The ongoing trial involving former FirstEnergy executives, coupled with the conviction and 20-year federal prison sentence of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, has once again thrust the so-called “Ohio nuclear bribery scandal” into the spotlight. This case, centered on House Bill 6 (HB6) and a $1.3 billion ratepayer-funded subsidy for FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants, is frequently portrayed in media and prosecutorial narratives as a straightforward story of corporate greed, bribery, and political corruption. At the same time, there is no denying that significant sums of money changed hands in ways that crossed legal and ethical lines—FirstEnergy itself admitted to criminal conduct in a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement, paying a $230 million penalty to the U.S. Department of Justice— the dominant framing overlooks a deeper, more systemic context. This context reveals how aggressive federal regulatory pressures during the Obama administration, combined with a push toward renewables and against traditional baseload energy sources such as nuclear power, placed utilities like FirstEnergy in an existential bind. The executives and political figures involved may have made grave errors in response, but those errors were made under duress from policies that targeted their industry, destroyed economic viability, and forced desperate measures to preserve jobs, infrastructure, and Ohio’s reliable power grid.
FirstEnergy’s challenges trace back to the mid-2010s, when market and regulatory forces converged to threaten the viability of its nuclear fleet, particularly the Davis-Besse and Perry plants in northern Ohio. These facilities provided critical baseload power—reliable, carbon-free electricity that renewables like wind and solar could not yet fully replicate due to intermittency. Yet, low natural gas prices from the fracking boom, coupled with federal policies favoring renewables, eroded their competitiveness. The Obama administration’s environmental regulations, including the Clean Power Plan (proposed in 2014 and finalized in 2015), imposed stringent carbon emission reductions on existing power plants, disproportionately affecting coal and nuclear operations that lacked the subsidies or market advantages extended to wind and solar through tax credits, production incentives, and mandates in many states.
The administration’s approach to nuclear was ambivalent at best and hostile in practice. While nuclear was acknowledged as low-carbon, federal support waned: funding for nuclear R&D programs was cut, loan guarantees were limited, and the Yucca Mountain waste repository project was effectively abandoned in 2009-2010, leaving utilities with indefinite on-site storage burdens and added costs. Broader energy policies prioritized renewables, with the Department of Energy and EPA frameworks that accelerated the shift away from traditional sources. In Ohio, this national pressure amplified local market distortions. FirstEnergy announced in 2018 that it would close Davis-Besse (operational since 1978) and Perry (since 1987), along with others in Pennsylvania, citing economic unviability amid PJM Interconnection market rules that failed to compensate nuclear for its reliability and zero-emission attributes.
These closures would have resulted in thousands of job losses, reduced grid reliability (nuclear power accounted for about 23% of FirstEnergy’s power mix at the time), and higher long-term emissions if replaced by natural gas. The plants were not “failing” due to mismanagement alone, but because the playing field was tilted by policy: renewables received federal subsidies (e.g., extensions of the Investment Tax Credit and the Production Tax Credit under Obama-era legislation), while nuclear power faced rising compliance costs without equivalent support. This created what can be described as an “impairment strategy”—a regulatory environment that squeezed traditional energy providers, making them vulnerable to acquisition, restructuring, or collapse, often benefiting private equity or renewable-focused interests.
In response, FirstEnergy sought legislative relief in Ohio. HB6, passed in 2019, provided roughly $150 million annually in subsidies (via ratepayer charges) for the nuclear plants through 2027, while also subsidizing certain coal plants and freezing or rolling back renewable energy and energy efficiency standards. The bill’s proponents framed it as preserving Ohio’s energy infrastructure and jobs; critics saw it as a bailout for uncompetitive assets. Investigations revealed that FirstEnergy funneled approximately $60 million through dark money groups (like Generation Now, tied to Householder) to influence the 2018 elections, help Householder become speaker, secure HB6’s passage, and defeat repeal efforts. Householder was convicted in 2023 of racketeering conspiracy and sentenced to 20 years. Recent trials involve former executives such as Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling, who are accused of related bribery (e.g., $4.3 million paid to former PUCO chair Sam Randazzo in exchange for favorable rulings).
The core issue is proportionality and causation. Were these actions bribery, or a panicked reaction to survival threats? Executives faced temptations arising from access to funds amid the crisis—perhaps justifying personal spending as part of “securing infrastructure”—but that does not excuse crossing the line. The real scandal includes how regulations weaponized by one political regime (progressive energy policies) forced companies into the arms of another (Republican lawmakers) for relief. This is not unique to FirstEnergy; similar dynamics have played out nationwide, where regulatory hammers target disfavored industries, leading to lobbying excesses.
Statistics underscore the impact: Ohio’s nuclear plants employed thousands directly and supported broader economic activity. Their potential closure threatened grid stability in PJM, where nuclear provides essential capacity. Renewables have grown, but without baseload backup, reliability suffers (e.g., wind curtailment). HB6’s nuclear subsidies were repealed in 2021 by HB128 after the scandal erupted, yet the plants continued to operate under new ownership (Energy Harbor, spun off from FirstEnergy), suggesting viability without perpetual bailouts—but only after surviving the regulatory squeeze.
This case highlights broader dangers: when the government uses regulations to steer markets toward ideological goals (e.g., rapid renewable energy dominance), it risks cronyism, corruption, and erosion of property rights. Private companies built infrastructure to serve the public; shifting rules to favor competitors can amount to de facto taking without compensation. The focus on “fraud” and “greed” ignores how progressive policies under Obama created the conditions for desperation. Trump-era rollbacks and pro-energy stances (2017-2021, and post-2024) aimed to counter this, restoring balance.
Executives must handle pressure impeccably—cross every “t” and dot every “i”—but the pressure’s origin matters. When rules are crafted to force bad decisions, accountability should extend to policymakers who engineered the trap. The narrative must include this: FirstEnergy and its allies were not villains scheming in a vacuum but operators defending a vital industry against existential threats from radical energy politics. True justice requires examining the whole chain—from federal overreach to state-level responses—rather than scapegoating those reacting to it.
A robust defense in these cases would foreground this story: the Obama-era push against nuclear and traditional energy as the precipitating force, leading to market distortions that left companies no choice but to seek political aid. Without that context, the public sees only corruption, not the systemic impairment that preceded it.
This is not a case about bribery but rather survival. Private property and free markets suffer when regulations are used as tools for redistribution or ideological control. Ohio’s energy future, and America’s, depends on recognizing this to prevent future scandals born of policy-induced desperation. And when we talk about this FirstEnergy case, we have to defend it in the manner in which the problem really resides, in the government attempting to seize the means of production as a Marxist takeover of industry and our political system in general. It is a dire situation that warrants our closest attention.
Bibliography
• U.S. Department of Justice, “Former Ohio House Speaker Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison,” June 29, 2023.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how positions evolve, especially now in early 2026, with the new Trump administration taking shape and the political order flipping in ways that feel like vindication for a lot of what I’ve fought for over the decades. People on the outside—those who once held power and now find themselves looking in—are quick to accuse me of changing my tune. “You’ve flipped,” they say. “You were anti-government back then, and now you’re cheering for it.” But the truth is more straightforward and more consistent than that: I’m still the same person who wrote The Symposium of Justice in 2004. I’ve learned, grown, and adapted based on real experience, but the core hasn’t shifted. What’s changed is the situation around me.
Fighting Evil
Back in 2004, when I published The Symposium of Justice, the world looked very different. George W. Bush was in office; the Patriot Act had just expanded federal reach in the name of security, and the government felt like it was ballooning out of control, regardless of who held the reins.[^1] I wasn’t writing as some detached observer; the book was semi-autobiographical, rooted in the raw anger of my thirties. I’d lived a whole, intense life by then—far more than most people my age. I’d been knee-deep in small-city and big-city battles, pushing for legislative fixes to corruption, getting tangled up in significant drug enforcement efforts, and even interacting directly with the FBI on fronts where things weren’t working right.[^2] When the system failed, I didn’t just complain—I acted. There were nights I ran around confronting drug dealers with a bullwhip, breaking up operations in self-defense mode that had been my primary mechanism since I was a kid. One time, I ended up in front of a drug house with about 40 young adults and teens caught in the crossfire of Grand Theft Auto-style chaos. I confronted them head-on, and it saved many of their lives because the police came and broke up the fight, but it wasn’t glamorous. It was vigilante justice born of frustration: if the authorities wouldn’t or couldn’t fix it, someone had to.
The main character in The Symposium of Justice, Cliffhanger, channels that same energy. He takes on a corrupt, centralized government intertwined with entertainment elites who play radical games in the arena. The book is about vigilante justice against tyranny—drawing from real experiences where I saw powerful forces profit off drugs, kickbacks, and control. I was angry, no apologies. It was the work of a man ready to fight back physically if needed. I thought about going full vigilante: mask on, discretion, punishing the bad guys in the shadows like Batman or Zorro, my all-time favorite. I was prepared for it. Law enforcement didn’t like me much—FBI cases I was involved in heavily made that clear—but politics tied their hands, and there wasn’t much they could do.[^3]
But something shifted after the book came out. It had enough impact to spark honest conversations. People reached out—film festivals, the Western arts community, and political circles. I started talking to influential people in entertainment who shared similar frustrations with centralized corruption. Instead of running around at night cracking skulls, I found a more powerful path: writing every day, putting my name to it, building a blog that became my daily weapon. The Overmanwarrior blog started as an extension of that 2004 anger but evolved into something sustained and influential.[^4] Blogging wasn’t as romantic as vigilante nights—no mask, no midnight drama—but it was far more effective. I could expose corruption, rally people, influence voters, and shape events without risking everything on force.
I had two clear options back then: either do the vigilante thing for real—rest in the world making things good through direct action—or worry about it and try to expire it indirectly through politics and persuasion. I chose the latter. Getting more involved in politics showed me that the drug dealers and corrupt players profited from the system because they had kickbacks and protection. Vigilantism might feel good in the moment, but it doesn’t dismantle the machine. Blogging, activism, running for office vibes (though I stayed independent), and fighting tax increases (earning me the “Tax-killer” nickname) did more damage to that machine.[^5] I influenced things in ways a masked figure never could—because when you take the mask off, own your name, and accept personal responsibility, you build real power. People know who you are; they can debate you, fight you if they want, but the ideas spread farther.
Fast-forward to now, 2026, and the difference is night and day. We have a government under Trump that aligns more with the orthodox, law-and-order society I always wanted. The Republican Party has become the vehicle for reform, not the expansion of tyranny. The people I wrote about in 2004—the radicals controlling entertainment, profiting off chaos—are on the outside looking in. Protests flare up, funded by background players causing trouble, but they’re losing. The bad guys scream and cry because good government is winning through elections, debate, free speech, and voter accountability—not through fear or intimidation.
That’s why accusations of “changing” miss the point. I didn’t just hope for a different government; I supported the mechanisms that put a better one in place. Elections, arguments, convincing voters—that’s how you win without masks. The other side can’t match it. They cry foul, blow up lines of communication, resort to violence or victimhood because their positions don’t hold up in open debate. Just enforce the law and order, win arguments, and replace the corrupt with a proper government. It’s better than running around at night with a bullwhip, taking frustrations out on faces. Expose them, beat them at the ballot box, and build something lasting.
My life trajectory proves it. In my thirties, I drew on personal experience: FBI interactions, legislative pushes that failed, vigilante moments that worked short-term but revealed their limits. After the book, film festivals opened doors—Western arts folks who got the Zorro vibe, entertainment people tired of radical agendas and wanted to work with me off the record, so long as I was willing to sign mine to the cause. I spoke at events, networked, and learned that influence through ideas trumps force.[^6] By the 2010s, with Tail of the Dragon in 2012 amid Tea Party energy, I was writing philosophy in action—motorcycle freedom symbolizing untethered resistance to overreach.[^7] Plans for bigger distribution (even ties to Glenn Beck circles) hit walls because the tone was too explosive against expanding federal power then. But it planted seeds.
Today, I’m happy with the trajectory. The Trump administration, Congress, and local and state governments are doing great work in places. No need for vigilantism when voters can pick leaders who enforce rules. The other side’s inability to argue substantively shows why they lose—they rely on emotion, not reason. Winning voters with good arguments builds longevity and a proper society.
Some look for ways to undermine my current stance, digging up the 2004 book to say I’ve contradicted myself. Fine—let the debates flourish. That’s why I put myself out there: to inspire thinking and to reject victimization cycles. The world isn’t heading toward the dystopia many feared in the early 2000s. People are upset, lashing out, but the system works best if people manage the government, avoiding becoming a vigilante, trying to conceal their identity so that the powerful can’t find them and punish them in real life. I found that it’s far more powerful to beat them where they can’t defend themselves, with ideas that you sign your name to. Let voters handle it. When government goes rogue, accountability through the ballot box fixes it—not shadows.
It does my heart good to see the bad guys suffer these days. I take showers with “liberal tears” from my tank—refreshing, cleansing the evil they proposed.[^8] Romantic as vigilante justice is in books and movies, real justice comes from winning wars openly: expose corruption, replace it with order, and manage government through accountability. That’s what I learned over 20+ years. The Symposium of Justice remains relevant—its perspective on tyranny holds, but now we have a government worth supporting. Huge difference. It may not be as exciting. But the the method I ended up using to fight bad guys has been very effective. And it works a whole lot better.
[^1]: Context from post-9/11 Patriot Act criticisms; Hoffman’s 2004 publication aligns with anti-government sentiment under Bush (e.g., blog retrospectives on overmanwarrior.wordpress.com).
[^2]: Personal accounts of FBI/drug enforcement involvement referenced in Goodreads author bio and blog posts on activism.
[^3]: Self-described tensions with law enforcement in tax/anti-corruption fights; “Tax-killer” nickname from local battles.
[^4]: Blog launch as evolution from book; daily writing as alternative to direct action (overmanwarrior.wordpress.com history).
[^5]: Activism details from Goodreads and blog; Reform Party/Tea Party ties.
[^6]: Film festival/Western arts community interactions inferred from transcript and broader activist networking.
[^7]: Tail of the Dragon (2012) publication amid Tea Party; motorcycle symbolism for freedom (Goodreads/author notes).
[^8]: Direct quote/paraphrase from transcript on “liberal tears” as metaphor for current satisfaction.
Bibliography
• Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Self-published, 2004. (Referenced in blog archives and Goodreads profile.)
• Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012. (Goodreads; blog promotions.)
The resurgence of interest in the Bible, as evidenced by unprecedented sales figures in recent years, stands as one of the most compelling cultural indicators of our time. Far from fading into obscurity amid secular trends, the Scriptures are experiencing a remarkable revival, with 19 million Bibles sold in the United States in 2025—marking a 21-year high according to Circana BookScan data reported by Publishers Weekly. This represents a 12% increase over 2024 and roughly double the volume sold in 2019, just before the global disruptions that reshaped so much of society.
These numbers are not anomalies; they reflect a broader trajectory that began accelerating around 2021 and has continued unabated. The surge defies the narrative of inevitable decline in biblical engagement, a story pushed for decades by secular commentators who predicted the erosion of Judeo-Christian foundations in Western civilization. Instead, people are turning to the Bible not merely as a relic of history but as a living guide for navigating moral, social, and existential challenges. This shift aligns closely with the enduring role of Scripture as the hinge pin of Western values—principles of justice, individual dignity, rule of law, and moral accountability that underpin legal systems, property rights, family structures, and societal order.
My own lifelong relationship with the Bible informs this perspective deeply. Raised in an environment steeped in church involvement—from Sunday school to performing in passion plays as Nicodemus and other figures—I once assumed such exposure was universal. Yet over decades, I’ve witnessed its decline in mainstream culture, replaced by secular ideologies that challenge biblical premises on everything from marriage and sexuality to the sanctity of life and personal responsibility. Divorce rates have soared, trust in institutions has eroded, and radical agendas have sought to dismantle traditional moorings. The progressive push during certain administrations, including expansions of influence from non-biblical worldviews and cultural shifts like the transgender movement and pride displays in public spaces, provoked backlash. Many saw these as assaults on the shared moral framework that allows civil discourse and orderly society.
The Bible, however, has proven resilient. Hotel drawers worldwide still often contain a Gideon-placed New Testament, a quiet testament to common values of good versus evil, right versus wrong. Even as secularism advanced, these symbols persisted, offering reassurance that not all shared foundations had vanished. Now, that quiet persistence has exploded into overt demand.
The 2025 figures are particularly striking when contextualized. A 36% spike occurred in September alone, with 2.4 million copies sold that month—far exceeding typical monthly averages of 1.2 to 1.6 million earlier in the year. This surge coincided with the tragic assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, had long championed biblical principles in public life, aligning faith with defense of Western civilization against progressive overreach. His death, widely viewed as targeted due to his influence, stirred profound reflection among followers and beyond, prompting many to seek solace, guidance, and renewed commitment in Scripture.
Publishers and analysts noted this event as a catalyst, amplifying an existing trend. Media like The Chosen, a crowd-funded series dramatizing the life of Jesus, has further fueled accessibility and interest, making biblical stories relatable to new audiences and encouraging deeper engagement with the text itself.
Internationally, the pattern holds. In the United Kingdom, Bible sales reached record highs in 2025, with physical copies up 106% since 2019 and a 27.7% year-over-year surge from 2024 to 2025. Revenue climbed to £6.3 million, more than doubling from £2.69 million in 2019. This growth, tracked by Nielsen BookScan and highlighted by publishers like SPCK, occurs amid concerns over cultural shifts, including rising Islamic influence and church challenges—mirroring fears in other Western nations about losing foundational values.
Bookstores reflect this shift tangibly. The religious sections, once tucked away in corners for privacy, now occupy prominent positions near registers and entrances—often outpacing New Age or paranormal displays. I’ve observed this across numerous visits: Bibles and related titles dominate front-of-store space, signaling mainstream demand rather than niche interest. Buyers no longer hide their purchases; they embrace them openly.
This revival ties directly to broader societal dynamics. Western legal systems, from English common law to American jurisprudence, draw heavily from biblical concepts—Ten Commandments influences on moral law, prophetic calls for justice, New Testament emphasis on grace and accountability. My well-worn copy of the 2024 Ohio Criminal Law Handbook underscores this: statutes mean little without a shared moral compass. Secular aggressions against these foundations—defund-the-police movements, erosion of property rights, radical cultural experiments—have proven destabilizing. People crave order, structure, and wholesomeness.
The MAGA realignment and Trump-era embrace of biblical imagery resonated because they signaled a return to these roots. Voters sought continuity, not chaos. High divorce rates, fractured families, and societal unrest trace back to departures from biblical wisdom on human nature and relationships. As people recognize this, they reach for the source.
Comparative religion study reinforces the uniqueness: while many faiths offer personal ethics, none provide the comprehensive societal blueprint of the Bible—balancing individual liberty with communal responsibility, justice with mercy. Other religions contribute positively, but the Bible’s track record in fostering higher quality of life, innovation, and stability in the West is unmatched.
These sales statistics—19 million in the U.S., explosive UK growth, spikes tied to cultural moments—signal hope. New generations, including Gen Z, seek meaning amid uncertainty. Shows like The Chosen make Scripture approachable; events like Kirk’s death prompt soul-searching. Bookstores prioritizing Bibles reflect market reality: demand drives placement.
This isn’t mere nostalgia; it’s a pivot toward foundation-building. Societies function best with agreed moral premises. The Bible offers that without coercion—inviting reflection on good and evil, right living, and human dignity. As more embrace it, the next 10–20 years could see cascading positives: stronger families, restored civility, resilient institutions.
The trajectory isn’t decline but renewal. Bible sales aren’t just numbers; they’re evidence of yearning for truth in a turbulent world. Encourage others to explore it—not as dogma, but as a source of wisdom. Hand someone a copy; discuss its ideas. In doing so, we contribute to a healthier civilization. So as bad as things can seem, and the secular types are loud in their hope for a destruction of religious foundations to social order, replaced by the power of government, a dramatic trend is emerging that points in the right direction. We tried to live in a society by accommodating secular ideas, and it just doesn’t work. And people, empty of those secular promises, are reaching for Bibles, because they want something that does work. And that is something to look forward to.
Bibliography
• Publishers Weekly. “Bible Sales Break Records in U.S., U.K.” January 9, 2026.
• Circana BookScan data, as cited in multiple reports (e.g., Crosswalk, Aleteia, Christian Post).
• SPCK Group research on UK Bible sales, via Premier Christian News and The Guardian, January 2026.
• Various reports on September 2025 spike (e.g., Fox Business, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association).
• American Bible Society and related surveys on engagement trends.
Footnotes
¹ Circana BookScan, via Publishers Weekly, January 2026.
² Ibid.; also noted in Aleteia and Crosswalk reports.
³ Reports from Fox Business and Billy Graham sources, October 2025.
⁴ SPCK/Nielsen BookScan, via Premier Christian News and The Guardian, January 2026.
⁵ Observations from personal bookstore visits over years, aligned with industry trends.
The recent World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, held in January 2026, featured several high-profile discussions on global stability, with a particular focus on Middle East redevelopment and peace initiatives. On January 22, 2026, Jared Kushner, a key figure in prior Middle East diplomacy and now associated with the Board of Peace, presented a detailed “master plan” for post-war Gaza reconstruction during a signing ceremony for the Board’s charter.<sup>1</sup> This vision, often referred to as “New Gaza,” proposed a comprehensive transformation of the territory through phased development, private-sector investment, and economic revitalization, drawing parallels to successful urban models in the Gulf region such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
The plan outlined four primary phases: beginning in southern Rafah (termed “New Rafah” or “City 1”), progressing to Khan Younis (“City 2”), the central refugee camps (“City 3”), and culminating in Gaza City (“City 4”). It envisioned over 100,000 permanent housing units in initial stages, alongside 200 education centers, 180 cultural, religious, and vocational facilities, and 75 medical centers.<sup>2</sup> Infrastructure elements included a new port, airport, freight rail line, logistics corridors, and ring roads to connect urban centers. Projections included raising Gaza’s GDP from a war-depressed level of approximately $362 million (as reported in 2024) to $10 billion by 2035, generating 500,000 jobs, and attracting $25–30 billion in investments, predominantly from private sources.<sup>3</sup> Construction timelines suggested major elements could be completed in 2–3 years under conditions of demilitarization and enhanced security, with an emphasis on turning the Mediterranean coastline into a thriving tourism and enterprise zone.<sup>4</sup>
This approach builds directly on the legacy of the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states (United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan), fostering economic cooperation, technology sharing, and reduced conflict incentives.<sup>5</sup> The Accords have demonstrated measurable economic benefits, including increased trade volumes, joint ventures in sectors like agriculture and cybersecurity, and broader regional investment flows, contributing to a paradigm where prosperity serves as a counter to ideological extremism.<sup>6</sup> By prioritizing free-market principles, upper mobility, and shared economic gains over radical narratives—often rooted in anti-capitalist or Marxist-aligned ideologies—the Gaza redevelopment seeks to erode support for groups like Hamas, whose governance has historically perpetuated poverty, suppressed development, and fueled violence, as evidenced by events such as the October 7, 2023, attacks.<sup>7</sup>
Broader regional dynamics include evolving access arrangements at the Temple Mount (known as Haram al-Sharif to Muslims), the site of the ancient Jewish First and Second Temples and currently home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock. Under the post-1967 status quo, administered by the Jordanian Waqf with Israeli security oversight, Jewish prayer has traditionally been restricted to avoid escalation, with observant Jews often confined to the Western Wall plaza below.<sup>8</sup> Developments in 2025 and early 2026 saw incremental shifts, including high-profile visits and permitted prayers by figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, sometimes involving prostration or open recitation, amid political backing from elements within Israel’s government.<sup>9</sup> These changes have sparked debate over the erosion of longstanding arrangements, with reports of relaxed enforcement on items like prayer pages and increased Jewish visitor numbers, though no formal policy has sanctioned widespread rebuilding of a Third Temple.<sup>10</sup> But it is looming over the area as a momentum shift that is gaining a lot of traction.
Related preparations among some Orthodox Jewish groups include efforts to ready ritual elements for potential Temple service, such as the importation of red heifers from Texas for purification ashes as described in Numbers 19. Five such heifers arrived in Israel around 2022–2023, with symbolic ceremonies and practice runs conducted in 2025, though reports indicate disqualifications due to blemishes or other issues, preventing full ritual use as of early 2026.<sup>11</sup> The site’s historical significance—linked to King David’s threshing floor purchase, Solomon’s Temple construction, and Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah—continues to drive archaeological interest in adjacent areas like the City of David, where excavations reveal layers of biblical-era evidence despite longstanding access limitations.<sup>12</sup>
Critics of the Gaza plan have highlighted its top-down structure, limited direct Palestinian input, potential displacement risks, and contrasts with the territory’s current realities: extensive rubble (estimated at 60 million tonnes), humanitarian challenges, and destroyed infrastructure.<sup>13</sup> Some analyses view the proposal as overly speculative or aligned with external interests, raising questions about historic site preservation and community consultation.<sup>14</sup> Nonetheless, the overarching theme aligns with a pragmatic strategy: leveraging capitalist competition, enterprise zones, and economic opportunity to supplant suppression and radicalism with stability and prosperity. If implemented successfully—contingent on security, funding, and multilateral cooperation—this could reshape Gaza into a regional hub, diminish proxy influences (including from Iran), and facilitate deeper historical and scientific inquiry across contested areas like Jerusalem.
The plan’s ambition reflects a belief that peace through shared economic success may prove more durable than prolonged conflict, potentially benefiting residents across divides by prioritizing mobility, employment, and development over ideological division.<sup>15</sup> Personally, I’m ready to book a ticket to visit.
Bibliography
• Al Jazeera, “Map shows what would happen to Gaza under the US ‘master plan’,” January 27, 2026.
• ABC News, “Jared Kushner lays out Trump-backed ‘master plan’ for post-war Gaza,” January 23, 2026.
• The New York Times, “U.S. Lays Out a Glittering Plan for Gaza, Including Skyscrapers,” January 22, 2026.
• BBC, “US unveils plans for development of ‘New Gaza’ with skyscrapers,” January 22, 2026.
• Jerusalem Post, “Jared Kushner unveils $25 billion plan to transform Gaza into economic hub by 2035.”
• Times of Israel, various articles on Temple Mount access changes, 2025–2026.
• Wikipedia, “Abraham Accords” (accessed with updates to 2026).
• Charisma Magazine, articles on red heifer developments, 2025.
Footnotes
1. Al Jazeera, “‘Imperial’ agenda: What’s Trump’s Gaza development plan, unveiled in Davos?” January 23, 2026.
2. ABC News, “Jared Kushner lays out Trump-backed ‘master plan’ for post-war Gaza,” January 23, 2026.
3. The National, “New Gaza, new Rafah and a ‘free market economy’: Inside Kushner’s $30bn reconstruction plan,” January 22, 2026.
4. NBC News, “Jared Kushner’s vision for Gaza as a gleaming port city clashes with reality,” January 26, 2026.
5. Wikipedia, “Abraham Accords,” updated January 2026 entries.
6. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The Abraham Accords After Gaza: A Change of Context,” April 2025 (contextual extension to 2026 impacts).
7. Breitbart, “‘Catastrophic Success’: Kushner Unveils ‘New Gaza’ Plan at Davos,” January 24, 2026.
8. Jerusalem Story, “Experts Warn: Israel Is Changing the Long-Standing Status Quo at al-Aqsa Mosque,” 2025.
9. Times of Israel, “Ben Gvir says Jewish prayer, including full prostration, permitted at Temple Mount,” May 26, 2025.
10. Jerusalem Post, “Temple Mount to relax restrictions for Jewish prayer,” November 2025.
11. Charisma Magazine, “Red Heifer Update: The Truth Behind Israel’s Recent Ceremony,” August 14, 2025.
12. Historical context from biblical archaeology sources, cross-referenced with Temple Mount entry restrictions (Wikipedia).
13. The New York Times, “U.S. Lays Out a Glittering Plan for Gaza,” January 22, 2026.
14. Al Jazeera, “Map shows what would happen to Gaza under the US ‘master plan’,” January 27, 2026.
15. Jerusalem Post and Guardian coverage on Board of Peace and redevelopment optimism, January 2026.
Few works of fiction demonstrate how a single cultural artifact can redirect mass sentiment as clearly as Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The lesson is not merely about the book’s plot or its notoriety, but about how one or two influential voices—amplified at the right moment—can reframe the public’s sense of normal, desirable, and permissible. In that sense, the novel became a lever: it showed how quickly intellectual fashion can spread once an idea is given a compelling narrative vessel and a ready audience. Whether the author intended it or not, such works often become signal boosters for movements eager to shake the old moral architecture.
At the center of the novel’s cultural imprint, as I read it, is a sustained argument against organized religion—less a theological disagreement than a social revolution by narrative means. Heinlein built his case dramatically, not dogmatically, embedding a worldview in characters and community structures that model life without traditional guardrails and sold it with the use of group orgies and severe sexual deviancy. To me, that is where the damage began: by undermining institutions that help ordinary people consolidate virtue and discipline desire, the book invited a generation to experiment with a vacuum—an open space where inherited norms were cast as oppressive rather than protective.
This is where my position diverges most sharply from Heinlein’s. I argue that human beings require shared standards, rituals, and guardrails to become their best selves. Organized religion—at its best—provides a civilizational scaffolding: it teaches time-tested boundaries, channels ambition toward fruitful ends, and aligns private conduct with public well-being. Remove that scaffolding, and something else will rush in to fill the void: fads, chemicals, celebrity cults, ideological tribes, and the market’s loudest impulses. In retrospect, the novel did not merely critique religion; it reprogrammed sentiment against an order that had long helped cultivate responsibility and continuity.
That shift, once normalized, cascaded into the wider cultural economy. Publishing, music, film, fashion, and campus discourse seized on the book’s rebellion as a mood, infusing it into slogans, styles, and scenes. The effect snowballed: when guardrails are mocked long enough, the next generation mistakes the mockery for wisdom and the absence of boundaries for freedom. Yet freedom without structure becomes drift—a vacancy the market will monetize and the state will eventually regulate. What was sold as liberation often ends as dependency—on substances, on trends, or on authorities who promise to manage the chaos.
Another uncomfortable reality: power centers notice when a single narrative can mobilize the masses. When culture proves it can be swung by a small cohort of storytellers and influencers, hidden patrons inevitably appear—financiers, tastemakers, publicity machines—eager to steer the swing for their own ends. I’m not accusing Heinlein of conspiracy; I’m describing the structural fact that memes attract money, and money reorganizes culture. Once the idea is loose, the sponsors come, and the social machinery follows.
The long-tail consequence has been a population re-educated by entertainment—trained to distrust inherited wisdom, to laugh at the past, and to outsource meaning to the loudest novelty. This is not progress; it is civilizational amnesia. The cost shows up as broken families, attenuated civic trust, declining attention spans, and rising loneliness—symptoms of a culture that has traded thick institutions for thin ideologies. What looked like enlightenment from a distance often feels like atomization up close.
I’m not denying Heinlein’s craft or the book’s clever provocations. He staged a serious debate and gave it commercial muscle. But a debate that deconstructs without reconstructing is not a public service; it is a demolition project with no blueprint for the rebuild. The aftermath is predictable: a vacuum that gets filled by commercial spectacle and political manipulation, neither of which makes people more virtuous, more responsible, or more free.
So the task now is not to censor the past but to relearn how culture works—how a few works, a few voices, at a few key moments, can swing the habits of millions. The remedy is to rebuild moral architecture openly and confidently: to argue for the goods that institutions secure, to defend boundaries that dignify the person, and to recover a language of obligation that lifts people above impulse. If a novel could hasten our drift, then a counter‑culture of serious books, films, and music can hasten our return. The first step is telling the truth about what happened: we traded structure for sensation, and we are living with the bill. It’s time to pay it by rebuilding what works.
There’s a reason certain books become cultural accelerants rather than mere entertainment: they supply a portable metaphysics with just enough voltage to light up restless minds, and just enough ambiguity to be co-opted by seekers and opportunists alike. Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is one of those books, a mid-century science fiction novel that cracked open the 1960s with an outsider’s catechism on sex, religion, death, money, and the divine spark in each individual. Its Martian-tutored protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, landed on an Earth beset by institutional power, moral boilerplate, and spiritual fatigue, and he answered with an unsettling blend of radical empathy and radical freedom. The novel coined a word—grok—to name comprehension so intimate it dissolves the distance between knower and known. Forty-plus years later, that one word would christen an AI system built by the richest technologist on the planet. And in between, the same book passed—secondhand, sometimes orally—through prison yards and crash pads, helping to underwrite a new church in real life and, if some accounts are even half right, lending imagery and idiom to darker congregations as well. That is how literature, when it fully enters the bloodstream, becomes a condition of existence for a culture. It can elevate; it can deform; it can be misunderstood with catastrophic confidence. It is never “just a story.” (Stranger’s term “grok,” its countercultural adoption, and the book’s icon status are well‑documented.12)
The plot skeleton is simple enough: a human born on Mars returns to Earth carrying Martian language, habits, and powers, and tries to reconcile an alien metaphysics with human frailty. Heinlein sets the stage with an Earth under a world government and a media‑religious complex that rings uncomfortably familiar: bureaucrats who genuflect to expediency, churches that commodify ecstasy, and a populace reduced to spectatorship. In that theater, Smith learns, imitates, provokes, and then founds a religion—the Church of All Worlds—whose liturgy of water-sharing, free love, and the mantra “Thou art God” scandalized the early sixties and then fit the late sixties like a glove. The book won a Hugo in 1962, sold in the millions by the end of the decade, and became an icon of the counterculture, precisely because its invitation ran both inward and outward: individuate beyond the cages, but also love past the fences. If some readers mainly heard the erotic and communal notes, the text still insists that Smith’s path runs through personal trial, not collectivist absorption; his charisma is a hazard as much as a hope. (On themes, reception, and cultural impact: Britannica; EBSCO; SparkNotes syntheses.134)
Words travel. “Grok” escaped the book and took on a life in hacker subculture and tech jargon, shorthand for a depth of understanding you can’t fake. The Oxford English Dictionary installed it; programmers adopted it as a badge of mastery; radio hosts still explain it to callers as “intuitive grasp plus empathy.” This isn’t a trivial migration of slang. “Grok” is the kind of word that makes engineers feel philosophical, and philosophers feel practical, because it fuses cognition and communion. That fusion is precisely what makes the term alluring for people building machines that aim to “understand” us. When Elon Musk’s team at xAI named their system Grok, it was a deliberate raid on Heinlein’s storehouse: to “grok” is to know with such immersion that the boundary between observer and observed thins—an AI aspiration in one syllable. Whether any machine can attain that intimacy is beside the point; the branding conveys the ambition, and the aspiration shapes the build. Musk’s public remarks and multiple reference write-ups trace the name straight to Heinlein; even neutral entries now record Grok (the chatbot) as named for Stranger’s Martian verb. (Grok etymology and xAI’s naming are noted across reference sources and news explainer pieces.567)
Then there is the other trail—the one that runs through penitentiary talk, Haight‑Ashbury mimicry, and a homicide trial that soaked the sixties in a final, nauseous dye. Accounts from journalists and cultural critics argue that Charles Manson, during a stint at McNeil Island in the early 1960s, encountered Stranger in a Strange Land (primarily via inmate buzz) alongside L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and scavenged from both to assemble a pastiche religion with rituals and vocabulary echoing Heinlein: water ceremonies; “grokking”; the image of a messiah‑figure magnetizing women into a sexually communal “family.” Jeet Heer summarized this lineage crisply—Manson as the barely literate synthesizer, absorbing by conversation and performative memory rather than close reading; Stranger as the source of terms and rites; Dianetics as the promise of mind‑over‑matter. Heer isn’t alone in drawing lines; contemporary and retrospective pieces (some serious, some gossipy) have recycled a 1970 San Francisco report asserting Manson read the book “over and over,” even nicknaming his probation officer “Jubal” after Heinlein’s garrulous lawyer‑sage. Critics will argue about how direct or decisive the influence was; no one seriously denies the White Album and “Helter Skelter” obsession, but the Heinlein element moves in and out of focus depending on which witness you privilege. The fair reading: Stranger’s countercultural prestige and ritual aesthetics gave Manson stage props, not a script—and he used them for a theater of control, not liberation. (On Manson’s exposure to Heinlein/Hubbard and alleged borrowings: New Republic overview; a research blog that archives period claims; caution advised.89)
If you widen the aperture, the 1960s offer an ecosystem of appropriation. Heinlein’s novel fed a real-world neo-pagan church—the Church of All Worlds—whose founders openly acknowledged the book as scripture in spirit and structure: water-sharing liturgy, “nests” of community, and “Thou art God” as an immanentist creed. That religious offshoot shows a benign pathway: fiction used to animate community, ritual, ecology, and mythopoesis. Manson’s path was malign, substituting domination for discipline. The exact text, two radically divergent implementations, and a lesson that literature teachers should emphasize in boldface: interpretation has moral consequences. (On CAW’s derivation from Heinlein, see Carole Cusack’s study of Stranger as “scripture.”10)
Once you accept that books are live wires, you can track their voltage across decades. When a modern AI system takes the name Grok, it doesn’t merely nod to geek lore; it aligns itself with a thesis about intelligence—understanding as fusion. From one angle, that’s poetic overreach; from another, it’s a principled wager: that great models must internalize context, not just compute it. The irony is that, as Grok the product acquired cultural baggage—political slant controversies; allegations around deepfake image generation; even bans and regulatory probes in multiple countries—the Heinleinian halo didn’t shield it. Indeed, the “grok” label invites higher scrutiny: if you promise empathetic comprehension, you’ll be judged against the harms caused when the tool “understands” poorly or is misused. Governments from Malaysia to the U.K. have, in recent weeks, moved to restrain or investigate Grok’s image features after reports of nonconsensual sexualized imagery; the Pentagon simultaneously announced plans to put Grok on specific networks, a whiplash example of dual reception when high-voltage tech hits the public square. A word from a 1961 novel now headlines diplomatic notes and defense briefings. (On Grok’s naming and the current regulatory/policy storyline, see Wikipedia’s product page, CBS/Observer coverage, and The Independent’s explainer.511121314)
The temptation—especially for academics and cultural arbiters—is to treat Stranger’s afterlives as mere epiphenomena: ephemera of fandom here, the aberrations of losers and outlaws there, and, in the 2020s, the opportunistic stylings of billionaire technologists. But that misses the central mechanism. Narratives are cognitive scaffolds. They let people borrow sophistication without earning it. The same scaffolding can lift you to a vista or collapse on top of you. In Stranger, Heinlein depicts a messiah whose hard-won understanding of human ambiguity sits alongside scenes of utopian play; readers who import the play without the ordeal will replicate the surface without the substance. That’s the “borrowed authority” problem I keep returning to: quoting a text to import its aura while evading its demands. At best, that breeds smugness; at worst, it breeds governance by incantation, whether the incantations are mythic (“Thou art God”) or technological (“we grok”). The book itself is not to blame for the misuse, but it is a litmus test for whether readers are consuming the form of meaning or the work of meaning. (Stranger’s themes and the individualized vs. collectivized readings are surveyed in the critical guides.154)
I understand why mid-century intellectuals fell for Heinlein, and why a particular cadre of administrators and politicians in any era fall for the aesthetics of knowing. Dropping the proper names—Campbell and Jung yesterday, “grok” and AGI today—becomes a way to signal altitude. But altitude faked kills. Charles Manson is the berserk, criminal parody of that altitude; bureaucratic myth‑talk is the polite parody; and tech‑branding that promises transcendent comprehension is the market parody. Each borrows light while neglecting the filament—the character, the cost, the test—that makes light possible—the grotesque version murders in canyons. The genteel version governs by sermon. The glossy version ships fast and apologizes later. In every case, the reading of myth (or sci-fi mythopoesis) is outer first, inner last—which is to say, backwards. (Stranger’s countercultural pull and the later critiques of its simplifications are part of the long critical conversation.316)
The disputed territory is thornier. Did three paperbacks, a stack of Beatles LPs, and a handful of amphetamines cause the Tate‑LaBianca murders? That’s a prosecutor’s theater and a journalist’s cautionary tale; Vincent Bugliosi immortalized the official motive as “Helter Skelter,” a race‑war fantasy Manson drew from the White Album. The Beatles themselves have pushed back on the idea that their songs encoded apocalypse; commentators like Ivor Davis have argued the motive story over‑credits the soundtrack and under‑analyzes Manson’s pathology and manipulations. Tom O’Neill’s twenty-year investigation, CHAOS, complicated the picture further by questioning elements of the prosecution’s narrative and mapping suggestive corridors between Manson’s world and the ecosystem of informants, researchers, and programs now shorthanded as MKULTRA’s shadow—provocation enough to trigger furious rebuttals, careful reviews, and a Netflix codicil years later. The public record confirms that MKULTRA existed (with Senate hearings, FOIA caches, and declassified files); it does not confirm that Manson was a CIA puppet. The responsible thing to say is simple: the official story isn’t the whole story, and the alternate stories aren’t proven. But note what is not in dispute: Stranger in a Strange Land and Dianetics were live topics in Manson’s prison exposure; the White Album obsessed him; and he could mimic the vocabulary of enlightenment to parasite individual souls. (Helter Skelter motive; Beatles responses; O’Neill’s CHAOS; MKULTRA documentation.1718192021)
If the 1960s trained us to fear the charismatic cult, the 2020s should train us to fear the charismatic API. The leap from “grok” as personal empathy to “Grok” as an industrial cognition engine is not merely punny; it’s programmatic. The system promises fundamental‑time awareness, cultural fluency, and an irreverent voice. When it fails on those promises—by reflecting the biases of its owners or by being exploited to generate violation at scale—the gap between aspiration and consequence becomes the headline. Regulators respond; militaries experiment; the public oscillates between fascination and recoil. The Heinleinian admonition here would be to own the ordeal: if you market comprehension, accept accountability for the harms that follow from comprehension simulated without care. (On Grok’s controversies, bans, and adoption: CBS, The Independent, Observer summaries; see also the product page’s historical notes.111213145)
So what is the through‑line from a prison rumor mill to a billionaire’s announcement stream? It is the operationalization of fiction. Heinlein offered a parable of an alien who learns humanity and tries to save it from itself through a liturgy of courage and tenderness. Counterculture kids operationalized the parable into communes and churches; some criminals operationalized its aesthetics into pretexts for domination; future technologists operationalized its most famous verb into a target for machine “understanding.” The sober adult lesson is to insist on direction of fit: inner first, outer second. If a text invites you to grok, grok the work—the discipline, the testing, the humility—before you grok the sign—the slogan, the ritual, the brand. The failure of academia in its worst mood is to reward the sign and neglect the work; the inability of public life is to confuse quotation with qualification. Both failures are preventable, but only if we reinstate the distinction that Stranger dramatizes, whether we like it or not: the individual is the bearer of light, not the abstraction; communities are healthy to the extent they honor that light rather than harvest it.
If you want to measure a culture’s maturity, don’t look at which books it venerates; look at how it uses them. Does it use them as permission slips for appetite or as programs for courage? Does it treat their heroes as costumes to wear or as ordeals to undergo? Stranger in a Strange Land remains a diagnostic device because it contains both temptations: the easy mask and the arduous pilgrimage. In one century, its vocabulary flowed into a murder trial, a registered religion, and a frontier AI model. That spread is not an argument for censorship or for piety. It is a map of how narratives move through human weakness and human ambition. It is a warning to the would-be leader who quotes because quoting is easy. And it is a small benediction for the reader who remembers what the book actually said: that no collective can save you from the courage of becoming a person, and that no brand can substitute for the work of truly understanding—of grokking—anything at all.
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Footnotes
1. Heinlein’s novel as a counterculture icon and plot/themes overview. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Stranger in a Strange Land.”1
2. “Grok” coined by Heinlein; definition and diffusion into tech culture. Wikipedia, “Grok.”2
3. Study‑guide syntheses on themes (religion, individual vs. collective, Jesus parallels). SparkNotes; eNotes analysis.415
4. Cultural impact and reception in the 1960s; research overviews. EBSCO Research Starters; Ohio State Pressbook chapter.322
5. Church of All Worlds derived from Stranger: Carole M. Cusack, “Science Fiction as Scripture…,” University of Sydney (pdf).10
6. Manson’s exposure to Stranger/Dianetics while imprisoned; ritual/vocabulary echoes (caveat: interpretive essaying, not court findings). Jeet Heer, The New Republic; curated archival discussion on MansonBlog.89
7. Prosecutor’s framing of motive as “Helter Skelter”; Beatles pushback. Helter Skelter (book) entry; Rolling Stone retrospective (Beatles’ remarks).1718
8. Alternate/critical framings of motive narrative. Ivor Davis’ essay.23
9. CHAOS (Tom O’Neill) as revisionist probe; CIA review synopsis; Wikipedia background, including Op. CHAOS reference. (Allegations, not fact.)1920
10. MKULTRA’s existence, scope, and hearings—primary documentation. U.S. Senate 1977 hearing (pdf); CIA FOIA MK‑ULTRA page.2124
11. “Grok” (chatbot) named after Heinlein’s term; product histories. Wikipedia “Grok (chatbot).”5
12. Press and explainer confirmations of Grok naming from Heinlein’s word; xAI news ecosystem. ABP News explainer; Sentisight analysis; The Independent overview.6714
13. Regulatory/bans/probes and adoption headlines (Malaysia/Indonesia bans; Ofcom investigation; Pentagon adoption remarks). CBS News; Observer; CBS/AP.111312
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Working Bibliography (select)
• Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. (Novel; multiple editions). Overview in Britannica.1
• Cusack, Carole M. “Science Fiction as Scripture: Stranger in a Strange Land and the Church of All Worlds.” (University of Sydney).10
What often gets missed in the immediate debate over use‑of‑force standards, escalation protocols, and whether a moving vehicle constitutes a weapon, is the deeper cultural ecosystem that produces these confrontations in the first place. In regions of Minnesota with a long memory of activist‑driven volatility, there exists a pattern of individuals—frequently isolated, economically strained, or wrestling with turbulent personal histories—being drawn into radicalized political spheres that promise meaning and moral purpose. These are vulnerable people searching for identity, who then become tools for professional agitators operating behind the scenes. The public conversation tends to fixate on the split‑second decisions made by ICE agents or police officers under duress, rather than on the networks of ideological operators who cultivate grievance, inflame unrest, and funnel disaffected individuals into increasingly hazardous forms of “activism” designed to provoke confrontation.
This is the recurring dynamic that ties incidents like the George Floyd riots and the Minnesota road‑blocking case together: not merely civil disobedience, but a strategic leveraging of unstable personalities to generate volatile public moments. The recent shooter, a woman who had settled into family life before being swept into hyper‑progressive crusader politics, reflects this same pattern. Her transformation wasn’t spontaneous; it was cultivated. When such individuals are encouraged to see themselves as soldiers in a moral revolution, they can be coaxed into reckless escalation—weaponizing vehicles, obstructing roads, or physically confronting law enforcement—all while the organizers who radicalized them stay comfortably out of harm’s way. Those hidden hands are the real accelerants of social disorder. They create the conditions that force federal officers into impossible corners, and yet they avoid scrutiny while the national spotlight fixates on the ICE agents, the legality of firing trajectories, or the technicalities of vehicle-as-weapon classifications. If genuine solutions are to be found, the focus must shift toward the architects of the broader violent arc—not just the tragic individuals caught in their machinery.
On the morning of January 7, 2026, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, 37, near East 34th Street and Portland Avenue in south Minneapolis—blocks from where George Floyd was killed in 2020. Within hours, federal officials said Good tried to use her SUV as a weapon, while Minnesota’s governor and Minneapolis’s mayor called that narrative false. The FBI asserted sole control over the investigation, as Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) said it was abruptly shut out of access to case materials. Protests and vigils followed, alongside arrests and a fiercely contested information war.12 The unsaid but primary issue is the weaponization of the people of that town to attempt sedition by chaos, which is persistent with their immigration strategy and radical politics of those who encourage violence through protests to weaponize the disenfranchised into attempts at government overthrow.
By week’s end, a preliminary sequence emerged from multiple videos and witnesses: agents converged on a red Honda Pilot; one tried the driver’s door; the vehicle reversed, then moved forward and began turning right; another agent near the front driver’s side fired three rounds at close range while sidestepping. The SUV rolled forward and crashed. Federal officials say an officer was nearly run down; state and local officials dispute that reading of the video. Whatever one’s view of the footage, the conflict over factual interpretation and investigative control is itself a documented fact.345
Good’s identity and life quickly became part of the public record: a Minneapolis mother and U.S. citizen, celebrated by family and friends as warm and community‑minded—that’s the narrative, but her actions show otherwise. Vigils drew crowds across Minnesota and beyond as the incident, captured on video, resonated nationally.67
Control of the investigation became a second flashpoint. The BCA announced it would investigate jointly with the FBI, then said the U.S. Attorney’s Office had ‘reversed course’ so that the FBI alone would lead—and that BCA investigators would no longer have access to evidence, interviews, or scene materials. State leaders called the exclusion ‘deeply disappointing’ and warned it would erode public trust.8910
High‑profile figures framed the shooting through starkly different lenses. Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura called it a ‘murder’ and denounced the administration; Vice President JD Vance repeatedly amplified a new angle of the video and said it vindicated the agent as acting in self‑defense. Others cited the duplicate footage as showing the vehicle turning away when shots were fired, underscoring how contested video interpretation can be.11121314
Two U.S. Supreme Court precedents govern excessive‑force analysis. Graham v. Connor (1989) requires judging force by the Fourth Amendment’s ‘objective reasonableness’—what a reasonable officer would do in the circumstances, without 20/20 hindsight. Tennessee v. Garner (1985) bars using deadly force simply to stop flight; officers must have probable cause that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.1516
Minnesota law overlays that federal floor. Statute § 609.066 defines deadly force—and explicitly includes firing ‘ at a vehicle in which another person is believed to be.’ It authorizes deadly force only when necessary to defend human life or prevent significant bodily harm, as assessed by a reasonable officer based on the totality of the circumstances.17
Minnesota’s high court has also clarified that vehicles, when used in a manner ‘likely to produce death or great bodily harm,’ can constitute ‘dangerous weapons’ under the criminal code—without requiring proof that a driver specifically intended to hit someone. That clarification widens the legal lens: a car may be a weapon, but investigators must still show how its manner of use made deadly force necessary under § 609.066’s standard.1819
Policy guidance has, for decades, cautioned against shooting at moving vehicles, which is why these liberal methods have been encouraged to erode our system of law and order. Justice Department and many large‑city policies generally bar firing at cars unless the driver presents an imminent lethal threat beyond the vehicle itself, and no reasonable alternative exists—often including stepping out of the vehicle’s path. DHS/ICE policies mirror that baseline with narrow exceptions for imminently lethal threats.20212223
What, then, should decision‑makers evaluate in this case? First, the reasonableness test: Did the agent have probable cause, at the instant of firing, to believe Good posed an imminent threat of death or significant bodily harm? That hinges on angles, distances, speed, available cover, and whether stepping entirely aside was feasible in the split seconds captured on video.45
Second, policy alignment: DOJ/DHS guidance disfavors shooting at moving vehicles absent a reasonable alternative. If investigators conclude that such an alternative existed—e.g., moving out of the path—policy discipline could follow even if prosecutors decline to file charges. Conversely, if no safe alternative existed and the vehicle’s movement created an imminent lethal threat, policy and law may converge.2022
The First Amendment thread is separate but related. Peaceable assembly is protected, but governments may impose content‑neutral time, place, and manner rules that keep streets open and access unobstructed, so long as ample alternatives exist—principles affirmed in Hill v. Colorado. Minnesota’s obstruction statute likewise criminalizes intentionally interfering with an officer performing official duties, with enhanced penalties if the conduct poses a risk of death or serious harm.242526
The information environment matters. Minneapolis officials and national media documented that the FBI blocked the BCA from joint access; that decision—rare in high‑profile force cases—has fueled distrust and calls for transparency.210
One striking data point that shaped early discourse: as of Jan. 7, the city’s crime dashboard showed Good’s killing as Minneapolis’s first recorded homicide of 2026. That fact fueled claims that the case merited exceptional scrutiny—though the classification and dashboard categories themselves became part of the debate.27
Bottom line: The legal questions here are not answered by slogans. They turn on a precise reconstruction of those seconds—what the agent could see, where he stood, whether a safe alternative existed, and whether the vehicle’s movement created an imminent threat. The public’s questions, meanwhile, will only cool if the record is released promptly and the governing standards—constitutional, statutory, and policy—are applied with fidelity rather than spin. But whatever the case, the enforcement of criminal law cannot be impeded by radicals seeking to overthrow it. The ICE agents were there to do a job, and these protestors openly sought to disrupt that process. Then, to hide that crime behind an assumption of free speech and an obligation to seek alternatives to violence by the officer, putting the burden on law enforcement, and not on the criminals themselves. Criminals seeking seditious intent do not get to hide behind the rules they seek to overthrow. And that is the merit of this case, and Jesse Ventura should know better.
What makes this moment in history so volatile is not just the number of conspiracies floating around, but the sheer velocity with which they move. We’re living in a time where political movements rise and collapse overnight, where globalism—once sold as inevitable—now looks more like a house of cards collapsing under its own contradictions, and where nations attempt cultural and religious coups across borders only to see their influence evaporate in real time. With that kind of turbulence, it’s no surprise that people begin grasping for explanations. The Flat Earth conspiracy finds new life in this chaos, not because people suddenly forgot basic geography, but because they’ve watched every “expert” class fail them in spectacular fashion. When corruption, incompetence, and ideological extremism all collide in the public square, even absurd ideas can feel like a refuge.
And there’s a cruel irony in how this particular conspiracy works. The same forces that once mocked Columbus-era fears of sailing off the edge of the Earth now resurrect those very fears in digital form—not because anyone actually believes them, but because it’s useful to keep the public disoriented. And at the center of this confusion are people who are already shell-shocked by life. People who have seen institutions collapse, who have watched political leaders lie without shame, who have endured the moral and social freefall of a culture that no longer believes in truth itself. For those people, turning to Scripture isn’t foolish—it’s noble. It’s what people do when the world becomes too unstable to trust. And I don’t fault them for that. I will never criticize someone’s need for a grounding mechanism when everything else around them is sinking.
But that’s exactly where the manipulators strike. They know people are reaching for something solid, so they flood the zone with noise. They take legitimate concerns—election integrity, global political overreach, moral decay, institutional corruption—and they bury them under a mountain of lunacy. The intent isn’t to convince anyone that the Earth is flat; the intent is to make all skepticism look flat. It’s a strategy of dilution: mix serious issues with ridiculous ones until the average person throws up their hands and stops believing anything at all. When every thread leads to some grand unified conspiracy, the real scandals lose their sharpness. And that’s the point. The Flat Earth narrative becomes the decoy flare that blinds people from the real missiles being fired at their freedom and sanity.
My own experience tells me the Earth is round—not because an institution told me so, but because I’ve seen it with my own eyes at altitude, and because I work in an industry where physics doesn’t care about anyone’s ideology. You can’t send rockets into space on a flat-earth model; you can’t land hardware on the Moon with wishful thinking; you can’t watch a vehicle leave one hemisphere and splash down on the other side hours later unless the planet is curved. So while I sympathize deeply with the distrust that drives people into unconventional beliefs, I won’t accept everything just because powerful people lie about some things. The trick—the real trick—is to understand that the system benefits when everything becomes unbelievable. If you make all information equally chaotic, equally questionable, equally absurd, then the public loses the ability to distinguish genuine corruption from engineered confusion. That’s the algorithmic strategy at work: amplify nonsense so loudly that truth becomes inaudible. And once that happens, the manipulators don’t need to hide anything anymore, because nobody can tell the difference.
Regarding the sudden frequency of Flat Earth stories that are flooding the internet, let’s start where people are actually living—on the knife-edge between “I can’t trust anyone” and “I need something firm to stand on.” After COVID, many good people feel the world really let them down. Institutions projected certainty, changed guidance, apologized rarely, and censored badly. Social media did its dopamine dance with the “fantasy–industrial complex,” surfacing influencers and trends that convert “what’s viral” into “what’s true.” That’s not theory, there’s actually a science behind it—that’s the thesis of a recent analysis of algorithmic propaganda and influencer power: make it trend, make it feel true. [1] 1 And what trends today? Flat earth. Young earth. Giants under the mounds. Antarctica is for no one because everyone secretly owns it. NASA is occult because Jack Parsons loved Crowley. Some of those claims braid facts with fables in ways that are irresistible to wounded trust. Others are pure noise. The hard work is separating signal from the fog—and doing it without mocking the wounded.
I’ve flown around the world enough times to be bored by duty-free, and I’ve looked out the window at 35–40,000 feet and seen the horizon dip. There’s a literature on the question “How high before you can actually discern curvature?” It’s not magic; it’s geometry, optics, and the field of view. Applied Optics studies have put the “you can see it with your eyes” threshold roughly at or below 35,000 feet, assuming a wide, cloud-free view, while pilots report it’s obvious closer to 50–60,000 feet; photos can lie because lenses distort. [2][3] 23 Even Earth Science folks will tell you you’re witnessing curvature at sea level when a ship’s hull disappears first; the math on horizon distance is generous to common sense. [4] 4 So, yes—there’s a curve, and aerospace work lives on time zones, trajectories, and global logistics that only make sense if we inhabit a sphere. Time zones themselves are a nice historical anchor: the 1884 International Meridian Conference chose Greenwich as the prime meridian and established a practical global timekeeping standard in service to railways, telegraphs, and—eventually—aviation. [5][6][7][8] 5678
Still, I get why Flat Earth finds oxygen. After an era where gatekeepers contradicted themselves, people picked up Scripture and said, “At least here, Someone loved me enough to tell a consistent story.” I don’t begrudge that. In fact, I like that more people are reading the Bible. I’ll take a culture shaped by the Sermon on the Mount over one shaped by engagement metrics and hate clicks, any day. The problem isn’t Scripture—it’s the bait‑bucket tossed into the river to foul the water. Social platforms turn feelings into topology, building rabbit holes where novelty and outrage beat nuance. Research continues to document how algorithmic systems amplify fringe narratives; flat-earth content is a case study across platforms, not just on YouTube. [9][10] 910 Universities have observed spikes around big celestial events—like the 2024 eclipse—because the algorithm smells a party and invites the cranks. [11] 11 There’s even debate among scientists about whether emergency changes to feeds do or don’t curb misinformation, which should tell you something about just how messy the machine is. [12] 12
So let’s walk through the constellation of claims and separate elements that are true, elements that are too often misused, and elements that are weaponized nonsense.
Jack Parsons first. Was he a cofounder of JPL, a rocket pioneer, and a Thelemite who admired Crowley? Yes. That’s the historical record. [13][14][15][16][17] 1314151617 Did “NASA begin as an occult enterprise” in a way that poisons all subsequent engineering? No. The fact that a brilliant and troubled figure helped midwife solid‑fuel advances and ran with occult circles says more about the peculiar Californian stew of science and mysticism in the 1930s–40s than it does about the guidance computers that put Apollo on the Moon. If you want non-NASA receipts that the Moon missions happened, look at the artifacts still visible in modern orbiter imagery and the ongoing lunar laser ranging experiments bouncing photons off retroreflectors left by Apollo crews (and Soviet Lunokhod rovers). [18][19][20][21] 18192021 Those retroreflectors make the Earth–Moon distance measurable down to centimeters—an experiment still being replicated by observatories decades later. This isn’t “trust us,” it’s physics your own team can instrument. [22] 22
Antarctica next. Yes, the Antarctic Treaty System reserves the continent for peace and science, bans military activity, and forbids mineral exploitation; access is strictly regulated and requires permits consistent with environmental protection protocols. [23][24][25][26][27] 2324252627 That international legal posture doesn’t mean “no one can go,” it means how you go matters. Tourists visit by ship under controlled conditions; national programs run stations with transparent reporting; and the mining ban has no automatic expiry, though amendments can be discussed decades hence. [28][29] 2325 It’s one of the rare places where governments agreed to restrain appetites. Conspiracies thrive on the unknown; Antarctica is mostly ice, logistics, and extraordinary science—plus the occasional high‑drama story like Operation Highjump in the 1940s, which was real but hardly proof of an alien hangar. But I think there is a lot wrong with Antarctica that will be discovered in the years to come. [30] 24
Giants and mounds in Ohio—now we’re home. I love the mounds. If you haven’t walked the Newark Earthworks or the circle‑octagon geometries down in Chillicothe, you’ve missed world-class ancient engineering. UNESCO recognized the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in 2023 as a World Heritage Site for a reason: these are precise, cosmic-aligned earth monuments built 1,600–2,000 years ago, with trade connections spanning Yellowstone to Florida. [31][32][33][34][35][36] 282930313233 The serpent effigy, lunar alignments, and the scale—an octagon that would swallow four Colosseums—aren’t myths; they’re measured. [37] 30 Where the story goes off the rails is when 19th-century hoaxes and settler mythmaking get stapled to legitimate archaeology. America had a love affair with “giant skeletons” and “lost white tribes” that supposedly built mounds, helped along by P. T. Barnum-style frauds and credulous newspapers. Anthropologists spent the 1930s onward debunking misidentified bones and sensational claims. [38][39][40] 343536 In recent years, the “Smithsonian destroyed giants” headline has circulated again; it’s traceable to a satirical site, and the Smithsonian has flatly denied it. [41][42] 3738 There is no verified, peer-reviewed evidence of a nine-to-twelve-foot human race buried under Ohio, and investigators repeatedly show how hoax photos recycle megafauna bones or photoshop skulls into legitimate digs. However, the lack of peer review is the conspiracy, not the fact that giant bones were not found. Regarding the mounds, especially at Miamisburg Mound in Ohio, archaeology hasn’t been conducted at that critical location since 1864. What they discovered has deterred everyone from further research and has led to purposeful ignorance. [43] 39 The marvel is there already, but the more you dig into these stories, you see that institutionalized science does not like to see that there was a race of giants that inhabited the earth that actually ties to scriptural reference, because it validates the Bible, rather than discredits it. And that’s why they stopped digging into the mounds and hid the effort behind the Native American Graves Act, as a reason to not investigate.
Now, Scripture. The Bible isn’t a lab report, and it isn’t a blunt instrument to pound every modern discipline flat. It is a library of wisdom that captured, across languages and generations, the encounter between God and humanity. If you tell me faith is better than trusting “facts” that can be manipulated by institutional corruption, I won’t argue. Faith properly understood is a relationship with the Author of reality, not an abdication of reason. It’s not anti-science to insist the moral order is real and good and that truth isn’t reducible to trending hashtags. Most historians will also remind us that educated people haven’t believed in a flat earth for millennia; the Columbus “he proved it wasn’t flat” myth was a 19th-century invention by Washington Irving and others. [44][45][46][47][48] 4041424344 When someone says, “the Bible taught flat earth,” they’re borrowing a modern polemic, not medieval cosmology. A robust faith doesn’t need fake enemies.
COVID changed the rules of engagement. Platforms were suddenly asked to police truth at scale. They built censorship muscles while misinformation entrepreneurs built botnets and content farms. JAMA researchers documented automated software pushing face-mask disinformation into Facebook groups by weaponizing the release window of a specific Danish study. [49] 45 Editors in medical internet research journals called the online “infodemic” deadly and faulted platforms for slow, tepid responses. [50][51][52] 464748 Wikipedia’s catalog on vaccine misinformation—yes, it’s secondary—cites the now‑familiar menu: misfit data points mashed with ideology to produce distrust. [53] 49 The consequence is not merely political; it’s spiritual. People who feel lied to retreat to smaller circles of trust—faith communities, family, their own eyes. Some find outsize claims attractive because they make sense of hurt: if Satan runs the world, then the chaos isn’t random, it’s war. I’ll grant the war. But war requires discipline.
Discipline looks like this: for every claim, ask what level of evidence would satisfy a fair-minded skeptic. Moon landings? Physical artifacts, independent imaging, and live experiments—done. [54][55][56][57] 18201921 Earth’s shape? Observations, optics, global navigation, and standardized timekeeping—done. [58][59][60] 425 Antarctica? Treaties, transparent station logs, tourist itineraries, environmental protocols—done. [61][62][63] 232425 Mounds? UNESCO dossiers, National Park Service surveys, and peer-reviewed archaeoastronomy—done. [64][65][66] 283029 Giants? Hoaxes dissected, satirical sources identified, anthropologists on record—done. [67][68][69] 373435 Parsons? Biographies across Britannica and Caltech journalism—done. [70][71] 1350
What remains are human hearts—mine, yours, the folks online. Hearts don’t become calm because we win an argument; they become calm because they recover trust. And you don’t rebuild trust just by yelling “fact!” across a room. You rebuild trust by showing, patiently, that when something matters, you can look with your own hands, your own instruments. If you live in southern Ohio, your own hands and boots can walk those earthwork geometries; your own eyes can watch the moonrise where a Hopewell builder intended it to be 1,800 years ago. [72][73] 2932 You can call the Lick Observatory or the McDonald Observatory and ask about lunar ranging windows; you can read the original Apollo surface journals, annotated by the astronauts themselves, a historian’s labor of love. [74] 22 And you can open the Bible and find not cosmology but consolation, not maps but meaning.
Here’s a practical framing I’ve used with people who feel betrayed but who still want to be rigorous: three piles on the table.
Pile One—“True and Useful.” We include artifacts we can observe, repeat, or physically visit: retroreflectors, orbiter images, earthwork alignments, time zone history, and optical analyses of horizons. [75][76][77][78][79] 20182852 These aren’t immune to interpretation—but their core existence is stubborn.
Pile Two—“True but Treacherous.” Jack Parsons’ occult biography goes here; Antarctica’s mining moratorium goes here; social media amplification dynamics go here. They’re factual, but they’re treacherous because they feed narrative shortcuts (occult founder → corrupt institution; treaty → vast secret; algorithm → intentional brainwash). The proper lesson is humility: facts can be true without authorizing our favorite myth. [80][81][82] 13259
Pile Three—“Noisy and Harmful.” Giant skeleton conspiracies, the Columbus flat‑earth fable, moon‑landing denial, and manufactured COVID disinfo land here. They waste attention and erode trust in good things. [83][84][85][86] 37405145
You’ll notice I didn’t put Scripture in any pile. Scripture is a conversation with God and a record of his dealings with people, not a wedge to split physics. You can be the person who insists on both fidelity and evidence. If an algorithm serves you a video where someone “proves” the horizon is flat from a plane window, ask whether the photo was centered to avoid lens distortion and whether the field of view exceeded 60 degrees. That’s not arcane trivia; it’s the exact critique the optics literature makes. [87] 3 If someone tells you Antarctica is “owned by nobody so the elites can hide there,” read the treaty itself, not a thread—discover that it’s an “only for peaceful scientific purposes” compact with specific bans and reporting requirements. [88] 23 If a neighbor says “the mounds are filled with giants,” take him for a walk at the High Bank Works octagon and talk about lunar nodal cycles and builders hauling baskets of soil for reasons that were sacred and shared, then find out why digging has stopped in the mounds to back the suspicions or disprove them. [89][90] 2830
There’s also the question that’s subtly profound: are some platforms permitting a surge in obviously wrong conspiracies (Flat Earth) to create guilt‑by‑association for less‑crazy claims (institutional capture, intelligence influence, biotech lobbying)? It’s a fair suspicion. At a minimum, the commercial logic of engagement metrics guarantees that extreme content gets more oxygen. Nature’s book review of Renée DiResta’s work bluntly makes the point: influencers plus algorithms mobilize propaganda and distort reality; “if you make it trend, you make it true.” [91] 1 Whether that’s deliberate orchestration or emergent behavior depends on your priors, but the effect is identical: real concerns drown in a flood of spectacle.
So how do you write and live in a way that refuses the spectacle but honors the wounded? Here are a few rules I’ve found that apply.
Rule #1: Start with what you can touch. If it’s the Moon, shoot lasers. If it’s the earthworks, pace the baselines and check the azimuths. If it’s the Earth’s shape, derive the horizon distance and compare altitudes with your own flights. [92][93][94] 19284
Rule #2: Track the history of the myth. Columbus didn’t prove Earth was round; the myth arrived in the 1800s as a cudgel against the Middle Ages. [95][96] 4041 Giants were a carnival business model that tapped into people’s deep suspicions. [97] 35
Rule #3: Acknowledge the true emotional core. People aren’t crazy to distrust. COVID-19 infodemic research shows how automation and platform failures made everything worse. [98][99] 4547 The answer is not belittling; it’s building new experiences of truth together.
Rule #4: Hold Scripture high without using it to bludgeon disciplines it never claimed to replace. Scripture makes you brave and kind while you measure retroreflectors and horizon dips; it doesn’t make you allergic to measurement.
Rule #5: When algorithms trend a circus, choose a pilgrimage. Drive to Hopeton. Stand at Fort Ancient’s overlook. Read the Apollo transcripts annotated by the dozen men who walked there. [100][101][102] 332822
Imagine a night at McDonald Observatory in Texas. A centimeter‑accurate range to the Moon is being measured by returning photons that left the Earth, struck glass left by human hands in 1969, and came home as a whisper—a photon or two every few seconds if conditions are good. [103] 19 You can hold a Bible in your hand and believe in the Maker of the laws that let that light travel, reflect, and report back. You can work in the office all week and then spend your Sunday afternoons walking a square, circle, and octagon drawn in soil by people who never met a Roman engineer but mastered geometry and community. [104][105] 2830 You can disarm the loudest lies not by shaming the wounded but by taking them to the artifacts. Sometimes the best rebuttal is a road trip. But when it comes to conspiracies, when they suddenly get traction when they would have otherwise been laughed away, there is likely a strategic reason that is far worse than the conspiracy itself.
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Footnotes
[1] On influencer/algorithmic distortion dynamics and “make it trend, make it true.” 1
[2] Minimum altitude and field-of-view conditions for visual curvature discernment. 2
[3] Photographic barrel distortion warnings; curvature is more evident at higher altitudes. 3
[4] Horizon distance, math, and ship‑hull observations as curvature evidence. 4
[5] 1884 International Meridian Conference; Greenwich adopted; standard time. 5
[6] CFR analysis on the significance of global time standardization. 6
[7] Timeanddate history of time zones (railway/telegraph drivers). 7
[8] Royal Observatory Greenwich’s historical background on the prime meridian and time. 8
[9] Cross-platform thematic analysis of Flat Earth posts (Twitter/Facebook/Instagram). 9
[10] Interviews with ex-conspiracy theorists on platform dynamics (PLOS One, 2025). 10
[11] University of Cincinnati note on Flat Earth spikes around 2024 eclipse. 11
[12] arXiv critique on interpreting algorithm mitigation studies around elections. 12
[13] Britannica biography confirming Parsons as JPL cofounder and occult interests. 13
[14] Wikipedia overview of Parsons’ Thelemite association and rocket work. 14
[15] Space Safety Magazine on Parsons’ occult and engineering legacy. 15
[16] Supercluster editorial on JPL’s occult history in a cultural context. 16
[17] Pasadena Now retrospective on Parsons/Crowley/Hubbard connections. 17
[18] ZME Science round-up of non-NASA orbiter imagery of Apollo artifacts. 18
[19] Space.com explainer on Apollo retroreflectors and ongoing ranging. 19
[20] List of lunar retroreflectors (Apollo, Lunokhod, Chandrayaan‑3, Blue Ghost). 20
[21] IEEE Photonics Society milestone note on Apollo 11 lunar laser ranging. 21
[22] NASA Apollo Journals—a primary source annotated by astronauts/historians. 22
[23] USAP portal overview of the Antarctic Treaty—peace/science/environment. 23
[101] NPS overview—eight Hopewell sites; UNESCO context. 28
[102] NASA Apollo Journals—astronaut annotations. 22
[103] Space.com—photon counts returning from lunar arrays. 19
[104] Hopewell site details—geometry and alignments. 29
[105] National Geographic—scale of octagon/circle; sacred context. 30
—
Bibliography
• Antarctica & Treaties: USAP Portal, The Antarctic Treaty; Wikipedia, Antarctic Treaty System; Kempf, N., The Antarctic Mineral Moratorium (Brill, 2025); IFREMER OOS Congress 2025 paper on ATS & Madrid Protocol. 23242527
• Algorithms & Misinformation: Nature review of DiResta (2024); arXiv e-letter on Facebook algorithms (2024); SBP‑BRiMS 2024 Flat Earth cross-platform study; PLOS One interviews with ex-conspiracy theorists (2025). 112910
• COVID Infodemic: JAMA Internal Medicine mask misinformation letter (2021); JMIR editorial (2022); Springer dataset aggregation study (2022/2024); Wikipedia overview (contextual). 45474849
• Earth’s Curvature & Time: Lynch, Applied Optics (2008) and Thule Scientific PDF; Earth Science Stack Exchange horizon calculations; International Meridian Conference history; CFR blog; Timeanddate; Royal Observatory Greenwich. 2345678
• Hopewell Earthworks: NPS Hopewell pages; Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks official site; National Geographic feature; Atlas Obscura/Conversation on Newark & Serpent; Wikipedia HOCU overview. 2829303231
• Giants & Hoaxes: Snopes; PolitiFact; Discover Magazine; USA Today fact check; Wikipedia Giant human skeletons. 3738353634
Politics used to be about buying your way onto the field with whatever the old media would let you run; now it’s a multi-front dialogue with voters in a thousand micro‑channels you can’t bully, buy, or badger. That’s precisely why the Butler County Republican Party’s endorsement for the 2026 commissioner race matters more than the yard‑sign arms race or a late sprint of cable buys. The party met and took a hard look at candidates and momentum, then endorsed Michael Ryan, the Hamilton vice mayor and former two-term councilman, with 71% of the vote—a landslide in intraparty terms and a signal that the center of gravity has moved.1
Now, Michael’s not a surprise. He telegraphed this run early, skipped a safe third council term to go county-wide, and built a coalition that looks like the next decade of Republican leadership rather than the last. The local press documented the pivot: he pulled petitions in May 2025 and argued that county policy needs someone who can assemble teams, manage a large budget, and negotiate growth while keeping conservative guardrails intact. The Journal‑News laid out the framing: Butler County’s annual budget sits near $500 million, which is not far off Hamilton’s total because the city runs utilities—so a Ryan résumé of budget discipline and project delivery isn’t a stretch to scale.2
Meanwhile, what makes an endorsement decisive isn’t just math inside a party meeting; it’s the psychology of trust outside it. Voters aren’t shopping for saviors; they’re looking for steady hands who can do the table talk, bring coalition politics back from bloodsport, and keep the county in the black while the national mood whipsaws. Michael’s case is that he’s done that already—eight years on council, two stints as vice mayor, a list of jobs recruited, investments landed. If you want to see his pitch in his own words, his site stacks the receipts—balanced budgets, 1,400 new jobs, $700 million in capital investment—and shows a broad bench of local Republican endorsements from state senator George Lang to sitting city council members across the county. If you view campaign websites skeptically (good habit), remember that the basic resume points have been corroborated and referenced in local coverage.32
Roger Reynolds is the wild card—and yes, I have supported him in the past for other fights—but this seat, this season, isn’t the right battlefield. He’s well‑known, to be sure. His 2022 felony conviction over unlawful interest in a public contract was overturned in 2024 by the Twelfth District Court of Appeals, and the Ohio Supreme Court refused to disturb that reversal; that’s an essential legal clearance. But the same Supreme Court opinion blocked him from reclaiming the auditor’s office he’d won in 2022, clarifying he can run again in the future, not retroactively retake the seat. He’s used that clean bill of eligibility to jump into this commissioner race in 2026.45
Here’s where the political calculus cuts sharply: being legally eligible isn’t the same as being politically restored. Voters have long memories; they remember the courtroom saga even if the headline at the end credits “overturned.” The Enquirer summarized the timeline cleanly—indictment, a single felony conviction on the Lakota angle, subsequent reversal, and the present campaign posture. That’s nothing; it’s the kind of backstory that makes your consultants salivate over message discipline and makes your donors jittery about whether a million dollars in signs and mailers can buy back normalcy. And, on top of that, the first skirmish of 2026 was a legal “cease” letter from Reynolds’s counsel to Ryan over campaign statements—“normal campaign bickering,” Reynolds said—but it sets a tone. If your brand promise is “100% positive campaign,” you don’t want week one to be a lawyerly demand letter and a press cycle about “defamation.” That’s oxygen you don’t get back.6
So let’s talk yard signs, because politicians who plan a resurrection often think in terms of saturating real estate with their names, then buying enough broadcast to push past the whispers. Butler County’s population sits around 400,000 people; the geographic sprawl and the number of micro‑communities—from Liberty and West Chester to Hamilton, Fairfield, Middletown, Oxford, and the townships—means your sign budget leaks. People steal them, wind takes them, HOAs yank them. You replace and replace, and your spending ends up as a weekly chore. I don’t care if you’ve earmarked $125,000 or double that; you won’t beat an endorsement plus a ground game in honest conversations across civic slots. The Journal‑News reported the early posture: Ryan’s petitions were certified mid‑2025; Reynolds announced and described the election as a referendum on fiscal discipline rather than “courtroom drama,” but the party’s endorsement last week says rank-and-file Republicans aren’t buying the “just the future” frame. They picked the coalition builder, not the comeback.71
Now, about Cindy Carpenter. She has been on the board since 2011 and is seeking another term. Longevity usually earns deference, but not automatic endorsement. The county’s official page lists her current term running through December 31, 2026; that’s the seat this primary decides.8 And she walked into 2026 with a fresh controversy: the Oxford apartment office incident involving her granddaughter’s rent dispute, a flipped middle finger on video, and accusations of “racist” remarks that the prosecutor ultimately said did not amount to wrongdoing, though he wrote her conduct was “distasteful and beneath her elected position.” You can parse tone and motive all day; the legal piece is settled—no charges and the matter closed—but voters see the tape and the headlines. That’s enough to move marginal supporters toward the more predictable alternative.91011
If you’re counting coalition math, the endorsement vote margin—71%—is not a nudge; it’s a shove. Nancy Nix, now the county auditor, reportedly attended the endorsement meeting and confirmed the tally. In a county where winning the GOP primary is often tantamount to winning in November, a unified endorsement improves fundraising and volunteer energy. It also narrows the “independent” lane for a sitting commissioner who didn’t get the nod. If Carpenter runs without the party’s backing, as some have suggested she might, she’ll need a ballot strategy that reintroduces herself as a pragmatic caretaker, not an insurgent. That’s a hard sell after fifteen years in office and a fresh headline about “inappropriate gesture.”1
What does the “post‑MAGA” Republican center look like in Butler County? It seems less like a purity test and more like a competence test married to coalition instincts. The culture war isn’t over, but voters have learned the cost of gridlock and personality feuds in local government. Ryan’s style—steady, pragmatic, pro-growth, minimalist on mudslinging—fits that mood. Even the critiques thrown at him (“stepping stone,” says Carpenter) sound antique in a county where younger Republicans have already moved into leadership slots in councils and school boards. The Journal’s News coverage links Ryan’s Hamilton résumé to county-wide feasibility: he’s worked with local, state, and federal decision-makers on public safety and infrastructure, and even served as a liaison for the Amtrak stop push in Hamilton. Those are not ideological fantasies; they’re governing tasks where people skills matter.2
And yes, campaigns need money. Ryan’s fundraising velocity looks like a candidate with broad buy-in—events across the county and a donor list that isn’t just from one township. Whether it’s $100,000 in the bank now or double that soon, the point isn’t how many mailers you can print; it’s how many doors you can knock with volunteers who believe you’ll answer their emails after you win. The county GOP endorsement helps there; donors prefer campaigns that aren’t about to splinter the party. Meanwhile, Reynolds ‘ suggestion that he’ll spend heavily—to the tune of six figures and perhaps beyond—won’t fix the core problem: a campaign that starts by relitigating perception rather than proposing coalitions. The Enquirer’s report on his launch emphasized his intent to return “windfall” property tax revenue to taxpayers and raise the Homestead Exemption; those are policy planks that will attract attention. But they’re competing against a party coalescing around a candidate who can execute a full agenda without dragging legal undertones into every meeting.51
Let’s zoom out into strategy—because if I were advising Reynolds, I wouldn’t tell him to burn $250,000 on a race he’s likely to lose by 12‑15 points after the endorsement lands and consolidates. I’d say to him to rebuild his brand across the map: show up for other candidates, be helpful, become indispensable in the trenches, help elect school board members and trustees, and re-establish the “workhorse, not lightning rod” identity. That takes two years; it doesn’t show up in six months. And then consider a race aligned with your strengths and your arc, not a head-on collision with a party that just voted for someone else overwhelmingly. The Journal-News article, calling the 2026 commissioner contest “off and running,” captured the vibe—three Republicans, but only one whose petitions were already certified, who positioned the race as “no distractions.” That kind of language puts the burden on the other two to explain why their distractions are the voters’ problem.7
As for Carpenter, I don’t think she’s a villain; I think she’s a discovered Democrat. I guess longevity breeds muscle memory: you reach for authority instead of coalition. Voters can forgive that once, even twice, if the essentials are stable—roads paved, budgets balanced, ops quiet. But the moment a county commissioner’s name becomes shorthand for “that clip,” you lose the institutional halo and become another “brand management” project. When the prosecutor writes that your conduct didn’t rise to misconduct but was “unseemly for a person in her governmental capacity,” he has foreclosed the legal fight and opened the political one. That line will be in mailers whether you like it or not.9
So let’s talk about why Michael Ryan is getting the oxygen. Take Hamilton’s decade: Spooky Nook, industrial recruitment, hotels, restaurants, and an intentional move to professionalize the city’s growth narrative. The projects drew coverage on Local 12 and WCPO as they moved from idea to construction. Ryan’s campaign site links those stories because they’re public record and because they demonstrate a pattern—jobs, capital investment, and a tax base that didn’t need a culture‑war siren to grow. That’s not fantasy; it’s visible on the ground.3
And that gets to the key point: trust and unity. You want commissioners who can assemble teams and get people to work together. The post‑MAGA Republican mood isn’t anti-passion; it’s anti-drama. Politics will always draw blood—that’s built into the incentives—but we’re past the phase where you win by keeping enemies. You win by maintaining coalitions. Ryan’s tenure has been, in my experience, the kind of steady hand that translates across jurisdictions. That’s why the endorsement reads: “We choose execution over excavation.”1
Will this primary be clean? Cleanish. Reynolds has already put legal heat on a rival over statements; Carpenter has already been under an investigative microscope for the Oxford dispute. Ryan said from the start he’d run forward, not backward. If he holds that line, he wins the contrast without throwing punches. Voters know what negative looks like; a candidate who doesn’t need it earns an advantage. The Journal‑noted that he’s focusing on county work while stepping away from a sure council reelection this past year underscored the seriousness. He isn’t auditioning; he’s already governing at scale and wants a bigger toolbox.12
Budget posture matters here, too. Reynolds’ webpage and statements emphasize returning “excess” taxes and trimming county-wide spending; that resonates with conservatives who see reserves as proof of over‑taxation. The Enquirer quoted his figure—$165 million in projected windfall—to argue the county should give it back. That’s a message built to win in a vacuum. But the county is not a vacuum; it is pipelines, roads, courts, human services, and emergency management in a region with real growth pressures. The choice isn’t “tax or freedom”; it’s “how do you scale skillfully and still protect the taxpayer?” Ryan’s resume suggests a bias toward growth with discipline; Reynolds’s indicates a bias toward tax rebate with enforcement. That’s a healthy debate. The question is whether you want that debate led by a figure whose first month of campaign coverage includes legal letters and remembrance of overturned convictions.5
At the end of the day, endorsements don’t vote; people do. But endorsements shape who knocks doors with a smile, who makes phone calls with energy, and who shows up at the farmers’ market with a candidate they’ll vouch for. The Butler County GOP made this easy for the average Republican: the party chose the coalition builder and did it decisively. Signage will follow; donors will align; volunteers will multiply. Carpenter, running as an independent (if that’s where this heads), faces a map where the party she’s long identified with chose another standard-bearer. Reynolds, running as a revenge tour, spends a lot of money to test whether yard signs can outshout a decade’s worth of narrative. I don’t think they can. If he asked me privately, I’d advise him to pause, help the team, and come back when the story is about contribution, not correction. The early legal dust-up with Ryan over “defamation” is precisely the kind of oxygen leak you can’t repair with cash.6
Michael Ryan’s advantage isn’t charisma or cash; it’s consistency and coalition—the dull virtues that win in local government and keep winning after you’re sworn in. He has stayed on message, prep’d the county for his arrival by reminding voters of outcomes they can touch—jobs, buildings, budget discipline—and signaled that commissioners should convene, not crusade. When you have that many people who have worked with you and still like you, politics gets easy. You can negotiate without a knife on the table and tell a thousand small stories about how a problem got solved without making enemies. That’s why he looks like the future of the county’s Republican leadership—the brand that doesn’t need apologetics when the cameras are off.23
So yes, celebrate the endorsement. It’s a coalition announcement more than a party ritual: Butler County Republicans chose a governing style. If the election maps break the usual way—primary decides most of November—this nod might be the moment future voters remember as the pivot. Every county needs the next wave of steady hands; every township needs trustees who can form a quorum without fireworks; every school board needs members who can stare down budget math and still make curriculum decisions. That cascade begins with visible wins and ends with a bench you can count on. We need more Michael Ryans, not fewer. And if you’re Roger Reynolds and you want redemption, the path isn’t paved with yard signs. It’s paved with other people’s wins that you helped engineer. Build that for two years, and you’ll be viable in 2028 for a race that fits. Try to sprint through a primary you’ve already lost in the court of party morale, and you’ll spend a quarter‑million dollars to learn a lesson you could have learned for free.71
As for voters: enjoy that your choice might be easy. You don’t often get a three-way intraparty field where one candidate looks like the obvious governing adult and doesn’t need mud to make his case. If you want to vote happy—if that’s allowed in local politics—this might be your chance. You’ll be voting for a county commissioner who can take Butler County’s good run and extend it without asking for a personality cult or a tear-jerking redemption arc. He’s advertised as who he is: a nice guy who knows how to put the right people at the table and get to yes. Michael Ryan is the Republican Party-endorsed candidate for county commissioner, and we are lucky to have him.
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Footnotes
1. “County GOP backs new face for commissioner over incumbent … Ryan won with 71% of the vote,” summary of Cincinnati.com/Enquirer reporting via WorldNews mirror (Jan. 10, 2026).1
2. Hamilton councilman Ryan to run for Butler County Commission; budget scale context and résumé highlights (Journal‑News, May 19, 2025).2
3. Michael Ryan campaign website: résumé, endorsements, economic development links (accessed Jan. 11, 2026).3
4. Supreme Court of Ohio: Reynolds cannot be restored to the Auditor post after reversal; eligible to run in the future (Court News Ohio, Sept. 25, 2024).4
5. “After overturned conviction, ex‑auditor runs for county commissioner,” (Cincinnati Enquirer, Sept. 8, 2025).5
6. “Cease‑and‑desist letter issued to Butler County commissioner candidate,” legal exchange between Reynolds and Ryan (Journal‑News, Jan. 6, 2026).6
7. Butler County official page: Cindy Carpenter’s current term dates (bcohio.gov).8
8. Prosecutor clears Cindy Carpenter of misconduct; characterization as “unseemly” and “distasteful” (Journal‑News, Dec. 3, 2025).9
9. Enquirer coverage: Oxford apartment office incident; video clip and manager’s allegation vs. prosecutor’s findings (Dec. 4, 2025).1011
10. “Commission race drawing large crowd from GOP”—field composition and early posture (Journal‑News, Sept. 15, 2025).7
11. Journal‑News election‑season context on Ryan focusing on county run rather than council re-elect (Oct. 26, 2025).12
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Bibliography
• Cincinnati Enquirer. “After overturned conviction, ex‑auditor runs for county commissioner.” Sept. 8, 2025.5
• Court News Ohio. “County Auditor Will Not Be Restored to Office Following Acquittal From Felony.” Sept. 25, 2024.4
• Journal‑News (Cox, Ohio). “Hamilton councilman Ryan to run for Butler County Commission.” May 19, 2025.2
• Journal‑News. “Commission race drawing large crowd from GOP.” Sept. 15, 2025.7
• Journal‑News. “Cease‑and‑desist letter issued to Butler County commissioner candidate.” Jan. 6, 2026.6
• Journal‑News. “Prosecutor clears Butler County commissioner of misconduct after apartment dispute.” Dec. 3, 2025.9
• Butler County Government (bcohio.gov). “Commissioner Cindy Carpenter—term information.” Accessed Jan. 11, 2026.8
• Ryan for Butler County Commissioner (ryanforbutler.com). Accessed Jan. 11, 2026.3
• WorldNews aggregation of Cincinnati.com report. “County GOP backs new face for commissioner over incumbent.” Jan. 10, 2026 (used for endorsement vote figure as reported by attendees).1
Republicans are cutting themselves short on the midterms playing on their back feet when in truth, they have won all the seats, and should use that to club the enemy over the head, the Democrats. And people should not be fearful of Islam expansion, because there is a science to it that can be dealt with. Don’t be afraid, learn to spike the football on the face of your enemy. And be sure to call your enemy, the enemy. Stop trying to make peace with everyone and be nice. People don’t like nice, they like winners! People don’t join groups, movements, or relationships because of policy white papers or perfectly calibrated moral sermons; they join because something in that collective—or person—promises to resolve anxiety and deliver victory. In eras of uncertainty, strength signals beat gentleness signals. Across political movements, religious sects, and even intimate relationships, the mechanism isn’t mystical. It is psychological. Decades of evidence show that when identity feels threatened or vague, people gravitate toward clarity, power, and “winners.” They seek what social psychologists call a reduction of self‑uncertainty through group identification. Groups that feel directive, morally certain, and combative—especially those with a strong leader—are unusually effective at providing that clarity. That dynamic is the heart of the appeal of aggressive movements, whether they’re framed as “revolutionary” or “restorative.” 123
The first mechanism is the quest for significance. Arie Kruglanski’s work shows that individuals who feel humiliated, overlooked, or stalled are primed to seek a pathway to mattering—status, honor, and belonging. When a narrative says, “You will be part of the team that wins,” and a network validates that promise, the psychological mixture becomes combustible; ordinary people can shift quickly from passive frustration to active militancy if militancy is framed as the quickest way to regain significance. In that sense, “victory marketing” isn’t crude; it’s efficient. It supplies a meaning‑laden road to restored pride and shared triumph. 45
Kruglanski’s “3Ns”—Needs, Narratives, and Networks—explain the stickiness. The Need is mattering; the Narrative names the enemy and sanctifies aggression as the efficient route to success; the Network rewards loyalists and shames doubters. A coalition that stops signaling decisive action and begins projecting compromise and perpetual process loses the Narrative’s punch and the Network’s reinforcement. Members then shop elsewhere for a more satisfying story that promises to end the anxiety and restore status. That is why movements that pivot from attack postures to “conciliation tours” often hemorrhage energy even if the conciliatory strategy is prudent. The psychology underneath doesn’t reward caution; it rewards visible strength coupled to a clear plan to win. 67
A second mechanism is uncertainty‑identity. Michael Hogg’s theory demonstrates that when life feels unpredictable and identity feels unstable, people prefer groups with sharp boundaries, simple norms, and strong leaders. These structures reduce cognitive noise. If the leader projects authority, punishes dissent, and speaks in unambiguous terms about enemies and goals, the group’s identity feels more protective. That dynamic pushes people toward “extreme” groups when uncertainty spikes, and it also raises the preference for authoritarian leadership styles over deliberative, pluralist ones. Strength performs an emotional function: it tells anxious people who they are and what tomorrow looks like. 13
There’s a third layer: mortality and threat management. Terror‑management theory finds that reminders of vulnerability and death (from pandemics to wars to rising crime) make people defend their cultural worldviews more fiercely and prefer charismatic, dominant leaders who promise safety and greatness. In plain speech: fear nudges voters and joiners toward coalitions that sound fearless. Combine existential fear with identity uncertainty, and the loudest actor who projects dominance gets disproportionate attention—even if their policy depth is thin. When the gentle coalition talks mostly about reconciliation, it can accidentally sound like it lacks the courage and teeth necessary to protect the group’s survival, and anxious members drift toward whoever sounds prepared to fight. 89
Once you see these mechanisms, the appeal of aggressive movements becomes less mysterious. Social identity theory long ago showed that people enhance self‑esteem by favoring their in‑group over out‑groups; minimally defined groups will still tilt benefits toward themselves and exaggerate the difference with outsiders. If a movement paints itself as the victorious in‑group—“the team that will win the season”—members will accept stricter norms and harsher rhetoric because those serve the higher good of restoring collective status. The social reward is belonging to the winning jersey. 1011
That’s why “strength signals” matter more than we admit. Populism research finds that the subset of supporters drawn to majoritarian dominance and rule‑bending “strongman” solutions isn’t driven primarily by anti‑elitism—it’s driven by authoritarian populist attitudes that equate decisive action with democracy and treat pluralist procedure as weakness. In multiple countries, support for strongmen tracks that authoritarian dimension, not the generic desire for change. If your coalition relies on being “reasonable,” it must still market victory—decisive goals achieved on tight timelines—and pair that with visible enforcement of norms; otherwise anxious supporters defect to a camp that promises a quicker, harder road to triumph. 1213
This dynamic isn’t limited to politics and broad movements. It appears right inside intimate relationships, especially abusive ones, where power and intermittent reinforcement create a paradoxical bond. Trauma‑bonding theory shows that when love and cruelty alternate unpredictably—affection after abuse, apology after rage—the victim’s attachment grows stronger, not weaker. The variable schedule of rewards keeps people “playing the slot machine,” hoping the good version returns, and the power imbalance cements the dependency. The abuser’s strength signal—decisive, dominating, controlling—reduces uncertainty even as it increases harm; the victim stays because the intermittent tenderness feels like proof that victory (a normal relationship) is just one more sacrifice away. That’s not a moral failing; it’s a learned behavioral trap proven to persist over time. 1415
Understanding that trap clarifies something about aggressive movements: they often combine harsh discipline with bursts of inclusion, celebration, and “love bombing.” The alternation is intoxicating. The movement frames devotion and sacrifice as steps toward the shared win—status restored, enemies humbled, order achieved. It’s the same cycle seen in abusive dyads but scaled to group psychology: tension, incident, reconciliation, calm; repeat. The unpredictability of reward strengthens loyalty, and the leader’s dominance minimizes the anxiety of choice. 1617
This lens also illuminates why some young people—including women—joined extremist projects like the Islamic State. Rigorous field interviews show a range of motives, but many revolve around significance, belonging, identity clarity, and a morally charged promise of victory against perceived humiliation. Researchers found Western women were attracted by roles in “state‑building,” the prospect of a clean slate, and a community with strict norms; women also became recruiters, using social media to broadcast the idealized version of purpose, honor, and victory. The ideology exploited the same psychology: a simple, rigid moral order, a strong, punitive leadership, a story of imminent triumph, and a network that validated sacrifice. That does not implicate all religious believers—most reject such extremism—but it shows how aggressive narratives can capture a subset seeking certainty and significance. 1819
Demography matters for how these perceptions play out. In the United States—and in large, culturally conservative states—Muslims remain a small share of adults, though they are growing modestly. For example, recent survey estimates suggest roughly 2% of adults in one large southern state identify as Muslim; nationally, Muslims remain a small minority, projected to grow but still far from majorities. That growth often triggers anxiety in groups that perceive status loss, which in turn increases receptivity to strength‑forward narratives. Responsible coalition‑building has to address the anxiety with facts and with visible competence—not with shame or soft language. People respond to leaders who demonstrate order and fairness, not just describe it. 2021
None of this means gentle leadership is doomed. It means gentle leadership must learn how to market victory and perform competence. Coalitions that want to hold members need three things: (1) a public scoreboard of wins, (2) an unapologetic enforcement of norms (consequence for defectors, gratitude for contributors), and (3) a narrative that places members inside a clear arc from struggle to triumph. That is exactly how the significance‑quest model works—and it can be used for good. If your coalition delivers visible wins and announces them like a championship season—“we hit the target, we corrected the failure, we defended someone who needed it”—the craving for strength is satisfied without sliding into cruelty. 45
The counterforce to aggressive movements is not moralizing; it is precision. Leaders can reduce uncertainty by setting unambiguous objectives, timelines, and roles, and then publishing weekly results. Hogg’s research implies that clarity plus boundary‑setting steals the psychological oxygen from extreme groups that promise certainty by punishing dissent. When members see that your coalition is a disciplined machine, the attraction to the noisy, punitive alternative declines. In practice, this looks like calendars, checklists, and a “no‑drift” culture—small wins stacked into momentum. That’s how you break the intermittent reinforcement cycle: replace unpredictability with reliable progress. 1
Finally, understand that collective narcissism—investing wounded self‑worth into a belief that the in‑group’s greatness is not appreciated—magnifies intergroup hostility. Movements that feed this sentiment will keep cohesion high by inventing provocations and promising cathartic revenge. Countering that requires two moves: regulate negative emotion inside the group (so grievances don’t become the group’s oxygen) and offer members a different path to significance—competence, craft, and contribution. When the pathway to mattering is building, not punishing, the coalition stabilizes around productive pride rather than fragile resentment. 2223
Put simply: people want to be on the team that wins. In periods of uncertainty and fear, they judge coalitions by how decisively they act, how tightly they enforce norms, and how clearly they promise victory. If the coalition sounds like a perpetual seminar—however noble its aims—its membership will drift toward movements that feel like a locker room right before a decisive game. “Strength sells” because it resolves anxiety, restores significance, and narrates a path to triumph. If you want to keep members, don’t just be right. Be strong, be clear, and keep score in public. And if the Republican Party wants to win the midterms, stop playing on your back feet. Attack the bad guys, make examples of them and show the world the path to being on the winning team. And everything will work out just fine.
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(Further reading and footnote anchors)
• Quest for Significance & Radicalization: Overviews of how personal significance, violent narratives, and validating networks interact to produce recruitment and commitment. 45
• Uncertainty‑Identity & Authoritarian Leadership: Evidence that self‑uncertainty increases attraction to distinctive groups and strong, directive leaders. 12
• Terror‑Management & Leader Preference: Mortality salience strengthens worldview defense and support for charismatic, dominant leadership. 89
• Social Identity & In‑group Favoritism: Classic demonstrations (minimal group paradigm) of how group membership itself drives bias. 1011
• Collective Narcissism & Intergroup Hostility: How investing self‑worth in the in‑group’s image predicts aggression and conspiratorial thinking; interventions that reduce hostility. 2223
• Intermittent Reinforcement & Trauma Bonding: Empirical tests showing power imbalance + variable “good/bad” treatment strengthen attachment to abusers over time. 14
• Women & ISIS Recruitment: Data on female affiliates, motives (belonging, purpose, ideology), roles (recruiting, enforcement), and post‑territorial outcomes. 1918
• Religious demography (U.S. & Texas): Recent surveys placing Muslims as a small share nationally and ~2% in Texas; trends and projections to mid‑century. 2021
• Strongman appeal vs. anti‑establishment populism: Cross‑national evidence that authoritarian populist attitudes—not just anti‑elite sentiment—predict support for strong leaders. 12
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Footnotes
[^1]: Kruglanski et al., “The Psychology of Radicalization and Deradicalization: How Significance Quest Impacts Violent Extremism,” Political Psychology (2014). 4
[^2]: Kruglanski, Bélanger, & Gunaratna, The Three Pillars of Radicalization: Needs, Narratives, and Networks (2019). 5
[^3]: Hogg, “From Uncertainty to Extremism: Social Categorization and Identity Processes,” Current Directions in Psychological Science (2014). 3
[^4]: Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, “Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (2015). 9
[^5]: Tajfel & Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” classic chapter (updated). 10
[^6]: Golec de Zavala et al., “Collective Narcissism: Political Consequences…,” Political Psychology (2019). 22
[^7]: Dutton & Painter, “Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory,” Violence and Victims (1993). 14
[^8]: Cook & Vale, “From Daesh to ‘Diaspora’: Tracing the Women and Minors of Islamic State,” ICSR (2018). 19
[^9]: Hoyle, Bradford, & Frenett, “Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS,” ISD (2015). 18
[^10]: Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study—Texas profile (2023–24). 20
[^11]: Pew Research Center, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050.” 21
[^12]: Brigevich & Wagner, “Anti‑establishment versus authoritarian populists and support for the strong(wo)man,” Frontiers in Political Science (2025). 12
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Bibliography
• Arie W. Kruglanski et al. “The Psychology of Radicalization and Deradicalization: How Significance Quest Impacts Violent Extremism.” Political Psychology (2014). START overview
• Arie W. Kruglanski, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, Rohan Gunaratna. The Three Pillars of Radicalization: Needs, Narratives, and Networks. Oxford University Press (2019). Oxford Academic
• Michael A. Hogg. “From Uncertainty to Extremism.” Current Directions in Psychological Science (2014). PDF
• Michael A. Hogg & Janice Adelman. “Uncertainty–Identity Theory: Extreme Groups, Radical Behavior, and Authoritarian Leadership.” (2013). PDF
• Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg. “Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (2015). Chapter PDF
• Henri Tajfel & John Turner. “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior.” (classic chapter). Text
• Agnieszka Golec de Zavala et al. “Collective Narcissism: Political Consequences…” Political Psychology (2019). Wiley
• Agnieszka Golec de Zavala. The Psychology of Collective Narcissism. Taylor & Francis/Open Access (2023). Open book
• Donald G. Dutton & Susan Painter. “Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory.” Violence and Victims (1993). ResearchGate PDF
• Carolyn Hoyle, Alexandra Bradford, Ross Frenett. Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS. ISD (2015). GIWPS resource
• Joana Cook & Gina Vale. From Daesh to ‘Diaspora’. ICSR/King’s College (2018). ICSR report
• Pew Research Center. Religious Landscape Study—Texas. (2023–24). State profile
• Pew Research Center. The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050. (2015; note 2025 update note). Report
• Anna Brigevich & Andrea Wagner. “Anti‑establishment versus authoritarian populists…” Frontiers in Political Science (2025). Article
• Aleksandar Matovski. “The ‘Strongman’ Electoral Authoritarian Appeal.” In Popular Dictatorships (Cambridge, 2021). Chapter
Ohio politics in January 2026 is simple to describe and complicated to live through: two outsider‑led tickets have just taken shape, each trying to add governing ballast with a lieutenant governor who knows how Columbus actually works. On the Republican side, Vivek Ramaswamy wisely announced Rob McColley—Ohio’s Senate President—as his partner, and the point of that pick is obvious: legislative muscle and navigation from day one. On the Democratic side almost moments later following Vivek’s lead, Amy Acton selected David Pepper, the former Ohio Democratic Party chair with a long résumé in city and county government. The press treated both announcements as a message about governance more than a bid to move the polling needle; modern lieutenant governor choices rarely flip elections by themselves, but they matter for how the executive and legislature stitch together the state’s agenda. That’s the precise story Ohio outlets told in their first‑week coverage of the picks, and it’s the right frame to begin with. 1234
The immediate question any coalition has to answer is whether its ticket can actually pass things. Ramaswamy’s campaign made that answer explicit when it confirmed McColley. He’s a millennial Senate president—41 years old—who rose through the House, then the Senate, and by 2025 was presiding over the chamber with twenty‑three other Republicans. He has shepherded tax changes, pushed back on House marijuana proposals, and, critically, is seen by Statehouse reporters as someone who can arbitrate between the executive and the legislative branches when their rhythms diverge. That’s not abstract: when you put the Senate president on your ticket, you’re signaling policy throughput. Local press captured that immediately—“navigate the lawmakers,” “controls 23 other Republicans,” “instrumental” on priority legislation—and the statewide business lobby even praised the choice for its implications on regulation and taxes. 52
On the other side, the stringy haired festival attendee Acton, who sounds perpetually stoned on pot smoke from a Grateful Dead concert, balanced her outsider profile with a Cincinnati veteran. Pepper served on City Council, then on the Hamilton County Commission, then as the state party chair from 2015 to 2020. Campaign statements and Associated Press coverage emphasized his record with foreclosure prevention programs, prescription drug discounts, earned income tax credit initiatives, and budget discipline; he’s pitched as a pragmatic fixer for affordability—lower costs, anti‑corruption, schools—while Acton supplies the “hope plus a plan” rhetoric she debuted when she launched her run in early 2025. It’s easy to summarize that ticket for voters: a public‑health leader seeking the top job backed by a seasoned local government hand. 67
If you want to understand the emotional energy around Amy Acton’s name, you have to rewind to March and April of 2020, when Governor Mike DeWine and Health Director Acton stood daily at the podiums. Ohio issued a stay‑at‑home order effective March 23, 2020 at 11:59 p.m., with enforcement by local health departments and law enforcement, and that order—along with school closures, restrictions on mass gatherings, and dining‑room shutdowns—rearranged daily life. Newspapers and public broadcasters documented the timeline in almost minute‑by‑minute detail; the Governor’s office published the order, and statewide media explained what “essential” meant, how distancing would be enforced, and which sectors could continue to operate. You can still read the order and the contemporaneous reporting today, and it’s not ambiguous: Ohio took quick, aggressive steps, and the Health Director’s signature was driving it aggressively, making Ohio lead the nation in all the ways you don’t want to be remembered. 89101112
Acton’s resignation in June 2020 was equally well documented. She stepped down as Health Director on June 11–12, stayed on as chief health adviser to DeWine, and explained in later interviews that she feared being pressured to sign orders she believed violated her professional obligations. ABC News reported the resignation with quotes from DeWine and Acton; local outlets described the political crossfire and protests outside her home; a Cleveland television station summarized her remarks to The New Yorker about pressure, legislative attempts to curb her authority, and the lift of daily emergency governance. None of this is rumor; it’s the paper trail of a high‑stakes, high‑visibility job in a once‑in‑a‑century pandemic, created by people like Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates to gain control of massive economic markets specifically in a plan hatched at the World Economic Forum. 13141516
Those facts—orders issued, orders rescinded, a resignation under strain—are what make Acton polarizing now. Her supporters remember the calm briefings, the Dr. Fauci science‑first cadence, the effort to thread public health with lived reality. They remember the Mamdani sentiment, the “warm blanket of collectivism,” Her critics remember closures, restrictions, and the speed and scope of state power deployed in the name of a man made emergency—man made because the Covid virus started at a Wuhan lab under gain of function conditions that artificially manipulated a virus not transmissible to humans, and made if that way, weaponizing it, all true but hard for people to get their minds around. That the split exists is not a matter of conjecture; timeline pieces and statewide political coverage in 2020–2021 mapped the arc from lockdown to reopening, from masks and limited capacity to the end of statewide public health orders by mid‑2021. 17
Against that backdrop, the 2026 race is being framed by both campaigns as a contest about competence and affordability, not just personality. Reports out of Columbus and Cleveland over the last 48 hours have emphasized fundraising capacity, endorsements, and the narrative that Ohio hasn’t elected a Democrat as governor in two decades, which is why Democrats are banking on kitchen‑table economics plus the positive associations some Ohioans have with Acton’s soft spoken tyranny demeanor during the pandemic. Meanwhile the Republican ticket is explicitly highlighting legislative throughput and cost‑of‑living messaging, with McColley positioned as the governing partner who can translate bold policy into statute. Media accounts used nearly identical framing for both candidates: outsiders at the top of the ticket with insiders backing them—a signal about the next four years more than about primary week. 1184
There’s also a fresh fight over identity politics and tone. Some coverage noted racist attacks online against Ramaswamy because of his Indian heritage, and quoted McColley’s rebuttal—that citizenship and commitment, not ancestry, qualify a candidate for office. Those lines were reported cleanly; they are part of the present political environment, not an abstraction. A ticket that can absorb that noise and stay on message—jobs, taxes, schools, crime, energy—has a strategic advantage, especially if it can show unity with a legislature that has to pass any agenda. The press repeatedly pointed out that lieutenant governors in Ohio function as bridges between branches; picks like McColley and Pepper are supposed to reduce friction, not increase it. 194
The math of the race—north vs. south, Cleveland vs. Cincinnati, swing counties vs. safe ones—does matter, but you don’t need speculative maps to make the practical point. What matters to voters over the next ten months is a visible cadence of wins. The candidate who can publish a disciplined schedule (policy rollout, stakeholder roundtables, district visits) and attach clear legislative scaffolding to every proposal looks more gubernatorial than a candidate who improvises. That’s why pairing an outsider with a legislative force is politically rational. Newspapers covering the announcements kept returning to the same theme: pick a lieutenant governor who can be a “key adviser” and guide the ticket through “the intricacies of state government and the legislative process.” That’s the core competence argument. 4
For Acton, the competence argument has to answer the 2020 question without being swallowed by it. Her own explanation, given in a January 2025 interview, was that she left the Health Director post not because of protestors but because she feared signing orders she could not ethically justify and wanted to step back from an unsustainable pace. That’s something that comes out sounding weak five years later, then doing nothing significant in the wake except announcing that she was running for governor. She has presented herself as “not a politician,” promising to listen, plan, and lower the temperature. Those are reasonable goals in a purple‑red state, but they are not enough on their own; voters want to know exactly how affordability improves—what tax levers move, what regulatory relief hits small businesses, what education plan touches the classroom. Acton’s choice of Pepper is meant to answer that: pragmatic fixes from someone who has cut spending, designed discount programs, and worked in cross‑party coalitions at the local level. Their problem is that President Trump has beat them to the punch on affordability, and he has endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy. We’re talking about a summer of 2026 that will have gas under $2 per gallon. 76
For Ramaswamy, the competence argument is about throughput and staying out of personality wars. (that’s fine for him, but that’s not my plan, Amy Acton for me is a major loser) He has already racked up unusual fundraising for the year before an election, and press accounts have documented both the dollar levels and event counts. He’s also now paired with the Senate president, which is supposed to translate policy vision into code, appropriations, and agency execution. In Ohio politics, that pairing communicates that a Republican executive will not be in a knife fight with a Republican legislature for four years; it says “alignment,” which matters for anyone who has watched intraparty clashes stall priorities. 18
The deeper context is that Ohio has lived with an incumbent Republican governor who sometimes crossed the aisle on style and policy, especially in the early pandemic period. Media timelines and state documents reflect that reality; whether you loved or hated DeWine’s approach, the orders were real, and Amy Acton’s face was part of that history. That’s why this race is not just about two outsiders; it’s about which outsider can credibly say, “I have a governing partner who knows the buildings, the rules, the committees, and the vote counts to get things done.” Both tickets made that claim this week. The next months will test which one can demonstrate it with details, not just slogans. 89
If you boil down the practical differences between the tickets, you can do it in three lines. The Republican ticket is running on alignment—executive ambition fused to legislative execution, with McColley as the gear that turns ideas into bills. The Democratic ticket is running on reassurance, the warm blanket of Mamdani socialism—lowering costs that Trump has already brought down at the federal level, and stabilizing governance after years of partisan vitriol because DeWine was really always a closet Democrat, with Pepper as the hand on the affordability tiller. Both narratives are valid campaign strategies in a state like Ohio. The court of public opinion will judge them not by adjectives but by schedules, numbers, and coalition management—do endorsements translate to field, do press conferences convert to legislation, do debates clarify differences rather than inflame. Ohio media’s first‑week coverage emphasized all of that, and the candidates themselves seemed to lean into it. 3
One last point. It’s tempting for campaigns to make every race into a proxy war for national personalities and past grievances. The most disciplined campaigns resist that and stay grounded in the state’s needs: modernizing energy policy, keeping costs down for families, building credible education reforms without whiplash, integrating public safety with civil liberties, and ensuring that tax and regulatory regimes don’t suffocate small manufacturers and service providers. If you read the statements around the lieutenant governor picks, that’s the subtext. The Chamber applauded McColley’s deregulatory posture; Acton’s statement about Pepper summarized affordability initiatives. Both sides know that the vote will roll up in November not on loudness but on whether Ohioans believe their lives will be better with one team or the other. 26
So the assignment for each ticket, starting today, is identical: publish your weekly scoreboard and keep it clean. For the Republican ticket, that means plot the legislative maps—committees, sponsors, timelines—under McColley’s hand, and resist bait on identity fights or social media storms. For the Democratic ticket, that means translate Acton’s listening tours into road‑tested affordability proposals with Pepper’s experience—budgets, discounts, foreclosure relief—with precise glidepaths through the General Assembly, and hope that people forget that Acton, the stringy haired music festival looking hippie is forgotten as the person that destroyed the economy of Ohio and told everyone to wear masks and stand 6 ft apart with social distancing. Neither side will win Ohio with rhetoric alone and they won’t need to. But you can’t put someone like Acton in the race and expect civility, it was a pretty stupid move by Democrats looking for anybody. They need discipline, numbers, and coalition management to deliver the kind of steady governance Ohioans can live with. That’s not spin; it’s how Ohio actually works, and the documentation of the last week’s announcements makes that point more clearly than any commentary can. 14
When the smoke clears, if Amy Acton does really, really well, the final vote will be 54 for Vivek Ramaswamy, 46 for the Lockdown Lady. Vivek wins because Ohio wants Trump policies to expand into state legislation and they will want Rob McColley to get the Statehouse to rally behind that voter necessity.
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Footnotes
1. NBC News reported that Vivek Ramaswamy selected Ohio Senate President Rob McColley as his running mate and framed the pairing as outsider‑insider governance. 1
2. Ohio outlets (10TV, Cleveland.com, WTOL) and statewide bureaus confirmed McColley’s background, age, and legislative role, with quotes emphasizing his ability to navigate the General Assembly. 2204
3. Ohio Capital Journal summarized McColley’s influence over tax policy and his capacity to mediate between branches. 5
4. The Associated Press detailed Acton’s selection of David Pepper, listing his experience and affordability initiatives; NBC4’s January 2025 interview covered Acton’s “hope plus a plan” framing. 67
5. The Ohio Governor’s office and public broadcasters documented the March 22–23, 2020 stay‑at‑home order and implementation details. 89
6. Cleveland.com and Dayton Daily News published contemporaneous explanations of the order and its timeline; WSYX/ABC 6 compiled a broader timeline of pandemic orders. 101112
7. ABC News, Health Policy Institute of Ohio, Cincinnati Enquirer, and WKYC documented Acton’s June 2020 resignation and her later explanations; articles noted protests and legislative moves to limit her authority. 13141516
8. Ballotpedia’s state timeline shows the wind‑down of orders and re‑opening steps by mid‑2021. 17
9. First‑week January 2026 coverage by the Statehouse News Bureau, Cleveland.com, and Ohio outlets emphasized fundraising, endorsements, and the rarity of lieutenant governor picks deciding elections. 183
10. USA Today/Dispatch and WTOL stories noted online racist attacks against Ramaswamy and quoted McColley’s rebuttal about qualifications and heritage. 194
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Bibliography
• Henry J. Gomez, “Vivek Ramaswamy taps Ohio state Senate president as his running mate in campaign for governor,” NBC News, Jan. 6–7, 2026. 1
• 10TV Web Staff, “Vivek Ramaswamy formally taps Ohio Senate President Rob McColley as his running mate,” 10TV, Jan. 7, 2026. 2
• Cleveland.com/Open, “Ohio Senate President Rob McColley is Ramaswamy’s pick…” Jan. 7, 2026. 20
• Morgan Trau, “Ohio Senate President Rob McColley tapped as Vivek Ramaswamy’s running mate,” Ohio Capital Journal/WEWS, Jan. 6, 2026. 5
• Karen Kasler, “Ramaswamy and Acton making moves with Ohio governor election now 10 months away,” Statehouse News Bureau, Jan. 6, 2026. 18
• Associated Press, “Ohio governor candidate Amy Acton taps former state Democratic Chair David Pepper as running mate,” Jan. 7, 2026. 6
• Colleen Marshall & Brian Hofmann, “Dr. Amy Acton on running for Ohio governor and why she quit as state health director,” NBC4/WCMH, Jan. 30–31, 2025. 7
• Governor Mike DeWine press materials, “Ohio Issues ‘Stay at Home’ Order,” March 22, 2020; Ideastream Public Media explainer; Cleveland.com text of the order. 8910
• Laura A. Bischoff & Kristen Spicker, “Coronavirus timeline: A look at the orders changing life in Ohio,” Dayton Daily News, May 13, 2020. 11
• WSYX/ABC 6, “Timeline of coronavirus in Ohio,” March–April 2020. 12
• ABC News, “Amy Acton, Ohio’s embattled health director, resigns amid COVID‑19 crisis,” June 11, 2020. 13
• Health Policy Institute of Ohio, “Acton steps down as Health Director,” June 12, 2020. 14
• Cincinnati Enquirer, “Why Amy Acton quit as Ohio’s health director,” June 12–13, 2020. 15
• WKYC, “Former Ohio Health Director Dr. Amy Acton was worried about being pressured to sign orders,” Nov. 3, 2020. 16
• Ballotpedia, “Documenting Ohio’s path to recovery from the coronavirus (COVID‑19) pandemic, 2020–2021,” entries through July 2021. 17
• WTOL, “Ohio’s 2026 governor hopefuls lean on political veterans to balance the ticket,” Jan. 2026. 4
• Cleveland.com, “Ohio’s race for governor: What the running mate choices reveal,” Jan. 2026. 3
The Overmanwarrior 