In the age of disclosure, you must understand the Politics of Heaven. The administrative state has failed. It produces bureaucrats, form-fillers, and people trained to manage decline rather than fix anything. Meanwhile, the people who still know how to put a tool belt on and make something work again are the ones quietly holding the real economy together. I have learned this the hard way, across decades of executive work, competitive shooting, gunsmithing, and long hours in machine shops. The happiest version of my life has always involved tools.
A Tool Belt Full of Useful Things
I was at O’Reilly’s recently, talking with the counter guy, and he showed me a small 3/8-inch drive universal joint with a spring in it. Most of those joints flop around the moment you get them into a tight spot. This one has a spring that lets it stand up and stay put until you apply force. Titan Tools. Simple, clever, and exactly the kind of thing that makes a working day better. It went straight into the belt.
That belt already carries a telescopic magnet for fishing dropped fasteners out of engine bays and dashboards, a selection of screwdrivers, O-ring picks that actually work, a half-inch drive ratchet, and a pair of DeWalt pliers I genuinely like. The grips on the pliers are supposed to be bright yellow. They are now dark with oil and use, which is how I prefer them. There is nothing ornamental about any of it. Every item has been chosen because it solves a recurring problem.
When I strap that belt on to work on a car in the driveway, or when I used to carry one every day, the day feels correctly ordered. You have the tools you need. You can see the problem, isolate it, and correct it. That is a form of competence the administrative world almost never delivers.
Machine Shop Days and the Double-Stack Toolbox
In my late teens and early twenties I worked in a machine shop attached to a metal-stamping operation. It was a rough place. People got hurt. The work was loud, dirty, and unforgiving. They called it a “sitter” in the older language of the trade—an operation that chewed through equipment and required constant attention. I learned to set dies, make dies, troubleshoot production lines, and keep machines running. I also learned how to work alongside people who had no interest in office politics or motivational posters. They cared whether the part was good and whether the press kept cycling.
Later I refurbished old machinery for a living. We would bring in worn-out equipment, tear it down to the last nut and bolt, and rebuild it. I kept a double-stacked toolbox in the shop. In the 1990s that box held roughly a thousand dollars’ worth of tools, many of them custom or modified for specific jobs. I looked forward to work because the tools were there and the problems were concrete. When I moved into more executive roles, that daily contact with tools largely disappeared. The satisfaction did not transfer automatically to meetings and spreadsheets.
Gunsmithing, Competitive Shooting, and the Real Pleasure
Early in my marriage I set up a gunsmithing shop behind the house. I studied the craft because I wanted to work for myself and because the tools are specialized and satisfying: spring compressors, sear jigs, headspace gauges, bolt-face tools, and the particular screwdrivers and punches required for Ruger, Browning, and other actions. The guns themselves were interesting, but the tools and the process of diagnosing and correcting problems were what I enjoyed most.
Competitive fast shooting later gave me an outlet on weekends. From roughly 2018 through 2025 I shot a lot, won a lot of first-place trophies, and filled part of the office with them. The shooting itself was enjoyable—drawing, presenting, and hitting plates in a quarter or half second is a pure skill. What I came to realize, though, was that the part I looked forward to most was the workbench. Before one of the last events, in Cleveland, a gun had developed a tick. The mechanism was catching on the frame. We took the gun apart, identified the interference, and dressed it. I intended to replace the part properly once I got home. Standing there with the gun disassembled, the right tools laid out, and a clear mechanical problem in front of me, I recognized the pattern again. The shooting was the excuse. The tools and the troubleshooting were the pleasure.
Every serious competitor ends up with a small collection of specialized items: the correct bit for the screw that loosens under recoil, the fixture that holds a slide while you stone a surface, the gauge that tells you whether the timing is still correct. Building that kit, and using it under time pressure before a match, felt like the same work I had done in the machine shop decades earlier. It was crew-chief work, not spectator work.
Public Education, the Administrative Class, and What Young People Actually Need
Public education has spent decades training people to become members of the administrative bureaucracy. It has done this systematically and with considerable success. The result is a surplus of people who can navigate forms, attend meetings, and manage processes, and a shortage of people who can diagnose a hydraulic leak, set a die, pull a wiring harness, or rebuild a transmission. We talk about college as the default path while the skilled trades remain under-taught and, in many places, socially discouraged.
I have no interest in romanticizing hard physical work for its own sake. The point is narrower and more practical: a society that cannot produce and retain people who know how to fix things will not remain productive. The administrative state can write regulations. It cannot keep the machines running. When the machines stop, the regulations become irrelevant.
Young men in particular have been steered away from this path for a generation. Many of them now reach their mid-twenties without basic mechanical competence. Women notice. A man who cannot change a tire, change the oil, or diagnose a simple electrical problem is less useful as a partner and less useful as a citizen. This is not a complicated observation, and it does not require hostility toward anyone. It is simply a description of what has happened when schools stopped teaching shop, when parents stopped requiring basic mechanical literacy, and when culture began treating hands-on work as a fallback rather than a respectable primary path.
Home-improvement television and the tool aisles at places like O’Reilly’s exist for a reason. People still want to solve physical problems. The gadgets keep improving—better ratchets, magnetic trays, spring-loaded universals, compact torque wrenches, inspection cameras—because the underlying need has not gone away.
The Economic Case for the Tool Belt
The next wave of American productivity will not be led exclusively by people who write code or manage brand narratives. Space launch, electric vehicles, robotics, data-center construction, and advanced manufacturing all require large numbers of technicians who can work with tools, read drawings, troubleshoot in real time, and keep complex systems operating. Tesla-style manufacturing, reusable rocketry, and the supporting industrial base will need people who treat a tool belt as normal daily equipment rather than a costume.
Companies such as Carvana have tried to reorganize automotive retail around logistics and software. Some of those experiments will succeed in pieces; others will discover that physical goods still require physical maintenance. The firms that scale will be the ones that can recruit and retain people who already know how to use tools and who take satisfaction in the work. Those people are currently in short supply.
I am not arguing that everyone should abandon white-collar work. I am arguing that the cultural hierarchy which treats skilled trades as inferior has been a mistake, and that the economic consequences of that mistake are becoming visible. A person who can make a living with a tool belt, who owns the tools, and who looks forward to using them is in a stronger position than many people with higher formal credentials and less practical capability. The work is measurable. The customer either gets a running machine or does not. There is less room for the kind of ambiguity that administrative roles often reward.
Personal Conclusion
Across machine-shop work in my twenties, gunsmithing in the early years of marriage, competitive shooting on weekends, and the ordinary maintenance of cars and equipment at home, the pattern has been consistent. The periods in which I used tools every day were the periods I looked forward to most. Executive work has its own satisfactions and its own necessities, but it has never replaced the direct feedback of diagnosing a problem, selecting the right tool, and correcting the fault.
If a young person can learn a trade, acquire good tools, and make a living while wearing a tool belt, that person has a realistic chance at a high-quality life. The marriage, the family stability, and the personal satisfaction tend to follow the competence rather than the other way around. Public education has spent too many years teaching the opposite lesson. The correction will not come from another round of administrative reforms. It will come from people who simply decide to learn how to fix things and who refuse to treat that skill as second-class.
The future economy will reward them. In the meantime, a well-stocked tool belt remains one of the more reliable sources of ordinary happiness available.
Footnotes
1. The spring-loaded 3/8-inch universal joint is a small but representative example of incremental tool improvement. Older flex-joint designs required constant manual positioning; the spring returns the joint to a usable attitude, reducing frustration in confined spaces.
2. “Sitter” was shop-floor language for certain stamping or forming operations that demanded continuous operator or maintenance attention because of wear rates, material variability, or tooling sensitivity. Injury rates in older metal-stamping environments were high by modern standards.
3. The double-stacked toolbox from the 1990s refurbishing work contained both standard and job-specific tooling. Custom ground punches, modified wrenches, and dedicated fixtures were common because production machinery of that era was not designed for rapid field service.
4. Competitive practical shooting requires ongoing gunsmith-level maintenance. Recoil, fouling, and high round counts loosen fasteners, alter timing, and reveal small dimensional problems that range guns rarely expose. Most serious competitors maintain a traveling tool kit for exactly this reason.
5. Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) remains one of the clearer modern arguments that manual competence produces a distinct form of cognitive and moral satisfaction largely absent from many administrative and symbolic-analytic jobs.
6. Public high-school shop programs declined sharply after the 1970s–1980s in most U.S. districts. The shift coincided with rising college-enrollment targets and a cultural redefinition of “good” jobs as those requiring bachelor’s degrees. Skilled-trade shortages in construction, manufacturing maintenance, and automotive repair have been widely documented since the mid-2010s.
7. Basic mechanical literacy (tire changes, oil changes, simple electrical diagnosis, plumbing and electrical fundamentals) functions as a practical filter in household and community life. Its absence is frequently noted in discussions of partner selection and household stability, independent of broader ideological framing.
8. Advanced manufacturing, commercial space, electric-vehicle production, and data-center build-out all increase demand for technicians who combine traditional mechanical skills with newer diagnostic tools (thermal imaging, borescopes, precision torque, digital multimeters, and basic programmable-logic troubleshooting). The tool belt evolves; it does not disappear.
Bibliography & Further Reading
• Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. (Personal framework connecting competitive shooting, tool use, executive decision-making, and individual agency.)
• Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Penguin, 2009.
• Rowe, Mike. Profoundly Disconnected (various essays and talks on skilled trades and cultural attitudes toward manual work).
• Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Classic exploration of quality, tools, and the relationship between mechanic and machine.)
• Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008.
• Industry reporting on skilled-trade shortages: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational outlooks for industrial machinery mechanics, automotive technicians, electricians, and millwrights (ongoing).
• Historical context on the decline of vocational education: various state and federal reports from the 1980s–2000s documenting the reduction of shop programs in public secondary schools.
The tools remain available. The work remains necessary. The satisfaction, for those willing to acquire the skill, has not been repealed by any administrative decree.
Rich Hoffman 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 received another round of texts and calls this week from people at the place where I spent twenty-five years. One of them came from a man I hired years ago, a man from Ghana who later introduced me to his children and, in time, began to treat me as a father figure in America. He is not the only one who has reached out. Several people have asked when I am coming back, whether I can fix what has become a nightmare, and whether there is any path for a return to the way things used to be. I appreciate the respect and the loyalty. It is an honor when someone from another continent decides you are the person he trusts that way. At the same time, the honest answer I need to give him—and everyone else who has written—is straightforward: go back and watch The Lion King. That is the clearest picture of what is happening, and it explains why I have no plans to return.
Twenty-Five Years and the Obligation to Set Everyone Up
I spent years trying to put people in a position where the paychecks would keep coming. That was the practical obligation. Mortgage payments, car notes, and ordinary life do not pause while leadership changes. I did what I could to arrange sustainable arrangements so that people who stayed would continue to receive regular pay for a year, two years, three years, or longer. From my side of the transaction, that was the success criterion. I left because the situation had become miserable for me personally, not because I wanted to abandon anyone. There are many ways to make money in the world; staying in a place that drains you is not required once the basic obligations have been met. I feel that I fulfilled those obligations as thoroughly as the circumstances allowed.
The man who considers me his American father was a leader on the machines and someone with whom the professional relationship grew into something more personal over time. When he told me years ago that God had directed him to come see me, I took that seriously. People of genuine faith do not say such things lightly. The same respect he showed then is present in the way he has reached out now. I value that. I also know that affection and loyalty do not change the structural facts of the place I left.
Scar’s Conspiracy and the Ruined Pride Lands
The Lion King (1994) remains one of the clearest popular stories about what happens when someone schemes for a title he cannot actually carry. Scar, Mufasa’s brother, conspires with the hyenas, engineers a stampede, and kills the king so he can seize the throne. Once he has the position, the Pride Lands deteriorate. The grass dies, the herds leave, and the remaining lions live under scarcity and fear. Scar’s rule is not an improvement; it is a slow collapse. The film makes the point without subtlety: taking the title does not confer the competence, the loyalty, or the capacity to sustain the kingdom. Ambition organized around grievance produces depletion rather than abundance.
That pattern appears in real organizations more often than people like to admit. Someone decides he can do the job better, works in the background to undermine the person currently holding it, and eventually obtains the role. The immediate result is often not improved performance but declining morale, reduced trust, and a workplace that feels worse for the people still inside it. Research on leadership transitions consistently shows measurable drops in engagement, trust, and retention after a change at the top. One global study found that after a reorganization, 88 percent of senior leaders believed the new structure would succeed while only 36 percent of employees agreed; only 22 percent of employees said they received adequate support to adapt. Other data indicate that poorly managed transitions can reduce employee performance by roughly 15 percent and that a substantial share of executive transitions are later judged failures. Communication often falls by about 20 percent in the first months after a CEO change as uncertainty rises. None of this is abstract when the people living it are calling and texting.
The Reality of Leadership Transitions
I have told people who reached out that I did my part. I arranged what I could so that paychecks would continue. Beyond that, I have no capacity or intention to re-enter the situation. I am busy. I am also taking time to recover from years of long hours and physical demand—time that was unavailable while I was responsible for keeping everyone paid. The desire for the former leader to return is understandable. Employees who trusted the previous arrangement naturally hope the person who made the place function will come back and restore it. In the film, Nala and others eventually find Simba and urge him to return. The difference is that Simba does return, confronts Scar, and restores the land. I am not that figure, and I have not left any door open for that role.
There is no Simba waiting to take the kingdom back. The place will continue in its current direction or it will not; that is now outside my control. People who need a regular paycheck can stay and work under the existing conditions. Those who find the conditions intolerable have the same option I exercised: they can leave and find another arrangement. I do not say that lightly. Changing jobs is disruptive. It is also sometimes necessary when the alternative is remaining in a declining environment run by people whose primary qualification was the desire for the title.
Why There Is No Simba Coming Back
I have no plans to return and save the pride from Scar. The years spent trying to set people up were already costly in personal terms. I did that work out of loyalty and a sense of obligation. Repeating it would not be healthy, and I have no desire to reopen that chapter. Greatness, for me, is now located elsewhere. Scar-type figures exist in many organizations; they scheme, obtain the position, and then discover that competence and care for the people under them are not automatically transferred with the title. The remaining employees have to navigate that reality themselves.
I appreciate every message that expresses affection or asks me to come back. It is good to be missed. It is also important to be clear. I fulfilled the practical duty of arranging sustainable pay where I could. I am not available to re-enter the role, and I do not expect that to change. For the man who calls me father in America, and for everyone else who wrote, the clearest reply remains the same: watch The Lion King again. Scar takes the throne through conspiracy. The Pride Lands decline under his rule. Simba eventually returns in the story. In this particular case, that return is not available. The circle of life continues either way, but it continues without me in that particular pride.
Notes
1. The Lion King, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff (Walt Disney Pictures, 1994). The film’s plot centers on Scar’s conspiracy to murder Mufasa, seize the throne, and the subsequent ecological and social collapse of the Pride Lands under his rule.
2. Standard plot summaries of The Lion King (1994) detail Scar’s alliance with the hyenas, the engineered stampede, the betrayal of Mufasa, and the later return of Simba. See also analyses of Scar as an archetype of toxic or subtractive leadership that obtains power through deception but cannot sustain the conditions that made the kingdom viable.
3. Bain & Company research (reported 2026) on organizational restructuring found large gaps between leader confidence and employee experience; only 22 percent of employees reported receiving sufficient support. Related findings appear in Gallup data on engagement declines after disruptive change and in studies of communication volume after CEO transitions (roughly 20 percent drop in the initial months). McKinsey and other sources have estimated that successful transitions reduce attrition while failed ones can reduce performance by double-digit percentages; estimates of transition failure rates commonly range into the 40 percent range within two years.
4. Leadership literature on succession and toxic leadership frequently uses narrative examples such as Scar to illustrate the difference between obtaining a title and possessing the capacity to lead. See also research on Leader-Member Exchange and engagement drops following top-level change.
Bibliography
Allers, Roger, and Rob Minkoff, dirs. The Lion King. Walt Disney Pictures, 1994.
Bain & Company. Research on organizational restructuring and employee adaptation (reported 2026).
Gallup. State of the Global Workplace reports and related analyses of engagement, change, and leadership levels.
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Studies on communication volume and uncertainty following CEO transitions.
McKinsey & Company. Research on executive transitions, retention, and performance outcomes.
Analyses of toxic leadership and narrative archetypes in The Lion King (various academic and popular treatments of Scar as manipulator versus competent steward).
Additional recommended reading: works on succession planning, employee trust after leadership change, and the practical limits of personal loyalty in organizational settings.
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 was very happy to see the Tesla Roadster demonstration. Teslas are the best-engineered cars in the world. The electric designation itself does not particularly move me; what matters is the engineering. When the Roadster drove upside down on a ramp using a suction system and then launched into the air on cold-gas thrusters—jumping over a line of other Teslas and landing under control—I thought immediately of the practical uses. Those kinds of features would be useful more often than people assume. It reminded me of the Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me, the car that drove into the water and became a submarine. It reminded me of Batmobile concepts. Most of all it reminded me of the jet car from Hooper, one of my favorite films. I have always wanted something like that. When the production Roadster arrives, I expect to get one for myself and probably a few for family. The Cybertruck, the rest of the Tesla line, and this new Roadster confirm what I have said for years: Tesla is the greatest car company in the world, and SpaceX is the greatest company in the world.¹
The October Demonstrations and the Bezos Interview
The Roadster event took place on October 15, 2026, at the SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas. The car used a multi-mode fan and ground-sealing system (drawing on SpaceX technology) to generate the downforce needed to cling to the inverted ramp, then cold-gas thrusters for the aerial maneuvers and the claimed 0–60 mph time of 0.81 seconds. Production is targeted for 2028. It is not a practical flying car for everyday traffic, but it is a serious demonstration of integrated vehicle and propulsion engineering.²
Around the same time, Jeff Bezos sat for an extensive interview with Bret Baier on Special Report from the Blue Origin facility in Cape Canaveral. I have been to that facility. Bezos has worked against Trump in the past, yet he is now aligned with the same capitalist push that is producing real hardware. The conversation was largely optimistic and focused on execution: a permanent lunar presence rather than a flags-and-footprints visit, routine cargo landings first, New Glenn’s return to flight, and the broader economic shift. Blue Origin has named one of its New Glenn boosters Never Tell Me the Odds, a direct reference to Han Solo’s line in The Empire Strikes Back during the asteroid-field sequence. That booster has already achieved successful landings and reuse. These are not abstract slogans. They are operating vehicles.³
The Films That Shaped the Builders
The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark came out close together and were written in ways that reinforced each other. Harrison Ford carried both. The asteroid-field escape under damaged conditions is the source of the “Never tell me the odds” line. The Raiders sequences—the well with the snakes, the desert fight near the flying wing, and the truck chase for the Ark—show the same tenacity: improvise, keep moving, finish the job under pressure. Those films, along with earlier work such as the Lotus submarine car in The Spy Who Loved Me, formed a generation that later built actual rockets and high-performance vehicles. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are the most visible examples, but the pattern is broader. The attitude was not “the odds are against it.” The attitude was to build the system that changes the odds.
I have watched the Blue Origin facility and the SpaceX operations at Boca Chica. The difference between those sites and the older institutional model is visible on the floor. The future workforce is not limited to people who followed a traditional path through the right degrees and the right political alliances. It includes people who can be trained from ordinary backgrounds—Waffle House shifts, mechanical work, or similar—onto a production cadence that builds flight hardware. The administrative economy that guaranteed a modest upper-middle-class living in exchange for compliance is losing ground. The next decade’s value is being created in companies that actually fly vehicles and manufacture advanced systems.⁴
Where the Money and the Work Are Going
When people ask me where to put effort or capital, I point to Tesla, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. The Roadster is more than a stunt; it is evidence that the same organizations building orbital vehicles are applying those methods to ground transportation. Bezos’s comments on lunar infrastructure, AI applied to physical manufacturing, and higher launch cadence describe a market that rewards execution over process. Traditional commodities, legacy military-industrial arrangements, and political career paths that top out in the low hundreds of thousands are not where the expansion is occurring. I have no interest in returning to earlier roles even if the opportunity reappeared. The work that matters is here.
I keep returning to those two films because the parallel is practical. The asteroid field and the desert chase both required precise control under failure conditions. The people now running the flight tests and production lines absorbed that lesson and applied it to hardware. The result is visible: reusable boosters that land, cars that can generate the forces needed for extreme maneuvers, and manufacturing systems that pull people into high-skill work faster than the old credentialed pipeline. That is the economy I am focused on. It is exciting, and I am looking forward to the Roadster when it is available.
Notes
1. Tesla Roadster demonstration, October 15, 2026, SpaceX McGregor, Texas facility. Livestreamed event showed inverted driving via suction system, aerial maneuvers with cold-gas thrusters (SpaceX collaboration), and sub-1-second 0–60 claims. Production targeted for 2028. Multiple contemporary reports (PCMag, The Verge, CNN Business, Business Insider) document the stunts and the distinction between demonstration capability and everyday road use.
2. Same event coverage. Specs discussed include multi-nozzle cold-gas thrusters, ultra-high-pressure air systems, and extreme acceleration. The demonstration was physical and attended, not AI-generated.
3. Bret Baier exclusive interview with Jeff Bezos, October 7, 2026, Blue Origin Cape Canaveral facility, aired on Special Report. Topics included permanent lunar base, New Glenn schedule, AI regulation with a light hand on tools rather than applications, and economic optimism. Blue Origin booster Never Tell Me the Odds references The Empire Strikes Back (1980); the vehicle has completed successful landings and reuse. See also Ars Technica, Reuters, and NASASpaceflight reporting on New Glenn flights.
4. On workforce and industrial cadence: public statements from Blue Origin and SpaceX leadership on production scaling, plus broader commentary on the shift from credentialed administrative paths to hands-on manufacturing in aerospace and advanced vehicles. The “Waffle House to flight line” observation is the author’s based on facility visits and industry pattern.
Bibliography
The Empire Strikes Back. Directed by Irvin Kershner. Lucasfilm, 1980.
Raiders of the Lost Ark. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Lucasfilm, 1981.
The Spy Who Loved Me. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Eon Productions, 1977.
Hooper. Directed by Hal Needham. Warner Bros., 1978.
Tesla. Roadster event livestream and official materials, October 15, 2026.
Contemporary reporting on the Roadster demonstration: PCMag, The Verge, CNN Business, Business Insider, Statesman (Austin), October 2026.
Fox News. Bret Baier interview with Jeff Bezos, Special Report, October 7, 2026, from Blue Origin Cape Canaveral.
Ars Technica, Reuters, NASASpaceflight, and related coverage of New Glenn launches, booster Never Tell Me the Odds, and recovery operations (2025–2026).
Additional recommended reading: technical histories of reusable launch systems, analyses of the commercial space sector’s manufacturing model, and contemporary accounts of Tesla vehicle engineering and production.
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.
It was good to see Trump have an event for Jon Husted at Vandalia, Ohio. More than ever, watching that event convinced me that Senator Jon Husted is the right person for Ohio. He’s a solid, practical guy who understands the state. I haven’t spent much time publicly defending him this cycle because Sherrod Brown’s return has been such a predictable mess, but I don’t think Brown has a real chance. Husted has been positioned to win this all along.
The Vandalia Rally and Why Husted Matters
Seeing Husted on stage in Vandalia with the crowd was good. Trump’s people will show up and vote; this isn’t a race to take for granted, but I expect Husted to win by four or five points once the numbers settle. Ohio isn’t as close as some national media outlets want it to be, and one of the seats Democrats are counting on flipping won’t go their way.
Husted is a top-tier senator for the job. He has been a proud business-oriented leader for years. When critics knock him on the FirstEnergy / House Bill 6 situation, the corruption accusations miss the point. That fight was about regulatory compliance, keeping nuclear capacity online, and listening to major employers in the state that bad policy was squeezing. I don’t blame him for listening to companies that employ many Ohioans. If you’re a senator or governor, part of the job is making yourself available to the people who keep the lights on and the payrolls running.
COVID Calls, Amusement Parks, and Listening to Employers
I was on several conference calls with Husted and other state officials during the COVID period. Senators, state representatives, and businesspeople tried to figure out how to keep Ohio from being locked down into oblivion. Shutdown pressure was intense, and the Republican response often fell between public-health theater and the reality of what a prolonged closure would do to the economy.
Amusement parks were a clear example. Kings Island and others were operating under rules that made little sense—social distancing on rides, capacity limits that ignored how the industry actually works, and the threat of penalties for trying to open. Those places are major employers and economic drivers. Husted and others in the administration had to navigate that mess while the parks were being squeezed. A senator or governor should be available when big employers in the state have problems. Husted has been willing to do that. I’ve seen it firsthand.
Energy policy is the same story. Nuclear, coal, and fossil fuels still run the grid. When policy turns those assets into liabilities, companies push back. Listening to them is not corruption; it’s basic competence. Good governance turns a liability into a manageable asset when the alternative is higher rates and less reliability.
A Buccaneers Fan’s Opinion About Jon Gruden’s Support of Jon Husted, a Former Teammate
I’m a Buccaneers fan, so the other Jon on that stage was a bonus. Jon Gruden won a Super Bowl with a strong defense and a quarterback who was good enough to win but not a superstar. That 2002 team was special. I’ve never gotten over how good that unit was. Gruden got knocked out of the coaching ranks over the email scandal involving comments about cheerleaders and other material that got leaked. It was a stupid episode that cost him the Raiders job and led to his removal from the Buccaneers Ring of Honor for a while.
The organization has brought him back in some capacity—broadcast work with Ronde Barber and a restored place in the franchise’s history. I’m happy about that. He flew from the Dayton area back to Tampa after the event to handle his obligations there. It was good to see him on stage talking about Husted and the season. Gruden is a leader type; he knows how to talk to people and get them moving. The Bucs are having a rough year right now, and much of that traces back to chemistry issues around Baker Mayfield. Mayfield is not Tom Brady. Brady knew how to run a locker room and get everyone pulling in the same direction. When a quarterback starts complaining about money and the team feels like he’s putting himself first, the chemistry breaks. The coaching staff has to deal with it, and the results show. Mayfield got hurt recently and wasn’t available for this week’s game, which only makes the situation harder.
The Senate Race and the Path Forward
Brown’s campaign is a disaster because it relies on the same tired playbook that lost him the seat two years ago. Husted has the record of actually governing in Ohio—secretary of state, lieutenant governor, and now senator—and the connections to the state’s employers. The people who showed up in Vandalia understand that. Trump’s voters are not staying home. The margin will not be razor-thin.
I’m proud of the affiliation. Watching Husted on stage with that crowd, and seeing Gruden there as well, was a good day. These are the kinds of practical leaders who keep a state functional instead of turning every issue into a purity test. And they have been through the pressure cooker, so we know what to expect. FirstEnergy, or any involvement in it, is the job of someone representing the governor’s office and a basic obligation. And the failures at FirstEnergy were typical leftist terrorism: destroy companies with policy. Democrats have not been in power, so they have no track record to criticize. Only that Sharrod Brown has been in government for many years and has advanced socialist causes during all those terms. It should be noted that when he was running against Bernie Moreno, the polling was tracking much like it is in this 2026 race. So that should tell you everything.
Footnotes
1. Husted was appointed to the Senate in January 2025 to fill the vacancy created by JD Vance’s elevation to vice president and is running in the 2026 special election against Sherrod Brown.
2. Brown lost his previous seat to Bernie Moreno in 2024.
3. House Bill 6 provided subsidies for nuclear and certain coal plants; FirstEnergy paid substantial penalties in related settlements, but Husted has not been charged with wrongdoing.
4. Gruden coached the Buccaneers to Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003 with a defense-led roster.
5. Buccaneers 2026 record and Mayfield’s thumb injury status as of mid-October.
6. Gruden and Husted were University of Dayton teammates in 1985; Gruden appeared at the October 3, 2026 Vandalia rally.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Ballotpedia and official campaign materials on the 2026 Ohio Senate special election (Husted vs. Brown).
• Reporting on the FirstEnergy / HB 6 matter from the Cincinnati Enquirer, Associated Press, and FactCheck.org summaries of Husted’s role and testimony.
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers historical accounts of the 2002 Super Bowl team and Gruden’s tenure (2002–2008).
• Contemporary coverage of the October 3, 2026 Vandalia rally (local Dayton outlets and national wires).
• Buccaneers 2026 season reports on quarterback play, coaching, and roster decisions.
• Broader context on Ohio energy policy and nuclear capacity from state utility commission records and utility industry analyses.
This is the kind of grounded, practical leadership Ohio needs.
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 like doing these kinds of talks. Positive stuff. The benefits of things. The proper role of government. When you vote people into government, you are not voting them in to manage your life. You are voting them in to manage something you need done at the local, state, and federal levels, and then to get out of the way so good minds can finish the work. I talk about that a lot, and I talk about my friend, State Senator George Lang, who I consider one of my very best friends, because he has spent a long time doing the unglamorous part of that job. Good things, done over a long period of time, eventually just happen. He does not always realize, in the moment, how far those things are going to travel. I will talk more about some of that in November. For now, I want to talk about a day in Oxford that caught me off guard in the best way.
We had an event at the College@Elm innovation center on September 21. I was there to talk about what I have been calling the dreams of Elm Street. I discussed the next generation of middle-mile work I am involved with through Volynt, the company I lead as COO, and the hybrid unmanned aircraft they call Vyper (with a Y), since Volynt also uses a Y. Volynt Aero sits at 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio, inside that building, and I am very proud of the affiliation and of the people around it.[1] When I do these kinds of things, I invite people I know. I know quite a few political people. I looked into the audience, and there were some very important faces in it. I had invited George to come out and listen. I had no idea he was already part of the roots of the place.
Positive people, positive work
It is nice to be involved in positive things with positive people who mean to do good things. I had no idea when I first got involved with Volynt, and they brought me out to show me the facility and how deep the story of that building went. I was impressed with the building. I didn’t know the story of the Innovation Center on Elm Street. When I gave the talk, I made a play on words. Nightmare on Elm Street used to be the honest description of the building Volynt is in. It was dilapidated. People had considered tearing it down. Miami University President Gregory Crawford brought George Lang out, and Nancy Nix, and a bunch of other people, and said Let us save this building and make it an innovation center for young minds coming through Miami University, a place to get a launch in life. That is exactly what is happening. A partnership moved into the building. I came out there in a COO role with Volynt. We talked a little about the history of how they arrived there, and about the other tenants, in a building that sits right there on the campus square, right there on Elm Street.
I talked about the play on words. A nightmare on Elm Street becoming dreams on Elm Street, because innovation startups are dreams. They are people trying to bring about new thoughts and new ideas. I guess a lot of people knew that story already. I did not. I was talking to George, telling him to come out, and George was already coming. As I was giving the speech, I looked out, and of course Michael Ryan was there, who I believe is going to be the next Butler County commissioner, and he came and gave part of the speech with me. In the audience were people like Nancy Nix. And George was there. I am going to show you. I know George is going to do the work. I had no idea that when I said, “Come on out,” he already knew all about it. He knew about the innovation center. He was there when it was being born. Nancy and I were talking about it, and she had been invited to see it back when President Crawford pitched the idea of taking this building and turning it into an innovation hub for aspiring ideas at Miami University. I had no idea this was where it was going.
The building that almost got torn down
I saw George in the background as we were setting up to give our speech. He was filming a short presentation on the building’s history, which he hadn’t told me about. I had no idea it was happening. I just joined the Volynt role. I admired the building. I thought it was a good use of a structure that might otherwise have been lost. It is very close, in Oxford terms, to the Miami University Airport, the little airport down the road at 7101 Fairfield Road, identifier OXD, a 4,011-foot runway that Miami operates and that sits only a few miles from campus.[2] For a company building uncrewed aircraft, that proximity is not a small thing. It is all very well set up.
Here is the history, for those unfamiliar, because it is a good story and deserves to be talked up.
The building at 20 S. Elm Street was built in 1933. For 68 years it served as Miami University’s central food service facility, the unglamorous engine room that kept the campus fed.[3] After dining services moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center, the Elm Street building became swing space and general storage, then sat vacant. By the time people were seriously arguing about its future, it was a roughly 90-year-old, 39,000-square-foot brick building with a strong foundation and a failing prospect. Miami and the City of Oxford debated what to do with it. Selling it was on the table. Tearing it down was on the table. Leaving it as a forgotten building on South Elm was the path of least resistance.[4]
President Crawford did not take the path of least resistance. He had been in business before higher education. He had founded companies. He knew the difference between a press release and a building that works. Around 2017 and 2018, he began walking potential partners through the place and asking whether they could see what Elm Street might become.[5] By 2020, the university and the city had a plan: turn the vacant structure into a technology, entrepreneurship, and workforce hub. Preparations began in 2021. The renovation cost about $10.7 million, part of a larger public-private investment of $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors.[6] Miami alumni Lee Fisher, class of 1968, and Rosemary Fisher, class of 1969, provided the naming gift. In February 2023, the building opened as the Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm.[7]
That is the part I did not know when I was admiring the brick.
George Lang, the incubator, and the long clock
George has said publicly that he used whatever political capital he had to get state dollars into the project so it could get started and get up and running. He has called College@Elm something very special and very unique. His line, the one that matches what I half-heard him filming in the background, is that it is the only incubator he knows of where you can go from concept to production under one roof: prototypes, marketing expertise, funding, the whole path an entrepreneur needs to find out whether an idea can succeed.[8] Advanced manufacturing was part of the original pitch. The Fischer Group was an early anchor concept, an “innovation extension” inside the same walls as Miami’s entrepreneurship training.[9] When I watched him in the background and later saw the clip surface on LinkedIn, because the algorithm knows I know him, he was not doing a campaign spot. He was telling the history of a building he had already helped stand up, eight or ten years before Volynt moved into Suite 117.
I have known George for about twenty years: very good times and some very hard times. You learn the character of a person that way. A good person is pretty stable whether the times are good or bad. I am sure things are going on in his life where people look at him from the outside and say, I wish I were him. Then you know the pressure of living. It can be hard. I am sure he would trade some of the blood pressure for an easier job. He has said as much, in the way friends say it. The goldfish feeder at Walmart might be a better life on some days, because you can enjoy things a little more and carry less pressure. He finds himself under a lot of pressure a lot of the time. I say that as a friend, someone I talk to pretty regularly. It is not always better on the other side of the glass. It is hard. But when you care about innovation, and business, and technology, and job growth, this is the work. That is why I am involved in it. Not because the title is comfortable. Because the output is real.
Nancy Nix has the same knack. She was in the audience on September 21. She has a way of seeing a good thing before it becomes important, and she has been that way for a long time, back through nearly sixteen years as Butler County Treasurer and into the Auditor’s office she was sworn into in February 2023.[10] She was invited out when Crawford was still pitching the building. She came. Michael Ryan has supported this kind of work well before the commissioner race, and he stood up and spoke with me that day. He won the Republican primary in May 2026 with about 72 percent of the vote, and he is on the November 3 ballot focused on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.[11] I think he is going to win. More to the point, he showed up.
What Volynt is actually doing there
Volynt Aero was formed in 2024 by people who have been developing uncrewed aircraft and eVTOL machines for years. The spelling is the point—Volynt, with a Y. The aircraft is the Vyper, also with a Y. They are always doing things a little differently, and I like that. The company builds hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft aimed at cargo logistics, highly mobile power generation, and forward communications for defense and for disaster response- the work where you cannot always count on a runway, a fuel truck, or a pilot who can get there.[1] The address on the capability statement and on the federal registration is the same as the innovation center: 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. They have taken Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support and partnered with Miami University on powertrain work. That is the right use of a building like this. Not a plaque. A prototype.
I had no idea, the first time I walked the facility, that the roots of the innovation talk went back that far, or that George was part of it, or that Nancy Nix was part of it. A lot of things in government never mature. Maybe only five percent of them ever become anything good. This one has a chance to mature into something really good. It is exactly the kind of thing that all of these people hope their role in government can do: take good minds, imagination, goodwill, and blood, and help them mature into something productive. Government, used properly, does not dream for people. It keeps the road open so the people who do dream can get the work to market.
Dreams, not the extended nightmare
I have always enjoyed my time on college campuses. I have not been happy with the direction academia has taken, captured as so much of it has been by left-wing politics and by the pursuit of intelligence subordinated to social order. I still encourage what I see. Even if everybody on a campus is not pushing the limit the way I think they should, you still see a proportion of people who are. I stop by the little convenience store on the campus, and I get a Mello Yello. People joke about it. The three drinks I drink are Mello Yello, water, and milk. A lot of water, a lot of milk, and a lot of Mello Yello. Sugar is not good for you, but I don’t consume much else with a lot of sugar in it, so I am good with it. And when I am standing there, I see a lot of bright-eyed people walking around with backpacks, dreaming and hoping.
That is what I was talking about in the speech. The dreams of Elm Street, because we were on Elm Street, in the innovation center. You expect a company like Volynt, working there, to have a shot at evolving into a technological powerhouse. It all started with the dreams of people like the president of Miami University, and Senator Lang, and Nancy Nix. You can tell who your friends are. It depends on who shows up for these things. You invite them to come out, you look into the audience, and you see faces that are very familiar to you. Some of the things you are doing may not become important for five years, or ten. They still come.
George said it in his own way. The things you do today are the things that show up eight or nine years from now. A lot of the work he does, and a lot of the work the other people who came out to our event are doing, works on that clock. I appreciate everybody who came. Michael Ryan has been supportive before he was ever on a commissioner ballot. Nancy has always supported things well before they become important. She has a good eye. She was in the audience. She knows a good thing when she sees it.
The innovation center on Elm Street is there for a purpose. It is there to inspire the growth of human intellect, as academia was always meant to do. I was proud to be there, and proud to be a part of it, and proud to look into that audience and see those kinds of people. I appreciate having high-quality people like that in my life. I think all of us, working together, can make dreams come true for a lot of people who don’t even know they are dreaming yet. They are just living their lives and hoping for a dream to dream, instead of living inside an extended nightmare where intellect is no longer in charge of the human condition.
Innovation centers like the one on Elm Street are, I think, among the highest-order things a community can build anywhere in the world, because they are dedicated to aspiring intelligence that makes everybody else’s lives much better. George Lang has always been supportive of that. It was good to hear his story, and to hear it go back those eight or nine years. The things you do today will be the things people are standing inside of nine years from now. That is what good government looks like. A president of a university pushing. A senator putting political capital on a building that is still empty. An auditor who shows up early. A future commissioner who stands up and speaks. They help pave the way for dreams to become a reality instead of a nightmare.
Footnotes
[1] Volynt Aero, Inc. lists its primary address as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Founded in 2024, the company develops hybrid-electric uncrewed eVTOL aircraft for cargo logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications under the Vyper name, and has paired Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support with Miami University powertrain work. See Volynt Aero capability statement, volynt.aero; federal entity record, CAGE 9X2Y4, UEI ZDFZRXS7EJY2; Volynt Aero LinkedIn company page.
[2] Miami University Airport (OXD), 7101 Fairfield Road, Oxford, Ohio 45056, is a public-use airport operated in connection with the university and has a 4,011-by-70-foot asphalt runway. Miami University, “OXD Airport in Oxford, Ohio,” miamioh.edu/oxd-airport.
[3] Miami University, “From Food Services to Innovation Hub: The Story of College@Elm,” College@Elm Impact Blog, 2025. The building was constructed in 1933 and served as the university’s central food service facility for 68 years before dining operations moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center.
[4] Halie Barger, “Forgotten building on South Elm Street to become space for innovation startups and a focus on the arts,” Oxford Observer, February 14, 2020. Miami and Oxford officials described a vacant former food-service building that had later been used for storage; sale and continued vacancy were both live options before the innovation-hub plan.
[5] Sean Scott reporting in the Oxford Free Press, “College@Elm aims to provide innovation hub for Southwest Ohio businesses,” drawing on Lee Fisher’s account that President Gregory Crawford approached potential partners around 2017–2018 and was “the big driving force” behind the project. Crawford has described walking partners through the building more than two years before the 2023 opening. Miami University News, “The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm celebrates grand opening,” February 2023.
[6] Miami University put the renovation at $10.7 million and total invested funding at $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors. Miami University News, February 4, 2021, “Miami and Oxford initiative to transform uptown into an entrepreneurial hub”; Miami University News, February 2023 grand-opening release. The Oxford Free Press separately noted a City of Oxford contribution of about $1.18 million toward renovations, plus parking-lot work. Figures vary by what is counted as renovation versus total public-private investment; both numbers are in the public record.
[7] Lee Fisher ’68 and Rosemary Fisher ’69 provided the naming gift. The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm held its grand opening in February 2023 at 20 S. Elm Street. Miami University News, February 2023.
[8] George Lang, quoted in the Oxford Free Press: “I was very proud to use whatever political capital I had to get some dollars at the state level to help get the program started and get it up and running.” And: “It’s the only place, literally the only incubator in Ohio, that I know of in the country, where you can go from concept to production all under one roof and have everything right there.” The Miami Student, March 2023, also noted Lang’s support through the funding process. The September 21, 2026 remarks I saw him filming are his own telling of that same history.
[9] Miami University News, February 4, 2021. The early plan named two anchor uses: Miami’s entrepreneurship training and incubator center, and the Fischer Group’s manufacturing “innovation extension.” Later tenants have included student and alums ventures such as Coarse Culture. The Miami Student, March 2023, reported a five-year hope, attached to the Fischer Group concept, of 52 jobs and just under $3 million in payroll.
[10] Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix was sworn in on February 13, 2023, after nearly 16 years as Butler County Treasurer, and was elected in November 2024 to the unexpired term. She holds a B.S. from Truman State University, an MBA from Miami University (2012), and a CPA license—Butler County Auditor, “Meet Nancy,” auditor.bcohio.gov.
[11] Michael V. Ryan, former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, won the May 5, 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with about 72 percent against incumbent Cindy Carpenter, and faces Democrat Mike Miller on the November 3, 2026 ballot. Journal-News, “Butler County commissioners race: Michael Ryan and Mike Miller up for open seat,” September 30, 2026. Ryan has campaigned on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.
Volynt Aero. Capability statement and company site. https://volynt.aero/ — address listed as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Aircraft program styled Vyper.
Volynt Aero. LinkedIn company page, Oxford, Ohio. Notes Ohio TVSF grant and Miami University powertrain partnership.
Hoffman, Rich. Overmanwarrior essays and podcast, hoffmanbooks.com — including the September 21, 2026 College@Elm remarks and the George Lang clip referenced here.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am proud of President Trump. I say that first because I have spent years decoding the obvious, and I don’t intend to pretend I discovered courage last week. I walked people through the exile years. I did the COVID coverage when it was still lonely work. I was calling balls and strikes before a lot of the later names had a show. Laura Loomer has done hard work. Natalie Winters has done hard work from a young age. The War Room lane has done hard work. I respect the daily calling of hypocrisy. I also think that lane, by itself, never gets to the doing. Recognition without a mechanism is how evil keeps the back office while we argue about the headline.[1]
I have shifted gears. Not away from Trump. Toward the machinery that outlasts him.
I USED TO SIT IN A COMFORTABLE CHAIR AND CALL BALLS AND STRIKES
For a long time I had a comfortable place to sit. Call it a cloud. Call it a good office. I could look down on the news cycle, name the lie, and go home. That is useful. It is also incomplete. Hypocrisy reporting is a spotlight. Evil works in the dark behind the spotlight, on purpose, while the audience stares at the bright circle.
The hardships I have been talking about in my own professional life were not a detour from the political argument. They were the laboratory. Once you are no longer sitting in the clubhouse, you see how the game is actually rigged. Corporate America. Easy Federal Reserve money. China in the supply chain and in the information pipe. HR departments as political enforcement. Flippers who buy a shop and call compliance a personality. I have covered that combination for years. I have now lived a chapter of it at ground level. Micro teaches macro. The same pattern that ruins a company ruins a republic.[2]
Pickle Rick was not a joke. If you are going to call balls and strikes, you cannot live on the owner’s floor. You cannot take the rigged clubhouse deal and then pretend you still have clean eyes. I put myself outside the comfortable chair on purpose. That is why the reporting sounds different now. I am not interested in announcing that we have a problem. I want the problem named at the layer where it is actually built.
WE HAVE NOT HAD A SYSTEM THAT RESPECTED VOTERS
This is October 1st, 2026. The midterms are November 3. Thirty days or so. I am not sitting here assuming Republicans have already lost the House and the Senate. I am sitting here watching a regime of people who have controlled the machinery for a long time try to convince you the race is already over so you will stay on the couch.[3]
We have not had what they call democracy in the clean-textbook sense. We have had a controlled, manipulated administrative state that learned a simple math problem. A 30-year career outlasts a 2-year House term, a 6-year Senate term, and even a 4-year presidency. They reveal elections. Then they outlast whoever slides through. Checks on power were meant to slow radicalism. The deep state learned to use those same checks as a parking brake on anyone the voters actually sent.[4]
I know this from men I have spoken with privately. Bernie Moreno. Warren Davidson. Others who went to Washington from my world. I have been close enough to Congress and the Senate to hear what they sound like when the cameras are off. I know who they were when they went in. I know what the building does to a mission. The system is designed to stop the mission. It is the same design I have seen in corporate cultures. New owner. New process. Same rotting joists. The title on the door changes. The permanent staff does not.[5]
THE IMPEACHMENT HEADLINE IS NOT A LEGAL DOCUMENT. IT IS A TAILGATE
I read the news Saturday morning the way I always do, through a lot of inputs. The outlets were already wet with impeachment—Yahoo-style aggregation. Democrats talking impeachment as if it were weather. Impeach him for what? He is the president the country put in office, and a large part of the opposition class cannot think past social takeover as a governing theory.[6]
Look at the actual paper on the table this month, not the feeling. On September 15, the House tabled Al Green’s latest impeachment attempt. Democrats split. Leadership voted present. On September 24, Steve Cohen filed 26 articles covering everything from Iran to immigration to emoluments. Hakeem Jeffries is already telling reporters that if Democrats take the House, oversight will be vast and impeachment is “not ruled out.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth already has articles hanging over him from Thomas Massie over the Iran war. That is not a completed removal. That is a war machine. It is built to make you feel like your side already lost, so you will not get up in November.[7]
I have used the tailgate picture because it is the most honest one I have. You wear your jersey into the other team’s parking lot. They put an arm around you. They sell you a hot dog. They tell you, friendly as Sunday, that your team is going to get destroyed. The point is not information. The point is to make you feel stupid for showing up. Democratic media does that at an industrial scale because the advertising model needs your despair. If you believe your side can win, you are harder to monetize and harder to keep home. If you believe the thing is already over, you stay on the couch while their people walk.[8]
POLLS ARE A WEAPON. TURNOUT IS THE ONLY COUNTER
I will not lie to you about the temperature. Generic ballots in late September are ugly for Republicans. Some aggregators have Democrats up by several points. Forecast shops are assigning the House to Democrats at high confidence and treating the Senate as a coin that has started to lean. Trump’s national approval is being printed in the high 30s by the same class of numbers that has been wrong before and will be wrong again if the people who actually vote decide the numbers are a dare.[9]
That is the point of the suppression. They do not need you to love their candidates. They need you to believe resistance is already futile. They need Republicans who have learned to live inside the old control system—comfortable calendar, known vacation, decent pay, no appetite for real reform—to sit still and hope the storm misses the golf course. How many men, alone on a tee box with nobody watching, will still take the honest lie? If they will cheat a stroke when the only prize is a par, why would you trust them with a republic when the prize is a career.[10]
GAS, IRAN, AND THE MEN WHO LICK THE BOOTS IN THE ROOM
I said I thought gas would be under two dollars by the summer of 2026. It is not. National averages this year ran from the low threes before the Iran escalation, spiked toward the mid-fours in May, kissed four dollars after a June paper ceasefire, and then climbed again when the fight did not stay dead—Labor Day printed above four. That is not the number I wanted. It is also not a mystery.[11]
Iran is being used as a straw man for price. As long as a war, a blockade, a rumor of the Strait, or a tent full of men who can still light a fuse exists, refiners and traders have a story. They will smile at the gold trim in the White House. Strong executives always get that smile. Then they talk on the way to the car. I have watched that smile in companies. I have been in the room. The Iran file is being stretched because stretched files protect margins and protect the permanent war party that wants Trump blamed for a fight they have been feeding for decades.[12]
We did not vote for a forever war. We voted for cheaper energy and a country that is not managed by the people who never leave. Forever war is how you wait a president out. Afghanistan already taught that lesson to anyone willing to read a graveyard. A movement that can pitch a tent and find water can outlast a news cycle. Radical Islamic politics and Marxist economics are not opposites in the field. They are often the same engine with different slogans. As long as the tent has water, the fire keeps a little wind.[13]
CHINA, HONG KONG, IRAN, AND A STRANGE CHANGE ON MY SITE
I have watched my own traffic for years. For a long stretch, there were two persistent hits a day from China, like a pair of regulators taking attendance. A few months ago that changed. I started seeing 37 to 40 hits a day from China. That is not a standing ovation. That is a change in the pipe. Somebody stopped capping the faucet, or somebody started studying the faucet. Either way, the information war is not only domestic.[14]
Hong Kong showed what happens when a population gets a window and does not finish the job. Iran is the same kind of window with worse weather. Voice of America, X, a blog in Ohio—none of that is a revolution by itself. The other side has speech control as a governing tool. We still talk as if the whole earth is a comments section. It is not. Getting a message into a closed country is half the war. The other half is whether the people inside will use the opening. I cannot do that part for them. Trump cannot do that part for them. A better speech will not save a hammer that refuses to swing.[15]
WRIGHT-PATT, DISCLOSURE, AND THE GIANT IN THE VIDEO GAME
I live close enough to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to know people who work there. They confirm what they can confirm. Files are coming out in a Trump administration that previous buildings sat on. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day movie is sitting in the culture as a myth-shaped object while the real files move in smaller rooms. I will give cameras their own essay. They deserve it. The point here is simpler. The same class of manipulator that runs a corporate takeover also runs a disclosure drip. Look this way. Do not look at the jurisdiction fight underneath.[16]
A new generation is walking into stories I have been telling for 20 and 30 years, and they are walking in through a game controller. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is not Sunday school. It is a very good game. The Order of Giants DLC puts Nephilim, Gibborim, Noah’s Ark, and a secret order of large men on PlayStation and Xbox and doesn’t apologize. Giants from the Bible are popular again because the old text never stopped being a map. Hollywood will sell you the costume. Michael Heiser spent his career trying to make people read the unseen realm without the costume. He died. People like to whisper that this kind of work draws fire. I do not need a ghost story to notice that my own life got louder after I finished The Politics of Heaven. I am not stopping.[17]
THE FALLEN CONSPIRACY HAS MORE THAN ONE LETTERHEAD
You can spell it a lot of ways—fallen angels. Secret societies. A Hollywood death cult. China in the media stack. Progressive branding on an old hatred of the God of creation. A mother in a Manson weather system. Lawyers and jurors leaned on until justice becomes a performance. Lucifer is not a Halloween decoration. He is a politician. He recruits institutions. He prefers a Truman Show to an honest election because a show can be rewritten between seasons.[18]
The same fingerprints show up on a Saturday impeachment dump and on a corporate letter telling a CEO to adopt the current left-wing weather or lose the easy money. Federal Reserve plumbing. Wall Street wash. ESG as a protection racket. That is not three conspiracies. That is one method at three altitudes. If you only stare at gas prices, you will miss the wet paint. If you only stare at the wet paint, you will miss the spirit that taught the painter his stroke.[19]
GOD IS NOT RUNNING A CLOSED SET
A lot of good people want the comfort sentence. God’s got this. God’s got my back. God knows where I live. I expect the plot is already locked and we are only extras. That’s not what I am looking at. I think conspirators are working against the script. I think they have been trying to overthrow the visible order for a very long time. I think calling them “progressives” or “Democrats” or even “the deep state” is sometimes accurate and always incomplete. Those are avatars. Avatars can be replaced. The method remains.[20]
The Constitution is a costume the other team has learned to wear. Free-speech rules get used to protect the spread of the thing the speech was supposed to restrain. Courts can refuse to join a mood and still leave a machine intact. A strong executive in the White House answers some questions. He cannot answer whether a people will stay home because a poll told them to feel defeated. He cannot be your rapture. He cannot be your substitute for courage.[21]
I have been saying this in the hammer language because I mean it. If you were made as a tool, waiting for heaven to happen while you use Jesus as an excuse for being a chicken is not piety. It is absenteeism. Trump was not a chicken. He stayed in the pocket long enough that the footprints in the wet paint became visible to people who did not want to see them. That is a gift. It is not a finished repair. He cannot repair for you any more than God will swing a hammer you refuse to pick up.[22]
WHAT I WANT INSTEAD OF ANOTHER DECADE OF HIGHLIGHT REELS
I am still with Trump. I think he has done a good job in a building that was built to digest him. I think the House and the Senate in November are still winnable if the people who know better refuse the tailgate. I think a lot of Republicans who like the current control system will not help you, because the current system pays them on time. I think election integrity is not a slogan. It is the only peaceful way to take a government back from a class that has already decided you do not own it. If you will not fight for a clean count, you are agreeing that you do not run the place.[23]
I do not want AI licensed by the same kind of people who wash out of real shops and land at a patent window because the job is protected and the standards are political. I have talked to that office. I know that weather. You do not want those hands on a technology China is already treating as a battlefield. You do not want a permission culture writing the rules of the next tool while the last tool is still being used to manage your speech.[24]
Identify the problem at the right layer. Then fix it. Reporting hypocrisy is a start. Naming the spirit, the paycheck, the waiting-out strategy, the impeachment-as-suppression cycle, the energy excuse, the China pipe, and the fallen-angel politics behind the human letterhead is the work I am actually in. The Politics of Heaven exists because the news cycle never goes downstairs.[25]
NOTES FOR LEADERS
Do not confuse a recognition show with a repair.
Do not let a poll put you on the couch. Polls are part of the tailgate.
Do not expect a president to finish a job the permanent class is paid to stall.
Do not call every delay incompetence. Some of it is a wait-him-out.
Do not baptize cowardice as faith if you are a hammer, swing.
Do not outsource election integrity to people who like the present machine.
Do not stare only at gas. Stare at who needs Iran to stay useful.
Do not flatten spiritual war into team colors. Teams change. The method does not.
I am proud of President Trump. He has not let me down. The world around him has. That is the sentence I will keep. The next sentence is on us.
FOOTNOTES
[1] War Room and associated daily-accountability media; Laura Loomer’s investigative work; Natalie Winters’s War Room reporting. The author does not claim this work is worthless. It is that recognition of hypocrisy, by itself, leaves the back office intact.
[2] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and the 2026 Overman Warrior essays on corporate flippers, HR politics, and Pickle Rick as a method.
[3] 2026 midterm election date: Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
[4] The administrative-state “outlast” problem is the author’s description of career officialdom relative to elected terms. See also the longer literature on the permanent bureaucracy after the Progressive Era and the postwar national-security state.
[5] Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio); Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). Private conversations described here are the author’s account of mood and structural frustration, not quoted transcripts.
[6] Late-September 2026 consumer aggregation of impeachment talk across Yahoo-style and similar feeds, coinciding with formal House activity cited below.
[7] House vote September 15, 2026, tabling Rep. Al Green’s impeachment articles, 232–147, with 18 Democrats joining Republicans to table and 46 Democrats voting present, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced 26 articles of impeachment on September 24, 2026. Associated Press, September 26, 2026: House Democrats preparing a vast oversight agenda if they win the chamber; impeachment “not off the table.” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over Iran-war management.
[8] Advertising-supported political media has an incentive to keep a horse race emotionally hot and a base emotionally tired. The tailgate analogy is the author’s.
[9] Late-September 2026 public aggregators printed Democratic leads on the generic ballot and elevated Democratic odds on House control. Silver Bulletin / FLIPR and similar models updated September 25–27, 2026. Trump approval prints in some aggregates near 37 percent. Aggregates are not ballots.
[10] The golf-course example is moral psychology, not a claim about a named official’s scorecard.
[11] AAA and related trackers: pre-escalation national averages near or under $3 in early 2026; spike toward about $4.50 in May; brief dip under $4 after a June 2026 preliminary U.S.–Iran arrangement to reopen Hormuz; return toward and above $4 as fighting and shipping risk resumed. Labor Day 2026 national average reported near $4.15 by inflation-tracking compilations using AAA. The author’s earlier $2 summer target did not materialize.
[12] U.S.–Israel strikes on Iran from late February 2026; Hormuz disruption; naval measures; a June preliminary arrangement that did not hold as a durable peace. Energy desks treated the file as a supply-risk story throughout.
[13] The author’s reading of forever-war incentives and of radical Islamic politics sharing logistical patience with other anti-Western movements. Afghanistan is cited as the recent American education in outlasting.
[14] Traffic observation from richhoffmanbooks.com / Overman Warrior properties, as reported by the author. Not a claim about a named Chinese agency.
[15] Hong Kong protests and the subsequent tightening; Iranian information controls. X and related platforms widened some outbound speech after 2022–2024, but inbound reach into closed states remains contested.
[16] Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, is a historic center of foreign-material and aerospace lore in disclosure literature. Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure (2025). Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is a forthcoming cultural object in the same weather system, not a substitute for documents.
[17] Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (MachineGames / Bethesda / Lucasfilm, 2024), with The Order of Giants DLC (2025). The game treats a Nephilim Order, Gibborim material, and Noah’s Ark as plot architecture. Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015); Heiser died February 20, 2023. The author’s parallel is vocational, not medical diagnosis.
[18] Genesis 6; Psalm 82; Ephesians 6:12. John Keel and Jacques Vallée on high-strange events as political and folkloric, not merely extraterrestrial.
[19] ESG shareholder letters and federal-contractor political pressure, 2018–2024, as a documented enforcement style even where the brand names later softened.
[20] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming).
[21] U.S. Const. arts. I–III. The author claims that factions can wear the procedural costumes the procedures were written to restrain.
[22] Matthew 25:14–30; James 2:17. The hammer language is the author’s, developed across the 2026 Overman Warrior series.
[23] Election-administration fights after 2020 and 2024 remain live in state houses, courts, and Congress. The author argues that integrity is a precondition of consent, not a conspiracy hobby.
[24] U.S. Patent and Trademark Office culture as experienced by the author in prior dealings; a critique of political hiring and risk-averse examination, not a claim that every examiner is incompetent.
[25] Closing frame of the Overman Warrior project, 2024–2026.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Politics, Midterms, and the Permanent Machine
Associated Press / Lisa Mascaro. “House Democrats Plan Vast Oversight of Trump Administration. Impeachment Is an Option.” September 26, 2026. New York Times. “House Kills Bid to Impeach Trump as Democrats Split.” September 15, 2026. Rep. Steve Cohen. “Congressman Cohen Introduces Comprehensive Articles of Impeachment Against President Donald Trump.” September 24, 2026. Silver Bulletin. “2026 Midterm Election Forecast: Senate & House.” Updated September 25, 2026. House of Representatives roll call on tabling the Green impeachment articles, September 15, 2026.
Energy and Iran
AAA Daily Fuel Gauge reports, 2026. New York Times. “Average U.S. Gas Price Falls Below $4 After U.S.-Iran Agreement.” June 18, 2026. New York Times. “U.S. Average Gas Price Returns to $4 a Gallon as Iran Crisis Escalates.” July 20, 2026. Axios; CNBC; GasBuddy 2026 pump-price coverage of Hormuz risk.
Spiritual War, Giants, and Disclosure
The Holy Bible. Genesis 6; Numbers 13:33; Psalm 82; Ephesians 6:12. Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017. Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. 1975. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969. MachineGames / Bethesda. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) and The Order of Giants (2025).
Money, Corporations, and Permission Culture
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Federal Reserve and post-2008 easy-money literature; ESG engagement letters as political enforcement. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office public reports and the author’s prior dealings.
The Author’s Related Work
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Hoffman, Rich. Overman Warrior essays, 2024–2026, including the Pickle Rick / hammer-of-God series. richhoffmanbooks.com and overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have loved the work I did for around about twenty-five years and I passed up a lot of opportunities do do that work. The financial opportunity cost was enormous. That is not a slogan. That is a long marriage to a craft, a lot of people counted on me to keep them in a job and it was not good for me, for a long time, several years. It was a really tough period and I didn’t talk about it much, but I did a lot of work that nobody will ever know about to make a lot of people’s lives just a little better. Then 2026 arrived, and one of the best things I have done in this decade, maybe in my adult life, was not a deal and not a title. It was a birthday. My wife and I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington to see Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition. I wear the hoodie from that day the way some men wear a championship jacket. The shirt is cloth. The day is not.
My new guys
In the gift shop outside the exhibit, I bought a replica clay jar, the kind of vessel the Qumran caves used to keep parchment alive through empires. [1] It was about twenty dollars. I spent far more than that in the gift shop. I like the twenty-dollar thing most. I put it on my desk at work so that every conference call had a reminder of a century before Christ sitting next to the phone. When I finally got free of that place, I left so fast I abandoned the jar. A friend kept it safe. It took about two months to get it back. I missed the jar more than I missed the job. That sentence tells you what I value. The people who took over the company paid me a lot of money to leave, and I couldn’t get out fast enough. And as I predicted, they are quickly running the place I spent a large part of my life running into the ground, which is a shame.
THE BIRTHDAY I ACTUALLY WANTED
If you can do anything you want on your birthday and you choose an exhibit of old skin and ink, you are telling the truth about your interior life. I am a member of the Museum of the Bible. I like the building. I like the traveling shows even more. This one was the only thing I wanted.
I don’t agree with DeWine on much, but I can work with him. A lot of people say they know people, but most of the time it’s nobodies just as dumb as they are. They might be good for a lunch meeting, but they can’t do anything for you.
The museum sits at 400 Fourth Street SW, a short walk from Federal Center, in that southwest quadrant where the Capitol complex, the Mall museums, and the old Department of Education neighborhood all lean on each other. [2] We parked in a garage, came up, and ate sausage-and-egg McMuffins at the McDonald’s down the road. I took a picture of my wife. We have been married thirty-eight years. You think you know a face. I have never seen her happier than that morning. The joy was all over her. It has become my favorite picture of her.
People who only know me from videos think they know what fills a man. A lot of the country is spiritually vacant, and they tune in to get a little ballast. Here is the ballast. If I could design a heaven, it would look like that day on a loop: time, the Bible, the cases, the reading, the thinking. I would be happy forever. Nothing I have bought with a title has come close.
THE EXHIBIT THAT WAS THE REAL THING
Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition opened at the museum on November 22, 2025, in partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Running Subway. Curators: Navit Popovich-Geller, Risa Levitt, and Joe Uziel. Floor 5. Official run through September 7, 2026. East Coast stop. [3]
They rotated the fragments in three phases so the skin could rest and so visitors would not see the same eight pieces all year.
First rotation, November 2025 into February 2026: 4Q7 Genesis, 11Q10 Targum Job, 4Q83 Psalms, Astronomical Enoch, Barkhi Nafshi, War Scroll material, an eschatological commentary, Temple Scroll. [3]
Second rotation, February through May 2026: fragments of the Great Psalms Scroll, Numbers, Lamentations, Community Rule, apocryphal psalms, Tohorot, non-canonical psalms, Book of the Giants. [3]
Third rotation, May through September 2026: Isaiah, Tobit, phylacteries, Birth of Noah, Jubilees, communal ceremony, Community Rule, Damascus Document. [3]
We hit Phase Two. I am glad we did. I stood in front of text copied when Rome was still a rumor in Judah and the Hebrew Bible was still held in a living community’s hands. You can read about Qumran in a chair. It is another thing to see the letter-forms under museum glass and realize the narrative did not begin in a nineteenth-century print shop.
That matters. The scrolls are the great twentieth-century confirmation that the biblical text is not a late pious invention. They are a Second Temple Jewish library, biblical and sectarian, hidden in jars in the caves above the Dead Sea and found again beginning in 1947. [4] They do not make a man holy by themselves. They make a liar work harder.
I know the museum’s early years included purchased “Dead Sea Scroll” fragments that testing later showed were fakes. The museum said so and pulled them. [5] This show is not that drawer. This is Israel Antiquities Authority material from the national collection, the real library on tour. Christianity Today called it the real deal. [6] They were right.
THE JAR THAT WAS NEVER THE POINT AND BECAME THE POINT
The original scroll jars are tall, lid-tight, local clay. They are why the texts survived weather, war, and time. [1] The replica I bought is a scale souvenir. It came with a copy of a scroll like the ones on display. I put the whole little shrine on the desk.
I kept fortune-cookie slips in it.
That needs explaining.
THE LUNCHES WHILE THE BUILDING CHANGED HANDS
CTL-Aerospace is a Butler County composites and aerospace shop with a long OEM life, the kind of midwestern plant that actually makes the parts. In September 2025, it filed Chapter 11 in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Case No. 1:25-bk-12226, Judge Beth A. Buchanan. [7] The company’s own first-day declaration described raw-material quality shocks, a 2024 loss on still-strong sales, and a lender fight with Wells Fargo that turned into a cash choke. [8]. The company never recovered from challenges caused initially by the COVID lockdowns. I worked real hard to save the company from an acquisition and I’m very bitter about the time I wasted on it, but I felt obligated to a lot of people which was not to my benefit. It was very insulting, as hard as I worked, to watch these new people coming into the management system and assume they could just erase me, which of course they haven’t been. A lot of people have been contaccting me wanting a job wherever I end up landing and wanting to know what’s going on with me, which doesn’t have a quick and easy answer. I Poured a lot of myself into something that was not in my control and I owe myself some time to dust off the negativitive experience. I traditionally list my work experience as a writer and consultants. Both take a lot of experience to do. And when you get a chance to learn new things, out of the box, you do all you can. It takes a lot of experience to be a good writer. That is always my first priority.
What followed is the new modern American ritual. Advisors. Debtor-in-possession money. An auction under section 363. A sale of substantially all assets free and clear. The docket names the buyer’s side as an affiliate of Davidson Kempner: DK OF VI Trading Subsidiary LP, designee DK CTL Aerospace Opco LLC. The sale hearing record sits in January 2026. The DK deal closed in March 2026. And followed a typical story these days among a lot of companies that don’t get talked about enough in CNBC financial discussions. [9][10]. Yes, I hate Amy Acton for what she did to the state of Ohio under the COVID lockdowns. And I haven’t talked about it much, but because I spent so much time there, I have to tell that story 50 times a week, because everyone wants to know what happened, especially since I was on the executive leadership end of it. And it comes up a lot because we launched Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor there, and people want to know what happened.
I kept things running as long as I could, but I witnessed a massive failure in the infrastructure smaller businesses use to stay running. And there are lots of parasites who look to target wounded companies for their profit, just like pirates in the days of old, only in a very modern context. Government made it possible for these pirates to make a lot of money off wounded companies. There’s a lot more to the story, but that’s a good starting point. Much of this is in the public record, and I wasn’t happy about any of it. You loan your name to these things, and lots of other people make your life difficult, and you stick around to take care of people you consider friends, when the smart money would have said goodbye a long time ago. Instead of getting upset, I spent my time going to places like The Museum of the Bible. I have some great and horrific stories to tell. Things nobody will believe.
I lived the floor version. Executive management had a habit of going out for Chinese. We were in a tough stretch. A takeover is a weather system. Consultants and funding people move through a plant like they already own everything when you spend years building everything they are taking. You can feel the Monopoly problem in your bones: you are still on the board, but you do not hold the properties, and every roll of the dice is a mortgage you cannot pay. I call that parasite logic because that is how it feels when people who did not build the thing arrive to manage the thing and treat the builders as furniture. I’m talking about this now because I would put all those fortunes in my Dead Sea Scrolls jar for safekeeping during this really hard period, and now that I have it back, it reminds me of these last several years. And I did a presentation at my new place this past week, which went well. And I have a chance to build everything from scratch again, which is about a ten-year plan. But it’s good to get going on something positive again instead of trying to defend employees from a takeover of the business they counted on to put food on their table. When we talk about the economy and Trump expanding jobs, nobody ever talks about these kinds of things which destroy many thousands of jobs every month in America, and it’s what I would consider the biggest job killer in the world, an open attack against America through finance. For many decades, we were able to protect the business from these kinds of elements, but it takes smart people to protect the finance side of things, and COVID conditions broke a lot of cracks that many companies already saw at a critical time.
The court file is the court file; we wanted employees to keep their jobs. My desk was my desk. During those lunches I kept the fortunes and dropped them in the jar. It was a private joke with history among those who went to lunch with me then. The oldest surviving copies of Scripture in a twenty-dollar pot, stuffed with cheap paper predictions, sitting in an office while a seventy-year industrial story got run through a Cincinnati docket. I could have done something else several years ago, but I couldn’t let everyone down who counted on me for their jobs. For my own personal interest, until I took the step shown in the video displayed here for a new opportunity built from the ground up, I was very bitter about it all.
What was good for me was to leave. And I found myself doing everything for everyone else. That made going to the Museum of the Bible a very personal, positive thing for me, as I was seeing massive failures all around me from so many people. Eventually, I will write a book about all this, name names, and tell the whole story. Right now, I’m too angry for it. For a lot of legal reasons, I just put my effort into better things for the future, things I could have direct control over. And I say all that knowing that there are a lot of people who want a new job with me. I have been building something that didn’t already have jobs made for it, which takes a lot more work and more time. That’s why I don’t have a new home for you, yet. But I won’t forget. I plan to build something that is at least 10 times more valuable. That’s how I prefer to work against those who did a lot of bad things.
WHY I LEFT LIKE THE ROAD RUNNER
I cleaned the office out. Books gone. Ready. I still could not stand to be apart from the jar, so it stayed on the desk until the last day. Then the last day came, and I did not make a farewell tour. I did not go room to room to say goodbye. I left like a cartoon puff of dust in a Looney Tunes episode of Road Runner.
A man across the hall belched and farted all day, which disgusted me. I would never hire a person like that for anything, yet there he was, inserted disrespectfully against me. That sentence is not decoration. Some characters are the atmosphere of a declining shop. He was disgusting to be near. The minute I could put distance between my lungs and that hallway, I did. I moved so fast I betrayed the one object I had meant to carry out in my hands.
Halfway down the road, I felt it. Incomplete. The phone and the computer were replaceable. The jar was not, because it held the day with my wife, the Phase Two case, the confirmation that the old book is old in the right way, and the little paper fortunes from the last honest lunches where in it. I had left my treasure in a building I found repulsive, so much so I don’t even drive down I-75 anymore in that part of town so I don’t have to look at the building. I probably won’t again for decades.
A friend picked it up and kept it exactly as I had left it. I have it back now, much to my relief. I feel finished and ready to do something else.
WHAT I LOOKED AT ALL DAY
Every call, every meeting, I looked at that jar and thought of her face at McDonald’s and the dim room where a fragment of a book still spoke. People think a man like me is fueled by argument. Argument is downstream. The fuel is contact with the source.
The feed has a spiritual vacancy. People come to a voice because they want to be filled. I cannot fill them with a hoodie. I can tell them what filled me. I chose, on a day I could have chosen anything, to stand in front of Qumran. I bought the cheapest true thing in the shop and put it where my work-eye would hit it. When the work turned into a court-supervised transfer to a fund, I still wanted the jar more than the chair.
That is not just nostalgia; it’s the kind of values and priorities that build the kind of value in a company that others want to steal because they can’t make it on their own.
THE SCROLLS AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN
I have been writing toward a book I call The Politics of Heaven. The phrase sounds misty until you have seen the evidence that the text survived empires in clay. Power is always trying to own the story. Jars on a cliff are what the story does when power is coming, just as the Romans did when they were plotting the destruction of the Jews. The intellectual rebels of Qumran stayed in the desert to get a jump on their planned retreat, to preserve themselves. I stayed around until the very last minute, even though I had lots of opportunities to do other, much more profitable things. It feels good now to be able to go down that road, instead of trying to hold everything together just long enough to save people’s jobs.
The Community Rule and the Damascus Document in those rotations are not tourist wallpaper. They are a sect’s attempt to live under a holy order while history went feral. [3][4] Psalms in the second rotation is the prayerbook of a people who had already learned that governments are weather. I looked at that material and felt the same thing I feel when I write: the old book is not a hobby. It is the deepest available account of how heaven and earth argue.
I do not thump people with it. I live next to it. My Dead Sea Scrolls hoodie is a souvenir of living next to it for a day that worked.
WHAT THE JAR ACCUSES ME OF, KINDLY
I felt as if I had betrayed it by leaving it. That is a strange sentence about fired clay. It is accurate. We betray what we love when we let urgency become panic. I was right to leave the hallway. I wanted to be away from those people so badly that I left behind the one object that proved I had a life outside the hallway.
Getting it back did not restore a career. It restored a ranking. The job was a long love. The jar is a truer one, because it points past the job to the day, the wife, the text, and the stubborn fact that some things are dear. Of course the experience has been very jarring to think about. I have a lot of information that is very valuable because of it. It will make an excellent book, the first third of one that I’ll write talking about all this. But, it needs a good last half to be the kind of book I like to write, which is a story that is unfolding right now. These are the dangers of modern business and its something that a lot of people can’t wait ten years for, because now its a problem. And pretty much nobody bothers to untangle the mess. But, I feel like I can talk about it more now that I have my Jar back. Its one of those incomplete things that has been bothering me a lot for a few months. The stories I will tell of these months will make great writing content, that a lot of people will never believe. And of course, I won’t hold anything back.
If you see me in the Museum of the Bible shirt, that is why. I do not get tired of it. I do not get tired of the little Dead Sea Scroll Jar. I got it back from people who were careful with it, and I will not park it again on a desk I might have to flee when the Romans come to destroy Jerusalem again, or corporate raiders come to steal all the treasure that hard work builds.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Qumran scroll jars: cylindrical, lidded storage pottery associated with the cave finds of 1947–1956. Israel Antiquities Authority / Library of Congress exhibit notes on Qumran pottery; World History Encyclopedia image and description of Dead Sea Scrolls jars. Gift-shop replicas commonly include a small clay pot and a printed scroll insert; museum retail varies by exhibit.
[2] Museum of the Bible, 400 Fourth Street SW, Washington, DC 20024. Near Federal Center SW Metro. The building sits south of the National Mall museum cluster; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building is at 400 Maryland Avenue SW, in the same southwest federal pocket.
[3] Museum of the Bible, “Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition,” November 22, 2025–September 7, 2026, partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Running Subway. Official rotation lists as published by the museum newsroom, October 1, 2025, and the exhibit page.
[4] Discovery and corpus: eleven caves near Qumran, 1947–1956; biblical manuscripts plus sectarian works (Community Rule, War Scroll, Damascus Document, Enoch traditions, and others). Standard introductions: Vermes; VanderKam; Collins.
[5] In 2018, the Museum of the Bible announced that five of its then-owned “Dead Sea Scroll” fragments showed characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin and removed them from display. That episode concerns purchased fragments in the museum’s own early collection, not the 2025–2026 IAA loan show.
[6] Gordon Govier, “New Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit Is the Real Deal,” Christianity Today, April 8, 2026.
[7] In re CTL-Aerospace, Inc., Case No. 1:25-bk-12226, United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division (Cincinnati), Judge Beth A. Buchanan, petition filed September 8, 2025. Debtor address in the petition header: 5616 Spellmire Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45246, Butler County.
[8] Declaration of President and COO, in support of the Chapter 11 petition and first-day motions, September 8, 2025 (Doc. 9 and related first-day papers). Public summaries: Stretto / chapter11cases write-up of the filing, September 2025.
[9] Docket items in 1:25-bk-12226 include the bidding-procedures motion (Doc. 90, October 9, 2025), sale papers, declaration of Geoffrey Frankel in support of sale to DK CTL Aerospace Opco LLC as designee of DK OF VI Trading Subsidiary LP (January 19, 2026), and the January 20, 2026 sale hearing activity. Later docket entries include a March 23, 2026 stipulation involving DK CTL Aerospace Opco LLC.
[10] Capstone Partners, “Capstone Partners Advised CTL Aerospace, Inc. on its Sale to Davidson Kempner in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy,” posted June 10, 2026, stating the section 363 sale to a DK affiliate closed in March 2026. Capstone describes its Special Situations and Financial Advisory Services work after the September 2025 filing. Pre-petition turnaround work with Focus Management Group is described in contemporary filing summaries. Davidson Kempner is a global investment firm; the buyer vehicle on the docket is the DK-named Opco / trading-subsidiary chain above. I am describing the public control change. My language about parasites is how a fund-and-consultant weather system feels to a builder on the floor.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Museum of the Bible. “The Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition with the Oldest Biblical Texts Arrives at Museum of the Bible in November 2025.” Newsroom, October 1, 2025.
Butler County development notes listing CTL among regional aerospace suppliers.
Riveron. Public descriptions of bankruptcy, fiduciary, and turnaround practice. I include the firm here because that consultant class is the air a Chapter 11 plant breathes; readers should use the CTL docket itself for who was retained in this specific case.
Wells Fargo as prepetition secured lender, per the first-day declaration summaries.
11 U.S.C. § 363. Sale of assets in Chapter 11.
On Museum of the Bible provenance controversies (for contrast with the IAA loan): 2018 reporting on forged fragments; Hobby Lobby / Green family civil penalty and repatriation coverage from 2017–2021. Frommer’s and major-wire summaries.
Library of Congress / IAA. “Scrolls from the Dead Sea” historical exhibit notes on jars and Cave 4.
World History Encyclopedia. Dead Sea Scrolls jars.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
A state can be defeated without a single soldier crossing a border and without a single missile leaving a rail. That sentence used to sound like science fiction. It is now closer to a working description of how power is actually contested. The old picture of war—troops, tanks, flags, and a declared beginning—still exists. It is no longer the whole picture. The more important contest often happens in finance, law, media, software, supply chains, classrooms, and the human-resources office that decides which attitudes are allowed at work.
I have talked about this for years, including when War Room and other outlets treated the subject as strategy rather than slogan. I still own a promotional shirt from the Atlas Shrugged film cycle that advertised in October 2012. The story in those pictures was about producers versus the people who live by controlling producers. This essay’s argument is related, but colder. It is not only about bad policy. It is about a style of conflict designed to make a free country less competitive without looking like an invasion.
What follows is part brief, part review, and part field note. The brief is the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army officers. The review is how that book’s logic shows up in gray-zone operations, cyber incidents, sanctions fights, and what NATO now calls cognitive warfare. The field note is personal. After decades in one workplace, I’ve talked to different people, in different rooms, under different rules. The rules often arrive as kindness, inclusion, and “compliance.” The effect is something else: a society trained to police its own energy.
What Clausewitz Said, and What the Colonels Rewrote
Carl von Clausewitz gave the West its most famous definition: war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.[1] That definition assumes you can see the force. It assumes a distinction between peace and war, soldier and civilian, battlefield and marketplace. Those distinctions were never perfect. In 1999, two PLA Air Force senior colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published Chao Xian Zhan—warfare beyond limits—arguing that the distinctions were collapsing on purpose.[2][3]
They were writing after the Gulf War, which had advertised American conventional superiority in brutal high definition. If you cannot beat a superpower on its preferred field, you do not accept the field. You change the game. You use economic pressure, legal process, media, networks, finance, culture, and technology as weapons in combination. You aim at political results, not at a parade of wrecked tanks. In a June 1999 interview, Qiao put the doctrine in one line: the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, and nothing is forbidden.[4]
Using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.
That is still Clausewitz’s object—compulsion of will—with the means blown wide open. The authors were not shy about the catalog. They discussed psychological warfare, media warfare, cultural warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, network warfare, legal warfare, smuggling, resources, and more.[5] They also insisted on combination. One tool is a dispute. A dozen tools timed together are a campaign. If you hit a currency, seed social discord, and probe a power grid in the same season, the target spends its energy arguing about which event “counts” as war. Meanwhile, the damage accumulates.
The most important sentence in the book is not the slogan about rules. It is the claim that the battlefield is everywhere. Ground, sea, air, and space remain battlefields. So do politics, economics, culture, and the psyche.[6] Once you accept that sentence, a lot of modern life stops looking like “politics as usual” and starts looking like low-intensity conflict that never has to declare itself.
Combination Warfare and the Vanishing Front Line
Traditional strategy likes a map with a front. Unrestricted warfare looks like a web. The authors talk about “addition”—stacking methods until the opponent cannot find the line of contact. Later PLA political work formalized a related toolkit as the “Three Warfares”: public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare, written into regulations in 2003.[7] Those three are not a substitute for the 1999 book. They are one way the same instinct was institutionalized: shape what people believe, shake what they are willing to endure, and use law as a weapon rather than a fence.
This is why “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone” became fashionable terms in the West. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine before and after 2014 mixed information operations, energy leverage, proxies, and cyber operations. On December 23, 2015, attackers attributed to the Sandworm group shut off power to roughly 230,000 customers in Ukraine. It was the first widely acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.[8] No tank had to roll for the lights to go out. Plausible deniability did part of the work. If activists, criminals, or “unknown actors” can be blamed, a conventional military reply becomes politically and legally expensive.
International law was built for visible armies. The Geneva tradition assumes you can tell a combatant from a civilian. A server room, a social platform, a ratings agency, or a human-resources policy shop does not wear a uniform. The Tallinn Manuals—first in 2013, then 2.0 in 2017—tried to apply existing law to cyber operations. Most of what unrestricted warfare describes happens below the threshold of an “armed attack.” States like the ambiguity. Clear rules would bind them too.[9]
Economic tools sit in the same gap. Sanctions can wreck a financial system and still fail the legal test of armed attack.[10] That is a feature if your doctrine says the point is political collapse or capitulation, not a formal declaration. The violence, when it comes, may be late. The conference room and the data center get there first.
Cognitive Warfare: The Target Is the Decision Itself
NATO and allied research communities now talk openly about cognitive warfare: operations aimed not only at what people know, but at how groups perceive, trust, and decide.[11] Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of volume. You do not need a master propagandist in every town. You need models that can generate tailored narratives, test what spreads, and keep the target public arguing with itself.
This is the frightening part of the 1999 thesis updated for 2026. The original colonels talked about media and psychology. They could not fully describe algorithmic amplification, deepfakes, or automated social engineering. The logic did not need those tools to be valid. The tools made the logic cheaper. If you can degrade collective cognition—attention, memory, trust, and the willingness to pay a cost—you do not have to occupy the capital. You occupy the argument.
Hardware races in the same direction. Autonomy reduces the political cost of using force because fewer of “your” people come home in boxes. That drops the barrier to kinetic conflict even as non-kinetic conflict is already permanent. The two trends reinforce each other. A society that is internally confused is easier to pressure. A society that is internally confident is harder to push around with either drones or narratives.
Cultural Warfare Does Not Arrive Waving a Foreign Flag
Here is where the argument gets personal, and where a serious reader should keep two ideas in the same hand.
First idea: Unrestricted Warfare names cultural warfare as a method. Weaken an adversary from the inside. Make the opponent less cohesive, less fertile, less industrious, less willing to defend its own standards. You do not need every Western fashion to be a Beijing plot for that method to be real. You only need the method to exist, and you need American institutions to be available as terrain.[12]
Second idea: over the last decade, much of American corporate culture has trained people to treat productivity, punctuality, sex differences, and plain speech as moral problems. The memos did not say “this is how you lose a contest with a mercantilist authoritarian state.” They said “values,” “belonging,” and “compliance.” The question worth asking is not whether every diversity officer reports to the PLA. The question is whether a rival who studies cultural warfare would look at the results and smile.
I think the rival would smile. I did not come to that as a theory first. I came to it after watching people obey rules they could not defend. During COVID, I watched institutions in Ohio treat CDC language as liturgy. Court challenges were slow. Social punishment was fast. I put a phone on speaker and called people who were supposed to know the law. That is how I got through it. Plenty of workplaces did not have anyone willing to do that. They complied because compliance had become the local religion. An enemy watching from outside would have learned something useful: large parts of the American professional class will enforce a rule before they will examine it.
That is the footprint. Not tanks on the lawn. A workforce taught that the highest civic virtue is not causing trouble.
The HR office as terrain
Human resources is where abstract ideology becomes a condition of employment. I have had HR people report to me. When I asked where an idea came from, the face-to-face answer was often some version of “we will do better.” The inbox told a different story. Newsletters and vendor templates arrived with the new values. The people sending them were frequently the age of my children, not villains in a movie. They were following a script that had already been professionalized.
Onboarding at many firms now spends a remarkable share of time on identity rules and sensitivity machinery. Time spent teaching a new hire to be useful—show up, learn the work, look your coworkers in the eye, carry weight—gets crowded out by time spent teaching the new hire which sentences are dangerous. If you are an older man who talks like work is a duty, you can be framed as a climate problem. If you ride a bicycle twenty miles to a job because the car is dead, that used to be called character. In some offices it now reads as “intensity,” which is a polite word for unwanted masculinity.
I am not romantic about every man over fifty. Some of them are tired and rude. I am romantic about the old expectation: if you are sick enough to stay home, stay home; if you are not, go. If it snows, go to work anyway; your co-workers are counting on you. Make yourself useful. That ethic built payrolls. The substitute ethic—work from the living room, treat output as optional, treat feelings as infrastructure—does not build payrolls. It manages them downward.
Masculinity, entertainment, and the cheapening of standards
Culture is not a side show in this doctrine. It is named terrain. When a commercial sport that sells collision and spectacle starts treating the halftime eye-candy as a seminar in preferences, that is not the end of the republic. It is a tell. Men who paid for front-row seats to watch a game and see women dance are not required to pretend they paid for a lecture. If saying so sends you to an HR office, the office is no longer just administering benefits. It is administering taste.
The same pattern showed up in film. The hard, unsmooth male lead became a problem to be managed. You can call that progress. You can also notice that a civilization in a long contest with a high-discipline mercantilist rival might not want to train its young men to be ashamed of drive. Beards and tattoos on men in their thirties are not a military doctrine. They are sometimes a leftover male signal in a workplace that punished the older signals. The strategic point is simpler: if you flatten the people who like to compete, you flatten the economy that depends on them.
Sexual identity fights belong in the same file. A free country can leave adults alone. A strategic culture that turns every workplace into a referendum on private life is doing something else. It burns attention. It splits coalitions. It makes ordinary competence look like aggression. Unrestricted warfare does not need to invent the fight. It only needs the fight to continue.
COVID as a rehearsal
I keep returning to COVID because it was the week the mask slipped on the machinery. Policy moved faster than evidence in too many rooms. Dissent was treated as dirtiness. The people who said “just follow the rules” were often the same people who could not name who wrote the rules. “We are a culture of compliance” is not a boast in a republic. It is a vulnerability report.
A rival does not have to love the virus to love the data. How quickly did professionals accept workplace punishments for speech? How quickly did schools take over children’s moral education while parents were isolated? How quickly did “expert” language replace judgment? Those are cultural measurements. They tell you how much friction an influence campaign would meet.
Corporations, LinkedIn, and the Myth of Neutral Policy
American business is not the Chinese Communist Party. Conflating the two is sloppy. What is not sloppy is noticing that global firms optimize for access, risk reduction, and reputational peace. If the cheapest way to keep markets, banks, campuses, and NGOs quiet is to import a values language that flattens conflict inside the firm, many firms will import it. They will call it best practice. Vendors will sell the templates. LinkedIn will reward the slogans. Smaller companies will copy larger ones because lenders, insurers, and talent pipelines punish deviation.
That is how you get a one-way ratchet without a conspiracy chalkboard. Beijing does not have to draft the memo if the memo already weakens the only large open society that still out-innovates it. United Front work, elite capture, research partnerships, and capital access are the documented channels. Cultural mimicry is the force multiplier—retired Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding and others have argued that if you watch Chinese behavior since 1999 through the lens of the book, the picture snaps into focus.[13] You do not have to accept every page of that popularization to accept the narrower point: connectivity is a weapon as well as a market.
Cashless systems, monitored transactions, and centralized payment rails belong to the same family of tools. They can be convenient. They can also be turned. A society that cannot complete a private exchange without a third-party ledger is a society that can be throttled. Again: not every debit card is an invasion. The doctrine says look at the combination, not the single instrument.
The Defense Paradox: How You Lose by Winning the Wrong Way
Qiao and Wang understood something Western liberals are late to admit. A society that lives by open rules can be made to trip over those rules. Lawfare ties up the opponent in his own courts. Media warfare uses the opponent’s platforms. Cultural warfare uses the opponent’s guilt. If the target responds by building a surveillance state to stop the influence, the target has paid in the coin the influence campaign wanted: less freedom. If the target refuses to notice the campaign, the target stays open and stays cut.
That is the lose-lose proposition. Defend badly, and you become the thing you were defending against. Decline to defend, and you are disarmed in the only war that is already underway. Critics of the 1999 doctrine are right that it treats human rights and international law as just another front. That is not a misunderstanding of the text. That is the text.
The Western answer cannot be “no rules, nothing forbidden.” That is how you cease to be the West. The answer is narrower and harder: name the methods, refuse the scripts that make you weaker, keep due process, and rebuild the habits that make a high-trust, high-output society possible. Resilience matters more than the fantasy of blocking every lie. Recovery speed and social trust are the actual defenses. A country that still believes its own people can work, argue, worship, raise children, and laugh at bad art is a hard country to hollow out.
What This Means on the Ground
If the battlefield is the paycheck, then the first duty is not a new missile. It is a refusal to treat the workplace as a reeducation camp. Hire for output. Measure output. Stop confusing moral fashion with risk management. Parents who want children should not have to apologize to a values slide deck. Men and women are not a paperwork error. Speech about all of that should not be a firing offense.
Political leadership matters because only the state can answer state-backed capital, theft of intellectual property, and platform manipulation at scale. Business leadership matters because most Americans meet the new rules at work, not at a Senate hearing. Voters who want people who have signed payrolls are not being crude. They are asking for officials who recognize a negotiation that smiles in public and competes in private.
I have watched firms that still recruit hungry people—SpaceX is the example everyone uses because it is obvious—outperform firms that recruit for the seminar. That gap will widen as the space economy and other fast industries punish delay. A culture that cannot tell a worker to come in when it snows will not beat a culture that can. This is not poetry. It is arithmetic.
Education is the long front. If the schoolhouse becomes the delivery system for political fashion, the family loses the first chance to form character. You do not need foreign infantry in the hallway after that. You need time. Time is what unrestricted warfare buys when it stays below the threshold of open war.
Conclusion: The Winner Integrates the Board
The authors of Unrestricted Warfare said the winner would be the side that can play on a board that keeps expanding, while the loser keeps staring at the old squares. Missiles still matter. So do grids, ports, chips, and ships. So do birth rates, work rates, attention spans, and whether a man can say he prefers female cheerleaders without being marched into a conference room. The last item sounds small until you notice the method: make the confident people tired, then call the tiredness progress.
I was insulated from a lot of this for a long time: same place, same people, same expectations. Coming back into a wider set of rooms felt like being thawed out of ice. The tools were new. The weakness was not new. It was the old American temptation to believe that because we mean well, the contest must be a seminar. It is not a seminar. It is a continuous campaign against cohesion.
Sun Tzu wanted victory without battle.[14] The 1999 colonels wrote a modern manual for that instinct and published it openly. They could afford to. A book is not dangerous to the side that is already inside the institutions of the other side. The dangerous thing is a public that still thinks war only looks like a landing craft.
Understand the doctrine. Keep the distinction between evidence and suspicion. Then look at your own shop, your own school, your own screen, and ask the only operational question that matters: does this rule make us harder to beat, or easier? If the honest answer is easier, it is not “best practice.” You have donated terrain to someone who is not confused about whether this is a contest.
Selected Bibliography
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Book I, Chapter 1.
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare (Chao Xian Zhan). Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999. English selections via FBIS.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Spalding, Robert. War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination. New York: Sentinel, 2022.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
Jamestown Foundation. “The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares.” China Brief, 2016.
NATO Science and Technology Organization. Materials from HFM-361, Mitigating and Responding to Cognitive Warfare (Madrid, November 2023), and related Chief Scientist reporting on cognitive warfare.
MITRE ATT&CK. “2015 Ukraine Electric Power Attack (Campaign C0028).”
Wikipedia and contemporaneous technical reporting on the December 23, 2015 Ukraine power-grid cyberattack attributed to Sandworm.
U.S. Marine Corps University. “To Win without Fighting” and related essays on PRC political warfare and unrestricted warfare.
RSIS Commentary. Nan Li, “Unrestricted Warfare and Chinese Military Strategy,” 2002.
Author’s Note
This essay is written in the first person on purpose. The strategic literature can be cited. The workplace scenes cannot be footnoted like a statute. They are offered as testimony from one American who spent decades in a single shop, then walked into the new rules and recognized the old doctrine. Readers who want only the book should stop at the bibliography. Readers living under the new rules already know why the paycheck is the front line.
Notes
[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter 1: “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”
[2] Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999). English selections circulated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).
[3] The original Chinese title is Chao Xian Zhan (超限战), literally “warfare beyond limits” or “warfare beyond bounds.”
[4] Zhongguo Qingnian Bao interview with Qiao Liang, June 28, 1999; FBIS translation OW2807114599. Qiao: “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”
[5] Qiao and Wang, Unrestricted Warfare. The authors list methods including psychological, media, cultural, financial, trade, network, legal, smuggling, drug, resource, and ecological warfare.
[6] Qiao and Wang write that “spaces in nature including the ground, the seas, the air, and outer space are battlefields, but social spaces such as the military, politics, economics, culture, and the psyche are also battlefields.”
[7] The “Three Warfares”—public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare—were written into PLA Political Work Regulations in 2003 and elaborated in subsequent PLA teaching texts.
[8] On December 23, 2015, attacks attributed to the Russian group Sandworm disrupted electricity for roughly 230,000 customers in western Ukraine. It is widely cited as the first publicly acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.
[9] Michael N. Schmitt, ed., Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Tallinn Manual 2.0 (2017). Legal literature has discussed work toward a third edition through 2025–2026.
[10] U.S. and allied legal analyses generally hold that ordinary economic sanctions, however severe, do not by themselves constitute an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That legal line is precisely why economic and regulatory pressure is attractive in unrestricted-warfare thinking.
[11] NATO Science and Technology Organization materials from the HFM-361 symposium (Madrid, November 2023) and subsequent Chief Scientist reporting treat cognitive warfare as influence operations aimed at human decision-making, accelerated by AI and digital platforms.
[12] This section states the author’s interpretive thesis. It is not a claim that a single CCP memo authored every Western HR policy. It is a claim about effects, incentives, and the kind of battlefield the 1999 doctrine described.
[13] Robert Spalding, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination (Sentinel, 2022), popularizes the 1999 text as a standing playbook rather than a one-off essay.
[14] Sun Tzu, The Art of War: the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Qiao and Wang explicitly place their argument in that lineage.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
A Community Night at Miami University’s Innovation Center
On September 21, 2026, we hosted a special community event at Miami University’s Innovation Center on Elm Street in Oxford, Ohio.
We called the evening “Dreams on Elm Street”, a lighthearted nod to the classic 1980s film. But what we’re building at Volynt isn’t the stuff of nightmares. It’s the realization of a dream, one that is taking shape right here in Butler County and has the potential to transform the future of logistics, aviation, and economic development in Ohio.
The turnout exceeded our expectations. The room was filled with Miami University staff, students, local business leaders, elected officials, and community members who wanted to learn more about what Volynt is building and where we’re headed.
We were honored to welcome Senator George Lang, Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix, and Michael Ryan, who is poised to become Butler County’s next commissioner. Their presence reflected the growing enthusiasm for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advanced aerospace development in our region.
Sharing the Vision
I opened the evening by welcoming our guests and providing an overview of the event. From there, our leadership team took the stage.
Our CEO shared Volynt’s long-term vision and mission. Our Chief Technology Officer highlighted the engineering milestones we’ve achieved and the technology behind the Volynt Vyper platform. As Chief Operating Officer, I discussed how Volynt is transforming cutting-edge aviation technology into a scalable and sustainable business. I outlined our operational strategy, manufacturing roadmap, partnerships, and the steps required to move from prototype development to commercial deployment.
The presentations were engaging, the audience was attentive, and the questions that followed demonstrated genuine interest and excitement.
Most importantly, this wasn’t a flashy product launch filled with unrealistic promises. It was an honest conversation about where we are today, what we’ve accomplished, and what the next several years may hold.
From Prototype to Production
Our immediate focus is straightforward.
Over the next six months, our team will complete the full-scale Vyper prototype that was unveiled at the Innovation Center. That aircraft represents years of design work, engineering refinement, and determination.
Once completed, the aircraft will enter an intensive testing phase designed to validate performance, reliability, and operational capabilities.
Looking ahead to 2027, we plan to participate in major industry competitions, build broader recognition within the aerospace community, and begin manufacturing multiple aircraft.
The goals are ambitious, but they are supported by a clear roadmap and a dedicated team committed to execution.
The Drone Revolution Is Already Here
One of the most important messages of the evening was that autonomous aviation is no longer a future concept.
It’s happening today.
Just one day after our event, Dayton-area company Dexa launched a drone delivery service in Kettering. The program delivers food orders from TJ Chumps on East Stroop Road to customers within a several-mile radius across Kettering, Oakwood, and Centerville.
These smaller drones operate as last-mile delivery systems. Flying at approximately 400 feet, they lower food orders safely to customers using a cable-delivery system. Dexa has spent years developing this capability and is helping demonstrate that drone delivery is becoming a practical reality.
Volynt’s mission is different.
While companies like Dexa focus on last-mile delivery, Volynt is developing larger autonomous aircraft designed for middle-mile logistics. Our aircraft are intended to transport meaningful payloads between regional hubs such as Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG), Dayton International Airport, Indianapolis, and other distribution centers.
This approach has the potential to reduce transportation bottlenecks, address driver shortages, and create more efficient supply chains.
Whether it’s delivering a meal across town or transporting freight across a region, autonomous aviation is rapidly reshaping how goods move through our economy.
Why Ohio Is Positioned to Lead
Ohio’s aviation legacy is unmatched.
The birthplace of powered flight now has an opportunity to become a leader in autonomous flight.
Few regions are better positioned than Butler County to participate in that transformation.
Our region offers access to multiple airports, including Miami University’s airport, where initial flight operations can be conducted. At the same time, substantial investment continues at Butler County Regional Airport, where significant infrastructure improvements are being planned.
The resources, workforce, educational institutions, and transportation network already exist. What remains is bringing together the innovators, investors, and community leaders who can turn opportunity into reality.
Creating Careers That Stay Close to Home
One topic that resonates deeply with me is talent retention.
I have spoken with countless parents who have made tremendous sacrifices to provide educational opportunities for their children through Miami University, Butler Tech, and the University of Cincinnati. Too often, those graduates leave Ohio because they believe the best opportunities are elsewhere.
That reality creates a challenge for families and communities alike.
One of our long-term goals at Volynt is to help change that story.
We envision creating thousands of high-quality aerospace, engineering, technology, and manufacturing jobs throughout Southern Ohio. We want talented young people to have the option of building exciting, fulfilling careers without leaving their families, communities, and hometowns behind.
Strong Community Support
One of the most encouraging moments of the evening was seeing the level of support from the community.
Michael Ryan delivered an excellent presentation about economic development in Butler County and how innovative companies such as Volynt can contribute to future growth and prosperity.
The participation from Miami University, local leaders, educators, students, business professionals, and community members reinforced something I’ve believed from the beginning:
Innovation succeeds when communities embrace it.
Dreams on Elm Street was more than a company presentation. It was a milestone. It brought together people from different backgrounds and perspectives to discuss a shared vision for the future of our region.
The energy in the room was unmistakable. The conversations were thoughtful. The questions were insightful. The enthusiasm was genuine.
For me, that confirmed that we’re moving in the right direction.
Looking Ahead
Volynt’s journey is still in its early chapters.
There is much work ahead, many challenges to overcome, and numerous milestones still to achieve. But the momentum is real, and the opportunities are significant.
We will continue sharing updates with the community as we progress from prototype development to testing, certification, manufacturing, and beyond.
This is only the beginning.
Thank you to everyone who attended Dreams on Elm Street and supported our mission. Your encouragement and belief in what we’re building means more than you know.
Together, we’re not just dreaming about the future.
We’re building it.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman is Chief Operating Officer of Volynt, where he leads operational strategy, business development, manufacturing planning, and growth initiatives for the company’s autonomous aerospace programs. A longtime Butler County leader and aerospace executive, he is committed to building high-quality technology careers and advancing innovation throughout Southwest Ohio.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
If you came here looking for a populist hit piece, this is not that. I write for people who lead, want to lead, or at least refuse to stay on the couch while the culture is rewritten around their children. Scripture is not a campaign prop. It is the sharpest instrument I know for cutting through a coordinated lie. That is the politics of heaven: not party first, not personality first, but the question of whether a people will still call good good and evil evil when the price of doing so is social exile.
I. THE AGE OF DISCLOSURE AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN
We are living in what I call an age of disclosure. Not merely the disclosure of secrets in government files, though that conversation is loud enough. I mean something older and more dangerous: the moment when a civilization is forced to admit what it has been doing in the dark. The ideologies that were supposed to stay in graduate seminars leaked into human-resources manuals, then into public schools, then into pediatric clinics. The result is not a private lifestyle. The result is a public demand that the rest of us recite the new creed or be treated as a moral contaminant.
The politics of heaven answers that demand. Heaven is not a voting bloc. Heaven is not a branding exercise. Heaven is the claim that God made the world a certain way, that male and female are not costumes, that children are not raw material for adult ideology, and that a nation which inverts those realities will not stay strong merely because its GDP looks impressive for another quarter.[1]
Paul said he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] That sentence is doing more work in 2026 than most platform planks. Shame is the enforcement mechanism of the present order. If they can make you embarrassed to name what you love, they do not have to refute you. They only have to watch you edit yourself until there is nothing left worth hearing.
I will not edit it.
II. FALSE COMPASSION IS NOT LOVE
Start with the word that has been most abused: compassion.
True compassion would protect children from irreversible medical decisions they cannot possibly understand. What we have instead is a coordinated social contagion, especially visible among elites, in which adults congratulate themselves for “affirming” a minor into a pathway of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. That is not love. That is sacrificing children to an ideology. I will call it what it is: a form of child abuse dressed up as progress.[3]
I am not talking about the rare, severe, persistent cases that clinicians used to treat with extreme caution. I am talking about the sudden clustering, the peer networks, the online scripts, the school social transitions done behind parents’ backs, and the astonishing overrepresentation of transgender-identifying children in a handful of zip codes, friend groups, and celebrity households. When parents, schools, corporations, and entertainment all push the same story at once, vulnerable children get swept up. That is not a coincidence. It is social engineering, plain and simple.
Look at Hollywood. The list of high-profile actors and actresses with children who identify as transgender or non-binary has become a genre of its own. Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez, Megan Fox, Dwyane Wade, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Naomi Watts—the names keep accumulating.[4] In a country where transgender identification among youth was, until recently, vanishingly rare, that concentration is not “just visibility.” Visibility does not create statistical spikes this localized unless something in the environment is recruiting.
Some researchers and activists insist there is no social contagion, and they would be wrong. Other researchers, clinicians, and dissenters say the opposite, and the Cass Review in the United Kingdom was blunt about the weakness of the evidence base that was used to medicalize children.[5] I do not need a unanimous journal to use my eyes. When a belief system travels through prestige networks faster than it travels through farm towns, you are not watching a spontaneous awakening. You are watching fashion with a clinical billing code.
Scripture is not ambiguous about the created order. God created them male and female.[6] To catechize children into rebellion against that order is not pastoral care. It is a revolt against the Creator, outsourced to minors who will live with the consequences long after the adults have moved on to the next cause.
The proper Christian response is not cruelty. It is not mockery of the suffering. It is this: speak truth with clarity, protect children from harm, and offer genuine compassion to those who are distressed—without affirming the lie that is injuring them. Affirmation of a falsehood is not mercy. It is participation.
III. WHY THE RATES ARE NOT RANDOM
People who do not want to face this subject hide in averages. They will tell you that “only a small percentage” of children identify this way, as if a small percentage plus institutional capture is nothing. The point is not only prevalence. The point is location.
Certain circles have dramatically higher rates of trans-identifying children. Elite schools. Entertainment. Specific online subcultures. Certain therapeutic fashions. Human-resources departments that rewrote the rules of speech and then dared the rest of the country to object. The same class of people who draft the corporate training also sit on museum boards, donate to universities, and lecture the working class about which words are now violence.
I have watched this move through institutions the way termites move through a beam. You do not notice the first memo. You notice the tenth, when a teacher is punished for using ordinary sexed language, or a parent is treated as the threat for refusing to transition a twelve-year-old socially. By then the lie has become policy.
This is why I reject the slogan that “silence is kindness.” Silence in a captured institution is how the capture finishes. If you work in a place where DEI language has been used to smuggle gender ideology into childhood, you already know the mechanism. It was not a grassroots cry from children. It was a professional class writing rules that everyone else was expected to obey while calling the obedience righteousness.
I do not owe that project my vocabulary.
IV. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SURRENDER WHAT YOU LOVE
There is a related lie, and it is aimed at Christians specifically: that the loving thing is to mute your own faith so that people who despise it can feel comfortable.
I reject that.
It is one thing to say we should not be cruel. It is another thing to say that Islam, progressive sexual ideology, and the new civic religion of the public school must be handled with velvet, while Christian speech must be handled with a muzzle. I am supposed to be endlessly compassionate toward alternative sexual lifestyles and toward the latest curriculum, and then I am supposed to treat my own Scripture as a private hobby that might offend the room.
No.
You like what you like. I like what I like. I am not going to edit the Bible to make you happy. You do not care if I am unhappy. So I am going to talk about the Bible. I am going to talk about the Scripture I enjoy. I believe this is what God says, and I will not be ashamed of it.
That kind of honest, unapologetic speech is far more powerful than the aggressive politeness of people who sand their faith down until it can pass a diversity seminar. The world feels no obligation to make Christians comfortable. Reciprocal self-erasure is not tolerance. It is surrender.
As Paul said, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] Speaking Scripture openly, without apology, is one of the most effective ways to push back against cultural pressure. It draws a clear line. It gives courage to people who have been staying quiet. Leaders who speak plainly strengthen the faithful and expose deception at the same time.
There is nothing wrong with liking Christian things and professing them openly. You do not have to put a lid on your viewpoint while everybody else imposes theirs and you are told to shut up and take it. That hour is over, or it should be.
V. THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE AND THE POWER OF BEING UNASHAMED
Let me give a point of reference I have used for years.
The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is one of my favorite places in the world.[7] I never liked Washington much until the political weather changed and I had reason to be there. I have been more than once. I am a member and a supporter. In the background of my life, I love using the Bible, and I love a building three blocks from the Capitol that says: here is the history of this book. See it. Relish it. Enjoy it.
They are not required to plant flags all over the National Mall. You can still go to the Smithsonian. You can still do every other official thing the capital offers. People love the Museum of the Bible anyway, because it feeds them. It does not pretend to be a neutral warehouse. It professes that this book is good. It is open about that goodness. It loves being good.
That is the model.
Other places I enjoy for the same reason: the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, the work of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.[8] I love those guys. I may not agree with their young-earth timeline. I am an old-earth kind of guy. We would argue, probably at length, about whether the earth is six thousand years old or many millions. I have read Ham. I understand the argument. I would still debate him profusely on the age of the earth. That disagreement does not cancel the thing I actually love: their embrace of goodness.
When you walk those sites, you cannot help but see how hard they try to be good, and they do not hide it. They do not cram it down every throat on earth. They also do not crush their own enjoyment to satisfy people who arrive already offended. The offended party does not mind offending you. It is quite fine to go the other way—to be audacious about your love for what you value. You do not have to destroy it to make someone else happy.
Jonathan Edwards understood the same principle in a different century. True religion is not mere outward show. When the heart is captured by the beauty of God and His word, it cannot stay silent. The joy overflows.[9] Dimming that joy to appease people who hate its source is not love, and it is not tolerance. It betrays the truth you claim to love.
You do not have to attack persons. You also must not shrink back. Let the light shine clearly. Those who love truth will be drawn to it. I have watched that happen in the galleries of the Museum of the Bible. Stand firm. Speak plainly. Enjoy God’s goodness without shame. That is every Christian’s duty, not a branding strategy for an election cycle.
VI. KEN HAM, BILL NYE, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE AND SECONDARY
I was at the Creation Museum not long ago, wearing a Museum of the Bible shirt—the kind I wear often, because it reminds me of the things I actually like when a lot of darkness surrounds me. The woman at the counter said it was great that I go to the Museum of the Bible. I told her I love that museum, and I also love what Ken Ham built. Ham set a public philosophy in motion. The exhibits are well done. I have read the books. I understand why the young-earth argument matters to the people who hold it.
The real discussion is larger than a debate-club win. Science and theology are allowed to argue. I would argue with Ham that the earth is much older than six thousand years. I would also tell Bill Nye that sneering at Genesis as if the only alternatives were a cartoon ark or a materialist closed system is a different kind of ignorance. The point for this essay is not to settle geology. The point is that Christians can disagree on the age of the earth and still refuse to surrender the created order, the moral law, and the right to love Scripture out loud.
That is maturity. Rally around the core of the confession, not around every secondary interpretation. Ken Ham loves what he believes and says it without shame. I will not take that joy from him. I wish more people in public life had that spine, even when I think their timeline is wrong.
VII. JD VANCE, BUTLER COUNTY, AND WHY SCRIPTURE AT A RALLY IS NOT A GIMMICK
JD Vance is from my part of the world. Middletown. Butler County. Monroe just down the road. I know those hardy people. I know the flea markets—Traders World, Treasure Island—where folks come out of church on Sunday and walk the aisles looking at vendors, wall art, and the kind of homemade biblical kitsch that elites mock and ordinary people actually live with.[10]
Vance knows that country. His people are those people. When he talks about Scripture, it does not sound like a consultant discovered “faith outreach” on a whiteboard. It sounds like Butler County. That matters.
I have been glad to see President Trump and Vice President Vance put Scripture into the open at the Texas midterm moment and in surrounding speeches and interviews.[11] Vance has been unusually explicit that Christianity is not a private hobby you hide to keep a coalition calm. He has said Christianity is America’s creed—not that every citizen must be a Christian, but that the moral language that actually formed the country is Christian.[12] He has said Satan’s favorite trick is convincing Christians that faith and politics belong in separate rooms.[13] He has even been willing to talk about end times without collapsing into either panic or passivity: do the work in front of you; do not outsource your whole moral life to a countdown clock.[14]
I think that is smart. It will help the midterms. Not because Bible verses are magic turnout dust, but because a lot of serious churchgoing conservatives have concluded that politicians are blabbermouths who say one thing at the banquet and another in the agency. Those people will stay home if they think the language is rented. They will show up if they think the man actually fears God more than he fears the clip.
I am not naive. Quoting Scripture at a rally is easy. Governing in a way that honors the God of that Scripture is harder. The test is not whether a line lands in a speech. The test is whether the administration’s actions, over time, hate what God hates and love what God loves. A leader who merely drapes verses over policies that protect evil is a hypocrite. A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood, confused children, and public lies are being baptized as kindness.
For midterms, for holding the House and the Senate, the Christian vote is not a sentiment. It is a body of people who still believe first allegiance is not to a party. If you want them off the couch, do not give them another focus-grouped paragraph about “values.” Give them the thing they already know is true and have been told to whisper.
VIII. THREE VERSES LEADERS SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID TO SAY OUT LOUD
If a leader wants language that encourages the faithful and warns the powerful at the same time, he does not need a speechwriter to invent it. It is already in the book.
First: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”[15]
That is Proverbs 14:34. It directly assaults the idea that a country becomes great by GDP, weapons, or branding. Moral order is not an accessory. If we keep normalizing what Scripture calls evil, we are not becoming sophisticated. We are becoming weak. Wealth will not save a people that has taught its children to despise the created order.
Second: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”[16]
Isaiah 5:20 is the verse for this exact hour. It names the mechanism. The deception is not only that people do wrong. The deception is that they rename the wrong and then punish the person who remembers the old name. Redefine marriage, celebrate the confusion of sex, treat biblical speech as harm, and you have not expanded compassion. You have inverted the moral dictionary. A leader who will not say that sentence is not being pastoral. He is being careful about his future bookings.
Third: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”[17]
Psalm 33:12 is not a magic formula for a superpower. It is a reminder of allegiance. The Christian community’s ultimate loyalty is not to a party, a personality, or a news cycle. Blessing, in the biblical sense, attaches to a people that still knows who God is. That is hope, not nostalgia. It tells serious people why they should bother.
These three verses do what a good rally needs: moral clarity, a warning against deception, and a promise larger than the next quarter. They are short enough to remember. They are sharp enough to divide light from fog.
IX. DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RAPTURE WHILE EVIL DOES THE WORK
Here is the pastoral failure I have watched for decades.
Many people I know will say they are good Christians because they refuse to “engage.” They will hang the Ten Commandments on the wall, go to church on Sunday, and then treat public evil as a problem God will vacuum up at the end of the age. They do not want to confront anybody. They do not want to fight. They want the apocalypse to do the job they were too tired or too timid to do. They call that humility. I call it a religious mask on laziness.
The same Bible that promises the return of Christ also commands believers to resist the devil, hate what is evil, do justice, and love mercy.[18] God never called a people to nap while wickedness reorganizes the schools. Waiting for God to fix everything while we do nothing is not faith. It is presumption.
Moses did not treat Egypt as a spectator sport. Deborah did not. David did not. Nehemiah did not rebuild a wall by quoting a verse about patience and going home. The apostles did not treat the ruling authorities as an excuse to go mute. Romans 13 tells Christians to recognize governing authority. Acts 5:29 tells them that when those authorities command what God forbids, the first allegiance is to God.[19] Submission to God is not submission to evil—quite the opposite.
If a world leader will not bow to the authority of God, that does not mean the rest of us take a back seat and wait for the credits. It means discernment. It means we do not confuse a Bible on the podium with a conscience in the chest. It also means we do not treat politics as a substitute for conversion. A man can win a midterm and still lose his soul. Reformation that begins only in rallies and podcasts, and never in the soul’s submission to Christ, profits nothing.
However, the opposite error is just as real: using “God will handle it” as cover for refusing to handle the thing in front of you. Faith works in its own generation. It prays for the kingdom to come and then spends its breath on righteousness while it still has breath.
X. FLEA-MARKET CHRISTIANITY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECORATION AND BACKBONE
I like Traders World. I like Treasure Island. Monroe, Ohio, is a strange and specific place, and I love it for what it is. Walk those markets, and you will see a lot of people who came straight from church. You will see biblical references on the walls. Treasure Island, in particular, draws a large Mexican immigrant population, and if you have spent time in Mexico, you already know how Catholic that visual world is. They love images of Jesus. They carried older indigenous forms into Catholic form and made something that is not a seminar paper. It is folk theology in color. I love Mexican religious art, including the Christianized approach to death that outsiders reduce to a cartoon of “the cult of the dead.” It is not voodoo. It is a people who still think the dead and the living are not sealed off from each other by a shopping mall.
I can love all of that and still say the hard thing: too many of those same households treat Scripture as interior decorating.
They will buy the plaque. They will love the verse. They will tell you they left it to Jesus. Then, when the school, the HR office, or the culture demands that they deny what the plaque says, they fold and call the fold piety. That is not devotion. That is decoration. Faith that only admires Scripture on a wall, and will not stand for the same commandments when the cost is a customer, a job, or a family argument, is not the faith that built anything worth keeping.
True Christianity has always required backbone. Nice religious imagery is easy. JD Vance coming out of that same region makes the stakes sharper. Those people need to see a leader who will fight for what the wall art claims to believe. If he only sounds like church on Sunday and then governs like every other manager of decline, the flea-market vote will stay home, and the professional class that rewrote childhood will not.
XI. CHRISTIANITY IS A WEAPON — BUT NOT THE WAY THE MOB MEANS WEAPON
People get nervous when you say Christianity is a weapon. They should get the meaning right.
Christianity is not a weapon in the way a riot is a weapon. It is not deceit. It is not a secret police of the pious. The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.[20] Truth is the blade. When a leader speaks Scripture with actual conviction, it cuts through slogans, exposes the rename-the-evil trick, and wakes a conscience that had gone to sleep under the word “kindness.”
That is how you fight evil in high places without becoming the thing you oppose.
Many of the policies I have been watching—the sexual ones, the speech ones, the childhood ones—were designed in the background to wear away a society that still had a Christian base. You do not have to invent a conspiracy chart to see the sequence. First, the language changes. Then the training changes. Then the child is caught in the middle, and the parent is the last to be informed. The answer is not to copy the enemy’s methods. The answer is to stop being ashamed of the only thing that can actually defeat the darkness: the gospel of Jesus Christ, spoken as if you mean it.
A leader should stand on Scripture not as a mascot but as a man who fears God more than he fears the mob. This generation is starving for that kind of boldness. Amen. Let it be said without the usual throat-clearing.
XII. ISLAM, SAUDI ARABIA, AND THE RIGHT TO DEFEND YOUR OWN HOUSE
A short word on a subject that makes consultants sweat.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, a lot of people are angry that American leadership will not spend every morning railing at Saudi Arabia and at radical Islam in the old post-2001 register. Radical Islam is not a hallucination. It is still at work. It is fair game. I also think you can put your hand on the Bible without turning every speech into a comparative-religion insult comic.
You do not have to be condescending toward every competing religion to defend Christianity. [21] A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood is shed in the name of religion. He also needs wisdom. Sometimes the most effective stand is not the loudest anathema. It is the clear, consistent defense of truth and justice, and the refusal to treat Christianity as the one faith that must apologize for existing.
If Trump or Vance quote Scripture, the test is not the quote. The test is whether their actions line up with the book they opened. Religion used as a costume for power is an old trick. Religion used as the thing a man actually submits to is rarer, and it is the only version worth the airtime.
XIII. THE JONATHAN EDWARDS STUDY BIBLE AND A PRACTICAL NEXT STEP
If you want an entry point that is not a meme and not a campaign pamphlet, start with a book that expects you to stay.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, published by Thomas Nelson in August 2026 and edited by Matthew Everhard, is built on the NKJV and Edwards’s own notes, resolutions, and theological instincts.[22] Edwards’s great theme was not American politics. It was joy in God. “The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That is the sentence under the project. Study notes drawn from his work, essays on the Great Awakening, his Resolutions, and his miscellanies system are all there if you want to do more than highlight a rally verse.
I love a study Bible that treats Scripture as something you live inside, not something you mine for applause lines. I do not agree with every secondary system any commentator has ever hung on the text. I do not need to. The point is daily reading, public love, and an unashamed life. Treat yourself to something good. Read it. Let people know you love it. At this stage of the game, visible joy in the word is not a small witness. It is one of the last clean ones left.
XIV. WHAT I WANT FROM LEADERS — AND WHAT I WILL NOT PRETEND
I want leaders who will:
Protect children from medical and social experiments they cannot consent to in any meaningful sense.
Stop treating “compassion” as a synonym for affirmation.
Speak Scripture as if it were true, not as if it were a demographic.
Refuse the HR liturgy that recodes male and female as optional.
Understand that Christian voters are not a prop. They are people whose first loyalty is supposed to be higher than a ticket.
Fight in their own generation instead of waiting for the sky to split.
Keep their joy. An ashamed church is a disarmed church.
I will say this: goodness is not something you have to apologize for. Find it. Love it. Project it. Evil is not shy about encroaching. You are not obligated to meet that encroachment with a permanent second cheek and a taped mouth. The job, when you see the lie eating children and renaming itself kindness, is to conquer it with righteousness and to be bold about the source of that righteousness.
Do not be ashamed of the gospel.
Do not be ashamed of the book.
Do not be ashamed of liking what is good.
That is the politics of heaven in an age that keeps disclosing how much of our public life was built on a dare: that ordinary people would rather be polite than tell the truth about their own sons and daughters.
XV. A LAST WORD TO THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY LEAD
This was never written for the algorithm that wants a screaming thumbnail. It was written for the smaller room: the people who draft, who vote in caucuses, who manage institutions, who sit close enough to power to change a line in a bill or a tone in a speech.
It is safe to put your arm around Scripture.
It is not safe, in the only sense that matters, to keep pretending that the sexual revolution’s latest chapter is too delicate to name.
You are allowed to enjoy the Museum of the Bible, the Creation Museum, a Mexican retablo of Christ, a Jonathan Edwards page, a Butler County flea market, and a Vice President who will still say the name of Jesus without coughing. You are allowed to disagree about the age of the earth and still agree that a girl is not a boy because a school counselor said so.
The light does not need your permission to be light. It needs you to stop putting a basket over it.
Speak plainly. Protect the children. Love the good without apology. Leave the shame to the people who require it.
That is how you strengthen the faithful. That is how you expose the deception. That is how a nation finds out, in an age of disclosure, whether it still remembers the politics of heaven.
NOTES
[1] The phrase “politics of heaven” is used here in the older Christian sense: the public consequences of God’s reign and moral law, not a claim that any party is the kingdom of God. See Augustine, The City of God, esp. Books XIV–XIX, on the interweaving of the city of God and the city of man.
[2] Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.”
[3] On the distinction between pastoral care for distressed youth and the affirmation-only medical pathway, see Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (NHS England, 2024); Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage (Regnery, 2020); Lisa Littman, “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria,” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018).
[4] Reporting and commentary on the clustering of transgender-identifying children in celebrity households include Rikki Schlott, “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood,” New York Post, June 4, 2026; “The rise of the celebrity trans kid,” The Spectator, April 10, 2024; and recurring profiles in mainstream entertainment coverage of specific families. Clustering is not the same as a complete census; it is a pattern that demands an explanation beyond “visibility.”
[5] Cass, Independent Review (2024). For the contrary claim that social contagion is unsupported, see Jack Turban et al., “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States,” Pediatrics (2022). For more recent discussion of declining youth identification after the peak years, see analysis associated with Eric Kaufmann’s 2025 commentary on survey trends. The existence of a debate is the point: the science was never “settled” in the way school districts pretended.
[6] Genesis 1:27; Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6.
[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 4th Street SW, Washington, D.C.; opened November 17, 2017; founded through the Green family / Museum of the Bible, Inc. See museumofthebible.org and the institution’s published FAQ on mission, square footage, and exhibit floors.
[8] Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis; Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky (opened 2007); Ark Encounter, Williamstown, Kentucky (opened 2016). See answersingenesis.org.
[9] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); The Life of David Brainerd; and the Resolutions. Edwards’s insistence that true religion engages the affections, not merely the mouth, is the through-line of the 2026 study Bible project cited below.
[10] Traders, World and Treasure Island are long-running flea-market / vendor sites serving the Monroe–Middletown corridor in Butler County, Ohio. JD Vance’s upbringing in Middletown and family ties in the county are documented in Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016) and in subsequent local reporting.
[11] Coverage of Trump and Vance at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, September 2026, includes contemporaneous reports from ABC and other national outlets. Vance’s broader 2025–2026 record of public Christian speech includes the Turning Point USA AmFest 2025 address and the May 2026 “Rededicate 250” remarks on the National Mall.
[12] JD Vance, AmFest / Turning Point USA remarks, December 2025: “Christianity is America’s creed,” with the explicit caveat that one need not be a Christian to be an American. See also Catholic News Agency, “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics,” December 2025.
[13] Ryan Foley, “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics,” The Christian Post, July 20, 2026, reporting on Vance’s conversation with Bishop Robert Barron.
[14] Maya Yang, “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK,’” The Guardian / syndicated, September 2, 2026, on the Bryce Crawford interview.
[15] Proverbs 14:34 (NKJV): “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”
[16] Isaiah 5:20.
[17] Psalm 33:12: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.”
[18] James 4:7; Romans 12:9; Micah 6:8; Psalm 97:10.
[19] Romans 13:1–7; Acts 5:29. The Deborah and David narratives are Judges 4–5 and 1 Samuel 16–31 / 2 Samuel.
[20] Hebrews 4:12; Ephesians 6:17.
[21] John 14:6; Acts 4:12.
[22] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Features include Edwards-derived study notes, doctrinal articles, essays on Edwards and the Great Awakening, the Resolutions, and an introduction to his miscellanies method.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Scripture and Classic Christian Sources
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960. Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. “Resolutions.” In Letters and Personal Writings, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. 1741. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). General editor Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026. Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943. Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York: Scribner, 1932. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “Live Not by Lies.” 1974. Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976. Schaeffer, Francis A. A Christian Manifesto. Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1981.
Creation, Museums, and Public Christian Witness
Ham, Ken. The Lie: Evolution. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1987; rev. eds. thereafter. Ham, Ken. Gospel Reset. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2018. Answers in Genesis. Creation Museum and Ark Encounter visitor guides and position papers. https://answersingenesis.org Museum of the Bible. Institutional FAQs, exhibit guides, and annual materials. Washington, D.C. https://www.museumofthebible.org Wishard, Grant. “Love to Tell the Story.” Washington Examiner, November 17, 2017. Zauzmer Weil, Julie, and Sarah Pulliam Bailey. “The ark vs. the covenant: the dramatic contrast between the Creation Museum and the Museum of the Bible.” Washington Post, November 20, 2017.
Sex, Children, Medicine, and Social Contagion
Cass, Hilary. Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report. NHS England, 2024. Shrier, Abigail. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2020. Shrier, Abigail. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Are Not Growing Up. New York: Sentinel, 2024. Littman, Lisa. “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018). Bailey, J. Michael, and Ray Blanchard. Clinical and taxonomic papers on autogynephilia and rapid-onset presentations (various). Laidlaw, Michael, et al. Endocrine and pediatric critique literature on puberty blockade. SEGM (Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine). Collected reviews. Turban, Jack L., et al. “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States.” Pediatrics (2022). [Contrary thesis; included so the reader can see both sides of the official argument.] Kaufmann, Eric. Commentary and data notes on declining youth LGBT / transgender identification after the early-2020s peak (2025). Schlott, Rikki. “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood.” New York Post, June 4, 2026. “The rise of the celebrity trans kid.” The Spectator, April 10, 2024. “Hollywood’s growing A-list of non-binary, transgender kids.” The Daily Telegraph, 2025. Hruz, Paul W., Lawrence S. Mayer, and Paul R. McHugh. “Growing Pains: Problems with Puberty Suppression in Treating Gender Dysphoria.” The New Atlantis, 2017. McHugh, Paul. “Transgender Surgery Is not the Solution.” Wall Street Journal, 2014, and related Johns Hopkins commentary. Soh, Debra. The End of Gender. New York: Threshold, 2020. Joyce, Helen. Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. London: Oneworld, 2021. Hilton, Emma, and Colin Wright. Biological-sex primer essays in Reality’s Last Stand and related venues. Singal, Jesse. Long-form reporting on youth gender medicine, The Atlantic and later independent work.
Culture, Elite Capture, and Institutional Language
Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Murray, Douglas. The War on the West. New York: Harper, 2022. Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020. Trueman, Carl R. Strange New World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022. Hanby, Michael. Various essays on technology, liberalism, and the body, First Things. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Anointed. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Sowell, Thomas. Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Darel E. Paul. From Tolerance to Equality. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018.
Vance, Ohio, and the Present Political-Religious Moment
Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy. New York: Harper, 2016. Vance, J. D. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. 2026. “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics.” Catholic News Agency, December 2025. “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics.” Christian Post, July 20, 2026. “Religious Vance seeks to avoid MAGA schism as he keeps the faith for 2028.” The Guardian / syndicated, September 13, 2026. Yang, Maya. “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK.’” September 2, 2026. Forbes Breaking News. “The Morality & Religion That Formed The American Consciousness Were Decidedly Christian.” National Mall remarks, May 2026. Local reporting on Middletown, the Cleveland-Cliffs mill, and Vance’s hometown visits: Cincinnati Enquirer, Journal-News, Fox News, 2023–2026. Dreher, Rod. Live Not by Lies. New York: Sentinel, 2020. Renn, Aaron M. Life in the Negative World. Washington, D.C.: Zondervan / related 2024 essays on post-Christian America.
Islam, Religious Liberty, and Public Courage
Ibn Warraq. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995. Spencer, Robert. The History of Jihad. New York: Bombardier, 2018. [Use critically; included because the public argument exists.] Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Weigel, George. Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. New York: Doubleday, 2007. First Amendment and religious-liberty case law: Employment Division v. Smith; Fulton v. City of Philadelphia; 303 Creative v. Elenis; related commentary in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Ohio Color, Folk Religion, and Place
Hoffman, Rich. Prior columns and commentary at OvermanWarrior / related essays on Middletown, Monroe, and regional culture. Brandes, Stanley. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Carmichael, Elizabeth, and Chloë Sayer. The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Nutini, Hugo G. Todos Santos en Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Local vendor culture around Traders World (Monroe, Ohio) and Treasure Island as primary, on-the-ground observation rather than academic monograph.
Journalism and Primary Documents Worth Keeping
Cass Review full report and supporting research annexes (NHS England). WPATH Files / leaked internal files and subsequent journalistic treatment (2024). SEGM, Genspect, and Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine bibliographies. Museum of the Bible press FAQs. Answers in Genesis statement of faith and museum interpretative materials. Thomas Nelson catalog entry and Everhard interviews on the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (August 2026).
Suggested Reading Paths
If you lead and have one night: Romans 1 and 13, Acts 5, Proverbs 14, Isaiah 5, Psalm 33, Hebrews 4; then Cass’s final report summary; then Vance’s Communion on why he will not keep the faith in a separate drawer.
If you want the child-medicine argument without online noise: Cass; Shrier; Hruz/Mayer/McHugh; then one contrary paper (Turban, 2022) so you know what the institutions cited.
If you want the soul of the thing rather than the policy: Edwards’s Religious Affections; the 2026 Edwards Study Bible notes on joy; Augustine’s two cities; Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not by Lies.”
Suppose you want to walk the places named here: Museum of the Bible in Washington; Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in Kentucky; a Sunday-to-Monday loop through Middletown and the Monroe markets. The argument is clearer after you have stood in the rooms.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman writes from the Middletown, Ohio, side of the country, for readers who still think Scripture is allowed in public and that children are not a canvas for someone else’s revolution. This essay is not a substitute for a church, a clinician, or a ballot. It is a refusal to whisper.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
