Why Ohio Suspended the Gas Tax: 38.5 Cents Off Gasoline, 47 Cents Off Diesel, and What Other States Can Copy

The signed version is House Bill 519. Governor DeWine signed it October 1. The cut started at 12:01 a.m. October 4 and runs through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027.

Ohio did something useful at the start of October 2026. The General Assembly suspended the state motor fuel tax for 90 days, and Governor Mike DeWine signed the bill. For the next three months, the state tax on gasoline drops from 38.5 cents a gallon to one-hundredth of one cent. The diesel tax drops from 47 cents to the same token rate. The lost revenue, about $725 million, is covered out of a General Revenue Fund surplus. Roads and bridges are not being raided to pay for it. The Rainy Day Fund is not being raided either. That is the whole story, and it is a better story than the price of a gallon usually gets.

I live in Butler County. Senator George Lang is my senator, and he was in the middle of getting this into shape. A lot of people had to touch it. That is how a legislature is supposed to work. One member does not pass a tax cut alone. Somebody still has to walk the Statehouse, catch a colleague at the water fountain, and get the vote. Lang was doing that work, and he was out announcing the suspension as the vote came together, which is what you do when you are leaning on the thing rather than waiting to see how it lands. I will give him the credit he earned. I will also name the people whose names are on the paper, because a useful account has to be accurate.

What the law actually does

House Bill 519 started as a vehicle-theft bill, aimed at electronic devices used to steal cars. The Senate amended the gas-tax holiday into it so the relief could move in days instead of months. The holiday language came from Senate Bill 475, sponsored by Senators Michele Reynolds of Canal Winchester and Jane Timken of Canton. The House bill itself was sponsored by Representative Andrea White of Kettering. On September 30 both chambers passed the package as an emergency: 26–5 in the Senate, 78–16 in the House. DeWine signed it the next morning, October 1. Because of the emergency clause, there was no 90-day wait. The reduction began at 12:01 a.m. on October 4, 2026, and it ends at 11:59 p.m. on January 2, 2027. [1] [2] [3]

The rate does not go to a flat zero. It goes to $0.0001 per gallon. That is an accounting choice, and a smart one. If Ohio levied no tax at all, some border counties could get hit by a neighboring state’s tax on fuel sold into Ohio. A token rate keeps that from happening and still takes essentially the whole state tax off the ticket. The holiday covers gasoline and diesel only. Compressed natural gas and propane are not in it. [4] [5]

Retailers have to pass the savings through. Failure to do that can be treated as an unfair or deceptive act and referred to the Attorney General. A receipt mandate that station owners opposed, and the $1 million that would have paid for it, came out of the final bill. The Department of Taxation got $250,000 to administer the break. The department told retailers to have their systems reset by midnight on October 4. [2] [6]

What a fill-up is worth

On a 15-gallon gasoline purchase the state piece is about $5.78, if the cut shows up at the pump. On 20 gallons it is about $7.70. A 20-gallon diesel fill is about $9.40. A work truck that takes 100 gallons of diesel is looking at about $47 off the state tax on that one stop. Over 90 days, for a family that fills up once a week, the gasoline savings are real money, not a rounding error. Statewide, the estimate is more than $725 million left at the pump instead of sent to Columbus. [1] [4]

The federal tax is still there. Washington still collects 18.4 cents on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Ohio cannot suspend that. Anyone who watches the sign and wonders why the whole tax did not vanish should look at the federal line before they blame the station. [7]

This is also why a diesel truck crossing Ohio this fall should fuel here if the route allows it. As of July 1, 2026, Kentucky’s total state gasoline tax was 26.4 cents a gallon. Indiana’s was in the 50-to-60-cent range, depending on which fees are counted. Michigan was in the same high band. For these 90 days Ohio’s state rate is a tenth of a mil. A truck that used to skip Ohio for a cheaper state has the math backward until January 2. [8]

Why the money was there

The $725 million is not a raid on the highway fund, and it is not a withdrawal from the Budget Stabilization Fund. Senate President Rob McColley said the state had enough to cover the holiday and still keep road and bridge work on schedule. Timken said the same thing in plainer words: conservative fiscal policy is what made the relief possible without touching the Rainy Day Fund or the Ohio Department of Transportation budget. The September report from the Office of Budget and Management projected a General Revenue Fund surplus of about $745.4 million at the end of the fiscal year. The holiday fits inside that surplus, with a little room left over. [2] [5] [9]

That is the part the critics do not like to say out loud. A surplus is not a mood. It is what is left after you refuse to spend every dollar that comes in. Ohio has had Republican majorities in the House and the Senate for a long time. The counties that stay in the black tend to be the counties run the same way. Where Democrats run the budget, the pattern I have watched for years is the opposite: spend past the line, then come back for a tax increase to cover the miss. David Pepper and the people who argue that Republicans have been in too long never explain where the $725 million would have come from under their model. It would not have been there. You cannot suspend a tax out of a deficit. You can only do it when someone, for years, spent less than they took in.

Lang put the practical case on the record the day the Senate passed it. Every dollar a small business spends on fuel is a dollar it cannot put into employees, equipment, or growth. Diesel, he said, powers the trucks, the farm equipment, and the construction equipment. Suspending the tax is breathing room, not a theory. [4] That is the right argument. A fuel tax is a tax on getting to work, on moving freight, and on a farm that has to run whether or not Columbus is in session.

Prices, excuses, and the point of doing it now

I have said all summer that the price at the pump should have come down in 2026, and a lot of it did not. Refiners and distributors have been slow. The Iranian conflict has been a convenient fog. There is no settled government on the other end of that war that can answer for a barrel, and there are plenty of people, in markets and in media, who would rather keep the uncertainty going. A long, muddy conflict is useful to anyone who wants a wider margin and a Republican governor’s race that looks expensive at the pump. I am not going to pretend every cent of the 2026 price is a conspiracy. I am going to say the excuse has been used past the point of honesty, and that waiting on a perfect global price was a bad plan for a state that had a surplus in the bank.

Ohio could not fix the world oil market. It could take its own 38.5 cents off the gallon, and its own 47 cents off diesel, and order the stations to pass it through. That is the part of the price a state actually controls. Doing it in the first week of October, with an emergency clause, was the proactive move. Early voting was about to start. People are still paying the summer’s hangover. A legislature that waits for a calmer headline is a legislature that never spends the surplus on the people who created it.

The vote was bipartisan enough to get the emergency clause, which needs more than a simple majority. It was not a love letter from the other party. More than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. [9] The ones who voted yes made the immediate effective date possible. The ones who voted no will explain, later, that the money should have been spent on something else. That is the argument. Their something else is always a larger government. The surplus is the evidence that Ohio did not need one.

What other states can copy

This is a model, not a stunt, and other states sitting on a real surplus should look at the mechanics instead of the press release.

First, suspend the tax. Do not invent a rebate card, a portal, or a six-month application. The relief has to show up on the receipt this week.

Second, backfill the road money from the general surplus. Do not cut the projects, and do not crack the rainy-day fund for a holiday. Ohio was explicit on both points. A tax holiday that steals from maintenance is just a pothole with a ribbon on it.

Third, leave a token rate in place if a zero rate would let a neighbor’s tax reach across the line. The tenth-of-a-mil was not cute. It was drafted for border counties.

Fourth, require the pass-through, and give the attorney general a hook if a station keeps the difference. A tax cut that dies in the wholesale markup is not a tax cut.

Fifth, do it with an emergency clause if the statute otherwise waits 90 days. A relief bill that takes effect after the pain is a press release.

The permanent version is a policy question, and it should be on the next governor’s desk. A 90-day window has ambiguity in it. Distributors and convenience stores have to reprice twice, and a driver cannot build a household budget on a holiday. The honest next step is to decide how much of this rate Ohio still needs once the books are open. Vivek Ramaswamy called for the pause the week before the vote. [10] I have already said he is the right direction for the job. This holiday is a hint of the governing style, not the whole platform: when there is a surplus, the default is to give it back, not to find a new program to absorb it. DeWine signed the bill quickly. The next governor can be the one who decides whether 38.5 cents needs to come back in full on January 3.

A tax only funds government. It does not improve it by being larger. Republicans in Ohio spent less than the alternative for long enough to have $725 million they could hand back without missing a road project. That is why a driver in Butler County, and a driver crossing the river from Kentucky, will see a cheaper gallon this fall. I am proud of the legislature for doing it when people needed it. If you are passing through Ohio before January 2, stop and fill the tank. The Statehouse already paid the difference.

Notes

[1] Gov. Mike DeWine signed House Bill 519 on October 1, 2026. The bill reduces the 38.5-cent gasoline tax and the 47-cent diesel tax to $0.0001 per gallon from 12:01 a.m. October 4, 2026, through 11:59 p.m. January 2, 2027. Estimated pump savings are about $725 million, roughly $5.78 on 15 gallons of gasoline and $7.70 on 20 gallons, and about $9.40 on 20 gallons of diesel. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension,” Your Ohio News, October 1, 2026.

[2] The chambers passed the emergency measure on September 30, 2026, 26–5 in the Senate and 78–16 in the House. The final bill appropriates $725 million from the General Revenue Fund and $250,000 to the Department of Taxation. A station-receipt mandate and its $1 million appropriation were removed. Danny Eldredge, “DeWine to sign bill suspending Ohio’s gas tax for 90 days,” The Blade, September 30, 2026.

[3] H.B. 519 was sponsored by Rep. Andrea White (R-Kettering). The gas-tax language came from S.B. 475, sponsored by Sens. Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) and Jane Timken (R-Canton), and was amended into H.B. 519 so the holiday could move faster. “Ohio’s gas tax holiday enacted into law,” Ohio Society of CPAs, October 2, 2026.

[4] Sen. George F. Lang (R-West Chester) announced Senate passage on September 30, 2026, including the small-business and diesel arguments, and noted that the token rate protects border counties from a neighbor’s tax. Highway work is covered by the fiscal-year surplus, not the Rainy Day Fund. “Lang Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026.

[5] Sen. Jane Timken: relief was possible without the Rainy Day Fund or the ODOT budget. “Timken Approves Gas Tax Suspension,” Ohio Senate, September 30, 2026. See also Ohio Department of Taxation, “Ohio Department of Taxation Issues Guidance for 90-Day Motor Fuel Tax Holiday,” October 2, 2026. Retailers must pass the savings through; failure may be referred to the Attorney General. Guidance: https://tax.ohio.gov/motor-fuel-tax-holiday

[6] Ohio Department of Taxation, guidance released October 2, 2026, cited above. Tax Commissioner Patricia Harris urged retailers to adjust systems by midnight October 4.

[7] Federal excise tax remains 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel. Nebraska Department of Transportation, “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel,” rates effective July 1, 2026, citing the Energy Information Administration. The federal layer is not part of H.B. 519.

[8] Same table: Ohio 38.50 cents, Kentucky 26.40 cents, Indiana 64.50 cents total state taxes on gasoline as of July 1, 2026. During the holiday Ohio’s state rate is $0.0001.

[9] Office of Budget and Management, September 2026 report, General Revenue Fund surplus projected at $745.4 million at fiscal year-end, as cited by The Blade, September 28, 2026. Senate passage was 26–5; more than half the Democrats in each chamber voted no. “Ohio General Assembly Suspends State Gas Tax,” Ohio Senate, October 1, 2026. McColley: the surplus covers the holiday without delaying road and bridge work.

[10] The vote followed a call for the pause by Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy the preceding week. Jake Zuckerman, “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote,” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.

Bibliography

Ohio Department of Taxation. “Ohio Department of Taxation Issues Guidance for 90-Day Motor Fuel Tax Holiday in Ohio.” October 2, 2026. https://tax.ohio.gov/home/news-and-events/all-news/10-02-2026-ohio-motor-fuel-tax-holiday

Ohio Department of Taxation. Motor fuel tax holiday page. https://tax.ohio.gov/motor-fuel-tax-holiday

Ohio General Assembly. House Bill 519 (136th General Assembly), sponsor Rep. Andrea White; Senate amendment incorporating Senate Bill 475, sponsors Sens. Michele Reynolds and Jane Timken. Passed September 30, 2026. Signed October 1, 2026.

Ohio Senate. “Lang Approves Gas Tax Suspension.” September 30, 2026. https://ohiosenate.gov/members/george-f-lang/news/lang-approves-gas-tax-suspension

Ohio Senate. “Timken Approves Gas Tax Suspension.” September 30, 2026. https://ohiosenate.gov/members/jane-m-timken/news/timken-approves-gas-tax-suspension

Ohio Senate. “Ohio General Assembly Suspends State Gas Tax.” October 1, 2026. https://ohiosenate.gov/news/on-the-record/ohio-general-assembly-suspends-state-gas-tax

Eldredge, Danny. “DeWine to sign bill suspending Ohio’s gas tax for 90 days.” The Blade, September 30, 2026.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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.Eldredge, Danny. “Ohio lawmakers introduce $726M gas tax holiday bill.” The Blade, September 28, 2026.

Ohio Society of CPAs. “Ohio’s gas tax holiday enacted into law.” October 2, 2026. https://ohiocpa.com/for-the-public/news/2026/10/02/ohio-s-gas-tax-holiday-enacted-into-law

Your Ohio News. “DeWine signs 90-day Ohio gas and diesel tax suspension.” October 1, 2026.

Zuckerman, Jake. “Gas tax in Ohio suspended for 90 days after politically charged Statehouse vote.” Signal Ohio, September 30, 2026.

Nebraska Department of Transportation. “Total State Taxes on Motor Fuel.” Rates effective July 1, 2026. Source table: Energy Information Administration, federal excise noted at 18.4 cents gasoline and 24.4 cents diesel.

Podcast Episode: How a Dilapidated Miami Food Service Building Became an Innovation Hub: Why Senator Lang is so Good

Pip: There is a building in Oxford, Ohio, that spent decades feeding college students and then spent a few more years being quietly forgotten — which, honestly, tracks for most institutional food service.

Mara: Rich Hoffman takes us inside that building’s second act, and into the argument underneath it about what government is actually for and who shows up when the work is real.

Pip: Let’s start with the building, the people who were already there, and the aircraft company operating out of Suite 117.

From Nightmare to Innovation: The College@Elm Story

Mara: The central question here is what good government actually looks like in practice — not in a press release, but in a building that almost got torn down.

Pip: The post opens with the framing that sets everything else up: “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.”

Mara: That is the operating theory behind the whole College@Elm story. The building at 20 South Elm Street was constructed in 1933, ran as Miami University’s central food service facility for 68 years, then sat vacant. Selling it and tearing it down were both live options.

Pip: Miami University President Gregory Crawford did not take the path of least resistance — a phrase that deserves to be stitched on something. He started walking potential partners through the building around 2017 and 2018, asking whether they could see what it might become.

Mara: By 2020 there was a plan, and by February 2023 the Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm opened after a renovation costing about 10.7 million dollars, part of a total public-private investment of 17.55 million from the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Butler County, the City of Oxford, and private donors.

Pip: And here is the part that caught the author off guard: he invited State Senator George Lang to come hear him speak, looked into the audience, and discovered Lang had been part of the building’s origin story for nearly a decade already.

Mara: Lang put it plainly in his own remarks: “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.”

Pip: That is the kind of sentence a politician says and usually doesn’t mean. The difference here is that Lang apparently spent real political capital getting state dollars into the project before anyone was sure it would work.

Mara: Auditor Nancy Nix was in that same audience on September 21. She had been invited out when Crawford was still pitching the vacant building, and she came then too. Michael Ryan, who won the Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner in May 2026 with about 72 percent of the vote, stood up and spoke that day as well.

Pip: The pattern the post keeps returning to is simple: you can tell who your friends are by who shows up before the thing becomes important.

Mara: Which brings us to who is actually operating inside the building now. Volynt Aero, the company where the author serves as COO, develops hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft for cargo logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications — the work where you cannot always count on a runway or a fuel truck. Their aircraft is called the Vyper, spelled with a Y, because Volynt also uses a Y.

Pip: Suite 117, 20 South Elm Street. A few miles from the Miami University Airport with its 4,011-foot runway. For a company building uncrewed aircraft, that proximity is, as the post notes, not a small thing.

Mara: The closing argument is about the long clock. The things done today are what people are standing inside of nine years from now — and the post holds College@Elm up as evidence that 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.

Pip: Dreams on Elm Street, not the extended nightmare — and on that note, the ideas here connect forward to something bigger about who builds these roads and why it matters.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is that good things, done over a long period of time, eventually just happen — and the people who make them happen are usually the ones who showed up before it was obvious.

Pip: Worth watching what Suite 117 looks like in nine years. We’ll be back with more from The Overmanwarrior next

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

How a Dilapidated Miami Food Service Building Became an Innovation Hub: Why Senator George Lang and Auditor Nancy Nix Were Already There, and What Volynt Is Doing With the Vyper at College@Elm

September 21, 2026, College@Elm, Oxford, Ohio

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 love George Lang and Volynt

<iframe src="https://t.co/TN61aKVSzw" height="768" width="504" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" title="Embedded post"></iframe>
— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) October 6, 2026

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/office-of-aspire-miami-university_miamioh-advancedairmobility-officeofaspire-activity-7511815152455843841-aw-v?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAaLXOYBJjGL53yuy7WBOUleGyPYXrUrJ0Q

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.

Bibliography and further reading

Miami University. “The Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm celebrates grand opening.” Miami University News, February 2023. https://miamioh.edu/news/2023/02/the-lee-and-rosemary-fisher-innovation-college@elm-celebrates-grand-opening-this-week.html

Miami University. “Miami and Oxford initiative to transform uptown into an entrepreneurial hub.” Miami University News, February 4, 2021. https://www.miamioh.edu/news/top-stories/2021/02/college-at-elm.html

Miami University. “From Food Services to Innovation Hub: The Story of College@Elm.” College@Elm Impact Blog, 2025. https://miamioh.edu/college-at-elm/impact/blog/2025/from-department-store-to-innovation-hub-the-story-of-college-at-elm.html

Miami University. Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm. https://miamioh.edu/college-at-elm/

Barger, Halie. “Forgotten building on South Elm Street to become space for innovation startups and a focus on the arts.” Oxford Observer, February 14, 2020. https://oxfordobserver.org/1021/business/forgotten-building-on-south-elm-street-to-become-space-for-innovation-startups/

Oxford Free Press. “College@Elm aims to provide innovation hub for Southwest Ohio businesses.” https://www.oxfreepress.com/college-elm-innovation-hub-southwest-ohio-businesses/

The Miami Student. “The new Fisher Innovation College@Elm center hopes to drive economic growth in the community.” March 2023. https://www.miamistudent.net/article/2023/03/new-fisher-innovation-collegeelm-center

Miami University. “OXD Airport in Oxford, Ohio.” https://miamioh.edu/oxd-airport/

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.

Butler County Auditor. “Meet Nancy.” https://auditor.bcohio.gov/auditors_office/meet_nancy.php

Journal-News. “Butler County commissioners race: Michael Ryan and Mike Miller up for open seat.” September 30, 2026.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. https://hoffmanbooks.com

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

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Podcast Episode: Jason Voorhees and the Gods of Canaan: Why a Doctoral Thesis Has to Start in a Haunted House at Kings Island

Pip: Welcome to The Overmanwarrior, where the reading list runs from the Book of Exodus to Dead by Daylight and somehow that is a straight line.

Mara: Rich Hoffman is laying out a doctoral thesis argument that connects American horror cinema to ancient Near Eastern religion, and today we are following that argument from the cold open all the way to the cosmological stakes underneath it.

Pip: Let’s start with Jason Voorhees and the gods of Canaan.

Jason Voorhees, Canaan, and the Shape of a Thesis

Mara: The post opens a question that is genuinely unusual for a horror-franchise discussion: why does a figure invented in New Jersey in 1980 for under six hundred thousand dollars still occupy a room in every generation’s imagination, including children who were not alive for the original film?

Pip: That is the setup, and the thesis sentence lands hard once it arrives.

Mara: Here it is directly: “The thesis, as I am presuming to pursue it, is Jason Voorhees: why he is scary, and why Yahweh had to save the world from the gods of Canaan. And why those are not two subjects.”

Pip: Two subjects that the academy would never seat at the same table, which is precisely the point.

Mara: The argument is that the psychological pattern behind Canaanite worship — the pull toward a lesser, more immediate god when the harder claim feels too distant — did not end in the ancient Near East. It shows up in the crowd that kept Jason alive for forty-six years, in the game Dead by Daylight where he is now a weekly opponent for children, and in what the post calls the transmission mechanism across generations.

Pip: And the academic credential is not the goal — it is described explicitly as a tool, a seat at a fight that otherwise dismisses the argument as coming from, and I appreciate the self-awareness here, a blogger with a whip and a podcast.

Mara: The post is direct about that: “A Ph.D. is a tool. It is not a personality. It gives you a seat in a fight that otherwise dismisses you as a blogger with a whip and a podcast.”

Mara: The practical stakes are that the thesis will run alongside the manuscript called The Politics of Heaven, already past two hundred thousand words in draft, rather than waiting for a five-or-six-year academic calendar. The blog carries the argument in real time.

Pip: The golden calf is the control case inside the thesis — Aaron accommodates the crowd’s impatience, the harder claim goes unrepresented, and the visible substitute fills the room. That mechanism is what the post argues keeps recurring, from Canaan to Portland to a hockey mask.

Mara: The post also raises New England stone chambers, Jordan Valley dolmens, and the Noah’s Ark formation in eastern Turkey as examples of questions the guild has professionally closed while other ritual claims remain professionally open — the asymmetry is part of the evidence.

Pip: So the hook before Halloween, as promised in the post, is that America’s thirteenth villain could only have been made here, and what he reveals about why human beings keep drifting back to the lesser worship is the door into everything else.

Mara: And the details from what the post calls the seasonal field observations — watching crowd reaction from both sides of the mask — are being held until November. That is where the operational evidence comes in.

Pip: So the thesis is the door, the blog is the bridge, and the hockey mask is apparently load-bearing architecture.

Mara: The real question underneath all of it is whether the psychological pattern that kept Jason alive across generations is the same one the ancient texts were warning about — and that argument is still being built.

Pip: More of it after Halloween. We will be here.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Not Good Enough: Why a Father and an Employer Want Superintelligence to Cover a Broken Workforce

I have said this for two decades, and it’s brought me more trouble than it was worth. I would rather not have to see it. I would rather the country I hired people in, and raised daughters in, had kept its standards. It did not. So when the argument turns to artificial intelligence, and to whether America should chase superintelligence at all, I am not interested in the polite version. I have already explained the economic case more than once. The real story is ruder than that, and it starts at my own kitchen table.

People don’t like AI because it doesn’t flatter them. A robot does not call in because a hamster died. A model does not clock out at 5:02 and have the car in the driveway before the second hand clears the twelve. A line that runs on automation does not need a bereavement policy for every emotional weather system that blows through a shift. That is offensive to a culture that has spent thirty years teaching people that their feelings are a form of production. I have employed thousands of people. I have watched the applicant pool’s quality fall in real time. I am not guessing.

The Boy from England and the Standard Nobody Wanted to Hear

I have two daughters. When they were teenagers, I looked around Butler County, and then around the wider American teenage market, and I said something I have repeated as recently as a few weeks ago. The boys being produced in the United States were not good enough for my daughters. Not the polite version of “not a fit.” Not good enough. Bad mouths. Bad sexual manners. Parents who had taught them the wrong things on purpose, or by neglect, which is the same thing as leaving the television on. I was not willing to hand eighteen years of work to that.

One of my daughters married a young man from England. He had manners. He had a work ethic you could see at fourteen and fifteen. His parents and ours coordinated supervised trips. He flew over. For the first couple of years, we put him up in a hotel. We picked him up in the morning. We drove them to the movies. We drove them to whatever else teenagers do when somebody is actually watching. Heavily supervised. The whole thing. They dated like that for years. Five years before they even kissed. That was my idea of how this was supposed to go, and I will not apologize for it.

He has been her husband for well over a decade, fourteen or fifteen years. He became an American citizen. He is a good young man. Our families are close. His father came with us on the camper, traveled with us, went to Put-in-Bay. We were coordinating this when their sons were fourteen and fifteen. It worked. It has been a traditional life. That is what I wanted for my kids. I did something like it for both daughters. It worked cleanly for one of them. I will take the win.

I caught ridicule for it. A father hosting supervised dates for a boy who flew in from another country did not match the local script. The script was that American boys were entitled to a shot because they were nearby and breathing. I did not accept the script. Suppose Lee Greenwood had wanted to date one of my daughters, I still would have wanted to see the manners. Patriotism is not a character reference. A flag on the truck is not a substitute for how you treat a young woman whose father spent eighteen years building her into a person rather than a hole. That last sentence is the one that gets people angry. Good. The anger is the confession.

What the Dating Market Was Already Telling Me About the Labor Market

I looked at my daughters’ friends and at the boys around them, and I was more right than I wanted to be. Sex was too easy. Porn had done what porn does, which is train a boy to treat a girl as a clip. Addiction was common and shrugged at. The language was garbage. The expectations were garbage. Schools had a hand in it. Parents had a hand in it. MTV and the shows that replaced MTV had a hand in it. A culture that cannot produce a boy willing to wait five years for a kiss won’t produce a man who will stay on a precision job until the work is done.

President Trump understands more of this, and so do Steve Bannon and the War Room crowd; Trump saw the raw material on The Apprentice. He wrote the books. Politically, the quiet part is hard to say out loud because it insults the audience. I will say it. I had daughters. The boys were not suitable. They were not good enough. A father is allowed to have that standard. An employer is allowed to have the same standard. A country that wants a gross domestic product will need the same standard, whether it admits it or not.

The marriage numbers have caught up to what I saw in the driveway. In 2024, half of American adults were not currently married. Among adults 18 to 29, 84 percent were unmarried. Among adults 30 to 39, 48 percent were unmarried, more than triple the 1960 share. Only about 20 percent of 25-year-old men have ever married, against roughly 75 percent in 1967. Lyman Stone’s projection, that something like a third of today’s teenagers may never marry by 45, is not a mood. It is the dating market I already priced in. [1][2]

David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson showed years ago that when young men’s earnings and employment fall, marriage falls with them, idleness rises, and more children end up in poor single-parent homes. They were measuring trade shocks. I was measuring manners. Same wreck, different instrument panel. [3]

The Arithmetic of a Country That Still Wants to Build Things

People hear “low unemployment” and think the labor market is a full parking lot. It is not. In August 2026, the civilian noninstitutional population was about 275 million. The labor force was about 170 million. The participation rate was 61.6 percent. Men 20 and over were participating at 69.4 percent. That is not a country in which every able body is on a line. [4]

Male participation has been falling for most of my adult life. It was about 87 percent in 1948. It was about 75 percent in 2000. It is about 68 percent now. The drop is sharpest among men 16 to 24. Prime-age men, 25 to 54, look healthier on a chart, near 89 percent, until you notice that more than one in ten of them are neither working nor looking. Nicholas Eberstadt has been writing about those men for a decade. The round number that keeps coming back is nearly seven million prime-age men off the economy. Among U.S.-born prime-age men, the share not in the labor force rose from about 4 percent in 1960 to 11.2 percent by April 2025. For those without a bachelor’s degree, it was 14.8 percent. [5][6][7]

I have said, roughly, that of 250 or 300 million people, you might have something like 100 million who can actually do industrial work. The official labor force is larger than that. The slice that can do high-mix, high-tolerance, show-up-every-day work is not. I have hired into that slice. I hosted a SpaceX event and had to get my own head around robotics, because even the hand-craft end of serious aerospace work doesn’t have a deep bench of people who can do it. The employees are not out there in the numbers the drawings assume. A robot does not solve taste. It does solve the empty chair.

Schools That Work Like a Public Toilet

Public education, as I have seen it, works like a public toilet. Everybody uses it. Nobody cleans it. Garbage in, garbage out, and then a diploma on top so the garbage can apply for a job.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress results released in 2025, from tests of 2024 seniors, put 12th-grade reading at the worst level in three decades. About a third of those seniors lacked basic reading skills. Nearly half were below basic in math, which means trouble with the sort of percentage problem a shipping clerk used to do on a pad. Only about a third were leaving high school with the reading and math for college-level work. Margaret Spellings called it an economic emergency. She was being polite. [8]

The adult figures are worse, because they are the people already out of the building. On the 2023 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, the share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels rose from 16 percent in 2017 to 25 percent. That is about five million young adults who can follow a short text but cannot analyze a long one. More of them held diplomas than in 2017. The paper improved. The skill did not. Across working-age adults, the share at the lowest literacy level rose from 19 percent to 28 percent. Numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. The United States sits below the international average in numeracy. [9][10]

I don’t need a chart to know the college experience hasn’t been cranking out people who walk into a plant or a courthouse and do good work. My wife comes home and says the same thing I hear from people who hire attorneys and prosecutors. There are not enough good ones. The courthouse has the same problem as the machine shop. The pipeline is thin because the formation was thin. Churches emptied of the basic teaching. Schools filled up with everything else. Twenty years of that and you do not get a workforce. You get a cohort that is not qualified to marry, not obviously qualified to raise a child, and only loosely qualified to hold a job. I am not interested in the hurt feelings attached to that sentence. I poured heart and soul into my kids. A lot of people out there are not worthy of the work that went into a serious daughter. An employer who has moved people through real jobs has the same right to say it about a shift.

The 32-Hour Week and the Cult of Going Home Early

I was always the man who frowned on the clock-watchers. People who would not stay. People who were in the car and out of the parking lot before you could look up and see 5:00. A progressive culture has taken that instinct and tried to make it policy.

On September 8, 2026, Bernie Sanders and Mark Takano reintroduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. It would lower the overtime threshold from 40 hours down to 32, with no loss of pay, in steps. The AFL-CIO is for it. So are the UAW, SEIU, UFCW, and others. Sanders argues that AI and robotics will raise productivity, and that the gain should be taken as time off rather than as output. [11]

I understand the politics of that argument. I do not accept its economics for a country that intends to stay ahead of China. Productivity that is cashed out as a shorter week, on top of a workforce that already struggles to fill a full one, is not a dividend. It is a surrender. The same political current that wants the 32-hour week spent a generation arguing that the government should pay people to stay home. Video games were not a secret. They were the plan. You cannot keep up with a rival that is installing robots if your domestic reform agenda is fewer hours, more process, and a medical report every time somebody skins a knuckle.

Unions do not like Elon Musk, and they are open about it. Tesla’s plants run on robotics. That is not a moral failure. That is what you do when the alternative is a union model in which a small injury becomes an incident report, the incident report becomes an insurance hit, the insurance hit eats the margin, and the margin was the only thing paying for the next hire. I have watched that movie. Robotics is how you refuse to cast it.

Walmart, the Rally, and the Lawsuit That Replaced It

My wife is loyal to Walmart. When we were raising the kids, it was stocked, the prices were honest, and the place worked. She still likes to go. I go where the stuff is. If Walmart doesn’t have it, I don’t have a sentimental objection to leaving.

Walmart used to rally people at the start of a shift. The company pushed greeters, sourcing, and the idea that workers should be better at the end of the day than at the beginning. Then the progressive lawsuits and the union drives arrived. A company does not have to vote a union in to catch the disease. It only has to spend enough years defending itself from one. The habits change. You stop asking who is good. In a lot of places you are not allowed to say “good” without a lawyer in the room. Standards become disparate impact. Disparate impact becomes a settlement. The settlement becomes the new handbook.

I have told my wife the plain version. Walmart does not have the employees it used to have. Kmart already showed one ending of that story. You cannot recruit what the schools did not make, and you cannot test for what the courts will not let you name. The aisles tell on the culture. So does the parking lot at 5:02.

China Is Not Confused About Any of This

China is not trying to talk America out of automation because China is worried about our feelings. China is automating as fast as its factories can take the machines. The International Federation of Robotics reported that China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54 percent of global demand, a record. The operational stock hit 2,027,000. It doubled in three years. Domestic Chinese robot makers took 57 percent of their home market. And remember, China has over 1 billion people in it, and they are automating wherever possible. Asia took 74 percent of new factory-robot deployments in 2024. Europe took 16 percent. The Americas took 9 percent. [12]

Beijing has also poured state money into the software side. Stanford’s AI Index puts state-initiated Chinese investment funds at about $184 billion into AI firms from 2000 to 2023, and Xi has told the apparatus to add tax breaks, contracts, financing, and infrastructure on top of that. In the first half of 2026, Chinese investment in information services, the bucket official statistics credit to AI, was up 19.2 percent. Their own youth unemployment, students excluded, was 18.9 percent in August. They are automating anyway. [13]

That is the tell. A rival with a fifth of its young people out of work is still buying the machines. The media campaign aimed at American companies, the one that treats every AI lab as a jobs villain, is not a labor policy. It is a delay. Slow the United States down. Protect the slug, as I have put it, the applicant covered in tattoos and piercings who wants thirty hours and a speech about work/life balance. China will take the productivity gap and cash it as industrial power. I have no interest in helping them. Get young people in America playing video games instead of producing product.

I have said I do not agree with the president on this point. A lot of people around him, and a lot of people in the Glenn Beck audience, want superintelligence treated as a threat to be slowed. If you want an economy that works, you had better get AI, or superintelligence, or whatever name clears the politics, into the work. The people are not standing there ready. Trump knows there are not a hundred million employees you can sit in a chair and point at a build. The machine does not complain, does not need a remote-work negotiation, and does not open a bereavement case when the pet dies.

Twenty Years to Grow a Better Cohort, If We Start Now

If we started this year, with the babies in the nursery, we are about twenty years from a cohort that could be reasonably good again. That assumes we actually change the inputs. Church. Rules. Fathers who will say no. Mothers who will back the no. Schools that teach reading and math instead of passing the toilet paper down the row. I am not optimistic about the institutions. I am insistent about the timeline.

Go back and watch the old films. The Wizard of Oz was 1939, every cell hand-painted, a country that still assumed competence was normal. I am not romantic about the Depression. I am clear-eyed about the people. The baseline manners, literacy, and willingness to be supervised were higher than what walks into an interview now. We let that fall. We can grow it back. We cannot grow it back by next quarter.

So the gap has to be covered. That is what automation is for. That is what AI is for. Not as a replacement for the best people I have ever hired. As a supplement for a corrupted workforce that is not ready for the basics of life, let alone for a competitive industrial policy. Three generations have been hit. The damage is intellectual and moral. A man who cannot be trusted with a daughter cannot be assumed ready for a clean room work environment.

Biblical Formation Is Not a Side Issue

I have told my wife this until she is tired of it. There are not enough good people to staff the work she sees, the legal work, the ordinary institutional work. The fix is not another HR module. People have to get back to church and back to basic teaching, because the last twenty years of young people, as a cohort, have been trash for the jobs and the marriages a country needs. Individuals escape that. I married one of my daughters to a man who escaped it, and he had to cross an ocean to do it. The cohort did not escape it.

AI does not preach. It also does not undo a sermon. What it can do is hold output up while a serious culture tries to form human beings again. Biblical scholarship, rules, agency, the old expectation that a man governs himself before he governs a shift. That is the long repair. Superintelligence is the bridge. China would prefer we argue about the bridge until the repair is irrelevant.

I am allowed to have high standards as a father, as an employer, and as a man who has lived in the same county long enough to watch the decline without a consultant’s chart. Low standards were sold as kindness. The kindness produced a country that cannot fill its own lines, cannot fill its own aisles, and cannot fill its own dating pool with men a serious father will hand a daughter to. AI offends that arrangement. Good. Be offended. The machine will make the shift. The rest of us have twenty or thirty years to remember how to make people who can.

Notes

1. Hannah N. Smith, “Unmarried Adulthood: More than a Century of Change, 1900–2024,” Family Profile No. 8, 2026, National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University. In 2024, half of U.S. adults were unmarried; 84 percent of adults 18–29 and 48 percent of adults 30–39 were unmarried.

2. Lyman Stone, “1 in 3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” Institute for Family Studies, February 2024. About 20 percent of 25-year-old men had ever married, against about 75 percent in 1967; about 60 percent of 35-year-old men had ever married, against about 90 percent in 1980.

3. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” AER: Insights 1, no. 2 (2019): 161–178.

4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026, Table A-1. Civilian noninstitutional population 275.4 million; labor force 169.8 million; participation rate 61.6 percent; men 20 and over participation rate 69.4 percent.

5. American Institute for Boys and Men, “What’s really going on with men and work? Seven facts,” May 2026. Male labor-force participation from about 87 percent in 1948 to 68 percent; from 75 percent in 2000 to 68 percent; prime-age men from 92 percent to 89 percent since 2000; men 16–24 from 69 percent to 57 percent.

6. Nicholas Eberstadt, summarized in “Time for ‘Shock Therapy’ — How to Get Our 7 Million Dropout Men Back to Work,” American Enterprise Institute, April 2025. Nearly seven million prime-age men are neither working nor looking.

7. Steven A. Camarota, “Working-Age, but Not Working, 1960 to 2025,” Center for Immigration Studies, November 2025. U.S.-born prime-age men not in the labor force: 4 percent in 1960, 11.2 percent in April 2025; 14.8 percent among those without a bachelor’s degree.

8. Dana Goldstein, “12th Grade Reading Skills Hit a New Low,” New York Times, September 9, 2025, reporting National Assessment of Educational Progress results. About a third of 12th graders are below basic in reading; nearly half are below basic in math; about a third are prepared for college-level work. Margaret Spellings, Bipartisan Policy Center, called the decline an economic emergency.

9. National Center for Education Statistics and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2023 results, released December 2024. U.S. adult literacy low performers rose from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023; numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. Young-adult figures: American Institutes for Research analysis, share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels from 16 percent to 25 percent, about five million people.

10. Sharon Bonney, Coalition on Adult Basic Education, quoted in reporting on the PIAAC release: more than 20 percent of young adults with a high-school diploma lack skills commensurate with it.

11. Office of Senator Bernie Sanders, “Sanders, Takano Reintroduce Bill to Move Toward 32-Hour Workweek,” September 8, 2026. Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act; endorsements include AFL-CIO, UAW, SEIU, UFCW, National Nurses United.

12. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025, press release, September 25, 2025. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 (54 percent of global demand); operational stock 2,027,000; domestic manufacturers’ home-market share 57 percent. Global new deployments: Asia 74 percent, Europe 16 percent, Americas 9 percent.

13. Li Yuan, “In China, A.I. Is Moving Forward While the Economy Lags Behind,” New York Times, September 20, 2026. Stanford AI Index estimate of $184 billion in state-initiated fund deployment into AI firms, 2000–2023; information-services investment up 19.2 percent in the first half of 2026; youth unemployment, students excluded, 18.9 percent in August.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, AER: Insights (2019). Eberstadt, Men Without Work (Templeton, 2016). Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies (November 2025). American Institute for Boys and Men, “Seven facts” (May 2026). NAEP via Goldstein, New York Times, September 9, 2025. PIAAC / NCES release, December 10, 2024. NCFMR Family Profile No. 8 (2026). Stone, Institute for Family Studies (February 2024). Sanders/Takano Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act, September 8, 2026. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025. Li Yuan, New York Times, September 20, 2026. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026.

For the longer shelf: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex; Kay Hymowitz, Manning Up; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; the Bradford Wilcox file at the Institute for Family Studies. Read Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men against Regnerus, not instead of him.

Rich Hoffman

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Sheriff Jones, the Big Tent: Why the Republican Party is better with him in it

If you have been anywhere near a television or a radio in the Cincinnati area lately, you have seen Sheriff Richard K. Jones. He has been on the local news. He has been on WLW. He has been on Channel 9. He has even ended up in the weather, which is not where most sheriffs go to make a point, and that is exactly why I like watching him. He can get on a set, talk about immigration, talk about the law, and then, if the moment calls for it, talk about whether your windshield wipers will work on the drive home. That is not a gimmick. That is a man who can think on his feet, and Butler County has benefited from that habit for a long time.

I have spent much of this year, 2026, working through the specifics of institutional persuasion and what proper ethical behavior actually looks like when you are trying to move a population. I am going to keep coming back to the root causes of purity, ethics, morality, righteousness, and the plain old goodness that used to be assumed in American public life. We need another Great Awakening in the United States. I do not say that as a slogan. I say it because the methods used against this country have been very sinister. They turned free speech into a weapon. Immigration was turned into a weapon. No place on earth has a more diverse population than the United States, and that diversity was not an accident of geography. It was a policy. When a policy is used to import people who reject the host country’s values, you are not running a humanitarian program. You are running a Trojan horse. Sheriff Jones has been willing to say the quiet part out loud, and that is why I want him in the room.

You Want This Man in the Party

People ask me whether Sheriff Jones is a hard-core Republican or a big-tent Republican. He is more the second than the first, and the question is the wrong test. You always want Sheriff Jones in the room. You want him on the news. You want him in your party. If you have built a party that cannot make room for a man like him to do good things, you are in the wrong place. You want people like him on your side.

Some of the people who have been against Sheriff Jones over the years are the same people who have been against President Trump, and they usually dress the objection up as ethics. I will get into the ethics of coalition-building in a separate piece, because I have been down that rabbit hole on purpose. I am usually a positive person. I am also, if I am honest about my own temperament, a little melancholy, and more Book of Revelation oriented than the average political commentator. The apocalypse has a following for a reason. There is a reason people talk about the Rapture taking the faithful out of a world that will not deliver justice. I know a lot of people who are so distraught over the lack of justice in ordinary life that they want God and Jesus to come and end the argument. I understand the feeling. I don’t think that excuses us from the work in front of us.

The work in front of us includes immigration, and it includes the people who will actually enforce the law while the rest of us argue about tone. Sheriff Jones has been that person in Butler County. He has done it well for decades. He has been especially visible lately, and he has earned the attention.

A Hamilton Kid Who Became the 45th Sheriff

Richard K. Jones was born on October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, in Butler County. He came up through the Hamilton city schools, volunteered for the draft, and served from 1973 to 1975 as a combat engineer in the United States Army, leaving as a Specialist 4. He then did the unglamorous work that actually teaches you how a jail runs. He went into the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, trained staff, rose to Senior Captain, and served as the warden’s designee for inmate appeals. From 1990 to 1993, he was a major at the Lebanon Correctional Institution. In 1993, he became chief deputy of the Butler County Sheriff’s Office and held that job for twelve years, adding deputies, expanding jail capacity, and dragging the office into the computer age.

He picked up the credentials along the way: an associate degree in corrections from Hocking Technical College, a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Wilmington College in 1981, and a master’s in corrections from Xavier University in 1984. In November 2004, Butler County voters elected him the 45th sheriff. He took the oath on January 3, 2005. He is now in his sixth term. That is not a media creation. That is a man the same county has returned to office, again and again, while the national argument about immigration has swung from one administration to the next.

In 2004 he put up the sign. “Illegal Aliens Here,” with an arrow pointing at the jail. The federal government was then in the habit of saying it did not know where illegal aliens were. Jones’s answer was a piece of roadside honesty: they are in my jail. The sign has come down and gone back up as presidents have changed. The sheriff has not. In 2006 he was already running billboards that said “Hire an illegal — break the law,” taking out newspaper ads, and opening a tip line on employers. Twenty years later, he is still on the same subject. Consistency is not fashionable. It is, in a sheriff, a virtue.

Immigration Is the Issue Because It Was Designed to Be

His main topic has always been immigration, and he has been a real enforcer of the law, not a press-release enforcer. Butler County had a contract to house federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled it because of the Biden administration’s rules. Two days after the 2024 election, he was already talking to federal officials about restoring the capacity. By early 2025, the “Illegal Aliens Here” sign was part of the public argument again. In February 2025, the county reentered an agreement to house U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees. Since March 2025, the jail has been holding them. Jones has a 287(g) agreement, covering both the jail-enforcement model and the task-force model, and he has said that fifty to sixty of his deputies have been trained by federal agents for that work.

"Meteorologist" Sheriff Jones forecasting for @WCPO yesterday! pic.twitter.com/5lMX8I0xN9
— Richard K. Jones (@butlersheriff) September 24, 2026

In a WCPO interview in late September 2026, tied to the book, he said roughly 450 people in his jail were held on immigration matters, and that about 6,000 people had been deported from the Butler County Jail over the prior eighteen or nineteen months. Those are not theoretical numbers. That is a sheriff’s office doing the job most jurisdictions in this part of Ohio will not do.

He also said, in that same interview, that the second Trump term “messed up” the early execution, that they “went about it the wrong way,” and that you cannot deport twenty or twenty-five million people on the timetable some people imagine. National outlets immediately tried to spin that into a sheriff “turning on MAGA.” I do not buy the spin. I have watched this man long enough to know the difference between a critic and a man who says what he thinks. He has called Trump a real leader. He likes the bluntness. He thinks the economy has moved in the right direction. He also thinks a federal bureaucracy that has to fire people, hire people, and find its footing will make a mess on the way to a policy. That is not betrayal. That is the same habit that makes him say the thing on the weather segment. You want that habit in your party. A party that can only tolerate applause is not a party. It is a fan club.

Deporting everybody does not, by itself, solve the whole problem. I agree with him on that, and I have said it in my own way for years. Enforcement is necessary. It is not sufficient. You also have to promote the country you are enforcing on behalf of. You have to say, out loud, why the law exists. You have to be willing to do it on WLW, on Channel 9, on Channel 5, on Fox, and, if that is where the audience is that day, in the weather. The strategy against us has been to get people stuck in a bureaucratic decision, transfer information and loyalty away from the host culture, and husk out society from the inside. I know immigrants who are more American than a lot of people born here, people who have not lost touch with how good it is to live in this country. Sheriff Jones has been one of the most consistent cheerleaders of that distinction for at least twenty years, and by his own count longer. Legal immigration can be expanded. Illegal entry cannot be treated as a civil right. He has been clear on both.

The Weather, the Wipers, and the Point of Being Clever

Which brings me back to the weather. I thought it was Channel 9, and the recent long interview was, in fact, WCPO (Channel 9) with Stephen Knobel, posted around September 24, 2026, under the heading of immigration and leadership. The sheriff’s own office has also been putting a weekly weather outlook in front of people, which tells you something about how he thinks about an audience. He does not wait for the national shows to call. He goes where the county already is.

And yes, I enjoyed the windshield-wiper bit. A stiff man cannot do that. A consultant cannot do that. A man who has spent his life in rooms where the next sentence has to be true can get handed a forecast and still sound like himself. It is clever, it is local, and it is funny, and funny is not the opposite of serious. Funny is how a serious man keeps the room. Butler County has always produced characters who understand that. Jungle Jim Bonaminio turned a produce stand across from the old Fisher Body plant into one of the country’s most unusual independent grocers. Sheriff Jones turned a Hamilton upbringing and a corrections career into a national immigration argument without ever really leaving the county. I will take both. I would rather have a county that produces originals than a county that produces spokespeople.

He wears the suit jacket with the American flag on it. He has the cowboy hat. He has had the snub-nose where a snub-nose belongs. He will tell you about the lawyers, and he will tell you about the jail, and he will not sand it down for a panel. That is the man I want as sheriff. That is the man I want in the party. Working with him can be challenging. He is a hard person to get along with if your idea of politics is a permanent compromise of your own position. I do not think the answer is to become him. The answer is to find the common cause and do the work. On immigration and on law and order, the common cause is obvious. A president can set the policy. He still needs Tom Homan; he still needs sheriffs, and he still needs people who came into the fight from different rooms and different ethical habits. You are not a king. You are a president. The freebies of the Obama years, of Obamacare, of the Biden credit-card bill, do not vanish because a new man takes the oath. Somebody pays. I warned about that while it was happening. The people now complaining about prices are often the same people who applauded the spending. The midterms are not the moment to wander off in search of a purer candidate. They are the moment to rally behind what has actually been accomplished and to keep the enforcers in the field.

The Jail, From the Other Side of the Glass

I have seen the Butler County Jail from the other side of the usual tour. I sat as foreman of a Butler County grand jury, and I have been around that building enough to have an opinion that is not borrowed from a press release. It is not a resort. It is also not the worst thing in the world, and I don’t think Sheriff Jones gets enough credit for how the place is actually run. He talks about the food. I would not say it the way he says it, but I will say this much from my own ethical seat: if you are serving a long sentence and you are eating the burger they serve in that jail every day, you are eating a better burger than the speeches against him would lead you to believe. I do not think he has a contemptuous relationship with the people in his custody. I think he runs a serious jail, and I am proud of it. I am proud that it is our jail.

The critics do not usually argue the operations. They argue the premise. In September 2026, Butler County for Immigrant Justice protested outside the Government Center in Hamilton and called the 287(g) agreement immoral. Around the same time, Jones and West Chester got into a public dispute over a September 14 fender-bender and whether township officers should have turned an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. The sheriff’s office arrested the man on September 18. Township officials disputed the sheriff’s account of their policy. There was also, in May, a federal lawsuit from a former ICE detainee alleging an assault in the jail; an internal investigation reported no assault, and the office denied the claim and stood behind its staff while the case was active. I am not going to pretend every allegation in a jail is fiction. I am going to say I have watched this operation more closely than the people holding the signs, and I trust the man who’s been willing to put his name on the door.

Read the Book

The book is They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. It came out on May 18, 2026. It is 294 pages long. I enjoyed it. I learned things about him as a younger man in Butler County that I did not know, even after years of watching him in public, and I have lived in this county my whole life. It is a practical explanation of why Butler County works as well as it does: law first, straight talk, no patience for the swamp, a memory of an older America in which extended families lived near one another, and neighbors still knew each other’s names. That older America is the one he keeps returning to. It is also the one I grew up in, a few miles down the road.

If you want to understand the sheriff instead of the caricature, read the book. If you want to understand the county, read the book and then look at the jail, the sign, and the number of times the voters have sent him back.

What I Had

I miss the old life more now than I missed it when I was in it. That is the ordinary trick of age. If I could buy it back, the church, the Sunday night, the bag of chips on the way home, I would think hard about the price. I don’t think I would change the course. I didn’t have the context then for how good it was.

We went to church most Sundays. My parents were active. I knew the pastor extremely well. I went through catechism. The church was off Nilles Road in Fairfield along Winton Road, and after the service we would drive past Jungle Jim’s as it grew, year after year, from the roadside stand across from Fisher Body into the monster it became, one of the biggest independent grocers in the country and about as Butler County a thing as exists. Sometimes we stopped for a bag of chips or a pop. Sometimes it was Chester’s pizza for Sunday night. Then The Wonderful World of Disney, back before the house had air-conditioning, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom at seven. I loved that show. I loved every Sunday for those reasons, life in Butler County.

Listen to this…this is my response to West Chester Twp. pic.twitter.com/pnfyyli1Hq
— Richard K. Jones (@butlersheriff) September 25, 2026

After that we worked. We cut the grass. We worked the garden. We did the things a household does when the household still believes work is part of the day, not an interruption of it. I have had a lot of comments lately about my work ethic. I learned it there. I look at younger people now, and I do not blame them for missing what nobody handed them. I do think they would benefit from a little more of that life than the present culture is willing to admit. A church on Sunday, a grocer who started with rejected potatoes and a truck, a sheriff who grew up in Hamilton and stayed: these are not nostalgia props. They are a civilizational technology. They are how a county transmits a standard.

Ethically, there are not enough values out there right now. I can see that more clearly at this age than I could when I was driving past Jungle Jim’s with a bag of chips, half listening to my parents, thinking about Wild Kingdom. The context arrives late. That does not make it less true.

Purity Is Not a Strategy

So here is the political point, and I will come back to the ethics of it in the series I have been building. A big-tent party is not a party without standards. It is a party that can tell the difference between a standard and a vanity. Immigration is a standard. The law is a standard. The willingness to say both of those things on a neutral platform, and to keep saying them after the headlines turn, is a standard. Sheriff Jones meets it. He is a Butler County kid who grew up and did the job. He is on Channel 9 talking about immigration and, when the segment allows it, about whether it is going to rain. He is a pride of this county in the same family of local facts as Jungle Jim’s, not because the two men are the same, but because both of them are unmistakably from here.

I love the Republican Party more with him in it than without him. I want the people who are strong on Trump and strong on immigration in the same room as the sheriff who will tell you the execution has been uneven. That argument is allowed. The alternative is a purity spiral that hands the institutions to people who do not believe in the country at all. If you do not have the law, you do not have a society to argue about. Immigration is one place the law has been deliberately hollowed out. Sheriff Jones saw it early, built a record on it, wrote it down, and is still willing to go on the air and say it.

Read They Call Me Jonesy. You will get the man, not the montage. And if you are building a party worth belonging to, leave a chair for the sheriff in the flag jacket. We are going to need him.

NOTES

1. Butler County Sheriff’s Office, “Sheriff,” biographical sketch of Richard K. Jones, https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff. See also the author note to Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). Born October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio. Hamilton City Schools. United States Army, combat engineer, 1973-1975, Specialist 4.

2. Ibid. County and office biographies place the Lebanon Correctional Institution major’s posting from 1990 to 1993 and the chief-deputy years from 1993 until he took office as sheriff in January 2005. Education: associate degree in corrections, Hocking Technical College, 1979; bachelor’s in criminal justice, Wilmington College, 1981; master’s in corrections, Xavier University, 1984.

3. Elected November 2004 as the 45th sheriff of Butler County. Took office January 3, 2005. Reelected to a sixth term in November 2024. See Butler County Sheriff’s Office biography, and Lauren Pack, “Sheriff Richard Jones makes it clear illegal immigrants are in his jail, but he is not housing ICE prisoners – yet,” Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025.

4. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025. The “Illegal Aliens Here” sign, with an arrow pointing at the jail, went up in 2004. Jones: “Originally the government said there were no illegal aliens. They said they don’t know where they are at. So I put that giant sign up with an arrow pointing to the jail in case they couldn’t find them. I let them know they were in my jail.” The sign has come down and gone back up as administrations changed. It was put back into the public argument in early 2025.

5. Julia Preston, “Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog,” The New York Times, July 31, 2006. Six billboards in Butler County read “Hire an illegal – break the law!” Jones also took out newspaper advertisements, opened a tip line on employers, and kept the yellow “Illegal Aliens Here” street signs outside the jail.

6. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025; Journal-News, May 19, 2026, and September 30, 2026; Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Butler County housed federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled the contract over Biden administration rules. Two days after the 2024 election he was back in contact with ICE. The county reentered an agreement to house ICE detainees in February 2025. Housing resumed in March 2025. Jones has a 287(g) agreement covering the Jail Enforcement Model and the Task Force Model. He told Local 12 that 50 to 60 deputies had been trained by federal agents. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported the jail holds up to 848 maximum- and medium-security inmates, and that the sheriff’s office is paid $68 per day and $36 per hour to transport ICE detainees to the airport.

7. “Butler County sheriff says Trump administration ‘went about it the wrong way’ on immigration,” Journal-News, September 30, 2026, reporting the WCPO interview with Stephen Knobel. Jones’s figures: about 450 people in the jail held on immigration matters, and about 6,000 people deported from the Butler County Jail over the preceding 18 to 19 months. He also said, “You can’t deport 20, 25 million people,” and “I don’t even think [Trump’s] deported maybe over a million.”

8. The Daily Beast headline of September 24, 2026, “JD Vance’s Ultra-Trumpy Hometown Sheriff Richard Jones Turns on MAGA,” is the clearest example of the spin. The underlying WCPO quotes acknowledge early execution problems in the second term (“Has it been kind of messed up when they first started this under the second term? Sure they have.” “Did they go about it in the wrong way? Sure they did.”) and the practical limits of mass removal. They do not renounce enforcement, the 287(g) agreement, or Jones’s description of Trump as a real leader. In the same interview he said he likes Trump’s bluntness and what he sees as positive movement in the economy. See also WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” September 24, 2026.

9. WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” posted September 24, 2026, interviewer Stephen Knobel. The sheriff’s office has also posted weekly National Weather Service outlooks under its own name, including a September 28, 2026 outlook introduced by meteorologist Natalie Fitzpatrick on the office account.

10. Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Demonstrators with Butler County for Immigrant Justice called for an end to the 287(g) agreement outside the Government Center in Hamilton. Jones’s reply, as reported: “The whole system’s broke and won’t be fixed by either party. So, we can’t allow people to come into this country illegally and not know who they are and where they’re at.”

11. Matthew Cupelli, “How a fender bender led to Butler County sheriff, West Chester dispute,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 26, 2026, updated September 27, 2026. The collision was September 14, 2026. No injuries. Jones said a West Chester policy kept officers from turning an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. Township officials said that was false. The sheriff’s office arrested the 26-year-old man on September 18. Jones said he was from Mexico, had been in the United States four years, and would likely be deported.

12. Journal-News, “New Butler County Jail lawsuit alleges assault of ICE detainee,” May 19, 2026, and “Internal investigations shows no assault on Butler County Jail detainee,” May 28, 2026. Attorneys for Luis Tenelanda sued Sheriff Richard Jones, Sgt. Corneal Rowe, and the county on May 18, 2026. The office denied the allegations, cited a 2025 internal investigation that found no assault, and declined further comment while litigation was active.

13. Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (May 18, 2026), 294 pages, ISBN 979-8253821909. In the book he describes Trump as a real leader and returns to the phrase “The America I once knew.”

14. Jungle Jim’s International Market places the Fairfield beginning in 1973, across from Fisher Body, after earlier produce selling out of a truck. James O. “Jungle Jim” Bonaminio, born 1949 in Lorain, Ohio. First store opened in 1975 at about 4,200 square feet. See Jungle Jim’s, “The Jungle Jim Story,” https://junglejims.com/about-us.

15. WLWT, “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation of CPS grad, high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants,” June 28, 2025. Jones said the office then had ten deputies with ICE-equivalent arrest authority, wanted ten more, and expected to have about fifty. At that point he said Butler County was the only jurisdiction in Ohio with that arrangement, and that the jail was the only ICE holding facility in the Greater Cincinnati area.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonaminio, James O. “The Jungle Jim Story.” Jungle Jim’s International Market. https://junglejims.com/about-us.

Butler County Sheriff’s Office. “Sheriff.” Biographical sketch of Richard K. Jones. https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff.

Cupelli, Matthew. “How a fender bender led to Butler County sheriff, West Chester dispute.” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 26, 2026. Updated September 27, 2026. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/local/butlercounty/2026/09/26/ohio-sheriff-township-feud-over-handling-of-undocumented-immigrant-collision/91941383007/

Daily Beast. “JD Vance’s Ultra-Trumpy Hometown Sheriff Richard Jones Turns on MAGA.” September 24, 2026. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jd-vances-ultra-trumpy-hometown-sheriff-richard-jones-turns-on-maga/

Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. May 18, 2026. 294 pages. ISBN 979-8253821909.

Journal-News. “Butler County sheriff says Trump administration ‘went about it the wrong way’ on immigration.” September 30, 2026.

Journal-News. “Internal investigations shows no assault on Butler County Jail detainee.” May 28, 2026.

Journal-News. “New Butler County Jail lawsuit alleges assault of ICE detainee.” May 19, 2026.

Local 12. “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations.” September 23, 2026. https://local12.com/news/local/immoral-protest-urges-butler-county-sheriff-stop-assisting-ice-deportations-immigrants-immigration-customs-enforcement-police-hamilton-ohio-cincinnati-justice-deport-deportations

Pack, Lauren. “Sheriff Richard Jones makes it clear illegal immigrants are in his jail, but he is not housing ICE prisoners – yet.” Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025. https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/sheriff-richard-jones-makes-it-clear-illegal-immigrants-are-in-his-jail-but-he-is-not-housing-ice-prisoners-yet/IDDB223XFRDTHC4WVXSMROEXNM/

Preston, Julia. “Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog.” The New York Times, July 31, 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/us/31sheriff.html

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g).” ice.gov.

WCPO 9. “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership.” September 24, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SVSNrejQus

WLWT. “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation of CPS grad, high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants.” June 28, 2025. https://www.wlwt.com/article/butler-county-sheriff-speaks-out-on-immigration-policies/65229930

“Jungle Jim’s International Market.” Wikipedia. Revised 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Jim%27s_International_Market

Jason Voorhees and the Gods of Canaan: Why a Doctoral Thesis Has to Start in an American Horror Movie

I have been hinting at this for weeks, and I still won’t say exactly what I am doing. I can tell you the shape of it. I have been toying with a Ph.D. for several years, and I think the trigger has finally been pulled. I already know what the doctoral thesis will be. A version of it will live on the blog, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years to hear the argument. A humanities dissertation runs on the order of 80,000 words. That is a long walk. It is also, if you do it right, a bridge between things the academy will not put in the same room.

I am not happy about what has happened to academia. I am not happy that a credential which was supposed to mean rigor has been rendered, in too many departments, into a party card for liberal politics. I think there are a lot of problems with that, and I would like to get on that side of the argument for my own reasons. A Ph.D. is a tool. It is not a personality. It gives you a seat in a fight that otherwise dismisses you as a blogger with a whip and a podcast. I do not want the universities left entirely to people who have already decided the conclusion. Big tent, small tent, ethics, the lack of ethics: this is the same argument I have been making about parties and about sheriffs. If you will not go into the room, you do not get to complain that the room was captured.

The thesis comes out of The Politics of Heaven. Even while I am doing everything else, if I write several books in that line, and if I am involved in aerospace work that makes money and does cool things, none of that changes the strategy. Money is a tool. You do not do the long work to get paid for it. The Politics of Heaven, in the draft I have been editing, is over 200,000 words. The published book will be shorter. Parts of it are clean. I’m combining two bodies of evidence in the same paragraph because few others have read both piles. The politics of heaven, as I am using the phrase, are my speculations built on a very wide reading. Very few people read as much of this material as I do, or as diversely. I put things together in places the guild system of the sciences cannot handle, because the guild system is paid to stay in its lane. There needs to be a bridge. If I am going to write a thesis anyway, I might as well make the bridge the doctorate.

People I trust with a book want an entry. They want to know the information has been through a fight. Academic argument, when it is actually argument and not a loyalty oath, comes across better if you get on their side of the table and make them defend the status quo. I think I have a hook. Less than one percent of the people who encounter it are going to love it. Everyone else will scratch their heads and say they are not ready. That is fine. A lot of what I assert is not laboratory science. It is immersion. It is psychology. It is a lifetime of reading. I make assertions that are not “scientifically grounded” in the sense a journal referee means, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. They are grounded in experience, in a level of ethical attention, and in a concern I am willing to name: the ethical behavior of the spirit world, how it moves against the human race, and how it plots against God’s design. That is the concern. I am not worried about putting the frame of it out here. Somebody might try to steal it. I’m happy to share them and see if anyone can do anything with them. Most people cannot.

The thesis, as I am presuming to pursue it, is Jason Voorhees: why he is scary, and why Yahweh had to save the world from the gods of Canaan. And why those are not two subjects.

A book I saw advertised through Biblical Archaeology Review took the very progressive line that the Palestinians are the indigenous people and that Israel is the invader, the same argument you hear about American Indians. I heard a woman out of Portland, Oregon, the other day, talking about the drug problem on those streets, the cities run by blue mayors, and she concluded that we need to teach kids to do drugs, because the Indians were doing drugs, talking to spirits, going on vision quests. Democrats, in that telling, need this to happen to our young people. Break them away from their parents at twelve and thirteen. Send them on a spirit journey under drug consumption. Let them communicate with the other world. Coyote. Peyote. The vision.

I am writing, among other things, about why you should not do that, and about what you are actually encountering when you go looking for the spirit world on those terms. I talk about three rivers a lot. I talk about the origin stories of the Aztecs. I talk about a claim almost no working archaeologist or anthropologist will yet admit in public, which is that the Noah story has a geographical hook in eastern Turkey that the guild retired, and that some of the people who wrote the retirement papers are themselves retired, and that methods we were told settled the question are being reopened because the ground will not stay closed. I am saying yes to some of those reopenings because I know where the argument is going. For me, proof is not a single carbon date. Proof is accumulated experience and a willingness to read the thing the department will not assign.

So the thesis, in a sentence: Jason Voorhees and how Yahweh saved the human race from the gods of Canaan; the rest of the map is the same type. Indian cultures. Central Mexican cultures. Large parts of South America. If we were allowed to explore the same questions in Russia, China, Afghanistan, and India with the same honesty, we would know more about them too. I hear the argument every week that Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the Hindu traditions are older than Christianity, and the related argument that Hindu and Buddhist ideas migrated into the community around Jesus, that John the Baptist was a rebel against orthodox Judaism, that Greek society had already been in those eastern regions for two or three hundred years before the Roman machine arrived, with its gods and its planetary worship and its mystery cults. We would also understand the dolmens of the Jordan Valley better than we do. We would ask a ruder question: why do we have stone chambers in New England, and mound-and-monument landscapes in the northern Great Lakes and the Michigan peninsula, that keep getting explained away as root cellars and colonial oddities. At the same time, the Jordan field is allowed to be religion? Those are good questions. They are not simple. They are the complicated kind of simple, the kind that looks obvious once you stop protecting the departmental border.

Here is the hook I plan to share before November. The thirteenth villain, the one America actually produced, could not have been created anywhere but here. No other artistic culture had the combination. A commercial horror film, made for almost nothing, aimed at teenagers, indifferent to critics’ approval, and then kept alive by the audience for forty-six years. That figure explains something the ancient Near Eastern texts only describe from the other side: why people worshiped the deities of Canaan, why Yahweh was necessary, why the land had to be cleared of rival cults if anyone wanted a garden rather than an altar, why there could not be another god before him, and why human beings keep drifting back to the lesser worship anyway. I will explain more of the operational evidence after Halloween. I cannot discuss that part yet. I can tell you I am obsessed with why Jason Voorhees was invented in American cinema, and why people are still obsessed with him.

I got interested again when I saw how people reacted. My grandkids and my wife play Dead by Daylight on the PlayStation 5 a lot, all the time. I wanted to know why this character was in the room. I remembered him from when I was a teenager. In those years, you watched the movies because you wanted to see kids get killed and you wanted the cheap thrill, and you filed it under science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and you moved on. He did not move on. Then I realized there was a psychological mechanism under the costume, and I immersed myself in it until I had something I could call objective evidence. Enough, I think, for 80,000 words on why Jason Voorhees matters in the art and entertainment of human cultures, and why he had to be invented in America.

The academic position I want to refuse is the one that treats indigenous worship as automatically virtuous. Worship of lesser gods, as against Yahweh, or against what I will call for the thesis an Alpha claim on the divine, is not a heritage to be restored. It is a psychology. It has a shape. It shows up in Canaan. It shows up in the vision-quest argument. It shows up in the woman who thinks the drug policy of a failing city is a sacrament. It shows up, dressed as entertainment, in a hockey mask. If you want to talk about the psychology of goodness in a culture, and about how you defend a big-tent civilization against people who think every altar is equal, you have to be willing to look at the altar people actually kneel at when nobody from the department is watching.

This will be a quiet undertaking. It is not the thing that makes the money. I think it is needed if the human race is going to get a psychological look at itself that is not written by the people who already agree with the Portland sermon. For my part, I jump off the board before the pool is finished filling. A lot of things have to happen on the way down. I have often made the large moves under dangerous circumstances, because that is where the world actually is. You do not find the treasure by doing the same thing everyone else is doing. I think I have found something in Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13th series: why human beings are so ready to worship an idea, and why a certain kind of academia wants to point everyone toward the indigenous deity and call it liberation. That is why the drug argument keeps coming back. I understand why people feel that way. I do not feel anything close to it. Liberal-minded people, tending to vote Democrat, accommodate the opinion because they have talked themselves into believing every spirit is a friend if it arrives wearing the costume of the oppressed. I have a different reading now of why Jason is revered across cultures and across decades, and why he became a killer in Dead by Daylight not as a memory of the movies but as a current character. I know him from the movies, from the games, and from everything that has cascaded off him. I have watched that cascade go through generations.

I am deep in it. It will not make anyone rich. The information I have learned is more than most people will ever care to know about the character and about the public reaction to him. In November, I will share the details I can’t share now. It is the doctoral idea. To help the academics, I will put it on ground they already understand, and on ground everybody else understands: a horror movie. It is a good comment. It is a big concept. I am going to use it to launch the reasoning about why those older worships were dangerous, why people still practice them, why they are still impactful, and why a society that wants to fix itself has to fix that before it fixes the tax bill.

It will be entertaining. I promise that. Some of the apocalyptic discussions I have had came from real reflection, because I put myself through a considerable amount of discomfort to see the thing from the inside. It is not enough to stand on the dock and throw a theory at the water. You have to go in with the sharks and the snakes and the vipers and see what is actually down there. I would like it to be easier. I want the design of the world to be more accommodating to personal pleasure. Here is the deal. I will get further into this over the coming weeks and months as I work up to it. A thesis, in the ordinary academic calendar, is five or six years of hard work. In another sense, I have already been at the reading for longer than that. I know what the end needs to be. It needs to be this. And it has an academic entrance, which you cannot use unless you have gone down the rabbit hole past Alice, further by a lot. That is what I am talking about. I think I understand Jason Voorhees, the public reaction to him, the fascination, and why the human race turns away from Yahweh and Jesus Christ and finds itself worshiping the old neighbors.

The Jewish people worshiped the calf when Moses took too long coming down with the commandments. The guidance drifted. Even Aaron drifted. He drifted for a reason. What is the reason? I think I have it. I will put it in the books, in the thesis, and in future academic work. I will also put it here, because I am not going to make people wait five or six years. Putting it out helps me. The feedback helps. People send notes. They ask questions I had not framed. I get a better answer, and I refine it. That is the process. It is not always the way I would design it. It has been working.

A dose of reality with a fire under it has been hard. This particular immersion has been out of my comfort zone. It will make for a richer discussion, which is the point of the effort. Job titles are transitory. Acquisitions are transitory. Most of them are built on compliance with human systems. I mean compliance with a cosmic claim. The Bible is not a hint. I think it is part of a larger story we are going to be covering for thousands of years, and that we miraculously captured some of it through prophets and through voices that managed to get a portion written down, and that the portion lasted through purges and reformations and kingdoms and empires to reach us.

I find that survival a miracle. There is a lot more, and when a generation is done with the portion it inherited, it still has to ask questions. It has to cut into the topic with evidence-based trajectories. That is what I am doing. I wish it were easier to get. If it were easy, more people would do it. Very few have the stomach for the fight. I have gone down the rabbit hole. I have seen what is down there. I know a treasure was left behind, and I think it is my task, because I have been given a voice, to bring some of that treasure into the light.

The structural thesis on Jason Voorhees is the door. I think people are going to get a kick out of it. It is going to be fun. If you liked The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you’ll know the voice. The subject is different. The standard is not.

NOTES

1. A typical humanities doctoral thesis in the United States and Britain falls somewhere around 80,000 to 100,000 words, excluding bibliography. I am using 80,000 as the working target, not as a university requirement already assigned to me. I am not enrolled in a program as of this writing. The point of saying the number is to mark the scale: this is not a blog post, and it is not a five-year wait for the blog either.

2. The Politics of Heaven is the manuscript I have described elsewhere as completed in draft in 2026, in final edits, and aimed at publication in 2027. The draft I am editing has run past 200,000 words. The published book will be cut down. The thesis is a bridge out of that book, not a substitute for it.

3. Friday the 13th, produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, written by Victor Miller, opened in the United States on May 9, 1980. Budget reported under $600,000. Domestic gross about $39.8 million; worldwide about $59.8 million. It was the first independent slasher picked up by a major studio, Paramount. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, revised 2026; Ryan Gilbey, “Friday the 13th at 40,” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.

4. In the first film, the killer is Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother. Jason himself appears at the end as a jump scare. Makeup designer Tom Savini has said the beat was his idea after Carrie: “let’s bring in Jason.” Victor Miller later objected to the sequels making Jason the killer: “Jason was dead from the very beginning. He was a victim, not a villain.” That argument inside the creative team is part of the evidence. The culture did not accept the victim. It promoted the corpse. See Friday the 13th (1980 film), Wikipedia, production history.

5. The hockey mask arrives in Friday the 13th Part III, released August 13, 1982, directed by Steve Miner, the only film in the series released in 3-D. On-set accounts say a Detroit Red Wings goaltender mask belonging to 3-D effects supervisor Martin Jay Sadoff was put on actor Richard Brooker for a lighting test, then enlarged by makeup effects. In Part 2, Jason had worn a sack. The mask is an American industrial object, a piece of sporting armor, not a cult image designed by a priest. That is the point.

6. The franchise then did what Canaanite cults did. It would not stay dead. Sequels, a 2009 reboot, a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street, novels, song references from Tupac to Eminem, The Simpsons, and, in 2026, a playable killer. Gilbey notes that Jason became the first fictional character to receive an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award. The culture promoted a murderer of teenagers into an institution.

7. Dead by Daylight, from Behavior Interactive, added Jason as Chapter 40 on June 16, 2026. In the game, he is called The Slasher. The chapter shipped as paid downloadable content at $4.99 or 500 Auric Cells, with a hockey-mask cosmetic and a “Misty Cabin” banner. He joined Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, and Leatherface on the same roster. My wife and my grandchildren play the game. That is not a footnote to the thesis. That is the transmission mechanism: a character I met as a teenager is now a weekly opponent for children who were not alive for the original film.

8. The Canaanite comparison is the theological half of the thesis, and I am stating it here as my claim, not as a finding already peer-reviewed. The biblical polemic is not subtle. Israel is commanded not to do what the nations did on their high places. Child sacrifice to Molech is forbidden and treated as a capital offense (Leviticus 18:21, 20:2-5; Deuteronomy 12:31; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 32:35). The contest on Carmel is a direct trial between Yahweh and Baal (1 Kings 18). Josiah’s reform demolishes the high places, the asherim, and the Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom (2 Kings 23). John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge, 1989), belongs in the bibliography so the fight is visible. My claim is that the psychological pattern survives the argument about body counts.

9. The golden calf is the control case inside Israel itself. Exodus 32: Aaron builds the calf because the people will not wait for Moses to come down. The text does not treat this as a moment of heritage. It treats it as drift under impatience, including drift by the priest. That is the mechanism I think I can show in the modern material: absence of the harder claim, impatience, a visible substitute, and a leader who accommodates the substitute so the crowd will not leave.

10. The Portland remark is from a broadcast comment I heard, a woman arguing that children should be taught drug use because indigenous vision quests used intoxicants to speak with spirits, set against the open drug scenes of cities run by Democratic mayors. I am not hanging the thesis on her name. I am hanging it on the argument, which is now common: the pre-Christian or non-Christian rite is the authentic one, the parental household is the interruption, and the drug is the sacrament. Standard starting points on the Native American Church and peyote, which is not the same thing as a municipal drug market, include Weston La Barre, The Peyote Cult (1938 and later editions), and Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).

11. On the Biblical Archaeology Review advertisement and the “Palestinians as indigenous, Israel as invader” line: BAR has long carried a range of politics alongside the archaeology, and the indigenous framing of the Palestinian claim has become a standard academic position in parts of Near Eastern studies since the 1990s, drawing on the same vocabulary used for Native American land claims. I am marking the parallel as my reading of that advertisement and of the wider literature, not as a quotation from a single editor. A fair bibliography has to carry both William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Eerdmans, 2003), and the more minimalist and postcolonial work the department actually assigns.

12. Jordan Valley dolmens are not a rumor. Fields run along the escarpment east of the Jordan, south from the Yarmuk toward the Kerak plateau, with a heavy Early Bronze Age I burial use and a possible late Chalcolithic beginning. See the radiometric dolmen paper in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2023), and David Gilead, “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100 (1968). James A. Fraser’s Dolmens in the Levant (2018) is the modern synthesis. More than a century of work has still not produced dolmens west of the Jordan south of the Upper Galilee.

13. New England stone chambers are the contested American analog, and I am not going to pretend the guild has conceded the point. The colonial root-cellar explanation is the standard one. A luminescence study of structures in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, published in 2022 in Quaternary Geochronology, reported sediment ages under some structures in the late sixteenth century, before sustained colonial settlement. That is not a Phoenician colony. It is a date that does not fit the root-cellar story cleanly. The thesis does not need the chambers to be dolmens. It needs the question to stay open.

14. The Michigan peninsula and the northern Great Lakes are a different monumental tradition: Late Woodland mounds and earthworks, roughly AD 1200-1600, not Levantine dolmens. Meghan C. L. Howey, Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600 (University of Arizona Press, 2012), is a careful book. I raise the peninsula because the public is told these are separate phenomena by disciplinary border, while the psychological function, a built place where the dead or the spirit is dealt with outside the household, keeps rhyming. The rhyme is my claim. The distinction in architecture is the academy’s fact. Both go in the thesis.

15. The Durupinar formation near Dogubayazit, eastern Turkey, is the Noah’s Ark claim I am referring to. The geological consensus, including a 1996 paper by Lorence Collins and David Fasold, “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure,” is that the boat shape is a natural formation. In 2026, a team led by Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University ran further scans and reported right-angled subsurface anomalies and higher carbon inside the formation than outside it. Mainstream outlets treated the new work as another round of a claim already rejected. I am not asking the reader to call it the Ark. I am asking why a formation that will not stay out of the news is professionally required to be a closed case, while vision-quest pharmacology is professionally required to be an open sacrament.

16. Aztec origin traditions are a separate dossier in The Politics of Heaven. The relevant point for the thesis is the public one: a civilization that built an imperial sacrificial system on a calendar of blood is still routinely taught as a heritage interrupted by Europeans, while the biblical refusal of that kind of altar is taught as the crime. The primary narrative is in the Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún and in Diego Durán. The archaeological frame is Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs. The moral question is mine.

17. Greek and eastern mystery religion in the centuries before Jesus is not an internet invention. The Hellenistic kingdoms sat on the Levant from Alexander’s campaigns in the late fourth century BC. The claim that Jesus or John the Baptist is a Buddhist or Hindu import is modern. The mainstream counter is still the Jewish context: Second Temple Palestine, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, and the Gospels. A clean entry is Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (1974).

18. The ethical claim of the thesis, which will not be popular in a religious-studies faculty, is that the spirit world has a moral direction, and that “indigenous” is not a moral category. A rite can be old and still be a violation. I am using Jason as the modern control because nobody can accuse a Paramount slasher of being a colonial slander against a living tribe. America invented him in New Jersey in 1980, out of a marketing bet on Halloween (1978). The audience then did what audiences have always done with the lesser god. It kept him, masked him, sold him, and handed him to the children.

19. I am withholding, until after Halloween and into November, the field observations from the seasonal work that put me inside the costume and inside the crowd reaction. That material is the part of the evidence I will not sketch in public yet. The thesis does not depend on gossip about a haunt. It depends on the crowd, which I have now watched from both sides of the mask.

20. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the earlier book in which I used a popular American figure to carry an argument about discipline, producers, and the refusal to live by permission. The Jason thesis is the same method on a darker subject. Readers who want the voice can start there. Readers who want the cosmology can start with The Politics of Heaven when it is out.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Lorence G., and David Fasold. “Bogus ‘Noah’s Ark’ from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure.” Journal of Geoscience Education, 1996.

Cunningham, Sean S., director. Friday the 13th. Paramount Pictures, 1980. Screenplay by Victor Miller.

Day, John. Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Dead by Daylight Wiki. “CHAPTER 40: Jason.” Behavior Interactive release, June 16, 2026.

Dever, William G. Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

Duran, Diego. The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated by Doris Heyden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).

Fraser, James A. Dolmens in the Levant. London: Routledge, 2018.

Gilbey, Ryan. “Friday the 13th at 40: the maligned slasher that’s haunted pop culture.” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.

Gilead, David. “Burial Customs and the Dolmen Problem.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 100, no. 1 (1968): 16-26.

Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974.

Howey, Meghan C. L. Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.

La Barre, Weston. The Peyote Cult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938.

Mahan, Shannon, and colleagues. Luminescence dating of enigmatic rock structures in New England. Quaternary Geochronology, 2022.

Miner, Steve, director. Friday the 13th Part III. Paramount Pictures, 1982.

Sahagun, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950-1982.

Smith, Michael E. The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

The Holy Bible. Exodus 32; Leviticus 18 and 20; Deuteronomy 12; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 23; Jeremiah 32.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Real War Is the Paycheck: Digital ID, the HR Office, and Why I Have Seen Both Sides

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

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Islam Means Submission: Jonathan Edwards, the Quran, and the Pilot Who Tried to Crash Flight FZ1073

Yesterday morning, while most of America was still arguing about whether you are allowed to notice patterns, Flydubai Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with roughly 174 people on board, almost all of them Israeli. Somewhere over the route, the Omani co-pilot stabbed the Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, and the Boeing 737 MAX dropped about 17,000 feet in under two minutes. Passengers broke into the cockpit. One of them put the attacker in a chokehold. Off-duty pilots landed the airplane in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel Katz called it an attempted jihadist attack. A fellow pilot told Israeli television the co-pilot prayed excessively and refused to shake hands with women. Saudi authorities are still questioning him. Trump said he might have been a terrorist or he might have been mentally ill. That is the news cycle. What follows is the argument underneath it.

I have my copy of the Quran. I have carried a flexible edition for years so I can argue with it instead of about it. I also have my Jonathan Edwards study Bible open on the desk. Edwards died in 1758, before there was a United States. He already knew the problem. He called the two great works of the devil against the kingdom of Christ the papal kingdom in the West and the Mahometan kingdom in the East. He said Muhammad was a subtle, crafty man who pretended the Alcoran came from Gabriel, sold a sensual paradise, and propagated the religion by the sword. That is a Northampton pastor in the 1750s, not a 2026 invention.

What the Word Actually Means

Islam means submission. Not peace in the Hallmark sense. The whole system is built around total submission to Allah and to the law derived from Muhammad. Anybody who does not have submission in the vocabulary is already in trouble with the text.

That is why the political class is comfortable with it. A religion that trains people to bend the knee to an authority they are not allowed to question is useful to people who want the same habit pointed at the state. If you will not submit to the God of the Quran, the substitute arrives quickly: submit to the bureau, the school board, the speech code. Historically the faith has almost never traveled as private piety. It has traveled with a political order attached — dhimmi status, tribute, second-class standing for those who will not convert, and expansion when the numbers allow it.

I can sit at a drinking fountain with a Muslim coworker and talk about anything. I joke with them. Why are you praying toward Mecca on a cloth at a set hour? They can tell me to read the Quran. I can tell them to read the Bible. We can still shake hands and walk away. That is ordinary human contact. It is not the same thing as pretending the systems are compatible. The insecurity shows up the moment you decline to submit. Then you are the enemy. Gentle people exist inside every population. The doctrine is still the doctrine.

Edwards, Before We Had a Country

If I could put Edwards in the chair, the question would be simple. What do you think of planting the Quran in the life of a nation that still claims the gospel?

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob revealed his Son. The Quran speaks of God and denies the eternal sonship of Christ and his death upon the cross. That is a false gospel. It leads away from the only name under heaven by which men must be saved. To implement that book as a peer authority in the public life of a nation is to invite spiritual darkness onto ground already cracking under its own weight. A house divided against itself cannot stand. A people who try to honor both light and darkness will perish.

From a 1750s seat, the attempt looks like division by design. It flatters the pride of man — one God, no mediator, no scandal of the cross — while denying the Savior. A nation cannot serve two masters. It cannot honor the cross and the crescent and stay one thing. Edwards thought God would not share his glory with another. I think he was right.

Same Names, Opposite Message

Adam is in the Quran. Moses is in there. Abraham is in there. Jesus is in there as a prophet who was not crucified and is not the Son. That is spiritual plagiarism. You take the names to borrow trust, then you twist the load-bearing walls to have a strategic meaning meant to destroy Western Civilization at the ground level.

The fork in the road is the sacrifice. In Genesis the son on the mountain is Isaac, the child of the covenant marriage. In the Islamic telling the favored line runs through Ishmael, the son of Hagar, outside that marriage. That rebuilds the family tree so the covenant son is no longer the covenant son. From the first chapter of the argument, Islam is set against Israel. A religion that elevates the son who was not the child of the covenant, and then asks the world to treat that reversal as revelation, is telling you something about the spirit behind the text.

Muhammad was a merchant in a region that wanted its older habits back under a new umbrella, aimed at the Christian order in the eastern Roman world. Something came and talked to him. That does not make a man great. The traditional account is roughly twenty-three years of recitation. The thing calling itself Gabriel contradicted what the Gospels say Gabriel announced to Mary six centuries earlier. Angels do not spend two decades canceling a message they already delivered. One of them was not Gabriel. The Bible tells you to test the spirits. He submitted instead.

Who Lets the Adversary Run?

People ask why Jesus lets the adversary operate. I have heard the real-estate version: a transaction in the garden, a deed, Satan as a squatter with papers. I do not think God lost the earth. Sovereignty over creation was not handed away. What was permitted was influence over human beings who chose the lie. The patience is not incompetence. Evil is allowed so that justice and mercy can both be seen when the thing is finally crushed.

That patience is expensive. Innocent people die. The biblical claim is that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and waits because he is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. The end of the patience will be worse than the middle of it. You can hate the cost and still see why a God who intends to save refuses to end the offer early. What you cannot do is confuse that patience with approval of a rival gospel.

The Black Stone and the Unasked Question

A billion and a half people circle a stone, touch it, kiss it, and cannot tell you where it came from. Pre-Islamic practice, rebranded. Kissing a stone the stranger ahead of you just kissed is not profound. It is submission performed so that nobody has to ask. Where did the rock come from? Why these characters were borrowed from the Bible? Why is the Christology reversed? Why is criticism of Muhammad blasphemy while criticism of the church is a Tuesday?

Truth does not need a threat to survive examination. A lie does. Revelation 22:18–19 warns against adding to or taking away from the words of that prophecy. It is a seal on a book, not a police regime. The habit of the New Testament is to test everything. The habit of the other book is submit and be quiet, from the first surah to the last.

Joseph Campbell bothered me on this point. When he spoke of Gabriel appearing to Muhammad, he softened it. He wanted to stay employed at Sarah Lawrence and keep the editing work which I always thought was dishonest, intellectually. He knew better. Polite academia already had a tribute system. That pressure is worse now. It is not scholarship. It is submission with a faculty ID.

Speech Is the Battlefield They Prefer

Everyone looks for Turks at the gates. The cheaper conquest is speech. You submit in what you are allowed to say to your wife, your kids, your readers. You do not ask where the stone came from.

The radical left has spent years introducing Islamic institutional power into a culture built on the Bible, English law, and the conscience of the individual. The ideas are not compatible. A system whose end state is Islamic rule, with non-Muslims as tolerated subordinates, cannot live as a permanent equal inside a republic that treats religions as voluntary associations under a civil law nobody gets to replace. The useful idiots think they can aim this at the church and then manage the aftermath. Every civilization that tried that partnership was wrong. What a lot of people don’t say about Iran is that their government is the goal of those attacking America. That’s what is expected of us and Islam is the entry point to that kind of blind totalitarian rule. That’s why destroying Iran was important for the Trump administration. It had to happen to break the spell.

Yesterday’s cockpit is the unpolite version of the same pressure. The Crusades were a late reaction to centuries of conquest, not the opening move. The argument was never settled. It changed vehicles.

Two Things Worth Keeping

Islam means submission, by whatever method gets the knee bent: fear, law, shame, the sword, the human-resources office. And the religion took shape in the seventh century as a rival system in the borderlands of the Roman East, borrowing names, reversing the covenant son, denying the cross, and requiring a submission Christianity does not require. That ambition did not retire. If you cannot find the authority inside the religious layer, look at the next layer up. Government is always happy to become the thing you submit to.

The pilot who opened the cockpit door while he was bleeding did not submit. Neither should we.

Footnotes and the bibliography — Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption, the Miscellanies, McDermott, Ibn Ishaq, Bat Ye’or, Genesis 16–22, Revelation 22:18–19, and the 30 September wire copy from BBC, Reuters, Times of Israel, and PBS

Notes

3. On 14 January 2026 the Telegraph reported that Labour 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.

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

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.

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. “Labour 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

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

THE SYSTEM WAS NEVER DESIGNED TO RESPECT THE VOTE—I’m Proud of Trump. The Media Is Already Writing the Impeachment as a Suppression Operation.

I am proud of President Trump. I say that first because I have spent years decoding the obvious, and I don’t intend to pretend I discovered courage last week. I walked people through the exile years. I did the COVID coverage when it was still lonely work. I was calling balls and strikes before a lot of the later names had a show. Laura Loomer has done hard work. Natalie Winters has done hard work from a young age. The War Room lane has done hard work. I respect the daily calling of hypocrisy. I also think that lane, by itself, never gets to the doing. Recognition without a mechanism is how evil keeps the back office while we argue about the headline.[1]

I have shifted gears. Not away from Trump. Toward the machinery that outlasts him.

I USED TO SIT IN A COMFORTABLE CHAIR AND CALL BALLS AND STRIKES

For a long time I had a comfortable place to sit. Call it a cloud. Call it a good office. I could look down on the news cycle, name the lie, and go home. That is useful. It is also incomplete. Hypocrisy reporting is a spotlight. Evil works in the dark behind the spotlight, on purpose, while the audience stares at the bright circle.

The hardships I have been talking about in my own professional life were not a detour from the political argument. They were the laboratory. Once you are no longer sitting in the clubhouse, you see how the game is actually rigged. Corporate America. Easy Federal Reserve money. China in the supply chain and in the information pipe. HR departments as political enforcement. Flippers who buy a shop and call compliance a personality. I have covered that combination for years. I have now lived a chapter of it at ground level. Micro teaches macro. The same pattern that ruins a company ruins a republic.[2]

Pickle Rick was not a joke. If you are going to call balls and strikes, you cannot live on the owner’s floor. You cannot take the rigged clubhouse deal and then pretend you still have clean eyes. I put myself outside the comfortable chair on purpose. That is why the reporting sounds different now. I am not interested in announcing that we have a problem. I want the problem named at the layer where it is actually built.

WE HAVE NOT HAD A SYSTEM THAT RESPECTED VOTERS

This is October 1st, 2026. The midterms are November 3. Thirty days or so. I am not sitting here assuming Republicans have already lost the House and the Senate. I am sitting here watching a regime of people who have controlled the machinery for a long time try to convince you the race is already over so you will stay on the couch.[3]

We have not had what they call democracy in the clean-textbook sense. We have had a controlled, manipulated administrative state that learned a simple math problem. A 30-year career outlasts a 2-year House term, a 6-year Senate term, and even a 4-year presidency. They reveal elections. Then they outlast whoever slides through. Checks on power were meant to slow radicalism. The deep state learned to use those same checks as a parking brake on anyone the voters actually sent.[4]

I know this from men I have spoken with privately. Bernie Moreno. Warren Davidson. Others who went to Washington from my world. I have been close enough to Congress and the Senate to hear what they sound like when the cameras are off. I know who they were when they went in. I know what the building does to a mission. The system is designed to stop the mission. It is the same design I have seen in corporate cultures. New owner. New process. Same rotting joists. The title on the door changes. The permanent staff does not.[5]

THE IMPEACHMENT HEADLINE IS NOT A LEGAL DOCUMENT. IT IS A TAILGATE

I read the news Saturday morning the way I always do, through a lot of inputs. The outlets were already wet with impeachment—Yahoo-style aggregation. Democrats talking impeachment as if it were weather. Impeach him for what? He is the president the country put in office, and a large part of the opposition class cannot think past social takeover as a governing theory.[6]

Look at the actual paper on the table this month, not the feeling. On September 15, the House tabled Al Green’s latest impeachment attempt. Democrats split. Leadership voted present. On September 24, Steve Cohen filed 26 articles covering everything from Iran to immigration to emoluments. Hakeem Jeffries is already telling reporters that if Democrats take the House, oversight will be vast and impeachment is “not ruled out.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth already has articles hanging over him from Thomas Massie over the Iran war. That is not a completed removal. That is a war machine. It is built to make you feel like your side already lost, so you will not get up in November.[7]

I have used the tailgate picture because it is the most honest one I have. You wear your jersey into the other team’s parking lot. They put an arm around you. They sell you a hot dog. They tell you, friendly as Sunday, that your team is going to get destroyed. The point is not information. The point is to make you feel stupid for showing up. Democratic media does that at an industrial scale because the advertising model needs your despair. If you believe your side can win, you are harder to monetize and harder to keep home. If you believe the thing is already over, you stay on the couch while their people walk.[8]

POLLS ARE A WEAPON. TURNOUT IS THE ONLY COUNTER

I will not lie to you about the temperature. Generic ballots in late September are ugly for Republicans. Some aggregators have Democrats up by several points. Forecast shops are assigning the House to Democrats at high confidence and treating the Senate as a coin that has started to lean. Trump’s national approval is being printed in the high 30s by the same class of numbers that has been wrong before and will be wrong again if the people who actually vote decide the numbers are a dare.[9]

That is the point of the suppression. They do not need you to love their candidates. They need you to believe resistance is already futile. They need Republicans who have learned to live inside the old control system—comfortable calendar, known vacation, decent pay, no appetite for real reform—to sit still and hope the storm misses the golf course. How many men, alone on a tee box with nobody watching, will still take the honest lie? If they will cheat a stroke when the only prize is a par, why would you trust them with a republic when the prize is a career.[10]

GAS, IRAN, AND THE MEN WHO LICK THE BOOTS IN THE ROOM

I said I thought gas would be under two dollars by the summer of 2026. It is not. National averages this year ran from the low threes before the Iran escalation, spiked toward the mid-fours in May, kissed four dollars after a June paper ceasefire, and then climbed again when the fight did not stay dead—Labor Day printed above four. That is not the number I wanted. It is also not a mystery.[11]

Iran is being used as a straw man for price. As long as a war, a blockade, a rumor of the Strait, or a tent full of men who can still light a fuse exists, refiners and traders have a story. They will smile at the gold trim in the White House. Strong executives always get that smile. Then they talk on the way to the car. I have watched that smile in companies. I have been in the room. The Iran file is being stretched because stretched files protect margins and protect the permanent war party that wants Trump blamed for a fight they have been feeding for decades.[12]

We did not vote for a forever war. We voted for cheaper energy and a country that is not managed by the people who never leave. Forever war is how you wait a president out. Afghanistan already taught that lesson to anyone willing to read a graveyard. A movement that can pitch a tent and find water can outlast a news cycle. Radical Islamic politics and Marxist economics are not opposites in the field. They are often the same engine with different slogans. As long as the tent has water, the fire keeps a little wind.[13]

CHINA, HONG KONG, IRAN, AND A STRANGE CHANGE ON MY SITE

I have watched my own traffic for years. For a long stretch, there were two persistent hits a day from China, like a pair of regulators taking attendance. A few months ago that changed. I started seeing 37 to 40 hits a day from China. That is not a standing ovation. That is a change in the pipe. Somebody stopped capping the faucet, or somebody started studying the faucet. Either way, the information war is not only domestic.[14]

Hong Kong showed what happens when a population gets a window and does not finish the job. Iran is the same kind of window with worse weather. Voice of America, X, a blog in Ohio—none of that is a revolution by itself. The other side has speech control as a governing tool. We still talk as if the whole earth is a comments section. It is not. Getting a message into a closed country is half the war. The other half is whether the people inside will use the opening. I cannot do that part for them. Trump cannot do that part for them. A better speech will not save a hammer that refuses to swing.[15]

WRIGHT-PATT, DISCLOSURE, AND THE GIANT IN THE VIDEO GAME

I live close enough to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to know people who work there. They confirm what they can confirm. Files are coming out in a Trump administration that previous buildings sat on. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day movie is sitting in the culture as a myth-shaped object while the real files move in smaller rooms. I will give cameras their own essay. They deserve it. The point here is simpler. The same class of manipulator that runs a corporate takeover also runs a disclosure drip. Look this way. Do not look at the jurisdiction fight underneath.[16]

A new generation is walking into stories I have been telling for 20 and 30 years, and they are walking in through a game controller. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is not Sunday school. It is a very good game. The Order of Giants DLC puts Nephilim, Gibborim, Noah’s Ark, and a secret order of large men on PlayStation and Xbox and doesn’t apologize. Giants from the Bible are popular again because the old text never stopped being a map. Hollywood will sell you the costume. Michael Heiser spent his career trying to make people read the unseen realm without the costume. He died. People like to whisper that this kind of work draws fire. I do not need a ghost story to notice that my own life got louder after I finished The Politics of Heaven. I am not stopping.[17]

THE FALLEN CONSPIRACY HAS MORE THAN ONE LETTERHEAD

You can spell it a lot of ways—fallen angels. Secret societies. A Hollywood death cult. China in the media stack. Progressive branding on an old hatred of the God of creation. A mother in a Manson weather system. Lawyers and jurors leaned on until justice becomes a performance. Lucifer is not a Halloween decoration. He is a politician. He recruits institutions. He prefers a Truman Show to an honest election because a show can be rewritten between seasons.[18]

The same fingerprints show up on a Saturday impeachment dump and on a corporate letter telling a CEO to adopt the current left-wing weather or lose the easy money. Federal Reserve plumbing. Wall Street wash. ESG as a protection racket. That is not three conspiracies. That is one method at three altitudes. If you only stare at gas prices, you will miss the wet paint. If you only stare at the wet paint, you will miss the spirit that taught the painter his stroke.[19]

GOD IS NOT RUNNING A CLOSED SET

A lot of good people want the comfort sentence. God’s got this. God’s got my back. God knows where I live. I expect the plot is already locked and we are only extras. That’s not what I am looking at. I think conspirators are working against the script. I think they have been trying to overthrow the visible order for a very long time. I think calling them “progressives” or “Democrats” or even “the deep state” is sometimes accurate and always incomplete. Those are avatars. Avatars can be replaced. The method remains.[20]

The Constitution is a costume the other team has learned to wear. Free-speech rules get used to protect the spread of the thing the speech was supposed to restrain. Courts can refuse to join a mood and still leave a machine intact. A strong executive in the White House answers some questions. He cannot answer whether a people will stay home because a poll told them to feel defeated. He cannot be your rapture. He cannot be your substitute for courage.[21]

I have been saying this in the hammer language because I mean it. If you were made as a tool, waiting for heaven to happen while you use Jesus as an excuse for being a chicken is not piety. It is absenteeism. Trump was not a chicken. He stayed in the pocket long enough that the footprints in the wet paint became visible to people who did not want to see them. That is a gift. It is not a finished repair. He cannot repair for you any more than God will swing a hammer you refuse to pick up.[22]

WHAT I WANT INSTEAD OF ANOTHER DECADE OF HIGHLIGHT REELS

I am still with Trump. I think he has done a good job in a building that was built to digest him. I think the House and the Senate in November are still winnable if the people who know better refuse the tailgate. I think a lot of Republicans who like the current control system will not help you, because the current system pays them on time. I think election integrity is not a slogan. It is the only peaceful way to take a government back from a class that has already decided you do not own it. If you will not fight for a clean count, you are agreeing that you do not run the place.[23]

I do not want AI licensed by the same kind of people who wash out of real shops and land at a patent window because the job is protected and the standards are political. I have talked to that office. I know that weather. You do not want those hands on a technology China is already treating as a battlefield. You do not want a permission culture writing the rules of the next tool while the last tool is still being used to manage your speech.[24]

Identify the problem at the right layer. Then fix it. Reporting hypocrisy is a start. Naming the spirit, the paycheck, the waiting-out strategy, the impeachment-as-suppression cycle, the energy excuse, the China pipe, and the fallen-angel politics behind the human letterhead is the work I am actually in. The Politics of Heaven exists because the news cycle never goes downstairs.[25]

NOTES FOR LEADERS

Do not confuse a recognition show with a repair.

Do not let a poll put you on the couch. Polls are part of the tailgate.

Do not expect a president to finish a job the permanent class is paid to stall.

Do not call every delay incompetence. Some of it is a wait-him-out.

Do not baptize cowardice as faith if you are a hammer, swing.

Do not outsource election integrity to people who like the present machine.

Do not stare only at gas. Stare at who needs Iran to stay useful.

Do not flatten spiritual war into team colors. Teams change. The method does not.

I am proud of President Trump. He has not let me down. The world around him has. That is the sentence I will keep. The next sentence is on us.

FOOTNOTES

[1] War Room and associated daily-accountability media; Laura Loomer’s investigative work; Natalie Winters’s War Room reporting. The author does not claim this work is worthless. It is that recognition of hypocrisy, by itself, leaves the back office intact.

[2] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and the 2026 Overman Warrior essays on corporate flippers, HR politics, and Pickle Rick as a method.

[3] 2026 midterm election date: Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

[4] The administrative-state “outlast” problem is the author’s description of career officialdom relative to elected terms. See also the longer literature on the permanent bureaucracy after the Progressive Era and the postwar national-security state.

[5] Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio); Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). Private conversations described here are the author’s account of mood and structural frustration, not quoted transcripts.

[6] Late-September 2026 consumer aggregation of impeachment talk across Yahoo-style and similar feeds, coinciding with formal House activity cited below.

[7] House vote September 15, 2026, tabling Rep. Al Green’s impeachment articles, 232–147, with 18 Democrats joining Republicans to table and 46 Democrats voting present, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced 26 articles of impeachment on September 24, 2026. Associated Press, September 26, 2026: House Democrats preparing a vast oversight agenda if they win the chamber; impeachment “not off the table.” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over Iran-war management.

[8] Advertising-supported political media has an incentive to keep a horse race emotionally hot and a base emotionally tired. The tailgate analogy is the author’s.

[9] Late-September 2026 public aggregators printed Democratic leads on the generic ballot and elevated Democratic odds on House control. Silver Bulletin / FLIPR and similar models updated September 25–27, 2026. Trump approval prints in some aggregates near 37 percent. Aggregates are not ballots.

[10] The golf-course example is moral psychology, not a claim about a named official’s scorecard.

[11] AAA and related trackers: pre-escalation national averages near or under $3 in early 2026; spike toward about $4.50 in May; brief dip under $4 after a June 2026 preliminary U.S.–Iran arrangement to reopen Hormuz; return toward and above $4 as fighting and shipping risk resumed. Labor Day 2026 national average reported near $4.15 by inflation-tracking compilations using AAA. The author’s earlier $2 summer target did not materialize.

[12] U.S.–Israel strikes on Iran from late February 2026; Hormuz disruption; naval measures; a June preliminary arrangement that did not hold as a durable peace. Energy desks treated the file as a supply-risk story throughout.

[13] The author’s reading of forever-war incentives and of radical Islamic politics sharing logistical patience with other anti-Western movements. Afghanistan is cited as the recent American education in outlasting.

[14] Traffic observation from richhoffmanbooks.com / Overman Warrior properties, as reported by the author. Not a claim about a named Chinese agency.

[15] Hong Kong protests and the subsequent tightening; Iranian information controls. X and related platforms widened some outbound speech after 2022–2024, but inbound reach into closed states remains contested.

[16] Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, is a historic center of foreign-material and aerospace lore in disclosure literature. Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure (2025). Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is a forthcoming cultural object in the same weather system, not a substitute for documents.

[17] Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (MachineGames / Bethesda / Lucasfilm, 2024), with The Order of Giants DLC (2025). The game treats a Nephilim Order, Gibborim material, and Noah’s Ark as plot architecture. Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015); Heiser died February 20, 2023. The author’s parallel is vocational, not medical diagnosis.

[18] Genesis 6; Psalm 82; Ephesians 6:12. John Keel and Jacques Vallée on high-strange events as political and folkloric, not merely extraterrestrial.

[19] ESG shareholder letters and federal-contractor political pressure, 2018–2024, as a documented enforcement style even where the brand names later softened.

[20] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming).

[21] U.S. Const. arts. I–III. The author claims that factions can wear the procedural costumes the procedures were written to restrain.

[22] Matthew 25:14–30; James 2:17. The hammer language is the author’s, developed across the 2026 Overman Warrior series.

[23] Election-administration fights after 2020 and 2024 remain live in state houses, courts, and Congress. The author argues that integrity is a precondition of consent, not a conspiracy hobby.

[24] U.S. Patent and Trademark Office culture as experienced by the author in prior dealings; a critique of political hiring and risk-averse examination, not a claim that every examiner is incompetent.

[25] Closing frame of the Overman Warrior project, 2024–2026.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

Politics, Midterms, and the Permanent Machine

Associated Press / Lisa Mascaro. “House Democrats Plan Vast Oversight of Trump Administration. Impeachment Is an Option.” September 26, 2026. New York Times. “House Kills Bid to Impeach Trump as Democrats Split.” September 15, 2026. Rep. Steve Cohen. “Congressman Cohen Introduces Comprehensive Articles of Impeachment Against President Donald Trump.” September 24, 2026. Silver Bulletin. “2026 Midterm Election Forecast: Senate & House.” Updated September 25, 2026. House of Representatives roll call on tabling the Green impeachment articles, September 15, 2026.

Energy and Iran

AAA Daily Fuel Gauge reports, 2026. New York Times. “Average U.S. Gas Price Falls Below $4 After U.S.-Iran Agreement.” June 18, 2026. New York Times. “U.S. Average Gas Price Returns to $4 a Gallon as Iran Crisis Escalates.” July 20, 2026. Axios; CNBC; GasBuddy 2026 pump-price coverage of Hormuz risk.

Spiritual War, Giants, and Disclosure

The Holy Bible. Genesis 6; Numbers 13:33; Psalm 82; Ephesians 6:12. Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017. Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. 1975. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969. MachineGames / Bethesda. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) and The Order of Giants (2025).

Money, Corporations, and Permission Culture

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Federal Reserve and post-2008 easy-money literature; ESG engagement letters as political enforcement. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office public reports and the author’s prior dealings.

The Author’s Related Work

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Hoffman, Rich. Overman Warrior essays, 2024–2026, including the Pickle Rick / hammer-of-God series. richhoffmanbooks.com and overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

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September 21, 2026, College@Elm, Oxford, Ohio

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Immigration Is the Issue Because It Was Designed to Be

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What I Had

Purity Is Not a Strategy

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NOTES

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The Other Side of the Desk

Paperless Is the Point

AI Is Why They Are Nervous

Submission, Again

The Flag in the Garage

What the Numbers Are Hiding

Notes

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What the Word Actually Means

Edwards, Before We Had a Country

Same Names, Opposite Message

Who Lets the Adversary Run?

The Black Stone and the Unasked Question

Speech Is the Battlefield They Prefer

Two Things Worth Keeping

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I USED TO SIT IN A COMFORTABLE CHAIR AND CALL BALLS AND STRIKES

WE HAVE NOT HAD A SYSTEM THAT RESPECTED VOTERS

THE IMPEACHMENT HEADLINE IS NOT A LEGAL DOCUMENT. IT IS A TAILGATE

POLLS ARE A WEAPON. TURNOUT IS THE ONLY COUNTER

GAS, IRAN, AND THE MEN WHO LICK THE BOOTS IN THE ROOM

CHINA, HONG KONG, IRAN, AND A STRANGE CHANGE ON MY SITE

WRIGHT-PATT, DISCLOSURE, AND THE GIANT IN THE VIDEO GAME

THE FALLEN CONSPIRACY HAS MORE THAN ONE LETTERHEAD

GOD IS NOT RUNNING A CLOSED SET

WHAT I WANT INSTEAD OF ANOTHER DECADE OF HIGHLIGHT REELS

NOTES FOR LEADERS

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