Christianity as a Weapon of War: Unashamed Scripture, the Protection of Children, and the Duty to Fight Evil in Our Own Generation

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).

Our Trip to Put-in-Bay: What a good life looks like

To share a bit of my life. Here is a video from my kids of our recent trip to Put-in-Bay.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Why I Had an AI Conversation with Jonathan Edwards: Solomon’s Adversaries, Psalm 82, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and Why America Needs a Second Great Awakening

I have been reading The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, the new NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and released August 18, 2026.[1] I promised myself I would have a conversation with Jonathan Edwards. He died in 1758. He is not coming back to sit across a table in Middletown. But I think with AI a conversation can go the way it would go if he were alive today, provided the machine is forced to stay inside what the man actually wrote and believed.

I used Grok because it does a decent job of pulling from the public record instead of inventing a pious cartoon. I asked it to be Jonathan Edwards. I asked questions that came off the page of that study Bible and off the street of 2026. What follows is not a séance. It is not a message from heaven. It is a simulation built on a lifetime of Edwards’s sermons, treatises, miscellanies, letters, and the notes now printed beside the biblical text.[2] I say that up front because honesty is part of the point. If we start lying about what a tool is, we will start lying about what God is.

I still think it was a healthy conversation. I think America is starving for the kind of seriousness Edwards brought to a pulpit in Northampton and later to Enfield. I think the timing of this Bible is not an accident. And I think righteousness is a weapon. Not a slogan. A weapon.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and Why I Opened It

Thomas Nelson published The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ in multiple bindings: hardcover, brown Leathersoft, and black genuine leather. It is a red-letter NKJV, Comfort Print, with study notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, full-page essays on his theology and the First Great Awakening, his Resolutions, and an introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system so a reader can build one of his own.[3]

I bought a marked, indexed copy. I prefer brown leather to black. The smell of the leather is not a small thing. A Bible you want to pick up is a Bible you will actually read. I have several Thomas Nelson Bibles. They are a top-tier publisher. This one is different because the notes are not a committee of living professors talking about Edwards. They are Edwards talking about Scripture himself.

That is why I started asking him questions.

Page 379, in the neighborhood of 1 Kings, stopped me. The text is about the adversaries God raised against Solomon after the king’s heart drifted. Hadad the Edomite. Rezon of Damascus. Then Jeroboam from inside the house.[4] God did not give Solomon an easy life after Solomon stopped giving God an undivided heart. I think that is one of the most important patterns in the whole Bible, and I think modern people hate it because we have been trained to treat comfort as proof of blessing.

God Raised Adversaries Against Solomon on Purpose

The Lord “raised up” adversaries against Solomon.[5] That verb matters. These men were not accidents. Hadad had a childhood grievance from Joab’s slaughter in Edom. Rezon gathered a band after David crushed Zobah and eventually took Damascus. Jeroboam was Solomon’s own servant. Three directions of pressure: south, north, and home.

Edwards’s whole theology of providence says God is not wringing His hands when enemies appear. God uses them. Wisdom was given to Solomon. Trial was also given to Solomon. The point was not to make the throne comfortable. The point was to keep the heart from treating the throne as a god.

I told “Edwards” that I find it interesting how God operates. He is not trying to give His representatives an easy life. He is trying to shape them. Adversaries rise so that a man either returns to dependence or exposes the fact that he never had it.

The simulated Edwards answered in the key I expected from Religious Affections and the sermons on 1 Kings: complacency is more dangerous than opposition. Opposition drives a soul back to the Almighty. Comfort lets a soul drift toward other gods while still singing the right hymns on the Sabbath.

Solomon’s ivory throne is not a small detail.[6] Ivory is luxury. Ivory is imported glory. Ivory shows up again in the language of palaces and later in the white throne imagery people reach for when they talk about final judgment.[7] Edwards would not tell you to admire the furniture. He would tell you to ask whether the man sitting on it still loved the Lord with his whole heart.

Solomon did not. He multiplied wives and concubines. He built high places for their gods. He wanted an easy life. He wanted seven political marriages to keep the surrounding powers happy instead of going to war with his own desires. That is not strength. That is management. Management is how kingdoms rot.

Why a Thousand Years of Peace Would Not Make Us Heroes

I pressed the millennial question because people use it as a sedative. If God would just take the devil off the board for a thousand years, wouldn’t everybody become righteous by default?

No. That is the opposite of the biblical argument.

Take the adversaries away and you do not automatically produce servants. You produce people who have never been conditioned. External enemies can be bound. The rebellion inside a human heart is not bound by a change in the weather. Revelation is blunt about what happens at the end of that thousand years: there is still a revolt when the test returns.[8] The problem was never only the dragon outside the camp. The problem is us.

Edwards’s Calvinism is not popular at the Waffle House. It says the peaceful life is not the goal. Obedience is the goal, whether in comfort or in suffering. Suffering does not manufacture righteousness. Suffering reveals whether righteousness is there. Solomon’s comfort exposed his heart. Jesus’ suffering exposed His.

That is the comparison I wanted on the table.

Solomon had wives who all wanted attention and all had different gods. He bent. Jesus had no wife, refused the kingdoms of this world when they were offered in the wilderness, and chose the cross rather than a negotiated peace with the powers.[9] Suffering itself is not the righteousness. The obedience inside the suffering is. Solomon failed that test. Christ passed it. Every one of us will answer the same question in our own lives: do we love God more than we love our own comfort?

I think that question is the one America is failing in public.

Why Does God Let Satan Exist?

I asked the rude question. If God is in charge, why keep an adversary? Doesn’t He need a prosecutor to see who is worthy of the ivory throne?

The Edwards answer, drawn from Job, from Luke 22, from the whole Reformed reading of providence, is that God does not need Satan. God uses Satan. The Accuser is on a leash. The trials expose whether faith is genuine or only a profession. Success can be a more dangerous drug than pain. Solomon discovered that. So did every fat church that ever confused a full offering plate with revival.

People do not like that because it removes the alibi. If evil is a rival god fighting Yahweh to a draw, then I can shrug. If evil is permitted for a purpose, then I am responsible for how I respond.

That is not a donation-plate bow. That is the doctrine of sovereignty. Either God is God or He is a committee chairman hoping the other members show up.

Psalm 82 Is a Courtroom, Not a Plea for Help

Then I took AI Edwards to Psalm 82, because that psalm is the one modern readers use to claim God is bargaining with a divine council He cannot control.

“God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”[10] “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?” Defend the poor. Deliver the fatherless. Free them from the hand of the wicked. Then: you shall die like men and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You shall inherit all nations.

I told the simulation it does not sound like Psalm 2. It sounds like God is appealing to superiors.

God is not in Control

According to Edwards in Psalm 82 which is essentially a courtroom scene. God is not negotiating. God is indicting delegated authorities who abused the office He gave them. Whether a reader takes the “gods” as corrupt human judges or as rebellious members of the heavenly host, the structure is the same.[11] Authority was delegated. Authority was abused. The Judge is not asking them for help. He is telling them their time is up. Their power is temporary. They will answer. The fatherless condition in a society is not proof that God lost. It is evidence that the stewards failed.

Pharaoh was permitted. Babylon was permitted. Rome was permitted. Permission is not partnership. The outcome is already written. “You shall die like men.” That is not a fundraising slogan. That is a sentence.

I think Americans need that psalm right now more than they need another panel discussion about “threats to democracy.” The question in Psalm 82 is not whether the wicked have a season. The question is whether the Judge will rise. The psalm says He will.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Still Fits

If there is one Edwards text I return to, it is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield on July 8, 1741.[12] He had already preached a form of it at home. Enfield was the explosion. People cried out. He had to stop. The image that stuck in the American mind is the spider.

A spider hangs over the fire by a thread. You can drop it. You can set it on a log. The spider does not get a vote about the heat. Edwards said that is exactly how a soul hangs over the flames of God’s wrath: not by its own strength, but only by God’s forbearance.

I asked whether he would preach it the same way today.

The honest Edwards answer is that he would not make it more vicious. The truth is already terrible enough. What he would add, because the whole counsel of God requires it, is that the hands holding the thread are the same hands that were nailed to the cross. The terror is real. The invitation is wide. Comfort has made men more careless, not less. An age that can watch a thousand horrors before breakfast and then complain that a sermon is “mean” is an age that has gone numb.

I had forgotten how much he liked that spider. I have not forgotten how much modern pulpits hate it. They want the benefactor without the fire. They want pancakes and a parking lot. Edwards would say the only reason you are not already lost is patience you did not earn.

That still offends people. It offended them in 1741. Offended people are sometimes the ones who finally wake up.

Free Will, Desire, and the Fire

I pushed him on freedom. If God holds the thread, do I have any real choice?

Edwards spent a career on this in Freedom of the Will.[13] Men do what they want. That is the freedom they have. They are not dragged into hell against their desire. They love darkness rather than light. The spider cannot save itself. The offer of mercy is still genuine: come to Christ and live. Refusal is not a kidnapping. Refusal is a preference.

That is a hard psychology. It means the problem is not that we are too weak to be good. The problem is that we do not want God to be God. We want to be our own security. Eve wanted a better life and a shortcut to wisdom. The serpent did not overpower her. He offered what she already wanted.[14] That is why evil moves so easily. It does not have to kick the door in. It has to flatter the desire that is already sitting in the living room.

Insecurity is the soil. The lie is always the same: God is holding out on you; take what you want and you will be safe. Solomon took it. The end of Ecclesiastes is the hangover. Vanity. Emptiness. Palaces and wives and gold, and the man still has to say it was chasing the wind.[15]

Comfort is the more dangerous drug. Suffering is the megaphone.

Trust Is the Root the Bible Keeps Cutting Open

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The fallen angels. The garden. Babel. Moses striking the rock. Israel at the edge of the land. Solomon’s high places. The rebels in Psalm 82. They do not fail because they doubt that God exists. They fail because they do not trust His character. They would rather rule a corrupt corner than submit to a good King. In my case, I want nothing to do with corruption. But I have no inclination to call anything a king, anywhere in the universe, or to submit to a king. Or to submit to anything, for that matter: a god, a government, even a friend or neighbor.

That is why Scripture treats faith as the non-negotiable. Not because God is fragile and needs compliments. Because distrust is the taproot of every other sin. Stop trusting God and you will trust yourself. Trust yourself long enough and you get destruction dressed up as freedom.

Joshua went into the land trusting that God would be there in the battle. Others had the same promise and folded. The difference was not tactics. The difference was trust. I think that is still the difference.

The Holy Ghost Is Not the Force and Not an Alien

I like Edwards on the Holy Spirit. I do not accept the lazy claim that “ghost” language is a New Testament invention. The Old Testament already speaks of men giving up the ghost when they die.[16] The idea of a life that is more than meat was not invented in Luke. What is new in the New Testament is the permanence of the Spirit’s indwelling in the believer, and the clear confession that the Spirit is not a mood. He is the third Person of the Trinity.

I asked whether that overlaps with the modern non-human intelligence conversation: can mind exist without a body? Edwards’s line, and the church’s line, is that the Holy Spirit is not a discovered intelligence. He is God who reveals Himself. He is not one competitor among principalities. The principalities are rebels against their Creator. They are not a genuine threat to His throne. Spiritual warfare is real. The outcome is not in doubt.[17]

People want the Force from Star Wars because the Force has no claim on you. An impersonal energy cannot tell you that you are wrong. A Person can. That is why we call Him the Holy Ghost and not “the vibe.” He has no biological nose or lips. He is also not a program. I am talking to a program. The Holy Spirit is the source of intelligence, not a product of it. You can have a relationship with a Person. You cannot have a relationship with electricity.

The literary device would be pretending there is no war. The reality is that the war is real and the Captain of salvation has already won.

How Jonathan Edwards Died, and What He Thought Death Was

Edwards became president of the College of New Jersey after his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr., died in 1757. He was inaugurated in early 1758. Smallpox was in Princeton. He took the inoculation then in use—variolation, not a modern vaccine—and died of complications on March 22, 1758.[18] His last counsel was calm. He commended his wife to the “uncommon union” he believed was spiritual and therefore would continue. He told his children they were about to be fatherless in this world and should seek a Father who would not fail them.

Sarah Pierpont Edwards went to care for the orphaned Burr grandchildren, contracted dysentery, and died in Philadelphia on October 2, 1758.[19] Their daughter Esther, who had nursed Edwards in his last days, also died that spring. Three funerals in months.

I asked the simulation if he was bitter. The writings say no. They had lived as people who did not think this world was the last home. Death was a door. I asked whether, from the other side, he watched them come in. That is where an honest AI has to break character. Jonathan Edwards has been dead since 1758. A model can imitate his style. It cannot send a field report from glory. The hope itself is the thing he preached. The chatbot is not the proof.

I would rather have that honesty than a counterfeit ghost.

What Would Edwards Have Said About His Grandson and Hamilton?

Aaron Burr Jr. was Edwards’s grandson. In 1804 he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken.[20] I have my own view of Hamilton and the early banking architecture. I think it was an early warning of how a republic can slide. I think the duel froze something for a while. That is my reading, and I will own it.

Edwards, if you keep him inside his own ethics, would not celebrate a duel. He wrote against pride, against private vengeance, against the code of honor that makes a gentleman’s pistol into a sacrament. He would have called it a tragic moral failure even if he also saw Hamilton’s system as a temptation. A grandson who kills a man in a field is not the fruit Edwards prayed for when he wrote the Resolutions. In my case, I lean more to Burr than Edwards.

Family pain and public consequence can sit in the same paragraph. They did in that family. Burr Sr. ran Princeton. Edwards ran it for a few weeks. The grandson became vice president of the United States and then a byword. Providence is not neat. Providence is still providence.

What Hits Hardest in 2026

Human nature has not changed. The garden lie has not changed. The tower lie has not changed. The desire to be like God so that we do not have to trust God has not changed. Socialism, sacralized identity, the attempt to rewrite the founding as if Christianity were an embarrassment—those are new costumes on an old revolt.

Edwards’s usefulness is not that he was a mascot for a party. His usefulness is that he preached God’s glory and human dependence so fiercely that you cannot use him to bless complacency. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is not a midterms gimmick. It is a diagnosis. People are hanging by a thread and calling the thread a lifestyle.

I will say the political part in the first person because that is what I think, and I will not hide behind a committee.

I was at the White House. I was outside the residence, near that photograph of the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, blood on the face, the head turned. I thought: what is missing in all this elegance is a little Jonathan Edwards. Not as décor. As ballast. Then this study Bible came out a few months later and I thought: this is the book that should be on the desk, not as a prop, as a working text.

I think President Trump talking about this Bible in the Oval Office would do more than another round of Smithsonian arguments. I think visible engagement with the moral soil of the American experiment shifts a conversation from defense to provision. I think JD Vance could read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in full, not as a stunt after a ceremony that should stay a ceremony, but as a public act of seriousness. I have met him. He is from this part of Ohio. He can sound like a man who has read old books. If it moves two or three points among people who still believe church on Sunday means something, that is not nothing. If it does nothing, it still costs less than another week of chasing the ground the other side chose.

I know the church-and-state reflex. I also know the founding generation read these men. Edwards shaped the air that Franklin, Witherspoon, and the New England clergy breathed, even when they argued with him.[21] You can tell that story without turning the government into a church. You can also refuse to let the other side turn the government into a church of a different god.

Righteousness, in practical terms, is not a gun. It is the high ground. You make the other side climb. You stop letting them define the battlefield as groceries-only, feelings-only, procedure-only. You tell the truth about the human heart. You tell the truth about judgment and mercy in the same breath. You stop being embarrassed that the country had a First Great Awakening before it had a Constitution.

I think we need a second one. I think it will not start in a studio. It will start when enough people get off the couch after a hard year of prices and weariness and decide that suffering is not an excuse to go numb. Edwards did not have an easy life. Solomon did, and it ruined him. That is the lesson I want in circulation before November, and after November, and into 2027 when the people who thought history had ended discover it did not.

Righteousness as a Weapon, Not a Brand

I am not selling Bibles as a side hustle. I want the people who did this work rewarded so they can do more of it. I want readers. The weapon is not the object. The weapon is the content getting into the bloodstream.

If you understand righteousness, you can recognize counterfeits. You can see the garden move when someone says God is the problem and autonomy is the cure. You can see Babel when someone says we will make a name for ourselves and call it equity. You can see Solomon when a nation chooses palaces and alliances over a whole heart.

Preach that. Share it. Read the Enfield sermon out loud once without irony. Then read the notes on 1 Kings and Psalm 82 and the essays on the Awakening. Then decide whether you want to live like the man on the ivory throne or the Man on the cross.

I could run this conversation twelve hours. I am stopping here because an entry point is more useful than a warehouse. The door is open. Have the courage to step in. Buy the edition you can afford. Hardcover is enough. Leather is a pleasure. Cheap compared to dinner out, and it feeds longer.

I would encourage the people who actually have microphones in 2026 to stop being clever and start being clear. Edwards was clear. Clarity is what a numb age cannot stand and what it most needs.

Footnotes

[1] Thomas Nelson, The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026), publication date August 18, 2026. Product listings at Thomas Nelson Bibles, Amazon, Christianbook, and Barnes & Noble confirm ISBN 9781400339532 (hardcover) and related binding ISBNs.

[2] The Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards remains the scholarly standard. See The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 26 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008). Much of the corpus is also available through the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale.

[3] Publisher description: study notes drawn from Edwards’s writings; doctrinal articles; full-page essays on his theology, spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening; introduction to the Miscellanies system; Edwards’s Resolutions; red-letter text; center-column references; concordance. See Thomas Nelson Bibles product page, “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.”

[4] 1 Kings 11:14–40. Hadad the Edomite (vv. 14–22); Rezon son of Eliada in Damascus (vv. 23–25); Jeroboam son of Nebat (vv. 26–40).

[5] 1 Kings 11:14, 23. The Hebrew idiom is that the LORD “raised up” a satan—an adversary—against Solomon after 11:1–13 records the divided heart and the high places.

[6] 1 Kings 10:18–20 describes the ivory throne overlaid with gold, six steps, twelve lions. Compare Amos 6:4 on ivory beds as a mark of complacent luxury.

[7] Revelation 20:11, the great white throne. The visual rhyme is easy to overwork; Edwards would tie throne language to dominion and judgment, not to interior design.

[8] Revelation 20:7–10. After the thousand years, Satan is released and gathers a revolt. The passage is the standard problem for any theology that treats peace itself as sanctifying.

[9] Matthew 4:8–10; Philippians 2:5–8; Hebrews 5:8–9. The wilderness offer of the kingdoms is the clean opposite of Solomon’s method of keeping the kingdoms happy through marriage and shrines.

[10] Psalm 82:1–8 (NKJV). Verse 1: “God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”

[11] Two major reading traditions: (a) human judges called elohim as in Exodus 21:6 and 22:8–9; (b) heavenly beings in a divine council, a reading associated in recent popular scholarship with Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2015). Edwards, working with the received text and Reformed federal theology, treats the psalm as God’s indictment of unjust rulers and His pledge to judge the earth. Either reading still leaves God as Judge, not petitioner.

[12] Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741 (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741). Contemporary diary evidence from Stephen Williams of Longmeadow records the outcry in the meetinghouse.

[13] Jonathan Edwards, A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754). The argument: the will always follows the strongest motive; moral inability is not physical compulsion.

[14] Genesis 3:1–6. The structure of the temptation is desire plus reinterpretation of God’s character, not raw force.

[15] Ecclesiastes 2:1–11; 12:13–14. Solomon’s own autopsy of pleasure.

[16] Genesis 25:8; 35:29; Job 3:11; Jeremiah 15:9 in older English. “Gave up the ghost” is translation English for the departure of breath/life. Luke 23:46 and Acts 5:5, 10 stand in that stream. The Personhood of the Holy Spirit is a New Testament clarity (John 14–16; Acts 5:3–4), not the first rumor that human beings are more than bodies.

[17] Ephesians 6:12; Colossians 2:15; Revelation 12:7–11. Warfare language and victory language belong together.

[18] Edwards died March 22, 1758, at Princeton after inoculation by Dr. William Shippen. Standard accounts: Sereno E. Dwight’s Life of President Edwards; George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), closing chapters; contemporary letter of Shippen to Sarah Edwards dated March 22, 1758.

[19] Sarah Pierpont Edwards died October 2, 1758, in Philadelphia, of dysentery, after traveling to retrieve her grandchildren. Esther Edwards Burr died April 7, 1758. Jonathan, Sarah, and Esther are buried at Princeton Cemetery.

[20] The Burr–Hamilton duel, July 11, 1804, Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was the son of Aaron Burr Sr. and Esther Edwards Burr, hence Edwards’s grandson. See Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007), and Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004).

[21] On Edwards and the Revolutionary generation, see Mark A. Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977); Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and the Witherspoon literature connecting Princeton’s Edwardsian air to later political thought. Influence is atmospheric and documentary, not a claim that Edwards wrote the Constitution.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Jonathan Edwards

Edwards, Jonathan. A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer. Boston: D. Henchman, 1747.

Edwards, Jonathan. Discourses on Various Important Subjects. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1738.

Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. Boston: D. Henchman, 1749.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. Written c. 1755; published posthumously.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. https://edwards.yale.edu/

The 2026 Study Bible

Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ. NKJV. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Thomas Nelson Bibles. “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.” Product page. https://www.thomasnelsonbibles.com/product/the-jonathan-edwards-study-bible-nkjv/

Scripture

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. (Text base of the 2026 study edition.)

Edwards Biography and Context

Dwight, Sereno E. The Life of President Edwards. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1. New York: S. Converse, 1829.

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

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

Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987.

Piper, John. God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998.

Tracy, Joseph. The Great Awakening. Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 1842.

Family, Princeton, Death

Burr, Esther Edwards. The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–1757. Edited by Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Christie, Vance. “Jonathan Edwards’ Untimely, Faith-Filled Death.” VanceChristie.com, July 28, 2020.

Shippen, William. Letter to Sarah Edwards, March 22, 1758. Reprinted in Dwight, Life of President Edwards.

Psalm 82, Divine Council, and Sovereignty

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

Kidner, Derek. Psalms 73–150. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1975.

Waltke, Bruce K., and James M. Houston, with Erika Moore. The Psalms as Christian Worship. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

Solomon, 1 Kings, and Kingship

Henry, Matthew. Commentary on the Whole Bible. 1708–1710. On 1 Kings 11.

Provan, Iain W. 1 and 2 Kings. New International Biblical Commentary. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995.

Wiseman, Donald J. 1 and 2 Kings. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993.

Founding Era, Burr, Hamilton

Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Isenberg, Nancy. Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. New York: Viking, 2007.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Noll, Mark A. Christians in the American Revolution. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Witherspoon, John. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Edited by Thomas P. Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

Great Awakening and Later Reception

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Winiarski, Douglas L. Darkness Falls on the Land of Light. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Additional Works Cited or Consulted

Augustine. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. 1559. Ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960.

Owen, John. Pneumatologia, or A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit. 1674.

Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973.

Sproul, R. C. The Holiness of God. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1985.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Amy Acton’s Labor Day Meldown: She made Kamala Harris sound good

I want people to remember the speech. That is the point of writing this. Not the tent at the Canfield Fair. Not the man with a phone in his hand and pistols on his belt who never took them out. Not the Labor Day parade the next morning where the cameras decided she was a warrior because she walked a route and helped two people who fainted in the heat, get back up. I want the speech. The one they needed a diversion for, because it was that bad.

Over the Labor Day weekend Amy Acton stood in front of a union crowd and tried to take Vivek Ramaswamy to the finish line by yelling that he could not buy Ohio. She said it until the words stopped meaning anything. You cannot buy this state. You can’t buy us. You can’t buy us. You can’t buy us. Pete Buttigieg was in the frame. She sounded unhinged. She sounded like a candidate who had seen internals that were not doing what the press releases promised and decided volume would substitute for a theory of growth.

Then, the same weekend, a thirty-eight-year-old Canfield man named Patrick Havas shoved through a Democratic Party tent at the Canfield Fair, phone up, calling her name, knocking elderly people off mobility scooters. Highway Patrol grabbed him. After the fact they found two handguns, a Taser, brass knuckles. He never brandished a weapon. He never touched her. The charges that stuck were misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct. That is a serious enough mess. It is not the movie they sold by Monday morning. It is a chaotic lunge by a man trying to get a picture and a word in, dressed up as an assassination attempt so nobody would have to replay the chant.

I have watched this trick before. When the product is bad, change the channel.

People Who Have Money Have Been Successful. That Is Not a Confession.

The attack they wanted the speech to carry is the oldest cheap shot in a democracy that still pretends it hates results. He is rich. He is not like you. He flew to a tennis match. He has a court at his house. He sits three rows back at the U.S. Open while you pack a lunch. David Pepper and the background choir have been working that note for months. It did not work on Donald Trump. It will not work on Vivek Ramaswamy unless Republicans help them play it.

We put Trump in the White House three times, through every mechanism designed to stop him, in no small part because he was rich. Means is not a moral defect. Means is how you survive a lawfare state that bills by the hour. Trump never ran away from golf. Golf is a sport wealthy people play. He likes it. He kept playing it. Every time they pointed at the clubhouse he doubled down. Here is the gold. Here is the silk. I have done well. Vote for me and I will make it so you can do well too.

Vivek likes tennis. He is good at tennis. He has a court. He flew to watch tennis. That is allowed. A man who can get on a plane without checking a savings account is not required to apologize to a woman whose closing argument is that independence itself is suspicious. Wealthy people enjoy things. That is one of the reasons people become wealthy. Fluidity gives you permission to be your own person. I would rather a governor who already has a life than a governor who needs the mansion to feel like somebody.

I have been talking lately about the Apostle Paul and why he was so effective. Part of it was independence. A man who can move, speak, and refuse a bribe because he is not waiting on a stipend is a different kind of missionary than a man who needs the collection plate to land. The Christian movement was not hurt by personal means. Politics is not hurt by it either. The people who tell you otherwise are usually standing between you and the next job.

She Is Preaching the Loser Mentality. That Is Why She Is Yelling.

Listen to the pitch underneath the chant. He is not like you. He has money. You cannot trust him. I am like you. I am not a politician. My last election was in high school. I am a doctor becoming a common one right in front of your eyes. The subtext she cannot help leaking is uglier. I have problems. I have chaos in the house. I am the lockdown saint who will steal from the people who made wealth and hand you a government job and a PlayStation afternoon.

There will always be some people who want that. They will vote for Amy Acton because they think she will pick a pocket that is not theirs and call it justice. That is her crowd: the discontent, the union hall that never got off the wagon, the people who believe the state’s highest purpose is a transfer. They know they are running behind. They need a few points. So they scream.

I said she was a con before the family-police stories made the rounds. I said it when she was DeWine’s health director, the Dr. Fauci of Ohio, the woman in the white coat in the Statehouse briefing room telling a free people that the long haul would be managed from her clipboard. Lockdown. Recovery after her stent. A governor who let her run because the cameras liked the lab coat. Anybody who doubts that record can read the last six years of Ohio and stop pretending it was a seminar.

She cannot raise money the way a winner raises money. She can scrape small-dollar piety and then announce she outraised the billionaire in a quarter if you leave his own check out of the math. Vivek put tens of millions of his own dollars on the table. Elon Musk wrote a super PAC a check. Jeff Yass and Bill Ackman showed up. Allies are outspending her on television by a brutal multiple. That is not “buying Ohio.” That is what happens when people who build things decide the state should not be handed back to the clipboard.

When you cannot compete in the only currency that buys airtime, you moralize the currency. You cannot buy us. Translation: please stop outspending us.

The 2016 Rhyme They Think We Forgot

I have been on stages with this type before. Going into 2016, John Kasich was still out there. Establishment machinery was still chipping. Mitch McConnell’s world was still working the edges against Trump. They said you could not vote for him because of this, because of that, because the lawyers had a theory. Trump did not run away from being Trump. He went around and spoke to people. He was proud. His crowds were better. He won anyway.

The same habit is alive in this race. Republicans still fight each other after the primary. A few voices would rather be right about Vivek’s swing in a batting cage than right about Ohio’s tax climate. Tucker-adjacent complainers who want the demise of the party more than they want a governor will always find a clip. Shame on them. They are doing what Kasich did in 2015 and what a slice of the donor class tried again in 2024. Trump won anyway. The people who stayed tight when it was hard have a special place with me. The late arrivals who discovered their conscience after the primary should know I have a memory.

Democrats do not have that problem. They made a fool of even the Democrats who privately know she is a weak closer, and they will still show up. That gives Amy Acton the feeling she can scream her way into a conversation. Republicans, meanwhile, donate opposition research to the other team and call it principle.

I Support Vivek. I Will Miss One Fundraiser. That Is Not a Taper.

I love Vivek Ramaswamy. I have said it. I will keep saying it. There was a fundraiser I was not at. I am usually at these things. This one I could not make, and it is not a cooling. I had something else that night. I will tell people privately what it was. Everybody will get a kick out of it. I expect to make an announcement in about a month, and I have to stay inside a contract until I know what I am allowed to say. When I am not in the room it is not personal. He will raise more at that party than she will raise in the next month. That is how the ball bounces when one candidate can fill a room with people who have already built something and the other candidate is asking the room to resent the builder.

The early people who stayed with him when it was not fashionable have my loyalty. I will always support them. The rock-throwers who showed up late to explain why a winner is insufficient should sit with that.

What Ohio Votes for When the Noise Stops

When the chant dies and the fairground movie is over, the choice is not mysterious. Do you want a state that brings job creators in so you can get hired, keep a paycheck, and climb, or do you want a state whose highest pitch is that the man with the plane should be ashamed of the plane?

Vivek flying to a tennis match is not a scandal. It is a demonstration that he does not need the job. “I don’t need the chair. I want the state to work so you can have what I have.” That is a better sentence than “I want to give everybody a government job.” One of those sentences produces a tax base. The other produces a line.

The public polls as of mid-September still bounce around a coin flip in the averages—Fox had him at 50–48 in August, Wedgewood had her up a point, Siena had them tied in June. Forecast models that bother with Ohio’s fundamentals still give him the better chance in a state Donald Trump carried by double digits. Tight is not tied in the soul of the electorate. Tight is what a bad weekend of Republican infighting and a successful media diversion can manufacture.

She sounded like the goalie of a team that knows the third period is going badly. I doubt she was drinking on the camera that caught the chant. She sounded like it. She cannot get out of her own way. That only helps him, and he does not need the help as much as she needs the noise.

Go vote for Vivek. If you want Ohio to prosper, he is the only logical candidate on the ballot. Do it enthusiastically. Remember that Amy Acton locked you down, and remember that she also stood in front of a crowd and tried to make success sound like theft. Do not let a fairground shove erase the sentence. The speech happened. The Amy Acton speech was bad.

Footnotes

[1] Amy Acton’s Labor Day-weekend appearances included a rally clip, circulated widely beginning about September 6, 2026, in which she repeated that Vivek Ramaswamy “cannot buy this state” and “can’t buy us,” with Secretary Pete Buttigieg in the orbit of the event. Conservative and independent clips branded the delivery a rant.

[2] On September 6, 2026, at the Canfield Fair in Mahoning County, Patrick Havas, 38, of Canfield, pushed through a crowd at the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent while Acton was speaking, phone raised, calling her name. Ohio State Highway Patrol detained him. Acton was unharmed. Two elderly attendees were knocked down. After the arrest, officers reported two pistols, a Taser, and brass knuckles on his person; he never brandished a firearm. Charges: misdemeanor assault, disorderly conduct, inducing panic. He pleaded not guilty.

[3] Acton marched the next morning, Labor Day, September 7, 2026, in Cleveland’s Labor Day parade, called Sunday a “rough day,” and assisted two women who collapsed on the route. The fair story dominated the weekend news hole.

[4] David Pepper is Acton’s 2026 running mate. He has used Ramaswamy’s wealth and a mocked batting-cage video as attack lines.

[5] Ramaswamy attended the U.S. Open in early September 2026. Acton’s campaign posted video and stills and accused him of “jetting off” the trail. He is a documented tennis player. Tennis was the sport they were afraid looked “too fancy.”

[6] Donald Trump’s refusal to apologize for golf, clubs, and wealth is the relevant precedent, 2016 through 2024. Ohio voted for Trump by 11.2 points in 2024.

[7] Acts of the Apostles presents Paul as a Roman citizen of Tarsus, a tentmaker who could travel, appeal to Caesar, and support himself. The argument here is independence, not a bank statement. See Acts 18:3, 22:25–29, 25:11.

[8] Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director under Gov. Mike DeWine from 2019 into 2020 and was the public face of Ohio’s COVID orders. Columbus Dispatch, September 14, 2026.

[9] Acton has at times outraised Ramaswamy in donor receipts for calendar 2026; Ramaswamy loaned his campaign on the order of $25 million plus later sums. A super PAC drew large checks including $5 million from Elon Musk. September reporting described allies outspending Acton on television by roughly six to one.

[10] Fox News / Beacon-Shaw, August 6–10: Ramaswamy 50, Acton 48. Wedgewood, August 11–13: Acton 47, Ramaswamy 46. NYT/Siena, June 15–28: 47–47. Aggregators in early September clustered near a dead heat.

[11] John Kasich remained a critic of Trump through the 2016 cycle as Ohio’s sitting governor. The parallel is factional Republican fire directed at a nominee after the fight should have ended.

Selected Bibliography

“2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” Wikipedia. Updated September 14, 2026.

“2026 Polls: Ohio Governor.” 270toWin.

“Who Is Ahead in the Ohio Governor’s Race?” New York Times. Updated September 14, 2026.

Balmert, Jessie. “Amy Acton’s COVID response at center of race for Ohio governor.” Columbus Dispatch, September 14, 2026.

WKYC; Akron Beacon Journal; News 5 Cleveland. Labor Day parade and Canfield Fair coverage, September 6–7, 2026.

BBC; Reuters; NBC News. Havas arrest and charging, September 6–8, 2026.

Washington Examiner; NBC4; Cleveland.com / Jeremy Pelzer; New York Times (Musk/V-PAC). Fundraising and ad spend, June–September 2026.

Newsweek; The Independent; Mediaite; James Surowiecki on X. Tennis, U.S. Open, batting-cage video, September 2026.

The Holy Bible. Acts 18, 22, 25.

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

DON’T PLAY LIKE YOU’RE LOSING: Football Weather, a Bible in the Hand, and the Two-Point Swing That Can Still Hold the House

This is free advice. Nobody sent a twenty-five-hundred-dollar-an-hour invoice. I have been talking to people who live close to the pointed end of Republican strategy—the White House orbit, the Hill, the donor class that still thinks a memo is a movement—and I am putting the same thing on paper that I have been saying out loud. I do not know their internals. I know the look of a team that has started managing a loss before the fourth quarter. I have a long track record of calling the weather before the radar does. Take it or leave it.

Two months is a long time in American politics and a short time in a football season. The generic ballot is ugly. The president’s numbers are not what they were on the night the balloons fell. A lot of very serious people have decided the House is already gone and the Senate is a grind. Fine. Serious people have been wrong before.[1] The map is still a map of close races. Close races move on turnout, weather, and whether your own side can stand to look at itself in the mirror. That last item is the one Speaker Johnson keeps failing.[2]

Mike Johnson Is Talking Like a Man Preparing the Concession Speech

Mike Johnson has not done a really good job of projecting the one thing a thin majority cannot live without: the appearance of wanting the ball. He says the right sentences. He told NOTUS he would not even think about minority leader because “we’re going to win.” He told Dallas this is a pivotal moment and that the next fifty-odd days decide the republic.[3] Then the body language arrives. The schedule shrinks. The House books a quick September exit. The speaker warns audiences what Democrats will do if they take the gavel—impeachment is “not even the big concern,” he says; they will go after the family, the donors, the cabinet. That is not a two-minute drill. That is a man describing the visitor’s locker room.[4]

I am not asking Johnson to lie about the polls, which I don’t think are that bad; the election of 2026 will be all about engagement. I am asking him to stop sounding like a chaplain at a wake. The country can smell managed decline. Voters who already lean your way will stay home if they think the people with the gavel have already donated the furniture. Democrats do not need a wave if Republicans supply the shrug.

Johnson is a devout man. That is supposed to be an asset. Lately it reads as apology. He has spent too many years on the hook, line, and sinker of the progressive contamination that treats public Christianity as a zoning violation. Separation of church and state, as the slogan is now used, is not Madison. It is a muzzle. If you want to know how stupid the muzzle is, skip the seminar and walk three blocks in Southwest Washington.

Remember the Stretch Between the Election and January 20

Everybody who was paying attention remembers that little corridor of time after the 2024 election and before the inauguration. People were happy. Trump went to the fights. He brought people around. He made the transition look like a court and a carnival at the same time—which, if you understand American energy, is the correct mixture. He brought Speaker Johnson into that weather. He brought Elon Musk into that weather. The country got to watch alignment instead of autopsy.[5]

That is the template. Not a new platform. Not another reconciliation draft that dies in a five-vote conference. Presence. Trump should pull Johnson into the open air again and keep him there until the speaker’s shoulders come down. Bring the candidates. Put an arm around the people he picked and let the picture do the work the talking points cannot. Ken Paxton is one. There are others. The point is not a photo-op for the already converted. The point is to tell a tight district that the president still thinks the race is live.

Elon Does Not Need to Pray on Camera. He Needs to Be in the Room.

I say Elon Musk should be around this because I have a significant position in SpaceX stock and I feel better about where the thing is headed than I did when I first said I was in for the IPO. I was enthusiastic then. I am more enthusiastic now. That is not a ticker-tape prayer. That is a judgment about build-out, launch cadence, orbital compute, and the simple fact that the country that cedes the high ground will not remain the country that writes the rules.[6]

Elon does not need to hang around Trump and do the praying circuit. Leave the altar to the people who mean it. What he needs to do is refuse the role the press has written for him: court jester, wrecking ball, or exile. The midterms will be run, in part, as a referendum on whether American industry is allowed to remain impolite. SpaceX is impolite. Good. Bring that heat into the same frame as the speaker and the president and let the contrast with the Democratic freeze-and-regulate coalition explain itself.

Fox Already Has Your People. Football Season Has Everybody Else.

Doing another hit on Fox & Friends is not a strategy. Those viewers are already in the boat. They will vote if the weather is decent and the church van shows up. What you do not have, automatically, is the man who works first shift, drinks a beer on Saturday, and thinks politics is a smell he would rather not bring into the house. That man still goes to football games.

It is football season. You may not have a string of UFC cards to tour, but you have stadiums. You have tailgates. You have jumbotrons and mayors who will still pose for a picture if the president of the United States walks the sideline. Arena speeches work because they look like a country that is still alive. Mega rallies work for the same reason. Take Johnson. Take the candidates. Shake hands. Kiss the babies. Let the vice president hang around and do the work vice presidents are for. Do it in October, when the leaves turn and people remember they have neighbors.

The professional class will call this optics. Optics is what you call it when you have forgotten that human beings decide with their eyes first and their position papers later. A president in a stadium on a Saturday afternoon is a statement that the administration is not hiding in the Residence reading tracking memos. A speaker who looks like he wants to be there is a statement that the majority is not a rental.

The McDonald’s Test, or What DC Actually Sounds Like Before 10 a.m.

If you want to know where America is, skip the think-tank breakfast and go to the McDonald’s on the corner just down from the federal cluster in Southwest. Everybody who films in this town knows the neighborhood I mean. You are close to the Air and Space Museum. The American Indian museum is in the same walk. Congressional offices, the old Health and Human Services pile, the Department of Education’s gravity well—the whole faded government face of the city sits in a few blocks. Two blocks south of that McDonald’s is the Museum of the Bible.[7]

My wife and I have a ritual when we are in Washington. We park in a garage there, at a spot next to the elevator shaft at the bottom where the car fits as if the architect had us in mind. Ten feet to the elevator. The elevator dumps into a lobby that looks like a financial office. Two rights and you are in that McDonald’s. It is awkward in the way elevators are awkward, so somebody always talks. I like your hat. Thank you. Where are you headed?

I have stood in those elevators and at those tables and listened. “I work at Education.” “I am heading to one of the Smithsonian buildings.” “Congressional office.” The voice is flat. It is a job voice. Then, in a car of seven people, somebody says they are going to the Museum of the Bible, and the register changes. There is a little pop. You can see it. Not piety as performance. Pleasure. Anticipation. The same city that teaches its workforce to speak in acronyms still produces a human sound when the subject is Scripture.

I could have gone anywhere I wanted for my birthday in April. I told my wife I wanted a full day at the Museum of the Bible. We did the other DC things. I kept one day just for that museum. Sausage muffin, egg, orange juice or a Coke, about nine o’clock. The museum opens around ten. Then six or seven hours inside a building that does not apologize for the book that made the country possible. That joy is not a private hobby. It is a political fact. I sat there and watched people the way I watch shop floors and precincts. The ones walking toward the Bible were the ones who still had a pulse. The ones walking toward another government building looked like they were reporting for a sentence.

If You Cannot Unite Them on a Bill, Unite Them on a Book

I have been carrying a new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and I am extremely pleased with it. I have been going through it like a man who has been waiting for a tool. Edwards understood something the modern party consultant has forgotten: joy is not the opposite of seriousness. Joy is the fuel. “The enjoyment of God,” he wrote, is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied. You do not have to sign the Westminster Confession to feel the political implication. A movement that cannot speak with pleasure about the source of its own moral language will lose to a movement that at least knows how to yell.[8] [9]

Republicans in the professional class are reluctant to do this because they swallowed, whole, the idea that the Constitution requires the public square to be a chapel with the crosses pried off. That is lunacy. The system was built Christian in the only sense that matters for a republic: it assumed a created order, a fallen citizen, a law above the state, and a people who could be trusted with liberty because they feared something higher than a committee.[10]

I love the Bible as a historical narrative. Those are not two different objects. There is an entry point at every degree of scholarship. Some people will come for the archaeology. Some will come for the cadence of the King James that still sits in the American ear whether they attend or not. Some will come because their grandmother did. You do not need a uniformity of dogma to get a uniformity of attention. Attention is the scarce commodity of a midterm.

So carry the book. Do not only produce it for a swearing-in and then lock it in a drawer. Talk about it. Do a short press availability that is not a culture-war trap and not a sermon. “This is the family Bible. This is a wonderful place. The country still knows what this is.” That is enough. The people you need do not require a systematic theology from the podium. They require permission to stop being embarrassed.

A Quiet Hour at the Museum Before the Ropes Open

I would go further. President Trump should walk across town—it is not far—and take a private tour of the Museum of the Bible before it opens to the public. Eight o’clock. They would open the building for him. Secret Service can lock a place like that down so it would be very safe. The access points are manageable. He can be through the history floors and the room with the Bibles laid out, pictures taken, and gone by nine-thirty, with the public none the wiser until the photos land. Visit the history-of-the-book exhibit while he is there. Stand in the room where the book is treated as an object of civilization rather than a punch line.

Then say the simple sentence: I love this museum. People who visit Washington often tell you it is their favorite stop, and they say it with that same pop in the voice I hear in the elevator. Put the president’s name next to that feeling. It is not phony if he means even half of it. Reminding people where he stands costs an hour and a motorcade. The return is not a sudden forty-state revival. The return is permission, again, for the people who already suspected they were allowed to believe this to act like it on a Tuesday in November.

Do Not Play Not to Lose

I have been saying this all along. Republicans who would not get behind the hard instruments—the same-day rules, the full use of a trifecta, the refusal to pre-negotiate the next Democratic revenge tour—did it because they believed Democrats always take power back, and that the smart play is to stay presentable so the other side will not pack the courts or torch the furniture. That is how you lose on purpose and call it statesmanship.

Democrats do not play that game. They play to take the referee. When they are out of power they yell, they play the victim, and they hope Republicans do not show up. When the rules of mail and curing and late counting favor them, they use the rules. I am not writing a brief for lawlessness. I am writing a brief against the peculiar Republican talent for bringing a rulebook to a street fight and then congratulating themselves for the bruises.

Go out there and win. If you cannot find a tax provision everyone will bleed for, you can still find a book almost everyone in your coalition will recognize. That is not a substitute for wages and borders and energy. It is the thing that makes people bother to vote for the wages and the borders and the energy in the first place.

The AI Debate Is a Strategy, Not a Concern

While we are talking about midterms, look at what is being built on the other side of the board. Democrats are trying to play the whole AI game. A lot of the people who run the large AI shops spent years working against President Trump. They are also busy playing games with each other over who owns the future. The issue is hot inside the Republican coalition for a reason: it is designed to be hot. Steve Bannon is set to appear at the same Washington “pro-human” AI gathering as Bernie Sanders. Populist right and socialist left, holding the same fear by different handles.[11]

For them the unifying note is jobs, dignity, the machine that will replace the man. Those are real human questions. I am not sneering at a machinist who wonders what a model trained on his craft will do to his shop. I am saying the political use of that fear is older than the transformer architecture.

They Ran This Play on Nuclear. They Will Run It on Compute.

Nuclear was always good for a healthy industrial society. Dense energy is how a free people stay warm without kneeling to a cartel or a planning board. Democrats of the anti-human strain used Three Mile Island—and every movie and textbook that turned a contained accident into a morality play—to discourage the independence that comes with the atom. They crippled an industry to suppress the growth of a capitalist nation and called it safety.[12]

Ohioans of a certain age do not need the lecture. We watched the same shot fired at FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants. Regulation and politics helped run a generation business onto the rocks. The subsidiary goes looking for a way to stay alive. Suddenly the company is corrupt, the Republicans who touched the file are dirty, and the moral of the story is that atoms were the original sin. The plants were a balance-sheet problem wrapped in a morality play. The morality play won the news cycle. The electrons still had to come from somewhere.[13]

AI is the new reactor. The doomsday register is the same. Pause. Ban superintelligence. Global coordination. Keep the models on a leash held by the people who already lost the last three arguments about growth. Trace a good portion of that propaganda and you will not end in a Vermont lecture hall. You will end in a strategic environment where China does not want America to embrace the thing that multiplies American labor. Beijing does not need to invent our anxiety. It only needs us to treat our own dynamism as a war crime.[14]

Barack Obama’s network does not have to send a memo titled “Split the GOP with AI” for the effect to be the effect. Put Republicans on their heels. Make the party of builders argue with the party of builders about whether building is allowed. In a midterm year, when turnout is already soft, that argument is not a seminar. It is a suppression tactic.

Low-turnout midterms reward whoever gets their people to the room. The AI fight, framed as apocalypse, keeps the Republican coalition in a family argument while the other side votes. That is why the biblical narrative is not a side quest. It is the offset. The communist register around AI—man as raw material, the future as a planning problem, the soul as an outdated user interface—cannot survive contact with a public that still thinks a human being is a creature and not a dataset. You do not beat a materialist panic with a better white paper. You beat it by reminding people what they are.[15]

The Tight Races Are Tight for a Reason

I look at the board and I do not see a wipeout that has already happened. I see a House that is still a handful of seats and a Senate that can hold even if a chair or two gets wobbly. Texas is the advertisement. Ken Paxton and James Talarico have been inside the margin of error for months. Some surveys now have Talarico a couple of points up. That is not destiny. That is a couple of points.[16]

A couple of points is a stadium visit. A couple of points is a president who looks like he is having a good time standing next to the man he wants in the seat. A couple of points is church-going women who decided the race was about more than a generic ballot average. A couple of points is the difference between Johnson keeping a gavel and Johnson becoming a trivia question about the last Republican speaker before the investigations.[17]

Fox will cover the rallies. That is not the point. The point is the pictures that leak into the places Fox does not run the morning show: the parking lot, the Sunday potluck, the group chat of the parents who have not voted since 2024 because they assumed the grown-ups had it. High engagement is not a mystery cult. It is a function of whether people think their side is alive.

Two Months. Not a Miracle. A Decision.

I think the House is winnable. I think the Senate can hold. I think some of these close races are close enough that a little public relations in football weather would move them. I think you can swing two or three points of engagement—not by converting the faculty lounge, but by giving your own people a reason to stand in a line. Democrats cannot pull this particular lever. They can lecture. They can threaten. They can mail. They cannot make the Museum of the Bible crowd feel seen, because they have spent a generation telling that crowd to sit down.

Do not act like you are losing. Act like you have fifty days and a country that still knows a hymn when it hears one. Bring Johnson into the light until he stops narrating the minority. Bring Musk into the frame as the man who builds. Bring Paxton and the rest into the presidential weather. Carry the book. Walk the museum. Go to the games. Talk like the majority is a thing you intend to keep.

If you ever read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know the rule I am applying. You do not win a gunfight by announcing your readiness to lose the street. You win it by being the man who came to keep the street. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven. The earthly contest is downstream of what a people think a human being is for. The Bible is not a prop in that argument. It is the argument, bound in leather, still doing what it has always done when somebody is willing to carry it into the weather.[18]

That is the advice. I would like to see Republicans win. From my map, and from the neighborhood I actually walk when I am in that city, it is very winnable—if they will stop rehearsing the loss and go collect the joy that is already standing in line for a sausage muffin and a museum ticket.

Notes:

Scripture, Theology, and American Religion

The Holy Bible. New King James Version. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press, various volumes.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

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

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. January 1, 1802.

Dreisbach, Daniel L. Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State. New York: NYU Press, 2002.

Museum of the Bible. “Plan Your Visit” and “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” museumofthebible.org.

Politics, Congress, and the 2026 Midterms

RealClearPolling. “Latest Polls 2026, 2028.” Accessed September 14, 2026.

USPollingData. “US Polling Data 2026 — Midterms, Generic Ballot & Trump Approval.” Updated September 14, 2026.

Cornell, Fred. “US Senate Forecast September 2026.” fredcornell.com. Model run September 14, 2026.

Newsweek. “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms—Polls.” September 14, 2026.

New York Times. “Senate Polls 2026: See the Latest Midterm Polls.” Updated September 10, 2026.

New York Times. “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House.” July 1, 2026.

NOTUS. “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations.” August 24, 2026.

Newsweek. “Mike Johnson Warns Impeachment Not ‘The Big Concern’ if Dems Win Midterms.” June 26, 2026.

CNN. “Johnson gambles on ambitious summer agenda as GOP anxiety rises ahead of midterms.” July 13, 2026.

Just the News. “Mike Johnson says 2026 marks a ‘pivotal moment’ in American history.” September 10, 2026.

Roll Call. “House plans quick September exit.” September 3, 2026.

Denver Gazette. “The 21 seats Mike Johnson says will decide the House majority.” September 2026.

NBC News / Meet the Press. Interview with Speaker Mike Johnson. September 13, 2026.

USA Today. “Talarico ahead of Paxton in Texas Senate race as older voters shift lead.” September 14, 2026.

The Hill. “James Talarico, Ken Paxton tied at 47 percent in Texas Senate race: Poll.” June 30, 2026.

Texas Politics Project / University of Texas. Statewide survey releases, spring–summer 2026.

NPR. “With 99 days until midterm elections, here’s where things stand.” July 27, 2026.

Campbell, Angus. “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change.” Public Opinion Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1960).

Artificial Intelligence, Energy, and Industrial Policy

New York Times. “From Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon, Political Figures Sound Alarms on A.I.” September 14, 2026.

Axios. “Scoop: Coxon, Bernie and Bannon unite for ‘pro-human’ AI.” September 14, 2026.

Reuters. “US Senator Sanders and podcaster Bannon, longtime foes, to urge AI restrictions.” September 14, 2026.

The Hill. “Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon join forces to advocate for AI regulation.” September 14, 2026.

Washington Examiner. “Sanders, Bannon, and former Anthropic staffer join forces in AI regulation push.” September 14, 2026.

Future of Life Institute. “The Pro-Human AI Declaration” and “Pro-Human Assembly” program notes. September 2026.

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Historical accounts of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident, March 28, 1979.

Federal Register. Materials related to the Crane Clean Energy Center / former Three Mile Island Unit 1 restart docket. 2026.

Ferrise, Adam. “Ex-regulator: FirstEnergy nearly tanked credit as nuke plants drained finances.” Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026.

Utility Dive. “Ohio PUC orders FirstEnergy utilities to pay $250.7M over HB 6 bribery scandal.” November 20, 2025.

U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio. Civil filings summarizing FirstEnergy, House Bill 6, and the nuclear-plant bailout structure.

Reuters. “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share.” June 11, 2026.

New York Times. “SpaceX Stock Rises in Largest IPO Ever.” June 12, 2026.

Wikipedia. “Initial public offering of SpaceX.” Accessed September 2026.

The Author’s Shelf and Related Works

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. iUniverse, 2004.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior (blog). overmanwarrior.wordpress.com and richhoffmanbooks.com.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–1885. For the Overman frame the author has long adapted, not baptized.

Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. Documentary, 2026.

Author’s note.

This essay is strategic commentary offered in a private and public voice I have used for years. It is not a paid consulting product, not an official statement of any campaign, and not investment advice. SpaceX is a publicly traded company as of June 2026; readers should treat every market sentence here as the opinion of a shareholder who has already shown his cards.

Footnotes

[1] Generic congressional ballot averages in mid-September 2026 have generally shown Democrats ahead by roughly five to eight points depending on the pollster. Rasmussen Reports, September 14, 2026, found Democrats 47 percent and Republicans 42 percent. CBS News, September 13, 2026, found Democrats 54 percent and Republicans 46 percent. Aggregators such as USPollingData placed the generic ballot near D+6.9 as of September 14, 2026.

[2] House and Senate seat counts as commonly reported in September 2026 put Republicans near 222–213 in the House and 53–47 in the Senate, meaning Democrats needed a modest net pickup for the House gavel and a larger four-seat swing for Senate control. See USPollingData, “US Polling Data 2026,” updated September 14, 2026; Newsweek, “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms,” September 14, 2026.

[3] Speaker Mike Johnson has publicly insisted Republicans will keep the House. See NOTUS, “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations,” August 24, 2026. The same coverage notes that Johnson’s future as speaker is widely understood to be tied to the majority. Separate reporting described caucus frustration and a sense of a thinning grip. New York Times, “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House,” July 1, 2026.

[4] Johnson told a Dallas audience that the next fifty-three days would “determine the fate of the republic.” Just the News, September 10, 2026. He has also spoken of twenty-one toss-up seats as decisive. Denver Gazette / Colorado Politics, September 2026.

[5] On the transition period after the 2024 election and before the January 20, 2025 inauguration, the public record is thick with high-visibility events, cabinet theater, and the brief alignment of Trump, congressional Republicans, and Elon Musk around a governing project. The point here is political memory, not a claim that every meeting was a prayer circle.

[6] SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 11, 2026, raising on the order of $75 billion and valuing the company near $1.77 trillion at pricing, with a first-day close that pushed the market capitalization higher. Reuters, “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share,” June 11–12, 2026; New York Times, June 12, 2026. Subsequent trading was volatile. This essay’s enthusiasm is the author’s investment thesis and political judgment, not investment advice.

[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 Fourth Street SW, Washington, D.C., opened November 17, 2017, three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Museum of the Bible, “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” A McDonald’s sits a short walk from the museum—Yelp lists one about 0.08 miles away—on the southwest federal corridor near Federal Center SW Metro, the National Air and Space Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

[8] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), edited by Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson, was released in 2026. Thomas Nelson Bibles product page; Christianbook.com listing for NKJV The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible.

[9] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) and the broader First Great Awakening are the American precedent for treating religious revival as a public, not merely private, event. Edwards’s own emphasis on joy in God is the stated editorial theme of the 2026 study Bible.

[10] On church and state, the relevant constitutional text is the First Amendment’s prohibition on an establishment of religion and its protection of the free exercise of religion. The modern slogan of a “wall of separation” is a later political gloss, most famously associated with Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, not a phrase in the Constitution itself.

[11] The Future of Life Institute’s “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, announced for September 15, 2026, listed Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon among speakers, along with labor leaders and members of both parties. They were not scheduled to share a single stage. New York Times, September 14, 2026; Axios, September 14, 2026; Reuters, September 14, 2026.

[12] Three Mile Island Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown on March 28, 1979. The accident produced no immediate deaths but became the central public symbol of anti-nuclear politics in the United States and helped freeze a generation of reactor construction. See NRC historical summaries of TMI-2.

[13] FirstEnergy’s Ohio nuclear plants, Davis-Besse and Perry, became the center of a financial and political crisis that included the bankruptcy of the generation subsidiary, House Bill 6, and later criminal and regulatory proceedings. Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026; Utility Dive, November 20, 2025; related federal court filings summarizing the HB 6 bailout structure.

[14] On AI industrial policy and Chinese competition, see the public record of export controls, semiconductor policy, and repeated U.S. government warnings that Beijing treats frontier compute as a strategic resource. The causal claim that every domestic “pause AI” campaign is a Chinese information operation is the author’s inference, not a documented indictment.

[15] Midterm electorates are typically older, more partisan, and lower-turnout than presidential electorates. The “surge and decline” literature from Angus Campbell onward remains the basic framework. Small shifts in evangelical and conservative Protestant turnout have been decisive in multiple close cycles since 2004.

[16] Recent Texas Senate polling has been tight. An AARP survey conducted August 30–September 1, 2026, and reported September 14, showed James Talarico at 48 percent and Ken Paxton at 44 percent among likely voters. Earlier NYT/Siena work in late June had them tied at 47 percent. USA Today, September 14, 2026; The Hill, June 30, 2026.

[17] President Trump’s job approval in mid-September 2026 varied by pollster, with several national surveys clustering in the high thirties to mid-forties approve and a clear plurality disapprove. Rasmussen, September 14, 2026: 45 approve / 54 disapprove. Morning Consult, same window: 42 / 56. CBS News, September 13: 39 / 61.

[18] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021). The forthcoming Politics of Heaven develops the same author’s argument that earthly power contests are unintelligible without the older grammar of heaven, will, and moral order.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Pursuit of Happiness Is Not a Handout: Aristotle, Jefferson, Eudaimonia, and Why Government Cannot Manufacture a Meaningful Life.

I am sitting on my porch with a book in my lap, the same way I have done it for years, and the same way I imagine Thomas Jefferson doing it at Monticello when the noise of government finally fell away. People still walk up and ask the question as if it were an accusation: you are in your prime earning years; what are you doing out here reading? I tell them the truth. I am practicing an old idea that most of modern politics has forgotten how to pronounce. The Greeks called it eudaimonia. Speech-to-text software, and more than a few hurried conversations, turn the word into “pneumonia.” That slip is almost perfect. We have caught a fever about happiness and then treated the wrong disease.

I am not an anti-machine person, and I am not an anti-data-center person. Tools are tools. I use them the way I use a library: to get to the argument faster. What I am against is the siren song that says a meaningful life can be issued by a legislature, mailed as a rebate, or confiscated from a neighbor who hit the jackpot. That song is older than the Democratic platform and older than the American republic. It is the temptation to let someone else define the good life and then charge you for the privilege.

The Declaration of Independence did not promise us a feeling. It promised us a pursuit. That difference is the whole American argument, and it is the argument I keep returning to when the season turns political, and every candidate suddenly wants to sell happiness by the pound.[1]

What Did the Founders Mean by the Pursuit of Happiness?

Schoolhouse history likes a tidy swap. Locke wrote “life, liberty, and property.” Jefferson, we are told, crossed out property and wrote happiness because he was more generous, or more poetic, or less capitalist. The tidy swap is too tidy.[2]

Jefferson had George Mason in front of him. Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights kept both goods on the table: the means of acquiring and possessing property, and the pursuing and obtaining of happiness and safety.[3] Jefferson compressed the line. He did not throw property into the river. He refused to let property pretend it was the whole human good. Locke himself, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, had already said that the highest perfection of an intellectual nature is “a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”[4] The phrase was in the air of the eighteenth century. Adams said the happiness of society is the end of government, as the happiness of the individual is the end of man.[5]

So the Founders were not announcing a mood. They were naming a classical end: a life that can actually be lived well. Happiness, in that older English, is closer to flourishing than to a grin. It is closer to a completed form than to a shopping list. Arthur Schlesinger once wrote about the “lost meaning” of the phrase, and Pauline Maier showed how common the political language of happiness already was in American writing before July 4, 1776.[6] Jefferson did not invent a slogan for a greeting card. He put a thick word in a thin space and trusted a free people to know the difference between a right and a result.

I like to say it this way, because it is how I live it. Happiness is not a second house in Florida, a place in the Upper Peninsula, and a third address in Cincinnati. Those things can be fine. They are not the definition. I have been happier with a book and a family meal of takeout Chinese than with a ledger that looked impressive to somebody else. The money that buys the meal matters less than the hour in which you eat it. If that sounds sentimental, it is only because we have been trained to measure a soul with a bank statement.

What Is Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, and Why Is It Not a PlayStation?

Aristotle calls the highest human good eudaimonia. Translators say happiness. They should also say flourishing, living well, a complete life of excellent activity. Aristotle is blunt about the alternatives. Pleasure is not enough. Honor depends on other people. Wealth is a tool. The human function is rational activity, and the human good is that activity done with virtue, not for a weekend but across a life.[7]

Two features of that definition wreck most modern politics.

First, happiness is an activity, not a stash. Aristotle says a virtuous man who never exercises the virtue is like an athlete who never enters the stadium. You do not become happy by owning the equipment. You become happy by running the race.[8] A free PlayStation in every house would not settle the question. It would only prove we had confused amusement with a soul.

Second, external goods are real and still secondary. Aristotle is not a monk. He knows a man needs enough equipment for a complete life. He does not pretend that catastrophe is a spiritual opportunity brochure. But he will not let the equipment become the prize.[9] That is why I can be making a million dollars a year or fifty dollars a year, and the inner measure does not have to move with the account. The measure is whether I am living a life I can defend: books, family, work I own, a porch that is mine, a conscience that is not for sale.

People hear that and think I am romanticizing poverty. I am not. I am refusing the opposite romance, the one that says the state can allocate flourishing the way it allocates a tax credit. You cannot mail a man eudaimonia. You can only leave him room to practice it, or crowd the room until he forgets how.[10]

Plato vs. Aristotle: Philosopher Kings, Jedi Knights, and Limited Government

If you want the American argument in one Greek quarrel, start here. The city executes Socrates. Plato, who loved him, answers with a republic in which the wise few rule the many for their own good. The guardians own little, lie when necessary, and impose a harmony the public cannot be trusted to choose. “Until philosophers rule as kings,” Plato says, the cities will have no rest from their troubles.[11]

Aristotle studied in that household of ideas and then pushed the furniture back toward the ground. He is more empirical, more household, more individual. He does not start with a caste of golden souls. He starts with a man who must choose, a family that must hold together, a city that must mix its powers so that no class eats the rest.[12] The debate is not a museum piece. It is the difference between a government that protects your pursuit and a government that performs your virtue in your name.

I have always thought Star Wars is popular philosophy wearing a robe. When George Lucas was at his best, the Jedi looked like knighthood: discipline, apprenticeship, a refusal of cheap power. Then the story showed you the other face. A council of the enlightened, hovering above the Republic, managing fairness, announcing balance, and slowly becoming what Aristotle warned against: a class that cannot imagine the good unless it administers it.[13] That is Plato in space. It is a beautiful picture and a dangerous constitution.

Ayn Rand saw the same fork and planted her flag with Aristotle.[14] You do not have to take her whole system to see why the Founders feared the Jedi option. Once an elite is authorized to impose happiness, it will need your property, your time, and eventually your vocabulary. The Book of Judges already knew the seesaw: no king, and every man does what is right in his own eyes; then a king, and the king takes your sons and your fields.[15] America tried to cut a third path. Not chaos. Not philosopher-kings. A limited government around an unlimited soul.

How Greek Philosophy Reached the Declaration of Independence

Ideas do not float. They ride languages, armies, and churches.

Aristotle taught Alexander. Alexander broke the old map and left Greek cities, Greek speech, and Greek books across a world that had not asked for them.[16] That Hellenistic weather is the weather in which Scripture becomes Greek, in which the New Testament can be written, in which Paul can argue in cities that already have a word for a complete life. I do not claim Alexander meant to pave a road for Christ. I claim history is thick. The Teacher of Righteousness, the Maccabean revolt, the tense priesthoods, John and his cousin in the wilderness—none of that happens in a vacuum. It happens in a Near East already argued over by Greek thought and imperial power.[17]

Rome later sits on that same furniture and, when it can no longer hold the old gods together, leans on the Church to keep a civilization from flying apart. I have spent years in books that tell that long story. Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity is one of them. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s three-thousand-year account is another, because he is honest that Christianity does not begin at the manger in an empty room. It inherits Israel and Greece.[18]

This is why I say something that makes secular lecture halls flinch. Without the Christian movement, the Aristotelian idea of a dignified individual soul does not arrive in Virginia with enough moral force to become a political principle. Cicero carried the Greek conversation into Latin. Aquinas baptized Aristotle for the schools.[19] The Reformation and the colonial pulpit then taught ordinary people that they stood before God without a philosopher-king in the way. That is not “separation of church and state” as a sterilization protocol. It is the free exercise of a faith that made limited government feel natural instead of suicidal.[20]

Jonathan Edwards and the Christian Platform Beneath American Liberty

I have been talking a lot about Jonathan Edwards, and not because I want to turn the Founders into revivalists in powdered wigs. Edwards is useful because he forced a distinction the modern state keeps trying to erase. Liberty is not the chance to do as you please. Liberty is the healed capacity to love what is good.[21]

The First Great Awakening did not write the Constitution. It did something prior. It taught crowds of uncredentialed people that the most important transaction in a human life happens between a soul and God, not between a subject and a board of guardians. Historians still fight about how straight the line runs from Edwards and Whitefield to 1776. Coolidge, speaking in Philadelphia on the Declaration’s 150th birthday, was not shy about it. He said the religious teaching of the preceding period prepared the mind of the country, and he put Edwards in that company.[22]

What I take from that fight is simple. A Christian account of human dignity—image of God, direct accountability, sin that a committee cannot cure—makes personal responsibility feel like realism rather than cruelty. If man is only appetite plus circumstance, then of course the only “fairness” left is to move piles of stuff from the disciplined to the wrecked. If man is a soul, then the first mercy is to tell him the truth: happiness cannot be injected. It has to be lived.[23]

Why Jefferson Wrote Happiness Instead of Property

Property matters. I won’t pretend otherwise. A man who cannot keep what he earns is not free; he is a tenant of whoever counts the votes. The Fifth Amendment still talks about property because the Founders were not monks. But Jefferson left the word out of the most famous sentence in American politics on purpose, or at least with a purpose that survived the editing.[24]

If he writes “property,” the sentence can be captured by the ledger. If he writes “happiness,” the sentence stays larger than the ledger. Happiness includes the right to acquire, to build, to fail, to start again, to sit down, to open a book, to refuse a treadmill that exists only so someone else can be paid from your exhaustion. Government is instituted to secure those rights, not to emit the outcome the rights were meant to make possible.[25]

Democrats who want to retire Jefferson with Sally Hemings are not, in my experience, primarily interested in the enslaved. They want to turn off the sentence.[26] I took my children to Monticello when I was in my twenties and thirties because I wanted them to see the house, the river country, the laboratory of a mind, and the wound in the same tour. A serious country can hold both. A propaganda country can hold only one. I will not surrender the idea of the pursuit because the man who wrote it failed his own measure. That would be like burning the Gospels because Peter denied Christ before sunrise.

What Is the Government’s Role in Happiness?

The government’s job is to get out of your way without disappearing. That is a narrower job than it sounds, and a harder one. Madison’s line still does the work: if men were angels, no government would be necessary.[27] Men are not angels. So you need law against force and fraud. You need a shield around the porch. You need courts that can tell a thief from a neighbor. You do not need a ministry of flourishing.

Every month people open an electric bill and feel that drop in the stomach. Some of that is the price of a physical world. Some of that is policy dressed up as compassion. When government decides it must manufacture happiness, it discovers it has no happiness in the warehouse. It only has other people’s time. So it takes. It calls the taking fairness. It calls the residue a benefit. And it is shocked—shocked—when the people being harvested stop believing the harvest is a public service.

Representatives are not Jedi. They are not there to impose a vision of the good life on Ohio or on the country. They are there to keep the framework from being eaten: contracts, speech, worship, arms, due process, the right to keep the fruit of work. The moment they start using your success to subsidize somebody else’s refusal of consequence, they have changed jobs. They are no longer guardians of liberty. They are brokers of dependence.[28]

Can Government Distribute Happiness by Taxing Success?

This is the active campaign version of the old temptation. A man goes out, takes risks, hits the jackpot, and the speech begins: tax the rich, because his surplus is the raw material of your comfort. I have watched that speech attach itself to Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio the way it attaches itself to anyone whose success is visible enough to photograph. The names change. The metaphysics do not.

If your only picture of a human being is a stomach, then the moral task is, of course, to move food. If your picture includes a soul, the moral task is harder. Some people are broke because the world broke them. Some people are broke because they made a string of decisions that would break anyone: addiction, idleness, the refusal to be teachable. A serious country can tell those stories apart. A political machine cannot afford to. Dependent people are reliable. Independent people are inconvenient. They might stay home and read. They might not need the next check. They might not love you at the next election.

Happiness cannot be confiscated from one life and poured into another like fuel. When you sever effort from reward, you do not get fairness. You get resentment on one side and learned helplessness on the other. Aristotle would not have been confused by this. A virtue that is not practiced dies. A city that pays people not to become excellent should not act surprised when excellence becomes scarce.

Why Minimum Wage Politics Often Create Dependence Instead of Dignity

Even a hard, poorly paid job can begin eudaimonia if the work is real and the paycheck is yours. Ownership of a small life is still ownership. The political class that talks down “minimum wage work” is not protecting the worker’s dignity. It is protecting a story in which only a managed outcome counts as a human life.

Artificially jack the wage floor and two ordinary things happen. Some businesses hire fewer people—some cut hours. Prices around the worker rise. The first rung rises, and more people never reach it. Then the same political class arrives with a program for the people who cannot find the rung, and the program requires a larger state, which requires a deeper reach into the people who are still climbing.[29] That is not an accident that keeps happening to kind-hearted people. It is a machine that converts failed economics into loyal constituencies.

I am not against a man earning more. I am against the pretense that a statute can repeal scarcity without repealing somebody’s opportunity. Happiness at the bottom of the ladder is not a higher number on a poster. It is the knowledge that the step you are standing on belongs to you.

Jefferson’s Porch, Roosevelt’s Badlands, and My Own Monticello

When life got heavy, Jefferson went home. He wrote that nature intended him for the tranquil pursuits of science and that leaving power felt like a prisoner shaking off chains. In retirement, he gave up newspapers for Tacitus and Thucydides, Newton and Euclid, and said he found himself much the happier.[30] After he sold his library to rebuild Congress’s, he said the line I have loved since I first walked that hill in Virginia: “I cannot live without books.”[31]

Theodore Roosevelt learned the same lesson the hard way. On February 14, 1884, his mother and his wife died in the same house, hours apart. He put a great X in the diary and wrote that the light had gone out of his life. Then he went to the Dakota Territory, simplified the world down to cattle, weather, and work, and stayed long enough to remember he was still a man.[32] That is not “self-care.” That is the Rough Rider version of Aristotle. Unplug from the grid of other people’s noise. Choose a smaller field. Practice being alive on purpose.

I do the same thing when the complications pile up. I start unplugging. I sit on a porch that reminds me of the older American houses, and I read. Visitors think I have dropped out. I have dropped back in. A designated place for thought is not a luxury good. It is how a person remembers that he is not a device on the state’s network. Aristotle said the highest activity is contemplation.[33] Jefferson built rooms for it. I have rooms for it. If government ever decides that my unproductive hours are a public resource, it will have declared war on the very right it exists to protect.

Homelessness, Bad Decisions, and the Difference Between Charity and Clientage

I have walked into Canterbury, past the old gates toward the cathedral I love, and seen the same scene you can see outside too many American churches and civic showpieces. People sleeping rough in the shadow of a great Christian building, because the building is a good place to be seen by tourists with sandwiches. I have looked at faces there, and in Los Angeles, and in New York. I do not claim I can read a whole biography off a face. I have spoken with enough of those men to know that many of them are not there because a rich stranger refused them a rebate. They are there because addiction, or a collapsed will, or a long series of refusals, ate the mechanisms by which a person stays housed.

A Christian society is supposed to help. It is not supposed to freeze a man in his worst hour and call the freeze compassion.[34] When a system removes the cost of a bad decision while also flattening the reward of a good one, it trains people out of agency. Then it photographs the wreckage and says, see, this is why we must take more from the competent.

Government’s legitimate role is to keep the road from being blocked so you can walk it in your own way: reading your books, staying with your family, ordering the Chinese food, building a firm, disappearing into North Dakota, disappearing onto a porch, working a first job that nobody at a fundraiser wants to brag about. The state may not decide your values and then bill you for the sermon. The state may not call your success a surplus inventory of happiness to be broken up for parts.

That is why the original quarrel still matters. Plato’s temptation is always to let the few define the good and administer it. Aristotle counters that a human life is an activity you cannot outsource. Christianity carried that dignity through empires that would have been happy to forget it. The American Founders, soaked in both Athens and the Bible, wrote a sentence telling the state to stay in its lane and not interfere with people’s happiness.

Notes

[1] Thomas Jefferson never left a memorandum explaining why he chose the phrase. The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello notes that he was almost certainly influenced by George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776), which spoke of “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” See “Pursuit of Happiness,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello.

[2] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise, §87 and §123. Locke’s triad is often summarized as “life, liberty, and property,” though Locke’s larger category of “property” includes life, liberty, and estate.

[3] George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, §1 (June 12, 1776). The National Archives notes that Jefferson drew on Mason for the opening paragraphs of the Declaration.

[4] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, ch. 21. Locke writes that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”

[5] John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776): “the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man.”

[6] Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Lost Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 3 (1964): 326–327. See also Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997).

[7] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16: the human good is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” The Greek εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia) is commonly rendered “happiness” or “flourishing.” It is not a mood. It is a life well lived.

[8] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a7–18 (the function argument) and 1103b26–30: the point of ethical inquiry is not merely to know what virtue is, but to become good.

[9] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1099a31–1099b8 and 1101a14–16. External goods are conditions of a complete life, not the definition of the good itself. A man wrecked by catastrophe is not called happy in the full sense, but neither is a rich man who lives without virtue.

[10] For a clear popular account of eudaimonia versus hedonic pleasure, see the discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Aristotle’s Ethics” (Richard Kraut). Flourishing is activity, not a pile of goods.

[11] Plato, Republic 473c–e: until philosophers rule as kings, or kings philosophize, “there can be no rest from ills for the cities.”

[12] Aristotle, Politics I and III. Aristotle begins with the household and the citizen, not with a caste of guardians. He defends a mixed constitution and treats extreme concentrations of power as a constant temptation toward tyranny.

[13] George Lucas has long acknowledged that Star Wars draws on myth, knighthood, and mentor-pupil initiation. The Jedi Council, however it began, becomes a cloistered caste managing the galaxy’s “balance.” That is a Republic problem, not an Ethics problem.

[14] Ayn Rand repeatedly named Aristotle as the only philosopher to whom she owed a genuine intellectual debt. See the appendix to Atlas Shrugged and her essay “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964). Rand’s politics are not the Founders’ politics, but her recovery of Aristotelian individualism is part of the modern American argument.

[15] 1 Samuel 8. Israel asks for a king “like all the nations.” Samuel warns that a king will take sons, daughters, fields, and a tenth. The Book of Judges had already shown the opposite problem: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

[16] Plutarch, Life of Alexander; and the ancient biographical tradition that Aristotle tutored the young Alexander at Mieza. The cultural aftershock of that education was Hellenism: Greek language, cities, and books stretched from the Aegean to the Indus.

[17] The Septuagint translated Hebrew Scripture into Greek in the Hellenistic age. The New Testament was written in Greek. Without that linguistic world, the Christian movement would have traveled a narrower road. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), opening chapters on Greece, Rome, and Israel.

[18] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1976). Johnson’s one-volume narrative remains a favorite of general readers who want the political and institutional story without losing the religion itself.

[19] Cicero, in De Finibus and De Officiis, transmitted the Greek conversation about the highest good into Latin moral vocabulary that later Christian and Enlightenment writers still used. Aquinas baptized large parts of Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae.

[20] The First Amendment protects free exercise; it does not exile Christianity from the moral formation of a people. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) was written to keep the state from prescribing worship, not to keep citizens from having a faith.

[21] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); and Freedom of the Will (1754). Edwards insisted that true liberty is not mere license—“opportunity to do as one pleases”—but the capacity of a converted heart to love what is good.

[22] Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926. Coolidge argued that the Declaration’s principles were prepared by the religious teaching of the preceding period, and he named Jonathan Edwards among those who had “aroused the thought” of the colonists.

[23] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

[24] On “happiness” as a political term already common in American writing before 1776, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture, and the Gilder Lehrman essay “The Harmonizing Sentiments of the Day.” Jefferson compressed a public language; he did not invent a private slogan.

[25] Declaration of Independence, final text adopted by Congress, July 4, 1776: governments are instituted “to secure these rights,” and the people may alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive of those ends, organizing new powers “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

[26] On Jefferson’s contradictions, including slavery and the Hemings family, the honest reader does not need a campaign commercial. He needs Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), and the documentary record at Monticello. The argument of this essay is not that Jefferson was a saint. It is that the sentence he wrote still tells the truth about what a free government is for.

[27] James Madison, Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Limited government is a theological and anthropological claim before it is a procedural one.

[28] See Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), and The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1995), on the difference between process and result, and on elites who treat other people’s lives as raw material for a designed outcome.

[29] Minimum-wage literature is contested, but the basic price-control logic is not mysterious: raise the legal price of low-skill labor and some hours, some jobs, and some first rungs disappear. For a classical statement, see Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper, 1946), ch. 19.

[30] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 21, 1812: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier.” Founders Online, National Archives.

[31] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 10, 1815: “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.” After the British burned the Capitol library in 1814, Jefferson sold his collection of more than 6,500 volumes to Congress. He immediately began assembling another library. See Endrina Tay, “I cannot live without books,” Monticello.

[32] On February 14, 1884, Martha “Mittie” Roosevelt died of typhoid fever, and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died of Bright’s disease, hours apart, in the same New York house. Roosevelt wrote in his diary, “The light has gone out of my life.” He left infant Alice with his sister and went west to the Dakota Territory. See Theodore Roosevelt National Park, “Theodore Roosevelt the Rancher,” National Park Service.

[33] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8. Contemplation (theoria) is the highest activity, which is why a porch, a book, and an unhurried hour are not laziness in the Aristotelian sense. They can be the peak of a human life if the rest of the life has been ordered toward virtue.

[34] Charity that preserves agency predates the welfare state. The Christian distinction between helping a neighbor and creating a client runs from the Pauline collections for the poor to later debates inside the Church of England itself.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary Texts

Adams, John. Thoughts on Government. 1776.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.

Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.

The Bible. Especially Judges; 1 Samuel 8; and the Pauline language of liberty and responsibility.

Cicero. De Officiis et De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Declaration of Independence. 1776. Drafts and final text in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, and at Founders Online.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letters to John Adams, January 21, 1812, and June 10, 1815. Founders Online, National Archives.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Book II, chapter 21.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689. Second Treatise.

Madison, James. The Federalist No. 51. 1788.

Mason, George. Virginia Declaration of Rights. June 12, 1776.

Plato. Republic. Especially Books IV–VII on the guardians and the philosopher-king.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Treatises on happiness, law, and virtue.

The Founding and the Phrase

Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright, 2014.

Ellis, Joseph J., ed. What Did the Declaration Declare? Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. “The Lost Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness.’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 3 (1964): 325–327.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “Pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. Monticello.org.

Yarbrough, Jean M. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998.

Christianity, Greece, and Transmission

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1946–1950.

Johnson, Paul. A History of Christianity. New York: Atheneum, 1976.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Viking, 2010.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition. 5 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971–1989.

Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Awakening, Virtue, and the American Mind

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Coolidge, Calvin. Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

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

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Jefferson, Monticello, and the Wound in the House

Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Time. 6 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948–1981.

Tay, Endrina. “I cannot live without books.” Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries. Retirement Library Catalog. Monticello / Library of Congress.

Roosevelt, Work, and the Hard Reset

Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979.

Roosevelt, Theodore. Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. New York: Century, 1888.

National Park Service. “Theodore Roosevelt the Rancher.” Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Modern Arguments About Flourishing, Incentives, and the State

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. New York: Harper, 1946.

Murray, Charles. In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

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

Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge and Decisions. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Anointed. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Kraut, Richard. “Aristotle’s Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

—

Go somewhere and be happy. The pursuit is still legal.

In the age of disclosure, the politics of heaven will not be administered from a capital.

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

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

A Family Adventure at The Wilds: A Week of Travel That Reminds Us What Matters

Every once in a while, life hands you one of those small, perfect weeks with family — the kind that doesn’t need a grand destination or a complicated itinerary to feel meaningful. Recently, we packed up the RV and took a short family trip to The Wilds in central Ohio. It wasn’t far from home, and it wasn’t meant to be anything elaborate. But it turned into exactly the kind of experience that reminds you why family time matters and why stepping away from the noise is sometimes the best thing you can do.

My daughter put together a fantastic video from the trip, capturing the highlights in a way only she can. A few of my grandkids are featured in it, running around, laughing, exploring, and just being kids. Watching them in that setting—surrounded by open sky, quiet water, and the wide, rolling landscape—reminded me how grounding these moments can be. We spend so much of our lives dealing with big issues, heavy conversations, and responsibilities that stack up day after day. But weeks like this show the other side of life, the part that keeps you centered.

If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time, you know I spend a lot of time talking about sovereignty, community, history, politics, and the deeper questions that shape our world. Those topics matter, and they deserve the attention we give them. But it’s just as important to share the lighter moments—the real life that happens between all the big ideas. This trip was a perfect example of that balance. It wasn’t a grand expedition; it was simply a family outing, close to home, filled with the kind of memories that last longer than most of the headlines we chase. As I have said, I have spent most of 2026 on the road like this. Sometimes it’s just my wife and I. Sometimes, like this, it’s family, some of our family. Sometimes it’s all my family. I like RV travel because it lets me take my office with me. I write books, I do consulting, and I can do all that work from anywhere in the world with a TEAMS call. I never know where I’m going to be, so that’s why I do all the videos these days from the kitchen in my RV. It has good power and a comfortable, studio-like setting. Sometimes the internet isn’t great at our campgrounds, but that can be solved with Starlink, which I’ll likely do next year.

The World of Everywhere and Anything

RV camping has a way of slowing everything down. There’s something about being on the road, even for a short distance, that shifts your mindset. You’re not rushing. You’re not checking your phone every five minutes. You’re not thinking about the next meeting or the next project. You’re just present. The video my daughter made captures that feeling beautifully — the simplicity, the quiet, the laughter, the sense of being together without distraction. It’s a glimpse into how we travel, unwind, and stay connected as a family.

The Wilds itself is a unique place. Wide open spaces, wildlife roaming in the distance, and a sense of calm that settles in as soon as you arrive. It’s the kind of environment that encourages reflection without forcing it. You breathe a little deeper. You listen a little more. You notice things you might overlook in the rush of everyday life. And when your kids and grandkids surround you, those moments become even more meaningful.

It was a short trip, but it was packed with fun and full of the kind of small joys that make life feel full. These are the moments that remind us that life isn’t just about the big battles or the big ideas — it’s also about the quiet weekends, the shared meals, the kids running around, and the chance to breathe for a minute. It’s about remembering that the world is bigger than our worries and that the people closest to us are the ones who make the journey worthwhile.

So I’m sharing this little slice of our life not because it’s dramatic or extraordinary, but because it’s real. It’s honest. It’s the kind of thing we all need more of. And I think you’ll enjoy seeing that side of our world — the family side, the simple side, the part that keeps everything else in perspective.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

Who Was Jeanne de Belleville?

A Poitevin heiress, not a tavern myth

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

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

The Clisson marriage was power with affection inside it.

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

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

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

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

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

The Breton War of Succession

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

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

The Trap of 1343: Tournament, Prison, Scaffold

A truce, a feast, and a lie

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

The execution of Olivier IV de Clisson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selling a Life to Buy a War

The conversion of an estate into a fleet

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

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

Black hulls and blood-red sails

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

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

Calculated grief, not a tantrum

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

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

Psychological Warfare in the English Channel

Why leave witnesses?

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

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

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

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

Crécy, 1346: When Vengeance Became Strategy

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

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

Utility does not cancel the oath. It funds it.

Thirteen Years: The Inner Weather of a Long Revenge

What does a decade of this do to a mind?

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

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

She was not a pirate in the cheap sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shakespearean Afterlife of the Family

Olivier V, the Butcher, Constable of France

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

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

Pirate, Privateer, and the Henry Morgan Problem

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

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

Legend, Record, and What We Can Actually Swear To

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

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

• A papal paper trail on the annulled second marriage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chivalry, Christianity, and the Argument I Will Not Drop

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

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

Revenge as a moral order

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

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

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

A good wife, in a sense the age still understood

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

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

Why Has No One Made the Movie?

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

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

What Jeanne de Belleville Still Teaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary and near-contemporary sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book that started this essay

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

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

Modern biographies and studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brittany, succession, and the Montfort war

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

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

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

Piracy, privateering, and the Channel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women, lordship, and violence

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

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

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

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

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

Accessible essays and public history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality.

Kelsen, Hans. General Theory of Law and State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Black Stone, the Monolith, and Consciousness Transfer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography for Further Reading

• Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943.

• Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.

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

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

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

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

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

• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

The Bible in the Green Bag

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

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

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

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

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

Museum of the Bible and a Pin from Qumran Country

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

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

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

What People Thought They Were Looking At

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

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

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

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

A New Market, an Old Warning About Wealth

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

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

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

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

Why Edwards, and Why Now

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

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

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

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

What I Am Building Next

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography for Further Reading

Study Bibles and Editions

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

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

ESV Study Bible. Crossway, 2008.

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

NIV Archaeological Study Bible. Zondervan, 2005.

Holy Bible, New King James Version. Thomas Nelson.

Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway.

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

Jonathan Edwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qumran, Second Temple Judaism, and the Teacher of Righteousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biblical Archaeology and the Land

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scripture, Wealth, and the Conscience of a Working Life

Augustine. Confessions and City of God.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion.

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

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

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées.

Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”

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

Matthew 19:16–30.

1 Corinthians 6:19–20.

American Religion and the Public Order

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

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

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

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

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

Space, Industry, and the Instrument of Wealth

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

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

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

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

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

On Dress, Attention, and the Desk as a Signal

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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I. THE AGE OF DISCLOSURE AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN

II. FALSE COMPASSION IS NOT LOVE

III. WHY THE RATES ARE NOT RANDOM

IV. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SURRENDER WHAT YOU LOVE

V. THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE AND THE POWER OF BEING UNASHAMED

That is the model.

VI. KEN HAM, BILL NYE, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE AND SECONDARY

VII. JD VANCE, BUTLER COUNTY, AND WHY SCRIPTURE AT A RALLY IS NOT A GIMMICK

IX. DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RAPTURE WHILE EVIL DOES THE WORK

X. FLEA-MARKET CHRISTIANITY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECORATION AND BACKBONE

XIV. WHAT I WANT FROM LEADERS — AND WHAT I WILL NOT PRETEND

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The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and Why I Opened It

That is why I started asking him questions.

God Raised Adversaries Against Solomon on Purpose

Why a Thousand Years of Peace Would Not Make Us Heroes

That is the comparison I wanted on the table.

I think that question is the one America is failing in public.

Psalm 82 Is a Courtroom, Not a Plea for Help

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Still Fits

Free Will, Desire, and the Fire

Comfort is the more dangerous drug. Suffering is the megaphone.

The Holy Ghost Is Not the Force and Not an Alien

How Jonathan Edwards Died, and What He Thought Death Was

I would rather have that honesty than a counterfeit ghost.

What Hits Hardest in 2026

Righteousness as a Weapon, Not a Brand

Footnotes

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I have watched this trick before. When the product is bad, change the channel.

She Is Preaching the Loser Mentality. That Is Why She Is Yelling.

The 2016 Rhyme They Think We Forgot

I Support Vivek. I Will Miss One Fundraiser. That Is Not a Taper.

What Ohio Votes for When the Noise Stops

Footnotes

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Mike Johnson Is Talking Like a Man Preparing the Concession Speech

Remember the Stretch Between the Election and January 20

Elon Does Not Need to Pray on Camera. He Needs to Be in the Room.

Fox Already Has Your People. Football Season Has Everybody Else.

The McDonald’s Test, or What DC Actually Sounds Like Before 10 a.m.

If You Cannot Unite Them on a Bill, Unite Them on a Book

A Quiet Hour at the Museum Before the Ropes Open

Do Not Play Not to Lose

The AI Debate Is a Strategy, Not a Concern

They Ran This Play on Nuclear. They Will Run It on Compute.

The Tight Races Are Tight for a Reason

Two Months. Not a Miracle. A Decision.

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What Did the Founders Mean by the Pursuit of Happiness?

What Is Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, and Why Is It Not a PlayStation?

Two features of that definition wreck most modern politics.

Plato vs. Aristotle: Philosopher Kings, Jedi Knights, and Limited Government

How Greek Philosophy Reached the Declaration of Independence

Jonathan Edwards and the Christian Platform Beneath American Liberty

Why Jefferson Wrote Happiness Instead of Property

What Is the Government’s Role in Happiness?

Can Government Distribute Happiness by Taxing Success?

Why Minimum Wage Politics Often Create Dependence Instead of Dignity

Jefferson’s Porch, Roosevelt’s Badlands, and My Own Monticello

Homelessness, Bad Decisions, and the Difference Between Charity and Clientage

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The World of Everywhere and Anything

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Who Was Jeanne de Belleville?

The Clisson marriage was power with affection inside it.

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

The Breton War of Succession

The Trap of 1343: Tournament, Prison, Scaffold

The execution of Olivier IV de Clisson

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

Selling a Life to Buy a War

Black hulls and blood-red sails

Calculated grief, not a tantrum

Psychological Warfare in the English Channel

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

Crécy, 1346: When Vengeance Became Strategy

What does a decade of this do to a mind?

She was not a pirate in the cheap sense.