Category: Giants

The American Novelist Ayn Rand: Understanding the rise of socialism in America


I have been saying this for years: ten years ago, twenty years ago, back when I was doing radio shows and walking people through Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist and the larger body of work that showed how the communist movement as a philosophy had already impregnated itself into American society. Most people did not want to talk about it then. They treated the subject like an embarrassment or a relic of the Cold War that had been safely buried. I wrote books of my own, put them out there, and kept advocating for capitalism because that is the actual economic engine of the United States. When we talk about America being so great, so wonderful, and we almost seem to have an insecure need to remind ourselves of it all the time, it is because we have been under sustained assault by forces that prefer a corporate form of socialism, and that assault has been aggressive for a very long time. It is a real problem, and the evidence is now sitting in plain sight.

What surprises me is how many people in the Fox News orbit, and in broader conservative media, act as if the sudden visibility of socialism and communism is some brand-new development. The same people who shrugged when I raised the issue years ago now look startled. Bernie Sanders was never an outlier; he was a representative of a current that had been moving on the left for decades. When Democrats start losing ground, you see figures like that gain oxygen, and you see cities and states that have voted blue for generations produce the logical results. New England has been practicing a softer version of this for a long time. New York is not an aberration. The kids running around calling themselves socialists did not invent the ideology in a vacuum. They were taught it. Public schools have been delivering pieces of that curriculum for years, and the culture has rewarded the language of grievance and redistribution. I warned about it. A lot of us did. Now the bill is coming due, and the people who once treated the warning as overheated are suddenly discovering that the problem did not simply disappear.

I like a lot of people in the broader movement. I like Steve Bannon a great deal. The way he has been treated, the jail time, the selective enforcement, the institutional effort to sideline him, has been corrupt and ugly. He has done important work with War Room and with the larger project of forcing attention onto the administrative state and the global arrangements that treat national sovereignty as an inconvenience. He made films, including serving as an executive producer on Julie Taymor’s Titus with Anthony Hopkins, a brutal and faithful take on Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, which is my favorite. That alone tells you something about the range of the man. He has operated inside the Hollywood sandbox for stretches of his career, raised money, dealt with the people who control distribution and narrative, and still tried to produce work that cut against the grain. The question I keep asking is whether you can play in that sandbox for years and come out entirely your own person. I have my doubts. The incentives are powerful. High-level politics and high-level media are environments where you sit around tables with people who do not share the same level of conviction about the productive core of the American experiment. You learn to speak in codes, to manage coalitions, to keep certain doors open. That is the nature of the work. It does not make the man worthless. It does mean the purity of the original impulse gets tested every single day.

What I cannot square is the apparent distaste for Ayn Rand. I have heard him talk about her work in ways that treat it as naïve, or as a kind of Wall Street cartoon of capitalism that turns people into commodities. He has distinguished that vision and what he calls the enlightened capitalism of the Judeo-Christian West. Fair enough as a philosophical difference. Rand was an atheist. She had a complicated personal life. She was more of a pure libertarian than a conservative in the traditional sense, and I am not a big libertarian myself. Yet the core of what she put on the page remains one of the clearest fictional diagnoses of the looter mentality that I have ever read, and it is bizarre to me that someone who understands the value of money, who has operated in finance, who drives people toward serious books, and who has spent years criticizing the Federal Reserve and the soft corruption of the system would keep her at arm’s length. Atlas Shrugged ranked as the second most frequently cited book after the Bible in a Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club survey of works that shaped American lives. That is not a small data point. The novel is a sustained argument about what happens when the people who actually create value decide they will no longer carry the people who only know how to take it.

Rand fled the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks confiscated her father’s pharmacy. She watched a functioning commercial order get smashed in the name of the collective, and she never got over it. That hatred of the communist method runs through everything she wrote. The Fountainhead came first, in 1943, and it is my favorite of her novels. Howard Roark is the architect who will not let his designs be diluted by committees and second-rate talents who want to ride his talent without earning it. There is a scene where he is invited to join an advisory board for a kind of world’s fair project, and he refuses. He will not lend his name and his mind so that lesser people can loot the prestige. Some readers find that extreme. In ordinary politics it is often impractical. George Lang and I have talked about this more than once. In a majority party you have to work with people whose instincts are not identical to yours if you want votes to move in a productive direction. Absolute purity can become a form of vanity. At the same time, Rand is right that there is a difference between tactical compromise with imperfect allies and the slow acceptance of actively evil principles. You cannot split the difference with people whose operating premise is that your productivity exists to be harvested. Roark’s refusal is a dramatic statement of that boundary. I see versions of it in the best of Trump’s refusal to play the expected game. I see versions of it in anyone who has built something real and then watched the administrative class try to regulate, tax, or shame it into submission.

Atlas Shrugged is the larger canvas. John Galt and the producers withdraw. They stop supplying the energy, the invention, the organizational talent that keeps the lights on. The looters are left with the machinery and no one who knows how to run it. The book is long, sometimes didactic, and unapologetic about the creator’s moral superiority over the expropriator. It is not a happy story. It is a warning written by someone who had witnessed the real thing in Russia and recognized the same intellectual currents moving through American universities and policy circles in the middle of the twentieth century. When the Tea Party erupted in 2009 and 2010, the novel found a new audience. “Who is John Galt?” showed up on signs. Sales spiked. People who had never read a word of Objectivist philosophy suddenly recognized the emotional truth of the strike. Hollywood had no interest in touching the material with any seriousness. The independent film trilogy that eventually appeared was made outside the studio system, with rotating casts, limited budgets, and the predictable critical hostility. Unions and the usual cultural gatekeepers treated the project as radioactive. Clint Eastwood and others circled The Fountainhead for years without ever getting a serious production off the ground. The resistance was not mysterious. The books argue that the people who make things have a moral right to the value they create, and that the people who only know how to consume or commandeer that value are not victims but predators. That message does not sit well with an industry and an academic class that has spent decades teaching the opposite.

I do not swallow every piece of Rand’s personal philosophy. She was extreme. The childhood wound of watching her father’s standing and property taken never fully healed, and it shows in the absolute tone of the later work. I am a Christian. I believe in family obligations that go beyond the pure calculation of self-interest. I do not think every social coordination is looting. But the central distinction she draws between producers and looters is still the cleanest language I have found for what is happening in large parts of American institutional life. Pirates board a ship, kill or maroon the people who built and sailed it, and then congratulate themselves on the redistribution of the cargo. Corporate raiders in the political sense do a slower version of the same thing. They capture the regulatory apparatus, the tax code, the university, the HR department, the foundation, and they extract. They call it equity, sustainability, or the common good. The result is the same: the people who know how to build eventually decide the game is no longer worth playing on those terms.

That is why the party culture matters more than most people want to admit. I watched the new Spider-Man film, No Way Home, and there is a scene where Peter Parker walks into an apartment full of people in their twenties. Beers are being handed around without ceremony. There is no real threshold, no sense that anyone is required to bring anything other than their presence and willingness to dissolve into the group. It is presented as normal, even warm. I have never liked that atmosphere. I married young and stepped out of it early. I do not romanticize the college or post-college party as some necessary rite of passage. Rand saw the same pattern in the Soviet and post-Soviet cultural residue and in the Western imitation of it: the deliberate lowering of standards, the free-love rhetoric that treats self-possession as bourgeois repression, the pressure to surrender individual judgment to the warmth of the crowd. The 1960s did not invent the impulse, but they industrialized it in the West. Once you train a generation to find identity in collective release rather than in the disciplined creation of value, you have prepared the ground for the political language of socialism. The kid who learns that adulthood begins by getting drunk and losing himself in a game or at a party is not being prepared to be a producer. He is being prepared for management.

I am not Howard Roark. I am not prepared to dynamite the building rather than see it compromised. Politics requires more patience and more willingness to persuade than pure fiction allows. But I have learned to recognize the looter pattern early, and when I see it taking over an enterprise I tend to check out. Not with terrorism, not by vanishing into a Colorado valley, but by refusing to keep pouring effort into a structure that has already decided my contribution is collective property. My own book Tail of the Dragon was, among other things, an effort to work through the same themes of self-initiation and refusal to be pulled under by people who only know how to take. Readers who have lived the problem recognized it.

If I were twenty-five again, or just out of college, or interning for some member of Congress on the Hill with more time than obligations, I know exactly how I would spend it. I would get a Library of Congress reader card, which is free and available across the hall from the main reading room, and I would go into that magnificent space every day, with its gold ceiling and its quiet gravity. I would take Atlas Shrugged or, better, start with The Fountainhead, and I would read for an hour or two. The tunnels that run under the street connect the Capitol complex, the Court, and the Library, so the people who work there never have to step outside into the city’s ordinary weather. It is a physical expression of the idea that the serious business of the republic is intellectual before it is anything else. Steve Bannon lives essentially next door to that world. The proximity is not accidental. The same few blocks contain the Supreme Court, the Library, and the offices where the daily compromises of legislation are hammered out. It is the most concentrated expression of American institutional ambition I know. I would use it. I would also walk over to the Supreme Court cafeteria when I needed a break. The building itself is a statement that law is supposed to be something higher than the temporary majority. Spending months in that environment with Rand’s novels would do more for a young person’s understanding of the current crisis than any number of seminars on equity.

I did my own version of that education later at night, after second-shift work, at Perkins, Denny’s, and Waffle House between midnight and four in the morning, reading until it was time to go back on the clock—hundreds of books. The habit of sitting alone with a serious text and refusing the easy company of the moment is how you build the internal resources that later let you recognize a looter when he smiles and calls himself your partner. The same impulse took my family to Put-in-Bay just a few weeks ago. Sometimes you need an island, a stretch of water, a temporary removal from the people who treat your energy as an open account. It is not Atlantis. It is just a necessary interval of clarity.

The novels are fiction. They are also more accurate in their portrayal of the moral psychology of redistribution than most of the nonfiction assigned in schools. Socialism is not a discovery. It is the oldest temptation in political life: the belief that the people who did not build the thing have a superior claim on it because there are more of them, or because they feel more strongly, or because history is said to be moving in their direction. Rand had watched that claim enforced with guns in Russia. She wrote the American version of the warning. You do not have to accept her atheism or her more extreme personal conclusions to see that the warning still applies. The engine of the world is not the committee. It is not the hashtag. It is not the person who has learned to speak the language of the oppressed while living off the productivity of others. The engine is the individual mind that looks at raw material and sees a railroad, a new alloy, a better way to generate power, a story worth telling, and then does the long, unglamorous work of making it real.

That is what is under assault. That is why the old books keep finding new readers whenever the political temperature rises. And that is why I keep returning to them even when people I otherwise respect prefer to keep their distance. The argument is not finished. The strike is not over. The only question is how many people still remember what it means to refuse to be looted.

Notes

1.  W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958; multiple later editions). Skousen, a former FBI agent, distilled Marxist theory and operational history into a widely circulated Cold War text that sold nearly two million copies.

2.  On the 1991 Library of Congress / Book-of-the-Month Club survey ranking Atlas Shrugged second only to the Bible among books that most influenced respondents’ lives, see Los Angeles Times, “Bible Ranks 1 of Books That Changed Lives,” December 2, 1991; and subsequent discussions in libertarian and Objectivist literature.

3.  Steve Bannon’s critical distinction between Randian capitalism and “enlightened capitalism of the Judeo-Christian West” appears in reporting from his 2014 remarks and later analyses, including Ralph Benko, “Ayn Rand’s Ghost Does Not Haunt The Trump Administration,” Forbes, December 18, 2016, and Wikipedia’s summary of Bannon’s economic nationalism.

4.  Bannon’s role as executive producer on Titus (1999, dir. Julie Taymor) is documented in contemporary Variety coverage and later profiles, including The Paris Review, “Steve Bannon’s Obsession with Shakespeare’s Goriest Play,” November 29, 2016.

5.  Ayn Rand’s family background and the confiscation of her father’s business after the Bolshevik Revolution are standard biographical facts; see Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009), and Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986).

6.  Sales surge and cultural visibility of Atlas Shrugged during the Tea Party period (2009–2010) are recorded in contemporary publishing data and reporting; “Who is John Galt?” signage became a common visual marker at rallies.

7.  The independent Atlas Shrugged film trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014) was produced outside the major studio system after decades of unsuccessful Hollywood development efforts. Critical and commercial reception was poor; the producers widely noted union and cultural resistance.

8.  Rand’s major fiction: Anthem (1938), The Fountainhead (1943), Atlas Shrugged (1957). Nonfiction collections include For the New Intellectual (1961) and The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).

9.  Parallel readings of Atlas Shrugged and the original Star Wars (1977) as narratives of resistance to oppressive systems are interpretive; George Lucas has not affirmed direct influence, though readers of both frequently observe the thematic overlap with individual agency versus bureaucratic or imperial control.

10.  Personal observations on party culture, the Spider-Man: No Way Home apartment scene, and the Put-in-Bay interval are drawn from direct experience and recent family travel.

Bibliography

Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

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

Heller, Anne C. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. [Publisher details per author’s edition].

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. [Publisher details per author’s edition].

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript in final preparation, targeted 2027.

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

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. London: Cassell, 1938; various later editions.

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

Rand, Ayn. For the New Intellectual. New York: Random House, 1961.

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

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

Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Communist. Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958; subsequent editions.

Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Multiple scholarly editions; film adaptation Titus (1999), dir: Julie Taymor, executive produced in part by Stephen K. Bannon.

Additional context on the Tea Party’s reception of Rand, Hollywood’s development history of the novels, and Bannon’s public economic commentary may be found in contemporary reporting from Forbes, The New York Times, Variety, and Objectivist periodicals such as The Objective Standard and New Ideal. For the Library of Congress survey, see the 1991 Book-of-the-Month Club / Center for the Book results as reported in the Los Angeles Times and subsequent secondary literature. Primary Marxist and progressive texts that form the intellectual background against which Rand wrote remain essential contrasting reading: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto; and selected works of the American progressive and New Left traditions.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

They Call Me Jonesy and the School Board Call That Keeps Coming

The text from Sheriff Richard K. Jones arrived while the phone sat face-down during a showing of Young George Washington. The calls and messages kept lighting the edge of the screen in the dark theater. One of them was Jonesy himself letting me know that the book was out and that a careful reading would be worth the time. The timing was almost perfect in its inconvenience. A planned window to get out of the normal daily life pattern had already opened. The decision had been made to break the usual Friday-night routine, drive a different route, and head for South Bass Island rather than return straight home. Packages left on a front porch while the household was away create their own problems. So the order waited until the return was certain. The Amazon driver handed the book over in the driveway as the camper was being backed into its usual spot after the short island run. Twenty-four hours of steady reading followed. 

They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America is not a polished campaign document. It is the voice of a man who has spent decades as Butler County Sheriff, wearing the same cowboy hat that has become a kind of quiet declaration, speaking the same plain language about crime, family, political correctness, and what he calls the swamp. The second half of the book returns again and again to a single practical point: if the country is going to be fixed, the most important public office available to ordinary citizens is the local school board. The phrase and the idea appear often enough that it begins to feel directed. Jonesy has watched the same ground for a long time. He knows the people who stay outside the formal structures and still manage to move things. He also knows how many of those same people keep getting told they should step inside. 

Politics remains a bloodsport even when the combatants know and respect one another. There have been seasons when Jones and others in the county stood on opposite sides of particular fights. That never erased the underlying regard. The nature of the game requires choosing a side and playing it hard. Sometimes the people across the board are the ones who would otherwise be natural allies. That is simply how the contest works. Jones himself has never shown much appetite for trading the sheriff’s office for something higher. He has said, in public and in the book, that effectiveness often improves when a person stays outside the formal swamp rather than climbing deeper into it. The same logic applies in reverse to those who have never worn a badge or held a seat. The most useful work is frequently done by people who refuse to become creatures of the system they are trying to restrain. 

The pressure to enter the school-board arena does not come only from Jonesy’s pages. It arrives weekly, sometimes more often. The arguments are familiar: the schools shape the next generation; the curriculum, the hiring, the culture, and the tax levies are decided there; surrendering those seats to people who treat traditional American formation as the problem is a slow form of civic suicide. Ben Nguyen’s recent election to the Lakota board stands as a living example that younger, clear-eyed candidates can still win and serve. The point is not lost. School boards remain the most direct lever ordinary citizens still possess. When they are captured by people who view the institution as a platform for every progressive fashion rather than a place to transmit competence, literacy, and ordered liberty, the damage compounds for decades. 

Yet the practical question remains. A life already organized around seventy-hour professional weeks, family obligations, writing, and the constant low-grade vigilance that comes with a public profile does not easily absorb another formal role. Most elected officials keep outside employment because the official salary alone is rarely enough and because the work itself expands to fill every available hour. Adding a school-board seat would require rearranging the entire calendar around meeting nights, executive sessions, and the inevitable political theater that follows any vote that displeases the organized interests. Controversy travels with the name. There are people who read the work, request signed copies of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and fly into Butler County Regional to hand over stacks for their own teams. There are also people who scheme in the opposite direction. Changing routes, avoiding predictable patterns, and occasionally leaving the mainland for an island that requires deliberate effort to reach are not theatrical gestures. They are the ordinary precautions of a man who would rather not end up in a courtroom explaining a justified use of force. The island trip provided a short psychological reset for me. The pressure did not disappear, but the constant proximity did. That matters.  When things are getting thick, its best to step away from the pressure so not to be impacted by it. 

Jonesy’s repeated insistence that the school board is the place to fight does not require every capable person to file petitions tomorrow. It does require that the capable people stop treating the board as someone else’s problem. Jonesy’s book’s larger argument is that America is not saved by distant national theater alone. It is saved, or lost, in the places where children are taught what to value, what to respect, and what to defend. The sheriff who prefers to remain a sheriff rather than become a congressman or a senator is making the same point from the other direction: stay close to the ground, stay effective, and do not surrender the institutions that still answer directly to the people who live under them.

The book is worth the careful reading it received. Jonesy has made hard decisions over a long career and has refused to sand the edges off the lessons. The message about the school board lands with particular force on those who already know the terrain and who keep being asked the same question. The answer, for now, is not a categorical refusal. It is a recognition that effectiveness has its own schedule and its own costs. The arena is real. The children in the classrooms are real. The people who would rather keep the seats filled with ideological placeholders are also real. Jonesy is not wrong about any of that. The only remaining question is how many more seasons the current arrangement can continue before the price of staying outside becomes higher than the price of stepping in.

They Call Me Jonesy is available now. Read it. Then look at the next school-board ballot in the county and decide what the ground actually requires.  The larger fight over what is taught, what is remembered, and what is defended has never been only about one board or one county. It has always been about whether the next generation will inherit a coherent civilization or a managed decline. Jonesy has stated his preference clearly. The rest is up to the people who still have the energy and the will to act on it.

Footnotes

1.  Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2025/2026), available via Amazon and theycallmejonesy.com. The official site describes the work as a candid leadership book addressing crime, political correctness, “The Swamp,” and the practical question of what ordinary citizens can do to save the country.

2.  Official book site, theycallmejonesy.com, accessed July 2026. Testimonials include statements from Mark Lamb, J.D. Vance, and former Middletown Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw emphasizing law-and-order leadership and traditional values.

3.  Rich Hoffman, “They Call Me Jonesy: The Night the Arena Roared and the Establishment Lost the Plot,” richhoffmanbooks.com, July 27, 2026. Earlier treatment of the same volume focusing on the 2016 U.S. Bank Arena appearance, family destruction by the drug culture, and Jones’s style of practical authority.

4.  Lakota Local School District Board of Education roster, lakotaonline.com, listing Benjamin Nguyen as a seated board member beginning January 2026. Nguyen, a 2025 Lakota West graduate, won election in November 2025 and has been described as among the youngest elected officials in Ohio.

5.  Butler County Sheriff’s Office public statements and local coverage (Journal-News, FOX19, WCPO) documenting Jones’s long record of engagement with area school boards on security, resource officers, and related policy.

6.  Personal observation of the repeated emphasis inside the volume itself on school-board service as the highest-leverage local office available to citizens concerned with the direction of the country.

Bibliography

Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. 2025/2026. https://theycallmejonesy.com/ and Amazon listings.

Hoffman, Rich. “They Call Me Jonesy: The Night the Arena Roared and the Establishment Lost the Plot.” richhoffmanbooks.com, July 27, 2026.

Lakota Local School District. Board of Education roster and meeting materials. lakotaonline.com.

Butler County Sheriff’s Office. Public releases and social-media statements regarding school security and related policy, 2018–2026.Various local reporting (Journal-News, FOX19 NOW, WCPO 9, Cincinnati.com ) 

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Why Young People Leave Their Parents Behind in Ohio: Amy Acton is the Jeff Spicoli of politics

I just got back from Put-in-Bay, and the whole time I kept looking at that big park and the yacht club thinking the same thing: this is exactly the kind of place a Republican governor candidate should plant a flag and talk about jobs. Not the usual Columbus or Cincinnati media circus. An island. Outside. Real people on vacation who still live in Ohio and want their kids to stay here. It would make great news precisely because it is not the typical stop. It signals strength. It tells the other side their strategy is already under pressure.

That same instinct applies east of Columbus in Amish country. Put an arm around the people who live with the paranormal side of Ohio—the Bigfoot reports that still come in, the stories that never make the official narrative. Those people vote. They know when somebody is listening and when somebody is talking down to them. A little color in the campaign does not hurt when the other side is running the same old progressive script.

Because that is what this race is really about. David Pepper is on the bottom of the Amy Acton ticket, the former Ohio Democratic Party chairman now serving as the institutional muscle. The person on the bottom of the ticket usually does the hard work of carrying the party machinery and the progressive money networks. They are connected into the larger Democrat operation that has treated Ohio as a prize in the long project of remaking the country. Mark Elias and that entire apparatus do not show up by accident. Ohio has been a target for years. Knock it off and the map changes.

Pepper has been loud about Vivek Ramaswamy moving Strive Asset Management out of Columbus to Texas. He acts like it is some personal betrayal. It is not. It is fiduciary duty. Companies exist to protect and grow capital, not to perform patriotism for politicians who create the conditions that drive capital away. Ramaswamy built brands. He understands that investors put money where the rules reward production instead of punishing it. Texas had better policy. Ohio is improving, and a lot of dedicated legislators have been grinding to make it friendlier, but the record under the last round of heavy-handed governance still hangs over the place. Aerospace manufacturing and advanced industry are coming whether the political class likes it or not. The only question is whether Ohio captures them or watches them locate somewhere else.

Amy Acton does not understand any of that. She resigned as health director in June 2020 after the COVID policies she helped drive produced real damage. Businesses closed. Ownership changed hands. Some never recovered. You can still feel it. Then there is the 2019 police call to her house over a domestic dispute where she had been drinking, took medication, shattered a mirror, and her husband had to keep her from driving. That is not abstract. It is part of the public record now. She never held a stable executive job that required building something that had to survive market discipline. She became popular with a certain type during the early COVID days because she made anxious people feel protected. That constituency is real, but it is not the majority that decides whether capital stays or leaves.

I have watched the type for decades. She reminds me of the girls who adopted the Fast Times at Ridgemont High beach-festival personality so they would not intimidate anyone by seeming too sharp. It worked in high school. It does not build a state. The Democrats seem to think they can turn that same soft, non-threatening persona into statewide votes. There are not enough of those voters left in Ohio to carry it. The people who still believe in opportunity look at a billionaire who actually ran companies and built an anti-woke asset manager because the existing ones had gone soft, and they see someone who knows how money moves.

Capitalism is voting with your feet. If the policy environment is hostile, you leave. That is not disloyalty. That is how free people protect what they have built. The Democrat instinct is closer to East Berlin. Stay. Wear the mask. Do not go to church. Be loyal to the state even when the rules are destroying the very conditions that let families raise the next generation here. They never understood why people climbed the wall. They still do not. North Korea makes the same calculation. Fear and guilt are cheaper than good policy.

That is why young people have been leaving their parents in Ohio for years. Mom and Dad stayed. Junior and the daughter looked around, saw limited opportunity, and moved. The traditional pattern—raise a family here, take the kids to Put-in-Bay or Hilton Head, keep the cycle going—breaks when the economic soil is thin. Ohio needs to be a premier destination again. That requires a governor who understands brand, investment, and the difference between real growth and political theater. Ramaswamy has lived that difference. He moved a company when the numbers said move. He will sign legislation that changes the numbers in Ohio’s favor. There is an army of legislators waiting for exactly that.

Pepper and the Acton operation are already showing the strain. The money is flowing in on their side, but the investment of belief is not. People remember who locked things down and who paid the price. They also notice who treats a corporate relocation as moral failure instead of economic signal. A few months out, the race is still competitive on paper, but the underlying dynamics favor the candidate who can talk about opportunity without apology. Seven or eight points is possible if the campaign stays aggressive and refuses to play on the other side’s chosen ground.

I would still take the Put-in-Bay stop and the Amish-country swing. Stretch the map. Force the media to cover something other than the scripted attacks. Show that the campaign is strong enough to go where the usual consultants say not to go. That is how you make the other side squirm. Ohio does not need another festival personality in the governor’s office ordering pizza and managing decline. It needs someone who knows how to build a brand people want to invest in and a state people want to raise families in. That is the choice. The rest is noise.

Notes

1.  Amy Acton selected former Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper as her lieutenant governor running mate in January 2026.

2.  Strive Asset Management, co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy as an anti-ESG/anti-woke firm, relocated its headquarters from Columbus, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas, with most staff expected to move by early 2025. Pepper and labor allies have repeatedly attacked the move as evidence of disloyalty to Ohio.

3.  Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director from February 2019 until her resignation on June 11, 2020, amid intense controversy over COVID orders; she briefly continued as an advisor to Governor DeWine.

4.  A 2019 Bexley police report described a domestic dispute at Acton’s home involving a verbal argument, alcohol, prescription medication, and a shattered mirror; no charges were filed. The report resurfaced during the 2026 campaign.

5.  Multiple 2026 polls and the Cook Political Report have rated the Ramaswamy–Acton race a toss-up or extremely close as of mid-to-late July, after earlier lean-Republican ratings.

6.  Ohio has long experienced net out-migration of young college-educated adults, a phenomenon repeatedly described as brain drain in academic and policy literature; recent data show some stabilization but the cultural memory of limited opportunity remains strong.

7.  Ohio continues to record Bigfoot and other cryptid reports, including a notable 2026 uptick in Northeast Ohio, with cultural resonance in rural and Amish-adjacent communities.

Bibliography for Further Research

Acton, Amy, and related Ohio Department of Health records, 2019–2020.

Ballotpedia. “Ohio gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2026.”

Cook Political Report. Race ratings for Ohio governor, July 2026 updates.

DeWine, Mike. Public statements on Acton’s resignation, June 11, 2020.

Elias, Marc / Democracy Docket. Broader progressive legal and electoral infrastructure materials.

McGuire, Patrick, et al. “Brain Drain in Ohio: Observations and Summaries.” University of Toledo Urban Affairs Center, 2006 (and subsequent updates).

Ohio Capital Journal and Columbus Dispatch reporting on Acton job history and the 2019 police call, April–July 2026.

Pepper, David. Substack writings and campaign statements criticizing Ramaswamy and Strive relocation, 2025–2026.

Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. and public comments on fiduciary duty, capital allocation, and state competitiveness.

RealClearPolitics / 270toWin / Decision Desk HQ polling aggregates for Ohio governor, March–July 2026.

Strive Enterprises press materials and Dallas Morning News coverage of the headquarters relocation, late 2024–2025.

U.S. Census and Ohio Board of Regents historical analyses of college-graduate migration patterns.

Additional reading on East German border controls, capital flight under socialist policy regimes, and the political economy of state competition (Texas vs. Ohio business climate comparisons).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

They Call Me Jonesy: The Night the Arena Roared and the Establishment Lost the Plot

I have been sitting with Sheriff Richard K. Jones’s book for about 24 hours now, turning the pages the way a man turns over an old photograph that still has the power to surprise him. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America is not a polished political memoir written by committee. It is the voice of a man who has spent a lifetime walking the same ground I have walked in Butler County, speaking the same language of family, order, and personal accountability that once held communities together before the experts decided those things were negotiable. Jones has always been the Sheriff who runs his office the way Andy Griffith ran Mayberry and Marshall Dillon ran Dodge City, with a healthy dose of Waffle House common sense thrown in for good measure. You show up, you tell the truth, you do the job, and you do not apologize for the results. That approach has kept Butler County safer than most places that spend three times the money and twice the consultants, and it is why so many of us who live here still call him simply Jones.

What kept pulling me back to the book was not the policy talk or the war stories about the jail, though those are solid enough. It was the cautionary tales about family and the slow corrosion of the values that once made a man accountable to his own house before he tried to run anyone else’s. Jones and I share a deep and permanent hatred of the drug culture that has hollowed out so many families in this county and across the country. We have both watched too many good people lose children, lose marriages, lose the simple ability to look their grandchildren in the eye without shame. He writes about those losses without the usual soft language of the therapeutic class. He writes like a man who has had to clean up the mess afterward. That kind of honesty is rare now, and it is the reason the book feels less like a campaign document and more like a dispatch from someone who has been on the wall for a long time and is finally willing to say what he has seen.

But the story that made me laugh out loud, the one that sent me straight back to October of 2016, is the one about the night he opened for Donald Trump at U.S. Bank Arena. I was there. Not in the sense that I was sitting in the same row or riding in the same car. I was backstage, working the edges of the same event, trying to find a quiet corner where I could take a conference call with people on the other side of the world while the whole building shook. And I watched the exchange Jones describes in the book unfold in real time.

It was Thursday, October 13, 2016. The Access Hollywood tape had dropped only six days earlier, on October 7, and the professional political class was still in full panic. Most of the Ohio Republican establishment had already decided Trump was finished. They had lined up behind Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or John Kasich, the local favorite who was still twisting arms for support even as the primary season was long over. Supporting Trump in those weeks was not the fashionable choice. It was the choice that got you labeled a crank, a risk, a man who did not understand how power actually worked. Senator George Lang, I, and a handful of others had been in that camp early. We had met Trump, sat with him, watched him operate before the primaries even heated up in Ohio. We knew the ground. Most of the smart people in the room did not.

Jones was one of the few who never flinched. By the time the campaign asked him to warm up the crowd at U.S. Bank Arena, the atmosphere was thick with the kind of nervous energy that only comes when the people in charge are not sure the candidate is going to survive the next news cycle. The director of the program that night wanted a script. He wanted to know exactly what the Sheriff was going to say. He wanted control. Jones looked at him the way he has looked at a thousand people who try to put a leash on him and said, essentially, that is not how I work. I talk from the hip. I have been talking all year. You tell me how long you need and I will fill the time. I do not need a teleprompter or your talking points.

I was standing close enough to hear the exchange while they were trying to get me upstairs to a box where I could take that overseas call. Giuliani was somewhere in the mix. The production people were frantic. Trump’s plane was still in the air. The arena was filling from the floor to the upper decks, and the noise was already starting to build. Jones went out there anyway. He did not have a prepared speech. He walked onto the stage and did the thing he has always done: he talked to the people the way a man talks to his neighbors when the subject is serious. Fifteen minutes turned into something closer to thirty. The crowd answered him the way Butler County has always answered him. They roared. From the high box where I finally closed the windows and tried to finish my call, Jones looked like a small figure on a distant stage, but the sound of that arena was impossible to shut out. I had the volume turned up on my headset and still could barely hear the people on the other end of the line. Part of me was irritated that my business meeting was being drowned out by a Sheriff who refused to stay on script. Most of me was very proud.

Trump claimed the crowd that night was 21,000, with thousands more outside who could not get in. Mike Pence put the number around 19,000 the next morning. The arena’s concert capacity sits somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,500, and some of the upper seats behind the stage were empty according to the reporters who were counting chairs instead of energy. The exact headcount is the kind of detail the media loves to argue about when they do not want to talk about what the crowd actually felt. What I saw from that box was a building packed tight enough that the noise had nowhere to go but up. People had not been paid to be there. They had not been bused in. They had decided that the Access Hollywood tape and the coordinated media effort to sink the candidate were not going to decide the election for them. Jones understood that before most of the professionals in the room did.

I have watched Jones make hard calls for more than twenty years. We have not always stood on the same side of every primary or every local fight. There have been nights when we were polite but cool because we were representing different candidates or different issues on the ballot. We have always found our way back to the common ground, because the common ground is larger than the temporary disagreements. Supporting Trump when it was still radioactive inside the Ohio Republican Party was one of those moments when the ground became visible. The same people who told us we were going to destroy our own political futures are now the ones who want their picture taken with the man. That is how these things usually go. The smart set picks the wrong horse for the wrong reasons, and then they rewrite the story after the race is over.

Jones has always had a gift for seeing through the fog. When Corey Lewandowski came through Ross’ Big Bull later, the first person he sought out was the same Sheriff who had refused to read from a script on a night when the campaign was still bleeding. That is the kind of quiet authority that does not show up on a résumé. It shows up when the building is full, and the professionals are nervous, and somebody still has to walk out there and speak without a net.

I recommend the book without reservation. Read the parts about family and the slow destruction of the old rules. Read the parts about the jail and the daily work of keeping order in a county that still believes order is possible. And read the part about that night at U.S. Bank Arena, because it captures something essential about the man. He is not a performer. He is not a consultant’s idea of a lawman. He is the product of a certain kind of American stubbornness that refuses to be managed, and on the nights when it matters most, that stubbornness turns out to be the smartest thing in the room.

I was proud of him that night. I am proud of him for putting the story down on paper without sanding off the edges. Some of us were right when it was expensive to be right. Ten years later, it is still a pleasure to remember it.

Footnotes

1.  Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (publication details as available through standard retail channels, 2025–2026). The account of the U.S. Bank Arena appearance appears in the sections dealing with early Trump support and the political pressures of the 2016 general election campaign.

2.  The Access Hollywood recording was published by The Washington Post on October 7, 2016. See “Donald Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005,” Washington Post, October 7, 2016.

3.  Attendance estimates for the October 13, 2016, rally at U.S. Bank Arena (now Heritage Bank Center) varied. Trump publicly claimed 21,000 inside with additional thousands outside; Mike Pence cited approximately 19,000 the following day. Contemporary reporting noted the arena’s concert configuration capacity near 17,500 and observed some empty upper-level seats. See “How many people attended Trump’s Cincy rally? No one seems to agree,” WCPO, October 13–14, 2016; and arena capacity data from Heritage Bank Center / U.S. Bank Arena historical records.

4.  Photographic and contemporaneous coverage confirming Sheriff Jones’s appearance as a speaker that evening can be found in the Cincinnati Enquirer photo gallery, “Trump supporters rally at U.S. Bank Arena,” October 13, 2016, and related local television reports from WCPO and WLWT.

5.  On the broader context of early Ohio support for Trump amid establishment resistance, see contemporaneous reporting on the positions of figures such as then-Senator Rob Portman, Governor John Kasich, and local Republican organizational dynamics in the weeks following the Access Hollywood release.

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America.

Fahrenthold, David A. “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.” The Washington Post, October 7, 2016.

“How many people attended Trump’s Cincy rally?” WCPO 9 News, October 2016.

Heritage Bank Center (formerly U.S. Bank Arena) venue history and capacity documentation.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Sheriff Jones’ New Book: The Treasure of Butler County, Waffle House, Andy Griffith, and Gunsmoke all wrapped up into one person

I first learned that Sheriff Richard K. Jones had put a book out when a few people in the county mentioned it in passing, and the moment I heard the title I knew I would read it. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America arrived on the front porch the day my family and I returned from being out of town at Put-in-Bay, in Ohio. I had ordered it so it would be waiting, because I had already promised myself and others that I would get through it promptly. After more than two decades of knowing the man, shaking his hand at events, watching him work a room in that cowboy hat of his, and hearing him on WLW or in national spots talking immigration and law and order, I still carried questions about how he became who he is, what shaped the priorities he brings to the office every morning, and how a man decides day to day what matters most when the badge is on. The book answered more of those questions than casual conversation ever could.

What struck me first is that this is not merely a campaign volume or a greatest-hits collection of media appearances. It reads like a man who has spent a lifetime speaking into microphones and cameras finally realizing that the voice does not last forever. There is a quiet urgency underneath the stories. He talks about the burial plot, about the friend at the funeral home who will one day see him prepared for the last service. He is only a little more than a decade older than I am, yet the public job ages a person in ways private life does not. Six terms as sheriff of Butler County, with the possibility of more, still brings the knowledge that one day the hat comes off for the last time. Writing the book becomes a way of leaving the voice behind so that the things he believes still matter after the daily briefings and the press conferences stop. 

I have always liked the Gunsmoke in him. He admits the debt openly. The old black-and-white shows, the clear line between the man who upholds the law and the men who break it, the sense that a sheriff walks the street and talks to people and puts things right when he can. Andy Griffith is there too, the Mayberry instinct to put an arm around the troubled soul and try to set him back on the path. Those two shows formed a generation of men who believed law enforcement could be both firm and decent. Jonesy lives that combination more than most. He is black-and-white on the big questions. Drugs destroy families and communities; illegal immigration brings more of the same; the jail is full of people who made choices that wrecked their own lives and the lives of others. Yet the book reveals a softer edge than the public persona sometimes allows. He is a compassionate conservative in the older sense of the term. He wants the county to feel more like the place he grew up, where most of the kids he knew had parents who stayed married twenty or thirty years and worked through their troubles instead of walking away at the first hard stretch. 

That observation about divorce rates is one of the strongest passages. He watched the numbers climb across his adult lifetime and saw the downstream damage in the jail, in the overdose calls, in the children who never had a stable home to push against. Stable families produce the work ethic and the self-control that keep a community from tipping into chaos. When the marriages fracture as a matter of course, the sheriff’s office ends up dealing with the wreckage. He does not present himself as a sociologist, but the pattern is plain to anyone who has spent decades answering the same kinds of calls. The data back the instinct. The sharp rise in divorce after the introduction of no-fault laws, the parallel growth in single-parent households, and the measurable links to higher rates of juvenile trouble, drug use, and later criminality are not left-wing inventions or right-wing inventions. They are simply what happened. 

I share the same cultural memory. I grew up with Gunsmoke playing in the background at my grandparents’ place near Oxford, rabbit ears and all, the same black-and-white morality on the screen while the adults talked about the real world. The shows did not prepare a man for the full depth of certain modern evils. Pornography addiction of the kind that turns a phone into a nonstop delivery system, and the further slide into the sexual exploitation of children, sit outside the frame of those old stories. Jonesy is of an era when a teenager might sneak a look at a dirty magazine on a high shelf in an old bookstore hoping that the cashier wouldn’t catch them. The scale and the numbness of what exists now are harder for that generation to metabolize, not because the men lack courage, but because the evil itself is newer in its accessibility and its intensity. He is devastatingly clear on drugs. On the deeper sexual corruptions that have grown in the last thirty years, the book leaves the impression of a man who sees the damage and still struggles to find language adequate to the thing itself. That is not a failing of character. It is the honest limit of a worldview formed before the internet made every darkness instantly available.

His record on the drug side is long and consistent. The seizures, the public messaging, the refusal to treat overdose deaths as inevitable background noise, all of it tracks with the same black-and-white view. He has been equally consistent on illegal immigration, which is why the national media found him useful for color and why the comparisons to Joe Arpaio sometimes surface. Arpaio paid a political and legal price for enforcing the same principles under a different administration; the pardon that followed was a recognition that the prosecution had been selective. Jonesy has not faced that level of federal hostility, and Butler County is not Maricopa. The local political climate has allowed him to keep doing the work. I expect him to keep winning as long as he wants the job, and I hope that is for a good while yet. The county is better for his presence. 

There is a section on the COVID years that brought back the tension of those days. He kept the office functioning, kept the messaging straightforward, and refused to let the panic dictate every decision. Leadership under that kind of pressure reveals the man. The same instinct shows up in the smaller habits. He likes the Waffle House on Main Street in Hamilton enough that they named an omelet after him. I understand the attraction. Walk in, sit at the counter, talk to the cooks and the waitresses and whoever else is there about the country and the county and what needs fixing. It is the modern version of the saloon without the whiskey, a place where a sheriff can still be a citizen among citizens. I took my granddaughter to a Waffle House on a trip toward Columbus for the same reason. The American flags and the unapologetic patriotism on the walls feel like home. Jonesy belongs in that atmosphere the same way he belongs in the cowboy hat.

The book is full of the personal details that never surface in a sound bite. Garfield High School. The long marriage. The children and grandchildren. The zoo trips. The quiet pride in having built a life that looks something like the ones he saw around him as a boy. He is not trying to present himself as a sophisticated theorist. He is trying to say that the old model still works if enough people insist on it. Strong families, clear laws, a sheriff who shows up every day ready to lock up the people who refuse to live by them, and a willingness to put an arm around the ones who might still be pulled back. That combination is rarer than it should be.

I have found myself on the opposite side of primary fights from time to time, the normal friction of people who share a party but not always a candidate. None of that changed the basic respect. The man has brought real public relations value to the office and to the county. When national outlets need a sheriff who will speak plainly about the border or the drug crisis, they know where to find him. Locally he has kept the department visible and the standards high. The book makes plain that the visibility is not an end in itself. It is a tool for keeping the public on the side of the people who have to make the hard calls at three in the morning.

Some of my favorite people. And I never get tired of Sheriff Jones.

What lingers after the last page is the sense of a man measuring the distance between the county he inherited and the county he will leave. He wants the next generation of law enforcement and the next generation of citizens to remember that the job is still worth doing it the old way. The book is his attempt to make that memory portable. It is not perfect. No book written by a working sheriff in the middle of the job is going to be. It is honest in the places that matter. The love of the old shows, the sadness over the collapse of stable families, the daily refusal to treat drug dealers as unfortunate victims of circumstance, the recognition that the voice will one day go quiet, all of it lands cleanly.

If the goal is still to make the country better starting from the ground up, then more sheriffs who think like this would help. Fix the families and a large part of the downstream crime and addiction begins to shrink. Keep the border and the drug pipelines under pressure. Keep the local office present and accountable. Jonesy has practiced that combination for a long time in one midwestern county. The book lets the rest of the country see the method without the filter of a three-minute television hit. I finished it glad I had waited for the porch delivery, and gladder still that the man who wrote it is still on the job. Butler County has been better for it. The country would be better if more places had the same standard.

I will keep endorsing him for as many terms as he chooses to run. The hat still fits. The instincts are still sound. And the book ensures that even after the last term the voice remains available to anyone willing to listen.  Which they should. 

Notes

1.  Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). Official description and author framing appear at theycallmejonesy.com and the Amazon listing for the title.

2.  Biographical details drawn from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office official profile and contemporary reporting: born October 11, 1953, Hamilton, Ohio; military service 1973–1975; long career in Ohio corrections before becoming chief deputy and then sheriff in 2005; multiple reelections including the 2020 cycle that secured a fifth term.

3.  Comparison to Joe Arpaio references the 2017 presidential pardon following the contempt conviction tied to immigration enforcement practices under the prior administration. See White House statement of August 25, 2017, and contemporaneous coverage.

4.  Historical divorce and family-structure trends are well documented in Census and CDC data showing the post-1960s acceleration after no-fault divorce reforms, the rise in single-parent households, and correlated social outcomes. See also the long-term cultural commentary in works such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and the earlier observations of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

5.  Jones’s public commentary on immigration, fentanyl, and COVID-era policy is extensively recorded in local outlets (Journal-News, Local 12), national appearances, and the sheriff’s own podcast In the Saddle.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Arpaio, Joe, and Tom Fitton. Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes On Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America. New York: AMACOM, 2008.

Murray, Charles. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965. (The original memorandum remains foundational for understanding family-structure effects on social outcomes.)

Putnam, Robert D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Sheriff Richard K. Jones. Official biography and news archive at butlersheriff.org.

They Call Me Jonesy official site: theycallmejonesy.com.

U.S. Census Bureau and National Center for Health Statistics historical tables on marriage, divorce, and household composition, 1950–present.

Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper, 2016. (Useful companion reading on the cultural and family pressures in the broader Ohio Valley region.)

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Trump Put out the Evidence: How can media companies claim it’s all false before they actually read it?

I sat there the other day listening to the typical pre-speech coverage of President Trump’s primetime address on election security, and it was the same tired script I’ve heard for years now. The reporters and anchors could barely contain their eagerness to frame it as the desperate act of a man who cannot bring himself to abandon the most unpopular policies, no matter how toxic they may be for his own people running for reelection or for the party itself. They talked about his “gambit,” about how he was going to try to convince Republicans that the sky is falling on voting machines and foreign influence, and they already had the line ready: the president is expected to release declassified intelligence about China’s role, but of course it will all be false. How do they know it’s false before anyone has even looked at the documents? Because the network producers and the people who own those networks already decided it was false. That network of people is the real problem. They take bits and pieces, glue them together into a predetermined conclusion, and then run with it as if they have done any real analysis. One thing Donald Trump is not incapable of is putting actual evidence in front of the American people. That was the coverage before the speech even aired, right in the middle of July, while Trump was still out there logging the hours and trying to lock in the system’s security for the long haul. It is disconcerting, and it is exactly why I have spent more time than most going down the rabbit hole of what is really running our political order. When every talking head gets the same memo and says the same thing about elections, you start to wonder whether they are all that stupid or whether a lie can be denied until you die and everybody will play along.

We have known Democrats have been cheating for decades. It was not invented in 2020. I knew something was fishy in 2012. I knew it again in 2016 when Trump obviously won Florida. The panhandle results came in early, and they were overwhelmingly Republican, just as anyone who understands the state would expect. Then you had the usual delays out of the bigger Democrat-leaning counties, Brevard and the rest, where the reporting slowed to a crawl on election night. What they found was that Trump’s lead was too large to overcome with the remaining ballots, so they finally had to turn the results in. This was before COVID and the great expansion of mail-in ballots, signature verification theater, and the endless counting until the other side got what it needed. We just kept counting. That is the pattern. Now people are paying closer attention, and the same act is still necessary for Democrats and the media that cover for them. I heard the ABC reporter come straight out and say the President of the United States was going to give an address to the nation on Thursday night talking about the SAVE Act and election security, and the framing was already that he was pushing something false. Trump is not going to run again. He will be well into his eighties when he leaves office. He has done the job he set out to do and will ride off into the sunset. So why does he care so much? Because the midterms are lining up to be an overwhelming Republican year if the elections are actually secure. Democrats are going to have a hard time if everybody is watching the results carefully. I will say it again: if you are a Republican and you do not want to have to compete against another Democrat who should never have been on the ballot, you need to pay attention to making these elections as secure as possible. They cannot cheat if the system will not let them. How do you know they have been cheating? You can tell by the way the coverage is handled. They know something is there. The same ABC voice that said “President Trump falsely claims there was election fraud in 2020” did not wait to examine the evidence he was about to release. They just declared it false. Trump does not need a personal reason beyond the upcoming midterms and the simple fact that he does not want Democrats taking the House through the same methods they have used for years. The projections already lean Republican, but those projections assume a relatively clean process. Force voter ID. Make people show identification to vote. Why is that so controversial? Because Democrats cannot win if they cannot cheat, and that is a real problem that has been with us not just for a few years but for decades. That is how they have kept it close since Reagan was in office.

Both Bushes knew it was going on, and the Republican establishment did not stand up for itself. I am not a typical Republican in that sense. I knew Rob Portman pretty well before he became a senator, and I watched him drift. You get to Washington, and people start leaning on you. You start sympathizing with the other side a little. You eat lunch with them every day in the cafeteria. They have good hamburgers down there, by the way. You stand in line with the people you are supposed to be fighting, and they talk about the movies and their kids and where the kids are going to college. You develop a liking for them. Pretty soon you are voting more similarly than you ever intended, and you might even suspect that some of them only got into office through fraud, but you do not want to see them embarrassed. You do not want to expose it because friendships have formed. Fair enough. It happens in almost every industry. But that is not what voters are voting for. Voters want representative government. When you soft-pedal the problem, you are voting not to give it to them. The 2020 election was the clearest case yet of the system deciding that President Trump would not be allowed a second term, so they threw him out. They rigged it the way they do in other nations, the way Russia and much of Europe keep their people in power. Democrats have kept it close in the United States through election fraud for many decades, and reporters are being deliberately disingenuous when they refuse to admit it. They know it. When they come out and say “President Trump falsely claims” before they have even looked at the reports he just released, they are not doing journalism. They are taking the corporate byline and running with it. He put the evidence out there. No one analyzed it. They just declared the claim false.

I happen to know precisely where a lot of the theft took place, and there were a lot of crooks involved. Now that more people are open to looking at it, we have to talk about it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. That is what Trump’s national address was about: why we need secure elections, what we have learned, and what needs to happen going forward so the SAVE Act can finally pass. He went to the public and laid it out, and the criticism from the media types was extraordinary in its uniformity and its arrogance. How do they have the right to say he provided evidence of fraud involving China and then act as if they already know more than he does? They were given a line by the producers and the owners of their media companies: Trump is crazy, there was no election fraud in 2020, even though everybody who has looked at the data knows there was an abundance of it. Most Democrats currently in office should not be there because the elections that put them there were compromised. Look at Kentucky. The teachers’ unions and the college towns in Louisville, Lexington, and Frankfort were able to push a candidate over the top with enough votes collected without proper identification. Anywhere you have low election security, you are going to find Democrats excelling and winning even when the broader population is not actually voting for them. That is the problem. If you do not have secure elections, you do not have representative government. You have a system that has seized power and is using its influence to destroy the free will of the voters. That is not acceptable. Before you say “he falsely claims,” you should at least look at the evidence. Trump put it out. There is a lot of it.

The documents released with the speech show that over a period of years starting in the 2020 cycle, China carried out what is described as the largest compromise of election data in history, acquiring roughly 220 million U.S. voter files. Those files included names, home addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that could be used to register voters or engage in other forms of interference. Intelligence assessments indicated that China assigned a specific data-exploitation unit to the project. U.S. agencies began learning about the compromise of tens of millions of voters’ data across 18 states as early as 2020, yet the information was suppressed and downplayed. The same set of documents underscores long-known vulnerabilities in electronic voting and ballot-counting systems. Adversaries including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea can compromise election infrastructure, particularly centralized repositories such as voter registration databases, poll books, and official election websites. A DHS review of available state voter rolls and public records identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections, and the actual number is almost certainly higher because several Democrat-controlled states refused to share their full files. These are not fringe theories. These are the findings that the administration declassified and put before the country. The media response was to declare the claims false before the public had time to read a single page.

That is the conspiracy. The people who run the corporations that own the major media outlets want to reserve the right to insert Democrats into office and play kingmaker through illegal or insecure election means, whether through machines, mail-in ballots with no reliable chain of custody, or perpetual counting that continues until the desired margin appears. There is no voter ID on many of these ballots, so votes can be manufactured until the numbers work out. There is a great deal of evidence that this is exactly what has happened in multiple cycles, and it is a big story. A primetime address should have received far more serious treatment. Instead, you see how the media handled it, because they are part of the problem. Corporations want to control who gets into office, which is why so many policy outcomes look the way they do. It is not because we freely chose them. It is because the system has been captured by people who treat free elections as an obstacle rather than the foundation of self-government. Free and secure elections are how a people maintains its own government. They are taking that away, and that is why Trump went on primetime and talked about it. We had a hard lesson in 2020. We are still fiddling around with the facts when we should have taken decisive action years ago. He went to the airwaves because the matter is serious, and it will remain serious for every election going forward.

The media voices who dismiss all of this without examination are in bed with the same forces trying to rob people of their ability to maintain their own government through honest elections. That is supposed to stay here. Until we address it, we will keep having the same problems. The SAVE Act needs to pass. If you are serious about representative government, demand it. Call your representatives. Pay attention to the midterms. Make the process as hard to cheat as possible. That is the only way the people who actually show up and vote get the government they intend.

If you have ever read my book on business and the gunfighter approach to dealing with reality as it is rather than as the comfortable prefer it to be, you already know where I stand on these matters of discipline and clear-eyed assessment. The larger story of how power actually operates in this country, and the deeper forces that shape the political order, is something I have been exploring at length. Disclosure of the full picture requires understanding the politics of heaven itself. The evidence is there for anyone willing to look past the daily bylines.

Footnotes

1.  Pre-speech and post-speech framing by ABC, NBC, and CNN treated Trump’s claims as predetermined falsehoods; networks declined to air the July 16, 2026, primetime address live on their main channels. See ABC News, “Key takeaways from Trump’s election speech,” July 17, 2026; The Hill, “James Carville criticizes networks for not airing Trump’s election security speech,” July 17, 2026.

2.  On 2016 Florida reporting patterns, panhandle counties reported early and heavily for Trump while certain larger counties lagged; contemporaneous accounts noted the scale of the Republican margin forced earlier reporting. See Politico, “How Trump won Florida,” November 8, 2016.

3.  The SAVE America Act (also referred to as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) mandates documentary proof of citizenship for registration, photo identification for voting in federal elections, and greater state sharing of voter-roll data. House passage occurred in February 2026; subsequent efforts attached provisions to other legislation amid Senate resistance. See Bipartisan Policy Center, “Six Things to Know About the SAVE America Act,” updated July 17, 2026; Congress.gov, H.R. 7296 and related measures.

4.  White House release accompanying the July 16, 2026, address: “Over a period of years starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history—resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” Includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and party preferences; intelligence community assessments spanning 2020–2026 document adversary capabilities against election infrastructure. Official White House page, “Election Integrity,” July 2026, and linked declassified packages on China’s acquisition of American voter data and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

5.  DHS review cited in the same release identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote based on available state rolls and public records; the administration noted the figure is incomplete because certain states declined full data sharing. White House, “Election Integrity,” July 2026.

6.  Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database contains more than 1,400 documented, proven instances of election fraud across multiple categories (as of late 2025 updates exceeding 1,600 sampled cases). Heritage Foundation, Election Fraud Map and Database, electionfraud.heritage.org.

7.  Kentucky races have repeatedly featured claims of irregularities concentrated in urban and university-adjacent counties with weaker identification practices; former Governor Matt Bevin and others publicly alleged absentee and machine issues after close contests. Courier-Journal, “What officials, experts say about Bevin’s voter fraud claims,” November 2019; ongoing Kentucky Attorney General election-integrity inquiries, 2026.

8.  Intelligence Community assessments (January 2020 onward) state that U.S. adversaries including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea possess the capability to compromise election infrastructure, with centralized voter databases and poll books judged most vulnerable: declassified materials released July 16, 2026, White House Election Integrity portal.

Bibliography

ABC News. “Key takeaways from Trump’s elections speech.” July 17, 2026. https://abcnews.com/Politics/key-takeaways-trumps-elections-speech/story?id=134835191.

Bipartisan Policy Center. “Six Things to Know About the SAVE America Act

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

The Resonance of Exceptional Sound: John Williams, the Art of the Film Score, and the Music That Refuses to Be Mediocre

I have always believed that the music which moves me most deeply is not the disposable pop that floods the airwaves and algorithms, but the symphonic scores crafted for great films. These orchestral works possess a unique power to resonate. They do not merely accompany the images on screen; they complete them, giving emotional weight and narrative propulsion to stories that might otherwise remain flat. They fill the spaces between dialogue and action with something larger than life, something that lingers in the mind and spirit long after the theater lights come up. In a culture saturated with catchy but ultimately empty beats designed to hypnotize rather than elevate, these scores stand apart as acts of genuine artistry.

Right now I am listening, as I have nearly every day since its release in June, to the soundtrack for Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day. Once again, at the age of ninety-four, John Williams has delivered something astonishing.  The orchestration is smart and purposeful, the pacing precise, the way the music weaves itself into the story’s fabric nothing short of genius. There is a contemplative main theme tinged with Americana that grounds the middle-American setting, eerie string passages that echo earlier sci-fi explorations, and moments of darker dissonance that speak to forces trying to suppress hidden truths. There are chases and revelations, wordless choral passages, and a large symphonic ensemble of ninety-six players recorded over months rather than the usual frantic weeks. Even in its more restrained passages—music that, as Spielberg has described it, accompanies the film from slightly behind, giving it a subtle nudge forward rather than dominating—it carries that unmistakable Williams signature: it makes you feel the weight of what is at stake. 

This latest score, their thirtieth collaboration stretching back more than half a century to The Sugarland Express in 1974, feels like both a culmination and a gift.  It arrives at a moment when the film itself grapples with disclosure, with non-human intelligence, with truths long kept in shadow. The music does not sensationalize; it deepens. It reminds us that some stories require more than spectacle. They require a composer who understands how to make the unseen feel present, how to turn tension into transcendence.

I have loved Williams’ work for as long as I can remember, but one cue in particular has lived with me for over thirty years: “Desert Chase” from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I have listened to it countless times, including this very morning. It never grows old. In that relentless, driving music, you hear the truck barreling through the canyon, the Nazi driver pushing gears, the dust and violence and desperate ingenuity of Indiana Jones. Thrown from the vehicle, he finds a way back underneath it, fights his way forward, and seizes control. The cue builds through key changes that ratchet up the intensity, like a truck driver shifting up, until it resolves in hard-won triumph. Williams captured something essential there: exceptional tenacity. The refusal to quit when every force is arrayed against you. The ability to resurrect yourself from the dirt, climb back into the fight, and take the prize. That is not just action music. It is a philosophy rendered in orchestra.

I remember standing in an eighth-grade English class when the assignment was to share our favorite song. Classmates spoke of current hits—the Police, Van Halen, whatever dominated the radio that year. When my turn came, I said, without hesitation, “Desert Chase” by John Williams. There were puzzled looks. It was not what anyone expected, and it was not what the culture was steering us toward. But it was the truth. Even then, I knew the difference between music that merely entertains for three minutes and music that tells a story of struggle and victory, that makes you believe in the possibility of overcoming. My oldest daughter later slept with the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack playing in her room; I could hear those themes drifting down the hall, the same composer who had already shaped so much of what I valued in storytelling.

What made Williams different from so many others who toiled in Hollywood before Jaws and Star Wars made him a household name? He had already built a substantial body of work—scores for television, for films like Daddy-O, Valley of the Dolls, The Reivers, the innovative Jane Eyre, disaster epics such as The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno, and his first collaboration with Spielberg on The Sugarland Express.  He was no unknown. He had won an Oscar for his work on Fiddler on the Roof. Yet many in the industry, particularly those operating by committee consensus, did not see the full measure of his gift. They judged him against the mediocre output that surrounded them and found him wanting because he refused to stay within those narrow bounds.

I recall profiles and television pieces from the mid-1980s, around the time he was scoring Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that tried to unpack why he succeeded where others plateaued. The answer was always the same: he was exceptional, and exceptional talent is often invisible or threatening to those who measure everything by average standards. Corporate and studio cultures built on consensus, consultants, and committee decision-making tend to produce safe, forgettable products. George Lucas has spoken recently about how studios now hire rooms full of people to make films by committee, with screenwriters chasing paychecks and delivering whatever the money wants. The result is rarely inspired. Most studios passed on Star Wars entirely; they did not understand it and saw only risk. Twentieth Century Fox took the chance largely because of Lucas’s prior success with American Graffiti, not because executives grasped the epic vision.  They undervalued what they could not immediately commodify.

Williams endured years of that environment. Mediocre people in positions of power often surround themselves with other mediocre people; it makes them feel less exposed in the mirror. They promote the average because true excellence makes them uncomfortable. They criticize work that aims higher as “too elevated” or not what “the public wants,” when what they really fear is being outshone. Committees become hiding places for those who lack the intuition or courage to back a singular vision. Williams kept working, kept refining his craft, kept writing music that filled narrative with emotional truth rather than wallpaper. It was only when he partnered consistently with other exceptional talents—Spielberg chief among them—that the string of iconic scores began to flow in full public view. But the genius had been there all along.

Spielberg’s particular gift as a director is his ability to recognize and elevate exceptional collaborators rather than constrain them. He does not manage by committee, noting that it dilutes everything to the lowest common denominator. He trusts the people who are operating at a higher level and lets them do what they do best. The result is work that consistently rises above the average—often far above. Their partnership across thirty films has produced some of the most memorable cinematic experiences of the last half-century precisely because it has been a meeting of two minds that value quality over consensus.  In Disclosure Day, even as Williams works in a more restrained mode for much of the score, the moments of power still feel earned and inevitable. Spielberg has called scoring the reward at the end of making a film—the chance to hear what Williams will bring. That trust, that mutual elevation, is rare in an industry that too often punishes it.

This is why Williams’ music has always resonated so strongly with me. It embodies the same principles I have written about elsewhere: the development of intuition that lets you act decisively and accurately, the refusal to settle for mediocrity, the willingness to impose will and vision on circumstances rather than waiting for permission or group approval. In The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I explored what it takes to rise above the common level, to shoot from the hip with precision because you have done the hard work of mastery. Williams’ career is a master class in that. He did not wait for the culture to catch up. He kept composing at the highest level, and eventually the culture—or at least the audiences and the exceptional partners—caught up with him.

Listening to this new score, I feel fortunate. For a man well into his nineties to pour such care, such detail, such soul into more than two hours of music—recorded across seven sessions over six months with a full orchestra, wordless choir, and meticulous attention to every nuance—is remarkable.  I wish there were ten or twenty more to come. If this proves to be among the final chapters, it is a worthy one. His legacy is already secure: a body of work that has taught generations what great film music can do. It elevates ambition. It makes us believe we can overcome the truck that tries to run us over, find our way back into the fight, and claim something greater than we were handed.

In a world that often seems engineered to flatten the exceptional and reward the safe, John Williams has spent a lifetime doing the opposite. His music does not pander. It invites us upward. That is why I have never tired of “Desert Chase,” why I still listen to these scores rather than the latest pop confection, and why this latest offering from a ninety-four-year-old master feels like both a benediction and a call to keep striving.

The themes that run through Disclosure Day—the uncovering of hidden truths, the encounter with the unknown, the courage required to face what has been concealed—find their perfect counterpart in music that refuses to settle for the ordinary. As I continue my own work, including the forthcoming The Politics of Heaven, I am reminded that the battle between forces that would diminish human potential and those that call us toward greater clarity and courage is fought on many fronts. Music of this caliber is one of them. It reminds us what is possible when exceptional talent is allowed to do its work without being dragged down by committee or consensus.

I am grateful for every note John Williams has given us, and especially for this one. The hourglass may have less sand left than we would like, but what remains is still producing gold. That, more than anything, is the lesson worth carrying forward.

Notes

[^1]: John Williams was born on February 8, 1932. As of mid-2026, he is 94 years old.

[^2]: Disclosure Day (2026) marks the 30th collaboration between Spielberg and Williams, and Williams’ 105th theatrical film score since his debut in 1958. The score was recorded over seven sessions from September 2025 to February 2026 with a 96-piece orchestra.

[^3]: Notable pre-Jaws (1975) scores by Williams include work on Daddy-O (1958), Valley of the Dolls (1967), The Reivers (1969), Jane Eyre (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974), and his first Spielberg film, The Sugarland Express (1974).

[^4]: Most major studios passed on Star Wars (1977). Twentieth Century Fox proceeded largely on the strength of Lucas’s prior success with American Graffiti, not full confidence in the concept itself. Lucas retained merchandising and sequel rights because the studio undervalued them.

[^5]: Spielberg has described the Disclosure Day score as “probably the most restrained score he has ever written for one of our collaborations—at least until it is not,” noting that Williams holds back in a subtle way that enriches the film by “accompanying it from slightly behind, pushing it forward.”

Bibliography / Further Reading

•  Burlingame, Jon. “How John Williams Scored Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’.” Variety, 2026.

•  “Disclosure Day: Everything you need to know about John Williams’ score.” Classic FM, 2026.

•  “List of compositions by John Williams.” Wikipedia (detailed filmography).

•  “TIMELINES: JOHN WILLIAMS” and related features. Film Score Monthly.

•  Accounts of the development and studio reception of Star Wars in works such as J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars and contemporary reporting.

•  Spielberg’s public comments on the Disclosure Day score and his long partnership with Williams (various 2026 interviews and press notes).

The music plays on. Keep listening for what elevates.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

The Empire of Mediocrity and the Call for American Exceptionalism

I sat at that lunch last week with human resources leaders from several large corporations in the Cincinnati area, the kind of gathering where the check routinely clears a hundred dollars a person, and the conversation circles the same drain it has circled for years. They were perplexed, as they always are when the numbers refuse to lie. Staffing shortages that will not resolve, artificial intelligence that has automated the kiosk and the order screen but still leaves tables to be wiped and registers to be tended by flesh-and-blood people, an economy that refuses to roar back to the promised heights, and a persistent inability to locate and keep the kind of talent that actually moves the needle. They wanted to know how to acquire an intelligent workforce. I told them what I have told anyone who will sit still long enough to hear it: you do not acquire exceptional results by staffing your organization with people selected for their ability to tolerate mediocrity. You find exceptional people, you recognize them when they appear in unconventional packages, and you protect them from the machinery that exists to grind them down.

I have cast aside the noisy, circular arguments over group averages in human capability—not because the psychometric data lack interest from a scientific standpoint, but because my concern has always been the human species as a whole, a young and still-fragile lineage trying to find its footing in a galaxy that is already crowded with other forms of intelligence. The question that matters is not which population cluster sits where on a distribution curve. The question is how any society, any company, any civilization identifies and elevates the outliers who can see around corners the rest of us cannot yet perceive.

Decades of personnel psychology research, distilled in landmark meta-analyses, have shown that general mental ability remains one of the strongest single predictors of job performance across occupations, with particularly high validity for complex, high-stakes roles.  That finding aligns with what I have observed across more than fifty years in business and executive life. Raw cognitive horsepower matters. It is not everything, and it is certainly not a guarantee of worldly success. I have known men and women with genius-level IQs who could not hold a marriage together, could not navigate an ordinary bank teller without frustration boiling over, could not endure the slow, stupid, political churn of ordinary corporate or governmental life without eventually self-destructing or walking away. Intelligence without gumption, without an intuitive compass, without some connection to a wider field of knowing, often becomes a curse rather than a blessing. The person who is “too smart for the room” learns to despise the room, and the room learns to despise him back.

That is the story I told the HR table, because it is the story I have lived and watched others live. In our twenties, a friend and I bought a small company. We were clearing out the accumulated junk of previous owners when we found, in a back closet, one of those enormous old projection bulbs—the kind that once threw motion pictures onto screens the size of a wall. It was a beautiful, ridiculous object, heavy glass and filament, a relic of an analog age already slipping into memory. We decided we had to have it. We loaded it into the hatchback of his car, unsecured, and drove across what was then the University of Cincinnati campus with the rear door open and that giant bulb rolling gently with every turn. The police pulled us over. My friend did not do deference. He despised unearned authority, especially when it could not match the scale of his own mind. Words were exchanged. A citation was issued. No arrest that evening, but the system had taken notice.

Later, when the matter escalated, he represented himself. No lawyer. In the deposition room, they brought in the heavy artillery—prominent litigators from New York and Los Angeles, flown in at considerable expense because a local prosecutor wanted a notable scalp. My friend sat across from them with that calm, encyclopedic brain of his. He had read the entire encyclopedia set by fifth grade and comprehended what he read; he could retrieve and deploy information like a living search engine. He dismantled their lines of questioning one by one. They could not corner him on facts, on law, on logic, or on the precise sequence of events. I watched it happen. During breaks, I heard the hallway mutters from the expensive suits: “He’s too fast.” “We can’t pin him.” These were men whose hourly rates in the early 1990s would have stunned most working people, and they were being outmaneuvered by someone who had never attended their law schools and did not play their credentialed games. The case collapsed. Not because the facts magically changed, but because the egos of the system could not tolerate being shown up by someone operating on an entirely different level of processing speed and intuitive grasp.

The empire does not forget such insults. Over the following years, the full weight of bureaucratic harassment came down—legal troubles, jail time, the slow, grinding destruction that mediocre institutions reserve for those who make them feel small. I have seen the pattern repeat across decades and across industries. Exceptional people do not fit the templates. They ask the questions that expose the fragility of the templates. They produce results that make the people above them look ordinary by comparison. And so the machinery—whether it calls itself corporate human resources, public education, or administrative government—develops antibodies. It promotes compliance. It measures inputs (degrees, time served, adherence to process) rather than outputs (actual value created under uncertainty). It pays a premium, often millions in aggregate payroll, for the comfort of predictability, even when that predictability delivers only mediocre results.

Robert Pirsig understood something essential about this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality is not the product of following the manual to the letter. It is a living relationship with the work itself, sustained by what he called gumption—the psychic gasoline that keeps a person engaged when things go wrong, when parts are missing, when the official procedure proves inadequate. Gumption traps are everywhere: external setbacks, yes, but more insidiously, the internal ones—ego that refuses to admit ignorance, value rigidity that cannot see a better way because it would require admitting the old way was flawed. Mediocre systems are gumption traps by design. They reward the appearance of order over the reality of excellence. They punish the person who cares too much about the actual motorcycle running well. 

That is why our schools, constructed largely by people of average ability to produce more people of average ability, tend to replicate mediocrity. That is why corporations that claim to want “innovation” and “disruption” simultaneously install layer upon layer of review, compliance, and diversity, equity, and inclusion machinery whose primary effect is to filter out people who will not make anyone above them feel intellectually or morally inferior. The result is expensive. You pay two or three million dollars more in payroll than you needed to, and you still cannot outrun competitors who have learned to locate and protect their own exceptional outliers. You cannot plug in interchangeable parts and expect exceptional output. The math does not work.

Abraham Lincoln understood the same principle in a different key. When the credentialed, politically connected generals of the eastern theater kept failing, he looked west to a man with a reputation for hard drinking and rough edges. Ulysses S. Grant had delivered results—Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Chattanooga—while others delivered excuses and body counts. Lincoln promoted him anyway, over the objections of those who preferred a more presentable mediocrity. Grant took responsibility, moved, and won. The American experiment has always contained this tension: on one side, the impulse to flatten outcomes and protect the feelings of the competent-but-not-brilliant; on the other, the older, riskier impulse to let the exceptional rise because the alternative is national stagnation or defeat. 

I have spent a lifetime recruiting and protecting such people—diamonds still in the rough, often overlooked by systems that prize polish over fire. That is why I keep getting invited to these lunches. The people across the table sense that the usual playbooks are failing, but they cannot yet say out loud what the failure actually is. The failure is the empire of mediocrity itself: the set of incentives, credentialing rituals, and cultural taboos that treat exceptional performance as a threat rather than the only thing that justifies an organization’s continued existence.

There is a deeper layer to this that I have only grown more convinced of with time. The intuition that separates the merely bright from the truly exceptional often looks, from the outside, like luck or inexplicable insight. The right decision is made quickly under pressure. The technical problem that yields to an approach no one else had considered. The “voice” that says, “Do not walk down that street tonight,” or, “Here is the battery configuration that actually works at scale.” I have come to understand these moments as instances of interface—imperfect, flickering, but real—between individual human consciousness and a wider field of intelligence that does not require a body. Call it universal mind, call it Providence, call it the spirit world, call it non-human intelligence. The label matters less than the observable pattern: the people who consistently produce outsized results often behave as if they have access to information and pattern recognition that ordinary channels cannot explain.

Ancient cultures knew this terrain better than we admit. The shamanic traditions, the prophetic lineages, the ritual architectures aligned to celestial events—all of them represent attempts to establish reliable contact with that wider field. Some did so through disciplined inner practice. Others, tragically, through blood sacrifice, as if the entities on the other side of the interface could be fed or bargained with. The archaeological record at places like Cahokia shows clear evidence of ritual violence and retainer sacrifice on a significant scale; power in those societies included the capacity to command the deaths of dozens in service of whatever cosmological or political order the elite claimed to mediate.  The Book of Enoch preserves an even older memory: the Watchers, a class of non-human intelligences, descending to impart forbidden knowledge—metallurgy, sorcery, weaponry, cosmetics—and producing hybrid offspring whose existence destabilized the world.  Whether one reads these accounts as literal history, as spiritual allegory, or as garbled cultural memory of real contact events, the through-line is the same: humanity has always lived in relationship with intelligences that do not share our biology, and the quality of that relationship has shaped what we become.

Jesus of Nazareth, in my reading, represents the decisive intervention in that long, bloody negotiation. He offered himself as the final sacrifice, ending the cycle of literal human and animal offerings that had sustained certain interfaces for millennia. In its place, he instituted a symbolic communion—bread and wine rather than flesh and blood—and pointed toward an internal, direct relationship with the source of that wider intelligence. The temple system, which had grown wealthy and powerful managing the sacrificial economy, could not tolerate the threat. They killed him for it, as systems of managed mediocrity have always killed or neutralized those who offer a cleaner, more direct path.

The men who designed the American republic carried some of the same intuition. Many were steeped in Enlightenment rationalism and biblical literacy simultaneously. Some, through Masonic networks, incorporated geometric and symbolic alignments into the new capital city, suggesting they were attempting to establish their own interface with providential or higher-order intelligence. They were not content to let the new nation drift on the currents of ordinary human politics. They wanted it oriented toward something larger. The experiment has been imperfect, repeatedly captured by mediocrity, yet it has also repeatedly produced the conditions under which exceptional individuals could do exceptional things—flight, computing, rocketry, the defeat of fascism and communism in their 20th-century forms.

That is why I have written what I have written and why I continue to speak plainly when the expensive lunches are served. In The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I worked to distill the practical discipline of intuitive action under pressure—the same quality that lets a person fix a broken motorcycle on the side of the road or make a high-stakes decision without waiting for committee approval. In The Politics of Heaven, the book I am completing now, I am attempting the larger map: how non-human intelligence has interacted with human history, why certain systems crush the exceptional while others (however imperfectly) give them room, and what it will take for this species to mature rather than stagnate or destroy itself.

Melania Trump is, in my estimation, one of the clearer contemporary examples of the type I am describing. She possessed the looks and presence that the modeling world rewards, but she also possessed an intuitive intelligence that recognized the limits of that world. She made a strategic alliance with a man whose wealth and later political power gave her insulation from the treadmill of mediocrity she had been navigating since her twenties. She has never courted the spotlight for its own sake. She has stayed largely off-grid, raising her son and preserving her own interior life. That choice is widely misunderstood by people who cannot imagine wanting autonomy more than attention. It is the choice of someone who has seen enough of the empire to know she does not want to live inside its walls.

The practical counsel I gave the human resources leaders and the counsel I give to anyone serious about results rather than appearances are straightforward. Stop measuring people primarily by the hoops they have jumped through—degrees, years of service, approved ideological language, willingness to sit through two-hour Friday lunches where nothing of consequence is decided. Measure them by what they actually produce when the plan goes sideways, when resources are constrained, when the problem has not been solved by anyone else. Go looking for the diamonds in the rough. They rarely wear the system’s uniform. They often make the people above them uncomfortable. They will save you far more in payroll than they will ever cost you in management overhead, because one exceptional person routinely does the work of three or four merely competent ones—and does it in a way that creates new possibilities rather than merely maintaining the existing machine.

The empire of mediocrity is expensive, brittle, and ultimately self-defeating. It can maintain control for a long time, especially when it controls education, credentialing, and the administrative state. But it cannot generate the breakthroughs a civilization needs to survive its own success—energy abundance, space settlement, genuine advances in human health and longevity, the wisdom to navigate contact with non-human intelligences that may already be observing us. Those breakthroughs require people who have retained or recovered the capacity to interface with the wider field. They require cultures that do not punish that capacity as a threat.

I have lived most of my life off the grid of that empire, not as an aesthetic choice but as a practical necessity. The view from out here is clearer. The exceptional are not the problem. They are the only remaining margin of safety this species possesses. The question before every organization, every school board, every nation is the same one I answered at that lunch table: do you want predictable mediocrity at premium prices, or do you want results that justify the entire enterprise? The two are not compatible and do not get along naturally.  They will always be at odds.  It took Robert Pirsig a long time to figure all this out and I’m not sure he ever did during his lifetime.  But, it is the question of our times, and the responsibility to action falls on all of us.

Footnotes

1.  Schmidt, Frank L., and John E. Hunter. “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings.” Psychological Bulletin 124, no. 2 (1998): 262–74. Subsequent meta-analyses have produced somewhat lower but still positive corrected validity estimates; the core finding that cognitive ability predicts performance across jobs, with higher validity for complex work, has held.

2.  Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: William Morrow, 1974. See especially the sections on gumption, gumption traps, and the distinction between static and dynamic quality.

3.  On Lincoln’s decision to elevate Grant: “Lincoln promotes Grant as top Civil War general, March 10, 1864,” Politico, March 10, 2017; and Grant’s own Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885–86). Lincoln’s reported comment—“I can’t spare this man; he fights”—captures the priority of results over presentability.

4.  Archaeological evidence from Cahokia’s Mound 72 includes mass burials with indications of ritual violence, retainer sacrifice, and both local and non-local individuals among the victims. See summaries of strontium isotope and osteological studies in reports such as those covered in Western Digs and subsequent analyses of Mississippian period power structures.

5.  The Book of Enoch, particularly the Book of the Watchers (chapters 6–36). Standard scholarly translations include R. H. Charles (1917) and more recent critical editions. The text describes non-human Watchers imparting forbidden knowledge to humanity and producing the Nephilim, with lasting consequences for human history and spiritual conditions.

6.  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. [Self-published or independent, drawing on decades of executive and entrepreneurial experience]. The work emphasizes intuitive decision-making under pressure as a learnable discipline.

7.  Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming, targeted for 2027 publication. A sustained exploration of biblical and historical patterns of interaction between human societies and non-human intelligence, including themes of giants, spiritual warfare, and the political implications of exceptional versus mediocratic orders.

Bibliography (selected; full working bibliography for The Politics of Heaven exceeds one hundred entries)

•  Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: William Morrow, 1974.

•  Schmidt, Frank L., and John E. Hunter. “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology…” Psychological Bulletin 124, no. 2 (1998): 262–74.

•  The Book of Enoch. Translated by R. H. Charles. London: SPCK, 1917.

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

•  Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. 2 vols. New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885–86.

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

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

•  Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Various translations (Overman/Warrior philosophical lineage).

•  McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

•  Nickelsburg, George W. E. 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

•  Ambrose, Stanley H., et al. Studies on Cahokia Mound 72 diet and health (various peer-reviewed articles in American Antiquity and related journals).

•  Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. London: Penguin, 2004 (for context on Second Temple Jewish literature including Enochic traditions).

•  Additional archaeological and historical sources on Mississippian and pre-Columbian ritual practice; biblical archaeology references from Biblical Archaeology Review; and primary accounts of American founding-era symbolism and Masonic geometry in the design of Washington, D.C.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

The Making of George Washington: Lessons from Youth and Adversity in Young Washington

George Washington occupies a unique place in the American imagination. His face appears on currency, his name rests upon the nation’s capital, and his reputation has become so intertwined with the founding of the United States that many people think of him only as the victorious commander of the Revolutionary War or the first President. Yet the making of George Washington occurred long before Yorktown, before the Constitutional Convention, and before the presidency itself. The true story of Washington is the story of formation through adversity, failure, hardship, and character. That is why a film centered upon his youth is so important. A society that wishes to understand greatness must study not only triumphs but also the difficult roads that produced them.

The importance of Young Washington lies precisely in its willingness to explore that earlier chapter. Rather than beginning with a celebrated general crossing the Delaware River or presiding over a new republic, the story examines the young man who had not yet become the legend. It reveals Washington during the years when mistakes carried consequences, when ambition collided with reality, and when the wilderness of North America tested the limits of endurance and leadership. Those experiences were not side notes to history. They were the furnace in which the future Father of His Country was forged.

Modern audiences often forget how dangerous eighteenth-century America actually was. The colonies were not peaceful settlements waiting patiently for independence. The frontier remained a contested world of forests, mountains, rivers, Native American nations, French military forces, British colonial ambitions, and competing claims to vast territories stretching westward beyond the Appalachians.[1] Young Washington entered this world as a surveyor and officer, navigating landscapes that were physically unforgiving and politically explosive.

The French and Indian War shaped the future of North America long before the American Revolution. Many historians describe it as the first global war because fighting extended beyond the American colonies into Europe, the Caribbean, India, and the Atlantic world.[2] The outcome would determine which empire dominated much of the continent—into this conflict stepped a young Virginian with little combat experience and enormous expectations resting upon his shoulders.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Washington’s early life was the extraordinary responsibility placed upon him at a remarkably young age. While many modern young adults are encouraged to avoid risk and postpone responsibility, eighteenth-century society frequently demanded the opposite. Washington found himself carrying diplomatic messages through wilderness territories, negotiating with Native American leaders, evaluating military threats, and commanding troops in situations that would challenge experienced officers.[3] Such responsibilities matured him quickly. The lessons learned in forests and mountains would prove no less valuable than those later learned on battlefields or in government chambers.

The story surrounding Fort Necessity remains one of the most important episodes of Washington’s development. It was not his greatest victory. In many respects, it represented a significant defeat. Yet history repeatedly shows that failures often teach more than successes. Built in a vulnerable meadow, the fort placed British colonial forces in a precarious position. French troops and their allies occupied superior terrain within the surrounding wooded areas. Rain transformed the battlefield into a muddy disaster. Washington ultimately surrendered under difficult circumstances in July 1754.[4]

Many historical figures spend their careers attempting to hide their failures. Washington did something different. He learned from them. The humiliation at Fort Necessity did not destroy his reputation; rather, it became one of the experiences that taught caution, patience, logistics, and strategic judgment. Years later, during the Revolutionary War, Washington would demonstrate restraint and discipline that distinguished him from many contemporaries. Those qualities did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from earlier encounters with defeat and disappointment.

There is also something powerful about physically visiting places connected to history. Reading books provides knowledge, but standing where events occurred provides perspective. The mountains of western Maryland and Pennsylvania remain striking reminders of the challenges faced by colonial soldiers. The terrain itself explains much of the story. Steep ridges, dense forests, winding roads, and isolated valleys reveal why campaigns in that region were so difficult. Geography often becomes an invisible character in historical narratives, and nowhere is that more evident than in Washington’s frontier experience.

The routes that would later become the National Road carry tremendous historical significance as well. Connecting eastern population centers with western territories, they became some of the most important transportation projects in early American history.[5] Yet before roads and highways transformed the region, movement through those mountains demanded determination, courage, and endurance. Washington’s experiences along those routes exposed him to the realities of frontier America and deepened his understanding of the continent he would later help unite.

A film exploring these events succeeds when it respects the material. Historical drama does not require perfect documentation of every detail, but it must convey the spirit, character, and significance of the people involved. According to many viewers familiar with Washington’s biography, Young Washington captures that spirit effectively. The portrayal of Washington as noble without being perfect allows audiences to encounter him as a human being rather than an untouchable monument.

That distinction matters because modern culture frequently swings between extremes. Historical figures are either idealized beyond recognition or condemned without context. Washington deserves neither treatment. He was a man with strengths and flaws, successes and failures, extraordinary abilities and ordinary limitations. What separates him from countless others is not perfection but character. Throughout crises, disappointments, and temptations, he consistently sought duty above personal comfort.[6]

This emphasis upon character may explain why the film resonates so strongly with audiences. Many forms of contemporary entertainment focus upon antiheroes, cynicism, moral ambiguity, or spectacle. Such approaches can produce compelling stories, but they often leave audiences hungry for something different. There remains a deep desire to witness individuals striving toward virtue, honor, courage, and responsibility. Human beings naturally admire excellence. They seek examples of people attempting to become better versions of themselves.

This is one reason George Washington continues to command respect centuries after his death. His achievements cannot be separated from his moral aspirations. He believed leadership required self-control. He believed reputation mattered. He believed public service demanded sacrifice. He understood that power, if not restrained by character, could destroy both leaders and nations.[7]

Few decisions illustrate this more clearly than his resignation of military authority after the American Revolution. History contains countless examples of victorious generals who transformed military success into political dictatorship. Washington chose another path. After securing independence, he surrendered power and returned home. King George III reportedly remarked that such an action would make Washington “the greatest man in the world.”[8] The roots of that decision can be traced back to earlier lessons learned during his youth. The young officer who experienced failure at Fort Necessity eventually became the mature statesman willing to relinquish power.

The success of films like Young Washington also reflects a broader cultural shift. Many audiences increasingly search for stories that celebrate rather than deconstruct. Entertainment once produced numerous historical adventures focused upon courage, exploration, leadership, and national heritage. Classic productions such as Davy Crockett and Zorro attracted viewers not because their heroes were flawless, but because they represented ideals worth pursuing. Such stories reminded audiences that civilization depends upon honorable conduct.

Angel Studios appears to recognize this hunger. The company has developed a reputation for producing projects that emphasize family-friendly storytelling, historical subjects, faith, perseverance, and moral clarity. Whether individual viewers agree with every creative choice is ultimately secondary. The greater significance lies in the fact that audiences continue to support films that treat virtue seriously rather than sarcastically.

The enthusiastic audience response described by many theatergoers reinforces this point. Packed theaters, applause during credits, and viewers remaining in their seats after the film concludes suggest more than mere entertainment value. They suggest emotional investment. People stay because they do not want the experience to end. They remain because something meaningful has occurred. The story has connected them not merely with a plot but with values, memories, and aspirations.

History possesses a unique ability to create that connection. Contemporary debates often divide people, but historical narratives sometimes unite them around shared admiration for courage and perseverance. George Washington serves as one of those rare figures capable of reaching across ideological boundaries. Americans may disagree about countless issues, yet many still recognize the importance of the leadership that guided the nation through its earliest and most fragile years.[9]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Washington’s story is the consistency between his public life and his private aspirations. The pursuit of self-improvement remained a recurring theme throughout his life. As a young man, he studied, observed, listened, and learned from mistakes. As a military leader, he refined discipline and judgment. As president, he attempted to place national interests above factional interests. Growth never stopped.

That emphasis upon striving rather than perfection carries enduring relevance. Every generation faces moments of disappointment, conflict, and uncertainty. Every individual encounters failures that seem overwhelming in the moment. Washington’s example demonstrates that setbacks need not define a life. Defeat at Fort Necessity did not prevent future greatness. Criticism did not prevent achievement. Hardship did not destroy resolve. Instead, adversity became preparation.

The frontier itself symbolized this process. The forests beyond colonial settlements represented danger, uncertainty, and opportunity. They tested physical endurance while revealing inner character. Washington’s journeys across that landscape helped develop qualities that later proved indispensable. Resourcefulness, patience, courage, adaptability, and resilience emerged not in comfort but in challenge.

A compelling historical film, therefore, accomplishes more than simple education. It invites audiences to reconsider what greatness actually means. Greatness is not merely holding office, winning battles, or receiving recognition. Greatness begins in the difficult choices made before anyone is watching. It begins with responsibility embraced rather than avoided. It begins with the willingness to learn from mistakes rather than deny them.

For that reason, Young Washington offers a valuable contribution to American historical storytelling. It introduces viewers to formative experiences that are often overshadowed by later accomplishments. It encourages appreciation for the long process through which character develops. Most importantly, it reminds audiences that the foundations of leadership are laid long before leadership is publicly recognized.

There is also something refreshing about spending time in the company of admirable characters. Modern culture often celebrates transgression while dismissing virtue as naïve. Yet viewers continue responding positively to stories featuring courage, integrity, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. The reason is simple. Human beings instinctively recognize these traits as desirable. They recognize them as qualities capable of elevating communities, institutions, and nations.

Washington’s story continues to endure because it illustrates that elevation. A young surveyor became a frontier officer. A frontier officer became a military commander. A military commander became the leader of a revolution. A revolutionary leader became the first president. Yet beneath each transformation remained the same aspiration toward honor and duty. The titles changed. The character remained.

Films capable of conveying that truth perform an important cultural service. They preserve memory. They encourage reflection. They connect present generations with the experiences that shaped earlier ones. They provide reminders that history is not simply a collection of dates and events but a record of human choices.

Ultimately, the enduring appeal of George Washington rests upon more than military accomplishments or political achievements. It rests upon the example of a man who repeatedly sought the higher path when easier alternatives existed. The youth who faced defeat in the mountains became the leader who guided a fragile republic. The officer who learned difficult lessons on the frontier became the statesman willing to place principle above personal ambition. The story remains powerful because it speaks to universal themes of growth, responsibility, perseverance, and character.

That is why Young Washington deserves attention. It tells a chapter of history too often ignored. It introduces audiences to the experiences that forged one of the most important figures in American history. It presents nobility without arrogance, courage without recklessness, and patriotism without cynicism. In an era frequently dominated by stories celebrating the worst of human behavior, there is something profoundly valuable about a story centered upon the possibility of becoming better. George Washington’s journey reminds audiences that greatness is not inherited, accidental, or effortless. It is earned through struggle, formed through adversity, and sustained through character. More than two centuries after his death, that lesson remains as relevant as ever.

Footnotes

[1] Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000).

[2] Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years’ War 1754–1763 (London: Routledge, 2011).

[3] George Washington, The Journal of Major George Washington (1754).

[4] David Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2015).

[5] Karl Raitz, The National Road (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

[6] Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).

[7] James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution (Little, Brown and Company, 1968).

[8] Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Knopf, 2004).

[9] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage Books, 1993).

Bibliography

Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Baugh, Daniel. The Global Seven Years’ War 1754–1763. London: Routledge, 2011.

Chernow, Ron. Washington: A Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2010.

Ellis, Joseph J. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Flexner, James Thomas. George Washington in the American Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968.

Preston, David. Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Raitz, Karl. The National Road. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Washington, George. The Journal of Major George Washington. Williamsburg, 1754.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

I Told You So: The Slow March of Communism in America and Why Warnings Went Unheeded

I’ve spent a good portion of my life studying the patterns of human behavior, the currents of history, and the undercurrents of power that most people never bother to examine deeply. It’s not because I’m some oracle with a crystal ball, but because I’ve immersed myself in the totality of human endeavor—ancient texts, biblical archaeology, philosophy from Nietzsche to the gunfighter ethos of self-reliance, and the hard lessons from real-world politics and business. That perspective has given me an edge in seeing where things are headed long before the crowd catches up. And right now, as we sit here in 2026 watching outright communists and their fellow travelers gain traction in elections across the country, including right here in Ohio, I can’t help but chuckle and say what I’ve said so many times before: I told you so. 

It’s astonishing, really, how quickly people forget—or choose to ignore—the warnings. Just the other day, I was flipping through Fox News and saw Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham, and even Greg Gutfeld on Gutfeld! Looking somewhat bewildered by the state of things. They’re grappling with the radical left’s influence, the populism that Bernie Sanders tapped into and figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represent, all while trying to navigate corporate media structures that prefer softball topics over hard truths. It’s the same crowd that, more than a decade ago, was all too eager to sideline voices like mine when I dared to call out the creeping socialism in public sector unions, education, and the broader culture. Back then, during the Tea Party era and around 2012, the orthodox establishment thought they could stuff the genie back in the bottle and return to the comfortable George W. Bush days of controlled opposition. They were wrong, and history has proven it. 

Let me take you back to those days, because the personal stories provide the color and context that make this more than just abstract political theory. Over a decade ago, I was a frequent guest on radio shows, including weekday slots from 9 to 12 and weekend mornings on platforms like the Darryl Park show, reaching millions. Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) had higher-ups who would pull me aside or call after my segments. “Rich,” they’d say, “you’re talking about socialism and communism in the public schools and unions—that’s too extreme. Communism is a bad word. You’re upsetting people.” They didn’t see the harm in the rising costs of labor in public education or in the influence of teachers’ unions funded by taxpayer money. I was in the extreme minority pushing back. 

The Cincinnati Enquirer even came out to my house for an exposé. They thought my approach to political campaigning was crazy—cracking bullwhips with targets, demonstrating precision, discipline, and the willingness to stand apart from the crowd. My family history with whips as tools of mastery in rural Kentucky informed that symbolism: it’s about imposing will on chaos, not violence. But to them, it was a spectacle. I knew better. Human nature responds to symbols of strength and self-mastery. People sense authenticity. That’s why my message resonated even as the gatekeepers tried to shut it down. 

I remember one particular push around public sector unions. John Kasich’s administration in Ohio dealt with reforms, but the backlash was fierce. I argued then, as I do now, that public unions should not be funded with taxpayer dollars in ways that entrench political power at the expense of the very people paying the bills. Unions affiliated with progressive causes, pushing agendas that bleed into classrooms—confiscatory property taxes funding Marxist-influenced education. It wasn’t popular. People told me I was making enemies, that “a lot of people make money off that chaos.” In 2012, things didn’t go well for those reforms in some places, and suddenly I was being pushed aside as an advisor or voice worth listening to. New forces were taking over, they thought. But I’ve seen this cycle many times in my life. 

Fast forward, and here we are. Trump’s movement exposed the rot; MAGA became the populist force on the right, while the left’s version coalesced around Sanders and then more radical figures. They tried to gloss it over with Schumer and Pelosi types, promoting AOC as the face of left-wing populism. In Ohio, we see echoes in candidates like Amy Acton, the former health director now running as a Democrat for governor against Vivek Ramaswamy. People are asking, “Is this who we are?” Yes, it is the natural evolution when you let structures rot from within. 

Around that time of trouble with Clear Channel, I didn’t care much about staying in the corporate fold. They offered me slots on stations like in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I wanted freedom. Private ownership was already being gobbled up, a pattern tied to larger centralizing forces. Instead, I joined Matt Clark on his radio show in Michigan—around 2013-2014—and we read the planks of the Communist Manifesto on air. I hadn’t even heard of The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen at first, but once I dug in, it was revelatory. Skousen’s 1958 book distills communist strategy: infiltrating institutions, undermining culture, using education as a weapon. We laid it out on air, and it hit hard because it mirrored what was happening. 

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels outlines transitional measures that sound eerily familiar: abolition of private property in land, heavy progressive income taxes, centralization of credit, free public education (with a specific ideological bent), and more. Skousen expanded on how these were being advanced not through overt revolution but gradual infiltration—especially post-WWII, through the New Deal era, the 1960s counterculture, and into public schools via the Department of Education created in the late 1970s. I’ve been railing against this for decades: property taxes as confiscation of wealth to fund socialist indoctrination. Drop your kids off for “babysitting” while they absorb attitudes hostile to capitalism, family, and individual liberty. 

Look at the evidence. Public sector unions grew massively, wielding power through collective bargaining that influences policy far beyond wages. In Ohio, the 2011 battles over Senate Bill 5 highlighted the tensions. Critics called reforms anti-worker; supporters saw them as protecting taxpayers. The long-term effect? Generations raised on these ideas are voting for policies that expand government control. We see it in New York and Portland, and in attempts here in Ohio. Soccer, as I’ve joked, is a socialist game—low scores, penalizing individual excellence, team dependency. Contrast that with American football: capitalism, specialization, big plays rewarding talent and strategy. Little cultural elements seep in, shaping mindsets. 

Fox News and corporate media during the Trump exile period played a role, too. When they thought he was done, they pivoted to DeSantis and conventional Republicans, hoping to normalize. Many in the media wanted less politics, more sports, grilling hot dogs—anything to avoid offending advertisers. Truth-telling took a backseat to revenue. I warned them. The corporate structure favors controlled narratives. But voters rejected it. Two terms of Trump, ongoing cultural shifts, and now the chickens coming home to roost. 

My own journey informs this. I’ve worked since age 12, from manual labor to aerospace executive. I’ve seen power operate in the shadows—from Cincinnati’s riverfront politics in the 1990s and interactions with figures across the aisle to insights from organized networks where coded signals and plausible deniability ruled. Ethics kept me straight: sober, honest, observant. That front-row seat to how establishments maintain control taught me not to let others define my value. I don’t give people power over me through consensus or popularity contests. That’s partly the Overman ethos—imposing will on circumstances—resilience over victimhood. 

People ridiculed me for talking about communism in schools or cultural Marxism. “Conspiracy theory!” they said. Yet here we are, with Marxist ideas normalized in curricula, DEI initiatives, attacks on private property, and big government solutions. The Naked Communist warned of this infiltration decades ago. Skousen detailed 45 goals, many of which involved media, education, and the weakening of moral foundations. We’ve seen music shift from 1950s-80s family themes to hedonism and occult influences, eroding values. Public schools, funded by confiscated wealth, became transmission belts for these ideas. 

I’ve always offered help sincerely—free advice from decades of study—out of a desire to strengthen families and communities. But many prefer scapegoats and the blame game. They sidelined voices like mine, thinking they could manage the narrative. When lives or policies fall apart, I don’t gloat maliciously, but there is satisfaction in the “I told you so.” It’s not personal profit; it’s validation of studying reality over wishful thinking. In business, politics, family—I’ve seen patterns repeat. Warnings about the socialist/Marxist wave, public unions, and education weren’t new; roots trace to the 1930s Red Decade, FDR’s expansions, and post-war shifts.

Now, with elections looming, including Ohio’s gubernatorial race, the question is whether people will learn. Vivek Ramaswamy represents pro-capitalist, America First energy—make money, innovate, don’t apologize. Opponents tap proletarian resentment: hate the rich, use government to redistribute. This is the apocalypse of learned helplessness versus the gunfighter spirit of self-mastery. 

My upcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, delves deeper into these spiritual and historical dimensions—biblical conspiracies, giants, divine rebellion, spiritual warfare manifesting in earthly power struggles. It’s a treasure hunt through history showing how anti-human forces operate. Sharing the manuscript with serious readers has been encouraging. It ties ancient insights to modern battles, urging resilience rooted in faith and truth.

As we recently celebrated the Fourth of July—fireworks, patriotism, soccer matches rallying some—it’s a reminder of what’s at stake. American exceptionalism isn’t compatible with the collectivist mindset. I’ve withdrawn from chasing those who won’t listen; it’s their choice to run into the wall. But for those paying attention, the lessons are clear. Study the sources, question the structures, reject the slow poison.

In the end, my reputation has held because I base decisions on evidence and human nature, not fleeting trends. Whether it’s aliens and UAP disclosure (topics I’ve discussed for years, tying into ancient histories) or the communist undercurrents, time vindicates. People may owe apologies in 20 years, but I won’t hold my breath. The age of “I told you so” is here, not for ego, but as a hard-earned lesson: listen to those who’ve studied the long game, or choke on the consequences. Family, faith, self-reliance—these endure. Everything else is noise.

Footnotes

1.  Observations on current Ohio politics and candidates.

2.  Personal radio experiences and Clear Channel interactions.

3.  W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (1958).

4.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

5.  Coverage of Ohio public sector union debates, e.g., 2011 reforms. 

Bibliography

•  Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Communist. Ensign Publishing, 1958.

•  Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848.

•  Various news sources on Ohio elections 2026 and historical union battles.

•  Personal archives and observations from radio, politics, and aerospace career.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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