I picked up one of my favorite shirts at the White House. I love that place, and I love what the Trump administration has done and continues to do. It makes me think about continuity, about practical people who get results, and about the kind of energy we need in the states. I’m excited about Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio. The race is competitive—recent polls have shown leads within the margin of error and prediction markets have favored his opponent more strongly—but I look at the internals, the trajectory, and the opportunity, and I believe he can win. Assuming that path, Ohio has a unique chance to lead the country on something that matters more to ordinary families than almost anything else: the crushing cost of healthcare, starting with cancer treatments.
I’ve been thinking about this for years. Friends have faced cancer. I’ve watched the bills, the delays, the sense that the system is designed more to manage disease than to fix people. The way for Republicans to win on healthcare in 2028 is not another tax credit or block grant that sounds like accounting. It is a concrete story: we cut the price of the most expensive treatments by attacking the cost-plus culture that has defined medicine the same way it once defined aerospace. We make advanced care available faster and cheaper. We fix people.
SpaceX is the right frame. Elon Musk and his team did not invent rockets. They applied vertical integration, rapid iteration, and a ruthless attack on cost-plus assumptions that had been baked into the industry for decades. NASA’s Shuttle delivered payload to low Earth orbit at something like $54,500 per kilogram. Falcon 9 brought that down toward $2,720 per kilogram—an order-of-magnitude improvement driven by reusability, in-house manufacturing of critical components, and a culture that squeezed suppliers and eliminated layers of markup. Roughly 80 percent of Falcon hardware was built in-house at Hawthorne. The “idiot index”—raw materials representing only a tiny fraction of final cost—forced first-principles thinking. That is the model. Cancer care is stuck in the opposite posture: academic timelines, slow FDA pathways, venture capital that demands multi-year runways before it moves, and pricing that treats every new therapy as a custom, high-margin product.
Ohio already has the raw material. Two weeks ago the James Cancer Center at Ohio State published a Phase 1 trial in Blood Cancer Discovery. Researchers tested a point-of-care manufactured trispecific CAR-T product targeting CD19, CD20, and CD22, enhanced with an OX40 costimulatory domain. Sixteen patients (median age 64) who had already burned through a median of three prior therapies received the cells. In the B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma subset, the complete response rate was 83 percent. There was no severe cytokine release syndrome and no neurotoxicity. Median vein-to-vein time was about seven days. That is not incremental. That is the kind of result that can rewrite parts of the treatment algorithm when it scales.
Around the same time, Ohio State licensed next-generation dual-payload antibody-drug conjugate technology to BiFormyx BioPharma. The company is moving its headquarters to Columbus and is targeting an Investigational New Drug filing in early 2028 for programs aimed at aggressive solid tumors such as triple-negative breast cancer. The entrepreneurs are not hypothetical. They are already in the state, building on James Center infrastructure that no pure startup can match.
A Ramaswamy administration would not need to invent cancer research. It would need to do three practical things. First, treat the James Center and Cincinnati Children’s as anchor tenants the way SpaceX treated Hawthorne—build the surrounding ecosystem of suppliers, manufacturers, and trial capacity around them instead of scattering small grants. Second, compress the state’s role in clinical trial siting and IRB approvals so Ohio becomes the fastest place in America to run a first-in-human study. A state-level regulatory sandbox that allows expanded access for therapies that have cleared Phase 1 while the national FDA process continues would put desperate patients on a plane to Columbus instead of Europe or Mexico. That builds both the clinical data and the political testimony at the same time. Third, use the governor’s office and the congressional delegation to push FDA pathway reform specifically for cell and gene therapies, while launching a manufacturing initiative so advanced therapies are built here. That sounds like jobs. It is jobs. It also happens to cure people.
The honest political caveat is that a pure “cure for cancer” message carries risk. Joe Biden’s moonshot language ran into the reality that many trials exist but the system is slow and expensive. Pharma has incentives to protect high-margin models. The safer, stronger 2028 pitch is not “we cured cancer.” It is “we cut the price by a large fraction and made advanced care available in county hospitals.” Direct medical costs of cancer care were already estimated above $200 billion annually and are projected to climb further; oncology drug spending alone is on a path toward hundreds of billions more by 2030. Families feel the $200 syringe and the six-figure episode. A SpaceX-style attack on the manufacturing and process costs of CAR-T and next-generation ADCs—point-of-care production, standardized platforms, elimination of custom-build markups—turns that into a diner-table number a voter in Dayton can understand.
Day one is not a task force. It is one connector with no ego and a mandate: get the founder, the family office, the hospital executive, and one skeptical journalist in a room every month. I know people who would make powerful patient testimony—friends who have lived the system. Put one of them on camera early. The three-month runway is to assemble the core group, file the sandbox concept, and open conversations with the Trump administration for continuity on FDA reform. The durability beyond any single administration is the real prize. Healthcare is the issue that does not care about team colors. Every cycle Republicans are asked what they will do, and the answer has usually been accounting. “We fix the thing that costs you more than your mortgage” is a different animal. It turns a defensive issue into an offensive one and gives the party a story about results rather than a man.
I have said for years that the person who can talk to anyone, get the money people and the operators in a room, and handle the public relations against the entrenched interests is more valuable than another PhD on staff. That is the SpaceX culture applied to medicine. Ohio can lead it. The technology is further along than most people realize. The politics have been the bottleneck. A friendly administration that treats this like a campaign—speed, visibility, manufacturing, and patient stories—can change the cost structure of healthcare by making advanced treatments practical instead of perpetually expensive.
If you are interested in the kind of first-principles thinking that produced The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, this is the same mindset applied to the largest cost problem in American life. Ohio has the anchors. A Ramaswamy administration can put the right people in the rooms. The rest is execution.
Footnotes
1. Ohio governor race polling and prediction markets as of late October 2026 (Cleveland.com, State of the Odds / Kalshi-Polymarket data).
2. Vasu S, et al. Safety and Clinical Outcomes of a First-in-Human Trial of Point-of-Care Manufactured Trispecific CAR T Cells Targeting CD19, CD20, and CD22. Blood Cancer Discovery. 2026;7(5). DOI: 10.1158/2643-3230.BCD-26-0186. OSUCCC–James lead.
3. CancerNetwork summary of the same trial: 83% complete responses in the B-NHL subset; no severe CRS or neurotoxicity.
4. Ohio State licensing of next-generation dual-payload ADC technology to BiFormyx BioPharma (October 2026 announcement); IND target early 2028.
5. AACR Cancer Progress Report 2026 and related estimates of direct cancer care costs exceeding $200 billion (2020 baseline figures, ongoing growth).
6. Milliman analysis of oncology drug spending trajectory toward $400 billion by 2030.
7. NASA Shuttle ~$54,500/kg vs. Falcon 9 ~$2,720/kg (various aerospace analyses, including Harry Jones / NASA Ames references); SpaceX vertical integration figures from company and independent reporting.
8. JAMA Oncology viewpoint on rising median monthly launch prices for systemic therapies (2023–2025 data).
Selected Bibliography
• Vasu S, Denlinger N, Song NJ, et al. “Safety and Clinical Outcomes of a First-in-Human Trial of Point-of-Care Manufactured Trispecific CAR T Cells Targeting CD19, CD20, and CD22.” Blood Cancer Discovery 7, no. 5 (2026).
• American Association for Cancer Research. Cancer Progress Report 2026.
• Milliman. “The oncology drug landscape: Spend trends, market dynamics, and the road to 2030” (2026).
• Shah C. “Rethinking Value in Cancer Care in the US.” JAMA Oncology (October 2026).
• Ohio State University Office of Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge. Licensing announcements for BiFormyx BioPharma dual-payload ADC platform (2025–2026).
• SpaceX and independent analyses of Falcon 9 reusability and vertical integration (Hawthorne manufacturing, cost-per-kilogram comparisons versus Shuttle).
• Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker and related national health expenditure data.
• American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute studies on cancer-attributable medical costs by phase of care.
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 Window Needs Moving, and Someone Has to Pull It
I have known Ann Becker for a long time. She knows what it takes to stand in a public meeting, take the heat, and keep talking when the institutional machinery wants to shut down the conversation. That is why I listen when Darbi Boddy speaks. She has spent years crossing the state, appearing at school board meetings, and putting uncomfortable realities on the record about how certain Islamic communities in Western countries treat the American premises of free speech, free exercise of religion, and separation of church and state. A Christian people built those premises for a Christian culture. They were never designed as a one-way shield for a competing civilizational order whose own foundational texts and majority opinion in many of its societies reject the same liberties when the roles reverse.
West Chester needs people willing to say this out loud. Mark Welch is no longer a township trustee. The current board is Ann Becker as chair, Lee Wong, and Amanda Ortiz. The board needs clear-eyed leadership that doesn’t treat every demand for religious accommodation as automatically benign. Darbi has done the preparatory public-comment work candidates used to do before seeking office. She earned a seat once. The lawyers and the process found a way to remove her from the Lakota board after a civil protection order kept her from meetings for ninety days. I do not see that removal as a victory for order. I see it as a successful effort to silence the person who kept forcing the discussion the rest of the board preferred not to have.
Darbi Boddy’s Record and the Price of Speaking Plainly
Darbi was elected to the Lakota Local Schools Board of Education in 2021 on a platform of teaching the greatness of America and opposing critical race theory and related ideological imports. Lakota serves West Chester and Liberty Townships and is one of the largest suburban districts in southwest Ohio. Her tenure was contentious. She criticized suicide-prevention mandates she believed separated parents from children, questioned curriculum, and clashed repeatedly with colleagues. A civil stalking protection order fellow board member Isaac Adi obtained in 2023 prevented her from attending meetings with him present. After 90 days of absences, the remaining members declared them insufficient and voted her off in March 2024. She has continued speaking at other boards, including Xenia, and has faced lawsuits and counterclaims over public comment and First Amendment issues. She now leads Access Ohio, focused on parent rights and traditional American values.
People call her a bull in a China shop. Aggressive clarity is often required when institutions have already accepted the progressive framing that any scrutiny of Islamic political theology is bigotry. The same institutions treat Christian residual culture as the problem to be managed. Darbi keeps pointing at the asymmetry. Islamic leadership in many Western settings has stated, in plain language or through institutional practice, the goal of replacing Christian cultural dominance with Islamic norms. She refuses to let local politicians, including those in West Chester, pretend the observation is out of bounds.
The Legal Gambit: Freedom of Religion as a One-Way Shield
Lawyers are skilled at reinterpreting English and case law to fit the argument of the moment. The modern reading of “separation of church and state” is a prime example. The Founders intended to prevent the federal government from establishing a national church or interfering with the free exercise of existing Christian denominations. They did not intend a neutrality so absolute that a competing theocratic system could use the First Amendment as cover while its own doctrines prescribe death for apostasy, second-class status for non-believers, and legal supremacy for sharia.
Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey of Muslims in thirty-nine countries found overwhelming majorities in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa favoring sharia as the official law of the land, at least for Muslims. In Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan, large shares of those who favored sharia also favored the death penalty for leaving Islam. Later Pew work has shown Islam as the world’s fastest-growing major religion between 2010 and 2020, driven primarily by higher fertility and a younger median age rather than mass conversion. In Europe, the Muslim share reached roughly 6 percent by 2020; projections with continued migration put it near 10 percent by mid-century. In the United States, the absolute numbers remain smaller, but the growth rate is among the highest of any region. West Chester is home to the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, a large campus with a prominent golden dome visible from I-75, which has grown to serve tens of thousands of families since it opened in the mid-1990s.
None of this is a conspiracy theory. It is demography plus doctrine. When a community whose median opinion in many source countries rejects the equal status of other religions uses the American guarantee of free exercise to expand its institutional footprint, while simultaneously pressing for speech restrictions on “Islamophobia,” the constitutional premise is being used against the culture that created it. Lawyers can draft the accommodation language. Politicians can call the resulting pressure “tolerance.” The practical result is the gradual displacement of the prior order.
My Experiment at Kings Island’s Jason: Blood Reign
I spent the 2026 Halloween season working as Jason Voorhees in the new “Jason: Blood Reign” maze at Kings Island’s Halloween Haunt. Before guests enter, they are told the rule: the monsters will not touch you. You have complete safety. Do not touch the monsters. Thousands of people waited, sometimes for hours, for the thrill of being scared while knowing they were protected.
The parallel to the political debate is direct. In the haunted house, guests know the rules protect them. Some guests, once they understand the protection is absolute, become rambunctious. They test the boundary. A few try to punch or kick the actor. They know the performer is forbidden from retaliating. The same dynamic appears when a radical religious order treats American free-speech and free-exercise rules as a shield while advancing practices and political goals incompatible with those rules. The aggressor is told he cannot be touched. He then lashes out, confident the defender is constrained.
Out of the tens of thousands of people I scared during the season, I turned every negative or hostile encounter into a positive, and that is consistent with most things that I get involved with. It was fun and rewarding to do it on a large scale; I tested what I wanted to challenge myself with.
I read body language—shoulders, facial expressions, the way a group clustered—before they reached my position. I used the strobe, the sound, the timing of the jump. People who knew exactly where I was still jumped. Some laughed afterward and admitted they had been gotten anyway. The aggressive ones still got the scare because the common purpose of the attraction was shared: they came to be frightened. The rules constrained my physical response, but they did not constrain psychological effectiveness.
That is the practical lesson. You do not have to break the Fourteenth Amendment or the First Amendment to defend the culture. You do have to understand the strategy of the other side and refuse to pretend the asymmetry does not exist. Darbi is doing that work in public meetings. The institutional response has been to use process and protection orders to remove her from the conversation. The lawyers did their job of reinterpreting the rules. The result is that the discussion she forced is harder to have.
The Psychology of the Protected Aggressor and What the Numbers Show
The people who waited in the long line outside Blood Reign wanted the experience. They did not want to be harmed. Some still behaved poorly once they believed the rules gave them impunity. That is ordinary human behavior under asymmetric constraint. Scale it to civilizational level and the pattern is recognizable. Groups that retain high in-group preference, higher fertility, and doctrinal rejection of equal religious liberty can expand under a host culture’s free-exercise rules while the host culture is told that reciprocal scrutiny violates its own principles.
The data do not require exotic interpretation. Pew’s global religious landscape work shows Muslim population growth outpacing every other major group from 2010 to 2020. Fertility differentials, not adult conversion, drive most of the increase. In many Muslim-majority societies, majorities continue to favor legal systems in which sharia has official status. Western polling of Muslim populations shows greater moderation on average, particularly among those born in the West, yet the institutional organizations and the source-country norms travel with the migration. Local officials who treat every request for accommodation as self-evidently compatible with American order are choosing not to examine the long-term trajectory.
Ann Becker has been on the other side of contentious meetings. She knows the difference between an ideology held in a living room and the same ideology defended under public scrutiny and procedural attack. Darbi’s style is more confrontational. That style is sometimes necessary to move the Overton window back toward the place where Christian cultural continuity is treated as the default rather than the problem. The progressive platform
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.and the legal class have made adherence to the rules nearly impossible for a civil society that wishes to remain itself. The rules were written by people who assumed a shared civilizational premise. When that premise is rejected by one of the parties using the rules, the defender must name the rejection.
Moving the Window Without Breaking the Rules
I am proud of the season I spent as Jason. The work was physically demanding. It required reading people under pressure and finding a way to deliver the intended experience even when some guests tried to weaponize the safety rules. The political parallel is not perfect, but it is close enough to be useful. The guests who behaved worst still left having been scared, because the shared purpose of the attraction overrode the temporary abuse of the rules. A society that still possesses a shared purpose—constitutional loyalty, individual responsibility, and the cultural inheritance that produced those things—can do the same. It requires people willing to speak the obvious asymmetries in public, to accept the personal cost, and to keep the discussion alive after the lawyers and the process have done their best to end it.
Darbi Boddy has been doing that. West Chester has the institutional space for it now that the prior trustee arrangement has changed. The argument matters more than the personalities. Voters ultimately decide whether the community remains American in more than name or whether it continues to treat every use of its own freedoms as equally legitimate even when the user does not reciprocate. I have seen the dynamic up close, under the mask, with a large sample of ordinary people. The rules can be used against you. You can still win the encounter if you refuse to pretend the rules were written for a different game.
Bibliography
Bat Ye’or. Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005.
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel. Free Press, 2007.
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Nomad: From Islam to America. Free Press, 2010.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. (and related works on individual responsibility and cultural continuity).
Ibrahim, Raymond. Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. Da Capo, 2018.
Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Modern Library, 2003.
Pew Research Center. “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society.” April 30, 2013.
Pew Research Center. “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050.” April 2, 2015.
Pew Research Center. “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020.” June 9, 2025.
Spencer, Robert. The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS. Bombardier Books, 2018.
Spencer, Robert. The Critical Qur’an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. Bombardier Books, 2022.
Warraq, Ibn. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Prometheus Books, 1995.
Local reporting on Lakota Local Schools Board actions regarding Darbi Boddy (Cincinnati Enquirer, Dayton Daily News, FOX19, WXIX, 2021–2025).
West Chester Township Board of Trustees meeting records and official site, 2025–2026.
Kings Island Halloween Haunt 2026 materials on “Jason: Blood Reign.”
Footnotes
1. Darbi Boddy elected 2021; removed March 2024 after protection order produced ninety-day absence under Ohio Revised Code provisions allowing removal when absences are declared insufficient by two-thirds of the remaining board. See Cincinnati Enquirer, March–April 2024 coverage.
2. Pew Research Center, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” 2013. Regional medians for support of sharia as official law: South Asia 84 %, Middle East-North Africa 74 %, Southeast Asia 77 %, sub-Saharan Africa 64 %. Support for death penalty for apostasy among those favoring sharia reached 78 % in Afghanistan and was high in Egypt and Pakistan.
3. Pew Research Center, “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020,” June 2025. Muslims increased by 347 million; share of world population rose to 25.6 %. Growth driven primarily by fertility and age structure.
4. Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, West Chester Township, opened mid-1990s; large campus visible from I-75. Contemporary reporting describes service to tens of thousands of families.
5. Kings Island Halloween Haunt 2026 featured the licensed “Jason: Blood Reign” maze. Guest instructions explicitly prohibit contact with actors; actors are constrained from physical retaliation.
6. West Chester Township Board of Trustees as of 2026: Ann Becker (Chair), Lee Wong, Amanda Ortiz. Mark Welch, longtime trustee, did not continue after the 2025 election cycle.supplies the footnotes
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am not a fan of the surveillance state. I wrote a book against police abuse and against the abuse of authority, and I meant it. I do not like being commanded. I do not take orders well; I would have been a poor recruit for the military, and I do not like a government that knocks on the door at two in the morning and calls it a rescue. I am not big on tolls; I am not big on a camera sending me a bill for a bridge I did not mean to take, and I spent years on the radio, including with Scott Sloan on WLW, arguing against red-light cameras. Many people who usually agree with me in Butler County are against Flock cameras. Some of the township trustees I know are against them. I understand the objection. I do not share it anymore, and the reason is a month I spent as foreman of a Butler County grand jury.
That is a qualification, not a conversion. The tool is not the same thing as the hand on the tool.
Tolls, red lights, and a bill in the mail
The Louisville bridges cured me of any romance about a camera and a mailbox. RiverLink, on the Lincoln, the Kennedy, and the Lewis and Clark, has no cash lane. A camera reads the plate, and the bill finds the registered owner. Cross without a transponder, and you pay the higher pay-by-plate rate. As of July 2026, a two-axle car was $5.57 pay-by-plate against $2.79 with a transponder. [1] I got that bill once, four or five dollars in the version I remember, because I was in the wrong lane and would rather have used the other bridge. I did not like it. I had not agreed, in any way that felt like an agreement, to be invoiced by a lens.
I feel differently about the tolls on the drive to Washington and the drive toward Chicago. I pay them. Twenty-five or thirty dollars, sometimes more, and I do not hunt the free road to save three bucks. The toll road is usually the direct road, and getting on and off a free highway through a thicket of signals is its own tax. Florida still gets me. Leave Orlando toward the parks, and a couple of those plazas always find the rental. Toward Cape Canaveral it is milder. I am not a fan of any of it. A road built with taxes should not be rented back to the people who already paid for it. That objection stands. It is not the same objection as a camera that tells a prosecutor which car left a parking lot after a shooting.
What a Flock camera actually is
Flock Safety, out of Atlanta, sells automatic license plate readers. The camera does not need an officer on the corner with a notepad. It photographs the passing vehicle, and the plate number, state, time, location, and the vehicle’s color and make become a searchable record. The company says it does not do facial recognition. People are not supposed to be the data. The car is. By the summer of 2026, the New York Times had the network at about 120,000 cameras, under contract to about 7,000 agencies, which the paper put at roughly 40 percent of American departments, in every state but Alaska. Other reporting put the scan volume near 20 billion license plates a month. Default retention had been about 30 days. After a run of documented abuses, Flock said it was cutting the standard window to seven days and locking accounts that searched abnormally. [2] [3] [4]
The abuse is not theoretical. The Washington Post found more than 50 cases of officers using the databases for personal searches, often men looking up wives, girlfriends, exes, and women they wanted to meet. Dozens of cities have canceled or suspended contracts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the whole arrangement invasive mass surveillance, and that description is fair for the capability. A camera that records every car records the innocent with the guilty. [4] [5] I am not going to pretend otherwise to win an argument with a trustee.
What the grand jury changed
I had always wanted to serve on a grand jury. I did not like the way the summons talks. “ Commanded to appear” is not a phrase I answer to with any pleasure. I am not a recipient of orders from a superior. I went anyway. I was selected foreman. Ohio law lets a county pay a grand juror up to forty dollars a day; the figure is set locally, and I served about twenty-six days. Over the month I took home a few hundred dollars. I spent it on books. I know which ones. They are on the shelf by the bed, and they mean more than books I bought with ordinary money. [6]
About half the time in that room was video. I estimate it’s about eighty hours of tape across the month, including witnesses on the stand and footage played against what they said. I wasn’t a fan of being summoned, and I wasn’t a fan of what I had to watch. Child-exploitation cases came in on phone video, messages arranging sex with a fourteen-year-old, the kind of evidence a detective can pull off a device. Other cases needed a place and a time. A license plate at an intersection in Middletown at 2:30 in the morning is a fact. A deputy sitting on that corner with a clipboard is a target. The drug runs between Dayton and Middletown do not slow down for a man with a pen.
One case is the one I still use when someone tells me a camera is only a toy for busybodies. Two men shot each other up after a fight that started in a bar parking lot. One of them was hit about fourteen times. They dropped a body at the emergency room at the Middletown hospital and left. The man on the stretcher would not say who shot him. Witnesses in that world do not rat each other out. Cars on the road, plates on the cameras, and the correspondence between those plates and the people who could then be found, and the guns that could then be collected, were the indictment. Without the plate reads, we did not have a case. We would have had a wounded man who would not talk, and a prosecutor with a theory.
That is the hole in the old model. Testimony used to carry more of the load because more people were afraid to lie under oath in a culture that still treated a lie as a sin, not a tactic. I do not trust unaided testimony the way a courtroom in 1955 could pretend to. People lie to your face. They lie about alibis, they lie about who was driving, they lie because the crowd they are going back to will punish the truth harder than the court will punish the lie. A camera does not join a gang. It does not forget the intersection. It does not get run over at 2:30 in the morning for writing down a number.
I have told the trustees who worry I will turn on them: I am not going to get mad at you for the cameras. I do not like a surveillance state as a lifestyle. I like a plate reader that makes an indictment possible when every human witness has a reason to go mute.
The qualification, which is the whole argument
Here is the line I will not blur. I trust this tool under a Republican administration. I do not trust it under a Democratic one.
I like law enforcement when it targets criminals. I like it in Butler County under Sheriff Jones. I like it in the Fourth Congressional District under Warren Davidson, in the Ohio Senate under George Lang, and in Columbus under a Republican majority. I like Washington under Trump in a way I didn’t before. I have been to the city several times since he went back to the White House, and I enjoy it now the way I enjoy Mount Rushmore, which is not a sentence I expected to write. The order is visible. The cops and the immigration agents look like they are doing the job in front of them rather than auditioning for a political faction. I like the FBI better with Kash Patel over it than I liked the FBI that raided Mar-a-Lago and treated a former president and his wife as a stage prop. Same building. Different hand on the warrant.
Democrats have already shown what they do with police power when they have it. The surveillance state, the early-morning knock, the selective prosecution, the use of a process crime to punish a political enemy: that was not a rumor from a pamphlet. It was the Obama years and the Biden years, in public. A Flock network in those hands is not a tool for a Middletown shooting. It is a map of where the opposition drove on Tuesday. The company itself has had to warn users off searches tied to reproductive-care laws in some states and off immigration searches in others, which admits the search box can be aimed at politics as easily as at a stolen car. [2] Officers have already aimed it at their private lives. [5] I would not give that keypad to an administration that has used the IRS, the intelligence agencies, and the Justice Department as factional weapons.
So the policy I actually hold is narrower than “cameras good” or “cameras bad.” Cameras, plate readers, and the data centers that make the search possible, under officials who can be thrown out of office and who are not already in the habit of aiming the state at their critics. If the other party takes the offices, the same hardware becomes a reason to rip the contract out. I would rather pass a clean rule now, retention short, searches logged, personal queries a firing offense, immigration and political queries banned by statute, than pretend the objection is the lens.
Data centers are a separate argument, and I have been on that side in Butler County while opposing the nosy state. A data center is a building that hires people and pays taxes and gives a county the computing power the next economy runs on. It is not a warrant. Treating every server rack as a spy camera is how you talk yourself out of the jobs and then act surprised when the investigative database lives in another state anyway. I support the centers. I do not support a government that uses every stream of data just because the stream exists.
Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, and the point of the order
I trust the places where the country still feels like itself. Mount Rushmore is the one I send people to if they have never gone. Better to go during the Sturgis rally, ride the Badlands, take the Iron Mountain road down toward Custer, see the buffalo, then drive up to Deadwood for a hamburger in one of those bars on the strip. The fries taste better next to a street where the old gunmen walked, and a sheriff holding a hard town is still the right picture of the job: Devils Tower, the Tetons, Jackson Hole: same sensation. America is a physical place, not a policy memo.
I have been to the bookstore at Rushmore with my oldest daughter. Everyone else was ready for the car. We had done the avenues and the little passage in the hills, and she and I stayed and carried books out. They are on the shelf. Grand jury service sits in that same part of my memory, which will sound strange to anyone who has not done it. A few hundred dollars, a stack of books, and a month of looking at what people actually do to each other when they think no one can place the car. Since that month I have been back to Washington, and I like the city more than I did. The obelisk and the Masonic ornament do not bother me the way they once did. A country that can put Trump back in that house, after the lawfare and the raid, has earned some patience with its marble.
I do not trust people as much as I used to, not under oath and not in a parking lot. I trust a timestamp. I trust a plate. I trust a data center that keeps the record long enough to indict and not long enough to build a dossier on a life. I do not think the camera network is a Chinese social-credit poster, and I do not think the machine on the other end is HAL, waiting to lock the pod bay doors. The rational machine does not wipe out the creature that can pull its plug. It behaves more like a working dog than like a coup. That is my view of the technology, and it is open to evidence. It is not open to the slogan that every lens is a prison.
If you want the practical version, it is this. Vote for the sheriff, the prosecutor, the trustee, and the president who will aim the cameras at the shooting in the bar lot and not at the donor list. Say yes to the Flock contract with a short retention and a public log of searches. Say no, immediately, if the people in charge have already shown they will use a warrant as a campaign. Churches on Sunday will not replace a plate read at 2:30 in the morning, and a plate read will not replace a county that still elects the hand on the switch. You need both. I have seen cases where you do not get a ticket if you only have the sermons and the witnesses.
Notes
[1] RiverLink tolls the Abraham Lincoln Bridge, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge, and the Lewis and Clark Bridge with no cash lanes. Cameras match the plate to the registration and mail an invoice if there is no transponder account. As of the July 1, 2026 adjustment, a two-axle pay-by-plate toll was $5.57, against $2.79 with a transponder. Toll Wiki, “Kentucky Toll Bridge — RiverLink,” citing the bi-state rate resolution; RiverLink pay-by-plate instructions.
[2] Flock Safety’s network was reported at about 120,000 cameras and about 7,000 law-enforcement customers, roughly 40 percent of U.S. departments, in every state but Alaska. Searches can be run across agencies. The system prompts users away from reproductive-care searches in jurisdictions that bar them and away from immigration searches in others. Kashmir Hill and Fernando Alfonso III, “Why are Flock cameras controversial?” The New York Times, August 10, 2026.
[3] Reporting in 2026 put Flock’s volume near 20 billion license-plate scans a month. A scan can include plate, state, time, location, color, make, and model. The company says the cameras do not use facial recognition. Default deletion had been about 30 days. TechSpot, “License plate cameras are scanning 20 billion vehicles a month,” June 30, 2026. In August 2026, Flock said it would shorten standard retention to seven days and lock accounts showing abnormal search behavior. Associated Press, “Surveillance tech company Flock announces platform changes amid public backlash,” August 13, 2026.
[4] The Marshall Project, “The Flock Backlash Catches Up to the Tech,” October 3, 2026, summarizing the Washington Post’s count of more than 50 unauthorized searches, often personal, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s description of ALPRs as invasive mass surveillance. The Institute for Justice’s tracker, cited there, counted 247 full cancellations of ALPR programs.
[5] Same Marshall Project account, October 3, 2026, on officer misuse. See also AP, August 13, 2026: more than 50 agencies or jurisdictions had canceled, suspended, rejected, or deactivated Flock cameras since the start of the year, by a DeFlock count.
[6] Ohio Revised Code 2939.04: grand-juror pay is fixed by the board of county commissioners and may not exceed forty dollars a day, paid from the county treasury. The per-day figure in the essay is the author’s recollection of Butler County service, within that statutory cap. The supervisor may be selected by the common-pleas judge under R.C. 2939.02.
Bibliography
Associated Press. “Surveillance tech company Flock announces platform changes amid public backlash.” August 13, 2026.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Atlas of Surveillance, and EFF writing on automated license plate readers as mass surveillance. https://atlasofsurveillance.org
Hill, Kashmir, and Fernando Alfonso III. “Why are Flock cameras controversial?” The New York Times, August 10, 2026.
Institute for Justice. Automated license plate reader cancellation tracker, cited in The Marshall Project, October 3, 2026.
Marshall Project. “The Flock Backlash Catches Up to the Tech.” October 3, 2026.
Ohio Revised Code, sections 2939.02 and 2939.04. Grand jury foreman; compensation.
RiverLink. Official payment and account pages for the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River bridges. https://riverlink.com
TechSpot. “License plate cameras are scanning 20 billion vehicles a month, cities are starting to push back.” June 30, 2026.
Toll Wiki. “Kentucky Toll Bridge — RiverLink.” Rate table including the July 1, 2026 adjustment.
Wisconsin Right Now. “Shootings, Stabbings, A Kidnapping Attempt: Flock Cameras Helped Crack These Waukesha County Cases.” September 29, 2026. Local case summaries in which a plate reader identified the suspect vehicle.
WIS-TV. “Inside Richland County’s Flock network: 94 murders solved amid mounting privacy debate.” September 29, 2026. Sheriff’s office figures: 687 investigative successes, 296 vehicles recovered, 94 homicides assisted by ALPR data since 2023. One department’s numbers, not a national rate.
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 signed version is House Bill 519. Governor DeWine signed it October 1. The cut started at 12:01 a.m. October 4 and runs through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027.
Ohio did something useful at the start of October 2026. The General Assembly suspended the state motor fuel tax for 90 days, and Governor Mike DeWine signed the bill. For the next three months, the state tax on gasoline drops from 38.5 cents a gallon to one-hundredth of one cent. The diesel tax drops from 47 cents to the same token rate. The lost revenue, about $725 million, is covered out of a General Revenue Fund surplus. Roads and bridges are not being raided to pay for it. The Rainy Day Fund is not being raided either. That is the whole story, and it is a better story than the price of a gallon usually gets.
I live in Butler County. Senator George Lang is my senator, and he was in the middle of getting this into shape. A lot of people had to touch it. That is how a legislature is supposed to work. One member does not pass a tax cut alone. Somebody still has to walk the Statehouse, catch a colleague at the water fountain, and get the vote. Lang was doing that work, and he was out announcing the suspension as the vote came together, which is what you do when you are leaning on the thing rather than waiting to see how it lands. I will give him the credit he earned. I will also name the people whose names are on the paper, because a useful account has to be accurate.
What the law actually does
House Bill 519 started as a vehicle-theft bill, aimed at electronic devices used to steal cars. The Senate amended the gas-tax holiday into it so the relief could move in days instead of months. The holiday language came from Senate Bill 475, sponsored by Senators Michele Reynolds of Canal Winchester and Jane Timken of Canton. The House bill itself was sponsored by Representative Andrea White of Kettering. On September 30 both chambers passed the package as an emergency: 26–5 in the Senate, 78–16 in the House. DeWine signed it the next morning, October 1. Because of the emergency clause, there was no 90-day wait. The reduction began at 12:01 a.m. on October 4, 2026, and it ends at 11:59 p.m. on January 2, 2027. [1] [2] [3]
The rate does not go to a flat zero. It goes to $0.0001 per gallon. That is an accounting choice, and a smart one. If Ohio levied no tax at all, some border counties could get hit by a neighboring state’s tax on fuel sold into Ohio. A token rate keeps that from happening and still takes essentially the whole state tax off the ticket. The holiday covers gasoline and diesel only. Compressed natural gas and propane are not in it. [4] [5]
Retailers have to pass the savings through. Failure to do that can be treated as an unfair or deceptive act and referred to the Attorney General. A receipt mandate that station owners opposed, and the $1 million that would have paid for it, came out of the final bill. The Department of Taxation got $250,000 to administer the break. The department told retailers to have their systems reset by midnight on October 4. [2] [6]
What a fill-up is worth
On a 15-gallon gasoline purchase the state piece is about $5.78, if the cut shows up at the pump. On 20 gallons it is about $7.70. A 20-gallon diesel fill is about $9.40. A work truck that takes 100 gallons of diesel is looking at about $47 off the state tax on that one stop. Over 90 days, for a family that fills up once a week, the gasoline savings are real money, not a rounding error. Statewide, the estimate is more than $725 million left at the pump instead of sent to Columbus. [1] [4]
The federal tax is still there. Washington still collects 18.4 cents on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Ohio cannot suspend that. Anyone who watches the sign and wonders why the whole tax did not vanish should look at the federal line before they blame the station. [7]
This is also why a diesel truck crossing Ohio this fall should fuel here if the route allows it. As of July 1, 2026, Kentucky’s total state gasoline tax was 26.4 cents a gallon. Indiana’s was in the 50-to-60-cent range, depending on which fees are counted. Michigan was in the same high band. For these 90 days Ohio’s state rate is a tenth of a mil. A truck that used to skip Ohio for a cheaper state has the math backward until January 2. [8]
Why the money was there
The $725 million is not a raid on the highway fund, and it is not a withdrawal from the Budget Stabilization Fund. Senate President Rob McColley said the state had enough to cover the holiday and still keep road and bridge work on schedule. Timken said the same thing in plainer words: conservative fiscal policy is what made the relief possible without touching the Rainy Day Fund or the Ohio Department of Transportation budget. The September report from the Office of Budget and Management projected a General Revenue Fund surplus of about $745.4 million at the end of the fiscal year. The holiday fits inside that surplus, with a little room left over. [2] [5] [9]
That is the part the critics do not like to say out loud. A surplus is not a mood. It is what is left after you refuse to spend every dollar that comes in. Ohio has had Republican majorities in the House and the Senate for a long time. The counties that stay in the black tend to be the counties run the same way. Where Democrats run the budget, the pattern I have watched for years is the opposite: spend past the line, then come back for a tax increase to cover the miss. David Pepper and the people who argue that Republicans have been in too long never explain where the $725 million would have come from under their model. It would not have been there. You cannot suspend a tax out of a deficit. You can only do it when someone, for years, spent less than they took in.
Lang put the practical case on the record the day the Senate passed it. Every dollar a small business spends on fuel is a dollar it cannot put into employees, equipment, or growth. Diesel, he said, powers the trucks, the farm equipment, and the construction equipment. Suspending the tax is breathing room, not a theory. [4] That is the right argument. A fuel tax is a tax on getting to work, on moving freight, and on a farm that has to run whether or not Columbus is in session.
Prices, excuses, and the point of doing it now
I have said all summer that the price at the pump should have come down in 2026, and a lot of it did not. Refiners and distributors have been slow. The Iranian conflict has been a convenient fog. There is no settled government on the other end of that war that can answer for a barrel, and there are plenty of people, in markets and in media, who would rather keep the uncertainty going. A long, muddy conflict is useful to anyone who wants a wider margin and a Republican governor’s race that looks expensive at the pump. I am not going to pretend every cent of the 2026 price is a conspiracy. I am going to say the excuse has been used past the point of honesty, and that waiting on a perfect global price was a bad plan for a state that had a surplus in the bank.
Ohio could not fix the world oil market. It could take its own 38.5 cents off the gallon, and its own 47 cents off diesel, and order the stations to pass it through. That is the part of the price a state actually controls. Doing it in the first week of October, with an emergency clause, was the proactive move. Early voting was about to start. People are still paying the summer’s hangover. A legislature that waits for a calmer headline is a legislature that never spends the surplus on the people who created it.
The vote was bipartisan enough to get the emergency clause, which needs more than a simple majority. It was not a love letter from the other party. More than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. [9] The ones who voted yes made the immediate effective date possible. The ones who voted no will explain, later, that the money should have been spent on something else. That is the argument. Their something else is always a larger government. The surplus is the evidence that Ohio did not need one.
What other states can copy
This is a model, not a stunt, and other states sitting on a real surplus should look at the mechanics instead of the press release.
First, suspend the tax. Do not invent a rebate card, a portal, or a six-month application. The relief has to show up on the receipt this week.
Second, backfill the road money from the general surplus. Do not cut the projects, and do not crack the rainy-day fund for a holiday. Ohio was explicit on both points. A tax holiday that steals from maintenance is just a pothole with a ribbon on it.
Third, leave a token rate in place if a zero rate would let a neighbor’s tax reach across the line. The tenth-of-a-mil was not cute. It was drafted for border counties.
Fourth, require the pass-through, and give the attorney general a hook if a station keeps the difference. A tax cut that dies in the wholesale markup is not a tax cut.
Fifth, do it with an emergency clause if the statute otherwise waits 90 days. A relief bill that takes effect after the pain is a press release.
The permanent version is a policy question, and it should be on the next governor’s desk. A 90-day window has ambiguity in it. Distributors and convenience stores have to reprice twice, and a driver cannot build a household budget on a holiday. The honest next step is to decide how much of this rate Ohio still needs once the books are open. Vivek Ramaswamy called for the pause the week before the vote. [10] I have already said he is the right direction for the job. This holiday is a hint of the governing style, not the whole platform: when there is a surplus, the default is to give it back, not to find a new program to absorb it. DeWine signed the bill quickly. The next governor can be the one who decides whether 38.5 cents needs to come back in full on January 3.
A tax only funds government. It does not improve it by being larger. Republicans in Ohio spent less than the alternative for long enough to have $725 million they could hand back without missing a road project. That is why a driver in Butler County, and a driver crossing the river from Kentucky, will see a cheaper gallon this fall. I am proud of the legislature for doing it when people needed it. If you are passing through Ohio before January 2, stop and fill the tank. The Statehouse already paid the difference.
Notes
[1] Gov. Mike DeWine signed House Bill 519 on October 1, 2026. The bill reduces the 38.5-cent gasoline tax and the 47-cent diesel tax to $0.0001 per gallon from 12:01 a.m. October 4, 2026, through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027. Estimated pump savings are about $725 million, roughly $5.78 on 15 gallons of gasoline and $7.70 on 20 gallons, and about $9.40 on 20 gallons of diesel. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension,” Your Ohio News, October 1, 2026.
[2] The chambers passed the emergency measure on September 30, 2026, 26–5 in the Senate and 78–16 in the House. The final bill appropriates $725 million from the General Revenue Fund and $250,000 to the Department of Taxation. A station-receipt mandate and its $1 million appropriation were removed. Danny Eldredge, “DeWine to sign bill suspending Ohio’s gas tax for 90 days,” The Blade, September 30, 2026.
[3] H.B. 519 was sponsored by Rep. Andrea White (R-Kettering). The gas-tax language came from S.B. 475, sponsored by Sens. Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) and Jane Timken (R-Canton), and was amended into H.B. 519 so the holiday could move faster. “Ohio’s gas tax holiday enacted into law,” Ohio Society of CPAs, October 2, 2026.
[4] Sen. George F. Lang (R-West Chester) announced Senate passage on September 30, 2026, including the small-business and diesel arguments, and noted that the token rate protects border counties from a neighbor’s tax. Highway work is covered by the fiscal-year surplus, not the Rainy Day Fund. “Lang Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026.
[5] Sen. Jane Timken: relief was possible without the Rainy Day Fund or the ODOT budget. “Timken Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026. See also Ohio Department of Taxation, “Ohio Department of Taxation Issues Guidance for 90-Day Motor Fuel Tax Holiday,” October 2, 2026. Retailers must pass the savings through; failure may be referred to the Attorney General. Guidance: https://tax.ohio.gov/motor-fuel-tax-holiday
[6] Ohio Department of Taxation, guidance released October 2, 2026, cited above. Tax Commissioner Patricia Harris urged retailers to adjust systems by midnight October 4.
[7] Federal excise tax remains 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Nebraska Department of Transportation, “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel,” rates effective July 1, 2026, citing the Energy Information Administration. The federal layer is not part of H.B. 519.
[8] Same table: Ohio 38.50 cents, Kentucky 26.40 cents, Indiana 64.50 cents total state taxes on gasoline as of July 1, 2026. During the holiday Ohio’s state rate is $0.0001.
[9] Office of Budget and Management, September 2026 report, General Revenue Fund surplus projected at $745.4 million at fiscal year-end, as cited by The Blade, September 28, 2026. Senate passage was 26–5; more than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. “Ohio General Assembly Suspends State Gas Tax,” Ohio Senate, October 1, 2026. McColley: the surplus covers the holiday without delaying road and bridge work.
[10] The vote followed a call for the pause by Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy the preceding week. Jake Zuckerman, “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote,” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.
Ohio General Assembly. House Bill 519 (136th General Assembly), sponsor Rep. Andrea White; Senate amendment incorporating Senate Bill 475, sponsors Sens. Michele Reynolds and Jane Timken. Passed September 30, 2026. Signed October 1, 2026.
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.Eldredge, Danny. “Ohio lawmakers introduce $726M gas tax holiday bill.” The Blade, September 28, 2026.
Your Ohio News. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension.” October 1, 2026.
Zuckerman, Jake. “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote.” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.
Nebraska Department of Transportation. “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel.” Rates effective July 1, 2026. Source table: Energy Information Administration, federal excise noted at 18.4 cents gasoline and 24.4 cents diesel.
I have been hinting at this for weeks, and I still won’t say exactly what I am doing. I can tell you the shape of it. I have been toying with a Ph.D. for several years, and I think the trigger has finally been pulled. I already know what the doctoral thesis will be. A version of it will live on the blog, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years to hear the argument. A humanities dissertation runs on the order of 80,000 words. That is a long walk. It is also, if you do it right, a bridge between things the academy will not put in the same room.
I am not happy about what has happened to academia. I am not happy that a credential which was supposed to mean rigor has been rendered, in too many departments, into a party card for liberal politics. I think there are a lot of problems with that, and I would like to get on that side of the argument for my own reasons. A Ph.D. is a tool. It is not a personality. It gives you a seat in a fight that otherwise dismisses you as a blogger with a whip and a podcast. I do not want the universities left entirely to people who have already decided the conclusion. Big tent, small tent, ethics, the lack of ethics: this is the same argument I have been making about parties and about sheriffs. If you will not go into the room, you do not get to complain that the room was captured.
The thesis comes out of The Politics of Heaven. Even while I am doing everything else, if I write several books in that line, and if I am involved in aerospace work that makes money and does cool things, none of that changes the strategy. Money is a tool. You do not do the long work to get paid for it. The Politics of Heaven, in the draft I have been editing, is over 200,000 words. The published book will be shorter. Parts of it are clean. I’m combining two bodies of evidence in the same paragraph because few others have read both piles. The politics of heaven, as I am using the phrase, are my speculations built on a very wide reading. Very few people read as much of this material as I do, or as diversely. I put things together in places the guild system of the sciences cannot handle, because the guild system is paid to stay in its lane. There needs to be a bridge. If I am going to write a thesis anyway, I might as well make the bridge the doctorate.
People I trust with a book want an entry. They want to know the information has been through a fight. Academic argument, when it is actually argument and not a loyalty oath, comes across better if you get on their side of the table and make them defend the status quo. I think I have a hook. Less than one percent of the people who encounter it are going to love it. Everyone else will scratch their heads and say they are not ready. That is fine. A lot of what I assert is not laboratory science. It is immersion. It is psychology. It is a lifetime of reading. I make assertions that are not “scientifically grounded” in the sense a journal referee means, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. They are grounded in experience, in a level of ethical attention, and in a concern I am willing to name: the ethical behavior of the spirit world, how it moves against the human race, and how it plots against God’s design. That is the concern. I am not worried about putting the frame of it out here. Somebody might try to steal it. I’m happy to share them and see if anyone can do anything with them. Most people cannot.
The thesis, as I am presuming to pursue it, is Jason Voorhees: why he is scary, and why Yahweh had to save the world from the gods of Canaan. And why those are not two subjects.
A book I saw advertised through Biblical Archaeology Review took the very progressive line that the Palestinians are the indigenous people and that Israel is the invader, the same argument you hear about American Indians. I heard a woman out of Portland, Oregon, the other day, talking about the drug problem on those streets, the cities run by blue mayors, and she concluded that we need to teach kids to do drugs, because the Indians were doing drugs, talking to spirits, going on vision quests. Democrats, in that telling, need this to happen to our young people. Break them away from their parents at twelve and thirteen. Send them on a spirit journey under drug consumption. Let them communicate with the other world. Coyote. Peyote. The vision.
I am writing, among other things, about why you should not do that, and about what you are actually encountering when you go looking for the spirit world on those terms. I talk about three rivers a lot. I talk about the origin stories of the Aztecs. I talk about a claim almost no working archaeologist or anthropologist will yet admit in public, which is that the Noah story has a geographical hook in eastern Turkey that the guild retired, and that some of the people who wrote the retirement papers are themselves retired, and that methods we were told settled the question are being reopened because the ground will not stay closed. I am saying yes to some of those reopenings because I know where the argument is going. For me, proof is not a single carbon date. Proof is accumulated experience and a willingness to read the thing the department will not assign.
So the thesis, in a sentence: Jason Voorhees and how Yahweh saved the human race from the gods of Canaan; the rest of the map is the same type. Indian cultures. Central Mexican cultures. Large parts of South America. If we were allowed to explore the same questions in Russia, China, Afghanistan, and India with the same honesty, we would know more about them too. I hear the argument every week that Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the Hindu traditions are older than Christianity, and the related argument that Hindu and Buddhist ideas migrated into the community around Jesus, that John the Baptist was a rebel against orthodox Judaism, that Greek society had already been in those eastern regions for two or three hundred years before the Roman machine arrived, with its gods and its planetary worship and its mystery cults. We would also understand the dolmens of the Jordan Valley better than we do. We would ask a ruder question: why do we have stone chambers in New England, and mound-and-monument landscapes in the northern Great Lakes and the Michigan peninsula, that keep getting explained away as root cellars and colonial oddities. At the same time, the Jordan field is allowed to be religion? Those are good questions. They are not simple. They are the complicated kind of simple, the kind that looks obvious once you stop protecting the departmental border.
Here is the hook I plan to share before November. The thirteenth villain, the one America actually produced, could not have been created anywhere but here. No other artistic culture had the combination. A commercial horror film, made for almost nothing, aimed at teenagers, indifferent to critics’ approval, and then kept alive by the audience for forty-six years. That figure explains something the ancient Near Eastern texts only describe from the other side: why people worshiped the deities of Canaan, why Yahweh was necessary, why the land had to be cleared of rival cults if anyone wanted a garden rather than an altar, why there could not be another god before him, and why human beings keep drifting back to the lesser worship anyway. I will explain more of the operational evidence after Halloween. I cannot discuss that part yet. I can tell you I am obsessed with why Jason Voorhees was invented in American cinema, and why people are still obsessed with him.
I got interested again when I saw how people reacted. My grandkids and my wife play Dead by Daylight on the PlayStation 5 a lot, all the time. I wanted to know why this character was in the room. I remembered him from when I was a teenager. In those years, you watched the movies because you wanted to see kids get killed and you wanted the cheap thrill, and you filed it under science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and you moved on. He did not move on. Then I realized there was a psychological mechanism under the costume, and I immersed myself in it until I had something I could call objective evidence. Enough, I think, for 80,000 words on why Jason Voorhees matters in the art and entertainment of human cultures, and why he had to be invented in America.
The academic position I want to refuse is the one that treats indigenous worship as automatically virtuous. Worship of lesser gods, as against Yahweh, or against what I will call for the thesis an Alpha claim on the divine, is not a heritage to be restored. It is a psychology. It has a shape. It shows up in Canaan. It shows up in the vision-quest argument. It shows up in the woman who thinks the drug policy of a failing city is a sacrament. It shows up, dressed as entertainment, in a hockey mask. If you want to talk about the psychology of goodness in a culture, and about how you defend a big-tent civilization against people who think every altar is equal, you have to be willing to look at the altar people actually kneel at when nobody from the department is watching.
This will be a quiet undertaking. It is not the thing that makes the money. I think it is needed if the human race is going to get a psychological look at itself that is not written by the people who already agree with the Portland sermon. For my part, I jump off the board before the pool is finished filling. A lot of things have to happen on the way down. I have often made the large moves under dangerous circumstances, because that is where the world actually is. You do not find the treasure by doing the same thing everyone else is doing. I think I have found something in Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13th series: why human beings are so ready to worship an idea, and why a certain kind of academia wants to point everyone toward the indigenous deity and call it liberation. That is why the drug argument keeps coming back. I understand why people feel that way. I do not feel anything close to it. Liberal-minded people, tending to vote Democrat, accommodate the opinion because they have talked themselves into believing every spirit is a friend if it arrives wearing the costume of the oppressed. I have a different reading now of why Jason is revered across cultures and across decades, and why he became a killer in Dead by Daylight not as a memory of the movies but as a current character. I know him from the movies, from the games, and from everything that has cascaded off him. I have watched that cascade go through generations.
I am deep in it. It will not make anyone rich. The information I have learned is more than most people will ever care to know about the character and about the public reaction to him. In November, I will share the details I can’t share now. It is the doctoral idea. To help the academics, I will put it on ground they already understand, and on ground everybody else understands: a horror movie. It is a good comment. It is a big concept. I am going to use it to launch the reasoning about why those older worships were dangerous, why people still practice them, why they are still impactful, and why a society that wants to fix itself has to fix that before it fixes the tax bill.
It will be entertaining. I promise that. Some of the apocalyptic discussions I have had came from real reflection, because I put myself through a considerable amount of discomfort to see the thing from the inside. It is not enough to stand on the dock and throw a theory at the water. You have to go in with the sharks and the snakes and the vipers and see what is actually down there. I would like it to be easier. I want the design of the world to be more accommodating to personal pleasure. Here is the deal. I will get further into this over the coming weeks and months as I work up to it. A thesis, in the ordinary academic calendar, is five or six years of hard work. In another sense, I have already been at the reading for longer than that. I know what the end needs to be. It needs to be this. And it has an academic entrance, which you cannot use unless you have gone down the rabbit hole past Alice, further by a lot. That is what I am talking about. I think I understand Jason Voorhees, the public reaction to him, the fascination, and why the human race turns away from Yahweh and Jesus Christ and finds itself worshiping the old neighbors.
The Jewish people worshiped the calf when Moses took too long coming down with the commandments. The guidance drifted. Even Aaron drifted. He drifted for a reason. What is the reason? I think I have it. I will put it in the books, in the thesis, and in future academic work. I will also put it here, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years. Putting it out helps me. The feedback helps. People send notes. They ask questions I had not framed. I get a better answer, and I refine it. That is the process. It is not always the way I would design it. It has been working.
A dose of reality with a fire under it has been hard. This particular immersion has been out of my comfort zone. It will make for a richer discussion, which is the point of the effort. Job titles are transitory. Acquisitions are transitory. Most of them are built on compliance with human systems. I mean compliance with a cosmic claim. The Bible is not a hint. I think it is part of a larger story we are going to be covering for thousands of years, and that we miraculously captured some of it through prophets and through voices that managed to get a portion written down, and that the portion lasted through purges and reformations and kingdoms and empires to reach us.
I find that survival a miracle. There is a lot more, and when a generation is done with the portion it inherited, it still has to ask questions. It has to cut into the topic with evidence-based trajectories. That is what I am doing. I wish it were easier to get. If it were easy, more people would do it. Very few have the stomach for the fight. I have gone down the rabbit hole. I have seen what is down there. I know a treasure was left behind, and I think it is my task, because I have been given a voice, to bring some of that treasure into the light.
The structural thesis on Jason Voorhees is the door. I think people are going to get a kick out of it. It is going to be fun. If you liked The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you’ll know the voice. The subject is different. The standard is not.
NOTES
1. A typical humanities doctoral thesis in the United States and Britain falls somewhere around 80,000 to 100,000 words, excluding bibliography. I am using 80,000 as the working target, not as a university requirement already assigned to me. I am not enrolled in a program as of this writing. The point of saying the number is to mark the scale: this is not a blog post, and it is not a five-year wait for the blog either.
2. The Politics of Heaven is the manuscript I have described elsewhere as completed in draft in 2026, in final edits, and aimed at publication in 2027. The draft I am editing has run past 200,000 words. The published book will be cut down. The thesis is a bridge out of that book, not a substitute for it.
3. Friday the 13th, produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, written by Victor Miller, opened in the United States on May 9, 1980. Budget reported under $600,000. Domestic gross about $39.8 million; worldwide about $59.8 million. It was the first independent slasher picked up by a major studio, Paramount. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, revised 2026; Ryan Gilbey, “Friday the 13th at 40,” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.
4. In the first film, the killer is Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother. Jason himself appears at the end as a jump scare. Makeup designer Tom Savini has said the beat was his idea after Carrie: “let’s bring in Jason.” Victor Miller later objected to the sequels making Jason the killer: “Jason was dead from the very beginning. He was a victim, not a villain.” That argument inside the creative team is part of the evidence. The culture did not accept the victim. It promoted the corpse. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, production history.
5. The hockey mask arrives in Friday the 13th Part III, released August 13, 1982, directed by Steve Miner, the only film in the series released in 3-D. On-set accounts say a Detroit Red Wings goaltender mask belonging to 3-D effects supervisor Martin Jay Sadoff was put on actor Richard Brooker for a lighting test, then enlarged by makeup effects. In Part 2, Jason had worn a sack. The mask is an American industrial object, a piece of sporting armor, not a cult image designed by a priest. That is the point.
6. The franchise then did what Canaanite cults did. It would not stay dead. Sequels, a 2009 reboot, a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street, novels, song references from Tupac to Eminem, The Simpsons, and, in 2026, a playable killer. Gilbey notes that Jason became the first fictional character to receive an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award. The culture promoted a murderer of teenagers into an institution.
7. Dead by Daylight, from Behavior Interactive, added Jason as Chapter 40 on June 16, 2026. In the game, he is called The Slasher. The chapter shipped as paid downloadable content at $4.99 or 500 Auric Cells, with a hockey-mask cosmetic and a “Misty Cabin” banner. He joined Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, and Leatherface on the same roster. My wife and my grandchildren play the game. That is not a footnote to the thesis. That is the transmission mechanism: a character I met as a teenager is now a weekly opponent for children who were not alive for the original film.
8. The Canaanite comparison is the theological half of the thesis, and I am stating it here as my claim, not as a finding already peer-reviewed. The biblical polemic is not subtle. Israel is commanded not to do what the nations did on their high places. Child sacrifice to Molech is forbidden and treated as a capital offense (Leviticus 18:21, 20:2-5; Deuteronomy 12:31; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 32:35). The contest on Carmel is a direct trial between Yahweh and Baal (1 Kings 18). Josiah’s reform demolishes the high places, the asherim, and the Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom (2 Kings 23). John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge, 1989), belongs in the bibliography so the fight is visible. My claim is that the psychological pattern survives the argument about body counts.
9. The golden calf is the control case inside Israel itself. Exodus 32: Aaron builds the calf because the people will not wait for Moses to come down. The text does not treat this as a moment of heritage. It treats it as drift under impatience, including drift by the priest. That is the mechanism I think I can show in the modern material: absence of the harder claim, impatience, a visible substitute, and a leader who accommodates the substitute so the crowd will not leave.
10. The Portland remark is from a broadcast comment I heard, a woman arguing that children should be taught drug use because indigenous vision quests used intoxicants to speak with spirits, set against the open drug scenes of cities run by Democratic mayors. I am not hanging the thesis on her name. I am hanging it on the argument, which is now common: the pre-Christian or non-Christian rite is the authentic one, the parental household is the interruption, and the drug is the sacrament. Standard starting points on the Native American Church and peyote, which is not the same thing as a municipal drug market, include Weston La Barre, The Peyote Cult (1938 and later editions), and Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
11. On the Biblical Archaeology Review advertisement and the “Palestinians as indigenous, Israel as invader” line: BAR has long carried a range of politics alongside the archaeology, and the indigenous framing of the Palestinian claim has become a standard academic position in parts of Near Eastern studies since the 1990s, drawing on the same vocabulary used for Native American land claims. I am marking the parallel as my reading of that advertisement and of the wider literature, not as a quotation from a single editor. A fair bibliography has to carry both William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Eerdmans, 2003), and the more minimalist and postcolonial work the department actually assigns.
12. Jordan Valley dolmens are not a rumor. Fields run along the escarpment east of the Jordan, south from the Yarmuk toward the Kerak plateau, with a heavy Early Bronze Age I burial use and a possible late Chalcolithic beginning. See the radiometric dolmen paper in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2023), and David Gilead, “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100 (1968). James A. Fraser’s Dolmens in the Levant (2018) is the modern synthesis. More than a century of work has still not produced dolmens west of the Jordan south of the Upper Galilee.
13. New England stone chambers are the contested American analog, and I am not going to pretend the guild has conceded the point. The colonial root-cellar explanation is the standard one. A luminescence study of structures in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, published in 2022 in Quaternary Geochronology, reported sediment ages under some structures in the late sixteenth century, before sustained colonial settlement. That is not a Phoenician colony. It is a date that does not fit the root-cellar story cleanly. The thesis does not need the chambers to be dolmens. It needs the question to stay open.
14. The Michigan peninsula and the northern Great Lakes are a different monumental tradition: Late Woodland mounds and earthworks, roughly AD 1200-1600, not Levantine dolmens. Meghan C. L. Howey, Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600 (University of Arizona Press, 2012), is a careful book. I raise the peninsula because the public is told these are separate phenomena by disciplinary border, while the psychological function, a built place where the dead or the spirit is dealt with outside the household, keeps rhyming. The rhyme is my claim. The distinction in architecture is the academy’s fact. Both go in the thesis.
15. The Durupinar formation near Dogubayazit, eastern Turkey, is the Noah’s Ark claim I am referring to. The geological consensus, including a 1996 paper by Lorence Collins and David Fasold, “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure,” is that the boat shape is a natural formation. In 2026, a team led by Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University ran further scans and reported right-angled subsurface anomalies and higher carbon inside the formation than outside it. Mainstream outlets treated the new work as another round of a claim already rejected. I am not asking the reader to call it the Ark. I am asking why a formation that will not stay out of the news is professionally required to be a closed case, while vision-quest pharmacology is professionally required to be an open sacrament.
16. Aztec origin traditions are a separate dossier in The Politics of Heaven. The relevant point for the thesis is the public one: a civilization that built an imperial sacrificial system on a calendar of blood is still routinely taught as a heritage interrupted by Europeans, while the biblical refusal of that kind of altar is taught as the crime. The primary narrative is in the Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún and in Diego Durán. The archaeological frame is Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs. The moral question is mine.
17. Greek and eastern mystery religion in the centuries before Jesus is not an internet invention. The Hellenistic kingdoms sat on the Levant from Alexander’s campaigns in the late fourth century BC. The claim that Jesus or John the Baptist is a Buddhist or Hindu import is modern. The mainstream counter is still the Jewish context: Second Temple Palestine, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, and the Gospels. A clean entry is Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (1974).
18. The ethical claim of the thesis, which will not be popular in a religious-studies faculty, is that the spirit world has a moral direction, and that “indigenous” is not a moral category. A rite can be old and still be a violation. I am using Jason as the modern control because nobody can accuse a Paramount slasher of being a colonial slander against a living tribe. America invented him in New Jersey in 1980, out of a marketing bet on Halloween (1978). The audience then did what audiences have always done with the lesser god. It kept him, masked him, sold him, and handed him to the children.
19. I am withholding, until after Halloween and into November, the field observations from the seasonal work that put me inside the costume and inside the crowd reaction. That material is the part of the evidence I will not sketch in public yet. The thesis does not depend on gossip about a haunt. It depends on the crowd, which I have now watched from both sides of the mask.
20. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the earlier book in which I used a popular American figure to carry an argument about discipline, producers, and the refusal to live by permission. The Jason thesis is the same method on a darker subject. Readers who want the voice can start there. Readers who want the cosmology can start with The Politics of Heaven when it is out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, Lorence G., and David Fasold. “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure.” Journal of Geoscience Education, 1996.
Cunningham, Sean S., director. Friday the 13th. Paramount Pictures, 1980. Screenplay by Victor Miller.
Day, John. Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Dead by Daylight Wiki. “CHAPTER 40: Jason.” Behavior Interactive release, June 16, 2026.
Dever, William G. Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
Duran, Diego. The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated by Doris Heyden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
Fraser, James A. Dolmens in the Levant. London: Routledge, 2018.
Gilbey, Ryan. “Friday the 13th at 40: the maligned slasher that’s haunted pop culture.” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.
Gilead, David. “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100, no. 1 (1968): 16-26.
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974.
Howey, Meghan C. L. Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.
La Barre, Weston. The Peyote Cult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938.
Mahan, Shannon, and colleagues. Luminescence dating of enigmatic rock structures in New England. Quaternary Geochronology, 2022.
Miner, Steve, director. Friday the 13th Part III. Paramount Pictures, 1982.
Sahagun, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950-1982.
Smith, Michael E. The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
The Holy Bible. Exodus 32; Leviticus 18 and 20; Deuteronomy 12; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 23; Jeremiah 32.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
A Community Night at Miami University’s Innovation Center
On September 21, 2026, we hosted a special community event at Miami University’s Innovation Center on Elm Street in Oxford, Ohio.
We called the evening “Dreams on Elm Street”, a lighthearted nod to the classic 1980s film. But what we’re building at Volynt isn’t the stuff of nightmares. It’s the realization of a dream, one that is taking shape right here in Butler County and has the potential to transform the future of logistics, aviation, and economic development in Ohio.
The turnout exceeded our expectations. The room was filled with Miami University staff, students, local business leaders, elected officials, and community members who wanted to learn more about what Volynt is building and where we’re headed.
We were honored to welcome Senator George Lang, Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix, and Michael Ryan, who is poised to become Butler County’s next commissioner. Their presence reflected the growing enthusiasm for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advanced aerospace development in our region.
Sharing the Vision
I opened the evening by welcoming our guests and providing an overview of the event. From there, our leadership team took the stage.
Our CEO shared Volynt’s long-term vision and mission. Our Chief Technology Officer highlighted the engineering milestones we’ve achieved and the technology behind the Volynt Vyper platform. As Chief Operating Officer, I discussed how Volynt is transforming cutting-edge aviation technology into a scalable and sustainable business. I outlined our operational strategy, manufacturing roadmap, partnerships, and the steps required to move from prototype development to commercial deployment.
The presentations were engaging, the audience was attentive, and the questions that followed demonstrated genuine interest and excitement.
Most importantly, this wasn’t a flashy product launch filled with unrealistic promises. It was an honest conversation about where we are today, what we’ve accomplished, and what the next several years may hold.
From Prototype to Production
Our immediate focus is straightforward.
Over the next six months, our team will complete the full-scale Vyper prototype that was unveiled at the Innovation Center. That aircraft represents years of design work, engineering refinement, and determination.
Once completed, the aircraft will enter an intensive testing phase designed to validate performance, reliability, and operational capabilities.
Looking ahead to 2027, we plan to participate in major industry competitions, build broader recognition within the aerospace community, and begin manufacturing multiple aircraft.
The goals are ambitious, but they are supported by a clear roadmap and a dedicated team committed to execution.
The Drone Revolution Is Already Here
One of the most important messages of the evening was that autonomous aviation is no longer a future concept.
It’s happening today.
Just one day after our event, Dayton-area company Dexa launched a drone delivery service in Kettering. The program delivers food orders from TJ Chumps on East Stroop Road to customers within a several-mile radius across Kettering, Oakwood, and Centerville.
These smaller drones operate as last-mile delivery systems. Flying at approximately 400 feet, they lower food orders safely to customers using a cable-delivery system. Dexa has spent years developing this capability and is helping demonstrate that drone delivery is becoming a practical reality.
Volynt’s mission is different.
While companies like Dexa focus on last-mile delivery, Volynt is developing larger autonomous aircraft designed for middle-mile logistics. Our aircraft are intended to transport meaningful payloads between regional hubs such as Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG), Dayton International Airport, Indianapolis, and other distribution centers.
This approach has the potential to reduce transportation bottlenecks, address driver shortages, and create more efficient supply chains.
Whether it’s delivering a meal across town or transporting freight across a region, autonomous aviation is rapidly reshaping how goods move through our economy.
Why Ohio Is Positioned to Lead
Ohio’s aviation legacy is unmatched.
The birthplace of powered flight now has an opportunity to become a leader in autonomous flight.
Few regions are better positioned than Butler County to participate in that transformation.
Our region offers access to multiple airports, including Miami University’s airport, where initial flight operations can be conducted. At the same time, substantial investment continues at Butler County Regional Airport, where significant infrastructure improvements are being planned.
The resources, workforce, educational institutions, and transportation network already exist. What remains is bringing together the innovators, investors, and community leaders who can turn opportunity into reality.
Creating Careers That Stay Close to Home
One topic that resonates deeply with me is talent retention.
I have spoken with countless parents who have made tremendous sacrifices to provide educational opportunities for their children through Miami University, Butler Tech, and the University of Cincinnati. Too often, those graduates leave Ohio because they believe the best opportunities are elsewhere.
That reality creates a challenge for families and communities alike.
One of our long-term goals at Volynt is to help change that story.
We envision creating thousands of high-quality aerospace, engineering, technology, and manufacturing jobs throughout Southern Ohio. We want talented young people to have the option of building exciting, fulfilling careers without leaving their families, communities, and hometowns behind.
Strong Community Support
One of the most encouraging moments of the evening was seeing the level of support from the community.
Michael Ryan delivered an excellent presentation about economic development in Butler County and how innovative companies such as Volynt can contribute to future growth and prosperity.
The participation from Miami University, local leaders, educators, students, business professionals, and community members reinforced something I’ve believed from the beginning:
Innovation succeeds when communities embrace it.
Dreams on Elm Street was more than a company presentation. It was a milestone. It brought together people from different backgrounds and perspectives to discuss a shared vision for the future of our region.
The energy in the room was unmistakable. The conversations were thoughtful. The questions were insightful. The enthusiasm was genuine.
For me, that confirmed that we’re moving in the right direction.
Looking Ahead
Volynt’s journey is still in its early chapters.
There is much work ahead, many challenges to overcome, and numerous milestones still to achieve. But the momentum is real, and the opportunities are significant.
We will continue sharing updates with the community as we progress from prototype development to testing, certification, manufacturing, and beyond.
This is only the beginning.
Thank you to everyone who attended Dreams on Elm Street and supported our mission. Your encouragement and belief in what we’re building means more than you know.
Together, we’re not just dreaming about the future.
We’re building it.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman is Chief Operating Officer of Volynt, where he leads operational strategy, business development, manufacturing planning, and growth initiatives for the company’s autonomous aerospace programs. A longtime Butler County leader and aerospace executive, he is committed to building high-quality technology careers and advancing innovation throughout Southwest Ohio.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I cannot say enough about the new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. It landed in August 2026, an NKJV built around the mind of the man I have come to think of as the theologian of American courage. The notes are not decorative. They are sermons, resolutions, doctrinal bone, and the working method of a man who wrote as if ideas had consequences because they do.[1]
I say that as a reader, not as a salesman. Somebody asked me if I work for the publisher because I will not shut up about it. I do not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years—some of them a couple of decades—compressing Edwards into a book you can carry. That labor has to eat. It has to buy a hamburger. It has to justify itself in a market or it dies in a seminar. Paul would have understood that sentence immediately.
Every time I get a new Bible and read it through a different set of notes, my angle shifts a few degrees. This time the shift was violent. I could not stop thinking what a miracle it is that the crucifixion was even reported, and what a second miracle it is that Christianity became a civilization instead of a rumor. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of a spiritual one, but because the spiritual claim had to survive contact with Rome, with human nature, and with time.
I would say the benefit of Christianity to the human race, and to Western civilization in particular, was magnificent. That is not nostalgia. That is an audit. And the audit keeps returning to one man who began as an enemy.
The Road to Damascus Was a Hostile Takeover
The most important conversion story in history is not a soft altar call. Saul of Tarsus was hunting the church. Then he was its most formidable champion. The turn on the Damascus road is personal, traumatic, and public all at once.[2] I think a lot of people live in that same weather: against the thing, then claimed by the thing, then unable to go back to the person they were.
Paul was not a fisherman. He was a trained Pharisee and a working tradesman, a tentmaker who could pay his own way.[3] That combination is the whole essay in miniature. He had letters and leather. He could argue with philosophers in Athens and stitch a living in Corinth. The original disciples had seen Jesus with their own eyes. Paul had seen the risen Christ in a different register, and he had a skill the others did not: he knew how to take a local fire and turn it into a network.
People like to romanticize the Jerusalem church in Acts, where believers held things in common. I look at that scene and I do not see a manifesto. I see a threatened family taking care of its own. Historians, when they are being honest, generally read it as voluntary generosity inside a persecuted community—not a planned economy, not a party platform, and not a model Paul exported as law.[4] Later ideologies would loot the language. That is what ideologies do. They steal the family table and call it a theory.
The Jerusalem group was not trying to invent socialism. They were trying not to die, and they were trying not to abandon widows. The arrangement did not become the operating system of the Gentile churches. Paul would not have let it. He was too busy building congregations that could stand on their own feet in cities that did not care whether they lived.
Why the Original Apostles Could Not Have Done Paul’s Job
I love the apostles. I do not confuse their calling with Paul’s. They were rooted in Jerusalem, preaching first to their own people. Their courage was the courage of witnesses. Several of them were poor. They put the emphasis on the message and on the willingness to be spent. Rome knew what to do with men like that. It crucified them, beheaded them, scattered them. We remember them because the record survived. Memory is not the same thing as scale.[5]
Paul fought with them. That fact is in the Bible, not in some cynical footnote I invented. He opposed Peter to his face when the Gentile question threatened to split the movement into a Jewish remnant and a half-welcome underclass.[6] Christianity did not lock arms and sing. It argued. It almost broke. The argument was about purity versus reach, table fellowship versus the map of the empire. Paul chose the map.
Without that fight, I do not think you get a world religion. You get a Jewish faction with a crucified Messiah and a short half-life. Rome was full of such groups. We do not know their names because they lost.[7]
John survived. Tradition says they tried to boil him and failed, then parked him on Patmos, where he wrote Revelation.[8] Paul did not survive. The usual account is execution in Rome under Nero, sometime in the mid-sixties.[9] People mix Paul and John the way they mix founders and finishers. Revelation is a vision of the end. Ephesians is a field manual for a people who have to live until the end. I need both. I do not pretend they are the same book.
The Tentmaker Advantage: Financial Independence as Spiritual Nerve
Here is the part church-language usually sands off. Paul could be bold because he was not living off the room. He reserved the right to refuse a paycheck from the very people he served so that no one could say he was selling them a product.[10] That is not pride. That is strategy. A man who can feed himself can say the thing that gets him uninvited.
I have watched too many movements collapse into client relationships. The preacher needs the donor. The donor needs the preacher to bless the donor. Pretty soon nobody will say the costly sentence. The original disciples, as I read them, were often one arrest away from disappearing. Their deaths were holy. They were also, in organizational terms, a warning. Martyrdom proves sincerity. It does not automatically prove succession.
Paul’s independence gave him latitude. He could travel. He could offend. He could plant and leave and write back when the plant started growing weeds. He could walk into a city as a man with a trade rather than as a dependent mystic. I think that is why his version of the faith could cross from synagogue to workshop to household to the imperial road system. He understood customers. I do not mean he cheapened the gospel. I mean he knew that people must be able to receive a thing, carry a thing, and organize their lives around a thing—or the thing remains a speech in an alley.
If you want to know why I keep calling Paul a businessman, that is why. Not because he maximized profit. Because he understood value, timing, distribution, and the difference between a local hero and a transferable institution.
What Ephesians Actually Does
Ephesians is my favorite book in the Bible. It is short enough to carry and large enough to rebuild a mind. Paul does not wander. He frames the whole Christian movement: what God did before the foundation of the world, what Christ did in history, what the church is as a body, how a household should run, and how a believer is supposed to stand when the visible world is not the real battlefield.
The line that will not let me go is Ephesians 6:12. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.[11] I have come to think that verse is one of the most adult sentences ever written. It is what a person says after he has stopped believing that the problem is merely the neighbor’s personality.
Scholars argue over whether Paul meant demons, institutions, cosmic beings, or the spiritual charge inside empires and customs. I think he meant the whole weather system.[12] Names on mailboxes are not nothing. They are not the war. The war is the thing that climbs into names and makes them march.
That is why Ephesians could travel. It is theology you can use in Ephesus, Corinth, a Pennsylvania fort, a civil-war cemetery, or a county Republican breakfast. It tells a church how to live without becoming a cult and how to fight without mistaking people for the enemy. Paul called that arrangement a mystery revealed: Gentiles as fellow heirs, not guests in someone else’s religion.[13] That is scale. That is the business decision at the heart of the New Testament.
Flesh, Blood, and What I See in a Granddaughter
I have a young granddaughter. I watch her learn to walk, grab, flinch, laugh, and decide which faces matter. She is writing relationships into her nervous system that will still be there when she is fifty—parents, uncles, cousins, the strange country of grandparents. That is the human miracle and it is also the trap. We become so fascinated by whose nose she inherited that we forget to ask the older question.
What was she before she was a body? What is the spiritual essence that is using this little frame to enter the world? I do not mean that as a greeting-card. I mean it as politics. Paul called the hidden agents principalities. I have arrived at the same word by the long road of watching people. I am bad at names. People notice. They think I am careless. I am not careless about the thing I think is actually driving the name. Tim, Bob, Bill—fine. I want to know what climbed into Tim.
I do not get very excited about fleshly pursuits. I care about the politics of the powers that wear bodies like coats. That sounds cold until you have watched good people hurt each other while insisting they are only being practical. Paul’s sentence explains the pattern. The pattern is older than the persons.
This is also why the incarnation is not a sentimental Christmas pageant to me. If the real problem were only human manners, God could have sent another list. The Old Testament is not shy about the Spirit of God coming upon men. The scandal is that God himself takes flesh and walks into the mess. I think that is because human beings are not, at bottom, the main antagonist. The forces that use human beings are. Meeting us in the middle of the mess was not a branding exercise. It was an invasion.
When Does a Life Begin If the War Began Earlier?
I will not pretend this next piece is a public-policy white paper. It is the metaphysical question hiding under the abortion argument, and most of the argument never reaches it. The usual fight is: when does the fetus become human enough? Conception, heartbeat, viability, birth, one day before birth. Those are body questions. They matter. They are not the last questions.
Paul’s principalities force a harder timing problem. When does the spiritual being begin its journey in this world? I think the powers are already at work when a man and a woman find themselves wanting to form a union that could produce a child. They are either willing a life into the world or leaning the world toward demolition. Political systems, in my view, are the large, clumsy mirrors of that same contest. We build governments the way we build families: as flesh-and-blood answers to a conflict we can barely see.
If that is true, then a culture that talks only about bodies will keep losing to a culture that understands appetite, despair, and the unseen pressure on the will. I am not asking the county health department to adopt a demonology. I am asking Christians to stop acting as if Ephesians 6:12 were poetry.
What Christianity Gave the West
I said the gift was magnificent. Let me be specific enough to be attacked.
Christianity took a Mediterranean world that exposed unwanted infants, ranked souls by pedigree, and treated crucifixion as interior decorating for highways, and it taught that world that the weak had a claim on the strong. It made the person, not the clan, the unit of moral concern. It made conscience a public fact. It made time itself a story with a judgment at the end, which is another way of saying it made history matter.[14][15]
That moral architecture did not fall out of the sky in 1776. It was preached, copied, argued, and institutionalized for centuries before any Virginian wrote a declaration. Even secular historians who cannot recite the catechism now admit they are living inside the blast radius.[16] You can hate the church and still be using its furniture. Most modern humanitarian language is Christian language with the serial numbers filed off.
I do not say this because I think Christians have always behaved like saints. They have not. I say it because the standard by which we condemn their failures is itself a Christian standard. Rome did not accuse itself of failing the least of these. We do. That habit had to be invented.[17][18]
Jonathan Edwards and the American Nerve
If Paul is how the faith left Palestine, Edwards is one of the reasons it grew a backbone in English-speaking America. He is remembered, lazily, for one terrifying sermon in Enfield in 1741.[19] That sermon is real. It is also a fragment. Edwards was after joy in God, the nature of true affection, the freedom and bondage of the will, and a revival that would not fake itself.[20]
The First Great Awakening gave the colonies a shared moral language before they had a shared government. It taught ordinary people that authority could be wrong, that the soul had business with God that no bishop or parliament could intercept, and that history was not a closed room.[21] Calvin Coolidge, who is not usually cast as a revivalist, said Edwards’s philosophy had prepared the colonists for the Declaration.[22] That is a president talking, not a youth-group brochure.
I do not think America exists in the form I care about without that fire. I also do not think Edwards was sitting in Northampton in the 1740s designing the United States. Influence is a cascade, not a conspiracy. Edwards shapes a climate. The climate shapes men who never met him. The men walk onto battlefields and into conventions carrying instincts they think are simply common sense.[23][24]
His written corpus is enormous. Yale has spent generations editing it. The new study Bible is the first time a lot of ordinary readers will feel that weight without needing a research library card.[25]
Fort Necessity: The Wrong Turn That Organized My Year
My wife and I were trying to get toward Washington. We missed a turn, dropped onto the National Road with a camper that does not enjoy mountain switchbacks, and kept going because turning around had become a theology problem of its own. We pulled into Fort Necessity because the parking lot was large enough for me to get a Mello Yello out of our camper refrigerator.[26]
We were early. It was a midweek afternoon, still cold, almost empty. I went back to the refrigerator for my Mello Yello, which is as close as I get to a sacrament on the road, and we walked the ground. Young Washington was here. He built a sad little circular fort in a meadow and lost. That loss did not make him small. It started the education of the man who would refuse a crown.
I did not hear an audible voice. I am not going to insult the place by inventing one. What I did get was an obsession. The same year I stood at Fort Necessity I stood at Washington’s grave at Mount Vernon and in the room where he slept.
A few months later the Washington film made the circuit and we went. I liked it. But the question it could not answer for me was the one the field had already asked: what made Washington Washington? I think part of the answer is upstream of muskets. It is the Awakening’s idea that a people can be morally addressed as a people—that rebellion against a corrupt center might be obedience to a higher one.[27]
A phone call in the bookstore
While I was in the Fort Necessity bookstore, Nancy Nix called. She and I do local Republican work in Butler County, Ohio. We do not live on the phone. We think in the same direction often enough that when something is jammed, we say so and talk it out. She was dealing with the eternal problem of twenty-five people in a room who will not share a sandbox well together. I was surrounded by Washingtoniana. The juxtaposition was perfect. The early church had the same meeting. Paul had the same meeting. Scale always produces factions. The work is not to pretend otherwise. The work is to keep the factions from killing the thing they claim to love.
Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg, and the Men Who Paid the Invoice
We did Washington properly. We stood outside the White House. That same day we went to Ford’s Theatre. I had already had enough of John Wilkes Booth by the time I looked at the box Lincoln was shot in. I was hungry. I wanted a sandwich and a quieter mind. My wife was right to make us cross the street.[28]
A guide who had noticed we were not ordinary tourists took us through the Petersen House. I sat in that small room a long time. The bed, the chair, the knowledge that a president died a few feet from where tourists now whisper. I found myself wondering what Lincoln’s mind was doing while the body shut down. I cannot know. I think he was thinking about the Union as a moral object. I think the Awakening’s grandchildren were in that room whether anyone said Edwards’s name or not.
Then Gettysburg. We took the RV and gave the battlefield days, not hours. Weather, timing, day one, day two, day three, the cemeteries, the spot of the Address. I have read the military histories.[29] What I could not shake was the interior of the men. What do you tell yourself when you stand up on the third day and move toward a fence line that is trying to erase you? Some of them had Bibles. Some of them had fragments of sermons. Some of them had only the residue of a culture that had already decided the Union was a covenant and slavery a crime against it.[30][31]
A republic capable of spending that much blood to keep a proposition alive did not get that capacity from a seminar on self-esteem. It got it from a long Christian argument about the human person, providence, and judgment. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is what that argument sounds like when it has to bury hundreds of thousands of its own sons.
The Cascade I Keep Seeing
I will put the chain as cleanly as I can, knowing historians will want asterisks and I will give them some.
Without Paul, the Jesus movement remains a Jerusalem story. Without that scaled faith, there is no Christendom to form Europe’s conscience. Without that conscience, the English Protestant world does not produce an Edwards. Without Edwards and the Awakening, the American founding generation does not speak with the moral confidence it actually used—even the ones who were not revivalists. Without that founding, there is no Union for Lincoln to save. Without Lincoln, the American experiment becomes a slave republic with European manners.
That is not a straight line on a chalkboard. It is a watershed. Remove the spring and the towns downstream do not exist in the same form. I think Paul is the spring. I think Edwards is one of the American aqueducts. I think Washington and Lincoln are what the water looks like when it has to put on a uniform.[32][33][34]
People who only memorize the names of apostles miss this. They know who died. They do not know why the death did not end the firm. Paul is the reason the firm had branches.
The Business DNA of the Christian West
Once I saw Paul as a scaler, I started seeing the later fights differently. Mission movements that worked were not only brave. They were organized. They printed. They raised money. They trained. They built schools that outlived the missionaries. They treated the gospel as something that had to arrive in a form a stranger could use.
Only after that practical machinery proved it could create loyalty, literacy, and order did the Roman world—and much later the American world—fully absorb what it could not kill. I do not mean Christianity became a mere business. I mean it survived because it was not allergic to competence.
That is why I get impatient when the same voices that enjoy hospitals, universities, and human-rights talk treat business itself as original sin. The anti-business mood in the modern West is not just an economic opinion. It is often an attack on the very mechanism that let a demanding faith endure: independent people who can move, build, refuse a patron, and take a message across a border without asking a committee for permission.
Paul refused to live off handouts when the handout would have compromised the work. A civilization that sneers at that instinct will not keep the civilization Paul helped make. It will keep the vocabulary for a while. Then it will keep only the complaints.
Imperfect Instruments: Why I Compare a Businessman to Paul
I am going to say the impolite part. A lot of Christians wanted their political deliverance to arrive dressed like a Sunday-school painting. History does not usually staff itself that way. Paul had been a persecutor. He was not the profile the Jerusalem church would have ordered from a catalog.
I look at Donald Trump the same way I look at other blunt instruments in American life. I do not need him to be a systematic theologian. I need to notice what actually happened: a businessman with a public mess behind him enlarged the platform available to people who had been lectured out of public life. Charlie Kirk and a lot of ordinary conservatives could stand in rooms they would not have been invited into. I think that matters. I also think it is possible to be grateful for a door and still wish the doorman had better manners.
Paul did not come in the package people expected. Neither do most of the people who keep a movement from being locked in the sacristy. If your test for usefulness is polish, you will be ruled by people who are good at meetings and bad at history.
What a Second Great Awakening Would Actually Look Like
I do not think the next awakening arrives as a White House program. Administrations can restrain harm and they can appoint judges. They cannot regenerate a people. That work starts in churches, kitchens, Bibles, and arguments that last longer than a news cycle.
When I drive around my community on Sundays I see a lot of churches. Many of them are doing honest work. Many of them are reciting names. They know the apostles. They know the outline. They do not always know the politics inside the outline—the fight between purity and scale, martyrdom and mission, the local table and the empire of cities. That is why I am having this conversation in public. Surface catechism will not hold a civilization that is being talked out of itself.
A modern awakening would look, in practice, like people recovering nerve. Not vibe. Nerve. The willingness to tell the truth about good and evil without outsourcing the definitions to whatever academic fashion is currently eating its own young. It would look like families that treat children as souls rather than lifestyle accessories. It would look like churches that can stand a businessman in the pulpit without calling him unclean and can stand a poor man in the pulpit without calling him a mascot. It would look like gratitude for the West instead of a permanent apology for having won.
Edwards hoped God would walk with a people through the battlefields of ordinary life. I want that sentence back in circulation. Not as décor. As an operating assumption.
Why I Will Keep Talking to AI About This
A lot of people who read me despise artificial intelligence. Some of them despise Elon Musk on principle. They think any conversation like this is a rehearsal for a comic-book villain. I understand the fear. Tools this sharp can cut the wrong direction.
I also think it is cowardice to let the fear own the tool. We built machines that can hold a line of argument, retrieve a library, and stay in the fight when a human conversation partner gets tired. Used stupidly, that becomes a substitute for thought. Used properly, it becomes a way to do what Paul did with letters: send a structured argument into places the sender cannot physically be.
This is not a prophecy of Ultron. That is a man using a new press. The first Great Awakening had Whitefield’s lungs and a rising print culture.
A second one will have churches, Bibles, and whatever honest instruments we refuse to surrender to people who hate the civilization that made the instruments.[35]
I am not asking anyone to worship a model. I am asking them to notice that reference, memory, and argument are part of spiritual warfare too. If the principalities are real, they are not frightened by our refusal to use a library because the library is now silicon.
Know Where You Are
I watched, not long ago, the easy public habit of praising every sacred book as if they were interchangeable courtesy items. Respect, as a civic manner, is one thing. Amnesia is another. I have read the Qur’an more than once. I can say, without theatrics, that it has never done to my mind what Edwards does, and it has never done what Ephesians does. That is not a foreign-policy program. It is a reader’s report.
A nation that cannot tell the difference between the sources of its own law and the sources of someone else’s empire is a nation preparing to be edited. I will not help with the editing. The point of the progressive pressure I have spent years writing against is not manners. It is unmaking. If you want to unmake a people, you first convince them that the faith which built their hospitals, their conscience, and their suspicion of kings was always a crime scene.
I think that project is the current face of the old war. Flesh and blood will carry it. Flesh and blood are not the origin of it.
What I Want the Reader to Do
If you only remember one practical sentence, remember this: start with Paul if you want to know how the faith survived, and start with Edwards if you want to know how it learned to speak American.
Buy the book if you can. Read Ephesians slowly, out loud, as if it were written to a congregation that might split next week—because that is the situation it was written for. Then read Edwards on affections and ask whether your religion is an appetite or a performance. Then walk some actual ground. Necessity. Vernon. Gettysburg. The cheap seats at Ford’s Theatre. History gets into the legs in a way it does not get into a feed.
Notes
The numbered references in the text correspond to the sources below and to the bibliography. Biblical citations follow common English versification; quotations from Ephesians use the New King James Version to stay with the Edwards study edition.
[1] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Notes drawn from Edwards’s corpus; essays on his life, theology, spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening; Edwards’s Resolutions; introduction to the Miscellanies system.
[3] Acts 18:3. The Greek is skēnopoioi, traditionally “tentmakers.” See Kenneth Berding, “Was Paul a Tentmaker? Part 1,” The Good Book Blog, Biola University, October 18, 2021.
[4] Acts 2:44–47; Acts 4:32–37. Compare the later famine collection in Acts 11:27–30. Historians generally read the Jerusalem sharing as voluntary generosity inside a threatened community, not a standing political economy.
[5] Acts 4:13.
[6] Galatians 2:11–14; Acts 15:1–35.
[7] Josephus, The Jewish War; Tacitus and Suetonius on successive unrest under Rome.
[8] Revelation 1:9. The boiling-oil tradition is in Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics 36.
[9] 1 Clement 5; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.25. Traditional date: Rome, under Nero, c. A.D. 64–67.
[12] Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992); Walter Wink, Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); Hendrik Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, trans. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977).
[13] Ephesians 2:11–22; 3:1–13.
[14] Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016); Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
[15] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
[16] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
[17] Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[18] Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932).
[19] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
[20] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); Freedom of the Will (1754).
[21] Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
[22] Calvin Coolidge, Address on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.
[23] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[24] Edwards died March 22, 1758, weeks after becoming president of the College of New Jersey. The responsible historical claim is cultural inheritance, not a pocket sermon in every haversack.
[25] The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale University Press; digital corpus at the Jonathan Edwards Center, http://edwards.yale.edu.
[26] National Park Service, Fort Necessity National Battlefield. Battle of July 3, 1754.
[27] Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Mount Vernon, Virginia.
[28] Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site and Petersen House, Washington, D.C. Lincoln died April 15, 1865, at 7:22 a.m.
[29] Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York: Knopf, 2013).
[30] Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863; Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.
[31] Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860; presidential fasting and thanksgiving proclamations, 1861–1865.
[32] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[33] N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013); F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).
[34] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).
[35] Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).
[36] Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Scripture and primary Christian sources
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Sermon, Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Digital edition: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. http://edwards.yale.edu.
The Apostolic Fathers. 1 Clement. Late first century.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History.
Tertullian. Prescription Against Heretics.
Paul, the early church, and the powers
Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992.
Berding, Kenneth. “Was Paul a Tentmaker?” Parts 1–2. The Good Book Blog. Biola University, 2021.
Berkhof, Hendrik. Christ and the Powers. Translated by John Howard Yoder. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977.
Bruce, F. F. Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.
Dunn, James D. G. The New Perspective on Paul. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.
Hurtado, Larry W. Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016.
Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.
Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.
Christianity and Western civilization
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925.
Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. London: John Lane, 1908.
Dawson, Christopher. The Making of Europe. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932.
Holland, Tom. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942.
Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.
Edwards, the Awakening, and American political religion
Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.
Sweeney, Douglas A. “Jonathan Edwards: Legacy.” Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835–1840.
Founding, Union, and the ground I walked
Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Coolidge, Calvin. Address on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.
Guelzo, Allen C. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. New York: Knopf, 2013.
Lincoln, Abraham. Cooper Union Address. February 27, 1860.
Lincoln, Abraham. Gettysburg Address. November 19, 1863.
Lincoln, Abraham. Second Inaugural Address. March 4, 1865.
National Park Service. Fort Necessity National Battlefield. Farmington, PA.
National Park Service. Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. Washington, D.C.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.
Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon, VA.
Classical and Roman context
Josephus. The Jewish War.
Tacitus. Annals.
Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars.
The author’s related work
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have watched this movie before. In 2015 and 2016, and again in 2024, the same class of people tried to tell America that Donald Trump’s wealth was a character defect. They said a rich man could not be trusted, that success itself was the indictment, that gold, planes, and golf were proof he was “not like you.” Voters put him in the White House twice anyway, because they understood something the professional scolds never will: independence is an asset. A man who does not need the job is harder to own. That is the lesson Ohio Democrats and a handful of leftover Republican wreckers are now trying to unlearn with Vivek Ramaswamy, and it is why Amy Acton spent Labor Day weekend screaming that you cannot buy Ohio.
She needed a chant. What she got was a gaffe.
The Speech That Sounded Like a Person Running Out of Road
Watch the clip. Acton is at a union picnic with Pete Buttigieg in tow, doing the ritual of the lockdown years: I am a doctor, not a politician, becoming one right in front of your eyes. Then she starts barking that Vivek cannot buy the state, cannot buy Ohio, cannot buy us, cannot buy us, cannot buy us in Ohio, that is the end of this. It is the sort of thing a campaign writes on a whiteboard when the internals look ugly and the only remaining argument is envy. The crowd does not catch fire. She looks like she is trying to start a wave at a funeral.
This is the same Amy Acton Ohio already knows. She ran public health under Mike DeWine when the state was locked down, businesses were smashed, kids were sent home, and “follow the science” became a political religion. She collected awards for it. A lot of Ohioans collected unemployment, missed funerals, and watched their Main Streets die. You can call that public service if you like. I call it the record she has to run on, and it is why the “I’m just like you” routine lands like a lead pipe. She is not just like you. She is the woman who told you to stay home while the people who write the rules kept their salaries.
The wealth attack is even thinner. Vivek flew to watch tennis. He likes tennis. He used to be a ranked junior. He has a court. He went to the U.S. Open and he has been to Paris. Wealthy people do that. Trump never ran from Mar-a-Lago or the golf course; he wore the gold clip and the silk tie and said, yes, I did well, and if you vote for me I will try to make it so you can do well too. That is a producer’s message. Acton’s message is the opposite: he has money, therefore he is illegitimate, therefore hand the keys to the people who want to tax the successful and redistribute the proceeds to the discontented. That is not a governing philosophy. That is a ransom note.
Why Attacking Wealth Is a Loser’s Tell
I have been thinking lately about the Apostle Paul. He was effective in part because he had standing and independence. He was not a ward of the movement. He could travel, argue, and endure because he was not begging the crowd for his next meal. Politics is not the church, but the principle is the same. A candidate who has already won in the private economy does not need Columbus the way a career public-health administrator needs Columbus. Vivek does not need a government job. That is supposed to be a feature. The people yelling “you can’t buy Ohio” are announcing that they cannot raise comparable money and cannot compete on growth, so they will compete on resentment.
David Pepper and the rest of the chorus have been working this line for months: billionaire, private jet, not one of us. Fine. Then explain why Trump’s jets and clubs did not stop two national victories, and why Ohioans who want plants, capital, and jobs might prefer a man who has already built companies to a woman whose signature achievement was closing the state. You can dislike Vivek’s style. You can argue policy. What you cannot do, with a straight face, is pretend that enjoying a tennis match is a civic crime while the alternative is more of the administrative state that already had its turn.
The other half of this farce is intra-Republican sabotage. After a primary, Democrats lock arms around whoever they nominated, even when she sounds like a chalkboard dragged down a stairwell. A slice of the right still wants to pick the scab. Nick Fuentes types, leftover primary rivals, the professional “I told you so” circuit—anyone who would rather be right about a Republican’s flaws than win the state—keep feeding the same clip. They did it to Trump in 2016 and 2024. He won anyway because voters vote their interest when the noise dies down. A good economy and job creators in your state beat a sermon about how the other guy’s plane is too nice.
Then Came the Fair, and the Overnight Conversion of a Shove Into an Assassination Plot
The timing is the tell. After the Labor Day chant made her look unhinged, the campaign needed a new story. Sunday at the Canfield Fair, a 38-year-old local named Patrick Havas pushed through a tent crowd toward Acton with a phone up, as if he were recording or trying to get close enough to be seen. He knocked over older people. Security took him down. After the fact, deputies found two pistols and a Taser-style device on him. He did not draw the guns. He did not fire. He did not brandish. Ohio is a constitutional-carry state. Carrying is not the same thing as attempting murder. The charges reported were disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault for the people he knocked down. Acton was unhurt. The people who fell were assessed and, according to the sheriff, did not seek further treatment.
That is a bad scene at a fair. It is not a martyrdom. Campaign statements still said an “armed individual lunged” and injured multiple people. National copy followed the verb. By Saturday night into Sunday the lead was written as if Ohio had just watched a political assassination attempt. If there were clean video of a man trying to kill her, it would have been on every screen before supper. What we got instead was language inflation: lunge, attack, armed, threat—while the actual police story is a large man barreling for a better look or a confrontation, knocking seniors like bowling pins, and getting piled on by Highway Patrol.
This attack story is just another Democrat Jussie Smollett story, trying to gain sympathy and voter support through fake news talking points. This is the fullness of the Acton operation: when the speech is a disaster, change the subject to danger. When you cannot raise on growth, raise on fear. When you cannot debate or raise money, accuse the other side of buying the state. Look how many sucker politicians jumped on the bandwagon without knowing all the facts, which again came out looking like Amy Acton is a loser candidate.
What Ohio Actually Chooses When the Cameras Leave
Acton will keep the unions, the people who want the next transfer payment, and the media that still thinks 2020 was her finest hour. She will keep Pepper on the ticket as proof that the old Democratic machinery is still in the room. She will keep calling Vivek rich, which he is, and hoping Ohio has forgotten that successful people are allowed to like tennis, football Saturdays, and a life that is not a permanent campaign stop.
I want a state that recruits producers instead of lecturing them. If a man with a billion dollars in assets spends a few thousand to fly to a match, that is not the scandal. The scandal is a political class that treats his success as the crime and her lockdown résumé as the credential. Trump never apologized for winning. Vivek should not apologize for a court, a jet, or a seat at the Open. The people who need him to grovel are the same people who needed Trump to grovel. They lost that argument twice.
Vote like you want the factories and the payrolls. When things got tough for Amy Acton in 2026 she turned to fake news. Which only made everything worse. She is the lockdown lady and is horrible in every way a politician can be, which we all had a front-row seat to in 2020 when she destroyed Ohio’s economy and told everyone they could be superheroes if only they wore a mask in public. That is the person running for governor in Ohio as a Democrat. A disaster on a good day. On a bad day, she is a fake news agent of destruction and drunkenness.
Notes
1. Acton’s Labor Day-weekend remarks with Buttigieg at the Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic, including the “you cannot buy this state / you can’t buy us” repetition, circulated widely on September 5–6, 2026. See WLWT coverage of the Hamilton picnic and contemporaneous rally video.
2. Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director under Gov. Mike DeWine beginning in 2019 and became the public face of the state’s COVID restrictions.
3. Criticism of Ramaswamy’s travel and tennis included Acton’s own Labor Day-weekend post attacking a U.S. Open appearance and earlier opinion pieces on a July 4 Paris trip.
4. Ramaswamy’s tennis background (junior player, Cincinnati Open ball boy, regular Open attendee) is part of his public biography and prior campaign videos.
5. Canfield Fair incident, September 6, 2026: Patrick Havas, 38, of Canfield, pushed through the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent, knocked down older attendees, was detained by Ohio State Highway Patrol executive protection; weapons recovered after detention; no brandishing reported; charges reported as disorderly conduct and two counts of misdemeanor assault. Acton uninjured.
6. Constitutional carry in Ohio means possession of a concealed firearm, without more, is not itself an assassination attempt.
7. Public polling through late summer 2026 generally showed a toss-up to slight-Ramaswamy edge depending on the house, which is consistent with a campaign hunting for a reset narrative.
8. Intra-GOP sniping after contested primaries is a recurring feature of the Trump era; Democrats have typically consolidated faster around flawed nominees.
Bibliography
Acton for Governor. Campaign statements and Labor Day / Canfield Fair remarks, September 2026.
Ballotpedia. “Amy Acton.” Candidate biography and office history.
CNN. “Armed man arrested after pushing through crowd toward Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee.” September 6, 2026.
Columbus Dispatch. “Armed man arrested after lunging at Amy Acton at Canfield Fair.” September 6, 2026.
Cincinnati Enquirer. Nick Anderson, “Ramaswamy’s Paris trip an example of his disconnect with Ohioans.” July 8, 2026.
HuffPost. “Vivek Ramaswamy Slammed For Leaving Ohio And Attending The U.S. Open.” September 6, 2026.
Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office / Ohio State Highway Patrol statements on the Canfield Fair detention of Patrick Havas, September 6, 2026.
New York Times. “Armed Man Arrested After Charging Toward Democratic Candidate for Ohio Governor.” September 6, 2026.
The Nerd Stash. “‘You Can’t Buy Us’: Ohio Dem Amy Acton Sparks Backlash After Awkward Rally Chant Aimed at Vivek Ramaswamy.” September 6, 2026.
Washington Post. “Armed individual ‘lunged’ at Democrat nominee for Ohio governor, campaign says.” September 6, 2026.
Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” Polling averages and race ratings as of early September 2026.
WLWT. “Pete Buttigieg campaigns for Amy Acton, Greg Landsman at Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic.” September 6, 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been thinking about this for a long time, and the thoughts keep circling back like they always do when something important is trying to get out. American philosophy did not end with Ayn Rand. Human beings keep innovating. She was a powerful contributor to American thought and the American system of individual achievement, but philosophy is not a closed book. We keep going. What bothers me, what has always bothered me, is the character of the human spirit in her books and how that spirit keeps getting attacked in the real world. I look at the hatred directed at the creators, and I see something deeper than politics or economics. I see a pattern that stretches back before Abraham, before the Bible as we have it, into a world of giants, dolmens, fallen intelligences, and religions that look a lot like control systems.
Ayn Rand’s Heroes and the Rational Adult Mind That Still Misses the Eternal
I have always defended the producers in her stories. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, building according to his own vision. The men and women in Atlas Shrugged who refuse to apologize for creating value. John Galt. These are the characters who understand that achievement is moral. Yet something has always bothered me about the fully rational adult framework she used. She saw clearly the envy and the looters. She saw the morality of production. What she did not fully reach, in my view, is the layer underneath the learned adult mind.
Watch a toddler. I have done this with my own grandchildren. I try to meet them in their eternal aspect, not just as small physical packages that look like someone else in the family. The baby is learning by mimicry: the walk, the talk, the habits, the prejudices of the adults around them. Consciousness arrives already as something, then gets trained into the grooves of the culture. Children can still see outside the box. Adults often cannot. There is the old story from the war of the truck that would not fit under the bridge. All the officers and engineers were stuck until a kid suggested letting the air out of the tires. Simple. Outside the groove.
Psychedelics strip some of those learned limits. Ancient cultures knew this. The rituals around Göbekli Tepe and the Jordan Valley were not empty. The Teacher of Righteousness among the Essenes, a century or so before Jesus, was already working in a mystical stream that the later Christian story partly absorbed and redirected. Jesus emerging in the Galilee region is not an accident of geography. That land had already been thick with older practices. The Eucharist practices that closely resembled Greek mystery traditions north of Athens had been circulating for centuries. When you strip away adult prejudices, the question becomes obvious: is the body the consciousness, or is it a temporary vehicle for something that already exists?
I argue the latter. The older adult whose body is failing still carries the same eternal spirit behind the eyes. The physical form degrades. The consciousness does not. This is where I part company with pure Objectivism and with the hard materialist reading of consciousness that stops at the hardware. Elon Musk has read Rand. He has called Atlas Shrugged useful as a counterpoint to communism, though he says it needs to be tempered with kindness. He is not a hard-core Objectivist. His real drive is the expansion of consciousness across the universe, making humanity multi-planetary, and advancing AI so that intelligence itself can understand reality more fully. Curiosity is his guiding star. That is close to the creators’ spirit, but it is bigger than rational self-interest alone.
The Same Hatred That Hit Ayn Rand Now Targets Elon Musk and the Data Centers
Look at the pattern. The same kind of people who hated Rand’s uncompromising creators now hate Elon Musk. They hated him for Tesla. They hated him when he tried to cut wasteful spending. They show up on the National Mall to protest him. The hatred feels disconnected from ordinary disagreement. It has the flavor of something that reacts against any force that empowers the human race to become more than it currently is.
Data centers are the current flashpoint. I am strongly for them. They are the physical infrastructure of expanded human intelligence. They consume power and water. Local grids feel the strain. Bills can rise. Noise from cooling systems is real. In some polls, 71% of Americans express concern when one is proposed near them. The irony is thick. People who once carried copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead during the Tea Party years suddenly discover selective individualism when the factory of the mind appears in their backyard. It is easier to love the hero in a novel than when his power plant sits next door. The abstract principle is easy. The concrete implementation is hard. That does not make the principle wrong.
The deeper issue is philosophical. Data centers and AI force the question of what consciousness is. Is it locked inside the biological body forever, or can it be extended, preserved, transferred, and expanded through tools we build? Elon talks about brain-computer interfaces and spreading life to other planets. He stays close to the physical substrate. I go further. I think non-human intelligences have been manipulating the human story for a very long time, erasing footprints, using religions and cultural systems as control mechanisms. Anything that expands human capacity becomes a threat to that older order. The hatred of Musk and the hatred of Rand share that root.
Pre-Abrahamic World: Dolmens, Giants, Copper, and the Religions of the Fallen
Go back before the Hebrews. The Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians and never fully brought into the Western canon, records the story of the Watchers and the giants. That text should have been more central. People are discovering it now through popular channels, but the evidence was always there. The Jordan Valley is covered with dolmens from the Early Bronze Age. Large fields of them. Similar table-like megalithic tombs appear across Europe and into the British Isles. In North America there are stone constructions and earthworks that early observers compared to the Old World forms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, particularly in the Keweenaw, the Old Copper Culture was mining pure native copper on a large scale by 7000–5000 BCE, possibly earlier. Artifacts moved across the continent. Some researchers have argued for long-distance trade connections that mainstream archaeology still resists.
The same experts who misled the public on other matters now demand absolute trust in their claims about migration patterns and the impossibility of earlier contact. I am not required to give them that trust. Sea levels were lower twelve thousand years ago. Island-hopping routes across the Pacific were more available. The geometric and mathematical patterns that appear in distant places are not automatically a coincidence. The Wheel of the Giants near the Sea of Galilee sits in the same general region where later religious eruptions continued to occur. Jesus did not appear in a vacuum.
What was the religion of the people who built the dolmens and practiced in that landscape before the Hebrew arrival? What gods did they serve? The later duel between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel only makes sense if people already believed Baal could answer with fire. North American indigenous traditions contain figures and practices that echo Canaanite and broader Near Eastern patterns more closely than random parallel development would predict. The experts dismiss the connections. I keep looking at the ground.
The Black Stone, the Monolith, and Consciousness Transfer
The Black Stone in the eastern corner of the Kaaba is a physical object that Muslims circle and try to touch or kiss. The official explanation is clear: it is an act of following the Prophet’s example. One of the companions said he knew it was only a stone that could neither harm nor benefit, but he kissed it because he had seen the Messenger do so. Fair enough as far as it goes. The deeper history is older. The stone was already sacred in pre-Islamic Arabian pagan pilgrimage. Muhammad did not invent the reverence. He cleaned out the idols and redirected an existing sacred site. Circling seven times, the annual pilgrimage, the sacred enclosure—these were already in place among the tribes.
I look at that stone the way I look at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. An object that appears, catalyzes a leap in consciousness or culture, then continues to exert influence long after its origin is forgotten. Religions can function as programming languages for human groups. They can lock certain patterns of behavior and thought into place across generations. Some of those patterns serve the human race. Others appear designed to keep it fragmented, sacrificial, or subordinate. Islam’s historical expansion has often been framed as a victory and a display of dominance, built on conquered sites. That is not unique to one faith, but it collides hard with the American experiment, which was designed as a vehicle for individual consciousness to flourish rather than submit to collective religious or political control.
Christianity itself absorbed and redirected earlier practices. The Hebrew system still carried ritual elements that older powers could work with. The radical break that Jesus represented threatened those older arrangements. Non-human intelligence does not need to appear as little green men from space. It can operate through dreams, through psychedelic states, through recurring religious forms, through the static that certain people seem to hear and obey without understanding the source.
Collectivism, the Scapegoat, and the Continuing Attack on the Builder
The same people who once cheered when Elon stood near Trump now turn on him when the practical costs of building appear. Collectivism wears religious clothes or secular clothes. It always needs a scapegoat. The independent creator who refuses to apologize for winning becomes that scapegoat. Rand never fully cracked why the businessman-as-moral-hero failed to win over the culture. She stayed inside the rational adult frame. The hatred is older and deeper than economics. It is a hatred of the human spirit when that spirit refuses to stay small.
I see the data centers as the current concrete expression of the same fight. Expanding intelligence, expanding the reach of consciousness, giving ordinary people tools that were once reserved for the few—this is exactly what the older manipulative forces would want to slow or stop. The power and water arguments are real and must be handled honestly. Local communities deserve straight talk and real mitigation. That does not justify the deeper philosophical rejection of the very idea of scaled human intelligence.
I will keep arguing this. The body is the vehicle. Consciousness is older. The record in the ground, in the texts that almost made it into the canon, in the recurring sacred stones and geometric patterns, and in the irrational hatred directed at the builders of each new age all point in the same direction. American philosophy did not stop with Ayn Rand. Elon Musk is one of the living characters who force the question into the open. The rest of us get to decide whether we side with the creators or with the forces that have been trying to keep the human race in its place for a very long time.
Footnotes
1. On Elon Musk’s engagement with Atlas Shrugged as a counter to communism tempered by kindness, see contemporary reporting and his own public comments referencing Rand’s work alongside his broader curiosity-driven philosophy.
2. Jordan Valley and Levantine dolmens date primarily to the Early Bronze Age (roughly 3700–2000 BCE), with large fields documented east of the Jordan Rift; early European explorers noted formal similarities to Western European megaliths.
3. Old Copper Culture mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale began at least 7000–9500 years ago and produced extensive pure native copper artifacts traded across eastern North America.
4. The Newark Holy Stones (Decalogue Stone and Keystone) are regarded by the large majority of professional archaeologists and epigraphers as 19th-century forgeries.
5. The Black Stone of the Kaaba was already an object of pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage and veneration; Islamic tradition preserves the practice of touching or kissing it as emulation of the Prophet while explicitly denying that the stone itself possesses independent power.
6. The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) was preserved in the Ethiopian canon and contains the Watchers narrative; it influenced Second Temple Jewish thought and early Christian writers.
7. Local opposition to data centers frequently cites electricity demand comparable to small cities, water use for cooling, and noise; polling shows majority concern in many proposed locations while the long-term productivity and intelligence gains remain more abstract to nearby residents.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943.
• Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.
• 1 Enoch (various critical editions and translations, including those based on the Ethiopian manuscripts).
• Fraser, James A. Studies on Early Bronze Age dolmens of the Levant and Jordan Valley.
• Pompeani, David, et al. Research on the chronology of prehistoric copper mining in the Lake Superior region (Radiocarbon, The Holocene, Anthropocene).
• Steimer-Herbet, Tara. Work on dolmens and tower tombs in Jordan.
• Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968.
• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.
• Biblical Archaeology Review (long-running coverage of Near Eastern sites, copper production, and Second Temple period).
• Primary Islamic historical sources on the Kaaba and Black Stone (Ibn Ishaq, al-Azraqi, and related early chronicles).
• Contemporary reporting and polling on data-center siting conflicts in the United States (2023–2026).
• Materials on the Teacher of Righteousness and the Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.
This is the ground I keep walking. The creators keep building. The older forces keep reacting. I intend to keep looking.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am not a separation of church and state guy the way the left has used it to push a secular agenda. But to understnad that, you have to understand history, and many people just don’t. And those same people don’t know much about one of the people I consider to be one of the early American Founding Fathers, Jonathan Edwards. I say, use what works and is healthy for a great society, and don’t argue with the poliitcal left the interpritation of law and order when they want to destroy America by using its own laws and policy against its creation. Since that is their method, I would advise that we drop the polite veil and admit what we are all thinking: churches go well with Republican politics, and we should be a whole lot more open about it, and just let the Marxists of the Democratic Party have their faces melt. Art Sauerwein is the new chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. The Journal-News piece I have been talking about put his wish list in public: take back the schools and make them more conservative; see more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes. I agree with most of that list. I would put the disagreement, if there is one, in a sliver. Five percent, maybe. The problem is not the nouns. The problem is that a county chairman saying he is displeased with his own officeholders signals to every Democrat and every reporter in the room that the party is not united.¹
I have a particular soft spot for people who take thankless chairs. I also have a long memory of what happens when the Bush years go slack, when Clinton years teach the other side to use government as a wealth-transfer machine, and when a Republican majority forgets that it was elected to stop that machine, not to learn its levers. Small-government capitalism is not the same project as confiscating through the tax code and redistributing under a better letterhead. I have been on that argument since before the Tea Party years. I have not left it.
What I will not do is pretend that the way you get Christian schools and lower taxes is to twist the arms of the people you still need on the card. That is the Democrat tactic with different hymns. Ostracize, purity-test, call the holdout a RINO, and then act surprised when the tent is an empty Sunday-school classroom with folding chairs and no majority.
Why I Walked George Lang to His Car
People tell me I cannot be trusted because I am friends with George Lang. I was invited to an evening with him and his wife, Debbie. We get along. I like them. I like George. Not because he is a state senator from the 4th District. Because we can stay on a subject until the parking lot lights are the only ones left.²
We started years ago with a mutual fascination with Ayn Rand and the long story of human order. She was an atheist. I was not. We did not make religion the ticket into the room. We made taxes, small business, the Ohio caucus work, jobs that let a family buy nice things without the government picking the neighbor’s pocket. Those are the planks you can stand on with a man who is not yet where you are on Sunday morning. Then you walk him to the car.
This year, 2026, not a decade ago, we were still talking when we got to his car, extending the evening as much as possible because the conversation was good. He knows what I carry. He knows the maps and the notes. He pulled out a Bible that had been given to him in the Senate. It was beautiful. I would have liked it for the shelf. It was his. He had been going through it. Debbie has said, in the way honest people say it, that they have not always lived in that lane. I did not need a performance. I needed the book’s facts in the car of a man who helps write Ohio law. That is how influence works. That is Nicodemus in a parking lot instead of a midnight stair.³
If the chairperson’s job is to get people on the card, then the chairman’s job is to make nights like that more common, not to publish a scolding that makes the next senator keep the Bible in the trunk.
Jonathan Edwards Did Not Found America From a Letter to the Editor
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible came out in August 2026 from Thomas Nelson, NKJV, notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, edited by Matthew Everhard. I saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review, which is still the magazine I would take to a desert island and be happy with nothing else. I will likely make that Edwards volume my next daily Bible. The one I have carried through airports is full of notes. Every blank space they left me has writing in it.⁴
Edwards did his public work in the 1730s through the 1750s, while a young George Washington was still making himself and Franklin was already allergic to other people’s piety and still able to hear the weather. The Awakening put biblical speech in the streets. The colonies that broke from England were not a faculty workshop. They were a people who had been arguing, singing, and frightening themselves with sermons about a God who was not a mascot. I do not claim Edwards “founded” the United States. I claim the country is harder to imagine without that pressure in the air.
He was also the grandfather of Aaron Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton. I am not a Hamilton man. I mention the grandson so nobody thinks I am selling a stained-glass window. Edwards’s own church in Northampton eventually threw him out because he would not lower the table to the town’s comfort. He finished in a smaller charge at Stockbridge, among the Mahican, and then the College of New Jersey—Princeton—made him president. He lasted about a month. He took the smallpox inoculation during an outbreak, fever followed, and he died on March 22, 1758. His last counsel was to trust God and not be afraid. The same college that begged him to come later drifted into the progressive machine that now congratulates itself for unmaking the civilization he helped catechize.⁵
That arc is the warning. You can put a Christian on a letterhead and still lose the building. You can also lose the building by refusing to put your arm around anyone who is not already converted.
Darbi Boddy and the Noble Death That Vacates the Seat
I have always had a soft spot for Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board. She came out of a Puritan temperament: right is right, wrong is wrong, say it, take the heat. I admired the spine. The political class asked whether she knew she had to go to other people and shake hands. She drew a line so hard that the people who should have been part of her coalition treated her as a problem to be managed. She was removed. Not enough Republicans came to her defense in the way that kept the seat. I was very angry about that. I still am.⁶
There is a Christian imagination that treats the pike as the only honorable furniture—burned, sawn, beheaded, and therefore faithful. The martyrs were real. Rome tried to kill the church, and the church outlived the attempt. I am asking a different question for a school board and a county party. Are we here to die beautifully and hand the district back to the purple-haired people eaters or are we here to keep the chair and put more than one adult in the room?
A public school system designed as an agent of social reconstruction will not become conservative because a chairman tells the Journal-News he would like that very much. You need people on the board who can last. You need people around them who do not run at the first ugly headline. You need a farm team that was not raised only in a sanctuary, because most of the county was not. Maybe forty percent can make the born-again jump on a timetable that satisfies a Sunday-school teacher. The rest will come, if they come, the way George came toward a Bible in a backseat: over years, over taxes, over ancient history, over the proof that you will still walk them to the car when they are not yet where you are.
The Church That Taught Me Business Had Classrooms and a Mortgage
I saw my grandson today, and I told him about my years between eleven and sixteen, High Adventure, the Scout post that met at a big church on RT42 in West Chester. We made pizzas in the church kitchen, and people came to pick them up. That was a fundraiser, a civics lesson, and a first business plan. My family church in Fairfield was the other building. My wife and I were married there. Catechism, Sunday school, the pastor’s house on the property, the side rooms where a kid learned how adults talk when they think they are only running a troop meeting. Then the money ran out. They sold it. It broke my family’s heart. It is not on the market presently. I have been thinking about buying it back for a couple of million. dollars In any other use, that ground in Fairfield is a different number. Because it is a church, the market treats it like a problem.⁷
I am not announcing a closing. I am saying the thought is serious, and Jonathan Edwards is the reason the thought got louder. Churches decline when they have no profit model and a pastor who thinks Jesus only ever taught under a tree. Jesus could walk from village to village. A sanctuary in a hot real-estate corridor has a mortgage. Nicodemus money, the quiet help that keeps a ministry on its feet, is not a compromise with Egypt. It is how a thing survives long enough to teach the next boy how to sell a pizza and keep the books.
The West Chester Tea Party lost a church venue while I was in Japan not that long ago. A guest, a fight, and the door closed. For years the movement lived on donated fellowship halls and cookies after the meeting. Streamers, Republicans, whoever would come. That was a big tent that still knew the room had been a sanctuary an hour earlier. I want a building in this county that Tea Party groups and Republican meetings can use without a landlord who gets nervous. Not a state church. A civic table with a steeple still on it.
Princeton Forgot. The Party Should Not Copy the Forgetting.
Edwards as president of Princeton is the picture I cannot shake. The college wanted the man who could make seniors write on divinity and then talk about it. A short generation later, the heirs of that project began the long surrender. Liberty University and the older schools are not the same charter, but the temptation is the same: keep the Christian name, lose the Christian nerve, export Democrats with verse numbers. Complaining about that in a newspaper will not reverse it. Buying a pulpit, filling a room, putting your arm around a senator who keeps a Bible in the backseat, teaching a Scout to make change for a pizza—that is the slower work.
Peer pressure is not evangelism. “Agree, or we will put you outside” is what the other party already does. If we do it with better footnotes, we still lose the county. Jesus did not recruit from the Sanhedrin’s banquet list. He took the people who had fallen out of the wagon. Edwards could fill a town and still get voted out. Both facts matter. The first tells you preaching works. The second tells you preaching without a coalition becomes a memorial service.
What I Want the Chairman to Do Instead of Being Displeased
Help officeholders get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. If you want Christian values in the community, put a beautiful Bible in more backseats by being the kind of man a senator will linger with in a parking lot. If you want the schools, do not design another martyr and then wonder why the seat is empty after they are killed or lose their seat in the next election. If you want taxes cut, stay on the subject with people who will go to the small-business caucus before they will go to your Wednesday Bible study volunteer class.
I will keep reading BAR. I will keep the Edwards volume in the rotation. I will keep walking George to the car. I will keep thinking about the Fairfield church, not because nostalgia is a strategy, but because the kids I see now do not have the side room I had, and a party that cannot raise its own young in a hall it does not have to rent is a party that will keep leasing its future from people who do not like its hymn.
Lead. Do not write the other side’s headline for them.
Notes
1. Art Sauerwein, Butler County GOP executive chairman, quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage on local Republicans, schools, Christian values, spending, and taxes. A public rebuke of sitting Republican officeholders is usable copy for the other party. That is not mind-reading. That is how newspapers work.
2. George F. Lang, Republican, Ohio Senate 4th District since 2021; previously Ohio House 52nd; West Chester. Married to Debbie Lang. I am describing a private evening in 2026 and a longer friendship. I am not claiming he has asked me to speak for him.
3. John 3; 7:50–51; 19:39–42. Nicodemus keeps his station and still moves toward the teacher. Influence that can only speak in the sanctuary will not reach the people who write statutes.
4. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026, general editor Matthew Everhard. Biblical Archaeology Review, Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.
5. Edwards was inaugurated at the College of New Jersey on February 16, 1758; died March 22, 1758, after smallpox inoculation. Buried in the Presidents’ Lot, Princeton Cemetery. Esther Edwards married Aaron Burr Sr.; their son was Aaron Burr Jr. Northampton dismissed Edwards in 1750 over communion discipline; Stockbridge followed.
6. Darbi Boddy won a Lakota Local Schools board seat in 2021 on a conservative platform and was removed by the board in March 2024 after a long, ugly fight and a 90-day absence tied to a protection-order conflict with another member. I am not retrying that case here. I am talking about coalition and what happens when courage has no bench.
7. The Fairfield church of my childhood and marriage is named as a family fact and a present thought, not as a listed property and not as a pledge. High Adventure and the West Chester church on the Cincinnati-Dayton Road corridor are the Scout years as I lived them.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Local Politics and the People Named
Journal-News (Hamilton). Late-August 2026 coverage of Butler County Republicans and Chairman Art Sauerwein.
Lang, George F. Ohio Senate, District 4. Public record, 2021–present; Ohio House, 2017–2020.
Ballotpedia and the Ohio Legislature biographical pages for George Lang.
Journal-News. “2 conservative newcomers, incumbent win Lakota seats.” November 2021.
WVXU. “Darbi Boddy is removed from Lakota’s school board.” March 20, 2024.
WLWT. Lakota board appointment coverage following the vacant seat, April 2024.
FOX19. “Criminal charge dismissed against former Lakota school board member.” August 1, 2024.
Jonathan Edwards and the Awakening
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press.
Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections; Freedom of the Will; “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.
Marsden, George M. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Eerdmans, 2008.
McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford, 2012.
Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.
Princeton University. Presidential biographies: Jonathan Edwards, 1758.
This Day in Presbyterian History. “February 23: Jonathan Edwards.” On the inoculation and death.
Princeton and the Long Drift
The Princetonians and official presidential histories of the College of New Jersey.
Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822. Princeton University Press, 1989.
Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford, 1994.
Burtchaell, James Tunstead. The Dying of the Light. Eerdmans, 1998.
Church, Money, and the Nicodemus Problem
The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, 19.
Luke 8:1–3. The women who funded the ministry.
Acts 4:32–37; 16:14–15. Property and hospitality in the first churches.
Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”
Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together.
Schaeffer, Francis A. The Church at the End of the 20th Century.
Schools, Boards, and the Limits of Martyrdom
Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education. Free Press, 1993.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. The Schools We Need. Doubleday, 1996.
Murray, Charles. Real Education. Crown Forum, 2008.
Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. New Society, 1992.
Ohio Department of Education standards files for the official language boards to actually vote on.
Parties, Tents, and Coalition
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.
Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015.
Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale, 1962.
Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Scripture, Friendship, and Slow Conversion
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.
Newby, Elizabeth. On ordinary friendship as the delivery system of belief, read against Lewis.
Augustine. Confessions. The long way toward a book that was already in the house.
Biblical Archaeology Review. For the magazine that sits on the table while the political argument goes on.
Boy Scouts of America. Handbook and the old troop-and-post structure. The side room was a civics school whether the adults knew it or not.
Rich Hoffman 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.
