The signed version is House Bill 519. Governor DeWine signed it October 1. The cut started at 12:01 a.m. October 4 and runs through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027.
Ohio did something useful at the start of October 2026. The General Assembly suspended the state motor fuel tax for 90 days, and Governor Mike DeWine signed the bill. For the next three months, the state tax on gasoline drops from 38.5 cents a gallon to one-hundredth of one cent. The diesel tax drops from 47 cents to the same token rate. The lost revenue, about $725 million, is covered out of a General Revenue Fund surplus. Roads and bridges are not being raided to pay for it. The Rainy Day Fund is not being raided either. That is the whole story, and it is a better story than the price of a gallon usually gets.
I live in Butler County. Senator George Lang is my senator, and he was in the middle of getting this into shape. A lot of people had to touch it. That is how a legislature is supposed to work. One member does not pass a tax cut alone. Somebody still has to walk the Statehouse, catch a colleague at the water fountain, and get the vote. Lang was doing that work, and he was out announcing the suspension as the vote came together, which is what you do when you are leaning on the thing rather than waiting to see how it lands. I will give him the credit he earned. I will also name the people whose names are on the paper, because a useful account has to be accurate.
What the law actually does
House Bill 519 started as a vehicle-theft bill, aimed at electronic devices used to steal cars. The Senate amended the gas-tax holiday into it so the relief could move in days instead of months. The holiday language came from Senate Bill 475, sponsored by Senators Michele Reynolds of Canal Winchester and Jane Timken of Canton. The House bill itself was sponsored by Representative Andrea White of Kettering. On September 30 both chambers passed the package as an emergency: 26–5 in the Senate, 78–16 in the House. DeWine signed it the next morning, October 1. Because of the emergency clause, there was no 90-day wait. The reduction began at 12:01 a.m. on October 4, 2026, and it ends at 11:59 p.m. on January 2, 2027. [1] [2] [3]
The rate does not go to a flat zero. It goes to $0.0001 per gallon. That is an accounting choice, and a smart one. If Ohio levied no tax at all, some border counties could get hit by a neighboring state’s tax on fuel sold into Ohio. A token rate keeps that from happening and still takes essentially the whole state tax off the ticket. The holiday covers gasoline and diesel only. Compressed natural gas and propane are not in it. [4] [5]
Retailers have to pass the savings through. Failure to do that can be treated as an unfair or deceptive act and referred to the Attorney General. A receipt mandate that station owners opposed, and the $1 million that would have paid for it, came out of the final bill. The Department of Taxation got $250,000 to administer the break. The department told retailers to have their systems reset by midnight on October 4. [2] [6]
What a fill-up is worth
On a 15-gallon gasoline purchase the state piece is about $5.78, if the cut shows up at the pump. On 20 gallons it is about $7.70. A 20-gallon diesel fill is about $9.40. A work truck that takes 100 gallons of diesel is looking at about $47 off the state tax on that one stop. Over 90 days, for a family that fills up once a week, the gasoline savings are real money, not a rounding error. Statewide, the estimate is more than $725 million left at the pump instead of sent to Columbus. [1] [4]
The federal tax is still there. Washington still collects 18.4 cents on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Ohio cannot suspend that. Anyone who watches the sign and wonders why the whole tax did not vanish should look at the federal line before they blame the station. [7]
This is also why a diesel truck crossing Ohio this fall should fuel here if the route allows it. As of July 1, 2026, Kentucky’s total state gasoline tax was 26.4 cents a gallon. Indiana’s was in the 50-to-60-cent range, depending on which fees are counted. Michigan was in the same high band. For these 90 days Ohio’s state rate is a tenth of a mil. A truck that used to skip Ohio for a cheaper state has the math backward until January 2. [8]
Why the money was there
The $725 million is not a raid on the highway fund, and it is not a withdrawal from the Budget Stabilization Fund. Senate President Rob McColley said the state had enough to cover the holiday and still keep road and bridge work on schedule. Timken said the same thing in plainer words: conservative fiscal policy is what made the relief possible without touching the Rainy Day Fund or the Ohio Department of Transportation budget. The September report from the Office of Budget and Management projected a General Revenue Fund surplus of about $745.4 million at the end of the fiscal year. The holiday fits inside that surplus, with a little room left over. [2] [5] [9]
That is the part the critics do not like to say out loud. A surplus is not a mood. It is what is left after you refuse to spend every dollar that comes in. Ohio has had Republican majorities in the House and the Senate for a long time. The counties that stay in the black tend to be the counties run the same way. Where Democrats run the budget, the pattern I have watched for years is the opposite: spend past the line, then come back for a tax increase to cover the miss. David Pepper and the people who argue that Republicans have been in too long never explain where the $725 million would have come from under their model. It would not have been there. You cannot suspend a tax out of a deficit. You can only do it when someone, for years, spent less than they took in.
Lang put the practical case on the record the day the Senate passed it. Every dollar a small business spends on fuel is a dollar it cannot put into employees, equipment, or growth. Diesel, he said, powers the trucks, the farm equipment, and the construction equipment. Suspending the tax is breathing room, not a theory. [4] That is the right argument. A fuel tax is a tax on getting to work, on moving freight, and on a farm that has to run whether or not Columbus is in session.
Prices, excuses, and the point of doing it now
I have said all summer that the price at the pump should have come down in 2026, and a lot of it did not. Refiners and distributors have been slow. The Iranian conflict has been a convenient fog. There is no settled government on the other end of that war that can answer for a barrel, and there are plenty of people, in markets and in media, who would rather keep the uncertainty going. A long, muddy conflict is useful to anyone who wants a wider margin and a Republican governor’s race that looks expensive at the pump. I am not going to pretend every cent of the 2026 price is a conspiracy. I am going to say the excuse has been used past the point of honesty, and that waiting on a perfect global price was a bad plan for a state that had a surplus in the bank.
Ohio could not fix the world oil market. It could take its own 38.5 cents off the gallon, and its own 47 cents off diesel, and order the stations to pass it through. That is the part of the price a state actually controls. Doing it in the first week of October, with an emergency clause, was the proactive move. Early voting was about to start. People are still paying the summer’s hangover. A legislature that waits for a calmer headline is a legislature that never spends the surplus on the people who created it.
The vote was bipartisan enough to get the emergency clause, which needs more than a simple majority. It was not a love letter from the other party. More than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. [9] The ones who voted yes made the immediate effective date possible. The ones who voted no will explain, later, that the money should have been spent on something else. That is the argument. Their something else is always a larger government. The surplus is the evidence that Ohio did not need one.
What other states can copy
This is a model, not a stunt, and other states sitting on a real surplus should look at the mechanics instead of the press release.
First, suspend the tax. Do not invent a rebate card, a portal, or a six-month application. The relief has to show up on the receipt this week.
Second, backfill the road money from the general surplus. Do not cut the projects, and do not crack the rainy-day fund for a holiday. Ohio was explicit on both points. A tax holiday that steals from maintenance is just a pothole with a ribbon on it.
Third, leave a token rate in place if a zero rate would let a neighbor’s tax reach across the line. The tenth-of-a-mil was not cute. It was drafted for border counties.
Fourth, require the pass-through, and give the attorney general a hook if a station keeps the difference. A tax cut that dies in the wholesale markup is not a tax cut.
Fifth, do it with an emergency clause if the statute otherwise waits 90 days. A relief bill that takes effect after the pain is a press release.
The permanent version is a policy question, and it should be on the next governor’s desk. A 90-day window has ambiguity in it. Distributors and convenience stores have to reprice twice, and a driver cannot build a household budget on a holiday. The honest next step is to decide how much of this rate Ohio still needs once the books are open. Vivek Ramaswamy called for the pause the week before the vote. [10] I have already said he is the right direction for the job. This holiday is a hint of the governing style, not the whole platform: when there is a surplus, the default is to give it back, not to find a new program to absorb it. DeWine signed the bill quickly. The next governor can be the one who decides whether 38.5 cents needs to come back in full on January 3.
A tax only funds government. It does not improve it by being larger. Republicans in Ohio spent less than the alternative for long enough to have $725 million they could hand back without missing a road project. That is why a driver in Butler County, and a driver crossing the river from Kentucky, will see a cheaper gallon this fall. I am proud of the legislature for doing it when people needed it. If you are passing through Ohio before January 2, stop and fill the tank. The Statehouse already paid the difference.
Notes
[1] Gov. Mike DeWine signed House Bill 519 on October 1, 2026. The bill reduces the 38.5-cent gasoline tax and the 47-cent diesel tax to $0.0001 per gallon from 12:01 a.m. October 4, 2026, through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027. Estimated pump savings are about $725 million, roughly $5.78 on 15 gallons of gasoline and $7.70 on 20 gallons, and about $9.40 on 20 gallons of diesel. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension,” Your Ohio News, October 1, 2026.
[2] The chambers passed the emergency measure on September 30, 2026, 26–5 in the Senate and 78–16 in the House. The final bill appropriates $725 million from the General Revenue Fund and $250,000 to the Department of Taxation. A station-receipt mandate and its $1 million appropriation were removed. Danny Eldredge, “DeWine to sign bill suspending Ohio’s gas tax for 90 days,” The Blade, September 30, 2026.
[3] H.B. 519 was sponsored by Rep. Andrea White (R-Kettering). The gas-tax language came from S.B. 475, sponsored by Sens. Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) and Jane Timken (R-Canton), and was amended into H.B. 519 so the holiday could move faster. “Ohio’s gas tax holiday enacted into law,” Ohio Society of CPAs, October 2, 2026.
[4] Sen. George F. Lang (R-West Chester) announced Senate passage on September 30, 2026, including the small-business and diesel arguments, and noted that the token rate protects border counties from a neighbor’s tax. Highway work is covered by the fiscal-year surplus, not the Rainy Day Fund. “Lang Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026.
[5] Sen. Jane Timken: relief was possible without the Rainy Day Fund or the ODOT budget. “Timken Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026. See also Ohio Department of Taxation, “Ohio Department of Taxation Issues Guidance for 90-Day Motor Fuel Tax Holiday,” October 2, 2026. Retailers must pass the savings through; failure may be referred to the Attorney General. Guidance: https://tax.ohio.gov/motor-fuel-tax-holiday
[6] Ohio Department of Taxation, guidance released October 2, 2026, cited above. Tax Commissioner Patricia Harris urged retailers to adjust systems by midnight October 4.
[7] Federal excise tax remains 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Nebraska Department of Transportation, “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel,” rates effective July 1, 2026, citing the Energy Information Administration. The federal layer is not part of H.B. 519.
[8] Same table: Ohio 38.50 cents, Kentucky 26.40 cents, Indiana 64.50 cents total state taxes on gasoline as of July 1, 2026. During the holiday Ohio’s state rate is $0.0001.
[9] Office of Budget and Management, September 2026 report, General Revenue Fund surplus projected at $745.4 million at fiscal year-end, as cited by The Blade, September 28, 2026. Senate passage was 26–5; more than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. “Ohio General Assembly Suspends State Gas Tax,” Ohio Senate, October 1, 2026. McColley: the surplus covers the holiday without delaying road and bridge work.
[10] The vote followed a call for the pause by Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy the preceding week. Jake Zuckerman, “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote,” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.
Ohio General Assembly. House Bill 519 (136th General Assembly), sponsor Rep. Andrea White; Senate amendment incorporating Senate Bill 475, sponsors Sens. Michele Reynolds and Jane Timken. Passed September 30, 2026. Signed October 1, 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.Eldredge, Danny. “Ohio lawmakers introduce $726M gas tax holiday bill.” The Blade, September 28, 2026.
Your Ohio News. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension.” October 1, 2026.
Zuckerman, Jake. “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote.” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.
Nebraska Department of Transportation. “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel.” Rates effective July 1, 2026. Source table: Energy Information Administration, federal excise noted at 18.4 cents gasoline and 24.4 cents diesel.
I like doing these kinds of talks. Positive stuff. The benefits of things. The proper role of government. When you vote people into government, you are not voting them in to manage your life. You are voting them in to manage something you need done at the local, state, and federal levels, and then to get out of the way so good minds can finish the work. I talk about that a lot, and I talk about my friend, State Senator George Lang, who I consider one of my very best friends, because he has spent a long time doing the unglamorous part of that job. Good things, done over a long period of time, eventually just happen. He does not always realize, in the moment, how far those things are going to travel. I will talk more about some of that in November. For now, I want to talk about a day in Oxford that caught me off guard in the best way.
We had an event at the College@Elm innovation center on September 21. I was there to talk about what I have been calling the dreams of Elm Street. I discussed the next generation of middle-mile work I am involved with through Volynt, the company I lead as COO, and the hybrid unmanned aircraft they call Vyper (with a Y), since Volynt also uses a Y. Volynt Aero sits at 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio, inside that building, and I am very proud of the affiliation and of the people around it.[1] When I do these kinds of things, I invite people I know. I know quite a few political people. I looked into the audience, and there were some very important faces in it. I had invited George to come out and listen. I had no idea he was already part of the roots of the place.
Positive people, positive work
It is nice to be involved in positive things with positive people who mean to do good things. I had no idea when I first got involved with Volynt, and they brought me out to show me the facility and how deep the story of that building went. I was impressed with the building. I didn’t know the story of the Innovation Center on Elm Street. When I gave the talk, I made a play on words. Nightmare on Elm Street used to be the honest description of the building Volynt is in. It was dilapidated. People had considered tearing it down. Miami University President Gregory Crawford brought George Lang out, and Nancy Nix, and a bunch of other people, and said Let us save this building and make it an innovation center for young minds coming through Miami University, a place to get a launch in life. That is exactly what is happening. A partnership moved into the building. I came out there in a COO role with Volynt. We talked a little about the history of how they arrived there, and about the other tenants, in a building that sits right there on the campus square, right there on Elm Street.
I talked about the play on words. A nightmare on Elm Street becoming dreams on Elm Street, because innovation startups are dreams. They are people trying to bring about new thoughts and new ideas. I guess a lot of people knew that story already. I did not. I was talking to George, telling him to come out, and George was already coming. As I was giving the speech, I looked out, and of course Michael Ryan was there, who I believe is going to be the next Butler County commissioner, and he came and gave part of the speech with me. In the audience were people like Nancy Nix. And George was there. I am going to show you. I know George is going to do the work. I had no idea that when I said, “Come on out,” he already knew all about it. He knew about the innovation center. He was there when it was being born. Nancy and I were talking about it, and she had been invited to see it back when President Crawford pitched the idea of taking this building and turning it into an innovation hub for aspiring ideas at Miami University. I had no idea this was where it was going.
The building that almost got torn down
I saw George in the background as we were setting up to give our speech. He was filming a short presentation on the building’s history, which he hadn’t told me about. I had no idea it was happening. I just joined the Volynt role. I admired the building. I thought it was a good use of a structure that might otherwise have been lost. It is very close, in Oxford terms, to the Miami University Airport, the little airport down the road at 7101 Fairfield Road, identifier OXD, a 4,011-foot runway that Miami operates and that sits only a few miles from campus.[2] For a company building uncrewed aircraft, that proximity is not a small thing. It is all very well set up.
Here is the history, for those unfamiliar, because it is a good story and deserves to be talked up.
The building at 20 S. Elm Street was built in 1933. For 68 years it served as Miami University’s central food service facility, the unglamorous engine room that kept the campus fed.[3] After dining services moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center, the Elm Street building became swing space and general storage, then sat vacant. By the time people were seriously arguing about its future, it was a roughly 90-year-old, 39,000-square-foot brick building with a strong foundation and a failing prospect. Miami and the City of Oxford debated what to do with it. Selling it was on the table. Tearing it down was on the table. Leaving it as a forgotten building on South Elm was the path of least resistance.[4]
President Crawford did not take the path of least resistance. He had been in business before higher education. He had founded companies. He knew the difference between a press release and a building that works. Around 2017 and 2018, he began walking potential partners through the place and asking whether they could see what Elm Street might become.[5] By 2020, the university and the city had a plan: turn the vacant structure into a technology, entrepreneurship, and workforce hub. Preparations began in 2021. The renovation cost about $10.7 million, part of a larger public-private investment of $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors.[6] Miami alumni Lee Fisher, class of 1968, and Rosemary Fisher, class of 1969, provided the naming gift. In February 2023, the building opened as the Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm.[7]
That is the part I did not know when I was admiring the brick.
George Lang, the incubator, and the long clock
George has said publicly that he used whatever political capital he had to get state dollars into the project so it could get started and get up and running. He has called College@Elm something very special and very unique. His line, the one that matches what I half-heard him filming in the background, is that it is the only incubator he knows of where you can go from concept to production under one roof: prototypes, marketing expertise, funding, the whole path an entrepreneur needs to find out whether an idea can succeed.[8] Advanced manufacturing was part of the original pitch. The Fischer Group was an early anchor concept, an “innovation extension” inside the same walls as Miami’s entrepreneurship training.[9] When I watched him in the background and later saw the clip surface on LinkedIn, because the algorithm knows I know him, he was not doing a campaign spot. He was telling the history of a building he had already helped stand up, eight or ten years before Volynt moved into Suite 117.
I have known George for about twenty years: very good times and some very hard times. You learn the character of a person that way. A good person is pretty stable whether the times are good or bad. I am sure things are going on in his life where people look at him from the outside and say, I wish I were him. Then you know the pressure of living. It can be hard. I am sure he would trade some of the blood pressure for an easier job. He has said as much, in the way friends say it. The goldfish feeder at Walmart might be a better life on some days, because you can enjoy things a little more and carry less pressure. He finds himself under a lot of pressure a lot of the time. I say that as a friend, someone I talk to pretty regularly. It is not always better on the other side of the glass. It is hard. But when you care about innovation, and business, and technology, and job growth, this is the work. That is why I am involved in it. Not because the title is comfortable. Because the output is real.
Nancy Nix has the same knack. She was in the audience on September 21. She has a way of seeing a good thing before it becomes important, and she has been that way for a long time, back through nearly sixteen years as Butler County Treasurer and into the Auditor’s office she was sworn into in February 2023.[10] She was invited out when Crawford was still pitching the building. She came. Michael Ryan has supported this kind of work well before the commissioner race, and he stood up and spoke with me that day. He won the Republican primary in May 2026 with about 72 percent of the vote, and he is on the November 3 ballot focused on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.[11] I think he is going to win. More to the point, he showed up.
What Volynt is actually doing there
Volynt Aero was formed in 2024 by people who have been developing uncrewed aircraft and eVTOL machines for years. The spelling is the point—Volynt, with a Y. The aircraft is the Vyper, also with a Y. They are always doing things a little differently, and I like that. The company builds hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft aimed at cargo logistics, highly mobile power generation, and forward communications for defense and for disaster response- the work where you cannot always count on a runway, a fuel truck, or a pilot who can get there.[1] The address on the capability statement and on the federal registration is the same as the innovation center: 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. They have taken Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support and partnered with Miami University on powertrain work. That is the right use of a building like this. Not a plaque. A prototype.
I had no idea, the first time I walked the facility, that the roots of the innovation talk went back that far, or that George was part of it, or that Nancy Nix was part of it. A lot of things in government never mature. Maybe only five percent of them ever become anything good. This one has a chance to mature into something really good. It is exactly the kind of thing that all of these people hope their role in government can do: take good minds, imagination, goodwill, and blood, and help them mature into something productive. Government, used properly, does not dream for people. It keeps the road open so the people who do dream can get the work to market.
Dreams, not the extended nightmare
I have always enjoyed my time on college campuses. I have not been happy with the direction academia has taken, captured as so much of it has been by left-wing politics and by the pursuit of intelligence subordinated to social order. I still encourage what I see. Even if everybody on a campus is not pushing the limit the way I think they should, you still see a proportion of people who are. I stop by the little convenience store on the campus, and I get a Mello Yello. People joke about it. The three drinks I drink are Mello Yello, water, and milk. A lot of water, a lot of milk, and a lot of Mello Yello. Sugar is not good for you, but I don’t consume much else with a lot of sugar in it, so I am good with it. And when I am standing there, I see a lot of bright-eyed people walking around with backpacks, dreaming and hoping.
That is what I was talking about in the speech. The dreams of Elm Street, because we were on Elm Street, in the innovation center. You expect a company like Volynt, working there, to have a shot at evolving into a technological powerhouse. It all started with the dreams of people like the president of Miami University, and Senator Lang, and Nancy Nix. You can tell who your friends are. It depends on who shows up for these things. You invite them to come out, you look into the audience, and you see faces that are very familiar to you. Some of the things you are doing may not become important for five years, or ten. They still come.
George said it in his own way. The things you do today are the things that show up eight or nine years from now. A lot of the work he does, and a lot of the work the other people who came out to our event are doing, works on that clock. I appreciate everybody who came. Michael Ryan has been supportive before he was ever on a commissioner ballot. Nancy has always supported things well before they become important. She has a good eye. She was in the audience. She knows a good thing when she sees it.
The innovation center on Elm Street is there for a purpose. It is there to inspire the growth of human intellect, as academia was always meant to do. I was proud to be there, and proud to be a part of it, and proud to look into that audience and see those kinds of people. I appreciate having high-quality people like that in my life. I think all of us, working together, can make dreams come true for a lot of people who don’t even know they are dreaming yet. They are just living their lives and hoping for a dream to dream, instead of living inside an extended nightmare where intellect is no longer in charge of the human condition.
Innovation centers like the one on Elm Street are, I think, among the highest-order things a community can build anywhere in the world, because they are dedicated to aspiring intelligence that makes everybody else’s lives much better. George Lang has always been supportive of that. It was good to hear his story, and to hear it go back those eight or nine years. The things you do today will be the things people are standing inside of nine years from now. That is what good government looks like. A president of a university pushing. A senator putting political capital on a building that is still empty. An auditor who shows up early. A future commissioner who stands up and speaks. They help pave the way for dreams to become a reality instead of a nightmare.
Footnotes
[1] Volynt Aero, Inc. lists its primary address as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Founded in 2024, the company develops hybrid-electric uncrewed eVTOL aircraft for cargo logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications under the Vyper name, and has paired Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support with Miami University powertrain work. See Volynt Aero capability statement, volynt.aero; federal entity record, CAGE 9X2Y4, UEI ZDFZRXS7EJY2; Volynt Aero LinkedIn company page.
[2] Miami University Airport (OXD), 7101 Fairfield Road, Oxford, Ohio 45056, is a public-use airport operated in connection with the university and has a 4,011-by-70-foot asphalt runway. Miami University, “OXD Airport in Oxford, Ohio,” miamioh.edu/oxd-airport.
[3] Miami University, “From Food Services to Innovation Hub: The Story of College@Elm,” College@Elm Impact Blog, 2025. The building was constructed in 1933 and served as the university’s central food service facility for 68 years before dining operations moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center.
[4] Halie Barger, “Forgotten building on South Elm Street to become space for innovation startups and a focus on the arts,” Oxford Observer, February 14, 2020. Miami and Oxford officials described a vacant former food-service building that had later been used for storage; sale and continued vacancy were both live options before the innovation-hub plan.
[5] Sean Scott reporting in the Oxford Free Press, “College@Elm aims to provide innovation hub for Southwest Ohio businesses,” drawing on Lee Fisher’s account that President Gregory Crawford approached potential partners around 2017–2018 and was “the big driving force” behind the project. Crawford has described walking partners through the building more than two years before the 2023 opening. Miami University News, “The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm celebrates grand opening,” February 2023.
[6] Miami University put the renovation at $10.7 million and total invested funding at $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors. Miami University News, February 4, 2021, “Miami and Oxford initiative to transform uptown into an entrepreneurial hub”; Miami University News, February 2023 grand-opening release. The Oxford Free Press separately noted a City of Oxford contribution of about $1.18 million toward renovations, plus parking-lot work. Figures vary by what is counted as renovation versus total public-private investment; both numbers are in the public record.
[7] Lee Fisher ’68 and Rosemary Fisher ’69 provided the naming gift. The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm held its grand opening in February 2023 at 20 S. Elm Street. Miami University News, February 2023.
[8] George Lang, quoted in the Oxford Free Press: “I was very proud to use whatever political capital I had to get some dollars at the state level to help get the program started and get it up and running.” And: “It’s the only place, literally the only incubator in Ohio, that I know of in the country, where you can go from concept to production all under one roof and have everything right there.” The Miami Student, March 2023, also noted Lang’s support through the funding process. The September 21, 2026 remarks I saw him filming are his own telling of that same history.
[9] Miami University News, February 4, 2021. The early plan named two anchor uses: Miami’s entrepreneurship training and incubator center, and the Fischer Group’s manufacturing “innovation extension.” Later tenants have included student and alums ventures such as Coarse Culture. The Miami Student, March 2023, reported a five-year hope, attached to the Fischer Group concept, of 52 jobs and just under $3 million in payroll.
[10] Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix was sworn in on February 13, 2023, after nearly 16 years as Butler County Treasurer, and was elected in November 2024 to the unexpired term. She holds a B.S. from Truman State University, an MBA from Miami University (2012), and a CPA license—Butler County Auditor, “Meet Nancy,” auditor.bcohio.gov.
[11] Michael V. Ryan, former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, won the May 5, 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with about 72 percent against incumbent Cindy Carpenter, and faces Democrat Mike Miller on the November 3, 2026 ballot. Journal-News, “Butler County commissioners race: Michael Ryan and Mike Miller up for open seat,” September 30, 2026. Ryan has campaigned on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.
Volynt Aero. Capability statement and company site. https://volynt.aero/ — address listed as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Aircraft program styled Vyper.
Volynt Aero. LinkedIn company page, Oxford, Ohio. Notes Ohio TVSF grant and Miami University powertrain partnership.
Hoffman, Rich. Overmanwarrior essays and podcast, hoffmanbooks.com — including the September 21, 2026 College@Elm remarks and the George Lang clip referenced here.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
If you have been anywhere near a television or a radio in the Cincinnati area lately, you have seen Sheriff Richard K. Jones. He has been on the local news. He has been on WLW. He has been on Channel 9. He has even ended up in the weather, which is not where most sheriffs go to make a point, and that is exactly why I like watching him. He can get on a set, talk about immigration, talk about the law, and then, if the moment calls for it, talk about whether your windshield wipers will work on the drive home. That is not a gimmick. That is a man who can think on his feet, and Butler County has benefited from that habit for a long time.
I have spent much of this year, 2026, working through the specifics of institutional persuasion and what proper ethical behavior actually looks like when you are trying to move a population. I am going to keep coming back to the root causes of purity, ethics, morality, righteousness, and the plain old goodness that used to be assumed in American public life. We need another Great Awakening in the United States. I do not say that as a slogan. I say it because the methods used against this country have been very sinister. They turned free speech into a weapon. Immigration was turned into a weapon. No place on earth has a more diverse population than the United States, and that diversity was not an accident of geography. It was a policy. When a policy is used to import people who reject the host country’s values, you are not running a humanitarian program. You are running a Trojan horse. Sheriff Jones has been willing to say the quiet part out loud, and that is why I want him in the room.
You Want This Man in the Party
People ask me whether Sheriff Jones is a hard-core Republican or a big-tent Republican. He is more the second than the first, and the question is the wrong test. You always want Sheriff Jones in the room. You want him on the news. You want him in your party. If you have built a party that cannot make room for a man like him to do good things, you are in the wrong place. You want people like him on your side.
Some of the people who have been against Sheriff Jones over the years are the same people who have been against President Trump, and they usually dress the objection up as ethics. I will get into the ethics of coalition-building in a separate piece, because I have been down that rabbit hole on purpose. I am usually a positive person. I am also, if I am honest about my own temperament, a little melancholy, and more Book of Revelation oriented than the average political commentator. The apocalypse has a following for a reason. There is a reason people talk about the Rapture taking the faithful out of a world that will not deliver justice. I know a lot of people who are so distraught over the lack of justice in ordinary life that they want God and Jesus to come and end the argument. I understand the feeling. I don’t think that excuses us from the work in front of us.
The work in front of us includes immigration, and it includes the people who will actually enforce the law while the rest of us argue about tone. Sheriff Jones has been that person in Butler County. He has done it well for decades. He has been especially visible lately, and he has earned the attention.
A Hamilton Kid Who Became the 45th Sheriff
Richard K. Jones was born on October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, in Butler County. He came up through the Hamilton city schools, volunteered for the draft, and served from 1973 to 1975 as a combat engineer in the United States Army, leaving as a Specialist 4. He then did the unglamorous work that actually teaches you how a jail runs. He went into the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, trained staff, rose to Senior Captain, and served as the warden’s designee for inmate appeals. From 1990 to 1993, he was a major at the Lebanon Correctional Institution. In 1993, he became chief deputy of the Butler County Sheriff’s Office and held that job for twelve years, adding deputies, expanding jail capacity, and dragging the office into the computer age.
He picked up the credentials along the way: an associate degree in corrections from Hocking Technical College, a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Wilmington College in 1981, and a master’s in corrections from Xavier University in 1984. In November 2004, Butler County voters elected him the 45th sheriff. He took the oath on January 3, 2005. He is now in his sixth term. That is not a media creation. That is a man the same county has returned to office, again and again, while the national argument about immigration has swung from one administration to the next.
In 2004 he put up the sign. “Illegal Aliens Here,” with an arrow pointing at the jail. The federal government was then in the habit of saying it did not know where illegal aliens were. Jones’s answer was a piece of roadside honesty: they are in my jail. The sign has come down and gone back up as presidents have changed. The sheriff has not. In 2006 he was already running billboards that said “Hire an illegal — break the law,” taking out newspaper ads, and opening a tip line on employers. Twenty years later, he is still on the same subject. Consistency is not fashionable. It is, in a sheriff, a virtue.
Immigration Is the Issue Because It Was Designed to Be
His main topic has always been immigration, and he has been a real enforcer of the law, not a press-release enforcer. Butler County had a contract to house federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled it because of the Biden administration’s rules. Two days after the 2024 election, he was already talking to federal officials about restoring the capacity. By early 2025, the “Illegal Aliens Here” sign was part of the public argument again. In February 2025, the county reentered an agreement to house U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees. Since March 2025, the jail has been holding them. Jones has a 287(g) agreement, covering both the jail-enforcement model and the task-force model, and he has said that fifty to sixty of his deputies have been trained by federal agents for that work.
In a WCPO interview in late September 2026, tied to the book, he said roughly 450 people in his jail were held on immigration matters, and that about 6,000 people had been deported from the Butler County Jail over the prior eighteen or nineteen months. Those are not theoretical numbers. That is a sheriff’s office doing the job most jurisdictions in this part of Ohio will not do.
He also said, in that same interview, that the second Trump term “messed up” the early execution, that they “went about it the wrong way,” and that you cannot deport twenty or twenty-five million people on the timetable some people imagine. National outlets immediately tried to spin that into a sheriff “turning on MAGA.” I do not buy the spin. I have watched this man long enough to know the difference between a critic and a man who says what he thinks. He has called Trump a real leader. He likes the bluntness. He thinks the economy has moved in the right direction. He also thinks a federal bureaucracy that has to fire people, hire people, and find its footing will make a mess on the way to a policy. That is not betrayal. That is the same habit that makes him say the thing on the weather segment. You want that habit in your party. A party that can only tolerate applause is not a party. It is a fan club.
Deporting everybody does not, by itself, solve the whole problem. I agree with him on that, and I have said it in my own way for years. Enforcement is necessary. It is not sufficient. You also have to promote the country you are enforcing on behalf of. You have to say, out loud, why the law exists. You have to be willing to do it on WLW, on Channel 9, on Channel 5, on Fox, and, if that is where the audience is that day, in the weather. The strategy against us has been to get people stuck in a bureaucratic decision, transfer information and loyalty away from the host culture, and husk out society from the inside. I know immigrants who are more American than a lot of people born here, people who have not lost touch with how good it is to live in this country. Sheriff Jones has been one of the most consistent cheerleaders of that distinction for at least twenty years, and by his own count longer. Legal immigration can be expanded. Illegal entry cannot be treated as a civil right. He has been clear on both.
The Weather, the Wipers, and the Point of Being Clever
Which brings me back to the weather. I thought it was Channel 9, and the recent long interview was, in fact, WCPO (Channel 9) with Stephen Knobel, posted around September 24, 2026, under the heading of immigration and leadership. The sheriff’s own office has also been putting a weekly weather outlook in front of people, which tells you something about how he thinks about an audience. He does not wait for the national shows to call. He goes where the county already is.
And yes, I enjoyed the windshield-wiper bit. A stiff man cannot do that. A consultant cannot do that. A man who has spent his life in rooms where the next sentence has to be true can get handed a forecast and still sound like himself. It is clever, it is local, and it is funny, and funny is not the opposite of serious. Funny is how a serious man keeps the room. Butler County has always produced characters who understand that. Jungle Jim Bonaminio turned a produce stand across from the old Fisher Body plant into one of the country’s most unusual independent grocers. Sheriff Jones turned a Hamilton upbringing and a corrections career into a national immigration argument without ever really leaving the county. I will take both. I would rather have a county that produces originals than a county that produces spokespeople.
He wears the suit jacket with the American flag on it. He has the cowboy hat. He has had the snub-nose where a snub-nose belongs. He will tell you about the lawyers, and he will tell you about the jail, and he will not sand it down for a panel. That is the man I want as sheriff. That is the man I want in the party. Working with him can be challenging. He is a hard person to get along with if your idea of politics is a permanent compromise of your own position. I do not think the answer is to become him. The answer is to find the common cause and do the work. On immigration and on law and order, the common cause is obvious. A president can set the policy. He still needs Tom Homan; he still needs sheriffs, and he still needs people who came into the fight from different rooms and different ethical habits. You are not a king. You are a president. The freebies of the Obama years, of Obamacare, of the Biden credit-card bill, do not vanish because a new man takes the oath. Somebody pays. I warned about that while it was happening. The people now complaining about prices are often the same people who applauded the spending. The midterms are not the moment to wander off in search of a purer candidate. They are the moment to rally behind what has actually been accomplished and to keep the enforcers in the field.
The Jail, From the Other Side of the Glass
I have seen the Butler County Jail from the other side of the usual tour. I sat as foreman of a Butler County grand jury, and I have been around that building enough to have an opinion that is not borrowed from a press release. It is not a resort. It is also not the worst thing in the world, and I don’t think Sheriff Jones gets enough credit for how the place is actually run. He talks about the food. I would not say it the way he says it, but I will say this much from my own ethical seat: if you are serving a long sentence and you are eating the burger they serve in that jail every day, you are eating a better burger than the speeches against him would lead you to believe. I do not think he has a contemptuous relationship with the people in his custody. I think he runs a serious jail, and I am proud of it. I am proud that it is our jail.
The critics do not usually argue the operations. They argue the premise. In September 2026, Butler County for Immigrant Justice protested outside the Government Center in Hamilton and called the 287(g) agreement immoral. Around the same time, Jones and West Chester got into a public dispute over a September 14 fender-bender and whether township officers should have turned an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. The sheriff’s office arrested the man on September 18. Township officials disputed the sheriff’s account of their policy. There was also, in May, a federal lawsuit from a former ICE detainee alleging an assault in the jail; an internal investigation reported no assault, and the office denied the claim and stood behind its staff while the case was active. I am not going to pretend every allegation in a jail is fiction. I am going to say I have watched this operation more closely than the people holding the signs, and I trust the man who’s been willing to put his name on the door.
Read the Book
The book is They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. It came out on May 18, 2026. It is 294 pages long. I enjoyed it. I learned things about him as a younger man in Butler County that I did not know, even after years of watching him in public, and I have lived in this county my whole life. It is a practical explanation of why Butler County works as well as it does: law first, straight talk, no patience for the swamp, a memory of an older America in which extended families lived near one another, and neighbors still knew each other’s names. That older America is the one he keeps returning to. It is also the one I grew up in, a few miles down the road.
If you want to understand the sheriff instead of the caricature, read the book. If you want to understand the county, read the book and then look at the jail, the sign, and the number of times the voters have sent him back.
What I Had
I miss the old life more now than I missed it when I was in it. That is the ordinary trick of age. If I could buy it back, the church, the Sunday night, the bag of chips on the way home, I would think hard about the price. I don’t think I would change the course. I didn’t have the context then for how good it was.
We went to church most Sundays. My parents were active. I knew the pastor extremely well. I went through catechism. The church was off Nilles Road in Fairfield along Winton Road, and after the service we would drive past Jungle Jim’s as it grew, year after year, from the roadside stand across from Fisher Body into the monster it became, one of the biggest independent grocers in the country and about as Butler County a thing as exists. Sometimes we stopped for a bag of chips or a pop. Sometimes it was Chester’s pizza for Sunday night. Then The Wonderful World of Disney, back before the house had air-conditioning, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom at seven. I loved that show. I loved every Sunday for those reasons, life in Butler County.
After that we worked. We cut the grass. We worked the garden. We did the things a household does when the household still believes work is part of the day, not an interruption of it. I have had a lot of comments lately about my work ethic. I learned it there. I look at younger people now, and I do not blame them for missing what nobody handed them. I do think they would benefit from a little more of that life than the present culture is willing to admit. A church on Sunday, a grocer who started with rejected potatoes and a truck, a sheriff who grew up in Hamilton and stayed: these are not nostalgia props. They are a civilizational technology. They are how a county transmits a standard.
Ethically, there are not enough values out there right now. I can see that more clearly at this age than I could when I was driving past Jungle Jim’s with a bag of chips, half listening to my parents, thinking about Wild Kingdom. The context arrives late. That does not make it less true.
Purity Is Not a Strategy
So here is the political point, and I will come back to the ethics of it in the series I have been building. A big-tent party is not a party without standards. It is a party that can tell the difference between a standard and a vanity. Immigration is a standard. The law is a standard. The willingness to say both of those things on a neutral platform, and to keep saying them after the headlines turn, is a standard. Sheriff Jones meets it. He is a Butler County kid who grew up and did the job. He is on Channel 9 talking about immigration and, when the segment allows it, about whether it is going to rain. He is a pride of this county in the same family of local facts as Jungle Jim’s, not because the two men are the same, but because both of them are unmistakably from here.
I love the Republican Party more with him in it than without him. I want the people who are strong on Trump and strong on immigration in the same room as the sheriff who will tell you the execution has been uneven. That argument is allowed. The alternative is a purity spiral that hands the institutions to people who do not believe in the country at all. If you do not have the law, you do not have a society to argue about. Immigration is one place the law has been deliberately hollowed out. Sheriff Jones saw it early, built a record on it, wrote it down, and is still willing to go on the air and say it.
Read They Call Me Jonesy. You will get the man, not the montage. And if you are building a party worth belonging to, leave a chair for the sheriff in the flag jacket. We are going to need him.
NOTES
1. Butler County Sheriff’s Office, “Sheriff,” biographical sketch of Richard K. Jones, https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff. See also the author note to Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). Born October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio. Hamilton City Schools. United States Army, combat engineer, 1973-1975, Specialist 4.
2. Ibid. County and office biographies place the Lebanon Correctional Institution major’s posting from 1990 to 1993 and the chief-deputy years from 1993 until he took office as sheriff in January 2005. Education: associate degree in corrections, Hocking Technical College, 1979; bachelor’s in criminal justice, Wilmington College, 1981; master’s in corrections, Xavier University, 1984.
3. Elected November 2004 as the 45th sheriff of Butler County. Took office January 3, 2005. Reelected to a sixth term in November 2024. See Butler County Sheriff’s Office biography, and Lauren Pack, “Sheriff Richard Jones makes it clear illegal immigrants are in his jail, but he is not housing ICE prisoners – yet,” Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025.
4. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025. The “Illegal Aliens Here” sign, with an arrow pointing at the jail, went up in 2004. Jones: “Originally the government said there were no illegal aliens. They said they don’t know where they are at. So I put that giant sign up with an arrow pointing to the jail in case they couldn’t find them. I let them know they were in my jail.” The sign has come down and gone back up as administrations changed. It was put back into the public argument in early 2025.
5. Julia Preston, “Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog,” The New York Times, July 31, 2006. Six billboards in Butler County read “Hire an illegal – break the law!” Jones also took out newspaper advertisements, opened a tip line on employers, and kept the yellow “Illegal Aliens Here” street signs outside the jail.
6. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025; Journal-News, May 19, 2026, and September 30, 2026; Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Butler County housed federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled the contract over Biden administration rules. Two days after the 2024 election he was back in contact with ICE. The county reentered an agreement to house ICE detainees in February 2025. Housing resumed in March 2025. Jones has a 287(g) agreement covering the Jail Enforcement Model and the Task Force Model. He told Local 12 that 50 to 60 deputies had been trained by federal agents. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported the jail holds up to 848 maximum- and medium-security inmates, and that the sheriff’s office is paid $68 per day and $36 per hour to transport ICE detainees to the airport.
7. “Butler County sheriff says Trump administration ‘went about it the wrong way’ on immigration,” Journal-News, September 30, 2026, reporting the WCPO interview with Stephen Knobel. Jones’s figures: about 450 people in the jail held on immigration matters, and about 6,000 people deported from the Butler County Jail over the preceding 18 to 19 months. He also said, “You can’t deport 20, 25 million people,” and “I don’t even think [Trump’s] deported maybe over a million.”
8. The Daily Beast headline of September 24, 2026, “JD Vance’s Ultra-Trumpy Hometown Sheriff Richard Jones Turns on MAGA,” is the clearest example of the spin. The underlying WCPO quotes acknowledge early execution problems in the second term (“Has it been kind of messed up when they first started this under the second term? Sure they have.” “Did they go about it in the wrong way? Sure they did.”) and the practical limits of mass removal. They do not renounce enforcement, the 287(g) agreement, or Jones’s description of Trump as a real leader. In the same interview he said he likes Trump’s bluntness and what he sees as positive movement in the economy. See also WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” September 24, 2026.
9. WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” posted September 24, 2026, interviewer Stephen Knobel. The sheriff’s office has also posted weekly National Weather Service outlooks under its own name, including a September 28, 2026 outlook introduced by meteorologist Natalie Fitzpatrick on the office account.
10. Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Demonstrators with Butler County for Immigrant Justice called for an end to the 287(g) agreement outside the Government Center in Hamilton. Jones’s reply, as reported: “The whole system’s broke and won’t be fixed by either party. So, we can’t allow people to come into this country illegally and not know who they are and where they’re at.”
11. Matthew Cupelli, “How a fender bender led to Butler County sheriff, West Chester dispute,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 26, 2026, updated September 27, 2026. The collision was September 14, 2026. No injuries. Jones said a West Chester policy kept officers from turning an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. Township officials said that was false. The sheriff’s office arrested the 26-year-old man on September 18. Jones said he was from Mexico, had been in the United States four years, and would likely be deported.
12. Journal-News, “New Butler County Jail lawsuit alleges assault of ICE detainee,” May 19, 2026, and “Internal investigations shows no assault on Butler County Jail detainee,” May 28, 2026. Attorneys for Luis Tenelanda sued Sheriff Richard Jones, Sgt. Corneal Rowe, and the county on May 18, 2026. The office denied the allegations, cited a 2025 internal investigation that found no assault, and declined further comment while litigation was active.
13. Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (May 18, 2026), 294 pages, ISBN 979-8253821909. In the book he describes Trump as a real leader and returns to the phrase “The America I once knew.”
14. Jungle Jim’s International Market places the Fairfield beginning in 1973, across from Fisher Body, after earlier produce selling out of a truck. James O. “Jungle Jim” Bonaminio, born 1949 in Lorain, Ohio. First store opened in 1975 at about 4,200 square feet. See Jungle Jim’s, “The Jungle Jim Story,” https://junglejims.com/about-us.
15. WLWT, “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation of CPS grad, high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants,” June 28, 2025. Jones said the office then had ten deputies with ICE-equivalent arrest authority, wanted ten more, and expected to have about fifty. At that point he said Butler County was the only jurisdiction in Ohio with that arrangement, and that the jail was the only ICE holding facility in the Greater Cincinnati area.
ICE, “Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g),” ice.gov, is the practical companion to the local record. For the older national argument Jones walked into, see Julia Preston, New York Times, July 31, 2006, and the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General reviews of 287(g) from 2010 onward. For the county side of the same years, the Journal-News archive on the ICE contract from 2003 through the June 2021 cancellation and the February 2025 reinstatement is the cleanest local paper trail.
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.
Yesterday morning, while most of America was still arguing about whether you are allowed to notice patterns, Flydubai Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with roughly 174 people on board, almost all of them Israeli. Somewhere over the route, the Omani co-pilot stabbed the Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, and the Boeing 737 MAX dropped about 17,000 feet in under two minutes. Passengers broke into the cockpit. One of them put the attacker in a chokehold. Off-duty pilots landed the airplane in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel Katz called it an attempted jihadist attack. A fellow pilot told Israeli television the co-pilot prayed excessively and refused to shake hands with women. Saudi authorities are still questioning him. Trump said he might have been a terrorist or he might have been mentally ill. That is the news cycle. What follows is the argument underneath it.
I have my copy of the Quran. I have carried a flexible edition for years so I can argue with it instead of about it. I also have my Jonathan Edwards study Bible open on the desk. Edwards died in 1758, before there was a United States. He already knew the problem. He called the two great works of the devil against the kingdom of Christ the papal kingdom in the West and the Mahometan kingdom in the East. He said Muhammad was a subtle, crafty man who pretended the Alcoran came from Gabriel, sold a sensual paradise, and propagated the religion by the sword. That is a Northampton pastor in the 1750s, not a 2026 invention.
What the Word Actually Means
Islam means submission. Not peace in the Hallmark sense. The whole system is built around total submission to Allah and to the law derived from Muhammad. Anybody who does not have submission in the vocabulary is already in trouble with the text.
That is why the political class is comfortable with it. A religion that trains people to bend the knee to an authority they are not allowed to question is useful to people who want the same habit pointed at the state. If you will not submit to the God of the Quran, the substitute arrives quickly: submit to the bureau, the school board, the speech code. Historically the faith has almost never traveled as private piety. It has traveled with a political order attached — dhimmi status, tribute, second-class standing for those who will not convert, and expansion when the numbers allow it.
I can sit at a drinking fountain with a Muslim coworker and talk about anything. I joke with them. Why are you praying toward Mecca on a cloth at a set hour? They can tell me to read the Quran. I can tell them to read the Bible. We can still shake hands and walk away. That is ordinary human contact. It is not the same thing as pretending the systems are compatible. The insecurity shows up the moment you decline to submit. Then you are the enemy. Gentle people exist inside every population. The doctrine is still the doctrine.
Edwards, Before We Had a Country
If I could put Edwards in the chair, the question would be simple. What do you think of planting the Quran in the life of a nation that still claims the gospel?
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob revealed his Son. The Quran speaks of God and denies the eternal sonship of Christ and his death upon the cross. That is a false gospel. It leads away from the only name under heaven by which men must be saved. To implement that book as a peer authority in the public life of a nation is to invite spiritual darkness onto ground already cracking under its own weight. A house divided against itself cannot stand. A people who try to honor both light and darkness will perish.
From a 1750s seat, the attempt looks like division by design. It flatters the pride of man — one God, no mediator, no scandal of the cross — while denying the Savior. A nation cannot serve two masters. It cannot honor the cross and the crescent and stay one thing. Edwards thought God would not share his glory with another. I think he was right.
Same Names, Opposite Message
Adam is in the Quran. Moses is in there. Abraham is in there. Jesus is in there as a prophet who was not crucified and is not the Son. That is spiritual plagiarism. You take the names to borrow trust, then you twist the load-bearing walls to have a strategic meaning meant to destroy Western Civilization at the ground level.
The fork in the road is the sacrifice. In Genesis the son on the mountain is Isaac, the child of the covenant marriage. In the Islamic telling the favored line runs through Ishmael, the son of Hagar, outside that marriage. That rebuilds the family tree so the covenant son is no longer the covenant son. From the first chapter of the argument, Islam is set against Israel. A religion that elevates the son who was not the child of the covenant, and then asks the world to treat that reversal as revelation, is telling you something about the spirit behind the text.
Muhammad was a merchant in a region that wanted its older habits back under a new umbrella, aimed at the Christian order in the eastern Roman world. Something came and talked to him. That does not make a man great. The traditional account is roughly twenty-three years of recitation. The thing calling itself Gabriel contradicted what the Gospels say Gabriel announced to Mary six centuries earlier. Angels do not spend two decades canceling a message they already delivered. One of them was not Gabriel. The Bible tells you to test the spirits. He submitted instead.
Who Lets the Adversary Run?
People ask why Jesus lets the adversary operate. I have heard the real-estate version: a transaction in the garden, a deed, Satan as a squatter with papers. I do not think God lost the earth. Sovereignty over creation was not handed away. What was permitted was influence over human beings who chose the lie. The patience is not incompetence. Evil is allowed so that justice and mercy can both be seen when the thing is finally crushed.
That patience is expensive. Innocent people die. The biblical claim is that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and waits because he is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. The end of the patience will be worse than the middle of it. You can hate the cost and still see why a God who intends to save refuses to end the offer early. What you cannot do is confuse that patience with approval of a rival gospel.
The Black Stone and the Unasked Question
A billion and a half people circle a stone, touch it, kiss it, and cannot tell you where it came from. Pre-Islamic practice, rebranded. Kissing a stone the stranger ahead of you just kissed is not profound. It is submission performed so that nobody has to ask. Where did the rock come from? Why these characters were borrowed from the Bible? Why is the Christology reversed? Why is criticism of Muhammad blasphemy while criticism of the church is a Tuesday?
Truth does not need a threat to survive examination. A lie does. Revelation 22:18–19 warns against adding to or taking away from the words of that prophecy. It is a seal on a book, not a police regime. The habit of the New Testament is to test everything. The habit of the other book is submit and be quiet, from the first surah to the last.
Joseph Campbell bothered me on this point. When he spoke of Gabriel appearing to Muhammad, he softened it. He wanted to stay employed at Sarah Lawrence and keep the editing work which I always thought was dishonest, intellectually. He knew better. Polite academia already had a tribute system. That pressure is worse now. It is not scholarship. It is submission with a faculty ID.
Speech Is the Battlefield They Prefer
Everyone looks for Turks at the gates. The cheaper conquest is speech. You submit in what you are allowed to say to your wife, your kids, your readers. You do not ask where the stone came from.
The radical left has spent years introducing Islamic institutional power into a culture built on the Bible, English law, and the conscience of the individual. The ideas are not compatible. A system whose end state is Islamic rule, with non-Muslims as tolerated subordinates, cannot live as a permanent equal inside a republic that treats religions as voluntary associations under a civil law nobody gets to replace. The useful idiots think they can aim this at the church and then manage the aftermath. Every civilization that tried that partnership was wrong. What a lot of people don’t say about Iran is that their government is the goal of those attacking America. That’s what is expected of us and Islam is the entry point to that kind of blind totalitarian rule. That’s why destroying Iran was important for the Trump administration. It had to happen to break the spell.
Yesterday’s cockpit is the unpolite version of the same pressure. The Crusades were a late reaction to centuries of conquest, not the opening move. The argument was never settled. It changed vehicles.
Two Things Worth Keeping
Islam means submission, by whatever method gets the knee bent: fear, law, shame, the sword, the human-resources office. And the religion took shape in the seventh century as a rival system in the borderlands of the Roman East, borrowing names, reversing the covenant son, denying the cross, and requiring a submission Christianity does not require. That ambition did not retire. If you cannot find the authority inside the religious layer, look at the next layer up. Government is always happy to become the thing you submit to.
The pilot who opened the cockpit door while he was bleeding did not submit. Neither should we.
Footnotes and the bibliography — Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption, the Miscellanies, McDermott, Ibn Ishaq, Bat Ye’or, Genesis 16–22, Revelation 22:18–19, and the 30 September wire copy from BBC, Reuters, Times of Israel, and PBS
Notes
1. Keir Starmer, 26 September 2025, announcing the digital-ID scheme: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” BBC, “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK,” 26 September 2025; BBC explainer, updated 23 October 2025. Darren Jones called a working system “the bedrock of the modern state.” A petition to scrap the scheme approached three million signatures.
2. The scheme was described as an app on the phone, carrying name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and a photograph, mandatory for proving the right to work by the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029), not required to be carried, and not retrospective for people already in a job. BBC, 23 October 2025.
3. On 14 January 2026 the Telegraph reported that Labour had dropped compulsory digital ID for right-to-work checks, describing it as the eleventh U-turn, while sources still spoke of mandatory digital checks as distinct from a compulsory card. The September sentence remains the clearest statement of intent.
4. U.S. “right to work” statutes bar compulsory union membership or dues as a condition of employment. Indiana is a right-to-work state; Ohio is not. The British phrase in Starmer’s announcement means the opposite: state permission as a condition of employment.
5. Amy Acton was director of the Ohio Department of Health during the 2020 orders. Subsequent litigation tested those orders against the Ohio Constitution. The employer-side account here is mine, from operating through the orders while those cases were being built.
6. Applicant-tracking systems and automated résumé screens are standard in large U.S. firms. The disparate-impact and DEI sorting layered on those systems expanded after 2020 and has been contested in federal policy since 2025. My 2026 job search is the field report; it is not a national census.
7. Real ID and passport-level identity checks for employment eligibility (Form I-9, E-Verify) tightened the document set employers will accept. I was required to produce a passport repeatedly in 2026 hiring processes.
8. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are the dominant U.S. index complexes. Their proxy and ESG policies in the early 2020s were a transmission belt from asset-manager politics into corporate HR. Political and legal pushback since 2023 has narrowed, not ended, that belt.
9. Vinyl’s return is a measured market, not a metaphor only. RIAA data through the mid-2020s show vinyl as the majority of physical music revenue, driven by ownership rather than by audio quality. The Cracker Barrel gift-shop scene is mine, with my grandsons.
10. Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, on the papal and Mahometan kingdoms as the two great rival orders that swallowed the Roman world.
11. Socialist International membership and the historic sympathies of Western socialist parties for the Cuban revolution and for Central American insurgencies are a matter of public record. Canada’s and Mexico’s governing models are social-democratic and corporatist respectively; neither is a classical liberal republic.
Bibliography
BBC News. “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK.” 26 September 2025.
BBC News. “What are digital ID cards, how will they work and will they be mandatory?” Updated 23 October 2025.
BBC News. “No digital ID checks until you change jobs, says No 10.” 23 October 2025.
Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, 1941.
Edwards, Jonathan. A History of the Work of Redemption. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 9, edited by John F. Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, completed 2026; publication targeted 2027.
Mises, Ludwig von. Bureaucracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism. 1922. English edition, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Murray, Charles. Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. New York: Twelve, 2020.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have driven past the sign for years. A name can sit on a building in plain Ohio daylight, and you will treat it like landscaping until the day your life rhymes with the story on the sign. I have been going through a hard stretch. I spent time in the Mason and Bridgewater Falls corridor, the seam where Warren County and Butler County lean on each other, and I looked at Joseph’s Cup the way you look at a verse you thought you already knew. It hit me as consolation. Not the soft kind. The kind that gives a shape to the pressure.
I am not swinging a Bible at anybody’s head. I have never liked that style. I am saying the book still does the best job on earth of describing how evil moves through ordinary rooms. It does not usually arrive painted red with a pitchfork. It arrives as a brother. It arrives as a social test. It arrives as the offer of an easy life if you will just say uncle.
THE SHOP PEOPLE DRIVE PAST WITHOUT READING THE NAME
Joseph’s Cup in Mason sits at 8050 Arbor Square Drive, inside the Pro-Clean Car Wash, ZIP 45040. [1] Reviews keep saying the same things: the owner, Joseph, greets people himself, the coffee is good, the room is small and human, you can watch cars come through the wash while you drink. [2] That is not a cathedral. That is a local counter. West of there, Bridgewater Falls in Fairfield Township is the big Butler County retail stretch on Princeton Road, the kind of place you pass because you have an errand. [3] I have been in that whole pocket of road. I was not hunting for a sermon. I was looking around during a season that felt like a sentence.
I could not find a public statement from the shop tying the name to Genesis. The Mason owner’s name is Joseph. That is enough for a storefront. [2] The biblical parallel is not a press release. It is what the name did to me when I finally had the ears for it. Sometimes a sign has been there for years and you only notice it when the story on it is already happening in your ribs.
WHY THE NAME IS NOT CUTE
People hear “Joseph” and think Sunday school felt board. The actual story is a machine for understanding betrayal.
Jacob loved Joseph and gave him the garment English Bibles call a coat of many colors, the ketonet passim of Genesis 37. [4] The brothers were jealous. They threw him in a pit, sold him for silver, and sent the torn coat home bloody so their father would think an animal had finished him. [4] In Egypt he was slandered in Potiphar’s house, jailed, and left to rot until he interpreted dreams and rose to sit just under Pharaoh. [5] Years later the same brothers came to him for grain and did not know his face. He put his silver cup in Benjamin’s sack, sent them out, and had them stopped. [6] The cup was a test. Silver had bought him. Silver would now show whether the brothers had changed.
That is not a children’s story. That is a man who was discarded by his own house, sentenced by a foreign power, and still wanted a living connection with the people who had done it. I am not sure I would have wanted the connection. Joseph did. He made himself known. The family came down into Egypt. A long time later, the book says, that sojourn became bondage, and Moses came. [7] The rescue of a later generation sits on the success and the wound of an earlier one. History is not tidy that way. Neither is a family.
I used to read that sequence as literature. I still think it is the best literature we have for the human race under pressure, better than Shakespeare at the specific job of showing how evil uses kinship, hunger, and status. [8] Shakespeare is a genius of pain. Genesis is a genius of mechanism. Lately I have not been reading Joseph. I have been recognizing him.
DOLLY PARTON WAS NOT THE FIRST COAT
A lot of Americans hear “coat of many colors” and think Dolly Parton first. That is backwards in the right American way. Parton wrote the 1971 song about a patchwork coat her mother sewed from rags in the Smokies. While she sewed, her mother told her the Joseph story. Appalachia already knew the verses. The hit was a local memory wearing a biblical name. [9] People of that country did not need a seminary to understand jealousy in a house. They needed a coat that cost nothing and meant everything.
That is how the Bible works when it is still a living book and not a museum object. It names a pattern. Then ordinary people keep walking into the pattern.
THE CUP IS THE POINT OF THE NAME
The Mason shop is called Joseph’s Cup, not Joseph’s Coat. The coat starts the jealousy. The cup finishes the test.
Joseph does not plant the cup to steal his brothers again. He plants it to see whether they will throw Benjamin away the way they threw him away. Judah steps forward and offers himself instead. [6] Only then does Joseph break. The cup is an instrument of disclosure. It forces the hidden thing into the sack where everyone can see it.
That is why the storefront name landed on me like a communication. I have been thinking about how evil tracks, how it recruits normal people, how it promises an easier life if you will just stop being the difficult one. The cup in the story is not china. It is a reveal. You find out who is still willing to sell a brother to keep their own seat at the table.
EVIL WITHOUT HORNS
The cheap version of evil is a costume. Red. Horns. A contract signed at midnight. That version is almost comforting, because you would see it coming.
The version I keep watching is the Joseph version. Siblings. Colleagues. People who want you smaller because your existence makes their position feel like a critique. They do not have to be brilliant. They have to be jealous and organized enough to use the room against you. They twist decent people with the promise of belonging. They put a little social screw to you and wait to see if you will say uncle.
I had one of those tests recently. Millennial operators who make a living off value other people created. They were sounding me out. Could I be made safe. Could I be enough like them to work with. They had gone to Paris for a Bad Bunny concert. I told them the only thing I knew about Bad Bunny was the Super Bowl appearance that made a lot of people angry. [10] I got the look. You are old. You are out of touch. You will not play ball with us; we are uncomfortable with you because you don’t have tattoos and don’t like pop music. The unspoken deal was obvious. Love the right noise, laugh at the right joke, and you can keep the easy life. Tell the truth, and you are the problem.
I am not going to fake a concert I do not care about so a thief of other people’s work will find me acceptable. Honesty costs you. Appeasement is how that kind of person gets a hand on the controls of real evil at work. A lot of people think the mature move is to make friends with the jealous sibling. Joseph’s brothers would have liked that version. It would have kept the coat in the house and the dreamer quiet.
I will not do it. I work nine times harder and stay clean. If I get the sense that someone is trying to shock me into line, I withdraw the thing they wanted to loop. Call it John Galt if you want the novel version. [11] I take my mind off their board. Let them find out how little they can build once the person they mocked is no longer available to be harvested.
AGE IS THE NEW EXCUSE FOR THE OLD JEALOUSY
The critique they offered was that I am pretty old. That is not analysis. That is a permission structure. If the target is old, or bald, or out of sync with the approved playlist, then discarding him feels like hygiene instead of sin. I have written about that fashion in business. It is the same spirit that treats a long résumé as a threat. [12] Joseph was not discarded for being old. He was discarded for being marked. The coat made him visible. Visibility is what jealousy cannot stand.
You do not have to be seventeen in a pit to know the temperature. You can be a grown man in Ohio, still doing the work, and feel the room decide that your continued competence is an insult.
WHY I WILL NOT BEFRIEND THE SIBLING WHO SOLD ME
People say forgiveness means proximity. Joseph’s story is more severe than that. He feeds them. He tests them. He does not pretend the pit was a misunderstanding. When he weeps, it is after Judah offers his own life. [6] Restoration in that book is not a group hug over the coat. It is a moral change that can be seen.
I can understand Joseph now in my guts, not just in a verse. The first night in the Egyptian system. The false charge. The years when the people who should have known you were silent. The strange second life when you can interpret what the powerful cannot see, and they use you, and you still have a hole where a family was. That is not “sad.” That is blood knowledge. I am taking material out of this season that I will write from for decades. I want to crush the mechanism, not just complain about the mood.
The mechanism is simple. Evil gains a dominant position in a family, a company, a market. It throws the marked person into a death sentence, social or professional. It tells the bystanders that the marked person was difficult, old, extra, out of fashion. It offers the bystanders a nicer life if they go along. Most people go along. That is how it scales from a pit in Canaan to a whole economy that punishes the wrong kind of excellence.
A SIGN YOU NOTICE LATE IS STILL A SIGN
I do not need the owner of Joseph’s Cup to have meant Genesis. Meaning is not only what a merchant intended. Meaning is also what a true story does when it finds you in the parking lot.
I have been wrestling with the depth of evil in ordinary American life. Not the cartoon devil. The brother-level stuff. The way it works in families, in businesses, in the little loyalty tests about music and politics and age. Looking at that sign gave me context worth more than money. Every time I see it now I think about the cup in the sack. I think about how many Josephs get thrown aside so a lesser circle can keep its story. I think about the work that comes after you refuse to say uncle.
You go through stages. At one stage the Bible is a book you respect. At another stage it is a map of the room you are standing in. I am in the second stage with this story. I would rather have the map than the easy life that requires me to laugh on cue at the stupid things evil people say.
WHAT I DO WITH THE CONSOLATION
Consolation, if it is real, is not a nap. It is a commission.
I keep my name. I keep the work. I do not audition for people who need me smaller to make themselves feel better about all their bad decisions in life. I use the season. I write. I have already put the gunfighter ethic in a book: trained instinct under pressure, not sloppiness, and not surrender to the fashion of the hour. [13] Joseph is the older cousin of that ethic. He does the hard years. He keeps his mind. He does not become his brothers in order to be loved by his brothers.
If you are in a pit someone else dug, do not decorate the pit with their playlist. Interpret the dream. Do the work they cannot do. Let the cup fall where it falls. The people who sold you will eventually need grain. That is not spite. That is how the world is built.
I love the name of the shop. I love it more because it sits in a car wash and a commercial corridor instead of on a steeple. Evil works in commercial corridors. So does the reminder. Butler County, Warren County, a cup of coffee, a sign I ignored until I couldn’t. That is enough communication for one stretch of road.
But, I’m not as forgiving as Joseph. I know a lot of people like mob movies, like Goodfellas and John Wick. Remember what happened when they took John Wick’s car, fellas. You’ll never know when or where. But you will get it, I will make sure of it. Enjoy!
FOOTNOTES
[1] Joseph’s Cup, 8050 Arbor Square Drive, Mason, Ohio 45040; listed as inside the Pro-Clean Car Wash. Phone commonly listed as (513) 409-3287. Site: josephscup.com.
[2] Aggregated customer reviews on Restaurantji, joe.coffee, LocalCoffeeShops.org, and related listings describe owner Joseph as personally greeting guests and note the car-wash setting. I found no official shop statement tying the name to Genesis 44.
[3] Bridgewater Falls, Fairfield Township / Hamilton, Ohio 45011 area, Princeton Road at State Route 4, Butler County. Travel Butler County and Kimco property descriptions. Mason itself is in Warren County; the two sit on the same daily-driving map.
[4] Genesis 37. Jacob’s gift of the ketonet passim; the brothers’ jealousy; sale to traders; the bloodied coat returned to Jacob. On the Hebrew garment and the “many colors” / long-sleeved translation debate, see standard Bible dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry “Coat of many colors.”
[5] Genesis 39–41. Potiphar’s house, the false accusation, prison, the cupbearer and baker, Pharaoh’s dreams, Joseph as vizier.
[6] Genesis 44–45. The silver cup placed in Benjamin’s sack; the chase; Judah’s offer to stand in Benjamin’s place; Joseph reveals himself.
[7] Genesis 46–47 and Exodus 1; Exodus 12:40 on the long sojourn. Traditional preaching often rounds the Egyptian years toward four centuries before Moses. Treat the figure as the Bible’s own long-memory math, not a modern archaeological press release.
[8] For Shakespeare on jealousy and household ruin, start with Othello and King Lear. The comparison in this essay is about function: Genesis tracks the social technology of betrayal with less ornament and more consequence.
[9] Dolly Parton, “Coat of Many Colors,” recorded 1971, album Coat of Many Colors. Parton has said her mother told the Joseph story while sewing the rag coat. See Songfacts; Parton interviews; Coat of Many Colors (song) overview.
[10] Bad Bunny performed as part of the Super Bowl LIV halftime-adjacent and later mainstream-award cycle in U.S. pop memory; the February 2026 Super Bowl conversation around his place in the show is the recent nerve the anecdote touches. The point of the story is the loyalty test, not a music review.
[11] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The withdrawal of the creative mind from a looting moral order is the John Galt plot. I am using the shape, not joining a fan club.
[12] Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967; U.S. EEOC age-discrimination materials. Cultural contempt for older workers is larger than the statute and smaller than a conspiracy chart. It is a fashion with teeth.
[13] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021).
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
The Holy Bible, Genesis 37–50 and Exodus 1–12. Read at least two translations side by side; the King James “coat of many colours” and modern renderings of ketonet passim both matter.
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. Basic Books, 1981. Still the cleanest account of how these stories are built.
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. Norton, 2004.
Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis. Jewish Publication Society / Schocken.
Kass, Leon R. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Free Press, 2003. Especially strong on Joseph, statesmanship, and the education of the brothers.
Fox, Everett. The Five Books of Moses. Schocken. Useful for hearing the Hebrew grit in English.
Guzik, David. Study Guide for Genesis 44. Blue Letter Bible.
Jamieson, Robert, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown. Commentary on Genesis 44.
Bible Hub and Bible Gateway, Genesis 44, “A Silver Cup in a Sack.”
Parton, Dolly. “Coat of Many Colors.” 1971. See also My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994) for the dry-cleaning-receipt composition story.
Songfacts; Rolling Stone Parton interviews on the coat and the Joseph telling.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Jealousy as a technology.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Family, ingratitude, the discarded father.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. The other great Western book on how evil talks in a household.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. For the intelligent voice of temptation, not the costume devil.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. The modern brief on evil that does not need horns.
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred; Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Mimetic rivalry is the academic name for what Genesis 37 shows without the jargon.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. On the line of evil running through every human heart, not only through official villains.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. Bureaucracy and flattery as the devil’s work clothes.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories”; The Lord of the Rings, on the Ring as a handle for domination. Different myth, same warning about the easy life.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Age Discrimination fact sheets and The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA.
Restaurant and place listings for Joseph’s Cup, 8050 Arbor Square Drive, Mason, Ohio: josephscup.com; joe.coffee location page; Restaurantji; TripAdvisor.
Travel Butler County. Listings for Bridgewater Falls and area hospitality.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I keep hearing the same two stories about artificial intelligence, and both of them are wrong. The first story says AI will take your job, run your company, replace your CEO, and close the gap left by people who were never qualified to sit in the chair. The second story says AI is a monster and you should protest data centers, paper, cash, and every tool that looks like the future. I have used the tools. I have run departments. I have been the job maker and the job getter. I have dealt with more human resources departments this year than in the rest of my life combined. My assessment is simple. AI is an employee that does not sleep. It is useful. It is not thinking. It won’t save a company that hired the wrong people. And it is not going to take over the market economy.
I said versions of this years ago. I wrote it into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business when I argued that trained intuition, the kind people smear as “shooting from the hip,” still beats a mechanical process most of the time. [1] I was curious whether I was being Paul Bunyan with an axe while the chainsaw era rolled in. I have checked that thought against reality. I was not being Paul Bunyan. I was early.
WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY MEAN WHEN THEY SAY THEY ARE AFRAID OF AI
A lot of the fear is not about software. It is about people. I have heard it all year. You are an old white guy with privilege, so nobody has to take you seriously. That is not an economic analysis. That is a social permission slip. A generation that came of age working from living rooms, insulated from deadlines, conflict, and performance pressure, was taught that experienced men over fifty were the threat. Angry. Scary. Too much résumé. Too many relationships. Too much industrial memory.
I did not even keep a LinkedIn account for a long time. I have one now because people look me up. The feedback is almost comic. Oh my gosh, you have a giant, scary résumé. You know a lot of people. You are scary. The consensus I keep running into among people twenty-five to fifty is that they want insulation from old white guys, and they want AI and HR processes to provide it.
That is arrogance dressed up as progress. It assumes the world started when they arrived. It assumes the CEOs who fly to Davos and recycle the same mantras on LinkedIn have discovered a substitute for judgment. They have not.
AN EMPLOYEE THAT DOES NOT SLEEP IS STILL AN EMPLOYEE
I like AI. I use it. I get up at three in the morning, and I can talk to it. A human expert may not be available at four. As a research assistant, an editor, a bundler of notes into a first-pass PowerPoint, it is excellent. That is the honest use.
Ask me if I use it to write the source material. No. I write. Then I use it to filter, clean, and catch sentences that sound like a machine trying to imitate a person. It still does not understand human communication the way a person does; it cannot write like me. It rearranges. It polishes. It does not originate the thing that has to be true in the real world.
I have given it more than a fair shake. I have tried versions of it on air and off. It is a resource. It is not a mind. The companies that bought the line that AI would author strategy, close the leadership gap, and replace people who have actually built things are now bumper-carring into the wall. The toy came out of the box broken and not broken as a tool and broken as a religion.
HUMAN RESOURCES DID NOT GET DUMBER BY ACCIDENT
I have run HR departments. I know what those departments are supposed to do on the job-maker side and how they feel on the job-getter side. What I have watched this year is a shift. A lot of people in those offices are just doing a job. They are not asking who wrote the rules. They inherited a form memo from a CEO who inherited a political fashion straight out of China and Davos. The fashion said identity boxes plus software would outperform experience.
That is why so many program-management groups now want to teach Microsoft Copilot as if a bundle of prompts can run a business. Copilot is brilliant as an aid. It is not a substitute for a person who has missed a shipment, faced a union problem, held a customer’s rage, signed a payroll when the cash was tight, and still hit the date. Conflict-averse HR, deadline-optional culture, and “AI will cover it” is a combination that looks modern and performs like a hobby.
Age discrimination is not a vibe I invented. Federal law has prohibited it against workers 40 and older since 1967, and the EEOC still takes thousands of charges a year, but it’s still a problem that slips through legal loopholes. [2][3] The cultural version is cruder than the legal version. It says experience itself is suspect if it comes in the wrong demographic wrapper. Then it pretends a model trained on yesterday’s text can replace the person who lived the work.
THE DEI-PLUS-AI BET WAS A COVER STORY
Here is the game I see. Corporations adopted policies that pushed skilled, experienced leadership aside. They checked the boxes. They told Wall Street a story. Wall Street, which is very good at polishing a story and selling it to investors who brag about the penthouse, treated it as value. The quiet assumption was that artificial intelligence would run the company anyway, so the nameplate on the office did not have to belong to the best operator. You could hang a CEO tag on almost anyone. The software would drive the results.
That is a communist-adjacent fantasy wearing a tech hoodie. Anybody can do it; the model will think, output will hold, and the country will not notice the drop. I have watched the opposite happen. Companies hired people who fit a political costume and lacked the scar tissue. The work did not get done. The dates slipped. The quality sagged. AI did not close the gap because AI cannot supply intuition, accountability, or the courage to tell a room the truth.
There is a live argument in the research about whether DEI programs help or hurt firm performance. Consulting shops have sold the “diversity outperforms” slide for years. [4] Other work, including recent official economic analysis, has argued that identity-based promotion into management after 2016 tracks with lower productivity and high aggregate costs. [5] Other papers say markets did not punish firms that kept DEI programs after the 2025 policy shift. [6] I am not asking you to treat any one paper as scripture. I am telling you what I have seen in the rooms where the product has to ship. When you select against experience and then pray a chatbot will think for the inexperienced, you do not get a renaissance. You get a mess you can hide only as long as cheap money and a pumped Wall Street aligned with the Federal Reserve keep the lights pretty.
THE 2026 ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT put a number on one version of the cost: industries that leaned hard into those practices were associated with lower productivity, with an estimated hit on the order of tens of billions of dollars a year by 2023. [5] You can fight about methods. You cannot fight the operating reality I keep walking into. The people who still know how to run plants, programs, and payrolls are being called back because the substitute failed.
CASHLESS, PAPERLESS, AND THE DREAM OF A HANDLE ON MONEY
The same fashion that sold AI-as-CEO sold cashless and paperless as moral improvement. Save the trees and they were all wrong. Go online. Let the system monitor everything. If money isn’t tied to anything hard, it becomes easier to change the unit of account, funnel value through banks and markets, and pay huge salaries that don’t have to answer to real output. I write things on my hand for a reason. Systems fail. Internet fails. Even a satellite link is not reliable beyond fault. When the process is slow because nobody will put a number on paper and look a vendor in the eye, you do not have innovation. You have latency with a sustainability sticker on it.
Central bank digital currency talk is the polished end of that dream. Supporters sell inclusion and efficiency. Critics, including people who are not talking from a barstool, warn about privacy, programmable control, bank-run risk, and a tool that lets the issuer see or freeze the transaction. [7][8][9] The United Kingdom’s House of Lords called retail CBDC a solution in search of a problem. [7] I do not need a white paper to know why cash still matters. Cash is rude to central planners. Paper is rude to people who want every thought inside a dashboard. It was a communist push sent straight from China to destroy the West and its economy.
Do I think every CEO who said “paperless” was running a global conspiracy? No. Most of them were repeating a slogan. The slogan still has a direction. If you can get firms off cash, off paper, off experienced dissenters, and onto a monitored stack “managed by AI,” you do not need to win the argument about value. You change the scoreboard to make it look good.
WALL STREET, THE TAIL OF THE DOG, AND THE STINK ON THE FIELD
I am tired of financial television chasing the tail of the dog. I am telling you where the nose is pointed. As long as the Federal Reserve can put money into the system and Wall Street can mark the story to a market that is not a gold standard, companies can hide bad operating bets. They can hire the wrong people, buy the wrong software narrative, and still show a chart. That does not last once real demand, real competition, and real delivery show up.
I have seen the smaller version of this inside companies. A finance person who thinks everyone is doing it, treats the accounts like a personal weather system, buys the boat and the early retirement, and assumes that by the time anyone counts, the story will have moved on. I have seen the harm that leaves behind. I am not going to dress that up as a composite Hollywood villain. I am telling you the pattern. Corporatism hides a lot of ordinary theft and ordinary incompetence behind process. AI will not save those people from arithmetic. Justice, eventually, is just arithmetic with a badge.
Trump’s first term already showed how official narratives about prices, energy, and markets can run one way while operators on the ground run another. I am not asking you to treat every spike as a morality play. I am asking you to notice when CEOs change how they value human beings because a political weather system told them experience was optional. When the weather changes, they want the experienced person back. They want the so-called angry white guy over fifty. They will pay. They should. The next stretch of this economy won’t be won by people who have only managed a Slack channel and a vendor scorecard.
WHY THE ANTI-AI, ANTI-DATA-CENTER PANIC IS USEFUL TO AMERICA’S RIVALS
Here is the part a lot of people miss because they only know how to protest. There is a strategy, whether fully coordinated or merely convenient, that wants American firms less competitive. Chase nonproductive internal politics. Constrain labor. Then tell the public that the remaining productive machinery, the data centers, the industrial base, the people who still know how to build, is the enemy.
AI can supplement a labor market that politics has made stupid. That is exactly why a rival would love the United States to hate the tool and keep the policy. If China can cap American output while American companies argue about pronouns, paper, and whether a fifty-five-year-old program manager is too frightening to hire, Beijing does not need to beat us in a fair race. It needs us to trip.
In 2026, OpenAI, Republican committee chairs, and threat-intelligence shops reported China-origin influence activity testing anti-data-center and anti-AI-infrastructure narratives in American feeds. [10][11][12] Serious reporters also pointed out that Americans have homegrown reasons to dislike a warehouse that eats power and water on the edge of town, and that foreign amplifiers often ride a wave they did not create. [13] Both things can be true. Local land-use fights are real. So is the fact that a strategic competitor has no incentive to cheer an American buildout.
I am not telling you to love every server farm or every utility bill. I am telling you not to take your marching orders from a laser pointer. If you have ever used a laser with a cat, you know the trick. The light is not the mouse. A lot of the anti-AI content is the light.
BLADE RUNNER IS A MOVIE
People talk as if we are one product launch from a replicant you cannot tell from a neighbor. That is science fiction. Current systems predict the next token from past data. They are strong on familiar patterns and weak on novel, counter-to-data judgment. Researchers keep finding the same limit: impressive on the benchmark you trained toward, brittle when the problem is actually new. [14][15][16][17] Clinical and decision studies show overconfidence and shallow reasoning where a human still has to live with the miss. [18]
Could robotics pick up a can, sort a bin, run a basic route? Yes, and that will get better. Could a model sit in a budget fight, read a liar across a table, redesign a line at 2 a.m. when the fixture is wrong and the customer is flying in at dawn? Not in this decade in any way that replaces the person. Maybe the mid-2030s produce something scarier on television. I do not see human-level intuition on a corporate org chart by 2027. The people who bet the firm would already be here were suckers. COVID revealed a lot of sucker games. This is another one.
THE MARKET IS ALREADY VOTING FOR EXPERIENCE
I am watching the reversal in real time. After the first wave of large firms and Davos talkers, the rest of the economy still has to find people who will work harder than the median, who still value cash, who will write the note, who will own the date. The companies that got off the hook early and went back to old school- paper when it helps, cash when it matters, experienced people when the problem is ugly- are going to eat the ones that cannot.
I run exercises that force me to think like a younger person. I get in the dirt and check the idea against the part. What I have learned is that I was more correct than I expected, and that a lot of CEOs who bought the AI-will-save-our-staffing-politics story are going to choke on it. Trump-era pressure and a tighter real economy make it harder to hide a nonperforming org chart behind a diversity slide and a Copilot license.
SpaceX and serious industrial operators didn’t get there by pretending a chatbot could substitute for a propulsion engineer who’s already failed twice and knows what failure smells like. In the second half of this decade, no matter the logo on the building, it’s a race for qualified people. Not vibes. Not boxes. People.
HOW I ACTUALLY USE THE TOOL, AND HOW YOU SHOULD
I use AI like a good editor and a tireless librarian. I do not outsource the claim. I do not let it invent a number I have not seen. I do not let it talk to a customer in my voice until I have put my name on the sentence. If your company is using it to hide the fact that nobody in the room has done the job, you are not modern. You are late and lying to yourself.
If you are a CEO who spent three years telling the board that software would replace judgment, you already know the next slide. You need operators. You will pay for them. Say it out loud before the market says it for you.
WHAT I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER
Do not fear AI. Fear the story that says you can fire experience, flatten money into a controllable token, put every process inside a monitor, and trust a model to think. That story is how a country makes itself smaller while it talks about innovation.
AI will help people work better. It will not replace human intuition. It will not run the next serious company. It will not protect a generation from having to confront other human beings. It will not get a DEI hire through a merit-based storm. It will not rescue the consultant class from the promises they sold.
Watch the dog’s nose, not the tail. The stink on the field is failed output. That is where the animal is going. I told you first. You will not hear it clean on the usual financial shows, because they are paid to narrate the tail.
Have a good day. Remember who told you. I will see you in the argument that actually matters: whether this country still believes a human being can outthink a woke agenda
FOOTNOTES
[1] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021). The book treats “shooting from the hip” as trained speed after fundamentals, not sloppiness, and sets that American gunfighter ethic against Eastern strategy texts.
[2] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Age Discrimination,” and “Fact Sheet: Age Discrimination.” The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 protects applicants and employees forty and older in hiring, firing, pay, promotion, and other terms of employment.
[3] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA; AARP reporting on EEOC charge volume, including 16,223 age-discrimination charges in 2024.
[4] McKinsey & Company, “Diversity Matters Even More” (2023) and earlier Diversity Matters series. These reports are the standard corporate citation for a diversity-outperformance claim and should be read as correlational advocacy research, not a controlled experiment.
[5] Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President, 2026, chapter on the economic consequences of DEI, discussing post-2016 associations between DEI-related management practices and productivity, including an estimated GDP cost on the order of $94 billion in 2023 in one specification.
[6] Jacob Grumbach and coauthors, “Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI” (2026 working paper / Democracy Policy Lab), finding no abnormal-return penalty for S&P 500 firms that kept DEI programs after Executive Order 14173 (January 2025). CBS News summary, August 18, 2026.
[7] House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, report on retail central bank digital currency (2023), described in later reviews as calling a retail CBDC a “solution in search of a problem.”
[8] Norbert Michel, “Central Bank Digital Currency: The Risks and the Myths,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 145 (January 10, 2023).
[9] Kevin Dowd, work collected in later Cambridge writing on CBDCs, arguing negligible public demand where retail CBDCs have been tried and warning about programmable control. See also SUERF review of retail CBDC costs and bank-run arguments (2026).
[10] OpenAI threat report, June 2026, describing China-origin clusters using ChatGPT to generate social content testing narratives against U.S. AI infrastructure and data centers—coverage: Politico, June 10, 2026.
[11] House Energy and Commerce Committee Republican letter (June 2026) asking the administration to investigate foreign influence around data-center opposition. E&E News / Politico, June 4, 2026.
[12] New York Times, “China, Russia and Others Seek to Inflame Debate Over A.I. Data Centers,” July 9, 2026, citing Alethea analysis of state-media amplification.
[13] Wired, “China Didn’t Make Americans Hate Data Centers,” June 12, 2026, and follow-up September 6, 2026, arguing domestic land-use, power, and political grievances are the base layer and that influence operations often exploit existing anger.
[14] “Does AI Prediction Scale to Decision Making?” Communications of the ACM, 2025, on the limit of past-data prediction for counter-to-data human decisions.
[15] MIT CSAIL / MIT News, “Reasoning skills of large language models are often overestimated” (July 11, 2024), on failure under counterfactual and unfamiliar variants.
[16] “Take caution in using LLMs as human surrogates,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025.
[17] Strategy Science, “Mean Articulation Machines” (2025), on remaining human advantages in abduction and strategy under true uncertainty.
[18] “Limitations of large language models in clinical problem-solving arising from inflexible reasoning,” Scientific Reports, 2025.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Self-published, 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript in revision; forthcoming.
Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal. North River Press, various editions.
Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. Free Press, 1990.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Multiple translations.
Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Age Discrimination resources and The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA.
AARP. Age-discrimination complaint tracking and related labor-force reports.
Council of Economic Advisers. Economic Report of the President. 2026. Chapter on DEI and productivity.
McKinsey & Company. Diversity Matters series, including “Diversity Matters Even More” (2023).
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow. Work on the allocation of talent and growth, often cited in the opposing DEI-economic-cost debate. See Science Forum, “On the economic costs of ending DEI,” May 15, 2025.
Grumbach, Jacob, et al. “Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI.” 2026.
Larcker, David F., Charles McClure, Shawn Shi, and Edward M. Watts. “The Limited Corporate Response to DEI Controversies.” SSRN, 2026.
Michel, Norbert. “Central Bank Digital Currency: The Risks and the Myths.” Cato Institute, 2023.
Dowd, Kevin. Critiques of retail CBDC adoption and demand. Cambridge / related essays, mid-2020s.
Bank for International Settlements. Surveys and risk papers on CBDC design, security, and financial-stability implications.
House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. Retail CBDC inquiry, 2023.
Allison and coauthors. “Central Bank Digital Currencies, Financial Inclusion, and Privacy: A Normative Perspective.” Southern Economic Journal, 2026.
OpenAI. Influence-operations reporting on AI-infrastructure narratives, June 2026.
Alethea. Threat-intelligence analysis of foreign state-media coverage of U.S. data centers, 2026.
Bitcoin Policy Institute. Reports on foreign influence ecosystems around AI infrastructure (treat as advocacy research; read against Wired and NYT).
Politico; E&E News; New York Times; Wired. 2026 coverage of the data-center politics and influence debate.
Acemoglu, Daron, and Simon Johnson. Power and Progress. PublicAffairs, 2023. For a broad political-economy critique of who captures tech rents.
Kissinger, Henry, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie. Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit. 2024.
Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique. Harvard Business Review Press.
Hougaard, Rasmus, and Jacqueline Carter. More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead. Harvard Business Review Press, 2025.
Hoffman, Reid, and Greg Beato. Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. 2025. Useful as the optimistic techno-humanist counter-case.
Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. 2026.
Communications of the ACM; PNAS; Scientific Reports; Strategy Science; MIT CSAIL papers cited in the footnotes, 2024–2025, on reasoning limits of large language models.
World Economic Forum. Annual meeting materials from Davos. Read as primary source for the managerial dialect, not as gospel.
Microsoft. Copilot for Microsoft 365 product documentation. Useful for separating the actual tool from the sales mysticism.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
A state can be defeated without a single soldier crossing a border and without a single missile leaving a rail. That sentence used to sound like science fiction. It is now closer to a working description of how power is actually contested. The old picture of war—troops, tanks, flags, and a declared beginning—still exists. It is no longer the whole picture. The more important contest often happens in finance, law, media, software, supply chains, classrooms, and the human-resources office that decides which attitudes are allowed at work.
I have talked about this for years, including when War Room and other outlets treated the subject as strategy rather than slogan. I still own a promotional shirt from the Atlas Shrugged film cycle that advertised in October 2012. The story in those pictures was about producers versus the people who live by controlling producers. This essay’s argument is related, but colder. It is not only about bad policy. It is about a style of conflict designed to make a free country less competitive without looking like an invasion.
What follows is part brief, part review, and part field note. The brief is the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army officers. The review is how that book’s logic shows up in gray-zone operations, cyber incidents, sanctions fights, and what NATO now calls cognitive warfare. The field note is personal. After decades in one workplace, I’ve talked to different people, in different rooms, under different rules. The rules often arrive as kindness, inclusion, and “compliance.” The effect is something else: a society trained to police its own energy.
What Clausewitz Said, and What the Colonels Rewrote
Carl von Clausewitz gave the West its most famous definition: war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.[1] That definition assumes you can see the force. It assumes a distinction between peace and war, soldier and civilian, battlefield and marketplace. Those distinctions were never perfect. In 1999, two PLA Air Force senior colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published Chao Xian Zhan—warfare beyond limits—arguing that the distinctions were collapsing on purpose.[2][3]
They were writing after the Gulf War, which had advertised American conventional superiority in brutal high definition. If you cannot beat a superpower on its preferred field, you do not accept the field. You change the game. You use economic pressure, legal process, media, networks, finance, culture, and technology as weapons in combination. You aim at political results, not at a parade of wrecked tanks. In a June 1999 interview, Qiao put the doctrine in one line: the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, and nothing is forbidden.[4]
Using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.
That is still Clausewitz’s object—compulsion of will—with the means blown wide open. The authors were not shy about the catalog. They discussed psychological warfare, media warfare, cultural warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, network warfare, legal warfare, smuggling, resources, and more.[5] They also insisted on combination. One tool is a dispute. A dozen tools timed together are a campaign. If you hit a currency, seed social discord, and probe a power grid in the same season, the target spends its energy arguing about which event “counts” as war. Meanwhile, the damage accumulates.
The most important sentence in the book is not the slogan about rules. It is the claim that the battlefield is everywhere. Ground, sea, air, and space remain battlefields. So do politics, economics, culture, and the psyche.[6] Once you accept that sentence, a lot of modern life stops looking like “politics as usual” and starts looking like low-intensity conflict that never has to declare itself.
Combination Warfare and the Vanishing Front Line
Traditional strategy likes a map with a front. Unrestricted warfare looks like a web. The authors talk about “addition”—stacking methods until the opponent cannot find the line of contact. Later PLA political work formalized a related toolkit as the “Three Warfares”: public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare, written into regulations in 2003.[7] Those three are not a substitute for the 1999 book. They are one way the same instinct was institutionalized: shape what people believe, shake what they are willing to endure, and use law as a weapon rather than a fence.
This is why “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone” became fashionable terms in the West. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine before and after 2014 mixed information operations, energy leverage, proxies, and cyber operations. On December 23, 2015, attackers attributed to the Sandworm group shut off power to roughly 230,000 customers in Ukraine. It was the first widely acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.[8] No tank had to roll for the lights to go out. Plausible deniability did part of the work. If activists, criminals, or “unknown actors” can be blamed, a conventional military reply becomes politically and legally expensive.
International law was built for visible armies. The Geneva tradition assumes you can tell a combatant from a civilian. A server room, a social platform, a ratings agency, or a human-resources policy shop does not wear a uniform. The Tallinn Manuals—first in 2013, then 2.0 in 2017—tried to apply existing law to cyber operations. Most of what unrestricted warfare describes happens below the threshold of an “armed attack.” States like the ambiguity. Clear rules would bind them too.[9]
Economic tools sit in the same gap. Sanctions can wreck a financial system and still fail the legal test of armed attack.[10] That is a feature if your doctrine says the point is political collapse or capitulation, not a formal declaration. The violence, when it comes, may be late. The conference room and the data center get there first.
Cognitive Warfare: The Target Is the Decision Itself
NATO and allied research communities now talk openly about cognitive warfare: operations aimed not only at what people know, but at how groups perceive, trust, and decide.[11] Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of volume. You do not need a master propagandist in every town. You need models that can generate tailored narratives, test what spreads, and keep the target public arguing with itself.
This is the frightening part of the 1999 thesis updated for 2026. The original colonels talked about media and psychology. They could not fully describe algorithmic amplification, deepfakes, or automated social engineering. The logic did not need those tools to be valid. The tools made the logic cheaper. If you can degrade collective cognition—attention, memory, trust, and the willingness to pay a cost—you do not have to occupy the capital. You occupy the argument.
Hardware races in the same direction. Autonomy reduces the political cost of using force because fewer of “your” people come home in boxes. That drops the barrier to kinetic conflict even as non-kinetic conflict is already permanent. The two trends reinforce each other. A society that is internally confused is easier to pressure. A society that is internally confident is harder to push around with either drones or narratives.
Cultural Warfare Does Not Arrive Waving a Foreign Flag
Here is where the argument gets personal, and where a serious reader should keep two ideas in the same hand.
First idea: Unrestricted Warfare names cultural warfare as a method. Weaken an adversary from the inside. Make the opponent less cohesive, less fertile, less industrious, less willing to defend its own standards. You do not need every Western fashion to be a Beijing plot for that method to be real. You only need the method to exist, and you need American institutions to be available as terrain.[12]
Second idea: over the last decade, much of American corporate culture has trained people to treat productivity, punctuality, sex differences, and plain speech as moral problems. The memos did not say “this is how you lose a contest with a mercantilist authoritarian state.” They said “values,” “belonging,” and “compliance.” The question worth asking is not whether every diversity officer reports to the PLA. The question is whether a rival who studies cultural warfare would look at the results and smile.
I think the rival would smile. I did not come to that as a theory first. I came to it after watching people obey rules they could not defend. During COVID, I watched institutions in Ohio treat CDC language as liturgy. Court challenges were slow. Social punishment was fast. I put a phone on speaker and called people who were supposed to know the law. That is how I got through it. Plenty of workplaces did not have anyone willing to do that. They complied because compliance had become the local religion. An enemy watching from outside would have learned something useful: large parts of the American professional class will enforce a rule before they will examine it.
That is the footprint. Not tanks on the lawn. A workforce taught that the highest civic virtue is not causing trouble.
The HR office as terrain
Human resources is where abstract ideology becomes a condition of employment. I have had HR people report to me. When I asked where an idea came from, the face-to-face answer was often some version of “we will do better.” The inbox told a different story. Newsletters and vendor templates arrived with the new values. The people sending them were frequently the age of my children, not villains in a movie. They were following a script that had already been professionalized.
Onboarding at many firms now spends a remarkable share of time on identity rules and sensitivity machinery. Time spent teaching a new hire to be useful—show up, learn the work, look your coworkers in the eye, carry weight—gets crowded out by time spent teaching the new hire which sentences are dangerous. If you are an older man who talks like work is a duty, you can be framed as a climate problem. If you ride a bicycle twenty miles to a job because the car is dead, that used to be called character. In some offices it now reads as “intensity,” which is a polite word for unwanted masculinity.
I am not romantic about every man over fifty. Some of them are tired and rude. I am romantic about the old expectation: if you are sick enough to stay home, stay home; if you are not, go. If it snows, go to work anyway; your co-workers are counting on you. Make yourself useful. That ethic built payrolls. The substitute ethic—work from the living room, treat output as optional, treat feelings as infrastructure—does not build payrolls. It manages them downward.
Masculinity, entertainment, and the cheapening of standards
Culture is not a side show in this doctrine. It is named terrain. When a commercial sport that sells collision and spectacle starts treating the halftime eye-candy as a seminar in preferences, that is not the end of the republic. It is a tell. Men who paid for front-row seats to watch a game and see women dance are not required to pretend they paid for a lecture. If saying so sends you to an HR office, the office is no longer just administering benefits. It is administering taste.
The same pattern showed up in film. The hard, unsmooth male lead became a problem to be managed. You can call that progress. You can also notice that a civilization in a long contest with a high-discipline mercantilist rival might not want to train its young men to be ashamed of drive. Beards and tattoos on men in their thirties are not a military doctrine. They are sometimes a leftover male signal in a workplace that punished the older signals. The strategic point is simpler: if you flatten the people who like to compete, you flatten the economy that depends on them.
Sexual identity fights belong in the same file. A free country can leave adults alone. A strategic culture that turns every workplace into a referendum on private life is doing something else. It burns attention. It splits coalitions. It makes ordinary competence look like aggression. Unrestricted warfare does not need to invent the fight. It only needs the fight to continue.
COVID as a rehearsal
I keep returning to COVID because it was the week the mask slipped on the machinery. Policy moved faster than evidence in too many rooms. Dissent was treated as dirtiness. The people who said “just follow the rules” were often the same people who could not name who wrote the rules. “We are a culture of compliance” is not a boast in a republic. It is a vulnerability report.
A rival does not have to love the virus to love the data. How quickly did professionals accept workplace punishments for speech? How quickly did schools take over children’s moral education while parents were isolated? How quickly did “expert” language replace judgment? Those are cultural measurements. They tell you how much friction an influence campaign would meet.
Corporations, LinkedIn, and the Myth of Neutral Policy
American business is not the Chinese Communist Party. Conflating the two is sloppy. What is not sloppy is noticing that global firms optimize for access, risk reduction, and reputational peace. If the cheapest way to keep markets, banks, campuses, and NGOs quiet is to import a values language that flattens conflict inside the firm, many firms will import it. They will call it best practice. Vendors will sell the templates. LinkedIn will reward the slogans. Smaller companies will copy larger ones because lenders, insurers, and talent pipelines punish deviation.
That is how you get a one-way ratchet without a conspiracy chalkboard. Beijing does not have to draft the memo if the memo already weakens the only large open society that still out-innovates it. United Front work, elite capture, research partnerships, and capital access are the documented channels. Cultural mimicry is the force multiplier—retired Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding and others have argued that if you watch Chinese behavior since 1999 through the lens of the book, the picture snaps into focus.[13] You do not have to accept every page of that popularization to accept the narrower point: connectivity is a weapon as well as a market.
Cashless systems, monitored transactions, and centralized payment rails belong to the same family of tools. They can be convenient. They can also be turned. A society that cannot complete a private exchange without a third-party ledger is a society that can be throttled. Again: not every debit card is an invasion. The doctrine says look at the combination, not the single instrument.
The Defense Paradox: How You Lose by Winning the Wrong Way
Qiao and Wang understood something Western liberals are late to admit. A society that lives by open rules can be made to trip over those rules. Lawfare ties up the opponent in his own courts. Media warfare uses the opponent’s platforms. Cultural warfare uses the opponent’s guilt. If the target responds by building a surveillance state to stop the influence, the target has paid in the coin the influence campaign wanted: less freedom. If the target refuses to notice the campaign, the target stays open and stays cut.
That is the lose-lose proposition. Defend badly, and you become the thing you were defending against. Decline to defend, and you are disarmed in the only war that is already underway. Critics of the 1999 doctrine are right that it treats human rights and international law as just another front. That is not a misunderstanding of the text. That is the text.
The Western answer cannot be “no rules, nothing forbidden.” That is how you cease to be the West. The answer is narrower and harder: name the methods, refuse the scripts that make you weaker, keep due process, and rebuild the habits that make a high-trust, high-output society possible. Resilience matters more than the fantasy of blocking every lie. Recovery speed and social trust are the actual defenses. A country that still believes its own people can work, argue, worship, raise children, and laugh at bad art is a hard country to hollow out.
What This Means on the Ground
If the battlefield is the paycheck, then the first duty is not a new missile. It is a refusal to treat the workplace as a reeducation camp. Hire for output. Measure output. Stop confusing moral fashion with risk management. Parents who want children should not have to apologize to a values slide deck. Men and women are not a paperwork error. Speech about all of that should not be a firing offense.
Political leadership matters because only the state can answer state-backed capital, theft of intellectual property, and platform manipulation at scale. Business leadership matters because most Americans meet the new rules at work, not at a Senate hearing. Voters who want people who have signed payrolls are not being crude. They are asking for officials who recognize a negotiation that smiles in public and competes in private.
I have watched firms that still recruit hungry people—SpaceX is the example everyone uses because it is obvious—outperform firms that recruit for the seminar. That gap will widen as the space economy and other fast industries punish delay. A culture that cannot tell a worker to come in when it snows will not beat a culture that can. This is not poetry. It is arithmetic.
Education is the long front. If the schoolhouse becomes the delivery system for political fashion, the family loses the first chance to form character. You do not need foreign infantry in the hallway after that. You need time. Time is what unrestricted warfare buys when it stays below the threshold of open war.
Conclusion: The Winner Integrates the Board
The authors of Unrestricted Warfare said the winner would be the side that can play on a board that keeps expanding, while the loser keeps staring at the old squares. Missiles still matter. So do grids, ports, chips, and ships. So do birth rates, work rates, attention spans, and whether a man can say he prefers female cheerleaders without being marched into a conference room. The last item sounds small until you notice the method: make the confident people tired, then call the tiredness progress.
I was insulated from a lot of this for a long time: same place, same people, same expectations. Coming back into a wider set of rooms felt like being thawed out of ice. The tools were new. The weakness was not new. It was the old American temptation to believe that because we mean well, the contest must be a seminar. It is not a seminar. It is a continuous campaign against cohesion.
Sun Tzu wanted victory without battle.[14] The 1999 colonels wrote a modern manual for that instinct and published it openly. They could afford to. A book is not dangerous to the side that is already inside the institutions of the other side. The dangerous thing is a public that still thinks war only looks like a landing craft.
Understand the doctrine. Keep the distinction between evidence and suspicion. Then look at your own shop, your own school, your own screen, and ask the only operational question that matters: does this rule make us harder to beat, or easier? If the honest answer is easier, it is not “best practice.” You have donated terrain to someone who is not confused about whether this is a contest.
Selected Bibliography
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Book I, Chapter 1.
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare (Chao Xian Zhan). Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999. English selections via FBIS.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Spalding, Robert. War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination. New York: Sentinel, 2022.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
Jamestown Foundation. “The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares.” China Brief, 2016.
NATO Science and Technology Organization. Materials from HFM-361, Mitigating and Responding to Cognitive Warfare (Madrid, November 2023), and related Chief Scientist reporting on cognitive warfare.
MITRE ATT&CK. “2015 Ukraine Electric Power Attack (Campaign C0028).”
Wikipedia and contemporaneous technical reporting on the December 23, 2015 Ukraine power-grid cyberattack attributed to Sandworm.
U.S. Marine Corps University. “To Win without Fighting” and related essays on PRC political warfare and unrestricted warfare.
RSIS Commentary. Nan Li, “Unrestricted Warfare and Chinese Military Strategy,” 2002.
Author’s Note
This essay is written in the first person on purpose. The strategic literature can be cited. The workplace scenes cannot be footnoted like a statute. They are offered as testimony from one American who spent decades in a single shop, then walked into the new rules and recognized the old doctrine. Readers who want only the book should stop at the bibliography. Readers living under the new rules already know why the paycheck is the front line.
Notes
[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter 1: “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”
[2] Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999). English selections circulated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).
[3] The original Chinese title is Chao Xian Zhan (超限战), literally “warfare beyond limits” or “warfare beyond bounds.”
[4] Zhongguo Qingnian Bao interview with Qiao Liang, June 28, 1999; FBIS translation OW2807114599. Qiao: “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”
[5] Qiao and Wang, Unrestricted Warfare. The authors list methods including psychological, media, cultural, financial, trade, network, legal, smuggling, drug, resource, and ecological warfare.
[6] Qiao and Wang write that “spaces in nature including the ground, the seas, the air, and outer space are battlefields, but social spaces such as the military, politics, economics, culture, and the psyche are also battlefields.”
[7] The “Three Warfares”—public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare—were written into PLA Political Work Regulations in 2003 and elaborated in subsequent PLA teaching texts.
[8] On December 23, 2015, attacks attributed to the Russian group Sandworm disrupted electricity for roughly 230,000 customers in western Ukraine. It is widely cited as the first publicly acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.
[9] Michael N. Schmitt, ed., Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Tallinn Manual 2.0 (2017). Legal literature has discussed work toward a third edition through 2025–2026.
[10] U.S. and allied legal analyses generally hold that ordinary economic sanctions, however severe, do not by themselves constitute an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That legal line is precisely why economic and regulatory pressure is attractive in unrestricted-warfare thinking.
[11] NATO Science and Technology Organization materials from the HFM-361 symposium (Madrid, November 2023) and subsequent Chief Scientist reporting treat cognitive warfare as influence operations aimed at human decision-making, accelerated by AI and digital platforms.
[12] This section states the author’s interpretive thesis. It is not a claim that a single CCP memo authored every Western HR policy. It is a claim about effects, incentives, and the kind of battlefield the 1999 doctrine described.
[13] Robert Spalding, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination (Sentinel, 2022), popularizes the 1999 text as a standing playbook rather than a one-off essay.
[14] Sun Tzu, The Art of War: the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Qiao and Wang explicitly place their argument in that lineage.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been living inside a new Bible. Not a novelty Bible. Not one of those thin inspirational editions that treat Scripture like a greeting card. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, New King James Version, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson in August of 2026. I cannot say enough about it. The notes are Edwards. The sermons sit next to the text. The Resolutions are there. The miscellany system is explained so a man can actually work the way Edwards worked. Every time I pick up a different Bible, I change perspective a little. This one changed it a lot.
I was going through it, and I couldn’t help thinking about a miracle that doesn’t get preached the way it should. Not only the crucifixion. Not only the empty tomb. The miracle that Christianity emerged at all. That the word got out. That a Jewish movement in a backwater of the Roman Empire became the operating system of Western civilization. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of the spiritual, but as the way the spiritual actually conquered. What benefit did Christianity bring to the race and to civilization? Magnificent. And I keep thinking, reading Edwards, how many movements rose and fell that we will never know about because the writing did not survive, or it is still buried in the desert waiting to be discovered. We know Christianity because it was documented, scaled, and defended by men who understood value.
King Charles, the Quran, and Knowing Where You Are
I saw King Charles in England talking about the holy book of the Quran, how we have to respect it, all that progressive mantra that is designed to undo Western civilization. You need to know where you are. You need to know your own nation’s history. I have read the Quran for years. I cannot say there is anything in any version I’ve read that has the spiritual and intellectual merit I get from Edwards. Edwards is a good writer. He is a great mind under pressure. He is the kind of intelligence that contemplates large ideas and then puts them into a form a civilization can use. If you want to know what the United States began as—a Christian nation in the serious sense, not the slogan sense—this Bible is the right tool.
Somebody asked me if I was working for the publisher because I have been pushing this volume so hard. I am not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years, decades of work behind them, putting Edwards next to the text so a man in 2026 can buy it on the open market and think. How do you make a living long enough to produce something intelligent? How do you buy a hamburger and still have thousands of hours left to put a mind like Edwards in one place? That question is not small. It is the same question Paul answered with a needle and goat hair.
Paul Was a Businessman. That is why we still have Christianity.
My favorite book in the Bible is Ephesians. Paul wrote it. I think a lot of people confuse Paul with John. John wrote Revelation. John is the one who survived—tradition says they tried to boil him and he lived, and then he wrote. They killed Paul in Rome, most likely sometime between 64 and 67. People mix the two up. They should not. John is the seer. Paul is the scaler.
Paul came in late. He was against Jesus, and then he was for Jesus. Many people in the world might find themselves in that place. He was a Pharisee, educated, and a tentmaker. The original disciples, when they were still following Jesus around Galilee, were mostly fishermen. Dirt poor. I tend to see that first circle as an early form of communal living—they held things in common, lived off shared provision, and took care of their own. Historians generally see the Jerusalem church in Acts as voluntary generosity inside a tight, persecuted community, not a formal communist system. It was “we take care of our own,” not a political ideology. And it did not last as a model. It could not scale.
Paul’s idea came from a businessman. Because of Paul, we still have Christianity today. That is not a slight against Peter or James or John. It is an observation about how movements survive. The dramatic turn—from hunting the church to becoming its biggest champion after the Damascus Road—matters. His background as a tentmaker and an educated Pharisee gave him a different toolkit than the original disciples. He could travel. He could talk to Gentiles. He could write letters that functioned as operating manuals. Without the missionary journeys and without letters like Ephesians, Christianity might have stayed a small Jewish sect. He brought structure, theology, and a scalable vision.
Financial Independence Is Not a Side Note. It Is the Strategy.
The part of Paul that made him effective with people initially against the movement is the part churches don’t like to talk about on Sunday. He did not have to live off a handout. He could be bold, even if he went a little over the edge, because he was financially independent enough from his trade to go against the grain and reshape a movement. That personal independence—having a trade, having a bank account from business days—gave him latitude. Everybody else emphasized martyrdom. Martyrdom is remembered. Martyrdom does not stay around long enough, or hold enough social influence, to make people listen after the body is gone. They were easily disposed of, crucified, written into history as a memento. It takes more than that to make a movement work.
Paul knew how to scale ideas. Ephesians is the proof. He supported himself while traveling and preaching, so he wasn’t as vulnerable to local pressure or to needing one house to feed him. That freedom let him be bolder in the message and push boundaries without worrying about immediate survival. The other apostles were deeply rooted in the Jewish context. Paul was building something that could outlast any single leader. The shift from “follow me to death” to “this truth can transform anyone, anywhere” is the difference between a local witness and a civilization.
If Paul had never converted, I think the movement would have fizzled. The Roman world was full of rebellions and religious groups we have never even heard of. Without his organizational skill and his ability to take the message beyond Jewish circles, Christianity likely stays small, localized, and eventually fades like the rest. His conversion and his strategic vision gave him a unique angle on the bigger picture. I wonder how many political efforts to overthrow or outlast Rome rose and fell that we will never know about. Paul would have been one of them if he had stayed Saul.
Ephesians 6:12 and the Politics of Heaven
My favorite verse is Ephesians 6:12. I love that line because it is a truth revealed to a mind under tremendous pressure, telling the grim reality of the human race. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Paul is preaching monotheism against the tides of the day, against a Roman world that had many gods, and he comes up with the idea that the secret rulers of existence are not the men in front of you. Thank goodness he had the creative nerve to write it that way.
I recognize that verse because I’ve learned it the hard way. The true reality of the universe is that good people end up hurting each other while chasing things that don’t matter, and the reason isn’t always the name on the driver’s license. It is the entities behind the people. Our mistake is stopping at Tim or Bob or Bill. I don’t remember names the way other people want me to. I care about the principalities that climb into bodies and drive them. The flesh-and-blood parts—whose nose looks like the father, whose hair color came from the great-grandfather—mean little to me. The politics of the principality does.
I have a granddaughter a few years old. I watch her walk, run, pick things up, touch the world, learn who is important and who is not. Those bonds will go through her entire life—parents, uncles, cousins, grandparents—even when she is forty or fifty. She is writing those meetings into her experience as she learns. We all go through that. But what was the human being before the human being? What is a person’s spiritual essence before it manifests in flesh and blood? What is the politics of that principality? That is the kind of thing I think about. A personality there is not rooted only in genetic material. We are not always what we are as defined by the human experience. We are what we are whether it manifests or not.
When Does the Principality Enter the World?
People want a clean answer on conception, quickening, birth. I think the principalities are already at work when a mother and father find themselves wanting to form a union to produce a child. They either will themselves into the world or wield the world toward its demise. Human beings create political systems that reflect that dependency because we learned to become flesh, and we rarely see the principal active behind the desire. We are stuck seeing the physical side. The human experience starts to feel like actors on a stage, with invisible directors.
That is why the incarnation is such a radical move. God of the universe taking form as a human being, the Spirit moving through people—if you only watch flesh, it looks strange. If you watch principalities, it looks like the only way to break through hidden influences and meet us in the middle of the mess. Human beings are not the whole problem. The forces that drive the human being are. If you measure your value only by how much you sacrifice yourself to other human beings, you can feed the wrong powers and call it virtue. I have an awful lot of friends in that place. To be nice, I will put my wife in that category. She is a person who will sacrifice as a mother, as a wife, as a community member, so that something good can happen. A lot of people judge their value in the world by what they are willing to give up. Hidden power resides behind the efforts of everything we interact with. You have to know what you are serving.
Paul and the Apostles Did Not Get Along. That Is Why It Worked.
Christianity did not spread as a locked-arm kumbaya. Paul fought the original apostles. The clashes were open. Peter was vocal. The question of Gentiles, purity, who is in and who is out—those were not polite committee meetings. It is amazing Christianity even made it. The Jerusalem circle wanted purity. Keep the impure out. Paul wanted scale. Include the nations. If the purity party had won clean, there would have been no movement that could leave Judea. There would have been no Edwards. There would have been no Washington. There would have been no Lincoln. Christianity does not break out of being a Jewish sect without Paul’s vision for the Gentile world.
I mentioned Nancy Nix in the video because that is how this works in real life. I was at Fort Necessity, walking around the bookstore outside the theater, and she called. She represents Republican politics in my community in Butler County, Ohio. We do not talk every five seconds. We talk a good deal. We think alike about a lot of things. She was having a particular problem—kids not playing well in the sandbox, twenty-five people in a room with twenty-five backgrounds and twenty-five ideas of right and wrong, and you have to point them in one direction. That is the same problem Paul had. How do you bring people together and make a movement voters, or believers, can actually trust? Real movements are made in that mess. Not by people who only keep the circle pure. By people who can stand the friction and still build.
Fort Necessity, Mount Vernon, Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg
If Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, my wife and I had Fort Necessity on a wrong turn. We were headed toward Washington. We took a wrong turn onto the National Road with the camper. Hard to turn a camper around in the mountains. We were too far in to go back, so we kept going and drove right by Necessity. I pulled into the big parking lot to turn around. I went back into the camper for a Mello Yello. She said we were already an hour and a half off schedule; we were here- why not go into the museum? So we did. March or April 2026. Cool. Not crowded. A Wednesday afternoon, and we had the place to ourselves. I walked the ground where a young George Washington learned what command costs.
A few months later the Washington movie came out, and we went to see it. I was already thinking about what made Washington Washington. The Great Awakening—the idea of a people who could stand up against the mother country—was coming out of churches. Edwards was in the air those men breathed. Then the same year I got to Mount Vernon, to the grave where Washington and Martha overlook the Potomac, into the house, into the room. I have been interested in the influence on his day-to-day life. Edwards is one of those influences. I was thinking about Edwards before this Bible existed. Then this is the year they put the Study Bible together. That is not an accident in my calendar.
A couple of days after Necessity, my friend Nancy called while I was in that library. A couple of days after that, my wife and I were in Gettysburg. We had already been in Washington. We took a whole day for Ford’s Theatre. I stood at the door of the box Booth walked through to shoot Lincoln in the back of the head. I had been at the White House that morning. Assassination attempts on Trump were in my head—the Butler, Pennsylvania picture, blood down the face. I was ready to leave and get a sandwich. My wife wanted to go across the street to see where Lincoln had died. We had made friends with a tour guide, a Park Service man who gives the presentation on stage. He saw we were abnormally interested. He took us to the Petersen House, to the room where Lincoln died. A little chair sat by the bed. I sat there a long time. No ghosts. A good museum. A man who works that room every day and understood where I was.
I sat there thinking what Lincoln was thinking as he bled out. I think he was thinking about the creation of the United States. I think he was thinking about the men who had already given their lives. I think the moral language in his pocket went back through the Awakening to Edwards. Then we spent days on the Gettysburg field with the RV. Maps. Day one, day two, day three. Temperature. What the soldiers felt like. I had this overwhelming thought that Edwards—the sermons, the memos of the Awakening in a man’s kit—helped Union soldiers hold together long enough to win, and Lincoln put everything on that hold. Day three. Cemetery Ridge. A republic built on Christian values against an aristocracy that still wanted Europe’s old arrangement. That does not happen without a moral backbone. That backbone does not happen without Edwards. Edwards does not happen in the form that made America without a Christianity that could already scale. That Christianity does not happen without Paul.
Trump Is a Lot Like Paul
A lot of people in the political circles I run in are asking what we are supposed to be doing. Trump has been in the White House. He has held Bibles. He has tried to bring old tradition back into the public eye. I don’t know that Trump is “into it” the way a seminary man is. He is a businessman. In many ways, Trump is a lot like Paul. We were given a second chance because a man with a messy former life and a real business ability sat Christians and conservatives down at a table of political power they would not have had otherwise. Charlie Kirk and a lot of others got a larger platform because of that. Things are better because of it. It does not always come in the package you would have designed on a Sunday morning. Paul did not either.
Both used a practical scaling mindset. Neither arrived as the saint the purity party wanted. Both made the movement larger than the room that wanted to keep it small. That is the comparison. I catch some of that same spirit in Edwards—the hope in the sermons that God would walk with a people onto the battlefields of life and that justice would be served. There are always difficulties. A remnant will always rather dismantle what was built than build on it. I am saying no. We need to build on what we built here and continue it productively.
The Second Great Awakening Will Not Come From Washington
We always focus on Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Adams. What made them? The first Great Awakening made the moral weather they walked through. A Second Great Awakening will not come from the Trump administration as a program. The administration can facilitate space. It cannot preach it. It has to come from churches and Bibles and men who will talk in public. Putting this Edwards Bible together helps people recover the first so we can form another.
What does a modern awakening look like? A lot of people despise AI. They do not like Elon Musk. They think we are headed for Age of Ultron, Tony Stark trying to fix the world and creating new problems. I am having a public conversation with a human-created intelligence on purpose. That does not mean we end up the villain. I think the next awakening is going to use the technology we created to serve the old fire—real-time reference, real-time argument, people able to spy on a serious conversation from their own house at whatever hour they can stand it. Churches on Sunday give you the names and the memorize-the-event version. They do not give you the psychology of why the thing worked. That is why this conversation matters.
The biggest threat to the legacy is not a missile. It is an anti-business movement aimed at the root of what Paul brought into Christianity: a sense of value, then that value carried into a relationship with the everlasting, with the principalities beyond flesh and blood. When people attack business and capital in Western culture, they are often attacking the mechanism that let Christianity endure long enough to shape law, ethics, and institutions. Paul’s business mindset did not just help Christianity. It shaped the DNA of a civilization that understood productivity and serving others as spiritual work. That came from a tentmaker who refused to live only on other people’s tables.
What I Want People to Take From This
Paul is why Christianity is a world force and not a forgotten Judean faction. Edwards is a large reason we have an America that could produce Washington and Lincoln. Washington and Lincoln are why a republic is left to defend.
I don’t think Jesus would say, “Take joy in melting their faces.” I think Jesus would do the thing that got Him in trouble: preach anyway, against the warnings, against the purity party, against the empire. Paul took that and made it travel. Edwards took that and made it American. We are due to take it again.
In the age of disclosure, you must understand the politics of heaven. Start with Paul. Start with Edwards.
Notes
1. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Study notes drawn from Edwards’s works; includes the Resolutions, an introduction to the Miscellanies note-taking system, and essays on Edwards’s theology and the First Great Awakening. Works of Jonathan Edwards are freely available at edwards.yale.edu.
2. Acts 18:2–3 identifies Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla as tentmakers (Greek skēnopoios). Cilicia, Paul’s home region, was known for cilicium, goat-hair cloth used in tents. Paul sometimes refused congregational support so the gospel would not look like a sales pitch (1 Corinthians 9; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; Acts 20:33–35).
3. Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–35 describe voluntary sharing in the Jerusalem church. Most historians treat this as emergency generosity in a persecuted minority, not a transferable political economy. The model does not govern later Pauline congregations.
4. Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV): “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Parallel language appears in Ephesians 1:21, 3:10; Colossians 1:16, 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.
5. Early tradition places Paul’s martyrdom in Rome under Nero, commonly dated 64–67. The New Testament does not narrate the death. John of Patmos, associated by church tradition with the apostle John, is the figure tied to Revelation and to survival of attempted execution.
6. Conflicts over Gentile inclusion are recorded in Acts 15 and Galatians 2. Paul’s public confrontation with Peter at Antioch is one of the clearest internal fractures in the earliest movement.
7. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, author of A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and the Enfield sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). The First Great Awakening (roughly 1734–1745) created the first intercolonial religious public in British America.
8. Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Farmington, Pennsylvania, marks Washington’s 1754 defeat in the opening of the French and Indian War. Mount Vernon; Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House in Washington, D.C.; Gettysburg National Military Park.
9. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002), traces the theological line from the Awakening through the early republic and the Civil War era. Influence is cultural and moral, not a claim that Edwards sat in Lincoln’s cabinet.
10. The comparison of Trump to Paul is analogical: a commercially formed outsider who enlarges a religious-political coalition the purity faction would have kept small. It is not a claim of apostleship.
Bibliography
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
A Community Night at Miami University’s Innovation Center
On September 21, 2026, we hosted a special community event at Miami University’s Innovation Center on Elm Street in Oxford, Ohio.
We called the evening “Dreams on Elm Street”, a lighthearted nod to the classic 1980s film. But what we’re building at Volynt isn’t the stuff of nightmares. It’s the realization of a dream, one that is taking shape right here in Butler County and has the potential to transform the future of logistics, aviation, and economic development in Ohio.
The turnout exceeded our expectations. The room was filled with Miami University staff, students, local business leaders, elected officials, and community members who wanted to learn more about what Volynt is building and where we’re headed.
We were honored to welcome Senator George Lang, Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix, and Michael Ryan, who is poised to become Butler County’s next commissioner. Their presence reflected the growing enthusiasm for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advanced aerospace development in our region.
Sharing the Vision
I opened the evening by welcoming our guests and providing an overview of the event. From there, our leadership team took the stage.
Our CEO shared Volynt’s long-term vision and mission. Our Chief Technology Officer highlighted the engineering milestones we’ve achieved and the technology behind the Volynt Vyper platform. As Chief Operating Officer, I discussed how Volynt is transforming cutting-edge aviation technology into a scalable and sustainable business. I outlined our operational strategy, manufacturing roadmap, partnerships, and the steps required to move from prototype development to commercial deployment.
The presentations were engaging, the audience was attentive, and the questions that followed demonstrated genuine interest and excitement.
Most importantly, this wasn’t a flashy product launch filled with unrealistic promises. It was an honest conversation about where we are today, what we’ve accomplished, and what the next several years may hold.
From Prototype to Production
Our immediate focus is straightforward.
Over the next six months, our team will complete the full-scale Vyper prototype that was unveiled at the Innovation Center. That aircraft represents years of design work, engineering refinement, and determination.
Once completed, the aircraft will enter an intensive testing phase designed to validate performance, reliability, and operational capabilities.
Looking ahead to 2027, we plan to participate in major industry competitions, build broader recognition within the aerospace community, and begin manufacturing multiple aircraft.
The goals are ambitious, but they are supported by a clear roadmap and a dedicated team committed to execution.
The Drone Revolution Is Already Here
One of the most important messages of the evening was that autonomous aviation is no longer a future concept.
It’s happening today.
Just one day after our event, Dayton-area company Dexa launched a drone delivery service in Kettering. The program delivers food orders from TJ Chumps on East Stroop Road to customers within a several-mile radius across Kettering, Oakwood, and Centerville.
These smaller drones operate as last-mile delivery systems. Flying at approximately 400 feet, they lower food orders safely to customers using a cable-delivery system. Dexa has spent years developing this capability and is helping demonstrate that drone delivery is becoming a practical reality.
Volynt’s mission is different.
While companies like Dexa focus on last-mile delivery, Volynt is developing larger autonomous aircraft designed for middle-mile logistics. Our aircraft are intended to transport meaningful payloads between regional hubs such as Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG), Dayton International Airport, Indianapolis, and other distribution centers.
This approach has the potential to reduce transportation bottlenecks, address driver shortages, and create more efficient supply chains.
Whether it’s delivering a meal across town or transporting freight across a region, autonomous aviation is rapidly reshaping how goods move through our economy.
Why Ohio Is Positioned to Lead
Ohio’s aviation legacy is unmatched.
The birthplace of powered flight now has an opportunity to become a leader in autonomous flight.
Few regions are better positioned than Butler County to participate in that transformation.
Our region offers access to multiple airports, including Miami University’s airport, where initial flight operations can be conducted. At the same time, substantial investment continues at Butler County Regional Airport, where significant infrastructure improvements are being planned.
The resources, workforce, educational institutions, and transportation network already exist. What remains is bringing together the innovators, investors, and community leaders who can turn opportunity into reality.
Creating Careers That Stay Close to Home
One topic that resonates deeply with me is talent retention.
I have spoken with countless parents who have made tremendous sacrifices to provide educational opportunities for their children through Miami University, Butler Tech, and the University of Cincinnati. Too often, those graduates leave Ohio because they believe the best opportunities are elsewhere.
That reality creates a challenge for families and communities alike.
One of our long-term goals at Volynt is to help change that story.
We envision creating thousands of high-quality aerospace, engineering, technology, and manufacturing jobs throughout Southern Ohio. We want talented young people to have the option of building exciting, fulfilling careers without leaving their families, communities, and hometowns behind.
Strong Community Support
One of the most encouraging moments of the evening was seeing the level of support from the community.
Michael Ryan delivered an excellent presentation about economic development in Butler County and how innovative companies such as Volynt can contribute to future growth and prosperity.
The participation from Miami University, local leaders, educators, students, business professionals, and community members reinforced something I’ve believed from the beginning:
Innovation succeeds when communities embrace it.
Dreams on Elm Street was more than a company presentation. It was a milestone. It brought together people from different backgrounds and perspectives to discuss a shared vision for the future of our region.
The energy in the room was unmistakable. The conversations were thoughtful. The questions were insightful. The enthusiasm was genuine.
For me, that confirmed that we’re moving in the right direction.
Looking Ahead
Volynt’s journey is still in its early chapters.
There is much work ahead, many challenges to overcome, and numerous milestones still to achieve. But the momentum is real, and the opportunities are significant.
We will continue sharing updates with the community as we progress from prototype development to testing, certification, manufacturing, and beyond.
This is only the beginning.
Thank you to everyone who attended Dreams on Elm Street and supported our mission. Your encouragement and belief in what we’re building means more than you know.
Together, we’re not just dreaming about the future.
We’re building it.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman is Chief Operating Officer of Volynt, where he leads operational strategy, business development, manufacturing planning, and growth initiatives for the company’s autonomous aerospace programs. A longtime Butler County leader and aerospace executive, he is committed to building high-quality technology careers and advancing innovation throughout Southwest Ohio.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
If you came here looking for a populist hit piece, this is not that. I write for people who lead, want to lead, or at least refuse to stay on the couch while the culture is rewritten around their children. Scripture is not a campaign prop. It is the sharpest instrument I know for cutting through a coordinated lie. That is the politics of heaven: not party first, not personality first, but the question of whether a people will still call good good and evil evil when the price of doing so is social exile.
I. THE AGE OF DISCLOSURE AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN
We are living in what I call an age of disclosure. Not merely the disclosure of secrets in government files, though that conversation is loud enough. I mean something older and more dangerous: the moment when a civilization is forced to admit what it has been doing in the dark. The ideologies that were supposed to stay in graduate seminars leaked into human-resources manuals, then into public schools, then into pediatric clinics. The result is not a private lifestyle. The result is a public demand that the rest of us recite the new creed or be treated as a moral contaminant.
The politics of heaven answers that demand. Heaven is not a voting bloc. Heaven is not a branding exercise. Heaven is the claim that God made the world a certain way, that male and female are not costumes, that children are not raw material for adult ideology, and that a nation which inverts those realities will not stay strong merely because its GDP looks impressive for another quarter.[1]
Paul said he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] That sentence is doing more work in 2026 than most platform planks. Shame is the enforcement mechanism of the present order. If they can make you embarrassed to name what you love, they do not have to refute you. They only have to watch you edit yourself until there is nothing left worth hearing.
I will not edit it.
II. FALSE COMPASSION IS NOT LOVE
Start with the word that has been most abused: compassion.
True compassion would protect children from irreversible medical decisions they cannot possibly understand. What we have instead is a coordinated social contagion, especially visible among elites, in which adults congratulate themselves for “affirming” a minor into a pathway of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. That is not love. That is sacrificing children to an ideology. I will call it what it is: a form of child abuse dressed up as progress.[3]
I am not talking about the rare, severe, persistent cases that clinicians used to treat with extreme caution. I am talking about the sudden clustering, the peer networks, the online scripts, the school social transitions done behind parents’ backs, and the astonishing overrepresentation of transgender-identifying children in a handful of zip codes, friend groups, and celebrity households. When parents, schools, corporations, and entertainment all push the same story at once, vulnerable children get swept up. That is not a coincidence. It is social engineering, plain and simple.
Look at Hollywood. The list of high-profile actors and actresses with children who identify as transgender or non-binary has become a genre of its own. Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez, Megan Fox, Dwyane Wade, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Naomi Watts—the names keep accumulating.[4] In a country where transgender identification among youth was, until recently, vanishingly rare, that concentration is not “just visibility.” Visibility does not create statistical spikes this localized unless something in the environment is recruiting.
Some researchers and activists insist there is no social contagion, and they would be wrong. Other researchers, clinicians, and dissenters say the opposite, and the Cass Review in the United Kingdom was blunt about the weakness of the evidence base that was used to medicalize children.[5] I do not need a unanimous journal to use my eyes. When a belief system travels through prestige networks faster than it travels through farm towns, you are not watching a spontaneous awakening. You are watching fashion with a clinical billing code.
Scripture is not ambiguous about the created order. God created them male and female.[6] To catechize children into rebellion against that order is not pastoral care. It is a revolt against the Creator, outsourced to minors who will live with the consequences long after the adults have moved on to the next cause.
The proper Christian response is not cruelty. It is not mockery of the suffering. It is this: speak truth with clarity, protect children from harm, and offer genuine compassion to those who are distressed—without affirming the lie that is injuring them. Affirmation of a falsehood is not mercy. It is participation.
III. WHY THE RATES ARE NOT RANDOM
People who do not want to face this subject hide in averages. They will tell you that “only a small percentage” of children identify this way, as if a small percentage plus institutional capture is nothing. The point is not only prevalence. The point is location.
Certain circles have dramatically higher rates of trans-identifying children. Elite schools. Entertainment. Specific online subcultures. Certain therapeutic fashions. Human-resources departments that rewrote the rules of speech and then dared the rest of the country to object. The same class of people who draft the corporate training also sit on museum boards, donate to universities, and lecture the working class about which words are now violence.
I have watched this move through institutions the way termites move through a beam. You do not notice the first memo. You notice the tenth, when a teacher is punished for using ordinary sexed language, or a parent is treated as the threat for refusing to transition a twelve-year-old socially. By then the lie has become policy.
This is why I reject the slogan that “silence is kindness.” Silence in a captured institution is how the capture finishes. If you work in a place where DEI language has been used to smuggle gender ideology into childhood, you already know the mechanism. It was not a grassroots cry from children. It was a professional class writing rules that everyone else was expected to obey while calling the obedience righteousness.
I do not owe that project my vocabulary.
IV. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SURRENDER WHAT YOU LOVE
There is a related lie, and it is aimed at Christians specifically: that the loving thing is to mute your own faith so that people who despise it can feel comfortable.
I reject that.
It is one thing to say we should not be cruel. It is another thing to say that Islam, progressive sexual ideology, and the new civic religion of the public school must be handled with velvet, while Christian speech must be handled with a muzzle. I am supposed to be endlessly compassionate toward alternative sexual lifestyles and toward the latest curriculum, and then I am supposed to treat my own Scripture as a private hobby that might offend the room.
No.
You like what you like. I like what I like. I am not going to edit the Bible to make you happy. You do not care if I am unhappy. So I am going to talk about the Bible. I am going to talk about the Scripture I enjoy. I believe this is what God says, and I will not be ashamed of it.
That kind of honest, unapologetic speech is far more powerful than the aggressive politeness of people who sand their faith down until it can pass a diversity seminar. The world feels no obligation to make Christians comfortable. Reciprocal self-erasure is not tolerance. It is surrender.
As Paul said, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] Speaking Scripture openly, without apology, is one of the most effective ways to push back against cultural pressure. It draws a clear line. It gives courage to people who have been staying quiet. Leaders who speak plainly strengthen the faithful and expose deception at the same time.
There is nothing wrong with liking Christian things and professing them openly. You do not have to put a lid on your viewpoint while everybody else imposes theirs and you are told to shut up and take it. That hour is over, or it should be.
V. THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE AND THE POWER OF BEING UNASHAMED
Let me give a point of reference I have used for years.
The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is one of my favorite places in the world.[7] I never liked Washington much until the political weather changed and I had reason to be there. I have been more than once. I am a member and a supporter. In the background of my life, I love using the Bible, and I love a building three blocks from the Capitol that says: here is the history of this book. See it. Relish it. Enjoy it.
They are not required to plant flags all over the National Mall. You can still go to the Smithsonian. You can still do every other official thing the capital offers. People love the Museum of the Bible anyway, because it feeds them. It does not pretend to be a neutral warehouse. It professes that this book is good. It is open about that goodness. It loves being good.
That is the model.
Other places I enjoy for the same reason: the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, the work of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.[8] I love those guys. I may not agree with their young-earth timeline. I am an old-earth kind of guy. We would argue, probably at length, about whether the earth is six thousand years old or many millions. I have read Ham. I understand the argument. I would still debate him profusely on the age of the earth. That disagreement does not cancel the thing I actually love: their embrace of goodness.
When you walk those sites, you cannot help but see how hard they try to be good, and they do not hide it. They do not cram it down every throat on earth. They also do not crush their own enjoyment to satisfy people who arrive already offended. The offended party does not mind offending you. It is quite fine to go the other way—to be audacious about your love for what you value. You do not have to destroy it to make someone else happy.
Jonathan Edwards understood the same principle in a different century. True religion is not mere outward show. When the heart is captured by the beauty of God and His word, it cannot stay silent. The joy overflows.[9] Dimming that joy to appease people who hate its source is not love, and it is not tolerance. It betrays the truth you claim to love.
You do not have to attack persons. You also must not shrink back. Let the light shine clearly. Those who love truth will be drawn to it. I have watched that happen in the galleries of the Museum of the Bible. Stand firm. Speak plainly. Enjoy God’s goodness without shame. That is every Christian’s duty, not a branding strategy for an election cycle.
VI. KEN HAM, BILL NYE, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE AND SECONDARY
I was at the Creation Museum not long ago, wearing a Museum of the Bible shirt—the kind I wear often, because it reminds me of the things I actually like when a lot of darkness surrounds me. The woman at the counter said it was great that I go to the Museum of the Bible. I told her I love that museum, and I also love what Ken Ham built. Ham set a public philosophy in motion. The exhibits are well done. I have read the books. I understand why the young-earth argument matters to the people who hold it.
The real discussion is larger than a debate-club win. Science and theology are allowed to argue. I would argue with Ham that the earth is much older than six thousand years. I would also tell Bill Nye that sneering at Genesis as if the only alternatives were a cartoon ark or a materialist closed system is a different kind of ignorance. The point for this essay is not to settle geology. The point is that Christians can disagree on the age of the earth and still refuse to surrender the created order, the moral law, and the right to love Scripture out loud.
That is maturity. Rally around the core of the confession, not around every secondary interpretation. Ken Ham loves what he believes and says it without shame. I will not take that joy from him. I wish more people in public life had that spine, even when I think their timeline is wrong.
VII. JD VANCE, BUTLER COUNTY, AND WHY SCRIPTURE AT A RALLY IS NOT A GIMMICK
JD Vance is from my part of the world. Middletown. Butler County. Monroe just down the road. I know those hardy people. I know the flea markets—Traders World, Treasure Island—where folks come out of church on Sunday and walk the aisles looking at vendors, wall art, and the kind of homemade biblical kitsch that elites mock and ordinary people actually live with.[10]
Vance knows that country. His people are those people. When he talks about Scripture, it does not sound like a consultant discovered “faith outreach” on a whiteboard. It sounds like Butler County. That matters.
I have been glad to see President Trump and Vice President Vance put Scripture into the open at the Texas midterm moment and in surrounding speeches and interviews.[11] Vance has been unusually explicit that Christianity is not a private hobby you hide to keep a coalition calm. He has said Christianity is America’s creed—not that every citizen must be a Christian, but that the moral language that actually formed the country is Christian.[12] He has said Satan’s favorite trick is convincing Christians that faith and politics belong in separate rooms.[13] He has even been willing to talk about end times without collapsing into either panic or passivity: do the work in front of you; do not outsource your whole moral life to a countdown clock.[14]
I think that is smart. It will help the midterms. Not because Bible verses are magic turnout dust, but because a lot of serious churchgoing conservatives have concluded that politicians are blabbermouths who say one thing at the banquet and another in the agency. Those people will stay home if they think the language is rented. They will show up if they think the man actually fears God more than he fears the clip.
I am not naive. Quoting Scripture at a rally is easy. Governing in a way that honors the God of that Scripture is harder. The test is not whether a line lands in a speech. The test is whether the administration’s actions, over time, hate what God hates and love what God loves. A leader who merely drapes verses over policies that protect evil is a hypocrite. A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood, confused children, and public lies are being baptized as kindness.
For midterms, for holding the House and the Senate, the Christian vote is not a sentiment. It is a body of people who still believe first allegiance is not to a party. If you want them off the couch, do not give them another focus-grouped paragraph about “values.” Give them the thing they already know is true and have been told to whisper.
VIII. THREE VERSES LEADERS SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID TO SAY OUT LOUD
If a leader wants language that encourages the faithful and warns the powerful at the same time, he does not need a speechwriter to invent it. It is already in the book.
First: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”[15]
That is Proverbs 14:34. It directly assaults the idea that a country becomes great by GDP, weapons, or branding. Moral order is not an accessory. If we keep normalizing what Scripture calls evil, we are not becoming sophisticated. We are becoming weak. Wealth will not save a people that has taught its children to despise the created order.
Second: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”[16]
Isaiah 5:20 is the verse for this exact hour. It names the mechanism. The deception is not only that people do wrong. The deception is that they rename the wrong and then punish the person who remembers the old name. Redefine marriage, celebrate the confusion of sex, treat biblical speech as harm, and you have not expanded compassion. You have inverted the moral dictionary. A leader who will not say that sentence is not being pastoral. He is being careful about his future bookings.
Third: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”[17]
Psalm 33:12 is not a magic formula for a superpower. It is a reminder of allegiance. The Christian community’s ultimate loyalty is not to a party, a personality, or a news cycle. Blessing, in the biblical sense, attaches to a people that still knows who God is. That is hope, not nostalgia. It tells serious people why they should bother.
These three verses do what a good rally needs: moral clarity, a warning against deception, and a promise larger than the next quarter. They are short enough to remember. They are sharp enough to divide light from fog.
IX. DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RAPTURE WHILE EVIL DOES THE WORK
Here is the pastoral failure I have watched for decades.
Many people I know will say they are good Christians because they refuse to “engage.” They will hang the Ten Commandments on the wall, go to church on Sunday, and then treat public evil as a problem God will vacuum up at the end of the age. They do not want to confront anybody. They do not want to fight. They want the apocalypse to do the job they were too tired or too timid to do. They call that humility. I call it a religious mask on laziness.
The same Bible that promises the return of Christ also commands believers to resist the devil, hate what is evil, do justice, and love mercy.[18] God never called a people to nap while wickedness reorganizes the schools. Waiting for God to fix everything while we do nothing is not faith. It is presumption.
Moses did not treat Egypt as a spectator sport. Deborah did not. David did not. Nehemiah did not rebuild a wall by quoting a verse about patience and going home. The apostles did not treat the ruling authorities as an excuse to go mute. Romans 13 tells Christians to recognize governing authority. Acts 5:29 tells them that when those authorities command what God forbids, the first allegiance is to God.[19] Submission to God is not submission to evil—quite the opposite.
If a world leader will not bow to the authority of God, that does not mean the rest of us take a back seat and wait for the credits. It means discernment. It means we do not confuse a Bible on the podium with a conscience in the chest. It also means we do not treat politics as a substitute for conversion. A man can win a midterm and still lose his soul. Reformation that begins only in rallies and podcasts, and never in the soul’s submission to Christ, profits nothing.
However, the opposite error is just as real: using “God will handle it” as cover for refusing to handle the thing in front of you. Faith works in its own generation. It prays for the kingdom to come and then spends its breath on righteousness while it still has breath.
X. FLEA-MARKET CHRISTIANITY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECORATION AND BACKBONE
I like Traders World. I like Treasure Island. Monroe, Ohio, is a strange and specific place, and I love it for what it is. Walk those markets, and you will see a lot of people who came straight from church. You will see biblical references on the walls. Treasure Island, in particular, draws a large Mexican immigrant population, and if you have spent time in Mexico, you already know how Catholic that visual world is. They love images of Jesus. They carried older indigenous forms into Catholic form and made something that is not a seminar paper. It is folk theology in color. I love Mexican religious art, including the Christianized approach to death that outsiders reduce to a cartoon of “the cult of the dead.” It is not voodoo. It is a people who still think the dead and the living are not sealed off from each other by a shopping mall.
I can love all of that and still say the hard thing: too many of those same households treat Scripture as interior decorating.
They will buy the plaque. They will love the verse. They will tell you they left it to Jesus. Then, when the school, the HR office, or the culture demands that they deny what the plaque says, they fold and call the fold piety. That is not devotion. That is decoration. Faith that only admires Scripture on a wall, and will not stand for the same commandments when the cost is a customer, a job, or a family argument, is not the faith that built anything worth keeping.
True Christianity has always required backbone. Nice religious imagery is easy. JD Vance coming out of that same region makes the stakes sharper. Those people need to see a leader who will fight for what the wall art claims to believe. If he only sounds like church on Sunday and then governs like every other manager of decline, the flea-market vote will stay home, and the professional class that rewrote childhood will not.
XI. CHRISTIANITY IS A WEAPON — BUT NOT THE WAY THE MOB MEANS WEAPON
People get nervous when you say Christianity is a weapon. They should get the meaning right.
Christianity is not a weapon in the way a riot is a weapon. It is not deceit. It is not a secret police of the pious. The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.[20] Truth is the blade. When a leader speaks Scripture with actual conviction, it cuts through slogans, exposes the rename-the-evil trick, and wakes a conscience that had gone to sleep under the word “kindness.”
That is how you fight evil in high places without becoming the thing you oppose.
Many of the policies I have been watching—the sexual ones, the speech ones, the childhood ones—were designed in the background to wear away a society that still had a Christian base. You do not have to invent a conspiracy chart to see the sequence. First, the language changes. Then the training changes. Then the child is caught in the middle, and the parent is the last to be informed. The answer is not to copy the enemy’s methods. The answer is to stop being ashamed of the only thing that can actually defeat the darkness: the gospel of Jesus Christ, spoken as if you mean it.
A leader should stand on Scripture not as a mascot but as a man who fears God more than he fears the mob. This generation is starving for that kind of boldness. Amen. Let it be said without the usual throat-clearing.
XII. ISLAM, SAUDI ARABIA, AND THE RIGHT TO DEFEND YOUR OWN HOUSE
A short word on a subject that makes consultants sweat.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, a lot of people are angry that American leadership will not spend every morning railing at Saudi Arabia and at radical Islam in the old post-2001 register. Radical Islam is not a hallucination. It is still at work. It is fair game. I also think you can put your hand on the Bible without turning every speech into a comparative-religion insult comic.
You do not have to be condescending toward every competing religion to defend Christianity. [21] A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood is shed in the name of religion. He also needs wisdom. Sometimes the most effective stand is not the loudest anathema. It is the clear, consistent defense of truth and justice, and the refusal to treat Christianity as the one faith that must apologize for existing.
If Trump or Vance quote Scripture, the test is not the quote. The test is whether their actions line up with the book they opened. Religion used as a costume for power is an old trick. Religion used as the thing a man actually submits to is rarer, and it is the only version worth the airtime.
XIII. THE JONATHAN EDWARDS STUDY BIBLE AND A PRACTICAL NEXT STEP
If you want an entry point that is not a meme and not a campaign pamphlet, start with a book that expects you to stay.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, published by Thomas Nelson in August 2026 and edited by Matthew Everhard, is built on the NKJV and Edwards’s own notes, resolutions, and theological instincts.[22] Edwards’s great theme was not American politics. It was joy in God. “The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That is the sentence under the project. Study notes drawn from his work, essays on the Great Awakening, his Resolutions, and his miscellanies system are all there if you want to do more than highlight a rally verse.
I love a study Bible that treats Scripture as something you live inside, not something you mine for applause lines. I do not agree with every secondary system any commentator has ever hung on the text. I do not need to. The point is daily reading, public love, and an unashamed life. Treat yourself to something good. Read it. Let people know you love it. At this stage of the game, visible joy in the word is not a small witness. It is one of the last clean ones left.
XIV. WHAT I WANT FROM LEADERS — AND WHAT I WILL NOT PRETEND
I want leaders who will:
Protect children from medical and social experiments they cannot consent to in any meaningful sense.
Stop treating “compassion” as a synonym for affirmation.
Speak Scripture as if it were true, not as if it were a demographic.
Refuse the HR liturgy that recodes male and female as optional.
Understand that Christian voters are not a prop. They are people whose first loyalty is supposed to be higher than a ticket.
Fight in their own generation instead of waiting for the sky to split.
Keep their joy. An ashamed church is a disarmed church.
I will say this: goodness is not something you have to apologize for. Find it. Love it. Project it. Evil is not shy about encroaching. You are not obligated to meet that encroachment with a permanent second cheek and a taped mouth. The job, when you see the lie eating children and renaming itself kindness, is to conquer it with righteousness and to be bold about the source of that righteousness.
Do not be ashamed of the gospel.
Do not be ashamed of the book.
Do not be ashamed of liking what is good.
That is the politics of heaven in an age that keeps disclosing how much of our public life was built on a dare: that ordinary people would rather be polite than tell the truth about their own sons and daughters.
XV. A LAST WORD TO THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY LEAD
This was never written for the algorithm that wants a screaming thumbnail. It was written for the smaller room: the people who draft, who vote in caucuses, who manage institutions, who sit close enough to power to change a line in a bill or a tone in a speech.
It is safe to put your arm around Scripture.
It is not safe, in the only sense that matters, to keep pretending that the sexual revolution’s latest chapter is too delicate to name.
You are allowed to enjoy the Museum of the Bible, the Creation Museum, a Mexican retablo of Christ, a Jonathan Edwards page, a Butler County flea market, and a Vice President who will still say the name of Jesus without coughing. You are allowed to disagree about the age of the earth and still agree that a girl is not a boy because a school counselor said so.
The light does not need your permission to be light. It needs you to stop putting a basket over it.
Speak plainly. Protect the children. Love the good without apology. Leave the shame to the people who require it.
That is how you strengthen the faithful. That is how you expose the deception. That is how a nation finds out, in an age of disclosure, whether it still remembers the politics of heaven.
NOTES
[1] The phrase “politics of heaven” is used here in the older Christian sense: the public consequences of God’s reign and moral law, not a claim that any party is the kingdom of God. See Augustine, The City of God, esp. Books XIV–XIX, on the interweaving of the city of God and the city of man.
[2] Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.”
[3] On the distinction between pastoral care for distressed youth and the affirmation-only medical pathway, see Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (NHS England, 2024); Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage (Regnery, 2020); Lisa Littman, “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria,” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018).
[4] Reporting and commentary on the clustering of transgender-identifying children in celebrity households include Rikki Schlott, “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood,” New York Post, June 4, 2026; “The rise of the celebrity trans kid,” The Spectator, April 10, 2024; and recurring profiles in mainstream entertainment coverage of specific families. Clustering is not the same as a complete census; it is a pattern that demands an explanation beyond “visibility.”
[5] Cass, Independent Review (2024). For the contrary claim that social contagion is unsupported, see Jack Turban et al., “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States,” Pediatrics (2022). For more recent discussion of declining youth identification after the peak years, see analysis associated with Eric Kaufmann’s 2025 commentary on survey trends. The existence of a debate is the point: the science was never “settled” in the way school districts pretended.
[6] Genesis 1:27; Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6.
[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 4th Street SW, Washington, D.C.; opened November 17, 2017; founded through the Green family / Museum of the Bible, Inc. See museumofthebible.org and the institution’s published FAQ on mission, square footage, and exhibit floors.
[8] Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis; Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky (opened 2007); Ark Encounter, Williamstown, Kentucky (opened 2016). See answersingenesis.org.
[9] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); The Life of David Brainerd; and the Resolutions. Edwards’s insistence that true religion engages the affections, not merely the mouth, is the through-line of the 2026 study Bible project cited below.
[10] Traders, World and Treasure Island are long-running flea-market / vendor sites serving the Monroe–Middletown corridor in Butler County, Ohio. JD Vance’s upbringing in Middletown and family ties in the county are documented in Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016) and in subsequent local reporting.
[11] Coverage of Trump and Vance at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, September 2026, includes contemporaneous reports from ABC and other national outlets. Vance’s broader 2025–2026 record of public Christian speech includes the Turning Point USA AmFest 2025 address and the May 2026 “Rededicate 250” remarks on the National Mall.
[12] JD Vance, AmFest / Turning Point USA remarks, December 2025: “Christianity is America’s creed,” with the explicit caveat that one need not be a Christian to be an American. See also Catholic News Agency, “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics,” December 2025.
[13] Ryan Foley, “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics,” The Christian Post, July 20, 2026, reporting on Vance’s conversation with Bishop Robert Barron.
[14] Maya Yang, “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK,’” The Guardian / syndicated, September 2, 2026, on the Bryce Crawford interview.
[15] Proverbs 14:34 (NKJV): “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”
[16] Isaiah 5:20.
[17] Psalm 33:12: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.”
[18] James 4:7; Romans 12:9; Micah 6:8; Psalm 97:10.
[19] Romans 13:1–7; Acts 5:29. The Deborah and David narratives are Judges 4–5 and 1 Samuel 16–31 / 2 Samuel.
[20] Hebrews 4:12; Ephesians 6:17.
[21] John 14:6; Acts 4:12.
[22] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Features include Edwards-derived study notes, doctrinal articles, essays on Edwards and the Great Awakening, the Resolutions, and an introduction to his miscellanies method.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Scripture and Classic Christian Sources
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960. Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. “Resolutions.” In Letters and Personal Writings, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. 1741. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). General editor Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026. Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943. Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York: Scribner, 1932. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “Live Not by Lies.” 1974. Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976. Schaeffer, Francis A. A Christian Manifesto. Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1981.
Creation, Museums, and Public Christian Witness
Ham, Ken. The Lie: Evolution. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1987; rev. eds. thereafter. Ham, Ken. Gospel Reset. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2018. Answers in Genesis. Creation Museum and Ark Encounter visitor guides and position papers. https://answersingenesis.org Museum of the Bible. Institutional FAQs, exhibit guides, and annual materials. Washington, D.C. https://www.museumofthebible.org Wishard, Grant. “Love to Tell the Story.” Washington Examiner, November 17, 2017. Zauzmer Weil, Julie, and Sarah Pulliam Bailey. “The ark vs. the covenant: the dramatic contrast between the Creation Museum and the Museum of the Bible.” Washington Post, November 20, 2017.
Sex, Children, Medicine, and Social Contagion
Cass, Hilary. Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report. NHS England, 2024. Shrier, Abigail. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2020. Shrier, Abigail. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Are Not Growing Up. New York: Sentinel, 2024. Littman, Lisa. “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018). Bailey, J. Michael, and Ray Blanchard. Clinical and taxonomic papers on autogynephilia and rapid-onset presentations (various). Laidlaw, Michael, et al. Endocrine and pediatric critique literature on puberty blockade. SEGM (Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine). Collected reviews. Turban, Jack L., et al. “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States.” Pediatrics (2022). [Contrary thesis; included so the reader can see both sides of the official argument.] Kaufmann, Eric. Commentary and data notes on declining youth LGBT / transgender identification after the early-2020s peak (2025). Schlott, Rikki. “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood.” New York Post, June 4, 2026. “The rise of the celebrity trans kid.” The Spectator, April 10, 2024. “Hollywood’s growing A-list of non-binary, transgender kids.” The Daily Telegraph, 2025. Hruz, Paul W., Lawrence S. Mayer, and Paul R. McHugh. “Growing Pains: Problems with Puberty Suppression in Treating Gender Dysphoria.” The New Atlantis, 2017. McHugh, Paul. “Transgender Surgery Is not the Solution.” Wall Street Journal, 2014, and related Johns Hopkins commentary. Soh, Debra. The End of Gender. New York: Threshold, 2020. Joyce, Helen. Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. London: Oneworld, 2021. Hilton, Emma, and Colin Wright. Biological-sex primer essays in Reality’s Last Stand and related venues. Singal, Jesse. Long-form reporting on youth gender medicine, The Atlantic and later independent work.
Culture, Elite Capture, and Institutional Language
Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Murray, Douglas. The War on the West. New York: Harper, 2022. Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020. Trueman, Carl R. Strange New World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022. Hanby, Michael. Various essays on technology, liberalism, and the body, First Things. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Anointed. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Sowell, Thomas. Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Darel E. Paul. From Tolerance to Equality. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018.
Vance, Ohio, and the Present Political-Religious Moment
Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy. New York: Harper, 2016. Vance, J. D. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. 2026. “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics.” Catholic News Agency, December 2025. “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics.” Christian Post, July 20, 2026. “Religious Vance seeks to avoid MAGA schism as he keeps the faith for 2028.” The Guardian / syndicated, September 13, 2026. Yang, Maya. “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK.’” September 2, 2026. Forbes Breaking News. “The Morality & Religion That Formed The American Consciousness Were Decidedly Christian.” National Mall remarks, May 2026. Local reporting on Middletown, the Cleveland-Cliffs mill, and Vance’s hometown visits: Cincinnati Enquirer, Journal-News, Fox News, 2023–2026. Dreher, Rod. Live Not by Lies. New York: Sentinel, 2020. Renn, Aaron M. Life in the Negative World. Washington, D.C.: Zondervan / related 2024 essays on post-Christian America.
Islam, Religious Liberty, and Public Courage
Ibn Warraq. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995. Spencer, Robert. The History of Jihad. New York: Bombardier, 2018. [Use critically; included because the public argument exists.] Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Weigel, George. Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. New York: Doubleday, 2007. First Amendment and religious-liberty case law: Employment Division v. Smith; Fulton v. City of Philadelphia; 303 Creative v. Elenis; related commentary in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Ohio Color, Folk Religion, and Place
Hoffman, Rich. Prior columns and commentary at OvermanWarrior / related essays on Middletown, Monroe, and regional culture. Brandes, Stanley. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Carmichael, Elizabeth, and Chloë Sayer. The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Nutini, Hugo G. Todos Santos en Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Local vendor culture around Traders World (Monroe, Ohio) and Treasure Island as primary, on-the-ground observation rather than academic monograph.
Journalism and Primary Documents Worth Keeping
Cass Review full report and supporting research annexes (NHS England). WPATH Files / leaked internal files and subsequent journalistic treatment (2024). SEGM, Genspect, and Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine bibliographies. Museum of the Bible press FAQs. Answers in Genesis statement of faith and museum interpretative materials. Thomas Nelson catalog entry and Everhard interviews on the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (August 2026).
Suggested Reading Paths
If you lead and have one night: Romans 1 and 13, Acts 5, Proverbs 14, Isaiah 5, Psalm 33, Hebrews 4; then Cass’s final report summary; then Vance’s Communion on why he will not keep the faith in a separate drawer.
If you want the child-medicine argument without online noise: Cass; Shrier; Hruz/Mayer/McHugh; then one contrary paper (Turban, 2022) so you know what the institutions cited.
If you want the soul of the thing rather than the policy: Edwards’s Religious Affections; the 2026 Edwards Study Bible notes on joy; Augustine’s two cities; Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not by Lies.”
Suppose you want to walk the places named here: Museum of the Bible in Washington; Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in Kentucky; a Sunday-to-Monday loop through Middletown and the Monroe markets. The argument is clearer after you have stood in the rooms.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman writes from the Middletown, Ohio, side of the country, for readers who still think Scripture is allowed in public and that children are not a canvas for someone else’s revolution. This essay is not a substitute for a church, a clinician, or a ballot. It is a refusal to whisper.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
