Dirty Hands at the Dinner Table: How Authority Conceals the Temple Mount Secrets

I find the stories of the Temple Mount in Israel infinitely fascinating.  The way authority figures hide things—whether it’s a father at the dinner table deflecting his daughter’s question in the movie Fire Walk with Me or entire systems built around keeping eyes off what’s buried—keeps echoing louder in the news and in the air. That scene isn’t just cinema; it’s a blueprint for how power protects itself. Laura asks the direct, impossible-to-ignore question—“Why were you in my room?”—and the response isn’t denial or apology. It’s inversion: Leland grabs her hand, inspects it closely, and declares, “Your hands are filthy… look, there is dirt way under this fingernail.” Suddenly, the spotlight shifts, the original inquiry evaporates, and the hierarchy snaps back into place. The abuser stays safe behind the façade of parental authority, and the victim is left doubting her own reality. I see that exact mechanism repeating at every scale, from family secrets to the kind of institutional cover that goes on at the Temple Mount.

What makes it so gripping is how deliberate it can feel when you zoom out. After the 1967 war, Israel had the Mount in hand—full military control, the keys to the gates, the ability to reshape everything. Yet the Waqf keeps running the show day to day. The official line has always been peace preservation: don’t inflame the Muslim world, avoid a wider religious war, and show tolerance as the new custodian of holy sites for all faiths. It sounded pragmatic at the time, almost noble. But layer on the archaeology angle, and it starts looking like genius-level deflection. Create a permanent tension zone where any serious dig—any probe into the tunnels, chambers, ancient wells, or pre-Davidic features—gets framed as an assault on Islam’s third-holiest site. The Waqf has a motive to block it (preserving their narrative overlay), the world has a motive to pressure Israel against escalation, and nothing changes underground. No permits for neutral international teams, no comprehensive mapping with modern tech without diplomatic blowback, no accidental exposure of whatever Solomon’s people might have sealed away before the Babylonians arrived. Hostility becomes the perfect guard dog: it barks at intruders, keeps the curious at bay, and nobody has to admit they’re hiding something.

The red heifer push keeps underscoring how serious this feels on the ground. Preparations haven’t stopped; they’ve accelerated in ways that are hard to ignore. The Temple Institute has been at it for over a decade, educating, crafting vessels, training priests, and monitoring candidates. Those five from Texas back in 2022 got a lot of attention—flown in, raised under strict conditions in Shiloh. Some were disqualified over time for developing imperfections (a single white hair can disqualify under halachic rules). There was that big July 1, 2025, event in the Samarian hills: a full simulation of the ritual burning with a disqualified animal, complete with priests in garments, ashes collected. The Institute clarified it was practice only, non-kosher because the heifer wasn’t perfect, and the setup wasn’t fully consecrated. Still, four candidates remain under observation there as of early 2026. Ministers have visited the site; photos circulate, and the message is clear: when a truly flawless one is ready, and everything else aligns, purification of the ashes becomes possible. That’s the biblical prerequisite for resuming Temple-level purity and service. No ashes, no Third Temple activity. With record numbers of Jewish visitors to the Mount lately—over 76,000 in 2025, shattering previous highs—and quiet shifts like police allowing limited prayer pages or sheets on site (a crack in the old status quo since late 2025 into this year), the momentum builds.

Those tunnels are key to the story. Explorers like Josh Gates have documented what they can—ancient passages, some possibly water systems from way back, others sealed or restricted. In episodes of Expedition Unknown, he rappels into shafts beneath Jerusalem, navigating cramped, centuries-sealed tunnels that hint at connections to the Mount area, though collapses and restrictions halt full exploration. Rabbis and Orthodox groups have long held traditions that the Ark never left Jerusalem: hidden by Solomon in purpose-built chambers, or by Josiah, or Jeremiah, or someone in that chain before the First Temple fell. A few bold digs happened quietly decades ago—1981 efforts by rabbis like Yehuda Getz chiseling into bedrock passages under the Mount, rumors of cleared rooms but no public Ark reveal. Modern statements from some rabbis lean hard on “it’s here, well hidden, we know where.” If it’s in those under-Mount networks—pre-David threshing-floor caves, Solomon-era vaults—the current setup is an ideal lock. Islamic administration means no Jewish-led archaeology without crisis. Muslim sensitivities mean no validation of biblical claims through digs. Politics means endless stalemate. And yet the pressure cooker is heating: October 7 still looms as a possible reaction to perceived Temple threats, red heifer talk fuels messianic expectations across lines, and post-COVID distrust means fewer people accept the old “don’t ask, don’t dig” deflection.

Whether it’s unaccountable governments sitting on restricted zones (Afghanistan caves, Chinese pyramids, Iraqi museums), or mystery-school oral traditions guarding knowledge, or straight gaslighting at the family level, the playbook is the same: manufacture antagonism or taboo to keep inquiry radioactive. But the erosion of blind trust changes everything. People aren’t swallowing “your hands are dirty” as an answer anymore. They’re asking why the room was entered in the first place. That’s why this feels like disclosure season—UFO files crack open, ancient anomalies get debated publicly, and the Temple Mount simmers closer to a boil. If the Ark surfaces, or a red heifer ritual goes live, or the status quo finally snaps, the cascade could rewrite maps, faiths, and power structures overnight.

Footnotes

1.  The dinner table scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, where Leland inspects Laura’s hands and says, “Your hands are filthy… look, there is dirt way under this fingernail,” is from the screenplay by David Lynch and Bob Engels (1991 shooting draft).

2.  Moshe Dayan’s decision to maintain the status quo on the Temple Mount, granting the Waqf administrative control while Israel handles external security, was made shortly after the Six-Day War in June 1967, without formal cabinet ratification.

3.  The Waqf’s role and the ban on Jewish prayer have been key elements of the status quo, though recent reports indicate limited allowances for Jewish prayer pages or sheets as of early 2026.

4.  Jewish visitor numbers to the Temple Mount reached record highs, with over 76,000 in 2025, according to activist groups.

5.  The Temple Institute conducted a practice red heifer ritual simulation on July 1, 2025, in the Samarian hills using a disqualified heifer; four candidates remain under monitoring in Shiloh as of early 2026.

6.  Explorations of tunnels beneath Jerusalem, including potential links to the Temple Mount, feature in Expedition Unknown episodes with Josh Gates, showing sealed passages and historical signatures but no conclusive Ark discovery due to restrictions.

7.  Jewish tradition and rabbinic statements often hold that the Ark was hidden in underground chambers beneath the Temple Mount before the Babylonian destruction, with some rabbis claiming knowledge of its location.

Bibliography

•  Lynch, David, and Bob Engels. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me screenplay (shooting draft). Lynch/Frost Productions, August 8, 1991.

•  Shragai, Nadav. “The ‘Status Quo’ on the Temple Mount.” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, November-December 2014.

•  “What is the Temple Mount ‘status quo’?” JNS.org, June 19, 2022.

•  “Jewish prayer signals Temple Mount’s shifting status quo.” The Jerusalem Post, 2026.

•  “UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION REGARDING THE RED HEIFER.” The Temple Institute official website and Instagram, November 2025.

•  “Record Temple Mount Visits and Red Heifers Signal Prophetic Momentum in Israel.” MyCharisma.com, February 4, 2026.

•  “Josh Gates Searches For The Lost Ark Of The Covenant In Jerusalem.” Expedition Unknown, Discovery Channel.

•  “The Ark of the Covenant.” Associates for Biblical Research.

•  Moskoff, Harry H. “The Enigma of the Lost Ark of the Covenant.” The Times of Israel Blogs, September 10, 2017.

Rich Hoffman

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Ted Cruz Doesn’t Understand the Bible: The danger of assumptions

I think it is one of the most embarrassing interviews I’ve seen in a long time, and you wouldn’t have expected it from Ted Cruz. But then again, maybe so.  It was the Tucker Carlson interview where Cruz said that the Bible instructs us to support Israel against the world.  Tucker caught that statement and wouldn’t let it go, and once he did, Senator Cruz just kept digging in, which was very embarrassing.  News flash, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible to follow Israel unthinkingly.  God himself sought to destroy Israel many times by its enemies for not following his commandments.  And who is to say that this modern fight with Iran isn’t just another action by God to destroy Israel because it has drifted too far away from its promises to God as conveyed by the Old Testament? It was astonishing that Ted Cruz, who has been on the short list to be a Supreme Court Justice, who has run for President, and has been a very successful senator, didn’t know one of those basic understandings of the Bible.  And we hear that a lot from people who talk about the Bible as a guiding light. They listen to what someone tells them in Sunday school or church on Sunday, and they repeat it themselves, sometimes for a lifetime, because they view the Bible as too hard to read, and they never really do.  They may be adamant Christian people, but they never gain firsthand understanding of the Bible, because they never really fully understand it. After all, the Bible is vast and contains a wealth of information, making it challenging to read if you don’t take the time to get to know it.  Once Tucker Carlson realized that one of the biggest Biblical cheerleaders in government didn’t understand a basic premise of Biblical perspective, he tore into Ted Cruz, and the Senator just kept digging himself deeper and deeper by trying to walk out of it, only to sink further.  It was pretty brutal.

But what it brought up was just how shallow people who profess to know the Bible are.  And that when the United Nations essentially created the state of Israel after World War II, many of the people in that movement had the same Biblical understanding of things that Ted Cruz did.  They heard something as kids and carried it through their lives, whether or not it was true, and as adults, they advocated a position based purely on a sentiment learned in childhood.  If Israel is up to no good and is evil itself, and has fallen into evil ways, would God want us in America to support them regardless of the content of their character?  Because that’s not how it ever was in the Bible.  God was displeased with many characters in the Bible, and He punished them severely.  God punished the people of Israel for not initially attacking the Land of Canaan upon learning from the spies that it was filled with scary, giant people.  So God scolded that generation to remain in the wilderness for another 40 years to let the current losers die off.  God punished Aaron. He punished Moses, not even allowing his chosen prophet to deliver his people into the Promised Land, and gave that pleasure over to Joshua.  God punished King Saul.  God punished King David.  God punished King Solomon.  And eventually God just destroyed all of Israel with the attack of King Nebuchadnezzar, forcing the Jewish people into exile from their holy land and to be servants as slaves to their captors.  God sent his son Jesus to redeem the people, and they killed him, leaving God to punish the people of Israel again with the Roman army that destroyed the Temple yet again and slaughtered all the Jewish rebels. 

God has been very hard on Israel, yet they are some of the oldest continuous people on the planet.  I believe that in the mound culture of North America and other parts of the world, we are witnessing a migration through the Mormon religion, reflecting their deep past and interactions with God.  There are unmistakably Jewish relics in the mounds of the Adena and Hopewell people that show a particular connection to the events of the Holy Land. God has been trying for a long time to make the people of Israel into something special, and they have let him down time and time again, scattering them in anger all over the world.  So I don’t think that God has suddenly given all the Jewish people a hall pass in modern times to perpetually good judgment and an endorsement from Heaven for continued existence.  Given the nature of God in the Bible, it would be likely that Hamas and Iran in general exist to punish the people of Israel for their continued lifestyle of sins.  What happened on that terrible day on October 7th 2023 can’t be forgiven, where Palestinian militants attacked kids at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an open-air music festival killing at least 364 people and taking around 40 hostages, and brutally raping in public several young women, then breaking up their bodies and throwing them into the back of pick-up trucks while spitting on their distorted bodies.  By the time the smoke cleared, 1200 people were killed in a broader attack, and the brutality of it by itself deserves to see the people of Hamas eradicated from the face of the earth because it was so evil. 

But by the way God works, such a thing would likely be a political move made against Israel to either punish it for past transgressions, or to rally the world to the cause of Israel, and to use it to conquer evil in the world, which would be why Ted Cruz would believe what he did about the Bible as an assumption.  Not a factual statement.  And that would be what the people who wanted to create a Jewish state of Israel would think as well, that God wanted them to make it, assuming that they knew God because of something they learned in Sunday school, or passed down through Hermetic tradition as a Masonic community trying to create in the world a New Atlantis to rival the homeland of the ancient past.  People believe a lot of things, but the vital thing to always consider is what they know and how they came to know it.  I think Matt Gaetz explained it well when he said that the entire reason Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to attack Iran when he did was to wipe out their nuclear weapon development, because he was hanging on to a tight election and needed to give Israel something to rally behind.  Everyone is likely guilty of something bad and detrimental; however, the critical thing to know is what the Bible says and what it means.  And clearly, Ted Cruz didn’t understand it.  It’s one thing to support Western Civilization, which Israel is a creation of, and to impose that on a world that does not like it, want it, and wants to destroy the concept of it completely and utterly.  And when it comes to the Palestinians and Islamic fundamentalism, with Marxism looming always in the background, there is no way to live in peace with people like that.  The only peace you can ever have in the Middle East is to eradicate the antagonizers all from existence and to pick Western Civilization over the other options.  And the Bible would imply that the right way to think is in that fashion.  However, that’s what people who follow the Quran believe as well, which creates the foundation of the conflict itself.  What Ted Cruz did was get caught making assumptions on something he should have, of all people, clearly understood.  Hearing him talk is a reminder of how little people in charge know about the actual reality of existence and what God wants from it.  And at best, it’s very dangerous.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Mothman Monster: One of the most myterious places on Earth

So, what do I think the Mothman Monster is?  I believe it is Stolis from The Lesser Keys of Solomon, or one of the 26 legions of demons that he commands, likely conjured up by the occult rituals of some maniacal lunatic in the region of Point Pleasant, West Virginia during the years 1966 to 1967.  Hundreds of people saw the Mothman Monster during that year, leading up to a bridge collapse that killed a lot of people transporting themselves over to Ohio from Point Pleasant.  Of course, demons and spiritual monsters are not regional to the Near East, nor are they concerned about what time they are in, as they seem to exist outside of our dimensional limitations.  Many described the Mothman as it appeared over seven feet tall with glowing red eyes and wings that allowed it to fly and harass innocent people.  I think the case with a lot of elements of cryptozoology is that these creatures are timeless and have been captured in classic literature, the mythologies of the world, particularly Greek and Roman myths, and of course the demonology of Europe exported to the world as the Bible grew in popularity and people wanted to figure out what the heck Paul was talking about in Ephesians.  I certainly believe in the cryptids that are reported. I have been to many sites where they have been found, particularly Sasquatches, which are again chronicled in books like the Lesser Keys and evoked through occult practices.  I think someone in the Point Pleasant region called on a monster from the Stolis family tree, and the thing ran around haunting people in a truly terrifying way.  I enjoy these topics a lot, so when my family asked me how I wanted to spend my birthday, we discussed a ghost hunt at Moonville, which I have spoken of.  But my main thing was that I wanted to go to the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

I’ve been there before, and so have some of my kids at different times, but I wanted to go again and spend some time there with my family all in one place, and we had a great day.  The Mothman story is genuinely creepy; all those people weren’t conspiring to lie about what they saw, the entire town was substantially haunted, even to this day.  The latest Mothman sighting in Point Pleasant was as recent as 2016.  It also shows up in Chicago now and then.  And that’s not all.  I think this Stolis character is the same one that the people of the pyramid of Cahokia worshipped, just outside of St. Louis, at the giant mound works there.  And it’s what the Indians called the Thunderbird.  I love the topic. We spent over 1,000 dollars in the gift shop there, part of the cool museum I wanted to visit so badly.  It’s cheesy, and very pulpy, but that is because the truly terrifying aspect of this giant creature that flies around foretelling doom to people so mysteriously has to have some psychological means of dealing with the crises.  And it’s a kind of wet blanket hanging over all of eastern Ohio, even the ghost hunt at Moonville I was talking about.  We’re dealing with a very ancient civilization in that precise location with all the mounds of West Virginia and Ohio up and down the Ohio River that have a very creepy vibe to them even if you didn’t know the stories of the various monsters that appear often to many people, even now. 

Truth be told, that day at the Mothman Museum was one of the happiest days I’ve ever had in my life.  Trump was in office doing good things.  And I had my family to myself living out of our RVs and visiting places like the Mothman Museum, thinking about the kinds of things I like to think about, the politics of demons and spiritual manipulators who plot and scheme against humanity with terror and temptations.  Even better, the Mothman sightings, well documented at the museum, were accompanied by Men in Black visits, a CIA and FBI kind of conspiracy theory.  Only the reports were that these guys were never quite human who visited people at their homes after Mothman sightings to tell them they weren’t seeing what they were seeing.  There were also UFOs all over the place abducting people and doing experiments on them, so we are dealing with a lot more than just the haunting of a monster upon innocent people along the Ohio River.  But we are touching on a phenomenon that traces back to why so many mounds were built by ancient people in the region in the first place.  Those kinds of fears are always buzzing in the background of how a conscious society builds itself, and in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there is something to these strange occurrences.  As we were there, I thought of the mound complexes up in Marietta, Ohio, and down the river at Portsmouth.  Then, up the road to Newark, where I discussed discovering the Ten Commandments in America inside a giant mound.  Then there are the graves of all the various giants found in the area, chronicled as evidence by early newspaper reports and a kind of Men in Black conspiracy to tell people that they never existed.  Something was going on, and it was fun to think about, and that was how I spent my birthday this year.  Giving myself fun things to think about that are likely significant to the human condition. 

Outside the museum, right in the middle of town, is the Mothman statue; of course, we had to get a family picture by it.  I think The Mothman Prophecy is one of the scariest books I’ve ever read about these events, written by John Keel, a reasonable journalist who didn’t intend to uncover some of the greatest mysteries of modern times.  After his experiences at Point Pleasant he went on to write several books, all of which I have read many times and I do not doubt that there is a lot more to the story of which he was reporting, that there is a political rule over humanity by creatures from beyond time and space that causes us a lot of trouble.  The story of King Solomon commanding these creatures with a ring given to him by God is just one example that has been attempted to be understood by the mind of humanity over the terrors of roaming spirits intent on evil designs.  And sometimes occultists make deals with these demons for benefits that can’t be obtained through some supernatural trade.  And most of us deal with that pressure by just ignoring the problem.  But not me, I want to know all about it. We had a great day at the Mothman Museum and spent significant time in the area thinking about Mothman Monsters and other cryptids who terrorize people worldwide.  Most of them were captured by the writers of The Lesser Keys of Solomon, which lists many similar characters.  There is a lot for us to learn about these creatures, but to say they don’t exist is only a means of avoiding the problem with rationality, because it wasn’t just the Mothman sightings in that region during a particular period, 1966-67.  But it has always been with us, especially along the length of the Ohio River, from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, in what I think is one of the most mysterious places on earth.  And the monsters still roam the night to terrorize the innocent. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The CIA Found The Ark of the Covenant: Confirming that it is located in Axum, Ethiopia

Is remote viewing possible?  I have discussed this before about Dolores Cannon and a very interesting book she wrote about the Essenes, using regression hypnosis to investigate relationships with Jesus Christ from 2,000 years ago; however, in talking to them in real time, as if they were right in front of us.  I can understand the skepticism, but I think we are talking about conditions of quantum entanglement rather than improbable scientific accidents.  Until people explain to me how ancient people moved large rocks without machines, I will remain skeptical that we are examining the correct science for all conditions.  I think I have a pretty good idea what they are. However, just for fun for my upcoming birthday this year, we are planning to go ghost hunting as a family.  We purchased some paranormal equipment, including an EMF detector, a spirit box, and a voice recorder, designed to detect spirits that are otherwise unable to communicate.  There is a lot invisible to us, such as electricity and radio waves, that are flying around all over the place, interacting with us constantly.  Yet we use these things to advance our society.  So, when it comes to the spirit world, I think there are a lot of life forms roaming around without bodies, across time and space, that do not function according to our linear measure of time, and are interacting with us in dreams, through devices that can pick them up, and even through drug use and hallucinogenic enterprise.  Just because we haven’t figured out all those scientific methods of communication yet, I think Dolores Cannan, and many others, including the CIA, have been able to use remote viewing to learn things they otherwise wouldn’t and to shape events from a great distance without getting up out of their chair.  So yes, I believe the declassified story about the CIA discovering the Ark of the Covenant, and that its location was in Axum, Ethiopia. 

What gives strength to that story is a book I read several years ago by Graham Hancock, which is one of my all-time favorite books, The Sign and the Seal, published in 1992 and heavily inspired by the fictional adventures of Indiana Jones.  Graham Hancock was a beat writer for The Economist and Ethiopia was his territory and they had all these rumors there by the locals that the Jewish Ark was hidden there in Axum because the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba had brought it there during his father’s lifetime, before the nations of the world moved against Israel to destroy it.  The story goes that Solomon wanted to preserve the Ark of the Covenant and the laws of Yahweh that were kept inside, the Ten Commandments, so he allowed his son and the Queen to hide them away with what is today a large contingent of Ethiopian Jews dedicated to protecting the Ark from the prying eyes of the world.  In his book, Graham Hancock conducted a tremendous amount of research that essentially led to the gates of a small church in Axum and a guard there who had given his life to protect the Ark from outsiders.  The guard there more or less displayed that at least he believed what he was guarding was the ancient Jewish relic, and he had radiation poisoning to prove it.  The guards at the Ark of Axum are elected to lifetime appointments by the town.  So, whoever gets the job gets it for life, and they typically become ill very quickly from their constant exposure to whatever it is they are guarding. When one dies, the next one is elected to a lifetime appointment, and they perform the service with a smile on their face, driven by the honor of it.  And they never leave their post. 

So to learn that the CIA had successfully confirmed through remote viewing that they discovered the Ark, not physically, not with their hands on it, but with the success of a telepathy practitioner, such as Delores Cannon was, I think only confirms what Graham Hancock, and many others have long said, that the Ark is in Axum Ethiopia and is still there to this day.  And I’ll go a little further as to the value of fantasy characters like Indiana Jones.  The value of those kinds of stories lies in getting people to think about such things, and if not for their popularity, Graham Hancock might have remained a beat writer and travel commentator for the rest of his life.  But because of Indiana Jones, the CIA was investigating the Ark, Graham Hancock wrote a book that changed his life, and many other people, and even now as there is a Trump administration declassifying many things, people are very excited to learn about what’s under the Giza plateau considering all this new news about mysterious objects under the Great Pyramid complex in Egypt, and this story about the Ark of the Covenant in Axum.  Fantasy fiction often drives us to scientific fact, and we are better off for the things we learn.  But as humans, we require some intellectual device that provokes us to ask questions we need to be asking; it’s how we acquire new information.  And there is still a lot we need to learn about the world, and I think the CIA has learned to do more with it than just view things remotely. 

A lot of times when you have a ghostly encounter, and a strange shadow man appears just outside your peripheral vision, I don’t always think it’s a ghost, but someone trying to interact with you, or spy on you from a remote viewing location.  And they might not even be living at the same time that you are.  They could be far in the past or way into the future, interacting with you through a dream, or a purposeful exploit of quantum entanglement.  And that these methods are scientific and can be used to communicate information just like a radio wave can now, or how electricity travels invisibly all around us, and we use it to power our entire civilization.  Even though those things are invisible to us, through our current senses, it doesn’t mean they aren’t real in and of themselves.  So, yes, I believe the CIA story, and I think there will be many more like it.  And I think it mainly because it confirms what Graham Hancock already figured out with hard reporting and boots on the ground regarding the actual location of The Ark of the Covenant and an adventure story that was inspired by Indiana Jones, but took on a life of its own that was even more interesting than the fictional account.  I’m not sure how much of the original Ark would be left, made out of wood and gold as it was.  It’s around 3,200 to 3,500 years old, and not much lasts that long, even when preserved.  However, I think what remains of it is in Axum, and the CIA confirmed this with a remote viewing method, which is exciting news.  However, it’s also just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what remains hidden from us using these same technological methods.  And the mysteries of science that we have yet to discover are still ahead of us, but have been seen through quantum entanglement, and it shows that we have a long way to go.

Rich Hoffman

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

Why America is the Best: Understanding Gideon and George Washington

While visiting George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, I was very interested in why it is OK for us to say that America is the best country on earth and that we should preserve it very boisterously.  And why George Washington?  Well, we named our capital city after him and think of him as the ultimate Founding Father, the pacesetter who started something new in the world, and we have measured everything thereafter with him in mind.  So, what made George Washington so great?  And why do Americans feel like they must always tell the world that they are the best and greatest?  Our form of government is by far the best, and it’s an unquestioned reality.  But if you’ve ever traveled the world and dined with acquaintances from other countries, and you’re watching a news report in which someone from America comes on and says that America is the best country on earth, it can get a little weird. In that case, it can be a little uncomfortable because the people you eat at the table think the same about their country.  What makes it more accurate for us in the United States than for them, whoever they are?  That’s happened to me a lot of times.  Yet, I think Americans should say such a thing because I believe our form of government is superior to that of anywhere in the world and that we should be proud of it.  We should even brag about it like we do.  But why?  You can understand something instinctively, but to actually “know” it requires much more understanding and perspective, which is undoubtedly the case with this topic.  And now that I’ve visited Mt. Vernon with my wife, George Washington’s home, I think I understand it much better.

I think the key to understanding why America is the best country in the world is literally a “key.”  The key that George Washinton used to hang in the entry to his house that his friend and long lost adopted son Marquis de Lafayette gave to him that used to be the key to the Bastille’s main gate, once the French stormed it and destroyed it as a symbol of tyranny during the French Revolution.  George Washington kept it to show how a country can overthrow tyranny, and even though the French Revolution got well out of hand while the American Revolution slightly before it was much more civil and orderly, the reminder that the people ultimately have the power to rule over themselves was represented in the key, which Washington understood as literally the key to setting up a proper government for the people and by the people.  George Washington liked his house so much that he didn’t want to be away from it with commitments to power and was always reluctant to achieve any high office.  But as to that as well, why?  Then, of course, you would have to understand the Bible, the primary literary entertainment at the time of these revolutions, and the forming of our country.  They didn’t have television shows or music to entertain themselves with thought, but they did have the Bible.  And George Washington would have shared the Bible with just about everyone pursuing a life of thoughtful understanding.  One thing that I have always thought about Biblical studies is that they are narratively, really insightful, psychologically.  I’ve read most of the foundation religious texts of the world, and I can say that the Bible is a brilliant enterprise that served as a good guide through the foundation of a new country.  It was the first to figure itself out, as the Bible had spent the previous 1500 years being fleshed out as an idea.  And the ideas formulated in the Bible essentially laid the groundwork for the creation of America.  So George Washington, by way of dinner conversation, would have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the Bible with his dinner guests at Mt. Vernon, which would have happened all the time. 

I spent most of the previous year leading up to Trump’s election reading various books about George Washington because I felt that the world would need to understand what was about to happen, and to understand America, you have to understand George Washington.  And to understand that, you must understand George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  So that’s what my wife and I did to celebrate Trump being back in the White House; we visited Mt. Vernon to unpack why putting Trump back in as President was necessary and why he should be so boisterous about why America was the best country.   It ultimately comes down to how George Washington thought and how much the Bible influenced him, especially the Book of Judges and the character within that book of Gideon, the military hero who saved Israel with only 300 men but was the reluctant hero always trying to downplay his efforts.  I often see our form of government as a republic as a deliberate attempt to fix the problems in the Book of Judges, where God wanted people to rule themselves. Still, the failure of the regional judges drove the Hebrew people to demand a king to rule over them. The wheels fell off the apple cart, leaving the kingdom to become divided by God’s anger after the death of King Solomon.

I think Washington modeled himself after Biblical characters with his approach to leadership and, most notably, Gideon himself.  Gideon’s conquests led to 40 years of peace during the rest of his lifetime. Still, before he died, he had made a gold ephod from the spoils of war that some Israelites began to worship. Once Gideon wasn’t around anymore, idolatry started to poison the minds of the people, and one of his 70 sons, Abimelech, led an uprising that killed all the others and drove them to a fallen society.  Thinking about human nature through this story, George Washington was trying not to make the mistakes of Gideon.  Rather than become just another corrupt king with multiple wives, like Gideon, Washington stayed loyal to Martha and kept himself grounded at Mt. Vernon all his life before and after the Revolution and his two terms as President.  George fought off the hungry temptation to be romantic with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his very good friend William, and the couple for which Fairfax County is named today.  But being inspired by Bible stories, Washington wanted to avoid those pitfalls and stayed grounded throughout his life.  However, once he was out of office, like Gideon’s sons, it was hard to pull together a republic without everyone fighting all the time, which was undoubtedly the case with subsequent presidents like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.  And like the story of the Book of Judges, leadership always failed.  And the way that America set up its republic form of government to resist those temptations, for society to call out for a king and to give them unlimited power, our government was built on the Book of Judges from the beginning to correct it.  That was certainly at the core of George Washington’s belief and why he thought the key to the Bastille was so important.  It was more important for people to rule themselves and to throw off the oppressors of social order than to conform to it.  Because once a person has collected such power, as the Bible shows, they all fail.  So Washington and our American form of government set everything up to resist that temptation and to give people just enough power, knowing that the faults of humanity were always very close.  And like his temptations with Sally Fairfax, he would keep those lusts cool and always on the back burner, where they belonged.  If a leader can’t govern their emotions, how can they govern other people?  Because of these concerns, and after several hundred years, they led to President Trump, who found that balance late in life on his own terms.  We can say that America is better than all other forms of government because it was built with these concerns in mind, which had previously destroyed every society people had in it.  And we have now sustained ourselves for many centuries on a premise of restraint, which George Washinton started, based on the Bible story of Gideon, the reluctant military general whom God worked through directly to save his people, even if only for a short time.

Rich Hoffman

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

Under Jerusalem: Why Trump has a right to build wonderful hotels over the Gaza Strip

I have a mild obsession with the city of Jerusalem, so there is a lot to talk about regarding the modern Middle East policy where that ancient city is concerned.  The claims that Islam has over it are very recent, and it’s a simple math problem to work out as far as territory rights.  The Arabs of Islam didn’t come along until about 600 A.D., after the fall of the Roman Empire, so claims to the area had long before been erased by the Greek and Roman Empires over a thousand years before.  But before Islam indicated any claim to the area, especially around the Temple Mount, the most hostile piece of real estate on planet earth, the Hebrew people were in the region over three thousand years ago, 1600 years before the creation of Islam as a religion.  I believe there was a very technological civilization in the area before any of them, including in North America, as it was global, and the only remnants of it are in our modern understanding of astrology. These people were large- what we call giants and had a very advanced civilization before and during the Ice Age. They used an astrology-like scientific approach to conduct a society that our history books do not yet understand.  And they were at the Mount Moriah area for tens of thousands of years before the Jews considered settling it.  One of their obvious artifacts of reference is Rujm el-Hiri, or Gilgal Refaim, “The Wheel of Giants,” which is so big you can see it from space, and it’s just west of the Sea of Galilee in the Golan Heights.  When we talk about Goliath and his family of giants, who King David killed in battle, we are talking about the last of their ancient species, which is how Jerusalem was founded to start with, as David built his city there and started the location that would eventually become the temple of his son, Solomon. 

I have a very nice map that shows the small mountain range that runs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and all these mountain peaks that are now covered by three thousand years of human history, built one on top of another, take up those high lands.  The caves under the Temple Mount and Jerusalem were there long before anybody else.  There are biblical kings, and others, who added a human touch, but there is a lot going on under Jerusalem that is very ancient, and doesn’t get talked about much at all.  And is at the heart of the dispute in the Middle East.  Do the Palestinians have any claim to the land?  What is behind the aggressive talk Trump has put forth about making the Gaza Strip into an American free enterprise zone?  Should the nation of Israel have ever been created after World War II?  The argument is that we are violating the indigenous claims of the Arabs in the area, and they use the aggressive stance of Islam to drive away legitimate claims to history that the Jewish and Christian people clearly have a right to.  More than that are the even more ancient cultures that we should be studying, but we can’t because of modern religious territorial squabbles that have no relevancy in the context of things.  The history of understanding isn’t on a scale of acceptable criteria.  Buried under all this religious history is a truth that is earth shattering and is at the heart of the whole problem.  And it’s in those caves under the Temple Mount where Mount Moriah held significance long before Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac there on that Foundation Stone, or from Islam, Ishmael.

I had the rare privilege of reading the book Under Jerusalem by Andrew Lawler, The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City.  I’m not one who constantly complains about how dumb archaeologists are and how they deliberately cover up the past with their discoveries.  I get the game. They have to hustle to get funding, and the people giving them money want specific validation discovered with the digs.  So, there is a lot of politics in archaeology.  My favorite thing in the world is my Biblical Archaeology Review magazines, which I have been getting since childhood. I love reading about what archaeologists discover in the Holy Land.  It is stunning how many feet of earth have been built up after three thousand years of people walking the streets of Jerusalem, and just how far under the modern city are the remains of the walled City of David.  In some cases, we are dealing with 30 to 40 feet of ancient dirt, sewage, and garbage that has built up to become the modern ground.  City streets in Jerusalem are not at the same level as they were during the time of David or earlier.  And to get to the foundation layers of Solomon’s Temple, you would have to dig deep.  The Second Temple period by Herod was 1000 years later, and many feet under even that period.  Dirt comes in off people’s shoes over time, and it builds up slowly.  And that’s just how old these sites are.  But I’m saying that even with all those considerations, there are tens of thousands more years of history in that area.  So we should be digging a lot more, giving archaeologists a lot more respect and money, and we should be openly prepared for what we learn during the adventure of discovery. 

As to the Islamic claim of the Temple Mount and their abuse of the Jewish people who had the first claim on the land after they conquered it from the pagan worshipping Canaanites, they are just the most recent culture to claim it for themselves.  They won’t let archaeologists dig under and around the Temple Mount to provide proof of the Jewish heritage.  But then they claim that there is no proof of that Jewish heritage because it’s buried under 40 feet of soot because their time on Mount Moriah is so ancient that nearly two thousand years had to pass before Islam became a religion.  The conflict and claims over the territory are entirely based on historical perspective, not a pursuit of the truth that is buried under layers of history on a range of small mountains that have been occupied for tens of thousands of years and of which the proof is in those caves under the Temple Mount.  What we know about Derinkuyu, just to the north in Turkey, is that that underground city was dated to the same period as Solomon’s Temple and even much older in some layers of it.  And, of course, the nearby Gobekli Tepe, dated in the 10,000 BCE range, has the same kind of math technology as the Rujm el-Hiri at the Golon Heights to the south.  So what does all this mean?  Well, Islam doesn’t have a legitimate claim to the area, not where they can demand that their heritage is more important than all this ancient history.  And when they say, show me the proof, they can’t play games by denying dig permits and funding for the truth to be found.  I would say that under the Mount Moriah complex is all the proof anybody needs.  But Islam doesn’t want to know because then it would erode their political claims in the area and destroy their modern aggressions.  Because they don’t want to see the truth.  As many don’t because they are afraid of what they suspect to be the case. Giants ruled the earth and had a technology that was far more sophisticated than what we are achieving in a modern way.  It was a different technology but undoubtedly very sophisticated and global.  Eventually, we must admit to it if we want to advance. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Women Run Off With Bad Men: How evil comes into the world

Probably because it’s the Holiday season, and it’s on people’s minds, Bible references have come up a lot, and some of the conversations I’ve been in have been interesting, especially on the topic of evil and how it comes into the world and why so many people would like to be good but act in such an evil fashion.  It often rocks us off our center when we have to confront it because we don’t understand how it arrived there in the first place.  So this provoked a rather detailed conversation with me that ended up being one of my long, hour-long utterances about some interesting topics, one of which was why women are the vehicles for evil in the world and what we can do about it.  Now, keep in mind that this is a psychological conversation, not one built out of woke politics and leftist social sentiment.  The needs of human beings are not aligned with political power plays, social construction, or reconstruction.  To that point, I would argue that feminism was never created to free women of a slave relationship with men but to destroy the very foundation of family building because governments in the world have radical beliefs about how many humans should be on earth, and they want through abortion, contraceptives, and family planning to discourage as many births as possible, for all kinds of reasons, most of them not sane.  So, just because there are rules that came up with what we can discuss regarding feminine roles in the world, it doesn’t mean that those rules were ever justified or constructive.  And that there is a good point to the original sin and the long history in the Bible of women who turned to evil and gave it a foundation to destroy the world. 

There is a reason that most women are unhappy with their nice husbands, and I would say that it’s not their fault.  God made them that way, and God shows throughout the Bible that he’s very mad, perhaps even at himself, for making human beings the way they are.  Women are being taken from Adam’s rib to serve him as a companion.  She is physically of weaker sex to fulfill her roles in the procreation of new human beings.  If she’s too masculine like Adam, the motivations for procreation aren’t as robust.  So, there is a balancing act genetically that is the problem behind all sexual interplay.  What makes people want to have sex with each other is not the same thing that might make them want to form and run a country.  So, in the Garden of Eden, the young couple of Adam and Eve are told not to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  But of course, Eve does so because the snake seduces her, and all humanity is thrown into a tailspin of perpetuating evil for which Jesus Christ has to come along to wash away the original sin through his sacrifice.  But why did Eve eat the apple from the forbidden tree?  Well, for the same reason that most people do evil things, out of a sense of personal security.  Rather than fight evil, people, men, and women seek to appease it out of self-preservation.  When a woman has a man she does not think can fight evil off, out of their sense of security, they seek to appease it.  So, in the original sin, Eve listened to the snake because it was a strange force of evil that she wasn’t sure Adam could protect her from. 

This is undoubtedly the case of one of the great villains of the Bible, Jezebel, who was known for turning the people of her kingdom to Baal worship at the expense of Yahweh.  God, all through the Bible, was constantly upset that his people, the Israelites, would turn to the temptations of other gods, specifically Baal, and Jezebel was one of the worst, who ended up being tossed out of a window and into the mouths of dogs below who ripped her to shreds, which we are supposed to applaud in reaction as the audience reading from the text.  But what made her so vile? Why didn’t she honor her husband, King Ahab?  Well, because he didn’t make her feel safe.  Women often seek the shelter of a monster to protect them from other monsters because they think they can control the beast with sex.  It’s the classic Beauty and the Beast scenario.  When a woman doesn’t think the man in her life can protect her from the many monsters of the world, she will, most of the time, pick a monster she believes she can control for her own self-preservation.  Her man might be fine with making children, cooking, cleaning, and talking to them.  But if he can’t protect her from monsters, out of her need for security, she will seek out her own monster to protect her from other monsters.  This is why Jezebel was so evil; she tossed away the protection of her husband and of God himself to seek refuge in the ultimate monster, Baal, a rival of God in the pantheon of the Divine Counsel.  This is the ”bad boy” complex that many women go through.  They might marry the nice guy who can hold a good job and raise good kids, but they seek to run off with the bad boy covered in tattoos, smokes, drinks and is a social wreck because she thinks having one of those monsters of her own will protect her from a world of other monsters.

When we look at a beautiful woman and she is with a disgusting man, we wonder why, after all, she could have anybody in the world that she could want.  Why that guy?  It’s because she doesn’t feel safe in a world full of monsters, and she thinks she can use sex to control her own kind of monster.  So, she seeks to appease one for her own protection.  And this was the problem King Solomon had.  He was married to a lot of women from all over the world, and God became very mad at him because he built temples for them to appease their gods, as they rejected Yahway.  Solomon had all the power and treasure on earth then, but it wasn’t enough for his women to honor and worship him as their husband.  So he found himself chasing after their attention to make them feel safe and secure.  He could at least build a temple to their gods.  This is the same kind of problem Mary Magdeline had with her seven demons until she found a good guy in Jesus to give her some temporary relief.  Jesus was a rebel that the authority figures wanted to kill, and he was removed from her life before she could abandon him for being too nice of a guy.  And through death, he gave her a purpose that would last well into history.  Most women aren’t so lucky.  They attach themselves to a good man either by accident or default and fall out of love with them because they aren’t beastlike enough.  But when the world’s beasts kill off their version of the beast, there is at least a crusade to pursue, and Christianity was born, which has been great for the human race.  But you don’t find that a good woman marries a good man and they live happily ever after anywhere in history.  Certainly not in the Bible.  There is always evil coming into the world, and it comes through the front door that women let in because of the need for safety and security that women have as the weaker sex.  And God, even though he created the universe and everything in it, is perpetually frustrated by the notion.  He tries over and over again to solve the problem through apocalypse after apocalypse.  But evil is never appeased, and the world is often overrun by the beasts of the world who take women for themselves without any level of respect and destroy the world through their bad conduct because other men never quite figure out that the best way to keep a woman is to be a bit of a beast themselves.  And to walk that fine line between being a good guy and a bad guy is a very fine line.  And the only way to make everything work out properly.  Which many never figure out in their lifetimes.

Rich Hoffman

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

King Solomon’s Great Mistake: The Keyhole tombs of Japan and lessons learned in fighting demons

Every time I go to Japan, it becomes more and more evident to me that the Kofan tombs, the many thousands of keyhole tombs in Japan, are the direct result of interactions with cultures of the Near East around 100 AD to 300 AD, which happened to be the time that the book The Testament of Solomon was written and was one of the books considered to be put into the Bible under the guidance of the Romans after the Greeks had preserved the stories over the previous 1000 years. Because Japan is an exciting culture that pays excellent reverence to its past, they have kept it better than in the West, so a window into periods of history becomes very obvious. Even though there is little to no archaeology occurring to explore the contents of these giant mounds built in the form of a keyhole, their dating points to a global culture that had a particular obsession with demons and how that spirit world rules over the minds of humanity, something that is just as concerning today as it would have been in times past. Talking to the modern Japanese, the considered wisdom from their culture points directly to their management of the spirit world through Shinto Buddhism, where they seek to utilize a relationship with the Kami, spirit creatures who roam about and work permanently in the background. In the Near East, in the times of the Bible or the Quran, we would call them Jinn, or “Genies.” In the West, we’d call them demons. And if you avoid assuming that everything over time was regional, the best window into that particular period and why they believe what they do can be reported from King Solomon himself in his book that never entirely made it into the official Bible, The Testament of Solomon.

In that book, Solomon, the great king of Yahweh, forms a relationship with a unique ring that God gave him to manage a pantheon of demons, and part of the signet was a keyhole symbol, according to legend. Solomon could use the ring to lock up the spirits and put them to work in building the great temple. However, by the end of the book, Solomon, in his never-ending quest to indulge in his sexual conquest of many thousands of women, finds one that refuses to sleep with him unless he grinds together five grasshoppers and dedicates their destruction to her god Moloch. So, Solomon does this, which makes God very angry, and essentially ends the line of kings created by the line of Abraham as the experiment to find a righteous people blew up in Yahweh’s face. At that point, the Hebrew people are doomed, the sons of Solomon are punished for their father’s transgressions, and Nebuchadnezzar soon follows to destroy the people of Israel and cast them into captivity once again. The mistake most commonly made by everyone is assuming that this Testament of Solomon is a regional story, not a global one. But I have a few maps that show the reach of King Solomon’s empire at the height of it, and it doesn’t take much creative thought to see that trade to make that empire so vast was extending into the New World, specifically the Amazon River Valley, and it spread to the East as far as it could go, Japan.

When you travel around modern-day Osaka, these keyhole tombs don’t look like much but a clump of trees in very packed urban settings. They are everywhere; some are much larger than others. But they remind me a lot of the various Indian mounds from North America, the same ones I have been saying contain the bones of a giant species of people, which is also not seeing much archaeology being done to investigate appropriately. Such a reach for the empire of Solomon is not unrealistic, traveling thousands of miles from Japan to the Middle East over a thousand years. Ironically, modern Japan’s relationship with demons of the spirit world is best captured by the work of the Near East writers, whether Arab, Greek, or Roman, or caretakers of the Indus Valley. The point is that people talk, and over the years, these stories took on a life of their own, but their point of origin was the empire of Solomon before being wiped away by a rival faction in Babylon. Solomon couldn’t have hoped to obtain such wealth without creating many enemies, and he had God’s protection with that ring as long as he was loyal to God, which allowed him to defeat his enemies and conquer many global territories. That is until he went too far by sleeping with women who worshipped all those previous gods, like Moloch and Baal, which still work in the background to this very day around the efforts of globalism. These interesting problems are best studied in cultures like Japan but still show signs of their practice. Because Japan has been protecting itself culturally from the effects of globalism, by fully embracing tradition the way they do, we can get a view into our past in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. If the mistake of assuming that Japan was always a regional culture can be avoided, more evidence of the truth can be utilized.

The giveaway to this global culture is in the site down the road from Osaka at Ishi-no-Hoden, one of the great megalithic sites in Japan and one of their current top three mystery sites. The dating for this gigantic rock that was in the process of being cut from the mountain is all over the place, with some of them dating back to 14,000 years, which would have put it in the Ice Age. During the Ice Age, these archaeological sites around Japan would have been the high ground as the entire Osaka Bay would have been drained of water, and a new oceanfront would have extended to the east, where many ancient temples are beginning to be discovered, now submerged. This is the same global culture working the stone at Easter Island, all over the Americas, and, of course, in the British Isles. Why an ancient people would go to such trouble isn’t the point, but what was is that there was a desire to work with such significant stone monuments, the same as was seen in the Near East at times before and after King Solomon for similar motivations. So, to assume that these are cultures in isolation is to do them a disservice. Therefore, to learn from history, we can look to the windows we do have, such as in the Testament of Solomon and the Kofan tombs all over Japan, and arrive at some very accurate understandings of how the people of the past dealt with malicious spirits in the politics of quantum physics. Whether we call them demons, jinn, or Kami, the modern Japanese people have been successful in managing those relationships, whereas people in the West have been seduced much as Solomon was, with the grasshoppers into throwing away everything, to sleep with another woman, especially when he had thousands of others he could have picked from. The lessons transcend time and are most apparent when visiting modern Japan, which has not used contemporary politics as a great eraser. We can still see some of the evidence left behind.

I think this map is much bigger

Rich Hoffman