Why Christianity Survived as a Scaling Operation, Not a Martyr Cult—and Why the Apostle Paul was the Best One

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.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Yale University. https://edwards.yale.edu.

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

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Wright, N. T. Paul: A Biography. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018.

Bruce, F. F. Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Berding, Kenneth. “Was Paul a Tentmaker?” The Good Book Blog, Biola University, 2021.

Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992.

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, forthcoming.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an 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.

Volynt Dreams on Elm Street: Turning Innovation into Reality

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

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Christianity as a Weapon of War: Unashamed Scripture, the Protection of Children, and the Duty to Fight Evil in Our Own Generation

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).

Our Trip to Put-in-Bay: What a good life looks like

To share a bit of my life. Here is a video from my kids of our recent trip to Put-in-Bay.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

DON’T PLAY LIKE YOU’RE LOSING: Football Weather, a Bible in the Hand, and the Two-Point Swing That Can Still Hold the House

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.

Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior (blog). overmanwarrior.wordpress.com and richhoffmanbooks.com.

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

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The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Why America’s First Pastoral Philosopher Still Holds the Foundation for Law and Order

These are my favorite kind of days. The best days. No matter how tough it is out there, no matter how rough the problems of life get, sometimes you just have a good day, and this is one of them. I had the grandkids all day. We have been running back and forth at Kings Island, parched in the heat, and we are going to finish the evening at the waterpark. In the middle of all that, a box arrived. I took a minute to sit down with it. I opened it the way I open every book that matters to me. I smelled the pages.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is the wisdom and context of history sitting in my hand. I love the Bible for that reason. I love having so much history in one place. I love study Bibles because they explore the thing you can actually build a civilization on. I have carried one of those Bibles everywhere for years. I will not retire it. I will still read large portions of it every day. But I was ready to add to it, and I was ready to give the old one a rest. The first few pages of the worn one have a crease I cannot get out. That crease has bothered me. The new one does not have wrinkled pages. It just came out of the box.

I saw the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review in the late-summer, early-fall edition. I fell in love with the idea immediately. When I hear the name Jonathan Edwards, I think of the father of the founding fathers. Thomas Nelson released the edition on August 18, 2026, after years of work under general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard. I picked the brown Leathersoft with thumb indexes. I was close to the black genuine leather. I wanted brown. I wanted the indexes. I am a sucker for thumb indexes. That had been my only real gripe with the Bible I have carried for years. They made this one with them. Brilliant.

A Good Day Is Not an Accident

I have said it before and I will say it again: a good day is not the absence of problems. A good day is the presence of a standard that can survive the problems. The world is full of people pinballing off each other. They do not share a common point of reference. They argue government, law, family, and history as if those things were invented last Tuesday. They were not. The argument over what kind of government we are supposed to have was largely settled in the long runway from the 1740s through the 1770s. The First Great Awakening was not a side show. It was a Christian surge into the New World that formed the conscience of a people who would soon have to decide whether they were subjects or citizens.

I wanted something that would push my mind into the right frame for the complicated issues in front of us. Two years into President Trump’s second term, the question is no longer whether the old order can be broken. The question is what we build with the pieces. Biblical scholarship is a very good place to start. Not as decoration. As infrastructure.

Who Jonathan Edwards Actually Was

Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703, and died March 22, 1758. He was a Congregationalist pastor, philosopher, and theologian, widely regarded as America’s most original philosophical theologian. He oversaw early revivals in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733–35. He preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. That sermon is the one everybody remembers. It is not the whole man.

Edwards was not a mascot for rage. He was a man obsessed with joy in God. “The enjoyment of [God] is…the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That line sits on the new study Bible for a reason. His Religious Affections, his Resolutions, his Miscellanies, and his massive unpublished notebooks were an attempt to think with total seriousness about Scripture, beauty, virtue, and the public order. He became the third president of the College of New Jersey—Princeton—after the death of his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr. He served only weeks. He died after a smallpox inoculation. Short tenure. Long shadow.

Princeton was a child of the Great Awakening. When Harvard and Yale resisted the revivals, New Lights built new colleges. The first presidents of Princeton stood in that stream. John Witherspoon, later president of the same college, signed the Declaration of Independence. The line from Edwards to Witherspoon to the Revolutionary generation is not a slogan. It is institutional history.

Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration, put it as plainly as any American president ever has: “No one can escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology… had aroused the thought and prepared the colonists for this great event.” I consider Calvin Coolidge to be one of America’s greatest presidents.

I call Edwards a founding father because America would not have the moral vocabulary it used to become America without men like him. Ben Franklin admired George Whitefield, the great itinerant of the same awakening. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Adams inherited a public that had already been trained to take sin, covenant, virtue, and judgment seriously. You do not get a Bill of Rights out of thin air. You get it from a people who already believed that law has a source above the king.

The Great Awakening Was a Political Event

People treat revival as private emotion. That is a modern mistake. The Awakening taught ordinary men and women that a regenerated beggar stood before God on the same ground as an unholy prince. In a hierarchical empire, that idea is dynamite. It does not automatically produce 1776. It does produce a population that can hear “all men are created equal” without laughing.

The Awakening also split churches, founded colleges, and trained a habit of examining authority rather than merely inheriting it. That habit can go wrong. It can become mere rebellion. Edwards himself was no enthusiast for unfettered liberty as an end in itself. He wanted ordered affections under God. That is exactly why he is useful now. A country that has spent years dissolving every standard needs the man who refused to separate joy from holiness and holiness from public life.

I have been telling people that the squabbles of the present require a basic foundation. Study of that foundation got settled, in outline, by the 1750s and was tested in the 1770s. If we will not return to it, we will keep inventing new religions of the self and calling them law.

What This Study Bible Actually Contains

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is an NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson: Comfort Print, red letter, center-column references, concordance, maps, translator notes, two-color printing. The distinctive load is Edwards himself. Study notes drawn from his work. Articles on doctrinal topics. Full-page essays on his theology, his life, his spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening. His Resolutions. An introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system, with space to build your own. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center remains the great online companion. If you are doing real scholarship, you can move from the page in your hand to the archive.

I like that. I like any book that tries to achieve superior intellect. The Bible, at its most basic essence, is the attempt to put the human mind in contact with the source of order. A study Bible is not a substitute for the text. It is scaffolding. Edwards is unusually good scaffolding because he will not let you treat Scripture as therapy. God, in Edwards, is not a life coach. God is holy. God is beautiful. God is uncompromising. If we follow in those footsteps, the same seriousness can look ruthless to a soft age. That is not a reason to flatten God into niceness. That is a reason to think.

I looked at the maps, the color, the paper, the print, the way the notes sit on the page. I judge Bibles the way I judge tools. Binding, glue, opacity, ribbon, indexes, whether the thing will survive being carried. Thomas Nelson still backs many of these editions with a lifetime guarantee against manufacturing defects. Companies that talk that way are running a different business model than the disposable world. I respect that.

I almost bought the black leather. I bought the brown because I like brown and because this one has the thumb indexes. I will likely still read the old study Bible. I will not carry the creased one everywhere anymore. This one takes that job.

The Smell of a New Book Is Not Trivial

I take publishers seriously when they do their job. The best smell in the book world is still new-Bible smell: paper, ink, glue, cloth, leather. I told my wife, half joking and half not, that if she wants me to keep loving her forever she should find a perfume that smells like a new book. The grandkids laugh at me because I keep putting my face in the pages. Fine. Let them laugh. There are very few things in life better than a well-made book that is trying to make you smarter than you were yesterday.

My old Bible still smells good to me. It has been everywhere. Full-color pages, notes from good scholars, a companion through work I am proud of. It also has the wounds of use. That is honorable. It is also honest to say when a tool has earned a rest. I can straighten pages and put it on the shelf without pretending I have outgrown it. I have not. I have added a second pillar.

Law and Order Begins With a Book on the Desk

People have told me they like that I keep a Bible on the desk in my office. Everybody walking by can see it. I did the same thing when I served as foreman of a grand jury in Butler County. I was not trying to be ostentatious. I was stating the premise. We were there for order. We were swearing to tell the truth. The values that created this civilization are not shameful. You do not apologize for them. You do not mumble that every tradition is equal so that no tradition can judge anything.

I put the Bible on the desk and I swore people in. That book represented a common standard. We can disagree about a thousand things after that. We cannot pretend there is no standard.

When I look back on a long life—good family, good kids, good grandchildren, good work in business—I still say that those weeks as grand jury foreman were among the most rewarding things I have ever done. I wish I could do that job every day. They paid something like twenty-four dollars a day. The whole stint put maybe four hundred dollars in my pocket. I spent every dime of it on Ohio law books, the kind of volumes lawyers keep on their shelves. I needed to explain the law to the other people in the room. Twelve other citizens. Evidence. A vote. Whether a person goes further into the machine of the state. That is serious work. I loved it. For a few weeks I was, in a manner of speaking, the top cop in Butler County, and I treated the job that way.

I have been thinking about cases that break your heart and then break your confidence in a jury’s ability to follow the law. A mother walks away from the death of her own children and the process cannot arrive at the destination the facts required. I will not relitigate a verdict in this space. I will say what the experience taught me. Law is not a mood. Law is a discipline. If the people in the room do not share a moral language, the statutes become a maze. The Bible is not a statute book. It is the source of the moral language that made statute books possible in the West.

Jonathan Edwards belongs on that desk because he is part of the formula that formed the legal society of the early republic. The attempt in our time has been to undermine that formation completely. Our job is to keep the undermining from succeeding. One way to do that is to return to the starting point and read it again, slowly, with notes from a man who actually thought.

God Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Seminar

I need to be clear about something I said in the moment and will not sand down. God is not a slogan for “can’t we all just get along.” God, as Scripture presents Him, is often ruthless and uncompromising. If we claim to follow, we do not get to edit that into suburban kindness and call it discipleship. The intellectual task is to understand what holiness requires in public life without turning the church into a mob and without turning the state into a church.

Edwards is helpful there. He is a pastoral philosopher. He will not let affection float free of doctrine, and he will not let doctrine float free of the glory of God. That combination is what a movement needs after it wins elections. Winning is not the same as governing. Governing requires a metaphysics. If your metaphysics is “the self is sovereign,” you will get the last twenty years on repeat. If your metaphysics is that there is a law above the ruler and a Judge above the law, you have a chance.

I have been saying that we need a common point of reference. This Bible can be that for people who are even half willing. You do not have to become a professional Edwards scholar. You have to read, mark, compare, and refuse the cheap alternatives.

The Politics of Heaven in the Age of Disclosure

We are living in what I have been calling the age of disclosure. Hidden things are coming up. Political things, institutional things, spiritual things. If you do not understand the politics of heaven, you will misread the politics of earth. Heaven is not a fog of niceness. Heaven is a court. There is a throne. There is law. There is judgment. There is mercy that costs something. Edwards never forgot that. A great deal of modern religion did.

The founding generation argued about church and state. They did not argue that the state could invent morality out of committee. They assumed a created order. They assumed sin. They assumed that republics die when character dies. That is not nostalgia. That is the operating system.

I want my grandchildren to see a Bible on the desk and know what it means when I walk into a room. It means I stand for law and order, and that law and order have a foundation that did not begin in a press release. I am not closing my life. I am opening a new chapter with a better tool for the same fight.

Why I Am Telling You to Get This One

If you need a first serious study Bible, this is a strong candidate. If you already have one you love, as I do, this is the right second. The scholarship is serious. The production is handsome. The price is not insane. The leather edition runs more. I paid for the version I would actually use—the one I will thumb through in the car, on the desk, and at the table.

I would like to shut the rest of life off and only read it. I will read a lot of it. It will become the Bible I carry. There is plenty here to work with. I think it is a key to launching a new stretch of work in my own life, and I think it can serve the same purpose for anyone who is tired of arguing with no floor under the argument.

Go get it. Put it where people can see it. Swear to the truth. Then go do the hard parts—family, work, citizenship, the long patience of building a civilization instead of commenting on its collapse.

I took the kids back to the waterpark and we had a great day. While I waited on them I sat in a chair and read through this new Bible and it turned out to be one of the best days I have had in a while. I am going to smell the pages again many more times. There are very few things in life better than that. If you want the longer map of how I think about work, conflict, and Western order, read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. If you want the foundation under that map, start with Scripture and a guide who already walked the ground we keep pretending is new.

Notes

1. Thomas Nelson released The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV) on August 18, 2026, with Dr. Matthew Everhard as general editor. Editions include hardcover, brown Leathersoft (including thumb-indexed), and black genuine leather. See publisher listings and trade bibliographic records for ISBNs 9781400339532 (hardcover), 9781400339556 (brown Leathersoft, thumb indexed), and 9781400339600 (black genuine leather).

2. Edwards’s dates, Northampton revivals, the Enfield sermon of July 8, 1741, and his brief presidency of the College of New Jersey are standard in the biographical literature. See George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003).

3. Edwards died after smallpox inoculation in March 1758, weeks into the Princeton presidency. Marsden and the Yale Jonathan Edwards Center treat the episode in detail.

4. Coolidge’s sesquicentennial remarks on Edwards and the Declaration are printed in Calvin Coolidge, The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses. The quotation is discussed in Gordon Arnold, “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought,” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

5. On Princeton’s revivalist origins and the New Light college movement, see Thomas Breidenthal, “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019, and George M. Marsden’s work on evangelical higher education.

6. John Witherspoon, sixth president of the College of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Continental Congress. The Edwards–Burr–Witherspoon succession is a matter of college history, not metaphor.

7. George Whitefield’s relationship with Benjamin Franklin is documented in Franklin’s Autobiography and in the standard Whitefield biographies. Admiration is not the same as conversion; it is evidence of the Awakening’s public weight.

8. Edwards’s line on the enjoyment of God as the only satisfying happiness is used by Thomas Nelson as the editorial keynote of the 2026 study Bible.

9. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center (edwards.yale.edu) hosts the Works of Jonathan Edwards and remains the primary digital archive corresponding to the print notes.

10. Thomas Nelson’s published lifetime guarantee covers manufacturing defects, not ordinary wear. See Thomas Nelson Bibles customer-service and Premier Collection guarantee pages.

11. The First Great Awakening’s role in colonial egalitarianism, church conflict, and revolutionary political culture is argued, with different emphases, by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (1966); Mark Noll, America’s God (2002); and Michael Novak’s essays on the “two wings” of the American eagle.

12. Butler County, Ohio, grand juries operate under Ohio law. Compensation for jurors has historically been modest; the figures given here are from my own service and recollection, not a claim about current statutory rates.

13. Biblical Archaeology Review is the flagship magazine of the Biblical Archaeology Society. I first noticed the Edwards Bible as a paid advertisement in a late-summer / early-fall issue.

14. Edwards owned enslaved people. That fact belongs in any honest account. It does not erase his intellectual role in American theology; it does forbid hagiography. See Marsden and the Yale Center’s documentary record.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary Edwards

• Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.

• Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.

• Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

• Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

• Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. 1749.

• Edwards, Jonathan. Ethical Writings. Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8. Yale University Press.

• Edwards, Jonathan. The Miscellanies. Works of Jonathan Edwards, multiple volumes. Yale University Press.

• Edwards, Jonathan. Resolutions. Various editions; also included in the 2026 study Bible.

• The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press. Digital companion: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, https://edwards.yale.edu.

The 2026 Study Bible

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

Biography and Intellectual History

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

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

• Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Banner of Truth, 1987.

• Gura, Philip F. Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. Hill and Wang, 2005.

• Sweeney, Douglas A. Edwards the Exegete. Oxford University Press, 2016.

• Nichols, Stephen J. Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. P&R, 2001.

Great Awakening, Princeton, and the Revolution

• Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford University Press, 2002.

• Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1966.

• McDermott, Gerald R. One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Penn State University Press, 1992.

• Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Yale University Press, 2007.

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

• Stohlman, Martha Lou Lemmon. John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot. Westminster, 1976.

• Coolidge, Calvin. The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses.

• Arnold, Gordon. “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought.” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

• Breidenthal, Thomas. “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019.

Scripture, Law, and Western Order

• Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press, 1983.

• Witte, John, Jr. The Reformation of Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

• Novak, Michael. On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. Encounter, 2002.

• Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England.

• The Declaration of Independence; the Constitution of the United States; the Bill of Rights.

Related Hoffman

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

• Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.

• Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

• Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior, https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

Periodicals and Tools• Biblical Archaeology Review. Biblical Archaeology

Rich Hoffman

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A Family Adventure at The Wilds: A Week of Travel That Reminds Us What Matters

Every once in a while, life hands you one of those small, perfect weeks with family — the kind that doesn’t need a grand destination or a complicated itinerary to feel meaningful. Recently, we packed up the RV and took a short family trip to The Wilds in central Ohio. It wasn’t far from home, and it wasn’t meant to be anything elaborate. But it turned into exactly the kind of experience that reminds you why family time matters and why stepping away from the noise is sometimes the best thing you can do.

My daughter put together a fantastic video from the trip, capturing the highlights in a way only she can. A few of my grandkids are featured in it, running around, laughing, exploring, and just being kids. Watching them in that setting—surrounded by open sky, quiet water, and the wide, rolling landscape—reminded me how grounding these moments can be. We spend so much of our lives dealing with big issues, heavy conversations, and responsibilities that stack up day after day. But weeks like this show the other side of life, the part that keeps you centered.

If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time, you know I spend a lot of time talking about sovereignty, community, history, politics, and the deeper questions that shape our world. Those topics matter, and they deserve the attention we give them. But it’s just as important to share the lighter moments—the real life that happens between all the big ideas. This trip was a perfect example of that balance. It wasn’t a grand expedition; it was simply a family outing, close to home, filled with the kind of memories that last longer than most of the headlines we chase. As I have said, I have spent most of 2026 on the road like this. Sometimes it’s just my wife and I. Sometimes, like this, it’s family, some of our family. Sometimes it’s all my family. I like RV travel because it lets me take my office with me. I write books, I do consulting, and I can do all that work from anywhere in the world with a TEAMS call. I never know where I’m going to be, so that’s why I do all the videos these days from the kitchen in my RV. It has good power and a comfortable, studio-like setting. Sometimes the internet isn’t great at our campgrounds, but that can be solved with Starlink, which I’ll likely do next year.

The World of Everywhere and Anything

RV camping has a way of slowing everything down. There’s something about being on the road, even for a short distance, that shifts your mindset. You’re not rushing. You’re not checking your phone every five minutes. You’re not thinking about the next meeting or the next project. You’re just present. The video my daughter made captures that feeling beautifully — the simplicity, the quiet, the laughter, the sense of being together without distraction. It’s a glimpse into how we travel, unwind, and stay connected as a family.

The Wilds itself is a unique place. Wide open spaces, wildlife roaming in the distance, and a sense of calm that settles in as soon as you arrive. It’s the kind of environment that encourages reflection without forcing it. You breathe a little deeper. You listen a little more. You notice things you might overlook in the rush of everyday life. And when your kids and grandkids surround you, those moments become even more meaningful.

It was a short trip, but it was packed with fun and full of the kind of small joys that make life feel full. These are the moments that remind us that life isn’t just about the big battles or the big ideas — it’s also about the quiet weekends, the shared meals, the kids running around, and the chance to breathe for a minute. It’s about remembering that the world is bigger than our worries and that the people closest to us are the ones who make the journey worthwhile.

So I’m sharing this little slice of our life not because it’s dramatic or extraordinary, but because it’s real. It’s honest. It’s the kind of thing we all need more of. And I think you’ll enjoy seeing that side of our world — the family side, the simple side, the part that keeps everything else in perspective.

Rich Hoffman

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Good Government Is Not Revenge: Jonathan Edwards, Sheriff Richard Jones, and the Butler County Republican Party

For me, the standard is Jonathan Edwards on human government. The new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible arrived in August of 2026. I opened it on a hot afternoon after riding roller coasters at Kings Island with two of my grandchildren. That is not a cute detail. That is the point. Good government is supposed to protect ordinary life — grandchildren, county fairs, Sunday school, a sheriff who still thinks Butler County can look a little like Mayberry and a little like a serious modern county at the same time.

If Yale and Princeton were like they were during Jonathan Edwards’s time, I would likely have several PhDs by now, but over time, they have turned into globalist institutions, which I found repulsive when I was of college age. They have turned into anti-American insurgent places that ruin the minds of young people. But, Yale has preserved Edwards’s papers. The Study Bible puts his notes, essays, Resolutions, and miscellanies system next to the New King James text.[1][2] Everybody in this party who claims to care about order, virtue, and limited government should own a copy and actually read it. I am a small-government kind of person. I was Tea Party. I was Reform Party in the 1990s. I was talking about Donald Trump in 1999 when he was circling the Reform Party nomination against Pat Buchanan.[3] I have been in human communication and local politics for thirty years. I know what an intramural fight looks like. I also know what it costs voters.

What Jonathan Edwards Meant by Human Government

Good government as a moral order, not a branding exercise

Edwards believed that good government belongs to the highest moral order of a proper civilization.[4] I agree with him. That does not make me a big-government conservative. It makes me a person who thinks the point of the smaller government we do have is to be good — competent, restrained, honest, and aimed at the public good, not at the vanity of the people holding powerful positions.

You do not get into government to make a name for yourself. You get into government so that people have representatives. You want those representatives to be as good as possible. There is only one legitimate motivation: to make the thing good in the Edwards sense — an earthly office that still answers to a moral law it did not invent.

“The enjoyment of [God] is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.”

— Jonathan Edwards, as featured in The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2026)

That sentence is about God. It is also a warning about politics. If your happiness is a title on a sample ballot, a headline, or the humiliation of a rival, you are already in the wrong temple. The party slate card exists so voters can find good candidates. It does not exist so that somebody can settle a score.

Romans 13 is not a revenge verse

Edwards read civil authority inside God’s moral government of the world.[5] Magistrates exist. They are not priests. They are not avengers of private grudges. They are supposed to keep the peace, punish actual wrongdoing, and leave room for the rest of life — family, work, church, property — to go on.

That is why I keep saying the same sentence to people who want to turn the Butler County Republican Party into a revenge shop: you do not do politics for revenge. You do not look to even scores even if you were bullied. You do not use the power of government, or the machinery of a party, to bully everybody else. If you cannot serve voters, you are not in it for the right reasons.

Why This Bible Arrived on Time

Kings Island, two grandchildren, and page 1176

I had a rare day with two of my grandchildren at Kings Island, late in the summer season. We rode the big coasters. It got hot. We came home for lunch and a cool-down. The box had been dropped at the house. I knew what it was. I sat down with that Bible for an hour while the kids recovered, and then we went back to the park to swim.

People can laugh at a grown man getting quiet over a study Bible. Fine. I have spent decades looking for a single object that holds theology, philosophy, and a usable picture of public life in one binding. This one does. There is an essay on human government that I keep pointing people to — in my copy it sits around page 1176 — and just over the next page there is another piece on the means of grace. The book is full of that mixture: doctrine with a spine, and a vision of what a people owe each other when they try to govern.

Edwards was thrown out of his own church

Edwards served the Northampton church for twenty-three years. He is the man of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”[6] By 1750 a majority of the congregation voted him out. He preached a farewell sermon and left.[7][8] He went to Stockbridge to teach and minister among Native Americans, a smaller work, after a public humiliation. Later he was respected enough to become president of the College of New Jersey — Princeton — and then he died. Yale keeps the papers. Princeton had the office. The church that made him famous also removed him.

He was not removed because he had become a thief. He was removed because he was more exacting than the politics of the room would bear. That is a lesson with teeth. Sometimes the righteous thing is to stay and fight. Sometimes the righteous thing is to step out of an equation you can no longer serve well, because the people have decided they do not want you. The question is never “What feeds my name?” The question is “What actually produces good government for the people in front of us?”

I Have Zero Tolerance for Bullies

I can already hear it: then why do you support Sheriff Jones? People call him rough. Some people call him a bully.

I have had no tolerance for bullies my entire life. I have gotten into fights over people being picked on, often. I do not care if the target is a man or a woman, big or small. I do not care which party the bully belongs to. I have no patience for personality types who use an office to get revenge on rivals.

That standard cuts in every direction. It cuts against Democrats who treat government as a punishment engine. It cuts against Republicans who treat a county central committee like a private army. It cuts against anyone who thinks the point of winning is to make the other guy miserable.

Sheriff Jones and I have not always been the best of friends. I still want him in the party. Those two sentences can both be true if you believe, with Edwards, that the office is larger than the grudge.

Sheriff Richard Jones Is My Guy

A big tent means you keep the sheriff

I like Sheriff Richard K. Jones.[9] I want Sheriff Jones in the Butler County Republican Party. I have said, more than once, that he sometimes sounds like he still has a Democrat nerve in him on a public-sector question. Good. I want a Republican Party big enough to pull people who left the other side. I want a party that can stand on a stage with him and not flinch.

He has been sheriff across multiple terms. I want him around for as long as he wants the job and the voters still give it to him. When he goes on international outlets and talks about immigration and the jail, I want him able to say he is a member of this county Republican Party. I do not want him pushed into independent exile because a faction could not share a room with him.

Seven years of silence, one parking lot, two hats

In 2011 Ohio went to war with itself over Senate Bill 5 and public-sector unions.[10] I was on one side of that fight. Sheriff Jones was not with the Tea Party types who got burned when the referendum turned. We were both on WLW in those years.[11] He was friendly with Willie. I was friendly with Doc Thompson. Doc got pushed off, went elsewhere, and later died after being hit by a train under circumstances people still talk about. Willie is still on the air. Jones is still on the air with him.

After that bill, Sheriff Jones and I did not talk for six or seven years. We would be at the same events and walk past each other. Then I took my family to Charleston, South Carolina, for a week. Charleston is a fine city. People treat it like one of the best places in the world. My daughters and I love pirate history; you cannot stand in that harbor without thinking of Blackbeard and of the Civil War forts. I liked it. I came home happier to see Butler County.

That is not a cheap patriotic line. You do not know what you have until you have walked a “better” place and realized your own county is just as good if not better in many ways, working farms, and a party that has actually produced national figures.[12] JD Vance came out of this ground. Vivek Ramaswamy has been in our orbit. Warren Davidson’s office in Washington has been a good shop. Bernie Moreno has been a serious addition.[13] Interns and staff I met this year in those offices were the kind of young people who make you think the farm system still works.

Jones and I walked out of an event toward the cars. He broke the ice. He liked my hat. I liked his hat. I liked his boots. I like his Andy Griffith picture of what a sheriff’s office should feel like. We started talking again. It took almost eight years.

The grand jury and the jail tour

I am not young. I am in my senior stretch of life, around sixty as of 2026. One of the best civic jobs I have ever held was foreman of a Butler County grand jury. It was not the money. It was the view.

People called me during that season to whisper about “corruption” in the sheriff’s office and the prosecutor’s office. That is what people do when they do not get the outcome they wanted, humans try to create political pull to get rid of people they don’t want to work with. I like our prosecutor’s office. I like Mary Swain a great deal.[14][15] I like the people who actually carry files upstairs to the prosecutors’ offices, which I was able to tour and I consider to be one of the finest places on earth.

The grand-jury room sits on the same floor as the clerk’s world. You take indictments up. You meet the assistants. You meet the deputies who work child-exploitation cases and drug cases. You get answers to questions you have had. And because a grand jury should understand what it is doing when it votes a true bill, Sheriff Jones gave me a tour of the jail. We talked. When his book came out he told me about it. I read it and reviewed it. I recommend it very highly.

That is the other side of the man some people only meet in a fight. If you cannot work with that, you probably do not have the temperament for coalition politics.

Nancy Nix Is the Benchmark

If Sheriff Jones is the law-and-order pillar I want inside the big Republican tent, Nancy Nix is the governing temperament I want the rest of the party to study.[16] I have said it until people are tired of hearing it. She pours hours into this party. She is good government from top to bottom. When she walks into a room, the room still works. That is a rare skill.

I liked Roger Reynolds for a long time. I was on his side until he turned his fight against Nancy Nix.[17] Clearing your name after a legal disaster is one thing. Using the wreckage to tear down a sitting officeholder who actually runs the shop is another. Parties are supposed to put a slate card in front of voters. They are not supposed to become instruments for a man who cares more about his name than about the taxpayers in the file.

George Lang and Debbie can sit down with almost anybody and not get moved off their mark. That is a Trump skill too: talk to the person across the table, find the deal, do not surrender the spine. I have asked George more than once whether Kathy Wyenandt (the area Democrat) can be pulled toward the party instead of left as a permanent foreign object working the community against itself. I would rather recruit than exile. Same rule as Jones. A bigger tent is not a mushier platform. It is a refusal to donate our own people to the other side because we enjoyed a feud.

What a County Party Is Actually For

Volunteers, yard signs, and jobs that do not pay

Most of the jobs that make a county party run do not pay. People do them because they love the idea of a slate card voters can trust. They stand at the county fair. They work a fundraiser. They put a name on a yard-sign list. When those people are disparaged in the paper, of course they get hurt. That does not make them fragile. It makes them human.

The job of party leadership is to keep that machine pointed at voters. A unified party that serves voters will beat a pure party that serves a clique. Purity spirals are how you lose townships you used to win in your sleep.

Butler County is a Republican county that still has to earn it

Most people in Butler County gravitate Republican. That is a blessing and a trap. It is hard to keep an identity when you win so often that winning starts to feel like weather. It is hard to remember that the point is still to make government good. Todd Hall, as chairman, understood a lot of that. I try to stay out of internal knives as much as I can, because I want the system to work and I want people to feel engaged.

Thomas Hall and Sheriff Jones had their differences on policy. They got through it. They use radio well. Once they were fine with each other, Jones and I were fine with each other, once again. That is how adults do it. You do not have to marry your coalition partners. You have to stop treating them like enemy combatants.

Trump changed the party. The county still has to govern.

Trump redefined what a Republican powerhouse looks like. The old country-club party cannot pretend he did not happen. He has also, over the years, become something closer to an evangelist of a certain American memory — Mount Rushmore more than permanent Washington. I have become a fan of Washington, D.C., in the years he has been back in the White House. The offices that represent this county have been worth visiting. The city is not the enemy. Drift is the enemy.

The next years will not be as easy as “were you for Trump after 2020.” Everybody had a simple test then. The tests now are messier: energy policy after the FirstEnergy mismanagement of the real message,[18] how statehouse fights land in a sheriff’s office, whether a township trustee race is a farm system or a grudge match, whether we run toward competent people or toward whoever promises to punish last year’s enemy.

A Personal Ledger I Had to Close

Latte Sipping Prostitutes, Lakota, and being left on the air

I am going to tell a story I almost left out, because good government requires that you put some things aside even when people wronged you.

Everybody around here remembers the meltdown on WLW when I called a class of Lakota levy politics what I thought it was. I said people were selling out children to a system that works like a taxpayer-funded babysitting service with a union attached. Democrats piled on. Some Republicans who had been with me went quiet or went woke on the spot. A donor-class press release landed on the Scott Sloan show while I was live. They confronted me on the air.

I got through the interview; it was very difficult. I did not fold. But a lot of people abandoned me when it would have cost them very little to stand there. Todd Hall was one of my people, and when it mattered most, he and many others left me hanging. It took years to get over that. I could have carried a grudge forever. I did not, because I wanted a Republican Party that could still win for the needs of the voters. I remember very well who stood with me and who didn’t, and when people wonder even now why I feel the way I do about certain people and not others, that memory usually gives an easy answer.

That is the whole method. You may feel one way in your chest. If the party is trying to build something voters can use, you park the personal file and work. You handle squabbles another way. You do not burn the machine to warm your pride.

I have a clean record on purpose

I sign my name to what I write. People have been looking me up for years trying to find dirt they could use against me. I have been married to the same person for a long time. I can say, as a man almost sixty, that there is not a woman who can step forward and say I bruised her or hurt her in some way that finds itself on a police report. If you don’t have a clean background, you can’t stand in front of a party and tell other people how to live. Even if you have your side of the story, just being in a story like that shows bad judgment, and it will cause people not to follow you as a leader. You have to be cleaner than clean if you want to hold big responsible seats.

If you want to be a Walmart greeter, you can often get a matter expunged and live a quiet life. If you want to be the head of a political party, or the person who starts busting heads and announcing that there is a new sheriff in town, you do not get that courtesy. Enemies come out. The past comes out. Paying someone to bury a file is not the same as righteousness. The internet keeps what the clerk seals.[19]

I am not interested in ruining people for sport. Plenty of men and women have made mistakes and then put out yard signs, joined a church, and tried to live a second chapter. Redemption is real. Leadership of a party is a different office. It has to be clean enough to survive daylight, because daylight will be applied.

Leadership, Todd Minniear, and the Problem of a Hidden Past

Todd Hall did a lot of unglamorous work in the background. Of course people complain about it, as they do everyone in a responsible seat, and they cling to the fantasy that they could do better if only they had more power. A lot of the people who have been running this thing are tired. They show up unpaid. They love the idea of good government even when the job does not love them back.

People have asked me about running for Liberty Township trustee and school board at Lakota; I get asked about it at least once a week for many years now. I like the trustees we have. I would not shove them aside for a title. People also asked Todd Minniear to step toward more leadership.[20] I have been a fan of that instinct. He has been a great trustee. He has the kind of energy a party uses when it needs a next chapter, and I was thinking of him as the Party Chairman once I knew that Todd Hall and others wanted a break. He and I had a good discussion not very long ago about Roger Reynolds; Todd was on one side of the discussion, and I was on the other. We didn’t argue about it, we instead put our focus on the things we shared in common.

If you are carrying material that political enemies can turn into a wrecking ball. I will not pretend that “nobody will notice” is a strategy. Democrats already collect this stuff and wait. Factional Republicans will use it too if the fight gets personal. That is not theory.

How to Have a Fight Without Becoming the Fight

A few rules:

1. Serve voters first. If a move does not make the ballot better, it is probably vanity.

2. Keep Sheriff Jones in the party. A Republican Party that exiles its own long-serving sheriff is not tough. It is insecure.

3. Treat Nancy Nix as a working model, not as a faction mascot. Rooms that light up when she enters are rooms that can still govern well, learn from her.

4. Recruit before you purge. Democrats who can live with limited government are more valuable than Republicans who only live to punish Republicans.

5. Do not use government, or party office, to even a private score. That is Edwards in one line.

6. If you want the chair, assume every sealed thing will be unsealed in public. Plan for that before you run, not after the first mailer.

7. Put grudges in a private drawer when the county needs a unified card. You can still be a man. You do not have to be a faction.

What Voters Actually Buy When They Buy a Party

Donors and church voters do not want the same conversation in the same hour. That is fine. The chairman’s job is to put them in enough of the same room that candidates can raise money without becoming a different species from the people who staff the polls. If you cannot do that, you do not have a party. You have a club.

I want GOP picnics that feel like a county still knows how to stand around a grill. I liked watching the energy when national operators came through Ross and people actually showed up. I want campfire competence. People do not have to agree on every shade of red. They can still agree that Sunday school is not a joke and that a sheriff’s office is not a think tank.

You can make a million dollars in a lot of businesses. You cannot easily build good government. It costs time, reputation, and the ability to absorb a newspaper hit without setting the headquarters on fire. People who pour themselves into this work deserve leaders who understand that cost.

Edwards lost Northampton and still did the next faithful job. That is available to anyone in this county who is about to lose a fight. It is also a warning to anyone who thinks winning a fight is the same thing as being right. We will all stand in a different dock than a central committee. That is the farewell sermon. It is a better political theory than most of what gets posted after a poorly run meeting.

The Need

Buy the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Read the government material. Read the farewell sermon. Then look at Butler County and ask a simple question: are we building a party voters can take pride in, or are we building a revenge path for people whose feelings got hurt?

I support Sheriff Richard Jones. I support a big-tent Republican Party that recruits instead of exiles. I support Nancy Nix as the working picture of countywide competence. I want new leadership that can stand daylight. I do not want scandals in the background of the people who hold the keys, and I do not want the keys used to punish rivals.

That is the Edwards form of Republican politics. It is also just adulthood. Butler County has given the country more than its share of serious people. We should act like it.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Jonathan Edwards and moral government

Edwards, Jonathan. A Farewell Sermon Preached at the First Precinct in Northampton. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1751. Reprinted in The Works of President Edwards and in modern sermon collections.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 22. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8, Ethical Writings. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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

Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. http://edwards.yale.edu.

Scripture

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Romans 13; 1 Timothy 2:1–2; 1 Peter 2:13–17; 2 Corinthians 1:14.

Butler County offices and elections

Butler County Sheriff’s Office. “Sheriff.” Official biography of Richard K. Jones. https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff.

Butler County Auditor. “Meet Nancy.” Official biography of Nancy Nix. https://auditor.bcohio.gov.

Ballotpedia. “Butler County, Ohio, elections, 2024.” Entries for sheriff, auditor, clerk of courts, and prosecuting attorney.

Butler County Republican Party. https://www.butlercountygop.org.

Reported local history

Callahan, Denise G. “Butler County GOP selects Nancy Nix as new auditor.” Journal-News, February 3, 2023.

Journal-News. Coverage of the Roger Reynolds prosecution, removal from the auditor’s office, and 2024 efforts to contest Nancy Nix’s tenure.

Dayton Daily News. “Jones easily re-elected as Butler County sheriff.” July 6, 2020.

WLWT. “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation… and high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants.” June 28, 2025.

ProPublica. “The Sheriff Gets His Man.” November 15, 2016. Background on Jones’s early Trump-era profile.

Ohio context

Ohio Senate Bill 5 (2011) and Issue 2 referendum materials, Ohio Secretary of State.

Reporting on Ohio House Bill 6 and the FirstEnergy scandal, 2019–2023, for the state-level energy fight mentioned in passing.

The author’s related work

Hoffman, Rich. The Man Warrior Podcast. Episodes on Butler County party politics, county government, and Edwards.

Hoffman, Rich. Signed columns and posts at overmanwarrior channels. The radio history with WLW is part of that public record.

Footnotes

[1] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), ed. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026). Publication date August 18, 2026. ISBN 978-1-4003-3953-2. Official product page: https://www.thomasnelsonbibles.com/product/the-jonathan-edwards-study-bible-nkjv/

[2] Yale University’s Jonathan Edwards Center hosts The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online at http://edwards.yale.edu. Edwards himself was not president of Yale. He served as the third president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1758 and died shortly after taking office.

[3] The Reform Party presidential contest of 2000 included Patrick J. Buchanan and a brief exploratory effort by Donald J. Trump in 1999–2000. Trump later ran as a Republican and won the presidency in 2016 and 2024.

[4] Edwards’s most sustained treatment of government is not a single short “essay on human government” in the modern magazine sense. It is woven through his moral theology: God’s moral government of the world, the duty of magistrates, and the obligation of citizens. See especially “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners”; sermons on Romans 13; and the dissertation The Nature of True Virtue. The Study Bible gathers related notes and essays beside the biblical text. Page references in this piece follow the author’s personal copy.

[5] Romans 13:1–7; 1 Timothy 2:1–2; 1 Peter 2:13–17. Edwards read civil authority as part of God’s moral government, not as a substitute for the church and not as a theater for private vengeance.

[6] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. Standard text in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 22, Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742 (New Haven: Yale University Press).

[7] On June 22, 1750, after twenty-three years as pastor of the Northampton church, Edwards was dismissed following a congregational vote over qualifications for church membership (the “communion controversy”). He preached A Farewell Sermon on 2 Corinthians 1:14. He then served the Stockbridge mission among Native Americans before his Princeton appointment.

[8] Edwards, A Farewell Sermon (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1751). The sermon’s central claim is that pastor and people will meet again before Christ’s tribunal, where controversies and treatment of one another will be judged. That is the moral frame the author applies to party fights.

[9] Richard K. Jones, 45th Sheriff of Butler County, Ohio. Born Hamilton, Ohio, October 11, 1953. Elected sheriff in 2004; took office January 3, 2005; subsequently re-elected, including 2020 and 2024. Official biography: https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff.

[10] Ohio Senate Bill 5 (2011) restricted collective bargaining for public employees. It passed the General Assembly and was signed by Governor John Kasich, then repealed by statewide referendum (Issue 2) in November 2011. The fight split many Ohio Republicans from public-safety unions and local officials.

[11] WLW (700 AM), Cincinnati. Long-running talk hosts associated with this period include Doc Thompson and Willie. The Lakota schools controversy and on-air confrontations described here are from the author’s firsthand radio work, not from a single official transcript.

[12] Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter, and the early-eighteenth-century pirate history of the Carolina coast (including Edward Teach, “Blackbeard”) are standard public history. The comparison to Butler County is the author’s travel observation.

[13] Vivek Ramaswamy (Ohio) and J.D. Vance (Middletown, Butler County) are the two most nationally visible political figures to come out of the modern Ohio / Butler County conservative pipeline. Vance is Vice President of the United States as of 2025. Rep. Warren Davidson represents Ohio’s 8th Congressional District. Bernie Moreno was elected U.S. Senator from Ohio in 2024.

[14] Mary L. Swain, Butler County Clerk of Courts. Michael T. Gmoser, Butler County Prosecuting Attorney. Both Republicans holding countywide office as of 2024–2026. See Ballotpedia, Butler County, Ohio, elections, 2024.

[15] Ohio grand juries are convened under the Ohio Revised Code and local court practice. Foreman service is a civic appointment. Descriptions of jail tours and floor layout are from the author’s service and are not a disclosure of secret grand-jury deliberations or votes.

[16] Nancy Nix, CPA, Butler County Auditor. Appointed February 2023 by the Butler County Republican Party Central Committee after the felony conviction and removal of Auditor Roger Reynolds; sworn in February 13, 2023; elected November 2024. Previously Butler County Treasurer for nearly sixteen years. Office: https://auditor.bcohio.gov.

[17] Roger Reynolds, former Butler County Auditor, was convicted in December 2022 of a felony count of unlawful interest in a public contract related to Lakota Local Schools and a golf-training facility. He was removed from office. In 2024 he unsuccessfully sought to oust Auditor Nancy Nix through Ohio Supreme Court action and a Board of Elections protest. See Journal-News coverage, 2023–2024.

[18] FirstEnergy / House Bill 6 is the shorthand for Ohio’s 2019 nuclear-and-coal subsidy scandal, which produced federal prosecutions and years of state-level fallout. Democrats and Republicans both own pieces of the policy environment that made Ohio’s generation politics toxic. The point in this essay is party discipline after a scandal, not a legal brief.

[19] On public records, expungement, and political research: Ohio sealing and expungement statutes do not erase every trace of a matter from news archives, court indexes, or opposition research files. Leadership of a county party is a public role. That is a practical warning, not a legal opinion.

[20] Todd Hall has served as Executive Chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. See butlercountygop.org. Todd Minniear ran for Liberty Township Trustee (at-large) in 2025. References here to party leadership conversations are the author’s personal political judgment, not an official party endorsement.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Swinging for the Fences: Why I Am Betting on Butler County’s Advanced Air Mobility Future

People have been asking me what I am doing. They have wondered about me. They have watched the episodes, read the blog, seen me in rooms around Butler County for years, and then I went quiet in the way a person goes quiet when they are changing the work under their feet and are not ready to turn it into content.

I am not looking for a safe job that pays well so I can run out the clock. I have had those offers. I appreciate them. I am affiliating myself with a team of very sharp engineers and builders at Volynt Aero, as a senior consultant, with a path toward the COO seat, and I am doing it because I am in a stage of life where I want to swing for the fences. Not out of desperation. Out of refusal. I have watched too many capable people spend their best remaining years hitting ground balls and calling it wisdom.[1][2]

On Monday, September 21, 2026, at 7:00 p.m., at 20 South Elm Street, Oxford, Ohio 45056, inside Fisher Innovation College@Elm on Miami University’s campus, we are going to talk in public about economic vitality and what I believe is an enormous opportunity for Butler County. The event is free. Nobody is asking you to bring a checkbook. Just eat some snacks, shake hands, and hear the plan. I told my wife to go to Costco and get Doritos, punch, and whatever else makes a room feel welcoming instead of processed. That is the tone—serious work. Easy room. If you have wanted a reason to see me after a decade of reading or listening, that is the date. My schedule jumps around a lot, but I will be there for this.[3][4]

Oxford. The university town on the west side of the county. The building is the renovated old food-service and workforce site at 20 S. Elm Street — College@Elm — not a lecture hall buried in the academic core. Volynt Aero lists that building as its home. Miami’s Advanced Air Mobility Hub lives in that same incubator. The door you want is on Elm.[1][2][3][5]

I still dislike the word consultant, even though I now wear it, because I spent years chained to a success I had already built, and I felt embarrassed standing next to men who had already swung and connected. And why I would rather strike out in public, in Butler County, in the aerospace market I have been talking about for years, than spend the rest of my working life protecting ground that other people were already trying to steal.

I am a job-creator kind of person. I want to make jobs. I do not want to get a job someone else already made. That distinction sounds like a slogan until you have lived both sides of it. Most of the professional class measures adulthood by getting a job. Making jobs is how a county stays alive. I am happiest when I create work for other people—hundreds, or thousands. If I can help build something that employs a thousand people or more, that is the scoreboard I care about. Upper mobility. Payrolls that put gas in cars. Families that can stay in Butler County instead of exporting their kids to Texas, North Carolina, or the coasts and then coming home at Christmas to tell us how much better the schools are somewhere else.

I have done versions of this before. I have hired. I have built programs. I have kept a business alive longer than I wanted to because I brought people into it and felt responsible for the lives attached to those paychecks. That loyalty was not branding. It cost me years. It also taught me the thing the consultant class never learns: once you make something valuable, you become a target. Pirates do not always arrive with hooks and flags. Sometimes they arrive with decks, retainers, and a vocabulary about “professionalizing the operation.”

Go back to 2019. We had a Trump rally at a place where I had spent much of my life building a business. The owner was my friend. I stayed with that business a long time because of that friendship and because I didn’t want to deal with the woke corporatism that evolved from 2015 through 2020. Then COVID. Then the years after COVID, when the work stopped being about building and started being about keeping the lights on for people I had hired. I felt chained to their ability to put gas in the car. In a lot of ways I felt like I was lashed to a white whale. From the outside, that can look like success. The people who still had jobs were glad the jobs existed. I was glad they still had them. Inside, I was resentful — not of the people, of the process. I had created jobs, and then I became the janitor of those jobs while other people bought in, layered in, and tried to change what I didn’t want changed.[6]

It felt like trying to stay married to someone who wanted to cheat. Every time you turned around, they were climbing out a window toward some new lover with a fancier spreadsheet and phony EBITA numbers propped up by a shell game. I poured my heart into a company I didn’t fully control. Other people wanted to change it. I didn’t like the changes or the people who came with them. I still liked the people I had encouraged to become part of it. So I stayed. I defended. I hit ground balls to advance other people already safely on base. I kept the lights on.

Over the last couple of years, I went through multiple cycles of consulting firms imposed on me by, come what may, financial institutions who thought they knew best, after the best was already placed in their lap and worked out for them. Three waves. Then a fourth. I will say it the way I say it when I am not dressing it up for a chamber breakfast: a lot of them are dumb as rocks, and I do not mean to insult rocks. They are paid like industry professionals while the world under their feet has already changed. They exist to maintain ground already taken. They do not create the ground. They arrive after value exists and explain to the people who made the value how the value should now be managed. That is not a free market. That is a priesthood of fools.[7][8]

I worked at the same place for many years because of loyalty to the owner and because I wanted his family to benefit from what had been built. I still want that. Friendship does not expire because a corporate process gets stupid. But I also wanted an excuse to get away from a machine that had stopped being a build and had become a defense. The first opening that would let me play where I actually wanted to play showed up in these guys at Miami, in vertical takeoff, in the new space-adjacent aerospace market I have been putting episodes on for a long time. I have been interested in vertical aerospace for years. I wanted into that market for all kinds of reasons. Then my life opened a gap; I met them, I liked them, I wanted them to succeed, and they started introducing me to people. That was the intention. That is why I said yes.

They have introduced me as the coming COO. Right now I am a consultant. A senior consultant. I have a path toward the COO role at the scale they are trying to reach. I was apprehensive about the word. I have been stunned by how many places want me to consult for them. I had personal reservations about putting my name on that label. I still have them. I am also proud to be affiliated with this particular team. The title is not the prize. The prize is whether we can turn a sharp technical package into manufacturing, customers, and jobs.

Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance were at that 2019 rally I hosted. Warren Davidson has been in the orbit. I have had conversations with Bernie Moreno. I had a good talk with Jim Renacci after an event at Jags in West Chester. I have watched a lot of people I know leave the safe lane, take a real risk, and come back with independent wealth—enough to enter politics, or to refuse to be owned by it.[9][10]

Vivek was already on a steep wealth curve then. He wasn’t quite in the billionaire club the way magazines like to print it, but he was headed that way, and since then he’s been in that conversation and has taken the political path back toward Ohio’s governorship. Years later the call came through other people: he wanted to announce a governor’s race at my place, because the place still represented a free-enterprise culture that had not gone fully woke, and because we were doing things that did not look like everybody else. I said yes. I meant yes. I also felt a private embarrassment I should admit here, because if I do not admit it, the rest of this sounds like a victory lap instead of a confession.

When you stand next to people who built or sold large enterprises and then used that capital to change the map, and you are the guy still defending last decade’s success against the fourth wave of consultants, you feel the difference in your chest. They look at you the way a hitting coach looks at a veteran who will not let the bat get through the zone. You are at this stage of life. Why are you hitting ground balls? Why are you taking the walk? Why are you protecting a single when the bases are loaded? You are a guy who could drive the ball with runners on. Why are you trying to beat out a roller to short?

The honest answer, for a long time, was loyalty. Loyalty to the owner who was my friend. Loyalty to the people I hired. I do not apologize for that. I also will not pretend it was the same thing as ambition. Ambition would have left earlier. Loyalty stayed. Then loyalty, after enough waves of professional stupidity, became a kind of self-betrayal. I felt like I was underperforming in front of people I respected. I felt like I was wasting a bat. When Vivek talked about using the place because it still stood for the free-enterprise system, I felt a flicker of pride and a bigger flicker of “I should have more to put on the table than a good venue and a good story about the past.”

I watched them swing. Some of the balls went over the fence. The crowd enjoyed it. The players enjoyed it. Everybody enjoys seeing a ball leave the yard, including the man who hit it. I wanted that feeling again — not the celebrity, the creation. I want to make other people wealthy. I want payrolls large enough that a community can even start talking about abolishing property taxes without gutting the services people actually like. That is a standard, not a slogan. If you are not trying to create billions in new market value, I am not sure the conversation is worth the evening. A few hundred million in annual revenue is what the coastal startup press calls a win. I do not think that is a win. Ten billion in new market growth is the starting point for a conversation about success. To me, success looks like a hundred billion. That is how you change a county instead of decorating it.

I haven’t built a job base that employed a thousand people or more in over a decade. I have been trying to hang on to the success I had already built. That work has its honor. It also became boring to me, and boredom in an operator is a warning light. When the fourth wave of consultants arrived with different ideas about how we should do the thing I had already done, I was happy to leave and not look back. They did not like me. I did not like their ideas. I did not want to be part of another cycle of ground balls. I took the off-ramp. I would rather hit the reset button and start over with people who want to build than spend another year arguing with people who think a slide deck is an airplane. I’m sure I’ll write a book about all this once I get some distance from the immediacy of it all. It will make a very interesting business book. But first, such books are only valuable to people once you are looking back from a position of success; otherwise, it’s just another story about a down-and-out situation. Success has to be attached to the narrative.

That is how I landed at Volynt.

The building matters, and I am going to stay on the building for a minute because “Miami University” is a large map, and people get lost on large maps. College@Elm is Miami’s innovation and workforce hub at 20 S. Elm Street. It used to sit vacant. The university, the City of Oxford, alumni, the state capital budget, and JobsOhio money turned it into a technology, entrepreneurship, and light-manufacturing incubator — office, design and testing, startup space, a workforce resource function, and room for real production instead of just posters about production. Miami alumni Lee and Rosemary Fisher put their name on it. Randi Thomas and the ASPIRE shop treated it as a way to drag Oxford out of an eight-month student economy and toward a twelve-month one. That is the room.[3][4][11][12]

Volynt Aero’s address is that building. Suite language has appeared in their capability materials as 20 S. Elm St., Suite 117. Miami has also stood up an Advanced Air Mobility Hub in the same incubator, aimed at autonomous, hybrid-electric, and eVTOL aircraft, in collaboration with Butler County and Middletown Regional Airports, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Butler Tech, and industry partners including Volynt.[1][2][5]

Volynt is not a passenger flying-taxi pitch dressed up for a TED talk. I need to say that because the popular press only knows one picture of this industry: a four-seat air taxi humming over a downtown skyline in a rendering that has never paid a supplier. The company is building large hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft for cargo logistics, disaster response, contested logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications—ugly work. Useful work. The work that can find a customer before the lifestyle brochure does. They call the aircraft line Vyper in their public materials. The founding team came out of UAS and eVTOL work dating to 2012, including AFWERX Agility Prime flight-test experience on a full-scale electric aircraft; University of Cincinnati aerospace engineering; Rose-Hulman and Illinois mechanical engineering; and FAA experimental airworthiness work. Together, they have forty-plus years of experience in electric vehicles, eVTOL, and manned and uncrewed aircraft. Jeffrey Bennett is the CEO. Justin Jantzen is the CTO. The rest of the technical bench is the kind of bench a county should want to keep.[2][5][13]

They have proposed a Hybrid Propulsion and Energy Lab — the HyPE Lab — at Miami University Airport in Oxford, a facility in the neighborhood of seven million dollars aimed at hybrid-electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and electric aviation development. They have already pulled Ohio Third Frontier / TVSF grant support in partnership with Miami and the Entrepreneurs’ Center. That is not a finished factory. That is a package with technology laid out, customer logic laid out, and a county sitting in the birthplace of powered flight, next to Wright-Patterson, next to a new Butler Tech aviation hangar beside Middletown Regional, next to Joby and BETA and Electra planting metal in the Miami Valley, in a state that has spent years trying to own advanced air mobility instead of applauding it from the stands.[14][15][16][17][18]

Ohio’s own AAM studies are not modest. DriveOhio and the NEXA work done for the state put the prize at roughly thirteen billion dollars in economic activity over twenty-five years, about fifteen thousand jobs, and about two and a half billion in tax revenue — if Ohio actually captures the market. Cargo, emergency services, and vehicle manufacturing are a large share of that stack. That is the lane Volynt is in. I do not treat a consultant forecast as destiny. I have spent too many years watching forecasts get used as incense. I treat the number as a fastball I can see. If the state leaves that stack on the table, California and Texas will take it and send us a newsletter about thought leadership.[19][20]

I want to give this some color, because “economic vitality” is a phrase chambers of commerce use until it means nothing.

Vitality is not a social-hour calendar. Vitality is surplus. It is when a county produces so much new value that young people do not have to leave, old industrial sites get reused, airports become more than weekend-pilot hobbies, and tax fights become less vicious because the base is growing faster than the government. I have spent a lot of my public life as the tax-killer in this county. I didn’t do that because I hate roads, sheriffs, and firehouses. I did it because a government that cannot stop growing will eat a private economy that has stopped growing. The only durable answer is not a clever levy. The durable answer is so much new payroll and new production that the argument changes temperature.

Butler County already has pieces of the machine. Miami’s Oxford campus and the regional campuses. Middletown’s steel and manufacturing memory, including the kind of heavy industry that still knows what a shift is. The I-75 corridor. Two relevant airports inside the conversation — Miami University Airport in Oxford and Middletown Regional — plus CVG as the big-hub partner on the AAM map. Butler Tech’s new aviation center, a roughly fifteen-million-dollar hangar and classroom pile next to the Middletown airport, with county, city, and JobsOhio money in it, training kids who can see an aerospace job without leaving home. And a university incubator on Elm Street, explicitly sold as a way to create year-round work in a town that used to hibernate when students left.[1][15][11]. And let’s not forget about the wonderful Butler County Regional, which has the prospect of enormous significance in a way that it has always been poised to bring forth.

Advanced air mobility is one of the few new industrial stacks that can still be built in the Midwest instead of being imported as a finished product from the coasts. Ohio has been recruiting it on purpose. Joby has been planting manufacturing near Dayton and talking about thousands of jobs and hundreds of aircraft a year if the production curve holds. Electra has committed a huge Ohio production bet out of an MIT classroom idea that turned into a short-takeoff hybrid aircraft and an $850 million manufacturing story in Springfield and Clark County, with job counts in the neighborhood of two thousand. BETA and the National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence in Springfield are part of the same weather system. JobsOhio has treated AAM as a super-sector and has been walking that story all the way to Paris. Hartzell in Piqua certified an electric-aircraft propeller. The FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program is on the 2026 calendar. Ohio entered that fight with a multi-state medical-logistics proposal.[16][17][18][21]

Most of the passenger eVTOL story is still a certification and capital-markets story. That is not an insult. It is a timeline. Certification is slow. Air-taxi unit economics are a sermon until the aircraft is legal, maintainable, and paid for by someone other than a vision fund. The cargo, disaster, defense-adjacent, and mobile-power story can move sooner because the customer is not waiting for a four-seat taxi to become socially fashionable. An uncrewed hybrid aircraft that can haul, generate, and communicate in ugly terrain is a product a government buyer and a logistics company can understand without a lifestyle brochure. That is why I like this package. It is closer to a truck than to a fashion object.

I have talked about the new space economy and vertical aerospace for years. All these things mentioned here are merging at a very unique time in Southern Ohio, and I’ve known it for a long time, and I had felt stuck, unable to participate because of my other commitments. I wanted into that market, not stuck to loyal obligations. Not as a fan. As an operator. I have walked the producer culture at SpaceX and looked at what happens when a company treats manufacturing as the product instead of treating the press release as the product. Reusability. Iteration. Catching the thing and flying it again. That is the version of aerospace I want in Ohio. I do not need Volynt to be SpaceX. I need Volynt to be as serious as SpaceX: close the gap between the drawing and the floor. California and Texas will take a lot of the gold rush. They should not take all of it. Ohio invented powered flight. It should not rent the sequel from the coasts and call the rental economic development.

There is a second vitality problem I will not dance around. A lot of American corporate culture imported a compliance religion that I believe tracks, in spirit if not in every memo, to the same managerial habits that made Wall Street comfortable with Communist China’s labor and governance model while lecturing American manufacturers about virtue. ESG-era asset managers scolded domestic firms and stayed hungry for China exposure. Larry Fink could write letters telling American CEOs that climate and stakeholders would reshape finance, and the same apparatus could treat Beijing as a growth market. That split personality cost real companies real billions in distracted leadership. It also trained a consultant class to speak fluent morality while missing the factory. I have watched it up close. I have watched financial institutions send in the next wave of advisors because they thought a firm that had not gone woke yet still had juice that could be squeezed if only the culture were more compliant. They do not like Elon Musk. They do not like being told the world will change through building instead of through postings. I have been a target of that instinct. I am done volunteering for it.[22][23][24]

I want to lead a very dramatic change that changes entire industry standards, around the world. I want to help build a company that makes money the old way: a customer pays for a machine that works. Easy money and financial engineering can look like vitality for a while. Then inflation shows up, and the community realizes the jobs were never as solid as the press release. I want the other kind. Output. Exports. Aircraft. Power systems. Maintenance hangars. Suppliers. Kids from Butler Tech and Miami who can stay home and get paid. I want so much money coming into this community that property taxes become a conversation you can have without destroying the services people like. That is where my mind is. Getting on base is not enough.

Swinging for the fences is a moral choice, not a motivational poster. Baseball metaphors get cheap. I am keeping this one because it is the cleanest picture of the decision.

Most people in operating roles at this stage of life take the safe route. Get on base. Take the walk. Protect the pension. Let someone else hit the homer. You have already done the hard thing once. Now you need to keep your place in the lineup. I understand that instinct. I rejected it.

Swinging for the fences can end in a strikeout. I know that. I am a realist in business. Success is not entirely up to me. Other people have to get on base. The pitcher has to leave a pitch you can actually hit. Certification, capital, customers, suppliers, and timing all have to arrive in something like the right order. I have said on the air that this is a poker game more than a guaranteed jackpot. The risk is real. I do not think the risk is stupid. They have a gap I think they can close. I know what I can do in an operating seat. That part is not in doubt in my mind. I have done versions of it many times. The barrier most early technical teams cannot cross is not the CAD model. It is the factory floor, the hiring machine, the customer close, and the culture that does not dissolve when the first institutional money arrives. In this case, I see all those coming together in very unique and profitable ways. It’s always about timing, and the timing for this is right now.

Even so, a strikeout while swinging for the fence feels more honest to me than a career of ground balls. I have wanted a window to build from the ground up again. I got one. Before the window closes, I want a grand slam for Butler County — or at least a swing that everybody in the stands can respect. Safety is not my default setting. Loyalty is. Those two traits fought each other for years. Loyalty won, until the fourth wave of consultants made it obvious that staying was no longer protecting the people I hired. It was protecting a process I did not believe in.

I enjoy risk. I enjoy my life most when there is real risk in it. People who have known me a long time know that. They also know I will hang onto a job base I created longer than a purely rational careerist would, because I do not like being the person who collected a check and left other people’s mortgages on the table. When the money showed up to go somewhere else, and I knew the new layer was going to take it in a direction I would not sign off on, I did not feel like I was letting anybody down by leaving. I felt like I was buying my freedom from a process that had already decided I was the problem.

I want to be a version, in Ohio, of what the serious aerospace builders are doing in Texas. I expect that of myself. I was embarrassed, in those conversations with people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Bernie Moreno who had already swung and connected in their own lives, because I could hear the unasked question from them: you love the free-enterprise system enough to host a speech, why aren’t you in the game at that scale? I hosted the speech. I meant it. I also needed a moment of my own — the kind where you roll the dice large enough that the win, if it comes, is visible from the rest of the world.

September 21 is not a fundraiser with a soft-ask after the punch. It is not the Rich Hoffman show. It is not a secret society. It is a public conversation about a plan for economic vitality in Butler County, hosted where the work is already living, on a Monday night, with the people doing the engineering in the room. If you come, you will not be listening to me invent a company out of a microphone. You will be listening to why I think this particular team, in this particular building, in this particular county, is a bat worth swinging.

Monday, September 21, 2026. Seven o’clock. Fisher Innovation College@Elm. 20 South Elm Street. Oxford, Ohio 45056. Free. Come as you are.

If the evening works, you will leave less interested in me and more interested in what a serious advanced-air-mobility build could do to the tax base, the talent pipeline, and the self-respect of a manufacturing region that has been told for twenty years that the future lives somewhere else. There is a lot of affiliation possible in this — Miami engineers, Butler Tech kids, airport boards, suppliers who already know composites and power electronics, people across Ohio who are tired of watching the next factory announcement land in another state. I want these guys among the names people mention when they talk about who actually built the upper-mobility market instead of posting about it on LinkedIn.

Let me stay in Butler County long enough that the vitality claim isn’t a vibe.

This county sits between Cincinnati and Dayton with a population now in the high 380,000s to about 400,000 depending on which vintage of the estimate you trust, employment in the neighborhood of 190,000 people, and a local GDP north of twenty billion dollars. Manufacturing is not the largest headcount sector—healthcare and retail usually win that race—but it is still the spine. County profile data puts manufacturing employment in the mid-teens of thousands, with hundreds of manufacturing establishments. That is the difference between a bedroom county and a producing county. Bedroom counties import paychecks and export children. Producing counties keep a reason to stay.[26][27]

I have lived in this county my whole adult life. I did not stay because it was fashionable. I stayed because this is the ground I know, and because I think a person who talks about job creation while quietly arranging his own exit to a coastal zip code is running a different play than the one they are selling. The future I want is not a TED talk in Austin about the Midwest. The future I want is a payroll in Oxford, Middletown, Hamilton, Trenton, West Chester, Fairfield, and the townships not named in the brochures.

Middletown still knows steel. Cleveland-Cliffs putting real capital into Middletown Works is the kind of story that should shame anyone who wrote this valley off as a twentieth-century museum. Hamilton is growing again, according to the latest Census slice of incorporated places. Oxford shrinks a little when the student count wobbles, which is exactly why College@Elm was sold as a twelve-month economy instead of an eight-month one. The I-75 corridor still moves freight. The airports are not theoretical. Miami University Airport is a tool if someone treats it as one. Middletown Regional now has a Butler Tech aviation hangar next door — roughly thirty thousand square feet and fifteen million dollars, with millions from the county commissioners, JobsOhio, and the city — so a kid can learn airframes and powerplants without buying a plane ticket to Dayton on the first day of class.[28][15][11]

That is the county I am talking about on the 21st. Not a fantasy county. This one.

I should talk about the industry itself, because vitality without an industry is just a mood.

The Wright brothers did not invent flight so Ohio could become a spectator. Huffman Prairie is a cow pasture with a better story than most nations ever get, and Wright-Patterson plus the Air Force Research Laboratory turned that story into a century of metal, propulsion, sensors, and people who know how to hold a tolerance. The National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence in Springfield gave the new stack a hangar and a test culture. Ohio was early on beyond-visual-line-of-sight work. JobsOhio has been walking AAM around the world as a super-sector. That is nothing. It is also not finished. A super-sector that does not produce aircraft, batteries, blades, software, and trained hands in this state is just a brand.[16][21]

Joby is the loudest nearby proof. In 2023, the state stood at Hawthorn Hill and announced a Dayton-area manufacturing bet aimed at two thousand jobs, hundreds of millions in investment, and a long-run rate described as up to five hundred aircraft a year if the curve holds. By late 2025 they were making propeller blades in Dayton — thirty blades per aircraft across six rotors, with talk of fifteen thousand blades a year at scale. In January 2026 they bought a 700,000-square-foot building in the Vandalia / Dayton orbit to support a doubling of production toward four aircraft a month in 2027, while California still does final assembly in Marina. That is what a real company looks like when it stops rendering and starts buying floor. I do not work for Joby. I am not pretending Volynt is Joby. I am saying the weather system is here, and a county that refuses to fly in that weather is choosing to stay on the ground for sport, and just hitting ground balls when they should be home runs.[18][29][30]

Electra is the other loud proof. An MIT classroom argument about short takeoff versus pure eVTOL turned into a hybrid-aircraft story, then into an $850 million Ohio manufacturing commitment in Springfield and Clark County, with job figures in the neighborhood of two thousand. That architecture differs from Volynt’s unmanned hybrid cargo and power mission, and that is the point. A healthy industrial stack is not one company. It is a density of companies that can share suppliers, schools, airports, and a labor pool that already knows composites, wiring harnesses, thermal problems, and shift work.[17]

BETA, Wisk, Archer, and the rest of the passenger field will keep eating capital and calendar until the FAA is satisfied. That is their fight. Ohio’s eIPP proposal — medical cargo, multi-state coordination, existing infrastructure north of a billion dollars already in the AAM pipeline by the state’s telling — is an attempt to make the fight operational instead of ceremonial.[21]

Volynt’s lane is the one I keep coming back to because it does not need a downtown skyline to make sense. Contested logistics. Disaster. Mobile power. Forward comms. Cargo that does not care whether the landing zone has a concourse. Hybrid propulsion because batteries alone still lose arguments with range, weather, and payload. Unmanned because the scarce resource in a bad place is often the trained crew, not the box. If you have listened to me talk about cargo drones, battlefield and hurricane power, and the difference between a toy and a truck, this is that conversation with a company attached to it.[2][5][13]

I have been drawing and talking through those vehicles for a long time — American-flag and camouflage workhorses, five-hundred-pound-class cargo, relief power after a storm, the ugly missions that do not photograph like an air taxi over a football stadium. The point of affiliation is not that I became a CAD operator. The point is that I know what it looks like when a technical team has the machine but doesn’t yet have the operating company around it. That gap is where COOs either earn their keep or become another slide.

What do I think I bring? I am not going to write myself a brochure. I will say this. I have hired at scale. I have built programs. I have kept operations alive under pressure. I have sat through the consultant priesthood, and I know which parts of their language are anesthesia. I have a public voice in this county, which is either an asset or a liability depending on whether you want the work known. I want the work known. I want suppliers to walk in. I want kids from Butler Tech to see a ladder. I want Miami engineers to have a reason to stay on Elm Street after graduation instead of taking the first offer that spells California correctly. I want political people who talk about jobs to have to look at an actual floor instead of a resolution.

I also want to be honest about scale. Volynt is early. Public profiles put the firm in the small-headcount startup band, founded in 2024, grant-supported, incubator-housed, airport-lab proposed. That is not a criticism. That is the inning. I am walking in at the inning where the bat still matters.

People will ask why a person who distrusts consultants became one. I have answered it, and I will answer it again because the contradiction is the point. I distrust consultants as a class because the class profits from ambiguity and from other people’s sunk costs. I accepted this particular affiliation because the team asked me to help them become a company, not to help them become a presentation about a company. If that changes — if the work becomes another layer of process laid on top of people who actually know how to build aircraft — I will not stay for the fee. I have already lived that movie. I did not like the ending.

The same is true of the COO language. A COO at this stage is not a parking place for a résumé. A COO at this stage is the person who turns a technical core into hiring, suppliers, quality, customers, cash discipline, and a culture that can survive the first serious outside money. Most startups die in that translation. They have smart founders and a concept that connects, and they cannot get distance. I think I can get them distance. That is the only reason to say the letters out loud. A COO has to be top notch and able to build at scale to achieve the kind of revenue I think is meaningful, and you won’t get that by playing it safe and hitting ground balls.

I want to address a risk that the safe people often overlook. Risk isn’t the same as recklessness. Recklessness is swinging at everything. Risk is knowing the count, knowing the pitcher, and still letting the bat go because a walk will not change the game. I have been offered safe work that paid well. I know what that work is. It is a ground ball with a 401(k). It is a walk with better catering. It is other people’s home runs. I have lost years to loyalty, and I am not going to lose the next window to comfort. Comfort is how a producing region becomes a commenting region.

A cultural fight runs beneath the industrial one, and I am not going to pretend I do not see it. LinkedIn-era corporate America learned a language that came into American firms through compliance, banking, and the HR stack, and a lot of that language treats production as a moral problem to be managed instead of a good to be multiplied. I have called that language anti-American in the sense that it distrusts the producer and trusts the administrator. I have called out the China contradiction because it is the tell. If your virtue system cannot survive contact with the actual labor and governance model of the country that ate so much of our manufacturing, your virtue system is a costume. I don’t want a company that puts on the costume to raise a round. I want a company that makes a machine a customer will pay for, then makes another one faster.[22][23][24]

That is why I talk about SpaceX the way I do. Not because I think every Ohio startup is going to catch a booster. Because the method is the method: iterate in public, treat the factory as the product, refuse the cost-plus fog, and accept that some days the thing blows up and you learn. The consultant class hates that method because it makes their timelines look like prayer. I like that method because it is the only one that has recently changed what a country can do in the air.

I also like it because it creates the thing I actually want to be judged by. Jobs. Not jobs as a press-release noun. Jobs as a person who can buy a house in this county, raise children who do not have to apologize for staying, and look at a factory or a hangar and know the work is real. I have not had a run at a thousand-plus job base in more than ten years. That sentence bothers me. It should. A person who knows how to do a thing and spends a decade defending a smaller version of the thing is not being humble. They are being delayed.

Vertical aerospace does not sit in a vacuum. The same decade that made reusable orbital machines ordinary made a lot of people rich and made a lot of other people angry that wealth could still be created without a committee. I have said that a few hundred million in revenue is not the definition of a serious company in this era. I meant it. The markets being built around launch, satellite constellations, lunar logistics, point-to-point cargo, and now advanced air mobility are not cottage markets. They are the next industrial revolution, and they still have an American accent if we keep it. If we treat them as branding exercises for cities that want to look modern, the accent moves to Shenzhen, to a Gulf sovereign fund, or to whatever coastal firm learned to speak Ohio long enough to take the incentive and leave the toolpath somewhere else.

Vertical takeoff is the part of that revolution that touches a county like mine first. You do not need a Cape to build a hybrid cargo aircraft. You need engineers, a hangar, a certification strategy, suppliers, and a customer with a problem a road cannot solve. Disaster is that customer. Defense logistics is that customer. A hospital network that cannot wait for a truck in snow is that customer. A grid that dies in a hurricane is that customer. I have watched too many AAM conversations start at the air-taxi rendering and stay there until the money gets bored. Start at the ugly mission. The ugly mission pays. The pretty mission might pay later.

I kept doing episodes on this because it would have been easier to do another week of political weather. Politics matters. I am not walking away from it. But politics without production is commentary. I got tired of being excellent at commentary while the production problem in my own working life was a whale I was feeding. That is the private engine under this public announcement. I wanted my workdays to match the thing I have been telling this audience is coming.

I also wanted my community to have a shot at the kind of wealth that does not arrive as a transfer payment. Transfer wealth makes clients. Produced wealth makes citizens. I have watched federal money, state money, levy money, and foundation money wash through this region and leave behind a professional class that knows how to apply for the next wash. I am not against a smart grant. Volynt has used Ohio Third Frontier support and I am not going to pretend that seed capital is sinful. I am against a culture that thinks the grant is the business. The business is an aircraft that flies, a customer who pays, a shop that can build the next one, and a payroll that does not vanish when the appropriation cycle turns.

Consultants love the grant cycle. They measure it in the way they understand measurement: hours, decks, compliance language, a ribbon, a quote in the paper. Builders love the second aircraft. The second aircraft is the only metric that means the first one was not a stunt. If you come on the 21st and you only want to hear about the first rendering, you will be in the wrong room. I want to hear about the second, the tenth, and the factory that makes the tenth boring.

Boring is the compliment. SpaceX became important when landing a booster stopped being a miracle and started being a Tuesday. Joby becomes important in Ohio when a blade is just a blade and an airframe is just an airframe and the third shift is staffed. Volynt becomes important in Butler County when a hybrid unmanned cargo aircraft is a product you can point at, not a paragraph in an incubator newsletter. I am here for the Tuesday. I am willing to live through the miracles to get there. I am not willing to live through another decade of process about the miracles.

People who have known me since the car lots and the plants and the courtrooms and the long years in aerospace programs know I do not have a clean corporate story. I have a Western story. I worked young. I learned in rooms that did not care about my feelings. I wrote a book that used a gunfighter as the American stand-in for Sun Tzu and Musashi because I thought this civilization had forgotten that speed plus competence is a moral achievement, not a personality defect. That book was not a merch play. It was meant to give operators a language that did not come from a consultancy or from a monastery. If you read it and then watch me take a safe COO job at a firm that wants to be liked by the same class the book was written against, you should reject the book and I would never want you to do that.[7]

The loyalty years complicate the legend, and I am leaving the complication in. I could tell this as a clean break: woke capital arrived, I left, I found the future. That is too clean. I stayed because of a friend. I stayed because of people I hired. That is a virtue until it becomes a cage. The cage ended when the fourth wave made it obvious that the fight was no longer about the work. It was about who got to narrate the work. I do not give that away anymore.

If you are a young engineer at Miami and you are reading this, I want you in the room. If you are a trades kid at Butler Tech who can hold a torque spec, I want you in the room. If you are a supplier who already sells to the Dayton aerospace pile and you are curious whether Oxford is serious, I want you in the room. If you are a mover and shaker, a trustee, a mayor, or a staffer who only knows this industry from a JobsOhio slide, I want you in the room. If you are a person who has listened to me for ten years and thought I would never come back to a build, I want you in the room so you can see that I meant what I said when it really mattered most. Not when the game was on the line and we were hitting ground balls just to get and stay on base. But to hit home runs and to win the game in ways that nobody ever forgets.

So come to Elm Street.

If you are coming from Middletown or Liberty Township, you are driving west toward Oxford, not south toward Cincinnati and not north toward Dayton unless you like extra highway. You want 20 South Elm Street. You want the College@Elm building. You want 7:00 p.m. on Monday the 21st. Park like a person who has been to Oxford before, the building has its own parking lot— the streets are tight, the students exist, the building is the old food-service site that does not look like a cathedral and should not. Walk in. Eat a Dorito. Shake a hand. Listen to engineers. Listen to why I think this is the fence we need to knock the ball over with the bases loaded.

If you have known me for a long time and you have been waiting for a reason that was not another levy fight or another school-board night, this is a different reason. I still care about taxes, because a county that cannot grow its base will keep reaching into the same pockets. I still care about schools, because a talent pipeline that hates production will not staff a hangar. I still care about the sheriff’s side of a functioning county, because none of this works in a place that cannot keep law and order. But the 21st is not a political rally. It is an economic conversation with a company in the room.

I have said I want wealth large enough that property tax abolition becomes thinkable without wrecking services. People hear that as a joke or as a campaign line. Hear it as a measuring stick. If the new stack in Ohio is really thirteen billion over twenty-five years and fifteen thousand jobs, and if Butler County captures even a serious slice of the cargo, power, training, and supplier work, the tax argument in this county changes. If we capture nothing, we will keep fighting over the same pie and calling the fight civic engagement.[19][20]

I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I thought America needed its own book of strategy — not another imported mystic manual, and not another consultant workbook that teaches people how to manage decline politely. Shooting from the hip, in that book, is not sloppiness. It is mastery under time pressure. I have made a lot of people money before. I have given a lot of people jobs they could live on. I am proud of that. I want to do it again, bigger than I have had a chance to do it in more than a decade. That is why I am standing where I am standing. That is why I stopped protecting the whale. That is why I am swinging.

If the ball goes over the fence, Butler County should feel it in the payrolls. If it does not, at least nobody will be able to say I spent the late innings bunting.

Notes

[1] Miami University ASPIRE, “Advanced Air Mobility Hub,” The Miami Difference. Hub housed in Fisher Innovation College@Elm; collaborators include Butler County and Middletown Regional Airports, CVG, Butler Tech, and Volynt Aero. https://miamioh.edu/aspire/miami-difference/stories-2025/advanced-air-mobility-hub.html

[2] Volynt Aero LinkedIn company page: Oxford headquarters; hybrid unmanned eVTOL mission; 20 S. Elm St. address; Ohio TVSF / Third Frontier grant with Miami University. https://www.linkedin.com/company/volynt-aero

[3] Miami University, “Economic and Community Impact of College@Elm,” 20 S. Elm St., Oxford, OH 45056. https://miamioh.edu/college-at-elm/impact/

[4] Hailee Perry, “Miami starts process of renovating workforce development building,” Oxford Observer, September 10, 2021.

[5] Volynt Aero, Capability Statement (2024): cargo, mobile power, forward comms; AFWERX Agility Prime background; 20 S. Elm St. Suite 117. https://volynt.aero/uploads/VolyntAero_CapabilityStatement_2024.pdf

[6] Author’s firsthand account, Overman Warrior podcast and contemporaneous notes, 2019–2026.

[7] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021).

[8] Rich Hoffman, video commentary on consultants, pricing, and corporate process theater, including “Affordability and Pricing” (2025).

[9] C-SPAN, “Gubernatorial Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R-OH) Campaign in Middletown,” August 2026.

[10] Public biographies and campaign records of Vivek Ramaswamy, J.D. Vance, Warren Davidson, Bernie Moreno, and Jim Renacci, used only to locate the author’s personal encounters.

[11] “The new Fisher Innovation College@Elm center hopes to drive economic growth in the community,” The Miami Student, March 9, 2023.

[12] Miami University, “Miami, city of Oxford receive JobsOhio Vibrant Community Grant for visionary College@Elm project,” June 2021.

[13] Volynt Aero, company site and team page. https://volynt-aero-site.netlify.app/

[14] Lauren Steen, “Manufacturer proposes $7M aviation facility at Miami University Airport,” Cincinnati Business Courier / Local 12, January 6, 2025.

[15] Aidan Cornue, “Butler Tech Aviation Education Hangar opens to students,” Oxford Free Press, February 14, 2026.

[16] “The Birthplace of Flight Is Going Electric,” Midstory, March 2, 2026.

[17] MIT News, “A new kind of aircraft departs an MIT classroom and arrives at an Ohio factory,” August 25, 2026.

[18] CoStar / industry coverage of Joby’s Dayton-area manufacturing expansion and production targets.

[19] DriveOhio, “Advanced Air Mobility Economic Impact Study.” Roughly $13 billion in activity, 15,000 jobs, $2.5 billion in tax revenue over 25 years if Ohio captures the market. https://drive.ohio.gov/programs/advanced-aviation/advanced-air-mobility/advanced-air-mobility-economic-impact-study

[20] Michael J. Dyment and Chase Leeby, Advanced Air Mobility Business Case Assessment: State of Ohio, NEXA Capital Partners / NEXA Advisors.

[21] JobsOhio, Ohio eIPP / AAM coalition materials, including the January 28, 2026 GlobeNewswire release on Ohio’s FAA eVTOL Integration Pilot Program proposal.

[22] “BlackRock’s China Hypocrisy Highlights ESG’s Shortcomings,” National Review, February 3, 2022.

[23] “China Has One Powerful Friend Left in the U.S.: Wall Street,” The Wall Street Journal.

[24] “‘Woke’ Capitalists Sell Out U.S. to China Behind a Mask of Virtue,” RealClearPolitics, June 4, 2020.

[25] Rich Hoffman, author bio and Politics of Heaven project description, The Overmanwarrior / richhoffmanbooks.com.

[26] St. Louis Fed (FRED), Employed Persons in Butler County, OH, 2025 annual: 189,920.

[27] Butler County / BCFA community profile: population near 388,000–399,000; manufacturing employment in the mid-teens of thousands; GDP reported above $22 billion in profile materials.

[28] Journal-News, May 26, 2026, Census estimates on Hamilton and other Butler County cities.

[29] JobsOhio, “Joby Aviation Doubles Down on Ohio,” 2026, and DeWine / Husted 2023 Dayton manufacturing announcement: 2,000 jobs targeted, up to 500 aircraft per year at full ambition.

[30] Dayton Daily News, June 15, 2026, Joby Dayton blade work and Vandalia 700,000-square-foot assembly building.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021. Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. CreateSpace, 2012. Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior (blog). https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/ Hoffman, Rich. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/ Volynt Aero. https://volynt.aero Volynt Aero. Capability Statement. 2024. Miami University ASPIRE. Advanced Air Mobility Hub. Miami University. Economic and Community Impact of College@Elm. DriveOhio. Advanced Air Mobility Economic Impact Study. Dyment, Michael J., and Leeby, Chase. Advanced Air Mobility Business Case Assessment: State of Ohio. JobsOhio eIPP and AAM super-sector materials, 2025–2026. Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal. Womack, Jones, and Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. 1990. Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma. 1997. Grove, Andrew S. Only the Paranoid Survive. 1996. Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup. 2011. Fink, Larry. Annual letters to CEOs, BlackRock, 2018–2025. Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. 2021. Ramaswamy, Vivek. Nation of Victims. 2022. Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy. 2016. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957. Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943. NASA / Booz Allen Hamilton urban air mobility market studies. FAA eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) announcements, 2026. AFWERX Agility Prime program overviews. Kahn, Roger. The Boys of Summer. 1972. Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings.

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

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Preparing for the Space Economy: Cargo Drones, Robotics, and Why Software Learns Faster Than Humans and Is Much Safer

This past week I gave a lecture to a room of college students I never physically entered. A professor at a prestigious university—someone who had been watching my videos, commenting on them, and treating the work as if it belonged in a classroom—asked me to talk to her students about aerospace and how a young person might prepare for the space economy, in the old arrangement that invitation meant a check from the university, a plane ticket, a hotel for two nights, and a professor who got to sit in the back of the hall while an outsider did the talking. The students got a visitor who had been out in the world doing the thing the syllabus only described.

That is not what happened. I asked the practical questions. Do I fly out? Do I book a hotel? Do we do lunch? She said no. We would do it on Teams. She plugged her laptop into the classroom monitor, ran the microphone system through the room, and about two hundred people—some in the seats, some on the call—looked at me the way people now look at a talking rectangle. Class was at 12:30 PM. I sat down at 12:30 from my RV and called into Teams, and spoke to the class. An hour later everybody went about their business.

I am not pretending I am above being paid for that kind of work. The geometry of expertise has changed. The old lecture tour burned three days to deliver one hour. The new version burns one hour to deliver one hour. It feels slightly wild, and I will take it. The students still asked good questions. The professor still got a guest. I still had to earn the room. The only thing missing was the airport.

What the Space Economy Actually Means in 2026

I have been doing a run of shows on the change of state coming for the American economy—how much work, how much income, how much industrial capacity the orbital and near-space markets are going to pull into existence. The phrase “space economy” still sounds to some people like a poster in a guidance counselor’s office. It is not a poster. Industry tallies put the global space economy at around $626 billion in 2025, with commercial activity already the large majority of that total and serious forecasts pointing toward a trillion dollars in the early 2030s.[1] Other estimates run higher still. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum have published a scenario near one-point-eight trillion by 2035. The commercial share is already about four-fifths of the whole.[2]

That money is not only rockets on television. It is satellite broadband, navigation, Earth observation, ground equipment, launch cadence, defense architectures, and the unglamorous logistics that will feed commercial stations as NASA tries to hand low-Earth orbit to private operators before the International Space Station is retired.[3] If you are a student sitting in a lecture hall in 2026, the relevant question is not whether space will become an industry. It already is. The question is whether you will be the kind of person an industry like that can use.

Cargo Drones Are Not the Toys You Buy at Target

The conversation turned, as these conversations always do, toward drones. People hear the word and picture a camera quadcopter over a soccer field. That is not the machine I have been around in Butler County. The airframes I have been involved with are in a different weight class. They are built to move real mass—on the order of five hundred pounds of cargo—not a birthday balloon and a GoPro.

That number is no longer science fiction. In the last year, Elroy Air’s Chaparral hybrid-electric cargo aircraft has been flying autonomous missions under the federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, with production ratings above five hundred pounds and ranges measured in hundreds of miles.[4] Other developers are in the same neighborhood. AIR has put a heavy-lift uncrewed aircraft into flight operations with a published payload near 550 pounds and a cargo bay large enough for bulky freight.[5] China has flown even heavier fixed-wing cargo drones. The point for a classroom is simple: the sky is about to carry freight the way the interstate already does.

My wife heard that payload number and immediately produced the sentence every civilian produces. She did not want a drone flying over her car on the way to a Cincinnati Reds game and dropping a refrigerator on the hood. I have now heard that joke, or some cousin of it, enough times that it has become the unofficial civic motto of advanced air mobility. The students had the same fear. A bright young woman put it to me cleanly: she had seen the YouTube talk about Elon Musk and the Tesla bots, she could tell I was excited about robots, and she still wanted to know what happens when one of these things fails over a building or a highway.

The Question Every Classroom Asks: What If a Drone Hits My Car?

I told her the truth as I see it. These machines will be driven by software that, over a short run of years, is more practical and more consistent than the average human behind the wheel. That is not a hymn to perfection. Automated systems have already had ugly days. Robots have done stupid things. Self-driving stacks have had incidents that made the evening news. I do not wave those away. I treat them the way a manufacturer treats first-article failures: as the tuition you pay to get a repeatable process.

Tesla’s own published safety figures—imperfect, debated, and still the largest public data set of its kind—have, for several quarters, shown that miles driven with Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) between crashes are far above the national average. In one quarterly snapshot, the company reported one crash per 6.69 million miles with the system engaged, compared with a U.S. average near one per 702,000 miles.[6] A later breakout put Full Self-Driving (Supervised) at roughly five million miles per major collision in North America.[7] Critics correctly note that the comparisons are not laboratory-clean. Highway mix, supervision, and crash definitions all matter. Fine. The direction of the curve still matters more than the purity of the press release. The stack learns. The humans who hate the stack do not update overnight.

Amazon drones will crash. Walmart drones will drop a payload early. Vandals will take shots at anything that flies low and looks expensive. Crosswinds, density altitude, summer heat, winter air thickness, and the occasional solar geometry the original coder did not anticipate will all produce a bad afternoon. That is what new technology does. Then the software gets a patch, and that particular stupidity is supposed to happen only once. A human being who wraps a truck around a pole at 2 a.m. does not receive a firmware update before the next Friday night.

It Is Not a Skill Gap. It Is an Engagement Gap.

The student’s question sat atop a second problem I have been hearing in manufacturing offices for years, and I have heard it with unusual frequency in the last two weeks. When you try to hire, you get applicants. A painful share of them cannot pass a drug test. A painful share of the rest do not want the job in any durable sense. I do not mean they lack a certificate. I mean they lack the old animal willingness to get up, go, and stay. People keep calling this a “skill gap” because “skill gap” is a polite phrase that can be used in a grant. What I am looking at is an ambition gap. An engagement gap.

It is not mysterious if you watch how a generation was fed. Old-time Facebook already trained people to receive a stream rather than make one. Video-game platforms now complete the circuit. The machine sends you the next mission, the next season pass, the next reason to tap a credit card. If public assistance covers the floor of a life, and a console covers the ceiling of a day’s stimulation, the case for gasoline money and a 5:30 a.m. alarm clock gets thin. You can stay in the house and still feel as if the world is happening to you.

The labor statistics are not a sermon, but they are not a hallucination either. U.S. labor force participation dropped to 61.6 percent in June 2026, the weakest non-pandemic reading since the mid-1970s.[8] Teen employment is a shadow of what it was when summer work was a normal American education. In July 2026, only 36.5 percent of sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds were working, compared with a late-1970s peak near 60 percent.[9] Young men have fallen out of the market with particular force. Participation among men aged 16 to 24 has been reported at near 56 percent, down from about 69 percent in 2000.[10]

Survey research on Gen Z fills in the mood. Deloitte’s 2026 global survey found that more than half of that cohort were delaying major life decisions under financial pressure, and only a sliver named leadership as their primary career aim.[11] Gallup has been describing a “Great Detachment”: engagement at decade lows, and half the workforce either hunting or half-hunting for the exit.[12] You can argue about causes until the sun goes down—student debt, housing costs, phones, opioids, the aftertaste of lockdowns, the collapse of certain male-coded industries. I will not pretend one variable explains a civilization. I will say that a space economy cannot be staffed by people trained to wait for the next push notification.

Kiosks, Tesla Bots, and the Quiet Replacement of Human Attention

Robotics has already walked into the most ordinary American rooms. You go to a fast-food restaurant now, and the building would prefer you not talk to anyone. You poke a kiosk. You pay the kiosk. Somewhere behind the stainless steel, a smaller, often older crew still performs the last human motions the equipment has not yet absorbed. When you do get a live person at the counter, there is a fair chance that person is over fifty and still practicing the old religion of showing up. The shortage of willing labor is intense enough that automation no longer feels like a futurist pamphlet. It feels like the manager’s only remaining idea.

That is the part of the Tesla-bot conversation the internet likes to turn into a cartoon. I am not excited about robots because I dislike people. I am excited about robots because I have watched the labor pool thin out in real businesses, in real counties, with real drug tests and real no-call no-shows. If the country will not produce enough people who want the work, the work will still get done. It will get done by a machine that does not need a second chance on Monday. Remember, the enemies of America have been attacking America a long time, and our workforce has been their target. Globalism is dangerous to a productive society.

The Video Game Patch Model Is Moving Into the Physical World

The last fifteen minutes of the class were the part I did not fully script. I could see the professor’s face on the feed. I could not see the faces of two hundred others clearly, which is the new condition of public speech. I reached for an analogy the room already understood.

It is August and early September, which means another Madden cycle has either just landed or is about to. How many times has that game shipped perfect on day one? Rarely. Characters clip through each other. A play-call menu eats itself. The engine meets an input it was not trained to expect and throws a fit. Then the telemetry goes home. PlayStation, EA, and every live-service shop of any size collect crash codes from millions of copies overnight. Developers walk in the next morning to a pile of bug reports harvested from the wild. They push a patch. Digital distribution exists so they never have to mail you another piece of plastic.

That is the industrial model now traveling out of entertainment and into vehicles, drones, and humanoid robots. If a robot drops your hamburger, the correction is not a congressional hearing. It is a software update. If a cargo drone flying at five hundred feet decides, because the sun is vicious or the air is thin or an eclipse confuses a sensor suite, that it would rather be at twenty feet, the fleet can be taught not to make that particular mistake again. Weather, payload, battery sag, and GPS drift become parameters in a model that gets revised on a cadence no legislature can match.

I told the students I still see the old hardware in the wild. I was at a Cracker Barrel not long ago, and there was an Atari 2600 sitting there like a museum piece you could still buy. I am going to pick one up. Those machines were honest in a way modern software is not. The game was the cartridge. If Combat shipped with a quirk, that quirk lived in your living room until you sold the console at a garage sale.[13] We have inverted that world. The physical object is now a temporary container for a mind that can be rewritten after midnight.

A Short History of How America Managed Traffic Before Software

People talk as if safety were a mood. It is not. It is a pile of statutes, standards, advocacy campaigns, and ugly metal that accumulated because the alternative was a death rate this country finally decided it would not live with.

In 1966, after years of treating highway slaughter as the price of modernity, President Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act. The Department of Transportation followed that same season, and out of that machinery came the agency that became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.[14] The results, stretched across half a century, are not subtle. The U.S. highway fatality rate fell from about 5.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 1966 to about 1.1 by the mid-2010s.[15] Federal vehicle standards from 1960 through 2012 have been credited with saving more than 600,000 lives. Seat belts alone account for a huge share of that total.[16]

The hardware inside the cabin changed as well. Airbags moved from an exotic option to a federal requirement in new light vehicles by the late 1990s, and then spread to side-impact protection.[17] Crumple zones, better steels, electronic stability control, and an entire crash-test priesthood at NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety made it much more likely that a person who should have died in 1978 would walk out of a 2018 wreck talking.[18]

Drunk driving, MADD, and the years when Friday night was a slaughterhouse

Behavior took longer. Drinking and driving was illegal in a formal sense long before it was shameful. New Jersey passed an automobile-specific drunk-driving statute in 1906. For most of the twentieth century, the culture still treated the offense as a joke with a badge. That broke in 1980, when Candace Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving after a repeat offender killed her thirteen-year-old daughter, Cari, in Fair Oaks, California.[19] Within a few years, the country had a presidential commission, a federal drinking-age hammer in 1984, a march toward 0.08 blood-alcohol limits, and a new vocabulary: designated driver, friends don’t let friends, administrative license suspension.[20]

NHTSA only began clean national tracking of alcohol-involved deaths in 1982, a year when those deaths ran above twenty-one thousand and approached half of all traffic fatalities. The later curve bent down hard. Analyses of the post-1980 campaign put the decline in impaired-driver fatalities in the neighborhood of forty percent across four decades.[21] I grew up on the early side of that bend. I remember what the road felt like before the country got religion about it.

Stop signs, signals, and the roundabout as a mechanical conscience.

Infrastructure learned more slowly than slogans. On the kind of two-lane state route I knew as a kid, the first political answers to a string of wrecks were the obvious ones: a stop sign, then a light, then a lower speed, then a different way of feeding cars through a conflict point. Later came the modern roundabout—not the old American traffic circle that locked up in the 1950s, but the yield-on-entry European design that forces a driver to slow down and keep turning.

The first modern U.S. roundabout was installed in Summerlin, Nevada, in 1990. FHWA spent the 1990s studying the form and published its informational guide in 2000.[22] The safety case is now ordinary engineering. Roundabouts cut speeds and slash the number of conflict points. Federal evaluation work estimated that the roughly 2,400 American roundabouts built from 1990 to 2014 prevented tens of thousands of injury crashes and saved more than nine billion dollars in social cost.[23][24] Drivers complain about them the way drivers complain about every device that interrupts a straight line. The geometry does not care. It makes you engage the road.

That is the whole history in miniature. First you change the vehicle. Then you change the law. Then you change the pavement. Then you wait a generation for the culture to catch up. Software compresses that sequence. A drone fleet can receive a correction in a week that used to require a legislative session, a standards docket, and a decade of funerals.

Two O’Clock in the Morning on a Two-Lane Road

Here is why I told the class a story instead of another slide about mean time between failures. Human beings do not attach to mean time between failures. They attach to a night they can still hear.

When I was a kid, we lived off a busy two-lane state route, the kind of industrious road that carried trucks all day and all night. The house sat a good stretch back from the pavement—on the order of a hundred fifty yards—but in summer the windows were open because we did not have air conditioning. One Friday night, about 2 a.m., a truck left the road and took the telephone pole at the end of our driveway.

I did not hear the impact so much as I woke inside the sound that came after it. Through the screen I heard a man screaming for his mother. Not a movie scream. The real thing: high, terrified, the voice of somebody who had just understood what had been done to his body. I got my parents up. The whole house heard it. I went down the driveway in the dark.

The first cars were already slowing down, staring, then speeding up because staring felt like involvement. Nobody official had arrived yet. The truck had come off the road, hit the mailbox, hit the pole, and folded the driver’s side of the cab until metal from one side was occupying the space where a man is supposed to sit. The violence had done what violence does when steel meets a wooden pole at highway speed. Parts of him were in the road. In the poor light I first thought I was looking at roadkill. Traffic had already run over it. It was not an animal.

He had smashed the glass with his head, trying to get out of a window that no longer framed a living person. Blood ran down his face. He was jammed, trying to crawl, and still calling for his mother. He got quiet soon after I reached the end of the drive. There was nothing to do for him. He was gone when the screaming started. He just had not finished being gone.

I have thought about that night for a lifetime, and the thought I keep is not a policy memo. It is this: that was a software problem in a human body. It was the early 1980s, before Mothers Against Drunk Driving had finished turning a private grief into a national prohibition. The man was almost certainly tired, almost certainly drinking, almost certainly carrying whatever mess a night driver carries home at 2 a.m.—money, a shift, a marriage, a rumor, a clock. Human beings drive with all of that in the cab. They drive with a mother still installed in the nervous system. When the pole arrives, they call for her.

I do not tell that story because I enjoy the memory. I tell it because every time someone says they do not want a five-hundred-pound drone over their roof, they are asking for a world with no new risk, and they are asking it in a country that already accepted far worse risk for a hundred years of human drivers. Those particular wrecks—the ones that take a body apart against a pole—are rarer now—not gone. Rarer. Police still work Friday and Saturday nights. They will tell you the texture of the crashes has changed. Vehicles stay together. People crawl out who would have been listed in the morning paper in years prior. Airbags, belts, better steel, and slower intersections did that.[25]

Why Machines Will Make Fewer of Those Mistakes

A cargo drone does not have a wife. It does not have a mistress. It does not drink through a shift and then try to beat the sunrise home. It does not experience shame, jealousy, exhaustion, or the sudden need to call for its mother. It has sensors, limits, and a model of the world that can be rewritten when the world refuses to match it.

That is the moral of the old wreck, and it is the part of the lecture the room understood. We did not abolish tragedy on American roads by hoping drivers would become better people. We put constraints around them. We put belts on their chests, bags in their wheels, and lights in their path, and eventually computers in the loop. The next constraint is the loop taking the wheel. You will still get incidents. You will get a season of ugly film. You will get a class of people who do not want to compete with the machine and who will feed every failure to a news cycle that is addicted to the wreck.

I called that the Don Henley problem in class—the dirty laundry impulse. Automation that replaces visible human jobs will be covered as a crime even when the body count falls. That coverage will not be fair. It does not have to be fair to be loud. Anyone building drones, robots, or space logistics has a better budget for the noise.

Planning a Space Economy Around People Who Do Not Want the Job

This is the uncomfortable planning assumption. The space economy will not arrive as a clean poster of astronauts and lecture-hall ambition. It will arrive in a labor market where a large cohort under thirty is unevenly attached to work, where drug tests still sink hiring classes, and where firms that need reliability will buy it from software and silicon vendors if they cannot buy it from applicants.

I do not treat that as a reason to sneer at young people. Plenty of them are hungry. The young woman who asked the question was hungry. She was trying to square a future she could see with a risk she could feel. That is what a serious student does. The problem is the volume of people who will not ask the question because they are already being entertained past the point of hunger.

If you are building workforce policy for orbital industry, advanced manufacturing, or unmanned logistics in a place like Butler County, you plan for three tracks at once. First, the people who still want the work—train them harder and pay them like the scarce resource they are. Second, the machines that will do the work the missing people will not do—design them to be patched like games, not worshipped like monuments. Third, the public argument—tell the refrigerator story before the opponent tells it, and keep telling the 2 a.m. story so the public remembers what human error actually looked like when it was allowed to run wide open down a state route.

What I Took Away from a Classroom I Never Entered

I ended the hour the way I have ended a version of this talk too many times in the last two weeks. Software will take the first years to be clumsy. Then it will stop repeating the same clumsiness. Human beings repeat theirs for decades, because the bug is not in a repository. The bug is in the life.

We already proved, as a species, that we can cut the worst traffic deaths without waiting for every driver to become a saint. We proved it with belts, bags, blood-alcohol statutes, a drinking age tied to highway money, crash-test scores, and those unpopular roundabouts that make you turn the wheel whether you feel like it or not. The space economy will require the same kind of proof at higher altitudes. Cargo will fly. Robots will stand at counters and on factory floors. Some of the coverage will be poison. Some of the early flights will be ugly. And then the patch will ship.

I did not have to get on a plane to say any of that. I thought that was strange when the invitation first arrived. I think it’s less strange now. The tools that let a professor in another city put me on a wall in front of two hundred students are cousins of the tools that will keep a five-hundred-pound airframe from treating a parking lot like a telephone pole. Same family of updates. Same refusal to leave the mistake in the cartridge.

If you want the longer argument in the form I use with operators and owners, read the business guide I have already put out. The lecture was a compact version of it, told to a room that still has time to decide what kind of worker—and what kind of citizen—it is going to be when the drones are no longer a joke about refrigerators.

Notes

Numbered citations in the text correspond to the footnotes. The bibliography below is offered for further reading and is organized by subject rather than by the order of appearance.

[1] Novaspace, Space Economy Report, 12th ed. (January 2026), valuing the global space economy at $626.4 billion in 2025 and projecting $1.01 trillion by 2034 at a 12 percent compound annual growth rate. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum have published a higher $1.8 trillion scenario for 2035.

[2] Brookings Institution, Darrell M. West, “Artemis II and the Rapid Rise of a Global Space Economy,” April 8, 2026. Commercial activity accounted for roughly 78 percent of 2025 space spending; U.S. space employment was estimated near 400,000.

[3] U.S. Government Accountability Office, Low-Earth Orbit: NASA Faces Impending Decisions for Replacing International Space Station with Commercial Stations, GAO-26-107805 (June 2026).

[4] Elroy Air and Federal Aviation Administration statements on the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program flights at Houma-Terrebonne Airport, August–September 2026. Production Chaparral aircraft are rated for more than 500 pounds of payload and a range of up to 450 miles.

[5] AIR company announcements, 2025–2026, describing a production heavy-lift cargo UAS with a 550-pound payload and a 70-cubic-foot cargo bay for civil and military logistics.

[6] Tesla Vehicle Safety Report, Q2 2025: one crash per 6.69 million miles with Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (Supervised) engaged, compared with a U.S. average of roughly one crash per 702,000 miles (NHTSA/FHWA 2023 data as cited by Tesla). Independent analysts have noted that highway-heavy use cases and definitional choices affect the comparison.

[7] Tesla safety dashboard release, November 2025, reporting approximately 5.1 million miles per major collision with Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in North America across road classes. Tesla defines a major collision using Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards criteria, including airbag or pyrotechnic restraint deployment.

[8] St. Louis Federal Reserve, “What’s Behind the Sharp Drop in Labor Force Participation?” (August 2026). The U.S. labor force participation rate fell to 61.6 percent in June 2026, the lowest reading outside the pandemic period since 1976.

[9] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Economics Daily, August 26, 2026. In July 2026, the employment–population ratio was 36.5 percent for teens ages 16–19 and 67.5 percent for young adults ages 20–24, both well below late-twentieth-century peaks.

[10] American Institute for Boys and Men analysis cited in reporting on July 2026 labor data: labor force participation among men ages 16–24 fell to 56.1 percent, down from about 69 percent in 2000.

[11] Deloitte Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey 2026. More than half of Gen Z respondents reported delaying major life decisions for financial reasons; only 6 percent named a leadership position as their primary career goal.

[12] Gallup workplace tracking through Q4 2025 described a “Great Detachment,” with engagement at decade lows and 51 percent of U.S. employees either actively looking or watching for other work.

[13] The Atari Video Computer System, later branded the Atari 2600, reached North American retail shelves in 1977. It used interchangeable ROM cartridges and a MOS 6507 processor; software, once pressed into plastic, could not be patched overnight.

[14] President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act on September 9, 1966. Congress established the U.S. Department of Transportation the following month; the agency that became NHTSA followed.

[15] Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “A Half Century of Highway Safety Innovations—1966 to 2016.” The U.S. highway fatality rate fell from 5.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 1966 to 1.1 by 2014.

[16] NHTSA estimates that technologies under the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards saved more than 613,000 lives from 1960 through 2012, with seat belts accounting for nearly 330,000 of those savings.

[17] Front airbags were required in all new cars, light trucks, and vans beginning with the 1998–1999 model years. Side-impact protection standards later made side air bags effectively standard equipment.

[18] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts annual series, and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety historical crashworthiness work. Occupant survival in serious crashes improved sharply after the introduction of airbags, crumple zones, electronic stability control, and structural redesign.

[19] Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded in 1980 by Candace Lightner after her 13-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed in Fair Oaks, California, by a repeat drunk driver. NHTSA began systematic tracking of alcohol-related fatalities in 1982, when such deaths exceeded 21,000.

[20] The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 tied federal highway funds to a statewide minimum purchase age of 21. A later federal incentive pushed every state to a 0.08 blood-alcohol per se standard by 2004.

[21] NHTSA and related analyses have credited the post-1980 impaired-driving campaign with large fatality reductions. One commonly cited figure is a decline of roughly 44 percent in fatalities involving impaired drivers between 1982 and 2022.

[22] FHWA Research and Technology Evaluation: Roundabout Research Final Report (June 2018). The first modern U.S. roundabout was built in Summerlin, Nevada, in 1990. FHWA published Roundabouts: An Informational Guide in 2000.

[23] Federal Highway Administration, Proven Safety Countermeasures: Roundabouts, FHWA-SA-21-042. Modern roundabouts reduce vehicle speeds and conflict points compared with conventional intersections.

[24] FHWA estimated that roughly 2,400 U.S. roundabouts installed between 1990 and 2014 averted between 38,000 and 53,000 injury crashes, with societal cost savings above $9 billion over that period.

[25] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts annual series, and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety historical crashworthiness work. Occupant survival in serious crashes improved sharply after the introduction of airbags, crumple zones, electronic stability control, and structural redesign.

Bibliography and Further Reading

This list is intentionally broader than the footnotes. It is a reading path for students and operators who want the lecture’s claims tested against primary sources.

Space Economy, Commercial LEO, and Aerospace Industry

Brookings Institution. West, Darrell M. “Artemis II and the Rapid Rise of a Global Space Economy.” April 8, 2026. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/artemis-ii-and-the-rapid-rise-of-a-global-space-economy/

McKinsey & Company. “From Moonshots to Markets: The $1.8 Trillion Space Economy.” April 2026. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/themes/from-moonshots-to-markets-the-1-point-8-trillion-dollar-space-economy

Novaspace. Space Economy Report. 12th edition. Paris, January 2026. Summary coverage: SpaceNews, “Global Space Economy Reaches $626 Billion, Marking a New Phase of Growth,” January 29, 2026.

Orbital Radar. “The Space Economy 2026: $626B, Heading for $1 Trillion.” March 2026. https://orbitalradar.com/space-economy

UBS. Space economy total addressable market outlook to 2040. Analyst commentary summarized in Yahoo Finance / Investing.com, July 18, 2026.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. Low-Earth Orbit: NASA Faces Impending Decisions for Replacing International Space Station with Commercial Stations. GAO-26-107805. June 2026. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107805

World Economic Forum. “3 Commercial Trends Propelling a $1.8 Trillion Space Market.” June 10, 2026.

NewSpace Tracker. “Space Economy Outlook 2026: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities.” April 2026.

NASA. Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program documentation and Commercial Lunar Payload Services program pages. nasa.gov.

Satellite Industry Association. Annual State of the Satellite Industry reports, 2024–2026 editions.

Cargo Drones, eVTOL, and Unmanned Logistics

Elroy Air. Chaparral program materials and eVTOL Integration Pilot Program flight announcements, Louisiana, August–September 2026.

Interesting Engineering. “US Startup Tests Cargo Drone with 500-lb Payload, 450-mile Range.” September 2026.

Tech Times. “Autonomous Cargo Drone Clears First FAA Hurdle at Gulf Coast’s Busiest Heliport.” September 1, 2026.

AIR. Production heavy-lift cargo UAS announcements, 2025–2026, including 550-pound payload configuration.

Defense Blog. “AIR Launches Heavy Lift Cargo Drone with 550 Pound Payload Capacity.” April 17, 2026.

Urban Air Mobility News. “AIR Unveils New eVTOL Cargo Drone with 550 lb Payload for Civil and Military Operations.”

Federal Aviation Administration. eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) materials; Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” June 2025.

Drone as a Service. “Heavy Lift Drones: Payload, FAA Rules & Top Models (2026).” Updated June 2026.

Sopowers. “Top 10 Cargo Drones in 2026: Payload, Range, Battery Systems & Logistics Trends.”

Zuri (Czech Republic). Hybrid VTOL cargo-drone specifications and 2027 flight-test schedule. NextGen Defense, September 2026.

Northern Changying / NORINCO. Changying-8 (CY-8) heavy cargo UAV maiden-flight reporting, March 31, 2026.

Vehicle Automation and Software-Defined Safety

Tesla, Inc. Vehicle Safety Reports, quarterly series, especially Q2 2025 Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) statistics. tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport.

Tesla, Inc. Full Self-Driving (Supervised) safety dashboard release, November 2025, including major-collision definitions keyed to 49 C.F.R. § 563.5.

TechCrunch. “Tesla Releases Detailed Safety Report after Waymo Co-CEO Called for More Data.” November 14, 2025.

Drive Tesla Canada. “Tesla’s Q2 2025 Vehicle Safety Report: Autopilot & FSD Remain Nearly 10x Safer than U.S. Average.” July 23, 2025.

Electrek. “Tesla’s Own Data Confirms Autopilot Safety Regressed in 2025.” July 23, 2025. (Critical reading of the same quarterly series.)

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Standing General Order on crash reporting for automated driving systems; ADS and Level 2 ADAS incident dashboards.

Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Occupant crash protection and event-data-recorder definitions, including 49 C.F.R. § 563.5.

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety / Highway Loss Data Institute. Autonomous vehicle and advanced driver-assistance system research pages.

History of U.S. Traffic Safety and Transportation Management

Johnson, Lyndon B. Remarks on signing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act, September 9, 1966.

U.S. Congress. National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, Pub. L. 89-563; Highway Safety Act of 1966, Pub. L. 89-564.

Bureau of Transportation Statistics. “A Half Century of Highway Safety Innovations—1966 to 2016.” https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/passenger_travel_2016/tables/half

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “A Brief History of Traffic Deaths in the U.S.” 2024. https://magazine.publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/brief-history-traffic-deaths-us

Haddon, William, Jr. Foundational NHTSA-era public-health approach to crash injury. See also the Haddon Matrix literature.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Lives Saved by Vehicle Safety Technologies and Associated Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, 1960 to 2012. DOT HS 812 069.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Traffic Safety Facts annual compilations, alcohol-impaired driving chapters, 1982–present.

Kahane, Charles J., and related NHTSA evaluation reports on seat belts, airbags, and electronic stability control.

Williams, Allan F., et al. “Fruits of 20 Years of Highway Safety Legislative Advocacy in the United States.” Annals of Advances in Automotive Medicine / PMC 3256822 (2011).

Ehsani, Johnathon P., et al. “The Future of Road Safety: Challenges and Opportunities.” PMC 10126980.

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Historical belt-use rates and crashworthiness ratings.

Impaired Driving Law and Advocacy

Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Organizational history; founded after the death of Cari Lightner, Fair Oaks, California, May 3, 1980.

MADD. 25th anniversary historical pamphlet (archival). https://web.archive.org/web/20070213040405/http://www.madd.org/docs/25years.pdf

U.S. Congress. National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, 23 U.S.C. § 158.

LegalClarity. “When Were DUI Laws Enacted? History and Evolution.” Updated 2026.

Fell, James C., and colleagues. Evaluations of minimum drinking-age laws and 0.08 BAC limits, NHTSA and peer-reviewed series.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism / NIH syntheses of impaired-driving fatality reductions after BAC and age reforms.

Roundabouts, Signals, and Roadway Engineering

Federal Highway Administration. Proven Safety Countermeasures: Roundabouts. FHWA-SA-21-042. 2021. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/66809

Federal Highway Administration. Roundabouts: An Informational Guide. 2000; later editions and NCHRP updates.

Federal Highway Administration. Research and Technology Evaluation: Roundabout Research Final Report. June 2018.

Transportation Research Board. NCHRP Synthesis 264, Modern Roundabout Practice in the United States.

Steyn, Hermanus, Ashleigh Griffin, and Lee A. Rodegerdts. Accelerating Roundabout Implementation in the United States, Vol. IV: Review of Fatal and Severe Injury Crashes at Roundabouts. FHWA, 2015.

Federal Highway Administration. Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) program materials under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Labor Force Participation, Youth Work, and Engagement

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Current Population Survey public data and The Employment Situation monthly releases, 2025–2026.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Teens Ages 16 to 19 Were Employed at Nearly Half the Rate of Young Adults Ages 20 to 24 in July 2026.” The Economics Daily, August 26, 2026.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “What’s Behind the Sharp Drop in Labor Force Participation?” August 2026.

Center for American Progress. “Teen Employment Remains Weak.” August 7, 2026.

Deloitte. Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey 2026. https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/work/genz-millennial-survey.html

Gallup. “U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows.” 2026 workplace series, including Q4 2025 engagement and job-search tracking.

American Institute for Boys and Men. Research on young-male labor force participation and disconnection, 2024–2026.

New York Post. “Male Gen Zers Are Dropping Out of the U.S. Job Market in Droves.” August 17, 2026. (Journalistic summary of BLS and AIBM figures.)

U.K. Department for Work and Pensions / related. Young People and Work: Interim Report. 2026. Useful comparative reading on youth participation outside the United States.

Video Games, Live-Service Software, and the Patch Economy

Atari, Inc. Atari Video Computer System / Atari 2600 launch materials, 1977; subsequent branding change, 1982.

Wikipedia contributors. “Atari 2600.” Encyclopedia entry with production history, hardware constraints, and cartridge-era economics.

PCMag. “The Atari 2600 at 45: The Console That Brought Arcade Games Home.” September 10, 2022.

Electronic Arts / EA Sports. Madden NFL annual release notes and title-update histories, illustrating same-week patch cadence.

Sony Interactive Entertainment. PlayStation Network crash-reporting and title-update architecture, public developer documentation.

Industry discussions of live-service telemetry, crash dumps, and over-the-air vehicle/robotics updates as an extension of the games-industry model.

Regional and Author Context

Hoffman, Rich. Business guide and related commentary on manufacturing, drones, and local economic development in Butler County, Ohio.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) cargo-hub reporting, for local context on freight aviation near the author’s home region.

Butler County, Ohio, economic-development and unmanned-systems coverage, 2024–2026.

Rich Hoffman

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When Does the Principality Enter the World?

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Fort Necessity, Mount Vernon, Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg

Trump Is a Lot Like Paul

The Second Great Awakening Will Not Come From Washington

What I Want People to Take From This

Notes

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A Community Night at Miami University’s Innovation Center

Sharing the Vision

From Prototype to Production

The Drone Revolution Is Already Here

Why Ohio Is Positioned to Lead

Creating Careers That Stay Close to Home

Strong Community Support

Looking Ahead

We’re building it.

About the Author

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I. THE AGE OF DISCLOSURE AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN

II. FALSE COMPASSION IS NOT LOVE

III. WHY THE RATES ARE NOT RANDOM

IV. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SURRENDER WHAT YOU LOVE

V. THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE AND THE POWER OF BEING UNASHAMED

That is the model.

VI. KEN HAM, BILL NYE, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE AND SECONDARY

VII. JD VANCE, BUTLER COUNTY, AND WHY SCRIPTURE AT A RALLY IS NOT A GIMMICK

IX. DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RAPTURE WHILE EVIL DOES THE WORK

X. FLEA-MARKET CHRISTIANITY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECORATION AND BACKBONE

XIV. WHAT I WANT FROM LEADERS — AND WHAT I WILL NOT PRETEND

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Mike Johnson Is Talking Like a Man Preparing the Concession Speech

Remember the Stretch Between the Election and January 20

Elon Does Not Need to Pray on Camera. He Needs to Be in the Room.

Fox Already Has Your People. Football Season Has Everybody Else.

The McDonald’s Test, or What DC Actually Sounds Like Before 10 a.m.

If You Cannot Unite Them on a Bill, Unite Them on a Book

A Quiet Hour at the Museum Before the Ropes Open

Do Not Play Not to Lose

The AI Debate Is a Strategy, Not a Concern

They Ran This Play on Nuclear. They Will Run It on Compute.

The Tight Races Are Tight for a Reason

Two Months. Not a Miracle. A Decision.

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A Good Day Is Not an Accident

Who Jonathan Edwards Actually Was

The Great Awakening Was a Political Event

What This Study Bible Actually Contains

The Smell of a New Book Is Not Trivial

Law and Order Begins With a Book on the Desk

God Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Seminar

The Politics of Heaven in the Age of Disclosure

Why I Am Telling You to Get This One

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The World of Everywhere and Anything

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What Jonathan Edwards Meant by Human Government

Romans 13 is not a revenge verse

Kings Island, two grandchildren, and page 1176

Edwards was thrown out of his own church

I Have Zero Tolerance for Bullies

Sheriff Richard Jones Is My Guy

Seven years of silence, one parking lot, two hats

The grand jury and the jail tour

Nancy Nix Is the Benchmark

What a County Party Is Actually For

Trump changed the party. The county still has to govern.

A Personal Ledger I Had to Close

I have a clean record on purpose

Leadership, Todd Minniear, and the Problem of a Hidden Past

How to Have a Fight Without Becoming the Fight

What Voters Actually Buy When They Buy a Party

The Need

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That is how I landed at Volynt.