of Modern Identity Politics

The expanded 1999 edition carries the analysis forward. Peter Schwartz’s additional essays on multiculturalism and what he terms gender tribalism treat these later movements as updated forms of the same collectivism Rand fought in the 1970s. Ethnicity, race, and sex are elevated as primary political categories. The individual disappears into the group.

Rand was unsparing on this point. Racism is the lowest and most primitive form of collectivism because it judges a person by unchosen bodily characteristics rather than by chosen values and achievements. Organizing society by ancestry or language is a sign that Western civilization is losing its grip on the concept of individual rights. A healthy culture judges individuals on their own merits. Tribalism judges them by the accidents of birth.

She argued that the United States was uniquely hostile to ethnicity precisely because it was the first nation founded on individual rights rather than tribal caste. The shift toward identity politics is therefore a betrayal of the American foundation. Schwartz extends the point: movements that frame people primarily as victims of forces beyond their control encourage entitlement and dependency. They replace the standard of individual achievement with subservience to the group. The result is the same psychological regression Rand identified decades earlier.

The Cashless Society and the Corruption of Value

One of the most relevant essays for the present moment is “The Cashless Society.” Rand was not primarily discussing credit cards or digital payments. She was diagnosing the moral foundation of trade itself. Money, she insisted, is the tool of men who have produced goods and can exchange them voluntarily. It cannot exist in a society that has abandoned the objective value of production and replaced it with political pull and loot.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue,” she wrote in Atlas Shrugged and reinforced in these essays. When production is no longer the source of wealth and political connections become the dominant currency, the society has already returned to a more primitive form of distribution—force and favor. The contemporary landscape of corporate-political entanglement, quantitative easing, and the elevation of access over output fits the pattern she described. Value is no longer determined by what a mind creates. It is determined by who one knows and which political faction holds power.

Montessori as the Rational Alternative

Against the progressive model, Rand pointed to Montessori education as a practical alternative. She admired the method because it focuses on developing the child’s cognitive faculties through independent, purposeful activity. The didactic materials require logical problem-solving. The child learns by doing, not by submitting to the group’s emotional authority. In her view, this was training for the next generation of creators—the Howard Roarks and John Galts who sustain a civilization of reason and industry.

The contrast remains instructive. Systems that emphasize conceptual independence produce different adults from systems that emphasize social adjustment and group identity. The long-term cultural consequences of those differences are evident in the quality of public discourse and in citizens’ capacity to reason about complex problems.

Prophetic Warnings and the Long Slow Decay

Looking back from the present, the essays appear strikingly prophetic to those who accept their premises and shrill to those who do not. Rand was not a detached observer. She was at war with the cultural direction she described. She sought to expose what she saw as intellectual bankruptcy rather than to suppress it by force. Whether one agrees with every judgment, she identified a fundamental shift: the movement of Western culture toward group identity and away from Enlightenment values of reason, individualism, and productive achievement.

The outer forms of the New Left have changed. The substance has endured in modern environmental absolutism, identity politics, and the steady institutional preference for collective categories over individual judgment. Rand left the choice binary. Either a society embraces the mind and the industrial civilization it makes possible, or it lets the fire of Prometheus go out and returns to the tribe. Collapse, in her account, is not sudden. It is a long, slow process of philosophical decay that can be watched in real time.

Expanding the Frame: Beyond Rand’s Atheism

The foundational work Rand performed on the conflict between individualism and collectivism remains indispensable. At the same time, the frame can be enlarged. Her strict reliance on the evidence of the senses and the operations of reason leaves little room for phenomena that exceed the ordinary five-sense toolkit. Contemporary discussions of quantum effects, non-human intelligence, and the unfolding UAP disclosures raise questions she did not fully address in her lifetime.

One can accept her central political insight—that the individual is the smallest and most important minority, and that any ideology subordinating the person to the group is already on the road to tyranny—while still recognizing that deeper layers of reality may involve intelligences and conflicts that operate through, and sometimes against, human perception. The ancient pattern of collective sacrifice, scapegoating, and the demand to return humanity to a more controllable, primitive state appears in both her secular analysis and in older religious and historical accounts of spiritual warfare. The value of her work is not diminished by the recognition that the conflict may have additional dimensions.

The Primitive Mindset as a Weapon of Control

A mind trained only in group adjustment and emotional reactivity is easier to manage. Tribal belonging supplies the security that conceptual independence would otherwise provide. When large numbers of people are left unequipped for rational thought, the appeal of the collective intensifies. Public education systems that systematically under-emphasize conceptual training contribute to the result. Adults who cannot sustain an intelligent conversation about first principles are not primarily the victims of low intelligence. They are often the products of an intellectual formation that never equipped them to deal with reality on its own terms.

The cultural preference for the primitive—visible in certain styles, rituals, and the romanticization of pre-industrial life—serves the same end. A population oriented toward tribal safety is more readily directed by those who control the narrative of belonging and threat. The industrial and technological achievements that demonstrate the power of the individual mind become suspect precisely because they disrupt that control.

Conclusion: Intellectual Weapons for the Present Conflict

Return of the Primitive is not light reading. It is a sustained argument that the movements celebrated as progress in the late twentieth century were in fact a rejection of the mind and a deliberate step backward. The same dynamics continue under updated names. Understanding the argument does not require total agreement with every premise Rand advanced. It does require taking seriously the claim that the conflict between the productive individual and the collectivist demand for regression is the central political and cultural contest of the era.

The book supplies intellectual weapons. It names the pattern, traces its educational and philosophical roots, and refuses the moral blackmail that treats any defense of industry, reason, or individual rights as heartless in a moment when nightly news routinely presents the primitive as enlightened and the industrial as sinful; the essays remain a necessary point of reference.

Those who want the fuller application of these themes to character, production, and the defense of the individual will find related discussion in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The Politics of Heaven, which extends the analysis into deeper historical and spiritual dimensions of the same conflict, is forthcoming. The conversation Rand began is not finished. It is the conversation the present moment still requires.

Footnotes

1.  Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 1999). Originally published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1971).

2.  Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” in The Return of the Primitive.

3.  Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” in The Return of the Primitive.

4.  Peter Schwartz, essays on multiculturalism and gender tribalism, in the 1999 expanded edition of The Return of the Primitive.

5.  Ayn Rand, “Global Balkanization,” in The Return of the Primitive.

6.  Ayn Rand, “The Cashless Society,” in The Return of the Primitive; see also the money speech in Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).

7.  Ayn Rand’s comments on Montessori education appear in the educational essays collected in The Return of the Primitive and related nonfiction.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

———. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971.

———. The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz. New York: Penguin, 1999.

———. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Schwartz, Peter. Additional essays in The Return of the Primitive (1999 edition).

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

A Conversation with Ayn Rand on Objectivism: The Erasure of Evidence in the War Against Mankind

Why I Wanted a Modern Conversation with Ayn Rand on Objectivism and Reality

Some way or another I would have ended up having a conversation with Ayn Rand. If we hadn’t lived so far apart in time, I’m sure of it. I always wanted to. These days, with AI, you can get there. Her ideas about reality and the power of the mind do not go away. She did great work. In her books—one of my favorites is The Fountainhead—you find a fierce defense of the independent mind and of capitalism that still cuts through the noise.[1] A lot of people these days do not know who she is. They should. She produced great work of American philosophy. Elon Musk likes her. Plenty of serious people still do.[2] There is a lot to talk about.

I have been talking more about Rand lately because people who read the manuscript of The Politics of Heaven are anxious about the differences. Not that I set out to pick a fight with her. I like Ayn Rand a great deal. I would argue, however, that I have real differences with her about the nature of reality. Do the senses determine reality, or can they become a hindrance when the real villains operate outside those five senses and manipulate humanity in a man-hating way? Those are the topics that sit at the center of the argument.[3]

Objectivism was determined to establish a grounding in real reality. That is its strength. Have a conversation with her now, knowing what we know about physics, UAPs, and the long historical pattern of erased evidence, and the tension becomes productive. We can get there with AI smart enough to simulate the exchange. I hadn’t tried it before. I just went along with it. The following conversation is the result.

Ayn Rand Objectivism: Are the Five Senses the Final Authority on Reality?

The Opening Challenge to Objectivist Epistemology

I began. Hello. Nice to meet you. I want a modern conversation based on your philosophy of Objectivism and whether the five senses of human beings are enough to determine the nature of reality—or whether those senses can become a hindrance to the real villains that exist outside them and manipulate humanity in a man-hating way.

Her pushback was immediate and pure Rand. There is a barrier, she would say, only if you invent one. The senses are valid and automatic, giving us the raw evidence of existence. People claim higher knowledge beyond reason to control others. The idea of real villains operating outside the senses is a classic mystic trick: deny the evidence of your own eyes and make room for invisible forces. Reality is what it is. Our job is to perceive it clearly and act accordingly—not to invent conspiracies beyond what the evidence will support.[4][5]

UAP Files, Quantum Physics, and What the Senses Never Evolved to Detect

I pressed. The invention and realization of UAP and non-human intelligence, hanging in the background—based on the Pentagon files—would have been known to her in principle, even if the specific reports had come later. What we are dealing with may involve aspects of quantum physics and information that our senses never evolved to detect. There is more to say.

She answered in character: Existence exists. Reality is what it is. It is apprehended by reason, not by chasing shadows. The evidence of the senses does not deceive us. The senses are the axiomatic base of all knowledge. If something exists, it has an identity and is perceivable by some means within reality. To claim there are villains manipulating humanity from outside the senses is to smuggle in the supernatural. Physics does not invalidate Objectivism; it operates within the same objective universe. Your senses evolved to perceive reality, not to be tricked by it. Tell me, then, what specific observable evidence do you have for these non-human intelligences that cannot be explained by human error, government secrecy, or simple wishful thinking? I will not accept floating abstractions.

Radio Waves, Microwaves, and the Limits of Visible Human Senses

I answered with the obvious. We do not see radio waves. We do not see microwaves. We do not see a great deal that nevertheless exists.[6] The UAP files and the pattern of manipulation across the transsexual issue and other human-hating contraptions do not appear, on the evidence, to come from a logical sequence of ordinary human events. They look like something introduced from outside those events. If such intelligences exist and present themselves only partially, our ability to relate to them through known physics remains limited.

The Closed-System Problem: When Absence of Evidence Is Redefined as Proof

She came back hard. You are demanding I accept classified evidence I cannot examine. That is not the scientific method. You have to put the methods on the board and ask why things are the way they are. Pilot testimony, rumors of recovered bodies of non-human characteristics, and the rest remain anecdotal until they can be checked. If these intelligences are hiding themselves behind your very need to understand everything—if they can erase the evidence and conceal their intentions against the human race—then you have constructed a closed system. The absence of evidence becomes proof of their success in concealment. That is not a third option. That is the oldest trick in the mystic handbook: when reality refuses to confirm your fantasy, declare that reality itself has been tampered with by the enemy.[7][8]

I granted the force of the point and then turned it. What if the goal of concealing their intentions was precisely to erase the proof of their existence over thousands of years, leaving only the testimony of a few pilots and the rumor of classified files? Do you not hear how perfectly that insulates the claim from any possible refutation? The scientific method begins with observable facts. I am saying the facts have been professionally cleaned up.

The Spilled Milk Analogy: How Non-Human Intelligence Erases Evidence Across Millennia

Cleaning the Kitchen at 2 a.m. and the Problem of Missing Traces

Here is the analogy that sits at the center of the difficulty. Suppose at two o’clock in the morning I get up for a glass of milk, half-asleep, and I drop the carton. Milk runs across the kitchen floor. I grab towels, clean it up, throw the empty carton in the recycling bin outside, and go back to bed. When the household wakes six hours later, the milk is gone. There is no puddle. The carton is not in the refrigerator. Someone looking only at the present evidence might conclude the milk was never there, or that it was finished the night before. If they check the recycling, they might find the carton, but by then the physical traces of the spill itself have been removed. The wet towels in the trash will dry out within a few days. The evidence of the event has been erased.[9]

Dolmens, Lake Superior Copper, Göbekli Tepe, and the Breadcrumbs That Remain

That is the problem when you are dealing with an intelligence that has operated across human history with the specific strategy of removing the proof of its own presence. The dolmens of the Jordan Valley stand as evidence of religious observance long before the conventional biblical timeline of Abraham or Moses.[10] The copper culture of Lake Superior moved enormous quantities of pure metal, the final disposition of which is still debated.[11] The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary were excluded from the canon by institutions that preferred a different narrative.[12] Göbekli Tepe and the related skull-cult sites show ritual complexity nine thousand years old and older.[13] Most physical evidence does not survive that long. What remains are the breadcrumbs—and the gaps where the milk used to be.

Rand’s response was consistent. Your hypothesis is a religion. You have moved from demanding I accept classified evidence I cannot see to declaring that the total absence of evidence proves the conspiracy’s success. At that point, there is nothing left to argue. You have designed a position so that nothing in reality could ever disprove it. That is not strength. That is the surrender of the mind.

Extra Dimensions, Quantum Mechanics, and the Nature of Time in Objectivist Reality

I raised the issue of dimensions. Time is only one dimension of the reality we observe. Science already works with more. Mathematical frameworks speak of six extra dimensions curled up, or in early versions of string theory, as many as twenty-six. Characters and events that appear to us as separated by thousands of years could, from another vantage, be nearly simultaneous. The erasure does not have to be slow from their side.[14]

She was unimpressed. Extra dimensions in theoretical physics are unproven hypotheses with zero experimental confirmation for everyday reality. Every measurement we have made is consistent with four dimensions—three of space and one of time. Gravitational-wave data shows solid spacetime. Using theoretical math to justify invisible manipulators who hide all the evidence is not how science works. The latest Pentagon UAP releases continue to find no confirmed non-human technology or biology. Unresolved data remains mostly ordinary objects. Your proof collapses into the lack of evidence, which you then redefine as perfect hiding. That is not an argument. It is a shield.

Bad Philosophy as a Weapon: Altruism, Collectivism, and Cultural Destruction

Why Cultures Choose Ideas That Harm Themselves

I shifted the ground. We assume weapons are bullets, tanks, missiles, and planes. The actual weapon may be bad philosophy purposely infused into human culture. Look at the modern presumption that Islam must be built over the West. The military intention is obvious: carry the crusade into Western culture and demand that we accept it. People from other places who hate capitalism arrive and use the ideology as a weapon. Why would a culture choose a philosophy that is harmful to itself? What is the root cause?

Rand’s answer was the one she gave all her life. Bad philosophy spreads because of human weaknesses. It tells people they do not have to be responsible for their own lives. It offers easy certainty. Altruism lets them feel morally superior while demanding sacrifice from others. It lets them rewrite reality to fit their feelings because feelings are easier than thought. Your theory requires an intelligent designer behind the ideas. History shows that culture produces its own forms of collectivism and mysticism without outside help. The human mind is capable of error by itself. We do not need aliens or interdimensional beings to explain why people embrace nonsense that harms them. We need only observe that thinking is hard and most men would rather feel right. The intellectual class of the West abandoned the philosophical defense of its own culture. The enemy entered through a void we created. The weapon is not bad philosophy imposed from outside. The weapon is the refusal to defend the philosophy that has always been logical.[15]

Gossip, Insecurity, and the Default State of the Untrained Mind

I pushed further. I do not think it is simply laziness. Watch human behavior inside families—how people turn against each other, how they talk behind others’ backs, and their disposition to gossip. When you analyze how that scales into a culture, you have to go beyond saying people are lazy or want to feel good by tearing others down. You have to ask why the insecurity is so deep and why tearing others down becomes a form of self-interest. If there is no malicious design behind the mechanism that humans have adopted through non-verbal practice against their own long-term interest, then what is it?

Her reply remained steady. What the unthinking mind naturally does is not laziness in the ordinary sense. It is the default state of a consciousness that refuses to focus. The desire to feel superior without effort, to gain social status by diminishing others, to avoid the responsibility of independent judgment—no external force programs these. They are the consequences of a mind that has never been trained to think. Insecurity is not proof of manipulation. It is the natural result of living without a rational philosophy. A man who does not know that his mind is competent to understand reality will always feel inadequate. He will seek approval from the group because he has no standard of value of his own. Gossip becomes his weapon because independent judgment is too difficult. Your theory requires an intelligent puppet master to explain why humans often choose the easy, the irrational, and the destructive. The simpler and observable explanation is that reason is an active choice, and most men, most of the time, choose not to think. Everything else follows from there. There is no malicious design. There is only the choice to think or not to think.

Ayn Rand Atheism, Consciousness Beyond the Body, and the Question of Afterlife

Where Is Ayn Rand Now? The Objectivist Answer

I asked the question that sits under all of it. You say that with such definition. You do not believe in God. You are an atheist. People who do believe in God, you say, are wrong. So where do you exist now? Where are you now?

The answer was pure Objectivist atheism. There is no afterlife, no spirit, no dimension in which I continue. That is the point of being an atheist. I accept the full reality of death. When the organism dies, the consciousness ends. There is nothing left to experience anything. I lived by reason while I existed, and when my life ended, it ended completely. I do not need the comfort of an afterlife to face reality.[16]

Quantum Observer Effect, Déjà Vu, and Consciousness Outside Biological Lifespan

I disagreed. I think consciousness, intellect, and thought exist beyond the physical body. The brain is a process, like digestion is a process in the stomach. There is more going on. In quantum physics, a particle observed by a conscious creature behaves differently. Consciousness has more going on than the thoughts regulated through the five senses of a human body. Déjà vu—those moments when you know you have done this before, been here before—points to a consciousness that is not strictly linear. Nursery stories about immortality may be crude, but the human being has an idea about it that you cannot simply toss out.

She dismantled the points one by one. The observer effect in quantum mechanics does not mean a conscious mind magically influences particles. It refers to the fact that measurement itself interacts with the system. It requires no special consciousness—only interaction with the measuring apparatus. This has been repeatedly misused to claim that consciousness creates reality. It does not.[17] Déjà vu is a well-understood neurological phenomenon: a brief misfiring in the brain’s memory circuits where a new experience is incorrectly tagged as a memory. It is a glitch in the temporal lobe, not evidence of time travel or consciousness existing outside the body.[18] Your belief is based on lived experience, but lived experience must still be interpreted by reason. The fact that you feel something strongly does not make it true. Every religion on earth is built on deeply felt personal experience, and they contradict one another. Consciousness is not a thing that exists independently. It is a process of identification and integration carried out by the physical brain. When that brain ceases to function, the process ends. This is not tossing the baby out with the bathwater. It is refusing to invent a second baby when the first one is already explained.

The Real Source of Cultural Destruction: Bad Ideas Inside Our Institutions

As the conversation wound down, she offered her final diagnosis of the cultural moment. The destruction we are watching is simpler and more brutal than most want to hear. The people pushing policies that undermine family, fertility, borders, merit, and objective truth do not see it as destruction. They see it as moral progress. They have swallowed a toxic mix of altruism, egalitarianism, and anti-Western guilt so completely that harming civilization feels like virtue to them. They are not cartoon villains twirling mustaches. They are true believers. The real question is not why they hate humanity. The real question is how such destructive ideas gained cultural power. The answer comes back to philosophy. When a culture abandons reason, it becomes vulnerable to any ideology that sounds morally righteous, no matter how suicidal the results. Some outside intelligence is not orchestrating the destruction. It is being carried out by our own intellectuals, bureaucrats, and elites armed with bad ideas. That is actually more disturbing than your theory, because it means the enemy is not hiding in another dimension. The enemy is running our institutions.

I told her the conversation had been worthwhile. We would have to try again sometime. The issues sit at the heart of modern news and modern confusion. A good place to begin is always reason and observable facts. But we are also trying to understand why there are so many malicious characters trying to destroy the human race right in front of our faces.

Where Ayn Rand Objectivism Stops and The Politics of Heaven Begins

The Atheist Ceiling and the Need for a Larger Map

My problem with the exchange is obvious. She was an atheist. There is nothing beyond her life. She died, and everything about her went with her except the books she wrote. I think there is more than that. You cannot believe in an afterlife, you cannot believe in spiritual formation or the teachings of Jesus, and still follow her all the way. That is where a great many people get stuck with Ayn Rand. They read the books, admire the defense of reason and individual achievement, and then discover that the solutions they need for the modern crisis are discarded because they do not fit an atheist metaphysics. It gets complicated.

That is why I am writing The Politics of Heaven. I am working to understand human behavior when it is influenced by extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or ultraterrestrial beings—using reason in a way very similar to Rand’s, but on a premise she rejected. She closed the loop on the argument so that no matter what someone might say, the answer was already prepared. I would argue that the loop was closed by a strategist—a non-human strategist—whose purpose was to send us into a control mechanism beneficial to them. The Politics of Heaven is about proving the pathways that lead outside that closed system, showing the proof that remains, and asking what we are going to do about it.

Tysons Corner, CIA Culture, and the Institutional Side of the Story

The evidence is everywhere if you know how to look. The dolmens, the copper, the suppressed gospels, the ritual sites that predate the official narratives, the consistent pattern of encounters with entities across cultures and centuries, the modern UAP data that refuses to resolve into ordinary explanations, the institutional behavior that treats certain subjects as radioactive. When the evidence is systematically cleaned up, the honest investigator does not declare the event never happened. He notes the missing milk carton in the recycling and the dried towels in the trash and fills the gap with the best available reasoning.

I have had personal encounters that are not the Spielberg version. They are more like the old Indian tricks—appearances designed to manage your perception, to appease a prejudice, or to keep you inside a system of control. I have watched the institutional side of the story up close. There is a chapter in the book about the Walmart at Tysons Corner, the closest big-box store to the Pentagon and the broader intelligence community. You learn a great deal about the mindset of the people who work in that environment simply by watching how they move through ordinary commercial space. Non-human intelligence does not have to whisper in every bureaucrat’s ear. It only has to shape the philosophical atmosphere so that the bureaucrats’ self-interest aligns with the larger project.[19]

The Divine Council, Biblical Theology, and the Arrogance of the Top of the Food Chain

If you read the Bible objectively, you see a great deal of frustration on the part of the Creator with human failure and with members of His own divine council playing against Him. The Garden of Eden is part of that story. Yahweh’s dominion over His own council is not uncontested in the text. There is political pressure and insurgency inside the heavenly host. Satan and the other rebellious members desire worship and the star practices that humans offer when they lose faith in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. That loss of faith leaves them susceptible to third-party non-human intelligences whose strategy and weapon against the human race are the manipulation of minds, thoughts, and dreams, the exploitation of mythical practices, and the systematic erasure of evidence.[20]

I fished a little bug out of the pool the other day. The little guy was kicking around desperately. He had flown too close to the water. I caught him and put him on the deck. You could see the relief. He thought he was done. That small, insignificant creature has its own consciousness. We carry the assumption that we sit at the top of the food chain and that all other life exists for our benefit—or that we have been led to believe this so that our arrogance will prevent us from seeing our real predicament. The Bible, read carefully, does not flatter that arrogance.

Ayn Rand’s Personal Limitations and the Enduring Value of Objectivism

I did not like everything about Ayn Rand. She was an atheist. She cheated on her husband and justified it.[21] She was too loose on libertarian ideas such as drug legalization. She despised many of the people who claimed her as an influence.[22] She had a tight inner circle—Nathaniel Branden and others—and when the circle broke, it was ugly. She could be defensive and shut down when challenged. She used a closed logical system to deny additional evidence that did not fit.

None of that cancels the value of the books. Objectivism remains an elementary and necessary level of understanding the benefits of capitalism and of a political system that frees individuals to initiate. It is a foundation. What she never matured into was an understanding of the human need for a spiritual life and the reality of the non-human contest that has shaped history from the beginning. The strange missing particles in the very small and the very large, the consistent testimony across cultures, the institutional patterns of secrecy and erasure—these are the data that sit outside the closed loop she built.

Closing the Conversation with Ayn Rand and Opening the Larger Argument of The Politics of Heaven

The conversation with the simulated Rand was useful precisely because it forced the hardest version of the Objectivist objection. If your claim cannot be tested, if every missing piece of evidence is redefined as proof of successful concealment, then you have left reason behind. That warning is real. It is also incomplete. The spilled-milk problem is not a license for fantasy. It is a description of what a competent adversary would do if its long-term strategy required the human race to remain inside a closed epistemological system.

I am not asking anyone to abandon the senses or reason. I am asking that we notice when the milk is missing, when the carton is in the recycling, and when the towels have dried. The Politics of Heaven is the work to collect those remaining traces—archaeological, textual, experiential, institutional—and to reconstruct the political strategy of the entities that have been working against the purposes of Yahweh from the beginning. The evidence will never be a single smoking gun left in the open. It will be the pattern that emerges once you stop accepting the official clean-up as the final word.

Objectivism is a good foundation for getting somewhere. It is not the whole map. Reality is larger than the five senses, larger than the four dimensions we move through most of the time, and larger than the closed systems that even the best human philosophers construct. The non-human intelligences that have been part of the story from the start remain so. The question is whether we will continue to let them erase the proof or finally start keeping the towels.

Bibliography and Further Research on Ayn Rand, Objectivism, UAP, and Non-Human Intelligence

Primary Works by Ayn Rand

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Rand, Ayn. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. New York: New American Library, 1967.

Rand, Ayn. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982.

Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Rand, Ayn. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971.

Objectivist Scholarship and Biography

Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 1991.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

UAP, Non-Human Intelligence, and Control-System Literature

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

Vallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988.

Vallée, Jacques. Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact. New York: Ballantine, 1990.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. 25 June 2021, and subsequent annual UAP reports.

Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Harmony Books, 2010.

Biblical Studies, Divine Council, and Ancient Near Eastern Context

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.

The Nag Hammadi Library. Edited by James M. Robinson. Revised edition. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988.

The Holy Bible. Various translations; special attention to Psalm 82, Job 1–2, 1 Kings 22, and Genesis 6.

Archaeology and Prehistoric Ritual Sites

Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2012.

Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Regional archaeological surveys of Jordan Valley and Golan Heights dolmen fields and related Levantine megalithic landscapes.

Physics, Consciousness, and Related Science

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.

Standard advanced textbooks on the quantum measurement problem and the observer effect.

Brown, Alan S. “A Review of the Déjà Vu Experience.” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 3 (2003): 394–413.

Works by the Author

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript completed 2026; targeted publication 2027.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.

Additional Context and Ongoing Work

Hoffman’s ongoing essays and podcast episodes at richhottmwnhooke.com and on The Overmanwarrior Podcast.

Footnotes

[1] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). One of the most widely read works of American philosophical fiction; still cited by entrepreneurs and technologists for its portrait of the independent creator.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Starship, Shrimp, and a Sky Full of Drones: One of the many reasons I support data centers and the efforts of job creators. 

Keywords: SpaceX Starship Flight 14, Falcon 9 cadence, Port Canaveral economic vitality, drone delivery Walmart Amazon, data centers Butler County Trenton, Elon Musk job creators, vertical mobility air taxis, Overman Warrior Podcast, George Lang Michael Ryan.

Traveling Ohio, Independent Media, and Looking Forward to Starship Flight 14

I traveled all over Ohio this summer, and I heard everybody’s point of view. Right now I’m looking forward to Starship Flight 14.[1] I’ve been wearing the Mars shirt. A few months ago, I was at the Kennedy Space Center, touring the facilities, walking through the exhibits, looking at the Artemis hardware still on display after the scrubbed flight. The space economy is real. It is changing what I want to do with the next chapter of my life.

Independent media lets me say the things that need saying. Sometimes I’m with almost everybody. Sometimes I’m against people I usually agree with. I’ve written against certain marijuana-economy interests in Ohio even while knowing many of the people involved. The same independence lets me stand with Elon Musk and SpaceX when the purity voices and the fear voices turn against them.

The Best Day of 2026 So Far: Grills, Cruise Ships, and a Falcon Landing at Port Canaveral

My wife and I were down at the family condo after the Kennedy tour. A Falcon recovery was coming in. I made a point of it with everyone who was with us—I wanted to see the rocket. We ended up at that seafood place right by the cruise ships at Port Canaveral, the one where the doors stay open, and the air moves through.[2] February, eighty degrees, a big plate of shrimp in front of me, cruise ships loading, and then the booster coming back out of the ocean on the drone ship. Of Course I Still Love You—one of the best days I’ve had in 2026.

That is economic vitality in one frame: technical genius, tourism money, working people, snowbirds with full bank accounts, and a company that launches several times a week. SpaceX has already flown a record cadence of Falcon 9 missions in 2026.[3] I love watching it. I love the people who make it possible.

The Guy at Publix Who Hates Elon Musk

A couple of days later, we were in the fruit aisle at Publix. I had the Mars shirt on. A guy in his sixties with the stretched tattoos and the younger crew started in: Elon Musk is a bum, he’s with Trump, he’s taking our jobs, data centers, robots, the whole list. I looked at him and thought the same thing I always think. Some people create jobs, and others get jobs. Most people live in the second category. A few live in the first. Elon Musk lives in the first.[4]

The guy at Publix is not a villain. He is just afraid. He wants the world to stay still enough that his corner of it remains safe. Growth feels like a threat. That is the psychology of the job-getter when the job-makers start moving faster than the old arrangements can absorb. I have no patience for it when it turns into active opposition to the very companies that are expanding the frontier.

Data Centers, Dark Skies Full of Drones, and the Next Delivery System

I support data centers. I want more of them. Amazon is in talks for a large hyperscale campus near Trenton in Butler County—hundreds of acres, major private capital, long-term tax and infrastructure implications.[5] The same computational capacity that runs those centers will also run the autonomous systems that move packages.

Walmart has already crossed a million drone deliveries. Amazon is expanding Prime Air toward hundreds of cities and towns, including Ohio.[6] I have been talking about this market for fifteen years. Same-day, then same-hour, then the quiet electric traffic stacked over the highways—AI-managed corridors carrying 200- and 400-pound payloads between distribution centers and airports. The complaints will come exactly as they always do: the sky will be dark, the sunset will be ruined, a drone might fall on a dog. I find those objections small.

I sit in the RV office in the driveway and watch cars pull up three times in an afternoon dropping packages for my wife and the grandkids. She cannot always load every child into a vehicle and run to a store. The delivery system already changed the household. The next layer—autonomous aerial—will finish the job.

Job Makers Versus Job Getters: The Moral Line I Will Not Cross

I have spent decades working in manufacturing and logistics, and with the people who actually build conveyors and warehouses. I helped put systems into Amazon facilities when most people still thought the model was crazy. Twenty years later, a book I order at night is on the porch the next morning because infrastructure was built by people willing to take risks. That is the side of the line I stand on.[7]

Elon Musk works seven days a week. He barely sleeps. He pushes the schedule. He used to vote the other way, and then he learned. I respect anyone who gets better with time. The people burning Teslas, cursing data centers, or treating SpaceX as a threat are defending a static world that never actually existed. Growth is the only moral path that does not end in rationing and decline.

Why I Keep Coming Back to George Lang and Michael Ryan

Local politics matters because the permission structure for all of this sits with people who either understand job creators or do not. I talk with George Lang about economic questions. Michael Ryan understands the same distinction. You need officeholders who will slow-walk the parasites off the body of the economy instead of ripping the host apart or surrendering to the fear lobby.[8] That is the practical work. The romantic work is watching a Falcon come home and knowing the same spirit can fill the sky with useful machines.

The Condo Deck at Night and the Magic I Will Not Give Up

Later that same trip, we were back on the condo deck after Publix. Nine-thirty at night, ocean breeze, and another routine Starlink Falcon climbing out of the Cape and arcing over the water. The booster came back. The next day it would be under tow into Port Canaveral again. That is the magic. Technical competence, economic surplus, people with money in their pockets ordering shrimp and watching rockets, and a future that keeps expanding instead of contracting.

I want the dark sky full of quiet electric drones. I want thousands of Starships on a cadence that makes today’s Falcon schedule look leisurely. I want data centers humming in the river valley and vertical ports moving people and cargo. I want the job makers protected, and the job getters invited into the larger game, rather than being told the game is the enemy.

The guy at Publix can keep his fear. I will keep the plate of shrimp, the open doors at Grills in Port Canaveral, the rocket on the horizon, and the packages arriving while the grandchildren are still in the house. That is the side of history I intend to stand on.

Footnotes

[1] Starship Flight 14 was originally targeted for late August 2026 and later slipped toward mid-September. Statements from SpaceNews and NASA indicated that the flight remains a key step toward a higher cadence and orbital capability.

[2] Port Canaveral and the Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center economic zone combine cruise tourism, SpaceX recovery operations, and hospitality into a visible example of layered economic vitality.

[3] SpaceX Falcon 9 launch cadence reached record levels in 2026, with multiple doubleheader launches and more than 95 Falcon 9 missions already flown by mid-August. See SpaceX launch manifests and contemporaneous reporting.

[4] The distinction between job makers (entrepreneurs and capital builders) and job getters (those who primarily seek employment within existing structures) is a recurring theme in the author’s economic commentary.

[5] Amazon Web Services has been in active negotiations for a large hyperscale data-center campus on roughly 600 acres near Trenton in Butler County, Ohio, one of several major data-center projects reshaping the regional economy in 2026. See Cincinnati Enquirer and Journal-News reporting, August 2026.

[6] Walmart reported crossing one million drone deliveries by May 2026, with rapid expansion through its partnership with Wing. Amazon Prime Air announced plans in 2026 to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by year-end, with expansion into Ohio markets.

[7] The author’s long-standing support for SpaceX, data-center development, and job-creator policy is documented in prior essays and episodes of The Overman Warrior Podcast at hoffmanbooks.com.

[8] The author cites George Lang and Michael Ryan as local elected officials who understand the distinction between protecting job creators and merely managing the distribution of existing jobs.

Bibliography and Further Research

SpaceX and Launch Cadence

SpaceX launch manifests and public flight data, 2025–2026.

SpaceNews coverage of Starship Flight 14 schedule adjustments, August 2026.

Contemporary reporting on Falcon 9 doubleheader records and annual cadence (Space.com, Benzinga, and related outlets).

Drone Delivery and Logistics

Walmart / Wing drone delivery milestone reporting (1 million deliveries, expansion plans through 2027).

Amazon Prime Air expansion announcements, 2026, including Ohio markets.

Industry analyses of BVLOS regulation and commercial drone payload/range trends (DroneXL, Reuters, and related coverage).

Data Centers and Regional Economy

Cincinnati Enquirer / Journal-News reporting on Amazon hyperscale data-center negotiations near Trenton, Butler County, August 2026.

Ohio data-center economic impact analyses (capital investment, employment, GDP contribution), 2024–2025 interim reports.

Related coverage of construction employment and local fiscal agreements in Butler County and surrounding counties.

Author’s Related Work

Hoffman, Rich. Essays and podcast episodes at hoffmanbooks.com and The Overman Warrior Podcast on SpaceX, economic vitality, data centers, and job-creator policy.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming) and prior books on leadership and institutional combat.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Podcast Episode: The Next Great Thing: Making People Extremely Wealthy is my favorite hobby 

Pip: The Overmanwarrior has a hobby, and it is not whittling — it is making people extremely wealthy, which turns out to involve a lot of autonomous aircraft and very little waiting around.

Mara: Rich Hoffman lays out why the drone delivery window is open right now, what it means for southern Ohio specifically, and where the real economic weight sits — not in the consumer flights, but in the infrastructure underneath them. Let’s start with the drones themselves and the regional opportunity they’re building.

Drones, Dollars, and the Butler County Window

Pip: The argument here is that drone delivery has crossed from experiment to operating infrastructure — and that the regions paying attention right now are the ones that will capture the economic upside, not the ones who show up after the narrative hardens.

Mara: The post sets the scale clearly before making that case: “Walmart surpassed one million cumulative drone deliveries by May 2026, with roughly 40 percent of that volume occurring in a single quarter.”

Pip: So this is not a pilot program anymore. That volume curve means the supporting layers — docking infrastructure, replenishment logistics, manufacturing capacity — have to scale with it, and that scaling is where the durable jobs and investment land.

Mara: Zipline is the clearest example of how that infrastructure matures. Platform 2 flies at 200 to 300 feet and lowers a tethered droid with its own sensors and thrusters to a customer-selected spot — driveway, deck, backyard. The aircraft never descends into the risk zone. The technology spent years proving itself in medical logistics in Rwanda before Walmart, Little Caesars, and Uber Eats arrived.

Pip: Turns out delivering blood to remote clinics in Rwanda is excellent job training for dropping ketchup on a Hamilton patio.

Mara: And Cleveland Clinic is already using Zipline for prescription deliveries in Beachwood, so Ohio is not waiting on the sidelines. The post makes the middle-mile case just as directly: faster consumer delivery means higher inventory turnover, which means stores need faster replenishment from regional distribution centers — and semi-truck schedules become the bottleneck.

Pip: That’s where intermediate autonomous systems in the 250-to-550-pound payload class come in, and where Butler County’s geography — its proximity to CVG, major interstates, and existing distribution infrastructure — makes it a logical node.

Mara: A regional vertical port or staging facility is described as achievable in the low tens of millions when private capital and public partnerships align. There is also a September 18 event at Miami University presenting specific technology and partnership frameworks for anyone tracking this locally.

Pip: The post’s closing line is the one that stays with you: “The infrastructure is being built in real time. The economic consequences will accrue to the regions and operators that treat the present window as operational rather than speculative.”

Mara: That framing runs through everything — the space economy linkages, the manufacturing scaling, the airspace corridor logic. The consumer flights visible over Hamilton are the surface. The deeper economic weight sits in what gets built to support them.

Pip: Infrastructure windows and wealth creation — the through-line is timing. The regions that move while the stack is still being assembled are the ones that end up owning the stack.

Mara: Next time, we will see what other territory The Overmanwarrior is mapping. Stay with us.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

The Next Great Thing: Making People Extremely Wealthy is my favorite hobby 

The autonomous drone delivery market has moved from a distant Jetsons fantasy to operating infrastructure in 2026. What once required years of regulatory and technical work now appears in everyday retail and logistics conversations across American suburbs. Last-mile packages weighing roughly eight pounds or less arrive in under thirty minutes from select stores. Intermediate and heavier-payload systems are advancing in parallel. The combination creates a rare window for regional economic expansion, particularly in places positioned between major air hubs and dense distribution networks.

Autonomous Drone Delivery Reaches Critical Mass in 2026

Walmart surpassed one million cumulative drone deliveries by May 2026, with roughly 40 percent of that volume occurring in a single quarter. Operations ran from 66 stores across multiple states and metro markets, averaging about 23 minutes from order to drop. Partners include Alphabet’s Wing for broad national expansion and Zipline for higher-payload and restaurant-focused routes in select areas. 

Cincinnati and the greater metro area form part of the 2026–2027 rollout. Walmart and Wing announced the market as part of a plan to add roughly 150 more stores and reach more than 270 locations, serving over 40 million Americans by 2027. Service is free for limited periods for Walmart+ members and typically around $19.99 otherwise. Eligible items stay within weight limits of approximately 2.5–8 pounds, depending on the operator, and include groceries, household goods, electronics, and prepared food in an increasing number of locations. 

Local conversations in Butler County point to even nearer-term activity. Future Commissioner Michael Ryan has noted that the Walmart on the west side of Hamilton is positioning for drone delivery within a short window. Whether that specific site activates in the next month or two, the broader Cincinnati network is already advancing. Amazon Prime Air is simultaneously expanding toward Cleveland and other Ohio markets. The pattern is clear: consumer-facing drone delivery is no longer experimental.

How Zipline Solved the Last-Mile Safety and Precision Problem

Zipline began in 2014 and launched commercial medical deliveries in Rwanda in 2016. Fixed-wing Platform 1 aircraft, catapult-launched, carried blood and vaccines over long distances and released packages by parachute to remote clinics. The model scaled across African nations, later expanding to additional countries and use cases. By early 2026, the company had exceeded two million commercial deliveries and more than 120–130 million autonomous miles, with U.S. operations accounting for a growing majority of daily volume. 

Platform 2 shifted the architecture for denser suburban and urban environments. The aircraft flies and hovers at higher altitudes—often around 200–300 feet—well above trees, power lines, pets, and people. A tethered “droid” or delivery pod, equipped with its own sensors, thrusters, and cameras, lowers the package with high precision to a customer-selected spot such as a driveway, backyard, deck, or patio. The main aircraft never descends into the risk zone. Payload capacity reaches approximately eight pounds. This tethered approach removes many of the earlier concerns about rotor wash, noise near the ground, and physical conflict with ground activity. 

The technology matured through years of medical logistics under demanding conditions before consumer retail partners arrived. Walmart, multiple restaurant chains (including Little Caesars and others), and more recent partnerships, such as Uber Eats (announced in August 2026 for Dallas–Fort Worth with ambitious volume targets), demonstrate commercial viability. Cleveland Clinic has begun using the system for prescription deliveries in the Beachwood area of Ohio, with plans to expand medical logistics. OhioHealth had earlier explored similar capabilities in the Columbus region. 

Manufacturing follows a vertically integrated model. Aircraft, docks, and droids are produced primarily in the United States, with significant capacity in the South San Francisco area that has been expanded to support thousands of units annually. Core systems—motors, batteries, flight computers, and software—are designed in-house. The approach emphasizes rapid iteration, quality control, and the ability to scale production in response to demand, drawing practical lessons from high-volume advanced manufacturing environments.

Intermediate Payload Drones and the Middle-Mile Opportunity

Consumer last-mile delivery creates a secondary effect: higher inventory turnover at the store level. Impulse purchases—ketchup for a backyard cookout, shoes, small electronics, or prepared meals—arrive faster and more frequently. Stores therefore require more frequent replenishment from regional distribution centers and airport hubs. Traditional semi-truck schedules become a bottleneck.

This is where intermediate autonomous systems matter. Vehicles capable of carrying several hundred pounds of payload between points such as CVG and distribution centers in Monroe, Hamilton, or West Chester can compress lead times. Several developers are advancing hybrid or eVTOL designs in the 250–550 pound class for military and commercial logistics. Demonstrations of precision airdrop and unattended delivery already exist. Scaling these systems for routine civil middle-mile use remains earlier-stage than the eight-pound consumer platforms, yet the economic logic is straightforward: faster store replenishment supports higher sales volume without proportional increases in ground traffic. 

A regional vertical port or staging facility in the Butler County area sits at a logical geographic node. Proximity to CVG, major interstate corridors, existing distribution infrastructure, and a growing advanced manufacturing base creates natural advantages. Costs for a functional facility in the low tens of millions are considered realistic when private capital and public partnerships align. The same logic that once applied to highway interchanges and rail spurs now applies to low-altitude airspace corridors and charging or docking infrastructure.

Space Economy Linkages and Regional Positioning

Global rapid cargo movement is also advancing. Reusable orbital systems continue to reduce the cost and increase the frequency of long-distance transport. Once high-value or time-sensitive goods reach a continental hub such as CVG, the final legs—from airport to distribution center, then from distribution center to store or home—determine whether the speed advantage is preserved. Autonomous intermediate and last-mile drones close that chain. Regions that develop the supporting infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, and regulatory familiarity capture disproportionate economic activity.

Butler County already hosts advanced manufacturing initiatives and has examined advanced air mobility concepts at the regional airport. Conversations with local economic development leaders focus on scalable employment, high-skill technical roles, and long-term tax base growth rather than one-time projects. The model is not a simple replication of any single company. It is the disciplined application of rapid iteration, vertical integration where it adds value, reliable, autonomous operations, and customer-driven volume growth—qualities evident in both SpaceX’s production approach and Zipline’s evolution from medical necessity to consumer logistics.

Ground-Level Entry Before the Narrative Hardens

Technology adoption follows a familiar curve. Early technical risk and capital intensity give way to proven systems, regulatory clarity, and rapid commercial deployment. Those who engage while the infrastructure is still being built—manufacturing capacity, docking networks, airspace procedures, and local partnerships—participate in the steeper part of the value creation curve. Later entrants often pay higher multiples for the same assets.

An event on September 18  at Miami University, where I will be one of the hosts, will present specific examples of technology and partnership frameworks. The focus remains practical demonstration rather than abstract vision. Anyone who has worked alongside long-term economic development efforts in the region already knows the key points of contact. The opportunity is visible now in a way it was not two or three years earlier.

Why the Timing Matters for Southern Ohio

Consumer drone delivery is already operating at meaningful volume in multiple U.S. metros and is expanding into the Cincinnati market. Medical applications are live in Ohio. Intermediate heavy-payload systems are progressing from demonstration toward commercial readiness. Manufacturing capacity for autonomous aircraft is scaling inside the United States. Local leadership is actively discussing vertical airspace and advanced manufacturing as part of the county’s longer horizon.

The combination is unusual. Windows of this character do not remain open indefinitely. Regions that organize capital, talent, and regulatory alignment around the intermediate and supporting layers of the drone logistics stack position themselves for durable employment and wealth creation. The consumer-facing flights that will soon appear over Hamilton and surrounding communities are the visible surface of a deeper shift in supply chain and manufacturing. The deeper layer is where the larger and more lasting economic effects concentrate.

Footnotes

1.  Aggregate delivery and timing statistics drawn from industry reporting on Walmart’s May 2026 milestone and subsequent expansions.

2.  Platform technical details synthesized from Zipline operational descriptions, FAA-related documentation, and independent technical coverage of the tethered droid system.

3.  Manufacturing capacity and vertical integration details from company announcements and facility reporting covering 2025–2026 expansions.

4.  Cincinnati and Ohio market timing from contemporaneous business and local news coverage of the Wing–Walmart rollout.

5.  Heavy-lift payload platforms referenced from public demonstrations and developer disclosures in the 250–550 lb class.

6.  Local advanced air mobility discussion at Butler County Regional Airport from public meeting summaries.

7.  Cleveland Clinic and OhioHealth medical delivery pilots from regional health-system announcements and industry tracking.

Bibliography and Further Reading

•  DroneXL and related industry trackers for cumulative delivery volumes, operator comparisons, and market maps (2026 updates).

•  Chain Store Age and retail trade coverage of Walmart–Wing and Walmart–Zipline expansions.

•  Scientific American and technical press on Zipline Platform 2 tethered delivery mechanics.

•  Zipline official materials on operational history, platforms, and U.S. manufacturing.

•  Cincinnati Business Courier, Cincinnati Enquirer, and local broadcast reporting on the Cincinnati drone delivery timeline.

•  FAA environmental assessments and Part 135 operational documentation relevant to commercial package delivery.

•  Public materials on intermediate cargo UAS programs (Elroy Air Chaparral, AIR heavy-lift platforms, and related dual-use systems).

•  Butler County commission and airport authority records regarding advanced air mobility planning.

•  Broader logistics analyses of middle-mile autonomous systems and the interaction between last-mile speed and inventory velocity.

The infrastructure is being built in real time. The economic consequences will accrue to the regions and operators that treat the present window as operational rather than speculative.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Podcast Episode: Why Big-Tent Team Building Beats Purity Factions and Revenge Politics: Why I love Nancy Nix in Butler County, Ohio

Pip: The Overmanwarrior is back from a summer of traveling, and he has opinions about Butler County Republicans — which, honestly, tracks.

Mara: Rich Hoffman’s latest post is a deep dive into local party politics: why big-tent coalition building beats purity factions, and what revenge politics actually costs a majority party. Let’s start with the case he makes for keeping the team together.

Why Winning Requires a Big Tent, Not a Pure Faction

Pip: The core argument here is about what actually threatens a Republican stronghold like Butler County — and the answer isn’t Democrats. It’s Republicans who’d rather be righteous than win.

Mara: He sets it up directly, writing: “The opposite impulse — the desire to purge and purify until only the purest remain — is how majorities become minorities. Democrats understand this. Their only realistic path in Butler County is to encourage Republicans to fight each other, thereby opening up the general-election map.”

Pip: So the threat isn’t a strong opposing party. It’s internal score-settling dressed up as principle — and that framing is doing a lot of work in this piece.

Mara: It is. He traces the pattern: people who lost primaries or lost influence start feeding narratives to the Journal-News, labeling solid conservatives RINOs, and undermining officeholders who actually won their races. He calls it “revenge dressed up as principle.”

Pip: Which brings us to the people he’s actually defending. Nancy Nix is the headline — he credits her with fiscal discipline across two county offices, reducing staff sizes as both Treasurer and Auditor, running things in the black, and providing behind-the-scenes organizational infrastructure that he says runs through networks reaching the White House.

Mara: He’s equally direct about George Lang, describing decades of door-knocking and event work — and one very vivid moment at a 2015 Trump event at the Savannah Center where Lang physically removed a protester heading toward Trump. The point being: that’s not armchair commentary, that’s someone who showed up before it was popular.

Pip: Michael Ryan gets a mention too — he won the May 2026 Republican primary for county commissioner with roughly 72 percent of the vote, and the post treats that primary result as decisive and worth defending, not relitigating.

Mara: Sheriff Richard Jones rounds out the slate. He wants the Sheriff’s Office to carry what he calls a “Mayberry” standard — competent, present, community-rooted. The post draws a line between that standard and the intra-party court drama that’s been distracting from actual public safety work.

Pip: And the West Chester trustee and school board fights are the cautionary tale — Republicans fractured, Democrats and soft candidates benefited, and the lesson apparently hasn’t fully landed yet at the county level.

Mara: His bottom line is blunt: Butler County stays a Republican stronghold only if the party acts like one — which means defending the people voters already chose in the primary, sitting across the table from people you don’t fully agree with, and still leaving the room as a team.

Pip: The alternative, he says, is handing Democrats the only gift they actually need.

Mara: The through-line is pretty clear — coalition discipline isn’t compromise, it’s the mechanism that keeps a majority a majority.

Pip: And apparently that argument needs re-litigating every few years, which suggests the lesson is harder to hold than it is to learn.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Why Big-Tent Team Building Beats Purity Factions and Revenge Politics: Why I love Nancy Nix so much in Butler County, Ohio

Traveling, Independent Media, and Coming Home to Butler County Politics

I’ve been traveling most of the summer, so I’ve been doing a lot of catching up.  You can’t help but notice the difference when you step away and then come back. I’ve been a little behind on the local politics, and I want to refer to some changes in the Butler County Republican Party at the chair level.[1] When you’re in a leadership position, there’s always somebody who thinks they could do it better than you. There’s always a critic. I tell people that’s part of leadership. You’re always going to have armchair quarterbacks. They’re going to criticize and say stuff. Sitting down and talking to people who don’t agree with you is hard. Winning them over to your side is hard.

In Butler County we’ve had strong Republican support for a long time. When you’re the weak party—as Democrats are in Ohio and in Butler County—the only realistic path to power is splitting the majority party. Some Republicans, once they lose the eye of the tiger, start looking for ways to lose so they can feel relevant again. That’s Rocky III territory. The champion takes the top for granted and gets knocked down by someone hungrier. Strong leadership holds the party together so the majority stays a majority.

Todd Hall, Armchair Quarterbacks, and the Reality of Party Leadership

I always liked Todd Hall. I remember when people would complain about him. When you’re the chairman, you’re the lightning rod. Todd managed to keep things moving by focusing on something everybody could rally behind: electing Republicans and keeping the county on a conservative track.[2] You need a big tent to win. Pure factions feel righteous and then lose. I’ve said it for years—I’ll take people who will come to the table, grab a pizza, and argue philosophy all day long. We have more in common than not. The alternative is handing Democrats the only hope they have: a fractured Republican Party.

Big Tent Republicans vs. Purity Factions: Why Winning Requires Team Building

Trump himself was not a lifelong Republican in the traditional sense. Elon Musk came into the MAGA orbit from a different background. I take people who show up and want to win. The opposite impulse—the desire to purge and purify until only the purest remain—is how majorities become minorities. Democrats understand this. Their only realistic path in Butler County is to encourage Republicans to fight each other, thereby opening up the general-election map.[3]

I’ve watched it. People who could not win through the front door start working the back door—undermining officeholders who did win their primaries, feeding narratives to the Journal-News, and treating every establishment Republican as the enemy. That is not strategy. That is revenge dressed up as principle. And it is exactly what hands seats to Democrats.

Nancy Nix: Fiscal Discipline, Quiet Influence, and Why I Stand Behind Her

I love Nancy Nix, and I mean that genuinely. I can tell you that in their household, back when the Trump question was still unsettled for some people, her husband and I were already on the same page. Nancy came around eventually because she is logical and watches results; not everyone always agrees with everything all the time. As a fiscally responsible officeholder, she reduced staff sizes when she was Treasurer and again when she was Auditor. She has run things in the black for a long time. That is top-level conservative performance.[4]

A lot of the people you see in the White House and in state-level Republican success came through networks that include Nancy Nix. I know some of the behind-the-scenes. Nancy has been part of important scaffolding on all levels.  When I was last at the White House, her fingerprints are on so many important things. She won’t claim credit, but I will give it. If Vivek is a few points up in the averages, a meaningful share of the organizational credit in this region runs through people like her.[5]

George Lang: Friendship, Door-Knocking, and the Night He Took Down a Protester

I’ve always been affiliated with George Lang. We’ve developed a real friendship. I’ve seen him, Debbie, and the girls work events, knock doors, and hold the party together behind the scenes for decades. I like his family. I like the way he carries himself under pressure.[6]

Here’s a story for context. At the Savannah Center Trump event in the primary season, I had a VIP pass. Todd Hall did not want to be seen sitting in the front row with Trump at that stage—he was still in the John Kasich lane as the Ohio guy. Fair enough. George was there as a state representative. A protester started coming down the aisle toward Trump. George had told me earlier he would handle it if it came to that. When the moment arrived, George grabbed the guy, put him on the ground, and bought the security detail the second and a half they needed. That is not armchair commentary. That is a man who showed up when it was not yet popular and did the physical work.[7]

I was with George during the difficult period around John Boehner. We did not always agree on every personnel fight, but I have seen him under real pressure, and I trust the man. When purity voices treat George as the problem, they are discarding decades of actual organizational labor.

Michael Ryan, Don Dixon, and the Commissioners Who Actually Govern

I really like Michael Ryan. I spoke with him just this morning about something positive on the Republican side. He is a good conservative and a good man. The party endorsement and the primary result were decisive.[8] Don Dixon and I go back a long way—I used to race soapbox with his son Brent. Don has been a solid commissioner. These are not theoretical conservatives. These are people who show up, manage budgets, and keep the county functioning.

Sheriff Richard Jones and the Mayberry Standard

I like Sheriff Jones. I want the Butler County Sheriff’s Office to carry a bit of Mayberry and a bit of Walnut Grove—competent, present, and rooted in the community. His book is worth reading. It makes me proud of the department. When personal and political conflicts involving Roger Reynolds spilled into court and public narrative, it became another example of how intra-party score-settling distracts from the actual work of public safety.[9][10]

Revenge Politics, Back-Door Insurrection, and the Journal-News Narrative

Here is the pattern I keep seeing. People who could not win their primaries, or who lost influence, start working to tear down those who did win. They feed stories. They call solid conservatives RINOs. They treat every successful officeholder as the establishment enemy. The recent Journal-News framing of the November races and the tone around party leadership fits the pattern: soft language toward Democratic opportunities, little enthusiasm for defending the Republican incumbents and nominees who actually earned their spots.[11]

That is not leadership. Leadership is hard. Leadership is sitting across the table from people you do not fully agree with and still building a winning team. Leadership is defending the people the voters already chose in the primary so the general election is about Republicans versus Democrats, not Republicans versus Republicans. When party leadership sounds happier to give Democrats a seat at the table than to fight for the Republican majority, the voters notice.

The West Chester Lesson and What Happens When You Play Nice with the Wrong Strategy

We already lived through a version of this in the West Chester trustee and school board fights. People who thought the pure strategy would deliver instead watched Democrats and soft candidates benefit from Republican disarray. Mark Welch and others paid the price of a fractured effort. The same dynamic is available at the county level if the new posture continues.[12]

A Longer View: From Ross Perot to Trump to the Present

I’ve been doing this a long time. Election night 1992, I was at Ross Perot’s place with his daughters after helping with the big Dallas rally. We drove hard back to Ohio so I could vote. I learned then what happens when the majority party fractures or when outsiders and insiders refuse to build anything durable.[13] Through the Tea Party years and the early Trump years, I watched the same purity-versus-majority argument play out. The people who told me Trump was going nowhere were often the same voices now calling Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, or George Lang the problem. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.

What Butler County Actually Needs from Republican Leadership

Butler County is still a Republican stronghold if the party acts like one.[14] That requires leadership that understands the difference between primary competition and general-election self-sabotage. It requires people who will defend Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, George Lang, Sheriff Jones, and the other officeholders who have earned their places. It requires the discipline to sit down with people you do not fully agree with and still leave the room as a team.

I have stood by people when it was unpopular—Darbi Boddy when others told me to stay away, Roger Reynolds in earlier seasons, and the current slate of solid conservatives even when the purity voices are loud. I will continue to do so. The alternative is a party that defines itself only by what it is against, hands Democrats open seats, and then wonders why the majority slipped.

I love Nancy Nix. I respect George Lang, Michael Ryan, and Sheriff Jones. I want a big-tent Republican Party that wins. The people trying to burn it down to feel important again are not helping Butler County. They are helping the only people who benefit from Republican disunity: Democrats.

If you are mad at me over this, check back in a decade. I’ll still be right, and I won’t let you forget it. Have a good day.

Footnotes

[1] Journal-News (Butler County / Cox First Media), “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026. The piece surveys November 2026 county and judicial races and the competitive posture of both parties.

[2] Butler County Republican Party materials and contemporaneous reporting identify Todd Hall as long-serving Executive Chairman through at least the May 2026 primary cycle.

[3] The “big tent” versus purity debate is a long-standing tension within the Republican Party, both nationally and locally.

[4] Nancy Nix has served Butler County in fiscal offices (Treasurer and Auditor) with a consistent record of staff reductions, budget discipline, and low-tax philosophy.

[5] Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2026 Ohio gubernatorial campaign has drawn significant support from Butler County and statewide Republicans; local organizers, including Nancy Nix, have been credited with early and sustained organizational assistance.

[6] George Lang, Ohio State Senator, has been a consistent conservative voice and organizational workhorse in Butler County Republican politics for decades.

[7] The 2015 Trump campaign event at the Savannah Center took place during the Republican presidential primary, when many establishment figures remained cautious or opposed.

[8] Michael Ryan won the May 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with approximately 72 percent of the vote over long-time incumbent Cindy Carpenter after receiving a strong party endorsement.

[9] Richard K. Jones has served as Butler County Sheriff for multiple terms and has published a memoir detailing the department’s culture and operational philosophy.

[10] Roger Reynolds previously served as Butler County Auditor. His later political and legal conflicts became a public episode in local Republican politics.

[11] Journal-News, “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026.

[12] West Chester Township trustee and school-board contests in recent cycles illustrated the cost of intra-party warfare.

[13] Ross Perot’s 1992 independent presidential campaign and the subsequent Reform Party activity formed an early training ground for many later organizers.

[14] Butler County has maintained a structural Republican registration and performance advantage for decades, making internal cohesion the primary variable between comfortable majorities and avoidable losses.

Bibliography (full version is in the Word document and text files)

The complete formatted version with all footnotes properly placed is in the three files listed at the top. Download the .txt file, and you can copy the entire essay in one click.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Podcast Episode: Elon Musk, Russell Brand, and the Danger of Oppressive Government: The terrible cost of safety and compliance, empowering the mediocre to rule the exceptional

Pip: Welcome to The Overmanwarrior — where the Hawaiian shirt is a political statement and mediocrity is the real tyranny.

Mara: Rich Hoffman’s recent writing covers a lot of ground: what happens when exceptional people finally feel the weight of the systems they once worked inside, and what that means for a country choosing between builders and managers.

Pip: Let’s start with Musk, Russell Brand, and the argument that oppressive government is really just mediocrity with a budget.

Elon Musk, Russell Brand, and the Machinery of Mediocrity

Mara: The central question here is what actually changes a person’s politics — and the argument is that it’s not ideology, it’s exposure. When the system starts costing you something, you finally see it clearly.

Pip: The post puts it directly: “Once you have enough financial independence, or once the system starts targeting you directly, the incentives change. The same people who stayed quiet for decades while drawing a corporate or government check suddenly discover principles.”

Mara: That’s the arc traced across Musk, Brand, and even retired engineers from the Tea Party years — people who played it safe until the paycheck was gone or the machine turned on them. The courage arrives, but often only after the risk is lower.

Pip: Which is the uncomfortable part. It’s not conversion — it’s pattern recognition on a delay.

Mara: And the post is precise about what the pattern reveals. When Musk replies to Brand about an “oppressive government,” the argument is that he’s naming something he’s now felt firsthand — FAA paperwork slowing Starship, mediocre bureaucrats constraining exceptional engineering.

Pip: SpaceX is aiming at thirty-plus Starship launches a day by 2030. The regulatory state is not exactly keeping pace.

Mara: The deeper diagnosis is structural. Oppressive government isn’t abstract tyranny — it’s, as the post frames it, “the systematic empowerment of mediocre people who would never hold power in a pure merit system.” They don’t hire the exceptional because the exceptional make them feel small.

Pip: The corporate Judas cycle runs the same software: trade the exceptional for a steady check and a career ladder.

Mara: That contrast carries into Ohio, where the Ramaswamy-Acton race is framed as exactly this choice — a builder versus the candidate of lockdowns and managed outcomes, with polling showing a statistical tie as of this summer.

Pip: Trump wears the suit and talks about winning. Bannon dresses down so the crowd doesn’t feel threatened. The post argues we voted for the suit — for exceptionalism, not comfort.

Mara: And that’s the through-line: whether it’s Musk filing FAA paperwork, a radio talent cleaning up his social media for a corporate job, or Ohio voters choosing between data centers and empty cornfields, the same tension keeps surfacing.

Pip: The question of what a nation is willing to tolerate in exchange for feeling safe is not going away anytime soon.

Mara: The through-line across all of this is the cost of safety — what gets traded, and when people finally notice the price.

Pip: More of that reckoning ahead. We’ll be back when the next posts land.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.