Ayn Rand, Elon Musk, Non-Human Intelligence, and the Eternal War on the Human Creator: Data Centers, Dolmens, Consciousness, and the Kaaba Stone in Mecca

I have been thinking about this for a long time, and the thoughts keep circling back like they always do when something important is trying to get out. American philosophy did not end with Ayn Rand. Human beings keep innovating. She was a powerful contributor to American thought and the American system of individual achievement, but philosophy is not a closed book. We keep going. What bothers me, what has always bothered me, is the character of the human spirit in her books and how that spirit keeps getting attacked in the real world. I look at the hatred directed at the creators, and I see something deeper than politics or economics. I see a pattern that stretches back before Abraham, before the Bible as we have it, into a world of giants, dolmens, fallen intelligences, and religions that look a lot like control systems.

Ayn Rand’s Heroes and the Rational Adult Mind That Still Misses the Eternal

I have always defended the producers in her stories. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, building according to his own vision. The men and women in Atlas Shrugged who refuse to apologize for creating value. John Galt. These are the characters who understand that achievement is moral. Yet something has always bothered me about the fully rational adult framework she used. She saw clearly the envy and the looters. She saw the morality of production. What she did not fully reach, in my view, is the layer underneath the learned adult mind.

Watch a toddler. I have done this with my own grandchildren. I try to meet them in their eternal aspect, not just as small physical packages that look like someone else in the family. The baby is learning by mimicry: the walk, the talk, the habits, the prejudices of the adults around them. Consciousness arrives already as something, then gets trained into the grooves of the culture. Children can still see outside the box. Adults often cannot. There is the old story from the war of the truck that would not fit under the bridge. All the officers and engineers were stuck until a kid suggested letting the air out of the tires. Simple. Outside the groove.

Psychedelics strip some of those learned limits. Ancient cultures knew this. The rituals around Göbekli Tepe and the Jordan Valley were not empty. The Teacher of Righteousness among the Essenes, a century or so before Jesus, was already working in a mystical stream that the later Christian story partly absorbed and redirected. Jesus emerging in the Galilee region is not an accident of geography. That land had already been thick with older practices. The Eucharist practices that closely resembled Greek mystery traditions north of Athens had been circulating for centuries. When you strip away adult prejudices, the question becomes obvious: is the body the consciousness, or is it a temporary vehicle for something that already exists?

I argue the latter. The older adult whose body is failing still carries the same eternal spirit behind the eyes. The physical form degrades. The consciousness does not. This is where I part company with pure Objectivism and with the hard materialist reading of consciousness that stops at the hardware. Elon Musk has read Rand. He has called Atlas Shrugged useful as a counterpoint to communism, though he says it needs to be tempered with kindness. He is not a hard-core Objectivist. His real drive is the expansion of consciousness across the universe, making humanity multi-planetary, and advancing AI so that intelligence itself can understand reality more fully. Curiosity is his guiding star. That is close to the creators’ spirit, but it is bigger than rational self-interest alone.

The Same Hatred That Hit Ayn Rand Now Targets Elon Musk and the Data Centers

Look at the pattern. The same kind of people who hated Rand’s uncompromising creators now hate Elon Musk. They hated him for Tesla. They hated him when he tried to cut wasteful spending. They show up on the National Mall to protest him. The hatred feels disconnected from ordinary disagreement. It has the flavor of something that reacts against any force that empowers the human race to become more than it currently is.

Data centers are the current flashpoint. I am strongly for them. They are the physical infrastructure of expanded human intelligence. They consume power and water. Local grids feel the strain. Bills can rise. Noise from cooling systems is real. In some polls, 71% of Americans express concern when one is proposed near them. The irony is thick. People who once carried copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead during the Tea Party years suddenly discover selective individualism when the factory of the mind appears in their backyard. It is easier to love the hero in a novel than when his power plant sits next door. The abstract principle is easy. The concrete implementation is hard. That does not make the principle wrong.

The deeper issue is philosophical. Data centers and AI force the question of what consciousness is. Is it locked inside the biological body forever, or can it be extended, preserved, transferred, and expanded through tools we build? Elon talks about brain-computer interfaces and spreading life to other planets. He stays close to the physical substrate. I go further. I think non-human intelligences have been manipulating the human story for a very long time, erasing footprints, using religions and cultural systems as control mechanisms. Anything that expands human capacity becomes a threat to that older order. The hatred of Musk and the hatred of Rand share that root.

Pre-Abrahamic World: Dolmens, Giants, Copper, and the Religions of the Fallen

Go back before the Hebrews. The Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians and never fully brought into the Western canon, records the story of the Watchers and the giants. That text should have been more central. People are discovering it now through popular channels, but the evidence was always there. The Jordan Valley is covered with dolmens from the Early Bronze Age. Large fields of them. Similar table-like megalithic tombs appear across Europe and into the British Isles. In North America there are stone constructions and earthworks that early observers compared to the Old World forms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, particularly in the Keweenaw, the Old Copper Culture was mining pure native copper on a large scale by 7000–5000 BCE, possibly earlier. Artifacts moved across the continent. Some researchers have argued for long-distance trade connections that mainstream archaeology still resists.

The same experts who misled the public on other matters now demand absolute trust in their claims about migration patterns and the impossibility of earlier contact. I am not required to give them that trust. Sea levels were lower twelve thousand years ago. Island-hopping routes across the Pacific were more available. The geometric and mathematical patterns that appear in distant places are not automatically a coincidence. The Wheel of the Giants near the Sea of Galilee sits in the same general region where later religious eruptions continued to occur. Jesus did not appear in a vacuum.

What was the religion of the people who built the dolmens and practiced in that landscape before the Hebrew arrival? What gods did they serve? The later duel between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel only makes sense if people already believed Baal could answer with fire. North American indigenous traditions contain figures and practices that echo Canaanite and broader Near Eastern patterns more closely than random parallel development would predict. The experts dismiss the connections. I keep looking at the ground.

The Black Stone, the Monolith, and Consciousness Transfer

The Black Stone in the eastern corner of the Kaaba is a physical object that Muslims circle and try to touch or kiss. The official explanation is clear: it is an act of following the Prophet’s example. One of the companions said he knew it was only a stone that could neither harm nor benefit, but he kissed it because he had seen the Messenger do so. Fair enough as far as it goes. The deeper history is older. The stone was already sacred in pre-Islamic Arabian pagan pilgrimage. Muhammad did not invent the reverence. He cleaned out the idols and redirected an existing sacred site. Circling seven times, the annual pilgrimage, the sacred enclosure—these were already in place among the tribes.

I look at that stone the way I look at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. An object that appears, catalyzes a leap in consciousness or culture, then continues to exert influence long after its origin is forgotten. Religions can function as programming languages for human groups. They can lock certain patterns of behavior and thought into place across generations. Some of those patterns serve the human race. Others appear designed to keep it fragmented, sacrificial, or subordinate. Islam’s historical expansion has often been framed as a victory and a display of dominance, built on conquered sites. That is not unique to one faith, but it collides hard with the American experiment, which was designed as a vehicle for individual consciousness to flourish rather than submit to collective religious or political control.

Christianity itself absorbed and redirected earlier practices. The Hebrew system still carried ritual elements that older powers could work with. The radical break that Jesus represented threatened those older arrangements. Non-human intelligence does not need to appear as little green men from space. It can operate through dreams, through psychedelic states, through recurring religious forms, through the static that certain people seem to hear and obey without understanding the source.

Collectivism, the Scapegoat, and the Continuing Attack on the Builder

The same people who once cheered when Elon stood near Trump now turn on him when the practical costs of building appear. Collectivism wears religious clothes or secular clothes. It always needs a scapegoat. The independent creator who refuses to apologize for winning becomes that scapegoat. Rand never fully cracked why the businessman-as-moral-hero failed to win over the culture. She stayed inside the rational adult frame. The hatred is older and deeper than economics. It is a hatred of the human spirit when that spirit refuses to stay small.

I see the data centers as the current concrete expression of the same fight. Expanding intelligence, expanding the reach of consciousness, giving ordinary people tools that were once reserved for the few—this is exactly what the older manipulative forces would want to slow or stop. The power and water arguments are real and must be handled honestly. Local communities deserve straight talk and real mitigation. That does not justify the deeper philosophical rejection of the very idea of scaled human intelligence.

I will keep arguing this. The body is the vehicle. Consciousness is older. The record in the ground, in the texts that almost made it into the canon, in the recurring sacred stones and geometric patterns, and in the irrational hatred directed at the builders of each new age all point in the same direction. American philosophy did not stop with Ayn Rand. Elon Musk is one of the living characters who force the question into the open. The rest of us get to decide whether we side with the creators or with the forces that have been trying to keep the human race in its place for a very long time.

Footnotes

1. On Elon Musk’s engagement with Atlas Shrugged as a counter to communism tempered by kindness, see contemporary reporting and his own public comments referencing Rand’s work alongside his broader curiosity-driven philosophy.

2. Jordan Valley and Levantine dolmens date primarily to the Early Bronze Age (roughly 3700–2000 BCE), with large fields documented east of the Jordan Rift; early European explorers noted formal similarities to Western European megaliths.

3. Old Copper Culture mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale began at least 7000–9500 years ago and produced extensive pure native copper artifacts traded across eastern North America.

4. The Newark Holy Stones (Decalogue Stone and Keystone) are regarded by the large majority of professional archaeologists and epigraphers as 19th-century forgeries.

5. The Black Stone of the Kaaba was already an object of pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage and veneration; Islamic tradition preserves the practice of touching or kissing it as emulation of the Prophet while explicitly denying that the stone itself possesses independent power.

6. The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) was preserved in the Ethiopian canon and contains the Watchers narrative; it influenced Second Temple Jewish thought and early Christian writers.

7. Local opposition to data centers frequently cites electricity demand comparable to small cities, water use for cooling, and noise; polling shows majority concern in many proposed locations while the long-term productivity and intelligence gains remain more abstract to nearby residents.

Bibliography for Further Reading

• Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943.

• Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.

• 1 Enoch (various critical editions and translations, including those based on the Ethiopian manuscripts).

• Fraser, James A. Studies on Early Bronze Age dolmens of the Levant and Jordan Valley.

• Pompeani, David, et al. Research on the chronology of prehistoric copper mining in the Lake Superior region (Radiocarbon, The Holocene, Anthropocene).

• Steimer-Herbet, Tara. Work on dolmens and tower tombs in Jordan.

• Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968.

• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.

• Biblical Archaeology Review (long-running coverage of Near Eastern sites, copper production, and Second Temple period).

• Primary Islamic historical sources on the Kaaba and Black Stone (Ibn Ishaq, al-Azraqi, and related early chronicles).

• Contemporary reporting and polling on data-center siting conflicts in the United States (2023–2026).

• Materials on the Teacher of Righteousness and the Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.

This is the ground I keep walking. The creators keep building. The older forces keep reacting. I intend to keep looking.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

George Lang’s Bible in the Backseat, Jonathan Edwards, Darbi Boddy: Lessons to build a better, and stronger, GOP in Butler County

I am not a separation of church and state guy the way the left has used it to push a secular agenda. But to understnad that, you have to understand history, and many people just don’t. And those same people don’t know much about one of the people I consider to be one of the early American Founding Fathers, Jonathan Edwards. I say, use what works and is healthy for a great society, and don’t argue with the poliitcal left the interpritation of law and order when they want to destroy America by using its own laws and policy against its creation. Since that is their method, I would advise that we drop the polite veil and admit what we are all thinking: churches go well with Republican politics, and we should be a whole lot more open about it, and just let the Marxists of the Democratic Party have their faces melt. Art Sauerwein is the new chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. The Journal-News piece I have been talking about put his wish list in public: take back the schools and make them more conservative; see more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes. I agree with most of that list. I would put the disagreement, if there is one, in a sliver. Five percent, maybe. The problem is not the nouns. The problem is that a county chairman saying he is displeased with his own officeholders signals to every Democrat and every reporter in the room that the party is not united.¹

I have a particular soft spot for people who take thankless chairs. I also have a long memory of what happens when the Bush years go slack, when Clinton years teach the other side to use government as a wealth-transfer machine, and when a Republican majority forgets that it was elected to stop that machine, not to learn its levers. Small-government capitalism is not the same project as confiscating through the tax code and redistributing under a better letterhead. I have been on that argument since before the Tea Party years. I have not left it.

What I will not do is pretend that the way you get Christian schools and lower taxes is to twist the arms of the people you still need on the card. That is the Democrat tactic with different hymns. Ostracize, purity-test, call the holdout a RINO, and then act surprised when the tent is an empty Sunday-school classroom with folding chairs and no majority.

Why I Walked George Lang to His Car

People tell me I cannot be trusted because I am friends with George Lang. I was invited to an evening with him and his wife, Debbie. We get along. I like them. I like George. Not because he is a state senator from the 4th District. Because we can stay on a subject until the parking lot lights are the only ones left.²

We started years ago with a mutual fascination with Ayn Rand and the long story of human order. She was an atheist. I was not. We did not make religion the ticket into the room. We made taxes, small business, the Ohio caucus work, jobs that let a family buy nice things without the government picking the neighbor’s pocket. Those are the planks you can stand on with a man who is not yet where you are on Sunday morning. Then you walk him to the car.

This year, 2026, not a decade ago, we were still talking when we got to his car, extending the evening as much as possible because the conversation was good. He knows what I carry. He knows the maps and the notes. He pulled out a Bible that had been given to him in the Senate. It was beautiful. I would have liked it for the shelf. It was his. He had been going through it. Debbie has said, in the way honest people say it, that they have not always lived in that lane. I did not need a performance. I needed the book’s facts in the car of a man who helps write Ohio law. That is how influence works. That is Nicodemus in a parking lot instead of a midnight stair.³

If the chairperson’s job is to get people on the card, then the chairman’s job is to make nights like that more common, not to publish a scolding that makes the next senator keep the Bible in the trunk.

Jonathan Edwards Did Not Found America From a Letter to the Editor

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible came out in August 2026 from Thomas Nelson, NKJV, notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, edited by Matthew Everhard. I saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review, which is still the magazine I would take to a desert island and be happy with nothing else. I will likely make that Edwards volume my next daily Bible. The one I have carried through airports is full of notes. Every blank space they left me has writing in it.⁴

Edwards did his public work in the 1730s through the 1750s, while a young George Washington was still making himself and Franklin was already allergic to other people’s piety and still able to hear the weather. The Awakening put biblical speech in the streets. The colonies that broke from England were not a faculty workshop. They were a people who had been arguing, singing, and frightening themselves with sermons about a God who was not a mascot. I do not claim Edwards “founded” the United States. I claim the country is harder to imagine without that pressure in the air.

He was also the grandfather of Aaron Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton. I am not a Hamilton man. I mention the grandson so nobody thinks I am selling a stained-glass window. Edwards’s own church in Northampton eventually threw him out because he would not lower the table to the town’s comfort. He finished in a smaller charge at Stockbridge, among the Mahican, and then the College of New Jersey—Princeton—made him president. He lasted about a month. He took the smallpox inoculation during an outbreak, fever followed, and he died on March 22, 1758. His last counsel was to trust God and not be afraid. The same college that begged him to come later drifted into the progressive machine that now congratulates itself for unmaking the civilization he helped catechize.⁵

That arc is the warning. You can put a Christian on a letterhead and still lose the building. You can also lose the building by refusing to put your arm around anyone who is not already converted.

Darbi Boddy and the Noble Death That Vacates the Seat

I have always had a soft spot for Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board. She came out of a Puritan temperament: right is right, wrong is wrong, say it, take the heat. I admired the spine. The political class asked whether she knew she had to go to other people and shake hands. She drew a line so hard that the people who should have been part of her coalition treated her as a problem to be managed. She was removed. Not enough Republicans came to her defense in the way that kept the seat. I was very angry about that. I still am.⁶

There is a Christian imagination that treats the pike as the only honorable furniture—burned, sawn, beheaded, and therefore faithful. The martyrs were real. Rome tried to kill the church, and the church outlived the attempt. I am asking a different question for a school board and a county party. Are we here to die beautifully and hand the district back to the purple-haired people eaters or are we here to keep the chair and put more than one adult in the room?

A public school system designed as an agent of social reconstruction will not become conservative because a chairman tells the Journal-News he would like that very much. You need people on the board who can last. You need people around them who do not run at the first ugly headline. You need a farm team that was not raised only in a sanctuary, because most of the county was not. Maybe forty percent can make the born-again jump on a timetable that satisfies a Sunday-school teacher. The rest will come, if they come, the way George came toward a Bible in a backseat: over years, over taxes, over ancient history, over the proof that you will still walk them to the car when they are not yet where you are.

The Church That Taught Me Business Had Classrooms and a Mortgage

I saw my grandson today, and I told him about my years between eleven and sixteen, High Adventure, the Scout post that met at a big church on RT42 in West Chester. We made pizzas in the church kitchen, and people came to pick them up. That was a fundraiser, a civics lesson, and a first business plan. My family church in Fairfield was the other building. My wife and I were married there. Catechism, Sunday school, the pastor’s house on the property, the side rooms where a kid learned how adults talk when they think they are only running a troop meeting. Then the money ran out. They sold it. It broke my family’s heart. It is not on the market presently. I have been thinking about buying it back for a couple of million. dollars In any other use, that ground in Fairfield is a different number. Because it is a church, the market treats it like a problem.⁷

I am not announcing a closing. I am saying the thought is serious, and Jonathan Edwards is the reason the thought got louder. Churches decline when they have no profit model and a pastor who thinks Jesus only ever taught under a tree. Jesus could walk from village to village. A sanctuary in a hot real-estate corridor has a mortgage. Nicodemus money, the quiet help that keeps a ministry on its feet, is not a compromise with Egypt. It is how a thing survives long enough to teach the next boy how to sell a pizza and keep the books.

The West Chester Tea Party lost a church venue while I was in Japan not that long ago. A guest, a fight, and the door closed. For years the movement lived on donated fellowship halls and cookies after the meeting. Streamers, Republicans, whoever would come. That was a big tent that still knew the room had been a sanctuary an hour earlier. I want a building in this county that Tea Party groups and Republican meetings can use without a landlord who gets nervous. Not a state church. A civic table with a steeple still on it.

Princeton Forgot. The Party Should Not Copy the Forgetting.

Edwards as president of Princeton is the picture I cannot shake. The college wanted the man who could make seniors write on divinity and then talk about it. A short generation later, the heirs of that project began the long surrender. Liberty University and the older schools are not the same charter, but the temptation is the same: keep the Christian name, lose the Christian nerve, export Democrats with verse numbers. Complaining about that in a newspaper will not reverse it. Buying a pulpit, filling a room, putting your arm around a senator who keeps a Bible in the backseat, teaching a Scout to make change for a pizza—that is the slower work.

Peer pressure is not evangelism. “Agree, or we will put you outside” is what the other party already does. If we do it with better footnotes, we still lose the county. Jesus did not recruit from the Sanhedrin’s banquet list. He took the people who had fallen out of the wagon. Edwards could fill a town and still get voted out. Both facts matter. The first tells you preaching works. The second tells you preaching without a coalition becomes a memorial service.

What I Want the Chairman to Do Instead of Being Displeased

Help officeholders get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. If you want Christian values in the community, put a beautiful Bible in more backseats by being the kind of man a senator will linger with in a parking lot. If you want the schools, do not design another martyr and then wonder why the seat is empty after they are killed or lose their seat in the next election. If you want taxes cut, stay on the subject with people who will go to the small-business caucus before they will go to your Wednesday Bible study volunteer class.

I will keep reading BAR. I will keep the Edwards volume in the rotation. I will keep walking George to the car. I will keep thinking about the Fairfield church, not because nostalgia is a strategy, but because the kids I see now do not have the side room I had, and a party that cannot raise its own young in a hall it does not have to rent is a party that will keep leasing its future from people who do not like its hymn.

Lead. Do not write the other side’s headline for them.

Notes

1. Art Sauerwein, Butler County GOP executive chairman, quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage on local Republicans, schools, Christian values, spending, and taxes. A public rebuke of sitting Republican officeholders is usable copy for the other party. That is not mind-reading. That is how newspapers work.

2. George F. Lang, Republican, Ohio Senate 4th District since 2021; previously Ohio House 52nd; West Chester. Married to Debbie Lang. I am describing a private evening in 2026 and a longer friendship. I am not claiming he has asked me to speak for him.

3. John 3; 7:50–51; 19:39–42. Nicodemus keeps his station and still moves toward the teacher. Influence that can only speak in the sanctuary will not reach the people who write statutes.

4. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026, general editor Matthew Everhard. Biblical Archaeology Review, Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.

5. Edwards was inaugurated at the College of New Jersey on February 16, 1758; died March 22, 1758, after smallpox inoculation. Buried in the Presidents’ Lot, Princeton Cemetery. Esther Edwards married Aaron Burr Sr.; their son was Aaron Burr Jr. Northampton dismissed Edwards in 1750 over communion discipline; Stockbridge followed.

6. Darbi Boddy won a Lakota Local Schools board seat in 2021 on a conservative platform and was removed by the board in March 2024 after a long, ugly fight and a 90-day absence tied to a protection-order conflict with another member. I am not retrying that case here. I am talking about coalition and what happens when courage has no bench.

7. The Fairfield church of my childhood and marriage is named as a family fact and a present thought, not as a listed property and not as a pledge. High Adventure and the West Chester church on the Cincinnati-Dayton Road corridor are the Scout years as I lived them.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Local Politics and the People Named

Journal-News (Hamilton). Late-August 2026 coverage of Butler County Republicans and Chairman Art Sauerwein.

Lang, George F. Ohio Senate, District 4. Public record, 2021–present; Ohio House, 2017–2020.

Ballotpedia and the Ohio Legislature biographical pages for George Lang.

Journal-News. “2 conservative newcomers, incumbent win Lakota seats.” November 2021.

WVXU. “Darbi Boddy is removed from Lakota’s school board.” March 20, 2024.

WLWT. Lakota board appointment coverage following the vacant seat, April 2024.

FOX19. “Criminal charge dismissed against former Lakota school board member.” August 1, 2024.

Jonathan Edwards and the Awakening

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press.

Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections; Freedom of the Will; “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.

Marsden, George M. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Eerdmans, 2008.

McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford, 2012.

Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.

Princeton University. Presidential biographies: Jonathan Edwards, 1758.

This Day in Presbyterian History. “February 23: Jonathan Edwards.” On the inoculation and death.

Princeton and the Long Drift

The Princetonians and official presidential histories of the College of New Jersey.

Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822. Princeton University Press, 1989.

Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford, 1994.

Burtchaell, James Tunstead. The Dying of the Light. Eerdmans, 1998.

Church, Money, and the Nicodemus Problem

The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, 19.

Luke 8:1–3. The women who funded the ministry.

Acts 4:32–37; 16:14–15. Property and hospitality in the first churches.

Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together.

Schaeffer, Francis A. The Church at the End of the 20th Century.

Schools, Boards, and the Limits of Martyrdom

Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education. Free Press, 1993.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. The Schools We Need. Doubleday, 1996.

Murray, Charles. Real Education. Crown Forum, 2008.

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. New Society, 1992.

Ohio Department of Education standards files for the official language boards to actually vote on.

Parties, Tents, and Coalition

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.

Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015.

Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale, 1962.

Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford, 2012.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Scripture, Friendship, and Slow Conversion

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.

Newby, Elizabeth. On ordinary friendship as the delivery system of belief, read against Lewis.

Augustine. Confessions. The long way toward a book that was already in the house.

Biblical Archaeology Review. For the magazine that sits on the table while the political argument goes on.

Boy Scouts of America. Handbook and the old troop-and-post structure. The side room was a civics school whether the adults knew it or not.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Spilled Milk on the Ocean Floor: Atlantis Claims, Lake Superior Copper, Florida’s Windover People, and the Stones Japan Still Will Not Study

I keep a simple picture in my head when the latest Atlantis headline floats across X. It is two o’clock in the morning. I am half asleep. I pull a carton of milk from the refrigerator and drop it. I do not want the house waking up to a white lake on the kitchen floor, so I wipe it, wring the paper towels, bag the evidence, and go back to bed. In the morning, the carton is lighter. The floor is dry. Somebody who was not there will tell you nothing happened, because the proof is already in the trash.

That is how I think about the deep past before three thousand BC. Not as a license to invent temples on every seamount. As a warning. Time is a very good janitor. Volcanoes are better. Rising seas are better still. Official narratives can be lazy without being a conspiracy. And wanting Atlantis so badly that every sonar blob becomes a ziggurat is how you end up mopping the floor with the carton still in your hand.

Plato is fascinating. I will not pretend otherwise.[1] The story that survives is already a story about a story: Egyptian priests, Solon, a vanished island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, a people who got proud and were erased in a day and a night. By the time Plato wrote it down, the alleged events were already older than the gap between Charlemagne and us. If that culture ever existed as a place, not only as a parable, the milk has had a long time to dry.

Underwater Pyramids Off the Azores and Why Portugal Said Volcano

Every few months the same pictures recirculate: a fisherman’s depth sounder off Terceira, a hard-edged pyramid, cardinal alignment, breathless talk that the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute is about to rewrite the Bronze Age. I have watched that clip move around X the way a rumor moves around a small town. It feels new because the algorithm is hungry. It is not new.

In 2013, Diocleciano Silva reported a structure roughly sixty meters high between Terceira and São Miguel. Television loved the silhouette. The Instituto Hidrográfico did what a hydrographic institute is paid to do. It pulled existing high-resolution bathymetry from 2009 and compared it with the reported coordinates. At the spot in question, the seafloor sat on the order of five hundred forty meters down. There was a submarine rise, the kind the Azores manufacture by the dozen. There was not an artificial pyramid whose apex grazed forty meters of water.[2]

The feature sits on Dom João de Castro Bank, a named, charted, still-gassy submarine volcano. In December 1720 it built an island a mile and a half long and then gave it back to the Atlantic. Fishermen still work the bank because fish like the edges of old fire. If you ping that slope with a cheap sounder, geometry will lie to you. Volcanic edifices make faces. People hunting Atlantis will see a face.[3]

I am not sneering at the hunger. I am saying the official answer in this particular case was not laziness. It was a navy map. The spilled-milk problem is real. So is pareidolia. You can see what you want to see, but at least they are looking.

The So-Called Sunken City Off Cuba

Then there is Cuba, which I find more interesting than the Azores pyramid precisely because it never quite died and never quite lived. In 2000 and 2001, a Canadian-Cuban survey team hunting colonial wrecks off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula, Pinar del Río, dragged side-scan sonar across a plateau six hundred to seven hundred fifty meters down and came home with images that looked like streets, blocks, and pyramids.

Paul Weinzweig said the organization was too much for geology. Video from a remotely operated vehicle showed smooth blocks, some stacked, some isolated, some vaguely pyramidal. Newspapers in Toronto and Sydney ran the story as a possible six-thousand-year-old city. Twenty-five years later we still do not have a crate of cut stone on a Havana dock. We do not have inscriptions. We do not have a hearth. We have sonar and a few hours of tape.[4]

Manuel Iturralde, a serious Cuban geologist who was on that expedition, said the shapes were unusual and that nature is richer than our textbooks. He also said that putting a built city at that depth would push the timeline back by about fifty thousand years, which is a problem if you are trying to hang the site on Maya cousins or on Plato’s calendar. The plateau sits on a faulted, mud-volcano-type seafloor. Linear ridges happen. Cubes of rock happen. Wishful enhancement of sonar prints happens even faster.[5]

Would I be shocked if something old turned up on the Cuban shelf in water a human diver can actually work? No. The Gulf, the Mississippi mouth, the Yucatán, and the old Olmec and Maya heartland are a single neighborhood if you think in rivers instead of passports. A site at two thousand feet is a different animal. That is not an Ice Age shoreline. That is a geological basement. If someone finally dredges a tool from those blocks, I will read the paper twice. Until then, it is a wet paper towel with a pyramid printed on it. The failure lies in the assumption that such a culture would be connected to the Maya, when in truth the Maya are probably connected to even older, undiscovered cultures. Just to the north, off the coast of Florida, there is plenty of evidence of old Archaic-period civilizations predating the Maya by a lot.

Lost City Is Real, and It Is Not Atlantis

The Atlantic does have a Lost City. Scientists named it that on purpose, which has been a gift to every thumbnail on the internet. It sits on the Atlantis Massif, which is another gift. It is a field of pale carbonate chimneys, some as tall as a building, venting warm, caustic water loaded with hydrogen and methane. Life down there does not wait on sunlight. It eats chemistry.

Lost City is not a ruin. It is serpentinization: seawater chewing through mantle rock, generating heat and simple molecules, and precipitating limestone towers for tens of thousands of years. In 2023, a drill ship bored a hole 1,268 meters into the massif, a short way north of the field, and recovered fluids that resemble the hidden plumbing of those vents. That is a beautiful discovery. It tells you how a world without photosynthesis can still set a table. It does not give you a palace wall.[6][7]

I mention this because the algorithm will keep marrying three different Atlantics: a Portuguese volcano, a Cuban sonar grid, and an alkaline spring with weird microbes. They are not the same story. Mixing them is how you spill the milk and then swear the stain is a floor plan.

Windover, Florida, and What 8,000 Years Actually Looks Like

If you want people who were organized before the classroom poster suggests, you do not have to drown in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. You can drive to Titusville, a few miles from where rockets now leave the planet, and stand near a pond that used to be a cemetery.

In 1982, a backhoe operator named Steve Vanderjagt was clearing muck for the Windover Farms subdivision and picked up what he thought was a round rock. Florida does not have round rocks. The rock looked back. Archaeologists eventually lifted at least 168 people from that peat. The pond had held them for seven to eight thousand years. Ninety-one skulls still had brain tissue. Bodies had been staked under poles and wrapped in the oldest woven cloth yet found in North America. A bottle gourd in one burial dated to about 7,290 radiocarbon years. Stomach contents still contained fish and berries.[8]

That is not a rumor from a yellowed county weekly. That is a National Historic Landmark. Those people were tall for their world, careful with their dead, oriented in space, and capable of textiles that take patience and a mind that plans. I have heard the beer-and-severed-heads version of this story attached to Windover. The beer belongs more honestly to places like Göbekli Tepe, where limestone troughs the size of a bathtub bear chemical traces of fermented cereal from around the tenth millennium BC. Windover gives you cloth, gourds, and a cemetery that was used long enough for families to keep coming back. That is already enough to puncture the cartoon of the wandering simpleton who only learned civilization when somebody from the Near East arrived with a lecture.

Göbekli Tepe matters to this argument even though it sits in Turkey, not Brevard County. Hunter-gatherers cut T-shaped pillars, gathered in numbers, and almost certainly threw feasts. The brewing case is not locked, but calcium oxalate in those troughs is the kind of stain you are allowed to take seriously.[9]

Put Windover next to that, and the pattern is not “Atlantis built Florida.” The pattern is that the centuries before Abraham, before Moses, before the first Hebrew sojourn stories, were already crowded with people who knew how to gather, bury, weave, ferment, and move. The promised land was not the first place on earth where a mind woke up.

Lake Superior Copper and the Question Europe Does Not Want to Finish

Now the metal. Around Lake Superior, on the Keweenaw and on Isle Royale, people hammered native copper into points, knives, and axes when much of the world was still arguing with stone. This is the Old Copper Complex. It is not a campfire story. Museum drawers in Milwaukee are heavy with it.

The dates keep getting older. Mining signatures in lake mud and dates on artifacts now push copper working in that country back toward 9,500 years ago, with a long peak in the Middle Archaic. Somebody spent thousands of hours of labor pulling metal out of pits and glacial float. Then, in a twist that still bothers experimental archaeologists, many of those big utilitarian tools fade away, and copper becomes jewelry and a marker of status. Why walk away from a technology that worked? That is a real question. It does not require Phoenician supervisors.[10][11]

I tend to think some of that copper moved farther than the textbooks like. I think island-hopping along a colder Atlantic, with sea levels lower and the English Channel a valley instead of a ditch, is not science fiction. I think later Mediterranean sailors were less provincial than modern departments. I think stories about orichalcum — that shining mix people hang on Atlantis — are the kind of folklore you get when a culture remembers a metal it can no longer find.

Here is the part I will not fake for color. Most analyzed European Bronze Age copper provenances point to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, Britain, Slovakia, Tuscany. Lead isotopes are a jealous witness. They are good at saying where a metal did not come from. A handful of papers and popular lectures have claimed a Superior fingerprint in this or that European object. The sample sizes are small. The replications are not sitting on my desk. The honest sentence is that the trade route I like is still a hypothesis with a motive, not a cargo list.[12]

Absence of a Bronze Age hull on the floor of Lake Huron is not proof the hull never existed. Organic ships in cold, oxygenated water become rumors. Bronze becomes a green stain and then a rumor. That is spilled milk. It is also why I will not pound the table and tell a room that Veneti captains were loading Keweenaw ingots in 2000 BC. I will say this: people who could bury their dead in a Florida pond with woven shrouds, and people who could mine Isle Royale until the lake mud recorded the smoke, were not waiting around for Columbus to invent curiosity.

Dolmens, Glacial Erratics, and the Ohio Habit of Calling Everything a Rock

I live in a state that is one long argument between ice and memory. Ohio has earthworks that are mathematical whether a tourist wants them to be or not. Serpent Mound deserves the kind of approach road Stonehenge finally received, not a shrug. Down the Mississippi and into the Ohio Valley, you can feel a society that thought in ridges, solstices, and labor. Similar appetites show up in the Amazon and in Mesoamerica long before the Aztec brand name. Olmec roots run deeper than the postcard.

New England has stone chambers and propped boulders that some call dolmens and some call glaciers having a sense of humor. I have heard the accidental-geology sermon. I have also walked enough country to distrust a sermon that always ends with “stop looking.” Some of those features will stay glacial. Some will not. The spilled-milk move is to classify the whole drawer as ice so nobody has to catalog the odd ones.

Giants belong in this paragraph only as a warning. Ohio papers, including the counties around Miamisburg and Liberty Township, printed skeleton stories for a century: extra teeth, impossible stature, boxes of bones that went to a museum and then to a fog. I have been reading in that literature. Some of it is folklore with a ruler attached. Some of it may be mismeasured burials and nineteenth-century salesmanship. A six-foot-three sailor on a modern wreck is not an eight-foot race. If you want me to believe a different human type walked the Miami Valley, bring a bone that is still in a drawer with a number on it. Do not bring a clipping and a vibe. But also, don’t say it didn’t exist because you gave the bones bag through NAGPRA to an Indian tribe that was not directly connected to the recovered bones. What about the Mooneyed people the Cherokee eradicated when they moved into the area? Were the Mooneyed people the real indigenous ones? Who were they and where did they come from?

The clippings exist. That is nothing. It is also not a species.[13]

Ishi-no-Hoden, the Keyhole Tombs, and a Fountain by the Warehouses

The site that rearranged my patience sits south of Kobe, in Takasago, on the grounds of Ōshiko Jinja. Locals and travelers call it Ishi-no-Hoden, the Stone Treasure Hall. It is a cube of volcanic tuff the size of a cottage, maybe five hundred tons, carved out of the living hill so neatly that it seems to float on a pond of its own quarry water. One side still grips the mountain. It looks unfinished, as if the crew walked off in the middle of a thought.

The Harima Fudoki, compiled in the early 700s, already treats it as a wonder and then trips over its own chronology, crediting men who did not live at the same time. Official Japan ties the nearby Tatsuyama quarries to the Kofun period. The monolith itself has no honest birth certificate. Laser scans in the mid-2000s confirmed the shape and left the date open to debate. People who live in that industrial weather will tell you it feels much older. I have stood there. I have washed my hands at the purification fountain because that is what you do before you walk into a shrine precinct, even when trucks are grinding past the parking lot like the sacred and the freight dock agreed to share a driveway.[14]

That is the image I cannot shake. One of the strangest worked stones on the islands, and the road to it is not a processional way. It is commerce. Stonehenge now has the visitor-center dignity it always deserved. Ishi-no-Hoden has a ladle and a workday. I do not want Disney. I want the courtesy of attention.

Then you go to Osaka, and the kofun rise out of the suburbs like keyholes cut into the earth. Daisenryō is more than five hundred meters of engineered mound, moat, and silence. The Imperial Household Agency keeps the great ones closed because they are tombs of emperors, or are said to be. Archaeologists get the berm, the haniwa, the occasional supervised walk on the grass. They do not get the burial chamber that would tell you who was actually put in the ground and what they were buried with. From the air those keyholes look startlingly like a design language that wandered. I have argued they look western in plan. That is an impression, not a laboratory result. Impression is allowed if you admit it.[15]

I do not buy the piety that says we cannot open those mounds because grandmother would be embarrassed. The dead are dead. Egypt would be a blank chapter if we had treated every wrapped body as a restraining order. NAGPRA and shrine politics and imperial dignity are not the same thing. I am saying a state that protects a story by locking the basement should not then lecture the rest of us about settled origins. If the relics in those keyholes ever show Near Eastern metalwork, glass, or motifs, the Silk Road gets older in the Japanese chapter. If they show nothing of the kind, the independent-development story gets a win it actually earned. Leaving the door shut and calling it reverence is how you keep the carton in the dark and insist it is still full.

I think the influence ran overland more than by a single heroic voyage: steppe, oasis, China, the islands, a long leak of forms. I also think the sea was never a wall to people who could see an island. Both can be true. What cannot be true is the claim that we already know because we have chosen not to look.

Yonaguni, the Sahara Eye, and Other Places the Internet Married to Plato

Off Yonaguni, the terraces look like a ruined grandstand. Masaaki Kimura spent years saying hands made them. Robert Schoch and later Japanese field studies said the sandstone is jointed the way bedded rock joints, and that the same right angles walk right up onto the dry coast. Tokyo does not manage the monument as a ruin. That does not forbid a little human tidying on a convenient ledge. It does mean the default is geology until someone bags a tool in place.[16]

Western Africa is the other marriage. The Richat Structure in Mauritania, the Eye of the Sahara, is a set of rings so tidy from orbit that Atlantis hunters drew canals on it in software. I have listened to those lectures. Some of the geographical special pleading is clever. The rock is not. It is an eroded dome with igneous guts that began during the breakup of Pangaea, not in 9600 BC. People passed through a greener Sahara and left tools. They did not leave Plato’s harbor. A circle is not a civilization.[17]

Could a lost culture have lived on a wetter West African plain and later been remembered as an island beyond Gibraltar? Folklore can migrate farther than copper. I will not call that proof. I will call it a question that still belongs on the table after the Eye itself has been returned to the geologists.

What the Strongest Evidence Actually Is

People ask me for the strongest clue that the official timeline is thin. I do not hand them a sonar pyramid. I hand them a stack of things that survived because they were lucky.

Windover is strongest on this continent because peat is a cheap time machine. Cloth, brains, gourds, and a cemetery used across generations will beat a thousand YouTube overlays.

Göbekli Tepe is strongest in the Old World because it is architecture before the lecture said architecture was allowed, and because the feast-and-fermentation argument is at least a chemical argument.

Old Copper is strongest as labor. You do not accidentally leave thousands of pits and a lead stain in island lakes. Somebody wanted that metal and organized the desire for it.

Ishi-no-Hoden is strongest as a rebuke. A half-born megalith sitting in a working landscape tells you how much of the human file is still labeled folklore because it is inconvenient to staff.

The kofun are strongest when locked in a cabinet. When a society admits the mounds are important enough for UNESCO and too important to open, the timeline is being protected as well as the bones.

Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic, as a datable city under a tourist depth, is not in that stack. Not yet. Deep water grinds stone into suggestion. The suggestion is to get a new viral clip every August. Suggestion is not a footnote.

Why We Study the Mess Instead of Defending the Narrative

I did not come to this from a need to baptize every mound as a lost white empire, and I did not come to it to defend a museum label written in 1962. The indigenous people who met Columbus were not the first chapter, nor a footnote. They were one more arrival in a long hallway. Maps in Lisbon, copper in Superior, ponds in Florida, keyholes in Osaka, pillars in Anatolia — that is a hallway. Trade can be a network without being a single named kingdom. Atlantis, if the word is still useful, may be that network remembered badly, the way a family remembers a rich uncle who died at sea.

We study this so we do not repeat the part Plato actually cared about. Not the orichalcum. The pride. A people who could organize labor at that scale and then vanish are a sermon whether they lived in the Atlantic, the Sahara, or only in an Athenian dialogue. Cultures make mistakes large enough to erase themselves. Rising water helps. So does fire. So do later people who need the land and the story.

The carton is lighter than it was when we went to bed. That is not proof of a thief, and it is not proof the carton was always that empty. It is proof we should stop yelling “nothing to see” while the paper towels are still wet.

If I am right about a pre-biblical traffic in metal, ideas, and burial customs, the evidence will show up the way Windover did: because a backhoe operator paid attention and a landowner decided not to pour a street over the dead. If I am wrong about Superior copper in the Mediterranean, the isotopes will keep saying so. I can live with being wrong. I cannot live with a method that treats curiosity as vandalism and geology as a blanket thrown over every hard edge on the seafloor.

Scan the bottom of the sea. Drill the vents. Open a kofun with ceremony and cameras. Date the cloth. Source the copper again with a larger sample and a meaner lab. Leave the volcanic banks to the fish. Keep Plato on the nightstand, where a good story belongs, and keep the peat ponds and the quarry stones in the working file, where history belongs.

The milk was in the carton. Some of it is still on the towels. That is enough to keep looking.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Primary reports, surveys, and the better popular treatments. I have marked the speculative shelf as such.

Dietrich, Oliver, et al. “The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities: New Evidence from Göbekli Tepe, South-eastern Turkey.” Antiquity 86 (2012).

Doran, Glen H., and David N. Dickel. Windover site reports and “A 7,290-Year-Old Bottle Gourd from the Windover Site, Florida.” American Antiquity 55, no. 2 (1990).

Instituto Hidrográfico da Marinha. Statement on the Terceira sonar feature, reported in Público, “Pirâmide subaquática ao largo da Terceira não existe,” October 4, 2013.

Kelley, Deborah S., et al. Papers on the Lost City Hydrothermal Field; NOAA Ocean Explorer background on serpentinization at the Atlantis Massif.

Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Milwaukee Public Museum. “Old Copper Culture.” Collection overview and dating summary.

Pernicka, Ernst. Surveys of Bronze Age metal provenance and the limits of lead-isotope attribution—Journal of Archaeological Research and related handbooks.

Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Any reliable translation. Read both the geography and the moral.

Pompeani, David P., et al. Lake-sediment metal records of Archaic copper mining around Isle Royale and the Keweenaw. The Holocene and subsequent papers, including later work placing early copper use near 9500 cal BP.

Schoch, Robert M. Assessments of the Yonaguni formation as primarily jointed Miocene sandstone.

Wentz, Rachel. Life and Death at Windover: Excavations of a 7000-Year-Old Pond Cemetery. Florida Historical Society Press.

Weinzweig, Paul, and Paulina Zelitsky. Contemporary interviews in the Globe and Mail (December 2001) and the Sydney Morning Herald (October 2002) on the Guanahacabibes sonar survey.

Iturralde-Vinent, Manuel. Cautionary comments on the Cuban deep-water blocks, circulated in Cuban scientific and press accounts.

UNESCO / Sakai City. Materials on the Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group and Imperial Household Agency access limits.

Takasago City / Ōshiko Jinja. Notices on Ishi-no-Hoden and the Tatsuyama stone quarries; Harima Fudoki references.

Matton, Guillaume, and Michel Jébrak, and later Ar/Ar work on the Richat Structure: geologic dome and CAMP-related gabbros, not a sunken capital.

On the speculative shelf, to be read with the carton in mind: popular Azores and Sahara-Atlantis lectures; newspaper giant-skeleton compilations from Ohio and the Mississippi Valley; claims of Superior copper in European museum bronzes awaiting large, independent isotope series.

Note on method. This essay is written in the first person because the questions are mine. The footnotes are there so the questions can be checked. Where the rock is volcanic, I have said so. Where the cabinet is locked, I have said that too. Wanting a lost world is not the same as finding one. Refusing to look is not the same as knowing.

Footnotes

[1] Plato, Timaeus and Critias, c. 360 BC. The Atlantis story is presented as a tale Solon heard in Egypt, set nine thousand years before Solon’s time.

[2] Instituto Hidrográfico da Marinha, communiqué summarized in Público, “Pirâmide subaquática ao largo da Terceira não existe,” October 4, 2013. High-resolution 2009 bathymetry showed depths of about 540 m at the reported position, not a 60 m pyramid rising to 40 m of water.

[3] Dom João de Castro Bank is a documented submarine volcano between Terceira and São Miguel. Summit depth is about 13 m. It built a temporary island in December 1720. See Wikipedia and Portuguese hydrographic records.

[4] Paul Weinzweig and Paulina Zelitsky / Advanced Digital Communications, working with Cuban authorities, 2000–2001. Contemporary coverage: Globe and Mail, December 7, 2001; Sydney Morning Herald, October 12, 2002.

[5] Manuel Iturralde-Vinent, Cuban geologist on the original team, cautioned that unusual geometry is not proof of architecture and that reaching 600–750 m would require tens of thousands of years of subsidence. Quoted in Spanish-language summaries and Granma retrospectives.

[6] Lost City Hydrothermal Field, Atlantis Massif, Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Discovered in 2000. Alkaline vents driven by serpentinization, not magma-fed black smokers. NOAA Ocean Explorer; Kelley et al.; Wikipedia, “Lost City Hydrothermal Field.”

[7] IODP Expedition 399 / JOIDES Resolution, Hole U1601C, 1,268 m below seafloor, 2023. Fluid chemistry matched Lost City end-member fluids after reaction with peridotite and gabbro above about 300°C. Reported 2025–2026 in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems coverage.

[8] Windover Archaeological Site, Brevard County, Florida. National Historic Landmark. Roughly 168 individuals, peat-pond cemetery dated about 7,000–8,000 years before present. Brain tissue in 91 skulls; woven palmetto-fiber textiles; bottle gourd dated 7,290 ± 120 rcybp. Doran and Dickel; Florida Historical Society.

[9] Dietrich et al., “The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities,” Antiquity (2012). Calcium oxalate residues in large limestone troughs at Göbekli Tepe are suggestive of cereal fermentation, not a closed case.

[10] Old Copper Complex / Old Copper Culture. Utilitarian native-copper tools around the western Great Lakes. Radiocarbon work places early copper use as far back as about 9,500 cal BP, with a peak roughly between 7,000 and 5,000 cal BP. Pompeani et al.; Bebber; Milwaukee Public Museum.

[11] Lake sediment records near Isle Royale mines show elevated lead levels consistent with Archaic mining about 6,000 years ago: Pompeani and colleagues, The Holocene, and later lake-sediment papers.

[12] Mainstream Bronze Age provenance work sources most European copper to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, the British Isles, and the Balkans via lead isotopes and trace elements. See Pernicka and OXALID-related surveys. Claims of Superior copper in European bronzes remain contested, small-sample, and unreplicated at scale.

[13] Newspaper-era reports of oversized skeletons in Ohio and elsewhere are a real historical genre. They are not the same thing as curated, measured, peer-reviewed osteology. Nineteenth-century papers sold marvels. That is part of the spilled-milk problem, not a solution to it.

[14] Ishi-no-Hōden (Ishi no Hōden), Ōshiko Jinja, Takasago, Hyōgo. About 500-ton tuff monolith, unfinished, appearing to float over a quarry pond. Mentioned in the Harima Fudoki (713–717). Official dating is unknown; the associated quarries date to the Kofun period. National Historic Site, 1979/2017.

[15] Mozu-Furuichi kofun group, Osaka. Daisenryō Kofun (attributed to Emperor Nintoku) is about 525 m long. Imperial Household Agency restricts excavation of designated imperial tombs. UNESCO World Heritage, 2019.

[16] Yonaguni Monument, off Yonaguni Island. Masaaki Kimura argued for an artificial origin. Robert Schoch and later Japanese topographic studies treat it as jointed Miocene sandstone eroded along bedding planes. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs does not list it as an archaeological site.

[17] Richat Structure (Eye of the Sahara), Mauritania. Eroded igneous/sedimentary dome. Gabbros consistent with CAMP-age magmatism around 200 million years ago; later carbonatites around 99 Ma. No excavated city, canals, or Bronze Age harbor works.

Rich Hoffman

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No New Taxes Means No Relief: Lakota is at it again

I have been saying no to Lakota tax increases for a long time. People who dislike that fact have a ready-made story about me. They say I will never be for anything. They say I hate schools. They say I would rather buy a television than teach a child. That last one is a joke I make myself, and I will make it again before we are done, because I would rather keep my money than subsidize a system that lectures families about everything except the marketplace those children will enter. I am not against education. I am against the public-education trick: lose at the ballot box, split the package, dress it up as a renewal, and come back until the people who write the checks get tired.

Last November the district asked this community for more than half a billion dollars. Voters answered with 61% no. That was not a polite disagreement. That was a verdict. Eight months later, the same board put a two-hundred-twenty-three-million-dollar, thirty-seven-year bond on the November 3, 2026 ballot and called it Phase One. They say it is not a tax increase. They say it merely replaces a bond that expires in 2028. They say seventy-seven dollars a year on a hundred-thousand-dollar home is what you are already paying, so why not keep paying it?

Here is what that sentence actually means. You have been making a mortgage payment to the school district. The mortgage is almost paid off. Instead of celebrating the payoff, they want you to sign a new note for thirty-seven more years and call the signing a favor. That is no new taxes. That is no tax relief. And tax relief is the thing this community has earned.

The Mortgage They Do Not Want You to Pay Off

Imagine a family in Liberty Township that bought a house in the early nineties. They paid the bank. They paid Lakota. They raised children who left the system twenty years ago. They kept writing the check because that is what property owners in Ohio do. They did not get a parade when the old bond schedule wound down. They got a brochure.

The brochure says the same thing every brochure says. Our buildings need work. Our classes are too large. Our enrollment is about to explode. If you vote no, you are against children. If you vote yes, your bill stays the same. Status quo. Responsible. Community.

I have watched this language for two decades. It is professional consent-building. The school board does not know how to say no, and the superintendent’s office is not hired to manage scarcity. It is hired to keep the train on the tracks after the train has already gone over the hill. When the train leaves the rails, they do not ask why the engineer was cheering. They ask the passengers for a new train.

Voting yes does not keep your taxes the same in any moral sense. It prevents the cut you were about to receive when the old debt died.

That is the whole argument, and everything else is scenery. The district is not wrong that buildings age. The district is not wrong that some classrooms are crowded. The district is wrong to claim that those facts entitle it to another generation of extraction without ever letting the burden fall on the people who already paid.

What Is Actually on the November 3 Ballot

Let us be precise, because the district is precise when it helps them and foggy when it does not.

On June 9, 2026, the Lakota Board of Education voted to place a bond issue before every elector in the district. The principal amount is $223,483,492. The maximum term is thirty-seven years. The Butler County Auditor certified an estimated average annual levy of 2.20 mills, which the resolution states amounts to $77 for each $100,000 of the county auditor’s market value. Collections would begin with tax year 2028 and first come due in calendar year 2029, timed to the death of the existing roughly 2.23 mill bond. [1] The election is Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

The money is not operating cash. It cannot legally be dumped into teacher salaries. It is debt service for facilities: renovating and improving existing schools, constructing facilities, safety work, furniture and equipment, site work, and land. Phase One of the Master Facilities Plan is estimated at $300 million. The Ohio Facilities Construction Commission would put up about seventy-seven million. Local taxpayers would carry $223 million.

If it passes, the district’s current sketch looks like this. Grade bands are being rearranged to reduce transitions: preschool at Liberty Early Childhood; K-5 in the remaining elementary plants; grades 6-8 at East Freshman and Plains Junior after additions; and grades 9-12 at East and West high schools after additions. Three schools will close: Adena Elementary, Ridge Junior, and the West Freshman / Creekside / Central complex. Twenty-one buildings become eighteen. [2]

That is the product. Now look at the price tag they put in the window.

The Seventy-Seven-Dollar Illusion

Every piece of official copy leads with $77 per $100,000. That number is not a lie. It is a costume. There is not a representative owner-occupied house in Liberty Township or West Chester listed on the tax duplicate at $100,000. Liberty’s recent median sales have been in the low-to-mid-500s. West Chester’s typical values sit in the low-to-mid-four hundreds.

Auditor market value / Annual cost of 2.20 mills / What the brochure calls it $100,000 / $77 / The headline $350,000 / About $270 / A modest house here $450,000 / About $347 / Common West Chester $530,000 / About $408 / Common Liberty Township $650,000 / About $501 / Plenty of roofs in this district

Figures are the bond’s stated $77 per $100,000, scaled. They do not include other school, township, or county levies.

Three hundred to four hundred dollars a year is not a Friday-night blowout at Liberty Center, though I have heard that comparison from people inside the system. It is a 65-inch television. It is several trips to Ford’s Garage. It is the difference between a household that just finished paying for someone else’s children and a household that gets to keep the last chapter of the old bond. The district calls it no increase because the new millage is almost identical to the old millage. I call it locking the extraction in place until most of the people voting today are dead.

Last Year They Asked for Half a Billion

November 4, 2025, was not a close call. The package failed 60.81 percent to 39.19 percent. The bond alone sought $506.4 million. There was a permanent-improvement levy riding along. Ballot language looked like nearly six mills. The district insisted the net would be 2.66 mills, or about $93 per $100,000, if collections waited until 2029 and old debt rolled off. Voters did not buy the complexity. [3]

I was not surprised. The 2025 plan was ostentatious. Tear-downs. New elementaries. A district-wide redesign sold as inevitability. When a community that has already funded a quarter-billion-dollar annual operation looks at a half-billion construction dream and says no, a healthy institution would ask whether the dream was the problem. Lakota asked how to slice the dream so it would fit through the door.

Phase One is the slice. Grades six through twelve first. Elementaries later. Same philosophy, smaller first bite, friendlier slogan. The public-education trick is to keep putting it on the ballot until compassion and confusion outvote memory. I do not think the memory of last November is that short. We will find out on November 3.

The Enrollment Story They Need You to Believe

The pitch depends on a spike. Maintain seventeen thousand students for years, then warn that apartments and new housing will deliver two thousand more children, nineteen thousand by 2033, hundreds already over capacity, nearly twenty-five hundred over by the end of the forecast if you use the aggressive numbers. Build or drown. That is the emergency.

The district’s own September 2025 slides said enrollment had reached 17,348, OFCC capacity was 16,577, and the system was already 771 students over. They projected 19,074 by 2033. [4] I do not dismiss crowding where it exists. I dismiss the habit of treating the high case as destiny and the housing pipeline as an act of God.

FutureThink Was More Cautious Than the Brochure

In March 2026, FutureThink delivered an enrollment study to the district. The total for 2025-26 in that report is 16,913. The ten-year path does not march to nineteen thousand. It drifts downward toward the mid-sixteen thousands by the mid-2030s. [5] The consultants, to their credit, tell the district to monitor births, housing, community school enrollment, and open enrollment. That is what a serious projection does. It does not convert every apartment proposal into a permanent crisis.

Two stories can be true at once. Some buildings feel tight today. Some grade levels bulge. And the long-run student count may not justify a thirty-seven-year debt service schedule sold as if the spike were already signed into law. If the independent study is closer to reality than the campaign slide, Lakota would be borrowing against a future that is not arriving.

This is why I keep dragging housing policy into a school argument. Enrollment is not weather. Enrollment is the residue of planning decisions made by trustees, zoning boards, and developers along the corridors we all drive. When those decisions load the district with children whose households do not share the same property-tax skin as a longtime homeowner, the school office declares an emergency, and the homeowner discovers another levy.

Apartments, Renters, and Who Pays the Bill

I like Costco. I like Liberty Center. I like development that looks like a place you would take your family on purpose. I do not like the psychological trick of county and township government, which is to look at empty dirt, imagine bodies, and call the bodies success. Bodies consume services. Bodies send children to school. Bodies vote. Bodies in apartments do not sit on the tax duplicate the way a paid-off house does.

The owner of the apartment building pays property tax once. The families inside pay rent. They use the schools, the roads, the deputies, the parks. On election day they are citizens, as they should be. The structural mismatch is still real. The coalition that benefits from the spending can grow faster than the coalition that writes the largest checks. School districts understand that math even when they pretend the conversation is only about children.

Renters vote for the services. Homeowners pay the bill. That is not a slur. It is the system’s design.

Todd Minniear saw this coming. He is a Liberty Township trustee, a small-government guy and not my Siamese twin. We do not agree on every topic. We agree on the load-bearing ones. When apartment proposals stacked up near new commercial toys, Todd’s warning was simple. You cannot recklessly add households that demand a school system and then act shocked when the school system sends the invoice to the people who already paid the taxes for it for thirty years.

Two years ago, in the hearings around those proposals, the answer from too many planners was that we would cross that bridge when we came to it. We are on the bridge. Lakota is the tollbooth. The district says there is a spike; therefore, you must keep paying. I say the spike, to the extent it is real, is the bill for yes votes that should have been no votes.

Ford’s Garage Instead of Another Stack of Balconies

If you want a picture of the difference one trustee can make, drive to Liberty Center and eat. During COVID, the place struggled. Condos were hard to move. The playground sat dark after the rest of the country had taken off their masks, because nobody wanted to call the health department to ask permission to let children play. I texted Todd from lunch. Why is this still closed? He made calls. The playground opened. My grandkids used it. That is government doing a small thing that actually matters.

There was also a temptation to drop an apartment complex onto the pad where Ford’s Garage sits now. Another trustee might have taken the bodies. Todd helped kill the apartment idea. A year and a half later, a theme restaurant arrived, the kind of room you expect in Orlando or Las Vegas, except you can go on a Thursday after a movie at the theater across the little park. On the menu there is a Sheriff Jones burger and a Todd Minniear burger. The Todd burger is the one I order. It is messy. It is also a tax base that turns over every night: people come, spend, leave, and do not enroll a child at 7:45 in the morning.

That is the contrast to consider. Commercial vitality throws off sales and property revenue without parking a permanent pupil in a classroom. An apartment complex throws off one owner’s tax bill and a precinct full of service demand. When Lakota says the enrollment spike requires a new thirty-seven-year note, they are describing the second model and mailing the statement to the first.

A Quarter-Billion Operating Budget, Already

Facilities are the ask this year. Operations are the ocean the ask floats on. Lakota’s general-fund operation is in the neighborhood of $226 million for the current fiscal year, with recent actual spending already north of two hundred million and climbing. [6] Call it a quarter of a billion dollars a year for one suburban district. Salaries and benefits eat most of it, as they do everywhere the public-sector union model still sets the clock.

On a student count near seventeen thousand, that is roughly thirteen thousand dollars per pupil from the operating side alone, before you count capital dreams. Ohio, as a state, spends near $17,000 per pupil. The national current-expenditure figures sit higher still, depending on the year and the accountant.

I can already hear the reply. See? We spend less than the average. We are efficient. Give us the bond. That is a category error. Below-average unit cost does not grant a moral claim on thirty-seven more years of debt if the outcomes are mediocre and the administration’s reflex is always expansion. A factory can spend less per widget than its competitors and still ship a product nobody wants to buy. The customers in this case cannot easily leave, because the tax is bolted to the house.

This community has not been stingy. The last bond was 2005. The last operating and permanent-improvement levy was in 2013, sold as a five-year bridge and extended through 2028. That stretch is the part the district likes to advertise as thrift. I read it as evidence that the last yes vote was larger than the brochure admitted, and that the institution learned it could live on the leftover air. Now that the air is thinning, they want the next yes before you notice you were about to breathe.

Outcomes Are the Part the Brochures Skip

Nice buildings do not automatically mean prepared adults. Lakota has had serious money for decades. Too many graduates still walk out unready for work or for a college that is not a remedial waiting room. I have talked to hundreds of people inside this system over the years. Plenty of them are decent. Plenty of classrooms are trying. The institution, as an institution, has drifted toward ideology and away from the marketplace.

I do not want Pride Month as a substitute for literacy. I do not want sexual politics smuggled in under social-emotional wallpaper. I do not want a free babysitting service that congratulates itself for equity language while employers quietly wonder what the diploma means. When district people tell me three hundred dollars a year is a small price to teach kids, they are asking me to pay my fair share of their mistakes and their curriculum. Fair share is the phrase you use when you have already decided the number and only need a sermon.

Saying no to the bond is not a curriculum veto by itself. Bond money is concrete and steel. But it is one of the few remaining levers a property owner has when the board will not say no, the superintendent class will not manage, and the next operating levy is already a rumor for 2028. They split the cost. Facilities now. Operations later. Teachers’ union step increases forever. If you keep saying yes to the split, you never get to the conversation about living within the two hundred twenty-six million.

Nancy Nix and the Math Problem of Property Taxes

I am going to say something that confuses the people who think I only throw rocks. I like competent government. I fought to put competent people in office. When they run the numbers in the black, I say so. Nancy Nix has been that kind of fiscal adult in Butler County. She does not enjoy the compliment. She has earned it. The county has operated with a seriousness about headcount and cash that you cannot take for granted anywhere in America.

I sat with her long enough to hear what a good auditor has to say, even when activists want a simpler hymn. There is a growing movement in Ohio to repeal property taxes outright. I hear from those people constantly. Many of them read me. They are tired of paying for schools after their children have been gone for twenty years. They look at a five-hundred-thousand-dollar house and see three or four hundred dollars a year of government clinging to the siding. They want the money back.

Nancy is not the enemy of that instinct. She is the person who has to make arithmetic survive contact with a government that was built on the assumption that the property-tax river never dries up. You cannot pull the plug on every district, every township, every county function on a Tuesday and call it a finished symphony. You also cannot keep telling seventy-year-olds that the river is sacred. The model is ancient; it is tied to ZIP codes instead of children, and young buyers are not lining up to inherit the millage with a smile.

That is the larger war. This levy is a local battle inside it. If Ohio ever funds students instead of geography, districts like Lakota will have to compete. Competition is the only force that brings per-pupil cost down without a speech. Until then, the only language the cheerleaders understand is a lost election.

What Voting No Actually Does

If the bond fails, the old millage still expires. That is the point they dance around. Failure is a tax cut in 2029, not a freeze in amber. The district will still have a massive operating budget. The buildings will still stand. The state co-funding window may shift. They will tell you that you left free state money on the table. State money is not free. It is a matching grant that requires you to indenture your own duplicate for a generation.

If the bond passes, you will be told nothing changed. Your bill looks familiar. The familiar bill is the trick. You just refinanced a house you had nearly paid off and congratulated yourself for keeping the payment flat.

I am a huge no. I will say it in rooms where it is unpopular. I will say it to people in the district who think I am cheap. I will say it to the professional consensus-builders who punish dissent until the dissenters get tired. I do not threaten anyone. I do not need to. I put facts in front of people who still own their own minds.

Good Government Is the Art of the Timely No

Todd saying no to apartments is why Ford’s Garage exists. A school board saying no to a superintendent’s monument is how you stay inside two hundred twenty-six million dollars. Voters saying no in 2025 is why this year’s ask is smaller. Voters saying no in 2026 is how you force the next conversation: manage the district you have, stop using development mistakes as a hostage note, and stop treating property owners as an ATM with a mascot.

People have asked me to run for the school board. I have always said no, because commentary requires independence. I may not say no forever. The board needs members who can stand in public, explain a refusal, and live with not being invited to the Friday wine tasting. Most people want to be liked. The system is built on that weakness. Liked people vote yes. Adults vote no and then do the hard work of living with the no.

Until that board exists, the taxpayer’s tool is the ballot. Not a riot. Not a smear. A no. Then another no if they come back in 2027. They will come back. They always come back. The only way the chaos model ends is if someone on the inside learns to stay within means, and someone on the outside keeps the lights on long enough for that lesson to hurt.

The Ask, Without the Perfume

Lakota wants you to authorize two hundred twenty-three million dollars of new bonded debt for thirty-seven years, collected at about seventy-seven dollars per hundred thousand of auditor value, beginning in 2029, to rebuild the secondary side of a district that already spends more than two hundred million a year, after voters crushed a five-hundred-six-million-dollar version of the same philosophy last fall.

They want you to believe enrollment is racing toward nineteen thousand even though a study sitting in their own files is far more cautious. They want you to treat apartment-driven growth as an act of nature. They want you to accept that a paid-off bond is a crisis rather than a reward. They want you to call that stewardship.

I want the money back. Not because I think children are disposable. Because I think a system that cannot live on a quarter-billion dollars a year, cannot tell a straight story about its own headcount, and cannot resist the next housing fad has lost the right to call the next thirty-seven years inevitable.

Vote no on November 3. If they bring an operating levy next, vote no again. Hire managers instead of cheerleaders. Put people on the board who can say the word. Keep the Todd Minniear instinct alive in the townships: better a restaurant that turns tables than a balcony that turns ballots. And when the old bond dies, do something radical in American public life. Keep the savings.

Notes

The numbered references in the essay correspond to the following sources. They are starting points, not a claim that any official agrees with my conclusions.

[1] Lakota Board of Education, Resolution to Proceed, June 9, 2026: bonds in the principal amount of $223,483,492; estimated average annual levy of 2.20 mills, certified as $77 per $100,000 of county auditor market value; election November 3, 2026; collections commencing in 2028, first due in calendar year 2029.

[2] Journal-News, July 6, 2026, and WCPO: Phase One would take Adena Elementary, Ridge Junior, and the Lakota West Freshman/Creekside/Lakota Central complex offline; reduce the building count from 21 to 18; add buildings at East Freshman, Plains Junior, and both high schools.

[3] Cincinnati Enquirer and Journal-News, November 2025: the November 4, 2025 bond and permanent improvement package failed 60.81 percent to 39.19 percent. The 2025 bond request was $506.4 million, plus a 0.95-mill PI levy.

[4] District presentations, September 2025: enrollment reported at 17,348 as of late September 2025; OFCC capacity listed at 16,577; district claimed it was already 771 students over capacity and projected 19,074 by 2033.

[5] FutureThink enrollment study for Lakota Local School District, March 11, 2026: 2025-26 total 16,913; projection declines toward approximately 16,555 by 2035-36. The study itself warns the district to watch live births, housing, and open enrollment.

[6] Lakota five-year forecast materials, Treasurer Adam Zink: FY2026 general-fund operating investment listed near $226 million; FY2025 general-fund expenditures in the low $221 million range before other financing uses.

Why Big-Tent Team Building Beats Purity Factions and Revenge Politics: Why I love Nancy Nix so much in Butler County, Ohio

Traveling, Independent Media, and Coming Home to Butler County Politics

I’ve been traveling most of the summer, so I’ve been doing a lot of catching up. You can’t help but notice the difference when you step away and then come back. I’ve been a little behind on the local politics, and I want to refer to some changes in the Butler County Republican Party at the chair level.[1] When you’re in a leadership position, there’s always somebody who thinks they could do it better than you. There’s always a critic. I tell people that’s part of leadership. You’re always going to have armchair quarterbacks. They’re going to criticize and say stuff. Sitting down and talking to people who don’t agree with you is hard. Winning them over to your side is hard.

In Butler County we’ve had strong Republican support for a long time. When you’re the weak party—as Democrats are in Ohio and in Butler County—the only realistic path to power is splitting the majority party. Some Republicans, once they lose the eye of the tiger, start looking for ways to lose so they can feel relevant again. That’s Rocky III territory. The champion takes the top for granted and gets knocked down by someone hungrier. Strong leadership holds the party together so the majority stays a majority.

Todd Hall, Armchair Quarterbacks, and the Reality of Party Leadership

I always liked Todd Hall. I remember when people would complain about him. When you’re the chairman, you’re the lightning rod. Todd managed to keep things moving by focusing on something everybody could rally behind: electing Republicans and keeping the county on a conservative track.[2] You need a big tent to win. Pure factions feel righteous and then lose. I’ve said it for years—I’ll take people who will come to the table, grab a pizza, and argue philosophy all day long. We have more in common than not. The alternative is handing Democrats the only hope they have: a fractured Republican Party.

Big Tent Republicans vs. Purity Factions: Why Winning Requires Team Building

Trump himself was not a lifelong Republican in the traditional sense. Elon Musk came into the MAGA orbit from a different background. I take people who show up and want to win. The opposite impulse—the desire to purge and purify until only the purest remain—is how majorities become minorities. Democrats understand this. Their only realistic path in Butler County is to encourage Republicans to fight each other, thereby opening up the general-election map.[3]

I’ve watched it. People who could not win through the front door start working the back door—undermining officeholders who did win their primaries, feeding narratives to the Journal-News, and treating every establishment Republican as the enemy. That is not strategy. That is revenge dressed up as principle. And it is exactly what hands seats to Democrats.

Nancy Nix: Fiscal Discipline, Quiet Influence, and Why I Stand Behind Her

I love Nancy Nix, and I mean that genuinely. I can tell you that in their household, back when the Trump question was still unsettled for some people, her husband and I were already on the same page. Nancy came around eventually because she is logical and watches results; not everyone always agrees with everything all the time. As a fiscally responsible officeholder, she reduced staff sizes when she was Treasurer and again when she was Auditor. She has run things in the black for a long time. That is top-level conservative performance.[4]

A lot of the people you see in the White House and in state-level Republican success came through networks that include Nancy Nix. I know some of the behind-the-scenes. Nancy has been part of important scaffolding on all levels. When I was last at the White House, her fingerprints are on so many important things. She won’t claim credit, but I will give it. If Vivek is a few points up in the averages, a meaningful share of the organizational credit in this region runs through people like her.[5]

George Lang: Friendship, Door-Knocking, and the Night He Took Down a Protester

I’ve always been affiliated with George Lang. We’ve developed a real friendship. I’ve seen him, Debbie, and the girls work events, knock doors, and hold the party together behind the scenes for decades. I like his family. I like the way he carries himself under pressure.[6]

Here’s a story for context. At the Savannah Center Trump event in the primary season, I had a VIP pass. Todd Hall did not want to be seen sitting in the front row with Trump at that stage—he was still in the John Kasich lane as the Ohio guy. Fair enough. George was there as a state representative. A protester started coming down the aisle toward Trump. George had told me earlier he would handle it if it came to that. When the moment arrived, George grabbed the guy, put him on the ground, and bought the security detail the second and a half they needed. That is not armchair commentary. That is a man who showed up when it was not yet popular and did the physical work.[7]

I was with George during the difficult period around John Boehner. We did not always agree on every personnel fight, but I have seen him under real pressure, and I trust the man. When purity voices treat George as the problem, they are discarding decades of actual organizational labor.

Michael Ryan, Don Dixon, and the Commissioners Who Actually Govern

I really like Michael Ryan. I spoke with him just this morning about something positive on the Republican side. He is a good conservative and a good man. The party endorsement and the primary result were decisive.[8] Don Dixon and I go back a long way—I used to race soapbox with his son Brent. Don has been a solid commissioner. These are not theoretical conservatives. These are people who show up, manage budgets, and keep the county functioning.

Sheriff Richard Jones and the Mayberry Standard

I like Sheriff Jones. I want the Butler County Sheriff’s Office to carry a bit of Mayberry and a bit of Walnut Grove—competent, present, and rooted in the community. His book is worth reading. It makes me proud of the department. When personal and political conflicts involving Roger Reynolds spilled into court and public narrative, it became another example of how intra-party score-settling distracts from the actual work of public safety.[9][10]

Revenge Politics, Back-Door Insurrection, and the Journal-News Narrative

Here is the pattern I keep seeing. People who could not win their primaries, or who lost influence, start working to tear down those who did win. They feed stories. They call solid conservatives RINOs. They treat every successful officeholder as the establishment enemy. The recent Journal-News framing of the November races and the tone around party leadership fits the pattern: soft language toward Democratic opportunities, little enthusiasm for defending the Republican incumbents and nominees who actually earned their spots.[11]

That is not leadership. Leadership is hard. Leadership is sitting across the table from people you do not fully agree with and still building a winning team. Leadership is defending the people the voters already chose in the primary so the general election is about Republicans versus Democrats, not Republicans versus Republicans. When party leadership sounds happier to give Democrats a seat at the table than to fight for the Republican majority, the voters notice.

The West Chester Lesson and What Happens When You Play Nice with the Wrong Strategy

We already lived through a version of this in the West Chester trustee and school board fights. People who thought the pure strategy would deliver instead watched Democrats and soft candidates benefit from Republican disarray. Mark Welch and others paid the price of a fractured effort. The same dynamic is available at the county level if the new posture continues.[12]

A Longer View: From Ross Perot to Trump to the Present

I’ve been doing this a long time. Election night 1992, I was at Ross Perot’s place with his daughters after helping with the big Dallas rally. We drove hard back to Ohio so I could vote. I learned then what happens when the majority party fractures or when outsiders and insiders refuse to build anything durable.[13] Through the Tea Party years and the early Trump years, I watched the same purity-versus-majority argument play out. The people who told me Trump was going nowhere were often the same voices now calling Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, or George Lang the problem. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.

What Butler County Actually Needs from Republican Leadership

Butler County is still a Republican stronghold if the party acts like one.[14] That requires leadership that understands the difference between primary competition and general-election self-sabotage. It requires people who will defend Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, George Lang, Sheriff Jones, and the other officeholders who have earned their places. It requires the discipline to sit down with people you do not fully agree with and still leave the room as a team.

I have stood by people when it was unpopular—Darbi Boddy when others told me to stay away, Roger Reynolds in earlier seasons, and the current slate of solid conservatives even when the purity voices are loud. I will continue to do so. The alternative is a party that defines itself only by what it is against, hands Democrats open seats, and then wonders why the majority slipped.

I love Nancy Nix. I respect George Lang, Michael Ryan, and Sheriff Jones. I want a big-tent Republican Party that wins. The people trying to burn it down to feel important again are not helping Butler County. They are helping the only people who benefit from Republican disunity: Democrats.

If you are mad at me over this, check back in a decade. I’ll still be right, and I won’t let you forget it. Have a good day.

Footnotes

[1] Journal-News (Butler County / Cox First Media), “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026. The piece surveys November 2026 county and judicial races and the competitive posture of both parties.

[2] Butler County Republican Party materials and contemporaneous reporting identify Todd Hall as long-serving Executive Chairman through at least the May 2026 primary cycle.

[3] The “big tent” versus purity debate is a long-standing tension within the Republican Party, both nationally and locally.

[4] Nancy Nix has served Butler County in fiscal offices (Treasurer and Auditor) with a consistent record of staff reductions, budget discipline, and low-tax philosophy.

[5] Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2026 Ohio gubernatorial campaign has drawn significant support from Butler County and statewide Republicans; local organizers, including Nancy Nix, have been credited with early and sustained organizational assistance.

[6] George Lang, Ohio State Senator, has been a consistent conservative voice and organizational workhorse in Butler County Republican politics for decades.

[7] The 2015 Trump campaign event at the Savannah Center took place during the Republican presidential primary, when many establishment figures remained cautious or opposed.

[8] Michael Ryan won the May 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with approximately 72 percent of the vote over long-time incumbent Cindy Carpenter after receiving a strong party endorsement.

[9] Richard K. Jones has served as Butler County Sheriff for multiple terms and has published a memoir detailing the department’s culture and operational philosophy.

[10] Roger Reynolds previously served as Butler County Auditor. His later political and legal conflicts became a public episode in local Republican politics.

[11] Journal-News, “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026.

[12] West Chester Township trustee and school-board contests in recent cycles illustrated the cost of intra-party warfare.

[13] Ross Perot’s 1992 independent presidential campaign and the subsequent Reform Party activity formed an early training ground for many later organizers.

[14] Butler County has maintained a structural Republican registration and performance advantage for decades, making internal cohesion the primary variable between comfortable majorities and avoidable losses.

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Elon Musk, Russell Brand, and the Danger of Oppressive Government: Exceptionalism Versus Mediocrity in Human Endeavors

I have watched Elon Musk for a long time. I have watched him evolve. The same is true of Russell Brand. I remember when Brand was an outright socialist advocate, covered in tattoos, calling for revolution and the redistribution of wealth. I remember when Musk was voting for Obama, donating to Democrats, and operating comfortably inside that orbit. Trump himself leaned Democrat in earlier years, invited the Clintons into his world, and only later became the force he is now. People believe things, then reality catches up, and they come around in their own way.

That arc is not rare. I saw it repeatedly in the early days of the Tea Party after the housing crisis. Retired engineers from places like GE who had spent decades voting for bigger government and going along with the corporate consensus suddenly called me. They were 65 or 70. They had steady paychecks for years. They wore the Hawaiian shirt on Fridays. They played it safe. Then they retired, looked at the deficit and the culture, and decided they wanted to do something useful. They wanted to fight tax increases and local levies. The paycheck was gone. The fear of HR and the next promotion was gone. Suddenly they could think for themselves.

Watching the Arc: From Collective Safety to Seeing the Trap

I see the same pattern in Musk and Brand. Brand spent years as a left-wing firebrand, guest-editing socialist magazines, endorsing Corbyn, preaching against capitalism. Then COVID, the lockdowns, the censorship, and the digital control mechanisms pushed him the other way. He now talks about freedom, digital ID dangers, and sounds far closer to the people who once opposed everything he stood for.

An oppressive government https://t.co/VExsgCzlXL
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2026

Musk’s shift is more visible because of the scale. He supported Obama. He voted for Biden. He was inside the system that issues permits, contracts, and regulatory approvals. Then he bought Twitter, turned it into X, and ran headfirst into the apparatus that decides who gets to speak. He has had to file the endless FAA paperwork for Starship. He has watched mediocre bureaucrats slow down exceptional engineering. When he replies to Brand about an “oppressive government,” I hear a man who has finally felt the weight of the machine he once navigated more carefully.

This is not pure conversion. It is pattern recognition. Once you have enough financial independence, or once the system starts targeting you directly, the incentives change. The same people who stayed quiet for decades while drawing a corporate or government check suddenly discover principles. I do not put them down for it. Better late than never. But I notice when the courage arrives only after the risk is lower.

The Corporate Judas Cycle and the Power of the Paycheck

I have seen the Judas move up close. A bright radio talent I knew had a private owner who did not care much about FCC memos. We could talk about American exceptionalism on air. We could say the hard things. Then a big corporate job appeared. The social media got cleaned up. The fighting-for-your-rights posts disappeared. The man who once spoke freely kissed the cheek for the steady check and the career ladder. Judas took the coins. Jesus, in the scapegoat tradition, knew it was coming. The system still runs on people willing to trade the exceptional for safety.

Corporate culture learned the lesson socialism figured out long ago. You do not build a mass movement by appealing to independent thinkers. You appeal to the collective. You offer safety, security, and a sense of belonging. You make Hawaiian shirt day the high point of the week. You hire the Normies—the blue-pill middle managers who show up to interviews in flip-flops and T-shirts—and you put them in charge of hiring. They reproduce themselves. They do not hire the exceptional because the exceptional make them feel small. The same personality type migrates easily into government jobs. Government is the ultimate safe paycheck with the ultimate power over others.

That is the core of oppressive government. It is not abstract tyranny. It is the systematic empowerment of mediocre people who would never hold power in a pure merit system. They gain leverage through the size of the state, endless money, grants, regulations, and the ability to punish anyone who stands too tall. Exceptional people become a threat. They might make the average feel inadequate. So the system levels everything downward.

Steve Bannon’s Strategy Versus Trump’s Exceptionalism

I like Steve Bannon. He kept things alive when others ran. He paid a price. He went to jail. He understands the front line. His deliberate “slob” presentation—untucked shirts, no tie, Band-Aid on the forehead—is a calculated move. He does not want to appear better than the people he is trying to pull into the movement. Joseph Campbell used to say it is not good to appear too good if you want to bring the average along. Bannon internalized that. He lowers himself so the crowd does not feel threatened.

Trump never did that. He wears the suit. He wears the red tie. He talks about winning, about being the best, about thinking big. We voted for that. We did not vote for a Normie in an untucked shirt. We voted for exceptionalism. When Musk started building the biggest rockets and the biggest companies and then turned against the regulatory state that slows him down, he moved closer to that same instinct. SpaceX is aiming at scale that still sounds insane to most people—Musk has talked about 30-plus Starship launches a day by 2030. That is not mediocrity. That is the opposite.

Ohio’s Choice: Vivek Ramaswamy or Amy Acton’s Mediocrity

I see the same fight right here in Ohio. Vivek Ramaswamy is a rich man who built things. Amy Acton’s side attacks that fact as if wealth earned through production is a moral stain. She talks about people “buying” the office. The implication is that successful people cannot be trusted, while the candidate of lockdowns and average outcomes somehow can. The polls are tight. Some have Ramaswamy slightly ahead. Others show Acton with a narrow edge or a statistical tie. The race will turn on whether voters want opportunity and capital or the familiar comfort of managed mediocrity.

Data centers are a perfect test. They bring tax revenue, jobs, and economic activity that can help close budget gaps and lower pressure on property taxes. The opposition often prefers the empty cornfield and the status quo. That is the voice of people who have never had to create the wealth they want to redistribute. It is the same impulse that treats exceptional builders as the enemy.

The Real Danger of Oppressive Government

An oppressive government is dangerous because it gives mediocre people the power to sit atop exceptional people. It funds the average and penalizes the outstanding. It turns corporations into risk-averse partners of the state so they can keep the grants and avoid the targeting. It creates a culture where people stay quiet until they retire, then suddenly want to be part of something important. It produces the Judas cycle over and over.

I have had more than enough of that mediocrity this summer of 2026. It has infected corporate culture deeply. The ultimate cost of a powerful government that hands out money and permission is that it rewards the people who will never do exceptional things and restrains the people who will.

Musk is not saying enough when he names “oppressive government.” The deeper problem is the systematic preference for the average over the excellent. We do not need more people who dress down so the crowd feels comfortable. We need more people willing to stand up, build, risk, and produce results that make the average uncomfortable. That is how a nation stays exceptional.

Footnotes

1. Elon Musk’s documented political evolution includes donations and support for Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a 2020 vote for Biden before the post-2022 shift toward Republican candidates and full endorsement of Trump. See reporting on his donation history and public statements.

2. Russell Brand’s earlier work included the book Revolution and explicit support for socialist redistribution and figures such as Jeremy Corbyn; his later public positions moved toward free-speech and anti-establishment critiques.

3. Elon Musk’s recent X reply to Russell Brand stated “An oppressive government” in response to Brand’s content on digital ID and related control mechanisms.

4. Musk has publicly stated the goal of 30-plus Starship launches per day by around 2030. Current production rates remain far lower, with recent comments indicating one vehicle per month and efforts to increase cadence.

5. Ohio gubernatorial polling in summer 2026 has shown a tight race between Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton, with results ranging from slight Ramaswamy leads to narrow Acton edges or statistical ties depending on the pollster and date.

6. The “Judas” analogy draws on the New Testament scapegoat and betrayal narrative as a metaphor for trading principle for institutional safety and reward.

Bibliography

Brand, Russell. Revolution. New York: Ballantine Books, 2014.

Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Musk, Elon. Public statements and X posts on political evolution, Starship production goals, and government regulation (2022–2026).

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966/1967. (For the moral framework of producers versus looters and the nature of government force.)

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Trump, Donald J. The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House, 1987. (Early expression of the exceptionalism theme.)

Reporting on Ohio 2026 gubernatorial polling from Fox News, AARP, Wedgewood, Emerson, and related outlets (June–August 2026).

SpaceX and FAA documentation and public statements on Starship launch cadence and regulatory constraints.

Additional reading: Joseph Campbell on the hero’s journey and the danger of appearing “too good”; historical accounts of the Tea Party movement’s post-2008 composition; analyses of corporate risk-aversion and regulatory capture.

Rich Hoffman

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Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal – Ayn Rand’s Moral Defense of the Only System Consistent with Human Nature, and Why It Still Matters in Ohio in 2026

I have been running a series on Ayn Rand because too many people who once understood her through the Tea Party years have let her slip out of memory, or worse, accepted the lazy smear that she was merely an atheist with nothing useful to say. That is a mistake. The radical left still hates her for the same reason they hate successful producers today. They understand, even if they will not admit it, that her arguments cut the moral legs out from under every scheme of redistribution, regulation, and class resentment.

I was reminded of this again after lunch with one of my favorite senators, George Lang. We talked about The Fountainhead, about the gold standard, and about how few people who claim to like Rand have actually read the full range of her nonfiction. That conversation pushed me to pick up the 1966 collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal again. It remains one of the clearest statements ever written of why pure capitalism is not just an economic preference but a moral necessity.

The book is not a dry economics text. Rand called it a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged. With contributions from Nathaniel Branden, a young Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen, it argues that the system we call capitalism today is a bastardized version of the real thing—an unknown ideal because it has never been allowed to exist in pure form. What we have instead is a mixed economy of freedom mixed with controls, and the controls always expand.

Capitalism as the Only Moral Social System

Rand’s central claim is simple and radical. Man is a rational being who must use his own mind to survive. Any social system that initiates force against that process is not merely inefficient; it is immoral. Capitalism, properly understood, is the only system that bans the initiation of physical force from human relationships and leaves individuals free to produce, trade, and keep what they create.

She defines it precisely: a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. The government’s sole legitimate function is to protect those rights by retaliating against those who initiate force. Everything else—regulation of production, redistribution of wealth, “industrial policy,” licensing of speech—is a violation.

This is why she rejected the conservative approach of her time. Conservatives often tried to defend capitalism on practical grounds or by appeal to tradition while accepting the moral premise of altruism—that the individual has a duty to live for others. Rand called that a fatal compromise. In “The Anatomy of Compromise,” she shows that when you try to mix a rational principle with an irrational one, the irrational always wins. You cannot have a little bit of socialism without eventually losing the foundation of freedom.

America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business

One of the most powerful essays in the collection is “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” Rand flips the usual narrative on its head. The productive genius is not the exploiter; he is the one being hamstrung by the looters and moochers who use the power of the state to seize what they did not create. Business people are treated as a scapegoat class in the same way other minorities have been treated under collectivist regimes. In Soviet Russia it was the bourgeoisie. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. In America it is the successful businessman.

I see this hatred every day in the attacks on Trump, on Vivek Ramaswamy, on any rich person who made money by creating value rather than extracting it through politics. The radical left’s outrage is not about fairness. It is pure Marxist class warfare dressed up in modern language. Rand saw it clearly because she lived it. Her father lost his pharmacy when the Bolsheviks nationalized private businesses. She never forgot.

Solving World Hunger: Production, Not Politics

People still talk about solving world hunger as if it were a distribution problem that requires more government. That is backward. Pigs, chickens, and rabbits reproduce rapidly. There is no physical shortage of the capacity to produce food. Shortages are created by politics—by governments that micromanage, confiscate, and regulate the very people who would otherwise raise the animals and grow the crops.

If you want to end hunger, get as close as possible to pure capitalism. Remove the artificial constraints. Let people own property, keep their profits, and trade freely. The poor in the United States, even under our imperfect capitalism, are rich compared to most of the world. A few American dollars can still be a fortune to someone living under the policies that Rand warned against. The guilt that drives redistribution often comes from people who helped create the barriers to opportunity and then want to ease their conscience by confiscating more from the productive.

Greenspan on Gold and the Hard Reality of Theory

One of the most quoted essays in the book is Alan Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom,” written years before he became Federal Reserve chairman. He argued that gold and economic freedom are inseparable. The gold standard protects property rights by limiting the government’s ability to inflate away wealth through deficit spending. Without it, the welfare state can confiscate savings silently.

Greenspan later operated in a system far from that ideal. Theory is cleaner than practice when you face political realities, activist judges, and entrenched interests. That does not make the original argument wrong. It shows how hard it is to implement principle once the mixed economy has taken hold. We are still living with the consequences of easy money, quantitative easing, and the revolving door between the Fed and large asset managers. The warnings in that 1966 essay hold up.

True Monopolies, Railroads, and the Industrial Revolution

The collection also dismantles the usual antitrust myths. Free-market monopolies can only be maintained by superior efficiency and better service. Coercive monopolies require government intervention—subsidies, franchises, or legal barriers to entry. The history of American railroads is a clear example. Most of the transcontinental lines were built with government land grants and ended in financial chaos. James J. Hill’s Great Northern was built without federal subsidies and remained the only one that did not go bankrupt.

Robert Hessen’s essay on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on women and children is equally important. Child labor was not created by capitalism; it was inherited from a world of grinding poverty. Factories gave children a way to earn a living and survive to adulthood. Rising wealth created by capitalism eventually made child labor unnecessary. The laws usually get the credit; the production gets the blame.

Airwaves, Speech, and the Nature of Government

Rand’s essay on the property status of the airwaves is still relevant. The early chaos in radio was not a failure of free enterprise but a failure of government to recognize and protect property rights in frequencies. Instead of allowing private ownership and trade, the government declared the airwaves public property and nationalized them through licensing. That opened the door to political control of speech—the same impulse we still see whenever independent voices become inconvenient.

Ohio’s Choice and the Fight Ahead

All of this is not abstract philosophy. It is the framework for understanding the hatred directed at successful people in our own state. Vivek Ramaswamy is a rich man who built companies. That alone is enough for the radical left and their media allies to paint him as untrustworthy. The same pattern appears in the attacks on Trump. They do not hate wealth. They hate the independence that wealth can buy when it is earned rather than granted.

I have watched this for decades. The people who want a governor who has never had to make a payroll or risk his own capital are the same people who will expand the very controls that create shortages and dependency. Michael Ryan understands these issues at the county level. Senators like George Lang still talk about gold-backed approaches and business-friendly policy. We need more of them.

Rand was not interested in being practical in the usual sense. She was interested in being right on principle. She knew that a culture that accepts altruism as its moral code will eventually sacrifice the producers. She also believed that the potential for human progress under pure capitalism is limitless. The nineteenth century, when America came closest to the ideal, proved it.

I have read her books many times, along with the work of those who analyzed her. I agree with her on the essentials of capitalism even while I am more of a man of faith than she was. The philosophy can be taken further. But the fight is now. The books are still on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. You can get them quickly. Read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Then look at the news with clearer eyes.

If you want to solve poverty and hunger, expand opportunity. More capitalism, not less. More people who understand how wealth is actually created. That is the only path that treats individuals as ends in themselves rather than means to someone else’s political vision.

Don’t give up the ship.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966; expanded 1967). Rand described the book as a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged.

2. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

3. Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

4. Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

5. Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” originally published in The Objectivist (1966) and reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

6. Robert Hessen, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

7. Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

8. On James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, see Burton W. Folsom Jr. and related free-market historical accounts; the railroad is frequently cited in Objectivist literature as the counter-example to subsidized lines.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. With additional articles by Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen. New York: New American Library, 1966 (hardcover); expanded Signet paperback, 1967.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Greenspan, Alan. “Gold and Economic Freedom.” The Objectivist, 1966.

Folsom, Burton W., Jr. Works on the “robber barons” myth and James J. Hill.

Additional recommended reading: Ayn Rand Lexicon entries on capitalism, business people, and the gold standard (aynrandlexicon.com); Ayn Rand Institute materials on laissez-faire.

Rich Hoffman

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The Columbus Dispatch’s Liberal Meltdown Over Bernie Moreno: Why Harsh Language Is the Only Justice Left Against Fauci’s COVID Catastrophe

I watched the clips. I read the outrage. And I am not embarrassed by Senator Bernie Moreno. I am proud of him.

When the Columbus Dispatch and its liberal opinion machinery clutched their pearls over Moreno dropping F-bombs on Dr. Anthony Fauci during that July 29, 2026 Senate hearing, they revealed exactly who they serve. They do not serve the Ohioans who lost jobs, businesses, childhoods, and years of life to policies Fauci championed. They serve the narrative that still treats Fauci as a secular saint who must never face real anger, even after he pleaded the Fifth more than one hundred times.

The Hearing That Triggered the Dispatch’s Righteous Indignation

Moreno did not whisper. He asked Fauci, “Who the f*** do you think you were for doing that?” He was talking about the mask mandates, the school closures, the arrests of ordinary people—including a mother at an Ohio middle school football game—and the broader lockdown culture that Fauci’s guidance helped justify. Moreno told the hearing that the arrest of that woman was the moment he decided to sell his businesses and run for the Senate. Six years later, he sat across from the man he holds most responsible and refused to play nice.

https://x.com/berniemoreno/status/2088972718649524720?s=46

He also asked whether Fauci felt he was “in deep s***” for showing up with a team of lawyers. Later, outside the hearing, when asked why Fauci took the Fifth so many times, Moreno answered without filter: because he’s a piece of s***.

The Columbus Dispatch opinion page, through Amelia Robinson, called this “deeper in the gutter than even Jim Jordan.” She compared it to childhood bullying, said it embarrassed Ohio, and wondered whether Senators Jon Husted, Sherrod Brown, Rob Portman, or Mike DeWine would ever sink so low. She defended Fauci’s record, framed the hearing as a “witch hunt,” and demanded apologies from the senators.

That is the liberal press in Ohio in miniature. They can lecture us about “decorum” while the economic and human wreckage of the policies they once cheered goes largely unexamined and unpunished.

The Real Bill: What COVID Lockdowns Cost Ohio and America

Are we supposed to be polite about this? Nationally, serious estimates of the total economic cost of COVID and the response range from roughly $14 trillion to $16 trillion and higher when you add lost output, premature deaths valued in economic terms, long-term health damage, mental health costs, and educational losses. One major analysis put the figure above $16 trillion—about 90 percent of a year’s U.S. GDP. Another put pure GDP losses on a path to $14 trillion over four years. A Heritage-linked commission later put the broader figure near $18 trillion.

In Ohio, the damage was concrete and brutal. The state’s unemployment rate exploded from the low single digits to a peak of 16.4 percent in April 2020—the highest on record in modern tracking. Ohio lost more than 800,000 jobs in that single month. Payroll employment collapsed by roughly 16 percent from February to April. Real GDP for the full year 2020 came in about 2.3 percent lower than 2019. The second-quarter contraction was far steeper—more than 10 percent on an annualized basis in some measures. Sectors like leisure and hospitality were gutted. Small businesses closed. Kids lost years of normal schooling and social development. Families were stressed to the breaking point.

I do not need a perfect spreadsheet to know the human cost in Butler County, across the Miami Valley, and throughout this state. People I know lost businesses. Kids I care about lost childhoods. The long-term damage to learning, mental health, and trust in institutions is still with us. And the same voices that now lecture Moreno about manners spent 2020 cheering the very policies that produced this wreckage.

Lab Origin, Gain-of-Function, and the Accountability Vacuum

We also know more than we did in 2020 about the likely origin. The virus almost certainly emerged from research-related activity in Wuhan. Gain-of-function work that made animal viruses more transmissible to humans was the context. Fauci and the public health establishment spent years downplaying or denying the lab-leak possibility while defending the research funding pathways. He has now repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and how the messaging was shaped.

In a healthier republic, that combination—policy catastrophe plus origin questions plus stonewalling—would produce serious consequences. In the actual America of 2026, the man most associated with the response gets to plead the Fifth a hundred times while the Columbus Dispatch frets about a senator’s language.

Why Moreno’s Anger Is Not a Bug—It Is the Point

I voted for disruptors. I did not vote for people who would sit politely while the architects of the damage smile and take the Fifth. Moreno is doing exactly what a large share of Ohio voters sent him to do: refuse the script. The liberal press and the Democratic establishment prefer senators who speak in carefully measured tones that never threaten the permanent administrative class. That is why they prefer the old style. That is why they are so offended by Moreno.

Jon Husted is a different kind of politician—more institutional, more measured. I would still rather see him hold the other Ohio Senate seat than watch Sherrod Brown claw his way back. But I am not looking for two of the same. Moreno’s willingness to use the language of ordinary frustrated Americans is a feature. When the system refuses to accept real accountability, harsh language at a hearing is one of the few remaining pressure points. Public executions are no longer on the table. Perjury prosecutions seem unlikely. So voters get a senator who will at least look the man in the eye and say the quiet part out loud.

The same media complex that now scolds Moreno spent years treating dissent on lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates as moral failure. They platformed the experts who got major things wrong and sidelined those who got them closer to right. Now they want the anger to stay within polite bounds. I reject that demand.

The Columbus Dispatch Is Not a Neutral Referee

Let’s drop the pretense. The Columbus Dispatch has long operated with a left-of-center editorial culture, even if its news pages sometimes maintain more balance. It broke a century-long pattern to endorse Hillary Clinton. Its opinion pages lean liberal on cultural and institutional questions. Amelia Robinson’s column is a piece of that tradition: defend the public-health establishment, pathologize Republican anger, and treat institutional “decorum” as the highest value even when the institutions failed spectacularly.

When the paper and its allies frame Moreno as the problem, they are protecting a status quo that inflicted real harm on Ohio and then largely escaped consequences. That is not neutrality. That is advocacy.

Looking Ahead in Ohio Politics

Amy Acton is the Democratic nominee for governor. She was the public face of Ohio’s early COVID response under DeWine. The same networks that once celebrated her now want to elevate her further while treating any residual anger at the policies of that era as vulgar. Meanwhile, Bernie Moreno sits in the Senate doing the opposite of playing patty-cake. I prefer the latter.

I want Jon Husted to hold his seat against Sherrod Brown’s comeback bid. Two strong Republicans in the Senate are better for Ohio than a return to the old Democratic hold. But I am under no illusion that measured institutionalists alone will deliver the accountability many of us still want. Moreno’s approach is the necessary corrective.

Final Word

I am not interested in lectures about Senate decorum from outlets that spent years amplifying the very policies that cost this country trillions and this state hundreds of thousands of jobs and years of normal life. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. The economic damage is measured in the tens of trillions nationally, and there is real suffering in every Ohio county. The origin questions remain serious. In that context, a senator who refuses to soft-pedal his contempt is representing the people who hired him.

I am proud of Bernie Moreno. Keep it up.

Footnotes

1. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, July 29, 2026; multiple contemporaneous reports of Moreno’s language and Fauci’s repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment.

2. Amelia Robinson, “Bernie Moreno mortified Ohio with profane attack on Fauci,” Columbus Dispatch, July 31, 2026.

3. Ohio Department of Job and Family Services / BLS data: Ohio unemployment rate peaked at approximately 16.4–16.8 percent in April 2020; job losses exceeded 800,000 in that month alone.

4. Ohio GDP: 2020 annual figure approximately 2.3 percent below 2019; sharp second-quarter contraction.

5. National cost estimates: Cutler & Summers (~$16 trillion total including health losses); USC/related GDP-loss projections approaching $14 trillion; Heritage Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (~$18 trillion broader estimate).

6. Lab-origin discussion and gain-of-function context: extensive public record from 2021–2026 congressional inquiries, intelligence assessments, and scientific literature.

7. Media bias assessments of the Columbus Dispatch: AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check ratings placing it Left-Center to Lean Left on editorial/opinion content; historical endorsement shift in 2016.

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

• Cutler, David M., and Lawrence H. Summers. “The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 Trillion Virus.” JAMA, 2020 (and subsequent updates/discussions).

• Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly employment and unemployment releases, 2020.

• Ohio Development Services Agency / BEA data on state GDP, 2019–2021.

• Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Report on economic and human costs (2024).

• Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Hearing record and transcripts, July 29, 2026.

• Robinson, Amelia. Opinion columns, Columbus Dispatch, July–August 2026.

• AllSides Media Bias ratings and Media Bias/Fact Check profiles of the Columbus Dispatch.

• Primary reporting from The Hill, Washington Examiner, Fox News, and local Ohio outlets on the Moreno-Fauci exchange.

• Additional reading on lab-origin hypotheses, gain-of-function research funding, and pandemic policy trade-offs available in the public congressional record and scientific literature from 2021 onward.

Rich Hoffman

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Objectivism and the American Experiment: Why Ayn Rand Still Matters in an Age of Collective Delusion, and Why Peter Thiel is a tremendous asset to any civlization

Ayn Rand remains one of the most polarizing figures in modern philosophy and literature for a reason, a very healthy reason. A refugee from the Soviet Union who watched her father’s business seized and her family’s life reduced to poverty under collectivist rule, she arrived in the United States in 1926 carrying a clear-eyed hatred of any system that subordinates the individual mind to the group. She built an entire philosophical system—Objectivism—around the primacy of objective reality, the sovereignty of reason, and the moral right of the individual to live for his own sake. In an era when official culture insists that feelings can rewrite biology, that the state may confiscate the product of one person’s effort for another’s benefit, and that the individual is merely a unit in larger identity categories, her work is no longer a historical curiosity. It is a live confrontation with the day’s dominant premises.

Her novels and nonfiction supply an on-ramp that mainstream institutions will not provide. Anthem stands as one of the cleanest anti-communist fables ever written—a short, devastating portrait of a society that has erased the word “I.” The Fountainhead dramatizes the creator who refuses to subordinate his vision to the demands of the collective. Atlas Shrugged takes the logic further: the men of the mind withdraw, and the parasites who lived off their productivity discover they cannot run the world without them. These books still circulate because they name a conflict that never went away—the individual versus the collective—and because the collectivist side is once again confident enough to drop the mask. For those wanting to understand the news cycles of our day, the work of Ayn Rand will help you get your mind around it.

Metaphysics: Reality Is Not Optional

Objectivism begins with a blunt metaphysical claim: existence exists. The universe is what it is independent of anyone’s wishes, prayers, social consensus, or emotional needs. Rand called this the primacy of existence. A rock is a rock whether or not someone finds the fact inconvenient. Facts are not created by consciousness; consciousness is the faculty that perceives them.

This sounds like common sense until one watches contemporary culture try to legislate it out of existence. A man cannot become a woman by declaration. A biological male does not acquire the capacity to menstruate or gestate simply because he “identifies” as female. The insistence that subjective feeling overrides observable reality is precisely the mentality Rand spent decades attacking. She was not writing about the more exotic claims of quantum measurement or observer effects in controlled laboratory settings; she was defending the four-dimensional world human beings actually inhabit and must act within. When that world is treated as infinitely malleable by will or decree, the result is not liberation. It is catastrophe dressed up as compassion.

Epistemology: Reason as Absolute

If reality is objective, then knowledge of it must be acquired by specific means. Rand held that the senses are the only source of information about the world and that reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates that material. There is no separate channel of “intuition,” mystical insight, or divine revelation that can override sensory evidence and logical processing. A concept that cannot be traced back to the evidence of the senses and the operation of logic is not merely mistaken; it is cognitively empty.

This is why she was merciless toward modern philosophy’s retreat from the world, particularly the influence of Immanuel Kant. If reason is limited or if “things-in-themselves” are forever inaccessible, then the door opens to every form of subjectivism and collectivist claim. Rand’s position is severe, and it leaves little room for the non-rational. One can grant that human sensory equipment is limited and that deeper layers of physical reality may require instruments and theories beyond the five senses; that does not license treating feelings or group consensus as substitutes for evidence. In the domain of ordinary human action—law, economics, medicine, education—her insistence on reason remains the only reliable check against those who would rewrite reality by force of declaration.

Ethics: The Virtue of Selfishness

The transition from facts to values is the most contentious part of her system. David Hume’s old problem—how one derives an “ought” from an “is”—is met head-on. Rand argued that the concept of value only arises for living organisms. A rock has no values because nothing can benefit or harm it as a rock. A living entity must act to maintain its life. For a human being, whose mode of survival is conceptual and productive rather than instinctual, the good is that which sustains and advances life according to the requirements of a rational being. The evil is that which destroys it.

From this, she derived rational egoism: one’s own life is the proper standard of value, and the moral purpose of each individual is to achieve their own happiness through productive work and voluntary trade. This is not a license for whim, predation, or short-term gratification. The man who drinks himself to death is not selfish; he is destroying the only value he possesses. Rational self-interest requires long-range thinking, integrity, and the refusal to live as a parasite or to treat others as sacrificial animals.

Altruism, in her usage, is not simple kindness or voluntary charity. It is the moral doctrine that the individual has a duty to sacrifice himself to others and that the needs of the collective create a claim on the productive. She rejected that doctrine root and branch. Charity is permissible and often admirable when it is voluntary and does not rest on the premise that the recipient has a moral mortgage on the giver. The moment it becomes a duty enforced by the state or by social pressure, it ceases to be benevolence and becomes predation with a halo.

Politics: Capitalism as the Only Moral System

If individuals have the right to their own lives and the products of their efforts, then the only political system consistent with that right bans the initiation of physical force. Government’s legitimate functions shrink to the police (to protect against domestic force), the military (to protect against foreign force), and the courts (to adjudicate disputes under objective law). Everything else—roads, schools, welfare, industrial policy—belongs in the realm of private voluntary action.

Capitalism, in this view, is not merely the most efficient system; it is the only moral one, because it is the only system that treats individuals as ends in themselves and organizes society based on trade rather than sacrifice. Any government seizure of wealth for redistribution is a violation of the producer’s right to the product of his mind. Rand did not arrive at this conclusion in a vacuum. She had watched the Bolsheviks liquidate private property and reduce her family to near-starvation. When she looked at the New Deal and the expanding administrative state in her adopted country, she saw a slower, softer version of the same principle: the subordination of the individual to the collective will.

The Novels as Philosophical Weapons

The Fountainhead gave the world Howard Roark, the architect who would rather see his building destroyed than allow it to be compromised by second-handers and taste-makers. He is the archetype of the man who lives by his own judgment. Atlas Shrugged escalated the drama: the inventors, industrialists, and thinkers who carry the world on their shoulders stop. The result is not utopia for the remaining population; it is collapse. The book’s influence on entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley founders, and a certain strain of American political thought is well documented. Peter Thiel has been open about its impact. Figures in the current administration’s orbit have circulated it for years. In Ohio, legislators have been known to hand out copies as a quiet statement of first principles. My good friend Senator George Lang is one of them. And the hatred of Peter Thiel largely, and specifically, comes from his support of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, which the political left despises.

Critics have always been harsh. Whittaker Chambers’s famous National Review attack treated Atlas Shrugged as if it issued from a totalitarian loudspeaker—an irony given Rand’s lifelong hatred of totalitarianism. Academic philosophers such as Robert Nozick argued that even if one accepts life as the standard of value, the leap to absolute property rights and the rejection of any enforceable duty of aid is not logically compelled. The Objectivist movement itself developed a reputation for rigidity and a personality cult, culminating in the public break with Nathaniel Branden. These criticisms are not trivial. A philosophy that demands near-perfect consistency will always struggle with the messy, interdependent realities of actual human lives, including disability, bad luck, and the genuine goods that arise from voluntary community.

Yet the core insight survives the objections. The productive genius of a relative handful of individuals—Edison, the Wrights, the modern equivalents like Elon Musk building reusable rockets and energy systems—creates the surplus that lifts entire societies. When those individuals are treated as cash cows for the collective or as moral suspects simply because they succeed, the long-term result is not justice. It is stagnation. The question is not whether Elon Musk or any particular innovator is personally likable. The question is whether a society that systematically handicaps its highest producers in the name of equity ends up better or worse for the average person. The historical record of systems that tried the latter experiment is not ambiguous.

America at the Crossroads of Two Traditions

Walk out of certain offices in the Ohio Statehouse and the architecture itself poses the question. Greek columns, vaulted ceilings, classical proportions—the visual language of a republican experiment that began on the other side of the Mediterranean. At the same time, the conversations that spontaneously arise among the people who work there often turn to Scripture, to the Book of Judges, to the warning that a people who demand a king “like all the nations” will discover what concentrated power does to both ruler and ruled. The American founding drew from both streams: classical political forms and a biblical anthropology that understood the corruption of the human heart and the danger of centralized authority.

Rand, an atheist, had little patience for the religious side of that inheritance. Yet her central political claim—that the smallest minority is the individual, and that any ideology which subordinates the individual to the group is already on the road to tyranny—converges with the older biblical suspicion of collective power. The scapegoat mechanism, the demand that someone be sacrificed for the sins or the needs of the many, is ancient. Objectivism names it without theological language and refuses to grant it moral legitimacy.

The same refusal applies to the newer forms of collectivism on offer: the racial and sexual identity politics that treat individuals as avatars of groups, the economic redistribution that treats productive achievement as a social resource to be reallocated, and the cultural insistence that biological reality itself is a social construct. These are not progressive refinements. They are regressions to the oldest political temptation—the belief that the group can rewrite the terms of its members’ existence.

The Continuing Argument

Objectivism is not the last word in philosophy. No system is. Human thought did not end with Aristotle, or with Rand, or with any other figure. Quantum theory, the limits of sensory apparatus, and the persistent human hunger for meaning beyond the strictly material remain open questions. One can accept the primacy of existence and the necessity of reason for navigating the world of action, while still acknowledging that the full picture of reality may lie beyond the current toolkit. The political core, however, does not require omniscience. It requires only the recognition that individuals are not raw material for someone else’s vision of the good, and that a society which protects the right of the mind to function is the only kind that has ever generated sustained prosperity and personal freedom.

That is why the books keep circulating and why the arguments keep returning. In a moment when collectivist premises dominate major institutions and when the productive minority is once again treated as a problem to be managed, Rand’s insistence on the individual as the irreducible unit of moral and political life is not nostalgia. It is a necessary corrective. The American experiment has always been an argument about how much room to give the person who refuses to live as a cog. Objectivism is one of the clearest modern statements of the side that says the person comes first. The debate is not academic. It is the daily substance of politics, culture, and the question of what kind of country this remains.

Further reading is straightforward. Start with the novels for the emotional and dramatic force, then move to the nonfiction for the systematic case. The rest is the ongoing work of testing those ideas against the evidence of history and the requirements of a free society.

Footnotes

1. For biographical context and the formative impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on Rand’s thought, see her own accounts in We the Living (semi-autobiographical) and the biographical material in Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Dutton, 1995).

2. Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982); also “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964).

3. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded 2nd ed., ed. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: NAL Books, 1990).

4. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness; the 1961 University of Wisconsin lecture is referenced in secondary literature and in Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991).

5. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” and related essays in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966).

6. On the novel’s reception and influence, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Whittaker Chambers’s review appeared in National Review, December 28, 1957. Robert Nozick’s critique is “On the Randian Argument,” The Personalist 52 (1971).

Bibliography

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Chambers, Whittaker. “Big Sister Is Watching You.” National Review, December 28, 1957.

Nozick, Robert. “On the Randian Argument.” The Personalist 52 (1971): 282–304.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 1991.

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1953 (orig. 1938).

———. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

———. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966.

———. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

———. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd ed. Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. New York: NAL Books, 1990.

———. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982.

———. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

———. We the Living. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

Rich Hoffman

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From Put-in-Bay Caves to Edison’s Milan Home: A Family Vacation That Reveals the Enduring Spark of American Curiosity

I have spent a good deal of time lately thinking about the ancient copper mines of Lake Superior and the strange, almost otherworldly geology that surrounds the Great Lakes. Those thoughts were still turning over in my mind when my family and I loaded the RV and headed for South Bass Island. People from California or Europe might look at a map of Ohio and wonder why anyone would choose an island in Lake Erie for a vacation. From where I sit, it is one of the finest places on earth. It is close enough that my wife and I can reach it without turning the trip into an ordeal, yet once you are on the island you feel properly away from the mainland and its noise. That distance matters to me more than it once did.

We took the ferry with the RV, set up camp, and let the grandchildren loose on golf carts. They had a tremendous time. My son-in-law captured a different angle of the same days on his YouTube channel—lighter, more focused on the pure family fun. I present information one way; he and my daughter present it another. The island itself offered exactly what I had hoped for: a short escape, some serious geology, and a chance to feed the particular curiosity I see in one of my grandsons.

Why South Bass Island and the Lake Erie Caves Called to Us

The geology of these islands is young by deep-time standards. Much of what you see was shaped by the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years ago, yet the underlying limestone and the cave systems hold older stories. I wanted the grandchildren to walk through those stories. Perry’s Cave is the most famous of them. During the War of 1812, men under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry used the underground freshwater stream inside the cave while the fleet was based in the natural harbor at Put-in-Bay. The cave sits fifty-odd feet below the surface, stays a constant cool temperature, and still carries that quiet historical weight.

A short distance away is Crystal Cave at Heineman’s Winery, recognized as the world’s largest geode. You descend into a single vast cavity lined with celestite crystals, some of them more than a foot long. The space is large enough to accommodate a small group of people comfortably. Standing inside it feels less like visiting a tourist attraction and more like stepping into a mineral cathedral formed over thousands of years after the ice retreated. My grandson, the one who already shows the restless, pattern-seeking intelligence that strongly reminds me of a young Thomas Edison, had been talking about the largest geode in the world. We made sure he saw it.

Joe’s Bar sits near the little airport, close enough that people flying in on small planes can walk over for a hamburger or fries. They allow dogs on the outdoor side, which is why my granddaughter wanted to go. We were not there for the drinking crowd. We were there because it sits almost on the path between the campground and the caves, and because a place that welcomes the family dog while serving simple food has its own quiet usefulness. These small details are part of what makes the island work.

The Edison Parallel and the Decision to Stay Longer in Milan

I talk about Thomas Edison a good deal around that particular grandson. It is not that I want to turn him into a replica. I want him to see that there have always been alternatives to the standard path. After the rest of us headed home, my oldest daughter, her husband, and that grandson stayed on. They took the extra days to drive over to Milan, Ohio, and visit Edison’s boyhood home. The house is modest, brick, and sits in a quiet town that still carries the inventor’s name with a certain local pride.

I had recommended Edmund Morris’s biography of Edison years earlier. Morris structured the book in reverse, beginning near the end of Edison’s life—when the older man was still frantically trying to solve the problem of domestic rubber production with Henry Ford and others—and working backward to the boy in Milan. That structure stays with me. It shows a man who never stopped pushing against limits, even when he was five minutes from death. His mother had pulled him out of the public school system early because the ordinary classroom could not contain him. She homeschooled him, protected his oddities, and gave him room to become the person who would later file patents at a pace almost no one has matched.

That decision by a mother in a small Ohio town still matters. The regulatory and educational environment today makes another Edison far less likely. My daughter understands this. Her husband understands it. They did not stay behind to force a legend on a child. They stayed to show him the actual house, the actual town, and the atmosphere that once allowed a singular mind to develop without being sanded down into a drone.

Local Newspapers, Mickey’s Gas Station, and the Voynich Manuscript

While they were in the Milan area, they stopped at one of the Mickey’s locations—a regional gas-station and market chain that still feels rooted in northern Ohio rather than corporate nowhere. At the counter, they picked up free local newspapers. One of them carried a feature on the Voynich Manuscript, the world’s most mysterious book. My daughter texted me photos of the pages and asked what I thought of it.

I had already written about the manuscript. My working view is that it may be the notebook of a non-human intelligence that somehow ended up in human hands—an idea that fits the larger pattern I explore in The Politics of Heaven. Whether that theory is ultimately correct or not, the fact that a free newspaper distributed at a gas station in Edison country would feature the Voynich at all tells you something about the residual curiosity that still lives in these communities. They are not merely selling fuel and snacks. They are still willing to put strange, difficult ideas in front of ordinary people who might take a copy home and actually read it.

That same spirit shows up in the little free papers and local efforts you find on the islands themselves. People publish them because they love the place and want to keep a certain industrious, heritage-minded atmosphere alive. It is the opposite of the passive consumption that dominates so much of modern life.

Hardware-Store Towels, Uranus Fudge, and the Ordinary Magic of Ohio Stops

One afternoon we took the kids to a beach facing Kelley’s Island from South Base Island. It is one of the better swimming spots in the area, down past the memorial at the far end. No one had packed swimsuits or towels. The water was cold, as Lake Erie usually is. My wife climbed into a golf cart, drove to the little hardware-and-grocery store that serves much of the island, bought towels and extra clothes, and raced back so the children would not freeze on the return ride. The whole episode lasted maybe half an hour. It was pure small-town improvisation, and it worked.

On other trips, we stop at Shelton’s fireworks store in Richmond, Indiana, right across the state line. Across the street sits the Uranus Fudge Factory, a place that leans hard into adolescent humor in its name yet sells genuinely high-quality candy. This has been a candy year for the grandchildren. We have hit obscure sweet shops all over Ohio, and Uranus held its own. We also make the ritual stop at the McDonald’s in Eaton with the good playground, even though the kids are now mostly too old to play on it. They still like being there. On the way back, we often grab Chinese food from the little plaza near the Walmart. These are not glamorous destinations. They are simply places that have kept a certain American texture—part commerce, part joke, part genuine local pride.

What These Days Actually Mean

I did not plan the vacation as a lesson. I planned it as time away with the people I care about, on an island that still feels like itself. The geology, the caves, the geode, the Edison house, the free newspaper with the Voynich article, the hardware-store towels, and the slightly ridiculous fudge factory all belong to the same larger pattern. They are evidence that pockets of real curiosity and individual initiative still exist in ordinary American places.

The copper mines of Superior, the glacial history of the islands, the unexplained manuscript, and the boy who was protected from the standard school system all feed into the same set of questions I have been carrying for years. Those questions will appear in full in The Politics of Heaven. For now, it is enough to say that a family trip to Put-in-Bay and a side journey to Milan reminded me why I keep returning to these subjects. Intelligence and inventiveness do not come from committees or from systems designed to produce uniform results. They come from particular minds given room to develop, often in small towns that still value their own odd heritage.

I am glad my daughter and son-in-law captured their version of the days on video. I am glad the grandchildren got to stand inside the largest geode, walk through Perry’s Cave, and see the actual house where Edison began. And I am glad a free newspaper at a gas station still bothers to tell people about the world’s most mysterious book. These are small signs, but they are real. In a time when so much of the culture seems determined to flatten everything into the same safe shape, they are worth noticing.

If you ever find yourself near Lake Erie with a few free days, take the ferry. Walk the caves. Stand inside the geode. And if you are driving through northern Ohio, stop at a Mickey’s and pick up whatever free paper they are giving away that week. You never know what might be inside it.

Footnotes

1. Guinness World Records recognizes Crystal Cave at Heineman’s Winery on South Bass Island as the largest geode, a single celestite cavity discovered in 1887 while digging a well.

2. Historical accounts credit men under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry with using the underground stream in Perry’s Cave for freshwater during the 1813 occupation of the island before the Battle of Lake Erie.

3. Edmund Morris, Edison (New York: Random House, 2019). The biography is structured in reverse chronological order, beginning near the end of Edison’s life and moving backward to his boyhood in Milan, Ohio.

4. The Voynich Manuscript, held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, remains undeciphered. Fringe theories have long included non-human or extraterrestrial origin; the author’s own published view aligns with that line of speculation as part of a broader inquiry into non-human intelligence.

5. Mickey’s is a regional convenience-store and gas-station chain headquartered in the Milan, Ohio area, known for community involvement and local character.

Selected Bibliography

Morris, Edmund. Edison. New York: Random House, 2019.

Heineman’s Winery and Crystal Cave historical materials, Put-in-Bay, Ohio.

Perry’s Cave Family Fun Center and related War of 1812 documentation.

National Park Service materials on Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial.

Voynich Manuscript facsimile and scholarly literature, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Local histories of South Bass Island, Kelleys Island, and the Lake Erie island archipelago.

Geology of the Great Lakes region and post-glacial cave formation studies.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming).

The Gunfighter’s Guide: A skeleton key to Western Civilization (gunfighterguide.shop)

Rich Hoffman

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