Pip: The Overmanwarrior has a talent for asking the question that makes a comfortable consensus squirm — and this time the question is about who was actually first.
Mara: Rich Hoffman digs into the Cherokee’s own oral tradition about a people who came before them in the southern Appalachians, and follows that thread into archaeology, rock art, and what the word “indigenous” is actually doing when we deploy it politically.
Pip: Let’s start with the moon-eyed people and the timeline they complicate.
The Moon-Eyed People and the Stolen-Land Clock
Mara: The core tension here is about where we freeze the historical frame — and who benefits when we freeze it at 1492 rather than looking at what the Cherokee themselves say about the mountains before they arrived.
Pip: The post sets it up directly: “when the Cherokee first came into the country they now inhabit, they found it possessed by certain moon-eyed people who could not see in the daytime, and they expelled them.” That is Benjamin Smith Barton in 1797, reporting what he was told by someone connected to the Cherokee.
Mara: What that means in practice is that the Cherokee, by their own account, displaced a prior people — which means the word “indigenous,” applied to the Cherokee in the Smokies, is already doing selective work. Someone else held the ridge first.
Pip: The moon-eyed people as described are small, pale, often bearded, light-sensitive — cave-dwellers who came out at night. Fort Mountain in north Georgia still has a wandering stone wall nobody has definitively attributed, and the park marker names them as possible builders. The Lost Sea in Craighead Caverns, the largest underground lake in the country, has Cherokee artifacts and a Pleistocene jaguar in the same system — a place that was a world before it became a tourist dock.
Mara: The post is careful here. The highly specific portrait — pale, bearded, giant light-sensitive eyes, full-moon battle — is thickest in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century print, written by Euro-American men. Living Cherokee tradition also has the Yunwi Tsunsdi, the Little People of the rocks and caves, and some cultural workers say the pale-bearded version is not central to tribal history. The honest framing the post offers is that the Cherokee world contains stories of earlier people in the mountains, and the 1797 English sentence is one channel — not a DNA report.
Pip: Right, and the post extends the geography — the Cherokee County Historical Museum in Murphy, North Carolina, has a flat-faced stone figure with oversized crescent eyes that visitors identify with the moon-eyed people, and Three Rivers in New Mexico has more than twenty thousand Jornada Mogollon petroglyphs, many of them goggle-eyed masks. The post does not claim those are portraits of Appalachian cave-dwellers; it refuses to use distance as a veto on the question.
Mara: And the deeper archaeology reinforces the problem with a fixed 1492 clock. The Windover people of Florida buried their dead seven to eight thousand years ago — brain tissue and fiber still readable. The Old Copper Complex around Lake Superior was working native copper as early as the ninth millennium before the present.
Pip: So the political use of “indigenous” to mean the nations of 1500 is, as the post puts it, not doing archaeology — it is choosing a photograph.
Mara: The post is equally direct about the Trail of Tears: it was terrible, the removal was real, the Cherokee have a right to that grief. The argument is not that the later wrong didn’t happen. It is that one removal is allowed to organize a nation’s shame while the earlier one is treated as a campfire story too thin to count — and that asymmetry tracks usefulness, not evidence quality.
Pip: A question that has been sitting in the back of the room, it turns out, while the drums were going.
Mara: The closing test the post applies is worth stating plainly: if “indigenous” means first on the ground, the Cherokee fail their own story in the Smokies. If it means a 1492 diplomatic stamp, it is not deep history. If it means a moral title against the United States, it is a legal brief, not anthropology — and briefs pick their plaintiffs. They do not fund caves.
Pip: The moon-eyed question does not close when you leave the Smokies — it just gets quieter, which is a different thing.
Mara: Who was standing on any ridge before the people we memorialized is a question the dirt keeps answering whether the grant office is listening or not.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am not trying to mess everybody up. I am trying to ask a question that the indigenous-people argument cannot survive if you let it breathe.
How do you decide that somebody is indigenous to an area? Do you draw the line at 1500 and call whoever is standing there when Columbus arrives the eternal landlord? What about everyone who was there before that tribe? What about the people that tribe says it ran off?
That is the academic question. The Cherokee of the southern Appalachians, through the story that reached print and through the story I have heard with my own ears in the Smoky Mountain country, say they were not the first people on that ground. They say a people were already there. They call them moon-eyed. They say they could not live with them. They say they drove them out. Then later the United States removed the Cherokee west, and the same word — indigenous — is used as if the Cherokee had been the beginning of the clock.
If the Cherokee took the land from someone, the Cherokee, in that hour, were not indigenous in the way the pamphlet uses the word. They were the latest people on the ridge. The moon-eyed people, if the story is even half a memory, would be the prior claim. So I want to know why we freeze the frame at the Cherokee and call that history, and why we treat Andrew Jackson as the original sinner of the mountains while treating the Cherokee expulsion of the earlier people as folklore too thin to count.
I used to love going down to the Cherokee country south of Gatlinburg. The museum. The dances. The ceremonies. I still like that culture. I am not here to rob a living nation of its art. I am here because I have always had the same question sitting in the back of my mind while the drums were going: if these people tell you they displaced somebody, why is that chapter a tourist shrug and the next chapter a moral law?
Who Were the Moon-Eyed People?
The moon-eyed people of Appalachia are described as small, pale, often bearded, with eyes that could not bear the day. They lived in caves and came out at night. They were already in the mountains when the Cherokee arrived. In the version that stuck, the last fight came under a full moon, when the light that should have helped them ruined them, and the Cherokee drove them out for good.[1]
That is not a Columbus story. That is not a settler pamphlet about noble savages. The first printed English version is 1797, Benjamin Smith Barton, who said he had it from a man connected to the Cherokee: when the Cherokee first came into the country they now inhabit, they found it possessed by certain moon-eyed people who could not see in the daytime, and they expelled them.[2] John Haywood picked it up in Tennessee. James Mooney put related material in the great Cherokee folklore collection. A marker at Fort Mountain in Georgia still tells visitors that a people who could not see in certain phases of the moon were annihilated, and that some believe they built the wall on the ridge.[3]
I have heard the short version from people who work the mountain tourist circuit and from Cherokee performers who will say, if you ask, that those people used to be here and that they got rid of them. That is not a controlled oral-history sample. When a people keep a story that makes them the invaders, they are not doing themselves a public-relations favor. Most nations bury that chapter. The Cherokee did not bury it well enough to keep it out of Barton, Haywood, the park signs, or the talk around Gatlinburg.
Commentary — what the paper trail actually is. The cautious version is real and should be said out loud. The highly specific package — small, white, bearded, giant light-sensitive eyes, cave-only, full-moon battle — is thickest in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print, written down by Euro-American men. Living Cherokee tradition also has the Yunwi Tsunsdi, the Little People: small beings of the rocks and caves, sometimes helpers, sometimes dangerous if watched. Lynn King Lossiah’s Eastern Band collection treats them as spiritual neighbors more than as a lost white tribe.[4] Some modern writers fuse the two. Some Cherokee cultural workers say the pale-bearded, moon-eyed story is not central to tribal history. So the honest sentence is this: the Cherokee world contains stories of earlier and other people in the mountains. The 1797 CE English sentence is one such channel. It is not a DNA report. It is also not a story that Europeans needed to invent to feel better about President Jackson. It makes the Cherokee look like what every people in history have been: successors.
Fort Mountain, the Lost Sea, and a Livable Dark
Fort Mountain in north Georgia has a low, wandering stone wall that nobody understands. Dates guessed for it range from 500 CE to 1500 CE. Park lore has given it to the moon-eyed people, to the Creek, to a Welsh prince named Madoc who is supposed to have crossed the Atlantic in the twelfth century.[5] I do not need Madoc. Madoc is what happens when a vacuum meets a romance. I need the simpler fact: there is stone on a ridge, there is a story of earlier people, and there are later people who say they won.
Then there is the underground. I have driven from Cincinnati to Florida enough times to know the halfway logic of Sweetwater, Tennessee. The Lost Sea, in Craighead Caverns, is the largest underground lake in the United States. You walk a long sloping path into fifty-eight-degree rock and take a boat on water that has no published end. Cherokee artifacts have been found in those caverns. So has a Pleistocene jaguar. The place is now a tourist dock. It was a world before that.[6]
A people who hated daylight and needed water, fish, cool air, and a door you could defend would not have to invent a habitat. The Appalachians are a limestone country. Caves are not a metaphor there. They are inventory. If you spent generations in that dark, your eyes would not be the eyes of a ridge farmer. Cave animals lose pigment and rewrite their sight because the sun stops paying them. I am not saying the moon-eyed people were salamanders. I am saying the description is not a gnome from a lawn catalog. It is what a human population might look like if the mountain taught it a different shift.
I know how this sounds—spilled milk. Someone cleans the floor, and in the morning you only notice the carton is light. That is the archaeological problem of a people who lived in holes and lost. The absence of a labeled skeleton is not proof that they were a symbol. It is proof we have not been paying for the kind of cave work that would settle it.
The Statue in Murphy and the Eyes at Three Rivers
In Murphy, North Carolina, at the Cherokee County Historical Museum, there is a strange stone. People point to a sculpture of two flat-faced figures with oversized crescent eyes and say, “There.” I have stood in that county’s history and felt the same jolt. It does not look like the museum-brochure Indian. Whether that particular piece is a portrait of the moon-eyed people is unproven. The museum’s public landscape also holds Nuya Saligugi, the soapstone turtle pulled out of a quarry on the Nottely, which is a different object and a different claim.[7] I mention both because the mountains keep coughing up faces that do not fit the costume.
Then you go west. I have been to Three Rivers in New Mexico. More than twenty thousand petroglyphs on a basalt ridge, Jornada Mogollon work, roughly from the early centuries into the 1400s. Masks. Goggle eyes. Almond eyes. Tablita headdresses. Figures that look at you like lamps.[8] Most southwestern archaeologists will tell you those are gods, rain-beings, Tlaloc-cousins, ceremonial masks — not a census of pale cave-dwellers from Georgia.
I am not going to pretend a thousand miles of dry country is a sidewalk. I am also not going to accept the lazy rule that two similar eyes cannot be related because a textbook put them in different chapters. People moved. Copper moved. Obsidian moved. Ideas move faster than bones. If a people were driven out of the Smokies, the next habitable dark and the next carved rock need not be in the next county. The Three Rivers eyes may be spirits. They may be masks. They may be a memory of faces that bothered everybody who met them. I have not seen a laboratory close that file. I have seen a habit of closing it with a tone.
Commentary — pattern is not proof, and proof is not a grant narrative. Big-eyed figures show up in the Amazon, in Mesoamerica, in Japan, in modern cryptid talk from Loveland, Ohio, on down. That pattern is real. It does not, by itself, make the moon-eyed people a separate biological species or “aliens.” Psychedelic vision, spirit-world encounter, mask tradition, and ordinary human portraiture can all produce a staring eye. What I will not do is use distance as a veto. Distance is a research problem. The political use of “indigenous” treats distance as a wall so that Appalachia and New Mexico cannot talk to each other, and so that 9000-year-old copper in Superior cannot talk to 8000-year-old burials in Florida. That wall is convenient. It is not science.
Windover, Superior, and the Clock That Does Not Start in 1492
We already know the continent was busy long before the tribes that met the English. The Windover people of Florida buried their dead in a pond seven to eight thousand years ago — brain tissue, fiber, a last meal still readable.[9] The Old Copper Complex around Lake Superior was hammering native copper as early as the ninth millennium before the present, with mining signatures argued even earlier. That metal moved.[10] Paleoindian presence goes deeper still.
So when someone says “indigenous people of North America” and means the nations of 1500, they are not doing archaeology. They are choosing a photograph. The moon-eyed story, even at its thinnest, is a local version of the same problem. There were people before the people we memorialized. The Cherokee say so about the Smokies. The dirt says so about Florida and the Keweenaw. The political argument needs those earlier people to stay fog, because fog cannot file a claim against the claim.
If we dug the caves with the same money we spend explaining why we must not dig, we would know more. I want archaeologists rich. I want them in campers only if they like campers. I want them paid like the story they are sitting on is worth a civilization’s attention. A profession that has to please a grant office will find what the grant office can stand. That is not a conspiracy in a cloak. That is how payroll works.
Why Jackson Is the Villain and the Earlier Removal Is a Campfire
Trail of Tears was terrible. I am not going to sand that down. Jackson signed a removal. People died on the road west. The Cherokee have a right to that grief, and the United States has a duty not to lie about it.[11]
I also like Andrew Jackson more than the people who run the tone of American finance like him. He went after the Bank. He thought a private money power sitting on the republic was a problem. Every summer, the same class of people gathers in Jackson Hole and manages not to notice the joke. They will tell you Jackson was a brute. They will not tell you that a president who breaks the bank is the kind of executive they do not want to see repeated. They are wary of Trump for the same reason as a cousin. Control of the executive is control of the weather around money.[12]
Watch how the two stories are weighted. Cherokee removal by the United States: sacred text, museum wing, school unit, moral veto on the founding. Cherokee removal of the moon-eyed people: cute legend, maybe Barton made it up, no bones so no crime. One removal is allowed to organize a nation’s shame. The other is not allowed to organize a question. That is not a difference in evidence quality sufficient to explain the difference in volume. That is a difference in usefulness.
I have a friend who thinks of himself as a red-white-and-blue, gun-owning, Republican-voting man. In the garage there is a Don’t Tread on Me. On the flagpole in the yard there is only the one flag he thinks the neighborhood can bear. He does not want the trouble. He likes his paycheck. Human resources and compliance offices do not need a politburo when they have a mortgage. Marxism in the nineteenth-century sense is not required. Capture of the story is enough. Academia, in the indigenous-people version I am talking about, serves the cause of stability. It freezes a timeline that makes the creation of America the original theft and makes every prior theft a myth. Markets like a simple guilt. Simple guilt is predictable.
How Do You Decide Someone Is Indigenous?
Here is the test I want applied without flinching.
If indigenous means first on the ground, the Cherokee of the Smokies fail their own story. The moon-eyed people, or whoever those prior people were, would hold the word.
If indigenous means the culture that was here when Europeans arrived, then the word is a 1492 stamp. It is not a deep history. It is a diplomatic category invented for a later fight.
If indigenous means continuous living nation with language, law, and memory, the Cherokee qualify and so do many others — and the word still does not make them the beginning of the mountain.
If “indigenous” means a moral title against the United States, then we are not doing anthropology. We are doing a brief. Briefs pick their plaintiffs. They do not fund caves.
Oral tradition is not a lesser archive. Rock art is not a lesser archive. I will not sneer at “white guys writing it down” as if ink were a racial sin. Writing is how my civilization keeps a sentence still. The Cherokee kept sentences moving by mouth, by stone, by dance. Both methods lose things. Both methods keep things. The method that survived in English is the method I can footnote. That does not make it holier. It makes it checkable. When Barton writes that the Cherokee said they expelled a moon-eyed people, you can argue he distorted it. You cannot argue that the existence of a prior-people story is a European need. Plenty of Native nations have prior-people stories. The honest ones sound like history because history is replacement.
The Cherokee later walked a road they did not choose. That is true. It does not erase the road they chose for the people they found in the dark. Two things can be true. The indigenous-people argument, in its left-wing political form, cannot afford two things to be true. It needs a single innocent and a single thief. The mountain will not give it that.
What I Think Happened
I think the Cherokee encountered someone unusual in those mountains. The encounter was bad enough to keep. I think caves like the Lost Sea system show that, at night, people did not need magic to eat. I think some of the staring faces in American rock are spirits, and some may be memories of faces. I think pale skin and bad day-eyes could be isolation, cave life, albinism, an early Atlantic crossing we have not proved, or a story that picked up European furniture as it passed through Barton and Haywood. I do not know which. I will not pretend I do.
I do know this. The Windover Dead and the Superior miners are not legends. They shatter any sentence that starts the indigenous clock at the tribes of contact. The moon-eyed story is the Appalachian version of that shatter, whether the people were a hidden band, a Little People tradition later dressed in English adjectives, or a real population whose bones are still in the limestone. The designation “indigenous” is being applied to serve a political and financial peace, not to record the stack of peoples who actually stood on the ridge.
That is why I say the moon-eyed people — or the unnamed prior people for whom they stand — are the indigenous question the Smokies cannot close. The Cherokee said they were there, and because the continent’s deeper archaeology says somebody always was.
NOTES
[1] Standard elements of the Appalachian moon-eyed story as circulated in Barton (1797), later Tennessee and Georgia antiquarian writing, Fort Mountain park interpretation, and popular retellings: prior occupation, light-sensitive eyes, night activity, expulsion by the Cherokee, sometimes under a bright moon.
[2] Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philadelphia, 1797), reporting via Col. Leonard Marbury that “the Cheerake tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain ‘moon-eyed-people,’ who could not see in the day-time. These wretches they expelled.”
[3] John Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee (Nashville, 1823); James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900); Georgia State Parks marker text at Fort Mountain State Park, Chatsworth, Georgia, on the stone wall and moon-eyed / Creek traditions.
[4] Lynn King Lossiah, Secrets and Mysteries of the Cherokee Little People (1998); discussion distinguishing Yunwi Tsunsdi from the pale-bearded 1797 type in recent public-history treatments, including Atlas Obscura (2024) and Appalachian Historian (2025).
[5] Fort Mountain wall: locally attributed in various decades to moon-eyed builders, Creek action, or Madoc of Wales. Archaeological authorship remains unassigned. Madoc material enters through later American antiquarianism and a tradition associated with John Sevier’s report of a conversation with Oconostota; it is not a solution to the wall.
[6] The Lost Sea, Craighead Caverns, Sweetwater, Tennessee. Largest underground lake in the United States; visible surface about 4.5 acres, 140 feet below ground, further rooms mapped by divers. Cherokee artifacts and Pleistocene jaguar remains reported from the cavern system. Commercial tours currently.
[7] Cherokee County Historical Museum, Murphy, North Carolina. Popular identification of a flat-faced, oversized-eye sculpture with the moon-eyed people is traditional among visitors and some local writers; it is not a demonstrated archaeological attribution. Nuya Saligugi, the soapstone turtle from a Nottely River quarry, sits on the museum grounds as a separate ancient carving.
[8] Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, Otero County, New Mexico, Bureau of Land Management. More than 21,000 Jornada Mogollon petroglyphs, commonly dated across roughly 200–1450 CE (village occupation often cited ~500–1450). Large corpus of masks and goggle-eye figures; standard interpretation is ceremonial / rain-and-deity iconography with Mesoamerican echoes, not a portrait gallery of Appalachian cave-dwellers.
[9] Windover Archaeological Site, Brevard County, Florida. Early/Middle Archaic pond cemetery, roughly 8,000–7,000 years before present; 168 individuals; exceptional organic preservation. Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
[10] Old Copper Complex of the western Great Lakes. Dates on organic material in copper artifacts from about 8500 to 3580 cal BP; sediment work around Isle Royale and Keweenaw used to argue for earlier mining signatures. Pompeani et al., The Holocene (2015) and Radiocarbon (2021); Susan R. Martin, Wonderful Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).
[11] Indian Removal Act (1830); Cherokee removal of 1838–39; Fort Butler at Murphy among the North Carolina collection points. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Viking, 2007).
[12] Jackson’s Bank War, 1832–36, against the Second Bank of the United States, is a separate historical file from removal policy. The claim that the financial memory of the Bank War explains the modern moral volume of the Trail of Tears is an inference about incentives, not a documented conspiracy by the Federal Reserve.
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING
Moon-eyed people, Fort Mountain, and Cherokee prior-people stories Barton, Benjamin Smith. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. Philadelphia, 1797. Haywood, John. The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. Nashville, 1823. Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900. Lossiah, Lynn King. Secrets and Mysteries of the Cherokee Little People. 1998. Meares, Hadley. “The Moon-Eyed People of Appalachia.” Atlas Obscura, October 22, 2024. “The Moon-Eyed People and the Fort Mountain Wall.” Appalachian Historian, 2025. Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Fort Mountain State Park interpretive materials.
Cherokee removal and the mountain country. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Cherokee County Historical Museum, Murphy, North Carolina. Site histories of Fort Butler and local collections. “Nuya Saligugi (Stone Turtle), Murphy.” Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, DocSouth.
Caves and the Lost Sea: Accounts of Craighead Caverns and the Lost Sea, Sweetwater, Tennessee. U.S. largest underground lake; tour and geological summaries.
Three Rivers and the goggle-eye motif. Bureau of Land Management. Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, Otero County, New Mexico. Miller, Myles R. “Dating Perishables to Refine the Chronology of Shrine Cave Use, the Goggle-eye Motif…” Kiva 90 (2024). Schaafsma, Polly. Rock Art in New Mexico and related Jornada Mogollon studies. Duran, Meliha S., and Helen K. Crotty. Three Rivers documentation of masks and figures.
Deeper American clocks. Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Pompeani, David P., et al. Papers on Isle Royale / Keweenaw copper chronology. The Holocene (2015); Radiocarbon (2021). Mann, Charles C. 1491. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Jackson, banks, and the fight over founding stories. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Bank War. New York: Norton, 1967. Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy. New York: Norton, 2005. Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al. “The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019. McClay, Wilfred M. Land of Hope. New York: Encounter, 2019.
Forthcoming Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Naming, order, and the hunger to fit in as contested ground — including the question of who is allowed to be called indigenous, and who pays when the clock is moved.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: Welcome to The Overmanwarrior, where Ohio politics is never boring and sometimes not even real.
Mara: Rich Hoffman this week is deep in the Ohio governor’s race — specifically what happened when Amy Acton’s Labor Day rally went sideways, and then a fair incident got repackaged into something much bigger than the police report supported.
Pip: Two stories, one weekend, one candidate who needed a better one. Let’s start with the rally chant that launched a thousand cringe compilations.
—
Amy Acton’s Labor Day: The Sympathy Play That Wasn’t
Mara: The setup here is a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Amy Acton, at a Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic with Pete Buttigieg, trying to land a line against Vivek Ramaswamy’s wealth — and what happened instead.
Pip: The post puts it plainly: “She needed a chant. What she got was a gaffe.”
Mara: That gaffe was a repeated loop of “you can’t buy Ohio, you can’t buy us” that, by the post’s account, failed to ignite the crowd. The argument underneath it — that Ramaswamy’s money disqualifies him — is the same argument that was tried against Trump’s jets and golf courses twice, and lost both times.
Pip: The post draws a direct line: independence from a government paycheck is a feature, not a bug. Voters apparently agree with that reading more than the professional scolds do.
Mara: Acton’s record is central to why the “I’m just like you” framing struggles. She ran Ohio public health during the lockdowns, and the post frames her signature credential as the thing she has to run away from, not toward.
Pip: Right — and the tennis angle is where the wealth attack gets thinnest. Ramaswamy flew to the U.S. Open. He played junior tennis. He has a court. The post’s point is that none of that is a civic crime, especially from a candidate whose own credential is closing the state.
Mara: Then Sunday at the Canfield Fair, Patrick Havas pushed through a crowd toward Acton, knocked over several older attendees, and was detained by Highway Patrol. Two pistols and a Taser-style device were found on him after the fact. He did not draw or brandish. Charges were disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault for the people he knocked down. Acton was unhurt.
Pip: Campaign language called it an “armed individual lunging.” National copy followed the verb.
Mara: The post calls this “just another Democrat Jussie Smollett story, trying to gain sympathy and voter support through fake news talking points” — and argues the inflation of the incident was a direct response to the rally footage making Acton look desperate.
Pip: Ohio is a constitutional-carry state. Carrying is not attempting murder. The post’s case is that when the speech is a disaster, you change the subject to danger.
Mara: The intra-GOP dimension gets a turn too — the post notes that a slice of the right keeps amplifying the worst clips of Republican candidates, the same pattern that followed Trump in 2016 and 2024 without stopping him.
Pip: Voters, the argument goes, vote their interests when the noise settles. Plants and payrolls beat a sermon about a tennis ticket.
—
Mara: The through-line is straightforward: resentment of success is not a governing philosophy, and inflating a fair incident does not replace one.
Pip: Ohio gets to decide whether the lockdown résumé or the private-economy résumé is the better credential. That answer is coming.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have watched this movie before. In 2015 and 2016, and again in 2024, the same class of people tried to tell America that Donald Trump’s wealth was a character defect. They said a rich man could not be trusted, that success itself was the indictment, that gold, planes, and golf were proof he was “not like you.” Voters put him in the White House twice anyway, because they understood something the professional scolds never will: independence is an asset. A man who does not need the job is harder to own. That is the lesson Ohio Democrats and a handful of leftover Republican wreckers are now trying to unlearn with Vivek Ramaswamy, and it is why Amy Acton spent Labor Day weekend screaming that you cannot buy Ohio.
She needed a chant. What she got was a gaffe.
The Speech That Sounded Like a Person Running Out of Road
Watch the clip. Acton is at a union picnic with Pete Buttigieg in tow, doing the ritual of the lockdown years: I am a doctor, not a politician, becoming one right in front of your eyes. Then she starts barking that Vivek cannot buy the state, cannot buy Ohio, cannot buy us, cannot buy us, cannot buy us in Ohio, that is the end of this. It is the sort of thing a campaign writes on a whiteboard when the internals look ugly and the only remaining argument is envy. The crowd does not catch fire. She looks like she is trying to start a wave at a funeral.
This is the same Amy Acton Ohio already knows. She ran public health under Mike DeWine when the state was locked down, businesses were smashed, kids were sent home, and “follow the science” became a political religion. She collected awards for it. A lot of Ohioans collected unemployment, missed funerals, and watched their Main Streets die. You can call that public service if you like. I call it the record she has to run on, and it is why the “I’m just like you” routine lands like a lead pipe. She is not just like you. She is the woman who told you to stay home while the people who write the rules kept their salaries.
The wealth attack is even thinner. Vivek flew to watch tennis. He likes tennis. He used to be a ranked junior. He has a court. He went to the U.S. Open and he has been to Paris. Wealthy people do that. Trump never ran from Mar-a-Lago or the golf course; he wore the gold clip and the silk tie and said, yes, I did well, and if you vote for me I will try to make it so you can do well too. That is a producer’s message. Acton’s message is the opposite: he has money, therefore he is illegitimate, therefore hand the keys to the people who want to tax the successful and redistribute the proceeds to the discontented. That is not a governing philosophy. That is a ransom note.
Why Attacking Wealth Is a Loser’s Tell
I have been thinking lately about the Apostle Paul. He was effective in part because he had standing and independence. He was not a ward of the movement. He could travel, argue, and endure because he was not begging the crowd for his next meal. Politics is not the church, but the principle is the same. A candidate who has already won in the private economy does not need Columbus the way a career public-health administrator needs Columbus. Vivek does not need a government job. That is supposed to be a feature. The people yelling “you can’t buy Ohio” are announcing that they cannot raise comparable money and cannot compete on growth, so they will compete on resentment.
David Pepper and the rest of the chorus have been working this line for months: billionaire, private jet, not one of us. Fine. Then explain why Trump’s jets and clubs did not stop two national victories, and why Ohioans who want plants, capital, and jobs might prefer a man who has already built companies to a woman whose signature achievement was closing the state. You can dislike Vivek’s style. You can argue policy. What you cannot do, with a straight face, is pretend that enjoying a tennis match is a civic crime while the alternative is more of the administrative state that already had its turn.
The other half of this farce is intra-Republican sabotage. After a primary, Democrats lock arms around whoever they nominated, even when she sounds like a chalkboard dragged down a stairwell. A slice of the right still wants to pick the scab. Nick Fuentes types, leftover primary rivals, the professional “I told you so” circuit—anyone who would rather be right about a Republican’s flaws than win the state—keep feeding the same clip. They did it to Trump in 2016 and 2024. He won anyway because voters vote their interest when the noise dies down. A good economy and job creators in your state beat a sermon about how the other guy’s plane is too nice.
Then Came the Fair, and the Overnight Conversion of a Shove Into an Assassination Plot
The timing is the tell. After the Labor Day chant made her look unhinged, the campaign needed a new story. Sunday at the Canfield Fair, a 38-year-old local named Patrick Havas pushed through a tent crowd toward Acton with a phone up, as if he were recording or trying to get close enough to be seen. He knocked over older people. Security took him down. After the fact, deputies found two pistols and a Taser-style device on him. He did not draw the guns. He did not fire. He did not brandish. Ohio is a constitutional-carry state. Carrying is not the same thing as attempting murder. The charges reported were disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault for the people he knocked down. Acton was unhurt. The people who fell were assessed and, according to the sheriff, did not seek further treatment.
That is a bad scene at a fair. It is not a martyrdom. Campaign statements still said an “armed individual lunged” and injured multiple people. National copy followed the verb. By Saturday night into Sunday the lead was written as if Ohio had just watched a political assassination attempt. If there were clean video of a man trying to kill her, it would have been on every screen before supper. What we got instead was language inflation: lunge, attack, armed, threat—while the actual police story is a large man barreling for a better look or a confrontation, knocking seniors like bowling pins, and getting piled on by Highway Patrol.
This attack story is just another Democrat Jussie Smollett story, trying to gain sympathy and voter support through fake news talking points. This is the fullness of the Acton operation: when the speech is a disaster, change the subject to danger. When you cannot raise on growth, raise on fear. When you cannot debate or raise money, accuse the other side of buying the state. Look how many sucker politicians jumped on the bandwagon without knowing all the facts, which again came out looking like Amy Acton is a loser candidate.
What Ohio Actually Chooses When the Cameras Leave
Acton will keep the unions, the people who want the next transfer payment, and the media that still thinks 2020 was her finest hour. She will keep Pepper on the ticket as proof that the old Democratic machinery is still in the room. She will keep calling Vivek rich, which he is, and hoping Ohio has forgotten that successful people are allowed to like tennis, football Saturdays, and a life that is not a permanent campaign stop.
I want a state that recruits producers instead of lecturing them. If a man with a billion dollars in assets spends a few thousand to fly to a match, that is not the scandal. The scandal is a political class that treats his success as the crime and her lockdown résumé as the credential. Trump never apologized for winning. Vivek should not apologize for a court, a jet, or a seat at the Open. The people who need him to grovel are the same people who needed Trump to grovel. They lost that argument twice.
Vote like you want the factories and the payrolls. When things got tough for Amy Acton in 2026 she turned to fake news. Which only made everything worse. She is the lockdown lady and is horrible in every way a politician can be, which we all had a front-row seat to in 2020 when she destroyed Ohio’s economy and told everyone they could be superheroes if only they wore a mask in public. That is the person running for governor in Ohio as a Democrat. A disaster on a good day. On a bad day, she is a fake news agent of destruction and drunkenness.
Notes
1. Acton’s Labor Day-weekend remarks with Buttigieg at the Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic, including the “you cannot buy this state / you can’t buy us” repetition, circulated widely on September 5–6, 2026. See WLWT coverage of the Hamilton picnic and contemporaneous rally video.
2. Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director under Gov. Mike DeWine beginning in 2019 and became the public face of the state’s COVID restrictions.
3. Criticism of Ramaswamy’s travel and tennis included Acton’s own Labor Day-weekend post attacking a U.S. Open appearance and earlier opinion pieces on a July 4 Paris trip.
4. Ramaswamy’s tennis background (junior player, Cincinnati Open ball boy, regular Open attendee) is part of his public biography and prior campaign videos.
5. Canfield Fair incident, September 6, 2026: Patrick Havas, 38, of Canfield, pushed through the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent, knocked down older attendees, was detained by Ohio State Highway Patrol executive protection; weapons recovered after detention; no brandishing reported; charges reported as disorderly conduct and two counts of misdemeanor assault. Acton uninjured.
6. Constitutional carry in Ohio means possession of a concealed firearm, without more, is not itself an assassination attempt.
7. Public polling through late summer 2026 generally showed a toss-up to slight-Ramaswamy edge depending on the house, which is consistent with a campaign hunting for a reset narrative.
8. Intra-GOP sniping after contested primaries is a recurring feature of the Trump era; Democrats have typically consolidated faster around flawed nominees.
Bibliography
Acton for Governor. Campaign statements and Labor Day / Canfield Fair remarks, September 2026.
Ballotpedia. “Amy Acton.” Candidate biography and office history.
CNN. “Armed man arrested after pushing through crowd toward Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee.” September 6, 2026.
Columbus Dispatch. “Armed man arrested after lunging at Amy Acton at Canfield Fair.” September 6, 2026.
Cincinnati Enquirer. Nick Anderson, “Ramaswamy’s Paris trip an example of his disconnect with Ohioans.” July 8, 2026.
HuffPost. “Vivek Ramaswamy Slammed For Leaving Ohio And Attending The U.S. Open.” September 6, 2026.
Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office / Ohio State Highway Patrol statements on the Canfield Fair detention of Patrick Havas, September 6, 2026.
New York Times. “Armed Man Arrested After Charging Toward Democratic Candidate for Ohio Governor.” September 6, 2026.
The Nerd Stash. “‘You Can’t Buy Us’: Ohio Dem Amy Acton Sparks Backlash After Awkward Rally Chant Aimed at Vivek Ramaswamy.” September 6, 2026.
Washington Post. “Armed individual ‘lunged’ at Democrat nominee for Ohio governor, campaign says.” September 6, 2026.
Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” Polling averages and race ratings as of early September 2026.
WLWT. “Pete Buttigieg campaigns for Amy Acton, Greg Landsman at Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic.” September 6, 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior is a show that refuses the easy road — no local gossip, no algorithm-friendly takes, just a man and a copper pit older than the pyramids’ reputation, asking whether the whole story of this continent needs to be rewritten.
Mara: Rich Hoffman’s recent work covers a lot of ground — Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario, the deep prehistory of the Great Lakes, the Copper Scroll, and what the word “indigenous” is actually doing in a political argument. Let’s start with the lake, the copper, and why the naming fight is really about something much older.
Lake America and the Copper That Built the Ancient World
Pip: The segment opens with a provocation: Trump signed an executive order on August 27th renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America, and the argument here is that the outrage that followed is actually the point — that names are how institutions teach a public what to value and what to be ashamed of.
Mara: The post frames the whole project this way: “I am trying to encourage people to come down the rabbit hole and take whatever treasure they can carry back out.” That’s the method — not a seminar, not a grievance catalog, but a sustained question about what the naming fight is actually downstream of.
Pip: And what it’s downstream of, the argument goes, is an institutional habit of treating the founding of the United States as the continent’s original sin — where every pre-Columbian name becomes untouchable and every American assertion becomes an act of erasure.
Mara: Canada’s prime minister said the lake is called Ontario “today and forever.” New York’s governor said the state wouldn’t use the new name. The legal reality is narrow — Washington can rename what Washington prints, it cannot rename what Toronto says — but that gap is exactly why a name becomes a weapon.
Pip: The copper is where this gets genuinely interesting. The Old Copper Complex of the Upper Great Lakes — Isle Royale, the Keweenaw Peninsula — shows prehistoric pits worked by hunter-gatherers dating into the ninth millennium before the present. More than a thousand pits on Isle Royale alone. That is not a weekend hobby.
Mara: The post is careful here. Two things it calls firm: Archaic people of the Upper Great Lakes worked native copper very early, with some dates rivaling the oldest copper work in the Old World, and the metal is so pure it can be hammered without smelting. The leap — walking that copper across the Atlantic to Solomon’s Temple — is flagged as a leap that still needs isotope evidence.
Pip: Then there’s the Windover site in Florida — a pond cemetery near Titusville where a backhoe in 1982 pulled up human bone dating seven to eight thousand years before the present. Brain tissue. Woven fiber. A readable last meal. A civilization of burial custom standing on this peninsula while the Near East was still becoming Egypt.
Mara: The Moon-eyed people tradition rounds out the prehistory argument. Cherokee oral memory, as recorded by early settlers, described finding and displacing a pale, light-shy people already living in the southern Appalachians. The point isn’t to convict a ghost — it’s that if the Cherokee displaced someone, they were the latest people of that ridge, not the first.
Pip: Which is exactly the human story from the Levant to the Andes — and exactly what the political use of “indigenous” tries to freeze out of the frame. The Copper Scroll enters as a related question: not where did the Temple treasure go, but where did the metal economy that made such a list thinkable come from in the first place.
Mara: The post asks whether the ancient Near East’s enormous copper hunger has been fully inventoried. Timna and the Arabah are on the map; recent radiocarbon work has restored a tenth-century industrial peak there. Lake Superior is the name the textbooks treat as a category error. The argument is that asking the question is scholarship — treating the crossing as proven is not.
Pip: So “Lake America” is doing a lot of work for four syllables. It’s not cartography — it’s a forced discussion about whether the United States is allowed to name its own waters without first clearing the claim through a political story that starts in 1492 and ignores every copper pit that came before.
Mara: The post puts it plainly: the copper miners of Superior, the burial people of Windover, the builders on the dry bay floor — those are indigenous facts. The political slogan that uses “indigenous” to unmake the United States is, the argument goes, not a fact. It is a maneuver.
Pip: And if the question of who names a lake connects to who gets to name the country itself, then the next question is what other forces — beyond the political — might have an interest in keeping that shame in place.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is the same question applied at different scales — are we getting what we want from the story we’ve been handed, whether that story is about a lake, a copper pit, or a national identity?
Pip: Follow the copper. Follow the names. That’s the assignment — and something tells me the rabbit hole goes considerably deeper than the bottom of Lake Superior.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I did not build this media form to talk about local personalities and small topics of no consequence. That is the easy road. Local talk gets hits. Local talk gets popular. I am not interested in it. I am interested in a format that lets a person go down a rabbit hole and stay there long enough to think a thought they would not have thought if the show had been engineered for an audience. Years ago, the question that started the whole habit was simple: Are we getting what we want from the education of children for the money we spend on it? The answer, then and now, was no. The same question can be asked of budgets, housing policy, the relationship between business and politics, and the names we place on large bodies of water. The method does not change. Ask the question at the level it deserves. Invite people along. Do not pander.
Anyone watching consistently knows the season we are in. Trump is in the White House. People are looking around at midterms, the price of gas, the word socialism used as if it were weather. I cover business and politics because that is where the American system is supposed to work, and because the relationship between the two is not what a civics textbook pretends it is. I enjoy the hard half of the map. You will not turn on a typical podcast and get the information nobody wants to handle in the way it should be handled. If I am not performing for more viewers, that is the approach. I am trying to encourage people to come down the rabbit hole and take whatever treasure they can carry back out.
President Trump, as a manager of the executive branch, expects people like me to fill in the blanks when he throws something controversial on the table. He renamed Lake Ontario. He called it Lake America.[1] I have said before that the emphasis was not cartography. The emphasis was provocation. Change the name. Force the discussion. What does the fight actually mean? I do not want to be the man whose entire contribution is a seminar on indigenous grievance. I also will not pretend the fight is about courtesy to a lake. The fight is about whether the United States is allowed to name its own waters without first kneeling to a political story about 1492.
Commentary — on the executive order itself: The August 27, 2026 order changes how the United States government refers to the lake. USGS electronic products were updated within hours. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, answered that the lake is called Ontario “today and forever.” New York’s governor said the state would not use the new name. About half the surface sits on the Canadian side. The legal reality is narrower than the cultural explosion: Washington can rename what Washington prints. It cannot rename what Toronto says. That gap is exactly why a name becomes a weapon. If the gesture were only petty trade-war theater, it would have died in a news cycle. It did not, because names are how institutions catechize a public.
Are We Getting What We Want from the Names We Spend Our Authority On?
I wish academia were designed for American designs. I wish a lot of our institutions had not been captured long ago. The day Trump got on the plane after his first term, I describe that departure as exile because that is what it felt like to millions of people who watched a system treat their vote as a problem to be managed. I am not going to relitigate every precinct here. I am going to say what the naming fight is downstream of: an institutional habit of treating the creation of the United States as the original sin of the continent, and of treating every pre-Columbian name as a sacrament that cannot be touched.
My first real teacher in the long-form sense was Joseph Campbell. I have lived in those lectures. Campbell understood something our public schools will not admit out loud. A great deal of a human life is spent trying to locate a place in an order—am I toward the top of the pyramid or the bottom, boss or subordinate, the person who leads the meeting or the person who cuts the grass on the side of the road? Schools are bult to establish that sorting. They are much worse at asking whether the order itself is true.[2] The same instinct that makes a teenager measure himself by house, spouse, and income is the instinct that makes a grown population easy to herd. If you were an enemy of the human race—and I will argue, as I will argue in The Politics of Heaven, that there is a non-human intelligence, call it the spirit world, call it the counsel that set itself against God—you would not need a tank. You would need the human craving to fit in. You would use names. You would use the way a culture is taught to value things. You would make some words untouchable and other words shameful. Then you would watch decent people police each other in a destructive fashion.
That is why I do not treat the indigenous-people argument as a seminar in ethnography. Ethnography is welcome. Cultures are fascinating. Their stories, legends, and rituals offer a glimpse into another time, and there is still a great deal to learn. I want archaeologists extremely well funded, even rich. I want them in the dirt. I want to spend evenings with Biblical Archaeology Review and with site reports from the Upper Peninsula. What I will not do is let a political Smithsonian wrap a living tribal present around the entire deep past of the continent and then use that wrapping to undo the United States.
The Indigenous People Argument Is a Political Machine
The academic embrace I am talking about is not “study the Haudenosaunee.” Study them. Learn the language families. Read the longhouse constitution if that is your work. The embrace I mean is the 1619-shaped habit: Europe arrives, and the story of the continent becomes death, theft, and a fall from an innocent world.[3] You can hear the same structure in other theaters. I have read papers that treat the biblical conquest of Canaan as an original crime and the modern Jewish state as its sequel, as if Yahweh were a late ethnic mascot and the land had a single rightful pagan landlord. Pagan preference is not a conspiracy in the cheap sense. It is a religious preference with political teeth. Hollywood has been more honest about its Canaanite sympathies than universities have been about theirs.
If you are going to say “indigenous people of North America” and mean it as an academic sentence rather than a chant, you do not get to start the clock in 1492, or 1619, or even 1000 CE. You have to accommodate the Windover people of Florida. You have to accommodate the copper miners of Lake Superior. You have to accommodate the drowned stone lines in the Great Lakes. You have to accept that “the Indians Columbus met” were not a timeless essence. They were people who had already replaced other people, because that is what human beings do on every continent God made.
Windover: Florida, seven to eight thousand years ago
In a pond near Titusville, not far from where rockets now leave the coast, a housing-development backhoe in 1982 lifted human bone out of peat. The police were called. Then the dates came back. The Windover pond held the dead of an Archaic people who used that water as a cemetery for a thousand years. Something like 168 individuals. Brain tissue. Woven fiber. A last meal still readable in a woman’s gut. Seven to eight thousand years before the present.[4] That is not a footnote to 1492. That is a civilization of burial custom, craft, and landscape memory standing on this peninsula while the Near East was still learning the habits that would become Egypt and Canaan.
I do not want that site used as a club against living tribes, and I do not want living tribes used as a club against that site. I want the sentence said out loud: the people of Windover are part of the indigenous story of North America, and any politics that cannot find room for them is not a politics of the past. It is a politics of the present.
The Old Copper Complex: Lake Superior and the oldest metalworking on the continent
Lake Superior is one of the wonders of the world. I do not hide that. Put-in-Bay, Mackinac, the Upper Peninsula—I love the Great Lakes the way some people love mountains. Superior also contains one of the sharpest mysteries we have. The Keweenaw and Isle Royale hold native copper of a purity that still startles metallurgists. Prehistoric pits pock the trap rock. Hammerstones lie in the fill. Organic scraps caught in copper tools have been dated into the ninth millennium before the present. Sediment cores beside the old workings have been read as mining signatures even earlier. This is the Old Copper Complex: hunter-gatherers who learned to beat, float, and vein copper into points, knives, and ornaments long before the Mediterranean named a Bronze Age.[5]
Thousands of pits. Not a weekend hobby. Not a single village knocking a nugget into a bead. An industry measured in centuries.[6] And here is the part that detonates the pamphlet version of “indigenous people”: the pamphlet wants a single moral cast—timeless tribal nations, then Columbus. The copper will not sit still for that cast. The people who opened those pits are real indigenous people of this continent. Later nations of the Great Lakes are also real. They are not the same photograph. If genetics and archaeology cannot staple the miners of 7000 BCE to the specific tribes who met the French, then an honest academy says so. A political academy changes the subject.
Commentary — what is firm, and what is a leap? Two facts are no longer eccentric. First, Archaic people of the Upper Great Lakes worked native copper very early; some dates now rival the oldest copper work in the Old World. Second, the metal is so pure it can be hammered without the smelting regimes of Cyprus or Timna. The leap—and it is a leap—is to walk that copper across the Atlantic into Solomon’s Temple or the Copper Scroll. Isotope maps of Bronze Age Europe keep finding Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, Wales, the Arabah. They have not found Keweenaw so far. My question is still the right kind of question: given the volume of metal the ancient Near East burned through, are we sure we have inventoried every source? Asking is scholarship. Treating the crossing as proven is not. The force of this argument does not require the crossing. It only requires that “indigenous” be a timeline, not a verdict.
Stone under Grand Traverse Bay
Off Traverse City, in about forty feet of water, there is a line of stone that should have ended the slogan version of prehistory by itself. Mark Holley was looking for a shipwreck and found an arrangement that the press, lazy as ever, called a Stonehenge. Holley does not like the word, and he is right not to. What he has is a long alignment on a lakebed that was dry when the lakes stood lower, with at least one boulder that some eyes read as a mastodon. Mastodons were gone from this country early. If that mark is a mark, the calendar drops into the same deep water as the copper pits.[7] Lake Huron has a cleaner case: a caribou drive-lane on a drowned hunting ground, dated to the same general world. The lakes keep the memory the textbooks compress.
When lake levels were lower, people walked landscapes we now boat over. When the English Channel was a valley, people walked to France.[8] We know migration at continental scale is not a fantasy; the first peopling of the Americas is itself a migration argument that still shifts every decade. The silly statement is not “people moved.” The silly statement is “nobody crossed open water until a Genoese sailor on a Spanish payroll made it official.” If you can keep a craft on water for forty days, you can cross an ocean. Genesis is not a Coast Guard manual, but it is a reminder that the ancient imagination did not think of the sea the way a modern tenure committee does.
The Moon-eyed people and the honesty of replacement
The Cherokee have a grievance against Andrew Jackson that American history already knows how to spell. Trail of Tears is not a rumor. Before that road west, though, Cherokee memory—or the memory settlers wrote down as Cherokee—said something else. When they came into the Smokies and the southern Appalachians, they found people already there. The printed versions call them moon-eyed: pale, light-shy, night-working, driven out when the moon was too bright for their eyes.[9] I am not asking a jury to convict a ghost. I am asking for a simple courtesy with the word “indigenous”. If the Cherokee displaced someone, then the Cherokee, in that hour, were not the first people of that ridge. They were the latest people of that ridge. That is not an insult. That is the human story from the Levant to the Andes. The political use of “indigenous” is an attempt to freeze one frame and call it eternity.
Lake Ontario was named from an Iroquoian language for the beauty of its waters. That is a good name. It is also a name that belongs to the people who happened to be in the neighborhood when the French and the English arrived.[10] They were not the copper miners of Superior. They were not the pond people of Windover. They were not a moral veto on the United States. Trump’s point in calling the water Lake America is not that Iroquoian speech never touched the shoreline. His point is that the lake is part of the American system and that the American system is allowed to say so.
What Lake America Is Actually For
Canada to the north and Mexico to the south are not mysterious to anyone who leaves their living room. The pressure on this country does not arrive only as an army. It arrives as policy language, corporate structure, United Nations furniture, and a habit of treating American particularity as an embarrassment. You see it when you get out of your comfort zone and talk to people who have memorized the indigenous-people argument the way an earlier generation memorized a catechism. The argument is doing work. The work is not respect. The work is to loosen the country’s name from the land.
So Trump changes the name. He did it with the Gulf.[11] He did it with the lake. He knows what happens next. People like me have to pick up the bone and worry about it. Museums will say he is contaminating their dialogue. Activists will say a lake is off-limits because an Iroquoian word was spoken over it four centuries ago. Fine. That reaction is the evidence. If the goal were respect for living nations, there are a hundred quieter instruments. The volume of the outrage is the tell. The goal, in the political use of the word, is to make the United States feel like a squatter in its own house.
I live in a state that still has to fight over Columbus. Columbus, Ohio, spends a remarkable amount of official energy trying to apologize for its very existence. I think that is a dumb way to run a civic conversation. Study every culture. Steal nothing sacred to a living people. Do not, as a substitute for thought, declare an entire European arrival illegitimate and then act surprised when the country loses the will to name a lake.
The Copper Scroll: Stop Asking Only Where It Went
I love the Dead Sea Scrolls. If I were not already married, I would marry them. I do not even think of that period as very ancient. The men of Qumran look, to my eyes, like a reform party inside a tired establishment—less temple museum, more faction. Call the comparison reckless. I will live with it. The Essenes against the institutions of their day; a populist temper against a collaborationist temper; Greek and Roman state-theory pressing from the outside. The names change. The pattern does not.[12]
Among those texts is the one I cannot leave alone: the Copper Scroll. Hershel Shanks, who did as much as any American to bring the Scrolls to light, wrote the book I keep on my desk.[13] It is a treasure inventory beaten into metal so it would not rot. Gold. Silver. Vessels. Caches. A map with the patience of a bookkeeper and the nerves of a man who thinks the Temple is about to die. People have hunted the deposits for seventy years. The holes come up empty, or they come up as someone else’s cellar.
The question everyone asks is: where did the treasure go? That is a fair question. I want a different one sitting beside it: where did the metal economy that made such a list thinkable come from? Copper is the quiet member of the family. The Temple accounts shine with gold, but the older world runs on copper. Bronze is copper that learned a second metal. The floor, the fittings, and the industry behind a sanctuary are not gilding. They are tonnage.
Nelson Glueck pointed at Timna and the Arabah and said, Solomon. The next generation of archaeologists rolled their eyes and gave the shafts to New Kingdom Egypt and to Midian. Then the radiocarbon clocks were wound again, and the tenth century—the horizon of David and Solomon—came back into the slag heaps.[14] I am glad of that. Local ore matters. I do not need to steal Timna from the map to ask whether Timna is the whole map. The ancient Mediterranean and the Levant were hungry for metal for a very long time. Cyprus, Sinai, the Arabah, the Alps, later Spain: these are the names the textbooks allow. Lake Superior is the name they treat as a category error.
I am going to keep treating it as a question. Native copper you can pluck, and hammer is a different proposition from sulfide ore you must smelt in a desert with ten thousand trees. If there was a way to move Superior metal, there was a reason to try. People in the Ohio country walked hundreds of miles for obsidian. We do not call them insane. We call them traders. Stretch the same instinct across a colder ocean, in an age when the shelves were wider, and the boats were not as primitive as our pride requires, and you have a hypothesis. Hypotheses are what academies are for, when academies remember.
Commentary — the Copper Scroll’s date, and the temptation of a single pipeline. Almost every specialist dates the Copper Scroll to the first century CE, as a list of Temple or sectarian deposits hidden against Rome. It is not a Bronze Age shipping manifesto. I treat the scroll as proof that ancient people recorded metal the way a state records oil, and then he asks whether the earlier, much larger copper hunger of the third and second millennia had sources we have undercounted. That is a legitimate historical appetite. What does not follow is a closed circuit: Superior pit to Solomonic floor to Qumran roll to later Islamic treasuries financing 1948. Each arrow in that circuit needs its own evidence. The first arrow is the one archaeology can actually test—with isotopes, with wreck cargoes, with smelting slag. Until those tests speak, the circuit is a storyboard. Storyboards are how books begin. They are not how cases close.
I will treat the speculative part as speculation, not a sermon dressed as a lab report. I think some of the metal listed in later memory, and some of the metal that built earlier sanctuaries, is easier to explain if the Superior district is allowed onto the trade map. I think caches get found by the wrong people over centuries. I think private holdings are a perfectly ordinary grave for a public treasure. I have even said, in the talk that became this essay, that old metal can become seed money for later politics, including politics aimed at a Jewish state. That sentence will get me blocked from rooms I wasn’t already invited to. So be it. I would rather over-ask than pretend the copper only ever moved as far as a museum caption allowed.
Copper, Lightning, and What We Forgot How to Say about Power
The Temple stories are not shy. Glory fills the house. Fire answers a prophet. A presence is described as having weight.[15] Copper is a conductor. Gold is a conductor. If you were going to build a room in which a people expected God to arrive the way a storm arrives, you would not build it out of wool. I do not need a YouTube priest of “Egyptian lightbulbs” to notice that. I also do not need to turn Yahweh into a battery. The Bible’s own language is already more interesting than the gadget version. The point is that the builders were not decorating. They were making a place that could bear a presence. Metal was part of that theology, not an afterthought from the gift shop.
Plato’s orichalcum—copper with a second metal in it, a gleam the Greeks could not quite leave alone—belongs to the same family of memories.[16] Ayn Rand, who is not an archaeologist and did not mean to be, wrote a little book about a city that forgot electricity so completely that it had to reinvent the lamp and the word “I”. That is Anthem. I point people to it because it is a moral picture of technical amnesia, not because I think Atlantis filed a patent.[17] We have forgotten more than we know. That sentence is not a license to claim every glyph is a circuit diagram. It is a license to stay humble about the inventory.
Göbekli Tepe, Hopewell earthworks, British alignments, the drowned lines under our lakes: I do not stitch them into one empire. I notice that ritual landscapes rhyme more often than chance should allow, and I notice that people under intoxication and under prayer have always claimed they were not alone in the room.[18]. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to take that claim seriously as politics—not as mood, not as metaphor. If there are wills other than human wills, they will not confine themselves to Sunday school. They will show up in the naming of lakes.
What I Want from Academia, and What I Will Do Without It
I want American archaeology. Not a European import of Marx with better maps. Not a campus that treats Columbus as a contaminant and the United States as a mistake that can be renamed out of existence. I want papers. I want dates. I want some graduate student with a better spectrometer than my opinions to take the Superior question and either kill it or keep it alive on evidence. I will read the kill-shot if it is a real one. I will not accept a sneer in place of a date.
I cover politics and business and Iran and the rest of the board because that is the world in which these arguments cash out. Trump throws a ball. Commentators pick it up. Other shows lift a line while I am asleep at two in the morning. That is the only revenue I actually care about: the advance of the idea. Fortune and glory are enjoyable when you can get it. But, the real wage is that someone eating Fritos in a dark kitchen looks out the window and realizes the indigenous-people argument he was handed in school cannot survive contact with a copper pit that is older than the pyramids’ reputation.
My wife says I am blacklisted again. I am blacklisted everywhere, on everything, by everybody who needs the story to stay simple. I am used to it. This forum exists so that truth has a place to sit when the institutions are otherwise occupied.
The Name on the Water
Call it Lake America. Not because the Iroquois never saw it. Because the Iroquois were not the beginning of the story, and they are not the end of the American claim. The copper miners of Superior, the burial people of Windover, the builders who stacked stone on a dry bay floor—those are indigenous facts. The political slogan that uses “indigenous” to unmake the United States is not a fact. It is a maneuver.
Trump understood the maneuver well enough to answer it with a Sharpie and a map. He can do that from the Resolute Desk. The rest of the work is ours. Follow the copper. Follow the names. Follow the will that taught a nation to be ashamed of its own reflection in a lake. That will is not only human. And if we really want to say “indigenous people,” shouldn’t we point to the Moon-eyed people and give them the credit?
NOTES
[1] Donald J. Trump, Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America for U.S. federal usage, signed August 27, 2026. Coverage: Reuters; BBC News; CNN Politics; New York Times, August 27–28, 2026. The order directs the Department of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days. It binds U.S. federal maps and communications; it does not bind Canada, New York State, or international bodies.
[2] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Campbell’s recurring concern is not career-ladder ranking but the inner work of finding a vocation larger than the self—“follow your bliss”—against a society that sorts people into stations.
[3] 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine (August 2019), Nikole Hannah-Jones et al. The Project’s framing of 1619 as the nation’s “true founding” produced a large scholarly rebuttal literature (see the later bibliography). It is cited here as the type of academic-political narrative the speaker is arguing against, not as a monograph on Great Lakes prehistory.
[4] Windover Archaeological Site, Brevard County, Florida. National Historic Landmark. Radiocarbon dates on the pond burials cluster roughly 8,000–7,000 years before present (Early/Middle Archaic). At least 168 individuals were recovered, with exceptional preservation of brain tissue, textiles, and wooden artifacts. See Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
[5] Old Copper Complex / Old Copper Culture of the western Great Lakes. Reliable dates on organic material embedded in copper artifacts run from roughly 8500 to 3580 cal BP; sediment-geochemistry work around Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula has been used to argue mining signatures as early as ~9500 years ago, with a peak often placed between ~7000 and 5000 cal BP. See Pompeani et al., Radiocarbon (2021); Pompeani et al., The Holocene (2015); Milwaukee Public Museum, Old Copper Culture collections.
[6] Isle Royale and Keweenaw native copper. The Lake Superior district contains the world’s largest concentration of native (nearly pure) copper. More than a thousand prehistoric pits have been recorded on Isle Royale alone. See National Park Service, “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.”
[7] Grand Traverse Bay stone alignment, Lake Michigan, identified in 2007 by underwater archaeologist Mark Holley during sonar survey. Stones lie about 40 feet down. Popular press labeled the site “Michigan’s Stonehenge”; Holley has repeatedly objected to that label and described a long linear arrangement rather than a henge. A possible mastodon image on one boulder remains unverified by a broad scholarly consensus. A better-documented submerged hunting structure of similar age is the Drop 45 Drive Lane in Lake Huron.
[8] Post-glacial sea level and Doggerland. During the early Holocene the English Channel and much of the southern North Sea were dry or marshy land (Doggerland), allowing pedestrian movement between Britain and the Continent until progressive inundation through the Mesolithic. This is mainstream Quaternary geology. Transatlantic crossings in that same era are a separate, and far more contested, claim.
[9] Cherokee “moon-eyed people.” Early printed versions appear in Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797), reporting that the Cherokee said they found and expelled a “moon-eyed” people who could not see well by day. Later treatments include John Haywood (1823) and James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900). Modern Cherokee cultural authorities often treat the tale as minor or as settler-amplified folklore rather than a central tribal history. No archaeological culture has been securely identified with the legend.
[10] The name Ontario is widely derived from a Wendat (Huron) / Iroquoian form, often given as Ontari’io, commonly glossed “beautiful lake,” “great lake,” or “lake of shining waters.” European mapmakers used the name in the seventeenth century, well before Canadian Confederation (1867) or the Declaration of Independence (1776). See Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s August 2026 statement and standard Great Lakes toponymy.
[11] Gulf of America: Trump proclamation renaming the Gulf of Mexico for U.S. federal usage in 2025, the immediate precedent for the 2026 Lake America order.
[12] Essenes and Qumran. The consensus that the Dead Sea Scrolls community was Essene remains the majority view, with vigorous dissent. Comparing them to a modern populist reform movement is analogy, not identity. The “RINO / tyrant” mapping in the source talk is rhetorical, not a claim that second-temple parties were American parties.
[13] Copper Scroll (3Q15), Cave 3, Qumran, discovered 1952. Two oxidized copper rolls, later cut into strips at Manchester (1955–56). The text lists dozens of hiding places and large quantities of gold, silver, and vessels—commonly read as a Temple-treasure inventory from the late Second Temple period, not a Bronze Age document. See Hershel Shanks, The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007); Judah K. Lefkovits, The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation (Leiden: Brill, 2000); John M. Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (1960).
[14] Timna Valley and Wadi Arabah copper. Nelson Glueck popularized “King Solomon’s Mines” in the 1930s–40s. Later work showed major Late Bronze Egyptian-Midianite activity; more recent radiocarbon work by Erez Ben-Yosef and colleagues has restored a significant 10th-century BCE (United Monarchy-era) industrial peak at Timna, with large slag heaps and evidence of export. Glueck’s romantic label outran the first generation of evidence; the newer dates put industrial copper back on the table for the Solomonic horizon—without requiring a Great Lakes source. Lead-isotope work on Bronze Age metal in Europe and the Near East has so far pointed to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, the British Isles, the Arabah, and other Old World sources, not to Keweenaw.
[15] Biblical theophanies associated with fire and storm: Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8 (the glory filling Solomon’s Temple); 1 Kings 18 (Elijah and the prophets of Baal); Ezekiel 1. Copper and gold are specified in the Tabernacle and Temple building accounts (Exodus 25–40; 1 Kings 6–7). Ancient recognition that metals conduct and gleam is not the same thing as a reconstructed electrical grid.
[16] Plato, Timaeus and Critias. Orichalcum is described as a metal second only to gold in the Atlantis story. A 2015 shipwreck off Gela, Sicily, yielded ingots some researchers identified as an alloy consistent with classical descriptions of orichalcum (primarily copper with zinc). That find, even if the alloy identification holds, does not locate Atlantis in the Azores or prove a Great Lakes connection.
[17] Ayn Rand, Anthem (1938). The novella imagines a collectivist future that has forgotten electricity and the word “I.” The “Anthem” YouTube adaptations mentioned in the source talk are fan and classroom dramatizations, not a Disney property.
[18] Hopewell Interaction Sphere (approx. 100 BCE–500 CE) is millennia later than the Old Copper peak and Göbekli Tepe (c. 9600–8000 BCE). Formal similarity of earthworks or ritual geometry across such distances in time is a prompt for research, not proof of a single whispering “spiritual entity” or a single people.
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING
Naming, the executive order, and the Great Lakes BBC News. “Trump Signs Order to Rename Lake Ontario as Lake America.” August 27, 2026. CNN Politics. “Trump Signs Executive Order to Change Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America.’” August 27, 2026. Reuters. “Trump Renames Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ amid Canada Trade War.” August 27, 2026. The New York Times. “Lake Ontario Didn’t Ask for Trump to Rename It.” August 27, 2026. Hough, Jack L. Geology of the Great Lakes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958. Vogel, Virgil J. Indian Names on Wisconsin’s Map. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Windover and the deep Archaic South Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Doran, Glen H., and David N. Dickel. “Multidisciplinary Investigations at the Windover Site.” In Wet Site Archaeology, edited by Barbara A. Purdy. Caldwell, N.J.: Telford Press, 1988. Milanich, Jerald T. Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Purdy, Barbara A. The Art and Archaeology of Florida’s Wetlands. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991.
Old Copper Complex, Isle Royale, and Keweenaw Bebber, Michelle R., and Alastair J. M. Key. “Optimal Linear Estimation Modeling Supports Early Holocene Copper Tool Production in North America.” American Antiquity 87 (2022). Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Pleger, Thomas C., and James B. Stoltman. “The Archaic Tradition in Wisconsin.” In Archaic Societies, edited by Thomas E. Emerson et al. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Pompeani, David P., et al. “Copper Mining on Isle Royale 6500–5400 Years Ago Identified Using Sediment Geochemistry.” The Holocene 25 (2015). Pompeani, David P., et al. “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in North America.” Radiocarbon 63 (2021). Ritzenthaler, Robert E. “The Old Copper Culture of Wisconsin.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 38 (1957). National Park Service. “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.” nps.gov. Milwaukee Public Museum. “Old Copper Culture.” mpm.edu.
Drowned landscapes of the Great Lakes Holley, Mark. Field reports and public notes on the Grand Traverse Bay alignment. Northwestern Michigan College. O’Shea, John M., and Guy A. Meadows. “Evidence for Early Hunters beneath the Great Lakes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009). O’Shea, John M., et al. “A 9,000-Year-Old Caribou Hunting Structure beneath Lake Huron.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014). Lewis, C. F. M., and T. W. Anderson. Papers on post-glacial lake levels in the Huron and Michigan basins. Geological Survey of Canada.
Cherokee memory, Appalachia, and the moon-eyed people Barton, Benjamin Smith. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. Philadelphia, 1797. Haywood, John. The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. Nashville, 1823. Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900. Mooney, James. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. Chicago: Aldine, 1975 [1900]. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
Dead Sea Scrolls and the Copper Scroll Allegro, John M. The Treasure of the Copper Scroll. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Lefkovits, Judah K. The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Puech, Émile. The Copper Scroll Revisited. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Shanks, Hershel. The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007. Shanks, Hershel. The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1998. VanderKam, James C., and Peter Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
Timna, Arabah, Solomon, and Near Eastern copper Ben-Yosef, Erez, et al. “A New Chronological Framework for Iron Age Copper Production at Timna.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 366 (2012). Glueck, Nelson. “On the Trail of King Solomon’s Mines.” National Geographic, February 1944. Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, and Mohammad Najjar. Studies of Iron Age copper production at Faynan / Wadi Arabah. Rothenberg, Beno. Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Yahalom-Mack, Naama, et al. Lead-isotope sourcing studies of Levantine copper.
Bronze Age metal provenance — the brake on a quiet Atlantic pipeline Ling, Johan, et al. “Moving Metals II: Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age Artefacts by Lead Isotope and Elemental Analyses.” Journal of Archaeological Science 41 (2014). Melheim, Lene, et al. “Shifting Networks and Mixing Metals.” PLOS ONE (2021). Pernicka, Ernst. Foundational papers on lead-isotope provenancing in the Aegean and Balkans. Williams, R. Alan. Studies of Great Orme copper and Atlantic Bronze Age distribution. Hauptmann, Andreas. The Archaeometallurgy of Copper. Berlin: Springer, 2007.
Alternative and contested Atlantic theses — read with the grain, and against it Fell, Barry. America B.C. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. The book that made a generation of amateurs certain and a generation of epigraphers furious. Jett, Stephen C. Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Kehoe, Alice Beck. Traveling Prehistoric Seas. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2016. McGhee, Robert. Critical essays on transoceanic contact claims; useful as a brake.
Temple, metal, and the language of presence The Holy Bible. Especially Exodus 19 and 25–40; 1 Kings 6–8 and 18; Ezekiel 1. Hurowitz, Victor Avigdor. I Have Built You an Exalted House. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992. Kitchen, Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Milgrom, Jacob. Leviticus. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001. Van Seters, John. The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Read as the academy’s counter-voice.
Atlantis, orichalcum, and technical amnesia as literature Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Rand, Ayn. Anthem. 1938. Reports on the 2015 Gela wreck ingots and the orichalcum identification debate. Forsyth, Phyllis Young. Atlantis: The Making of Myth. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980.
Campbell, order, and the inner politics of fitting in Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Campbell, Joseph, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
The political fight over founding stories Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al. “The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019. Wood, Gordon S., Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes. Letter of objection to the 1619 Project. The New York Times, December 2019. McClay, Wilfred M. Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. New York: Encounter, 2019. Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello. New York: Norton, 2008. Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration. New York: Liveright, 2014.
Hopewell, Göbekli Tepe, and the problem of rhyme across millennia Byers, A. Martin. The Ohio Hopewell Episode. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2004. Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, eds. Gathering Hopewell. New York: Springer, 2005. Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2012. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior is the kind of site where you click in expecting a blog post and emerge three thousand years later, slightly uncertain whether the Kaaba predates your mortgage.
Mara: Rich Hoffman’s recent writing does cover a lot of ground — we’re talking about the philosophical legacy of Ayn Rand, the hatred aimed at builders like Elon Musk, pre-Abrahamic sacred sites, and what data centers have to do with all of it.
Pip: Which is, genuinely, a lot to have to do with anything.
Mara: It is a wide frame, but there’s a through-line: who creates, who attacks the creators, and how old that conflict actually is. Let’s start with that argument.
Creators, Consciousness, and the Enemies of Both
Pip: The post opens with Ayn Rand — specifically what she got right about the creators and what she may have left unfinished. The question underneath it is whether rational self-interest is a complete account of why builders build, and why the hatred aimed at them feels so disproportionate to ordinary disagreement.
Mara: The setup is personal before it goes philosophical. Here’s the line: “What bothers me, what has always bothered me, is the character of the human spirit in her books and how that spirit keeps getting attacked in the real world.”
Pip: So the attack on Howard Roark and John Galt isn’t just a plot device — it’s a pattern that keeps recurring outside the novel, and the post is asking what’s actually driving it.
Mara: The argument is that Rand saw the looters and the envy clearly, but stayed inside what the post calls the fully rational adult framework. The counterexample is a child — specifically the story of the truck stuck under a bridge, where every engineer is stumped until a kid suggests letting the air out of the tires. Adults lose that outside-the-groove thinking.
Pip: And the post connects that lost capacity to consciousness itself — whether the body is the whole story or just the vehicle.
Mara: Right. The claim is that consciousness arrives as something before culture trains it into grooves. That’s where the post parts company with strict Objectivism and with hard materialism. On Musk specifically, the post notes he’s called Atlas Shrugged useful as a counterpoint to communism but says it needs to be tempered with kindness — and that his real drive is curiosity and expanding intelligence across the universe, which is bigger than rational self-interest alone.
Pip: Which lands him in the same crosshairs anyway.
Mara: Exactly. The post traces the same pattern of hatred — from Rand’s fictional creators to Musk’s actual projects. On data centers specifically, it notes that 71% of Americans express concern when one is proposed near them, and calls out the irony: people who once carried copies of Atlas Shrugged during the Tea Party years now discover selective individualism when the factory of the mind appears in their backyard.
Mara: From there the post goes deep into pre-Abrahamic history — dolmens across the Jordan Valley and Europe, the Old Copper Culture mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula dating back possibly nine thousand years, the Book of Enoch’s Watchers narrative, and the Black Stone of the Kaaba, which was already a sacred pilgrimage object before Islam redirected the site. The argument is that non-human intelligence has been operating through religious and cultural systems as control mechanisms for a very long time, and that anything expanding human capacity threatens that older order.
Pip: So the data center opponents and the Bronze Age priests are, philosophically, in the same coalition.
Mara: That’s the through-line. The post closes on it directly: “The creators keep building. The older forces keep reacting.” The power and water concerns around data centers are called real and worth honest mitigation — but not sufficient reason to reject the expansion of human intelligence itself.
Pip: The philosophical stakes are high. The practical stakes are your electricity bill.
Mara: Which the post would say is exactly the point — the abstract principle is easy, the concrete implementation is where it gets tested.
Pip: So: Rand, Musk, dolmens, the Kaaba, and your local utility grid — all one argument.
Mara: The core of it is that the war on builders is older than economics and deeper than politics. That’s the territory worth sitting with.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been thinking about this for a long time, and the thoughts keep circling back like they always do when something important is trying to get out. American philosophy did not end with Ayn Rand. Human beings keep innovating. She was a powerful contributor to American thought and the American system of individual achievement, but philosophy is not a closed book. We keep going. What bothers me, what has always bothered me, is the character of the human spirit in her books and how that spirit keeps getting attacked in the real world. I look at the hatred directed at the creators, and I see something deeper than politics or economics. I see a pattern that stretches back before Abraham, before the Bible as we have it, into a world of giants, dolmens, fallen intelligences, and religions that look a lot like control systems.
Ayn Rand’s Heroes and the Rational Adult Mind That Still Misses the Eternal
I have always defended the producers in her stories. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, building according to his own vision. The men and women in Atlas Shrugged who refuse to apologize for creating value. John Galt. These are the characters who understand that achievement is moral. Yet something has always bothered me about the fully rational adult framework she used. She saw clearly the envy and the looters. She saw the morality of production. What she did not fully reach, in my view, is the layer underneath the learned adult mind.
Watch a toddler. I have done this with my own grandchildren. I try to meet them in their eternal aspect, not just as small physical packages that look like someone else in the family. The baby is learning by mimicry: the walk, the talk, the habits, the prejudices of the adults around them. Consciousness arrives already as something, then gets trained into the grooves of the culture. Children can still see outside the box. Adults often cannot. There is the old story from the war of the truck that would not fit under the bridge. All the officers and engineers were stuck until a kid suggested letting the air out of the tires. Simple. Outside the groove.
Psychedelics strip some of those learned limits. Ancient cultures knew this. The rituals around Göbekli Tepe and the Jordan Valley were not empty. The Teacher of Righteousness among the Essenes, a century or so before Jesus, was already working in a mystical stream that the later Christian story partly absorbed and redirected. Jesus emerging in the Galilee region is not an accident of geography. That land had already been thick with older practices. The Eucharist practices that closely resembled Greek mystery traditions north of Athens had been circulating for centuries. When you strip away adult prejudices, the question becomes obvious: is the body the consciousness, or is it a temporary vehicle for something that already exists?
I argue the latter. The older adult whose body is failing still carries the same eternal spirit behind the eyes. The physical form degrades. The consciousness does not. This is where I part company with pure Objectivism and with the hard materialist reading of consciousness that stops at the hardware. Elon Musk has read Rand. He has called Atlas Shrugged useful as a counterpoint to communism, though he says it needs to be tempered with kindness. He is not a hard-core Objectivist. His real drive is the expansion of consciousness across the universe, making humanity multi-planetary, and advancing AI so that intelligence itself can understand reality more fully. Curiosity is his guiding star. That is close to the creators’ spirit, but it is bigger than rational self-interest alone.
The Same Hatred That Hit Ayn Rand Now Targets Elon Musk and the Data Centers
Look at the pattern. The same kind of people who hated Rand’s uncompromising creators now hate Elon Musk. They hated him for Tesla. They hated him when he tried to cut wasteful spending. They show up on the National Mall to protest him. The hatred feels disconnected from ordinary disagreement. It has the flavor of something that reacts against any force that empowers the human race to become more than it currently is.
Data centers are the current flashpoint. I am strongly for them. They are the physical infrastructure of expanded human intelligence. They consume power and water. Local grids feel the strain. Bills can rise. Noise from cooling systems is real. In some polls, 71% of Americans express concern when one is proposed near them. The irony is thick. People who once carried copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead during the Tea Party years suddenly discover selective individualism when the factory of the mind appears in their backyard. It is easier to love the hero in a novel than when his power plant sits next door. The abstract principle is easy. The concrete implementation is hard. That does not make the principle wrong.
The deeper issue is philosophical. Data centers and AI force the question of what consciousness is. Is it locked inside the biological body forever, or can it be extended, preserved, transferred, and expanded through tools we build? Elon talks about brain-computer interfaces and spreading life to other planets. He stays close to the physical substrate. I go further. I think non-human intelligences have been manipulating the human story for a very long time, erasing footprints, using religions and cultural systems as control mechanisms. Anything that expands human capacity becomes a threat to that older order. The hatred of Musk and the hatred of Rand share that root.
Pre-Abrahamic World: Dolmens, Giants, Copper, and the Religions of the Fallen
Go back before the Hebrews. The Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians and never fully brought into the Western canon, records the story of the Watchers and the giants. That text should have been more central. People are discovering it now through popular channels, but the evidence was always there. The Jordan Valley is covered with dolmens from the Early Bronze Age. Large fields of them. Similar table-like megalithic tombs appear across Europe and into the British Isles. In North America there are stone constructions and earthworks that early observers compared to the Old World forms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, particularly in the Keweenaw, the Old Copper Culture was mining pure native copper on a large scale by 7000–5000 BCE, possibly earlier. Artifacts moved across the continent. Some researchers have argued for long-distance trade connections that mainstream archaeology still resists.
The same experts who misled the public on other matters now demand absolute trust in their claims about migration patterns and the impossibility of earlier contact. I am not required to give them that trust. Sea levels were lower twelve thousand years ago. Island-hopping routes across the Pacific were more available. The geometric and mathematical patterns that appear in distant places are not automatically a coincidence. The Wheel of the Giants near the Sea of Galilee sits in the same general region where later religious eruptions continued to occur. Jesus did not appear in a vacuum.
What was the religion of the people who built the dolmens and practiced in that landscape before the Hebrew arrival? What gods did they serve? The later duel between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel only makes sense if people already believed Baal could answer with fire. North American indigenous traditions contain figures and practices that echo Canaanite and broader Near Eastern patterns more closely than random parallel development would predict. The experts dismiss the connections. I keep looking at the ground.
The Black Stone, the Monolith, and Consciousness Transfer
The Black Stone in the eastern corner of the Kaaba is a physical object that Muslims circle and try to touch or kiss. The official explanation is clear: it is an act of following the Prophet’s example. One of the companions said he knew it was only a stone that could neither harm nor benefit, but he kissed it because he had seen the Messenger do so. Fair enough as far as it goes. The deeper history is older. The stone was already sacred in pre-Islamic Arabian pagan pilgrimage. Muhammad did not invent the reverence. He cleaned out the idols and redirected an existing sacred site. Circling seven times, the annual pilgrimage, the sacred enclosure—these were already in place among the tribes.
I look at that stone the way I look at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. An object that appears, catalyzes a leap in consciousness or culture, then continues to exert influence long after its origin is forgotten. Religions can function as programming languages for human groups. They can lock certain patterns of behavior and thought into place across generations. Some of those patterns serve the human race. Others appear designed to keep it fragmented, sacrificial, or subordinate. Islam’s historical expansion has often been framed as a victory and a display of dominance, built on conquered sites. That is not unique to one faith, but it collides hard with the American experiment, which was designed as a vehicle for individual consciousness to flourish rather than submit to collective religious or political control.
Christianity itself absorbed and redirected earlier practices. The Hebrew system still carried ritual elements that older powers could work with. The radical break that Jesus represented threatened those older arrangements. Non-human intelligence does not need to appear as little green men from space. It can operate through dreams, through psychedelic states, through recurring religious forms, through the static that certain people seem to hear and obey without understanding the source.
Collectivism, the Scapegoat, and the Continuing Attack on the Builder
The same people who once cheered when Elon stood near Trump now turn on him when the practical costs of building appear. Collectivism wears religious clothes or secular clothes. It always needs a scapegoat. The independent creator who refuses to apologize for winning becomes that scapegoat. Rand never fully cracked why the businessman-as-moral-hero failed to win over the culture. She stayed inside the rational adult frame. The hatred is older and deeper than economics. It is a hatred of the human spirit when that spirit refuses to stay small.
I see the data centers as the current concrete expression of the same fight. Expanding intelligence, expanding the reach of consciousness, giving ordinary people tools that were once reserved for the few—this is exactly what the older manipulative forces would want to slow or stop. The power and water arguments are real and must be handled honestly. Local communities deserve straight talk and real mitigation. That does not justify the deeper philosophical rejection of the very idea of scaled human intelligence.
I will keep arguing this. The body is the vehicle. Consciousness is older. The record in the ground, in the texts that almost made it into the canon, in the recurring sacred stones and geometric patterns, and in the irrational hatred directed at the builders of each new age all point in the same direction. American philosophy did not stop with Ayn Rand. Elon Musk is one of the living characters who force the question into the open. The rest of us get to decide whether we side with the creators or with the forces that have been trying to keep the human race in its place for a very long time.
Footnotes
1. On Elon Musk’s engagement with Atlas Shrugged as a counter to communism tempered by kindness, see contemporary reporting and his own public comments referencing Rand’s work alongside his broader curiosity-driven philosophy.
2. Jordan Valley and Levantine dolmens date primarily to the Early Bronze Age (roughly 3700–2000 BCE), with large fields documented east of the Jordan Rift; early European explorers noted formal similarities to Western European megaliths.
3. Old Copper Culture mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale began at least 7000–9500 years ago and produced extensive pure native copper artifacts traded across eastern North America.
4. The Newark Holy Stones (Decalogue Stone and Keystone) are regarded by the large majority of professional archaeologists and epigraphers as 19th-century forgeries.
5. The Black Stone of the Kaaba was already an object of pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage and veneration; Islamic tradition preserves the practice of touching or kissing it as emulation of the Prophet while explicitly denying that the stone itself possesses independent power.
6. The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) was preserved in the Ethiopian canon and contains the Watchers narrative; it influenced Second Temple Jewish thought and early Christian writers.
7. Local opposition to data centers frequently cites electricity demand comparable to small cities, water use for cooling, and noise; polling shows majority concern in many proposed locations while the long-term productivity and intelligence gains remain more abstract to nearby residents.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943.
• Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.
• 1 Enoch (various critical editions and translations, including those based on the Ethiopian manuscripts).
• Fraser, James A. Studies on Early Bronze Age dolmens of the Levant and Jordan Valley.
• Pompeani, David, et al. Research on the chronology of prehistoric copper mining in the Lake Superior region (Radiocarbon, The Holocene, Anthropocene).
• Steimer-Herbet, Tara. Work on dolmens and tower tombs in Jordan.
• Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968.
• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.
• Biblical Archaeology Review (long-running coverage of Near Eastern sites, copper production, and Second Temple period).
• Primary Islamic historical sources on the Kaaba and Black Stone (Ibn Ishaq, al-Azraqi, and related early chronicles).
• Contemporary reporting and polling on data-center siting conflicts in the United States (2023–2026).
• Materials on the Teacher of Righteousness and the Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.
This is the ground I keep walking. The creators keep building. The older forces keep reacting. I intend to keep looking.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior is the rare corner of the internet where a business meeting leads directly to Ephesians, Augustine, and the Book of Enoch — and somehow that is the logical progression.
Mara: Rich Hoffman is doing something specific here: taking Paul’s language about principalities and powers and arguing it describes a political operation, not just a spiritual metaphor. Let’s start with what that actually means in practice.
Principalities and Powers: The War Behind the Room
Pip: The question at the center of this piece is whether evil has a structure — not a mood, not a vibe, but an actual operating method. The Ephesians 6:12 framework is the entry point, and the claim is that it belongs in political analysis, not just Sunday school.
Mara: The post grounds that claim in the Greek. The New Testament word behind “principalities” is archai — rulers, first things, authorities at the head of an order — almost always paired with exousiai, powers, the right to act. And then the post lands on this: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood. This is a political statement, not a religious one.”
Pip: So the sentence Paul wrote to a church in Ephesus is being read as a theory of power — who controls whom, through whom, toward what end. That reframing is doing a lot of work.
Mara: It is. And the post doesn’t stay abstract. The argument moves into personal testimony: two men, unrelated, encountered in separate business settings close together in time, running what reads as the same script. Same language, same pressure, same intent. The image used is a driver getting out of one car and into another — the vehicle changed, the driver did not.
Pip: Which is either a genuinely unsettling pattern recognition or the most theologically sophisticated way anyone has ever described a bad week of meetings.
Mara: The post is careful to flag that this is testimony, not a lab result. What it does argue is that vacant people — those who, as The Politics of Heaven puts it, have hollowed out the self through drink, painkillers, or the erasure of identity — are easier to occupy than people who know their own name. The susceptibility question, not a judgment on any individual.
Mara: The Book of Enoch enters here as more than a footnote. Jude quotes Enoch. Genesis 6 leaves the door open. Timothy Alberino’s work, including his conversation with Glenn Beck on episode 274 of Beck’s podcast, brought the Watchers narrative — hybridizing the human, rewriting the creature — to an audience well outside fringe forums. The post notes that this is no longer a subject easy to exile with a laugh track.
Pip: Augustine makes the case even older. In City of God, Book XV, he reports a molar found at Utica so large it could have been cut into a hundred ordinary teeth. Fifth-century field notes, not a modern osteology paper — but the point is that the tradition of a larger, older world runs through the canon, through Goliath, through Og’s bed, through “also after that” in Genesis 6:4.
Mara: And Job ties it back to the political frame. Job is described here as a courtroom text: Satan presents himself, asks permission to wreck a loyal servant, and the motive is explicitly to prove that worship is a transaction. The post draws the line directly — “Principalities do not need to win a show of hands if they can unmake the image they hate.”
Pip: The closing argument is that silence is a concession. The field isn’t quiet just because the water receded.
Mara: And that the tools — including AI, including this kind of writing — are neutral. The point, as the post puts it, is the heart behind the instrument.
Pip: What stays with me is the Job framing — evil as a long political project of erosion, not a horror-movie event.
Mara: That thread runs through everything here: the war is named so it can be engaged. More from The Overmanwarrior next time.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly 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.
After the mistrial of Lindsay Clancy today, people are wondering a lot about evil, which I just so happen to spend a lot of time talking about. So let’s set some ground rules here and talk about what makes evil work in the world so that we can prepare ourselves to defeat it. Emphatically! And ruthlessly. Let’s begin. When we see a jury of our peers unable to see right from wrong, we have to understand the strategy of evil to weaken the resolve of jurors, the manipulations of lawyers, and the antics of political persuasion, and ultimately, the power of government. I would suggest, in addition to this text, that you watch this video. It has a lot of different kinds of things in it.
What the Word Actually Means
The New Testament word behind “principalities” is archai, rulers, first things, authorities at the head of an order. It is almost always paired with exousiai, powers, the right to act. In Ephesians 6:12 Paul adds two more phrases: the kosmokratores of this darkness, world-rulers, and the pneumatika of wickedness in the heavenly places. The sentence is built to take the fight off the sidewalk. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.”¹. This is a political statement, not a religious one. And I will likely spend the next 20 years of my life proving it and defining it for people. But it’s quite a statement, and a big, major political problem.
Colossians 1:16 says thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers were created through Christ and for Him. The vocabulary is larger than demons. It can name any organized spiritual authority, loyal or rebel. In the spiritual-warfare conversations most people know, the word has narrowed in scope. Principalities are treated as territorial, as the unseen administration behind nations, systems, and persons. I use the word that way because that is how the encounter presented itself. I do not use it as a slogan. “Satan is working” is a bumper sticker. The question is the work. Against whom. Through whom. Toward what political end.
Our eyes were built for human scale. They miss the microbe and the principality. That is not an argument that the unseen is imaginary. It is an argument that the instrument is limited. I would not take a courtroom’s word that a virus does not exist because the jury cannot see it.
I Met the Same Character in Two Different People
I met a personality recently. I met it in two people, in two different business settings, close enough in time that I could not pretend I was imagining a mood. The bodies were unrelated. The personality was not. Same language. Same pressure. This thing made sure to let me know it was the same “thing” in two different bodies. It was very specific to me almost with a wink and a nod. Same intent. Same way of coming at the conversation. If you have ever watched a driver get out of one car and into another and keep the same hands on the wheel, you know the feeling. The vehicle changed. The driver did not.²
I have written in The Politics of Heaven that people who drink hard, who live on painkillers, who hollow out the pronoun I, surrender the vehicle they live in. I do not mean every drinker is possessed. I mean an empty house is easier to occupy than a house with a resident who knows his own name. The two men I am talking about were not sophisticated. They were not formidable on their own. They were vacant enough to be used. Both had the same kind of tattoo on the inner arm, the kind you can cover with a sleeve in a professional room and flash when the Monday-night crowd wants to know you are still one of the rebels at BW3s half drunk by the second quarter of a Monday Night Football game. I do not think the ink is the spirit. I think the ink, in those cases, was a marker of a type: the man who wants the title of an executive and the alibi of a slob, who will fold under peer pressure, who has already practiced not being fully present in his own skin.³
If you have a tattoo on the inside of your arm and you are reading this to see whether I just called you evil, I did not. Sit with the other layer. When the lights are out, what do you rehearse in your head? That is the question I am asking about susceptibility, not about ink.
I have seen the same signature in places that could not have compared notes. A café. A terminal. Tokyo, Paris, Heathrow. A young waitress who has no idea she is being used, who thinks she is only tired and behind on a car payment, and then another person on another continent running the same play against the same target. The temptation is not always lust. Sometimes it is the attempt to get a man to blow up his public life so the rest of his work becomes easy to dismiss. That is a political move. It is not a horror-movie fog. It is an operation.
The Book of Enoch Is No Longer a Basement Subject
Jude quotes Enoch. Genesis 6 leaves the door open rather than closing it. The Book of the Watchers, preserved in 1 Enoch and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, tells the story the short biblical verses assume the reader already knows: two hundred Watchers conspire, descend, take wives from the daughters of men, beget the giants, and teach what heaven had not authorized.⁴ The text is not in most Protestant canons. It is nothing. A book the New Testament can cite is a book a serious reader of the Bible has to account for.
Timothy Alberino has been making that case for years in Birthright and in his commentary on Enoch. In late 2025, he sat down with Glenn Beck on episode 274 of the podcast, and the conversation moved from Genesis 6 to the Watchers to transhumanism in front of an audience that does not live on fringe forums.⁵ Ten years ago, this was a few tens of thousands of people online. I have been in the subject more than twenty years. Millions can now hear the same file. That does not make every inference true. It does mean the subject is no longer easy to exile with a laugh track.
Alberino’s warning about “Nephilim 2.0” is not that a chatbot is a demon. It is that the old pattern—hybridizing the human, seizing Adam’s brief, rewriting the creature so the Cross no longer applies to it—can return as gene editing, machine merger, and the dream of becoming an immortal without God. Fire is not evil. The heart that uses fire to burn a village is. I use AI as a tool on this show. I do not think the tool is the Watcher. I think the Watcher would be happy to have a new kind of empty vessel.
Augustine, Giants, and What the Flood Did Not Wash Away
City of God is one of the books I go back to a lot and I absolutely love it. I love it so much so that if I wasn’t already married to my wife, I’d marry it!. It takes time. It is worth the time. Augustine is writing as Rome is coming apart and as Christianity is being asked to explain why the city of man is not the City of God. In Book XV he talks about giants. He says sepulchers give up bones of incredible size. He says he himself, with others, saw on the shore at Utica a human molar so large that, cut down to ordinary teeth, it might have made a hundred. He believed it belonged to a giant. He thought the bodies of the ancients were larger, and the giants larger still.⁶
That is a fifth-century report, not a modern osteology paper. I do not need Augustine to have measured a femur correctly to take his witness seriously. He assumed his readers around the Mediterranean already knew the old world had held larger men. Goliath is in the canon. Og’s bed is in the canon. Genesis says the Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after.⁷
I live with the Hopewell and Adena earthworks in my own river valley. I have written about copper culture and the mounds for years. I think we have been timid about what the ground still holds. I also think a spirit does not have to maintain the skeleton of a fifteen-foot body to keep working. A soul is not required to be the size of the corpse. If a soul can be smaller than a cell, then the death of a giant does not retire the intelligence that used the giant. The flood judged a world. I do not believe it vacuumed every rebel power out of the air. If it had, Paul would not have written Ephesians 6 to a church living after Noah, after Abraham, after the Cross.
Job Is the Political Text People Skip
The book of Job is not only a book about suffering. It is a book about a courtroom. Satan presents himself among the sons of God and asks permission to wreck a loyal servant. The motive is political. Prove that worship is a transaction. Prove that the kingdom is only as strong as the hedge. Take that lesson off the page, and you have a method. Harass the person who would otherwise be a problem. Empty the person who can be worn like a coat. Conceal the operation by making the subject sound unhinged, so the Trojan horse never has to come out of the wood in daylight.⁸
That is why I keep using the word political. Democrats in a Republican county do not need a majority on Tuesday if they can spend two years sanding down trust. Principalities do not need to win a show of hands if they can unmake the image they hate. The conspiracy, if you want the old word, is not a committee in a basement. It is the long project of erasing the original: the garden, the image, the Son. The Watchers’ crime in Enoch is not only lust. It is a vote against the arrangement God had made. Two hundred of them decided heaven’s rule was negotiable.
The empty vessel is useful because it does not argue. Legalize the solvents, praise the erasure of the pronoun I, call rootedness oppression, and you have manufactured occupancy. I am not saying every short man who drinks after work is a portal. I am saying, from what I have watched, insecure people who already live outside themselves are cheaper to run than people who wake up intending to be good.
What I Saw, and What I Cannot Photograph
I cannot put the principality on a slide. I can report the pattern. Same speech in two mouths that had no business sharing a script. Same type of compromised body. Same objective: get inside the work, dirty the witness, keep the war from being named. Quantum talk about entanglement is a modern vocabulary for an old claim: that distance and clock time do not bind a spirit the way they bind a truck. I do not pretend that vocabulary is a proof. I am saying the observed thing is older than the vocabulary.
Spider-Man: Far From Home put a body-jumping antagonist on a screen because storytellers keep stumbling into the mechanic. I did not get the idea from the movie. I got it from the meeting. Science fiction is often late to the church’s mail.
If you stay in the Bible and refuse this subject, you stay in a censored Bible. The inconvenient pages are the ones that tell you the war did not end when the water receded. We assume God has won at the end of the story, and I believe He does. That is not the same as assuming the field is quiet. Turning the other cheek is a command about revenge. It is not a claim that no one is swinging.
A Tool, a Book, and the Work in Front of Us
I will keep using the tools in front of me, including this one, because a principality is not allergic to electricity, and neither is the other side. The point is the heart. Play God, rewrite the creature, chase deathlessness without the Creator, and you are back in Genesis 6 with better lab equipment. Ask a question, solve a problem, put language on an encounter you would rather not leave in a fog, and you are doing what readers of Scripture have always done with the instruments of their century.
Alberino’s books are on the table. Enoch is on the table. Augustine is on the table. Paul is on the table. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to write the psychology and the politics of that war in one place, because quoting Ephesians 6:12 is not the same as understanding why the enemy wants the city. I will not agree with every explorer on every bone in every mound. I will not pretend I did not recognize the same face in two different, short men with tattoos on the inside of their arms, to conceal who they are.
Do not give a principality the courtesy of silence just because it would prefer to stay in the shadows. Hey, I’ve been traveling a lot and thinking about these things on long camping trips while everyone else has been sleeping inside my camper, with the smell of woodsmoke from our campfire dying away into the deep night. I think I understand and can relate to Paul as he wrote Ephesians. You have to go through some tough stuff, then think in isolation before you can begin to see the tormentors of existence. And I think it is there that we have to focus on the real war at hand. I think Paul, and only Paul, could have written the marvelous work of Ephesians and begin to contemplate the efforts of principalities.
Notes
1. Greek of Ephesians 6:12: palē, wrestling, not a vague struggle; archas, exousias, kosmokratoras tou skotous toutou, pneumatika tēs ponērias en tois epouraniois. See also Ephesians 1:21; 3:10; Colossians 1:16; 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.
2. This is testimony, not a lab result. I am describing two business encounters within days of each other and a recognition I have had in other cities. I am not asking a reader to take my word as canon. I am asking a reader of Paul to leave room for the thing Paul said we wrestle.
3. Inner-arm tattoos as a tell are my field notes from these cases and from a type I have watched for years. They are not a doctrine. Plenty of marked skin belongs to people who are awake in their own lives. The question is occupancy, not decoration.
4. 1 Enoch 6–16, the Book of the Watchers. Jude 14–15 cites Enoch. Genesis 6:1–4 remains the canonical hinge. 1 Enoch fragments are among the Dead Sea Scrolls; the full Ethiopic corpus preserved the book for the Ethiopian Church.
5. “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” Timothy Alberino with Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, November 2025. Alberino, Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth (2020), and The Book of Enoch, with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.
6. Augustine, City of God 15.9, the Utica Murmur; 15.23 on angels and the daughters of men. Written in the years after 410. I read him as an early Christian mind defending the faith inside a failing imperial order, not as a modern archaeologist.
7. Genesis 6:4; Deuteronomy 3:11; 1 Samuel 17. “Also after that” is the phrase that keeps the subject from dying in the Flood chapter.
8. Job 1–2. The Accuser’s politics are the demand that loyalty be exposed as a deal. Homer’s Trojan Horse is only a later picture of concealment. I use it as an image, not as Scripture.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Scripture and the Powers
The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 6; Deuteronomy 3; 1 Samuel 17; Job 1–2; Daniel 10; Matthew 4; Mark 5; John 12:31; Romans 8:38–39; 1 Corinthians 15:24–26; Ephesians 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:10–20; Colossians 1:16; 2:10, 15; Jude 6, 14–15; Revelation 12.
Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. InterVarsity, 1992.
Arnold, Clinton E. Ephesians: Power and Magic. Baker, 1989.
Caird, G. B. Principalities and Powers. Clarendon, 1956.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham, 2015.
Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.
O’Brien, Peter T. “Principalities and Powers.” Evangelical Review of Theology 16 (1992).
Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers. Fortress, 1984. Read as a map of the vocabulary even where the theology diverges.
Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Fortress, 2013. For the larger Pauline world in which the powers sit.
Enoch, Watchers, and Second Temple Literature
1 Enoch. Translations by R. H. Charles (1912); George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam (Fortress); and the Alberino / Blurry Creatures edition with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.
2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, in Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Doubleday, 1983–85.
Nickelsburg, George W. E. 1 Enoch 1. Hermeneia. Fortress, 2001.
VanderKam, James C. Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition. Catholic Biblical Association, 1984.
Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. 3rd ed. Eerdmans, 2016.
Stuckenbruck, Loren T. The Myth of Rebellious Angels. Mohr Siebeck, 2014.
Boccaccini, Gabriele. Beyond the Essene Hypothesis. Eerdmans, 1998.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. García Martínez and Tigchelaar.
Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.
Augustine and the Early Church
Augustine. The City of God. Especially Books XI–XV. Translations by Marcus Dods; R. W. Dyson; and the Loeb edition.
Augustine. Confessions.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Harper, 1978.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Giants, Genesis 6, and the Old World
Doak, Brian R. The Last of the Rephaim. Brown Judaic Studies, 2012.
Hendel, Ronald. “The Nephilim Were on the Earth.” In The Fall of the Angels, ed. Auffarth and Stuckenbruck. Brill, 2004.
Annus, Amar. “On the Origin of Watchers.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19 (2010).
Homer. Iliad. For the older-and-larger-bodies tradition Augustine also cites through Pliny.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History 7.
Alberino, Beck, and the Present Conversation
Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth. 2020.
Alberino, Timothy. The Book of Enoch. With Blurry Creatures. Commentary on 1 Enoch 1–36.
Beck, Glenn, host. The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” with Timothy Alberino. November 2025.
Heiser, Michael S. Demons. Lexham, 2020.
Missler, Chuck. Return of the Nephilim. Briefings and notes, Koinonia House.
Spiritual Warfare, Discernment, and the Occupied Life
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. 1945.
Peretti, Frank. This Present Darkness. Crossway, 1986. Fiction that taught a generation the furniture of the subject. Not evidence. Atmosphere.
Nee, Watchman. The Spiritual Man. Christian Fellowship Publishers.
Bounds, E. M. Power Through Prayer and the Satan volumes.
Leahy, Frederick S. Satan Cast Out. Banner of Truth, 1975.
Unger, Merrill F. Biblical Demonology. Scripture Press, 1952.
Politics, Concealment, and the Long War
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Ellul, Jacques. The Presence of the Kingdom and The Subversion of Christianity.
O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations. Cambridge, 1996.
Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Revell, 1976.
Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1952. For the old habit of immanentizing what belongs to another city.
Consciousness, Tools, and the Limit of the Eye
Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind. Oxford, 1996. For the hardness of the problem, not for angels.
Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford, 1989.
Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Physics and Theology. Yale, 2007.
Scruton, Roger. The Face of God. Continuum, 2012.
Local Ground and the Older America
Squier and Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. 1848.
Webb, William S., and Charles E. Snow. The Adena People.
Romain, William F. Mysteries of the Hopewell. University of Akron Press, 2000.
Baldwin, John D. Ancient America. 1872. Read with a modern filter and an open map.
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.
