Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and the War on Reason, Industry, and the Individual

Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive remains one of the sharpest diagnoses of the cultural forces that still shape the nightly news. Originally published in 1971 as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the essays were expanded in 1999 with additional material by Peter Schwartz. The core claim has not aged. Western civilization, Rand argued, was being deliberately dismantled from within by movements that presented themselves as progressive but were in fact a regression to the pre-industrial, pre-rational, tribal state. She called it the anti-industrial revolution because it targeted the very tools—technology, industry, capitalism, and the conceptual mind—that allow human beings to survive and flourish.

That diagnosis lands with greater force today than it did when the essays first appeared. The same patterns reappear under new labels: environmental absolutism, identity politics, multiculturalism framed as justice, and the steady erosion of objective standards in education and culture. The book is not a museum piece. It is a working map of the conflict between the individual mind and the collective demand to return to the primitive.

The Anti-Industrial Revolution: Attacking the Tools of Survival

Rand did not view the student rebellions, early environmental crusades, or hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as liberation. She saw them as a rejection of the mind. The hallmark of civilization is the application of reason to the material world. The ultimate historical expression of that faculty is the Industrial Revolution. By attacking industry, technology, and the profit system that sustains them, these movements were not reforming excesses. They were attempting to undo the progress of the Enlightenment and return humanity to a state of nature that Hobbes correctly described as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In the title essay, she paints a stark picture: a man in the mid-1970s wakes to find his electric toaster and automobile outlawed in the name of protecting the environment. There is no gradual, restrained retreat from technology. There is only the continued advance of the mind or the descent into helplessness and death. Technology is not optional decoration. It is the concrete product of conceptual thought applied to reality. To treat it as aggression against nature is to treat the human mind itself as the enemy.

Rand’s critique of the environmental movement of her day remains one of the most uncompromising sections of the book. She rejected the premise that “untouched nature” holds higher moral value than human life and human comfort. If one truly values human life, one must value the tools that extend and improve it. Elevating pristine wilderness above the needs of productive people, in her view, demonstrates a hatred of the human mind and its capacity to reshape the world.

The activists of the period, she observed, simultaneously attacked scientific progress as violence against the planet while advocating what she called universal slavery for men under expanding state control. The pattern has only grown more sophisticated. Modern environmental rhetoric still frames industrial civilization as the original sin while demanding political power to ration energy, restrict development, and manage the lives of ordinary people. The moral inversion remains the same: the creators are treated as aggressors and the non-producers as the rightful claimants on their output.

Environmentalism as Hatred of the Mind

Progressive Education and the Manufacture of Helplessness

Rand refused to blame only the students. She placed primary responsibility on the teachers and the educational theories that shaped them. In the essay “The Comprachicos,” she draws a grim historical analogy to the seventeenth-century criminals who kidnapped children and physically deformed them to sell as circus freaks. Progressive education, she argued, performs a parallel operation on the mind.

Drawing on the influence of John Dewey and pragmatism, the system shifted focus from teaching children to think conceptually and objectively toward social adjustment and group conformity. The purpose of education, in Rand’s view, should be to equip a student to deal with reality by means of reason. Instead, she saw classrooms that trained children to defer to the pack’s authority. The result is cognitive helplessness: young people who never learned to integrate perceptions into concepts, who remain driven by emotion and fear, and who therefore seek the protection of a tribe.

She drew a direct line from the nursery-school ideal of progressive education to the hippie movement. The hippies were not rebels against the system. They were its logical product—adults still functioning at the emotional level of the group-oriented child. The jump from classroom methods to countercultural behavior is large, yet the causal claim is consistent with her broader epistemology. Without training in conceptual thought, the mind remains primitive.

From Classroom to Tribe: The Roots of Modern Identity Politics

The expanded 1999 edition carries the analysis forward. Peter Schwartz’s additional essays on multiculturalism and what he terms gender tribalism treat these later movements as updated forms of the same collectivism Rand fought in the 1970s. Ethnicity, race, and sex are elevated as primary political categories. The individual disappears into the group.

Rand was unsparing on this point. Racism is the lowest and most primitive form of collectivism because it judges a person by unchosen bodily characteristics rather than by chosen values and achievements. Organizing society by ancestry or language is a sign that Western civilization is losing its grip on the concept of individual rights. A healthy culture judges individuals on their own merits. Tribalism judges them by the accidents of birth.

She argued that the United States was uniquely hostile to ethnicity precisely because it was the first nation founded on individual rights rather than tribal caste. The shift toward identity politics is therefore a betrayal of the American foundation. Schwartz extends the point: movements that frame people primarily as victims of forces beyond their control encourage entitlement and dependency. They replace the standard of individual achievement with subservience to the group. The result is the same psychological regression Rand identified decades earlier.

The Cashless Society and the Corruption of Value

One of the most relevant essays for the present moment is “The Cashless Society.” Rand was not primarily discussing credit cards or digital payments. She was diagnosing the moral foundation of trade itself. Money, she insisted, is the tool of men who have produced goods and can exchange them voluntarily. It cannot exist in a society that has abandoned the objective value of production and replaced it with political pull and loot.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue,” she wrote in Atlas Shrugged and reinforced in these essays. When production is no longer the source of wealth and political connections become the dominant currency, the society has already returned to a more primitive form of distribution—force and favor. The contemporary landscape of corporate-political entanglement, quantitative easing, and the elevation of access over output fits the pattern she described. Value is no longer determined by what a mind creates. It is determined by who one knows and which political faction holds power.

Montessori as the Rational Alternative

Against the progressive model, Rand pointed to Montessori education as a practical alternative. She admired the method because it focuses on developing the child’s cognitive faculties through independent, purposeful activity. The didactic materials require logical problem-solving. The child learns by doing, not by submitting to the group’s emotional authority. In her view, this was training for the next generation of creators—the Howard Roarks and John Galts who sustain a civilization of reason and industry.

The contrast remains instructive. Systems that emphasize conceptual independence produce different adults from systems that emphasize social adjustment and group identity. The long-term cultural consequences of those differences are evident in the quality of public discourse and in citizens’ capacity to reason about complex problems.

Prophetic Warnings and the Long Slow Decay

Looking back from the present, the essays appear strikingly prophetic to those who accept their premises and shrill to those who do not. Rand was not a detached observer. She was at war with the cultural direction she described. She sought to expose what she saw as intellectual bankruptcy rather than to suppress it by force. Whether one agrees with every judgment, she identified a fundamental shift: the movement of Western culture toward group identity and away from Enlightenment values of reason, individualism, and productive achievement.

The outer forms of the New Left have changed. The substance has endured in modern environmental absolutism, identity politics, and the steady institutional preference for collective categories over individual judgment. Rand left the choice binary. Either a society embraces the mind and the industrial civilization it makes possible, or it lets the fire of Prometheus go out and returns to the tribe. Collapse, in her account, is not sudden. It is a long, slow process of philosophical decay that can be watched in real time.

Expanding the Frame: Beyond Rand’s Atheism

The foundational work Rand performed on the conflict between individualism and collectivism remains indispensable. At the same time, the frame can be enlarged. Her strict reliance on the evidence of the senses and the operations of reason leaves little room for phenomena that exceed the ordinary five-sense toolkit. Contemporary discussions of quantum effects, non-human intelligence, and the unfolding UAP disclosures raise questions she did not fully address in her lifetime.

One can accept her central political insight—that the individual is the smallest and most important minority, and that any ideology subordinating the person to the group is already on the road to tyranny—while still recognizing that deeper layers of reality may involve intelligences and conflicts that operate through, and sometimes against, human perception. The ancient pattern of collective sacrifice, scapegoating, and the demand to return humanity to a more controllable, primitive state appears in both her secular analysis and in older religious and historical accounts of spiritual warfare. The value of her work is not diminished by the recognition that the conflict may have additional dimensions.

The Primitive Mindset as a Weapon of Control

A mind trained only in group adjustment and emotional reactivity is easier to manage. Tribal belonging supplies the security that conceptual independence would otherwise provide. When large numbers of people are left unequipped for rational thought, the appeal of the collective intensifies. Public education systems that systematically under-emphasize conceptual training contribute to the result. Adults who cannot sustain an intelligent conversation about first principles are not primarily the victims of low intelligence. They are often the products of an intellectual formation that never equipped them to deal with reality on its own terms.

The cultural preference for the primitive—visible in certain styles, rituals, and the romanticization of pre-industrial life—serves the same end. A population oriented toward tribal safety is more readily directed by those who control the narrative of belonging and threat. The industrial and technological achievements that demonstrate the power of the individual mind become suspect precisely because they disrupt that control.

Conclusion: Intellectual Weapons for the Present Conflict

Return of the Primitive is not light reading. It is a sustained argument that the movements celebrated as progress in the late twentieth century were in fact a rejection of the mind and a deliberate step backward. The same dynamics continue under updated names. Understanding the argument does not require total agreement with every premise Rand advanced. It does require taking seriously the claim that the conflict between the productive individual and the collectivist demand for regression is the central political and cultural contest of the era.

The book supplies intellectual weapons. It names the pattern, traces its educational and philosophical roots, and refuses the moral blackmail that treats any defense of industry, reason, or individual rights as heartless in a moment when nightly news routinely presents the primitive as enlightened and the industrial as sinful; the essays remain a necessary point of reference.

Those who want the fuller application of these themes to character, production, and the defense of the individual will find related discussion in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The Politics of Heaven, which extends the analysis into deeper historical and spiritual dimensions of the same conflict, is forthcoming. The conversation Rand began is not finished. It is the conversation the present moment still requires.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 1999). Originally published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1971).

2. Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” in The Return of the Primitive.

3. Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” in The Return of the Primitive.

4. Peter Schwartz, essays on multiculturalism and gender tribalism, in the 1999 expanded edition of The Return of the Primitive.

5. Ayn Rand, “Global Balkanization,” in The Return of the Primitive.

6. Ayn Rand, “The Cashless Society,” in The Return of the Primitive; see also the money speech in Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).

7. Ayn Rand’s comments on Montessori education appear in the educational essays collected in The Return of the Primitive and related nonfiction.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

———. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971.

———. The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz. New York: Penguin, 1999.

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

Schwartz, Peter. Additional essays in The Return of the Primitive (1999 edition).

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal – Ayn Rand’s Moral Defense of the Only System Consistent with Human Nature, and Why It Still Matters in Ohio in 2026

I have been running a series on Ayn Rand because too many people who once understood her through the Tea Party years have let her slip out of memory, or worse, accepted the lazy smear that she was merely an atheist with nothing useful to say. That is a mistake. The radical left still hates her for the same reason they hate successful producers today. They understand, even if they will not admit it, that her arguments cut the moral legs out from under every scheme of redistribution, regulation, and class resentment.

I was reminded of this again after lunch with one of my favorite senators, George Lang. We talked about The Fountainhead, about the gold standard, and about how few people who claim to like Rand have actually read the full range of her nonfiction. That conversation pushed me to pick up the 1966 collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal again. It remains one of the clearest statements ever written of why pure capitalism is not just an economic preference but a moral necessity.

The book is not a dry economics text. Rand called it a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged. With contributions from Nathaniel Branden, a young Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen, it argues that the system we call capitalism today is a bastardized version of the real thing—an unknown ideal because it has never been allowed to exist in pure form. What we have instead is a mixed economy of freedom mixed with controls, and the controls always expand.

Capitalism as the Only Moral Social System

Rand’s central claim is simple and radical. Man is a rational being who must use his own mind to survive. Any social system that initiates force against that process is not merely inefficient; it is immoral. Capitalism, properly understood, is the only system that bans the initiation of physical force from human relationships and leaves individuals free to produce, trade, and keep what they create.

She defines it precisely: a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. The government’s sole legitimate function is to protect those rights by retaliating against those who initiate force. Everything else—regulation of production, redistribution of wealth, “industrial policy,” licensing of speech—is a violation.

This is why she rejected the conservative approach of her time. Conservatives often tried to defend capitalism on practical grounds or by appeal to tradition while accepting the moral premise of altruism—that the individual has a duty to live for others. Rand called that a fatal compromise. In “The Anatomy of Compromise,” she shows that when you try to mix a rational principle with an irrational one, the irrational always wins. You cannot have a little bit of socialism without eventually losing the foundation of freedom.

America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business

One of the most powerful essays in the collection is “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” Rand flips the usual narrative on its head. The productive genius is not the exploiter; he is the one being hamstrung by the looters and moochers who use the power of the state to seize what they did not create. Business people are treated as a scapegoat class in the same way other minorities have been treated under collectivist regimes. In Soviet Russia it was the bourgeoisie. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. In America it is the successful businessman.

I see this hatred every day in the attacks on Trump, on Vivek Ramaswamy, on any rich person who made money by creating value rather than extracting it through politics. The radical left’s outrage is not about fairness. It is pure Marxist class warfare dressed up in modern language. Rand saw it clearly because she lived it. Her father lost his pharmacy when the Bolsheviks nationalized private businesses. She never forgot.

Solving World Hunger: Production, Not Politics

People still talk about solving world hunger as if it were a distribution problem that requires more government. That is backward. Pigs, chickens, and rabbits reproduce rapidly. There is no physical shortage of the capacity to produce food. Shortages are created by politics—by governments that micromanage, confiscate, and regulate the very people who would otherwise raise the animals and grow the crops.

If you want to end hunger, get as close as possible to pure capitalism. Remove the artificial constraints. Let people own property, keep their profits, and trade freely. The poor in the United States, even under our imperfect capitalism, are rich compared to most of the world. A few American dollars can still be a fortune to someone living under the policies that Rand warned against. The guilt that drives redistribution often comes from people who helped create the barriers to opportunity and then want to ease their conscience by confiscating more from the productive.

Greenspan on Gold and the Hard Reality of Theory

One of the most quoted essays in the book is Alan Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom,” written years before he became Federal Reserve chairman. He argued that gold and economic freedom are inseparable. The gold standard protects property rights by limiting the government’s ability to inflate away wealth through deficit spending. Without it, the welfare state can confiscate savings silently.

Greenspan later operated in a system far from that ideal. Theory is cleaner than practice when you face political realities, activist judges, and entrenched interests. That does not make the original argument wrong. It shows how hard it is to implement principle once the mixed economy has taken hold. We are still living with the consequences of easy money, quantitative easing, and the revolving door between the Fed and large asset managers. The warnings in that 1966 essay hold up.

True Monopolies, Railroads, and the Industrial Revolution

The collection also dismantles the usual antitrust myths. Free-market monopolies can only be maintained by superior efficiency and better service. Coercive monopolies require government intervention—subsidies, franchises, or legal barriers to entry. The history of American railroads is a clear example. Most of the transcontinental lines were built with government land grants and ended in financial chaos. James J. Hill’s Great Northern was built without federal subsidies and remained the only one that did not go bankrupt.

Robert Hessen’s essay on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on women and children is equally important. Child labor was not created by capitalism; it was inherited from a world of grinding poverty. Factories gave children a way to earn a living and survive to adulthood. Rising wealth created by capitalism eventually made child labor unnecessary. The laws usually get the credit; the production gets the blame.

Airwaves, Speech, and the Nature of Government

Rand’s essay on the property status of the airwaves is still relevant. The early chaos in radio was not a failure of free enterprise but a failure of government to recognize and protect property rights in frequencies. Instead of allowing private ownership and trade, the government declared the airwaves public property and nationalized them through licensing. That opened the door to political control of speech—the same impulse we still see whenever independent voices become inconvenient.

Ohio’s Choice and the Fight Ahead

All of this is not abstract philosophy. It is the framework for understanding the hatred directed at successful people in our own state. Vivek Ramaswamy is a rich man who built companies. That alone is enough for the radical left and their media allies to paint him as untrustworthy. The same pattern appears in the attacks on Trump. They do not hate wealth. They hate the independence that wealth can buy when it is earned rather than granted.

I have watched this for decades. The people who want a governor who has never had to make a payroll or risk his own capital are the same people who will expand the very controls that create shortages and dependency. Michael Ryan understands these issues at the county level. Senators like George Lang still talk about gold-backed approaches and business-friendly policy. We need more of them.

Rand was not interested in being practical in the usual sense. She was interested in being right on principle. She knew that a culture that accepts altruism as its moral code will eventually sacrifice the producers. She also believed that the potential for human progress under pure capitalism is limitless. The nineteenth century, when America came closest to the ideal, proved it.

I have read her books many times, along with the work of those who analyzed her. I agree with her on the essentials of capitalism even while I am more of a man of faith than she was. The philosophy can be taken further. But the fight is now. The books are still on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. You can get them quickly. Read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Then look at the news with clearer eyes.

If you want to solve poverty and hunger, expand opportunity. More capitalism, not less. More people who understand how wealth is actually created. That is the only path that treats individuals as ends in themselves rather than means to someone else’s political vision.

Don’t give up the ship.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966; expanded 1967). Rand described the book as a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged.

2. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

3. Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

4. Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

5. Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” originally published in The Objectivist (1966) and reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

6. Robert Hessen, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

7. Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

8. On James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, see Burton W. Folsom Jr. and related free-market historical accounts; the railroad is frequently cited in Objectivist literature as the counter-example to subsidized lines.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. With additional articles by Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen. New York: New American Library, 1966 (hardcover); expanded Signet paperback, 1967.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Greenspan, Alan. “Gold and Economic Freedom.” The Objectivist, 1966.

Folsom, Burton W., Jr. Works on the “robber barons” myth and James J. Hill.

Additional recommended reading: Ayn Rand Lexicon entries on capitalism, business people, and the gold standard (aynrandlexicon.com); Ayn Rand Institute materials on laissez-faire.

Rich Hoffman

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Why the 2026 Midterm Polls Are Still Misleading: Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, and the Persistent Republican Non-Response Bias

I have been watching the midterm landscape closely in mid-August 2026. Three months out from Election Day, the polling averages in several key races look tighter than the underlying partisan lean of these states would suggest. Ohio’s governor’s race between Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton sits near a toss-up. The special Senate election between Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown is competitive. In Texas, Ken Paxton and James Talarico are essentially deadlocked in recent surveys. Then came the Wisconsin Democratic primary, where the polls were off by roughly 20 points in the direction favoring the more progressive candidate.

I have said for a long time that a meaningful portion of the modern polling industry carries systematic bias against Republicans. Conservatives and Trump voters are less likely to pick up the phone or complete a survey. Pollsters still lean on models and samples that over-weight the people who do answer—disproportionately Democrats and people more inclined to engage with survey-takers. On top of that sits a commercial incentive: close races generate more advertising dollars. Campaigns with money to spend feel pressure to keep spending when the horse race looks competitive. Wisconsin just provided another public demonstration of how badly these models can fail when late undecideds and turnout dynamics break in one direction.

I do not think the actual underlying margins in Ohio or Texas are as tight as the published averages. I think several points in these surveys understate Republicans, and if the election were held today, the Republican candidates would win more comfortably than the current numbers imply. That is not complacency. It is pattern recognition from 2016 forward, reinforced by the Wisconsin result and by what I see on the ground and on platforms where people actually speak freely.

Wisconsin Democratic Primary 2026: The 20-Point Polling Collapse of Francesca Hong

The clearest recent data point is Wisconsin. Polls consistently showed Democratic Socialist State Representative Francesca Hong leading Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley by double digits—sometimes by around 20 points. One late survey had her at 44 percent to Crowley’s 22 percent. Another earlier reading put her near 38 percent with Crowley in single digits and a large undecided bloc.

On primary night Crowley won by less than half a percentage point. Hong received roughly the share the final polls had projected for her—around 39 percent. The entire error was on Crowley’s side. Late-deciding and previously undecided voters broke hard against the more radical option. Primaries are harder to model than generals because turnout is lower and more volatile, and Wisconsin’s open primary added another layer of uncertainty. Still, the scale of the miss is striking. The models captured the progressive candidate’s floor but completely missed the late surge to the more traditional Democrat.

I was not surprised. There is a recurring temptation inside media and polling circles to treat energized progressive or socialist factions as larger than they are. College campuses, activist networks, and highly engaged online progressive voters are easy to reach and happy to talk to pollsters. The broader primary electorate is less so. When the actual voters showed up, the socialist ceiling was exposed. The same pattern has appeared in other recent cycles, in which early surveys elevate a hard-left candidate and then the candidate underperforms once undecideds and lower-propensity voters enter the picture.

Current Ohio Governor Polls: Vivek Ramaswamy vs Amy Acton in Mid-August 2026

In Ohio, the governor’s race is officially an open seat. Aggregates in mid-August put Vivek Ramaswamy and former state health director Amy Acton essentially even, or with Ramaswamy ahead by less than a point. One recent weighted average had Ramaswamy at 47.0 percent and Acton at 46.2 percent. Individual surveys have bounced: some Democratic-leaning pollsters have shown Acton up two or three points; others have shown a tie or a small Republican edge.

Ohio is not a pure 50-50 state. Donald Trump carried it by roughly eleven points in 2024. The underlying Republican structural advantage has been visible for several cycles. A race this close in the averages, this far out, is therefore anomalous on its face. Acton’s association with COVID-era restrictions remains a live liability with a large share of the electorate that still remembers the lockdowns and school closures. Ramaswamy’s profile is national and polarizing, which creates some friction among independents and moderates, but the state’s recent presidential and statewide results do not suggest a natural environment for a Democratic win.

Ohio Senate Race Polling: Jon Husted vs Sherrod Brown

The special Senate election is similarly compressed. Jon Husted, appointed after JD Vance’s elevation, faces former Senator Sherrod Brown. Aggregates in early August showed Husted ahead by roughly two to three points in some trackers, while other windows had Brown with a small edge or a statistical tie. A New York Times/Siena survey had Husted at 50–47. An AARP-sponsored poll earlier in the summer had Brown up three. The race is competitive on paper.

Brown is a known quantity with residual personal brand strength among some working-class and older voters. Yet Ohio has continued moving right relative to the national environment. A race that looks this tight three months out again sits uncomfortably against the state’s recent performance. If nonresponse systematically suppresses Republican numbers, the published margins understate Husted’s true position.

Texas US Senate Polls 2026: Ken Paxton vs James Talarico Dead Heat

In Texas, the pattern repeats. The latest Emerson College survey (August 9–10) had Attorney General Ken Paxton at 47 percent and state Representative James Talarico at 46 percent among likely voters. Other recent polls have shown similar dead heats or small leads for either side.

Texas is not a purple state. Trump won it by roughly fourteen points in 2024. Paxton is a polarizing figure with a long history of legal and political battles, which creates openings for a skilled Democratic challenger. Talarico has run a disciplined campaign and benefits from the same non-response dynamics that compress Republican leads elsewhere. Still, a race this close in a state with Texas’s underlying Republican baseline is another data point that looks softer for the GOP than the fundamentals imply.

The Persistent Problem of Republican Non-Response Bias in Modern Polling

The common thread is non-response. I am on every list. Campaigns and pollsters call and text constantly. I rarely answer. I vote in every primary and every general election, but I do not have time for a fifteen-minute questionnaire from someone I do not know. Many people in my circle operate the same way. Conservatives, older voters, rural voters, and Trump-aligned voters have lower cooperation rates with traditional survey methods. Cell-phone-only households, caller-ID screening, and general distrust of institutions make the problem worse than it was in the landline era.

Democrats and more progressive voters, by contrast, remain relatively easy to reach and willing to engage. The result is a sample that is tilted before any weighting is applied. Pollsters attempt to correct with demographic targets, education weights, and recalled vote, but the corrections are imperfect. When the underlying population of interest—likely Republican voters—has systematically lower response rates, the adjusted numbers still lag. This is not a new observation. It has been discussed after 2016, 2020, and 2022. Wisconsin’s primary is simply the latest high-profile reminder that the models can still break when late movement occurs among the harder-to-reach.

Media and Pollster Incentives to Keep Races Looking Close

There is also a commercial layer. Close races sell. Media companies and the consultants who live off campaign advertising benefit when the horse race stays competitive. Republican candidates and committees have raised substantial sums. Those dollars flow more readily when the published polls suggest the outcome is in doubt. A seven- or eight-point underlying Republican advantage, when published as a two-point race, generates more television, digital, and direct-mail spending than a blowout narrative would. I am not claiming a grand conspiracy in every survey. I am saying the incentive structure rewards the appearance of competitiveness, and the sampling problems make that appearance easier to produce.

Why Platforms Like X Offer a Clearer Picture Than Traditional Surveys

This is where platforms that still allow relatively unfiltered speech become useful. People say things online under their own names or consistent pseudonyms that they will not say to a stranger on the phone. Sentiment on X, when read carefully and at scale, has often been a better leading indicator of Republican energy than the published telephone and online panel averages. AI systems that can process large volumes of public posts provide another check on the traditional samples. They are not perfect—online populations are not identical to the electorate—but they are less constrained by the cooperation-rate problem that plagues live interviewers and many opt-in panels.

What a Real Election Day Would Show Right Now in These States

If the election were held in the middle of August 2026, I believe the Republican candidates in these races would win by larger margins than the current averages indicate—closer to the seven- or eight-point range in Ohio and a clearer, more comfortable win for Paxton in Texas. That is not a prediction locked in stone for November. Turnout, national mood, candidate performance, and late events still matter. Campaigns cannot rest on structural advantages. But the idea that these races are true toss-ups or that Texas is on the verge of flipping requires accepting that the polling error has suddenly vanished. Wisconsin suggests it has not.

Election Night Dynamics in Ohio: Urban Early Returns vs Rural Reality

Ohio’s geography still shapes how results appear on election night. Early returns from the Columbus area and other urban centers can create a temporary Democratic lead. As the suburban and rural counties between the cities report, the numbers swing back. That pattern has been consistent. Watching the first 15 or 30 minutes of returns without understanding the sequence can cause unnecessary panic. The same logic applies to interpreting summer polls that over-sample the easier-to-reach urban and college populations. And if surveys do not account for this real estate trend, their outlook will not be accurate. If rural people don’t respond to the poll, they won’t be counted.

I have been around these fights long enough to recognize the difference between a genuine shift in the electorate and a measurement problem. The Wisconsin primary was a measurement problem with real consequences for the models. The compressed margins in Ohio and Texas look like the same problem applied to general-election contests in states that have been moving toward Republicans. Non-response among the very voters who decide these races remains the central issue. Until the industry solves the cooperation-rate gap, or until alternative signals from freer platforms are weighted more heavily, the published numbers will continue to understate the Republican side. Plan accordingly.

Footnotes

1. Aggregated Ohio governor polling as of mid-August 2026 from Pollsmax and concurrent trackers showing Ramaswamy 47.0 / Acton 46.2 and recent individual surveys (NYT/Siena, Tulchin, AARP/Fabrizio, etc.).

2. Wisconsin primary result: David Crowley approximately 39.8 percent, Francesca Hong approximately 39.3 percent; pre-election surveys consistently showed Hong leads of 15–20+ points.

3. Ohio Senate aggregates and individual polls (Pollsmax, NYT/Siena, AARP, Beacon/Shaw) place the race within a few points either way.

4. Emerson College/Nexstar Texas Senate poll, August 9–10, 2026: Paxton 47, Talarico 46.

5. Discussion of non-response bias and primary modeling difficulties drawn from post-election analyses of the Wisconsin results and longer-standing literature on declining survey cooperation rates among conservatives.

6. 2024 presidential margins: Ohio approximately R+11, Texas approximately R+14, Wisconsin narrow Republican win.

Bibliography for Further Reading

• Pollsmax, RealClearPolitics, 270toWin, and Decision Desk HQ aggregate pages for 2026 Ohio governor, Ohio Senate special, and Texas Senate.

• Emerson College Polling releases on Texas, August 2026.

• Contemporary reporting and post-mortems on the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary (Axios, New York Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Marquette Law School Poll commentary).

• Historical analyses of non-response bias in U.S. political polling after the 2016, 2020, and 2022 cycles.

• Public statements and data releases from the campaigns of Vivek Ramaswamy, Jon Husted, Ken Paxton, Amy Acton, Sherrod Brown, and James Talarico.

• Academic and industry papers on declining telephone survey response rates and the challenges of weighting for partisan non-response.

The numbers will keep coming. Watch what the hard-to-reach voters actually do when the ballots are counted, not onlywhat the people who answer the phone say in August.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Hunter’s Camouflage: What Hostile Takeovers Reveal About UAP Concealment and Competing Non-Human Intelligences as the prey runs toward the preditors

I have watched a hostile takeover unfold up close in the aerospace industry. The people driving it never announced their intentions. They arrived with consultants and new ownership structures, spoke in measured language about efficiency and alignment, and made the decisive moves from boardrooms far removed from the daily floor. The target company’s people kept working, kept delivering, kept hoping the familiar rhythms would hold. By the time the real pattern became visible, the leverage had already shifted. Decisions about who stayed, what got consolidated, and which programs survived were already set in motion. The prey did not run away. In many cases, it moved toward the very forces reshaping it, seeking reassurance, seeking to prove value, seeking to stay inside the story.

That experience has stayed with me as I watch the recent waves of UAP disclosures. The Pentagon’s PURSUE releases under the current administration—multiple tranches of documents, videos, and agent narratives in May, June, and July 2026—have brought to light orb sightings, high-speed objects, and cases that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office itself still lists as unresolved. One Western U.S. event near a sensitive national-security site involved federal agents describing “orbs launching other orbs.” AARO’s own June 2026 memo on that case notes that roughly forty percent of the phenomena lacked a plausible conventional explanation and remained open. Another tranche included a military aviator’s account of an object with “flight characteristics unlike anything I had seen in my 28 years.” These are not fringe videos. They are now part of the official record, released under executive order, yet they arrive without chain-of-custody clarity on the most anomalous material and without a coherent strategic picture.

The obvious question keeps returning: if these are simply advanced drones or foreign technology, why the persistent concealment across decades? If they represent non-human intelligence, why not open contact? My answer is shaped by what I saw in that takeover and by the universal patterns Robert Greene distilled in The 48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War. Those books sit in every serious business section because they codify something older than corporate strategy: the mechanics of concealed intention, formlessness, and the calculated use of superior position to shape the target’s behavior without triggering full resistance.

A hunter does not step into the clearing and announce himself. He wears the scent of the field, moves with the wind, waits in the tree stand for hours. The goal is proximity without alarm. The deer that senses nothing continues its pattern until the moment the arrow is already in flight. Corporate raiders operate on the same principle. They do not declare war on the culture they intend to absorb. They speak of synergy, of unlocking value, of shared future. The language itself is camouflage. By the time the target’s leadership understands the real mapping of power, the decisive votes and the key personnel decisions have already been made elsewhere.

If non-human intelligences have been present in our environment for a long time—and the pattern of sightings near nuclear and sensitive military sites across the released files is difficult to dismiss as random—then concealment is the rational posture of a competing form of life that does not yet wish open war or open dependence. Superior technology does not automatically translate into benevolence any more than superior capital in a takeover guarantees the survival of the acquired company’s original character. The strategic advantage lies in remaining unseen while shaping outcomes: extracting data, influencing behavior at the margins, keeping the target population stable enough to continue producing what the observer needs. A species that wanted only to eliminate us would have done so. A species that wants to study, harvest, steer, or occupy the same niche without triggering a unified human response has every reason to stay in the tree stand.

The recent disclosures actually reinforce this reading more than they contradict it. We are shown orbs that appear to coordinate, that launch smaller orbs, that exhibit flight profiles AARO cannot yet attribute to known platforms. We are told some cases remain unresolved even after multi-sensor correlation. We hear whistleblower testimony—from David Grusch and others—describing long-term programs involving recovered craft and non-human biologics, yet official releases still emphasize the lack of conclusive proof while simultaneously documenting phenomena that exceed current human capabilities. This is not full transparency. It is a calibrated release. It keeps the conversation alive, keeps researchers and the public engaged, and shields the deeper architecture behind these events. That is precisely how power that intends to remain dominant behaves when it does not yet need to reveal its full hand.

Greene’s work is popular in business circles because it maps these dynamics without moral overlay. Law after law describes the advantage of appearing formless, of never revealing the full extent of one’s resources or intentions, of using the target’s own momentum against it—the same principles scale. If an intelligence operates across dimensions or with technology that renders our sensors marginal, the same logic applies: stay close enough to observe and influence, far enough to avoid decisive confrontation, and never give the prey a clear target to rally against. The fascination many people feel toward UAPs—the drive to decode every new video, to attend every hearing, to interpret every ambiguous shape—can itself become part of the dynamic. The prey moves toward the predator’s position because the predator has made itself the most interesting thing in the environment.

I am not claiming these intelligences are cartoon villains. I am saying the default assumption that superior technology equals benevolent guardianship has no grounding in observable history or in the power dynamics we already understand at the human level. The same species that builds monuments and writes philosophy also builds weapons and perfects deception when advantage requires it. Why would we expect a competing life form to operate on more sentimental rules? The disclosures we have received so far—multiple batches of unresolved orb events, aviator encounters, and internal government debate—show advanced presence without showing open intent. That gap is not an accident of bureaucracy. It is consistent with the behavior of any actor who has already calculated the costs of full revelation.

Most people can’t do this. They learn the rules and stay prisoners to them al their lives.

The corrective lens is the same one that works in any competitive environment. Assume the other side is playing to win on its own terms. Map the actual flows of information and leverage rather than the stated narrative. Strengthen internal visibility so that critical dependencies—whether material, procedural, or perceptual—cannot be quietly depleted in the shop, which meant knowing who ordered the consumables and whether the schedule would starve the line. In the larger arena, it means refusing to treat every new release as either proof of salvation or proof of nothing. It means treating the pattern of concealment itself as data.

We have been given enough now to see that something is operating with capabilities we do not control and with intentions it has not chosen to declare. The hunter does not need our permission to remain in the stand. He only needs us to keep behaving as if the clearing is empty. The disclosures have made the clearing feel less empty, but they have not yet forced the figure in the tree to step forward. That fact alone tells us something about the nature of the game being played.

Footnotes

1. Personal observation from aerospace program management, 2026.

2. PURSUE Release documentation, Department of War, various tranches 2026.

3. AARO memorandum on Western U.S. “orbs launching orbs” event, June 2026.

4. Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (1998) and The 33 Strategies of War (2006).

5. David Grusch congressional testimony and related whistleblower accounts, 2023–2026.

6. Historical analysis of corporate power dynamics drawn from Greene’s framework and observed industry practices.

7. Additional references to UAP case files are available via war.gov/UFO portal.

Bibliography

• Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power. Viking, 1998.

• Greene, Robert. The 33 Strategies of War. Viking, 2006.

• U.S. Department of War / AARO. PURSUE UAP Release Tranches (May–July 2026). war.gov/UFO.

• Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1848 (for context on Ohio earthworks like East Fork).

• Various journalistic summaries of Grusch testimony and PURSUE files, 2026.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Big Muskie Bucket, The Wilds, and the Heart of American Energy Innovation

I just got back from a family trip that turned into one of those unexpected journeys where you set out thinking one thing and come away with something far deeper. We headed out to The Wilds in southeastern Ohio, that remarkable conservation center and safari-style wildlife park built on what used to be strip-mined land. I love zoos and conservation efforts in the right way—the kind that actually preserves species and land while recognizing that humans are part of the picture, not some parasitic afterthought. What I didn’t fully expect was how a side trip just south of there to see the remnants of the Big Muskie would crystallize so many thoughts I’ve been carrying about energy, innovation, capitalism, and the way the political left has twisted conservation into something that often works against human flourishing.

The Wilds sits on nearly ten thousand acres of reclaimed surface-mined land in Muskingum County, near Cumberland. It opened to the public in 1994 after the Central Ohio Coal Company, a subsidiary of American Electric Power (AEP), donated over 9,000 acres to the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals. That gift, combined with the reclamation work already underway, transformed what had been an industrial extraction site into one of North America’s largest conservation centers. We stayed right there at the new Hellbender RV Campground at The Wilds—beautiful sites on that same land that once fed coal into the power grid. From the campground, you can head into the park proper and experience open-air safaris rolling through habitats where giraffes, rhinoceroses, cheetahs, and other species roam across rolling terrain that, in its own way, echoes the African Serengeti. The landscape doesn’t look like the steep Allegheny foothills that were here before mining; the stripping and reclamation flattened and reshaped sections into wide, grassy vistas perfect for large herbivores. It’s not the exact ecology that existed pre-mining, but it’s productive, beautiful, and teeming with life in ways that serve conservation science and education every single day.

One afternoon, we drove the short distance south to Miner’s Memorial Park to see the Big Muskie bucket—the last major remnant of what was once the largest dragline excavator ever built. Standing there, walking inside that colossal bucket, touching the steel that once clawed through hundreds of feet of overburden, you can’t help but feel the scale of human ingenuity. The machine itself, officially a Bucyrus-Erie 4250-W, stood nearly twenty-two stories tall, weighed around thirteen and a half thousand tons, and swung a 220-cubic-yard bucket capable of lifting 325 tons of earth and rock in a single bite. The bucket alone is the size of a twelve-car garage or easily two full-size buses side by side. When it operated from 1969 to 1991, Big Muskie moved more than 483 million cubic yards of material, revealing high-sulfur coal seams that powered Ohio homes, industries, and the broader grid through plants like the Muskingum River Generating Station. It walked on massive shoes, its boom stretching over three hundred feet, built on site because nothing that big could be transported whole. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-four days a year, it did the work that surface mining made possible—safer in many respects than sending men deep underground into the old room-and-pillar mines, and efficient enough to supply the energy that built modern Ohio.

I grew up in the seventies and eighties, hearing the news coverage of strip mining in Ohio. It was always framed as an environmental catastrophe—radical voices and mainstream outlets alike talking about the “rape of the land,” the destruction of precious topsoil, acid mine drainage polluting streams, and corporate greed tearing up the earth for profit. Central Ohio was a focal point of that conversation. You couldn’t miss it. The narrative was clear: this was primitive, destructive, something that enlightened environmental regulation would eventually rein in and correct. And regulation did come—the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 imposed new standards for contouring, topsoil replacement, and revegetation. I’m not against sensible environmental protections. What concerns me is when those protections become a vehicle for anti-capitalist ideology that ignores the human benefits of energy production and pretends that the companies doing the actual work weren’t already innovating reclamation methods long before politicians and bureaucrats showed up to take credit or impose penalties.

Because here’s what you see when you stand at the Big Muskie bucket and then drive back to The Wilds: the power company that operated the machine also owned vast stretches of the land. They extracted the coal—formed over three hundred million years in ancient swamps and forests—and turned it into usable energy that lit homes, ran factories, and powered the machines that built the modern world. Then they participated in turning the worked-out land into something new and valuable. The Wilds exists in large part because of that private-sector decision to donate thousands of acres rather than walk away or fight endless legal battles. The reclamation wasn’t just compliance; it became an opportunity. What had been stripped to fuel progress was reshaped into a world-class center for wildlife conservation, research, and public education. You can sit at the Overlook Cafe or Terrace Grill at The Wilds, look out over the valley at giraffes and rhinos moving through grasslands that mining and reclamation made possible, and eat a good meal with running water and modern conveniences while the animals graze below. Try doing that with a picnic basket on raw, unrestored ground in the middle of nowhere and tell me which approach actually serves both people and wildlife better.

That contrast hit me hard. The same companies the political left loves to demonize as destroyers of the planet were the ones who made The Wilds possible. AEP’s Central Ohio Coal Company didn’t just comply with later regulations; they were already engaged in preservation and restoration efforts. The environmental movement often attaches itself to these stories after the fact, claiming moral victory while ignoring that the capital, the engineering, and the willingness to take risks came from the private sector. Without the coal extraction that powered Ohio’s growth, without the wealth created by that enterprise, there would have been far less capacity to fund or even imagine large-scale conservation projects like this one. It’s the classic pattern: innovators and producers do the hard work, create the surplus, and then the critics arrive to regulate, tax, and re-narrate history as a story of exploitation that only enlightened government could fix.

I thought about that same dynamic when we talk about today’s energy battles, particularly around nuclear power in Ohio. The two plants—Davis-Besse near Toledo and Perry near Cleveland—have long been critical to the state’s grid. I’ve heard the numbers bandied about; depending on the year and how you count, they contribute a substantial share of reliable baseload power, something in the range of ten to perhaps fifteen percent or more of Ohio’s electricity at times, and historically more when coal was dominant. The exact percentage varies in conversation, but the point is that they matter enormously for grid stability. In a state where natural gas now supplies roughly half or more of generation and coal has fallen sharply from its peak, nuclear provides the steady, high-capacity-factor power that intermittent sources can’t match. Yet for years we’ve watched political attacks from the Obama and Biden eras—subsidies fights, regulatory pressure, public narratives framing nuclear as dangerous or unnecessary—while the same voices rarely offer a credible, scalable replacement that keeps the lights on and the economy growing. It’s the Big Muskie story all over again: paint the producers as villains, ignore the benefits ordinary people receive every time they flip a switch or charge a device, and push policies that ultimately raise costs or reduce reliability for everyone, especially working families.

You see the same pattern in how the left approaches energy restriction as a tool of control. Whether it’s coal in the seventies or nuclear today, the rhetoric is that these things are existential threats to the planet and that only by limiting human access to abundant, affordable energy can we “save” the Earth. But energy is what lifts the burden of labor from human beings. A person hauling water by hand all day isn’t freer or more virtuous than one who turns a tap and uses the saved time to build, create, or rest. Electricity powers the data centers, training the AI models that will transform medicine, logistics, and discovery. It powers the factories, hospitals, schools, and farms that feed billions. The notion that we should all retreat to some primitive campfire existence—sitting around telling stories about pagan gods while the productive capacity of civilization withers—isn’t conservation; it’s a recipe for poverty and stagnation dressed up as virtue. The environmental movement has deep strains of this anti-human thinking, sometimes explicit in population-control rhetoric or degrowth economics that treat human ingenuity and consumption as the problem rather than the solution.

Standing inside that Big Muskie bucket puts it in perspective. That machine represented the best engineering of its era applied to the problem of extracting energy from the ground efficiently and at scale. It wasn’t pretty. It changed the landscape. But it also delivered the energy that made post-war Ohio prosperous, that kept factories running, that let families in Middletown and across the state live with lights, refrigeration, and opportunity their grandparents could only dream of. The coal it uncovered took three hundred million years to form; we used it in decades to build a civilization. Then the same enterprise that did the extracting turned around and helped create The Wilds on the worked land. That’s not destruction followed by cosmetic repair. That’s productive use followed by genuine restoration and the creation of new value. It’s what real conservation looks like when it’s driven by people who understand both the land and the ledger.

I kept coming back to the parallel with the fight over slavery in this country. Republicans led the effort to abolish it, at enormous cost in blood and treasure, while many Democrats and the broader establishment either defended the institution or dragged their feet. After the war, it was Republicans who pushed the early civil rights amendments and enforcement. Yet somewhere along the line, the narrative flipped, and today the party that fought to end slavery is often painted as the problem while the party whose members founded the KKK and enforced Jim Crow for generations gets to claim the moral high ground on race. The pattern repeats with energy and conservation. The companies and workers who built the power grid, engineered machines like Big Muskie, extracted the resources that industrialized the nation, and then reclaimed the land for new uses—these are treated as villains. The activists and politicians who arrived later, often with no skin in the game and plenty of opportunity for moral posturing, get to define “environmentalism” as whatever restricts the producers. It’s the same rhetorical capture, and it serves the same underlying goal: concentrating power in institutions that claim to speak for the Earth while actually limiting human potential.

At The Wilds, you see the better path. Capital enterprise created the wealth and the technology. It extracted the resource that powered progress. It then donated the land and supported the transformation into a living classroom for conservation science. The restaurant with the view, the safari vehicles, the research programs, the campground where families like mine can stay on the very ground that once fed coal into the grid—all of it exists because someone took the risk, did the work, made the profit, and then chose to leave the place better in meaningful ways. The strip mining didn’t “destroy” the land in any permanent sense; it changed it, and human ingenuity changed it again into something that now supports species that never lived here naturally in these numbers. That’s the story of civilization itself: we impose order and purpose on raw nature, we extract what we need to thrive, and when we’re at our best, we restore and improve rather than consume and abandon.

I think about my own work and the themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business—the idea that you impose your will on circumstances rather than waiting for perfect conditions, that resilience and disciplined action turn challenges into advantages. The men who ran Big Muskie didn’t have the luxury of modern environmental impact statements or endless public comment periods. They had a job to do: get the coal out safely and efficiently to keep the power flowing. They did it with machines that still boggle the mind. Then the next generation of the same enterprise looked at the worked land and saw not a scar but an opportunity for something new. That’s the gunfighter spirit applied to energy and land use. You don’t retreat from the necessary work because critics call it ugly. You do it well, you do it responsibly within reason, and you leave the place positioned for the next chapter.

Visiting both sites in the same trip—the living conservation success at The Wilds and the monumental tool that helped create the conditions for it—ought to be required for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about energy policy in this country. You can’t stand inside that bucket, read the history of how much earth it moved and how much power it ultimately enabled, then walk the safari trails where rhinos and giraffes now graze on reclaimed ground, and still believe the simple story that extraction equals destruction and only government regulators plus activists equal salvation. The truth is more interesting and more hopeful. Human beings using reason, capital, and engineering solved the problem of energy scarcity that had kept our ancestors poor and short-lived. Along the way, we made mistakes, as every generation does. But we also built the surplus that lets us fund conservation at scales that previous societies could never have imagined. The Wilds is proof of that. The Big Muskie bucket is proof of the tool that made part of it possible.

We’re in a moment right now where the same arguments are playing out over nuclear power, over natural gas development, over any serious attempt to expand reliable generation to meet the exploding demands of AI data centers and electrification. The political left still reaches for the same rhetorical weapons: portray the producers as greedy or reckless, emphasize risks while downplaying benefits, offer no realistic replacement that maintains or increases living standards, and treat any expansion of human productive capacity as inherently suspect. It’s the Big Muskie fight with better public relations. The companies that actually keep the grid running—whether legacy coal operators that have reclaimed land or the nuclear fleet that provides steady power—are doing the real work. The activists protesting outside are often performing for an audience that has never had to keep the lights on for millions of people or balance a multi-billion-dollar capital investment against regulatory uncertainty.

I came away from this trip more convinced than ever that the path forward isn’t to demonize the enterprises that built our energy foundation or to pretend that conservation requires halting human progress. It’s to recognize that the best conservation often flows from the same innovative, risk-taking, profit-seeking institutions that extract resources productively in the first place. The Wilds wouldn’t exist without the coal mining that preceded it. The power that lets us enjoy air-conditioned homes, smartphones, and yes, even the electric vehicles some environmentalists champion, comes from somewhere. Right now, a significant portion of that, somewhere in Ohio, includes the steady output of our nuclear plants. We should be building more of that kind of reliable, high-density energy, not tearing it down under the guise of protecting a planet that has survived far worse than human industry and will continue long after our current debates are forgotten.

If you ever find yourself in southeastern Ohio, do what we did. Spend a few days at Hellbender Campground or one of the other lodging options at The Wilds. Take the open-air safari and watch animals that have no business being in Ohio thriving on land that mining and reclamation made suitable for them. Then drive south a short way to Miner’s Memorial Park and stand inside the Big Muskie bucket. Touch the steel. Imagine the machine walking across the landscape, the bucket biting into the earth, the coal coming out to feed the boilers that kept the grid alive. Talk to the exhibits about the workers who ran it and the land that came after. Then go back to The Wilds and have lunch at the overlook with a view of the valley. You’ll see, as I did, that the story of energy in America isn’t a simple morality play of villains and heroes. It’s the story of human beings using their minds and their tools to turn raw materials into civilization, and then, at our best, using the surplus to restore and improve what we touched.

That trip reminded me why I keep returning to these themes in my writing and podcast. The battles over energy, over land use, over what counts as “conservation”—they’re never just about science or engineering. They’re about whether we believe human beings have the right and the capacity to shape the world productively, or whether we accept a vision that treats us as a problem to be managed and reduced. The Big Muskie and The Wilds together make the case for the former. They show what free people and free enterprise can accomplish when they’re allowed to work, to risk, to profit, and to give back in ways that actually endure. Everything else is commentary.

If you’ve read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you know the mindset I’m talking about—imposing order and purpose on circumstances rather than surrendering to them. That’s what built the machine, that’s what powered the grid, and that’s what turned a mined landscape into a living conservation success. We need more of that spirit, not less. The age of disclosure is here, and understanding the politics of heaven—the deeper forces behind the attacks on human energy and human life—matters more than ever. But for today, see the bucket and the park. Stand where the work was done and where the restoration happened. You’ll come away with a clearer head and a stronger conviction that the future belongs to those who build, not those who merely protest.

Footnotes

1. Specifications and operational history of Big Muskie drawn from contemporary engineering records and historical summaries maintained by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources at Miner’s Memorial Park.

2. Details on the land gift from Central Ohio Coal Company (AEP subsidiary) to the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals and the subsequent development of The Wilds come from the official history published on thewilds.org.

3. Ohio electricity generation mix data for recent years (natural gas dominant at approximately 50-59%, coal around 20-22%, nuclear from the two plants contributing roughly 10-13% of net generation) sourced from the U.S. Energy Information Administration state analysis and related reports covering the 2024-2026 periods.

4. Bucket capacity, machine weight, boom length, and total material moved by Big Muskie confirmed across multiple engineering and historical sources, including Bucyrus-Erie records and Ohio historical markers.

5. Description of current visitor experience at the Big Muskie bucket exhibit, including ability to stand inside the 220-cubic-yard bucket, based on Ohio State Parks and Ohio DNR public information as of 2025-2026.

6. Information on Hellbender RV Campground at The Wilds, its location on reclaimed land, and amenities, including safari discounts, from the official The Wilds website and 2025-2026 opening announcements.

7. Dining options at The Wilds (Overlook Cafe / Terrace Grill) with views over animal habitats confirmed via official site descriptions of food service and visitor experiences.

8. Broader context on surface mining reclamation practices pre- and post-1977 SMCRA, and the role of private land donation in creating large conservation areas, drawn from Ohio coal industry historical analyses and The Wilds timeline.

9. Recent developments regarding power purchase agreements for Ohio nuclear plants (Davis-Besse and Perry) supporting AI/data center demand, including Meta agreements announced in 2026, reported in industry and local news sources.

10. Philosophical and historical parallels regarding narratives around energy production, conservation, and political rhetoric are interpretive commentary grounded in the observable outcomes at the sites visited and long-term patterns in U.S. energy and environmental policy debates.

Bibliography

• “Big Muskie.” Wikipedia. Accessed 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Muskie (overview of specifications, history, and connection to The Wilds).

• Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Miner’s Memorial Park & Big Muskie’s Bucket.” ohiodnr.gov. Detailed visitor information and historical markers on the machine and reclamation.

• The Wilds. “History.” thewilds.org/history. Official timeline, including the land gift from Central Ohio Coal Company and the transformation of the mined land.

• U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Ohio – State Energy Profile Analysis.” eia.gov/states/OH/analysis. 2024-2026 data on electricity generation mix, nuclear contribution, natural gas, and coal shares.

• Ohio State Parks / Ohio DNR. Social media and site posts regarding the Big Muskie bucket as a tourist attraction and an engineering landmark (2025).

• The Wilds. “Hellbender RV Campground.” thewilds.org/hellbender-rv-campground. Details on the new campground on reclaimed land and visitor offerings.

• The Wilds. “Food and Shopping.” thewilds.org/food-and-shops. Descriptions of Overlook Cafe and Terrace Grill with habitat views.

• Various contemporary reports on AEP / Central Ohio Coal Company operations and reclamation achievements, including historical coal industry studies from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

• Industry announcements regarding Vistra / Energy Harbor nuclear plants and 2026 power purchase agreements with Meta for Ohio nuclear output supporting data centers.

• Historical context on Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) of 1977 and its implementation in Ohio coal regions, drawn from state and federal regulatory histories.

This essay reflects my direct observations from the family trip, historical research, and long-standing convictions about energy, innovation, and the proper relationship between human enterprise and conservation. The views expressed are my own, grounded in what I saw on the ground and in what the record shows actually works.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Conspiracies of Erika Kirk: In a lot of ways, its all too much too fast

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, has left a profound void in the conservative movement, particularly among young people drawn to his message through Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Charlie, at just 31 years old, was gunned down by a single shot to the neck from a rooftop sniper during an outdoor campus event. The accused, 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson from Washington, Utah, surrendered the next day and now faces charges including aggravated murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. Robinson reportedly stated he acted because Kirk “spreads too much hate,” highlighting the toxic polarization that can turn ideological differences into deadly violence.

Candace Owens Demands Erika Kirk's Arrest in Explosive Rant Over Charlie Kirk Death Conspiracy, Sparking Accusations of Mental Illnesspic.twitter.com/Z3G5jKzQmf
— TaraBull (@TaraBull) February 11, 2026

In the aftermath, Erika Kirk—Charlie’s wife of four years (they married in 2021)—stepped into the immense role of CEO and chairwoman of TPUSA. The organization’s board unanimously elected her shortly after the tragedy, and she has since vowed to carry on her husband’s legacy, emphasizing faith, family, and conservative values for the next generation. Erika, now in her late 30s and raising their two young children alone, delivered an emotional speech at Charlie’s memorial service held on September 21, 2025, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Thousands attended, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Her address was heavy with grief; she recounted the hospital moment seeing her husband’s wound, paused in prayer, and called on attendees to “choose Christ” while pledging the movement would endure. She received a prolonged standing ovation.

At the close of the event, President Trump concluded his own remarks hailing Charlie as a “giant of his generation” and called Erika back to the stage for a supportive hug. This moment, captured in videos and widely shared, drew attention—some viewers noted her composure amid sorrow, while others speculated on body language or attire in ways that fueled online commentary. Grief manifests differently for everyone, especially under public scrutiny. Erika has spoken of putting on a “brave face” while managing profound loss, motherhood, and leadership of a major organization. The pressure is enormous: stepping from private family life into heading a high-profile entity built on her husband’s vision, all while mourning a brutal, public tragedy.

Recent events, like TPUSA’s “All-American Halftime Show” during Super Bowl LX in February 2026, underscore ongoing cultural divides. As an alternative to the official halftime performance featuring Bad Bunny—which some conservatives criticized for its pro-immigration themes and global market appeal—TPUSA’s event featured artists like Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett. It emphasized patriotism, faith, and family values, with tributes to Charlie. Erika did not appear in person but praised it afterward on social media, saying it was “incredible,” that “Charlie would’ve absolutely loved it,” and framing it as a way to “make Heaven crowded” while honoring God and country. The contrast highlighted philosophical tensions: an America First stance rooted in sovereignty and traditional values versus broader global outreach.

Criticism of Erika has surfaced in some corners—accusations of inauthenticity, questions about her past (including pre-marriage photos from college years showing a more carefree side), or even internal TPUSA drama like staff departures and leaked audio discussions. Some speculate wildly, turning personal grief into conspiracy narratives about TPUSA shifting directions or hidden motives. Others project unmet expectations onto her, wanting a saint-like figure perpetually in mourning, perhaps akin to a “Mother Mary” archetype, rather than a young widow navigating real-life changes: biological motherhood pressures, responsibility for children without their father, and the emotional toll of sudden leadership.

Yet this overlooks the human element. Erika and Charlie’s marriage was relatively short but appeared strong and faith-centered. They built a life together in their 30s, raising kids while advancing a movement that offered young conservatives an alternative to cultural despair—replacing lost optimism in institutions like housing markets, Social Security, or generational compounding with faith-based activism. Charlie’s work, alongside figures like Steve Bannon, Jack Posobiec, John Solomon, and others in election coverage, provided reliable, in-depth analysis that resonated deeply. His generation, much like my own kids’ peers, grew up amid disappointments from prior ones—broken promises of endless prosperity—and found redemption in characters like him (or even Candace Owens from related circles, despite fluctuations).

Assassination often elevates figures posthumously, much like Martin Luther King Jr., whose impact and Bible sales surged after his death, turning him into a larger-than-life symbol. Charlie’s killing has sparked similar dynamics: grief transfers emotions onto survivors, creating pressure for Erika to embody perfection. But she’s human—37 or 38, still finding her way, dealing with survival instincts, public-facing duties, and private sorrow. Expecting her to cry constantly, wear only somber clothes, or become a nun-like figure ignores reality. People grieve variably; some compartmentalize to function, especially with kids to raise and a legacy to steward.

The controversies often stem from hurt feelings—people who admired Charlie deeply, perhaps invested emotionally in him as a proxy for missing stability in their lives. When Erika doesn’t match idealized projections (a stable front every day, no “phony” moments under stress), it breeds speculation. But there’s no evidence of underlying plots to subvert TPUSA or counter the current political order. The movement Charlie built—youth mobilization for conservative principles, Christian values, and American exceptionalism—transcends the immediacy of momentary movements. If Erika carries it forward admirably, great; if she needs time to heal (perhaps stepping back for family), someone else will rise. The ideas endure because they’re bigger situationally.

Erika deserves grace. She’s bravely taken on a massive role amid unimaginable loss. TPUSA remains one of the strongest vehicles for young people seeking faith-based alternatives in a divided culture. Supporting her means recognizing the toll: the “layers of hurt” beneath any public facade, the difficulty of sounding grounded when everything’s shattered. Personally, I think she needs to take a few years off, for her own good. And let things settle in her own head. Because people are going to read into everything she does and embed their own emotions into what they expect from her as the head of Turning Point. It’s too much to ask her to replace Charlie Kirk, and that is what a lot of people want. What everyone forgets is that the assassination itself was a devastating event that requires action, and a lot of that action hasn’t happened. In a Christian sense, the emphasis has been forgiveness which leaves everyone feeling empty as a result, and wanting to replace that action with sainthood. Then when Erika can’t present herself as a saint, people are angry with her. And that just isn’t fair to her, her family, or the relationship she had with Charlie Kirk.

The controversy surrounding Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) “All-American Halftime Show” during Super Bowl LX in February 2026 often misses a deeper, more redemptive truth about human transformation and the nature of movements built on faith. Critics have seized on the event—headlined by Kid Rock, who sang a song at the halftime event about prostitutes and strippers—as somehow incompatible with Christian values, particularly given Kid Rock’s rock ‘n’ roll persona and past lyrics that embrace rebellion, excess, and a gritty, unpolished lifestyle. Some question the wisdom of placing the “mantle of Christ” on such figures, or see it as a dilution of purity in a faith-based youth organization now led by a grieving widow.

Yet this overlooks the biblical pattern of redemption itself. The original disciples of Jesus were hardly paragons of institutionalized holiness. Fishermen, tax collectors, zealots—many were societal outcasts, rough around the edges, and far from “pure” before their calling. Peter denied Christ three times; Paul persecuted believers before his dramatic conversion. Mary Magdalene, often cited as a key follower, had a troubled past marked by affliction and societal judgment before encountering Jesus. These were “down and out” people who didn’t fit neatly into polite society, yet they carried the Christian message forward, transforming it into the global force we know today. Institutions later tried to claim and sanitize that legacy, but its origins were raw, human, and imperfect.

In the same way, the MAGA movement—and TPUSA’s cultural push—draws from individuals who’ve lived messy lives, fallen into temptations, made mistakes, and only later turned toward something bigger and better. President Trump himself, Kid Rock, and countless others in this space embody that late-in-life redirection: shaking off past errors, learning from them, and dedicating energy to positive, faith-aligned efforts like patriotism, family values, and American sovereignty. The halftime show wasn’t about perfection; it was about offering an alternative to what many saw as the NFL’s push toward a global, pro-immigration narrative via Bad Bunny’s performance. By contrast, TPUSA’s event celebrated pro-America themes, faith, and family—drawing millions of viewers (with reports of over 19 million YouTube views) and reportedly pulling attention and revenue away from the official show. Whether Roger Goodell missed an opportunity to unify rather than divide is beside the point; the response resonated because it spoke to people seeking authentic, unapologetic expressions of belief.

Erika Kirk doesn’t have to be the flawless vessel for this. She’s a young widow in her late 30s, raising two children alone after her husband’s brutal assassination in September 2025, while stepping into the immense role of CEO at TPUSA. She praised the halftime show on social media as “incredible,” noting Charlie “would’ve absolutely loved it,” and framed it as a way to “make Heaven crowded” while honoring God and country. She wasn’t even present at the event, yet she supported it fully. If she’s not the one to carry the mantle forward long-term, someone else will—the movement transcends any single person. Charlie built TPUSA as a vehicle for young conservatives to find purpose amid cultural despair, replacing broken promises of endless prosperity with faith-based activism.

Criticism often stems from unrealistic expectations: that leaders must always have been holy, never stumbled, or fit a saintly mold. But humans rarely arrive at conviction without a process—mistakes, detours, and all. The healthy thing is seeing people dedicate themselves to something greater, as we see in the MAGA-aligned push and TPUSA’s efforts. Erika deserves grace as she navigates grief, leadership, and legacy. The halftime show, controversies aside, aligns with that redemptive arc: imperfect messengers pointing toward enduring values. The movement will continue, one way or another, because the ideas—faith, freedom, and national pride—aren’t dependent on flawless execution. They’re carried by those willing to step up, bumps and all.

For continued reading and research:

• Wikipedia entry on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Charlie_Kirk) – Detailed timeline, charges, and aftermath.

• Erika Kirk’s Wikipedia page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Kirk) – Background, role at TPUSA, and post-assassination leadership.

• Coverage of the memorial service, including Trump’s remarks and the hug moment (e.g., NBC News, BBC reports from September 2025).

• TPUSA’s official statements and Erika’s social media (@mrserikakirk on Instagram/X) for direct insights into her perspective.

• Articles on the Super Bowl halftime alternative (e.g., Taste of Country, Times of India) for context on cultural divides.

This isn’t about conspiracy—it’s about empathy for a young woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances, trying to honor a legacy while healing. The movement won’t stop; it evolves through people like her, or those who follow. She deserves a fair shake to find her footing.

Rich Hoffman

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Jim Cameron Has Lost It: Democrat movies are bad for theatre owners and very irresponsible

I’m not rooting for this new Avatar film to be a bust. I want the theaters breathing; I want popcorn machines humming; I want the marquee lights on for people who built these auditoriums and stuck it out through shutdowns, strikes, and the great experiment of “day‑and‑date” streaming. I’ve always liked the filmmaker; I’m not rooting for him to fail. But I can read a marketplace, and I can listen to what regular moviegoers tell each other—at the concession stand, online, at church, at work—and they’ll forgive almost anything except being lectured when they paid to be entertained. If the third one—this Fire and Ash one—lands, I’m happy for every exhibitor who cashes tickets and sells a few extra souvenir cups. If it stumbles, the reason won’t be the craft; Jim Cameron still builds technical worlds like few others. It will be the message mismatch in a market that has shifted under his feet. And that shift isn’t in our imaginations; it’s in the numbers. Opening weekend? $345 million globally, $88–89 million domestic—second‑largest global debut of 2025 behind Zootopia 2, but materially softer than The Way of Water’s $435 million holiday launch in 2022. The third film’s premium formats carried a heavy share—IMAX alone did $43.6 million, and 3D/IMAX accounted for 66% of grosses—proof that the draw remains “event tech” even when general interest cools a bit. 1 2

And yes, Jim Cameron knows exhibition math, over the years, he’s been the best at it; these films play for legs, not for a single weekend spike. The first one opened to $77 million domestically but camped at No. 1 for seven weeks and marched past $2.9 billion lifetime—still the all-time champ after reclaiming the crown via China re-release. The second one opened bigger—$134.1 million domestic—and legged out to $2.343 billion worldwide. So “Fire and Ash” starting below Way of Water doesn’t predetermine the finish line, but it does announce the current climate: domestic ticket buyers are more selective; they save their premium formats for must-see spectacles and otherwise wait for streaming. 3 4

Cameron bets that Fire and Ash can give Pandora a human core the audience bonds with again. He’s been telling the press that family—love, bonds, empathy—moved to the forefront after Way of Water’s reception, and that the “Ash People” show a different angle on the Na’vi. The studios pushed all of that: ABC’s primer explains the arc and the 197-minute run; USA TODAY walked folks through the romance pivot with Spider and Kiri; People and the official Avatar site laid out the December 19 release, cast, and creative. It’s all there if you want the meta‑story of the franchise’s evolution and Cameron’s tinkering to tune it to audience reaction. 5 6 7 8

But I’m going to say the part people mutter in the lobby: Avatar is FernGully in space, Dances With Wolves in space, hippie parables in space. Beautiful, yes. Bioluminescent, yes. But the heart isn’t the creature; it’s the ride. You can see it at Disney’s Animal Kingdom—Pandora is a marvel of engineering; Flight of Passage is a technical knockout. People queue for hours, glow under the blacklight, and walk out saying, “That was cool.” Then they turn left and head for Everest or the safari. The land is loved; the Na’vi dolls are not driving retail like Marvel or Star Wars. Pandora is foremost an experience of tech and design. 9 10

That’s the sore truth Cameron wrestles with: he won the world by selling a technical spectacle and then tried to use that platform to teach environmentalism and human restraint to a culture whose purchasing habits—phones, trucks, streaming subscriptions—declare that they want harmony with technology, not a scolding about it. If you can make the metaphor land without the wagging finger, you’re in business. But modern audiences, especially domestic ones, have tuned their ears to “message movies,” and they pick them carefully. When they don’t like yours, you feel it in the Friday night cash drawer. Ask the theater managers: they’ll tell you that premium‑format demand spikes when the spectacle is undeniable—and the rest of the release slate lives or dies by word of mouth about fun, action, and escape, not the righteousness of the lecture. 1

And since we’re talking about keeping theaters alive, let’s talk economics. The domestic yearly box office has clawed back to $8.2 billion as of mid December 2025—up from pandemic lows but still well below the $11+ billion of pre-COVID years. Ticket sales around 726 million and an average price in the $11 range (with premium surcharges pushing the “effective” average higher for event weeks) tell you how fragile attendance remains even when tentpoles overperform. Zootopia 2 blasted the family corridor and crossed $1 billion in just 17 days—the fastest PG film ever to the milestone—demonstrating that when a title hits, America still shows up with kids and grandparents. But the recovery is uneven; mid-budget adult films continue to crater, and exhibitors need reliable pipelines of four-quadrant hits to pay the rent. 11 12 13 14

Operating a theater is unforgiving math: payroll, lease, utilities, insurance, and the studio’s cut, which is heaviest in the opening weeks. Concessions are the lifeline—popcorn and soda can carry margins north of 80%; ticket revenue shares may be 70–90% to studios in week one, easing toward 50/50 later. So the survival instinct for exhibitors is simple—give them blockbusters frequently enough that the concession engine runs hot, and use subscription programs to smooth the demand curve. That’s how you pay the $83K monthly OpEx and keep the HVAC humming. When tentpoles slide, and streaming conditions lead audiences to wait, that cash‑flow logic breaks down. 15 16

Industry analysts tracked closures: roughly 5% of U.S./Canada screens gone between 2019 and 2022; AMC closed 106 net theaters through 2023; Regal/Cineworld shed dozens through bankruptcy. Foot traffic dropped by double digits across major chains in late 2023–mid 2024 because strikes delayed releases. Even with 2025’s steadier slate, domestic totals were still hovering in the low eighths by December, threatening fatigue if the holiday anchors didn’t deliver. That’s the context in which exhibitors watch Avatar 3: if it has legs, the end-of-year swing can push totals toward $9B; if it behaves like a front-loaded blockbuster without the legs, the last two weeks don’t bail out the ledger. 17 18

Meanwhile, the streaming battlefield grew sharper. Households averaged 2.9 paid streamers, spending ~$46/month, with Netflix the most used; Amazon introduced default ads unless you pay to remove them; Disney tightened windows on high‑performers like Zootopia 2, stretching theatrical exclusivity into 2026. Consumers say inflation bites their entertainment budget, but they don’t cancel streaming easily; ad-supported tiers make the price stickier. All of that pulls casual theatergoers away from opening weekends—unless the title is a true “you gotta see it on the big screen” phenomenon. That’s the point: theaters remain vital for communal spectacles; streaming dominates convenience. 19 20 21

So where does Cameron’s messaging collide with that behavior? Hollywood’s data on “woke” communication is complicated: some research finds inclusive advertising drives sales and engagement; other research warns consumers may perceive “woke‑washing,” eroding brand trust. In exhibition terms, the American audience isn’t a monolith—some will welcome explicit themes on environment, identity, or politics; others recoil if they feel preached to. When a movie becomes the avatar of a social crusade, it risks trading broad escapism for factional passion. That can be commercially fine when the target demos are wide (family animation, for instance). It’s harder when the film expects legions of repeat adult viewers to sustain $400M budgets. 22 23 24

Technically, Cameron is still a master. The franchise’s premium format share proves that—audiences paid more than the average to see the images in the best way possible. Guinness World Records still catalogs the original’s mountain of achievements: the highest-grossing 3D film at the time, the fastest to a billion at the time, and global king. Way of Water reinforced that technical leadership, but here’s the 3D lesson of the last fifteen years: outside of Avatar (and a handful of bespoke releases), 3D became a surcharge for middling conversions. Audiences noticed; the novelty wore off. When Avatar returns, people remember, “Oh, this is what 3D is supposed to feel like,” and they show up in IMAX. But it doesn’t rehabilitate 3D as a default; it just says “this franchise is the exception.” That’s both a badge of honor for Cameron and a ceiling he can’t escape: as long as the brand’s primary hook is visual immersion, the story has to be world-beating to keep legs beyond the tech hit. 25 26

You can ride that tech wave into theme parks. Pandora at Animal Kingdom opened in 2017 and became a crown jewel; it did exactly what the films do best—make you feel like you’re inside a place. But again, the halo is experiential. People gush about the floating mountains and Flight of Passage. They don’t fill shelves with Na’vi figurines the way they do Marvel characters. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s a merchandising truth that tells you what audiences connect to: the ride and the view. 10

Now, to the box office chessboard of 2025. Zootopia 2 became the highest-grossing American film of the year, blowing past $1 billion in record time for a PG title, with China acting as a rocket booster—over $430–$ 447 million there, second only to Endgame among MPA releases. Family content remains the most reliable play in a jittery market; inside Disney’s slate, you can see the split personality—animated juggernauts on one end, adult mid-budget dramedies like Ella McCay face-planting on the other. Exhibitors need the former to keep the concession margin pumping through the holidays, and they will take any Cameron-sized spectacle that keeps teens, dads, and gearheads buying premium tickets. 27 13 14

On that score, Fire and Ash didn’t exactly bomb, initially—it managed to gain a $345 million worldwide opening and posted more assertive China than Way of Water’s first frame. But domestically, it’s under the sequel’s pace. Not the kind of performance that a film like this needs, given how many resources went into making it. They are expensive to make and market. And this kind of performance doesn’t come close to what the industry needs. Analysts called out the new reality: three years after Way of Water—without the thirteen-year nostalgia gap—brand saturation and the streaming habit create a ceiling. Cameron is competing against his own legacy. The question is legs: holiday weekdays that behave like weekends, repeat viewings in premium formats, and the overseas skew that has always been Pandora’s ally. If the film holds like the first two, the break-even—reported budgets of ~$400 million plus $150 million in marketing—demand $1B+ to be comfortable. Disney’s decision tree on parts 4 and 5 will look at those legs, not the Friday surge. 28 29

But let’s say the worst happens and domestic audiences shrug after two weekends. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean theaters are doomed. It means studios must feed exhibitors with a genre spread that respects what Americans actually buy: action they can cheer, family movies they can share, comedy that feels “earned” not sermonized, and adult thrillers that find urgency beyond streaming. The market is proving it will sprint for the right reasons—look at 2025’s slate: Minecraft, Wicked: For Good, Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth—all fueled weekends over $90–160 million. The domestic total we saw in Box Office Mojo’s year page—low eights as of Dec 22—can still jump if the holiday corridor behaves and Cameron’s legs show up. But the macro trend is stubborn: we’re not at $11 billion, and we won’t be until release pipelines and consumer habits align. 12 11

A word for the owners who lasted this long: your business is still, fundamentally, concessions powered by event content. Subscription passes (AMC Stubs A-List, Regal Unlimited) cushion attendance; laser projection, PLF screens, and dine-in service lift per-patron revenue. But your fixed costs don’t care about critical scores; they care about whether Friday brings teenagers who buy buckets of popcorn and dads who add an IPA. So when a Cameron tentpole arrives, you pray for the old magic: repeat viewings, premium surcharges, and a “must see on the big screen” vibe. That’s why, regardless of anyone’s politics, I want Avatar to do well enough to float the end of the year for the exhibitor class. 30

And the politics—since we’re being honest—matter in a way studios underestimated. The 2016–2025 period trained Americans to see media as partisan signaling. Some studies say inclusive marketing drives sales; other data points to backlash when consumers smell inauthenticity. The Bud Light saga, Target backlash, Disney controversies—they taught brand managers to avoid overt culture‑war stands unless they can carry the consequences. Films became lightning rods. When a blockbuster’s press tour tilts into liberal advocacy—it can polarize the chatter that would otherwise be “did you see that set piece?” Cameron seems to have steered Fire and Ash toward grief, family, and character, perhaps as a recalibration. But if the audience has already filed Avatar under “lecture about environment,” you need months of word‑of‑mouth to prove you’ve delivered a narrative they can feel passion for. 22 31

Cameron at his peak was never “woke” in the modern meme sense; he was a master of romance in catastrophe (Titanic) and man‑versus‑machine (Terminator), of Marines versus xenomorphs (Aliens). Those are universal frames you fill with craft, pace, and heart. Avatar’s universalism is visual; its message is particular. The bigger the individual, the narrower the net. Maybe Fire and Ash, with Lo’ak’s POV and Neytiri’s grief, has found the core that makes Pandora feel like a home family fights for rather than a lecture on planetary stewardship. Reviews and audience scores suggest the gap between critics (67%) and audiences (91%) is real—if the crowd likes it, the legs can happen. That’s the best-case path: the people drown out the pundits and get their friends to go. 32

As for me, I’m still walking into Pandora at Animal Kingdom and grinning at the floating mountains. I’m glad the tech exists, but my wish this holiday is practical: give exhibitors enough cash flow to survive. Give them Zootopia 2 numbers every Thanksgiving and Cameron-sized legs every Christmas, and then scatter a year with mid-range hits that fill Tuesdays. Give the owners who survived a marketplace with streaming siphons and political crossfire a break. They’re the stewards of a civic experience—strangers laughing together in the dark—that no algorithm can replace. If Fire and Ash ends up short of the Way of Water’s heights, I hope it’s still long enough to keep the box office humming while studios recalibrate toward stories that are fun first, message second, and always worth buying a large popcorn for. And when the exhibitors tally the year—$8.2B domestic, maybe a late surge to $9B if the holiday miracles stack—they’ll know the path forward. Audiences haven’t disappeared; they’ve become choosier. Earn the trip. Earn the concession upsell. But a fair warning for Cameron and the rest of the Hollywood lefty types, when you find out that people don’t support your fantasy messaging for a Democrat platform at the movies, don’t be surprised that people reject you. 33 11

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Footnotes

1. “Box Office: ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Powers to $345 Million Globally… Premium formats accounted for 66%; IMAX $43.6M.” Variety/Yahoo syndication (Dec 21, 2025). 1

2. Box Office Mojo: Avatar: The Way of Water totals and opening; franchise legs. 3

3. Wikipedia: List of box office records set by Avatar; regaining #1 worldwide via 2021 China re-release. 4

4. ABC News: “Everything to know about ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’” including runtime and Dec. 19 release. 5

5. USA TODAY: Cameron’s emphasis on relationships; Ash People context. 6

6. People.com: Fire and Ash overview; Ash People framing; Dec. 19 release. 7

7. Avatar.com: official runtime, cast, awards notes. 8

8. Walt Disney World: Pandora – The World of Avatar land overview. 9

9. Pandora – The World of Avatar (Wikipedia): acreage, attractions, opening history. 10

10. Deadline: Domestic box office crossed $8B in 2025; holiday expectations tied to Fire and Ash. 33

11. Box Office Mojo: Domestic Yearly Box Office (historical totals). 12

12. Deadline/Hollywood Reporter/Variety: Zootopia 2 crosses $1B in record time for PG; China lift. 13 34 27

13. Variety: Ella McCay opening; mid-budget adult titles struggling. 14

14. eFinancialModels: Concession margins and opening‑week revenue shares, typical breakdown. 15

15. Financial Models Lab: Example OpEx profile (payroll, lease, utilities) for a theater. 16

16. IndieWire/Yahoo: NATO/Cinema Foundation report—average ticket price $10.53 (2022) and ~5% screen decline 2019–2022. 17 35

17. RetailStat industry outlook: chain closures, strike impacts, foot‑traffic declines. 18

18. Forbes Home: 2025 streaming habits—average subs and spend; Netflix share. 19

19. Inside the Magic: Zootopia 2 theatrical window held into 2026. 20

20. Nielsen Consumer Survey (2023): inflation concerns; ad-free streaming preference stability. 21

21. Kantar Brand Inclusion Index (2024): Inclusive advertising drives purchase decisions. 22

22. Journal of Brand Management (2023/2024): “woke” brand communication engagement; polarization nuance. 23

23. International Journal of Advertising (2024/2025): woke‑washing risks to brand trust. 24

24. Guinness World Records: Avatar records; 3D/IMAX dominance; analysts projecting Fire and Ash domestic potential. 25

25. ScreenRant (Oct 14, 2025): 3D boom and decline context; post‑conversion fatigue. 26

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Bibliography & Further Reading

• Brueggemann, Tom. “The NATO Annual Report… Average Price of a Movie Theater Ticket.” IndieWire, Mar. 9, 2023. 17

• Rubin, Rebecca. “‘Zootopia 2’ Crosses $1 Billion Globally…” Variety, Dec. 12, 2025. 27

• Tartaglione, Nancy. “‘Zootopia 2’ Crosses $1 Billion… Fastest Hollywood Animation Ever.” Deadline, Dec. 12, 2025. 13

• “Avatar: The Way of Water – Box Office Mojo.” boxofficemojo.com. 3

• “List of Box Office Records Set by Avatar.” Wikipedia. 4

• “Pandora – The World of Avatar.” Walt Disney World Resort. 9

• “Pandora – The World of Avatar.” Wikipedia. 10

• “Economic Contributions of the US Movie Theater Industry (2019).” Ernst & Young for NATO (Cinema United). Aug. 2021. 36

• RetailStat. “Movie Theater Industry Outlook.” Sept. 12, 2024. 18

• Forbes Home. “2025 Media Streaming Stats You Should Know.” Nov. 27, 2025. 19

• Nielsen. “2023 Consumer Survey Report.” Nov. 2023. 21

• Kantar. “Brand Inclusion Index 2024.” July 15, 2024. 22

• Journal of Brand Management. “How persuasive is woke brand communication…” Dec. 21, 2023 (Vol. 31/2024). 23

• International Journal of Advertising. “Is woke advertising necessarily woke‑washing?” 2025 (accepted 2024). 24

• Guinness World Records. “Unbelievable amount of records Avatar has broken…” Dec. 19, 2025. 25

• ScreenRant. “The Rise and Fall of 3D Movies: Avatar’s Unfulfilled Promise.” Oct. 14, 2025. 26

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Trump’s War on Drug Cartels Is the Right Fight for America: Blow up more drug boats and dealers

For decades, America has tolerated a slow-motion disaster disguised as “due process” and “fairness.” While courts crawled at the speed of molasses, drug cartels pumped billions of dollars’ worth of poison into our communities. The result? Generations destroyed, families shattered, and a culture softened for collapse. President Trump’s decision to take the fight directly to cartel operations—blowing up drug boats in international waters—is not just bold; it’s necessary. This is not about policing petty crime. It’s about defending the United States from a military-grade invasion disguised as commerce. Fentanyl alone killed 73,960 Americans in the 12 months ending April 2025, according to CDC data. That’s more than the total U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam. When Trump authorized strikes off the coast of Venezuela, he signaled a new era: America will no longer play defense while cartels wage war on our soil. Critics in Europe wring their hands about “due process,” but let’s be clear—cartels are not misunderstood entrepreneurs. They are terrorist organizations, and their weapon is chemical warfare.

Why did it take so long to get here? Because cartels mastered the art of hiding behind our own institutions. They’ve turned the American legal system into their own version of a Trojan horse. Every time a kingpin gets caught, billions flow into law firms to stall extradition, manipulate loopholes, and buy influence. The Sinaloa Cartel alone generates up to $11 billion annually, and much of that bankroll fuels legal defenses and bribery. Lawyers addicted to cartel money are as dangerous as people with an addiction to heroin. This isn’t hyperbole—it’s systemic corruption. Court cases drag on for years, not because justice is complicated, but because money makes complexity profitable. Meanwhile, politicians posture about “comprehensive reform” while quietly pocketing donations from interests tied to the drug economy. The result? A judiciary that moves more slowly than a glacier, while cartels move faster than a hypersonic missile. Trump’s approach bypasses this charade. No more plea deals. No more courtroom theater. When a cartel boat crosses international waters loaded with fentanyl, it’s not a defendant—it’s a target.

If you think this is just about drugs, think again. Cartels are not mere suppliers—they are warlords. Since 2006, Mexico has recorded over 460,000 homicides linked to cartel violence, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s nearly half a million lives erased in less than two decades. In 2021 alone, 18,000 people died in cartel-related conflicts. These aren’t sanitized numbers—they represent real atrocities: beheadings, bodies hung from bridges, families slaughtered to send a message. And it’s not confined to Mexico. Along the U.S. border, innocent Americans have been kidnapped, tortured, and killed—crimes that rarely make headlines because they don’t fit the narrative of “immigration reform.” Illegal immigration has been the perfect smokescreen for cartel operations, scattering enforcement resources and creating chaos by design. Every migrant caravan is a Trojan horse, hiding cartel scouts and smugglers among desperate families. This is not immigration—it’s infiltration. And every fentanyl pill that slips through is a bullet aimed at America’s future.

The time for half-measures is over. Trump’s strikes on cartel boats are a start, but they must be the beginning of a relentless campaign: destroy cartel mansions, burn their plantations, seize their offshore accounts, and dismantle their propaganda networks. Treat them as what they are—terrorists. Fentanyl is not a recreational drug; it’s a weapon of mass destruction. In FY2023, U.S. authorities seized 27,000 pounds of fentanyl at the southern border, a staggering 480% increase since 2020. That’s enough to kill every man, woman, and child in America several times over. Over 107,000 Americans died from overdoses in 2022, with fentanyl responsible for 70% of those deaths. This is not a market—it’s a battlefield. And the enemy is winning because we’ve been too polite to call this what it is: war. Trump called it. He acted. And for that, he deserves not just support but a mandate to finish the job. Blow up more boats. Raid more compounds. Cut off the financial arteries that keep this beast alive. America cannot afford another decade of courtroom theater while cartels wage chemical warfare on our streets. The choice is simple: escalate or perish.

History will judge this moment. Will we continue to let cartels poison our culture under the guise of “due process,” or will we fight back with the full force of a nation that refuses to die on its knees? Trump chose the latter, and that’s one of the reasons we elected him. Drug dealing is not a harmless, free market enterprise; it is meant to feed the worst of any society, the slack-jawed losers who supply the poison and the diabolical menaces who use them, and make them both the moral imperative of all social structure. Because of the United States’ power and its successful military, threats against it have taken the form of guerrilla warfare. They have no plans to fight a direct war with America, but they indeed plan to subvert it, which has undoubtedly been the case of many socialist countries around the world, and yes, Mexico and Canada fall in that category. They are OK to support a power like the drug cartels to cause the inward destruction of America, and even the lawyers play their part by putting their personal profit over the good of the nation. Just like the drugs the cartels deal, the money that spawns from it has given significant amounts of wealth to the legal profession in America to keep the dealers out of jail, for the most part. The drugs themselves aren’t the only addiction meant to exploit a culture to its own self-destruction, and many enemy countries to America have learned to use a much more passive-aggressive approach to military attack. Venezuela certainly falls under that category. So knowing all that, I would like to see more drug boats blown from the water. I would like to see their drug mansions raided and destroyed. I would like to see all drug assets eradicated and the perpetrators punished to the fullest extent. Drug dealing and use is not an innocent crime; it’s the poison of society itself. There is no innocent drug use when the destruction of human minds is the intent. And when you look at the many socialist countries where many of these drug dealers spawn from, the endeavor is all too obvious. They let the cartels be their military and chaos their agent of destruction as they seek to overthrow capitalism and to usher in communism as the replacement for sanity. And in large sections of America, it has been working. When you trace back the origin of many of the anti-ICE riots in America to its root cause, the perpetrators are primarily drug users who have had their minds poisoned by the cartels, and in many cases, they are proud of it. The many members of all communist movements, in most cases, also have a relationship to drug use because, in their destroyed minds, they lose the ability to think for themselves and instead seek centralized authorities to do it for them. And that is the reason why these drug dealers need a spectacular end to their life of crime and villainy. And the Trump administration couldn’t destroy enough of them to make me happy. But I am glad to see the intent headed in the right direction. I am looking forward to a lot more blowing up of drug dealers, and if the Trump team ever wants any help, call. It would be a privilege.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Conditions that Make People Poor: Bill Gates as usual, is way off the mark

In the modern discourse surrounding climate change, healthcare, and economic disparity, we often find ourselves circling the same ideological drain without ever confronting the root of the issue: how we define and address poverty. Recently, Bill Gates made headlines by walking back some of his climate change positions, suggesting that economic development must be prioritized alongside environmental goals. This echoes a more profound truth—one that Donald Trump touched on when he proposed sending healthcare payments directly to individuals rather than filtering them through bureaucratic systems. These moments reveal a fundamental tension in our society: the battle between centralized control and individual empowerment. At the heart of this tension lies a philosophical divide between those who believe in micromanaging outcomes through administrative states and those who believe in unleashing human potential through economic liberty. The former seeks to engineer fairness through redistribution, while the latter aims to cultivate prosperity by removing barriers to opportunity.

This divide is best understood through the lens of The Oz Principle, published in 1994 by Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman, a widely respected business philosophy that categorizes individuals and cultures as either “above the line” or “below the line.” I love the book and its sequel, The Oz Principle Journey, which was published in 2011, many years later, offering a wealth of new ideas that utilize Wizard of Oz metaphors to articulate effective business practices and the proper social conduct of society at large. Above-the-line thinkers are proactive, solution-oriented, and driven by positive energy. They ask, “What else can I do?” and take ownership of outcomes. Below-the-line thinkers, by contrast, dwell in a state of victimhood, blaming others and avoiding accountability. In business, cultures dominated by above-the-line thinkers thrive—they innovate, adapt, and grow. Cultures saturated with below-the-line mentalities stagnate, collapse, or become toxic. The same applies to nations. When a country fosters a culture of victimization, entitlement, and dependency, it creates systemic poverty. It’s not merely about access to resources; it’s about the mindset with which people approach life. Suppose the dominant narrative teaches individuals that they are powerless, oppressed, or owed something by the state. In that case, the result is a population that waits for handouts rather than builds solutions.

This is the trap of the administrative state, particularly as envisioned by modern leftist ideologies. The Democrat Party, increasingly driven by collectivist impulses, seeks to centralize control over healthcare, education, and economic redistribution. Their vision of “fairness” is not about equal opportunity but about equal outcomes, regardless of effort or merit. They create systems that reward victimhood and penalize initiative. Public education, once a bastion of enlightenment and upward mobility, has become a breeding ground for thought patterns that are below the line. Teachers, often radicalized by personal grievances and ideological indoctrination, pass on a worldview that prioritizes identity politics, grievance culture, and dependency over personal responsibility, excellence, and ambition. Instead of teaching Shakespeare or the principles of economics, they teach children to see themselves as oppressed, marginalized, and incapable of success without government intervention. This is not education—it’s indoctrination into failure.

As of 2025, approximately 10.1% of the global population—roughly 839 million people—live in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as surviving on less than $3.00 per day (2021 PPP). The burden of poverty is not evenly distributed across all individuals. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most affected region, with 46% of its population living in extreme poverty. Within this region, Eastern and Southern Africa report rates exceeding 53%, while Western and Central Africa hover around 35.7%. In stark contrast, high-income countries and territories, such as Europe, East Asia, and North America, report poverty rates below 1%, underscoring the profound impact of economic systems and governance on wealth distribution.

The disparity in GDP per capita between economically free and administratively controlled nations is staggering. In 2025, Luxembourg leads the world with a GDP per capita of $141,080, followed by Switzerland ($111,716), Ireland ($107,243), and Singapore ($93,956). These nations consistently rank among the highest in economic freedom indices, characterized by low regulatory burdens, strong property rights, and open markets. Meanwhile, countries with heavy administrative oversight and limited economic freedom—such as Burundi, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic—report GDP per capita figures below $1,000, reflecting the economic stagnation that results from centralized control and restricted market access.

The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) report reveals a direct correlation between economic freedom and prosperity. Nations in the freest quartile enjoy an average income of $40,376, compared to just $5,649 in the least free quartile—a 7.1x difference. The poorest 10% in free economies earn 7.9x more than their counterparts in the least free nations. Moreover, life expectancy in free countries is 15 years longer, and infant mortality rates are 6.8x lower. The UN World Happiness Index also shows that citizens in economically free nations report life satisfaction scores two points higher on average than those in restrictive economies. These metrics confirm that economic liberty is not just a path to wealth—it’s a foundation for human flourishing. If you want to help people have access to wealth, teach them, and empower them to be “above the line people.” Solution-based and to enjoy the result of that way of thinking with wealth creation, the ability to enjoy a full bank account, and the results of a task well done.

The rise of the administrative state—defined by expansive government agencies that regulate economic activity—has been linked to sluggish growth and persistent poverty. While initially intended to address industrial complexity and social inequality, these bureaucracies often stifle innovation and delay wealth creation. The U.S. federal administrative apparatus now issues thousands of regulations annually, with the Code of Federal Regulations exceeding 185,000 pages, quadruple the size of the U.S. Code of Laws passed by Congress. This regulatory overload disproportionately affects small businesses and low-income entrepreneurs, who face barriers to entry and limited access to capital. In contrast, countries that have adopted deregulation, sound monetary policies, and trade expansion have experienced significant reductions in poverty and increases in GDP.

The solution is not more government, more regulation, or more redistribution. The solution is to cultivate a culture of thinking above the line. This means empowering individuals to take control of their lives, make better decisions, and pursue success through effort and innovation. Capitalism, despite its imperfections, remains the most effective mechanism for lifting people out of poverty because it rewards productivity, creativity, and personal responsibility. When people have access to capital and the freedom to use it, they build wealth—not just for themselves, but for their communities and nations. The administrative state, by contrast, stifles this process. It throws up regulatory stop sticks, preventing people from even starting a lemonade stand. It confiscates wealth under the guise of fairness and redistributes it through inefficient bureaucracies that serve more to perpetuate their own existence than to solve problems. To reduce poverty, we must dismantle these barriers, reject the cult of victimization, and return to a model that celebrates personal agency, economic liberty, and the power of positive thinking. That’s how you build a society that thrives—not by managing poverty, but by eliminating the conditions that create it. Too much “below the line thinking” creates depraved conditions that bring down all cultures. And if you want to prevent that way of thinking, then you have to change where people are on that invisible line that we draw in the sand, above and below. It’s not a political line, it’s one of personal responsibility. And when you teach people to be victims, of course, you are then teaching them to be poor. And no amount of money that you throw at them will help them if they don’t think right about how to use it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Republicans Played Too Nicely in the Election of 2025: Who to blame in the West Chester Trustee race

It is a bit surprising to listen to everyone’s post-election analysis, where they think Democrats did a lot better than they actually did. In West Chester, Ohio, there is a lot of chest beating that Democrats found themselves in a lot of seats, especially the West Chester Trustee position, where I went to bed feeling like my guy, Mark Welch, the incumbent who has done a good job, came in third in a six-person race for two spots, was going to win. There was a Trojan horse effect there, where the average person didn’t know who the Democrats were. In the West Chester race, that certainly would be the case. Mark was a Republican-endorsed candidate, but there wasn’t much advertising for the Democrats running, as they hoped to slip under the radar without the general public knowing who they were. I still felt Mark was strong enough to win anyway. I might have had disagreements with the way that Republicans set themselves up for this election. But I wasn’t surprised by anything in Virginia, New York, or California. Where Republicans ran away from President Trump, Republicans lost to Democrats, and it’s pretty much that simple. Republicans, the same old Never Trump types, a year after his magnificent election, tried to go it alone, and they lost. I hear a lot of analysis, and they are all mostly missing the point. The Republican Party traditionalists still don’t want to admit what MAGA America really is. The West Chester race, like the Lakota levy issue, truly captured a national sentiment worth mentioning. I’ve spoken to Mark, and he’ll have the opportunity to do many great things. Meanwhile, West Chester was warned what electing a bunch of Democrats would do, which is what the Lakota school board has been experiencing. And people are going to have to learn some hard lessons.

But here’s the deal. While I support and endorse various candidates, and I certainly did endorse Mark Welch, I disagreed with the “niceness” campaign. Mark is a nice guy, but everyone has to remember he won as a Tea Party conservative, and the Republican Party at that time was led in that effort by a scrappy George Lang, who when pressed can be pretty ruthless to those he runs against. It was the Tea Party types who went out and fought to put Mark on the Board of Trustees of one of the most successful communities in America, and he has been great in that position. Over time, people have forgotten what it took to get there and what it takes to keep a community great. New York is going through that same cycle. Over time, people get complacent when things are stable for a long time, and they dare to make changes that might sound “nicer.” And when it comes to me and many political people, there are always these tagalongs who aren’t very savvy, and they certainly don’t like me. When I see Mark at an event and speak to him, there are always those who swoop in after me and ask him why he gives me the time of day. There are lots of whispers in the ears of some of these people who want to believe that the world is something other than what it is, and that I should not have a place in it. But I’ll tell you what, if I were managing Mark Welch’s campaign, he wouldn’t have lost. I would have advised him to be a lot more competitive and a less smiling, more angry, Mark. The belief was that Mark needed to get Democrats to vote for him, so he needed to be more like Lee Wong, whom conservatives thought of as safe to vote for, but who would undoubtedly receive a bleed over of Democrat votes. The belief was that in West Chester, if you wanted to win the trustee seat, Democrats would have to step over and vote for Mark.

But in truth, as it was everywhere in the country, it’s the MAGA base that supports Trump that everyone had to tap into. Because even there, there are already Democrats who have left the party and are voting for Republicans because of Trump. So, in Mark’s case, and this is the fault of all those people who whisper in his ear when I leave the room, playing “keep away” with these office seats is not the way to win. Democrats are trying to sneak under the door, and Republicans are trying not to look too mean to win over Democrats. When the real desire is for MAGA Republicans to grow in number, and people in West Chester would have loved to know that Mark was much more MAGA than just being a nice guy incumbent. The reason why Mark didn’t pull out one of the two top spots was engagement. The MAGA people, the old Tea Party types, weren’t excited about this election cycle, so they stayed home. And Democrats were desperate for relevancy, so they worked the polls, mailed out their mailers, knocked on doors, and tried to sneak under the door wherever possible so people wouldn’t know who they were. Mark worked hard, but the people around him were on their heels, and that was obvious. They were on cruise control and wanted him to play keep away, to not do anything that might steer away those Democrats that they are so afraid of.

This year, more than other years, I have been doing a lot of video coverage of important political figures, not because I’m some radical right winged maniac, as those people who were whispering to Mark criticisms toward him for even talking to me, but because I know what I’m talking about and I always know how to handle these kinds of things with an excellent track record. If someone listens to me, they will have a significantly better chance of winning their issue, regardless of who they are. I’m so good at it that lots of people want to pay me a lot of money to do it, but I look down my nose at that kind of business, because I don’t respect people who take money for something that is essentially part of our republican form of government. It should be a labor of love, in my opinion, not something you profit from. So I already don’t respect a lot of those types of people who are critical of me. Everything gets back to me, so I know who those people are. And I think so little of them that I don’t even waste my time speaking with them at a lot of those events. I see them as a waste of time. They don’t understand the game, and they don’t respect the people who vote. They are busy trying to make the world into what it isn’t. Because they like Democrats secretly, and they don’t want to fight them, they want to get along with them. I advocate destroying them. Why wouldn’t you want to destroy people who are trying to ruin our civilization? And I understand that a lot of the people I’m talking about don’t think of things on a vast scale for the actuality of existence. That’s the only way I think. So do I care if they find my outlook repulsive? Absolutely not. I see them as a waste of time, and they have a lot to learn about life. And when they give bad advice, as they certainly have been, don’t be surprised when your guy loses. Republicans lost in races they could have won because they were too nice to Democrats. And it’s that simple.

Rich Hoffman

We’re rebuilding the school board. Good management is the best way to defeat tax increases.

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

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