I like Vivek Ramaswamy. I thought he represented a genuine chance to move Ohio forward with energy, business sense, and a clear America First orientation instead of the usual managed decline. Watching him lose to Amy Acton was a real tragedy for the state. It was not inevitable. A lot of the damage came from inside the Republican Party itself—the same pattern I have watched for years where people would rather fight each other than win. The result is that Democrats get handed a candidate they can work with while the GOP tears itself up over personality, purity tests, and who is “like us.”
What the Numbers Actually Show
Statewide, Acton finished with about 52.3 percent (roughly 2.4 million votes) to Ramaswamy’s 44.4 percent (about 2.04 million). The margin was roughly eight points. She became the first woman elected governor of Ohio and the first Democrat to win the office in twenty years, in a state Trump carried by double digits in 2024.
That does not mean Ramaswamy was rejected across the board. He carried 73 of Ohio’s 88 counties. In many rural counties he ran 60, 70, even 76 percent. Acton won only 15 counties, but they included the big population centers: Cuyahoga (she took about 72 percent and 877 of 898 precincts), Franklin, Hamilton (Ramaswamy’s home county), Summit, Montgomery, Lucas, and others. Ohio has roughly 8,834 precincts. Ramaswamy won the large majority of them by number. The problem was density. A handful of urban and inner-suburban precincts delivered enough raw votes to overcome the rest of the state.
Here in Butler County the pattern was clearer and more local. Ramaswamy won with about 52.3 percent to Acton’s 44.6 percent. Turnout was strong at 59.5 percent of registered voters. Republicans also held the county commissioner’s seat (Michael Ryan) and the auditor’s office (Nancy Nix). The margins were tighter than recent presidential cycles, but the county stayed red. That is the reality on the ground where I live and work.
The NFL Analogy and the Party’s Self-Inflicted Damage
I have said this to anyone who will listen: the Republican Party right now looks like a dysfunctional NFL team in mid-season. The coaches have lost control. The offense is arguing with the defense. Practices are half-hearted because players do not want to risk injury when they already sense the season is slipping away. Fans still show up and buy the jersey or the Terrible Towel, but the product on the field is mediocre. After a few losses the front office starts blaming the quarterback, the fans start blaming the front office, and nobody cleans house. The result is another year of “good enough” that is not actually good enough.
That is what happened with Ramaswamy. There was a real opening. He had the Trump endorsement, national profile, money, and a message centered on efficiency and economic growth. Instead of locking arms, elements of the party treated him as an outsider. The identity attacks were ugly and predictable: he is Hindu, he is not “like us,” he is some kind of anchor-baby interloper. Those lines circulated in precincts and on social media. Democrats were happy to amplify them. When your own side is whispering that the nominee does not belong, you hand the other side free ammunition.
The campaign itself made unforced errors. The late attack ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother—accusing her of lying about a childhood that included abuse and instability—backfired. Even some Republicans called it out. Husted distanced himself from it. The ad ran, money was spent, and it gave Acton a sympathy story while the substantive arguments about her record as health director during COVID got buried. That is coaching malpractice. You do not need to go there when the opponent’s actual record is available.
Local Reality in Butler County and the Central Committee Problem
I know the local landscape. Sheriff Richard Jones is not my closest personal friend, but I respect him as a person and as someone who has been elected repeatedly and delivers on the law-and-order side of the job. He shows up. People notice when he walks into a place like Ace Hardware. That does not mean every decision is perfect or that powerful people never make mistakes that affect others. Ethical arguments happen. The question is whether the party rallies to win or whether central-committee factions spend their energy trying to ostracize the people who actually deliver votes.
Nancy Nix won re-election as auditor. A lot of people I work with and talk to like her. In other parts of the state she would be called a moderate or even soft; here she is a Republican who keeps the books and pushes back on unnecessary tax increases. The same pattern holds: the people who show up and do the work get results, while the internal fights over who is pure enough waste time.
The goal should be simple. Vote. Invest in the team. Buy the jersey of the people who are actually trying to win rather than treating every election as an opportunity to settle scores. When the party spends years fighting itself, Democrats walk in with a candidate who can be sold as reasonable and the results follow. Acton will now govern. That was not the only possible outcome.
What Comes Next
Most people do not have a long view. They vote for the person who promises something immediate or against the person they were told to hate. Defending capitalism, competent administration, and basic order requires standing by each other longer than one news cycle. The same forces that turn every disagreement into a purity test are the ones that leave the field open for the other side.
I have watched this pattern for decades. The coaches lose control, the players stop fully committing, and the fans are left wondering why the team underperforms relative to its talent. Ramaswamy was not perfect. No candidate is. But the opportunity that existed in Ohio was real, and a significant part of it was squandered by people inside the Republican Party who preferred the civil war to the victory. That is on us to fix if we want different results next time.
Footnotes
1. Statewide results drawn from multiple election trackers and Ohio Secretary of State unofficial counts as of early November 2026. Acton 52.3 percent (2,404,178), Ramaswamy 44.4 percent (2,039,730).
2. County and precinct analysis from Cleveland.com reporting on Acton’s 15-county win and the Cuyahoga precinct breakdown (877 of 898).
3. Butler County figures from local Journal-News coverage and Board of Elections reporting: Ramaswamy ~52.3 percent, turnout 59.5 percent.
4. Campaign controversy details from contemporaneous reporting on the mother attack ad and reactions from both parties.
Bibliography
• Ohio Secretary of State unofficial 2026 general election results and county summaries.
• Cleveland.com: “How Amy Acton won the Ohio governor’s race: A look behind the numbers” (November 2026).
• Journal-News (Butler County): coverage of local results and turnout.
• Multiple national outlets (BBC, USA Today, Dispatch, CNN) on the Acton-Ramaswamy contest and the mother-ad controversy.
• Local Board of Elections precinct-level reporting for Butler, Cuyahoga, and other counties.
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 by email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have followed the work at the Durupinar site near Doğubayazıt in eastern Turkey for some time. A university-led team under Professor Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University, working with partners including Andrew Jones of Noah’s Ark Scans, conducted the most intensive fieldwork there in 2026. They drilled inside and outside the boat-shaped formation, reaching depths of roughly 18 to 20 meters. Radar scans showed linear features, angular intersections, possible voids, and layered structures. Soil samples indicated higher organic matter inside the outline than outside it. Charred wood fragments recovered from about 30 feet down were sent for species identification and carbon dating to laboratories in Turkey and France. Results are expected in stages through early 2027, with a fuller report planned later. No laboratory confirmation has been published. Some team members have been careful not to overclaim; others have spoken more strongly about non-geological signals. The honest reading is that serious work is underway and the next several months of lab data will matter.
Large Ships in Antiquity and the Question of Capability
The biblical dimensions in Genesis 6—300 cubits long, 50 wide, 30 high—convert to roughly 450 feet on a short cubit or about 510 feet on the royal cubit used for the full-scale model at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. I have stood near that structure. It is enormous. It does not have to be seaworthy; it is a prop. A real vessel of that size would have faced wave stresses, flexing, and the practical limits of timber. Naval architects note that wooden ships encounter structural ceilings well before modern steel designs. Still, the existence of the biblical description and the later Chinese examples raise a straightforward engineering question: could pre-Bronze Age and early historic peoples organize the timber, labor, and knowledge to build very large hulls?
Gavin Menzies argued in 1421 and 1434 that Ming treasure fleets under Zheng He were far larger and ranged much farther than standard histories allow—reaching the Americas, Australia, and even Europe. I first encountered the idea of Chinese junks in an old tabletop game called Pirates and later read the books. They are adventure volumes with photographs and maps. Mainstream historians across China, Europe, and the United States have rejected the central claims as pseudohistory. Contemporary Chinese records detail the known Indian Ocean voyages in detail and do not mention the Americas or a 1434 fleet in Italy. Robert Finlay in the Journal of World History described the evidence handling as reckless. A PBS documentary with Chinese historians examined the major assertions and found none holding. The oft-cited 450-foot figure appears to derive from later compilations rather than contemporary descriptions; more careful estimates place the largest treasure ships in the 200- to 250-foot range or smaller. Even at those reduced sizes they were the largest ocean-going vessels of their day, bigger than anything Europe was building for another century and a half. The books fill a void with speculation. That does not make the void disappear.
What Survives and What the Ocean Removes
Wood does not last. The strongest physical evidence of early large timber construction often comes from protected contexts: cedar timbers buried beside Egyptian pyramids, Scandinavian boats from roughly 2300 BC, and other finds that escaped water worms and ordinary decay. The absence of a 450-foot wooden hull from any era is not proof that none were built. It is evidence that the ocean and time remove most of what is not deliberately preserved. The same logic applies to claims of early transatlantic crossings. Passive drift simulations from Japan to North America or northern Africa to South America run on the order of 80 to 90 days. A purposeful voyage with sails and navigation would be longer and riskier, but not impossible in principle for a seaworthy hull. The problem is the lack of artifacts or wrecks on those routes before the Columbian era. Imagination fills the silence. Evidence has not yet done so.
Donna D’Errico has visited the Durupinar site more than once and produced YouTube material that treats the location as interesting without treating it as confirmed. That posture is reasonable. The formation may prove geological. It may contain organic layers and anomalies that reward further study. Either outcome advances the conversation about what ancient people could organize.
Regional Connections and the Broader Pattern
Southeast Turkey, the Armenian border region, Göbekli Tepe, and related sites sit within a few hundred miles of one another—regional by the scale of the Earth’s circumference, yet concentrated enough to show early monumental construction, timber use, and cultural complexity. The Windover site in Florida preserved brain tissue, wood, and textiles in wet conditions because of unusual sealing, demonstrating that 8,000-year-old organic material can survive under the right circumstances. The archaeological trail from Anatolia toward the Americas, if it exists, would most likely run through smaller craft, coastal movement, or land bridges that have not been fully mapped, rather than through a single class of 400-foot vessels. Large ships remain part of the possible toolkit. They are not required to explain every cultural contact.
Human beings have repeatedly organized to build the biggest thing their materials and social systems allowed—pyramids, cathedrals, treasure fleets, and later rockets. The inclination is consistent. Whether the Durupinar formation contains the remains of a vessel described in Genesis, a different ancient structure, or a natural feature with interesting anomalies, the fieldwork underway is the correct method. Lab results on the wood and organic samples will either support further excavation or constrain the interpretation. In the meantime the scale model in Kentucky makes the engineering brief concrete. Seeing the volume of timber required, even for a non-seaworthy replica, clarifies what any real project of that size would have demanded.
I tend to think the evidence of early large-scale timber construction, wherever it survives, will continue to push the timeline of organized seafaring earlier than many textbook summaries allow. That does not require accepting every speculative voyage. It requires following the physical remains and the laboratory data as they appear. The next several months of results from the Turkish and French laboratories on the Durupinar samples will be part of that record.
Footnotes
1. 2026 Durupinar fieldwork under Sivas Cumhuriyet University (Prof. Cenker Atila) and partners: core drilling to approximately 18–20 m, radar surveys showing linear and angular features, elevated organic matter inside the formation, and recovery of charred wood fragments sent for carbon dating. Results pending; no peer-reviewed confirmation published as of early November 2026. Reporting from Jerusalem Post, Daily Sabah, Anatolian Archaeology, and related outlets.
2. Genesis 6 dimensions and Ark Encounter conversion: 300 × 50 × 30 cubits; Answers in Genesis uses a 20.4-inch royal cubit yielding a 510-foot-long structure in Williamstown, Kentucky.
3. Gavin Menzies, 1421 and 1434: widely classified as pseudohistory by professional historians. Contemporary Chinese records do not support the extended voyages claimed; see Robert Finlay, Journal of World History (2004), and the 2004 PBS examination.
4. Wooden-ship structural limits and surviving early timber finds (Egyptian cedar, Scandinavian boats ca. 2300 BC) are standard points in maritime archaeology. Transatlantic drift estimates appear in oceanographic modeling literature.
5. Windover archaeological site (Florida) and Göbekli Tepe provide well-documented examples of early organic preservation and monumental construction in their respective regions.
Selected Bibliography / Further Reading
• Contemporary reporting on the 2026 Durupinar / Noah’s Ark Scans season (Jerusalem Post, Daily Sabah, Anatolian Archaeology, Ancient Origins fact-checks).
• Genesis 6 and standard cubit conversions; Ark Encounter technical descriptions (Answers in Genesis).
• Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World and 1434; critical reviews by Robert Finlay (Journal of World History), PBS “1421” documentary materials, and Sinological responses.
• Maritime archaeology surveys of early watercraft (Egyptian, Scandinavian, and Mediterranean timber vessels).
• Site reports on Göbekli Tepe and the Windover burials.
• Naval architecture literature on the practical size limits of traditional wooden hulls.
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 by email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
The 2026 midterms delivered a mixed bag across Butler County, the state of Ohio, and the nation. Local officeholders who were on the ballot largely held or won, and I was never truly worried about my good friend Michael Ryan’s commissioner race once the early numbers started coming in. Republicans had reason for concern as the night progressed in other races, and the tighter margins reflect new voter groups, split-ticket voting, and a failure at higher levels to deliver the results people can feel in their wallets. What I said for years about Pauline, gerrymandering, jury-mandering, and the need to treat Democrats as the opponent they are proved true. Socialism was on the ballot. Democrats ran on free stuff and big government without clearly defining the costs, and a lot of insecure or younger voters bought it because Republicans did not smash-mouth them hard enough or show decisive victories on the things that matter most: gas prices, the cost of goods, and a quality of life people can actually live with.
Election Night at the Michael Ryan Watch Party and the Precinct Math
I was at Michael Ryan’s watch party with a table set up to break down precincts, the numbers behind the numbers, state races, and national races. Warren Davidson was there; he was fine locally but the early tightness everywhere put people on edge. We called Ryan’s race around 9:30 or so once enough precincts reported that his opponent could not catch him mathematically. Ryan ran a great campaign over a couple of years with strong endorsement support—this is exactly why voters need to believe in their party in Ohio instead of treating every race as an independent free-for-all. He defeated longtime incumbent Cindy Carpenter in the May primary by 72% to 28%, a historic margin according to local GOP leaders, then carried the general with roughly 57.2–57.3% (around 78,000–82,000 votes) over Democrat Mike Miller’s 42.7–42.8%. Miller, a Fairfield Township resident and first-time candidate, ran as a community volunteer focused on “bad news and controversies.” Ryan, a former Hamilton City Council member and vice mayor who works as a life insurance underwriter, emphasized economic development, lower taxes, and bringing technology and innovation to the county. Nancy Nix held the auditor’s seat with about 59% over Amy Hines. Turnout in Butler County sat near 60%. These were real wins for people who showed up and worked the ground game.
Butler County Still Leans Republican—But the Margins Tell a Story
Ramaswamy carried Butler County in the governor’s race by roughly 52.4% to Amy Acton’s 44.5%, and Warren Davidson held Ohio’s 8th District (which includes much of Butler) with about 52.1% to Vanessa Enoch’s 47.9%. That is far closer than Davidson’s previous margins of 25–38 points. Redistricting added more Democratic-leaning areas from Hamilton County, but the broader pattern is clear: even reliable Republican territory is seeing tighter races. Younger voters under 40 who have been taught that big government will give them free stuff, plus demographic shifts from people who recognize big-government tactics from places they left, are changing the math. I talked to plenty of folks beforehand who said they were not voting or would go for their guns if Democrats won big; some split tickets or stayed home because they had lost faith in the system after years of feeling the pocketbook smash. My own kids in their 30s are still conservative enough, but they did not feel passionate enough about the national tickets to put yard signs out. They blamed high gas prices on Trump and the administration. That is the real-world performance review.
Statewide Ohio: Affordability Wins the Night for Democrats
Amy Acton (D) defeated Vivek Ramaswamy (R) for governor, taking roughly 52% (about 2.4 million votes) to his 44% (about 2.04 million). She becomes the first Democrat elected governor of Ohio in 20 years and the first woman elected to the office. Sherrod Brown (D) beat incumbent Jon Husted (R) for the U.S. Senate by about 50% to 45%. Other statewide races were mixed and often close—Attorney General, Auditor, Secretary of State, Treasurer, and Supreme Court seats all saw competitive results with some Democratic gains or near-misses. Ramaswamy had Trump’s endorsement, strong name recognition from the 2024 primary and DOGE work, and a chance to look strong on the trail. Independents and some conservatives peeled off; he was painted as rich and out of touch, and a late attack ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother backfired hard with many Republicans. Acton, the former Ohio Department of Health director during the early COVID response, ran on affordability, ending corruption, and tax cuts for working families. Socialism’s populist platform—free stuff, nanny state, big taxes—won the argument where Republicans did not counter it decisively. I said all along that Vivek needed to come down to the trail and connect on results; the national and state numbers show why.
National Results: Democrats Seize the House and Senate
Got to talk to Willie today about many things, especially the elections. Have a listen!!https://t.co/s6oncS293h
Democrats took control of both the U.S. House and Senate in a historic blue wave. They flipped Senate seats in places like Kansas (first Democratic senator since 1932), Texas, Iowa, South Carolina, Ohio (Brown), and others, ending up with a clear majority (projections around 54 seats). In the House they flipped more than two dozen seats, many in Trump-won districts, and are projected well above the 218 needed. Mike Johnson was reelected in his Louisiana district but the majority is gone; his future as the top House Republican is uncertain as others position for minority leader. This is what happens when you do not protect the turf. Johnson and the leadership did not treat voter problems—especially gerrymandering fights and the need to fight hard on redistricting and election integrity—seriously enough. They played softball while Democrats played smash-mouth war-room politics. You cannot let the enemy stick around and then complain when they smash your mouth. People wanted action: Fauci still free, no real accountability on past COVID and election issues, and no decisive delivery on costs. Trump’s rallies and tough talk are not big-time wrestling. When you are in the White House, voters hold you to results. Gas prices stayed high years into the administration; people blamed the Iranian conflict (the U.S.-Israel actions beginning in late February 2026 that disrupted oil through the Strait of Hormuz and sent prices soaring), refinery capacity issues, and what looked like price-gouging. Promising money or blaming others does not substitute for lower costs of living. Democrats sabotaged where they could, then ran a campaign blaming Republicans—just as they once managed to pin slavery on the party created to end it. The midterms became a performance review, and Republicans did not get the grade they needed.
Gas Prices, the Iranian War, and Why Pocketbooks Overrode Everything Else
National average gas prices rose roughly 40% or more after the Iran conflict began, with Ohio seeing increases in the 35–48% range in key reporting. Average prices sat well above $4 a gallon in many places heading into Election Day; diesel spiked even harder in some periods. Inflation ran around 3.7% year-over-year in recent reports, with energy, groceries, and housing all elevated. Ohio households faced hundreds of dollars in extra gas costs alone from the war-related surge, on top of broader cost pressures. Trump’s administration had mechanisms—refinery capacity explanations, pressure on oil companies, clear defense of why the Iranian actions were necessary against a terrorist, Marxist, Muslim-fundamentalist regime that suppresses its own people—but they did not hammer those points hard enough or long enough for average voters. Bill Riley and others had been warning about this forever. People understand that Brent crude and gasoline are too high; complex geopolitics is harder. They ran on bringing prices down. Two years later the sabotaging by Democrats was coming to fruition, and Republicans cried foul instead of delivering smash-mouth victories people could point to. Victims look weak. Winners who lower the cost of filling the tank and putting food on the table keep their majorities.
Demographic Shifts, New Faces, and the Socialism Taught in Schools
Butler County still delivered for local Republicans, but the closer-than-usual margins at the start of the night were a scare for people used to double-digit wins. New faces less invested in long-time county politics, younger voters steeped in public-school socialism (“big government will give you stuff”), and people from places where they already lived under heavy government recognize the Democratic playbook and vote accordingly—even if their English is limited. Split-ticket voting was real. Many traditional Trump supporters showed up but without the enthusiasm of past cycles because they had not seen the results they were promised. Democrats ran a base campaign focused on affordability grievances without owning the sabotage that helped create them. Christianity and traditional measures are under pressure from a strategy that tries to hijack the language while embracing far worse ideologies; I have been covering the value of Christianity against this for a reason. We are told to abandon strong resolutions against evil while embracing something far more dangerous. That ridiculousness was on the ballot, and voters looking for a strong government that lowers costs chose the option that promised free stuff.
Party Unity, Smash-Mouth Politics, and the Path Forward
Republicans need to pull together, put differences aside, and build a party people invest in and feel good about. Do not primary your own candidates two or three days before an election. Get behind the people on the ballot for statewide races. Defend the turf on issues like FirstEnergy-style deals or redistricting instead of playing defense after the fact. Deliver real victories—low gas prices, controlled costs, accountability—that people can watch and believe. Crying foul and drawing offside penalties does not move the ball. When you lose the big seats, the punching comes too late. Locally we had wins worth being proud of: Michael Ryan’s campaign and victory, Nix’s hold, Davidson’s narrow retention. Statewide and nationally the lesson is clear—socialism’s populist platform (the one Bernie Sanders showed could work) is now mainstream Democratic strategy, and it advances when Republicans fail to give people something better to invest in. Elections are always interesting; they show you what your society has become. We have learned that the high costs in the background will hurt for a long time if Democrats now put the screws to everything. The people who wanted results and strength did not get enough of them from the national ticket. That is why the midterms of 2026 went the way they did.
Footnotes
1. Unofficial Butler County Board of Elections and Journal-News reporting: Michael Ryan 57.2% over Mike Miller 42.8%; primary win over Cindy Carpenter 72–28. Commissioner oversees ~$563 million budget and nearly 1,900 employees. Salary ~$112,502 in 2027.
2. Nancy Nix (R) ~59% over Amy Hines (D) ~41% for auditor.
3. Butler County turnout reported just under 60%.
4. Ohio Secretary of State / local results: Ramaswamy carried Butler County ~52.4% to Acton’s ~44.5%. Statewide Acton ~52% (≈2.4M) to Ramaswamy ~44% (≈2.04M); first Democratic governor in 20 years and first woman elected.
5. Warren Davidson (OH-8) ≈52.1% to Vanessa Enoch ≈47.9% (unofficial). Previous margins far larger; redistricting noted as a factor.
6. Sherrod Brown (D) ≈50% over Jon Husted (R) ≈45% for U.S. Senate.
7. National projections (AP, CNN, Axios, Politico, Ballotpedia summaries as of Nov. 4, 2026): Democrats control House (projections 220+ to well above 218) and Senate (≈54 seats after multiple flips including Kansas, Texas, Iowa, South Carolina, Ohio). Mike Johnson reelected in LA-4 but loses majority.
8. Gas price and inflation context: National averages rose ~40%+ post-late-February 2026 Iran-related conflict (Strait of Hormuz disruptions); Ohio increases in the 35–48% range reported; prices commonly above $4/gallon. CPI ~3.7% year-over-year in recent data. Multiple outlets (Fox, NBC, Reuters, Washington Post, Joint Economic Committee analyses) linked affordability/gas to midterm voter anger.
9. Acton background and campaign: Former Ohio Department of Health director; campaign focused on affordability and working-family relief. Controversial Ramaswamy ad featuring estranged mother widely reported as backfiring.
10. Local Butler County results page and Journal-News confirm Ryan, Nix, and related county outcomes. Statewide numbers consistent across WKRC, Dispatch, Ballotpedia, and Secretary of State feeds as of early Nov. 4.
Selected Bibliography / Further Reading
• Butler County Board of Elections unofficial results and Journal-News coverage of commissioner and auditor races (Nov. 3–4, 2026).
• Ohio Secretary of State election night results and county-level feeds.
• Economic context: AAA/EIA gas price data, CPI reports, and analyses from NBC News, Fox News, Reuters, and congressional Joint Economic Committee materials on Ohio household costs.
• Campaign and candidate background pieces from Journal-News (primary and general), Cincinnati Enquirer, and statewide outlets on Ramaswamy-Acton and Brown-Husted.
• Historical comparisons on Ohio gubernatorial and Senate control (last Democratic governor 2006; prior Senate patterns).
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 by email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
The Window Needs Moving, and Someone Has to Pull It
I have known Ann Becker for a long time. She knows what it takes to stand in a public meeting, take the heat, and keep talking when the institutional machinery wants to shut down the conversation. That is why I listen when Darbi Boddy speaks. She has spent years crossing the state, appearing at school board meetings, and putting uncomfortable realities on the record about how certain Islamic communities in Western countries treat the American premises of free speech, free exercise of religion, and separation of church and state. A Christian people built those premises for a Christian culture. They were never designed as a one-way shield for a competing civilizational order whose own foundational texts and majority opinion in many of its societies reject the same liberties when the roles reverse.
West Chester needs people willing to say this out loud. Mark Welch is no longer a township trustee. The current board is Ann Becker as chair, Lee Wong, and Amanda Ortiz. The board needs clear-eyed leadership that doesn’t treat every demand for religious accommodation as automatically benign. Darbi has done the preparatory public-comment work candidates used to do before seeking office. She earned a seat once. The lawyers and the process found a way to remove her from the Lakota board after a civil protection order kept her from meetings for ninety days. I do not see that removal as a victory for order. I see it as a successful effort to silence the person who kept forcing the discussion the rest of the board preferred not to have.
Darbi Boddy’s Record and the Price of Speaking Plainly
Darbi was elected to the Lakota Local Schools Board of Education in 2021 on a platform of teaching the greatness of America and opposing critical race theory and related ideological imports. Lakota serves West Chester and Liberty Townships and is one of the largest suburban districts in southwest Ohio. Her tenure was contentious. She criticized suicide-prevention mandates she believed separated parents from children, questioned curriculum, and clashed repeatedly with colleagues. A civil stalking protection order fellow board member Isaac Adi obtained in 2023 prevented her from attending meetings with him present. After 90 days of absences, the remaining members declared them insufficient and voted her off in March 2024. She has continued speaking at other boards, including Xenia, and has faced lawsuits and counterclaims over public comment and First Amendment issues. She now leads Access Ohio, focused on parent rights and traditional American values.
People call her a bull in a China shop. Aggressive clarity is often required when institutions have already accepted the progressive framing that any scrutiny of Islamic political theology is bigotry. The same institutions treat Christian residual culture as the problem to be managed. Darbi keeps pointing at the asymmetry. Islamic leadership in many Western settings has stated, in plain language or through institutional practice, the goal of replacing Christian cultural dominance with Islamic norms. She refuses to let local politicians, including those in West Chester, pretend the observation is out of bounds.
The Legal Gambit: Freedom of Religion as a One-Way Shield
Lawyers are skilled at reinterpreting English and case law to fit the argument of the moment. The modern reading of “separation of church and state” is a prime example. The Founders intended to prevent the federal government from establishing a national church or interfering with the free exercise of existing Christian denominations. They did not intend a neutrality so absolute that a competing theocratic system could use the First Amendment as cover while its own doctrines prescribe death for apostasy, second-class status for non-believers, and legal supremacy for sharia.
Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey of Muslims in thirty-nine countries found overwhelming majorities in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa favoring sharia as the official law of the land, at least for Muslims. In Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan, large shares of those who favored sharia also favored the death penalty for leaving Islam. Later Pew work has shown Islam as the world’s fastest-growing major religion between 2010 and 2020, driven primarily by higher fertility and a younger median age rather than mass conversion. In Europe, the Muslim share reached roughly 6 percent by 2020; projections with continued migration put it near 10 percent by mid-century. In the United States, the absolute numbers remain smaller, but the growth rate is among the highest of any region. West Chester is home to the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, a large campus with a prominent golden dome visible from I-75, which has grown to serve tens of thousands of families since it opened in the mid-1990s.
None of this is a conspiracy theory. It is demography plus doctrine. When a community whose median opinion in many source countries rejects the equal status of other religions uses the American guarantee of free exercise to expand its institutional footprint, while simultaneously pressing for speech restrictions on “Islamophobia,” the constitutional premise is being used against the culture that created it. Lawyers can draft the accommodation language. Politicians can call the resulting pressure “tolerance.” The practical result is the gradual displacement of the prior order.
My Experiment at Kings Island’s Jason: Blood Reign
I spent the 2026 Halloween season working as Jason Voorhees in the new “Jason: Blood Reign” maze at Kings Island’s Halloween Haunt. Before guests enter, they are told the rule: the monsters will not touch you. You have complete safety. Do not touch the monsters. Thousands of people waited, sometimes for hours, for the thrill of being scared while knowing they were protected.
The parallel to the political debate is direct. In the haunted house, guests know the rules protect them. Some guests, once they understand the protection is absolute, become rambunctious. They test the boundary. A few try to punch or kick the actor. They know the performer is forbidden from retaliating. The same dynamic appears when a radical religious order treats American free-speech and free-exercise rules as a shield while advancing practices and political goals incompatible with those rules. The aggressor is told he cannot be touched. He then lashes out, confident the defender is constrained.
Out of the tens of thousands of people I scared during the season, I turned every negative or hostile encounter into a positive, and that is consistent with most things that I get involved with. It was fun and rewarding to do it on a large scale; I tested what I wanted to challenge myself with.
I read body language—shoulders, facial expressions, the way a group clustered—before they reached my position. I used the strobe, the sound, the timing of the jump. People who knew exactly where I was still jumped. Some laughed afterward and admitted they had been gotten anyway. The aggressive ones still got the scare because the common purpose of the attraction was shared: they came to be frightened. The rules constrained my physical response, but they did not constrain psychological effectiveness.
That is the practical lesson. You do not have to break the Fourteenth Amendment or the First Amendment to defend the culture. You do have to understand the strategy of the other side and refuse to pretend the asymmetry does not exist. Darbi is doing that work in public meetings. The institutional response has been to use process and protection orders to remove her from the conversation. The lawyers did their job of reinterpreting the rules. The result is that the discussion she forced is harder to have.
The Psychology of the Protected Aggressor and What the Numbers Show
The people who waited in the long line outside Blood Reign wanted the experience. They did not want to be harmed. Some still behaved poorly once they believed the rules gave them impunity. That is ordinary human behavior under asymmetric constraint. Scale it to civilizational level and the pattern is recognizable. Groups that retain high in-group preference, higher fertility, and doctrinal rejection of equal religious liberty can expand under a host culture’s free-exercise rules while the host culture is told that reciprocal scrutiny violates its own principles.
The data do not require exotic interpretation. Pew’s global religious landscape work shows Muslim population growth outpacing every other major group from 2010 to 2020. Fertility differentials, not adult conversion, drive most of the increase. In many Muslim-majority societies, majorities continue to favor legal systems in which sharia has official status. Western polling of Muslim populations shows greater moderation on average, particularly among those born in the West, yet the institutional organizations and the source-country norms travel with the migration. Local officials who treat every request for accommodation as self-evidently compatible with American order are choosing not to examine the long-term trajectory.
Ann Becker has been on the other side of contentious meetings. She knows the difference between an ideology held in a living room and the same ideology defended under public scrutiny and procedural attack. Darbi’s style is more confrontational. That style is sometimes necessary to move the Overton window back toward the place where Christian cultural continuity is treated as the default rather than the problem. The progressive platform
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.and the legal class have made adherence to the rules nearly impossible for a civil society that wishes to remain itself. The rules were written by people who assumed a shared civilizational premise. When that premise is rejected by one of the parties using the rules, the defender must name the rejection.
Moving the Window Without Breaking the Rules
I am proud of the season I spent as Jason. The work was physically demanding. It required reading people under pressure and finding a way to deliver the intended experience even when some guests tried to weaponize the safety rules. The political parallel is not perfect, but it is close enough to be useful. The guests who behaved worst still left having been scared, because the shared purpose of the attraction overrode the temporary abuse of the rules. A society that still possesses a shared purpose—constitutional loyalty, individual responsibility, and the cultural inheritance that produced those things—can do the same. It requires people willing to speak the obvious asymmetries in public, to accept the personal cost, and to keep the discussion alive after the lawyers and the process have done their best to end it.
Darbi Boddy has been doing that. West Chester has the institutional space for it now that the prior trustee arrangement has changed. The argument matters more than the personalities. Voters ultimately decide whether the community remains American in more than name or whether it continues to treat every use of its own freedoms as equally legitimate even when the user does not reciprocate. I have seen the dynamic up close, under the mask, with a large sample of ordinary people. The rules can be used against you. You can still win the encounter if you refuse to pretend the rules were written for a different game.
Bibliography
Bat Ye’or. Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005.
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel. Free Press, 2007.
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Nomad: From Islam to America. Free Press, 2010.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. (and related works on individual responsibility and cultural continuity).
Ibrahim, Raymond. Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. Da Capo, 2018.
Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Modern Library, 2003.
Pew Research Center. “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society.” April 30, 2013.
Pew Research Center. “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050.” April 2, 2015.
Pew Research Center. “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020.” June 9, 2025.
Spencer, Robert. The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS. Bombardier Books, 2018.
Spencer, Robert. The Critical Qur’an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. Bombardier Books, 2022.
Warraq, Ibn. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Prometheus Books, 1995.
Local reporting on Lakota Local Schools Board actions regarding Darbi Boddy (Cincinnati Enquirer, Dayton Daily News, FOX19, WXIX, 2021–2025).
West Chester Township Board of Trustees meeting records and official site, 2025–2026.
Kings Island Halloween Haunt 2026 materials on “Jason: Blood Reign.”
Footnotes
1. Darbi Boddy elected 2021; removed March 2024 after protection order produced ninety-day absence under Ohio Revised Code provisions allowing removal when absences are declared insufficient by two-thirds of the remaining board. See Cincinnati Enquirer, March–April 2024 coverage.
2. Pew Research Center, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” 2013. Regional medians for support of sharia as official law: South Asia 84 %, Middle East-North Africa 74 %, Southeast Asia 77 %, sub-Saharan Africa 64 %. Support for death penalty for apostasy among those favoring sharia reached 78 % in Afghanistan and was high in Egypt and Pakistan.
3. Pew Research Center, “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020,” June 2025. Muslims increased by 347 million; share of world population rose to 25.6 %. Growth driven primarily by fertility and age structure.
4. Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, West Chester Township, opened mid-1990s; large campus visible from I-75. Contemporary reporting describes service to tens of thousands of families.
5. Kings Island Halloween Haunt 2026 featured the licensed “Jason: Blood Reign” maze. Guest instructions explicitly prohibit contact with actors; actors are constrained from physical retaliation.
6. West Chester Township Board of Trustees as of 2026: Ann Becker (Chair), Lee Wong, Amanda Ortiz. Mark Welch, longtime trustee, did not continue after the 2025 election cycle.supplies the footnotes
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I received another round of texts and calls this week from people at the place where I spent twenty-five years. One of them came from a man I hired years ago, a man from Ghana who later introduced me to his children and, in time, began to treat me as a father figure in America. He is not the only one who has reached out. Several people have asked when I am coming back, whether I can fix what has become a nightmare, and whether there is any path for a return to the way things used to be. I appreciate the respect and the loyalty. It is an honor when someone from another continent decides you are the person he trusts that way. At the same time, the honest answer I need to give him—and everyone else who has written—is straightforward: go back and watch The Lion King. That is the clearest picture of what is happening, and it explains why I have no plans to return.
Twenty-Five Years and the Obligation to Set Everyone Up
I spent years trying to put people in a position where the paychecks would keep coming. That was the practical obligation. Mortgage payments, car notes, and ordinary life do not pause while leadership changes. I did what I could to arrange sustainable arrangements so that people who stayed would continue to receive regular pay for a year, two years, three years, or longer. From my side of the transaction, that was the success criterion. I left because the situation had become miserable for me personally, not because I wanted to abandon anyone. There are many ways to make money in the world; staying in a place that drains you is not required once the basic obligations have been met. I feel that I fulfilled those obligations as thoroughly as the circumstances allowed.
The man who considers me his American father was a leader on the machines and someone with whom the professional relationship grew into something more personal over time. When he told me years ago that God had directed him to come see me, I took that seriously. People of genuine faith do not say such things lightly. The same respect he showed then is present in the way he has reached out now. I value that. I also know that affection and loyalty do not change the structural facts of the place I left.
Scar’s Conspiracy and the Ruined Pride Lands
The Lion King (1994) remains one of the clearest popular stories about what happens when someone schemes for a title he cannot actually carry. Scar, Mufasa’s brother, conspires with the hyenas, engineers a stampede, and kills the king so he can seize the throne. Once he has the position, the Pride Lands deteriorate. The grass dies, the herds leave, and the remaining lions live under scarcity and fear. Scar’s rule is not an improvement; it is a slow collapse. The film makes the point without subtlety: taking the title does not confer the competence, the loyalty, or the capacity to sustain the kingdom. Ambition organized around grievance produces depletion rather than abundance.
That pattern appears in real organizations more often than people like to admit. Someone decides he can do the job better, works in the background to undermine the person currently holding it, and eventually obtains the role. The immediate result is often not improved performance but declining morale, reduced trust, and a workplace that feels worse for the people still inside it. Research on leadership transitions consistently shows measurable drops in engagement, trust, and retention after a change at the top. One global study found that after a reorganization, 88 percent of senior leaders believed the new structure would succeed while only 36 percent of employees agreed; only 22 percent of employees said they received adequate support to adapt. Other data indicate that poorly managed transitions can reduce employee performance by roughly 15 percent and that a substantial share of executive transitions are later judged failures. Communication often falls by about 20 percent in the first months after a CEO change as uncertainty rises. None of this is abstract when the people living it are calling and texting.
The Reality of Leadership Transitions
I have told people who reached out that I did my part. I arranged what I could so that paychecks would continue. Beyond that, I have no capacity or intention to re-enter the situation. I am busy. I am also taking time to recover from years of long hours and physical demand—time that was unavailable while I was responsible for keeping everyone paid. The desire for the former leader to return is understandable. Employees who trusted the previous arrangement naturally hope the person who made the place function will come back and restore it. In the film, Nala and others eventually find Simba and urge him to return. The difference is that Simba does return, confronts Scar, and restores the land. I am not that figure, and I have not left any door open for that role.
There is no Simba waiting to take the kingdom back. The place will continue in its current direction or it will not; that is now outside my control. People who need a regular paycheck can stay and work under the existing conditions. Those who find the conditions intolerable have the same option I exercised: they can leave and find another arrangement. I do not say that lightly. Changing jobs is disruptive. It is also sometimes necessary when the alternative is remaining in a declining environment run by people whose primary qualification was the desire for the title.
Why There Is No Simba Coming Back
I have no plans to return and save the pride from Scar. The years spent trying to set people up were already costly in personal terms. I did that work out of loyalty and a sense of obligation. Repeating it would not be healthy, and I have no desire to reopen that chapter. Greatness, for me, is now located elsewhere. Scar-type figures exist in many organizations; they scheme, obtain the position, and then discover that competence and care for the people under them are not automatically transferred with the title. The remaining employees have to navigate that reality themselves.
I appreciate every message that expresses affection or asks me to come back. It is good to be missed. It is also important to be clear. I fulfilled the practical duty of arranging sustainable pay where I could. I am not available to re-enter the role, and I do not expect that to change. For the man who calls me father in America, and for everyone else who wrote, the clearest reply remains the same: watch The Lion King again. Scar takes the throne through conspiracy. The Pride Lands decline under his rule. Simba eventually returns in the story. In this particular case, that return is not available. The circle of life continues either way, but it continues without me in that particular pride.
Notes
1. The Lion King, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff (Walt Disney Pictures, 1994). The film’s plot centers on Scar’s conspiracy to murder Mufasa, seize the throne, and the subsequent ecological and social collapse of the Pride Lands under his rule.
2. Standard plot summaries of The Lion King (1994) detail Scar’s alliance with the hyenas, the engineered stampede, the betrayal of Mufasa, and the later return of Simba. See also analyses of Scar as an archetype of toxic or subtractive leadership that obtains power through deception but cannot sustain the conditions that made the kingdom viable.
3. Bain & Company research (reported 2026) on organizational restructuring found large gaps between leader confidence and employee experience; only 22 percent of employees reported receiving sufficient support. Related findings appear in Gallup data on engagement declines after disruptive change and in studies of communication volume after CEO transitions (roughly 20 percent drop in the initial months). McKinsey and other sources have estimated that successful transitions reduce attrition while failed ones can reduce performance by double-digit percentages; estimates of transition failure rates commonly range into the 40 percent range within two years.
4. Leadership literature on succession and toxic leadership frequently uses narrative examples such as Scar to illustrate the difference between obtaining a title and possessing the capacity to lead. See also research on Leader-Member Exchange and engagement drops following top-level change.
Bibliography
Allers, Roger, and Rob Minkoff, dirs. The Lion King. Walt Disney Pictures, 1994.
Bain & Company. Research on organizational restructuring and employee adaptation (reported 2026).
Gallup. State of the Global Workplace reports and related analyses of engagement, change, and leadership levels.
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Studies on communication volume and uncertainty following CEO transitions.
McKinsey & Company. Research on executive transitions, retention, and performance outcomes.
Analyses of toxic leadership and narrative archetypes in The Lion King (various academic and popular treatments of Scar as manipulator versus competent steward).
Additional recommended reading: works on succession planning, employee trust after leadership change, and the practical limits of personal loyalty in organizational settings.
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.
Nate Silver’s latest FLIPR model for the November 2026 midterms has Democrats at roughly 75 percent to take the Senate and 93 percent to take the House. Those numbers treat the election as a standard second-year reaction against the party holding the White House. I do not see it that way. Silver has been wrong before when the underlying conditions changed. The conditions have changed again. Trump did not create the political order we are living in. A large group of Americans who rejected the prior direction created the opening that Trump filled. That group is still here, and the administrative class clustered around Tysons Corner does not appear to understand why.
The Model Assumes the Old Midterm Pattern Still Holds
Silver’s framework, like most quantitative election models, leans on historical patterns. The president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms. Voters register dissatisfaction with the status quo. Generic-ballot movement and polling in a handful of competitive states (Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and others) get translated into chamber-control probabilities. When the model shows Democrats leading by a few points in places Trump won comfortably in 2024, the simulation produces a blue wave.
I have watched enough of these cycles to know the pattern is not iron law. It assumes a normal presidency, normal opposition, and voters who treat the midterms as a routine check. Trump was not a normal candidate, and the coalition that put him in office was not reacting to ordinary policy drift. People watched the border, inflation, cultural institutions, and the administrative expansion and decided they wanted a different representative. Models that treat that choice as a temporary fever that cools after two years are modeling the wrong thing. They are modeling the expectation inside the permanent government that the fever will pass if they simply wait.
Watching the Permanent Government at the Tysons Corner Walmart
My wife and I have been to the Walmart in Tysons Corner enough times that we have a preferred parking level in the garage. The store sits inside a dense cluster of high-rises roughly 15–16 miles west of downtown Washington, near Langley and the concentration of defense contractors and intelligence-community support firms that define Fairfax County. It is not the freestanding big-box with the wide parking lot that most people picture when they hear “Walmart.” It is compressed vertically, stacked into the same footprint as the surrounding office and residential towers. The people shopping there are not primarily the ones who drive in from the farther suburbs for bulk groceries. A large share live and work inside the federal-contractor economy that expanded after 9/11 and never really contracted.
I have written a chapter about this place in The Politics of Heaven. The observation is not complicated. You watch people move through the freezer section for chicken nuggets and the wine aisle with the same expression I have seen in other high-density administrative centers. They are performing the motions of ordinary life while remaining largely insulated from the consequences that ordinary voters experience. Pensions are secure. Housing is expensive but stable for those inside the system. The work is process-oriented rather than output-oriented. When you talk to them, the default expectation is that presidents come and go, but the block of offices, contracts, and clearances remains. They will wait. They have waited before.
That expectation is visible in the way the midterm forecasts are discussed inside the same circle. Trump’s approval, gas prices, or a few state polls are treated as sufficient to restore the prior equilibrium. The deeper reason voters chose him—the desire for someone who would actually represent the people who do not live inside that equilibrium—is treated as noise. Silver’s probabilities reflect the same assumption at scale. The model does not need to assume conspiracy. It only needs to assume that the historical midterm reaction will reassert itself because that is what the people who live near the model’s data sources expect to happen.
Trump Was the Hand That Went Up, Not the Creator of the Demand
I have been around the Trump issue since the Tea Party period. The demand existed before he filled it. People wanted a representative who would treat the border as a border, treat the administrative state as something that could be constrained, and reject the idea that the United States should converge toward the European or coastal-institutional model. When someone raised a hand and said he would do the job, enough of them voted for him twice. The same people are still there. Some will stay home if the candidate is weak. Many more will show up if they believe the alternative is a return to the prior arrangement.
That is why I do not treat the current Senate and House probabilities as predictive. They rest on the idea that voters will punish the president’s party for the ordinary reasons and then accept whatever the permanent government produces afterward. The people I talk to outside the Tysons corridor do not describe their choice that way. They describe it as a decision not to accept managed decline, open-ended migration without assimilation, or the expansion of process jobs at the expense of productive ones. Those preferences do not expire on a fixed calendar. They persist until the underlying conditions change or until voters decide the representative they chose is no longer doing the job.
Steve Bannon and others have floated the third-term idea. That is a separate legal and political question. The more immediate point is that the coalition does not disappear when one person leaves the stage. The administrative class that believes it can simply outlast the current presidency and restore the previous operating rules is counting on a reversion that the voters who created the opening have not signaled they want. Fairfax County mansions and secure pensions are real. They are not evidence that the rest of the country has decided to fund them indefinitely under the old terms.
What the Numbers Are Actually Measuring
Silver’s model is transparent about its inputs: polls, fundamentals, historical midterm patterns, and expert ratings. Those inputs are useful when the electorate is behaving within historical ranges. They become less useful when a significant share of the electorate has already rejected the range. The 75 percent and 93 percent figures measure the current state of polling and the weight the model assigns to past midterm reactions. They do not measure whether the people who voted for enforcement, energy production, and institutional constraint have changed their minds. From what I see, they have not.
We will know more on election night. Models can be updated. Voters can be wrong about the consequences of their choices. What I do not expect is a simple return to the equilibrium that the people shopping at the Tysons Corner Walmart treat as normal. That equilibrium required the rest of the country to keep accepting arrangements they had already rejected. Trump was the available instrument. He was not the source of the rejection. Treating the midterms as the moment when the instrument is discarded and the prior arrangement resumes is the hopeful reading inside one corridor of the administrative state. It is not the reading I take from the voters who put the instrument in place.
Footnotes
1. Contemporary reporting in early-to-mid October 2026 placed Nate Silver’s FLIPR model at approximately 75 percent for Democratic Senate control and 93 percent for House control, consistent with the figures discussed here. The model incorporates polling averages, historical midterm patterns, and other fundamentals.
2. Tysons Corner (Fairfax County, Virginia) sits adjacent to major defense-contractor concentrations and roughly a short drive from CIA headquarters in Langley. The multi-level Walmart is a documented feature of the dense, high-rise development that replaced earlier suburban patterns in the area.
3. Post-9/11 defense and intelligence contracting expanded the economic footprint of Northern Virginia. Accounts of the region describe the concentration of firms, clearances, and related employment that remains visible in the local commercial landscape.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin / FLIPR methodology posts and midterm forecast updates (2026), including discussions of historical midterm waves and polling inputs.
• Paul E. Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005 (history of the defense-contractor and technology corridor).
• Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire and related reporting on the privatization of intelligence and defense functions in the Washington region.
• Victor Davis Hanson, essays on administrative growth, cultural divergence between coastal/institutional centers and the broader electorate, and the persistence of voter preferences on borders and institutions.
• Contemporary coverage of 2026 generic-ballot movement and competitive Senate races (Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and others) from multiple polling aggregators.
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (on the distinction between productive enterprise and politically protected process).
• Local and regional reporting on Fairfax County demographics, federal contracting
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
When problems arise, I work through them by grinding them out deliberately and roughly. I dive deep, often isolating myself from society’s wider noise and reading intensively during the hardest stretches of labor. This is not abstract philosophy for me. It is a method forged under physical strain—long days, sore bones, limited sleep—and it has repeatedly yielded clearer answers than comfort ever has. In 2026, the question of integrity has forced me back to that method. A currency I want to believe in has failed widely, and the only way forward has been to confront it head-on, the way Jonah was swallowed by the whale and spat back out with a message he could no longer avoid.
Years ago I established a baseline by working extreme hours: sixteen-hour days Monday through Friday, with shorter days only on the weekend. I commuted by bicycle, often an hour or more round-trip, and still managed to read during brief breaks. Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God (the multi-volume series exploring comparative mythology) was one of the books that sustained me then. Those nights around four in the morning, with ten or fifteen minutes stolen from the schedule, the pages offered a different lens on human invention of meaning. Recently the pattern has returned. I have been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s major works under similar pressure: The Reformation: A History, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, and Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. These are substantial volumes. Consumed in short segments amid physical exhaustion, they clarify rather than dilute. The hardship itself becomes part of the reading. Comfortable readers may absorb the narrative; those with bloody knuckles and joint pain tend to feel the stakes.
Integrity functions as a currency more durable than dollars. A dollar is worth a dollar. In my experience, integrity multiplies that value roughly tenfold in practical terms—employment, trust, the capacity to build lasting things. You cannot fake it on paper the way central banks can expand the money supply. When Richard Nixon suspended dollar convertibility to gold on August 15, 1971 (the “Nixon Shock”), the world moved further into a fiat system. The parallel in social discourse is the removal of fixed standards. Without a recognizable measure—historically supplied in the West by biblical teaching, the Commandments, and the Golden Rule—trust-based transactions become unreliable. Societies that abandon it find law and order harder to maintain, just as currencies without backing invite inflation and capture by those who print the paper.
Historically, Christianity functioned as an effective invention for establishing such standards. MacCulloch’s sweeping accounts show its development from earlier Mediterranean and Near Eastern roots, its encounter with Greek ideas, and its institutionalization through the first three millennia. Martin Luther’s stand at Worms in 1521—“Here I stand; I can do no other”—exemplifies the priority of conscience tethered to Scripture over institutional power. The Reformation, whatever its later complexities and conflicts, helped embed notions of individual responsibility and resistance to unchecked authority. These contributed to the broader Western emphasis on the rule of law, voluntary association, and limits on the sacralization of politics. Historians examining Christianity’s role in equality before God, the desacralization of the state, and the development of institutions of care and inquiry have documented measurable civilizational effects. Places that adopted or adapted these patterns often produced more orderly cooperation and material progress than surrounding alternatives. Israel’s relative success amid regional difficulties illustrates the same point: coherent standards, however imperfectly applied, produce measurable outcomes.
I have seen the opposite in practice. When people treat integrity as optional—prioritizing short-term advantage, food, status, or sex over consistent character—the results are shallow and destructive. Betrayals feel like the Judas kiss: anticipated, yet still corrosive. Low-integrity actors in business, politics, or consulting often operate through compromises (honeypots, selective enforcement of rules, or ideological capture of institutions). Corporate examples include lasting damage from certain marketing campaigns and cultural shifts in sports and entertainment that prioritized signaling over the reality of customers or employees. Globalist and administrative approaches that print moral or financial value without backing have repeatedly underperformed. They assume that authority or volume of paper can substitute for earned trust. History and recent experience show otherwise. Organizations built on high-integrity leadership—Elon Musk’s track record with SpaceX and Tesla is a clear case—succeed because the people involved endure the same grinding conditions at the top. Sleeping on the floor, working long hours, and refusing to outsource the hard problems produces systems capable of repeated launches and engineered excellence. Fiat substitutes do not.
My own choices have followed the same logic. I have turned down or walked away from money when it conflicted with integrity, not because money is unimportant, but because unbacked claims eventually collapse. Isolation by age, family responsibilities, and deliberate separation from comfortable consensus has sharpened the contrast. You notice how many people resent the mirror of consistent standards. They prefer environments where value can be assigned rather than earned. Christianity, for all its internal contradictions and failures across centuries (which MacCulloch documents without flinching), repeatedly reasserted a public measure against pure power or appetite. Efforts to erase that measure—whether through selective historical revision, institutional capture, or the claim that standards are merely tools of oppression—have not produced the stable, high-trust societies their advocates predicted.
The treasures worth retrieving come from the whale’s belly. Embracing the pain of disappointment, physical exhaustion, and clear-eyed observation of widespread failure does not invalidate the diagnosis. It supplies the clarity. I have written about related themes in The Politics of Heaven, which examines conspiracies and schemes against the ordering principles of creation, drawing on Milton’s Paradise Lost and the observable footprints of such dynamics. The same pattern appears in attempts to detach currency, law, and personal conduct from any fixed reference. Integrity cannot be stolen the way printed money or institutional prestige can. Those who defend it remain employable and effective even when low-integrity actors prefer their absence.
This is not a call to nostalgia or perfection. It is an observation that the most valuable currency to accumulate is the one that cannot be counterfeited by decree. Western civilization’s relative historical success is inseparable from the standards Christianity helped install and maintain. Restoring or protecting them requires the same grinding method that produces any durable result: long hours, discomfort, and refusal to accept substitutes. The alternative is continued inflation of claims and erosion of trust until the system fails in plain view.
Footnotes
1. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God (four volumes: Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, Creative Mythology), Viking Press, 1959–1968. Campbell’s comparative approach traces how cultures invent and transmit frameworks of meaning.
2. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2009). A comprehensive survey of Christian development from pre-Christian roots through global expansion.
3. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Penguin, 2005; originally Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700). Details the institutional and theological ruptures of the sixteenth century.
4. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Allen Lane, 2024). Examines evolving Christian approaches to sexuality, gender, and family across millennia, highlighting contradictions and changes.
5. Richard Nixon’s suspension of dollar-gold convertibility, August 15, 1971. See Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, “Nixon and the End of the Bretton Woods System,” and Federal Reserve History essays on the end of gold convertibility. This marked a decisive shift toward fiat arrangements.
6. Martin Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms, 1521. His refusal to recant without scriptural or reasoned conviction is a standard reference point for conscience versus institutional authority. See standard biographies and MacCulloch’s Reformation history.
7. On Christianity’s contributions to Western institutions (equality of persons, rule of law, voluntary association, limits on political power), see works by George Weigel, Larry Siedentop, Nick Spencer, and others examining pre-Enlightenment Christian sources of modern norms. Outcomes were neither uniform nor unmixed with conflict.
8. Max Weber’s thesis on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism remains a classic (if debated) account of how certain religious attitudes correlated with economic patterns. Contemporary economic historians have also traced earlier monastic and legal contributions within Christian Europe.
9. Elon Musk’s operational style at SpaceX and Tesla is widely documented in contemporary reporting: long hours, direct engineering involvement, and emphasis on iterative hard work over signaling.
10. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667). The epic’s portrayal of rebellion against ordered creation supplies a literary frame for themes of conspiracy and resistance explored in related writing.
Bibliography
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. 4 vols. New York: Viking Press, 1959–1968.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin, 2005.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. London: Allen Lane, 2024.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Silence: A Christian History. London: Allen Lane, 2013.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667.
Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Weigel, George. Various essays and books on Christianity’s civilizational impact, including contributions to discussions of Western democratic and moral foundations.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1905.
Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. “Milestones: 1969–1976 – Nixon and the End of the Bretton Woods System.”
Federal Reserve History. Essays on the end of gold convertibility, August 1971.
Blainey, Geoffrey. A Short History of Christianity. (General survey of Christian historical influence.)
Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason and related works on Christianity and the rise of Western institutions and science.
Additional relevant reading: histories of the gold standard and fiat currency (e.g., works on Bretton Woods), studies of Protestant work ethic and economic development, accounts of corporate cultural shifts in the 2010s–2020s, and primary Reformation sources including Luther’s writings.
This text is structured for straightforward copying. The core argument remains that integrity, grounded in durable standards and tested under pressure, is the non-counterfeitable currency required for any lasting personal or civilizational achievement.
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.
My daughter brought this one to me. That matters. We both carry a long love of pirates and pirate history, and there is nothing like a good story about Jeanne de Belleville—Jeanne de Clisson if you meet her in the legal papers, the Lioness of Brittany if you meet her in the legend.[1] The book that set this off is the English handling of an older French telling: Ellen O’Brien’s work on Jeanne de Belleville, built on Émile Péhant’s great 1868 narrative poem from Nantes. People say 1890. The poem is 1868. The feeling is older than both.[2] I read it the way I read most history that still has blood in the floorboards, not as a museum label. As a problem the present has not solved.
The story takes place in the 1330s and 1340s, in the first storms of the Hundred Years’ War and the Breton War of Succession. A French aristocrat. A husband slaughtered by a king. A woman who sold the prosperous life she was born into, bought ships, painted them for terror, and spent about thirteen years teaching the crown of France what a widow can become when the state puts a head on a pike and calls it law.
I know what people tell me when I talk like this. They tell me it is not very Christian. They tell me forgiveness is the higher road. They tell me revenge is a poison you drink while waiting for the other man to die. I have heard all of that. I still like the way Jeanne conducted herself more. Not because killing is pretty. Because some injuries are not misunderstandings. They are messages. And a message that goes unanswered becomes the world’s new constitution.
This is the true story, as the records and the durable legend allow us to tell it. It is also my argument. When people do you a public wrong, you owe something to the world’s justice. Jeanne understood that. England understood that she was useful. History remembered her because she was too rich, too well-born, and too bloody to file under a footnote. I want her out of the footnote.
Who Was Jeanne de Belleville?
A Poitevin heiress, not a tavern myth
Jeanne was born around 1300 in Belleville-sur-Vie in Poitou, just south of the Breton border, the daughter of Maurice IV de Montaigu and Létice de Parthenay.[3] She was not born a pirate. She was born an heiress: salt, wine, islands, castles. The islands of Yeu and Noirmoutier sat in the family world like locked cabinets of money and wind. If you want to understand the later black fleet, start here. She already knew what a coast was worth.
The early life is the ordinary violence of high birth. Married about age twelve to Geoffroy de Châteaubriant. Children. Widowed in 1326. A second marriage to Guy de Penthièvre, annulled.[4][5] Then, in 1330, the marriage that detonates the rest of the century: Olivier IV de Clisson, a Breton lord with the castle at Clisson, a house in Nantes, and lands at Blain.[6]
The Clisson marriage was power with affection inside it.
Arranged marriages are supposed to be ledgers. This one seems to have been a ledger that caught fire. Even the cautious sources keep saying they loved each other. They had children. Maurice died young. Olivier V would live to become Constable of France. Guillaume would die in a boat. Their daughter, Jeanne, would carry the name forward.[7] For thirteen years they were a border empire: Brittany on one shoulder, Poitou on the other, the Loire-Atlantique of our maps still wet with their rents.
I like that she already knew how to sue. Before she ever painted a sail, she took Olivier to law over a marriage settlement he had not paid, and the case went to the king, and she won. That is not a fainting woman. That is a woman who understood that paper is a weapon until the day paper fails, and then you find another weapon.
The World That Made Her: France, England, and Brittany
The Hundred Years’ War was a lawyers’ war with arrows
In 1337 Edward III of England and Philip VI of France stopped pretending the old argument could stay in court. Edward claimed the French crown through his mother. Philip sat on it as a Valois. Gascony, Flanders, and the Channel were the real estate. Brittany was the hinge.[8]
The Breton War of Succession
Duke John III of Brittany died in 1341 without a clear heir. Charles de Blois claimed through Jeanne de Penthièvre, with Philip VI behind him. John of Montfort claimed through the male line, with Edward III behind him.[9] Every Breton lord had to pick a roof. Pick wrong, and you are a traitor. Pick right, and you are a patriot until the next campaign season. Loyalty in that world is not a hymn. It is a weather report.
Olivier de Clisson had spent years fighting English landings. That should have made him safe. It made him useful to ruin. After French setbacks, Charles de Blois—who wanted Clisson land and Clisson influence out of the way—had the king’s ear.[10][11] A king who feels illegitimate hears treason in every low ransom and every delayed sortie. Philip heard it in Olivier.
The Trap of 1343: Tournament, Prison, Scaffold
A truce, a feast, and a lie
In January 1343, the Truce of Malestroit gave men a reason to travel. Breton lords were invited toward the French court under the manners of chivalry—tournament, sport, the old fiction that armored men can play.[12] Olivier went. The invitation was the snare. They arrested him, hauled him to Paris, held him in the Châtelet, and tried him by his peers. Charles de Blois sat among the men judging a rival whose lands he coveted. That is not a court. That is a harvest.
The execution of Olivier IV de Clisson
On Saturday, 2 August 1343, Olivier, lord of Clisson, was drawn from the Châtelet to Les Halles and beheaded on a scaffold.[13] The judgment found him guilty of treason and alliance with the king of England. Olivier protested his innocence to the last. Later English correspondence suggests some Breton lords had in fact leaned toward Edward. I will not tidy that. History is allowed to be both a judicial murder and a political guess that happened to have a grain in it. The method was still a king using a tournament as a cage.
They did not stop at the neck. They treated the body like a common criminal’s. The head was sent west to Nantes and planted on a pike at the Porte Sauvetout so that Brittany could read the sermon in bone.[14] Froissart and the men of that age flinched at it. Even a century that liked spectacles thought this one had the stink of panic on it.[15]
The image she carried: a wife, two sons, a pike
The story that will not die is this. Jeanne took her boys, Olivier and Guillaume, to Nantes and made them look at their father’s head.[16] I believe the scene because it is the kind of thing a certain kind of mother does when she decides the children will not be raised on lullabies. She is not showing them a relic. She is showing them the state. She is teaching them that the crown is an enemy and that fear is the only currency left. That is a complete rejection of the feudal order she was born to serve.
She does not see herself as a widow asking for a pension. She sees a head on a wall and a lesson that has to be paid forward.
France then convicted her in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and seized the lands.[17] She ignored the summons. Of course she did. You do not answer a letter from the man who decorated a gate with your husband.
Selling a Life to Buy a War
The conversion of an estate into a fleet
Here is the part I love without apology. Jeanne sold the world that had made her safe. Lands, jewels, the pompous attire, the furniture that tells visitors you are still in the club. Later writers like to inventory the sacrifice because the sacrifice is the moral. She did not keep a townhouse in reserve. She converted a seigneurie into violence.
First she raised men—maybe a hundred, maybe four hundred—and hit French garrisons in Brittany.[18] When the land got too hot, she took the war to the only road the king could not garrison with a single castle: the sea.
Black hulls and blood-red sails
The legend says three ships, converted from merchant cogs, with hulls painted black and sails dyed red.[19] Some versions name the flagship My Revenge.[20] Historians who like clean footnotes will cough here, and they should. We do not have the shipwright’s receipt. What we have is a visual so exact that it has survived six centuries of retelling. I treat it as operational poetry, probably sitting on top of a real small squadron.
That paint job is not fashion in a world where news moved at the speed of a wet deck and a tired horse; a black ship with red canvas in the fog of the Channel is a broadcast. She wanted to be seen. She wanted the terror to arrive before the grappling hooks. Branding is not a modern invention. It is what you do when you intend to work for years and need the enemy’s imagination working the night shift for you.
Calculated grief, not a tantrum
People talk about revenge as if it were a sneeze. Jeanne’s war lasted on the order of thirteen years—one year, the storytellers like to say, for each year of the marriage.[21] That is not a burst of rage. That is a career. Rage does not provision biscuit and inspect standing rigging. Rage does not negotiate with England. Rage does not last until the king who started it is dead and then keep going.
I call it a calculated form of grief. Grief that has accepted a job. The widow becomes a sovereign of one: her own black navy, her own foreign policy, her own theory of the body. When she took French nobles, the tradition says she used an axe on them herself and put the corpses in the water. Leave a few sailors alive. Send them home. Make them talk.[22]
Psychological Warfare in the English Channel
Why leave witnesses?
Killing everyone is hygiene. Leaving two men alive is publishing. Jeanne understood the audience. The audience was Philip VI, the court, the next captain who had to decide whether a cargo was worth the fog. In slow communication, a survivor is a newspaper. The black ship did the headline. The neck did the editorial.
She was not living outside the system. She was hiring a rival system.
This is the point amateurs miss when they call her a pirate and stop. She allied with England and with the Montfort cause in Brittany. Edward III granted her income from lands in English-held Brittany in the same year France confiscated her life.[23] In 1347, the Truce of Calais lists her as an English ally.[24] That is not a woman in a cave. That is a woman changing employers.
I have said that she was a merchant of chaos and England was the primary buyer. I still like that sentence. Personal vengeance was the fuel. Geopolitics was the market. There is always a buyer for revenge against a shared enemy. A merchant will always take the payment and go to work. Jeanne was both the widow and the firm.
Crécy, 1346: When Vengeance Became Strategy
In 1346, Edward III landed the army that would win Crécy.[25] Modern tellings put Jeanne’s ships in the supply and screening work that kept French hulls from making the Channel a French lake. I cannot put her quarterdeck at a numbered buoy. The logic is clean. A hostile widow with local pilots and a grudge is exactly the asset a cross-Channel invasion wants.
So the question people love—was she a broken woman or a useful one?—is a false door. She was both. The English did not need her to be healthy. They needed her to be pointed at France. She did not need them to love her husband. She needed ports, cover, and a market for captured canvas.
Utility does not cancel the oath. It funds it.
Thirteen Years: The Inner Weather of a Long Revenge
What does a decade of this do to a mind?
I keep getting stuck on the duration. A night of murder is a story. Thirteen years of boarding actions, winter Channel weather, noble blood, and the knowledge that one lost fight ends with your own head over a different gate—that is a vocation. The chroniclers give her the heart of a lion. Of course they do. They have no other animal left.
Was she reclaiming power by performing an ultra-masculine, ultra-violent role? Or was she becoming the monster the execution had sketched on the wall? I do not treat those as opposites. Power, in her spot, looked like the thing that had destroyed her. She put it on like armor. Armor that fits long enough becomes skin.
She was not a pirate in the cheap sense.
A pirate in the cheap sense steals for the hold. Jeanne’s hold mattered. Her targeting mattered more. French shipping. French nobles. The men whose world had clapped when Olivier fell. This is why I say she was closer to a sovereign-in-exile than to a dockside thief. She had no letter of marque we can hold up to the light.[26] She had English money, English recognition, and a war that already refused to distinguish private grief from public policy.
Shipwreck, a Dead Son, and the Cost of the Oath
Luck thins. A French force, or a storm, or both, takes the flagship. Jeanne gets off with the boys in a small boat. Five days. No water worth drinking. Guillaume dies of exposure.[27] They come ashore toward Morlaix and the Montfort world of Hennebont. The legend needs that death. Without it, the woman is only terrible. With it, she is terrible and billed.
I will not pretty this up. If you dedicate a life to revenge, the invoice does not go only to the original king. It goes to the child in the boat. That is not an argument against her. It is the receipt. Justice at that voltage has collateral. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a saint’s card, not a history.
The Later Peace: Bentley, Hennebont, and a Death on Her Own Terms
Around 1356 she married again, this time Sir Walter Bentley, an English captain who had smashed a larger Franco-Breton force at Mauron.[28] Lands came back in the English manner: Beauvoir-sur-Mer, islands, fragments of the old Atlantic belt. By 1357 the barony of La Roche-Moisan is in the file. She settles at Hennebont, a castle that had already been a Montfort rock in the worst years, and dies there about 1359.[29]
That ending is rare in the pirate catalog. Most sea-kings finish on a rope, a reef, or a friend’s knife. Jeanne finishes in a castle, having outlived Philip VI, having kept enough status that the world could not pretend she had only ever been a criminal. From one angle she is an outlaw. From another, she is a noblewoman in exile who chose a different court. Perspective is not relativism here. It is the difference between the French indictment and the English household book.
The Shakespearean Afterlife of the Family
Olivier V, the Butcher, Constable of France
The boy she took to look at a head grows up in England beside John of Montfort, learns war as a native language, then does the unthinkable and goes back to the French side.[30] He becomes Constable of France in 1380, the highest military office in the kingdom that killed his father. They called him the Butcher because he would not give prisoners the courtesy his father’s executioners had not given Olivier IV. He inherited the velocity and pointed it at whoever was standing in front of him, which for a long time meant the English.
I do not call that betrayal of the mother. I call it the family trade. Alliances in that century were never hymns to a crown. They were instruments for survival and the restoration of honor. The Clissons go from betrayal to piracy to the summit of the hierarchy that tried to erase them. That is not irony for a dinner play. That is the operating system of late feudal politics. Honor is not loyalty to a logo. Honor is refusal to be deleted.
Pirate, Privateer, and the Henry Morgan Problem
My mind goes to Henry Morgan because the English later ran the same trick at industrial scale.[31] When they needed a blade in the Caribbean, they called him a privateer. When they needed to look like a government, they called him a pirate, then knighted him anyway. There is no clean moral difference in the work. Only who stamps the paper matters.
Jeanne stands at the beginning of that European habit. France called her traitor. England called her ally. The Channel called her weather. I understand her motives. I understand the English motives. I understand why a later respectability tries to sand her down into a “controversial noblewoman.” The sanding is the tell. If she had only been a nuisance, she would be gone. She survived in ink because she was too wealthy and too well-placed to ignore even when she was covered in other men’s blood.
Legend, Record, and What We Can Actually Swear To
The romantic surface—crimson sails, the personal axe, the flagship’s name—comes to us thickened by the nineteenth century, especially Péhant’s poem, and by every retelling that needed a heroine who looks like a painting.[32] Descendants and careful modern biographers have said the embroidery is real.[33][34]
What sits on the table without the embroidery is already enough:
• A papal paper trail on the annulled second marriage.
• A French judgment of 1343 branding her a traitor and stripping her of her lands.[35]
• English grants of income from Breton lands the same year.[36]
• Her name among English allies in the Truce of Calais, 1347.[37]
• The execution record of Olivier IV at Les Halles, 2 August 1343.[38]
• Later settlement with Walter Bentley and death at Hennebont around 1359.[39][40]
That file is a woman who broke with France, was paid by England, fought in the orbit of the Channel war, and did not crawl back. The black fleet may be a costume. The war is not.
Chivalry, Christianity, and the Argument I Will Not Drop
The age of knights was already an age of heads on gates.
People hear me talk in biblical language, then hear me praise Jeanne, and think I have lost the plot. The 1330s and 1340s are the high room of official chivalry. Edward is founding the Garter. French knighthood still talks like a sacrament. And in the middle of that talk, a king lures a vassal to a tournament and cuts off his head to keep the rest of the room quiet.[41] If that is Christendom, then Christendom had already hired a butcher and called him justice.
Revenge as a moral order
I will say it in the first person so nobody has to guess. I think revenge, when it becomes the arm of justice, is good and healthy. Not petty score-settling. Not a bar fight remembered for twenty years. The answer to a public, state-grade crime that the courts will not touch because the courts are the crime. Jeanne did not have a higher court. The higher court was the man who ordered the pike. So she built a court that floated.
A lot of people will disagree. They should say so with their full chest. I am tired of the sermon that tells the injured party to be the only adult in the room while the killer keeps the gate. Forgiveness without teeth is just a way to train the next king. Jeanne refused the training.
Is that “not very Christian”? It is not very polite. The older books are less polite than the modern pulpit. They are full of widows, oaths, blood avengers, and cities that fall because nobody wanted to be rude. I am not writing a homily. I am writing about a woman who treated injustice as a thing that must be made expensive.
A good wife, in a sense the age still understood
I love Jeanne. I love that she sold everything she had to get revenge for a husband whose head was used as political signage. That is a good wife in the only sense that still has voltage. Not good because she was mild. Good because she did not let the story end where the king placed the period.
Whether the person who does that work is a woman or a man is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that when justice is needed, someone has to enforce it. Jeanne enforced it for thirteen years with a paint scheme designed to make French crews pray before they died.
Why Has No One Made the Movie?
I keep asking this, and the answer is always costume-deep. The story has everything cinema says it wants. A high-born woman. A decapitation. Children at a gate. A fleet like a nightmare. A Channel war. A son who grows up to run the army of the enemy. A last marriage and a castle death. It is more exciting than most of the fiction that gets financed, and it has the unfair advantage of having happened in outline.
That may be why it stays a footnote. A widow who is right to be terrible is hard to merchandise. You cannot make her a girlboss mascot without lying. You cannot make her a simple villain without taking Philip VI’s word for it. You have to let a woman be the arm of justice and let the audience sit in the smell. Most rooms do not want the smell. I do. My daughter does. That is why we are here.
What Jeanne de Belleville Still Teaches
If you take only the romance, you get a pirate queen for a poster. If you take only the historians’ caution, you get a confiscation order and a truce list. Take both, and you get the thing I actually care about.
A political execution is not an argument. It is a display. Displays are meant to end conversation. Jeanne reopened the conversation with iron. She turned her husband’s death into a decade of consequences for the men who ordered it and the sailors who worked their trade. She proved that a widow could be the most dangerous person in the English Channel. She also proved that blood vengeance, during war, can be a career path if you are solvent enough and well-placed enough that the other crown will buy your grief.
The family was not erased. That was the real stake. Not the private satisfaction of watching Philip flinch. The refusal to let one king’s panic delete a house. Olivier V ends up Constable. The name climbs back through the same state that tried to cut it off. Cycle, restoration, mutation. Call it Shakespearean if you want a literary bow. Call it the reason she did it if you want the prose version.
I want more Jeannes in the moral imagination—not more corpses in the water for sport, but more people who will not accept the official narrative of their own injury. When bad people do bad things to you, I do not advise you to buy three cogs and dye the canvas. I do say this. Do not help them finish the story. Do not call it holiness when you swallow a pike. Jeanne looked at the pike and built a navy. That is why her name is still here.
Closing: Black Ships, Red Sails, and a Better Day
Remember the picture, because pictures outlive arguments. A noblewoman of France sells the furniture. She paints the hulls black so that you will see her in bad light. She dyes the sails the color of the thing done to her husband. She cuts; she leaves witnesses; she feeds an English war because the English will pay for French fear. She loses a son to the same water. She marries a soldier. She dies in a castle. The boy who saw the head becomes France’s sword.
That is the story my daughter brought me. That is the story Péhant sang in 1868, and O’Brien put back into English for readers who still have a stomach. I like it because it is not safe. I like it because it treats revenge as a serious adult project rather than a guilty snack. I like it because Jeanne de Belleville looked at the highest power in her world and did not kneel.
Revenge is part of the morality of the human race. Not the whole of it. Enough of it that when justice will not come down the official stairs, someone still has to walk into the Channel. Jeanne did. I understand her. I wanted this written so the search engines and the living both have to trip over her name.
Footnotes
[1] Jeanne de Clisson (c. 1300–1359) is also recorded as Jeanne de Belleville, Jeanne Louise de Belleville, and, in later tradition, the Lioness of Brittany, the Bloody Lioness, and the Breton Tigress. See the English Wikipedia entry compiled from French legal and English diplomatic notices: Jeanne de Clisson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_de_Clisson.
[2] Ellen O’Brien, Jeanne de Belleville: The Life of Jeanne de Clisson, an English Translation and Critical Introduction (translation of Émile Péhant’s 1868 narrative poem Jeanne de Belleville). Péhant’s original appeared in Nantes in 1868 with V. Forest & E. Grimaud; the English edition is the book my daughter put in my hands.
[3] Maurice IV de Montaigu, seigneur de Belleville-sur-Vie en Poitou, et Létice de Parthenay. Jeanne inherited Belleville, Palluau, and Montaigu and, through the family, an interest in the salt and wine islands of Yeu and Noirmoutier.
[4] Her first marriage, c. 1312–1314, was to Geoffroy VIII de Châteaubriant. Two children are commonly listed: Geoffroy IX and Louise. She was widowed in 1326.
[5] A brief second union with Guy de Penthièvre was annulled, almost certainly for political reasons, with papal involvement. The legal paper trail of that annulment is one of the firmer documents attached to her name.
[6] The marriage to Olivier IV de Clisson is dated 1330. Combined, the couple controlled a seigneurial bloc on the Brittany–Poitou frontier: Clisson, Blain, lands around Nantes, and Jeanne’s Poitevin inheritance.
[7] Children generally listed from the Clisson marriage: Maurice (d. infancy), Olivier V (1336–1407), Guillaume (c. 1338–1345), and Jeanne. Some genealogies include an older daughter, Isabeau.
[8] Philip VI of Valois (r. 1328–1350) came to the throne after the Capetian line failed in the male line. Edward III of England claimed the French crown through Isabella. That dynastic quarrel is the legal skin over a much older contest for the Channel, Gascony, and Flanders.
[9] The Breton War of Succession (1341–1365) followed the death of Duke John III. Charles de Blois, backed by Philip VI of France, claimed through Jeanne de Penthièvre. John of Montfort, backed by Edward III of England, claimed through the male line. The war sat inside the larger Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).
[10] Olivier IV had fought the English in Brittany. Suspicion fell on him after English successes, including the fighting around Vannes. Charles de Blois is widely named as the courtier who poisoned the king’s mind against him.
[11] Charles de Blois (c. 1319–1364), nephew of Philip VI by marriage into the Penthièvre claim, later canonized in popular devotion and killed at Auray in 1364. Jeanne’s oath names him beside the king.
[12] The Truce of Malestroit was agreed in January 1343. Under cover of that truce, Breton lords were drawn toward Paris. Arrest under a tournament invitation is the version preserved in later narrative and in the Order of Medieval Women summary of the case.
[13] Official execution record, 2 August 1343, Les Halles, Paris: Olivier, lord of Clisson, prisoner in the Châtelet, condemned for treason and for alliances with the king of England. Head struck off on a scaffold; body treated as a traitor’s—text reproduced in modern summaries of the judgment.
[14] The head was sent to Nantes and displayed on a pike at the Porte Sauvetout (also associated in popular accounts with the castle of Bouffay). Public exhibition of a noble head in his own country was meant as a sermon.
[15] Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Froissart and his contemporaries judged Olivier IV’s execution harshly. Froissart is a court reporter with a poet’s appetite, not a modern footnote machine, but he is the age’s weather system.
[16] The story that she took her young sons, Olivier and Guillaume, to look at their father’s head is standard in the later tradition (Péhant, popular biographies, Order of Medieval Women). It cannot be footnoted to a signed diary. It is the scene the culture refused to forget.
[17] French judgment of 1343 convicted Jeanne in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and confiscated the Clisson lands. That paper is one of the hardest proofs that she did not submit.
[18] Estimates of her land force run from about 100 men (Laure Buisson’s caution) to the 400 of the more theatrical retellings. She first struck French garrisons in Brittany, including places tied to the Clisson name such as Château-Thébaud.
[19] The Black Fleet of three converted cogs, hulls painted black and sails dyed red or crimson, is the image that made her immortal. Wikipedia and most modern popular accounts mark this as “said to have” rather than as a surviving naval inventory. The image is too consistent across the legend to ignore and too late in the sources to swear by as a carpenter’s fact.
[20] Many retellings name the flagship My Revenge. That name is legend-grade, not charter-grade.
[21] Philip VI died in 1350. Tradition says she kept hunting French shipping after his death. Revenge, once it becomes a craft, does not punch out when the original face disappears.
[22] The tactic of leaving two or three sailors alive to carry the story is the legend’s psychological heart. It is also good operational art: terror travels faster than a dispatch rider when the Channel is the road.
[23] English court records from 1343 show Edward III granting Jeanne income from lands in English-controlled Brittany. That same year, France calls her a traitor; England puts her on the payroll.
[24] Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347: Jeanne named as an English ally. This is the diplomatic receipt that the “pirate queen” was also a piece on the board.
[25] Battle of Crécy, 26 August 1346. Edward III’s longbow army broke the French chivalry in Ponthieu. Control of the Channel approaches was not a side issue. It was the road the army used.
[26] On the difference between pirate and privateer: a letter of marque is a hunting license issued by a crown. No surviving royal patent for Jeanne has been produced. English pay, English land income, and a truce listing are the next best thing to a license.
[27] The sinking of her flagship, five days adrift, and the death of Guillaume by exposure appear across the later biographies. Rescue toward Morlaix and then Hennebont is the usual sequel.
[28] Sir Walter Bentley, English captain and lieutenant of Edward III, victor at Mauron (1352) with an Anglo-Breton force. Marriage to Jeanne is usually placed in the mid-1350s. By January 1357 they were granted the barony of La Roche-Moisan.
[29] Jeanne settled at the castle of Hennebont, a Montfortist port on the Blavet, and died there about 1359. The cause of death is not recorded. She outlived Philip VI by nine years.
[30] Olivier V de Clisson (1336–1407), raised in part at the court of Edward III beside John IV de Montfort, later defected to the French crown, became Constable of France in 1380 after Bertrand du Guesclin, and earned the nickname “the Butcher” for refusing quarter. See John Bell Henneman, Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
[31] Henry Morgan (c. 1635–1688) is the later English and Welsh comparison: privateer when London needed Port Royal, pirate when London needed respectability. The legal name changes. The work does not.
[32] Émile Péhant, Jeanne de Belleville (Nantes: V. Forest & E. Grimaud, 1868). Péhant was conservateur of the public library at Nantes. The poem is a nineteenth-century chanson de geste built on a fourteenth-century core.
[33] Laure Buisson, Pour ce qu’il me plaît (Paris: Grasset, 2017). Buisson argues Jeanne is the first French woman pirate for whom traces and proofs exist, while warning that the axe-and-crimson-sail romance has been richly embroidered.
[34] Astrid de Belleville, descendant and medieval historian, has said the pirate story was embellished centuries after the fact. I take the warning. I do not take it as a command to flatten the woman into a widow with a lawyer.
[35] French judgment of 1343 convicted Jeanne in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and confiscated the Clisson lands. That paper is one of the hardest proofs that she did not submit.
[36] English court records from 1343 show Edward III granting Jeanne income from lands in English-controlled Brittany. That same year, France calls her a traitor; England puts her on the payroll.
[37] Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347: Jeanne named as an English ally. This is the diplomatic receipt that the “pirate queen” was also a piece on the board.
[38] Official execution record, 2 August 1343, Les Halles, Paris: Olivier, lord of Clisson, prisoner in the Châtelet, condemned for treason and for alliances with the king of England. Head struck off on a scaffold; body treated as a traitor’s—text reproduced in modern summaries of the judgment.
[39] Sir Walter Bentley, English captain and lieutenant of Edward III, victor at Mauron (1352) with an Anglo-Breton force. Marriage to Jeanne is usually placed in the mid-1350s. By January 1357 they were granted the barony of La Roche-Moisan.
[40] Jeanne settled at the castle of Hennebont, a Montfortist port on the Blavet, and died there about 1359. The cause of death is not recorded. She outlived Philip VI by nine years.
[41] Chivalry in the 1330s and 1340s was already a costume draped over fiscal war. The Order of the Garter was founded in the 1340s. Olivier’s head is on a pike in the same decade. That is the age.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Primary and near-contemporary sources
Anselme de Sainte-Marie and M. Potier de Courcy. Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la Maison royale de France. Tome IX. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1879.
Chronique des quatre premiers Valois (1327–1393). Edited by Siméon Luce. Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 1862.
Chronographia Regum Francorum. Fifteenth-century compilation; modern references discuss its notices of the Clisson affair.
Froissart, Jean. Chroniques. Multiple manuscripts and editions; see especially the passages on the Breton war and the executions of 1343. English readers can begin with the older translations of Thomas Johnes and the modern selections in the Penguin and Yale series.
Grandes Chroniques de France, volume covering John II through Charles V.
Guillaume de Nangis, and continuators. Chronique latine, 1317–1368.
Jean le Bel. Chronique. Modern English translation: The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel, 1290–1360, translated by Nigel Bryant. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011.
Official judgment and execution notice of Olivier IV de Clisson, 2 August 1343, Paris, Les Halles, as reproduced in later legal and narrative compilations.
Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347. Diplomatic instrument listing Jeanne among English allies.
English exchequer and household notices, 1343 and after, recording grants of income to Jeanne from lands in English-influenced Brittany.
The book that started this essay
O’Brien, Ellen. Jeanne de Belleville: The Life of Jeanne de Clisson, an English Translation and Critical Introduction. English presentation of Émile Péhant’s 1868 poem, with historical and literary apparatus.
Péhant, Émile. Jeanne de Belleville. Nantes: V. Forest & E. Grimaud, 1868. Also issued in the cycle Olivier de Clisson ou la Bretagne au XIVe siècle.
Modern biographies and studies
Buisson, Laure. Pour ce qui me plaît. Paris: Grasset, 2017.
Henneman, John Bell. Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Jones, Michael. Ducal Brittany, 1364–1399. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Jones, Michael. The Creation of Brittany: A Late Medieval State. London: Hambledon, 1988.
Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War. Vol. 1, Trial by Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Vol. 2, Trial by Fire. 1999.
Allmand, Christopher. The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Fowler, Kenneth. The Age of Plantagenet and Valois. New York: Putnam, 1967.
Prestwich, Michael. The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.
Cuttler, S. H. The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Déprez, Eugène. Les préliminaires de la Guerre de Cent Ans. Paris: Fontemoing, 1902.
Brittany, succession, and the Montfort war
Le Patourel, John. Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet. London: Hambledon, 1984.
Morvan, Frédéric. La chevalerie bretonne et la formation de l’armée ducale, 1260–1341. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009.
Knowlson, George A. Jean V, duc de Bretagne, et l’Angleterre, 1399–1442. Cambridge: Heffer, 1964.
Piracy, privateering, and the Channel
Rodger, N. A. M. The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649. London: HarperCollins, 1997.
Daly, Tom. “The Incredible Story of a 14th Century French Female Pirate: The Lioness of Brittany, Jeanne de Clisson.” History Is Now Magazine, 18 October 2020.
David, Samantha. “Jeanne de Belleville: The True Story of a Noblewoman Turned Pirate.” Connexion, 17 October 2024.
Williams, Terry. “Pirate Profile: Jeanne de Clisson.” Queen Anne’s Revenge Project, 20 January 2021.
“The Revenge of Pirate Jeanne de Clisson, The Lioness of Brittany.” Ancient Origins, 25 March 2020.
Ouest-France. “Pour venger son mari décapité, Jeanne de Belleville est devenue la première pirate de l’histoire.” 30 August 2025.
France Culture / Radio France. “Jeanne de Belleville, de dame de la seigneurie à pirate sanguinaire.”
WikiTree. “Jeanne (Belleville) de Clisson (bef. 1300–abt. 1359).”
On war, honor, and the ethics readers will argue with me about
The Holy Bible. Especially the historical books and the imprecatory psalms.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, on justice and reciprocity.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, II-II, questions on vengeance, war, and justice.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality.
Kelsen, Hans. General Theory of Law and State.
Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Suggested Search Topics
Jeanne de Belleville, Jeanne de Clisson, Lioness of Brittany, Lionne de Bretagne, Lionne sanglante, Tigresse bretonne, Veuve sanglante
Olivier IV de Clisson execution 1343, Les Halles, Porte Sauvetout, Nantes, Philip VI of France, Charles de Blois
Black Fleet red sails English Channel, My Revenge flagship, Breton privateer, Hundred Years’ War piracy
Battle of Crécy 1346, Channel supply, Truce of Calais 1347, Truce of Malestroit 1343
Olivier V de Clisson, Constable of France, the Butcher, Walter Bentley, Hennebont Castle, Battle of Mauron
Émile Péhant Jeanne de Belleville 1868, Ellen O’Brien translation, Laure Buisson Pour ce qu’il me plaît
War of Breton Succession, John of Montfort, Edward III of England, female pirate medieval France
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I did not build this media form to talk about local personalities and small topics of no consequence. That is the easy road. Local talk gets hits. Local talk gets popular. I am not interested in it. I am interested in a format that lets a person go down a rabbit hole and stay there long enough to think a thought they would not have thought if the show had been engineered for an audience. Years ago, the question that started the whole habit was simple: Are we getting what we want from the education of children for the money we spend on it? The answer, then and now, was no. The same question can be asked of budgets, housing policy, the relationship between business and politics, and the names we place on large bodies of water. The method does not change. Ask the question at the level it deserves. Invite people along. Do not pander.
Anyone watching consistently knows the season we are in. Trump is in the White House. People are looking around at midterms, the price of gas, the word socialism used as if it were weather. I cover business and politics because that is where the American system is supposed to work, and because the relationship between the two is not what a civics textbook pretends it is. I enjoy the hard half of the map. You will not turn on a typical podcast and get the information nobody wants to handle in the way it should be handled. If I am not performing for more viewers, that is the approach. I am trying to encourage people to come down the rabbit hole and take whatever treasure they can carry back out.
President Trump, as a manager of the executive branch, expects people like me to fill in the blanks when he throws something controversial on the table. He renamed Lake Ontario. He called it Lake America.[1] I have said before that the emphasis was not cartography. The emphasis was provocation. Change the name. Force the discussion. What does the fight actually mean? I do not want to be the man whose entire contribution is a seminar on indigenous grievance. I also will not pretend the fight is about courtesy to a lake. The fight is about whether the United States is allowed to name its own waters without first kneeling to a political story about 1492.
Commentary — on the executive order itself: The August 27, 2026 order changes how the United States government refers to the lake. USGS electronic products were updated within hours. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, answered that the lake is called Ontario “today and forever.” New York’s governor said the state would not use the new name. About half the surface sits on the Canadian side. The legal reality is narrower than the cultural explosion: Washington can rename what Washington prints. It cannot rename what Toronto says. That gap is exactly why a name becomes a weapon. If the gesture were only petty trade-war theater, it would have died in a news cycle. It did not, because names are how institutions catechize a public.
Are We Getting What We Want from the Names We Spend Our Authority On?
I wish academia were designed for American designs. I wish a lot of our institutions had not been captured long ago. The day Trump got on the plane after his first term, I describe that departure as exile because that is what it felt like to millions of people who watched a system treat their vote as a problem to be managed. I am not going to relitigate every precinct here. I am going to say what the naming fight is downstream of: an institutional habit of treating the creation of the United States as the original sin of the continent, and of treating every pre-Columbian name as a sacrament that cannot be touched.
My first real teacher in the long-form sense was Joseph Campbell. I have lived in those lectures. Campbell understood something our public schools will not admit out loud. A great deal of a human life is spent trying to locate a place in an order—am I toward the top of the pyramid or the bottom, boss or subordinate, the person who leads the meeting or the person who cuts the grass on the side of the road? Schools are bult to establish that sorting. They are much worse at asking whether the order itself is true.[2] The same instinct that makes a teenager measure himself by house, spouse, and income is the instinct that makes a grown population easy to herd. If you were an enemy of the human race—and I will argue, as I will argue in The Politics of Heaven, that there is a non-human intelligence, call it the spirit world, call it the counsel that set itself against God—you would not need a tank. You would need the human craving to fit in. You would use names. You would use the way a culture is taught to value things. You would make some words untouchable and other words shameful. Then you would watch decent people police each other in a destructive fashion.
That is why I do not treat the indigenous-people argument as a seminar in ethnography. Ethnography is welcome. Cultures are fascinating. Their stories, legends, and rituals offer a glimpse into another time, and there is still a great deal to learn. I want archaeologists extremely well funded, even rich. I want them in the dirt. I want to spend evenings with Biblical Archaeology Review and with site reports from the Upper Peninsula. What I will not do is let a political Smithsonian wrap a living tribal present around the entire deep past of the continent and then use that wrapping to undo the United States.
The Indigenous People Argument Is a Political Machine
The academic embrace I am talking about is not “study the Haudenosaunee.” Study them. Learn the language families. Read the longhouse constitution if that is your work. The embrace I mean is the 1619-shaped habit: Europe arrives, and the story of the continent becomes death, theft, and a fall from an innocent world.[3] You can hear the same structure in other theaters. I have read papers that treat the biblical conquest of Canaan as an original crime and the modern Jewish state as its sequel, as if Yahweh were a late ethnic mascot and the land had a single rightful pagan landlord. Pagan preference is not a conspiracy in the cheap sense. It is a religious preference with political teeth. Hollywood has been more honest about its Canaanite sympathies than universities have been about theirs.
If you are going to say “indigenous people of North America” and mean it as an academic sentence rather than a chant, you do not get to start the clock in 1492, or 1619, or even 1000 CE. You have to accommodate the Windover people of Florida. You have to accommodate the copper miners of Lake Superior. You have to accommodate the drowned stone lines in the Great Lakes. You have to accept that “the Indians Columbus met” were not a timeless essence. They were people who had already replaced other people, because that is what human beings do on every continent God made.
Windover: Florida, seven to eight thousand years ago
In a pond near Titusville, not far from where rockets now leave the coast, a housing-development backhoe in 1982 lifted human bone out of peat. The police were called. Then the dates came back. The Windover pond held the dead of an Archaic people who used that water as a cemetery for a thousand years. Something like 168 individuals. Brain tissue. Woven fiber. A last meal still readable in a woman’s gut. Seven to eight thousand years before the present.[4] That is not a footnote to 1492. That is a civilization of burial custom, craft, and landscape memory standing on this peninsula while the Near East was still learning the habits that would become Egypt and Canaan.
I do not want that site used as a club against living tribes, and I do not want living tribes used as a club against that site. I want the sentence said out loud: the people of Windover are part of the indigenous story of North America, and any politics that cannot find room for them is not a politics of the past. It is a politics of the present.
The Old Copper Complex: Lake Superior and the oldest metalworking on the continent
Lake Superior is one of the wonders of the world. I do not hide that. Put-in-Bay, Mackinac, the Upper Peninsula—I love the Great Lakes the way some people love mountains. Superior also contains one of the sharpest mysteries we have. The Keweenaw and Isle Royale hold native copper of a purity that still startles metallurgists. Prehistoric pits pock the trap rock. Hammerstones lie in the fill. Organic scraps caught in copper tools have been dated into the ninth millennium before the present. Sediment cores beside the old workings have been read as mining signatures even earlier. This is the Old Copper Complex: hunter-gatherers who learned to beat, float, and vein copper into points, knives, and ornaments long before the Mediterranean named a Bronze Age.[5]
Thousands of pits. Not a weekend hobby. Not a single village knocking a nugget into a bead. An industry measured in centuries.[6] And here is the part that detonates the pamphlet version of “indigenous people”: the pamphlet wants a single moral cast—timeless tribal nations, then Columbus. The copper will not sit still for that cast. The people who opened those pits are real indigenous people of this continent. Later nations of the Great Lakes are also real. They are not the same photograph. If genetics and archaeology cannot staple the miners of 7000 BCE to the specific tribes who met the French, then an honest academy says so. A political academy changes the subject.
Commentary — what is firm, and what is a leap? Two facts are no longer eccentric. First, Archaic people of the Upper Great Lakes worked native copper very early; some dates now rival the oldest copper work in the Old World. Second, the metal is so pure it can be hammered without the smelting regimes of Cyprus or Timna. The leap—and it is a leap—is to walk that copper across the Atlantic into Solomon’s Temple or the Copper Scroll. Isotope maps of Bronze Age Europe keep finding Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, Wales, the Arabah. They have not found Keweenaw so far. My question is still the right kind of question: given the volume of metal the ancient Near East burned through, are we sure we have inventoried every source? Asking is scholarship. Treating the crossing as proven is not. The force of this argument does not require the crossing. It only requires that “indigenous” be a timeline, not a verdict.
Stone under Grand Traverse Bay
Off Traverse City, in about forty feet of water, there is a line of stone that should have ended the slogan version of prehistory by itself. Mark Holley was looking for a shipwreck and found an arrangement that the press, lazy as ever, called a Stonehenge. Holley does not like the word, and he is right not to. What he has is a long alignment on a lakebed that was dry when the lakes stood lower, with at least one boulder that some eyes read as a mastodon. Mastodons were gone from this country early. If that mark is a mark, the calendar drops into the same deep water as the copper pits.[7] Lake Huron has a cleaner case: a caribou drive-lane on a drowned hunting ground, dated to the same general world. The lakes keep the memory the textbooks compress.
When lake levels were lower, people walked landscapes we now boat over. When the English Channel was a valley, people walked to France.[8] We know migration at continental scale is not a fantasy; the first peopling of the Americas is itself a migration argument that still shifts every decade. The silly statement is not “people moved.” The silly statement is “nobody crossed open water until a Genoese sailor on a Spanish payroll made it official.” If you can keep a craft on water for forty days, you can cross an ocean. Genesis is not a Coast Guard manual, but it is a reminder that the ancient imagination did not think of the sea the way a modern tenure committee does.
The Moon-eyed people and the honesty of replacement
The Cherokee have a grievance against Andrew Jackson that American history already knows how to spell. Trail of Tears is not a rumor. Before that road west, though, Cherokee memory—or the memory settlers wrote down as Cherokee—said something else. When they came into the Smokies and the southern Appalachians, they found people already there. The printed versions call them moon-eyed: pale, light-shy, night-working, driven out when the moon was too bright for their eyes.[9] I am not asking a jury to convict a ghost. I am asking for a simple courtesy with the word “indigenous”. If the Cherokee displaced someone, then the Cherokee, in that hour, were not the first people of that ridge. They were the latest people of that ridge. That is not an insult. That is the human story from the Levant to the Andes. The political use of “indigenous” is an attempt to freeze one frame and call it eternity.
Lake Ontario was named from an Iroquoian language for the beauty of its waters. That is a good name. It is also a name that belongs to the people who happened to be in the neighborhood when the French and the English arrived.[10] They were not the copper miners of Superior. They were not the pond people of Windover. They were not a moral veto on the United States. Trump’s point in calling the water Lake America is not that Iroquoian speech never touched the shoreline. His point is that the lake is part of the American system and that the American system is allowed to say so.
What Lake America Is Actually For
Canada to the north and Mexico to the south are not mysterious to anyone who leaves their living room. The pressure on this country does not arrive only as an army. It arrives as policy language, corporate structure, United Nations furniture, and a habit of treating American particularity as an embarrassment. You see it when you get out of your comfort zone and talk to people who have memorized the indigenous-people argument the way an earlier generation memorized a catechism. The argument is doing work. The work is not respect. The work is to loosen the country’s name from the land.
So Trump changes the name. He did it with the Gulf.[11] He did it with the lake. He knows what happens next. People like me have to pick up the bone and worry about it. Museums will say he is contaminating their dialogue. Activists will say a lake is off-limits because an Iroquoian word was spoken over it four centuries ago. Fine. That reaction is the evidence. If the goal were respect for living nations, there are a hundred quieter instruments. The volume of the outrage is the tell. The goal, in the political use of the word, is to make the United States feel like a squatter in its own house.
I live in a state that still has to fight over Columbus. Columbus, Ohio, spends a remarkable amount of official energy trying to apologize for its very existence. I think that is a dumb way to run a civic conversation. Study every culture. Steal nothing sacred to a living people. Do not, as a substitute for thought, declare an entire European arrival illegitimate and then act surprised when the country loses the will to name a lake.
The Copper Scroll: Stop Asking Only Where It Went
I love the Dead Sea Scrolls. If I were not already married, I would marry them. I do not even think of that period as very ancient. The men of Qumran look, to my eyes, like a reform party inside a tired establishment—less temple museum, more faction. Call the comparison reckless. I will live with it. The Essenes against the institutions of their day; a populist temper against a collaborationist temper; Greek and Roman state-theory pressing from the outside. The names change. The pattern does not.[12]
Among those texts is the one I cannot leave alone: the Copper Scroll. Hershel Shanks, who did as much as any American to bring the Scrolls to light, wrote the book I keep on my desk.[13] It is a treasure inventory beaten into metal so it would not rot. Gold. Silver. Vessels. Caches. A map with the patience of a bookkeeper and the nerves of a man who thinks the Temple is about to die. People have hunted the deposits for seventy years. The holes come up empty, or they come up as someone else’s cellar.
The question everyone asks is: where did the treasure go? That is a fair question. I want a different one sitting beside it: where did the metal economy that made such a list thinkable come from? Copper is the quiet member of the family. The Temple accounts shine with gold, but the older world runs on copper. Bronze is copper that learned a second metal. The floor, the fittings, and the industry behind a sanctuary are not gilding. They are tonnage.
Nelson Glueck pointed at Timna and the Arabah and said, Solomon. The next generation of archaeologists rolled their eyes and gave the shafts to New Kingdom Egypt and to Midian. Then the radiocarbon clocks were wound again, and the tenth century—the horizon of David and Solomon—came back into the slag heaps.[14] I am glad of that. Local ore matters. I do not need to steal Timna from the map to ask whether Timna is the whole map. The ancient Mediterranean and the Levant were hungry for metal for a very long time. Cyprus, Sinai, the Arabah, the Alps, later Spain: these are the names the textbooks allow. Lake Superior is the name they treat as a category error.
I am going to keep treating it as a question. Native copper you can pluck, and hammer is a different proposition from sulfide ore you must smelt in a desert with ten thousand trees. If there was a way to move Superior metal, there was a reason to try. People in the Ohio country walked hundreds of miles for obsidian. We do not call them insane. We call them traders. Stretch the same instinct across a colder ocean, in an age when the shelves were wider, and the boats were not as primitive as our pride requires, and you have a hypothesis. Hypotheses are what academies are for, when academies remember.
Commentary — the Copper Scroll’s date, and the temptation of a single pipeline. Almost every specialist dates the Copper Scroll to the first century CE, as a list of Temple or sectarian deposits hidden against Rome. It is not a Bronze Age shipping manifesto. I treat the scroll as proof that ancient people recorded metal the way a state records oil, and then he asks whether the earlier, much larger copper hunger of the third and second millennia had sources we have undercounted. That is a legitimate historical appetite. What does not follow is a closed circuit: Superior pit to Solomonic floor to Qumran roll to later Islamic treasuries financing 1948. Each arrow in that circuit needs its own evidence. The first arrow is the one archaeology can actually test—with isotopes, with wreck cargoes, with smelting slag. Until those tests speak, the circuit is a storyboard. Storyboards are how books begin. They are not how cases close.
I will treat the speculative part as speculation, not a sermon dressed as a lab report. I think some of the metal listed in later memory, and some of the metal that built earlier sanctuaries, is easier to explain if the Superior district is allowed onto the trade map. I think caches get found by the wrong people over centuries. I think private holdings are a perfectly ordinary grave for a public treasure. I have even said, in the talk that became this essay, that old metal can become seed money for later politics, including politics aimed at a Jewish state. That sentence will get me blocked from rooms I wasn’t already invited to. So be it. I would rather over-ask than pretend the copper only ever moved as far as a museum caption allowed.
Copper, Lightning, and What We Forgot How to Say about Power
The Temple stories are not shy. Glory fills the house. Fire answers a prophet. A presence is described as having weight.[15] Copper is a conductor. Gold is a conductor. If you were going to build a room in which a people expected God to arrive the way a storm arrives, you would not build it out of wool. I do not need a YouTube priest of “Egyptian lightbulbs” to notice that. I also do not need to turn Yahweh into a battery. The Bible’s own language is already more interesting than the gadget version. The point is that the builders were not decorating. They were making a place that could bear a presence. Metal was part of that theology, not an afterthought from the gift shop.
Plato’s orichalcum—copper with a second metal in it, a gleam the Greeks could not quite leave alone—belongs to the same family of memories.[16] Ayn Rand, who is not an archaeologist and did not mean to be, wrote a little book about a city that forgot electricity so completely that it had to reinvent the lamp and the word “I”. That is Anthem. I point people to it because it is a moral picture of technical amnesia, not because I think Atlantis filed a patent.[17] We have forgotten more than we know. That sentence is not a license to claim every glyph is a circuit diagram. It is a license to stay humble about the inventory.
Göbekli Tepe, Hopewell earthworks, British alignments, the drowned lines under our lakes: I do not stitch them into one empire. I notice that ritual landscapes rhyme more often than chance should allow, and I notice that people under intoxication and under prayer have always claimed they were not alone in the room.[18]. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to take that claim seriously as politics—not as mood, not as metaphor. If there are wills other than human wills, they will not confine themselves to Sunday school. They will show up in the naming of lakes.
What I Want from Academia, and What I Will Do Without It
I want American archaeology. Not a European import of Marx with better maps. Not a campus that treats Columbus as a contaminant and the United States as a mistake that can be renamed out of existence. I want papers. I want dates. I want some graduate student with a better spectrometer than my opinions to take the Superior question and either kill it or keep it alive on evidence. I will read the kill-shot if it is a real one. I will not accept a sneer in place of a date.
I cover politics and business and Iran and the rest of the board because that is the world in which these arguments cash out. Trump throws a ball. Commentators pick it up. Other shows lift a line while I am asleep at two in the morning. That is the only revenue I actually care about: the advance of the idea. Fortune and glory are enjoyable when you can get it. But, the real wage is that someone eating Fritos in a dark kitchen looks out the window and realizes the indigenous-people argument he was handed in school cannot survive contact with a copper pit that is older than the pyramids’ reputation.
My wife says I am blacklisted again. I am blacklisted everywhere, on everything, by everybody who needs the story to stay simple. I am used to it. This forum exists so that truth has a place to sit when the institutions are otherwise occupied.
The Name on the Water
Call it Lake America. Not because the Iroquois never saw it. Because the Iroquois were not the beginning of the story, and they are not the end of the American claim. The copper miners of Superior, the burial people of Windover, the builders who stacked stone on a dry bay floor—those are indigenous facts. The political slogan that uses “indigenous” to unmake the United States is not a fact. It is a maneuver.
Trump understood the maneuver well enough to answer it with a Sharpie and a map. He can do that from the Resolute Desk. The rest of the work is ours. Follow the copper. Follow the names. Follow the will that taught a nation to be ashamed of its own reflection in a lake. That will is not only human. And if we really want to say “indigenous people,” shouldn’t we point to the Moon-eyed people and give them the credit?
NOTES
[1] Donald J. Trump, Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America for U.S. federal usage, signed August 27, 2026. Coverage: Reuters; BBC News; CNN Politics; New York Times, August 27–28, 2026. The order directs the Department of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days. It binds U.S. federal maps and communications; it does not bind Canada, New York State, or international bodies.
[2] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Campbell’s recurring concern is not career-ladder ranking but the inner work of finding a vocation larger than the self—“follow your bliss”—against a society that sorts people into stations.
[3] 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine (August 2019), Nikole Hannah-Jones et al. The Project’s framing of 1619 as the nation’s “true founding” produced a large scholarly rebuttal literature (see the later bibliography). It is cited here as the type of academic-political narrative the speaker is arguing against, not as a monograph on Great Lakes prehistory.
[4] Windover Archaeological Site, Brevard County, Florida. National Historic Landmark. Radiocarbon dates on the pond burials cluster roughly 8,000–7,000 years before present (Early/Middle Archaic). At least 168 individuals were recovered, with exceptional preservation of brain tissue, textiles, and wooden artifacts. See Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
[5] Old Copper Complex / Old Copper Culture of the western Great Lakes. Reliable dates on organic material embedded in copper artifacts run from roughly 8500 to 3580 cal BP; sediment-geochemistry work around Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula has been used to argue mining signatures as early as ~9500 years ago, with a peak often placed between ~7000 and 5000 cal BP. See Pompeani et al., Radiocarbon (2021); Pompeani et al., The Holocene (2015); Milwaukee Public Museum, Old Copper Culture collections.
[6] Isle Royale and Keweenaw native copper. The Lake Superior district contains the world’s largest concentration of native (nearly pure) copper. More than a thousand prehistoric pits have been recorded on Isle Royale alone. See National Park Service, “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.”
[7] Grand Traverse Bay stone alignment, Lake Michigan, identified in 2007 by underwater archaeologist Mark Holley during sonar survey. Stones lie about 40 feet down. Popular press labeled the site “Michigan’s Stonehenge”; Holley has repeatedly objected to that label and described a long linear arrangement rather than a henge. A possible mastodon image on one boulder remains unverified by a broad scholarly consensus. A better-documented submerged hunting structure of similar age is the Drop 45 Drive Lane in Lake Huron.
[8] Post-glacial sea level and Doggerland. During the early Holocene the English Channel and much of the southern North Sea were dry or marshy land (Doggerland), allowing pedestrian movement between Britain and the Continent until progressive inundation through the Mesolithic. This is mainstream Quaternary geology. Transatlantic crossings in that same era are a separate, and far more contested, claim.
[9] Cherokee “moon-eyed people.” Early printed versions appear in Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797), reporting that the Cherokee said they found and expelled a “moon-eyed” people who could not see well by day. Later treatments include John Haywood (1823) and James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900). Modern Cherokee cultural authorities often treat the tale as minor or as settler-amplified folklore rather than a central tribal history. No archaeological culture has been securely identified with the legend.
[10] The name Ontario is widely derived from a Wendat (Huron) / Iroquoian form, often given as Ontari’io, commonly glossed “beautiful lake,” “great lake,” or “lake of shining waters.” European mapmakers used the name in the seventeenth century, well before Canadian Confederation (1867) or the Declaration of Independence (1776). See Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s August 2026 statement and standard Great Lakes toponymy.
[11] Gulf of America: Trump proclamation renaming the Gulf of Mexico for U.S. federal usage in 2025, the immediate precedent for the 2026 Lake America order.
[12] Essenes and Qumran. The consensus that the Dead Sea Scrolls community was Essene remains the majority view, with vigorous dissent. Comparing them to a modern populist reform movement is analogy, not identity. The “RINO / tyrant” mapping in the source talk is rhetorical, not a claim that second-temple parties were American parties.
[13] Copper Scroll (3Q15), Cave 3, Qumran, discovered 1952. Two oxidized copper rolls, later cut into strips at Manchester (1955–56). The text lists dozens of hiding places and large quantities of gold, silver, and vessels—commonly read as a Temple-treasure inventory from the late Second Temple period, not a Bronze Age document. See Hershel Shanks, The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007); Judah K. Lefkovits, The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation (Leiden: Brill, 2000); John M. Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (1960).
[14] Timna Valley and Wadi Arabah copper. Nelson Glueck popularized “King Solomon’s Mines” in the 1930s–40s. Later work showed major Late Bronze Egyptian-Midianite activity; more recent radiocarbon work by Erez Ben-Yosef and colleagues has restored a significant 10th-century BCE (United Monarchy-era) industrial peak at Timna, with large slag heaps and evidence of export. Glueck’s romantic label outran the first generation of evidence; the newer dates put industrial copper back on the table for the Solomonic horizon—without requiring a Great Lakes source. Lead-isotope work on Bronze Age metal in Europe and the Near East has so far pointed to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, the British Isles, the Arabah, and other Old World sources, not to Keweenaw.
[15] Biblical theophanies associated with fire and storm: Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8 (the glory filling Solomon’s Temple); 1 Kings 18 (Elijah and the prophets of Baal); Ezekiel 1. Copper and gold are specified in the Tabernacle and Temple building accounts (Exodus 25–40; 1 Kings 6–7). Ancient recognition that metals conduct and gleam is not the same thing as a reconstructed electrical grid.
[16] Plato, Timaeus and Critias. Orichalcum is described as a metal second only to gold in the Atlantis story. A 2015 shipwreck off Gela, Sicily, yielded ingots some researchers identified as an alloy consistent with classical descriptions of orichalcum (primarily copper with zinc). That find, even if the alloy identification holds, does not locate Atlantis in the Azores or prove a Great Lakes connection.
[17] Ayn Rand, Anthem (1938). The novella imagines a collectivist future that has forgotten electricity and the word “I.” The “Anthem” YouTube adaptations mentioned in the source talk are fan and classroom dramatizations, not a Disney property.
[18] Hopewell Interaction Sphere (approx. 100 BCE–500 CE) is millennia later than the Old Copper peak and Göbekli Tepe (c. 9600–8000 BCE). Formal similarity of earthworks or ritual geometry across such distances in time is a prompt for research, not proof of a single whispering “spiritual entity” or a single people.
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING
Naming, the executive order, and the Great Lakes BBC News. “Trump Signs Order to Rename Lake Ontario as Lake America.” August 27, 2026. CNN Politics. “Trump Signs Executive Order to Change Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America.’” August 27, 2026. Reuters. “Trump Renames Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ amid Canada Trade War.” August 27, 2026. The New York Times. “Lake Ontario Didn’t Ask for Trump to Rename It.” August 27, 2026. Hough, Jack L. Geology of the Great Lakes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958. Vogel, Virgil J. Indian Names on Wisconsin’s Map. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Windover and the deep Archaic South Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Doran, Glen H., and David N. Dickel. “Multidisciplinary Investigations at the Windover Site.” In Wet Site Archaeology, edited by Barbara A. Purdy. Caldwell, N.J.: Telford Press, 1988. Milanich, Jerald T. Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Purdy, Barbara A. The Art and Archaeology of Florida’s Wetlands. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991.
Old Copper Complex, Isle Royale, and Keweenaw Bebber, Michelle R., and Alastair J. M. Key. “Optimal Linear Estimation Modeling Supports Early Holocene Copper Tool Production in North America.” American Antiquity 87 (2022). Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Pleger, Thomas C., and James B. Stoltman. “The Archaic Tradition in Wisconsin.” In Archaic Societies, edited by Thomas E. Emerson et al. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Pompeani, David P., et al. “Copper Mining on Isle Royale 6500–5400 Years Ago Identified Using Sediment Geochemistry.” The Holocene 25 (2015). Pompeani, David P., et al. “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in North America.” Radiocarbon 63 (2021). Ritzenthaler, Robert E. “The Old Copper Culture of Wisconsin.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 38 (1957). National Park Service. “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.” nps.gov. Milwaukee Public Museum. “Old Copper Culture.” mpm.edu.
Drowned landscapes of the Great Lakes Holley, Mark. Field reports and public notes on the Grand Traverse Bay alignment. Northwestern Michigan College. O’Shea, John M., and Guy A. Meadows. “Evidence for Early Hunters beneath the Great Lakes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009). O’Shea, John M., et al. “A 9,000-Year-Old Caribou Hunting Structure beneath Lake Huron.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014). Lewis, C. F. M., and T. W. Anderson. Papers on post-glacial lake levels in the Huron and Michigan basins. Geological Survey of Canada.
Cherokee memory, Appalachia, and the moon-eyed people Barton, Benjamin Smith. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. Philadelphia, 1797. Haywood, John. The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. Nashville, 1823. Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900. Mooney, James. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. Chicago: Aldine, 1975 [1900]. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
Dead Sea Scrolls and the Copper Scroll Allegro, John M. The Treasure of the Copper Scroll. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Lefkovits, Judah K. The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Puech, Émile. The Copper Scroll Revisited. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Shanks, Hershel. The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007. Shanks, Hershel. The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1998. VanderKam, James C., and Peter Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
Timna, Arabah, Solomon, and Near Eastern copper Ben-Yosef, Erez, et al. “A New Chronological Framework for Iron Age Copper Production at Timna.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 366 (2012). Glueck, Nelson. “On the Trail of King Solomon’s Mines.” National Geographic, February 1944. Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, and Mohammad Najjar. Studies of Iron Age copper production at Faynan / Wadi Arabah. Rothenberg, Beno. Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Yahalom-Mack, Naama, et al. Lead-isotope sourcing studies of Levantine copper.
Bronze Age metal provenance — the brake on a quiet Atlantic pipeline Ling, Johan, et al. “Moving Metals II: Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age Artefacts by Lead Isotope and Elemental Analyses.” Journal of Archaeological Science 41 (2014). Melheim, Lene, et al. “Shifting Networks and Mixing Metals.” PLOS ONE (2021). Pernicka, Ernst. Foundational papers on lead-isotope provenancing in the Aegean and Balkans. Williams, R. Alan. Studies of Great Orme copper and Atlantic Bronze Age distribution. Hauptmann, Andreas. The Archaeometallurgy of Copper. Berlin: Springer, 2007.
Alternative and contested Atlantic theses — read with the grain, and against it Fell, Barry. America B.C. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. The book that made a generation of amateurs certain and a generation of epigraphers furious. Jett, Stephen C. Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Kehoe, Alice Beck. Traveling Prehistoric Seas. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2016. McGhee, Robert. Critical essays on transoceanic contact claims; useful as a brake.
Temple, metal, and the language of presence The Holy Bible. Especially Exodus 19 and 25–40; 1 Kings 6–8 and 18; Ezekiel 1. Hurowitz, Victor Avigdor. I Have Built You an Exalted House. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992. Kitchen, Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Milgrom, Jacob. Leviticus. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001. Van Seters, John. The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Read as the academy’s counter-voice.
Atlantis, orichalcum, and technical amnesia as literature Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Rand, Ayn. Anthem. 1938. Reports on the 2015 Gela wreck ingots and the orichalcum identification debate. Forsyth, Phyllis Young. Atlantis: The Making of Myth. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980.
Campbell, order, and the inner politics of fitting in Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Campbell, Joseph, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
The political fight over founding stories Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al. “The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019. Wood, Gordon S., Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes. Letter of objection to the 1619 Project. The New York Times, December 2019. McClay, Wilfred M. Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. New York: Encounter, 2019. Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello. New York: Norton, 2008. Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration. New York: Liveright, 2014.
Hopewell, Göbekli Tepe, and the problem of rhyme across millennia Byers, A. Martin. The Ohio Hopewell Episode. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2004. Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, eds. Gathering Hopewell. New York: Springer, 2005. Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2012. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
It is hard to be in a leadership position. I know that. I wanted to wish the new chair of the Butler County Republican Party well. Art Sauerwein stepped into a job that is mostly thankless, always public, and never as simple as it sounds when you are talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror.¹ I have worked with people in this orbit. We have agreed on more than we have fought about. I was not looking to pick a fight with a brand-new chairman. Bloodsport politics is already crowded with people who think volume is a substitute for skill.
But people are already getting sour on his wine. This is not the pleasant kind. This is the vintage you spit out when you realize the bottle lacks what it takes. Sauerwein literally means sour wine.² I did not invent the metaphor. The paper did him the courtesy of putting the raw vintage on the table.
I want the Republican Party in this county to succeed. I do not want the political disease that has been cultivated in parts of West Chester to migrate township by township until the rest of Butler County starts talking like a faculty lounge. I want more unification, not less. I want a bigger tent, not a Sunday-school classroom with a padlock on the door. That is why I am saying something now, at the start of September 2026, while the article is still warm and the Democrats are still salivating.
What Sounded Fine in the Shower Did Not Survive the Newspaper
Some lines sound terrific when you are singing in the shower. They still sound pretty good at a Sunday meeting among people who already agree with you. They do not survive contact with newsprint. Once they are in the Journal-News, they belong to every Democrat, every fence-sitter, every officeholder you still need next cycle, and every volunteer who is privately deciding whether this job is worth the abuse.
The chairman’s public message, as it landed, ran something like this: take back the schools and make them more conservative; put more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, the Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, eliminate waste and fraud, and get in alignment with conservative values. Then the kicker: he has not been seeing that happen, and it displeases him.
I agree with a large percentage of the substance. Cutting spending, cutting taxes, reducing waste, and stopping fraud are not radical demands in a Republican county. I have been in the tax fight in this county for a long time, going back through names people still remember and some they would rather forget. I want conservative schools. I am not embarrassed by Christian values in a community that was built on them. That is not the argument.
The argument is tone, timing, venue, and target. You do not build a governing party by taking out the people you just spent years getting elected. You especially do not do it two months before a midterm when Democrats are hunting local gains and the only story they need is “Republicans are already eating their own.”
The Fast-Food Manager Problem in Bloodsport Politics
I have heard this voice before. It usually comes from people who have a hard time making a legitimate argument that requires sitting down, listening, and converting someone who does not already attend their Bible study to their way of thinking. Instead of doing that work, they reach for the lecture. I have seen it in entry-level managers at places that sell fast food. They get handed a shift. They have run something with five employees. They discover that barking feels like leadership.
You can talk that way to teenagers folding boxes. You cannot talk that way to people you are asking to put their name on a ballot, raise money, take votes, absorb the hate mail, and then run again in two years. Public office is already a faithless job. If word gets out that the chairman treats officeholders like children who missed curfew, the short list of people willing to do the work gets shorter. Then you will complain that nobody good will run, and you will be right, and you will have helped cause it.
The grandfather tone does not work on people who already moved out of their father’s house. Younger Republicans, the ones you claim you want to recruit so the party is not a retirement home, can smell a lecture from across the parking lot. Trump did not build a coalition by scolding his own team in the local paper. He built one by pointing the fire outward.
Good Old Boys, Street Vendors, and the Nicodemus Problem
I have heard the comments on Facebook. People send me this stuff all day. “Good old boys club.” It is always the boys club when you are not in it. When you are outside, you throw a rock and call it prophecy. You say you are Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers. You say you are honest and pure. Meanwhile the people you need are quietly updating their résumés for a private-sector job that pays better and does not include a chairman who inspects their homework in the newspaper.
You have to remember Nicodemus. He loved Jesus. He wanted the message to advance. He also had to remain a functioning member of the priesthood. He walked a fine line on purpose.³ That is the nature of serious politics. It should not be a purity cult. I have heard the purity speech for years: we should be clean, we should be absolute, we should never sit at a table with anyone who is only 80 percent of the way home. Meanwhile you bleed support. You try to build a big party and then you shove people toward the door with absolutism and call the ones who leave compromised.
Cheerleaders are useful. Rock throwers are useful too, in the right hour. Leadership is deciding which tool you are holding before you swing it at your own team.
David Kern Knew How to Throw a Rock and Still Keep the Township
I have known the Kern family since I was very little. I was friends with his son. I knew Katy. I remember David Kern as a man who could throw a rock with the best of them and still serve as a respected Liberty Township trustee for decades. He chaired this county party. He also discovered, the hard way, that herding quarreling Republicans is a different sport than fighting Democrats.⁴ He said as much when he walked away from the chairmanship. That history is sitting right there for anyone who wants to read it instead of repeating it.
You need people who will volunteer for the ugly jobs. The short list of adults willing to be lectured in public like children is very short. You do not want your officeholders saying, “I will take the private job. It pays. I do not have to run every two years. I do not have to take a sermon from a chairman who just discovered the budget.” Once they leave, you do not get them back by posting harder.
West Chester Is Not a Metaphor. It Is a Beachhead.
I know Kathy Wyenandt. I have watched her work. She is out there trying to hitch a truck and a horse to the same socialist push that is running through school boards, township halls, and every other local institution that used to be too boring for ideology. Call it progressivism if the word socialism makes the room cough. The destination is the same: more government, more cultural renovation, more migration of West Chester habits into townships that did not ask for them.⁵
She does not need a majority tomorrow. She needs Republicans to do her turnout work for her. A county party that announces, in the paper, that its own officeholders have disappointed the chairman is a gift. Democrats do not have to beat Republicans if Republicans will brand their own people as failures eight weeks before Election Day. I do not want a bunch of Democrats in offices that took a generation to flip. That is not a purity position. That is arithmetic.
The people pushing the chairman to talk like this represent a slice of the party, not the whole vineyard. I would put that slice well under 40 percent of Republicans in this county, with the rest on the fence, tired, transactional, or capable of being seduced by a smiling Democrat who promises to be less exhausting. If you lecture the 60 percent as if they were the problem, you will meet them later on the other side of the aisle, or at home on the couch.
You Cannot Shut Off a County Budget Like a Spigot
“The Republicans that are in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, and I have not been seeing that happen, and it displeases me.” That sentence is the whole problem in one pour. You cannot just turn the spigot off on a dime. I have been in these tax fights my whole adult life. There were plenty of pizzas eaten over tables with Mike Fox and the old Liberty Township crowd. There were plenty of arguments. You still had to build a team.⁶
County government is not a lemonade stand. It is labor contracts, state mandates, jails, boards of developmental disabilities, roads, courts, and a sales-tax stream that moves with the economy. Butler County has rolled back millage, sat on windfalls, and still gets accused of betrayal because the cut was not theatrical enough for people who do their budgeting in comment threads. Results matter. Theater is cheaper. Voters, after two years of Republicans in power, vote results. If the chairman’s public line is “our people have not done a very good job,” do not be shocked when the other team puts that quote on a mailer.
This is the midterm problem in miniature. The buzzwords that pulled people to the polls the first time do not work the same way once you own the desks. Insurgents always arrive to take advantage of disappointment. Some of them only know how to throw rocks. They want Jesus in the temple every Tuesday. If you are not flipping tables, you are not holy enough. That energy can win a primary. It does not automatically win a county, and it does not automatically govern one.
Todd Hall, Thomas Hall, and the Unfashionable Work of Building a Team
Todd Hall was good at building a team. Thomas Hall has done the unglamorous work in the Statehouse. I have had disagreements with people in that circle. There were disputes. We worked them out over time. Nobody has to be attached at the hip. Leadership is the art of bringing people to your way of thinking without setting their chairs on fire.⁷
People who lack that skill often lecture because lecture is what you do when you cannot close. They talk themselves into a lather in the bathroom. It sounds like Churchill. Then they get into a meeting with actual officeholders, actual budgets, and actual voters, and the words come out like a substitute teacher on the last day of school. “It displeases me” is not a governing strategy. It is a report card written by someone who is not taking the test.
Sometimes a chairman will sound like the star quarterback at a pep rally. In the bleachers you will have a row of people who never liked football and came for the argument. The quarterback will look like a cardboard cutout of the good old boys club. Fine. People still like winning the game. They like being around a team that wins. They will tolerate a certain amount of jock energy if the scoreboard gives them what they want. They will not tolerate a coach who spends the pregame interview explaining that his own starters are a disappointment.
Unity Is Not Compromise. Isolation Is Not Courage.
I do not want a compromised party. I also do not want a minority party that congratulates itself for being pure while Kathy’s people take another township seat. Those are not the only two options, no matter how many Facebook theologians insist they are. Learning to communicate with people who are not as conservative as a Sunday-morning Sunday-school teacher is not the same thing as becoming one of them. It means you can share a sandbox without eating the sand.
People who cannot do that work are often insecure about their ability to win a conversation. So they push the other person away. Then they never have to experience the small death of losing the argument. They say, “We did our best. We stood on principle. We were outnumbered.” Being outnumbered is not a sacrament. I do not want the minority party in Butler County. I want the party that keeps winning and then governs like it intended to keep the job.
Compromise has a cost. Losing has a cost. Leadership is weighing those two costs in public without pretending one of them is free. Thanksgiving dinner is the annual clinic: you do not have to agree on the football game to keep the same people at the table. A smart network puts more than one game on. That is not cowardice. That is how you still have a family next year.
A Friendly Note to the New Chairman
I want Art Sauerwein to be a successful chairman. I want people to support him. I want the party to grow. I agree with him on most of the policy nouns in that article. Cut spending. Cut taxes. Watch the schools. Say the quiet part about values out loud. Do it in a room with the officeholders first. Bring the concerns to a meeting. Make the case. Count votes. Help them find the money, the language, and the coalition. Then go to the paper together.
If you push them away in August, you will not have them in November, and you will not have them when you need a candidate in 2028. Chairmen who listen only to the people who want them to tear the party down do not last. The job looks important from the outside. From the inside it is volunteer hours, bruised egos, and a phone that rings with problems nobody else wanted. You will not keep good people if the public posture is “Father Knows Best and the children have disappointed the table.”
Help them get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. Show up for them when the Journal-News calls. Save the lecture for the closed session, and even then, make it a conversation. The people who are whispering that the only moral posture is table-flipping are not the ones who will still be in the room when the chairs are empty.
Tomorrow Can Still Be a Better Day
It is hard to be in leadership in all phases. It is hard when people will not come over to your way of seeing the field. You still have to try. You have to bring together people who would never choose the same dinner table if football were not on. You have to give people latitude without becoming a wet rag. That is the whole craft.
So here is the friendly advice, based on what I am seeing in the first weeks of this chairmanship: do not sour the wine. Do not sour the voters. Do not sour the big tent. Do not push away the people who are not as conservative as you wish they were on a Sunday morning. Sit down. Work it out. Inspect the team in private. Cheer the team in public. I want this chairman to prosper. I want this party to keep the county. Lecturing your own officeholders in the newspaper is how you do the Democrats’ work for them.
Notes
1. Art Sauerwein quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage of Butler County politics heading into the November 2026 midterms. The phrasing matches public circulation of the piece under titles such as “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.”
2. Sauerwein is a German occupational/descriptive surname meaning “sour wine,” historically attached to makers or sellers of tart wine. The pun writes itself; I did not invent the vintage.
3. John 3:1–21. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, came to Jesus by night. He later spoke for due process (John 7:50–51) and helped bury Jesus (John 19:39–40). He never became a street-corner prophet. That is the point.
4. David Kern served 32 years as a Liberty Township trustee, briefly chaired the Butler County Republican Party, and died in 2021. See Journal-News obituary coverage and the Congressional Record tribute by Rep. Warren Davidson, April 22, 2021.
5. Kathy D. Wyenandt of Liberty/Fairfield Township has been central committee chair and a visible public face of the Butler County Democratic Party, a Board of Elections member, and a candidate for Ohio House and Senate. She has written openly urging voters to consider Democrats in local cycles.
6. Butler County commissioners have repeatedly used inside-millage rollbacks and related tools in recent budget cycles; sales-tax receipts have also risen. Whether that pace satisfies every activist is a separate question from whether the county is “not cutting.” See Journal-News budget coverage 2024–2026.
7. Todd Hall served as Butler County GOP executive chairman through the 2024–2026 cycle and was frequently quoted on endorsements, including the 2026 commissioner primary. State Rep. Thomas Hall represents Ohio House District 46.
8. Richard K. Jones, Butler County sheriff, published They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). The book is a leadership memoir, not a novel about cartels; the shower version of the pitch always sounds punchier than the jacket copy.
Bibliography for Further Reading
A working shelf, not a complete library. I have included the books that actually change how you think about parties, persuasion, local government, and the temptation to confuse purity with power.
Local and Ohio Politics
Butler County Republican Party. Candidate and leadership materials, butlercountygop.org, 2024–2026.
Callahan, Denise G., and Journal-News staff. Budget, millage, sales-tax, and commissioner coverage, Hamilton Journal-News, 2018–2026.
Clark, Michael D. “Beloved Butler County icon, political leader David Kern dies after illness.” Journal-News, April 16, 2021.
Davidson, Warren. “Honoring the Life and Memory of David Kern.” Congressional Record, April 22, 2021.
Ohio Republican Party. County chair directory and State Central Committee materials, ohiogop.org.
Wyenandt, Kathy. “You may want to vote Democrat this election cycle.” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 15, 2022.
Journal-News. “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.” Late August 2026. (Article circulating with the Sauerwein quotations discussed here.)
Parties, Coalitions, and the Big Tent
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Still the best warning against people who love principles more than the society those principles have to live in.
Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper, 1957.
Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. Yale University Press, 1981.
Galston, William A., and Elaine C. Kamarck. “The Politics of Polarization.” Third Way / Brookings essays, various years.
Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Harper, 1946.
Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind. Regnery, 1953.
Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford University Press, 1990. Useful even for a two-party county: coalition is a skill.
Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale University Press, 1962.
Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Truman, David B. The Governmental Process. Knopf, 1951.
Leadership, Management, and Why Lectures Fail
Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster, 1936. Mock it after you can do it.
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Politics is the continuation of coalition by other means.
Collins, Jim. Good to Great. HarperBusiness, 2001.
Drucker, Peter F. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row, 1967.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Overman Warrior Publications.
Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. 2026.
Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 1532. Read it as a warning about what happens when your own captains stop trusting you.
Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings. c. 1645.
Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. You cannot lecture a production system into existence.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Do not announce your disappointment with your own left flank.
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. The leader who needs to be seen lecturing is already losing.
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, 1946.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking, 1985.
Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Henry Regnery, 1953.
Scripture and the Fine Line
The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, and 19. Nicodemus.
Matthew 21:12–13 and parallels. The temple tables. Note the target: a corrupt marketplace inside the holy precinct, not your own disciples on the night before a fight.
Augustine. City of God. The two cities argument is older than any county central committee.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1932.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942. Especially the parts about factions inside the church.
American Party History and Populism
Gerring, John. Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. Knopf, 1955.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Knopf, 1965.
Phillips, Kevin. The Emerging Republican Majority. Arlington House, 1969.
Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015. Parties exist to tame factions. When the faction tames the party, you get what you are watching.
Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.
Sundquist, James L. Dynamics of the Party System. Brookings, 1983.
Local Government, Taxes, and the Spigot That Will Not Shut
Fisher, Ronald C. State and Local Public Finance. Various editions.
Oates, Wallace E. Fiscal Federalism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Tiebout, Charles M. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956).
Ohio Auditor of State and Butler County Auditor annual financial reports, 2022–2026.
Rich Hoffman 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.
