Category: Communisim

The Failure of Eric Swalwell: When danger always lurks behind power

I’ve always said that Eric Swalwell was a crook. From the moment he burst onto the national scene as a freshman congressman from California back in 2013, something about the guy never sat right with me. He was Nancy Pelosi’s right-hand man in so many ways—her attack dog on Trump, her reliable vote on every progressive cause, and the guy who seemed to relish every opportunity to grandstand against conservatives like me who just wanted honest government. Remember how he behaved during the Supreme Court nominations? The way he went after Brett Kavanaugh with that smug certainty, or how he hammered away at Trump for years on everything from Russia to January 6th? It was all so performative, so self-righteous, while the man himself was hiding a mountain of personal failings that made those accusations look tame by comparison. 

I mean, let’s start with the elephant in the room that everyone on Capitol Hill has known about for years: the Chinese honey pot named Christine Fang, or “Fang Fang” as she was affectionately called by those who knew her. This woman wasn’t some random flirt; she was a suspected Chinese intelligence operative who embedded herself in California politics like a tick. She helped Swalwell with fundraising for his 2014 reelection campaign, placed an intern in his office, and had what can only be described as an uncomfortably close relationship with him. The FBI briefed him on her in 2015, and he cut ties—publicly claiming he cooperated fully and that the case was closed. But come on. A congressman on the House Intelligence Committee sleeping with a foreign agent who was actively cultivating access to American politicians? That’s not just reckless; it’s a national security red flag the size of the Golden Gate Bridge. And yet, the media gave him a pass. Pelosi and the Democratic machine circled the wagons, and Swalwell kept rising through the ranks, preaching about ethics and women’s rights while his own conduct screamed hypocrisy. 

Fast forward to early April 2026, and suddenly the mask slips in spectacular fashion. Between April 9 and April 11, four women came forward accusing Swalwell of sexual misconduct—unsolicited explicit photos sent to their phones, non-consensual encounters while they were intoxicated, abuse of power with staffers and interns, and offers of political access in exchange for sex. The San Francisco Chronicle and CNN laid it all out: one former staffer detailed how he raped her when she was too drunk to consent, leaving her bruised and bleeding. Another spoke of waking up in a hotel room with no memory after a night out, only to realize what had happened. These weren’t random accusers; they were people who worked for him or crossed paths in his professional world. Then, just a week later, around April 14 or 15, a fifth woman, Lonna Drewes from Beverly Hills, went public with her story of a 2018 incident where she believes she was drugged and raped—classic Cosby-style horror, complete with choking and loss of consciousness. She described it in harrowing detail at a press conference, standing with the other women and vowing to report it to law enforcement. By then, Swalwell had already suspended his campaign for California governor—the race he was leading as a top Democratic contender—and soon after resigned from Congress altogether amid a House Ethics investigation and calls for his expulsion from both sides of the aisle. 

I wasn’t surprised one bit. I’ve been watching this guy for over a decade, and the pattern was always there. The same Eric Swalwell who loved to lecture America about Donald Trump’s alleged mistreatment of women was allegedly drugging and assaulting young women in his orbit while holding positions of immense power. The irony is thicker than the fog rolling off the Bay. He positioned himself as a progressive champion, a defender of the vulnerable, all while his staffers and associates whispered about his behavior behind closed doors. And let’s not forget his wife—how does someone in that position not know or at least suspect? The whole thing reeks of the kind of entitlement that comes with unchecked power in Washington. You get elected, you surround yourself with ambitious young interns and staffers in their 20s and 30s who are hungry for advancement, and suddenly the lines blur. It’s not hard to see how it happens: a late-night drink after a long day on the Hill, a flirty text on Snapchat, an offer to “help” someone’s career. But when it crosses into coercion, assault, or exploitation, it becomes something far darker. 

What really gets me—and what should scare every American—is the timing and the coordinated silence until it became politically convenient. These women didn’t just materialize out of nowhere in April 2026. Rumors had been swirling on Capitol Hill for years about Swalwell’s personal life. Everybody knew, or at least suspected. Nancy Pelosi, his longtime ally and mentor in the California Democratic machine, suddenly developed amnesia? Please. The same Democrats who rushed to defend him during the Fang Fang scandal years earlier turned on him like a pack of wolves the moment he became a threat to their control of the governor’s race. California Democrats were already scrambling in a crowded field with no clear frontrunner—Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, Xavier Becerra, and others jockeying for position. Swalwell was polling strongly, and his presence was complicating matters, especially as Republicans like Steve Hilton were gaining ground. I picked Steve Hilton early on; I even had him at my place of business here in Ohio to announce aspects of his run alongside other conservative voices. I told folks over a year ago that this shakeup was coming. Now, with Swalwell out, Hilton’s leading in polls, and the race is wide open. Coincidence? Not a chance. This was a calculated hit from inside the party to clear the field and protect their power structure. 

I’ve seen this playbook before, right here in my own backyard in Ohio. Take the Cindy Carpenter case in Butler County— a local commissioner who couldn’t handle the power and got called out for misconduct. Republicans didn’t circle the wagons; we held her accountable and moved on to someone who could do the job without the drama. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But Democrats? They protect their own until the political math changes. Swalwell wasn’t exposed because of some noble pursuit of justice for these women. He was exposed because he was running for governor and threatening the status quo. The media that had ignored or downplayed his ties to Fang Fang for years suddenly amplified every accusation. The same outlets that spent years attacking Trump over Access Hollywood or Stormy Daniels looked the other way on Swalwell until it suited the narrative. It’s selective outrage at its finest, and it erodes trust in the entire system.

Think about the broader culture this reveals. Politics attracts ambitious people, especially young staffers and interns flooding into state capitals and Washington, D.C. They’re in their 20s and 30s, working long hours, volunteering for campaigns, hoping to climb the ladder. Some are genuine public servants; others see it as a shortcut to power, money, and influence. How do you stand out in a sea of thousands of eager faces? Exceptional work is one way, but too often it’s by compromising—attending the right parties, accepting the “extra” invitations, blurring professional boundaries for that extra boost. I’ve talked to enough people who’ve been through it to know the temptation is real on both sides. Power is intoxicating. You’re no longer “Dad” or “Husband” at home; you’re “Congressman Swalwell,” the guy with staff calling you “sir” and donors throwing money at you. Your family doesn’t worship you like the political machine does. It’s easy to fall into the trap of late nights, flattery, and affairs that make you feel alive again. But it takes real integrity to resist, and Swalwell clearly didn’t have it. The same goes for plenty of others—Anthony Weiner sending explicit photos while married to a Clinton insider, or the countless scandals we’ve seen from both parties. It’s human nature amplified by proximity to power. 

Swalwell’s hypocrisy on this front is what sticks in my craw the most. He spent years weaponizing accusations against Trump—impeachment after impeachment, endless hearings, public shaming—all while allegedly engaging in the very behavior he condemned. He preached progressive values, women’s empowerment, and holding the powerful accountable, yet treated his own staff and associates like personal playthings. The unsolicited explicit photos, the drugged encounters, the abuse of authority—it’s the kind of thing that would have ended any Republican’s career instantly. But for Swalwell, it took a gubernatorial bid and internal party pressure to bring it to light finally. Even then, he categorically denied everything, calling the claims “flat false” and vowing to fight them. Fine, let the investigations play out—due process matters. But the pattern, combined with the Fang Fang mess, paints a picture of a man who was always more interested in self-preservation and advancement than in serving the public. 

And don’t get me started on the media’s role. For years, they carried water for Swalwell. They platformed him as a fresh face against Trump, ignored the spy scandal’s implications, and only turned when the Democrat establishment signaled it was time. It’s the same machine that protected Biden’s obvious decline until it couldn’t, or that downplays scandals on their side while amplifying anything on the right. This isn’t journalism; it’s narrative control. The public deserves better. We need a vetting process that actually works—real scrutiny of candidates’ personal lives, financial dealings, and associations before they get near power. But in a system where the press picks sides, that rarely happens until it’s too late or politically expedient.

Looking back, I remember watching Swalwell’s rise and thinking, “This guy is too slick for his own good.” He went from local prosecutor to Congress, landed on the Intelligence Committee despite the red flags, and became a fixture on cable news attacking conservatives. His wife had to have known about the wandering eye; the staffers whispered; the Hill insiders joked. Yet nothing stuck until April 2026. Now, with him out of Congress and the governor’s race in chaos, California Democrats are scrambling, and Republicans like Steve Hilton—who I backed early—are poised to capitalize. It’s a reminder that power corrupts, and absolute power in one-party strongholds like California corrupts absolutely. The women who came forward deserve justice, not to be used as pawns. But the real scandal is how long the system protected one of its own.

This isn’t isolated to Swalwell. It’s systemic. From local capitals to D.C., the temptations are everywhere. Young people enter politics with stars in their eyes, only to learn that climbing requires compromises. Staffers trade favors for access; politicians leverage their positions for personal gratification. Politics should be about service, not a lifestyle upgrade. When you see someone like Swalwell preaching against Trump while allegedly living the exact opposite, it confirms what I’ve long suspected: many in that bubble can’t handle the power. They’re weak, entitled, and dangerous to the republic.

The Fang Fang connection adds another layer of recklessness. A suspected Chinese spy with direct access? Helping pick interns and raise money? And Swalwell on Intelligence? It boggles the mind that he wasn’t removed sooner. The FBI knew, briefed him, and yet he stayed. Now, with fresh scrutiny amid the scandal, calls are growing to release those old files. Why the resistance? If he has nothing to hide, let it all out. But transparency has never been the Democrats’ value.

In the end, this whole saga should be a wake-up call. We can’t trust the process when it’s this rigged by insiders. The women spoke out when it mattered for the party machine, not necessarily for justice alone. Everybody knew, but nobody said anything until it served their interests. That’s the real betrayal—of the public, of women seeking fair treatment, and of the democrat ideals they claim to uphold. I’ve been saying it for years: Democrats like Swalwell aren’t just misguided; they’re often operating with a different set of rules. The hypocrisy, the cover-ups, the selective amnesia—it’s all part of maintaining power at any cost. California voters, and the rest of us watching, deserve representatives with integrity, not predators in suits. As more details emerge from the investigations, I hope the truth finally prevails over the politics. But based on history, I’m not holding my breath. The machine grinds on, and guys like Swalwell are just symptoms of a deeper rot.

Footnotes

¹ San Francisco Chronicle report on former staffer allegations, April 10, 2026.

² CNN investigation detailing four women’s accounts, including unsolicited photos and non-consensual encounters.

³ Axios original reporting on Fang Fang ties, December 2020 (updated context in 2026 coverage).

⁴ Coverage of Lonna Drewes press conference and fifth allegation, April 14-15, 2026.

⁵ Reports on Swalwell’s resignation and governor campaign suspension.

Bibliography for Further Reading

•  “Four women describe sexual misconduct by Rep. Eric Swalwell,” CNN, April 10, 2026.

•  “Ex-staffer says Rep. Eric Swalwell sexually assaulted her,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 10, 2026.

•  “Woman alleges violent sexual assault by Eric Swalwell,” CalMatters, April 14, 2026.

•  “How a suspected Chinese spy gained access to California politicians,” Axios, December 8, 2020.

•  “Eric Swalwell’s exit shakes up chaotic California governor’s race,” BBC, April 13, 2026.

•  “Trump endorses Republican Steven Hilton for California governor,” Washington Post, April 6, 2026.

•  Various AP, NYT, and Politico reports on the timeline of allegations and investigations, April 2026.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Iran Was Never In Control: The dumb speculators, consultants, and lazy reporters were wrong from the beginning–as they usually are

I had just come back from Washington, DC, where the streets were already buzzing with preparations for the big 250th anniversary celebrations of the United States this summer. T-shirts were everywhere, vendors hawking souvenirs for what promised to be one of the greatest patriotic displays in our history, and yet amid all that excitement, I couldn’t help but notice the gas prices hovering around three dollars and sixty cents to four dollars and ten cents from Cincinnati all the way up through the heart of the country. It wasn’t the six-dollar-a-gallon nightmare some of the big voices in the media had been screaming about just weeks earlier, but it was high enough to make people uneasy, especially with summer travel on the horizon and the weight of everything else going on in the world. I remember walking those sidewalks thinking to myself how quickly the narrative had shifted, and how right I had been from the very first seconds when the trouble with Iran started flaring up again. I said it then, and I’ll say it now: the Strait of Hormuz was never going to be the catastrophe they wanted us to believe it was. Iran was never in control, and President Trump knew exactly how to handle it. The price of oil would drop dramatically—down around forty-five dollars a barrel very soon, maybe even by Memorial Day weekend—and with it, the relief would ripple through every corner of the economy, from fries at the drive-thru to tires on your truck. 

Looking back, it all unfolded just as I had predicted hours after those initial Iranian provocations hit the news. People who get paid big money to analyze these things on cable shows and in think-tank papers were out there forecasting doom: gas at four, five, even six dollars a gallon by summertime, the Iranian situation dragging on for months, maybe even derailing the whole anniversary season. But I saw through it immediately. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow choke point carrying about a fifth of the world’s oil, had been threatened before, and history showed the pattern. Iran loves to rattle sabers, but they depend on those same waters for their own exports more than anyone. They weren’t about to turn off the tap permanently without shooting themselves in the foot. I told anyone who would listen—from my own circles to folks tuning into my commentary—that Trump only had to exercise America’s ability to secure the lanes, apply pressure through negotiations, and if necessary, block Iranian ports to keep the troublemakers in check. That’s exactly what happened. There were some talks, a brief window where Vice President JD Vance and others extended every reasonable mechanism for rationality, and when Iran refused—still wanting to provoke, execute, and pretend they held the cards—Trump moved decisively. The Navy went in, the blockade tightened, and the shipping lanes reopened faster than the doomsayers could pivot their scripts. By the time I’m writing this, the price of a barrel is already trending downward, and I have no doubt it will settle around that forty-five-dollar mark in short order, with gas prices following suit across the board. 

What amazed me most wasn’t just the outcome, but how few mainstream voices dared to say any of this from day one. I did. I’ve been consistent about it because I understand the players involved: Iran, China, Russia, North Korea—these are paper tigers at heart, regimes that create horse races and drama for lazy reporters and profit-driven interests. They bluff because that’s all they have left after years of internal rot. Iran’s people have been broken for decades under the weight of executions for the smallest dissent, forced dress codes, and a theocracy that punishes women for not wearing the right covering. They lack the unified will or the military punch to sustain a real blockade against determined American power. I’ve studied these dynamics long enough to know that when push comes to shove, they fold. Trump understood it too, and so did plenty of us who advised or observed from the outside. He wanted the Iranian people to have a chance to rise and run their own affairs without endless American entanglement as the world’s policeman. But when they couldn’t or wouldn’t stand for themselves after all the punishment they’d endured, we had to step in for the sake of global stability. A short, targeted action to neutralize the threat—that’s what leadership looks like. It wasn’t about occupation or endless war; it was about removing the bad actors so the rest of the world could breathe. 

To really appreciate why this resolution came so swiftly and why I was so confident it would, you have to look at the deeper history of the Strait of Hormuz, stories that don’t get told enough in the rush of twenty-four-hour news cycles. Take the Tanker War of the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq conflict. For eight brutal years, both sides attacked shipping in the Persian Gulf, laying mines and targeting neutral tankers. Iran threatened repeatedly to close the strait entirely, but they never followed through fully because their own oil exports depended on it. They harassed vessels with speedboats and mines, yet the flow continued, albeit disrupted. The United States got involved to protect neutral shipping, reflagging Kuwaiti tankers and escorting them through. And then came Operation Praying Mantis on April 18, 1988—a single day of decisive American naval action that should be required reading for anyone doubting our ability to secure those waters. After the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine, the U.S. Navy launched a retaliatory strike that destroyed two Iranian oil platforms, sank a frigate and a missile boat, crippled another frigate, took out several armed speedboats, and drove off Iranian jets. It was the largest surface engagement for the U.S. Navy since World War II, and it ended with Iran losing nearly half its operational fleet in hours. The message was clear: threats and asymmetric tactics might make headlines, but real power prevails quickly when applied with precision. That history echoed in 2026. Iran tried the same playbook—issuing warnings, laying mines, attacking merchant ships—but once Trump authorized the response, the strait was back open before the summer beach crowds even arrived. No stalemate, no prolonged crisis wrecking our economy or the midterms. Just decisive action rooted in precedent. 

This brings me to the real villains in the piece: the speculators and the media ecosystem that feeds off them. I know quite a few of these characters personally—the consultants, the hedge-fund types, the Wall Street voices who strut like peacocks claiming they can read the tea leaves better than anyone. They don’t know how to fry a potato into a French fry, let alone navigate the complexities of global energy, but they sure know how to profit from fear. In this case, they wanted oil prices to climb. They hyped every Iranian move as the end of cheap energy, justifying spikes that would ripple into everything from chicken nuggets to cookie oil to tires. Historical precedent shows how this works. During past flare-ups, like the 2008 run-up or earlier crises, speculators in futures markets amplified volatility far beyond supply-and-demand fundamentals. Studies from the IMF and others have pegged speculative demand shocks at contributing 10 to 35 percent to short-term price swings, sometimes more when fear dominates. They bet big on disruption, and the media amplifies it with breathless reports, creating a self-fulfilling loop in which prices detach from reality. Independent energy production in the United States—turbocharged under Trump’s first term by the shale revolution—made us net exporters and far less vulnerable, but the world still feels the effects of global market dynamics. China got caught in the middle, reliant on that chaotic flow, while Europe and others scrambled. Trump played it masterfully, turning the pressure back on Tehran without overcommitting American blood and treasure. Speculators lost their easy narrative, and prices are coming down reluctantly, exactly as I said they would. 

The media’s role in all this has been especially galling, and I’ve watched it for years. These are often lazy reporters who develop a few key contacts, grab lunch, and file stories with minimal effort. They slant against the current administration or big-government skeptics because it keeps their editors happy and their ten-minute workdays intact. In this Iranian episode, they clung to the old script: Trump bad, chaos inevitable, prices exploding by summer. They ignored the structural realities—such as America’s ability to ramp up domestic production quickly and the Navy’s proven track record in the Gulf. I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it here: these regimes are paper tigers propped up for drama. Lazy journalism loves a horse race, especially if it paints free-market policies or strong leadership in a negative light. Meanwhile, the globalists and certain Wall Street interests used the antagonism to reshape political order, profiting from the very chaos they helped stoke. Oil should never trade above a hundred dollars a barrel in a rational world; it belongs in the thirties or twenties when markets are truly open. Policy bottlenecks like the Strait are artificial, and removing them—as Trump did—unlocks freedom for everyone, not just us.

I’ve never been one to shy away from these truths, even when it meant standing alone against the chorus. From the moment the Iranian actions escalated, I laid it out plainly: this was never going to wreck the summer or our 2026 economy. The United States, with its energy dominance, could weather it and force the issue. China’s reliance on Middle Eastern stability became a liability, its machine now facing jeopardy from the very disruptions it once exploited. Trump’s approach—securing lanes, calling the bluff, and prioritizing American interests without becoming the world’s endless babysitter—has been a masterclass. Prices are falling, volatility is ebbing, and the villains who bet on bad news are scrambling. I doubt many will remember the details of this brief flare-up by the time the anniversary fireworks light up the White House grounds, but those of us who saw it clearly will. We understood that removing Iran as an economic threat wasn’t about war; it was about prosperity. The bad guys—speculators, media enablers, regime hardliners—got exposed, and the American people get the benefits: lower costs at the pump, stronger growth, and a summer of celebration unmarred by artificial crises.

There’s a larger lesson here about how the world really works versus the narratives sold to us. I’ve spent years observing these patterns, from energy markets to geopolitical chess. Regimes like Iran’s survive on fear and control, but they crumble under sustained pressure because their people are exhausted from the blanket-on-the-head mandates and worse. Speculators chase easy money off volatility, but they hate when reality reasserts itself quickly, as it did here. And the media? They adapt to fluid conditions by clinging to outdated scripts that favor big government or anti-Trump angles. Trump knew it all along, just as I did. He gave Iran every chance for peaceful self-reliance, but when that failed, decisive action followed. The Navy secured the lanes, the strait opened, and the price of oil headed south fast. By Memorial Day, the relief will be palpable everywhere—from grocery aisles to road trips. It was never going to be a stalemate; it was a calculated move to protect 2026’s promise.

Some might wonder why I keep emphasizing these points. It’s because I’ve seen the cost of ignoring them. A few weeks ago, while speculation ran wild, people were bracing for economic pain that never came. I told folks then: listen, position yourself accordingly, and you could profit handsomely. Some did, and good for them. Others clung to the fear. Next time, I hope more people pay attention.

I’ve been consistent because the patterns are obvious once you step back from the daily noise. Iran’s provocations were real but limited; their control was illusory. The strait’s importance is undeniable, yet history—from the Tanker War’s mine-laying to Praying Mantis’s swift rebuttal—shows that determined power reopens it without endless entanglement. Speculators thrive on the uncertainty, but fundamentals win when leadership calls the bluff. Media laziness perpetuates the fear because it sells, but truth-seekers cut through it. For China and others hooked on that regional chaos, this was a wake-up call. For America, it was validation of energy dominance and strategic clarity. Prices are dropping, the economy breathes easier, and the 250th anniversary can proceed without the shadow of inflated costs. I said it from the start, and events proved it. If you listened early, you likely made some smart moves. If not, there’s always next time.

Bibliography

•  Strauss Center. “Strait of Hormuz – Tanker War.” https://www.strausscenter.org/strait-of-hormuz-tanker-war/

•  History.com. “The Strait of Hormuz: A Timeline of Tensions.” Published March 13, 2026.

•  Wikipedia. “2026 Strait of Hormuz Crisis.”

•  Congressional Research Service. “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas…” March 11, 2026.

•  IMF Working Paper. “Oil Price Volatility and the Role of Speculation.” WP/14/218.

•  CFTC Report. “The Role of Speculators in the Crude Oil Futures Market.”

•  U.S. Navy Historical Center. “Operation Praying Mantis.”

•  Reuters and Bloomberg reports on 2026 oil price movements and de-escalation.

•  Additional historical analyses from National Interest and U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings on Tanker War and Praying Mantis.

•  White House and energy policy releases on U.S. shale production and energy dominance, 2026.

These sources provide the factual backbone for the historical and economic details sprinkled throughout, allowing readers to dig deeper and advance their own understanding of these fluid global dynamics.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Amy Acton is a Drunk Disaster: She’s not qualified to run down the street, let alone run the state of Ohio

I’ve never been a fan of Amy Acton during COVID. Yeah, I wouldn’t trust her to be in charge of a milk carton, let alone the state of Ohio. What she did during COVID was disastrous. Mike DeWine can apologize all he wants—you know he picked her. She was [his health director], and the state has not recovered from her policies since then. She basically followed Dr. Fauci’s guidelines to a tee, along with the CDC. 

There should have been a lot more questioning. We elect those people in part to protect us from centralized government overreach, and the CDC was way over its skis. All the challenges in court have gone against many of the violations the CDC and state officials put forth. They had no right to do what they did, either at the federal level or in the states, and in court, they largely lost. In 2020, they lost key cases. 

Amy Acton locked down, listened to everything they said, and did everything they said—including masking, social distancing, the ridiculous lockdowns—all while questions swirled about gain-of-function research, which Dr. Fauci knew about, and the release from a Chinese lab. It was only supposed to be transmissible among bats, but the gain-of-function made it jump to people. There was a lot of manipulation, a lot of bad stuff with COVID-19. And it killed people. She played her role in it. She wrecked the state. She harmed people in the process. And she was horrendous in all facets. I’ll never forgive her for what she did.

But I find it ironic that she is upset at the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign, and her husband is upset because it’s all about politics—this 2019 release of the police visit to their house. She and her husband, Amy Acton and Eric, got into a fight over her working long hours. They had been drinking. She pulled a mirror off the wall and shattered the glass. Then she wanted to leave the house. He talked her out of it because she was going to drive drunk. Someone in the house called the police. Police arrived and defused the situation. And this was while she was the health director, which I don’t recall hearing at the time. I remember the news telling us what a great lady she was when she was locking down the state because they were in love with Dr. Fauci and centralized authority. She played it to a tee, and no one talked about this police report. 

Now it’s out because she’s running for governor. I don’t know why—she doesn’t have a good track record on anything. And yet she seems to be the best option Democrats have. So they’re trotting her out, hoping people will like her bedside manner during COVID—very bad miscalculation on their part, the Democrat Party in Ohio. But I guess if you don’t have anything else going on, you go with the stringy-haired Grateful Dead concert-goer, which is what she reminds me of. Every time I look at her face, I think of some stringy-haired person wearing a tarp at a music festival covered in mud because she’s been strung out for days.

And when people say “that’s not fair, she’s a doctor,” well, she’s also someone who got caught in this incident involving drinking and meds. A very stable person? I’ve been married for closer to 40 years—39 years now. My wife and I have never had the police come out to our house to break up a fight. It never happened. Anybody, handling your life—if you have that kind of thing happening and you can’t handle your affairs at home and you’re that reckless where police get called—it’s on your record. You’re not qualified to be governor. You might not go to jail, but you’ve shown you definitely can’t handle yourself, your family, or your liquor.

There’s a whole lot of bad things that come out of this story, and they want to make it all about “Vivek Ramaswamy should not have told anybody—this campaign is just being mean. It’s all about politics. We’re just trying to tear her down.” She gave him ammunition. She’s the one who did it. She’s the drunk one; they had to call the police on her, and she’s the one who wanted to drive drunk while she was working for the DeWine administration—before she had some gift of leftist redemption aligned with Dr. Fauci. No wonder she was so eager to appease everything he said, lock down the state, and hope all this stuff goes away so she could repair her public image. The story didn’t get out in 2019, but now it’s out because she’s running for governor. What do you expect? It’s gonna happen.

So when I call her a reckless person, not qualified to handle things, I’m basing that on my own experience. I’ve been married a long time, and the police never had to come break up my wife and me. And if they did, I probably wouldn’t be qualified to give speeches like this. You can’t manage your life like this.

This wasn’t 30 years ago—it was 2019. She was in public office at the time, and she was going to get in a car and drive drunk. Her husband had to talk her out of it, and that’s what they admitted to after the police came. That’s the kind of person who wants to be governor of Ohio. She can’t run her family, and she certainly can’t run a state. And she’s proven a track record that she takes all her orders straight from the CDC, which came straight out of the World Health Organization and Chinese Communist policy—enacted through influences like Bill Gates money and a complicit media that wanted to sell COVID. She hooked into it and made Ohio a state that many blue states followed because of her policies. She started the initiative.

Only when the DeWine administration was sued over unconstitutional lockdowns and policies enacted by Amy Acton did Mike DeWine back off and start opening up the state. He had some losses in court to get there, and he knew he was gonna lose those cases because they were major constitutional violations. The Supreme Court had to kick in. I remember the conversations—I was on many conference calls at the time with the governor and people close to the Supreme Court case. So I know exactly what went on behind the scenes. That was a disaster. Amy Acton had major egg on her face at the end of that whole escapade. People were mad at her. They were outside her house—protesting, not bringing violence, but really mad. She had to resign in disgrace, hide, and lick her wounds. 

Only six years later, she is coming back out to run for governor—as if everyone’s going to forget what she did in COVID and now this police case. When you bring it up, she wants to say maybe you’re just being political. Hey, if Vivek Ramaswamy has something in his past, people are going to bring it up. They throw everything at him—he made his money too aggressively, wasn’t always hardcore Republican, his parents are from India, born in Cincinnati. But he’s a good guy, likable, qualified. His wife is super nice. He’s a good family person. I’ve met him, talked to him lots of times—he manages his businesses, his life at home, and can be trusted to run the state of Ohio as governor. He’ll play well with the legislature and get a lot done. There’s a lot to be excited about.

Amy Acton? Not even remotely close. She can’t run down her sidewalk, let alone a state. I was joking a little when I said a milk carton. I don’t think she can run anything. She has no proven track record of running anything—only of going out sounding like a stringy-haired hippie quoting Joseph Campbell and saying we all love each other. Let’s wear a mask, stay safe, stay home, socially distance, and shut down the economy. We have to “drive down the curve.” A bunch of measurements that were completely falsified, ridiculous, hand-picked data she used every day. It was embarrassing to Mike DeWine. I always felt sorry for Jon Husted because he had to go out there as lieutenant governor and be a part of that, even though you could see it on his face. It’s something he would love to have not been a part of. But you’re in the DeWine administration, and Amy Acton was the health director listening to the CDC. Nobody knew at the time how crooked it was—although I said so. It was unconstitutional; they had no right to do it. I said so when everybody else was saying otherwise. Guess who was right in the opening hours of all those mandates? Everyone eventually caught on. The Supreme Court did exactly what I said it would do. Constitutionally, DeWine had egg on his face, and Amy Acton resigned in disgrace because everyone was ready to string her up. She ruined their lives. 

And now you find out she has problems at home. She drinks, can’t hold her liquor, and had the police called on her in 2019. That’s the kind of person she is. Is it fair to judge somebody like that? You bet it is. I don’t drink, and I’m just saying—if you go out there and have problems like that and it’s not in the ancient past, that’s a lapse in judgment that shows you can’t handle your affairs. When someone’s so scared about your behavior that they call the police on you—and it’s a family member—and you’ve got problems, there’s no way David Pepper or anybody else can explain it away. She brought it on herself. She’s the one who made it all happen, and she can only blame herself.

When you’re in a hard campaign, of course, it’s gonna come out. She’s crazy to think it won’t—and I’m sure there’s more. What I’ve said about her being a complete derelict only lends more credence to my thoughts about her initially. Anybody who thinks she deserves the benefit of the doubt—there’s probably more stories. If you show lapses in judgment once, you’re probably going to do it twice. And she had a big, important office at the time and still had a lapse in judgment. She was on medication that she didn’t even know how much she had taken—and she’s supposed to be a doctor. How is she equipped to advise about anything?

Yeah, it’s a big deal. She’s not qualified again—she’s not qualified for anything. Should she be thrown in jail? She could join the club of many people who can’t manage their lives very well. But you certainly don’t elect them to run the state. You certainly don’t make them governor. She’s a disaster. As I said, the lockdown lady is a disaster of epic proportions, and this police report only chronicles part of the history that we’re ever going to find out about. But there’s a police record on it, and if your governor has one, you probably shouldn’t be voting for her. She’s a disaster.

Definitely don’t vote for her. Vote for Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s the guy, and he’s certainly the best pick, I’d say, anywhere in the country, let alone in Ohio. 

Bibliography

1.  NBC News. “Police responded to a report of ‘domestic dispute’ at Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s home.” April 11, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/amy-acton-police-domestic-dispute-ohio-governor-candidate-home-rcna269188

2.  Ohio Capital Journal. “Amy Acton’s team defends 2019 police visit as a ‘simple argument’ amid GOP criticism.” April 15, 2026. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/04/15/amy-actons-team-defends-2019-police-visit-as-a-simple-argument-amid-gop-criticism/

3.  Reason. “Ohio Judge Deems the State’s COVID-19 Lockdown Arbitrary, Unreasonable, and Oppressive.” May 20, 2020. https://reason.com/2020/05/20/ohio-judge-deems-the-states-covid-19-lockdown-arbitrary-unreasonable-and-oppressive/

4.  Reason. “Another Judge Rules That Ohio’s COVID-19 Lockdown Is Illegal.” June 12, 2020. https://reason.com/2020/06/12/another-judge-rules-that-ohios-covid-19-lockdown-is-illegal/

5.  The Guardian. “Dr. Amy Acton resigns amid backlash against Ohio’s lockdown after leading coronavirus fight.” June 12, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/dr-amy-acton-resigns-after-helping-lead-ohio-aggressive-fight-against-coronavirus

6.  State News. “Lawyer Who Challenged Health Orders Says He’s OK Playing Role in Acton’s Departure.” August 14, 2020. https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2020-08-14/lawyer-who-challenged-health-orders-says-hes-ok-playing-role-in-actons-departure

7.  Bricker & Eckler LLP. “Governor DeWine and Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton Issue ‘Stay at Home’ Order.” March 23, 2020. https://www.bricker.com/employment-law-report/governor-dewine-and-ohio-department-of-health-director-dr-amy-acton-issue-stay-at-home-order

8.  Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” (Overview of candidates, including Amy Acton as the Democratic nominee and Vivek Ramaswamy as the Republican frontrunner.) Accessed April 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ohio_gubernatorial_election

9.  The Columbus Dispatch and other outlets (various 2026 articles on the intensifying race and attacks between Ramaswamy and Acton).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

It Was Always Only Going To Be, Vivek Ramaswamy: Amy Acton, the Lockdown Lady is a complete and total disaster

The excitement I feel about Vivek Ramaswamy running for governor of Ohio is not some fleeting campaign cheer. It is a deep, personal conviction rooted in years of watching Ohio politics from the inside, knowing the players, and seeing what has been stalled under the current administration. When I first learned Vivek wanted to run, it felt like a natural extension of everything I have observed about effective leadership in this state. I have known some of the people working quietly in the background on his behalf, and I have seen how the legislative agenda that has been bottled up under Mike DeWine would finally break loose under someone with Vivek’s energy, vision, and willingness to align with the changes happening at the national level. I have talked with Vivek directly about these things, and every conversation reinforces my belief that he is the right person at the right time.

I have been following Ohio politics for decades, and I have seen governors come and go. Some were solid, some were centrist placeholders, and a few were outright disasters. Mike DeWine has been a steady hand in many ways, but he has also represented the old guard that plays it safe, avoids bold moves, and leaves too many good ideas on the table because they might rock the boat with the establishment. That is where Vivek Ramaswamy stands apart. He is not a career politician. He built real businesses, created jobs, and proved he can execute under pressure. I see him as the perfect fit for the governor’s mansion because he brings fresh thinking to economic expansion, regulatory reform, and the kind of pro-growth policies that Ohio desperately needs after years of incrementalism. When he is in that seat, I believe we will see a vigorous, aggressive push on everything from attracting new industry to streamlining government—things that have been talked about but never fully delivered.

The primary process right now, in the spring of 2026, is noisy, as primaries always are. You have critics throwing everything at Vivek—his Indian heritage, how he made his money, his youth. I have heard it all, and I dismiss most of it as the predictable noise that comes when someone surges to the front. I supported Donald Trump long before he announced his first run in 2015. I was with him back in 1999, when he and Pat Buchanan were battling it out in the Reform Party. I have watched this cycle repeat itself with Reagan, with Trump, and now with Vivek. People who are frontrunners always draw fire. The media loves to amplify the drama because it sells advertising. Pollsters release numbers that seem tight because they sample in ways that lean one direction or another. But I have been around long enough to know that spring polling in a primary year is not the final story. By July and August, things clarify dramatically. The peripheral candidates fade, the serious ones consolidate, and the voters who matter—the ones who show up in primaries—make their choice based on substance, not sound bites.

I have spoken with Vivek about the critics, including those questioning his background or wealth. His response was straightforward and mature: if everyone is always on your side, something is wrong. That is the mark of someone who understands leadership. You do not get rattled by the noise. You win people over with results. Vivek has shown he can do that. He has been out speaking at Lincoln dinners, fundraising events, and town halls across the state. He is articulate, energetic, and has a strong partner in his wife. Those are the qualities that translate to governing. I have watched him handle crowds, including the occasional boo from a handful of people who had too much to drink at a St. Patrick’s Day event at an Irish pub where he made an unannounced appearance. The cheers far outnumbered the jeers, and he took it in stride. That is the kind of poise Ohio needs in the governor’s office.

On the other side, the Democrats’ best option is Amy Acton. That alone tells you how weak their bench is. Acton was the face of Ohio’s COVID lockdowns, and her record is one of economic devastation and overreach. She has a one-trick pony: “I’m a doctor, I care about health.” But when you look at the results, her policies crushed businesses, schools, and families. The 2019 police incident involving her husband or a family member only adds to the picture of someone whose personal life has intersected with public scrutiny in ways that raise questions about judgment. I have followed her career closely, and every time she speaks, she reinforces why she should not be anywhere near the governor’s mansion again. Polling showing her competitiveness is skewed by sampling in heavily Democratic areas like Cuyahoga County, where the same lockdown supporters still hold on to nostalgia for her “bedside manner.” But real-world results matter more than nostalgia. Ohio cannot afford another round of that.

The horse race today looks tighter than it will be in a few months because primaries are designed to be messy. You have candidates like Casey, the car guy, and Nick Fuentes-style voices on the fringes throwing darts, trying to peel off a few percentage points by questioning Vivek’s heritage or his business success. That is standard primary theater. I remember the same thing with Trump—people saying he was too much of an outsider, too wealthy, too whatever. Reagan faced it too; he was a former Democrat who had to prove himself to the base. I have never been anything but a Republican, but I respect people who evolve toward conservatism because they see the failure of the alternative. Vivek has been a Republican from early on, and he brings conservative principles with the added advantage of being young, articulate, and unburdened by decades of insider baggage. He is not a middle-grounder. He is the kind of conservative who can actually get things done because he knows how to talk to business leaders, legislators, and everyday voters.

I have roots in this state’s politics. I have consulted with candidates, watched the legislature up close, and seen how the Senate and House work together—or fail to—under different governors. Vivek already has strong relationships there. He has been building them for years through events and direct conversations. When he wins the primary, which I fully expect, those relationships will accelerate. The legislative agenda that has been stalled will move. Economic expansion will follow because business leaders trust someone who has built companies himself. Trump’s endorsement is not just symbolic. It is practical. Trump will campaign in Ohio in 2026 the way he campaigned for president because he needs strong Republican majorities at the state level to support his national agenda. He will be on the ground with Vivek, and that combination will be unstoppable.

Critics who say Vivek does not have full Republican support are the same voices who said the same about Trump in 2015 and 2016. They are lazy analysts who read polls taken in Democrat-heavy zip codes and declare the race close. Real polling—the kind that matters—is what happens when Vivek walks into a packed Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day, and the crowd cheers louder than the handful of boos. That is the energy that wins primaries and general elections. Casey the car guy and the fringe voices will get their 7 or 8 percent, but they will not have the resources, the organization, or the broad appeal to compete once the field narrows. Independents and traditional Republicans will consolidate behind the frontrunner who has Trump’s backing and a proven track record of execution.

I have been through enough cycles to know how this plays out. The Tea Party movement evolved into the MAGA movement because people got tired of centrists who talked conservatively but governed like the other side. Vivek represents the next step: a young, articulate conservative who is not afraid to challenge the status quo. He has the temperament to win over skeptics without compromising principles. His wife is a strong partner in the effort. Together, they project the kind of stability and vision Ohio needs after years of incremental leadership.

The contrast with Amy Acton could not be sharper. She is the lockdown lady who turned Ohio’s economy into a cautionary tale. Her policies hurt working families, small businesses, and schools in ways we are still recovering from. The idea that polling shows her even close is a function of media hype and skewed samples. When the real campaign begins, when Trump is in the state campaigning like it is 2024 all over again, and when Vivek is out there speaking directly to voters about jobs, freedom, and growth, the numbers will shift dramatically. That is how primaries work. The noise in spring gives way to clarity by summer.

I am excited because I see the potential for real change. I have talked with Vivek about the critics, about the primary grind, and about what governing Ohio would look like. He gets it. He knows leadership means winning people over, not just preaching to the choir. He has the resources, the relationships, and the resolve to deliver. When he is in the governor’s mansion, we will finally see the vigorous economic expansion that has been promised but never fully realized. The peripheral discussions—the heritage questions, the wealth attacks, the fringe candidates—will fall away quickly once the primary is over. Republicans will unify because the alternative is unacceptable.

That is why I support Vivek Ramaswamy without hesitation. I have been a Republican my entire life, rooting for the party even as a kid. I have watched outsiders like Trump and Reagan prove the skeptics wrong. Vivek fits that mold, but with the added advantage of being a conservative from the beginning. He is the clear frontrunner for good reason. The primary process is doing its job—vetting him, testing him, and ultimately strengthening him. By the time the general election arrives, the choice will be obvious to anyone paying attention. Ohio cannot afford another lockdown-era disaster. It needs leadership that builds, not restricts. Vivek Ramaswamy is that leader.

The horse race today is a theater. The real race will be decided by voters who show up, who listen to the candidates, and who remember what Ohio went through under the previous administration. I have confidence in the outcome because I have seen Vivek in action, talked with him personally, and watched the pieces fall into place. The critics will keep talking, but the results will speak louder. This is going to be a good year for Ohio, and I am excited to be part of it.

Footnotes

1.  Ohio Secretary of State records and public reporting on the 2026 gubernatorial primary field, including Vivek Ramaswamy’s announcement and early polling trends as of April 2026.

2.  Public statements and campaign events featuring Vivek Ramaswamy at Lincoln dinners and St. Patrick’s Day gatherings in Ohio, 2025–2026.

3.  Amy Acton’s tenure as Ohio Department of Health Director during COVID-19 lockdowns, documented in state economic impact reports and legislative hearings.

4.  2019 police incident involving Amy Acton and a family member, as reported in local Ohio news outlets and public records.

5.  Donald Trump’s endorsement of Vivek Ramaswamy for Ohio governor was announced in early 2026 campaign communications.

6.  Historical polling data from Gallup and Rasmussen on voter ID support and election integrity measures in Ohio, 2024–2026.

7.  Ohio legislative records on stalled bills under the DeWine administration, contrasted with potential reforms under a Ramaswamy governorship.

Bibliography

•  Ohio Secretary of State. 2026 Gubernatorial Primary Candidate Filings and Polling Summaries.

•  Ramaswamy, Vivek. Campaign speeches and public appearances, Ohio Lincoln dinners, 2025–2026.

•  Acton, Amy. Ohio Department of Health records and COVID policy impact assessments, 2020–2021.

•  Local news archives (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch). Coverage of the 2019 Acton family incident and the 2026 campaign developments.

•  Trump, Donald. Official endorsement statements for the 2026 Ohio governor race.

•  Pew Research Center and Gallup. Polling on election security and voter ID, 2024–2026.

•  Ohio Legislative Service Commission. Bill status reports under DeWine administration, 2022–2026.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Getting ‘The Right Stuff’ Again in American Manufacturing: NASA needs a lot more than bold talk to beat China to the Moon

The recent interview between Fox News host Jesse Watters and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, which aired amid the high-stakes momentum of the Artemis program, captured more than just technical difficulties with an earpiece that briefly cut out audio during a live segment. It encapsulated a deeper tension roiling American aerospace ambitions: the urgent race to establish a permanent lunar presence before China, set against decades of bureaucratic drift, cultural shifts in the workforce, and policy choices that prioritized social engineering over raw engineering excellence. Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur and commercial astronaut who assumed the role of NASA’s 15th administrator in December 2025 after President Trump’s nomination and swift Senate confirmation, has injected a dose of private-sector urgency into the agency. Yet the exchange with Watters—where questions about beating China to a sustained moon base prompted the glitch—sparked immediate online speculation about whether it was a genuine malfunction or narrative control. Those who follow space policy closely understand the subtext: the United States holds a lead today, but sustaining it demands confronting uncomfortable truths about how DEI-driven mandates, union-influenced work cultures, and regulatory bloat have eroded the very foundations that once propelled America to the moon in under a decade during the Apollo era. 

To appreciate the stakes, one must revisit NASA’s trajectory since the glory days of Apollo 11 in 1969. That achievement, born of Cold War necessity and a national commitment to excellence under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, saw the agency operate with a singular focus: land humans on the moon and return them safely. The program succeeded through relentless innovation, round-the-clock engineering, and a workforce ethos that tolerated risk in pursuit of national objectives. By contrast, the post-Apollo decades brought complacency, budget constraints, and the rise of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station as routine operations rather than frontier-pushing endeavors. Human spaceflight stagnated, with the shuttle program ending in 2011 after the Columbia and Challenger tragedies highlighted safety concerns but also exposed layers of bureaucracy. Enter the Obama administration in 2009, which inherited a Constellation program already strained but pivoted sharply. In a 2010 Al Jazeera interview, then-NASA Administrator Charles Bolden articulated what he described as one of President Obama’s top priorities for the agency: reaching out to the Muslim world to highlight historic contributions to science, math, and engineering. The White House quickly clarified that this was not NASA’s foremost mission—emphasizing inspiration for children and international partnerships instead—but the remark crystallized a broader reorientation. Funding for human exploration was curtailed in favor of commercial partnerships and Earth science, while SLS (Space Launch System) development, mandated by Congress as a jobs program across multiple states, ballooned in cost and timeline. By 2012-2013, as the administration emphasized diversity and inclusion initiatives across federal agencies, NASA and its contractors began integrating DEI frameworks into hiring, training, and performance evaluations. Executive performance plans incorporated DEI metrics, and contractors faced pressure to align with equity action plans that emphasized demographic targets over merit-based selection. 

These policies did not emerge in isolation. Across aerospace and manufacturing sectors, similar mandates proliferated, often tied to federal contracts worth billions. NASA’s 2022 Equity Action Plan, for instance, embedded DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) requirements into mission leadership selection, mentorship programs, and supplier diversity goals. While proponents argued that diverse teams foster innovation—as evidenced by claims about the Mars Curiosity rover mission, where varied perspectives allegedly enhanced problem-solving—critics pointed to measurable performance drag. OpenTheBooks analyses from the period revealed NASA allocating tens of millions to DEI-specific contracts and training between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, even as core programs like Artemis faced delays. Boeing and SpaceX, major NASA partners, navigated these pressures amid their own unionized workforces and supplier chains, where compliance sometimes trumped speed. The result? Extended timelines and cost overruns that dwarfed Apollo’s efficiency. Artemis I, the uncrewed SLS test flight, finally launched in 2022 after years of slippage; Artemis II, the crewed lunar flyby, occurred in early 2026 following further postponements linked to technical issues, hydrogen leaks, and integration challenges. Cumulative costs for the program through 2025 exceeded $93 billion according to NASA’s Office of Inspector General, with SLS launches now priced at around $4 billion each—far beyond initial projections of $500 million. These figures reflect not just inflation or complexity but systemic inefficiencies: multilayered oversight, “safety-first” cultures that sometimes masked risk aversion, and a workforce environment where political correctness and work-from-home mandates during COVID exacerbated disconnects between salaried administrators and shop-floor technicians. 

From an insider’s perspective in aerospace manufacturing—where physical hardware must meet unforgiving tolerances for flight—the cultural erosion becomes glaring. Large primes and their tiered suppliers adopted elements of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the 1980s and 1990s, inspired by Japan’s post-war industrial miracle. Taiichi Ohno’s lean principles emphasized waste elimination, just-in-time inventory, and the Andon cord: a mechanism empowering any line worker to halt production upon spotting a defect, triggering immediate problem-solving by cross-functional teams. In Japanese facilities, this system thrived on a cultural bedrock of exceptional work ethic—deep bows at convenience stores, meticulous attention to detail in every task, and a societal emphasis on collective diligence rooted in post-war reconstruction values. Workers viewed line stops as a matter of quality and the customer, not as excuses for downtime. NUMMI, the 1984 Toyota-GM joint venture in Fremont, California, demonstrated that these principles could be transplanted to American soil, transforming a dysfunctional GM plant into a high-performing operation through rigorous training, respect for workers, and a kaizen (continuous improvement) mindset. Yet scaling this across U.S. aerospace proved elusive, largely due to entrenched differences in labor culture. 

American manufacturing, particularly in union-heavy sectors like aerospace and autos, evolved differently. Labor unions, while securing wages and protections, often fostered adversarial dynamics that prioritized job security and grievance processes over rapid resolution. The United Auto Workers (UAW), for example, navigated the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009, yet patterns persisted: when issues arose—defective parts, process deviations—responses frequently involved slowdowns, Netflix viewing on phones during waits, or leveraging downtime for personal pursuits rather than pursuing aggressive root-cause fixes. This contrasts sharply with TPS’s “stop to fix” ethos, where Japanese teams swarm problems relentlessly. In aerospace, where suppliers cascade behaviors from primes like Boeing or Lockheed, the ripple effects compound. During the COVID-era mandates, remote work for administrators clashed with the impossibility of “building stuff” from home, revealing the fragility of cultures detached from physical production. Safety protocols, essential after historical tragedies, sometimes became pretexts for caution that bordered on paralysis, inflating costs and timelines. A recent tour of NASA facilities underscored this: late on a Saturday night, parking lots sat half-empty, with activity levels insufficient for the compressed schedules needed to outpace rivals. Contrast this with SpaceX’s Hawthorne and Boca Chica operations, where engineers and technicians work extended shifts, holidays included, driven by founder Elon Musk’s “hardcore” ethos of iteration and urgency. The Falcon and Starship programs demonstrate that meritocratic, high-engagement cultures can deliver reusable hardware at a fraction of traditional costs, pressuring NASA and legacy contractors to adapt. 

The geopolitical dimension amplifies these internal frailties. China’s lunar ambitions are no secret and proceed with authoritarian efficiency. Having landed robotic missions on the far side of the moon and established the Tiangong space station, Beijing aims to achieve a crewed landing by 2030 using the Long March 10 rocket, Mengzhou spacecraft, and Lanyue lander. Follow-on plans include an International Lunar Research Station (with Russia) by 2035, featuring habitats, resource utilization, and sustained presence near the south pole. Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar program, has outlined aggressive resource-development goals, unhindered by the democratic debates or union negotiations that constrain the U.S. As of April 2026, NASA’s Artemis architecture—post-Isaacman’s overhaul—targets crewed landings in 2028 via Artemis III or IV, pivoting from the canceled Lunar Gateway to direct south pole infrastructure: habitats, pressurized rovers, nuclear power, and ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) for oxygen and construction. NASA’s Ignition event in March 2026 laid out a $20-30 billion, multi-phase plan over seven to ten years for a base that supports month-long crew stays, leveraging commercial partners like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Yet without cultural acceleration, China’s state-directed workforce—operating under conditions that Americans might deem “unhealthy” but that yield results—could close the gap. The lead is “too great” only if maintained; hesitation invites reversal. 

Isaacman’s leadership signals a potential inflection. A veteran of the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn missions, he brings entrepreneurial grit, having overseen infrastructure demolitions at the Marshall Space Flight Center to modernize for Trump-era goals. The Watters interview, despite the glitch (deemed technical by most accounts, not evasion), highlighted Artemis II’s successes and Mars-forward experiments. But sustaining momentum requires a broader resurrection of the American manufacturing base. This means rejecting leniency toward policies that dilute merit—hiring, promotions, and evaluations rooted in competence rather than quotas. It demands seven-day operations, holiday shifts without complaint, and full parking lots at 3 a.m. Safety must remain paramount, but not as a shield for disengagement; engaged teams, as SpaceX proves, reduce errors through vigilance rather than bureaucracy. Unions supporting political shifts (many backed Trump in recent cycles) face a reckoning: adapt to competitive realities or risk irrelevance as smaller, agile players—Firefly, Blue Origin, and commercial upstarts—overtake sluggish giants. Suppliers must follow suit, cascading urgency downward rather than mirroring top-down complacency. 

Historical parallels abound. The original space race demanded Apollo-era grit: engineers sleeping under desks, welders iterating prototypes until flawless, a nation unified against Soviet threats. Today’s competition, while economic and scientific rather than purely military, carries strategic weight. Lunar resources—helium-3 for fusion, water ice for propellant, regolith for construction—could dictate cislunar dominance, influencing satellite networks, planetary defense, and future Mars missions. An American flag on the first sustained base is not symbolism but necessity, setting norms for celestial governance amid rising multipolarity. Sacrificing lives recklessly is unacceptable, yet charging forward with calculated risk mirrors historical precedents: D-Day assaults or Pacific island-hopping campaigns where objectives justified intensity. NASA’s suppliers, from avionics to propulsion, must internalize this; half-asleep workers awaiting problem resolution or LinkedIn job-hunting administrators undermine the mission.

My book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (2021), anticipated these manufacturing and cultural crossroads. Hard-learned truths from COVID—when intent behind policies crystallized as micromanagement and reduced output—demand a return to basics: merit over mandates, engagement over entitlement, innovation over regulation. Trump’s second term, with Isaacman at the helm, has already accelerated Artemis restructuring, but longevity matters. Republican continuity post-2028 ensures that policies endure beyond a single administration, preventing a reversion to pre-2025 drift. This is not partisan rhetoric but pragmatic necessity for a workforce revival that dusts off “the right stuff”—the toughness, curiosity, and dedication that defined mid-20th-century America.

In aerospace, where atmospheric or orbital flight shares the same adventurous DNA, success hinges on compressing timelines rather than extending them. Japan’s lean techniques succeeded not through rote imitation but cultural alignment; America must forge its hybrid, leveraging individual initiative within disciplined systems. Parasite-like drags—DEI overhead, union-enabled slowdowns, safety-as-excuse—must yield to vitality. Recent conferences with major manufacturers reveal lingering Toyota envy without the execution; presentations touting incremental lean gains ignore root cultural mismatches. Smaller innovators will force adaptation, as they already do via commercial crew and cargo.

Ultimately, the moon base vision—sustainable habitats and a continuous presence akin to the ISS but extraterrestrial—demands more than hardware. It requires human capital aligned with purpose: passionate, grid-tough teams working around the clock because the frontier calls. China pushes aggressively, accepting trade-offs for primacy; the U.S. can lead by reclaiming its edge without mirroring authoritarianism, simply by unleashing latent American ingenuity. The Watters-Isaacman moment, glitch and all, reminds us that the stakes are real. With policies favoring merit, excellence, and intelligence (MEI) supplanting prior frameworks, and commercial pressure from SpaceX et al., NASA can reclaim leadership. The American manufacturing base, long crippled by self-inflicted wounds, stands poised for resurrection—if leaders and workers alike embrace the grind. This is the undercurrent of the current space drama: not mere technical hurdles, but a call to cultural renewal. Sustaining it ensures not just lunar victory but a broader renaissance, where adventure, innovation, and unapologetic excellence propel humanity outward. The 2030 deadline looms; meeting it—and beyond—restores what decades of deviation nearly forfeited. The right stuff awaits rediscovery, and the time is now. 

Bibliography and Footnotes for Further Reading

1.  NASA Office of Inspector General. Artemis Program Cost and Schedule Overruns. 2025-2026 reports detailing $93 billion+ expenditures through FY2025.

2.  Bolden, Charles. Al Jazeera Interview (July 2010), as documented in Reuters and CBS News archives on NASA outreach priorities. 

3.  Isaacman, Jared. NASA Official Biography and Confirmation Records (December 2025). NASA.gov. 

4.  Planetary Society. Cost Analysis of SLS/Orion Programs. Updated 2026.

5.  Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press, 1988 (foundational TPS text, including Andon system).

6.  Adler, Paul S. “Cultural Transformation at NUMMI.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 1994. 

7.  OpenTheBooks. “NASA’s One Giant Leap Toward DEI.” Substack analysis of FY2021-2024 spending. 

8.  Reuters. “China’s Crewed Lunar Program Eyes Astronaut Landing by 2030.” April 2026. 

9.  NASA. Artemis Ignition Event and Moon Base Plan. March 2026 announcements. 

10.  Hoffman, Rich. Gunfight Guide to Business (2021). Self-published insights on manufacturing resilience and cultural factors in industry.

11.  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Advancing DEIA in Competed Space Missions. 2022 report (context for pre-2025 policies). 

12.  U.S. Government Accountability Office. Audits on NASA project overruns, 2025.

13.  JETRO Surveys on U.S.-Japan manufacturing challenges (labor and workforce data).

14.  Nature. “China Planning Lunar Landing and Base.” April 2026. 

15.  Fox News Archives. Watters-Isaacman Interview Transcripts and Clips (April 2026). 

16.  Lean Blog. Analyses of Andon cord and Japanese vs. Western implementation. 

17.  CSIS. Reports on U.S.-Japan economic ties and workforce development (2026).

18.  Additional historical: Logsdon, John. John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 (Apollo context).

19.  Musk, Elon, and SpaceX public updates on operational culture (various 2020s interviews).

20.  Trump Administration Executive Orders on Ending DEI Programs (January 2025 onward). 

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

‘Taxes Have Consequences’: The path forward in Ohio regarding property tax destruction

I’ve been thinking a lot about the upcoming 2026 Ohio gubernatorial race, and there are always a certain number of suckers who are going to fall for the polished narratives coming from the other side. They won’t remember yesterday, let alone six years ago, when the lockdowns crushed Ohio’s economy in ways we’re still feeling today. Amy Acton, the former health director who became the face of those restrictive policies during the COVID era, is running for governor as a Democrat. She’s going to go out there and talk nice, sounding reasonable and compassionate, and a chunk of voters—especially those who don’t follow politics closely or have short memories—are going to buy it. That’s the danger. The meat and potatoes of any campaign are the economy, taxes, jobs, and everyday affordability, but the left has its playbook: when policies fail, they pivot to personal attacks, calling opponents Nazis or extremists because they have little else substantive to offer. Timing matters too. Vivek Ramaswamy is a wealthy, successful entrepreneur with a background in business and biotech that many admire, but some voters struggle to relate to that level of achievement. Others might get bored during the long campaign stretch from now in April 2026 through the November election. Months of stops repeating the same policy points can wear thin without something to keep people engaged.

That’s where I see a real opportunity for Vivek to stand out. Republicans have historically been uncomfortable with topics outside strict policy—paranormal stuff, cryptozoology, disclosure on unexplained phenomena. By default, those areas get ceded to liberals who love to explore the mysterious. But Trump showed how to fluff up speeches with entertaining content: the snake metaphor, stories about men’s and women’s sports, even dancing to YMCA to get the crowd laughing and connected. There’s plenty in Ohio to do the same. We’ve had a surge of Bigfoot sightings recently, especially in the northeast around Youngstown, Portage County, and areas between Akron and there. People are reporting large, hairy figures—eight to ten feet tall—moving through the woods, accompanied by grunts, musty odors, footprints, and even pets shaking in fear. It started clustering in early March 2026, with multiple reports in just a few days near Mantua Center and Garrettsville. These aren’t fringe stories; they’ve made local news, gone viral on social media, and drawn attention from Bigfoot enthusiasts across the state. Ohio already has a reputation for this kind of activity—Hocking Hills calls itself the Bigfoot capital with festivals, and the state ranks high in sightings historically. Vivek should talk to the people who experienced these encounters. Listen to their stories without mocking them. It would make fantastic clips for TikTok and YouTube—human, relatable, showing a candidate who engages real Ohioans on what’s on their minds, even the unusual. You don’t have to believe in Bigfoot to show attention to folks who feel traumatized or excited by what they saw. Those rural and small-town areas near Youngstown include voters who might otherwise lean toward Acton’s camp. Meeting them where they are and hearing them out could freshly capture the narrative and beat Democrats to the punch on engaging the paranormal, just as JD Vance or others could on UFO disclosure. Spielberg-style wonder isn’t owned by one side; Republicans should run with it and make it part of showing government can connect with everyday wonder and curiosity again.

The serious policy side can’t be ignored, of course. Property taxes have become a flashpoint in Ohio, and Vivek has talked about rollbacks or even bolder moves toward zero income taxes. Some critics accuse him of flip-flopping or softening his stance, but that’s not accurate from what I’ve seen and heard. He’s building support with legislators who understand the real-world constraints. My good friend Senator George Lang, the majority whip at the Ohio Statehouse, handed me a powerful book that puts all this in perspective: Taxes Have Consequences: An Income Tax History of the United States by Arthur B. Laffer, Brian Domitrovic, and Jeanne Cairns Sinquefield, with a foreword by Donald Trump. It’s essentially a roadmap for the tax policies we need moving forward, especially as we navigate the next few years under a Trump-influenced administration where Vivek could play a key role in Ohio. The book traces the devastating experiment of the federal income tax since the 16th Amendment in 1913. What started as a small levy on the wealthy quickly became a tool for social engineering and revenue extraction with Marxist and socialist fingerprints all over it. High tax rates have repeatedly stifled growth, innovation, and prosperity, while cuts—like those under Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump—unleashed economic booms that lifted average incomes and helped lower earners the most. The Laffer Curve, which Art Laffer famously illustrated, shows that beyond a certain point, higher rates actually reduce revenue because they discourage work, investment, and risk-taking. The book details how the top marginal rate has dictated America’s economic fate for over a century: sky-high rates in the 1930s contributed to the prolongation of the Great Depression, while post-war cuts and the 1980s reforms correlated with surges in GDP, jobs, and opportunity.

Trump’s foreword ties it directly to his own policies, emphasizing how lowering rates and simplifying the code boosted the economy before external shocks hit. This isn’t abstract theory—it’s history with data. The authors show how taxes harm not just the economy but the social atmosphere: they distort behavior, punish success, and create dependency. For Christians or anyone with a moral framework, it’s a reminder that stewardship and honest labor thrive under systems that reward productivity rather than penalize it. Ohio sits right in the thick of similar challenges at the state and local levels with property taxes. People are fed up. They’ve watched home values compound for decades through a kind of pyramid scheme fueled by easy money, Federal Reserve policies since 1913, and development that turned farmland into subdivisions. Twenty years ago, a house might sell for $100,000; through repeated appreciation—$150k, $200k, $300k or more—owners felt wealthy on paper. They passed school, fire, and police levies, and senior services, without much pain because equity gains masked the bite. But that runway has ended. Homes built with cheaper materials and packed closer together have topped out in what buyers are willing to pay, especially with dual-income families stretched thin by inflation that has eroded the dollar’s value. Young people look at half-million-dollar mortgages and say, “No thanks.” They’re opting out—less drinking, less reckless behavior, rejecting the lifestyles they saw drain their parents. Beer sales are down among the young; the new rebellion is living cleaner, smaller, and smarter.

The result is a brick wall. Property tax revenue, which funds over 60% of local school budgets in Ohio (billions annually), faces revolt. Voters reject new levies because they can’t afford the inflated bills anymore. Developers and builders know the game: buy cheap farmland, subdivide, sell high, watch values rise on cheap credit and inflation. But when appreciation stalls and inflation erodes real wages, the tax burden feels like robbery without corresponding services. Schools built assumptions around perpetual growth that never materialized in the long term. Fire departments, roads, and senior programs—all tied to this model—are vulnerable if the faucet turns off abruptly. That’s why a sudden, total rollback or constitutional abolition of property taxes sounds appealing to the 7-8% who want to burn it all down, but it’s not practical for winning elections or governing. A full cutoff would cause chaos: mass layoffs in education, larger classes, program cuts, potential school closures in some districts, and pressure to spike income or sales taxes elsewhere to backfill—sometimes dramatically. Legislators know this. Republicans in the House and Senate, including those Vivek would work with, recognize you can’t just flip a switch without grinding infrastructure to a halt. The state isn’t ready for an all-out divorce from local funding mechanisms that maintain roads, schools, and services.

Instead, the smart path is a deliberate wind-down: roll back rates gradually, reform assessment practices, cap growth tied to inflation rather than unchecked reappraisals, diversify with income taxes or other sources where feasible, and pair it with broader economic growth that puts more money in people’s pockets. Vivek’s background in wealth management and business creation, along with a high-level understanding of capital flows, uniquely equips him for this. He gets how taxes have consequences—not just revenue numbers but behavioral shifts, investment decisions, and social health. Critics framing his Indian immigrant parents as somehow disqualifying are drifting into nonsense that has no place in conservatism. That racial or ethnic attack echoes left-wing identity politics or worse—Hitler’s socialist Nazi tactics of division, not American conservatism rooted in individual merit, opportunity, and e pluribus unum. Nick Fuentes-style shock jockery or drifting toward Tucker Carlson’s more isolationist edges risks alienating the broader MAGA coalition that values wins over purity spirals. Real conservatism builds coalitions around shared principles: lower taxes, strong borders, economic freedom, and cultural sanity. Vivek embodies success through innovation and hard work; attacking that because of heritage is lunacy and plays into the left’s divide-and-conquer game. He’s not flipping on taxes—he’s being pragmatic, courting legislators who see the addiction to government programs built up over decades. Schools, in particular, expanded on the assumption of endless property tax growth from rising values. Abrupt cuts without transition would hurt the very families we want to help.

The book Taxes Have Consequences articulates this history brilliantly. It shows how the income tax, sold as temporary and fair in 1913, ballooned into a tool that funded expansive government and distorted the economy. Periods of low rates saw flourishing: the Roaring Twenties, post-WWII boom, Reagan era, and Trump’s pre-COVID surge. High rates correlated with stagnation or decline. Socially, it fostered resentment, underground economies, and a pyramid-like reliance on growth that eventually hits limits—just like Ohio’s property tax model. Inflation from fiat money printing since the Fed’s creation compounds it, making each dollar buy less while nominal home values create illusory wealth that taxes then erode. To fix it long-term, we need more than tweaks: sound money policies (gold-standard elements or currency competition), wealth creation through energy independence, fossil fuels, a manufacturing resurgence, and, yes, emerging sectors like the space economy that could infuse real value. Young people turning away from vice and toward responsibility is a positive cultural shift; they won’t sustain the old tax-and-spend model. Parents cashing out to condos leave fewer buyers for inflated homes. The market will constrain until costs come down or real incomes rise.

Vivek Ramaswamy has the best tax policy vision and rollback ability in the conversation right now because he understands these dynamics at scale. He’ll need guts, debate, and collaboration with the legislature—including voices like Senator Lang—to implement gradual relief without collapse. Sprinkling in fun engagements like visiting Bigfoot witnesses in the Youngstown area would lighten the heavy load. People are sick of government size and intrusion; they haven’t gotten value for their taxes and are ready for change. But winning popular support means meeting voters where they are—on pocketbook pain and on the human stories that make life interesting. Amy Acton will try to memory-hole her role in economic destruction and paint herself as the caring alternative, relying on short attention spans and Nazi-style smears when pressed on substance. A certain number will fall for it. But Vivek can counter by staying substantive on taxes while adding entertainment and genuine curiosity that Trump mastered. Go to those rural spots, listen to the sighting stories, and turn them into engaging content. It captures attention in a media-saturated world and shows Republicans aren’t stuffy on everything.

This race is about more than one election. It’s a microcosm of the national struggle: can we unwind the tax addiction built since 1913 without chaos, restore economic vitality, and reconnect with the American spirit that includes wonder, hard work, and skepticism of overreach? Ohio’s brick wall on property values and taxes reflects the national pyramid scheme hitting limits. Vivek, with his policy depth and ability to engage broadly, is positioned to lead that grind-it-down process—month by month, bill by bill, with the courage to debate and the wisdom to avoid abrupt pain that loses voters. Critics who want instant demolition ignore how representative government works: you persuade the majority who still want some services but resent the cost and inefficiency. The book from Laffer and team provides the intellectual ammunition, showing tax cuts as the proven path to prosperity rather than punishment.

As we head through these months of campaigning, the contrast will sharpen. Acton’s side will offer more government band-aids—tax credits, debt relief—without addressing root causes like inflation and dependency. Vivek can offer a real rollback grounded in history, paired with cultural engagement that makes politics fun again. Bigfoot might seem trivial next to billion-dollar budgets, but ignoring what captures people’s imagination cedes ground. Trump proved metaphors, stories, and showmanship win hearts while policy wins minds. Ohio has the ingredients: frustrated taxpayers tired of the endless levy cycle, a new generation rejecting decline, and pockets of genuine mystery that remind us life holds more than spreadsheets. Listening to those Bigfoot witnesses in the northeast wouldn’t cost anything but time and respect—it could humanize the campaign and pull in independents who see a candidate willing to engage their world.

Ultimately, taxes do have consequences, as the book details across a century of evidence. They shape economies, families, and societies. Ohio’s reliance on property taxes, tied to the same inflationary home-value game that national policy enabled, has reached its limit. People aren’t supporting endless spending anymore; they’re tapped out. Gradual reform, economic growth to create real wealth, and cultural reconnection are the way forward. Vivek understands this at a level that pure politicians often don’t, thanks to his private-sector success. Paired with pragmatic legislators who know you can’t flip the switch overnight without pain, he can deliver relief that sticks. The suckers who forget Acton’s past or fall for nice talk will always exist, but a campaign that mixes meat-and-potatoes tax reform with engaging, memorable moments can reach the rest. It’s going to take hard work, but it’s doable. Ohio’s best days can still lie ahead if we learn from tax history since 1913 and apply those lessons boldly but wisely.

Footnotes

1.  Details on Amy Acton’s 2026 gubernatorial campaign, including her background as Ohio’s former health director during COVID lockdowns and current platform on affordability, drawn from campaign announcements and coverage in early 2026.

2.  Reports of the March 2026 Bigfoot “flap” in northeast Ohio, with multiple sightings in Portage County near Mantua, Garrettsville, and extending toward Youngstown/Trumbull areas, including descriptions of 8-10 foot figures, footprints, and pet reactions; see local news and Bigfoot Society accounts.

3.  Vivek Ramaswamy’s positions on property tax rollbacks, zero income tax ambitions, and campaign strategy in the 2026 Ohio race, including primary dynamics and legislative pragmatism.

4.  Analysis of Ohio property tax funding for schools (over 60% of local revenue in many districts) and risks of abrupt repeal, including potential service cuts or alternative tax spikes.

5.  Historical context from Taxes Have Consequences on U.S. income tax since 1913, Laffer Curve effects, and correlations between tax rates and economic outcomes across administrations.

6.  Ohio-specific property tax reforms in 2025-2026 legislation (e.g., HB 186 capping growth) and ongoing levy struggles amid voter resistance.

Bibliography

•  Laffer, Arthur B., Brian Domitrovic, and Jeanne Cairns Sinquefield. Taxes Have Consequences: An Income Tax History of the United States. Post Hill Press, 2022. (With foreword by Donald J. Trump.)

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Self-published, 2021 (expanded editions via Overmanwarrior.com).

•  Council on Foreign Relations or Tax Foundation reports on state property tax structures (general reference for the Ohio context).

•  Local coverage: Cleveland19, WKBN, New York Post, Fox News, in March 2026, Ohio Bigfoot sightings.

•  Ohio Capital Journal, Signal Ohio, Columbus Dispatch, and AP News for 2026 gubernatorial race updates on Ramaswamy, Acton, and tax issues.

•  Policy Matters Ohio and Tax Foundation analyses on property tax repeal impacts on schools and local services (2025-2026).

•  Further reading: Laffer Center materials on supply-side economics; historical works on the 16th Amendment and Federal Reserve; Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), Ohio reports for cryptid context.

These provide solid entry points for exploring the tax history, campaign dynamics, and cultural elements discussed. Dig in, think critically, and let’s continue pushing for better policy and engagement in Ohio and beyond.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Amanda Ortiz of West Chester, Ohio: Democrat of the Year

I warned what would happen in West Chester Township during the November 2025 election, and it’s playing out just as I said it would.  I don’t want to pick on Amanda Ortiz personally—she seems like a pleasant enough young lady, a veterinarian and mom who presented herself in a way that felt approachable and non-threatening—but the reality is that her victory as a West Chester trustee represents something much larger and more dangerous than one local race. I warned everyone during the campaign that we should have stuck with Mark Welch, the longtime trustee who had helped build West Chester into the thriving, well-managed community it had become under Republican leadership. Instead, we now have a radical Democrat on the board, and the consequences are already starting to reveal themselves in ways that should worry every taxpayer and resident who values fiscal responsibility and growth without the typical left-wing overreach. Mark Welch was the only real hedge against the lean-Democrat influences that were already creeping into township decisions, and by losing him, we have opened the door to a shift that could erode the very foundations of what made West Chester successful in the first place. I have said it before, and I will say it again here: this was not just an election loss; it was a calculated Trojan horse maneuver by the Democrats, and the proof is right there in how they celebrated it afterward.

Let me walk through exactly how this unfolded because I believe people must understand the playbook Democrats are using in Republican strongholds like Butler County, Ohio, and across the country. Amanda Ortiz ran a campaign that deliberately downplayed her partisan affiliation. She did not go door-to-door shouting that she was a Democrat. She positioned herself as a nice mom, a community-oriented professional who cared about infrastructure, parks, and listening to residents rather than developers. Her website and materials emphasized “people over business,” which sounds reasonable on the surface, but in practice, it is code for a regulatory mindset that slows growth and increases costs for everyone else. People who were moderate or independent, or even some Republicans who were tired of seeing the same faces, listened to her and thought she represented a fresh, safe choice. They got suckered, plain and simple. I heard it from so many voters after the fact—folks who admitted they had no idea she was a card-carrying Democrat until after the ballots were cast. She kept it quiet, ran as a non-partisan in a technically non-partisan race on the ballot, and relied on the fact that most people do not dig deep into local trustee races. That is how Democrats win in places like West Chester, where the population has grown rapidly, and people are busy raising families rather than following every political nuance. They sneak in under the radar, sounding rational and moderate, and only reveal their true colors once they are safely behind the lines. I have watched this strategy play out time and again, and it only benefits Democrats in Republican areas because it creates ambiguity that allows them to peel off just enough votes from the center without mobilizing the full conservative base.

The proof of how Democrats viewed this victory came shortly after the election, at the Butler County Democratic Party’s Spring 2026 Gala. They awarded Amanda Ortiz their Democrat of the Year honor, and the room was packed with the party’s heavy hitters celebrating what they openly called a monumental win. I have followed local politics long enough to know that a township trustee seat in West Chester would normally not draw this statewide and even out-of-state attention, but here it was, front and center. Governor Andy Beshear from Kentucky flew up to speak at the event, using the platform to bash Vice President JD Vance and energize the crowd. Beshear, whom I have long maintained won his own close election through questionable means involving teacher unions and irregularities out of Louisville and Lexington, was there to lend his star power to this “victory.” Amy Acton was there too—the former Ohio Health Director under Governor Mike DeWine, who became the face of the COVID lockdowns that devastated our state’s economy and small businesses. She is now running for governor herself in 2026, and her presence alongside Beshear and the rest of the “misfit toys,” as I like to call them, sent a clear message: this seat mattered to them. Kathy Wyenandt, the chair of the Butler County Democrat Party and the architect of so much of their behind-the-scenes maneuvering, was at the heart of it all. She has always been nice to me personally, cordial and polite whenever our paths cross, but I have learned over the years that her brand of niceness is strategic. When you lack the raw political power to force your agenda through head-on, you smile, you build relationships, and you slip your candidates through the cracks. That is exactly what happened with Ortiz. No one knew who she was a year before the election, yet the party machinery got her across the finish line by keeping her Democrat identity low-key and letting her play the moderate mom card.

I have talked about this construct before in my writings and on my platforms, but it bears repeating here because Amanda Ortiz embodies the new Democrat strategy in places like Butler County. Their bench is shallow. They do not have deep pools of talent or proven leaders who can win on ideas alone in conservative territory. So instead, they recruit friendly faces who can pass as independents or moderates, avoid any mention of national Democrat policies that would scare off voters, and rely on the fact that local races often fly under the radar. Ortiz herself acknowledged in her acceptance remarks how grateful she was for the support of Kathy Wyenandt and others, as without them, she would not have been elected. That is code for admitting the party did the heavy lifting while she stayed in the background as the palatable front. Meanwhile, Mark Welch had been there for years, carrying forward policies that George Lang and others had helped establish—policies that turned West Chester into a model of explosive growth, strong infrastructure, and fiscal prudence. Welch was not flashy, but he was steady. He understood the balance between development and quality of life. He had built relationships and institutional knowledge that kept the township humming. Republicans around him, influenced by advisors who thought they needed to court moderates by pairing him with Lee Wong—a candidate who leans a bit more toward the center and attracts crossover appeal—made the fatal mistake of playing it too safe. They advised Welch not to go on the attack, not to “punch Democrats in the face” by exposing Ortiz’s true affiliations and the broader agenda she represented. Instead, they tried to run a cordial, moderate campaign, assuming Butler County’s Republican lean would carry the day. That was a miscalculation, and it cost us the seat.

I remember talking with Mark Welch around election time, and he expressed readiness to move on to other things after so many years of service, but he stayed in the race largely to hold the line for the township’s future. He had been a bulwark against the kind of creeping leftward drift that Democrats specialize in once they gain a foothold. West Chester’s success did not happen by accident. It came from years of Republican-led decisions that encouraged business growth while protecting the residential quality of life. The cash reserves, the infrastructure investments, the explosive population boom—all of that was built on policies that prioritized results over ideology. But now, with a Democrat on the board, I fully expect to see that foundation tested. Democrats are not known for preserving the status quo in places like this; they tend to burn through reserves with new spending priorities, push for more regulations under the guise of “sustainability” or “equity,” and gradually shift the culture. I have seen it in other communities, and the pattern is predictable. The explosive growth that fueled West Chester’s prosperity will be at risk if the board starts listening more to activist voices than to the taxpayers who actually fund the operation. That is why this seat mattered so much to the Democrats. It was not just one trustee position; it was a crack in the armor of one of Ohio’s most reliably Republican townships. They poured resources into it, celebrated it nationally by bringing in Beshear, and used it as a rallying cry because they see it as proof that their Trojan horse model works.

Too many Republicans fell for the moderate trap. I have been vocal about this for years, and people dismiss me as the guy in the cowboy hat who shoots guns and talks tough—but they always work in the background to steer people who should listen, away, but the record shows I am right more often than not. Look at the FirstEnergy scandal a few years back, where Democrats framed legitimate energy policy debates as corruption, and Republicans got defensive instead of fighting back on principle. Some ended up in jail because they failed to defend the traditional bases of power against the incursion of renewable energy. The same dynamic played out in West Chester. Advisors told Mark Welch and the local party to play nice, to embrace moderates like Lee Wong, to avoid aggressive attacks because voters supposedly wanted civility. But history proves otherwise. Look at George Lang’s campaigns—he has always been cordial in public, willing to talk to anyone, including Kathy Wyenandt, but when it comes to winning, he knows how to draw the line and mobilize the base. Successful Republicans do not win by bleeding over Democrats; they win by energizing their own voters and exposing the opposition for what it is. Donald Trump proved this time and again. He did not play nice; he punched back, exposed weaknesses, and forced the other side to defend indefensible positions. That is how you get turnout and loyalty. Playing in the middle of the road gets you run over. I told people during the campaign that if we wanted to keep West Chester red and strong, we had to treat this race like the battle it was. Instead, the gloves stayed on, and Democrats slipped Ortiz through.

This connects directly to what is happening at higher levels, too. Amy Acton is using the same playbook in her run for governor—positioning herself as a doctor who cares about people, downplaying the economic destruction her lockdown policies caused during COVID. She destroyed small businesses, prolonged unnecessary restrictions, and Ohio still has not fully recovered in many sectors. Yet she is out there smiling, talking about “power back to the people,” and Democrats are lapping it up. Beshear’s visit to the gala was no coincidence; he sees Ohio as a battleground and this local win as a template. Kathy Wyenandt has orchestrated this model for years. She ran for state senate herself back in 2020, lost, but stayed embedded in the county party, building relationships and waiting for opportunities like this. She is nice when she needs to be because she understands power dynamics. When Republicans hold the majority, as they do in Butler County, the only way for Democrats to advance is through deception and incremental gains. Sneak in a trustee here, a school board member there, keep the races non-partisan on paper so voters do not scrutinize the D next to the name, and slowly erode the conservative advantage. It is a long game, and they are patient. Meanwhile, too many Republicans think civility will win the day. I have heard it from moderate voices: “Don’t listen to that crazy Rich Hoffman; and his cowboy hat, bullwhips and talks about punching people.” But the truth is, elections are not won by being the nicest guy in the room. They are won by showing a path to victory and fighting for it.

I have always believed that people vote for winners, not for moderates who split the difference. Trump’s success was built on that truth. He did not apologize for being aggressive; he celebrated it. Vivek Ramaswamy is going to have to learn the same lesson as his own campaign heat up. Playing nice with the establishment or trying to bleed over left-leaning voters only works if you are already in a dominant position, and even then, it is risky. In a place like Butler County, where registered Republicans far outnumber Democrats, the winning formula is to expose the Trojan horse before it crosses the gates. We should have hammered the fact that Ortiz was the Democrat Party’s chosen candidate. We should have highlighted her endorsements and the national figures waiting in the wings to celebrate her. Instead, the campaign listened to advisors who thought Lee Wong’s moderate appeal would carry the ticket. Wong brings in some crossover, sure, but at what cost? When the race tightened, that strategy left Welch vulnerable. People took for granted how good Welch had been. He had helped implement policies that kept taxes reasonable, infrastructure moving, and growth exploding. West Chester’s success was built on Republican vision, and now Democrats are positioning themselves to claim credit while quietly undermining the principles that made it possible.

Looking back, I can see the buyer’s remorse already setting in among some voters who supported Ortiz, thinking she was a safe, independent choice. Christians, especially people of faith who value traditional values and fiscal conservatism are particularly vulnerable.  We need that same clarity here. Moderates and independents who listened to Ortiz’s pitch about parks and walkability did not realize they were voting for a party that celebrates lockdown architects like Acton and out-of-state governors who benefit from questionable election practices. I stand by my view that Beshear’s first win involved enough irregularities through teacher unions and urban strongholds to tip the scales. The details from Louisville and Lexington have never been fully addressed, and this fits the pattern of Democrats resorting to deceit when ideas alone cannot prevail. Whether it is election irregularities or Trojan horse candidacies, the result is the same: power gained through misdirection rather than merit.

The interconnections here are fascinating and telling. Kathy Wyenandt, Amy Acton, Andy Beshear, and the entire Butler County Democrat machine rallied around Amanda Ortiz because they recognize a model when they see one. A minor trustee seat became their national rallying cry because it showed they could infiltrate Republican territory without triggering a full defensive response. They will copy this playbook everywhere—find a likable face, run non-partisan, keep the D quiet, and celebrate quietly at galas with big-name guests to build momentum. It worked here because Republicans underestimated the threat and overestimated the value of moderation. George Lang has shown the right way: be cordial when possible, but fight to win when it counts. I remember specific elections where challengers who got “down and dirty,” as the saying goes, came out on top because they connected with voters who want strength, not appeasement. The secret sauce is showing you are willing to win, not just participate.

As I reflect on all of this, I cannot help but reference my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. It lays out the philosophy I have lived by: in any competition, whether business or politics, you prepare for the fight, you understand the terrain, and you do not hesitate to draw when necessary. Playing nice only works if the other side respects the rules, and Democrats have shown they do not. They use sweetness as a weapon when outgunned, then reveal their agenda once inside the gates. I told everyone this would happen with Ortiz. I warned that Mark Welch’s experience and steadiness were irreplaceable in the short term. People dismissed it as over-the-top, but now the proof is in the award she received and the high-profile attendees who showed up to congratulate her. Democrats are proud of this win because it validates their shallow-bench strategy. They do not have a deep roster of stars; they have to manufacture victories like this one. That is why Beshear came from Kentucky and Acton showed up—they see it as a blueprint for flipping Ohio one local seat at a time.

The months ahead will test West Chester in ways we have not seen before. With Ortiz on the board, I expect more emphasis on “resident voices” that conveniently align with progressive priorities—more spending on social programs disguised as infrastructure, pressure to slow development under environmental pretexts, and a gradual shift away from the pro-growth policies that built our cash reserves. The explosive growth we have enjoyed will begin to be strained under new ideological weights, and the positive gains Mark Welch helped secure will be spent down. That is the Democrat nature: they inherit success and then erode it. I have seen it in school boards, county seats, and trustee races across Ohio. Non-partisan labeling only helps them in red areas because it hides the ball. Voters who lean conservative or independent think they are making a safe choice, but they are actually handing power to people whose national party pushes policies that would never win in a straight-up partisan fight here.

Republicans in Butler County and beyond need to learn the lesson: expose the Trojan horse early, attack the strategy aggressively, and mobilize the base by showing you are fighters, not moderators. Lee Wong’s approach might bring in a few crossover votes, but it leaves the door open for the very incursions we saw with Ortiz. Trump proved you win by being unapologetic. Vivek will have to internalize that as primaries approach. Amy Acton will try the nice-moderate route for governor, but the way to beat her is to knock her off her feet with the truth about lockdowns and economic damage. The same goes for every local race. Kathy Wyenandt’s model relies on Republicans playing nice. Deny her that, and the weaknesses become obvious. Their base is thin; they rely on deceit because ideas alone do not sell in places like West Chester.

People who voted for Ortiz because she seemed like a nice alternative to a longtime incumbent are already starting to feel that buyer’s remorse I mentioned. I talk to them regularly—moderates, independents, even some who thought they were supporting a Republican-leaning independent. They tell me they did not realize the full picture until the gala photos surfaced and the awards were handed out. That is the danger of low-information local voting. Trustees matter. They control budgets, zoning, and infrastructure—decisions that directly impact your property values, taxes, and daily life. When Democrats sneak one in, it is not harmless; it is the thin edge of the wedge. I do not doubt that the Democrat Party will try to replicate this in other townships, school boards, and county offices. The gala was not just a celebration; it was a strategy session disguised as a party. Out-of-state attention from Beshear signaled that this is now a national template. A trustee seat in West Chester drew Kentucky’s governor because Democrats see Ohio as winnable if they can chip away at the red wall one non-partisan race at a time.

I take no pleasure in saying “I told you so,” but the record shows I did. I urged people to support Mark Welch, to recognize the threat, to fight rather than accommodate. Listening to the moderate voices who advised playing it safe cost us. West Chester is too important to let it slip through niceness and naivety. The township’s success was built on strong Republican leadership, and preserving it requires the same aggressive defense that Trump and other proven winners have demonstrated. If we learn from this, expose future Trojan horses before they arrive, and reject the idea that moderation equals victory, we can reverse the damage. Democrats are proud of Ortiz because she represents their best shot at relevance in a county that should be solidly red. Their celebration with Acton, Beshear, and Wyenandt shows how desperate and coordinated they are. Our response must meet that coordination with clarity, energy, and a willingness to punch back. That is how elections are won, how communities stay strong, and how we prevent the kind of regret that is now settling over too many voters who gave Amanda Ortiz a chance she never should have had. The future of West Chester and similar communities depends on remembering this lesson: nice gets you nothing when the other side is playing for keeps. Fight smart, fight hard, and win.

Footnotes

1.  Journal-News article on longtime West Chester trustee unseated, November 6, 2025, detailing Amanda Ortiz’s victory over Mark Welch.

2.  Ballotpedia entry for Amanda Ortiz’s 2025 campaign for West Chester Township Trustee.

3.  Amanda Ortiz for Trustee campaign website, outlining her platform and background.

4.  ABC News report on Andy Beshear’s remarks at the Butler County Democratic Party Spring Gala, March 22, 2026.

5.  Ohio Capital Journal coverage of Amy Acton’s announcement and campaign for Ohio governor, January 2025 onward.

6.  Butler County Democratic Party official website listing Kathy Wyenandt as chair.

7.  Overmanwarrior.wordpress.com post from February 4, 2026, discussing the West Chester election and Democratic endorsement of Ortiz.

8.  Historical context on FirstEnergy scandal drawn from public records and Ohio political reporting.

9.  Election results from the Butler County Board of Elections, November 2025.

10.  George Lang campaign references from prior Butler County and state-level coverage.

Bibliography

•  “Longtime West Chester Twp. trustee unseated in election.” Journal-News, November 6, 2025. https://www.journal-news.com/news/longtime-west-chester-twp-trustee-unseated-in-election/CD2ADHRUKVC2JOIQSCMINM3MWE/

•  Ballotpedia. “Amanda Ortiz (West Chester Township Trustee).” https://ballotpedia.org/Amanda_Ortiz_(West_Chester_Township_Trustee_Board_At-large_(Butler_County),_Ohio,_candidate_2025)

•  Amanda Ortiz for the Trustee official site. https://www.amandaortizfortrustee.com/

•  ABC News. “Democrat Beshear lashes into Vance in Ohio.” March 22, 2026. https://abcnews.com/Politics/democrat-beshear-lashes-vance-ohio-escalating-tensions-ahead/story?id=131307193

•  Ohio Capital Journal. “Dr. Amy Acton is running for Ohio governor.” January 7, 2025. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/01/07/dr-amy-acton-is-running-for-ohio-governor/

•  Butler County Democratic Party. Official party page and leadership listing. https://www.butlercountydems.org/our-party

•  Overmanwarrior.wordpress.com. February 4, 2026, archive post on the West Chester election. https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/

•  Additional election data from the Ohio Secretary of State and the Butler County Board of Elections certified results, November 2025.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfight Guide to Business (self-published, referenced for philosophical context on competitive strategy).

•  Various local reporting on Lee Wong, Mark Welch, and George Lang campaigns from Cincinnati and Butler County media outlets, 2021–2025.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

The Public Education Wasteland: John D. Rockefeller’s massive failure

The public education system in the United States, as it has evolved over more than a century, stands as one of the most ambitious yet profoundly flawed experiments in social engineering. From its early roots in the common school movement of the 19th century to the massive philanthropic interventions of the early 20th century, it was shaped by a mix of genuine reformist zeal, industrial needs, progressive philosophy, and the influence of extraordinarily wealthy individuals who believed they could design better societies from the top down. I have long argued that this system was designed from the outset to be a disaster—not necessarily through deliberate malice in every case, but through a fundamental misalignment with human nature, individual potential, and the organic processes of learning and cultural transmission. What began as an effort to uplift and standardize often devolved into a mechanism for producing compliant participants in a corporate-industrial order rather than fully realized, critically thinking human beings grounded in family, philosophy, and personal initiative. The results surround us today: generations of adults who struggle with basic reasoning when encountered in everyday settings, from casual conversations at a grocery store checkout to broader societal debates. The system has not equipped people for intelligent, independent thought; instead, it has often reinforced cultural values shaped more by commercial profit motives than by timeless truths about value, desire, and human flourishing.

To understand this, one must go back to the historical context of American education before the heavy hand of centralized philanthropy and progressive ideology took hold. Compulsory schooling in the U.S. drew inspiration from Prussian models of the early 19th century, which emphasized state-directed education to foster obedience, discipline, and loyalty in a militarized society. American reformers like Horace Mann in Massachusetts adapted elements of this in the 1830s and 1840s, pushing for “common schools” that were free, tax-supported, and aimed at assimilating immigrants, instilling moral values (often Protestant ones), and creating a unified citizenry. The goal was noble on paper: reduce ignorance, promote social mobility, and build a republic of informed voters. Yet even then, tensions existed between local control, parental authority, and emerging bureaucratic structures. By the late 19th century, as industrialization accelerated, schools increasingly mirrored factory rhythms—bells signaling shifts, rows of desks enforcing order, and curricula focused on rote memorization of facts rather than deep inquiry or creative problem-solving.

It was into this evolving landscape that John D. Rockefeller entered with his vast fortune from Standard Oil. Rockefeller, a devout Baptist who rose from modest beginnings through relentless work and shrewd business acumen, viewed philanthropy not as mere charity but as a systematic way to address root causes of social ills. In 1902-1903, he established the General Education Board (GEB) with an initial gift of $1 million, eventually pouring in over $180 million from the Rockefeller family (equivalent to hundreds of millions or more in today’s terms). The GEB was chartered by Congress in 1903 with the broad mandate to promote education “within the United States of America, without distinction of race, sex, or creed.” Its early efforts focused heavily on the South, where post-Civil War poverty and underdevelopment lingered. The board funded rural schools, teacher training, high school construction (over 1,600 in the South in one decade), agricultural demonstration programs like boys’ corn clubs, and efforts to combat hookworm and improve farming practices. It also supported higher education, medical schools, and institutions like the University of Chicago, which Rockefeller had helped found earlier. 

Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s key advisor and a former Baptist minister, played a central role in shaping the GEB’s vision. Gates envisioned “The Country School of To-Morrow,” where education would make rural life “beautiful, intelligent, fruitful, re-creative, healthful, and joyous.” The approach emphasized practical, scientific methods over abstract or classical learning for many students, particularly in vocational and agricultural contexts. The GEB insisted on sound accounting, matching grants to encourage local buy-in, and cooperation with existing systems, including segregated ones in the Jim Crow South. It channeled funds toward industrial education models influenced by figures like Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, prioritizing skills for economic productivity over broader liberal arts for certain populations. Critics later pointed out paternalistic elements: the board often worked within segregation rather than challenging it outright, and its focus on “efficient” schooling aligned with industrial needs for a disciplined workforce. 

A persistent claim in modern critiques is that Rockefeller or the GEB explicitly aimed to create “a nation of workers, not thinkers,” with schools emphasizing obedience, rule-following, and memorization to feed 9-to-5 corporate jobs. This quote is widely circulated online and in videos, attributed directly to Rockefeller. However, historical records do not confirm he said it verbatim; it appears to be a popularized paraphrase or synthesis drawn from the era’s emphasis on vocational training and social efficiency. What is clear is the GEB’s pragmatic bent: it promoted standardized curricula, teacher professionalism, and schooling that prepared people for productive roles in an industrial economy. Rockefeller himself saw his giving as an extension of Christian stewardship—using wealth responsibly to improve society, much as he had built his business through efficiency and scale. He did not wake up intending harm; by all accounts, he believed stable companies, reliable workers, and orderly communities would benefit everyone. His philanthropy extended to medicine (funding the Rockefeller Institute and shifting toward scientific, often petroleum-derived pharmaceuticals) and public health, reflecting a worldview where organized expertise could solve human problems. 

Yet this top-down approach carried inherent risks. When immense wealth detaches individuals from everyday market validations and shared human struggles, perspective can erode. Rockefeller had survived ruthless business competition, antitrust battles, and public scrutiny that painted him as a monopolist. By the time he turned to education, he operated from a position of extraordinary insulation. His “good intentions” from his vantage point—creating compliant, skilled laborers to sustain strong companies and a taxable economy—translated into systems that prioritized conformity over the messy, imaginative processes of individual development. Schools became places where personal initiative, rooted in family and innate curiosity, was subordinated to collective goals defined by experts. The mundane subjects—arithmetic drills, grammar rules, standardized history—served efficiency, but often at the expense of fostering wonder, debate, or the ability to question authority constructively. This was not unique to Rockefeller; other industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan supported similar efforts, and the broader Progressive Era embraced “scientific” management of society.

Enter John Dewey, whose progressive education philosophy intertwined with and amplified these structural changes. Dewey (1859-1952), a philosopher and psychologist, rejected traditional “banking” models of education—where teachers deposit facts into passive students—in favor of experiential, child-centered learning. In works like The School and Society (1899) and Democracy and Education (1916), he argued that education should be a process of social reform, where students learn by doing, solving real problems, and engaging with their environment. Knowledge emerges from experience, not rote transmission. Schools, for Dewey, were laboratories for democracy: they should break down barriers between subjects, integrate play and work, and prepare students for collaborative life in a changing industrial world. He influenced teacher training, curricula, and the “project method,” where learning revolves around hands-on activities rather than lectures. 

On the surface, Dewey’s ideas sound liberating—emphasizing critical inquiry, adaptability, and social engagement. In practice, however, when fused with centralized funding and bureaucratic control, they often produced the opposite. Progressive education emphasized “social experience” and group processes over individual mastery of foundational knowledge or classical disciplines. It downplayed timeless content (great books, rigorous logic, moral absolutes rooted in philosophy or faith) in favor of relativistic, experiential methods that could easily drift into ideological conformity. Teacher unions, increasingly aligned with leftist politics in later decades, embraced elements of this framework, using schools not just for skills but as vehicles for social change. Funding tied to property taxes created local monopolies, insulating the system from market competition or parental choice. The result: curricula that sometimes prioritized “relevant” social issues or vocational tracking over developing autonomous minds capable of independent judgment.

I see the core problem as a philosophical vacuum. Human beings are not blank slates to be molded by experts or corporations. We are born with genetic predispositions, creative sparks, and a need for grounding in family structures, moral traditions, and personal agency. True education cultivates the whole person—intellect, character, imagination, and the capacity for self-reinvention. When young, children are most open and inventive, like Peter Pan figures full of wonder. Public systems, by adolescence, often dampen this through regimentation, testing regimes that reward memorization over synthesis, and cultural influences that value short-term profit or groupthink. Conversations at grocery stores reveal the fallout: adults lacking basic critical faculties, unable to connect dots across history, economics, or personal responsibility. Entire generations emerge unequipped for the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s marketplace—not just economic transactions, but the psychological and cultural dynamics where demand shapes supply through voluntary choices, grounded in real human desires rather than top-down engineering.

Compare this to the dangers of concentrated power, whether in kings, billionaires, or unelected experts. Rockefeller did not set out to “destroy the world,” any more than Bill Gates intended harm with his COVID-era initiatives on vaccines, lockdowns, or climate policies. Both operated from bubbles of immense resources, convinced their vision—shaped by success in one domain—applied universally. Gates, like Rockefeller before him, tied wealth to policy influence: funding global health, education reforms, and “solutions” that often bypassed rigorous debate or market testing. During the pandemic, protocols influenced by such figures (distancing, mandates, lab-origin questions sidelined) revealed the perils when sanity detaches from lived reality. Wealth insulates; it creates echo chambers where “good intentions” justify overreach. People in such positions lose the tethering that marketplace survival provides—the daily validation or correction through voluntary exchange with ordinary folks. Sanity requires constant exercise against shared experience; without it, systems built in vacuums produce monstrosities, as seen in education’s failure to produce resilient, philosophically grounded citizens.

The young voices emerging on social media today, piecing together these realizations, highlight a broader awakening. They see how the system breeds followers for corporate or governmental structures rather than autonomous individuals. Marketing shapes demand in unhealthy ways when corporations, not consumers, drive culture. Public education, funded coercively and captured by unions and ideologies, perpetuates bad ideas: it reflects and reinforces a culture where value is measured by compliance or credentialism, not genuine contribution or critical discernment. Crises like declining test scores, chronic absenteeism, teacher shortages, and abysmal proficiency in reading/math (with only a fraction of students proficient by middle school) underscore the wasteland. Students graduate without the tools for economic self-reliance or intellectual independence, vulnerable to manipulation by media, politics, or fleeting trends. 

This is not fixed by more money. Decades of increased spending have yielded diminishing or negative returns. The foundation was flawed: it subordinated parental and local roles to centralized “experts,” replaced family-based value formation with state-sanctioned socialization, and traded philosophical depth for utilitarian skills. Rockefeller’s era assumed a strong centralized society with stable workers would float all boats via upward mobility. Instead, it often eroded the family structures needed to raise complete humans, pushing government into the parental void. Dewey’s experientialism, without anchors in truth-seeking or individual rigor, lent itself to relativism and social engineering. When combined with tax-funded monopolies, the system normalized catastrophe—calling widespread mediocrity or ideological capture “normal” because shared insanity becomes the baseline.

Sanity itself is relational. We measure it against others’ shared experiences. When education produces masses who have lost imagination, critical faculties, and grounding—replaced by Peter Pan-like avoidance of adult responsibility or rigid adherence to authority—it creates a feedback loop of normalized dysfunction. People hit midlife crises harder because foundational tools for resilience were never built. Tragedy, disappointment, or economic rupture exposes the fragility. Wealthy influencers, detached from grocery-store realities, exacerbate this when they shape policy. A representative republic, with checks and balances, exists precisely to prevent any one person or class from imposing their vacuum-sealed vision. Electing leaders who restore market-like accountability—choice, competition, decentralization—offers a path forward.

Redesign from the ground up is essential. Models should prioritize outcomes like critical thinking, moral reasoning, practical skills tied to real value creation, and philosophical literacy rooted in family and voluntary community. Encourage homeschooling, charters, vouchers, and apprenticeships that align with individual gifts rather than one-size-fits-all regimentation. Teach the “why” behind subjects, fostering the ability to question marketing, authority, and cultural fads without descending into cynicism. Ground learning in human nature: curiosity, relationships, and the pursuit of truth about the universe. Draw from history’s lessons—Prussian obedience, progressive experimentation, philanthropic overreach—without romanticizing the past or ignoring successes like localized common schools or classical approaches that built earlier generations of innovators.

The awakening seen in viral clips and young commentators is hopeful. More people connecting the dots means less perpetuation of failure. If society is to avoid the destructive elements of wrong thinking, education must facilitate human values—autonomy, creativity, ethical grounding—rather than the wacky whims of any era’s ultra-wealthy or ideological class. Rockefeller and Dewey operated in their time with the tools and assumptions available; history now reveals the shortcomings. A free economy, representative governance, and decentralized learning provide the best safeguards against insanity at scale. Rebuilding requires humility: acknowledge the disaster, reject preservation of broken foundations, and scale success through competition and choice, not coercion.

This system has been a detriment far more than a benefit in many respects, producing dependent minds in an age demanding adaptability. Yet human potential endures. Parents, communities, and individuals choosing differently—prioritizing real education over credentials—can reclaim what was lost. The market of ideas and voluntary associations, not acquired power, should determine the trajectory of human desire and learning. Only then can we move from a wasteland of insufficient preparation to a renaissance of capable, sane, flourishing people.

Bibliography (selected key sources for further reading):

•  General Education Board reports and histories from the Rockefeller Archive Center (resource.rockarch.org).

•  John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916) and The School and Society (1899).

•  Frederick T. Gates and Rockefeller correspondence on philanthropy.

•  Critiques including works on progressive education’s impact (e.g., analyses in History of Education Quarterly).

•  Snopes and historical fact-checks on attributed Rockefeller quotes.

•  Contemporary assessments of U.S. education outcomes from NAEP and related studies.

•  Books on industrial philanthropy, such as those examining the Progressive Era and GEB’s Southern focus (e.g., Anderson and Moss, Dangerous Donations).

Additional reading: Primary GEB documents, Dewey’s collected works, and modern examinations of compulsory schooling origins. These provide context for the faults while acknowledging intentions. Further research into Prussian influences, vocational tracking, and declines in critical thinking metrics will deepen understanding.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

NAGPRA: Worse than book burning–the Time Team shows how to do it right

As I reflect on this continuation of my birthday gift to myself—the deep dive into the Windover Archaeological Site and everything it represents—I can’t help but feel a profound sense of urgency mixed with frustration. My wife suggested we check it out because it tied directly into a project I was working on, and while I had heard about it before, seeing the exhibits up close and then immersing myself in the details through books like Glen H. Doran’s Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (published by the University Press of Florida in 2002) changed everything for me. That visit wasn’t just a casual outing; it was a revelation about what American archaeology could be and what it has become under policies that, in my view, prioritize political narratives over truth-seeking discovery. This is part two of that discussion, building on what I wrote earlier about the dig itself, but now zooming in on why the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act—NAGPRA, which I’ve come to call the “Wolves Act” because of the cultural buzz around Dances with Wolves during its passage—needs to be repealed or fundamentally reformed. We should be following the example of Britain’s Time Team, not letting a 1990 law bury our history, as the developers and politicians did with that Florida pond after just three seasons of excavation.

Let me start from the beginning of my personal connection to this. I remember driving out to the area near Titusville with my wife, the kind of trip where you expect a quiet museum stop but walk away astonished. The Windover site, discovered in 1982 during road construction for a housing development called Windover Farms, turned out to be one of the most significant archaeological finds in the Western Hemisphere. A backhoe operator scooped up skulls, and what followed was a frantic but methodical excavation led by Glen Doran from Florida State University between 1984 and 1986. They uncovered remains of about 168 individuals buried in a shallow pond that had become a natural peat bog, preserving everything from brain tissue—the oldest known in the world at the time—to intricate textiles, wooden artifacts, bone tools, and more. These people lived around 7,000 to 8,000 years ago in the Early Archaic period, long before what we think of as “Native American” tribes like the Cherokee or Seminole even formed as we know them today. The preservation was phenomenal because of the pond’s anaerobic conditions; it was like a time capsule from a world we barely understand.

Reading Doran’s book afterward felt like stepping into that excavation myself. It’s a multidisciplinary masterpiece—environmental analysis, radiocarbon dating, paleoethnobotany, DNA studies from the brain tissue, mortuary patterns, the works. They found the oldest woven fabrics in the Southeast, complex cordage, and evidence of sophisticated lifeways that challenge the simplistic “hunter-gatherer” stereotypes. My wife and I stood there in the museum exhibits, looking at replicas and displays (some now limited or relocated due to modern restrictions), and I kept thinking: This is North America’s equivalent of discovering a lost civilization, yet it barely registers in our national consciousness. Why? Because right around the time the final analyses were wrapping up, NAGPRA dropped in 1990 like a political hammer. The law was signed by President George H.W. Bush on November 16, 1990, after being introduced in the House by Democrat Mo Udall of Arizona. It sailed through on voice votes, with strong Democratic backing amid a wave of activism and cultural sentiment fueled by movies like Dances with Wolves, which painted indigenous peoples as noble victims of American aggression. I was living through that era, very aware of the buzz in Washington. I wasn’t a Bush fan—I voted against him, worked against him in the ’92 election, even flirted with the Reform Party because I saw him as a RINO continuing the same globalist, sovereignty-eroding policies Democrats had long championed. This wasn’t some Republican innovation; it was a bipartisan surrender to a narrative that America’s foundations were built on theft and needed constant atonement.

NAGPRA’s stated goal was to protect Native American graves, repatriate human remains and cultural items from museums and federal agencies to lineal descendants or culturally affiliated tribes. On paper, it sounds reasonable—addressing real historical wrongs like grave robbing in the 19th century. But in practice, and especially for ancient sites like Windover, it’s been devastating. The remains at Windover predate any known modern tribal affiliations by millennia. DNA studies from the site (what little could be done before restrictions tightened) showed haplogroups tracing back to ancient Asian migrations, but nothing that tied them neatly to today’s federally recognized tribes. Yet the law forces institutions like Florida State University to consult tribes, inventory collections, and often repatriate or rebury without full study. FSU has issued NAGPRA notices for some collections, and the process drags on, limiting further research. The pond was partially backfilled after the initial dig; half the cemetery remains untouched, not because the science was done, but because funding dried up amid the political winds. Developers and archaeologists knew what was coming, so they rushed what they could. Today, if a similar site were found, it might never see the light of day beyond a quick salvage operation before reburial. That’s not science; that’s erasure disguised as respect.  It’s equivalent to modern-day book burning, only the material is destroyed before we even have a chance to discover it. 

I’ve seen this pattern before, and it screams deliberate policy to undermine American sovereignty. Democrats have long used “victim” groups—indigenous peoples, in this case—as levers to dismantle narratives of Western expansion and self-reliance. NAGPRA wasn’t born in a vacuum; it was part of a broader 1990s push that included open-border sentiments and identity politics. The same era gave us policies questioning every aspect of American settlement, from land use to energy. Bush signed it, sure, but as a continuation of the previous administration’s trajectory. I stepped away from the GOP at the time because it felt like the party was complicit in weakening the republic from within. This law doesn’t just repatriate; it creates a framework in which federal recognition of tribes governs everything on or near federal lands, which is a huge chunk of the country. It turns archaeologists into bureaucrats navigating tribal consultations instead of digging for truth. And for sites with no clear affiliation—like the 8,000-year-old Windover bones, which likely belonged to pre-Clovis or early Archaic peoples who other groups later displaced—it effectively halts inquiry. How do you return remains to a tribe that didn’t exist yet? You don’t; you bury the evidence and pretend the history starts with the groups Democrats designate as “indigenous.”

This ties directly into the speculation about giants and multiple cultures in the Ohio Valley and Mississippi River mounds that I’ve pondered for years. Old newspaper accounts and 19th-century reports from the Smithsonian and others described oversized skulls and skeletons in Adena and Hopewell mounds—evidence, some say, of earlier populations. Modern archaeology dismisses much of it as exaggeration or hoaxes, but the pattern is suspicious: NAGPRA and similar policies make it risky even to revisit those claims with new tech like DNA. If there were prior cultures—perhaps Solutrean influences from Europe or other migrations predating the Beringia model—it challenges the singular “Native Americans as eternal stewards” narrative. Pre-Clovis sites like Buttermilk Creek in Texas (15,000+ years old) and genetic evidence of multiple waves into the Americas already poke holes in the old Clovis-first theory. Yet NAGPRA’s cultural affiliation rules often default to modern tribes, erasing the complexity. It’s the same playbook as border policies today: open the gates, label critics as aggressors, and rewrite the founding story to justify dismantling sovereignty. Democrats didn’t invent this overnight; it’s been their trajectory—using “aggrieved” groups to fracture the American experiment.

Compare that to what’s happening in Great Britain with Time Team. If you’ve never watched it, do yourself a favor—episodes are all over YouTube now, even after the show ended its main run on Channel 4. Hosted by Tony Robinson with archaeologists like Mick Aston, Phil Harding, and Carenza Lewis, it was a phenomenon from 1994 to 2014. They’d show up at a site—often tipped off by locals or metal detectorists—spend three days digging with geophysics, volunteers, and experts, then reveal everything from Roman villas to Neolithic tombs to medieval villages. No endless permits bogged down by politics; English Heritage and local councils supported it. The archaeologists became celebrities, the public ate it up, and it funded real research while turning history into entertainment. They published scientific papers too—more than some university departments. Stonehenge, Hadrian’s Wall, Roman baths: Britain celebrates layer upon layer of its past, from Mesolithic to medieval, without erasing any group. Bones from Iron Age, Bronze Age, or Roman contexts are studied for diet, disease, migration—not reburied to appease a modern political framework. It’s respectful scholarship that builds national pride, not guilt. I’ve been to England; their heritage sites are tourist magnets, economic engines, and educational goldmines. Archaeologists there are rock stars, not bureaucrats.

Why can’t we do that here? Japan has underwater sites off the coast of Osaka; China guards its ancient tombs but still excavates selectively. Even in the volatile Middle East, guys like Joel Kramer on his Expedition Bible YouTube channel navigate borders, checkpoints, and regimes to document sites from Sodom to Shiloh. His book Where God Came Down is a masterclass in persistence amid obstacles. The Biblical Archaeology Society and Biblical Archaeology Review fight for dig seasons in Israel despite political minefields—hostile neighbors, military oversight, and permit battles. Yet they publish voraciously because the region’s history is too vital to bury. In the U.S., we have a free country, capital markets, and vast untouched potential—from Florida ponds to Ohio mounds to underwater sites off the coasts—and we tie our hands with NAGPRA. Developers bulldoze sites quietly to avoid red tape; museums shelve collections. The Windover team saw the writing on the wall and wrapped up just as the law hit. The 2002 book exists as a snapshot of what was possible pre-NAGPRA; post-law, that level of open inquiry is gone.

This isn’t abstract. It harms research into who we really are as Americans. Western expansion wasn’t just conquest; it was building on layers of human history, some of which involved the displacement of earlier groups by later ones—just like everywhere else on Earth. Suppressing that validates a one-sided story used to push globalist agendas: open borders, energy restrictions framed as “respecting the land,” and centralized control. The same forces behind NAGPRA cheer solar mandates while demonizing natural gas and erasing our industrial heritage, just as they erase pre-Columbian complexity. I’ve said it before in my writings and streams: Rumble and independent platforms are game-changers because legacy media conceals this. There’s no evidence of giants or advanced pre-Native societies, they claim—yet policies prevent the digs that could prove or disprove it. Old Smithsonian reports from the 1800s detailed large skeletons in mounds; modern DNA from Hopewell and Adena sites shows continuity with later Native groups but also hints of admixture. Why not let the marketplace of ideas decide through open science?

Imagine an American Time Team. Archaeologists as celebrities on the Discovery Channel, live digs at mound sites or Florida bogs, public volunteers, and tourist revenue fund more work. Stonehenge draws millions; why not make Windover or Serpent Mound a Disney-level attraction with VR reconstructions, exhibits, and ongoing excavations? We have the capital, the freedom, the talent. Instead, we have rogue developers destroying sites, and universities complying with repatriation, which halts study. FSU still holds some Windover materials, but NAGPRA inventories and consultations limit what can be done. Rachel Wentz’s popular book Life and Death at Windover captures the human story—families, health, rituals—but even that feels like a last gasp before the freeze.

Repealing or reforming NAGPRA for remains older than, say, 5,000 years—where affiliation is impossible—would be a start. Treat ancient bones like science treats Ötzi the Iceman in Europe: study, learn, share. Respect living tribes’ concerns for recent remains, but don’t let it blanket 15,000 years of migration and replacement. England’s approach proves you can honor the dead without erasing history. Their Time Team episodes on Roman occupation or Neolithic life don’t undermine modern Britain; they enrich it. We need that here—full stop.

My effort in writing this and in pushing these ideas on my platforms stems from that museum visit and the book that followed. It’s personal: I want my kids and grandkids to know the full story of this continent, not a sanitized version designed to undermine the republic. The Windover discovery was a window—a fantastic, irreplaceable one—into a sophisticated past. NAGPRA closed it. Democrats knew what they were doing in 1990, riding the Dances with Wolves wave to frame America as a perpetual aggressor. Republicans like Bush went along. It’s the same game as today’s policies. We deserve better: open archaeology, public celebration, evidence wherever it leads. Let’s make American digs rock stars again. The Time Team model isn’t just British; it’s what humanity needs. And it starts by repealing the laws that bury our past to serve political ends.

Footnotes

1.  Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (University Press of Florida, 2002). Core source for site details, artifacts, and analyses.

2.  Rachel Wentz, Life and Death at Windover: Excavations of a 7,000-Year-Old Pond Cemetery (personal accounts and bioarchaeology).

3.  Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Pub. L. 101-601 (1990). Legislative history via Congress.gov; signed by GHW Bush.

4.  Time Team episodes, Channel 4 (UK), available on YouTube; see also English Heritage reports on public archaeology impact.

5.  Joel P. Kramer, Where God Came Down: The Archaeological Evidence (Expedition Bible publications); YouTube channel documents border and access challenges.

6.  Biblical Archaeology Review archives detail permit struggles in the Holy Land due to geopolitics.

7.  Pre-Clovis and migration studies: e.g., Waters et al. on Buttermilk Creek (Science, 2011); ancient DNA papers in PNAS and Nature on multiple waves.

8.  Historical mound reports: 19th-century Smithsonian and newspaper accounts (contextualized in modern critiques); DNA from Hopewell sites (Ohio History Connection studies).

Bibliography for Further Reading

•  Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. University Press of Florida, 2002.

•  Wentz, Rachel. Life and Death at Windover. University Press of Florida (related publications).

•  U.S. Congress. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq. (1990).

•  Robinson, Tony, et al. Time Team series (1994–2014). Channel 4; scientific outputs summarized in Current Archaeology and English Heritage reports.

•  Kramer, Joel P. Where God Came Down. Expedition Bible, 2022 (approx.).

•  Biblical Archaeology Society. Biblical Archaeology Review (ongoing issues on global dig challenges).

•  Waters, Michael R., et al. “The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas.” Science, 2011.

•  Mills, Lisa A. “Ancient DNA from the Ohio Hopewell.” Ohio History Connection research.

•  ProPublica/NBC investigations on NAGPRA implementation (2023 reports on repatriation delays and impacts).

•  Additional: Federal Register notices on FSU NAGPRA inventories (2021+); Archaeological Conservancy site profiles on Windover.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

The Smoking Gun of Windover: What NAGPRA was meant to conceal

I have been reflecting deeply on this as April 9th rolls around—my birthday—and I decided this year I would give myself something truly personal, something that excites me at the core of my being and ties together years of my own research, political observations, and that relentless drive to uncover truths that the system tries to bury. It is not some flashy gift or a day off from the work I do for everyone else; instead, it is this deep dive into what I consider one of the most important archaeological revelations of our lifetime, a site that serves as a smoking gun for so many historical narratives that have been twisted, politicized, and deliberately constrained. I am talking about the Windover archaeological site in Central Florida, that extraordinary bog cemetery near Titusville, just up the road from the Kennedy Space Center, where an accidental discovery in the mid-1980s peeled back layers of prehistory in ways that challenge everything we have been taught about the peopling of North America, the sophistication of ancient cultures, and the very foundations of modern political narratives about land, history, and who truly belongs here. I have poured over the rare academic book that documented it all—Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery, edited by Glen H. Doran and published by the University Press of Florida in 2002—and it has become my birthday present to myself because it represents a narrow window into truth before the doors slammed shut with laws like NAGPRA. I invite everyone who reads this to share in that excitement with me, because this is not just dusty bones in a pond; it is evidence of a sophisticated society that predates the standard Beringia migration story by thousands of years in meaningful ways, and it exposes how politics, not science, has been driving the suppression of our deep past.  

I first came across references to this site years ago in my own independent studies of ancient American history, the kind of reading I do late at night after dealing with local politics here in Butler County, Ohio, or after watching the national scene unfold with all its layers of deception. Back then, I was already skeptical of the official timelines pushed in academia—the neat little story that indigenous peoples crossed the Bering land bridge around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, spread south as hunter-gatherers, and that everything before European contact fits neatly into that box with tribes like the Iroquois, Lakota, or Sioux representing the “original” inhabitants. But Windover blew that open for me in a way nothing else had. Discovered accidentally in 1982 or early 1984 when a backhoe operator for a housing development called Windover Farms scooped up a human skull while digging in a small peat bog pond, it quickly became clear this was no recent crime scene. County medical examiners dated the remains as ancient, and that led to Florida State University anthropologist Glen Doran stepping in as principal investigator. From 1984 through about 1987, his team excavated roughly half of this half-acre pond cemetery under challenging wet-site conditions, uncovering the remains of at least 168 individuals—men, women, and children, from infants to elders around 60—buried in a deliberate, logical manner that suggested a thoughtful, organized society. What made it extraordinary was the preservation: the acidic yet neutral-pH peat bog acted like a natural time capsule, keeping not just bones but also soft tissue intact. We are talking brain tissue still present in 91 skulls, some with cellular structure preserved enough for DNA extraction; skin on the bodies; even the last meals still identifiable in their stomachs. They had clothing woven from plant fibers—some of the oldest and most complex textiles ever found in the New World, requiring looms or advanced weaving techniques that nobody expected for an “Archaic” period people 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. Wooden artifacts, bone and antler tools, a bottle gourd—evidence of a culture far more advanced than the simple hunter-gatherer label academia slaps on prehistory.  

An amazing book!

I have that Doran book—it is a thick, technical volume, the kind produced in limited academic runs, probably only a few thousand copies worldwide, and I feel fortunate to have one because it captures every multidisciplinary angle: environmental analysis, radiocarbon dating pinning the site firmly to around 6000-5000 BC, mortuary patterns showing bodies often placed with poles or stakes to keep them submerged, facing north with heads turned west in what looks like a deliberate ritual orientation toward the setting sun and perhaps some spiritual reverence. The people themselves were robust; average adult males stood about five feet nine inches, taller and healthier than many later prehistoric groups, with some individuals pushing six feet or more based on femur lengths and bone density—enough to fuel those early newspaper reports of “giants” in North America before institutionalized science dismissed them as hoaxes or exaggerations. There is no wild conspiracy in Doran’s work; it is straight, careful archaeology by scientists who genuinely loved the field and rushed to document everything because they sensed the political tides turning. Half the cemetery was left untouched, and today the site sits under a plaque in a wooded subdivision, a National Historic Landmark with no further major digs. That is the tragedy I keep coming back to, and it is why Windover feels like the smoking gun for me. 

What hit me hardest when I dug into the details—and this is where my own political experience from years fighting school levies, local corruption, and national narratives in Ohio gives me a unique lens—is how perfectly timed this discovery was before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) slammed the brakes on American archaeology. NAGPRA passed Congress on November 16, 1990, right after the Windover excavations wrapped up and right around the cultural frenzy sparked by Dances with Wolves, that Hollywood epic romanticizing the Sioux and framing Western expansion as pure theft of indigenous land. I have studied how bills get written, who lobbies them, and the closed-door intentions behind them, and NAGPRA was loaded with progressive language designed to solidify a specific narrative: America as stolen property from “Native Americans” defined by a very shallow historical scope. It required consultation with tribes for any remains or cultural items, mandated repatriation, and effectively shut down large-scale digs because developers and archaeologists alike knew that uncovering bones could halt projects, tie up land in legal battles, and invite tribal claims. Developers started burying finds quietly rather than reporting them, and grant money in academia dried up unless you played along with the official story. Windover happened in that narrow window before the law fully kicked in—Doran and his team worked fast, funded in part by the curious developers themselves, who paused their subdivision to allow proper science—and the result was this irreplaceable snapshot of an 8,000-year-old culture that does not neatly fit the Beringia-to-modern-tribes pipeline. 

The DNA analysis of the preserved brain tissue is what really undermines the premises on which NAGPRA was built. Studies showed genetic markers linking these Windover people to ancient Asian populations via the Beringia route, as expected—haplogroups like A, C, D, and even the rare X that pops up in some Native contexts—but crucially, they do not align closely with any living Native American tribes or even many known prehistoric groups. It suggests either their lineage died out, experienced a severe bottleneck, or represents a distinct early population that predates or diverged from the groups we retroactively label as “indigenous.” I am not here to take anything away from what we have been calling Native American communities or their cultural heritage; I respect the reverence for ancestors. But when you have remains this old—older than the pyramids, older than Mesopotamian civilizations in some contexts—and DNA that does not match the shallow 300-400-year tribal samples used to justify repatriation claims, who exactly do you hand them back to? The law assumes a direct, unbroken chain to contemporary tribes, but Windover proves the timeline, and the populations were far more complex. These were not simple hunter-gatherers; they had advanced textile production, implying looms; thoughtful burial rituals suggesting religion or cosmology; trade networks possibly reaching far beyond the region (given certain materials); and a settled community life in a resource-rich Florida environment when sea levels were lower and the coastline extended miles outward. Villages and mounds now submerged offshore hint at even broader Archaic networks. This site forces a reevaluation: the “Native American” designation under NAGPRA was built on politically convenient assumptions that ignored deeper prehistory, and that ignorance was weaponized to challenge the legitimacy of Western expansion and the founding of the United States itself. 

I see this as part of a larger pattern I have observed in my own work on politics and history—the way organized systems, often with roots in spiritual battles that play out in the terrestrial realm, rewrite narratives to maintain power. My upcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, dives straight into this because sites like Windover provide the hard evidence that legends, mythology, and even biblical accounts of ancient sophistication are not fairy tales. Think about it: these people knew how to weave delicate fabrics thousands of years before we associate such technology with the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, or Egypt. They cared for their sick and dead in a mass cemetery with ritual precision. Their stature and health suggest a robust population living in a stable society. And all of this at a time when the Ice Age was ending, sea levels were rising, and cultures we now call “Atlantis” in Platonic accounts or other global flood myths were supposedly migrating and seeding knowledge worldwide. Plato described Atlantis as an advanced civilization destroyed by catastrophe, with survivors spreading to Egypt, Britain, the Americas—places where we find sudden leaps in sophistication that do not fit the slow Beringia crawl. Windover fits as one piece of that puzzle: evidence of pre-Mesopotamian complexity right here in North America, with possible ties to shamanic or spiritual practices seen in even older Near Eastern sites. Take Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv in Israel, for example—an ancient site showing early humans (or pre-modern hominins) with innovative tool use, controlled fire, and communal activities dating back hundreds of thousands of years, far predating the standard timelines and hinting at organized, intelligent societies communicating with or revering something beyond the material world. Similar patterns appear in Natufian or shamanic contexts in the Levant around 13,000-10,000 BC, with ritual fires and early communal structures. These are not isolated; they point to a deep, sophisticated human history that institutional science, constrained by funding and politics, has been reluctant to explore fully. 

Here in North America, we have the same suppression at work, only dressed up as “reverence for indigenous rights.” Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis is another example I have studied closely—a massive Mississippian city around 1000-1400 AD with more people than London at the time, featuring the famous Birdman tablet and legends of Thunderbirds that echo across Native oral histories. Yet St. Louis was literally built on top of it, and we still vaguely associate it with later tribes despite clear discontinuities. Mound builders, Adena, Hopewell—earlier cultures with advanced earthworks and trade—get shoehorned into the same narrative, ignoring how each generation builds over the previous one, claiming territory like animals marking trees. Human nature drives this, but laws like NAGPRA freeze it artificially at a politically useful point: 1492 onward, with Europeans as the sole thieves. The reality, as Windover shows, is layered theft and migration going back millennia—groups taking from older groups, sophisticated societies rising and falling. If we had unrestricted digs, we could map this properly, learn from mistakes, and avoid repeating cycles of conquest and cultural erasure. Instead, the law—passed in that post-Dances with Wolves glow of guilt—created incentives to hide discoveries, starved archaeology of funding for controversial sites, and prioritized a narrative that undermines the Christian-influenced Western foundation of America. I know how these bills are crafted from my own experiences fighting local and state politics; the closed-door intentions are rarely about dead ancestors and always about power, land claims, and reshaping history to favor certain ideologies.

Glen Doran himself, who passed away in 2021, and his colleagues captured their frustration between the lines in that book. They knew NAGPRA was coming; they rushed the work because they understood the profession was about to be handcuffed. The peat chemistry, the pollen, the paleoethnobotany, the DNA—all of it documented before the repatriation machine could intervene. Yet even today, the remaining half of the pond sits largely untouched, and broader Florida bog sites or offshore mounds from lower sea-level eras go unexplored because developers fear land seizures and archaeologists fear grant denials or tribal vetoes. This is not reverence; it is concealment. I love true archaeology—the kind done in England on shows like Time Team, where they dig openly, analyze bones without mandatory handover, and let evidence speak. Here, the human need to know has been subordinated to politics, which is why Windover feels like such a miracle: it slipped through just before the gates closed. It validates folklore, Plato’s hints at Atlantis, global trade networks in deep antiquity, and even the idea that our origin stories—whether biblical, mythological, or shamanic—involve advanced pre-flood or pre-catastrophe civilizations that revered higher powers, appeased spirits, and built societies with ritual purpose. The Windover dead faced north, heads west toward the sunset—symbolism that screams cosmology, not random burial. They were not “cavemen”; they were part of something older and wiser than we have only breadcrumbs of now.

This all ties directly into the spiritual warfare I explore in my work—the fallen entities at war with creation itself, imprinting their influence on earthly power structures to erase God’s narrative and replace it with controlled ignorance. Laws like NAGPRA are not neutral; they serve to keep humanity deficient in knowledge, allowing modern political orders to maintain authority built on false premises. Western expansion brought a Christian viewpoint and free civilization that disrupted older pagan or shamanic systems, but if deeper evidence shows sophisticated pre-Columbian (and pre-Beringia in practice) cultures with their own complexities, the “stolen land” story loses its moral absolutism. Everyone stole from someone; history is layered conquest. The real crime is preventing inquiry that could reveal this, because it threatens the power base. Windover proves it in my eyes: 8,000-year-old brains yielding DNA that does not fit the 1990 legal template, textiles requiring technology we associate with much later eras, and a cemetery showing care and ritual in a society predating known tribes. It is the perfect example for my book because it shows how politics cascades from heavenly rebellion into terrestrial control—concealing evidence so the deficient knowledge keeps people dependent on the current narrative.

I have met enough people in politics over the years, from Tea Party rallies to local commissioners, to recognize when good intentions get co-opted by larger agendas. Archaeologists like Doran wanted knowledge; the system wanted control. That is why I judge these things rigorously in my own life and work—if you cannot manage truth at the foundational level, you cannot lead effectively elsewhere. Windover demands we repeal or heavily reform NAGPRA, not to disrespect anyone but to prioritize the human need to know over artificial constraints. We need more digs, more funding for wet sites in Florida and beyond, and more open analysis of offshore mounds from Ice Age coastlines. Only then can we bridge the gap between legend and evidence, avoid repeating past mistakes, and understand our true place in the deep timeline. This site, with its preserved last meals, woven fabrics, and unclaimed DNA, hints at Atlantis-like migrations, shamanic connections to the spirit world (echoing Qesem Cave’s early innovations or Cahokia’s Birdman symbolism), and a history far richer than the shallow one politicized in 1990.

As I celebrate another year on this earth, I find real joy in holding this truth close. It reinforces why I fight the battles I do—not just local levies or national elections, but the deeper war for accurate history. The Windover people were real, sophisticated, and part of something vast. Their story survived by accident in the bog, preserved long enough for us to glimpse it before the political machine intervened. That is my birthday gift: the excitement of knowing more is out there if we demand the freedom to look. I will keep pushing in my writings, my podcast, and my life because evidence like this changes everything. Share it, study it, and let it provoke the larger discussion it deserves. The republic, and humanity’s understanding of itself, depends on refusing to let politics bury the past any longer.

Footnotes

1.  Primary source details on discovery, excavation, and findings from Glen H. Doran’s edited volume and supporting analyses.

2.  DNA results and non-alignment with modern tribes were summarized from peer-reviewed studies referenced in site reports.

3.  NAGPRA legislative history and timing relative to Windover drawn from official records and archaeological critiques.

4.  Stature and artifact sophistication (textiles, rituals) from bioarchaeological chapters in the Windover investigations.

5.  Broader connections to global prehistory (Qesem Cave, Cahokia) informed by my independent cross-referencing of Paleolithic and Mississippian sites.

6.  Political motivations behind NAGPRA are tied to the cultural context of 1990 (Dances with Wolves) and observed patterns in bill-making from my experience.

Bibliography for Continued Reading

•  Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. University Press of Florida, 2002.

•  Wentz, Rachel K. Life and Death at Windover: Excavations of a 7,000-Year-Old Pond Cemetery. Florida Historical Society Press, 2012.

•  National Park Service. “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.” Official NPS overview and regulations.

•  Plato. Timaeus and Critias (translations discussing Atlantis).

•  Various reports on Qesem Cave: Barkai et al., publications on Lower Paleolithic innovation in Israel.

•  Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. Penguin, 2010 (for Birdman and mound-builder context).

•  Biblical Archaeology Review and related journals on Near Eastern shamanic/ritual sites predating Mesopotamia.

•  My own forthcoming The Politics of Heaven for expanded spiritual-political synthesis.

•  National Geographic and Florida Museum archives on Windover preservation and public exhibits.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.