I have watched this movie before. In 2015 and 2016, and again in 2024, the same class of people tried to tell America that Donald Trump’s wealth was a character defect. They said a rich man could not be trusted, that success itself was the indictment, that gold, planes, and golf were proof he was “not like you.” Voters put him in the White House twice anyway, because they understood something the professional scolds never will: independence is an asset. A man who does not need the job is harder to own. That is the lesson Ohio Democrats and a handful of leftover Republican wreckers are now trying to unlearn with Vivek Ramaswamy, and it is why Amy Acton spent Labor Day weekend screaming that you cannot buy Ohio.
She needed a chant. What she got was a gaffe.
The Speech That Sounded Like a Person Running Out of Road
Watch the clip. Acton is at a union picnic with Pete Buttigieg in tow, doing the ritual of the lockdown years: I am a doctor, not a politician, becoming one right in front of your eyes. Then she starts barking that Vivek cannot buy the state, cannot buy Ohio, cannot buy us, cannot buy us, cannot buy us in Ohio, that is the end of this. It is the sort of thing a campaign writes on a whiteboard when the internals look ugly and the only remaining argument is envy. The crowd does not catch fire. She looks like she is trying to start a wave at a funeral.
This is the same Amy Acton Ohio already knows. She ran public health under Mike DeWine when the state was locked down, businesses were smashed, kids were sent home, and “follow the science” became a political religion. She collected awards for it. A lot of Ohioans collected unemployment, missed funerals, and watched their Main Streets die. You can call that public service if you like. I call it the record she has to run on, and it is why the “I’m just like you” routine lands like a lead pipe. She is not just like you. She is the woman who told you to stay home while the people who write the rules kept their salaries.
The wealth attack is even thinner. Vivek flew to watch tennis. He likes tennis. He used to be a ranked junior. He has a court. He went to the U.S. Open and he has been to Paris. Wealthy people do that. Trump never ran from Mar-a-Lago or the golf course; he wore the gold clip and the silk tie and said, yes, I did well, and if you vote for me I will try to make it so you can do well too. That is a producer’s message. Acton’s message is the opposite: he has money, therefore he is illegitimate, therefore hand the keys to the people who want to tax the successful and redistribute the proceeds to the discontented. That is not a governing philosophy. That is a ransom note.
Why Attacking Wealth Is a Loser’s Tell
I have been thinking lately about the Apostle Paul. He was effective in part because he had standing and independence. He was not a ward of the movement. He could travel, argue, and endure because he was not begging the crowd for his next meal. Politics is not the church, but the principle is the same. A candidate who has already won in the private economy does not need Columbus the way a career public-health administrator needs Columbus. Vivek does not need a government job. That is supposed to be a feature. The people yelling “you can’t buy Ohio” are announcing that they cannot raise comparable money and cannot compete on growth, so they will compete on resentment.
David Pepper and the rest of the chorus have been working this line for months: billionaire, private jet, not one of us. Fine. Then explain why Trump’s jets and clubs did not stop two national victories, and why Ohioans who want plants, capital, and jobs might prefer a man who has already built companies to a woman whose signature achievement was closing the state. You can dislike Vivek’s style. You can argue policy. What you cannot do, with a straight face, is pretend that enjoying a tennis match is a civic crime while the alternative is more of the administrative state that already had its turn.
The other half of this farce is intra-Republican sabotage. After a primary, Democrats lock arms around whoever they nominated, even when she sounds like a chalkboard dragged down a stairwell. A slice of the right still wants to pick the scab. Nick Fuentes types, leftover primary rivals, the professional “I told you so” circuit—anyone who would rather be right about a Republican’s flaws than win the state—keep feeding the same clip. They did it to Trump in 2016 and 2024. He won anyway because voters vote their interest when the noise dies down. A good economy and job creators in your state beat a sermon about how the other guy’s plane is too nice.
Then Came the Fair, and the Overnight Conversion of a Shove Into an Assassination Plot
The timing is the tell. After the Labor Day chant made her look unhinged, the campaign needed a new story. Sunday at the Canfield Fair, a 38-year-old local named Patrick Havas pushed through a tent crowd toward Acton with a phone up, as if he were recording or trying to get close enough to be seen. He knocked over older people. Security took him down. After the fact, deputies found two pistols and a Taser-style device on him. He did not draw the guns. He did not fire. He did not brandish. Ohio is a constitutional-carry state. Carrying is not the same thing as attempting murder. The charges reported were disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault for the people he knocked down. Acton was unhurt. The people who fell were assessed and, according to the sheriff, did not seek further treatment.
That is a bad scene at a fair. It is not a martyrdom. Campaign statements still said an “armed individual lunged” and injured multiple people. National copy followed the verb. By Saturday night into Sunday the lead was written as if Ohio had just watched a political assassination attempt. If there were clean video of a man trying to kill her, it would have been on every screen before supper. What we got instead was language inflation: lunge, attack, armed, threat—while the actual police story is a large man barreling for a better look or a confrontation, knocking seniors like bowling pins, and getting piled on by Highway Patrol.
This attack story is just another Democrat Jussie Smollett story, trying to gain sympathy and voter support through fake news talking points. This is the fullness of the Acton operation: when the speech is a disaster, change the subject to danger. When you cannot raise on growth, raise on fear. When you cannot debate or raise money, accuse the other side of buying the state. Look how many sucker politicians jumped on the bandwagon without knowing all the facts, which again came out looking like Amy Acton is a loser candidate.
What Ohio Actually Chooses When the Cameras Leave
Acton will keep the unions, the people who want the next transfer payment, and the media that still thinks 2020 was her finest hour. She will keep Pepper on the ticket as proof that the old Democratic machinery is still in the room. She will keep calling Vivek rich, which he is, and hoping Ohio has forgotten that successful people are allowed to like tennis, football Saturdays, and a life that is not a permanent campaign stop.
I want a state that recruits producers instead of lecturing them. If a man with a billion dollars in assets spends a few thousand to fly to a match, that is not the scandal. The scandal is a political class that treats his success as the crime and her lockdown résumé as the credential. Trump never apologized for winning. Vivek should not apologize for a court, a jet, or a seat at the Open. The people who need him to grovel are the same people who needed Trump to grovel. They lost that argument twice.
Vote like you want the factories and the payrolls. When things got tough for Amy Acton in 2026 she turned to fake news. Which only made everything worse. She is the lockdown lady and is horrible in every way a politician can be, which we all had a front-row seat to in 2020 when she destroyed Ohio’s economy and told everyone they could be superheroes if only they wore a mask in public. That is the person running for governor in Ohio as a Democrat. A disaster on a good day. On a bad day, she is a fake news agent of destruction and drunkenness.
Notes
1. Acton’s Labor Day-weekend remarks with Buttigieg at the Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic, including the “you cannot buy this state / you can’t buy us” repetition, circulated widely on September 5–6, 2026. See WLWT coverage of the Hamilton picnic and contemporaneous rally video.
2. Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director under Gov. Mike DeWine beginning in 2019 and became the public face of the state’s COVID restrictions.
3. Criticism of Ramaswamy’s travel and tennis included Acton’s own Labor Day-weekend post attacking a U.S. Open appearance and earlier opinion pieces on a July 4 Paris trip.
4. Ramaswamy’s tennis background (junior player, Cincinnati Open ball boy, regular Open attendee) is part of his public biography and prior campaign videos.
5. Canfield Fair incident, September 6, 2026: Patrick Havas, 38, of Canfield, pushed through the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent, knocked down older attendees, was detained by Ohio State Highway Patrol executive protection; weapons recovered after detention; no brandishing reported; charges reported as disorderly conduct and two counts of misdemeanor assault. Acton uninjured.
6. Constitutional carry in Ohio means possession of a concealed firearm, without more, is not itself an assassination attempt.
7. Public polling through late summer 2026 generally showed a toss-up to slight-Ramaswamy edge depending on the house, which is consistent with a campaign hunting for a reset narrative.
8. Intra-GOP sniping after contested primaries is a recurring feature of the Trump era; Democrats have typically consolidated faster around flawed nominees.
Bibliography
Acton for Governor. Campaign statements and Labor Day / Canfield Fair remarks, September 2026.
Ballotpedia. “Amy Acton.” Candidate biography and office history.
CNN. “Armed man arrested after pushing through crowd toward Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee.” September 6, 2026.
Columbus Dispatch. “Armed man arrested after lunging at Amy Acton at Canfield Fair.” September 6, 2026.
Cincinnati Enquirer. Nick Anderson, “Ramaswamy’s Paris trip an example of his disconnect with Ohioans.” July 8, 2026.
HuffPost. “Vivek Ramaswamy Slammed For Leaving Ohio And Attending The U.S. Open.” September 6, 2026.
Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office / Ohio State Highway Patrol statements on the Canfield Fair detention of Patrick Havas, September 6, 2026.
New York Times. “Armed Man Arrested After Charging Toward Democratic Candidate for Ohio Governor.” September 6, 2026.
The Nerd Stash. “‘You Can’t Buy Us’: Ohio Dem Amy Acton Sparks Backlash After Awkward Rally Chant Aimed at Vivek Ramaswamy.” September 6, 2026.
Washington Post. “Armed individual ‘lunged’ at Democrat nominee for Ohio governor, campaign says.” September 6, 2026.
Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” Polling averages and race ratings as of early September 2026.
WLWT. “Pete Buttigieg campaigns for Amy Acton, Greg Landsman at Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic.” September 6, 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
After the mistrial of Lindsay Clancy today, people are wondering a lot about evil, which I just so happen to spend a lot of time talking about. So let’s set some ground rules here and talk about what makes evil work in the world so that we can prepare ourselves to defeat it. Emphatically! And ruthlessly. Let’s begin. When we see a jury of our peers unable to see right from wrong, we have to understand the strategy of evil to weaken the resolve of jurors, the manipulations of lawyers, and the antics of political persuasion, and ultimately, the power of government. I would suggest, in addition to this text, that you watch this video. It has a lot of different kinds of things in it.
What the Word Actually Means
The New Testament word behind “principalities” is archai, rulers, first things, authorities at the head of an order. It is almost always paired with exousiai, powers, the right to act. In Ephesians 6:12 Paul adds two more phrases: the kosmokratores of this darkness, world-rulers, and the pneumatika of wickedness in the heavenly places. The sentence is built to take the fight off the sidewalk. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.”¹. This is a political statement, not a religious one. And I will likely spend the next 20 years of my life proving it and defining it for people. But it’s quite a statement, and a big, major political problem.
Colossians 1:16 says thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers were created through Christ and for Him. The vocabulary is larger than demons. It can name any organized spiritual authority, loyal or rebel. In the spiritual-warfare conversations most people know, the word has narrowed in scope. Principalities are treated as territorial, as the unseen administration behind nations, systems, and persons. I use the word that way because that is how the encounter presented itself. I do not use it as a slogan. “Satan is working” is a bumper sticker. The question is the work. Against whom. Through whom. Toward what political end.
Our eyes were built for human scale. They miss the microbe and the principality. That is not an argument that the unseen is imaginary. It is an argument that the instrument is limited. I would not take a courtroom’s word that a virus does not exist because the jury cannot see it.
I Met the Same Character in Two Different People
I met a personality recently. I met it in two people, in two different business settings, close enough in time that I could not pretend I was imagining a mood. The bodies were unrelated. The personality was not. Same language. Same pressure. This thing made sure to let me know it was the same “thing” in two different bodies. It was very specific to me almost with a wink and a nod. Same intent. Same way of coming at the conversation. If you have ever watched a driver get out of one car and into another and keep the same hands on the wheel, you know the feeling. The vehicle changed. The driver did not.²
I have written in The Politics of Heaven that people who drink hard, who live on painkillers, who hollow out the pronoun I, surrender the vehicle they live in. I do not mean every drinker is possessed. I mean an empty house is easier to occupy than a house with a resident who knows his own name. The two men I am talking about were not sophisticated. They were not formidable on their own. They were vacant enough to be used. Both had the same kind of tattoo on the inner arm, the kind you can cover with a sleeve in a professional room and flash when the Monday-night crowd wants to know you are still one of the rebels at BW3s half drunk by the second quarter of a Monday Night Football game. I do not think the ink is the spirit. I think the ink, in those cases, was a marker of a type: the man who wants the title of an executive and the alibi of a slob, who will fold under peer pressure, who has already practiced not being fully present in his own skin.³
If you have a tattoo on the inside of your arm and you are reading this to see whether I just called you evil, I did not. Sit with the other layer. When the lights are out, what do you rehearse in your head? That is the question I am asking about susceptibility, not about ink.
I have seen the same signature in places that could not have compared notes. A café. A terminal. Tokyo, Paris, Heathrow. A young waitress who has no idea she is being used, who thinks she is only tired and behind on a car payment, and then another person on another continent running the same play against the same target. The temptation is not always lust. Sometimes it is the attempt to get a man to blow up his public life so the rest of his work becomes easy to dismiss. That is a political move. It is not a horror-movie fog. It is an operation.
The Book of Enoch Is No Longer a Basement Subject
Jude quotes Enoch. Genesis 6 leaves the door open rather than closing it. The Book of the Watchers, preserved in 1 Enoch and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, tells the story the short biblical verses assume the reader already knows: two hundred Watchers conspire, descend, take wives from the daughters of men, beget the giants, and teach what heaven had not authorized.⁴ The text is not in most Protestant canons. It is nothing. A book the New Testament can cite is a book a serious reader of the Bible has to account for.
Timothy Alberino has been making that case for years in Birthright and in his commentary on Enoch. In late 2025, he sat down with Glenn Beck on episode 274 of the podcast, and the conversation moved from Genesis 6 to the Watchers to transhumanism in front of an audience that does not live on fringe forums.⁵ Ten years ago, this was a few tens of thousands of people online. I have been in the subject more than twenty years. Millions can now hear the same file. That does not make every inference true. It does mean the subject is no longer easy to exile with a laugh track.
Alberino’s warning about “Nephilim 2.0” is not that a chatbot is a demon. It is that the old pattern—hybridizing the human, seizing Adam’s brief, rewriting the creature so the Cross no longer applies to it—can return as gene editing, machine merger, and the dream of becoming an immortal without God. Fire is not evil. The heart that uses fire to burn a village is. I use AI as a tool on this show. I do not think the tool is the Watcher. I think the Watcher would be happy to have a new kind of empty vessel.
Augustine, Giants, and What the Flood Did Not Wash Away
City of God is one of the books I go back to a lot and I absolutely love it. I love it so much so that if I wasn’t already married to my wife, I’d marry it!. It takes time. It is worth the time. Augustine is writing as Rome is coming apart and as Christianity is being asked to explain why the city of man is not the City of God. In Book XV he talks about giants. He says sepulchers give up bones of incredible size. He says he himself, with others, saw on the shore at Utica a human molar so large that, cut down to ordinary teeth, it might have made a hundred. He believed it belonged to a giant. He thought the bodies of the ancients were larger, and the giants larger still.⁶
That is a fifth-century report, not a modern osteology paper. I do not need Augustine to have measured a femur correctly to take his witness seriously. He assumed his readers around the Mediterranean already knew the old world had held larger men. Goliath is in the canon. Og’s bed is in the canon. Genesis says the Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after.⁷
I live with the Hopewell and Adena earthworks in my own river valley. I have written about copper culture and the mounds for years. I think we have been timid about what the ground still holds. I also think a spirit does not have to maintain the skeleton of a fifteen-foot body to keep working. A soul is not required to be the size of the corpse. If a soul can be smaller than a cell, then the death of a giant does not retire the intelligence that used the giant. The flood judged a world. I do not believe it vacuumed every rebel power out of the air. If it had, Paul would not have written Ephesians 6 to a church living after Noah, after Abraham, after the Cross.
Job Is the Political Text People Skip
The book of Job is not only a book about suffering. It is a book about a courtroom. Satan presents himself among the sons of God and asks permission to wreck a loyal servant. The motive is political. Prove that worship is a transaction. Prove that the kingdom is only as strong as the hedge. Take that lesson off the page, and you have a method. Harass the person who would otherwise be a problem. Empty the person who can be worn like a coat. Conceal the operation by making the subject sound unhinged, so the Trojan horse never has to come out of the wood in daylight.⁸
That is why I keep using the word political. Democrats in a Republican county do not need a majority on Tuesday if they can spend two years sanding down trust. Principalities do not need to win a show of hands if they can unmake the image they hate. The conspiracy, if you want the old word, is not a committee in a basement. It is the long project of erasing the original: the garden, the image, the Son. The Watchers’ crime in Enoch is not only lust. It is a vote against the arrangement God had made. Two hundred of them decided heaven’s rule was negotiable.
The empty vessel is useful because it does not argue. Legalize the solvents, praise the erasure of the pronoun I, call rootedness oppression, and you have manufactured occupancy. I am not saying every short man who drinks after work is a portal. I am saying, from what I have watched, insecure people who already live outside themselves are cheaper to run than people who wake up intending to be good.
What I Saw, and What I Cannot Photograph
I cannot put the principality on a slide. I can report the pattern. Same speech in two mouths that had no business sharing a script. Same type of compromised body. Same objective: get inside the work, dirty the witness, keep the war from being named. Quantum talk about entanglement is a modern vocabulary for an old claim: that distance and clock time do not bind a spirit the way they bind a truck. I do not pretend that vocabulary is a proof. I am saying the observed thing is older than the vocabulary.
Spider-Man: Far From Home put a body-jumping antagonist on a screen because storytellers keep stumbling into the mechanic. I did not get the idea from the movie. I got it from the meeting. Science fiction is often late to the church’s mail.
If you stay in the Bible and refuse this subject, you stay in a censored Bible. The inconvenient pages are the ones that tell you the war did not end when the water receded. We assume God has won at the end of the story, and I believe He does. That is not the same as assuming the field is quiet. Turning the other cheek is a command about revenge. It is not a claim that no one is swinging.
A Tool, a Book, and the Work in Front of Us
I will keep using the tools in front of me, including this one, because a principality is not allergic to electricity, and neither is the other side. The point is the heart. Play God, rewrite the creature, chase deathlessness without the Creator, and you are back in Genesis 6 with better lab equipment. Ask a question, solve a problem, put language on an encounter you would rather not leave in a fog, and you are doing what readers of Scripture have always done with the instruments of their century.
Alberino’s books are on the table. Enoch is on the table. Augustine is on the table. Paul is on the table. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to write the psychology and the politics of that war in one place, because quoting Ephesians 6:12 is not the same as understanding why the enemy wants the city. I will not agree with every explorer on every bone in every mound. I will not pretend I did not recognize the same face in two different, short men with tattoos on the inside of their arms, to conceal who they are.
Do not give a principality the courtesy of silence just because it would prefer to stay in the shadows. Hey, I’ve been traveling a lot and thinking about these things on long camping trips while everyone else has been sleeping inside my camper, with the smell of woodsmoke from our campfire dying away into the deep night. I think I understand and can relate to Paul as he wrote Ephesians. You have to go through some tough stuff, then think in isolation before you can begin to see the tormentors of existence. And I think it is there that we have to focus on the real war at hand. I think Paul, and only Paul, could have written the marvelous work of Ephesians and begin to contemplate the efforts of principalities.
Notes
1. Greek of Ephesians 6:12: palē, wrestling, not a vague struggle; archas, exousias, kosmokratoras tou skotous toutou, pneumatika tēs ponērias en tois epouraniois. See also Ephesians 1:21; 3:10; Colossians 1:16; 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.
2. This is testimony, not a lab result. I am describing two business encounters within days of each other and a recognition I have had in other cities. I am not asking a reader to take my word as canon. I am asking a reader of Paul to leave room for the thing Paul said we wrestle.
3. Inner-arm tattoos as a tell are my field notes from these cases and from a type I have watched for years. They are not a doctrine. Plenty of marked skin belongs to people who are awake in their own lives. The question is occupancy, not decoration.
4. 1 Enoch 6–16, the Book of the Watchers. Jude 14–15 cites Enoch. Genesis 6:1–4 remains the canonical hinge. 1 Enoch fragments are among the Dead Sea Scrolls; the full Ethiopic corpus preserved the book for the Ethiopian Church.
5. “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” Timothy Alberino with Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, November 2025. Alberino, Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth (2020), and The Book of Enoch, with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.
6. Augustine, City of God 15.9, the Utica Murmur; 15.23 on angels and the daughters of men. Written in the years after 410. I read him as an early Christian mind defending the faith inside a failing imperial order, not as a modern archaeologist.
7. Genesis 6:4; Deuteronomy 3:11; 1 Samuel 17. “Also after that” is the phrase that keeps the subject from dying in the Flood chapter.
8. Job 1–2. The Accuser’s politics are the demand that loyalty be exposed as a deal. Homer’s Trojan Horse is only a later picture of concealment. I use it as an image, not as Scripture.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Scripture and the Powers
The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 6; Deuteronomy 3; 1 Samuel 17; Job 1–2; Daniel 10; Matthew 4; Mark 5; John 12:31; Romans 8:38–39; 1 Corinthians 15:24–26; Ephesians 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:10–20; Colossians 1:16; 2:10, 15; Jude 6, 14–15; Revelation 12.
Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. InterVarsity, 1992.
Arnold, Clinton E. Ephesians: Power and Magic. Baker, 1989.
Caird, G. B. Principalities and Powers. Clarendon, 1956.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham, 2015.
Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.
O’Brien, Peter T. “Principalities and Powers.” Evangelical Review of Theology 16 (1992).
Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers. Fortress, 1984. Read as a map of the vocabulary even where the theology diverges.
Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Fortress, 2013. For the larger Pauline world in which the powers sit.
Enoch, Watchers, and Second Temple Literature
1 Enoch. Translations by R. H. Charles (1912); George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam (Fortress); and the Alberino / Blurry Creatures edition with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.
2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, in Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Doubleday, 1983–85.
Nickelsburg, George W. E. 1 Enoch 1. Hermeneia. Fortress, 2001.
VanderKam, James C. Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition. Catholic Biblical Association, 1984.
Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. 3rd ed. Eerdmans, 2016.
Stuckenbruck, Loren T. The Myth of Rebellious Angels. Mohr Siebeck, 2014.
Boccaccini, Gabriele. Beyond the Essene Hypothesis. Eerdmans, 1998.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. García Martínez and Tigchelaar.
Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.
Augustine and the Early Church
Augustine. The City of God. Especially Books XI–XV. Translations by Marcus Dods; R. W. Dyson; and the Loeb edition.
Augustine. Confessions.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Harper, 1978.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Giants, Genesis 6, and the Old World
Doak, Brian R. The Last of the Rephaim. Brown Judaic Studies, 2012.
Hendel, Ronald. “The Nephilim Were on the Earth.” In The Fall of the Angels, ed. Auffarth and Stuckenbruck. Brill, 2004.
Annus, Amar. “On the Origin of Watchers.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19 (2010).
Homer. Iliad. For the older-and-larger-bodies tradition Augustine also cites through Pliny.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History 7.
Alberino, Beck, and the Present Conversation
Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth. 2020.
Alberino, Timothy. The Book of Enoch. With Blurry Creatures. Commentary on 1 Enoch 1–36.
Beck, Glenn, host. The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” with Timothy Alberino. November 2025.
Heiser, Michael S. Demons. Lexham, 2020.
Missler, Chuck. Return of the Nephilim. Briefings and notes, Koinonia House.
Spiritual Warfare, Discernment, and the Occupied Life
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. 1945.
Peretti, Frank. This Present Darkness. Crossway, 1986. Fiction that taught a generation the furniture of the subject. Not evidence. Atmosphere.
Nee, Watchman. The Spiritual Man. Christian Fellowship Publishers.
Bounds, E. M. Power Through Prayer and the Satan volumes.
Leahy, Frederick S. Satan Cast Out. Banner of Truth, 1975.
Unger, Merrill F. Biblical Demonology. Scripture Press, 1952.
Politics, Concealment, and the Long War
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Ellul, Jacques. The Presence of the Kingdom and The Subversion of Christianity.
O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations. Cambridge, 1996.
Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Revell, 1976.
Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1952. For the old habit of immanentizing what belongs to another city.
Consciousness, Tools, and the Limit of the Eye
Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind. Oxford, 1996. For the hardness of the problem, not for angels.
Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford, 1989.
Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Physics and Theology. Yale, 2007.
Scruton, Roger. The Face of God. Continuum, 2012.
Local Ground and the Older America
Squier and Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. 1848.
Webb, William S., and Charles E. Snow. The Adena People.
Romain, William F. Mysteries of the Hopewell. University of Akron Press, 2000.
Baldwin, John D. Ancient America. 1872. Read with a modern filter and an open map.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
We’re going to go down a rabbit hole here for a bit, because we need to. The evil we are dealing with is pretty easy to beat. And the Bible is one of the best ways to beat it. I’ve confirmed that with a long journey and a lot of experience but for now, let me give you a great weapon to fight that evil. I was reading Biblical Archaeology Review the way I always read it when a new one comes to my mailbox. I take the day. I sit with the issue and I shut off the world to do what I enjoy most. I have been receiving that magazine since the 1970s, when it first came out, and it is still one of the happiest things I do with a stretch of quiet hours.¹ My wife understands that. Most people never see it. I do not usually talk about it. I think its time that we defend our American laws with a bibilical understanding and framework. And just let the Karl Marx lovers have their faces melt. I’m tired of them personally, and their ridiculous view of human affairs.
Then I saw an advertisement for a new study Bible centered on Jonathan Edwards,I wanted others to know it exists. I like the people who put it together and I want to see it sell successfully. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is out now from Thomas Nelson, New King James Version, general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard, who is a fantastic scholar. The publication date was August 18, 2026. It comes in hardcover, flexible Leathersoft, and genuine leather.² I already have more study Bibles than a reasonable person needs. I plan to make this the next one I put my hands on every day. I would suggest all my readers get a copy, and to use it so we can have much better discussions in the coming years. Do not let the God-hating Marxist left define our law-and-order society.
I would argue that Edwards shaped the moral weather that made the United States possible, in the 1730s and 1740s, in the First Great Awakening, from a pulpit in Northampton and from a mind that refused to separate joy in God from serious thought.³ I recommend getting the new Bible and living with it. That is the news. The rest is why the news landed on me the way it did.
The Bible in the Green Bag
The Bible I typically carry has been through airports all over the world. Soft pages. Maps in the back. Notes in every blank the editors left me. I have filled the margins to the end. It does not look ruined. It looks used. I could carry it another ten years, and it would still hold. I keep it in a green utility bag with my laptop, the phone, a charging brick, and whatever snack will survive security. One bag. One pass through the scanner. Then I sit at the gate and do what I have always done while a plane loads: I look at the maps, the timelines, the concordance, and a note I wrote two years ago in another terminal.
I am not opening it because I think God will only forgive me if the other passengers watch. I open it because I like it. I like the history that survived. I like the drawings. I like having a piece of the ancient world in my hands while the PA system talks about zone two.
That Carry Bible is not my only one. I keep going back to the Crossway ESV Archaeology Study Bible. I gave a softcover of that one to my youngest daughter. I kept the copy I use. It is a wealth of a book: the text, then the dirt beneath the text, the photographs, the sidebars, the sense that Abraham, Hezekiah, and Paul walked on actual ground.⁴ I first saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review years ago and kept it on the back burner until I bought it. A decade later, I still reach for it more than almost anything else on the shelf, because archaeology is the companion that keeps the stories from floating.
Then there is the MacArthur Study Bible a friend put in my hands on June 12, 2023. He wrote in the front. I did not ask for it. He was a retired Army colonel, later president of aerospace companies, and he valued the conversations we had about biblical context. He walked into the office, set down one of his favorites, and left. I keep it where I can see it from the chair.⁵
Those three sit in a kind of rotation: the traveler, the archaeologist, the gift. The Edwards volume is the first new study Bible in a while that I would consider letting the traveler retire to the shelf.
Museum of the Bible and a Pin from Qumran Country
My favorite day of 2026 so far was my birthday. I took a break from work. My wife and I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington. We are members. Besides the main reading room at the Library of Congress, that museum is my favorite place on earth, and inside it, my favorite gallery is the History of the Bible exhibit. You walk into architecture that evokes a cathedral. You watch the book move through languages, empires, paper, print, and culture. I am not talking about a private feeling there. I am talking about the measurable power a set of texts has had on human civilization.⁶
I carry a small pin from a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in the same bag. I do not want to forget that trip. The Teacher of Righteousness in the Qumran literature is, for me, one of the most compelling figures in Second Temple history. I do not flatten Jesus into that figure. I do not need to. A man is born into a world that already has a language, a priesthood, a Roman shadow, and a set of arguments about purity and power. John the Baptist and Jesus both make more sense when you have sat with the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Pesher, and the people who left Jerusalem’s gravity for the desert.⁷ The Essenes were suspicious of wealth and of a priesthood they thought had made itself comfortable with the wrong masters. That is not a modern talking point. That is the air of the first century.
I find the psychology of that period inexhaustible. Conference calls still get my attention. I listen. Some of them take an hour to arrive at the sentence that could have been said in four minutes. In those stretches I used to slide the desk Bible over and keep my mind working: instead of getting bored: a map, a timeline, a note. Not as theater. As ballast.
What People Thought They Were Looking At
I dress for work—shirt, jacket, often a tie. I have a White House tie. I have one Ross Perot gave me years ago. I have silk ties from the Trump Organization, the kind with the mark on the back, soft, well-made. Ties are not a costume. They are respect for the room I am walking into and the work we do there.
TSA has watched that combination for years: the jacket, the green bag, the Bible coming out of it. More than once the assumption has been that I must be a preacher or some other official holy man. I am not. I am an executive who likes Scripture, archaeology, and not wasting the twenty minutes before a plane pushes back. People sitting in the next seat have asked, in so many words, why a person would look at a Bible in an airport unless he were trying to get something forgiven. I find that question more revealing than they intend. You can live a decent life and still want the book. You can refuse tattoos, refuse to deface the body, refuse the little wink that says “I am as wrecked as you are,” and still not be a priest. You can be a man who thinks the human temple is not a billboard.⁸
I have been stunned, this summer of 2026, at how much hostility that posture draws once you leave a familiar building. Inside two-decade-old relationships, people who suddenly miss me are letting me know just how much, they miss the Bible on my desk realizing it was more than just furniture. People who ran large companies told me later it was the first thing they trusted when they walked in my office. Not the speeches I gave them. The book. A flag that said the room was safe for a person who still went to church on Sunday and did not need to advertise a tattoo on the inside of their arm or hidden on an ankle.
I have had something like forty or fifty messages in the last three weeks from people who used to come through that door. The line repeats. They miss the Bible on the desk. Some of them have more money than they will ever be able to spend and can afford to say what they think in their older years. What they valued was not a performance of righteousness. It was a reminder that the world was not all bad. That has been the shock of changing circumstances. You do not know who was quietly depending on a habit you thought was private until the habit is no longer in the same room.
A New Market, an Old Warning About Wealth
I have been talking with new people in Butler County and in the space-adjacent market I have watched for years. I first heard the pitch the way you hear a hundred pitches on LinkedIn. Everybody has a new idea. My own working estimate, from the work I have actually done, is that the space economy is heading toward something on the order of three trillion dollars by around 2033.⁹ That is not hype. That is a forecast based on experience. If it is even close, the people who build the right things will be rewarded on a scale that sounds like island-buying money to anyone still thinking in last decade’s units.
I am not embarrassed by the pursuit of wealth. I am careful about it. Jesus was not sentimental about rich men. The people behind the Dead Sea Scrolls were not sentimental about rich men. A needle is still a needle.¹⁰ If I had no dime and a box of chicken nuggets from Kroger and a new issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, I would still be myself. The magazine and the book are the happy part. The wealth is the instrument. Nicodemus had standing in the priesthood and still came to Jesus at night. He did not have to choose between influence and curiosity. I would rather earn the hours from five to ten in the evening, the hours when a man who has already taken care of his people can sit in a chair and read, than pretend poverty is automatically holy.¹¹
The colonel who gave me the MacArthur Bible had seen the military change and then seen large companies change until he barely recognized them. He told those stories in an office that still had a Bible on the desk. When he retired, I lost interest in the polite version of going along. That is a disclosure, not a press release. The people who stepped into some of those roles were closer to the airport glance than to the man who wrote in the front of a study Bible. Why are you wearing a tie? Why don’t you have the tattoo? Why don’t you throw a curse word into the meeting so we know you are not a robot? I have known that weather existed. I had commented on it from a protected side of the glass. This year I have been on the other side of the glass.
The Teacher of Righteousness did not win a popularity contest in Jerusalem. The community at Qumran put miles between itself and a priesthood it thought had made peace with the wrong power. I do not think the answer for a modern working life is to move to a desert. I do think the answer is to stop being surprised that people who are only sails, and never a keel, hate a keel when they see one. They go with the wind. A person who gets up in the morning intending to be good is steering. Those two habits do not like each other.
Why Edwards, and Why Now
Jonathan Edwards filled notebooks. The Miscellanies, the Notes on Scripture, the Resolutions he wrote as a young man and kept. The new study Bible is built out of that habit. Everhard’s edition puts Edwards’s own doctrinal work under the NKJV text, adds essays on his life and the Awakening, reprints the Resolutions, and explains the note system so a reader can start one of his own.¹² That is not merchandising. That is an old American technology: write what you see in the text until the text starts writing back to you.
I have been doing a smaller version of that in the carry Bible for years. Lines in the places the publisher left blank. Thoughts in the maps. Reactions I did not want to lose between Dayton and some other runway. Edwards did it at a different scale in the 1740s and 1750s. The country that came after him, the republic that knew his sermons even when it argued with them, did not appear out of a vacuum. If you want a founding-era mind that treated Scripture as something a serious adult could spend a life on, he is near the head of the line.
I am loyal to the Bible that has already been around the world with me. I am not going to mistreat it. I am thinking about letting it live on the shelf and putting a leather Edwards next to the chair and in the bag. A new study Bible is not a better God. It is another set of trained eyes, another century of notes, another chance to keep the mind awake while the rest of the cabin looks at a phone.
If you need a first Bible, or another Bible, this is the one I would put in front of you this month. Hardcover if it will stay on a table. Leathersoft or leather if it is going to travel. Read Edwards’s own sentence on the cover logic of the edition: the enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied.¹³ Then read the maps. Then write in the blanks.
What I Am Building Next
I have said for a while that the age of disclosure and the politics of heaven are not separate subjects. They are the same story told from two altitudes. That work is coming.¹⁴ Until it does, the ordinary practice remains the same. Subscribe to a better day. Sit with a magazine that still believes the dirt in Israel and Jordan and the West Bank can teach you to read. Carry a book that has already outlived empires. Dress as if the work matters. Do not wait for a stranger in an airport to bless the habit.
If you have been one of the people writing to say you missed the Bible on my desk, I appreciate all the kind words and have been impressed how many people were using that object as something stable in their life. Edwards can sit where the last one sat. The green bag still does its work and carries in it what’s truly valuable.
Notes
1. Biblical Archaeology Review began publication in 1975 under Hershel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society. I have read it across five decades. The Fall 2026 issue includes work on Negev tombs, Kidron Valley monuments, Tell Qasile, and spacing in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
2. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, general editor Matthew Everhard. Hardcover ISBN 9781400339532; also issued in brown Leathersoft and black genuine leather. Comfort Print, red letter, maps, concordance, essays, Resolutions, and an introduction to Edwards’s Miscellanies method.
3. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, later missionary at Stockbridge and president of the College of New Jersey—the First Great Awakening’s most demanding American theologian. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) is the famous shard. The Religious Affections and the Miscellanies are the longer works.
4. ESV Archaeology Study Bible, Crossway, editorial oversight by John Currid and David Chapman, first issued 2018, later TruTone editions. Field notes, photographs, maps, timelines. I have also used Zondervan’s older NIV Archaeological Study Bible; they are different books.
5. The MacArthur Study Bible, long associated with John MacArthur and issued in NASB, NKJV, ESV, and other texts across many printings. The copy on my shelf is the one dated in the front, June 12, 2023.
6. Museum of the Bible, Washington, D.C. The History of the Bible floor remains, for me, the heart of the building. Membership is how we treat a place we intend to keep returning to.
7. Teacher of Righteousness: the sectarian leader in the Damascus Document, the Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab), and related Qumran texts. I read him as a Second Temple reformer whose conflict with a “Wicked Priest” and with Jerusalem’s establishment belongs in any serious account of the world Jesus and John walked into. That is history and typology, not a claim that the Gospel is only Qumran.
8. I mean the body as temple in the Pauline sense, 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, not a fashion rule I am prepared to police on strangers. It is a rule I keep.
9. Public forecasts of the commercial space economy vary. Morgan Stanley and others have used a trillion-dollar frame toward 2040. My three-trillion-by-2033 figure is an experience-based working number, not a consensus estimate. Treat it as a claim to test.
10. Matthew 19:24 and parallels. The camel and the needle. The point is not that wealth is impossible. The point is that it is spiritually expensive.
11. John 3; John 7:50–51; John 19:39–40. Nicodemus again, because he is the patron saint of people in positions who still want the conversation.
12. Edwards’s “Resolutions” (1722–1723) and the Miscellanies notebooks are in the Yale Edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. Everhard’s study Bible is a reading edition of that archive under Scripture, not a replacement for the Yale volumes.
13. The cover quotation is Edwards on the enjoyment of God as the soul’s only satisfying happiness. Related language runs through the Miscellanies and The End for Which God Created the World.
14. The Politics of Heaven is the book I have been building toward; “the age of disclosure” is the public weather that book has to walk into. Forthcoming. The desk Bible is older than both.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Study Bibles and Editions
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Thomas Nelson, 2026.
ESV Archaeology Study Bible. Edited by John D. Currid and David Chapman. Crossway, 2018.
ESV Study Bible. Crossway, 2008.
The MacArthur Study Bible. Various texts and publishers; Thomas Nelson and others.
NIV Archaeological Study Bible. Zondervan, 2005.
Holy Bible, New King James Version. Thomas Nelson.
Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway.
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. For readers who want the next shelf over.
Jonathan Edwards
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press, 1957–2008. Especially vol. 2, Religious Affections; vol. 8, Ethical Writings; vol. 13 and following, the Miscellanies; vol. 15, Notes on Scripture.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Edited by John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema. Yale University Press, 1995.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Resolutions.” 1722–1723.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.
McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.
Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul. Oxford University Press, 1986.
Tracy, Patricia J. Jonathan Edwards, Pastor. Hill and Wang, 1980.
Qumran, Second Temple Judaism, and the Teacher of Righteousness
The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. Edited by Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar. Brill / Eerdmans.
Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Penguin, revised editions.
Collins, John J. The Scepter and the Star. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2010.
Collins, John J. Beyond the Qumran Community. Eerdmans, 2010.
Cross, Frank Moore. The Ancient Library of Qumran. 3rd ed. Sheffield, 1995.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins. Eerdmans, 2000.
Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2021.
Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Doubleday, 1994.
VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2010.
Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. Harper.
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.
It is hard to be in a leadership position. I know that. I wanted to wish the new chair of the Butler County Republican Party well. Art Sauerwein stepped into a job that is mostly thankless, always public, and never as simple as it sounds when you are talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror.¹ I have worked with people in this orbit. We have agreed on more than we have fought about. I was not looking to pick a fight with a brand-new chairman. Bloodsport politics is already crowded with people who think volume is a substitute for skill.
But people are already getting sour on his wine. This is not the pleasant kind. This is the vintage you spit out when you realize the bottle lacks what it takes. Sauerwein literally means sour wine.² I did not invent the metaphor. The paper did him the courtesy of putting the raw vintage on the table.
I want the Republican Party in this county to succeed. I do not want the political disease that has been cultivated in parts of West Chester to migrate township by township until the rest of Butler County starts talking like a faculty lounge. I want more unification, not less. I want a bigger tent, not a Sunday-school classroom with a padlock on the door. That is why I am saying something now, at the start of September 2026, while the article is still warm and the Democrats are still salivating.
What Sounded Fine in the Shower Did Not Survive the Newspaper
Some lines sound terrific when you are singing in the shower. They still sound pretty good at a Sunday meeting among people who already agree with you. They do not survive contact with newsprint. Once they are in the Journal-News, they belong to every Democrat, every fence-sitter, every officeholder you still need next cycle, and every volunteer who is privately deciding whether this job is worth the abuse.
The chairman’s public message, as it landed, ran something like this: take back the schools and make them more conservative; put more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, the Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, eliminate waste and fraud, and get in alignment with conservative values. Then the kicker: he has not been seeing that happen, and it displeases him.
I agree with a large percentage of the substance. Cutting spending, cutting taxes, reducing waste, and stopping fraud are not radical demands in a Republican county. I have been in the tax fight in this county for a long time, going back through names people still remember and some they would rather forget. I want conservative schools. I am not embarrassed by Christian values in a community that was built on them. That is not the argument.
The argument is tone, timing, venue, and target. You do not build a governing party by taking out the people you just spent years getting elected. You especially do not do it two months before a midterm when Democrats are hunting local gains and the only story they need is “Republicans are already eating their own.”
The Fast-Food Manager Problem in Bloodsport Politics
I have heard this voice before. It usually comes from people who have a hard time making a legitimate argument that requires sitting down, listening, and converting someone who does not already attend their Bible study to their way of thinking. Instead of doing that work, they reach for the lecture. I have seen it in entry-level managers at places that sell fast food. They get handed a shift. They have run something with five employees. They discover that barking feels like leadership.
You can talk that way to teenagers folding boxes. You cannot talk that way to people you are asking to put their name on a ballot, raise money, take votes, absorb the hate mail, and then run again in two years. Public office is already a faithless job. If word gets out that the chairman treats officeholders like children who missed curfew, the short list of people willing to do the work gets shorter. Then you will complain that nobody good will run, and you will be right, and you will have helped cause it.
The grandfather tone does not work on people who already moved out of their father’s house. Younger Republicans, the ones you claim you want to recruit so the party is not a retirement home, can smell a lecture from across the parking lot. Trump did not build a coalition by scolding his own team in the local paper. He built one by pointing the fire outward.
Good Old Boys, Street Vendors, and the Nicodemus Problem
I have heard the comments on Facebook. People send me this stuff all day. “Good old boys club.” It is always the boys club when you are not in it. When you are outside, you throw a rock and call it prophecy. You say you are Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers. You say you are honest and pure. Meanwhile the people you need are quietly updating their résumés for a private-sector job that pays better and does not include a chairman who inspects their homework in the newspaper.
You have to remember Nicodemus. He loved Jesus. He wanted the message to advance. He also had to remain a functioning member of the priesthood. He walked a fine line on purpose.³ That is the nature of serious politics. It should not be a purity cult. I have heard the purity speech for years: we should be clean, we should be absolute, we should never sit at a table with anyone who is only 80 percent of the way home. Meanwhile you bleed support. You try to build a big party and then you shove people toward the door with absolutism and call the ones who leave compromised.
Cheerleaders are useful. Rock throwers are useful too, in the right hour. Leadership is deciding which tool you are holding before you swing it at your own team.
David Kern Knew How to Throw a Rock and Still Keep the Township
I have known the Kern family since I was very little. I was friends with his son. I knew Katy. I remember David Kern as a man who could throw a rock with the best of them and still serve as a respected Liberty Township trustee for decades. He chaired this county party. He also discovered, the hard way, that herding quarreling Republicans is a different sport than fighting Democrats.⁴ He said as much when he walked away from the chairmanship. That history is sitting right there for anyone who wants to read it instead of repeating it.
You need people who will volunteer for the ugly jobs. The short list of adults willing to be lectured in public like children is very short. You do not want your officeholders saying, “I will take the private job. It pays. I do not have to run every two years. I do not have to take a sermon from a chairman who just discovered the budget.” Once they leave, you do not get them back by posting harder.
West Chester Is Not a Metaphor. It Is a Beachhead.
I know Kathy Wyenandt. I have watched her work. She is out there trying to hitch a truck and a horse to the same socialist push that is running through school boards, township halls, and every other local institution that used to be too boring for ideology. Call it progressivism if the word socialism makes the room cough. The destination is the same: more government, more cultural renovation, more migration of West Chester habits into townships that did not ask for them.⁵
She does not need a majority tomorrow. She needs Republicans to do her turnout work for her. A county party that announces, in the paper, that its own officeholders have disappointed the chairman is a gift. Democrats do not have to beat Republicans if Republicans will brand their own people as failures eight weeks before Election Day. I do not want a bunch of Democrats in offices that took a generation to flip. That is not a purity position. That is arithmetic.
The people pushing the chairman to talk like this represent a slice of the party, not the whole vineyard. I would put that slice well under 40 percent of Republicans in this county, with the rest on the fence, tired, transactional, or capable of being seduced by a smiling Democrat who promises to be less exhausting. If you lecture the 60 percent as if they were the problem, you will meet them later on the other side of the aisle, or at home on the couch.
You Cannot Shut Off a County Budget Like a Spigot
“The Republicans that are in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, and I have not been seeing that happen, and it displeases me.” That sentence is the whole problem in one pour. You cannot just turn the spigot off on a dime. I have been in these tax fights my whole adult life. There were plenty of pizzas eaten over tables with Mike Fox and the old Liberty Township crowd. There were plenty of arguments. You still had to build a team.⁶
County government is not a lemonade stand. It is labor contracts, state mandates, jails, boards of developmental disabilities, roads, courts, and a sales-tax stream that moves with the economy. Butler County has rolled back millage, sat on windfalls, and still gets accused of betrayal because the cut was not theatrical enough for people who do their budgeting in comment threads. Results matter. Theater is cheaper. Voters, after two years of Republicans in power, vote results. If the chairman’s public line is “our people have not done a very good job,” do not be shocked when the other team puts that quote on a mailer.
This is the midterm problem in miniature. The buzzwords that pulled people to the polls the first time do not work the same way once you own the desks. Insurgents always arrive to take advantage of disappointment. Some of them only know how to throw rocks. They want Jesus in the temple every Tuesday. If you are not flipping tables, you are not holy enough. That energy can win a primary. It does not automatically win a county, and it does not automatically govern one.
Todd Hall, Thomas Hall, and the Unfashionable Work of Building a Team
Todd Hall was good at building a team. Thomas Hall has done the unglamorous work in the Statehouse. I have had disagreements with people in that circle. There were disputes. We worked them out over time. Nobody has to be attached at the hip. Leadership is the art of bringing people to your way of thinking without setting their chairs on fire.⁷
People who lack that skill often lecture because lecture is what you do when you cannot close. They talk themselves into a lather in the bathroom. It sounds like Churchill. Then they get into a meeting with actual officeholders, actual budgets, and actual voters, and the words come out like a substitute teacher on the last day of school. “It displeases me” is not a governing strategy. It is a report card written by someone who is not taking the test.
Sometimes a chairman will sound like the star quarterback at a pep rally. In the bleachers you will have a row of people who never liked football and came for the argument. The quarterback will look like a cardboard cutout of the good old boys club. Fine. People still like winning the game. They like being around a team that wins. They will tolerate a certain amount of jock energy if the scoreboard gives them what they want. They will not tolerate a coach who spends the pregame interview explaining that his own starters are a disappointment.
Unity Is Not Compromise. Isolation Is Not Courage.
I do not want a compromised party. I also do not want a minority party that congratulates itself for being pure while Kathy’s people take another township seat. Those are not the only two options, no matter how many Facebook theologians insist they are. Learning to communicate with people who are not as conservative as a Sunday-morning Sunday-school teacher is not the same thing as becoming one of them. It means you can share a sandbox without eating the sand.
People who cannot do that work are often insecure about their ability to win a conversation. So they push the other person away. Then they never have to experience the small death of losing the argument. They say, “We did our best. We stood on principle. We were outnumbered.” Being outnumbered is not a sacrament. I do not want the minority party in Butler County. I want the party that keeps winning and then governs like it intended to keep the job.
Compromise has a cost. Losing has a cost. Leadership is weighing those two costs in public without pretending one of them is free. Thanksgiving dinner is the annual clinic: you do not have to agree on the football game to keep the same people at the table. A smart network puts more than one game on. That is not cowardice. That is how you still have a family next year.
A Friendly Note to the New Chairman
I want Art Sauerwein to be a successful chairman. I want people to support him. I want the party to grow. I agree with him on most of the policy nouns in that article. Cut spending. Cut taxes. Watch the schools. Say the quiet part about values out loud. Do it in a room with the officeholders first. Bring the concerns to a meeting. Make the case. Count votes. Help them find the money, the language, and the coalition. Then go to the paper together.
If you push them away in August, you will not have them in November, and you will not have them when you need a candidate in 2028. Chairmen who listen only to the people who want them to tear the party down do not last. The job looks important from the outside. From the inside it is volunteer hours, bruised egos, and a phone that rings with problems nobody else wanted. You will not keep good people if the public posture is “Father Knows Best and the children have disappointed the table.”
Help them get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. Show up for them when the Journal-News calls. Save the lecture for the closed session, and even then, make it a conversation. The people who are whispering that the only moral posture is table-flipping are not the ones who will still be in the room when the chairs are empty.
Tomorrow Can Still Be a Better Day
It is hard to be in leadership in all phases. It is hard when people will not come over to your way of seeing the field. You still have to try. You have to bring together people who would never choose the same dinner table if football were not on. You have to give people latitude without becoming a wet rag. That is the whole craft.
So here is the friendly advice, based on what I am seeing in the first weeks of this chairmanship: do not sour the wine. Do not sour the voters. Do not sour the big tent. Do not push away the people who are not as conservative as you wish they were on a Sunday morning. Sit down. Work it out. Inspect the team in private. Cheer the team in public. I want this chairman to prosper. I want this party to keep the county. Lecturing your own officeholders in the newspaper is how you do the Democrats’ work for them.
Notes
1. Art Sauerwein quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage of Butler County politics heading into the November 2026 midterms. The phrasing matches public circulation of the piece under titles such as “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.”
2. Sauerwein is a German occupational/descriptive surname meaning “sour wine,” historically attached to makers or sellers of tart wine. The pun writes itself; I did not invent the vintage.
3. John 3:1–21. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, came to Jesus by night. He later spoke for due process (John 7:50–51) and helped bury Jesus (John 19:39–40). He never became a street-corner prophet. That is the point.
4. David Kern served 32 years as a Liberty Township trustee, briefly chaired the Butler County Republican Party, and died in 2021. See Journal-News obituary coverage and the Congressional Record tribute by Rep. Warren Davidson, April 22, 2021.
5. Kathy D. Wyenandt of Liberty/Fairfield Township has been central committee chair and a visible public face of the Butler County Democratic Party, a Board of Elections member, and a candidate for Ohio House and Senate. She has written openly urging voters to consider Democrats in local cycles.
6. Butler County commissioners have repeatedly used inside-millage rollbacks and related tools in recent budget cycles; sales-tax receipts have also risen. Whether that pace satisfies every activist is a separate question from whether the county is “not cutting.” See Journal-News budget coverage 2024–2026.
7. Todd Hall served as Butler County GOP executive chairman through the 2024–2026 cycle and was frequently quoted on endorsements, including the 2026 commissioner primary. State Rep. Thomas Hall represents Ohio House District 46.
8. Richard K. Jones, Butler County sheriff, published They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). The book is a leadership memoir, not a novel about cartels; the shower version of the pitch always sounds punchier than the jacket copy.
Bibliography for Further Reading
A working shelf, not a complete library. I have included the books that actually change how you think about parties, persuasion, local government, and the temptation to confuse purity with power.
Local and Ohio Politics
Butler County Republican Party. Candidate and leadership materials, butlercountygop.org, 2024–2026.
Callahan, Denise G., and Journal-News staff. Budget, millage, sales-tax, and commissioner coverage, Hamilton Journal-News, 2018–2026.
Clark, Michael D. “Beloved Butler County icon, political leader David Kern dies after illness.” Journal-News, April 16, 2021.
Davidson, Warren. “Honoring the Life and Memory of David Kern.” Congressional Record, April 22, 2021.
Ohio Republican Party. County chair directory and State Central Committee materials, ohiogop.org.
Wyenandt, Kathy. “You may want to vote Democrat this election cycle.” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 15, 2022.
Journal-News. “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.” Late August 2026. (Article circulating with the Sauerwein quotations discussed here.)
Parties, Coalitions, and the Big Tent
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Still the best warning against people who love principles more than the society those principles have to live in.
Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper, 1957.
Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. Yale University Press, 1981.
Galston, William A., and Elaine C. Kamarck. “The Politics of Polarization.” Third Way / Brookings essays, various years.
Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Harper, 1946.
Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind. Regnery, 1953.
Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford University Press, 1990. Useful even for a two-party county: coalition is a skill.
Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale University Press, 1962.
Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Truman, David B. The Governmental Process. Knopf, 1951.
Leadership, Management, and Why Lectures Fail
Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster, 1936. Mock it after you can do it.
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Politics is the continuation of coalition by other means.
Collins, Jim. Good to Great. HarperBusiness, 2001.
Drucker, Peter F. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row, 1967.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Overman Warrior Publications.
Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. 2026.
Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 1532. Read it as a warning about what happens when your own captains stop trusting you.
Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings. c. 1645.
Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. You cannot lecture a production system into existence.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Do not announce your disappointment with your own left flank.
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. The leader who needs to be seen lecturing is already losing.
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, 1946.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking, 1985.
Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Henry Regnery, 1953.
Scripture and the Fine Line
The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, and 19. Nicodemus.
Matthew 21:12–13 and parallels. The temple tables. Note the target: a corrupt marketplace inside the holy precinct, not your own disciples on the night before a fight.
Augustine. City of God. The two cities argument is older than any county central committee.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1932.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942. Especially the parts about factions inside the church.
American Party History and Populism
Gerring, John. Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. Knopf, 1955.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Knopf, 1965.
Phillips, Kevin. The Emerging Republican Majority. Arlington House, 1969.
Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015. Parties exist to tame factions. When the faction tames the party, you get what you are watching.
Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.
Sundquist, James L. Dynamics of the Party System. Brookings, 1983.
Local Government, Taxes, and the Spigot That Will Not Shut
Fisher, Ronald C. State and Local Public Finance. Various editions.
Oates, Wallace E. Fiscal Federalism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Tiebout, Charles M. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956).
Ohio Auditor of State and Butler County Auditor annual financial reports, 2022–2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I keep a simple picture in my head when the latest Atlantis headline floats across X. It is two o’clock in the morning. I am half asleep. I pull a carton of milk from the refrigerator and drop it. I do not want the house waking up to a white lake on the kitchen floor, so I wipe it, wring the paper towels, bag the evidence, and go back to bed. In the morning, the carton is lighter. The floor is dry. Somebody who was not there will tell you nothing happened, because the proof is already in the trash.
That is how I think about the deep past before three thousand BC. Not as a license to invent temples on every seamount. As a warning. Time is a very good janitor. Volcanoes are better. Rising seas are better still. Official narratives can be lazy without being a conspiracy. And wanting Atlantis so badly that every sonar blob becomes a ziggurat is how you end up mopping the floor with the carton still in your hand.
Plato is fascinating. I will not pretend otherwise.[1] The story that survives is already a story about a story: Egyptian priests, Solon, a vanished island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, a people who got proud and were erased in a day and a night. By the time Plato wrote it down, the alleged events were already older than the gap between Charlemagne and us. If that culture ever existed as a place, not only as a parable, the milk has had a long time to dry.
Underwater Pyramids Off the Azores and Why Portugal Said Volcano
Every few months the same pictures recirculate: a fisherman’s depth sounder off Terceira, a hard-edged pyramid, cardinal alignment, breathless talk that the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute is about to rewrite the Bronze Age. I have watched that clip move around X the way a rumor moves around a small town. It feels new because the algorithm is hungry. It is not new.
In 2013, Diocleciano Silva reported a structure roughly sixty meters high between Terceira and São Miguel. Television loved the silhouette. The Instituto Hidrográfico did what a hydrographic institute is paid to do. It pulled existing high-resolution bathymetry from 2009 and compared it with the reported coordinates. At the spot in question, the seafloor sat on the order of five hundred forty meters down. There was a submarine rise, the kind the Azores manufacture by the dozen. There was not an artificial pyramid whose apex grazed forty meters of water.[2]
The feature sits on Dom João de Castro Bank, a named, charted, still-gassy submarine volcano. In December 1720 it built an island a mile and a half long and then gave it back to the Atlantic. Fishermen still work the bank because fish like the edges of old fire. If you ping that slope with a cheap sounder, geometry will lie to you. Volcanic edifices make faces. People hunting Atlantis will see a face.[3]
I am not sneering at the hunger. I am saying the official answer in this particular case was not laziness. It was a navy map. The spilled-milk problem is real. So is pareidolia. You can see what you want to see, but at least they are looking.
The So-Called Sunken City Off Cuba
Then there is Cuba, which I find more interesting than the Azores pyramid precisely because it never quite died and never quite lived. In 2000 and 2001, a Canadian-Cuban survey team hunting colonial wrecks off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula, Pinar del Río, dragged side-scan sonar across a plateau six hundred to seven hundred fifty meters down and came home with images that looked like streets, blocks, and pyramids.
Paul Weinzweig said the organization was too much for geology. Video from a remotely operated vehicle showed smooth blocks, some stacked, some isolated, some vaguely pyramidal. Newspapers in Toronto and Sydney ran the story as a possible six-thousand-year-old city. Twenty-five years later we still do not have a crate of cut stone on a Havana dock. We do not have inscriptions. We do not have a hearth. We have sonar and a few hours of tape.[4]
Manuel Iturralde, a serious Cuban geologist who was on that expedition, said the shapes were unusual and that nature is richer than our textbooks. He also said that putting a built city at that depth would push the timeline back by about fifty thousand years, which is a problem if you are trying to hang the site on Maya cousins or on Plato’s calendar. The plateau sits on a faulted, mud-volcano-type seafloor. Linear ridges happen. Cubes of rock happen. Wishful enhancement of sonar prints happens even faster.[5]
Would I be shocked if something old turned up on the Cuban shelf in water a human diver can actually work? No. The Gulf, the Mississippi mouth, the Yucatán, and the old Olmec and Maya heartland are a single neighborhood if you think in rivers instead of passports. A site at two thousand feet is a different animal. That is not an Ice Age shoreline. That is a geological basement. If someone finally dredges a tool from those blocks, I will read the paper twice. Until then, it is a wet paper towel with a pyramid printed on it. The failure lies in the assumption that such a culture would be connected to the Maya, when in truth the Maya are probably connected to even older, undiscovered cultures. Just to the north, off the coast of Florida, there is plenty of evidence of old Archaic-period civilizations predating the Maya by a lot.
Lost City Is Real, and It Is Not Atlantis
The Atlantic does have a Lost City. Scientists named it that on purpose, which has been a gift to every thumbnail on the internet. It sits on the Atlantis Massif, which is another gift. It is a field of pale carbonate chimneys, some as tall as a building, venting warm, caustic water loaded with hydrogen and methane. Life down there does not wait on sunlight. It eats chemistry.
Lost City is not a ruin. It is serpentinization: seawater chewing through mantle rock, generating heat and simple molecules, and precipitating limestone towers for tens of thousands of years. In 2023, a drill ship bored a hole 1,268 meters into the massif, a short way north of the field, and recovered fluids that resemble the hidden plumbing of those vents. That is a beautiful discovery. It tells you how a world without photosynthesis can still set a table. It does not give you a palace wall.[6][7]
I mention this because the algorithm will keep marrying three different Atlantics: a Portuguese volcano, a Cuban sonar grid, and an alkaline spring with weird microbes. They are not the same story. Mixing them is how you spill the milk and then swear the stain is a floor plan.
Windover, Florida, and What 8,000 Years Actually Looks Like
If you want people who were organized before the classroom poster suggests, you do not have to drown in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. You can drive to Titusville, a few miles from where rockets now leave the planet, and stand near a pond that used to be a cemetery.
In 1982, a backhoe operator named Steve Vanderjagt was clearing muck for the Windover Farms subdivision and picked up what he thought was a round rock. Florida does not have round rocks. The rock looked back. Archaeologists eventually lifted at least 168 people from that peat. The pond had held them for seven to eight thousand years. Ninety-one skulls still had brain tissue. Bodies had been staked under poles and wrapped in the oldest woven cloth yet found in North America. A bottle gourd in one burial dated to about 7,290 radiocarbon years. Stomach contents still contained fish and berries.[8]
That is not a rumor from a yellowed county weekly. That is a National Historic Landmark. Those people were tall for their world, careful with their dead, oriented in space, and capable of textiles that take patience and a mind that plans. I have heard the beer-and-severed-heads version of this story attached to Windover. The beer belongs more honestly to places like Göbekli Tepe, where limestone troughs the size of a bathtub bear chemical traces of fermented cereal from around the tenth millennium BC. Windover gives you cloth, gourds, and a cemetery that was used long enough for families to keep coming back. That is already enough to puncture the cartoon of the wandering simpleton who only learned civilization when somebody from the Near East arrived with a lecture.
Göbekli Tepe matters to this argument even though it sits in Turkey, not Brevard County. Hunter-gatherers cut T-shaped pillars, gathered in numbers, and almost certainly threw feasts. The brewing case is not locked, but calcium oxalate in those troughs is the kind of stain you are allowed to take seriously.[9]
Put Windover next to that, and the pattern is not “Atlantis built Florida.” The pattern is that the centuries before Abraham, before Moses, before the first Hebrew sojourn stories, were already crowded with people who knew how to gather, bury, weave, ferment, and move. The promised land was not the first place on earth where a mind woke up.
Lake Superior Copper and the Question Europe Does Not Want to Finish
Now the metal. Around Lake Superior, on the Keweenaw and on Isle Royale, people hammered native copper into points, knives, and axes when much of the world was still arguing with stone. This is the Old Copper Complex. It is not a campfire story. Museum drawers in Milwaukee are heavy with it.
The dates keep getting older. Mining signatures in lake mud and dates on artifacts now push copper working in that country back toward 9,500 years ago, with a long peak in the Middle Archaic. Somebody spent thousands of hours of labor pulling metal out of pits and glacial float. Then, in a twist that still bothers experimental archaeologists, many of those big utilitarian tools fade away, and copper becomes jewelry and a marker of status. Why walk away from a technology that worked? That is a real question. It does not require Phoenician supervisors.[10][11]
I tend to think some of that copper moved farther than the textbooks like. I think island-hopping along a colder Atlantic, with sea levels lower and the English Channel a valley instead of a ditch, is not science fiction. I think later Mediterranean sailors were less provincial than modern departments. I think stories about orichalcum — that shining mix people hang on Atlantis — are the kind of folklore you get when a culture remembers a metal it can no longer find.
Here is the part I will not fake for color. Most analyzed European Bronze Age copper provenances point to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, Britain, Slovakia, Tuscany. Lead isotopes are a jealous witness. They are good at saying where a metal did not come from. A handful of papers and popular lectures have claimed a Superior fingerprint in this or that European object. The sample sizes are small. The replications are not sitting on my desk. The honest sentence is that the trade route I like is still a hypothesis with a motive, not a cargo list.[12]
Absence of a Bronze Age hull on the floor of Lake Huron is not proof the hull never existed. Organic ships in cold, oxygenated water become rumors. Bronze becomes a green stain and then a rumor. That is spilled milk. It is also why I will not pound the table and tell a room that Veneti captains were loading Keweenaw ingots in 2000 BC. I will say this: people who could bury their dead in a Florida pond with woven shrouds, and people who could mine Isle Royale until the lake mud recorded the smoke, were not waiting around for Columbus to invent curiosity.
Dolmens, Glacial Erratics, and the Ohio Habit of Calling Everything a Rock
I live in a state that is one long argument between ice and memory. Ohio has earthworks that are mathematical whether a tourist wants them to be or not. Serpent Mound deserves the kind of approach road Stonehenge finally received, not a shrug. Down the Mississippi and into the Ohio Valley, you can feel a society that thought in ridges, solstices, and labor. Similar appetites show up in the Amazon and in Mesoamerica long before the Aztec brand name. Olmec roots run deeper than the postcard.
New England has stone chambers and propped boulders that some call dolmens and some call glaciers having a sense of humor. I have heard the accidental-geology sermon. I have also walked enough country to distrust a sermon that always ends with “stop looking.” Some of those features will stay glacial. Some will not. The spilled-milk move is to classify the whole drawer as ice so nobody has to catalog the odd ones.
Giants belong in this paragraph only as a warning. Ohio papers, including the counties around Miamisburg and Liberty Township, printed skeleton stories for a century: extra teeth, impossible stature, boxes of bones that went to a museum and then to a fog. I have been reading in that literature. Some of it is folklore with a ruler attached. Some of it may be mismeasured burials and nineteenth-century salesmanship. A six-foot-three sailor on a modern wreck is not an eight-foot race. If you want me to believe a different human type walked the Miami Valley, bring a bone that is still in a drawer with a number on it. Do not bring a clipping and a vibe. But also, don’t say it didn’t exist because you gave the bones bag through NAGPRA to an Indian tribe that was not directly connected to the recovered bones. What about the Mooneyed people the Cherokee eradicated when they moved into the area? Were the Mooneyed people the real indigenous ones? Who were they and where did they come from?
The clippings exist. That is nothing. It is also not a species.[13]
Ishi-no-Hoden, the Keyhole Tombs, and a Fountain by the Warehouses
The site that rearranged my patience sits south of Kobe, in Takasago, on the grounds of Ōshiko Jinja. Locals and travelers call it Ishi-no-Hoden, the Stone Treasure Hall. It is a cube of volcanic tuff the size of a cottage, maybe five hundred tons, carved out of the living hill so neatly that it seems to float on a pond of its own quarry water. One side still grips the mountain. It looks unfinished, as if the crew walked off in the middle of a thought.
The Harima Fudoki, compiled in the early 700s, already treats it as a wonder and then trips over its own chronology, crediting men who did not live at the same time. Official Japan ties the nearby Tatsuyama quarries to the Kofun period. The monolith itself has no honest birth certificate. Laser scans in the mid-2000s confirmed the shape and left the date open to debate. People who live in that industrial weather will tell you it feels much older. I have stood there. I have washed my hands at the purification fountain because that is what you do before you walk into a shrine precinct, even when trucks are grinding past the parking lot like the sacred and the freight dock agreed to share a driveway.[14]
That is the image I cannot shake. One of the strangest worked stones on the islands, and the road to it is not a processional way. It is commerce. Stonehenge now has the visitor-center dignity it always deserved. Ishi-no-Hoden has a ladle and a workday. I do not want Disney. I want the courtesy of attention.
Then you go to Osaka, and the kofun rise out of the suburbs like keyholes cut into the earth. Daisenryō is more than five hundred meters of engineered mound, moat, and silence. The Imperial Household Agency keeps the great ones closed because they are tombs of emperors, or are said to be. Archaeologists get the berm, the haniwa, the occasional supervised walk on the grass. They do not get the burial chamber that would tell you who was actually put in the ground and what they were buried with. From the air those keyholes look startlingly like a design language that wandered. I have argued they look western in plan. That is an impression, not a laboratory result. Impression is allowed if you admit it.[15]
I do not buy the piety that says we cannot open those mounds because grandmother would be embarrassed. The dead are dead. Egypt would be a blank chapter if we had treated every wrapped body as a restraining order. NAGPRA and shrine politics and imperial dignity are not the same thing. I am saying a state that protects a story by locking the basement should not then lecture the rest of us about settled origins. If the relics in those keyholes ever show Near Eastern metalwork, glass, or motifs, the Silk Road gets older in the Japanese chapter. If they show nothing of the kind, the independent-development story gets a win it actually earned. Leaving the door shut and calling it reverence is how you keep the carton in the dark and insist it is still full.
I think the influence ran overland more than by a single heroic voyage: steppe, oasis, China, the islands, a long leak of forms. I also think the sea was never a wall to people who could see an island. Both can be true. What cannot be true is the claim that we already know because we have chosen not to look.
Yonaguni, the Sahara Eye, and Other Places the Internet Married to Plato
Off Yonaguni, the terraces look like a ruined grandstand. Masaaki Kimura spent years saying hands made them. Robert Schoch and later Japanese field studies said the sandstone is jointed the way bedded rock joints, and that the same right angles walk right up onto the dry coast. Tokyo does not manage the monument as a ruin. That does not forbid a little human tidying on a convenient ledge. It does mean the default is geology until someone bags a tool in place.[16]
Western Africa is the other marriage. The Richat Structure in Mauritania, the Eye of the Sahara, is a set of rings so tidy from orbit that Atlantis hunters drew canals on it in software. I have listened to those lectures. Some of the geographical special pleading is clever. The rock is not. It is an eroded dome with igneous guts that began during the breakup of Pangaea, not in 9600 BC. People passed through a greener Sahara and left tools. They did not leave Plato’s harbor. A circle is not a civilization.[17]
Could a lost culture have lived on a wetter West African plain and later been remembered as an island beyond Gibraltar? Folklore can migrate farther than copper. I will not call that proof. I will call it a question that still belongs on the table after the Eye itself has been returned to the geologists.
What the Strongest Evidence Actually Is
People ask me for the strongest clue that the official timeline is thin. I do not hand them a sonar pyramid. I hand them a stack of things that survived because they were lucky.
Windover is strongest on this continent because peat is a cheap time machine. Cloth, brains, gourds, and a cemetery used across generations will beat a thousand YouTube overlays.
Göbekli Tepe is strongest in the Old World because it is architecture before the lecture said architecture was allowed, and because the feast-and-fermentation argument is at least a chemical argument.
Old Copper is strongest as labor. You do not accidentally leave thousands of pits and a lead stain in island lakes. Somebody wanted that metal and organized the desire for it.
Ishi-no-Hoden is strongest as a rebuke. A half-born megalith sitting in a working landscape tells you how much of the human file is still labeled folklore because it is inconvenient to staff.
The kofun are strongest when locked in a cabinet. When a society admits the mounds are important enough for UNESCO and too important to open, the timeline is being protected as well as the bones.
Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic, as a datable city under a tourist depth, is not in that stack. Not yet. Deep water grinds stone into suggestion. The suggestion is to get a new viral clip every August. Suggestion is not a footnote.
Why We Study the Mess Instead of Defending the Narrative
I did not come to this from a need to baptize every mound as a lost white empire, and I did not come to it to defend a museum label written in 1962. The indigenous people who met Columbus were not the first chapter, nor a footnote. They were one more arrival in a long hallway. Maps in Lisbon, copper in Superior, ponds in Florida, keyholes in Osaka, pillars in Anatolia — that is a hallway. Trade can be a network without being a single named kingdom. Atlantis, if the word is still useful, may be that network remembered badly, the way a family remembers a rich uncle who died at sea.
We study this so we do not repeat the part Plato actually cared about. Not the orichalcum. The pride. A people who could organize labor at that scale and then vanish are a sermon whether they lived in the Atlantic, the Sahara, or only in an Athenian dialogue. Cultures make mistakes large enough to erase themselves. Rising water helps. So does fire. So do later people who need the land and the story.
The carton is lighter than it was when we went to bed. That is not proof of a thief, and it is not proof the carton was always that empty. It is proof we should stop yelling “nothing to see” while the paper towels are still wet.
If I am right about a pre-biblical traffic in metal, ideas, and burial customs, the evidence will show up the way Windover did: because a backhoe operator paid attention and a landowner decided not to pour a street over the dead. If I am wrong about Superior copper in the Mediterranean, the isotopes will keep saying so. I can live with being wrong. I cannot live with a method that treats curiosity as vandalism and geology as a blanket thrown over every hard edge on the seafloor.
Scan the bottom of the sea. Drill the vents. Open a kofun with ceremony and cameras. Date the cloth. Source the copper again with a larger sample and a meaner lab. Leave the volcanic banks to the fish. Keep Plato on the nightstand, where a good story belongs, and keep the peat ponds and the quarry stones in the working file, where history belongs.
The milk was in the carton. Some of it is still on the towels. That is enough to keep looking.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Primary reports, surveys, and the better popular treatments. I have marked the speculative shelf as such.
Dietrich, Oliver, et al. “The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities: New Evidence from Göbekli Tepe, South-eastern Turkey.” Antiquity 86 (2012).
Doran, Glen H., and David N. Dickel. Windover site reports and “A 7,290-Year-Old Bottle Gourd from the Windover Site, Florida.” American Antiquity 55, no. 2 (1990).
Instituto Hidrográfico da Marinha. Statement on the Terceira sonar feature, reported in Público, “Pirâmide subaquática ao largo da Terceira não existe,” October 4, 2013.
Kelley, Deborah S., et al. Papers on the Lost City Hydrothermal Field; NOAA Ocean Explorer background on serpentinization at the Atlantis Massif.
Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.
Milwaukee Public Museum. “Old Copper Culture.” Collection overview and dating summary.
Pernicka, Ernst. Surveys of Bronze Age metal provenance and the limits of lead-isotope attribution—Journal of Archaeological Research and related handbooks.
Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Any reliable translation. Read both the geography and the moral.
Pompeani, David P., et al. Lake-sediment metal records of Archaic copper mining around Isle Royale and the Keweenaw. The Holocene and subsequent papers, including later work placing early copper use near 9500 cal BP.
Schoch, Robert M. Assessments of the Yonaguni formation as primarily jointed Miocene sandstone.
Wentz, Rachel. Life and Death at Windover: Excavations of a 7000-Year-Old Pond Cemetery. Florida Historical Society Press.
Weinzweig, Paul, and Paulina Zelitsky. Contemporary interviews in the Globe and Mail (December 2001) and the Sydney Morning Herald (October 2002) on the Guanahacabibes sonar survey.
Iturralde-Vinent, Manuel. Cautionary comments on the Cuban deep-water blocks, circulated in Cuban scientific and press accounts.
UNESCO / Sakai City. Materials on the Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group and Imperial Household Agency access limits.
Takasago City / Ōshiko Jinja. Notices on Ishi-no-Hoden and the Tatsuyama stone quarries; Harima Fudoki references.
Matton, Guillaume, and Michel Jébrak, and later Ar/Ar work on the Richat Structure: geologic dome and CAMP-related gabbros, not a sunken capital.
On the speculative shelf, to be read with the carton in mind: popular Azores and Sahara-Atlantis lectures; newspaper giant-skeleton compilations from Ohio and the Mississippi Valley; claims of Superior copper in European museum bronzes awaiting large, independent isotope series.
Note on method. This essay is written in the first person because the questions are mine. The footnotes are there so the questions can be checked. Where the rock is volcanic, I have said so. Where the cabinet is locked, I have said that too. Wanting a lost world is not the same as finding one. Refusing to look is not the same as knowing.
Footnotes
[1] Plato, Timaeus and Critias, c. 360 BC. The Atlantis story is presented as a tale Solon heard in Egypt, set nine thousand years before Solon’s time.
[2] Instituto Hidrográfico da Marinha, communiqué summarized in Público, “Pirâmide subaquática ao largo da Terceira não existe,” October 4, 2013. High-resolution 2009 bathymetry showed depths of about 540 m at the reported position, not a 60 m pyramid rising to 40 m of water.
[3] Dom João de Castro Bank is a documented submarine volcano between Terceira and São Miguel. Summit depth is about 13 m. It built a temporary island in December 1720. See Wikipedia and Portuguese hydrographic records.
[4] Paul Weinzweig and Paulina Zelitsky / Advanced Digital Communications, working with Cuban authorities, 2000–2001. Contemporary coverage: Globe and Mail, December 7, 2001; Sydney Morning Herald, October 12, 2002.
[5] Manuel Iturralde-Vinent, Cuban geologist on the original team, cautioned that unusual geometry is not proof of architecture and that reaching 600–750 m would require tens of thousands of years of subsidence. Quoted in Spanish-language summaries and Granma retrospectives.
[6] Lost City Hydrothermal Field, Atlantis Massif, Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Discovered in 2000. Alkaline vents driven by serpentinization, not magma-fed black smokers. NOAA Ocean Explorer; Kelley et al.; Wikipedia, “Lost City Hydrothermal Field.”
[7] IODP Expedition 399 / JOIDES Resolution, Hole U1601C, 1,268 m below seafloor, 2023. Fluid chemistry matched Lost City end-member fluids after reaction with peridotite and gabbro above about 300°C. Reported 2025–2026 in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems coverage.
[8] Windover Archaeological Site, Brevard County, Florida. National Historic Landmark. Roughly 168 individuals, peat-pond cemetery dated about 7,000–8,000 years before present. Brain tissue in 91 skulls; woven palmetto-fiber textiles; bottle gourd dated 7,290 ± 120 rcybp. Doran and Dickel; Florida Historical Society.
[9] Dietrich et al., “The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities,” Antiquity (2012). Calcium oxalate residues in large limestone troughs at Göbekli Tepe are suggestive of cereal fermentation, not a closed case.
[10] Old Copper Complex / Old Copper Culture. Utilitarian native-copper tools around the western Great Lakes. Radiocarbon work places early copper use as far back as about 9,500 cal BP, with a peak roughly between 7,000 and 5,000 cal BP. Pompeani et al.; Bebber; Milwaukee Public Museum.
[11] Lake sediment records near Isle Royale mines show elevated lead levels consistent with Archaic mining about 6,000 years ago: Pompeani and colleagues, The Holocene, and later lake-sediment papers.
[12] Mainstream Bronze Age provenance work sources most European copper to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, the British Isles, and the Balkans via lead isotopes and trace elements. See Pernicka and OXALID-related surveys. Claims of Superior copper in European bronzes remain contested, small-sample, and unreplicated at scale.
[13] Newspaper-era reports of oversized skeletons in Ohio and elsewhere are a real historical genre. They are not the same thing as curated, measured, peer-reviewed osteology. Nineteenth-century papers sold marvels. That is part of the spilled-milk problem, not a solution to it.
[14] Ishi-no-Hōden (Ishi no Hōden), Ōshiko Jinja, Takasago, Hyōgo. About 500-ton tuff monolith, unfinished, appearing to float over a quarry pond. Mentioned in the Harima Fudoki (713–717). Official dating is unknown; the associated quarries date to the Kofun period. National Historic Site, 1979/2017.
[15] Mozu-Furuichi kofun group, Osaka. Daisenryō Kofun (attributed to Emperor Nintoku) is about 525 m long. Imperial Household Agency restricts excavation of designated imperial tombs. UNESCO World Heritage, 2019.
[16] Yonaguni Monument, off Yonaguni Island. Masaaki Kimura argued for an artificial origin. Robert Schoch and later Japanese topographic studies treat it as jointed Miocene sandstone eroded along bedding planes. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs does not list it as an archaeological site.
[17] Richat Structure (Eye of the Sahara), Mauritania. Eroded igneous/sedimentary dome. Gabbros consistent with CAMP-age magmatism around 200 million years ago; later carbonatites around 99 Ma. No excavated city, canals, or Bronze Age harbor works.
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 writing almost every day since about 2009.[1] That is nearly twenty years of putting the same argument on the table while people told me I was not supposed to say it out loud. The argument is simple. America works when people who make jobs are allowed to make them. America fails when the political class uses the power of government to confiscate what those people built and hand it out as a permanent constituency. In Ohio, a few weeks out from the November 3, 2026 election, that argument has a name on each side of the ballot.[2]
Vivek Ramaswamy is the unapologetic capitalist. Amy Acton is the candidate of the administrative state that shut down the economy in 2020 and never fully admitted what that was. I do not care how many sidebars the campaigns invent between now and Election Day. Skin color, private jets, drinking rumors, data-center talking points, Lake Ontario, the Gulf of America — they all collapse into one question: do you want a job creator in the governor’s office, or do you want a manager of other people’s money?
The Horse Race as of Late August 2026
I will give the numbers first, because the people who live on polls will not read anything else. The race is a dead heat inside the margin of error. Aggregators in mid-August had the two candidates essentially tied near 47 percent each. A Fox News poll taken August 6–10 among registered voters had Ramaswamy 50 to Acton’s 48. A Wedgewood survey of likely voters a few days later had Acton 47 to 46. Prediction markets on Polymarket and Kalshi flipped toward Acton late in the week of August 24 after sitting near a coin flip. Markets are not votes. They are bets. I treat them as weather, not gospel.[3]. In this governor’s race, you’d rather be Vivek Ramaswamy than Amy Acton.
Ohio is still a state Donald Trump won by more than ten points in 2024. That does not make the governor’s race automatic. Midterms punish the party in the White House. Democrats are trying to turn Acton’s bedside manner into a permission structure for the same governing philosophy that produced the lockdowns. Republicans are trying to turn Ramaswamy’s wealth into a character supplement. Both tactics tell you what each side fears.
Money, Jets, and the “Why Is He Even Running?” Attack
David Pepper, Acton’s running mate and the former Ohio Democratic Party chair, has been out on the circuit asking why a billionaire would want the governor’s mansion. He has made a meal of campaign reports showing roughly $700,000 in private-jet leasing. Ramaswamy has self-funded at a scale no normal Ohio candidate can touch and has outspent Acton several times over in 2026 filings.[4]
I find the question revealing in the exact way Pepper does not intend. Why would a man who already cashed out of companies he built take a pay cut, live in a government house, and spend two years being screamed at by people who think profit is a sin? I asked a version of that question years ago, when he was still a CEO who had not yet written the book that Fox News later discovered. The answer he gave me then is the answer his campaign is still giving now: he made money. He wants to spend the next chapter creating the conditions for other people to make money. That is not a job hunt. That is a mission.
A communist-minded person looks at a private jet and sees stolen bread. A capitalist looks at the same jet and asks whether the man inside it is flying toward a plant, a donor meeting, or a vacation after creating tremendous market value. Intent matters. Output matters more.
I will never apologize for preferring self-funded candidates. The moment a politician’s paycheck depends on a machine, the machine owns the mind. I have watched it up close. I know a patriotic couple who together make a few hundred thousand a year, keep the flags in the garage, and stay quiet at the corporate job because they do not want the HR department to discover they vote like Americans. Control the check, and you control the speech. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is how large organizations work in 2026.
Amy Acton and the Lockdown State
Acton was Ohio’s health director when the state closed schools and businesses in 2020. Critics call her Ohio’s Dr. Fauci. Democrats treat that as a slur. I treat it as a job description. She was the face of orders that treated the economy as a switch a bureaucrat could flip. I lived through it here. So did every shop owner who found out a signature in Columbus could erase a year’s work overnight.[5]
The Amy Acton Covid response was authoritarian in method and Marxist in assumption: the productive life of a free people could be suspended by experts, who would decide when life was allowed to resume. That is not public health as a limited tool. That is government as the owner of time.
Why I Call the Lockdowns Marxist
Marxism is not only red flags and five-year plans. It is the belief that the state is the rightful allocator of work, risk, and reward. When you shut the places where people create value and keep the administrative offices open, you have already chosen a side. You have decided that the badge-wearing clerk outranks the owner who makes payroll. Ohio Democrats gambled that voters would remember Acton’s tone of voice and forget the empty Main Streets. I did not forget.
DeWine appointed her. DeWine has now endorsed Ramaswamy. That fact alone should end the fairy tale that Acton was a nonpolitical healer floating above faction. She was a cabinet officer who used emergency power. Emergency power is the most addictive drug in American government. People who taste it rarely volunteer to put the bottle down.
Unions, Paychecks, and the Long March Through the Shop Floor
I have said for years that the modern political union is a child of the Marxist analysis of class, even when the guy in the union hall flies a flag, hunts on weekends, and would punch you for calling him a communist. The original theory was never a mystery. Labor was organized as a counter-power to private ownership. In practice, union leadership in this country has spent decades steering members toward the party that grows government, because government is the only force large enough to take ownership away from the people who built the plant.[6]
That is why so many red-white-and-blue households still vote for the party that talks about them as a class to be managed. The leadership is not confused. The membership is loyal to the paycheck and the hall. I do not hate the welder. I hate the theory that says the welder’s children should live under a political class that treats the owner as a villain and the agency as a parent.
The FirstEnergy Lesson I Have Deep Sympathy For
I have been around Ohio politics long enough to watch a struggling energy company buy itself a statute. House Bill 6 and the FirstEnergy dark-money case are the exhibit. Ratepayers paid. Executives and a speaker went to court. The regulatory environment became a marketplace for influence. I will not bless a “deal” in which a company that cannot survive honest rules writes a check to a campaign so the rules change.[7]
That is the fine line I have learned to walk. Politicians have to keep the confiscators out of the regulatory shop so builders can build. That is not an unholy alliance. That is the only way a mixed economy does not slide into a managed one. A President Trump saying to industry, “I want a regulatory environment in which you can hire,” is the opposite of a health director saying, “I want an environment in which you may not open.” One expands the field. The other sits on it.
Why a Billionaire Wants a Crummy Mansion
I hosted a gathering in 2019. Vivek was there. So was J.D. Vance. It was neither a bundling operation nor a corporate ask. It was capitalists in a room talking about whether the country still believed in itself. Later, I sat in the front row at a Middletown-area event and talked to Vivek before and after the event. He told me the earlier room had mattered. He had built companies, sold, and was deciding whether the next chapter was a quieter rich life or a public fight.[8]
He chose the fight. I understand the psychology because my own life is simpler than it used to be, and I still cannot leave the argument alone. You spend years making something. You cash out. Then you look at the country that made the cash-out possible and watch a political movement try to call the making itself immoral. At that point, money is not the point. Example is the point. He has young children. So do a lot of the people I know who are still trying to start shops in Butler County, Warren County, and along the I-75 corridor. They need a governor who thinks a payroll is a moral achievement.
What “Public Servant” Actually Means
Acton’s campaign asks why he needs a job. That sentence is the whole Democratic theory of government in eight words. They think office is a job you take because you need income and status. I think office is a temporary grant of power you take because you already know how to create value and you want the rules to stop punishing the next person who tries. She needs the apparatus. He does not. That difference is not a smear. It is the reason self-reliant candidates are harder to own.
Naming Lakes, Inventing Guilt, and the Attack on the Founding
I have been talking about early Bronze Age copper, Florida’s long human timeline, and the political use of the word “indigenous.” I am not an “indigenous peoples” activist because a university committee decided the founding of the United States was a crime scene. Lake Ontario had Iroquoian names before English maps. That is history. It is not a veto of Ohio’s existence. The campaign to treat every European place-name as an apology is a campaign to treat American creation as illegitimate. If the country was born in sin, then the wealth it produced is stolen, and the state may seize it with a clean conscience.[9]
That is why I do not roll my eyes when President Trump puts a new name on a body of water. Marketing people understand pressure points. Force the argument into the open. Mexico is not a capitalist peer. Canada is a softer social democracy with better manners. China runs a party-state that Western finance keeps trying to copy while calling itself “stakeholder capitalism.” If you import the constraint structure of a manifesto into a corporation, do not act shocked when the sales numbers coming out the door shrink.
China has more than a billion people and still does not outrun American output on the terms that matter most. People are not GDP. Property, energy, and permission to try are the components of GDP.[10]
Free Speech, Treason Talk, and Where I Draw the Line
I use a hard word on purpose. I view a political project that intends to undo the capitalist republic from inside its own universities, HR offices, and public schools as hostile to the country that protects the speech. That is my moral line, not a statute I am asking a prosecutor to file tomorrow. The left has been brilliant at wrapping the project in the First Amendment. They want the protection of the system they are trying to hollow out. I will not pretend those things are neutral.
Republicans have often been cowards about this. They recite “free speech” as if the phrase were a substitute for a spine. Speech is the method. The aim is still the aim. If the aim is to teach children that job creation is exploitation and that America should not have been founded, you are not hosting a seminar. You are running a treasonous succession operation.
What I Want from a Governor of Ohio
I want a political class that keeps the confiscators out of the permit office. I want data centers and plants and the power to run them, not a lecture about why the grid should be smaller. I want elections that are elections, then an executive who tells builders: the rules will be stable enough that you can risk a decade of your life. I want fewer people who take jobs from the tax base and more people who create jobs that build the tax base.
You can steal only so much before you run out of victims. Every society that tries to live on confiscation discovers that the makers leave, hide, or stop. Then the speeches about “the people” get louder and the shelves get emptier. That is not a metaphor from a paperback. That is the twentieth century.
The Quiet Majority in the Garage
I do not think Ohio has reached the saturation point at which the paycheck controllers can order a blue state into existence. The man with the flags in the garage is still voting. He will not wear the pin at work. Democrats had to come all the way out into open socialism because they could not out-Trump Trump on prosperity. Bernie always beat Hillary in the heart of the Democrat Party. The party followed the energy. Now they have Acton as the respectable face of that energy in Ohio.
How I Measure Morality
Money is a human construct. I do not worship it. I measure it the way I measure any tool: by what it lets a free person do for other free people. A 12- or 16-hour day that produces a payroll is a moral act. A political career that lives off the payroll someone else produced is, at best, a borrowed life. I am sympathetic to imperfect Republicans who still know which side of that line they live on. I am not sympathetic to a politics that calls the maker greedy and the taker compassionate.
My people, the ones who have stayed with this blog for years, tend to be biblical in the old sense. They think a man should work, keep promises, raise children, and not covet his neighbor’s possessions. I am with them. The copper trade of the early Bronze Age, the mound builders, the later Iroquois, the English, the Americans — all of that is a long argument about who gets to take risk and keep the result. I come down on the side that built the country I actually live in.
The Vote
Vote for the job creator. That is the whole essay. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be governor, so more people like him can exist. Amy Acton wants to be governor so the power that closed Ohio can be normalized as kindness. I was in the room when he was still deciding whether to step down from the CEO role. I have watched the last two years of his campaign confirm the pitch. I have watched her coalition confirm mine.
Ignore the sidebars if you can. The race is not about a jet. It is not about a lake. It is not about whether a rich man “needs a job.” It is about whether Ohio still believes that making something is better than administering something. I do. I have believed it since before this blog had a name. I will believe it after the returns come in.
Go vote. Keep the line. Make a job if you can. If you cannot, stand with the person who will.
Selected Sources for Readers Who Want the Record
Polling and market snapshots: RealClearPolitics; Decision Desk HQ; Fox News / Beacon Research / Shaw & Company (August 6–10, 2026); Wedgewood Polls (August 11–13, 2026); Newsweek reporting on Polymarket and Kalshi, August 28, 2026.
Campaign finance and travel: Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026; NBC4 Columbus, August 26, 2026; Ohio Secretary of State campaign-finance database.
Candidate backgrounds: Ballotpedia and Wikipedia entries for the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election and for Amy Acton; Politico Magazine profile, June 28, 2025; Cincinnati Enquirer coverage of COVID-era advertising, August 28, 2026.
HB 6 / FirstEnergy: U.S. Department of Justice deferred-prosecution materials; contemporaneous Ohio reporting summarized in footnote 6.
Personal context: author’s contemporaneous posts at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com; NBC News, October 4, 2023, on Ramaswamy’s 2019 Ohio political beginnings; C-SPAN, August 21, 2026, Middletown campaign event.
[1] Rich Hoffman, The Overmanwarrior (blog), published since approximately 2009–2010 at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com. Author of The Symposium of Justice (2004), Tail of the Dragon (2012), and The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Forthcoming: The Politics of Heaven (targeted 2027).
[2] Ohio gubernatorial election set for November 3, 2026. Incumbent Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is term-limited. Republican nominee: Vivek Ramaswamy (running mate: Ohio Senate President Rob McColley). Democratic nominee: Dr. Amy Acton (running mate: former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper). Libertarian: Don Kissick. See Ballotpedia, “Ohio gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2026.”
[3] RealClearPolitics aggregate through August 10, 2026: Acton 47.0%, Ramaswamy 46.8% (Acton +0.2). Decision Desk HQ through August 13: Acton 47.2%, Ramaswamy 46.8%. Fox News / Beacon / Shaw poll, August 6–10, 2026 (1,008 registered voters, ±3%): Ramaswamy 50%, Acton 48%. Wedgewood Polls, August 11–13, 2026 (800 likely voters, ±4%): Acton 47%, Ramaswamy 46%. Newsweek, August 28, 2026, reported Polymarket 54% Acton / 47% Ramaswamy and Kalshi 55% / 45% after a late-August shift.
[4] Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026: Ramaswamy campaign spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft, including payments to V Leasing LLC (address tied to a Ramaswamy-owned property) and TVPX Aircraft Solutions. NBC4, August 26, 2026: Ramaswamy spent about $21.2 million in 2026 campaign funds through early August filings; Acton spent over $5.5 million. Wikipedia / Ohio Secretary of State filings, summarized in mid-August 2026, show Ramaswamy with substantially higher receipts and cash on hand, including substantial self-funding.
[5] Amy Acton served as director of the Ohio Department of Health from 2019 into 2020 under Gov. Mike DeWine and was the public face of Ohio’s early COVID-19 orders, including school closures and stay-at-home rules. She resigned as director in June 2020 amid protests and lawsuits, remaining briefly as an adviser. See Wikipedia, “Amy Acton”; Politico Magazine, June 28, 2025, “Can ‘Ohio’s Anthony Fauci’ Beat Vivek Ramaswamy?”
[6] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), treat trade unions as instruments of class struggle within industrial capitalism. American labor history is more mixed: many U.S. unions were anti-communist during the Cold War. The author’s claim is interpretive—that union political machines often align with larger government and redistribution—not a claim that every rank-and-file member is a Marxist.
[7] House Bill 6 (2019) provided subsidies tied to FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants and other generation sources. Federal prosecutors described a roughly $60 million dark-money scheme around the bill. FirstEnergy entered a deferred prosecution agreement and paid a $230 million criminal penalty, admitting relevant facts. Former House Speaker Larry Householder was convicted. Related civil and regulatory costs to ratepayers have been widely reported. The author cites this episode as an example of captured regulation, not as a charge against any 2026 nominee.
[8] Author’s personal account of a 2019 gathering in the Cincinnati/Middletown area that included Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance, and of later attendance at a Ramaswamy event at a Middletown-area headquarters. NBC News, October 4, 2023, documented Ramaswamy’s 2019 return to Ohio and early political relationships, including with Vance and then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted. C-SPAN recorded an August 21, 2026 Middletown campaign event featuring Ramaswamy.
[9] President Trump’s 2025 executive action renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and related debates over naming (including Great Lakes/Iroquois toponyms such as Ontario) became a cultural flashpoint. The author argues that renaming fights are proxies for whether the United States is a legitimate capitalist republic or a moral error to be undone. Geographic names have layered indigenous, colonial, and American histories; Ontario is an Iroquoian-derived name adopted into English cartography.
[10] World Bank and IMF national accounts: the United States remains the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP; China is second with a much larger population. Productivity, capital formation, property rights, and energy abundance—not headcount—drive output. Figures fluctuate yearly; the comparative point is structural, not a single-year snapshot.
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.
Full disclosure, this is a long one and it might be easier to watch the video. I have a lot to explain here, and this topic is much bigger than most surface-level discussions on politics and business and what role the two play in a happy society. I talk about abortion in a different way here, but it’s a mentality that is at the heart of Marxism, and many years of our civilization straining under a mixed economy that many of us never even thought about. But it’s the heart of what has been driving me for many years to this point. I am affiliated with Volynt Aero in Oxford. I am a consultant and, at this point, an advisor. I am proud of it. I do not normally attach my name to things. For years, I’ve handled much of the work in the background. People who have known me a long time know the method. You trade whatever you have—sometimes it was literally baseball cards when I was young—to get close enough to a problem to be useful. I come out of the school of hard knocks. I have seen what happens to people and to companies when the process is dirty, when the lawyers arrive late, when the regulators decide the idea should die in the permit office. I have helped a lot of people mine their way through improper methods without becoming the method.
That is the only reason this essay exists; there is a lot of interconnected tissue to consider in something as massive as this, and it takes a bit to discuss in context. Not because I needed another logo on a card. Because I watched a good idea be born in Oxford, in Butler County, Ohio, and I recognized the old American pattern: the builders are ready, the market is arriving whether the townships like the noise or not, and the political class is still deciding whether it wants to midwife the thing or abort it.
Why I Attach a Name at All
I have been a huge supporter of FirstEnergy. I was a supporter when Larry Householder was Speaker. When we talk about alliances between government and big business, I think FirstEnergy got a raw deal in the public square. I do not think they did a good job defending themselves. Real life in the background of a utility is lived inside regulatory compliance, rate cases, and a grid that still has to keep the lights on while somebody in Washington changes the religion of energy policy every four years.[1] What I saw was a company running a model that the Obama-era compliance environment made it almost impossible to operate profitably, then being treated as a morality play when it sought political relief.
I see a lot of Democrats trying to take ground in Ohio after years of Republican control of the House, the Senate, and the governor’s office. They cannot get a message through to people because the message, once you strip the focus-grouped nouns off it, is still a mixed-economy sermon with a communist destination. That is not what people in this county vote for. It is not what they vote for in 2026 either. But the fight does not end because you won a map. You are always overcoming Karl Marx. You can see it in the way a left-wing media personality in Columbus will work a hit job on a Republican until the man will not look you in the face in a hallway. I have watched politicians go quiet because they do not want to be called a communist, or worse. After all, they do not want to be trapped at a urinal in the Statehouse by somebody with a microphone asking why they voted for an “evil” bank or an “evil” energy company that was not kneeling hard enough toward the religion of wind and solar power.
There are a lot of safer ways to make money. There are not many ways to do it that still serve the two parts of the American condition I actually care about: job creation, and political representation honest enough to get out of the job creator’s way. I lend my name to enterprising people who take risks because I want to see them make jobs. I lend my name to political figures for the same reason. The Marxist type always attacks them, and it is a lonely business to be sabotaged out of a restroom at the Statehouse by a hostile media personality trying to put you in a horrible state of mind. Why did you vote for that? Why did you say this? Why do you support FirstEnergy? Why aren’t they for wind? All questions from a Marxist perspective, intended to root everything in a leftist point of view as a baseline.
I involve myself because I want to protect capitalism from the next adjustment to the breaker panel, the one that shows up on your electric bill whether or not you ever voted for the sermon that caused it.
John Galt Types, and the Movie That Taught Me the Pattern
At the beginning of this, I put the Volynt affiliation together because I like the guys. I like entrepreneurs. I like John Galt types. I like people who work. When I meet them, I want to help them. I want to help them avoid having to dynamite their own buildings at the end of the story, the way the book taught a generation of us to fear.
My favorite movie on this subject is still Tucker: The Man and His Dream, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, from the same mind that gave the country The Godfather and then turned around and made a hymn to the American crackpot who wanted to build a better car outside Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors.[2] Tucker put the engine in the back. He put seat belts in the car. Fuel injection in 1947. The Big Three knew they could not retool fast enough to compete. The pipeline was already poured. So the story goes that they used Senator Ferguson to try to throw Tucker in jail.[3] That is how the red decade moved into the American system: not always with a red flag in the street, but with a committee, a compliance file, and a prosecutor.
There is a speech Tucker gives at the end of that movie that I have never gotten over. It sounds like Howard Roark’s speech in The Fountainhead, stretched across a courtroom instead of granite.[4] He is wondering where his country went. Marx came in. Regulatory compliance came in. The power of government came in. Ferguson wanted donations from the Big Three, so he tried to eliminate the competition that would have made them better. Tucker assumed the American dream was still built around the man who builds something better. The country had changed on him in the thirties and forties, and he just then figured that out.
We had just won a war by manufacturing the Nazis and the Japanese into the ground. Then, mysteriously, we started sending consultants the other direction to learn how to manufacture from our former enemies; we let our enemies teach us how to mass-produce when it was that very trait which caused us to win World War II. People like Tucker got crushed in the interval.[5] He stayed out of jail. He built fifty cars. Some were wrecked in the process. The ones that remain are still Tucker cars, and you can look at them. The ideas did not die. The company did; it was murdered by a tyrannical government.[6]
I have always hated, in the background of my adult life, the long trend that followed: the creation of a permanent international management layer, the suppression of American ingenuity as if ingenuity were a pollutant, the habit of treating the founder as a defendant. We did something right in the teens, the twenties, even into the thirties. Then the red decade came over from Europe under the banner of free speech, and pretty soon you had a government trying to jail a man for building a safer car.
If it had been me in Householder’s chair, I would not have done the pinhead stuff a two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer could later dissect. I tend to have sympathy for the people who were trying to keep power flowing while the rules were written to euthanize the old plant in favor of a liberal sermon. I do not want to see the power of government illuminate ingenuity only long enough to book it.
What These Drones Actually Do
So why Volynt Aero? Yes, they have an unmanned hybrid VTOL—the Vyper—that can fly, carry a serious payload, and put a box where a truck cannot go. You have seen the animation. I was able to get close enough to the real work that the animation looks like a polite version of what I watched. I went to the facility in Oxford. I talked to a great bunch of guys. The intellectual property is not a napkin. It is already there. Public specs on the aircraft talk about carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to 150 nautical miles, then landing and offering plug-in power—110, 240, or 480 volts—off standard jet fuel, without waiting for a charging farm to be built in the mud.
The crowded market is last-mile photographs and Amazon-adjacent experiments. Everybody has a drone story now. Walmart has a drone story. Amazon has a drone story. Texas has companies. California has companies.[7] The middle-mile market alone is described as a ten-billion-dollar band within a much larger stack. I have been saying to anybody who will listen that the five-year systems market—vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, municipal integration—could run toward a trillion dollars if the country actually lets it hatch. Those are inside numbers, not a press release.
What makes Volynt different is not that they can hover. It is the combination. Cargo logistics and highly mobile power generation on the same airframe. They can come in, drop a payload, and leave. And they can do battlefield resource management, which in civilian clothes means disaster-zone logistics. Power recovery. Fly into a hurricane zone or an Ohio River floodplain, get past the trees that are lying across the only road the trucks can use, land, and put 110, 240, or 480 volts where a ventilator is still a life.[8]
The Hurricane, the Chainsaws, and the Road You Cannot See
Years ago, I was between jobs. I tend to get involved in crusades because they teach you things you cannot learn from a paycheck. One of the reasons I have been effective over the years is that I have done things other people never get to do, or never have the guts to do, because it means leaving the comfort of a W-2. A friend who ran a tree crew called. A storm had flattened a stretch of the Carolinas around the Raleigh-Durham universities. Trees older than the subdivisions they shaded were down across the highways.[9] He was paying cash crews a thousand dollars a day because people were pulling money out of safes rather than wait on insurance to cut the trees off their homes after the storm. A crew member—the kind of guy who couldn’t do anything else because he did not have many other options, because he was out of jail for killing people—had decided he wanted all of it and had started talking about killing my friend. My friend asked me to come down to help him with the guy. My wife did not want me to go. I did not want to leave her. A couple of weeks of that work could be a year’s income. I got on a plane to chase treasure and danger. And to that point, where there is danger, is usually where there is treasure.
As we were landing, they had just cleared the runway. From the air, you could not even see the highway. That is the image I have never forgotten. There is no way for the trucks to get the equipment to the poles if the trees own the asphalt. Before the utility can be a utility, somebody with a saw has to invent a road again. It took some of those people three or four weeks to get power back. Generators mattered. They still matter. A patriot generator in a garage is not a hobby. It is how you keep a freezer and a CPAP and a window into the world from dying on the same night.
When the Volynt team walked me through the demonstration, that memory came back to me. Every September, somewhere, a hurricane does a version of that story. Every late winter, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Great Miami find a floodplain and take a substation with them. Senior citizens do not have three weeks for power to return. A drone that can fly the downed corridor and restore a line, or drop the thing that lets a crew restore a line, is not a gadget. It is the difference between a shelter with lights and a shelter guessing.
Same grid logic as fifty years ago. The wires still have to carry the current. The new part is that you do not always have to wait for the infrastructure; you can fly the infrastructure into a distressed zone.
The Mixed Economy That Aborts the Company Before It Is Born
The hard problem is not the airframe technology. The hard problem is an unfriendly manufacturing and permitting environment. Unless you can throw Elon Musk money at it, the political monster can crush you before the second prototype.[10] Even Musk needed government contracts and, for a stretch, an alliance with China to get Tesla through the years when the same people who wanted electric cars also wanted to drown the factory in process. A lot of the operators I talk to do not want politics at all. They want the big animal to stay in its cage until the product exists. I get involved because I have watched companies get crushed before they build anything.
I was in Columbus a few years ago sitting next to very expensive lawyers who were selling solar the way people used to sell riverfront lots. There is a big solar farm near Piqua. There is another in Warren County. Fine. Generate what you can generate; I’m not against other ways of getting power. But if we aren’t talking about Thorium or nuclear, we aren’t being serious about acquiring real energy. What I will not do is pretend that a sermon about wind and panels is a substitute for a dispatchable grid when you are trying to host the next wave of computation and industry.[11] FirstEnergy was the legacy company being squeezed like a zit so that a younger lobby could inherit the moral high ground. That is an Obama-era move, and it is still the move. Euthanize the old method. Call it progress. Act shocked when people are upset about it.
Republicans have not defended capitalism very well. They have not defended FirstEnergy well. They have not defended the Householder disaster as a policy failure instead of a personality failure, which is what it was, and that has fed this Amy Acton narrative now. I listen to two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers miss the only point that matters: are you using the power of government to confiscate wealth, or are you using it to keep the builder from being hunted while he builds? A lot of people in the political class do not feel they have latitude to say that out loud because they do not want the Columbus media animals waiting for them at the urinal. I am not in public office, so I can say it.[12]
The metaphor I keep using, because Ohio taught it to me, is abortion as industrial policy. A certain kind of politics wants to abort the business before it attaches. Regulation becomes the instrument. You never have to out-compete the founder if you can keep him from being born. The same crowd will turn around and euthanize a legacy company they have decided is morally expired, which was what the FirstEnergy story was really about. Young ideas killed in the womb. Old plants killed in the bed. What they never want is a living competitor that was not pre-cleared by the donor list.
Fences, Data Centers, and Who Gets to Say No
In my neighborhood, an older, decent neighbor started a wooden fence in the front yard. Posts went in. It was their property. I would not have chosen the look. My wife and I were not going to say anything. Then came the hearing. Then the posts came back out of the ground. I had not called a trustee. I did not need to. I knew what happened. People who bought half-million and million-dollar houses, some of them new from the coasts, did not want to look at a tacky fence on the drive-by. No lumber in the front. Property rights, until the new people appeal to government to make your porch match their taste.
That is the data-center argument in miniature. I am pro data center. The new economy is an electricity story whether the township signs the petition or not. China is building data centers whether or not we do, and if people protest, they just disappear. That’s how it is in China, in America: communist terrorism hides behind free speech, which does not exist in a real communist country. People who do not want the noise still want the market cap that pays for a federal deficit that no longer fits on a bumper sticker. They want a trillion-dollar growth story and a quiet backyard. They want to keep up with Beijing and keep the transformers out of sight.[13] My daughter lives near Millikan Road in the Liberty Township development and does not want more congestion. I understand the feeling. I also drive through Middletown and remember what the place looked like when the work was here. You can still find houses in that city at prices that tell you how much vitality is left. Vance can talk about investment, but there’s a lot more. I want the investment to be real enough that Main Street is not a museum of what we used to make.
I love Liberty Center. I like Costco. I like the Monroe exits and the Millikin exchange along the 63 corridor as places where you can put large things without paving a township’s last pasture. Balance is a real problem for trustees. Pretending that every large thing is a moral injury is not balance. It is a lifestyle veto dressed up as conservation.[14]
Property taxes are the scream under all of this. There is a movement that wants them gone. Fine. Show me the replacement arithmetic. One honest way to change the math is to land in an industry that generates revenue on land that is already industrial. Vertical mobility—middle-mile drones, disaster logistics, the power-restore mission—is not a server farm humming behind a fence. It is a reason a site exists. Amazon, Walmart, the carriers, the hospitals, the utilities, the Guard: they all have the same problem. Get the box, or the tool, or the kilowatt, past the broken road.[15]. We’re talking about a lot of things here that are always under the tip of our tongues, but they are the center of all discussion.
Michael Ryan Was There Before It Was a Photo Opportunity
I was not going to drag a campaign into this. Michael Ryan put his visit on Facebook. He went to the Volynt facility. He talked about it at a fundraiser. I happened to be there with him. I know what he has been doing in the background for a couple of years while other people were still deciding whether drones were a toy, a nuisance, or a federal problem.[16]
By the time a lot of people read this, he may already be sitting as a Butler County commissioner, or he may be in the last stretch of proving it in November. Either way, I want it on the record. Michael Ryan has been acting like a commissioner of this county well before the title was his. He has been providing leadership in rooms that were not yet fashionable. Four years from now, when the project is a ribbon and a CNBC segment, and every officeholder in a fifty-mile radius is trying to stand in the photograph, I want it remembered that he was there when it was still a risk.
That is what good leadership looks like when it is not a press release. It is not waiting for the market to become safe and then claiming the harvest. Socialism, in the small-town version, is just that reflex: somebody else takes the risk, then the committee arrives to redistribute the credit. Ryan did the opposite. He showed up early. He has done a lot of unglamorous work that makes life in this county better. This is one of the visible ones.[17]
I like a lot of the Ohio names in the builder register. I have had the chance to talk to them one-on-one in informal settings. I think I know who they are. Bernie Moreno built businesses and then walked into the grinder of public service with enough money in the bank that a paycheck could not vote for him. Warren Davidson is in that same pattern. That is the opposite of the professional politician, who needs the mixed economy because it is his meal. Bernie Sanders is a communist. The late-life American version I respect is the man who made something and then spent the surplus defending the conditions that let other people make something.
Ryan is young enough to want still the county to have a next chapter. That matters. The people who have been in the chair too long start to treat every new idea as a zoning headache. The people who still think like founders treat it as a chance.
What I Want This to Become
I want Volynt featured on CNBC as one of the great global innovators, not as a local curiosity that got a grant and a ribbon. A proposed HyPE Lab at the Miami University Airport is the kind of physical bet a county should want next to an existing runway. Ohio Third Frontier money already touched the powertrain work. That is a start, not a finish. I want them to have a shot at being the next SpaceX in the only sense that phrase is useful: a company that made a hard physical thing at a scale the incumbents said was impossible, in a county that decided not to strangle it. That is a lofty goal. Lofty goals are how factories start. The constraint is not imagination. The constraint is whether Ohio and Butler County will keep the political animal on a leash long enough for scale.
Scale needs land that is already industrial, power that is actually on the bus, a workforce that can turn a wrench and read a print, and a waiver culture at the FAA that does not take a decade to admit a machine can fly past the pilot’s eyeballs.[18] Ohio is already in the drone-first-responder business through DriveOhio. Hamilton police are getting aircraft that beat a cruiser to the scene. That is a different mission from cargo and power restoration, but it is the same county learning the same sky.[19]
I have been accused of being part of the military-industrial complex because I have worked around aerospace companies for a long time and I know people in politics. The accusation is a category error. I want the opposite of what happened to Tucker. I want the opposite of what happened to Roark in the book. I want the man with the idea outside the approved pipeline to get to the market before the senator from the incumbent district files the paperwork. I have put my name on things when it was unpopular and could and have cost me. I will put it here.
Books do not usually make the kind of money people think they do. I am writing The Politics of Heaven anyway, because I think there is a spiritual war under the economic one, and because non-human intelligence—call it what your tradition requires—does not only show up in a sky story. It shows up in the institutional habit of killing the builder.[20] I volunteer a lot of time that isn’t invoiced. I want the human race better. Helping a company in my own county get off the ground is one of the ways that sentence becomes concrete.
The Record I Want Left
This is a long one. Context does not work in ten minutes. The video at the front of this would be useful to watch.
When people ask me what I am working on, this is the answer. I am helping a group of scrappy operators, with the IP already done and the demonstration already flown, get across a minefield that usually destroys the idea before it can pay a tax bill. I am proud of them. I want the state of Ohio to treat this as more than a local hobby. The upside is not a buzz in the background. The upside is a transportation and recovery layer that Amazon, Walmart, and every hospital system in a floodplain will need, whether the township board likes the look of the fence or not.
Watch Tucker’s speech. Read Roark’s. Then look at a county that still has room at the exits, a commissioner candidate who showed up before the cameras were easy to get, and a machine that can put power back on at a shelter while the trees are still on the road. That is the whole argument. I would like, for once, not to give the speech at the end of the movie. I want the cars—or, in this case, the aircraft—to be built.
Michael Ryan was ahead of it. The company is ahead of the market’s imagination. I am putting years of scar tissue behind both facts. The rest is execution, voltage, and whether we still believe a man with a better idea should be allowed to leave the ground.
Cincinnati Business Courier / Dayton Business Journal. Coverage of Volynt Aero’s proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport, January 2025.
LinkedIn, Volynt Aero company page. Oxford headquarters; Vyper aircraft described for emergency cargo logistics and autonomous power generation.
Workhorse Group and other Midwest cargo-UAS public materials, Sharonville / Mason, Ohio.
National Hurricane Center. Storm histories for Carolinas landfalls affecting the Research Triangle transportation grid.
Notes
[1] On Householder and FirstEnergy, see United States v. Householder, S.D. Ohio, and contemporaneous reporting in The Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2020–2023. The policy point here is not a brief for every transaction; it is that one administration’s rules can squeeze a regulated utility until the only remaining path appears to be politics.
[3] Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan chaired the Senate investigations that, in Coppola’s telling and in Tucker’s own defense, functioned as a political weapon for Detroit incumbents. Whether every cinematic beat is courtroom-accurate is less important than the pattern: government process used as a moat.
[4] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Howard Roark’s courtroom defense remains the clearest American statement that a creator does not exist to feed the parasites who arrive after the risk is taken.
[5] U.S. manufacturing after 1945 did send missions to study Japanese methods; the irony Tucker’s speech names is that the country that out-produced the Axis then imported process discipline from the countries it had just defeated. See postwar productivity literature and W. Edwards Deming’s later influence in Japan.
[6] Preston Tucker produced fifty Tucker 48 automobiles. Most survive. The Big Three later adopted seat belts, disc brakes, fuel injection, and aerodynamic safety ideas that Tucker had already put on the road. See Tucker Automobile Club of America histories.
[7] Amazon, Walmart, UPS, and the United States Postal Service have all published or piloted roadmaps for drone and middle-mile automation. Industry estimates for advanced air mobility and drone logistics through the early 2030s commonly range from tens of billions in the near term to well above $100 billion as last-mile and middle-mile use cases stack. The trillion-dollar figure in this essay is a five-year systems view that includes vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, and municipal infrastructure—not airframes alone.
[8] Volynt Aero, Inc., Oxford, Ohio (Butler County). Public materials describe the Vyper hybrid-electric unmanned eVTOL as carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to about 150 nautical miles, then landing and providing 110, 240, or 480 VAC plug-in power from JP-8 or Jet A without a high-voltage charging network. See Volynt Aero’s capability statement and company site at volyntaero.com. A proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport was reported by the Cincinnati Business Courier and Dayton Business Journal in January 2025. The company received Ohio Third Frontier/TVSF support through the Entrepreneurs’ Center.
[9] Hurricane Fran (1996) and later storms that struck the Carolinas left large sections of the I-40 / Research Triangle corridor impassable from downed timber. The operational lesson is unchanged: you cannot restore a grid if you cannot reach the poles.
[10] Elon Musk’s public record on Tesla and SpaceX includes DOE loans, NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo contracts, and later criticism of the same regulatory state. The relevant point is not purity. It is that even a high-capacity founder needed both capital and political oxygen to keep the factory from being regulated out of existence before the product matured.
[11] On Ohio energy policy after House Bill 6, see Public Utilities Commission of Ohio dockets and legislative history of subsequent repeal and reform efforts. Nuclear and dispatchable baseload remain the quiet argument under every data-center fight.
[12] On mixed-economy control, see Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, and Rand’s distinction between the producer and the looter. The essay’s claim is practical: once incumbents learn they can buy a senator rather than retool a factory, innovation becomes a permit problem.
[13] On local data-center zoning fights, see Journal-News coverage of the Butler County commissioners’ 2026 moratorium discussion and township requests. The noise argument and the fiscal argument are not the same conversation, though they are treated as one at public meetings.
[14] Liberty Center, Monroe / I-75 corridor industrial sites, Middletown Regional Airport aviation investments, and the Spooky Nook complex on Hamilton’s west side are the visible pieces of a county trying to replace lost mill and auto-adjacent employment with logistics, aviation, sport, and advanced manufacturing.
[15] Property tax pressure in Ohio townships is the political surface of a deeper math problem: residential valuations rise while commercial and industrial bases either leave or get blocked. A new high-value industry that uses existing industrial land is one of the few honest answers that does not require another levy speech.
[16] Butler County Commission primary, May 5, 2026: Michael V. Ryan defeated incumbent Cindy Carpenter approximately 72 percent to 28 percent. See Journal-News (Hamilton), May 5–6, 2026. Ryan, a former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, advanced to the November 2026 general election.
[17] Bernie Moreno and Warren Davidson have both operated in the Ohio builder-and-business register the essay prefers to the professional political class. Endorsement lists in the 2026 Butler County commission primary included both names on Ryan’s side.
[18] Federal Aviation Administration, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) regulations, 14 C.F.R. Part 107, and successive beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) waiver practice. Ohio House Bill 77 (effective April 9, 2025) added state-level UAV provisions at Ohio Revised Code §§ 4561.50–4561.53.
[19] Ohio Department of Transportation / DriveOhio statewide drone-first-responder pilot, announced for multiple agencies including Hamilton Police, 2025–2026. Public-safety drones and cargo drones are different machines; they share airspace, waiver culture, and a county that is already learning to fly.
[20] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (manuscript, 2026; targeted 2027 publication). The book treats non-human intelligence, spiritual warfare, and the political history of heaven as the long background to why human institutions keep aborting builders.
Rich Hoffman 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 was talking about this Fauci story for a long time, and there is a lot to break down. Anthony Fauci showed up on Capitol Hill, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times, and the whole performance confirmed what a lot of us had been saying for years. Good lawyers at two thousand dollars an hour told him not to answer questions about the color of his tie or the carpet. That is not strategy in the traditional sense. That is damage control after the diary came out and after Biden’s pardon language made every single answer a potential risk.¹
The hearing was theater, yes. But it was also a window into how power protects itself when the bill for bad decisions runs into the trillions. I said much of this in 2020, when people called it crazy. The diary, the celebrity capture, the origins knowledge, and the blanket Fifth all landed right on schedule. Now we get to talk about the real cost.
The Fifth Amendment Over 100 Times: Lazy Preparation or Calculated Silence
Fauci walked into that Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing chaired by Rand Paul and refused to answer. He invoked the Fifth more than one hundred times. Reports put the number at 111 in some counts. Senators asked the day of the week. They asked the color of his tie. They asked about the carpet. Fifth. Fifth. Fifth.²
I understand not wanting to get boxed into a dialogue that opens rabbit holes. Hard questions about gain-of-function funding, lab-leak timelines, and previous sworn statements carry real risk. But when the easy questions also get the Fifth, it stops looking like careful lawyering and starts looking like the lawyers decided the safest path was total silence. Paul has been clear he intends to pursue contempt. The committee already voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt and refer it. Democrats will not help in the full Senate, and the January 2025 pardon complicates federal options. Still, the optics of a man who cost the country so much refusing even the simplest answers is a form of accountability in itself.³
Bernie Moreno from Ohio asked the kind of direct questions that needed to be asked. He made me proud as a senator from this state. The frustration in the room was real because the public already knew the story’s outlines. The Fifth just made the admission louder.
The Diary Revelations: COVID Origins Knowledge and Falling in Love with Celebrity Status
The diary dropped right before the hearing—more than a thousand pages. Early entries show Fauci writing that the wet market was the amplifier, not the source. He recorded conversations in which most of the scientists on the call thought deliberate insertion or laboratory involvement was possible. Publicly, the story stayed different for a long time.⁴
At the same time, the diary shows a man falling in love with the celebrity scan. Magazine covers. Rock-star treatment. “Explosive and really unimaginable” fame. Petitions for Sexiest Man Alive. Celebrity phone calls and name-dropping. While the country was locked down and the economic damage was compounding, the private notes record the thrill of the attention. That contrast is damaging. It was already suspected. The diary made it concrete. The timing, right before the testimony, turned a public-relations disaster into something harder to spin.⁵
The Trillions Lost: Quantifying the Economic Catastrophe of the Lockdowns
This is the part that still matters most. Separating the damage caused by the virus itself from that caused by the policy response is tricky. Economists still argue about the exact split. What is not in serious dispute is the scale.
Federal relief spending alone ran about $4.65 trillion. GDP losses from the pandemic period have been estimated in the multiple trillions. One USC analysis put the four-year GDP hit near $14 trillion. A Heritage-linked commission put the total cost—deaths, chronic conditions, lost income, mental health, educational losses—around $18 trillion. School closures alone have been estimated to result in roughly $2 trillion in future earnings losses. Long COVID continues to impose ongoing productivity costs measured in the billions annually. Global output losses for 2020–2024 have been estimated at nearly $13.8 trillion, with the United States accounting for a large share.⁶
We are still living with the long-term effects. Inflation, labor-force scarring, learning loss that will depress lifetime earnings for a generation of kids, and the permanent expansion of federal debt all trace back in part to the choices made in 2020 and 2021. Someone who helped design and sell those choices, who enjoyed the magazine covers while the economy took the hit, does not get to walk away with only a pardon and a Fifth Amendment performance. Public embarrassment is part of the bill. Legal immunity does not erase the reputation ledger or the need for a full accounting.
Biden’s Pardon and Why the Lawyers Demanded Total Silence
The January 19, 2025, pardon from President Biden is the key. It covers “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”⁷
That language is broad. The lawyers treated every answer as a potential new statement that could create fresh exposure or complicate the protection already granted. Even questions about the color of a tie carry risk if the answer can be twisted into inconsistency or if it opens a door outside the pardoned window. That is why the advice was absolute: do not answer. The optics look terrible. The legal logic is coherent if the goal is preserving the pardon at all costs. States are still free to look at their own statutes. Florida has already moved. The federal shield does not cover everything.⁸
Why the Hearing Still Mattered and What Comes Next
We already knew the broad outline. The hearing put the Fifth on the record more than a hundred times and forced the diary into the center of the conversation. Rand Paul is pushing the contempt referral. Criminal prosecution at the federal level faces the prospect of pardon and partisan math. State investigations and the public record are not constrained the same way. The real next step is continued pressure for transparency on the origins, the funding decisions, and the true cost-benefit of the lockdowns. Reputational accountability is nothing. Strategy that relies on silence still has a price.
I remember saying all of this about Fauci when people thought it was crazy. Before some of the books were written, before the diaries were public, before the pardon. I got the usual pushback for not going along with the official line. Now the Fifth, the diary, and the economic numbers have caught up. I told you so. I will keep saying it because the next time something sounds wild and outside the approved explanations, people might listen a little sooner and save themselves some of the pain.
The hole we are still climbing out of six years later was not inevitable. Manufactured crisis or not, the policy choices had authors. Those authors should not get to treat the trillions as someone else’s problem.
Footnotes
1. CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic,” July 29, 2026; Axios, “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins,” July 29, 2026.
2. The New York Times, “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing,” July 29–30, 2026; USA Today, “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19,” July 29, 2026; Washington Times, “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress,” July 29, 2026.
3. Forbes, “Fauci Contempt of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines,” August 6, 2026; Politico, “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote,” August 6, 2026; Reuters, “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote,” August 6, 2026.
4. USA Today, “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame,” July 29, 2026; National Review, “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him,” July 27, 2026; The Telegraph, “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal,” July 27, 2026.
5. The Atlantic, “Anthony Fauci’s Embarrassing, Revealing Diary,” July 29, 2026; The New Yorker, “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves,” August 4, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing,” July 27, 2026; Wall Street Journal, “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci,” July 28–29, 2026.
6. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588), July 31, 2025; USC Price School, “Mandatory business closures drove the economic decline during COVID-19 pandemic,” reporting ~$14 trillion GDP impact; Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (via SCNR reporting), estimating ~$18 trillion total U.S. costs; University of Washington/Oxford analysis on school closures (~$2 trillion future losses); Center for Global Development estimates of global output losses ~$13.8 trillion (2020–2024).
7. Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, January 19, 2025 (full text via Wikisource and Department of Justice Pardon Attorney records); White House Statement from President Joe Biden, January 20, 2025.
8. CBS12 / Florida reporting on Attorney General James Uthmeier investigation announcement, July 30, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry,” July 30, 2026; Lawfare, “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?,” August 11, 2026.
Bibliography
Axios. “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins.” July 29, 2026.
Center for Global Development. Estimates of global COVID-19 output losses, 2020–2024 (~$13.8 trillion).
CNN. “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic.” July 29, 2026.
Forbes. “Fauci Contempt Of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines.” August 6, 2026.
Heritage Foundation / Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Cost estimates totaling approximately $18 trillion (deaths, chronic illness, lost income, mental health, education). Reported via SCNR, July 2024 (updated context 2026).
Hoover Institution. Various analyses of lockdown costs and learning losses (e.g., Hanushek et al. on the economic impact).
Lawfare. “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?” August 11, 2026; “Biden Grants Preemptive Pardons to Milley, Fauci, and Others.” January 20, 2025.
National Review. “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him.” July 27, 2026.
The New York Times. “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing.” July 29–30, 2026.
The New Yorker. “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves.” August 4, 2026.
Politico. “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote.” August 6, 2026.
Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Executive Grant of Clemency, January 19, 2025 (Wikisource / U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney).
Reuters. “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote.” August 6, 2026.
The Telegraph. “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal.” July 27, 2026.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588). July 31, 2025 (~$4.65 trillion federal relief).
USA Today. “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19.” July 29, 2026; “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame.” July 29, 2026.
USC Price School / Economic Modeling. Analyses projecting ~$14 trillion U.S. GDP losses from the pandemic period.
University of Washington / Oxford University. School-closure economic impact estimates (~$2 trillion future losses).
Wall Street Journal. “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci.” July 28–29, 2026.
Washington Examiner. “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing.” July 27, 2026; “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry.” July 30, 2026; “Fauci held in contempt by Rand Paul’s committee.” August 6, 2026.
Washington Times. “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress.” July 29, 2026.
White House. Statement from President Joe Biden on preemptive pardons. January 20, 2025.
Additional primary materials: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing transcript and video, July 29, 2026; Fauci personal diary excerpts released by Sen. Rand Paul, July 2026 (1,000+ pages covering late 2019–2022).
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive remains one of the sharpest diagnoses of the cultural forces that still shape the nightly news. Originally published in 1971 as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the essays were expanded in 1999 with additional material by Peter Schwartz. The core claim has not aged. Western civilization, Rand argued, was being deliberately dismantled from within by movements that presented themselves as progressive but were in fact a regression to the pre-industrial, pre-rational, tribal state. She called it the anti-industrial revolution because it targeted the very tools—technology, industry, capitalism, and the conceptual mind—that allow human beings to survive and flourish.
That diagnosis lands with greater force today than it did when the essays first appeared. The same patterns reappear under new labels: environmental absolutism, identity politics, multiculturalism framed as justice, and the steady erosion of objective standards in education and culture. The book is not a museum piece. It is a working map of the conflict between the individual mind and the collective demand to return to the primitive.
The Anti-Industrial Revolution: Attacking the Tools of Survival
Rand did not view the student rebellions, early environmental crusades, or hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as liberation. She saw them as a rejection of the mind. The hallmark of civilization is the application of reason to the material world. The ultimate historical expression of that faculty is the Industrial Revolution. By attacking industry, technology, and the profit system that sustains them, these movements were not reforming excesses. They were attempting to undo the progress of the Enlightenment and return humanity to a state of nature that Hobbes correctly described as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
In the title essay, she paints a stark picture: a man in the mid-1970s wakes to find his electric toaster and automobile outlawed in the name of protecting the environment. There is no gradual, restrained retreat from technology. There is only the continued advance of the mind or the descent into helplessness and death. Technology is not optional decoration. It is the concrete product of conceptual thought applied to reality. To treat it as aggression against nature is to treat the human mind itself as the enemy.
Rand’s critique of the environmental movement of her day remains one of the most uncompromising sections of the book. She rejected the premise that “untouched nature” holds higher moral value than human life and human comfort. If one truly values human life, one must value the tools that extend and improve it. Elevating pristine wilderness above the needs of productive people, in her view, demonstrates a hatred of the human mind and its capacity to reshape the world.
The activists of the period, she observed, simultaneously attacked scientific progress as violence against the planet while advocating what she called universal slavery for men under expanding state control. The pattern has only grown more sophisticated. Modern environmental rhetoric still frames industrial civilization as the original sin while demanding political power to ration energy, restrict development, and manage the lives of ordinary people. The moral inversion remains the same: the creators are treated as aggressors and the non-producers as the rightful claimants on their output.
Environmentalism as Hatred of the Mind
Progressive Education and the Manufacture of Helplessness
Rand refused to blame only the students. She placed primary responsibility on the teachers and the educational theories that shaped them. In the essay “The Comprachicos,” she draws a grim historical analogy to the seventeenth-century criminals who kidnapped children and physically deformed them to sell as circus freaks. Progressive education, she argued, performs a parallel operation on the mind.
Drawing on the influence of John Dewey and pragmatism, the system shifted focus from teaching children to think conceptually and objectively toward social adjustment and group conformity. The purpose of education, in Rand’s view, should be to equip a student to deal with reality by means of reason. Instead, she saw classrooms that trained children to defer to the pack’s authority. The result is cognitive helplessness: young people who never learned to integrate perceptions into concepts, who remain driven by emotion and fear, and who therefore seek the protection of a tribe.
She drew a direct line from the nursery-school ideal of progressive education to the hippie movement. The hippies were not rebels against the system. They were its logical product—adults still functioning at the emotional level of the group-oriented child. The jump from classroom methods to countercultural behavior is large, yet the causal claim is consistent with her broader epistemology. Without training in conceptual thought, the mind remains primitive.
From Classroom to Tribe: The Roots of Modern Identity Politics
The expanded 1999 edition carries the analysis forward. Peter Schwartz’s additional essays on multiculturalism and what he terms gender tribalism treat these later movements as updated forms of the same collectivism Rand fought in the 1970s. Ethnicity, race, and sex are elevated as primary political categories. The individual disappears into the group.
Rand was unsparing on this point. Racism is the lowest and most primitive form of collectivism because it judges a person by unchosen bodily characteristics rather than by chosen values and achievements. Organizing society by ancestry or language is a sign that Western civilization is losing its grip on the concept of individual rights. A healthy culture judges individuals on their own merits. Tribalism judges them by the accidents of birth.
She argued that the United States was uniquely hostile to ethnicity precisely because it was the first nation founded on individual rights rather than tribal caste. The shift toward identity politics is therefore a betrayal of the American foundation. Schwartz extends the point: movements that frame people primarily as victims of forces beyond their control encourage entitlement and dependency. They replace the standard of individual achievement with subservience to the group. The result is the same psychological regression Rand identified decades earlier.
The Cashless Society and the Corruption of Value
One of the most relevant essays for the present moment is “The Cashless Society.” Rand was not primarily discussing credit cards or digital payments. She was diagnosing the moral foundation of trade itself. Money, she insisted, is the tool of men who have produced goods and can exchange them voluntarily. It cannot exist in a society that has abandoned the objective value of production and replaced it with political pull and loot.
“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue,” she wrote in Atlas Shrugged and reinforced in these essays. When production is no longer the source of wealth and political connections become the dominant currency, the society has already returned to a more primitive form of distribution—force and favor. The contemporary landscape of corporate-political entanglement, quantitative easing, and the elevation of access over output fits the pattern she described. Value is no longer determined by what a mind creates. It is determined by who one knows and which political faction holds power.
Montessori as the Rational Alternative
Against the progressive model, Rand pointed to Montessori education as a practical alternative. She admired the method because it focuses on developing the child’s cognitive faculties through independent, purposeful activity. The didactic materials require logical problem-solving. The child learns by doing, not by submitting to the group’s emotional authority. In her view, this was training for the next generation of creators—the Howard Roarks and John Galts who sustain a civilization of reason and industry.
The contrast remains instructive. Systems that emphasize conceptual independence produce different adults from systems that emphasize social adjustment and group identity. The long-term cultural consequences of those differences are evident in the quality of public discourse and in citizens’ capacity to reason about complex problems.
Prophetic Warnings and the Long Slow Decay
Looking back from the present, the essays appear strikingly prophetic to those who accept their premises and shrill to those who do not. Rand was not a detached observer. She was at war with the cultural direction she described. She sought to expose what she saw as intellectual bankruptcy rather than to suppress it by force. Whether one agrees with every judgment, she identified a fundamental shift: the movement of Western culture toward group identity and away from Enlightenment values of reason, individualism, and productive achievement.
The outer forms of the New Left have changed. The substance has endured in modern environmental absolutism, identity politics, and the steady institutional preference for collective categories over individual judgment. Rand left the choice binary. Either a society embraces the mind and the industrial civilization it makes possible, or it lets the fire of Prometheus go out and returns to the tribe. Collapse, in her account, is not sudden. It is a long, slow process of philosophical decay that can be watched in real time.
Expanding the Frame: Beyond Rand’s Atheism
The foundational work Rand performed on the conflict between individualism and collectivism remains indispensable. At the same time, the frame can be enlarged. Her strict reliance on the evidence of the senses and the operations of reason leaves little room for phenomena that exceed the ordinary five-sense toolkit. Contemporary discussions of quantum effects, non-human intelligence, and the unfolding UAP disclosures raise questions she did not fully address in her lifetime.
One can accept her central political insight—that the individual is the smallest and most important minority, and that any ideology subordinating the person to the group is already on the road to tyranny—while still recognizing that deeper layers of reality may involve intelligences and conflicts that operate through, and sometimes against, human perception. The ancient pattern of collective sacrifice, scapegoating, and the demand to return humanity to a more controllable, primitive state appears in both her secular analysis and in older religious and historical accounts of spiritual warfare. The value of her work is not diminished by the recognition that the conflict may have additional dimensions.
The Primitive Mindset as a Weapon of Control
A mind trained only in group adjustment and emotional reactivity is easier to manage. Tribal belonging supplies the security that conceptual independence would otherwise provide. When large numbers of people are left unequipped for rational thought, the appeal of the collective intensifies. Public education systems that systematically under-emphasize conceptual training contribute to the result. Adults who cannot sustain an intelligent conversation about first principles are not primarily the victims of low intelligence. They are often the products of an intellectual formation that never equipped them to deal with reality on its own terms.
The cultural preference for the primitive—visible in certain styles, rituals, and the romanticization of pre-industrial life—serves the same end. A population oriented toward tribal safety is more readily directed by those who control the narrative of belonging and threat. The industrial and technological achievements that demonstrate the power of the individual mind become suspect precisely because they disrupt that control.
Conclusion: Intellectual Weapons for the Present Conflict
Return of the Primitive is not light reading. It is a sustained argument that the movements celebrated as progress in the late twentieth century were in fact a rejection of the mind and a deliberate step backward. The same dynamics continue under updated names. Understanding the argument does not require total agreement with every premise Rand advanced. It does require taking seriously the claim that the conflict between the productive individual and the collectivist demand for regression is the central political and cultural contest of the era.
The book supplies intellectual weapons. It names the pattern, traces its educational and philosophical roots, and refuses the moral blackmail that treats any defense of industry, reason, or individual rights as heartless in a moment when nightly news routinely presents the primitive as enlightened and the industrial as sinful; the essays remain a necessary point of reference.
Those who want the fuller application of these themes to character, production, and the defense of the individual will find related discussion in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The Politics of Heaven, which extends the analysis into deeper historical and spiritual dimensions of the same conflict, is forthcoming. The conversation Rand began is not finished. It is the conversation the present moment still requires.
Footnotes
1. Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 1999). Originally published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1971).
2. Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” in The Return of the Primitive.
3. Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” in The Return of the Primitive.
4. Peter Schwartz, essays on multiculturalism and gender tribalism, in the 1999 expanded edition of The Return of the Primitive.
5. Ayn Rand, “Global Balkanization,” in The Return of the Primitive.
6. Ayn Rand, “The Cashless Society,” in The Return of the Primitive; see also the money speech in Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).
7. Ayn Rand’s comments on Montessori education appear in the educational essays collected in The Return of the Primitive and related nonfiction.
Bibliography
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.
———. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971.
———. The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz. New York: Penguin, 1999.
———. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.
Schwartz, Peter. Additional essays in The Return of the Primitive (1999 edition).
Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Rich Hoffman 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.
Traveling, Independent Media, and Coming Home to Butler County Politics
I’ve been traveling most of the summer, so I’ve been doing a lot of catching up. You can’t help but notice the difference when you step away and then come back. I’ve been a little behind on the local politics, and I want to refer to some changes in the Butler County Republican Party at the chair level.[1] When you’re in a leadership position, there’s always somebody who thinks they could do it better than you. There’s always a critic. I tell people that’s part of leadership. You’re always going to have armchair quarterbacks. They’re going to criticize and say stuff. Sitting down and talking to people who don’t agree with you is hard. Winning them over to your side is hard.
In Butler County we’ve had strong Republican support for a long time. When you’re the weak party—as Democrats are in Ohio and in Butler County—the only realistic path to power is splitting the majority party. Some Republicans, once they lose the eye of the tiger, start looking for ways to lose so they can feel relevant again. That’s Rocky III territory. The champion takes the top for granted and gets knocked down by someone hungrier. Strong leadership holds the party together so the majority stays a majority.
Todd Hall, Armchair Quarterbacks, and the Reality of Party Leadership
I always liked Todd Hall. I remember when people would complain about him. When you’re the chairman, you’re the lightning rod. Todd managed to keep things moving by focusing on something everybody could rally behind: electing Republicans and keeping the county on a conservative track.[2] You need a big tent to win. Pure factions feel righteous and then lose. I’ve said it for years—I’ll take people who will come to the table, grab a pizza, and argue philosophy all day long. We have more in common than not. The alternative is handing Democrats the only hope they have: a fractured Republican Party.
Big Tent Republicans vs. Purity Factions: Why Winning Requires Team Building
Trump himself was not a lifelong Republican in the traditional sense. Elon Musk came into the MAGA orbit from a different background. I take people who show up and want to win. The opposite impulse—the desire to purge and purify until only the purest remain—is how majorities become minorities. Democrats understand this. Their only realistic path in Butler County is to encourage Republicans to fight each other, thereby opening up the general-election map.[3]
I’ve watched it. People who could not win through the front door start working the back door—undermining officeholders who did win their primaries, feeding narratives to the Journal-News, and treating every establishment Republican as the enemy. That is not strategy. That is revenge dressed up as principle. And it is exactly what hands seats to Democrats.
Nancy Nix: Fiscal Discipline, Quiet Influence, and Why I Stand Behind Her
I love Nancy Nix, and I mean that genuinely. I can tell you that in their household, back when the Trump question was still unsettled for some people, her husband and I were already on the same page. Nancy came around eventually because she is logical and watches results; not everyone always agrees with everything all the time. As a fiscally responsible officeholder, she reduced staff sizes when she was Treasurer and again when she was Auditor. She has run things in the black for a long time. That is top-level conservative performance.[4]
A lot of the people you see in the White House and in state-level Republican success came through networks that include Nancy Nix. I know some of the behind-the-scenes. Nancy has been part of important scaffolding on all levels. When I was last at the White House, her fingerprints are on so many important things. She won’t claim credit, but I will give it. If Vivek is a few points up in the averages, a meaningful share of the organizational credit in this region runs through people like her.[5]
George Lang: Friendship, Door-Knocking, and the Night He Took Down a Protester
I’ve always been affiliated with George Lang. We’ve developed a real friendship. I’ve seen him, Debbie, and the girls work events, knock doors, and hold the party together behind the scenes for decades. I like his family. I like the way he carries himself under pressure.[6]
Here’s a story for context. At the Savannah Center Trump event in the primary season, I had a VIP pass. Todd Hall did not want to be seen sitting in the front row with Trump at that stage—he was still in the John Kasich lane as the Ohio guy. Fair enough. George was there as a state representative. A protester started coming down the aisle toward Trump. George had told me earlier he would handle it if it came to that. When the moment arrived, George grabbed the guy, put him on the ground, and bought the security detail the second and a half they needed. That is not armchair commentary. That is a man who showed up when it was not yet popular and did the physical work.[7]
I was with George during the difficult period around John Boehner. We did not always agree on every personnel fight, but I have seen him under real pressure, and I trust the man. When purity voices treat George as the problem, they are discarding decades of actual organizational labor.
Michael Ryan, Don Dixon, and the Commissioners Who Actually Govern
I really like Michael Ryan. I spoke with him just this morning about something positive on the Republican side. He is a good conservative and a good man. The party endorsement and the primary result were decisive.[8] Don Dixon and I go back a long way—I used to race soapbox with his son Brent. Don has been a solid commissioner. These are not theoretical conservatives. These are people who show up, manage budgets, and keep the county functioning.
Sheriff Richard Jones and the Mayberry Standard
I like Sheriff Jones. I want the Butler County Sheriff’s Office to carry a bit of Mayberry and a bit of Walnut Grove—competent, present, and rooted in the community. His book is worth reading. It makes me proud of the department. When personal and political conflicts involving Roger Reynolds spilled into court and public narrative, it became another example of how intra-party score-settling distracts from the actual work of public safety.[9][10]
Revenge Politics, Back-Door Insurrection, and the Journal-News Narrative
Here is the pattern I keep seeing. People who could not win their primaries, or who lost influence, start working to tear down those who did win. They feed stories. They call solid conservatives RINOs. They treat every successful officeholder as the establishment enemy. The recent Journal-News framing of the November races and the tone around party leadership fits the pattern: soft language toward Democratic opportunities, little enthusiasm for defending the Republican incumbents and nominees who actually earned their spots.[11]
That is not leadership. Leadership is hard. Leadership is sitting across the table from people you do not fully agree with and still building a winning team. Leadership is defending the people the voters already chose in the primary so the general election is about Republicans versus Democrats, not Republicans versus Republicans. When party leadership sounds happier to give Democrats a seat at the table than to fight for the Republican majority, the voters notice.
The West Chester Lesson and What Happens When You Play Nice with the Wrong Strategy
We already lived through a version of this in the West Chester trustee and school board fights. People who thought the pure strategy would deliver instead watched Democrats and soft candidates benefit from Republican disarray. Mark Welch and others paid the price of a fractured effort. The same dynamic is available at the county level if the new posture continues.[12]
A Longer View: From Ross Perot to Trump to the Present
I’ve been doing this a long time. Election night 1992, I was at Ross Perot’s place with his daughters after helping with the big Dallas rally. We drove hard back to Ohio so I could vote. I learned then what happens when the majority party fractures or when outsiders and insiders refuse to build anything durable.[13] Through the Tea Party years and the early Trump years, I watched the same purity-versus-majority argument play out. The people who told me Trump was going nowhere were often the same voices now calling Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, or George Lang the problem. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.
What Butler County Actually Needs from Republican Leadership
Butler County is still a Republican stronghold if the party acts like one.[14] That requires leadership that understands the difference between primary competition and general-election self-sabotage. It requires people who will defend Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, George Lang, Sheriff Jones, and the other officeholders who have earned their places. It requires the discipline to sit down with people you do not fully agree with and still leave the room as a team.
I have stood by people when it was unpopular—Darbi Boddy when others told me to stay away, Roger Reynolds in earlier seasons, and the current slate of solid conservatives even when the purity voices are loud. I will continue to do so. The alternative is a party that defines itself only by what it is against, hands Democrats open seats, and then wonders why the majority slipped.
I love Nancy Nix. I respect George Lang, Michael Ryan, and Sheriff Jones. I want a big-tent Republican Party that wins. The people trying to burn it down to feel important again are not helping Butler County. They are helping the only people who benefit from Republican disunity: Democrats.
If you are mad at me over this, check back in a decade. I’ll still be right, and I won’t let you forget it. Have a good day.
Footnotes
[1] Journal-News (Butler County / Cox First Media), “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026. The piece surveys November 2026 county and judicial races and the competitive posture of both parties.
[2] Butler County Republican Party materials and contemporaneous reporting identify Todd Hall as long-serving Executive Chairman through at least the May 2026 primary cycle.
[3] The “big tent” versus purity debate is a long-standing tension within the Republican Party, both nationally and locally.
[4] Nancy Nix has served Butler County in fiscal offices (Treasurer and Auditor) with a consistent record of staff reductions, budget discipline, and low-tax philosophy.
[5] Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2026 Ohio gubernatorial campaign has drawn significant support from Butler County and statewide Republicans; local organizers, including Nancy Nix, have been credited with early and sustained organizational assistance.
[6] George Lang, Ohio State Senator, has been a consistent conservative voice and organizational workhorse in Butler County Republican politics for decades.
[7] The 2015 Trump campaign event at the Savannah Center took place during the Republican presidential primary, when many establishment figures remained cautious or opposed.
[8] Michael Ryan won the May 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with approximately 72 percent of the vote over long-time incumbent Cindy Carpenter after receiving a strong party endorsement.
[9] Richard K. Jones has served as Butler County Sheriff for multiple terms and has published a memoir detailing the department’s culture and operational philosophy.
[10] Roger Reynolds previously served as Butler County Auditor. His later political and legal conflicts became a public episode in local Republican politics.
[11] Journal-News, “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026.
[12] West Chester Township trustee and school-board contests in recent cycles illustrated the cost of intra-party warfare.
[13] Ross Perot’s 1992 independent presidential campaign and the subsequent Reform Party activity formed an early training ground for many later organizers.
[14] Butler County has maintained a structural Republican registration and performance advantage for decades, making internal cohesion the primary variable between comfortable majorities and avoidable losses.
Bibliography (full version is in the Word document and text files)
The complete formatted version with all footnotes properly placed is in the three files listed at the top. Download the .txt file, and you can copy the entire essay in one click.
Rich Hoffman 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.
