Tag: institutionalism

Lake America and the Copper That Built the Ancient World: Why the Indigenous-People Argument Cannot Survive 

I did not build this media form to talk about local personalities and small topics of no consequence. That is the easy road. Local talk gets hits. Local talk gets popular. I am not interested in it. I am interested in a format that lets a person go down a rabbit hole and stay there long enough to think a thought they would not have thought if the show had been engineered for an audience. Years ago, the question that started the whole habit was simple: Are we getting what we want from the education of children for the money we spend on it? The answer, then and now, was no. The same question can be asked of budgets, housing policy, the relationship between business and politics, and the names we place on large bodies of water. The method does not change. Ask the question at the level it deserves. Invite people along. Do not pander.

Anyone watching consistently knows the season we are in. Trump is in the White House. People are looking around at midterms, the price of gas, the word socialism used as if it were weather. I cover business and politics because that is where the American system is supposed to work, and because the relationship between the two is not what a civics textbook pretends it is. I enjoy the hard half of the map. You will not turn on a typical podcast and get the information nobody wants to handle in the way it should be handled. If I am not performing for more viewers, that is the approach. I am trying to encourage people to come down the rabbit hole and take whatever treasure they can carry back out.

President Trump, as a manager of the executive branch, expects people like me to fill in the blanks when he throws something controversial on the table. He renamed Lake Ontario. He called it Lake America.[1] I have said before that the emphasis was not cartography. The emphasis was provocation. Change the name. Force the discussion. What does the fight actually mean? I do not want to be the man whose entire contribution is a seminar on indigenous grievance. I also will not pretend the fight is about courtesy to a lake. The fight is about whether the United States is allowed to name its own waters without first kneeling to a political story about 1492.

Commentary — on the executive order itself: The August 27, 2026 order changes how the United States government refers to the lake. USGS electronic products were updated within hours. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, answered that the lake is called Ontario “today and forever.” New York’s governor said the state would not use the new name. About half the surface sits on the Canadian side. The legal reality is narrower than the cultural explosion: Washington can rename what Washington prints. It cannot rename what Toronto says. That gap is exactly why a name becomes a weapon. If the gesture were only petty trade-war theater, it would have died in a news cycle. It did not, because names are how institutions catechize a public.

Are We Getting What We Want from the Names We Spend Our Authority On?

I wish academia were designed for American designs. I wish a lot of our institutions had not been captured long ago. The day Trump got on the plane after his first term, I describe that departure as exile because that is what it felt like to millions of people who watched a system treat their vote as a problem to be managed. I am not going to relitigate every precinct here. I am going to say what the naming fight is downstream of: an institutional habit of treating the creation of the United States as the original sin of the continent, and of treating every pre-Columbian name as a sacrament that cannot be touched.

My first real teacher in the long-form sense was Joseph Campbell. I have lived in those lectures. Campbell understood something our public schools will not admit out loud. A great deal of a human life is spent trying to locate a place in an order—am I toward the top of the pyramid or the bottom, boss or subordinate, the person who leads the meeting or the person who cuts the grass on the side of the road? Schools are bult to establish that sorting. They are much worse at asking whether the order itself is true.[2] The same instinct that makes a teenager measure himself by house, spouse, and income is the instinct that makes a grown population easy to herd. If you were an enemy of the human race—and I will argue, as I will argue in The Politics of Heaven, that there is a non-human intelligence, call it the spirit world, call it the counsel that set itself against God—you would not need a tank. You would need the human craving to fit in. You would use names. You would use the way a culture is taught to value things. You would make some words untouchable and other words shameful. Then you would watch decent people police each other in a destructive fashion.

That is why I do not treat the indigenous-people argument as a seminar in ethnography. Ethnography is welcome. Cultures are fascinating. Their stories, legends, and rituals offer a glimpse into another time, and there is still a great deal to learn. I want archaeologists extremely well funded, even rich. I want them in the dirt. I want to spend evenings with Biblical Archaeology Review and with site reports from the Upper Peninsula. What I will not do is let a political Smithsonian wrap a living tribal present around the entire deep past of the continent and then use that wrapping to undo the United States.

The Indigenous People Argument Is a Political Machine

The academic embrace I am talking about is not “study the Haudenosaunee.” Study them. Learn the language families. Read the longhouse constitution if that is your work. The embrace I mean is the 1619-shaped habit: Europe arrives, and the story of the continent becomes death, theft, and a fall from an innocent world.[3] You can hear the same structure in other theaters. I have read papers that treat the biblical conquest of Canaan as an original crime and the modern Jewish state as its sequel, as if Yahweh were a late ethnic mascot and the land had a single rightful pagan landlord. Pagan preference is not a conspiracy in the cheap sense. It is a religious preference with political teeth. Hollywood has been more honest about its Canaanite sympathies than universities have been about theirs.

If you are going to say “indigenous people of North America” and mean it as an academic sentence rather than a chant, you do not get to start the clock in 1492, or 1619, or even 1000 CE. You have to accommodate the Windover people of Florida. You have to accommodate the copper miners of Lake Superior. You have to accommodate the drowned stone lines in the Great Lakes. You have to accept that “the Indians Columbus met” were not a timeless essence. They were people who had already replaced other people, because that is what human beings do on every continent God made.

Windover: Florida, seven to eight thousand years ago

In a pond near Titusville, not far from where rockets now leave the coast, a housing-development backhoe in 1982 lifted human bone out of peat. The police were called. Then the dates came back. The Windover pond held the dead of an Archaic people who used that water as a cemetery for a thousand years. Something like 168 individuals. Brain tissue. Woven fiber. A last meal still readable in a woman’s gut. Seven to eight thousand years before the present.[4] That is not a footnote to 1492. That is a civilization of burial custom, craft, and landscape memory standing on this peninsula while the Near East was still learning the habits that would become Egypt and Canaan.

I do not want that site used as a club against living tribes, and I do not want living tribes used as a club against that site. I want the sentence said out loud: the people of Windover are part of the indigenous story of North America, and any politics that cannot find room for them is not a politics of the past. It is a politics of the present.

The Old Copper Complex: Lake Superior and the oldest metalworking on the continent

Lake Superior is one of the wonders of the world. I do not hide that. Put-in-Bay, Mackinac, the Upper Peninsula—I love the Great Lakes the way some people love mountains. Superior also contains one of the sharpest mysteries we have. The Keweenaw and Isle Royale hold native copper of a purity that still startles metallurgists. Prehistoric pits pock the trap rock. Hammerstones lie in the fill. Organic scraps caught in copper tools have been dated into the ninth millennium before the present. Sediment cores beside the old workings have been read as mining signatures even earlier. This is the Old Copper Complex: hunter-gatherers who learned to beat, float, and vein copper into points, knives, and ornaments long before the Mediterranean named a Bronze Age.[5]

Thousands of pits. Not a weekend hobby. Not a single village knocking a nugget into a bead. An industry measured in centuries.[6] And here is the part that detonates the pamphlet version of “indigenous people”: the pamphlet wants a single moral cast—timeless tribal nations, then Columbus. The copper will not sit still for that cast. The people who opened those pits are real indigenous people of this continent. Later nations of the Great Lakes are also real. They are not the same photograph. If genetics and archaeology cannot staple the miners of 7000 BCE to the specific tribes who met the French, then an honest academy says so. A political academy changes the subject.

Commentary — what is firm, and what is a leap? Two facts are no longer eccentric. First, Archaic people of the Upper Great Lakes worked native copper very early; some dates now rival the oldest copper work in the Old World. Second, the metal is so pure it can be hammered without the smelting regimes of Cyprus or Timna. The leap—and it is a leap—is to walk that copper across the Atlantic into Solomon’s Temple or the Copper Scroll. Isotope maps of Bronze Age Europe keep finding Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, Wales, the Arabah. They have not found Keweenaw so far. My question is still the right kind of question: given the volume of metal the ancient Near East burned through, are we sure we have inventoried every source? Asking is scholarship. Treating the crossing as proven is not. The force of this argument does not require the crossing. It only requires that “indigenous” be a timeline, not a verdict.

Stone under Grand Traverse Bay

Off Traverse City, in about forty feet of water, there is a line of stone that should have ended the slogan version of prehistory by itself. Mark Holley was looking for a shipwreck and found an arrangement that the press, lazy as ever, called a Stonehenge. Holley does not like the word, and he is right not to. What he has is a long alignment on a lakebed that was dry when the lakes stood lower, with at least one boulder that some eyes read as a mastodon. Mastodons were gone from this country early. If that mark is a mark, the calendar drops into the same deep water as the copper pits.[7] Lake Huron has a cleaner case: a caribou drive-lane on a drowned hunting ground, dated to the same general world. The lakes keep the memory the textbooks compress.

When lake levels were lower, people walked landscapes we now boat over. When the English Channel was a valley, people walked to France.[8] We know migration at continental scale is not a fantasy; the first peopling of the Americas is itself a migration argument that still shifts every decade. The silly statement is not “people moved.” The silly statement is “nobody crossed open water until a Genoese sailor on a Spanish payroll made it official.” If you can keep a craft on water for forty days, you can cross an ocean. Genesis is not a Coast Guard manual, but it is a reminder that the ancient imagination did not think of the sea the way a modern tenure committee does.

The Moon-eyed people and the honesty of replacement

The Cherokee have a grievance against Andrew Jackson that American history already knows how to spell. Trail of Tears is not a rumor. Before that road west, though, Cherokee memory—or the memory settlers wrote down as Cherokee—said something else. When they came into the Smokies and the southern Appalachians, they found people already there. The printed versions call them moon-eyed: pale, light-shy, night-working, driven out when the moon was too bright for their eyes.[9] I am not asking a jury to convict a ghost. I am asking for a simple courtesy with the word “indigenous”. If the Cherokee displaced someone, then the Cherokee, in that hour, were not the first people of that ridge. They were the latest people of that ridge. That is not an insult. That is the human story from the Levant to the Andes. The political use of “indigenous” is an attempt to freeze one frame and call it eternity.

Lake Ontario was named from an Iroquoian language for the beauty of its waters. That is a good name. It is also a name that belongs to the people who happened to be in the neighborhood when the French and the English arrived.[10] They were not the copper miners of Superior. They were not the pond people of Windover. They were not a moral veto on the United States. Trump’s point in calling the water Lake America is not that Iroquoian speech never touched the shoreline. His point is that the lake is part of the American system and that the American system is allowed to say so.

What Lake America Is Actually For

Canada to the north and Mexico to the south are not mysterious to anyone who leaves their living room. The pressure on this country does not arrive only as an army. It arrives as policy language, corporate structure, United Nations furniture, and a habit of treating American particularity as an embarrassment. You see it when you get out of your comfort zone and talk to people who have memorized the indigenous-people argument the way an earlier generation memorized a catechism. The argument is doing work. The work is not respect. The work is to loosen the country’s name from the land.

So Trump changes the name. He did it with the Gulf.[11] He did it with the lake. He knows what happens next. People like me have to pick up the bone and worry about it. Museums will say he is contaminating their dialogue. Activists will say a lake is off-limits because an Iroquoian word was spoken over it four centuries ago. Fine. That reaction is the evidence. If the goal were respect for living nations, there are a hundred quieter instruments. The volume of the outrage is the tell. The goal, in the political use of the word, is to make the United States feel like a squatter in its own house.

I live in a state that still has to fight over Columbus. Columbus, Ohio, spends a remarkable amount of official energy trying to apologize for its very existence. I think that is a dumb way to run a civic conversation. Study every culture. Steal nothing sacred to a living people. Do not, as a substitute for thought, declare an entire European arrival illegitimate and then act surprised when the country loses the will to name a lake.

The Copper Scroll: Stop Asking Only Where It Went

I love the Dead Sea Scrolls. If I were not already married, I would marry them. I do not even think of that period as very ancient. The men of Qumran look, to my eyes, like a reform party inside a tired establishment—less temple museum, more faction. Call the comparison reckless. I will live with it. The Essenes against the institutions of their day; a populist temper against a collaborationist temper; Greek and Roman state-theory pressing from the outside. The names change. The pattern does not.[12]

Among those texts is the one I cannot leave alone: the Copper Scroll. Hershel Shanks, who did as much as any American to bring the Scrolls to light, wrote the book I keep on my desk.[13] It is a treasure inventory beaten into metal so it would not rot. Gold. Silver. Vessels. Caches. A map with the patience of a bookkeeper and the nerves of a man who thinks the Temple is about to die. People have hunted the deposits for seventy years. The holes come up empty, or they come up as someone else’s cellar.

The question everyone asks is: where did the treasure go? That is a fair question. I want a different one sitting beside it: where did the metal economy that made such a list thinkable come from? Copper is the quiet member of the family. The Temple accounts shine with gold, but the older world runs on copper. Bronze is copper that learned a second metal. The floor, the fittings, and the industry behind a sanctuary are not gilding. They are tonnage.

Nelson Glueck pointed at Timna and the Arabah and said, Solomon. The next generation of archaeologists rolled their eyes and gave the shafts to New Kingdom Egypt and to Midian. Then the radiocarbon clocks were wound again, and the tenth century—the horizon of David and Solomon—came back into the slag heaps.[14] I am glad of that. Local ore matters. I do not need to steal Timna from the map to ask whether Timna is the whole map. The ancient Mediterranean and the Levant were hungry for metal for a very long time. Cyprus, Sinai, the Arabah, the Alps, later Spain: these are the names the textbooks allow. Lake Superior is the name they treat as a category error.

I am going to keep treating it as a question. Native copper you can pluck, and hammer is a different proposition from sulfide ore you must smelt in a desert with ten thousand trees. If there was a way to move Superior metal, there was a reason to try. People in the Ohio country walked hundreds of miles for obsidian. We do not call them insane. We call them traders. Stretch the same instinct across a colder ocean, in an age when the shelves were wider, and the boats were not as primitive as our pride requires, and you have a hypothesis. Hypotheses are what academies are for, when academies remember.

Commentary — the Copper Scroll’s date, and the temptation of a single pipeline. Almost every specialist dates the Copper Scroll to the first century CE, as a list of Temple or sectarian deposits hidden against Rome. It is not a Bronze Age shipping manifesto. I treat the scroll as proof that ancient people recorded metal the way a state records oil, and then he asks whether the earlier, much larger copper hunger of the third and second millennia had sources we have undercounted. That is a legitimate historical appetite. What does not follow is a closed circuit: Superior pit to Solomonic floor to Qumran roll to later Islamic treasuries financing 1948. Each arrow in that circuit needs its own evidence. The first arrow is the one archaeology can actually test—with isotopes, with wreck cargoes, with smelting slag. Until those tests speak, the circuit is a storyboard. Storyboards are how books begin. They are not how cases close.

I will treat the speculative part as speculation, not a sermon dressed as a lab report. I think some of the metal listed in later memory, and some of the metal that built earlier sanctuaries, is easier to explain if the Superior district is allowed onto the trade map. I think caches get found by the wrong people over centuries. I think private holdings are a perfectly ordinary grave for a public treasure. I have even said, in the talk that became this essay, that old metal can become seed money for later politics, including politics aimed at a Jewish state. That sentence will get me blocked from rooms I wasn’t already invited to. So be it. I would rather over-ask than pretend the copper only ever moved as far as a museum caption allowed.

Copper, Lightning, and What We Forgot How to Say about Power

The Temple stories are not shy. Glory fills the house. Fire answers a prophet. A presence is described as having weight.[15] Copper is a conductor. Gold is a conductor. If you were going to build a room in which a people expected God to arrive the way a storm arrives, you would not build it out of wool. I do not need a YouTube priest of “Egyptian lightbulbs” to notice that. I also do not need to turn Yahweh into a battery. The Bible’s own language is already more interesting than the gadget version. The point is that the builders were not decorating. They were making a place that could bear a presence. Metal was part of that theology, not an afterthought from the gift shop.

Plato’s orichalcum—copper with a second metal in it, a gleam the Greeks could not quite leave alone—belongs to the same family of memories.[16] Ayn Rand, who is not an archaeologist and did not mean to be, wrote a little book about a city that forgot electricity so completely that it had to reinvent the lamp and the word “I”. That is Anthem. I point people to it because it is a moral picture of technical amnesia, not because I think Atlantis filed a patent.[17] We have forgotten more than we know. That sentence is not a license to claim every glyph is a circuit diagram. It is a license to stay humble about the inventory.

Göbekli Tepe, Hopewell earthworks, British alignments, the drowned lines under our lakes: I do not stitch them into one empire. I notice that ritual landscapes rhyme more often than chance should allow, and I notice that people under intoxication and under prayer have always claimed they were not alone in the room.[18]. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to take that claim seriously as politics—not as mood, not as metaphor. If there are wills other than human wills, they will not confine themselves to Sunday school. They will show up in the naming of lakes.

What I Want from Academia, and What I Will Do Without It

I want American archaeology. Not a European import of Marx with better maps. Not a campus that treats Columbus as a contaminant and the United States as a mistake that can be renamed out of existence. I want papers. I want dates. I want some graduate student with a better spectrometer than my opinions to take the Superior question and either kill it or keep it alive on evidence. I will read the kill-shot if it is a real one. I will not accept a sneer in place of a date.

I cover politics and business and Iran and the rest of the board because that is the world in which these arguments cash out. Trump throws a ball. Commentators pick it up. Other shows lift a line while I am asleep at two in the morning. That is the only revenue I actually care about: the advance of the idea. Fortune and glory are enjoyable when you can get it.  But, the real wage is that someone eating Fritos in a dark kitchen looks out the window and realizes the indigenous-people argument he was handed in school cannot survive contact with a copper pit that is older than the pyramids’ reputation.

My wife says I am blacklisted again. I am blacklisted everywhere, on everything, by everybody who needs the story to stay simple. I am used to it. This forum exists so that truth has a place to sit when the institutions are otherwise occupied.

The Name on the Water

Call it Lake America. Not because the Iroquois never saw it. Because the Iroquois were not the beginning of the story, and they are not the end of the American claim. The copper miners of Superior, the burial people of Windover, the builders who stacked stone on a dry bay floor—those are indigenous facts. The political slogan that uses “indigenous” to unmake the United States is not a fact. It is a maneuver.

Trump understood the maneuver well enough to answer it with a Sharpie and a map. He can do that from the Resolute Desk. The rest of the work is ours. Follow the copper. Follow the names. Follow the will that taught a nation to be ashamed of its own reflection in a lake. That will is not only human.  And if we really want to say “indigenous people,” shouldn’t we point to the Moon-eyed people and give them the credit?

NOTES

[1] Donald J. Trump, Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America for U.S. federal usage, signed August 27, 2026. Coverage: Reuters; BBC News; CNN Politics; New York Times, August 27–28, 2026. The order directs the Department of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days. It binds U.S. federal maps and communications; it does not bind Canada, New York State, or international bodies.

[2] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Campbell’s recurring concern is not career-ladder ranking but the inner work of finding a vocation larger than the self—“follow your bliss”—against a society that sorts people into stations.

[3] 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine (August 2019), Nikole Hannah-Jones et al. The Project’s framing of 1619 as the nation’s “true founding” produced a large scholarly rebuttal literature (see the later bibliography). It is cited here as the type of academic-political narrative the speaker is arguing against, not as a monograph on Great Lakes prehistory.

[4] Windover Archaeological Site, Brevard County, Florida. National Historic Landmark. Radiocarbon dates on the pond burials cluster roughly 8,000–7,000 years before present (Early/Middle Archaic). At least 168 individuals were recovered, with exceptional preservation of brain tissue, textiles, and wooden artifacts. See Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

[5] Old Copper Complex / Old Copper Culture of the western Great Lakes. Reliable dates on organic material embedded in copper artifacts run from roughly 8500 to 3580 cal BP; sediment-geochemistry work around Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula has been used to argue mining signatures as early as ~9500 years ago, with a peak often placed between ~7000 and 5000 cal BP. See Pompeani et al., Radiocarbon (2021); Pompeani et al., The Holocene (2015); Milwaukee Public Museum, Old Copper Culture collections.

[6] Isle Royale and Keweenaw native copper. The Lake Superior district contains the world’s largest concentration of native (nearly pure) copper. More than a thousand prehistoric pits have been recorded on Isle Royale alone. See National Park Service, “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.”

[7] Grand Traverse Bay stone alignment, Lake Michigan, identified in 2007 by underwater archaeologist Mark Holley during sonar survey. Stones lie about 40 feet down. Popular press labeled the site “Michigan’s Stonehenge”; Holley has repeatedly objected to that label and described a long linear arrangement rather than a henge. A possible mastodon image on one boulder remains unverified by a broad scholarly consensus. A better-documented submerged hunting structure of similar age is the Drop 45 Drive Lane in Lake Huron.

[8] Post-glacial sea level and Doggerland. During the early Holocene the English Channel and much of the southern North Sea were dry or marshy land (Doggerland), allowing pedestrian movement between Britain and the Continent until progressive inundation through the Mesolithic. This is mainstream Quaternary geology. Transatlantic crossings in that same era are a separate, and far more contested, claim.

[9] Cherokee “moon-eyed people.” Early printed versions appear in Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797), reporting that the Cherokee said they found and expelled a “moon-eyed” people who could not see well by day. Later treatments include John Haywood (1823) and James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900). Modern Cherokee cultural authorities often treat the tale as minor or as settler-amplified folklore rather than a central tribal history. No archaeological culture has been securely identified with the legend.

[10] The name Ontario is widely derived from a Wendat (Huron) / Iroquoian form, often given as Ontari’io, commonly glossed “beautiful lake,” “great lake,” or “lake of shining waters.” European mapmakers used the name in the seventeenth century, well before Canadian Confederation (1867) or the Declaration of Independence (1776). See Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s August 2026 statement and standard Great Lakes toponymy.

[11] Gulf of America: Trump proclamation renaming the Gulf of Mexico for U.S. federal usage in 2025, the immediate precedent for the 2026 Lake America order.

[12] Essenes and Qumran. The consensus that the Dead Sea Scrolls community was Essene remains the majority view, with vigorous dissent. Comparing them to a modern populist reform movement is analogy, not identity. The “RINO / tyrant” mapping in the source talk is rhetorical, not a claim that second-temple parties were American parties.

[13] Copper Scroll (3Q15), Cave 3, Qumran, discovered 1952. Two oxidized copper rolls, later cut into strips at Manchester (1955–56). The text lists dozens of hiding places and large quantities of gold, silver, and vessels—commonly read as a Temple-treasure inventory from the late Second Temple period, not a Bronze Age document. See Hershel Shanks, The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007); Judah K. Lefkovits, The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation (Leiden: Brill, 2000); John M. Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (1960).

[14] Timna Valley and Wadi Arabah copper. Nelson Glueck popularized “King Solomon’s Mines” in the 1930s–40s. Later work showed major Late Bronze Egyptian-Midianite activity; more recent radiocarbon work by Erez Ben-Yosef and colleagues has restored a significant 10th-century BCE (United Monarchy-era) industrial peak at Timna, with large slag heaps and evidence of export. Glueck’s romantic label outran the first generation of evidence; the newer dates put industrial copper back on the table for the Solomonic horizon—without requiring a Great Lakes source. Lead-isotope work on Bronze Age metal in Europe and the Near East has so far pointed to Cyprus, the Alps, Iberia, the British Isles, the Arabah, and other Old World sources, not to Keweenaw.

[15] Biblical theophanies associated with fire and storm: Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8 (the glory filling Solomon’s Temple); 1 Kings 18 (Elijah and the prophets of Baal); Ezekiel 1. Copper and gold are specified in the Tabernacle and Temple building accounts (Exodus 25–40; 1 Kings 6–7). Ancient recognition that metals conduct and gleam is not the same thing as a reconstructed electrical grid.

[16] Plato, Timaeus and Critias. Orichalcum is described as a metal second only to gold in the Atlantis story. A 2015 shipwreck off Gela, Sicily, yielded ingots some researchers identified as an alloy consistent with classical descriptions of orichalcum (primarily copper with zinc). That find, even if the alloy identification holds, does not locate Atlantis in the Azores or prove a Great Lakes connection.

[17] Ayn Rand, Anthem (1938). The novella imagines a collectivist future that has forgotten electricity and the word “I.” The “Anthem” YouTube adaptations mentioned in the source talk are fan and classroom dramatizations, not a Disney property.

[18] Hopewell Interaction Sphere (approx. 100 BCE–500 CE) is millennia later than the Old Copper peak and Göbekli Tepe (c. 9600–8000 BCE). Formal similarity of earthworks or ritual geometry across such distances in time is a prompt for research, not proof of a single whispering “spiritual entity” or a single people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING

Naming, the executive order, and the Great Lakes BBC News. “Trump Signs Order to Rename Lake Ontario as Lake America.” August 27, 2026. CNN Politics. “Trump Signs Executive Order to Change Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America.’” August 27, 2026. Reuters. “Trump Renames Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ amid Canada Trade War.” August 27, 2026. The New York Times. “Lake Ontario Didn’t Ask for Trump to Rename It.” August 27, 2026. Hough, Jack L. Geology of the Great Lakes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958. Vogel, Virgil J. Indian Names on Wisconsin’s Map. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Windover and the deep Archaic South Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Doran, Glen H., and David N. Dickel. “Multidisciplinary Investigations at the Windover Site.” In Wet Site Archaeology, edited by Barbara A. Purdy. Caldwell, N.J.: Telford Press, 1988. Milanich, Jerald T. Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Purdy, Barbara A. The Art and Archaeology of Florida’s Wetlands. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991.

Old Copper Complex, Isle Royale, and Keweenaw Bebber, Michelle R., and Alastair J. M. Key. “Optimal Linear Estimation Modeling Supports Early Holocene Copper Tool Production in North America.” American Antiquity 87 (2022). Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Pleger, Thomas C., and James B. Stoltman. “The Archaic Tradition in Wisconsin.” In Archaic Societies, edited by Thomas E. Emerson et al. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Pompeani, David P., et al. “Copper Mining on Isle Royale 6500–5400 Years Ago Identified Using Sediment Geochemistry.” The Holocene 25 (2015). Pompeani, David P., et al. “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in North America.” Radiocarbon 63 (2021). Ritzenthaler, Robert E. “The Old Copper Culture of Wisconsin.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 38 (1957). National Park Service. “Archaeological History of Isle Royale and Ancient Copper Mining.” nps.gov. Milwaukee Public Museum. “Old Copper Culture.” mpm.edu.

Drowned landscapes of the Great Lakes Holley, Mark. Field reports and public notes on the Grand Traverse Bay alignment. Northwestern Michigan College. O’Shea, John M., and Guy A. Meadows. “Evidence for Early Hunters beneath the Great Lakes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009). O’Shea, John M., et al. “A 9,000-Year-Old Caribou Hunting Structure beneath Lake Huron.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014). Lewis, C. F. M., and T. W. Anderson. Papers on post-glacial lake levels in the Huron and Michigan basins. Geological Survey of Canada.

Cherokee memory, Appalachia, and the moon-eyed people Barton, Benjamin Smith. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. Philadelphia, 1797. Haywood, John. The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. Nashville, 1823. Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900. Mooney, James. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. Chicago: Aldine, 1975 [1900]. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.

Dead Sea Scrolls and the Copper Scroll Allegro, John M. The Treasure of the Copper Scroll. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Lefkovits, Judah K. The Copper Scroll—3Q15: A Reevaluation. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Puech, Émile. The Copper Scroll Revisited. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Shanks, Hershel. The Copper Scroll and the Search for the Temple Treasure. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007. Shanks, Hershel. The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1998. VanderKam, James C., and Peter Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

Timna, Arabah, Solomon, and Near Eastern copper Ben-Yosef, Erez, et al. “A New Chronological Framework for Iron Age Copper Production at Timna.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 366 (2012). Glueck, Nelson. “On the Trail of King Solomon’s Mines.” National Geographic, February 1944. Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, and Mohammad Najjar. Studies of Iron Age copper production at Faynan / Wadi Arabah. Rothenberg, Beno. Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Yahalom-Mack, Naama, et al. Lead-isotope sourcing studies of Levantine copper.

Bronze Age metal provenance — the brake on a quiet Atlantic pipeline Ling, Johan, et al. “Moving Metals II: Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age Artefacts by Lead Isotope and Elemental Analyses.” Journal of Archaeological Science 41 (2014). Melheim, Lene, et al. “Shifting Networks and Mixing Metals.” PLOS ONE (2021). Pernicka, Ernst. Foundational papers on lead-isotope provenancing in the Aegean and Balkans. Williams, R. Alan. Studies of Great Orme copper and Atlantic Bronze Age distribution. Hauptmann, Andreas. The Archaeometallurgy of Copper. Berlin: Springer, 2007.

Alternative and contested Atlantic theses — read with the grain, and against it Fell, Barry. America B.C. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. The book that made a generation of amateurs certain and a generation of epigraphers furious. Jett, Stephen C. Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Kehoe, Alice Beck. Traveling Prehistoric Seas. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2016. McGhee, Robert. Critical essays on transoceanic contact claims; useful as a brake.

Temple, metal, and the language of presence The Holy Bible. Especially Exodus 19 and 25–40; 1 Kings 6–8 and 18; Ezekiel 1. Hurowitz, Victor Avigdor. I Have Built You an Exalted House. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992. Kitchen, Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Milgrom, Jacob. Leviticus. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001. Van Seters, John. The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Read as the academy’s counter-voice.

Atlantis, orichalcum, and technical amnesia as literature Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Rand, Ayn. Anthem. 1938. Reports on the 2015 Gela wreck ingots and the orichalcum identification debate. Forsyth, Phyllis Young. Atlantis: The Making of Myth. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980.

Campbell, order, and the inner politics of fitting in Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Campbell, Joseph, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

The political fight over founding stories Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al. “The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019. Wood, Gordon S., Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes. Letter of objection to the 1619 Project. The New York Times, December 2019. McClay, Wilfred M. Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. New York: Encounter, 2019. Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello. New York: Norton, 2008. Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration. New York: Liveright, 2014.

Hopewell, Göbekli Tepe, and the problem of rhyme across millennia Byers, A. Martin. The Ohio Hopewell Episode. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2004. Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, eds. Gathering Hopewell. New York: Springer, 2005. Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2012. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Ayn Rand, Elon Musk, Non-Human Intelligence, and the Eternal War on the Human Creator: Data Centers, Dolmens, Consciousness, and the Kaaba Stone in Mecca

I have been thinking about this for a long time, and the thoughts keep circling back like they always do when something important is trying to get out. American philosophy did not end with Ayn Rand. Human beings keep innovating. She was a powerful contributor to American thought and the American system of individual achievement, but philosophy is not a closed book. We keep going. What bothers me, what has always bothered me, is the character of the human spirit in her books and how that spirit keeps getting attacked in the real world. I look at the hatred directed at the creators, and I see something deeper than politics or economics. I see a pattern that stretches back before Abraham, before the Bible as we have it, into a world of giants, dolmens, fallen intelligences, and religions that look a lot like control systems.

Ayn Rand’s Heroes and the Rational Adult Mind That Still Misses the Eternal

I have always defended the producers in her stories. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, building according to his own vision. The men and women in Atlas Shrugged who refuse to apologize for creating value. John Galt. These are the characters who understand that achievement is moral. Yet something has always bothered me about the fully rational adult framework she used. She saw clearly the envy and the looters. She saw the morality of production. What she did not fully reach, in my view, is the layer underneath the learned adult mind.

Watch a toddler. I have done this with my own grandchildren. I try to meet them in their eternal aspect, not just as small physical packages that look like someone else in the family. The baby is learning by mimicry: the walk, the talk, the habits, the prejudices of the adults around them. Consciousness arrives already as something, then gets trained into the grooves of the culture. Children can still see outside the box. Adults often cannot. There is the old story from the war of the truck that would not fit under the bridge. All the officers and engineers were stuck until a kid suggested letting the air out of the tires. Simple. Outside the groove.

Psychedelics strip some of those learned limits. Ancient cultures knew this. The rituals around Göbekli Tepe and the Jordan Valley were not empty. The Teacher of Righteousness among the Essenes, a century or so before Jesus, was already working in a mystical stream that the later Christian story partly absorbed and redirected. Jesus emerging in the Galilee region is not an accident of geography. That land had already been thick with older practices. The Eucharist practices that closely resembled Greek mystery traditions north of Athens had been circulating for centuries. When you strip away adult prejudices, the question becomes obvious: is the body the consciousness, or is it a temporary vehicle for something that already exists?

I argue the latter. The older adult whose body is failing still carries the same eternal spirit behind the eyes. The physical form degrades. The consciousness does not. This is where I part company with pure Objectivism and with the hard materialist reading of consciousness that stops at the hardware. Elon Musk has read Rand. He has called Atlas Shrugged useful as a counterpoint to communism, though he says it needs to be tempered with kindness. He is not a hard-core Objectivist. His real drive is the expansion of consciousness across the universe, making humanity multi-planetary, and advancing AI so that intelligence itself can understand reality more fully. Curiosity is his guiding star. That is close to the creators’ spirit, but it is bigger than rational self-interest alone.

The Same Hatred That Hit Ayn Rand Now Targets Elon Musk and the Data Centers

Look at the pattern. The same kind of people who hated Rand’s uncompromising creators now hate Elon Musk. They hated him for Tesla. They hated him when he tried to cut wasteful spending. They show up on the National Mall to protest him. The hatred feels disconnected from ordinary disagreement. It has the flavor of something that reacts against any force that empowers the human race to become more than it currently is.

Data centers are the current flashpoint. I am strongly for them. They are the physical infrastructure of expanded human intelligence. They consume power and water. Local grids feel the strain. Bills can rise. Noise from cooling systems is real. In some polls, 71% of Americans express concern when one is proposed near them. The irony is thick. People who once carried copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead during the Tea Party years suddenly discover selective individualism when the factory of the mind appears in their backyard. It is easier to love the hero in a novel than when his power plant sits next door. The abstract principle is easy. The concrete implementation is hard. That does not make the principle wrong.

The deeper issue is philosophical. Data centers and AI force the question of what consciousness is. Is it locked inside the biological body forever, or can it be extended, preserved, transferred, and expanded through tools we build? Elon talks about brain-computer interfaces and spreading life to other planets. He stays close to the physical substrate. I go further. I think non-human intelligences have been manipulating the human story for a very long time, erasing footprints, using religions and cultural systems as control mechanisms. Anything that expands human capacity becomes a threat to that older order. The hatred of Musk and the hatred of Rand share that root.

Pre-Abrahamic World: Dolmens, Giants, Copper, and the Religions of the Fallen

Go back before the Hebrews. The Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians and never fully brought into the Western canon, records the story of the Watchers and the giants. That text should have been more central. People are discovering it now through popular channels, but the evidence was always there. The Jordan Valley is covered with dolmens from the Early Bronze Age. Large fields of them. Similar table-like megalithic tombs appear across Europe and into the British Isles. In North America there are stone constructions and earthworks that early observers compared to the Old World forms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, particularly in the Keweenaw, the Old Copper Culture was mining pure native copper on a large scale by 7000–5000 BCE, possibly earlier. Artifacts moved across the continent. Some researchers have argued for long-distance trade connections that mainstream archaeology still resists.

The same experts who misled the public on other matters now demand absolute trust in their claims about migration patterns and the impossibility of earlier contact. I am not required to give them that trust. Sea levels were lower twelve thousand years ago. Island-hopping routes across the Pacific were more available. The geometric and mathematical patterns that appear in distant places are not automatically a coincidence. The Wheel of the Giants near the Sea of Galilee sits in the same general region where later religious eruptions continued to occur. Jesus did not appear in a vacuum.

What was the religion of the people who built the dolmens and practiced in that landscape before the Hebrew arrival? What gods did they serve? The later duel between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel only makes sense if people already believed Baal could answer with fire. North American indigenous traditions contain figures and practices that echo Canaanite and broader Near Eastern patterns more closely than random parallel development would predict. The experts dismiss the connections. I keep looking at the ground.

The Black Stone, the Monolith, and Consciousness Transfer

The Black Stone in the eastern corner of the Kaaba is a physical object that Muslims circle and try to touch or kiss. The official explanation is clear: it is an act of following the Prophet’s example. One of the companions said he knew it was only a stone that could neither harm nor benefit, but he kissed it because he had seen the Messenger do so. Fair enough as far as it goes. The deeper history is older. The stone was already sacred in pre-Islamic Arabian pagan pilgrimage. Muhammad did not invent the reverence. He cleaned out the idols and redirected an existing sacred site. Circling seven times, the annual pilgrimage, the sacred enclosure—these were already in place among the tribes.

I look at that stone the way I look at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. An object that appears, catalyzes a leap in consciousness or culture, then continues to exert influence long after its origin is forgotten. Religions can function as programming languages for human groups. They can lock certain patterns of behavior and thought into place across generations. Some of those patterns serve the human race. Others appear designed to keep it fragmented, sacrificial, or subordinate. Islam’s historical expansion has often been framed as a victory and a display of dominance, built on conquered sites. That is not unique to one faith, but it collides hard with the American experiment, which was designed as a vehicle for individual consciousness to flourish rather than submit to collective religious or political control.

Christianity itself absorbed and redirected earlier practices. The Hebrew system still carried ritual elements that older powers could work with. The radical break that Jesus represented threatened those older arrangements. Non-human intelligence does not need to appear as little green men from space. It can operate through dreams, through psychedelic states, through recurring religious forms, through the static that certain people seem to hear and obey without understanding the source.

Collectivism, the Scapegoat, and the Continuing Attack on the Builder

The same people who once cheered when Elon stood near Trump now turn on him when the practical costs of building appear. Collectivism wears religious clothes or secular clothes. It always needs a scapegoat. The independent creator who refuses to apologize for winning becomes that scapegoat. Rand never fully cracked why the businessman-as-moral-hero failed to win over the culture. She stayed inside the rational adult frame. The hatred is older and deeper than economics. It is a hatred of the human spirit when that spirit refuses to stay small.

I see the data centers as the current concrete expression of the same fight. Expanding intelligence, expanding the reach of consciousness, giving ordinary people tools that were once reserved for the few—this is exactly what the older manipulative forces would want to slow or stop. The power and water arguments are real and must be handled honestly. Local communities deserve straight talk and real mitigation. That does not justify the deeper philosophical rejection of the very idea of scaled human intelligence.

I will keep arguing this. The body is the vehicle. Consciousness is older. The record in the ground, in the texts that almost made it into the canon, in the recurring sacred stones and geometric patterns, and in the irrational hatred directed at the builders of each new age all point in the same direction. American philosophy did not stop with Ayn Rand.  Elon Musk is one of the living characters who force the question into the open. The rest of us get to decide whether we side with the creators or with the forces that have been trying to keep the human race in its place for a very long time.

Footnotes

1.  On Elon Musk’s engagement with Atlas Shrugged as a counter to communism tempered by kindness, see contemporary reporting and his own public comments referencing Rand’s work alongside his broader curiosity-driven philosophy.

2.  Jordan Valley and Levantine dolmens date primarily to the Early Bronze Age (roughly 3700–2000 BCE), with large fields documented east of the Jordan Rift; early European explorers noted formal similarities to Western European megaliths.

3.  Old Copper Culture mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale began at least 7000–9500 years ago and produced extensive pure native copper artifacts traded across eastern North America.

4.  The Newark Holy Stones (Decalogue Stone and Keystone) are regarded by the large majority of professional archaeologists and epigraphers as 19th-century forgeries.

5.  The Black Stone of the Kaaba was already an object of pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage and veneration; Islamic tradition preserves the practice of touching or kissing it as emulation of the Prophet while explicitly denying that the stone itself possesses independent power.

6.  The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) was preserved in the Ethiopian canon and contains the Watchers narrative; it influenced Second Temple Jewish thought and early Christian writers.

7.  Local opposition to data centers frequently cites electricity demand comparable to small cities, water use for cooling, and noise; polling shows majority concern in many proposed locations while the long-term productivity and intelligence gains remain more abstract to nearby residents.

Bibliography for Further Reading

•  Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943.

•  Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.

•  1 Enoch (various critical editions and translations, including those based on the Ethiopian manuscripts).

•  Fraser, James A. Studies on Early Bronze Age dolmens of the Levant and Jordan Valley.

•  Pompeani, David, et al. Research on the chronology of prehistoric copper mining in the Lake Superior region (Radiocarbon, The Holocene, Anthropocene).

•  Steimer-Herbet, Tara. Work on dolmens and tower tombs in Jordan.

•  Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968.

•  Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.

•  Biblical Archaeology Review (long-running coverage of Near Eastern sites, copper production, and Second Temple period).

•  Primary Islamic historical sources on the Kaaba and Black Stone (Ibn Ishaq, al-Azraqi, and related early chronicles).

•  Contemporary reporting and polling on data-center siting conflicts in the United States (2023–2026).

•  Materials on the Teacher of Righteousness and the Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.

This is the ground I keep walking. The creators keep building. The older forces keep reacting. I intend to keep looking.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Principalities and Powers: What Ephesians 6:12 Means When the Same Spirit Shows Up in Two Unrelated People

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

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

The New Jonathan Edwards Bible: I appreciate all the kind words

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.

Biblical Archaeology and the Land

Biblical Archaeology Review. Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.

Cline, Eric H. Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Currid, John D. Doing Archaeology in the Land of the Bible. Baker, 1999.

Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Eerdmans, 2001.

Hoffmeier, James K. The Archaeology of the Bible. Lion Hudson, 2008.

Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Eerdmans, 2003.

Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. Doubleday, 1990.

Shanks, Hershel. Freeing the Dead Sea Scrolls. Continuum, 2010.

Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Vol. 2. Doubleday, 2001.

Museum of the Bible. Permanent exhibition catalogs and the History of the Bible gallery materials. Washington, D.C.

Scripture, Wealth, and the Conscience of a Working Life

Augustine. Confessions and City of God.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1932.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées.

Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”

The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, and 19.

Matthew 19:16–30.

1 Corinthians 6:19–20.

American Religion and the Public Order

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. Yale University Press, 1972.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1967.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Sweeney, Douglas A. The American Evangelical Story. Baker, 2005.

Space, Industry, and the Instrument of Wealth

Bezos, Jeff, and the public Blue Origin/industrial-space record read as primary sources, not devotionals.

Hoffmeier is archaeology; for space, keep the shelf honest:

Logsdail, various commercial space market outlooks; Morgan Stanley Research, “Space: Investing in the Final Frontier,” and subsequent updates.

National Academies and NASA commercial market assessments, 2020–2026.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

On Dress, Attention, and the Desk as a Signal

Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Only after you already know why you would wear the tie without him.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking, 1985.

Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. Knopf, 1977.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Attention as the real liturgy of a working day.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

George Lang’s Bible in the Backseat, Jonathan Edwards, Darbi Boddy: Lessons to build a better, and stronger, GOP in Butler County

I am not a separation of church and state guy the way the left has used it to push a secular agenda. But to understnad that, you have to understand history, and many people just don’t. And those same people don’t know much about one of the people I consider to be one of the early American Founding Fathers, Jonathan Edwards. I say, use what works and is healthy for a great society, and don’t argue with the poliitcal left the interpritation of law and order when they want to destroy America by using its own laws and policy against its creation. Since that is their method, I would advise that we drop the polite veil and admit what we are all thinking: churches go well with Republican politics, and we should be a whole lot more open about it, and just let the Marxists of the Democratic Party have their faces melt. Art Sauerwein is the new chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. The Journal-News piece I have been talking about put his wish list in public: take back the schools and make them more conservative; see more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes. I agree with most of that list. I would put the disagreement, if there is one, in a sliver. Five percent, maybe. The problem is not the nouns. The problem is that a county chairman saying he is displeased with his own officeholders signals to every Democrat and every reporter in the room that the party is not united.¹

I have a particular soft spot for people who take thankless chairs. I also have a long memory of what happens when the Bush years go slack, when Clinton years teach the other side to use government as a wealth-transfer machine, and when a Republican majority forgets that it was elected to stop that machine, not to learn its levers. Small-government capitalism is not the same project as confiscating through the tax code and redistributing under a better letterhead. I have been on that argument since before the Tea Party years. I have not left it.

What I will not do is pretend that the way you get Christian schools and lower taxes is to twist the arms of the people you still need on the card. That is the Democrat tactic with different hymns. Ostracize, purity-test, call the holdout a RINO, and then act surprised when the tent is an empty Sunday-school classroom with folding chairs and no majority.

Why I Walked George Lang to His Car

People tell me I cannot be trusted because I am friends with George Lang. I was invited to an evening with him and his wife, Debbie. We get along. I like them. I like George. Not because he is a state senator from the 4th District. Because we can stay on a subject until the parking lot lights are the only ones left.²

We started years ago with a mutual fascination with Ayn Rand and the long story of human order. She was an atheist. I was not. We did not make religion the ticket into the room. We made taxes, small business, the Ohio caucus work, jobs that let a family buy nice things without the government picking the neighbor’s pocket. Those are the planks you can stand on with a man who is not yet where you are on Sunday morning. Then you walk him to the car.

This year, 2026, not a decade ago, we were still talking when we got to his car, extending the evening as much as possible because the conversation was good. He knows what I carry. He knows the maps and the notes. He pulled out a Bible that had been given to him in the Senate. It was beautiful. I would have liked it for the shelf. It was his. He had been going through it. Debbie has said, in the way honest people say it, that they have not always lived in that lane. I did not need a performance. I needed the book’s facts in the car of a man who helps write Ohio law. That is how influence works. That is Nicodemus in a parking lot instead of a midnight stair.³

If the chairperson’s job is to get people on the card, then the chairman’s job is to make nights like that more common, not to publish a scolding that makes the next senator keep the Bible in the trunk.

Jonathan Edwards Did Not Found America From a Letter to the Editor

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible came out in August 2026 from Thomas Nelson, NKJV, notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, edited by Matthew Everhard. I saw it advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review, which is still the magazine I would take to a desert island and be happy with nothing else.   I will likely make that Edwards volume my next daily Bible. The one I have carried through airports is full of notes. Every blank space they left me has writing in it.⁴

Edwards did his public work in the 1730s through the 1750s, while a young George Washington was still making himself and Franklin was already allergic to other people’s piety and still able to hear the weather. The Awakening put biblical speech in the streets. The colonies that broke from England were not a faculty workshop. They were a people who had been arguing, singing, and frightening themselves with sermons about a God who was not a mascot. I do not claim Edwards “founded” the United States. I claim the country is harder to imagine without that pressure in the air.

He was also the grandfather of Aaron Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton. I am not a Hamilton man. I mention the grandson so nobody thinks I am selling a stained-glass window. Edwards’s own church in Northampton eventually threw him out because he would not lower the table to the town’s comfort. He finished in a smaller charge at Stockbridge, among the Mahican, and then the College of New Jersey—Princeton—made him president. He lasted about a month. He took the smallpox inoculation during an outbreak, fever followed, and he died on March 22, 1758. His last counsel was to trust God and not be afraid. The same college that begged him to come later drifted into the progressive machine that now congratulates itself for unmaking the civilization he helped catechize.⁵

That arc is the warning. You can put a Christian on a letterhead and still lose the building. You can also lose the building by refusing to put your arm around anyone who is not already converted.

Darbi Boddy and the Noble Death That Vacates the Seat

I have always had a soft spot for Darbi Boddy on the Lakota school board. She came out of a Puritan temperament: right is right, wrong is wrong, say it, take the heat. I admired the spine. The political class asked whether she knew she had to go to other people and shake hands. She drew a line so hard that the people who should have been part of her coalition treated her as a problem to be managed. She was removed. Not enough Republicans came to her defense in the way that kept the seat. I was very angry about that. I still am.⁶

There is a Christian imagination that treats the pike as the only honorable furniture—burned, sawn, beheaded, and therefore faithful. The martyrs were real. Rome tried to kill the church, and the church outlived the attempt. I am asking a different question for a school board and a county party. Are we here to die beautifully and hand the district back to the purple-haired people eaters or are we here to keep the chair and put more than one adult in the room?

A public school system designed as an agent of social reconstruction will not become conservative because a chairman tells the Journal-News he would like that very much. You need people on the board who can last. You need people around them who do not run at the first ugly headline. You need a farm team that was not raised only in a sanctuary, because most of the county was not. Maybe forty percent can make the born-again jump on a timetable that satisfies a Sunday-school teacher. The rest will come, if they come, the way George came toward a Bible in a backseat: over years, over taxes, over ancient history, over the proof that you will still walk them to the car when they are not yet where you are.

The Church That Taught Me Business Had Classrooms and a Mortgage

I saw my grandson today, and I told him about my years between eleven and sixteen, High Adventure, the Scout post that met at a big church on RT42 in West Chester. We made pizzas in the church kitchen, and people came to pick them up. That was a fundraiser, a civics lesson, and a first business plan. My family church in Fairfield was the other building. My wife and I were married there. Catechism, Sunday school, the pastor’s house on the property, the side rooms where a kid learned how adults talk when they think they are only running a troop meeting. Then the money ran out. They sold it. It broke my family’s heart. It is not on the market presently. I have been thinking about buying it back for a couple of million. dollars In any other use, that ground in Fairfield is a different number. Because it is a church, the market treats it like a problem.⁷

I am not announcing a closing. I am saying the thought is serious, and Jonathan Edwards is the reason the thought got louder. Churches decline when they have no profit model and a pastor who thinks Jesus only ever taught under a tree. Jesus could walk from village to village. A sanctuary in a hot real-estate corridor has a mortgage. Nicodemus money, the quiet help that keeps a ministry on its feet, is not a compromise with Egypt. It is how a thing survives long enough to teach the next boy how to sell a pizza and keep the books.

The West Chester Tea Party lost a church venue while I was in Japan not that long ago. A guest, a fight, and the door closed. For years the movement lived on donated fellowship halls and cookies after the meeting. Streamers, Republicans, whoever would come. That was a big tent that still knew the room had been a sanctuary an hour earlier. I want a building in this county that Tea Party groups and Republican meetings can use without a landlord who gets nervous. Not a state church. A civic table with a steeple still on it.

Princeton Forgot. The Party Should Not Copy the Forgetting.

Edwards as president of Princeton is the picture I cannot shake. The college wanted the man who could make seniors write on divinity and then talk about it. A short generation later, the heirs of that project began the long surrender. Liberty University and the older schools are not the same charter, but the temptation is the same: keep the Christian name, lose the Christian nerve, export Democrats with verse numbers. Complaining about that in a newspaper will not reverse it. Buying a pulpit, filling a room, putting your arm around a senator who keeps a Bible in the backseat, teaching a Scout to make change for a pizza—that is the slower work.

Peer pressure is not evangelism. “Agree, or we will put you outside” is what the other party already does. If we do it with better footnotes, we still lose the county. Jesus did not recruit from the Sanhedrin’s banquet list. He took the people who had fallen out of the wagon. Edwards could fill a town and still get voted out. Both facts matter. The first tells you preaching works. The second tells you preaching without a coalition becomes a memorial service.

What I Want the Chairman to Do Instead of Being Displeased

Help officeholders get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. If you want Christian values in the community, put a beautiful Bible in more backseats by being the kind of man a senator will linger with in a parking lot. If you want the schools, do not design another martyr and then wonder why the seat is empty after they are killed or lose their seat in the next election. If you want taxes cut, stay on the subject with people who will go to the small-business caucus before they will go to your Wednesday Bible study volunteer class.

I will keep reading BAR. I will keep the Edwards volume in the rotation. I will keep walking George to the car. I will keep thinking about the Fairfield church, not because nostalgia is a strategy, but because the kids I see now do not have the side room I had, and a party that cannot raise its own young in a hall it does not have to rent is a party that will keep leasing its future from people who do not like its hymn.

Lead. Do not write the other side’s headline for them.

Notes

1.  Art Sauerwein, Butler County GOP executive chairman, quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage on local Republicans, schools, Christian values, spending, and taxes. A public rebuke of sitting Republican officeholders is usable copy for the other party. That is not mind-reading. That is how newspapers work.

2.  George F. Lang, Republican, Ohio Senate 4th District since 2021; previously Ohio House 52nd; West Chester. Married to Debbie Lang. I am describing a private evening in 2026 and a longer friendship. I am not claiming he has asked me to speak for him.

3.  John 3; 7:50–51; 19:39–42. Nicodemus keeps his station and still moves toward the teacher. Influence that can only speak in the sanctuary will not reach the people who write statutes.

4.  The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026, general editor Matthew Everhard. Biblical Archaeology Review, Biblical Archaeology Society, 1975–present.

5.  Edwards was inaugurated at the College of New Jersey on February 16, 1758; died March 22, 1758, after smallpox inoculation. Buried in the Presidents’ Lot, Princeton Cemetery. Esther Edwards married Aaron Burr Sr.; their son was Aaron Burr Jr. Northampton dismissed Edwards in 1750 over communion discipline; Stockbridge followed.

6.  Darbi Boddy won a Lakota Local Schools board seat in 2021 on a conservative platform and was removed by the board in March 2024 after a long, ugly fight and a 90-day absence tied to a protection-order conflict with another member. I am not retrying that case here. I am talking about coalition and what happens when courage has no bench.

7.  The Fairfield church of my childhood and marriage is named as a family fact and a present thought, not as a listed property and not as a pledge. High Adventure and the West Chester church on the Cincinnati-Dayton Road corridor are the Scout years as I lived them.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Local Politics and the People Named

Journal-News (Hamilton). Late-August 2026 coverage of Butler County Republicans and Chairman Art Sauerwein.

Lang, George F. Ohio Senate, District 4. Public record, 2021–present; Ohio House, 2017–2020.

Ballotpedia and the Ohio Legislature biographical pages for George Lang.

Journal-News. “2 conservative newcomers, incumbent win Lakota seats.” November 2021.

WVXU. “Darbi Boddy is removed from Lakota’s school board.” March 20, 2024.

WLWT. Lakota board appointment coverage following the vacant seat, April 2024.

FOX19. “Criminal charge dismissed against former Lakota school board member.” August 1, 2024.

Jonathan Edwards and the Awakening

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press.

Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections; Freedom of the Will; “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.

Marsden, George M. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Eerdmans, 2008.

McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford, 2012.

Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism. InterVarsity, 2003.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening. Yale University Press, 2007.

Princeton University. Presidential biographies: Jonathan Edwards, 1758.

This Day in Presbyterian History. “February 23: Jonathan Edwards.” On the inoculation and death.

Princeton and the Long Drift

The Princetonians and official presidential histories of the College of New Jersey.

Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822. Princeton University Press, 1989.

Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford, 1994.

Burtchaell, James Tunstead. The Dying of the Light. Eerdmans, 1998.

Church, Money, and the Nicodemus Problem

The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, 19.

Luke 8:1–3. The women who funded the ministry.

Acts 4:32–37; 16:14–15. Property and hospitality in the first churches.

Wesley, John. “The Use of Money.”

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together.

Schaeffer, Francis A. The Church at the End of the 20th Century.

Schools, Boards, and the Limits of Martyrdom

Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education. Free Press, 1993.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. The Schools We Need. Doubleday, 1996.

Murray, Charles. Real Education. Crown Forum, 2008.

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. New Society, 1992.

Ohio Department of Education standards files for the official language boards to actually vote on.

Parties, Tents, and Coalition

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.

Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015.

Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale, 1962.

Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford, 2012.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Scripture, Friendship, and Slow Conversion

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.

Newby, Elizabeth. On ordinary friendship as the delivery system of belief, read against Lewis.

Augustine. Confessions. The long way toward a book that was already in the house.

Biblical Archaeology Review. For the magazine that sits on the table while the political argument goes on.

Boy Scouts of America. Handbook and the old troop-and-post structure. The side room was a civics school whether the adults knew it or not. 

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Don’t Sour the Wine: Why Public Lectures from a County GOP Chair Push Officeholders Away, make Democrats happy, and Shrink the Tent We Want to Grow

It is hard to be in a leadership position. I know that. I wanted to wish the new chair of the Butler County Republican Party well. Art Sauerwein stepped into a job that is mostly thankless, always public, and never as simple as it sounds when you are talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror.¹ I have worked with people in this orbit. We have agreed on more than we have fought about. I was not looking to pick a fight with a brand-new chairman. Bloodsport politics is already crowded with people who think volume is a substitute for skill.

But people are already getting sour on his wine. This is not the pleasant kind. This is the vintage you spit out when you realize the bottle lacks what it takes. Sauerwein literally means sour wine.² I did not invent the metaphor. The paper did him the courtesy of putting the raw vintage on the table.

I want the Republican Party in this county to succeed. I do not want the political disease that has been cultivated in parts of West Chester to migrate township by township until the rest of Butler County starts talking like a faculty lounge. I want more unification, not less. I want a bigger tent, not a Sunday-school classroom with a padlock on the door. That is why I am saying something now, at the start of September 2026, while the article is still warm and the Democrats are still salivating.

What Sounded Fine in the Shower Did Not Survive the Newspaper

Some lines sound terrific when you are singing in the shower. They still sound pretty good at a Sunday meeting among people who already agree with you. They do not survive contact with newsprint. Once they are in the Journal-News, they belong to every Democrat, every fence-sitter, every officeholder you still need next cycle, and every volunteer who is privately deciding whether this job is worth the abuse.

The chairman’s public message, as it landed, ran something like this: take back the schools and make them more conservative; put more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, the Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, eliminate waste and fraud, and get in alignment with conservative values. Then the kicker: he has not been seeing that happen, and it displeases him.

I agree with a large percentage of the substance. Cutting spending, cutting taxes, reducing waste, and stopping fraud are not radical demands in a Republican county. I have been in the tax fight in this county for a long time, going back through names people still remember and some they would rather forget. I want conservative schools. I am not embarrassed by Christian values in a community that was built on them. That is not the argument.

The argument is tone, timing, venue, and target. You do not build a governing party by taking out the people you just spent years getting elected. You especially do not do it two months before a midterm when Democrats are hunting local gains and the only story they need is “Republicans are already eating their own.”

The Fast-Food Manager Problem in Bloodsport Politics

I have heard this voice before. It usually comes from people who have a hard time making a legitimate argument that requires sitting down, listening, and converting someone who does not already attend their Bible study to their way of thinking. Instead of doing that work, they reach for the lecture. I have seen it in entry-level managers at places that sell fast food. They get handed a shift. They have run something with five employees. They discover that barking feels like leadership.

You can talk that way to teenagers folding boxes. You cannot talk that way to people you are asking to put their name on a ballot, raise money, take votes, absorb the hate mail, and then run again in two years. Public office is already a faithless job. If word gets out that the chairman treats officeholders like children who missed curfew, the short list of people willing to do the work gets shorter. Then you will complain that nobody good will run, and you will be right, and you will have helped cause it.

The grandfather tone does not work on people who already moved out of their father’s house.  Younger Republicans, the ones you claim you want to recruit so the party is not a retirement home, can smell a lecture from across the parking lot. Trump did not build a coalition by scolding his own team in the local paper. He built one by pointing the fire outward.

Good Old Boys, Street Vendors, and the Nicodemus Problem

I have heard the comments on Facebook. People send me this stuff all day. “Good old boys club.” It is always the boys club when you are not in it. When you are outside, you throw a rock and call it prophecy. You say you are Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers. You say you are honest and pure. Meanwhile the people you need are quietly updating their résumés for a private-sector job that pays better and does not include a chairman who inspects their homework in the newspaper.

You have to remember Nicodemus. He loved Jesus. He wanted the message to advance. He also had to remain a functioning member of the priesthood. He walked a fine line on purpose.³ That is the nature of serious politics. It should not be a purity cult. I have heard the purity speech for years: we should be clean, we should be absolute, we should never sit at a table with anyone who is only 80 percent of the way home. Meanwhile you bleed support. You try to build a big party and then you shove people toward the door with absolutism and call the ones who leave compromised.

Cheerleaders are useful. Rock throwers are useful too, in the right hour. Leadership is deciding which tool you are holding before you swing it at your own team.

David Kern Knew How to Throw a Rock and Still Keep the Township

I have known the Kern family since I was very little. I was friends with his son. I knew Katy. I remember David Kern as a man who could throw a rock with the best of them and still serve as a respected Liberty Township trustee for decades. He chaired this county party. He also discovered, the hard way, that herding quarreling Republicans is a different sport than fighting Democrats.⁴ He said as much when he walked away from the chairmanship. That history is sitting right there for anyone who wants to read it instead of repeating it.

You need people who will volunteer for the ugly jobs. The short list of adults willing to be lectured in public like children is very short. You do not want your officeholders saying, “I will take the private job. It pays. I do not have to run every two years. I do not have to take a sermon from a chairman who just discovered the budget.” Once they leave, you do not get them back by posting harder.

West Chester Is Not a Metaphor. It Is a Beachhead.

I know Kathy Wyenandt. I have watched her work. She is out there trying to hitch a truck and a horse to the same socialist push that is running through school boards, township halls, and every other local institution that used to be too boring for ideology. Call it progressivism if the word socialism makes the room cough. The destination is the same: more government, more cultural renovation, more migration of West Chester habits into townships that did not ask for them.⁵

She does not need a majority tomorrow. She needs Republicans to do her turnout work for her. A county party that announces, in the paper, that its own officeholders have disappointed the chairman is a gift. Democrats do not have to beat Republicans if Republicans will brand their own people as failures eight weeks before Election Day. I do not want a bunch of Democrats in offices that took a generation to flip. That is not a purity position. That is arithmetic.

The people pushing the chairman to talk like this represent a slice of the party, not the whole vineyard. I would put that slice well under 40 percent of Republicans in this county, with the rest on the fence, tired, transactional, or capable of being seduced by a smiling Democrat who promises to be less exhausting. If you lecture the 60 percent as if they were the problem, you will meet them later on the other side of the aisle, or at home on the couch.

You Cannot Shut Off a County Budget Like a Spigot

“The Republicans that are in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, and I have not been seeing that happen, and it displeases me.” That sentence is the whole problem in one pour. You cannot just turn the spigot off on a dime. I have been in these tax fights my whole adult life. There were plenty of pizzas eaten over tables with Mike Fox and the old Liberty Township crowd. There were plenty of arguments. You still had to build a team.⁶

County government is not a lemonade stand. It is labor contracts, state mandates, jails, boards of developmental disabilities, roads, courts, and a sales-tax stream that moves with the economy. Butler County has rolled back millage, sat on windfalls, and still gets accused of betrayal because the cut was not theatrical enough for people who do their budgeting in comment threads. Results matter. Theater is cheaper. Voters, after two years of Republicans in power, vote results. If the chairman’s public line is “our people have not done a very good job,” do not be shocked when the other team puts that quote on a mailer.

This is the midterm problem in miniature. The buzzwords that pulled people to the polls the first time do not work the same way once you own the desks. Insurgents always arrive to take advantage of disappointment. Some of them only know how to throw rocks. They want Jesus in the temple every Tuesday. If you are not flipping tables, you are not holy enough. That energy can win a primary. It does not automatically win a county, and it does not automatically govern one.

Todd Hall, Thomas Hall, and the Unfashionable Work of Building a Team

Todd Hall was good at building a team. Thomas Hall has done the unglamorous work in the Statehouse. I have had disagreements with people in that circle. There were disputes. We worked them out over time. Nobody has to be attached at the hip. Leadership is the art of bringing people to your way of thinking without setting their chairs on fire.⁷

People who lack that skill often lecture because lecture is what you do when you cannot close. They talk themselves into a lather in the bathroom. It sounds like Churchill. Then they get into a meeting with actual officeholders, actual budgets, and actual voters, and the words come out like a substitute teacher on the last day of school. “It displeases me” is not a governing strategy. It is a report card written by someone who is not taking the test.

Sometimes a chairman will sound like the star quarterback at a pep rally. In the bleachers you will have a row of people who never liked football and came for the argument. The quarterback will look like a cardboard cutout of the good old boys club. Fine. People still like winning the game. They like being around a team that wins. They will tolerate a certain amount of jock energy if the scoreboard gives them what they want. They will not tolerate a coach who spends the pregame interview explaining that his own starters are a disappointment.

Unity Is Not Compromise. Isolation Is Not Courage.

I do not want a compromised party. I also do not want a minority party that congratulates itself for being pure while Kathy’s people take another township seat. Those are not the only two options, no matter how many Facebook theologians insist they are. Learning to communicate with people who are not as conservative as a Sunday-morning Sunday-school teacher is not the same thing as becoming one of them. It means you can share a sandbox without eating the sand.

People who cannot do that work are often insecure about their ability to win a conversation. So they push the other person away. Then they never have to experience the small death of losing the argument. They say, “We did our best. We stood on principle. We were outnumbered.” Being outnumbered is not a sacrament. I do not want the minority party in Butler County. I want the party that keeps winning and then governs like it intended to keep the job.

Compromise has a cost. Losing has a cost. Leadership is weighing those two costs in public without pretending one of them is free. Thanksgiving dinner is the annual clinic: you do not have to agree on the football game to keep the same people at the table. A smart network puts more than one game on. That is not cowardice. That is how you still have a family next year.

A Friendly Note to the New Chairman

I want Art Sauerwein to be a successful chairman. I want people to support him. I want the party to grow. I agree with him on most of the policy nouns in that article. Cut spending. Cut taxes. Watch the schools. Say the quiet part about values out loud. Do it in a room with the officeholders first. Bring the concerns to a meeting. Make the case. Count votes. Help them find the money, the language, and the coalition. Then go to the paper together.

If you push them away in August, you will not have them in November, and you will not have them when you need a candidate in 2028. Chairmen who listen only to the people who want them to tear the party down do not last. The job looks important from the outside. From the inside it is volunteer hours, bruised egos, and a phone that rings with problems nobody else wanted. You will not keep good people if the public posture is “Father Knows Best and the children have disappointed the table.”

Help them get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. Show up for them when the Journal-News calls. Save the lecture for the closed session, and even then, make it a conversation. The people who are whispering that the only moral posture is table-flipping are not the ones who will still be in the room when the chairs are empty.

Tomorrow Can Still Be a Better Day

It is hard to be in leadership in all phases. It is hard when people will not come over to your way of seeing the field. You still have to try. You have to bring together people who would never choose the same dinner table if football were not on. You have to give people latitude without becoming a wet rag. That is the whole craft.

So here is the friendly advice, based on what I am seeing in the first weeks of this chairmanship: do not sour the wine. Do not sour the voters. Do not sour the big tent. Do not push away the people who are not as conservative as you wish they were on a Sunday morning. Sit down. Work it out. Inspect the team in private. Cheer the team in public. I want this chairman to prosper. I want this party to keep the county. Lecturing your own officeholders in the newspaper is how you do the Democrats’ work for them.

Notes

1.  Art Sauerwein quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage of Butler County politics heading into the November 2026 midterms. The phrasing matches public circulation of the piece under titles such as “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.”

2.  Sauerwein is a German occupational/descriptive surname meaning “sour wine,” historically attached to makers or sellers of tart wine. The pun writes itself; I did not invent the vintage.

3.  John 3:1–21. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, came to Jesus by night. He later spoke for due process (John 7:50–51) and helped bury Jesus (John 19:39–40). He never became a street-corner prophet. That is the point.

4.  David Kern served 32 years as a Liberty Township trustee, briefly chaired the Butler County Republican Party, and died in 2021. See Journal-News obituary coverage and the Congressional Record tribute by Rep. Warren Davidson, April 22, 2021.

5.  Kathy D. Wyenandt of Liberty/Fairfield Township has been central committee chair and a visible public face of the Butler County Democratic Party, a Board of Elections member, and a candidate for Ohio House and Senate. She has written openly urging voters to consider Democrats in local cycles.

6.  Butler County commissioners have repeatedly used inside-millage rollbacks and related tools in recent budget cycles; sales-tax receipts have also risen. Whether that pace satisfies every activist is a separate question from whether the county is “not cutting.” See Journal-News budget coverage 2024–2026.

7.  Todd Hall served as Butler County GOP executive chairman through the 2024–2026 cycle and was frequently quoted on endorsements, including the 2026 commissioner primary. State Rep. Thomas Hall represents Ohio House District 46.

8.  Richard K. Jones, Butler County sheriff, published They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). The book is a leadership memoir, not a novel about cartels; the shower version of the pitch always sounds punchier than the jacket copy.

Bibliography for Further Reading

A working shelf, not a complete library. I have included the books that actually change how you think about parties, persuasion, local government, and the temptation to confuse purity with power.

Local and Ohio Politics

Butler County Republican Party. Candidate and leadership materials, butlercountygop.org, 2024–2026.

Callahan, Denise G., and Journal-News staff. Budget, millage, sales-tax, and commissioner coverage, Hamilton Journal-News, 2018–2026.

Clark, Michael D. “Beloved Butler County icon, political leader David Kern dies after illness.” Journal-News, April 16, 2021.

Davidson, Warren. “Honoring the Life and Memory of David Kern.” Congressional Record, April 22, 2021.

Ohio Republican Party. County chair directory and State Central Committee materials, ohiogop.org.

Wyenandt, Kathy. “You may want to vote Democrat this election cycle.” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 15, 2022.

Journal-News. “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.” Late August 2026. (Article circulating with the Sauerwein quotations discussed here.)

Parties, Coalitions, and the Big Tent

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Still the best warning against people who love principles more than the society those principles have to live in.

Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper, 1957.

Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. Yale University Press, 1981.

Galston, William A., and Elaine C. Kamarck. “The Politics of Polarization.” Third Way / Brookings essays, various years.

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Harper, 1946.

Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind. Regnery, 1953.

Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford University Press, 1990. Useful even for a two-party county: coalition is a skill.

Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale University Press, 1962.

Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Truman, David B. The Governmental Process. Knopf, 1951.

Leadership, Management, and Why Lectures Fail

Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster, 1936. Mock it after you can do it.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Politics is the continuation of coalition by other means.

Collins, Jim. Good to Great. HarperBusiness, 2001.

Drucker, Peter F. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row, 1967.

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Overman Warrior Publications.

Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. 2026.

Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 1532. Read it as a warning about what happens when your own captains stop trusting you.

Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings. c. 1645.

Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. You cannot lecture a production system into existence.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Do not announce your disappointment with your own left flank.

Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. The leader who needs to be seen lecturing is already losing.

Rhetoric, Media, and the Local Paper Problem

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda. Knopf, 1965.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, 1946.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking, 1985.

Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Henry Regnery, 1953.

Scripture and the Fine Line

The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, and 19. Nicodemus.

Matthew 21:12–13 and parallels. The temple tables. Note the target: a corrupt marketplace inside the holy precinct, not your own disciples on the night before a fight.

Augustine. City of God. The two cities argument is older than any county central committee.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1932.

Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942. Especially the parts about factions inside the church.

American Party History and Populism

Gerring, John. Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. Knopf, 1955.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Knopf, 1965.

Phillips, Kevin. The Emerging Republican Majority. Arlington House, 1969.

Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015. Parties exist to tame factions. When the faction tames the party, you get what you are watching.

Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Sundquist, James L. Dynamics of the Party System. Brookings, 1983.

Local Government, Taxes, and the Spigot That Will Not Shut

Fisher, Ronald C. State and Local Public Finance. Various editions.

Oates, Wallace E. Fiscal Federalism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Tiebout, Charles M. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956).

Ohio Auditor of State and Butler County Auditor annual financial reports, 2022–2026.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

No New Taxes Means No Relief: Lakota is at it again

I have been saying no to Lakota tax increases for a long time. People who dislike that fact have a ready-made story about me. They say I will never be for anything. They say I hate schools. They say I would rather buy a television than teach a child. That last one is a joke I make myself, and I will make it again before we are done, because I would rather keep my money than subsidize a system that lectures families about everything except the marketplace those children will enter. I am not against education. I am against the public-education trick: lose at the ballot box, split the package, dress it up as a renewal, and come back until the people who write the checks get tired.

Last November the district asked this community for more than half a billion dollars. Voters answered with 61% no. That was not a polite disagreement. That was a verdict. Eight months later, the same board put a two-hundred-twenty-three-million-dollar, thirty-seven-year bond on the November 3, 2026 ballot and called it Phase One. They say it is not a tax increase. They say it merely replaces a bond that expires in 2028. They say seventy-seven dollars a year on a hundred-thousand-dollar home is what you are already paying, so why not keep paying it?

Here is what that sentence actually means. You have been making a mortgage payment to the school district. The mortgage is almost paid off. Instead of celebrating the payoff, they want you to sign a new note for thirty-seven more years and call the signing a favor. That is no new taxes. That is no tax relief. And tax relief is the thing this community has earned.

The Mortgage They Do Not Want You to Pay Off

Imagine a family in Liberty Township that bought a house in the early nineties. They paid the bank. They paid Lakota. They raised children who left the system twenty years ago. They kept writing the check because that is what property owners in Ohio do. They did not get a parade when the old bond schedule wound down. They got a brochure.

The brochure says the same thing every brochure says. Our buildings need work. Our classes are too large. Our enrollment is about to explode. If you vote no, you are against children. If you vote yes, your bill stays the same. Status quo. Responsible. Community.

I have watched this language for two decades. It is professional consent-building. The school board does not know how to say no, and the superintendent’s office is not hired to manage scarcity. It is hired to keep the train on the tracks after the train has already gone over the hill. When the train leaves the rails, they do not ask why the engineer was cheering. They ask the passengers for a new train.

Voting yes does not keep your taxes the same in any moral sense. It prevents the cut you were about to receive when the old debt died.

That is the whole argument, and everything else is scenery. The district is not wrong that buildings age. The district is not wrong that some classrooms are crowded. The district is wrong to claim that those facts entitle it to another generation of extraction without ever letting the burden fall on the people who already paid.

What Is Actually on the November 3 Ballot

Let us be precise, because the district is precise when it helps them and foggy when it does not.

On June 9, 2026, the Lakota Board of Education voted to place a bond issue before every elector in the district. The principal amount is $223,483,492. The maximum term is thirty-seven years. The Butler County Auditor certified an estimated average annual levy of 2.20 mills, which the resolution states amounts to $77 for each $100,000 of the county auditor’s market value. Collections would begin with tax year 2028 and first come due in calendar year 2029, timed to the death of the existing roughly 2.23 mill bond. [1] The election is Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

The money is not operating cash. It cannot legally be dumped into teacher salaries. It is debt service for facilities: renovating and improving existing schools, constructing facilities, safety work, furniture and equipment, site work, and land. Phase One of the Master Facilities Plan is estimated at $300 million. The Ohio Facilities Construction Commission would put up about seventy-seven million. Local taxpayers would carry $223 million.

If it passes, the district’s current sketch looks like this. Grade bands are being rearranged to reduce transitions: preschool at Liberty Early Childhood; K-5 in the remaining elementary plants; grades 6-8 at East Freshman and Plains Junior after additions; and grades 9-12 at East and West high schools after additions. Three schools will close: Adena Elementary, Ridge Junior, and the West Freshman / Creekside / Central complex. Twenty-one buildings become eighteen. [2]

That is the product. Now look at the price tag they put in the window.

The Seventy-Seven-Dollar Illusion

Every piece of official copy leads with $77 per $100,000. That number is not a lie. It is a costume. There is not a representative owner-occupied house in Liberty Township or West Chester listed on the tax duplicate at $100,000. Liberty’s recent median sales have been in the low-to-mid-500s. West Chester’s typical values sit in the low-to-mid-four hundreds.

Auditor market value / Annual cost of 2.20 mills / What the brochure calls it $100,000 / $77 / The headline $350,000 / About $270 / A modest house here $450,000 / About $347 / Common West Chester $530,000 / About $408 / Common Liberty Township $650,000 / About $501 / Plenty of roofs in this district

Figures are the bond’s stated $77 per $100,000, scaled. They do not include other school, township, or county levies.

Three hundred to four hundred dollars a year is not a Friday-night blowout at Liberty Center, though I have heard that comparison from people inside the system. It is a 65-inch television. It is several trips to Ford’s Garage. It is the difference between a household that just finished paying for someone else’s children and a household that gets to keep the last chapter of the old bond. The district calls it no increase because the new millage is almost identical to the old millage. I call it locking the extraction in place until most of the people voting today are dead.

Last Year They Asked for Half a Billion

November 4, 2025, was not a close call. The package failed 60.81 percent to 39.19 percent. The bond alone sought $506.4 million. There was a permanent-improvement levy riding along. Ballot language looked like nearly six mills. The district insisted the net would be 2.66 mills, or about $93 per $100,000, if collections waited until 2029 and old debt rolled off. Voters did not buy the complexity. [3]

I was not surprised. The 2025 plan was ostentatious. Tear-downs. New elementaries. A district-wide redesign sold as inevitability. When a community that has already funded a quarter-billion-dollar annual operation looks at a half-billion construction dream and says no, a healthy institution would ask whether the dream was the problem. Lakota asked how to slice the dream so it would fit through the door.

Phase One is the slice. Grades six through twelve first. Elementaries later. Same philosophy, smaller first bite, friendlier slogan. The public-education trick is to keep putting it on the ballot until compassion and confusion outvote memory. I do not think the memory of last November is that short. We will find out on November 3.

The Enrollment Story They Need You to Believe

The pitch depends on a spike. Maintain seventeen thousand students for years, then warn that apartments and new housing will deliver two thousand more children, nineteen thousand by 2033, hundreds already over capacity, nearly twenty-five hundred over by the end of the forecast if you use the aggressive numbers. Build or drown. That is the emergency.

The district’s own September 2025 slides said enrollment had reached 17,348, OFCC capacity was 16,577, and the system was already 771 students over. They projected 19,074 by 2033. [4] I do not dismiss crowding where it exists. I dismiss the habit of treating the high case as destiny and the housing pipeline as an act of God.

FutureThink Was More Cautious Than the Brochure

In March 2026, FutureThink delivered an enrollment study to the district. The total for 2025-26 in that report is 16,913. The ten-year path does not march to nineteen thousand. It drifts downward toward the mid-sixteen thousands by the mid-2030s. [5] The consultants, to their credit, tell the district to monitor births, housing, community school enrollment, and open enrollment. That is what a serious projection does. It does not convert every apartment proposal into a permanent crisis.

Two stories can be true at once. Some buildings feel tight today. Some grade levels bulge. And the long-run student count may not justify a thirty-seven-year debt service schedule sold as if the spike were already signed into law. If the independent study is closer to reality than the campaign slide, Lakota would be borrowing against a future that is not arriving.

This is why I keep dragging housing policy into a school argument. Enrollment is not weather. Enrollment is the residue of planning decisions made by trustees, zoning boards, and developers along the corridors we all drive. When those decisions load the district with children whose households do not share the same property-tax skin as a longtime homeowner, the school office declares an emergency, and the homeowner discovers another levy.

Apartments, Renters, and Who Pays the Bill

I like Costco. I like Liberty Center. I like development that looks like a place you would take your family on purpose. I do not like the psychological trick of county and township government, which is to look at empty dirt, imagine bodies, and call the bodies success. Bodies consume services. Bodies send children to school. Bodies vote. Bodies in apartments do not sit on the tax duplicate the way a paid-off house does.

The owner of the apartment building pays property tax once. The families inside pay rent. They use the schools, the roads, the deputies, the parks. On election day they are citizens, as they should be. The structural mismatch is still real. The coalition that benefits from the spending can grow faster than the coalition that writes the largest checks. School districts understand that math even when they pretend the conversation is only about children.

Renters vote for the services. Homeowners pay the bill. That is not a slur. It is the system’s design.

Todd Minniear saw this coming. He is a Liberty Township trustee, a small-government guy and not my Siamese twin. We do not agree on every topic. We agree on the load-bearing ones. When apartment proposals stacked up near new commercial toys, Todd’s warning was simple. You cannot recklessly add households that demand a school system and then act shocked when the school system sends the invoice to the people who already paid the taxes for it for thirty years.

Two years ago, in the hearings around those proposals, the answer from too many planners was that we would cross that bridge when we came to it. We are on the bridge. Lakota is the tollbooth. The district says there is a spike; therefore, you must keep paying. I say the spike, to the extent it is real, is the bill for yes votes that should have been no votes.

Ford’s Garage Instead of Another Stack of Balconies

If you want a picture of the difference one trustee can make, drive to Liberty Center and eat. During COVID, the place struggled. Condos were hard to move. The playground sat dark after the rest of the country had taken off their masks, because nobody wanted to call the health department to ask permission to let children play. I texted Todd from lunch. Why is this still closed? He made calls. The playground opened. My grandkids used it. That is government doing a small thing that actually matters.

There was also a temptation to drop an apartment complex onto the pad where Ford’s Garage sits now. Another trustee might have taken the bodies. Todd helped kill the apartment idea. A year and a half later, a theme restaurant arrived, the kind of room you expect in Orlando or Las Vegas, except you can go on a Thursday after a movie at the theater across the little park. On the menu there is a Sheriff Jones burger and a Todd Minniear burger. The Todd burger is the one I order. It is messy. It is also a tax base that turns over every night: people come, spend, leave, and do not enroll a child at 7:45 in the morning.

That is the contrast to consider. Commercial vitality throws off sales and property revenue without parking a permanent pupil in a classroom. An apartment complex throws off one owner’s tax bill and a precinct full of service demand. When Lakota says the enrollment spike requires a new thirty-seven-year note, they are describing the second model and mailing the statement to the first.

A Quarter-Billion Operating Budget, Already

Facilities are the ask this year. Operations are the ocean the ask floats on. Lakota’s general-fund operation is in the neighborhood of $226 million for the current fiscal year, with recent actual spending already north of two hundred million and climbing. [6] Call it a quarter of a billion dollars a year for one suburban district. Salaries and benefits eat most of it, as they do everywhere the public-sector union model still sets the clock.

On a student count near seventeen thousand, that is roughly thirteen thousand dollars per pupil from the operating side alone, before you count capital dreams. Ohio, as a state, spends near $17,000 per pupil. The national current-expenditure figures sit higher still, depending on the year and the accountant.

I can already hear the reply. See? We spend less than the average. We are efficient. Give us the bond. That is a category error. Below-average unit cost does not grant a moral claim on thirty-seven more years of debt if the outcomes are mediocre and the administration’s reflex is always expansion. A factory can spend less per widget than its competitors and still ship a product nobody wants to buy. The customers in this case cannot easily leave, because the tax is bolted to the house.

This community has not been stingy. The last bond was 2005. The last operating and permanent-improvement levy was in 2013, sold as a five-year bridge and extended through 2028. That stretch is the part the district likes to advertise as thrift. I read it as evidence that the last yes vote was larger than the brochure admitted, and that the institution learned it could live on the leftover air. Now that the air is thinning, they want the next yes before you notice you were about to breathe.

Outcomes Are the Part the Brochures Skip

Nice buildings do not automatically mean prepared adults. Lakota has had serious money for decades. Too many graduates still walk out unready for work or for a college that is not a remedial waiting room. I have talked to hundreds of people inside this system over the years. Plenty of them are decent. Plenty of classrooms are trying. The institution, as an institution, has drifted toward ideology and away from the marketplace.

I do not want Pride Month as a substitute for literacy. I do not want sexual politics smuggled in under social-emotional wallpaper. I do not want a free babysitting service that congratulates itself for equity language while employers quietly wonder what the diploma means. When district people tell me three hundred dollars a year is a small price to teach kids, they are asking me to pay my fair share of their mistakes and their curriculum. Fair share is the phrase you use when you have already decided the number and only need a sermon.

Saying no to the bond is not a curriculum veto by itself. Bond money is concrete and steel. But it is one of the few remaining levers a property owner has when the board will not say no, the superintendent class will not manage, and the next operating levy is already a rumor for 2028. They split the cost. Facilities now. Operations later. Teachers’ union step increases forever. If you keep saying yes to the split, you never get to the conversation about living within the two hundred twenty-six million.

Nancy Nix and the Math Problem of Property Taxes

I am going to say something that confuses the people who think I only throw rocks. I like competent government. I fought to put competent people in office. When they run the numbers in the black, I say so. Nancy Nix has been that kind of fiscal adult in Butler County. She does not enjoy the compliment. She has earned it. The county has operated with a seriousness about headcount and cash that you cannot take for granted anywhere in America.

I sat with her long enough to hear what a good auditor has to say, even when activists want a simpler hymn. There is a growing movement in Ohio to repeal property taxes outright. I hear from those people constantly. Many of them read me. They are tired of paying for schools after their children have been gone for twenty years. They look at a five-hundred-thousand-dollar house and see three or four hundred dollars a year of government clinging to the siding. They want the money back.

Nancy is not the enemy of that instinct. She is the person who has to make arithmetic survive contact with a government that was built on the assumption that the property-tax river never dries up. You cannot pull the plug on every district, every township, every county function on a Tuesday and call it a finished symphony. You also cannot keep telling seventy-year-olds that the river is sacred. The model is ancient; it is tied to ZIP codes instead of children, and young buyers are not lining up to inherit the millage with a smile.

That is the larger war. This levy is a local battle inside it. If Ohio ever funds students instead of geography, districts like Lakota will have to compete. Competition is the only force that brings per-pupil cost down without a speech. Until then, the only language the cheerleaders understand is a lost election.

What Voting No Actually Does

If the bond fails, the old millage still expires. That is the point they dance around. Failure is a tax cut in 2029, not a freeze in amber. The district will still have a massive operating budget. The buildings will still stand. The state co-funding window may shift. They will tell you that you left free state money on the table. State money is not free. It is a matching grant that requires you to indenture your own duplicate for a generation.

If the bond passes, you will be told nothing changed. Your bill looks familiar. The familiar bill is the trick. You just refinanced a house you had nearly paid off and congratulated yourself for keeping the payment flat.

I am a huge no. I will say it in rooms where it is unpopular. I will say it to people in the district who think I am cheap. I will say it to the professional consensus-builders who punish dissent until the dissenters get tired. I do not threaten anyone. I do not need to. I put facts in front of people who still own their own minds.

Good Government Is the Art of the Timely No

Todd saying no to apartments is why Ford’s Garage exists. A school board saying no to a superintendent’s monument is how you stay inside two hundred twenty-six million dollars. Voters saying no in 2025 is why this year’s ask is smaller. Voters saying no in 2026 is how you force the next conversation: manage the district you have, stop using development mistakes as a hostage note, and stop treating property owners as an ATM with a mascot.

People have asked me to run for the school board. I have always said no, because commentary requires independence. I may not say no forever. The board needs members who can stand in public, explain a refusal, and live with not being invited to the Friday wine tasting. Most people want to be liked. The system is built on that weakness. Liked people vote yes. Adults vote no and then do the hard work of living with the no.

Until that board exists, the taxpayer’s tool is the ballot. Not a riot. Not a smear. A no. Then another no if they come back in 2027. They will come back. They always come back. The only way the chaos model ends is if someone on the inside learns to stay within means, and someone on the outside keeps the lights on long enough for that lesson to hurt.

The Ask, Without the Perfume

Lakota wants you to authorize two hundred twenty-three million dollars of new bonded debt for thirty-seven years, collected at about seventy-seven dollars per hundred thousand of auditor value, beginning in 2029, to rebuild the secondary side of a district that already spends more than two hundred million a year, after voters crushed a five-hundred-six-million-dollar version of the same philosophy last fall.

They want you to believe enrollment is racing toward nineteen thousand even though a study sitting in their own files is far more cautious. They want you to treat apartment-driven growth as an act of nature. They want you to accept that a paid-off bond is a crisis rather than a reward. They want you to call that stewardship.

I want the money back. Not because I think children are disposable. Because I think a system that cannot live on a quarter-billion dollars a year, cannot tell a straight story about its own headcount, and cannot resist the next housing fad has lost the right to call the next thirty-seven years inevitable.

Vote no on November 3. If they bring an operating levy next, vote no again. Hire managers instead of cheerleaders. Put people on the board who can say the word. Keep the Todd Minniear instinct alive in the townships: better a restaurant that turns tables than a balcony that turns ballots. And when the old bond dies, do something radical in American public life. Keep the savings.

Notes

The numbered references in the essay correspond to the following sources. They are starting points, not a claim that any official agrees with my conclusions.

[1] Lakota Board of Education, Resolution to Proceed, June 9, 2026: bonds in the principal amount of $223,483,492; estimated average annual levy of 2.20 mills, certified as $77 per $100,000 of county auditor market value; election November 3, 2026; collections commencing in 2028, first due in calendar year 2029.

[2] Journal-News, July 6, 2026, and WCPO: Phase One would take Adena Elementary, Ridge Junior, and the Lakota West Freshman/Creekside/Lakota Central complex offline; reduce the building count from 21 to 18; add buildings at East Freshman, Plains Junior, and both high schools.

[3] Cincinnati Enquirer and Journal-News, November 2025: the November 4, 2025 bond and permanent improvement package failed 60.81 percent to 39.19 percent. The 2025 bond request was $506.4 million, plus a 0.95-mill PI levy.

[4] District presentations, September 2025: enrollment reported at 17,348 as of late September 2025; OFCC capacity listed at 16,577; district claimed it was already 771 students over capacity and projected 19,074 by 2033.

[5] FutureThink enrollment study for Lakota Local School District, March 11, 2026: 2025-26 total 16,913; projection declines toward approximately 16,555 by 2035-36. The study itself warns the district to watch live births, housing, and open enrollment.

[6] Lakota five-year forecast materials, Treasurer Adam Zink: FY2026 general-fund operating investment listed near $226 million; FY2025 general-fund expenditures in the low $221 million range before other financing uses.

Further Reading

Lakota Local Schools, Resolution to Proceed on November 2026 Bonds (BoardDocs, June 9, 2026). The controlling legal description of the amount, millage, term, and election date.

Lakota Master Facilities Plan site, https://mfp.lakotaonline.com, and the June 17, 2026 board news release on Phase One, grade bands, and the no-increase claim.

Zack Carreon, “Lakota approves $223M bond issue for November ballot,” WVXU, June 11, 2026; De’Jah Gross, WCPO, same week—straight news on the replacement structure.

Michael D. Clark, Journal-News coverage of the 2025 ballot, the 60.81 percent defeat, and the 2026 reset, including the July 6, 2026 strategic-plan piece.

FutureThink, “Report: Lakota Local School District,” March 11, 2026. Read the tables, not the campaign adjectives.

Adam Zink, Lakota five-year forecasts (September 2025 and February 2026)—operating reality, not construction poetry.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Ohio Education by the Numbers, 2026 edition; National Education Association, Rankings and Estimates. Context for per-pupil cost.

Butler County Auditor tax-calculator materials and Ohio Revised Code Chapter 133 and 5705 on bonds, millage, and auditor market value. The $77 figure lives here.

Redfin and Zillow 2026 market pages for Liberty Township and West Chester. Use them when someone pretends this is a hundred-thousand-dollar housing stock.

Ohio Department of Education and Workforce district profile and expenditure-per-pupil pages; Legislative Service Commission school-spending primers for readers who want the statewide frame.

Rich Hoffman

Capitalist or Marxist: When communists get control of your paycheck, they control your mind

I have been writing almost every day since about 2009.[1] That is nearly twenty years of putting the same argument on the table while people told me I was not supposed to say it out loud. The argument is simple. America works when people who make jobs are allowed to make them. America fails when the political class uses the power of government to confiscate what those people built and hand it out as a permanent constituency. In Ohio, a few weeks out from the November 3, 2026 election, that argument has a name on each side of the ballot.[2]

Vivek Ramaswamy is the unapologetic capitalist. Amy Acton is the candidate of the administrative state that shut down the economy in 2020 and never fully admitted what that was. I do not care how many sidebars the campaigns invent between now and Election Day. Skin color, private jets, drinking rumors, data-center talking points, Lake Ontario, the Gulf of America — they all collapse into one question: do you want a job creator in the governor’s office, or do you want a manager of other people’s money?

The Horse Race as of Late August 2026

I will give the numbers first, because the people who live on polls will not read anything else. The race is a dead heat inside the margin of error. Aggregators in mid-August had the two candidates essentially tied near 47 percent each. A Fox News poll taken August 6–10 among registered voters had Ramaswamy 50 to Acton’s 48. A Wedgewood survey of likely voters a few days later had Acton 47 to 46. Prediction markets on Polymarket and Kalshi flipped toward Acton late in the week of August 24 after sitting near a coin flip. Markets are not votes. They are bets. I treat them as weather, not gospel.[3]. In this governor’s race, you’d rather be Vivek Ramaswamy than Amy Acton. 

Ohio is still a state Donald Trump won by more than ten points in 2024. That does not make the governor’s race automatic. Midterms punish the party in the White House. Democrats are trying to turn Acton’s bedside manner into a permission structure for the same governing philosophy that produced the lockdowns. Republicans are trying to turn Ramaswamy’s wealth into a character supplement. Both tactics tell you what each side fears.

Money, Jets, and the “Why Is He Even Running?” Attack

David Pepper, Acton’s running mate and the former Ohio Democratic Party chair, has been out on the circuit asking why a billionaire would want the governor’s mansion. He has made a meal of campaign reports showing roughly $700,000 in private-jet leasing. Ramaswamy has self-funded at a scale no normal Ohio candidate can touch and has outspent Acton several times over in 2026 filings.[4]

I find the question revealing in the exact way Pepper does not intend. Why would a man who already cashed out of companies he built take a pay cut, live in a government house, and spend two years being screamed at by people who think profit is a sin? I asked a version of that question years ago, when he was still a CEO who had not yet written the book that Fox News later discovered. The answer he gave me then is the answer his campaign is still giving now: he made money. He wants to spend the next chapter creating the conditions for other people to make money. That is not a job hunt. That is a mission.

A communist-minded person looks at a private jet and sees stolen bread. A capitalist looks at the same jet and asks whether the man inside it is flying toward a plant, a donor meeting, or a vacation after creating tremendous market value.  Intent matters. Output matters more.

I will never apologize for preferring self-funded candidates. The moment a politician’s paycheck depends on a machine, the machine owns the mind. I have watched it up close. I know a patriotic couple who together make a few hundred thousand a year, keep the flags in the garage, and stay quiet at the corporate job because they do not want the HR department to discover they vote like Americans. Control the check, and you control the speech. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is how large organizations work in 2026.

Amy Acton and the Lockdown State

Acton was Ohio’s health director when the state closed schools and businesses in 2020. Critics call her Ohio’s Dr. Fauci. Democrats treat that as a slur. I treat it as a job description. She was the face of orders that treated the economy as a switch a bureaucrat could flip. I lived through it here. So did every shop owner who found out a signature in Columbus could erase a year’s work overnight.[5]

The Amy Acton Covid response was authoritarian in method and Marxist in assumption: the productive life of a free people could be suspended by experts, who would decide when life was allowed to resume. That is not public health as a limited tool. That is government as the owner of time.

Why I Call the Lockdowns Marxist

Marxism is not only red flags and five-year plans. It is the belief that the state is the rightful allocator of work, risk, and reward. When you shut the places where people create value and keep the administrative offices open, you have already chosen a side. You have decided that the badge-wearing clerk outranks the owner who makes payroll. Ohio Democrats gambled that voters would remember Acton’s tone of voice and forget the empty Main Streets. I did not forget.

DeWine appointed her. DeWine has now endorsed Ramaswamy. That fact alone should end the fairy tale that Acton was a nonpolitical healer floating above faction. She was a cabinet officer who used emergency power. Emergency power is the most addictive drug in American government. People who taste it rarely volunteer to put the bottle down.

Unions, Paychecks, and the Long March Through the Shop Floor

I have said for years that the modern political union is a child of the Marxist analysis of class, even when the guy in the union hall flies a flag, hunts on weekends, and would punch you for calling him a communist. The original theory was never a mystery. Labor was organized as a counter-power to private ownership. In practice, union leadership in this country has spent decades steering members toward the party that grows government, because government is the only force large enough to take ownership away from the people who built the plant.[6]

That is why so many red-white-and-blue households still vote for the party that talks about them as a class to be managed. The leadership is not confused. The membership is loyal to the paycheck and the hall. I do not hate the welder. I hate the theory that says the welder’s children should live under a political class that treats the owner as a villain and the agency as a parent.

The FirstEnergy Lesson I Have Deep Sympathy For

I have been around Ohio politics long enough to watch a struggling energy company buy itself a statute. House Bill 6 and the FirstEnergy dark-money case are the exhibit. Ratepayers paid. Executives and a speaker went to court. The regulatory environment became a marketplace for influence. I will not bless a “deal” in which a company that cannot survive honest rules writes a check to a campaign so the rules change.[7]

That is the fine line I have learned to walk. Politicians have to keep the confiscators out of the regulatory shop so builders can build. That is not an unholy alliance. That is the only way a mixed economy does not slide into a managed one. A President Trump saying to industry, “I want a regulatory environment in which you can hire,” is the opposite of a health director saying, “I want an environment in which you may not open.” One expands the field. The other sits on it.

Why a Billionaire Wants a Crummy Mansion

I hosted a gathering in 2019. Vivek was there. So was J.D. Vance. It was neither a bundling operation nor a corporate ask. It was capitalists in a room talking about whether the country still believed in itself. Later, I sat in the front row at a Middletown-area event and talked to Vivek before and after the event. He told me the earlier room had mattered. He had built companies, sold, and was deciding whether the next chapter was a quieter rich life or a public fight.[8]

He chose the fight. I understand the psychology because my own life is simpler than it used to be, and I still cannot leave the argument alone. You spend years making something. You cash out. Then you look at the country that made the cash-out possible and watch a political movement try to call the making itself immoral. At that point, money is not the point. Example is the point. He has young children. So do a lot of the people I know who are still trying to start shops in Butler County, Warren County, and along the I-75 corridor. They need a governor who thinks a payroll is a moral achievement.

What “Public Servant” Actually Means

Acton’s campaign asks why he needs a job. That sentence is the whole Democratic theory of government in eight words. They think office is a job you take because you need income and status. I think office is a temporary grant of power you take because you already know how to create value and you want the rules to stop punishing the next person who tries. She needs the apparatus. He does not. That difference is not a smear. It is the reason self-reliant candidates are harder to own.

Naming Lakes, Inventing Guilt, and the Attack on the Founding

I have been talking about early Bronze Age copper, Florida’s long human timeline, and the political use of the word “indigenous.” I am not an “indigenous peoples” activist because a university committee decided the founding of the United States was a crime scene. Lake Ontario had Iroquoian names before English maps. That is history. It is not a veto of Ohio’s existence. The campaign to treat every European place-name as an apology is a campaign to treat American creation as illegitimate. If the country was born in sin, then the wealth it produced is stolen, and the state may seize it with a clean conscience.[9]

That is why I do not roll my eyes when President Trump puts a new name on a body of water. Marketing people understand pressure points. Force the argument into the open. Mexico is not a capitalist peer. Canada is a softer social democracy with better manners. China runs a party-state that Western finance keeps trying to copy while calling itself “stakeholder capitalism.” If you import the constraint structure of a manifesto into a corporation, do not act shocked when the sales numbers coming out the door shrink.

China has more than a billion people and still does not outrun American output on the terms that matter most. People are not GDP. Property, energy, and permission to try are the components of GDP.[10]

Free Speech, Treason Talk, and Where I Draw the Line

I use a hard word on purpose. I view a political project that intends to undo the capitalist republic from inside its own universities, HR offices, and public schools as hostile to the country that protects the speech. That is my moral line, not a statute I am asking a prosecutor to file tomorrow. The left has been brilliant at wrapping the project in the First Amendment. They want the protection of the system they are trying to hollow out. I will not pretend those things are neutral.

Republicans have often been cowards about this. They recite “free speech” as if the phrase were a substitute for a spine. Speech is the method. The aim is still the aim. If the aim is to teach children that job creation is exploitation and that America should not have been founded, you are not hosting a seminar. You are running a treasonous succession operation.

What I Want from a Governor of Ohio

I want a political class that keeps the confiscators out of the permit office. I want data centers and plants and the power to run them, not a lecture about why the grid should be smaller. I want elections that are elections, then an executive who tells builders: the rules will be stable enough that you can risk a decade of your life. I want fewer people who take jobs from the tax base and more people who create jobs that build the tax base.

You can steal only so much before you run out of victims. Every society that tries to live on confiscation discovers that the makers leave, hide, or stop. Then the speeches about “the people” get louder and the shelves get emptier. That is not a metaphor from a paperback. That is the twentieth century.

The Quiet Majority in the Garage

I do not think Ohio has reached the saturation point at which the paycheck controllers can order a blue state into existence. The man with the flags in the garage is still voting. He will not wear the pin at work. Democrats had to come all the way out into open socialism because they could not out-Trump Trump on prosperity. Bernie always beat Hillary in the heart of the Democrat Party. The party followed the energy. Now they have Acton as the respectable face of that energy in Ohio.

How I Measure Morality

Money is a human construct. I do not worship it. I measure it the way I measure any tool: by what it lets a free person do for other free people. A 12- or 16-hour day that produces a payroll is a moral act. A political career that lives off the payroll someone else produced is, at best, a borrowed life. I am sympathetic to imperfect Republicans who still know which side of that line they live on. I am not sympathetic to a politics that calls the maker greedy and the taker compassionate.

My people, the ones who have stayed with this blog for years, tend to be biblical in the old sense. They think a man should work, keep promises, raise children, and not covet his neighbor’s possessions. I am with them. The copper trade of the early Bronze Age, the mound builders, the later Iroquois, the English, the Americans — all of that is a long argument about who gets to take risk and keep the result. I come down on the side that built the country I actually live in.

The Vote

Vote for the job creator. That is the whole essay. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be governor, so more people like him can exist. Amy Acton wants to be governor so the power that closed Ohio can be normalized as kindness. I was in the room when he was still deciding whether to step down from the CEO role. I have watched the last two years of his campaign confirm the pitch. I have watched her coalition confirm mine.

Ignore the sidebars if you can. The race is not about a jet. It is not about a lake. It is not about whether a rich man “needs a job.” It is about whether Ohio still believes that making something is better than administering something. I do. I have believed it since before this blog had a name. I will believe it after the returns come in.

Go vote. Keep the line. Make a job if you can. If you cannot, stand with the person who will.

Selected Sources for Readers Who Want the Record

Polling and market snapshots: RealClearPolitics; Decision Desk HQ; Fox News / Beacon Research / Shaw & Company (August 6–10, 2026); Wedgewood Polls (August 11–13, 2026); Newsweek reporting on Polymarket and Kalshi, August 28, 2026.

Campaign finance and travel: Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026; NBC4 Columbus, August 26, 2026; Ohio Secretary of State campaign-finance database.

Candidate backgrounds: Ballotpedia and Wikipedia entries for the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election and for Amy Acton; Politico Magazine profile, June 28, 2025; Cincinnati Enquirer coverage of COVID-era advertising, August 28, 2026.

HB 6 / FirstEnergy: U.S. Department of Justice deferred-prosecution materials; contemporaneous Ohio reporting summarized in footnote 6.

Personal context: author’s contemporaneous posts at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com; NBC News, October 4, 2023, on Ramaswamy’s 2019 Ohio political beginnings; C-SPAN, August 21, 2026, Middletown campaign event.

[1] Rich Hoffman, The Overmanwarrior (blog), published since approximately 2009–2010 at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com. Author of The Symposium of Justice (2004), Tail of the Dragon (2012), and The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Forthcoming: The Politics of Heaven (targeted 2027).

[2] Ohio gubernatorial election set for November 3, 2026. Incumbent Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is term-limited. Republican nominee: Vivek Ramaswamy (running mate: Ohio Senate President Rob McColley). Democratic nominee: Dr. Amy Acton (running mate: former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper). Libertarian: Don Kissick. See Ballotpedia, “Ohio gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2026.”

[3] RealClearPolitics aggregate through August 10, 2026: Acton 47.0%, Ramaswamy 46.8% (Acton +0.2). Decision Desk HQ through August 13: Acton 47.2%, Ramaswamy 46.8%. Fox News / Beacon / Shaw poll, August 6–10, 2026 (1,008 registered voters, ±3%): Ramaswamy 50%, Acton 48%. Wedgewood Polls, August 11–13, 2026 (800 likely voters, ±4%): Acton 47%, Ramaswamy 46%. Newsweek, August 28, 2026, reported Polymarket 54% Acton / 47% Ramaswamy and Kalshi 55% / 45% after a late-August shift.

[4] Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026: Ramaswamy campaign spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft, including payments to V Leasing LLC (address tied to a Ramaswamy-owned property) and TVPX Aircraft Solutions. NBC4, August 26, 2026: Ramaswamy spent about $21.2 million in 2026 campaign funds through early August filings; Acton spent over $5.5 million. Wikipedia / Ohio Secretary of State filings, summarized in mid-August 2026, show Ramaswamy with substantially higher receipts and cash on hand, including substantial self-funding.

[5] Amy Acton served as director of the Ohio Department of Health from 2019 into 2020 under Gov. Mike DeWine and was the public face of Ohio’s early COVID-19 orders, including school closures and stay-at-home rules. She resigned as director in June 2020 amid protests and lawsuits, remaining briefly as an adviser. See Wikipedia, “Amy Acton”; Politico Magazine, June 28, 2025, “Can ‘Ohio’s Anthony Fauci’ Beat Vivek Ramaswamy?”

[6] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), treat trade unions as instruments of class struggle within industrial capitalism. American labor history is more mixed: many U.S. unions were anti-communist during the Cold War. The author’s claim is interpretive—that union political machines often align with larger government and redistribution—not a claim that every rank-and-file member is a Marxist.

[7] House Bill 6 (2019) provided subsidies tied to FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants and other generation sources. Federal prosecutors described a roughly $60 million dark-money scheme around the bill. FirstEnergy entered a deferred prosecution agreement and paid a $230 million criminal penalty, admitting relevant facts. Former House Speaker Larry Householder was convicted. Related civil and regulatory costs to ratepayers have been widely reported. The author cites this episode as an example of captured regulation, not as a charge against any 2026 nominee.

[8] Author’s personal account of a 2019 gathering in the Cincinnati/Middletown area that included Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance, and of later attendance at a Ramaswamy event at a Middletown-area headquarters. NBC News, October 4, 2023, documented Ramaswamy’s 2019 return to Ohio and early political relationships, including with Vance and then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted. C-SPAN recorded an August 21, 2026 Middletown campaign event featuring Ramaswamy.

[9] President Trump’s 2025 executive action renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and related debates over naming (including Great Lakes/Iroquois toponyms such as Ontario) became a cultural flashpoint. The author argues that renaming fights are proxies for whether the United States is a legitimate capitalist republic or a moral error to be undone. Geographic names have layered indigenous, colonial, and American histories; Ontario is an Iroquoian-derived name adopted into English cartography.

[10] World Bank and IMF national accounts: the United States remains the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP; China is second with a much larger population. Productivity, capital formation, property rights, and energy abundance—not headcount—drive output. Figures fluctuate yearly; the comparative point is structural, not a single-year snapshot.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Why Michael Ryan Got There First, and Why America Still Tries to Jail the Next Tucker: Why Volynt in Butler County is the Next Great Thing

Full disclosure, this is a long one and it might be easier to watch the video.  I have a lot to explain here, and this topic is much bigger than most surface-level discussions on politics and business and what role the two play in a happy society.  I talk about abortion in a different way here, but it’s a mentality that is at the heart of Marxism, and many years of our civilization straining under a mixed economy that many of us never even thought about. But it’s the heart of what has been driving me for many years to this point.  I am affiliated with Volynt Aero in Oxford. I am a consultant and, at this point, an advisor. I am proud of it. I do not normally attach my name to things. For years, I’ve handled much of the work in the background. People who have known me a long time know the method. You trade whatever you have—sometimes it was literally baseball cards when I was young—to get close enough to a problem to be useful. I come out of the school of hard knocks. I have seen what happens to people and to companies when the process is dirty, when the lawyers arrive late, when the regulators decide the idea should die in the permit office. I have helped a lot of people mine their way through improper methods without becoming the method.

That is the only reason this essay exists; there is a lot of interconnected tissue to consider in something as massive as this, and it takes a bit to discuss in context. Not because I needed another logo on a card. Because I watched a good idea be born in Oxford, in Butler County, Ohio, and I recognized the old American pattern: the builders are ready, the market is arriving whether the townships like the noise or not, and the political class is still deciding whether it wants to midwife the thing or abort it.

Why I Attach a Name at All

I have been a huge supporter of FirstEnergy. I was a supporter when Larry Householder was Speaker. When we talk about alliances between government and big business, I think FirstEnergy got a raw deal in the public square. I do not think they did a good job defending themselves. Real life in the background of a utility is lived inside regulatory compliance, rate cases, and a grid that still has to keep the lights on while somebody in Washington changes the religion of energy policy every four years.[1] What I saw was a company running a model that the Obama-era compliance environment made it almost impossible to operate profitably, then being treated as a morality play when it sought political relief.

I see a lot of Democrats trying to take ground in Ohio after years of Republican control of the House, the Senate, and the governor’s office. They cannot get a message through to people because the message, once you strip the focus-grouped nouns off it, is still a mixed-economy sermon with a communist destination. That is not what people in this county vote for. It is not what they vote for in 2026 either. But the fight does not end because you won a map. You are always overcoming Karl Marx. You can see it in the way a left-wing media personality in Columbus will work a hit job on a Republican until the man will not look you in the face in a hallway. I have watched politicians go quiet because they do not want to be called a communist, or worse. After all, they do not want to be trapped at a urinal in the Statehouse by somebody with a microphone asking why they voted for an “evil” bank or an “evil” energy company that was not kneeling hard enough toward the religion of wind and solar power.

There are a lot of safer ways to make money. There are not many ways to do it that still serve the two parts of the American condition I actually care about: job creation, and political representation honest enough to get out of the job creator’s way. I lend my name to enterprising people who take risks because I want to see them make jobs. I lend my name to political figures for the same reason. The Marxist type always attacks them, and it is a lonely business to be sabotaged out of a restroom at the Statehouse by a hostile media personality trying to put you in a horrible state of mind. Why did you vote for that? Why did you say this? Why do you support FirstEnergy? Why aren’t they for wind?  All questions from a Marxist perspective, intended to root everything in a leftist point of view as a baseline. 

I involve myself because I want to protect capitalism from the next adjustment to the breaker panel, the one that shows up on your electric bill whether or not you ever voted for the sermon that caused it.

John Galt Types, and the Movie That Taught Me the Pattern

At the beginning of this, I put the Volynt affiliation together because I like the guys. I like entrepreneurs. I like John Galt types. I like people who work. When I meet them, I want to help them. I want to help them avoid having to dynamite their own buildings at the end of the story, the way the book taught a generation of us to fear.

My favorite movie on this subject is still Tucker: The Man and His Dream, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, from the same mind that gave the country The Godfather and then turned around and made a hymn to the American crackpot who wanted to build a better car outside Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors.[2] Tucker put the engine in the back. He put seat belts in the car. Fuel injection in 1947. The Big Three knew they could not retool fast enough to compete. The pipeline was already poured. So the story goes that they used Senator Ferguson to try to throw Tucker in jail.[3] That is how the red decade moved into the American system: not always with a red flag in the street, but with a committee, a compliance file, and a prosecutor.

There is a speech Tucker gives at the end of that movie that I have never gotten over. It sounds like Howard Roark’s speech in The Fountainhead, stretched across a courtroom instead of granite.[4] He is wondering where his country went. Marx came in. Regulatory compliance came in. The power of government came in. Ferguson wanted donations from the Big Three, so he tried to eliminate the competition that would have made them better. Tucker assumed the American dream was still built around the man who builds something better. The country had changed on him in the thirties and forties, and he just then figured that out. 

We had just won a war by manufacturing the Nazis and the Japanese into the ground. Then, mysteriously, we started sending consultants the other direction to learn how to manufacture from our former enemies; we let our enemies teach us how to mass-produce when it was that very trait which caused us to win World War II.  People like Tucker got crushed in the interval.[5] He stayed out of jail. He built fifty cars. Some were wrecked in the process. The ones that remain are still Tucker cars, and you can look at them. The ideas did not die. The company did; it was murdered by a tyrannical government.[6]

I have always hated, in the background of my adult life, the long trend that followed: the creation of a permanent international management layer, the suppression of American ingenuity as if ingenuity were a pollutant, the habit of treating the founder as a defendant. We did something right in the teens, the twenties, even into the thirties. Then the red decade came over from Europe under the banner of free speech, and pretty soon you had a government trying to jail a man for building a safer car.

If it had been me in Householder’s chair, I would not have done the pinhead stuff a two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer could later dissect. I tend to have sympathy for the people who were trying to keep power flowing while the rules were written to euthanize the old plant in favor of a liberal sermon. I do not want to see the power of government illuminate ingenuity only long enough to book it.

What These Drones Actually Do

So why Volynt Aero?  Yes, they have an unmanned hybrid VTOL—the Vyper—that can fly, carry a serious payload, and put a box where a truck cannot go. You have seen the animation. I was able to get close enough to the real work that the animation looks like a polite version of what I watched. I went to the facility in Oxford. I talked to a great bunch of guys. The intellectual property is not a napkin. It is already there. Public specs on the aircraft talk about carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to 150 nautical miles, then landing and offering plug-in power—110, 240, or 480 volts—off standard jet fuel, without waiting for a charging farm to be built in the mud.

The crowded market is last-mile photographs and Amazon-adjacent experiments. Everybody has a drone story now. Walmart has a drone story. Amazon has a drone story. Texas has companies. California has companies.[7] The middle-mile market alone is described as a ten-billion-dollar band within a much larger stack. I have been saying to anybody who will listen that the five-year systems market—vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, municipal integration—could run toward a trillion dollars if the country actually lets it hatch. Those are inside numbers, not a press release.

What makes Volynt different is not that they can hover. It is the combination. Cargo logistics and highly mobile power generation on the same airframe. They can come in, drop a payload, and leave. And they can do battlefield resource management, which in civilian clothes means disaster-zone logistics. Power recovery. Fly into a hurricane zone or an Ohio River floodplain, get past the trees that are lying across the only road the trucks can use, land, and put 110, 240, or 480 volts where a ventilator is still a life.[8]

The Hurricane, the Chainsaws, and the Road You Cannot See

Years ago, I was between jobs. I tend to get involved in crusades because they teach you things you cannot learn from a paycheck. One of the reasons I have been effective over the years is that I have done things other people never get to do, or never have the guts to do, because it means leaving the comfort of a W-2. A friend who ran a tree crew called. A storm had flattened a stretch of the Carolinas around the Raleigh-Durham universities. Trees older than the subdivisions they shaded were down across the highways.[9] He was paying cash crews a thousand dollars a day because people were pulling money out of safes rather than wait on insurance to cut the trees off their homes after the storm. A crew member—the kind of guy who couldn’t do anything else because he did not have many other options, because he was out of jail for killing people—had decided he wanted all of it and had started talking about killing my friend. My friend asked me to come down to help him with the guy. My wife did not want me to go. I did not want to leave her. A couple of weeks of that work could be a year’s income. I got on a plane to chase treasure and danger.  And to that point, where there is danger, is usually where there is treasure.  

As we were landing, they had just cleared the runway. From the air, you could not even see the highway. That is the image I have never forgotten. There is no way for the trucks to get the equipment to the poles if the trees own the asphalt. Before the utility can be a utility, somebody with a saw has to invent a road again. It took some of those people three or four weeks to get power back. Generators mattered. They still matter. A patriot generator in a garage is not a hobby. It is how you keep a freezer and a CPAP and a window into the world from dying on the same night.

When the Volynt team walked me through the demonstration, that memory came back to me. Every September, somewhere, a hurricane does a version of that story. Every late winter, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Great Miami find a floodplain and take a substation with them. Senior citizens do not have three weeks for power to return.  A drone that can fly the downed corridor and restore a line, or drop the thing that lets a crew restore a line, is not a gadget. It is the difference between a shelter with lights and a shelter guessing.

Same grid logic as fifty years ago. The wires still have to carry the current. The new part is that you do not always have to wait for the infrastructure; you can fly the infrastructure into a distressed zone.

The Mixed Economy That Aborts the Company Before It Is Born

The hard problem is not the airframe technology. The hard problem is an unfriendly manufacturing and permitting environment. Unless you can throw Elon Musk money at it, the political monster can crush you before the second prototype.[10] Even Musk needed government contracts and, for a stretch, an alliance with China to get Tesla through the years when the same people who wanted electric cars also wanted to drown the factory in process. A lot of the operators I talk to do not want politics at all. They want the big animal to stay in its cage until the product exists. I get involved because I have watched companies get crushed before they build anything.

I was in Columbus a few years ago sitting next to very expensive lawyers who were selling solar the way people used to sell riverfront lots. There is a big solar farm near Piqua. There is another in Warren County. Fine. Generate what you can generate; I’m not against other ways of getting power.  But if we aren’t talking about Thorium or nuclear, we aren’t being serious about acquiring real energy. What I will not do is pretend that a sermon about wind and panels is a substitute for a dispatchable grid when you are trying to host the next wave of computation and industry.[11] FirstEnergy was the legacy company being squeezed like a zit so that a younger lobby could inherit the moral high ground. That is an Obama-era move, and it is still the move. Euthanize the old method. Call it progress. Act shocked when people are upset about it. 

Republicans have not defended capitalism very well. They have not defended FirstEnergy well. They have not defended the Householder disaster as a policy failure instead of a personality failure, which is what it was, and that has fed this Amy Acton narrative now. I listen to two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers miss the only point that matters: are you using the power of government to confiscate wealth, or are you using it to keep the builder from being hunted while he builds? A lot of people in the political class do not feel they have latitude to say that out loud because they do not want the Columbus media animals waiting for them at the urinal. I am not in public office, so I can say it.[12]

The metaphor I keep using, because Ohio taught it to me, is abortion as industrial policy. A certain kind of politics wants to abort the business before it attaches. Regulation becomes the instrument. You never have to out-compete the founder if you can keep him from being born. The same crowd will turn around and euthanize a legacy company they have decided is morally expired, which was what the FirstEnergy story was really about. Young ideas killed in the womb. Old plants killed in the bed. What they never want is a living competitor that was not pre-cleared by the donor list.

Fences, Data Centers, and Who Gets to Say No

In my neighborhood, an older, decent neighbor started a wooden fence in the front yard. Posts went in. It was their property. I would not have chosen the look. My wife and I were not going to say anything. Then came the hearing. Then the posts came back out of the ground. I had not called a trustee. I did not need to. I knew what happened. People who bought half-million and million-dollar houses, some of them new from the coasts, did not want to look at a tacky fence on the drive-by.  No lumber in the front. Property rights, until the new people appeal to government to make your porch match their taste.

That is the data-center argument in miniature. I am pro data center. The new economy is an electricity story whether the township signs the petition or not. China is building data centers whether or not we do, and if people protest, they just disappear.  That’s how it is in China, in America: communist terrorism hides behind free speech, which does not exist in a real communist country. People who do not want the noise still want the market cap that pays for a federal deficit that no longer fits on a bumper sticker. They want a trillion-dollar growth story and a quiet backyard. They want to keep up with Beijing and keep the transformers out of sight.[13] My daughter lives near Millikan Road in the Liberty Township development and does not want more congestion. I understand the feeling. I also drive through Middletown and remember what the place looked like when the work was here. You can still find houses in that city at prices that tell you how much vitality is left. Vance can talk about investment, but there’s a lot more. I want the investment to be real enough that Main Street is not a museum of what we used to make.

I love Liberty Center. I like Costco. I like the Monroe exits and the Millikin exchange along the 63 corridor as places where you can put large things without paving a township’s last pasture. Balance is a real problem for trustees. Pretending that every large thing is a moral injury is not balance. It is a lifestyle veto dressed up as conservation.[14]

Property taxes are the scream under all of this. There is a movement that wants them gone. Fine. Show me the replacement arithmetic. One honest way to change the math is to land in an industry that generates revenue on land that is already industrial. Vertical mobility—middle-mile drones, disaster logistics, the power-restore mission—is not a server farm humming behind a fence. It is a reason a site exists. Amazon, Walmart, the carriers, the hospitals, the utilities, the Guard: they all have the same problem. Get the box, or the tool, or the kilowatt, past the broken road.[15]. We’re talking about a lot of things here that are always under the tip of our tongues, but they are the center of all discussion.  

Michael Ryan Was There Before It Was a Photo Opportunity

I was not going to drag a campaign into this. Michael Ryan put his visit on Facebook. He went to the Volynt facility. He talked about it at a fundraiser. I happened to be there with him. I know what he has been doing in the background for a couple of years while other people were still deciding whether drones were a toy, a nuisance, or a federal problem.[16]

By the time a lot of people read this, he may already be sitting as a Butler County commissioner, or he may be in the last stretch of proving it in November. Either way, I want it on the record. Michael Ryan has been acting like a commissioner of this county well before the title was his. He has been providing leadership in rooms that were not yet fashionable. Four years from now, when the project is a ribbon and a CNBC segment, and every officeholder in a fifty-mile radius is trying to stand in the photograph, I want it remembered that he was there when it was still a risk.

That is what good leadership looks like when it is not a press release. It is not waiting for the market to become safe and then claiming the harvest. Socialism, in the small-town version, is just that reflex: somebody else takes the risk, then the committee arrives to redistribute the credit. Ryan did the opposite. He showed up early. He has done a lot of unglamorous work that makes life in this county better. This is one of the visible ones.[17]

I like a lot of the Ohio names in the builder register. I have had the chance to talk to them one-on-one in informal settings. I think I know who they are. Bernie Moreno built businesses and then walked into the grinder of public service with enough money in the bank that a paycheck could not vote for him. Warren Davidson is in that same pattern. That is the opposite of the professional politician, who needs the mixed economy because it is his meal. Bernie Sanders is a communist. The late-life American version I respect is the man who made something and then spent the surplus defending the conditions that let other people make something.

Ryan is young enough to want still the county to have a next chapter. That matters. The people who have been in the chair too long start to treat every new idea as a zoning headache. The people who still think like founders treat it as a chance.

What I Want This to Become

I want Volynt featured on CNBC as one of the great global innovators, not as a local curiosity that got a grant and a ribbon. A proposed HyPE Lab at the Miami University Airport is the kind of physical bet a county should want next to an existing runway. Ohio Third Frontier money already touched the powertrain work. That is a start, not a finish. I want them to have a shot at being the next SpaceX in the only sense that phrase is useful: a company that made a hard physical thing at a scale the incumbents said was impossible, in a county that decided not to strangle it. That is a lofty goal. Lofty goals are how factories start. The constraint is not imagination. The constraint is whether Ohio and Butler County will keep the political animal on a leash long enough for scale.

Scale needs land that is already industrial, power that is actually on the bus, a workforce that can turn a wrench and read a print, and a waiver culture at the FAA that does not take a decade to admit a machine can fly past the pilot’s eyeballs.[18] Ohio is already in the drone-first-responder business through DriveOhio. Hamilton police are getting aircraft that beat a cruiser to the scene. That is a different mission from cargo and power restoration, but it is the same county learning the same sky.[19]

I have been accused of being part of the military-industrial complex because I have worked around aerospace companies for a long time and I know people in politics. The accusation is a category error. I want the opposite of what happened to Tucker. I want the opposite of what happened to Roark in the book. I want the man with the idea outside the approved pipeline to get to the market before the senator from the incumbent district files the paperwork. I have put my name on things when it was unpopular and could and have cost me. I will put it here.

Books do not usually make the kind of money people think they do. I am writing The Politics of Heaven anyway, because I think there is a spiritual war under the economic one, and because non-human intelligence—call it what your tradition requires—does not only show up in a sky story. It shows up in the institutional habit of killing the builder.[20] I volunteer a lot of time that isn’t invoiced. I want the human race better. Helping a company in my own county get off the ground is one of the ways that sentence becomes concrete.

The Record I Want Left

This is a long one. Context does not work in ten minutes. The video at the front of this would be useful to watch.

When people ask me what I am working on, this is the answer. I am helping a group of scrappy operators, with the IP already done and the demonstration already flown, get across a minefield that usually destroys the idea before it can pay a tax bill. I am proud of them. I want the state of Ohio to treat this as more than a local hobby. The upside is not a buzz in the background. The upside is a transportation and recovery layer that Amazon, Walmart, and every hospital system in a floodplain will need, whether the township board likes the look of the fence or not.

Watch Tucker’s speech. Read Roark’s. Then look at a county that still has room at the exits, a commissioner candidate who showed up before the cameras were easy to get, and a machine that can put power back on at a shelter while the trees are still on the road. That is the whole argument. I would like, for once, not to give the speech at the end of the movie. I want the cars—or, in this case, the aircraft—to be built.

Michael Ryan was ahead of it. The company is ahead of the market’s imagination. I am putting years of scar tissue behind both facts. The rest is execution, voltage, and whether we still believe a man with a better idea should be allowed to leave the ground.

https://www.facebook.com/RyanForButler

Bibliography and Further Reading

Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Paramount Pictures, 1988.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

American Rhetoric. “Movie Speech from Tucker: The Man and His Dream — Tucker Presents His Closing Argument.” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtucker.html.

Tucker Automobile Club of America. Historical notes on the Tucker 48 and the Coppola film. https://www.tuckerclub.org/.

Federal Aviation Administration. 14 C.F.R. Part 107 and UAS exemption / BVLOS waiver materials.

Ohio Revised Code §§ 4561.50–4561.53, as enacted by House Bill 77, 135th General Assembly (effective April 9, 2025).

Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio). “Michael Ryan nabs Butler County commissioner primary with 72% of the vote.” May 5–6, 2026.

Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio). “Primary Election 2026: Republican primary for Butler County commission seat contentious.” April 20, 2026.

Ballotpedia. “Michael V. Ryan (Butler County Commission, Ohio, candidate 2026).”

WCPO. “Hamilton police are getting drones that beat officers to the scene.” DriveOhio / SkyfireAI statewide DFR pilot.

Journal-News. Coverage of Butler County data-center moratorium requests and commission action, June 2026.

United States v. Householder and related FirstEnergy reporting, Southern District of Ohio, 2020–2023.

Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. House Bill 6 aftermath dockets and subsequent electric security plan materials.

Mises, Ludwig von. Interventionism: An Economic Analysis. 1940; later editions.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, 2026.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business; Tail of the Dragon; The Symposium of Justice.

Volynt Aero, Inc. Company site and capability statement. Oxford, Ohio. https://volyntaero.com / https://volynt.aero.

Cincinnati Business Courier / Dayton Business Journal. Coverage of Volynt Aero’s proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport, January 2025.

LinkedIn, Volynt Aero company page. Oxford headquarters; Vyper aircraft described for emergency cargo logistics and autonomous power generation.

Workhorse Group and other Midwest cargo-UAS public materials, Sharonville / Mason, Ohio.

National Hurricane Center. Storm histories for Carolinas landfalls affecting the Research Triangle transportation grid.

Notes

[1] On Householder and FirstEnergy, see United States v. Householder, S.D. Ohio, and contemporaneous reporting in The Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2020–2023. The policy point here is not a brief for every transaction; it is that one administration’s rules can squeeze a regulated utility until the only remaining path appears to be politics.

[2] Francis Ford Coppola, dir., Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Paramount Pictures, 1988). The courtroom speech is transcribed at American Rhetoric, “Movie Speech from Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtucker.html.

[3] Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan chaired the Senate investigations that, in Coppola’s telling and in Tucker’s own defense, functioned as a political weapon for Detroit incumbents. Whether every cinematic beat is courtroom-accurate is less important than the pattern: government process used as a moat.

[4] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Howard Roark’s courtroom defense remains the clearest American statement that a creator does not exist to feed the parasites who arrive after the risk is taken.

[5] U.S. manufacturing after 1945 did send missions to study Japanese methods; the irony Tucker’s speech names is that the country that out-produced the Axis then imported process discipline from the countries it had just defeated. See postwar productivity literature and W. Edwards Deming’s later influence in Japan.

[6] Preston Tucker produced fifty Tucker 48 automobiles. Most survive. The Big Three later adopted seat belts, disc brakes, fuel injection, and aerodynamic safety ideas that Tucker had already put on the road. See Tucker Automobile Club of America histories.

[7] Amazon, Walmart, UPS, and the United States Postal Service have all published or piloted roadmaps for drone and middle-mile automation. Industry estimates for advanced air mobility and drone logistics through the early 2030s commonly range from tens of billions in the near term to well above $100 billion as last-mile and middle-mile use cases stack. The trillion-dollar figure in this essay is a five-year systems view that includes vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, and municipal infrastructure—not airframes alone.

[8] Volynt Aero, Inc., Oxford, Ohio (Butler County). Public materials describe the Vyper hybrid-electric unmanned eVTOL as carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to about 150 nautical miles, then landing and providing 110, 240, or 480 VAC plug-in power from JP-8 or Jet A without a high-voltage charging network. See Volynt Aero’s capability statement and company site at volyntaero.com. A proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport was reported by the Cincinnati Business Courier and Dayton Business Journal in January 2025. The company received Ohio Third Frontier/TVSF support through the Entrepreneurs’ Center.

[9] Hurricane Fran (1996) and later storms that struck the Carolinas left large sections of the I-40 / Research Triangle corridor impassable from downed timber. The operational lesson is unchanged: you cannot restore a grid if you cannot reach the poles.

[10] Elon Musk’s public record on Tesla and SpaceX includes DOE loans, NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo contracts, and later criticism of the same regulatory state. The relevant point is not purity. It is that even a high-capacity founder needed both capital and political oxygen to keep the factory from being regulated out of existence before the product matured.

[11] On Ohio energy policy after House Bill 6, see Public Utilities Commission of Ohio dockets and legislative history of subsequent repeal and reform efforts. Nuclear and dispatchable baseload remain the quiet argument under every data-center fight.

[12] On mixed-economy control, see Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, and Rand’s distinction between the producer and the looter. The essay’s claim is practical: once incumbents learn they can buy a senator rather than retool a factory, innovation becomes a permit problem.

[13] On local data-center zoning fights, see Journal-News coverage of the Butler County commissioners’ 2026 moratorium discussion and township requests. The noise argument and the fiscal argument are not the same conversation, though they are treated as one at public meetings.

[14] Liberty Center, Monroe / I-75 corridor industrial sites, Middletown Regional Airport aviation investments, and the Spooky Nook complex on Hamilton’s west side are the visible pieces of a county trying to replace lost mill and auto-adjacent employment with logistics, aviation, sport, and advanced manufacturing.

[15] Property tax pressure in Ohio townships is the political surface of a deeper math problem: residential valuations rise while commercial and industrial bases either leave or get blocked. A new high-value industry that uses existing industrial land is one of the few honest answers that does not require another levy speech.

[16] Butler County Commission primary, May 5, 2026: Michael V. Ryan defeated incumbent Cindy Carpenter approximately 72 percent to 28 percent. See Journal-News (Hamilton), May 5–6, 2026. Ryan, a former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, advanced to the November 2026 general election.

[17] Bernie Moreno and Warren Davidson have both operated in the Ohio builder-and-business register the essay prefers to the professional political class. Endorsement lists in the 2026 Butler County commission primary included both names on Ryan’s side.

[18] Federal Aviation Administration, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) regulations, 14 C.F.R. Part 107, and successive beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) waiver practice. Ohio House Bill 77 (effective April 9, 2025) added state-level UAV provisions at Ohio Revised Code §§ 4561.50–4561.53.

[19] Ohio Department of Transportation / DriveOhio statewide drone-first-responder pilot, announced for multiple agencies including Hamilton Police, 2025–2026. Public-safety drones and cargo drones are different machines; they share airspace, waiver culture, and a county that is already learning to fly.

[20] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (manuscript, 2026; targeted 2027 publication). The book treats non-human intelligence, spiritual warfare, and the political history of heaven as the long background to why human institutions keep aborting builders.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Trillions in Economic Damage from COVID Lockdowns and Over 100 Fifth Amendment Invocations: Fauci’s Capitol Hill Disaster

I was talking about this Fauci story for a long time, and there is a lot to break down. Anthony Fauci showed up on Capitol Hill, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times, and the whole performance confirmed what a lot of us had been saying for years. Good lawyers at two thousand dollars an hour told him not to answer questions about the color of his tie or the carpet. That is not strategy in the traditional sense. That is damage control after the diary came out and after Biden’s pardon language made every single answer a potential risk.¹

The hearing was theater, yes. But it was also a window into how power protects itself when the bill for bad decisions runs into the trillions. I said much of this in 2020, when people called it crazy. The diary, the celebrity capture, the origins knowledge, and the blanket Fifth all landed right on schedule. Now we get to talk about the real cost.

The Fifth Amendment Over 100 Times: Lazy Preparation or Calculated Silence

Fauci walked into that Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing chaired by Rand Paul and refused to answer. He invoked the Fifth more than one hundred times. Reports put the number at 111 in some counts. Senators asked the day of the week. They asked the color of his tie. They asked about the carpet. Fifth. Fifth. Fifth.²

I understand not wanting to get boxed into a dialogue that opens rabbit holes. Hard questions about gain-of-function funding, lab-leak timelines, and previous sworn statements carry real risk. But when the easy questions also get the Fifth, it stops looking like careful lawyering and starts looking like the lawyers decided the safest path was total silence. Paul has been clear he intends to pursue contempt. The committee already voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt and refer it. Democrats will not help in the full Senate, and the January 2025 pardon complicates federal options. Still, the optics of a man who cost the country so much refusing even the simplest answers is a form of accountability in itself.³

Bernie Moreno from Ohio asked the kind of direct questions that needed to be asked. He made me proud as a senator from this state. The frustration in the room was real because the public already knew the story’s outlines. The Fifth just made the admission louder.

The Diary Revelations: COVID Origins Knowledge and Falling in Love with Celebrity Status

The diary dropped right before the hearing—more than a thousand pages. Early entries show Fauci writing that the wet market was the amplifier, not the source. He recorded conversations in which most of the scientists on the call thought deliberate insertion or laboratory involvement was possible. Publicly, the story stayed different for a long time.⁴

At the same time, the diary shows a man falling in love with the celebrity scan. Magazine covers. Rock-star treatment. “Explosive and really unimaginable” fame. Petitions for Sexiest Man Alive. Celebrity phone calls and name-dropping. While the country was locked down and the economic damage was compounding, the private notes record the thrill of the attention. That contrast is damaging. It was already suspected. The diary made it concrete. The timing, right before the testimony, turned a public-relations disaster into something harder to spin.⁵

The Trillions Lost: Quantifying the Economic Catastrophe of the Lockdowns

This is the part that still matters most. Separating the damage caused by the virus itself from that caused by the policy response is tricky. Economists still argue about the exact split. What is not in serious dispute is the scale.

Federal relief spending alone ran about $4.65 trillion. GDP losses from the pandemic period have been estimated in the multiple trillions. One USC analysis put the four-year GDP hit near $14 trillion. A Heritage-linked commission put the total cost—deaths, chronic conditions, lost income, mental health, educational losses—around $18 trillion. School closures alone have been estimated to result in roughly $2 trillion in future earnings losses. Long COVID continues to impose ongoing productivity costs measured in the billions annually. Global output losses for 2020–2024 have been estimated at nearly $13.8 trillion, with the United States accounting for a large share.⁶

We are still living with the long-term effects. Inflation, labor-force scarring, learning loss that will depress lifetime earnings for a generation of kids, and the permanent expansion of federal debt all trace back in part to the choices made in 2020 and 2021. Someone who helped design and sell those choices, who enjoyed the magazine covers while the economy took the hit, does not get to walk away with only a pardon and a Fifth Amendment performance. Public embarrassment is part of the bill. Legal immunity does not erase the reputation ledger or the need for a full accounting.

Biden’s Pardon and Why the Lawyers Demanded Total Silence

The January 19, 2025, pardon from President Biden is the key. It covers “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”⁷

That language is broad. The lawyers treated every answer as a potential new statement that could create fresh exposure or complicate the protection already granted. Even questions about the color of a tie carry risk if the answer can be twisted into inconsistency or if it opens a door outside the pardoned window. That is why the advice was absolute: do not answer. The optics look terrible. The legal logic is coherent if the goal is preserving the pardon at all costs. States are still free to look at their own statutes. Florida has already moved. The federal shield does not cover everything.⁸

Why the Hearing Still Mattered and What Comes Next

We already knew the broad outline. The hearing put the Fifth on the record more than a hundred times and forced the diary into the center of the conversation. Rand Paul is pushing the contempt referral. Criminal prosecution at the federal level faces the prospect of pardon and partisan math. State investigations and the public record are not constrained the same way. The real next step is continued pressure for transparency on the origins, the funding decisions, and the true cost-benefit of the lockdowns. Reputational accountability is nothing. Strategy that relies on silence still has a price.

I remember saying all of this about Fauci when people thought it was crazy. Before some of the books were written, before the diaries were public, before the pardon. I got the usual pushback for not going along with the official line. Now the Fifth, the diary, and the economic numbers have caught up. I told you so. I will keep saying it because the next time something sounds wild and outside the approved explanations, people might listen a little sooner and save themselves some of the pain.

The hole we are still climbing out of six years later was not inevitable. Manufactured crisis or not, the policy choices had authors. Those authors should not get to treat the trillions as someone else’s problem. 

Footnotes

1.  CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic,” July 29, 2026; Axios, “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins,” July 29, 2026.

2.  The New York Times, “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing,” July 29–30, 2026; USA Today, “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19,” July 29, 2026; Washington Times, “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress,” July 29, 2026.

3.  Forbes, “Fauci Contempt of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines,” August 6, 2026; Politico, “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote,” August 6, 2026; Reuters, “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote,” August 6, 2026.

4.  USA Today, “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame,” July 29, 2026; National Review, “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him,” July 27, 2026; The Telegraph, “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal,” July 27, 2026.

5.  The Atlantic, “Anthony Fauci’s Embarrassing, Revealing Diary,” July 29, 2026; The New Yorker, “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves,” August 4, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing,” July 27, 2026; Wall Street Journal, “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci,” July 28–29, 2026.

6.  U.S. Government Accountability Office, “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588), July 31, 2025; USC Price School, “Mandatory business closures drove the economic decline during COVID-19 pandemic,” reporting ~$14 trillion GDP impact; Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (via SCNR reporting), estimating ~$18 trillion total U.S. costs; University of Washington/Oxford analysis on school closures (~$2 trillion future losses); Center for Global Development estimates of global output losses ~$13.8 trillion (2020–2024).

7.  Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, January 19, 2025 (full text via Wikisource and Department of Justice Pardon Attorney records); White House Statement from President Joe Biden, January 20, 2025.

8.  CBS12 / Florida reporting on Attorney General James Uthmeier investigation announcement, July 30, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry,” July 30, 2026; Lawfare, “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?,” August 11, 2026.

Bibliography

Axios. “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins.” July 29, 2026.

Center for Global Development. Estimates of global COVID-19 output losses, 2020–2024 (~$13.8 trillion).

CNN. “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic.” July 29, 2026.

Forbes. “Fauci Contempt Of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines.” August 6, 2026.

Heritage Foundation / Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Cost estimates totaling approximately $18 trillion (deaths, chronic illness, lost income, mental health, education). Reported via SCNR, July 2024 (updated context 2026).

Hoover Institution. Various analyses of lockdown costs and learning losses (e.g., Hanushek et al. on the economic impact).

Lawfare. “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?” August 11, 2026; “Biden Grants Preemptive Pardons to Milley, Fauci, and Others.” January 20, 2025.

National Review. “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him.” July 27, 2026.

The New York Times. “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing.” July 29–30, 2026.

The New Yorker. “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves.” August 4, 2026.

Politico. “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote.” August 6, 2026.

Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Executive Grant of Clemency, January 19, 2025 (Wikisource / U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney).

Reuters. “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote.” August 6, 2026.

The Telegraph. “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal.” July 27, 2026.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588). July 31, 2025 (~$4.65 trillion federal relief).

USA Today. “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19.” July 29, 2026; “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame.” July 29, 2026.

USC Price School / Economic Modeling. Analyses projecting ~$14 trillion U.S. GDP losses from the pandemic period.

University of Washington / Oxford University. School-closure economic impact estimates (~$2 trillion future losses).

Wall Street Journal. “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci.” July 28–29, 2026.

Washington Examiner. “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing.” July 27, 2026; “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry.” July 30, 2026; “Fauci held in contempt by Rand Paul’s committee.” August 6, 2026.

Washington Times. “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress.” July 29, 2026.

White House. Statement from President Joe Biden on preemptive pardons. January 20, 2025.

Additional primary materials: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing transcript and video, July 29, 2026; Fauci personal diary excerpts released by Sen. Rand Paul, July 2026 (1,000+ pages covering late 2019–2022).

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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