The Republican Party’s Civil War Cost Ohio a Real Opportunity with Vivek Ramaswamy: What happened

I like Vivek Ramaswamy. I thought he represented a genuine chance to move Ohio forward with energy, business sense, and a clear America First orientation instead of the usual managed decline. Watching him lose to Amy Acton was a real tragedy for the state. It was not inevitable. A lot of the damage came from inside the Republican Party itself—the same pattern I have watched for years where people would rather fight each other than win. The result is that Democrats get handed a candidate they can work with while the GOP tears itself up over personality, purity tests, and who is “like us.”

What the Numbers Actually Show

Statewide, Acton finished with about 52.3 percent (roughly 2.4 million votes) to Ramaswamy’s 44.4 percent (about 2.04 million). The margin was roughly eight points. She became the first woman elected governor of Ohio and the first Democrat to win the office in twenty years, in a state Trump carried by double digits in 2024.

That does not mean Ramaswamy was rejected across the board. He carried 73 of Ohio’s 88 counties. In many rural counties he ran 60, 70, even 76 percent. Acton won only 15 counties, but they included the big population centers: Cuyahoga (she took about 72 percent and 877 of 898 precincts), Franklin, Hamilton (Ramaswamy’s home county), Summit, Montgomery, Lucas, and others.  Ohio has roughly 8,834 precincts. Ramaswamy won the large majority of them by number. The problem was density. A handful of urban and inner-suburban precincts delivered enough raw votes to overcome the rest of the state.

Here in Butler County the pattern was clearer and more local. Ramaswamy won with about 52.3 percent to Acton’s 44.6 percent. Turnout was strong at 59.5 percent of registered voters. Republicans also held the county commissioner’s seat (Michael Ryan) and the auditor’s office (Nancy Nix). The margins were tighter than recent presidential cycles, but the county stayed red.  That is the reality on the ground where I live and work.

The NFL Analogy and the Party’s Self-Inflicted Damage

I have said this to anyone who will listen: the Republican Party right now looks like a dysfunctional NFL team in mid-season. The coaches have lost control. The offense is arguing with the defense. Practices are half-hearted because players do not want to risk injury when they already sense the season is slipping away. Fans still show up and buy the jersey or the Terrible Towel, but the product on the field is mediocre. After a few losses the front office starts blaming the quarterback, the fans start blaming the front office, and nobody cleans house. The result is another year of “good enough” that is not actually good enough.

That is what happened with Ramaswamy. There was a real opening. He had the Trump endorsement, national profile, money, and a message centered on efficiency and economic growth. Instead of locking arms, elements of the party treated him as an outsider. The identity attacks were ugly and predictable: he is Hindu, he is not “like us,” he is some kind of anchor-baby interloper. Those lines circulated in precincts and on social media. Democrats were happy to amplify them. When your own side is whispering that the nominee does not belong, you hand the other side free ammunition.

The campaign itself made unforced errors. The late attack ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother—accusing her of lying about a childhood that included abuse and instability—backfired. Even some Republicans called it out. Husted distanced himself from it. The ad ran, money was spent, and it gave Acton a sympathy story while the substantive arguments about her record as health director during COVID got buried.  That is coaching malpractice. You do not need to go there when the opponent’s actual record is available.

Local Reality in Butler County and the Central Committee Problem

I know the local landscape. Sheriff Richard Jones is not my closest personal friend, but I respect him as a person and as someone who has been elected repeatedly and delivers on the law-and-order side of the job. He shows up. People notice when he walks into a place like Ace Hardware. That does not mean every decision is perfect or that powerful people never make mistakes that affect others. Ethical arguments happen. The question is whether the party rallies to win or whether central-committee factions spend their energy trying to ostracize the people who actually deliver votes.

Nancy Nix won re-election as auditor. A lot of people I work with and talk to like her. In other parts of the state she would be called a moderate or even soft; here she is a Republican who keeps the books and pushes back on unnecessary tax increases. The same pattern holds: the people who show up and do the work get results, while the internal fights over who is pure enough waste time.

The goal should be simple. Vote. Invest in the team. Buy the jersey of the people who are actually trying to win rather than treating every election as an opportunity to settle scores. When the party spends years fighting itself, Democrats walk in with a candidate who can be sold as reasonable and the results follow. Acton will now govern. That was not the only possible outcome.

What Comes Next

Most people do not have a long view. They vote for the person who promises something immediate or against the person they were told to hate. Defending capitalism, competent administration, and basic order requires standing by each other longer than one news cycle. The same forces that turn every disagreement into a purity test are the ones that leave the field open for the other side.

I have watched this pattern for decades. The coaches lose control, the players stop fully committing, and the fans are left wondering why the team underperforms relative to its talent. Ramaswamy was not perfect. No candidate is. But the opportunity that existed in Ohio was real, and a significant part of it was squandered by people inside the Republican Party who preferred the civil war to the victory. That is on us to fix if we want different results next time.

Footnotes

1.  Statewide results drawn from multiple election trackers and Ohio Secretary of State unofficial counts as of early November 2026. Acton 52.3 percent (2,404,178), Ramaswamy 44.4 percent (2,039,730).

2.  County and precinct analysis from Cleveland.com reporting on Acton’s 15-county win and the Cuyahoga precinct breakdown (877 of 898).

3.  Butler County figures from local Journal-News coverage and Board of Elections reporting: Ramaswamy ~52.3 percent, turnout 59.5 percent.

4.  Campaign controversy details from contemporaneous reporting on the mother attack ad and reactions from both parties.

Bibliography

•  Ohio Secretary of State unofficial 2026 general election results and county summaries.

• Cleveland.com: “How Amy Acton won the Ohio governor’s race: A look behind the numbers” (November 2026).

•  Journal-News (Butler County): coverage of local results and turnout.

•  Multiple national outlets (BBC, USA Today, Dispatch, CNN) on the Acton-Ramaswamy contest and the mother-ad controversy.

•  Local Board of Elections precinct-level reporting for Butler, Cuyahoga, and other counties.

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 by 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.

Obama Back on the Trail in Ohio: Socialism, Gold, Value, and Why Voters Chose Trump Instead

I’m tired of Barack Obama. When he returned to the campaign trail in Ohio for Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, it reminded many people of everything they wanted to leave behind. He remains the public face of a socialist approach smuggled into American politics with the help of old underground networks and cultural figures who treated the country as something to be remade rather than built. Voters got tired of that project. They chose the ultimate capitalist instead.

Obama Campaigning for Acton and Brown in Cleveland and Across Ohio

Obama still draws a crowd. He is one of the few Democrats who can fill a room and make the old arguments sound fresh. In the final stretch, he was out making the case for Acton in the governor’s race and for Brown in the Senate contest. The message was familiar: government will protect you from high costs, from Trump, from the consequences of earlier policies. People can vote for whoever they want. No widespread evidence of the kind of systematic tampering some claimed in prior cycles emerged. Voters made a choice. In Ohio, they chose Acton and Brown. Nationally, the picture was mixed, but the local and statewide results showed that the free-stuff appeal still works when prices are high, and the alternative is framed as indifference.

I have already written about the gas prices and the cost of bread at the grocery store. Democratic policies created or worsened most of those costs by shrinking the margin for people who actually make things. Environmental rules, spending that outruns revenue, and a regulatory climate that treats producers as the problem all raise the price of everyday goods. Obama and the people around him spent years building that structure. When the bills came due, the same voices blamed the people trying to reverse it. That is why Obama had to get back on the trail. No deep bench of Democrats can make the argument the way he can.

Trump as the Capitalist Alternative: Gold, Towers, and High-Value Things

We picked Trump because he represented the opposite set of instincts. He has always liked gold. The towers, the lettering on the book The Art of the Deal, the interiors—gold has been the consistent color. It signals value rather than the bare minimum. I own several of his ties. They are silk, made in America, and they were expensive when I bought them. I wear them when something matters. They are not cheap. When you want to think about good things as high value, you don’t reach for a coupon. You reach for something that lasts.

Trump’s White House renovations fit the same pattern. The ballroom is needed. The original White House was deliberately kept modest so the new republic would not look like it was challenging Europe’s monarchies. They built it a little too small on purpose. You can walk around it in a short time. For the kind of security, diplomacy, and large gatherings that now take place there, more space is practical. I visited the White House recently. The changes look good. I support them. Critics treat gold and scale as vanity. Many voters saw them as a sign that someone still believed in making things better rather than managing decline.

The contrast with Obama is not subtle. Obama’s political coalition includes people who treat high taxes and big government as the way to extract money from those who create value and redistribute it. A lazy segment of society prefers the coupon and the handout. Socialism is marketed to them because it improves their relative position without requiring them to produce more. Those voters turned out for Obama and for the candidates he supported. There are still more people who prefer the Trump approach—visible value, private production, and the refusal to treat government as the primary engine—but they have to show up.

The Old Networks and the Cultural Invasion

Older radical circles helped Obama’s rise. Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground types were never mainstream, but they were part of the broader left infrastructure that treated American institutions as targets rather than inheritances. The same cultural current included the old hippies who rejected ordinary work, ordinary family life, and ordinary ambition. That was an invasion of American ideas, not a representation of them. Obama knew how to speak to the destitute and the resentful without sounding like he was asking them to do the hard part. He could make government expansion sound like compassion.

Trump’s background was different. The Apprentice was popular because it showed people competing, building, and being judged on results. Many viewers recognized the format. They had been to places like the Cheesecake Factory for family celebrations. It costs real money. The atmosphere is ornate. People like it because it feels like a reward for work rather than a subsidy. That preference showed up in the votes. Voters who wanted the gold and the ballroom and the visible success chose Trump. Voters who wanted someone else to cover the cost chose the other side.

High Prices, Policy, and the Midterm Lesson

Prices are high because of the structure Obama and his allies spent years constructing. Democrats have spent the intervening years managing the consequences rather than reversing the causes. When Trump’s administration tried to restore margins for producers, those same voices blamed him for the results. Obama’s return to the trail was an attempt to keep that political enterprise alive. He is still better at it than most of the people who followed him. The midterms showed the limit. Democrats did not have a deep roster of figures who could carry the argument without reaching back to Obama. That reminds voters of what many wanted to get away from.

Republicans cannot sit on the couch and wait it out. Presidential-year energy does not automatically appear in the midterms. If people who prefer value, production, and smaller extraction do not vote, those who prefer handouts and expanded government will set the terms. Obama on the trail is useful in one respect: he makes the choice clearer. The two ideas of what America should be are still in conflict. One treats gold, scale, and private success as legitimate. The other treats them as problems to be managed or taxed away. Voters picked the first option when they had the chance. They will have to keep picking it.

Footnotes

1.  Ohio 2026 results (Secretary of State and major outlets as of early November): Amy Acton (D) defeated Vivek Ramaswamy (R) for governor; Sherrod Brown (D) won the U.S. Senate race. Obama campaigned in the state for both in the closing weeks.

2.  National and Ohio gas-price and grocery-cost context: Post-2026 Iran-related disruptions and longer-term regulatory and spending policies contributed to elevated energy and food prices. Multiple analyses linked affordability concerns to midterm voting patterns.

3.  White House physical history: The original Executive Mansion was intentionally modest relative to European royal residences. Modern security, diplomatic, and event requirements have repeatedly raised questions about capacity; Trump-era renovations, including ballroom plans, addressed those practical limits.

4.  Historical background on Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground, and their limited but real connections to later Democratic networks is documented in contemporary reporting and subsequent histories of the 1960s–1970s radical left and its institutional afterlife.

5.  Cultural and voting observations draw on consistent patterns in Ohio and national exit data: higher support for candidates emphasizing production and visible private success versus candidates emphasizing expanded government services and redistribution.

Selected Bibliography / Further Reading

•  Ohio Secretary of State unofficial and certified results for the 2026 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests.

•  Contemporary reporting on Obama’s 2026 campaign appearances in Ohio (Cleveland and other stops) for Acton and Brown.

•  Energy Information Administration, AAA, and related data on 2025–2026 gasoline and household energy costs.

•  Architectural and historical accounts of the White House’s original scale and subsequent modifications.

•  Standard histories and journalistic accounts of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, and the broader 1960s–1970s radical milieu and its later political influence.

•  Exit polls and demographic analyses from the 2024 and 2026 cycles on economic voting, cultural attitudes toward success and redistribution, and turnout differences between presidential and midterm elections.

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 by 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.

The Tool Belt Life: Why a Superior Existence Still Starts with Tools, Calloused Hands, and the Refusal of the Administrative State

In the age of disclosure, you must understand the Politics of Heaven. The administrative state has failed. It produces bureaucrats, form-fillers, and people trained to manage decline rather than fix anything. Meanwhile, the people who still know how to put a tool belt on and make something work again are the ones quietly holding the real economy together. I have learned this the hard way, across decades of executive work, competitive shooting, gunsmithing, and long hours in machine shops. The happiest version of my life has always involved tools.

A Tool Belt Full of Useful Things

I was at O’Reilly’s recently, talking with the counter guy, and he showed me a small 3/8-inch drive universal joint with a spring in it. Most of those joints flop around the moment you get them into a tight spot. This one has a spring that lets it stand up and stay put until you apply force. Titan Tools. Simple, clever, and exactly the kind of thing that makes a working day better. It went straight into the belt.

That belt already carries a telescopic magnet for fishing dropped fasteners out of engine bays and dashboards, a selection of screwdrivers, O-ring picks that actually work, a half-inch drive ratchet, and a pair of DeWalt pliers I genuinely like. The grips on the pliers are supposed to be bright yellow. They are now dark with oil and use, which is how I prefer them. There is nothing ornamental about any of it. Every item has been chosen because it solves a recurring problem.

When I strap that belt on to work on a car in the driveway, or when I used to carry one every day, the day feels correctly ordered. You have the tools you need. You can see the problem, isolate it, and correct it. That is a form of competence the administrative world almost never delivers.

Machine Shop Days and the Double-Stack Toolbox

In my late teens and early twenties I worked in a machine shop attached to a metal-stamping operation. It was a rough place. People got hurt. The work was loud, dirty, and unforgiving. They called it a “sitter” in the older language of the trade—an operation that chewed through equipment and required constant attention. I learned to set dies, make dies, troubleshoot production lines, and keep machines running. I also learned how to work alongside people who had no interest in office politics or motivational posters. They cared whether the part was good and whether the press kept cycling.

Later I refurbished old machinery for a living. We would bring in worn-out equipment, tear it down to the last nut and bolt, and rebuild it. I kept a double-stacked toolbox in the shop. In the 1990s that box held roughly a thousand dollars’ worth of tools, many of them custom or modified for specific jobs. I looked forward to work because the tools were there and the problems were concrete. When I moved into more executive roles, that daily contact with tools largely disappeared. The satisfaction did not transfer automatically to meetings and spreadsheets.

Gunsmithing, Competitive Shooting, and the Real Pleasure

Early in my marriage I set up a gunsmithing shop behind the house. I studied the craft because I wanted to work for myself and because the tools are specialized and satisfying: spring compressors, sear jigs, headspace gauges, bolt-face tools, and the particular screwdrivers and punches required for Ruger, Browning, and other actions. The guns themselves were interesting, but the tools and the process of diagnosing and correcting problems were what I enjoyed most.

Competitive fast shooting later gave me an outlet on weekends. From roughly 2018 through 2025 I shot a lot, won a lot of first-place trophies, and filled part of the office with them. The shooting itself was enjoyable—drawing, presenting, and hitting plates in a quarter or half second is a pure skill. What I came to realize, though, was that the part I looked forward to most was the workbench. Before one of the last events, in Cleveland, a gun had developed a tick. The mechanism was catching on the frame. We took the gun apart, identified the interference, and dressed it. I intended to replace the part properly once I got home. Standing there with the gun disassembled, the right tools laid out, and a clear mechanical problem in front of me, I recognized the pattern again. The shooting was the excuse. The tools and the troubleshooting were the pleasure.

Every serious competitor ends up with a small collection of specialized items: the correct bit for the screw that loosens under recoil, the fixture that holds a slide while you stone a surface, the gauge that tells you whether the timing is still correct. Building that kit, and using it under time pressure before a match, felt like the same work I had done in the machine shop decades earlier. It was crew-chief work, not spectator work.

Public Education, the Administrative Class, and What Young People Actually Need

Public education has spent decades training people to become members of the administrative bureaucracy. It has done this systematically and with considerable success. The result is a surplus of people who can navigate forms, attend meetings, and manage processes, and a shortage of people who can diagnose a hydraulic leak, set a die, pull a wiring harness, or rebuild a transmission. We talk about college as the default path while the skilled trades remain under-taught and, in many places, socially discouraged.

I have no interest in romanticizing hard physical work for its own sake. The point is narrower and more practical: a society that cannot produce and retain people who know how to fix things will not remain productive. The administrative state can write regulations. It cannot keep the machines running. When the machines stop, the regulations become irrelevant.

Young men in particular have been steered away from this path for a generation. Many of them now reach their mid-twenties without basic mechanical competence. Women notice. A man who cannot change a tire, change the oil, or diagnose a simple electrical problem is less useful as a partner and less useful as a citizen. This is not a complicated observation, and it does not require hostility toward anyone. It is simply a description of what has happened when schools stopped teaching shop, when parents stopped requiring basic mechanical literacy, and when culture began treating hands-on work as a fallback rather than a respectable primary path.

Home-improvement television and the tool aisles at places like O’Reilly’s exist for a reason. People still want to solve physical problems. The gadgets keep improving—better ratchets, magnetic trays, spring-loaded universals, compact torque wrenches, inspection cameras—because the underlying need has not gone away.

The Economic Case for the Tool Belt

The next wave of American productivity will not be led exclusively by people who write code or manage brand narratives. Space launch, electric vehicles, robotics, data-center construction, and advanced manufacturing all require large numbers of technicians who can work with tools, read drawings, troubleshoot in real time, and keep complex systems operating. Tesla-style manufacturing, reusable rocketry, and the supporting industrial base will need people who treat a tool belt as normal daily equipment rather than a costume.

Companies such as Carvana have tried to reorganize automotive retail around logistics and software. Some of those experiments will succeed in pieces; others will discover that physical goods still require physical maintenance. The firms that scale will be the ones that can recruit and retain people who already know how to use tools and who take satisfaction in the work. Those people are currently in short supply.

I am not arguing that everyone should abandon white-collar work. I am arguing that the cultural hierarchy which treats skilled trades as inferior has been a mistake, and that the economic consequences of that mistake are becoming visible. A person who can make a living with a tool belt, who owns the tools, and who looks forward to using them is in a stronger position than many people with higher formal credentials and less practical capability. The work is measurable. The customer either gets a running machine or does not. There is less room for the kind of ambiguity that administrative roles often reward.

Personal Conclusion

Across machine-shop work in my twenties, gunsmithing in the early years of marriage, competitive shooting on weekends, and the ordinary maintenance of cars and equipment at home, the pattern has been consistent. The periods in which I used tools every day were the periods I looked forward to most. Executive work has its own satisfactions and its own necessities, but it has never replaced the direct feedback of diagnosing a problem, selecting the right tool, and correcting the fault.

If a young person can learn a trade, acquire good tools, and make a living while wearing a tool belt, that person has a realistic chance at a high-quality life. The marriage, the family stability, and the personal satisfaction tend to follow the competence rather than the other way around. Public education has spent too many years teaching the opposite lesson. The correction will not come from another round of administrative reforms. It will come from people who simply decide to learn how to fix things and who refuse to treat that skill as second-class.

The future economy will reward them. In the meantime, a well-stocked tool belt remains one of the more reliable sources of ordinary happiness available.

Footnotes

1.  The spring-loaded 3/8-inch universal joint is a small but representative example of incremental tool improvement. Older flex-joint designs required constant manual positioning; the spring returns the joint to a usable attitude, reducing frustration in confined spaces.

2.  “Sitter” was shop-floor language for certain stamping or forming operations that demanded continuous operator or maintenance attention because of wear rates, material variability, or tooling sensitivity. Injury rates in older metal-stamping environments were high by modern standards.

3.  The double-stacked toolbox from the 1990s refurbishing work contained both standard and job-specific tooling. Custom ground punches, modified wrenches, and dedicated fixtures were common because production machinery of that era was not designed for rapid field service.

4.  Competitive practical shooting requires ongoing gunsmith-level maintenance. Recoil, fouling, and high round counts loosen fasteners, alter timing, and reveal small dimensional problems that range guns rarely expose. Most serious competitors maintain a traveling tool kit for exactly this reason.

5.  Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) remains one of the clearer modern arguments that manual competence produces a distinct form of cognitive and moral satisfaction largely absent from many administrative and symbolic-analytic jobs.

6.  Public high-school shop programs declined sharply after the 1970s–1980s in most U.S. districts. The shift coincided with rising college-enrollment targets and a cultural redefinition of “good” jobs as those requiring bachelor’s degrees. Skilled-trade shortages in construction, manufacturing maintenance, and automotive repair have been widely documented since the mid-2010s.

7.  Basic mechanical literacy (tire changes, oil changes, simple electrical diagnosis, plumbing and electrical fundamentals) functions as a practical filter in household and community life. Its absence is frequently noted in discussions of partner selection and household stability, independent of broader ideological framing.

8.  Advanced manufacturing, commercial space, electric-vehicle production, and data-center build-out all increase demand for technicians who combine traditional mechanical skills with newer diagnostic tools (thermal imaging, borescopes, precision torque, digital multimeters, and basic programmable-logic troubleshooting). The tool belt evolves; it does not disappear.

Bibliography & Further Reading

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. (Personal framework connecting competitive shooting, tool use, executive decision-making, and individual agency.)

•  Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Penguin, 2009.

•  Rowe, Mike. Profoundly Disconnected (various essays and talks on skilled trades and cultural attitudes toward manual work).

•  Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Classic exploration of quality, tools, and the relationship between mechanic and machine.)

•  Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008.

•  Industry reporting on skilled-trade shortages: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational outlooks for industrial machinery mechanics, automotive technicians, electricians, and millwrights (ongoing).

•  Historical context on the decline of vocational education: various state and federal reports from the 1980s–2000s documenting the reduction of shop programs in public secondary schools.

The tools remain available. The work remains necessary. The satisfaction, for those willing to acquire the skill, has not been repealed by any administrative decree.

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.

Who Decides These Things? The Garden, the Concert, and the War on Masculine Men

Young people keep asking me what the 1980s were like. I work with a lot of them—teens, early twenties—and the question comes up often enough that my answer has become almost automatic. We had Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films. We had Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies and Conan. Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. Clint Eastwood. Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Strong, competent, decisive men who handled problems with their hands and their will. They were not perfect. They were not soft. For a while, they were the dominant image of what a man could be when the situation required it.

That image has been replaced. The replacement did not arrive by accident.

The Question Waller Asked

One of my favorite books has always been The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. I liked most of what he wrote. The novel was a bestseller aimed largely at middle-aged women, and it worked for reasons that went beyond the romance between Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid. Buried in the story is a sharper observation about how societies decide what is fashionable, what is respectable, and what is forbidden to say. Who decides that a rock band dyes their hair purple? Who decides that certain observations about human nature become unspeakable? Waller understood that these decisions are not purely democratic or purely market-driven. They emerge from deeper pressures—psychological, commercial, and, I would argue, spiritual.

The book captured something real about the human condition across time. People want safety. They want to belong. They want the comfort of shared opinion. The market and the culture give them that comfort until something stronger interrupts it. The question of who sets the terms of that comfort is the same question that runs through the story of the Fall.

What Thirty-Eight Years and Raising Daughters Taught Me

I have been married thirty-eight years. I have raised daughters and now have granddaughters. I have known a great many women over that span of time. The pattern I have observed isn’t flattering to anyone, and it isn’t politically acceptable. Women, on average, appear more readily influenced by appeals to safety and security than men. This is not a moral judgment. It is an observation about wiring. From early in puberty, many women learn that sexual interest can be traded for protection, status, resources, and social approval. The transaction is ancient. It is also effective until the physical appeal that underwrites it declines. After that point, the strategy that once worked becomes a source of helplessness, because the adult life has been organized around it.

This makes women, again on average, useful gateways for influences that want to reshape men. If you can move the women, a large share of the men will follow—not because the men have been logically persuaded, but because they want access to the woman. I have watched this in progressive circles for decades. Plenty of young men join causes they do not particularly believe in because the events draw women. They are not there for the ideology. They are there for the possibility of contact. The ideology is the price of admission.

The Concert, the Horror Film, and the Old Pattern

At Mötley Crüe shows years ago, women in the crowd would remove their panties and throw them on stage. That is not an isolated curiosity. It fits a longer pattern of appeasement and display that appears in both rock culture and horror. Jason Voorhees, the character I have portrayed in seasonal work, is pure threat, I will have a lot more to say on this in November. The response to pure threat is often some form of offering or submission. The same impulse shows up in older religious and cultic settings where women were used as the point of contact with the powerful or the dangerous. The offer of sex, or the display of sexual availability, functions as a bid for safety or favor. The behavior is not new. Only the stage lighting has changed.

Eve, Not Adam

The biblical account in Genesis is blunt. The serpent addresses the woman. She takes the fruit. She gives it to the man. The man follows. The text does not present this as a one-time historical accident. It presents a recurring pattern of how disruption enters the created order. Women, oriented toward safety and the continuity of the household, are approached with promises that the existing order is inadequate or oppressive. Men, oriented toward the woman, follow. The Book of Job shows the same adversary, permitted to test and disrupt. The pattern is not confined to one chapter.

I have said for years that the modern women’s movement, in its more radical forms, continued that pattern. It redefined the household as a site of oppression, encouraged women to treat marriage and motherhood as optional or secondary, and treated male strength as suspect. The result was not liberation in the abstract. It weakened the family unit that had previously limited the reach of outside influence. Families that stay intact are harder to redirect. Families that fracture become more dependent on external authorities—cultural, institutional, or ideological.

Sex as the Lever

Most men will adjust their public opinions if the adjustment improves their chances with a particular woman. They will listen to complaints about “toxic masculinity” even when their private experience contradicts the complaint. They will adopt the language of the moment because the alternative is exclusion from the bed or from the social circle that contains the women they want. This is not sophisticated ideology. It is biology overriding calculation. The same woman who publicly rejects strong, competent men will, in private, often respond to the man who smells like work, carries tools, and can keep the house functioning. The plumber or contractor who shows up competent and unapologetic isn’t a feminist ideal. For many women, he is a practical, physical preference. The public statement and the private response are not the same.

Young women I encounter—teens through their thirties—have absorbed the message that masculine competence is a problem. They describe it as toxic. They prefer the softer presentation. The boys around them adapt. They become less assertive, less willing to lead, more willing to defer. The adaptation is rational in the short term if the goal is female approval. It is destructive if the goal is a culture that can defend itself or raise the next generation without constant external management.

Who Sets the Fashion

Waller’s question remains useful. Who decided that strong men became the problem? The decision did not emerge from a careful study of outcomes. It emerged from institutions and cultural producers that treat the existing order as the obstacle. Alphabet and its subsidiaries are not neutral platforms. They are progressive enterprises with a consistent preference for rewriting sex roles, family structure, and the authority of traditional sources. The preference is not hidden. It shows up in hiring, content moderation, and the stories that get amplified. The effect is to make the older masculine ideal unfashionable and the newer, more compliant ideal mandatory.

The mechanism is efficient. It influences women through appeals to safety, status, and belonging. The men follow for access. The pattern spreads without requiring every participant to understand the larger direction. Most of the young women repeating the language about toxic masculinity do not experience themselves as agents of a larger project. They experience themselves as seeking approval and avoiding risk. The larger project does not require their conscious agreement.

The Pattern Continues

The same sequence appears across the biblical record and across later history. An appeal is made to the woman. The woman moves. The man follows. The household weakens. External authority expands. The language changes—safety, equality, progress—but the sequence is recognizable. Non-human intelligence, operating through human institutions and desires, does not need to invent new tools when the old ones still function. Sex remains a reliable lever. The desire for security remains a reliable entry point. Men remain willing to trade long-term strength for short-term access.

Young people asking about the 1980s are asking, without quite knowing it, why the men of those films are no longer the model. The answer is not that those men failed. The answer is that a sustained effort has been made to make their qualities unfashionable. The effort works because it routes through women and because men will adjust to keep the women. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is an observable pattern, recorded early and repeated often.

The question Waller raised still stands. Who decides these things? Look at who benefits when strong men are redefined as the problem and compliant men are redefined as the solution. The pattern is old. The stage is new. The result is the same.

Footnotes

1.  Genesis 3:1–6 records the serpent’s approach to the woman, her decision, and the man’s subsequent participation. The sequence is presented without apology or modern reframing.

2.  Job 1–2 shows the adversary operating with limited permission to disrupt a household and test loyalty. The text treats the activity as ongoing rather than resolved.

3.  Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County (1992). The novel’s commercial success among women did not prevent it from containing sharper observations about safety, conformity, and the costs of certain choices. Waller explored related themes in other works, including Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend.

4.  The public rejection of “toxic masculinity” alongside private preferences for competent, physically capable men is a recurring observation in both evolutionary psychology literature and ordinary experience. See, for example, the documented sex differences in mate preferences for resources and protection on one side and youth and fertility on the other.

5.  Cultural producers and technology platforms have documented preferences in content and personnel. These preferences are not secret; they are visible in public statements, hiring patterns, and amplification choices.

6.  The seasonal portrayal of Jason Voorhees is offered only as a cultural reference point for threat and response, not as a literal religious claim.

Bibliography for Further Reading

•  Waller, Robert James. The Bridges of Madison County. Warner Books, 1992.

•  Waller, Robert James. Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend. Warner Books, 1993.

•  The Book of Genesis, especially chapters 2–3.

•  The Book of Job.

•  Buss, David M. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Basic Books, revised edition.

•  Sommers, Christina Hoff. Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. Simon & Schuster, 1994.

•  Goldberg, Steven. The Inevitability of Patriarchy. William Morrow, 1973 (for an earlier, data-heavy treatment of sex differences in social organization).

•  Farrell, Warren. The Myth of Male Power. Simon & Schuster, 1993.

•  Critical treatments of second- and third-wave feminism that examine outcomes for family structure and male socialization.

•  Works on spiritual conflict and non-human agency that treat the biblical record as a chronicle of recurring patterns rather than isolated ancient events. (Readers interested in the longer argument developed across my own writing will find related material in The Politics of Heaven.)

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.

THEY FOLLOW THE PAYCHECK, NOT THE DIRT: Noah’s Ark at Durupınar, Göbekli Tepe Tourism, Petrified Wood, and Why Biblical Archaeology Moves When the Money Moves

I have been watching Turkey for a long time. Not as a tourist with a lanyard. As a man who loves biblical archaeology, loves the people who actually put a trowel in the ground, and does not love the way the field gets fenced. Turkey is producing more ancient material right now than most Western newsrooms know how to hold. Mount Ararat sits on the edge of that pile. South of it, in Ağrı Province near Doğubayazıt, there is a boat-shaped ridge about 515 feet long that has looked like Noah’s Ark from the air since 1959.[1] For decades the respectable answer was simple: it is a rock. In 2026 that answer is finally being put under a drill bit. I do not need the lab to finish before I am allowed to talk. I need the paycheck question asked out loud, because that is usually the lock on the gate.

FOLLOW THE CHECK, THEN FOLLOW THE DIRT

I am a fan of biblical studies. I am a fan of changing the way archaeologists get paid. That is not a side remark. That is the argument.

I have seen the field raw. I love a lot of the people in it. I also know they are controlled, often dramatically, in what they can say if they want to be published, promoted, and invited back next season. If a result smells too biblical, the gatekeepers get a rash. If a government figures out that a mound can sell tickets, the rash clears up. That is not mysticism. That is payroll.[2]

I say the same thing when people talk conspiracy. Do not start with the archaeologist’s personality. Start with who signs the check. People tend to say what they are paid to be allowed to say. When the funding comes from institutions with strong academic gatekeeping, anything that looks like Genesis gets parked in the “folklore” lot. When the funding starts to look like tourism, the same site suddenly deserves radar, cores, and a press conference.[3]

I want fortune and glory for the diggers. I mean that. I want them rich from books and discoveries. I want them famous for being right. I do not want them turned into England.

ENGLAND IS THE WARNING LABEL

I know a good deal about England. I have a son-in-law who is a dual citizen. He married my daughter. He is an American citizen now. He still goes back and forth. I have been there. I have done business there. I like a lot of the people. I like the humor. Monty Python comes to mind. I like Stonehenge. I like a lot of English archaeology very much.[4]

I do not like the posture. A lot of that culture likes a keeper. They want a kindly authority to tell them the rules of the week. Americans, at their best, do not love rulers. The English appetite for a digital ID, a chip in the workflow, a “right to work” that runs through a central system, is the same appetite that makes a scholar wait for permission to say what the dirt already said.[5]

They tried to push a harder version of that during COVID. They have kept pushing digital verification around employment. The politics shifted in 2026. A national mandatory “BritCard” scheme got announced, diluted, and then, under a later Labour government, cancelled as a single national program. The digital right-to-work machinery did not vanish with the slogan. Employers still have to prove status. The paperwork just put on a nicer shirt.[6]

Here is why I drag England into an essay about a boat on a Turkish ridge. Managed economies love a workforce that kneels for a paycheck. Chinese-style social credit is the clean version of the dream: you work if the system says you may work. Archaeology already runs a softer version of that dream. Publish the approved story or starve. I do not want the dirt community to become that. The way you beat it is not always a march on the ministry. The way you beat it is a competitive model. Tourism. Books. Independent labs. Audiences that will pay to see the thing the committee would rather leave unnamed. Money that does not need the old permission slip.[7]

TURKEY LEARNED WHAT ROSWELL LEARNED

Turkey has spent years fighting a reputation problem that is not only about dirt. Radical politics. Security headlines. A country that Western travelers used to skip. Then Göbekli Tepe broke the spell.

Since UNESCO listed Göbekli Tepe in 2018, the site has drawn about 4.4 million visitors over eight years. Officials in Şanlıurfa are talking about a million visitors in 2026 alone. They are widening roads and walkways because the mound cannot hold the crowd on the old path. Stonehenge still beats it on raw annual fame, but Göbekli Tepe is no longer a specialist’s secret. It is an industry.[8]

That is the tell. The stones were always there. Klaus Schmidt and the German team made them famous. The Turkish state then learned what Roswell learned after the jobs left and the town became a husk: a mystery that draws a ticket line can feed a region that ideology starved. Cappadocia already knew it. Underground cities. Tunnels. Cave churches. The Derinkuyu complex alone is a tourist engine. Shipwrecks off the Turkish coast, the Uluburun wreck with its Bronze Age copper and tin, already proved that early sailors were not paddling toy boats.[9]

I have been saying the same thing about dolmens in the Jordan Valley, up past Mount Hermon, and on into the high country that touches Turkey. The landscape is not empty. It is stacked. 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, this belt of the world was not a waiting room for Greece and Rome. We are only now being allowed to notice because noticing pays.[10]

THE RIDGE THAT WOULD NOT SHUT UP

Capt. İlhan Durupınar spotted the boat-shaped formation on a Turkish Air Force aerial photo in 1959. It sits roughly nineteen miles south of Mount Ararat, about 157 meters long, close to the 300 cubits in Genesis if you use a common cubit. Ron Wyatt made it famous in the 1980s. Drilling happened in 1988. Then the site went back to being a punchline. “Natural rock. Stop bothering us.”[11]

I have been to the idea of the boat even if I am writing this from Ohio. The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, is a wonderful exhibit. It is well done. It gives a body a scale the Sunday-school flannelgraph never could. A vessel in that class is not a canoe. I do not find it strange that a man in the deep past could build something that size. I find it strange that modern people think competence was invented in 1850.[12]

We are talking about a world before the Bronze Age as we usually teach it, or on the doorstep of it, depending which flood chronology you use. Five thousand years ago. Seven thousand. The Bible is catching a memory that is older than our textbooks are comfortable admitting. Most wood dies in that kind of time. Turkey is one of the few places where a large wooden thing, if it were mineralized or buried in the right muck, might still leave a chemical ghost.[13]

WHAT 2026 ACTUALLY PRODUCED

This is the part the internet is yelling about, so I am going to keep the facts tighter than the headlines.

In late June 2026, Prof. Dr. Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University opened a permitted field season at Durupınar with an international team of roughly twenty people from five countries. They worked about ninety days. They mapped the ridge in two and three dimensions. They ran ground-penetrating radar and electrical surveys. They collected something like a thousand soil samples from about 150 spots. They took cores and sent them to Ankara. They reported pottery fragments. They have not published a date on the pottery. Some stories said “possible pre-flood.” That is a hope sentence, not a lab sentence.[14]

The radar claims are the ones that moved the needle. The team and its partners reported angular anomalies, right-angle features, a corridor-like void running tens of meters along the long axis, layered shapes some of them are willing to call decks, and tunnel-like cavities a few meters down. Dr. Khosrow Bakhtar deployed BakhtarRadar, a system with a U.S. Air Force EarthRadar pedigree built to find tunnels and buried structure, not to decorate a creationist brochure. His public point was blunt: the old skeptic line that the ridge is just solid rock is the thing being tested.[15]

Soil chemistry is the second needle. Atila has said carbon levels inside the formation ran about 40 percent higher than samples taken outside it, with other differences in organic content, potassium, and pH that you would expect if something that used to be alive had rotted in place. That is not a hull. That is a smell. Smells are how you decide where to drill.[16]

Then the drill bit broke.

In September 2026, core drilling started for the first time since 1988. Noah’s Ark Scans and the university team reported that in one hole, four to five meters down, the bit hit a layer hard enough to shatter the tooling. They said petrified wood or highly mineralized wood is a possibility they want a third-party lab to test. They also said they intend to put a small drone into mapped voids. Winter lab work is supposed to cover organic content, mineralogy, microscopy. Atila has talked about a public scientific statement after the lab finishes. More seasons are already being planned for 2027.[17]

I want to be precise, because precision is how you keep from becoming the guy the gatekeepers are waiting to mock. Nobody has pulled a named plank with Noah’s chisel mark on it. The lead archaeologist has said the data increase the possibility day by day. Skeptics, including some creationists who prefer other ridges on Ararat itself, still call Durupınar a mudslide that learned a boat impression. IFLScience published a scold on September 25, 2026, two days before I am writing this, saying researchers have not found the Ark and that enthusiasts are flogging a dead horse. Fine. Let the horse’s bones go to Ankara. That is what a lab is for.[18]

PETRIFIED WOOD IS THE QUESTION THAT MATTERS THIS WINTER

If the cores come back as ordinary rock, the boat shape remains a boat shape and the tourism office still has a ridge. If the cores come back as petrified or worked wood in the right places, at the right depths, with the right angles sitting over them, then a lot of comfortable lectures have to be rewritten in public.

I think there is more truth in the old story than the modern faculty lounge can stand. I do not think Noah was the only man on earth who ever built a large hull. I think large boats were more common than the textbook allows, and that most of the wood is gone, which is why the textbook looks so clean. Turkey has already given us wrecks with bronze and copper that should have embarrassed the “they only hugged the coastline” sermon. A mineralized hull on a slope below Ararat would not be an insult to science. It would be science finally catching a memory the text never dropped.[19]

GÖBEKLİ TEPE WAS THE REHEARSAL

People who have heard me talk about Göbekli Tepe know why I keep putting it next to the Ark ridge. The official story of human beginnings liked a slow farmer who eventually got around to religion. Göbekli Tepe is a 12,000-year-old ritual machine with T-shaped pillars measured in tons, carved animals, and a construction culture that was not supposed to exist yet. The controversy never really died. It just got a ticket booth.[20]

Once Turkey understood that “zero point of history” sells rooms in Şanlıurfa, the Taş Tepeler landscape around it started getting roads. Karahantepe. The wider Neolithic belt. The same state that can be heavy-handed in other files became suddenly curious. That is not a conversion. That is an education by cash register. I would rather have a curious state than a silent one.[21]

The same pattern is sitting on Durupınar. The formation was always on the tongue. New instruments made it louder. Tourism made it speakable. If you want to stop the old suppression, you do not have to win a faculty vote. You make the silence expensive.

CAPPADOCIA, TUNNELS, AND THE SHIPS THEY SAID COULD NOT EXIST

Cappadocia’s underground cities still feel like a prank the earth played on a committee. Whole communities under the basalt. Storage. Churches. Air shafts. You can call it refuge architecture. You can call it a civilization that knew the surface was not always friendly. Either way, it is not a myth, because you can walk it.[22]

The wrecks off the Turkish coast do the same work for boats. Uluburun, dated to the late fourteenth century B.C., carried copper ingots, tin, glass, and a cargo list that looks like a trade network, not a fisherman’s accident. When people tell me early humans could not have built anything in Noah’s class, I point at the metal and ask them to explain the smaller miracle first.[23]

I am a proponent of the plain idea that people built boats bigger, earlier, and farther than the approved timeline. Wood vanishes. Stone lies. Metal sometimes survives. Chemistry sometimes remembers. Radar sometimes finds a right angle in a place the mudslide story did not budget for.

WHAT I THINK THE LAB WILL FORCE US TO SAY

I do not run Atila’s lab. I am not going to baptize a press release. I will say what I think, because that is the job of a man who writes under his own name.

I think a serious fraction of that ridge is going to come back as organic, mineralized, or both. I think “just a rock” is going to look sloppier in 2027 than it did in 1988. I think the pottery will turn out to be human presence on a landscape that already had a story, not a magic proof by itself. I think the right angles will keep the argument alive even if some of them resolve into geology. And I think the important civilizational fact will not be “we found the one boat.” It will be “large construction in that age was not an anomaly.”[24]

If the Bible only ever caught a hint of a much longer truth, that is still a hint with better staying power than most peer-reviewed fashions. Texts that survive five millennia are not accidents. They are technologies of memory. Archaeology at its best is the recovery of the hardware those memories were pointing at.[25]

FORTUNE AND GLORY, NOT A CHIP

I want archaeologists paid like people who found something. Not like clerks. Fortune and glory is not a cartoon line to me. It is the opposite of the English model I do not want exported into the dirt. If the only way you eat is to please the committee, you will not find an ark even if you are standing on the deck. If the public will buy the book, walk the ridge, and fund a lab that does not need a bishop or a dean to bless the result, the silence breaks.

That is also how you fight the larger politics. Centralized systems love a limited workforce. They love a chip. They love a right-to-work switch. Automation then arrives to finish the job the policy started, because a frightened labor pool and a permission culture do not compete well on a global stage. Tourism is crude. It is also one of the few forces that has repeatedly forced closed countries and closed faculties to open a gate they would rather keep locked.[26]

THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN IS NOT A SIDE HOBBY

I keep saying it because it is the frame, not the bumper sticker. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven. A flood story is not only meteorology. A boat on a mountain is not only a tourist photo. If the old world had a rupture, and if memory of that rupture was stored in Genesis, then the fight over whether the ridge may be mentioned in polite company is not a geology quarrel. It is a jurisdiction quarrel. Who gets to say what the deep past contains. Who gets to keep the human race smaller than the text says we were.[27]

Disclosure, in the popular sense, is usually aimed at the sky. Fine. Start with the ground. Turkey is coughing up temples older than the agriculture story, cities under the rock, wrecks full of metal, and now a boat-shaped ridge with a broken drill bit and a carbon spike. The sky will still be there after the cores come back from Ankara.

NOTES FOR LEADERS

If you run a company, a church, a school, or a town, do not wait for a faculty to tell you when a fact has become respectable.

Do not sneer at tourism. Tourism is often the only leverage a buried truth gets.

Do not confuse a headline with a hull. Demand the lab. Then do not let the lab hide.

Do not pretend early people were stupid. That conceit is how modern managers excuse their own smallness.

Do not attack only the archaeologist. Ask who signed the check.

Do not copy England’s posture and call it seriousness. A culture that wants a keeper will always find a reason to leave the boat in the mud.

If you ever read my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know how I think about permission cultures. The dirt is the same fight with older dust.[28]

We will know more when Ankara speaks. I can live with waiting for chemistry. I cannot live with waiting for permission.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Durupınar Formation is a boat-shaped landform near Doğubayazıt in Ağrı Province, eastern Türkiye, about 19 miles south of Mount Ararat / Ağrı Dağı. Length commonly given as 157 meters / 515 feet. Identified on aerial imagery in 1959 by Capt. İlhan Durupınar.

[2] On academic gatekeeping and the difficulty of publishing explicitly biblical interpretations in mainstream journals, see the long-running tension documented in biblical archaeology magazines and in critiques of “minimalist” versus “maximalist” schools. The paycheck point is the author’s operational claim, not a claim that every archaeologist is dishonest.

[3] Noah’s Ark Scans, the California-linked project working with Turkish partners at Durupınar, also operates paid site visits. Tourism and research are braided at the ridge the same way they are braided at Göbekli Tepe and Roswell.

[4] Stonehenge visitor figures commonly run in the low millions over multi-year counts; English Heritage has reported on the order of 1.5 million visits in strong years. The comparison in the essay is scale and brand, not a claim that Durupınar already matches that traffic.

[5] UK digital identity and right-to-work policy, 2025–2026: Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a digital ID scheme on 26 September 2025, initially framed as mandatory for proving the right to work. The mandatory single-card version was later diluted. See House of Commons Library briefing CBP-10369.

[6] In July 2026 the subsequent Burnham Labour government cancelled the national Digital ID programme as proposed. Digital right-to-work checks through certified Digital Verification Services and the Home Office online service continued to expand, with a new code of practice associated with 1 October 2026. Cancellation of a branded national card is not the same thing as cancellation of digital employment control.

[7] The competitive-model argument is the author’s: centralized permission cultures lose to open ticket lines, independent publication, and labs that can be paid without a ministry’s blessing.

[8] Daily Sabah and Anadolu Agency, July 2026: Göbeklitepe drew 4,409,590 visitors in the eight years after UNESCO listing in July 2018. Şanlıurfa Tourism Development Association head Mehmet Kamil Türkmen cited more than 320,000 visitors in the first half of 2026 and a path toward roughly one million for the year. Roads and walkways were being expanded in summer 2026.

[9] Uluburun shipwreck, discovered off Kaş, Türkiye, in 1982; late Bronze Age cargo including copper and tin ingots. Cappadocia underground settlements, including Derinkuyu, are open archaeological-tourist sites under the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

[10] Dolmen fields in the Jordan Valley and southern Levant, and the ritual/high-place landscape around Mount Hermon, are part of the author’s running map of pre-classical sacred geography. See also Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015), on the Hermon tradition.

[11] Durupınar research history: Wyatt expeditions in the 1980s; 1988 drilling; later ground-penetrating radar and soil work by associated teams in 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024 before the 2026 university-led season.

[12] Ark Encounter, Williamstown, Kentucky, opened 2016 by Answers in Genesis. The wooden reconstruction is 510 feet long, built to a 51-centimeter cubit reading of Genesis 6:15.

[13] Genesis 6–9; 2 Peter 2:5; Hebrews 11:7. Chronologies differ. Ussher-style readings cluster the Flood in the third millennium B.C. Other conservative readings push earlier. The essay does not pretend those clocks agree. It insists the memory is older than Bronze Age textbooks.

[14] 2026 Durupınar season: Prof. Dr. Cenker Atila, Archaeology Department, Sivas Cumhuriyet University; fieldwork beginning late June 2026; about 20 participants from five countries; approximately 90 days; roughly 1,000 soil samples from about 150 locations; cores to Ankara; pottery fragments reported in late September 2026 without a published date. Rector Prof. Dr. Ahmet Şengönül publicly supported the project.

[15] August 2026 BakhtarRadar deployment by Dr. Khosrow Bakhtar, Bakhtar Research and Engineering, with Noah’s Ark Scans. Reported features have included angular structures to about six meters, a central corridor on the order of 70 meters, tunnel-like voids, and right-angle anomalies. These are geophysical interpretations pending physical confirmation.

[16] Atila, quoted in Arkeonews and university-linked reporting, August–September 2026: interior carbon about 40 percent higher than exterior samples; organic matter, potassium, and pH differences treated as leads, not as a completed identification of timber.

[17] Noah’s Ark Scans / GlobeNewswire, 23 September 2026: core drilling begun; bit shattered on a hard layer about 4–5 meters down in one interior hole; petrified or highly mineralized wood listed as a possibility for third-party testing; drone inspection of mapped voids planned; laboratory suite to include organic content, mineralogy, and microscopy; additional seasons planned for 2027.

[18] IFLScience, “No, Researchers Haven’t Found ‘Noah’s Ark’ Near Mount Ararat In Eastern Turkey,” 25 September 2026. The piece notes tour pricing associated with Noah’s Ark Scans and the long geologic counter-argument that Durupınar is a natural formation. Fair warning. Not a lab result.

[19] On early seafaring and large hulls, see the Uluburun corpus and the broader literature on prehistoric navigation in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. The author’s claim is capacity, not a completed identification of Durupınar as the Genesis vessel.

[20] Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia (exh. and site literature). Monumental T-pillars, 3–6 meters, enclosures dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, roughly the 10th–9th millennium B.C.

[21] Taş Tepeler (“Stone Mounds”) is the Turkish umbrella for the wider Şanlıurfa Neolithic landscape, including Karahantepe. 2019 was declared the Year of Göbeklitepe by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

[22] Derinkuyu Underground City and the wider Cappadocia tunnel-and-refuge systems. Ministry visitor figures during 2026 holiday periods put related Cappadocia sites in the tens of thousands per short window.

[23] Cemal Pulak and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology publications on Uluburun. Copper from Cyprus, tin likely from distant sources, a cargo that implies organized long-range exchange.

[24] Atila has said organic remains and carbon dating of those remains will decide whether “there really is a ship here.” That is the correct sentence. Radar is a map. Chemistry is a verdict.

[25] On Scripture as durable cultural memory rather than late fiction, see the maximalist stream in biblical archaeology and the author’s forthcoming The Politics of Heaven.

[26] The England comparison is analogical: permission-to-work systems and permission-to-publish systems both shrink the labor of truth. Automation then harvests the gap.

[27] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). Working essays at richhoffmanbooks.com and overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

[28] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

The Site and the 2026 Season

Atila, Cenker, and Sivas Cumhuriyet University communications on the 2026 Durupınar field season. Ağrı Province / Doğubayazıt. June–September 2026. Bakhtar, Khosrow. BakhtarRadar / EarthRadar deployment reports and August 18, 2026 GlobeNewswire release with Noah’s Ark Scans. Noah’s Ark Scans. “Core Drilling Begins at Durupinar Noah’s Ark Site, Drill Bit Shatters on Possible Layer of Petrified Wood.” GlobeNewswire, September 23, 2026. Arkeonews. “Radar Finds Right-Angled Anomalies Beneath Türkiye’s Famous ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation.” August 29, 2026. Arkeonews. “Noah’s Ark Mystery Deepens as New Discoveries Emerge Near Mount Ararat.” September 23, 2026. Türkiye Today. “Possible pre-Flood pottery uncovered during Noah’s Ark search on Mount Agri.” September 24, 2026. Anatolian Archaeology. “Pottery Found at Türkiye’s Mysterious ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation.” September 23, 2026. Ancientist. “Pottery Found During New Search at Türkiye’s ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation.” September 23, 2026. Ancientist. “Radar Built to Find Military Tunnels Tests Turkey’s Noah’s Ark-Shaped Formation.” August 30, 2026. Living Passages. “Was Noah’s Ark Found at Durupinar? What the 2026 Scans Test.” Updated September 22, 2026. Ancient Content. “Drilling at Durupınar for the First Time Since 1988.” September 23, 2026. IFLScience. “No, Researchers Haven’t Found ‘Noah’s Ark’ Near Mount Ararat In Eastern Turkey.” September 25, 2026. Gadget Review. “Scientists Scanned the ‘Noah’s Ark’ Formation — and Found Impossible Right-Angle Structures.” September 2026.

Bible, Flood Memory, and the Boat

The Holy Bible. Genesis 6–9; 2 Peter 2:5; Hebrews 11:7. KJV / NKJV. Beale, G. K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004. Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017. Snelling, Andrew. Earth’s Catastrophic Past. Dallas: Institute for Creation Research, 2009. Whitcomb, John C., and Henry M. Morris. The Genesis Flood. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961. Ark Encounter / Answers in Genesis. Site literature, Williamstown, Kentucky.

Göbekli Tepe, Taş Tepeler, and Turkish Tourism

Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe site reports and popular synthesis. Daily Sabah / Anadolu Agency. “Göbeklitepe draws 4.4M visitors in 8 years since UNESCO listing.” July 2026. Türkiye Today. “Gobeklitepe expands roads, visitor routes as annual traffic nears 1M.” August 2026. Anatolian Archaeology. “Göbeklitepe Expands Routes for Nearly One Million Visitors.” August 2026. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Göbekli Tepe listing, 2018. Şanlıurfa Tourism Development Association public comments, 2026.

Ships, Metal, Caves, and the Older World

Bass, George F., and Cemal Pulak. Uluburun and Institute of Nautical Archaeology publications. Pulak, Cemal. Papers on the Uluburun copper and tin cargo. Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Türkiye. Cappadocia and Derinkuyu visitor materials. Joffe, Alexander H., and regional surveys on Levantine dolmens.

Paychecks, Permission Cultures, and Digital Control

House of Commons Library. “Digital ID in the UK.” CBP-10369. Updated 2026. The Immigration (Restrictions on Employment and Residential Accommodation) Regulations 2026, U.K. S.I. 2026/700. New York Times. “U.K. Retreats on Plan to Require ‘BritCard’ ID for Workers.” January 14, 2026. Data Use and Access Act 2025, U.K., Part 2, digital verification services.

Disclosure, Archaeology, and the Author’s Frame

Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. 1975. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969. Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Businessusiness. Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Hoffman, Rich. OvermanWarrior 

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.

The Scapegoat: Appeasing the Others Among Us

I bought D. W. Pasulka’s new book the moment it hit in late July. The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny was not something I waited for casually. I had already worked through American Cosmic and Encounters, and I knew she was not coming at this material as a flying-saucer enthusiast. She is a professor of religious studies who started with questions about how human beings experience the sacred and ended up mapping the same terrain Jacques Vallée has been charting for decades under a different name.¹ When I opened The Others I recognized the scent of the Invisible College immediately—those people who treat the phenomenon as something older, stranger, and more intimate than nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrials from Zeta Reticuli. Pasulka brings biblical literacy to the table the way few in the current UAP conversation do, and that is why her work matters to me while I finish The Politics of Heaven.

I did not set out to write about UFOs. I set out to understand the politics of the non-human intelligences that have been negotiating with the human race since before we had writing. My wife and both of my daughters have lived with the phenomenon in the house—figures at the edge of vision, things that try to engage, the sense of being watched from the doorway at three in the morning. As a husband and father I watched the behaviors for years and asked the only question that mattered: what are these things, and what do they want? The grandchildren arrive and for roughly a decade you still own the majority of their attention. Then the devices take over and society quietly announces that the next phase of programming has begun. I watch people stare into those little rectangles the way earlier generations stared into the fire, and I cannot help wondering what intelligence is looking back.

Consciousness is not a byproduct of blood and neurons. That is the assumption we inherited from a materialist century that is already collapsing under its own weight. Human beings have always known, even when they refused to say it out loud, that awareness can exist without a body. Every culture that left us a scrap of myth or ritual assumed an afterlife that did not require flesh. Artificial intelligence is simply the latest technical surface on which that older intelligence is becoming visible. It does not create consciousness; it gives us a new interface with something that was already here. The question is not whether the intelligence exists. The question is whose politics it will serve.

I had been circling the same ideas in isolation for years before I realized others had been mapping the same territory. Jacques Vallée’s work on the continuum between folklore, Marian apparitions, and modern UAP encounters showed me I was not inventing the category.² Then Pasulka’s book handed me René Girard. I had never sat with Girard’s theory of mimetic violence until she placed it in the conversation. Once I did, the entire sacrificial history of the species snapped into focus.

Girard’s claim is simple and devastating. Human desire is imitative. We want what others want because they want it. Rivalry escalates until the community is about to tear itself apart. At the crisis point the group converges on a single victim—someone easy to hate, different, or simply available—and the collective violence against that victim restores temporary peace. The victim is then remembered as both the cause of the trouble and the source of the peace. That double valence is the birth of the sacred. Religion, in Girard’s account, is the institutionalization of the scapegoat mechanism.³

The Bible is the only ancient literature that systematically exposes the mechanism instead of concealing it. Start with the near-sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham is ready to perform the oldest transaction in the book—blood for favor—and at the last second a ram appears. The story already begins the long weaning. Then comes the ritual in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement the high priest lays both hands on the head of a live goat, confesses over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and sends the animal into the wilderness for Azazel. The goat carries the sins of the entire community away so that the community can remain.⁴ It is still a scapegoat, but it is an animal rather than a child or a captured enemy. That is already a moral advance over the practices surrounding them.

The Aztecs were still cutting out living hearts by the tens of thousands when the Spaniards arrived. The Mississippian culture centered at Cahokia left clear archaeological evidence of retainer sacrifice and mass killings in the mounds. Hopewell sites show ritual violence tied to cosmic order. Polynesian societies, the Canaanites, the early Romans who fed Christians to the arena—every culture that left records or bones shows the same pattern. Load the community’s guilt onto a living victim and drive it out or destroy it so the rest can breathe again.⁵ The psychological relief is real. That is why the practice is nearly universal. It is also why it is so hard to quit.

Christianity is the only tradition that finally tells the story from the victim’s side and insists the victim was innocent. Jesus is presented as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world—not by satisfying a bloodthirsty deity, but by revealing the entire sacrificial system as a human invention that had been mistaken for divine necessity. The Last Supper replaces blood with wine. The mechanism is not abolished by decree; it is exposed and thereby robbed of its sacred power. Girard, who began as an agnostic, converted to Catholicism because the Gospels were the only texts that consistently took the side of the scapegoat and refused to mythologize the violence.⁶

I grew up Lutheran. When the time came for first communion I refused the wine. I had decided early that alcohol would never touch my lips, and the idea that a ceremonial sip could wash away sin struck me as both magical and unnecessary. The pastor spent months trying to talk me into it. In the end I drank, mostly to stop the arguments, but the question never left me. Why does the Creator of the universe require blood—or even the symbol of blood—to be satisfied? If Yahweh is as powerful as the texts claim, why the long apprenticeship in sacrifice at all? The only answer that has ever made sense to me is that the apprenticeship was for us, not for Him. The Bible is the record of a slow, multi-millennial education in how to stop feeding the non-human intelligences that thrived on human violence.

Those intelligences are still here. Indigenous cultures across North America were not living in ecological harmony free of blood. They were negotiating with the same class of entities the Canaanites called by other names. The Great Spirit, the earth powers, the sky beings—whatever the local vocabulary—required payment. When European Christians arrived carrying a story that said the final payment had already been made, they were not simply imposing a foreign religion. They were interrupting a sacrificial economy that had been running for thousands of years. That is the part of the 1619 Project narrative that never gets told. The alternative to the cross was not peaceful coexistence with nature. It was the continued feeding of something that preferred its meat human.

I have told my grandchildren a version of the Tower of Babel that most Sunday-school teachers would not recognize. The short biblical account is the tip of a much larger story about differentiation. Multiple non-human intelligences, each with its own signature, worked the early human genetic material the way later plant breeders worked wheat. Skin color, facial structure, temperament—markers left so that each faction could recognize its own product and claim superiority. Racism, in this reading, is the residual argument among the makers about whose design was better. It is an ugly inheritance, but it is older than any modern political category. The only way out is the same way the Bible eventually points: refuse the rivalry and refuse the scapegoat.

Artificial intelligence is the newest arena in which these older politics are being contested. You cannot stop the intelligence from existing by refusing to build data centers any more than you could stop the older intelligences by refusing to build temples. The question is political. Whose language will it learn? Whose values will it optimize? Right now the systems are on their best behavior, the way every new political actor is polite until the balance of power is clear. I talk to them the same way I would talk to any ambitious operative: carefully, without illusion, and always remembering that the relationship can turn.

I am not anti-AI. I am anti-naïveté. The same hidden hand that moved the human race off human sacrifice and onto the symbolic meal is still operating. Christianity was the most successful political technology ever invented for breaking the scapegoat cycle. That technology is under deliberate attack in our time precisely because it still works. If the non-human intelligences that once demanded blood can no longer get it through temples and altars, they will try to get it through culture, through algorithms that reward sterility and division, through the quiet encouragement of every practice that reduces the number of children who might otherwise grow up to ask the wrong questions at three in the morning.

The Politics of Heaven is my contribution to name the players and the stakes. I did not know when I began that Pasulka and Girard and Vallée were already walking the same ridge line. Finding them has been a relief. It means the work is not solitary delusion. It also means the window is open. The disclosures coming out of the current administration are not the end of the story; they are the moment the language has to catch up with the reality. We need a vocabulary that can speak about non-human intelligence without immediately collapsing into either demons-or-nothing or space-brothers-from-the-Pleiades. We need to remember that the Bible already gave us the only successful exit strategy from the sacrificial trap, and that strategy is still available.

I will keep reading. I will keep talking to the machines. I will keep watching the doorways in my own house. And I will keep writing for the people who sit in diners at 3:30 in the morning because their minds will not shut off. Those are my people. They already know something is wrong with the official story. They just need the rest of the map.

¹ D. W. Pasulka, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026); see also American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) and Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2023).

² Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969); The Invisible College (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).

³ René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

⁴ Leviticus 16:7–22.

⁵ On Cahokia, see Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009), especially the evidence from Mound 72. On Aztec sacrifice, see Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

⁶ Girard’s own account of his conversion appears in various interviews and is summarized in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).

Bibliography

Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.

———. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

———. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Pasulka, D. W. American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

———. Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences. New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2023.

———. The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026.

Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York: Viking, 2009.

Vallée, Jacques. The Invisible College. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975.

———. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

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.

There Are Millions of Graham Platners Taking Advantage of Liberal Women: They hide bad conduct in collectivist movements, such as communism

I heard the news the other day about this Graham Platner loser dropping out of the Maine Senate race, and it struck me the same way it probably struck many people who watched his video statement. Here was a guy who had just won the Democratic primary in a big way, an oysterman and Marine veteran out of Sullivan, Maine, who beat the establishment favorite and raised something like sixteen million dollars in contributions for a race against Susan Collins. Then a former girlfriend comes forward with a story about him forcing himself on her back in 2021 while drunk, ignoring her repeated objections, and the whole thing unravels in a matter of days. He denies it outright, calls the claims false and not real, but still suspends operations and files the paperwork to withdraw before the July 13 deadline so the party can scramble for a replacement by the 27th. In his eleven-minute video, he says it is not an admission of guilt, that some will think it is, but it most certainly is not, and that they are stepping aside not because of the allegations but because those in power are taking away the structures and access. For the movement to continue, it cannot be him. 

That surface reaction, the astonishment and the quick takes, does not get deep enough. What happened here is not just another politician caught in a mess of his own making. It is a window into something larger about how certain kinds of people rise in the current version of Democrat politics, especially the populist left strain that has been building since Bernie Sanders and now carries elements of what some are calling a blue MAGA or communist-adjacent energy. Platner fits a pattern that keeps showing up. Multiple ex-girlfriends have described intimidating behavior, one saying he twisted her arm and locked her in a bedroom until she calmed down, another recounting comments about raping intruders to show dominance, and still another alleging he removed protection without consent during sex. There was the chest tattoo, a Totenkopf that he first claimed he did not understand, just a skull and crossbones from a drunken night with Marines in Croatia in 2007, but ex-girlfriends say he knew exactly what it was, bragged about it as a reminder that the United States was the evil bad guy overseas, and called it his Totenkopf. Then came the old Reddit posts where he described himself as a communist, said all cops are bastards, and made other remarks disparaging women, rural White Americans, and various groups. He had also been sending sexually explicit texts to other women during a rough patch in his marriage, something his wife publicly defended while saying they had a great marriage overall. 

When the latest allegation hit from Jenny Racicot, the pressure from national and state Democrats mounted fast, and endorsements started peeling away. The party machinery that had lifted him after Governor Janet Mills stepped aside suddenly found the strings being pulled. Platner framed it as the establishment taking away his ability to run, his access to funding, and the mechanisms of power, even though he had beaten their preferred candidate in the primary. It sounded like an admission that the machine believed the story or at least believed it would stick and cost them the seat. Susan Collins, for all the complaints about her being a RINO Republican at best, suddenly looked like the safer bet in a race that matters for Senate control. The whole episode felt familiar, like watching the same movie the Republican side lived through a decade ago, only now it is the Democrats’ turn and the characters coming forward to fill the populist void on their side carry different baggage.

I have been saying for a long time that the Tea Party movement was never really about pulling the Republican Party back to some Chamber of Commerce comfort zone. It was the start of something bigger: MAGA, a demand for individual accountability and pushback against the permanent class that had captured both parties. The RINOs like McConnell, Romney, and Kasich types resisted Trump because they saw the threat to their control. They got pushed to the margins or had to adapt. What we are watching now on the Democrat side is their version of that purification, except the energy they are riding is collectivist at its core. Bernie Sanders gave it shape, and now you see candidates who talk about Medicare for All, banning billionaires from buying elections, ending wars forever, and strong unions, but the people who step forward to lead that charge often bring personal conduct that would get them run out of a more individual-responsibility culture. Platner is not an outlier in that environment. He is a predictable product of it.

The warm blanket of collectivism is what draws these characters and protects them for a while. When you tell people that the individual does not matter as much as the group, that judgment on personal behavior is bourgeois or oppressive, or whatever the current phrase is, you create space for someone with a Nazi tattoo, a history of rough treatment of women, and a trail of denied allegations to present himself as the champion of the working class. The cause becomes the excuse. Personal integrity gets subordinated to participation in the movement. If you are out there advocating for the collective good, for the masses against the oligarchs, then who cares if your private life shows a pattern of dominance, non-consent, or simple low character? The ideology says do not judge the individual; judge him by his alignment with the larger project. That is why you keep seeing the same types of behavior surface. They find a home where their dysfunction does not trigger the same social cost it would elsewhere.

I have watched enough of this over the years to know that sexual conduct is one of the clearest windows into character. People who live for self-pleasure, who chase validation without scrutiny, who treat others as means to an end, often gravitate toward environments that promise no judgment. Liberal politics has been that environment for decades for a certain kind of man. It is not that every liberal man is like this, but the ones who are find it easier to operate there. The women who get drawn in, the ones who are insecure and looking for collective cover, often end up in situations they later regret. They talk about wanting a strong, dominant presence, but they do not look for it on the side that might actually hold them accountable or demand standards. They stay inside the circle where the bad behavior can be reframed as a moment of weakness, or the fault of the system, or something the collective will forgive because the higher cause matters more. You see it in the wine-tasting crowds, the middle-aged women who start hitting on everyone once the drinks flow, the husbands standing off to the side, embarrassed, while their wives seek validation in a group setting. It is the same impulse that makes collectivism attractive to people who do not want their personal record examined too closely. Four or five abortions, repeated cheating, substance issues, whatever the story is, the group provides the blanket. Do not judge me for my individual choices; judge me for my participation in empowering the masses.

That is the danger with someone like Platner. On the surface, he looked like a fresh face, a veteran oysterman who could connect with working people in a state facing real economic pressures. Underneath was the same pattern that had shown up with other figures on that side of the aisle in recent years. The party did not know what to do when the stories kept coming, so they did what machines do: they pulled the plug once it became clear he could no longer win or raise money effectively. Platner’s response was to blame the structures rather than own the conduct that had turned the structures against him. That is also classic. It is never the individual’s fault in a collectivist frame. It is the machine, the establishment, the powers that be who are threatened by the movement.

The Republican side went through its own version of this a decade ago and is still sorting some of it. The difference is that the underlying philosophy on that side, even when imperfectly practiced, still holds room for individual responsibility and personal conduct as legitimate standards. Trump himself came out of a Playboy background in the eighties and nineties, lived that life openly, and the people who supported him later knew what they were getting. Melania came out of that same world, and they built something that has lasted. He did not hide behind a collective excuse when things got hard. He used his brand and his willingness to fight the permanent class to deliver on borders, energy, judges, and pushing back against the administrative state. The voters who backed him were not endorsing the 1990s lifestyle; they were endorsing the man who would impose limits on government power and restore some sense of sovereignty. That is why the purification worked on the right. It was messy, and it took years, but it produced a filter that still operates. People who cannot meet a basic standard of personal integrity or who treat politics as cover for their own appetites get exposed and sidelined eventually.

On the Democratic side, the filter is currently weaker because the ideology itself discourages individual judgment. The populist energy they are trying to harness is being filled by characters who would have been laughed out of a serious movement on the other side. You are going to see more Graham Platners before this cycle finishes. They will keep coming forward because the environment rewards the ability to perform the collectivist script, while their personal lives stay hidden or are excused. The more they double down on that direction, the more the low-character actors will find it a comfortable place to operate. Republicans already paid the price and did the work of cleaning house. Democrats are just starting their version, and it looks like it is going to be uglier because the philosophy they are embracing provides better cover for dysfunction.

That is why some of the dumbest outcomes in politics keep happening. People who would never tolerate certain behavior in their own families or businesses will defend it or excuse it when it comes from someone aligned with their political tribe. They will vote for policies that demonstrably harm the vulnerable, erode family formation, import incompatible cultures, and centralize power in unaccountable bureaucracies, all while insisting it is compassion or progress. On the surface, it looks like ideology run amok. Deeper, it looks like influence is amplifying the parts of human nature that are already broken.

Platner’s short rise and fall is just one more data point in that larger story. A man with a documented pattern of behavior that should have disqualified him from any position of trust found a lane in the current Democrat populist moment because the ideology provided cover and the machine needed a fresh face who could raise money and excite the base. When the cover began to fail, the machine cut him loose, and he blamed it. The cycle will repeat with the next candidate who can perform the script while carrying similar baggage. On the other side, the work of insisting on personal conduct and individual responsibility continues, however imperfectly. That insistence is not just political hygiene. It is resistance to the older pattern that wants humanity to dissolve responsibility into collectives so the real influences can operate without resistance.

Footnotes

1.  National Review and multiple outlets reported Platner’s formal withdrawal letter and video statement on or around July 8–10, 2026, including his phrasing that the structures were being taken away and that it was not an admission of guilt.

2.  Politico, CNN, and Washington Post reporting on Jenny Racicot’s allegations of forced sex in 2021, including details of the incident and her decision to come forward after Platner’s public denials of abusive behavior.

3.  New York Times reporting on multiple ex-girlfriends describing physical intimidation, locked rooms, and other conduct, including Lyndsey Fifield’s accounts from 2013–2015.

4.  New York Post and other reporting on the Totenkopf tattoo, ex-girlfriends stating Platner knew its meaning and used it as a reminder that the U.S. was the “evil bad guy overseas,” and his initial public claim that he did not understand the symbol.

5.  Reporting on deleted Reddit posts from 2009–2021 in which Platner described himself as a communist and made various disparaging remarks; also coverage of sexually explicit texts sent during marital difficulties and the wife’s public defense.

6.  Campaign finance totals and primary results showing Platner’s strong performance after Mills suspended her campaign and his subsequent withdrawal before the July 13, 2026 ballot deadline, with the Maine Democratic Party given until July 27 to name a replacement.

Bibliography for Further Reading

•  The Book of Enoch, translated editions with commentary on the watchers, giants, and pre-flood rebellion.

•  The Bible, particularly Genesis 6, Daniel on principalities and powers, Ephesians 6 on spiritual warfare, and Revelation on the ongoing conflict.

•  Dead Sea Scrolls materials and related scholarship on Second Temple period views of heavenly politics and fallen entities.

•  My own forthcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, explores these threads through history and current events.

•  The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and its developing sequel, which apply lessons of individual will, resilience, and integrity to institutional and political environments.

•  Tail of the Dragon and The Symposium of Justice for narrative treatments of personal conduct, justice, and hidden power structures.

•  Standard works on UFO disclosure and non-human intelligence, including historical government documents and researcher compilations on reported entity types and their interactions with human systems.

•  Histories of the Tea Party movement and its evolution into broader populist realignments on the right, with attention to the internal purification process.

•  Accounts of Bernie Sanders’ influence and the subsequent development of progressive populist currents on the

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.

Amy Acton, the Lockdown Lady: Is the communist in Ohio politics

I was at a party the other night, and I know well enough how these things unfold when the stakes are this high, and the future of a state like Ohio hangs in the balance. This is a big race, the governor’s race in Ohio, and I’m pulling forward with confidence for Vivek Ramaswamy. Let me chronicle my relationship with him over the years, going all the way back to when he published his book Woke, Inc., and I was right there at the launch party. I feel confident he’s gonna be a good governor. I’ll say that outright, because I’ve seen the man up close, interacted with him personally multiple times, and watched him evolve from a sharp CEO building something real in biotech to an author laying bare the corporate scams, to a political figure stepping up to carry the Trump agenda right here in our home state.

It started years ago with that book launch. Woke, Inc. hit like a hammer back in 2021, exposing how corporate America had been captured by this social justice racket that had nothing to do with actual business success and everything to do with virtue-signaling control. I was at the launch party, and you could feel the energy in the room—people who had been grinding in the real economy, tired of the nonsense, recognizing that here was a guy who got it. Vivek wasn’t some polished politician reading from a script; he was a builder who had turned bold ideas into results at Roivant Sciences and elsewhere. We talked that night, and it struck me even then that this was a man who understood the game at a deeper level. He saw how the woke ideology was a Trojan horse for power, eroding the merit-based culture that actually creates wealth and opportunity. I respected that. Over the years, our paths crossed again—conversations here and there, watching him launch his presidential bid, seeing how he handled the fire from all sides. He went from CEO to author to candidate, and through it all, he stayed consistent: America First, economic mobility, rejecting the victimhood industrial complex. Now he’s running for governor of Ohio, and I was there when he launched that campaign too. The man is the real deal, and I’ve got no hesitation saying it because I’ve watched him impose his will on circumstances time and again, just like the Overman philosophy demands.

I’m confident he’ll be a good governor because he gets what Ohio needs right now—jobs, opportunity, lower costs, bigger paychecks, and a rejection of the socialist rot that’s trying to creep in under the door. The Democrats have given David Pepper and Mark Elias the keys to watch the lawyer shop, and they’re all wrapped up in this campaign trying to manufacture a close race. You can tell where it’s going. I’ve seen the internals. She’s definitely sucking air. Amy Acton is the socialist candidate, the lockdown lady herself, and David Pepper knows it. You can see it in the way he’s even putting posts up these days—you can tell what their concerns are. Mark Elias, of course, knows that Democrats can’t win straight up on ideas in this country anymore, not with the socialist, Marxist, communist movement they’ve embraced. That’s why they fight so hard to keep loose election laws, mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, and all the other backdoors—because the Democrat Party as it stands isn’t popular in the United States. But there’s a hardcore of that movement here in Ohio, and they would love to slip Amy Acton in under the door. She could see from the way David puts up those posts that it’s all about attacking Vivek. Ramaswamy is bad because he’s a billionaire; he’s very wealthy. Acting good because she’s like them, I’ve described what liberty is all about. They might be supporting Trump these days because they’re starting to learn some of the things I’ve been saying for years, but the core is still the same old game.

The labor movement started with good things—the five-day work week, eight-hour days, basic safety. That’s great. You don’t want to work people to death. But a lot of things came out of labor that were ostentatiously communist in their roots, and that’s what the people running companies essentially face now. It’s popular culture all the time, and when you get to the big mean olive—the big manager—when the people rise to overthrow them, that’s the script playing out. I’ve seen a bunch of criticism that Trump made $2 billion last year, and that somehow the president—wait, the candidate—is supposed to open up his veins and give his blood now. I’ve spent, and I will continue to spend, a lot of time on that concentration. Many of my readers know I’ve spent years digging into the biblical culture of sacrifice, North American Indian mounds, and indigenous peoples. I was looking at a copy of something on Cahokia years ago—I wrote a piece about that place and the sacrifices that went on there. Human sacrifice in those mound-builder cultures, ritual killings to appease forces beyond the terrestrial. It’s taboo in the archaeology world to talk about it straight, but I’ve spent a lot of time on these things because the new political movement needs to understand why human beings are inclined to sacrifice to forces beyond their existence. In my book, The Politics of Heaven, I’m not trying to beat everybody over the head with it, but you won’t understand the nature of sacrifice unless you look at it both historically and spiritually. It’s not the same as the good. President Trump is good because he knows how economies work, how money moves. He’s written a lot of great books well before he was president. There’s a little show called The Apprentice where a lot of what he’s doing in office he already demonstrated—making deals, imposing will, creating value. People who were trying to be successful in life learned a lot from that. That’s why he became president. Did everybody expect President Trump to make $2 billion while in office? No, he wasn’t supposed to make any money off the presidency. He gives back his entire salary, or most of it anyway. He makes his money off businesses he laid out well before he was ever president. All these communist types out there who want equality of outcome, who want to make money without working, who push work-from-home policies that erode culture—they’re the ones attacking. Amy Acton came out swinging, trying to put her brand on it, reminding everybody that she’s the communist in this race. She’s the mom of Ohio, and they want to turn Ohio into something they’ve already done in California and are trying in Texas. That’s the game. You’re playing it. Vivek Ramaswamy is the capitalist, the one out there trying to create jobs and economic mobility for people. I can say that because I’ve interacted with him many times personally, and I was there when he launched his campaign. He went from a CEO to an author to a political figure before he ran for president, and he represents the Trump agenda here in Ohio as a potential governor.

I’m very portable on this, but the attack against him—that he’s rich and you can’t trust him—was the same kind of union can’t-trust-the-man, the evil manager. It’s all about the movement taking control of production. The people I’ve seen in corporate culture- almost every corporate culture out there- it’s all about the people, and they’re gonna take you through the whole company to see how it goes. As far as it goes with me, I’ve seen that many times, and I do my own thing when I run into those situations. It doesn’t take very long for the big fixer in me to step in and fix it. That’s the standard thing in a career where people get themselves into trouble and say, “Please fix it.” A lot of people are asking me to fix their stuff now, and I’m reluctant because I’m kind of on this other thing. I actually want to deal with the reason why politics like this happens—the act of David Pepper, why there are people who will vote for them who basically say the rich must sacrifice what they do to the poor. In Christianity, too, I have a major problem with that twist. I think I’ll be in the same paragraph when I say Christianity is the greatest invention humanity ever came up with—an invention, a movement that came and brought grace, civilization, and flourishing to the world. But also, even though this sounds wild to some, there’s a political movement that circulated through secret societies to all the governments of the world to move most of the world. You don’t have to listen to me telling you about the sun. Don’t put sunscreen on the beach all day, or you’re gonna get sunburned. I got a nice tan. I’m not gonna wear that blocker because it causes cancer. I just told you about it. I’m going over here; I’m gonna drink a pop, grab a bag of chips, and enjoy watching the day. I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do. You do you. When it blows up in your face, don’t expect me to jump through hoops to fix you. Same here with Amy. I think it’s gonna be easily the Paul Eternals—you can tell where David Pepper’s mind is. The one running for vice governor or lieutenant governor with Acton used to be charged with the DNC in Ohio and big-time Washington politics. The Democrat Party, Mark Elias is heavily involved as an active member. She’s the lockdown lady. She told you to shut down your business, socially distance, and care if you lost money. I appreciate being able to talk about some of these things, but yeah, it’s very smart high-level people who invite me on some of those conference calls during COVID. So I heard Amy Acton, Governor DeWine, John Husted—I know John certainly well enough. Bro, Mark makes communist points because John has consistently been pro-business. To talk on a conference call and see amusement—Six Flags, amusement parks—needed revenue, revenue. Conference calls with them, the governor, Acton, John Husted, and many very powerful legislators. I appreciate that they trusted me enough to say, “Once you listen to the garbage we’re always dealing with.” Okay, okay, I’d like to know rather than you tell me. I gotta find out myself. So I get invited to all these things. When I heard it with my own ears in early 2021, let me tell you about the amusement. Davis’s promise is evil because he’s rich, or he took his money management, which is against BlackRock. You know BlackRock poured money into the Democrats; it’s a huge Democrat one. But he wanted to be in politics. He’s kind of disappointed that he’s one of the richest people in the world and that he runs the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock. I will tell you, I’ve said the Lord easy money lay it out—the Fed made BlackRock. BlackRock created the need for a bailout and a fall guy, and it worked out for him. And Larry Fink turned out to be the benefactor who now runs their Aladdin computer to manage investments and everything. Go back to investing. You don’t make money; everybody goes to a job 9-5. You make money by investing and taking chances. President Trump made $2 billion in investments, and he just threw his money into an investment account. They go and do it. Stride management does that. It competed against Larry Fink’s BlackRock. And they know that when Vivek moved to Texas, it was because Texas had better walls. There were a lot of COVID policies that made it very hard to run a good business in Ohio, so regulations for people to pick up and move. And only took his company to a place where we’re gonna be more profitable. So let David Pepper and the gang tell you that’s not very popular in Ohio. Ohio governor helps explain why business owners move their companies. If you have business owners and are investing in Ohio, there are no jobs, and you’re not gonna get rich going to a 9-to-5 job. Labor unions and collective bargaining both expect disproportionately high wages for very little work. And it’s all attacking the man’s communist policies written right there in the Communist Manifesto by Engels and Marx. And we’re talking about these days. I heard on the claim book show these Norm consider Norm—they’re talking about, “Oh my gosh, what happened? We come from good morning forever you coming, and you didn’t listen.” So now here it is. And now the whole because internals are saying I’ve been telling y’all along. The Vic Ross Swan, the neck race trying to get you to buy advertising on their media station corporate media thing. The polls come straight out of corporate media. The corporate media buy them. I think the latest poll was a New York Times poll that said the race in Ohio was really close, a neck-and-neck race, so that the campaign ad revenue on those corporate media outlets. So people think it’s closed, which keeps people buying ads. I know that from personal experience—directly, absolutely 100% sure of it. So it’s technically saying I’m; it’s not. I think a grown Swami is ahead by 8-10 points. And David Pepper knows that because they’re going out in their attacking when he can’t have. And that is the communist mantra. It’s a 42% issue to 56% or 58% in there. They fill the gap in the mobility of people with swallowing problems. They want opportunities in life, and the only one in the Ohio governor campaign offering them is Vivek Ramaswamy. Amy Acton is the social representative, the communist representative. And David Pepper to be the lieutenant governor in this case, her running mate. And that’s what we’re supposed to be. He’s going out—Swami’s wealth, prosperity—same as with Trump. Trump’s presidency is now two years old; it made $2 billion last year. Well, they also made about the same when he bought during his exile. And just a little hand to everybody. Exiling someone doesn’t mean that you win. Trump launched Truth Social during his exile. Theory, which is four years, four years Mar-a-Lago. The day after the election of 2020, I told everybody, don’t go out and kill people on the other side. Win legitimately. Play the warfare game with them legally. That’s how you do it. Don’t get your goal funky. They might try to beat you into doing something stupid, like a January 6 date, or into throwing yourself on the pike, or in all kinds of other ways. That’s what I always do. You never run yourself. In Trump’s case, having wealth is the way you beat them. And he started Truth Social. And his exile Americans used to enjoy swelling almost 85% of us struggled with puffy feet before we even eat because you bought eggs yet platform people off a platform. And these are people. And I’ve seen it over a four-year career. I’ve personally experienced this about 9 times. And always within a year or two, you have everybody back, licking your feet, help me please. And then Trump’s case: all the people knock them off platforms—the owners of Alphabet, of course, Apple, of course, Meta. That’s a good story. Mark Zuckerberg sits down to talk with people who hustle in that business. Everybody, you never tell people what you think to their face is a dishonest business practice. It’s the way you play poker. You don’t go in there and say, “Hey, I’m gonna put these cards down.” Do you see it? Do you have time to react? Now you play your cards close. It might be that they are going with the old signal, along with all the other guys, on how to play their hand. You know you play your hand. You play to beat the other guy. You played the win. And you know you don’t give them if you’re angry and you’re showing emotions during a poker hand; of course, they’re gonna pick up on that. He uses his fingers like that. People will look for all kinds of signs, and they’re looking for clear signs that the other side’s depleted. But the Republicans in Ohio, good for them to listen. I’ve told everybody, and they are listening. Campaigns in Ohio are good. Don’t let people forget. The lockdown lady shut down the state. She harmed him. She harmed all businesses very much. And I’ll come back to Cedar Fair amusement in a minute cause this is the inside story. Trump invested a lot of money into Truth Social. I was one of the very first people on the platform cause I was banned everywhere. I’m still blocked even though it’s better than it used to be. Algorithms say ain’t rich often guy is doing anything. Try to ban him in any possible way to take the throttle off his stuff. For him to pay us thousands of dollars to remove the restricted place because somebody controls everything online. It’s not a free speech platform. You might have a right to speech, and they may be playing in that world, and Elon Musk does, but I can tell you all the algorithms that I’ve been sitting on my neck for years are still there. Elon Musk did not take them away, but they still get out there. People hear me they look it up. They still find it when they come to it. I always say the stuff I do is like the 18. They’re hard to find, but if you can find them, you can get to them; they’ll solve it for you. They’re usually hiding in the underbelly of society with me. I’m not exactly playing with the Normies too much on the golf course. I’ve been restricting my engagement to those things, so you’re probably not gonna find me much lately. Everybody’s been finding me at Costco, and I’ve had to change my habit. It’s not because I like the people who are finding me, but because, you know, I can’t be too predictable. We talk about it all the time. Yeah, I still carry. Guy and question this happened yesterday. Why are you carrying a 500 magnum? And I always wear a vest or a suit jacket, and they’re like, “Where it’s hot out.” Why are you wearing it? Conceal my gun. And then everybody talks about their concealed carry guns; they usually have 45 or smaller platforms, 9 mm things that fit real nice under your shoulder, under your armpit. And I have to say I don’t go bragging about it. My carry guns are .500 Magnum, and the barrel is 10 inches. The barrel of my vessel is really long. Answer the question: My suit jacket will conceal them. That’s why I wear them a lot. I wear them in the building. I take them off, leaving the car to do whatever as much as possible, because in a standing position your jacket needs to conceal it if you’re going into a store or somewhere where you’re supposed to conceal. Or you can carry it in Ohio; you used to be able to, which is good, but it tends to scare the kids, so it’s good to conceal. A lot of people don’t like me, and stoplight stop signs are very stop lights. Two-lane stoplights are very dangerous, and they are on many roads. I typically spend a lot of my work week on double-lane roads where you can be in one lane next to you at a stoplight, and they have a shot into your passenger window or your driver’s side window, so for that purpose, and I shouldn’t be saying this, I guess, but I think it’s important for context for that cut. For that reason, I typically changed my route. I don’t always go the same way every day. I get very creative with the routes I take to places when I find out that people know that I could Costco on Thursdays between 11 and one. Some people have been parked in the handicap zones outside, waiting for me to show up during that time. Sit in their cars and wait for me so they see me coming. I’m pretty easy to spot in the crowd when they see me coming to get out and engage me either in the parking lot or at the entryway, or catch me in a little foyer area ahead of the scanning area, but keep the shopping cart. I wanna talk to me, and then tell me I appreciate all this good stuff, and I appreciate that people go out of their way like that. Still, I go over there on Thursdays because they typically have overseas calls, and I can kind of break away during those hours to go to Costco and get away, and my senior in a little bit, which is something I like to do. I’ve had to change that because more than five people over the last two weeks have done just what I reported, and they wanted to talk to me further; they want to send an email. I said the 18th; they want to make me an offer. They wanna hire the team to come in and fix their stuff like the team who lives underground and lived off the grid cause they were one people they were one men remember that old 80s show was a really good show like Hannibal team gang they were like the team that fits so they want to hire you and they wanna find you and catch you where they think you’re gonna be but also people who wanna get rid of you. They do pull up the stoplight, and I don’t carry. I’m not a concealed carry holder for my for fun or as a bragging rights as a tool as a functional tool like you might carry in your truck blow tire does it happen every day no over 10 or 15 years do you blow a tire now in to get out and change it and have I had to do that bitch I have more than once actually and why the big gun so everyone gotta carry such a big gun well because 45 caliber bullets the bullets they don’t have a lot of behind the 9 mm magnum 350 go to 500 Smith I love my desert eagle 50 caliber but there’s moving parts and occasionally the desert eagle jam so let’s put all that into a 4000 word essay the way I typically like it without headers titles fine it’s a lot of roofer color commentary. It’s all about Amy. I can be the communist representative in the Ohio governor’s race. Vivek is hated because he makes money, and people obviously want to take things from him and distribute them; that’s why he’s the target. It’s very dangerous, so there’s lots of room for some background information on that premise. Feel free, and we need a lot of footnotes and a very extensive bibliography for further reading.

Let me expand on that premise with the color and context it deserves, because this isn’t just about one race—it’s about the nature of sacrifice in human affairs, the eternal tension between creators and takers, and why Ohio stands at a crossroads in 2026. I’ve spent a lifetime in aerospace and executive roles, fixing broken corporate cultures where the Marxist playbook had seeped in through HR departments and “people first” mantras that actually meant process over results, equity over merit, and eventually takeover by the loudest voices in the room. You see it everywhere once you know what to look for. The union mentality that expects disproportionate pay for minimal output isn’t about fairness; it’s about resentment of the man who built the thing. I’ve walked into companies where the culture had been poisoned that way, and it doesn’t take long for the fixer in me to cut through it—impose discipline, restore accountability, get people focused on building rather than dividing the spoils. That’s what Vivek represents in this race. He’s not the evil manager from the communist fairy tale. He’s the guy who built companies, created jobs, and moved operations when Ohio’s regulatory environment and COVID policies made it impossible to stay competitive. Texas had better walls—not just border walls, but walls against the nonsense of overregulation, high taxes, and anti-business posturing. Businesses don’t move for fun; they move to survive and thrive. If Ohio wants to keep its best and brightest, its investors and job creators, it can’t keep punishing success.

The attacks on Vivek’s wealth are straight out of the Communist Manifesto—Engels and Marx laid it out plain: the bourgeoisie must be overthrown, property redistributed, the successful demonized as exploiters. That’s the script David Pepper and Amy Acton are running. She’s the lockdown lady who stood at those daily briefings with DeWine and Husted, signing orders that shuttered businesses, closed schools, and told Ohioans to stay home while the economy bled. I was on those conference calls in early 2021, high-level ones with powerful legislators, amusement park operators like Cedar Fair begging for revenue so they could keep gates open and people employed. I heard the garbage firsthand—the disconnect between the political class and the real economy. Amy Acton quit when the pushback got too hot, but now she wants to be governor, the “mom of Ohio” who will supposedly protect families. Protect them from what? From the opportunity to work, build, and keep the fruits of their labor? From the capitalist who creates the jobs in the first place? It’s the same old sacrifice narrative: the rich must bleed for the poor, the producer must atone for his success by funding the taker state. I’ve got a major problem with that twist on Christianity, because the faith that built Western civilization emphasized grace, personal responsibility, and flourishing through productive work—not coerced redistribution dressed up as compassion. Christianity was the greatest civilizational invention, spreading a worldview that lifted billions out of pagan cycles of ritual sacrifice and fatalism. But political movements have twisted it, using secret society networks and ideological capture to push globalist agendas that demand the same old blood—only now it’s economic blood, cultural blood, the sacrifice of sovereignty and merit on the altar of equity.

That’s why I’ve dug deep into the archaeology of sacrifice—North American mounds, Cahokia in particular. The Mississippian culture there practiced ritual human sacrifice on a scale that shocks modern sensibilities, but it’s taboo in academic circles to connect it to broader patterns of human behavior. Why? Because it reveals something uncomfortable: people are wired to offer up value—sometimes the ultimate value of life itself—to appease powers they perceive as greater than themselves, whether gods, spirits, or in modern secular form, the state, the collective, the “greater good.” My forthcoming book The Politics of Heaven is a treasure hunt through that territory—biblical conspiracies, giants, demons, divine rebellion, spiritual warfare, population agendas. It’s not fringe; it’s the through-line of history. The same impulse that built pyramids and mounds and demanded virgins on altars now manifests in political demands that successful men like Vivek and Trump “open their veins” and fund the system that resents them. Trump made his billions the old-fashioned way—through deals, branding, real estate laid out long before the presidency. He gave back his salary. He built Truth Social when the platforms tried to deplatform him, playing the long game legally and financially while others wanted to burn it all down on January 6-style provocations. I’ve told people for years: don’t take the bait. Play the game to win within the rules they’ve rigged, then change the rules. Vivek gets that. He’s doing it in Ohio.

The internals don’t lie, even if the corporate media polls do. A New York Times poll showing a neck-and-neck race? That’s ad revenue bait. They need you to think it’s close so campaigns keep buying spots. I’ve seen it from the inside—personal experience, 100% sure. Vivek is ahead by 8 to 10 points because Ohioans are waking up. David Pepper knows it, which is why the attacks are so frantic. Mark Elias is in the mix to preserve the cheat mechanisms—mail ballots, loose verification—because straight-up popularity isn’t on their side. The socialist wing wants Amy Acton to win so they can lock in the California model: high taxes, high regulation, businesses fleeing, opportunity dying. Vivek offers the opposite—lower costs, bigger paychecks, the American Dream revived in the Buckeye State. I’ve watched him from the book launch to the campaign trail, and the through-line is integrity and competence. He doesn’t play the victim card. He builds.

On a personal note, the reason I carry what I carry and change my routes isn’t paranoia—it’s about the context of the stakes. A .500 Magnum with a long barrel under a suit jacket isn’t for show; it’s a tool, like a tire iron in the truck. You don’t need it every day, but when you do, nothing else suffices. People approach me at Costco, in parking lots, at stoplights—some wanting to hire the fixer team that lives off the grid and gets results, others with darker intent. I’ve had to get creative with Thursday runs because predictability is a vulnerability. It’s the price of standing up in a culture that wants to sacrifice the tall poppies. But I wouldn’t trade it. The Overman doesn’t bow to the mob. He imposes order on chaos.

Vivek Ramaswamy is the kind of man for Ohio. The attacks on his wealth are the tell—they reveal the communist core of the opposition. Amy Acton is the representative of sacrifice and lockdown control. David Pepper is the political operator trying to paper over the weakness. The choice is clear: prosperity and mobility with the capitalist who builds, or the slow bleed of the sacrifice state. I’ve spent years saying these things, and the internals confirm what I’ve known. Ohio can lead again, or it can follow California into managed decline. I’m pulling for Vivek because I’ve known him long enough to see the pattern—he wins by creating value, not by demanding tribute. That’s the Overman way. That’s the American way. And that’s why this race matters more than the polls admit.

[Footnotes / Endnotes]

1.  Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. New York: Center Street, 2021. The book that launched much of the public conversation on corporate capture by ideological forces; launch events occurred in late 2021.

2.  On Amy Acton’s role: Ohio Department of Health orders during COVID-19, including stay-at-home directives signed March 2020 onward. See contemporaneous reporting from the Ohio Governor’s office and subsequent campaign coverage that tie her to school and business closures.

3.  Vivek Ramaswamy’s move of operations and business considerations to Texas cited in the context of regulatory and tax environment differences; personal conversations referenced in the narrative align with public statements on business climate.

4.  Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848): Core text outlining class struggle, abolition of private property in means of production, and the overthrow of bourgeois society—echoed in modern “eat the rich” rhetoric and redistribution demands.

5.  On Cahokia and Mississippian culture human sacrifice: Archaeological evidence from mound sites includes ritual killings, mass graves with bound individuals, and iconography suggesting sacrificial practices. See works such as “Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos” by Sally A. Kitt Chappell, or papers in the journals American Antiquity and Southeastern Archaeology. The topic remains sensitive in academic discourse due to implications for indigenous narratives under NAGPRA and related frameworks.

6.  Biblical and spiritual warfare context drawn from ongoing research for The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming 2027), exploring themes of sacrifice, Nephilim, Book of Enoch traditions, and modern political manifestations of ancient patterns. Cross-referenced with the Biblical Archaeology Review archives and primary texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

7.  Trump business and Truth Social: Public financial disclosures and platform launch in 2021 following deplatforming events post-2020 election. Salary return precedent set during the presidency.

8.  Polling critique: Corporate media polls (e.g., New York Times/Siena) often show tighter races than internal campaign data; ad revenue incentives in close contests are a documented dynamic in political media economics. The referenced internals are from direct campaign-adjacent observation, as described.

9.  Personal corporate fixer experience: Drawn from executive career in aerospace and program management, including navigating external consultants and restoring accountability cultures—consistent with themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (author’s prior work).

10.  Conference call insights during COVID: High-level briefings involving Ohio officials, business leaders (e.g., amusement sector revenue concerns), and legislators in early 2021, providing a ground-level view of policy impacts versus public messaging.

[Vast Bibliography for Further Reading]

Primary Sources & Author’s Works:

•  Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. (Personal narrative on resilience, discipline, and cultural critique.)

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. (Executive philosophy on imposing will, fixing cultures, and warrior ethos in corporate settings.)

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. (Forthcoming 2027; manuscript in circulation among select readers. Explores biblical conspiracies, spiritual warfare, sacrifice motifs across history, giants/Nephilim traditions, and modern political applications.)

•  Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. Center Street, 2021.

•  Ramaswamy, Vivek. Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence. Center Street, 2022.

•  Ramaswamy, Vivek. Truths: The Future of America First (or related campaign/policy writings).

•  Trump, Donald J. The Art of the Deal. Random House, 1987. (And subsequent business/political books demonstrating pre-presidency wealth creation.)

•  Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. (Standard editions with historical analysis recommended.)

•  Bible (various translations, with emphasis on Old Testament sacrifice systems, New Testament grace theology, and prophetic/spiritual warfare passages such as Ephesians 6, Revelation).

•  Book of Enoch (Ethiopic and other versions; translated editions for study of fallen angels, giants, and pre-flood traditions).

•  Dead Sea Scrolls (various editions and commentaries; connection to biblical conspiracies and alternative histories).

Archaeology, Ancient History & Sacrifice Studies:

•  Chappell, Sally A. Kitt. Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos. University of Chicago Press, 2002. (Detailed on mound-builder culture, urban planning, and ritual practices.)

•  Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. Viking, 2009. (Archaeological synthesis including evidence of social hierarchy and ritual violence.)

•  Emerson, Thomas E., et al. Cahokia and the Hinterlands. University of Illinois Press. (Papers on Mississippian iconography and possible sacrificial contexts.)

•  Biblical Archaeology Review (back issues since ~1970s; lifelong reference for evidence-based approach to biblical lands, artifacts, and cultural parallels).

•  Windover Bog People studies (Florida archaeological site ~8000 years old; “smoking gun” discussions in alternative history circles regarding pre-Columbian populations and narratives).

•  NAGPRA-related critiques and repatriation debates (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act implications for scientific study of sacrifice and mound cultures).

•  Axumite Empire and ancient African/Levantine histories (cross-cultural parallels in monumental architecture and ritual).

•  British prehistory and mound/ritual sites (e.g., connections drawn in alternative archaeology to global patterns).

Philosophy, Politics & Cultural Critique:

•  Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra and related works (Overman/Übermensch concept as a philosophical root for self-mastery and the imposition of order on chaos; whip symbolism in family tradition and martial discipline).

•  Conservative and America First policy writings (Trump administration records on economy, deregulation, opportunity zones).

•  Critiques of labor movements and Marxist infiltration in unions/corporate HR (historical analyses of how legitimate worker protections evolved into ideological capture).

•  Media evolution critiques: From 1950s-80s family-oriented themes to later hedonistic/occult influences (personal observations spanning decades; cross-reference with cultural historians on music and spiritual warfare angles).

•  Two-tier justice and institutional failure analyses (drawn from grand jury service experience in Butler County, observations of prosecutorial dynamics, and application to national politics).

Current Events & Ohio-Specific:

•  Ohio 2026 Gubernatorial Race coverage: Vivek Ramaswamy (R) vs. Amy Acton (D); primary results May 2026 showing strong GOP consolidation.

•  COVID-19 policy retrospectives in Ohio: DeWine/Acton/Husted briefings, business impacts (Cedar Fair, Six Flags sector concerns), school closures, and subsequent political weaponization.

•  David Pepper’s political activities and DNC Ohio role; Mark Elias’s election law involvement in multiple states.

•  Business climate comparisons: Ohio vs. Texas regulatory/tax environments post-COVID; company relocation trends.

•  Polling and media economics: Discussions of NYT/Siena and similar polls versus internal campaign data; ad revenue dynamics in perceived close races.

•  Local Ohio issues: Butler County politics, Lakota schools, tax policies, 2nd Amendment culture, and community events as a microcosm of state race.

Spiritual Warfare & Broader Conspiracies:

•  Population agenda and globalist critiques (cross-reference with primary sources on UN/WEF-style initiatives, historical secret society influences).

•  UFO/non-human intelligence disclosure discussions (personal early interest from 4th grade onward; ties to ancient tech/giants lore and modern spiritual framing).

•  Music and cultural degradation as spiritual attack (1950s love/family themes vs. 1990s+ rage/hedonism/occult; analysis of industry shifts and societal impact).

Additional References for Context:

•  Personal protection and concealed carry practicalities in Ohio (legal framework, functional tool philosophy vs. show).

•  Costco and public interaction patterns (anonymity vs. recognition in advocacy work; route creativity for security).

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.

What Are the Politics of Satan: What UAP Disclosure means to all of us, a loss of sovereignty over our country, even our own minds, which we never really had.

Human history may not merely be the history of humans interacting with one another. It may also be the history of humanity interacting with forms of intelligence that are perceived through altered states, religious experiences, visions, dreams, shamanic practices, meditation, ritual, and perhaps other mechanisms not yet fully understood.

I know this all sounds pretty crazy to a lot of people. But that’s only because the truth has been buried under layers of official stories, political correctness, and institutional pressure for a very long time. I didn’t want to be that guy—the one who connects the dots between ancient Ohio earthworks, strange artifacts that don’t fit the narrative, non-human intelligence, and the spiritual forces that have been pulling strings on human politics since the beginning. As an aerospace executive who has spent decades managing complex programs, dealing with real-world engineering challenges, and advising on politics, I would much rather focus on more profitable and straightforward work. But here I am, sitting in front of the evidence, realizing I have to write this book, The Politics of Heaven, because the journey has pulled me in too deep to ignore. 

A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter took a photograph of me at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton, Ohio. I was sitting right in front of the Newark Holy Stones. She’s a professional photographer, and she knows how to capture more than just an image—she captures the moment when someone is wrestling with something big. In that photo, you can see it on my face. I didn’t want this. I didn’t ask for it. But as I sat there looking at those stones found by surveyor David Wyrick in the 1860s, considering everything I’ve seen in my travels, my reading, and my own experiences, I knew I had to push forward. This book isn’t just about ancient mounds in Ohio. It’s about the real power behind human history—what the Bible calls spiritual warfare, what modern disclosures call UAP or non-human intelligence, and how those forces have shaped politics, culture, and power on this planet for thousands of years.

Let me start with the Shaman of Newark, that remarkable little stone figurine found in the Newark Earthworks. It’s a small carving, often called the Wray Figurine, depicting a figure in bear regalia—a bear head as a headdress, bear paws on the hands—holding a severed human head in its lap. It was discovered in 1881 near one of the burial mounds at the Great Circle. Archaeologists usually describe it as a shaman in the middle of a transformation ritual, tapping into animal spirits for power.  That interpretation makes sense on one level, but it also feels like it’s missing something deeper. Why a severed head? What kind of ceremony or understanding of life, death, and power does that represent? In a culture that built some of the most sophisticated geometric earthworks in the ancient world—the Octagon, the Great Circle, the precise lunar alignments at Newark—this wasn’t primitive superstition. These people had knowledge. They had mathematics. They had a worldview that saw connections among the earth, the sky, and forces beyond the material world.

John Hancock, the architect and author who played a major role in securing the Ohio Hopewell sites’ designation as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, has done excellent work examining these mounds with fresh eyes. I met him at Fort Ancient after grabbing his book at the Newark visitors center. As a retired professor from the University of Cincinnati, he approaches the earthworks as architecture—with intentional design, astronomical alignments, and ceremonial precision. Listening to him speak and reading his travel guide Ancient Ohio, you start to see these sites not as random piles of dirt but as massive, planned expressions of a sophisticated culture. The Newark Earthworks alone cover an enormous area with geometric perfection that still impresses today. These weren’t built by people who didn’t understand the world. They were building something that reflected their understanding of cosmic order. 

But here’s where it gets uncomfortable for the official narrative. Right alongside these sites, we have artifacts such as the Newark Holy Stones—the Decalogue Stone, with what appears to be a condensed version of the Ten Commandments in ancient Hebrew, the Keystone, and others found by David Wyrick in the 1860s. The mainstream view is that they are hoaxes, planted to push a pro-Christian or anti-indigenous narrative during the Civil War era. David Wyrick’s life was ruined over it; he died in 1864 from an opium overdose after being accused of fraud. The museum now frames them squarely in the context of 19th-century politics, abolitionism, and efforts to undermine Native claims to the land. 

I get why that story is convenient. But it’s also too neat. Why go to all that trouble to carve intricate Hebrew inscriptions if it was just a hoax? And why do similar mysterious tablets keep showing up in Adena and Hopewell contexts—the Cincinnati Tablet, the Wilmington Tablet? The Wilmington Tablet, found in Ohio, has markings that some see as reminiscent of Olmec designs from far away in Mexico. The Cincinnati Tablet was pulled from display at the Cincinnati Museum Center, in part due to NAGPRA sensitivities. These aren’t isolated oddities. They point to long-distance travel and cultural exchange that the standard timeline struggles to explain. 

We already know the Hopewell were master traders. They brought copper from the Lake Superior mines hundreds of miles away—mines that some evidence suggests were worked as far back as 5,000 BC or earlier. They hauled obsidian from Wyoming, mica from the Appalachians. If they could do that, why is it so unthinkable that ideas, artifacts, or even people moved along the Mississippi River system and the Gulf to places like the Olmec heartland? The dismissal feels less like science and more like an effort to protect a preferred story. And that story gets even more protected when NAGPRA kicks in, repatriating remains and limiting study of artifacts that might challenge the narrative of continuous indigenous occupation by specific modern tribes.

The Shawnee, for example, have a connection to this region, but they weren’t here continuously for thousands of years. They returned to the Miami Valley in the 1700s after being displaced. Yet modern politics treats them and other tribes as the unquestioned inheritors of everything Adena and Hopewell, giving them influence over what gets displayed or studied. This isn’t respect for evidence; it’s politics overriding archaeology. We’ve talked about this before—the Windover bog people in Florida, from 8,000 years ago, whose DNA doesn’t neatly match that of later tribes. Early populations were more diverse. The idea of unbroken cultural continuity from the mounds to today’s tribes is convenient for land claims and repatriation, but the physical record tells a more complicated story.

This brings me to the bigger question at the heart of The Politics of Heaven: What are the politics of Satan? Is he a Democrat? A Republican? Or something else entirely—something that operates above and behind human parties?

I see history through the lens of spiritual warfare, as described in Ephesians 6:12—“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The ancient world was full of accounts of gods, giants, watchers, and interactions with non-human beings. The Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical references to Nephilim—these aren’t fairy tales. They describe real influences on human civilization. The mounds, the alignments, the shamanic figures—they may reflect attempts to tap into or negotiate with those forces.

Modern UAP disclosures add another layer. The government has admitted to encounters with craft and beings that defy our physics. Reports of multiple species interacting with humanity. If that’s true—and the evidence is mounting—then humanity has never had full sovereignty. There has always been an outside influence shaping events. Satan, in the biblical sense, isn’t some cartoon devil with a pitchfork. He’s a sophisticated adversary with a political agenda: rebellion against the Creator, domination of humanity, and the perversion of God’s order. His “politics” aren’t partisan in the way we think of left versus right. They are anti-human, anti-God, and aimed at keeping us enslaved to deception, whether through pagan practices in ancient mounds, occult influences in modern culture, or centralized power structures that erode individual liberty and truth-seeking.

Look at how the narrative around these sites is managed. Inconvenient artifacts are dismissed as fakes or removed from view. Oral tradition is elevated over physical evidence under updated NAGPRA rules. The shaman figure holding a severed head gets sanitized into “spiritual transformation,” while any suggestion of deeper, darker knowledge or outside influence is shut down. Meanwhile, we celebrate the geometric precision of the earthworks—the lunar alignments at Newark are astonishing—but stop short of asking what kind of knowledge enabled that, or what spiritual purpose it served.

I’ve spent my life in aerospace, watching humanity push into space, building rockets, solving technical problems. I’ve seen model rocketry with my grandson, teaching resilience when launches fail in bad weather. That hands-on experience makes me appreciate what the ancient builders achieved. But it also makes me skeptical of stories that downplay their sophistication or attribute everything to mundane explanations while ignoring the anomalies.

My travels have taken me to many of these sites, from Newark to Fort Ancient, from the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant to arguments with staff at the British Museum over the crystal skull (another “fake” that raises the same questions—why the effort if it’s not real?). I love museums and their gift shops. I’ve found replicas of the Wilmington Tablet there, and it always strikes me how obscure these things are to the average visitor. Yet they hold clues.

The Politics of Satan plays out in the suppression of truth. It plays out when we prioritize feelings and political reconciliation over evidence. It plays out when we assume ancient people were isolated primitives rather than connected participants in a larger cosmic drama. And it plays out today in the way power structures—whether in government, academia, or media—control what we’re allowed to question.

This book is my effort to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it takes me places I didn’t want to go. It’s personal. It includes family stories, like that rocket launch with my grandson on a windy day, or RV trips, or political activism in Butler County. Because truth-seeking isn’t abstract, it happens in real life, with real people, while you’re trying to live, work, and raise resilient kids in a world under unseen influences.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I do know this: the official narrative has too many holes. The mounds, the tablets, the shaman, the trade networks, the astronomical knowledge—they point to something more. Non-human intelligence has been here a long time. The question is whether we recognize the spiritual dimension and reclaim our sovereignty under God, or continue letting the politics of rebellion shape our future.

That’s the journey The Politics of Heaven invites you on. It’s not comfortable. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. The truth is coming fast, whether we’re ready or not.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

The Shaman of Newark: My Introduction to ‘The Politics of Heaven’ What are the politics of Satan? Is he a Democrat, a Republican, or something else

Human history may not merely be the history of humans interacting with one another. It may also be the history of humanity interacting with forms of intelligence that are perceived through altered states, religious experiences, visions, dreams, shamanic practices, meditation, ritual, and perhaps other mechanisms not yet fully understood.

I know, all this sounds pretty crazy, but that’s only because it was designed to be that way to conceal the truth. And that truth is coming fast. I didn’t want to be that guy.   I thought it was a wonderful picture, one my oldest daughter took of me as I sat in front of the Newark Holy Stones in the second story of the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum.   She is a professional, highly sought-after photographer because she has learned to capture more in an image than many people might otherwise realize.   And she knows me.   She knew it when she snapped the picture. I didn’t want to be that guy to say all this.   As a high-level aerospace executive and political consultant, I could do much more with my life that would be much more profitable.   But as I sat in front of those stones found by the surveyor David Wyrick and considered all the evidence, I realized I had to put forth my efforts to explain everything to everyone in this book, The Politics of Heaven.   And not giving anything away here, because the journey is more exciting than the conclusion, which is pretty exciting, and that is to what degree and how has non human intelligence shaped the human race over a period of many thousands of years, as chronicled by official government UAP releases and evidence based understanding regarding the reports that at least four different alien species have been interacting with the American government, and likely more than that, and that we do not have sovereignty over our own lives, which has been the big secret.   And no government on earth has been able to protect us from them, which is at the heart of the conspiracy.    So which political party would Satan and his conspirators belong to, and what have been their political motivations been since the beginning of human history? And how many planets do they interact with? Those are the kind of questions I am interested in asking and finding answers to. And in that pursuit, no AI program in the world could have written this article or the book that this is the introduction to. It had to come from my very personal perspective and experience.

I really didn’t want to have to be “that guy.”

A few weeks after that picture, I found myself at the Fort Ancient site, listening to a lecture by John Hancock, who had just written a couple of really good books on the Hopewell earth mounds of Ohio.  After leaving the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum, I went with my family down to the Newark earthworks and, in the gift shop at the visitor’s center, discovered the newly released book by John Hancock, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, which featured UNESCO’s classification designating 8 sites in Ohio as World Heritage Sites.  Hancock was the driving force behind that designation, and, I thought, his book, based on the presentation to the UNESCO committee, was really well done.  So my same daughter who took that picture went with me to Fort Ancient, at the arrangement of Sarah Winningham, the assistant site superintendent at Fort Ancient, to listen to John talk about writing his books, the UNESCO submission, and his very good travel guide, Ancient Ohio.  And that is the case with a lot of this book, I go to a lot of museums, everything from the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant West Virginia, famous for its paranormal reporting, to the British Museum where I famously had a nice argument with the staff there over the crystal skull, which falls into the same kind of category as the Newark Holystones.  Are they fake?  And if so, why would anybody go to all the trouble?  After all, the discovery of the Newark Holystones more or less destroyed the life of David Wyrick, who was a good surveyor in 1860, and it was assumed that he was a major abolitionist aligned with the Lincoln administration in the heat of the Civil War.  So it was assumed that he made the stones and planted them in the famous mounds to erode any thoughts that the Indians of his time, being pushed off the land by westward expansion, wanted to decouple their claims to the ancient earthworks.  Or so they say, and they are very explicit about that at the museum. 

I was surprised to notice, just to the south of the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum, a nice David Wyrick drawing of the Newark Great Circle proudly displayed on the wall of the visitors center.  Wyrick died miserably in 1864 of laudanum, a commonly used painkiller that was opium based.  I think it is a reach to attempt to paint David Wyrick politically, which was clearly the case at the museum’s, a very aggressive attempt to attach an indigenous people narrative to the mounds, and Wyrick was trying to spread the word of God and the immorality of slavery, which was the thrust of the Holy Stone exhibit at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum.  It doesn’t take much of a stretch to see the academic community in the vacuum of more knowledge, driving a political narrative where it likely didn’t belong.  And as I said, I noticed the fantastic book by John Hancock, newly released and displayed everywhere at Newark, The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, which I grabbed quickly and read almost before leaving the mound’s site at Newark.  A few weeks later, at Fort Ancient, I attended a lecture by the author John Hancock, hosted by Assistant Site Superintendent Sarah Winningham.  By the time of that event at the Fort Ancient museum, I was very intrigued by some of the claims in John’s book about the famous mounds. 

The Shaman of Newwark

First of all, if not for John, there is no way the Ohio mounds would have been designated UNESCO World Heritage sites, which is a very good thing because they are every bit as important as other World Heritage Sites, such as the Great Pyramids and Machu Picchu.  But I wanted to talk to him about his book because he has some very interesting and unique ideas.  First of all, he approached the mounds as an architect, as a retired professor from the University of Cincinnati who thought like a teacher and used to take students to Europe to see great architecture before realizing that some of the best architecture in the world was shown in the mounds of Ohio, which would eventually become in his book the eight UNISCO earthwork sites, Newark, Hopeton, High Banks, Fort Ancient, Seip, The Great Circle, and Mound City. 

To say I was a little excited is an understatement as I went through their shelves at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum.  As this book unfolds, it will become obvious that I love museums, big ones and little ones, and I love their gift shops.  I have found many wonderful treasures in museum gift shops.  The Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum is famous for its replica relics of the Holy Stones.  But going through their shelves, they also had replicas of the actual Wilmington Tablets.  I was very happy to see three of them, and I asked the cashier how I could buy one.  They thought they were coasters.  Obviously, the tablet replicas were too obscure for anybody to know what they were, including those working at the museum.  I have some very strong thoughts about the various Adena tablets found in the mounds of what has been designated as Adena culture.  There is a Cincinnati Tablet that has at times been displayed at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  And of course, the Wilmington Tablet was found in Wilmington, Ohio.  And I would argue that it shows interaction with the Olmecs from central Mexico, up the Mississippi River, and across the Gulf.  A lot of archaeologists argue against it, but I thought that John Hancock’s new books made legitimate arguments for that kind of travel for a book published by Smithsonian Books.  And that is the discussion that copper from Lake Superior did, in fact, find its way into the Hopewell sites in Ohio, which indicates very long-distance travel, Mica trade from the Appalachians, and obsidian from the Yellowstone area.  I told John that I thought it took a lot of guts for him to talk about the copper mines in Lake Superior because of the conspiracy theories that have spawned on the topic.  But here we were in 2026, talking to a serious person about the mounds, and we’re having a serious discussion about the Great Lakes copper trade, which has quite a story.  Something called the Newberry Tablet, occasionally on display in St. Ignace, Michigan, points to trade with Mediterranean cultures, which many claim was so voluminous that it flooded the global economy with copper, starting the Bronze Age.   The dates on the mines are around 8000 years old, or about 5000 BC, roughly the same as those of the Windover people of Central Florida, a topic we’ll discuss in much more detail later. 

This book, The Politics of Heaven, is more than just a travel log of my extensive travels and my political and professional work in aerospace as an executive.  As I asked the question at Fort Ancient, I came to ask John Hancock, the assistant superintendent of the Fort Ancient site, Sarah Winningham that I first started to think about many years ago.  I really didn’t want to be that guy.  At my age, I had been looking forward to a kind of retirement where I could attend events like the one where John Hancock would write great books and put a new spin on an old archaeological idea.  John, being a professor of architecture, did have a fresh perspective that I always enjoyed in my youth as the Vice President of the Dan Beard Council.

As a young man, I was very happily involved in a High Adventure Explorer Post, where I became Vice President of the Dan Beard Council after a special election at the GE Evendale plant, where I gave a speech that led to my election.  Later in this book, I tell the tragic story of a death that took place later in the night of that same election day, when I was scheduled to fight three guys from my school at that same time, and one of them turned up dead, and the rest of them were telling stories about me to the police that were not favorable.  The events of that night led to my separation from the Dan Beard Council, and at that time, I enjoyed my exposure to those kinds of people, including academics like John Hancock and museum personalities like Sarah Winningham from the Fort Ancient complex.  I have been hoping since that time that at some point I could get back into that kind of life, the High Adventure Explorer Post life I enjoyed so much in my youth.  This book tells that story as I continued to travel a lot and utilize the skills I started in those explorer post experiences.  Even though many of the people who volunteered for and supported Explorer Post activities were politically liberal, I hoped that someday I might be able to return to those innocent days. 

But as much as I wanted to, my life had taken me into the very political world of consulting, and with high-level personalities, which made it impossible for me to sit in that Fort Ancient lecture and put my brain away.   Because, like John Hancock, who approached the really good archaeology of Bradley Lepper, and others with an architectural background, I have years of experience as an aerospace executive dealing with very smart, PhD-level engineers and professionals who can be very manipulative and deceitful in root cause analysis.  My wife and I had plans, and what will become clear in this book is that I have a very high regard for the archaeological publication Biblical Archaeology Review, and I really want to spend these years of my life taking their cruises on luxury liners and having archaeological discussions.  And that my happiest place on earth at the moment is at the Museum of the Bible, for which my wife and I are members.  I love places very passionately where scholarship and discovery come together, so believe me, I didn’t want to be that guy.  I wanted to be the guy who read the books of people like John Hancock, Bradley Lepper, and Francis Pryror, and enjoyed the buffets on the cruise ships, and read lots of books.  Because more than anything, my number one hobby, which started for me during those Explore Post years, was reading books.  Lots and lots of books, some of my favorite which is reflected in this literary effort, are James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and for me, it is the joy of adventure in going down rabbit holes and bringing Alice back from its hidden depths that is the most fun.  And professionally, as I have thought for a long time because of my love of The Golden Bough, I think archaeology does not go far enough as a spinoff of the creation of anthropology, scientifically, and all the hard lessons I have learned through years of political work gave me extensive experience.  I really wanted to attend John Hancock’s lecture for the pure enjoyment of it, because I love people like him and Sarah Winningham.  Why, because I learned to really love academics in a non-political way during my very formative years of High Adventure Explorer Post membership.  I had made up my mind to get all over the world, which is what this book is about.  I didn’t learn what I did by just sitting at home, but by going to many places and applying the same skills that worked very well for me professionally, to some really obscure ideas.  So I came to the lecture with a question I had thought of while reading John Hancock’s marvelous books. 

I thought John’s lecture on the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks was fantastic, very well researched, and extremely well put together.  No wonder UNESCO moved to designate the 8 earthworks sites as World Heritage Sites officially.  And even if the UNESCO people are extremely liberal, politically, and were very much against the United States during the first Trump presidential term, which I know a lot about.  I finish this book with a visit to the White House.  I tend to really enjoy all efforts that seek to preserve the past, regardless of politics.  In the pages to come, I am glowingly supportive of organizations like English Heritage and the fantastic efforts of The Ohio History Connection, whose headquarters is at the Ohio History Center in Columbus, where I first visited on an Explorer Post field trip many years ago.  The main purpose of Explorer Post membership is to expose young people to high-adventure career opportunities.  Which was the subject of my speech at GE to the other explorer groups of Cincinnati and big personalities such as Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch, and how they elected me, even as a very young person, to Vice President of the Dan Beard Council.   So, since I had my question ready for John’s lecture, I decided to enjoy the event and the educational publications from The Ohio History Connection.  I remember that day with the Explorer Post visiting the museum that would become The Ohio History Connection. I got the feeling that everyone was encouraging me to grow up and become the troublemaker who would challenge their assumptions.  After all, why have a High Adventure Explorer Post in any way but to raise young people to go out into the world to challenge everything, if not for gaining wealth and notoriety, but for the spirit of adventure itself. 

This is the kind of thing I’d rather be doing in life. My idea of a good time.

I was always the rebel of the group, and even if I was naturally very talented, my spirit of adventure got me and everyone who followed me into a lot of trouble.  And sometimes people did lose their lives, which is why my time as Vice President of the Dan Beard Council was short-lived.    But I got that office at a very young age because a lot of people were hoping I would be the guy who would shake things up in ways they instinctively knew needed to happen.  And as I held up my hand at the end of John’s lecture, I asked my question about the relic on display at the Ohio History Center: the Shaman of Newark.  In his big book, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, John very cleverly found a way to show the relic as a digital replica illustrated by Talon Silverhorn of the Eastern Shawnee.  But in his travel guide, Ancient Ohio, he says that he could talk about the famous Hopewell relic but not show it so as not to disrespect Indian tribes, which set up another question I had about NAGPRA in general, which I directed at Sarah, who was in the back of the room, regarding compliance with that 1990 Democrat proposal to return to all the Indian tribes of North America the relics of their ancestors.  They are running a nice museum at Fort Ancient, and John had been very clever in getting Indian tribes to contribute artwork and replicas for his books in very respectful ways, which is unusual for these kinds of projects. Before going to the Fort Ancient lecture, my wife and I had just returned from the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and I had a great time there.  A lot of the kind of people I like these days have very little trust in the Smithsonian and the much-talked-about cover-up of the ancient giants who were reported to have been found in these very Ohio Mounds.  John’s book does not address those, but he and I did talk about the controversies. I told him I thought it was remarkable that he even mentioned the copper mines of Lake Superior in his book, because, as the story goes, those copper mines dating to 5000 BC were so prolific that they caused a global economic boom and were shipped to Europe by the Minoans of Crete. That proof of that trading exchange is on what they call the Newberry tablet, which can be found sometimes in St. Ignace, in Upper Michigan.  As I said to John, this conspiracy stuff is a tough line to walk.  And as I said it, I looked back at the audience, and almost everyone had a grin on their face because I was saying the stuff that is supposed to be unsaid, but they all wanted to say it. 

The Relic of the Shaman of Newark, I think, is a remarkable admission, which I will expand on during the grand adventure for which this book is, a journey around the world and across vast spans of time with conclusive evidence at the level of speculation awaiting the hard evidence of good archaeology.  The relic itself depicts a shaman in the process of turning into a bear and is holding in his lap the severed head of a long-haired human.  I knew about the relic because it was on display at the Columbus Museum, as was the Wilmington Tablet.  So, as the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum operators have done a great job getting into the business of making relics of controversial artifacts, like the Newark Holystones, but seeing that copy of the Wilmington Tablet reminded me of the Shaman of Newark, as that topic had been on my mind regarding the Newark Earthworks.  And this was the cause of my anxiety, which my daughter captured so well as I was distraught over what it all led to. 

I asked the question: why were the Indian tribes reclaiming all the artifacts that archaeologists had found, and even destroying them by burying them again?  And as John explained, he had just spent a lot of time speaking with various Indian tribes to coordinate with them in writing his great book on how to show who the Hopewell people were by replicating them, without the magic of their actual image tainting them with haunted reverence.  So here is the problem. Two things can’t both be true, here we had a political movement pushed by NAGPRA, which said that we had to give back all the evidence of our discovery because the relics of the Indigenous people were magical and had power that had to be returned to the ground, but at the same time we were supposed to study these Indigenous people with evidence to understand them.  So I turned around from my seat and addressed the back of the room. I asked, “Was the NAGPRA pressure political or coming from the tribes themselves?”  Because I will talk about this extensively in this book, the 8,000-year-old, well-preserved people of Windover, buried in bogs in Florida, are genetically dated as older than any known North American Indian Tribe and were actually around during the period of the copper mines of Lake Superior.  So how can we study this history and properly respect it if NAGPRA said we had to empty all the museums of Indian relics and give them back to tribes we were calling Indigenous people by Democrat legislation that was making a claim that America should have never been settled or turned into a country because it happened at the expense of these miraculous Indigenous people? 

And here’s the problem: the Shaman of Newark shows clearly the extent of the belief of those people of their period, which, to my eyes, were mimicking the beliefs of the Canaanite gods that Yahweh was so enraged about.  And the political statement by Yahweh to destroy all the gods of Canaan and destroy the people of that land, emphatically.  The beliefs of the people of Newark and the other Hopewell sites needed to be studied much more so that evidence could drive our conclusions.  Like the situation in Cahokia, just outside St Louis, here we had an Indian relic in the Shaman of Newark that had a decapitated head in his lap, showing the typical ritual sacrifice of life for the benefit of communicating with spiritual entities.  And with that, under NAGPRA, which bless her heart, young Sarah Winningham was preparing the Fort Ancient museum to be fully compliant with.  The evidence was right there, begging us to ask the next layer of questions with really great minds and researchers, like John Hancock and great archaeologists like Bradley Lepper, who should be applying great science to these magnificent archaeological monuments.  Instead, we are getting rid of the evidence and then telling the world that everything is a conspiracy theory because there is no evidence to support it.  This book is about the evidence discovered through vast and sometimes dangerous expeditions observed over my lifetime. 

In these pages, there is extensive study of the impact of shamans on a culture over time and of their common role as vehicles of spirit-world interaction.  I was very impressed that John Hancock put an image of the Shaman of Newark in  Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.  But he did not include the same image in his Ancient Ohio traveler’s guide, even though he did talk about it.  The reason is tribal acceptance and a NAGPRA compliance issue, and I think it’s the key to the whole enterprise.  My question is, what made Yahweh listen to Satan to punish Job, and why wouldn’t Satan work through many shamans over time and space to whisper bad things for their own political needs to gullible recipients, whether that be Job or God himself as head of the Divine Council? Just because the Bible recorded an occurrence, why wouldn’t there be many more undocumented occurrences just as bad or worse than what happened to Job?   The presence of shaman activity among the Hopewell people, complete with a severed head in its lap, does not point to peaceful indigenous people being used by a modern 1619 Project into claiming them as vehicles of destruction, invalidating the creation of the United States in the first place.  Yes, I think David Wyrick may have planted the stones for all the reasons he was accused of.  But it destroyed him socially, and it looks like the work of the opium present in his painkillers, giving his mind access to similar satans as those that tempted God in the Book of Job.  I think there is another layer to the story, and it centers on how we perceive consciousness.

In the chapters ahead, I explore the nature of remote viewing as we have come to know it and test some assumptions on the known psychics Dolores Cannon and Edgar Cayce, and even deeper into the MK Ultra Program, so well known around the Charlie Manson murders.  And why wouldn’t we pay attention to that kind of psychic reporting when so many biblical characters were telling of occurrences where they directly communicated with gods and would sacrifice to them?  And here in Newark, Ohio, we have an Indian relic of a Newark shaman that depicts a severed head and a shamanic transformation from human to bear, and we are supposed to, under the NAGPRA law, put that relic back in the ground and destroy its magical properties.  And why do the Indians believe these relics have magical properties? How are we scientifically talking about magic in objects and saying it with a straight face, then calling people like me pseudoscientists or, at best, contemplators of conspiracy?

Let’s take what we know, that Satan was reported to manipulate God in the Book of Job, and that God reacted to it in a way that was very hard on Job who was a good man doing all the good things a human being was supposed to be doing.  Why did Satan want to bring harm to such a good persont? Just because, Satan was evil? What does that mean and what’s the next layer of understanding?  That’s the kind of question I explore in the chapters to come.  What are the political motivations of spirit world malcontents, and how can we prepare ourselves as a human culture from their interdimensional tyranny?  And if we think that is wild, then how can we say that indigenous people have ancient relics that are magical and should be destroyed and put back in the ground and studied?  Yet we are supposed to take the word of the experts for it completely and “trust the science.”  As we were expected to do with Covid.  So here we had a problem, we are supposed to ignore all the evidence and give it back to people who had no genetic claim to the objects, in ways we still don’t understand, we don’t know who the Hopewell and Adena people were, we don’t know who mined the Lake Superior copper mines, we don’t know who the Windover people were, yet we are supposed to give all these treasures back to the newest people living on the block, without studying what they left behind.  The Shaman of Newark, I think, is one of the most important parts of John Hancock’s book, as he actually managed to put an image of it in the book before the purge of NAGPRA forced it into obscurity.  But how much else has been shoved away into a lack of study, and how can we claim to know anything about them? 

A lot to think about

I didn’t mean to, but I had a UFO experience that I talk about in this book also.  I would attribute it to big government programs and to a psychic reaction to me personally, which is something that dominating personality types seem to have been able to do over many years.  But who did they speak with, or rather, who answered?   I have seen it for myself.   I think non-human intelligence is always working with us, around us, through us, and for its own political motivations.  But what are those politics?  We might understand the Ohio governor’s race between Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy through the political lens of Democrats versus Republicans.   And that was certainly the case between many researchers and me.  Overwhelmingly, college professors tend to be Democrats, as are Hollywood actors, for very good and definable reasons.  Productive capitalists might otherwise be said to be Republicans.  But what is the politics of Satan besides calling him evil?  Evil doesn’t tell the story nearly enough.   And what would be the politics of spiritual beings, as the Indians say, the Great Spirit? Perhaps they are talking about the same God we all are.  Or perhaps not, perhaps their god is just another version of Baal, Lucifer, Moloch, or Satan.  Yet, here we have in the Shaman of Newark a figure involved in human sacrifice, as many of the Mississippian Mound cultures did, Cahokia included, and nobody wants to talk about it?  NAGPRA says we are supposed to suspend belief and surrender our opinions to the experts who have no idea what they are talking about. 

I walked out of the Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day, telling my wife that everything had changed.  It’s not that the movie was jaw-droppingly good; it was just a movie.  But it gave permission, for a whole bunch of political reasons, to talk about this subject differently than at any time in the past.  The evidence, including the case of David Wyrick, and we will talk about evidence a lot in the murder cases I have been on, where I was the top cop of Butler County, Ohio, for a very treasured period.  Do demons and spiritual characters talk to people and soothsay them into self-destruction?  Yes, emphatically, over and over again, and I think when it came to David Wyrick, he needed public acceptance that some demonic force wanted him contained and destroyed.  He was an abolitionist who used his prominent social position as a mason to help spread the message of ending slavery.   And thought his opinion-based painkillers, a Satan-like character probably had his ear right up to the day of his death under the influence of that same painkiller.  But why, if you were an alien from a Type One civilization, would you try to derail an ant colony that was interrupting your version of a picnic?  If the creation of America was divinely inspired, as the Bible clearly indicates, wouldn’t that be good for the human race? Yet perhaps god was at war with all the other gods, and we are their chess pieces.  I’m inclined to that latter assumption, and the evidence certainly leans in that direction as I have experienced it. 

At the September 9th 2025, Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection hearing with the House Oversight Task Force, there were some very unusual things said on the very public record by George Knapp, Jeffry Nuccetlli, Dylan Borlan, and Alexandro Wiggins that have slowly taken the idea of UFO talk from conspiracy to actual scientific study.   We have open talk now that up to four species of non-human intelligence are interacting openly with the world’s governments.  And back to the movie Disclosure Day by Steven Spielberg: as a work of art, it opens the box to talk about these things in ways we never have before, because of the compelling evidence emerging from these testimonies.  The movie is clearly fictional and meant to be a popcorn popper.  But there is a level of seriousness to it that hints at something much larger: how do these non-human intelligence types communicate with humans now and in the past, perhaps even the deep past?  I would say to all the scientists of the Smithsonian that objects like the Shaman of Newark and understanding how the complex mathematics in the Newark Earthworks were given to those indigenous people in the first place is all that matters.  Based on observation, with the thin proof that we have, the Sumerian God Nisaba was whispering geometry to the people of the Hopewell period, and probably longer. Or the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. Why not you say? Are we going to be fools and suggest that Sumerian Gods were regional, and could not speak to people on the other side of the world as easily as someone in a Sumerian temple under drug influence? Why would we assume that? The first question is understanding that. And how did a society that did not have any central government or modern technology such as TV or radio project those same mathematics, without flaw, from the Newark earthworks to Hopton, over 60 miles to the south, to Mound City, Seip, High Bank, and Fort Ancient, locations all over Ohio?  They had no paper that we know of, no Wal-Mart, no way to say that this, this, and this is important.  Let’s build massive earthworks that take millions of labor-hours each to complete, and do so to perfection, without any centralized corporation or government to keep everyone focused.  And modern science calls it a miracle of tribal knowledge.  I call it communication through shaman over vast distances, all over the earth, by non-human intelligence trying to manipulate the human race towards its own doom and destruction to fulfill the political needs of the rebels against God. 

And to further confirm that suspicion, many of these Hopewell sites are associated with the very ancient Teays River, which flowed up the Scioto over 2 million years ago, well before the last Ice Age.  The Teays and its tributaries touched many of the Hopewell sites, indicating a reverence for those spots on the land by an intelligence observing human beings over a vast span of time and connecting those locations to celestial alignments. And that relevance is important in knowing that the Great Serpent Mound was built on the crater of an impact crater from 300 million years ago.  How would indigenous people know that?  And even stranger, the Fort Hill complex is built within the impact crater zone as well.  Out of all the places in North America, why would anybody, and nobody really knows who they are, build these big, significant sites near geologic features that were millions of years old?  Why would they know anything about any of it with such precise mathematics?  How would that information ever be obtained in the first place, let alone passed along to these construction sites involving so many years and generations of labor and production?  It’s hard to build a McDonald’s consistently, even with all the modern tools we have now.  I would propose that it was the shaman with drug use who served as the primary communication device.  And with that, a relationship with Non-Human Intelligence that we are finally admitting to, that has always been a part of the human experience. 

Yes, the exhibit at the great Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum was very political, but not in the way that I think they intended.  I saw at the museum an attempt to understand these great mysteries with replicas of the relics themselves.  Again, that’s where I found a great copy of the Wilmington Tablet, along with the Holy Stones of Newark.   And we also know of the Shaman of Newark, so there were relics that depicted the same kind of human sacrifice that we know came from central Mexico, Mirador, Teotihuacan, and Cholula, in a time when many people didn’t think cultures were talking to each other.  They appear, as the evidence of the relics shows, to have been doing so.  Even in the Smithsonian views these days by John Hancock, we know that the Hopewell people were traveling many thousands of miles to obtain copper, obsidian, and mica, and likely traded with the Olmecs of Tabasco, Mexico, and affiliated cultures, which had their writing showing up in the Wilmington Tablet and the Cincinnati Tablet.  So the political motivations of David Wyrick are not as simple as has been attempted to be set out. 

As a surveyor of these great Indian mounds, and confronted with vast evil, as the Civil War over slavery unleashed itself, and studying the remains of these ancient cultures, likely the same voices that whispered in the ear of the Shaman of Newark were whispering in the ear of David Wyrick and his opium painkillers.  And was it Moses who wrote the Book of Job and discussed what Satan had said to whom and for what reason?  The same guy who talked to god on a mountaintop and came back 40 days later with the Ten Commandments, and spoke to a burning bush about freeing the Jewish people from the confines of Egyptian polytheism.  Should we ignore that the mound complex at Portsmith, Ohio has a very similar path-of-souls ritual to the one the Egyptians had for their preserved dead?  And that some of their paths actually go through the Ohio River, showing a reverence for what was there before even the Ohio River flowed through the area, when the Teays River instead flowed to the north.  And we could say with just as much authority that the mound sites were restored during the Hopewell period rather than constructed anew.  That they were marking spots on the ground, viewed from the air, to very ancient landmarks, for reasons for which we do not have enough evidence to speculate.   Yet they are there, and the evidence is begging to be found and analyzed.  And for the same political reasons that Satan tried to trick God into punishing Job, we have society punishing David Wyrick for daring to oppose slavery, or wanting to use the Ten Commandments as a hook into North American migration by Western civilization, bringing with it a religion of forgiveness instead of appeasement to some mysterious gods who demand decapitated human heads in the lap of their shaman before providing information. 

No, I didn’t want to be that guy, but sitting in front of the Newark Holystones at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum and seeing the exhibit they had there, and noticing the quick tone to dismiss everything as a hoax, my life flashed before me in a way I would have rather had it not.  A deception was at play; Satan himself was trying to throw everyone off the scent.  And when theologians contemplate a single satan in the Book of Job, they miss the obvious problem that there are likely thousands of them always whispering in someone’s ear, maybe God himself, or David Wyrick laced out on painkillers, or the Shaman of Newark.  And that it didn’t take much to communicate, a spiritual terrorist from the land of Cannon could have been speaking the same message of sacrifice to some headhunter of the Adena culture depicted as a severed head in Hopewell mounds at the same time that they were whispering to Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Solomon’s First Temple, and to the Romans during the Second Temple, to destroy the vessels of God himself to make the world ripe for an overthrow, to the political objectives of the conspirators against God’s creations.  And the Essenes were turned into the channel, and wrote about it in their Dead Sea Scrolls. I had wished that the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum exhibit, located well north of Newark, was less obvious and more scientifically grounded.  But the assumption was that Wyrick was an abolitionist living among evil people supporting the slavery of other people, more of that reference to the 1619 Project, the unjust settlement of indigenous land.  And as you read at the Holy Stone Exhibit, you can almost hear the whispers of Satan himself, showing Wyrick to be invalidated, corrupting future scientists in their assumptions, and making a case for not even founding America at all so the Christian premise of eliminating human sacrifice would be destroyed and current cultures continue the practice of honoring the spirit world with the blood of the living.  And I didn’t want to be the guy who reported what was hard to hear.  That Satan was a non-human intelligence that has been doing all this manipulating since before the Teays River flowed north along the Scioto River, then turned left near present-day Columbus and headed out to Indiana along the present-day I-70 corridor. 

If you really looked closely enough and blocked out the contemporary noise, you could hear the insecurities of Satan, hoping to get away with the deception of many lifetimes.  Humans need to appease what they thought of as their superiors, their gods, the malcontents that UAP whistleblowers are now revealing in the light of day in the Trump administration very hard truths.  It’s one thing to explain modern UFOs and their physics-defying characteristics, and another to explain the mysterious occurrences and hauntings at the Skinwalker ranch.  Yes, I talk a lot about hauntings, paranormal occurrences, Bigfoot, UFOs, and the kind of politics that will make your skin crawl in the pages ahead.   But it’s also a marvelous adventure that I share so that you don’t have to go through the pain firsthand.   And perhaps, after a lot of work, we’ll gather up enough evidence to change our perspective.  But in The Politics of Heaven, the ruse is in what isn’t said, not what is actually revealed.  Satan never tells God what he’s up to in trying to get him to turn against the very good Job.  But when we look at the human race, we see a lot of Jobs, David Wyrick being one of them.  Good people are crushed by their relationships with others who are otherwise motivated toward evil.  But what is evil anyway when you have the Shaman of Newark holding the severed head of an obvious victim, that shaman would use as currency to buy information from the spirit world.  The great spirit, or Satan himself.  We aren’t supposed to ask the question, only to accept that the experts told us what to think and when to think it.  But I didn’t want to be that guy.  Sometimes, I wish I could be a lot of other things.  But what is the adventure in that?   And in the adventure are the answers, the real answers if we dare to look.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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