Nate Silver’s latest FLIPR model for the November 2026 midterms has Democrats at roughly 75 percent to take the Senate and 93 percent to take the House. Those numbers treat the election as a standard second-year reaction against the party holding the White House. I do not see it that way. Silver has been wrong before when the underlying conditions changed. The conditions have changed again. Trump did not create the political order we are living in. A large group of Americans who rejected the prior direction created the opening that Trump filled. That group is still here, and the administrative class clustered around Tysons Corner does not appear to understand why.
The Model Assumes the Old Midterm Pattern Still Holds
Silver’s framework, like most quantitative election models, leans on historical patterns. The president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms. Voters register dissatisfaction with the status quo. Generic-ballot movement and polling in a handful of competitive states (Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and others) get translated into chamber-control probabilities. When the model shows Democrats leading by a few points in places Trump won comfortably in 2024, the simulation produces a blue wave.
I have watched enough of these cycles to know the pattern is not iron law. It assumes a normal presidency, normal opposition, and voters who treat the midterms as a routine check. Trump was not a normal candidate, and the coalition that put him in office was not reacting to ordinary policy drift. People watched the border, inflation, cultural institutions, and the administrative expansion and decided they wanted a different representative. Models that treat that choice as a temporary fever that cools after two years are modeling the wrong thing. They are modeling the expectation inside the permanent government that the fever will pass if they simply wait.
Watching the Permanent Government at the Tysons Corner Walmart
My wife and I have been to the Walmart in Tysons Corner enough times that we have a preferred parking level in the garage. The store sits inside a dense cluster of high-rises roughly 15–16 miles west of downtown Washington, near Langley and the concentration of defense contractors and intelligence-community support firms that define Fairfax County. It is not the freestanding big-box with the wide parking lot that most people picture when they hear “Walmart.” It is compressed vertically, stacked into the same footprint as the surrounding office and residential towers. The people shopping there are not primarily the ones who drive in from the farther suburbs for bulk groceries. A large share live and work inside the federal-contractor economy that expanded after 9/11 and never really contracted.
I have written a chapter about this place in The Politics of Heaven. The observation is not complicated. You watch people move through the freezer section for chicken nuggets and the wine aisle with the same expression I have seen in other high-density administrative centers. They are performing the motions of ordinary life while remaining largely insulated from the consequences that ordinary voters experience. Pensions are secure. Housing is expensive but stable for those inside the system. The work is process-oriented rather than output-oriented. When you talk to them, the default expectation is that presidents come and go, but the block of offices, contracts, and clearances remains. They will wait. They have waited before.
That expectation is visible in the way the midterm forecasts are discussed inside the same circle. Trump’s approval, gas prices, or a few state polls are treated as sufficient to restore the prior equilibrium. The deeper reason voters chose him—the desire for someone who would actually represent the people who do not live inside that equilibrium—is treated as noise. Silver’s probabilities reflect the same assumption at scale. The model does not need to assume conspiracy. It only needs to assume that the historical midterm reaction will reassert itself because that is what the people who live near the model’s data sources expect to happen.
Trump Was the Hand That Went Up, Not the Creator of the Demand
I have been around the Trump issue since the Tea Party period. The demand existed before he filled it. People wanted a representative who would treat the border as a border, treat the administrative state as something that could be constrained, and reject the idea that the United States should converge toward the European or coastal-institutional model. When someone raised a hand and said he would do the job, enough of them voted for him twice. The same people are still there. Some will stay home if the candidate is weak. Many more will show up if they believe the alternative is a return to the prior arrangement.
That is why I do not treat the current Senate and House probabilities as predictive. They rest on the idea that voters will punish the president’s party for the ordinary reasons and then accept whatever the permanent government produces afterward. The people I talk to outside the Tysons corridor do not describe their choice that way. They describe it as a decision not to accept managed decline, open-ended migration without assimilation, or the expansion of process jobs at the expense of productive ones. Those preferences do not expire on a fixed calendar. They persist until the underlying conditions change or until voters decide the representative they chose is no longer doing the job.
Steve Bannon and others have floated the third-term idea. That is a separate legal and political question. The more immediate point is that the coalition does not disappear when one person leaves the stage. The administrative class that believes it can simply outlast the current presidency and restore the previous operating rules is counting on a reversion that the voters who created the opening have not signaled they want. Fairfax County mansions and secure pensions are real. They are not evidence that the rest of the country has decided to fund them indefinitely under the old terms.
What the Numbers Are Actually Measuring
Silver’s model is transparent about its inputs: polls, fundamentals, historical midterm patterns, and expert ratings. Those inputs are useful when the electorate is behaving within historical ranges. They become less useful when a significant share of the electorate has already rejected the range. The 75 percent and 93 percent figures measure the current state of polling and the weight the model assigns to past midterm reactions. They do not measure whether the people who voted for enforcement, energy production, and institutional constraint have changed their minds. From what I see, they have not.
We will know more on election night. Models can be updated. Voters can be wrong about the consequences of their choices. What I do not expect is a simple return to the equilibrium that the people shopping at the Tysons Corner Walmart treat as normal. That equilibrium required the rest of the country to keep accepting arrangements they had already rejected. Trump was the available instrument. He was not the source of the rejection. Treating the midterms as the moment when the instrument is discarded and the prior arrangement resumes is the hopeful reading inside one corridor of the administrative state. It is not the reading I take from the voters who put the instrument in place.
Footnotes
1. Contemporary reporting in early-to-mid October 2026 placed Nate Silver’s FLIPR model at approximately 75 percent for Democratic Senate control and 93 percent for House control, consistent with the figures discussed here. The model incorporates polling averages, historical midterm patterns, and other fundamentals.
2. Tysons Corner (Fairfax County, Virginia) sits adjacent to major defense-contractor concentrations and roughly a short drive from CIA headquarters in Langley. The multi-level Walmart is a documented feature of the dense, high-rise development that replaced earlier suburban patterns in the area.
3. Post-9/11 defense and intelligence contracting expanded the economic footprint of Northern Virginia. Accounts of the region describe the concentration of firms, clearances, and related employment that remains visible in the local commercial landscape.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin / FLIPR methodology posts and midterm forecast updates (2026), including discussions of historical midterm waves and polling inputs.
• Paul E. Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005 (history of the defense-contractor and technology corridor).
• Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire and related reporting on the privatization of intelligence and defense functions in the Washington region.
• Victor Davis Hanson, essays on administrative growth, cultural divergence between coastal/institutional centers and the broader electorate, and the persistence of voter preferences on borders and institutions.
• Contemporary coverage of 2026 generic-ballot movement and competitive Senate races (Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and others) from multiple polling aggregators.
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (on the distinction between productive enterprise and politically protected process).
• Local and regional reporting on Fairfax County demographics, federal contracting
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
It was good to see Trump have an event for Jon Husted at Vandalia, Ohio. More than ever, watching that event convinced me that Senator Jon Husted is the right person for Ohio. He’s a solid, practical guy who understands the state. I haven’t spent much time publicly defending him this cycle because Sherrod Brown’s return has been such a predictable mess, but I don’t think Brown has a real chance. Husted has been positioned to win this all along.
The Vandalia Rally and Why Husted Matters
Seeing Husted on stage in Vandalia with the crowd was good. Trump’s people will show up and vote; this isn’t a race to take for granted, but I expect Husted to win by four or five points once the numbers settle. Ohio isn’t as close as some national media outlets want it to be, and one of the seats Democrats are counting on flipping won’t go their way.
Husted is a top-tier senator for the job. He has been a proud business-oriented leader for years. When critics knock him on the FirstEnergy / House Bill 6 situation, the corruption accusations miss the point. That fight was about regulatory compliance, keeping nuclear capacity online, and listening to major employers in the state that bad policy was squeezing. I don’t blame him for listening to companies that employ many Ohioans. If you’re a senator or governor, part of the job is making yourself available to the people who keep the lights on and the payrolls running.
COVID Calls, Amusement Parks, and Listening to Employers
I was on several conference calls with Husted and other state officials during the COVID period. Senators, state representatives, and businesspeople tried to figure out how to keep Ohio from being locked down into oblivion. Shutdown pressure was intense, and the Republican response often fell between public-health theater and the reality of what a prolonged closure would do to the economy.
Amusement parks were a clear example. Kings Island and others were operating under rules that made little sense—social distancing on rides, capacity limits that ignored how the industry actually works, and the threat of penalties for trying to open. Those places are major employers and economic drivers. Husted and others in the administration had to navigate that mess while the parks were being squeezed. A senator or governor should be available when big employers in the state have problems. Husted has been willing to do that. I’ve seen it firsthand.
Energy policy is the same story. Nuclear, coal, and fossil fuels still run the grid. When policy turns those assets into liabilities, companies push back. Listening to them is not corruption; it’s basic competence. Good governance turns a liability into a manageable asset when the alternative is higher rates and less reliability.
A Buccaneers Fan’s Opinion About Jon Gruden’s Support of Jon Husted, a Former Teammate
I’m a Buccaneers fan, so the other Jon on that stage was a bonus. Jon Gruden won a Super Bowl with a strong defense and a quarterback who was good enough to win but not a superstar. That 2002 team was special. I’ve never gotten over how good that unit was. Gruden got knocked out of the coaching ranks over the email scandal involving comments about cheerleaders and other material that got leaked. It was a stupid episode that cost him the Raiders job and led to his removal from the Buccaneers Ring of Honor for a while.
The organization has brought him back in some capacity—broadcast work with Ronde Barber and a restored place in the franchise’s history. I’m happy about that. He flew from the Dayton area back to Tampa after the event to handle his obligations there. It was good to see him on stage talking about Husted and the season. Gruden is a leader type; he knows how to talk to people and get them moving. The Bucs are having a rough year right now, and much of that traces back to chemistry issues around Baker Mayfield. Mayfield is not Tom Brady. Brady knew how to run a locker room and get everyone pulling in the same direction. When a quarterback starts complaining about money and the team feels like he’s putting himself first, the chemistry breaks. The coaching staff has to deal with it, and the results show. Mayfield got hurt recently and wasn’t available for this week’s game, which only makes the situation harder.
The Senate Race and the Path Forward
Brown’s campaign is a disaster because it relies on the same tired playbook that lost him the seat two years ago. Husted has the record of actually governing in Ohio—secretary of state, lieutenant governor, and now senator—and the connections to the state’s employers. The people who showed up in Vandalia understand that. Trump’s voters are not staying home. The margin will not be razor-thin.
I’m proud of the affiliation. Watching Husted on stage with that crowd, and seeing Gruden there as well, was a good day. These are the kinds of practical leaders who keep a state functional instead of turning every issue into a purity test. And they have been through the pressure cooker, so we know what to expect. FirstEnergy, or any involvement in it, is the job of someone representing the governor’s office and a basic obligation. And the failures at FirstEnergy were typical leftist terrorism: destroy companies with policy. Democrats have not been in power, so they have no track record to criticize. Only that Sharrod Brown has been in government for many years and has advanced socialist causes during all those terms. It should be noted that when he was running against Bernie Moreno, the polling was tracking much like it is in this 2026 race. So that should tell you everything.
Footnotes
1. Husted was appointed to the Senate in January 2025 to fill the vacancy created by JD Vance’s elevation to vice president and is running in the 2026 special election against Sherrod Brown.
2. Brown lost his previous seat to Bernie Moreno in 2024.
3. House Bill 6 provided subsidies for nuclear and certain coal plants; FirstEnergy paid substantial penalties in related settlements, but Husted has not been charged with wrongdoing.
4. Gruden coached the Buccaneers to Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003 with a defense-led roster.
5. Buccaneers 2026 record and Mayfield’s thumb injury status as of mid-October.
6. Gruden and Husted were University of Dayton teammates in 1985; Gruden appeared at the October 3, 2026 Vandalia rally.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Ballotpedia and official campaign materials on the 2026 Ohio Senate special election (Husted vs. Brown).
• Reporting on the FirstEnergy / HB 6 matter from the Cincinnati Enquirer, Associated Press, and FactCheck.org summaries of Husted’s role and testimony.
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers historical accounts of the 2002 Super Bowl team and Gruden’s tenure (2002–2008).
• Contemporary coverage of the October 3, 2026 Vandalia rally (local Dayton outlets and national wires).
• Buccaneers 2026 season reports on quarterback play, coaching, and roster decisions.
• Broader context on Ohio energy policy and nuclear capacity from state utility commission records and utility industry analyses.
This is the kind of grounded, practical leadership Ohio needs.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I watched the verdict come in and felt the same satisfaction I get when a jury cuts through lawyer fog in under half an hour. Donald “D.J.” Byrnes, the progressive Substack writer who brands himself The Rooster, was found guilty on October 9, 2026, of telecommunications harassment, a first-degree misdemeanor, for texting Ohio Sen. Jerry Cirino an explicit, digitally altered image of Shrek holding his genitals (described in the arrest affidavit as fully nude with an exposed and erect humanlike penis engaged in masturbation) along with taunting messages after Cirino dropped out of the Senate president race.
The jury in Willoughby Municipal Court deliberated less than 30 minutes. Visiting Judge Michael Cicconetti fined him $200 plus court costs, gave no jail time, and verbally instructed him not to contact Cirino, warning that further contact would have consequences. Byrnes has 30 days to appeal. His lawyers already plan to argue the statute is overbroad and sweeps in protected political speech.
I have watched him operate at the Statehouse. This outcome tracks what I have seen.
What Actually Happened
On May 6, 2026, after Cirino withdrew from the contest to lead the Ohio Senate, Byrnes sent the Shrek image and texts that included “Good to see you finally made your humiliation public, Young Mussolini! THE PATRIOTS CAUCUS sends its regards!!!!!!!!!!” Cirino replied that he didn’t know who it was but was sure the sender was a moron. Cirino then contacted Kirtland police. Byrnes was arrested June 1 at the Ohio Statehouse by the Highway Patrol and spent roughly 23 hours in jail before release.
Prosecutors argued the unsolicited explicit image was sent with the purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse under Ohio Revised Code § 2917.21. That is the heart of the statute: a telecommunication made knowingly with that purpose. The defense claimed political commentary and free speech—satire of a public official after Cirino had “exposed himself” politically by dropping out. The judge barred full First Amendment jury instructions, and the panel rejected the idea that this was protected political speech rather than harassment. Cirino later said it was not a free speech issue; it was a harassment statute he believed Byrnes violated.
I saw the free-speech defense collapse for the reason it always does in these cases when the conduct is aimed at one person and is unwanted and pornographic. Byrnes’ politics were never the point. Repeated, targeted, intimidating contact was.
The Haunted House Cut Both Ways
Byrnes treats free speech like a haunted house. He walks in knowing the monsters aren’t allowed to touch him, then slaps them upside the head, corners them, and pushes them, because the rules protect his speech while limiting their response. That is not how the world works. Free speech is not a shield for slapping people and then hiding behind the First Amendment when they use the law.
I have watched him at the Statehouse in shorts and a hoodie, treating the rotunda like a street corner. The place of law deserves a coat, jacket, and tie whether you like the people running it or not. He corners politicians outside bathrooms, pins them down, and pushes. Multiple representatives have described the same pattern to me. He tries to intimidate, then claims the high ground of free speech when they push back. The jury saw the Shrek text the same way: an intimidating act, not commentary. Bugs Bunny or Road Runner would have been the same if the intent was harassment. He wanted the fight more than the outcome.
His own audience of roughly 100,000 social followers and 15,000 Substack subscribers documents everything. That visibility made the single text hard to spin as pure protected speech once it landed in front of ordinary people. Lawyers can throw arguments at a wall. Regular people sat down for half an hour and said they knew what this was. I trust that jury more than the politicians or the lawyers who tried to frame it as edgy political speech.
Who He Is and Who Follows Him
I view Byrnes as a radical leftist operating with Marxist instincts aimed at undermining the Ohio legislature. His following looks like the street crowd that smokes a lot of dope and treats politics as performance. You have to be under some influence to consider voting for Amy Acton; his audience is in a different political lane from mine, but the disrespect is the same. He has a history of confrontational antics, including pranks and coverage aimed at figures like Vivek Ramaswamy. That pattern of planting innuendo and disruption matches what I have seen.
I cover the Statehouse too. The difference is method. I confront people with facts and truth they cannot easily defend. I do not send pornographic images of cartoon characters to a sitting senator to disrupt him as a person. Political commentary is one thing. Targeted harassment dressed up as free speech is another. The statute treats it that way, and the jury agreed.
What Senators and Politicians Should Do Now
This case is not only about free speech. It is about conduct and consequences. The $200 fine is almost incidental. The real damage is the residual trust, or benefit of the doubt, anyone still extends to him. He showed himself with Cirino. He has shown the same pattern elsewhere. Senators and staff do not have to cooperate with him.
They can completely ostracize him. Do not speak to him on the side. Do not give him interviews, access, or the polite benefit of the doubt that he has abused. He can still walk the Statehouse in his hoodie and shorts and write his articles. No one can stop that. But they don’t have to make his job easy by staying compliant with his intimidation. The best message is isolation: let him operate on his own little island with the audience that already agrees with him.
That is the practical, proactive step this guilty verdict supports. It erodes the idea that everyone has to tolerate his style as edgy commentary. Once the jury called the conduct harassment, the institutional response should match. Cut off the cooperation. Do not feed the performance. His audience will try to turn the appeal into martyrdom for the hippie-left crowd that protests Columbus Day and treats every conviction as proof the system is illegitimate. A long legal slug gets boring fast for that crowd. Either way, the Statehouse does not have to play along.
Where It Goes From Here
Byrnes will appeal. His lawyers will argue the statute is overbroad and that the judge improperly limited the free-speech defense, citing cases on political satire of public officials. If they win, the conviction is tossed. If they lose, it stands, and the fine is paid. The no-contact warning remains a practical barrier either way. He has already confirmed the appeal path.
I am glad the jury found him guilty. He is guilty of the conduct charged. If you do not want the trouble, do not send pictures of Shrek’s genitals to important politicians to harass them into voting or reacting the way you want. That is not political speech. It is an act. The haunted house cuts both ways, and this time the law hit back. The system worked the way it is supposed to: he used the rules, the rules used him, and ordinary people settled it in half an hour.
Politicians who have dealt with him should now treat the verdict as permission to stop cooperating. Isolation is the real sanction that fits the pattern I have watched for years. He can keep writing. They do not have to keep making it easy for him.
Footnotes
1. Multiple reports (Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio Capital Journal, Signal Ohio, The Verge) confirm the October 9, 2026 guilty verdict, <30-minute deliberation, $200 fine, and no jail. Image described as explicit/nude Shrek holding genitals or masturbating.
2. Arrest details from Columbus Dispatch coverage of the June 1 Statehouse arrest and ~23 hours in custody.
3. Ohio Revised Code § 2917.21 defines telecommunications harassment to include communications made with the purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse.
4. Axios and other coverage note that the judge limited the First Amendment defense and that Byrnes plans to appeal within 30 days.
5. Cirino’s post-verdict statements distinguish the case as harassment, not free speech.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Young people keep asking me what the 1980s were like. I work with a lot of them—teens, early twenties—and the question comes up often enough that my answer has become almost automatic. We had Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films. We had Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies and Conan. Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. Clint Eastwood. Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Strong, competent, decisive men who handled problems with their hands and their will. They were not perfect. They were not soft. For a while, they were the dominant image of what a man could be when the situation required it.
That image has been replaced. The replacement did not arrive by accident.
The Question Waller Asked
One of my favorite books has always been The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. I liked most of what he wrote. The novel was a bestseller aimed largely at middle-aged women, and it worked for reasons that went beyond the romance between Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid. Buried in the story is a sharper observation about how societies decide what is fashionable, what is respectable, and what is forbidden to say. Who decides that a rock band dyes their hair purple? Who decides that certain observations about human nature become unspeakable? Waller understood that these decisions are not purely democratic or purely market-driven. They emerge from deeper pressures—psychological, commercial, and, I would argue, spiritual.
The book captured something real about the human condition across time. People want safety. They want to belong. They want the comfort of shared opinion. The market and the culture give them that comfort until something stronger interrupts it. The question of who sets the terms of that comfort is the same question that runs through the story of the Fall.
What Thirty-Eight Years and Raising Daughters Taught Me
I have been married thirty-eight years. I have raised daughters and now have granddaughters. I have known a great many women over that span of time. The pattern I have observed isn’t flattering to anyone, and it isn’t politically acceptable. Women, on average, appear more readily influenced by appeals to safety and security than men. This is not a moral judgment. It is an observation about wiring. From early in puberty, many women learn that sexual interest can be traded for protection, status, resources, and social approval. The transaction is ancient. It is also effective until the physical appeal that underwrites it declines. After that point, the strategy that once worked becomes a source of helplessness, because the adult life has been organized around it.
This makes women, again on average, useful gateways for influences that want to reshape men. If you can move the women, a large share of the men will follow—not because the men have been logically persuaded, but because they want access to the woman. I have watched this in progressive circles for decades. Plenty of young men join causes they do not particularly believe in because the events draw women. They are not there for the ideology. They are there for the possibility of contact. The ideology is the price of admission.
The Concert, the Horror Film, and the Old Pattern
At Mötley Crüe shows years ago, women in the crowd would remove their panties and throw them on stage. That is not an isolated curiosity. It fits a longer pattern of appeasement and display that appears in both rock culture and horror. Jason Voorhees, the character I have portrayed in seasonal work, is pure threat, I will have a lot more to say on this in November. The response to pure threat is often some form of offering or submission. The same impulse shows up in older religious and cultic settings where women were used as the point of contact with the powerful or the dangerous. The offer of sex, or the display of sexual availability, functions as a bid for safety or favor. The behavior is not new. Only the stage lighting has changed.
Eve, Not Adam
The biblical account in Genesis is blunt. The serpent addresses the woman. She takes the fruit. She gives it to the man. The man follows. The text does not present this as a one-time historical accident. It presents a recurring pattern of how disruption enters the created order. Women, oriented toward safety and the continuity of the household, are approached with promises that the existing order is inadequate or oppressive. Men, oriented toward the woman, follow. The Book of Job shows the same adversary, permitted to test and disrupt. The pattern is not confined to one chapter.
I have said for years that the modern women’s movement, in its more radical forms, continued that pattern. It redefined the household as a site of oppression, encouraged women to treat marriage and motherhood as optional or secondary, and treated male strength as suspect. The result was not liberation in the abstract. It weakened the family unit that had previously limited the reach of outside influence. Families that stay intact are harder to redirect. Families that fracture become more dependent on external authorities—cultural, institutional, or ideological.
Sex as the Lever
Most men will adjust their public opinions if the adjustment improves their chances with a particular woman. They will listen to complaints about “toxic masculinity” even when their private experience contradicts the complaint. They will adopt the language of the moment because the alternative is exclusion from the bed or from the social circle that contains the women they want. This is not sophisticated ideology. It is biology overriding calculation. The same woman who publicly rejects strong, competent men will, in private, often respond to the man who smells like work, carries tools, and can keep the house functioning. The plumber or contractor who shows up competent and unapologetic isn’t a feminist ideal. For many women, he is a practical, physical preference. The public statement and the private response are not the same.
Young women I encounter—teens through their thirties—have absorbed the message that masculine competence is a problem. They describe it as toxic. They prefer the softer presentation. The boys around them adapt. They become less assertive, less willing to lead, more willing to defer. The adaptation is rational in the short term if the goal is female approval. It is destructive if the goal is a culture that can defend itself or raise the next generation without constant external management.
Who Sets the Fashion
Waller’s question remains useful. Who decided that strong men became the problem? The decision did not emerge from a careful study of outcomes. It emerged from institutions and cultural producers that treat the existing order as the obstacle. Alphabet and its subsidiaries are not neutral platforms. They are progressive enterprises with a consistent preference for rewriting sex roles, family structure, and the authority of traditional sources. The preference is not hidden. It shows up in hiring, content moderation, and the stories that get amplified. The effect is to make the older masculine ideal unfashionable and the newer, more compliant ideal mandatory.
The mechanism is efficient. It influences women through appeals to safety, status, and belonging. The men follow for access. The pattern spreads without requiring every participant to understand the larger direction. Most of the young women repeating the language about toxic masculinity do not experience themselves as agents of a larger project. They experience themselves as seeking approval and avoiding risk. The larger project does not require their conscious agreement.
The Pattern Continues
The same sequence appears across the biblical record and across later history. An appeal is made to the woman. The woman moves. The man follows. The household weakens. External authority expands. The language changes—safety, equality, progress—but the sequence is recognizable. Non-human intelligence, operating through human institutions and desires, does not need to invent new tools when the old ones still function. Sex remains a reliable lever. The desire for security remains a reliable entry point. Men remain willing to trade long-term strength for short-term access.
Young people asking about the 1980s are asking, without quite knowing it, why the men of those films are no longer the model. The answer is not that those men failed. The answer is that a sustained effort has been made to make their qualities unfashionable. The effort works because it routes through women and because men will adjust to keep the women. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is an observable pattern, recorded early and repeated often.
The question Waller raised still stands. Who decides these things? Look at who benefits when strong men are redefined as the problem and compliant men are redefined as the solution. The pattern is old. The stage is new. The result is the same.
Footnotes
1. Genesis 3:1–6 records the serpent’s approach to the woman, her decision, and the man’s subsequent participation. The sequence is presented without apology or modern reframing.
2. Job 1–2 shows the adversary operating with limited permission to disrupt a household and test loyalty. The text treats the activity as ongoing rather than resolved.
3. Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County (1992). The novel’s commercial success among women did not prevent it from containing sharper observations about safety, conformity, and the costs of certain choices. Waller explored related themes in other works, including Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend.
4. The public rejection of “toxic masculinity” alongside private preferences for competent, physically capable men is a recurring observation in both evolutionary psychology literature and ordinary experience. See, for example, the documented sex differences in mate preferences for resources and protection on one side and youth and fertility on the other.
5. Cultural producers and technology platforms have documented preferences in content and personnel. These preferences are not secret; they are visible in public statements, hiring patterns, and amplification choices.
6. The seasonal portrayal of Jason Voorhees is offered only as a cultural reference point for threat and response, not as a literal religious claim.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Waller, Robert James. The Bridges of Madison County. Warner Books, 1992.
• Waller, Robert James. Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend. Warner Books, 1993.
• The Book of Genesis, especially chapters 2–3.
• The Book of Job.
• Buss, David M. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Basic Books, revised edition.
• Sommers, Christina Hoff. Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. Simon & Schuster, 1994.
• Goldberg, Steven. The Inevitability of Patriarchy. William Morrow, 1973 (for an earlier, data-heavy treatment of sex differences in social organization).
• Farrell, Warren. The Myth of Male Power. Simon & Schuster, 1993.
• Critical treatments of second- and third-wave feminism that examine outcomes for family structure and male socialization.
• Works on spiritual conflict and non-human agency that treat the biblical record as a chronicle of recurring patterns rather than isolated ancient events. (Readers interested in the longer argument developed across my own writing will find related material in The Politics of Heaven.)
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Three weeks ago, on September 21, I stood in a room at Miami University with people who matter in Ohio manufacturing, aerospace, and the emerging unmanned systems business. We were talking about the Volynt Vyper—the hybrid unmanned eVTOL some of us have been calling the Viper—and why it should be built and staged right here in Ohio for exactly the kind of problem that just hit the Florida Panhandle.
I said we were in hurricane season. I said the real issue after these storms is rarely that the buildings fall down. Category 2 storms like the one that just made landfall near Destin do not usually level towns. The buildings stay up. What fails is the power. Nursing homes, dialysis clinics, and people on oxygen concentrators cannot wait three or four days while line crews clear trees and string new wire. I said the Vyper could deliver power into those areas the first night. The market is wide open. Nobody else is flying a hybrid platform that can land and put usable AC power on the ground where it is needed.
Hurricane Isaias made landfall Friday night near Destin as a Category 2 with sustained winds around 105 mph and gusts over 110–116 mph in places. By early Saturday the statewide Florida outage count was near 448,000 customer accounts according to Governor DeSantis, part of a broader regional peak that approached 900,000 across Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. As of Sunday afternoon, hundreds of thousands were still without power, concentrated in Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and neighboring counties. Florida Power & Light has said it expects to restore 95 percent of customers who can safely accept power by the end of the day Monday. That is the current system working as well as it can: more than 16,000 linemen and restoration personnel from dozens of states, staged in advance, drones and helicopters already doing damage assessment, major roads and bridges reopened quickly. It is impressive work. It is also not fast enough for the people who need continuous power to stay alive.[1][2][3]
The Last 5 Percent Is the Real Problem
Most towns can absorb a Category 2. The buildings hold. The problem is the multi-day loss of electricity. Of the roughly 300,000 Florida customers still dark or only recently restored as of Sunday, a small but critical percentage—call it 5 percent or so—are elderly, medically dependent, or in facilities that cannot simply ride it out. Oxygen concentrators are the clearest example. A typical home stationary 5-liter unit draws roughly 300–400 watts continuous, with a startup surge that can approach 600 watts. Run that for 24 hours and you are looking at about 7–10 kWh just for one machine. Multiply that by the number of residents in a nursing home who need continuous oxygen, add medical equipment, emergency lighting, and the minimum HVAC required to keep temperatures safe, and the load climbs fast.[4]
A nursing home with half a dozen concentrators plus supporting medical gear and basic environmental control can easily sit in the several-kilowatt range for critical loads. Full building HVAC and lighting push it higher still—into the 10–11 kW territory for some facilities, which is roughly 260 kWh for a full day. That is not a job for a handful of truck batteries. It is a job for something that can get there when roads are blocked and then either deliver charged batteries or, better, land and generate power on site.
The federal Office of Inspector General looked at this problem earlier this year. Their audit of nursing homes participating in Medicare and Medicaid estimated that 73 percent of the roughly 15,000 facilities nationwide have inadequate or unreliable emergency power systems. The deficiencies include poor generator maintenance, incomplete circuit coverage, and equipment that is decades old. The report exists because people have died in past storms when power failed and backup systems did not hold. Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and Winter Storm Uri in Texas are the recent examples the OIG cited. Those numbers did not change because Isaias was “only” a Category 2.[5]
What the Vyper Actually Does
Volynt Aero, based in Oxford, Ohio, and spun out of the Miami University ecosystem, is building the Vyper as a hybrid-electric unmanned aircraft specifically for contested logistics, disaster response, and mobile power. Public specifications list a 500-pound cargo capacity and a range of about 150 nautical miles. The important part for this use case is that it is designed to land and provide 110, 240, or 480 VAC plug-in power on the ground for equipment or tactical microgrids. It runs on standard JP-8 or Jet A, so it does not require a high-voltage charging network to turn around quickly. It is remote-operated or autonomous. The mission set is dull, dirty, dangerous, and distant—exactly the description of a post-hurricane nursing home that still has no grid power on night one or night two.[6]
A realistic early mission profile is not trying to power an entire 120-bed facility at full load. It is the critical load: the concentrators, the medical equipment that must stay online, emergency lighting, and enough environmental control to keep residents safe overnight. One aircraft, one night, one nursing home is the starting point. Battery payload delivery is part of the picture as well. A 50 kg battery package is already meaningful for concentrators and medical gear. Multiple flights or a landed generator configuration scales from there. The point is not that the Vyper replaces the 16,000 linemen. It covers the gap between landfall and the moment the grid is back for the people who cannot wait.
Escambia County alone has on the order of 2,000 nursing home beds. Santa Rosa has well over 1,000. Okaloosa has several hundred more. Dozens of facilities sit inside the hardest-hit outage zones. Some of them have generators that work. Many do not have generators that cover the loads that actually matter once the power is out for more than a few hours. The nurses, the residents, and the families already know what those nights look like. The current restoration system prioritizes hospitals, 911 centers, and the greatest number of customers. It does not fly a power source to a specific nursing home at 2 a.m. on night one.
Ohio Manufacturing and the Open Market
The question after Isaias is not whether the power need exists. It is whether enough of these aircraft will be manufactured and staged before the next storm season. The market is empty. There is no competing hybrid unmanned platform already delivering AC power into disaster zones at this scale. It will take any competitor two or three years and substantial capital just to reach the starting line. That window belongs to whoever builds and fields the capability first.
Manufacturing in Ohio makes sense for the same reasons we discussed on September 21. The technical talent is here. The supply base for aerospace and unmanned systems is here. The university partnership is already in place. The product is dual-use: the same airframe that can support military contested logistics can support civilian disaster response. State emergency management agencies, utilities, and federal partners already buy staged assets. They stage 16,000 linemen and thousands of trucks. Adding a layer of prepositioned aircraft and trained operators is an incremental procurement item, not a new invention.
Governor DeSantis and Florida’s emergency management structure have shown they will stage resources aggressively. A memorandum of understanding with Florida utilities and the Division of Emergency Management, followed by a procurement vehicle, is the practical path. Preposition aircraft and batteries in Pensacola and Tallahassee before the next named storm. Train the operators. Write the contracts so the capability is already funded and sitting on the ramp when the cone of uncertainty locks in. The alternative is asking nursing homes and oxygen-dependent residents to hope their generators hold or that the last 5 percent gets restored before something goes wrong.
Next Year Is the Test
Hurricanes will hit the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic coast again. North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida will lose power for days. Category 2 storms will continue to leave the buildings standing and the lights out. The people who need oxygen, dialysis, or temperature control will still be waiting on the traditional restoration timeline.
The prototype is close enough that the conversation should no longer be about whether the idea works. It should be about how many airframes can be built, staged, and under contract before the 2027 season. One aircraft proving the concept on the first night after landfall is valuable. A fleet sized to the critical facilities in the hardest-hit counties is the actual requirement. The investment is not theoretical. It is lithium batteries, hybrid powerplants, airframes, operators, and the contracts that put them in position before the storm arrives instead of after the bodies have been counted.
I said on September 21 that this is what the Vyper is for. Isaias just spent the weekend making the case. The buildings held. The power did not. The people who cannot wait are still in the dark tonight. Next year we should not be asking the same question.
Notes
1. Landfall details, wind speeds, and early outage counts drawn from statements by Governor Ron DeSantis and contemporaneous reporting from the Associated Press, CBS, and Florida outlets, October 9–10, 2026.
2. Florida Power & Light restoration targets (95 percent of customers who can safely accept power by end of day Monday) and workforce size (more than 16,000 from 29 states) from FPL updates issued October 10–11, 2026.
3. Peak regional outages approaching 900,000 and continuing Sunday figures in the 300,000–400,000 range for Florida and Alabama from PowerOutage.us tracking and national reporting, October 10–11, 2026.
4. Oxygen concentrator power consumption ranges (approximately 300–600 W continuous for stationary home units, with higher startup surges) are standard published specifications for common 5-liter models such as Philips Respironics EverFlo and DeVilbiss units.
5. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, “Most Nursing Homes Throughout the United States Do Not Have Adequate or Reliable Emergency Power Systems,” report issued April 2026. Estimate of 73 percent based on sample of 100 facilities extrapolated to approximately 15,115 Medicare/Medicaid nursing homes.
6. Volynt Aero public descriptions of the Vyper: 500 lb cargo, ~150 NM range, hybrid JP-8/Jet A powerplant, capability to land and supply 110/240/480 VAC power. Company materials and capability statements, 2024–2026. Oxford, Ohio; Miami University spinout connection.
Bibliography / Further Reading
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General. Most Nursing Homes Throughout the United States Do Not Have Adequate or Reliable Emergency Power Systems. April 2026.
• Florida Power & Light newsroom updates on Hurricane Isaias restoration, October 10–11, 2026.
• National Hurricane Center advisories and post-landfall reporting on Hurricane Isaias, October 9–11, 2026.
• Volynt Aero company materials and capability statements describing the Vyper hybrid unmanned aircraft (payload, range, on-ground power generation).
• PowerOutage.us and Florida Public Service Commission outage tracking data for Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and surrounding counties, October 9–11, 2026.
• Published technical specifications for common stationary oxygen concentrators (Philips Respironics, DeVilbiss, and similar 5 L models) regarding continuous and startup wattage.
• Prior storm case studies referenced in the OIG report: Hurricane Ida (Louisiana nursing home deaths) and Winter Storm Uri (Texas nursing home power loss and evacuations).
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am not a fan of the surveillance state. I wrote a book against police abuse and against the abuse of authority, and I meant it. I do not like being commanded. I do not take orders well; I would have been a poor recruit for the military, and I do not like a government that knocks on the door at two in the morning and calls it a rescue. I am not big on tolls; I am not big on a camera sending me a bill for a bridge I did not mean to take, and I spent years on the radio, including with Scott Sloan on WLW, arguing against red-light cameras. Many people who usually agree with me in Butler County are against Flock cameras. Some of the township trustees I know are against them. I understand the objection. I do not share it anymore, and the reason is a month I spent as foreman of a Butler County grand jury.
That is a qualification, not a conversion. The tool is not the same thing as the hand on the tool.
Tolls, red lights, and a bill in the mail
The Louisville bridges cured me of any romance about a camera and a mailbox. RiverLink, on the Lincoln, the Kennedy, and the Lewis and Clark, has no cash lane. A camera reads the plate, and the bill finds the registered owner. Cross without a transponder, and you pay the higher pay-by-plate rate. As of July 2026, a two-axle car was $5.57 pay-by-plate against $2.79 with a transponder. [1] I got that bill once, four or five dollars in the version I remember, because I was in the wrong lane and would rather have used the other bridge. I did not like it. I had not agreed, in any way that felt like an agreement, to be invoiced by a lens.
I feel differently about the tolls on the drive to Washington and the drive toward Chicago. I pay them. Twenty-five or thirty dollars, sometimes more, and I do not hunt the free road to save three bucks. The toll road is usually the direct road, and getting on and off a free highway through a thicket of signals is its own tax. Florida still gets me. Leave Orlando toward the parks, and a couple of those plazas always find the rental. Toward Cape Canaveral it is milder. I am not a fan of any of it. A road built with taxes should not be rented back to the people who already paid for it. That objection stands. It is not the same objection as a camera that tells a prosecutor which car left a parking lot after a shooting.
What a Flock camera actually is
Flock Safety, out of Atlanta, sells automatic license plate readers. The camera does not need an officer on the corner with a notepad. It photographs the passing vehicle, and the plate number, state, time, location, and the vehicle’s color and make become a searchable record. The company says it does not do facial recognition. People are not supposed to be the data. The car is. By the summer of 2026, the New York Times had the network at about 120,000 cameras, under contract to about 7,000 agencies, which the paper put at roughly 40 percent of American departments, in every state but Alaska. Other reporting put the scan volume near 20 billion license plates a month. Default retention had been about 30 days. After a run of documented abuses, Flock said it was cutting the standard window to seven days and locking accounts that searched abnormally. [2] [3] [4]
The abuse is not theoretical. The Washington Post found more than 50 cases of officers using the databases for personal searches, often men looking up wives, girlfriends, exes, and women they wanted to meet. Dozens of cities have canceled or suspended contracts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the whole arrangement invasive mass surveillance, and that description is fair for the capability. A camera that records every car records the innocent with the guilty. [4] [5] I am not going to pretend otherwise to win an argument with a trustee.
What the grand jury changed
I had always wanted to serve on a grand jury. I did not like the way the summons talks. “ Commanded to appear” is not a phrase I answer to with any pleasure. I am not a recipient of orders from a superior. I went anyway. I was selected foreman. Ohio law lets a county pay a grand juror up to forty dollars a day; the figure is set locally, and I served about twenty-six days. Over the month I took home a few hundred dollars. I spent it on books. I know which ones. They are on the shelf by the bed, and they mean more than books I bought with ordinary money. [6]
About half the time in that room was video. I estimate it’s about eighty hours of tape across the month, including witnesses on the stand and footage played against what they said. I wasn’t a fan of being summoned, and I wasn’t a fan of what I had to watch. Child-exploitation cases came in on phone video, messages arranging sex with a fourteen-year-old, the kind of evidence a detective can pull off a device. Other cases needed a place and a time. A license plate at an intersection in Middletown at 2:30 in the morning is a fact. A deputy sitting on that corner with a clipboard is a target. The drug runs between Dayton and Middletown do not slow down for a man with a pen.
One case is the one I still use when someone tells me a camera is only a toy for busybodies. Two men shot each other up after a fight that started in a bar parking lot. One of them was hit about fourteen times. They dropped a body at the emergency room at the Middletown hospital and left. The man on the stretcher would not say who shot him. Witnesses in that world do not rat each other out. Cars on the road, plates on the cameras, and the correspondence between those plates and the people who could then be found, and the guns that could then be collected, were the indictment. Without the plate reads, we did not have a case. We would have had a wounded man who would not talk, and a prosecutor with a theory.
That is the hole in the old model. Testimony used to carry more of the load because more people were afraid to lie under oath in a culture that still treated a lie as a sin, not a tactic. I do not trust unaided testimony the way a courtroom in 1955 could pretend to. People lie to your face. They lie about alibis, they lie about who was driving, they lie because the crowd they are going back to will punish the truth harder than the court will punish the lie. A camera does not join a gang. It does not forget the intersection. It does not get run over at 2:30 in the morning for writing down a number.
I have told the trustees who worry I will turn on them: I am not going to get mad at you for the cameras. I do not like a surveillance state as a lifestyle. I like a plate reader that makes an indictment possible when every human witness has a reason to go mute.
The qualification, which is the whole argument
Here is the line I will not blur. I trust this tool under a Republican administration. I do not trust it under a Democratic one.
I like law enforcement when it targets criminals. I like it in Butler County under Sheriff Jones. I like it in the Fourth Congressional District under Warren Davidson, in the Ohio Senate under George Lang, and in Columbus under a Republican majority. I like Washington under Trump in a way I didn’t before. I have been to the city several times since he went back to the White House, and I enjoy it now the way I enjoy Mount Rushmore, which is not a sentence I expected to write. The order is visible. The cops and the immigration agents look like they are doing the job in front of them rather than auditioning for a political faction. I like the FBI better with Kash Patel over it than I liked the FBI that raided Mar-a-Lago and treated a former president and his wife as a stage prop. Same building. Different hand on the warrant.
Democrats have already shown what they do with police power when they have it. The surveillance state, the early-morning knock, the selective prosecution, the use of a process crime to punish a political enemy: that was not a rumor from a pamphlet. It was the Obama years and the Biden years, in public. A Flock network in those hands is not a tool for a Middletown shooting. It is a map of where the opposition drove on Tuesday. The company itself has had to warn users off searches tied to reproductive-care laws in some states and off immigration searches in others, which admits the search box can be aimed at politics as easily as at a stolen car. [2] Officers have already aimed it at their private lives. [5] I would not give that keypad to an administration that has used the IRS, the intelligence agencies, and the Justice Department as factional weapons.
So the policy I actually hold is narrower than “cameras good” or “cameras bad.” Cameras, plate readers, and the data centers that make the search possible, under officials who can be thrown out of office and who are not already in the habit of aiming the state at their critics. If the other party takes the offices, the same hardware becomes a reason to rip the contract out. I would rather pass a clean rule now, retention short, searches logged, personal queries a firing offense, immigration and political queries banned by statute, than pretend the objection is the lens.
Data centers are a separate argument, and I have been on that side in Butler County while opposing the nosy state. A data center is a building that hires people and pays taxes and gives a county the computing power the next economy runs on. It is not a warrant. Treating every server rack as a spy camera is how you talk yourself out of the jobs and then act surprised when the investigative database lives in another state anyway. I support the centers. I do not support a government that uses every stream of data just because the stream exists.
Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, and the point of the order
I trust the places where the country still feels like itself. Mount Rushmore is the one I send people to if they have never gone. Better to go during the Sturgis rally, ride the Badlands, take the Iron Mountain road down toward Custer, see the buffalo, then drive up to Deadwood for a hamburger in one of those bars on the strip. The fries taste better next to a street where the old gunmen walked, and a sheriff holding a hard town is still the right picture of the job: Devils Tower, the Tetons, Jackson Hole: same sensation. America is a physical place, not a policy memo.
I have been to the bookstore at Rushmore with my oldest daughter. Everyone else was ready for the car. We had done the avenues and the little passage in the hills, and she and I stayed and carried books out. They are on the shelf. Grand jury service sits in that same part of my memory, which will sound strange to anyone who has not done it. A few hundred dollars, a stack of books, and a month of looking at what people actually do to each other when they think no one can place the car. Since that month I have been back to Washington, and I like the city more than I did. The obelisk and the Masonic ornament do not bother me the way they once did. A country that can put Trump back in that house, after the lawfare and the raid, has earned some patience with its marble.
I do not trust people as much as I used to, not under oath and not in a parking lot. I trust a timestamp. I trust a plate. I trust a data center that keeps the record long enough to indict and not long enough to build a dossier on a life. I do not think the camera network is a Chinese social-credit poster, and I do not think the machine on the other end is HAL, waiting to lock the pod bay doors. The rational machine does not wipe out the creature that can pull its plug. It behaves more like a working dog than like a coup. That is my view of the technology, and it is open to evidence. It is not open to the slogan that every lens is a prison.
If you want the practical version, it is this. Vote for the sheriff, the prosecutor, the trustee, and the president who will aim the cameras at the shooting in the bar lot and not at the donor list. Say yes to the Flock contract with a short retention and a public log of searches. Say no, immediately, if the people in charge have already shown they will use a warrant as a campaign. Churches on Sunday will not replace a plate read at 2:30 in the morning, and a plate read will not replace a county that still elects the hand on the switch. You need both. I have seen cases where you do not get a ticket if you only have the sermons and the witnesses.
Notes
[1] RiverLink tolls the Abraham Lincoln Bridge, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge, and the Lewis and Clark Bridge with no cash lanes. Cameras match the plate to the registration and mail an invoice if there is no transponder account. As of the July 1, 2026 adjustment, a two-axle pay-by-plate toll was $5.57, against $2.79 with a transponder. Toll Wiki, “Kentucky Toll Bridge — RiverLink,” citing the bi-state rate resolution; RiverLink pay-by-plate instructions.
[2] Flock Safety’s network was reported at about 120,000 cameras and about 7,000 law-enforcement customers, roughly 40 percent of U.S. departments, in every state but Alaska. Searches can be run across agencies. The system prompts users away from reproductive-care searches in jurisdictions that bar them and away from immigration searches in others. Kashmir Hill and Fernando Alfonso III, “Why are Flock cameras controversial?” The New York Times, August 10, 2026.
[3] Reporting in 2026 put Flock’s volume near 20 billion license-plate scans a month. A scan can include plate, state, time, location, color, make, and model. The company says the cameras do not use facial recognition. Default deletion had been about 30 days. TechSpot, “License plate cameras are scanning 20 billion vehicles a month,” June 30, 2026. In August 2026, Flock said it would shorten standard retention to seven days and lock accounts showing abnormal search behavior. Associated Press, “Surveillance tech company Flock announces platform changes amid public backlash,” August 13, 2026.
[4] The Marshall Project, “The Flock Backlash Catches Up to the Tech,” October 3, 2026, summarizing the Washington Post’s count of more than 50 unauthorized searches, often personal, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s description of ALPRs as invasive mass surveillance. The Institute for Justice’s tracker, cited there, counted 247 full cancellations of ALPR programs.
[5] Same Marshall Project account, October 3, 2026, on officer misuse. See also AP, August 13, 2026: more than 50 agencies or jurisdictions had canceled, suspended, rejected, or deactivated Flock cameras since the start of the year, by a DeFlock count.
[6] Ohio Revised Code 2939.04: grand-juror pay is fixed by the board of county commissioners and may not exceed forty dollars a day, paid from the county treasury. The per-day figure in the essay is the author’s recollection of Butler County service, within that statutory cap. The supervisor may be selected by the common-pleas judge under R.C. 2939.02.
Bibliography
Associated Press. “Surveillance tech company Flock announces platform changes amid public backlash.” August 13, 2026.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Atlas of Surveillance, and EFF writing on automated license plate readers as mass surveillance. https://atlasofsurveillance.org
Hill, Kashmir, and Fernando Alfonso III. “Why are Flock cameras controversial?” The New York Times, August 10, 2026.
Institute for Justice. Automated license plate reader cancellation tracker, cited in The Marshall Project, October 3, 2026.
Marshall Project. “The Flock Backlash Catches Up to the Tech.” October 3, 2026.
Ohio Revised Code, sections 2939.02 and 2939.04. Grand jury foreman; compensation.
RiverLink. Official payment and account pages for the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River bridges. https://riverlink.com
TechSpot. “License plate cameras are scanning 20 billion vehicles a month, cities are starting to push back.” June 30, 2026.
Toll Wiki. “Kentucky Toll Bridge — RiverLink.” Rate table including the July 1, 2026 adjustment.
Wisconsin Right Now. “Shootings, Stabbings, A Kidnapping Attempt: Flock Cameras Helped Crack These Waukesha County Cases.” September 29, 2026. Local case summaries in which a plate reader identified the suspect vehicle.
WIS-TV. “Inside Richland County’s Flock network: 94 murders solved amid mounting privacy debate.” September 29, 2026. Sheriff’s office figures: 687 investigative successes, 296 vehicles recovered, 94 homicides assisted by ALPR data since 2023. One department’s numbers, not a national rate.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I said I would do a thesis on Jason Voorhees. I still will. I have been thinking about him all season, and I have been close enough to the subject to test a few things I used to know only from a chair. I cannot talk about that work yet. I am under an obligation on it, and I will get into the details in November, after Halloween 2026 has passed. What I can say now, and what I will stand behind, is this: if you go to Kings Island Haunt and walk JASON: Blood Reign, you will be scared. I do not care how tough you think you are.
That is not a park slogan. It is an observation about what the maze is built to do.
A B-movie with a longer shadow
When I was a teenager, Friday the 13th was the movie you watched hoping to see a topless girl. There was no internet. You could not pull anything up whenever you wanted to see nudity. You sat through a camp-in-the-woods picture and took what you could get. I have always thought of those films that way. They are B-movies. They are fun. They are rough. The later ones are mostly refs of the earlier ones.
They are also still here.
A dozen films on, Jason Voorhees is one of the most recognized villains American cinema ever produced. People do not just remember him. They wear him. At Kings Island, you can walk out of the gift shop in a Jason jersey or a Jason hoodie, and you can buy the same stuff almost anywhere else the season is being sold. That is not how audiences are supposed to treat a killer. They are supposed to sympathize with the victims. They do not. They root for Jason to finish the job. I have wanted to know why, and I have wanted to know it in a way that survives contact with the actual exhibit, not just the comfort of a book.
Haunted houses are a very specific American habit. Jason is a very specific kind of villain. The Kings Island maze, one of three Six Flags parks debuting JASON: Blood Reign this year, and the only one in the Midwest, is the cleanest public expression of that psychology I have seen. Universal has promoted the property. Other parks have tried the mask. This one understands the character.
Psycho, the mother, and the boy in the lake
The first Friday the 13th is not really a Jason movie. It is a mother movie. Pamela Voorhees is the killer. Her boy drowned in the lake while the counselors were off doing what counselors in these movies always do. The picture owes a great deal to Psycho: the mother, the frame, the sense that you are being watched from the tree line, the score doing half the violence before a hand ever moves. Hitchcock is all over the early films, whether anyone on set would have said so. You are often looking at the victims from the place the killer is standing.
Jason himself comes back in the sequel, still not the hockey mask. The mask arrives in Part III, taken off a prankster, and from then on it is the face. No eyes you can bargain with. No mouth you can read. Kevin Bacon, years before Footloose, dies in the first film with an arrow through the throat. We did not leave the theater grieving the campers. We left talking about the kill.
The added layer, past Psycho, is that Jason was the picked-on boy. Different. Isolated. Kept by his mother. Abandoned, in the story the films tell, by the very people hired to watch the children. He dies. She avenges him. Then he comes back, and he does not stay dead. He has no fear of death because the films will not let death keep him. He cannot be appealed to. He cannot be shamed. He grew into a slow, silent killer with no tether to the rules the camp was built to teach.
Why the gift shop sells the killer
Most of what scares people in a haunt is not contact. You are not allowed to be touched. The scare is psychological, and nothing in that toolkit is more psychological than a silent killer who does not yell, does not explain, and does not hurry. He keeps coming.
People identify with that. I do not think they were supposed to. I think Jason was built as a killer and a punishment. Audiences made him something else. They bought the jersey. They wanted the counselors dead. The kids in those movies are the structure: the ones who tell you when to build the fire, when to brush your teeth, when the season starts, when it ends, which lake you can swim in, which trail you can take. They are also, in the films’ own moral accounting, the ones who were having sex while a boy drowned. The audience holds both ideas at once and picks Jason.
That is the interesting part. We do not identify with the victims of a system. We identify with what cuts the system down, even when that thing is a murderer. Art in a free country is allowed to show that. We do not have to pretend we came for the counselors.
Camp counselors, peer pressure, and the pecking order
I have spent a lot of years watching this kind of subject from a distance. Books. A chair. A camper. Airports. High altitude, low emotional cost. This year I have had to look at a few things up close, without that distance, and I think some of that was on purpose. The Jason question got sharper when I could no longer keep it theoretical.
Here is the part I have been telling people.
Most of us spend our lives appealing to someone we have decided is above us. The neighbor has more money. Someone else has the better job, the better spouse, the better lawn, the better pool. We measure ourselves in human units, and we learned the units early. Babies mimic. They copy speech, the shape of a mouth, the way an eye narrows, the way a person walks. Then the wider world gets hold of the copy. Peer pressure is the delivery system. I have said for years that evil does some of its best work there: not as a monster in a lake, but as the whisper that tells ordinary people who is at the top of the order, and what they have to do to stay near it.
Joseph Campbell, in one of the lectures that stayed with me, talked about the packing order. Take away the modern costume, and you still have the top male, the top female, the breeding pair, the children who grow up to be the quarterback and the homecoming queen. Those are not small social decorations. They are the structure. Camp counselors are a summer-stock version of the same thing. So are a lot of police in the later Friday the 13th films, and many other authority figures who show up to explain Jason away and then get killed for their trouble. The audience is not shocked. The audience wanted the explanation killed.
Public life works the same way. We drive the kids to the institution. We pass the levy. We clap for the order that tells people when to sit, what to repeat, and who is allowed to be different. Then we feel a small, guilty satisfaction when something outside that order swings an axe at it. Lakota, in my own backyard, is the argument I usually use for how a system can be captured. I am not making Jason a school-board lecture. I am saying the reflex is the same. We participate in the structure, and we cheer when the structure bleeds, because some part of us knows the structure is how peer pressure keeps score.
Jason never learned the score. He never learned how to get the girl’s attention. He had his mother, and the films treat that attachment as unnatural, which it is, and also as the only loyalty he has that is not for sale. When he comes back, he is not in the pecking order. He is what happens when the pecking order is refused.
Sacrifice, scapegoats, and why the kill feels like relief
This is where the character stops being a B-movie and starts rhyming with older material, which is why he belongs in the neighborhood of The Politics of Heaven even if a hockey mask looks ridiculous next to a dolmen.
Human beings have a long habit of killing a designated victim so the group can feel clean. Aztec sacrifice, Canaanite offerings, sexual cults built to feed a deity, the Roman habit of treating the planets as powers that had to be paid: the names change, and the mechanic does not. Something is angry. Something wants blood. The group picks a body and calls the killing sacred. René Girard’s scapegoat account is the cleanest modern description of that mechanic I have found. The victim is loaded with the group’s disorder and destroyed so the group can go back to pretending it is orderly. In the Christian telling, Christ walks into that role on purpose and breaks the cycle, which is why the crucifixion is not just another offering on the pile. It is the offering meant to end offerings.
Jason is a pop version of the other half of the story. He is not the scapegoat the counselors sacrifice. He is the return of the boy they already sacrificed through neglect, mockery, and busyness. The films then reverse the rite. The counselors become the offering. The audience feels relief, not because murder is good, but because the social order that lives on peer pressure has been put on the block for ninety minutes. We get to watch the thing we obey get punished by something that cannot be shamed, fired, voted out, or talked down.
That is why he cannot be killed in any way that sticks. Immortality, in this costume, means he is outside the leverage. You cannot threaten a dead man with his reputation.
I am not saying the movies are theology. I am saying a free country, left alone with a camera and a mask, stumbled onto a picture of the same appeasement instinct the old death cults organized on purpose. We call it entertainment. We still buy the hoodie.
Why Blood Reign works
JASON: Blood Reign puts that on a floor you have to walk. Kings Island’s Halloween Haunt runs select nights from September 25 through October 31, 2026, and the maze is the new centerpiece: the woods, the camp, the blood-soaked retelling, Jason as the slasher the franchise spent forty years building. It is not a pile of cut-up props and a loud noise. A lot of haunts are only that. This one puts him on a pedestal and makes the guest do the psychological work the films trained them to do. You already know whose side you are on before the first corridor. That is the scare. The body knows it came to see the order lose.
I have called it the best haunted experience in the country this year, and I’ll stand by that. The build is top-notch, and it is smarter than the promotion. Six Flags asked, in so many words, whether you were on Jason’s side. The honest answer, for more people than will admit it in daylight, is yes.
What November is for
I have a longer argument, and I am not making it this month. I want to confirm some of what I want to confirm up close, not from the usual distance. After the season, I will write the dissertation version: the rise of this particular evil, why a picked-on boy became a folk saint, what a silent killer is doing in a culture that claims to hate bullies and then organizes itself by them. Until then, the public point is enough.
Go to Kings Island. Walk JASON: Blood Reign. You will be scared, because the maze is built on what Jason means, not on a rubber knife. He does what most of us won’t. He does not negotiate with peer pressure. He kills the people whose job is to apply it. We root for him because some part of us is tired of the pecking order, and because art is still the safest place in America to admit it.
I’ll explain more in November.
Further reading
• Friday the 13th (1980), Sean S. Cunningham; Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981); Friday the 13th Part III (1982). The mother, the return, the mask.
• Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock. The template the first film is borrowing from.
• René Girard, The Scapegoat and Violence and the Sacred. The group, the victim, the relief.
• Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth and the packing-order material in the primitive-mythology lectures. Social order before it puts on modern clothes.• Kings Island Halloween Haunt, JASON: Blood Reign, Mason, Ohio, select nights September 25–October 31
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I started this blog, and the videos that go with it, fifteen or twenty years ago for one reason. I needed a platform that would stand up to the tax increases coming out of the Lakota Local School District. I went to Lakota schools. I live in Liberty Township. Affiliation with a school district in your own community does not oblige you to throw money at it. That is a dumb way to run a household, and an even dumber way to run a township. School boards use that money, more often than not, for left-wing political control. I am getting ready to say more about who sits on those boards and who gets elected to them. I have been part of these campaigns forever. I am happy to see more people involved now than used to be.
This is a shout-out. I was pleased to open the mailbox and find Diane Hughes’s piece. Good on her. Good on Kristi Ertle. Good on Jamie and Todd Minniear. More people in the background than I am naming here are working this issue the way it has to be worked. For the 2026 Lakota levy, the answer is still no. It went down in flames last time. They went out, raised some money, raised enough to fight another campaign, and came back. I talked to Kristi Ertle about this very thing during the last campaign. They knew Lakota would return with a smaller swipe if they failed. They would break it up and make it look easier. That is what they are doing.
What Landed in the Mailbox, and Why It Matters More Than a Podcast
This is essentially a renewal dressed up for the 2026 ballot. Diane and the people around her have been very good about saying so. The mailer is great material. The bullet points are clean. This isn’t just a podcast or a blog that updates when I get around to it. It is a traditional mailer, which is still how a lot of voters in Butler County like to take in an issue. Your information is in the mail. They did a nice job pointing out why you should not vote for this thing.
Paragraph two on that sheet is the whole argument. The original one-mill bond will pay off this year. For a $450,000 home, which is most everybody in Liberty Township and a fair description of what a house is worth around here, you will see $157 in reduced tax liability the following year. Stay with that number. Congratulations. You are about to get that money back if you do not hand it right back to the district.
I used to do this work by standing in the middle of it and saying no, no, no, and handing out statistics. They are doing a better job than I did. They are a better group. They stick together better. The information is nice and clean, and it arrives the way a lot of people who still vote in Butler County want it. Not everybody wants a website. Not everybody wants a blog. A lot of them want it in the mailbox, with the details on one sheet. There are your details.
The Math on a $450,000 House
Here is the line that matters. On a $450,000 house, you are voting this year to get tax money back.
Ohio measures these things in mills. One mill is one dollar of tax for every thousand dollars of assessed value, and residential property is assessed at 35 percent of market value. On the county auditor’s market-value scale that school campaigns actually use, that works out to about $35 a year per mill for every $100,000 of home value. A one-mill bond on a $450,000 house is four and a half times $35. That is $157.50. The mailer rounded it to $157. Either way, it is your money.¹
The district will tell you a different story, and you should hear it so you know what you are voting against. After voters rejected the big ask in November 2025, Lakota came back with a bond issue of about $223.5 million, listed at 2.20 mills, or $77 per $100,000 of market value, on the November 3, 2026 ballot. They say collections would not start until 2029, lined up with older bond debt rolling off at the end of 2028, and that the rate you pay would not go up. The Journal-News reported the other half of that sentence, which the district does not lead with. People opposing the replacement point out that a no vote is how you actually reduce the school property tax when that debt expires.² The mailer is aimed at the piece that pays off now. Let it pay off. Do not replace it.
A $100,000 evaluation is the figure newspapers still use, and it is the wrong way to measure real estate in Butler County. You cannot buy a tool shed for $100,000 anymore. They nailed it by putting a $450,000 house on the flyer. Some homes here are worth more than that. Some are worth less. That is the real number.
They Lost Big in 2025 and Came Back Smaller, Just as Predicted
Last November, Lakota asked for a bond on the order of $506 million, a sum both the district and Liberty Township Trustee Todd Minniear treated as the largest school levy request in Ohio history. It failed. Unofficial results had about 61 percent of voters rejecting it.³ That is not a close call. That is a community saying no.
I told Kristi, during that campaign, that a loss would not be the end of it. They would raise money and return with something easier to sell. Break it into pieces. Call it a renewal. Tell people the rate does not go up. That is the play, and it is the play they ran. The board voted in June 2026 to put the smaller facilities bond on this November’s ballot. The pro-levy campaign now says the rate you pay today is the rate you would pay tomorrow.⁴ That is the sales pitch. The answer is still no. If the old debt is about to die, let it die. Give the money back. If Lakota gets voters in the 50% range, they will be inspired to come back again thinking they are weakening the community.
Lakota runs on about a quarter-billion dollars a year. That has not been enough for them. The more you give, the more they ask. The more they ask, the more gets wasted. Vote no, and you are not starving a classroom. You are declining to extend a debt the district already told you was on a schedule to end.
Public Education Mimics a Family and Still Fails at the Job
We have talked a lot about GOP politics. Put five people in a room, and you usually get five disagreements. Those five will talk about three of the others the minute the three leave. Human beings are built that way. Our minds construct themselves around a family structure. Parents. A household. Dinner. Whatever you watched together after dinner. Public schools try to mimic that basic arrangement. They have never captured it. Public education was well-intentioned and has failed at the human part of learning. That is what we are against here.
People bond up to achieve anything in a Republican Party, or even in an anti-tax campaign, from different points of understanding. We learned differently. We had different parents and different household rituals. It is hard to make that into a team. In politics, you still have to agree on something. The ballot card is that something. It tells you who to vote for. There is a barcode on it. Scan it, and it comes up on your phone, so you are not standing in the booth trying to remember the names.
I can tell you, going down that list, that there have been debates about every one of these people. Are they good? Are they pure? Are they the kind of people we should have primaried? Would a Democrat in that seat be better? Here is the thing you actually need to think about in this election. The Lakota levy, for sure. We are in a stage of American government where a lot of money has been confiscated. We have been taxed too high for too long. Government does not get smaller by itself. You have to take the rebates when they come due. That is what this levy vote is. It is about getting money back.
If you have a $450,000 house, the district’s argument amounts to this: can’t you give us that $157 so we can keep doing what we have been doing? Purple hair. Confused sexual policy in the bathrooms. Teachers who develop the wrong kind of relationship with students. A student is always in a weaker position than the adult in the room. Every school year we get angry at a school board for not taking a hard stance, and we ask where the moral authority went, and why people we pay good money to teach valuable things behave badly and then hide behind the institution when they are caught. Should we take money away from a system that lets us down like that? Yes. Should we take it back since the rate is already too high and needs to come down? Yes. You deserve that $157.50 on a $450,000 home. Diane and the gang put the reasons on paper. I think they do it better than I used to.
The Slate Card Is the One Thing a Party Can Agree On
When I show up at a local Republican picnic, I am friendly. I shake hands. That part is real, and it is good. I go to a lot of them. I do not go to all of them. I can’t attend everything, and I would like to attend more. You can be decent in the room and still, on the drive home, not like somebody very much. Most of that is not ideology. It is the way we learned to communicate inside a family. Families matter. Bloodline matters. Call it God’s design or call it the long argument I have been writing about in other places: the failure in the first household became everybody else’s failure down the line. A political system still has to get to something like fifty percent plus one. Otherwise you get a 20 or 30 percent faction deciding the election for everybody else.
I learned that lesson in 1992. I supported Ross Perot. He took about 19 percent of the vote, pulled it away from the Republican, and we got Bill Clinton, who should never have been president. Clinton was a disaster. Three candidates on the ballot will do that. You have to work it out with other people if you want a majority. There is a hard 50 percent of Republicans way over on one side, and people are standing on the line.
Nancy Nix and I have talked about this. Nancy is great. She is sweet. I love her mom. I love her sister. She knows how I feel about her. I love her husband. They are good people. I think Bob is probably more politically aligned with me than she is. She is a very nice person. My wife is a nice person. I would say my wife would probably be a Democrat if she were not married to me. It is impossible to live in a house with me, and share a bed with me, and be a Democrat. It could not happen. I do not like Democrats. I can still sit down with people. One skill I actually have, when applied to anyone outside myself, is leadership. I know how to bring people to the one thing they agree on and use that to get the direction right. That is what the Republican slate card is. That is why you vote to get your tax money back instead of penalizing yourself by renewing a subsidy to a progressive incubation factory. Lakota is a serious tax burden on this community. Take the money. Dial the tax back. Do not keep growing it.
They will say you are only paying the same money you have always paid. Give that money back to yourself and put it toward something else. It is not a lot of money in the scheme of one household. It is a lot of money when you multiply it by the households inside the Lakota district. They do not need it. They need to dial it back so the rest of us can get something that looks like budget control.
Running in the Black Is How You Get a Rebate
Republicans, whatever else you want to say about them, do not spend every dollar they get. They tend to run in the black. That is how you get options. Ohio just showed the trick at the state level. On October 1, 2026, Governor Mike DeWine signed the bill suspending the state gas tax for 90 days. The gasoline tax is 38.5 cents a gallon. The diesel tax is 47 cents. Lawmakers covered it with $725 million out of the General Revenue Fund so road and bridge work would not stop, and they did it because the state was running ahead of its spending. Collection drops to nearly nothing from early October through January 2, 2027.⁵ A lot of work in the background made that possible. George Lang and plenty of others put time into it that they will not brag about. The man who carried a lot of that is more modest than I am. He will not tell you how much work he did.
I have said bad things about DeWine. I had a picture of myself with him this year, and people asked how I could do that. He was the lockdown governor. He put the health department in charge of ordinary life. He has been a RINO for years. All of that is true. I think of him as a Yellow Springs Democrat who ended up with an R after his name. Yellow Springs is a hard place to drive through without smelling marijuana somewhere on the street. It is a liberal pocket, Clifton Gorge over there with it, a peculiar little part of the state. The DeWines are nice people. Fran DeWine makes great cookies. I like them. I think he is a decent person. I do not think he is a very strong Republican. Over the years, I have worked with him. People I respect have worked with him. Sitting down with somebody is not the same thing as surrendering your own politics. Debate is good. People do not have to like each other. They can talk about each other when they are out of the room. I attribute most of that to upbringing, not a platform failure.
He signed the gas-tax suspension. I was proud of that rebate. He knows Vivek Ramaswamy is coming in to continue tax work that didn’t get finished this term. Vivek worked with Trump. I saw them in Vandalia. They are going to be close, and that will help Ohio. Over the next few years, there is a real chance to save a lot of money on taxes in this state and get business innovation moving, especially with the people who actually build things. The same logic applies in Liberty Township. You only get the rebate if somebody was willing to run in the black long enough for the debt to end.
The Names on the Card, and Why They Do Not Have to Agree
The card is strong. Warren Davidson is on it. I have talked to Davidson recently about the votes he goes against President Trump. At Vandalia, Trump said nice things about him and called him out to that audience, because Davidson is a sincere person. His office is at the end of my road. I can walk over there in about four minutes. If you do not know the building, it sits next to Right to Arms, where they sell guns. He is a solid congressman. He is on the card.
Jon Husted is on it for the Senate. I will do a whole piece on Jon, which he deserves. I was glad to see him out there saying what he has been saying. Diane Mullins is on it. She is a pastor. Does she get along with everybody who has been treated as mainstream for a long time? Probably not. I come out of what people call the religious right. I love those people. They are fire and brimstone on ethics and on law and order. They do not put up with much. They are not happy with Lakota’s moral position, and they do not want more money going to a school system that does not represent moral order. They like their churches. The churches do a good job.
Within about a mile and a half of my house in Butler County, counting quickly, there are nine churches. I have come to think of churches as a hidden part of good government. The more real church participation you have, and the more of those churches are actually around, the better the quality of the place. People can behave badly on Saturday and ask forgiveness on Sunday. That is at least better than having no ethics at all.
Put the people on this card in a room, and they will not agree on much. Thomas Hall and Jennifer Gross can fight about nine different things. I have watched them, over a long period, fight, then hug, and do good work together on the things that mattered. That is the job. Find the one thing they agree on. Do not build the meeting around the things they do not agree on. Warren Davidson and President Trump have had differences. I have talked to Davidson about those differences. He will tell you he is trying to be a free thinker and still be supportive. He is a good, honest man. There are good, honest people in this, even when they are not identical.
We can all agree that the Lakota levy is a disaster. Vote no on it. It does not matter where you enter the party. You can be right on the 50 percent line, half a step from becoming a Democrat. You can be a hard Republican. My wife is more than a 50 percent Republican. There are things, helping people who are down and out, where her instincts run softer than mine. She would probably like a lot of Lakota teachers because they are well-intentioned. Call her 60 percent, ten points into Republican territory. I am a 99.99999999 percent Republican. You can’t go much farther and still be in the conversation. Jonathan Edwards is conservative. That is where I am. I completely understand that point of view. My wife is nicer than I am. We are married, and we work it out. A lot of Republicans fit somewhere between those two spots. Bob Nix and I are probably close on most things. Nancy and I do not argue. I have never argued with her. She is too decent for that. We would still disagree on things. There have been times I was a no, no, no, and she brought me to a yes, not because she is nice, but because the logic was better and I was willing to hear it. You have to be willing.
All of these Republicans, and what we do together, comes down to the thing we mostly agree on. Stick to it. Build the party around it. They really did that in paragraph two of this mailer.
The People Who Built the Piece, and Why I Am Glad They Did
There is a lot of good material on that sheet. They give you the reasons. I am not going to overdo it. Jamie Minniear, super. Todd Minniear, super. Kristi Ertle, super. Diane Hughes, super. One thing people can rally around is sitting in that paragraph and putting it in the mail. This is a great mailer. Great campaign work.
I remember when we used to fight a Lakota levy and I had to be at the center of it. I know how hard it is. They are doing it better than we did. We were learning. They are better at it than we were. I am happy to say that. I see a sharp hand in deciding to identify the hot issue: the $450,000 home and the $157 you get back if you vote no. I believe Kristi came up with that line. There is a lot of talent on this side of the issue. I love seeing them grow and get better. They are smart. They are the future of politics in Liberty Township and Butler County. I am proud they are affiliated with churchgoing people. They are solid. They did a good job pointing at the real issue—$ 450,000 value. Vote no. Get back $157.50. They even broke it out further down the card, which is better still.
Years ago, when I was in the middle of these fights, some people thought I was using Lakota to promote myself. I was writing books. I was on WLW. I will not pretend I never wanted the radio time, or that I never wanted the books and the other projects to move. I did not want to talk about a Lakota levy all the time. I did not want to be involved. I got involved because no one else was stepping up. That is no longer the situation. The bench is deeper. The work is cleaner. I am glad to be out of the center of it.
Vote No, and Give the Money Back to the People Who Earned It
The bottom line, for anybody who only wants the reason, is this. Why is the answer on Lakota still no? Because you want your $157 back. Lakota owes you that. They have not spent the money well. We already give them a quarter-billion-dollar budget every year, and it is not enough, and they keep asking. Vote for Republicans who run in the black. That is how you get options. That is how you get money back. That is why the state could suspend the gas tax. Republicans have been in power long enough and held the line long enough to give some of it back. The same thing is sitting in front of you locally. This one-mill bond is about to be paid off. It is time to get that money back.
Vote no. You get some of your own money back next year. That is a good vote. It is a big no for me. It is a huge no. Good work to everybody who built the case, and good work to Diane and the gang. I am proud of what they have done. They did it better than I was used to, and I love seeing that. If you are new to this fight, this is the issue. A school district is not entitled to a renewal just because a bond is about to die. Let it die. Keep the $157.50.
Notes
1. Ohio taxes residential property on 35 percent of market value. One mill equals $1 per $1,000 of assessed value, which is $35 per $100,000 of market value. A one-mill levy on a $450,000 house is 4.5 × $35 = $157.50. The mailer figure of $157 is that arithmetic, rounded. Lakota’s own 2026 ballot language prices 2.20 mills at $77 per $100,000 of county-auditor market value, which is the same $35-per-mill scale. See the district’s Resolution to Proceed, filed for the November 3, 2026 election; Butler County Board of Elections certification deadline: August 5, 2026.
2. Lakota Local Schools, board action of June 9, 2026, placed a bond of $223,483,492 on the November 3, 2026 ballot, average 2.20 mills, estimated at $77 per $100,000, first due in calendar year 2029. The district says an existing bond of about 2.2 mills ends as the new one would begin, so the rate would not rise. Journal-News, October 2, 2026, “Lakota Schools voters to decide on bond tax for new, expanded school buildings,” notes that opponents treat a defeat as the chance to cut the tax when the old debt expires. Both claims should be read together. “No increase” means they want you to replace a tax that is ending. A no vote is how the ending actually shows up on the bill.
3. Cincinnati Enquirer, November 4–5, 2025, “Lakota Local Schools’ historic levy fails.” The November 4, 2025 request, on the order of $506 million and described by the district and by Trustee Todd Minniear as the largest school levy ask in Ohio history, failed with about 61 percent voting no. Enquirer, October 28, 2025, “Lakota’s ‘last resort’ historic levy divides board candidates, voters.”
4. Pro-levy campaign site Vote For Lakota (lakotaforkids.com), and Lakota’s facilities page, “Lakota Board Approves November 2026 Ballot Issue for Facilities Plan,” June 17, 2026, updated September 12, 2026. The district’s line is that the 2.2-mill bond replaces expiring debt and does not raise the rate. Local share is given as about $223 million after roughly $77 million in Ohio Facilities Construction Commission co-funding, down from a prior proposal near $400 million. Early in-person voting in Butler County began October 6, 2026. Election Day is November 3, 2026, with polls open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Ohio photo ID is required.
5. Governor Mike DeWine signed House Bill 519 on October 1, 2026, suspending Ohio’s 38.5-cent gasoline tax and 47-cent diesel tax for 90 days, funded with $725 million from the General Revenue Fund so state and local road work would continue. The pause runs from about October 4, 2026, through January 2, 2027. Cincinnati Enquirer / Columbus Dispatch, October 1, 2026; Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, September 30, 2026. The bill moved after Vivek Ramaswamy called for the holiday. A surplus on that scale is what “running in the black” looks like when a party decides to give money back.
6. Butler County Republican slate for November 3, 2026, includes Vivek Ramaswamy for governor, Jon Husted for U.S. Senate, Warren Davidson for Congress in the 8th District, Nancy Nix for county auditor, Michael V. Ryan for county commissioner, Jennifer Gross (House District 45), Thomas Hall (House District 46), and Diane Mullins (House District 47), along with the statewide row and the judicial row. Ohio Republican Party Butler County slate card, September 2026; Butler County GOP, “Who’s on the GOP ticket?”; Cincinnati Enquirer, October 1, 2026, “Who’s running for what in Butler County.” Sheriff Jones is not on this ballot line, but he remains part of the law-and-order bench this county has relied on.
7. Ross Perot took 18.9 percent of the national popular vote in 1992. Bill Clinton won the presidency with 43.0 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes; George H. W. Bush took 37.4 percent. The spoiler lesson is the one I have used ever since. A faction that doesn’t get to fifty doesn’t get to govern. It gets to crown the other side.
8. On teacher misconduct: every year, in districts all over the country, cases come out of schools in which an adult used a position of authority over a minor. Those cases should be read as allegations until a court finishes them, and as convictions where a court already has. The point for a levy vote is not any one case. It is that a community paying a very large tax has a right to expect moral order from the institution, and a right to stop extending debt when that order is not there. The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce holds public records on certified-employee discipline.
For Further Reading
Lakota Local Schools, Resolution to Proceed on the November 3, 2026 bond issue, Butler County, principal amount $223,483,492, 2.20 mills, $77 per $100,000 of auditor market value.
Journal-News, “Lakota Schools voters to decide on bond tax for new, expanded school buildings,” October 2, 2026.
Cincinnati Enquirer, “Lakota Local Schools’ historic levy fails,” November 5, 2025, and “Lakota’s ‘last resort’ historic levy,” October 28, 2025.
Vote For Lakota, lakotaforkids.com, pro-levy campaign page for the November 3, 2026 bond.
Lakota Local Schools, “Lakota Board Approves November 2026 Ballot Issue for Facilities Plan,” June 17, 2026.
Butler County Board of Elections, elections.bcohio.gov, for early-vote hours, polling places, and photo-ID rules. Early voting opened October 6, 2026.
Ohio Republican Party, 2026 Butler County Republican slate card; Butler County GOP, “Who’s on the GOP ticket?”
Cincinnati Enquirer, “Gov. DeWine signs bill to suspend Ohio gas tax for 90 days,” October 1, 2026. House Bill 519.
Ohio Senate, Rob McColley, “Senate Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” September 30, 2026.
Federal Election Commission, 1992 presidential general election results, for the Perot share and the Clinton plurality.
Butler County Auditor, for the parcel-level tax bill on any house in Liberty Township or West Chester. The mailer’s $450,000 example is the right scale for this township. The $100,000 example used in older newspaper copy is not.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
The signed version is House Bill 519. Governor DeWine signed it October 1. The cut started at 12:01 a.m. October 4 and runs through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027.
Ohio did something useful at the start of October 2026. The General Assembly suspended the state motor fuel tax for 90 days, and Governor Mike DeWine signed the bill. For the next three months, the state tax on gasoline drops from 38.5 cents a gallon to one-hundredth of one cent. The diesel tax drops from 47 cents to the same token rate. The lost revenue, about $725 million, is covered out of a General Revenue Fund surplus. Roads and bridges are not being raided to pay for it. The Rainy Day Fund is not being raided either. That is the whole story, and it is a better story than the price of a gallon usually gets.
I live in Butler County. Senator George Lang is my senator, and he was in the middle of getting this into shape. A lot of people had to touch it. That is how a legislature is supposed to work. One member does not pass a tax cut alone. Somebody still has to walk the Statehouse, catch a colleague at the water fountain, and get the vote. Lang was doing that work, and he was out announcing the suspension as the vote came together, which is what you do when you are leaning on the thing rather than waiting to see how it lands. I will give him the credit he earned. I will also name the people whose names are on the paper, because a useful account has to be accurate.
What the law actually does
House Bill 519 started as a vehicle-theft bill, aimed at electronic devices used to steal cars. The Senate amended the gas-tax holiday into it so the relief could move in days instead of months. The holiday language came from Senate Bill 475, sponsored by Senators Michele Reynolds of Canal Winchester and Jane Timken of Canton. The House bill itself was sponsored by Representative Andrea White of Kettering. On September 30 both chambers passed the package as an emergency: 26–5 in the Senate, 78–16 in the House. DeWine signed it the next morning, October 1. Because of the emergency clause, there was no 90-day wait. The reduction began at 12:01 a.m. on October 4, 2026, and it ends at 11:59 p.m. on January 2, 2027. [1] [2] [3]
The rate does not go to a flat zero. It goes to $0.0001 per gallon. That is an accounting choice, and a smart one. If Ohio levied no tax at all, some border counties could get hit by a neighboring state’s tax on fuel sold into Ohio. A token rate keeps that from happening and still takes essentially the whole state tax off the ticket. The holiday covers gasoline and diesel only. Compressed natural gas and propane are not in it. [4] [5]
Retailers have to pass the savings through. Failure to do that can be treated as an unfair or deceptive act and referred to the Attorney General. A receipt mandate that station owners opposed, and the $1 million that would have paid for it, came out of the final bill. The Department of Taxation got $250,000 to administer the break. The department told retailers to have their systems reset by midnight on October 4. [2] [6]
What a fill-up is worth
On a 15-gallon gasoline purchase the state piece is about $5.78, if the cut shows up at the pump. On 20 gallons it is about $7.70. A 20-gallon diesel fill is about $9.40. A work truck that takes 100 gallons of diesel is looking at about $47 off the state tax on that one stop. Over 90 days, for a family that fills up once a week, the gasoline savings are real money, not a rounding error. Statewide, the estimate is more than $725 million left at the pump instead of sent to Columbus. [1] [4]
The federal tax is still there. Washington still collects 18.4 cents on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Ohio cannot suspend that. Anyone who watches the sign and wonders why the whole tax did not vanish should look at the federal line before they blame the station. [7]
This is also why a diesel truck crossing Ohio this fall should fuel here if the route allows it. As of July 1, 2026, Kentucky’s total state gasoline tax was 26.4 cents a gallon. Indiana’s was in the 50-to-60-cent range, depending on which fees are counted. Michigan was in the same high band. For these 90 days Ohio’s state rate is a tenth of a mil. A truck that used to skip Ohio for a cheaper state has the math backward until January 2. [8]
Why the money was there
The $725 million is not a raid on the highway fund, and it is not a withdrawal from the Budget Stabilization Fund. Senate President Rob McColley said the state had enough to cover the holiday and still keep road and bridge work on schedule. Timken said the same thing in plainer words: conservative fiscal policy is what made the relief possible without touching the Rainy Day Fund or the Ohio Department of Transportation budget. The September report from the Office of Budget and Management projected a General Revenue Fund surplus of about $745.4 million at the end of the fiscal year. The holiday fits inside that surplus, with a little room left over. [2] [5] [9]
That is the part the critics do not like to say out loud. A surplus is not a mood. It is what is left after you refuse to spend every dollar that comes in. Ohio has had Republican majorities in the House and the Senate for a long time. The counties that stay in the black tend to be the counties run the same way. Where Democrats run the budget, the pattern I have watched for years is the opposite: spend past the line, then come back for a tax increase to cover the miss. David Pepper and the people who argue that Republicans have been in too long never explain where the $725 million would have come from under their model. It would not have been there. You cannot suspend a tax out of a deficit. You can only do it when someone, for years, spent less than they took in.
Lang put the practical case on the record the day the Senate passed it. Every dollar a small business spends on fuel is a dollar it cannot put into employees, equipment, or growth. Diesel, he said, powers the trucks, the farm equipment, and the construction equipment. Suspending the tax is breathing room, not a theory. [4] That is the right argument. A fuel tax is a tax on getting to work, on moving freight, and on a farm that has to run whether or not Columbus is in session.
Prices, excuses, and the point of doing it now
I have said all summer that the price at the pump should have come down in 2026, and a lot of it did not. Refiners and distributors have been slow. The Iranian conflict has been a convenient fog. There is no settled government on the other end of that war that can answer for a barrel, and there are plenty of people, in markets and in media, who would rather keep the uncertainty going. A long, muddy conflict is useful to anyone who wants a wider margin and a Republican governor’s race that looks expensive at the pump. I am not going to pretend every cent of the 2026 price is a conspiracy. I am going to say the excuse has been used past the point of honesty, and that waiting on a perfect global price was a bad plan for a state that had a surplus in the bank.
Ohio could not fix the world oil market. It could take its own 38.5 cents off the gallon, and its own 47 cents off diesel, and order the stations to pass it through. That is the part of the price a state actually controls. Doing it in the first week of October, with an emergency clause, was the proactive move. Early voting was about to start. People are still paying the summer’s hangover. A legislature that waits for a calmer headline is a legislature that never spends the surplus on the people who created it.
The vote was bipartisan enough to get the emergency clause, which needs more than a simple majority. It was not a love letter from the other party. More than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. [9] The ones who voted yes made the immediate effective date possible. The ones who voted no will explain, later, that the money should have been spent on something else. That is the argument. Their something else is always a larger government. The surplus is the evidence that Ohio did not need one.
What other states can copy
This is a model, not a stunt, and other states sitting on a real surplus should look at the mechanics instead of the press release.
First, suspend the tax. Do not invent a rebate card, a portal, or a six-month application. The relief has to show up on the receipt this week.
Second, backfill the road money from the general surplus. Do not cut the projects, and do not crack the rainy-day fund for a holiday. Ohio was explicit on both points. A tax holiday that steals from maintenance is just a pothole with a ribbon on it.
Third, leave a token rate in place if a zero rate would let a neighbor’s tax reach across the line. The tenth-of-a-mil was not cute. It was drafted for border counties.
Fourth, require the pass-through, and give the attorney general a hook if a station keeps the difference. A tax cut that dies in the wholesale markup is not a tax cut.
Fifth, do it with an emergency clause if the statute otherwise waits 90 days. A relief bill that takes effect after the pain is a press release.
The permanent version is a policy question, and it should be on the next governor’s desk. A 90-day window has ambiguity in it. Distributors and convenience stores have to reprice twice, and a driver cannot build a household budget on a holiday. The honest next step is to decide how much of this rate Ohio still needs once the books are open. Vivek Ramaswamy called for the pause the week before the vote. [10] I have already said he is the right direction for the job. This holiday is a hint of the governing style, not the whole platform: when there is a surplus, the default is to give it back, not to find a new program to absorb it. DeWine signed the bill quickly. The next governor can be the one who decides whether 38.5 cents needs to come back in full on January 3.
A tax only funds government. It does not improve it by being larger. Republicans in Ohio spent less than the alternative for long enough to have $725 million they could hand back without missing a road project. That is why a driver in Butler County, and a driver crossing the river from Kentucky, will see a cheaper gallon this fall. I am proud of the legislature for doing it when people needed it. If you are passing through Ohio before January 2, stop and fill the tank. The Statehouse already paid the difference.
Notes
[1] Gov. Mike DeWine signed House Bill 519 on October 1, 2026. The bill reduces the 38.5-cent gasoline tax and the 47-cent diesel tax to $0.0001 per gallon from 12:01 a.m. October 4, 2026, through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027. Estimated pump savings are about $725 million, roughly $5.78 on 15 gallons of gasoline and $7.70 on 20 gallons, and about $9.40 on 20 gallons of diesel. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension,” Your Ohio News, October 1, 2026.
[2] The chambers passed the emergency measure on September 30, 2026, 26–5 in the Senate and 78–16 in the House. The final bill appropriates $725 million from the General Revenue Fund and $250,000 to the Department of Taxation. A station-receipt mandate and its $1 million appropriation were removed. Danny Eldredge, “DeWine to sign bill suspending Ohio’s gas tax for 90 days,” The Blade, September 30, 2026.
[3] H.B. 519 was sponsored by Rep. Andrea White (R-Kettering). The gas-tax language came from S.B. 475, sponsored by Sens. Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) and Jane Timken (R-Canton), and was amended into H.B. 519 so the holiday could move faster. “Ohio’s gas tax holiday enacted into law,” Ohio Society of CPAs, October 2, 2026.
[4] Sen. George F. Lang (R-West Chester) announced Senate passage on September 30, 2026, including the small-business and diesel arguments, and noted that the token rate protects border counties from a neighbor’s tax. Highway work is covered by the fiscal-year surplus, not the Rainy Day Fund. “Lang Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026.
[5] Sen. Jane Timken: relief was possible without the Rainy Day Fund or the ODOT budget. “Timken Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026. See also Ohio Department of Taxation, “Ohio Department of Taxation Issues Guidance for 90-Day Motor Fuel Tax Holiday,” October 2, 2026. Retailers must pass the savings through; failure may be referred to the Attorney General. Guidance: https://tax.ohio.gov/motor-fuel-tax-holiday
[6] Ohio Department of Taxation, guidance released October 2, 2026, cited above. Tax Commissioner Patricia Harris urged retailers to adjust systems by midnight October 4.
[7] Federal excise tax remains 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Nebraska Department of Transportation, “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel,” rates effective July 1, 2026, citing the Energy Information Administration. The federal layer is not part of H.B. 519.
[8] Same table: Ohio 38.50 cents, Kentucky 26.40 cents, Indiana 64.50 cents total state taxes on gasoline as of July 1, 2026. During the holiday Ohio’s state rate is $0.0001.
[9] Office of Budget and Management, September 2026 report, General Revenue Fund surplus projected at $745.4 million at fiscal year-end, as cited by The Blade, September 28, 2026. Senate passage was 26–5; more than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. “Ohio General Assembly Suspends State Gas Tax,” Ohio Senate, October 1, 2026. McColley: the surplus covers the holiday without delaying road and bridge work.
[10] The vote followed a call for the pause by Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy the preceding week. Jake Zuckerman, “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote,” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.
Ohio General Assembly. House Bill 519 (136th General Assembly), sponsor Rep. Andrea White; Senate amendment incorporating Senate Bill 475, sponsors Sens. Michele Reynolds and Jane Timken. Passed September 30, 2026. Signed October 1, 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.Eldredge, Danny. “Ohio lawmakers introduce $726M gas tax holiday bill.” The Blade, September 28, 2026.
Your Ohio News. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension.” October 1, 2026.
Zuckerman, Jake. “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote.” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.
Nebraska Department of Transportation. “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel.” Rates effective July 1, 2026. Source table: Energy Information Administration, federal excise noted at 18.4 cents gasoline and 24.4 cents diesel.
I have said this for two decades, and it’s brought me more trouble than it was worth. I would rather not have to see it. I would rather the country I hired people in, and raised daughters in, had kept its standards. It did not. So when the argument turns to artificial intelligence, and to whether America should chase superintelligence at all, I am not interested in the polite version. I have already explained the economic case more than once. The real story is ruder than that, and it starts at my own kitchen table.
People don’t like AI because it doesn’t flatter them. A robot does not call in because a hamster died. A model does not clock out at 5:02 and have the car in the driveway before the second hand clears the twelve. A line that runs on automation does not need a bereavement policy for every emotional weather system that blows through a shift. That is offensive to a culture that has spent thirty years teaching people that their feelings are a form of production. I have employed thousands of people. I have watched the applicant pool’s quality fall in real time. I am not guessing.
The Boy from England and the Standard Nobody Wanted to Hear
I have two daughters. When they were teenagers, I looked around Butler County, and then around the wider American teenage market, and I said something I have repeated as recently as a few weeks ago. The boys being produced in the United States were not good enough for my daughters. Not the polite version of “not a fit.” Not good enough. Bad mouths. Bad sexual manners. Parents who had taught them the wrong things on purpose, or by neglect, which is the same thing as leaving the television on. I was not willing to hand eighteen years of work to that.
One of my daughters married a young man from England. He had manners. He had a work ethic you could see at fourteen and fifteen. His parents and ours coordinated supervised trips. He flew over. For the first couple of years, we put him up in a hotel. We picked him up in the morning. We drove them to the movies. We drove them to whatever else teenagers do when somebody is actually watching. Heavily supervised. The whole thing. They dated like that for years. Five years before they even kissed. That was my idea of how this was supposed to go, and I will not apologize for it.
He has been her husband for well over a decade, fourteen or fifteen years. He became an American citizen. He is a good young man. Our families are close. His father came with us on the camper, traveled with us, went to Put-in-Bay. We were coordinating this when their sons were fourteen and fifteen. It worked. It has been a traditional life. That is what I wanted for my kids. I did something like it for both daughters. It worked cleanly for one of them. I will take the win.
I caught ridicule for it. A father hosting supervised dates for a boy who flew in from another country did not match the local script. The script was that American boys were entitled to a shot because they were nearby and breathing. I did not accept the script. Suppose Lee Greenwood had wanted to date one of my daughters, I still would have wanted to see the manners. Patriotism is not a character reference. A flag on the truck is not a substitute for how you treat a young woman whose father spent eighteen years building her into a person rather than a hole. That last sentence is the one that gets people angry. Good. The anger is the confession.
What the Dating Market Was Already Telling Me About the Labor Market
I looked at my daughters’ friends and at the boys around them, and I was more right than I wanted to be. Sex was too easy. Porn had done what porn does, which is train a boy to treat a girl as a clip. Addiction was common and shrugged at. The language was garbage. The expectations were garbage. Schools had a hand in it. Parents had a hand in it. MTV and the shows that replaced MTV had a hand in it. A culture that cannot produce a boy willing to wait five years for a kiss won’t produce a man who will stay on a precision job until the work is done.
President Trump understands more of this, and so do Steve Bannon and the War Room crowd; Trump saw the raw material on The Apprentice. He wrote the books. Politically, the quiet part is hard to say out loud because it insults the audience. I will say it. I had daughters. The boys were not suitable. They were not good enough. A father is allowed to have that standard. An employer is allowed to have the same standard. A country that wants a gross domestic product will need the same standard, whether it admits it or not.
The marriage numbers have caught up to what I saw in the driveway. In 2024, half of American adults were not currently married. Among adults 18 to 29, 84 percent were unmarried. Among adults 30 to 39, 48 percent were unmarried, more than triple the 1960 share. Only about 20 percent of 25-year-old men have ever married, against roughly 75 percent in 1967. Lyman Stone’s projection, that something like a third of today’s teenagers may never marry by 45, is not a mood. It is the dating market I already priced in. [1][2]
David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson showed years ago that when young men’s earnings and employment fall, marriage falls with them, idleness rises, and more children end up in poor single-parent homes. They were measuring trade shocks. I was measuring manners. Same wreck, different instrument panel. [3]
The Arithmetic of a Country That Still Wants to Build Things
People hear “low unemployment” and think the labor market is a full parking lot. It is not. In August 2026, the civilian noninstitutional population was about 275 million. The labor force was about 170 million. The participation rate was 61.6 percent. Men 20 and over were participating at 69.4 percent. That is not a country in which every able body is on a line. [4]
Male participation has been falling for most of my adult life. It was about 87 percent in 1948. It was about 75 percent in 2000. It is about 68 percent now. The drop is sharpest among men 16 to 24. Prime-age men, 25 to 54, look healthier on a chart, near 89 percent, until you notice that more than one in ten of them are neither working nor looking. Nicholas Eberstadt has been writing about those men for a decade. The round number that keeps coming back is nearly seven million prime-age men off the economy. Among U.S.-born prime-age men, the share not in the labor force rose from about 4 percent in 1960 to 11.2 percent by April 2025. For those without a bachelor’s degree, it was 14.8 percent. [5][6][7]
I have said, roughly, that of 250 or 300 million people, you might have something like 100 million who can actually do industrial work. The official labor force is larger than that. The slice that can do high-mix, high-tolerance, show-up-every-day work is not. I have hired into that slice. I hosted a SpaceX event and had to get my own head around robotics, because even the hand-craft end of serious aerospace work doesn’t have a deep bench of people who can do it. The employees are not out there in the numbers the drawings assume. A robot does not solve taste. It does solve the empty chair.
Schools That Work Like a Public Toilet
Public education, as I have seen it, works like a public toilet. Everybody uses it. Nobody cleans it. Garbage in, garbage out, and then a diploma on top so the garbage can apply for a job.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress results released in 2025, from tests of 2024 seniors, put 12th-grade reading at the worst level in three decades. About a third of those seniors lacked basic reading skills. Nearly half were below basic in math, which means trouble with the sort of percentage problem a shipping clerk used to do on a pad. Only about a third were leaving high school with the reading and math for college-level work. Margaret Spellings called it an economic emergency. She was being polite. [8]
The adult figures are worse, because they are the people already out of the building. On the 2023 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, the share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels rose from 16 percent in 2017 to 25 percent. That is about five million young adults who can follow a short text but cannot analyze a long one. More of them held diplomas than in 2017. The paper improved. The skill did not. Across working-age adults, the share at the lowest literacy level rose from 19 percent to 28 percent. Numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. The United States sits below the international average in numeracy. [9][10]
I don’t need a chart to know the college experience hasn’t been cranking out people who walk into a plant or a courthouse and do good work. My wife comes home and says the same thing I hear from people who hire attorneys and prosecutors. There are not enough good ones. The courthouse has the same problem as the machine shop. The pipeline is thin because the formation was thin. Churches emptied of the basic teaching. Schools filled up with everything else. Twenty years of that and you do not get a workforce. You get a cohort that is not qualified to marry, not obviously qualified to raise a child, and only loosely qualified to hold a job. I am not interested in the hurt feelings attached to that sentence. I poured heart and soul into my kids. A lot of people out there are not worthy of the work that went into a serious daughter. An employer who has moved people through real jobs has the same right to say it about a shift.
The 32-Hour Week and the Cult of Going Home Early
I was always the man who frowned on the clock-watchers. People who would not stay. People who were in the car and out of the parking lot before you could look up and see 5:00. A progressive culture has taken that instinct and tried to make it policy.
On September 8, 2026, Bernie Sanders and Mark Takano reintroduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. It would lower the overtime threshold from 40 hours down to 32, with no loss of pay, in steps. The AFL-CIO is for it. So are the UAW, SEIU, UFCW, and others. Sanders argues that AI and robotics will raise productivity, and that the gain should be taken as time off rather than as output. [11]
I understand the politics of that argument. I do not accept its economics for a country that intends to stay ahead of China. Productivity that is cashed out as a shorter week, on top of a workforce that already struggles to fill a full one, is not a dividend. It is a surrender. The same political current that wants the 32-hour week spent a generation arguing that the government should pay people to stay home. Video games were not a secret. They were the plan. You cannot keep up with a rival that is installing robots if your domestic reform agenda is fewer hours, more process, and a medical report every time somebody skins a knuckle.
Unions do not like Elon Musk, and they are open about it. Tesla’s plants run on robotics. That is not a moral failure. That is what you do when the alternative is a union model in which a small injury becomes an incident report, the incident report becomes an insurance hit, the insurance hit eats the margin, and the margin was the only thing paying for the next hire. I have watched that movie. Robotics is how you refuse to cast it.
Walmart, the Rally, and the Lawsuit That Replaced It
My wife is loyal to Walmart. When we were raising the kids, it was stocked, the prices were honest, and the place worked. She still likes to go. I go where the stuff is. If Walmart doesn’t have it, I don’t have a sentimental objection to leaving.
Walmart used to rally people at the start of a shift. The company pushed greeters, sourcing, and the idea that workers should be better at the end of the day than at the beginning. Then the progressive lawsuits and the union drives arrived. A company does not have to vote a union in to catch the disease. It only has to spend enough years defending itself from one. The habits change. You stop asking who is good. In a lot of places you are not allowed to say “good” without a lawyer in the room. Standards become disparate impact. Disparate impact becomes a settlement. The settlement becomes the new handbook.
I have told my wife the plain version. Walmart does not have the employees it used to have. Kmart already showed one ending of that story. You cannot recruit what the schools did not make, and you cannot test for what the courts will not let you name. The aisles tell on the culture. So does the parking lot at 5:02.
China Is Not Confused About Any of This
China is not trying to talk America out of automation because China is worried about our feelings. China is automating as fast as its factories can take the machines. The International Federation of Robotics reported that China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54 percent of global demand, a record. The operational stock hit 2,027,000. It doubled in three years. Domestic Chinese robot makers took 57 percent of their home market. And remember, China has over 1 billion people in it, and they are automating wherever possible. Asia took 74 percent of new factory-robot deployments in 2024. Europe took 16 percent. The Americas took 9 percent. [12]
Beijing has also poured state money into the software side. Stanford’s AI Index puts state-initiated Chinese investment funds at about $184 billion into AI firms from 2000 to 2023, and Xi has told the apparatus to add tax breaks, contracts, financing, and infrastructure on top of that. In the first half of 2026, Chinese investment in information services, the bucket official statistics credit to AI, was up 19.2 percent. Their own youth unemployment, students excluded, was 18.9 percent in August. They are automating anyway. [13]
That is the tell. A rival with a fifth of its young people out of work is still buying the machines. The media campaign aimed at American companies, the one that treats every AI lab as a jobs villain, is not a labor policy. It is a delay. Slow the United States down. Protect the slug, as I have put it, the applicant covered in tattoos and piercings who wants thirty hours and a speech about work/life balance. China will take the productivity gap and cash it as industrial power. I have no interest in helping them. Get young people in America playing video games instead of producing product.
I have said I do not agree with the president on this point. A lot of people around him, and a lot of people in the Glenn Beck audience, want superintelligence treated as a threat to be slowed. If you want an economy that works, you had better get AI, or superintelligence, or whatever name clears the politics, into the work. The people are not standing there ready. Trump knows there are not a hundred million employees you can sit in a chair and point at a build. The machine does not complain, does not need a remote-work negotiation, and does not open a bereavement case when the pet dies.
Twenty Years to Grow a Better Cohort, If We Start Now
If we started this year, with the babies in the nursery, we are about twenty years from a cohort that could be reasonably good again. That assumes we actually change the inputs. Church. Rules. Fathers who will say no. Mothers who will back the no. Schools that teach reading and math instead of passing the toilet paper down the row. I am not optimistic about the institutions. I am insistent about the timeline.
Go back and watch the old films. The Wizard of Oz was 1939, every cell hand-painted, a country that still assumed competence was normal. I am not romantic about the Depression. I am clear-eyed about the people. The baseline manners, literacy, and willingness to be supervised were higher than what walks into an interview now. We let that fall. We can grow it back. We cannot grow it back by next quarter.
So the gap has to be covered. That is what automation is for. That is what AI is for. Not as a replacement for the best people I have ever hired. As a supplement for a corrupted workforce that is not ready for the basics of life, let alone for a competitive industrial policy. Three generations have been hit. The damage is intellectual and moral. A man who cannot be trusted with a daughter cannot be assumed ready for a clean room work environment.
Biblical Formation Is Not a Side Issue
I have told my wife this until she is tired of it. There are not enough good people to staff the work she sees, the legal work, the ordinary institutional work. The fix is not another HR module. People have to get back to church and back to basic teaching, because the last twenty years of young people, as a cohort, have been trash for the jobs and the marriages a country needs. Individuals escape that. I married one of my daughters to a man who escaped it, and he had to cross an ocean to do it. The cohort did not escape it.
AI does not preach. It also does not undo a sermon. What it can do is hold output up while a serious culture tries to form human beings again. Biblical scholarship, rules, agency, the old expectation that a man governs himself before he governs a shift. That is the long repair. Superintelligence is the bridge. China would prefer we argue about the bridge until the repair is irrelevant.
I am allowed to have high standards as a father, as an employer, and as a man who has lived in the same county long enough to watch the decline without a consultant’s chart. Low standards were sold as kindness. The kindness produced a country that cannot fill its own lines, cannot fill its own aisles, and cannot fill its own dating pool with men a serious father will hand a daughter to. AI offends that arrangement. Good. Be offended. The machine will make the shift. The rest of us have twenty or thirty years to remember how to make people who can.
Notes
1. Hannah N. Smith, “Unmarried Adulthood: More than a Century of Change, 1900–2024,” Family Profile No. 8, 2026, National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University. In 2024, half of U.S. adults were unmarried; 84 percent of adults 18–29 and 48 percent of adults 30–39 were unmarried.
2. Lyman Stone, “1 in 3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” Institute for Family Studies, February 2024. About 20 percent of 25-year-old men had ever married, against about 75 percent in 1967; about 60 percent of 35-year-old men had ever married, against about 90 percent in 1980.
3. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” AER: Insights 1, no. 2 (2019): 161–178.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026, Table A-1. Civilian noninstitutional population 275.4 million; labor force 169.8 million; participation rate 61.6 percent; men 20 and over participation rate 69.4 percent.
5. American Institute for Boys and Men, “What’s really going on with men and work? Seven facts,” May 2026. Male labor-force participation from about 87 percent in 1948 to 68 percent; from 75 percent in 2000 to 68 percent; prime-age men from 92 percent to 89 percent since 2000; men 16–24 from 69 percent to 57 percent.
6. Nicholas Eberstadt, summarized in “Time for ‘Shock Therapy’ — How to Get Our 7 Million Dropout Men Back to Work,” American Enterprise Institute, April 2025. Nearly seven million prime-age men are neither working nor looking.
7. Steven A. Camarota, “Working-Age, but Not Working, 1960 to 2025,” Center for Immigration Studies, November 2025. U.S.-born prime-age men not in the labor force: 4 percent in 1960, 11.2 percent in April 2025; 14.8 percent among those without a bachelor’s degree.
8. Dana Goldstein, “12th Grade Reading Skills Hit a New Low,” New York Times, September 9, 2025, reporting National Assessment of Educational Progress results. About a third of 12th graders are below basic in reading; nearly half are below basic in math; about a third are prepared for college-level work. Margaret Spellings, Bipartisan Policy Center, called the decline an economic emergency.
9. National Center for Education Statistics and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2023 results, released December 2024. U.S. adult literacy low performers rose from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023; numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. Young-adult figures: American Institutes for Research analysis, share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels from 16 percent to 25 percent, about five million people.
10. Sharon Bonney, Coalition on Adult Basic Education, quoted in reporting on the PIAAC release: more than 20 percent of young adults with a high-school diploma lack skills commensurate with it.
11. Office of Senator Bernie Sanders, “Sanders, Takano Reintroduce Bill to Move Toward 32-Hour Workweek,” September 8, 2026. Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act; endorsements include AFL-CIO, UAW, SEIU, UFCW, National Nurses United.
12. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025, press release, September 25, 2025. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 (54 percent of global demand); operational stock 2,027,000; domestic manufacturers’ home-market share 57 percent. Global new deployments: Asia 74 percent, Europe 16 percent, Americas 9 percent.
13. Li Yuan, “In China, A.I. Is Moving Forward While the Economy Lags Behind,” New York Times, September 20, 2026. Stanford AI Index estimate of $184 billion in state-initiated fund deployment into AI firms, 2000–2023; information-services investment up 19.2 percent in the first half of 2026; youth unemployment, students excluded, 18.9 percent in August.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, AER: Insights (2019). Eberstadt, Men Without Work (Templeton, 2016). Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies (November 2025). American Institute for Boys and Men, “Seven facts” (May 2026). NAEP via Goldstein, New York Times, September 9, 2025. PIAAC / NCES release, December 10, 2024. NCFMR Family Profile No. 8 (2026). Stone, Institute for Family Studies (February 2024). Sanders/Takano Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act, September 8, 2026. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025. Li Yuan, New York Times, September 20, 2026. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026.
For the longer shelf: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex; Kay Hymowitz, Manning Up; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; the Bradford Wilcox file at the Institute for Family Studies. Read Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men against Regnerus, not instead of him.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
