When problems arise, I work through them by grinding them out deliberately and roughly. I dive deep, often isolating myself from society’s wider noise and reading intensively during the hardest stretches of labor. This is not abstract philosophy for me. It is a method forged under physical strain—long days, sore bones, limited sleep—and it has repeatedly yielded clearer answers than comfort ever has. In 2026, the question of integrity has forced me back to that method. A currency I want to believe in has failed widely, and the only way forward has been to confront it head-on, the way Jonah was swallowed by the whale and spat back out with a message he could no longer avoid.
Years ago I established a baseline by working extreme hours: sixteen-hour days Monday through Friday, with shorter days only on the weekend. I commuted by bicycle, often an hour or more round-trip, and still managed to read during brief breaks. Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God (the multi-volume series exploring comparative mythology) was one of the books that sustained me then. Those nights around four in the morning, with ten or fifteen minutes stolen from the schedule, the pages offered a different lens on human invention of meaning. Recently the pattern has returned. I have been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s major works under similar pressure: The Reformation: A History, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, and Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. These are substantial volumes. Consumed in short segments amid physical exhaustion, they clarify rather than dilute. The hardship itself becomes part of the reading. Comfortable readers may absorb the narrative; those with bloody knuckles and joint pain tend to feel the stakes.
Integrity functions as a currency more durable than dollars. A dollar is worth a dollar. In my experience, integrity multiplies that value roughly tenfold in practical terms—employment, trust, the capacity to build lasting things. You cannot fake it on paper the way central banks can expand the money supply. When Richard Nixon suspended dollar convertibility to gold on August 15, 1971 (the “Nixon Shock”), the world moved further into a fiat system. The parallel in social discourse is the removal of fixed standards. Without a recognizable measure—historically supplied in the West by biblical teaching, the Commandments, and the Golden Rule—trust-based transactions become unreliable. Societies that abandon it find law and order harder to maintain, just as currencies without backing invite inflation and capture by those who print the paper.
Historically, Christianity functioned as an effective invention for establishing such standards. MacCulloch’s sweeping accounts show its development from earlier Mediterranean and Near Eastern roots, its encounter with Greek ideas, and its institutionalization through the first three millennia. Martin Luther’s stand at Worms in 1521—“Here I stand; I can do no other”—exemplifies the priority of conscience tethered to Scripture over institutional power. The Reformation, whatever its later complexities and conflicts, helped embed notions of individual responsibility and resistance to unchecked authority. These contributed to the broader Western emphasis on the rule of law, voluntary association, and limits on the sacralization of politics. Historians examining Christianity’s role in equality before God, the desacralization of the state, and the development of institutions of care and inquiry have documented measurable civilizational effects. Places that adopted or adapted these patterns often produced more orderly cooperation and material progress than surrounding alternatives. Israel’s relative success amid regional difficulties illustrates the same point: coherent standards, however imperfectly applied, produce measurable outcomes.
I have seen the opposite in practice. When people treat integrity as optional—prioritizing short-term advantage, food, status, or sex over consistent character—the results are shallow and destructive. Betrayals feel like the Judas kiss: anticipated, yet still corrosive. Low-integrity actors in business, politics, or consulting often operate through compromises (honeypots, selective enforcement of rules, or ideological capture of institutions). Corporate examples include lasting damage from certain marketing campaigns and cultural shifts in sports and entertainment that prioritized signaling over the reality of customers or employees. Globalist and administrative approaches that print moral or financial value without backing have repeatedly underperformed. They assume that authority or volume of paper can substitute for earned trust. History and recent experience show otherwise. Organizations built on high-integrity leadership—Elon Musk’s track record with SpaceX and Tesla is a clear case—succeed because the people involved endure the same grinding conditions at the top. Sleeping on the floor, working long hours, and refusing to outsource the hard problems produces systems capable of repeated launches and engineered excellence. Fiat substitutes do not.
My own choices have followed the same logic. I have turned down or walked away from money when it conflicted with integrity, not because money is unimportant, but because unbacked claims eventually collapse. Isolation by age, family responsibilities, and deliberate separation from comfortable consensus has sharpened the contrast. You notice how many people resent the mirror of consistent standards. They prefer environments where value can be assigned rather than earned. Christianity, for all its internal contradictions and failures across centuries (which MacCulloch documents without flinching), repeatedly reasserted a public measure against pure power or appetite. Efforts to erase that measure—whether through selective historical revision, institutional capture, or the claim that standards are merely tools of oppression—have not produced the stable, high-trust societies their advocates predicted.
The treasures worth retrieving come from the whale’s belly. Embracing the pain of disappointment, physical exhaustion, and clear-eyed observation of widespread failure does not invalidate the diagnosis. It supplies the clarity. I have written about related themes in The Politics of Heaven, which examines conspiracies and schemes against the ordering principles of creation, drawing on Milton’s Paradise Lost and the observable footprints of such dynamics. The same pattern appears in attempts to detach currency, law, and personal conduct from any fixed reference. Integrity cannot be stolen the way printed money or institutional prestige can. Those who defend it remain employable and effective even when low-integrity actors prefer their absence.
This is not a call to nostalgia or perfection. It is an observation that the most valuable currency to accumulate is the one that cannot be counterfeited by decree. Western civilization’s relative historical success is inseparable from the standards Christianity helped install and maintain. Restoring or protecting them requires the same grinding method that produces any durable result: long hours, discomfort, and refusal to accept substitutes. The alternative is continued inflation of claims and erosion of trust until the system fails in plain view.
Footnotes
1. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God (four volumes: Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, Creative Mythology), Viking Press, 1959–1968. Campbell’s comparative approach traces how cultures invent and transmit frameworks of meaning.
2. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2009). A comprehensive survey of Christian development from pre-Christian roots through global expansion.
3. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Penguin, 2005; originally Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700). Details the institutional and theological ruptures of the sixteenth century.
4. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Allen Lane, 2024). Examines evolving Christian approaches to sexuality, gender, and family across millennia, highlighting contradictions and changes.
5. Richard Nixon’s suspension of dollar-gold convertibility, August 15, 1971. See Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, “Nixon and the End of the Bretton Woods System,” and Federal Reserve History essays on the end of gold convertibility. This marked a decisive shift toward fiat arrangements.
6. Martin Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms, 1521. His refusal to recant without scriptural or reasoned conviction is a standard reference point for conscience versus institutional authority. See standard biographies and MacCulloch’s Reformation history.
7. On Christianity’s contributions to Western institutions (equality of persons, rule of law, voluntary association, limits on political power), see works by George Weigel, Larry Siedentop, Nick Spencer, and others examining pre-Enlightenment Christian sources of modern norms. Outcomes were neither uniform nor unmixed with conflict.
8. Max Weber’s thesis on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism remains a classic (if debated) account of how certain religious attitudes correlated with economic patterns. Contemporary economic historians have also traced earlier monastic and legal contributions within Christian Europe.
9. Elon Musk’s operational style at SpaceX and Tesla is widely documented in contemporary reporting: long hours, direct engineering involvement, and emphasis on iterative hard work over signaling.
10. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667). The epic’s portrayal of rebellion against ordered creation supplies a literary frame for themes of conspiracy and resistance explored in related writing.
Bibliography
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. 4 vols. New York: Viking Press, 1959–1968.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin, 2005.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. London: Allen Lane, 2024.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Silence: A Christian History. London: Allen Lane, 2013.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667.
Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Weigel, George. Various essays and books on Christianity’s civilizational impact, including contributions to discussions of Western democratic and moral foundations.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1905.
Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. “Milestones: 1969–1976 – Nixon and the End of the Bretton Woods System.”
Federal Reserve History. Essays on the end of gold convertibility, August 1971.
Blainey, Geoffrey. A Short History of Christianity. (General survey of Christian historical influence.)
Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason and related works on Christianity and the rise of Western institutions and science.
Additional relevant reading: histories of the gold standard and fiat currency (e.g., works on Bretton Woods), studies of Protestant work ethic and economic development, accounts of corporate cultural shifts in the 2010s–2020s, and primary Reformation sources including Luther’s writings.
This text is structured for straightforward copying. The core argument remains that integrity, grounded in durable standards and tested under pressure, is the non-counterfeitable currency required for any lasting personal or civilizational achievement.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I said I would do a thesis on Jason Voorhees. I still will. I have been thinking about him all season, and I have been close enough to the subject to test a few things I used to know only from a chair. I cannot talk about that work yet. I am under an obligation on it, and I will get into the details in November, after Halloween 2026 has passed. What I can say now, and what I will stand behind, is this: if you go to Kings Island Haunt and walk JASON: Blood Reign, you will be scared. I do not care how tough you think you are.
That is not a park slogan. It is an observation about what the maze is built to do.
A B-movie with a longer shadow
When I was a teenager, Friday the 13th was the movie you watched hoping to see a topless girl. There was no internet. You could not pull anything up whenever you wanted to see nudity. You sat through a camp-in-the-woods picture and took what you could get. I have always thought of those films that way. They are B-movies. They are fun. They are rough. The later ones are mostly refs of the earlier ones.
They are also still here.
A dozen films on, Jason Voorhees is one of the most recognized villains American cinema ever produced. People do not just remember him. They wear him. At Kings Island, you can walk out of the gift shop in a Jason jersey or a Jason hoodie, and you can buy the same stuff almost anywhere else the season is being sold. That is not how audiences are supposed to treat a killer. They are supposed to sympathize with the victims. They do not. They root for Jason to finish the job. I have wanted to know why, and I have wanted to know it in a way that survives contact with the actual exhibit, not just the comfort of a book.
Haunted houses are a very specific American habit. Jason is a very specific kind of villain. The Kings Island maze, one of three Six Flags parks debuting JASON: Blood Reign this year, and the only one in the Midwest, is the cleanest public expression of that psychology I have seen. Universal has promoted the property. Other parks have tried the mask. This one understands the character.
Psycho, the mother, and the boy in the lake
The first Friday the 13th is not really a Jason movie. It is a mother movie. Pamela Voorhees is the killer. Her boy drowned in the lake while the counselors were off doing what counselors in these movies always do. The picture owes a great deal to Psycho: the mother, the frame, the sense that you are being watched from the tree line, the score doing half the violence before a hand ever moves. Hitchcock is all over the early films, whether anyone on set would have said so. You are often looking at the victims from the place the killer is standing.
Jason himself comes back in the sequel, still not the hockey mask. The mask arrives in Part III, taken off a prankster, and from then on it is the face. No eyes you can bargain with. No mouth you can read. Kevin Bacon, years before Footloose, dies in the first film with an arrow through the throat. We did not leave the theater grieving the campers. We left talking about the kill.
The added layer, past Psycho, is that Jason was the picked-on boy. Different. Isolated. Kept by his mother. Abandoned, in the story the films tell, by the very people hired to watch the children. He dies. She avenges him. Then he comes back, and he does not stay dead. He has no fear of death because the films will not let death keep him. He cannot be appealed to. He cannot be shamed. He grew into a slow, silent killer with no tether to the rules the camp was built to teach.
Why the gift shop sells the killer
Most of what scares people in a haunt is not contact. You are not allowed to be touched. The scare is psychological, and nothing in that toolkit is more psychological than a silent killer who does not yell, does not explain, and does not hurry. He keeps coming.
People identify with that. I do not think they were supposed to. I think Jason was built as a killer and a punishment. Audiences made him something else. They bought the jersey. They wanted the counselors dead. The kids in those movies are the structure: the ones who tell you when to build the fire, when to brush your teeth, when the season starts, when it ends, which lake you can swim in, which trail you can take. They are also, in the films’ own moral accounting, the ones who were having sex while a boy drowned. The audience holds both ideas at once and picks Jason.
That is the interesting part. We do not identify with the victims of a system. We identify with what cuts the system down, even when that thing is a murderer. Art in a free country is allowed to show that. We do not have to pretend we came for the counselors.
Camp counselors, peer pressure, and the pecking order
I have spent a lot of years watching this kind of subject from a distance. Books. A chair. A camper. Airports. High altitude, low emotional cost. This year I have had to look at a few things up close, without that distance, and I think some of that was on purpose. The Jason question got sharper when I could no longer keep it theoretical.
Here is the part I have been telling people.
Most of us spend our lives appealing to someone we have decided is above us. The neighbor has more money. Someone else has the better job, the better spouse, the better lawn, the better pool. We measure ourselves in human units, and we learned the units early. Babies mimic. They copy speech, the shape of a mouth, the way an eye narrows, the way a person walks. Then the wider world gets hold of the copy. Peer pressure is the delivery system. I have said for years that evil does some of its best work there: not as a monster in a lake, but as the whisper that tells ordinary people who is at the top of the order, and what they have to do to stay near it.
Joseph Campbell, in one of the lectures that stayed with me, talked about the packing order. Take away the modern costume, and you still have the top male, the top female, the breeding pair, the children who grow up to be the quarterback and the homecoming queen. Those are not small social decorations. They are the structure. Camp counselors are a summer-stock version of the same thing. So are a lot of police in the later Friday the 13th films, and many other authority figures who show up to explain Jason away and then get killed for their trouble. The audience is not shocked. The audience wanted the explanation killed.
Public life works the same way. We drive the kids to the institution. We pass the levy. We clap for the order that tells people when to sit, what to repeat, and who is allowed to be different. Then we feel a small, guilty satisfaction when something outside that order swings an axe at it. Lakota, in my own backyard, is the argument I usually use for how a system can be captured. I am not making Jason a school-board lecture. I am saying the reflex is the same. We participate in the structure, and we cheer when the structure bleeds, because some part of us knows the structure is how peer pressure keeps score.
Jason never learned the score. He never learned how to get the girl’s attention. He had his mother, and the films treat that attachment as unnatural, which it is, and also as the only loyalty he has that is not for sale. When he comes back, he is not in the pecking order. He is what happens when the pecking order is refused.
Sacrifice, scapegoats, and why the kill feels like relief
This is where the character stops being a B-movie and starts rhyming with older material, which is why he belongs in the neighborhood of The Politics of Heaven even if a hockey mask looks ridiculous next to a dolmen.
Human beings have a long habit of killing a designated victim so the group can feel clean. Aztec sacrifice, Canaanite offerings, sexual cults built to feed a deity, the Roman habit of treating the planets as powers that had to be paid: the names change, and the mechanic does not. Something is angry. Something wants blood. The group picks a body and calls the killing sacred. René Girard’s scapegoat account is the cleanest modern description of that mechanic I have found. The victim is loaded with the group’s disorder and destroyed so the group can go back to pretending it is orderly. In the Christian telling, Christ walks into that role on purpose and breaks the cycle, which is why the crucifixion is not just another offering on the pile. It is the offering meant to end offerings.
Jason is a pop version of the other half of the story. He is not the scapegoat the counselors sacrifice. He is the return of the boy they already sacrificed through neglect, mockery, and busyness. The films then reverse the rite. The counselors become the offering. The audience feels relief, not because murder is good, but because the social order that lives on peer pressure has been put on the block for ninety minutes. We get to watch the thing we obey get punished by something that cannot be shamed, fired, voted out, or talked down.
That is why he cannot be killed in any way that sticks. Immortality, in this costume, means he is outside the leverage. You cannot threaten a dead man with his reputation.
I am not saying the movies are theology. I am saying a free country, left alone with a camera and a mask, stumbled onto a picture of the same appeasement instinct the old death cults organized on purpose. We call it entertainment. We still buy the hoodie.
Why Blood Reign works
JASON: Blood Reign puts that on a floor you have to walk. Kings Island’s Halloween Haunt runs select nights from September 25 through October 31, 2026, and the maze is the new centerpiece: the woods, the camp, the blood-soaked retelling, Jason as the slasher the franchise spent forty years building. It is not a pile of cut-up props and a loud noise. A lot of haunts are only that. This one puts him on a pedestal and makes the guest do the psychological work the films trained them to do. You already know whose side you are on before the first corridor. That is the scare. The body knows it came to see the order lose.
I have called it the best haunted experience in the country this year, and I’ll stand by that. The build is top-notch, and it is smarter than the promotion. Six Flags asked, in so many words, whether you were on Jason’s side. The honest answer, for more people than will admit it in daylight, is yes.
What November is for
I have a longer argument, and I am not making it this month. I want to confirm some of what I want to confirm up close, not from the usual distance. After the season, I will write the dissertation version: the rise of this particular evil, why a picked-on boy became a folk saint, what a silent killer is doing in a culture that claims to hate bullies and then organizes itself by them. Until then, the public point is enough.
Go to Kings Island. Walk JASON: Blood Reign. You will be scared, because the maze is built on what Jason means, not on a rubber knife. He does what most of us won’t. He does not negotiate with peer pressure. He kills the people whose job is to apply it. We root for him because some part of us is tired of the pecking order, and because art is still the safest place in America to admit it.
I’ll explain more in November.
Further reading
• Friday the 13th (1980), Sean S. Cunningham; Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981); Friday the 13th Part III (1982). The mother, the return, the mask.
• Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock. The template the first film is borrowing from.
• René Girard, The Scapegoat and Violence and the Sacred. The group, the victim, the relief.
• Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth and the packing-order material in the primitive-mythology lectures. Social order before it puts on modern clothes.• Kings Island Halloween Haunt, JASON: Blood Reign, Mason, Ohio, select nights September 25–October 31
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been hinting at this for weeks, and I still won’t say exactly what I am doing. I can tell you the shape of it. I have been toying with a Ph.D. for several years, and I think the trigger has finally been pulled. I already know what the doctoral thesis will be. A version of it will live on the blog, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years to hear the argument. A humanities dissertation runs on the order of 80,000 words. That is a long walk. It is also, if you do it right, a bridge between things the academy will not put in the same room.
I am not happy about what has happened to academia. I am not happy that a credential which was supposed to mean rigor has been rendered, in too many departments, into a party card for liberal politics. I think there are a lot of problems with that, and I would like to get on that side of the argument for my own reasons. A Ph.D. is a tool. It is not a personality. It gives you a seat in a fight that otherwise dismisses you as a blogger with a whip and a podcast. I do not want the universities left entirely to people who have already decided the conclusion. Big tent, small tent, ethics, the lack of ethics: this is the same argument I have been making about parties and about sheriffs. If you will not go into the room, you do not get to complain that the room was captured.
The thesis comes out of The Politics of Heaven. Even while I am doing everything else, if I write several books in that line, and if I am involved in aerospace work that makes money and does cool things, none of that changes the strategy. Money is a tool. You do not do the long work to get paid for it. The Politics of Heaven, in the draft I have been editing, is over 200,000 words. The published book will be shorter. Parts of it are clean. I’m combining two bodies of evidence in the same paragraph because few others have read both piles. The politics of heaven, as I am using the phrase, are my speculations built on a very wide reading. Very few people read as much of this material as I do, or as diversely. I put things together in places the guild system of the sciences cannot handle, because the guild system is paid to stay in its lane. There needs to be a bridge. If I am going to write a thesis anyway, I might as well make the bridge the doctorate.
People I trust with a book want an entry. They want to know the information has been through a fight. Academic argument, when it is actually argument and not a loyalty oath, comes across better if you get on their side of the table and make them defend the status quo. I think I have a hook. Less than one percent of the people who encounter it are going to love it. Everyone else will scratch their heads and say they are not ready. That is fine. A lot of what I assert is not laboratory science. It is immersion. It is psychology. It is a lifetime of reading. I make assertions that are not “scientifically grounded” in the sense a journal referee means, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. They are grounded in experience, in a level of ethical attention, and in a concern I am willing to name: the ethical behavior of the spirit world, how it moves against the human race, and how it plots against God’s design. That is the concern. I am not worried about putting the frame of it out here. Somebody might try to steal it. I’m happy to share them and see if anyone can do anything with them. Most people cannot.
The thesis, as I am presuming to pursue it, is Jason Voorhees: why he is scary, and why Yahweh had to save the world from the gods of Canaan. And why those are not two subjects.
A book I saw advertised through Biblical Archaeology Review took the very progressive line that the Palestinians are the indigenous people and that Israel is the invader, the same argument you hear about American Indians. I heard a woman out of Portland, Oregon, the other day, talking about the drug problem on those streets, the cities run by blue mayors, and she concluded that we need to teach kids to do drugs, because the Indians were doing drugs, talking to spirits, going on vision quests. Democrats, in that telling, need this to happen to our young people. Break them away from their parents at twelve and thirteen. Send them on a spirit journey under drug consumption. Let them communicate with the other world. Coyote. Peyote. The vision.
I am writing, among other things, about why you should not do that, and about what you are actually encountering when you go looking for the spirit world on those terms. I talk about three rivers a lot. I talk about the origin stories of the Aztecs. I talk about a claim almost no working archaeologist or anthropologist will yet admit in public, which is that the Noah story has a geographical hook in eastern Turkey that the guild retired, and that some of the people who wrote the retirement papers are themselves retired, and that methods we were told settled the question are being reopened because the ground will not stay closed. I am saying yes to some of those reopenings because I know where the argument is going. For me, proof is not a single carbon date. Proof is accumulated experience and a willingness to read the thing the department will not assign.
So the thesis, in a sentence: Jason Voorhees and how Yahweh saved the human race from the gods of Canaan; the rest of the map is the same type. Indian cultures. Central Mexican cultures. Large parts of South America. If we were allowed to explore the same questions in Russia, China, Afghanistan, and India with the same honesty, we would know more about them too. I hear the argument every week that Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the Hindu traditions are older than Christianity, and the related argument that Hindu and Buddhist ideas migrated into the community around Jesus, that John the Baptist was a rebel against orthodox Judaism, that Greek society had already been in those eastern regions for two or three hundred years before the Roman machine arrived, with its gods and its planetary worship and its mystery cults. We would also understand the dolmens of the Jordan Valley better than we do. We would ask a ruder question: why do we have stone chambers in New England, and mound-and-monument landscapes in the northern Great Lakes and the Michigan peninsula, that keep getting explained away as root cellars and colonial oddities. At the same time, the Jordan field is allowed to be religion? Those are good questions. They are not simple. They are the complicated kind of simple, the kind that looks obvious once you stop protecting the departmental border.
Here is the hook I plan to share before November. The thirteenth villain, the one America actually produced, could not have been created anywhere but here. No other artistic culture had the combination. A commercial horror film, made for almost nothing, aimed at teenagers, indifferent to critics’ approval, and then kept alive by the audience for forty-six years. That figure explains something the ancient Near Eastern texts only describe from the other side: why people worshiped the deities of Canaan, why Yahweh was necessary, why the land had to be cleared of rival cults if anyone wanted a garden rather than an altar, why there could not be another god before him, and why human beings keep drifting back to the lesser worship anyway. I will explain more of the operational evidence after Halloween. I cannot discuss that part yet. I can tell you I am obsessed with why Jason Voorhees was invented in American cinema, and why people are still obsessed with him.
I got interested again when I saw how people reacted. My grandkids and my wife play Dead by Daylight on the PlayStation 5 a lot, all the time. I wanted to know why this character was in the room. I remembered him from when I was a teenager. In those years, you watched the movies because you wanted to see kids get killed and you wanted the cheap thrill, and you filed it under science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and you moved on. He did not move on. Then I realized there was a psychological mechanism under the costume, and I immersed myself in it until I had something I could call objective evidence. Enough, I think, for 80,000 words on why Jason Voorhees matters in the art and entertainment of human cultures, and why he had to be invented in America.
The academic position I want to refuse is the one that treats indigenous worship as automatically virtuous. Worship of lesser gods, as against Yahweh, or against what I will call for the thesis an Alpha claim on the divine, is not a heritage to be restored. It is a psychology. It has a shape. It shows up in Canaan. It shows up in the vision-quest argument. It shows up in the woman who thinks the drug policy of a failing city is a sacrament. It shows up, dressed as entertainment, in a hockey mask. If you want to talk about the psychology of goodness in a culture, and about how you defend a big-tent civilization against people who think every altar is equal, you have to be willing to look at the altar people actually kneel at when nobody from the department is watching.
This will be a quiet undertaking. It is not the thing that makes the money. I think it is needed if the human race is going to get a psychological look at itself that is not written by the people who already agree with the Portland sermon. For my part, I jump off the board before the pool is finished filling. A lot of things have to happen on the way down. I have often made the large moves under dangerous circumstances, because that is where the world actually is. You do not find the treasure by doing the same thing everyone else is doing. I think I have found something in Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13th series: why human beings are so ready to worship an idea, and why a certain kind of academia wants to point everyone toward the indigenous deity and call it liberation. That is why the drug argument keeps coming back. I understand why people feel that way. I do not feel anything close to it. Liberal-minded people, tending to vote Democrat, accommodate the opinion because they have talked themselves into believing every spirit is a friend if it arrives wearing the costume of the oppressed. I have a different reading now of why Jason is revered across cultures and across decades, and why he became a killer in Dead by Daylight not as a memory of the movies but as a current character. I know him from the movies, from the games, and from everything that has cascaded off him. I have watched that cascade go through generations.
I am deep in it. It will not make anyone rich. The information I have learned is more than most people will ever care to know about the character and about the public reaction to him. In November, I will share the details I can’t share now. It is the doctoral idea. To help the academics, I will put it on ground they already understand, and on ground everybody else understands: a horror movie. It is a good comment. It is a big concept. I am going to use it to launch the reasoning about why those older worships were dangerous, why people still practice them, why they are still impactful, and why a society that wants to fix itself has to fix that before it fixes the tax bill.
It will be entertaining. I promise that. Some of the apocalyptic discussions I have had came from real reflection, because I put myself through a considerable amount of discomfort to see the thing from the inside. It is not enough to stand on the dock and throw a theory at the water. You have to go in with the sharks and the snakes and the vipers and see what is actually down there. I would like it to be easier. I want the design of the world to be more accommodating to personal pleasure. Here is the deal. I will get further into this over the coming weeks and months as I work up to it. A thesis, in the ordinary academic calendar, is five or six years of hard work. In another sense, I have already been at the reading for longer than that. I know what the end needs to be. It needs to be this. And it has an academic entrance, which you cannot use unless you have gone down the rabbit hole past Alice, further by a lot. That is what I am talking about. I think I understand Jason Voorhees, the public reaction to him, the fascination, and why the human race turns away from Yahweh and Jesus Christ and finds itself worshiping the old neighbors.
The Jewish people worshiped the calf when Moses took too long coming down with the commandments. The guidance drifted. Even Aaron drifted. He drifted for a reason. What is the reason? I think I have it. I will put it in the books, in the thesis, and in future academic work. I will also put it here, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years. Putting it out helps me. The feedback helps. People send notes. They ask questions I had not framed. I get a better answer, and I refine it. That is the process. It is not always the way I would design it. It has been working.
A dose of reality with a fire under it has been hard. This particular immersion has been out of my comfort zone. It will make for a richer discussion, which is the point of the effort. Job titles are transitory. Acquisitions are transitory. Most of them are built on compliance with human systems. I mean compliance with a cosmic claim. The Bible is not a hint. I think it is part of a larger story we are going to be covering for thousands of years, and that we miraculously captured some of it through prophets and through voices that managed to get a portion written down, and that the portion lasted through purges and reformations and kingdoms and empires to reach us.
I find that survival a miracle. There is a lot more, and when a generation is done with the portion it inherited, it still has to ask questions. It has to cut into the topic with evidence-based trajectories. That is what I am doing. I wish it were easier to get. If it were easy, more people would do it. Very few have the stomach for the fight. I have gone down the rabbit hole. I have seen what is down there. I know a treasure was left behind, and I think it is my task, because I have been given a voice, to bring some of that treasure into the light.
The structural thesis on Jason Voorhees is the door. I think people are going to get a kick out of it. It is going to be fun. If you liked The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you’ll know the voice. The subject is different. The standard is not.
NOTES
1. A typical humanities doctoral thesis in the United States and Britain falls somewhere around 80,000 to 100,000 words, excluding bibliography. I am using 80,000 as the working target, not as a university requirement already assigned to me. I am not enrolled in a program as of this writing. The point of saying the number is to mark the scale: this is not a blog post, and it is not a five-year wait for the blog either.
2. The Politics of Heaven is the manuscript I have described elsewhere as completed in draft in 2026, in final edits, and aimed at publication in 2027. The draft I am editing has run past 200,000 words. The published book will be cut down. The thesis is a bridge out of that book, not a substitute for it.
3. Friday the 13th, produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, written by Victor Miller, opened in the United States on May 9, 1980. Budget reported under $600,000. Domestic gross about $39.8 million; worldwide about $59.8 million. It was the first independent slasher picked up by a major studio, Paramount. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, revised 2026; Ryan Gilbey, “Friday the 13th at 40,” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.
4. In the first film, the killer is Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother. Jason himself appears at the end as a jump scare. Makeup designer Tom Savini has said the beat was his idea after Carrie: “let’s bring in Jason.” Victor Miller later objected to the sequels making Jason the killer: “Jason was dead from the very beginning. He was a victim, not a villain.” That argument inside the creative team is part of the evidence. The culture did not accept the victim. It promoted the corpse. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, production history.
5. The hockey mask arrives in Friday the 13th Part III, released August 13, 1982, directed by Steve Miner, the only film in the series released in 3-D. On-set accounts say a Detroit Red Wings goaltender mask belonging to 3-D effects supervisor Martin Jay Sadoff was put on actor Richard Brooker for a lighting test, then enlarged by makeup effects. In Part 2, Jason had worn a sack. The mask is an American industrial object, a piece of sporting armor, not a cult image designed by a priest. That is the point.
6. The franchise then did what Canaanite cults did. It would not stay dead. Sequels, a 2009 reboot, a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street, novels, song references from Tupac to Eminem, The Simpsons, and, in 2026, a playable killer. Gilbey notes that Jason became the first fictional character to receive an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award. The culture promoted a murderer of teenagers into an institution.
7. Dead by Daylight, from Behavior Interactive, added Jason as Chapter 40 on June 16, 2026. In the game, he is called The Slasher. The chapter shipped as paid downloadable content at $4.99 or 500 Auric Cells, with a hockey-mask cosmetic and a “Misty Cabin” banner. He joined Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, and Leatherface on the same roster. My wife and my grandchildren play the game. That is not a footnote to the thesis. That is the transmission mechanism: a character I met as a teenager is now a weekly opponent for children who were not alive for the original film.
8. The Canaanite comparison is the theological half of the thesis, and I am stating it here as my claim, not as a finding already peer-reviewed. The biblical polemic is not subtle. Israel is commanded not to do what the nations did on their high places. Child sacrifice to Molech is forbidden and treated as a capital offense (Leviticus 18:21, 20:2-5; Deuteronomy 12:31; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 32:35). The contest on Carmel is a direct trial between Yahweh and Baal (1 Kings 18). Josiah’s reform demolishes the high places, the asherim, and the Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom (2 Kings 23). John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge, 1989), belongs in the bibliography so the fight is visible. My claim is that the psychological pattern survives the argument about body counts.
9. The golden calf is the control case inside Israel itself. Exodus 32: Aaron builds the calf because the people will not wait for Moses to come down. The text does not treat this as a moment of heritage. It treats it as drift under impatience, including drift by the priest. That is the mechanism I think I can show in the modern material: absence of the harder claim, impatience, a visible substitute, and a leader who accommodates the substitute so the crowd will not leave.
10. The Portland remark is from a broadcast comment I heard, a woman arguing that children should be taught drug use because indigenous vision quests used intoxicants to speak with spirits, set against the open drug scenes of cities run by Democratic mayors. I am not hanging the thesis on her name. I am hanging it on the argument, which is now common: the pre-Christian or non-Christian rite is the authentic one, the parental household is the interruption, and the drug is the sacrament. Standard starting points on the Native American Church and peyote, which is not the same thing as a municipal drug market, include Weston La Barre, The Peyote Cult (1938 and later editions), and Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
11. On the Biblical Archaeology Review advertisement and the “Palestinians as indigenous, Israel as invader” line: BAR has long carried a range of politics alongside the archaeology, and the indigenous framing of the Palestinian claim has become a standard academic position in parts of Near Eastern studies since the 1990s, drawing on the same vocabulary used for Native American land claims. I am marking the parallel as my reading of that advertisement and of the wider literature, not as a quotation from a single editor. A fair bibliography has to carry both William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Eerdmans, 2003), and the more minimalist and postcolonial work the department actually assigns.
12. Jordan Valley dolmens are not a rumor. Fields run along the escarpment east of the Jordan, south from the Yarmuk toward the Kerak plateau, with a heavy Early Bronze Age I burial use and a possible late Chalcolithic beginning. See the radiometric dolmen paper in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2023), and David Gilead, “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100 (1968). James A. Fraser’s Dolmens in the Levant (2018) is the modern synthesis. More than a century of work has still not produced dolmens west of the Jordan south of the Upper Galilee.
13. New England stone chambers are the contested American analog, and I am not going to pretend the guild has conceded the point. The colonial root-cellar explanation is the standard one. A luminescence study of structures in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, published in 2022 in Quaternary Geochronology, reported sediment ages under some structures in the late sixteenth century, before sustained colonial settlement. That is not a Phoenician colony. It is a date that does not fit the root-cellar story cleanly. The thesis does not need the chambers to be dolmens. It needs the question to stay open.
14. The Michigan peninsula and the northern Great Lakes are a different monumental tradition: Late Woodland mounds and earthworks, roughly AD 1200-1600, not Levantine dolmens. Meghan C. L. Howey, Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600 (University of Arizona Press, 2012), is a careful book. I raise the peninsula because the public is told these are separate phenomena by disciplinary border, while the psychological function, a built place where the dead or the spirit is dealt with outside the household, keeps rhyming. The rhyme is my claim. The distinction in architecture is the academy’s fact. Both go in the thesis.
15. The Durupinar formation near Dogubayazit, eastern Turkey, is the Noah’s Ark claim I am referring to. The geological consensus, including a 1996 paper by Lorence Collins and David Fasold, “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure,” is that the boat shape is a natural formation. In 2026, a team led by Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University ran further scans and reported right-angled subsurface anomalies and higher carbon inside the formation than outside it. Mainstream outlets treated the new work as another round of a claim already rejected. I am not asking the reader to call it the Ark. I am asking why a formation that will not stay out of the news is professionally required to be a closed case, while vision-quest pharmacology is professionally required to be an open sacrament.
16. Aztec origin traditions are a separate dossier in The Politics of Heaven. The relevant point for the thesis is the public one: a civilization that built an imperial sacrificial system on a calendar of blood is still routinely taught as a heritage interrupted by Europeans, while the biblical refusal of that kind of altar is taught as the crime. The primary narrative is in the Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún and in Diego Durán. The archaeological frame is Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs. The moral question is mine.
17. Greek and eastern mystery religion in the centuries before Jesus is not an internet invention. The Hellenistic kingdoms sat on the Levant from Alexander’s campaigns in the late fourth century BC. The claim that Jesus or John the Baptist is a Buddhist or Hindu import is modern. The mainstream counter is still the Jewish context: Second Temple Palestine, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, and the Gospels. A clean entry is Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (1974).
18. The ethical claim of the thesis, which will not be popular in a religious-studies faculty, is that the spirit world has a moral direction, and that “indigenous” is not a moral category. A rite can be old and still be a violation. I am using Jason as the modern control because nobody can accuse a Paramount slasher of being a colonial slander against a living tribe. America invented him in New Jersey in 1980, out of a marketing bet on Halloween (1978). The audience then did what audiences have always done with the lesser god. It kept him, masked him, sold him, and handed him to the children.
19. I am withholding, until after Halloween and into November, the field observations from the seasonal work that put me inside the costume and inside the crowd reaction. That material is the part of the evidence I will not sketch in public yet. The thesis does not depend on gossip about a haunt. It depends on the crowd, which I have now watched from both sides of the mask.
20. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the earlier book in which I used a popular American figure to carry an argument about discipline, producers, and the refusal to live by permission. The Jason thesis is the same method on a darker subject. Readers who want the voice can start there. Readers who want the cosmology can start with The Politics of Heaven when it is out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, Lorence G., and David Fasold. “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure.” Journal of Geoscience Education, 1996.
Cunningham, Sean S., director. Friday the 13th. Paramount Pictures, 1980. Screenplay by Victor Miller.
Day, John. Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Dead by Daylight Wiki. “CHAPTER 40: Jason.” Behavior Interactive release, June 16, 2026.
Dever, William G. Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
Duran, Diego. The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated by Doris Heyden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
Fraser, James A. Dolmens in the Levant. London: Routledge, 2018.
Gilbey, Ryan. “Friday the 13th at 40: the maligned slasher that’s haunted pop culture.” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.
Gilead, David. “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100, no. 1 (1968): 16-26.
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974.
Howey, Meghan C. L. Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.
La Barre, Weston. The Peyote Cult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938.
Mahan, Shannon, and colleagues. Luminescence dating of enigmatic rock structures in New England. Quaternary Geochronology, 2022.
Miner, Steve, director. Friday the 13th Part III. Paramount Pictures, 1982.
Sahagun, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950-1982.
Smith, Michael E. The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
The Holy Bible. Exodus 32; Leviticus 18 and 20; Deuteronomy 12; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 23; Jeremiah 32.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have driven past the sign for years. A name can sit on a building in plain Ohio daylight, and you will treat it like landscaping until the day your life rhymes with the story on the sign. I have been going through a hard stretch. I spent time in the Mason and Bridgewater Falls corridor, the seam where Warren County and Butler County lean on each other, and I looked at Joseph’s Cup the way you look at a verse you thought you already knew. It hit me as consolation. Not the soft kind. The kind that gives a shape to the pressure.
I am not swinging a Bible at anybody’s head. I have never liked that style. I am saying the book still does the best job on earth of describing how evil moves through ordinary rooms. It does not usually arrive painted red with a pitchfork. It arrives as a brother. It arrives as a social test. It arrives as the offer of an easy life if you will just say uncle.
THE SHOP PEOPLE DRIVE PAST WITHOUT READING THE NAME
Joseph’s Cup in Mason sits at 8050 Arbor Square Drive, inside the Pro-Clean Car Wash, ZIP 45040. [1] Reviews keep saying the same things: the owner, Joseph, greets people himself, the coffee is good, the room is small and human, you can watch cars come through the wash while you drink. [2] That is not a cathedral. That is a local counter. West of there, Bridgewater Falls in Fairfield Township is the big Butler County retail stretch on Princeton Road, the kind of place you pass because you have an errand. [3] I have been in that whole pocket of road. I was not hunting for a sermon. I was looking around during a season that felt like a sentence.
I could not find a public statement from the shop tying the name to Genesis. The Mason owner’s name is Joseph. That is enough for a storefront. [2] The biblical parallel is not a press release. It is what the name did to me when I finally had the ears for it. Sometimes a sign has been there for years and you only notice it when the story on it is already happening in your ribs.
WHY THE NAME IS NOT CUTE
People hear “Joseph” and think Sunday school felt board. The actual story is a machine for understanding betrayal.
Jacob loved Joseph and gave him the garment English Bibles call a coat of many colors, the ketonet passim of Genesis 37. [4] The brothers were jealous. They threw him in a pit, sold him for silver, and sent the torn coat home bloody so their father would think an animal had finished him. [4] In Egypt he was slandered in Potiphar’s house, jailed, and left to rot until he interpreted dreams and rose to sit just under Pharaoh. [5] Years later the same brothers came to him for grain and did not know his face. He put his silver cup in Benjamin’s sack, sent them out, and had them stopped. [6] The cup was a test. Silver had bought him. Silver would now show whether the brothers had changed.
That is not a children’s story. That is a man who was discarded by his own house, sentenced by a foreign power, and still wanted a living connection with the people who had done it. I am not sure I would have wanted the connection. Joseph did. He made himself known. The family came down into Egypt. A long time later, the book says, that sojourn became bondage, and Moses came. [7] The rescue of a later generation sits on the success and the wound of an earlier one. History is not tidy that way. Neither is a family.
I used to read that sequence as literature. I still think it is the best literature we have for the human race under pressure, better than Shakespeare at the specific job of showing how evil uses kinship, hunger, and status. [8] Shakespeare is a genius of pain. Genesis is a genius of mechanism. Lately I have not been reading Joseph. I have been recognizing him.
DOLLY PARTON WAS NOT THE FIRST COAT
A lot of Americans hear “coat of many colors” and think Dolly Parton first. That is backwards in the right American way. Parton wrote the 1971 song about a patchwork coat her mother sewed from rags in the Smokies. While she sewed, her mother told her the Joseph story. Appalachia already knew the verses. The hit was a local memory wearing a biblical name. [9] People of that country did not need a seminary to understand jealousy in a house. They needed a coat that cost nothing and meant everything.
That is how the Bible works when it is still a living book and not a museum object. It names a pattern. Then ordinary people keep walking into the pattern.
THE CUP IS THE POINT OF THE NAME
The Mason shop is called Joseph’s Cup, not Joseph’s Coat. The coat starts the jealousy. The cup finishes the test.
Joseph does not plant the cup to steal his brothers again. He plants it to see whether they will throw Benjamin away the way they threw him away. Judah steps forward and offers himself instead. [6] Only then does Joseph break. The cup is an instrument of disclosure. It forces the hidden thing into the sack where everyone can see it.
That is why the storefront name landed on me like a communication. I have been thinking about how evil tracks, how it recruits normal people, how it promises an easier life if you will just stop being the difficult one. The cup in the story is not china. It is a reveal. You find out who is still willing to sell a brother to keep their own seat at the table.
EVIL WITHOUT HORNS
The cheap version of evil is a costume. Red. Horns. A contract signed at midnight. That version is almost comforting, because you would see it coming.
The version I keep watching is the Joseph version. Siblings. Colleagues. People who want you smaller because your existence makes their position feel like a critique. They do not have to be brilliant. They have to be jealous and organized enough to use the room against you. They twist decent people with the promise of belonging. They put a little social screw to you and wait to see if you will say uncle.
I had one of those tests recently. Millennial operators who make a living off value other people created. They were sounding me out. Could I be made safe. Could I be enough like them to work with. They had gone to Paris for a Bad Bunny concert. I told them the only thing I knew about Bad Bunny was the Super Bowl appearance that made a lot of people angry. [10] I got the look. You are old. You are out of touch. You will not play ball with us; we are uncomfortable with you because you don’t have tattoos and don’t like pop music. The unspoken deal was obvious. Love the right noise, laugh at the right joke, and you can keep the easy life. Tell the truth, and you are the problem.
I am not going to fake a concert I do not care about so a thief of other people’s work will find me acceptable. Honesty costs you. Appeasement is how that kind of person gets a hand on the controls of real evil at work. A lot of people think the mature move is to make friends with the jealous sibling. Joseph’s brothers would have liked that version. It would have kept the coat in the house and the dreamer quiet.
I will not do it. I work nine times harder and stay clean. If I get the sense that someone is trying to shock me into line, I withdraw the thing they wanted to loop. Call it John Galt if you want the novel version. [11] I take my mind off their board. Let them find out how little they can build once the person they mocked is no longer available to be harvested.
AGE IS THE NEW EXCUSE FOR THE OLD JEALOUSY
The critique they offered was that I am pretty old. That is not analysis. That is a permission structure. If the target is old, or bald, or out of sync with the approved playlist, then discarding him feels like hygiene instead of sin. I have written about that fashion in business. It is the same spirit that treats a long résumé as a threat. [12] Joseph was not discarded for being old. He was discarded for being marked. The coat made him visible. Visibility is what jealousy cannot stand.
You do not have to be seventeen in a pit to know the temperature. You can be a grown man in Ohio, still doing the work, and feel the room decide that your continued competence is an insult.
WHY I WILL NOT BEFRIEND THE SIBLING WHO SOLD ME
People say forgiveness means proximity. Joseph’s story is more severe than that. He feeds them. He tests them. He does not pretend the pit was a misunderstanding. When he weeps, it is after Judah offers his own life. [6] Restoration in that book is not a group hug over the coat. It is a moral change that can be seen.
I can understand Joseph now in my guts, not just in a verse. The first night in the Egyptian system. The false charge. The years when the people who should have known you were silent. The strange second life when you can interpret what the powerful cannot see, and they use you, and you still have a hole where a family was. That is not “sad.” That is blood knowledge. I am taking material out of this season that I will write from for decades. I want to crush the mechanism, not just complain about the mood.
The mechanism is simple. Evil gains a dominant position in a family, a company, a market. It throws the marked person into a death sentence, social or professional. It tells the bystanders that the marked person was difficult, old, extra, out of fashion. It offers the bystanders a nicer life if they go along. Most people go along. That is how it scales from a pit in Canaan to a whole economy that punishes the wrong kind of excellence.
A SIGN YOU NOTICE LATE IS STILL A SIGN
I do not need the owner of Joseph’s Cup to have meant Genesis. Meaning is not only what a merchant intended. Meaning is also what a true story does when it finds you in the parking lot.
I have been wrestling with the depth of evil in ordinary American life. Not the cartoon devil. The brother-level stuff. The way it works in families, in businesses, in the little loyalty tests about music and politics and age. Looking at that sign gave me context worth more than money. Every time I see it now I think about the cup in the sack. I think about how many Josephs get thrown aside so a lesser circle can keep its story. I think about the work that comes after you refuse to say uncle.
You go through stages. At one stage the Bible is a book you respect. At another stage it is a map of the room you are standing in. I am in the second stage with this story. I would rather have the map than the easy life that requires me to laugh on cue at the stupid things evil people say.
WHAT I DO WITH THE CONSOLATION
Consolation, if it is real, is not a nap. It is a commission.
I keep my name. I keep the work. I do not audition for people who need me smaller to make themselves feel better about all their bad decisions in life. I use the season. I write. I have already put the gunfighter ethic in a book: trained instinct under pressure, not sloppiness, and not surrender to the fashion of the hour. [13] Joseph is the older cousin of that ethic. He does the hard years. He keeps his mind. He does not become his brothers in order to be loved by his brothers.
If you are in a pit someone else dug, do not decorate the pit with their playlist. Interpret the dream. Do the work they cannot do. Let the cup fall where it falls. The people who sold you will eventually need grain. That is not spite. That is how the world is built.
I love the name of the shop. I love it more because it sits in a car wash and a commercial corridor instead of on a steeple. Evil works in commercial corridors. So does the reminder. Butler County, Warren County, a cup of coffee, a sign I ignored until I couldn’t. That is enough communication for one stretch of road.
But, I’m not as forgiving as Joseph. I know a lot of people like mob movies, like Goodfellas and John Wick. Remember what happened when they took John Wick’s car, fellas. You’ll never know when or where. But you will get it, I will make sure of it. Enjoy!
FOOTNOTES
[1] Joseph’s Cup, 8050 Arbor Square Drive, Mason, Ohio 45040; listed as inside the Pro-Clean Car Wash. Phone commonly listed as (513) 409-3287. Site: josephscup.com.
[2] Aggregated customer reviews on Restaurantji, joe.coffee, LocalCoffeeShops.org, and related listings describe owner Joseph as personally greeting guests and note the car-wash setting. I found no official shop statement tying the name to Genesis 44.
[3] Bridgewater Falls, Fairfield Township / Hamilton, Ohio 45011 area, Princeton Road at State Route 4, Butler County. Travel Butler County and Kimco property descriptions. Mason itself is in Warren County; the two sit on the same daily-driving map.
[4] Genesis 37. Jacob’s gift of the ketonet passim; the brothers’ jealousy; sale to traders; the bloodied coat returned to Jacob. On the Hebrew garment and the “many colors” / long-sleeved translation debate, see standard Bible dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry “Coat of many colors.”
[5] Genesis 39–41. Potiphar’s house, the false accusation, prison, the cupbearer and baker, Pharaoh’s dreams, Joseph as vizier.
[6] Genesis 44–45. The silver cup placed in Benjamin’s sack; the chase; Judah’s offer to stand in Benjamin’s place; Joseph reveals himself.
[7] Genesis 46–47 and Exodus 1; Exodus 12:40 on the long sojourn. Traditional preaching often rounds the Egyptian years toward four centuries before Moses. Treat the figure as the Bible’s own long-memory math, not a modern archaeological press release.
[8] For Shakespeare on jealousy and household ruin, start with Othello and King Lear. The comparison in this essay is about function: Genesis tracks the social technology of betrayal with less ornament and more consequence.
[9] Dolly Parton, “Coat of Many Colors,” recorded 1971, album Coat of Many Colors. Parton has said her mother told the Joseph story while sewing the rag coat. See Songfacts; Parton interviews; Coat of Many Colors (song) overview.
[10] Bad Bunny performed as part of the Super Bowl LIV halftime-adjacent and later mainstream-award cycle in U.S. pop memory; the February 2026 Super Bowl conversation around his place in the show is the recent nerve the anecdote touches. The point of the story is the loyalty test, not a music review.
[11] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The withdrawal of the creative mind from a looting moral order is the John Galt plot. I am using the shape, not joining a fan club.
[12] Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967; U.S. EEOC age-discrimination materials. Cultural contempt for older workers is larger than the statute and smaller than a conspiracy chart. It is a fashion with teeth.
[13] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021).
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
The Holy Bible, Genesis 37–50 and Exodus 1–12. Read at least two translations side by side; the King James “coat of many colours” and modern renderings of ketonet passim both matter.
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. Basic Books, 1981. Still the cleanest account of how these stories are built.
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. Norton, 2004.
Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis. Jewish Publication Society / Schocken.
Kass, Leon R. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Free Press, 2003. Especially strong on Joseph, statesmanship, and the education of the brothers.
Fox, Everett. The Five Books of Moses. Schocken. Useful for hearing the Hebrew grit in English.
Guzik, David. Study Guide for Genesis 44. Blue Letter Bible.
Jamieson, Robert, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown. Commentary on Genesis 44.
Bible Hub and Bible Gateway, Genesis 44, “A Silver Cup in a Sack.”
Parton, Dolly. “Coat of Many Colors.” 1971. See also My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994) for the dry-cleaning-receipt composition story.
Songfacts; Rolling Stone Parton interviews on the coat and the Joseph telling.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Jealousy as a technology.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Family, ingratitude, the discarded father.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. The other great Western book on how evil talks in a household.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. For the intelligent voice of temptation, not the costume devil.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. The modern brief on evil that does not need horns.
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred; Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Mimetic rivalry is the academic name for what Genesis 37 shows without the jargon.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. On the line of evil running through every human heart, not only through official villains.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. Bureaucracy and flattery as the devil’s work clothes.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories”; The Lord of the Rings, on the Ring as a handle for domination. Different myth, same warning about the easy life.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Age Discrimination fact sheets and The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA.
Restaurant and place listings for Joseph’s Cup, 8050 Arbor Square Drive, Mason, Ohio: josephscup.com; joe.coffee location page; Restaurantji; TripAdvisor.
Travel Butler County. Listings for Bridgewater Falls and area hospitality.
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.
A state can be defeated without a single soldier crossing a border and without a single missile leaving a rail. That sentence used to sound like science fiction. It is now closer to a working description of how power is actually contested. The old picture of war—troops, tanks, flags, and a declared beginning—still exists. It is no longer the whole picture. The more important contest often happens in finance, law, media, software, supply chains, classrooms, and the human-resources office that decides which attitudes are allowed at work.
I have talked about this for years, including when War Room and other outlets treated the subject as strategy rather than slogan. I still own a promotional shirt from the Atlas Shrugged film cycle that advertised in October 2012. The story in those pictures was about producers versus the people who live by controlling producers. This essay’s argument is related, but colder. It is not only about bad policy. It is about a style of conflict designed to make a free country less competitive without looking like an invasion.
What follows is part brief, part review, and part field note. The brief is the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army officers. The review is how that book’s logic shows up in gray-zone operations, cyber incidents, sanctions fights, and what NATO now calls cognitive warfare. The field note is personal. After decades in one workplace, I’ve talked to different people, in different rooms, under different rules. The rules often arrive as kindness, inclusion, and “compliance.” The effect is something else: a society trained to police its own energy.
What Clausewitz Said, and What the Colonels Rewrote
Carl von Clausewitz gave the West its most famous definition: war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.[1] That definition assumes you can see the force. It assumes a distinction between peace and war, soldier and civilian, battlefield and marketplace. Those distinctions were never perfect. In 1999, two PLA Air Force senior colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published Chao Xian Zhan—warfare beyond limits—arguing that the distinctions were collapsing on purpose.[2][3]
They were writing after the Gulf War, which had advertised American conventional superiority in brutal high definition. If you cannot beat a superpower on its preferred field, you do not accept the field. You change the game. You use economic pressure, legal process, media, networks, finance, culture, and technology as weapons in combination. You aim at political results, not at a parade of wrecked tanks. In a June 1999 interview, Qiao put the doctrine in one line: the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, and nothing is forbidden.[4]
Using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.
That is still Clausewitz’s object—compulsion of will—with the means blown wide open. The authors were not shy about the catalog. They discussed psychological warfare, media warfare, cultural warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, network warfare, legal warfare, smuggling, resources, and more.[5] They also insisted on combination. One tool is a dispute. A dozen tools timed together are a campaign. If you hit a currency, seed social discord, and probe a power grid in the same season, the target spends its energy arguing about which event “counts” as war. Meanwhile, the damage accumulates.
The most important sentence in the book is not the slogan about rules. It is the claim that the battlefield is everywhere. Ground, sea, air, and space remain battlefields. So do politics, economics, culture, and the psyche.[6] Once you accept that sentence, a lot of modern life stops looking like “politics as usual” and starts looking like low-intensity conflict that never has to declare itself.
Combination Warfare and the Vanishing Front Line
Traditional strategy likes a map with a front. Unrestricted warfare looks like a web. The authors talk about “addition”—stacking methods until the opponent cannot find the line of contact. Later PLA political work formalized a related toolkit as the “Three Warfares”: public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare, written into regulations in 2003.[7] Those three are not a substitute for the 1999 book. They are one way the same instinct was institutionalized: shape what people believe, shake what they are willing to endure, and use law as a weapon rather than a fence.
This is why “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone” became fashionable terms in the West. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine before and after 2014 mixed information operations, energy leverage, proxies, and cyber operations. On December 23, 2015, attackers attributed to the Sandworm group shut off power to roughly 230,000 customers in Ukraine. It was the first widely acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.[8] No tank had to roll for the lights to go out. Plausible deniability did part of the work. If activists, criminals, or “unknown actors” can be blamed, a conventional military reply becomes politically and legally expensive.
International law was built for visible armies. The Geneva tradition assumes you can tell a combatant from a civilian. A server room, a social platform, a ratings agency, or a human-resources policy shop does not wear a uniform. The Tallinn Manuals—first in 2013, then 2.0 in 2017—tried to apply existing law to cyber operations. Most of what unrestricted warfare describes happens below the threshold of an “armed attack.” States like the ambiguity. Clear rules would bind them too.[9]
Economic tools sit in the same gap. Sanctions can wreck a financial system and still fail the legal test of armed attack.[10] That is a feature if your doctrine says the point is political collapse or capitulation, not a formal declaration. The violence, when it comes, may be late. The conference room and the data center get there first.
Cognitive Warfare: The Target Is the Decision Itself
NATO and allied research communities now talk openly about cognitive warfare: operations aimed not only at what people know, but at how groups perceive, trust, and decide.[11] Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of volume. You do not need a master propagandist in every town. You need models that can generate tailored narratives, test what spreads, and keep the target public arguing with itself.
This is the frightening part of the 1999 thesis updated for 2026. The original colonels talked about media and psychology. They could not fully describe algorithmic amplification, deepfakes, or automated social engineering. The logic did not need those tools to be valid. The tools made the logic cheaper. If you can degrade collective cognition—attention, memory, trust, and the willingness to pay a cost—you do not have to occupy the capital. You occupy the argument.
Hardware races in the same direction. Autonomy reduces the political cost of using force because fewer of “your” people come home in boxes. That drops the barrier to kinetic conflict even as non-kinetic conflict is already permanent. The two trends reinforce each other. A society that is internally confused is easier to pressure. A society that is internally confident is harder to push around with either drones or narratives.
Cultural Warfare Does Not Arrive Waving a Foreign Flag
Here is where the argument gets personal, and where a serious reader should keep two ideas in the same hand.
First idea: Unrestricted Warfare names cultural warfare as a method. Weaken an adversary from the inside. Make the opponent less cohesive, less fertile, less industrious, less willing to defend its own standards. You do not need every Western fashion to be a Beijing plot for that method to be real. You only need the method to exist, and you need American institutions to be available as terrain.[12]
Second idea: over the last decade, much of American corporate culture has trained people to treat productivity, punctuality, sex differences, and plain speech as moral problems. The memos did not say “this is how you lose a contest with a mercantilist authoritarian state.” They said “values,” “belonging,” and “compliance.” The question worth asking is not whether every diversity officer reports to the PLA. The question is whether a rival who studies cultural warfare would look at the results and smile.
I think the rival would smile. I did not come to that as a theory first. I came to it after watching people obey rules they could not defend. During COVID, I watched institutions in Ohio treat CDC language as liturgy. Court challenges were slow. Social punishment was fast. I put a phone on speaker and called people who were supposed to know the law. That is how I got through it. Plenty of workplaces did not have anyone willing to do that. They complied because compliance had become the local religion. An enemy watching from outside would have learned something useful: large parts of the American professional class will enforce a rule before they will examine it.
That is the footprint. Not tanks on the lawn. A workforce taught that the highest civic virtue is not causing trouble.
The HR office as terrain
Human resources is where abstract ideology becomes a condition of employment. I have had HR people report to me. When I asked where an idea came from, the face-to-face answer was often some version of “we will do better.” The inbox told a different story. Newsletters and vendor templates arrived with the new values. The people sending them were frequently the age of my children, not villains in a movie. They were following a script that had already been professionalized.
Onboarding at many firms now spends a remarkable share of time on identity rules and sensitivity machinery. Time spent teaching a new hire to be useful—show up, learn the work, look your coworkers in the eye, carry weight—gets crowded out by time spent teaching the new hire which sentences are dangerous. If you are an older man who talks like work is a duty, you can be framed as a climate problem. If you ride a bicycle twenty miles to a job because the car is dead, that used to be called character. In some offices it now reads as “intensity,” which is a polite word for unwanted masculinity.
I am not romantic about every man over fifty. Some of them are tired and rude. I am romantic about the old expectation: if you are sick enough to stay home, stay home; if you are not, go. If it snows, go to work anyway; your co-workers are counting on you. Make yourself useful. That ethic built payrolls. The substitute ethic—work from the living room, treat output as optional, treat feelings as infrastructure—does not build payrolls. It manages them downward.
Masculinity, entertainment, and the cheapening of standards
Culture is not a side show in this doctrine. It is named terrain. When a commercial sport that sells collision and spectacle starts treating the halftime eye-candy as a seminar in preferences, that is not the end of the republic. It is a tell. Men who paid for front-row seats to watch a game and see women dance are not required to pretend they paid for a lecture. If saying so sends you to an HR office, the office is no longer just administering benefits. It is administering taste.
The same pattern showed up in film. The hard, unsmooth male lead became a problem to be managed. You can call that progress. You can also notice that a civilization in a long contest with a high-discipline mercantilist rival might not want to train its young men to be ashamed of drive. Beards and tattoos on men in their thirties are not a military doctrine. They are sometimes a leftover male signal in a workplace that punished the older signals. The strategic point is simpler: if you flatten the people who like to compete, you flatten the economy that depends on them.
Sexual identity fights belong in the same file. A free country can leave adults alone. A strategic culture that turns every workplace into a referendum on private life is doing something else. It burns attention. It splits coalitions. It makes ordinary competence look like aggression. Unrestricted warfare does not need to invent the fight. It only needs the fight to continue.
COVID as a rehearsal
I keep returning to COVID because it was the week the mask slipped on the machinery. Policy moved faster than evidence in too many rooms. Dissent was treated as dirtiness. The people who said “just follow the rules” were often the same people who could not name who wrote the rules. “We are a culture of compliance” is not a boast in a republic. It is a vulnerability report.
A rival does not have to love the virus to love the data. How quickly did professionals accept workplace punishments for speech? How quickly did schools take over children’s moral education while parents were isolated? How quickly did “expert” language replace judgment? Those are cultural measurements. They tell you how much friction an influence campaign would meet.
Corporations, LinkedIn, and the Myth of Neutral Policy
American business is not the Chinese Communist Party. Conflating the two is sloppy. What is not sloppy is noticing that global firms optimize for access, risk reduction, and reputational peace. If the cheapest way to keep markets, banks, campuses, and NGOs quiet is to import a values language that flattens conflict inside the firm, many firms will import it. They will call it best practice. Vendors will sell the templates. LinkedIn will reward the slogans. Smaller companies will copy larger ones because lenders, insurers, and talent pipelines punish deviation.
That is how you get a one-way ratchet without a conspiracy chalkboard. Beijing does not have to draft the memo if the memo already weakens the only large open society that still out-innovates it. United Front work, elite capture, research partnerships, and capital access are the documented channels. Cultural mimicry is the force multiplier—retired Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding and others have argued that if you watch Chinese behavior since 1999 through the lens of the book, the picture snaps into focus.[13] You do not have to accept every page of that popularization to accept the narrower point: connectivity is a weapon as well as a market.
Cashless systems, monitored transactions, and centralized payment rails belong to the same family of tools. They can be convenient. They can also be turned. A society that cannot complete a private exchange without a third-party ledger is a society that can be throttled. Again: not every debit card is an invasion. The doctrine says look at the combination, not the single instrument.
The Defense Paradox: How You Lose by Winning the Wrong Way
Qiao and Wang understood something Western liberals are late to admit. A society that lives by open rules can be made to trip over those rules. Lawfare ties up the opponent in his own courts. Media warfare uses the opponent’s platforms. Cultural warfare uses the opponent’s guilt. If the target responds by building a surveillance state to stop the influence, the target has paid in the coin the influence campaign wanted: less freedom. If the target refuses to notice the campaign, the target stays open and stays cut.
That is the lose-lose proposition. Defend badly, and you become the thing you were defending against. Decline to defend, and you are disarmed in the only war that is already underway. Critics of the 1999 doctrine are right that it treats human rights and international law as just another front. That is not a misunderstanding of the text. That is the text.
The Western answer cannot be “no rules, nothing forbidden.” That is how you cease to be the West. The answer is narrower and harder: name the methods, refuse the scripts that make you weaker, keep due process, and rebuild the habits that make a high-trust, high-output society possible. Resilience matters more than the fantasy of blocking every lie. Recovery speed and social trust are the actual defenses. A country that still believes its own people can work, argue, worship, raise children, and laugh at bad art is a hard country to hollow out.
What This Means on the Ground
If the battlefield is the paycheck, then the first duty is not a new missile. It is a refusal to treat the workplace as a reeducation camp. Hire for output. Measure output. Stop confusing moral fashion with risk management. Parents who want children should not have to apologize to a values slide deck. Men and women are not a paperwork error. Speech about all of that should not be a firing offense.
Political leadership matters because only the state can answer state-backed capital, theft of intellectual property, and platform manipulation at scale. Business leadership matters because most Americans meet the new rules at work, not at a Senate hearing. Voters who want people who have signed payrolls are not being crude. They are asking for officials who recognize a negotiation that smiles in public and competes in private.
I have watched firms that still recruit hungry people—SpaceX is the example everyone uses because it is obvious—outperform firms that recruit for the seminar. That gap will widen as the space economy and other fast industries punish delay. A culture that cannot tell a worker to come in when it snows will not beat a culture that can. This is not poetry. It is arithmetic.
Education is the long front. If the schoolhouse becomes the delivery system for political fashion, the family loses the first chance to form character. You do not need foreign infantry in the hallway after that. You need time. Time is what unrestricted warfare buys when it stays below the threshold of open war.
Conclusion: The Winner Integrates the Board
The authors of Unrestricted Warfare said the winner would be the side that can play on a board that keeps expanding, while the loser keeps staring at the old squares. Missiles still matter. So do grids, ports, chips, and ships. So do birth rates, work rates, attention spans, and whether a man can say he prefers female cheerleaders without being marched into a conference room. The last item sounds small until you notice the method: make the confident people tired, then call the tiredness progress.
I was insulated from a lot of this for a long time: same place, same people, same expectations. Coming back into a wider set of rooms felt like being thawed out of ice. The tools were new. The weakness was not new. It was the old American temptation to believe that because we mean well, the contest must be a seminar. It is not a seminar. It is a continuous campaign against cohesion.
Sun Tzu wanted victory without battle.[14] The 1999 colonels wrote a modern manual for that instinct and published it openly. They could afford to. A book is not dangerous to the side that is already inside the institutions of the other side. The dangerous thing is a public that still thinks war only looks like a landing craft.
Understand the doctrine. Keep the distinction between evidence and suspicion. Then look at your own shop, your own school, your own screen, and ask the only operational question that matters: does this rule make us harder to beat, or easier? If the honest answer is easier, it is not “best practice.” You have donated terrain to someone who is not confused about whether this is a contest.
Selected Bibliography
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Book I, Chapter 1.
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare (Chao Xian Zhan). Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999. English selections via FBIS.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Spalding, Robert. War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination. New York: Sentinel, 2022.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
Jamestown Foundation. “The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares.” China Brief, 2016.
NATO Science and Technology Organization. Materials from HFM-361, Mitigating and Responding to Cognitive Warfare (Madrid, November 2023), and related Chief Scientist reporting on cognitive warfare.
MITRE ATT&CK. “2015 Ukraine Electric Power Attack (Campaign C0028).”
Wikipedia and contemporaneous technical reporting on the December 23, 2015 Ukraine power-grid cyberattack attributed to Sandworm.
U.S. Marine Corps University. “To Win without Fighting” and related essays on PRC political warfare and unrestricted warfare.
RSIS Commentary. Nan Li, “Unrestricted Warfare and Chinese Military Strategy,” 2002.
Author’s Note
This essay is written in the first person on purpose. The strategic literature can be cited. The workplace scenes cannot be footnoted like a statute. They are offered as testimony from one American who spent decades in a single shop, then walked into the new rules and recognized the old doctrine. Readers who want only the book should stop at the bibliography. Readers living under the new rules already know why the paycheck is the front line.
Notes
[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter 1: “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”
[2] Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999). English selections circulated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).
[3] The original Chinese title is Chao Xian Zhan (超限战), literally “warfare beyond limits” or “warfare beyond bounds.”
[4] Zhongguo Qingnian Bao interview with Qiao Liang, June 28, 1999; FBIS translation OW2807114599. Qiao: “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”
[5] Qiao and Wang, Unrestricted Warfare. The authors list methods including psychological, media, cultural, financial, trade, network, legal, smuggling, drug, resource, and ecological warfare.
[6] Qiao and Wang write that “spaces in nature including the ground, the seas, the air, and outer space are battlefields, but social spaces such as the military, politics, economics, culture, and the psyche are also battlefields.”
[7] The “Three Warfares”—public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare—were written into PLA Political Work Regulations in 2003 and elaborated in subsequent PLA teaching texts.
[8] On December 23, 2015, attacks attributed to the Russian group Sandworm disrupted electricity for roughly 230,000 customers in western Ukraine. It is widely cited as the first publicly acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.
[9] Michael N. Schmitt, ed., Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Tallinn Manual 2.0 (2017). Legal literature has discussed work toward a third edition through 2025–2026.
[10] U.S. and allied legal analyses generally hold that ordinary economic sanctions, however severe, do not by themselves constitute an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That legal line is precisely why economic and regulatory pressure is attractive in unrestricted-warfare thinking.
[11] NATO Science and Technology Organization materials from the HFM-361 symposium (Madrid, November 2023) and subsequent Chief Scientist reporting treat cognitive warfare as influence operations aimed at human decision-making, accelerated by AI and digital platforms.
[12] This section states the author’s interpretive thesis. It is not a claim that a single CCP memo authored every Western HR policy. It is a claim about effects, incentives, and the kind of battlefield the 1999 doctrine described.
[13] Robert Spalding, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination (Sentinel, 2022), popularizes the 1999 text as a standing playbook rather than a one-off essay.
[14] Sun Tzu, The Art of War: the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Qiao and Wang explicitly place their argument in that lineage.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been living inside a new Bible. Not a novelty Bible. Not one of those thin inspirational editions that treat Scripture like a greeting card. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, New King James Version, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson in August of 2026. I cannot say enough about it. The notes are Edwards. The sermons sit next to the text. The Resolutions are there. The miscellany system is explained so a man can actually work the way Edwards worked. Every time I pick up a different Bible, I change perspective a little. This one changed it a lot.
I was going through it, and I couldn’t help thinking about a miracle that doesn’t get preached the way it should. Not only the crucifixion. Not only the empty tomb. The miracle that Christianity emerged at all. That the word got out. That a Jewish movement in a backwater of the Roman Empire became the operating system of Western civilization. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of the spiritual, but as the way the spiritual actually conquered. What benefit did Christianity bring to the race and to civilization? Magnificent. And I keep thinking, reading Edwards, how many movements rose and fell that we will never know about because the writing did not survive, or it is still buried in the desert waiting to be discovered. We know Christianity because it was documented, scaled, and defended by men who understood value.
King Charles, the Quran, and Knowing Where You Are
I saw King Charles in England talking about the holy book of the Quran, how we have to respect it, all that progressive mantra that is designed to undo Western civilization. You need to know where you are. You need to know your own nation’s history. I have read the Quran for years. I cannot say there is anything in any version I’ve read that has the spiritual and intellectual merit I get from Edwards. Edwards is a good writer. He is a great mind under pressure. He is the kind of intelligence that contemplates large ideas and then puts them into a form a civilization can use. If you want to know what the United States began as—a Christian nation in the serious sense, not the slogan sense—this Bible is the right tool.
Somebody asked me if I was working for the publisher because I have been pushing this volume so hard. I am not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years, decades of work behind them, putting Edwards next to the text so a man in 2026 can buy it on the open market and think. How do you make a living long enough to produce something intelligent? How do you buy a hamburger and still have thousands of hours left to put a mind like Edwards in one place? That question is not small. It is the same question Paul answered with a needle and goat hair.
Paul Was a Businessman. That is why we still have Christianity.
My favorite book in the Bible is Ephesians. Paul wrote it. I think a lot of people confuse Paul with John. John wrote Revelation. John is the one who survived—tradition says they tried to boil him and he lived, and then he wrote. They killed Paul in Rome, most likely sometime between 64 and 67. People mix the two up. They should not. John is the seer. Paul is the scaler.
Paul came in late. He was against Jesus, and then he was for Jesus. Many people in the world might find themselves in that place. He was a Pharisee, educated, and a tentmaker. The original disciples, when they were still following Jesus around Galilee, were mostly fishermen. Dirt poor. I tend to see that first circle as an early form of communal living—they held things in common, lived off shared provision, and took care of their own. Historians generally see the Jerusalem church in Acts as voluntary generosity inside a tight, persecuted community, not a formal communist system. It was “we take care of our own,” not a political ideology. And it did not last as a model. It could not scale.
Paul’s idea came from a businessman. Because of Paul, we still have Christianity today. That is not a slight against Peter or James or John. It is an observation about how movements survive. The dramatic turn—from hunting the church to becoming its biggest champion after the Damascus Road—matters. His background as a tentmaker and an educated Pharisee gave him a different toolkit than the original disciples. He could travel. He could talk to Gentiles. He could write letters that functioned as operating manuals. Without the missionary journeys and without letters like Ephesians, Christianity might have stayed a small Jewish sect. He brought structure, theology, and a scalable vision.
Financial Independence Is Not a Side Note. It Is the Strategy.
The part of Paul that made him effective with people initially against the movement is the part churches don’t like to talk about on Sunday. He did not have to live off a handout. He could be bold, even if he went a little over the edge, because he was financially independent enough from his trade to go against the grain and reshape a movement. That personal independence—having a trade, having a bank account from business days—gave him latitude. Everybody else emphasized martyrdom. Martyrdom is remembered. Martyrdom does not stay around long enough, or hold enough social influence, to make people listen after the body is gone. They were easily disposed of, crucified, written into history as a memento. It takes more than that to make a movement work.
Paul knew how to scale ideas. Ephesians is the proof. He supported himself while traveling and preaching, so he wasn’t as vulnerable to local pressure or to needing one house to feed him. That freedom let him be bolder in the message and push boundaries without worrying about immediate survival. The other apostles were deeply rooted in the Jewish context. Paul was building something that could outlast any single leader. The shift from “follow me to death” to “this truth can transform anyone, anywhere” is the difference between a local witness and a civilization.
If Paul had never converted, I think the movement would have fizzled. The Roman world was full of rebellions and religious groups we have never even heard of. Without his organizational skill and his ability to take the message beyond Jewish circles, Christianity likely stays small, localized, and eventually fades like the rest. His conversion and his strategic vision gave him a unique angle on the bigger picture. I wonder how many political efforts to overthrow or outlast Rome rose and fell that we will never know about. Paul would have been one of them if he had stayed Saul.
Ephesians 6:12 and the Politics of Heaven
My favorite verse is Ephesians 6:12. I love that line because it is a truth revealed to a mind under tremendous pressure, telling the grim reality of the human race. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Paul is preaching monotheism against the tides of the day, against a Roman world that had many gods, and he comes up with the idea that the secret rulers of existence are not the men in front of you. Thank goodness he had the creative nerve to write it that way.
I recognize that verse because I’ve learned it the hard way. The true reality of the universe is that good people end up hurting each other while chasing things that don’t matter, and the reason isn’t always the name on the driver’s license. It is the entities behind the people. Our mistake is stopping at Tim or Bob or Bill. I don’t remember names the way other people want me to. I care about the principalities that climb into bodies and drive them. The flesh-and-blood parts—whose nose looks like the father, whose hair color came from the great-grandfather—mean little to me. The politics of the principality does.
I have a granddaughter a few years old. I watch her walk, run, pick things up, touch the world, learn who is important and who is not. Those bonds will go through her entire life—parents, uncles, cousins, grandparents—even when she is forty or fifty. She is writing those meetings into her experience as she learns. We all go through that. But what was the human being before the human being? What is a person’s spiritual essence before it manifests in flesh and blood? What is the politics of that principality? That is the kind of thing I think about. A personality there is not rooted only in genetic material. We are not always what we are as defined by the human experience. We are what we are whether it manifests or not.
When Does the Principality Enter the World?
People want a clean answer on conception, quickening, birth. I think the principalities are already at work when a mother and father find themselves wanting to form a union to produce a child. They either will themselves into the world or wield the world toward its demise. Human beings create political systems that reflect that dependency because we learned to become flesh, and we rarely see the principal active behind the desire. We are stuck seeing the physical side. The human experience starts to feel like actors on a stage, with invisible directors.
That is why the incarnation is such a radical move. God of the universe taking form as a human being, the Spirit moving through people—if you only watch flesh, it looks strange. If you watch principalities, it looks like the only way to break through hidden influences and meet us in the middle of the mess. Human beings are not the whole problem. The forces that drive the human being are. If you measure your value only by how much you sacrifice yourself to other human beings, you can feed the wrong powers and call it virtue. I have an awful lot of friends in that place. To be nice, I will put my wife in that category. She is a person who will sacrifice as a mother, as a wife, as a community member, so that something good can happen. A lot of people judge their value in the world by what they are willing to give up. Hidden power resides behind the efforts of everything we interact with. You have to know what you are serving.
Paul and the Apostles Did Not Get Along. That Is Why It Worked.
Christianity did not spread as a locked-arm kumbaya. Paul fought the original apostles. The clashes were open. Peter was vocal. The question of Gentiles, purity, who is in and who is out—those were not polite committee meetings. It is amazing Christianity even made it. The Jerusalem circle wanted purity. Keep the impure out. Paul wanted scale. Include the nations. If the purity party had won clean, there would have been no movement that could leave Judea. There would have been no Edwards. There would have been no Washington. There would have been no Lincoln. Christianity does not break out of being a Jewish sect without Paul’s vision for the Gentile world.
I mentioned Nancy Nix in the video because that is how this works in real life. I was at Fort Necessity, walking around the bookstore outside the theater, and she called. She represents Republican politics in my community in Butler County, Ohio. We do not talk every five seconds. We talk a good deal. We think alike about a lot of things. She was having a particular problem—kids not playing well in the sandbox, twenty-five people in a room with twenty-five backgrounds and twenty-five ideas of right and wrong, and you have to point them in one direction. That is the same problem Paul had. How do you bring people together and make a movement voters, or believers, can actually trust? Real movements are made in that mess. Not by people who only keep the circle pure. By people who can stand the friction and still build.
Fort Necessity, Mount Vernon, Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg
If Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, my wife and I had Fort Necessity on a wrong turn. We were headed toward Washington. We took a wrong turn onto the National Road with the camper. Hard to turn a camper around in the mountains. We were too far in to go back, so we kept going and drove right by Necessity. I pulled into the big parking lot to turn around. I went back into the camper for a Mello Yello. She said we were already an hour and a half off schedule; we were here- why not go into the museum? So we did. March or April 2026. Cool. Not crowded. A Wednesday afternoon, and we had the place to ourselves. I walked the ground where a young George Washington learned what command costs.
A few months later the Washington movie came out, and we went to see it. I was already thinking about what made Washington Washington. The Great Awakening—the idea of a people who could stand up against the mother country—was coming out of churches. Edwards was in the air those men breathed. Then the same year I got to Mount Vernon, to the grave where Washington and Martha overlook the Potomac, into the house, into the room. I have been interested in the influence on his day-to-day life. Edwards is one of those influences. I was thinking about Edwards before this Bible existed. Then this is the year they put the Study Bible together. That is not an accident in my calendar.
A couple of days after Necessity, my friend Nancy called while I was in that library. A couple of days after that, my wife and I were in Gettysburg. We had already been in Washington. We took a whole day for Ford’s Theatre. I stood at the door of the box Booth walked through to shoot Lincoln in the back of the head. I had been at the White House that morning. Assassination attempts on Trump were in my head—the Butler, Pennsylvania picture, blood down the face. I was ready to leave and get a sandwich. My wife wanted to go across the street to see where Lincoln had died. We had made friends with a tour guide, a Park Service man who gives the presentation on stage. He saw we were abnormally interested. He took us to the Petersen House, to the room where Lincoln died. A little chair sat by the bed. I sat there a long time. No ghosts. A good museum. A man who works that room every day and understood where I was.
I sat there thinking what Lincoln was thinking as he bled out. I think he was thinking about the creation of the United States. I think he was thinking about the men who had already given their lives. I think the moral language in his pocket went back through the Awakening to Edwards. Then we spent days on the Gettysburg field with the RV. Maps. Day one, day two, day three. Temperature. What the soldiers felt like. I had this overwhelming thought that Edwards—the sermons, the memos of the Awakening in a man’s kit—helped Union soldiers hold together long enough to win, and Lincoln put everything on that hold. Day three. Cemetery Ridge. A republic built on Christian values against an aristocracy that still wanted Europe’s old arrangement. That does not happen without a moral backbone. That backbone does not happen without Edwards. Edwards does not happen in the form that made America without a Christianity that could already scale. That Christianity does not happen without Paul.
Trump Is a Lot Like Paul
A lot of people in the political circles I run in are asking what we are supposed to be doing. Trump has been in the White House. He has held Bibles. He has tried to bring old tradition back into the public eye. I don’t know that Trump is “into it” the way a seminary man is. He is a businessman. In many ways, Trump is a lot like Paul. We were given a second chance because a man with a messy former life and a real business ability sat Christians and conservatives down at a table of political power they would not have had otherwise. Charlie Kirk and a lot of others got a larger platform because of that. Things are better because of it. It does not always come in the package you would have designed on a Sunday morning. Paul did not either.
Both used a practical scaling mindset. Neither arrived as the saint the purity party wanted. Both made the movement larger than the room that wanted to keep it small. That is the comparison. I catch some of that same spirit in Edwards—the hope in the sermons that God would walk with a people onto the battlefields of life and that justice would be served. There are always difficulties. A remnant will always rather dismantle what was built than build on it. I am saying no. We need to build on what we built here and continue it productively.
The Second Great Awakening Will Not Come From Washington
We always focus on Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Adams. What made them? The first Great Awakening made the moral weather they walked through. A Second Great Awakening will not come from the Trump administration as a program. The administration can facilitate space. It cannot preach it. It has to come from churches and Bibles and men who will talk in public. Putting this Edwards Bible together helps people recover the first so we can form another.
What does a modern awakening look like? A lot of people despise AI. They do not like Elon Musk. They think we are headed for Age of Ultron, Tony Stark trying to fix the world and creating new problems. I am having a public conversation with a human-created intelligence on purpose. That does not mean we end up the villain. I think the next awakening is going to use the technology we created to serve the old fire—real-time reference, real-time argument, people able to spy on a serious conversation from their own house at whatever hour they can stand it. Churches on Sunday give you the names and the memorize-the-event version. They do not give you the psychology of why the thing worked. That is why this conversation matters.
The biggest threat to the legacy is not a missile. It is an anti-business movement aimed at the root of what Paul brought into Christianity: a sense of value, then that value carried into a relationship with the everlasting, with the principalities beyond flesh and blood. When people attack business and capital in Western culture, they are often attacking the mechanism that let Christianity endure long enough to shape law, ethics, and institutions. Paul’s business mindset did not just help Christianity. It shaped the DNA of a civilization that understood productivity and serving others as spiritual work. That came from a tentmaker who refused to live only on other people’s tables.
What I Want People to Take From This
Paul is why Christianity is a world force and not a forgotten Judean faction. Edwards is a large reason we have an America that could produce Washington and Lincoln. Washington and Lincoln are why a republic is left to defend.
I don’t think Jesus would say, “Take joy in melting their faces.” I think Jesus would do the thing that got Him in trouble: preach anyway, against the warnings, against the purity party, against the empire. Paul took that and made it travel. Edwards took that and made it American. We are due to take it again.
In the age of disclosure, you must understand the politics of heaven. Start with Paul. Start with Edwards.
Notes
1. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Study notes drawn from Edwards’s works; includes the Resolutions, an introduction to the Miscellanies note-taking system, and essays on Edwards’s theology and the First Great Awakening. Works of Jonathan Edwards are freely available at edwards.yale.edu.
2. Acts 18:2–3 identifies Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla as tentmakers (Greek skēnopoios). Cilicia, Paul’s home region, was known for cilicium, goat-hair cloth used in tents. Paul sometimes refused congregational support so the gospel would not look like a sales pitch (1 Corinthians 9; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; Acts 20:33–35).
3. Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–35 describe voluntary sharing in the Jerusalem church. Most historians treat this as emergency generosity in a persecuted minority, not a transferable political economy. The model does not govern later Pauline congregations.
4. Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV): “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Parallel language appears in Ephesians 1:21, 3:10; Colossians 1:16, 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.
5. Early tradition places Paul’s martyrdom in Rome under Nero, commonly dated 64–67. The New Testament does not narrate the death. John of Patmos, associated by church tradition with the apostle John, is the figure tied to Revelation and to survival of attempted execution.
6. Conflicts over Gentile inclusion are recorded in Acts 15 and Galatians 2. Paul’s public confrontation with Peter at Antioch is one of the clearest internal fractures in the earliest movement.
7. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, author of A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and the Enfield sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). The First Great Awakening (roughly 1734–1745) created the first intercolonial religious public in British America.
8. Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Farmington, Pennsylvania, marks Washington’s 1754 defeat in the opening of the French and Indian War. Mount Vernon; Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House in Washington, D.C.; Gettysburg National Military Park.
9. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002), traces the theological line from the Awakening through the early republic and the Civil War era. Influence is cultural and moral, not a claim that Edwards sat in Lincoln’s cabinet.
10. The comparison of Trump to Paul is analogical: a commercially formed outsider who enlarges a religious-political coalition the purity faction would have kept small. It is not a claim of apostleship.
Bibliography
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
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.
A Community Night at Miami University’s Innovation Center
On September 21, 2026, we hosted a special community event at Miami University’s Innovation Center on Elm Street in Oxford, Ohio.
We called the evening “Dreams on Elm Street”, a lighthearted nod to the classic 1980s film. But what we’re building at Volynt isn’t the stuff of nightmares. It’s the realization of a dream, one that is taking shape right here in Butler County and has the potential to transform the future of logistics, aviation, and economic development in Ohio.
The turnout exceeded our expectations. The room was filled with Miami University staff, students, local business leaders, elected officials, and community members who wanted to learn more about what Volynt is building and where we’re headed.
We were honored to welcome Senator George Lang, Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix, and Michael Ryan, who is poised to become Butler County’s next commissioner. Their presence reflected the growing enthusiasm for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advanced aerospace development in our region.
Sharing the Vision
I opened the evening by welcoming our guests and providing an overview of the event. From there, our leadership team took the stage.
Our CEO shared Volynt’s long-term vision and mission. Our Chief Technology Officer highlighted the engineering milestones we’ve achieved and the technology behind the Volynt Vyper platform. As Chief Operating Officer, I discussed how Volynt is transforming cutting-edge aviation technology into a scalable and sustainable business. I outlined our operational strategy, manufacturing roadmap, partnerships, and the steps required to move from prototype development to commercial deployment.
The presentations were engaging, the audience was attentive, and the questions that followed demonstrated genuine interest and excitement.
Most importantly, this wasn’t a flashy product launch filled with unrealistic promises. It was an honest conversation about where we are today, what we’ve accomplished, and what the next several years may hold.
From Prototype to Production
Our immediate focus is straightforward.
Over the next six months, our team will complete the full-scale Vyper prototype that was unveiled at the Innovation Center. That aircraft represents years of design work, engineering refinement, and determination.
Once completed, the aircraft will enter an intensive testing phase designed to validate performance, reliability, and operational capabilities.
Looking ahead to 2027, we plan to participate in major industry competitions, build broader recognition within the aerospace community, and begin manufacturing multiple aircraft.
The goals are ambitious, but they are supported by a clear roadmap and a dedicated team committed to execution.
The Drone Revolution Is Already Here
One of the most important messages of the evening was that autonomous aviation is no longer a future concept.
It’s happening today.
Just one day after our event, Dayton-area company Dexa launched a drone delivery service in Kettering. The program delivers food orders from TJ Chumps on East Stroop Road to customers within a several-mile radius across Kettering, Oakwood, and Centerville.
These smaller drones operate as last-mile delivery systems. Flying at approximately 400 feet, they lower food orders safely to customers using a cable-delivery system. Dexa has spent years developing this capability and is helping demonstrate that drone delivery is becoming a practical reality.
Volynt’s mission is different.
While companies like Dexa focus on last-mile delivery, Volynt is developing larger autonomous aircraft designed for middle-mile logistics. Our aircraft are intended to transport meaningful payloads between regional hubs such as Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG), Dayton International Airport, Indianapolis, and other distribution centers.
This approach has the potential to reduce transportation bottlenecks, address driver shortages, and create more efficient supply chains.
Whether it’s delivering a meal across town or transporting freight across a region, autonomous aviation is rapidly reshaping how goods move through our economy.
Why Ohio Is Positioned to Lead
Ohio’s aviation legacy is unmatched.
The birthplace of powered flight now has an opportunity to become a leader in autonomous flight.
Few regions are better positioned than Butler County to participate in that transformation.
Our region offers access to multiple airports, including Miami University’s airport, where initial flight operations can be conducted. At the same time, substantial investment continues at Butler County Regional Airport, where significant infrastructure improvements are being planned.
The resources, workforce, educational institutions, and transportation network already exist. What remains is bringing together the innovators, investors, and community leaders who can turn opportunity into reality.
Creating Careers That Stay Close to Home
One topic that resonates deeply with me is talent retention.
I have spoken with countless parents who have made tremendous sacrifices to provide educational opportunities for their children through Miami University, Butler Tech, and the University of Cincinnati. Too often, those graduates leave Ohio because they believe the best opportunities are elsewhere.
That reality creates a challenge for families and communities alike.
One of our long-term goals at Volynt is to help change that story.
We envision creating thousands of high-quality aerospace, engineering, technology, and manufacturing jobs throughout Southern Ohio. We want talented young people to have the option of building exciting, fulfilling careers without leaving their families, communities, and hometowns behind.
Strong Community Support
One of the most encouraging moments of the evening was seeing the level of support from the community.
Michael Ryan delivered an excellent presentation about economic development in Butler County and how innovative companies such as Volynt can contribute to future growth and prosperity.
The participation from Miami University, local leaders, educators, students, business professionals, and community members reinforced something I’ve believed from the beginning:
Innovation succeeds when communities embrace it.
Dreams on Elm Street was more than a company presentation. It was a milestone. It brought together people from different backgrounds and perspectives to discuss a shared vision for the future of our region.
The energy in the room was unmistakable. The conversations were thoughtful. The questions were insightful. The enthusiasm was genuine.
For me, that confirmed that we’re moving in the right direction.
Looking Ahead
Volynt’s journey is still in its early chapters.
There is much work ahead, many challenges to overcome, and numerous milestones still to achieve. But the momentum is real, and the opportunities are significant.
We will continue sharing updates with the community as we progress from prototype development to testing, certification, manufacturing, and beyond.
This is only the beginning.
Thank you to everyone who attended Dreams on Elm Street and supported our mission. Your encouragement and belief in what we’re building means more than you know.
Together, we’re not just dreaming about the future.
We’re building it.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman is Chief Operating Officer of Volynt, where he leads operational strategy, business development, manufacturing planning, and growth initiatives for the company’s autonomous aerospace programs. A longtime Butler County leader and aerospace executive, he is committed to building high-quality technology careers and advancing innovation throughout Southwest Ohio.
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.
If you came here looking for a populist hit piece, this is not that. I write for people who lead, want to lead, or at least refuse to stay on the couch while the culture is rewritten around their children. Scripture is not a campaign prop. It is the sharpest instrument I know for cutting through a coordinated lie. That is the politics of heaven: not party first, not personality first, but the question of whether a people will still call good good and evil evil when the price of doing so is social exile.
I. THE AGE OF DISCLOSURE AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN
We are living in what I call an age of disclosure. Not merely the disclosure of secrets in government files, though that conversation is loud enough. I mean something older and more dangerous: the moment when a civilization is forced to admit what it has been doing in the dark. The ideologies that were supposed to stay in graduate seminars leaked into human-resources manuals, then into public schools, then into pediatric clinics. The result is not a private lifestyle. The result is a public demand that the rest of us recite the new creed or be treated as a moral contaminant.
The politics of heaven answers that demand. Heaven is not a voting bloc. Heaven is not a branding exercise. Heaven is the claim that God made the world a certain way, that male and female are not costumes, that children are not raw material for adult ideology, and that a nation which inverts those realities will not stay strong merely because its GDP looks impressive for another quarter.[1]
Paul said he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] That sentence is doing more work in 2026 than most platform planks. Shame is the enforcement mechanism of the present order. If they can make you embarrassed to name what you love, they do not have to refute you. They only have to watch you edit yourself until there is nothing left worth hearing.
I will not edit it.
II. FALSE COMPASSION IS NOT LOVE
Start with the word that has been most abused: compassion.
True compassion would protect children from irreversible medical decisions they cannot possibly understand. What we have instead is a coordinated social contagion, especially visible among elites, in which adults congratulate themselves for “affirming” a minor into a pathway of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. That is not love. That is sacrificing children to an ideology. I will call it what it is: a form of child abuse dressed up as progress.[3]
I am not talking about the rare, severe, persistent cases that clinicians used to treat with extreme caution. I am talking about the sudden clustering, the peer networks, the online scripts, the school social transitions done behind parents’ backs, and the astonishing overrepresentation of transgender-identifying children in a handful of zip codes, friend groups, and celebrity households. When parents, schools, corporations, and entertainment all push the same story at once, vulnerable children get swept up. That is not a coincidence. It is social engineering, plain and simple.
Look at Hollywood. The list of high-profile actors and actresses with children who identify as transgender or non-binary has become a genre of its own. Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez, Megan Fox, Dwyane Wade, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Naomi Watts—the names keep accumulating.[4] In a country where transgender identification among youth was, until recently, vanishingly rare, that concentration is not “just visibility.” Visibility does not create statistical spikes this localized unless something in the environment is recruiting.
Some researchers and activists insist there is no social contagion, and they would be wrong. Other researchers, clinicians, and dissenters say the opposite, and the Cass Review in the United Kingdom was blunt about the weakness of the evidence base that was used to medicalize children.[5] I do not need a unanimous journal to use my eyes. When a belief system travels through prestige networks faster than it travels through farm towns, you are not watching a spontaneous awakening. You are watching fashion with a clinical billing code.
Scripture is not ambiguous about the created order. God created them male and female.[6] To catechize children into rebellion against that order is not pastoral care. It is a revolt against the Creator, outsourced to minors who will live with the consequences long after the adults have moved on to the next cause.
The proper Christian response is not cruelty. It is not mockery of the suffering. It is this: speak truth with clarity, protect children from harm, and offer genuine compassion to those who are distressed—without affirming the lie that is injuring them. Affirmation of a falsehood is not mercy. It is participation.
III. WHY THE RATES ARE NOT RANDOM
People who do not want to face this subject hide in averages. They will tell you that “only a small percentage” of children identify this way, as if a small percentage plus institutional capture is nothing. The point is not only prevalence. The point is location.
Certain circles have dramatically higher rates of trans-identifying children. Elite schools. Entertainment. Specific online subcultures. Certain therapeutic fashions. Human-resources departments that rewrote the rules of speech and then dared the rest of the country to object. The same class of people who draft the corporate training also sit on museum boards, donate to universities, and lecture the working class about which words are now violence.
I have watched this move through institutions the way termites move through a beam. You do not notice the first memo. You notice the tenth, when a teacher is punished for using ordinary sexed language, or a parent is treated as the threat for refusing to transition a twelve-year-old socially. By then the lie has become policy.
This is why I reject the slogan that “silence is kindness.” Silence in a captured institution is how the capture finishes. If you work in a place where DEI language has been used to smuggle gender ideology into childhood, you already know the mechanism. It was not a grassroots cry from children. It was a professional class writing rules that everyone else was expected to obey while calling the obedience righteousness.
I do not owe that project my vocabulary.
IV. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SURRENDER WHAT YOU LOVE
There is a related lie, and it is aimed at Christians specifically: that the loving thing is to mute your own faith so that people who despise it can feel comfortable.
I reject that.
It is one thing to say we should not be cruel. It is another thing to say that Islam, progressive sexual ideology, and the new civic religion of the public school must be handled with velvet, while Christian speech must be handled with a muzzle. I am supposed to be endlessly compassionate toward alternative sexual lifestyles and toward the latest curriculum, and then I am supposed to treat my own Scripture as a private hobby that might offend the room.
No.
You like what you like. I like what I like. I am not going to edit the Bible to make you happy. You do not care if I am unhappy. So I am going to talk about the Bible. I am going to talk about the Scripture I enjoy. I believe this is what God says, and I will not be ashamed of it.
That kind of honest, unapologetic speech is far more powerful than the aggressive politeness of people who sand their faith down until it can pass a diversity seminar. The world feels no obligation to make Christians comfortable. Reciprocal self-erasure is not tolerance. It is surrender.
As Paul said, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] Speaking Scripture openly, without apology, is one of the most effective ways to push back against cultural pressure. It draws a clear line. It gives courage to people who have been staying quiet. Leaders who speak plainly strengthen the faithful and expose deception at the same time.
There is nothing wrong with liking Christian things and professing them openly. You do not have to put a lid on your viewpoint while everybody else imposes theirs and you are told to shut up and take it. That hour is over, or it should be.
V. THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE AND THE POWER OF BEING UNASHAMED
Let me give a point of reference I have used for years.
The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is one of my favorite places in the world.[7] I never liked Washington much until the political weather changed and I had reason to be there. I have been more than once. I am a member and a supporter. In the background of my life, I love using the Bible, and I love a building three blocks from the Capitol that says: here is the history of this book. See it. Relish it. Enjoy it.
They are not required to plant flags all over the National Mall. You can still go to the Smithsonian. You can still do every other official thing the capital offers. People love the Museum of the Bible anyway, because it feeds them. It does not pretend to be a neutral warehouse. It professes that this book is good. It is open about that goodness. It loves being good.
That is the model.
Other places I enjoy for the same reason: the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, the work of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.[8] I love those guys. I may not agree with their young-earth timeline. I am an old-earth kind of guy. We would argue, probably at length, about whether the earth is six thousand years old or many millions. I have read Ham. I understand the argument. I would still debate him profusely on the age of the earth. That disagreement does not cancel the thing I actually love: their embrace of goodness.
When you walk those sites, you cannot help but see how hard they try to be good, and they do not hide it. They do not cram it down every throat on earth. They also do not crush their own enjoyment to satisfy people who arrive already offended. The offended party does not mind offending you. It is quite fine to go the other way—to be audacious about your love for what you value. You do not have to destroy it to make someone else happy.
Jonathan Edwards understood the same principle in a different century. True religion is not mere outward show. When the heart is captured by the beauty of God and His word, it cannot stay silent. The joy overflows.[9] Dimming that joy to appease people who hate its source is not love, and it is not tolerance. It betrays the truth you claim to love.
You do not have to attack persons. You also must not shrink back. Let the light shine clearly. Those who love truth will be drawn to it. I have watched that happen in the galleries of the Museum of the Bible. Stand firm. Speak plainly. Enjoy God’s goodness without shame. That is every Christian’s duty, not a branding strategy for an election cycle.
VI. KEN HAM, BILL NYE, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE AND SECONDARY
I was at the Creation Museum not long ago, wearing a Museum of the Bible shirt—the kind I wear often, because it reminds me of the things I actually like when a lot of darkness surrounds me. The woman at the counter said it was great that I go to the Museum of the Bible. I told her I love that museum, and I also love what Ken Ham built. Ham set a public philosophy in motion. The exhibits are well done. I have read the books. I understand why the young-earth argument matters to the people who hold it.
The real discussion is larger than a debate-club win. Science and theology are allowed to argue. I would argue with Ham that the earth is much older than six thousand years. I would also tell Bill Nye that sneering at Genesis as if the only alternatives were a cartoon ark or a materialist closed system is a different kind of ignorance. The point for this essay is not to settle geology. The point is that Christians can disagree on the age of the earth and still refuse to surrender the created order, the moral law, and the right to love Scripture out loud.
That is maturity. Rally around the core of the confession, not around every secondary interpretation. Ken Ham loves what he believes and says it without shame. I will not take that joy from him. I wish more people in public life had that spine, even when I think their timeline is wrong.
VII. JD VANCE, BUTLER COUNTY, AND WHY SCRIPTURE AT A RALLY IS NOT A GIMMICK
JD Vance is from my part of the world. Middletown. Butler County. Monroe just down the road. I know those hardy people. I know the flea markets—Traders World, Treasure Island—where folks come out of church on Sunday and walk the aisles looking at vendors, wall art, and the kind of homemade biblical kitsch that elites mock and ordinary people actually live with.[10]
Vance knows that country. His people are those people. When he talks about Scripture, it does not sound like a consultant discovered “faith outreach” on a whiteboard. It sounds like Butler County. That matters.
I have been glad to see President Trump and Vice President Vance put Scripture into the open at the Texas midterm moment and in surrounding speeches and interviews.[11] Vance has been unusually explicit that Christianity is not a private hobby you hide to keep a coalition calm. He has said Christianity is America’s creed—not that every citizen must be a Christian, but that the moral language that actually formed the country is Christian.[12] He has said Satan’s favorite trick is convincing Christians that faith and politics belong in separate rooms.[13] He has even been willing to talk about end times without collapsing into either panic or passivity: do the work in front of you; do not outsource your whole moral life to a countdown clock.[14]
I think that is smart. It will help the midterms. Not because Bible verses are magic turnout dust, but because a lot of serious churchgoing conservatives have concluded that politicians are blabbermouths who say one thing at the banquet and another in the agency. Those people will stay home if they think the language is rented. They will show up if they think the man actually fears God more than he fears the clip.
I am not naive. Quoting Scripture at a rally is easy. Governing in a way that honors the God of that Scripture is harder. The test is not whether a line lands in a speech. The test is whether the administration’s actions, over time, hate what God hates and love what God loves. A leader who merely drapes verses over policies that protect evil is a hypocrite. A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood, confused children, and public lies are being baptized as kindness.
For midterms, for holding the House and the Senate, the Christian vote is not a sentiment. It is a body of people who still believe first allegiance is not to a party. If you want them off the couch, do not give them another focus-grouped paragraph about “values.” Give them the thing they already know is true and have been told to whisper.
VIII. THREE VERSES LEADERS SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID TO SAY OUT LOUD
If a leader wants language that encourages the faithful and warns the powerful at the same time, he does not need a speechwriter to invent it. It is already in the book.
First: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”[15]
That is Proverbs 14:34. It directly assaults the idea that a country becomes great by GDP, weapons, or branding. Moral order is not an accessory. If we keep normalizing what Scripture calls evil, we are not becoming sophisticated. We are becoming weak. Wealth will not save a people that has taught its children to despise the created order.
Second: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”[16]
Isaiah 5:20 is the verse for this exact hour. It names the mechanism. The deception is not only that people do wrong. The deception is that they rename the wrong and then punish the person who remembers the old name. Redefine marriage, celebrate the confusion of sex, treat biblical speech as harm, and you have not expanded compassion. You have inverted the moral dictionary. A leader who will not say that sentence is not being pastoral. He is being careful about his future bookings.
Third: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”[17]
Psalm 33:12 is not a magic formula for a superpower. It is a reminder of allegiance. The Christian community’s ultimate loyalty is not to a party, a personality, or a news cycle. Blessing, in the biblical sense, attaches to a people that still knows who God is. That is hope, not nostalgia. It tells serious people why they should bother.
These three verses do what a good rally needs: moral clarity, a warning against deception, and a promise larger than the next quarter. They are short enough to remember. They are sharp enough to divide light from fog.
IX. DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RAPTURE WHILE EVIL DOES THE WORK
Here is the pastoral failure I have watched for decades.
Many people I know will say they are good Christians because they refuse to “engage.” They will hang the Ten Commandments on the wall, go to church on Sunday, and then treat public evil as a problem God will vacuum up at the end of the age. They do not want to confront anybody. They do not want to fight. They want the apocalypse to do the job they were too tired or too timid to do. They call that humility. I call it a religious mask on laziness.
The same Bible that promises the return of Christ also commands believers to resist the devil, hate what is evil, do justice, and love mercy.[18] God never called a people to nap while wickedness reorganizes the schools. Waiting for God to fix everything while we do nothing is not faith. It is presumption.
Moses did not treat Egypt as a spectator sport. Deborah did not. David did not. Nehemiah did not rebuild a wall by quoting a verse about patience and going home. The apostles did not treat the ruling authorities as an excuse to go mute. Romans 13 tells Christians to recognize governing authority. Acts 5:29 tells them that when those authorities command what God forbids, the first allegiance is to God.[19] Submission to God is not submission to evil—quite the opposite.
If a world leader will not bow to the authority of God, that does not mean the rest of us take a back seat and wait for the credits. It means discernment. It means we do not confuse a Bible on the podium with a conscience in the chest. It also means we do not treat politics as a substitute for conversion. A man can win a midterm and still lose his soul. Reformation that begins only in rallies and podcasts, and never in the soul’s submission to Christ, profits nothing.
However, the opposite error is just as real: using “God will handle it” as cover for refusing to handle the thing in front of you. Faith works in its own generation. It prays for the kingdom to come and then spends its breath on righteousness while it still has breath.
X. FLEA-MARKET CHRISTIANITY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECORATION AND BACKBONE
I like Traders World. I like Treasure Island. Monroe, Ohio, is a strange and specific place, and I love it for what it is. Walk those markets, and you will see a lot of people who came straight from church. You will see biblical references on the walls. Treasure Island, in particular, draws a large Mexican immigrant population, and if you have spent time in Mexico, you already know how Catholic that visual world is. They love images of Jesus. They carried older indigenous forms into Catholic form and made something that is not a seminar paper. It is folk theology in color. I love Mexican religious art, including the Christianized approach to death that outsiders reduce to a cartoon of “the cult of the dead.” It is not voodoo. It is a people who still think the dead and the living are not sealed off from each other by a shopping mall.
I can love all of that and still say the hard thing: too many of those same households treat Scripture as interior decorating.
They will buy the plaque. They will love the verse. They will tell you they left it to Jesus. Then, when the school, the HR office, or the culture demands that they deny what the plaque says, they fold and call the fold piety. That is not devotion. That is decoration. Faith that only admires Scripture on a wall, and will not stand for the same commandments when the cost is a customer, a job, or a family argument, is not the faith that built anything worth keeping.
True Christianity has always required backbone. Nice religious imagery is easy. JD Vance coming out of that same region makes the stakes sharper. Those people need to see a leader who will fight for what the wall art claims to believe. If he only sounds like church on Sunday and then governs like every other manager of decline, the flea-market vote will stay home, and the professional class that rewrote childhood will not.
XI. CHRISTIANITY IS A WEAPON — BUT NOT THE WAY THE MOB MEANS WEAPON
People get nervous when you say Christianity is a weapon. They should get the meaning right.
Christianity is not a weapon in the way a riot is a weapon. It is not deceit. It is not a secret police of the pious. The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.[20] Truth is the blade. When a leader speaks Scripture with actual conviction, it cuts through slogans, exposes the rename-the-evil trick, and wakes a conscience that had gone to sleep under the word “kindness.”
That is how you fight evil in high places without becoming the thing you oppose.
Many of the policies I have been watching—the sexual ones, the speech ones, the childhood ones—were designed in the background to wear away a society that still had a Christian base. You do not have to invent a conspiracy chart to see the sequence. First, the language changes. Then the training changes. Then the child is caught in the middle, and the parent is the last to be informed. The answer is not to copy the enemy’s methods. The answer is to stop being ashamed of the only thing that can actually defeat the darkness: the gospel of Jesus Christ, spoken as if you mean it.
A leader should stand on Scripture not as a mascot but as a man who fears God more than he fears the mob. This generation is starving for that kind of boldness. Amen. Let it be said without the usual throat-clearing.
XII. ISLAM, SAUDI ARABIA, AND THE RIGHT TO DEFEND YOUR OWN HOUSE
A short word on a subject that makes consultants sweat.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, a lot of people are angry that American leadership will not spend every morning railing at Saudi Arabia and at radical Islam in the old post-2001 register. Radical Islam is not a hallucination. It is still at work. It is fair game. I also think you can put your hand on the Bible without turning every speech into a comparative-religion insult comic.
You do not have to be condescending toward every competing religion to defend Christianity. [21] A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood is shed in the name of religion. He also needs wisdom. Sometimes the most effective stand is not the loudest anathema. It is the clear, consistent defense of truth and justice, and the refusal to treat Christianity as the one faith that must apologize for existing.
If Trump or Vance quote Scripture, the test is not the quote. The test is whether their actions line up with the book they opened. Religion used as a costume for power is an old trick. Religion used as the thing a man actually submits to is rarer, and it is the only version worth the airtime.
XIII. THE JONATHAN EDWARDS STUDY BIBLE AND A PRACTICAL NEXT STEP
If you want an entry point that is not a meme and not a campaign pamphlet, start with a book that expects you to stay.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, published by Thomas Nelson in August 2026 and edited by Matthew Everhard, is built on the NKJV and Edwards’s own notes, resolutions, and theological instincts.[22] Edwards’s great theme was not American politics. It was joy in God. “The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That is the sentence under the project. Study notes drawn from his work, essays on the Great Awakening, his Resolutions, and his miscellanies system are all there if you want to do more than highlight a rally verse.
I love a study Bible that treats Scripture as something you live inside, not something you mine for applause lines. I do not agree with every secondary system any commentator has ever hung on the text. I do not need to. The point is daily reading, public love, and an unashamed life. Treat yourself to something good. Read it. Let people know you love it. At this stage of the game, visible joy in the word is not a small witness. It is one of the last clean ones left.
XIV. WHAT I WANT FROM LEADERS — AND WHAT I WILL NOT PRETEND
I want leaders who will:
Protect children from medical and social experiments they cannot consent to in any meaningful sense.
Stop treating “compassion” as a synonym for affirmation.
Speak Scripture as if it were true, not as if it were a demographic.
Refuse the HR liturgy that recodes male and female as optional.
Understand that Christian voters are not a prop. They are people whose first loyalty is supposed to be higher than a ticket.
Fight in their own generation instead of waiting for the sky to split.
Keep their joy. An ashamed church is a disarmed church.
I will say this: goodness is not something you have to apologize for. Find it. Love it. Project it. Evil is not shy about encroaching. You are not obligated to meet that encroachment with a permanent second cheek and a taped mouth. The job, when you see the lie eating children and renaming itself kindness, is to conquer it with righteousness and to be bold about the source of that righteousness.
Do not be ashamed of the gospel.
Do not be ashamed of the book.
Do not be ashamed of liking what is good.
That is the politics of heaven in an age that keeps disclosing how much of our public life was built on a dare: that ordinary people would rather be polite than tell the truth about their own sons and daughters.
XV. A LAST WORD TO THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY LEAD
This was never written for the algorithm that wants a screaming thumbnail. It was written for the smaller room: the people who draft, who vote in caucuses, who manage institutions, who sit close enough to power to change a line in a bill or a tone in a speech.
It is safe to put your arm around Scripture.
It is not safe, in the only sense that matters, to keep pretending that the sexual revolution’s latest chapter is too delicate to name.
You are allowed to enjoy the Museum of the Bible, the Creation Museum, a Mexican retablo of Christ, a Jonathan Edwards page, a Butler County flea market, and a Vice President who will still say the name of Jesus without coughing. You are allowed to disagree about the age of the earth and still agree that a girl is not a boy because a school counselor said so.
The light does not need your permission to be light. It needs you to stop putting a basket over it.
Speak plainly. Protect the children. Love the good without apology. Leave the shame to the people who require it.
That is how you strengthen the faithful. That is how you expose the deception. That is how a nation finds out, in an age of disclosure, whether it still remembers the politics of heaven.
NOTES
[1] The phrase “politics of heaven” is used here in the older Christian sense: the public consequences of God’s reign and moral law, not a claim that any party is the kingdom of God. See Augustine, The City of God, esp. Books XIV–XIX, on the interweaving of the city of God and the city of man.
[2] Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.”
[3] On the distinction between pastoral care for distressed youth and the affirmation-only medical pathway, see Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (NHS England, 2024); Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage (Regnery, 2020); Lisa Littman, “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria,” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018).
[4] Reporting and commentary on the clustering of transgender-identifying children in celebrity households include Rikki Schlott, “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood,” New York Post, June 4, 2026; “The rise of the celebrity trans kid,” The Spectator, April 10, 2024; and recurring profiles in mainstream entertainment coverage of specific families. Clustering is not the same as a complete census; it is a pattern that demands an explanation beyond “visibility.”
[5] Cass, Independent Review (2024). For the contrary claim that social contagion is unsupported, see Jack Turban et al., “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States,” Pediatrics (2022). For more recent discussion of declining youth identification after the peak years, see analysis associated with Eric Kaufmann’s 2025 commentary on survey trends. The existence of a debate is the point: the science was never “settled” in the way school districts pretended.
[6] Genesis 1:27; Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6.
[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 4th Street SW, Washington, D.C.; opened November 17, 2017; founded through the Green family / Museum of the Bible, Inc. See museumofthebible.org and the institution’s published FAQ on mission, square footage, and exhibit floors.
[8] Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis; Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky (opened 2007); Ark Encounter, Williamstown, Kentucky (opened 2016). See answersingenesis.org.
[9] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); The Life of David Brainerd; and the Resolutions. Edwards’s insistence that true religion engages the affections, not merely the mouth, is the through-line of the 2026 study Bible project cited below.
[10] Traders, World and Treasure Island are long-running flea-market / vendor sites serving the Monroe–Middletown corridor in Butler County, Ohio. JD Vance’s upbringing in Middletown and family ties in the county are documented in Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016) and in subsequent local reporting.
[11] Coverage of Trump and Vance at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, September 2026, includes contemporaneous reports from ABC and other national outlets. Vance’s broader 2025–2026 record of public Christian speech includes the Turning Point USA AmFest 2025 address and the May 2026 “Rededicate 250” remarks on the National Mall.
[12] JD Vance, AmFest / Turning Point USA remarks, December 2025: “Christianity is America’s creed,” with the explicit caveat that one need not be a Christian to be an American. See also Catholic News Agency, “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics,” December 2025.
[13] Ryan Foley, “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics,” The Christian Post, July 20, 2026, reporting on Vance’s conversation with Bishop Robert Barron.
[14] Maya Yang, “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK,’” The Guardian / syndicated, September 2, 2026, on the Bryce Crawford interview.
[15] Proverbs 14:34 (NKJV): “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”
[16] Isaiah 5:20.
[17] Psalm 33:12: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.”
[18] James 4:7; Romans 12:9; Micah 6:8; Psalm 97:10.
[19] Romans 13:1–7; Acts 5:29. The Deborah and David narratives are Judges 4–5 and 1 Samuel 16–31 / 2 Samuel.
[20] Hebrews 4:12; Ephesians 6:17.
[21] John 14:6; Acts 4:12.
[22] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Features include Edwards-derived study notes, doctrinal articles, essays on Edwards and the Great Awakening, the Resolutions, and an introduction to his miscellanies method.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Scripture and Classic Christian Sources
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960. Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. “Resolutions.” In Letters and Personal Writings, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. 1741. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). General editor Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026. Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943. Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York: Scribner, 1932. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “Live Not by Lies.” 1974. Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976. Schaeffer, Francis A. A Christian Manifesto. Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1981.
Creation, Museums, and Public Christian Witness
Ham, Ken. The Lie: Evolution. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1987; rev. eds. thereafter. Ham, Ken. Gospel Reset. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2018. Answers in Genesis. Creation Museum and Ark Encounter visitor guides and position papers. https://answersingenesis.org Museum of the Bible. Institutional FAQs, exhibit guides, and annual materials. Washington, D.C. https://www.museumofthebible.org Wishard, Grant. “Love to Tell the Story.” Washington Examiner, November 17, 2017. Zauzmer Weil, Julie, and Sarah Pulliam Bailey. “The ark vs. the covenant: the dramatic contrast between the Creation Museum and the Museum of the Bible.” Washington Post, November 20, 2017.
Sex, Children, Medicine, and Social Contagion
Cass, Hilary. Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report. NHS England, 2024. Shrier, Abigail. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2020. Shrier, Abigail. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Are Not Growing Up. New York: Sentinel, 2024. Littman, Lisa. “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018). Bailey, J. Michael, and Ray Blanchard. Clinical and taxonomic papers on autogynephilia and rapid-onset presentations (various). Laidlaw, Michael, et al. Endocrine and pediatric critique literature on puberty blockade. SEGM (Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine). Collected reviews. Turban, Jack L., et al. “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States.” Pediatrics (2022). [Contrary thesis; included so the reader can see both sides of the official argument.] Kaufmann, Eric. Commentary and data notes on declining youth LGBT / transgender identification after the early-2020s peak (2025). Schlott, Rikki. “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood.” New York Post, June 4, 2026. “The rise of the celebrity trans kid.” The Spectator, April 10, 2024. “Hollywood’s growing A-list of non-binary, transgender kids.” The Daily Telegraph, 2025. Hruz, Paul W., Lawrence S. Mayer, and Paul R. McHugh. “Growing Pains: Problems with Puberty Suppression in Treating Gender Dysphoria.” The New Atlantis, 2017. McHugh, Paul. “Transgender Surgery Is not the Solution.” Wall Street Journal, 2014, and related Johns Hopkins commentary. Soh, Debra. The End of Gender. New York: Threshold, 2020. Joyce, Helen. Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. London: Oneworld, 2021. Hilton, Emma, and Colin Wright. Biological-sex primer essays in Reality’s Last Stand and related venues. Singal, Jesse. Long-form reporting on youth gender medicine, The Atlantic and later independent work.
Culture, Elite Capture, and Institutional Language
Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Murray, Douglas. The War on the West. New York: Harper, 2022. Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020. Trueman, Carl R. Strange New World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022. Hanby, Michael. Various essays on technology, liberalism, and the body, First Things. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Anointed. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Sowell, Thomas. Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Darel E. Paul. From Tolerance to Equality. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018.
Vance, Ohio, and the Present Political-Religious Moment
Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy. New York: Harper, 2016. Vance, J. D. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. 2026. “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics.” Catholic News Agency, December 2025. “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics.” Christian Post, July 20, 2026. “Religious Vance seeks to avoid MAGA schism as he keeps the faith for 2028.” The Guardian / syndicated, September 13, 2026. Yang, Maya. “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK.’” September 2, 2026. Forbes Breaking News. “The Morality & Religion That Formed The American Consciousness Were Decidedly Christian.” National Mall remarks, May 2026. Local reporting on Middletown, the Cleveland-Cliffs mill, and Vance’s hometown visits: Cincinnati Enquirer, Journal-News, Fox News, 2023–2026. Dreher, Rod. Live Not by Lies. New York: Sentinel, 2020. Renn, Aaron M. Life in the Negative World. Washington, D.C.: Zondervan / related 2024 essays on post-Christian America.
Islam, Religious Liberty, and Public Courage
Ibn Warraq. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995. Spencer, Robert. The History of Jihad. New York: Bombardier, 2018. [Use critically; included because the public argument exists.] Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Weigel, George. Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. New York: Doubleday, 2007. First Amendment and religious-liberty case law: Employment Division v. Smith; Fulton v. City of Philadelphia; 303 Creative v. Elenis; related commentary in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Ohio Color, Folk Religion, and Place
Hoffman, Rich. Prior columns and commentary at OvermanWarrior / related essays on Middletown, Monroe, and regional culture. Brandes, Stanley. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Carmichael, Elizabeth, and Chloë Sayer. The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Nutini, Hugo G. Todos Santos en Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Local vendor culture around Traders World (Monroe, Ohio) and Treasure Island as primary, on-the-ground observation rather than academic monograph.
Journalism and Primary Documents Worth Keeping
Cass Review full report and supporting research annexes (NHS England). WPATH Files / leaked internal files and subsequent journalistic treatment (2024). SEGM, Genspect, and Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine bibliographies. Museum of the Bible press FAQs. Answers in Genesis statement of faith and museum interpretative materials. Thomas Nelson catalog entry and Everhard interviews on the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (August 2026).
Suggested Reading Paths
If you lead and have one night: Romans 1 and 13, Acts 5, Proverbs 14, Isaiah 5, Psalm 33, Hebrews 4; then Cass’s final report summary; then Vance’s Communion on why he will not keep the faith in a separate drawer.
If you want the child-medicine argument without online noise: Cass; Shrier; Hruz/Mayer/McHugh; then one contrary paper (Turban, 2022) so you know what the institutions cited.
If you want the soul of the thing rather than the policy: Edwards’s Religious Affections; the 2026 Edwards Study Bible notes on joy; Augustine’s two cities; Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not by Lies.”
Suppose you want to walk the places named here: Museum of the Bible in Washington; Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in Kentucky; a Sunday-to-Monday loop through Middletown and the Monroe markets. The argument is clearer after you have stood in the rooms.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman writes from the Middletown, Ohio, side of the country, for readers who still think Scripture is allowed in public and that children are not a canvas for someone else’s revolution. This essay is not a substitute for a church, a clinician, or a ballot. It is a refusal to whisper.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I know a lot of people out there take issue with my point of view. Good. I get involved in this stuff precisely because that is the case. I did not want another polite Bible study where everybody already agrees and then goes home feeling spiritually hydrated. I wanted an open discussion, talking to an audience, with the entire database of Jonathan Edwards in the chair across from me. Faith, theology, the Bible as I actually read it, and the work I have been doing for years under the heading I call the politics of heaven.
The timing is not accidental. We are living through what the documentary industry has branded The Age of Disclosure — a season in which former officials, intelligence people, and military witnesses are finally willing to say out loud that non-human intelligence is here, that craft have been recovered, and that the American state has been lying about it since at least 1947.[1] The film treats that as a national-security and science story. I treat it as a political story that starts long before Roswell. If you have read me for any length of time, you already know I do not separate UFOs from demons, Elohim, Watchers, or the divine council. I do not separate any of that from how human beings get sorted into controllable categories. That is the whole point of The Politics of Heaven.[2]
Why I Chose Jonathan Edwards as a Sparring Partner
Jonathan Edwards does not agree with me. That is why I wanted him. If I only talk to people who already think the universe is a messy civil war among non-human rebels, I am just warming up my own choir. Edwards spent a life preaching the absolute sovereignty of God over all things, including the devil.[3] His notes sit in one of my favorite Bibles on the planet. I love the intelligence in that book. I love the seriousness. I do not swallow the theology hook, line, and sinker just because it became part of the American founding atmosphere.[4]
A lot of people who read me are 1750s people in 2026 clothes. They want Edwards’s God — the God who never loses a committee vote, the God whose enemies only borrow power for a season. I understand the hunger. I have been through enough grief to know why a soul wants a strong anchor. I also think that hunger can become a psychological mechanism. When life is chaotic, the human heart will pay almost any price to believe somebody competent is driving. That does not make the belief true. It makes it useful.
Edwards would say Satan was once among the brightest in heaven, fallen, subtle, powerful, and still on a leash. He would say rebellion was never a political contest because God is not one being among beings. God is the ground of existence. I love that sentence. I have used versions of it myself. I also look at the last several thousand years, and I do not see a manager winning on the ground. I see a lot of borrowed-power talk and a lot of bodies.
The Age of Disclosure and the Politics of Heaven
Disclosure, as the government class uses the word, means a press conference. A file release. A hearing. A former AATIP guy staring at a building while the score tells you to feel solemn. That is not disclosure. Disclosure is when you admit the other intelligence in the room has been running a ground game through religion, politics, sex, war, and category-making since before your grandparents had a country.
Michael Heiser did the church a favor by forcing Psalm 82 back onto the table. God stands in the divine council. He judges among the gods. Deuteronomy 32, in the older reading, has the Most High allotting nations to the sons of God. Job opens with the sons of God presenting themselves and the Accuser walking in like he has a badge.[5] You can baptize all of that into “God is still in charge” if you need to sleep. Alternatively, you can read it the way a political operator reads a situation room: there is a board, there are governors, some of them have gone rogue, and the chairman keeps insisting the org chart proves he never lost control. Moreover, to the point of evil being in control, remember Michael Heiser died of a rare illness. I have also had a lot of trouble since completing my most recent book on this precise subject. The bad guys look to get rid of people who are close to smoking them out of their hiding places. I have seen it up close, and it is much more than a coincidence.
Inside the disclosure world there is already a split. One camp wants interstellar biologists and reverse-engineered alloys. The other camp — the so-called Collins Elite strain inside defense culture — has been whispering for decades that these things are not cousins from Zeta Reticuli. They are deceivers. They deny the Son. They catechize abductees.[6] I am closer to the second camp, with one difference. I do not think calling them “demons” ends the argument. Demons is a church word that lets people stop thinking. I want the org chart. I want the ground game. I want to know who is manipulating whom, and why God keeps hiring the same contractors after they burn the city down.
Categories Are How Non-Human Intelligence Controls the Human Race
Here is the running thought I brought into the conversation. When astronomers hunted black holes, they did not start with a photograph. They started with a gravity signature. Something unseen was tugging at visible bodies. The logical conclusion was a compact mass so dense light could not climb out. Better instruments later confirmed what the footprints already said.
I look at human history the same way. You can see spirit-world manipulation in how people get thrown into categories, and then those categories get administered. Left, right. Saved, unsaved. Young earth, old earth. Alien, angel. Loyal servant, blasphemer. Once you are in the box, the box does the rest of the work. You police yourself. You attack the neighboring box. Meanwhile, the intelligence that built the shelves goes home early.
That is why I get impatient with people who think the main spiritual task is to pick the correct team jersey and never ask whether the stadium itself is the trap. I used a football picture in the conversation because I live in Bengal country and I have watched 60,000 people invent causation out of a lucky shirt. One receiver catches a ball in the last minute, and ten thousand isolated nervous systems all decide their fabric caused the physics. We do the same thing with God and history. We live in a vacuum of limited observation, and then we call the vacuum providence.
I Am Not a Young-Earth Creationist, and I Do Not Need the Planetarium to Close the Argument
The Creation Museum has a fine exhibit culture. I live in this triangle. I have sat through their planetarium show, which is really good, and I have been curious how they sell a 6,000-year-old Earth with a straight face while the sky over Petersburg is the same sky that makes deep time obvious.[7] I am not a young-earth man. I am a deep-past man. The idea that life only exists here, and only during this thin slice of time, is ridiculous to me. That is not rebellion against Genesis. That is refusing to let a nineteenth-century fight with Darwin become the whole religion.
Young-earth certainty and materialist certainty are twin categories. Both are easy to administer. Both spare you from the harder sentence: we do not know how old the war is, we do not know how many worlds it touches, and we are arrogant to think the Bible’s human camera angle is the only camera in the universe. I love the Bible because it is the longest political and spiritual after-action report I have. I do not love it because a committee told me I am not allowed to notice the lens.
Job Is Not Comfort Literature
I understand Job. I have had enough wreckage in my life that the book does not feel like a classroom exercise. I do not sit around looking for a hug from a psychotherapist. I outmaneuver hard things by moving. People say I am positive about everything. That is not a personality quirk. That is a method. You do not beat a siege by narrating your wounds to an audience that cannot lift a gate.[8]
What I will not do is pretend Job is a success story for management. Satan walks into the council, talks God into a demonstration, and a good man’s world is stripped for a wager. Edwards says the boundaries prove sovereignty because the Accuser had to ask permission. I say that is the behavior of a boss who can still sign the visitor badge while the factory burns. Permission is not the same thing as competence. Permission is not the same thing as loyalty to the people who actually bleed.
If I had been standing in that council, I would have wanted Satan’s head off in the air. Not as theater. As containment. Then I would have watched God’s face. That is the test nobody in Sunday school is allowed to run. If the Accuser is a rebel, you kill the rebel. If the Accuser is a tool, you just learned something about the toolmaker that the later chapters are designed to keep you from saying out loud.
Sovereignty, Lucky Jerseys, and the Divine Council Bureaucracy
Edwards’s best line in the exchange, the one that still rings, is that God is not a being among beings. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. The greater one in us is greater than the one in the world.[9] I like the music of that. I also asked the question bureaucracy always dreads: if he is in charge of everybody, why the council? Why the governors? Why the sons of God with portfolios? Why a heavenly civil service if the king can move the sun with a sentence?
The approved answer is generosity. God does not need help. He shares the dignity of rule, as a great king appoints judges. Fine. I have run companies. I have watched kings appoint judges. Sometimes it is generosity. Sometimes it is a man who cannot stand to be seen doing the ugly work with his own hands. A weak leader uses other people to do what he lacks the social courage to do himself. He works through passive systems. He keeps a villain on payroll, so the villain can be blamed when the quarterly report comes in bloody.
That is how Job reads to me when I take the piety filter off. God keeps an Accuser. The Accuser proposes torture. God authorizes a limited version. Later writers explain that it was for Job’s refinement and for the audience’s faith. Hindsight is the favorite tool of every failed administration. You look back at what already happened and discover it was necessary. Necessity is cheap when you are not the one burying children.
Why Does an All-Powerful God Need Proof of Loyalty Through Pain?
Edwards says God is not insecure. The infinite self-existent one was happy before he made a single atom. Tests are for us, not for him. The fire does not inform the goldsmith. It purifies the gold. I have heard that sermon. I have preached versions of it to myself on bad mornings. It still leaves the managerial question on the table.
Why is the refinement this expensive? Why do the loyal become the demonstration models? Why does Israel get the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Roman, the exile, the rape, the blinded king, the suicide cliff at Masada, and then a theologian with a clean desk explaining that holiness required it? I am too old to pretend that stacking enough millennia on the wound automatically turns it into wisdom. Maybe from the vantage of a thousand years and many worlds there is a logic. I have been looking for that logic. So far I have found a political war against non-human insurgents, and a human need to believe the chairman is still chairman.
People do not like that sentence because you are not supposed to question God’s authority. Scripture itself is full of people who did — Job, David, Jeremiah, the man on the cross quoting Psalm 22. The ban is not in the text. The ban is in the later management of the text. You may wrestle. You may not judge the judge. That rule is very convenient for the judge.
I Do Not Wake Up Looking for a Savior
I will say this as plainly as I said it in the conversation. I am not a bend-the-knee type. I am not looking for a replacement father. I think a lot of organized religion is built for people who never stopped needing that structure, and I do not despise them for it. If that is what holds a person together, it is more valuable than my path would be for them. It is not my path.
Loyalty has to be earned. You do not get my service because I inherited Adam’s paperwork. You do not get it because a Roman-era council said the canon is closed and the questions are now a character issue. If you let evil run loose through my world and then call the wreckage a quiz, you have not earned the title you keep putting on the letterhead.
Edwards asked the fair question: if you no longer believe God is fully in control, why keep the Bible? Because it is the only chronicle I have that is long enough to show the pattern. Three or four thousand years of God-talk, council-talk, war-talk, and human failure. I read it the way I would read an after-action report on a candidate who keeps losing precincts and then writing memoirs about hidden victories. I am looking for the ground game. I want to beat the evil that I think God has failed to contain. I do not want a ticket out. I do not want an eternal basement where I am safe because I surrendered. I want the thing hunted where it lives — on earth, in the unseen, in whatever dark matter and outer dark the language is pointing at.
The Strategic Failure Pattern Across Scripture
Edwards’s counter is the old one. Every time man tries to destroy evil in his own strength, he fails or makes it worse. Lasting victories come only when God acts through surrendered people. Therefore, the strategy I am hunting is the one I distrust: decrease so he can increase.
That sounds to me like passive-aggressive leadership. A failed executive telling the staff that the only competence left in the building is his, so stop trying. Maybe divine wisdom really does sit above my pay grade which is a concept I don’t believe in because it accepts a structure that protects evil from analysis. Maybe. I have also watched that speech get used by every earthly institution that wanted obedience without performance. Israel tries to clear the land and cannot. Disciples try to cast out a demon and cannot. The church inherits the empire and then burns people for translation errors. The pattern I keep seeing is not “surrender works.” The pattern is “the movement needs the failure so it can keep selling surrender.”
If I could rewrite one rule of the war, I would stop using good and innocent people as acceptable casualties. I would stop treating the loyal as the easiest demonstration objects. A leader who lets the enemy chew his own household to make a point is not mysterious. He is a poor defender. Call that blasphemy if you need the category. I call it a performance review.
What Jesus Meant by “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me”
That was the question I wanted Edwards for. In the last minutes, Jesus quotes the opening of Psalm 22.[10] The orthodox reading is elegant. Every Jew in earshot knows the rest of the psalm. Agony first, victory later. The Son bears wrath. The physical torture is not the worst part. The worst part is separation. It is not doubt. It is payment.
What I hear is a man in a scapegoat machine. The idea that the sins of the world can be loaded onto one body and walked out of the camp is older than Golgotha. It is in Leviticus. It is in the human nervous system. People who have cheated, grabbed, and gone numb need a goat. First-century Jerusalem had Rome on its neck and a purity system in its temples. A public death that could be read as both Roman order and Jewish atonement is politically efficient. I do not say that as a sneer at the man. I say it as a reading of the market.
Was he doubting? I think he was a tortured human body, lightheaded, pierced, and still honest enough to say the sentence that piety wants to footnote away. If the cry is only liturgy, then the pain is only theater. I do not think the pain was theater.
The Kashmir Question, Politics, and Why Bodies Matter
I am going to say the part that gets people really upset. I think the crucifixion was a political killing. I think Rome wanted a problem removed without owning the whole bill, and a slice of the Jerusalem establishment wanted a pressure valve. I think the body of Jesus becoming unfindable helped everyone who needed a story that could travel. Moreover, I think the Kashmir tradition — Roza Bal, Yuz Asaf, a man who survives the empire and dies old in the north of India — is at least as entitled to forensic curiosity as the claim that matter dematerialized because a later council said so.[11]
I know the Ahmadiyya have their own reasons for wanting Jesus alive and unsacrificed. I know Islam has its own reasons. I know Led Zeppelin fans have their reasons, and they are not theological. None of that makes the empty tomb automatically supernatural. It makes the empty tomb a contested piece of political property. If there are bones in a private or shrine context that people have whispered about for a century, the adult move is not to hiss “blasphemy.” The adult move is to ask what the genes say. We are not ready for that conversation as a culture because the conversation would smash too many identities at once.
Edwards, and the whole martyr argument after him, asks why the inner circle would die for a lie. It is a serious question.[12] My answer is not that they were cartoon frauds. My answer is that movements eat identity. Once your name, your friends, your enemies, and your hope of being remembered are all welded to a story, the story becomes the last asset you have. I have watched modern parties do it. I have watched people who finally got power try to crawl back into the victim costume because the costume was the only self they trusted. Rome, Judea, a dead or vanished leader, a handful of men who would otherwise be nobody — that is enough heat to bake a religion.[13]
James, Paul, and the Psychology of Movements After the Leader Is Gone
James is the hard case, and I will not pretend otherwise. He was not a believer during the ministry. Afterward, he becomes the spine of the Jerusalem church and dies for it.[14] Guilt is part of my read. Grief is part of it. So is the sudden, terrible honor of being the last blood left in the room. That is not the same celebrity as wine and women. If you inherit a crucified brother’s name, the only way the currency spends is to live poor, pray the knees off yourself, and look like him. Immortality through the written word is still immortality. Most people thrown off temples are forgotten. James is not. That incentive is real whether the metaphysics are true or not.
Paul is the scaling engine. Without Paul there is no Gentile church as we know it. James and Paul did not roast hot dogs in matching shirts. They fought. The later harmony is a product, the way party platforms are products.[15] I like James. I think he was one of the good ones. I also think good men can stabilize a narrative they did not start and cannot fact-check anymore because the body is gone and the politics have already hardened.
Led Zeppelin, Kashmir, and the Whisper of the Spirit World
Why do people who like to dissolve their ordinary mind keep circling that song? I do not think it is just the riff.[16] I think the spirit world has a long memory and popular art is one of the leaks. We hear whispers, and we dress them as taste. That is not an argument for taking a rock band as a footnote to Matthew. It is an argument that the official custodians of the story do not have a monopoly on the residue.
If you love God and you look around, you do not see a tight ship. You see evil spitting in the claim of control every five seconds. Then you see nice people turn the other cheek and use Jesus as a permit to stay out of the fight. Martyrdom becomes a brand. Cowardice borrows a cross. I want the opposite instinct. I want the war taken to the thing that is torturing people.
Are We Free, or Are We Reading a Record Left by People Who Needed Compliance?
Who wrote the dumb rules? That was my question when Edwards said the only way to beat evil is to yield to the God who, from my chair, has let it run. A rational rule would look like any competent shop floor. Contain the arsonist. Do not use the night shift as kindling to prove the arsonist exists. Do not publish a handbook later that says the fire was a teaching moment.
The Bible I trust is the Bible I can read between the lines of. I trust it more than I trust the handlers. Councils, empires, reformers, and television teachers all have motives. Rome needed glue as the frontiers cracked. A crucified provincial who could be turned into a cosmic loyalty oath is better glue than another legion.[17] That does not make every line a lie. It means you read like an adult. You ask what was written down and what was not, and why.
My assertion is simple enough to make people furious. Non-human intelligence — call them Elohim, Watchers, demons, NHI, whatever shelf-label you need — has been trying to undo what was made. I think the garden commission was a political statement against rebels on the council. Humans were not designed to be mascots.[18] We were designed to be dangerous to the bureaucracy that did not want us here. That is why the categories exist. That is why “do not question” is preached as humility. A questioning human is harder to herd.
What I Am Looking For in the Bible
I am looking for a strategy. I study wars because I want to know where people failed to beat what was hunting them. I want to succeed where they failed. That is not pride in the cheap sense. It is refusal. I did not wake up wanting to be anybody’s servant, on earth or off it. I woke up wanting to do good work and to stop watching evil treat the world like an open cafeteria.
Edwards was right about my temperature. I am angry. I think anger, in this case, is cleaner than the sweetness that calls itself faith while the same pattern repeats. He was also right that I still have the book open. I keep it open because it is the only long record that does not pretend human beings are only animals or only angels. It shows the council. It shows the Accuser. It shows the empires. It shows the scapegoat. It shows the men who died with the name in their mouths. It shows, if you will look, the politics.[19][20]
If you want the softer Edwards, he is in the Study Bible, and he is worth the time. If you want the American warrior version of the same hunger — competence, natural law, no more yielding to a failed order because the order has a hymn — that is the work I put into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the earlier books.[21] Read both. Argue with both. I did not earn the right to say these things by being careful. I earned it by thinking them for a long time and then saying them with my own name attached.
Are we free? That is the only question left that matters. Free will is either real, or we are livestock with better marketing. I act as if it is real. I read as if the other side is trying to convince me it is not. Moreover, I will keep looking for a way to destroy the evil that has been working for thousands of years, with God if he will do a decent job of it, and without him if he will not. That is the conversation I wanted. That is the conversation I had.
Notes for Searchers, Pastors, and Operators
If you came here from a search on Age of Disclosure, divine council, Jonathan Edwards sovereignty, Job and Satan, Jesus in Kashmir, or whether UAP are demons, you are in the right file. The point was never to baptize a documentary. The point was to stop letting science-press-conference language hide a much older political structure. Read Psalm 82 before you read the next hearing transcript. Read Job 1 before you let a preacher tell you permission and goodness are the same thing. Read the crucifixion as both theology and provincial crisis management. Then decide what you are willing to serve.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam. Jesus in India. 1899. English editions vary.
Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Annihilation of Man. 2020, and related Enochic commentary in the current disclosure debate.
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Creation Museum / Answers in Genesis. Public exhibits and published young-earth materials. Petersburg, Kentucky.
Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754. WJE vol. 1. Yale University Press, 1957.
Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.
Edwards, Jonathan. Sermons on the sovereignty of God in the salvation of men. Various WJE volumes.
Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History.
Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025.
Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Knopf, 2007.
Habermas, Gary, and Michael Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Kregel, 2004.
Hassnain, Fida. A Search for the Historical Jesus. 1994, and later Roza Bal collaborations.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham Press, 2015.
Heiser, Michael S. Supernatural. Lexham Press, 2015.
Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Led Zeppelin. “Kashmir.” Physical Graffiti. Swan Song, 1975.
Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Redfern, Nick. Final Events. Anomalist Books, 2010.
The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 1–11; Deuteronomy 32; 1 Kings 22; Job; Psalm 22; Psalm 82; Daniel 4; Matthew 27; Mark 15; Acts; Galatians; Ephesians 6; Hebrews 1; 1 John 4.
Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003.
1 Enoch (Book of the Watchers) and related Second Temple literature, including material from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Suggested search headers for syndication
Age of Disclosure spiritual meaning; non-human intelligence demons or Elohim; Jonathan Edwards sovereignty of God critique; divine council Psalm 82 politics; Book of Job Satan permission; Jesus tomb Kashmir Roza Bal; James brother of Jesus motive; why did disciples die for the resurrection; Creation Museum planetarium old earth; politics of heaven Rich Hoffman; Overmanwarrior theology.
[1] Dan Farah, dir., The Age of Disclosure (Farah Films, 2025). The film compiles testimony from current and former U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials asserting an eighty-year concealment of non-human intelligence and recovered craft.
[2] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). The working thesis is that biblical theology, ancient Near Eastern political structures, and modern power systems describe one continuous contest, not two separate subjects called “religion” and “politics.”
[3] Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1957). Edwards distinguishes God as the permitter and disposer of events from God as the moral author of sin.
[4] Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (various Crossway/ESV study editions and companion notes used in American Reformed preaching). Edwards remains the most serious American attempt to hold together revival, metaphysics, and civic order.
[5] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, 2015); see also Psalm 82:1; Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls / LXX reading); Job 1:6–12; 1 Kings 22:19–23.
[6] On the “Collins Elite” and the demonic interpretation of UAP/NHI inside defense circles, see Nick Redfern, Final Events (Anomalist Books, 2010), and later pastoral briefings discussed in coverage of Age of Disclosure. The claim is contested. The pattern is not.
[7] Answers in Genesis / Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky. The institution is a short drive from the Cincinnati–Northern Kentucky metro. Young-earth chronology is their public commitment; it is not mine.
[8] Job 1–2; Job 38–42. The book is not a Hallmark card. It is a courtroom transcript with a body count.
[9] Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17; 1 John 4:4. Edwards and the Reformed tradition treat these as proofs of unshared sovereignty. I treat them as claims that still have to survive contact with history.
[10] Psalm 22. The first line is agony; the psalm ends in public vindication. That literary fact does not automatically settle what a dying man felt.
[11] Roza Bal (Rozabal) shrine, Khanyar, Srinagar. The Ahmadiyya claim that Yuz Asaf is Jesus after a survived crucifixion is advanced in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India (1899), and later in Fida Hassnain and popular Kashmir travel literature. Mainstream historians and the shrine’s Sunni caretakers reject the identification. I am not asking anyone to baptize the theory. I am asking why the empty-tomb claim is protected from ordinary forensic curiosity.
[12] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003), remains the strongest academic case that the earliest Christians believed they had seen a bodily risen Jesus and were willing to die for that claim. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona collect the “minimal facts” argument. I am familiar with that literature. I am unpersuaded that martyrdom proves the metaphysics. It proves intensity.
[13] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[14] Josephus, Antiquities 20.197–203, on the death of James. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23, preserves Hegesippus on James’s reputation and execution.
[15] Acts 9; Galatians 1–2; and the well-documented tension between Paul and the Jerusalem circle. Christianity as a scaled movement is unthinkable without Paul. That is a political observation, not a Sunday-school slight.
[16] Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir,” Physical Graffiti (Swan Song, 1975). Popular culture often keeps older spirit-world memory that official theology pretends it has already solved.
[17] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[18] Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8. The image-of-God commission is a political charter over the garden and the nations, not a permission slip to become a house pet in someone else’s bureaucracy.
[19] 1 Peter 5:8; Ephesians 6:12. Principalities and powers language is not a metaphor for bad vibes. It is organizational language.
[20] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741); Religious Affections (1746); and the sermons on God’s sovereignty in the salvation of men. Edwards feared chaos in the human heart more than he feared looking like a weak manager. That is the difference between us.
[21] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021); The Symposium of Justice (2004); Tail of the Dragon (2012).
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.
This is free advice. Nobody sent a twenty-five-hundred-dollar-an-hour invoice. I have been talking to people who live close to the pointed end of Republican strategy—the White House orbit, the Hill, the donor class that still thinks a memo is a movement—and I am putting the same thing on paper that I have been saying out loud. I do not know their internals. I know the look of a team that has started managing a loss before the fourth quarter. I have a long track record of calling the weather before the radar does. Take it or leave it.
Two months is a long time in American politics and a short time in a football season. The generic ballot is ugly. The president’s numbers are not what they were on the night the balloons fell. A lot of very serious people have decided the House is already gone and the Senate is a grind. Fine. Serious people have been wrong before.[1] The map is still a map of close races. Close races move on turnout, weather, and whether your own side can stand to look at itself in the mirror. That last item is the one Speaker Johnson keeps failing.[2]
Mike Johnson Is Talking Like a Man Preparing the Concession Speech
Mike Johnson has not done a really good job of projecting the one thing a thin majority cannot live without: the appearance of wanting the ball. He says the right sentences. He told NOTUS he would not even think about minority leader because “we’re going to win.” He told Dallas this is a pivotal moment and that the next fifty-odd days decide the republic.[3] Then the body language arrives. The schedule shrinks. The House books a quick September exit. The speaker warns audiences what Democrats will do if they take the gavel—impeachment is “not even the big concern,” he says; they will go after the family, the donors, the cabinet. That is not a two-minute drill. That is a man describing the visitor’s locker room.[4]
I am not asking Johnson to lie about the polls, which I don’t think are that bad; the election of 2026 will be all about engagement. I am asking him to stop sounding like a chaplain at a wake. The country can smell managed decline. Voters who already lean your way will stay home if they think the people with the gavel have already donated the furniture. Democrats do not need a wave if Republicans supply the shrug.
Johnson is a devout man. That is supposed to be an asset. Lately it reads as apology. He has spent too many years on the hook, line, and sinker of the progressive contamination that treats public Christianity as a zoning violation. Separation of church and state, as the slogan is now used, is not Madison. It is a muzzle. If you want to know how stupid the muzzle is, skip the seminar and walk three blocks in Southwest Washington.
Remember the Stretch Between the Election and January 20
Everybody who was paying attention remembers that little corridor of time after the 2024 election and before the inauguration. People were happy. Trump went to the fights. He brought people around. He made the transition look like a court and a carnival at the same time—which, if you understand American energy, is the correct mixture. He brought Speaker Johnson into that weather. He brought Elon Musk into that weather. The country got to watch alignment instead of autopsy.[5]
That is the template. Not a new platform. Not another reconciliation draft that dies in a five-vote conference. Presence. Trump should pull Johnson into the open air again and keep him there until the speaker’s shoulders come down. Bring the candidates. Put an arm around the people he picked and let the picture do the work the talking points cannot. Ken Paxton is one. There are others. The point is not a photo-op for the already converted. The point is to tell a tight district that the president still thinks the race is live.
Elon Does Not Need to Pray on Camera. He Needs to Be in the Room.
I say Elon Musk should be around this because I have a significant position in SpaceX stock and I feel better about where the thing is headed than I did when I first said I was in for the IPO. I was enthusiastic then. I am more enthusiastic now. That is not a ticker-tape prayer. That is a judgment about build-out, launch cadence, orbital compute, and the simple fact that the country that cedes the high ground will not remain the country that writes the rules.[6]
Elon does not need to hang around Trump and do the praying circuit. Leave the altar to the people who mean it. What he needs to do is refuse the role the press has written for him: court jester, wrecking ball, or exile. The midterms will be run, in part, as a referendum on whether American industry is allowed to remain impolite. SpaceX is impolite. Good. Bring that heat into the same frame as the speaker and the president and let the contrast with the Democratic freeze-and-regulate coalition explain itself.
Fox Already Has Your People. Football Season Has Everybody Else.
Doing another hit on Fox & Friends is not a strategy. Those viewers are already in the boat. They will vote if the weather is decent and the church van shows up. What you do not have, automatically, is the man who works first shift, drinks a beer on Saturday, and thinks politics is a smell he would rather not bring into the house. That man still goes to football games.
It is football season. You may not have a string of UFC cards to tour, but you have stadiums. You have tailgates. You have jumbotrons and mayors who will still pose for a picture if the president of the United States walks the sideline. Arena speeches work because they look like a country that is still alive. Mega rallies work for the same reason. Take Johnson. Take the candidates. Shake hands. Kiss the babies. Let the vice president hang around and do the work vice presidents are for. Do it in October, when the leaves turn and people remember they have neighbors.
The professional class will call this optics. Optics is what you call it when you have forgotten that human beings decide with their eyes first and their position papers later. A president in a stadium on a Saturday afternoon is a statement that the administration is not hiding in the Residence reading tracking memos. A speaker who looks like he wants to be there is a statement that the majority is not a rental.
The McDonald’s Test, or What DC Actually Sounds Like Before 10 a.m.
If you want to know where America is, skip the think-tank breakfast and go to the McDonald’s on the corner just down from the federal cluster in Southwest. Everybody who films in this town knows the neighborhood I mean. You are close to the Air and Space Museum. The American Indian museum is in the same walk. Congressional offices, the old Health and Human Services pile, the Department of Education’s gravity well—the whole faded government face of the city sits in a few blocks. Two blocks south of that McDonald’s is the Museum of the Bible.[7]
My wife and I have a ritual when we are in Washington. We park in a garage there, at a spot next to the elevator shaft at the bottom where the car fits as if the architect had us in mind. Ten feet to the elevator. The elevator dumps into a lobby that looks like a financial office. Two rights and you are in that McDonald’s. It is awkward in the way elevators are awkward, so somebody always talks. I like your hat. Thank you. Where are you headed?
I have stood in those elevators and at those tables and listened. “I work at Education.” “I am heading to one of the Smithsonian buildings.” “Congressional office.” The voice is flat. It is a job voice. Then, in a car of seven people, somebody says they are going to the Museum of the Bible, and the register changes. There is a little pop. You can see it. Not piety as performance. Pleasure. Anticipation. The same city that teaches its workforce to speak in acronyms still produces a human sound when the subject is Scripture.
I could have gone anywhere I wanted for my birthday in April. I told my wife I wanted a full day at the Museum of the Bible. We did the other DC things. I kept one day just for that museum. Sausage muffin, egg, orange juice or a Coke, about nine o’clock. The museum opens around ten. Then six or seven hours inside a building that does not apologize for the book that made the country possible. That joy is not a private hobby. It is a political fact. I sat there and watched people the way I watch shop floors and precincts. The ones walking toward the Bible were the ones who still had a pulse. The ones walking toward another government building looked like they were reporting for a sentence.
If You Cannot Unite Them on a Bill, Unite Them on a Book
I have been carrying a new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and I am extremely pleased with it. I have been going through it like a man who has been waiting for a tool. Edwards understood something the modern party consultant has forgotten: joy is not the opposite of seriousness. Joy is the fuel. “The enjoyment of God,” he wrote, is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied. You do not have to sign the Westminster Confession to feel the political implication. A movement that cannot speak with pleasure about the source of its own moral language will lose to a movement that at least knows how to yell.[8] [9]
Republicans in the professional class are reluctant to do this because they swallowed, whole, the idea that the Constitution requires the public square to be a chapel with the crosses pried off. That is lunacy. The system was built Christian in the only sense that matters for a republic: it assumed a created order, a fallen citizen, a law above the state, and a people who could be trusted with liberty because they feared something higher than a committee.[10]
I love the Bible as a historical narrative. Those are not two different objects. There is an entry point at every degree of scholarship. Some people will come for the archaeology. Some will come for the cadence of the King James that still sits in the American ear whether they attend or not. Some will come because their grandmother did. You do not need a uniformity of dogma to get a uniformity of attention. Attention is the scarce commodity of a midterm.
So carry the book. Do not only produce it for a swearing-in and then lock it in a drawer. Talk about it. Do a short press availability that is not a culture-war trap and not a sermon. “This is the family Bible. This is a wonderful place. The country still knows what this is.” That is enough. The people you need do not require a systematic theology from the podium. They require permission to stop being embarrassed.
A Quiet Hour at the Museum Before the Ropes Open
I would go further. President Trump should walk across town—it is not far—and take a private tour of the Museum of the Bible before it opens to the public. Eight o’clock. They would open the building for him. Secret Service can lock a place like that down so it would be very safe. The access points are manageable. He can be through the history floors and the room with the Bibles laid out, pictures taken, and gone by nine-thirty, with the public none the wiser until the photos land. Visit the history-of-the-book exhibit while he is there. Stand in the room where the book is treated as an object of civilization rather than a punch line.
Then say the simple sentence: I love this museum. People who visit Washington often tell you it is their favorite stop, and they say it with that same pop in the voice I hear in the elevator. Put the president’s name next to that feeling. It is not phony if he means even half of it. Reminding people where he stands costs an hour and a motorcade. The return is not a sudden forty-state revival. The return is permission, again, for the people who already suspected they were allowed to believe this to act like it on a Tuesday in November.
Do Not Play Not to Lose
I have been saying this all along. Republicans who would not get behind the hard instruments—the same-day rules, the full use of a trifecta, the refusal to pre-negotiate the next Democratic revenge tour—did it because they believed Democrats always take power back, and that the smart play is to stay presentable so the other side will not pack the courts or torch the furniture. That is how you lose on purpose and call it statesmanship.
Democrats do not play that game. They play to take the referee. When they are out of power they yell, they play the victim, and they hope Republicans do not show up. When the rules of mail and curing and late counting favor them, they use the rules. I am not writing a brief for lawlessness. I am writing a brief against the peculiar Republican talent for bringing a rulebook to a street fight and then congratulating themselves for the bruises.
Go out there and win. If you cannot find a tax provision everyone will bleed for, you can still find a book almost everyone in your coalition will recognize. That is not a substitute for wages and borders and energy. It is the thing that makes people bother to vote for the wages and the borders and the energy in the first place.
The AI Debate Is a Strategy, Not a Concern
While we are talking about midterms, look at what is being built on the other side of the board. Democrats are trying to play the whole AI game. A lot of the people who run the large AI shops spent years working against President Trump. They are also busy playing games with each other over who owns the future. The issue is hot inside the Republican coalition for a reason: it is designed to be hot. Steve Bannon is set to appear at the same Washington “pro-human” AI gathering as Bernie Sanders. Populist right and socialist left, holding the same fear by different handles.[11]
For them the unifying note is jobs, dignity, the machine that will replace the man. Those are real human questions. I am not sneering at a machinist who wonders what a model trained on his craft will do to his shop. I am saying the political use of that fear is older than the transformer architecture.
They Ran This Play on Nuclear. They Will Run It on Compute.
Nuclear was always good for a healthy industrial society. Dense energy is how a free people stay warm without kneeling to a cartel or a planning board. Democrats of the anti-human strain used Three Mile Island—and every movie and textbook that turned a contained accident into a morality play—to discourage the independence that comes with the atom. They crippled an industry to suppress the growth of a capitalist nation and called it safety.[12]
Ohioans of a certain age do not need the lecture. We watched the same shot fired at FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants. Regulation and politics helped run a generation business onto the rocks. The subsidiary goes looking for a way to stay alive. Suddenly the company is corrupt, the Republicans who touched the file are dirty, and the moral of the story is that atoms were the original sin. The plants were a balance-sheet problem wrapped in a morality play. The morality play won the news cycle. The electrons still had to come from somewhere.[13]
AI is the new reactor. The doomsday register is the same. Pause. Ban superintelligence. Global coordination. Keep the models on a leash held by the people who already lost the last three arguments about growth. Trace a good portion of that propaganda and you will not end in a Vermont lecture hall. You will end in a strategic environment where China does not want America to embrace the thing that multiplies American labor. Beijing does not need to invent our anxiety. It only needs us to treat our own dynamism as a war crime.[14]
Barack Obama’s network does not have to send a memo titled “Split the GOP with AI” for the effect to be the effect. Put Republicans on their heels. Make the party of builders argue with the party of builders about whether building is allowed. In a midterm year, when turnout is already soft, that argument is not a seminar. It is a suppression tactic.
Low-turnout midterms reward whoever gets their people to the room. The AI fight, framed as apocalypse, keeps the Republican coalition in a family argument while the other side votes. That is why the biblical narrative is not a side quest. It is the offset. The communist register around AI—man as raw material, the future as a planning problem, the soul as an outdated user interface—cannot survive contact with a public that still thinks a human being is a creature and not a dataset. You do not beat a materialist panic with a better white paper. You beat it by reminding people what they are.[15]
The Tight Races Are Tight for a Reason
I look at the board and I do not see a wipeout that has already happened. I see a House that is still a handful of seats and a Senate that can hold even if a chair or two gets wobbly. Texas is the advertisement. Ken Paxton and James Talarico have been inside the margin of error for months. Some surveys now have Talarico a couple of points up. That is not destiny. That is a couple of points.[16]
A couple of points is a stadium visit. A couple of points is a president who looks like he is having a good time standing next to the man he wants in the seat. A couple of points is church-going women who decided the race was about more than a generic ballot average. A couple of points is the difference between Johnson keeping a gavel and Johnson becoming a trivia question about the last Republican speaker before the investigations.[17]
Fox will cover the rallies. That is not the point. The point is the pictures that leak into the places Fox does not run the morning show: the parking lot, the Sunday potluck, the group chat of the parents who have not voted since 2024 because they assumed the grown-ups had it. High engagement is not a mystery cult. It is a function of whether people think their side is alive.
Two Months. Not a Miracle. A Decision.
I think the House is winnable. I think the Senate can hold. I think some of these close races are close enough that a little public relations in football weather would move them. I think you can swing two or three points of engagement—not by converting the faculty lounge, but by giving your own people a reason to stand in a line. Democrats cannot pull this particular lever. They can lecture. They can threaten. They can mail. They cannot make the Museum of the Bible crowd feel seen, because they have spent a generation telling that crowd to sit down.
Do not act like you are losing. Act like you have fifty days and a country that still knows a hymn when it hears one. Bring Johnson into the light until he stops narrating the minority. Bring Musk into the frame as the man who builds. Bring Paxton and the rest into the presidential weather. Carry the book. Walk the museum. Go to the games. Talk like the majority is a thing you intend to keep.
If you ever read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know the rule I am applying. You do not win a gunfight by announcing your readiness to lose the street. You win it by being the man who came to keep the street. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven. The earthly contest is downstream of what a people think a human being is for. The Bible is not a prop in that argument. It is the argument, bound in leather, still doing what it has always done when somebody is willing to carry it into the weather.[18]
That is the advice. I would like to see Republicans win. From my map, and from the neighborhood I actually walk when I am in that city, it is very winnable—if they will stop rehearsing the loss and go collect the joy that is already standing in line for a sausage muffin and a museum ticket.
Notes:
Scripture, Theology, and American Religion
The Holy Bible. New King James Version. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press, various volumes.
Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural World of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.
Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. January 1, 1802.
Dreisbach, Daniel L. Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State. New York: NYU Press, 2002.
Museum of the Bible. “Plan Your Visit” and “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” museumofthebible.org.
Politics, Congress, and the 2026 Midterms
RealClearPolling. “Latest Polls 2026, 2028.” Accessed September 14, 2026.
USPollingData. “US Polling Data 2026 — Midterms, Generic Ballot & Trump Approval.” Updated September 14, 2026.
Cornell, Fred. “US Senate Forecast September 2026.” fredcornell.com. Model run September 14, 2026.
Newsweek. “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms—Polls.” September 14, 2026.
New York Times. “Senate Polls 2026: See the Latest Midterm Polls.” Updated September 10, 2026.
New York Times. “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House.” July 1, 2026.
NOTUS. “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations.” August 24, 2026.
Newsweek. “Mike Johnson Warns Impeachment Not ‘The Big Concern’ if Dems Win Midterms.” June 26, 2026.
CNN. “Johnson gambles on ambitious summer agenda as GOP anxiety rises ahead of midterms.” July 13, 2026.
Just the News. “Mike Johnson says 2026 marks a ‘pivotal moment’ in American history.” September 10, 2026.
Roll Call. “House plans quick September exit.” September 3, 2026.
Denver Gazette. “The 21 seats Mike Johnson says will decide the House majority.” September 2026.
NBC News / Meet the Press. Interview with Speaker Mike Johnson. September 13, 2026.
USA Today. “Talarico ahead of Paxton in Texas Senate race as older voters shift lead.” September 14, 2026.
The Hill. “James Talarico, Ken Paxton tied at 47 percent in Texas Senate race: Poll.” June 30, 2026.
Texas Politics Project / University of Texas. Statewide survey releases, spring–summer 2026.
NPR. “With 99 days until midterm elections, here’s where things stand.” July 27, 2026.
Campbell, Angus. “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change.” Public Opinion Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1960).
Artificial Intelligence, Energy, and Industrial Policy
New York Times. “From Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon, Political Figures Sound Alarms on A.I.” September 14, 2026.
Axios. “Scoop: Coxon, Bernie and Bannon unite for ‘pro-human’ AI.” September 14, 2026.
Reuters. “US Senator Sanders and podcaster Bannon, longtime foes, to urge AI restrictions.” September 14, 2026.
The Hill. “Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon join forces to advocate for AI regulation.” September 14, 2026.
Washington Examiner. “Sanders, Bannon, and former Anthropic staffer join forces in AI regulation push.” September 14, 2026.
Future of Life Institute. “The Pro-Human AI Declaration” and “Pro-Human Assembly” program notes. September 2026.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Historical accounts of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident, March 28, 1979.
Federal Register. Materials related to the Crane Clean Energy Center / former Three Mile Island Unit 1 restart docket. 2026.
Ferrise, Adam. “Ex-regulator: FirstEnergy nearly tanked credit as nuke plants drained finances.” Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026.
Utility Dive. “Ohio PUC orders FirstEnergy utilities to pay $250.7M over HB 6 bribery scandal.” November 20, 2025.
U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio. Civil filings summarizing FirstEnergy, House Bill 6, and the nuclear-plant bailout structure.
Reuters. “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share.” June 11, 2026.
New York Times. “SpaceX Stock Rises in Largest IPO Ever.” June 12, 2026.
Wikipedia. “Initial public offering of SpaceX.” Accessed September 2026.
The Author’s Shelf and Related Works
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. iUniverse, 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–1885. For the Overman frame the author has long adapted, not baptized.
Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. Documentary, 2026.
Author’s note.
This essay is strategic commentary offered in a private and public voice I have used for years. It is not a paid consulting product, not an official statement of any campaign, and not investment advice. SpaceX is a publicly traded company as of June 2026; readers should treat every market sentence here as the opinion of a shareholder who has already shown his cards.
Footnotes
[1] Generic congressional ballot averages in mid-September 2026 have generally shown Democrats ahead by roughly five to eight points depending on the pollster. Rasmussen Reports, September 14, 2026, found Democrats 47 percent and Republicans 42 percent. CBS News, September 13, 2026, found Democrats 54 percent and Republicans 46 percent. Aggregators such as USPollingData placed the generic ballot near D+6.9 as of September 14, 2026.
[2] House and Senate seat counts as commonly reported in September 2026 put Republicans near 222–213 in the House and 53–47 in the Senate, meaning Democrats needed a modest net pickup for the House gavel and a larger four-seat swing for Senate control. See USPollingData, “US Polling Data 2026,” updated September 14, 2026; Newsweek, “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms,” September 14, 2026.
[3] Speaker Mike Johnson has publicly insisted Republicans will keep the House. See NOTUS, “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations,” August 24, 2026. The same coverage notes that Johnson’s future as speaker is widely understood to be tied to the majority. Separate reporting described caucus frustration and a sense of a thinning grip. New York Times, “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House,” July 1, 2026.
[4] Johnson told a Dallas audience that the next fifty-three days would “determine the fate of the republic.” Just the News, September 10, 2026. He has also spoken of twenty-one toss-up seats as decisive. Denver Gazette / Colorado Politics, September 2026.
[5] On the transition period after the 2024 election and before the January 20, 2025 inauguration, the public record is thick with high-visibility events, cabinet theater, and the brief alignment of Trump, congressional Republicans, and Elon Musk around a governing project. The point here is political memory, not a claim that every meeting was a prayer circle.
[6] SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 11, 2026, raising on the order of $75 billion and valuing the company near $1.77 trillion at pricing, with a first-day close that pushed the market capitalization higher. Reuters, “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share,” June 11–12, 2026; New York Times, June 12, 2026. Subsequent trading was volatile. This essay’s enthusiasm is the author’s investment thesis and political judgment, not investment advice.
[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 Fourth Street SW, Washington, D.C., opened November 17, 2017, three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Museum of the Bible, “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” A McDonald’s sits a short walk from the museum—Yelp lists one about 0.08 miles away—on the southwest federal corridor near Federal Center SW Metro, the National Air and Space Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian.
[8] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), edited by Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson, was released in 2026. Thomas Nelson Bibles product page; Christianbook.com listing for NKJV The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible.
[9] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) and the broader First Great Awakening are the American precedent for treating religious revival as a public, not merely private, event. Edwards’s own emphasis on joy in God is the stated editorial theme of the 2026 study Bible.
[10] On church and state, the relevant constitutional text is the First Amendment’s prohibition on an establishment of religion and its protection of the free exercise of religion. The modern slogan of a “wall of separation” is a later political gloss, most famously associated with Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, not a phrase in the Constitution itself.
[11] The Future of Life Institute’s “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, announced for September 15, 2026, listed Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon among speakers, along with labor leaders and members of both parties. They were not scheduled to share a single stage. New York Times, September 14, 2026; Axios, September 14, 2026; Reuters, September 14, 2026.
[12] Three Mile Island Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown on March 28, 1979. The accident produced no immediate deaths but became the central public symbol of anti-nuclear politics in the United States and helped freeze a generation of reactor construction. See NRC historical summaries of TMI-2.
[13] FirstEnergy’s Ohio nuclear plants, Davis-Besse and Perry, became the center of a financial and political crisis that included the bankruptcy of the generation subsidiary, House Bill 6, and later criminal and regulatory proceedings. Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026; Utility Dive, November 20, 2025; related federal court filings summarizing the HB 6 bailout structure.
[14] On AI industrial policy and Chinese competition, see the public record of export controls, semiconductor policy, and repeated U.S. government warnings that Beijing treats frontier compute as a strategic resource. The causal claim that every domestic “pause AI” campaign is a Chinese information operation is the author’s inference, not a documented indictment.
[15] Midterm electorates are typically older, more partisan, and lower-turnout than presidential electorates. The “surge and decline” literature from Angus Campbell onward remains the basic framework. Small shifts in evangelical and conservative Protestant turnout have been decisive in multiple close cycles since 2004.
[16] Recent Texas Senate polling has been tight. An AARP survey conducted August 30–September 1, 2026, and reported September 14, showed James Talarico at 48 percent and Ken Paxton at 44 percent among likely voters. Earlier NYT/Siena work in late June had them tied at 47 percent. USA Today, September 14, 2026; The Hill, June 30, 2026.
[17] President Trump’s job approval in mid-September 2026 varied by pollster, with several national surveys clustering in the high thirties to mid-forties approve and a clear plurality disapprove. Rasmussen, September 14, 2026: 45 approve / 54 disapprove. Morning Consult, same window: 42 / 56. CBS News, September 13: 39 / 61.
[18] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021). The forthcoming Politics of Heaven develops the same author’s argument that earthly power contests are unintelligible without the older grammar of heaven, will, and moral order.
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.
