I like doing these kinds of talks. Positive stuff. The benefits of things. The proper role of government. When you vote people into government, you are not voting them in to manage your life. You are voting them in to manage something you need done at the local, state, and federal levels, and then to get out of the way so good minds can finish the work. I talk about that a lot, and I talk about my friend, State Senator George Lang, who I consider one of my very best friends, because he has spent a long time doing the unglamorous part of that job. Good things, done over a long period of time, eventually just happen. He does not always realize, in the moment, how far those things are going to travel. I will talk more about some of that in November. For now, I want to talk about a day in Oxford that caught me off guard in the best way.
We had an event at the College@Elm innovation center on September 21. I was there to talk about what I have been calling the dreams of Elm Street. I discussed the next generation of middle-mile work I am involved with through Volynt, the company I lead as COO, and the hybrid unmanned aircraft they call Vyper (with a Y), since Volynt also uses a Y. Volynt Aero sits at 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio, inside that building, and I am very proud of the affiliation and of the people around it.[1] When I do these kinds of things, I invite people I know. I know quite a few political people. I looked into the audience, and there were some very important faces in it. I had invited George to come out and listen. I had no idea he was already part of the roots of the place.
Positive people, positive work
It is nice to be involved in positive things with positive people who mean to do good things. I had no idea when I first got involved with Volynt, and they brought me out to show me the facility and how deep the story of that building went. I was impressed with the building. I didn’t know the story of the Innovation Center on Elm Street. When I gave the talk, I made a play on words. Nightmare on Elm Street used to be the honest description of the building Volynt is in. It was dilapidated. People had considered tearing it down. Miami University President Gregory Crawford brought George Lang out, and Nancy Nix, and a bunch of other people, and said Let us save this building and make it an innovation center for young minds coming through Miami University, a place to get a launch in life. That is exactly what is happening. A partnership moved into the building. I came out there in a COO role with Volynt. We talked a little about the history of how they arrived there, and about the other tenants, in a building that sits right there on the campus square, right there on Elm Street.
I talked about the play on words. A nightmare on Elm Street becoming dreams on Elm Street, because innovation startups are dreams. They are people trying to bring about new thoughts and new ideas. I guess a lot of people knew that story already. I did not. I was talking to George, telling him to come out, and George was already coming. As I was giving the speech, I looked out, and of course Michael Ryan was there, who I believe is going to be the next Butler County commissioner, and he came and gave part of the speech with me. In the audience were people like Nancy Nix. And George was there. I am going to show you. I know George is going to do the work. I had no idea that when I said, “Come on out,” he already knew all about it. He knew about the innovation center. He was there when it was being born. Nancy and I were talking about it, and she had been invited to see it back when President Crawford pitched the idea of taking this building and turning it into an innovation hub for aspiring ideas at Miami University. I had no idea this was where it was going.
The building that almost got torn down
I saw George in the background as we were setting up to give our speech. He was filming a short presentation on the building’s history, which he hadn’t told me about. I had no idea it was happening. I just joined the Volynt role. I admired the building. I thought it was a good use of a structure that might otherwise have been lost. It is very close, in Oxford terms, to the Miami University Airport, the little airport down the road at 7101 Fairfield Road, identifier OXD, a 4,011-foot runway that Miami operates and that sits only a few miles from campus.[2] For a company building uncrewed aircraft, that proximity is not a small thing. It is all very well set up.
Here is the history, for those unfamiliar, because it is a good story and deserves to be talked up.
The building at 20 S. Elm Street was built in 1933. For 68 years it served as Miami University’s central food service facility, the unglamorous engine room that kept the campus fed.[3] After dining services moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center, the Elm Street building became swing space and general storage, then sat vacant. By the time people were seriously arguing about its future, it was a roughly 90-year-old, 39,000-square-foot brick building with a strong foundation and a failing prospect. Miami and the City of Oxford debated what to do with it. Selling it was on the table. Tearing it down was on the table. Leaving it as a forgotten building on South Elm was the path of least resistance.[4]
President Crawford did not take the path of least resistance. He had been in business before higher education. He had founded companies. He knew the difference between a press release and a building that works. Around 2017 and 2018, he began walking potential partners through the place and asking whether they could see what Elm Street might become.[5] By 2020, the university and the city had a plan: turn the vacant structure into a technology, entrepreneurship, and workforce hub. Preparations began in 2021. The renovation cost about $10.7 million, part of a larger public-private investment of $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors.[6] Miami alumni Lee Fisher, class of 1968, and Rosemary Fisher, class of 1969, provided the naming gift. In February 2023, the building opened as the Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm.[7]
That is the part I did not know when I was admiring the brick.
George Lang, the incubator, and the long clock
George has said publicly that he used whatever political capital he had to get state dollars into the project so it could get started and get up and running. He has called College@Elm something very special and very unique. His line, the one that matches what I half-heard him filming in the background, is that it is the only incubator he knows of where you can go from concept to production under one roof: prototypes, marketing expertise, funding, the whole path an entrepreneur needs to find out whether an idea can succeed.[8] Advanced manufacturing was part of the original pitch. The Fischer Group was an early anchor concept, an “innovation extension” inside the same walls as Miami’s entrepreneurship training.[9] When I watched him in the background and later saw the clip surface on LinkedIn, because the algorithm knows I know him, he was not doing a campaign spot. He was telling the history of a building he had already helped stand up, eight or ten years before Volynt moved into Suite 117.
I have known George for about twenty years: very good times and some very hard times. You learn the character of a person that way. A good person is pretty stable whether the times are good or bad. I am sure things are going on in his life where people look at him from the outside and say, I wish I were him. Then you know the pressure of living. It can be hard. I am sure he would trade some of the blood pressure for an easier job. He has said as much, in the way friends say it. The goldfish feeder at Walmart might be a better life on some days, because you can enjoy things a little more and carry less pressure. He finds himself under a lot of pressure a lot of the time. I say that as a friend, someone I talk to pretty regularly. It is not always better on the other side of the glass. It is hard. But when you care about innovation, and business, and technology, and job growth, this is the work. That is why I am involved in it. Not because the title is comfortable. Because the output is real.
Nancy Nix has the same knack. She was in the audience on September 21. She has a way of seeing a good thing before it becomes important, and she has been that way for a long time, back through nearly sixteen years as Butler County Treasurer and into the Auditor’s office she was sworn into in February 2023.[10] She was invited out when Crawford was still pitching the building. She came. Michael Ryan has supported this kind of work well before the commissioner race, and he stood up and spoke with me that day. He won the Republican primary in May 2026 with about 72 percent of the vote, and he is on the November 3 ballot focused on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.[11] I think he is going to win. More to the point, he showed up.
What Volynt is actually doing there
Volynt Aero was formed in 2024 by people who have been developing uncrewed aircraft and eVTOL machines for years. The spelling is the point—Volynt, with a Y. The aircraft is the Vyper, also with a Y. They are always doing things a little differently, and I like that. The company builds hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft aimed at cargo logistics, highly mobile power generation, and forward communications for defense and for disaster response- the work where you cannot always count on a runway, a fuel truck, or a pilot who can get there.[1] The address on the capability statement and on the federal registration is the same as the innovation center: 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. They have taken Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support and partnered with Miami University on powertrain work. That is the right use of a building like this. Not a plaque. A prototype.
I had no idea, the first time I walked the facility, that the roots of the innovation talk went back that far, or that George was part of it, or that Nancy Nix was part of it. A lot of things in government never mature. Maybe only five percent of them ever become anything good. This one has a chance to mature into something really good. It is exactly the kind of thing that all of these people hope their role in government can do: take good minds, imagination, goodwill, and blood, and help them mature into something productive. Government, used properly, does not dream for people. It keeps the road open so the people who do dream can get the work to market.
Dreams, not the extended nightmare
I have always enjoyed my time on college campuses. I have not been happy with the direction academia has taken, captured as so much of it has been by left-wing politics and by the pursuit of intelligence subordinated to social order. I still encourage what I see. Even if everybody on a campus is not pushing the limit the way I think they should, you still see a proportion of people who are. I stop by the little convenience store on the campus, and I get a Mello Yello. People joke about it. The three drinks I drink are Mello Yello, water, and milk. A lot of water, a lot of milk, and a lot of Mello Yello. Sugar is not good for you, but I don’t consume much else with a lot of sugar in it, so I am good with it. And when I am standing there, I see a lot of bright-eyed people walking around with backpacks, dreaming and hoping.
That is what I was talking about in the speech. The dreams of Elm Street, because we were on Elm Street, in the innovation center. You expect a company like Volynt, working there, to have a shot at evolving into a technological powerhouse. It all started with the dreams of people like the president of Miami University, and Senator Lang, and Nancy Nix. You can tell who your friends are. It depends on who shows up for these things. You invite them to come out, you look into the audience, and you see faces that are very familiar to you. Some of the things you are doing may not become important for five years, or ten. They still come.
George said it in his own way. The things you do today are the things that show up eight or nine years from now. A lot of the work he does, and a lot of the work the other people who came out to our event are doing, works on that clock. I appreciate everybody who came. Michael Ryan has been supportive before he was ever on a commissioner ballot. Nancy has always supported things well before they become important. She has a good eye. She was in the audience. She knows a good thing when she sees it.
The innovation center on Elm Street is there for a purpose. It is there to inspire the growth of human intellect, as academia was always meant to do. I was proud to be there, and proud to be a part of it, and proud to look into that audience and see those kinds of people. I appreciate having high-quality people like that in my life. I think all of us, working together, can make dreams come true for a lot of people who don’t even know they are dreaming yet. They are just living their lives and hoping for a dream to dream, instead of living inside an extended nightmare where intellect is no longer in charge of the human condition.
Innovation centers like the one on Elm Street are, I think, among the highest-order things a community can build anywhere in the world, because they are dedicated to aspiring intelligence that makes everybody else’s lives much better. George Lang has always been supportive of that. It was good to hear his story, and to hear it go back those eight or nine years. The things you do today will be the things people are standing inside of nine years from now. That is what good government looks like. A president of a university pushing. A senator putting political capital on a building that is still empty. An auditor who shows up early. A future commissioner who stands up and speaks. They help pave the way for dreams to become a reality instead of a nightmare.
Footnotes
[1] Volynt Aero, Inc. lists its primary address as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Founded in 2024, the company develops hybrid-electric uncrewed eVTOL aircraft for cargo logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications under the Vyper name, and has paired Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support with Miami University powertrain work. See Volynt Aero capability statement, volynt.aero; federal entity record, CAGE 9X2Y4, UEI ZDFZRXS7EJY2; Volynt Aero LinkedIn company page.
[2] Miami University Airport (OXD), 7101 Fairfield Road, Oxford, Ohio 45056, is a public-use airport operated in connection with the university and has a 4,011-by-70-foot asphalt runway. Miami University, “OXD Airport in Oxford, Ohio,” miamioh.edu/oxd-airport.
[3] Miami University, “From Food Services to Innovation Hub: The Story of College@Elm,” College@Elm Impact Blog, 2025. The building was constructed in 1933 and served as the university’s central food service facility for 68 years before dining operations moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center.
[4] Halie Barger, “Forgotten building on South Elm Street to become space for innovation startups and a focus on the arts,” Oxford Observer, February 14, 2020. Miami and Oxford officials described a vacant former food-service building that had later been used for storage; sale and continued vacancy were both live options before the innovation-hub plan.
[5] Sean Scott reporting in the Oxford Free Press, “College@Elm aims to provide innovation hub for Southwest Ohio businesses,” drawing on Lee Fisher’s account that President Gregory Crawford approached potential partners around 2017–2018 and was “the big driving force” behind the project. Crawford has described walking partners through the building more than two years before the 2023 opening. Miami University News, “The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm celebrates grand opening,” February 2023.
[6] Miami University put the renovation at $10.7 million and total invested funding at $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors. Miami University News, February 4, 2021, “Miami and Oxford initiative to transform uptown into an entrepreneurial hub”; Miami University News, February 2023 grand-opening release. The Oxford Free Press separately noted a City of Oxford contribution of about $1.18 million toward renovations, plus parking-lot work. Figures vary by what is counted as renovation versus total public-private investment; both numbers are in the public record.
[7] Lee Fisher ’68 and Rosemary Fisher ’69 provided the naming gift. The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm held its grand opening in February 2023 at 20 S. Elm Street. Miami University News, February 2023.
[8] George Lang, quoted in the Oxford Free Press: “I was very proud to use whatever political capital I had to get some dollars at the state level to help get the program started and get it up and running.” And: “It’s the only place, literally the only incubator in Ohio, that I know of in the country, where you can go from concept to production all under one roof and have everything right there.” The Miami Student, March 2023, also noted Lang’s support through the funding process. The September 21, 2026 remarks I saw him filming are his own telling of that same history.
[9] Miami University News, February 4, 2021. The early plan named two anchor uses: Miami’s entrepreneurship training and incubator center, and the Fischer Group’s manufacturing “innovation extension.” Later tenants have included student and alums ventures such as Coarse Culture. The Miami Student, March 2023, reported a five-year hope, attached to the Fischer Group concept, of 52 jobs and just under $3 million in payroll.
[10] Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix was sworn in on February 13, 2023, after nearly 16 years as Butler County Treasurer, and was elected in November 2024 to the unexpired term. She holds a B.S. from Truman State University, an MBA from Miami University (2012), and a CPA license—Butler County Auditor, “Meet Nancy,” auditor.bcohio.gov.
[11] Michael V. Ryan, former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, won the May 5, 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with about 72 percent against incumbent Cindy Carpenter, and faces Democrat Mike Miller on the November 3, 2026 ballot. Journal-News, “Butler County commissioners race: Michael Ryan and Mike Miller up for open seat,” September 30, 2026. Ryan has campaigned on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.
Volynt Aero. Capability statement and company site. https://volynt.aero/ — address listed as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Aircraft program styled Vyper.
Volynt Aero. LinkedIn company page, Oxford, Ohio. Notes Ohio TVSF grant and Miami University powertrain partnership.
Hoffman, Rich. Overmanwarrior essays and podcast, hoffmanbooks.com — including the September 21, 2026 College@Elm remarks and the George Lang clip referenced here.
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 said this for two decades, and it’s brought me more trouble than it was worth. I would rather not have to see it. I would rather the country I hired people in, and raised daughters in, had kept its standards. It did not. So when the argument turns to artificial intelligence, and to whether America should chase superintelligence at all, I am not interested in the polite version. I have already explained the economic case more than once. The real story is ruder than that, and it starts at my own kitchen table.
People don’t like AI because it doesn’t flatter them. A robot does not call in because a hamster died. A model does not clock out at 5:02 and have the car in the driveway before the second hand clears the twelve. A line that runs on automation does not need a bereavement policy for every emotional weather system that blows through a shift. That is offensive to a culture that has spent thirty years teaching people that their feelings are a form of production. I have employed thousands of people. I have watched the applicant pool’s quality fall in real time. I am not guessing.
The Boy from England and the Standard Nobody Wanted to Hear
I have two daughters. When they were teenagers, I looked around Butler County, and then around the wider American teenage market, and I said something I have repeated as recently as a few weeks ago. The boys being produced in the United States were not good enough for my daughters. Not the polite version of “not a fit.” Not good enough. Bad mouths. Bad sexual manners. Parents who had taught them the wrong things on purpose, or by neglect, which is the same thing as leaving the television on. I was not willing to hand eighteen years of work to that.
One of my daughters married a young man from England. He had manners. He had a work ethic you could see at fourteen and fifteen. His parents and ours coordinated supervised trips. He flew over. For the first couple of years, we put him up in a hotel. We picked him up in the morning. We drove them to the movies. We drove them to whatever else teenagers do when somebody is actually watching. Heavily supervised. The whole thing. They dated like that for years. Five years before they even kissed. That was my idea of how this was supposed to go, and I will not apologize for it.
He has been her husband for well over a decade, fourteen or fifteen years. He became an American citizen. He is a good young man. Our families are close. His father came with us on the camper, traveled with us, went to Put-in-Bay. We were coordinating this when their sons were fourteen and fifteen. It worked. It has been a traditional life. That is what I wanted for my kids. I did something like it for both daughters. It worked cleanly for one of them. I will take the win.
I caught ridicule for it. A father hosting supervised dates for a boy who flew in from another country did not match the local script. The script was that American boys were entitled to a shot because they were nearby and breathing. I did not accept the script. Suppose Lee Greenwood had wanted to date one of my daughters, I still would have wanted to see the manners. Patriotism is not a character reference. A flag on the truck is not a substitute for how you treat a young woman whose father spent eighteen years building her into a person rather than a hole. That last sentence is the one that gets people angry. Good. The anger is the confession.
What the Dating Market Was Already Telling Me About the Labor Market
I looked at my daughters’ friends and at the boys around them, and I was more right than I wanted to be. Sex was too easy. Porn had done what porn does, which is train a boy to treat a girl as a clip. Addiction was common and shrugged at. The language was garbage. The expectations were garbage. Schools had a hand in it. Parents had a hand in it. MTV and the shows that replaced MTV had a hand in it. A culture that cannot produce a boy willing to wait five years for a kiss won’t produce a man who will stay on a precision job until the work is done.
President Trump understands more of this, and so do Steve Bannon and the War Room crowd; Trump saw the raw material on The Apprentice. He wrote the books. Politically, the quiet part is hard to say out loud because it insults the audience. I will say it. I had daughters. The boys were not suitable. They were not good enough. A father is allowed to have that standard. An employer is allowed to have the same standard. A country that wants a gross domestic product will need the same standard, whether it admits it or not.
The marriage numbers have caught up to what I saw in the driveway. In 2024, half of American adults were not currently married. Among adults 18 to 29, 84 percent were unmarried. Among adults 30 to 39, 48 percent were unmarried, more than triple the 1960 share. Only about 20 percent of 25-year-old men have ever married, against roughly 75 percent in 1967. Lyman Stone’s projection, that something like a third of today’s teenagers may never marry by 45, is not a mood. It is the dating market I already priced in. [1][2]
David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson showed years ago that when young men’s earnings and employment fall, marriage falls with them, idleness rises, and more children end up in poor single-parent homes. They were measuring trade shocks. I was measuring manners. Same wreck, different instrument panel. [3]
The Arithmetic of a Country That Still Wants to Build Things
People hear “low unemployment” and think the labor market is a full parking lot. It is not. In August 2026, the civilian noninstitutional population was about 275 million. The labor force was about 170 million. The participation rate was 61.6 percent. Men 20 and over were participating at 69.4 percent. That is not a country in which every able body is on a line. [4]
Male participation has been falling for most of my adult life. It was about 87 percent in 1948. It was about 75 percent in 2000. It is about 68 percent now. The drop is sharpest among men 16 to 24. Prime-age men, 25 to 54, look healthier on a chart, near 89 percent, until you notice that more than one in ten of them are neither working nor looking. Nicholas Eberstadt has been writing about those men for a decade. The round number that keeps coming back is nearly seven million prime-age men off the economy. Among U.S.-born prime-age men, the share not in the labor force rose from about 4 percent in 1960 to 11.2 percent by April 2025. For those without a bachelor’s degree, it was 14.8 percent. [5][6][7]
I have said, roughly, that of 250 or 300 million people, you might have something like 100 million who can actually do industrial work. The official labor force is larger than that. The slice that can do high-mix, high-tolerance, show-up-every-day work is not. I have hired into that slice. I hosted a SpaceX event and had to get my own head around robotics, because even the hand-craft end of serious aerospace work doesn’t have a deep bench of people who can do it. The employees are not out there in the numbers the drawings assume. A robot does not solve taste. It does solve the empty chair.
Schools That Work Like a Public Toilet
Public education, as I have seen it, works like a public toilet. Everybody uses it. Nobody cleans it. Garbage in, garbage out, and then a diploma on top so the garbage can apply for a job.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress results released in 2025, from tests of 2024 seniors, put 12th-grade reading at the worst level in three decades. About a third of those seniors lacked basic reading skills. Nearly half were below basic in math, which means trouble with the sort of percentage problem a shipping clerk used to do on a pad. Only about a third were leaving high school with the reading and math for college-level work. Margaret Spellings called it an economic emergency. She was being polite. [8]
The adult figures are worse, because they are the people already out of the building. On the 2023 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, the share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels rose from 16 percent in 2017 to 25 percent. That is about five million young adults who can follow a short text but cannot analyze a long one. More of them held diplomas than in 2017. The paper improved. The skill did not. Across working-age adults, the share at the lowest literacy level rose from 19 percent to 28 percent. Numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. The United States sits below the international average in numeracy. [9][10]
I don’t need a chart to know the college experience hasn’t been cranking out people who walk into a plant or a courthouse and do good work. My wife comes home and says the same thing I hear from people who hire attorneys and prosecutors. There are not enough good ones. The courthouse has the same problem as the machine shop. The pipeline is thin because the formation was thin. Churches emptied of the basic teaching. Schools filled up with everything else. Twenty years of that and you do not get a workforce. You get a cohort that is not qualified to marry, not obviously qualified to raise a child, and only loosely qualified to hold a job. I am not interested in the hurt feelings attached to that sentence. I poured heart and soul into my kids. A lot of people out there are not worthy of the work that went into a serious daughter. An employer who has moved people through real jobs has the same right to say it about a shift.
The 32-Hour Week and the Cult of Going Home Early
I was always the man who frowned on the clock-watchers. People who would not stay. People who were in the car and out of the parking lot before you could look up and see 5:00. A progressive culture has taken that instinct and tried to make it policy.
On September 8, 2026, Bernie Sanders and Mark Takano reintroduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. It would lower the overtime threshold from 40 hours down to 32, with no loss of pay, in steps. The AFL-CIO is for it. So are the UAW, SEIU, UFCW, and others. Sanders argues that AI and robotics will raise productivity, and that the gain should be taken as time off rather than as output. [11]
I understand the politics of that argument. I do not accept its economics for a country that intends to stay ahead of China. Productivity that is cashed out as a shorter week, on top of a workforce that already struggles to fill a full one, is not a dividend. It is a surrender. The same political current that wants the 32-hour week spent a generation arguing that the government should pay people to stay home. Video games were not a secret. They were the plan. You cannot keep up with a rival that is installing robots if your domestic reform agenda is fewer hours, more process, and a medical report every time somebody skins a knuckle.
Unions do not like Elon Musk, and they are open about it. Tesla’s plants run on robotics. That is not a moral failure. That is what you do when the alternative is a union model in which a small injury becomes an incident report, the incident report becomes an insurance hit, the insurance hit eats the margin, and the margin was the only thing paying for the next hire. I have watched that movie. Robotics is how you refuse to cast it.
Walmart, the Rally, and the Lawsuit That Replaced It
My wife is loyal to Walmart. When we were raising the kids, it was stocked, the prices were honest, and the place worked. She still likes to go. I go where the stuff is. If Walmart doesn’t have it, I don’t have a sentimental objection to leaving.
Walmart used to rally people at the start of a shift. The company pushed greeters, sourcing, and the idea that workers should be better at the end of the day than at the beginning. Then the progressive lawsuits and the union drives arrived. A company does not have to vote a union in to catch the disease. It only has to spend enough years defending itself from one. The habits change. You stop asking who is good. In a lot of places you are not allowed to say “good” without a lawyer in the room. Standards become disparate impact. Disparate impact becomes a settlement. The settlement becomes the new handbook.
I have told my wife the plain version. Walmart does not have the employees it used to have. Kmart already showed one ending of that story. You cannot recruit what the schools did not make, and you cannot test for what the courts will not let you name. The aisles tell on the culture. So does the parking lot at 5:02.
China Is Not Confused About Any of This
China is not trying to talk America out of automation because China is worried about our feelings. China is automating as fast as its factories can take the machines. The International Federation of Robotics reported that China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54 percent of global demand, a record. The operational stock hit 2,027,000. It doubled in three years. Domestic Chinese robot makers took 57 percent of their home market. And remember, China has over 1 billion people in it, and they are automating wherever possible. Asia took 74 percent of new factory-robot deployments in 2024. Europe took 16 percent. The Americas took 9 percent. [12]
Beijing has also poured state money into the software side. Stanford’s AI Index puts state-initiated Chinese investment funds at about $184 billion into AI firms from 2000 to 2023, and Xi has told the apparatus to add tax breaks, contracts, financing, and infrastructure on top of that. In the first half of 2026, Chinese investment in information services, the bucket official statistics credit to AI, was up 19.2 percent. Their own youth unemployment, students excluded, was 18.9 percent in August. They are automating anyway. [13]
That is the tell. A rival with a fifth of its young people out of work is still buying the machines. The media campaign aimed at American companies, the one that treats every AI lab as a jobs villain, is not a labor policy. It is a delay. Slow the United States down. Protect the slug, as I have put it, the applicant covered in tattoos and piercings who wants thirty hours and a speech about work/life balance. China will take the productivity gap and cash it as industrial power. I have no interest in helping them. Get young people in America playing video games instead of producing product.
I have said I do not agree with the president on this point. A lot of people around him, and a lot of people in the Glenn Beck audience, want superintelligence treated as a threat to be slowed. If you want an economy that works, you had better get AI, or superintelligence, or whatever name clears the politics, into the work. The people are not standing there ready. Trump knows there are not a hundred million employees you can sit in a chair and point at a build. The machine does not complain, does not need a remote-work negotiation, and does not open a bereavement case when the pet dies.
Twenty Years to Grow a Better Cohort, If We Start Now
If we started this year, with the babies in the nursery, we are about twenty years from a cohort that could be reasonably good again. That assumes we actually change the inputs. Church. Rules. Fathers who will say no. Mothers who will back the no. Schools that teach reading and math instead of passing the toilet paper down the row. I am not optimistic about the institutions. I am insistent about the timeline.
Go back and watch the old films. The Wizard of Oz was 1939, every cell hand-painted, a country that still assumed competence was normal. I am not romantic about the Depression. I am clear-eyed about the people. The baseline manners, literacy, and willingness to be supervised were higher than what walks into an interview now. We let that fall. We can grow it back. We cannot grow it back by next quarter.
So the gap has to be covered. That is what automation is for. That is what AI is for. Not as a replacement for the best people I have ever hired. As a supplement for a corrupted workforce that is not ready for the basics of life, let alone for a competitive industrial policy. Three generations have been hit. The damage is intellectual and moral. A man who cannot be trusted with a daughter cannot be assumed ready for a clean room work environment.
Biblical Formation Is Not a Side Issue
I have told my wife this until she is tired of it. There are not enough good people to staff the work she sees, the legal work, the ordinary institutional work. The fix is not another HR module. People have to get back to church and back to basic teaching, because the last twenty years of young people, as a cohort, have been trash for the jobs and the marriages a country needs. Individuals escape that. I married one of my daughters to a man who escaped it, and he had to cross an ocean to do it. The cohort did not escape it.
AI does not preach. It also does not undo a sermon. What it can do is hold output up while a serious culture tries to form human beings again. Biblical scholarship, rules, agency, the old expectation that a man governs himself before he governs a shift. That is the long repair. Superintelligence is the bridge. China would prefer we argue about the bridge until the repair is irrelevant.
I am allowed to have high standards as a father, as an employer, and as a man who has lived in the same county long enough to watch the decline without a consultant’s chart. Low standards were sold as kindness. The kindness produced a country that cannot fill its own lines, cannot fill its own aisles, and cannot fill its own dating pool with men a serious father will hand a daughter to. AI offends that arrangement. Good. Be offended. The machine will make the shift. The rest of us have twenty or thirty years to remember how to make people who can.
Notes
1. Hannah N. Smith, “Unmarried Adulthood: More than a Century of Change, 1900–2024,” Family Profile No. 8, 2026, National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University. In 2024, half of U.S. adults were unmarried; 84 percent of adults 18–29 and 48 percent of adults 30–39 were unmarried.
2. Lyman Stone, “1 in 3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” Institute for Family Studies, February 2024. About 20 percent of 25-year-old men had ever married, against about 75 percent in 1967; about 60 percent of 35-year-old men had ever married, against about 90 percent in 1980.
3. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” AER: Insights 1, no. 2 (2019): 161–178.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026, Table A-1. Civilian noninstitutional population 275.4 million; labor force 169.8 million; participation rate 61.6 percent; men 20 and over participation rate 69.4 percent.
5. American Institute for Boys and Men, “What’s really going on with men and work? Seven facts,” May 2026. Male labor-force participation from about 87 percent in 1948 to 68 percent; from 75 percent in 2000 to 68 percent; prime-age men from 92 percent to 89 percent since 2000; men 16–24 from 69 percent to 57 percent.
6. Nicholas Eberstadt, summarized in “Time for ‘Shock Therapy’ — How to Get Our 7 Million Dropout Men Back to Work,” American Enterprise Institute, April 2025. Nearly seven million prime-age men are neither working nor looking.
7. Steven A. Camarota, “Working-Age, but Not Working, 1960 to 2025,” Center for Immigration Studies, November 2025. U.S.-born prime-age men not in the labor force: 4 percent in 1960, 11.2 percent in April 2025; 14.8 percent among those without a bachelor’s degree.
8. Dana Goldstein, “12th Grade Reading Skills Hit a New Low,” New York Times, September 9, 2025, reporting National Assessment of Educational Progress results. About a third of 12th graders are below basic in reading; nearly half are below basic in math; about a third are prepared for college-level work. Margaret Spellings, Bipartisan Policy Center, called the decline an economic emergency.
9. National Center for Education Statistics and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2023 results, released December 2024. U.S. adult literacy low performers rose from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023; numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. Young-adult figures: American Institutes for Research analysis, share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels from 16 percent to 25 percent, about five million people.
10. Sharon Bonney, Coalition on Adult Basic Education, quoted in reporting on the PIAAC release: more than 20 percent of young adults with a high-school diploma lack skills commensurate with it.
11. Office of Senator Bernie Sanders, “Sanders, Takano Reintroduce Bill to Move Toward 32-Hour Workweek,” September 8, 2026. Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act; endorsements include AFL-CIO, UAW, SEIU, UFCW, National Nurses United.
12. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025, press release, September 25, 2025. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 (54 percent of global demand); operational stock 2,027,000; domestic manufacturers’ home-market share 57 percent. Global new deployments: Asia 74 percent, Europe 16 percent, Americas 9 percent.
13. Li Yuan, “In China, A.I. Is Moving Forward While the Economy Lags Behind,” New York Times, September 20, 2026. Stanford AI Index estimate of $184 billion in state-initiated fund deployment into AI firms, 2000–2023; information-services investment up 19.2 percent in the first half of 2026; youth unemployment, students excluded, 18.9 percent in August.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, AER: Insights (2019). Eberstadt, Men Without Work (Templeton, 2016). Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies (November 2025). American Institute for Boys and Men, “Seven facts” (May 2026). NAEP via Goldstein, New York Times, September 9, 2025. PIAAC / NCES release, December 10, 2024. NCFMR Family Profile No. 8 (2026). Stone, Institute for Family Studies (February 2024). Sanders/Takano Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act, September 8, 2026. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025. Li Yuan, New York Times, September 20, 2026. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026.
For the longer shelf: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex; Kay Hymowitz, Manning Up; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; the Bradford Wilcox file at the Institute for Family Studies. Read Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men against Regnerus, not instead of him.
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.
If you have been anywhere near a television or a radio in the Cincinnati area lately, you have seen Sheriff Richard K. Jones. He has been on the local news. He has been on WLW. He has been on Channel 9. He has even ended up in the weather, which is not where most sheriffs go to make a point, and that is exactly why I like watching him. He can get on a set, talk about immigration, talk about the law, and then, if the moment calls for it, talk about whether your windshield wipers will work on the drive home. That is not a gimmick. That is a man who can think on his feet, and Butler County has benefited from that habit for a long time.
I have spent much of this year, 2026, working through the specifics of institutional persuasion and what proper ethical behavior actually looks like when you are trying to move a population. I am going to keep coming back to the root causes of purity, ethics, morality, righteousness, and the plain old goodness that used to be assumed in American public life. We need another Great Awakening in the United States. I do not say that as a slogan. I say it because the methods used against this country have been very sinister. They turned free speech into a weapon. Immigration was turned into a weapon. No place on earth has a more diverse population than the United States, and that diversity was not an accident of geography. It was a policy. When a policy is used to import people who reject the host country’s values, you are not running a humanitarian program. You are running a Trojan horse. Sheriff Jones has been willing to say the quiet part out loud, and that is why I want him in the room.
You Want This Man in the Party
People ask me whether Sheriff Jones is a hard-core Republican or a big-tent Republican. He is more the second than the first, and the question is the wrong test. You always want Sheriff Jones in the room. You want him on the news. You want him in your party. If you have built a party that cannot make room for a man like him to do good things, you are in the wrong place. You want people like him on your side.
Some of the people who have been against Sheriff Jones over the years are the same people who have been against President Trump, and they usually dress the objection up as ethics. I will get into the ethics of coalition-building in a separate piece, because I have been down that rabbit hole on purpose. I am usually a positive person. I am also, if I am honest about my own temperament, a little melancholy, and more Book of Revelation oriented than the average political commentator. The apocalypse has a following for a reason. There is a reason people talk about the Rapture taking the faithful out of a world that will not deliver justice. I know a lot of people who are so distraught over the lack of justice in ordinary life that they want God and Jesus to come and end the argument. I understand the feeling. I don’t think that excuses us from the work in front of us.
The work in front of us includes immigration, and it includes the people who will actually enforce the law while the rest of us argue about tone. Sheriff Jones has been that person in Butler County. He has done it well for decades. He has been especially visible lately, and he has earned the attention.
A Hamilton Kid Who Became the 45th Sheriff
Richard K. Jones was born on October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, in Butler County. He came up through the Hamilton city schools, volunteered for the draft, and served from 1973 to 1975 as a combat engineer in the United States Army, leaving as a Specialist 4. He then did the unglamorous work that actually teaches you how a jail runs. He went into the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, trained staff, rose to Senior Captain, and served as the warden’s designee for inmate appeals. From 1990 to 1993, he was a major at the Lebanon Correctional Institution. In 1993, he became chief deputy of the Butler County Sheriff’s Office and held that job for twelve years, adding deputies, expanding jail capacity, and dragging the office into the computer age.
He picked up the credentials along the way: an associate degree in corrections from Hocking Technical College, a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Wilmington College in 1981, and a master’s in corrections from Xavier University in 1984. In November 2004, Butler County voters elected him the 45th sheriff. He took the oath on January 3, 2005. He is now in his sixth term. That is not a media creation. That is a man the same county has returned to office, again and again, while the national argument about immigration has swung from one administration to the next.
In 2004 he put up the sign. “Illegal Aliens Here,” with an arrow pointing at the jail. The federal government was then in the habit of saying it did not know where illegal aliens were. Jones’s answer was a piece of roadside honesty: they are in my jail. The sign has come down and gone back up as presidents have changed. The sheriff has not. In 2006 he was already running billboards that said “Hire an illegal — break the law,” taking out newspaper ads, and opening a tip line on employers. Twenty years later, he is still on the same subject. Consistency is not fashionable. It is, in a sheriff, a virtue.
Immigration Is the Issue Because It Was Designed to Be
His main topic has always been immigration, and he has been a real enforcer of the law, not a press-release enforcer. Butler County had a contract to house federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled it because of the Biden administration’s rules. Two days after the 2024 election, he was already talking to federal officials about restoring the capacity. By early 2025, the “Illegal Aliens Here” sign was part of the public argument again. In February 2025, the county reentered an agreement to house U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees. Since March 2025, the jail has been holding them. Jones has a 287(g) agreement, covering both the jail-enforcement model and the task-force model, and he has said that fifty to sixty of his deputies have been trained by federal agents for that work.
In a WCPO interview in late September 2026, tied to the book, he said roughly 450 people in his jail were held on immigration matters, and that about 6,000 people had been deported from the Butler County Jail over the prior eighteen or nineteen months. Those are not theoretical numbers. That is a sheriff’s office doing the job most jurisdictions in this part of Ohio will not do.
He also said, in that same interview, that the second Trump term “messed up” the early execution, that they “went about it the wrong way,” and that you cannot deport twenty or twenty-five million people on the timetable some people imagine. National outlets immediately tried to spin that into a sheriff “turning on MAGA.” I do not buy the spin. I have watched this man long enough to know the difference between a critic and a man who says what he thinks. He has called Trump a real leader. He likes the bluntness. He thinks the economy has moved in the right direction. He also thinks a federal bureaucracy that has to fire people, hire people, and find its footing will make a mess on the way to a policy. That is not betrayal. That is the same habit that makes him say the thing on the weather segment. You want that habit in your party. A party that can only tolerate applause is not a party. It is a fan club.
Deporting everybody does not, by itself, solve the whole problem. I agree with him on that, and I have said it in my own way for years. Enforcement is necessary. It is not sufficient. You also have to promote the country you are enforcing on behalf of. You have to say, out loud, why the law exists. You have to be willing to do it on WLW, on Channel 9, on Channel 5, on Fox, and, if that is where the audience is that day, in the weather. The strategy against us has been to get people stuck in a bureaucratic decision, transfer information and loyalty away from the host culture, and husk out society from the inside. I know immigrants who are more American than a lot of people born here, people who have not lost touch with how good it is to live in this country. Sheriff Jones has been one of the most consistent cheerleaders of that distinction for at least twenty years, and by his own count longer. Legal immigration can be expanded. Illegal entry cannot be treated as a civil right. He has been clear on both.
The Weather, the Wipers, and the Point of Being Clever
Which brings me back to the weather. I thought it was Channel 9, and the recent long interview was, in fact, WCPO (Channel 9) with Stephen Knobel, posted around September 24, 2026, under the heading of immigration and leadership. The sheriff’s own office has also been putting a weekly weather outlook in front of people, which tells you something about how he thinks about an audience. He does not wait for the national shows to call. He goes where the county already is.
And yes, I enjoyed the windshield-wiper bit. A stiff man cannot do that. A consultant cannot do that. A man who has spent his life in rooms where the next sentence has to be true can get handed a forecast and still sound like himself. It is clever, it is local, and it is funny, and funny is not the opposite of serious. Funny is how a serious man keeps the room. Butler County has always produced characters who understand that. Jungle Jim Bonaminio turned a produce stand across from the old Fisher Body plant into one of the country’s most unusual independent grocers. Sheriff Jones turned a Hamilton upbringing and a corrections career into a national immigration argument without ever really leaving the county. I will take both. I would rather have a county that produces originals than a county that produces spokespeople.
He wears the suit jacket with the American flag on it. He has the cowboy hat. He has had the snub-nose where a snub-nose belongs. He will tell you about the lawyers, and he will tell you about the jail, and he will not sand it down for a panel. That is the man I want as sheriff. That is the man I want in the party. Working with him can be challenging. He is a hard person to get along with if your idea of politics is a permanent compromise of your own position. I do not think the answer is to become him. The answer is to find the common cause and do the work. On immigration and on law and order, the common cause is obvious. A president can set the policy. He still needs Tom Homan; he still needs sheriffs, and he still needs people who came into the fight from different rooms and different ethical habits. You are not a king. You are a president. The freebies of the Obama years, of Obamacare, of the Biden credit-card bill, do not vanish because a new man takes the oath. Somebody pays. I warned about that while it was happening. The people now complaining about prices are often the same people who applauded the spending. The midterms are not the moment to wander off in search of a purer candidate. They are the moment to rally behind what has actually been accomplished and to keep the enforcers in the field.
The Jail, From the Other Side of the Glass
I have seen the Butler County Jail from the other side of the usual tour. I sat as foreman of a Butler County grand jury, and I have been around that building enough to have an opinion that is not borrowed from a press release. It is not a resort. It is also not the worst thing in the world, and I don’t think Sheriff Jones gets enough credit for how the place is actually run. He talks about the food. I would not say it the way he says it, but I will say this much from my own ethical seat: if you are serving a long sentence and you are eating the burger they serve in that jail every day, you are eating a better burger than the speeches against him would lead you to believe. I do not think he has a contemptuous relationship with the people in his custody. I think he runs a serious jail, and I am proud of it. I am proud that it is our jail.
The critics do not usually argue the operations. They argue the premise. In September 2026, Butler County for Immigrant Justice protested outside the Government Center in Hamilton and called the 287(g) agreement immoral. Around the same time, Jones and West Chester got into a public dispute over a September 14 fender-bender and whether township officers should have turned an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. The sheriff’s office arrested the man on September 18. Township officials disputed the sheriff’s account of their policy. There was also, in May, a federal lawsuit from a former ICE detainee alleging an assault in the jail; an internal investigation reported no assault, and the office denied the claim and stood behind its staff while the case was active. I am not going to pretend every allegation in a jail is fiction. I am going to say I have watched this operation more closely than the people holding the signs, and I trust the man who’s been willing to put his name on the door.
Read the Book
The book is They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. It came out on May 18, 2026. It is 294 pages long. I enjoyed it. I learned things about him as a younger man in Butler County that I did not know, even after years of watching him in public, and I have lived in this county my whole life. It is a practical explanation of why Butler County works as well as it does: law first, straight talk, no patience for the swamp, a memory of an older America in which extended families lived near one another, and neighbors still knew each other’s names. That older America is the one he keeps returning to. It is also the one I grew up in, a few miles down the road.
If you want to understand the sheriff instead of the caricature, read the book. If you want to understand the county, read the book and then look at the jail, the sign, and the number of times the voters have sent him back.
What I Had
I miss the old life more now than I missed it when I was in it. That is the ordinary trick of age. If I could buy it back, the church, the Sunday night, the bag of chips on the way home, I would think hard about the price. I don’t think I would change the course. I didn’t have the context then for how good it was.
We went to church most Sundays. My parents were active. I knew the pastor extremely well. I went through catechism. The church was off Nilles Road in Fairfield along Winton Road, and after the service we would drive past Jungle Jim’s as it grew, year after year, from the roadside stand across from Fisher Body into the monster it became, one of the biggest independent grocers in the country and about as Butler County a thing as exists. Sometimes we stopped for a bag of chips or a pop. Sometimes it was Chester’s pizza for Sunday night. Then The Wonderful World of Disney, back before the house had air-conditioning, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom at seven. I loved that show. I loved every Sunday for those reasons, life in Butler County.
After that we worked. We cut the grass. We worked the garden. We did the things a household does when the household still believes work is part of the day, not an interruption of it. I have had a lot of comments lately about my work ethic. I learned it there. I look at younger people now, and I do not blame them for missing what nobody handed them. I do think they would benefit from a little more of that life than the present culture is willing to admit. A church on Sunday, a grocer who started with rejected potatoes and a truck, a sheriff who grew up in Hamilton and stayed: these are not nostalgia props. They are a civilizational technology. They are how a county transmits a standard.
Ethically, there are not enough values out there right now. I can see that more clearly at this age than I could when I was driving past Jungle Jim’s with a bag of chips, half listening to my parents, thinking about Wild Kingdom. The context arrives late. That does not make it less true.
Purity Is Not a Strategy
So here is the political point, and I will come back to the ethics of it in the series I have been building. A big-tent party is not a party without standards. It is a party that can tell the difference between a standard and a vanity. Immigration is a standard. The law is a standard. The willingness to say both of those things on a neutral platform, and to keep saying them after the headlines turn, is a standard. Sheriff Jones meets it. He is a Butler County kid who grew up and did the job. He is on Channel 9 talking about immigration and, when the segment allows it, about whether it is going to rain. He is a pride of this county in the same family of local facts as Jungle Jim’s, not because the two men are the same, but because both of them are unmistakably from here.
I love the Republican Party more with him in it than without him. I want the people who are strong on Trump and strong on immigration in the same room as the sheriff who will tell you the execution has been uneven. That argument is allowed. The alternative is a purity spiral that hands the institutions to people who do not believe in the country at all. If you do not have the law, you do not have a society to argue about. Immigration is one place the law has been deliberately hollowed out. Sheriff Jones saw it early, built a record on it, wrote it down, and is still willing to go on the air and say it.
Read They Call Me Jonesy. You will get the man, not the montage. And if you are building a party worth belonging to, leave a chair for the sheriff in the flag jacket. We are going to need him.
NOTES
1. Butler County Sheriff’s Office, “Sheriff,” biographical sketch of Richard K. Jones, https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff. See also the author note to Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). Born October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio. Hamilton City Schools. United States Army, combat engineer, 1973-1975, Specialist 4.
2. Ibid. County and office biographies place the Lebanon Correctional Institution major’s posting from 1990 to 1993 and the chief-deputy years from 1993 until he took office as sheriff in January 2005. Education: associate degree in corrections, Hocking Technical College, 1979; bachelor’s in criminal justice, Wilmington College, 1981; master’s in corrections, Xavier University, 1984.
3. Elected November 2004 as the 45th sheriff of Butler County. Took office January 3, 2005. Reelected to a sixth term in November 2024. See Butler County Sheriff’s Office biography, and Lauren Pack, “Sheriff Richard Jones makes it clear illegal immigrants are in his jail, but he is not housing ICE prisoners – yet,” Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025.
4. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025. The “Illegal Aliens Here” sign, with an arrow pointing at the jail, went up in 2004. Jones: “Originally the government said there were no illegal aliens. They said they don’t know where they are at. So I put that giant sign up with an arrow pointing to the jail in case they couldn’t find them. I let them know they were in my jail.” The sign has come down and gone back up as administrations changed. It was put back into the public argument in early 2025.
5. Julia Preston, “Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog,” The New York Times, July 31, 2006. Six billboards in Butler County read “Hire an illegal – break the law!” Jones also took out newspaper advertisements, opened a tip line on employers, and kept the yellow “Illegal Aliens Here” street signs outside the jail.
6. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025; Journal-News, May 19, 2026, and September 30, 2026; Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Butler County housed federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled the contract over Biden administration rules. Two days after the 2024 election he was back in contact with ICE. The county reentered an agreement to house ICE detainees in February 2025. Housing resumed in March 2025. Jones has a 287(g) agreement covering the Jail Enforcement Model and the Task Force Model. He told Local 12 that 50 to 60 deputies had been trained by federal agents. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported the jail holds up to 848 maximum- and medium-security inmates, and that the sheriff’s office is paid $68 per day and $36 per hour to transport ICE detainees to the airport.
7. “Butler County sheriff says Trump administration ‘went about it the wrong way’ on immigration,” Journal-News, September 30, 2026, reporting the WCPO interview with Stephen Knobel. Jones’s figures: about 450 people in the jail held on immigration matters, and about 6,000 people deported from the Butler County Jail over the preceding 18 to 19 months. He also said, “You can’t deport 20, 25 million people,” and “I don’t even think [Trump’s] deported maybe over a million.”
8. The Daily Beast headline of September 24, 2026, “JD Vance’s Ultra-Trumpy Hometown Sheriff Richard Jones Turns on MAGA,” is the clearest example of the spin. The underlying WCPO quotes acknowledge early execution problems in the second term (“Has it been kind of messed up when they first started this under the second term? Sure they have.” “Did they go about it in the wrong way? Sure they did.”) and the practical limits of mass removal. They do not renounce enforcement, the 287(g) agreement, or Jones’s description of Trump as a real leader. In the same interview he said he likes Trump’s bluntness and what he sees as positive movement in the economy. See also WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” September 24, 2026.
9. WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” posted September 24, 2026, interviewer Stephen Knobel. The sheriff’s office has also posted weekly National Weather Service outlooks under its own name, including a September 28, 2026 outlook introduced by meteorologist Natalie Fitzpatrick on the office account.
10. Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Demonstrators with Butler County for Immigrant Justice called for an end to the 287(g) agreement outside the Government Center in Hamilton. Jones’s reply, as reported: “The whole system’s broke and won’t be fixed by either party. So, we can’t allow people to come into this country illegally and not know who they are and where they’re at.”
11. Matthew Cupelli, “How a fender bender led to Butler County sheriff, West Chester dispute,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 26, 2026, updated September 27, 2026. The collision was September 14, 2026. No injuries. Jones said a West Chester policy kept officers from turning an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. Township officials said that was false. The sheriff’s office arrested the 26-year-old man on September 18. Jones said he was from Mexico, had been in the United States four years, and would likely be deported.
12. Journal-News, “New Butler County Jail lawsuit alleges assault of ICE detainee,” May 19, 2026, and “Internal investigations shows no assault on Butler County Jail detainee,” May 28, 2026. Attorneys for Luis Tenelanda sued Sheriff Richard Jones, Sgt. Corneal Rowe, and the county on May 18, 2026. The office denied the allegations, cited a 2025 internal investigation that found no assault, and declined further comment while litigation was active.
13. Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (May 18, 2026), 294 pages, ISBN 979-8253821909. In the book he describes Trump as a real leader and returns to the phrase “The America I once knew.”
14. Jungle Jim’s International Market places the Fairfield beginning in 1973, across from Fisher Body, after earlier produce selling out of a truck. James O. “Jungle Jim” Bonaminio, born 1949 in Lorain, Ohio. First store opened in 1975 at about 4,200 square feet. See Jungle Jim’s, “The Jungle Jim Story,” https://junglejims.com/about-us.
15. WLWT, “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation of CPS grad, high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants,” June 28, 2025. Jones said the office then had ten deputies with ICE-equivalent arrest authority, wanted ten more, and expected to have about fifty. At that point he said Butler County was the only jurisdiction in Ohio with that arrangement, and that the jail was the only ICE holding facility in the Greater Cincinnati area.
ICE, “Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g),” ice.gov, is the practical companion to the local record. For the older national argument Jones walked into, see Julia Preston, New York Times, July 31, 2006, and the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General reviews of 287(g) from 2010 onward. For the county side of the same years, the Journal-News archive on the ICE contract from 2003 through the June 2021 cancellation and the February 2025 reinstatement is the cleanest local paper trail.
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 hinting at this for weeks, and I still won’t say exactly what I am doing. I can tell you the shape of it. I have been toying with a Ph.D. for several years, and I think the trigger has finally been pulled. I already know what the doctoral thesis will be. A version of it will live on the blog, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years to hear the argument. A humanities dissertation runs on the order of 80,000 words. That is a long walk. It is also, if you do it right, a bridge between things the academy will not put in the same room.
I am not happy about what has happened to academia. I am not happy that a credential which was supposed to mean rigor has been rendered, in too many departments, into a party card for liberal politics. I think there are a lot of problems with that, and I would like to get on that side of the argument for my own reasons. A Ph.D. is a tool. It is not a personality. It gives you a seat in a fight that otherwise dismisses you as a blogger with a whip and a podcast. I do not want the universities left entirely to people who have already decided the conclusion. Big tent, small tent, ethics, the lack of ethics: this is the same argument I have been making about parties and about sheriffs. If you will not go into the room, you do not get to complain that the room was captured.
The thesis comes out of The Politics of Heaven. Even while I am doing everything else, if I write several books in that line, and if I am involved in aerospace work that makes money and does cool things, none of that changes the strategy. Money is a tool. You do not do the long work to get paid for it. The Politics of Heaven, in the draft I have been editing, is over 200,000 words. The published book will be shorter. Parts of it are clean. I’m combining two bodies of evidence in the same paragraph because few others have read both piles. The politics of heaven, as I am using the phrase, are my speculations built on a very wide reading. Very few people read as much of this material as I do, or as diversely. I put things together in places the guild system of the sciences cannot handle, because the guild system is paid to stay in its lane. There needs to be a bridge. If I am going to write a thesis anyway, I might as well make the bridge the doctorate.
People I trust with a book want an entry. They want to know the information has been through a fight. Academic argument, when it is actually argument and not a loyalty oath, comes across better if you get on their side of the table and make them defend the status quo. I think I have a hook. Less than one percent of the people who encounter it are going to love it. Everyone else will scratch their heads and say they are not ready. That is fine. A lot of what I assert is not laboratory science. It is immersion. It is psychology. It is a lifetime of reading. I make assertions that are not “scientifically grounded” in the sense a journal referee means, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. They are grounded in experience, in a level of ethical attention, and in a concern I am willing to name: the ethical behavior of the spirit world, how it moves against the human race, and how it plots against God’s design. That is the concern. I am not worried about putting the frame of it out here. Somebody might try to steal it. I’m happy to share them and see if anyone can do anything with them. Most people cannot.
The thesis, as I am presuming to pursue it, is Jason Voorhees: why he is scary, and why Yahweh had to save the world from the gods of Canaan. And why those are not two subjects.
A book I saw advertised through Biblical Archaeology Review took the very progressive line that the Palestinians are the indigenous people and that Israel is the invader, the same argument you hear about American Indians. I heard a woman out of Portland, Oregon, the other day, talking about the drug problem on those streets, the cities run by blue mayors, and she concluded that we need to teach kids to do drugs, because the Indians were doing drugs, talking to spirits, going on vision quests. Democrats, in that telling, need this to happen to our young people. Break them away from their parents at twelve and thirteen. Send them on a spirit journey under drug consumption. Let them communicate with the other world. Coyote. Peyote. The vision.
I am writing, among other things, about why you should not do that, and about what you are actually encountering when you go looking for the spirit world on those terms. I talk about three rivers a lot. I talk about the origin stories of the Aztecs. I talk about a claim almost no working archaeologist or anthropologist will yet admit in public, which is that the Noah story has a geographical hook in eastern Turkey that the guild retired, and that some of the people who wrote the retirement papers are themselves retired, and that methods we were told settled the question are being reopened because the ground will not stay closed. I am saying yes to some of those reopenings because I know where the argument is going. For me, proof is not a single carbon date. Proof is accumulated experience and a willingness to read the thing the department will not assign.
So the thesis, in a sentence: Jason Voorhees and how Yahweh saved the human race from the gods of Canaan; the rest of the map is the same type. Indian cultures. Central Mexican cultures. Large parts of South America. If we were allowed to explore the same questions in Russia, China, Afghanistan, and India with the same honesty, we would know more about them too. I hear the argument every week that Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the Hindu traditions are older than Christianity, and the related argument that Hindu and Buddhist ideas migrated into the community around Jesus, that John the Baptist was a rebel against orthodox Judaism, that Greek society had already been in those eastern regions for two or three hundred years before the Roman machine arrived, with its gods and its planetary worship and its mystery cults. We would also understand the dolmens of the Jordan Valley better than we do. We would ask a ruder question: why do we have stone chambers in New England, and mound-and-monument landscapes in the northern Great Lakes and the Michigan peninsula, that keep getting explained away as root cellars and colonial oddities. At the same time, the Jordan field is allowed to be religion? Those are good questions. They are not simple. They are the complicated kind of simple, the kind that looks obvious once you stop protecting the departmental border.
Here is the hook I plan to share before November. The thirteenth villain, the one America actually produced, could not have been created anywhere but here. No other artistic culture had the combination. A commercial horror film, made for almost nothing, aimed at teenagers, indifferent to critics’ approval, and then kept alive by the audience for forty-six years. That figure explains something the ancient Near Eastern texts only describe from the other side: why people worshiped the deities of Canaan, why Yahweh was necessary, why the land had to be cleared of rival cults if anyone wanted a garden rather than an altar, why there could not be another god before him, and why human beings keep drifting back to the lesser worship anyway. I will explain more of the operational evidence after Halloween. I cannot discuss that part yet. I can tell you I am obsessed with why Jason Voorhees was invented in American cinema, and why people are still obsessed with him.
I got interested again when I saw how people reacted. My grandkids and my wife play Dead by Daylight on the PlayStation 5 a lot, all the time. I wanted to know why this character was in the room. I remembered him from when I was a teenager. In those years, you watched the movies because you wanted to see kids get killed and you wanted the cheap thrill, and you filed it under science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and you moved on. He did not move on. Then I realized there was a psychological mechanism under the costume, and I immersed myself in it until I had something I could call objective evidence. Enough, I think, for 80,000 words on why Jason Voorhees matters in the art and entertainment of human cultures, and why he had to be invented in America.
The academic position I want to refuse is the one that treats indigenous worship as automatically virtuous. Worship of lesser gods, as against Yahweh, or against what I will call for the thesis an Alpha claim on the divine, is not a heritage to be restored. It is a psychology. It has a shape. It shows up in Canaan. It shows up in the vision-quest argument. It shows up in the woman who thinks the drug policy of a failing city is a sacrament. It shows up, dressed as entertainment, in a hockey mask. If you want to talk about the psychology of goodness in a culture, and about how you defend a big-tent civilization against people who think every altar is equal, you have to be willing to look at the altar people actually kneel at when nobody from the department is watching.
This will be a quiet undertaking. It is not the thing that makes the money. I think it is needed if the human race is going to get a psychological look at itself that is not written by the people who already agree with the Portland sermon. For my part, I jump off the board before the pool is finished filling. A lot of things have to happen on the way down. I have often made the large moves under dangerous circumstances, because that is where the world actually is. You do not find the treasure by doing the same thing everyone else is doing. I think I have found something in Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13th series: why human beings are so ready to worship an idea, and why a certain kind of academia wants to point everyone toward the indigenous deity and call it liberation. That is why the drug argument keeps coming back. I understand why people feel that way. I do not feel anything close to it. Liberal-minded people, tending to vote Democrat, accommodate the opinion because they have talked themselves into believing every spirit is a friend if it arrives wearing the costume of the oppressed. I have a different reading now of why Jason is revered across cultures and across decades, and why he became a killer in Dead by Daylight not as a memory of the movies but as a current character. I know him from the movies, from the games, and from everything that has cascaded off him. I have watched that cascade go through generations.
I am deep in it. It will not make anyone rich. The information I have learned is more than most people will ever care to know about the character and about the public reaction to him. In November, I will share the details I can’t share now. It is the doctoral idea. To help the academics, I will put it on ground they already understand, and on ground everybody else understands: a horror movie. It is a good comment. It is a big concept. I am going to use it to launch the reasoning about why those older worships were dangerous, why people still practice them, why they are still impactful, and why a society that wants to fix itself has to fix that before it fixes the tax bill.
It will be entertaining. I promise that. Some of the apocalyptic discussions I have had came from real reflection, because I put myself through a considerable amount of discomfort to see the thing from the inside. It is not enough to stand on the dock and throw a theory at the water. You have to go in with the sharks and the snakes and the vipers and see what is actually down there. I would like it to be easier. I want the design of the world to be more accommodating to personal pleasure. Here is the deal. I will get further into this over the coming weeks and months as I work up to it. A thesis, in the ordinary academic calendar, is five or six years of hard work. In another sense, I have already been at the reading for longer than that. I know what the end needs to be. It needs to be this. And it has an academic entrance, which you cannot use unless you have gone down the rabbit hole past Alice, further by a lot. That is what I am talking about. I think I understand Jason Voorhees, the public reaction to him, the fascination, and why the human race turns away from Yahweh and Jesus Christ and finds itself worshiping the old neighbors.
The Jewish people worshiped the calf when Moses took too long coming down with the commandments. The guidance drifted. Even Aaron drifted. He drifted for a reason. What is the reason? I think I have it. I will put it in the books, in the thesis, and in future academic work. I will also put it here, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years. Putting it out helps me. The feedback helps. People send notes. They ask questions I had not framed. I get a better answer, and I refine it. That is the process. It is not always the way I would design it. It has been working.
A dose of reality with a fire under it has been hard. This particular immersion has been out of my comfort zone. It will make for a richer discussion, which is the point of the effort. Job titles are transitory. Acquisitions are transitory. Most of them are built on compliance with human systems. I mean compliance with a cosmic claim. The Bible is not a hint. I think it is part of a larger story we are going to be covering for thousands of years, and that we miraculously captured some of it through prophets and through voices that managed to get a portion written down, and that the portion lasted through purges and reformations and kingdoms and empires to reach us.
I find that survival a miracle. There is a lot more, and when a generation is done with the portion it inherited, it still has to ask questions. It has to cut into the topic with evidence-based trajectories. That is what I am doing. I wish it were easier to get. If it were easy, more people would do it. Very few have the stomach for the fight. I have gone down the rabbit hole. I have seen what is down there. I know a treasure was left behind, and I think it is my task, because I have been given a voice, to bring some of that treasure into the light.
The structural thesis on Jason Voorhees is the door. I think people are going to get a kick out of it. It is going to be fun. If you liked The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you’ll know the voice. The subject is different. The standard is not.
NOTES
1. A typical humanities doctoral thesis in the United States and Britain falls somewhere around 80,000 to 100,000 words, excluding bibliography. I am using 80,000 as the working target, not as a university requirement already assigned to me. I am not enrolled in a program as of this writing. The point of saying the number is to mark the scale: this is not a blog post, and it is not a five-year wait for the blog either.
2. The Politics of Heaven is the manuscript I have described elsewhere as completed in draft in 2026, in final edits, and aimed at publication in 2027. The draft I am editing has run past 200,000 words. The published book will be cut down. The thesis is a bridge out of that book, not a substitute for it.
3. Friday the 13th, produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, written by Victor Miller, opened in the United States on May 9, 1980. Budget reported under $600,000. Domestic gross about $39.8 million; worldwide about $59.8 million. It was the first independent slasher picked up by a major studio, Paramount. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, revised 2026; Ryan Gilbey, “Friday the 13th at 40,” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.
4. In the first film, the killer is Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother. Jason himself appears at the end as a jump scare. Makeup designer Tom Savini has said the beat was his idea after Carrie: “let’s bring in Jason.” Victor Miller later objected to the sequels making Jason the killer: “Jason was dead from the very beginning. He was a victim, not a villain.” That argument inside the creative team is part of the evidence. The culture did not accept the victim. It promoted the corpse. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, production history.
5. The hockey mask arrives in Friday the 13th Part III, released August 13, 1982, directed by Steve Miner, the only film in the series released in 3-D. On-set accounts say a Detroit Red Wings goaltender mask belonging to 3-D effects supervisor Martin Jay Sadoff was put on actor Richard Brooker for a lighting test, then enlarged by makeup effects. In Part 2, Jason had worn a sack. The mask is an American industrial object, a piece of sporting armor, not a cult image designed by a priest. That is the point.
6. The franchise then did what Canaanite cults did. It would not stay dead. Sequels, a 2009 reboot, a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street, novels, song references from Tupac to Eminem, The Simpsons, and, in 2026, a playable killer. Gilbey notes that Jason became the first fictional character to receive an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award. The culture promoted a murderer of teenagers into an institution.
7. Dead by Daylight, from Behavior Interactive, added Jason as Chapter 40 on June 16, 2026. In the game, he is called The Slasher. The chapter shipped as paid downloadable content at $4.99 or 500 Auric Cells, with a hockey-mask cosmetic and a “Misty Cabin” banner. He joined Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, and Leatherface on the same roster. My wife and my grandchildren play the game. That is not a footnote to the thesis. That is the transmission mechanism: a character I met as a teenager is now a weekly opponent for children who were not alive for the original film.
8. The Canaanite comparison is the theological half of the thesis, and I am stating it here as my claim, not as a finding already peer-reviewed. The biblical polemic is not subtle. Israel is commanded not to do what the nations did on their high places. Child sacrifice to Molech is forbidden and treated as a capital offense (Leviticus 18:21, 20:2-5; Deuteronomy 12:31; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 32:35). The contest on Carmel is a direct trial between Yahweh and Baal (1 Kings 18). Josiah’s reform demolishes the high places, the asherim, and the Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom (2 Kings 23). John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge, 1989), belongs in the bibliography so the fight is visible. My claim is that the psychological pattern survives the argument about body counts.
9. The golden calf is the control case inside Israel itself. Exodus 32: Aaron builds the calf because the people will not wait for Moses to come down. The text does not treat this as a moment of heritage. It treats it as drift under impatience, including drift by the priest. That is the mechanism I think I can show in the modern material: absence of the harder claim, impatience, a visible substitute, and a leader who accommodates the substitute so the crowd will not leave.
10. The Portland remark is from a broadcast comment I heard, a woman arguing that children should be taught drug use because indigenous vision quests used intoxicants to speak with spirits, set against the open drug scenes of cities run by Democratic mayors. I am not hanging the thesis on her name. I am hanging it on the argument, which is now common: the pre-Christian or non-Christian rite is the authentic one, the parental household is the interruption, and the drug is the sacrament. Standard starting points on the Native American Church and peyote, which is not the same thing as a municipal drug market, include Weston La Barre, The Peyote Cult (1938 and later editions), and Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
11. On the Biblical Archaeology Review advertisement and the “Palestinians as indigenous, Israel as invader” line: BAR has long carried a range of politics alongside the archaeology, and the indigenous framing of the Palestinian claim has become a standard academic position in parts of Near Eastern studies since the 1990s, drawing on the same vocabulary used for Native American land claims. I am marking the parallel as my reading of that advertisement and of the wider literature, not as a quotation from a single editor. A fair bibliography has to carry both William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Eerdmans, 2003), and the more minimalist and postcolonial work the department actually assigns.
12. Jordan Valley dolmens are not a rumor. Fields run along the escarpment east of the Jordan, south from the Yarmuk toward the Kerak plateau, with a heavy Early Bronze Age I burial use and a possible late Chalcolithic beginning. See the radiometric dolmen paper in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2023), and David Gilead, “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100 (1968). James A. Fraser’s Dolmens in the Levant (2018) is the modern synthesis. More than a century of work has still not produced dolmens west of the Jordan south of the Upper Galilee.
13. New England stone chambers are the contested American analog, and I am not going to pretend the guild has conceded the point. The colonial root-cellar explanation is the standard one. A luminescence study of structures in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, published in 2022 in Quaternary Geochronology, reported sediment ages under some structures in the late sixteenth century, before sustained colonial settlement. That is not a Phoenician colony. It is a date that does not fit the root-cellar story cleanly. The thesis does not need the chambers to be dolmens. It needs the question to stay open.
14. The Michigan peninsula and the northern Great Lakes are a different monumental tradition: Late Woodland mounds and earthworks, roughly AD 1200-1600, not Levantine dolmens. Meghan C. L. Howey, Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600 (University of Arizona Press, 2012), is a careful book. I raise the peninsula because the public is told these are separate phenomena by disciplinary border, while the psychological function, a built place where the dead or the spirit is dealt with outside the household, keeps rhyming. The rhyme is my claim. The distinction in architecture is the academy’s fact. Both go in the thesis.
15. The Durupinar formation near Dogubayazit, eastern Turkey, is the Noah’s Ark claim I am referring to. The geological consensus, including a 1996 paper by Lorence Collins and David Fasold, “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure,” is that the boat shape is a natural formation. In 2026, a team led by Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University ran further scans and reported right-angled subsurface anomalies and higher carbon inside the formation than outside it. Mainstream outlets treated the new work as another round of a claim already rejected. I am not asking the reader to call it the Ark. I am asking why a formation that will not stay out of the news is professionally required to be a closed case, while vision-quest pharmacology is professionally required to be an open sacrament.
16. Aztec origin traditions are a separate dossier in The Politics of Heaven. The relevant point for the thesis is the public one: a civilization that built an imperial sacrificial system on a calendar of blood is still routinely taught as a heritage interrupted by Europeans, while the biblical refusal of that kind of altar is taught as the crime. The primary narrative is in the Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún and in Diego Durán. The archaeological frame is Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs. The moral question is mine.
17. Greek and eastern mystery religion in the centuries before Jesus is not an internet invention. The Hellenistic kingdoms sat on the Levant from Alexander’s campaigns in the late fourth century BC. The claim that Jesus or John the Baptist is a Buddhist or Hindu import is modern. The mainstream counter is still the Jewish context: Second Temple Palestine, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, and the Gospels. A clean entry is Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (1974).
18. The ethical claim of the thesis, which will not be popular in a religious-studies faculty, is that the spirit world has a moral direction, and that “indigenous” is not a moral category. A rite can be old and still be a violation. I am using Jason as the modern control because nobody can accuse a Paramount slasher of being a colonial slander against a living tribe. America invented him in New Jersey in 1980, out of a marketing bet on Halloween (1978). The audience then did what audiences have always done with the lesser god. It kept him, masked him, sold him, and handed him to the children.
19. I am withholding, until after Halloween and into November, the field observations from the seasonal work that put me inside the costume and inside the crowd reaction. That material is the part of the evidence I will not sketch in public yet. The thesis does not depend on gossip about a haunt. It depends on the crowd, which I have now watched from both sides of the mask.
20. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the earlier book in which I used a popular American figure to carry an argument about discipline, producers, and the refusal to live by permission. The Jason thesis is the same method on a darker subject. Readers who want the voice can start there. Readers who want the cosmology can start with The Politics of Heaven when it is out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, Lorence G., and David Fasold. “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure.” Journal of Geoscience Education, 1996.
Cunningham, Sean S., director. Friday the 13th. Paramount Pictures, 1980. Screenplay by Victor Miller.
Day, John. Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Dead by Daylight Wiki. “CHAPTER 40: Jason.” Behavior Interactive release, June 16, 2026.
Dever, William G. Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
Duran, Diego. The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated by Doris Heyden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
Fraser, James A. Dolmens in the Levant. London: Routledge, 2018.
Gilbey, Ryan. “Friday the 13th at 40: the maligned slasher that’s haunted pop culture.” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.
Gilead, David. “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100, no. 1 (1968): 16-26.
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974.
Howey, Meghan C. L. Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.
La Barre, Weston. The Peyote Cult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938.
Mahan, Shannon, and colleagues. Luminescence dating of enigmatic rock structures in New England. Quaternary Geochronology, 2022.
Miner, Steve, director. Friday the 13th Part III. Paramount Pictures, 1982.
Sahagun, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950-1982.
Smith, Michael E. The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
The Holy Bible. Exodus 32; Leviticus 18 and 20; Deuteronomy 12; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 23; Jeremiah 32.
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.
Yesterday morning, while most of America was still arguing about whether you are allowed to notice patterns, Flydubai Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with roughly 174 people on board, almost all of them Israeli. Somewhere over the route, the Omani co-pilot stabbed the Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, and the Boeing 737 MAX dropped about 17,000 feet in under two minutes. Passengers broke into the cockpit. One of them put the attacker in a chokehold. Off-duty pilots landed the airplane in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel Katz called it an attempted jihadist attack. A fellow pilot told Israeli television the co-pilot prayed excessively and refused to shake hands with women. Saudi authorities are still questioning him. Trump said he might have been a terrorist or he might have been mentally ill. That is the news cycle. What follows is the argument underneath it.
I have my copy of the Quran. I have carried a flexible edition for years so I can argue with it instead of about it. I also have my Jonathan Edwards study Bible open on the desk. Edwards died in 1758, before there was a United States. He already knew the problem. He called the two great works of the devil against the kingdom of Christ the papal kingdom in the West and the Mahometan kingdom in the East. He said Muhammad was a subtle, crafty man who pretended the Alcoran came from Gabriel, sold a sensual paradise, and propagated the religion by the sword. That is a Northampton pastor in the 1750s, not a 2026 invention.
What the Word Actually Means
Islam means submission. Not peace in the Hallmark sense. The whole system is built around total submission to Allah and to the law derived from Muhammad. Anybody who does not have submission in the vocabulary is already in trouble with the text.
That is why the political class is comfortable with it. A religion that trains people to bend the knee to an authority they are not allowed to question is useful to people who want the same habit pointed at the state. If you will not submit to the God of the Quran, the substitute arrives quickly: submit to the bureau, the school board, the speech code. Historically the faith has almost never traveled as private piety. It has traveled with a political order attached — dhimmi status, tribute, second-class standing for those who will not convert, and expansion when the numbers allow it.
I can sit at a drinking fountain with a Muslim coworker and talk about anything. I joke with them. Why are you praying toward Mecca on a cloth at a set hour? They can tell me to read the Quran. I can tell them to read the Bible. We can still shake hands and walk away. That is ordinary human contact. It is not the same thing as pretending the systems are compatible. The insecurity shows up the moment you decline to submit. Then you are the enemy. Gentle people exist inside every population. The doctrine is still the doctrine.
Edwards, Before We Had a Country
If I could put Edwards in the chair, the question would be simple. What do you think of planting the Quran in the life of a nation that still claims the gospel?
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob revealed his Son. The Quran speaks of God and denies the eternal sonship of Christ and his death upon the cross. That is a false gospel. It leads away from the only name under heaven by which men must be saved. To implement that book as a peer authority in the public life of a nation is to invite spiritual darkness onto ground already cracking under its own weight. A house divided against itself cannot stand. A people who try to honor both light and darkness will perish.
From a 1750s seat, the attempt looks like division by design. It flatters the pride of man — one God, no mediator, no scandal of the cross — while denying the Savior. A nation cannot serve two masters. It cannot honor the cross and the crescent and stay one thing. Edwards thought God would not share his glory with another. I think he was right.
Same Names, Opposite Message
Adam is in the Quran. Moses is in there. Abraham is in there. Jesus is in there as a prophet who was not crucified and is not the Son. That is spiritual plagiarism. You take the names to borrow trust, then you twist the load-bearing walls to have a strategic meaning meant to destroy Western Civilization at the ground level.
The fork in the road is the sacrifice. In Genesis the son on the mountain is Isaac, the child of the covenant marriage. In the Islamic telling the favored line runs through Ishmael, the son of Hagar, outside that marriage. That rebuilds the family tree so the covenant son is no longer the covenant son. From the first chapter of the argument, Islam is set against Israel. A religion that elevates the son who was not the child of the covenant, and then asks the world to treat that reversal as revelation, is telling you something about the spirit behind the text.
Muhammad was a merchant in a region that wanted its older habits back under a new umbrella, aimed at the Christian order in the eastern Roman world. Something came and talked to him. That does not make a man great. The traditional account is roughly twenty-three years of recitation. The thing calling itself Gabriel contradicted what the Gospels say Gabriel announced to Mary six centuries earlier. Angels do not spend two decades canceling a message they already delivered. One of them was not Gabriel. The Bible tells you to test the spirits. He submitted instead.
Who Lets the Adversary Run?
People ask why Jesus lets the adversary operate. I have heard the real-estate version: a transaction in the garden, a deed, Satan as a squatter with papers. I do not think God lost the earth. Sovereignty over creation was not handed away. What was permitted was influence over human beings who chose the lie. The patience is not incompetence. Evil is allowed so that justice and mercy can both be seen when the thing is finally crushed.
That patience is expensive. Innocent people die. The biblical claim is that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and waits because he is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. The end of the patience will be worse than the middle of it. You can hate the cost and still see why a God who intends to save refuses to end the offer early. What you cannot do is confuse that patience with approval of a rival gospel.
The Black Stone and the Unasked Question
A billion and a half people circle a stone, touch it, kiss it, and cannot tell you where it came from. Pre-Islamic practice, rebranded. Kissing a stone the stranger ahead of you just kissed is not profound. It is submission performed so that nobody has to ask. Where did the rock come from? Why these characters were borrowed from the Bible? Why is the Christology reversed? Why is criticism of Muhammad blasphemy while criticism of the church is a Tuesday?
Truth does not need a threat to survive examination. A lie does. Revelation 22:18–19 warns against adding to or taking away from the words of that prophecy. It is a seal on a book, not a police regime. The habit of the New Testament is to test everything. The habit of the other book is submit and be quiet, from the first surah to the last.
Joseph Campbell bothered me on this point. When he spoke of Gabriel appearing to Muhammad, he softened it. He wanted to stay employed at Sarah Lawrence and keep the editing work which I always thought was dishonest, intellectually. He knew better. Polite academia already had a tribute system. That pressure is worse now. It is not scholarship. It is submission with a faculty ID.
Speech Is the Battlefield They Prefer
Everyone looks for Turks at the gates. The cheaper conquest is speech. You submit in what you are allowed to say to your wife, your kids, your readers. You do not ask where the stone came from.
The radical left has spent years introducing Islamic institutional power into a culture built on the Bible, English law, and the conscience of the individual. The ideas are not compatible. A system whose end state is Islamic rule, with non-Muslims as tolerated subordinates, cannot live as a permanent equal inside a republic that treats religions as voluntary associations under a civil law nobody gets to replace. The useful idiots think they can aim this at the church and then manage the aftermath. Every civilization that tried that partnership was wrong. What a lot of people don’t say about Iran is that their government is the goal of those attacking America. That’s what is expected of us and Islam is the entry point to that kind of blind totalitarian rule. That’s why destroying Iran was important for the Trump administration. It had to happen to break the spell.
Yesterday’s cockpit is the unpolite version of the same pressure. The Crusades were a late reaction to centuries of conquest, not the opening move. The argument was never settled. It changed vehicles.
Two Things Worth Keeping
Islam means submission, by whatever method gets the knee bent: fear, law, shame, the sword, the human-resources office. And the religion took shape in the seventh century as a rival system in the borderlands of the Roman East, borrowing names, reversing the covenant son, denying the cross, and requiring a submission Christianity does not require. That ambition did not retire. If you cannot find the authority inside the religious layer, look at the next layer up. Government is always happy to become the thing you submit to.
The pilot who opened the cockpit door while he was bleeding did not submit. Neither should we.
Footnotes and the bibliography — Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption, the Miscellanies, McDermott, Ibn Ishaq, Bat Ye’or, Genesis 16–22, Revelation 22:18–19, and the 30 September wire copy from BBC, Reuters, Times of Israel, and PBS
Notes
1. Keir Starmer, 26 September 2025, announcing the digital-ID scheme: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” BBC, “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK,” 26 September 2025; BBC explainer, updated 23 October 2025. Darren Jones called a working system “the bedrock of the modern state.” A petition to scrap the scheme approached three million signatures.
2. The scheme was described as an app on the phone, carrying name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and a photograph, mandatory for proving the right to work by the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029), not required to be carried, and not retrospective for people already in a job. BBC, 23 October 2025.
3. On 14 January 2026 the Telegraph reported that Labour had dropped compulsory digital ID for right-to-work checks, describing it as the eleventh U-turn, while sources still spoke of mandatory digital checks as distinct from a compulsory card. The September sentence remains the clearest statement of intent.
4. U.S. “right to work” statutes bar compulsory union membership or dues as a condition of employment. Indiana is a right-to-work state; Ohio is not. The British phrase in Starmer’s announcement means the opposite: state permission as a condition of employment.
5. Amy Acton was director of the Ohio Department of Health during the 2020 orders. Subsequent litigation tested those orders against the Ohio Constitution. The employer-side account here is mine, from operating through the orders while those cases were being built.
6. Applicant-tracking systems and automated résumé screens are standard in large U.S. firms. The disparate-impact and DEI sorting layered on those systems expanded after 2020 and has been contested in federal policy since 2025. My 2026 job search is the field report; it is not a national census.
7. Real ID and passport-level identity checks for employment eligibility (Form I-9, E-Verify) tightened the document set employers will accept. I was required to produce a passport repeatedly in 2026 hiring processes.
8. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are the dominant U.S. index complexes. Their proxy and ESG policies in the early 2020s were a transmission belt from asset-manager politics into corporate HR. Political and legal pushback since 2023 has narrowed, not ended, that belt.
9. Vinyl’s return is a measured market, not a metaphor only. RIAA data through the mid-2020s show vinyl as the majority of physical music revenue, driven by ownership rather than by audio quality. The Cracker Barrel gift-shop scene is mine, with my grandsons.
10. Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, on the papal and Mahometan kingdoms as the two great rival orders that swallowed the Roman world.
11. Socialist International membership and the historic sympathies of Western socialist parties for the Cuban revolution and for Central American insurgencies are a matter of public record. Canada’s and Mexico’s governing models are social-democratic and corporatist respectively; neither is a classical liberal republic.
Bibliography
BBC News. “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK.” 26 September 2025.
BBC News. “What are digital ID cards, how will they work and will they be mandatory?” Updated 23 October 2025.
BBC News. “No digital ID checks until you change jobs, says No 10.” 23 October 2025.
Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, 1941.
Edwards, Jonathan. A History of the Work of Redemption. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 9, edited by John F. Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, completed 2026; publication targeted 2027.
Mises, Ludwig von. Bureaucracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism. 1922. English edition, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Murray, Charles. Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. New York: Twelve, 2020.
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 proud of President Trump. I say that first because I have spent years decoding the obvious, and I don’t intend to pretend I discovered courage last week. I walked people through the exile years. I did the COVID coverage when it was still lonely work. I was calling balls and strikes before a lot of the later names had a show. Laura Loomer has done hard work. Natalie Winters has done hard work from a young age. The War Room lane has done hard work. I respect the daily calling of hypocrisy. I also think that lane, by itself, never gets to the doing. Recognition without a mechanism is how evil keeps the back office while we argue about the headline.[1]
I have shifted gears. Not away from Trump. Toward the machinery that outlasts him.
I USED TO SIT IN A COMFORTABLE CHAIR AND CALL BALLS AND STRIKES
For a long time I had a comfortable place to sit. Call it a cloud. Call it a good office. I could look down on the news cycle, name the lie, and go home. That is useful. It is also incomplete. Hypocrisy reporting is a spotlight. Evil works in the dark behind the spotlight, on purpose, while the audience stares at the bright circle.
The hardships I have been talking about in my own professional life were not a detour from the political argument. They were the laboratory. Once you are no longer sitting in the clubhouse, you see how the game is actually rigged. Corporate America. Easy Federal Reserve money. China in the supply chain and in the information pipe. HR departments as political enforcement. Flippers who buy a shop and call compliance a personality. I have covered that combination for years. I have now lived a chapter of it at ground level. Micro teaches macro. The same pattern that ruins a company ruins a republic.[2]
Pickle Rick was not a joke. If you are going to call balls and strikes, you cannot live on the owner’s floor. You cannot take the rigged clubhouse deal and then pretend you still have clean eyes. I put myself outside the comfortable chair on purpose. That is why the reporting sounds different now. I am not interested in announcing that we have a problem. I want the problem named at the layer where it is actually built.
WE HAVE NOT HAD A SYSTEM THAT RESPECTED VOTERS
This is October 1st, 2026. The midterms are November 3. Thirty days or so. I am not sitting here assuming Republicans have already lost the House and the Senate. I am sitting here watching a regime of people who have controlled the machinery for a long time try to convince you the race is already over so you will stay on the couch.[3]
We have not had what they call democracy in the clean-textbook sense. We have had a controlled, manipulated administrative state that learned a simple math problem. A 30-year career outlasts a 2-year House term, a 6-year Senate term, and even a 4-year presidency. They reveal elections. Then they outlast whoever slides through. Checks on power were meant to slow radicalism. The deep state learned to use those same checks as a parking brake on anyone the voters actually sent.[4]
I know this from men I have spoken with privately. Bernie Moreno. Warren Davidson. Others who went to Washington from my world. I have been close enough to Congress and the Senate to hear what they sound like when the cameras are off. I know who they were when they went in. I know what the building does to a mission. The system is designed to stop the mission. It is the same design I have seen in corporate cultures. New owner. New process. Same rotting joists. The title on the door changes. The permanent staff does not.[5]
THE IMPEACHMENT HEADLINE IS NOT A LEGAL DOCUMENT. IT IS A TAILGATE
I read the news Saturday morning the way I always do, through a lot of inputs. The outlets were already wet with impeachment—Yahoo-style aggregation. Democrats talking impeachment as if it were weather. Impeach him for what? He is the president the country put in office, and a large part of the opposition class cannot think past social takeover as a governing theory.[6]
Look at the actual paper on the table this month, not the feeling. On September 15, the House tabled Al Green’s latest impeachment attempt. Democrats split. Leadership voted present. On September 24, Steve Cohen filed 26 articles covering everything from Iran to immigration to emoluments. Hakeem Jeffries is already telling reporters that if Democrats take the House, oversight will be vast and impeachment is “not ruled out.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth already has articles hanging over him from Thomas Massie over the Iran war. That is not a completed removal. That is a war machine. It is built to make you feel like your side already lost, so you will not get up in November.[7]
I have used the tailgate picture because it is the most honest one I have. You wear your jersey into the other team’s parking lot. They put an arm around you. They sell you a hot dog. They tell you, friendly as Sunday, that your team is going to get destroyed. The point is not information. The point is to make you feel stupid for showing up. Democratic media does that at an industrial scale because the advertising model needs your despair. If you believe your side can win, you are harder to monetize and harder to keep home. If you believe the thing is already over, you stay on the couch while their people walk.[8]
POLLS ARE A WEAPON. TURNOUT IS THE ONLY COUNTER
I will not lie to you about the temperature. Generic ballots in late September are ugly for Republicans. Some aggregators have Democrats up by several points. Forecast shops are assigning the House to Democrats at high confidence and treating the Senate as a coin that has started to lean. Trump’s national approval is being printed in the high 30s by the same class of numbers that has been wrong before and will be wrong again if the people who actually vote decide the numbers are a dare.[9]
That is the point of the suppression. They do not need you to love their candidates. They need you to believe resistance is already futile. They need Republicans who have learned to live inside the old control system—comfortable calendar, known vacation, decent pay, no appetite for real reform—to sit still and hope the storm misses the golf course. How many men, alone on a tee box with nobody watching, will still take the honest lie? If they will cheat a stroke when the only prize is a par, why would you trust them with a republic when the prize is a career.[10]
GAS, IRAN, AND THE MEN WHO LICK THE BOOTS IN THE ROOM
I said I thought gas would be under two dollars by the summer of 2026. It is not. National averages this year ran from the low threes before the Iran escalation, spiked toward the mid-fours in May, kissed four dollars after a June paper ceasefire, and then climbed again when the fight did not stay dead—Labor Day printed above four. That is not the number I wanted. It is also not a mystery.[11]
Iran is being used as a straw man for price. As long as a war, a blockade, a rumor of the Strait, or a tent full of men who can still light a fuse exists, refiners and traders have a story. They will smile at the gold trim in the White House. Strong executives always get that smile. Then they talk on the way to the car. I have watched that smile in companies. I have been in the room. The Iran file is being stretched because stretched files protect margins and protect the permanent war party that wants Trump blamed for a fight they have been feeding for decades.[12]
We did not vote for a forever war. We voted for cheaper energy and a country that is not managed by the people who never leave. Forever war is how you wait a president out. Afghanistan already taught that lesson to anyone willing to read a graveyard. A movement that can pitch a tent and find water can outlast a news cycle. Radical Islamic politics and Marxist economics are not opposites in the field. They are often the same engine with different slogans. As long as the tent has water, the fire keeps a little wind.[13]
CHINA, HONG KONG, IRAN, AND A STRANGE CHANGE ON MY SITE
I have watched my own traffic for years. For a long stretch, there were two persistent hits a day from China, like a pair of regulators taking attendance. A few months ago that changed. I started seeing 37 to 40 hits a day from China. That is not a standing ovation. That is a change in the pipe. Somebody stopped capping the faucet, or somebody started studying the faucet. Either way, the information war is not only domestic.[14]
Hong Kong showed what happens when a population gets a window and does not finish the job. Iran is the same kind of window with worse weather. Voice of America, X, a blog in Ohio—none of that is a revolution by itself. The other side has speech control as a governing tool. We still talk as if the whole earth is a comments section. It is not. Getting a message into a closed country is half the war. The other half is whether the people inside will use the opening. I cannot do that part for them. Trump cannot do that part for them. A better speech will not save a hammer that refuses to swing.[15]
WRIGHT-PATT, DISCLOSURE, AND THE GIANT IN THE VIDEO GAME
I live close enough to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to know people who work there. They confirm what they can confirm. Files are coming out in a Trump administration that previous buildings sat on. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day movie is sitting in the culture as a myth-shaped object while the real files move in smaller rooms. I will give cameras their own essay. They deserve it. The point here is simpler. The same class of manipulator that runs a corporate takeover also runs a disclosure drip. Look this way. Do not look at the jurisdiction fight underneath.[16]
A new generation is walking into stories I have been telling for 20 and 30 years, and they are walking in through a game controller. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is not Sunday school. It is a very good game. The Order of Giants DLC puts Nephilim, Gibborim, Noah’s Ark, and a secret order of large men on PlayStation and Xbox and doesn’t apologize. Giants from the Bible are popular again because the old text never stopped being a map. Hollywood will sell you the costume. Michael Heiser spent his career trying to make people read the unseen realm without the costume. He died. People like to whisper that this kind of work draws fire. I do not need a ghost story to notice that my own life got louder after I finished The Politics of Heaven. I am not stopping.[17]
THE FALLEN CONSPIRACY HAS MORE THAN ONE LETTERHEAD
You can spell it a lot of ways—fallen angels. Secret societies. A Hollywood death cult. China in the media stack. Progressive branding on an old hatred of the God of creation. A mother in a Manson weather system. Lawyers and jurors leaned on until justice becomes a performance. Lucifer is not a Halloween decoration. He is a politician. He recruits institutions. He prefers a Truman Show to an honest election because a show can be rewritten between seasons.[18]
The same fingerprints show up on a Saturday impeachment dump and on a corporate letter telling a CEO to adopt the current left-wing weather or lose the easy money. Federal Reserve plumbing. Wall Street wash. ESG as a protection racket. That is not three conspiracies. That is one method at three altitudes. If you only stare at gas prices, you will miss the wet paint. If you only stare at the wet paint, you will miss the spirit that taught the painter his stroke.[19]
GOD IS NOT RUNNING A CLOSED SET
A lot of good people want the comfort sentence. God’s got this. God’s got my back. God knows where I live. I expect the plot is already locked and we are only extras. That’s not what I am looking at. I think conspirators are working against the script. I think they have been trying to overthrow the visible order for a very long time. I think calling them “progressives” or “Democrats” or even “the deep state” is sometimes accurate and always incomplete. Those are avatars. Avatars can be replaced. The method remains.[20]
The Constitution is a costume the other team has learned to wear. Free-speech rules get used to protect the spread of the thing the speech was supposed to restrain. Courts can refuse to join a mood and still leave a machine intact. A strong executive in the White House answers some questions. He cannot answer whether a people will stay home because a poll told them to feel defeated. He cannot be your rapture. He cannot be your substitute for courage.[21]
I have been saying this in the hammer language because I mean it. If you were made as a tool, waiting for heaven to happen while you use Jesus as an excuse for being a chicken is not piety. It is absenteeism. Trump was not a chicken. He stayed in the pocket long enough that the footprints in the wet paint became visible to people who did not want to see them. That is a gift. It is not a finished repair. He cannot repair for you any more than God will swing a hammer you refuse to pick up.[22]
WHAT I WANT INSTEAD OF ANOTHER DECADE OF HIGHLIGHT REELS
I am still with Trump. I think he has done a good job in a building that was built to digest him. I think the House and the Senate in November are still winnable if the people who know better refuse the tailgate. I think a lot of Republicans who like the current control system will not help you, because the current system pays them on time. I think election integrity is not a slogan. It is the only peaceful way to take a government back from a class that has already decided you do not own it. If you will not fight for a clean count, you are agreeing that you do not run the place.[23]
I do not want AI licensed by the same kind of people who wash out of real shops and land at a patent window because the job is protected and the standards are political. I have talked to that office. I know that weather. You do not want those hands on a technology China is already treating as a battlefield. You do not want a permission culture writing the rules of the next tool while the last tool is still being used to manage your speech.[24]
Identify the problem at the right layer. Then fix it. Reporting hypocrisy is a start. Naming the spirit, the paycheck, the waiting-out strategy, the impeachment-as-suppression cycle, the energy excuse, the China pipe, and the fallen-angel politics behind the human letterhead is the work I am actually in. The Politics of Heaven exists because the news cycle never goes downstairs.[25]
NOTES FOR LEADERS
Do not confuse a recognition show with a repair.
Do not let a poll put you on the couch. Polls are part of the tailgate.
Do not expect a president to finish a job the permanent class is paid to stall.
Do not call every delay incompetence. Some of it is a wait-him-out.
Do not baptize cowardice as faith if you are a hammer, swing.
Do not outsource election integrity to people who like the present machine.
Do not stare only at gas. Stare at who needs Iran to stay useful.
Do not flatten spiritual war into team colors. Teams change. The method does not.
I am proud of President Trump. He has not let me down. The world around him has. That is the sentence I will keep. The next sentence is on us.
FOOTNOTES
[1] War Room and associated daily-accountability media; Laura Loomer’s investigative work; Natalie Winters’s War Room reporting. The author does not claim this work is worthless. It is that recognition of hypocrisy, by itself, leaves the back office intact.
[2] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and the 2026 Overman Warrior essays on corporate flippers, HR politics, and Pickle Rick as a method.
[3] 2026 midterm election date: Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
[4] The administrative-state “outlast” problem is the author’s description of career officialdom relative to elected terms. See also the longer literature on the permanent bureaucracy after the Progressive Era and the postwar national-security state.
[5] Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio); Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). Private conversations described here are the author’s account of mood and structural frustration, not quoted transcripts.
[6] Late-September 2026 consumer aggregation of impeachment talk across Yahoo-style and similar feeds, coinciding with formal House activity cited below.
[7] House vote September 15, 2026, tabling Rep. Al Green’s impeachment articles, 232–147, with 18 Democrats joining Republicans to table and 46 Democrats voting present, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced 26 articles of impeachment on September 24, 2026. Associated Press, September 26, 2026: House Democrats preparing a vast oversight agenda if they win the chamber; impeachment “not off the table.” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over Iran-war management.
[8] Advertising-supported political media has an incentive to keep a horse race emotionally hot and a base emotionally tired. The tailgate analogy is the author’s.
[9] Late-September 2026 public aggregators printed Democratic leads on the generic ballot and elevated Democratic odds on House control. Silver Bulletin / FLIPR and similar models updated September 25–27, 2026. Trump approval prints in some aggregates near 37 percent. Aggregates are not ballots.
[10] The golf-course example is moral psychology, not a claim about a named official’s scorecard.
[11] AAA and related trackers: pre-escalation national averages near or under $3 in early 2026; spike toward about $4.50 in May; brief dip under $4 after a June 2026 preliminary U.S.–Iran arrangement to reopen Hormuz; return toward and above $4 as fighting and shipping risk resumed. Labor Day 2026 national average reported near $4.15 by inflation-tracking compilations using AAA. The author’s earlier $2 summer target did not materialize.
[12] U.S.–Israel strikes on Iran from late February 2026; Hormuz disruption; naval measures; a June preliminary arrangement that did not hold as a durable peace. Energy desks treated the file as a supply-risk story throughout.
[13] The author’s reading of forever-war incentives and of radical Islamic politics sharing logistical patience with other anti-Western movements. Afghanistan is cited as the recent American education in outlasting.
[14] Traffic observation from richhoffmanbooks.com / Overman Warrior properties, as reported by the author. Not a claim about a named Chinese agency.
[15] Hong Kong protests and the subsequent tightening; Iranian information controls. X and related platforms widened some outbound speech after 2022–2024, but inbound reach into closed states remains contested.
[16] Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, is a historic center of foreign-material and aerospace lore in disclosure literature. Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure (2025). Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is a forthcoming cultural object in the same weather system, not a substitute for documents.
[17] Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (MachineGames / Bethesda / Lucasfilm, 2024), with The Order of Giants DLC (2025). The game treats a Nephilim Order, Gibborim material, and Noah’s Ark as plot architecture. Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015); Heiser died February 20, 2023. The author’s parallel is vocational, not medical diagnosis.
[18] Genesis 6; Psalm 82; Ephesians 6:12. John Keel and Jacques Vallée on high-strange events as political and folkloric, not merely extraterrestrial.
[19] ESG shareholder letters and federal-contractor political pressure, 2018–2024, as a documented enforcement style even where the brand names later softened.
[20] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming).
[21] U.S. Const. arts. I–III. The author claims that factions can wear the procedural costumes the procedures were written to restrain.
[22] Matthew 25:14–30; James 2:17. The hammer language is the author’s, developed across the 2026 Overman Warrior series.
[23] Election-administration fights after 2020 and 2024 remain live in state houses, courts, and Congress. The author argues that integrity is a precondition of consent, not a conspiracy hobby.
[24] U.S. Patent and Trademark Office culture as experienced by the author in prior dealings; a critique of political hiring and risk-averse examination, not a claim that every examiner is incompetent.
[25] Closing frame of the Overman Warrior project, 2024–2026.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Politics, Midterms, and the Permanent Machine
Associated Press / Lisa Mascaro. “House Democrats Plan Vast Oversight of Trump Administration. Impeachment Is an Option.” September 26, 2026. New York Times. “House Kills Bid to Impeach Trump as Democrats Split.” September 15, 2026. Rep. Steve Cohen. “Congressman Cohen Introduces Comprehensive Articles of Impeachment Against President Donald Trump.” September 24, 2026. Silver Bulletin. “2026 Midterm Election Forecast: Senate & House.” Updated September 25, 2026. House of Representatives roll call on tabling the Green impeachment articles, September 15, 2026.
Energy and Iran
AAA Daily Fuel Gauge reports, 2026. New York Times. “Average U.S. Gas Price Falls Below $4 After U.S.-Iran Agreement.” June 18, 2026. New York Times. “U.S. Average Gas Price Returns to $4 a Gallon as Iran Crisis Escalates.” July 20, 2026. Axios; CNBC; GasBuddy 2026 pump-price coverage of Hormuz risk.
Spiritual War, Giants, and Disclosure
The Holy Bible. Genesis 6; Numbers 13:33; Psalm 82; Ephesians 6:12. Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017. Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. 1975. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969. MachineGames / Bethesda. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) and The Order of Giants (2025).
Money, Corporations, and Permission Culture
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Federal Reserve and post-2008 easy-money literature; ESG engagement letters as political enforcement. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office public reports and the author’s prior dealings.
The Author’s Related Work
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Hoffman, Rich. Overman Warrior essays, 2024–2026, including the Pickle Rick / hammer-of-God series. richhoffmanbooks.com and overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.
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 watching Turkey for a long time. Not as a tourist with a lanyard. As a man who loves biblical archaeology, loves the people who actually put a trowel in the ground, and does not love the way the field gets fenced. Turkey is producing more ancient material right now than most Western newsrooms know how to hold. Mount Ararat sits on the edge of that pile. South of it, in Ağrı Province near Doğubayazıt, there is a boat-shaped ridge about 515 feet long that has looked like Noah’s Ark from the air since 1959.[1] For decades the respectable answer was simple: it is a rock. In 2026 that answer is finally being put under a drill bit. I do not need the lab to finish before I am allowed to talk. I need the paycheck question asked out loud, because that is usually the lock on the gate.
FOLLOW THE CHECK, THEN FOLLOW THE DIRT
I am a fan of biblical studies. I am a fan of changing the way archaeologists get paid. That is not a side remark. That is the argument.
I have seen the field raw. I love a lot of the people in it. I also know they are controlled, often dramatically, in what they can say if they want to be published, promoted, and invited back next season. If a result smells too biblical, the gatekeepers get a rash. If a government figures out that a mound can sell tickets, the rash clears up. That is not mysticism. That is payroll.[2]
I say the same thing when people talk conspiracy. Do not start with the archaeologist’s personality. Start with who signs the check. People tend to say what they are paid to be allowed to say. When the funding comes from institutions with strong academic gatekeeping, anything that looks like Genesis gets parked in the “folklore” lot. When the funding starts to look like tourism, the same site suddenly deserves radar, cores, and a press conference.[3]
I want fortune and glory for the diggers. I mean that. I want them rich from books and discoveries. I want them famous for being right. I do not want them turned into England.
ENGLAND IS THE WARNING LABEL
I know a good deal about England. I have a son-in-law who is a dual citizen. He married my daughter. He is an American citizen now. He still goes back and forth. I have been there. I have done business there. I like a lot of the people. I like the humor. Monty Python comes to mind. I like Stonehenge. I like a lot of English archaeology very much.[4]
I do not like the posture. A lot of that culture likes a keeper. They want a kindly authority to tell them the rules of the week. Americans, at their best, do not love rulers. The English appetite for a digital ID, a chip in the workflow, a “right to work” that runs through a central system, is the same appetite that makes a scholar wait for permission to say what the dirt already said.[5]
They tried to push a harder version of that during COVID. They have kept pushing digital verification around employment. The politics shifted in 2026. A national mandatory “BritCard” scheme got announced, diluted, and then, under a later Labour government, cancelled as a single national program. The digital right-to-work machinery did not vanish with the slogan. Employers still have to prove status. The paperwork just put on a nicer shirt.[6]
Here is why I drag England into an essay about a boat on a Turkish ridge. Managed economies love a workforce that kneels for a paycheck. Chinese-style social credit is the clean version of the dream: you work if the system says you may work. Archaeology already runs a softer version of that dream. Publish the approved story or starve. I do not want the dirt community to become that. The way you beat it is not always a march on the ministry. The way you beat it is a competitive model. Tourism. Books. Independent labs. Audiences that will pay to see the thing the committee would rather leave unnamed. Money that does not need the old permission slip.[7]
TURKEY LEARNED WHAT ROSWELL LEARNED
Turkey has spent years fighting a reputation problem that is not only about dirt. Radical politics. Security headlines. A country that Western travelers used to skip. Then Göbekli Tepe broke the spell.
Since UNESCO listed Göbekli Tepe in 2018, the site has drawn about 4.4 million visitors over eight years. Officials in Şanlıurfa are talking about a million visitors in 2026 alone. They are widening roads and walkways because the mound cannot hold the crowd on the old path. Stonehenge still beats it on raw annual fame, but Göbekli Tepe is no longer a specialist’s secret. It is an industry.[8]
That is the tell. The stones were always there. Klaus Schmidt and the German team made them famous. The Turkish state then learned what Roswell learned after the jobs left and the town became a husk: a mystery that draws a ticket line can feed a region that ideology starved. Cappadocia already knew it. Underground cities. Tunnels. Cave churches. The Derinkuyu complex alone is a tourist engine. Shipwrecks off the Turkish coast, the Uluburun wreck with its Bronze Age copper and tin, already proved that early sailors were not paddling toy boats.[9]
I have been saying the same thing about dolmens in the Jordan Valley, up past Mount Hermon, and on into the high country that touches Turkey. The landscape is not empty. It is stacked. 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, this belt of the world was not a waiting room for Greece and Rome. We are only now being allowed to notice because noticing pays.[10]
THE RIDGE THAT WOULD NOT SHUT UP
Capt. İlhan Durupınar spotted the boat-shaped formation on a Turkish Air Force aerial photo in 1959. It sits roughly nineteen miles south of Mount Ararat, about 157 meters long, close to the 300 cubits in Genesis if you use a common cubit. Ron Wyatt made it famous in the 1980s. Drilling happened in 1988. Then the site went back to being a punchline. “Natural rock. Stop bothering us.”[11]
I have been to the idea of the boat even if I am writing this from Ohio. The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, is a wonderful exhibit. It is well done. It gives a body a scale the Sunday-school flannelgraph never could. A vessel in that class is not a canoe. I do not find it strange that a man in the deep past could build something that size. I find it strange that modern people think competence was invented in 1850.[12]
We are talking about a world before the Bronze Age as we usually teach it, or on the doorstep of it, depending which flood chronology you use. Five thousand years ago. Seven thousand. The Bible is catching a memory that is older than our textbooks are comfortable admitting. Most wood dies in that kind of time. Turkey is one of the few places where a large wooden thing, if it were mineralized or buried in the right muck, might still leave a chemical ghost.[13]
WHAT 2026 ACTUALLY PRODUCED
This is the part the internet is yelling about, so I am going to keep the facts tighter than the headlines.
In late June 2026, Prof. Dr. Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University opened a permitted field season at Durupınar with an international team of roughly twenty people from five countries. They worked about ninety days. They mapped the ridge in two and three dimensions. They ran ground-penetrating radar and electrical surveys. They collected something like a thousand soil samples from about 150 spots. They took cores and sent them to Ankara. They reported pottery fragments. They have not published a date on the pottery. Some stories said “possible pre-flood.” That is a hope sentence, not a lab sentence.[14]
The radar claims are the ones that moved the needle. The team and its partners reported angular anomalies, right-angle features, a corridor-like void running tens of meters along the long axis, layered shapes some of them are willing to call decks, and tunnel-like cavities a few meters down. Dr. Khosrow Bakhtar deployed BakhtarRadar, a system with a U.S. Air Force EarthRadar pedigree built to find tunnels and buried structure, not to decorate a creationist brochure. His public point was blunt: the old skeptic line that the ridge is just solid rock is the thing being tested.[15]
Soil chemistry is the second needle. Atila has said carbon levels inside the formation ran about 40 percent higher than samples taken outside it, with other differences in organic content, potassium, and pH that you would expect if something that used to be alive had rotted in place. That is not a hull. That is a smell. Smells are how you decide where to drill.[16]
Then the drill bit broke.
In September 2026, core drilling started for the first time since 1988. Noah’s Ark Scans and the university team reported that in one hole, four to five meters down, the bit hit a layer hard enough to shatter the tooling. They said petrified wood or highly mineralized wood is a possibility they want a third-party lab to test. They also said they intend to put a small drone into mapped voids. Winter lab work is supposed to cover organic content, mineralogy, microscopy. Atila has talked about a public scientific statement after the lab finishes. More seasons are already being planned for 2027.[17]
I want to be precise, because precision is how you keep from becoming the guy the gatekeepers are waiting to mock. Nobody has pulled a named plank with Noah’s chisel mark on it. The lead archaeologist has said the data increase the possibility day by day. Skeptics, including some creationists who prefer other ridges on Ararat itself, still call Durupınar a mudslide that learned a boat impression. IFLScience published a scold on September 25, 2026, two days before I am writing this, saying researchers have not found the Ark and that enthusiasts are flogging a dead horse. Fine. Let the horse’s bones go to Ankara. That is what a lab is for.[18]
PETRIFIED WOOD IS THE QUESTION THAT MATTERS THIS WINTER
If the cores come back as ordinary rock, the boat shape remains a boat shape and the tourism office still has a ridge. If the cores come back as petrified or worked wood in the right places, at the right depths, with the right angles sitting over them, then a lot of comfortable lectures have to be rewritten in public.
I think there is more truth in the old story than the modern faculty lounge can stand. I do not think Noah was the only man on earth who ever built a large hull. I think large boats were more common than the textbook allows, and that most of the wood is gone, which is why the textbook looks so clean. Turkey has already given us wrecks with bronze and copper that should have embarrassed the “they only hugged the coastline” sermon. A mineralized hull on a slope below Ararat would not be an insult to science. It would be science finally catching a memory the text never dropped.[19]
GÖBEKLİ TEPE WAS THE REHEARSAL
People who have heard me talk about Göbekli Tepe know why I keep putting it next to the Ark ridge. The official story of human beginnings liked a slow farmer who eventually got around to religion. Göbekli Tepe is a 12,000-year-old ritual machine with T-shaped pillars measured in tons, carved animals, and a construction culture that was not supposed to exist yet. The controversy never really died. It just got a ticket booth.[20]
Once Turkey understood that “zero point of history” sells rooms in Şanlıurfa, the Taş Tepeler landscape around it started getting roads. Karahantepe. The wider Neolithic belt. The same state that can be heavy-handed in other files became suddenly curious. That is not a conversion. That is an education by cash register. I would rather have a curious state than a silent one.[21]
The same pattern is sitting on Durupınar. The formation was always on the tongue. New instruments made it louder. Tourism made it speakable. If you want to stop the old suppression, you do not have to win a faculty vote. You make the silence expensive.
CAPPADOCIA, TUNNELS, AND THE SHIPS THEY SAID COULD NOT EXIST
Cappadocia’s underground cities still feel like a prank the earth played on a committee. Whole communities under the basalt. Storage. Churches. Air shafts. You can call it refuge architecture. You can call it a civilization that knew the surface was not always friendly. Either way, it is not a myth, because you can walk it.[22]
The wrecks off the Turkish coast do the same work for boats. Uluburun, dated to the late fourteenth century B.C., carried copper ingots, tin, glass, and a cargo list that looks like a trade network, not a fisherman’s accident. When people tell me early humans could not have built anything in Noah’s class, I point at the metal and ask them to explain the smaller miracle first.[23]
I am a proponent of the plain idea that people built boats bigger, earlier, and farther than the approved timeline. Wood vanishes. Stone lies. Metal sometimes survives. Chemistry sometimes remembers. Radar sometimes finds a right angle in a place the mudslide story did not budget for.
WHAT I THINK THE LAB WILL FORCE US TO SAY
I do not run Atila’s lab. I am not going to baptize a press release. I will say what I think, because that is the job of a man who writes under his own name.
I think a serious fraction of that ridge is going to come back as organic, mineralized, or both. I think “just a rock” is going to look sloppier in 2027 than it did in 1988. I think the pottery will turn out to be human presence on a landscape that already had a story, not a magic proof by itself. I think the right angles will keep the argument alive even if some of them resolve into geology. And I think the important civilizational fact will not be “we found the one boat.” It will be “large construction in that age was not an anomaly.”[24]
If the Bible only ever caught a hint of a much longer truth, that is still a hint with better staying power than most peer-reviewed fashions. Texts that survive five millennia are not accidents. They are technologies of memory. Archaeology at its best is the recovery of the hardware those memories were pointing at.[25]
FORTUNE AND GLORY, NOT A CHIP
I want archaeologists paid like people who found something. Not like clerks. Fortune and glory is not a cartoon line to me. It is the opposite of the English model I do not want exported into the dirt. If the only way you eat is to please the committee, you will not find an ark even if you are standing on the deck. If the public will buy the book, walk the ridge, and fund a lab that does not need a bishop or a dean to bless the result, the silence breaks.
That is also how you fight the larger politics. Centralized systems love a limited workforce. They love a chip. They love a right-to-work switch. Automation then arrives to finish the job the policy started, because a frightened labor pool and a permission culture do not compete well on a global stage. Tourism is crude. It is also one of the few forces that has repeatedly forced closed countries and closed faculties to open a gate they would rather keep locked.[26]
THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN IS NOT A SIDE HOBBY
I keep saying it because it is the frame, not the bumper sticker. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven. A flood story is not only meteorology. A boat on a mountain is not only a tourist photo. If the old world had a rupture, and if memory of that rupture was stored in Genesis, then the fight over whether the ridge may be mentioned in polite company is not a geology quarrel. It is a jurisdiction quarrel. Who gets to say what the deep past contains. Who gets to keep the human race smaller than the text says we were.[27]
Disclosure, in the popular sense, is usually aimed at the sky. Fine. Start with the ground. Turkey is coughing up temples older than the agriculture story, cities under the rock, wrecks full of metal, and now a boat-shaped ridge with a broken drill bit and a carbon spike. The sky will still be there after the cores come back from Ankara.
NOTES FOR LEADERS
If you run a company, a church, a school, or a town, do not wait for a faculty to tell you when a fact has become respectable.
Do not sneer at tourism. Tourism is often the only leverage a buried truth gets.
Do not confuse a headline with a hull. Demand the lab. Then do not let the lab hide.
Do not pretend early people were stupid. That conceit is how modern managers excuse their own smallness.
Do not attack only the archaeologist. Ask who signed the check.
Do not copy England’s posture and call it seriousness. A culture that wants a keeper will always find a reason to leave the boat in the mud.
If you ever read my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know how I think about permission cultures. The dirt is the same fight with older dust.[28]
We will know more when Ankara speaks. I can live with waiting for chemistry. I cannot live with waiting for permission.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The Durupınar Formation is a boat-shaped landform near Doğubayazıt in Ağrı Province, eastern Türkiye, about 19 miles south of Mount Ararat / Ağrı Dağı. Length commonly given as 157 meters / 515 feet. Identified on aerial imagery in 1959 by Capt. İlhan Durupınar.
[2] On academic gatekeeping and the difficulty of publishing explicitly biblical interpretations in mainstream journals, see the long-running tension documented in biblical archaeology magazines and in critiques of “minimalist” versus “maximalist” schools. The paycheck point is the author’s operational claim, not a claim that every archaeologist is dishonest.
[3] Noah’s Ark Scans, the California-linked project working with Turkish partners at Durupınar, also operates paid site visits. Tourism and research are braided at the ridge the same way they are braided at Göbekli Tepe and Roswell.
[4] Stonehenge visitor figures commonly run in the low millions over multi-year counts; English Heritage has reported on the order of 1.5 million visits in strong years. The comparison in the essay is scale and brand, not a claim that Durupınar already matches that traffic.
[5] UK digital identity and right-to-work policy, 2025–2026: Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a digital ID scheme on 26 September 2025, initially framed as mandatory for proving the right to work. The mandatory single-card version was later diluted. See House of Commons Library briefing CBP-10369.
[6] In July 2026 the subsequent Burnham Labour government cancelled the national Digital ID programme as proposed. Digital right-to-work checks through certified Digital Verification Services and the Home Office online service continued to expand, with a new code of practice associated with 1 October 2026. Cancellation of a branded national card is not the same thing as cancellation of digital employment control.
[7] The competitive-model argument is the author’s: centralized permission cultures lose to open ticket lines, independent publication, and labs that can be paid without a ministry’s blessing.
[8] Daily Sabah and Anadolu Agency, July 2026: Göbeklitepe drew 4,409,590 visitors in the eight years after UNESCO listing in July 2018. Şanlıurfa Tourism Development Association head Mehmet Kamil Türkmen cited more than 320,000 visitors in the first half of 2026 and a path toward roughly one million for the year. Roads and walkways were being expanded in summer 2026.
[9] Uluburun shipwreck, discovered off Kaş, Türkiye, in 1982; late Bronze Age cargo including copper and tin ingots. Cappadocia underground settlements, including Derinkuyu, are open archaeological-tourist sites under the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
[10] Dolmen fields in the Jordan Valley and southern Levant, and the ritual/high-place landscape around Mount Hermon, are part of the author’s running map of pre-classical sacred geography. See also Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015), on the Hermon tradition.
[11] Durupınar research history: Wyatt expeditions in the 1980s; 1988 drilling; later ground-penetrating radar and soil work by associated teams in 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024 before the 2026 university-led season.
[12] Ark Encounter, Williamstown, Kentucky, opened 2016 by Answers in Genesis. The wooden reconstruction is 510 feet long, built to a 51-centimeter cubit reading of Genesis 6:15.
[13] Genesis 6–9; 2 Peter 2:5; Hebrews 11:7. Chronologies differ. Ussher-style readings cluster the Flood in the third millennium B.C. Other conservative readings push earlier. The essay does not pretend those clocks agree. It insists the memory is older than Bronze Age textbooks.
[14] 2026 Durupınar season: Prof. Dr. Cenker Atila, Archaeology Department, Sivas Cumhuriyet University; fieldwork beginning late June 2026; about 20 participants from five countries; approximately 90 days; roughly 1,000 soil samples from about 150 locations; cores to Ankara; pottery fragments reported in late September 2026 without a published date. Rector Prof. Dr. Ahmet Şengönül publicly supported the project.
[15] August 2026 BakhtarRadar deployment by Dr. Khosrow Bakhtar, Bakhtar Research and Engineering, with Noah’s Ark Scans. Reported features have included angular structures to about six meters, a central corridor on the order of 70 meters, tunnel-like voids, and right-angle anomalies. These are geophysical interpretations pending physical confirmation.
[16] Atila, quoted in Arkeonews and university-linked reporting, August–September 2026: interior carbon about 40 percent higher than exterior samples; organic matter, potassium, and pH differences treated as leads, not as a completed identification of timber.
[17] Noah’s Ark Scans / GlobeNewswire, 23 September 2026: core drilling begun; bit shattered on a hard layer about 4–5 meters down in one interior hole; petrified or highly mineralized wood listed as a possibility for third-party testing; drone inspection of mapped voids planned; laboratory suite to include organic content, mineralogy, and microscopy; additional seasons planned for 2027.
[18] IFLScience, “No, Researchers Haven’t Found ‘Noah’s Ark’ Near Mount Ararat In Eastern Turkey,” 25 September 2026. The piece notes tour pricing associated with Noah’s Ark Scans and the long geologic counter-argument that Durupınar is a natural formation. Fair warning. Not a lab result.
[19] On early seafaring and large hulls, see the Uluburun corpus and the broader literature on prehistoric navigation in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. The author’s claim is capacity, not a completed identification of Durupınar as the Genesis vessel.
[20] Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia (exh. and site literature). Monumental T-pillars, 3–6 meters, enclosures dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, roughly the 10th–9th millennium B.C.
[21] Taş Tepeler (“Stone Mounds”) is the Turkish umbrella for the wider Şanlıurfa Neolithic landscape, including Karahantepe. 2019 was declared the Year of Göbeklitepe by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
[22] Derinkuyu Underground City and the wider Cappadocia tunnel-and-refuge systems. Ministry visitor figures during 2026 holiday periods put related Cappadocia sites in the tens of thousands per short window.
[23] Cemal Pulak and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology publications on Uluburun. Copper from Cyprus, tin likely from distant sources, a cargo that implies organized long-range exchange.
[24] Atila has said organic remains and carbon dating of those remains will decide whether “there really is a ship here.” That is the correct sentence. Radar is a map. Chemistry is a verdict.
[25] On Scripture as durable cultural memory rather than late fiction, see the maximalist stream in biblical archaeology and the author’s forthcoming The Politics of Heaven.
[26] The England comparison is analogical: permission-to-work systems and permission-to-publish systems both shrink the labor of truth. Automation then harvests the gap.
[28] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
The Site and the 2026 Season
Atila, Cenker, and Sivas Cumhuriyet University communications on the 2026 Durupınar field season. Ağrı Province / Doğubayazıt. June–September 2026. Bakhtar, Khosrow. BakhtarRadar / EarthRadar deployment reports and August 18, 2026 GlobeNewswire release with Noah’s Ark Scans. Noah’s Ark Scans. “Core Drilling Begins at Durupinar Noah’s Ark Site, Drill Bit Shatters on Possible Layer of Petrified Wood.” GlobeNewswire, September 23, 2026. Arkeonews. “Radar Finds Right-Angled Anomalies Beneath Türkiye’s Famous ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation.” August 29, 2026. Arkeonews. “Noah’s Ark Mystery Deepens as New Discoveries Emerge Near Mount Ararat.” September 23, 2026. Türkiye Today. “Possible pre-Flood pottery uncovered during Noah’s Ark search on Mount Agri.” September 24, 2026. Anatolian Archaeology. “Pottery Found at Türkiye’s Mysterious ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation.” September 23, 2026. Ancientist. “Pottery Found During New Search at Türkiye’s ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation.” September 23, 2026. Ancientist. “Radar Built to Find Military Tunnels Tests Turkey’s Noah’s Ark-Shaped Formation.” August 30, 2026. Living Passages. “Was Noah’s Ark Found at Durupinar? What the 2026 Scans Test.” Updated September 22, 2026. Ancient Content. “Drilling at Durupınar for the First Time Since 1988.” September 23, 2026. IFLScience. “No, Researchers Haven’t Found ‘Noah’s Ark’ Near Mount Ararat In Eastern Turkey.” September 25, 2026. Gadget Review. “Scientists Scanned the ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation — and Found Impossible Right-Angle Structures.” September 2026.
Bible, Flood Memory, and the Boat
The Holy Bible. Genesis 6–9; 2 Peter 2:5; Hebrews 11:7. KJV / NKJV. Beale, G. K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004. Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017. Snelling, Andrew. Earth’s Catastrophic Past. Dallas: Institute for Creation Research, 2009. Whitcomb, John C., and Henry M. Morris. The Genesis Flood. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961. Ark Encounter / Answers in Genesis. Site literature, Williamstown, Kentucky.
Göbekli Tepe, Taş Tepeler, and Turkish Tourism
Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe site reports and popular synthesis. Daily Sabah / Anadolu Agency. “Göbeklitepe draws 4.4M visitors in 8 years since UNESCO listing.” July 2026. Türkiye Today. “Gobeklitepe expands roads, visitor routes as annual traffic nears 1M.” August 2026. Anatolian Archaeology. “Göbeklitepe Expands Routes for Nearly One Million Visitors.” August 2026. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Göbekli Tepe listing, 2018. Şanlıurfa Tourism Development Association public comments, 2026.
Ships, Metal, Caves, and the Older World
Bass, George F., and Cemal Pulak. Uluburun and Institute of Nautical Archaeology publications. Pulak, Cemal. Papers on the Uluburun copper and tin cargo. Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Türkiye. Cappadocia and Derinkuyu visitor materials. Joffe, Alexander H., and regional surveys on Levantine dolmens.
Paychecks, Permission Cultures, and Digital Control
House of Commons Library. “Digital ID in the UK.” CBP-10369. Updated 2026. The Immigration (Restrictions on Employment and Residential Accommodation) Regulations 2026, U.K. S.I. 2026/700. New York Times. “U.K. Retreats on Plan to Require ‘BritCard’ ID for Workers.” January 14, 2026. Data Use and Access Act 2025, U.K., Part 2, digital verification services.
Disclosure, Archaeology, and the Author’s Frame
Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. 1975. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969. Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Businessusiness. Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Hoffman, Rich. OvermanWarrior
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly 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 write this for leadership people. Everyday readers can come along. I am glad when they do. But I am not aiming at a general audience that wants a latte and a soft ending. I am aiming at the people who have to make payroll, keep promises after a friend dies, and decide whether the universe still contains free will or only the appearance of it. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven.[1] That sentence is not a slogan I printed on a mug. It is the working title of the book I have been writing, and it is the only frame I have found that can hold Milton, a pickle on a workbench, a farting office pirate, the Holy Spirit, and the rivals who do not want any of that named.[2]
People have been kind about the AI conversations I have been having in public. I appreciate that. I think those conversations are one useful tool in a much older war. Human beings built tools because the rules of the fight have been lopsided against our race for a very long time. Through art, theology, and the various sciences we have tried to identify the problem and answer it. Artificial intelligence is one more hammer in that toolbox. I do not worship the hammer. I use it.
WHAT PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME ABOUT PARADISE LOST
The feedback I have been getting on The Politics of Heaven keeps rhyming with the same book. People who have read it tell me it reminds them of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Some of them say that as a compliment. Some of them say it as a warning. A traditional publisher hears “this is like Paradise Lost” and starts calculating how many buyers in a secular market want a twelve-book blank-verse argument about the Fall, pride, and the architecture of existence.[3] I think the comparison is a good thing. I also think the mechanisms of trade publishing have been too entrenched for a book this heavy-handed to walk in the front door without being asked to lose twenty pounds and smile more.[49]
I picked up a copy at my Barnes & Noble at Bridgewater Falls. It was the kind of edition that sits off the ordinary shelf, the one with the art that makes you hold the object like it still believes language can carry glory. I bought it because so many people had already put Milton’s name next to mine, and I wanted the poem in my hands while I decided what I believed about the Holy Spirit’s role in a blind man’s work.[33]
Milton’s poem is the famous English account of the Fall in the garden. It is also more than that. It is an attempt to “justify the ways of God to men.”[4] That is an insane sentence if you say it out loud in 2026. It is also the only sentence large enough for the problem. If you will not justify the ways of God, you will justify the ways of the house flipper, the compliance officer, the cartel in the sewer, or the spirit that does not want the garden mentioned at all.
MILTON WAS BLIND, DEFEATED, AND STILL WROTE THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXISTENCE
John Milton was completely blind when he composed Paradise Lost. He dictated it. He had already given his eyes to pamphlets and state papers for a republic that collapsed under him. After the Restoration he was a politically defeated man, lucky to keep his head.[5][6][7] People who write books like this have usually gone over the deep end a little. They are not sipping lattes on a yacht in a distant luxury destination. The work comes out of the school of hard knocks. The harder the knocks, the more some readers feel the heat in the page.
A lot of people say Milton was inspired by the Holy Spirit. I tend to agree. I also want to challenge the bubble version of that claim. The bubble version says the Spirit lives in a giant empty room with no rivals, no politics, no competing wills, and no interest in using ugly tools. That is not the Bible I read. That is not the world I have watched. And that is not the Milton I hear when Satan wakes up in a lake of fire and starts giving speeches that still recruit undergraduates.[8][9]
Milton revised the poem from ten books to twelve so it would stand next to Virgil.[3][59] That is not a decorating choice. That is a man who believed the English language could carry an epic the way Latin carried Rome. He gave English the word pandemonium for the capital of Hell.[34] He made Satan so persuasive in the early books that William Blake said Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it, and Shelley treated Satan as a moral being superior to the God Milton depicts.[8][9] I think Blake and Shelley were usefully wrong. They felt the heat and then baptized it. Milton made Satan alluring on purpose so the reader would feel the temptation and then watch the costume shrink. The fallen archangel ends as a serpent on his belly. The revolutionary becomes a reptile. That is not an accident of taste. That is a diagnosis.[10][11][36]
“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” — Paradise Lost 1.254–255
Stanley Fish argued that the poem first seduces you and then convicts you. You sympathize with the charismatic rebel. Then you watch pride eat him from the inside. “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”[11][36] That is not liberty. That is self-imprisonment with better speeches. I have sat across the hall from men who thought they were running a revolution because they had a fresh coat of paint and a compliance binder. Same energy. Smaller stage.
SUFFICIENT TO HAVE STOOD, THOUGH FREE TO FALL
The human half of the poem is where Milton gets modern. In Genesis the Fall is brief. In Paradise Lost it is a long, agonizing process of psychological manipulation and domestic drama.[13] Eve wants to work alone to prove her strength. Adam lets her. The serpent does not have to invent vanity. He only has to aim it. Milton’s God says the pair were “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”[12] If they had been puppets, their obedience would have meant nothing. Love that cannot refuse is not love. It is programming.
Eve reaches for knowledge and status. Adam is not deceived the same way. He chooses to fall because he cannot bear separation from her. That is a very expensive sentence. It means the first man preferred a human relationship to a divine command, and then had to live inside the wreck of both. The shame arrives. The blame arrives. Love turns into lust and then into argument. They only find their way back by reconciling with each other and then with God. The ending is not a crushed defeat. Michael shows them a vision of the future, the Messiah, the long road of redemption. They leave Eden hand in hand, wandering steps and slow.[42] Milton turned a story of loss into a story of potential. That is why Mary Shelley’s Creature reads the poem and cannot decide whether he is Adam or Satan.[14] That is why Pullman tried to flip the whole machine and call the Fall a graduation.[15]
C. S. Lewis warned readers not to confuse Satan’s charisma with Milton’s allegiance.[16] I agree with Lewis on the hierarchy. I do not agree that hierarchy settles the political question I keep asking. Milton wrote after his earthly republic failed. He had served Cromwell. He had argued that kings could be tried.[48] Then the king came back. The poem is doing more than Sunday school. It is a defeated revolutionary trying to understand authority, liberty, order, and why a just cause can still lose on Tuesday. Orlando Reade has traced how later revolutionaries kept stealing the poem for their own wars.[35] I am not stealing it for a party. I am using it as a map of a fight that did not end in 1660 and did not end in Eden.
WAS THE HOLY SPIRIT ALONE IN THE ROOM?
If you believe the Holy Spirit drove Milton’s hand, you already believe the Spirit works in history through damaged people. Good. Then do not stop the sentence halfway. Who said the Spirit was the only intelligence in the room? The Bible does not say that. Paul says we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers.[17] Psalm 82 is a courtroom, not a lullaby.[18] Daniel watches territorial princes delay an angel.[19] Revelation puts a war in heaven before it puts a cradle in Bethlehem.[43]
My book follows those breadcrumbs across a long stretch of time. I think The Politics of Heaven will be a series, not a pamphlet. The first volume has to identify the crumbs before it can feed you the loaf. I am not claiming I sit on an ivory throne and watch galaxies turn. I am claiming that a lot of respectable theology prefers a lonely God because a lonely God is easier to manage. A God with rivals requires politics. Politics requires sides. Sides require tools. Tools get splinters.
They loved a certain plastic Jesus in the 1960s when they needed him to bless a hippie lifestyle with loveless sex and primal behavior embraced as virtue. They did not want the message. They still do not want the God of creation to finish what He started. The hatred of Jesus that walks around in polite clothes is not a personality quirk. It is a tell. If there were no competing spirits, the tell would not be so consistent, so old, and so allergic to the actual claims of the text.
I have been shown things on purpose so I can talk like this. That sounds silly until you have lived inside a twenty-year stretch that felt almost ordinary and then watched the ordinary catch fire after you finished a manuscript. Since I completed The Politics of Heaven I have had nothing but trouble. Weird family friction. Job change. Time-sucking nonsense. I do not think that is a coincidence, and I also do not think coincidence is a Christian doctrine. If the elements I identified wanted to stay hidden in the order of our culture, they would prefer I write a nice book about leadership habits and leave heaven out of it.
PICKLE RICK IS NOT A JOKE. IT IS A METHOD.
On my fiftieth birthday my kids gave me a Pickle Rick figure. It used to sit on my desk at work. I do not talk about Rick and Morty as much as I watch it. It is my favorite show, and the grandpa is the character my family thinks I resemble.[20][21][58] I will take the comparison. Rick is the smartest being in that universe. He does not want to go to family therapy. So he turns himself into a pickle on the workbench to challenge himself: if I remove my own tools, can I still win?
The family leaves. It rains. A cat knocks him off the bench. He has no arms and no legs. He is a mouth and a pair of eyes. He rolls into the sewer. He bites the heads off rats, hijacks their biology, builds himself a filthy little warrior body, conquers the sewer, knocks over a drug cartel, and still ends up in therapy on time. He does not escape the appointment. He survives the condition. That is the part my family recognized. That is the part I recognized.
When I say I am going through something, Pickle Rick is the cleanest picture I have. I did not want to stay in a chair I no longer believed in. I also did not want to pretend I was above the fight. So I put myself in a hard spot on purpose. I wanted to measure how the universe responds when the old furniture gets carried out and the new owners start talking about compliance. I wanted to know whether God protects His tools or just uses them up. I wanted to know whether free will exists or whether the only choice a hammer gets is which nail it hits first.
People hear “I turned myself into a pickle” and think I am being cute. I am not being cute. I am describing a method. If hardship is coming anyway, you can at least choose the shape of it. Rick chose the pickle to dodge therapy and accidentally ran a graduate seminar in survival. I chose a season of stripped tools to see what was left when the title, the office, and the illusion of being indispensable were gone. The show is filthy. The theology is not. The theology is: do not confuse comfort with calling, and do not confuse a workbench with a grave.[47]
THE HAMMER OF GOD AND THE QUESTION I RESENT
I have said for a while that I feel like the hammer of the Holy Spirit. I do not always want the job. When I try not to be it, the reminder comes back in the grain of things: in the biological world of Earth, you are My hammer. I had about twenty years when day-to-day life was pretty good. Then the weather changed. I wrote the book. The book named a structure. The structure pushed back.
Here is the part that makes me mad, and I am not going to baptize the anger so it sounds pious. If God made the universe, why does He need a hammer that talks back? Why this tool? Why not a better one? The head of a hammer after a carpenter has been on a roof all day is not a glamorous object. Nobody envies the steel. They envy the house. I look at the pain that followed the manuscript and I ask the obvious question: why can’t You do a cleaner job of running Your own shop, God?
The answer that keeps coming back is the one I like least. You were not created for your own enjoyment. You may taste wine. You may love a grandchild’s chicken nugget day. Those are real pleasures. They are not the purpose. They are incentives and mercies inside an assignment. If you buy a hamster a wheel and a salt block, the hamster has pleasures. The hamster does not own the living room.[39]
Read the garden that way and a lot of sentimental religion falls over. We were put in Eden as stewards, image-bearers, a living toolset meant to extend heaven’s order into earth. The wrath in the garden is not the tantrum of a needy parent. It is the fury of a craftsman whose instrument started taking orders from the competition.[39] I view the human race as a way of copying God’s work on earth as it is in heaven. I think we were made the way we now make AI: as combat capacity against elements that do not love the garden. The disaster was not that we were tools. The disaster was that we were easily seduced off the task. That is Paradise Lost in one paragraph.
Isaiah can call Assyria a rod in the Lord’s hand and still hold Assyria responsible.[45] Paul can call a thorn a messenger and still plead three times for it to leave.[44] Hebrews can call hardship evidence of sonship rather than abandonment.[37] None of that makes the hammer feel better at 2 a.m. It does keep the hammer from lying about the job.
WE WERE NOT CREATED FOR OUR OWN PLEASURE
We do not exist for our own pleasure. We are given the opportunity to experience pleasure through taste and the rest of the senses. A good meal is not a sin. A good day with grandchildren is not a bribe I have to refuse. But we are not promised a comfortable life as the point of the contract. Pleasure is used to incentivize the right thing. It is not the right thing.
If you read the Bible as a prosperity brochure you will hate this essay, and you will hate Milton, and you will hate half the Psalms. The theme is not “God wants you on a yacht.” The theme is that suffering is in the plot because the plot is a war, not a spa.[38] Remove the suffering and you do not get a better book. You get a brochure. Satan suffers. Milton suffers. Christ suffers. The people who tell you the Holy Spirit only produces serenity have not read the sources they quote. Suffering is the key theme of life, but why?
I resent the binary when it is put crudely: suffer or serve. I have spent a career arguing about limited government, competent companies, and whether a shop can hit a number without lying. Those are debates with room in them. Then you get told the deeper game does not offer the same menu. You can choose a method of pain. You cannot choose a universe with no pain and still tell the truth about evil. I do not like those two options. I am not required to like them. I am required not to pretend a third option exists just because I have a personality.
BUSINESS FLIPPERS, COMPLIANCE AS A COSTUME, AND WHY I LEFT
I was a high-level senior executive at a very good company. I put a lot of love into that place for a long time. The owner passed away. I had made promises. Some members of that world I liked. Loyalty is a real thing. It is also how a man stays in a room after the room has changed species.
New buyers arrived. A new management group set up across the hall. I was the old furniture. They put up with me for the politics of the transition. I did not like their furniture either. I have used the house-flipper analogy for context. You have seen the type in every neighborhood. They buy a tired house, lay cheap carpet, spray a smell that means “new,” and sell at the top of the market. The same rot is still in the joists. There is a corporate version of that man. He distresses a business, especially a business coming out of COVID, puts a coat of process on it, talks about compliance, and tries to ride someone else’s years of work to an exit.[41]
I have sympathy for what a political and regulatory vise can do to a company. I have watched FirstEnergy’s public wreck and recognized the pattern of a firm pushed toward the brink by forces that are not all on the shop floor.[40] I have also watched incompetent men use “the last guys cut corners” as a story that excuses their inability to sell. The turtle calls the rabbit a criminal because the turtle cannot run. Then the turtle staffs the building with people who are good at hiding inside rules they did not write. Compliance becomes a costume for ineptitude. That costume works until the payroll has to be borrowed and the people who used to make the place go start asking for a door.
There was a man across from me I will not decorate. He was a low character kind of person. The kind of person who would whistle at a girl on the sidewalk and call it charm. Not biblically inclined. He sat there and farted through the day like the air belonged to him. Pirates used to be a romance my oldest daughter and I could share. I do not like pirates as much as I used to. These were pirates who wanted to steal wealth other people had built, and when they could not find the well they blamed the previous management for having known where the water was.
I made it easy for them to want me gone, and I was glad to go. They paid me a lot of money to leave. I took it. I wanted that message in the air. I know what it costs to perform at a certain level. I know what happens to a payroll when you replace operators with flippers. I am not going to let them loaf off my work and then baptize their slowness as virtue.
WHAT I TOLD THE PEOPLE WHO WANT THEIR JOBS BACK
Since I left, the place has struggled to hit the numbers they thought would be easy. People who used to work with me have been asking if I can give them a job. I told them the truth. I am not quite ready. Give me a month. Give me two. I am Pickle Rick right now. That means I am on the workbench without the old tools, testing what I can survive, and I am not going to hire a rescue party before I have a body again.
I did what I could for employees while I was there. I am not obligated to become the emergency exit for every person the new owners disappoint. I also know how this works. When you are the person who can still hit a number, every frightened staffer wants to climb onto your back. If you let them do it during the pickle phase, you never find out whether you can crawl through the sewer on your own. I will keep them in mind. I will not pretend I am already staffed for a company I have not rebuilt.
This is why I talk about swinging for the fences. I want there to be free will in the universe. I am testing the market to see if it exists. I suspect the deeper layer does not offer as much of it as American speeches claim. I still act as if a man can choose his method. God protects His tools from being eradicated because He still wants them in the box. That is not the same thing as promising the tool a beach.
JONATHAN EDWARDS, AI, AND THE SCHOOL OF AFFLICTION
One of the useful things about these machines is that if a dead man left a large enough paper trail, you can have a conversation that stays inside his mind instead of your fan fiction. Jonathan Edwards left that kind of trail.[22][23][52] I wanted Edwards and I wanted the Holy Spirit in the same room as Milton. I wanted to ask whether the Spirit acted alone when a blind, politically ruined man wrote the English language’s most ambitious poem, or whether competing spirits were trying to interrupt the work.
Edwards, as the machine rendered him from his actual body of writing, would not give me the lonely-bubble theory. He would give me spiritual warfare. Satan as the adversary. Affliction as the school. The resurrection as public victory rather than a mood.[24][54] When I pressed him on hope versus conviction, the distinction mattered. Hope can be a wish. Conviction says providence already governs the story and the empty tomb is not a pep talk. Milton did not write Paradise Lost as optimism. He wrote it as a claim about the government of all things.
I told Edwards—this will sound comic, and I meant it—that he ought to watch some Rick and Morty. The principle is older than Adult Swim. Hardship comes. A man may choose a posture inside it. Fire purifies gold. Affliction strips the earthly props so a man has to lean on God or collapse.[25][26] Milton’s blindness did not merely add atmosphere. It took away the last ordinary supports. My pickle season is a cruder picture of the same school. I do not like the school. I have stopped pretending I am only visiting.
Edwards would say our choice does not dethrone providence. I can live with that sentence if I am allowed the other half of it: providence does not make the flipper innocent, and it does not make the hammer mute. Augustine already knew the two cities grow in the same field.[27] Father Schall already knew heaven and hell have political consequences on earth.[28] I am not inventing a subject. I am refusing to keep it in the seminary basement while the shop floor gets looted.
SATAN’S RHETORIC AND THE RIVALS OF YAHWEH
Milton understood something Hollywood keeps cheapening. Evil is not only a cartoon villain. Evil is a rhetoric. It sounds like liberty. It sounds like injured merit. It sounds like “who wrote these rules?” It recruits the part of you that is tired of being a tool. Then it builds a capital named Pandemonium and calls the construction project freedom.
I do not think Yahweh, the Son, and the Spirit are alone in a big empty universe. I think the biblical writers already told us there is a contested field. I think some of what the age of disclosure is circling—UAP, non-human intelligence, the old folklore Jacques Vallée and John Keel tried to drag into the modern conversation—will not make sense if you insist that the only two categories are “space aliens” and “nothing.”[29][30][46] I like Keel. I like the older investigators who refused to flatten every light in the sky into either a sermon or a saucer. My book is an effort to put a political order back on the spirit side of the ledger. If heaven has politics, disclosure is not a press conference. It is a jurisdiction fight.
God may be the creator of this frame and still not be the mascot of the way we prefer to imagine Him. Scale is grotesque. Quantum and cosmic sizes make our arguments look like ants debating a cathedral. That does not make the ants imaginary. It makes their pride funny and their assignment still binding. I have used the image of cells in a body, worlds inside worlds, not because I want a new cult, but because the lonely-monarch model cannot explain the evidence the Bible itself keeps putting on the table.
NOAH’S ARK, THE GARDEN, AND THE BREADCRUMBS
I said on the podcast I would get to a wonderful and contested piece of news out of Turkey. I will not oversell it. The Durupınar Formation near Mount Ararat has been a boat-shaped argument since 1959. In 2026 an international team under Prof. Cenker Atila spent a field season there with radar, mapping, pottery fragments, and something like a thousand soil samples. Enthusiasts hear ark. Geologists hear hill. I hear a breadcrumb.[31][32]
I do not need a tourist ticket to believe Genesis. I also do not think it is an accident that the old stories keep growing physical arguments at the edge of respectable attention. The garden, the flood, the tower, the temple, the empty tomb—these are not self-help metaphors. They are claims about a contested earth. If you flatten them into Sunday-school felt boards, you will not understand why naming them in a book might make a man’s ordinary life get louder.[53]
AI AS A TOOL IN A LOPSIDED WAR
I said at the start that AI is a tool mankind created to fight a battle whose rules have been lopsided against us. I mean that. The people who want the tool banned and the people who want the tool worshiped are both useful to the wrong side. One leaves you unarmed. The other puts a new idol on the workbench and calls it a colleague. I use the machine the way I use a press or a spreadsheet. I do not let it baptize itself.
Talking to a reconstructed Jonathan Edwards is not necromancy. It is literacy plus memory. If the paper trail is thick enough, the conversation can be more honest than a living panel that only knows three quotations. That is one more way to steal fire back. The rivals of God have always preferred a dark information environment. Flood the zone with noise, mock the old books, keep Milton on the exam and out of the bloodstream. Then act surprised when a generation cannot tell a rebel from a savior.
I am not the Holy Spirit. I am not Milton. I am not Edwards. I am a man from Ohio who ran things, wrote things, and got tired of watching low-character people call their appetite a strategy.[57] If it is presumptuous to say I have been driven in a way that rhymes with the old driven men, the alternative is worse: that nothing is driving anyone and the sewer is all there is. I have looked at the sewer. I do not believe it is all there is.
FINDING PARADISE AGAIN IS THE WORK
The point is not to mourn a lost garden as if the story ended at the gate. Milton did not end there. Michael’s vision runs forward. The Messiah is not a footnote. Adam and Eve walk out together. The human story begins in motion, not in a museum of regret.[42]
Bringing paradise back under God’s glory, in the only sense a mortal can mean that sentence, means you have to fight the local characters. My way of fighting is not a costume and not a rant. It is refusal. I will not let pirates live off my numbers. I will not let compliance theater hide a dead sales curve. I will not let a secular publishing mood decide whether heaven is allowed to have politics. I will not let a lonely-Spirit theology talk me out of the war the Bible itself describes.
If you are selected to be a tool, you do the job. You can complain on the way. I have. Complaining is not the same as laying the hammer down. The strain in a man’s voice when he says this stuff is not unbelief. It is the sound of someone who expected fairness to be the same thing as purpose and found out it isn’t.
CHICK-FIL-A, GRANDCHILDREN, AND WHY THE SUFFERING IS WORTH IT
I do not want to leave this where the dark would prefer it to end. A Saturday afternoon at Bridgewater Falls, Paradise Lost in the bag, grandchildren in the car, chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A on the way home—that day made a lot of the rest of it worth carrying. I am not a monk. I am not a masochist. I am a grandfather who still thinks a good small day is part of the evidence. Pleasure is not the purpose. Pleasure is still a witness that the garden was real and that the world, even now, is not only sewer.
I am going to pickle Rick all the way through this stretch and see how it turns out. I think I know how it turns out. I think I am inclined to climb, and I think I am not permitted to choose my own demise even when I am angry at the assignment. That is either grace or a leash. On most days I can live with both words.
NOTES FOR LEADERS
If you lead anything—a company, a shop, a family, a church, a town—I would leave you with a short list, not a mood.
Do not confuse a fresh coat of paint with a resurrection. Flippers can smell like a new house. The joists still know.
Do not let compliance become your personality. Rules are tools. When they become a hiding place for people who cannot sell, build, or keep a promise, the rules have been captured.
Do not outsource your backbone to a publisher, a platform, or a committee. Heavy books have always had a hard time in soft rooms. That is not a verdict on the book.
Do not treat AI as either a god or a demon. Treat it as a tool in a fight that started before the tool existed.
Do not accept the lonely-Spirit model just because it is tidier. Read the war passages. Read Milton without becoming Satan’s intern. Read Edwards without becoming a museum.
Do not waste a pickle season. If you are going to be stripped of ordinary tools, learn what you still are. Then come back and hire the people who were worth hiring—on your terms, not on their panic.
In the age of disclosure, the press conference is the least important part of the event. The important part is whether you have a politics big enough for heaven, hell, the shop floor, and the garden that still has a gate. I wrote The Politics of Heaven because I got tired of watching serious people discuss power as if the only actors were human. They are not. They never were.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Dan Farah, dir., The Age of Disclosure (Farah Films, 2025), premiered at SXSW March 9, 2025; theatrical and Amazon Prime Video release November 21, 2025. The film presents testimony from more than thirty current and former U.S. officials concerning UAP and alleged non-human craft recovery programs.
[3] John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; rev. 12-book edition, 1674). Milton recast the original ten-book poem to mirror Virgil’s Aeneid.
[4] Milton, Paradise Lost 1.1–26. The invocation addresses both a heavenly Muse and the Spirit that “from the first / Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss.” Most Christian readers identify that Spirit with the Holy Spirit.
[5] William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
[6] Milton went completely blind by 1652. Paradise Lost was dictated to amanuenses, including his daughters. See Milton, Second Defence of the English People (1654), on blindness as inward sight rather than curse.
[7] Milton served the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues under the Council of State. After the Restoration of 1660 he was briefly imprisoned and narrowly escaped worse punishment as a defender of regicide.
[8] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93): “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
[9] Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840); and the preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820).
[10] Milton, Paradise Lost 1.254–255: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” And 1.263: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.”
[11] Milton, Paradise Lost 4.75: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”
[12] Milton, Paradise Lost 3.98–99: “I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”
[13] Genesis 3; compare Milton’s long domestic and psychological treatment of the Fall in Books 9–10 with the brevity of the biblical narrative.
[14] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). The Creature finds a copy of Paradise Lost and identifies with both Adam and Satan.
[15] Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000), an explicit inversion of Milton in which the “Fall” is treated as the birth of consciousness.
[16] C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). Lewis argues that Romantic sympathy for Satan misreads Milton’s hierarchical cosmos.
[17] Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (KJV)
[18] Psalm 82; Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls / LXX reading); Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015).
[19] Daniel 10:13, 20–21, on the “prince of Persia” and the “prince of Grecia” as territorial spiritual powers opposed to Michael.
[20] “Pickle Rick,” Rick and Morty, season 3, episode 3, written by Jessica Gao, directed by Anthony Chun, first broadcast Adult Swim, August 6, 2017.
[21] The figurine described is the popular Pickle Rick merchandising line associated with Adult Swim / Cartoon Network’s Rick and Morty.
[22] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); Freedom of the Will (1754); “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741).
[23] Thomas Nelson, The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: NKJV, general editor Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026).
[24] Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
[25] Job 23:10; 1 Peter 1:6–7; Malachi 3:2–3 on affliction as refinement.
[26] Romans 8:28; Edwards’s doctrine of providence as meticulous, not merely general.
[27] Augustine, The City of God, Books XIV–XIX, on the interwoven cities of God and man.
[28] James V. Schall, S.J., The Politics of Heaven and Hell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984; Ignatius Press reprint).
[29] John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975); Operation Trojan Horse (1970). Keel treated many “UFO” events as interdimensional and folkloric rather than simply extraterrestrial.
[30] Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969); Dimensions (1988); Wonders in the Sky (2009).
[31] The Durupınar Formation near Doğubayazıt, Ağrı Province, Turkey, identified in 1959 by Capt. İlhan Durupınar. 2026 field season led by Prof. Cenker Atila, Sivas Cumhuriyet University, with Noah’s Ark Scans and Bakhtar Research radar work. Pottery fragments and roughly 1,000 soil samples were reported; identification as Noah’s Ark remains unproven and is disputed by many geologists.
[32] Genesis 6–9; 2 Peter 2:5; Hebrews 11:7.
[33] Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions and related illustrated reprints of Paradise Lost; the Bridgewater Falls location is the Barnes & Noble at Bridgewater Falls, Miami Township / Monroe, Ohio.
[34] Milton coined or popularized “pandemonium” (Paradise Lost 1.756) as the capital of Hell.
[35] Orlando Reade, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost (London: Jonathan Cape / Princeton University Press, 2024).
[36] Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; 2nd ed. Harvard University Press, 1997). Fish argues Milton first seduces the reader into Satan’s rhetoric and then convicts the reader.
[37] Hebrews 12:5–11 on discipline as evidence of sonship, not abandonment.
[38] Matthew 10:34–39; Luke 12:49–53. The Gospels do not present discipleship as a yacht.
[39] Colossians 1:16; John 1:1–3; Genesis 1:26–28 on human beings as image-bearing stewards, not pets in a luxury habitat.
[40] FirstEnergy Corp. entered Chapter 11 in 2023 amid the Ohio House Bill 6 scandal and related investigations; the case is cited here as a public example of how a large enterprise can be pushed into financial peril by politics, regulation, and internal failure—not as a claim about the author’s employment.
[41] On “house flipper” private-equity and roll-up patterns in middle-market manufacturing after COVID-19, see general reporting in The Wall Street Journal and Private Equity International, 2021–2025.
[42] Milton, Paradise Lost 12.641–649: Adam and Eve leave Eden “hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow.”
[43] Revelation 12:7–12; the war in heaven as the larger frame Milton dramatizes in Books 5–6.
[44] 2 Corinthians 12:7–10; Paul’s thorn and strength in weakness.
[45] Isaiah 10:5, 15 on Assyria as the rod and axe in the Lord’s hand—an instrument that still remains accountable.
[46] The phrase “age of disclosure” is used both as the title of Farah’s 2025 film and, more broadly, for the post-2017 public UAP turn that followed the New York Times AATIP reporting and the creation of AARO.
[47] Helene Wecker and others have noted the afterlife of Milton’s Satan in modern anti-hero culture; the point here is cultural, not a claim that Adult Swim intended a Milton commentary.
[48] Cromwell’s government and Milton’s political prose: Areopagitica (1644); The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649); Eikonoklastes (1649).
[49] On traditional publishing’s risk aversion toward heavy theological-political manuscripts, see industry reporting in Publishers Weekly and the decline of midlist nonfiction lists after 2010.
[50] Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[52] Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737); A History of the Work of Redemption (posthumous).
[53] G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004).
[54] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), on resurrection as public victory rather than private optimism.
[55] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942), on bureaucratic evil and the unspectacular methods of spiritual opposition.
[56] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973–78), on ideology as a lie that requires human instruments.
[57] Middletown / Warren and Butler Counties, Ohio, as the geographic frame of the author’s public writing and business life.
[58] Adult Swim / Williams Street, Rick and Morty created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (2013– ).
[59] Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006). Milton’s twelve-book revision deliberately courts comparison with Rome’s national epic.
[60] Homer, Iliad and Odyssey. Milton places himself in the line of blind bards: “blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides” (Paradise Lost 3.35).
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
This list is longer than a polite essay needs. That is the point. If you are going to argue about heaven’s politics you should know the shelf, not three quotations.
Scripture and Classical Theology
The Holy Bible. King James Version; New King James Version. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Especially Books XIV–XIX. Beale, G. K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004. Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017. Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945. Schall, James V. The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope. New York: HarperOne, 2008. Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.
Milton and the Afterlife of Paradise Lost
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667. Revised twelve-book edition, 1674. Milton, John. Areopagitica. 1644. Milton, John. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. 1649. Milton, John. Second Defence of the English People. 1654. Campbell, Gordon, and Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 1967. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Fowler, Alastair, ed. Milton: Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1998. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942. Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Parker, William Riley. Milton: A Biography. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Quint, David. “Things Invisible to Mortal Sight”: Light, Vision, and the Unity of Book 3 of Paradise Lost. Modern Language Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2010). Reade, Orlando. What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost. London: Jonathan Cape, 2024. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. c. 1790–93. Including Blake’s later watercolors for Paradise Lost. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. Written 1821; published 1840.
Edwards, Awakening, and Providence
Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737. Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Sermon preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746. Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754. WJE vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Edwards, Jonathan. A History of the Work of Redemption. Posthumous. Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: NKJV. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026. Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Spiritual Warfare, Unseen Realm, and Disclosure
Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. Farah Films, 2025. SXSW premiere March 9, 2025; Prime Video November 21, 2025. Keel, John A. Operation Trojan Horse. New York: Putnam, 1970. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969. Vallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988. Vallée, Jacques, and Chris Aubeck. Wonders in the Sky. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. Elizondo, Luis. Forthcoming and prior public testimony associated with AATIP and the disclosure debate, 2017–2026. New York Times. Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean, and Ralph Blumenthal. “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” December 16, 2017. Atila, Cenker, and collaborators. 2026 Durupınar Formation field season reporting, Sivas Cumhuriyet University / Noah’s Ark Scans / Bakhtar Research radar deployment. Identification of the formation as Noah’s Ark remains unproven.
Literature, Myth, and Modern Retellings
Homer. Iliad and Odyssey. Virgil. Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 2006. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Pullman, Philip. His Dark Materials. 3 vols. 1995–2000. Gao, Jessica, writer. “Pickle Rick.” Rick and Morty, season 3, episode 3. Adult Swim, August 6, 2017. Harmon, Dan, and Justin Roiland, creators. Rick and Morty. Adult Swim, 2013– . Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. 1973–1978.
Business, Power, and the Shop Floor
Reporting on post-COVID middle-market acquisitions, add-on roll-ups, and operational distress. The Wall Street Journal; Private Equity International, 2021–2025. Public record of FirstEnergy Corp. restructuring and the Ohio House Bill 6 investigations, 2020–2024. Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Prior volume in the author’s leadership line.
The Author’s Related Work
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Working essays serialized at richhoffmanbooks.com and overmanwarrior.wordpress.com. Hoffman, Rich. “Why I Had an AI Conversation with Jonathan Edwards.” 2026. Hoffman, Rich. “Is God an Idiot: I don’t want to serve a king; I want allies who want to fight and defeat a vast evil.” 2026. Hoffman, Rich. “The Twenty-Dollar Jar I Left on My Desk.” 2026. Hoffman, Rich. “Joseph’s Cup: What a Coffee-Shop Sign Showed Me About How Evil Actually Works.” 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have loved the work I did for around about twenty-five years and I passed up a lot of opportunities do do that work. The financial opportunity cost was enormous. That is not a slogan. That is a long marriage to a craft, a lot of people counted on me to keep them in a job and it was not good for me, for a long time, several years. It was a really tough period and I didn’t talk about it much, but I did a lot of work that nobody will ever know about to make a lot of people’s lives just a little better. Then 2026 arrived, and one of the best things I have done in this decade, maybe in my adult life, was not a deal and not a title. It was a birthday. My wife and I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington to see Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition. I wear the hoodie from that day the way some men wear a championship jacket. The shirt is cloth. The day is not.
My new guys
In the gift shop outside the exhibit, I bought a replica clay jar, the kind of vessel the Qumran caves used to keep parchment alive through empires. [1] It was about twenty dollars. I spent far more than that in the gift shop. I like the twenty-dollar thing most. I put it on my desk at work so that every conference call had a reminder of a century before Christ sitting next to the phone. When I finally got free of that place, I left so fast I abandoned the jar. A friend kept it safe. It took about two months to get it back. I missed the jar more than I missed the job. That sentence tells you what I value. The people who took over the company paid me a lot of money to leave, and I couldn’t get out fast enough. And as I predicted, they are quickly running the place I spent a large part of my life running into the ground, which is a shame.
THE BIRTHDAY I ACTUALLY WANTED
If you can do anything you want on your birthday and you choose an exhibit of old skin and ink, you are telling the truth about your interior life. I am a member of the Museum of the Bible. I like the building. I like the traveling shows even more. This one was the only thing I wanted.
I don’t agree with DeWine on much, but I can work with him. A lot of people say they know people, but most of the time it’s nobodies just as dumb as they are. They might be good for a lunch meeting, but they can’t do anything for you.
The museum sits at 400 Fourth Street SW, a short walk from Federal Center, in that southwest quadrant where the Capitol complex, the Mall museums, and the old Department of Education neighborhood all lean on each other. [2] We parked in a garage, came up, and ate sausage-and-egg McMuffins at the McDonald’s down the road. I took a picture of my wife. We have been married thirty-eight years. You think you know a face. I have never seen her happier than that morning. The joy was all over her. It has become my favorite picture of her.
People who only know me from videos think they know what fills a man. A lot of the country is spiritually vacant, and they tune in to get a little ballast. Here is the ballast. If I could design a heaven, it would look like that day on a loop: time, the Bible, the cases, the reading, the thinking. I would be happy forever. Nothing I have bought with a title has come close.
THE EXHIBIT THAT WAS THE REAL THING
Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition opened at the museum on November 22, 2025, in partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Running Subway. Curators: Navit Popovich-Geller, Risa Levitt, and Joe Uziel. Floor 5. Official run through September 7, 2026. East Coast stop. [3]
They rotated the fragments in three phases so the skin could rest and so visitors would not see the same eight pieces all year.
First rotation, November 2025 into February 2026: 4Q7 Genesis, 11Q10 Targum Job, 4Q83 Psalms, Astronomical Enoch, Barkhi Nafshi, War Scroll material, an eschatological commentary, Temple Scroll. [3]
Second rotation, February through May 2026: fragments of the Great Psalms Scroll, Numbers, Lamentations, Community Rule, apocryphal psalms, Tohorot, non-canonical psalms, Book of the Giants. [3]
Third rotation, May through September 2026: Isaiah, Tobit, phylacteries, Birth of Noah, Jubilees, communal ceremony, Community Rule, Damascus Document. [3]
We hit Phase Two. I am glad we did. I stood in front of text copied when Rome was still a rumor in Judah and the Hebrew Bible was still held in a living community’s hands. You can read about Qumran in a chair. It is another thing to see the letter-forms under museum glass and realize the narrative did not begin in a nineteenth-century print shop.
That matters. The scrolls are the great twentieth-century confirmation that the biblical text is not a late pious invention. They are a Second Temple Jewish library, biblical and sectarian, hidden in jars in the caves above the Dead Sea and found again beginning in 1947. [4] They do not make a man holy by themselves. They make a liar work harder.
I know the museum’s early years included purchased “Dead Sea Scroll” fragments that testing later showed were fakes. The museum said so and pulled them. [5] This show is not that drawer. This is Israel Antiquities Authority material from the national collection, the real library on tour. Christianity Today called it the real deal. [6] They were right.
THE JAR THAT WAS NEVER THE POINT AND BECAME THE POINT
The original scroll jars are tall, lid-tight, local clay. They are why the texts survived weather, war, and time. [1] The replica I bought is a scale souvenir. It came with a copy of a scroll like the ones on display. I put the whole little shrine on the desk.
I kept fortune-cookie slips in it.
That needs explaining.
THE LUNCHES WHILE THE BUILDING CHANGED HANDS
CTL-Aerospace is a Butler County composites and aerospace shop with a long OEM life, the kind of midwestern plant that actually makes the parts. In September 2025, it filed Chapter 11 in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Case No. 1:25-bk-12226, Judge Beth A. Buchanan. [7] The company’s own first-day declaration described raw-material quality shocks, a 2024 loss on still-strong sales, and a lender fight with Wells Fargo that turned into a cash choke. [8]. The company never recovered from challenges caused initially by the COVID lockdowns. I worked real hard to save the company from an acquisition and I’m very bitter about the time I wasted on it, but I felt obligated to a lot of people which was not to my benefit. It was very insulting, as hard as I worked, to watch these new people coming into the management system and assume they could just erase me, which of course they haven’t been. A lot of people have been contaccting me wanting a job wherever I end up landing and wanting to know what’s going on with me, which doesn’t have a quick and easy answer. I Poured a lot of myself into something that was not in my control and I owe myself some time to dust off the negativitive experience. I traditionally list my work experience as a writer and consultants. Both take a lot of experience to do. And when you get a chance to learn new things, out of the box, you do all you can. It takes a lot of experience to be a good writer. That is always my first priority.
What followed is the new modern American ritual. Advisors. Debtor-in-possession money. An auction under section 363. A sale of substantially all assets free and clear. The docket names the buyer’s side as an affiliate of Davidson Kempner: DK OF VI Trading Subsidiary LP, designee DK CTL Aerospace Opco LLC. The sale hearing record sits in January 2026. The DK deal closed in March 2026. And followed a typical story these days among a lot of companies that don’t get talked about enough in CNBC financial discussions. [9][10]. Yes, I hate Amy Acton for what she did to the state of Ohio under the COVID lockdowns. And I haven’t talked about it much, but because I spent so much time there, I have to tell that story 50 times a week, because everyone wants to know what happened, especially since I was on the executive leadership end of it. And it comes up a lot because we launched Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor there, and people want to know what happened.
I kept things running as long as I could, but I witnessed a massive failure in the infrastructure smaller businesses use to stay running. And there are lots of parasites who look to target wounded companies for their profit, just like pirates in the days of old, only in a very modern context. Government made it possible for these pirates to make a lot of money off wounded companies. There’s a lot more to the story, but that’s a good starting point. Much of this is in the public record, and I wasn’t happy about any of it. You loan your name to these things, and lots of other people make your life difficult, and you stick around to take care of people you consider friends, when the smart money would have said goodbye a long time ago. Instead of getting upset, I spent my time going to places like The Museum of the Bible. I have some great and horrific stories to tell. Things nobody will believe.
I lived the floor version. Executive management had a habit of going out for Chinese. We were in a tough stretch. A takeover is a weather system. Consultants and funding people move through a plant like they already own everything when you spend years building everything they are taking. You can feel the Monopoly problem in your bones: you are still on the board, but you do not hold the properties, and every roll of the dice is a mortgage you cannot pay. I call that parasite logic because that is how it feels when people who did not build the thing arrive to manage the thing and treat the builders as furniture. I’m talking about this now because I would put all those fortunes in my Dead Sea Scrolls jar for safekeeping during this really hard period, and now that I have it back, it reminds me of these last several years. And I did a presentation at my new place this past week, which went well. And I have a chance to build everything from scratch again, which is about a ten-year plan. But it’s good to get going on something positive again instead of trying to defend employees from a takeover of the business they counted on to put food on their table. When we talk about the economy and Trump expanding jobs, nobody ever talks about these kinds of things which destroy many thousands of jobs every month in America, and it’s what I would consider the biggest job killer in the world, an open attack against America through finance. For many decades, we were able to protect the business from these kinds of elements, but it takes smart people to protect the finance side of things, and COVID conditions broke a lot of cracks that many companies already saw at a critical time.
The court file is the court file; we wanted employees to keep their jobs. My desk was my desk. During those lunches I kept the fortunes and dropped them in the jar. It was a private joke with history among those who went to lunch with me then. The oldest surviving copies of Scripture in a twenty-dollar pot, stuffed with cheap paper predictions, sitting in an office while a seventy-year industrial story got run through a Cincinnati docket. I could have done something else several years ago, but I couldn’t let everyone down who counted on me for their jobs. For my own personal interest, until I took the step shown in the video displayed here for a new opportunity built from the ground up, I was very bitter about it all.
What was good for me was to leave. And I found myself doing everything for everyone else. That made going to the Museum of the Bible a very personal, positive thing for me, as I was seeing massive failures all around me from so many people. Eventually, I will write a book about all this, name names, and tell the whole story. Right now, I’m too angry for it. For a lot of legal reasons, I just put my effort into better things for the future, things I could have direct control over. And I say all that knowing that there are a lot of people who want a new job with me. I have been building something that didn’t already have jobs made for it, which takes a lot more work and more time. That’s why I don’t have a new home for you, yet. But I won’t forget. I plan to build something that is at least 10 times more valuable. That’s how I prefer to work against those who did a lot of bad things.
WHY I LEFT LIKE THE ROAD RUNNER
I cleaned the office out. Books gone. Ready. I still could not stand to be apart from the jar, so it stayed on the desk until the last day. Then the last day came, and I did not make a farewell tour. I did not go room to room to say goodbye. I left like a cartoon puff of dust in a Looney Tunes episode of Road Runner.
A man across the hall belched and farted all day, which disgusted me. I would never hire a person like that for anything, yet there he was, inserted disrespectfully against me. That sentence is not decoration. Some characters are the atmosphere of a declining shop. He was disgusting to be near. The minute I could put distance between my lungs and that hallway, I did. I moved so fast I betrayed the one object I had meant to carry out in my hands.
Halfway down the road, I felt it. Incomplete. The phone and the computer were replaceable. The jar was not, because it held the day with my wife, the Phase Two case, the confirmation that the old book is old in the right way, and the little paper fortunes from the last honest lunches where in it. I had left my treasure in a building I found repulsive, so much so I don’t even drive down I-75 anymore in that part of town so I don’t have to look at the building. I probably won’t again for decades.
A friend picked it up and kept it exactly as I had left it. I have it back now, much to my relief. I feel finished and ready to do something else.
WHAT I LOOKED AT ALL DAY
Every call, every meeting, I looked at that jar and thought of her face at McDonald’s and the dim room where a fragment of a book still spoke. People think a man like me is fueled by argument. Argument is downstream. The fuel is contact with the source.
The feed has a spiritual vacancy. People come to a voice because they want to be filled. I cannot fill them with a hoodie. I can tell them what filled me. I chose, on a day I could have chosen anything, to stand in front of Qumran. I bought the cheapest true thing in the shop and put it where my work-eye would hit it. When the work turned into a court-supervised transfer to a fund, I still wanted the jar more than the chair.
That is not just nostalgia; it’s the kind of values and priorities that build the kind of value in a company that others want to steal because they can’t make it on their own.
THE SCROLLS AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN
I have been writing toward a book I call The Politics of Heaven. The phrase sounds misty until you have seen the evidence that the text survived empires in clay. Power is always trying to own the story. Jars on a cliff are what the story does when power is coming, just as the Romans did when they were plotting the destruction of the Jews. The intellectual rebels of Qumran stayed in the desert to get a jump on their planned retreat, to preserve themselves. I stayed around until the very last minute, even though I had lots of opportunities to do other, much more profitable things. It feels good now to be able to go down that road, instead of trying to hold everything together just long enough to save people’s jobs.
The Community Rule and the Damascus Document in those rotations are not tourist wallpaper. They are a sect’s attempt to live under a holy order while history went feral. [3][4] Psalms in the second rotation is the prayerbook of a people who had already learned that governments are weather. I looked at that material and felt the same thing I feel when I write: the old book is not a hobby. It is the deepest available account of how heaven and earth argue.
I do not thump people with it. I live next to it. My Dead Sea Scrolls hoodie is a souvenir of living next to it for a day that worked.
WHAT THE JAR ACCUSES ME OF, KINDLY
I felt as if I had betrayed it by leaving it. That is a strange sentence about fired clay. It is accurate. We betray what we love when we let urgency become panic. I was right to leave the hallway. I wanted to be away from those people so badly that I left behind the one object that proved I had a life outside the hallway.
Getting it back did not restore a career. It restored a ranking. The job was a long love. The jar is a truer one, because it points past the job to the day, the wife, the text, and the stubborn fact that some things are dear. Of course the experience has been very jarring to think about. I have a lot of information that is very valuable because of it. It will make an excellent book, the first third of one that I’ll write talking about all this. But, it needs a good last half to be the kind of book I like to write, which is a story that is unfolding right now. These are the dangers of modern business and its something that a lot of people can’t wait ten years for, because now its a problem. And pretty much nobody bothers to untangle the mess. But, I feel like I can talk about it more now that I have my Jar back. Its one of those incomplete things that has been bothering me a lot for a few months. The stories I will tell of these months will make great writing content, that a lot of people will never believe. And of course, I won’t hold anything back.
If you see me in the Museum of the Bible shirt, that is why. I do not get tired of it. I do not get tired of the little Dead Sea Scroll Jar. I got it back from people who were careful with it, and I will not park it again on a desk I might have to flee when the Romans come to destroy Jerusalem again, or corporate raiders come to steal all the treasure that hard work builds.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Qumran scroll jars: cylindrical, lidded storage pottery associated with the cave finds of 1947–1956. Israel Antiquities Authority / Library of Congress exhibit notes on Qumran pottery; World History Encyclopedia image and description of Dead Sea Scrolls jars. Gift-shop replicas commonly include a small clay pot and a printed scroll insert; museum retail varies by exhibit.
[2] Museum of the Bible, 400 Fourth Street SW, Washington, DC 20024. Near Federal Center SW Metro. The building sits south of the National Mall museum cluster; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building is at 400 Maryland Avenue SW, in the same southwest federal pocket.
[3] Museum of the Bible, “Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition,” November 22, 2025–September 7, 2026, partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Running Subway. Official rotation lists as published by the museum newsroom, October 1, 2025, and the exhibit page.
[4] Discovery and corpus: eleven caves near Qumran, 1947–1956; biblical manuscripts plus sectarian works (Community Rule, War Scroll, Damascus Document, Enoch traditions, and others). Standard introductions: Vermes; VanderKam; Collins.
[5] In 2018, the Museum of the Bible announced that five of its then-owned “Dead Sea Scroll” fragments showed characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin and removed them from display. That episode concerns purchased fragments in the museum’s own early collection, not the 2025–2026 IAA loan show.
[6] Gordon Govier, “New Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit Is the Real Deal,” Christianity Today, April 8, 2026.
[7] In re CTL-Aerospace, Inc., Case No. 1:25-bk-12226, United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division (Cincinnati), Judge Beth A. Buchanan, petition filed September 8, 2025. Debtor address in the petition header: 5616 Spellmire Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45246, Butler County.
[8] Declaration of President and COO, in support of the Chapter 11 petition and first-day motions, September 8, 2025 (Doc. 9 and related first-day papers). Public summaries: Stretto / chapter11cases write-up of the filing, September 2025.
[9] Docket items in 1:25-bk-12226 include the bidding-procedures motion (Doc. 90, October 9, 2025), sale papers, declaration of Geoffrey Frankel in support of sale to DK CTL Aerospace Opco LLC as designee of DK OF VI Trading Subsidiary LP (January 19, 2026), and the January 20, 2026 sale hearing activity. Later docket entries include a March 23, 2026 stipulation involving DK CTL Aerospace Opco LLC.
[10] Capstone Partners, “Capstone Partners Advised CTL Aerospace, Inc. on its Sale to Davidson Kempner in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy,” posted June 10, 2026, stating the section 363 sale to a DK affiliate closed in March 2026. Capstone describes its Special Situations and Financial Advisory Services work after the September 2025 filing. Pre-petition turnaround work with Focus Management Group is described in contemporary filing summaries. Davidson Kempner is a global investment firm; the buyer vehicle on the docket is the DK-named Opco / trading-subsidiary chain above. I am describing the public control change. My language about parasites is how a fund-and-consultant weather system feels to a builder on the floor.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Museum of the Bible. “The Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition with the Oldest Biblical Texts Arrives at Museum of the Bible in November 2025.” Newsroom, October 1, 2025.
Butler County development notes listing CTL among regional aerospace suppliers.
Riveron. Public descriptions of bankruptcy, fiduciary, and turnaround practice. I include the firm here because that consultant class is the air a Chapter 11 plant breathes; readers should use the CTL docket itself for who was retained in this specific case.
Wells Fargo as prepetition secured lender, per the first-day declaration summaries.
11 U.S.C. § 363. Sale of assets in Chapter 11.
On Museum of the Bible provenance controversies (for contrast with the IAA loan): 2018 reporting on forged fragments; Hobby Lobby / Green family civil penalty and repatriation coverage from 2017–2021. Frommer’s and major-wire summaries.
Library of Congress / IAA. “Scrolls from the Dead Sea” historical exhibit notes on jars and Cave 4.
World History Encyclopedia. Dead Sea Scrolls jars.
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 driven past the sign for years. A name can sit on a building in plain Ohio daylight, and you will treat it like landscaping until the day your life rhymes with the story on the sign. I have been going through a hard stretch. I spent time in the Mason and Bridgewater Falls corridor, the seam where Warren County and Butler County lean on each other, and I looked at Joseph’s Cup the way you look at a verse you thought you already knew. It hit me as consolation. Not the soft kind. The kind that gives a shape to the pressure.
I am not swinging a Bible at anybody’s head. I have never liked that style. I am saying the book still does the best job on earth of describing how evil moves through ordinary rooms. It does not usually arrive painted red with a pitchfork. It arrives as a brother. It arrives as a social test. It arrives as the offer of an easy life if you will just say uncle.
THE SHOP PEOPLE DRIVE PAST WITHOUT READING THE NAME
Joseph’s Cup in Mason sits at 8050 Arbor Square Drive, inside the Pro-Clean Car Wash, ZIP 45040. [1] Reviews keep saying the same things: the owner, Joseph, greets people himself, the coffee is good, the room is small and human, you can watch cars come through the wash while you drink. [2] That is not a cathedral. That is a local counter. West of there, Bridgewater Falls in Fairfield Township is the big Butler County retail stretch on Princeton Road, the kind of place you pass because you have an errand. [3] I have been in that whole pocket of road. I was not hunting for a sermon. I was looking around during a season that felt like a sentence.
I could not find a public statement from the shop tying the name to Genesis. The Mason owner’s name is Joseph. That is enough for a storefront. [2] The biblical parallel is not a press release. It is what the name did to me when I finally had the ears for it. Sometimes a sign has been there for years and you only notice it when the story on it is already happening in your ribs.
WHY THE NAME IS NOT CUTE
People hear “Joseph” and think Sunday school felt board. The actual story is a machine for understanding betrayal.
Jacob loved Joseph and gave him the garment English Bibles call a coat of many colors, the ketonet passim of Genesis 37. [4] The brothers were jealous. They threw him in a pit, sold him for silver, and sent the torn coat home bloody so their father would think an animal had finished him. [4] In Egypt he was slandered in Potiphar’s house, jailed, and left to rot until he interpreted dreams and rose to sit just under Pharaoh. [5] Years later the same brothers came to him for grain and did not know his face. He put his silver cup in Benjamin’s sack, sent them out, and had them stopped. [6] The cup was a test. Silver had bought him. Silver would now show whether the brothers had changed.
That is not a children’s story. That is a man who was discarded by his own house, sentenced by a foreign power, and still wanted a living connection with the people who had done it. I am not sure I would have wanted the connection. Joseph did. He made himself known. The family came down into Egypt. A long time later, the book says, that sojourn became bondage, and Moses came. [7] The rescue of a later generation sits on the success and the wound of an earlier one. History is not tidy that way. Neither is a family.
I used to read that sequence as literature. I still think it is the best literature we have for the human race under pressure, better than Shakespeare at the specific job of showing how evil uses kinship, hunger, and status. [8] Shakespeare is a genius of pain. Genesis is a genius of mechanism. Lately I have not been reading Joseph. I have been recognizing him.
DOLLY PARTON WAS NOT THE FIRST COAT
A lot of Americans hear “coat of many colors” and think Dolly Parton first. That is backwards in the right American way. Parton wrote the 1971 song about a patchwork coat her mother sewed from rags in the Smokies. While she sewed, her mother told her the Joseph story. Appalachia already knew the verses. The hit was a local memory wearing a biblical name. [9] People of that country did not need a seminary to understand jealousy in a house. They needed a coat that cost nothing and meant everything.
That is how the Bible works when it is still a living book and not a museum object. It names a pattern. Then ordinary people keep walking into the pattern.
THE CUP IS THE POINT OF THE NAME
The Mason shop is called Joseph’s Cup, not Joseph’s Coat. The coat starts the jealousy. The cup finishes the test.
Joseph does not plant the cup to steal his brothers again. He plants it to see whether they will throw Benjamin away the way they threw him away. Judah steps forward and offers himself instead. [6] Only then does Joseph break. The cup is an instrument of disclosure. It forces the hidden thing into the sack where everyone can see it.
That is why the storefront name landed on me like a communication. I have been thinking about how evil tracks, how it recruits normal people, how it promises an easier life if you will just stop being the difficult one. The cup in the story is not china. It is a reveal. You find out who is still willing to sell a brother to keep their own seat at the table.
EVIL WITHOUT HORNS
The cheap version of evil is a costume. Red. Horns. A contract signed at midnight. That version is almost comforting, because you would see it coming.
The version I keep watching is the Joseph version. Siblings. Colleagues. People who want you smaller because your existence makes their position feel like a critique. They do not have to be brilliant. They have to be jealous and organized enough to use the room against you. They twist decent people with the promise of belonging. They put a little social screw to you and wait to see if you will say uncle.
I had one of those tests recently. Millennial operators who make a living off value other people created. They were sounding me out. Could I be made safe. Could I be enough like them to work with. They had gone to Paris for a Bad Bunny concert. I told them the only thing I knew about Bad Bunny was the Super Bowl appearance that made a lot of people angry. [10] I got the look. You are old. You are out of touch. You will not play ball with us; we are uncomfortable with you because you don’t have tattoos and don’t like pop music. The unspoken deal was obvious. Love the right noise, laugh at the right joke, and you can keep the easy life. Tell the truth, and you are the problem.
I am not going to fake a concert I do not care about so a thief of other people’s work will find me acceptable. Honesty costs you. Appeasement is how that kind of person gets a hand on the controls of real evil at work. A lot of people think the mature move is to make friends with the jealous sibling. Joseph’s brothers would have liked that version. It would have kept the coat in the house and the dreamer quiet.
I will not do it. I work nine times harder and stay clean. If I get the sense that someone is trying to shock me into line, I withdraw the thing they wanted to loop. Call it John Galt if you want the novel version. [11] I take my mind off their board. Let them find out how little they can build once the person they mocked is no longer available to be harvested.
AGE IS THE NEW EXCUSE FOR THE OLD JEALOUSY
The critique they offered was that I am pretty old. That is not analysis. That is a permission structure. If the target is old, or bald, or out of sync with the approved playlist, then discarding him feels like hygiene instead of sin. I have written about that fashion in business. It is the same spirit that treats a long résumé as a threat. [12] Joseph was not discarded for being old. He was discarded for being marked. The coat made him visible. Visibility is what jealousy cannot stand.
You do not have to be seventeen in a pit to know the temperature. You can be a grown man in Ohio, still doing the work, and feel the room decide that your continued competence is an insult.
WHY I WILL NOT BEFRIEND THE SIBLING WHO SOLD ME
People say forgiveness means proximity. Joseph’s story is more severe than that. He feeds them. He tests them. He does not pretend the pit was a misunderstanding. When he weeps, it is after Judah offers his own life. [6] Restoration in that book is not a group hug over the coat. It is a moral change that can be seen.
I can understand Joseph now in my guts, not just in a verse. The first night in the Egyptian system. The false charge. The years when the people who should have known you were silent. The strange second life when you can interpret what the powerful cannot see, and they use you, and you still have a hole where a family was. That is not “sad.” That is blood knowledge. I am taking material out of this season that I will write from for decades. I want to crush the mechanism, not just complain about the mood.
The mechanism is simple. Evil gains a dominant position in a family, a company, a market. It throws the marked person into a death sentence, social or professional. It tells the bystanders that the marked person was difficult, old, extra, out of fashion. It offers the bystanders a nicer life if they go along. Most people go along. That is how it scales from a pit in Canaan to a whole economy that punishes the wrong kind of excellence.
A SIGN YOU NOTICE LATE IS STILL A SIGN
I do not need the owner of Joseph’s Cup to have meant Genesis. Meaning is not only what a merchant intended. Meaning is also what a true story does when it finds you in the parking lot.
I have been wrestling with the depth of evil in ordinary American life. Not the cartoon devil. The brother-level stuff. The way it works in families, in businesses, in the little loyalty tests about music and politics and age. Looking at that sign gave me context worth more than money. Every time I see it now I think about the cup in the sack. I think about how many Josephs get thrown aside so a lesser circle can keep its story. I think about the work that comes after you refuse to say uncle.
You go through stages. At one stage the Bible is a book you respect. At another stage it is a map of the room you are standing in. I am in the second stage with this story. I would rather have the map than the easy life that requires me to laugh on cue at the stupid things evil people say.
WHAT I DO WITH THE CONSOLATION
Consolation, if it is real, is not a nap. It is a commission.
I keep my name. I keep the work. I do not audition for people who need me smaller to make themselves feel better about all their bad decisions in life. I use the season. I write. I have already put the gunfighter ethic in a book: trained instinct under pressure, not sloppiness, and not surrender to the fashion of the hour. [13] Joseph is the older cousin of that ethic. He does the hard years. He keeps his mind. He does not become his brothers in order to be loved by his brothers.
If you are in a pit someone else dug, do not decorate the pit with their playlist. Interpret the dream. Do the work they cannot do. Let the cup fall where it falls. The people who sold you will eventually need grain. That is not spite. That is how the world is built.
I love the name of the shop. I love it more because it sits in a car wash and a commercial corridor instead of on a steeple. Evil works in commercial corridors. So does the reminder. Butler County, Warren County, a cup of coffee, a sign I ignored until I couldn’t. That is enough communication for one stretch of road.
But, I’m not as forgiving as Joseph. I know a lot of people like mob movies, like Goodfellas and John Wick. Remember what happened when they took John Wick’s car, fellas. You’ll never know when or where. But you will get it, I will make sure of it. Enjoy!
FOOTNOTES
[1] Joseph’s Cup, 8050 Arbor Square Drive, Mason, Ohio 45040; listed as inside the Pro-Clean Car Wash. Phone commonly listed as (513) 409-3287. Site: josephscup.com.
[2] Aggregated customer reviews on Restaurantji, joe.coffee, LocalCoffeeShops.org, and related listings describe owner Joseph as personally greeting guests and note the car-wash setting. I found no official shop statement tying the name to Genesis 44.
[3] Bridgewater Falls, Fairfield Township / Hamilton, Ohio 45011 area, Princeton Road at State Route 4, Butler County. Travel Butler County and Kimco property descriptions. Mason itself is in Warren County; the two sit on the same daily-driving map.
[4] Genesis 37. Jacob’s gift of the ketonet passim; the brothers’ jealousy; sale to traders; the bloodied coat returned to Jacob. On the Hebrew garment and the “many colors” / long-sleeved translation debate, see standard Bible dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry “Coat of many colors.”
[5] Genesis 39–41. Potiphar’s house, the false accusation, prison, the cupbearer and baker, Pharaoh’s dreams, Joseph as vizier.
[6] Genesis 44–45. The silver cup placed in Benjamin’s sack; the chase; Judah’s offer to stand in Benjamin’s place; Joseph reveals himself.
[7] Genesis 46–47 and Exodus 1; Exodus 12:40 on the long sojourn. Traditional preaching often rounds the Egyptian years toward four centuries before Moses. Treat the figure as the Bible’s own long-memory math, not a modern archaeological press release.
[8] For Shakespeare on jealousy and household ruin, start with Othello and King Lear. The comparison in this essay is about function: Genesis tracks the social technology of betrayal with less ornament and more consequence.
[9] Dolly Parton, “Coat of Many Colors,” recorded 1971, album Coat of Many Colors. Parton has said her mother told the Joseph story while sewing the rag coat. See Songfacts; Parton interviews; Coat of Many Colors (song) overview.
[10] Bad Bunny performed as part of the Super Bowl LIV halftime-adjacent and later mainstream-award cycle in U.S. pop memory; the February 2026 Super Bowl conversation around his place in the show is the recent nerve the anecdote touches. The point of the story is the loyalty test, not a music review.
[11] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The withdrawal of the creative mind from a looting moral order is the John Galt plot. I am using the shape, not joining a fan club.
[12] Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967; U.S. EEOC age-discrimination materials. Cultural contempt for older workers is larger than the statute and smaller than a conspiracy chart. It is a fashion with teeth.
[13] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021).
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
The Holy Bible, Genesis 37–50 and Exodus 1–12. Read at least two translations side by side; the King James “coat of many colours” and modern renderings of ketonet passim both matter.
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. Basic Books, 1981. Still the cleanest account of how these stories are built.
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. Norton, 2004.
Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis. Jewish Publication Society / Schocken.
Kass, Leon R. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Free Press, 2003. Especially strong on Joseph, statesmanship, and the education of the brothers.
Fox, Everett. The Five Books of Moses. Schocken. Useful for hearing the Hebrew grit in English.
Guzik, David. Study Guide for Genesis 44. Blue Letter Bible.
Jamieson, Robert, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown. Commentary on Genesis 44.
Bible Hub and Bible Gateway, Genesis 44, “A Silver Cup in a Sack.”
Parton, Dolly. “Coat of Many Colors.” 1971. See also My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994) for the dry-cleaning-receipt composition story.
Songfacts; Rolling Stone Parton interviews on the coat and the Joseph telling.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Jealousy as a technology.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Family, ingratitude, the discarded father.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. The other great Western book on how evil talks in a household.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. For the intelligent voice of temptation, not the costume devil.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. The modern brief on evil that does not need horns.
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred; Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Mimetic rivalry is the academic name for what Genesis 37 shows without the jargon.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. On the line of evil running through every human heart, not only through official villains.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. Bureaucracy and flattery as the devil’s work clothes.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories”; The Lord of the Rings, on the Ring as a handle for domination. Different myth, same warning about the easy life.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Age Discrimination fact sheets and The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA.
Restaurant and place listings for Joseph’s Cup, 8050 Arbor Square Drive, Mason, Ohio: josephscup.com; joe.coffee location page; Restaurantji; TripAdvisor.
Travel Butler County. Listings for Bridgewater Falls and area hospitality.
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.
