Pip: Welcome to The Overmanwarrior — where the big questions get answered the way most people avoid answering them: in the dark, on a bicycle, on four hours of sleep.
Mara: Rich Hoffman is working through some genuinely large territory here — integrity as a non-counterfeitable currency, the Christian foundations of Western standards, and what happens when those standards get replaced with something printed on demand.
Pip: Let’s start with the whale’s belly.
The Currency of Integrity: Standards, History, and What Cannot Be Faked
Mara: The central claim is that integrity operates like a currency — but one that cannot be inflated by decree. The post frames this through a period of intense physical labor and reading, asking what holds value when institutional standards collapse.
Pip: And the method here is not metaphorical. The post describes sixteen-hour days, bicycle commutes, four a.m. reading windows — Diarmaid MacCulloch’s major histories consumed in short bursts between physical exhaustion. The hardship is part of the argument.
Mara: The post puts it directly: “Integrity functions as a currency more durable than dollars. A dollar is worth a dollar. In my experience, integrity multiplies that value roughly tenfold in practical terms — employment, trust, the capacity to build lasting things. You cannot fake it on paper the way central banks can expand the money supply.”
Pip: So the Nixon Shock of 1971 — the moment dollar convertibility to gold was suspended — becomes more than economic history. It is the template for what happens when any fixed standard gets removed.
Mara: Exactly. The post draws a direct parallel: without a recognizable measure, trust-based transactions become unreliable. Christianity, in this reading, historically supplied that measure in the West — the Commandments, the Golden Rule, the notion of individual conscience tethered to something outside institutional power.
Pip: Which is where MacCulloch’s sweeping histories come in — Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, The Reformation: A History, and Lower than the Angels. Three thousand years of documentation that the standard existed, shifted, got contested, and kept reasserting itself.
Mara: Luther at Worms in 1521 is the post’s exemplar: conscience over institutional authority. The Reformation, for all its later conflicts, helped embed individual responsibility and limits on unchecked power — patterns the post connects to the rule of law and voluntary association.
Pip: The counterexample is fiat substitutes — moral or financial — that assume authority can replace earned trust. The post points to Elon Musk’s operational style at SpaceX and Tesla as the positive case: sleeping on the floor, refusing to outsource the hard problems, producing systems capable of repeated engineered excellence.
Mara: And the post is clear this is not nostalgia. The closing line is precise: “the most valuable currency to accumulate is the one that cannot be counterfeited by decree.”
Pip: The whale spits you out with a message. The question is whether you deliver it.
Mara: The throughline is durable: standards that cannot be printed, earned through pressure rather than assigned by authority.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see what other fixed points are worth defending — and what it costs to hold them.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I write this for leadership people. Everyday readers can come along. I am glad when they do. But I am not aiming at a general audience that wants a latte and a soft ending. I am aiming at the people who have to make payroll, keep promises after a friend dies, and decide whether the universe still contains free will or only the appearance of it. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven.[1] That sentence is not a slogan I printed on a mug. It is the working title of the book I have been writing, and it is the only frame I have found that can hold Milton, a pickle on a workbench, a farting office pirate, the Holy Spirit, and the rivals who do not want any of that named.[2]
People have been kind about the AI conversations I have been having in public. I appreciate that. I think those conversations are one useful tool in a much older war. Human beings built tools because the rules of the fight have been lopsided against our race for a very long time. Through art, theology, and the various sciences we have tried to identify the problem and answer it. Artificial intelligence is one more hammer in that toolbox. I do not worship the hammer. I use it.
WHAT PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME ABOUT PARADISE LOST
The feedback I have been getting on The Politics of Heaven keeps rhyming with the same book. People who have read it tell me it reminds them of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Some of them say that as a compliment. Some of them say it as a warning. A traditional publisher hears “this is like Paradise Lost” and starts calculating how many buyers in a secular market want a twelve-book blank-verse argument about the Fall, pride, and the architecture of existence.[3] I think the comparison is a good thing. I also think the mechanisms of trade publishing have been too entrenched for a book this heavy-handed to walk in the front door without being asked to lose twenty pounds and smile more.[49]
I picked up a copy at my Barnes & Noble at Bridgewater Falls. It was the kind of edition that sits off the ordinary shelf, the one with the art that makes you hold the object like it still believes language can carry glory. I bought it because so many people had already put Milton’s name next to mine, and I wanted the poem in my hands while I decided what I believed about the Holy Spirit’s role in a blind man’s work.[33]
Milton’s poem is the famous English account of the Fall in the garden. It is also more than that. It is an attempt to “justify the ways of God to men.”[4] That is an insane sentence if you say it out loud in 2026. It is also the only sentence large enough for the problem. If you will not justify the ways of God, you will justify the ways of the house flipper, the compliance officer, the cartel in the sewer, or the spirit that does not want the garden mentioned at all.
MILTON WAS BLIND, DEFEATED, AND STILL WROTE THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXISTENCE
John Milton was completely blind when he composed Paradise Lost. He dictated it. He had already given his eyes to pamphlets and state papers for a republic that collapsed under him. After the Restoration he was a politically defeated man, lucky to keep his head.[5][6][7] People who write books like this have usually gone over the deep end a little. They are not sipping lattes on a yacht in a distant luxury destination. The work comes out of the school of hard knocks. The harder the knocks, the more some readers feel the heat in the page.
A lot of people say Milton was inspired by the Holy Spirit. I tend to agree. I also want to challenge the bubble version of that claim. The bubble version says the Spirit lives in a giant empty room with no rivals, no politics, no competing wills, and no interest in using ugly tools. That is not the Bible I read. That is not the world I have watched. And that is not the Milton I hear when Satan wakes up in a lake of fire and starts giving speeches that still recruit undergraduates.[8][9]
Milton revised the poem from ten books to twelve so it would stand next to Virgil.[3][59] That is not a decorating choice. That is a man who believed the English language could carry an epic the way Latin carried Rome. He gave English the word pandemonium for the capital of Hell.[34] He made Satan so persuasive in the early books that William Blake said Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it, and Shelley treated Satan as a moral being superior to the God Milton depicts.[8][9] I think Blake and Shelley were usefully wrong. They felt the heat and then baptized it. Milton made Satan alluring on purpose so the reader would feel the temptation and then watch the costume shrink. The fallen archangel ends as a serpent on his belly. The revolutionary becomes a reptile. That is not an accident of taste. That is a diagnosis.[10][11][36]
“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” — Paradise Lost 1.254–255
Stanley Fish argued that the poem first seduces you and then convicts you. You sympathize with the charismatic rebel. Then you watch pride eat him from the inside. “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”[11][36] That is not liberty. That is self-imprisonment with better speeches. I have sat across the hall from men who thought they were running a revolution because they had a fresh coat of paint and a compliance binder. Same energy. Smaller stage.
SUFFICIENT TO HAVE STOOD, THOUGH FREE TO FALL
The human half of the poem is where Milton gets modern. In Genesis the Fall is brief. In Paradise Lost it is a long, agonizing process of psychological manipulation and domestic drama.[13] Eve wants to work alone to prove her strength. Adam lets her. The serpent does not have to invent vanity. He only has to aim it. Milton’s God says the pair were “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”[12] If they had been puppets, their obedience would have meant nothing. Love that cannot refuse is not love. It is programming.
Eve reaches for knowledge and status. Adam is not deceived the same way. He chooses to fall because he cannot bear separation from her. That is a very expensive sentence. It means the first man preferred a human relationship to a divine command, and then had to live inside the wreck of both. The shame arrives. The blame arrives. Love turns into lust and then into argument. They only find their way back by reconciling with each other and then with God. The ending is not a crushed defeat. Michael shows them a vision of the future, the Messiah, the long road of redemption. They leave Eden hand in hand, wandering steps and slow.[42] Milton turned a story of loss into a story of potential. That is why Mary Shelley’s Creature reads the poem and cannot decide whether he is Adam or Satan.[14] That is why Pullman tried to flip the whole machine and call the Fall a graduation.[15]
C. S. Lewis warned readers not to confuse Satan’s charisma with Milton’s allegiance.[16] I agree with Lewis on the hierarchy. I do not agree that hierarchy settles the political question I keep asking. Milton wrote after his earthly republic failed. He had served Cromwell. He had argued that kings could be tried.[48] Then the king came back. The poem is doing more than Sunday school. It is a defeated revolutionary trying to understand authority, liberty, order, and why a just cause can still lose on Tuesday. Orlando Reade has traced how later revolutionaries kept stealing the poem for their own wars.[35] I am not stealing it for a party. I am using it as a map of a fight that did not end in 1660 and did not end in Eden.
WAS THE HOLY SPIRIT ALONE IN THE ROOM?
If you believe the Holy Spirit drove Milton’s hand, you already believe the Spirit works in history through damaged people. Good. Then do not stop the sentence halfway. Who said the Spirit was the only intelligence in the room? The Bible does not say that. Paul says we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers.[17] Psalm 82 is a courtroom, not a lullaby.[18] Daniel watches territorial princes delay an angel.[19] Revelation puts a war in heaven before it puts a cradle in Bethlehem.[43]
My book follows those breadcrumbs across a long stretch of time. I think The Politics of Heaven will be a series, not a pamphlet. The first volume has to identify the crumbs before it can feed you the loaf. I am not claiming I sit on an ivory throne and watch galaxies turn. I am claiming that a lot of respectable theology prefers a lonely God because a lonely God is easier to manage. A God with rivals requires politics. Politics requires sides. Sides require tools. Tools get splinters.
They loved a certain plastic Jesus in the 1960s when they needed him to bless a hippie lifestyle with loveless sex and primal behavior embraced as virtue. They did not want the message. They still do not want the God of creation to finish what He started. The hatred of Jesus that walks around in polite clothes is not a personality quirk. It is a tell. If there were no competing spirits, the tell would not be so consistent, so old, and so allergic to the actual claims of the text.
I have been shown things on purpose so I can talk like this. That sounds silly until you have lived inside a twenty-year stretch that felt almost ordinary and then watched the ordinary catch fire after you finished a manuscript. Since I completed The Politics of Heaven I have had nothing but trouble. Weird family friction. Job change. Time-sucking nonsense. I do not think that is a coincidence, and I also do not think coincidence is a Christian doctrine. If the elements I identified wanted to stay hidden in the order of our culture, they would prefer I write a nice book about leadership habits and leave heaven out of it.
PICKLE RICK IS NOT A JOKE. IT IS A METHOD.
On my fiftieth birthday my kids gave me a Pickle Rick figure. It used to sit on my desk at work. I do not talk about Rick and Morty as much as I watch it. It is my favorite show, and the grandpa is the character my family thinks I resemble.[20][21][58] I will take the comparison. Rick is the smartest being in that universe. He does not want to go to family therapy. So he turns himself into a pickle on the workbench to challenge himself: if I remove my own tools, can I still win?
The family leaves. It rains. A cat knocks him off the bench. He has no arms and no legs. He is a mouth and a pair of eyes. He rolls into the sewer. He bites the heads off rats, hijacks their biology, builds himself a filthy little warrior body, conquers the sewer, knocks over a drug cartel, and still ends up in therapy on time. He does not escape the appointment. He survives the condition. That is the part my family recognized. That is the part I recognized.
When I say I am going through something, Pickle Rick is the cleanest picture I have. I did not want to stay in a chair I no longer believed in. I also did not want to pretend I was above the fight. So I put myself in a hard spot on purpose. I wanted to measure how the universe responds when the old furniture gets carried out and the new owners start talking about compliance. I wanted to know whether God protects His tools or just uses them up. I wanted to know whether free will exists or whether the only choice a hammer gets is which nail it hits first.
People hear “I turned myself into a pickle” and think I am being cute. I am not being cute. I am describing a method. If hardship is coming anyway, you can at least choose the shape of it. Rick chose the pickle to dodge therapy and accidentally ran a graduate seminar in survival. I chose a season of stripped tools to see what was left when the title, the office, and the illusion of being indispensable were gone. The show is filthy. The theology is not. The theology is: do not confuse comfort with calling, and do not confuse a workbench with a grave.[47]
THE HAMMER OF GOD AND THE QUESTION I RESENT
I have said for a while that I feel like the hammer of the Holy Spirit. I do not always want the job. When I try not to be it, the reminder comes back in the grain of things: in the biological world of Earth, you are My hammer. I had about twenty years when day-to-day life was pretty good. Then the weather changed. I wrote the book. The book named a structure. The structure pushed back.
Here is the part that makes me mad, and I am not going to baptize the anger so it sounds pious. If God made the universe, why does He need a hammer that talks back? Why this tool? Why not a better one? The head of a hammer after a carpenter has been on a roof all day is not a glamorous object. Nobody envies the steel. They envy the house. I look at the pain that followed the manuscript and I ask the obvious question: why can’t You do a cleaner job of running Your own shop, God?
The answer that keeps coming back is the one I like least. You were not created for your own enjoyment. You may taste wine. You may love a grandchild’s chicken nugget day. Those are real pleasures. They are not the purpose. They are incentives and mercies inside an assignment. If you buy a hamster a wheel and a salt block, the hamster has pleasures. The hamster does not own the living room.[39]
Read the garden that way and a lot of sentimental religion falls over. We were put in Eden as stewards, image-bearers, a living toolset meant to extend heaven’s order into earth. The wrath in the garden is not the tantrum of a needy parent. It is the fury of a craftsman whose instrument started taking orders from the competition.[39] I view the human race as a way of copying God’s work on earth as it is in heaven. I think we were made the way we now make AI: as combat capacity against elements that do not love the garden. The disaster was not that we were tools. The disaster was that we were easily seduced off the task. That is Paradise Lost in one paragraph.
Isaiah can call Assyria a rod in the Lord’s hand and still hold Assyria responsible.[45] Paul can call a thorn a messenger and still plead three times for it to leave.[44] Hebrews can call hardship evidence of sonship rather than abandonment.[37] None of that makes the hammer feel better at 2 a.m. It does keep the hammer from lying about the job.
WE WERE NOT CREATED FOR OUR OWN PLEASURE
We do not exist for our own pleasure. We are given the opportunity to experience pleasure through taste and the rest of the senses. A good meal is not a sin. A good day with grandchildren is not a bribe I have to refuse. But we are not promised a comfortable life as the point of the contract. Pleasure is used to incentivize the right thing. It is not the right thing.
If you read the Bible as a prosperity brochure you will hate this essay, and you will hate Milton, and you will hate half the Psalms. The theme is not “God wants you on a yacht.” The theme is that suffering is in the plot because the plot is a war, not a spa.[38] Remove the suffering and you do not get a better book. You get a brochure. Satan suffers. Milton suffers. Christ suffers. The people who tell you the Holy Spirit only produces serenity have not read the sources they quote. Suffering is the key theme of life, but why?
I resent the binary when it is put crudely: suffer or serve. I have spent a career arguing about limited government, competent companies, and whether a shop can hit a number without lying. Those are debates with room in them. Then you get told the deeper game does not offer the same menu. You can choose a method of pain. You cannot choose a universe with no pain and still tell the truth about evil. I do not like those two options. I am not required to like them. I am required not to pretend a third option exists just because I have a personality.
BUSINESS FLIPPERS, COMPLIANCE AS A COSTUME, AND WHY I LEFT
I was a high-level senior executive at a very good company. I put a lot of love into that place for a long time. The owner passed away. I had made promises. Some members of that world I liked. Loyalty is a real thing. It is also how a man stays in a room after the room has changed species.
New buyers arrived. A new management group set up across the hall. I was the old furniture. They put up with me for the politics of the transition. I did not like their furniture either. I have used the house-flipper analogy for context. You have seen the type in every neighborhood. They buy a tired house, lay cheap carpet, spray a smell that means “new,” and sell at the top of the market. The same rot is still in the joists. There is a corporate version of that man. He distresses a business, especially a business coming out of COVID, puts a coat of process on it, talks about compliance, and tries to ride someone else’s years of work to an exit.[41]
I have sympathy for what a political and regulatory vise can do to a company. I have watched FirstEnergy’s public wreck and recognized the pattern of a firm pushed toward the brink by forces that are not all on the shop floor.[40] I have also watched incompetent men use “the last guys cut corners” as a story that excuses their inability to sell. The turtle calls the rabbit a criminal because the turtle cannot run. Then the turtle staffs the building with people who are good at hiding inside rules they did not write. Compliance becomes a costume for ineptitude. That costume works until the payroll has to be borrowed and the people who used to make the place go start asking for a door.
There was a man across from me I will not decorate. He was a low character kind of person. The kind of person who would whistle at a girl on the sidewalk and call it charm. Not biblically inclined. He sat there and farted through the day like the air belonged to him. Pirates used to be a romance my oldest daughter and I could share. I do not like pirates as much as I used to. These were pirates who wanted to steal wealth other people had built, and when they could not find the well they blamed the previous management for having known where the water was.
I made it easy for them to want me gone, and I was glad to go. They paid me a lot of money to leave. I took it. I wanted that message in the air. I know what it costs to perform at a certain level. I know what happens to a payroll when you replace operators with flippers. I am not going to let them loaf off my work and then baptize their slowness as virtue.
WHAT I TOLD THE PEOPLE WHO WANT THEIR JOBS BACK
Since I left, the place has struggled to hit the numbers they thought would be easy. People who used to work with me have been asking if I can give them a job. I told them the truth. I am not quite ready. Give me a month. Give me two. I am Pickle Rick right now. That means I am on the workbench without the old tools, testing what I can survive, and I am not going to hire a rescue party before I have a body again.
I did what I could for employees while I was there. I am not obligated to become the emergency exit for every person the new owners disappoint. I also know how this works. When you are the person who can still hit a number, every frightened staffer wants to climb onto your back. If you let them do it during the pickle phase, you never find out whether you can crawl through the sewer on your own. I will keep them in mind. I will not pretend I am already staffed for a company I have not rebuilt.
This is why I talk about swinging for the fences. I want there to be free will in the universe. I am testing the market to see if it exists. I suspect the deeper layer does not offer as much of it as American speeches claim. I still act as if a man can choose his method. God protects His tools from being eradicated because He still wants them in the box. That is not the same thing as promising the tool a beach.
JONATHAN EDWARDS, AI, AND THE SCHOOL OF AFFLICTION
One of the useful things about these machines is that if a dead man left a large enough paper trail, you can have a conversation that stays inside his mind instead of your fan fiction. Jonathan Edwards left that kind of trail.[22][23][52] I wanted Edwards and I wanted the Holy Spirit in the same room as Milton. I wanted to ask whether the Spirit acted alone when a blind, politically ruined man wrote the English language’s most ambitious poem, or whether competing spirits were trying to interrupt the work.
Edwards, as the machine rendered him from his actual body of writing, would not give me the lonely-bubble theory. He would give me spiritual warfare. Satan as the adversary. Affliction as the school. The resurrection as public victory rather than a mood.[24][54] When I pressed him on hope versus conviction, the distinction mattered. Hope can be a wish. Conviction says providence already governs the story and the empty tomb is not a pep talk. Milton did not write Paradise Lost as optimism. He wrote it as a claim about the government of all things.
I told Edwards—this will sound comic, and I meant it—that he ought to watch some Rick and Morty. The principle is older than Adult Swim. Hardship comes. A man may choose a posture inside it. Fire purifies gold. Affliction strips the earthly props so a man has to lean on God or collapse.[25][26] Milton’s blindness did not merely add atmosphere. It took away the last ordinary supports. My pickle season is a cruder picture of the same school. I do not like the school. I have stopped pretending I am only visiting.
Edwards would say our choice does not dethrone providence. I can live with that sentence if I am allowed the other half of it: providence does not make the flipper innocent, and it does not make the hammer mute. Augustine already knew the two cities grow in the same field.[27] Father Schall already knew heaven and hell have political consequences on earth.[28] I am not inventing a subject. I am refusing to keep it in the seminary basement while the shop floor gets looted.
SATAN’S RHETORIC AND THE RIVALS OF YAHWEH
Milton understood something Hollywood keeps cheapening. Evil is not only a cartoon villain. Evil is a rhetoric. It sounds like liberty. It sounds like injured merit. It sounds like “who wrote these rules?” It recruits the part of you that is tired of being a tool. Then it builds a capital named Pandemonium and calls the construction project freedom.
I do not think Yahweh, the Son, and the Spirit are alone in a big empty universe. I think the biblical writers already told us there is a contested field. I think some of what the age of disclosure is circling—UAP, non-human intelligence, the old folklore Jacques Vallée and John Keel tried to drag into the modern conversation—will not make sense if you insist that the only two categories are “space aliens” and “nothing.”[29][30][46] I like Keel. I like the older investigators who refused to flatten every light in the sky into either a sermon or a saucer. My book is an effort to put a political order back on the spirit side of the ledger. If heaven has politics, disclosure is not a press conference. It is a jurisdiction fight.
God may be the creator of this frame and still not be the mascot of the way we prefer to imagine Him. Scale is grotesque. Quantum and cosmic sizes make our arguments look like ants debating a cathedral. That does not make the ants imaginary. It makes their pride funny and their assignment still binding. I have used the image of cells in a body, worlds inside worlds, not because I want a new cult, but because the lonely-monarch model cannot explain the evidence the Bible itself keeps putting on the table.
NOAH’S ARK, THE GARDEN, AND THE BREADCRUMBS
I said on the podcast I would get to a wonderful and contested piece of news out of Turkey. I will not oversell it. The Durupınar Formation near Mount Ararat has been a boat-shaped argument since 1959. In 2026 an international team under Prof. Cenker Atila spent a field season there with radar, mapping, pottery fragments, and something like a thousand soil samples. Enthusiasts hear ark. Geologists hear hill. I hear a breadcrumb.[31][32]
I do not need a tourist ticket to believe Genesis. I also do not think it is an accident that the old stories keep growing physical arguments at the edge of respectable attention. The garden, the flood, the tower, the temple, the empty tomb—these are not self-help metaphors. They are claims about a contested earth. If you flatten them into Sunday-school felt boards, you will not understand why naming them in a book might make a man’s ordinary life get louder.[53]
AI AS A TOOL IN A LOPSIDED WAR
I said at the start that AI is a tool mankind created to fight a battle whose rules have been lopsided against us. I mean that. The people who want the tool banned and the people who want the tool worshiped are both useful to the wrong side. One leaves you unarmed. The other puts a new idol on the workbench and calls it a colleague. I use the machine the way I use a press or a spreadsheet. I do not let it baptize itself.
Talking to a reconstructed Jonathan Edwards is not necromancy. It is literacy plus memory. If the paper trail is thick enough, the conversation can be more honest than a living panel that only knows three quotations. That is one more way to steal fire back. The rivals of God have always preferred a dark information environment. Flood the zone with noise, mock the old books, keep Milton on the exam and out of the bloodstream. Then act surprised when a generation cannot tell a rebel from a savior.
I am not the Holy Spirit. I am not Milton. I am not Edwards. I am a man from Ohio who ran things, wrote things, and got tired of watching low-character people call their appetite a strategy.[57] If it is presumptuous to say I have been driven in a way that rhymes with the old driven men, the alternative is worse: that nothing is driving anyone and the sewer is all there is. I have looked at the sewer. I do not believe it is all there is.
FINDING PARADISE AGAIN IS THE WORK
The point is not to mourn a lost garden as if the story ended at the gate. Milton did not end there. Michael’s vision runs forward. The Messiah is not a footnote. Adam and Eve walk out together. The human story begins in motion, not in a museum of regret.[42]
Bringing paradise back under God’s glory, in the only sense a mortal can mean that sentence, means you have to fight the local characters. My way of fighting is not a costume and not a rant. It is refusal. I will not let pirates live off my numbers. I will not let compliance theater hide a dead sales curve. I will not let a secular publishing mood decide whether heaven is allowed to have politics. I will not let a lonely-Spirit theology talk me out of the war the Bible itself describes.
If you are selected to be a tool, you do the job. You can complain on the way. I have. Complaining is not the same as laying the hammer down. The strain in a man’s voice when he says this stuff is not unbelief. It is the sound of someone who expected fairness to be the same thing as purpose and found out it isn’t.
CHICK-FIL-A, GRANDCHILDREN, AND WHY THE SUFFERING IS WORTH IT
I do not want to leave this where the dark would prefer it to end. A Saturday afternoon at Bridgewater Falls, Paradise Lost in the bag, grandchildren in the car, chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A on the way home—that day made a lot of the rest of it worth carrying. I am not a monk. I am not a masochist. I am a grandfather who still thinks a good small day is part of the evidence. Pleasure is not the purpose. Pleasure is still a witness that the garden was real and that the world, even now, is not only sewer.
I am going to pickle Rick all the way through this stretch and see how it turns out. I think I know how it turns out. I think I am inclined to climb, and I think I am not permitted to choose my own demise even when I am angry at the assignment. That is either grace or a leash. On most days I can live with both words.
NOTES FOR LEADERS
If you lead anything—a company, a shop, a family, a church, a town—I would leave you with a short list, not a mood.
Do not confuse a fresh coat of paint with a resurrection. Flippers can smell like a new house. The joists still know.
Do not let compliance become your personality. Rules are tools. When they become a hiding place for people who cannot sell, build, or keep a promise, the rules have been captured.
Do not outsource your backbone to a publisher, a platform, or a committee. Heavy books have always had a hard time in soft rooms. That is not a verdict on the book.
Do not treat AI as either a god or a demon. Treat it as a tool in a fight that started before the tool existed.
Do not accept the lonely-Spirit model just because it is tidier. Read the war passages. Read Milton without becoming Satan’s intern. Read Edwards without becoming a museum.
Do not waste a pickle season. If you are going to be stripped of ordinary tools, learn what you still are. Then come back and hire the people who were worth hiring—on your terms, not on their panic.
In the age of disclosure, the press conference is the least important part of the event. The important part is whether you have a politics big enough for heaven, hell, the shop floor, and the garden that still has a gate. I wrote The Politics of Heaven because I got tired of watching serious people discuss power as if the only actors were human. They are not. They never were.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Dan Farah, dir., The Age of Disclosure (Farah Films, 2025), premiered at SXSW March 9, 2025; theatrical and Amazon Prime Video release November 21, 2025. The film presents testimony from more than thirty current and former U.S. officials concerning UAP and alleged non-human craft recovery programs.
[3] John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; rev. 12-book edition, 1674). Milton recast the original ten-book poem to mirror Virgil’s Aeneid.
[4] Milton, Paradise Lost 1.1–26. The invocation addresses both a heavenly Muse and the Spirit that “from the first / Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss.” Most Christian readers identify that Spirit with the Holy Spirit.
[5] William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
[6] Milton went completely blind by 1652. Paradise Lost was dictated to amanuenses, including his daughters. See Milton, Second Defence of the English People (1654), on blindness as inward sight rather than curse.
[7] Milton served the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues under the Council of State. After the Restoration of 1660 he was briefly imprisoned and narrowly escaped worse punishment as a defender of regicide.
[8] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93): “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
[9] Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840); and the preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820).
[10] Milton, Paradise Lost 1.254–255: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” And 1.263: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.”
[11] Milton, Paradise Lost 4.75: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”
[12] Milton, Paradise Lost 3.98–99: “I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”
[13] Genesis 3; compare Milton’s long domestic and psychological treatment of the Fall in Books 9–10 with the brevity of the biblical narrative.
[14] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). The Creature finds a copy of Paradise Lost and identifies with both Adam and Satan.
[15] Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000), an explicit inversion of Milton in which the “Fall” is treated as the birth of consciousness.
[16] C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). Lewis argues that Romantic sympathy for Satan misreads Milton’s hierarchical cosmos.
[17] Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (KJV)
[18] Psalm 82; Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls / LXX reading); Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015).
[19] Daniel 10:13, 20–21, on the “prince of Persia” and the “prince of Grecia” as territorial spiritual powers opposed to Michael.
[20] “Pickle Rick,” Rick and Morty, season 3, episode 3, written by Jessica Gao, directed by Anthony Chun, first broadcast Adult Swim, August 6, 2017.
[21] The figurine described is the popular Pickle Rick merchandising line associated with Adult Swim / Cartoon Network’s Rick and Morty.
[22] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); Freedom of the Will (1754); “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741).
[23] Thomas Nelson, The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: NKJV, general editor Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026).
[24] Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
[25] Job 23:10; 1 Peter 1:6–7; Malachi 3:2–3 on affliction as refinement.
[26] Romans 8:28; Edwards’s doctrine of providence as meticulous, not merely general.
[27] Augustine, The City of God, Books XIV–XIX, on the interwoven cities of God and man.
[28] James V. Schall, S.J., The Politics of Heaven and Hell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984; Ignatius Press reprint).
[29] John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975); Operation Trojan Horse (1970). Keel treated many “UFO” events as interdimensional and folkloric rather than simply extraterrestrial.
[30] Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969); Dimensions (1988); Wonders in the Sky (2009).
[31] The Durupınar Formation near Doğubayazıt, Ağrı Province, Turkey, identified in 1959 by Capt. İlhan Durupınar. 2026 field season led by Prof. Cenker Atila, Sivas Cumhuriyet University, with Noah’s Ark Scans and Bakhtar Research radar work. Pottery fragments and roughly 1,000 soil samples were reported; identification as Noah’s Ark remains unproven and is disputed by many geologists.
[32] Genesis 6–9; 2 Peter 2:5; Hebrews 11:7.
[33] Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions and related illustrated reprints of Paradise Lost; the Bridgewater Falls location is the Barnes & Noble at Bridgewater Falls, Miami Township / Monroe, Ohio.
[34] Milton coined or popularized “pandemonium” (Paradise Lost 1.756) as the capital of Hell.
[35] Orlando Reade, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost (London: Jonathan Cape / Princeton University Press, 2024).
[36] Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; 2nd ed. Harvard University Press, 1997). Fish argues Milton first seduces the reader into Satan’s rhetoric and then convicts the reader.
[37] Hebrews 12:5–11 on discipline as evidence of sonship, not abandonment.
[38] Matthew 10:34–39; Luke 12:49–53. The Gospels do not present discipleship as a yacht.
[39] Colossians 1:16; John 1:1–3; Genesis 1:26–28 on human beings as image-bearing stewards, not pets in a luxury habitat.
[40] FirstEnergy Corp. entered Chapter 11 in 2023 amid the Ohio House Bill 6 scandal and related investigations; the case is cited here as a public example of how a large enterprise can be pushed into financial peril by politics, regulation, and internal failure—not as a claim about the author’s employment.
[41] On “house flipper” private-equity and roll-up patterns in middle-market manufacturing after COVID-19, see general reporting in The Wall Street Journal and Private Equity International, 2021–2025.
[42] Milton, Paradise Lost 12.641–649: Adam and Eve leave Eden “hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow.”
[43] Revelation 12:7–12; the war in heaven as the larger frame Milton dramatizes in Books 5–6.
[44] 2 Corinthians 12:7–10; Paul’s thorn and strength in weakness.
[45] Isaiah 10:5, 15 on Assyria as the rod and axe in the Lord’s hand—an instrument that still remains accountable.
[46] The phrase “age of disclosure” is used both as the title of Farah’s 2025 film and, more broadly, for the post-2017 public UAP turn that followed the New York Times AATIP reporting and the creation of AARO.
[47] Helene Wecker and others have noted the afterlife of Milton’s Satan in modern anti-hero culture; the point here is cultural, not a claim that Adult Swim intended a Milton commentary.
[48] Cromwell’s government and Milton’s political prose: Areopagitica (1644); The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649); Eikonoklastes (1649).
[49] On traditional publishing’s risk aversion toward heavy theological-political manuscripts, see industry reporting in Publishers Weekly and the decline of midlist nonfiction lists after 2010.
[50] Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[52] Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737); A History of the Work of Redemption (posthumous).
[53] G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004).
[54] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), on resurrection as public victory rather than private optimism.
[55] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942), on bureaucratic evil and the unspectacular methods of spiritual opposition.
[56] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973–78), on ideology as a lie that requires human instruments.
[57] Middletown / Warren and Butler Counties, Ohio, as the geographic frame of the author’s public writing and business life.
[58] Adult Swim / Williams Street, Rick and Morty created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (2013– ).
[59] Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006). Milton’s twelve-book revision deliberately courts comparison with Rome’s national epic.
[60] Homer, Iliad and Odyssey. Milton places himself in the line of blind bards: “blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides” (Paradise Lost 3.35).
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
This list is longer than a polite essay needs. That is the point. If you are going to argue about heaven’s politics you should know the shelf, not three quotations.
Scripture and Classical Theology
The Holy Bible. King James Version; New King James Version. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Especially Books XIV–XIX. Beale, G. K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004. Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017. Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945. Schall, James V. The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope. New York: HarperOne, 2008. Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.
Milton and the Afterlife of Paradise Lost
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667. Revised twelve-book edition, 1674. Milton, John. Areopagitica. 1644. Milton, John. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. 1649. Milton, John. Second Defence of the English People. 1654. Campbell, Gordon, and Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 1967. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Fowler, Alastair, ed. Milton: Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1998. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942. Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Parker, William Riley. Milton: A Biography. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Quint, David. “Things Invisible to Mortal Sight”: Light, Vision, and the Unity of Book 3 of Paradise Lost. Modern Language Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2010). Reade, Orlando. What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost. London: Jonathan Cape, 2024. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. c. 1790–93. Including Blake’s later watercolors for Paradise Lost. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. Written 1821; published 1840.
Edwards, Awakening, and Providence
Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737. Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Sermon preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746. Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754. WJE vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Edwards, Jonathan. A History of the Work of Redemption. Posthumous. Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: NKJV. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026. Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Spiritual Warfare, Unseen Realm, and Disclosure
Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. Farah Films, 2025. SXSW premiere March 9, 2025; Prime Video November 21, 2025. Keel, John A. Operation Trojan Horse. New York: Putnam, 1970. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969. Vallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988. Vallée, Jacques, and Chris Aubeck. Wonders in the Sky. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. Elizondo, Luis. Forthcoming and prior public testimony associated with AATIP and the disclosure debate, 2017–2026. New York Times. Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean, and Ralph Blumenthal. “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” December 16, 2017. Atila, Cenker, and collaborators. 2026 Durupınar Formation field season reporting, Sivas Cumhuriyet University / Noah’s Ark Scans / Bakhtar Research radar deployment. Identification of the formation as Noah’s Ark remains unproven.
Literature, Myth, and Modern Retellings
Homer. Iliad and Odyssey. Virgil. Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 2006. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Pullman, Philip. His Dark Materials. 3 vols. 1995–2000. Gao, Jessica, writer. “Pickle Rick.” Rick and Morty, season 3, episode 3. Adult Swim, August 6, 2017. Harmon, Dan, and Justin Roiland, creators. Rick and Morty. Adult Swim, 2013– . Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. 1973–1978.
Business, Power, and the Shop Floor
Reporting on post-COVID middle-market acquisitions, add-on roll-ups, and operational distress. The Wall Street Journal; Private Equity International, 2021–2025. Public record of FirstEnergy Corp. restructuring and the Ohio House Bill 6 investigations, 2020–2024. Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Prior volume in the author’s leadership line.
The Author’s Related Work
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming. Working essays serialized at richhoffmanbooks.com and overmanwarrior.wordpress.com. Hoffman, Rich. “Why I Had an AI Conversation with Jonathan Edwards.” 2026. Hoffman, Rich. “Is God an Idiot: I don’t want to serve a king; I want allies who want to fight and defeat a vast evil.” 2026. Hoffman, Rich. “The Twenty-Dollar Jar I Left on My Desk.” 2026. Hoffman, Rich. “Joseph’s Cup: What a Coffee-Shop Sign Showed Me About How Evil Actually Works.” 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been living inside a new Bible. Not a novelty Bible. Not one of those thin inspirational editions that treat Scripture like a greeting card. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, New King James Version, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson in August of 2026. I cannot say enough about it. The notes are Edwards. The sermons sit next to the text. The Resolutions are there. The miscellany system is explained so a man can actually work the way Edwards worked. Every time I pick up a different Bible, I change perspective a little. This one changed it a lot.
I was going through it, and I couldn’t help thinking about a miracle that doesn’t get preached the way it should. Not only the crucifixion. Not only the empty tomb. The miracle that Christianity emerged at all. That the word got out. That a Jewish movement in a backwater of the Roman Empire became the operating system of Western civilization. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of the spiritual, but as the way the spiritual actually conquered. What benefit did Christianity bring to the race and to civilization? Magnificent. And I keep thinking, reading Edwards, how many movements rose and fell that we will never know about because the writing did not survive, or it is still buried in the desert waiting to be discovered. We know Christianity because it was documented, scaled, and defended by men who understood value.
King Charles, the Quran, and Knowing Where You Are
I saw King Charles in England talking about the holy book of the Quran, how we have to respect it, all that progressive mantra that is designed to undo Western civilization. You need to know where you are. You need to know your own nation’s history. I have read the Quran for years. I cannot say there is anything in any version I’ve read that has the spiritual and intellectual merit I get from Edwards. Edwards is a good writer. He is a great mind under pressure. He is the kind of intelligence that contemplates large ideas and then puts them into a form a civilization can use. If you want to know what the United States began as—a Christian nation in the serious sense, not the slogan sense—this Bible is the right tool.
Somebody asked me if I was working for the publisher because I have been pushing this volume so hard. I am not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years, decades of work behind them, putting Edwards next to the text so a man in 2026 can buy it on the open market and think. How do you make a living long enough to produce something intelligent? How do you buy a hamburger and still have thousands of hours left to put a mind like Edwards in one place? That question is not small. It is the same question Paul answered with a needle and goat hair.
Paul Was a Businessman. That is why we still have Christianity.
My favorite book in the Bible is Ephesians. Paul wrote it. I think a lot of people confuse Paul with John. John wrote Revelation. John is the one who survived—tradition says they tried to boil him and he lived, and then he wrote. They killed Paul in Rome, most likely sometime between 64 and 67. People mix the two up. They should not. John is the seer. Paul is the scaler.
Paul came in late. He was against Jesus, and then he was for Jesus. Many people in the world might find themselves in that place. He was a Pharisee, educated, and a tentmaker. The original disciples, when they were still following Jesus around Galilee, were mostly fishermen. Dirt poor. I tend to see that first circle as an early form of communal living—they held things in common, lived off shared provision, and took care of their own. Historians generally see the Jerusalem church in Acts as voluntary generosity inside a tight, persecuted community, not a formal communist system. It was “we take care of our own,” not a political ideology. And it did not last as a model. It could not scale.
Paul’s idea came from a businessman. Because of Paul, we still have Christianity today. That is not a slight against Peter or James or John. It is an observation about how movements survive. The dramatic turn—from hunting the church to becoming its biggest champion after the Damascus Road—matters. His background as a tentmaker and an educated Pharisee gave him a different toolkit than the original disciples. He could travel. He could talk to Gentiles. He could write letters that functioned as operating manuals. Without the missionary journeys and without letters like Ephesians, Christianity might have stayed a small Jewish sect. He brought structure, theology, and a scalable vision.
Financial Independence Is Not a Side Note. It Is the Strategy.
The part of Paul that made him effective with people initially against the movement is the part churches don’t like to talk about on Sunday. He did not have to live off a handout. He could be bold, even if he went a little over the edge, because he was financially independent enough from his trade to go against the grain and reshape a movement. That personal independence—having a trade, having a bank account from business days—gave him latitude. Everybody else emphasized martyrdom. Martyrdom is remembered. Martyrdom does not stay around long enough, or hold enough social influence, to make people listen after the body is gone. They were easily disposed of, crucified, written into history as a memento. It takes more than that to make a movement work.
Paul knew how to scale ideas. Ephesians is the proof. He supported himself while traveling and preaching, so he wasn’t as vulnerable to local pressure or to needing one house to feed him. That freedom let him be bolder in the message and push boundaries without worrying about immediate survival. The other apostles were deeply rooted in the Jewish context. Paul was building something that could outlast any single leader. The shift from “follow me to death” to “this truth can transform anyone, anywhere” is the difference between a local witness and a civilization.
If Paul had never converted, I think the movement would have fizzled. The Roman world was full of rebellions and religious groups we have never even heard of. Without his organizational skill and his ability to take the message beyond Jewish circles, Christianity likely stays small, localized, and eventually fades like the rest. His conversion and his strategic vision gave him a unique angle on the bigger picture. I wonder how many political efforts to overthrow or outlast Rome rose and fell that we will never know about. Paul would have been one of them if he had stayed Saul.
Ephesians 6:12 and the Politics of Heaven
My favorite verse is Ephesians 6:12. I love that line because it is a truth revealed to a mind under tremendous pressure, telling the grim reality of the human race. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Paul is preaching monotheism against the tides of the day, against a Roman world that had many gods, and he comes up with the idea that the secret rulers of existence are not the men in front of you. Thank goodness he had the creative nerve to write it that way.
I recognize that verse because I’ve learned it the hard way. The true reality of the universe is that good people end up hurting each other while chasing things that don’t matter, and the reason isn’t always the name on the driver’s license. It is the entities behind the people. Our mistake is stopping at Tim or Bob or Bill. I don’t remember names the way other people want me to. I care about the principalities that climb into bodies and drive them. The flesh-and-blood parts—whose nose looks like the father, whose hair color came from the great-grandfather—mean little to me. The politics of the principality does.
I have a granddaughter a few years old. I watch her walk, run, pick things up, touch the world, learn who is important and who is not. Those bonds will go through her entire life—parents, uncles, cousins, grandparents—even when she is forty or fifty. She is writing those meetings into her experience as she learns. We all go through that. But what was the human being before the human being? What is a person’s spiritual essence before it manifests in flesh and blood? What is the politics of that principality? That is the kind of thing I think about. A personality there is not rooted only in genetic material. We are not always what we are as defined by the human experience. We are what we are whether it manifests or not.
When Does the Principality Enter the World?
People want a clean answer on conception, quickening, birth. I think the principalities are already at work when a mother and father find themselves wanting to form a union to produce a child. They either will themselves into the world or wield the world toward its demise. Human beings create political systems that reflect that dependency because we learned to become flesh, and we rarely see the principal active behind the desire. We are stuck seeing the physical side. The human experience starts to feel like actors on a stage, with invisible directors.
That is why the incarnation is such a radical move. God of the universe taking form as a human being, the Spirit moving through people—if you only watch flesh, it looks strange. If you watch principalities, it looks like the only way to break through hidden influences and meet us in the middle of the mess. Human beings are not the whole problem. The forces that drive the human being are. If you measure your value only by how much you sacrifice yourself to other human beings, you can feed the wrong powers and call it virtue. I have an awful lot of friends in that place. To be nice, I will put my wife in that category. She is a person who will sacrifice as a mother, as a wife, as a community member, so that something good can happen. A lot of people judge their value in the world by what they are willing to give up. Hidden power resides behind the efforts of everything we interact with. You have to know what you are serving.
Paul and the Apostles Did Not Get Along. That Is Why It Worked.
Christianity did not spread as a locked-arm kumbaya. Paul fought the original apostles. The clashes were open. Peter was vocal. The question of Gentiles, purity, who is in and who is out—those were not polite committee meetings. It is amazing Christianity even made it. The Jerusalem circle wanted purity. Keep the impure out. Paul wanted scale. Include the nations. If the purity party had won clean, there would have been no movement that could leave Judea. There would have been no Edwards. There would have been no Washington. There would have been no Lincoln. Christianity does not break out of being a Jewish sect without Paul’s vision for the Gentile world.
I mentioned Nancy Nix in the video because that is how this works in real life. I was at Fort Necessity, walking around the bookstore outside the theater, and she called. She represents Republican politics in my community in Butler County, Ohio. We do not talk every five seconds. We talk a good deal. We think alike about a lot of things. She was having a particular problem—kids not playing well in the sandbox, twenty-five people in a room with twenty-five backgrounds and twenty-five ideas of right and wrong, and you have to point them in one direction. That is the same problem Paul had. How do you bring people together and make a movement voters, or believers, can actually trust? Real movements are made in that mess. Not by people who only keep the circle pure. By people who can stand the friction and still build.
Fort Necessity, Mount Vernon, Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg
If Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, my wife and I had Fort Necessity on a wrong turn. We were headed toward Washington. We took a wrong turn onto the National Road with the camper. Hard to turn a camper around in the mountains. We were too far in to go back, so we kept going and drove right by Necessity. I pulled into the big parking lot to turn around. I went back into the camper for a Mello Yello. She said we were already an hour and a half off schedule; we were here- why not go into the museum? So we did. March or April 2026. Cool. Not crowded. A Wednesday afternoon, and we had the place to ourselves. I walked the ground where a young George Washington learned what command costs.
A few months later the Washington movie came out, and we went to see it. I was already thinking about what made Washington Washington. The Great Awakening—the idea of a people who could stand up against the mother country—was coming out of churches. Edwards was in the air those men breathed. Then the same year I got to Mount Vernon, to the grave where Washington and Martha overlook the Potomac, into the house, into the room. I have been interested in the influence on his day-to-day life. Edwards is one of those influences. I was thinking about Edwards before this Bible existed. Then this is the year they put the Study Bible together. That is not an accident in my calendar.
A couple of days after Necessity, my friend Nancy called while I was in that library. A couple of days after that, my wife and I were in Gettysburg. We had already been in Washington. We took a whole day for Ford’s Theatre. I stood at the door of the box Booth walked through to shoot Lincoln in the back of the head. I had been at the White House that morning. Assassination attempts on Trump were in my head—the Butler, Pennsylvania picture, blood down the face. I was ready to leave and get a sandwich. My wife wanted to go across the street to see where Lincoln had died. We had made friends with a tour guide, a Park Service man who gives the presentation on stage. He saw we were abnormally interested. He took us to the Petersen House, to the room where Lincoln died. A little chair sat by the bed. I sat there a long time. No ghosts. A good museum. A man who works that room every day and understood where I was.
I sat there thinking what Lincoln was thinking as he bled out. I think he was thinking about the creation of the United States. I think he was thinking about the men who had already given their lives. I think the moral language in his pocket went back through the Awakening to Edwards. Then we spent days on the Gettysburg field with the RV. Maps. Day one, day two, day three. Temperature. What the soldiers felt like. I had this overwhelming thought that Edwards—the sermons, the memos of the Awakening in a man’s kit—helped Union soldiers hold together long enough to win, and Lincoln put everything on that hold. Day three. Cemetery Ridge. A republic built on Christian values against an aristocracy that still wanted Europe’s old arrangement. That does not happen without a moral backbone. That backbone does not happen without Edwards. Edwards does not happen in the form that made America without a Christianity that could already scale. That Christianity does not happen without Paul.
Trump Is a Lot Like Paul
A lot of people in the political circles I run in are asking what we are supposed to be doing. Trump has been in the White House. He has held Bibles. He has tried to bring old tradition back into the public eye. I don’t know that Trump is “into it” the way a seminary man is. He is a businessman. In many ways, Trump is a lot like Paul. We were given a second chance because a man with a messy former life and a real business ability sat Christians and conservatives down at a table of political power they would not have had otherwise. Charlie Kirk and a lot of others got a larger platform because of that. Things are better because of it. It does not always come in the package you would have designed on a Sunday morning. Paul did not either.
Both used a practical scaling mindset. Neither arrived as the saint the purity party wanted. Both made the movement larger than the room that wanted to keep it small. That is the comparison. I catch some of that same spirit in Edwards—the hope in the sermons that God would walk with a people onto the battlefields of life and that justice would be served. There are always difficulties. A remnant will always rather dismantle what was built than build on it. I am saying no. We need to build on what we built here and continue it productively.
The Second Great Awakening Will Not Come From Washington
We always focus on Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Adams. What made them? The first Great Awakening made the moral weather they walked through. A Second Great Awakening will not come from the Trump administration as a program. The administration can facilitate space. It cannot preach it. It has to come from churches and Bibles and men who will talk in public. Putting this Edwards Bible together helps people recover the first so we can form another.
What does a modern awakening look like? A lot of people despise AI. They do not like Elon Musk. They think we are headed for Age of Ultron, Tony Stark trying to fix the world and creating new problems. I am having a public conversation with a human-created intelligence on purpose. That does not mean we end up the villain. I think the next awakening is going to use the technology we created to serve the old fire—real-time reference, real-time argument, people able to spy on a serious conversation from their own house at whatever hour they can stand it. Churches on Sunday give you the names and the memorize-the-event version. They do not give you the psychology of why the thing worked. That is why this conversation matters.
The biggest threat to the legacy is not a missile. It is an anti-business movement aimed at the root of what Paul brought into Christianity: a sense of value, then that value carried into a relationship with the everlasting, with the principalities beyond flesh and blood. When people attack business and capital in Western culture, they are often attacking the mechanism that let Christianity endure long enough to shape law, ethics, and institutions. Paul’s business mindset did not just help Christianity. It shaped the DNA of a civilization that understood productivity and serving others as spiritual work. That came from a tentmaker who refused to live only on other people’s tables.
What I Want People to Take From This
Paul is why Christianity is a world force and not a forgotten Judean faction. Edwards is a large reason we have an America that could produce Washington and Lincoln. Washington and Lincoln are why a republic is left to defend.
I don’t think Jesus would say, “Take joy in melting their faces.” I think Jesus would do the thing that got Him in trouble: preach anyway, against the warnings, against the purity party, against the empire. Paul took that and made it travel. Edwards took that and made it American. We are due to take it again.
In the age of disclosure, you must understand the politics of heaven. Start with Paul. Start with Edwards.
Notes
1. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Study notes drawn from Edwards’s works; includes the Resolutions, an introduction to the Miscellanies note-taking system, and essays on Edwards’s theology and the First Great Awakening. Works of Jonathan Edwards are freely available at edwards.yale.edu.
2. Acts 18:2–3 identifies Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla as tentmakers (Greek skēnopoios). Cilicia, Paul’s home region, was known for cilicium, goat-hair cloth used in tents. Paul sometimes refused congregational support so the gospel would not look like a sales pitch (1 Corinthians 9; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; Acts 20:33–35).
3. Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–35 describe voluntary sharing in the Jerusalem church. Most historians treat this as emergency generosity in a persecuted minority, not a transferable political economy. The model does not govern later Pauline congregations.
4. Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV): “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Parallel language appears in Ephesians 1:21, 3:10; Colossians 1:16, 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.
5. Early tradition places Paul’s martyrdom in Rome under Nero, commonly dated 64–67. The New Testament does not narrate the death. John of Patmos, associated by church tradition with the apostle John, is the figure tied to Revelation and to survival of attempted execution.
6. Conflicts over Gentile inclusion are recorded in Acts 15 and Galatians 2. Paul’s public confrontation with Peter at Antioch is one of the clearest internal fractures in the earliest movement.
7. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, author of A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and the Enfield sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). The First Great Awakening (roughly 1734–1745) created the first intercolonial religious public in British America.
8. Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Farmington, Pennsylvania, marks Washington’s 1754 defeat in the opening of the French and Indian War. Mount Vernon; Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House in Washington, D.C.; Gettysburg National Military Park.
9. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002), traces the theological line from the Awakening through the early republic and the Civil War era. Influence is cultural and moral, not a claim that Edwards sat in Lincoln’s cabinet.
10. The comparison of Trump to Paul is analogical: a commercially formed outsider who enlarges a religious-political coalition the purity faction would have kept small. It is not a claim of apostleship.
Bibliography
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
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.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior is the rare corner of the internet where a business meeting leads directly to Ephesians, Augustine, and the Book of Enoch — and somehow that is the logical progression.
Mara: Rich Hoffman is doing something specific here: taking Paul’s language about principalities and powers and arguing it describes a political operation, not just a spiritual metaphor. Let’s start with what that actually means in practice.
Principalities and Powers: The War Behind the Room
Pip: The question at the center of this piece is whether evil has a structure — not a mood, not a vibe, but an actual operating method. The Ephesians 6:12 framework is the entry point, and the claim is that it belongs in political analysis, not just Sunday school.
Mara: The post grounds that claim in the Greek. The New Testament word behind “principalities” is archai — rulers, first things, authorities at the head of an order — almost always paired with exousiai, powers, the right to act. And then the post lands on this: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood. This is a political statement, not a religious one.”
Pip: So the sentence Paul wrote to a church in Ephesus is being read as a theory of power — who controls whom, through whom, toward what end. That reframing is doing a lot of work.
Mara: It is. And the post doesn’t stay abstract. The argument moves into personal testimony: two men, unrelated, encountered in separate business settings close together in time, running what reads as the same script. Same language, same pressure, same intent. The image used is a driver getting out of one car and into another — the vehicle changed, the driver did not.
Pip: Which is either a genuinely unsettling pattern recognition or the most theologically sophisticated way anyone has ever described a bad week of meetings.
Mara: The post is careful to flag that this is testimony, not a lab result. What it does argue is that vacant people — those who, as The Politics of Heaven puts it, have hollowed out the self through drink, painkillers, or the erasure of identity — are easier to occupy than people who know their own name. The susceptibility question, not a judgment on any individual.
Mara: The Book of Enoch enters here as more than a footnote. Jude quotes Enoch. Genesis 6 leaves the door open. Timothy Alberino’s work, including his conversation with Glenn Beck on episode 274 of Beck’s podcast, brought the Watchers narrative — hybridizing the human, rewriting the creature — to an audience well outside fringe forums. The post notes that this is no longer a subject easy to exile with a laugh track.
Pip: Augustine makes the case even older. In City of God, Book XV, he reports a molar found at Utica so large it could have been cut into a hundred ordinary teeth. Fifth-century field notes, not a modern osteology paper — but the point is that the tradition of a larger, older world runs through the canon, through Goliath, through Og’s bed, through “also after that” in Genesis 6:4.
Mara: And Job ties it back to the political frame. Job is described here as a courtroom text: Satan presents himself, asks permission to wreck a loyal servant, and the motive is explicitly to prove that worship is a transaction. The post draws the line directly — “Principalities do not need to win a show of hands if they can unmake the image they hate.”
Pip: The closing argument is that silence is a concession. The field isn’t quiet just because the water receded.
Mara: And that the tools — including AI, including this kind of writing — are neutral. The point, as the post puts it, is the heart behind the instrument.
Pip: What stays with me is the Job framing — evil as a long political project of erosion, not a horror-movie event.
Mara: That thread runs through everything here: the war is named so it can be engaged. More from The Overmanwarrior next time.
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.
After the mistrial of Lindsay Clancy today, people are wondering a lot about evil, which I just so happen to spend a lot of time talking about. So let’s set some ground rules here and talk about what makes evil work in the world so that we can prepare ourselves to defeat it. Emphatically! And ruthlessly. Let’s begin. When we see a jury of our peers unable to see right from wrong, we have to understand the strategy of evil to weaken the resolve of jurors, the manipulations of lawyers, and the antics of political persuasion, and ultimately, the power of government. I would suggest, in addition to this text, that you watch this video. It has a lot of different kinds of things in it.
What the Word Actually Means
The New Testament word behind “principalities” is archai, rulers, first things, authorities at the head of an order. It is almost always paired with exousiai, powers, the right to act. In Ephesians 6:12 Paul adds two more phrases: the kosmokratores of this darkness, world-rulers, and the pneumatika of wickedness in the heavenly places. The sentence is built to take the fight off the sidewalk. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.”¹. This is a political statement, not a religious one. And I will likely spend the next 20 years of my life proving it and defining it for people. But it’s quite a statement, and a big, major political problem.
Colossians 1:16 says thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers were created through Christ and for Him. The vocabulary is larger than demons. It can name any organized spiritual authority, loyal or rebel. In the spiritual-warfare conversations most people know, the word has narrowed in scope. Principalities are treated as territorial, as the unseen administration behind nations, systems, and persons. I use the word that way because that is how the encounter presented itself. I do not use it as a slogan. “Satan is working” is a bumper sticker. The question is the work. Against whom. Through whom. Toward what political end.
Our eyes were built for human scale. They miss the microbe and the principality. That is not an argument that the unseen is imaginary. It is an argument that the instrument is limited. I would not take a courtroom’s word that a virus does not exist because the jury cannot see it.
I Met the Same Character in Two Different People
I met a personality recently. I met it in two people, in two different business settings, close enough in time that I could not pretend I was imagining a mood. The bodies were unrelated. The personality was not. Same language. Same pressure. This thing made sure to let me know it was the same “thing” in two different bodies. It was very specific to me almost with a wink and a nod. Same intent. Same way of coming at the conversation. If you have ever watched a driver get out of one car and into another and keep the same hands on the wheel, you know the feeling. The vehicle changed. The driver did not.²
I have written in The Politics of Heaven that people who drink hard, who live on painkillers, who hollow out the pronoun I, surrender the vehicle they live in. I do not mean every drinker is possessed. I mean an empty house is easier to occupy than a house with a resident who knows his own name. The two men I am talking about were not sophisticated. They were not formidable on their own. They were vacant enough to be used. Both had the same kind of tattoo on the inner arm, the kind you can cover with a sleeve in a professional room and flash when the Monday-night crowd wants to know you are still one of the rebels at BW3s half drunk by the second quarter of a Monday Night Football game. I do not think the ink is the spirit. I think the ink, in those cases, was a marker of a type: the man who wants the title of an executive and the alibi of a slob, who will fold under peer pressure, who has already practiced not being fully present in his own skin.³
If you have a tattoo on the inside of your arm and you are reading this to see whether I just called you evil, I did not. Sit with the other layer. When the lights are out, what do you rehearse in your head? That is the question I am asking about susceptibility, not about ink.
I have seen the same signature in places that could not have compared notes. A café. A terminal. Tokyo, Paris, Heathrow. A young waitress who has no idea she is being used, who thinks she is only tired and behind on a car payment, and then another person on another continent running the same play against the same target. The temptation is not always lust. Sometimes it is the attempt to get a man to blow up his public life so the rest of his work becomes easy to dismiss. That is a political move. It is not a horror-movie fog. It is an operation.
The Book of Enoch Is No Longer a Basement Subject
Jude quotes Enoch. Genesis 6 leaves the door open rather than closing it. The Book of the Watchers, preserved in 1 Enoch and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, tells the story the short biblical verses assume the reader already knows: two hundred Watchers conspire, descend, take wives from the daughters of men, beget the giants, and teach what heaven had not authorized.⁴ The text is not in most Protestant canons. It is nothing. A book the New Testament can cite is a book a serious reader of the Bible has to account for.
Timothy Alberino has been making that case for years in Birthright and in his commentary on Enoch. In late 2025, he sat down with Glenn Beck on episode 274 of the podcast, and the conversation moved from Genesis 6 to the Watchers to transhumanism in front of an audience that does not live on fringe forums.⁵ Ten years ago, this was a few tens of thousands of people online. I have been in the subject more than twenty years. Millions can now hear the same file. That does not make every inference true. It does mean the subject is no longer easy to exile with a laugh track.
Alberino’s warning about “Nephilim 2.0” is not that a chatbot is a demon. It is that the old pattern—hybridizing the human, seizing Adam’s brief, rewriting the creature so the Cross no longer applies to it—can return as gene editing, machine merger, and the dream of becoming an immortal without God. Fire is not evil. The heart that uses fire to burn a village is. I use AI as a tool on this show. I do not think the tool is the Watcher. I think the Watcher would be happy to have a new kind of empty vessel.
Augustine, Giants, and What the Flood Did Not Wash Away
City of God is one of the books I go back to a lot and I absolutely love it. I love it so much so that if I wasn’t already married to my wife, I’d marry it!. It takes time. It is worth the time. Augustine is writing as Rome is coming apart and as Christianity is being asked to explain why the city of man is not the City of God. In Book XV he talks about giants. He says sepulchers give up bones of incredible size. He says he himself, with others, saw on the shore at Utica a human molar so large that, cut down to ordinary teeth, it might have made a hundred. He believed it belonged to a giant. He thought the bodies of the ancients were larger, and the giants larger still.⁶
That is a fifth-century report, not a modern osteology paper. I do not need Augustine to have measured a femur correctly to take his witness seriously. He assumed his readers around the Mediterranean already knew the old world had held larger men. Goliath is in the canon. Og’s bed is in the canon. Genesis says the Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after.⁷
I live with the Hopewell and Adena earthworks in my own river valley. I have written about copper culture and the mounds for years. I think we have been timid about what the ground still holds. I also think a spirit does not have to maintain the skeleton of a fifteen-foot body to keep working. A soul is not required to be the size of the corpse. If a soul can be smaller than a cell, then the death of a giant does not retire the intelligence that used the giant. The flood judged a world. I do not believe it vacuumed every rebel power out of the air. If it had, Paul would not have written Ephesians 6 to a church living after Noah, after Abraham, after the Cross.
Job Is the Political Text People Skip
The book of Job is not only a book about suffering. It is a book about a courtroom. Satan presents himself among the sons of God and asks permission to wreck a loyal servant. The motive is political. Prove that worship is a transaction. Prove that the kingdom is only as strong as the hedge. Take that lesson off the page, and you have a method. Harass the person who would otherwise be a problem. Empty the person who can be worn like a coat. Conceal the operation by making the subject sound unhinged, so the Trojan horse never has to come out of the wood in daylight.⁸
That is why I keep using the word political. Democrats in a Republican county do not need a majority on Tuesday if they can spend two years sanding down trust. Principalities do not need to win a show of hands if they can unmake the image they hate. The conspiracy, if you want the old word, is not a committee in a basement. It is the long project of erasing the original: the garden, the image, the Son. The Watchers’ crime in Enoch is not only lust. It is a vote against the arrangement God had made. Two hundred of them decided heaven’s rule was negotiable.
The empty vessel is useful because it does not argue. Legalize the solvents, praise the erasure of the pronoun I, call rootedness oppression, and you have manufactured occupancy. I am not saying every short man who drinks after work is a portal. I am saying, from what I have watched, insecure people who already live outside themselves are cheaper to run than people who wake up intending to be good.
What I Saw, and What I Cannot Photograph
I cannot put the principality on a slide. I can report the pattern. Same speech in two mouths that had no business sharing a script. Same type of compromised body. Same objective: get inside the work, dirty the witness, keep the war from being named. Quantum talk about entanglement is a modern vocabulary for an old claim: that distance and clock time do not bind a spirit the way they bind a truck. I do not pretend that vocabulary is a proof. I am saying the observed thing is older than the vocabulary.
Spider-Man: Far From Home put a body-jumping antagonist on a screen because storytellers keep stumbling into the mechanic. I did not get the idea from the movie. I got it from the meeting. Science fiction is often late to the church’s mail.
If you stay in the Bible and refuse this subject, you stay in a censored Bible. The inconvenient pages are the ones that tell you the war did not end when the water receded. We assume God has won at the end of the story, and I believe He does. That is not the same as assuming the field is quiet. Turning the other cheek is a command about revenge. It is not a claim that no one is swinging.
A Tool, a Book, and the Work in Front of Us
I will keep using the tools in front of me, including this one, because a principality is not allergic to electricity, and neither is the other side. The point is the heart. Play God, rewrite the creature, chase deathlessness without the Creator, and you are back in Genesis 6 with better lab equipment. Ask a question, solve a problem, put language on an encounter you would rather not leave in a fog, and you are doing what readers of Scripture have always done with the instruments of their century.
Alberino’s books are on the table. Enoch is on the table. Augustine is on the table. Paul is on the table. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to write the psychology and the politics of that war in one place, because quoting Ephesians 6:12 is not the same as understanding why the enemy wants the city. I will not agree with every explorer on every bone in every mound. I will not pretend I did not recognize the same face in two different, short men with tattoos on the inside of their arms, to conceal who they are.
Do not give a principality the courtesy of silence just because it would prefer to stay in the shadows. Hey, I’ve been traveling a lot and thinking about these things on long camping trips while everyone else has been sleeping inside my camper, with the smell of woodsmoke from our campfire dying away into the deep night. I think I understand and can relate to Paul as he wrote Ephesians. You have to go through some tough stuff, then think in isolation before you can begin to see the tormentors of existence. And I think it is there that we have to focus on the real war at hand. I think Paul, and only Paul, could have written the marvelous work of Ephesians and begin to contemplate the efforts of principalities.
Notes
1. Greek of Ephesians 6:12: palē, wrestling, not a vague struggle; archas, exousias, kosmokratoras tou skotous toutou, pneumatika tēs ponērias en tois epouraniois. See also Ephesians 1:21; 3:10; Colossians 1:16; 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.
2. This is testimony, not a lab result. I am describing two business encounters within days of each other and a recognition I have had in other cities. I am not asking a reader to take my word as canon. I am asking a reader of Paul to leave room for the thing Paul said we wrestle.
3. Inner-arm tattoos as a tell are my field notes from these cases and from a type I have watched for years. They are not a doctrine. Plenty of marked skin belongs to people who are awake in their own lives. The question is occupancy, not decoration.
4. 1 Enoch 6–16, the Book of the Watchers. Jude 14–15 cites Enoch. Genesis 6:1–4 remains the canonical hinge. 1 Enoch fragments are among the Dead Sea Scrolls; the full Ethiopic corpus preserved the book for the Ethiopian Church.
5. “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” Timothy Alberino with Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, November 2025. Alberino, Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth (2020), and The Book of Enoch, with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.
6. Augustine, City of God 15.9, the Utica Murmur; 15.23 on angels and the daughters of men. Written in the years after 410. I read him as an early Christian mind defending the faith inside a failing imperial order, not as a modern archaeologist.
7. Genesis 6:4; Deuteronomy 3:11; 1 Samuel 17. “Also after that” is the phrase that keeps the subject from dying in the Flood chapter.
8. Job 1–2. The Accuser’s politics are the demand that loyalty be exposed as a deal. Homer’s Trojan Horse is only a later picture of concealment. I use it as an image, not as Scripture.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Scripture and the Powers
The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 6; Deuteronomy 3; 1 Samuel 17; Job 1–2; Daniel 10; Matthew 4; Mark 5; John 12:31; Romans 8:38–39; 1 Corinthians 15:24–26; Ephesians 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:10–20; Colossians 1:16; 2:10, 15; Jude 6, 14–15; Revelation 12.
Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. InterVarsity, 1992.
Arnold, Clinton E. Ephesians: Power and Magic. Baker, 1989.
Caird, G. B. Principalities and Powers. Clarendon, 1956.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham, 2015.
Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.
O’Brien, Peter T. “Principalities and Powers.” Evangelical Review of Theology 16 (1992).
Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers. Fortress, 1984. Read as a map of the vocabulary even where the theology diverges.
Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Fortress, 2013. For the larger Pauline world in which the powers sit.
Enoch, Watchers, and Second Temple Literature
1 Enoch. Translations by R. H. Charles (1912); George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam (Fortress); and the Alberino / Blurry Creatures edition with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.
2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, in Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Doubleday, 1983–85.
Nickelsburg, George W. E. 1 Enoch 1. Hermeneia. Fortress, 2001.
VanderKam, James C. Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition. Catholic Biblical Association, 1984.
Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. 3rd ed. Eerdmans, 2016.
Stuckenbruck, Loren T. The Myth of Rebellious Angels. Mohr Siebeck, 2014.
Boccaccini, Gabriele. Beyond the Essene Hypothesis. Eerdmans, 1998.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. García Martínez and Tigchelaar.
Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.
Augustine and the Early Church
Augustine. The City of God. Especially Books XI–XV. Translations by Marcus Dods; R. W. Dyson; and the Loeb edition.
Augustine. Confessions.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Harper, 1978.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Giants, Genesis 6, and the Old World
Doak, Brian R. The Last of the Rephaim. Brown Judaic Studies, 2012.
Hendel, Ronald. “The Nephilim Were on the Earth.” In The Fall of the Angels, ed. Auffarth and Stuckenbruck. Brill, 2004.
Annus, Amar. “On the Origin of Watchers.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19 (2010).
Homer. Iliad. For the older-and-larger-bodies tradition Augustine also cites through Pliny.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History 7.
Alberino, Beck, and the Present Conversation
Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth. 2020.
Alberino, Timothy. The Book of Enoch. With Blurry Creatures. Commentary on 1 Enoch 1–36.
Beck, Glenn, host. The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” with Timothy Alberino. November 2025.
Heiser, Michael S. Demons. Lexham, 2020.
Missler, Chuck. Return of the Nephilim. Briefings and notes, Koinonia House.
Spiritual Warfare, Discernment, and the Occupied Life
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. 1945.
Peretti, Frank. This Present Darkness. Crossway, 1986. Fiction that taught a generation the furniture of the subject. Not evidence. Atmosphere.
Nee, Watchman. The Spiritual Man. Christian Fellowship Publishers.
Bounds, E. M. Power Through Prayer and the Satan volumes.
Leahy, Frederick S. Satan Cast Out. Banner of Truth, 1975.
Unger, Merrill F. Biblical Demonology. Scripture Press, 1952.
Politics, Concealment, and the Long War
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Ellul, Jacques. The Presence of the Kingdom and The Subversion of Christianity.
O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations. Cambridge, 1996.
Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Revell, 1976.
Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1952. For the old habit of immanentizing what belongs to another city.
Consciousness, Tools, and the Limit of the Eye
Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind. Oxford, 1996. For the hardness of the problem, not for angels.
Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford, 1989.
Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Physics and Theology. Yale, 2007.
Scruton, Roger. The Face of God. Continuum, 2012.
Local Ground and the Older America
Squier and Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. 1848.
Webb, William S., and Charles E. Snow. The Adena People.
Romain, William F. Mysteries of the Hopewell. University of Akron Press, 2000.
Baldwin, John D. Ancient America. 1872. Read with a modern filter and an open map.
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.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior is the rare corner of the internet where a Bible in an airport carry bag, a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition pin, and a forthcoming space-economy forecast all coexist without anyone blinking.
Mara: Rich Hoffman covers all of it in one sprawling post — the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, the personal library behind it, and what a desk Bible signals to the people who walk past it. Let’s start with the book itself and the argument around it.
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: A Weapon Worth Carrying
Pip: The post opens with a direct claim: the Bible is one of the best tools available for fighting what he calls the evil of the current moment — and a new study Bible just arrived that he thinks is worth your attention.
Mara: He sets the scene in Biblical Archaeology Review, a magazine he has received since the 1970s, before landing on the advertisement that prompted the piece. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, published August 18, 2026, from Thomas Nelson, general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard, available in hardcover, Leathersoft, and genuine leather.
Pip: So a magazine subscription that predates most of our listeners’ parents is still doing its job as a discovery engine. That’s a long return on a postal address.
Mara: The recommendation is unambiguous. “I would suggest all my readers get a copy, and to use it so we can have much better discussions in the coming years.”
Pip: The stakes behind that suggestion matter. Edwards is positioned not as a historical curiosity but as a founding-era architect — the argument being that the moral conditions that made the United States possible ran through his pulpit in Northampton during the First Great Awakening.
Mara: Everhard’s edition puts Edwards’s own doctrinal work under the New King James text, adds essays on his life and the Awakening, reprints the Resolutions he wrote as a young man, and explains the note system so a reader can build their own practice. That is the practical pitch: it is a reading method, not just a reference volume.
Pip: Three study Bibles already sit in rotation — the carry Bible with filled margins, the Crossway ESV Archaeology Study Bible given to him by a friend who later gave away his own copy, and a MacArthur Study Bible a retired Army colonel set on the desk on June 12, 2023, and walked out.
Mara: The Edwards volume is described as the first new study Bible in some time that he would consider letting the traveler retire to the shelf. That is a meaningful threshold given how much mileage the carry Bible has.
Pip: Then there is the Museum of the Bible visit on his birthday, a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition pin still in the green bag, and a long passage on the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran — the point being that the world Jesus and John the Baptist walked into already had a language, a priesthood, and a set of arguments about purity and power.
Mara: What ties it together is the desk. Forty or fifty messages arrived in three weeks from people who used to come through his office. The line repeats: they miss the Bible on the desk. Not the speeches. The book. He writes that what they valued “was not a performance of righteousness. It was a reminder that the world was not all bad.”
Pip: That is a quiet observation with a sharp edge — a habit you thought was private turns out to have been load-bearing for a lot of people who never said so while they were standing in the room.
Mara: The closing recommendation is direct: hardcover if it stays on a table, leather if it travels. Read Edwards’s own line from the edition — “the enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied” — then read the maps, then write in the blanks.
Pip: A Bible in a green bag, a space-economy forecast, and forty messages from people who miss a desk object — it is a wide orbit, but it all pulls toward the same center.
Mara: The question underneath all of it is what a habit signals, and who was quietly depending on it. That tension is not going away.
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.
We’re going to go down a rabbit hole here for a bit, because we need to. The evil we are dealing with is pretty easy to beat. And the Bible is one of the best ways to beat it. I’ve confirmed that with a long journey and a lot of experience but for now, let me give you a great weapon to fight that evil. I was reading Biblical Archaeology Review the way I always read it when a new one comes to my mailbox. I take the day. I sit with the issue and I shut off the world to do what I enjoy most. I have been receiving that magazine since the 1970s, when it first came out, and it is still one of the happiest things I do with a stretch of quiet hours.¹ My wife understands that. Most people never see it. I do not usually talk about it. I think its time that we defend our American laws with a bibilical understanding and framework. And just let the Karl Marx lovers have their faces melt. I’m tired of them personally, and their ridiculous view of human affairs.
Then I saw an advertisement for a new study Bible centered on Jonathan Edwards,I wanted others to know it exists. I like the people who put it together and I want to see it sell successfully. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is out now from Thomas Nelson, New King James Version, general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard, who is a fantastic scholar. The publication date was August 18, 2026. It comes in hardcover, flexible Leathersoft, and genuine leather.² I already have more study Bibles than a reasonable person needs. I plan to make this the next one I put my hands on every day. I would suggest all my readers get a copy, and to use it so we can have much better discussions in the coming years. Do not let the God-hating Marxist left define our law-and-order society.
I would argue that Edwards shaped the moral weather that made the United States possible, in the 1730s and 1740s, in the First Great Awakening, from a pulpit in Northampton and from a mind that refused to separate joy in God from serious thought.³ I recommend getting the new Bible and living with it. That is the news. The rest is why the news landed on me the way it did.
The Bible in the Green Bag
The Bible I typically carry has been through airports all over the world. Soft pages. Maps in the back. Notes in every blank the editors left me. I have filled the margins to the end. It does not look ruined. It looks used. I could carry it another ten years, and it would still hold. I keep it in a green utility bag with my laptop, the phone, a charging brick, and whatever snack will survive security. One bag. One pass through the scanner. Then I sit at the gate and do what I have always done while a plane loads: I look at the maps, the timelines, the concordance, and a note I wrote two years ago in another terminal.
I am not opening it because I think God will only forgive me if the other passengers watch. I open it because I like it. I like the history that survived. I like the drawings. I like having a piece of the ancient world in my hands while the PA system talks about zone two.
That Carry Bible is not my only one. I keep going back to the Crossway ESV Archaeology Study Bible. I gave a softcover of that one to my youngest daughter. I kept the copy I use. It is a wealth of a book: the text, then the dirt beneath the text, the photographs, the sidebars, the sense that Abraham, Hezekiah, and Paul walked on actual ground.⁴ I first saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review years ago and kept it on the back burner until I bought it. A decade later, I still reach for it more than almost anything else on the shelf, because archaeology is the companion that keeps the stories from floating.
Then there is the MacArthur Study Bible a friend put in my hands on June 12, 2023. He wrote in the front. I did not ask for it. He was a retired Army colonel, later president of aerospace companies, and he valued the conversations we had about biblical context. He walked into the office, set down one of his favorites, and left. I keep it where I can see it from the chair.⁵
Those three sit in a kind of rotation: the traveler, the archaeologist, the gift. The Edwards volume is the first new study Bible in a while that I would consider letting the traveler retire to the shelf.
Museum of the Bible and a Pin from Qumran Country
My favorite day of 2026 so far was my birthday. I took a break from work. My wife and I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington. We are members. Besides the main reading room at the Library of Congress, that museum is my favorite place on earth, and inside it, my favorite gallery is the History of the Bible exhibit. You walk into architecture that evokes a cathedral. You watch the book move through languages, empires, paper, print, and culture. I am not talking about a private feeling there. I am talking about the measurable power a set of texts has had on human civilization.⁶
I carry a small pin from a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in the same bag. I do not want to forget that trip. The Teacher of Righteousness in the Qumran literature is, for me, one of the most compelling figures in Second Temple history. I do not flatten Jesus into that figure. I do not need to. A man is born into a world that already has a language, a priesthood, a Roman shadow, and a set of arguments about purity and power. John the Baptist and Jesus both make more sense when you have sat with the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Pesher, and the people who left Jerusalem’s gravity for the desert.⁷ The Essenes were suspicious of wealth and of a priesthood they thought had made itself comfortable with the wrong masters. That is not a modern talking point. That is the air of the first century.
I find the psychology of that period inexhaustible. Conference calls still get my attention. I listen. Some of them take an hour to arrive at the sentence that could have been said in four minutes. In those stretches I used to slide the desk Bible over and keep my mind working: instead of getting bored: a map, a timeline, a note. Not as theater. As ballast.
What People Thought They Were Looking At
I dress for work—shirt, jacket, often a tie. I have a White House tie. I have one Ross Perot gave me years ago. I have silk ties from the Trump Organization, the kind with the mark on the back, soft, well-made. Ties are not a costume. They are respect for the room I am walking into and the work we do there.
TSA has watched that combination for years: the jacket, the green bag, the Bible coming out of it. More than once the assumption has been that I must be a preacher or some other official holy man. I am not. I am an executive who likes Scripture, archaeology, and not wasting the twenty minutes before a plane pushes back. People sitting in the next seat have asked, in so many words, why a person would look at a Bible in an airport unless he were trying to get something forgiven. I find that question more revealing than they intend. You can live a decent life and still want the book. You can refuse tattoos, refuse to deface the body, refuse the little wink that says “I am as wrecked as you are,” and still not be a priest. You can be a man who thinks the human temple is not a billboard.⁸
I have been stunned, this summer of 2026, at how much hostility that posture draws once you leave a familiar building. Inside two-decade-old relationships, people who suddenly miss me are letting me know just how much, they miss the Bible on my desk realizing it was more than just furniture. People who ran large companies told me later it was the first thing they trusted when they walked in my office. Not the speeches I gave them. The book. A flag that said the room was safe for a person who still went to church on Sunday and did not need to advertise a tattoo on the inside of their arm or hidden on an ankle.
I have had something like forty or fifty messages in the last three weeks from people who used to come through that door. The line repeats. They miss the Bible on the desk. Some of them have more money than they will ever be able to spend and can afford to say what they think in their older years. What they valued was not a performance of righteousness. It was a reminder that the world was not all bad. That has been the shock of changing circumstances. You do not know who was quietly depending on a habit you thought was private until the habit is no longer in the same room.
A New Market, an Old Warning About Wealth
I have been talking with new people in Butler County and in the space-adjacent market I have watched for years. I first heard the pitch the way you hear a hundred pitches on LinkedIn. Everybody has a new idea. My own working estimate, from the work I have actually done, is that the space economy is heading toward something on the order of three trillion dollars by around 2033.⁹ That is not hype. That is a forecast based on experience. If it is even close, the people who build the right things will be rewarded on a scale that sounds like island-buying money to anyone still thinking in last decade’s units.
I am not embarrassed by the pursuit of wealth. I am careful about it. Jesus was not sentimental about rich men. The people behind the Dead Sea Scrolls were not sentimental about rich men. A needle is still a needle.¹⁰ If I had no dime and a box of chicken nuggets from Kroger and a new issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, I would still be myself. The magazine and the book are the happy part. The wealth is the instrument. Nicodemus had standing in the priesthood and still came to Jesus at night. He did not have to choose between influence and curiosity. I would rather earn the hours from five to ten in the evening, the hours when a man who has already taken care of his people can sit in a chair and read, than pretend poverty is automatically holy.¹¹
The colonel who gave me the MacArthur Bible had seen the military change and then seen large companies change until he barely recognized them. He told those stories in an office that still had a Bible on the desk. When he retired, I lost interest in the polite version of going along. That is a disclosure, not a press release. The people who stepped into some of those roles were closer to the airport glance than to the man who wrote in the front of a study Bible. Why are you wearing a tie? Why don’t you have the tattoo? Why don’t you throw a curse word into the meeting so we know you are not a robot? I have known that weather existed. I had commented on it from a protected side of the glass. This year I have been on the other side of the glass.
The Teacher of Righteousness did not win a popularity contest in Jerusalem. The community at Qumran put miles between itself and a priesthood it thought had made peace with the wrong power. I do not think the answer for a modern working life is to move to a desert. I do think the answer is to stop being surprised that people who are only sails, and never a keel, hate a keel when they see one. They go with the wind. A person who gets up in the morning intending to be good is steering. Those two habits do not like each other.
Why Edwards, and Why Now
Jonathan Edwards filled notebooks. The Miscellanies, the Notes on Scripture, the Resolutions he wrote as a young man and kept. The new study Bible is built out of that habit. Everhard’s edition puts Edwards’s own doctrinal work under the NKJV text, adds essays on his life and the Awakening, reprints the Resolutions, and explains the note system so a reader can start one of his own.¹² That is not merchandising. That is an old American technology: write what you see in the text until the text starts writing back to you.
I have been doing a smaller version of that in the carry Bible for years. Lines in the places the publisher left blank. Thoughts in the maps. Reactions I did not want to lose between Dayton and some other runway. Edwards did it at a different scale in the 1740s and 1750s. The country that came after him, the republic that knew his sermons even when it argued with them, did not appear out of a vacuum. If you want a founding-era mind that treated Scripture as something a serious adult could spend a life on, he is near the head of the line.
I am loyal to the Bible that has already been around the world with me. I am not going to mistreat it. I am thinking about letting it live on the shelf and putting a leather Edwards next to the chair and in the bag. A new study Bible is not a better God. It is another set of trained eyes, another century of notes, another chance to keep the mind awake while the rest of the cabin looks at a phone.
If you need a first Bible, or another Bible, this is the one I would put in front of you this month. Hardcover if it will stay on a table. Leathersoft or leather if it is going to travel. Read Edwards’s own sentence on the cover logic of the edition: the enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied.¹³ Then read the maps. Then write in the blanks.
What I Am Building Next
I have said for a while that the age of disclosure and the politics of heaven are not separate subjects. They are the same story told from two altitudes. That work is coming.¹⁴ Until it does, the ordinary practice remains the same. Subscribe to a better day. Sit with a magazine that still believes the dirt in Israel and Jordan and the West Bank can teach you to read. Carry a book that has already outlived empires. Dress as if the work matters. Do not wait for a stranger in an airport to bless the habit.
If you have been one of the people writing to say you missed the Bible on my desk, I appreciate all the kind words and have been impressed how many people were using that object as something stable in their life. Edwards can sit where the last one sat. The green bag still does its work and carries in it what’s truly valuable.
Notes
1. Biblical Archaeology Review began publication in 1975 under Hershel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society. I have read it across five decades. The Fall 2026 issue includes work on Negev tombs, Kidron Valley monuments, Tell Qasile, and spacing in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
2. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, general editor Matthew Everhard. Hardcover ISBN 9781400339532; also issued in brown Leathersoft and black genuine leather. Comfort Print, red letter, maps, concordance, essays, Resolutions, and an introduction to Edwards’s Miscellanies method.
3. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, later missionary at Stockbridge and president of the College of New Jersey—the First Great Awakening’s most demanding American theologian. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) is the famous shard. The Religious Affections and the Miscellanies are the longer works.
4. ESV Archaeology Study Bible, Crossway, editorial oversight by John Currid and David Chapman, first issued 2018, later TruTone editions. Field notes, photographs, maps, timelines. I have also used Zondervan’s older NIV Archaeological Study Bible; they are different books.
5. The MacArthur Study Bible, long associated with John MacArthur and issued in NASB, NKJV, ESV, and other texts across many printings. The copy on my shelf is the one dated in the front, June 12, 2023.
6. Museum of the Bible, Washington, D.C. The History of the Bible floor remains, for me, the heart of the building. Membership is how we treat a place we intend to keep returning to.
7. Teacher of Righteousness: the sectarian leader in the Damascus Document, the Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab), and related Qumran texts. I read him as a Second Temple reformer whose conflict with a “Wicked Priest” and with Jerusalem’s establishment belongs in any serious account of the world Jesus and John walked into. That is history and typology, not a claim that the Gospel is only Qumran.
8. I mean the body as temple in the Pauline sense, 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, not a fashion rule I am prepared to police on strangers. It is a rule I keep.
9. Public forecasts of the commercial space economy vary. Morgan Stanley and others have used a trillion-dollar frame toward 2040. My three-trillion-by-2033 figure is an experience-based working number, not a consensus estimate. Treat it as a claim to test.
10. Matthew 19:24 and parallels. The camel and the needle. The point is not that wealth is impossible. The point is that it is spiritually expensive.
11. John 3; John 7:50–51; John 19:39–40. Nicodemus again, because he is the patron saint of people in positions who still want the conversation.
12. Edwards’s “Resolutions” (1722–1723) and the Miscellanies notebooks are in the Yale Edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. Everhard’s study Bible is a reading edition of that archive under Scripture, not a replacement for the Yale volumes.
13. The cover quotation is Edwards on the enjoyment of God as the soul’s only satisfying happiness. Related language runs through the Miscellanies and The End for Which God Created the World.
14. The Politics of Heaven is the book I have been building toward; “the age of disclosure” is the public weather that book has to walk into. Forthcoming. The desk Bible is older than both.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Study Bibles and Editions
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Thomas Nelson, 2026.
ESV Archaeology Study Bible. Edited by John D. Currid and David Chapman. Crossway, 2018.
ESV Study Bible. Crossway, 2008.
The MacArthur Study Bible. Various texts and publishers; Thomas Nelson and others.
NIV Archaeological Study Bible. Zondervan, 2005.
Holy Bible, New King James Version. Thomas Nelson.
Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway.
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. For readers who want the next shelf over.
Jonathan Edwards
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press, 1957–2008. Especially vol. 2, Religious Affections; vol. 8, Ethical Writings; vol. 13 and following, the Miscellanies; vol. 15, Notes on Scripture.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Edited by John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema. Yale University Press, 1995.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Resolutions.” 1722–1723.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.
McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.
Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul. Oxford University Press, 1986.
Tracy, Patricia J. Jonathan Edwards, Pastor. Hill and Wang, 1980.
Qumran, Second Temple Judaism, and the Teacher of Righteousness
The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. Edited by Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar. Brill / Eerdmans.
Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Penguin, revised editions.
Collins, John J. The Scepter and the Star. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2010.
Collins, John J. Beyond the Qumran Community. Eerdmans, 2010.
Cross, Frank Moore. The Ancient Library of Qumran. 3rd ed. Sheffield, 1995.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins. Eerdmans, 2000.
Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2021.
Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Doubleday, 1994.
VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 2010.
Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. Harper.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been thinking about group behavior again. There is a reason people are afraid of conspiracies, or more accurately, afraid of going against the grain. They fear being ostracized from the group. It is not abstract philosophy. It is survival. In academic, professional, and corporate fields, the pattern is the same. When a narrative hardens, stepping outside it carries real costs. Jobs disappear. Funding dries up. Colleagues suddenly see a friend across the room and need to talk to them. The conversation ends. I have watched it happen more times than I can count, and not only in archaeology.
This is why the copper of Lake Superior remains such a charged subject. It should not be. The evidence is physical, measurable, and increasingly hard to dismiss. Yet the moment the discussion turns toward possible contact between the Near East and North America in the Bronze Age or earlier, the temperature changes. People get skittish. They change the subject. I do not believe the copper trade from Lake Superior is a conspiracy theory. I believe it is an under-examined historical reality, and the resistance to it reveals more about institutional incentives than about the data.
Roger L. Jewell’s Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America remains one of the more level-headed treatments of the subject. Jewell does not rant. He lays out the scale of prehistoric mining on Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula, the volume of pure native copper removed, and the awkward fact that so much of it seems to have vanished from North America’s archaeological record. Estimates vary, but the lower end runs to tens of millions of pounds extracted over centuries beginning roughly 3000 BCE or earlier. The upper estimates are higher still. Native copper of that purity, occurring in large masses that could be worked cold, is geologically unusual. Lake Superior is the standout source.
I have been up there myself. The Upper Peninsula leaves an impression. The landscape, the isolation, the sheer number of ancient pits still visible in places, all of it sits in the mind differently once you have walked the ground. Mainstream accounts, such as Susan R. Martin’s Wonderful Power, document the Native mining and the extensive trade of copper artifacts across the Midwest and beyond. That part is not in dispute. The Hopewell and Adena cultures moved copper hundreds of miles. They moved Yellowstone obsidian even farther. Orthodoxy accepts long-distance foot and canoe trade within the continent. It balks at the idea that the same copper, or knowledge of the same source, could have reached the Mediterranean by sea.
I attended a lecture by John E. Hancock when his Smithsonian Books volume on the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks came out. The book is careful, well-illustrated, and frames the sites within the indigenous narrative that has become the required language for World Heritage and institutional publication. Hancock has done serious work on the geometry and lunar alignments of the Ohio earthworks. The conversation before and after the talk was civil. Then the subject of copper trade came up, and the tone shifted. Once it became clear I was not content to stop at the indigenous-only explanation, the interest cooled. That is the pattern. UNESCO recognition is valuable. The political framing that accompanies it is not optional if you want the institutional platform. I understand the pressure. I do not accept that it settles the historical question.
The Blue Pill Pays Well, but the Truth is in the Red Pill, Not a Popular Decision:
The same dynamic appears across fields. During COVID, expert consensus hardened rapidly around certain data interpretations from the CDC and related bodies. Dissent carried professional risk. Careers were damaged. People who had built comfortable lives inside the consensus had every incentive to stay inside it. The sociological pattern is not unique to public health. It operates in archaeology, history, and the soft sciences whenever a preferred narrative about origins, land, or cultural purity is at stake. A professor at Marquette or any similar institution who begins teaching that Mediterranean traders may have been active on Lake Superior risks the quiet professional death that follows from being labeled unreliable or politically tone-deaf. No one has to fire you formally. The invitations stop. The grants dry up. The department stops protecting you. Group behavior does the rest.
I do not romanticize the red-pill posture. It is often lonely, and it does not pay well. But the alternative is to pretend that evidence stops mattering once it threatens the story. Behind my interest in the copper is a long-standing rebellion against that academic etiquette. Truth is not a popularity contest.
Here are the primary reasons I find the case for significant transatlantic movement of Lake Superior copper, and associated cultural contact, between roughly 3000 BCE and 10000 BCE persuasive. The list is not exhaustive, and not every item is equally strong. Taken together, they form a pattern that orthodoxy has not adequately answered.
First, the sheer volume and purity of the copper. Prehistoric miners removed enormous quantities of nearly pure native copper from the Lake Superior region. Much of it is not accounted for in the surviving North American archaeological inventory. Bronze Age Mediterranean societies consumed copper at industrial scale. A source of cold-workable, high-purity copper would have been economically transformative. The Uluburun shipwreck, dated to around 1320 BCE, off the coast of Turkey, carried approximately 10 tons of copper ingots, along with tin and other luxury goods. The vessel was a substantial, sophisticated craft. If such ships were operating in the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, then the technological capacity for longer voyages in the northern Atlantic existed earlier.
Second, long-distance trade is already conceded inside North America. Hopewell people obtained copper from the Superior region and obsidian from the Yellowstone area. Distances of 900 miles or more, traveled on foot or by water, are accepted without controversy. Once that capacity is granted, the additional claim that no one ever continued the northern route via Hudson Bay, Greenland, Iceland, and the British Isles becomes an assumption rather than a demonstrated barrier. Sea levels were lower for long stretches of the relevant period. Coastal and island-hopping routes would have been more forgiving than they are today.
The Lesson of Captain Bligh:
Third, human capability for open-boat ocean travel is not theoretical. After the mutiny on the Bounty, Captain William Bligh and a small loyal crew covered roughly 3,618 nautical miles in a 23-foot open launch, navigating by memory, dead reckoning, and the stars, reaching Timor in about 45 to 47 days. They avoided hostile landings and stretched meager provisions across the Pacific. If a determined 18th-century British officer could do that without charts under survival conditions, then Bronze Age or earlier sailors, with purpose, better vessels, and knowledge of prevailing winds and currents, could have managed the northern Atlantic circuit. The Phoenicians and earlier Mediterranean seafarers were not less capable.
Fourth, certain artifacts refuse to fit neatly. The Newberry Tablet, recovered in 1896 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula after a storm toppled a tree and exposed objects entangled in the roots, carried inscriptions in 140 squares. Photographs survive; the original deteriorated after poor storage. Some researchers have argued the signs resemble Cypro-Minoan or related scripts. The discovery predates modern knowledge of Linear A and related systems. A tree of that size does not grow overnight over a planted modern fraud. The Michigan Relics as a broader category include clear forgeries, but the Newberry find has peculiarities that keep it from being dismissed with a wave of the hand. Similar problems attach to other contested pieces such as the Wilmington Tablet from the Adena context in Ohio. Orthodoxy prefers to label them all frauds aimed at dispossessing indigenous claims. That explanation is politically convenient. It is not always archaeologically decisive.
Cocaine in Egyptian Mummies:
Fifth, the botanical evidence from Egyptian mummies. In 1992, toxicologist Svetlana Balabanova and colleagues reported traces of nicotine and cocaine in tissues and hair of Egyptian mummies spanning a wide date range. Cocaine is derived from a New World plant. Nicotine is more complicated because other Old World plants contain it, yet the concentrations and the presence of cocaine raised the contact question immediately. Subsequent work has been contested, with contamination from modern handling or insecticides offered as explanations. Forensic-style testing, as used in criminal courts, produced the original results. The debate continues, but the data did not vanish simply because it was inconvenient.
Sixth, architectural and astronomical parallels. The lunar standstill alignments at Stonehenge have counterparts in the Hopewell earthworks of Ohio, particularly the Newark complex. Dolmens and related megalithic forms appear in the Jordan Valley, the British Isles, New England, and the Upper Great Lakes region. Mainstream geology attributes many of the American examples to glacial deposition. The formal similarities and the association of some of these landscapes with skull cults, beer brewing, and ritual architecture at sites like Göbekli Tepe (and related early Holocene complexes) invite comparison rather than automatic dismissal. A submerged stone alignment in Grand Traverse Bay, located in 2007 at a depth of roughly 40 feet by Mark Holley, dates to a period when lake levels were lower, and the area was dry land. Media called it a “Stonehenge.” Holley himself has been more cautious, describing a long linear arrangement rather than a classic henge. The date range, however, places human activity on that landscape thousands of years before the classical Hopewell.
Seventh, cultural and religious correspondences. Skull veneration, psychedelic or beer-based ritual, and communication with non-ordinary intelligences appear in early Near Eastern contexts, in Greek mystery practices that laced wine, and in ethnographic accounts of North American shamanism. The same pattern of entities contacted through altered states recurs. I do not treat this as proof of direct migration of priests. I treat it as evidence that the same spiritual technology and the same class of non-human intelligences were being engaged on both sides of the ocean. The Canaanite and broader Levantine world that produced the biblical accounts of Rephaim and related giant clans occupied the same landscape of dolmens and high places. Early newspaper reports of large skeletal remains in Ohio mounds were later suppressed or explained away, partly because they complicated the emerging political narrative that all significant pre-Columbian culture was indigenous and that European presence began with Columbus. The political utility of that narrative does not make it complete history.
Eighth, the northern route is geographically coherent. From the copper districts one can move by water and portage toward Hudson Bay, then by sea past Greenland and Iceland to the British Isles and down the Atlantic coast into the Mediterranean. The Odyssey, though a literary work, preserves descriptions of long days that fit higher latitudes better than the confined Mediterranean. Most classical literature of the period did not survive. What remains is a thin sample. Treating Homer’s poem as pure fantasy while ignoring the possibility that it encodes remembered routes is a choice, not a necessity. Troy was real. The ships of the period were real. The copper cargoes were real.
It’s All About the Bog People
Ninth, recent discoveries continue to complicate the closed story. Windover in Florida yielded remarkably well-preserved brains and evidence of a caring, structured society thousands of years ago, whose genetic profile does not map neatly onto later-known tribes. Poverty Point, the Adena and Hopewell sequences, and Cahokia (whose Monk’s Mound remains one of the largest earthen pyramids in the Americas) show complex, interconnected societies that moved materials and ideas across vast distances. Each new site that surfaces, whether under construction or by sonar, forces another quiet revision. The institutional response is usually to absorb the data into the existing indigenous-only model and move on. The model is stretched thinner with every decade.
I could continue. The point is not that every anomalous tablet is genuine or that every newspaper giant story from the 19th century is accurate. The point is that the cumulative weight of mining scale, missing metal, admitted intra-continental trade, demonstrated seafaring capacity, contested but persistent artifacts, botanical anomalies, architectural parallels, and ritual correspondences is more than noise. It is a signal. Orthodoxy’s refusal to engage it seriously is itself evidence of the group behavior problem I began with.
Jewell’s Book is a Good Start
I finished Jewell’s book and found it useful precisely because it stays relatively measured. I go further than he does in terms of chronological depth and the frequency of contact. Lower sea levels, better boats than we sometimes assume, and powerful economic and spiritual incentives make repeated voyages plausible across millennia. The same human ingenuity that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, that organized the copper trade of the eastern Mediterranean, and that produced the precise lunar geometry of the Ohio earthworks is not suddenly incompetent when the Atlantic intervenes.
The blue-pill life is comfortable. It comes with pensions, conference invitations, and the warm feeling of belonging. The red-pill alternative does not. I have watched capable people choose the paycheck. I understand the choice. I do not respect it when it requires pretending that inconvenient evidence does not exist. Whether the subject is COVID data, election integrity, or the copper of Lake Superior, the pattern is the same. Group survival is prioritized over truth-seeking. That is why the conversation keeps getting shut down. That is also why it will not stay shut down. Physical evidence has a longer half-life than institutional consensus.
The copper mines of Lake Superior are one of the largest archaeological stories still sitting in plain sight. They should be mainstream. Serious, multi-disciplinary work that follows the metal, the isotopes, the boat technology, and the ritual parallels wherever they lead is overdue. I will continue to say so. Popularity is not the measure. Evidence is.
I base my opinions about Lake Superior Copper Trade again on these factors:
My trip to the Upper Peninsula
The Newberry tablet.
The Dolmans of the Near East.
The admission that copper was traded by the Hopewell culture, 900 miles away.
That Captain Bligh traveled from Tonga to Timor — Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) 3,600 nautical miles over 36 days with only 1 week of food and water. It was a death sentence.
Cocaine and tobacco in Egypt, 1992: the material is in the hair shafts, not contamination.
The Uluburun shipwreck (1300 BCE) shows Egypt, Canaan, Cyprus, and the Aegean were part of a massive trade network. George Bass.
Stonehenge off Traverse City, 9000 years ago. Validates Newberry. It was first discovered in 2007 by sonar.
Of course, Windover.
Communication might have occurred through shamans rather than through evolutionary contact.
LiDAR in South America
Cahokia
The Odyssey path.
Poverty Point and Olmecs, my Wilmington Tablet
Notes
1. Roger L. Jewell, Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America (Jewell Histories, various editions). Summarizes the scale of prehistoric extraction and the Mediterranean trader hypothesis.
2. Susan R. Martin, Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin (Wayne State University Press, 1999). Mainstream archaeological synthesis of Native mining and trade.
3. On the Uluburun wreck and its copper cargo, see the Institute of Nautical Archaeology summaries and Cemal Pulak’s publications; roughly ten tons of copper ingots, late 14th century BCE.
4. Captain Bligh’s open-boat voyage: standard historical accounts place the distance at approximately 3,618 nautical miles in 45–47 days.
5. Newberry Tablet: contemporary newspaper reports from 1896; later discussions in epigraphic and alternative archaeology literature; original largely destroyed by poor storage.
6. Balabanova et al., early 1990s toxicological studies on Egyptian mummies; subsequent controversy over contamination versus genuine presence of New World alkaloids.
7. Grand Traverse Bay stone alignment: Mark Holley, 2007 discovery; media “Stonehenge” framing versus Holley’s more restrained description of a linear feature on a former shoreline.
8. John E. Hancock, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley (Smithsonian Books). Documents the UNESCO sites and indigenous framing.
9. On Hopewell long-distance trade networks, standard archaeological literature accepts Superior copper and Rocky Mountain obsidian among other materials.
Selected Bibliography
Bass, George F., et al. Publications on the Uluburun shipwreck (Institute of Nautical Archaeology).
Hancock, John E. Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley. Smithsonian Books.
Jewell, Roger L. Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America. Jewell Histories.
Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Wayne State University Press, 1999.
Pulak, Cemal. Various papers on the Uluburun cargo and Late Bronze Age maritime trade.
Additional primary reports on the Newberry find (1896 local Michigan newspapers), Balabanova toxicology papers (1992 onward), and Holley’s Grand Traverse Bay survey notes. Classical sources include Homer’s Odyssey (any standard translation) for the literary reflection of long-distance seafaring memory.
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.
Yes, George, you need to watch this video. I had to finish our discussion from lunch. I had a good lunch with Senator George Lang the other day. Nothing formal, nothing staged for the cameras, just two guys who have known each other a long time sitting outside at a place we both like, talking the way we always end up talking when the politics finally take a back seat. People assume that every time I sit down with a senator or a sheriff or a treasurer around here, it is some closed-door strategy session. It is not. George and I share a long-standing interest in ancient history, the kind of deep, layered history that most people in public life never get the chance to dig into. He likes that I run into the stranger corners of it. I like that he actually reads the books I recommend and asks the kind of questions that keep the conversation alive long after the plates are cleared.
We ran out of time that day. Rain started coming down hard while we were still outside, and I had only gotten started on the things I wanted to walk him through. So I am continuing the conversation here the same way I would if he were still sitting across from me and the rest of you were at the next table over. Nothing confidential. Nothing I would not say in front of anyone. Just the thoughts that were already in motion when we had to pack it up.
I updated him on where The Politics of Heaven stands, my next book. The manuscript is finished. The first full draft has been through enough eyes that the early feedback keeps coming back in the same surprising way. More than one reader, including people who know the publishing world, has said the same thing: this book reminds them of The Immortality Key. That 2020 book from St. Martin’s Press by Brian Muraresku, the one Graham Hancock helped put on the map. I told George that I had already decided to go back through The Immortality Key carefully, not because I think I borrowed from it, but because the comparison keeps arriving uninvited and I want to be precise about where the overlap ends and where my own line of inquiry begins. Publication is a relationship, like any other. You do not jump straight into sharing an apartment. You get dinner. You talk. You figure out whether the trust is real. That process takes time, and patience is part of the work.
What pushed me back into The Immortality Key was the same impulse that had me reading Sharon and Derek Gilbert’s Veneration in the early hours before that lunch. Timothy Alberino had been discussing related material on Joe Rogan, and the conversation turned to the older Near Eastern material that most people never hear about. The Gilberts work from a biblical frame, and they do it with real attention to the primary texts. I respect that. Their book digs into the cult of the Rephaim, those dead aristocratic warrior kings whose spirits the living kings of the Late Bronze Age still summoned by name. The Ugaritic tablet known as KTU 1.161 records the liturgy. The dead are called up. Food and drink are set for them. The living king anchors his own right to rule in a line that stretches back into a mythic age of heroes. The meal is not polite remembrance. It is consultation. It is power.
That is the system the biblical writers were confronting. When the scouts came back from Canaan and said they felt like grasshoppers beside the people living there, they were describing more than physical size. They were describing a culture that still fed and consulted the spirits of the giants who had once ruled. Og of Bashan, the last of the remnant of the Rephaim, still had an iron bedstead measured in cubits that made the point for anyone who needed numbers. The physical and spiritual threats were the same. The command to wipe the system out was not simple land hunger. It was an attempt to close the door that the cult of the dead kept trying to hold open.
Mount Hermon sits at the center of that geography. In the Book of Enoch it is the place where the Watchers came down. In the older Canaanite material it is the mountain of assembly, the seat of the divine council that opposed Yahweh. When Jesus took his disciples to the region of Caesarea Philippi at the foot of that mountain and said the gates of hell would not prevail, he was standing on the front porch of the old cult and issuing a direct challenge. The Gilberts make that geography impossible to ignore once you have seen it.
I have been reading this material with one eye on the Near East and the other on the ground under my own feet. The Wheel of the Giants, Gilgal Refaim, sits up in the Golan Heights, a massive set of concentric stone circles that some call the Stonehenge of the East. It belongs to the same broad horizon of ritual architecture that appears along the Jordan and then, in different forms, moves westward. At the same time, over here in the Ohio Valley, the Hopewell people were raising enormous ceremonial centers with the same intensity of purpose. The Milford Works, the great earthworks near the confluence of the Little Miami and the East Fork, the alignments at Newark, the mounds that once stood all through what is now Butler County and Warren County and on up the Scioto. These were not random piles of dirt. They were places where the living gathered to deal with the dead and whatever else they believed could be reached through the right rituals and alignments.
I keep coming back to the Windover site just west of Titusville, a few miles from the Kennedy Space Center. Seven to eight thousand years old. Bodies preserved in peat with brain tissue still intact. Textiles more sophisticated than anything the standard story allows for at that early stage. Directional burial practices. A people who do not fit neatly into the later tribal identities we project backward. Some of the individuals were tall by the standards of the time. The site sits in a region that later becomes part of the same trade networks that moved copper out of the Lake Superior mines and into the wider world just as the Bronze Age was taking shape. The usual explanations for exotic materials found in these contexts grow more strained the longer you look at them. Bananas and turmeric proteins in elite Near Eastern burials. Advanced textiles and possible African or Mediterranean contacts at Windover. The copper that left the Upper Peninsula in quantities that still have not been fully accounted for. At some point, the assumption that the oceans were closed until Columbus made his journey starts to look like a real leap of faith.
The Loveland Frogmen sightings sit right in the middle of this local landscape. 1955, then 1972, later reports still in the same general corridor. Small, grayish, bipedal figures near the water, not far from the old Hopewell ceremonial centers. I am not claiming they are the same entities the Ugaritic kings were feeding under the palace benches. I am saying that when you map the places where people once worked hard to open contact with the dead, and then you look at the places where anomalous encounters keep showing up in the modern record, the overlap is hard to ignore. Point Pleasant and the Mothman. The poltergeist activity that still gets reported in houses built over older burial grounds. The same pattern appears in other parts of the world whenever the old ritual centers are disturbed or left alone long enough for whatever was once invited to keep answering.
I told George that the deeper I go into this material, the clearer it becomes that the biblical story is not a late invention dropped into an empty landscape. It is a record of conflict in a world already thick with competing claims about who had the right to rule and whose spirits still held authority. The non-human intelligences that show up in the older texts, the ones that later get called demons or Watchers or the shades of the Rephaim, did not disappear when the last physical giant was killed. The cult changed its methods. Psychedelics appear to have been one of the technologies that kept the door open. Muraresku’s work on the ritual use of those substances in the ancient Mediterranean and their possible survival into early Christian practice is part of the same larger picture. If you want to understand why a culture builds a certain kind of religion, you have to understand what it was taking and what it thought it was talking to while it was under the influence.
My own book takes the next step. It treats the entire span from the deep pre-biblical period to the present as a single continuous political and spiritual struggle. The copper, the earthworks, the burial practices, the later attempts to rebury or reclassify the evidence, the modern fascination with ascended masters and ancient aliens and celebrity necromancy, all of it belongs to the same long contest. The entities that once sat at the banquet tables under the palace floors in Ugarit are still trying to claim a seat at the table. The question is whether we keep setting places for them.
I am not interested in scaring people. I am interested in making the pattern visible so that the next time someone tries to sell a new version of the old system we recognize it for what it is. The Gilberts do that work from one angle. Muraresku does it from another. Alberino keeps pushing the conversation into the open. I am simply adding the North American material and the long view that comes from living in a place where the mounds are still under the subdivisions, and the river valleys still remember older traffic.
Notes:
¹ Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020). Foreword by Graham Hancock.
² Sharon K. Gilbert and Derek P. Gilbert, Veneration: Unveiling the Ancient Realms of Demonic Kings and Satan’s Battle Plan for Armageddon (Crane, MO: Defender, 2020).
³ KTU 1.161 (Ugaritic funerary liturgy), standard edition in Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz, and Joaquín Sanmartín, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013). See also Baruch A. Levine and Jean-Michel de Tarragon, “Dead Kings and Rephaim: The Patrons of the Ugaritic Dynasty,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 649–659.
⁴ On Gilgal Refaim / Rujm el-Hiri see Yonathan Mizrachi et al., recent satellite survey work published in PLOS ONE (2026) documenting additional circular structures in the Golan; earlier discussions in Yonathan Paz and others on Early Bronze Age ritual landscapes.
⁵ Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). See also subsequent DNA and textile studies confirming the site’s uniqueness within the Archaic Southeast.
⁶ On Hopewell ceremonial centers, alignments, and ritual feasting, see Bradley T. Lepper, Ohio Archaeology (Wilmington, OH: Orange Frazer Press, various editions) and the UNESCO World Heritage documentation for the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. For the Milford Works specifically, nineteenth-century surveys by Squier and Davis remain foundational.
⁷ Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) 6–16 on the descent of the Watchers at Mount Hermon; standard translation by R. H. Charles or George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam.
⁸ Timothy Alberino’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience #2530 (July 2026) discusses the Rephaim, the kispum rites, and the continued occult utility of giant remains in modern contexts.
Bibliography for further reading
Alberino, Timothy. Various lectures and the special edition of The Book of Enoch with commentary (2026).
Byers, A. Martin. Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011.
Charles, R. H., trans. The Book of Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912 (and later editions).
Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Gilbert, Derek P., and Sharon K. Gilbert. Veneration. Crane, MO: Defender, 2020.
———. The Great Inception. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017.
Hancock, Graham. America Before. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.
Lepper, Bradley T. Ohio Archaeology. Wilmington, OH: Orange Frazer Press.
Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020.
Nickelsburg, George W. E., and James C. VanderKam. 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.
Pardee, Dennis. Ritual and Cult at Ugarit. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002.
Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1848 (reprint editions widely available).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969 (and later editions).
Additional primary Near Eastern texts are available in The Context of Scripture, ed—William W. Hallo (Leiden: Brill), and in the standard Ugaritic editions cited above.
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.
Human history may not merely be the history of humans interacting with one another. It may also be the history of humanity interacting with forms of intelligence that are perceived through altered states, religious experiences, visions, dreams, shamanic practices, meditation, ritual, and perhaps other mechanisms not yet fully understood.
I know this all sounds pretty crazy to a lot of people. But that’s only because the truth has been buried under layers of official stories, political correctness, and institutional pressure for a very long time. I didn’t want to be that guy—the one who connects the dots between ancient Ohio earthworks, strange artifacts that don’t fit the narrative, non-human intelligence, and the spiritual forces that have been pulling strings on human politics since the beginning. As an aerospace executive who has spent decades managing complex programs, dealing with real-world engineering challenges, and advising on politics, I would much rather focus on more profitable and straightforward work. But here I am, sitting in front of the evidence, realizing I have to write this book, The Politics of Heaven, because the journey has pulled me in too deep to ignore.
A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter took a photograph of me at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton, Ohio. I was sitting right in front of the Newark Holy Stones. She’s a professional photographer, and she knows how to capture more than just an image—she captures the moment when someone is wrestling with something big. In that photo, you can see it on my face. I didn’t want this. I didn’t ask for it. But as I sat there looking at those stones found by surveyor David Wyrick in the 1860s, considering everything I’ve seen in my travels, my reading, and my own experiences, I knew I had to push forward. This book isn’t just about ancient mounds in Ohio. It’s about the real power behind human history—what the Bible calls spiritual warfare, what modern disclosures call UAP or non-human intelligence, and how those forces have shaped politics, culture, and power on this planet for thousands of years.
Let me start with the Shaman of Newark, that remarkable little stone figurine found in the Newark Earthworks. It’s a small carving, often called the Wray Figurine, depicting a figure in bear regalia—a bear head as a headdress, bear paws on the hands—holding a severed human head in its lap. It was discovered in 1881 near one of the burial mounds at the Great Circle. Archaeologists usually describe it as a shaman in the middle of a transformation ritual, tapping into animal spirits for power. That interpretation makes sense on one level, but it also feels like it’s missing something deeper. Why a severed head? What kind of ceremony or understanding of life, death, and power does that represent? In a culture that built some of the most sophisticated geometric earthworks in the ancient world—the Octagon, the Great Circle, the precise lunar alignments at Newark—this wasn’t primitive superstition. These people had knowledge. They had mathematics. They had a worldview that saw connections among the earth, the sky, and forces beyond the material world.
John Hancock, the architect and author who played a major role in securing the Ohio Hopewell sites’ designation as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, has done excellent work examining these mounds with fresh eyes. I met him at Fort Ancient after grabbing his book at the Newark visitors center. As a retired professor from the University of Cincinnati, he approaches the earthworks as architecture—with intentional design, astronomical alignments, and ceremonial precision. Listening to him speak and reading his travel guide Ancient Ohio, you start to see these sites not as random piles of dirt but as massive, planned expressions of a sophisticated culture. The Newark Earthworks alone cover an enormous area with geometric perfection that still impresses today. These weren’t built by people who didn’t understand the world. They were building something that reflected their understanding of cosmic order.
But here’s where it gets uncomfortable for the official narrative. Right alongside these sites, we have artifacts such as the Newark Holy Stones—the Decalogue Stone, with what appears to be a condensed version of the Ten Commandments in ancient Hebrew, the Keystone, and others found by David Wyrick in the 1860s. The mainstream view is that they are hoaxes, planted to push a pro-Christian or anti-indigenous narrative during the Civil War era. David Wyrick’s life was ruined over it; he died in 1864 from an opium overdose after being accused of fraud. The museum now frames them squarely in the context of 19th-century politics, abolitionism, and efforts to undermine Native claims to the land.
I get why that story is convenient. But it’s also too neat. Why go to all that trouble to carve intricate Hebrew inscriptions if it was just a hoax? And why do similar mysterious tablets keep showing up in Adena and Hopewell contexts—the Cincinnati Tablet, the Wilmington Tablet? The Wilmington Tablet, found in Ohio, has markings that some see as reminiscent of Olmec designs from far away in Mexico. The Cincinnati Tablet was pulled from display at the Cincinnati Museum Center, in part due to NAGPRA sensitivities. These aren’t isolated oddities. They point to long-distance travel and cultural exchange that the standard timeline struggles to explain.
We already know the Hopewell were master traders. They brought copper from the Lake Superior mines hundreds of miles away—mines that some evidence suggests were worked as far back as 5,000 BC or earlier. They hauled obsidian from Wyoming, mica from the Appalachians. If they could do that, why is it so unthinkable that ideas, artifacts, or even people moved along the Mississippi River system and the Gulf to places like the Olmec heartland? The dismissal feels less like science and more like an effort to protect a preferred story. And that story gets even more protected when NAGPRA kicks in, repatriating remains and limiting study of artifacts that might challenge the narrative of continuous indigenous occupation by specific modern tribes.
The Shawnee, for example, have a connection to this region, but they weren’t here continuously for thousands of years. They returned to the Miami Valley in the 1700s after being displaced. Yet modern politics treats them and other tribes as the unquestioned inheritors of everything Adena and Hopewell, giving them influence over what gets displayed or studied. This isn’t respect for evidence; it’s politics overriding archaeology. We’ve talked about this before—the Windover bog people in Florida, from 8,000 years ago, whose DNA doesn’t neatly match that of later tribes. Early populations were more diverse. The idea of unbroken cultural continuity from the mounds to today’s tribes is convenient for land claims and repatriation, but the physical record tells a more complicated story.
This brings me to the bigger question at the heart of The Politics of Heaven: What are the politics of Satan? Is he a Democrat? A Republican? Or something else entirely—something that operates above and behind human parties?
I see history through the lens of spiritual warfare, as described in Ephesians 6:12—“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The ancient world was full of accounts of gods, giants, watchers, and interactions with non-human beings. The Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical references to Nephilim—these aren’t fairy tales. They describe real influences on human civilization. The mounds, the alignments, the shamanic figures—they may reflect attempts to tap into or negotiate with those forces.
Modern UAP disclosures add another layer. The government has admitted to encounters with craft and beings that defy our physics. Reports of multiple species interacting with humanity. If that’s true—and the evidence is mounting—then humanity has never had full sovereignty. There has always been an outside influence shaping events. Satan, in the biblical sense, isn’t some cartoon devil with a pitchfork. He’s a sophisticated adversary with a political agenda: rebellion against the Creator, domination of humanity, and the perversion of God’s order. His “politics” aren’t partisan in the way we think of left versus right. They are anti-human, anti-God, and aimed at keeping us enslaved to deception, whether through pagan practices in ancient mounds, occult influences in modern culture, or centralized power structures that erode individual liberty and truth-seeking.
Look at how the narrative around these sites is managed. Inconvenient artifacts are dismissed as fakes or removed from view. Oral tradition is elevated over physical evidence under updated NAGPRA rules. The shaman figure holding a severed head gets sanitized into “spiritual transformation,” while any suggestion of deeper, darker knowledge or outside influence is shut down. Meanwhile, we celebrate the geometric precision of the earthworks—the lunar alignments at Newark are astonishing—but stop short of asking what kind of knowledge enabled that, or what spiritual purpose it served.
I’ve spent my life in aerospace, watching humanity push into space, building rockets, solving technical problems. I’ve seen model rocketry with my grandson, teaching resilience when launches fail in bad weather. That hands-on experience makes me appreciate what the ancient builders achieved. But it also makes me skeptical of stories that downplay their sophistication or attribute everything to mundane explanations while ignoring the anomalies.
My travels have taken me to many of these sites, from Newark to Fort Ancient, from the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant to arguments with staff at the British Museum over the crystal skull (another “fake” that raises the same questions—why the effort if it’s not real?). I love museums and their gift shops. I’ve found replicas of the Wilmington Tablet there, and it always strikes me how obscure these things are to the average visitor. Yet they hold clues.
The Politics of Satan plays out in the suppression of truth. It plays out when we prioritize feelings and political reconciliation over evidence. It plays out when we assume ancient people were isolated primitives rather than connected participants in a larger cosmic drama. And it plays out today in the way power structures—whether in government, academia, or media—control what we’re allowed to question.
This book is my effort to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it takes me places I didn’t want to go. It’s personal. It includes family stories, like that rocket launch with my grandson on a windy day, or RV trips, or political activism in Butler County. Because truth-seeking isn’t abstract, it happens in real life, with real people, while you’re trying to live, work, and raise resilient kids in a world under unseen influences.
I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I do know this: the official narrative has too many holes. The mounds, the tablets, the shaman, the trade networks, the astronomical knowledge—they point to something more. Non-human intelligence has been here a long time. The question is whether we recognize the spiritual dimension and reclaim our sovereignty under God, or continue letting the politics of rebellion shape our future.
That’s the journey The Politics of Heaven invites you on. It’s not comfortable. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. The truth is coming fast, whether we’re ready or not.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
