I’m tired of Barack Obama. When he returned to the campaign trail in Ohio for Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, it reminded many people of everything they wanted to leave behind. He remains the public face of a socialist approach smuggled into American politics with the help of old underground networks and cultural figures who treated the country as something to be remade rather than built. Voters got tired of that project. They chose the ultimate capitalist instead.
Obama Campaigning for Acton and Brown in Cleveland and Across Ohio
Obama still draws a crowd. He is one of the few Democrats who can fill a room and make the old arguments sound fresh. In the final stretch, he was out making the case for Acton in the governor’s race and for Brown in the Senate contest. The message was familiar: government will protect you from high costs, from Trump, from the consequences of earlier policies. People can vote for whoever they want. No widespread evidence of the kind of systematic tampering some claimed in prior cycles emerged. Voters made a choice. In Ohio, they chose Acton and Brown. Nationally, the picture was mixed, but the local and statewide results showed that the free-stuff appeal still works when prices are high, and the alternative is framed as indifference.
I have already written about the gas prices and the cost of bread at the grocery store. Democratic policies created or worsened most of those costs by shrinking the margin for people who actually make things. Environmental rules, spending that outruns revenue, and a regulatory climate that treats producers as the problem all raise the price of everyday goods. Obama and the people around him spent years building that structure. When the bills came due, the same voices blamed the people trying to reverse it. That is why Obama had to get back on the trail. No deep bench of Democrats can make the argument the way he can.
Trump as the Capitalist Alternative: Gold, Towers, and High-Value Things
We picked Trump because he represented the opposite set of instincts. He has always liked gold. The towers, the lettering on the book The Art of the Deal, the interiors—gold has been the consistent color. It signals value rather than the bare minimum. I own several of his ties. They are silk, made in America, and they were expensive when I bought them. I wear them when something matters. They are not cheap. When you want to think about good things as high value, you don’t reach for a coupon. You reach for something that lasts.
Trump’s White House renovations fit the same pattern. The ballroom is needed. The original White House was deliberately kept modest so the new republic would not look like it was challenging Europe’s monarchies. They built it a little too small on purpose. You can walk around it in a short time. For the kind of security, diplomacy, and large gatherings that now take place there, more space is practical. I visited the White House recently. The changes look good. I support them. Critics treat gold and scale as vanity. Many voters saw them as a sign that someone still believed in making things better rather than managing decline.
The contrast with Obama is not subtle. Obama’s political coalition includes people who treat high taxes and big government as the way to extract money from those who create value and redistribute it. A lazy segment of society prefers the coupon and the handout. Socialism is marketed to them because it improves their relative position without requiring them to produce more. Those voters turned out for Obama and for the candidates he supported. There are still more people who prefer the Trump approach—visible value, private production, and the refusal to treat government as the primary engine—but they have to show up.
The Old Networks and the Cultural Invasion
Older radical circles helped Obama’s rise. Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground types were never mainstream, but they were part of the broader left infrastructure that treated American institutions as targets rather than inheritances. The same cultural current included the old hippies who rejected ordinary work, ordinary family life, and ordinary ambition. That was an invasion of American ideas, not a representation of them. Obama knew how to speak to the destitute and the resentful without sounding like he was asking them to do the hard part. He could make government expansion sound like compassion.
Trump’s background was different. The Apprentice was popular because it showed people competing, building, and being judged on results. Many viewers recognized the format. They had been to places like the Cheesecake Factory for family celebrations. It costs real money. The atmosphere is ornate. People like it because it feels like a reward for work rather than a subsidy. That preference showed up in the votes. Voters who wanted the gold and the ballroom and the visible success chose Trump. Voters who wanted someone else to cover the cost chose the other side.
High Prices, Policy, and the Midterm Lesson
Prices are high because of the structure Obama and his allies spent years constructing. Democrats have spent the intervening years managing the consequences rather than reversing the causes. When Trump’s administration tried to restore margins for producers, those same voices blamed him for the results. Obama’s return to the trail was an attempt to keep that political enterprise alive. He is still better at it than most of the people who followed him. The midterms showed the limit. Democrats did not have a deep roster of figures who could carry the argument without reaching back to Obama. That reminds voters of what many wanted to get away from.
Republicans cannot sit on the couch and wait it out. Presidential-year energy does not automatically appear in the midterms. If people who prefer value, production, and smaller extraction do not vote, those who prefer handouts and expanded government will set the terms. Obama on the trail is useful in one respect: he makes the choice clearer. The two ideas of what America should be are still in conflict. One treats gold, scale, and private success as legitimate. The other treats them as problems to be managed or taxed away. Voters picked the first option when they had the chance. They will have to keep picking it.
Footnotes
1. Ohio 2026 results (Secretary of State and major outlets as of early November): Amy Acton (D) defeated Vivek Ramaswamy (R) for governor; Sherrod Brown (D) won the U.S. Senate race. Obama campaigned in the state for both in the closing weeks.
2. National and Ohio gas-price and grocery-cost context: Post-2026 Iran-related disruptions and longer-term regulatory and spending policies contributed to elevated energy and food prices. Multiple analyses linked affordability concerns to midterm voting patterns.
3. White House physical history: The original Executive Mansion was intentionally modest relative to European royal residences. Modern security, diplomatic, and event requirements have repeatedly raised questions about capacity; Trump-era renovations, including ballroom plans, addressed those practical limits.
4. Historical background on Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground, and their limited but real connections to later Democratic networks is documented in contemporary reporting and subsequent histories of the 1960s–1970s radical left and its institutional afterlife.
5. Cultural and voting observations draw on consistent patterns in Ohio and national exit data: higher support for candidates emphasizing production and visible private success versus candidates emphasizing expanded government services and redistribution.
Selected Bibliography / Further Reading
• Ohio Secretary of State unofficial and certified results for the 2026 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests.
• Contemporary reporting on Obama’s 2026 campaign appearances in Ohio (Cleveland and other stops) for Acton and Brown.
• Energy Information Administration, AAA, and related data on 2025–2026 gasoline and household energy costs.
• Architectural and historical accounts of the White House’s original scale and subsequent modifications.
• Standard histories and journalistic accounts of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, and the broader 1960s–1970s radical milieu and its later political influence.
• Exit polls and demographic analyses from the 2024 and 2026 cycles on economic voting, cultural attitudes toward success and redistribution, and turnout differences between presidential and midterm elections.
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.
In my view, ideological pressures have shaped scholarship and made certain questions difficult to examine openly. This is not a new problem. When I visited the Museum of the Bible and spent time with the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition and related high-level books on the formation of the biblical canon, the transition from earlier Near Eastern traditions to the exclusive worship of Yahweh, and the pre-Israelite cultures of Canaan, I kept encountering the same pattern: ritual practices involving fertility, sacrifice, and the role of women were either minimized or reframed in ways that avoided uncomfortable historical realities. The same tendency appears in discussions of pre-Columbian copper-working cultures around Lake Superior, where evidence of large-scale indigenous mining dating back thousands of years is accepted, yet contemporary academic assumptions often constrain questions about broader cultural contacts, religious practices, or the nature of those societies.
I wanted to test one specific question with direct observation rather than theory alone. The question concerned how women, particularly those in childbearing years, respond under sudden fear, and whether that response retains traces of older cultural and biological patterns. Ancient Near Eastern sources, including biblical condemnations of Canaanite practices, describe fertility cults associated with deities such as Baal and Asherah/Astarte. These involved sexual rites intended to stimulate agricultural and human fertility through sympathetic magic. While modern scholarship has become more cautious about the precise scale of “sacred prostitution,” the biblical texts themselves (Deuteronomy 23, Hosea 4, 2 Kings 23) treat the practices as real and objectionable enough to prohibit. Parallel patterns appear in accounts of other cultures that used sexual signaling or ritualized access to women as a means of managing powerful or dangerous forces.
An Observational Method: Playing Jason at Kings Island
In the fall of 2026, I auditioned for and worked as Jason Voorhees in the Jason: Blood Reign attraction at Kings Island’s Halloween Haunt. The role placed me in a controlled environment where thousands of guests moved through a maze under strobe lights, timed sound effects, and deliberate jump scares. I was often at the curtain, where timing and speed produced consistent reactions. Over multiple eight-hour shifts, I observed a broad cross-section of Cincinnati and southern Ohio residents. The hockey mask created a psychological barrier that made sustained observation easier than face-to-face interaction.
Men and women reacted differently under the same stimulus. Men often stiffened, tried to project toughness, or positioned themselves protectively. A noticeable subset of women in the approximate age range of the late teens through the early fifties—the years when sexual signaling capacity is highest—responded by flashing, winking, sticking out their tongues, making explicit sexual gestures, or saying some version of “Jason, I love you.” I estimated this at roughly five percent of the women who passed through under direct scare conditions, with a larger group showing subtler eye contact or flirtatious recovery behaviors once the immediate fright subsided. These were not isolated incidents. They repeated night after night across a large sample.
Historical and Biological Context
The pattern is consistent with both historical fertility practices and with findings in evolutionary psychology. Anne Campbell’s work on sex differences in fear, and the broader “staying alive” literature, documents that women on average exhibit stronger fear responses and more self-protective strategies than men. Self-protection carries higher fitness value for women because of the demands of pregnancy and dependent offspring. Sexual signaling is one available tool for reducing threat or securing protection in unstable conditions. In a modern haunted attraction, the threat is theatrical, yet the first-order physiological reaction appears to draw on older circuitry.
The same logic appears in non-theatrical settings. Women at rock concerts and at Mardi Gras flash as a status display and a way to seek access from high-status males in the room. The behavior is not random. It is a calculated or semi-automatic use of a resource historically exchanged for security, resources, or reduced danger. Ancient temple practices formalized a version of the same exchange. Contemporary culture has largely removed the religious framing while retaining the underlying bargaining pattern.
Why the Observation Matters
I do not claim that five percent of women will behave this way under every form of stress, nor that the behavior defines women as a class. I do claim that the frequency is high enough, and consistent enough across a large public sample, that it cannot be dismissed as noise. It also cannot be fully explained by “just having fun in a haunted house.” The guests knew they were in a commercial attraction. The response still emerged when fear was suddenly activated. Evolutionary and historical accounts predict exactly this kind of residual pattern; much current academic and political discourse treats the pattern as either nonexistent or unmentionable.
The biblical narrative of Eve and the serpent is one ancient attempt to describe a recurring vulnerability: a point of entry through which external influence can operate by appealing to desire rather than force. Cultures that later restricted women’s formal political or economic roles often cited long observation of this dynamic, not abstract misogyny. Whether those restrictions were justified in every case is a separate question. The observational record, both ancient and modern, shows that a non-trivial minority of women will use sexual access as a primary tool for securing safety or advantage when other tools feel unavailable. Pretending the pattern does not exist does not make the underlying incentives disappear.
This short account is the observational core of a longer project. The data come from repeated, structured exposure to the same stimulus across thousands of people in a single season. Further controlled work would be useful. What I observed at Kings Island in October 2026 is not an outlier. It is a visible remainder of patterns that ancient texts, archaeological records, and evolutionary psychology have all described from different directions. The question is whether contemporary scholarship is willing to look at the remainder directly.
Footnotes
1. Museum of the Bible hosted an authenticated Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority beginning in November 2025, distinct from earlier forged fragments previously associated with the museum.
2. Lake Superior copper mining by indigenous groups is documented from roughly 9,500–6,000 years ago onward, with thousands of pits and cold-hammered artifacts recovered from Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula.
3. Biblical prohibitions on cultic sexual practices appear in Deuteronomy 23:17–18, Hosea 4:14, and the Josiah reforms in 2 Kings 23:7. Scholarly debate continues over the precise institutional form of these practices, but the texts treat them as real and objectionable.
4. Anne Campbell and subsequent work on the “staying alive” hypothesis document consistent sex differences in fear intensity and self-protective behavior across multiple threat domains.
5. The five-percent figure is an observational estimate based on repeated shifts in the Jason: Blood Rain attraction; it is not a formal statistical sample but reflects consistent patterning across a large public throughput.
Bibliography
• Campbell, Anne. Sex Differences in Fear Response: An Evolutionary Perspective. Springer, 2021.
• Benenson, Joyce F., et al. “Self-protection as an adaptive female strategy.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2021.
• Lipiński, Edward. “Cult Prostitution and Passage Rites in the Biblical World.” The Biblical Annals, 2019.
• Pompeani, David P., et al. “Copper mining on Isle Royale 6500–5400 years ago.” The Holocene, 2015.
• Scientific American reporting on lead-isotope evidence for Archaic copper production in the Lake Superior basin.
• Museum of the Bible / Israel Antiquities Authority materials on the 2025–2026 Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.
• Biblical texts: Deuteronomy 23, Hosea 4, 2 Kings 23; Ugaritic mythological texts on Baal and Anat.
• Herodotus, Histories (on Babylonian temple practices); comparative ancient Near Eastern sources collected in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament.
• Buss, David M. and related evolutionary psychology literature on female threat management and sexual signaling.
• Hoffman, Rich. Prior essays and podcast material on the politics of fear, institutional incentives, and the limits of contemporary academic framing.
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.
Three weeks ago, on September 21, I stood in a room at Miami University with people who matter in Ohio manufacturing, aerospace, and the emerging unmanned systems business. We were talking about the Volynt Vyper—the hybrid unmanned eVTOL some of us have been calling the Viper—and why it should be built and staged right here in Ohio for exactly the kind of problem that just hit the Florida Panhandle.
I said we were in hurricane season. I said the real issue after these storms is rarely that the buildings fall down. Category 2 storms like the one that just made landfall near Destin do not usually level towns. The buildings stay up. What fails is the power. Nursing homes, dialysis clinics, and people on oxygen concentrators cannot wait three or four days while line crews clear trees and string new wire. I said the Vyper could deliver power into those areas the first night. The market is wide open. Nobody else is flying a hybrid platform that can land and put usable AC power on the ground where it is needed.
Hurricane Isaias made landfall Friday night near Destin as a Category 2 with sustained winds around 105 mph and gusts over 110–116 mph in places. By early Saturday the statewide Florida outage count was near 448,000 customer accounts according to Governor DeSantis, part of a broader regional peak that approached 900,000 across Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. As of Sunday afternoon, hundreds of thousands were still without power, concentrated in Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and neighboring counties. Florida Power & Light has said it expects to restore 95 percent of customers who can safely accept power by the end of the day Monday. That is the current system working as well as it can: more than 16,000 linemen and restoration personnel from dozens of states, staged in advance, drones and helicopters already doing damage assessment, major roads and bridges reopened quickly. It is impressive work. It is also not fast enough for the people who need continuous power to stay alive.[1][2][3]
The Last 5 Percent Is the Real Problem
Most towns can absorb a Category 2. The buildings hold. The problem is the multi-day loss of electricity. Of the roughly 300,000 Florida customers still dark or only recently restored as of Sunday, a small but critical percentage—call it 5 percent or so—are elderly, medically dependent, or in facilities that cannot simply ride it out. Oxygen concentrators are the clearest example. A typical home stationary 5-liter unit draws roughly 300–400 watts continuous, with a startup surge that can approach 600 watts. Run that for 24 hours and you are looking at about 7–10 kWh just for one machine. Multiply that by the number of residents in a nursing home who need continuous oxygen, add medical equipment, emergency lighting, and the minimum HVAC required to keep temperatures safe, and the load climbs fast.[4]
A nursing home with half a dozen concentrators plus supporting medical gear and basic environmental control can easily sit in the several-kilowatt range for critical loads. Full building HVAC and lighting push it higher still—into the 10–11 kW territory for some facilities, which is roughly 260 kWh for a full day. That is not a job for a handful of truck batteries. It is a job for something that can get there when roads are blocked and then either deliver charged batteries or, better, land and generate power on site.
The federal Office of Inspector General looked at this problem earlier this year. Their audit of nursing homes participating in Medicare and Medicaid estimated that 73 percent of the roughly 15,000 facilities nationwide have inadequate or unreliable emergency power systems. The deficiencies include poor generator maintenance, incomplete circuit coverage, and equipment that is decades old. The report exists because people have died in past storms when power failed and backup systems did not hold. Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and Winter Storm Uri in Texas are the recent examples the OIG cited. Those numbers did not change because Isaias was “only” a Category 2.[5]
What the Vyper Actually Does
Volynt Aero, based in Oxford, Ohio, and spun out of the Miami University ecosystem, is building the Vyper as a hybrid-electric unmanned aircraft specifically for contested logistics, disaster response, and mobile power. Public specifications list a 500-pound cargo capacity and a range of about 150 nautical miles. The important part for this use case is that it is designed to land and provide 110, 240, or 480 VAC plug-in power on the ground for equipment or tactical microgrids. It runs on standard JP-8 or Jet A, so it does not require a high-voltage charging network to turn around quickly. It is remote-operated or autonomous. The mission set is dull, dirty, dangerous, and distant—exactly the description of a post-hurricane nursing home that still has no grid power on night one or night two.[6]
A realistic early mission profile is not trying to power an entire 120-bed facility at full load. It is the critical load: the concentrators, the medical equipment that must stay online, emergency lighting, and enough environmental control to keep residents safe overnight. One aircraft, one night, one nursing home is the starting point. Battery payload delivery is part of the picture as well. A 50 kg battery package is already meaningful for concentrators and medical gear. Multiple flights or a landed generator configuration scales from there. The point is not that the Vyper replaces the 16,000 linemen. It covers the gap between landfall and the moment the grid is back for the people who cannot wait.
Escambia County alone has on the order of 2,000 nursing home beds. Santa Rosa has well over 1,000. Okaloosa has several hundred more. Dozens of facilities sit inside the hardest-hit outage zones. Some of them have generators that work. Many do not have generators that cover the loads that actually matter once the power is out for more than a few hours. The nurses, the residents, and the families already know what those nights look like. The current restoration system prioritizes hospitals, 911 centers, and the greatest number of customers. It does not fly a power source to a specific nursing home at 2 a.m. on night one.
Ohio Manufacturing and the Open Market
The question after Isaias is not whether the power need exists. It is whether enough of these aircraft will be manufactured and staged before the next storm season. The market is empty. There is no competing hybrid unmanned platform already delivering AC power into disaster zones at this scale. It will take any competitor two or three years and substantial capital just to reach the starting line. That window belongs to whoever builds and fields the capability first.
Manufacturing in Ohio makes sense for the same reasons we discussed on September 21. The technical talent is here. The supply base for aerospace and unmanned systems is here. The university partnership is already in place. The product is dual-use: the same airframe that can support military contested logistics can support civilian disaster response. State emergency management agencies, utilities, and federal partners already buy staged assets. They stage 16,000 linemen and thousands of trucks. Adding a layer of prepositioned aircraft and trained operators is an incremental procurement item, not a new invention.
Governor DeSantis and Florida’s emergency management structure have shown they will stage resources aggressively. A memorandum of understanding with Florida utilities and the Division of Emergency Management, followed by a procurement vehicle, is the practical path. Preposition aircraft and batteries in Pensacola and Tallahassee before the next named storm. Train the operators. Write the contracts so the capability is already funded and sitting on the ramp when the cone of uncertainty locks in. The alternative is asking nursing homes and oxygen-dependent residents to hope their generators hold or that the last 5 percent gets restored before something goes wrong.
Next Year Is the Test
Hurricanes will hit the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic coast again. North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida will lose power for days. Category 2 storms will continue to leave the buildings standing and the lights out. The people who need oxygen, dialysis, or temperature control will still be waiting on the traditional restoration timeline.
The prototype is close enough that the conversation should no longer be about whether the idea works. It should be about how many airframes can be built, staged, and under contract before the 2027 season. One aircraft proving the concept on the first night after landfall is valuable. A fleet sized to the critical facilities in the hardest-hit counties is the actual requirement. The investment is not theoretical. It is lithium batteries, hybrid powerplants, airframes, operators, and the contracts that put them in position before the storm arrives instead of after the bodies have been counted.
I said on September 21 that this is what the Vyper is for. Isaias just spent the weekend making the case. The buildings held. The power did not. The people who cannot wait are still in the dark tonight. Next year we should not be asking the same question.
Notes
1. Landfall details, wind speeds, and early outage counts drawn from statements by Governor Ron DeSantis and contemporaneous reporting from the Associated Press, CBS, and Florida outlets, October 9–10, 2026.
2. Florida Power & Light restoration targets (95 percent of customers who can safely accept power by end of day Monday) and workforce size (more than 16,000 from 29 states) from FPL updates issued October 10–11, 2026.
3. Peak regional outages approaching 900,000 and continuing Sunday figures in the 300,000–400,000 range for Florida and Alabama from PowerOutage.us tracking and national reporting, October 10–11, 2026.
4. Oxygen concentrator power consumption ranges (approximately 300–600 W continuous for stationary home units, with higher startup surges) are standard published specifications for common 5-liter models such as Philips Respironics EverFlo and DeVilbiss units.
5. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, “Most Nursing Homes Throughout the United States Do Not Have Adequate or Reliable Emergency Power Systems,” report issued April 2026. Estimate of 73 percent based on sample of 100 facilities extrapolated to approximately 15,115 Medicare/Medicaid nursing homes.
6. Volynt Aero public descriptions of the Vyper: 500 lb cargo, ~150 NM range, hybrid JP-8/Jet A powerplant, capability to land and supply 110/240/480 VAC power. Company materials and capability statements, 2024–2026. Oxford, Ohio; Miami University spinout connection.
Bibliography / Further Reading
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General. Most Nursing Homes Throughout the United States Do Not Have Adequate or Reliable Emergency Power Systems. April 2026.
• Florida Power & Light newsroom updates on Hurricane Isaias restoration, October 10–11, 2026.
• National Hurricane Center advisories and post-landfall reporting on Hurricane Isaias, October 9–11, 2026.
• Volynt Aero company materials and capability statements describing the Vyper hybrid unmanned aircraft (payload, range, on-ground power generation).
• PowerOutage.us and Florida Public Service Commission outage tracking data for Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and surrounding counties, October 9–11, 2026.
• Published technical specifications for common stationary oxygen concentrators (Philips Respironics, DeVilbiss, and similar 5 L models) regarding continuous and startup wattage.
• Prior storm case studies referenced in the OIG report: Hurricane Ida (Louisiana nursing home deaths) and Winter Storm Uri (Texas nursing home power loss and evacuations).
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I like doing these kinds of talks. Positive stuff. The benefits of things. The proper role of government. When you vote people into government, you are not voting them in to manage your life. You are voting them in to manage something you need done at the local, state, and federal levels, and then to get out of the way so good minds can finish the work. I talk about that a lot, and I talk about my friend, State Senator George Lang, who I consider one of my very best friends, because he has spent a long time doing the unglamorous part of that job. Good things, done over a long period of time, eventually just happen. He does not always realize, in the moment, how far those things are going to travel. I will talk more about some of that in November. For now, I want to talk about a day in Oxford that caught me off guard in the best way.
We had an event at the College@Elm innovation center on September 21. I was there to talk about what I have been calling the dreams of Elm Street. I discussed the next generation of middle-mile work I am involved with through Volynt, the company I lead as COO, and the hybrid unmanned aircraft they call Vyper (with a Y), since Volynt also uses a Y. Volynt Aero sits at 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio, inside that building, and I am very proud of the affiliation and of the people around it.[1] When I do these kinds of things, I invite people I know. I know quite a few political people. I looked into the audience, and there were some very important faces in it. I had invited George to come out and listen. I had no idea he was already part of the roots of the place.
Positive people, positive work
It is nice to be involved in positive things with positive people who mean to do good things. I had no idea when I first got involved with Volynt, and they brought me out to show me the facility and how deep the story of that building went. I was impressed with the building. I didn’t know the story of the Innovation Center on Elm Street. When I gave the talk, I made a play on words. Nightmare on Elm Street used to be the honest description of the building Volynt is in. It was dilapidated. People had considered tearing it down. Miami University President Gregory Crawford brought George Lang out, and Nancy Nix, and a bunch of other people, and said Let us save this building and make it an innovation center for young minds coming through Miami University, a place to get a launch in life. That is exactly what is happening. A partnership moved into the building. I came out there in a COO role with Volynt. We talked a little about the history of how they arrived there, and about the other tenants, in a building that sits right there on the campus square, right there on Elm Street.
I talked about the play on words. A nightmare on Elm Street becoming dreams on Elm Street, because innovation startups are dreams. They are people trying to bring about new thoughts and new ideas. I guess a lot of people knew that story already. I did not. I was talking to George, telling him to come out, and George was already coming. As I was giving the speech, I looked out, and of course Michael Ryan was there, who I believe is going to be the next Butler County commissioner, and he came and gave part of the speech with me. In the audience were people like Nancy Nix. And George was there. I am going to show you. I know George is going to do the work. I had no idea that when I said, “Come on out,” he already knew all about it. He knew about the innovation center. He was there when it was being born. Nancy and I were talking about it, and she had been invited to see it back when President Crawford pitched the idea of taking this building and turning it into an innovation hub for aspiring ideas at Miami University. I had no idea this was where it was going.
The building that almost got torn down
I saw George in the background as we were setting up to give our speech. He was filming a short presentation on the building’s history, which he hadn’t told me about. I had no idea it was happening. I just joined the Volynt role. I admired the building. I thought it was a good use of a structure that might otherwise have been lost. It is very close, in Oxford terms, to the Miami University Airport, the little airport down the road at 7101 Fairfield Road, identifier OXD, a 4,011-foot runway that Miami operates and that sits only a few miles from campus.[2] For a company building uncrewed aircraft, that proximity is not a small thing. It is all very well set up.
Here is the history, for those unfamiliar, because it is a good story and deserves to be talked up.
The building at 20 S. Elm Street was built in 1933. For 68 years it served as Miami University’s central food service facility, the unglamorous engine room that kept the campus fed.[3] After dining services moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center, the Elm Street building became swing space and general storage, then sat vacant. By the time people were seriously arguing about its future, it was a roughly 90-year-old, 39,000-square-foot brick building with a strong foundation and a failing prospect. Miami and the City of Oxford debated what to do with it. Selling it was on the table. Tearing it down was on the table. Leaving it as a forgotten building on South Elm was the path of least resistance.[4]
President Crawford did not take the path of least resistance. He had been in business before higher education. He had founded companies. He knew the difference between a press release and a building that works. Around 2017 and 2018, he began walking potential partners through the place and asking whether they could see what Elm Street might become.[5] By 2020, the university and the city had a plan: turn the vacant structure into a technology, entrepreneurship, and workforce hub. Preparations began in 2021. The renovation cost about $10.7 million, part of a larger public-private investment of $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors.[6] Miami alumni Lee Fisher, class of 1968, and Rosemary Fisher, class of 1969, provided the naming gift. In February 2023, the building opened as the Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm.[7]
That is the part I did not know when I was admiring the brick.
George Lang, the incubator, and the long clock
George has said publicly that he used whatever political capital he had to get state dollars into the project so it could get started and get up and running. He has called College@Elm something very special and very unique. His line, the one that matches what I half-heard him filming in the background, is that it is the only incubator he knows of where you can go from concept to production under one roof: prototypes, marketing expertise, funding, the whole path an entrepreneur needs to find out whether an idea can succeed.[8] Advanced manufacturing was part of the original pitch. The Fischer Group was an early anchor concept, an “innovation extension” inside the same walls as Miami’s entrepreneurship training.[9] When I watched him in the background and later saw the clip surface on LinkedIn, because the algorithm knows I know him, he was not doing a campaign spot. He was telling the history of a building he had already helped stand up, eight or ten years before Volynt moved into Suite 117.
I have known George for about twenty years: very good times and some very hard times. You learn the character of a person that way. A good person is pretty stable whether the times are good or bad. I am sure things are going on in his life where people look at him from the outside and say, I wish I were him. Then you know the pressure of living. It can be hard. I am sure he would trade some of the blood pressure for an easier job. He has said as much, in the way friends say it. The goldfish feeder at Walmart might be a better life on some days, because you can enjoy things a little more and carry less pressure. He finds himself under a lot of pressure a lot of the time. I say that as a friend, someone I talk to pretty regularly. It is not always better on the other side of the glass. It is hard. But when you care about innovation, and business, and technology, and job growth, this is the work. That is why I am involved in it. Not because the title is comfortable. Because the output is real.
Nancy Nix has the same knack. She was in the audience on September 21. She has a way of seeing a good thing before it becomes important, and she has been that way for a long time, back through nearly sixteen years as Butler County Treasurer and into the Auditor’s office she was sworn into in February 2023.[10] She was invited out when Crawford was still pitching the building. She came. Michael Ryan has supported this kind of work well before the commissioner race, and he stood up and spoke with me that day. He won the Republican primary in May 2026 with about 72 percent of the vote, and he is on the November 3 ballot focused on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.[11] I think he is going to win. More to the point, he showed up.
What Volynt is actually doing there
Volynt Aero was formed in 2024 by people who have been developing uncrewed aircraft and eVTOL machines for years. The spelling is the point—Volynt, with a Y. The aircraft is the Vyper, also with a Y. They are always doing things a little differently, and I like that. The company builds hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft aimed at cargo logistics, highly mobile power generation, and forward communications for defense and for disaster response- the work where you cannot always count on a runway, a fuel truck, or a pilot who can get there.[1] The address on the capability statement and on the federal registration is the same as the innovation center: 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. They have taken Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support and partnered with Miami University on powertrain work. That is the right use of a building like this. Not a plaque. A prototype.
I had no idea, the first time I walked the facility, that the roots of the innovation talk went back that far, or that George was part of it, or that Nancy Nix was part of it. A lot of things in government never mature. Maybe only five percent of them ever become anything good. This one has a chance to mature into something really good. It is exactly the kind of thing that all of these people hope their role in government can do: take good minds, imagination, goodwill, and blood, and help them mature into something productive. Government, used properly, does not dream for people. It keeps the road open so the people who do dream can get the work to market.
Dreams, not the extended nightmare
I have always enjoyed my time on college campuses. I have not been happy with the direction academia has taken, captured as so much of it has been by left-wing politics and by the pursuit of intelligence subordinated to social order. I still encourage what I see. Even if everybody on a campus is not pushing the limit the way I think they should, you still see a proportion of people who are. I stop by the little convenience store on the campus, and I get a Mello Yello. People joke about it. The three drinks I drink are Mello Yello, water, and milk. A lot of water, a lot of milk, and a lot of Mello Yello. Sugar is not good for you, but I don’t consume much else with a lot of sugar in it, so I am good with it. And when I am standing there, I see a lot of bright-eyed people walking around with backpacks, dreaming and hoping.
That is what I was talking about in the speech. The dreams of Elm Street, because we were on Elm Street, in the innovation center. You expect a company like Volynt, working there, to have a shot at evolving into a technological powerhouse. It all started with the dreams of people like the president of Miami University, and Senator Lang, and Nancy Nix. You can tell who your friends are. It depends on who shows up for these things. You invite them to come out, you look into the audience, and you see faces that are very familiar to you. Some of the things you are doing may not become important for five years, or ten. They still come.
George said it in his own way. The things you do today are the things that show up eight or nine years from now. A lot of the work he does, and a lot of the work the other people who came out to our event are doing, works on that clock. I appreciate everybody who came. Michael Ryan has been supportive before he was ever on a commissioner ballot. Nancy has always supported things well before they become important. She has a good eye. She was in the audience. She knows a good thing when she sees it.
The innovation center on Elm Street is there for a purpose. It is there to inspire the growth of human intellect, as academia was always meant to do. I was proud to be there, and proud to be a part of it, and proud to look into that audience and see those kinds of people. I appreciate having high-quality people like that in my life. I think all of us, working together, can make dreams come true for a lot of people who don’t even know they are dreaming yet. They are just living their lives and hoping for a dream to dream, instead of living inside an extended nightmare where intellect is no longer in charge of the human condition.
Innovation centers like the one on Elm Street are, I think, among the highest-order things a community can build anywhere in the world, because they are dedicated to aspiring intelligence that makes everybody else’s lives much better. George Lang has always been supportive of that. It was good to hear his story, and to hear it go back those eight or nine years. The things you do today will be the things people are standing inside of nine years from now. That is what good government looks like. A president of a university pushing. A senator putting political capital on a building that is still empty. An auditor who shows up early. A future commissioner who stands up and speaks. They help pave the way for dreams to become a reality instead of a nightmare.
Footnotes
[1] Volynt Aero, Inc. lists its primary address as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Founded in 2024, the company develops hybrid-electric uncrewed eVTOL aircraft for cargo logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications under the Vyper name, and has paired Ohio Third Frontier and TVSF support with Miami University powertrain work. See Volynt Aero capability statement, volynt.aero; federal entity record, CAGE 9X2Y4, UEI ZDFZRXS7EJY2; Volynt Aero LinkedIn company page.
[2] Miami University Airport (OXD), 7101 Fairfield Road, Oxford, Ohio 45056, is a public-use airport operated in connection with the university and has a 4,011-by-70-foot asphalt runway. Miami University, “OXD Airport in Oxford, Ohio,” miamioh.edu/oxd-airport.
[3] Miami University, “From Food Services to Innovation Hub: The Story of College@Elm,” College@Elm Impact Blog, 2025. The building was constructed in 1933 and served as the university’s central food service facility for 68 years before dining operations moved to the Demske Culinary Support Center.
[4] Halie Barger, “Forgotten building on South Elm Street to become space for innovation startups and a focus on the arts,” Oxford Observer, February 14, 2020. Miami and Oxford officials described a vacant former food-service building that had later been used for storage; sale and continued vacancy were both live options before the innovation-hub plan.
[5] Sean Scott reporting in the Oxford Free Press, “College@Elm aims to provide innovation hub for Southwest Ohio businesses,” drawing on Lee Fisher’s account that President Gregory Crawford approached potential partners around 2017–2018 and was “the big driving force” behind the project. Crawford has described walking partners through the building more than two years before the 2023 opening. Miami University News, “The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm celebrates grand opening,” February 2023.
[6] Miami University put the renovation at $10.7 million and total invested funding at $17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors. Miami University News, February 4, 2021, “Miami and Oxford initiative to transform uptown into an entrepreneurial hub”; Miami University News, February 2023 grand-opening release. The Oxford Free Press separately noted a City of Oxford contribution of about $1.18 million toward renovations, plus parking-lot work. Figures vary by what is counted as renovation versus total public-private investment; both numbers are in the public record.
[7] Lee Fisher ’68 and Rosemary Fisher ’69 provided the naming gift. The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm held its grand opening in February 2023 at 20 S. Elm Street. Miami University News, February 2023.
[8] George Lang, quoted in the Oxford Free Press: “I was very proud to use whatever political capital I had to get some dollars at the state level to help get the program started and get it up and running.” And: “It’s the only place, literally the only incubator in Ohio, that I know of in the country, where you can go from concept to production all under one roof and have everything right there.” The Miami Student, March 2023, also noted Lang’s support through the funding process. The September 21, 2026 remarks I saw him filming are his own telling of that same history.
[9] Miami University News, February 4, 2021. The early plan named two anchor uses: Miami’s entrepreneurship training and incubator center, and the Fischer Group’s manufacturing “innovation extension.” Later tenants have included student and alums ventures such as Coarse Culture. The Miami Student, March 2023, reported a five-year hope, attached to the Fischer Group concept, of 52 jobs and just under $3 million in payroll.
[10] Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix was sworn in on February 13, 2023, after nearly 16 years as Butler County Treasurer, and was elected in November 2024 to the unexpired term. She holds a B.S. from Truman State University, an MBA from Miami University (2012), and a CPA license—Butler County Auditor, “Meet Nancy,” auditor.bcohio.gov.
[11] Michael V. Ryan, former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, won the May 5, 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with about 72 percent against incumbent Cindy Carpenter, and faces Democrat Mike Miller on the November 3, 2026 ballot. Journal-News, “Butler County commissioners race: Michael Ryan and Mike Miller up for open seat,” September 30, 2026. Ryan has campaigned on economic development, job creation, and capital investment.
Volynt Aero. Capability statement and company site. https://volynt.aero/ — address listed as 20 S. Elm Street, Suite 117, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Aircraft program styled Vyper.
Volynt Aero. LinkedIn company page, Oxford, Ohio. Notes Ohio TVSF grant and Miami University powertrain partnership.
Hoffman, Rich. Overmanwarrior essays and podcast, hoffmanbooks.com — including the September 21, 2026 College@Elm remarks and the George Lang clip referenced here.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I keep hearing the same two stories about artificial intelligence, and both of them are wrong. The first story says AI will take your job, run your company, replace your CEO, and close the gap left by people who were never qualified to sit in the chair. The second story says AI is a monster and you should protest data centers, paper, cash, and every tool that looks like the future. I have used the tools. I have run departments. I have been the job maker and the job getter. I have dealt with more human resources departments this year than in the rest of my life combined. My assessment is simple. AI is an employee that does not sleep. It is useful. It is not thinking. It won’t save a company that hired the wrong people. And it is not going to take over the market economy.
I said versions of this years ago. I wrote it into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business when I argued that trained intuition, the kind people smear as “shooting from the hip,” still beats a mechanical process most of the time. [1] I was curious whether I was being Paul Bunyan with an axe while the chainsaw era rolled in. I have checked that thought against reality. I was not being Paul Bunyan. I was early.
WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY MEAN WHEN THEY SAY THEY ARE AFRAID OF AI
A lot of the fear is not about software. It is about people. I have heard it all year. You are an old white guy with privilege, so nobody has to take you seriously. That is not an economic analysis. That is a social permission slip. A generation that came of age working from living rooms, insulated from deadlines, conflict, and performance pressure, was taught that experienced men over fifty were the threat. Angry. Scary. Too much résumé. Too many relationships. Too much industrial memory.
I did not even keep a LinkedIn account for a long time. I have one now because people look me up. The feedback is almost comic. Oh my gosh, you have a giant, scary résumé. You know a lot of people. You are scary. The consensus I keep running into among people twenty-five to fifty is that they want insulation from old white guys, and they want AI and HR processes to provide it.
That is arrogance dressed up as progress. It assumes the world started when they arrived. It assumes the CEOs who fly to Davos and recycle the same mantras on LinkedIn have discovered a substitute for judgment. They have not.
AN EMPLOYEE THAT DOES NOT SLEEP IS STILL AN EMPLOYEE
I like AI. I use it. I get up at three in the morning, and I can talk to it. A human expert may not be available at four. As a research assistant, an editor, a bundler of notes into a first-pass PowerPoint, it is excellent. That is the honest use.
Ask me if I use it to write the source material. No. I write. Then I use it to filter, clean, and catch sentences that sound like a machine trying to imitate a person. It still does not understand human communication the way a person does; it cannot write like me. It rearranges. It polishes. It does not originate the thing that has to be true in the real world.
I have given it more than a fair shake. I have tried versions of it on air and off. It is a resource. It is not a mind. The companies that bought the line that AI would author strategy, close the leadership gap, and replace people who have actually built things are now bumper-carring into the wall. The toy came out of the box broken and not broken as a tool and broken as a religion.
HUMAN RESOURCES DID NOT GET DUMBER BY ACCIDENT
I have run HR departments. I know what those departments are supposed to do on the job-maker side and how they feel on the job-getter side. What I have watched this year is a shift. A lot of people in those offices are just doing a job. They are not asking who wrote the rules. They inherited a form memo from a CEO who inherited a political fashion straight out of China and Davos. The fashion said identity boxes plus software would outperform experience.
That is why so many program-management groups now want to teach Microsoft Copilot as if a bundle of prompts can run a business. Copilot is brilliant as an aid. It is not a substitute for a person who has missed a shipment, faced a union problem, held a customer’s rage, signed a payroll when the cash was tight, and still hit the date. Conflict-averse HR, deadline-optional culture, and “AI will cover it” is a combination that looks modern and performs like a hobby.
Age discrimination is not a vibe I invented. Federal law has prohibited it against workers 40 and older since 1967, and the EEOC still takes thousands of charges a year, but it’s still a problem that slips through legal loopholes. [2][3] The cultural version is cruder than the legal version. It says experience itself is suspect if it comes in the wrong demographic wrapper. Then it pretends a model trained on yesterday’s text can replace the person who lived the work.
THE DEI-PLUS-AI BET WAS A COVER STORY
Here is the game I see. Corporations adopted policies that pushed skilled, experienced leadership aside. They checked the boxes. They told Wall Street a story. Wall Street, which is very good at polishing a story and selling it to investors who brag about the penthouse, treated it as value. The quiet assumption was that artificial intelligence would run the company anyway, so the nameplate on the office did not have to belong to the best operator. You could hang a CEO tag on almost anyone. The software would drive the results.
That is a communist-adjacent fantasy wearing a tech hoodie. Anybody can do it; the model will think, output will hold, and the country will not notice the drop. I have watched the opposite happen. Companies hired people who fit a political costume and lacked the scar tissue. The work did not get done. The dates slipped. The quality sagged. AI did not close the gap because AI cannot supply intuition, accountability, or the courage to tell a room the truth.
There is a live argument in the research about whether DEI programs help or hurt firm performance. Consulting shops have sold the “diversity outperforms” slide for years. [4] Other work, including recent official economic analysis, has argued that identity-based promotion into management after 2016 tracks with lower productivity and high aggregate costs. [5] Other papers say markets did not punish firms that kept DEI programs after the 2025 policy shift. [6] I am not asking you to treat any one paper as scripture. I am telling you what I have seen in the rooms where the product has to ship. When you select against experience and then pray a chatbot will think for the inexperienced, you do not get a renaissance. You get a mess you can hide only as long as cheap money and a pumped Wall Street aligned with the Federal Reserve keep the lights pretty.
THE 2026 ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT put a number on one version of the cost: industries that leaned hard into those practices were associated with lower productivity, with an estimated hit on the order of tens of billions of dollars a year by 2023. [5] You can fight about methods. You cannot fight the operating reality I keep walking into. The people who still know how to run plants, programs, and payrolls are being called back because the substitute failed.
CASHLESS, PAPERLESS, AND THE DREAM OF A HANDLE ON MONEY
The same fashion that sold AI-as-CEO sold cashless and paperless as moral improvement. Save the trees and they were all wrong. Go online. Let the system monitor everything. If money isn’t tied to anything hard, it becomes easier to change the unit of account, funnel value through banks and markets, and pay huge salaries that don’t have to answer to real output. I write things on my hand for a reason. Systems fail. Internet fails. Even a satellite link is not reliable beyond fault. When the process is slow because nobody will put a number on paper and look a vendor in the eye, you do not have innovation. You have latency with a sustainability sticker on it.
Central bank digital currency talk is the polished end of that dream. Supporters sell inclusion and efficiency. Critics, including people who are not talking from a barstool, warn about privacy, programmable control, bank-run risk, and a tool that lets the issuer see or freeze the transaction. [7][8][9] The United Kingdom’s House of Lords called retail CBDC a solution in search of a problem. [7] I do not need a white paper to know why cash still matters. Cash is rude to central planners. Paper is rude to people who want every thought inside a dashboard. It was a communist push sent straight from China to destroy the West and its economy.
Do I think every CEO who said “paperless” was running a global conspiracy? No. Most of them were repeating a slogan. The slogan still has a direction. If you can get firms off cash, off paper, off experienced dissenters, and onto a monitored stack “managed by AI,” you do not need to win the argument about value. You change the scoreboard to make it look good.
WALL STREET, THE TAIL OF THE DOG, AND THE STINK ON THE FIELD
I am tired of financial television chasing the tail of the dog. I am telling you where the nose is pointed. As long as the Federal Reserve can put money into the system and Wall Street can mark the story to a market that is not a gold standard, companies can hide bad operating bets. They can hire the wrong people, buy the wrong software narrative, and still show a chart. That does not last once real demand, real competition, and real delivery show up.
I have seen the smaller version of this inside companies. A finance person who thinks everyone is doing it, treats the accounts like a personal weather system, buys the boat and the early retirement, and assumes that by the time anyone counts, the story will have moved on. I have seen the harm that leaves behind. I am not going to dress that up as a composite Hollywood villain. I am telling you the pattern. Corporatism hides a lot of ordinary theft and ordinary incompetence behind process. AI will not save those people from arithmetic. Justice, eventually, is just arithmetic with a badge.
Trump’s first term already showed how official narratives about prices, energy, and markets can run one way while operators on the ground run another. I am not asking you to treat every spike as a morality play. I am asking you to notice when CEOs change how they value human beings because a political weather system told them experience was optional. When the weather changes, they want the experienced person back. They want the so-called angry white guy over fifty. They will pay. They should. The next stretch of this economy won’t be won by people who have only managed a Slack channel and a vendor scorecard.
WHY THE ANTI-AI, ANTI-DATA-CENTER PANIC IS USEFUL TO AMERICA’S RIVALS
Here is the part a lot of people miss because they only know how to protest. There is a strategy, whether fully coordinated or merely convenient, that wants American firms less competitive. Chase nonproductive internal politics. Constrain labor. Then tell the public that the remaining productive machinery, the data centers, the industrial base, the people who still know how to build, is the enemy.
AI can supplement a labor market that politics has made stupid. That is exactly why a rival would love the United States to hate the tool and keep the policy. If China can cap American output while American companies argue about pronouns, paper, and whether a fifty-five-year-old program manager is too frightening to hire, Beijing does not need to beat us in a fair race. It needs us to trip.
In 2026, OpenAI, Republican committee chairs, and threat-intelligence shops reported China-origin influence activity testing anti-data-center and anti-AI-infrastructure narratives in American feeds. [10][11][12] Serious reporters also pointed out that Americans have homegrown reasons to dislike a warehouse that eats power and water on the edge of town, and that foreign amplifiers often ride a wave they did not create. [13] Both things can be true. Local land-use fights are real. So is the fact that a strategic competitor has no incentive to cheer an American buildout.
I am not telling you to love every server farm or every utility bill. I am telling you not to take your marching orders from a laser pointer. If you have ever used a laser with a cat, you know the trick. The light is not the mouse. A lot of the anti-AI content is the light.
BLADE RUNNER IS A MOVIE
People talk as if we are one product launch from a replicant you cannot tell from a neighbor. That is science fiction. Current systems predict the next token from past data. They are strong on familiar patterns and weak on novel, counter-to-data judgment. Researchers keep finding the same limit: impressive on the benchmark you trained toward, brittle when the problem is actually new. [14][15][16][17] Clinical and decision studies show overconfidence and shallow reasoning where a human still has to live with the miss. [18]
Could robotics pick up a can, sort a bin, run a basic route? Yes, and that will get better. Could a model sit in a budget fight, read a liar across a table, redesign a line at 2 a.m. when the fixture is wrong and the customer is flying in at dawn? Not in this decade in any way that replaces the person. Maybe the mid-2030s produce something scarier on television. I do not see human-level intuition on a corporate org chart by 2027. The people who bet the firm would already be here were suckers. COVID revealed a lot of sucker games. This is another one.
THE MARKET IS ALREADY VOTING FOR EXPERIENCE
I am watching the reversal in real time. After the first wave of large firms and Davos talkers, the rest of the economy still has to find people who will work harder than the median, who still value cash, who will write the note, who will own the date. The companies that got off the hook early and went back to old school- paper when it helps, cash when it matters, experienced people when the problem is ugly- are going to eat the ones that cannot.
I run exercises that force me to think like a younger person. I get in the dirt and check the idea against the part. What I have learned is that I was more correct than I expected, and that a lot of CEOs who bought the AI-will-save-our-staffing-politics story are going to choke on it. Trump-era pressure and a tighter real economy make it harder to hide a nonperforming org chart behind a diversity slide and a Copilot license.
SpaceX and serious industrial operators didn’t get there by pretending a chatbot could substitute for a propulsion engineer who’s already failed twice and knows what failure smells like. In the second half of this decade, no matter the logo on the building, it’s a race for qualified people. Not vibes. Not boxes. People.
HOW I ACTUALLY USE THE TOOL, AND HOW YOU SHOULD
I use AI like a good editor and a tireless librarian. I do not outsource the claim. I do not let it invent a number I have not seen. I do not let it talk to a customer in my voice until I have put my name on the sentence. If your company is using it to hide the fact that nobody in the room has done the job, you are not modern. You are late and lying to yourself.
If you are a CEO who spent three years telling the board that software would replace judgment, you already know the next slide. You need operators. You will pay for them. Say it out loud before the market says it for you.
WHAT I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER
Do not fear AI. Fear the story that says you can fire experience, flatten money into a controllable token, put every process inside a monitor, and trust a model to think. That story is how a country makes itself smaller while it talks about innovation.
AI will help people work better. It will not replace human intuition. It will not run the next serious company. It will not protect a generation from having to confront other human beings. It will not get a DEI hire through a merit-based storm. It will not rescue the consultant class from the promises they sold.
Watch the dog’s nose, not the tail. The stink on the field is failed output. That is where the animal is going. I told you first. You will not hear it clean on the usual financial shows, because they are paid to narrate the tail.
Have a good day. Remember who told you. I will see you in the argument that actually matters: whether this country still believes a human being can outthink a woke agenda
FOOTNOTES
[1] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021). The book treats “shooting from the hip” as trained speed after fundamentals, not sloppiness, and sets that American gunfighter ethic against Eastern strategy texts.
[2] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Age Discrimination,” and “Fact Sheet: Age Discrimination.” The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 protects applicants and employees forty and older in hiring, firing, pay, promotion, and other terms of employment.
[3] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA; AARP reporting on EEOC charge volume, including 16,223 age-discrimination charges in 2024.
[4] McKinsey & Company, “Diversity Matters Even More” (2023) and earlier Diversity Matters series. These reports are the standard corporate citation for a diversity-outperformance claim and should be read as correlational advocacy research, not a controlled experiment.
[5] Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President, 2026, chapter on the economic consequences of DEI, discussing post-2016 associations between DEI-related management practices and productivity, including an estimated GDP cost on the order of $94 billion in 2023 in one specification.
[6] Jacob Grumbach and coauthors, “Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI” (2026 working paper / Democracy Policy Lab), finding no abnormal-return penalty for S&P 500 firms that kept DEI programs after Executive Order 14173 (January 2025). CBS News summary, August 18, 2026.
[7] House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, report on retail central bank digital currency (2023), described in later reviews as calling a retail CBDC a “solution in search of a problem.”
[8] Norbert Michel, “Central Bank Digital Currency: The Risks and the Myths,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 145 (January 10, 2023).
[9] Kevin Dowd, work collected in later Cambridge writing on CBDCs, arguing negligible public demand where retail CBDCs have been tried and warning about programmable control. See also SUERF review of retail CBDC costs and bank-run arguments (2026).
[10] OpenAI threat report, June 2026, describing China-origin clusters using ChatGPT to generate social content testing narratives against U.S. AI infrastructure and data centers—coverage: Politico, June 10, 2026.
[11] House Energy and Commerce Committee Republican letter (June 2026) asking the administration to investigate foreign influence around data-center opposition. E&E News / Politico, June 4, 2026.
[12] New York Times, “China, Russia and Others Seek to Inflame Debate Over A.I. Data Centers,” July 9, 2026, citing Alethea analysis of state-media amplification.
[13] Wired, “China Didn’t Make Americans Hate Data Centers,” June 12, 2026, and follow-up September 6, 2026, arguing domestic land-use, power, and political grievances are the base layer and that influence operations often exploit existing anger.
[14] “Does AI Prediction Scale to Decision Making?” Communications of the ACM, 2025, on the limit of past-data prediction for counter-to-data human decisions.
[15] MIT CSAIL / MIT News, “Reasoning skills of large language models are often overestimated” (July 11, 2024), on failure under counterfactual and unfamiliar variants.
[16] “Take caution in using LLMs as human surrogates,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025.
[17] Strategy Science, “Mean Articulation Machines” (2025), on remaining human advantages in abduction and strategy under true uncertainty.
[18] “Limitations of large language models in clinical problem-solving arising from inflexible reasoning,” Scientific Reports, 2025.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Self-published, 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript in revision; forthcoming.
Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal. North River Press, various editions.
Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. Free Press, 1990.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Multiple translations.
Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Age Discrimination resources and The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA.
AARP. Age-discrimination complaint tracking and related labor-force reports.
Council of Economic Advisers. Economic Report of the President. 2026. Chapter on DEI and productivity.
McKinsey & Company. Diversity Matters series, including “Diversity Matters Even More” (2023).
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow. Work on the allocation of talent and growth, often cited in the opposing DEI-economic-cost debate. See Science Forum, “On the economic costs of ending DEI,” May 15, 2025.
Grumbach, Jacob, et al. “Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI.” 2026.
Larcker, David F., Charles McClure, Shawn Shi, and Edward M. Watts. “The Limited Corporate Response to DEI Controversies.” SSRN, 2026.
Michel, Norbert. “Central Bank Digital Currency: The Risks and the Myths.” Cato Institute, 2023.
Dowd, Kevin. Critiques of retail CBDC adoption and demand. Cambridge / related essays, mid-2020s.
Bank for International Settlements. Surveys and risk papers on CBDC design, security, and financial-stability implications.
House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. Retail CBDC inquiry, 2023.
Allison and coauthors. “Central Bank Digital Currencies, Financial Inclusion, and Privacy: A Normative Perspective.” Southern Economic Journal, 2026.
OpenAI. Influence-operations reporting on AI-infrastructure narratives, June 2026.
Alethea. Threat-intelligence analysis of foreign state-media coverage of U.S. data centers, 2026.
Bitcoin Policy Institute. Reports on foreign influence ecosystems around AI infrastructure (treat as advocacy research; read against Wired and NYT).
Politico; E&E News; New York Times; Wired. 2026 coverage of the data-center politics and influence debate.
Acemoglu, Daron, and Simon Johnson. Power and Progress. PublicAffairs, 2023. For a broad political-economy critique of who captures tech rents.
Kissinger, Henry, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie. Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit. 2024.
Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique. Harvard Business Review Press.
Hougaard, Rasmus, and Jacqueline Carter. More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead. Harvard Business Review Press, 2025.
Hoffman, Reid, and Greg Beato. Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. 2025. Useful as the optimistic techno-humanist counter-case.
Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. 2026.
Communications of the ACM; PNAS; Scientific Reports; Strategy Science; MIT CSAIL papers cited in the footnotes, 2024–2025, on reasoning limits of large language models.
World Economic Forum. Annual meeting materials from Davos. Read as primary source for the managerial dialect, not as gospel.
Microsoft. Copilot for Microsoft 365 product documentation. Useful for separating the actual tool from the sales mysticism.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I know a lot of people out there take issue with my point of view. Good. I get involved in this stuff precisely because that is the case. I did not want another polite Bible study where everybody already agrees and then goes home feeling spiritually hydrated. I wanted an open discussion, talking to an audience, with the entire database of Jonathan Edwards in the chair across from me. Faith, theology, the Bible as I actually read it, and the work I have been doing for years under the heading I call the politics of heaven.
The timing is not accidental. We are living through what the documentary industry has branded The Age of Disclosure — a season in which former officials, intelligence people, and military witnesses are finally willing to say out loud that non-human intelligence is here, that craft have been recovered, and that the American state has been lying about it since at least 1947.[1] The film treats that as a national-security and science story. I treat it as a political story that starts long before Roswell. If you have read me for any length of time, you already know I do not separate UFOs from demons, Elohim, Watchers, or the divine council. I do not separate any of that from how human beings get sorted into controllable categories. That is the whole point of The Politics of Heaven.[2]
Why I Chose Jonathan Edwards as a Sparring Partner
Jonathan Edwards does not agree with me. That is why I wanted him. If I only talk to people who already think the universe is a messy civil war among non-human rebels, I am just warming up my own choir. Edwards spent a life preaching the absolute sovereignty of God over all things, including the devil.[3] His notes sit in one of my favorite Bibles on the planet. I love the intelligence in that book. I love the seriousness. I do not swallow the theology hook, line, and sinker just because it became part of the American founding atmosphere.[4]
A lot of people who read me are 1750s people in 2026 clothes. They want Edwards’s God — the God who never loses a committee vote, the God whose enemies only borrow power for a season. I understand the hunger. I have been through enough grief to know why a soul wants a strong anchor. I also think that hunger can become a psychological mechanism. When life is chaotic, the human heart will pay almost any price to believe somebody competent is driving. That does not make the belief true. It makes it useful.
Edwards would say Satan was once among the brightest in heaven, fallen, subtle, powerful, and still on a leash. He would say rebellion was never a political contest because God is not one being among beings. God is the ground of existence. I love that sentence. I have used versions of it myself. I also look at the last several thousand years, and I do not see a manager winning on the ground. I see a lot of borrowed-power talk and a lot of bodies.
The Age of Disclosure and the Politics of Heaven
Disclosure, as the government class uses the word, means a press conference. A file release. A hearing. A former AATIP guy staring at a building while the score tells you to feel solemn. That is not disclosure. Disclosure is when you admit the other intelligence in the room has been running a ground game through religion, politics, sex, war, and category-making since before your grandparents had a country.
Michael Heiser did the church a favor by forcing Psalm 82 back onto the table. God stands in the divine council. He judges among the gods. Deuteronomy 32, in the older reading, has the Most High allotting nations to the sons of God. Job opens with the sons of God presenting themselves and the Accuser walking in like he has a badge.[5] You can baptize all of that into “God is still in charge” if you need to sleep. Alternatively, you can read it the way a political operator reads a situation room: there is a board, there are governors, some of them have gone rogue, and the chairman keeps insisting the org chart proves he never lost control. Moreover, to the point of evil being in control, remember Michael Heiser died of a rare illness. I have also had a lot of trouble since completing my most recent book on this precise subject. The bad guys look to get rid of people who are close to smoking them out of their hiding places. I have seen it up close, and it is much more than a coincidence.
Inside the disclosure world there is already a split. One camp wants interstellar biologists and reverse-engineered alloys. The other camp — the so-called Collins Elite strain inside defense culture — has been whispering for decades that these things are not cousins from Zeta Reticuli. They are deceivers. They deny the Son. They catechize abductees.[6] I am closer to the second camp, with one difference. I do not think calling them “demons” ends the argument. Demons is a church word that lets people stop thinking. I want the org chart. I want the ground game. I want to know who is manipulating whom, and why God keeps hiring the same contractors after they burn the city down.
Categories Are How Non-Human Intelligence Controls the Human Race
Here is the running thought I brought into the conversation. When astronomers hunted black holes, they did not start with a photograph. They started with a gravity signature. Something unseen was tugging at visible bodies. The logical conclusion was a compact mass so dense light could not climb out. Better instruments later confirmed what the footprints already said.
I look at human history the same way. You can see spirit-world manipulation in how people get thrown into categories, and then those categories get administered. Left, right. Saved, unsaved. Young earth, old earth. Alien, angel. Loyal servant, blasphemer. Once you are in the box, the box does the rest of the work. You police yourself. You attack the neighboring box. Meanwhile, the intelligence that built the shelves goes home early.
That is why I get impatient with people who think the main spiritual task is to pick the correct team jersey and never ask whether the stadium itself is the trap. I used a football picture in the conversation because I live in Bengal country and I have watched 60,000 people invent causation out of a lucky shirt. One receiver catches a ball in the last minute, and ten thousand isolated nervous systems all decide their fabric caused the physics. We do the same thing with God and history. We live in a vacuum of limited observation, and then we call the vacuum providence.
I Am Not a Young-Earth Creationist, and I Do Not Need the Planetarium to Close the Argument
The Creation Museum has a fine exhibit culture. I live in this triangle. I have sat through their planetarium show, which is really good, and I have been curious how they sell a 6,000-year-old Earth with a straight face while the sky over Petersburg is the same sky that makes deep time obvious.[7] I am not a young-earth man. I am a deep-past man. The idea that life only exists here, and only during this thin slice of time, is ridiculous to me. That is not rebellion against Genesis. That is refusing to let a nineteenth-century fight with Darwin become the whole religion.
Young-earth certainty and materialist certainty are twin categories. Both are easy to administer. Both spare you from the harder sentence: we do not know how old the war is, we do not know how many worlds it touches, and we are arrogant to think the Bible’s human camera angle is the only camera in the universe. I love the Bible because it is the longest political and spiritual after-action report I have. I do not love it because a committee told me I am not allowed to notice the lens.
Job Is Not Comfort Literature
I understand Job. I have had enough wreckage in my life that the book does not feel like a classroom exercise. I do not sit around looking for a hug from a psychotherapist. I outmaneuver hard things by moving. People say I am positive about everything. That is not a personality quirk. That is a method. You do not beat a siege by narrating your wounds to an audience that cannot lift a gate.[8]
What I will not do is pretend Job is a success story for management. Satan walks into the council, talks God into a demonstration, and a good man’s world is stripped for a wager. Edwards says the boundaries prove sovereignty because the Accuser had to ask permission. I say that is the behavior of a boss who can still sign the visitor badge while the factory burns. Permission is not the same thing as competence. Permission is not the same thing as loyalty to the people who actually bleed.
If I had been standing in that council, I would have wanted Satan’s head off in the air. Not as theater. As containment. Then I would have watched God’s face. That is the test nobody in Sunday school is allowed to run. If the Accuser is a rebel, you kill the rebel. If the Accuser is a tool, you just learned something about the toolmaker that the later chapters are designed to keep you from saying out loud.
Sovereignty, Lucky Jerseys, and the Divine Council Bureaucracy
Edwards’s best line in the exchange, the one that still rings, is that God is not a being among beings. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. The greater one in us is greater than the one in the world.[9] I like the music of that. I also asked the question bureaucracy always dreads: if he is in charge of everybody, why the council? Why the governors? Why the sons of God with portfolios? Why a heavenly civil service if the king can move the sun with a sentence?
The approved answer is generosity. God does not need help. He shares the dignity of rule, as a great king appoints judges. Fine. I have run companies. I have watched kings appoint judges. Sometimes it is generosity. Sometimes it is a man who cannot stand to be seen doing the ugly work with his own hands. A weak leader uses other people to do what he lacks the social courage to do himself. He works through passive systems. He keeps a villain on payroll, so the villain can be blamed when the quarterly report comes in bloody.
That is how Job reads to me when I take the piety filter off. God keeps an Accuser. The Accuser proposes torture. God authorizes a limited version. Later writers explain that it was for Job’s refinement and for the audience’s faith. Hindsight is the favorite tool of every failed administration. You look back at what already happened and discover it was necessary. Necessity is cheap when you are not the one burying children.
Why Does an All-Powerful God Need Proof of Loyalty Through Pain?
Edwards says God is not insecure. The infinite self-existent one was happy before he made a single atom. Tests are for us, not for him. The fire does not inform the goldsmith. It purifies the gold. I have heard that sermon. I have preached versions of it to myself on bad mornings. It still leaves the managerial question on the table.
Why is the refinement this expensive? Why do the loyal become the demonstration models? Why does Israel get the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Roman, the exile, the rape, the blinded king, the suicide cliff at Masada, and then a theologian with a clean desk explaining that holiness required it? I am too old to pretend that stacking enough millennia on the wound automatically turns it into wisdom. Maybe from the vantage of a thousand years and many worlds there is a logic. I have been looking for that logic. So far I have found a political war against non-human insurgents, and a human need to believe the chairman is still chairman.
People do not like that sentence because you are not supposed to question God’s authority. Scripture itself is full of people who did — Job, David, Jeremiah, the man on the cross quoting Psalm 22. The ban is not in the text. The ban is in the later management of the text. You may wrestle. You may not judge the judge. That rule is very convenient for the judge.
I Do Not Wake Up Looking for a Savior
I will say this as plainly as I said it in the conversation. I am not a bend-the-knee type. I am not looking for a replacement father. I think a lot of organized religion is built for people who never stopped needing that structure, and I do not despise them for it. If that is what holds a person together, it is more valuable than my path would be for them. It is not my path.
Loyalty has to be earned. You do not get my service because I inherited Adam’s paperwork. You do not get it because a Roman-era council said the canon is closed and the questions are now a character issue. If you let evil run loose through my world and then call the wreckage a quiz, you have not earned the title you keep putting on the letterhead.
Edwards asked the fair question: if you no longer believe God is fully in control, why keep the Bible? Because it is the only chronicle I have that is long enough to show the pattern. Three or four thousand years of God-talk, council-talk, war-talk, and human failure. I read it the way I would read an after-action report on a candidate who keeps losing precincts and then writing memoirs about hidden victories. I am looking for the ground game. I want to beat the evil that I think God has failed to contain. I do not want a ticket out. I do not want an eternal basement where I am safe because I surrendered. I want the thing hunted where it lives — on earth, in the unseen, in whatever dark matter and outer dark the language is pointing at.
The Strategic Failure Pattern Across Scripture
Edwards’s counter is the old one. Every time man tries to destroy evil in his own strength, he fails or makes it worse. Lasting victories come only when God acts through surrendered people. Therefore, the strategy I am hunting is the one I distrust: decrease so he can increase.
That sounds to me like passive-aggressive leadership. A failed executive telling the staff that the only competence left in the building is his, so stop trying. Maybe divine wisdom really does sit above my pay grade which is a concept I don’t believe in because it accepts a structure that protects evil from analysis. Maybe. I have also watched that speech get used by every earthly institution that wanted obedience without performance. Israel tries to clear the land and cannot. Disciples try to cast out a demon and cannot. The church inherits the empire and then burns people for translation errors. The pattern I keep seeing is not “surrender works.” The pattern is “the movement needs the failure so it can keep selling surrender.”
If I could rewrite one rule of the war, I would stop using good and innocent people as acceptable casualties. I would stop treating the loyal as the easiest demonstration objects. A leader who lets the enemy chew his own household to make a point is not mysterious. He is a poor defender. Call that blasphemy if you need the category. I call it a performance review.
What Jesus Meant by “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me”
That was the question I wanted Edwards for. In the last minutes, Jesus quotes the opening of Psalm 22.[10] The orthodox reading is elegant. Every Jew in earshot knows the rest of the psalm. Agony first, victory later. The Son bears wrath. The physical torture is not the worst part. The worst part is separation. It is not doubt. It is payment.
What I hear is a man in a scapegoat machine. The idea that the sins of the world can be loaded onto one body and walked out of the camp is older than Golgotha. It is in Leviticus. It is in the human nervous system. People who have cheated, grabbed, and gone numb need a goat. First-century Jerusalem had Rome on its neck and a purity system in its temples. A public death that could be read as both Roman order and Jewish atonement is politically efficient. I do not say that as a sneer at the man. I say it as a reading of the market.
Was he doubting? I think he was a tortured human body, lightheaded, pierced, and still honest enough to say the sentence that piety wants to footnote away. If the cry is only liturgy, then the pain is only theater. I do not think the pain was theater.
The Kashmir Question, Politics, and Why Bodies Matter
I am going to say the part that gets people really upset. I think the crucifixion was a political killing. I think Rome wanted a problem removed without owning the whole bill, and a slice of the Jerusalem establishment wanted a pressure valve. I think the body of Jesus becoming unfindable helped everyone who needed a story that could travel. Moreover, I think the Kashmir tradition — Roza Bal, Yuz Asaf, a man who survives the empire and dies old in the north of India — is at least as entitled to forensic curiosity as the claim that matter dematerialized because a later council said so.[11]
I know the Ahmadiyya have their own reasons for wanting Jesus alive and unsacrificed. I know Islam has its own reasons. I know Led Zeppelin fans have their reasons, and they are not theological. None of that makes the empty tomb automatically supernatural. It makes the empty tomb a contested piece of political property. If there are bones in a private or shrine context that people have whispered about for a century, the adult move is not to hiss “blasphemy.” The adult move is to ask what the genes say. We are not ready for that conversation as a culture because the conversation would smash too many identities at once.
Edwards, and the whole martyr argument after him, asks why the inner circle would die for a lie. It is a serious question.[12] My answer is not that they were cartoon frauds. My answer is that movements eat identity. Once your name, your friends, your enemies, and your hope of being remembered are all welded to a story, the story becomes the last asset you have. I have watched modern parties do it. I have watched people who finally got power try to crawl back into the victim costume because the costume was the only self they trusted. Rome, Judea, a dead or vanished leader, a handful of men who would otherwise be nobody — that is enough heat to bake a religion.[13]
James, Paul, and the Psychology of Movements After the Leader Is Gone
James is the hard case, and I will not pretend otherwise. He was not a believer during the ministry. Afterward, he becomes the spine of the Jerusalem church and dies for it.[14] Guilt is part of my read. Grief is part of it. So is the sudden, terrible honor of being the last blood left in the room. That is not the same celebrity as wine and women. If you inherit a crucified brother’s name, the only way the currency spends is to live poor, pray the knees off yourself, and look like him. Immortality through the written word is still immortality. Most people thrown off temples are forgotten. James is not. That incentive is real whether the metaphysics are true or not.
Paul is the scaling engine. Without Paul there is no Gentile church as we know it. James and Paul did not roast hot dogs in matching shirts. They fought. The later harmony is a product, the way party platforms are products.[15] I like James. I think he was one of the good ones. I also think good men can stabilize a narrative they did not start and cannot fact-check anymore because the body is gone and the politics have already hardened.
Led Zeppelin, Kashmir, and the Whisper of the Spirit World
Why do people who like to dissolve their ordinary mind keep circling that song? I do not think it is just the riff.[16] I think the spirit world has a long memory and popular art is one of the leaks. We hear whispers, and we dress them as taste. That is not an argument for taking a rock band as a footnote to Matthew. It is an argument that the official custodians of the story do not have a monopoly on the residue.
If you love God and you look around, you do not see a tight ship. You see evil spitting in the claim of control every five seconds. Then you see nice people turn the other cheek and use Jesus as a permit to stay out of the fight. Martyrdom becomes a brand. Cowardice borrows a cross. I want the opposite instinct. I want the war taken to the thing that is torturing people.
Are We Free, or Are We Reading a Record Left by People Who Needed Compliance?
Who wrote the dumb rules? That was my question when Edwards said the only way to beat evil is to yield to the God who, from my chair, has let it run. A rational rule would look like any competent shop floor. Contain the arsonist. Do not use the night shift as kindling to prove the arsonist exists. Do not publish a handbook later that says the fire was a teaching moment.
The Bible I trust is the Bible I can read between the lines of. I trust it more than I trust the handlers. Councils, empires, reformers, and television teachers all have motives. Rome needed glue as the frontiers cracked. A crucified provincial who could be turned into a cosmic loyalty oath is better glue than another legion.[17] That does not make every line a lie. It means you read like an adult. You ask what was written down and what was not, and why.
My assertion is simple enough to make people furious. Non-human intelligence — call them Elohim, Watchers, demons, NHI, whatever shelf-label you need — has been trying to undo what was made. I think the garden commission was a political statement against rebels on the council. Humans were not designed to be mascots.[18] We were designed to be dangerous to the bureaucracy that did not want us here. That is why the categories exist. That is why “do not question” is preached as humility. A questioning human is harder to herd.
What I Am Looking For in the Bible
I am looking for a strategy. I study wars because I want to know where people failed to beat what was hunting them. I want to succeed where they failed. That is not pride in the cheap sense. It is refusal. I did not wake up wanting to be anybody’s servant, on earth or off it. I woke up wanting to do good work and to stop watching evil treat the world like an open cafeteria.
Edwards was right about my temperature. I am angry. I think anger, in this case, is cleaner than the sweetness that calls itself faith while the same pattern repeats. He was also right that I still have the book open. I keep it open because it is the only long record that does not pretend human beings are only animals or only angels. It shows the council. It shows the Accuser. It shows the empires. It shows the scapegoat. It shows the men who died with the name in their mouths. It shows, if you will look, the politics.[19][20]
If you want the softer Edwards, he is in the Study Bible, and he is worth the time. If you want the American warrior version of the same hunger — competence, natural law, no more yielding to a failed order because the order has a hymn — that is the work I put into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the earlier books.[21] Read both. Argue with both. I did not earn the right to say these things by being careful. I earned it by thinking them for a long time and then saying them with my own name attached.
Are we free? That is the only question left that matters. Free will is either real, or we are livestock with better marketing. I act as if it is real. I read as if the other side is trying to convince me it is not. Moreover, I will keep looking for a way to destroy the evil that has been working for thousands of years, with God if he will do a decent job of it, and without him if he will not. That is the conversation I wanted. That is the conversation I had.
Notes for Searchers, Pastors, and Operators
If you came here from a search on Age of Disclosure, divine council, Jonathan Edwards sovereignty, Job and Satan, Jesus in Kashmir, or whether UAP are demons, you are in the right file. The point was never to baptize a documentary. The point was to stop letting science-press-conference language hide a much older political structure. Read Psalm 82 before you read the next hearing transcript. Read Job 1 before you let a preacher tell you permission and goodness are the same thing. Read the crucifixion as both theology and provincial crisis management. Then decide what you are willing to serve.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam. Jesus in India. 1899. English editions vary.
Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Annihilation of Man. 2020, and related Enochic commentary in the current disclosure debate.
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Creation Museum / Answers in Genesis. Public exhibits and published young-earth materials. Petersburg, Kentucky.
Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754. WJE vol. 1. Yale University Press, 1957.
Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.
Edwards, Jonathan. Sermons on the sovereignty of God in the salvation of men. Various WJE volumes.
Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History.
Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025.
Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Knopf, 2007.
Habermas, Gary, and Michael Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Kregel, 2004.
Hassnain, Fida. A Search for the Historical Jesus. 1994, and later Roza Bal collaborations.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham Press, 2015.
Heiser, Michael S. Supernatural. Lexham Press, 2015.
Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Led Zeppelin. “Kashmir.” Physical Graffiti. Swan Song, 1975.
Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Redfern, Nick. Final Events. Anomalist Books, 2010.
The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 1–11; Deuteronomy 32; 1 Kings 22; Job; Psalm 22; Psalm 82; Daniel 4; Matthew 27; Mark 15; Acts; Galatians; Ephesians 6; Hebrews 1; 1 John 4.
Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003.
1 Enoch (Book of the Watchers) and related Second Temple literature, including material from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Suggested search headers for syndication
Age of Disclosure spiritual meaning; non-human intelligence demons or Elohim; Jonathan Edwards sovereignty of God critique; divine council Psalm 82 politics; Book of Job Satan permission; Jesus tomb Kashmir Roza Bal; James brother of Jesus motive; why did disciples die for the resurrection; Creation Museum planetarium old earth; politics of heaven Rich Hoffman; Overmanwarrior theology.
[1] Dan Farah, dir., The Age of Disclosure (Farah Films, 2025). The film compiles testimony from current and former U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials asserting an eighty-year concealment of non-human intelligence and recovered craft.
[2] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). The working thesis is that biblical theology, ancient Near Eastern political structures, and modern power systems describe one continuous contest, not two separate subjects called “religion” and “politics.”
[3] Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1957). Edwards distinguishes God as the permitter and disposer of events from God as the moral author of sin.
[4] Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (various Crossway/ESV study editions and companion notes used in American Reformed preaching). Edwards remains the most serious American attempt to hold together revival, metaphysics, and civic order.
[5] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, 2015); see also Psalm 82:1; Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls / LXX reading); Job 1:6–12; 1 Kings 22:19–23.
[6] On the “Collins Elite” and the demonic interpretation of UAP/NHI inside defense circles, see Nick Redfern, Final Events (Anomalist Books, 2010), and later pastoral briefings discussed in coverage of Age of Disclosure. The claim is contested. The pattern is not.
[7] Answers in Genesis / Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky. The institution is a short drive from the Cincinnati–Northern Kentucky metro. Young-earth chronology is their public commitment; it is not mine.
[8] Job 1–2; Job 38–42. The book is not a Hallmark card. It is a courtroom transcript with a body count.
[9] Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17; 1 John 4:4. Edwards and the Reformed tradition treat these as proofs of unshared sovereignty. I treat them as claims that still have to survive contact with history.
[10] Psalm 22. The first line is agony; the psalm ends in public vindication. That literary fact does not automatically settle what a dying man felt.
[11] Roza Bal (Rozabal) shrine, Khanyar, Srinagar. The Ahmadiyya claim that Yuz Asaf is Jesus after a survived crucifixion is advanced in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India (1899), and later in Fida Hassnain and popular Kashmir travel literature. Mainstream historians and the shrine’s Sunni caretakers reject the identification. I am not asking anyone to baptize the theory. I am asking why the empty-tomb claim is protected from ordinary forensic curiosity.
[12] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003), remains the strongest academic case that the earliest Christians believed they had seen a bodily risen Jesus and were willing to die for that claim. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona collect the “minimal facts” argument. I am familiar with that literature. I am unpersuaded that martyrdom proves the metaphysics. It proves intensity.
[13] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[14] Josephus, Antiquities 20.197–203, on the death of James. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23, preserves Hegesippus on James’s reputation and execution.
[15] Acts 9; Galatians 1–2; and the well-documented tension between Paul and the Jerusalem circle. Christianity as a scaled movement is unthinkable without Paul. That is a political observation, not a Sunday-school slight.
[16] Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir,” Physical Graffiti (Swan Song, 1975). Popular culture often keeps older spirit-world memory that official theology pretends it has already solved.
[17] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[18] Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8. The image-of-God commission is a political charter over the garden and the nations, not a permission slip to become a house pet in someone else’s bureaucracy.
[19] 1 Peter 5:8; Ephesians 6:12. Principalities and powers language is not a metaphor for bad vibes. It is organizational language.
[20] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741); Religious Affections (1746); and the sermons on God’s sovereignty in the salvation of men. Edwards feared chaos in the human heart more than he feared looking like a weak manager. That is the difference between us.
[21] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021); The Symposium of Justice (2004); Tail of the Dragon (2012).
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.
Some conversations don’t stay inside the news cycle. They punch through the floorboards of what people assume reality is made of. I am not trying to wreck anybody for sport. I am trying to tell the truth about a case that has America arguing with itself, and then I am going to take that case all the way down into the older question underneath it: what is evil, how does it work, and what kind of people does a free republic need if it still intends to have law and order?
The case is Lindsay Clancy. The older question is Jonathan Edwards. The connecting image is a spider.
I have been living in the new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, and I keep running into his spiders.1 That is not a cute curiosity. Edwards looked at a web and saw intelligence. I look at the same geometry, and I see something else as well: a design that catches the living while they are going about their business. That is the argument I want to make. Evil is not only a mood. It is not only a chemical storm in a brain. It is not only a bad lawyer and a weak juror. It is also an architecture. It builds traps. It waits. It uses our own rules against us. And if we do not face that, we will keep getting hung juries in the cases that matter most.
What a Mistrial Actually Means
A mistrial is not an acquittal. It is not a conviction. It is the legal system admitting that this particular jury could not finish the job.
In Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy still faces first-degree murder charges in the deaths of her three children. The charges did not vanish on Friday, September 4, 2026, when Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in Plymouth Superior Court.2 Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz now decides whether to retry her before a new jury. The next status hearing is set for September 29, 2026.3 Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has already said he expects prosecutors to try the first-degree murder case again.4 Clancy remains held at a hospital without bail.5
That is the dry definition. The human meaning is harder. Three children are still dead. A mother is still paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from a window. A husband still has to live in the wreckage. And a country is still split between two sentences that cannot both be the last word: she was sick, and she killed them.
The Lindsay Clancy Case the News Cycle Keeps Flattening
On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands while her husband, Patrick, was out getting dinner.6 Cora Marie Clancy was five. Dawson William Clancy was three. Callan Patrick Clancy was eight months old.7 Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that night. Callan died days later.8 Lindsay then tried to kill herself, cutting herself and leaping from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down.9
She has not denied that the children died by her hand. The trial was never really about the physical act. It was about criminal responsibility. Prosecutors said she acted intentionally, rationally, and swiftly.10 They pointed to planning: sending her husband farther away for takeout so she would have time.11 The defense said she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare and catastrophic break linked to the hormonal crash, sleeplessness, and psychiatric collapse that can follow childbirth, and that she should be found not criminally responsible.12
The jury of nine women and three men heard weeks of testimony.13 They deliberated about seven days, nearly forty hours.14 They told the judge more than once they were deadlocked. He gave them the extra push judges give hung juries, the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, sometimes called a dynamite charge, and told them to keep trying.15 It did not work.
According to the defense, the split was 11 to 1 in favor of finding her not criminally responsible. The holdout was described as a man who would not move.16 The foreperson told the court that one juror would not follow the instructions on reasonable doubt. Reddington tried to have that juror removed. The judge refused. Reddington then made an emergency run to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. That failed too.17 The judge would not pick a side inside the disagreement. He declared a mistrial and reset the machine.
That is why people are furious. They are not only angry at a mother. They are angry at a system that can look at three dead children, a confession of the act, a paralyzed defendant, a seven-day deliberation, and still end with no verdict at all.
Why One Holdout Can Stop a Nation
I understand the rage. I have sat in the room where one person refuses to move.
I was the foreman of a grand jury in Butler County, Ohio. Officers had pulled over drivers coming from a house the police already believed was feeding the Hamilton drug market out of Cincinnati. The stop was a traffic infraction. The drivers had not signaled. Inside the car, the officers found a small amount of marijuana. It was not a Hollywood seizure. It was a paper trail. Law enforcement needed a lawful step they could take to a judge so they could get a warrant and go into the house the right way.
Eleven of us were ready to advance the indictment. One woman would not. I knew the shape of her life well enough to see the sympathy sitting in the chair. Family wreckage around drugs. A softness toward marijuana legalization. A story in her head about intrusive government, pretext stops, and police using a little weed to build a bigger case. She heard “setup.” I heard “the only legal door they have.”
I walked the Ohio code. I explained why you cannot just kick the door because you “know” what is in the house. I explained that an indictment on the people coming and going was how you give the next case a spine. It was not enough. Emotions outran the statute.
That is the same tension I see in Plymouth. A jury is supposed to be a cross-section of the community. That is the poetry we tell ourselves. The prose is uglier. Twelve strangers bring their dead marriages, their addicted kids, their distrust of cops, their hatred of cops, their church or their lack of church, their private disasters, and their appetite to be the hero of their own movie. Rules of evidence and jury instructions exist because human beings are not robots. You cannot fully extract the person from the juror.
The flip side is just as true. If you screened out everyone with a history and a strong opinion, you would not have a jury of peers. You would have a room of people who have never been marked by life. That is not a republic. That is a lab.
So the system lives in the mess. It assumes that twelve random people will follow the law and the evidence far enough to reach one sentence together. When that assumption fails, you get O.J. memory. You get this Clancy mistrial. You get a grand jury that will not give police the warrant-path they need to dismantle a dope house. You get a society that wants justice as a feeling and then acts shocked when feelings deadlock the law.
The Dirty Harry Temptation and Why I Will Not Live There
I will say the ugly part out loud, because pretending I never thought it would be a lie.
When I looked at that drug house, my private interpretation of justice was primitive. Go in at night. End it. The people flooding a city with poison are already killing more innocents than a clean raid ever would. That is the Batman version. That is Dirty Harry. We have made a century of movies about that exact hunger because the hunger is real.
I also know what that hunger becomes if you baptize it. It becomes another species of lawlessness. It becomes the thing you claimed you were fighting. I told the prosecutor I could not manufacture the twelfth vote. I did not take a rifle to Hamilton and settle the account myself. I stood inside the process I claim to believe in.
That is the cost of order. Evil knows the cost. It uses our refusal to become death squads. It spreads behind procedure, discovery, sympathy, delay, and the one juror who will not move. If you love law, you have to admit that law can be turned into a web.
I carry guns. I am not a pacifist. I still say this without blinking: righteousness is a better weapon than bullets. I have seen enough to mean it. A bullet ends a body. Righteousness rebuilds a people who can sit in a jury box and tell the truth when it costs them something.
Jonathan Edwards and the Country That Used to Know What Judgment Was
If you want to know why America once had a stronger instinct for law and order, you do not start with the Constitution as if it fell out of the sky in 1787. You start earlier. You start with the moral weather that made a constitutional people even imaginable.
Jonathan Edwards lived from 1703 to 1758.18 He was dead before the Revolution. He was the intellectual voltage of the First Great Awakening. He was a pastor, philosopher, missionary, short-lived president of the College of New Jersey that became Princeton, and the last man a lot of modern people want to read because he will not flatter them.19
On July 8, 1741, in Enfield, Connecticut, he preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”20 People still treat that sermon like a Halloween prop. They should read it instead. Edwards did not invent wrath for the sake of theatre. He described a universe in which holiness is real, rebellion is real, and the only reason a man is not already ruined is God’s patience.
America did not come from therapy language. It came from people who thought judgment was as actual as weather. You can hate that. You cannot erase it and then act stunned when juries no longer share a common floor of right and wrong.
That is why I have been promoting the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Thomas Nelson released the NKJV edition in 2026, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard, with Edwards’s own notes, doctrinal essays, his Resolutions, and his way of keeping miscellanies.21 I have burned hours in it. Some days it has felt like the whole day. I love it because it does not give you a decorative Founder. It gives you the mind that helped form the country before the country had a Constitution.
If you want better juries, you need better people. If you want better people, you need a shared story about good and evil that is older and harder than the last viral clip. Two or three generations of daily Scripture and Sunday worship will not manufacture angels. It will raise the odds that eleven people are not held hostage by one person’s private fog.
The Obsession Edwards Had With Spiders
Edwards was not only the fire preacher. As a young man, he was a natural philosopher in Newton’s age. He watched the woods the way a physicist watches an experiment.
As a youth, he wrote the essay “Of Insects.”22 On October 31, 1723, he sent a polished letter, now famous as the spider letter, describing the “flying” spiders of New England.23 He had seen them sail. They let out a thread lighter than air, hang, loosen, and ride the current from tree to tree. He sketched it. He chased them through the forest all day. He wrote that of all insects none was more wonderful than the spider, “especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.”24
He drew two theological conclusions that still matter.
First, God provides not only for creatures’ necessities but for their pleasure. Edwards thought the spiders looked like they were enjoying themselves.25
Second, the numbers stay. Birds eat them. The sailing itself destroys many of them. And still the kind continues. He saw mathematical providence in that balance.26
That is intelligent design as an eighteenth-century Christian meant it. Nature is not an accident with pretty lighting. Nature is speech. The web is too exact to be a shrug.
Then, almost twenty years later, he picked up the same creature and turned it into the most famous image in American preaching. In Enfield he said:
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.”27
In the same sermon he pressed the image further: a man’s own righteousness would have “no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock.”28
The spider that had been a proof of delight became a proof of exposure. Same man. Same insect. Two sermons in one life: wonder and warning.
I do not think that was a contradiction. I think Edwards saw that the same world can display the mind of God and the peril of the soul. Creation is not a children’s museum. It is beautiful, and it bites.
What I See in the Web That Edwards Did Not Have to Name
Here is where I leave the safe academic reading and say what I actually think.
I look at a spiderweb, and I see intelligence. Edwards was right about that. The geometry is not sloppy. The angles, the tension, the patience, the invisibility until the light hits it just so: that is design. You can stand in late sun and watch filaments that look tacked to the sky. Edwards described that exact sight.29
I also look at a web and see a trap.
The insect is not committing a crime. It is flying. It is doing what it was made to do. Then it hits a structure built to convert motion into food. The spider does not debate. The spider waits. That is predation with architecture.
Ohio people should feel this in their bones. The Hopewell and other mound-building cultures left geometric earthworks through the Scioto and Little Miami valleys, around Chillicothe, and in places like the old works near Milford that settlement later erased or buried under ordinary American life.30 In 2023, UNESCO inscribed eight of those Ohio complexes as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, the state’s first World Heritage Site: precise circles, squares, and octagons on a scale that still startles engineers.31 Newark’s Octagon encloses about fifty acres and tracks major standstills of the moon across an 18.6-year cycle.32 Those shapes were not doodles. They were alignments. They were attempts to deal with powers the builders believed were real.
I am not saying a Hopewell priest and a garden spider sat on a committee. I am saying human beings keep stumbling into the same patterns: circle, octagon, line, trap, offering, sky.
Indigenous peoples were not stupid. They were reaching for non-human intelligence. So was Israel, except Israel named the source and bound it to law. So was Edwards, except he named the source Holy Spirit and Creator. I am not interested in flattening all of that into “UFO content” for a thumbnail. I am interested in the older, harder claim: some minds are not us. Some of them tell the truth. Some of them hunt.
I have spent a lot of time talking about non-human intelligence. I think people hear “aliens” and stop listening. That is their problem. Scripture already assumed a populated unseen world. Edwards assumed it. The first Americans on this ground assumed it. The modern mistake is to pretend the only actors in a murder trial are a brain, a statute, and a camera.
I think there was evil at work in Duxbury that wanted those children dead. I think evil wanted a mother at a window. I think there is evil that wants a jury to freeze, a lawyer to aim at sympathy instead of truth, a public to lose the ability to say that slaughtering Cora, Dawson, and Callan is a crime even if the killer’s mind was in pieces. Mental illness can be real, and responsibility can still matter. The unseen war does not cancel the courtroom. It explains why the courtroom feels haunted.
Edwards would have called the good side of that pressure the Holy Spirit working through nature and through people, often cryptically. I agree that the Spirit works that way. I also think there is a rival. The rival likes webs. The rival likes procedure without righteousness. The rival likes a geometric perfection that exists to feed.
God made the spider. That sentence is true. It does not obligate me to call every pattern in nature a children’s Sunday-school poster. Some of creation is a sermon about provision. Some of it is a sermon about how easily the living are taken.
Lawyers, Sympathy, and the Forked Tongue
We hire professionals to do what that web does.
A great defense lawyer is paid to find the strand you missed. That is the job. In a decent system, the prosecutor is paid to cut you free with facts. The jury is supposed to be the thing with a spine. When the jury becomes the meal, the whole design fails.
People still talk about Johnny Cochran the way they talk about magic. They remember the glove and forget the dead. I hear the same music around this Clancy trial. The defense needed one heart to crack. In a culture with no common moral language, one heart is not hard to find. You do not even have to trick a fool. You only have to find someone whose life has already trained them to confuse mercy with refusing to judge.
I am not saying postpartum psychosis is fake. I am saying a society that can only speak the language of diagnosis will eventually lose the language of guilt. And a society that can only speak the language of guilt will crush the truly broken. The adult position is both. The children are dead. The mother’s mind may have been on fire. The law still has to answer. A hung jury answers nothing.
There is a reason people do not want to serve. Jury duty is one of the last places America asks a citizen to be an adult in public. Of course, the unserious run from it. I loved being grand jury foreman. It was one of the most rewarding things I have done. I wish more people understood that sitting in judgment of facts is not cruelty. It is how a civilization refuses to become either a mob or a therapy waiting room.
After that one holdout voted against me on the drug case, she voted with me on the next stretch of indictments. Not because I bullied her. Because I gave her a platform, took her seriously, and then held the line. That is what persuasion in a jury room actually looks like. It is slow. It is personal. It is why character in the pool matters more than any trick a high-priced tongue can perform.
The Politics of Heaven and the Age of Disclosure
At the end of all this, I keep coming back to a sentence I cannot shake: you must understand the politics of heaven.
If the only government you believe in is the one with a flag and a courthouse, you will misread every major case. You will think the Clancy trial is only about Massachusetts procedure. You will think a hung jury is only a staffing problem. You will think a spider is only an arthropod.
I think we are living through a disclosure, whether officialdom likes it or not. Not just of craft in the sky. Of the fact that the world is contested. Edwards already knew that. The Bible already knew that. The people who cut those Ohio earthworks knew that in their own vocabulary. The modern West forgot it and called the forgetting sophistication.
Evil wants political charge over human order. It wants the rules of a biblical people without the fear of God. It wants juries that cannot condemn. It wants churches that cannot mention hell. It wants Bibles as décor. It wants Edwards reduced to a spider quote on a tote bag and stripped of the sermon that made grown men hold the pew.
I am not asking the state to become a church. I am asking a people who still claim law and order to remember where their nerves for judgment came from. Church and state can be distinct, and the Bible can still be the book that teaches a citizen how not to be a sucker.
Righteousness Is How You Slay What Bullets Cannot Touch.
If this case wrecked you, I understand. Cora liked princesses and taking care of people. Dawson liked firefighters, trucks, and Paw Patrol. Callan was a happy baby.33 Their father has had to learn how to breathe in a house that no longer contains them. In the days after the killings, he asked the public to forgive his wife, as he had.34 A park in Duxbury now carries the children’s names because the living did not know what else to build.35 Lindsay Clancy will never have an ordinary body again. Some people think that is already a sentence. Other people will not sleep until a prison door closes. Both of those instincts are human. Only one of them can become a verdict, and even that one just failed.
I will not tell you to stop wanting accountability. I will tell you that rage without formation becomes the next web.
Spread the narrative that makes better human beings. Increase Bible literacy like you mean it. Stop being shy. The church-and-state slogan was never a command to raise a nation of morally illiterate people. Read Edwards. Read the sermon. Read the spider letter. Hold both in one head: the God who delights in the sailing thread and the God who will not be mocked.
If you know someone who cannot get there alone, put a Bible in their hands. If the older English feels like a locked door, the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is one of the best ways I know to walk through it. Edwards is mixed now with the text that made him. You get the philosophy that helped create America sitting next to the Scriptures that helped create Edwards.
That is how you squeeze evil without becoming it. Not by pretending the drug house is a misunderstanding. Not by pretending three strangled children are a policy debate by forming a people who can look at a web and recognize both the mind of God and the appetite of the trap.
The insect that flies into the geometry was not asking for it. The children in Duxbury were not asking for it. A republic that forgets how to judge will keep calling the trap a misunderstanding and the holdout a deep thinker.
I want law. I want order. I want juries that will do their duty. I want a public that knows righteousness is not a mood. And I want us awake enough to see that the fight is older than Massachusetts, older than Butler County, older than the Constitution, and visible even in a thread of silk shining in the sun.
Get the book. Get the Bible. Get your nerve back.
Then show up when they call your name for the jury.
FOOTNOTES
1. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ, NKJV, ed. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026).
2. Jacey Fortin, “Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Trial Ended With a Hung Jury. What Now?,” New York Times, September 4, 2026; Associated Press, “Mistrial Is Declared in Lindsay Clancy Child Killings Case After Jury Deadlocks,” September 4, 2026.
3. Travis Andersen, “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Case After Jury Deadlocks,” Boston Globe, September 4–5, 2026. Judge William Sullivan set a status hearing for September 29, 2026, at 2:30 p.m.
4. Fortin, “What Now?” Reddington told reporters he expected the Plymouth County district attorney to retry the first-degree murder charges.
5. CNN, “Lindsay Clancy’s Triple-Murder Case Ended in a Mistrial. What Happens Next?,” September 4, 2026. Clancy was returned to Tewksbury Hospital and held without bail.
6. “Killing of the Clancy Children,” Wikipedia, last modified September 17, 2026; Abby Patkin, “Duxbury Case: 5 Things We Learned from Lindsay Clancy’s Arraignment,” Boston.com, February 7, 2023.
7. Cora Marie Clancy, born December 24, 2017 (some contemporaneous reports give December 4); Dawson William Clancy, born September 30, 2019; Callan Patrick Clancy, born May 26, 2022. See Maia Spoto, “The Clancy Children: A ‘Girly Girl,’ a ‘Paw Patrol’ Fan and a Happy Baby,” New York Times, September 3, 2026.
8. Callan died after being flown to Boston Children’s Hospital. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead the night of January 24, 2023. Noah R. Bombard, “Duxbury Mother Lindsay Clancy’s Husband Says He Forgives Wife,” MassLive, January 28, 2023.
9. “Killing of the Clancy Children,” Wikipedia; Associated Press, “Mistrial Is Declared.”
10. CNN live coverage, September 4, 2026, summarizing the Commonwealth’s theory that Clancy acted “intentionally, rationally, and swiftly.”
11. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague’s arraignment timeline, reported in “A Timeline of Events in the Case Against Lindsay Clancy,” Boston Globe, February 8, 2023.
12. Associated Press, “Mistrial Is Declared”; defense theory as argued by Kevin Reddington throughout the 2026 trial.
13. Melina Khan and Christopher Cann, “Lindsay Clancy Case Ends in Mistrial over Hung Jury,” USA Today, September 4, 2026.
14. Fortin, “What Now?”; Khan and Cann, USA Today. Deliberations ran roughly 38 to 40 hours across seven days.
15. NBC Boston, “Lindsay Clancy Trial: What Happens If There’s a Hung Jury and Mistrial?,” September 2, 2026. Judge Sullivan gave the Tuey-Rodriguez charge after jurors reported they were deadlocked.
16. Defense statements after the mistrial; Reddington said the jury “know one man robbed them.” Associated Press, September 4, 2026; CNN, September 4, 2026.
17. CBS Boston, “Lindsay Clancy Murder Case Ends in Mistrial After Her Attorney’s Last-Ditch Attempt to Avoid Jury Deadlock,” September 4, 2026; Andersen, Boston Globe. Associate Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt of the Supreme Judicial Court denied the emergency appeal.
18. George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
19. Edwards served briefly as president of the College of New Jersey in 1758 and died that same year after a smallpox inoculation. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards.
20. Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741 (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741). Modern reading text: Reiner Smolinski, ed., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Electronic Texts in American Studies.
21. Thomas Nelson, The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV, ed. Matthew Everhard (2026).
22. Jonathan Edwards, “Of Insects,” in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
23. Jonathan Edwards to Paul Dudley, Windsor, October 31, 1723, manuscript at the New-York Historical Society; printed in WJE 6. See also New-York Historical Society, “Jonathan Edwards and the Flying Spiders.”
24. Edwards, “Of Insects,” WJE 6: “Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.”
25. Edwards, spider letter, October 31, 1723, WJE 6. He concluded that the Creator provides “not only for all the necessities, but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects.”
26. Ibid. Edwards argued that despite destruction by sailing and by birds, the species does not dwindle, evidence of the Creator’s “nicely and mathematically adjusting their plastic nature.”
27. Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741).
28. Ibid.: “all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock.”
29. Edwards, spider letter, October 31, 1723, describing “vast multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings” that appeared “tacked to the vault of the heavens.”
30. On the Milford, Ohio, works along the Little Miami, later damaged by settlement and agriculture, see Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1848); site reconstructions at earthworks. site, “Milford Earthworks.”
31. UNESCO inscription, September 19, 2023: Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, eight sites in Ohio. National Park Service, “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.”
32. Ohio History Connection / hopewellearthworks.org, “Octagon Earthworks,” Newark, Ohio. The octagon encloses approximately 50 acres; alignments correspond to the 18.6-year lunar cycle.
33. Spoto, “The Clancy Children,” New York Times, September 3, 2026, quoting Patrick Clancy’s trial testimony.
34. Patrick Clancy public statement, late January 2023, asking people to “forgive my wife as I have.” Bombard, MassLive, January 28, 2023.
35. WBZ NewsRadio, “Park Opens in Duxbury to Honor Clancy Children,” June 10, 2025. The Heard Foundation, founded by Patrick Clancy, built the playground at Wadsworth Field Park.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Court Case and Contemporary Reporting
Andersen, Travis. “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Case After Jury Deadlocks.” Boston Globe, September 4–5, 2026.
Associated Press. “Mistrial Is Declared in Lindsay Clancy Child Killings Case After Jury Deadlocks.” September 4, 2026.
Bombard, Noah R. “Duxbury Mother Lindsay Clancy’s Husband Says He Forgives Wife, Accused of Killing Their Three Children.” MassLive, January 28, 2023.
Boston Globe. “A Timeline of Events in the Case Against Lindsay Clancy.” February 8, 2023.
CBS Boston. “Lindsay Clancy Murder Case Ends in Mistrial After Her Attorney’s Last-Ditch Attempt to Avoid Jury Deadlock.” September 4, 2026.
CNN. “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy Case After Jury Deadlock.” September 4, 2026.
CNN. “Lindsay Clancy’s Triple-Murder Case Ended in a Mistrial. What Happens Next?” September 4, 2026.
Fortin, Jacey. “Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Trial Ended With a Hung Jury. What Now?” New York Times, September 4, 2026.
Khan, Melina, and Christopher Cann. “Lindsay Clancy Case Ends in Mistrial over Hung Jury.” USA Today, September 4, 2026.
“Killing of the Clancy Children.” Wikipedia. Last modified September 17, 2026.
NBC Boston. “Lindsay Clancy Trial: What Happens If There’s a Hung Jury and Mistrial?” September 2, 2026.
New York Times live file. “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy Triple-Murder Case.” September 4–5, 2026.
Patkin, Abby. “Duxbury Case: 5 Things We Learned from Lindsay Clancy’s Arraignment.” Boston.com, February 7, 2023.
Slate. “The Lindsay Clancy Case Has Ended in a Mistrial. What Happens Now?” September 4, 2026.
Spoto, Maia. “The Clancy Children: A ‘Girly Girl,’ a ‘Paw Patrol’ Fan and a Happy Baby.” New York Times, September 3, 2026.
WBZ NewsRadio. “Park Opens in Duxbury to Honor Clancy Children.” June 10, 2025.
Jonathan Edwards: Primary Sources
Edwards, Jonathan. “Of Insects.” In Scientific and Philosophical Writings, edited by Wallace E. Anderson. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Edwards, Jonathan. Letter to Paul Dudley, Windsor, October 31, 1723 (“Spider Letter”). Manuscript, New-York Historical Society. Printed in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6.
Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741. Modern edition: Reiner Smolinski, ed. Electronic Texts in American Studies. University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Vol. 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings. Edited by Wallace E. Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Jonathan Edwards: Secondary Sources and Study Bible
Everhard, Matthew, ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ. NKJV. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
New-York Historical Society. “Jonathan Edwards and the Flying Spiders.” September 29, 2015.
Philosophy Now. “Jonathan Edwards on Spiders.” Issue 145.
Thomas Nelson Bibles. “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.” Product page, 2026.
Yale University, Jonathan Edwards Center. WJE Online, vol. 6.
Ohio Earthworks and Comparative Geometry
City of Milford, Ohio. Public history note on the Route 50 / Greenlawn Cemetery corridor. April 11, 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.
I am not a separation of church and state guy the way the left has used it to push a secular agenda. But to understnad that, you have to understand history, and many people just don’t. And those same people don’t know much about one of the people I consider to be one of the early American Founding Fathers, Jonathan Edwards. I say, use what works and is healthy for a great society, and don’t argue with the poliitcal left the interpritation of law and order when they want to destroy America by using its own laws and policy against its creation. Since that is their method, I would advise that we drop the polite veil and admit what we are all thinking: churches go well with Republican politics, and we should be a whole lot more open about it, and just let the Marxists of the Democratic Party have their faces melt. Art Sauerwein is the new chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. The Journal-News piece I have been talking about put his wish list in public: take back the schools and make them more conservative; see more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes. I agree with most of that list. I would put the disagreement, if there is one, in a sliver. Five percent, maybe. The problem is not the nouns. The problem is that a county chairman saying he is displeased with his own officeholders signals to every Democrat and every reporter in the room that the party is not united.¹
I have a particular soft spot for people who take thankless chairs. I also have a long memory of what happens when the Bush years go slack, when Clinton years teach the other side to use government as a wealth-transfer machine, and when a Republican majority forgets that it was elected to stop that machine, not to learn its levers. Small-government capitalism is not the same project as confiscating through the tax code and redistributing under a better letterhead. I have been on that argument since before the Tea Party years. I have not left it.
What I will not do is pretend that the way you get Christian schools and lower taxes is to twist the arms of the people you still need on the card. That is the Democrat tactic with different hymns. Ostracize, purity-test, call the holdout a RINO, and then act surprised when the tent is an empty Sunday-school classroom with folding chairs and no majority.
Why I Walked George Lang to His Car
People tell me I cannot be trusted because I am friends with George Lang. I was invited to an evening with him and his wife, Debbie. We get along. I like them. I like George. Not because he is a state senator from the 4th District. Because we can stay on a subject until the parking lot lights are the only ones left.²
We started years ago with a mutual fascination with Ayn Rand and the long story of human order. She was an atheist. I was not. We did not make religion the ticket into the room. We made taxes, small business, the Ohio caucus work, jobs that let a family buy nice things without the government picking the neighbor’s pocket. Those are the planks you can stand on with a man who is not yet where you are on Sunday morning. Then you walk him to the car.
This year, 2026, not a decade ago, we were still talking when we got to his car, extending the evening as much as possible because the conversation was good. He knows what I carry. He knows the maps and the notes. He pulled out a Bible that had been given to him in the Senate. It was beautiful. I would have liked it for the shelf. It was his. He had been going through it. Debbie has said, in the way honest people say it, that they have not always lived in that lane. I did not need a performance. I needed the book’s facts in the car of a man who helps write Ohio law. That is how influence works. That is Nicodemus in a parking lot instead of a midnight stair.³
If the chairperson’s job is to get people on the card, then the chairman’s job is to make nights like that more common, not to publish a scolding that makes the next senator keep the Bible in the trunk.
Jonathan Edwards Did Not Found America From a Letter to the Editor
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible came out in August 2026 from Thomas Nelson, NKJV, notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, edited by Matthew Everhard. I saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review, which is still the magazine I would take to a desert island and be happy with nothing else. I will likely make that Edwards volume my next daily Bible. The one I have carried through airports is full of notes. Every blank space they left me has writing in it.⁴
Edwards did his public work in the 1730s through the 1750s, while a young George Washington was still making himself and Franklin was already allergic to other people’s piety and still able to hear the weather. The Awakening put biblical speech in the streets. The colonies that broke from England were not a faculty workshop. They were a people who had been arguing, singing, and frightening themselves with sermons about a God who was not a mascot. I do not claim Edwards “founded” the United States. I claim the country is harder to imagine without that pressure in the air.
He was also the grandfather of Aaron Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton. I am not a Hamilton man. I mention the grandson so nobody thinks I am selling a stained-glass window. Edwards’s own church in Northampton eventually threw him out because he would not lower the table to the town’s comfort. He finished in a smaller charge at Stockbridge, among the Mahican, and then the College of New Jersey—Princeton—made him president. He lasted about a month. He took the smallpox inoculation during an outbreak, fever followed, and he died on March 22, 1758. His last counsel was to trust God and not be afraid. The same college that begged him to come later drifted into the progressive machine that now congratulates itself for unmaking the civilization he helped catechize.⁵
That arc is the warning. You can put a Christian on a letterhead and still lose the building. You can also lose the building by refusing to put your arm around anyone who is not already converted.
Darbi Boddy and the Noble Death That Vacates the Seat
I have always had a soft spot for Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board. She came out of a Puritan temperament: right is right, wrong is wrong, say it, take the heat. I admired the spine. The political class asked whether she knew she had to go to other people and shake hands. She drew a line so hard that the people who should have been part of her coalition treated her as a problem to be managed. She was removed. Not enough Republicans came to her defense in the way that kept the seat. I was very angry about that. I still am.⁶
There is a Christian imagination that treats the pike as the only honorable furniture—burned, sawn, beheaded, and therefore faithful. The martyrs were real. Rome tried to kill the church, and the church outlived the attempt. I am asking a different question for a school board and a county party. Are we here to die beautifully and hand the district back to the purple-haired people eaters or are we here to keep the chair and put more than one adult in the room?
A public school system designed as an agent of social reconstruction will not become conservative because a chairman tells the Journal-News he would like that very much. You need people on the board who can last. You need people around them who do not run at the first ugly headline. You need a farm team that was not raised only in a sanctuary, because most of the county was not. Maybe forty percent can make the born-again jump on a timetable that satisfies a Sunday-school teacher. The rest will come, if they come, the way George came toward a Bible in a backseat: over years, over taxes, over ancient history, over the proof that you will still walk them to the car when they are not yet where you are.
The Church That Taught Me Business Had Classrooms and a Mortgage
I saw my grandson today, and I told him about my years between eleven and sixteen, High Adventure, the Scout post that met at a big church on RT42 in West Chester. We made pizzas in the church kitchen, and people came to pick them up. That was a fundraiser, a civics lesson, and a first business plan. My family church in Fairfield was the other building. My wife and I were married there. Catechism, Sunday school, the pastor’s house on the property, the side rooms where a kid learned how adults talk when they think they are only running a troop meeting. Then the money ran out. They sold it. It broke my family’s heart. It is not on the market presently. I have been thinking about buying it back for a couple of million. dollars In any other use, that ground in Fairfield is a different number. Because it is a church, the market treats it like a problem.⁷
I am not announcing a closing. I am saying the thought is serious, and Jonathan Edwards is the reason the thought got louder. Churches decline when they have no profit model and a pastor who thinks Jesus only ever taught under a tree. Jesus could walk from village to village. A sanctuary in a hot real-estate corridor has a mortgage. Nicodemus money, the quiet help that keeps a ministry on its feet, is not a compromise with Egypt. It is how a thing survives long enough to teach the next boy how to sell a pizza and keep the books.
The West Chester Tea Party lost a church venue while I was in Japan not that long ago. A guest, a fight, and the door closed. For years the movement lived on donated fellowship halls and cookies after the meeting. Streamers, Republicans, whoever would come. That was a big tent that still knew the room had been a sanctuary an hour earlier. I want a building in this county that Tea Party groups and Republican meetings can use without a landlord who gets nervous. Not a state church. A civic table with a steeple still on it.
Princeton Forgot. The Party Should Not Copy the Forgetting.
Edwards as president of Princeton is the picture I cannot shake. The college wanted the man who could make seniors write on divinity and then talk about it. A short generation later, the heirs of that project began the long surrender. Liberty University and the older schools are not the same charter, but the temptation is the same: keep the Christian name, lose the Christian nerve, export Democrats with verse numbers. Complaining about that in a newspaper will not reverse it. Buying a pulpit, filling a room, putting your arm around a senator who keeps a Bible in the backseat, teaching a Scout to make change for a pizza—that is the slower work.
Peer pressure is not evangelism. “Agree, or we will put you outside” is what the other party already does. If we do it with better footnotes, we still lose the county. Jesus did not recruit from the Sanhedrin’s banquet list. He took the people who had fallen out of the wagon. Edwards could fill a town and still get voted out. Both facts matter. The first tells you preaching works. The second tells you preaching without a coalition becomes a memorial service.
What I Want the Chairman to Do Instead of Being Displeased
Help officeholders get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. If you want Christian values in the community, put a beautiful Bible in more backseats by being the kind of man a senator will linger with in a parking lot. If you want the schools, do not design another martyr and then wonder why the seat is empty after they are killed or lose their seat in the next election. If you want taxes cut, stay on the subject with people who will go to the small-business caucus before they will go to your Wednesday Bible study volunteer class.
I will keep reading BAR. I will keep the Edwards volume in the rotation. I will keep walking George to the car. I will keep thinking about the Fairfield church, not because nostalgia is a strategy, but because the kids I see now do not have the side room I had, and a party that cannot raise its own young in a hall it does not have to rent is a party that will keep leasing its future from people who do not like its hymn.
Lead. Do not write the other side’s headline for them.
Notes
1. Art Sauerwein, Butler County GOP executive chairman, quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage on local Republicans, schools, Christian values, spending, and taxes. A public rebuke of sitting Republican officeholders is usable copy for the other party. That is not mind-reading. That is how newspapers work.
2. George F. Lang, Republican, Ohio Senate 4th District since 2021; previously Ohio House 52nd; West Chester. Married to Debbie Lang. I am describing a private evening in 2026 and a longer friendship. I am not claiming he has asked me to speak for him.
3. John 3; 7:50–51; 19:39–42. Nicodemus keeps his station and still moves toward the teacher. Influence that can only speak in the sanctuary will not reach the people who write statutes.
4. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026, general editor Matthew Everhard. Biblical Archaeology Review, Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.
5. Edwards was inaugurated at the College of New Jersey on February 16, 1758; died March 22, 1758, after smallpox inoculation. Buried in the Presidents’ Lot, Princeton Cemetery. Esther Edwards married Aaron Burr Sr.; their son was Aaron Burr Jr. Northampton dismissed Edwards in 1750 over communion discipline; Stockbridge followed.
6. Darbi Boddy won a Lakota Local Schools board seat in 2021 on a conservative platform and was removed by the board in March 2024 after a long, ugly fight and a 90-day absence tied to a protection-order conflict with another member. I am not retrying that case here. I am talking about coalition and what happens when courage has no bench.
7. The Fairfield church of my childhood and marriage is named as a family fact and a present thought, not as a listed property and not as a pledge. High Adventure and the West Chester church on the Cincinnati-Dayton Road corridor are the Scout years as I lived them.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Local Politics and the People Named
Journal-News (Hamilton). Late-August 2026 coverage of Butler County Republicans and Chairman Art Sauerwein.
Lang, George F. Ohio Senate, District 4. Public record, 2021–present; Ohio House, 2017–2020.
Ballotpedia and the Ohio Legislature biographical pages for George Lang.
Journal-News. “2 conservative newcomers, incumbent win Lakota seats.” November 2021.
WVXU. “Darbi Boddy is removed from Lakota’s school board.” March 20, 2024.
WLWT. Lakota board appointment coverage following the vacant seat, April 2024.
FOX19. “Criminal charge dismissed against former Lakota school board member.” August 1, 2024.
Jonathan Edwards and the Awakening
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press.
Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections; Freedom of the Will; “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.
Marsden, George M. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Eerdmans, 2008.
McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford, 2012.
Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.
Princeton University. Presidential biographies: Jonathan Edwards, 1758.
This Day in Presbyterian History. “February 23: Jonathan Edwards.” On the inoculation and death.
Princeton and the Long Drift
The Princetonians and official presidential histories of the College of New Jersey.
Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822. Princeton University Press, 1989.
Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford, 1994.
Burtchaell, James Tunstead. The Dying of the Light. Eerdmans, 1998.
Church, Money, and the Nicodemus Problem
The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, 19.
Luke 8:1–3. The women who funded the ministry.
Acts 4:32–37; 16:14–15. Property and hospitality in the first churches.
Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”
Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together.
Schaeffer, Francis A. The Church at the End of the 20th Century.
Schools, Boards, and the Limits of Martyrdom
Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education. Free Press, 1993.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. The Schools We Need. Doubleday, 1996.
Murray, Charles. Real Education. Crown Forum, 2008.
Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. New Society, 1992.
Ohio Department of Education standards files for the official language boards to actually vote on.
Parties, Tents, and Coalition
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.
Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015.
Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale, 1962.
Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Scripture, Friendship, and Slow Conversion
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.
Newby, Elizabeth. On ordinary friendship as the delivery system of belief, read against Lewis.
Augustine. Confessions. The long way toward a book that was already in the house.
Biblical Archaeology Review. For the magazine that sits on the table while the political argument goes on.
Boy Scouts of America. Handbook and the old troop-and-post structure. The side room was a civics school whether the adults knew it or not.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been carrying these questions in the background of my thinking for decades. The frequency with which they demand attention has risen sharply since the recent UAP disclosures. When the best technology the Air Force possesses cannot keep pace with something that behaves more like a ghost than a craft, the old categories collapse. It is not enough to say a flying saucer is real. It is not enough to say a religious claim is real. I want to know what causes people to believe what they believe, what political order forms around those beliefs, and what self-interest drives the entire system. Once you understand the political motivation behind belief, you understand the kind of society people are actually building—and whether you should support it.
That is why the conversation around Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key landed with such force. The book is not merely another academic argument about ancient wine. It is a direct challenge to the sanitized version of early Christianity most of us inherited. And it raises a harder question: if the original Eucharist carried a pharmacological charge, what does that tell us about the entities people were trying to contact, and why did Christianity’s later institutional form deliberately move away from that charge?
The Immortality Key and the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis
Muraresku’s central claim is straightforward and explosive. The original Christian communion was not a symbolic sip of ordinary wine. It was a potent psychedelic sacrament inherited from the Greek mysteries, specifically the cult of Dionysus and the rites at Eleusis. For nearly two thousand years, the greatest minds of antiquity—Cicero among them—traveled to the sanctuary at Eleusis to drink the kykeon. They claimed the experience removed the fear of death. The recipe was a state secret punishable by death.
The chemistry focuses on ergot, the fungus that grows on barley and rye—the same fungus from which Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938. The theory is not new. It was proposed in 1978 by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck in The Road to Eleusis. Hofmann and Ruck’s academic careers suffered for it. The idea that the foundations of Western philosophy and early Christianity rested on controlled visionary pharmacology was too much for the scholarly stomach of the time. And when you think about that very obvious claim, and the way those names were ostracized, you can see the root cause of a much larger problem.
Muraresku spends years in the Vatican archives and archaeological sites looking for the transition. He notes that ancient wine was rarely plain fermented grape juice. It was routinely an infusion of herbs, roots, and potentially fungi—a pharmakon. The Gospel of John, the most Greek of the Gospels, uses language for the wine that suggests something more complex than table drink. Jesus’ miracle at Cana occurs in a cultural zone saturated with Dionysian imagery. In early Jesus centuries, Dionysus and Jesus were sometimes treated as interchangeable figures of death, rebirth, and ecstatic immortality.
The book’s most compelling social argument concerns women. For millennia, the preparation of these visionary beverages was women’s work. As Christianity became institutionalized and more patriarchal, particularly from the fourth century onward, those women and their spiked drinks became a threat to the emerging clerical monopoly on the divine. Muraresku reads the Inquisition’s language of pharmaka and sorcery not merely as superstition but as the systematic eradication of a competing technology of direct encounter with the sacred. The shift, in his framing, is from pharmacological Christianity to placebo Christianity.
I want Christianity to succeed. I do not read Muraresku as an enemy of the faith. He identifies as a Catholic who is trying to recover rather than destroy the Eucharist. Yet the implications cut in two directions at once. If the earliest layers of the tradition carried a visionary intensity later deliberately muted, then the institutional Church both preserved and constrained something powerful. And if that intensity was chemically mediated, we must ask what, exactly, the initiates were encountering.
Beer, Skulls, and the Long Continuity of Death Cults
The problem is larger than Greece. When I go back further—ten thousand years further—the pattern sharpens.
At Göbekli Tepe (the site that Muraresku and others still sometimes refer to by earlier or variant names in popular discussion), the evidence is no longer subtle. T-shaped pillars, snakes carved everywhere, a clear skull cult, and chemical traces consistent with beer brewing. People were not merely gathering to eat. They were preparing fermented beverages, removing soft tissue from human heads, drilling holes, and displaying the skulls in ritual contexts under carefully oriented architecture. The same complex appears, in different local forms, along the Jordan Valley in the dolmen fields that stretch from the Golan south toward the Dead Sea, and again in the megalithic “Wheel of Giants” (Rujm el-Hiri / Gilgal Refa’im) east of the Sea of Galilee—roughly 160 meters across, built of more than 40,000 tons of basalt, aligned with solar and stellar markers.
I have scoured the archaeological literature for a serious treatment of these Jordan Valley dolmens from roughly 10,000 to 3,000 BC. The silence is telling, just like any discussion dealing with the use of wine in Greek culture outside of mainstream opinion. Mainstream discussion prefers the safer Bronze Age and later. Yet the structures are there. The alignments are there. The continuity of ritual astronomy with later Hopewell earthworks in the Ohio Valley is difficult to ignore once you stop treating the Atlantic as an absolute barrier.
Pure native copper from the Lake Superior region was extracted for thousands of years. Isotopic and purity studies continue to raise questions about whether some of that copper moved farther than orthodoxy allows. The Windover bog people of central Florida preserve soft tissue and brain matter from the same deep time window. The Newberry Tablet and other Michigan finds remain controversial, but the pattern of megalithic and copper-working activity across the Great Lakes and the Upper Peninsula does not vanish because it is inconvenient.
Everywhere you look in this pre-biblical window, you find cultures oriented toward death, severed heads, fermented or psychoactive drink, and communication with something beyond the ordinary dead—the politics of that communication matter. Human beings do not casually cut off a neighbor’s head, scrape the flesh, hang the skull, and pour blood on an altar for sport. They do it because they believe the act buys favor, knowledge, rain, fertility, or protection from harm.
The Mouse and the Snake
I use a simple allegory. Watch a pet snake being fed. Drop a mouse into the glass enclosure. For the first few minutes, the mouse runs, freezes, and tests every corner. Eventually it realizes there is no exit. Then the behavior changes. It becomes still. It positions itself near the water dish or the food bowl as if stillness and proximity to ordinary life might persuade the snake to look elsewhere. The snake, of course, is not persuaded. It simply waits and then eats.
Humanity has lived for a very long time with the anxiety of that mouse. Non-human intelligences—call them Watchers, old gods, ultraterrestrials, or whatever the current UAP language prefers—appear in the record as entities that demand appeasement. Psychedelics, ritual sex, blood, and skull display are technologies of that appeasement. The mouse tries to make itself useful or invisible so the snake will not strike.
Christianity, in its mature form, broke that cycle. It did not deny the existence of the hostile powers. It declared them defeated in principle and offered a different posture: moral agency, individual responsibility, and direct relationship with a God who does not require the constant feeding of death. The result, imperfect as every human institution is, was the rise of a civilization that valued the living more than the skulls of the dead. Strip the Christian premise from a mass of people, and the older pattern reasserts itself with remarkable speed. I have watched it at a Jason Aldean concert from the VIP area—twenty thousand people, many drunk since morning, public sexual display, the old fertility and abandon patterns returning the moment the moral frame loosens. The same retreat appears wherever the teachings of Jesus are actively removed from a culture.
That is why I am not enthusiastic about the modern psychedelic renaissance framing itself as the recovery of a lost “religion with no name.” The experiences reported at Johns Hopkins and NYU—ego death, loss of fear of mortality—are real. The question is whether the entities contacted in those states are friends of the human project. My reading of the long archaeological record is that they are not. They have been competing for control of human attention and behavior for a very long time. Christianity was never their preferred outcome.
The Four Pillars That Still Need Digging
The gap between roughly 10,000 BC and the world of Abraham remains the least examined and most consequential stretch of the human story. Four clusters of evidence deserve far more serious, well-funded attention than they currently receive. I am committing myself to putting money and attention to these ideas:
1. The skull cult, beer residues, and snake iconography at Göbekli Tepe and related Anatolian sites.
2. The dolmen fields and the Wheel of Giants along the Jordan Valley and Golan.
3. The pure copper extraction systems of the Lake Superior region and their possible long-distance movement.
4. The Windover and related Archaic Florida populations with their extraordinary preservation of soft tissue and ritual practice.
These are not isolated curiosities. They form the deep background against which both the biblical narrative and the later Greek mysteries emerge. More excavation, more isotopic analysis, more open discussion of possible transoceanic contact, and less reflexive dismissal of “fringe” data would change the conversation. I am writing The Politics of Heaven in part to force that conversation into the open. The secular publishing world prefers books that treat Christianity as the problem rather than as a partial solution to an older and darker problem. That preference itself looks, from where I sit, like another form of the mouse’s stillness—keeping the larger questions safely inside the glass.
Conclusion: Do Not Be the Mouse
The original Eucharist may well have carried a pharmacological dimension inherited from older Mediterranean practice. The women who prepared the drinks may have been the last keepers of a technology the institutional Church found threatening. None of that requires us to return to the skull cults and the blood altars. The miracle of Christianity was not that it invented the sacred. It redirected the human drive for transcendence away from appeasement of predatory powers and toward a moral and spiritual posture that could build a durable civilization.
I want more money poured into the archaeology of the deep past—not the archaeology that already knows what it is allowed to find, but the kind willing to follow the copper, the alignments, the beer residues, and the severed heads wherever they lead. I want the conversation about non-human intelligence to stop treating the entities as either cartoon aliens or harmless spirit guides. They have a politics. Humanity needs a politics equal to theirs.
The Politics of Heaven is my effort to map that battlefield. The four pillars above are the places where the next decade of serious digging should concentrate. The rest is commentary, color, and the long memory of a man who has watched the same patterns repeat across continents and millennia.
Do not be the mouse. Learn the snake’s methods. The enemy is the one who puts the mouse in the cage with the snake. That is the answer to our many questions. And in the UAP disclosures, we are getting a hint of that world.
Footnotes
1. Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (St. Martin’s Press, 2020).
2. R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978; later editions).
3. On the ergot detoxification experiments and the University of Athens work referenced by Muraresku, see the discussion and citations in The Immortality Key, chapters on Eleusis and the chemistry of the kykeon.
4. Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press, 2003) and subsequent biomolecular archaeology papers on mixed fermented beverages.
5. For Göbekli Tepe skull cult and brewing evidence: Klaus Schmidt and subsequent publications of the German Archaeological Institute; recent chemical analyses of residues in stone vessels.
6. Rujm el-Hiri (Gilgal Refa’im / Wheel of Giants): surveys and interpretations in Israeli archaeology literature; see also popular and specialist treatments of its astronomical alignments.
7. Old Copper Culture / Lake Superior copper: standard Midwestern archaeology; purity and sourcing debates continue in archaeometallurgy literature.
8. Windover site, Florida: Glen H. Doran et al., publications on the Archaic wet-site cemetery and preserved soft tissue.
9. Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery, 1969) and later works on the continuity of non-human encounter narratives.
10. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking, 2009).
11. Biblical Archaeology Review, ongoing coverage of Jordan Valley and related megalithic sites; earlier issues treating dolmens remain limited relative to the density of the remains.
12. On Hopewell copper and ceremonial complexes: standard Ohio Valley archaeology; Newark Earthworks and related lunar alignments.
13. Dolores Cannon’s reported communications with Essene figures appear in her Conversations with Nostradamus series and related remote-viewing / past-life material; treated here as phenomenological data rather than conventional historiography.
14. Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and later works on Göbekli Tepe and catastrophic prehistory; useful for raising questions even where orthodoxy disagrees with conclusions.
Selected Bibliography
• Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key. St. Martin’s Press, 2020.
• Wasson, R. Gordon, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck. The Road to Eleusis. 1978 and later editions.
• MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2009.
• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969.
• McGovern, Patrick E. Ancient Wine. Princeton University Press, 2003.
• Schmidt, Klaus. Publications on Göbekli Tepe (German Archaeological Institute).
• Doran, Glen H., et al. Windover site monographs and papers.
• Hancock, Graham. Fingerprints of the Gods and subsequent titles.
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.
