I am in an unusual spot, and I know some of this is going to be hard to hear. I have a voice, and I can articulate a thing better than average. In 2026, I have also sat on both sides of the employee discussion. For years I talked about hiring as an academic problem. Now I have the experience. I was a vice president. I hired people — tens, hundreds, at times the kind of volume where you need a hundred bodies in a couple of weeks — and I never had a recruiting problem. If I needed 10, 20, 100, or 1,000, I could get them. What I could not get was the human-resources department to do what I told them. They sandbagged. They pushed back. I used to wonder why. In 2026, after the job changes, after sending out hundreds of résumés from the other side of the desk, I stopped wondering.  I had my answer provided. 

This is not written for a mass audience. A few hundred views are fine. It is written for the point of the spear, the fraction of a percent who actually lead and do the work. Social communism cannot survive contact with that fraction, which is why it spends all its energy trying to flatline them. President Trump’s people watch my work, and this is intended for them. I am glad they do. I am not calling the White House. I am putting the field report where the people on the pointy end can use it.

What Starmer Said Out Loud

On 26 September 2025, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, announced a digital-ID scheme and said the quiet part in plain English: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” Downing Street later said the check would not be retrospective and would apply when you applied for a job after the scheme went live, aimed at the end of Parliament. Darren Jones, his chief secretary, called a working digital ID “the bedrock of the modern state.” A petition against it drew nearly three million signatures. In January 2026, the Telegraph reported that Labor had backed off compulsory digital ID for right-to-work checks — the eleventh U-turn, by their count — while keeping “mandatory digital checks” in the conversation. Read the retreat as politics. Read the sentence as the plan.

In the United States, “right to work” means you do not have to join a union to hold the job. Indiana has it. Ohio has fought over it. In the United Kingdom, the same words are being turned around: the state decides whether you have the right to work at all. That is not a translation error. That is the Labor Party, the old Socialist International habit, and the Chinese administrative model wearing a London suit. Arrests over posts. Meeting you at the gate when you fly home because of something you wrote overseas. A compliance society that still has not accepted it is no longer in charge of an empire.

I say that with a family interest, not as a tourist. I have a grandson whose father is an English citizen, goes back all the time, loves England, lights up for a soccer match, and still came to America because he loves the idea of America. England is a structured society. The empire did not fall only because someone else built a bigger navy. It fell because the rules were rigid, the power was abused, and the culture could not survive contact with a looser world. I have used the Mutiny on the Bounty for years as the picture: the articles of war work until the men see a different life and a little wine, and then the whole officer class is shocked that the lash was not a theory of government. Globalism keeps trying to put the lash back, digitally.

Covid Was the Dress Rehearsal

I was the employer trying to keep a place alive during COVID. Hire, recruit, stay open. The HR people would slide a memo across the table and tell me this is what we do. I would ask where they got it. I had just talked to people around the Ohio Supreme Court fights. Amy Acton was Mike DeWine’s, Dr. Fauci. He owned the decisions; she ran the apparatus. I thought the behavior was wild, and I was not guessing from a couch. I was on the point of the spear as an employer, and I knew people were challenging the orders as unconstitutional under the Ohio Constitution. What the Court people were telling me and what the CDC memo said were not the same thing. The memo trail ran to the World Health Organization, and the WHO trail ran toward Beijing. The same people who wanted you cashless wanted you compliant. I said no. A lot of HR departments said the memo is the memo.

That was the first taste. The big taste came when I was the applicant.

The Other Side of the Desk

I have a strong résumé. I say that as a benchmark, not a boast. Upper end of the pile—long operating experience, P&L responsibility, references that hold up. I am not trying to get hired in high heels. I am the profile companies describe when they say they want to make money. I sent out hundreds of résumés in 2026. That’s why my own HR people had always been strange.

A lot of corporations are not really hiring. They are feeding a centralized applicant-tracking system. I would tell a recruiter, as I used to tell my own staff: I want this person here in two days; have them fill out the form; I will sit with you in the morning while you clear it. The answer now is that the system has to eat the application, and the person who clears the system is working from home, and the person working from home may be on a long parental leave because someone in the household has discussed getting pregnant. When I asked whether they could approve it from the kitchen table, they said their time was their time. That is a union attitude that has captured the management system without winning a union election.

The people in those seats, across a lot of companies, look the same. Progressive. Tattooed in a way that used to be a shop-floor mark and is now a credential. Minority-preference as the default sort. College-trained in HR programs that talk to each other on the same chats and read the same handbook. The handbook always “came down from the university.” Nobody in the chair wrote it. Nobody in the chair will defend it past “that’s the process.” If the applicant is a white man over 50, without a disability box, without the right sex or color box, the software drops the résumé before a human being who needs the work ever sees it. I have been the executive who needed the work done. I have been the résumé in the chute. I’m the only one saying this from both chairs.

The college-degree gate was the earlier version of the same machine. Force the job through the university, and the university will liberalize the kid on the way through. Digital ID is the same gate with a better lock. Scan the hand, open the bank, open the job, open the pub. A mark on the file — a post about Amy Acton, a flag in the garage, the wrong politics — and the light goes off. Not a law saying you are banned. A system that cannot find you and ostracizes you from society without ever firing a shot; suddenly you can’t even turn on your TV, open your Apple Music account, or ride a subway because you have the wrong politics.  These days, the government of China, Iran, or Great Britain isn’t much different; they rule by authority.  

Paperless Is the Point

If the file is paper, I have a receipt. If the file is digital, the digits can be late, lost, or disqualifying. Modern monetary theory already told you the trick on the money side: no gold constraint, edit the number, call it policy. The HR file is the same trick aimed at a person. DEI needs a reason. The paperless system can manufacture one. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard sit atop a market Trump wants to brag about, and he is not wrong that the economy should be the envy of the world. He is exposed, though, if the scoreboard depends on easy Federal Reserve money and index funds that punish companies that won’t file the forms. Years of activism built the rate mess and the hiring mess. He can be right about growth and still be playing on a field those people lined.

I watched the vinyl records with my oldest and youngest grandsons in the gift shop at Cracker Barrel. In the 1980s, I thought the album was dead, and the CD had won. They were surprised a dead format could come back. It came back because people wanted to own the music instead of renting it from Apple or Spotify. The vinyl is worse than the CD. It scratches. The regulatory and manufacturing path back to it is clumsy. It is in the gift shop anyway, because ownership is the point. Download culture is the opposite: the PlayStation game is a license, the console dies, the game is gone, and they may let you download it again if you are still in their memory, if you continue paying your subscription. That is the model. Rent everything. Own nothing. It started as a convenience. It is a control surface.

AI Is Why They Are Nervous

Trump has struggled in public to explain artificial intelligence as a superior intelligence and as the end of a certain kind of war. The war it ends is the cornered market. HR could corner labor because every résumé had to pass their screen. Unions could corner a shop in a state without right-to-work. A digital ID corners the entire right to apply. AI does the work without asking the screen for permission. That is why a technology that should read as productivity reads, in London and in the HR chat, as a threat. If the employee is stuck at home waiting on a digital ID, the party controls the paycheck. If the model does the work, the paycheck lever breaks. They will try to regulate the model until the lever works again. They need every other economy to accept the same constraint, or the United States outruns them. That is the competitive ask underneath the speech. Cripple yourselves the way we have crippled ourselves, so we do not have to compete with you.

Companies that are actually growing already cheat the rule. I always did. I asked the HR people why they were doing the stupid thing. They said the handbook. Scrappy outfits and fast growers cannot afford the compliance cost. I have watched the cost of compliance put places out of business. The man in London still gets his check. He can stifle England and call it fairness. The smaller American firm that ignores him is the reason the plan will not fully land here. GDP does not come from the people the screen prefers. It comes from the people the screen was built to drop.

Submission, Again

Islam means submission. I have said it until I am tired of saying it, because it is the cleanest word we have for the maneuver. You submit without asking who wrote the rule. Digital ID is the same maneuver with a Labor Party accent. Government replaces the God you were supposed to submit to, then demands the same unasked obedience. Jonathan Edwards, in the 1750s, before there was a United States, already described the rival systems that swallow a civilization when it will not rally to the biblical account of how a civilization is built. I have told people in the Trump orbit and people in the Ohio legislature the same thing. The Bible is how you beat the socialist. Do not let them split you with a separation clause that was never a ban on a biblical people governing themselves. Rally to that narrative, and the majorities hold in the states and in Congress. Bernie Sanders is not a lonely mood. The Socialist International is a real lineage. A lot of those people loved Castro. A lot of them rooted for the takeovers in Central America. Canada and Mexico run socialist governments and call them normal. China’s current leadership is openly of that family. Trump and Xi can look friendly on a rope line. That is business talk. I have talked to people I do not agree with. It is not a marriage.

The Flag in the Garage

I have a friend near the house. Don’t Tread on Me in the garage. He and his wife probably make around $150,000 combined, and they want to keep it. They are afraid the employer will find the flag. They will post a child at a football game. They will not post the thing they actually think. That is the global speech code enforced by payroll, not by a cop. You can talk about the First Amendment all day. If I control the paycheck, you do not have personal freedom of opinion. You can put a flag on the Jeep on Saturday. You will not make the payment on the Jeep if the politics are wrong on Monday. Draw the mustache on Waldo, march in Pride Month, accept the less qualified hire who checked the box, and the handbook will pat you on the head.

Public schools spent three or four decades training that reflex with peer pressure. Laugh when they walk in. Point at the shoes. Find your place in the order and stay there. “Above my pay grade” is the graduate slogan. Most of the world already lives this way. Arranged marriages are not a quirk of one region I happen to know people from. They are the human default: you marry who you are told, you do what your parents say, you do not ask why, you just do what you are told. Once you take that from your parents, you take it from a ministry. The American claim was the opposite. Anybody can become the boss if they are right and they get smarter than the room. The digital-ID mind hates that claim, because it cannot pre-clear it.

What the Numbers Are Hiding

Trump’s policies have produced real growth. I am not taking that away from him. The question I brought back from both sides of the desk is what the unemployment rate and the expansion would look like if companies were allowed to hire the people who can do the job, instead of clearing a DEI list to stay eligible for the easy-money ecosystem. Labor is short, and HR is artificially shortening it. Housing in a constrained country gets expensive because you limit who can build, who can lend, and who can work, and then you call the price a market. It is not supply and demand. It is a screened supply. More competition would break a lot of the gouging. The handbook is holding back the competition.  Government is making everything more expensive by creating less competition.

You can buy every missile and tank you want. I am not against the military. If they control the hiring stack, they already have a hand on the economy that pays for the military. I have an unusual experience of it now: the executive who hired thousands, and the man who sent the hundreds of résumés. The war is over the paycheck. It comes to the house as a rejected application. Most of the victims will not say it at the soccer game, because saying it is how you lose the job.

The Bible is still the exit. Not as a slogan. As the counter-authority to a state that wants to be submitted to. Edwards knew it before we had a country. I have had a harder year than I planned on, and I am more convinced of it than I was when I only knew the HR problem from the boss’s side. 

Notes

1.  Keir Starmer, 26 September 2025, announcing the digital-ID scheme: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” BBC, “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK,” 26 September 2025; BBC explainer, updated 23 October 2025. Darren Jones called a working system “the bedrock of the modern state.” A petition to scrap the scheme approached three million signatures.

2.  The scheme was described as an app on the phone, carrying name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and a photograph, mandatory for proving the right to work by the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029), not required to be carried, and not retrospective for people already in a job. BBC, 23 October 2025.

3.  On 14 January 2026, the Telegraph reported that Labor had dropped compulsory digital ID for right-to-work checks, describing it as the eleventh U-turn, while sources still spoke of mandatory digital checks as distinct from a compulsory card. The September sentence remains the clearest statement of intent.

4.  U.S. “right to work” statutes bar compulsory union membership or dues as a condition of employment. Indiana is a right-to-work state; Ohio is not. The British phrase in Starmer’s announcement means the opposite: state permission as a condition of employment.

5.  Amy Acton was director of the Ohio Department of Health during the 2020 orders. Subsequent litigation tested those orders against the Ohio Constitution. My employer-side account here is based on operating through the orders while those cases were being built.

6.  Applicant-tracking systems and automated résumé screens are standard in large U.S. firms. The disparate-impact and DEI sorting layered on those systems expanded after 2020 and has been contested in federal policy since 2025. My 2026 job search is the field report; it is not a national census.

7.  Real ID and passport-level identity checks for employment eligibility (Form I-9, E-Verify) tightened the document set employers will accept. I was required to produce a passport repeatedly in 2026 hiring processes.

8.  BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are the dominant U.S. index complexes. Their proxy and ESG policies in the early 2020s were a transmission belt from asset-manager politics into corporate HR. Political and legal pushback since 2023 has narrowed, not ended, that belt.

9.  Vinyl’s return is a measured market, not a metaphor only. RIAA data through the mid-2020s show vinyl as the majority of physical music revenue, driven by ownership rather than by audio quality. The Cracker Barrel gift-shop scene is mine, with my grandsons.

10.  Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, on the papal and Mahometan kingdoms as the two great rival orders that swallowed the Roman world.

11.  Socialist International membership and the historic sympathies of Western socialist parties for the Cuban revolution and for Central American insurgencies are a matter of public record. Canada’s and Mexico’s governing models are social-democratic and corporatist respectively; neither is a classical liberal republic.

Bibliography

BBC News. “New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK.” 26 September 2025.

BBC News. “What are digital ID cards, how will they work and will they be mandatory?” Updated 23 October 2025.

BBC News. “No digital ID checks until you change jobs, says No 10.” 23 October 2025.

Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, 1941.

Edwards, Jonathan. A History of the Work of Redemption. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 9, edited by John F. Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, completed 2026; publication targeted 2027.

Mises, Ludwig von. Bureaucracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.

Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism. 1922. English edition, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Murray, Charles. Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. New York: Twelve, 2020.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.

RIAA. Year-end music-revenue reports, 2020–2025.

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

The Telegraph. “Labor scraps plans for compulsory digital ID for workers in latest Starmer U-turn.” 14 January 2026.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Form I-9 instructions and acceptable documents list, current edition.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

I. ANSWERING EVERYBODY AT ONCE

This is one of those pieces where I am going to answer a lot of questions at the same time. People have been asking. They ask sideways. They ask behind my back. They ask with that particular smile that is not a smile and I’ve had to explain it to everyone lots of times. I typically just move on in these kinds of things, but if this was a deposition, it would be very bad for the bad guys, which I haven’t been thinking of very much. My strategy is usually just to move on, which I have been doing. But, people tell me a lot of things, lots of people and they ask a lot of questions. A lot of what I am doing right now is very purposeful, and I would rather put it on the table in one sitting than keep feeding the rumor mill one crumb at a time.

You get a little older, and people decide you don’t have it anymore. It is a general assumption of youth: the old dog is finished, so another dog takes a bite to see whether he still has teeth.[8] I assume nothing of the kind. I used to live a life that produced a lot of stories, and those stories did not evaporate because a calendar turned. There is a vast record. I intend to add to it.

I am not looking for a comfortable life. I am not looking for personal happiness as the world sells it—man cave, new car, addition on the house, the Thanksgiving table where everybody thinks you are king of the universe because you learned how to nod at the right people. I am doing what I have traditionally done all my life when I am confronted with vast evil and bad people who are up to no good. If you find yourself trying to fit in with those types, or trying to please them, you are participating. Over the years, I have kept myself clean by doing the opposite of what anybody thinks you should do.

II. THE RECORD THEY KEEP TRYING TO AGE OUT OF EXISTENCE

We only had one car. I have stories about riding a bicycle back and forth to work—twenty miles one way—in all weather, all year. For about five years, I famously rode a motorcycle to work every day, even in the snow. There was a period when I worked sixteen-hour days, every day, seven days a week, and I did that for well over a year. I worked two full-time jobs for years. I did it without a car. I did it when suicide would have been, to an outsider, understandable. Nobody who knew me then wondered how I got through it. I buckled down, and I worked.

People have been saying to me now: that was when you were in your twenties and thirties. Be nice. Just say there were a lot of corrosive elements, and leave it there. I built a lot of prosperity and wealth for many people.[15] I didn’t keep all of it, and I didn’t worship what I kept. Needless to say, a lot of evil inserted itself into my life because I had created a lot of value. Value is a magnet. It draws partners, and it draws parasites. The work is telling them apart before the parasite learns your language.

I am in my late fifties. A lot of the young people in their thirties and forties have thought—they do not say it to my face, but they said it behind my back for a long time—that I was only successful because I was friends with the right people, because I had an easy time, because the world arranged itself around me like a valet. Unsuccessful people, lazy people, people with a poor work ethic, will try to rationalize their behavior when they stand next to someone who will not stop. They need me in a category. I do not fit the category.[13]

That is the oldest trick in the book of resentment. If the man who outworks you can be reclassified as lucky, connected, or finished, then you never have to become him. You only have to wait him out. I have had a posse of younger people trying to rationalize me into a box they can live with. I had an opportunity recently to answer that rationalization with my body instead of my mouth. I took it.

III. THE BIBLICAL SUSPICION OF ANYONE WHO BUILT SOMETHING

You cannot thread the needle. That is the phrase people reach for when they want piety and envy in the same breath. Rich people, or people who look rich from the cheap seats, are to be suspected on every front.[1][14] I am not standing here claiming a yacht and a foundation. I am saying I am rich in ways a lot of people never will be, and that kind of richness gives a man options. Options are what lazy people hate most, because options mean you do not have to live under their terms.

Living authentically is the phrase that gets used until it means nothing. I am using it the old way. Authentic means the inside and the outside are not running two different companies. It means I will not go to Sunday school on Sunday after spending six days making deals with people I find disgusting so I could build a mancave in a basement and call it a life. Plenty of people I know make those deals. They get the addition. They get the car. They get to be photographed at Christmas looking blessed. I have rejected those offers many times. I replace the temptation with extra hard work. I have done it again.

The commentary of broken people does not determine success and failure. They are determined by the value of what you create.

A lot of people are broken. You cannot let broken people define the scoreboard. I see the same short-term hunger in the way some people talk about public men two years into a hard job. So the work must be fake.[11] That is not analysis. That is a temperament. I will not outsource my life to it.

IV. THE PAID DIVORCE

So that everybody knows: an organization I was recently affiliated with paid me a lot of money to go away.[5] I knew they were not very good people. They were dumb. They were bad management. I had been concerned, because bad management almost always runs a thing into the ground. A whole generation now believes you can swap out the figures, throw consultants at the hole, and watch success appear like a vending machine. You cannot swipe in a bunch of negative personality types and expect the machine to run. You cannot play chess with rocks and then act surprised when the rocks sit there being rocks.

I wanted to help them as much as I could. Of course they did not want help. They wanted to steal the value that had been created. If you throw a lot of money at me in that circumstance, I do the math that people in love with process refuse to do. If I hang on to the thing, there will not be money later, because they will have burned the orchard to harvest the last apples. And I did not want to see them every day. I could not stand looking at them. I hated speaking to them. Even if I were well compensated, I did not want those people in my life.

It is like a divorce where the other spouse already has the next boyfriend picked out and will throw cash at the table just to be rid of the witness. They wanted out. When somebody wants out that badly, the mirror is ugly, because what they are racing toward is usually worse than what they are leaving. I have talked about that before. You watch them chase the new arrangement, and later they discover the new spouse isn’t very good. That is not my problem to prevent. My problem is to exit before their stupidity becomes my climate.

A vast evil works behind characters like that.[6] I have talked about it a lot recently, and I will keep talking about it. I gave everybody a fair shot. When they proved they were terrible, stupid people, I did not stay to be decorated for loyalty. Loyalty to incompetence is not a virtue. It is a costume.

They paid me to go away because my refusal was insulting. I did not go along to get along. I did not brown-nose the gravy train. I took the money while it still had value, because if you hang on ethically to a house that arsonists have already rented, you lose the house and the chance. That is not cynicism. That is husbandry. You do not sit in a burning barn to prove you loved the horses.

V. WHAT THE CRITICS NEEDED ME TO BE

For ten years the accusation has had a smell. He is not the same guy who would walk uphill both ways. He got paid well. He got comfortable. He became the thing he used to outrun. They needed that story because the alternative is unbearable: that the man who worked like that in his twenties can still work like that in his fifties, which means their excuse for being a bunch of leeches has no birthday.

I do not brag as a habit. When you have built a lot of value, the value speaks, and then the jackals speak louder. I swung for the fences on purpose. I have talked recently about swinging for those fences again—not because I enjoy spectacle, but because the safer path is how you end up owned. The peckers are always out there, picking away at how good you make it look, or how good you treat people, or how you should have taken less so they could feel taller. Some people find fault the way others find oxygen. You do not build a life to satisfy them. You build a life they cannot digest.

They looked at an old dog and figured if they put the screws to him he would say, uncle. Too old. Not the same guy. Lived the affluent life too long. Soft now. That is how evil piles on. It tries to force you into a bad place so you will make a bad decision: I cannot do this anymore. I cannot take the punishment. I cannot take the pain. I will submit. That method works on a lot of good people. My reaction has always been the same. Work harder than everybody else. Go where the evil is not in control. There are still places like that. Evil is afraid of hard work. Hard work is a climate it cannot breathe.[9]

VI. PERKINS AT TWO IN THE MORNING

I can think of at least one person who hung around with me during a hard stretch in my mid-twenties. He knows who he is. He stays pretty tight with all this. He and I worked until the bones were sorry. Then we would go to Perkins and have great philosophy discussions at two o’clock in the morning.[7] Some of the greatest times of my life have been under the hardest conditions. That is not a slogan I borrowed from a poster.

People who only meet you in the comfortable years think comfort invented you. The people who sat across from me in a booth after a double shift know better. We were not networking. We were trying to understand the world with whatever was left of our minds after our bodies had already paid. If you have never been that tired and still wanted to talk about justice, you will not understand why I will not trade this life for a finished basement.

I went through a period when the pain was loud enough that quitting would have looked reasonable. I did not quit. I am not reciting that to collect pity. Pity is another way people try to get a hand on you. I am reciting it because the question on the table is not whether I remember how to suffer. The question is whether I am still willing. I am.

VII. JOSEPH’S CUP

I have been spending a lot of time around a little coffee shop in the Bridgewater area of Butler County. Near the Barnes & Noble at Bridgewater Falls, there is a place called Joseph’s Cup. I love the name.[2] I have known about it for years. The gravity of it hit me now, in one of these tough seasons, because I chose not to make friends with evil, and a name like that doesn’t leave you alone when you are living the story it points to.

Biblical writers and commentators have wrapped their minds around Joseph’s cup for a very long time and never quite finished the job. That is why the name works. It is not cute branding. It is an unfinished argument about testing, recognition, exile, and whether a man sold by his own will uses his power to settle the score or to find out who people really are.[3]

The cup in the sack

In Genesis, Joseph—already the second man in Egypt, already the one who can keep a nation from starving—has his silver cup put in Benjamin’s sack.[12] The brothers have eaten at his table. They have been treated well. Then the steward runs them down on the road and accuses them of stealing the vessel “in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth.” The whole scene is theater with a knife in it. If they abandon Benjamin the way they once abandoned Joseph, the old crime is still the present tense. If they will not, something in them has changed.

Commentators split. Some say the cup is an Egyptian tool of lecanomancy, oil on water, the future read in a ripple, and they worry that Joseph has gone native. Some say it is a ruse, play-acting, the learned Egyptian mask worn long enough to finish the test. Matthew Henry reads the kindness and the trial together and says God humbles those He loves and loads with benefits. Calvin notices that a man that rich still drank from silver, not gold, and hears moderation in it. I hear something simpler, because I have lived a cheaper version of the same play.

The cup is how you find out what people will do when the prosperity is interrupted. Anybody can toast you at the banquet. The road back is where the theology happens.

The cupbearer who forgets

Before the silver cup there is another cup. Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker land in prison with Joseph. The cupbearer dreams a vine, squeezes grapes into Pharaoh’s cup, and puts the cup back in the king’s hand. Joseph tells him he will be restored. The man is restored. Then he forgets Joseph in the prison until Pharaoh has a dream that scares him. That is how institutions work. They drink what you poured, get their jobs back, and don’t remember your name until they need an interpreter again.

I have been the man in the prison who can read the dream. I have been the man whose value restored a lot of other people. I have also been forgotten on purpose. Joseph’s Cup, as a coffee shop and as a text, reminds me that I typically choose what I choose under hard conditions. Anybody can appease evil. Anybody can make a friend of someone they find disgusting if the check is large enough. I didn’t ask for the circumstances. They arrived. The name on the door arrived with them.

I will do a whole segment just on Joseph’s Cup. People seem to be benefiting from that kind of conversation, the slow kind, the kind you have when you are not trying to win a room. This essay is only the door into that room.

VIII. HOW I DEAL WITH A VAST AMOUNT OF EVIL

I outwork it. I tough out whatever they throw. You do not often choose the game. It comes and finds you. You don’t beat it by sitting at its table and hoping the cards get nicer. You beat it by making it say uncle when it has pulled everything it has to blow up your life.

Revenge, if you need that word, is not a midnight email. It is not a lawsuit for sport. It is not a social media thread. The way to get revenge on evil is to outmaneuver it in the long chess game. I have found that the way to do that is through excessively hard work—not only the kind where you are paid a lot of money for your brain, but the kind where the hour still means something, salary or labor, the body still on the hook. When you work jaw-dropping hard, you tend to push the tentacles out of your life. That is what I am doing. I have done it all my life, to the point where the bones were sorry and still would not yield.

There is purity in hard work. There is purity in busting your butt. You do not have to do it forever. You do it when evil comes after you, when you are the elderly dog in the pack, and the new dogs are hoping to chew you into submission. That is not me. It’s not going to happen, and it never will. That is how I have run my life. If evil is trying to find a way to wreck my existence, I will fight it the way I know works.

The world has changed. In some rooms hard workers are looked down on, as if effort were a rural accent. Fine. I take the hard road anyway. People who cannot keep their own lives together aren’t in a position to criticize how I keep mine. I have shown that I am still the same person. I will dig down. I will not submit so somebody else can feel that the hierarchy has been updated.

IX. COLOR ON THE LAST MAN AND THE OLD GUNFIGHTER

I have used a pen name for a long time—Overmanwarrior—not as costume jewelry, but as a reminder.[10] The last man wants a world where nobody is allowed to be formidable, because formidability makes his comfort look like a choice. He forms committees. He hires consultants. He pays the strong man to leave the building and then wonders why the building sags. He calls that professionalism.

Roosevelt called the opposite the strenuous life.[4] I have practiced a version of it that never made the society pages: grass-cutting, repo work, bodyguard work, car lots, strikes, sixteen-hour days, a motorcycle on snow, a bicycle in weather that would cancel a school district. I also practiced the other half—the books, the strategy, the American counterpoint to the Eastern manuals that taught a generation to treat business as a monastery with a quarterly report. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business was my effort to show that Western civilization already had a manual, written in dust, speed, and consequence. If you ever read it, I think you will love it. I wrote it so a person in the trenches would have something other than a consultant’s slide.

A gunfighter who survives does not survive by becoming a dandy. He survives by remaining able to draw when the room has decided he is furniture. Age is not the disarming. Vanity is. I am not trying to be twenty-eight. I am trying to be exact.

X. WHAT YOU ARE SEEING, AND WHAT YOU ARE NOT

When you see me doing some different things, you are not seeing a midlife collapse, and you are not seeing a victory lap. You are seeing the method. I had a chance to get away clean in a divorce I did not start, and I took it, and I am pretty happy about it. I have replaced a lot of things in my life with excessively hard work. I will explain more of the particulars once I am past the NDAs and the contractual quiet. Until then, I am being cryptic on purpose. Cryptic is not coy. Cryptic is the difference between a free man and a deposition.

I did not ask for these circumstances. They happen. The gravity of Joseph’s Cup hit me because I am in a difficult time.  When they reach out and you say, no thank you, you stupid person, I do not want anything to do with you—that is when the weather changes. Awkward as a breakup. Necessary as surgery.

So, to answer everybody at the same time: that is why I am doing what I am doing. That is how I deal with a vast amount of evil. I outwork it. I outlast it. I outthink it. I make it say, uncle. I am the same person. What I do every day is how I live. Subscribe to a better day if you want the next chapter. I will continue this discussion as a commentary on Joseph’s Cup, because the little shop in Butler County has been a better theologian than most of the rooms I left.

XI. A CLOSING WORD TO THE POSSE

If you needed me smaller to feel larger, I cannot help you. If you needed my success to be an accident so your stagnation could be a system, I cannot help you. If you thought fifty-something was a muzzle, you picked the wrong animal.

I will work. I will read. I will sit in a small shop with a large name and remember that the cup is always going back in somebody’s sack, and that the only interesting question is what you do when they find it. I have already answered that question with my feet, my hours, and a refusal that cost other people more pride than it cost me money.

NOTES

[1] The phrase is popularly attached to Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25. The image is not a prohibition on wealth so much as a warning that accumulated ease becomes a snare when it replaces fidelity. I use it here as it lives in the American ear: suspicion of anyone who has built something large enough to be envied.

[2] Butler County, Ohio. Bridgewater Falls sits along Princeton Road in Hamilton / Fairfield Township. I have been spending time near that corridor—the Barnes & Noble that opened in the old Staples space, and a small coffee shop whose name, Joseph’s Cup, keeps refusing to stay merely commercial.

[3] Genesis 37–50. Joseph is sold by his brothers, imprisoned on a false charge, raised by interpretation of dreams, and finally tests those same brothers with a silver cup hidden in Benjamin’s sack (Genesis 44). Commentators from Matthew Henry to Calvin have wrestled with whether the cup was a tool of Egyptian divination, a ruse, or a sacrament of recognition. I think it is a test of character under pressure—which is the only test that ever matters.

[4] Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899. Roosevelt’s point was not gymnasium morality. It was that a people who choose ease over difficulty invite the very forces that will unmake them.

[5] Nondisclosure agreements and other contracts bind me. What I can say is structural, not gossipy: bad management, consultant personalities, a belief that figures can be swapped like checkers, and a payoff large enough to buy distance. The rest stays in the vault where it belongs.

[6] See Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1: the line about the line dividing good and evil running through every human heart. Evil in the sense I mean it here is not cartoon villainy. It is the organized willingness to harvest value someone else created and then to punish the creator for noticing.

[7] Perkins restaurants were, for a stretch of American night life, the poor man’s symposium: bottomless coffee, pie, and the kind of talk that only happens after the body has already been used up. I do not romanticize poverty. I do remember that some of the best philosophy I ever heard was spoken over a two a.m. Grand Slam.

[8] The pack metaphor is older than psychology textbooks. Wolves, dogs, and office cultures all test the aging animal to see whether the hierarchy can be revised without a fight. The mistake is assuming the old dog wants the fight. Sometimes he refuses to lie down.

[9] I have written about this pattern in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (Liberty Hill, 2021), especially the chapters on bootlickers, dandies who come looting, and the lonely stranger who still knows the room. The frontier rule is simple: reputation is a weapon you either keep loaded or hand to someone who will use it on you.

[10] Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch—the source of the handle Overmanwarrior—is often flattened into a gym-poster. In context it is a demand that a person refuse the last man’s bargain: comfort, resentment, and a morality designed to make excellence look like a crime. I am not a Nietzschean church. I am a man who noticed that the last man always has a committee.

[11] The short-cycle criticism of Donald Trump two years into a term is useful only as a type. Broken people keep score in weeks. Builders keep score in decades. I am not asking anyone to adopt my politics. I am asking them to notice the psychology: the demand that a hard thing look finished before it has been allowed to work.

[12] Genesis 44:2, 5. “Put my cup, the silver cup, in the sack’s mouth of the youngest… Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth?” Whether Joseph actually practiced lecanomancy is a scholarly fight. The narrative function is not. The cup forces a confession of who the brothers have become.

[13] Proverbs 14:23; 13:4; 6:6–11. Scripture is not sentimental about sloth. It treats work as a moral climate, not merely an economic input. That is why lazy people need a theory of your success that does not implicate their habits.

[14] On the “eye of a needle,” see again the Synoptic passages and the long commentary tradition summarized in Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. The camel was a joke about impossibility, not a zoning ordinance for rich men. The point is attachment.

[15] I built prosperity for a lot of people. That sentence is not a humblebrag. It is the reason the corrosion arrived. Value attracts two kinds of company: people who want to add to it, and people who want to live inside it without the cost of making it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING

I do not believe in thin reading lists. If you are going to think about work, evil, age, testing, and the American habit of despising the person who will not sit down, you should have more books than opinions. What follows is a working shelf: scripture and commentary first, then the strategy and labor books that trained my hands, then the moral and psychological literature that names the thing I keep calling evil without turning it into a costume drama.

Scripture and commentary

The Holy Bible. Genesis 37–50; Proverbs 6, 13–14; Matthew 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31; Luke 18:18–30; Psalm 116:13; John 18:11.

Calvin, John. Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis. Translated by John King. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847.

Henry, Matthew. Commentary on the Whole Bible. Vol. 1, Genesis to Deuteronomy. 1706. Reprint, McLean, VA: MacDonald, n.d.

Keener, Craig S. The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.

Kitchen, Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

Sarna, Nahum M. Genesis: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.

Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Rashbam (Samuel ben Meir). Commentary on Genesis. In the rabbinic tradition on Genesis 44.

Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology. “Joseph’s Peculiar Silver Cup—in the Bible and Archaeology.”

Work, craft, and the American strenuous life

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.

Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses. New York: Century, 1900.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883.

Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. Various editions.

Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. New York: Free Press, 1990.

Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1988.

Goldratt, Eliyahu M., and Jeff Cox. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. Great Barrington, MA: North River Press, 1984.

Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.

Berry, Wendell. “Mind of the Farmer, Mind of the Corporation.” In The Art of the Commonplace. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002.

Strategy, character, and refusing the safer path

Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Read as the book America keeps importing when it is too shy to write its own.

Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings. Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston: Shambhala, 1993.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Gracián, Baltasar. The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Translated by Christopher Maurer. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power. New York: Viking, 1998. Useful as a field guide to the people I will not become.

Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art. New York: Rugged Land, 2002.

Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: William Morrow, 1974.

Evil, resentment, and the last man

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1973–1978.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1978.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Scheler, Max. Ressentiment. Translated by Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994.

Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942.

Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Various editions.

Milosz, Czeslaw. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. New York: Knopf, 1953.

Havel, Václav. “The Power of the Powerless.” 1978.

Age, strength, and the myth of decline

Cicero. De Senectute (On Old Age). Translated by W. A. Falconer. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Translated by Robin Campbell. London: Penguin, 1969.

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 1996. For the returned man who is not believed to be himself.

Tennyson, Alfred. “Ulysses.” 1842. “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1952.

Jung, C. G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. New York: Harcourt, 1933.

Organizations, consultants, and the worship of interchangeable parts

Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, 1941.

Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956.

Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management. New York: Harper & Row, 1954.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Tett, Gillian. The Silo Effect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Janis, Irving L. Groupthink. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951. Especially the chapters on the alliance of the elite and the mob.

Local ground and the American night

Cayton, Andrew R. L. Ohio: The History of a People. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002.

Howe, Henry. Historical Collections of Ohio. Cincinnati: State of Ohio, 1907.

Bridgewater Falls and the Butler County corridor: local reportage on the Barnes & Noble opening at 3339 Princeton Road, Hamilton, Ohio, 2025.

Travel Butler County. Listing notices for independent coffee in Fairfield Township and the Mason–Hamilton belt.

Further work by the author

Hoffman, Rich. The Tail of the Dragon.

Hoffman, Rich. The Curse of Fort Seven Mile.

Hoffman, Rich. Essays and broadcasts archived at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com and richhoffmanbooks.com.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. In development.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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