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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is how I landed at Volynt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So come to Elm Street.

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography and Further Reading

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

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

What the Space Economy Actually Means in 2026

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

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

Cargo Drones Are Not the Toys You Buy at Target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Video Game Patch Model Is Moving Into the Physical World

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

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

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

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

A Short History of How America Managed Traffic Before Software

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Machines Will Make Fewer of Those Mistakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Took Away from a Classroom I Never Entered

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography and Further Reading

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

Space Economy, Commercial LEO, and Aerospace Industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cargo Drones, eVTOL, and Unmanned Logistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vehicle Automation and Software-Defined Safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History of U.S. Traffic Safety and Transportation Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impaired Driving Law and Advocacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roundabouts, Signals, and Roadway Engineering

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labor Force Participation, Youth Work, and Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regional and Author Context

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Morality of Revenge: How a merchent of chaos brings justice to the world

My daughter brought this one to me. That matters. We both carry a long love of pirates and pirate history, and there is nothing like a good story about Jeanne de Belleville—Jeanne de Clisson if you meet her in the legal papers, the Lioness of Brittany if you meet her in the legend.[1] The book that set this off is the English handling of an older French telling: Ellen O’Brien’s work on Jeanne de Belleville, built on Émile Péhant’s great 1868 narrative poem from Nantes. People say 1890. The poem is 1868. The feeling is older than both.[2] I read it the way I read most history that still has blood in the floorboards, not as a museum label. As a problem the present has not solved.

The story takes place in the 1330s and 1340s, in the first storms of the Hundred Years’ War and the Breton War of Succession. A French aristocrat. A husband slaughtered by a king. A woman who sold the prosperous life she was born into, bought ships, painted them for terror, and spent about thirteen years teaching the crown of France what a widow can become when the state puts a head on a pike and calls it law.

I know what people tell me when I talk like this. They tell me it is not very Christian. They tell me forgiveness is the higher road. They tell me revenge is a poison you drink while waiting for the other man to die. I have heard all of that. I still like the way Jeanne conducted herself more. Not because killing is pretty. Because some injuries are not misunderstandings. They are messages. And a message that goes unanswered becomes the world’s new constitution.

This is the true story, as the records and the durable legend allow us to tell it. It is also my argument. When people do you a public wrong, you owe something to the world’s justice. Jeanne understood that. England understood that she was useful. History remembered her because she was too rich, too well-born, and too bloody to file under a footnote. I want her out of the footnote.

Who Was Jeanne de Belleville?

A Poitevin heiress, not a tavern myth

Jeanne was born around 1300 in Belleville-sur-Vie in Poitou, just south of the Breton border, the daughter of Maurice IV de Montaigu and Létice de Parthenay.[3] She was not born a pirate. She was born an heiress: salt, wine, islands, castles. The islands of Yeu and Noirmoutier sat in the family world like locked cabinets of money and wind. If you want to understand the later black fleet, start here. She already knew what a coast was worth.

The early life is the ordinary violence of high birth. Married about age twelve to Geoffroy de Châteaubriant. Children. Widowed in 1326. A second marriage to Guy de Penthièvre, annulled.[4][5] Then, in 1330, the marriage that detonates the rest of the century: Olivier IV de Clisson, a Breton lord with the castle at Clisson, a house in Nantes, and lands at Blain.[6]

The Clisson marriage was power with affection inside it.

Arranged marriages are supposed to be ledgers. This one seems to have been a ledger that caught fire. Even the cautious sources keep saying they loved each other. They had children. Maurice died young. Olivier V would live to become Constable of France. Guillaume would die in a boat. Their daughter, Jeanne, would carry the name forward.[7] For thirteen years they were a border empire: Brittany on one shoulder, Poitou on the other, the Loire-Atlantique of our maps still wet with their rents.

I like that she already knew how to sue. Before she ever painted a sail, she took Olivier to law over a marriage settlement he had not paid, and the case went to the king, and she won. That is not a fainting woman. That is a woman who understood that paper is a weapon until the day paper fails, and then you find another weapon.

The World That Made Her: France, England, and Brittany

The Hundred Years’ War was a lawyers’ war with arrows

In 1337 Edward III of England and Philip VI of France stopped pretending the old argument could stay in court. Edward claimed the French crown through his mother. Philip sat on it as a Valois. Gascony, Flanders, and the Channel were the real estate. Brittany was the hinge.[8]

The Breton War of Succession

Duke John III of Brittany died in 1341 without a clear heir. Charles de Blois claimed through Jeanne de Penthièvre, with Philip VI behind him. John of Montfort claimed through the male line, with Edward III behind him.[9] Every Breton lord had to pick a roof. Pick wrong, and you are a traitor. Pick right, and you are a patriot until the next campaign season. Loyalty in that world is not a hymn. It is a weather report.

Olivier de Clisson had spent years fighting English landings. That should have made him safe. It made him useful to ruin. After French setbacks, Charles de Blois—who wanted Clisson land and Clisson influence out of the way—had the king’s ear.[10][11] A king who feels illegitimate hears treason in every low ransom and every delayed sortie. Philip heard it in Olivier.

The Trap of 1343: Tournament, Prison, Scaffold

A truce, a feast, and a lie

In January 1343, the Truce of Malestroit gave men a reason to travel. Breton lords were invited toward the French court under the manners of chivalry—tournament, sport, the old fiction that armored men can play.[12] Olivier went. The invitation was the snare. They arrested him, hauled him to Paris, held him in the Châtelet, and tried him by his peers. Charles de Blois sat among the men judging a rival whose lands he coveted. That is not a court. That is a harvest.

The execution of Olivier IV de Clisson

On Saturday, 2 August 1343, Olivier, lord of Clisson, was drawn from the Châtelet to Les Halles and beheaded on a scaffold.[13] The judgment found him guilty of treason and alliance with the king of England. Olivier protested his innocence to the last. Later English correspondence suggests some Breton lords had in fact leaned toward Edward. I will not tidy that. History is allowed to be both a judicial murder and a political guess that happened to have a grain in it. The method was still a king using a tournament as a cage.

They did not stop at the neck. They treated the body like a common criminal’s. The head was sent west to Nantes and planted on a pike at the Porte Sauvetout so that Brittany could read the sermon in bone.[14] Froissart and the men of that age flinched at it. Even a century that liked spectacles thought this one had the stink of panic on it.[15]

The image she carried: a wife, two sons, a pike

The story that will not die is this. Jeanne took her boys, Olivier and Guillaume, to Nantes and made them look at their father’s head.[16] I believe the scene because it is the kind of thing a certain kind of mother does when she decides the children will not be raised on lullabies. She is not showing them a relic. She is showing them the state. She is teaching them that the crown is an enemy and that fear is the only currency left. That is a complete rejection of the feudal order she was born to serve.

She does not see herself as a widow asking for a pension. She sees a head on a wall and a lesson that has to be paid forward.

France then convicted her in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and seized the lands.[17] She ignored the summons. Of course she did. You do not answer a letter from the man who decorated a gate with your husband.

Selling a Life to Buy a War

The conversion of an estate into a fleet

Here is the part I love without apology. Jeanne sold the world that had made her safe. Lands, jewels, the pompous attire, the furniture that tells visitors you are still in the club. Later writers like to inventory the sacrifice because the sacrifice is the moral. She did not keep a townhouse in reserve. She converted a seigneurie into violence.

First she raised men—maybe a hundred, maybe four hundred—and hit French garrisons in Brittany.[18] When the land got too hot, she took the war to the only road the king could not garrison with a single castle: the sea.

Black hulls and blood-red sails

The legend says three ships, converted from merchant cogs, with hulls painted black and sails dyed red.[19] Some versions name the flagship My Revenge.[20] Historians who like clean footnotes will cough here, and they should. We do not have the shipwright’s receipt. What we have is a visual so exact that it has survived six centuries of retelling. I treat it as operational poetry, probably sitting on top of a real small squadron.

That paint job is not fashion in a world where news moved at the speed of a wet deck and a tired horse; a black ship with red canvas in the fog of the Channel is a broadcast. She wanted to be seen. She wanted the terror to arrive before the grappling hooks. Branding is not a modern invention. It is what you do when you intend to work for years and need the enemy’s imagination working the night shift for you.

Calculated grief, not a tantrum

People talk about revenge as if it were a sneeze. Jeanne’s war lasted on the order of thirteen years—one year, the storytellers like to say, for each year of the marriage.[21] That is not a burst of rage. That is a career. Rage does not provision biscuit and inspect standing rigging. Rage does not negotiate with England. Rage does not last until the king who started it is dead and then keep going.

I call it a calculated form of grief. Grief that has accepted a job. The widow becomes a sovereign of one: her own black navy, her own foreign policy, her own theory of the body. When she took French nobles, the tradition says she used an axe on them herself and put the corpses in the water. Leave a few sailors alive. Send them home. Make them talk.[22]

Psychological Warfare in the English Channel

Why leave witnesses?

Killing everyone is hygiene. Leaving two men alive is publishing. Jeanne understood the audience. The audience was Philip VI, the court, the next captain who had to decide whether a cargo was worth the fog. In slow communication, a survivor is a newspaper. The black ship did the headline. The neck did the editorial.

She was not living outside the system. She was hiring a rival system.

This is the point amateurs miss when they call her a pirate and stop. She allied with England and with the Montfort cause in Brittany. Edward III granted her income from lands in English-held Brittany in the same year France confiscated her life.[23] In 1347, the Truce of Calais lists her as an English ally.[24] That is not a woman in a cave. That is a woman changing employers.

I have said that she was a merchant of chaos and England was the primary buyer. I still like that sentence. Personal vengeance was the fuel. Geopolitics was the market. There is always a buyer for revenge against a shared enemy. A merchant will always take the payment and go to work. Jeanne was both the widow and the firm.

Crécy, 1346: When Vengeance Became Strategy

In 1346, Edward III landed the army that would win Crécy.[25] Modern tellings put Jeanne’s ships in the supply and screening work that kept French hulls from making the Channel a French lake. I cannot put her quarterdeck at a numbered buoy. The logic is clean. A hostile widow with local pilots and a grudge is exactly the asset a cross-Channel invasion wants.

So the question people love—was she a broken woman or a useful one?—is a false door. She was both. The English did not need her to be healthy. They needed her to be pointed at France. She did not need them to love her husband. She needed ports, cover, and a market for captured canvas.

Utility does not cancel the oath. It funds it.

Thirteen Years: The Inner Weather of a Long Revenge

What does a decade of this do to a mind?

I keep getting stuck on the duration. A night of murder is a story. Thirteen years of boarding actions, winter Channel weather, noble blood, and the knowledge that one lost fight ends with your own head over a different gate—that is a vocation. The chroniclers give her the heart of a lion. Of course they do. They have no other animal left.

Was she reclaiming power by performing an ultra-masculine, ultra-violent role? Or was she becoming the monster the execution had sketched on the wall? I do not treat those as opposites. Power, in her spot, looked like the thing that had destroyed her. She put it on like armor. Armor that fits long enough becomes skin.

She was not a pirate in the cheap sense.

A pirate in the cheap sense steals for the hold. Jeanne’s hold mattered. Her targeting mattered more. French shipping. French nobles. The men whose world had clapped when Olivier fell. This is why I say she was closer to a sovereign-in-exile than to a dockside thief. She had no letter of marque we can hold up to the light.[26] She had English money, English recognition, and a war that already refused to distinguish private grief from public policy.

Shipwreck, a Dead Son, and the Cost of the Oath

Luck thins. A French force, or a storm, or both, takes the flagship. Jeanne gets off with the boys in a small boat. Five days. No water worth drinking. Guillaume dies of exposure.[27] They come ashore toward Morlaix and the Montfort world of Hennebont. The legend needs that death. Without it, the woman is only terrible. With it, she is terrible and billed.

I will not pretty this up. If you dedicate a life to revenge, the invoice does not go only to the original king. It goes to the child in the boat. That is not an argument against her. It is the receipt. Justice at that voltage has collateral. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a saint’s card, not a history.

The Later Peace: Bentley, Hennebont, and a Death on Her Own Terms

Around 1356 she married again, this time Sir Walter Bentley, an English captain who had smashed a larger Franco-Breton force at Mauron.[28] Lands came back in the English manner: Beauvoir-sur-Mer, islands, fragments of the old Atlantic belt. By 1357 the barony of La Roche-Moisan is in the file. She settles at Hennebont, a castle that had already been a Montfort rock in the worst years, and dies there about 1359.[29]

That ending is rare in the pirate catalog. Most sea-kings finish on a rope, a reef, or a friend’s knife. Jeanne finishes in a castle, having outlived Philip VI, having kept enough status that the world could not pretend she had only ever been a criminal. From one angle she is an outlaw. From another, she is a noblewoman in exile who chose a different court. Perspective is not relativism here. It is the difference between the French indictment and the English household book.

The Shakespearean Afterlife of the Family

Olivier V, the Butcher, Constable of France

The boy she took to look at a head grows up in England beside John of Montfort, learns war as a native language, then does the unthinkable and goes back to the French side.[30] He becomes Constable of France in 1380, the highest military office in the kingdom that killed his father. They called him the Butcher because he would not give prisoners the courtesy his father’s executioners had not given Olivier IV. He inherited the velocity and pointed it at whoever was standing in front of him, which for a long time meant the English.

I do not call that betrayal of the mother. I call it the family trade. Alliances in that century were never hymns to a crown. They were instruments for survival and the restoration of honor. The Clissons go from betrayal to piracy to the summit of the hierarchy that tried to erase them. That is not irony for a dinner play. That is the operating system of late feudal politics. Honor is not loyalty to a logo. Honor is refusal to be deleted.

Pirate, Privateer, and the Henry Morgan Problem

My mind goes to Henry Morgan because the English later ran the same trick at industrial scale.[31] When they needed a blade in the Caribbean, they called him a privateer. When they needed to look like a government, they called him a pirate, then knighted him anyway. There is no clean moral difference in the work. Only who stamps the paper matters.

Jeanne stands at the beginning of that European habit. France called her traitor. England called her ally. The Channel called her weather. I understand her motives. I understand the English motives. I understand why a later respectability tries to sand her down into a “controversial noblewoman.” The sanding is the tell. If she had only been a nuisance, she would be gone. She survived in ink because she was too wealthy and too well-placed to ignore even when she was covered in other men’s blood.

Legend, Record, and What We Can Actually Swear To

The romantic surface—crimson sails, the personal axe, the flagship’s name—comes to us thickened by the nineteenth century, especially Péhant’s poem, and by every retelling that needed a heroine who looks like a painting.[32] Descendants and careful modern biographers have said the embroidery is real.[33][34]

What sits on the table without the embroidery is already enough:

• A papal paper trail on the annulled second marriage.

• A French judgment of 1343 branding her a traitor and stripping her of her lands.[35]

• English grants of income from Breton lands the same year.[36]

• Her name among English allies in the Truce of Calais, 1347.[37]

• The execution record of Olivier IV at Les Halles, 2 August 1343.[38]

• Later settlement with Walter Bentley and death at Hennebont around 1359.[39][40]

That file is a woman who broke with France, was paid by England, fought in the orbit of the Channel war, and did not crawl back. The black fleet may be a costume. The war is not.

Chivalry, Christianity, and the Argument I Will Not Drop

The age of knights was already an age of heads on gates.

People hear me talk in biblical language, then hear me praise Jeanne, and think I have lost the plot. The 1330s and 1340s are the high room of official chivalry. Edward is founding the Garter. French knighthood still talks like a sacrament. And in the middle of that talk, a king lures a vassal to a tournament and cuts off his head to keep the rest of the room quiet.[41] If that is Christendom, then Christendom had already hired a butcher and called him justice.

Revenge as a moral order

I will say it in the first person so nobody has to guess. I think revenge, when it becomes the arm of justice, is good and healthy. Not petty score-settling. Not a bar fight remembered for twenty years. The answer to a public, state-grade crime that the courts will not touch because the courts are the crime. Jeanne did not have a higher court. The higher court was the man who ordered the pike. So she built a court that floated.

A lot of people will disagree. They should say so with their full chest. I am tired of the sermon that tells the injured party to be the only adult in the room while the killer keeps the gate. Forgiveness without teeth is just a way to train the next king. Jeanne refused the training.

Is that “not very Christian”? It is not very polite. The older books are less polite than the modern pulpit. They are full of widows, oaths, blood avengers, and cities that fall because nobody wanted to be rude. I am not writing a homily. I am writing about a woman who treated injustice as a thing that must be made expensive.

A good wife, in a sense the age still understood

I love Jeanne. I love that she sold everything she had to get revenge for a husband whose head was used as political signage. That is a good wife in the only sense that still has voltage. Not good because she was mild. Good because she did not let the story end where the king placed the period.

Whether the person who does that work is a woman or a man is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that when justice is needed, someone has to enforce it. Jeanne enforced it for thirteen years with a paint scheme designed to make French crews pray before they died.

Why Has No One Made the Movie?

I keep asking this, and the answer is always costume-deep. The story has everything cinema says it wants. A high-born woman. A decapitation. Children at a gate. A fleet like a nightmare. A Channel war. A son who grows up to run the army of the enemy. A last marriage and a castle death. It is more exciting than most of the fiction that gets financed, and it has the unfair advantage of having happened in outline.

That may be why it stays a footnote. A widow who is right to be terrible is hard to merchandise. You cannot make her a girlboss mascot without lying. You cannot make her a simple villain without taking Philip VI’s word for it. You have to let a woman be the arm of justice and let the audience sit in the smell. Most rooms do not want the smell. I do. My daughter does. That is why we are here.

What Jeanne de Belleville Still Teaches

If you take only the romance, you get a pirate queen for a poster. If you take only the historians’ caution, you get a confiscation order and a truce list. Take both, and you get the thing I actually care about.

A political execution is not an argument. It is a display. Displays are meant to end conversation. Jeanne reopened the conversation with iron. She turned her husband’s death into a decade of consequences for the men who ordered it and the sailors who worked their trade. She proved that a widow could be the most dangerous person in the English Channel. She also proved that blood vengeance, during war, can be a career path if you are solvent enough and well-placed enough that the other crown will buy your grief.

The family was not erased. That was the real stake. Not the private satisfaction of watching Philip flinch. The refusal to let one king’s panic delete a house. Olivier V ends up Constable. The name climbs back through the same state that tried to cut it off. Cycle, restoration, mutation. Call it Shakespearean if you want a literary bow. Call it the reason she did it if you want the prose version.

I want more Jeannes in the moral imagination—not more corpses in the water for sport, but more people who will not accept the official narrative of their own injury. When bad people do bad things to you, I do not advise you to buy three cogs and dye the canvas. I do say this. Do not help them finish the story. Do not call it holiness when you swallow a pike. Jeanne looked at the pike and built a navy. That is why her name is still here.

Closing: Black Ships, Red Sails, and a Better Day

Remember the picture, because pictures outlive arguments. A noblewoman of France sells the furniture. She paints the hulls black so that you will see her in bad light. She dyes the sails the color of the thing done to her husband. She cuts; she leaves witnesses; she feeds an English war because the English will pay for French fear. She loses a son to the same water. She marries a soldier. She dies in a castle. The boy who saw the head becomes France’s sword.

That is the story my daughter brought me. That is the story Péhant sang in 1868, and O’Brien put back into English for readers who still have a stomach. I like it because it is not safe. I like it because it treats revenge as a serious adult project rather than a guilty snack. I like it because Jeanne de Belleville looked at the highest power in her world and did not kneel.

Revenge is part of the morality of the human race. Not the whole of it. Enough of it that when justice will not come down the official stairs, someone still has to walk into the Channel. Jeanne did. I understand her. I wanted this written so the search engines and the living both have to trip over her name.

Footnotes

[1] Jeanne de Clisson (c. 1300–1359) is also recorded as Jeanne de Belleville, Jeanne Louise de Belleville, and, in later tradition, the Lioness of Brittany, the Bloody Lioness, and the Breton Tigress. See the English Wikipedia entry compiled from French legal and English diplomatic notices: Jeanne de Clisson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_de_Clisson.

[2] Ellen O’Brien, Jeanne de Belleville: The Life of Jeanne de Clisson, an English Translation and Critical Introduction (translation of Émile Péhant’s 1868 narrative poem Jeanne de Belleville). Péhant’s original appeared in Nantes in 1868 with V. Forest & E. Grimaud; the English edition is the book my daughter put in my hands.

[3] Maurice IV de Montaigu, seigneur de Belleville-sur-Vie en Poitou, et Létice de Parthenay. Jeanne inherited Belleville, Palluau, and Montaigu and, through the family, an interest in the salt and wine islands of Yeu and Noirmoutier.

[4] Her first marriage, c. 1312–1314, was to Geoffroy VIII de Châteaubriant. Two children are commonly listed: Geoffroy IX and Louise. She was widowed in 1326.

[5] A brief second union with Guy de Penthièvre was annulled, almost certainly for political reasons, with papal involvement. The legal paper trail of that annulment is one of the firmer documents attached to her name.

[6] The marriage to Olivier IV de Clisson is dated 1330. Combined, the couple controlled a seigneurial bloc on the Brittany–Poitou frontier: Clisson, Blain, lands around Nantes, and Jeanne’s Poitevin inheritance.

[7] Children generally listed from the Clisson marriage: Maurice (d. infancy), Olivier V (1336–1407), Guillaume (c. 1338–1345), and Jeanne. Some genealogies include an older daughter, Isabeau.

[8] Philip VI of Valois (r. 1328–1350) came to the throne after the Capetian line failed in the male line. Edward III of England claimed the French crown through Isabella. That dynastic quarrel is the legal skin over a much older contest for the Channel, Gascony, and Flanders.

[9] The Breton War of Succession (1341–1365) followed the death of Duke John III. Charles de Blois, backed by Philip VI of France, claimed through Jeanne de Penthièvre. John of Montfort, backed by Edward III of England, claimed through the male line. The war sat inside the larger Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).

[10] Olivier IV had fought the English in Brittany. Suspicion fell on him after English successes, including the fighting around Vannes. Charles de Blois is widely named as the courtier who poisoned the king’s mind against him.

[11] Charles de Blois (c. 1319–1364), nephew of Philip VI by marriage into the Penthièvre claim, later canonized in popular devotion and killed at Auray in 1364. Jeanne’s oath names him beside the king.

[12] The Truce of Malestroit was agreed in January 1343. Under cover of that truce, Breton lords were drawn toward Paris. Arrest under a tournament invitation is the version preserved in later narrative and in the Order of Medieval Women summary of the case.

[13] Official execution record, 2 August 1343, Les Halles, Paris: Olivier, lord of Clisson, prisoner in the Châtelet, condemned for treason and for alliances with the king of England. Head struck off on a scaffold; body treated as a traitor’s—text reproduced in modern summaries of the judgment.

[14] The head was sent to Nantes and displayed on a pike at the Porte Sauvetout (also associated in popular accounts with the castle of Bouffay). Public exhibition of a noble head in his own country was meant as a sermon.

[15] Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Froissart and his contemporaries judged Olivier IV’s execution harshly. Froissart is a court reporter with a poet’s appetite, not a modern footnote machine, but he is the age’s weather system.

[16] The story that she took her young sons, Olivier and Guillaume, to look at their father’s head is standard in the later tradition (Péhant, popular biographies, Order of Medieval Women). It cannot be footnoted to a signed diary. It is the scene the culture refused to forget.

[17] French judgment of 1343 convicted Jeanne in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and confiscated the Clisson lands. That paper is one of the hardest proofs that she did not submit.

[18] Estimates of her land force run from about 100 men (Laure Buisson’s caution) to the 400 of the more theatrical retellings. She first struck French garrisons in Brittany, including places tied to the Clisson name such as Château-Thébaud.

[19] The Black Fleet of three converted cogs, hulls painted black and sails dyed red or crimson, is the image that made her immortal. Wikipedia and most modern popular accounts mark this as “said to have” rather than as a surviving naval inventory. The image is too consistent across the legend to ignore and too late in the sources to swear by as a carpenter’s fact.

[20] Many retellings name the flagship My Revenge. That name is legend-grade, not charter-grade.

[21] Philip VI died in 1350. Tradition says she kept hunting French shipping after his death. Revenge, once it becomes a craft, does not punch out when the original face disappears.

[22] The tactic of leaving two or three sailors alive to carry the story is the legend’s psychological heart. It is also good operational art: terror travels faster than a dispatch rider when the Channel is the road.

[23] English court records from 1343 show Edward III granting Jeanne income from lands in English-controlled Brittany. That same year, France calls her a traitor; England puts her on the payroll.

[24] Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347: Jeanne named as an English ally. This is the diplomatic receipt that the “pirate queen” was also a piece on the board.

[25] Battle of Crécy, 26 August 1346. Edward III’s longbow army broke the French chivalry in Ponthieu. Control of the Channel approaches was not a side issue. It was the road the army used.

[26] On the difference between pirate and privateer: a letter of marque is a hunting license issued by a crown. No surviving royal patent for Jeanne has been produced. English pay, English land income, and a truce listing are the next best thing to a license.

[27] The sinking of her flagship, five days adrift, and the death of Guillaume by exposure appear across the later biographies. Rescue toward Morlaix and then Hennebont is the usual sequel.

[28] Sir Walter Bentley, English captain and lieutenant of Edward III, victor at Mauron (1352) with an Anglo-Breton force. Marriage to Jeanne is usually placed in the mid-1350s. By January 1357 they were granted the barony of La Roche-Moisan.

[29] Jeanne settled at the castle of Hennebont, a Montfortist port on the Blavet, and died there about 1359. The cause of death is not recorded. She outlived Philip VI by nine years.

[30] Olivier V de Clisson (1336–1407), raised in part at the court of Edward III beside John IV de Montfort, later defected to the French crown, became Constable of France in 1380 after Bertrand du Guesclin, and earned the nickname “the Butcher” for refusing quarter. See John Bell Henneman, Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

[31] Henry Morgan (c. 1635–1688) is the later English and Welsh comparison: privateer when London needed Port Royal, pirate when London needed respectability. The legal name changes. The work does not.

[32] Émile Péhant, Jeanne de Belleville (Nantes: V. Forest & E. Grimaud, 1868). Péhant was conservateur of the public library at Nantes. The poem is a nineteenth-century chanson de geste built on a fourteenth-century core.

[33] Laure Buisson, Pour ce qu’il me plaît (Paris: Grasset, 2017). Buisson argues Jeanne is the first French woman pirate for whom traces and proofs exist, while warning that the axe-and-crimson-sail romance has been richly embroidered.

[34] Astrid de Belleville, descendant and medieval historian, has said the pirate story was embellished centuries after the fact. I take the warning. I do not take it as a command to flatten the woman into a widow with a lawyer.

[35] French judgment of 1343 convicted Jeanne in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and confiscated the Clisson lands. That paper is one of the hardest proofs that she did not submit.

[36] English court records from 1343 show Edward III granting Jeanne income from lands in English-controlled Brittany. That same year, France calls her a traitor; England puts her on the payroll.

[37] Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347: Jeanne named as an English ally. This is the diplomatic receipt that the “pirate queen” was also a piece on the board.

[38] Official execution record, 2 August 1343, Les Halles, Paris: Olivier, lord of Clisson, prisoner in the Châtelet, condemned for treason and for alliances with the king of England. Head struck off on a scaffold; body treated as a traitor’s—text reproduced in modern summaries of the judgment.

[39] Sir Walter Bentley, English captain and lieutenant of Edward III, victor at Mauron (1352) with an Anglo-Breton force. Marriage to Jeanne is usually placed in the mid-1350s. By January 1357 they were granted the barony of La Roche-Moisan.

[40] Jeanne settled at the castle of Hennebont, a Montfortist port on the Blavet, and died there about 1359. The cause of death is not recorded. She outlived Philip VI by nine years.

[41] Chivalry in the 1330s and 1340s was already a costume draped over fiscal war. The Order of the Garter was founded in the 1340s. Olivier’s head is on a pike in the same decade. That is the age.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary and near-contemporary sources

Anselme de Sainte-Marie and M. Potier de Courcy. Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la Maison royale de France. Tome IX. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1879.

Chronique des quatre premiers Valois (1327–1393). Edited by Siméon Luce. Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 1862.

Chronographia Regum Francorum. Fifteenth-century compilation; modern references discuss its notices of the Clisson affair.

Froissart, Jean. Chroniques. Multiple manuscripts and editions; see especially the passages on the Breton war and the executions of 1343. English readers can begin with the older translations of Thomas Johnes and the modern selections in the Penguin and Yale series.

Grandes Chroniques de France, volume covering John II through Charles V.

Guillaume de Nangis, and continuators. Chronique latine, 1317–1368.

Jean le Bel. Chronique. Modern English translation: The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel, 1290–1360, translated by Nigel Bryant. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011.

Official judgment and execution notice of Olivier IV de Clisson, 2 August 1343, Paris, Les Halles, as reproduced in later legal and narrative compilations.

Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347. Diplomatic instrument listing Jeanne among English allies.

English exchequer and household notices, 1343 and after, recording grants of income to Jeanne from lands in English-influenced Brittany.

The book that started this essay

O’Brien, Ellen. Jeanne de Belleville: The Life of Jeanne de Clisson, an English Translation and Critical Introduction. English presentation of Émile Péhant’s 1868 poem, with historical and literary apparatus.

Péhant, Émile. Jeanne de Belleville. Nantes: V. Forest & E. Grimaud, 1868. Also issued in the cycle Olivier de Clisson ou la Bretagne au XIVe siècle.

Modern biographies and studies

Buisson, Laure. Pour ce qui me plaît. Paris: Grasset, 2017.

Henneman, John Bell. Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Jones, Michael. Ducal Brittany, 1364–1399. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Jones, Michael. The Creation of Brittany: A Late Medieval State. London: Hambledon, 1988.

Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War. Vol. 1, Trial by Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Vol. 2, Trial by Fire. 1999.

Allmand, Christopher. The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Fowler, Kenneth. The Age of Plantagenet and Valois. New York: Putnam, 1967.

Prestwich, Michael. The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.

Cuttler, S. H. The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Déprez, Eugène. Les préliminaires de la Guerre de Cent Ans. Paris: Fontemoing, 1902.

Brittany, succession, and the Montfort war

Le Patourel, John. Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet. London: Hambledon, 1984.

Morvan, Frédéric. La chevalerie bretonne et la formation de l’armée ducale, 1260–1341. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009.

Knowlson, George A. Jean V, duc de Bretagne, et l’Angleterre, 1399–1442. Cambridge: Heffer, 1964.

Piracy, privateering, and the Channel

Rodger, N. A. M. The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649. London: HarperCollins, 1997.

Rose, Susan. Medieval Naval Warfare, 1000–1500. London: Routledge, 2002.

Friel, Ian. The Good Ship: Ships, Shipbuilding and Technology in England, 1200–1520. London: British Museum Press, 1995.

Heebøll-Holm, Thomas K. Ports, Piracy and Maritime War: Piracy in the English Channel and the Atlantic, c. 1280–c. 1330. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Cawthorne, Nigel. A History of Pirates. London: Arcturus, 2003.

Earle, Peter. The Pirate Wars. London: Methuen, 2003.

Pope, Dudley. Harry Morgan’s Way. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.

Women, lordship, and violence

Erler, Mary C., and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds. Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Johns, Susan M. Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

McLaughlin, Megan. “The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare and Society in Medieval Europe.” Women’s Studies 17 (1990): 193–209.

Solterer, Helen. “Figures of Female Militancy in Medieval France.” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 522–549.

Wheeler, Bonnie, and Charles T. Wood, eds. Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc. New York: Garland, 1996.

Accessible essays and public history

“Jeanne de Belleville.” Order of Medieval Women. https://www.medievalwomen.org/jeanne-de-belleville.html.

Daly, Tom. “The Incredible Story of a 14th Century French Female Pirate: The Lioness of Brittany, Jeanne de Clisson.” History Is Now Magazine, 18 October 2020.

David, Samantha. “Jeanne de Belleville: The True Story of a Noblewoman Turned Pirate.” Connexion, 17 October 2024.

Williams, Terry. “Pirate Profile: Jeanne de Clisson.” Queen Anne’s Revenge Project, 20 January 2021.

“The Revenge of Pirate Jeanne de Clisson, The Lioness of Brittany.” Ancient Origins, 25 March 2020.

Ouest-France. “Pour venger son mari décapité, Jeanne de Belleville est devenue la première pirate de l’histoire.” 30 August 2025.

France Culture / Radio France. “Jeanne de Belleville, de dame de la seigneurie à pirate sanguinaire.”

WikiTree. “Jeanne (Belleville) de Clisson (bef. 1300–abt. 1359).”

On war, honor, and the ethics readers will argue with me about

The Holy Bible. Especially the historical books and the imprecatory psalms.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, on justice and reciprocity.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, II-II, questions on vengeance, war, and justice.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality.

Kelsen, Hans. General Theory of Law and State.

Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

The Day the Past Arrives in the Mail: Why Biblical Archaeology Review Is My Favorite Thing in the World.

It is always a special day whenever one of these comes in the mail.

I have been saying that for most of a lifetime, and I have not found a reason to take it back. I have been reading Biblical Archaeology Review since I was a kid in the 1970s.[1] The magazine was new then. Hershel Shanks had just pried a door open between the trench and the kitchen table, and a generation of ordinary readers suddenly had access to the same arguments the professors were having in Jerusalem, Amman, and Cambridge.[2] I am still on that list. The issue still arrives every few months. And when it does, I have a ritual. I block the calendar. I throw the noise out of the room. I turn the phone face down. I let the house go quiet, and I go through the thing article by wonderful article until the night is gone.

If I milk it—and I usually do—I stay up while everyone else has gone to bed. Two o’clock in the morning, a glass of water, the window dark, the mind finally unhurried. I never get tired of it. They do such a good job on this magazine that I can disagree with half of what I am reading and still close the cover grateful. That is a rarer virtue than most publications admit.

A Rough Day, a Small Face, and Japanese Dumplings from Costco

Today was a rough day. There were problems stacked on problems, the kind of list that makes a person keep working because stopping would only let the list talk louder. I was at it when my wife went to the mailbox. She saw the mailman go down the road. She came back in with that smaller face she wears when she is carrying a gift she already knows will land, and she pulled the issue out of the stack as if she had found a holiday hiding in ordinary paper.

She knows the ritual. She has known it for years. Shut everything down. Give him the hours. Let him disappear into the Bronze Age and come back when he is done. She also knows the other half of the ceremony, which is not in any style guide and would not impress a tenure committee: Japanese dumplings from Costco. They are our favorite meal in the world. I put my work away. We ate. Then I came back to the magazine and started turning pages again.

I can tell you, without much fear of contradiction from anyone who has lived a long marriage, that there is not much better in the world than those two things arriving on the same evening. Life is already wonderful. The dumplings do not create the wonder. They just have the good manners to show up when the past does.

That is not a small thing. A culture is what it chooses to interrupt itself for. Some houses interrupt themselves for a game. Some interrupt themselves for a crisis. In this house we interrupt ourselves for a quarterly argument with the dirt of the ancient Near East, served with dumplings. I will defend that liturgy against any number of more fashionable ones.

I Do Not Read This Magazine Because I Agree with It

I do a lot of coverage on alternative history. The people who write Biblical Archaeology Review are, by and large, the academics who write the official history. In a seminar room, we would probably disagree on most of the load-bearing claims. Over coffee, one on one, we would discover we have more in common than the professional costumes suggest. We both love the ground. We both hate a lazy sentence. We both know it takes years to get one good layer out of a tell and only minutes for a man in an armchair to declare the layer silly.

I do not want to disparage their work. It takes a special kind of patience to spend a salary’s worth of afternoons on ancient Mediterranean studies, to draw a wall, to weigh a sherd, to argue about a burn layer until the argument itself becomes a kind of craft. Thank God people go out and dig. I love them for it. What they hand a general reader is the compressed labor of thousands of hours. That bandwidth is the gift. I can sit with their results at two in the morning and ask what the weight of the discovery actually does to the historical narrative.

The gift is not the same thing as a verdict. I come out of aerospace, which is a culture that slings a thousand things at the wall at the same time and then forces smart people to defend their assumptions out loud. You get them in a room. You make them spell the claim. When they stumble—because the evidence is not quite obtained enough, not quite clear enough—you put a mark next to that line and you keep going. A 5-Why breakdown is just the civilian name for the same habit.[3] You are trying to get to the bottom. You often end with more questions than you started with. That is not failure. That is the work confessing that the universe is larger than the first memo.

So I read BAR the way I used to sit in those rooms. I take the facts they sweat for. I refuse to inherit the spellings they cannot finish. Conviction, if it is worth anything, has to be able to look a trench report in the eye and still ask the next why.

What These Pages Teach Better Than Almost Anything

If you want a working grasp of the land of Canaan, of Israel, of the First Temple and the Second, this magazine is still one of the best public teachers in the English language. It will not give you a Sunday-school flannelgraph. It will give you walls, seals, bullae, burnt rooms, inscription fights, and the slow humiliation of theories that looked inevitable in 1986. That is how you learn a period well enough to ask an intelligent question about what is not on the page.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the obvious example. Once you have sat with what those caves actually held—the textual habits, the calendar arguments, the purity rules, the war language—you can hear Second Temple Judaism thinking out loud.[4] You stop treating “what people believed” as a slogan. You start treating it as an artifact. Belief leaves residue. So does politics. So does fear. A society is whatever it bothers to bury, copy, smash, or hide in a jar.

That is also why I read this magazine as a student of business and politics, not only as a student of Scripture. If you are trying to build a company culture, you are already in the archaeology business. You are asking what a group worships when no one is watching, what it will pay for, what it will kill a project to protect, and what story it tells itself about why the last city fell. Civilizations rise for reasons. They decline for reasons. The reasons are never only economic and never only theological. They are psychological, liturgical, and military at the same time.[5] The Bronze Age did not end because a professor needed a chapter title. It ended because systems that looked permanent discovered they were not.

I like politics. I like business. I like understanding how cultures work so I can apply the lesson before the lesson applies itself to me. You cannot do that on vibes. You do it by watching how a people handled copper, kingship, covenant, and collapse when the outcome was still in doubt.

The Questions the Trench Reports Keep Leaving Off the Table

Here is where I stop being a grateful subscriber and start being the guy from aerospace with a marker in his hand.

Everybody who reads widely in this field knows the argument about Bronze Age copper and long-distance trade. I have said for years that North American copper belongs in that conversation. The Old Copper Culture of the Great Lakes was not a footnote. The people working the Keweenaw and Isle Royale were among the earliest miners and metalsmiths on the planet.[6] Mainstream archaeology is prepared to praise that fact and then change the subject when the next question arrives: where did all that copper go, and what does the timing do to the usual map of Bronze Age supply? I know the consensus answer. The consensus answer is that European and Near Eastern copper is accounted for by Old World mines, and that a transatlantic trade remains unproven.[7] Fair enough. Unproven is not the same as unaskable. In a review room, “we have not found the shipwreck yet” is a status report. It is not a gag order.

The same habit shows up closer to home. When I talk about stone monuments in northern Michigan—dolmens, capstones, arrangements that look like cousins of the chambers you can walk through in the British Isles and across Atlantic Europe—the geological reflex is always waiting. Displacement. Glaciers. The ice did it.[8] Ice did a great many things. Ice does not get a monopoly on every balanced stone in the Upper Midwest. We already know that people in the Great Lakes arranged rock on purpose. Under Lake Huron, on the old Alpena-Amberley Ridge, there are drive lanes and hunting blinds nine thousand years old. That is not a glacier having a hobby. That is a culture thinking in stone.[9] If a people can build that under what is now water, I am not required to call every terrestrial chamber an accident of meltwater.

I am not asking BAR to become a magazine of North American diffusionism. I am asking the older question the magazine itself taught me to ask: if you know a period well, you are obligated to notice the silence around it. Why this map and not the larger one? Why this set of ancestors and not the ones standing in the next drainage? Absence from a journal is not the same thing as absence from the world. Spilled milk can disappear from the fossil record. That does not mean the glass was never full.

Canaan, Yahweh, and the Politics That Did Not Stay in the Ground

Once you have a good grip on what the excavators actually know about Canaan and the highlands of Israel, you can ask the question the field sometimes treats as bad manners: what kind of culture was already there when the Hebrew Bible says Yahweh told a people to go in?[10] I do not treat that command as a campfire exaggeration and I do not treat it as a modern war-crimes pamphlet. I treat it as politics in the older sense—the ordering of a people under a claim about who runs the unseen world.

The Bible is not embarrassed by a populated heaven. Psalm 82 puts God on his feet in a council of gods and tells them they are going to die like men. Deuteronomy 32, in the reading preserved by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, says the nations were parceled out according to the number of the sons of God, while Yahweh kept Israel as his own portion.[11] That is not a children’s story. That is a jurisdictional map. Babel is the administrative crisis that precedes the map. The conquest traditions are what the map looks like when it reaches the ground. You do not have to like the theology to see the structure. You only have to stop flattening the text until it resembles a modern committee.

This is the argument of the book I have been writing, The Politics of Heaven. Blood, loyalty, and throne-claims do not stay in one register. They move between temples, palaces, and the beings the temples were built to negotiate with. If that sounds speculative from the cheap seats, I would only note that the Bible itself is less shy about the subject than many of its professional interpreters.[12]

Eve, the Fruit, and a Remark I Have Not Been Able to Shake

Most of my readers do not leave public comments. They send texts. They send emails. They would rather be known by a sentence than by a handle. One of them said something I have been turning over ever since: Eve was the original Ayn Rand.

It is a mischievous line, and it is sharper than it first sounds. Rand was an atheist who treated knowledge as security. Eve reaches for the fruit she was told not to eat because the fruit promises the knowledge of good and evil—which is to say, it promises a kind of coverage. If I can see the whole field, I will not be surprised. If I cannot be surprised, I might not need to trust. The serpent’s pitch is not “become wicked.” The serpent’s pitch is “become independently briefed.” That is a political offer. It is also a religious one. The two are not different departments in Genesis.

There is good and evil. That part is not subtle. There is also the other tree, the one that did not get eaten, the one that has to do with eternal life. We were built for a purpose and we fell out of the purpose. Ever since, there has been a disorder in the world that would prefer the purpose stay fallen. The snakes are still in the catalog. They still talk. They still offer fruit at the expense of every Adam who thought he could manage the garden by intelligence alone.

I am not above a joke when I say that Jesus was crucified in the middle of that argument. I am thinking of Job, and of Satan telling the court that loyalty is only loyalty until the invoice arrives.[13] I am thinking of the wilderness, with the kingdoms of the world placed on a ridgeline and the offer to jump, to seize, to save himself. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” is what it sounds like when a man refuses the offer and pays the price the offer was designed to avoid. If Eve reached for knowledge as security, the cross is the opposite transaction: knowledge of the worst thing, accepted without the security.

That is not a footnote to archaeology. It is the reason archaeology of the biblical world still matters to a person who also thinks about elections, companies, and the way a culture decides what it is allowed to notice. The past is not a museum. It is a set of unfinished negotiations.

How to Read a Magazine Without Becoming Its Disciple

The method is simple, and I commend it to anyone who is going to spend a night with BAR or with any other serious journal.

First, grant the labor. A published excavation is not a blog post. Treat it that way.

Second, separate the find from the frame. The wall is one fact. The paragraph that tells you what the wall “means for early Israelite state formation” is another fact, and a softer one.

Third, ask the aerospace question: can they spell the assumption without coughing? If the dating depends on a circular pottery sequence, say so. If the absence of evidence is doing the work of a conclusion, say so. If a whole continent has been ruled out because it would rearrange the lecture notes, say so.

Fourth, keep a second ledger for the questions the article makes possible and then declines to ask. Those questions are often the real harvest.

Fifth, take the night. Do not speed-read a civilization. The quiet is part of the instrument. A magazine like this is built for the hours when the house has stopped performing and a reader can finally hear himself think.

Why I Will Keep Subscribing

I can say the things I say about these topics because other people did the unglamorous work first. They published. I sat with what they published. Sometimes I said, that is not good enough. Sometimes I said, that changes the picture. Either way, the picture moved because they went into the ground.[14]

That is how you connect the past to the future without turning either into a costume. You learn a period until you can feel its joints. You watch what a people did when copper was wealth, when a temple was a government, when a scroll was a survival strategy. Then you look at your own shop floor, your own county, your own country, and you ask whether the same joints are moving.

If you have ever read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know I do not treat culture as decoration. Culture is the operating system. Archaeology is one of the few disciplines that lets you watch an operating system fail in slow motion and leave the wreckage where a later age can still touch it. That is why this magazine remains, for me, one of the best publications in the world. Not because it is always right. Because it keeps putting first-rate evidence in the hands of people who are willing to stay up with it.

My wife knew what kind of day I was having. She also knew the cure that would not insult the day by pretending it had been easy. She brought in the mail. She made the dumplings. She gave me the hours. It does not get any better than that.

Life is wonderful with or without the dumplings. It is more wonderful when the past arrives on the same plate.

Notes

The numbered notes in the essay appear as footnotes on each page. The list below is a reading path, not a claim that every title agrees with me. A good bibliography should be a room you can walk around in, not a unanimous chorus.

A Working Bibliography for Further Reading

Biblical Archaeology Review and the Public Craft

Biblical Archaeology Society. Biblical Archaeology Review. Washington, D.C., 1975–present. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/.

Cline, Eric H. “Larger Than Life.” Biblical Archaeology Society, February 8, 2021.

Shanks, Hershel, ed. Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1992.

Shanks, Hershel. The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1998.

VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

Collins, John J. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021.

Canaan, Israel, Judah, and the Temples

Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Mazar, Amihai, and Ephraim Stern. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 2, The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.

Dever, William G. Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017.

Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Finkelstein, Israel. The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013.

Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III. A Biblical History of Israel. 2nd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015.

Rainey, Anson F., and R. Steven Notley. The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World. 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Carta, 2014.

Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Ussishkin, David. Biblical Lachish. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2014.

Mazar, Eilat. The Palace of King David. Jerusalem: Shoham, 2009.

Faust, Avraham. The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012.

Killebrew, Ann E. Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.

Levy, Thomas E., ed. Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future. London: Equinox, 2010.

Bronze Age Worlds, Collapse, and Trade

Cline, Eric H. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

Cline, Eric H. After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Yoffee, Norman, and George L. Cowgill, eds. The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988.

Drews, Robert. The End of the Bronze Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Broodbank, Cyprian. The Making of the Middle Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kristiansen, Kristian, and Thomas B. Larsson. The Rise of Bronze Age Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Kristiansen, Kristian. “The Rise of Bronze Age Peripheries and the Expansion of International Trade.” In Trade and Civilisation, edited by Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Lindkvist, and Janken Myrdal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Roberts, Benjamin W., and Christopher P. Thornton, eds. Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective. New York: Springer, 2014.

Radivojević, Miljana, et al. “The Provenance, Use, and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age.” Journal of Archaeological Research 27 (2019): 331–98.

Muhly, James D. Copper and Tin. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973.

Kassianidou, Vasiliki, and A. Bernard Knapp. “Archaeometallurgy in the Mediterranean.” In The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory, edited by Emma Blake and A. Bernard Knapp. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Great Lakes Copper, Stone, and the North American File

Pompeani, David P., et al. “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale.” Radiocarbon, 2021.

Wade, Lizzie. “Great Lakes people among first coppersmiths.” Science 371, no. 6536 (2021): 1299.

Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Pleger, Thomas C. “A Brief Introduction to the Old Copper Complex of the Western Great Lakes.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 82 (2001).

O’Shea, John M., and Guy A. Meadows. “A 9,000-year-old caribou hunting structure beneath Lake Huron.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 19 (2014): 6911–15.

Howey, Meghan C. L., et al. “Geospatial modeling approach to monument construction using Michigan from A.D. 1000–1600 as a case study.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 29 (2016).

Griffin, James B. “The Late Prehistory of the Ohio Valley.” In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1978.

Cunningham, Wilbur M. A Study of the Glacial Kame Culture in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948.

Squier, E. G., and E. H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1848.

Fell, Barry. America B.C. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. Read as a document in the history of a controversy, not as a closed case.

Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries. 10th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. The standard skeptical counterweight.

Midgley, Magdalena S. The Megaliths of Northern Europe. London: Routledge, 2008.

Divine Council, Genesis, and the Unseen Politics of Scripture

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God.” Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001): 52–74.

Heiser, Michael S. “Divine Council.” In Lexham Bible Dictionary, edited by John D. Barry et al. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012.

Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Day, John. Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

Mullen, E. Theodore, Jr. The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980.

Boyd, Gregory A. God at War. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997.

Walton, John H. The Lost World of Genesis One. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009.

Walton, John H. Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.

Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis. New York: Schocken, 1966.

Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses. New York: Norton, 2004.

Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Random House, 1995.

Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003.

Culture, Business, and Why the Past Still Issues Orders

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. New York: Productivity Press, 1988.

Schein, Edgar H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 5th ed. Hoboken: Wiley, 2017.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History. 5 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956–1987.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, 1959.

Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Scott, James C. Against the Grain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Jordan, the East Bank, and the Neighbors the Text Will Not Leave Alone

MacDonald, Burton. East of the Jordan: Territories and Sites of the Hebrew Scriptures. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2000.

Bienkowski, Piotr, ed. Early Edom and Moab. Sheffield: J. R. Collis, 1992.

Dearman, J. Andrew, ed. Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989.

Routledge, Bruce. Moab in the Iron Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Herr, Larry G., and Douglas R. Clark. “Madaba Plains Project.” Multiple season reports in Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.

Savage, Stephen H., and Steven E. Falconer. “Spatial and Temporal Trends in Levantine Settlement.” Journal of Archaeological Science, various.

A note on method. I have not required the bibliography to agree with me, and I have not required myself to agree with the bibliography. That is the same rule I bring to Biblical Archaeology Review. Read the people who dug. Read the people who doubt the people who dug. Then keep the night watch and decide which assumptions still refuse to be spelled.

[1] Biblical Archaeology Review (ISSN 0098-9444) has been published by the Biblical Archaeology Society since March 1975. The magazine is presently issued quarterly. See “About Biblical Archaeology Review,” Biblical Archaeology Society, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/magazines/.

[2] Hershel Shanks (1930–2021), a Washington lawyer turned editor, founded the Biblical Archaeology Society in 1974 and launched BAR in March 1975. He remained editor-in-chief until 2018. See Eric H. Cline, “Larger Than Life,” Biblical Archaeology Society, February 8, 2021; and “Setting the BAR,” Biblical Archaeology Society, 2025.

[3] The 5 Whys method is associated with Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System. It is a root-cause drill: ask “why” until the chain of causation is exposed. In aerospace and other high-reliability cultures the same spirit appears as assumption-busting reviews, red teams, and formal failure analysis. See Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System (New York: Productivity Press, 1988).

[4] On the Dead Sea Scrolls as a window into Second Temple belief, see James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); and Hershel Shanks, ed., Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Random House, 1992).

[5] On collapse and regeneration as a comparative problem, see Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); and Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, eds., The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).

[6] David P. Pompeani et al., “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale,” Radiocarbon (2021); and Lizzie Wade, “Great Lakes people among first coppersmiths,” Science 371, no. 6536 (2021): 1299. Sediment and radiocarbon work now places intensive Great Lakes copper working as early as ca. 9500 years ago, peaking roughly 7000–5000 years ago.

[7] The hypothesis that Lake Superior native copper supplied Bronze Age Europe remains outside the archaeological consensus. Mainstream syntheses locate European copper in Alpine, Iberian, Balkan, Cypriot, and British Isles sources. See Benjamin W. Roberts and Christopher P. Thornton, eds., Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective (New York: Springer, 2014); and “The Provenance, Use, and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age,” Journal of Archaeological Research 27 (2019). I record the disagreement rather than pretend it does not exist.

[8] On European and Levantine dolmens, see Magdalena S. Midgley, The Megaliths of Northern Europe (London: Routledge, 2008); and James L. Swauger, work on petroforms and stone constructions in the Upper Great Lakes. Geologists commonly classify northern Michigan capstone-and-pedestal arrangements as glacial erratics. I do not find that explanation sufficient for every specimen.

[9] John M. O’Shea and Guy A. Meadows, “A 9,000-year-old caribou hunting structure beneath Lake Huron,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 19 (2014): 6911–15. The Alpena-Amberley Ridge drive lanes are a reminder that stone work in the Great Lakes is not exhausted by the glacial-dumping story.

[10] On the archaeology of Canaan, Israel, and Judah in the Iron Age, standard entry points include Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday, 1990); Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (New York: Free Press, 2001); and William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). I read all three and do not baptize any of them.

[11] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015); and Heiser, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001): 52–74. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint support “sons of God” rather than “sons of Israel” at Deuteronomy 32:8.

[12] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (author’s edition); and Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). Related essays appear at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

[13] Job 1–2; Luke 4:1–13; Matthew 4:1–11. The Accuser’s wager in Job and the wilderness temptations of Jesus are two scenes in the same political drama: a claim on loyalty, tested under pressure, with the kingdoms of the world placed on the table.

[14] Biblical Archaeology Society All-Access membership presently includes the print magazine, the digital BAS Library (every issue of BAR since 1975, plus Bible Review and Archaeology Odyssey), lecture video, and curated collections. See https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/.

Rich Hoffman

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Amy Acton’s Labor Day Meltdown: The Fake-Assassination Sympathy Play, her Jussie Smollett Moment of Fake News

I have watched this movie before. In 2015 and 2016, and again in 2024, the same class of people tried to tell America that Donald Trump’s wealth was a character defect. They said a rich man could not be trusted, that success itself was the indictment, that gold, planes, and golf were proof he was “not like you.” Voters put him in the White House twice anyway, because they understood something the professional scolds never will: independence is an asset. A man who does not need the job is harder to own. That is the lesson Ohio Democrats and a handful of leftover Republican wreckers are now trying to unlearn with Vivek Ramaswamy, and it is why Amy Acton spent Labor Day weekend screaming that you cannot buy Ohio.

She needed a chant. What she got was a gaffe.

The Speech That Sounded Like a Person Running Out of Road

Watch the clip. Acton is at a union picnic with Pete Buttigieg in tow, doing the ritual of the lockdown years: I am a doctor, not a politician, becoming one right in front of your eyes. Then she starts barking that Vivek cannot buy the state, cannot buy Ohio, cannot buy us, cannot buy us, cannot buy us in Ohio, that is the end of this. It is the sort of thing a campaign writes on a whiteboard when the internals look ugly and the only remaining argument is envy. The crowd does not catch fire. She looks like she is trying to start a wave at a funeral.

This is the same Amy Acton Ohio already knows. She ran public health under Mike DeWine when the state was locked down, businesses were smashed, kids were sent home, and “follow the science” became a political religion. She collected awards for it. A lot of Ohioans collected unemployment, missed funerals, and watched their Main Streets die. You can call that public service if you like. I call it the record she has to run on, and it is why the “I’m just like you” routine lands like a lead pipe. She is not just like you. She is the woman who told you to stay home while the people who write the rules kept their salaries.

The wealth attack is even thinner. Vivek flew to watch tennis. He likes tennis. He used to be a ranked junior. He has a court. He went to the U.S. Open and he has been to Paris. Wealthy people do that. Trump never ran from Mar-a-Lago or the golf course; he wore the gold clip and the silk tie and said, yes, I did well, and if you vote for me I will try to make it so you can do well too. That is a producer’s message. Acton’s message is the opposite: he has money, therefore he is illegitimate, therefore hand the keys to the people who want to tax the successful and redistribute the proceeds to the discontented. That is not a governing philosophy. That is a ransom note.

Why Attacking Wealth Is a Loser’s Tell

I have been thinking lately about the Apostle Paul. He was effective in part because he had standing and independence. He was not a ward of the movement. He could travel, argue, and endure because he was not begging the crowd for his next meal. Politics is not the church, but the principle is the same. A candidate who has already won in the private economy does not need Columbus the way a career public-health administrator needs Columbus. Vivek does not need a government job. That is supposed to be a feature. The people yelling “you can’t buy Ohio” are announcing that they cannot raise comparable money and cannot compete on growth, so they will compete on resentment.

David Pepper and the rest of the chorus have been working this line for months: billionaire, private jet, not one of us. Fine. Then explain why Trump’s jets and clubs did not stop two national victories, and why Ohioans who want plants, capital, and jobs might prefer a man who has already built companies to a woman whose signature achievement was closing the state. You can dislike Vivek’s style. You can argue policy. What you cannot do, with a straight face, is pretend that enjoying a tennis match is a civic crime while the alternative is more of the administrative state that already had its turn.

The other half of this farce is intra-Republican sabotage. After a primary, Democrats lock arms around whoever they nominated, even when she sounds like a chalkboard dragged down a stairwell. A slice of the right still wants to pick the scab. Nick Fuentes types, leftover primary rivals, the professional “I told you so” circuit—anyone who would rather be right about a Republican’s flaws than win the state—keep feeding the same clip. They did it to Trump in 2016 and 2024. He won anyway because voters vote their interest when the noise dies down. A good economy and job creators in your state beat a sermon about how the other guy’s plane is too nice.

Then Came the Fair, and the Overnight Conversion of a Shove Into an Assassination Plot

The timing is the tell. After the Labor Day chant made her look unhinged, the campaign needed a new story. Sunday at the Canfield Fair, a 38-year-old local named Patrick Havas pushed through a tent crowd toward Acton with a phone up, as if he were recording or trying to get close enough to be seen. He knocked over older people. Security took him down. After the fact, deputies found two pistols and a Taser-style device on him. He did not draw the guns. He did not fire. He did not brandish. Ohio is a constitutional-carry state. Carrying is not the same thing as attempting murder. The charges reported were disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault for the people he knocked down. Acton was unhurt. The people who fell were assessed and, according to the sheriff, did not seek further treatment.

That is a bad scene at a fair. It is not a martyrdom. Campaign statements still said an “armed individual lunged” and injured multiple people. National copy followed the verb. By Saturday night into Sunday the lead was written as if Ohio had just watched a political assassination attempt. If there were clean video of a man trying to kill her, it would have been on every screen before supper. What we got instead was language inflation: lunge, attack, armed, threat—while the actual police story is a large man barreling for a better look or a confrontation, knocking seniors like bowling pins, and getting piled on by Highway Patrol.

This attack story is just another Democrat Jussie Smollett story, trying to gain sympathy and voter support through fake news talking points. This is the fullness of the Acton operation: when the speech is a disaster, change the subject to danger. When you cannot raise on growth, raise on fear. When you cannot debate or raise money, accuse the other side of buying the state. Look how many sucker politicians jumped on the bandwagon without knowing all the facts, which again came out looking like Amy Acton is a loser candidate.

What Ohio Actually Chooses When the Cameras Leave

Acton will keep the unions, the people who want the next transfer payment, and the media that still thinks 2020 was her finest hour. She will keep Pepper on the ticket as proof that the old Democratic machinery is still in the room. She will keep calling Vivek rich, which he is, and hoping Ohio has forgotten that successful people are allowed to like tennis, football Saturdays, and a life that is not a permanent campaign stop.

I want a state that recruits producers instead of lecturing them. If a man with a billion dollars in assets spends a few thousand to fly to a match, that is not the scandal. The scandal is a political class that treats his success as the crime and her lockdown résumé as the credential. Trump never apologized for winning. Vivek should not apologize for a court, a jet, or a seat at the Open. The people who need him to grovel are the same people who needed Trump to grovel. They lost that argument twice.

Vote like you want the factories and the payrolls. When things got tough for Amy Acton in 2026 she turned to fake news. Which only made everything worse. She is the lockdown lady and is horrible in every way a politician can be, which we all had a front-row seat to in 2020 when she destroyed Ohio’s economy and told everyone they could be superheroes if only they wore a mask in public. That is the person running for governor in Ohio as a Democrat. A disaster on a good day. On a bad day, she is a fake news agent of destruction and drunkenness.

Notes

1. Acton’s Labor Day-weekend remarks with Buttigieg at the Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic, including the “you cannot buy this state / you can’t buy us” repetition, circulated widely on September 5–6, 2026. See WLWT coverage of the Hamilton picnic and contemporaneous rally video.

2. Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director under Gov. Mike DeWine beginning in 2019 and became the public face of the state’s COVID restrictions.

3. Criticism of Ramaswamy’s travel and tennis included Acton’s own Labor Day-weekend post attacking a U.S. Open appearance and earlier opinion pieces on a July 4 Paris trip.

4. Ramaswamy’s tennis background (junior player, Cincinnati Open ball boy, regular Open attendee) is part of his public biography and prior campaign videos.

5. Canfield Fair incident, September 6, 2026: Patrick Havas, 38, of Canfield, pushed through the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent, knocked down older attendees, was detained by Ohio State Highway Patrol executive protection; weapons recovered after detention; no brandishing reported; charges reported as disorderly conduct and two counts of misdemeanor assault. Acton uninjured.

6. Constitutional carry in Ohio means possession of a concealed firearm, without more, is not itself an assassination attempt.

7. Public polling through late summer 2026 generally showed a toss-up to slight-Ramaswamy edge depending on the house, which is consistent with a campaign hunting for a reset narrative.

8. Intra-GOP sniping after contested primaries is a recurring feature of the Trump era; Democrats have typically consolidated faster around flawed nominees.

Bibliography

Acton for Governor. Campaign statements and Labor Day / Canfield Fair remarks, September 2026.

Ballotpedia. “Amy Acton.” Candidate biography and office history.

CNN. “Armed man arrested after pushing through crowd toward Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee.” September 6, 2026.

Columbus Dispatch. “Armed man arrested after lunging at Amy Acton at Canfield Fair.” September 6, 2026.

Cincinnati Enquirer. Nick Anderson, “Ramaswamy’s Paris trip an example of his disconnect with Ohioans.” July 8, 2026.

HuffPost. “Vivek Ramaswamy Slammed For Leaving Ohio And Attending The U.S. Open.” September 6, 2026.

Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office / Ohio State Highway Patrol statements on the Canfield Fair detention of Patrick Havas, September 6, 2026.

New York Times. “Armed Man Arrested After Charging Toward Democratic Candidate for Ohio Governor.” September 6, 2026.

The Nerd Stash. “‘You Can’t Buy Us’: Ohio Dem Amy Acton Sparks Backlash After Awkward Rally Chant Aimed at Vivek Ramaswamy.” September 6, 2026.

Washington Post. “Armed individual ‘lunged’ at Democrat nominee for Ohio governor, campaign says.” September 6, 2026.

Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” Polling averages and race ratings as of early September 2026.

WLWT. “Pete Buttigieg campaigns for Amy Acton, Greg Landsman at Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic.” September 6, 2026.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Lake America and the Copper That Built the Ancient World: Why the Indigenous-People Argument Cannot Survive

I did not build this media form to talk about local personalities and small topics of no consequence. That is the easy road. Local talk gets hits. Local talk gets popular. I am not interested in it. I am interested in a format that lets a person go down a rabbit hole and stay there long enough to think a thought they would not have thought if the show had been engineered for an audience. Years ago, the question that started the whole habit was simple: Are we getting what we want from the education of children for the money we spend on it? The answer, then and now, was no. The same question can be asked of budgets, housing policy, the relationship between business and politics, and the names we place on large bodies of water. The method does not change. Ask the question at the level it deserves. Invite people along. Do not pander.

Anyone watching consistently knows the season we are in. Trump is in the White House. People are looking around at midterms, the price of gas, the word socialism used as if it were weather. I cover business and politics because that is where the American system is supposed to work, and because the relationship between the two is not what a civics textbook pretends it is. I enjoy the hard half of the map. You will not turn on a typical podcast and get the information nobody wants to handle in the way it should be handled. If I am not performing for more viewers, that is the approach. I am trying to encourage people to come down the rabbit hole and take whatever treasure they can carry back out.

President Trump, as a manager of the executive branch, expects people like me to fill in the blanks when he throws something controversial on the table. He renamed Lake Ontario. He called it Lake America.[1] I have said before that the emphasis was not cartography. The emphasis was provocation. Change the name. Force the discussion. What does the fight actually mean? I do not want to be the man whose entire contribution is a seminar on indigenous grievance. I also will not pretend the fight is about courtesy to a lake. The fight is about whether the United States is allowed to name its own waters without first kneeling to a political story about 1492.

Commentary — on the executive order itself: The August 27, 2026 order changes how the United States government refers to the lake. USGS electronic products were updated within hours. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, answered that the lake is called Ontario “today and forever.” New York’s governor said the state would not use the new name. About half the surface sits on the Canadian side. The legal reality is narrower than the cultural explosion: Washington can rename what Washington prints. It cannot rename what Toronto says. That gap is exactly why a name becomes a weapon. If the gesture were only petty trade-war theater, it would have died in a news cycle. It did not, because names are how institutions catechize a public.

Are We Getting What We Want from the Names We Spend Our Authority On?

I wish academia were designed for American designs. I wish a lot of our institutions had not been captured long ago. The day Trump got on the plane after his first term, I describe that departure as exile because that is what it felt like to millions of people who watched a system treat their vote as a problem to be managed. I am not going to relitigate every precinct here. I am going to say what the naming fight is downstream of: an institutional habit of treating the creation of the United States as the original sin of the continent, and of treating every pre-Columbian name as a sacrament that cannot be touched.

My first real teacher in the long-form sense was Joseph Campbell. I have lived in those lectures. Campbell understood something our public schools will not admit out loud. A great deal of a human life is spent trying to locate a place in an order—am I toward the top of the pyramid or the bottom, boss or subordinate, the person who leads the meeting or the person who cuts the grass on the side of the road? Schools are bult to establish that sorting. They are much worse at asking whether the order itself is true.[2] The same instinct that makes a teenager measure himself by house, spouse, and income is the instinct that makes a grown population easy to herd. If you were an enemy of the human race—and I will argue, as I will argue in The Politics of Heaven, that there is a non-human intelligence, call it the spirit world, call it the counsel that set itself against God—you would not need a tank. You would need the human craving to fit in. You would use names. You would use the way a culture is taught to value things. You would make some words untouchable and other words shameful. Then you would watch decent people police each other in a destructive fashion.

That is why I do not treat the indigenous-people argument as a seminar in ethnography. Ethnography is welcome. Cultures are fascinating. Their stories, legends, and rituals offer a glimpse into another time, and there is still a great deal to learn. I want archaeologists extremely well funded, even rich. I want them in the dirt. I want to spend evenings with Biblical Archaeology Review and with site reports from the Upper Peninsula. What I will not do is let a political Smithsonian wrap a living tribal present around the entire deep past of the continent and then use that wrapping to undo the United States.

The Indigenous People Argument Is a Political Machine

The academic embrace I am talking about is not “study the Haudenosaunee.” Study them. Learn the language families. Read the longhouse constitution if that is your work. The embrace I mean is the 1619-shaped habit: Europe arrives, and the story of the continent becomes death, theft, and a fall from an innocent world.[3] You can hear the same structure in other theaters. I have read papers that treat the biblical conquest of Canaan as an original crime and the modern Jewish state as its sequel, as if Yahweh were a late ethnic mascot and the land had a single rightful pagan landlord. Pagan preference is not a conspiracy in the cheap sense. It is a religious preference with political teeth. Hollywood has been more honest about its Canaanite sympathies than universities have been about theirs.

If you are going to say “indigenous people of North America” and mean it as an academic sentence rather than a chant, you do not get to start the clock in 1492, or 1619, or even 1000 CE. You have to accommodate the Windover people of Florida. You have to accommodate the copper miners of Lake Superior. You have to accommodate the drowned stone lines in the Great Lakes. You have to accept that “the Indians Columbus met” were not a timeless essence. They were people who had already replaced other people, because that is what human beings do on every continent God made.

Windover: Florida, seven to eight thousand years ago

In a pond near Titusville, not far from where rockets now leave the coast, a housing-development backhoe in 1982 lifted human bone out of peat. The police were called. Then the dates came back. The Windover pond held the dead of an Archaic people who used that water as a cemetery for a thousand years. Something like 168 individuals. Brain tissue. Woven fiber. A last meal still readable in a woman’s gut. Seven to eight thousand years before the present.[4] That is not a footnote to 1492. That is a civilization of burial custom, craft, and landscape memory standing on this peninsula while the Near East was still learning the habits that would become Egypt and Canaan.

I do not want that site used as a club against living tribes, and I do not want living tribes used as a club against that site. I want the sentence said out loud: the people of Windover are part of the indigenous story of North America, and any politics that cannot find room for them is not a politics of the past. It is a politics of the present.

The Old Copper Complex: Lake Superior and the oldest metalworking on the continent

Lake Superior is one of the wonders of the world. I do not hide that. Put-in-Bay, Mackinac, the Upper Peninsula—I love the Great Lakes the way some people love mountains. Superior also contains one of the sharpest mysteries we have. The Keweenaw and Isle Royale hold native copper of a purity that still startles metallurgists. Prehistoric pits pock the trap rock. Hammerstones lie in the fill. Organic scraps caught in copper tools have been dated into the ninth millennium before the present. Sediment cores beside the old workings have been read as mining signatures even earlier. This is the Old Copper Complex: hunter-gatherers who learned to beat, float, and vein copper into points, knives, and ornaments long before the Mediterranean named a Bronze Age.[5]

Thousands of pits. Not a weekend hobby. Not a single village knocking a nugget into a bead. An industry measured in centuries.[6] And here is the part that detonates the pamphlet version of “indigenous people”: the pamphlet wants a single moral cast—timeless tribal nations, then Columbus. The copper will not sit still for that cast. The people who opened those pits are real indigenous people of this continent. Later nations of the Great Lakes are also real. They are not the same photograph. If genetics and archaeology cannot staple the miners of 7000 BCE to the specific tribes who met the French, then an honest academy says so. A political academy changes the subject.

Commentary — what is firm, and what is a leap? Two facts are no longer eccentric. First, Archaic people of the Upper Great Lakes worked native copper very early; some dates now rival the oldest copper work in the Old World. Second, the metal is so pure it can be hammered without the smelting regimes of Cyprus or Timna. The leap—and it is a leap—is to walk that copper across the Atlantic into Solomon’s Temple or the Copper Scroll. Isotope maps of Bronze Age Europe keep finding Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, Wales, the Arabah. They have not found Keweenaw so far. My question is still the right kind of question: given the volume of metal the ancient Near East burned through, are we sure we have inventoried every source? Asking is scholarship. Treating the crossing as proven is not. The force of this argument does not require the crossing. It only requires that “indigenous” be a timeline, not a verdict.

Stone under Grand Traverse Bay

Off Traverse City, in about forty feet of water, there is a line of stone that should have ended the slogan version of prehistory by itself. Mark Holley was looking for a shipwreck and found an arrangement that the press, lazy as ever, called a Stonehenge. Holley does not like the word, and he is right not to. What he has is a long alignment on a lakebed that was dry when the lakes stood lower, with at least one boulder that some eyes read as a mastodon. Mastodons were gone from this country early. If that mark is a mark, the calendar drops into the same deep water as the copper pits.[7] Lake Huron has a cleaner case: a caribou drive-lane on a drowned hunting ground, dated to the same general world. The lakes keep the memory the textbooks compress.

When lake levels were lower, people walked landscapes we now boat over. When the English Channel was a valley, people walked to France.[8] We know migration at continental scale is not a fantasy; the first peopling of the Americas is itself a migration argument that still shifts every decade. The silly statement is not “people moved.” The silly statement is “nobody crossed open water until a Genoese sailor on a Spanish payroll made it official.” If you can keep a craft on water for forty days, you can cross an ocean. Genesis is not a Coast Guard manual, but it is a reminder that the ancient imagination did not think of the sea the way a modern tenure committee does.

The Moon-eyed people and the honesty of replacement

The Cherokee have a grievance against Andrew Jackson that American history already knows how to spell. Trail of Tears is not a rumor. Before that road west, though, Cherokee memory—or the memory settlers wrote down as Cherokee—said something else. When they came into the Smokies and the southern Appalachians, they found people already there. The printed versions call them moon-eyed: pale, light-shy, night-working, driven out when the moon was too bright for their eyes.[9] I am not asking a jury to convict a ghost. I am asking for a simple courtesy with the word “indigenous”. If the Cherokee displaced someone, then the Cherokee, in that hour, were not the first people of that ridge. They were the latest people of that ridge. That is not an insult. That is the human story from the Levant to the Andes. The political use of “indigenous” is an attempt to freeze one frame and call it eternity.

Lake Ontario was named from an Iroquoian language for the beauty of its waters. That is a good name. It is also a name that belongs to the people who happened to be in the neighborhood when the French and the English arrived.[10] They were not the copper miners of Superior. They were not the pond people of Windover. They were not a moral veto on the United States. Trump’s point in calling the water Lake America is not that Iroquoian speech never touched the shoreline. His point is that the lake is part of the American system and that the American system is allowed to say so.

What Lake America Is Actually For

Canada to the north and Mexico to the south are not mysterious to anyone who leaves their living room. The pressure on this country does not arrive only as an army. It arrives as policy language, corporate structure, United Nations furniture, and a habit of treating American particularity as an embarrassment. You see it when you get out of your comfort zone and talk to people who have memorized the indigenous-people argument the way an earlier generation memorized a catechism. The argument is doing work. The work is not respect. The work is to loosen the country’s name from the land.

So Trump changes the name. He did it with the Gulf.[11] He did it with the lake. He knows what happens next. People like me have to pick up the bone and worry about it. Museums will say he is contaminating their dialogue. Activists will say a lake is off-limits because an Iroquoian word was spoken over it four centuries ago. Fine. That reaction is the evidence. If the goal were respect for living nations, there are a hundred quieter instruments. The volume of the outrage is the tell. The goal, in the political use of the word, is to make the United States feel like a squatter in its own house.

I live in a state that still has to fight over Columbus. Columbus, Ohio, spends a remarkable amount of official energy trying to apologize for its very existence. I think that is a dumb way to run a civic conversation. Study every culture. Steal nothing sacred to a living people. Do not, as a substitute for thought, declare an entire European arrival illegitimate and then act surprised when the country loses the will to name a lake.

The Copper Scroll: Stop Asking Only Where It Went

I love the Dead Sea Scrolls. If I were not already married, I would marry them. I do not even think of that period as very ancient. The men of Qumran look, to my eyes, like a reform party inside a tired establishment—less temple museum, more faction. Call the comparison reckless. I will live with it. The Essenes against the institutions of their day; a populist temper against a collaborationist temper; Greek and Roman state-theory pressing from the outside. The names change. The pattern does not.[12]

Among those texts is the one I cannot leave alone: the Copper Scroll. Hershel Shanks, who did as much as any American to bring the Scrolls to light, wrote the book I keep on my desk.[13] It is a treasure inventory beaten into metal so it would not rot. Gold. Silver. Vessels. Caches. A map with the patience of a bookkeeper and the nerves of a man who thinks the Temple is about to die. People have hunted the deposits for seventy years. The holes come up empty, or they come up as someone else’s cellar.

The question everyone asks is: where did the treasure go? That is a fair question. I want a different one sitting beside it: where did the metal economy that made such a list thinkable come from? Copper is the quiet member of the family. The Temple accounts shine with gold, but the older world runs on copper. Bronze is copper that learned a second metal. The floor, the fittings, and the industry behind a sanctuary are not gilding. They are tonnage.

Nelson Glueck pointed at Timna and the Arabah and said, Solomon. The next generation of archaeologists rolled their eyes and gave the shafts to New Kingdom Egypt and to Midian. Then the radiocarbon clocks were wound again, and the tenth century—the horizon of David and Solomon—came back into the slag heaps.[14] I am glad of that. Local ore matters. I do not need to steal Timna from the map to ask whether Timna is the whole map. The ancient Mediterranean and the Levant were hungry for metal for a very long time. Cyprus, Sinai, the Arabah, the Alps, later Spain: these are the names the textbooks allow. Lake Superior is the name they treat as a category error.

I am going to keep treating it as a question. Native copper you can pluck, and hammer is a different proposition from sulfide ore you must smelt in a desert with ten thousand trees. If there was a way to move Superior metal, there was a reason to try. People in the Ohio country walked hundreds of miles for obsidian. We do not call them insane. We call them traders. Stretch the same instinct across a colder ocean, in an age when the shelves were wider, and the boats were not as primitive as our pride requires, and you have a hypothesis. Hypotheses are what academies are for, when academies remember.

Commentary — the Copper Scroll’s date, and the temptation of a single pipeline. Almost every specialist dates the Copper Scroll to the first century CE, as a list of Temple or sectarian deposits hidden against Rome. It is not a Bronze Age shipping manifesto. I treat the scroll as proof that ancient people recorded metal the way a state records oil, and then he asks whether the earlier, much larger copper hunger of the third and second millennia had sources we have undercounted. That is a legitimate historical appetite. What does not follow is a closed circuit: Superior pit to Solomonic floor to Qumran roll to later Islamic treasuries financing 1948. Each arrow in that circuit needs its own evidence. The first arrow is the one archaeology can actually test—with isotopes, with wreck cargoes, with smelting slag. Until those tests speak, the circuit is a storyboard. Storyboards are how books begin. They are not how cases close.

I will treat the speculative part as speculation, not a sermon dressed as a lab report. I think some of the metal listed in later memory, and some of the metal that built earlier sanctuaries, is easier to explain if the Superior district is allowed onto the trade map. I think caches get found by the wrong people over centuries. I think private holdings are a perfectly ordinary grave for a public treasure. I have even said, in the talk that became this essay, that old metal can become seed money for later politics, including politics aimed at a Jewish state. That sentence will get me blocked from rooms I wasn’t already invited to. So be it. I would rather over-ask than pretend the copper only ever moved as far as a museum caption allowed.

Copper, Lightning, and What We Forgot How to Say about Power

The Temple stories are not shy. Glory fills the house. Fire answers a prophet. A presence is described as having weight.[15] Copper is a conductor. Gold is a conductor. If you were going to build a room in which a people expected God to arrive the way a storm arrives, you would not build it out of wool. I do not need a YouTube priest of “Egyptian lightbulbs” to notice that. I also do not need to turn Yahweh into a battery. The Bible’s own language is already more interesting than the gadget version. The point is that the builders were not decorating. They were making a place that could bear a presence. Metal was part of that theology, not an afterthought from the gift shop.

Plato’s orichalcum—copper with a second metal in it, a gleam the Greeks could not quite leave alone—belongs to the same family of memories.[16] Ayn Rand, who is not an archaeologist and did not mean to be, wrote a little book about a city that forgot electricity so completely that it had to reinvent the lamp and the word “I”. That is Anthem. I point people to it because it is a moral picture of technical amnesia, not because I think Atlantis filed a patent.[17] We have forgotten more than we know. That sentence is not a license to claim every glyph is a circuit diagram. It is a license to stay humble about the inventory.

Göbekli Tepe, Hopewell earthworks, British alignments, the drowned lines under our lakes: I do not stitch them into one empire. I notice that ritual landscapes rhyme more often than chance should allow, and I notice that people under intoxication and under prayer have always claimed they were not alone in the room.[18]. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to take that claim seriously as politics—not as mood, not as metaphor. If there are wills other than human wills, they will not confine themselves to Sunday school. They will show up in the naming of lakes.

What I Want from Academia, and What I Will Do Without It

I want American archaeology. Not a European import of Marx with better maps. Not a campus that treats Columbus as a contaminant and the United States as a mistake that can be renamed out of existence. I want papers. I want dates. I want some graduate student with a better spectrometer than my opinions to take the Superior question and either kill it or keep it alive on evidence. I will read the kill-shot if it is a real one. I will not accept a sneer in place of a date.

I cover politics and business and Iran and the rest of the board because that is the world in which these arguments cash out. Trump throws a ball. Commentators pick it up. Other shows lift a line while I am asleep at two in the morning. That is the only revenue I actually care about: the advance of the idea. Fortune and glory are enjoyable when you can get it. But, the real wage is that someone eating Fritos in a dark kitchen looks out the window and realizes the indigenous-people argument he was handed in school cannot survive contact with a copper pit that is older than the pyramids’ reputation.

My wife says I am blacklisted again. I am blacklisted everywhere, on everything, by everybody who needs the story to stay simple. I am used to it. This forum exists so that truth has a place to sit when the institutions are otherwise occupied.

The Name on the Water

Call it Lake America. Not because the Iroquois never saw it. Because the Iroquois were not the beginning of the story, and they are not the end of the American claim. The copper miners of Superior, the burial people of Windover, the builders who stacked stone on a dry bay floor—those are indigenous facts. The political slogan that uses “indigenous” to unmake the United States is not a fact. It is a maneuver.

Trump understood the maneuver well enough to answer it with a Sharpie and a map. He can do that from the Resolute Desk. The rest of the work is ours. Follow the copper. Follow the names. Follow the will that taught a nation to be ashamed of its own reflection in a lake. That will is not only human. And if we really want to say “indigenous people,” shouldn’t we point to the Moon-eyed people and give them the credit?

NOTES

[1] Donald J. Trump, Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America for U.S. federal usage, signed August 27, 2026. Coverage: Reuters; BBC News; CNN Politics; New York Times, August 27–28, 2026. The order directs the Department of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days. It binds U.S. federal maps and communications; it does not bind Canada, New York State, or international bodies.

[2] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Campbell’s recurring concern is not career-ladder ranking but the inner work of finding a vocation larger than the self—“follow your bliss”—against a society that sorts people into stations.

[3] 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine (August 2019), Nikole Hannah-Jones et al. The Project’s framing of 1619 as the nation’s “true founding” produced a large scholarly rebuttal literature (see the later bibliography). It is cited here as the type of academic-political narrative the speaker is arguing against, not as a monograph on Great Lakes prehistory.

[4] Windover Archaeological Site, Brevard County, Florida. National Historic Landmark. Radiocarbon dates on the pond burials cluster roughly 8,000–7,000 years before present (Early/Middle Archaic). At least 168 individuals were recovered, with exceptional preservation of brain tissue, textiles, and wooden artifacts. See Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

[5] Old Copper Complex / Old Copper Culture of the western Great Lakes. Reliable dates on organic material embedded in copper artifacts run from roughly 8500 to 3580 cal BP; sediment-geochemistry work around Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula has been used to argue mining signatures as early as ~9500 years ago, with a peak often placed between ~7000 and 5000 cal BP. See Pompeani et al., Radiocarbon (2021); Pompeani et al., The Holocene (2015); Milwaukee Public Museum, Old Copper Culture collections.

[6] Isle Royale and Keweenaw native copper. The Lake Superior district contains the world’s largest concentration of native (nearly pure) copper. More than a thousand prehistoric pits have been recorded on Isle Royale alone. See National Park Service, “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.”

[7] Grand Traverse Bay stone alignment, Lake Michigan, identified in 2007 by underwater archaeologist Mark Holley during sonar survey. Stones lie about 40 feet down. Popular press labeled the site “Michigan’s Stonehenge”; Holley has repeatedly objected to that label and described a long linear arrangement rather than a henge. A possible mastodon image on one boulder remains unverified by a broad scholarly consensus. A better-documented submerged hunting structure of similar age is the Drop 45 Drive Lane in Lake Huron.

[8] Post-glacial sea level and Doggerland. During the early Holocene the English Channel and much of the southern North Sea were dry or marshy land (Doggerland), allowing pedestrian movement between Britain and the Continent until progressive inundation through the Mesolithic. This is mainstream Quaternary geology. Transatlantic crossings in that same era are a separate, and far more contested, claim.

[9] Cherokee “moon-eyed people.” Early printed versions appear in Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797), reporting that the Cherokee said they found and expelled a “moon-eyed” people who could not see well by day. Later treatments include John Haywood (1823) and James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900). Modern Cherokee cultural authorities often treat the tale as minor or as settler-amplified folklore rather than a central tribal history. No archaeological culture has been securely identified with the legend.

[10] The name Ontario is widely derived from a Wendat (Huron) / Iroquoian form, often given as Ontari’io, commonly glossed “beautiful lake,” “great lake,” or “lake of shining waters.” European mapmakers used the name in the seventeenth century, well before Canadian Confederation (1867) or the Declaration of Independence (1776). See Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s August 2026 statement and standard Great Lakes toponymy.

[11] Gulf of America: Trump proclamation renaming the Gulf of Mexico for U.S. federal usage in 2025, the immediate precedent for the 2026 Lake America order.

[12] Essenes and Qumran. The consensus that the Dead Sea Scrolls community was Essene remains the majority view, with vigorous dissent. Comparing them to a modern populist reform movement is analogy, not identity. The “RINO / tyrant” mapping in the source talk is rhetorical, not a claim that second-temple parties were American parties.

[13] Copper Scroll (3Q15), Cave 3, Qumran, discovered 1952. Two oxidized copper rolls, later cut into strips at Manchester (1955–56). The text lists dozens of hiding places and large quantities of gold, silver, and vessels—commonly read as a Temple-treasure inventory from the late Second Temple period, not a Bronze Age document. See Hershel Shanks, The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007); Judah K. Lefkovits, The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation (Leiden: Brill, 2000); John M. Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (1960).

[14] Timna Valley and Wadi Arabah copper. Nelson Glueck popularized “King Solomon’s Mines” in the 1930s–40s. Later work showed major Late Bronze Egyptian-Midianite activity; more recent radiocarbon work by Erez Ben-Yosef and colleagues has restored a significant 10th-century BCE (United Monarchy-era) industrial peak at Timna, with large slag heaps and evidence of export. Glueck’s romantic label outran the first generation of evidence; the newer dates put industrial copper back on the table for the Solomonic horizon—without requiring a Great Lakes source. Lead-isotope work on Bronze Age metal in Europe and the Near East has so far pointed to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, the British Isles, the Arabah, and other Old World sources, not to Keweenaw.

[15] Biblical theophanies associated with fire and storm: Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8 (the glory filling Solomon’s Temple); 1 Kings 18 (Elijah and the prophets of Baal); Ezekiel 1. Copper and gold are specified in the Tabernacle and Temple building accounts (Exodus 25–40; 1 Kings 6–7). Ancient recognition that metals conduct and gleam is not the same thing as a reconstructed electrical grid.

[16] Plato, Timaeus and Critias. Orichalcum is described as a metal second only to gold in the Atlantis story. A 2015 shipwreck off Gela, Sicily, yielded ingots some researchers identified as an alloy consistent with classical descriptions of orichalcum (primarily copper with zinc). That find, even if the alloy identification holds, does not locate Atlantis in the Azores or prove a Great Lakes connection.

[17] Ayn Rand, Anthem (1938). The novella imagines a collectivist future that has forgotten electricity and the word “I.” The “Anthem” YouTube adaptations mentioned in the source talk are fan and classroom dramatizations, not a Disney property.

[18] Hopewell Interaction Sphere (approx. 100 BCE–500 CE) is millennia later than the Old Copper peak and Göbekli Tepe (c. 9600–8000 BCE). Formal similarity of earthworks or ritual geometry across such distances in time is a prompt for research, not proof of a single whispering “spiritual entity” or a single people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING

Naming, the executive order, and the Great Lakes BBC News. “Trump Signs Order to Rename Lake Ontario as Lake America.” August 27, 2026. CNN Politics. “Trump Signs Executive Order to Change Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America.’” August 27, 2026. Reuters. “Trump Renames Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ amid Canada Trade War.” August 27, 2026. The New York Times. “Lake Ontario Didn’t Ask for Trump to Rename It.” August 27, 2026. Hough, Jack L. Geology of the Great Lakes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958. Vogel, Virgil J. Indian Names on Wisconsin’s Map. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Windover and the deep Archaic South Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Doran, Glen H., and David N. Dickel. “Multidisciplinary Investigations at the Windover Site.” In Wet Site Archaeology, edited by Barbara A. Purdy. Caldwell, N.J.: Telford Press, 1988. Milanich, Jerald T. Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Purdy, Barbara A. The Art and Archaeology of Florida’s Wetlands. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991.

Old Copper Complex, Isle Royale, and Keweenaw Bebber, Michelle R., and Alastair J. M. Key. “Optimal Linear Estimation Modeling Supports Early Holocene Copper Tool Production in North America.” American Antiquity 87 (2022). Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Pleger, Thomas C., and James B. Stoltman. “The Archaic Tradition in Wisconsin.” In Archaic Societies, edited by Thomas E. Emerson et al. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Pompeani, David P., et al. “Copper Mining on Isle Royale 6500–5400 Years Ago Identified Using Sediment Geochemistry.” The Holocene 25 (2015). Pompeani, David P., et al. “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in North America.” Radiocarbon 63 (2021). Ritzenthaler, Robert E. “The Old Copper Culture of Wisconsin.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 38 (1957). National Park Service. “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.” nps.gov. Milwaukee Public Museum. “Old Copper Culture.” mpm.edu.

Drowned landscapes of the Great Lakes Holley, Mark. Field reports and public notes on the Grand Traverse Bay alignment. Northwestern Michigan College. O’Shea, John M., and Guy A. Meadows. “Evidence for Early Hunters beneath the Great Lakes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009). O’Shea, John M., et al. “A 9,000-Year-Old Caribou Hunting Structure beneath Lake Huron.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014). Lewis, C. F. M., and T. W. Anderson. Papers on post-glacial lake levels in the Huron and Michigan basins. Geological Survey of Canada.

Cherokee memory, Appalachia, and the moon-eyed people Barton, Benjamin Smith. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. Philadelphia, 1797. Haywood, John. The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. Nashville, 1823. Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900. Mooney, James. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. Chicago: Aldine, 1975 [1900]. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.

Dead Sea Scrolls and the Copper Scroll Allegro, John M. The Treasure of the Copper Scroll. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Lefkovits, Judah K. The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Puech, Émile. The Copper Scroll Revisited. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Shanks, Hershel. The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007. Shanks, Hershel. The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1998. VanderKam, James C., and Peter Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

Timna, Arabah, Solomon, and Near Eastern copper Ben-Yosef, Erez, et al. “A New Chronological Framework for Iron Age Copper Production at Timna.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 366 (2012). Glueck, Nelson. “On the Trail of King Solomon’s Mines.” National Geographic, February 1944. Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, and Mohammad Najjar. Studies of Iron Age copper production at Faynan / Wadi Arabah. Rothenberg, Beno. Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Yahalom-Mack, Naama, et al. Lead-isotope sourcing studies of Levantine copper.

Bronze Age metal provenance — the brake on a quiet Atlantic pipeline Ling, Johan, et al. “Moving Metals II: Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age Artefacts by Lead Isotope and Elemental Analyses.” Journal of Archaeological Science 41 (2014). Melheim, Lene, et al. “Shifting Networks and Mixing Metals.” PLOS ONE (2021). Pernicka, Ernst. Foundational papers on lead-isotope provenancing in the Aegean and Balkans. Williams, R. Alan. Studies of Great Orme copper and Atlantic Bronze Age distribution. Hauptmann, Andreas. The Archaeometallurgy of Copper. Berlin: Springer, 2007.

Alternative and contested Atlantic theses — read with the grain, and against it Fell, Barry. America B.C. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. The book that made a generation of amateurs certain and a generation of epigraphers furious. Jett, Stephen C. Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Kehoe, Alice Beck. Traveling Prehistoric Seas. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2016. McGhee, Robert. Critical essays on transoceanic contact claims; useful as a brake.

Temple, metal, and the language of presence The Holy Bible. Especially Exodus 19 and 25–40; 1 Kings 6–8 and 18; Ezekiel 1. Hurowitz, Victor Avigdor. I Have Built You an Exalted House. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992. Kitchen, Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Milgrom, Jacob. Leviticus. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001. Van Seters, John. The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Read as the academy’s counter-voice.

Atlantis, orichalcum, and technical amnesia as literature Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Rand, Ayn. Anthem. 1938. Reports on the 2015 Gela wreck ingots and the orichalcum identification debate. Forsyth, Phyllis Young. Atlantis: The Making of Myth. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980.

Campbell, order, and the inner politics of fitting in Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Campbell, Joseph, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

The political fight over founding stories Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al. “The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019. Wood, Gordon S., Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes. Letter of objection to the 1619 Project. The New York Times, December 2019. McClay, Wilfred M. Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. New York: Encounter, 2019. Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello. New York: Norton, 2008. Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration. New York: Liveright, 2014.

Hopewell, Göbekli Tepe, and the problem of rhyme across millennia Byers, A. Martin. The Ohio Hopewell Episode. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2004. Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, eds. Gathering Hopewell. New York: Springer, 2005. Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2012. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Rich Hoffman

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Ayn Rand, Elon Musk, Non-Human Intelligence, and the Eternal War on the Human Creator: Data Centers, Dolmens, Consciousness, and the Kaaba Stone in Mecca

I have been thinking about this for a long time, and the thoughts keep circling back like they always do when something important is trying to get out. American philosophy did not end with Ayn Rand. Human beings keep innovating. She was a powerful contributor to American thought and the American system of individual achievement, but philosophy is not a closed book. We keep going. What bothers me, what has always bothered me, is the character of the human spirit in her books and how that spirit keeps getting attacked in the real world. I look at the hatred directed at the creators, and I see something deeper than politics or economics. I see a pattern that stretches back before Abraham, before the Bible as we have it, into a world of giants, dolmens, fallen intelligences, and religions that look a lot like control systems.

Ayn Rand’s Heroes and the Rational Adult Mind That Still Misses the Eternal

I have always defended the producers in her stories. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, building according to his own vision. The men and women in Atlas Shrugged who refuse to apologize for creating value. John Galt. These are the characters who understand that achievement is moral. Yet something has always bothered me about the fully rational adult framework she used. She saw clearly the envy and the looters. She saw the morality of production. What she did not fully reach, in my view, is the layer underneath the learned adult mind.

Watch a toddler. I have done this with my own grandchildren. I try to meet them in their eternal aspect, not just as small physical packages that look like someone else in the family. The baby is learning by mimicry: the walk, the talk, the habits, the prejudices of the adults around them. Consciousness arrives already as something, then gets trained into the grooves of the culture. Children can still see outside the box. Adults often cannot. There is the old story from the war of the truck that would not fit under the bridge. All the officers and engineers were stuck until a kid suggested letting the air out of the tires. Simple. Outside the groove.

Psychedelics strip some of those learned limits. Ancient cultures knew this. The rituals around Göbekli Tepe and the Jordan Valley were not empty. The Teacher of Righteousness among the Essenes, a century or so before Jesus, was already working in a mystical stream that the later Christian story partly absorbed and redirected. Jesus emerging in the Galilee region is not an accident of geography. That land had already been thick with older practices. The Eucharist practices that closely resembled Greek mystery traditions north of Athens had been circulating for centuries. When you strip away adult prejudices, the question becomes obvious: is the body the consciousness, or is it a temporary vehicle for something that already exists?

I argue the latter. The older adult whose body is failing still carries the same eternal spirit behind the eyes. The physical form degrades. The consciousness does not. This is where I part company with pure Objectivism and with the hard materialist reading of consciousness that stops at the hardware. Elon Musk has read Rand. He has called Atlas Shrugged useful as a counterpoint to communism, though he says it needs to be tempered with kindness. He is not a hard-core Objectivist. His real drive is the expansion of consciousness across the universe, making humanity multi-planetary, and advancing AI so that intelligence itself can understand reality more fully. Curiosity is his guiding star. That is close to the creators’ spirit, but it is bigger than rational self-interest alone.

The Same Hatred That Hit Ayn Rand Now Targets Elon Musk and the Data Centers

Look at the pattern. The same kind of people who hated Rand’s uncompromising creators now hate Elon Musk. They hated him for Tesla. They hated him when he tried to cut wasteful spending. They show up on the National Mall to protest him. The hatred feels disconnected from ordinary disagreement. It has the flavor of something that reacts against any force that empowers the human race to become more than it currently is.

Data centers are the current flashpoint. I am strongly for them. They are the physical infrastructure of expanded human intelligence. They consume power and water. Local grids feel the strain. Bills can rise. Noise from cooling systems is real. In some polls, 71% of Americans express concern when one is proposed near them. The irony is thick. People who once carried copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead during the Tea Party years suddenly discover selective individualism when the factory of the mind appears in their backyard. It is easier to love the hero in a novel than when his power plant sits next door. The abstract principle is easy. The concrete implementation is hard. That does not make the principle wrong.

The deeper issue is philosophical. Data centers and AI force the question of what consciousness is. Is it locked inside the biological body forever, or can it be extended, preserved, transferred, and expanded through tools we build? Elon talks about brain-computer interfaces and spreading life to other planets. He stays close to the physical substrate. I go further. I think non-human intelligences have been manipulating the human story for a very long time, erasing footprints, using religions and cultural systems as control mechanisms. Anything that expands human capacity becomes a threat to that older order. The hatred of Musk and the hatred of Rand share that root.

Pre-Abrahamic World: Dolmens, Giants, Copper, and the Religions of the Fallen

Go back before the Hebrews. The Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians and never fully brought into the Western canon, records the story of the Watchers and the giants. That text should have been more central. People are discovering it now through popular channels, but the evidence was always there. The Jordan Valley is covered with dolmens from the Early Bronze Age. Large fields of them. Similar table-like megalithic tombs appear across Europe and into the British Isles. In North America there are stone constructions and earthworks that early observers compared to the Old World forms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, particularly in the Keweenaw, the Old Copper Culture was mining pure native copper on a large scale by 7000–5000 BCE, possibly earlier. Artifacts moved across the continent. Some researchers have argued for long-distance trade connections that mainstream archaeology still resists.

The same experts who misled the public on other matters now demand absolute trust in their claims about migration patterns and the impossibility of earlier contact. I am not required to give them that trust. Sea levels were lower twelve thousand years ago. Island-hopping routes across the Pacific were more available. The geometric and mathematical patterns that appear in distant places are not automatically a coincidence. The Wheel of the Giants near the Sea of Galilee sits in the same general region where later religious eruptions continued to occur. Jesus did not appear in a vacuum.

What was the religion of the people who built the dolmens and practiced in that landscape before the Hebrew arrival? What gods did they serve? The later duel between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel only makes sense if people already believed Baal could answer with fire. North American indigenous traditions contain figures and practices that echo Canaanite and broader Near Eastern patterns more closely than random parallel development would predict. The experts dismiss the connections. I keep looking at the ground.

The Black Stone, the Monolith, and Consciousness Transfer

The Black Stone in the eastern corner of the Kaaba is a physical object that Muslims circle and try to touch or kiss. The official explanation is clear: it is an act of following the Prophet’s example. One of the companions said he knew it was only a stone that could neither harm nor benefit, but he kissed it because he had seen the Messenger do so. Fair enough as far as it goes. The deeper history is older. The stone was already sacred in pre-Islamic Arabian pagan pilgrimage. Muhammad did not invent the reverence. He cleaned out the idols and redirected an existing sacred site. Circling seven times, the annual pilgrimage, the sacred enclosure—these were already in place among the tribes.

I look at that stone the way I look at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. An object that appears, catalyzes a leap in consciousness or culture, then continues to exert influence long after its origin is forgotten. Religions can function as programming languages for human groups. They can lock certain patterns of behavior and thought into place across generations. Some of those patterns serve the human race. Others appear designed to keep it fragmented, sacrificial, or subordinate. Islam’s historical expansion has often been framed as a victory and a display of dominance, built on conquered sites. That is not unique to one faith, but it collides hard with the American experiment, which was designed as a vehicle for individual consciousness to flourish rather than submit to collective religious or political control.

Christianity itself absorbed and redirected earlier practices. The Hebrew system still carried ritual elements that older powers could work with. The radical break that Jesus represented threatened those older arrangements. Non-human intelligence does not need to appear as little green men from space. It can operate through dreams, through psychedelic states, through recurring religious forms, through the static that certain people seem to hear and obey without understanding the source.

Collectivism, the Scapegoat, and the Continuing Attack on the Builder

The same people who once cheered when Elon stood near Trump now turn on him when the practical costs of building appear. Collectivism wears religious clothes or secular clothes. It always needs a scapegoat. The independent creator who refuses to apologize for winning becomes that scapegoat. Rand never fully cracked why the businessman-as-moral-hero failed to win over the culture. She stayed inside the rational adult frame. The hatred is older and deeper than economics. It is a hatred of the human spirit when that spirit refuses to stay small.

I see the data centers as the current concrete expression of the same fight. Expanding intelligence, expanding the reach of consciousness, giving ordinary people tools that were once reserved for the few—this is exactly what the older manipulative forces would want to slow or stop. The power and water arguments are real and must be handled honestly. Local communities deserve straight talk and real mitigation. That does not justify the deeper philosophical rejection of the very idea of scaled human intelligence.

I will keep arguing this. The body is the vehicle. Consciousness is older. The record in the ground, in the texts that almost made it into the canon, in the recurring sacred stones and geometric patterns, and in the irrational hatred directed at the builders of each new age all point in the same direction. American philosophy did not stop with Ayn Rand. Elon Musk is one of the living characters who force the question into the open. The rest of us get to decide whether we side with the creators or with the forces that have been trying to keep the human race in its place for a very long time.

Footnotes

1. On Elon Musk’s engagement with Atlas Shrugged as a counter to communism tempered by kindness, see contemporary reporting and his own public comments referencing Rand’s work alongside his broader curiosity-driven philosophy.

2. Jordan Valley and Levantine dolmens date primarily to the Early Bronze Age (roughly 3700–2000 BCE), with large fields documented east of the Jordan Rift; early European explorers noted formal similarities to Western European megaliths.

3. Old Copper Culture mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale began at least 7000–9500 years ago and produced extensive pure native copper artifacts traded across eastern North America.

4. The Newark Holy Stones (Decalogue Stone and Keystone) are regarded by the large majority of professional archaeologists and epigraphers as 19th-century forgeries.

5. The Black Stone of the Kaaba was already an object of pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage and veneration; Islamic tradition preserves the practice of touching or kissing it as emulation of the Prophet while explicitly denying that the stone itself possesses independent power.

6. The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) was preserved in the Ethiopian canon and contains the Watchers narrative; it influenced Second Temple Jewish thought and early Christian writers.

7. Local opposition to data centers frequently cites electricity demand comparable to small cities, water use for cooling, and noise; polling shows majority concern in many proposed locations while the long-term productivity and intelligence gains remain more abstract to nearby residents.

Bibliography for Further Reading

• Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943.

• Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.

• 1 Enoch (various critical editions and translations, including those based on the Ethiopian manuscripts).

• Fraser, James A. Studies on Early Bronze Age dolmens of the Levant and Jordan Valley.

• Pompeani, David, et al. Research on the chronology of prehistoric copper mining in the Lake Superior region (Radiocarbon, The Holocene, Anthropocene).

• Steimer-Herbet, Tara. Work on dolmens and tower tombs in Jordan.

• Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968.

• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.

• Biblical Archaeology Review (long-running coverage of Near Eastern sites, copper production, and Second Temple period).

• Primary Islamic historical sources on the Kaaba and Black Stone (Ibn Ishaq, al-Azraqi, and related early chronicles).

• Contemporary reporting and polling on data-center siting conflicts in the United States (2023–2026).

• Materials on the Teacher of Righteousness and the Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.

This is the ground I keep walking. The creators keep building. The older forces keep reacting. I intend to keep looking.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The New Jonathan Edwards Bible: I appreciate all the kind words

We’re going to go down a rabbit hole here for a bit, because we need to. The evil we are dealing with is pretty easy to beat. And the Bible is one of the best ways to beat it. I’ve confirmed that with a long journey and a lot of experience but for now, let me give you a great weapon to fight that evil. I was reading Biblical Archaeology Review the way I always read it when a new one comes to my mailbox. I take the day. I sit with the issue and I shut off the world to do what I enjoy most. I have been receiving that magazine since the 1970s, when it first came out, and it is still one of the happiest things I do with a stretch of quiet hours.¹ My wife understands that. Most people never see it. I do not usually talk about it. I think its time that we defend our American laws with a bibilical understanding and framework. And just let the Karl Marx lovers have their faces melt. I’m tired of them personally, and their ridiculous view of human affairs.

Then I saw an advertisement for a new study Bible centered on Jonathan Edwards,I wanted others to know it exists. I like the people who put it together and I want to see it sell successfully. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is out now from Thomas Nelson, New King James Version, general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard, who is a fantastic scholar. The publication date was August 18, 2026. It comes in hardcover, flexible Leathersoft, and genuine leather.² I already have more study Bibles than a reasonable person needs. I plan to make this the next one I put my hands on every day. I would suggest all my readers get a copy, and to use it so we can have much better discussions in the coming years. Do not let the God-hating Marxist left define our law-and-order society.

I would argue that Edwards shaped the moral weather that made the United States possible, in the 1730s and 1740s, in the First Great Awakening, from a pulpit in Northampton and from a mind that refused to separate joy in God from serious thought.³ I recommend getting the new Bible and living with it. That is the news. The rest is why the news landed on me the way it did.

The Bible in the Green Bag

The Bible I typically carry has been through airports all over the world. Soft pages. Maps in the back. Notes in every blank the editors left me. I have filled the margins to the end. It does not look ruined. It looks used. I could carry it another ten years, and it would still hold. I keep it in a green utility bag with my laptop, the phone, a charging brick, and whatever snack will survive security. One bag. One pass through the scanner. Then I sit at the gate and do what I have always done while a plane loads: I look at the maps, the timelines, the concordance, and a note I wrote two years ago in another terminal.

I am not opening it because I think God will only forgive me if the other passengers watch. I open it because I like it. I like the history that survived. I like the drawings. I like having a piece of the ancient world in my hands while the PA system talks about zone two.

That Carry Bible is not my only one. I keep going back to the Crossway ESV Archaeology Study Bible. I gave a softcover of that one to my youngest daughter. I kept the copy I use. It is a wealth of a book: the text, then the dirt beneath the text, the photographs, the sidebars, the sense that Abraham, Hezekiah, and Paul walked on actual ground.⁴ I first saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review years ago and kept it on the back burner until I bought it. A decade later, I still reach for it more than almost anything else on the shelf, because archaeology is the companion that keeps the stories from floating.

Then there is the MacArthur Study Bible a friend put in my hands on June 12, 2023. He wrote in the front. I did not ask for it. He was a retired Army colonel, later president of aerospace companies, and he valued the conversations we had about biblical context. He walked into the office, set down one of his favorites, and left. I keep it where I can see it from the chair.⁵

Those three sit in a kind of rotation: the traveler, the archaeologist, the gift. The Edwards volume is the first new study Bible in a while that I would consider letting the traveler retire to the shelf.

Museum of the Bible and a Pin from Qumran Country

My favorite day of 2026 so far was my birthday. I took a break from work. My wife and I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington. We are members. Besides the main reading room at the Library of Congress, that museum is my favorite place on earth, and inside it, my favorite gallery is the History of the Bible exhibit. You walk into architecture that evokes a cathedral. You watch the book move through languages, empires, paper, print, and culture. I am not talking about a private feeling there. I am talking about the measurable power a set of texts has had on human civilization.⁶

I carry a small pin from a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in the same bag. I do not want to forget that trip. The Teacher of Righteousness in the Qumran literature is, for me, one of the most compelling figures in Second Temple history. I do not flatten Jesus into that figure. I do not need to. A man is born into a world that already has a language, a priesthood, a Roman shadow, and a set of arguments about purity and power. John the Baptist and Jesus both make more sense when you have sat with the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Pesher, and the people who left Jerusalem’s gravity for the desert.⁷ The Essenes were suspicious of wealth and of a priesthood they thought had made itself comfortable with the wrong masters. That is not a modern talking point. That is the air of the first century.

I find the psychology of that period inexhaustible. Conference calls still get my attention. I listen. Some of them take an hour to arrive at the sentence that could have been said in four minutes. In those stretches I used to slide the desk Bible over and keep my mind working: instead of getting bored: a map, a timeline, a note. Not as theater. As ballast.

What People Thought They Were Looking At

I dress for work—shirt, jacket, often a tie. I have a White House tie. I have one Ross Perot gave me years ago. I have silk ties from the Trump Organization, the kind with the mark on the back, soft, well-made. Ties are not a costume. They are respect for the room I am walking into and the work we do there.

TSA has watched that combination for years: the jacket, the green bag, the Bible coming out of it. More than once the assumption has been that I must be a preacher or some other official holy man. I am not. I am an executive who likes Scripture, archaeology, and not wasting the twenty minutes before a plane pushes back. People sitting in the next seat have asked, in so many words, why a person would look at a Bible in an airport unless he were trying to get something forgiven. I find that question more revealing than they intend. You can live a decent life and still want the book. You can refuse tattoos, refuse to deface the body, refuse the little wink that says “I am as wrecked as you are,” and still not be a priest. You can be a man who thinks the human temple is not a billboard.⁸

I have been stunned, this summer of 2026, at how much hostility that posture draws once you leave a familiar building. Inside two-decade-old relationships, people who suddenly miss me are letting me know just how much, they miss the Bible on my desk realizing it was more than just furniture. People who ran large companies told me later it was the first thing they trusted when they walked in my office. Not the speeches I gave them. The book. A flag that said the room was safe for a person who still went to church on Sunday and did not need to advertise a tattoo on the inside of their arm or hidden on an ankle.

I have had something like forty or fifty messages in the last three weeks from people who used to come through that door. The line repeats. They miss the Bible on the desk. Some of them have more money than they will ever be able to spend and can afford to say what they think in their older years. What they valued was not a performance of righteousness. It was a reminder that the world was not all bad. That has been the shock of changing circumstances. You do not know who was quietly depending on a habit you thought was private until the habit is no longer in the same room.

A New Market, an Old Warning About Wealth

I have been talking with new people in Butler County and in the space-adjacent market I have watched for years. I first heard the pitch the way you hear a hundred pitches on LinkedIn. Everybody has a new idea. My own working estimate, from the work I have actually done, is that the space economy is heading toward something on the order of three trillion dollars by around 2033.⁹ That is not hype. That is a forecast based on experience. If it is even close, the people who build the right things will be rewarded on a scale that sounds like island-buying money to anyone still thinking in last decade’s units.

I am not embarrassed by the pursuit of wealth. I am careful about it. Jesus was not sentimental about rich men. The people behind the Dead Sea Scrolls were not sentimental about rich men. A needle is still a needle.¹⁰ If I had no dime and a box of chicken nuggets from Kroger and a new issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, I would still be myself. The magazine and the book are the happy part. The wealth is the instrument. Nicodemus had standing in the priesthood and still came to Jesus at night. He did not have to choose between influence and curiosity. I would rather earn the hours from five to ten in the evening, the hours when a man who has already taken care of his people can sit in a chair and read, than pretend poverty is automatically holy.¹¹

The colonel who gave me the MacArthur Bible had seen the military change and then seen large companies change until he barely recognized them. He told those stories in an office that still had a Bible on the desk. When he retired, I lost interest in the polite version of going along. That is a disclosure, not a press release. The people who stepped into some of those roles were closer to the airport glance than to the man who wrote in the front of a study Bible. Why are you wearing a tie? Why don’t you have the tattoo? Why don’t you throw a curse word into the meeting so we know you are not a robot? I have known that weather existed. I had commented on it from a protected side of the glass. This year I have been on the other side of the glass.

The Teacher of Righteousness did not win a popularity contest in Jerusalem. The community at Qumran put miles between itself and a priesthood it thought had made peace with the wrong power. I do not think the answer for a modern working life is to move to a desert. I do think the answer is to stop being surprised that people who are only sails, and never a keel, hate a keel when they see one. They go with the wind. A person who gets up in the morning intending to be good is steering. Those two habits do not like each other.

Why Edwards, and Why Now

Jonathan Edwards filled notebooks. The Miscellanies, the Notes on Scripture, the Resolutions he wrote as a young man and kept. The new study Bible is built out of that habit. Everhard’s edition puts Edwards’s own doctrinal work under the NKJV text, adds essays on his life and the Awakening, reprints the Resolutions, and explains the note system so a reader can start one of his own.¹² That is not merchandising. That is an old American technology: write what you see in the text until the text starts writing back to you.

I have been doing a smaller version of that in the carry Bible for years. Lines in the places the publisher left blank. Thoughts in the maps. Reactions I did not want to lose between Dayton and some other runway. Edwards did it at a different scale in the 1740s and 1750s. The country that came after him, the republic that knew his sermons even when it argued with them, did not appear out of a vacuum. If you want a founding-era mind that treated Scripture as something a serious adult could spend a life on, he is near the head of the line.

I am loyal to the Bible that has already been around the world with me. I am not going to mistreat it. I am thinking about letting it live on the shelf and putting a leather Edwards next to the chair and in the bag. A new study Bible is not a better God. It is another set of trained eyes, another century of notes, another chance to keep the mind awake while the rest of the cabin looks at a phone.

If you need a first Bible, or another Bible, this is the one I would put in front of you this month. Hardcover if it will stay on a table. Leathersoft or leather if it is going to travel. Read Edwards’s own sentence on the cover logic of the edition: the enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied.¹³ Then read the maps. Then write in the blanks.

What I Am Building Next

I have said for a while that the age of disclosure and the politics of heaven are not separate subjects. They are the same story told from two altitudes. That work is coming.¹⁴ Until it does, the ordinary practice remains the same. Subscribe to a better day. Sit with a magazine that still believes the dirt in Israel and Jordan and the West Bank can teach you to read. Carry a book that has already outlived empires. Dress as if the work matters. Do not wait for a stranger in an airport to bless the habit.

If you have been one of the people writing to say you missed the Bible on my desk, I appreciate all the kind words and have been impressed how many people were using that object as something stable in their life. Edwards can sit where the last one sat. The green bag still does its work and carries in it what’s truly valuable.

Notes

1. Biblical Archaeology Review began publication in 1975 under Hershel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society. I have read it across five decades. The Fall 2026 issue includes work on Negev tombs, Kidron Valley monuments, Tell Qasile, and spacing in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

2. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, general editor Matthew Everhard. Hardcover ISBN 9781400339532; also issued in brown Leathersoft and black genuine leather. Comfort Print, red letter, maps, concordance, essays, Resolutions, and an introduction to Edwards’s Miscellanies method.

3. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, later missionary at Stockbridge and president of the College of New Jersey—the First Great Awakening’s most demanding American theologian. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) is the famous shard. The Religious Affections and the Miscellanies are the longer works.

4. ESV Archaeology Study Bible, Crossway, editorial oversight by John Currid and David Chapman, first issued 2018, later TruTone editions. Field notes, photographs, maps, timelines. I have also used Zondervan’s older NIV Archaeological Study Bible; they are different books.

5. The MacArthur Study Bible, long associated with John MacArthur and issued in NASB, NKJV, ESV, and other texts across many printings. The copy on my shelf is the one dated in the front, June 12, 2023.

6. Museum of the Bible, Washington, D.C. The History of the Bible floor remains, for me, the heart of the building. Membership is how we treat a place we intend to keep returning to.

7. Teacher of Righteousness: the sectarian leader in the Damascus Document, the Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab), and related Qumran texts. I read him as a Second Temple reformer whose conflict with a “Wicked Priest” and with Jerusalem’s establishment belongs in any serious account of the world Jesus and John walked into. That is history and typology, not a claim that the Gospel is only Qumran.

8. I mean the body as temple in the Pauline sense, 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, not a fashion rule I am prepared to police on strangers. It is a rule I keep.

9. Public forecasts of the commercial space economy vary. Morgan Stanley and others have used a trillion-dollar frame toward 2040. My three-trillion-by-2033 figure is an experience-based working number, not a consensus estimate. Treat it as a claim to test.

10. Matthew 19:24 and parallels. The camel and the needle. The point is not that wealth is impossible. The point is that it is spiritually expensive.

11. John 3; John 7:50–51; John 19:39–40. Nicodemus again, because he is the patron saint of people in positions who still want the conversation.

12. Edwards’s “Resolutions” (1722–1723) and the Miscellanies notebooks are in the Yale Edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. Everhard’s study Bible is a reading edition of that archive under Scripture, not a replacement for the Yale volumes.

13. The cover quotation is Edwards on the enjoyment of God as the soul’s only satisfying happiness. Related language runs through the Miscellanies and The End for Which God Created the World.

14. The Politics of Heaven is the book I have been building toward; “the age of disclosure” is the public weather that book has to walk into. Forthcoming. The desk Bible is older than both.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Study Bibles and Editions

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

ESV Archaeology Study Bible. Edited by John D. Currid and David Chapman. Crossway, 2018.

ESV Study Bible. Crossway, 2008.

The MacArthur Study Bible. Various texts and publishers; Thomas Nelson and others.

NIV Archaeological Study Bible. Zondervan, 2005.

Holy Bible, New King James Version. Thomas Nelson.

Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway.

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. For readers who want the next shelf over.

Jonathan Edwards

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press, 1957–2008. Especially vol. 2, Religious Affections; vol. 8, Ethical Writings; vol. 13 and following, the Miscellanies; vol. 15, Notes on Scripture.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Edited by John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema. Yale University Press, 1995.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Resolutions.” 1722–1723.

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

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

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

Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.

Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Tracy, Patricia J. Jonathan Edwards, Pastor. Hill and Wang, 1980.

Qumran, Second Temple Judaism, and the Teacher of Righteousness

The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. Edited by Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar. Brill / Eerdmans.

Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Penguin, revised editions.

Collins, John J. The Scepter and the Star. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2010.

Collins, John J. Beyond the Qumran Community. Eerdmans, 2010.

Cross, Frank Moore. The Ancient Library of Qumran. 3rd ed. Sheffield, 1995.

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins. Eerdmans, 2000.

Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2021.

Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Doubleday, 1994.

VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2010.

Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. Harper.

Biblical Archaeology and the Land

Biblical Archaeology Review. Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.

Cline, Eric H. Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Currid, John D. Doing Archaeology in the Land of the Bible. Baker, 1999.

Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Eerdmans, 2001.

Hoffmeier, James K. The Archaeology of the Bible. Lion Hudson, 2008.

Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Eerdmans, 2003.

Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. Doubleday, 1990.

Shanks, Hershel. Freeing the Dead Sea Scrolls. Continuum, 2010.

Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Vol. 2. Doubleday, 2001.

Museum of the Bible. Permanent exhibition catalogs and the History of the Bible gallery materials. Washington, D.C.

Scripture, Wealth, and the Conscience of a Working Life

Augustine. Confessions and City of God.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1932.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées.

Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”

The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, and 19.

Matthew 19:16–30.

1 Corinthians 6:19–20.

American Religion and the Public Order

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. Yale University Press, 1972.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1967.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Sweeney, Douglas A. The American Evangelical Story. Baker, 2005.

Space, Industry, and the Instrument of Wealth

Bezos, Jeff, and the public Blue Origin/industrial-space record read as primary sources, not devotionals.

Hoffmeier is archaeology; for space, keep the shelf honest:

Logsdail, various commercial space market outlooks; Morgan Stanley Research, “Space: Investing in the Final Frontier,” and subsequent updates.

National Academies and NASA commercial market assessments, 2020–2026.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

On Dress, Attention, and the Desk as a Signal

Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Only after you already know why you would wear the tie without him.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking, 1985.

Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. Knopf, 1977.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Attention as the real liturgy of a working day.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

George Lang’s Bible in the Backseat, Jonathan Edwards, Darbi Boddy: Lessons to build a better, and stronger, GOP in Butler County

I am not a separation of church and state guy the way the left has used it to push a secular agenda. But to understnad that, you have to understand history, and many people just don’t. And those same people don’t know much about one of the people I consider to be one of the early American Founding Fathers, Jonathan Edwards. I say, use what works and is healthy for a great society, and don’t argue with the poliitcal left the interpritation of law and order when they want to destroy America by using its own laws and policy against its creation. Since that is their method, I would advise that we drop the polite veil and admit what we are all thinking: churches go well with Republican politics, and we should be a whole lot more open about it, and just let the Marxists of the Democratic Party have their faces melt. Art Sauerwein is the new chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. The Journal-News piece I have been talking about put his wish list in public: take back the schools and make them more conservative; see more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes. I agree with most of that list. I would put the disagreement, if there is one, in a sliver. Five percent, maybe. The problem is not the nouns. The problem is that a county chairman saying he is displeased with his own officeholders signals to every Democrat and every reporter in the room that the party is not united.¹

I have a particular soft spot for people who take thankless chairs. I also have a long memory of what happens when the Bush years go slack, when Clinton years teach the other side to use government as a wealth-transfer machine, and when a Republican majority forgets that it was elected to stop that machine, not to learn its levers. Small-government capitalism is not the same project as confiscating through the tax code and redistributing under a better letterhead. I have been on that argument since before the Tea Party years. I have not left it.

What I will not do is pretend that the way you get Christian schools and lower taxes is to twist the arms of the people you still need on the card. That is the Democrat tactic with different hymns. Ostracize, purity-test, call the holdout a RINO, and then act surprised when the tent is an empty Sunday-school classroom with folding chairs and no majority.

Why I Walked George Lang to His Car

People tell me I cannot be trusted because I am friends with George Lang. I was invited to an evening with him and his wife, Debbie. We get along. I like them. I like George. Not because he is a state senator from the 4th District. Because we can stay on a subject until the parking lot lights are the only ones left.²

We started years ago with a mutual fascination with Ayn Rand and the long story of human order. She was an atheist. I was not. We did not make religion the ticket into the room. We made taxes, small business, the Ohio caucus work, jobs that let a family buy nice things without the government picking the neighbor’s pocket. Those are the planks you can stand on with a man who is not yet where you are on Sunday morning. Then you walk him to the car.

This year, 2026, not a decade ago, we were still talking when we got to his car, extending the evening as much as possible because the conversation was good. He knows what I carry. He knows the maps and the notes. He pulled out a Bible that had been given to him in the Senate. It was beautiful. I would have liked it for the shelf. It was his. He had been going through it. Debbie has said, in the way honest people say it, that they have not always lived in that lane. I did not need a performance. I needed the book’s facts in the car of a man who helps write Ohio law. That is how influence works. That is Nicodemus in a parking lot instead of a midnight stair.³

If the chairperson’s job is to get people on the card, then the chairman’s job is to make nights like that more common, not to publish a scolding that makes the next senator keep the Bible in the trunk.

Jonathan Edwards Did Not Found America From a Letter to the Editor

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible came out in August 2026 from Thomas Nelson, NKJV, notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, edited by Matthew Everhard. I saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review, which is still the magazine I would take to a desert island and be happy with nothing else. I will likely make that Edwards volume my next daily Bible. The one I have carried through airports is full of notes. Every blank space they left me has writing in it.⁴

Edwards did his public work in the 1730s through the 1750s, while a young George Washington was still making himself and Franklin was already allergic to other people’s piety and still able to hear the weather. The Awakening put biblical speech in the streets. The colonies that broke from England were not a faculty workshop. They were a people who had been arguing, singing, and frightening themselves with sermons about a God who was not a mascot. I do not claim Edwards “founded” the United States. I claim the country is harder to imagine without that pressure in the air.

He was also the grandfather of Aaron Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton. I am not a Hamilton man. I mention the grandson so nobody thinks I am selling a stained-glass window. Edwards’s own church in Northampton eventually threw him out because he would not lower the table to the town’s comfort. He finished in a smaller charge at Stockbridge, among the Mahican, and then the College of New Jersey—Princeton—made him president. He lasted about a month. He took the smallpox inoculation during an outbreak, fever followed, and he died on March 22, 1758. His last counsel was to trust God and not be afraid. The same college that begged him to come later drifted into the progressive machine that now congratulates itself for unmaking the civilization he helped catechize.⁵

That arc is the warning. You can put a Christian on a letterhead and still lose the building. You can also lose the building by refusing to put your arm around anyone who is not already converted.

Darbi Boddy and the Noble Death That Vacates the Seat

I have always had a soft spot for Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board. She came out of a Puritan temperament: right is right, wrong is wrong, say it, take the heat. I admired the spine. The political class asked whether she knew she had to go to other people and shake hands. She drew a line so hard that the people who should have been part of her coalition treated her as a problem to be managed. She was removed. Not enough Republicans came to her defense in the way that kept the seat. I was very angry about that. I still am.⁶

There is a Christian imagination that treats the pike as the only honorable furniture—burned, sawn, beheaded, and therefore faithful. The martyrs were real. Rome tried to kill the church, and the church outlived the attempt. I am asking a different question for a school board and a county party. Are we here to die beautifully and hand the district back to the purple-haired people eaters or are we here to keep the chair and put more than one adult in the room?

A public school system designed as an agent of social reconstruction will not become conservative because a chairman tells the Journal-News he would like that very much. You need people on the board who can last. You need people around them who do not run at the first ugly headline. You need a farm team that was not raised only in a sanctuary, because most of the county was not. Maybe forty percent can make the born-again jump on a timetable that satisfies a Sunday-school teacher. The rest will come, if they come, the way George came toward a Bible in a backseat: over years, over taxes, over ancient history, over the proof that you will still walk them to the car when they are not yet where you are.

The Church That Taught Me Business Had Classrooms and a Mortgage

I saw my grandson today, and I told him about my years between eleven and sixteen, High Adventure, the Scout post that met at a big church on RT42 in West Chester. We made pizzas in the church kitchen, and people came to pick them up. That was a fundraiser, a civics lesson, and a first business plan. My family church in Fairfield was the other building. My wife and I were married there. Catechism, Sunday school, the pastor’s house on the property, the side rooms where a kid learned how adults talk when they think they are only running a troop meeting. Then the money ran out. They sold it. It broke my family’s heart. It is not on the market presently. I have been thinking about buying it back for a couple of million. dollars In any other use, that ground in Fairfield is a different number. Because it is a church, the market treats it like a problem.⁷

I am not announcing a closing. I am saying the thought is serious, and Jonathan Edwards is the reason the thought got louder. Churches decline when they have no profit model and a pastor who thinks Jesus only ever taught under a tree. Jesus could walk from village to village. A sanctuary in a hot real-estate corridor has a mortgage. Nicodemus money, the quiet help that keeps a ministry on its feet, is not a compromise with Egypt. It is how a thing survives long enough to teach the next boy how to sell a pizza and keep the books.

The West Chester Tea Party lost a church venue while I was in Japan not that long ago. A guest, a fight, and the door closed. For years the movement lived on donated fellowship halls and cookies after the meeting. Streamers, Republicans, whoever would come. That was a big tent that still knew the room had been a sanctuary an hour earlier. I want a building in this county that Tea Party groups and Republican meetings can use without a landlord who gets nervous. Not a state church. A civic table with a steeple still on it.

Princeton Forgot. The Party Should Not Copy the Forgetting.

Edwards as president of Princeton is the picture I cannot shake. The college wanted the man who could make seniors write on divinity and then talk about it. A short generation later, the heirs of that project began the long surrender. Liberty University and the older schools are not the same charter, but the temptation is the same: keep the Christian name, lose the Christian nerve, export Democrats with verse numbers. Complaining about that in a newspaper will not reverse it. Buying a pulpit, filling a room, putting your arm around a senator who keeps a Bible in the backseat, teaching a Scout to make change for a pizza—that is the slower work.

Peer pressure is not evangelism. “Agree, or we will put you outside” is what the other party already does. If we do it with better footnotes, we still lose the county. Jesus did not recruit from the Sanhedrin’s banquet list. He took the people who had fallen out of the wagon. Edwards could fill a town and still get voted out. Both facts matter. The first tells you preaching works. The second tells you preaching without a coalition becomes a memorial service.

What I Want the Chairman to Do Instead of Being Displeased

Help officeholders get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. If you want Christian values in the community, put a beautiful Bible in more backseats by being the kind of man a senator will linger with in a parking lot. If you want the schools, do not design another martyr and then wonder why the seat is empty after they are killed or lose their seat in the next election. If you want taxes cut, stay on the subject with people who will go to the small-business caucus before they will go to your Wednesday Bible study volunteer class.

I will keep reading BAR. I will keep the Edwards volume in the rotation. I will keep walking George to the car. I will keep thinking about the Fairfield church, not because nostalgia is a strategy, but because the kids I see now do not have the side room I had, and a party that cannot raise its own young in a hall it does not have to rent is a party that will keep leasing its future from people who do not like its hymn.

Lead. Do not write the other side’s headline for them.

Notes

1. Art Sauerwein, Butler County GOP executive chairman, quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage on local Republicans, schools, Christian values, spending, and taxes. A public rebuke of sitting Republican officeholders is usable copy for the other party. That is not mind-reading. That is how newspapers work.

2. George F. Lang, Republican, Ohio Senate 4th District since 2021; previously Ohio House 52nd; West Chester. Married to Debbie Lang. I am describing a private evening in 2026 and a longer friendship. I am not claiming he has asked me to speak for him.

3. John 3; 7:50–51; 19:39–42. Nicodemus keeps his station and still moves toward the teacher. Influence that can only speak in the sanctuary will not reach the people who write statutes.

4. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026, general editor Matthew Everhard. Biblical Archaeology Review, Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.

5. Edwards was inaugurated at the College of New Jersey on February 16, 1758; died March 22, 1758, after smallpox inoculation. Buried in the Presidents’ Lot, Princeton Cemetery. Esther Edwards married Aaron Burr Sr.; their son was Aaron Burr Jr. Northampton dismissed Edwards in 1750 over communion discipline; Stockbridge followed.

6. Darbi Boddy won a Lakota Local Schools board seat in 2021 on a conservative platform and was removed by the board in March 2024 after a long, ugly fight and a 90-day absence tied to a protection-order conflict with another member. I am not retrying that case here. I am talking about coalition and what happens when courage has no bench.

7. The Fairfield church of my childhood and marriage is named as a family fact and a present thought, not as a listed property and not as a pledge. High Adventure and the West Chester church on the Cincinnati-Dayton Road corridor are the Scout years as I lived them.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Local Politics and the People Named

Journal-News (Hamilton). Late-August 2026 coverage of Butler County Republicans and Chairman Art Sauerwein.

Lang, George F. Ohio Senate, District 4. Public record, 2021–present; Ohio House, 2017–2020.

Ballotpedia and the Ohio Legislature biographical pages for George Lang.

Journal-News. “2 conservative newcomers, incumbent win Lakota seats.” November 2021.

WVXU. “Darbi Boddy is removed from Lakota’s school board.” March 20, 2024.

WLWT. Lakota board appointment coverage following the vacant seat, April 2024.

FOX19. “Criminal charge dismissed against former Lakota school board member.” August 1, 2024.

Jonathan Edwards and the Awakening

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

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press.

Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections; Freedom of the Will; “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

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

Marsden, George M. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Eerdmans, 2008.

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

Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.

Princeton University. Presidential biographies: Jonathan Edwards, 1758.

This Day in Presbyterian History. “February 23: Jonathan Edwards.” On the inoculation and death.

Princeton and the Long Drift

The Princetonians and official presidential histories of the College of New Jersey.

Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822. Princeton University Press, 1989.

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

Burtchaell, James Tunstead. The Dying of the Light. Eerdmans, 1998.

Church, Money, and the Nicodemus Problem

The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, 19.

Luke 8:1–3. The women who funded the ministry.

Acts 4:32–37; 16:14–15. Property and hospitality in the first churches.

Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together.

Schaeffer, Francis A. The Church at the End of the 20th Century.

Schools, Boards, and the Limits of Martyrdom

Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education. Free Press, 1993.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. The Schools We Need. Doubleday, 1996.

Murray, Charles. Real Education. Crown Forum, 2008.

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. New Society, 1992.

Ohio Department of Education standards files for the official language boards to actually vote on.

Parties, Tents, and Coalition

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.

Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015.

Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale, 1962.

Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford, 2012.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Scripture, Friendship, and Slow Conversion

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.

Newby, Elizabeth. On ordinary friendship as the delivery system of belief, read against Lewis.

Augustine. Confessions. The long way toward a book that was already in the house.

Biblical Archaeology Review. For the magazine that sits on the table while the political argument goes on.

Boy Scouts of America. Handbook and the old troop-and-post structure. The side room was a civics school whether the adults knew it or not.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Don’t Sour the Wine: Why Public Lectures from a County GOP Chair Push Officeholders Away, make Democrats happy, and Shrink the Tent We Want to Grow

It is hard to be in a leadership position. I know that. I wanted to wish the new chair of the Butler County Republican Party well. Art Sauerwein stepped into a job that is mostly thankless, always public, and never as simple as it sounds when you are talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror.¹ I have worked with people in this orbit. We have agreed on more than we have fought about. I was not looking to pick a fight with a brand-new chairman. Bloodsport politics is already crowded with people who think volume is a substitute for skill.

But people are already getting sour on his wine. This is not the pleasant kind. This is the vintage you spit out when you realize the bottle lacks what it takes. Sauerwein literally means sour wine.² I did not invent the metaphor. The paper did him the courtesy of putting the raw vintage on the table.

I want the Republican Party in this county to succeed. I do not want the political disease that has been cultivated in parts of West Chester to migrate township by township until the rest of Butler County starts talking like a faculty lounge. I want more unification, not less. I want a bigger tent, not a Sunday-school classroom with a padlock on the door. That is why I am saying something now, at the start of September 2026, while the article is still warm and the Democrats are still salivating.

What Sounded Fine in the Shower Did Not Survive the Newspaper

Some lines sound terrific when you are singing in the shower. They still sound pretty good at a Sunday meeting among people who already agree with you. They do not survive contact with newsprint. Once they are in the Journal-News, they belong to every Democrat, every fence-sitter, every officeholder you still need next cycle, and every volunteer who is privately deciding whether this job is worth the abuse.

The chairman’s public message, as it landed, ran something like this: take back the schools and make them more conservative; put more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, the Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, eliminate waste and fraud, and get in alignment with conservative values. Then the kicker: he has not been seeing that happen, and it displeases him.

I agree with a large percentage of the substance. Cutting spending, cutting taxes, reducing waste, and stopping fraud are not radical demands in a Republican county. I have been in the tax fight in this county for a long time, going back through names people still remember and some they would rather forget. I want conservative schools. I am not embarrassed by Christian values in a community that was built on them. That is not the argument.

The argument is tone, timing, venue, and target. You do not build a governing party by taking out the people you just spent years getting elected. You especially do not do it two months before a midterm when Democrats are hunting local gains and the only story they need is “Republicans are already eating their own.”

The Fast-Food Manager Problem in Bloodsport Politics

I have heard this voice before. It usually comes from people who have a hard time making a legitimate argument that requires sitting down, listening, and converting someone who does not already attend their Bible study to their way of thinking. Instead of doing that work, they reach for the lecture. I have seen it in entry-level managers at places that sell fast food. They get handed a shift. They have run something with five employees. They discover that barking feels like leadership.

You can talk that way to teenagers folding boxes. You cannot talk that way to people you are asking to put their name on a ballot, raise money, take votes, absorb the hate mail, and then run again in two years. Public office is already a faithless job. If word gets out that the chairman treats officeholders like children who missed curfew, the short list of people willing to do the work gets shorter. Then you will complain that nobody good will run, and you will be right, and you will have helped cause it.

The grandfather tone does not work on people who already moved out of their father’s house. Younger Republicans, the ones you claim you want to recruit so the party is not a retirement home, can smell a lecture from across the parking lot. Trump did not build a coalition by scolding his own team in the local paper. He built one by pointing the fire outward.

Good Old Boys, Street Vendors, and the Nicodemus Problem

I have heard the comments on Facebook. People send me this stuff all day. “Good old boys club.” It is always the boys club when you are not in it. When you are outside, you throw a rock and call it prophecy. You say you are Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers. You say you are honest and pure. Meanwhile the people you need are quietly updating their résumés for a private-sector job that pays better and does not include a chairman who inspects their homework in the newspaper.

You have to remember Nicodemus. He loved Jesus. He wanted the message to advance. He also had to remain a functioning member of the priesthood. He walked a fine line on purpose.³ That is the nature of serious politics. It should not be a purity cult. I have heard the purity speech for years: we should be clean, we should be absolute, we should never sit at a table with anyone who is only 80 percent of the way home. Meanwhile you bleed support. You try to build a big party and then you shove people toward the door with absolutism and call the ones who leave compromised.

Cheerleaders are useful. Rock throwers are useful too, in the right hour. Leadership is deciding which tool you are holding before you swing it at your own team.

David Kern Knew How to Throw a Rock and Still Keep the Township

I have known the Kern family since I was very little. I was friends with his son. I knew Katy. I remember David Kern as a man who could throw a rock with the best of them and still serve as a respected Liberty Township trustee for decades. He chaired this county party. He also discovered, the hard way, that herding quarreling Republicans is a different sport than fighting Democrats.⁴ He said as much when he walked away from the chairmanship. That history is sitting right there for anyone who wants to read it instead of repeating it.

You need people who will volunteer for the ugly jobs. The short list of adults willing to be lectured in public like children is very short. You do not want your officeholders saying, “I will take the private job. It pays. I do not have to run every two years. I do not have to take a sermon from a chairman who just discovered the budget.” Once they leave, you do not get them back by posting harder.

West Chester Is Not a Metaphor. It Is a Beachhead.

I know Kathy Wyenandt. I have watched her work. She is out there trying to hitch a truck and a horse to the same socialist push that is running through school boards, township halls, and every other local institution that used to be too boring for ideology. Call it progressivism if the word socialism makes the room cough. The destination is the same: more government, more cultural renovation, more migration of West Chester habits into townships that did not ask for them.⁵

She does not need a majority tomorrow. She needs Republicans to do her turnout work for her. A county party that announces, in the paper, that its own officeholders have disappointed the chairman is a gift. Democrats do not have to beat Republicans if Republicans will brand their own people as failures eight weeks before Election Day. I do not want a bunch of Democrats in offices that took a generation to flip. That is not a purity position. That is arithmetic.

The people pushing the chairman to talk like this represent a slice of the party, not the whole vineyard. I would put that slice well under 40 percent of Republicans in this county, with the rest on the fence, tired, transactional, or capable of being seduced by a smiling Democrat who promises to be less exhausting. If you lecture the 60 percent as if they were the problem, you will meet them later on the other side of the aisle, or at home on the couch.

You Cannot Shut Off a County Budget Like a Spigot

“The Republicans that are in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, and I have not been seeing that happen, and it displeases me.” That sentence is the whole problem in one pour. You cannot just turn the spigot off on a dime. I have been in these tax fights my whole adult life. There were plenty of pizzas eaten over tables with Mike Fox and the old Liberty Township crowd. There were plenty of arguments. You still had to build a team.⁶

County government is not a lemonade stand. It is labor contracts, state mandates, jails, boards of developmental disabilities, roads, courts, and a sales-tax stream that moves with the economy. Butler County has rolled back millage, sat on windfalls, and still gets accused of betrayal because the cut was not theatrical enough for people who do their budgeting in comment threads. Results matter. Theater is cheaper. Voters, after two years of Republicans in power, vote results. If the chairman’s public line is “our people have not done a very good job,” do not be shocked when the other team puts that quote on a mailer.

This is the midterm problem in miniature. The buzzwords that pulled people to the polls the first time do not work the same way once you own the desks. Insurgents always arrive to take advantage of disappointment. Some of them only know how to throw rocks. They want Jesus in the temple every Tuesday. If you are not flipping tables, you are not holy enough. That energy can win a primary. It does not automatically win a county, and it does not automatically govern one.

Todd Hall, Thomas Hall, and the Unfashionable Work of Building a Team

Todd Hall was good at building a team. Thomas Hall has done the unglamorous work in the Statehouse. I have had disagreements with people in that circle. There were disputes. We worked them out over time. Nobody has to be attached at the hip. Leadership is the art of bringing people to your way of thinking without setting their chairs on fire.⁷

People who lack that skill often lecture because lecture is what you do when you cannot close. They talk themselves into a lather in the bathroom. It sounds like Churchill. Then they get into a meeting with actual officeholders, actual budgets, and actual voters, and the words come out like a substitute teacher on the last day of school. “It displeases me” is not a governing strategy. It is a report card written by someone who is not taking the test.

Sometimes a chairman will sound like the star quarterback at a pep rally. In the bleachers you will have a row of people who never liked football and came for the argument. The quarterback will look like a cardboard cutout of the good old boys club. Fine. People still like winning the game. They like being around a team that wins. They will tolerate a certain amount of jock energy if the scoreboard gives them what they want. They will not tolerate a coach who spends the pregame interview explaining that his own starters are a disappointment.

Unity Is Not Compromise. Isolation Is Not Courage.

I do not want a compromised party. I also do not want a minority party that congratulates itself for being pure while Kathy’s people take another township seat. Those are not the only two options, no matter how many Facebook theologians insist they are. Learning to communicate with people who are not as conservative as a Sunday-morning Sunday-school teacher is not the same thing as becoming one of them. It means you can share a sandbox without eating the sand.

People who cannot do that work are often insecure about their ability to win a conversation. So they push the other person away. Then they never have to experience the small death of losing the argument. They say, “We did our best. We stood on principle. We were outnumbered.” Being outnumbered is not a sacrament. I do not want the minority party in Butler County. I want the party that keeps winning and then governs like it intended to keep the job.

Compromise has a cost. Losing has a cost. Leadership is weighing those two costs in public without pretending one of them is free. Thanksgiving dinner is the annual clinic: you do not have to agree on the football game to keep the same people at the table. A smart network puts more than one game on. That is not cowardice. That is how you still have a family next year.

A Friendly Note to the New Chairman

I want Art Sauerwein to be a successful chairman. I want people to support him. I want the party to grow. I agree with him on most of the policy nouns in that article. Cut spending. Cut taxes. Watch the schools. Say the quiet part about values out loud. Do it in a room with the officeholders first. Bring the concerns to a meeting. Make the case. Count votes. Help them find the money, the language, and the coalition. Then go to the paper together.

If you push them away in August, you will not have them in November, and you will not have them when you need a candidate in 2028. Chairmen who listen only to the people who want them to tear the party down do not last. The job looks important from the outside. From the inside it is volunteer hours, bruised egos, and a phone that rings with problems nobody else wanted. You will not keep good people if the public posture is “Father Knows Best and the children have disappointed the table.”

Help them get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. Show up for them when the Journal-News calls. Save the lecture for the closed session, and even then, make it a conversation. The people who are whispering that the only moral posture is table-flipping are not the ones who will still be in the room when the chairs are empty.

Tomorrow Can Still Be a Better Day

It is hard to be in leadership in all phases. It is hard when people will not come over to your way of seeing the field. You still have to try. You have to bring together people who would never choose the same dinner table if football were not on. You have to give people latitude without becoming a wet rag. That is the whole craft.

So here is the friendly advice, based on what I am seeing in the first weeks of this chairmanship: do not sour the wine. Do not sour the voters. Do not sour the big tent. Do not push away the people who are not as conservative as you wish they were on a Sunday morning. Sit down. Work it out. Inspect the team in private. Cheer the team in public. I want this chairman to prosper. I want this party to keep the county. Lecturing your own officeholders in the newspaper is how you do the Democrats’ work for them.

Notes

1. Art Sauerwein quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage of Butler County politics heading into the November 2026 midterms. The phrasing matches public circulation of the piece under titles such as “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.”

2. Sauerwein is a German occupational/descriptive surname meaning “sour wine,” historically attached to makers or sellers of tart wine. The pun writes itself; I did not invent the vintage.

3. John 3:1–21. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, came to Jesus by night. He later spoke for due process (John 7:50–51) and helped bury Jesus (John 19:39–40). He never became a street-corner prophet. That is the point.

4. David Kern served 32 years as a Liberty Township trustee, briefly chaired the Butler County Republican Party, and died in 2021. See Journal-News obituary coverage and the Congressional Record tribute by Rep. Warren Davidson, April 22, 2021.

5. Kathy D. Wyenandt of Liberty/Fairfield Township has been central committee chair and a visible public face of the Butler County Democratic Party, a Board of Elections member, and a candidate for Ohio House and Senate. She has written openly urging voters to consider Democrats in local cycles.

6. Butler County commissioners have repeatedly used inside-millage rollbacks and related tools in recent budget cycles; sales-tax receipts have also risen. Whether that pace satisfies every activist is a separate question from whether the county is “not cutting.” See Journal-News budget coverage 2024–2026.

7. Todd Hall served as Butler County GOP executive chairman through the 2024–2026 cycle and was frequently quoted on endorsements, including the 2026 commissioner primary. State Rep. Thomas Hall represents Ohio House District 46.

8. Richard K. Jones, Butler County sheriff, published They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). The book is a leadership memoir, not a novel about cartels; the shower version of the pitch always sounds punchier than the jacket copy.

Bibliography for Further Reading

A working shelf, not a complete library. I have included the books that actually change how you think about parties, persuasion, local government, and the temptation to confuse purity with power.

Local and Ohio Politics

Butler County Republican Party. Candidate and leadership materials, butlercountygop.org, 2024–2026.

Callahan, Denise G., and Journal-News staff. Budget, millage, sales-tax, and commissioner coverage, Hamilton Journal-News, 2018–2026.

Clark, Michael D. “Beloved Butler County icon, political leader David Kern dies after illness.” Journal-News, April 16, 2021.

Davidson, Warren. “Honoring the Life and Memory of David Kern.” Congressional Record, April 22, 2021.

Ohio Republican Party. County chair directory and State Central Committee materials, ohiogop.org.

Wyenandt, Kathy. “You may want to vote Democrat this election cycle.” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 15, 2022.

Journal-News. “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.” Late August 2026. (Article circulating with the Sauerwein quotations discussed here.)

Parties, Coalitions, and the Big Tent

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Still the best warning against people who love principles more than the society those principles have to live in.

Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper, 1957.

Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. Yale University Press, 1981.

Galston, William A., and Elaine C. Kamarck. “The Politics of Polarization.” Third Way / Brookings essays, various years.

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Harper, 1946.

Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind. Regnery, 1953.

Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford University Press, 1990. Useful even for a two-party county: coalition is a skill.

Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale University Press, 1962.

Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Truman, David B. The Governmental Process. Knopf, 1951.

Leadership, Management, and Why Lectures Fail

Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster, 1936. Mock it after you can do it.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Politics is the continuation of coalition by other means.

Collins, Jim. Good to Great. HarperBusiness, 2001.

Drucker, Peter F. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row, 1967.

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Overman Warrior Publications.

Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. 2026.

Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 1532. Read it as a warning about what happens when your own captains stop trusting you.

Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings. c. 1645.

Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. You cannot lecture a production system into existence.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Do not announce your disappointment with your own left flank.

Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. The leader who needs to be seen lecturing is already losing.

Rhetoric, Media, and the Local Paper Problem

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda. Knopf, 1965.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, 1946.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking, 1985.

Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Henry Regnery, 1953.

Scripture and the Fine Line

The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, and 19. Nicodemus.

Matthew 21:12–13 and parallels. The temple tables. Note the target: a corrupt marketplace inside the holy precinct, not your own disciples on the night before a fight.

Augustine. City of God. The two cities argument is older than any county central committee.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1932.

Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942. Especially the parts about factions inside the church.

American Party History and Populism

Gerring, John. Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. Knopf, 1955.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Knopf, 1965.

Phillips, Kevin. The Emerging Republican Majority. Arlington House, 1969.

Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015. Parties exist to tame factions. When the faction tames the party, you get what you are watching.

Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Sundquist, James L. Dynamics of the Party System. Brookings, 1983.

Local Government, Taxes, and the Spigot That Will Not Shut

Fisher, Ronald C. State and Local Public Finance. Various editions.

Oates, Wallace E. Fiscal Federalism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Tiebout, Charles M. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956).

Ohio Auditor of State and Butler County Auditor annual financial reports, 2022–2026.

Rich Hoffman

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That is how I landed at Volynt.

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

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

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

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

So come to Elm Street.

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NOTES

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