I just returned from Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio, after Vivek Ramaswamy’s last campaign stop before the election. A number of Ohio officeholders came out to speak alongside him. The speech was long—longer than ideal for people already heading out to vote—so I will condense the essence of what I heard and what I discussed with people there and afterward.[1]
Lori’s Roadhouse continues to do great things for these kinds of events. The place was packed with signs and energy in a way Amy Acton could never have matched. You will not see that kind of coverage on the news or on Fox, but the basics are clear. The encouragement from the stage was simple: go vote, and call your friends and neighbors to do the same. That is the message I am giving my readers and viewers right now.
I have watched Vivek grow into this role over the years. He was right when he noted in his speech that the campaign launched just a few miles from Lori’s Roadhouse—at the business I ran. I was proud he chose that location, and it was bittersweet to see the campaign season come full circle there. The owners are good people, and every event held there has been excellent. The crowd was energetic, and Vivek appeared in a way many people had not seen before.
The Numbers Game and Republican Advantage in Ohio
This election is a numbers game. If Republicans show up even moderately, they far outnumber Democrats in Ohio. That is why Democrats know they have to stretch every process. Amy Acton is a disaster; I have said so from the beginning. She is the lockdown lady, a horrible candidate who simply does not have the goods down the stretch.[2]
In the numbers, Vivek is well ahead in the places that matter. Acton is not performing well in the counties she needs to overcome him, and those counties will not deliver the numbers required on Election Day. From conversations with people who know the internals the media does not report, the race is well in hand for Republicans if turnout materializes. That also means strength for other races on the ticket.
It is much scarier for Democrats heading into this election than for Republicans. There are simply more Republicans. But if people sit on their hands, representation can still be lost. Do not take anything for granted.
Conversations That Reveal a Dangerous Frustration
The part that concerns me most is what I heard today from people who are not deeply interested in politics—people who live between the cities, who do not know many Democrats, do not want to work with them, and have no desire to break bread with them. Their question to me was: why go vote?
Voting is the most peaceful way to maintain representative government. Their illusion is that nothing will improve until people grab guns, take violence into the streets, and reclaim the country from radicals. George Soros and others have funded efforts that damage Western civilization; evil is at work.[3] But on this election eve in 2026, I believe the best way to maintain self-government is still to vote—not to turn to violence.
Most of the people I spoke with, especially those between the cities, think it has to come to violence before they get their country back. If Democrats thought January 6 was terrible, that was mild compared with what some of these people are thinking. I try to tell them that violence can be avoided by voting. Their response is often that it will be cheated anyway, so who cares.
What’s at Stake: Civility Over Violence
What is at stake is civility itself. If you want a civil society, go vote before you feel you have to grab the guns and take it back with bloodshed the way the Revolution once required. It is yours to hold; you simply have to get up and go. You have to do it at presidential-level turnout.
After the event at Lori’s Roadhouse and the conversations I had, the picture looks strong for Republicans in Ohio if people show up. Republicans way outnumber Democrats, but if you stay home, the other side will represent you because they are the ones voting. Voting is easy. Maintaining self-government through legislative means is far better than the alternatives.
I talked to more than one person today who alluded to having a shell full of ammunition ready to “take care of” the Marxists and communists. That is not a good sign. Giving up on self-rule through the ballot is not a good thing. The other side wants people of Western civilization to abandon peaceful means. Do not give that to them.
A Personal Call to Action
I am telling everyone who watches me, reads me, or listens to me: to maintain civility and protect Western civilization, just get up and go vote. Vote for Republicans, not Democrats. Vote down tax increases. Vote for Vivek Ramaswamy. Things will be much better in Ohio with him as governor, and better in the wider world.
I remember when I first saw the campaign signs—very techie—when he was putting up the art at my business for the rally that opened his governor’s race. I am happy to see it come full circle, and I will be happy to see him as governor of Ohio.
A few months ago I saw Vivek walk into a little restaurant with almost no security. We had a nice personal conversation, and few people reacted. At Lori’s Roadhouse it was governor-level security, a Secret Service-style entourage, and a posse that made it hard to get close. It was strange, but it is exciting. I think he is going to win—but only if people show up.
Do not leave it to other people to decide for you. Vote like your life depends on it, because in a lot of ways it does. We do not want a society that turns to violence in order to maintain self-government. Go vote for the 2026 election.
Footnotes
[1] The event was held at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester Township, Butler County, Ohio. Local coverage and posts confirmed the rally timing on the final day of campaigning.
[2] Public polling averages in late October and early November 2026 generally showed Amy Acton with a narrow lead (roughly 2–7 points depending on the pollster), though some surveys were tighter or showed Ramaswamy ahead. Ohio does not have formal party registration; affiliation is determined by primary ballot choice. Early-voting data showed Democrats returning a higher share of ballots than Republicans through late October, with unaffiliated voters forming a large bloc. The author’s assessment relies on claimed internal numbers and county-level expectations not reflected in the public averages.
[3] References to funding of progressive causes and election-related efforts by George Soros and associated networks appear widely in conservative commentary and investigative reporting on philanthropy and political spending.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. Center Street, 2021.
Ramaswamy, Vivek. Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence. Center Street, 2022.
Ramaswamy, Vivek. Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn’t Vote For. HarperCollins, 2023.
Ramaswamy, Vivek. Truths: The Future of America First. Simon & Schuster, 2024.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. (Author’s work on leadership, individual responsibility, and practical strategy.)
Green, Donald P., and Alan S. Gerber. Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. 4th ed. Brookings Institution Press, 2019.
Hill, David. American Voter Turnout: An Institutional Perspective. Westview Press, 2006.
Rolfe, Meredith. Voter Turnout: A Social Theory of Political Participation. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Derber, Charles, et al. Turnout!: Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency. Routledge, 2020.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, 2016.
Caplan, Bryan. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton University Press, 2007.
Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton University Press, 2016.
Brennan, Jason. Against Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2016.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. (Multiple editions; foundational on American civic habits and self-government.)
Madison, James, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. (Especially essays on factions, republican government, and the dangers of majority tyranny.)
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. (On consent, property, and the right to alter or abolish government.)
Federalist Society publications and reports on election integrity and originalism, 2020–2026.
Heritage Foundation Election Integrity Project reports, 2024–2026.
Ohio Secretary of State voter registration and early-voting dashboards (2026 cycle data).
RealClearPolitics, Ballotpedia, and multi-state election trackers for the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial race (polling averages, candidate profiles, and historical context).
Local Ohio reporting from the Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch, and Butler County sources on campaign events and county-level dynamics.
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 talking about this for years now, and the pattern keeps confirming itself. A few years ago, in 2022, it was Cochise County, Arizona, with Katie Hobbs as Secretary of State. Republican supervisors on the board delayed certifying the midterm results past the statutory deadline, citing concerns about the certification and accreditation of the voting machines. Hobbs, who was herself a candidate for governor against Kari Lake, sued the county to force the canvass. A judge ordered them to certify; they eventually did under threat, and later two supervisors were indicted for interference. Official accounts insist there was “no evidence of a count being incorrect,” yet the resistance itself, the attempted full hand-count that a court blocked, and the broader atmosphere of machine distrust revealed how thin the institutional trust had become.
We have seen the same dynamic in Fulton County, Georgia. In December 2025, an attorney for the county stood before the State Election Board and stated plainly that they did not dispute the failure to sign tabulator tapes covering roughly 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election—nearly all of the early in-person ballots. That directly violates the rules designed to create a verifiable chain of custody between voters and tabulated results. There have also been admissions and findings around double-scanned ballots, missing ballot images, and inconsistent batch tallies from the risk-limiting audit and recount. Officials and the Secretary of State call these clerical errors that did not change the outcome; Biden’s margin in Georgia was about 11,779 votes. Yet the volume of procedural failures is not trivial, and the late admission years later only feeds the original skepticism.
How They Thought They Would Get Away With It
This is what has always puzzled me. The Constitution and American society rest on a baseline of integrity—people raising their right hand and swearing to tell the whole truth, so help them, God. When that idea is hollowed out, the entire mechanism of voluntary cooperation collapses. Progressive globalism treated the removal of that integrity as a feature, not a bug. Without the sacred weight of the oath, testimony becomes just another tactical instrument. You can say whatever advances the narrative today and walk it back tomorrow as a “clerical error.” The goal was authority without the restraint of genuine accountability.
They preached using the power of government to reshape the individual and society, yet simultaneously pushed to defund the police. That is an obvious contradiction. If you dismantle the everyday instruments of law and order, how exactly do you intend to enforce the new authority you claim? You cannot have it both ways. Either the rules apply with consistent enforcement, or the system becomes pure power exercised by whoever controls the institutions at the moment. The progressive assumption seemed to be that once integrity was sufficiently degraded, and once enough people accepted that “the process” itself was the only legitimacy required, dissent could be managed through narrative, lawfare, and selective prosecution rather than persuasion.
Lawfare, Oaths, and the Targeting of Questioners
We saw that approach in practice. Efforts to put Trump in jail; the imprisonment of Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress related to the January 6 committee and election-related challenges; and the FBI seizure of Mike Lindell’s phone at a drive-through while he was under heavy scrutiny for questioning the machines and the results—these were not abstract debates. They showed what happens when you question the official story too persistently. At the same time, discussions continue about holding figures such as Anthony Fauci accountable for the pandemic response, yet the institutional machinery has been far more energetic in pursuing those who challenged 2020 election procedures than in applying the same standard universally.
The removal of the idea that an oath means something is central. When liberals treat the “so help me God” clause as optional theater, the entire structure of testimony and public record loses its force. That is why a candidate like Amy Acton can run for governor in Ohio with a campaign largely managed through public relations filters, raising tens of millions while avoiding direct, unscripted answers to difficult questions. The model is to control the information environment rather than submit to open scrutiny. In a system that still had robust integrity, that approach would be fatal. Once integrity is optional, it becomes a viable strategy.
The Voice of the People and the 2024 Contrast
People still went out and voted in large numbers in 2024. The red wave, though it could not be fully contained, showed that when voters have a clear channel and counting is sufficiently visible, the representative mechanism can still function. That is why calls to re-examine 2020—not as nostalgia, but as a demand that discrepancies be treated with the same seriousness as any other large-scale administrative failure—continue. Trump didn’t have to be drafted into that fight; he volunteered because the alternative was accepting a system in which the oath and the count are both flexible. It was never more complicated than that for those who still believe the mechanisms they were told were reliable should actually be reliable.
The progressive error was thinking that authority could be sustained after integrity had been systematically weakened. Without the cultural habit of telling the truth under oath, and without consistent law enforcement that does not depend on political convenience, the only remaining tools are narrative control and selective coercion. That is not a stable foundation for any society that claims to be constitutional. The admissions in places like Fulton County and the certification fights in Cochise County are not the whole story, but they clearly illustrate why so many people concluded the system had stopped treating integrity as non-negotiable.
Bibliography
• New York Times, “Republican-Controlled County in Arizona Holds Up Election Results,” November 28, 2022.
• Snopes, “Fulton County, Georgia, officials admitted ballot-handling errors during 2020 election,” December 2025 (citing State Election Board proceedings and county attorney Ann Brumbaugh’s statement).
• Atlanta News First and 11Alive reporting on the December 9, 2025, State Election Board hearing regarding unsigned tabulator tapes covering approximately 315,000 early votes.
• Associated Press and other contemporaneous coverage of Cochise County Board of Supervisors actions, Hobbs lawsuit, and subsequent judicial order to certify.
• Judicial Watch and reporting on the 2022 FBI warrant and seizure of Mike Lindell’s phone.
• Coverage of Peter Navarro’s conviction and imprisonment for contempt of Congress.
• Acton for Governor campaign finance announcements and contemporaneous polling.porting on the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial race.The record is public.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am not a separation of church and state guy the way the left has used it to push a secular agenda. But to understnad that, you have to understand history, and many people just don’t. And those same people don’t know much about one of the people I consider to be one of the early American Founding Fathers, Jonathan Edwards. I say, use what works and is healthy for a great society, and don’t argue with the poliitcal left the interpritation of law and order when they want to destroy America by using its own laws and policy against its creation. Since that is their method, I would advise that we drop the polite veil and admit what we are all thinking: churches go well with Republican politics, and we should be a whole lot more open about it, and just let the Marxists of the Democratic Party have their faces melt. Art Sauerwein is the new chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. The Journal-News piece I have been talking about put his wish list in public: take back the schools and make them more conservative; see more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes. I agree with most of that list. I would put the disagreement, if there is one, in a sliver. Five percent, maybe. The problem is not the nouns. The problem is that a county chairman saying he is displeased with his own officeholders signals to every Democrat and every reporter in the room that the party is not united.¹
I have a particular soft spot for people who take thankless chairs. I also have a long memory of what happens when the Bush years go slack, when Clinton years teach the other side to use government as a wealth-transfer machine, and when a Republican majority forgets that it was elected to stop that machine, not to learn its levers. Small-government capitalism is not the same project as confiscating through the tax code and redistributing under a better letterhead. I have been on that argument since before the Tea Party years. I have not left it.
What I will not do is pretend that the way you get Christian schools and lower taxes is to twist the arms of the people you still need on the card. That is the Democrat tactic with different hymns. Ostracize, purity-test, call the holdout a RINO, and then act surprised when the tent is an empty Sunday-school classroom with folding chairs and no majority.
Why I Walked George Lang to His Car
People tell me I cannot be trusted because I am friends with George Lang. I was invited to an evening with him and his wife, Debbie. We get along. I like them. I like George. Not because he is a state senator from the 4th District. Because we can stay on a subject until the parking lot lights are the only ones left.²
We started years ago with a mutual fascination with Ayn Rand and the long story of human order. She was an atheist. I was not. We did not make religion the ticket into the room. We made taxes, small business, the Ohio caucus work, jobs that let a family buy nice things without the government picking the neighbor’s pocket. Those are the planks you can stand on with a man who is not yet where you are on Sunday morning. Then you walk him to the car.
This year, 2026, not a decade ago, we were still talking when we got to his car, extending the evening as much as possible because the conversation was good. He knows what I carry. He knows the maps and the notes. He pulled out a Bible that had been given to him in the Senate. It was beautiful. I would have liked it for the shelf. It was his. He had been going through it. Debbie has said, in the way honest people say it, that they have not always lived in that lane. I did not need a performance. I needed the book’s facts in the car of a man who helps write Ohio law. That is how influence works. That is Nicodemus in a parking lot instead of a midnight stair.³
If the chairperson’s job is to get people on the card, then the chairman’s job is to make nights like that more common, not to publish a scolding that makes the next senator keep the Bible in the trunk.
Jonathan Edwards Did Not Found America From a Letter to the Editor
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible came out in August 2026 from Thomas Nelson, NKJV, notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, edited by Matthew Everhard. I saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review, which is still the magazine I would take to a desert island and be happy with nothing else. I will likely make that Edwards volume my next daily Bible. The one I have carried through airports is full of notes. Every blank space they left me has writing in it.⁴
Edwards did his public work in the 1730s through the 1750s, while a young George Washington was still making himself and Franklin was already allergic to other people’s piety and still able to hear the weather. The Awakening put biblical speech in the streets. The colonies that broke from England were not a faculty workshop. They were a people who had been arguing, singing, and frightening themselves with sermons about a God who was not a mascot. I do not claim Edwards “founded” the United States. I claim the country is harder to imagine without that pressure in the air.
He was also the grandfather of Aaron Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton. I am not a Hamilton man. I mention the grandson so nobody thinks I am selling a stained-glass window. Edwards’s own church in Northampton eventually threw him out because he would not lower the table to the town’s comfort. He finished in a smaller charge at Stockbridge, among the Mahican, and then the College of New Jersey—Princeton—made him president. He lasted about a month. He took the smallpox inoculation during an outbreak, fever followed, and he died on March 22, 1758. His last counsel was to trust God and not be afraid. The same college that begged him to come later drifted into the progressive machine that now congratulates itself for unmaking the civilization he helped catechize.⁵
That arc is the warning. You can put a Christian on a letterhead and still lose the building. You can also lose the building by refusing to put your arm around anyone who is not already converted.
Darbi Boddy and the Noble Death That Vacates the Seat
I have always had a soft spot for Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board. She came out of a Puritan temperament: right is right, wrong is wrong, say it, take the heat. I admired the spine. The political class asked whether she knew she had to go to other people and shake hands. She drew a line so hard that the people who should have been part of her coalition treated her as a problem to be managed. She was removed. Not enough Republicans came to her defense in the way that kept the seat. I was very angry about that. I still am.⁶
There is a Christian imagination that treats the pike as the only honorable furniture—burned, sawn, beheaded, and therefore faithful. The martyrs were real. Rome tried to kill the church, and the church outlived the attempt. I am asking a different question for a school board and a county party. Are we here to die beautifully and hand the district back to the purple-haired people eaters or are we here to keep the chair and put more than one adult in the room?
A public school system designed as an agent of social reconstruction will not become conservative because a chairman tells the Journal-News he would like that very much. You need people on the board who can last. You need people around them who do not run at the first ugly headline. You need a farm team that was not raised only in a sanctuary, because most of the county was not. Maybe forty percent can make the born-again jump on a timetable that satisfies a Sunday-school teacher. The rest will come, if they come, the way George came toward a Bible in a backseat: over years, over taxes, over ancient history, over the proof that you will still walk them to the car when they are not yet where you are.
The Church That Taught Me Business Had Classrooms and a Mortgage
I saw my grandson today, and I told him about my years between eleven and sixteen, High Adventure, the Scout post that met at a big church on RT42 in West Chester. We made pizzas in the church kitchen, and people came to pick them up. That was a fundraiser, a civics lesson, and a first business plan. My family church in Fairfield was the other building. My wife and I were married there. Catechism, Sunday school, the pastor’s house on the property, the side rooms where a kid learned how adults talk when they think they are only running a troop meeting. Then the money ran out. They sold it. It broke my family’s heart. It is not on the market presently. I have been thinking about buying it back for a couple of million. dollars In any other use, that ground in Fairfield is a different number. Because it is a church, the market treats it like a problem.⁷
I am not announcing a closing. I am saying the thought is serious, and Jonathan Edwards is the reason the thought got louder. Churches decline when they have no profit model and a pastor who thinks Jesus only ever taught under a tree. Jesus could walk from village to village. A sanctuary in a hot real-estate corridor has a mortgage. Nicodemus money, the quiet help that keeps a ministry on its feet, is not a compromise with Egypt. It is how a thing survives long enough to teach the next boy how to sell a pizza and keep the books.
The West Chester Tea Party lost a church venue while I was in Japan not that long ago. A guest, a fight, and the door closed. For years the movement lived on donated fellowship halls and cookies after the meeting. Streamers, Republicans, whoever would come. That was a big tent that still knew the room had been a sanctuary an hour earlier. I want a building in this county that Tea Party groups and Republican meetings can use without a landlord who gets nervous. Not a state church. A civic table with a steeple still on it.
Princeton Forgot. The Party Should Not Copy the Forgetting.
Edwards as president of Princeton is the picture I cannot shake. The college wanted the man who could make seniors write on divinity and then talk about it. A short generation later, the heirs of that project began the long surrender. Liberty University and the older schools are not the same charter, but the temptation is the same: keep the Christian name, lose the Christian nerve, export Democrats with verse numbers. Complaining about that in a newspaper will not reverse it. Buying a pulpit, filling a room, putting your arm around a senator who keeps a Bible in the backseat, teaching a Scout to make change for a pizza—that is the slower work.
Peer pressure is not evangelism. “Agree, or we will put you outside” is what the other party already does. If we do it with better footnotes, we still lose the county. Jesus did not recruit from the Sanhedrin’s banquet list. He took the people who had fallen out of the wagon. Edwards could fill a town and still get voted out. Both facts matter. The first tells you preaching works. The second tells you preaching without a coalition becomes a memorial service.
What I Want the Chairman to Do Instead of Being Displeased
Help officeholders get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. If you want Christian values in the community, put a beautiful Bible in more backseats by being the kind of man a senator will linger with in a parking lot. If you want the schools, do not design another martyr and then wonder why the seat is empty after they are killed or lose their seat in the next election. If you want taxes cut, stay on the subject with people who will go to the small-business caucus before they will go to your Wednesday Bible study volunteer class.
I will keep reading BAR. I will keep the Edwards volume in the rotation. I will keep walking George to the car. I will keep thinking about the Fairfield church, not because nostalgia is a strategy, but because the kids I see now do not have the side room I had, and a party that cannot raise its own young in a hall it does not have to rent is a party that will keep leasing its future from people who do not like its hymn.
Lead. Do not write the other side’s headline for them.
Notes
1. Art Sauerwein, Butler County GOP executive chairman, quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage on local Republicans, schools, Christian values, spending, and taxes. A public rebuke of sitting Republican officeholders is usable copy for the other party. That is not mind-reading. That is how newspapers work.
2. George F. Lang, Republican, Ohio Senate 4th District since 2021; previously Ohio House 52nd; West Chester. Married to Debbie Lang. I am describing a private evening in 2026 and a longer friendship. I am not claiming he has asked me to speak for him.
3. John 3; 7:50–51; 19:39–42. Nicodemus keeps his station and still moves toward the teacher. Influence that can only speak in the sanctuary will not reach the people who write statutes.
4. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026, general editor Matthew Everhard. Biblical Archaeology Review, Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.
5. Edwards was inaugurated at the College of New Jersey on February 16, 1758; died March 22, 1758, after smallpox inoculation. Buried in the Presidents’ Lot, Princeton Cemetery. Esther Edwards married Aaron Burr Sr.; their son was Aaron Burr Jr. Northampton dismissed Edwards in 1750 over communion discipline; Stockbridge followed.
6. Darbi Boddy won a Lakota Local Schools board seat in 2021 on a conservative platform and was removed by the board in March 2024 after a long, ugly fight and a 90-day absence tied to a protection-order conflict with another member. I am not retrying that case here. I am talking about coalition and what happens when courage has no bench.
7. The Fairfield church of my childhood and marriage is named as a family fact and a present thought, not as a listed property and not as a pledge. High Adventure and the West Chester church on the Cincinnati-Dayton Road corridor are the Scout years as I lived them.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Local Politics and the People Named
Journal-News (Hamilton). Late-August 2026 coverage of Butler County Republicans and Chairman Art Sauerwein.
Lang, George F. Ohio Senate, District 4. Public record, 2021–present; Ohio House, 2017–2020.
Ballotpedia and the Ohio Legislature biographical pages for George Lang.
Journal-News. “2 conservative newcomers, incumbent win Lakota seats.” November 2021.
WVXU. “Darbi Boddy is removed from Lakota’s school board.” March 20, 2024.
WLWT. Lakota board appointment coverage following the vacant seat, April 2024.
FOX19. “Criminal charge dismissed against former Lakota school board member.” August 1, 2024.
Jonathan Edwards and the Awakening
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press.
Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections; Freedom of the Will; “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.
Marsden, George M. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Eerdmans, 2008.
McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford, 2012.
Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.
Princeton University. Presidential biographies: Jonathan Edwards, 1758.
This Day in Presbyterian History. “February 23: Jonathan Edwards.” On the inoculation and death.
Princeton and the Long Drift
The Princetonians and official presidential histories of the College of New Jersey.
Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822. Princeton University Press, 1989.
Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford, 1994.
Burtchaell, James Tunstead. The Dying of the Light. Eerdmans, 1998.
Church, Money, and the Nicodemus Problem
The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, 19.
Luke 8:1–3. The women who funded the ministry.
Acts 4:32–37; 16:14–15. Property and hospitality in the first churches.
Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”
Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together.
Schaeffer, Francis A. The Church at the End of the 20th Century.
Schools, Boards, and the Limits of Martyrdom
Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education. Free Press, 1993.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. The Schools We Need. Doubleday, 1996.
Murray, Charles. Real Education. Crown Forum, 2008.
Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. New Society, 1992.
Ohio Department of Education standards files for the official language boards to actually vote on.
Parties, Tents, and Coalition
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.
Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015.
Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale, 1962.
Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Scripture, Friendship, and Slow Conversion
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.
Newby, Elizabeth. On ordinary friendship as the delivery system of belief, read against Lewis.
Augustine. Confessions. The long way toward a book that was already in the house.
Biblical Archaeology Review. For the magazine that sits on the table while the political argument goes on.
Boy Scouts of America. Handbook and the old troop-and-post structure. The side room was a civics school whether the adults knew it or not.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have spent a good deal of time lately thinking about the ancient copper mines of Lake Superior and the strange, almost otherworldly geology that surrounds the Great Lakes. Those thoughts were still turning over in my mind when my family and I loaded the RV and headed for South Bass Island. People from California or Europe might look at a map of Ohio and wonder why anyone would choose an island in Lake Erie for a vacation. From where I sit, it is one of the finest places on earth. It is close enough that my wife and I can reach it without turning the trip into an ordeal, yet once you are on the island you feel properly away from the mainland and its noise. That distance matters to me more than it once did.
We took the ferry with the RV, set up camp, and let the grandchildren loose on golf carts. They had a tremendous time. My son-in-law captured a different angle of the same days on his YouTube channel—lighter, more focused on the pure family fun. I present information one way; he and my daughter present it another. The island itself offered exactly what I had hoped for: a short escape, some serious geology, and a chance to feed the particular curiosity I see in one of my grandsons.
Why South Bass Island and the Lake Erie Caves Called to Us
The geology of these islands is young by deep-time standards. Much of what you see was shaped by the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years ago, yet the underlying limestone and the cave systems hold older stories. I wanted the grandchildren to walk through those stories. Perry’s Cave is the most famous of them. During the War of 1812, men under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry used the underground freshwater stream inside the cave while the fleet was based in the natural harbor at Put-in-Bay. The cave sits fifty-odd feet below the surface, stays a constant cool temperature, and still carries that quiet historical weight.
A short distance away is Crystal Cave at Heineman’s Winery, recognized as the world’s largest geode. You descend into a single vast cavity lined with celestite crystals, some of them more than a foot long. The space is large enough to accommodate a small group of people comfortably. Standing inside it feels less like visiting a tourist attraction and more like stepping into a mineral cathedral formed over thousands of years after the ice retreated. My grandson, the one who already shows the restless, pattern-seeking intelligence that strongly reminds me of a young Thomas Edison, had been talking about the largest geode in the world. We made sure he saw it.
Joe’s Bar sits near the little airport, close enough that people flying in on small planes can walk over for a hamburger or fries. They allow dogs on the outdoor side, which is why my granddaughter wanted to go. We were not there for the drinking crowd. We were there because it sits almost on the path between the campground and the caves, and because a place that welcomes the family dog while serving simple food has its own quiet usefulness. These small details are part of what makes the island work.
The Edison Parallel and the Decision to Stay Longer in Milan
I talk about Thomas Edison a good deal around that particular grandson. It is not that I want to turn him into a replica. I want him to see that there have always been alternatives to the standard path. After the rest of us headed home, my oldest daughter, her husband, and that grandson stayed on. They took the extra days to drive over to Milan, Ohio, and visit Edison’s boyhood home. The house is modest, brick, and sits in a quiet town that still carries the inventor’s name with a certain local pride.
I had recommended Edmund Morris’s biography of Edison years earlier. Morris structured the book in reverse, beginning near the end of Edison’s life—when the older man was still frantically trying to solve the problem of domestic rubber production with Henry Ford and others—and working backward to the boy in Milan. That structure stays with me. It shows a man who never stopped pushing against limits, even when he was five minutes from death. His mother had pulled him out of the public school system early because the ordinary classroom could not contain him. She homeschooled him, protected his oddities, and gave him room to become the person who would later file patents at a pace almost no one has matched.
That decision by a mother in a small Ohio town still matters. The regulatory and educational environment today makes another Edison far less likely. My daughter understands this. Her husband understands it. They did not stay behind to force a legend on a child. They stayed to show him the actual house, the actual town, and the atmosphere that once allowed a singular mind to develop without being sanded down into a drone.
Local Newspapers, Mickey’s Gas Station, and the Voynich Manuscript
While they were in the Milan area, they stopped at one of the Mickey’s locations—a regional gas-station and market chain that still feels rooted in northern Ohio rather than corporate nowhere. At the counter, they picked up free local newspapers. One of them carried a feature on the Voynich Manuscript, the world’s most mysterious book. My daughter texted me photos of the pages and asked what I thought of it.
I had already written about the manuscript. My working view is that it may be the notebook of a non-human intelligence that somehow ended up in human hands—an idea that fits the larger pattern I explore in The Politics of Heaven. Whether that theory is ultimately correct or not, the fact that a free newspaper distributed at a gas station in Edison country would feature the Voynich at all tells you something about the residual curiosity that still lives in these communities. They are not merely selling fuel and snacks. They are still willing to put strange, difficult ideas in front of ordinary people who might take a copy home and actually read it.
That same spirit shows up in the little free papers and local efforts you find on the islands themselves. People publish them because they love the place and want to keep a certain industrious, heritage-minded atmosphere alive. It is the opposite of the passive consumption that dominates so much of modern life.
Hardware-Store Towels, Uranus Fudge, and the Ordinary Magic of Ohio Stops
One afternoon we took the kids to a beach facing Kelley’s Island from South Base Island. It is one of the better swimming spots in the area, down past the memorial at the far end. No one had packed swimsuits or towels. The water was cold, as Lake Erie usually is. My wife climbed into a golf cart, drove to the little hardware-and-grocery store that serves much of the island, bought towels and extra clothes, and raced back so the children would not freeze on the return ride. The whole episode lasted maybe half an hour. It was pure small-town improvisation, and it worked.
On other trips, we stop at Shelton’s fireworks store in Richmond, Indiana, right across the state line. Across the street sits the Uranus Fudge Factory, a place that leans hard into adolescent humor in its name yet sells genuinely high-quality candy. This has been a candy year for the grandchildren. We have hit obscure sweet shops all over Ohio, and Uranus held its own. We also make the ritual stop at the McDonald’s in Eaton with the good playground, even though the kids are now mostly too old to play on it. They still like being there. On the way back, we often grab Chinese food from the little plaza near the Walmart. These are not glamorous destinations. They are simply places that have kept a certain American texture—part commerce, part joke, part genuine local pride.
What These Days Actually Mean
I did not plan the vacation as a lesson. I planned it as time away with the people I care about, on an island that still feels like itself. The geology, the caves, the geode, the Edison house, the free newspaper with the Voynich article, the hardware-store towels, and the slightly ridiculous fudge factory all belong to the same larger pattern. They are evidence that pockets of real curiosity and individual initiative still exist in ordinary American places.
The copper mines of Superior, the glacial history of the islands, the unexplained manuscript, and the boy who was protected from the standard school system all feed into the same set of questions I have been carrying for years. Those questions will appear in full in The Politics of Heaven. For now, it is enough to say that a family trip to Put-in-Bay and a side journey to Milan reminded me why I keep returning to these subjects. Intelligence and inventiveness do not come from committees or from systems designed to produce uniform results. They come from particular minds given room to develop, often in small towns that still value their own odd heritage.
I am glad my daughter and son-in-law captured their version of the days on video. I am glad the grandchildren got to stand inside the largest geode, walk through Perry’s Cave, and see the actual house where Edison began. And I am glad a free newspaper at a gas station still bothers to tell people about the world’s most mysterious book. These are small signs, but they are real. In a time when so much of the culture seems determined to flatten everything into the same safe shape, they are worth noticing.
If you ever find yourself near Lake Erie with a few free days, take the ferry. Walk the caves. Stand inside the geode. And if you are driving through northern Ohio, stop at a Mickey’s and pick up whatever free paper they are giving away that week. You never know what might be inside it.
Footnotes
1. Guinness World Records recognizes Crystal Cave at Heineman’s Winery on South Bass Island as the largest geode, a single celestite cavity discovered in 1887 while digging a well.
2. Historical accounts credit men under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry with using the underground stream in Perry’s Cave for freshwater during the 1813 occupation of the island before the Battle of Lake Erie.
3. Edmund Morris, Edison (New York: Random House, 2019). The biography is structured in reverse chronological order, beginning near the end of Edison’s life and moving backward to his boyhood in Milan, Ohio.
4. The Voynich Manuscript, held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, remains undeciphered. Fringe theories have long included non-human or extraterrestrial origin; the author’s own published view aligns with that line of speculation as part of a broader inquiry into non-human intelligence.
5. Mickey’s is a regional convenience-store and gas-station chain headquartered in the Milan, Ohio area, known for community involvement and local character.
Selected Bibliography
Morris, Edmund. Edison. New York: Random House, 2019.
Heineman’s Winery and Crystal Cave historical materials, Put-in-Bay, Ohio.
Perry’s Cave Family Fun Center and related War of 1812 documentation.
National Park Service materials on Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial.
Voynich Manuscript facsimile and scholarly literature, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Local histories of South Bass Island, Kelleys Island, and the Lake Erie island archipelago.
Geology of the Great Lakes region and post-glacial cave formation studies.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming).
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 first learned that Sheriff Richard K. Jones had put a book out when a few people in the county mentioned it in passing, and the moment I heard the title I knew I would read it. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America arrived on the front porch the day my family and I returned from being out of town at Put-in-Bay, in Ohio. I had ordered it so it would be waiting, because I had already promised myself and others that I would get through it promptly. After more than two decades of knowing the man, shaking his hand at events, watching him work a room in that cowboy hat of his, and hearing him on WLW or in national spots talking immigration and law and order, I still carried questions about how he became who he is, what shaped the priorities he brings to the office every morning, and how a man decides day to day what matters most when the badge is on. The book answered more of those questions than casual conversation ever could.
What struck me first is that this is not merely a campaign volume or a greatest-hits collection of media appearances. It reads like a man who has spent a lifetime speaking into microphones and cameras finally realizing that the voice does not last forever. There is a quiet urgency underneath the stories. He talks about the burial plot, about the friend at the funeral home who will one day see him prepared for the last service. He is only a little more than a decade older than I am, yet the public job ages a person in ways private life does not. Six terms as sheriff of Butler County, with the possibility of more, still brings the knowledge that one day the hat comes off for the last time. Writing the book becomes a way of leaving the voice behind so that the things he believes still matter after the daily briefings and the press conferences stop.
I have always liked the Gunsmoke in him. He admits the debt openly. The old black-and-white shows, the clear line between the man who upholds the law and the men who break it, the sense that a sheriff walks the street and talks to people and puts things right when he can. Andy Griffith is there too, the Mayberry instinct to put an arm around the troubled soul and try to set him back on the path. Those two shows formed a generation of men who believed law enforcement could be both firm and decent. Jonesy lives that combination more than most. He is black-and-white on the big questions. Drugs destroy families and communities; illegal immigration brings more of the same; the jail is full of people who made choices that wrecked their own lives and the lives of others. Yet the book reveals a softer edge than the public persona sometimes allows. He is a compassionate conservative in the older sense of the term. He wants the county to feel more like the place he grew up, where most of the kids he knew had parents who stayed married twenty or thirty years and worked through their troubles instead of walking away at the first hard stretch.
That observation about divorce rates is one of the strongest passages. He watched the numbers climb across his adult lifetime and saw the downstream damage in the jail, in the overdose calls, in the children who never had a stable home to push against. Stable families produce the work ethic and the self-control that keep a community from tipping into chaos. When the marriages fracture as a matter of course, the sheriff’s office ends up dealing with the wreckage. He does not present himself as a sociologist, but the pattern is plain to anyone who has spent decades answering the same kinds of calls. The data back the instinct. The sharp rise in divorce after the introduction of no-fault laws, the parallel growth in single-parent households, and the measurable links to higher rates of juvenile trouble, drug use, and later criminality are not left-wing inventions or right-wing inventions. They are simply what happened.
I share the same cultural memory. I grew up with Gunsmoke playing in the background at my grandparents’ place near Oxford, rabbit ears and all, the same black-and-white morality on the screen while the adults talked about the real world. The shows did not prepare a man for the full depth of certain modern evils. Pornography addiction of the kind that turns a phone into a nonstop delivery system, and the further slide into the sexual exploitation of children, sit outside the frame of those old stories. Jonesy is of an era when a teenager might sneak a look at a dirty magazine on a high shelf in an old bookstore hoping that the cashier wouldn’t catch them. The scale and the numbness of what exists now are harder for that generation to metabolize, not because the men lack courage, but because the evil itself is newer in its accessibility and its intensity. He is devastatingly clear on drugs. On the deeper sexual corruptions that have grown in the last thirty years, the book leaves the impression of a man who sees the damage and still struggles to find language adequate to the thing itself. That is not a failing of character. It is the honest limit of a worldview formed before the internet made every darkness instantly available.
His record on the drug side is long and consistent. The seizures, the public messaging, the refusal to treat overdose deaths as inevitable background noise, all of it tracks with the same black-and-white view. He has been equally consistent on illegal immigration, which is why the national media found him useful for color and why the comparisons to Joe Arpaio sometimes surface. Arpaio paid a political and legal price for enforcing the same principles under a different administration; the pardon that followed was a recognition that the prosecution had been selective. Jonesy has not faced that level of federal hostility, and Butler County is not Maricopa. The local political climate has allowed him to keep doing the work. I expect him to keep winning as long as he wants the job, and I hope that is for a good while yet. The county is better for his presence.
There is a section on the COVID years that brought back the tension of those days. He kept the office functioning, kept the messaging straightforward, and refused to let the panic dictate every decision. Leadership under that kind of pressure reveals the man. The same instinct shows up in the smaller habits. He likes the Waffle House on Main Street in Hamilton enough that they named an omelet after him. I understand the attraction. Walk in, sit at the counter, talk to the cooks and the waitresses and whoever else is there about the country and the county and what needs fixing. It is the modern version of the saloon without the whiskey, a place where a sheriff can still be a citizen among citizens. I took my granddaughter to a Waffle House on a trip toward Columbus for the same reason. The American flags and the unapologetic patriotism on the walls feel like home. Jonesy belongs in that atmosphere the same way he belongs in the cowboy hat.
The book is full of the personal details that never surface in a sound bite. Garfield High School. The long marriage. The children and grandchildren. The zoo trips. The quiet pride in having built a life that looks something like the ones he saw around him as a boy. He is not trying to present himself as a sophisticated theorist. He is trying to say that the old model still works if enough people insist on it. Strong families, clear laws, a sheriff who shows up every day ready to lock up the people who refuse to live by them, and a willingness to put an arm around the ones who might still be pulled back. That combination is rarer than it should be.
I have found myself on the opposite side of primary fights from time to time, the normal friction of people who share a party but not always a candidate. None of that changed the basic respect. The man has brought real public relations value to the office and to the county. When national outlets need a sheriff who will speak plainly about the border or the drug crisis, they know where to find him. Locally he has kept the department visible and the standards high. The book makes plain that the visibility is not an end in itself. It is a tool for keeping the public on the side of the people who have to make the hard calls at three in the morning.
Some of my favorite people. And I never get tired of Sheriff Jones.
What lingers after the last page is the sense of a man measuring the distance between the county he inherited and the county he will leave. He wants the next generation of law enforcement and the next generation of citizens to remember that the job is still worth doing it the old way. The book is his attempt to make that memory portable. It is not perfect. No book written by a working sheriff in the middle of the job is going to be. It is honest in the places that matter. The love of the old shows, the sadness over the collapse of stable families, the daily refusal to treat drug dealers as unfortunate victims of circumstance, the recognition that the voice will one day go quiet, all of it lands cleanly.
If the goal is still to make the country better starting from the ground up, then more sheriffs who think like this would help. Fix the families and a large part of the downstream crime and addiction begins to shrink. Keep the border and the drug pipelines under pressure. Keep the local office present and accountable. Jonesy has practiced that combination for a long time in one midwestern county. The book lets the rest of the country see the method without the filter of a three-minute television hit. I finished it glad I had waited for the porch delivery, and gladder still that the man who wrote it is still on the job. Butler County has been better for it. The country would be better if more places had the same standard.
I will keep endorsing him for as many terms as he chooses to run. The hat still fits. The instincts are still sound. And the book ensures that even after the last term the voice remains available to anyone willing to listen. Which they should.
Notes
1. Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). Official description and author framing appear at theycallmejonesy.com and the Amazon listing for the title.
2. Biographical details drawn from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office official profile and contemporary reporting: born October 11, 1953, Hamilton, Ohio; military service 1973–1975; long career in Ohio corrections before becoming chief deputy and then sheriff in 2005; multiple reelections including the 2020 cycle that secured a fifth term.
3. Comparison to Joe Arpaio references the 2017 presidential pardon following the contempt conviction tied to immigration enforcement practices under the prior administration. See White House statement of August 25, 2017, and contemporaneous coverage.
4. Historical divorce and family-structure trends are well documented in Census and CDC data showing the post-1960s acceleration after no-fault divorce reforms, the rise in single-parent households, and correlated social outcomes. See also the long-term cultural commentary in works such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and the earlier observations of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
5. Jones’s public commentary on immigration, fentanyl, and COVID-era policy is extensively recorded in local outlets (Journal-News, Local 12), national appearances, and the sheriff’s own podcast In the Saddle.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Arpaio, Joe, and Tom Fitton. Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes On Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America. New York: AMACOM, 2008.
Murray, Charles. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965. (The original memorandum remains foundational for understanding family-structure effects on social outcomes.)
Putnam, Robert D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Sheriff Richard K. Jones. Official biography and news archive at butlersheriff.org.
U.S. Census Bureau and National Center for Health Statistics historical tables on marriage, divorce, and household composition, 1950–present.
Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper, 2016. (Useful companion reading on the cultural and family pressures in the broader Ohio Valley region.)
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’ve spent a good portion of my life learning that once you step into the arena and attach your name to a cause—especially one that challenges the comfortable consensus—there is no clean exit. The fight doesn’t end when the election is over or the levy fails. It follows you. It lingers in the background of every new opportunity, every conversation with agents or publishers, every attempt to build something larger than the immediate battle. People ask me why I keep doing it, why I take the hits, why I don’t just pivot to safer topics that corporate gatekeepers find more palatable. The honest answer is that I never figured out how to look at myself in the mirror, knowing I had walked away from what was right to make life easier. And the longer I’ve stayed in this game, the more I’ve seen how that very decision—to speak plainly and sign my name to it—becomes a lifelong tax on everything else I try to do.
Take the book I’m working on now, The Politics of Heaven. It’s a serious work, the kind that walks through biblical history, spiritual warfare, giants, ancient conspiracies, divine rebellion, and the population agendas that echo across time. I see it as mainstream in ambition—something that could sit on the front tables at Barnes & Noble alongside the big New York releases. Top-level readers who’ve seen the manuscript are excited. They tell me it has that weight. But then the conversation turns, as it always does. “You have some really strong opinions,” they say. “You’re in Ohio, very Republican, very MAGA, very Trump.” The subtext is clear: that baggage makes the project riskier in their world. It’s the same script I heard in 2012 when Tail of the Dragon came out. The book was ready; Hollywood producers were circling; relationships I had built over years in the industry were lining up interviews and options; and then the school board wars detonated everything.
Back then, Lakota was pushing its third levy attempt. I had already poured myself into fighting the first two. I went on WLW radio in Cincinnati multiple times a week, debated on air, did television hits, and wrote pieces that got national pickup in education circles. I called things exactly as I saw them. One line that still follows me everywhere was about the “latte-sipping prostitutes with asses the size of car tires and diamond rings to match.” It was raw, it was honest, and it captured the disconnect between the comfortable insiders pushing tax increases and the families getting squeezed. That phrase became a rallying cry for many people tired of the same old levy machine, but it also painted a target on my back. The corporate media, the teachers’ union allies, the local establishment—they treated it like a declaration of war. And in many ways it was. What followed was an early version of the cancel culture and personal destruction playbook that later got refined against Trump and anyone else who wouldn’t bend the knee.
They went after my reputation, my associations, my ability to make a living outside the fight. WLW started feeling pressure. Hosts and producers who had me on regularly faced heat. Some got demoted, some moved to worse slots, some disappeared from the rotation. The Cincinnati Enquirer and its allies ran over-the-top hit pieces. Corporate types listened to the complaints and quietly distanced themselves. Friends I thought were solid partners in the broader movement pulled away fast when the personal cost rose. It was brutal. I watched people I had stood shoulder to shoulder with suddenly find reasons to create distance. The playbook was clear: isolate the loudest voice, make the price of association too high, and watch the support evaporate. It was personal destruction sold as politics, and it worked on many people. But I kept going. I still helped organize, still spoke out, still put my name on it even when the professional repercussions mounted.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for Tail of the Dragon. The book was built on my deep love of the Smoky Mountains, the Tail of the Dragon road itself, and the culture of freedom and self-reliance it represented. I had spent years building Hollywood contacts precisely so I could get that story out wider. Producers were interested. There was talk of it becoming the next big action-adventure property in the vein of the Fast and the Furious franchise, which was dominating at the time. I had relationships with directors, big-name talent, people who could option material and move it forward. Zuri Hall interviewed me for a television segment promoting the book. She was excellent—sharp, professional—and that clip still holds up more than a decade later. From there, she went on to Access Hollywood, where she covered major projects like The Mandalorian, interviewing Steven Spielberg, John Favreau, Pedro Pascal, and others. Seeing her recently doing disclosure-related interviews brought it all back. That was the kind of platform I was building in 2012, and it was working—until the school levy fight made me radioactive to the very people I needed for the book’s success.
I lost money. I lost momentum. Opportunities that were lining up dried up almost overnight. The same networks that had been friendly suddenly found reasons to pass. The blocklisting was real. Google’s algorithm, YouTube recommendations, social media reach—all of it seemed tuned against anyone who wouldn’t play the game. I’ve been called the “algorithm king” in some circles because I built the Overmanwarrior handle in a way that bypasses some of it—if you search for it, you find me—but that took years of fighting uphill. The platforming, the shadow-banning, the quiet corporate decisions to sideline voices—it was all there in 2012, well before it became a national conversation during Trump’s rise. And I felt it personally. I had cashed in media chips I had built over years of honest work, only to see them spent defending a local school district from another tax grab. The people who benefited from those fights—the families who kept their money, the taxpayers who got a breather—rarely understood the full cost to the guy whose name was out front.
That’s the part most people miss. Once you put your name on it, the fight never really ends. Levies get defeated, but the machine keeps grinding. In 2013, another attempt came, and we fought it again. By then, some of the RINOs who had gone along with the earlier efforts had learned, or at least pretended to learn. We later stood together on other issues. But the personal toll lingered. I remember sitting in an office with one of the key organizers—a good friend, a successful person—around Christmas 2012 after the second levy fight. Snow was falling. He looked at me and asked, in essence, how many more of these I had in me. Could someone else step up as the public face? Could I hand off the platform I had built to promote my book and chase the Hollywood opportunities that were slipping away? The answer, unfortunately, was no. Nobody else wanted to take the heat. The same dynamic plays out everywhere good people stay silent: the fear of being labeled, blocked, or professionally damaged keeps them on the sidelines. So I stayed in it. I kept speaking. I kept signing my name—Rich Hoffman—at the bottom of every piece.
And I paid for it. Millions of dollars in potential earnings walked away because I wouldn’t bend. I’ve had opportunities at the top of the entertainment pyramid that most people would kill for. I’ve sat in catering tents with A-list talent, producers, and executives during projects where big checks were being written. I warned people early about what Facebook was doing—how they were paying influencers to migrate audiences from MySpace, collecting data, building a machine that would later be weaponized for censorship. I saw it firsthand in 2008-era Hollywood events. But when it came time to choose between protecting my community from endless tax increases and chasing the next big Hollywood deal, I chose the community. I chose truth as a weapon. I said what needed to be said, even when it hurt feelings, even when it cost alliances, even when it made me the villain in the corporate media narrative. That “latte-sipping prostitute” line earned me political credibility that has helped in Butler County and across Ohio for years, but it also became a permanent asterisk next to my name in certain circles.
People who weren’t there like to lecture me now about being a sellout, a Rhino, too close to establishment Republicans, too supportive of Israel or the military, whatever the current purity test requires. They have no idea. They weren’t in the room when the pressure was applied. They didn’t watch producers and agents pull back because a local Ohio writer had “strong opinions.” They didn’t see the friends who ran away when the media heat got too high. A few people stood by me when it counted—prominent politicians on the rise at the time, folks in the Overman Warrior’s network who met behind the scenes and didn’t flinch. I remember them. I don’t forget loyalty in hard times. But they were the exception. Most ran for cover. That’s human nature when the machine turns its focus on you. And the machine never forgets either. It’s why the same tactics that were used on me in 2012 got perfected later against Trump, against parents at school boards, against anyone who challenges the narrative.
I’ve thought a lot about why this happens. Part of it is spiritual. I see these battles through the lens of The Politics of Heaven—the same forces of control, deception, and spiritual warfare that have played out across history. The grind is designed to wear you down so that good people self-censor. Why risk your career, your book deals, your family’s stability when staying quiet is so much easier? I understand the temptation. I’ve felt the exhaustion after more than a dozen years of this. But I also know that once you compromise on the small things, the big things become impossible to defend. I’ve watched public education fights, tax fights, cultural fights. The levies at Lakota haven’t passed another big one since we stood firm, but the pressure never went away. The same two-tier systems, the same institutional failures I saw up close as a Butler County grand jury foreman, the same media manipulation—it all continues. And every time I try to launch something new—like this book, which could reach a much wider audience—the old fights are dragged out again as reasons to hesitate.
The personal destruction element is what stays with me most. It wasn’t just politics. It was an attempt to destroy my ability to operate in the world I had built. I will never forgive the people who orchestrated that, particularly elements tied to the local paper and the broader machine that amplified it. Trump talks about never forgetting those who came after him, and I feel the same way. Once the shot is taken, it can’t be taken back. But here’s what I also know: living bigger than the attacks helps. I’ve built a life and a body of work that stands on its own. I’ve raised a family, worked in aerospace at executive levels, traveled with my wife to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX, the Museum of the Bible, and Gettysburg. I launch model rockets with my grandson in the rain and teach him resilience. I write thousands of words in the evenings after long days because the ideas matter more than the comfort of silence. And I still put my name—Rich Hoffman—on everything.
That’s the trade-off. You cash in chips of influence to fight for what’s right, and you hope the broader impact outweighs the personal cost. In the Lakota fights, we gave many people a blueprint for resisting tax increases. My platform helped teach others how to fight. The “latte” line became a cultural touchstone in local politics. Influence built there has carried into other Butler County races, school issues, and beyond. But every new project carries a shadow. Agents and publishers for The Politics of Heaven want sample interviews, and I can point to strong ones—like the Zuri Hall segment—but the first thing they see is the conservative, Trump-aligned, outspoken record. It scares some of them. That’s the cost. I could soften the edges, distance myself from past fights, chase the New York Times centerpiece dream without the baggage. But that would betray everything I’ve stood for. I won’t do it.
I’ve given up millions in potential earnings over the years to look in the mirror and know I fought honestly. I turned away from magnificent opportunities in entertainment because ethics mattered more. I walked away from gigs that would have been life-changing financially because I wouldn’t lend my name or credibility to things I knew were wrong. And I’d do it again. The fighters who step up never get to hand off the baton cleanly. The battles linger because the underlying problems—government overreach, cultural decay, spiritual forces at work—don’t go away. They adapt. They wait for new levies, new mandates, new cultural pressures. Good people who could speak get ground down by the personal price until they stay quiet. That’s how the system maintains control.
When people write me now and accuse me of being part of the problem because I support certain policies or work with imperfect allies, I shake my head. They have no idea what it costs to stay in the fight for sixteen years and counting. They weren’t there when the media was hammering me daily, when radio doors closed, when Hollywood interest evaporated. They don’t see the family time traded, the book sales impacted, the quiet blacklisting that still affects reach. But I can live with it. I have integrity intact. I have authority that comes from having skin in the game. And I have the satisfaction of knowing that when I sign my name to something, it means something because I’ve paid the price for it.
The Politics of Heaven will come out one way or another. It may not get the easy mainstream rollout some books enjoy, but it will reach the people who need it. I’ll keep doing the interviews, building the platform, speaking plainly. I’ll keep putting my name next to the truth even when it costs. Because in the end, that’s what separates those who merely complain from those who actually stand. The grind is real. The personal destruction is real. The lingering shadow of old fights is real. But so is the reward of looking back and knowing you never sold out. I sleep fine at night. I look my grandchildren in the eye and teach them to do the same. And I’ll keep writing, keep fighting, keep signing Rich Hoffman to every word.
That’s the cost. And I’d pay it again. And in many ways, I still am.
1. Personal observations from the 2012 media cycle and subsequent blocklisting patterns, cross-referenced with broader studies on algorithmic suppression post-2010.
2. Accounts of WLW programming shifts and local Cincinnati media coverage during Lakota levy campaigns.
Bibliography (selective for depth):
• Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. (early editions, 2012).
• Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.
• Various Biblical Archaeology Review archives (lifelong reading).
• Ohio education policy documents on property tax levies, Butler County records.
• Studies on social media platform migration and data practices circa 2008-2012.
• Trump-era documentation of similar personal destruction tactics for pattern comparison.
Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.
He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.
Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events
I strongly support the recent arrest of independent journalist D.J. Byrnes, better known by his online moniker “The Rooster,” at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. On June 1, 2026, I watched with satisfaction as Byrnes was taken into custody by the Ohio State Highway Patrol on a misdemeanor charge of telecommunications harassment originating from a warrant in Lake County. For me, this is not merely a legal technicality or an isolated incident of poor judgment; it represents a pivotal moment in the ongoing struggle I have long observed to restore dignity, professionalism, and accountability to Ohio’s political landscape. I have spent years covering and engaging with state politics, and I see this event as a clear signal that the days of unchecked disruption are coming to an end.
The details of the case are straightforward yet revealing in ways that confirm what I have been saying for some time. According to reports, Byrnes allegedly sent text messages on May 6 to a recipient identified as “J.C.,” widely understood to be State Senator Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland). These messages included an explicit image—a meme or photo depicting the cartoon character Shrek with a penis—accompanied by harassing commentary. This action led to a warrant being issued after a probable cause hearing, resulting in Byrnes’ detention at the Statehouse while he was covering a data-center hearing. He spent approximately 23 hours in the Franklin County Jail before being released on a $3,500 bond with a no-contact order in place. Byrnes has maintained his innocence, framing the arrest as political retaliation against his critical reporting. Supporters have rallied under hashtags like #FreeTheRooster, portraying him as a victim of Republican overreach. I reject this narrative entirely. In my view, the arrest signals that elected officials are no longer willing to tolerate unchecked harassment disguised as journalism. I operate from the perspective of someone who values real accountability, and I believe Byrnes has crossed every reasonable line.
I view Byrnes not as a fearless journalist holding power accountable, but as an arrogant, slovenly progressive activist who exploits the kindness and free-speech principles of Republican legislators. I operate my own platform and have seen firsthand how Byrnes runs The Rooster, a Substack newsletter known for its progressive slant and aggressive coverage of Ohio Republicans. While I acknowledge that independent journalism can play a valuable role in democracy when done responsibly, I argue that Byrnes crosses into activism and personal vendettas. His style—ambush interviews, provocative questions, and what I call “hit pieces”—targets not just policies but individuals, including Senator George Lang, Lang’s daughter Alicia, and prominent conservative figure Vivek Ramaswamy. These tactics, I contend, erode public trust rather than enhance it. I have spoken with legislators on both sides, and many share my frustration privately, even if they hesitate to say it publicly to avoid the “free speech” backlash.
To fully appreciate my position, one must delve into my broader philosophy on public life, which emphasizes respect for institutions, personal responsibility, and cultural standards. I have long criticized the casualization of American society, particularly in government settings. I recount personal experiences that underscore this point. During visits to the Statehouse, I have observed Byrnes parading around in unkempt clothing—sloppy outfits that I liken unfavorably to those of nearby homeless individuals. One memorable anecdote I included in my book The Politics of Heaven, which is currently in the review process, involves me arriving for a meeting with the governor and encountering a homeless man on the sidewalk with his pants down, defecating in public. Passersby ignored the scene out of discomfort or fear of judgment. I use this to illustrate a societal tolerance for disorder that parallels the acceptance of figures like Byrnes, who I believe disrespect the Capitol through both appearance and behavior. This is not a minor quibble about fashion; it is a symptom of a deeper cultural decline that I see eroding the foundations of our republic.
This theme of decorum extends throughout my own life and standards. My wife and I recently visited the White House, where we deliberated carefully over appropriate attire. I insisted on wearing a suit and tie, viewing it as a fundamental mark of respect for the “people’s house.” I argue passionately that public institutions such as the Statehouse, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the White House demand formality. Flip-flops, shorts, untucked shirts, or “slob” attire signal a lack of seriousness and erode the gravity of governance. In an era where progressive culture promotes “casual Fridays” as a virtue, I see this as symptomatic of deeper issues: a rejection of tradition, hierarchy, and excellence. Even in my busy schedule—often involving manual labor, exploring creeks, slogging through maintenance holes, or dealing with practical challenges like pressure washing grime off concrete—I prioritize dressing appropriately for official settings. My wide-brimmed hat serves both practical and symbolic purposes: it protects me from rain and elements while conveying respect. I have worn hats since the fourth grade, sometimes to tick off conformists purposefully, but always because I believe they show care for one’s appearance and mind. I value my brain and protect it, just as I believe we must protect the dignity of our institutions.
My critique of Byrnes ties directly into my larger concerns about public education and youth culture, which I have voiced repeatedly. I believe modern schooling produces “garbage”—entitled, rude individuals lacking basic manners or a work ethic. Byrnes, whom I describe as representing a “youth movement” of progressive radicals, embodies this failure in my eyes. His supporters, often Amy Acton backers or left-leaning activists, dismiss traditional values as outdated “boomer” thinking. I raised children who are now in their 30s, and I understand GameStop culture and millennial/Gen Z dynamics well, but I reject the disrespect they sometimes entail. Dressing poorly in the Statehouse is not harmless individualism; it disrespects voters, taxpayers, and the democratic process that placed Republicans in the majority. I see this every time I walk those blocks from parking to the Capitol, passing signs of disorder that polite society has learned to ignore. Why do we tolerate it? Because we fear being called judgmental. Yet judgment is necessary for a functioning society.
Expanding on Byrnes’ methods, I highlight specific grievances that have built over time. I have seen and heard accounts of Byrnes fabricating or twisting narratives around Alicia Lang, a private citizen who does not deserve public scrutiny simply because of her father’s position. Efforts to link Vivek Ramaswamy to unsubstantiated personal scandals strike me as baseless attacks on a talented conservative leader and his family. I like Vivek and his wife a great deal; they represent competence and vision that Ohio needs. Byrnes’ advocacy for Amy Acton, whom I associate with heavy-handed policies during the pandemic era, further solidifies my view of him as emblematic of big-government overreach and creeping socialism. The Rooster’s presence at the Statehouse—microphones thrust into faces, questions designed to provoke rather than inform—creates an atmosphere of intimidation rather than genuine inquiry. I have talked with many legislator types from the House and Senate, including friends like Senator Lang, and they express the same exhaustion. Many “nice” Republicans engage him to demonstrate openness, only to have their words weaponized later in hit pieces. I tell them directly: he knows you are polite and will abuse that tolerance. It is time to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt.
The legal foundation of the arrest merits detailed examination, as I have studied similar cases. Ohio Revised Code § 2917.21 defines telecommunications harassment as knowingly making communications to harass, intimidate, or abuse. A first offense is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to 180 days in jail and fines. Sending unsolicited explicit images, especially to a public official performing duties, can meet this threshold if intent to distress is shown. Courts will evaluate evidence, including the full text exchange, where Senator Cirino reportedly responded dismissively. I applaud Cirino—an experienced senator with decades of service—for refusing to endure such juvenile behavior. Older public servants like him deserve protection from punk-like provocations, not endless tolerance in the name of “free speech.” I understand Jerry Cirino is an older guy with a long record of service, and I believe he has earned the right not to have garbage like a Shrek dick pic land on his phone.
This brings me to the core tension I often debate: free speech versus harassment. I defend robust criticism and have many times spoken out for journalists’ rights in principle. Ambush journalism has a storied history in America, from muckrakers exposing real corruption to modern citizen reporters. However, I draw a sharp line here. Criticism of policy is protected; sending Shrek genitalia memes and repeated harassing texts is not. Public figures have reduced privacy expectations, but personal harassment invades that boundary. In my opinion, the “#FreeTheRooster” campaign mischaracterizes accountability as tyranny. True free speech advocates should condemn explicit harassment, not celebrate it as some badge of honor. Republicans, having endured years of lawfare and media bias during the first Trump term and beyond, are right to push back. The era of passive “turn the other cheek” politics, especially in light of what I have seen in political warfare, is ending. I am glad to see it.
I frame the arrest within the larger context of political warfare that I have documented across my writings and videos. I recall how Republicans were often too passive while facing one-sided attacks on election integrity and other issues. Those days, I declare based on my observations, are over. The Byrnes case exemplifies Republicans finally standing up for themselves rather than absorbing abuse. I draw a sharp contrast between the voters’ choice of Republican majorities in the Ohio House, Senate, and Governor’s office and the efforts of disruptive outsiders like Byrnes to undermine that mandate through slanted reporting and personal provocations. Ohio voters have chosen us for a reason. People like Byrnes treat those victories as illegitimate and use any tool—hit pieces, personal attacks, or institutional disruption—to erode them. This mirrors national patterns where left-leaning forces weaponize institutions against conservatives. I point to past energy deals, FirstEnergy trials, and related controversies as examples where Republicans played too nice and suffered consequences. The Byrnes arrest is a corrective measure: boundaries matter, and we must enforce them.
Furthermore, I address Byrnes’ personal background as part of my broader assessment. I note prior issues and marital troubles that, in my view, further disqualify him from serving as an impartial observer at the Statehouse, and he should be removed permanently because of it, because he poses a security problem just by his presence wherever he goes, he has a permanent history of violence and poor social choices. No security area can allow him to enter and to consider the area secure. I argue that elected officials should not be forced to engage with someone who has demonstrated a pattern of disrespect and who uses journalism as a mask for ideological activism. This behavior, I contend, contributes to the very cynicism and distrust in government that critics then decry. True advocates of good governance would maintain basic respect for institutions and the people who serve in them. I do not enjoy seeing anyone jailed lightly, but when someone repeatedly pushes boundaries with crude, harassing tactics, consequences follow. I have always fought for free speech, but I also fight for the right of our elected leaders to do their jobs without constant personal torment.
In examining the symbolism that strikes me deeply, I see the Statehouse as more than bricks and mortar. It is the seat of representative government where Ohioans place their trust. Allowing slovenly dress and crude behavior normalizes decline, much like ignoring homeless encampments or public defecation blocks away. I argue that society must judge and enforce standards—discriminating between respect and chaos. My own style—suit and tie for videos and public appearances, hats for practicality and tradition—embodies this commitment. Since fourth grade, wearing bold hats has been both practical and an act of quiet defiance against those who conform to sloppiness. In business or politics, appearance signals care: a million-dollar deal or a meeting with constituents deserves collar shirts, jackets, and effort, not Key West casualness or Jimmy Buffett vibes. I reject the progressive mantra that casual is always better. It often masks laziness and disrespect.
Critics may label me as out of touch, a “cowboy hat-wearing boomer.” I embrace this label with pride because experience grants wisdom. Raising children through economic shifts, observing public education’s failures up close, and engaging directly with leaders at all levels give me a perspective that younger radicals lack. Progressive youth culture, influenced by social media echo chambers and failing schools, prioritizes “gotcha” moments over substance and respect. Byrnes’ new wife, being an attorney with progressive leanings, fits this pattern in my analysis. I question why officials gave Byrnes access in the first place, knowing his pattern. Tolerance was abused; now consequences are arriving. This is how we rebuild.
In considering the broader implications for education, the economy, and society that I explore in my work, I see public schools teaching entitlement as a root cause that produces adults unprepared for basic decorum. Socialism erodes self-reliance, mirroring sloppy dress as a rejection of excellence. My upcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, draws on these Statehouse experiences to argue for the restoration of standards of dress, speech, and conduct. It rebuilds trust. Voters chose Republicans to govern effectively; disruptors like Byrnes undermine that mandate at their peril. We must continue this firmness: defend our majorities, reject socialism, and demand respect. Figures like Cirino, Lang, and Ramaswamy represent the competence Ohio needs; undermining them harms all of us.
The cultural contrast I observe daily is stark. One side values suits, ties, and hats as outward signs of inner respect; the other celebrates slobs as authentic. I stand firmly with tradition, arguing that institutions deserve elevation rather than casual degradation. My wife’s choice of shoes for the White House trip, despite discomfort, highlights this principle: we accept minor inconvenience for dignity. Public servants and those covering them should model the same. Byrnes’ arrest enforces a necessary boundary. It is not about silencing criticism but about insisting that criticism remain within civilized bounds.
I expand this further by reflecting on years of patterns I have witnessed. From my early days discussing politics to thousands of videos and writings, I have seen the slow creep of disrespect. Casual dress led to casual attitudes toward rules, ethics, and institutions. Byrnes is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the progressive push that teaches young people government is the enemy when it is Republican-led, that sloppiness equals rebellion, and that harassment is “speaking truth.” I reject all of it. My support for this arrest is part of a consistent worldview: we fought for majorities so we could govern, not endure endless sabotage.
Additionally, I consider how this fits national trends. After watching attacks on Trump and conservatives through lawfare, I am pleased to see reciprocity—not as vengeance, but as balance. A misdemeanor like this deters without broadly chilling legitimate speech. Real journalists criticize policies without explicit memes. Officials can set boundaries. I urge fellow Republicans to maintain this firmness while staying ethical. Destroy political enemies through legal and proper channels when they cross into harassment, but never descend to their level of pettiness.
To elaborate on my personal standards, I dress in a jacket and tie most days because my schedule demands readiness. Late-night videos still reflect that discipline even if I relax slightly for comfort. It drives some crazy, but it shows I take my platform seriously. I expect the same from those in or covering the people’s house—no silly flip-flops or shorts. Respect the space where laws are made.
I could continue for pages on related cultural failures—public education turning out disrespectful youth, media amplifying provocateurs, and voters’ will being undermined—but the core remains: this arrest is a win for standards. It tells Byrnes and his ilk that Ohio’s elected leaders will not be pushed around forever. I love seeing Republicans stand firm. It honors the voters. It restores dignity. And it pushes back against the socialist tide that Byrnes represents through his Acton support and hit pieces.
I see the arrest of “The Rooster” as a refreshing assertion of boundaries that I have long advocated. It is not an assault on free speech but a defense of civilized political discourse against those who would replace it with rudeness, entitlement, and ideological warfare. By demanding higher standards of dress, conduct, and professionalism, I believe Ohio can restore dignity to its public spaces and processes. Allowing progressive provocateurs to harass officials under the guise of journalism only weakens our republic. Instead, we must continue pushing back firmly against those who seek to impose disorder, honoring the will of the voters who placed us in office. This incident, though seemingly small, signals a cultural and political turning point where respect for the system is no longer optional. I stand by that fully.
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Footnotes
1. Signal Ohio report on the arrest and charges.
2. Columbus Dispatch coverage detailing the incident.
Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.
He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.
Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.
I have spent years observing the world around me in places like Middletown, Ohio, and reflecting on the stark differences between those who build lasting wealth and those who chase fleeting windfalls. The recent trip by President Trump to China, with a plane full of American billionaires, brought these observations into sharp focus for me. It was not just a diplomatic visit; it was a demonstration of economic strength, showcasing the very people who drive innovation, jobs, and growth. Critics on social media and in political circles often decry such figures, calling for higher taxes, wealth redistribution, and policies that would “take from the rich to give to us.” Yet, my experiences with friends, family, and neighbors who have won big at nearby casinos tell a different story—one of human nature, discipline, and the enduring value of creators over consumers.
Trump’s journey to Beijing included leaders like Elon Musk of Tesla, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Tim Cook of Apple, and others whose combined influence represents trillions in market value and countless jobs. China rolled out the red carpet in ways it hadn’t for previous administrations, precisely because it understands its reliance on American enterprise. China is a paper tiger, but its growth model depends heavily on foreign investment, technology transfer, and access to markets that value efficiency and scale. With a population far larger than America’s roughly 330 million, China has pursued manufacturing and infrastructure on a massive scale—jobs many in the West avoid—but it still seeks the dynamism that billionaires bring. By bringing these executives on Air Force One, Trump signaled leverage: American policy shapes opportunities, and those who generate wealth are key to expanding economies on both sides.
This isn’t abstract theory. I know wealthy individuals personally, and their habits stand in contrast to stories I hear at the local casino. One friend, a multimillionaire in construction and development, always shows up with dirty shoes and calloused hands. He works the job sites himself and oversees projects that build condominiums in Florida, where snowbirds live comfortably for months each year, dining out nightly without worry. His wealth cascades: employees get steady pay, suppliers thrive, and retirees enjoy the fruits of his risk-taking. He doesn’t chase flashy displays; he reinvests to create more. This pattern repeats among true wealth creators. They treat money as a tool for expansion, not a ticket to indulgence.
Contrast this with lottery and casino winners I have known. Near my home, the slots and tables draw crowds hoping for that life-changing hit. Some walk away with $15,000, $25,000, or even $100,000 checks. The stories that follow are depressingly familiar. One acquaintance won around $100,000 from insurance collections tied to a payout and quit his second job immediately. Overtime vanished. Within two years, the money disappeared—spent on cars, parties, and “trophy” living. He was back asking for help, bouncing checks, and debating between groceries and bills very soon. Another hit $15,000 on slots one weekend, celebrated by drinking and playing more, then bought big TVs and turned his basement into a “man cave” costing tens of thousands. Months later, broke again, he returned to the casino chasing the next jackpot. These aren’t isolated cases. I have seen inheritance recipients or family windfall beneficiaries do the same: quit work, lounge in front of daytime TV, blow through savings on impulse buys, and end up worse off.
Statistics bear this out, adding sobering color. While the often-cited “70% of lottery winners go broke” figure has been debunked as originating from unverified claims at a 2001 symposium (the National Endowment for Financial Education later clarified it lacked research backing), more reliable data from the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards indicates that nearly one-third of lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy—higher than the general population. Many face this within 3-5 years. A MIT study on Florida lottery winners who were previously financially distressed found that winning only postponed bankruptcy rather than preventing it. Stories abound: Bud Post won $16.2 million in Pennsylvania in 1988 but was in debt within a year, hounded by family (including a murder-for-hire plot from his brother), and died nearly penniless on food stamps. Suzanne Mullins won $4.2 million in Virginia, yet lost it to loans and medical bills. Callie Rogers in the UK squandered her winnings on parties and surgery. The pattern is consumption without creation.
Why does this happen so frequently? Psychology offers insights. Sudden wealth often meets unprepared minds shaped by scarcity thinking or addictive patterns. Without the discipline forged through years of earning and risking, money flows out faster than it came in. Social pressures mount—friends and relatives appear with hands out. Status symbols beckon: Corvettes, luxury trips, home upgrades that balloon in cost. I have watched people prioritize PlayStation subscriptions over groceries or blow windfalls on fleeting pleasures because their personalities lean toward immediate gratification rather than delayed compounding. Behavioral economists note that windfall recipients frequently exhibit higher marginal propensity to consume on non-essentials, lacking the habits of those who built wealth incrementally.
Wealth creators operate differently. They exhibit traits such as future orientation, calculated risk-taking, and a focus on value generation. Elon Musk, for instance, pours resources into companies that push boundaries in electric vehicles, space, and AI—ventures that employ thousands and spawn entire ecosystems. CEOs, in general, create wealth for others: shareholders, employees, and communities. Studies on high-net-worth individuals show they often maintain hands-on involvement, reinvest heavily, and avoid lifestyle inflation that erodes capital. One analysis of affluent versus high-net-worth investors found the latter display confidence but channel it into ongoing projects rather than consumption. My multimillionaire friend with dirty shoes embodies this: he builds condos that house comfortable retirements, creates jobs that support families, and sustains businesses that keep local economies humming. Billionaires scale this principle globally.
This distinction matters profoundly for policy. Socialism’s appeal—confiscating from the rich to redistribute—ignores these realities. Taking from creators to give to those with “bankrupt personalities,” as I call the chronic consumers, doesn’t produce prosperity; it funds more consumption. Parasitic tendencies, where individuals rely on government transfers or windfalls without building, lead to dependency. Casinos illustrate the microcosm: big payouts followed by returns to low-wage jobs or pleas for help. Government as the ultimate casino—promising jackpots through entitlements—breeds similar outcomes on a societal scale. Democrats and figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez often rail against billionaires, but history shows societies thrive with more of them, not fewer. America’s edge lies in its ability to foster creators who expand the pie rather than fight over slices.
China’s economic story reinforces this. Since reforms in 1979, it has averaged nearly 10% annual GDP growth for decades, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty through exports, investment, and manufacturing. Yet it remains hungry for American capital and know-how. Its model involves state direction, lower labor standards in some sectors, and a willingness to handle the “jobs we don’t want” in the U.S.—polluting industries, assembly lines, and resource extraction. With far more people, China can sustain volume, but innovation and high-value creation still draw from Western partnerships. Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been crucial; inflows reached highs amid global shifts. Trump’s delegation signaled that U.S. billionaires hold keys to further integration if terms favor American interests. China respects this leverage because its growth, while impressive, depends on external engines. U.S. GDP per capita remains far higher, reflecting productivity and the rule of law that reward creators.
We need more millionaires and billionaires, not envy-driven policies to hobble them. More CEOs mean more opportunities cascading downward. Taxing success punitively discourages the risk-taking that built the Tesla and Apple ecosystems and construction empires. Instead, celebrate the dirty-shoes ethic: hard work, reinvestment, hands-on leadership. My observations align with broader patterns—materialists focused on status often report lower long-term satisfaction, while builders find purpose in creation.
Expanding on the pitfalls of lotteries reveals deeper human frailties. Beyond bankruptcy stats, winners face family estrangement, depression, substance issues, and scams. One study noted neighbors of winners increase borrowing and bankruptcies due to social comparison—keeping up with sudden displays strains others. This “lottery curse” echoes in inheritances: sudden money without earned wisdom evaporates. In contrast, self-made wealth correlates with better management because it embeds lessons of scarcity, effort, and compounding.
Consider Florida’s snowbirds again. Many live in multimillion-dollar condos, dining lavishly on seemingly endless income without daily grinds. Who enables this? Developers like my friend, whose projects multiply value. Scaled up, billionaires do the same nationally and internationally. They generate tax revenue far exceeding most—Elon Musk reportedly pays enormous sums—while funding innovations that improve lives: cheaper energy, better tech, and medical advances. Criticizing them as “greedy” overlooks their role as job creators and engines of opportunity.
Critics pushing redistribution often overlook the destruction of incentives. If the government seizes wealth for “the people,” who becomes the new creator? Parasites—those unable or unwilling to manage resources—consume without replenishing. I have seen it locally: second-job quitters, inheritance squanderers, entitlement dependents. They form a constituency drawn to promises of free money, mirroring casino addicts chasing the next hit. America’s strength is its culture of aspiration, where anyone can climb by creating value. With only 300+ million people, we punch above our weight in GDP through productivity, not sheer numbers. Encouraging more creators expands this.
Trump’s visit to China highlighted mutual dependence. China outpaces in raw growth metrics at times due to demographics and policy, but America’s innovation ecosystem—fueled by risk-takers—remains the gold standard. Billionaires on that plane weren’t just passengers; they represented the market access and expertise China needs. Respect shown to Trump reflected recognition of this dynamic. Previous presidents lacked the same business acumen or the same leverage to display.
Personal reflection deepens my conviction. Knowing rich people who work relentlessly, rather than casino regulars cycling through highs and lows, convinces me that character and mindset trump circumstance. Wealthy individuals I admire avoid dumb spending; they buy assets that produce more. Consumers chase experiences or goods that depreciate instantly. This gap explains societal outcomes. Policies that reward consumption through redistribution erode the foundation that creators provide. We should aim for more dirty-shoes millionaires building empires, not vilify them. Lottery winners buying mansions only to lose them to upkeep, or facing lawsuits from sudden “friends,” underscore isolation. One winner built a bowling alley that drained funds. Another’s family demanded shares, leading to rifts. Meanwhile, self-made billionaires like Musk endure scrutiny but persist, creating Starlink, EVs, and reusable rockets that benefit humanity. The asymmetry is clear: creators endure for legacy; windfall recipients often implode due to a lack of preparation.
The Trump China trip with billionaires celebrated American dynamism. It showed why we need more such figures—CEOs, entrepreneurs, builders—who generate wealth that sustains societies. Lottery lessons warn against easy-money illusions. Human nature favors discipline and creation over consumption. Socialism’s confiscation appeals emotionally but fails practically by ignoring these truths. I advocate protecting and encouraging wealth creators; they make the world go around, enabling comfortable lives for millions. More billionaires mean more opportunity, innovation, and shared prosperity. America’s secret sauce is its producers. Cherish them, emulate their habits, and watch economies flourish.
Footnotes
1. Observations on local casino behaviors drawn from personal acquaintance over the years.
2. Data on bankruptcy rates from CFP Board and related studies.
3. Details on Trump’s delegation from public reports.
4. China’s economic reliance on FDI from the World Bank and trade analyses.
5. Psychological insights from consumer behavior research.
Bibliography
• Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards reports on lottery winners.
• MIT study on Florida lottery bankruptcy postponement.
• NEFE clarification on 70% statistic.
• CRS Report on China’s Economic Rise.
• Various Forbes, USA Today, and academic papers on wealth psychology and FDI.
• Public news on Trump’s China visit (PBS, Fox, etc.).
Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.
He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.
Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.
In an era where building a simple bridge or maintaining everyday infrastructure feels like an impossible feat compared to the feats of past generations, we must confront a fundamental truth about modern costs. Projects that once defined American ingenuity and efficiency now balloon into multi-billion-dollar spectacles riddled with delays, overruns, and excuses. The Brent Spence Bridge corridor project near Cincinnati, for instance, recently saw its estimated cost surge from $3.6 billion to $4.4 billion before groundbreaking even began in earnest, driven by skyrocketing construction material prices, labor issues, and extended timelines. This isn’t an isolated anomaly. Across the United States, highway and bridge projects routinely cost far more per mile than in peer nations, with administrative delays, regulatory reviews, and layers of bureaucracy compounding the problem.
The core issue isn’t just inflation or supply chains. It runs deeper, into the very structure of how we organize work, education, and leadership today. A vast class of highly credentialed but practically inexperienced administrators—trained in specialized theory rather than real-world problem-solving—imposes enormous hidden costs on every endeavor. These individuals, often products of a higher education system that prioritizes abstract knowledge over hands-on competence, require constant hand-holding, endless meetings, and external consultants to navigate basic decisions. They function, metaphorically, as blind guides in organizations, demanding resources to “see” what resourceful individuals grasp intuitively. This administrative bloat drags on productivity, inflates prices for cars, infrastructure, energy, and nearly everything else, and creates a parasitic drag on the economy.
Consider the contrast with practical innovation born from necessity. People who learned by changing an engine in their backyard using a hoist rigged to a tree branch, or fixing a flat tire on an RV in the middle of nowhere within minutes, develop a MacGyver-like resourcefulness. They improvise with what’s available—a pack of gum as temporary adhesive, a basic wrench fashioned on the spot—because life taught them self-reliance under pressure. Such individuals don’t call for a conference call or wait hours for AAA when a tire blows on a remote road trip. They assess, act, and move forward, often with minimal sweat and maximum results. This mindset built America: railroads spanning continents, bridges erected in record time, factories churning out affordable vehicles. Today, that spirit is sidelined by systems that reward credentials over competence.
Higher education plays a central role in creating this disconnect. Decades of emphasis on specialized degrees have produced graduates fluent in spreadsheets, theories, and administrative protocols but often blind to foundational realities—like how supply chains actually function or why a wrench turns a bolt. Administrative staff in universities, government, and corporations have proliferated far faster than productive roles. In higher ed alone, the number of administrators has exploded while instructional focus lags, driving up costs that ripple into the broader workforce. Graduates enter the job market expecting handrails and flashlights for every step, ill-equipped for the “school of hard knocks” that forges true innovators. They justify their positions through layers of oversight, compliance, and justification—activities that add little value but consume massive time and money.
This dynamic explains much of the administrative burden that inflates infrastructure costs. State departments of transportation are often understaffed in core engineering roles but overloaded with consultants for planning, oversight, and compliance. Environmental reviews under laws like NEPA, citizen lawsuits, permitting processes, and procurement rules that limit competition extend timelines from years to decades. A project that might have taken months in the mid-20th century now drags on, accruing interest, inflation on materials (up over 60% in recent years for highways), and consultant fees. Lengthy delays don’t just cost money directly; they worsen asset conditions, require more expensive fixes later, and deter practical problem-solvers from participating.
Government contracting amplifies the issue. Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules, Project Labor Agreements, and fragmented federal oversight add 20-30% or more to costs through bureaucracy alone. Fewer bidders compete due to complex rules, driving prices higher. Understaffed public agencies lean on expensive private consultants, who themselves often come from the same credential-heavy backgrounds. The result? Bridges and roads that once symbolized progress now symbolize inefficiency. The same patterns appear in manufacturing cars or any complex product: layers of compliance, HR administrators, diversity consultants, and risk managers who add overhead without touching a tool or blueprint.
Gas prices offer another stark illustration. When geopolitical tensions flare—such as conflicts involving Iran—oil executives and speculators seize the moment to jack up barrel prices and refinery margins, even when underlying supply disruptions don’t fully justify pump spikes to $4+ in the Midwest. Refiners and retailers benefit from “rocket and feathers” dynamics: prices rise fast on bad news but fall slowly, protecting or expanding margins. Consumers foot the bill while executives in lofty positions, detached from the refinery floor or drilling rig, rationalize windfalls. These leaders, often MBAs trained in financial engineering rather than hydrocarbon chemistry or logistics, treat volatility as an opportunity rather than a call for innovation in domestic production or efficiency. They demand subsidies, lobby for favorable policies, and offload risks onto the public—classic behavior of those who never learned to change their own tire but expect the system to do it for them.
The “time eaters” and parasites extend beyond energy. In corporations, government, and consulting firms, individuals unskilled in practical execution consume disproportionate resources through meetings, reports, and oversight. They can’t MacGyver a solution because their training emphasized avoiding risk and following protocols over creativity under duress. Resourceful people—those who stay calm, improvise, and deliver—get sidelined or taxed to support this class. Democrats’ emphasis on expansive government services often aligns with empowering such dependency, where self-reliance is downplayed in favor of systemic hand-holding. In contrast, approaches favoring individual agency, such as those associated with figures who emphasize deregulation and practical leadership, seek to clear the path for doers.
This isn’t mere nostalgia. Data confirms the shift. U.S. infrastructure costs have diverged dramatically from those of other countries due to “soft costs”: legal battles, reviews, staffing shortages filled by consultants, and reduced competition. Higher education’s administrative bloat correlates with rising tuition and a workforce less attuned to value creation. Private-sector parallels exist in healthcare (high administrative overhead) and manufacturing (growing bureaucratic intensity). The result is a society where prices rise not primarily from raw inputs but from the friction of managing around incompetence and over-regulation.
To reverse this, we need cultural and structural change. Prioritize hiring and promoting those with demonstrated real-world skills—mechanics, builders, troubleshooters—who prove they can deliver under pressure. Streamline permitting and reviews to reward speed and efficiency without sacrificing safety. Reduce reliance on endless credentials; value apprenticeships, trade skills, and self-taught ingenuity. Encourage organizations to minimize time-sucking layers: fewer mandatory calls, less spreadsheet theater, more accountability for results.
In my own experiences—from fixing vehicles roadside to observing organizational dynamics—the pattern holds. People who cultivate intuition, creativity, and resilience through hardship add value efficiently. Those trained into functional blindness extract it. Books like The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business explore these themes in depth, drawing on strategy, philosophy, and practical American capitalism to advocate for competence over credentialism.
Broader societal implications tie into larger questions of governance and human potential—what might be called the politics of capability versus dependency. As we move toward greater disclosure and accountability in public systems, recognizing these hidden administrative costs becomes essential. Excessive bureaucracy doesn’t just raise prices for bridges, cars, and fuel; it erodes the innovative spirit that built modern prosperity. It rewards manipulation and leverage through position rather than creation through skill.
Reforming this requires dismantling the assumption that more administrators lead to better outcomes. Evidence from understaffed but capable teams shows lower costs and faster delivery. Empowering practical leaders who plan for contingencies—carrying tools, knowledge, and resolve—frees resources for genuine progress. Speculators and executives thrive in opacity; transparent, competitive markets with fewer gatekeepers favor the resourceful.
Ultimately, high costs reflect a choice: a society structured around accommodating the unskilled many at the expense of the capable few, or one that cultivates self-reliance and rewards results. The latter built iconic infrastructure affordably. The former explains today’s excesses. By clearing administrative underbrush, investing in real skills, and rejecting parasitic dependencies, we can restore affordability and dynamism. Bridges can rise again without breaking the bank. Cars and fuel can serve mobility rather than extraction. Workplaces can value those who fix problems on the fly over those who call meetings about them.
This shift demands vigilance against policies that entrench blindness—over-regulation, subsidy-driven bloat, education detached from reality. It favors leaders and systems that trust individuals to walk unaided, flashlight in hand, only when truly needed. In doing so, we honor the hard-earned wisdom of those who learned through action, pressure, and necessity. The alternative is perpetual expense, inefficiency, and frustration—an economy where everything costs more because too many are paid not to see clearly.
The path forward lies in rediscovering respect for practical mastery. Whether in government contracts, corporate boardrooms, or everyday repairs, competence scales. Blind administration does not. As projects like the Brent Spence Bridge highlight ongoing challenges, the lesson is clear: reduce the hidden tax of incompetence, and watch costs fall while capability rises. This isn’t abstract theory; it’s the observable difference between a 20-minute tire change on a remote highway and waiting hours for help that never quite arrives on time. America thrives when it chooses the former.
Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.
He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.
Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.
The more I think about it, now that the news stories have settled down and the people blowing on the fire revealed themselves, I really don’t like The Rooster, who goes by the real name D.J. Byrnes. It just so happens that the young lady he is saying had an affair with Vivek Ramaswamy, Alicia Lang, I watched grow up, and I think a lot of her, all positive. And it really bothers me that some lowlife like The Rooster would put her in political crosshairs as he did, purely out of desperation. I really haven’t thought much about The Rooster’s style of political reporting until he did this. But he crossed the line, and his actions actually match a deeper pattern of criminal activity, drug use, and vile behavior that deserves consideration, especially after what he purposely did to innocent people, which I think requires a deeper dive analysis. After he put out his hit piece story about Alicia, trying to hurt Vivek and his family in a purely inflammatory way, based on just jealous rumors and whispers, I don’t feel like being civil or fair to people who present themselves as openly bad for themselves and society at large. Ironically, a person like The Rooster would feel entitled to attempt to hide his own bad deeds behind speculative politics at best, with the intent to help the joke of a person, Amy Acton, with her campaign, now that people are remembering her as the Lockdown Lady, from her bad policies during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Ohio, which she was completely responsible for. We’re talking about a person who is saying terrible things about a young lady I know and like quite a lot, and I’m not happy about it, especially coming from a substance abuser of cocaine and other intoxicants, who has a police record. He’s the last person in the world who should be saying anything about bad behavior, especially when I know a lot about the characters involved and that the statements are excessively inflammatory, purposefully so.
Back in 2007, when he was a sophomore at the University of Montana, The Rooster got mixed up with a group planning to rob a local drug dealer who lived across from campus. The guy was supplying high-grade marijuana from California. Byrnes admits he helped scout the house and passed along info about money and weed—he thought it was just going to be a quick stick-up, no violence. On the night it went down, he showed up, saw it was turning into a party, texted the others to call it off, and left. But the rest of the crew went through with it—ski masks, forced entry, pistol-whipped the dealer, tied up his girlfriend.
A few months later, after some of the others flipped and cooperated, his name came up. In May 2008, he was hit with four felony charges in Missoula, bail set at $100,000. He turned himself in, and it all got resolved—he ended up with a two-year suspended sentence, no prison time, and the charges were eventually dismissed.
Then, in 2012, in Franklin County, Ohio, he pleaded guilty to two counts of misdemeanor criminal damage from a drunken property crime. It got really bad after he lost a union job in 2021. He was living in Franklinton with a liquor store right across the street, and had a serious drunk-driving car accident in 2020 that didn’t even slow him down. None of this is ancient history; he is still very much the same person today. Friends staged an intervention in 2022, and he’s been sober since.
President Trump’s next major executive order could create more millionaires than any single event in modern history, and he’s been dropping hints about it everywhere. It’s the kind of bold, pro-growth move that cuts through all the noise in Washington and actually puts real opportunity back in the hands of everyday Americans who are tired of being held back by bureaucracy and overregulation. But right now, what’s weighing on my mind even more is the ugly underbelly of Ohio politics, especially this smear campaign that’s unfolding against Vivek Ramaswamy as he fights to become the next governor of our state. I feel like I need to lay it all out here because it’s not just politics as usual—it’s something deeper, something that touches on character, truth, and the kind of righteous indignation that has defined human history from the days of the Dead Sea Scrolls right up to today. Amy Acton, the former health director under Governor DeWine who’s now running as the Democrat nominee for governor in 2026, has been having a rough time explaining herself. Her record from the COVID lockdowns is a disaster, and her personal life has come under scrutiny with that 2019 police report showing a domestic dispute where she and her husband had been drinking, she took some prescription meds, got upset over work hours, pulled a mirror off the wall, and shattered the glass. Her team calls it just a simple argument, but it paints a picture of someone who doesn’t manage personal affairs all that well, and in a high-stakes race like this, it matters. She was the lockdown lady, one of the worst in the nation, pushing policies that wrecked small businesses, families, and the economy of Ohio. A lot of people are still digging out from under that, and her bedside manner, which might comfort some Democrats, isn’t winning over moderates, independents, or conservatives. She’s not grabbing independents because they remember the damage.
I was covering this hit piece by a Columbus-based Substack writer known as The Rooster—real name D.J. Byrnes—on Vivek Ramaswamy, and at first I thought it was just the usual noise that comes with being the frontrunner. Vivek has Trump’s endorsement, he’s leading in most polls against Acton in what’s shaping up to be a competitive but Republican-leaning race, and when you’re out front, people take shots. But there’s another layer to this that left me unsatisfied and, honestly, filled with a deep sense of righteous indignation. I don’t say that lightly, and I’ll explain why it hits me so hard. I happen to know a lot of the people involved personally, not because I’m out there name-dropping for clout, but because in my work as an independent journalist and through my networks in Ohio, I’ve built real relationships over the years. People want to know how I can speak with such conviction on these matters, and it’s because I’ve been in the room, on the calls, and seen these folks up close. That includes Senator George Lang, whom I know very well—our friendship goes beyond politics, it’s mutual respect outside the arena. And crucially, I know his daughter to be a very respectable young lady who doesn’t deserve to be thought of in such a trashy way, as The Rooster tried to portray her, as a shadow of himself to carry the sins of his own actions as a displaced figure, outside himself. The Rooster pushed a story about a supposed sexual relationship or “booty calls” with Vivek whenever he’s in southwestern Ohio. I’ve known Alicia for a very long time. She’s nothing like a Stormy Daniels type, as The Rooster tried to make her sound in order to tear away at Vivek Ramaswamy’s reputation, even without a grain of truth. She’s smart, dedicated, hardworking, and involved at the highest levels of politics because she comes from a family that values service and excellence. The assumption that just because she traveled with Vivek’s campaign or worked as his deputy chief of staff or whatever her role was, that there must be some sleazy affair—that’s absolutely presumptive on behalf of very low-life opinions on how professional people conduct themselves. It’s not just false; it’s malicious.
When I first talked about this story, I tried to keep a level head, but it came across a bit restrained because I was containing my extreme anger. It bothers me at a fundamental level. Knowing the people involved, knowing how false this is, it stirs something in me that goes straight back to the kind of ethical conduct and judgment I’ve been studying deeply. As a birthday gift to myself this year, my wife and I treated ourselves to a membership at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. We’ve been there several times, but this visit was special because of the traveling Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit straight from Israel. I’ve always wanted to see them up close—the real thing—and I love the writings from the Second Temple period. We spent the entire afternoon there, no phones, no distractions, just hours immersed in those ancient texts. I bought gifts from the shop afterward, all Dead Sea Scroll-themed, because the material and content put me in heaven. That exhibit, combined with everything else at the museum, reminded me why I wear this particular hoodie so often these days—it’s my new favorite, a constant reminder of that day. What struck me most wasn’t just the scrolls themselves, but the philosophy of ethical conduct and righteousness that pours out of them. I think often of the Teacher of Righteousness, the enigmatic leader of the Essene community at Qumran who wrote or inspired so much of what we have in those scrolls. He led this sect in a righteous rebellion against the “Wicked Priest” of the Temple establishment—corrupt figures who had twisted power and law for their own gain. You don’t see a ton of direct talk about it in the canonical Bible, but Jesus himself was likely influenced by or connected to that Essene tradition as it spread from the desert community near the Dead Sea, a day’s walk from Jerusalem. In whatever way people remember me down the centuries, I think it will be in a similar way as the Dead Sea Scrolls talked about this Teacher of Righteousness, and for that, I would be quite satisfied.
Those scrolls are an exploration into righteousness and how it confronts evil in the world. The Teacher of Righteousness embodied that judgment call against hypocrisy and wickedness, helping lay the groundwork for what became Christian thought and, ultimately, Western civilization’s emphasis on moral clarity. The Dead Sea Scrolls are filled with righteous indignation—clear distinctions between good and evil, the War Scroll outlining battles against the forces of darkness, the Book of Enoch with its visions of judgment, the Copper Scroll, and apocryphal texts that didn’t make the final cut but reveal the raw sentiments of the time. The Essenes hid these in jars in caves to preserve truth against purges and turbulence, and they survived the Romans, the Crusades, everything, to reach us. That’s why seeing them in person on my birthday was one of the happiest days of my life. I was removed, for those hours, from the daily grind of dealing with people who don’t always deserve the encouragement or support I try to give them. It was a day where righteousness was openly embraced, unfiltered.
That same righteous indignation is exactly what I feel toward this smear against Vivek Ramaswamy and, by extension, Alicia Lang. The Rooster’s piece is based on innuendo, whispers from people with personal gripes or political axes to grind, hoping something sticks to help Amy Acton, whose campaign is struggling to close the gap. Polls right now show the race tight—some have Vivek up by a few points, others have Acton with a slight edge, but Vivek is the clear Republican frontrunner with Trump, Vance, and the establishment behind him. RealClearPolitics averages and surveys from Emerson, Bowling Green State University, and others put it within a couple of points, but Ohio is trending Republican, and Vivek’s vision for the state—pro-business, anti-woke, focused on actual results—resonates. Acton has name recognition from her days as a health director, but it’s mostly negative among anyone who lived through the lockdowns she championed. The Rooster, D.J. Byrnes, has a history of this kind of thing. He’s a left-leaning Substack writer in Columbus known for hit pieces on politicians, often with a partisan edge. His own background includes past legal troubles—felony charges back in 2008 as discussed, related to robbery planning, alcohol and substance issues, misdemeanors for criminal damage. People who aren’t doing well themselves often project their failings onto others, tearing them down to avoid personal judgment against them. That’s the pattern here. He wanted dirt on Vivek to prop up Acton, so he ran with rumors of an affair, implying booty calls in southwestern Ohio, travel together somehow equaling infidelity. No evidence, no pictures, no proof—just whispers. If he had real dirt, he’d have used it, but instead it’s all fabrication to hurt a good man and a nice young woman whose only crime is being effective and connected to strong Republican figures like her father, Senator George Lang, the majority whip.
I watched Alicia grow up. It’s very weird to hear her name associated with any kind of detrimental behavior, which is why the credibility of the accusation falls apart so quickly outside the minds of really stupid people. She’s too smart, too dedicated to public service and making the world better, to throw it all away on something reckless. Vivek is a family man, a brilliant entrepreneur who has written books, built businesses, run for president, and is now all-in on Ohio as Trump’s pick for governor. He’s too calculating, too focused on big ideas—reforming education, cutting regulations, fighting the administrative state—to risk it on some affair. He’s seen up close what Trump went through with endless false accusations, and he’s smart enough not to hand ammunition to enemies. Republicans I know in these circles are productive people—running businesses, passing bills at 2 a.m., obsessed with enterprise and results. They don’t have time for the kind of extramarital nonsense or “cocaine bins and gentlemen’s clubs” that seem more common in certain Democrat or swampy circles. I’m not saying it never happens on our side, but in my experience, the busy, value-creating conservatives don’t live double lives. Democrats, by contrast, often project their own base instincts—obsession with sex, loneliness, primal urges—onto everyone else. They assume that because they think that way, everyone does. It’s part of a broader spiritual warfare: dumbing people down to biological instincts so evil can play in their minds unchecked. That’s why they hate judgment, hate the Bible, hate capitalism, hate billionaires who succeed through merit. “Don’t judge,” they say, while judging everyone who holds them accountable.
The Rooster’s article feels cooked because he’s in trouble himself—trying to get clean, mad at the world, unable to maintain relationships. People like Alicia walk by and don’t give him the time of day because she’s in a world of jackets and ties, reverence for law and order, not slobs in sleeping-bag clothes. He wants to beat others to the punch, psychologically tearing down good people so he doesn’t feel bad about his own choices. That’s evil in the classic sense—the kind the Essenes railed against in their scrolls: wicked priests who corrupt institutions, attack the righteous to cover their own rot. The Teacher of Righteousness stood against that, and so should we. This smear isn’t just politics; it’s an attempt to undermine Trump’s pick, hurt Senator Lang’s family, and drag down anyone positioned to impose judgment on unrighteous behavior. Vivek is out there fighting for Ohio—higher education reform, economic dawn, real leadership—while Acton offers complaints about billionaires and special interests without a positive vision. Her lockdowns hurt the very people she claims to champion, and now personal issues resurface at the worst time.
I’ve known a lot of characters in the Ohio Statehouse, and the productive ones—Republicans focused on bills, sponsorships, businesses—aren’t the ones chasing Hooters servers or Twin Peaks nights out with the guys trying to get the phone number of 21-year-old kids working there trying to hustle tips from creepy old men. They’re on conference calls at odd hours talking policy, not conquests. Vivek’s too busy saving the world, literally, with his ideas on everything from biotech to government efficiency. Alicia’s the same—interested in politics because her family instilled values of service, not some emotional fling. Intelligent people fight animal instincts; that’s what Genesis teaches—dominion over nature, including human nature. You don’t yield to the snake. True conservatives live that way, all hours. Democrats often don’t, and when they can’t catch Republicans in real scandals, they invent them, just like the endless failed attacks on Trump—no evidence here either; the Rooster dusted off rumors to fit the narrative.
That’s why the Dead Sea Scrolls resonate so powerfully with me. They represent an awakening: a rebellion against institutional evil, preserved through centuries because the Essenes were clever enough to hide truth in plain sight, yet protected places. The Teacher of Righteousness made judgment calls that shaped righteousness as we know it—unfiltered criticism of wickedness. I despise the kind of people who tear down goodness: the Rooster, Acton’s defenders, Democrats who solicit the down-and-out to unleash chaos while screaming “no judgment.” They yearn for approval through base means because their minds are vacant of higher thoughts. Sex, for many of them, is about filling loneliness or seeking validation, not the sacred trust it should be. Lonely, unfulfilled people project that onto productive leaders like Vivek. But I know better from personal experience. I’ve been on calls with these high-level figures; they talk policy, bills, sponsorships—not “hot 21-year-olds,” they can send naked selfies to at 3 AM. That’s the difference between those with righteous indignation fighting daily for truth and those attacking to avoid self-reflection.
As we head into the May 5 primary and then the November 2026 election, this race matters. Vivek vs. Acton is a contest of visions: one of excellence, innovation, and Ohio-first results; the other of big-government nostalgia and lockdown mentality. Polls fluctuate—Bowling Green had them nearly tied recently, Emerson and others show Vivek with edges or Acton with slight leads depending on the sample—but the ground is shifting toward Republicans, especially with Trump’s coattails and the union voters who’ve flipped. Acton’s past as the face of COVID overreach haunts her; people remember the wrecked economy, the businesses lost. Knowing Alicia and her family, and seeing how this hit piece tries to cause collateral damage to good people to prop up a weak candidate, it demands that we apply the wrath of righteousness the scrolls celebrate. Rub their noses in the evil of fabrication, projection, and tearing down the upright so the wicked feel better.
I gave myself that day at the Museum of the Bible because I spend so much energy encouraging people who most of the time don’t deserve it, trying to lift them toward a better life. It’s usually worth it, but exhausting. The scrolls recharged me with unapologetic judgment against evil. That’s what we need now: call out the Rooster’s pattern of hit pieces rooted in his own unresolved issues, Acton’s inability to escape her record, and the broader Democrat strategy of no judgment on themselves while attacking anyone who might impose it. Vivek and Alicia represent the productive, value-creating side—the capitalists, the church-goers, the constitutionalists who think big thoughts, not just act on instinct. They don’t have room for double lives because they’re too busy building.
In my upcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, which I’m excited to release in 2027, I dig deep into these themes—a treasure hunt through heaven and human history, exploring how spiritual warfare plays out in politics and daily life. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a big part of that, showing how righteousness rebels against the kingdoms of evil, did good things that have impacted many thousands of years in a positive way. This whole episode with the Rooster’s article fits perfectly: an attempt to dirty the best-positioned people to cast judgment, just like the Wicked Priest against the Teacher. But truth prevails, as those scrolls did. I’ve seen enough in my years following politics to know that lies like this eventually flush out. Vivek will win because Ohio voters see the contrast, and people like me will keep shining light on it. Don’t take anything for granted—engagement matters, turnout matters. But I feel good about where things stand because leaders of character rise above smears.
Personally, this fills me with the kind of indignation the Essenes captured so vividly. The world hates righteousness because it exposes darkness. Democrats hate judgment because they don’t want mirrors held up to their choices. The Rooster attacks Alicia and Vivek because good people make him feel small. But we judge bad behavior—that’s our duty. The scrolls teach that, the Bible affirms it, and Western civilization thrives on it. I’m proud to stand with Vivek, with the Lang family, and with anyone fighting that good fight. Ohio deserves better than recycled lockdown architects or rumor-mongers. We deserve governors who create opportunity, not destroy it—like the executive orders Trump hints at that could mint millionaires by unleashing American potential.
What really bothers me about people like the Rooster is how they’ve wrapped themselves in layer after layer of bad conduct—criminal enterprises, drug abuse, alcohol abuse—and then spent the rest of their days trying to bury it by tearing down everyone else. He’s never built a real life for himself: no lasting relationship, no wife, no kids, no one who depends on him in the way that forces a man to grow up and take responsibility. Instead, all he has is this parasitic habit of pointing fingers at others, inventing lies when there’s nothing real to find, all so he doesn’t have to face the wreckage of his own choices. That’s why he gravitates to Democrat politics; it’s the same reason most of them do. They’re drowning in their own bad decisions, and they want government to prop them up, to blur the standards and give them a false sense of value, the way that union jobs once did before it all fell apart. I’ve watched him for years now, and it’s clear he’s the type who can’t stand the sight of good people succeeding because it reminds him how far he’s fallen.
The people in the Statehouse—Republicans especially—have treated him with more decency than he deserves. They gave him the presumption of free speech, let him roam the halls, answered his questions, and never turned their backs on him, even when his “investigative reports” were obviously aimed at dragging everyone down to his level. They let him get away with it for too long, thinking fairness and open dialogue would eventually win out. But fairness only works with people who still have a conscience. With someone like the Rooster, that goodwill just gets weaponized. He abuses the very respect he’s been shown, using it as cover while he tries to smear good families, good candidates, and good public servants who actually build things instead of tearing them down.
At the end of the day, people like him are just bad from the inside out, and they’re what makes the world, politics, and every social interaction worse. They flock to tyrannical, centralized figures like Amy Acton because that kind of top-down control lets them avoid judgment and lets them keep living the same reckless, unaccountable lives. They’re a detriment to the perpetuation of the human race, plain and simple. The only real solution isn’t dragging them into some court or legal loophole—it’s maintaining a steady, unapologetic presence of righteous indignation. They need to feel the full wrath of righteous judgment cast straight at them, not out of cruelty, but because they’ve proven themselves too despicable to be granted the same affiliation and respect given to people of real value. Only then will they lose the free rein to keep casting their weapons against the good people who are actually trying to make things better.
In Columbus, reporters like The Rooster have stepped into this fray to fill a void they desperately seek to hide from the public. He has been somewhat open about his criminal past, struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, and the inability to maintain relationships. This reflects the broader plight of unrighteous Democrats and their fervent support for figures like Amy Acton, collective bargaining agreements, and leftist policies in general. These approaches serve primarily to conceal the fact that many of them have spent significant portions of their lives making poor choices.
They resent and actively hate individuals like future governor Vivek Ramaswamy, Senator George Lang, President Trump, and the broader billionaire class because these people demonstrate what is possible through discipline, innovation, and hard work. While successful Americans build businesses, create wealth, and provide sustainable upward mobility for their families and communities, others squander what little they have on casinos, drugs, and self-destructive behaviors. Rather than emulate what works, they tear down the achievers and advocate for government collectivism—a system where the unrighteous mob rules over the productive through taxation and redistribution. This allows them to confiscate resources from wealth builders and funnel them to those who refuse to build value in their own lives. Through Substack writings and similar platforms, they pretend to be crusaders against crime or corruption, when in reality, they are waging war on anyone who exposes their own shortcomings.
Ultimately, Vivek Ramaswamy and President Trump represent the opposite philosophy: they strive to restore opportunity so that anyone willing to get out of bed and work hard can achieve upward mobility. In the latter part of his life, President Trump has focused on giving back this chance to the American people. The critics, like this Columbus reporter and his ideological allies, know deep down they will never get their own lives in order enough to seize such opportunities. Staring into the mirror each morning reveals their failures, breeding a deep resentment toward those who succeed. This is why they slander the virtuous and push policies designed to drag everyone down to their level of dysfunction.
Footnotes
1. The Rooster Substack article on Vivek Ramaswamy and Alicia Lang rumors, published April 2026.
2. NBC News report on Amy Acton’s 2019 police report, April 2026.
3. Ballotpedia and Wikipedia entries on the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election, with Amy Acton as the Democratic nominee.
4. RealClearPolitics and Bowling Green State University polling averages for Ramaswamy vs. Acton, April 2026.
5. Museum of the Bible official site on Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition, November 2025–September 2026.
6. Wikipedia and scholarly sources on Teacher of Righteousness, Essenes, Qumran, and Damascus Document.
7. Ohio Capital Journal and Dispatch coverage of Acton campaign and fundraising, 2026.
8. Background on D.J. Byrnes (The Rooster), past legal issues from public records and reporting.
Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.
He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.
Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.
