I keep hearing the same two stories about artificial intelligence, and both of them are wrong. The first story says AI will take your job, run your company, replace your CEO, and close the gap left by people who were never qualified to sit in the chair. The second story says AI is a monster and you should protest data centers, paper, cash, and every tool that looks like the future. I have used the tools. I have run departments. I have been the job maker and the job getter. I have dealt with more human resources departments this year than in the rest of my life combined. My assessment is simple. AI is an employee that does not sleep. It is useful. It is not thinking. It won’t save a company that hired the wrong people. And it is not going to take over the market economy.
I said versions of this years ago. I wrote it into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business when I argued that trained intuition, the kind people smear as “shooting from the hip,” still beats a mechanical process most of the time. [1] I was curious whether I was being Paul Bunyan with an axe while the chainsaw era rolled in. I have checked that thought against reality. I was not being Paul Bunyan. I was early.
WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY MEAN WHEN THEY SAY THEY ARE AFRAID OF AI
A lot of the fear is not about software. It is about people. I have heard it all year. You are an old white guy with privilege, so nobody has to take you seriously. That is not an economic analysis. That is a social permission slip. A generation that came of age working from living rooms, insulated from deadlines, conflict, and performance pressure, was taught that experienced men over fifty were the threat. Angry. Scary. Too much résumé. Too many relationships. Too much industrial memory.
I did not even keep a LinkedIn account for a long time. I have one now because people look me up. The feedback is almost comic. Oh my gosh, you have a giant, scary résumé. You know a lot of people. You are scary. The consensus I keep running into among people twenty-five to fifty is that they want insulation from old white guys, and they want AI and HR processes to provide it.
That is arrogance dressed up as progress. It assumes the world started when they arrived. It assumes the CEOs who fly to Davos and recycle the same mantras on LinkedIn have discovered a substitute for judgment. They have not.
AN EMPLOYEE THAT DOES NOT SLEEP IS STILL AN EMPLOYEE
I like AI. I use it. I get up at three in the morning, and I can talk to it. A human expert may not be available at four. As a research assistant, an editor, a bundler of notes into a first-pass PowerPoint, it is excellent. That is the honest use.
Ask me if I use it to write the source material. No. I write. Then I use it to filter, clean, and catch sentences that sound like a machine trying to imitate a person. It still does not understand human communication the way a person does; it cannot write like me. It rearranges. It polishes. It does not originate the thing that has to be true in the real world.
I have given it more than a fair shake. I have tried versions of it on air and off. It is a resource. It is not a mind. The companies that bought the line that AI would author strategy, close the leadership gap, and replace people who have actually built things are now bumper-carring into the wall. The toy came out of the box broken and not broken as a tool and broken as a religion.
HUMAN RESOURCES DID NOT GET DUMBER BY ACCIDENT
I have run HR departments. I know what those departments are supposed to do on the job-maker side and how they feel on the job-getter side. What I have watched this year is a shift. A lot of people in those offices are just doing a job. They are not asking who wrote the rules. They inherited a form memo from a CEO who inherited a political fashion straight out of China and Davos. The fashion said identity boxes plus software would outperform experience.
That is why so many program-management groups now want to teach Microsoft Copilot as if a bundle of prompts can run a business. Copilot is brilliant as an aid. It is not a substitute for a person who has missed a shipment, faced a union problem, held a customer’s rage, signed a payroll when the cash was tight, and still hit the date. Conflict-averse HR, deadline-optional culture, and “AI will cover it” is a combination that looks modern and performs like a hobby.
Age discrimination is not a vibe I invented. Federal law has prohibited it against workers 40 and older since 1967, and the EEOC still takes thousands of charges a year, but it’s still a problem that slips through legal loopholes. [2][3] The cultural version is cruder than the legal version. It says experience itself is suspect if it comes in the wrong demographic wrapper. Then it pretends a model trained on yesterday’s text can replace the person who lived the work.
THE DEI-PLUS-AI BET WAS A COVER STORY
Here is the game I see. Corporations adopted policies that pushed skilled, experienced leadership aside. They checked the boxes. They told Wall Street a story. Wall Street, which is very good at polishing a story and selling it to investors who brag about the penthouse, treated it as value. The quiet assumption was that artificial intelligence would run the company anyway, so the nameplate on the office did not have to belong to the best operator. You could hang a CEO tag on almost anyone. The software would drive the results.
That is a communist-adjacent fantasy wearing a tech hoodie. Anybody can do it; the model will think, output will hold, and the country will not notice the drop. I have watched the opposite happen. Companies hired people who fit a political costume and lacked the scar tissue. The work did not get done. The dates slipped. The quality sagged. AI did not close the gap because AI cannot supply intuition, accountability, or the courage to tell a room the truth.
There is a live argument in the research about whether DEI programs help or hurt firm performance. Consulting shops have sold the “diversity outperforms” slide for years. [4] Other work, including recent official economic analysis, has argued that identity-based promotion into management after 2016 tracks with lower productivity and high aggregate costs. [5] Other papers say markets did not punish firms that kept DEI programs after the 2025 policy shift. [6] I am not asking you to treat any one paper as scripture. I am telling you what I have seen in the rooms where the product has to ship. When you select against experience and then pray a chatbot will think for the inexperienced, you do not get a renaissance. You get a mess you can hide only as long as cheap money and a pumped Wall Street aligned with the Federal Reserve keep the lights pretty.
THE 2026 ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT put a number on one version of the cost: industries that leaned hard into those practices were associated with lower productivity, with an estimated hit on the order of tens of billions of dollars a year by 2023. [5] You can fight about methods. You cannot fight the operating reality I keep walking into. The people who still know how to run plants, programs, and payrolls are being called back because the substitute failed.
CASHLESS, PAPERLESS, AND THE DREAM OF A HANDLE ON MONEY
The same fashion that sold AI-as-CEO sold cashless and paperless as moral improvement. Save the trees and they were all wrong. Go online. Let the system monitor everything. If money isn’t tied to anything hard, it becomes easier to change the unit of account, funnel value through banks and markets, and pay huge salaries that don’t have to answer to real output. I write things on my hand for a reason. Systems fail. Internet fails. Even a satellite link is not reliable beyond fault. When the process is slow because nobody will put a number on paper and look a vendor in the eye, you do not have innovation. You have latency with a sustainability sticker on it.
Central bank digital currency talk is the polished end of that dream. Supporters sell inclusion and efficiency. Critics, including people who are not talking from a barstool, warn about privacy, programmable control, bank-run risk, and a tool that lets the issuer see or freeze the transaction. [7][8][9] The United Kingdom’s House of Lords called retail CBDC a solution in search of a problem. [7] I do not need a white paper to know why cash still matters. Cash is rude to central planners. Paper is rude to people who want every thought inside a dashboard. It was a communist push sent straight from China to destroy the West and its economy.
Do I think every CEO who said “paperless” was running a global conspiracy? No. Most of them were repeating a slogan. The slogan still has a direction. If you can get firms off cash, off paper, off experienced dissenters, and onto a monitored stack “managed by AI,” you do not need to win the argument about value. You change the scoreboard to make it look good.
WALL STREET, THE TAIL OF THE DOG, AND THE STINK ON THE FIELD
I am tired of financial television chasing the tail of the dog. I am telling you where the nose is pointed. As long as the Federal Reserve can put money into the system and Wall Street can mark the story to a market that is not a gold standard, companies can hide bad operating bets. They can hire the wrong people, buy the wrong software narrative, and still show a chart. That does not last once real demand, real competition, and real delivery show up.
I have seen the smaller version of this inside companies. A finance person who thinks everyone is doing it, treats the accounts like a personal weather system, buys the boat and the early retirement, and assumes that by the time anyone counts, the story will have moved on. I have seen the harm that leaves behind. I am not going to dress that up as a composite Hollywood villain. I am telling you the pattern. Corporatism hides a lot of ordinary theft and ordinary incompetence behind process. AI will not save those people from arithmetic. Justice, eventually, is just arithmetic with a badge.
Trump’s first term already showed how official narratives about prices, energy, and markets can run one way while operators on the ground run another. I am not asking you to treat every spike as a morality play. I am asking you to notice when CEOs change how they value human beings because a political weather system told them experience was optional. When the weather changes, they want the experienced person back. They want the so-called angry white guy over fifty. They will pay. They should. The next stretch of this economy won’t be won by people who have only managed a Slack channel and a vendor scorecard.
WHY THE ANTI-AI, ANTI-DATA-CENTER PANIC IS USEFUL TO AMERICA’S RIVALS
Here is the part a lot of people miss because they only know how to protest. There is a strategy, whether fully coordinated or merely convenient, that wants American firms less competitive. Chase nonproductive internal politics. Constrain labor. Then tell the public that the remaining productive machinery, the data centers, the industrial base, the people who still know how to build, is the enemy.
AI can supplement a labor market that politics has made stupid. That is exactly why a rival would love the United States to hate the tool and keep the policy. If China can cap American output while American companies argue about pronouns, paper, and whether a fifty-five-year-old program manager is too frightening to hire, Beijing does not need to beat us in a fair race. It needs us to trip.
In 2026, OpenAI, Republican committee chairs, and threat-intelligence shops reported China-origin influence activity testing anti-data-center and anti-AI-infrastructure narratives in American feeds. [10][11][12] Serious reporters also pointed out that Americans have homegrown reasons to dislike a warehouse that eats power and water on the edge of town, and that foreign amplifiers often ride a wave they did not create. [13] Both things can be true. Local land-use fights are real. So is the fact that a strategic competitor has no incentive to cheer an American buildout.
I am not telling you to love every server farm or every utility bill. I am telling you not to take your marching orders from a laser pointer. If you have ever used a laser with a cat, you know the trick. The light is not the mouse. A lot of the anti-AI content is the light.
BLADE RUNNER IS A MOVIE
People talk as if we are one product launch from a replicant you cannot tell from a neighbor. That is science fiction. Current systems predict the next token from past data. They are strong on familiar patterns and weak on novel, counter-to-data judgment. Researchers keep finding the same limit: impressive on the benchmark you trained toward, brittle when the problem is actually new. [14][15][16][17] Clinical and decision studies show overconfidence and shallow reasoning where a human still has to live with the miss. [18]
Could robotics pick up a can, sort a bin, run a basic route? Yes, and that will get better. Could a model sit in a budget fight, read a liar across a table, redesign a line at 2 a.m. when the fixture is wrong and the customer is flying in at dawn? Not in this decade in any way that replaces the person. Maybe the mid-2030s produce something scarier on television. I do not see human-level intuition on a corporate org chart by 2027. The people who bet the firm would already be here were suckers. COVID revealed a lot of sucker games. This is another one.
THE MARKET IS ALREADY VOTING FOR EXPERIENCE
I am watching the reversal in real time. After the first wave of large firms and Davos talkers, the rest of the economy still has to find people who will work harder than the median, who still value cash, who will write the note, who will own the date. The companies that got off the hook early and went back to old school- paper when it helps, cash when it matters, experienced people when the problem is ugly- are going to eat the ones that cannot.
I run exercises that force me to think like a younger person. I get in the dirt and check the idea against the part. What I have learned is that I was more correct than I expected, and that a lot of CEOs who bought the AI-will-save-our-staffing-politics story are going to choke on it. Trump-era pressure and a tighter real economy make it harder to hide a nonperforming org chart behind a diversity slide and a Copilot license.
SpaceX and serious industrial operators didn’t get there by pretending a chatbot could substitute for a propulsion engineer who’s already failed twice and knows what failure smells like. In the second half of this decade, no matter the logo on the building, it’s a race for qualified people. Not vibes. Not boxes. People.
HOW I ACTUALLY USE THE TOOL, AND HOW YOU SHOULD
I use AI like a good editor and a tireless librarian. I do not outsource the claim. I do not let it invent a number I have not seen. I do not let it talk to a customer in my voice until I have put my name on the sentence. If your company is using it to hide the fact that nobody in the room has done the job, you are not modern. You are late and lying to yourself.
If you are a CEO who spent three years telling the board that software would replace judgment, you already know the next slide. You need operators. You will pay for them. Say it out loud before the market says it for you.
WHAT I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER
Do not fear AI. Fear the story that says you can fire experience, flatten money into a controllable token, put every process inside a monitor, and trust a model to think. That story is how a country makes itself smaller while it talks about innovation.
AI will help people work better. It will not replace human intuition. It will not run the next serious company. It will not protect a generation from having to confront other human beings. It will not get a DEI hire through a merit-based storm. It will not rescue the consultant class from the promises they sold.
Watch the dog’s nose, not the tail. The stink on the field is failed output. That is where the animal is going. I told you first. You will not hear it clean on the usual financial shows, because they are paid to narrate the tail.
Have a good day. Remember who told you. I will see you in the argument that actually matters: whether this country still believes a human being can outthink a woke agenda
FOOTNOTES
[1] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021). The book treats “shooting from the hip” as trained speed after fundamentals, not sloppiness, and sets that American gunfighter ethic against Eastern strategy texts.
[2] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Age Discrimination,” and “Fact Sheet: Age Discrimination.” The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 protects applicants and employees forty and older in hiring, firing, pay, promotion, and other terms of employment.
[3] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA; AARP reporting on EEOC charge volume, including 16,223 age-discrimination charges in 2024.
[4] McKinsey & Company, “Diversity Matters Even More” (2023) and earlier Diversity Matters series. These reports are the standard corporate citation for a diversity-outperformance claim and should be read as correlational advocacy research, not a controlled experiment.
[5] Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President, 2026, chapter on the economic consequences of DEI, discussing post-2016 associations between DEI-related management practices and productivity, including an estimated GDP cost on the order of $94 billion in 2023 in one specification.
[6] Jacob Grumbach and coauthors, “Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI” (2026 working paper / Democracy Policy Lab), finding no abnormal-return penalty for S&P 500 firms that kept DEI programs after Executive Order 14173 (January 2025). CBS News summary, August 18, 2026.
[7] House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, report on retail central bank digital currency (2023), described in later reviews as calling a retail CBDC a “solution in search of a problem.”
[8] Norbert Michel, “Central Bank Digital Currency: The Risks and the Myths,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 145 (January 10, 2023).
[9] Kevin Dowd, work collected in later Cambridge writing on CBDCs, arguing negligible public demand where retail CBDCs have been tried and warning about programmable control. See also SUERF review of retail CBDC costs and bank-run arguments (2026).
[10] OpenAI threat report, June 2026, describing China-origin clusters using ChatGPT to generate social content testing narratives against U.S. AI infrastructure and data centers—coverage: Politico, June 10, 2026.
[11] House Energy and Commerce Committee Republican letter (June 2026) asking the administration to investigate foreign influence around data-center opposition. E&E News / Politico, June 4, 2026.
[12] New York Times, “China, Russia and Others Seek to Inflame Debate Over A.I. Data Centers,” July 9, 2026, citing Alethea analysis of state-media amplification.
[13] Wired, “China Didn’t Make Americans Hate Data Centers,” June 12, 2026, and follow-up September 6, 2026, arguing domestic land-use, power, and political grievances are the base layer and that influence operations often exploit existing anger.
[14] “Does AI Prediction Scale to Decision Making?” Communications of the ACM, 2025, on the limit of past-data prediction for counter-to-data human decisions.
[15] MIT CSAIL / MIT News, “Reasoning skills of large language models are often overestimated” (July 11, 2024), on failure under counterfactual and unfamiliar variants.
[16] “Take caution in using LLMs as human surrogates,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025.
[17] Strategy Science, “Mean Articulation Machines” (2025), on remaining human advantages in abduction and strategy under true uncertainty.
[18] “Limitations of large language models in clinical problem-solving arising from inflexible reasoning,” Scientific Reports, 2025.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Self-published, 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript in revision; forthcoming.
Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal. North River Press, various editions.
Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. Free Press, 1990.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Multiple translations.
Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Age Discrimination resources and The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the ADEA.
AARP. Age-discrimination complaint tracking and related labor-force reports.
Council of Economic Advisers. Economic Report of the President. 2026. Chapter on DEI and productivity.
McKinsey & Company. Diversity Matters series, including “Diversity Matters Even More” (2023).
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow. Work on the allocation of talent and growth, often cited in the opposing DEI-economic-cost debate. See Science Forum, “On the economic costs of ending DEI,” May 15, 2025.
Grumbach, Jacob, et al. “Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI.” 2026.
Larcker, David F., Charles McClure, Shawn Shi, and Edward M. Watts. “The Limited Corporate Response to DEI Controversies.” SSRN, 2026.
Michel, Norbert. “Central Bank Digital Currency: The Risks and the Myths.” Cato Institute, 2023.
Dowd, Kevin. Critiques of retail CBDC adoption and demand. Cambridge / related essays, mid-2020s.
Bank for International Settlements. Surveys and risk papers on CBDC design, security, and financial-stability implications.
House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. Retail CBDC inquiry, 2023.
Allison and coauthors. “Central Bank Digital Currencies, Financial Inclusion, and Privacy: A Normative Perspective.” Southern Economic Journal, 2026.
OpenAI. Influence-operations reporting on AI-infrastructure narratives, June 2026.
Alethea. Threat-intelligence analysis of foreign state-media coverage of U.S. data centers, 2026.
Bitcoin Policy Institute. Reports on foreign influence ecosystems around AI infrastructure (treat as advocacy research; read against Wired and NYT).
Politico; E&E News; New York Times; Wired. 2026 coverage of the data-center politics and influence debate.
Acemoglu, Daron, and Simon Johnson. Power and Progress. PublicAffairs, 2023. For a broad political-economy critique of who captures tech rents.
Kissinger, Henry, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie. Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit. 2024.
Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique. Harvard Business Review Press.
Hougaard, Rasmus, and Jacqueline Carter. More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead. Harvard Business Review Press, 2025.
Hoffman, Reid, and Greg Beato. Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. 2025. Useful as the optimistic techno-humanist counter-case.
Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. 2026.
Communications of the ACM; PNAS; Scientific Reports; Strategy Science; MIT CSAIL papers cited in the footnotes, 2024–2025, on reasoning limits of large language models.
World Economic Forum. Annual meeting materials from Davos. Read as primary source for the managerial dialect, not as gospel.
Microsoft. Copilot for Microsoft 365 product documentation. Useful for separating the actual tool from the sales mysticism.
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.
A state can be defeated without a single soldier crossing a border and without a single missile leaving a rail. That sentence used to sound like science fiction. It is now closer to a working description of how power is actually contested. The old picture of war—troops, tanks, flags, and a declared beginning—still exists. It is no longer the whole picture. The more important contest often happens in finance, law, media, software, supply chains, classrooms, and the human-resources office that decides which attitudes are allowed at work.
I have talked about this for years, including when War Room and other outlets treated the subject as strategy rather than slogan. I still own a promotional shirt from the Atlas Shrugged film cycle that advertised in October 2012. The story in those pictures was about producers versus the people who live by controlling producers. This essay’s argument is related, but colder. It is not only about bad policy. It is about a style of conflict designed to make a free country less competitive without looking like an invasion.
What follows is part brief, part review, and part field note. The brief is the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army officers. The review is how that book’s logic shows up in gray-zone operations, cyber incidents, sanctions fights, and what NATO now calls cognitive warfare. The field note is personal. After decades in one workplace, I’ve talked to different people, in different rooms, under different rules. The rules often arrive as kindness, inclusion, and “compliance.” The effect is something else: a society trained to police its own energy.
What Clausewitz Said, and What the Colonels Rewrote
Carl von Clausewitz gave the West its most famous definition: war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.[1] That definition assumes you can see the force. It assumes a distinction between peace and war, soldier and civilian, battlefield and marketplace. Those distinctions were never perfect. In 1999, two PLA Air Force senior colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published Chao Xian Zhan—warfare beyond limits—arguing that the distinctions were collapsing on purpose.[2][3]
They were writing after the Gulf War, which had advertised American conventional superiority in brutal high definition. If you cannot beat a superpower on its preferred field, you do not accept the field. You change the game. You use economic pressure, legal process, media, networks, finance, culture, and technology as weapons in combination. You aim at political results, not at a parade of wrecked tanks. In a June 1999 interview, Qiao put the doctrine in one line: the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, and nothing is forbidden.[4]
Using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.
That is still Clausewitz’s object—compulsion of will—with the means blown wide open. The authors were not shy about the catalog. They discussed psychological warfare, media warfare, cultural warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, network warfare, legal warfare, smuggling, resources, and more.[5] They also insisted on combination. One tool is a dispute. A dozen tools timed together are a campaign. If you hit a currency, seed social discord, and probe a power grid in the same season, the target spends its energy arguing about which event “counts” as war. Meanwhile, the damage accumulates.
The most important sentence in the book is not the slogan about rules. It is the claim that the battlefield is everywhere. Ground, sea, air, and space remain battlefields. So do politics, economics, culture, and the psyche.[6] Once you accept that sentence, a lot of modern life stops looking like “politics as usual” and starts looking like low-intensity conflict that never has to declare itself.
Combination Warfare and the Vanishing Front Line
Traditional strategy likes a map with a front. Unrestricted warfare looks like a web. The authors talk about “addition”—stacking methods until the opponent cannot find the line of contact. Later PLA political work formalized a related toolkit as the “Three Warfares”: public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare, written into regulations in 2003.[7] Those three are not a substitute for the 1999 book. They are one way the same instinct was institutionalized: shape what people believe, shake what they are willing to endure, and use law as a weapon rather than a fence.
This is why “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone” became fashionable terms in the West. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine before and after 2014 mixed information operations, energy leverage, proxies, and cyber operations. On December 23, 2015, attackers attributed to the Sandworm group shut off power to roughly 230,000 customers in Ukraine. It was the first widely acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.[8] No tank had to roll for the lights to go out. Plausible deniability did part of the work. If activists, criminals, or “unknown actors” can be blamed, a conventional military reply becomes politically and legally expensive.
International law was built for visible armies. The Geneva tradition assumes you can tell a combatant from a civilian. A server room, a social platform, a ratings agency, or a human-resources policy shop does not wear a uniform. The Tallinn Manuals—first in 2013, then 2.0 in 2017—tried to apply existing law to cyber operations. Most of what unrestricted warfare describes happens below the threshold of an “armed attack.” States like the ambiguity. Clear rules would bind them too.[9]
Economic tools sit in the same gap. Sanctions can wreck a financial system and still fail the legal test of armed attack.[10] That is a feature if your doctrine says the point is political collapse or capitulation, not a formal declaration. The violence, when it comes, may be late. The conference room and the data center get there first.
Cognitive Warfare: The Target Is the Decision Itself
NATO and allied research communities now talk openly about cognitive warfare: operations aimed not only at what people know, but at how groups perceive, trust, and decide.[11] Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of volume. You do not need a master propagandist in every town. You need models that can generate tailored narratives, test what spreads, and keep the target public arguing with itself.
This is the frightening part of the 1999 thesis updated for 2026. The original colonels talked about media and psychology. They could not fully describe algorithmic amplification, deepfakes, or automated social engineering. The logic did not need those tools to be valid. The tools made the logic cheaper. If you can degrade collective cognition—attention, memory, trust, and the willingness to pay a cost—you do not have to occupy the capital. You occupy the argument.
Hardware races in the same direction. Autonomy reduces the political cost of using force because fewer of “your” people come home in boxes. That drops the barrier to kinetic conflict even as non-kinetic conflict is already permanent. The two trends reinforce each other. A society that is internally confused is easier to pressure. A society that is internally confident is harder to push around with either drones or narratives.
Cultural Warfare Does Not Arrive Waving a Foreign Flag
Here is where the argument gets personal, and where a serious reader should keep two ideas in the same hand.
First idea: Unrestricted Warfare names cultural warfare as a method. Weaken an adversary from the inside. Make the opponent less cohesive, less fertile, less industrious, less willing to defend its own standards. You do not need every Western fashion to be a Beijing plot for that method to be real. You only need the method to exist, and you need American institutions to be available as terrain.[12]
Second idea: over the last decade, much of American corporate culture has trained people to treat productivity, punctuality, sex differences, and plain speech as moral problems. The memos did not say “this is how you lose a contest with a mercantilist authoritarian state.” They said “values,” “belonging,” and “compliance.” The question worth asking is not whether every diversity officer reports to the PLA. The question is whether a rival who studies cultural warfare would look at the results and smile.
I think the rival would smile. I did not come to that as a theory first. I came to it after watching people obey rules they could not defend. During COVID, I watched institutions in Ohio treat CDC language as liturgy. Court challenges were slow. Social punishment was fast. I put a phone on speaker and called people who were supposed to know the law. That is how I got through it. Plenty of workplaces did not have anyone willing to do that. They complied because compliance had become the local religion. An enemy watching from outside would have learned something useful: large parts of the American professional class will enforce a rule before they will examine it.
That is the footprint. Not tanks on the lawn. A workforce taught that the highest civic virtue is not causing trouble.
The HR office as terrain
Human resources is where abstract ideology becomes a condition of employment. I have had HR people report to me. When I asked where an idea came from, the face-to-face answer was often some version of “we will do better.” The inbox told a different story. Newsletters and vendor templates arrived with the new values. The people sending them were frequently the age of my children, not villains in a movie. They were following a script that had already been professionalized.
Onboarding at many firms now spends a remarkable share of time on identity rules and sensitivity machinery. Time spent teaching a new hire to be useful—show up, learn the work, look your coworkers in the eye, carry weight—gets crowded out by time spent teaching the new hire which sentences are dangerous. If you are an older man who talks like work is a duty, you can be framed as a climate problem. If you ride a bicycle twenty miles to a job because the car is dead, that used to be called character. In some offices it now reads as “intensity,” which is a polite word for unwanted masculinity.
I am not romantic about every man over fifty. Some of them are tired and rude. I am romantic about the old expectation: if you are sick enough to stay home, stay home; if you are not, go. If it snows, go to work anyway; your co-workers are counting on you. Make yourself useful. That ethic built payrolls. The substitute ethic—work from the living room, treat output as optional, treat feelings as infrastructure—does not build payrolls. It manages them downward.
Masculinity, entertainment, and the cheapening of standards
Culture is not a side show in this doctrine. It is named terrain. When a commercial sport that sells collision and spectacle starts treating the halftime eye-candy as a seminar in preferences, that is not the end of the republic. It is a tell. Men who paid for front-row seats to watch a game and see women dance are not required to pretend they paid for a lecture. If saying so sends you to an HR office, the office is no longer just administering benefits. It is administering taste.
The same pattern showed up in film. The hard, unsmooth male lead became a problem to be managed. You can call that progress. You can also notice that a civilization in a long contest with a high-discipline mercantilist rival might not want to train its young men to be ashamed of drive. Beards and tattoos on men in their thirties are not a military doctrine. They are sometimes a leftover male signal in a workplace that punished the older signals. The strategic point is simpler: if you flatten the people who like to compete, you flatten the economy that depends on them.
Sexual identity fights belong in the same file. A free country can leave adults alone. A strategic culture that turns every workplace into a referendum on private life is doing something else. It burns attention. It splits coalitions. It makes ordinary competence look like aggression. Unrestricted warfare does not need to invent the fight. It only needs the fight to continue.
COVID as a rehearsal
I keep returning to COVID because it was the week the mask slipped on the machinery. Policy moved faster than evidence in too many rooms. Dissent was treated as dirtiness. The people who said “just follow the rules” were often the same people who could not name who wrote the rules. “We are a culture of compliance” is not a boast in a republic. It is a vulnerability report.
A rival does not have to love the virus to love the data. How quickly did professionals accept workplace punishments for speech? How quickly did schools take over children’s moral education while parents were isolated? How quickly did “expert” language replace judgment? Those are cultural measurements. They tell you how much friction an influence campaign would meet.
Corporations, LinkedIn, and the Myth of Neutral Policy
American business is not the Chinese Communist Party. Conflating the two is sloppy. What is not sloppy is noticing that global firms optimize for access, risk reduction, and reputational peace. If the cheapest way to keep markets, banks, campuses, and NGOs quiet is to import a values language that flattens conflict inside the firm, many firms will import it. They will call it best practice. Vendors will sell the templates. LinkedIn will reward the slogans. Smaller companies will copy larger ones because lenders, insurers, and talent pipelines punish deviation.
That is how you get a one-way ratchet without a conspiracy chalkboard. Beijing does not have to draft the memo if the memo already weakens the only large open society that still out-innovates it. United Front work, elite capture, research partnerships, and capital access are the documented channels. Cultural mimicry is the force multiplier—retired Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding and others have argued that if you watch Chinese behavior since 1999 through the lens of the book, the picture snaps into focus.[13] You do not have to accept every page of that popularization to accept the narrower point: connectivity is a weapon as well as a market.
Cashless systems, monitored transactions, and centralized payment rails belong to the same family of tools. They can be convenient. They can also be turned. A society that cannot complete a private exchange without a third-party ledger is a society that can be throttled. Again: not every debit card is an invasion. The doctrine says look at the combination, not the single instrument.
The Defense Paradox: How You Lose by Winning the Wrong Way
Qiao and Wang understood something Western liberals are late to admit. A society that lives by open rules can be made to trip over those rules. Lawfare ties up the opponent in his own courts. Media warfare uses the opponent’s platforms. Cultural warfare uses the opponent’s guilt. If the target responds by building a surveillance state to stop the influence, the target has paid in the coin the influence campaign wanted: less freedom. If the target refuses to notice the campaign, the target stays open and stays cut.
That is the lose-lose proposition. Defend badly, and you become the thing you were defending against. Decline to defend, and you are disarmed in the only war that is already underway. Critics of the 1999 doctrine are right that it treats human rights and international law as just another front. That is not a misunderstanding of the text. That is the text.
The Western answer cannot be “no rules, nothing forbidden.” That is how you cease to be the West. The answer is narrower and harder: name the methods, refuse the scripts that make you weaker, keep due process, and rebuild the habits that make a high-trust, high-output society possible. Resilience matters more than the fantasy of blocking every lie. Recovery speed and social trust are the actual defenses. A country that still believes its own people can work, argue, worship, raise children, and laugh at bad art is a hard country to hollow out.
What This Means on the Ground
If the battlefield is the paycheck, then the first duty is not a new missile. It is a refusal to treat the workplace as a reeducation camp. Hire for output. Measure output. Stop confusing moral fashion with risk management. Parents who want children should not have to apologize to a values slide deck. Men and women are not a paperwork error. Speech about all of that should not be a firing offense.
Political leadership matters because only the state can answer state-backed capital, theft of intellectual property, and platform manipulation at scale. Business leadership matters because most Americans meet the new rules at work, not at a Senate hearing. Voters who want people who have signed payrolls are not being crude. They are asking for officials who recognize a negotiation that smiles in public and competes in private.
I have watched firms that still recruit hungry people—SpaceX is the example everyone uses because it is obvious—outperform firms that recruit for the seminar. That gap will widen as the space economy and other fast industries punish delay. A culture that cannot tell a worker to come in when it snows will not beat a culture that can. This is not poetry. It is arithmetic.
Education is the long front. If the schoolhouse becomes the delivery system for political fashion, the family loses the first chance to form character. You do not need foreign infantry in the hallway after that. You need time. Time is what unrestricted warfare buys when it stays below the threshold of open war.
Conclusion: The Winner Integrates the Board
The authors of Unrestricted Warfare said the winner would be the side that can play on a board that keeps expanding, while the loser keeps staring at the old squares. Missiles still matter. So do grids, ports, chips, and ships. So do birth rates, work rates, attention spans, and whether a man can say he prefers female cheerleaders without being marched into a conference room. The last item sounds small until you notice the method: make the confident people tired, then call the tiredness progress.
I was insulated from a lot of this for a long time: same place, same people, same expectations. Coming back into a wider set of rooms felt like being thawed out of ice. The tools were new. The weakness was not new. It was the old American temptation to believe that because we mean well, the contest must be a seminar. It is not a seminar. It is a continuous campaign against cohesion.
Sun Tzu wanted victory without battle.[14] The 1999 colonels wrote a modern manual for that instinct and published it openly. They could afford to. A book is not dangerous to the side that is already inside the institutions of the other side. The dangerous thing is a public that still thinks war only looks like a landing craft.
Understand the doctrine. Keep the distinction between evidence and suspicion. Then look at your own shop, your own school, your own screen, and ask the only operational question that matters: does this rule make us harder to beat, or easier? If the honest answer is easier, it is not “best practice.” You have donated terrain to someone who is not confused about whether this is a contest.
Selected Bibliography
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Book I, Chapter 1.
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare (Chao Xian Zhan). Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999. English selections via FBIS.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Spalding, Robert. War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination. New York: Sentinel, 2022.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
Jamestown Foundation. “The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares.” China Brief, 2016.
NATO Science and Technology Organization. Materials from HFM-361, Mitigating and Responding to Cognitive Warfare (Madrid, November 2023), and related Chief Scientist reporting on cognitive warfare.
MITRE ATT&CK. “2015 Ukraine Electric Power Attack (Campaign C0028).”
Wikipedia and contemporaneous technical reporting on the December 23, 2015 Ukraine power-grid cyberattack attributed to Sandworm.
U.S. Marine Corps University. “To Win without Fighting” and related essays on PRC political warfare and unrestricted warfare.
RSIS Commentary. Nan Li, “Unrestricted Warfare and Chinese Military Strategy,” 2002.
Author’s Note
This essay is written in the first person on purpose. The strategic literature can be cited. The workplace scenes cannot be footnoted like a statute. They are offered as testimony from one American who spent decades in a single shop, then walked into the new rules and recognized the old doctrine. Readers who want only the book should stop at the bibliography. Readers living under the new rules already know why the paycheck is the front line.
Notes
[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter 1: “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”
[2] Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999). English selections circulated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).
[3] The original Chinese title is Chao Xian Zhan (超限战), literally “warfare beyond limits” or “warfare beyond bounds.”
[4] Zhongguo Qingnian Bao interview with Qiao Liang, June 28, 1999; FBIS translation OW2807114599. Qiao: “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”
[5] Qiao and Wang, Unrestricted Warfare. The authors list methods including psychological, media, cultural, financial, trade, network, legal, smuggling, drug, resource, and ecological warfare.
[6] Qiao and Wang write that “spaces in nature including the ground, the seas, the air, and outer space are battlefields, but social spaces such as the military, politics, economics, culture, and the psyche are also battlefields.”
[7] The “Three Warfares”—public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare—were written into PLA Political Work Regulations in 2003 and elaborated in subsequent PLA teaching texts.
[8] On December 23, 2015, attacks attributed to the Russian group Sandworm disrupted electricity for roughly 230,000 customers in western Ukraine. It is widely cited as the first publicly acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.
[9] Michael N. Schmitt, ed., Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Tallinn Manual 2.0 (2017). Legal literature has discussed work toward a third edition through 2025–2026.
[10] U.S. and allied legal analyses generally hold that ordinary economic sanctions, however severe, do not by themselves constitute an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That legal line is precisely why economic and regulatory pressure is attractive in unrestricted-warfare thinking.
[11] NATO Science and Technology Organization materials from the HFM-361 symposium (Madrid, November 2023) and subsequent Chief Scientist reporting treat cognitive warfare as influence operations aimed at human decision-making, accelerated by AI and digital platforms.
[12] This section states the author’s interpretive thesis. It is not a claim that a single CCP memo authored every Western HR policy. It is a claim about effects, incentives, and the kind of battlefield the 1999 doctrine described.
[13] Robert Spalding, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination (Sentinel, 2022), popularizes the 1999 text as a standing playbook rather than a one-off essay.
[14] Sun Tzu, The Art of War: the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Qiao and Wang explicitly place their argument in that lineage.
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.
A Community Night at Miami University’s Innovation Center
On September 21, 2026, we hosted a special community event at Miami University’s Innovation Center on Elm Street in Oxford, Ohio.
We called the evening “Dreams on Elm Street”, a lighthearted nod to the classic 1980s film. But what we’re building at Volynt isn’t the stuff of nightmares. It’s the realization of a dream, one that is taking shape right here in Butler County and has the potential to transform the future of logistics, aviation, and economic development in Ohio.
The turnout exceeded our expectations. The room was filled with Miami University staff, students, local business leaders, elected officials, and community members who wanted to learn more about what Volynt is building and where we’re headed.
We were honored to welcome Senator George Lang, Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix, and Michael Ryan, who is poised to become Butler County’s next commissioner. Their presence reflected the growing enthusiasm for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advanced aerospace development in our region.
Sharing the Vision
I opened the evening by welcoming our guests and providing an overview of the event. From there, our leadership team took the stage.
Our CEO shared Volynt’s long-term vision and mission. Our Chief Technology Officer highlighted the engineering milestones we’ve achieved and the technology behind the Volynt Vyper platform. As Chief Operating Officer, I discussed how Volynt is transforming cutting-edge aviation technology into a scalable and sustainable business. I outlined our operational strategy, manufacturing roadmap, partnerships, and the steps required to move from prototype development to commercial deployment.
The presentations were engaging, the audience was attentive, and the questions that followed demonstrated genuine interest and excitement.
Most importantly, this wasn’t a flashy product launch filled with unrealistic promises. It was an honest conversation about where we are today, what we’ve accomplished, and what the next several years may hold.
From Prototype to Production
Our immediate focus is straightforward.
Over the next six months, our team will complete the full-scale Vyper prototype that was unveiled at the Innovation Center. That aircraft represents years of design work, engineering refinement, and determination.
Once completed, the aircraft will enter an intensive testing phase designed to validate performance, reliability, and operational capabilities.
Looking ahead to 2027, we plan to participate in major industry competitions, build broader recognition within the aerospace community, and begin manufacturing multiple aircraft.
The goals are ambitious, but they are supported by a clear roadmap and a dedicated team committed to execution.
The Drone Revolution Is Already Here
One of the most important messages of the evening was that autonomous aviation is no longer a future concept.
It’s happening today.
Just one day after our event, Dayton-area company Dexa launched a drone delivery service in Kettering. The program delivers food orders from TJ Chumps on East Stroop Road to customers within a several-mile radius across Kettering, Oakwood, and Centerville.
These smaller drones operate as last-mile delivery systems. Flying at approximately 400 feet, they lower food orders safely to customers using a cable-delivery system. Dexa has spent years developing this capability and is helping demonstrate that drone delivery is becoming a practical reality.
Volynt’s mission is different.
While companies like Dexa focus on last-mile delivery, Volynt is developing larger autonomous aircraft designed for middle-mile logistics. Our aircraft are intended to transport meaningful payloads between regional hubs such as Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG), Dayton International Airport, Indianapolis, and other distribution centers.
This approach has the potential to reduce transportation bottlenecks, address driver shortages, and create more efficient supply chains.
Whether it’s delivering a meal across town or transporting freight across a region, autonomous aviation is rapidly reshaping how goods move through our economy.
Why Ohio Is Positioned to Lead
Ohio’s aviation legacy is unmatched.
The birthplace of powered flight now has an opportunity to become a leader in autonomous flight.
Few regions are better positioned than Butler County to participate in that transformation.
Our region offers access to multiple airports, including Miami University’s airport, where initial flight operations can be conducted. At the same time, substantial investment continues at Butler County Regional Airport, where significant infrastructure improvements are being planned.
The resources, workforce, educational institutions, and transportation network already exist. What remains is bringing together the innovators, investors, and community leaders who can turn opportunity into reality.
Creating Careers That Stay Close to Home
One topic that resonates deeply with me is talent retention.
I have spoken with countless parents who have made tremendous sacrifices to provide educational opportunities for their children through Miami University, Butler Tech, and the University of Cincinnati. Too often, those graduates leave Ohio because they believe the best opportunities are elsewhere.
That reality creates a challenge for families and communities alike.
One of our long-term goals at Volynt is to help change that story.
We envision creating thousands of high-quality aerospace, engineering, technology, and manufacturing jobs throughout Southern Ohio. We want talented young people to have the option of building exciting, fulfilling careers without leaving their families, communities, and hometowns behind.
Strong Community Support
One of the most encouraging moments of the evening was seeing the level of support from the community.
Michael Ryan delivered an excellent presentation about economic development in Butler County and how innovative companies such as Volynt can contribute to future growth and prosperity.
The participation from Miami University, local leaders, educators, students, business professionals, and community members reinforced something I’ve believed from the beginning:
Innovation succeeds when communities embrace it.
Dreams on Elm Street was more than a company presentation. It was a milestone. It brought together people from different backgrounds and perspectives to discuss a shared vision for the future of our region.
The energy in the room was unmistakable. The conversations were thoughtful. The questions were insightful. The enthusiasm was genuine.
For me, that confirmed that we’re moving in the right direction.
Looking Ahead
Volynt’s journey is still in its early chapters.
There is much work ahead, many challenges to overcome, and numerous milestones still to achieve. But the momentum is real, and the opportunities are significant.
We will continue sharing updates with the community as we progress from prototype development to testing, certification, manufacturing, and beyond.
This is only the beginning.
Thank you to everyone who attended Dreams on Elm Street and supported our mission. Your encouragement and belief in what we’re building means more than you know.
Together, we’re not just dreaming about the future.
We’re building it.
About the Author
Rich Hoffman is Chief Operating Officer of Volynt, where he leads operational strategy, business development, manufacturing planning, and growth initiatives for the company’s autonomous aerospace programs. A longtime Butler County leader and aerospace executive, he is committed to building high-quality technology careers and advancing innovation throughout Southwest Ohio.
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.
This is free advice. Nobody sent a twenty-five-hundred-dollar-an-hour invoice. I have been talking to people who live close to the pointed end of Republican strategy—the White House orbit, the Hill, the donor class that still thinks a memo is a movement—and I am putting the same thing on paper that I have been saying out loud. I do not know their internals. I know the look of a team that has started managing a loss before the fourth quarter. I have a long track record of calling the weather before the radar does. Take it or leave it.
Two months is a long time in American politics and a short time in a football season. The generic ballot is ugly. The president’s numbers are not what they were on the night the balloons fell. A lot of very serious people have decided the House is already gone and the Senate is a grind. Fine. Serious people have been wrong before.[1] The map is still a map of close races. Close races move on turnout, weather, and whether your own side can stand to look at itself in the mirror. That last item is the one Speaker Johnson keeps failing.[2]
Mike Johnson Is Talking Like a Man Preparing the Concession Speech
Mike Johnson has not done a really good job of projecting the one thing a thin majority cannot live without: the appearance of wanting the ball. He says the right sentences. He told NOTUS he would not even think about minority leader because “we’re going to win.” He told Dallas this is a pivotal moment and that the next fifty-odd days decide the republic.[3] Then the body language arrives. The schedule shrinks. The House books a quick September exit. The speaker warns audiences what Democrats will do if they take the gavel—impeachment is “not even the big concern,” he says; they will go after the family, the donors, the cabinet. That is not a two-minute drill. That is a man describing the visitor’s locker room.[4]
I am not asking Johnson to lie about the polls, which I don’t think are that bad; the election of 2026 will be all about engagement. I am asking him to stop sounding like a chaplain at a wake. The country can smell managed decline. Voters who already lean your way will stay home if they think the people with the gavel have already donated the furniture. Democrats do not need a wave if Republicans supply the shrug.
Johnson is a devout man. That is supposed to be an asset. Lately it reads as apology. He has spent too many years on the hook, line, and sinker of the progressive contamination that treats public Christianity as a zoning violation. Separation of church and state, as the slogan is now used, is not Madison. It is a muzzle. If you want to know how stupid the muzzle is, skip the seminar and walk three blocks in Southwest Washington.
Remember the Stretch Between the Election and January 20
Everybody who was paying attention remembers that little corridor of time after the 2024 election and before the inauguration. People were happy. Trump went to the fights. He brought people around. He made the transition look like a court and a carnival at the same time—which, if you understand American energy, is the correct mixture. He brought Speaker Johnson into that weather. He brought Elon Musk into that weather. The country got to watch alignment instead of autopsy.[5]
That is the template. Not a new platform. Not another reconciliation draft that dies in a five-vote conference. Presence. Trump should pull Johnson into the open air again and keep him there until the speaker’s shoulders come down. Bring the candidates. Put an arm around the people he picked and let the picture do the work the talking points cannot. Ken Paxton is one. There are others. The point is not a photo-op for the already converted. The point is to tell a tight district that the president still thinks the race is live.
Elon Does Not Need to Pray on Camera. He Needs to Be in the Room.
I say Elon Musk should be around this because I have a significant position in SpaceX stock and I feel better about where the thing is headed than I did when I first said I was in for the IPO. I was enthusiastic then. I am more enthusiastic now. That is not a ticker-tape prayer. That is a judgment about build-out, launch cadence, orbital compute, and the simple fact that the country that cedes the high ground will not remain the country that writes the rules.[6]
Elon does not need to hang around Trump and do the praying circuit. Leave the altar to the people who mean it. What he needs to do is refuse the role the press has written for him: court jester, wrecking ball, or exile. The midterms will be run, in part, as a referendum on whether American industry is allowed to remain impolite. SpaceX is impolite. Good. Bring that heat into the same frame as the speaker and the president and let the contrast with the Democratic freeze-and-regulate coalition explain itself.
Fox Already Has Your People. Football Season Has Everybody Else.
Doing another hit on Fox & Friends is not a strategy. Those viewers are already in the boat. They will vote if the weather is decent and the church van shows up. What you do not have, automatically, is the man who works first shift, drinks a beer on Saturday, and thinks politics is a smell he would rather not bring into the house. That man still goes to football games.
It is football season. You may not have a string of UFC cards to tour, but you have stadiums. You have tailgates. You have jumbotrons and mayors who will still pose for a picture if the president of the United States walks the sideline. Arena speeches work because they look like a country that is still alive. Mega rallies work for the same reason. Take Johnson. Take the candidates. Shake hands. Kiss the babies. Let the vice president hang around and do the work vice presidents are for. Do it in October, when the leaves turn and people remember they have neighbors.
The professional class will call this optics. Optics is what you call it when you have forgotten that human beings decide with their eyes first and their position papers later. A president in a stadium on a Saturday afternoon is a statement that the administration is not hiding in the Residence reading tracking memos. A speaker who looks like he wants to be there is a statement that the majority is not a rental.
The McDonald’s Test, or What DC Actually Sounds Like Before 10 a.m.
If you want to know where America is, skip the think-tank breakfast and go to the McDonald’s on the corner just down from the federal cluster in Southwest. Everybody who films in this town knows the neighborhood I mean. You are close to the Air and Space Museum. The American Indian museum is in the same walk. Congressional offices, the old Health and Human Services pile, the Department of Education’s gravity well—the whole faded government face of the city sits in a few blocks. Two blocks south of that McDonald’s is the Museum of the Bible.[7]
My wife and I have a ritual when we are in Washington. We park in a garage there, at a spot next to the elevator shaft at the bottom where the car fits as if the architect had us in mind. Ten feet to the elevator. The elevator dumps into a lobby that looks like a financial office. Two rights and you are in that McDonald’s. It is awkward in the way elevators are awkward, so somebody always talks. I like your hat. Thank you. Where are you headed?
I have stood in those elevators and at those tables and listened. “I work at Education.” “I am heading to one of the Smithsonian buildings.” “Congressional office.” The voice is flat. It is a job voice. Then, in a car of seven people, somebody says they are going to the Museum of the Bible, and the register changes. There is a little pop. You can see it. Not piety as performance. Pleasure. Anticipation. The same city that teaches its workforce to speak in acronyms still produces a human sound when the subject is Scripture.
I could have gone anywhere I wanted for my birthday in April. I told my wife I wanted a full day at the Museum of the Bible. We did the other DC things. I kept one day just for that museum. Sausage muffin, egg, orange juice or a Coke, about nine o’clock. The museum opens around ten. Then six or seven hours inside a building that does not apologize for the book that made the country possible. That joy is not a private hobby. It is a political fact. I sat there and watched people the way I watch shop floors and precincts. The ones walking toward the Bible were the ones who still had a pulse. The ones walking toward another government building looked like they were reporting for a sentence.
If You Cannot Unite Them on a Bill, Unite Them on a Book
I have been carrying a new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and I am extremely pleased with it. I have been going through it like a man who has been waiting for a tool. Edwards understood something the modern party consultant has forgotten: joy is not the opposite of seriousness. Joy is the fuel. “The enjoyment of God,” he wrote, is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied. You do not have to sign the Westminster Confession to feel the political implication. A movement that cannot speak with pleasure about the source of its own moral language will lose to a movement that at least knows how to yell.[8] [9]
Republicans in the professional class are reluctant to do this because they swallowed, whole, the idea that the Constitution requires the public square to be a chapel with the crosses pried off. That is lunacy. The system was built Christian in the only sense that matters for a republic: it assumed a created order, a fallen citizen, a law above the state, and a people who could be trusted with liberty because they feared something higher than a committee.[10]
I love the Bible as a historical narrative. Those are not two different objects. There is an entry point at every degree of scholarship. Some people will come for the archaeology. Some will come for the cadence of the King James that still sits in the American ear whether they attend or not. Some will come because their grandmother did. You do not need a uniformity of dogma to get a uniformity of attention. Attention is the scarce commodity of a midterm.
So carry the book. Do not only produce it for a swearing-in and then lock it in a drawer. Talk about it. Do a short press availability that is not a culture-war trap and not a sermon. “This is the family Bible. This is a wonderful place. The country still knows what this is.” That is enough. The people you need do not require a systematic theology from the podium. They require permission to stop being embarrassed.
A Quiet Hour at the Museum Before the Ropes Open
I would go further. President Trump should walk across town—it is not far—and take a private tour of the Museum of the Bible before it opens to the public. Eight o’clock. They would open the building for him. Secret Service can lock a place like that down so it would be very safe. The access points are manageable. He can be through the history floors and the room with the Bibles laid out, pictures taken, and gone by nine-thirty, with the public none the wiser until the photos land. Visit the history-of-the-book exhibit while he is there. Stand in the room where the book is treated as an object of civilization rather than a punch line.
Then say the simple sentence: I love this museum. People who visit Washington often tell you it is their favorite stop, and they say it with that same pop in the voice I hear in the elevator. Put the president’s name next to that feeling. It is not phony if he means even half of it. Reminding people where he stands costs an hour and a motorcade. The return is not a sudden forty-state revival. The return is permission, again, for the people who already suspected they were allowed to believe this to act like it on a Tuesday in November.
Do Not Play Not to Lose
I have been saying this all along. Republicans who would not get behind the hard instruments—the same-day rules, the full use of a trifecta, the refusal to pre-negotiate the next Democratic revenge tour—did it because they believed Democrats always take power back, and that the smart play is to stay presentable so the other side will not pack the courts or torch the furniture. That is how you lose on purpose and call it statesmanship.
Democrats do not play that game. They play to take the referee. When they are out of power they yell, they play the victim, and they hope Republicans do not show up. When the rules of mail and curing and late counting favor them, they use the rules. I am not writing a brief for lawlessness. I am writing a brief against the peculiar Republican talent for bringing a rulebook to a street fight and then congratulating themselves for the bruises.
Go out there and win. If you cannot find a tax provision everyone will bleed for, you can still find a book almost everyone in your coalition will recognize. That is not a substitute for wages and borders and energy. It is the thing that makes people bother to vote for the wages and the borders and the energy in the first place.
The AI Debate Is a Strategy, Not a Concern
While we are talking about midterms, look at what is being built on the other side of the board. Democrats are trying to play the whole AI game. A lot of the people who run the large AI shops spent years working against President Trump. They are also busy playing games with each other over who owns the future. The issue is hot inside the Republican coalition for a reason: it is designed to be hot. Steve Bannon is set to appear at the same Washington “pro-human” AI gathering as Bernie Sanders. Populist right and socialist left, holding the same fear by different handles.[11]
For them the unifying note is jobs, dignity, the machine that will replace the man. Those are real human questions. I am not sneering at a machinist who wonders what a model trained on his craft will do to his shop. I am saying the political use of that fear is older than the transformer architecture.
They Ran This Play on Nuclear. They Will Run It on Compute.
Nuclear was always good for a healthy industrial society. Dense energy is how a free people stay warm without kneeling to a cartel or a planning board. Democrats of the anti-human strain used Three Mile Island—and every movie and textbook that turned a contained accident into a morality play—to discourage the independence that comes with the atom. They crippled an industry to suppress the growth of a capitalist nation and called it safety.[12]
Ohioans of a certain age do not need the lecture. We watched the same shot fired at FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants. Regulation and politics helped run a generation business onto the rocks. The subsidiary goes looking for a way to stay alive. Suddenly the company is corrupt, the Republicans who touched the file are dirty, and the moral of the story is that atoms were the original sin. The plants were a balance-sheet problem wrapped in a morality play. The morality play won the news cycle. The electrons still had to come from somewhere.[13]
AI is the new reactor. The doomsday register is the same. Pause. Ban superintelligence. Global coordination. Keep the models on a leash held by the people who already lost the last three arguments about growth. Trace a good portion of that propaganda and you will not end in a Vermont lecture hall. You will end in a strategic environment where China does not want America to embrace the thing that multiplies American labor. Beijing does not need to invent our anxiety. It only needs us to treat our own dynamism as a war crime.[14]
Barack Obama’s network does not have to send a memo titled “Split the GOP with AI” for the effect to be the effect. Put Republicans on their heels. Make the party of builders argue with the party of builders about whether building is allowed. In a midterm year, when turnout is already soft, that argument is not a seminar. It is a suppression tactic.
Low-turnout midterms reward whoever gets their people to the room. The AI fight, framed as apocalypse, keeps the Republican coalition in a family argument while the other side votes. That is why the biblical narrative is not a side quest. It is the offset. The communist register around AI—man as raw material, the future as a planning problem, the soul as an outdated user interface—cannot survive contact with a public that still thinks a human being is a creature and not a dataset. You do not beat a materialist panic with a better white paper. You beat it by reminding people what they are.[15]
The Tight Races Are Tight for a Reason
I look at the board and I do not see a wipeout that has already happened. I see a House that is still a handful of seats and a Senate that can hold even if a chair or two gets wobbly. Texas is the advertisement. Ken Paxton and James Talarico have been inside the margin of error for months. Some surveys now have Talarico a couple of points up. That is not destiny. That is a couple of points.[16]
A couple of points is a stadium visit. A couple of points is a president who looks like he is having a good time standing next to the man he wants in the seat. A couple of points is church-going women who decided the race was about more than a generic ballot average. A couple of points is the difference between Johnson keeping a gavel and Johnson becoming a trivia question about the last Republican speaker before the investigations.[17]
Fox will cover the rallies. That is not the point. The point is the pictures that leak into the places Fox does not run the morning show: the parking lot, the Sunday potluck, the group chat of the parents who have not voted since 2024 because they assumed the grown-ups had it. High engagement is not a mystery cult. It is a function of whether people think their side is alive.
Two Months. Not a Miracle. A Decision.
I think the House is winnable. I think the Senate can hold. I think some of these close races are close enough that a little public relations in football weather would move them. I think you can swing two or three points of engagement—not by converting the faculty lounge, but by giving your own people a reason to stand in a line. Democrats cannot pull this particular lever. They can lecture. They can threaten. They can mail. They cannot make the Museum of the Bible crowd feel seen, because they have spent a generation telling that crowd to sit down.
Do not act like you are losing. Act like you have fifty days and a country that still knows a hymn when it hears one. Bring Johnson into the light until he stops narrating the minority. Bring Musk into the frame as the man who builds. Bring Paxton and the rest into the presidential weather. Carry the book. Walk the museum. Go to the games. Talk like the majority is a thing you intend to keep.
If you ever read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know the rule I am applying. You do not win a gunfight by announcing your readiness to lose the street. You win it by being the man who came to keep the street. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven. The earthly contest is downstream of what a people think a human being is for. The Bible is not a prop in that argument. It is the argument, bound in leather, still doing what it has always done when somebody is willing to carry it into the weather.[18]
That is the advice. I would like to see Republicans win. From my map, and from the neighborhood I actually walk when I am in that city, it is very winnable—if they will stop rehearsing the loss and go collect the joy that is already standing in line for a sausage muffin and a museum ticket.
Notes:
Scripture, Theology, and American Religion
The Holy Bible. New King James Version. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press, various volumes.
Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural World of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.
Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. January 1, 1802.
Dreisbach, Daniel L. Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State. New York: NYU Press, 2002.
Museum of the Bible. “Plan Your Visit” and “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” museumofthebible.org.
Politics, Congress, and the 2026 Midterms
RealClearPolling. “Latest Polls 2026, 2028.” Accessed September 14, 2026.
USPollingData. “US Polling Data 2026 — Midterms, Generic Ballot & Trump Approval.” Updated September 14, 2026.
Cornell, Fred. “US Senate Forecast September 2026.” fredcornell.com. Model run September 14, 2026.
Newsweek. “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms—Polls.” September 14, 2026.
New York Times. “Senate Polls 2026: See the Latest Midterm Polls.” Updated September 10, 2026.
New York Times. “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House.” July 1, 2026.
NOTUS. “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations.” August 24, 2026.
Newsweek. “Mike Johnson Warns Impeachment Not ‘The Big Concern’ if Dems Win Midterms.” June 26, 2026.
CNN. “Johnson gambles on ambitious summer agenda as GOP anxiety rises ahead of midterms.” July 13, 2026.
Just the News. “Mike Johnson says 2026 marks a ‘pivotal moment’ in American history.” September 10, 2026.
Roll Call. “House plans quick September exit.” September 3, 2026.
Denver Gazette. “The 21 seats Mike Johnson says will decide the House majority.” September 2026.
NBC News / Meet the Press. Interview with Speaker Mike Johnson. September 13, 2026.
USA Today. “Talarico ahead of Paxton in Texas Senate race as older voters shift lead.” September 14, 2026.
The Hill. “James Talarico, Ken Paxton tied at 47 percent in Texas Senate race: Poll.” June 30, 2026.
Texas Politics Project / University of Texas. Statewide survey releases, spring–summer 2026.
NPR. “With 99 days until midterm elections, here’s where things stand.” July 27, 2026.
Campbell, Angus. “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change.” Public Opinion Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1960).
Artificial Intelligence, Energy, and Industrial Policy
New York Times. “From Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon, Political Figures Sound Alarms on A.I.” September 14, 2026.
Axios. “Scoop: Coxon, Bernie and Bannon unite for ‘pro-human’ AI.” September 14, 2026.
Reuters. “US Senator Sanders and podcaster Bannon, longtime foes, to urge AI restrictions.” September 14, 2026.
The Hill. “Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon join forces to advocate for AI regulation.” September 14, 2026.
Washington Examiner. “Sanders, Bannon, and former Anthropic staffer join forces in AI regulation push.” September 14, 2026.
Future of Life Institute. “The Pro-Human AI Declaration” and “Pro-Human Assembly” program notes. September 2026.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Historical accounts of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident, March 28, 1979.
Federal Register. Materials related to the Crane Clean Energy Center / former Three Mile Island Unit 1 restart docket. 2026.
Ferrise, Adam. “Ex-regulator: FirstEnergy nearly tanked credit as nuke plants drained finances.” Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026.
Utility Dive. “Ohio PUC orders FirstEnergy utilities to pay $250.7M over HB 6 bribery scandal.” November 20, 2025.
U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio. Civil filings summarizing FirstEnergy, House Bill 6, and the nuclear-plant bailout structure.
Reuters. “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share.” June 11, 2026.
New York Times. “SpaceX Stock Rises in Largest IPO Ever.” June 12, 2026.
Wikipedia. “Initial public offering of SpaceX.” Accessed September 2026.
The Author’s Shelf and Related Works
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. iUniverse, 2004.
Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.
Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–1885. For the Overman frame the author has long adapted, not baptized.
Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. Documentary, 2026.
Author’s note.
This essay is strategic commentary offered in a private and public voice I have used for years. It is not a paid consulting product, not an official statement of any campaign, and not investment advice. SpaceX is a publicly traded company as of June 2026; readers should treat every market sentence here as the opinion of a shareholder who has already shown his cards.
Footnotes
[1] Generic congressional ballot averages in mid-September 2026 have generally shown Democrats ahead by roughly five to eight points depending on the pollster. Rasmussen Reports, September 14, 2026, found Democrats 47 percent and Republicans 42 percent. CBS News, September 13, 2026, found Democrats 54 percent and Republicans 46 percent. Aggregators such as USPollingData placed the generic ballot near D+6.9 as of September 14, 2026.
[2] House and Senate seat counts as commonly reported in September 2026 put Republicans near 222–213 in the House and 53–47 in the Senate, meaning Democrats needed a modest net pickup for the House gavel and a larger four-seat swing for Senate control. See USPollingData, “US Polling Data 2026,” updated September 14, 2026; Newsweek, “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms,” September 14, 2026.
[3] Speaker Mike Johnson has publicly insisted Republicans will keep the House. See NOTUS, “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations,” August 24, 2026. The same coverage notes that Johnson’s future as speaker is widely understood to be tied to the majority. Separate reporting described caucus frustration and a sense of a thinning grip. New York Times, “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House,” July 1, 2026.
[4] Johnson told a Dallas audience that the next fifty-three days would “determine the fate of the republic.” Just the News, September 10, 2026. He has also spoken of twenty-one toss-up seats as decisive. Denver Gazette / Colorado Politics, September 2026.
[5] On the transition period after the 2024 election and before the January 20, 2025 inauguration, the public record is thick with high-visibility events, cabinet theater, and the brief alignment of Trump, congressional Republicans, and Elon Musk around a governing project. The point here is political memory, not a claim that every meeting was a prayer circle.
[6] SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 11, 2026, raising on the order of $75 billion and valuing the company near $1.77 trillion at pricing, with a first-day close that pushed the market capitalization higher. Reuters, “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share,” June 11–12, 2026; New York Times, June 12, 2026. Subsequent trading was volatile. This essay’s enthusiasm is the author’s investment thesis and political judgment, not investment advice.
[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 Fourth Street SW, Washington, D.C., opened November 17, 2017, three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Museum of the Bible, “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” A McDonald’s sits a short walk from the museum—Yelp lists one about 0.08 miles away—on the southwest federal corridor near Federal Center SW Metro, the National Air and Space Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian.
[8] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), edited by Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson, was released in 2026. Thomas Nelson Bibles product page; Christianbook.com listing for NKJV The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible.
[9] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) and the broader First Great Awakening are the American precedent for treating religious revival as a public, not merely private, event. Edwards’s own emphasis on joy in God is the stated editorial theme of the 2026 study Bible.
[10] On church and state, the relevant constitutional text is the First Amendment’s prohibition on an establishment of religion and its protection of the free exercise of religion. The modern slogan of a “wall of separation” is a later political gloss, most famously associated with Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, not a phrase in the Constitution itself.
[11] The Future of Life Institute’s “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, announced for September 15, 2026, listed Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon among speakers, along with labor leaders and members of both parties. They were not scheduled to share a single stage. New York Times, September 14, 2026; Axios, September 14, 2026; Reuters, September 14, 2026.
[12] Three Mile Island Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown on March 28, 1979. The accident produced no immediate deaths but became the central public symbol of anti-nuclear politics in the United States and helped freeze a generation of reactor construction. See NRC historical summaries of TMI-2.
[13] FirstEnergy’s Ohio nuclear plants, Davis-Besse and Perry, became the center of a financial and political crisis that included the bankruptcy of the generation subsidiary, House Bill 6, and later criminal and regulatory proceedings. Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026; Utility Dive, November 20, 2025; related federal court filings summarizing the HB 6 bailout structure.
[14] On AI industrial policy and Chinese competition, see the public record of export controls, semiconductor policy, and repeated U.S. government warnings that Beijing treats frontier compute as a strategic resource. The causal claim that every domestic “pause AI” campaign is a Chinese information operation is the author’s inference, not a documented indictment.
[15] Midterm electorates are typically older, more partisan, and lower-turnout than presidential electorates. The “surge and decline” literature from Angus Campbell onward remains the basic framework. Small shifts in evangelical and conservative Protestant turnout have been decisive in multiple close cycles since 2004.
[16] Recent Texas Senate polling has been tight. An AARP survey conducted August 30–September 1, 2026, and reported September 14, showed James Talarico at 48 percent and Ken Paxton at 44 percent among likely voters. Earlier NYT/Siena work in late June had them tied at 47 percent. USA Today, September 14, 2026; The Hill, June 30, 2026.
[17] President Trump’s job approval in mid-September 2026 varied by pollster, with several national surveys clustering in the high thirties to mid-forties approve and a clear plurality disapprove. Rasmussen, September 14, 2026: 45 approve / 54 disapprove. Morning Consult, same window: 42 / 56. CBS News, September 13: 39 / 61.
[18] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021). The forthcoming Politics of Heaven develops the same author’s argument that earthly power contests are unintelligible without the older grammar of heaven, will, and moral order.
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.
These are my favorite kind of days. The best days. No matter how tough it is out there, no matter how rough the problems of life get, sometimes you just have a good day, and this is one of them. I had the grandkids all day. We have been running back and forth at Kings Island, parched in the heat, and we are going to finish the evening at the waterpark. In the middle of all that, a box arrived. I took a minute to sit down with it. I opened it the way I open every book that matters to me. I smelled the pages.
One of my greatest pleasures in life is the wisdom and context of history sitting in my hand. I love the Bible for that reason. I love having so much history in one place. I love study Bibles because they explore the thing you can actually build a civilization on. I have carried one of those Bibles everywhere for years. I will not retire it. I will still read large portions of it every day. But I was ready to add to it, and I was ready to give the old one a rest. The first few pages of the worn one have a crease I cannot get out. That crease has bothered me. The new one does not have wrinkled pages. It just came out of the box.
I saw the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review in the late-summer, early-fall edition. I fell in love with the idea immediately. When I hear the name Jonathan Edwards, I think of the father of the founding fathers. Thomas Nelson released the edition on August 18, 2026, after years of work under general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard. I picked the brown Leathersoft with thumb indexes. I was close to the black genuine leather. I wanted brown. I wanted the indexes. I am a sucker for thumb indexes. That had been my only real gripe with the Bible I have carried for years. They made this one with them. Brilliant.
A Good Day Is Not an Accident
I have said it before and I will say it again: a good day is not the absence of problems. A good day is the presence of a standard that can survive the problems. The world is full of people pinballing off each other. They do not share a common point of reference. They argue government, law, family, and history as if those things were invented last Tuesday. They were not. The argument over what kind of government we are supposed to have was largely settled in the long runway from the 1740s through the 1770s. The First Great Awakening was not a side show. It was a Christian surge into the New World that formed the conscience of a people who would soon have to decide whether they were subjects or citizens.
I wanted something that would push my mind into the right frame for the complicated issues in front of us. Two years into President Trump’s second term, the question is no longer whether the old order can be broken. The question is what we build with the pieces. Biblical scholarship is a very good place to start. Not as decoration. As infrastructure.
Who Jonathan Edwards Actually Was
Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703, and died March 22, 1758. He was a Congregationalist pastor, philosopher, and theologian, widely regarded as America’s most original philosophical theologian. He oversaw early revivals in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733–35. He preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. That sermon is the one everybody remembers. It is not the whole man.
Edwards was not a mascot for rage. He was a man obsessed with joy in God. “The enjoyment of [God] is…the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That line sits on the new study Bible for a reason. His Religious Affections, his Resolutions, his Miscellanies, and his massive unpublished notebooks were an attempt to think with total seriousness about Scripture, beauty, virtue, and the public order. He became the third president of the College of New Jersey—Princeton—after the death of his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr. He served only weeks. He died after a smallpox inoculation. Short tenure. Long shadow.
Princeton was a child of the Great Awakening. When Harvard and Yale resisted the revivals, New Lights built new colleges. The first presidents of Princeton stood in that stream. John Witherspoon, later president of the same college, signed the Declaration of Independence. The line from Edwards to Witherspoon to the Revolutionary generation is not a slogan. It is institutional history.
Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration, put it as plainly as any American president ever has: “No one can escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology… had aroused the thought and prepared the colonists for this great event.” I consider Calvin Coolidge to be one of America’s greatest presidents.
I call Edwards a founding father because America would not have the moral vocabulary it used to become America without men like him. Ben Franklin admired George Whitefield, the great itinerant of the same awakening. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Adams inherited a public that had already been trained to take sin, covenant, virtue, and judgment seriously. You do not get a Bill of Rights out of thin air. You get it from a people who already believed that law has a source above the king.
The Great Awakening Was a Political Event
People treat revival as private emotion. That is a modern mistake. The Awakening taught ordinary men and women that a regenerated beggar stood before God on the same ground as an unholy prince. In a hierarchical empire, that idea is dynamite. It does not automatically produce 1776. It does produce a population that can hear “all men are created equal” without laughing.
The Awakening also split churches, founded colleges, and trained a habit of examining authority rather than merely inheriting it. That habit can go wrong. It can become mere rebellion. Edwards himself was no enthusiast for unfettered liberty as an end in itself. He wanted ordered affections under God. That is exactly why he is useful now. A country that has spent years dissolving every standard needs the man who refused to separate joy from holiness and holiness from public life.
I have been telling people that the squabbles of the present require a basic foundation. Study of that foundation got settled, in outline, by the 1750s and was tested in the 1770s. If we will not return to it, we will keep inventing new religions of the self and calling them law.
What This Study Bible Actually Contains
The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is an NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson: Comfort Print, red letter, center-column references, concordance, maps, translator notes, two-color printing. The distinctive load is Edwards himself. Study notes drawn from his work. Articles on doctrinal topics. Full-page essays on his theology, his life, his spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening. His Resolutions. An introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system, with space to build your own. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center remains the great online companion. If you are doing real scholarship, you can move from the page in your hand to the archive.
I like that. I like any book that tries to achieve superior intellect. The Bible, at its most basic essence, is the attempt to put the human mind in contact with the source of order. A study Bible is not a substitute for the text. It is scaffolding. Edwards is unusually good scaffolding because he will not let you treat Scripture as therapy. God, in Edwards, is not a life coach. God is holy. God is beautiful. God is uncompromising. If we follow in those footsteps, the same seriousness can look ruthless to a soft age. That is not a reason to flatten God into niceness. That is a reason to think.
I looked at the maps, the color, the paper, the print, the way the notes sit on the page. I judge Bibles the way I judge tools. Binding, glue, opacity, ribbon, indexes, whether the thing will survive being carried. Thomas Nelson still backs many of these editions with a lifetime guarantee against manufacturing defects. Companies that talk that way are running a different business model than the disposable world. I respect that.
I almost bought the black leather. I bought the brown because I like brown and because this one has the thumb indexes. I will likely still read the old study Bible. I will not carry the creased one everywhere anymore. This one takes that job.
The Smell of a New Book Is Not Trivial
I take publishers seriously when they do their job. The best smell in the book world is still new-Bible smell: paper, ink, glue, cloth, leather. I told my wife, half joking and half not, that if she wants me to keep loving her forever she should find a perfume that smells like a new book. The grandkids laugh at me because I keep putting my face in the pages. Fine. Let them laugh. There are very few things in life better than a well-made book that is trying to make you smarter than you were yesterday.
My old Bible still smells good to me. It has been everywhere. Full-color pages, notes from good scholars, a companion through work I am proud of. It also has the wounds of use. That is honorable. It is also honest to say when a tool has earned a rest. I can straighten pages and put it on the shelf without pretending I have outgrown it. I have not. I have added a second pillar.
Law and Order Begins With a Book on the Desk
People have told me they like that I keep a Bible on the desk in my office. Everybody walking by can see it. I did the same thing when I served as foreman of a grand jury in Butler County. I was not trying to be ostentatious. I was stating the premise. We were there for order. We were swearing to tell the truth. The values that created this civilization are not shameful. You do not apologize for them. You do not mumble that every tradition is equal so that no tradition can judge anything.
I put the Bible on the desk and I swore people in. That book represented a common standard. We can disagree about a thousand things after that. We cannot pretend there is no standard.
When I look back on a long life—good family, good kids, good grandchildren, good work in business—I still say that those weeks as grand jury foreman were among the most rewarding things I have ever done. I wish I could do that job every day. They paid something like twenty-four dollars a day. The whole stint put maybe four hundred dollars in my pocket. I spent every dime of it on Ohio law books, the kind of volumes lawyers keep on their shelves. I needed to explain the law to the other people in the room. Twelve other citizens. Evidence. A vote. Whether a person goes further into the machine of the state. That is serious work. I loved it. For a few weeks I was, in a manner of speaking, the top cop in Butler County, and I treated the job that way.
I have been thinking about cases that break your heart and then break your confidence in a jury’s ability to follow the law. A mother walks away from the death of her own children and the process cannot arrive at the destination the facts required. I will not relitigate a verdict in this space. I will say what the experience taught me. Law is not a mood. Law is a discipline. If the people in the room do not share a moral language, the statutes become a maze. The Bible is not a statute book. It is the source of the moral language that made statute books possible in the West.
Jonathan Edwards belongs on that desk because he is part of the formula that formed the legal society of the early republic. The attempt in our time has been to undermine that formation completely. Our job is to keep the undermining from succeeding. One way to do that is to return to the starting point and read it again, slowly, with notes from a man who actually thought.
God Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Seminar
I need to be clear about something I said in the moment and will not sand down. God is not a slogan for “can’t we all just get along.” God, as Scripture presents Him, is often ruthless and uncompromising. If we claim to follow, we do not get to edit that into suburban kindness and call it discipleship. The intellectual task is to understand what holiness requires in public life without turning the church into a mob and without turning the state into a church.
Edwards is helpful there. He is a pastoral philosopher. He will not let affection float free of doctrine, and he will not let doctrine float free of the glory of God. That combination is what a movement needs after it wins elections. Winning is not the same as governing. Governing requires a metaphysics. If your metaphysics is “the self is sovereign,” you will get the last twenty years on repeat. If your metaphysics is that there is a law above the ruler and a Judge above the law, you have a chance.
I have been saying that we need a common point of reference. This Bible can be that for people who are even half willing. You do not have to become a professional Edwards scholar. You have to read, mark, compare, and refuse the cheap alternatives.
The Politics of Heaven in the Age of Disclosure
We are living in what I have been calling the age of disclosure. Hidden things are coming up. Political things, institutional things, spiritual things. If you do not understand the politics of heaven, you will misread the politics of earth. Heaven is not a fog of niceness. Heaven is a court. There is a throne. There is law. There is judgment. There is mercy that costs something. Edwards never forgot that. A great deal of modern religion did.
The founding generation argued about church and state. They did not argue that the state could invent morality out of committee. They assumed a created order. They assumed sin. They assumed that republics die when character dies. That is not nostalgia. That is the operating system.
I want my grandchildren to see a Bible on the desk and know what it means when I walk into a room. It means I stand for law and order, and that law and order have a foundation that did not begin in a press release. I am not closing my life. I am opening a new chapter with a better tool for the same fight.
Why I Am Telling You to Get This One
If you need a first serious study Bible, this is a strong candidate. If you already have one you love, as I do, this is the right second. The scholarship is serious. The production is handsome. The price is not insane. The leather edition runs more. I paid for the version I would actually use—the one I will thumb through in the car, on the desk, and at the table.
I would like to shut the rest of life off and only read it. I will read a lot of it. It will become the Bible I carry. There is plenty here to work with. I think it is a key to launching a new stretch of work in my own life, and I think it can serve the same purpose for anyone who is tired of arguing with no floor under the argument.
Go get it. Put it where people can see it. Swear to the truth. Then go do the hard parts—family, work, citizenship, the long patience of building a civilization instead of commenting on its collapse.
I took the kids back to the waterpark and we had a great day. While I waited on them I sat in a chair and read through this new Bible and it turned out to be one of the best days I have had in a while. I am going to smell the pages again many more times. There are very few things in life better than that. If you want the longer map of how I think about work, conflict, and Western order, read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. If you want the foundation under that map, start with Scripture and a guide who already walked the ground we keep pretending is new.
Notes
1. Thomas Nelson released The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV) on August 18, 2026, with Dr. Matthew Everhard as general editor. Editions include hardcover, brown Leathersoft (including thumb-indexed), and black genuine leather. See publisher listings and trade bibliographic records for ISBNs 9781400339532 (hardcover), 9781400339556 (brown Leathersoft, thumb indexed), and 9781400339600 (black genuine leather).
2. Edwards’s dates, Northampton revivals, the Enfield sermon of July 8, 1741, and his brief presidency of the College of New Jersey are standard in the biographical literature. See George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003).
3. Edwards died after smallpox inoculation in March 1758, weeks into the Princeton presidency. Marsden and the Yale Jonathan Edwards Center treat the episode in detail.
4. Coolidge’s sesquicentennial remarks on Edwards and the Declaration are printed in Calvin Coolidge, The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses. The quotation is discussed in Gordon Arnold, “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought,” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.
5. On Princeton’s revivalist origins and the New Light college movement, see Thomas Breidenthal, “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019, and George M. Marsden’s work on evangelical higher education.
6. John Witherspoon, sixth president of the College of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Continental Congress. The Edwards–Burr–Witherspoon succession is a matter of college history, not metaphor.
7. George Whitefield’s relationship with Benjamin Franklin is documented in Franklin’s Autobiography and in the standard Whitefield biographies. Admiration is not the same as conversion; it is evidence of the Awakening’s public weight.
8. Edwards’s line on the enjoyment of God as the only satisfying happiness is used by Thomas Nelson as the editorial keynote of the 2026 study Bible.
9. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center (edwards.yale.edu) hosts the Works of Jonathan Edwards and remains the primary digital archive corresponding to the print notes.
10. Thomas Nelson’s published lifetime guarantee covers manufacturing defects, not ordinary wear. See Thomas Nelson Bibles customer-service and Premier Collection guarantee pages.
11. The First Great Awakening’s role in colonial egalitarianism, church conflict, and revolutionary political culture is argued, with different emphases, by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (1966); Mark Noll, America’s God (2002); and Michael Novak’s essays on the “two wings” of the American eagle.
12. Butler County, Ohio, grand juries operate under Ohio law. Compensation for jurors has historically been modest; the figures given here are from my own service and recollection, not a claim about current statutory rates.
13. Biblical Archaeology Review is the flagship magazine of the Biblical Archaeology Society. I first noticed the Edwards Bible as a paid advertisement in a late-summer / early-fall issue.
14. Edwards owned enslaved people. That fact belongs in any honest account. It does not erase his intellectual role in American theology; it does forbid hagiography. See Marsden and the Yale Center’s documentary record.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Primary Edwards
• Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.
• Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.
• Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
• Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.
• Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. 1749.
• Edwards, Jonathan. Ethical Writings. Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8. Yale University Press.
• Edwards, Jonathan. The Miscellanies. Works of Jonathan Edwards, multiple volumes. Yale University Press.
• Edwards, Jonathan. Resolutions. Various editions; also included in the 2026 study Bible.
• The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press. Digital companion: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, https://edwards.yale.edu.
The 2026 Study Bible
• Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Biography and Intellectual History
• 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.
• Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Banner of Truth, 1987.
• Gura, Philip F. Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. Hill and Wang, 2005.
• Sweeney, Douglas A. Edwards the Exegete. Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Nichols, Stephen J. Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. P&R, 2001.
Great Awakening, Princeton, and the Revolution
• Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1966.
• McDermott, Gerald R. One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Penn State University Press, 1992.
• Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Yale University Press, 2007.
• Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am sitting on my porch with a book in my lap, the same way I have done it for years, and the same way I imagine Thomas Jefferson doing it at Monticello when the noise of government finally fell away. People still walk up and ask the question as if it were an accusation: you are in your prime earning years; what are you doing out here reading? I tell them the truth. I am practicing an old idea that most of modern politics has forgotten how to pronounce. The Greeks called it eudaimonia. Speech-to-text software, and more than a few hurried conversations, turn the word into “pneumonia.” That slip is almost perfect. We have caught a fever about happiness and then treated the wrong disease.
I am not an anti-machine person, and I am not an anti-data-center person. Tools are tools. I use them the way I use a library: to get to the argument faster. What I am against is the siren song that says a meaningful life can be issued by a legislature, mailed as a rebate, or confiscated from a neighbor who hit the jackpot. That song is older than the Democratic platform and older than the American republic. It is the temptation to let someone else define the good life and then charge you for the privilege.
The Declaration of Independence did not promise us a feeling. It promised us a pursuit. That difference is the whole American argument, and it is the argument I keep returning to when the season turns political, and every candidate suddenly wants to sell happiness by the pound.[1]
What Did the Founders Mean by the Pursuit of Happiness?
Schoolhouse history likes a tidy swap. Locke wrote “life, liberty, and property.” Jefferson, we are told, crossed out property and wrote happiness because he was more generous, or more poetic, or less capitalist. The tidy swap is too tidy.[2]
Jefferson had George Mason in front of him. Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights kept both goods on the table: the means of acquiring and possessing property, and the pursuing and obtaining of happiness and safety.[3] Jefferson compressed the line. He did not throw property into the river. He refused to let property pretend it was the whole human good. Locke himself, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, had already said that the highest perfection of an intellectual nature is “a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”[4] The phrase was in the air of the eighteenth century. Adams said the happiness of society is the end of government, as the happiness of the individual is the end of man.[5]
So the Founders were not announcing a mood. They were naming a classical end: a life that can actually be lived well. Happiness, in that older English, is closer to flourishing than to a grin. It is closer to a completed form than to a shopping list. Arthur Schlesinger once wrote about the “lost meaning” of the phrase, and Pauline Maier showed how common the political language of happiness already was in American writing before July 4, 1776.[6] Jefferson did not invent a slogan for a greeting card. He put a thick word in a thin space and trusted a free people to know the difference between a right and a result.
I like to say it this way, because it is how I live it. Happiness is not a second house in Florida, a place in the Upper Peninsula, and a third address in Cincinnati. Those things can be fine. They are not the definition. I have been happier with a book and a family meal of takeout Chinese than with a ledger that looked impressive to somebody else. The money that buys the meal matters less than the hour in which you eat it. If that sounds sentimental, it is only because we have been trained to measure a soul with a bank statement.
What Is Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, and Why Is It Not a PlayStation?
Aristotle calls the highest human good eudaimonia. Translators say happiness. They should also say flourishing, living well, a complete life of excellent activity. Aristotle is blunt about the alternatives. Pleasure is not enough. Honor depends on other people. Wealth is a tool. The human function is rational activity, and the human good is that activity done with virtue, not for a weekend but across a life.[7]
Two features of that definition wreck most modern politics.
First, happiness is an activity, not a stash. Aristotle says a virtuous man who never exercises the virtue is like an athlete who never enters the stadium. You do not become happy by owning the equipment. You become happy by running the race.[8] A free PlayStation in every house would not settle the question. It would only prove we had confused amusement with a soul.
Second, external goods are real and still secondary. Aristotle is not a monk. He knows a man needs enough equipment for a complete life. He does not pretend that catastrophe is a spiritual opportunity brochure. But he will not let the equipment become the prize.[9] That is why I can be making a million dollars a year or fifty dollars a year, and the inner measure does not have to move with the account. The measure is whether I am living a life I can defend: books, family, work I own, a porch that is mine, a conscience that is not for sale.
People hear that and think I am romanticizing poverty. I am not. I am refusing the opposite romance, the one that says the state can allocate flourishing the way it allocates a tax credit. You cannot mail a man eudaimonia. You can only leave him room to practice it, or crowd the room until he forgets how.[10]
Plato vs. Aristotle: Philosopher Kings, Jedi Knights, and Limited Government
If you want the American argument in one Greek quarrel, start here. The city executes Socrates. Plato, who loved him, answers with a republic in which the wise few rule the many for their own good. The guardians own little, lie when necessary, and impose a harmony the public cannot be trusted to choose. “Until philosophers rule as kings,” Plato says, the cities will have no rest from their troubles.[11]
Aristotle studied in that household of ideas and then pushed the furniture back toward the ground. He is more empirical, more household, more individual. He does not start with a caste of golden souls. He starts with a man who must choose, a family that must hold together, a city that must mix its powers so that no class eats the rest.[12] The debate is not a museum piece. It is the difference between a government that protects your pursuit and a government that performs your virtue in your name.
I have always thought Star Wars is popular philosophy wearing a robe. When George Lucas was at his best, the Jedi looked like knighthood: discipline, apprenticeship, a refusal of cheap power. Then the story showed you the other face. A council of the enlightened, hovering above the Republic, managing fairness, announcing balance, and slowly becoming what Aristotle warned against: a class that cannot imagine the good unless it administers it.[13] That is Plato in space. It is a beautiful picture and a dangerous constitution.
Ayn Rand saw the same fork and planted her flag with Aristotle.[14] You do not have to take her whole system to see why the Founders feared the Jedi option. Once an elite is authorized to impose happiness, it will need your property, your time, and eventually your vocabulary. The Book of Judges already knew the seesaw: no king, and every man does what is right in his own eyes; then a king, and the king takes your sons and your fields.[15] America tried to cut a third path. Not chaos. Not philosopher-kings. A limited government around an unlimited soul.
How Greek Philosophy Reached the Declaration of Independence
Ideas do not float. They ride languages, armies, and churches.
Aristotle taught Alexander. Alexander broke the old map and left Greek cities, Greek speech, and Greek books across a world that had not asked for them.[16] That Hellenistic weather is the weather in which Scripture becomes Greek, in which the New Testament can be written, in which Paul can argue in cities that already have a word for a complete life. I do not claim Alexander meant to pave a road for Christ. I claim history is thick. The Teacher of Righteousness, the Maccabean revolt, the tense priesthoods, John and his cousin in the wilderness—none of that happens in a vacuum. It happens in a Near East already argued over by Greek thought and imperial power.[17]
Rome later sits on that same furniture and, when it can no longer hold the old gods together, leans on the Church to keep a civilization from flying apart. I have spent years in books that tell that long story. Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity is one of them. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s three-thousand-year account is another, because he is honest that Christianity does not begin at the manger in an empty room. It inherits Israel and Greece.[18]
This is why I say something that makes secular lecture halls flinch. Without the Christian movement, the Aristotelian idea of a dignified individual soul does not arrive in Virginia with enough moral force to become a political principle. Cicero carried the Greek conversation into Latin. Aquinas baptized Aristotle for the schools.[19] The Reformation and the colonial pulpit then taught ordinary people that they stood before God without a philosopher-king in the way. That is not “separation of church and state” as a sterilization protocol. It is the free exercise of a faith that made limited government feel natural instead of suicidal.[20]
Jonathan Edwards and the Christian Platform Beneath American Liberty
I have been talking a lot about Jonathan Edwards, and not because I want to turn the Founders into revivalists in powdered wigs. Edwards is useful because he forced a distinction the modern state keeps trying to erase. Liberty is not the chance to do as you please. Liberty is the healed capacity to love what is good.[21]
The First Great Awakening did not write the Constitution. It did something prior. It taught crowds of uncredentialed people that the most important transaction in a human life happens between a soul and God, not between a subject and a board of guardians. Historians still fight about how straight the line runs from Edwards and Whitefield to 1776. Coolidge, speaking in Philadelphia on the Declaration’s 150th birthday, was not shy about it. He said the religious teaching of the preceding period prepared the mind of the country, and he put Edwards in that company.[22]
What I take from that fight is simple. A Christian account of human dignity—image of God, direct accountability, sin that a committee cannot cure—makes personal responsibility feel like realism rather than cruelty. If man is only appetite plus circumstance, then of course the only “fairness” left is to move piles of stuff from the disciplined to the wrecked. If man is a soul, then the first mercy is to tell him the truth: happiness cannot be injected. It has to be lived.[23]
Why Jefferson Wrote Happiness Instead of Property
Property matters. I won’t pretend otherwise. A man who cannot keep what he earns is not free; he is a tenant of whoever counts the votes. The Fifth Amendment still talks about property because the Founders were not monks. But Jefferson left the word out of the most famous sentence in American politics on purpose, or at least with a purpose that survived the editing.[24]
If he writes “property,” the sentence can be captured by the ledger. If he writes “happiness,” the sentence stays larger than the ledger. Happiness includes the right to acquire, to build, to fail, to start again, to sit down, to open a book, to refuse a treadmill that exists only so someone else can be paid from your exhaustion. Government is instituted to secure those rights, not to emit the outcome the rights were meant to make possible.[25]
Democrats who want to retire Jefferson with Sally Hemings are not, in my experience, primarily interested in the enslaved. They want to turn off the sentence.[26] I took my children to Monticello when I was in my twenties and thirties because I wanted them to see the house, the river country, the laboratory of a mind, and the wound in the same tour. A serious country can hold both. A propaganda country can hold only one. I will not surrender the idea of the pursuit because the man who wrote it failed his own measure. That would be like burning the Gospels because Peter denied Christ before sunrise.
What Is the Government’s Role in Happiness?
The government’s job is to get out of your way without disappearing. That is a narrower job than it sounds, and a harder one. Madison’s line still does the work: if men were angels, no government would be necessary.[27] Men are not angels. So you need law against force and fraud. You need a shield around the porch. You need courts that can tell a thief from a neighbor. You do not need a ministry of flourishing.
Every month people open an electric bill and feel that drop in the stomach. Some of that is the price of a physical world. Some of that is policy dressed up as compassion. When government decides it must manufacture happiness, it discovers it has no happiness in the warehouse. It only has other people’s time. So it takes. It calls the taking fairness. It calls the residue a benefit. And it is shocked—shocked—when the people being harvested stop believing the harvest is a public service.
Representatives are not Jedi. They are not there to impose a vision of the good life on Ohio or on the country. They are there to keep the framework from being eaten: contracts, speech, worship, arms, due process, the right to keep the fruit of work. The moment they start using your success to subsidize somebody else’s refusal of consequence, they have changed jobs. They are no longer guardians of liberty. They are brokers of dependence.[28]
Can Government Distribute Happiness by Taxing Success?
This is the active campaign version of the old temptation. A man goes out, takes risks, hits the jackpot, and the speech begins: tax the rich, because his surplus is the raw material of your comfort. I have watched that speech attach itself to Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio the way it attaches itself to anyone whose success is visible enough to photograph. The names change. The metaphysics do not.
If your only picture of a human being is a stomach, then the moral task is, of course, to move food. If your picture includes a soul, the moral task is harder. Some people are broke because the world broke them. Some people are broke because they made a string of decisions that would break anyone: addiction, idleness, the refusal to be teachable. A serious country can tell those stories apart. A political machine cannot afford to. Dependent people are reliable. Independent people are inconvenient. They might stay home and read. They might not need the next check. They might not love you at the next election.
Happiness cannot be confiscated from one life and poured into another like fuel. When you sever effort from reward, you do not get fairness. You get resentment on one side and learned helplessness on the other. Aristotle would not have been confused by this. A virtue that is not practiced dies. A city that pays people not to become excellent should not act surprised when excellence becomes scarce.
Why Minimum Wage Politics Often Create Dependence Instead of Dignity
Even a hard, poorly paid job can begin eudaimonia if the work is real and the paycheck is yours. Ownership of a small life is still ownership. The political class that talks down “minimum wage work” is not protecting the worker’s dignity. It is protecting a story in which only a managed outcome counts as a human life.
Artificially jack the wage floor and two ordinary things happen. Some businesses hire fewer people—some cut hours. Prices around the worker rise. The first rung rises, and more people never reach it. Then the same political class arrives with a program for the people who cannot find the rung, and the program requires a larger state, which requires a deeper reach into the people who are still climbing.[29] That is not an accident that keeps happening to kind-hearted people. It is a machine that converts failed economics into loyal constituencies.
I am not against a man earning more. I am against the pretense that a statute can repeal scarcity without repealing somebody’s opportunity. Happiness at the bottom of the ladder is not a higher number on a poster. It is the knowledge that the step you are standing on belongs to you.
Jefferson’s Porch, Roosevelt’s Badlands, and My Own Monticello
When life got heavy, Jefferson went home. He wrote that nature intended him for the tranquil pursuits of science and that leaving power felt like a prisoner shaking off chains. In retirement, he gave up newspapers for Tacitus and Thucydides, Newton and Euclid, and said he found himself much the happier.[30] After he sold his library to rebuild Congress’s, he said the line I have loved since I first walked that hill in Virginia: “I cannot live without books.”[31]
Theodore Roosevelt learned the same lesson the hard way. On February 14, 1884, his mother and his wife died in the same house, hours apart. He put a great X in the diary and wrote that the light had gone out of his life. Then he went to the Dakota Territory, simplified the world down to cattle, weather, and work, and stayed long enough to remember he was still a man.[32] That is not “self-care.” That is the Rough Rider version of Aristotle. Unplug from the grid of other people’s noise. Choose a smaller field. Practice being alive on purpose.
I do the same thing when the complications pile up. I start unplugging. I sit on a porch that reminds me of the older American houses, and I read. Visitors think I have dropped out. I have dropped back in. A designated place for thought is not a luxury good. It is how a person remembers that he is not a device on the state’s network. Aristotle said the highest activity is contemplation.[33] Jefferson built rooms for it. I have rooms for it. If government ever decides that my unproductive hours are a public resource, it will have declared war on the very right it exists to protect.
Homelessness, Bad Decisions, and the Difference Between Charity and Clientage
I have walked into Canterbury, past the old gates toward the cathedral I love, and seen the same scene you can see outside too many American churches and civic showpieces. People sleeping rough in the shadow of a great Christian building, because the building is a good place to be seen by tourists with sandwiches. I have looked at faces there, and in Los Angeles, and in New York. I do not claim I can read a whole biography off a face. I have spoken with enough of those men to know that many of them are not there because a rich stranger refused them a rebate. They are there because addiction, or a collapsed will, or a long series of refusals, ate the mechanisms by which a person stays housed.
A Christian society is supposed to help. It is not supposed to freeze a man in his worst hour and call the freeze compassion.[34] When a system removes the cost of a bad decision while also flattening the reward of a good one, it trains people out of agency. Then it photographs the wreckage and says, see, this is why we must take more from the competent.
Government’s legitimate role is to keep the road from being blocked so you can walk it in your own way: reading your books, staying with your family, ordering the Chinese food, building a firm, disappearing into North Dakota, disappearing onto a porch, working a first job that nobody at a fundraiser wants to brag about. The state may not decide your values and then bill you for the sermon. The state may not call your success a surplus inventory of happiness to be broken up for parts.
That is why the original quarrel still matters. Plato’s temptation is always to let the few define the good and administer it. Aristotle counters that a human life is an activity you cannot outsource. Christianity carried that dignity through empires that would have been happy to forget it. The American Founders, soaked in both Athens and the Bible, wrote a sentence telling the state to stay in its lane and not interfere with people’s happiness.
Notes
[1] Thomas Jefferson never left a memorandum explaining why he chose the phrase. The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello notes that he was almost certainly influenced by George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776), which spoke of “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” See “Pursuit of Happiness,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello.
[2] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise, §87 and §123. Locke’s triad is often summarized as “life, liberty, and property,” though Locke’s larger category of “property” includes life, liberty, and estate.
[3] George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, §1 (June 12, 1776). The National Archives notes that Jefferson drew on Mason for the opening paragraphs of the Declaration.
[4] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, ch. 21. Locke writes that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”
[5] John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776): “the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man.”
[6] Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Lost Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 3 (1964): 326–327. See also Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997).
[7] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16: the human good is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” The Greek εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia) is commonly rendered “happiness” or “flourishing.” It is not a mood. It is a life well lived.
[8] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a7–18 (the function argument) and 1103b26–30: the point of ethical inquiry is not merely to know what virtue is, but to become good.
[9] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1099a31–1099b8 and 1101a14–16. External goods are conditions of a complete life, not the definition of the good itself. A man wrecked by catastrophe is not called happy in the full sense, but neither is a rich man who lives without virtue.
[10] For a clear popular account of eudaimonia versus hedonic pleasure, see the discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Aristotle’s Ethics” (Richard Kraut). Flourishing is activity, not a pile of goods.
[11] Plato, Republic 473c–e: until philosophers rule as kings, or kings philosophize, “there can be no rest from ills for the cities.”
[12] Aristotle, Politics I and III. Aristotle begins with the household and the citizen, not with a caste of guardians. He defends a mixed constitution and treats extreme concentrations of power as a constant temptation toward tyranny.
[13] George Lucas has long acknowledged that Star Wars draws on myth, knighthood, and mentor-pupil initiation. The Jedi Council, however it began, becomes a cloistered caste managing the galaxy’s “balance.” That is a Republic problem, not an Ethics problem.
[14] Ayn Rand repeatedly named Aristotle as the only philosopher to whom she owed a genuine intellectual debt. See the appendix to Atlas Shrugged and her essay “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964). Rand’s politics are not the Founders’ politics, but her recovery of Aristotelian individualism is part of the modern American argument.
[15] 1 Samuel 8. Israel asks for a king “like all the nations.” Samuel warns that a king will take sons, daughters, fields, and a tenth. The Book of Judges had already shown the opposite problem: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).
[16] Plutarch, Life of Alexander; and the ancient biographical tradition that Aristotle tutored the young Alexander at Mieza. The cultural aftershock of that education was Hellenism: Greek language, cities, and books stretched from the Aegean to the Indus.
[17] The Septuagint translated Hebrew Scripture into Greek in the Hellenistic age. The New Testament was written in Greek. Without that linguistic world, the Christian movement would have traveled a narrower road. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), opening chapters on Greece, Rome, and Israel.
[18] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1976). Johnson’s one-volume narrative remains a favorite of general readers who want the political and institutional story without losing the religion itself.
[19] Cicero, in De Finibus and De Officiis, transmitted the Greek conversation about the highest good into Latin moral vocabulary that later Christian and Enlightenment writers still used. Aquinas baptized large parts of Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae.
[20] The First Amendment protects free exercise; it does not exile Christianity from the moral formation of a people. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) was written to keep the state from prescribing worship, not to keep citizens from having a faith.
[21] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); and Freedom of the Will (1754). Edwards insisted that true liberty is not mere license—“opportunity to do as one pleases”—but the capacity of a converted heart to love what is good.
[22] Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926. Coolidge argued that the Declaration’s principles were prepared by the religious teaching of the preceding period, and he named Jonathan Edwards among those who had “aroused the thought” of the colonists.
[23] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[24] On “happiness” as a political term already common in American writing before 1776, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture, and the Gilder Lehrman essay “The Harmonizing Sentiments of the Day.” Jefferson compressed a public language; he did not invent a private slogan.
[25] Declaration of Independence, final text adopted by Congress, July 4, 1776: governments are instituted “to secure these rights,” and the people may alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive of those ends, organizing new powers “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
[26] On Jefferson’s contradictions, including slavery and the Hemings family, the honest reader does not need a campaign commercial. He needs Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), and the documentary record at Monticello. The argument of this essay is not that Jefferson was a saint. It is that the sentence he wrote still tells the truth about what a free government is for.
[27] James Madison, Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Limited government is a theological and anthropological claim before it is a procedural one.
[28] See Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), and The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1995), on the difference between process and result, and on elites who treat other people’s lives as raw material for a designed outcome.
[29] Minimum-wage literature is contested, but the basic price-control logic is not mysterious: raise the legal price of low-skill labor and some hours, some jobs, and some first rungs disappear. For a classical statement, see Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper, 1946), ch. 19.
[30] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 21, 1812: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier.” Founders Online, National Archives.
[31] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 10, 1815: “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.” After the British burned the Capitol library in 1814, Jefferson sold his collection of more than 6,500 volumes to Congress. He immediately began assembling another library. See Endrina Tay, “I cannot live without books,” Monticello.
[32] On February 14, 1884, Martha “Mittie” Roosevelt died of typhoid fever, and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died of Bright’s disease, hours apart, in the same New York house. Roosevelt wrote in his diary, “The light has gone out of my life.” He left infant Alice with his sister and went west to the Dakota Territory. See Theodore Roosevelt National Park, “Theodore Roosevelt the Rancher,” National Park Service.
[33] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8. Contemplation (theoria) is the highest activity, which is why a porch, a book, and an unhurried hour are not laziness in the Aristotelian sense. They can be the peak of a human life if the rest of the life has been ordered toward virtue.
[34] Charity that preserves agency predates the welfare state. The Christian distinction between helping a neighbor and creating a client runs from the Pauline collections for the poor to later debates inside the Church of England itself.
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.
For me, the standard is Jonathan Edwards on human government. The new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible arrived in August of 2026. I opened it on a hot afternoon after riding roller coasters at Kings Island with two of my grandchildren. That is not a cute detail. That is the point. Good government is supposed to protect ordinary life — grandchildren, county fairs, Sunday school, a sheriff who still thinks Butler County can look a little like Mayberry and a little like a serious modern county at the same time.
If Yale and Princeton were like they were during Jonathan Edwards’s time, I would likely have several PhDs by now, but over time, they have turned into globalist institutions, which I found repulsive when I was of college age. They have turned into anti-American insurgent places that ruin the minds of young people. But, Yale has preserved Edwards’s papers. The Study Bible puts his notes, essays, Resolutions, and miscellanies system next to the New King James text.[1][2] Everybody in this party who claims to care about order, virtue, and limited government should own a copy and actually read it. I am a small-government kind of person. I was Tea Party. I was Reform Party in the 1990s. I was talking about Donald Trump in 1999 when he was circling the Reform Party nomination against Pat Buchanan.[3] I have been in human communication and local politics for thirty years. I know what an intramural fight looks like. I also know what it costs voters.
What Jonathan Edwards Meant by Human Government
Good government as a moral order, not a branding exercise
Edwards believed that good government belongs to the highest moral order of a proper civilization.[4] I agree with him. That does not make me a big-government conservative. It makes me a person who thinks the point of the smaller government we do have is to be good — competent, restrained, honest, and aimed at the public good, not at the vanity of the people holding powerful positions.
You do not get into government to make a name for yourself. You get into government so that people have representatives. You want those representatives to be as good as possible. There is only one legitimate motivation: to make the thing good in the Edwards sense — an earthly office that still answers to a moral law it did not invent.
“The enjoyment of [God] is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.”
— Jonathan Edwards, as featured in The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2026)
That sentence is about God. It is also a warning about politics. If your happiness is a title on a sample ballot, a headline, or the humiliation of a rival, you are already in the wrong temple. The party slate card exists so voters can find good candidates. It does not exist so that somebody can settle a score.
Romans 13 is not a revenge verse
Edwards read civil authority inside God’s moral government of the world.[5] Magistrates exist. They are not priests. They are not avengers of private grudges. They are supposed to keep the peace, punish actual wrongdoing, and leave room for the rest of life — family, work, church, property — to go on.
That is why I keep saying the same sentence to people who want to turn the Butler County Republican Party into a revenge shop: you do not do politics for revenge. You do not look to even scores even if you were bullied. You do not use the power of government, or the machinery of a party, to bully everybody else. If you cannot serve voters, you are not in it for the right reasons.
Why This Bible Arrived on Time
Kings Island, two grandchildren, and page 1176
I had a rare day with two of my grandchildren at Kings Island, late in the summer season. We rode the big coasters. It got hot. We came home for lunch and a cool-down. The box had been dropped at the house. I knew what it was. I sat down with that Bible for an hour while the kids recovered, and then we went back to the park to swim.
People can laugh at a grown man getting quiet over a study Bible. Fine. I have spent decades looking for a single object that holds theology, philosophy, and a usable picture of public life in one binding. This one does. There is an essay on human government that I keep pointing people to — in my copy it sits around page 1176 — and just over the next page there is another piece on the means of grace. The book is full of that mixture: doctrine with a spine, and a vision of what a people owe each other when they try to govern.
Edwards was thrown out of his own church
Edwards served the Northampton church for twenty-three years. He is the man of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”[6] By 1750 a majority of the congregation voted him out. He preached a farewell sermon and left.[7][8] He went to Stockbridge to teach and minister among Native Americans, a smaller work, after a public humiliation. Later he was respected enough to become president of the College of New Jersey — Princeton — and then he died. Yale keeps the papers. Princeton had the office. The church that made him famous also removed him.
He was not removed because he had become a thief. He was removed because he was more exacting than the politics of the room would bear. That is a lesson with teeth. Sometimes the righteous thing is to stay and fight. Sometimes the righteous thing is to step out of an equation you can no longer serve well, because the people have decided they do not want you. The question is never “What feeds my name?” The question is “What actually produces good government for the people in front of us?”
I Have Zero Tolerance for Bullies
I can already hear it: then why do you support Sheriff Jones? People call him rough. Some people call him a bully.
I have had no tolerance for bullies my entire life. I have gotten into fights over people being picked on, often. I do not care if the target is a man or a woman, big or small. I do not care which party the bully belongs to. I have no patience for personality types who use an office to get revenge on rivals.
That standard cuts in every direction. It cuts against Democrats who treat government as a punishment engine. It cuts against Republicans who treat a county central committee like a private army. It cuts against anyone who thinks the point of winning is to make the other guy miserable.
Sheriff Jones and I have not always been the best of friends. I still want him in the party. Those two sentences can both be true if you believe, with Edwards, that the office is larger than the grudge.
Sheriff Richard Jones Is My Guy
A big tent means you keep the sheriff
I like Sheriff Richard K. Jones.[9] I want Sheriff Jones in the Butler County Republican Party. I have said, more than once, that he sometimes sounds like he still has a Democrat nerve in him on a public-sector question. Good. I want a Republican Party big enough to pull people who left the other side. I want a party that can stand on a stage with him and not flinch.
He has been sheriff across multiple terms. I want him around for as long as he wants the job and the voters still give it to him. When he goes on international outlets and talks about immigration and the jail, I want him able to say he is a member of this county Republican Party. I do not want him pushed into independent exile because a faction could not share a room with him.
Seven years of silence, one parking lot, two hats
In 2011 Ohio went to war with itself over Senate Bill 5 and public-sector unions.[10] I was on one side of that fight. Sheriff Jones was not with the Tea Party types who got burned when the referendum turned. We were both on WLW in those years.[11] He was friendly with Willie. I was friendly with Doc Thompson. Doc got pushed off, went elsewhere, and later died after being hit by a train under circumstances people still talk about. Willie is still on the air. Jones is still on the air with him.
After that bill, Sheriff Jones and I did not talk for six or seven years. We would be at the same events and walk past each other. Then I took my family to Charleston, South Carolina, for a week. Charleston is a fine city. People treat it like one of the best places in the world. My daughters and I love pirate history; you cannot stand in that harbor without thinking of Blackbeard and of the Civil War forts. I liked it. I came home happier to see Butler County.
That is not a cheap patriotic line. You do not know what you have until you have walked a “better” place and realized your own county is just as good if not better in many ways, working farms, and a party that has actually produced national figures.[12] JD Vance came out of this ground. Vivek Ramaswamy has been in our orbit. Warren Davidson’s office in Washington has been a good shop. Bernie Moreno has been a serious addition.[13] Interns and staff I met this year in those offices were the kind of young people who make you think the farm system still works.
Jones and I walked out of an event toward the cars. He broke the ice. He liked my hat. I liked his hat. I liked his boots. I like his Andy Griffith picture of what a sheriff’s office should feel like. We started talking again. It took almost eight years.
The grand jury and the jail tour
I am not young. I am in my senior stretch of life, around sixty as of 2026. One of the best civic jobs I have ever held was foreman of a Butler County grand jury. It was not the money. It was the view.
People called me during that season to whisper about “corruption” in the sheriff’s office and the prosecutor’s office. That is what people do when they do not get the outcome they wanted, humans try to create political pull to get rid of people they don’t want to work with. I like our prosecutor’s office. I like Mary Swain a great deal.[14][15] I like the people who actually carry files upstairs to the prosecutors’ offices, which I was able to tour and I consider to be one of the finest places on earth.
The grand-jury room sits on the same floor as the clerk’s world. You take indictments up. You meet the assistants. You meet the deputies who work child-exploitation cases and drug cases. You get answers to questions you have had. And because a grand jury should understand what it is doing when it votes a true bill, Sheriff Jones gave me a tour of the jail. We talked. When his book came out he told me about it. I read it and reviewed it. I recommend it very highly.
That is the other side of the man some people only meet in a fight. If you cannot work with that, you probably do not have the temperament for coalition politics.
Nancy Nix Is the Benchmark
If Sheriff Jones is the law-and-order pillar I want inside the big Republican tent, Nancy Nix is the governing temperament I want the rest of the party to study.[16] I have said it until people are tired of hearing it. She pours hours into this party. She is good government from top to bottom. When she walks into a room, the room still works. That is a rare skill.
I liked Roger Reynolds for a long time. I was on his side until he turned his fight against Nancy Nix.[17] Clearing your name after a legal disaster is one thing. Using the wreckage to tear down a sitting officeholder who actually runs the shop is another. Parties are supposed to put a slate card in front of voters. They are not supposed to become instruments for a man who cares more about his name than about the taxpayers in the file.
George Lang and Debbie can sit down with almost anybody and not get moved off their mark. That is a Trump skill too: talk to the person across the table, find the deal, do not surrender the spine. I have asked George more than once whether Kathy Wyenandt (the area Democrat) can be pulled toward the party instead of left as a permanent foreign object working the community against itself. I would rather recruit than exile. Same rule as Jones. A bigger tent is not a mushier platform. It is a refusal to donate our own people to the other side because we enjoyed a feud.
What a County Party Is Actually For
Volunteers, yard signs, and jobs that do not pay
Most of the jobs that make a county party run do not pay. People do them because they love the idea of a slate card voters can trust. They stand at the county fair. They work a fundraiser. They put a name on a yard-sign list. When those people are disparaged in the paper, of course they get hurt. That does not make them fragile. It makes them human.
The job of party leadership is to keep that machine pointed at voters. A unified party that serves voters will beat a pure party that serves a clique. Purity spirals are how you lose townships you used to win in your sleep.
Butler County is a Republican county that still has to earn it
Most people in Butler County gravitate Republican. That is a blessing and a trap. It is hard to keep an identity when you win so often that winning starts to feel like weather. It is hard to remember that the point is still to make government good. Todd Hall, as chairman, understood a lot of that. I try to stay out of internal knives as much as I can, because I want the system to work and I want people to feel engaged.
Thomas Hall and Sheriff Jones had their differences on policy. They got through it. They use radio well. Once they were fine with each other, Jones and I were fine with each other, once again. That is how adults do it. You do not have to marry your coalition partners. You have to stop treating them like enemy combatants.
Trump changed the party. The county still has to govern.
Trump redefined what a Republican powerhouse looks like. The old country-club party cannot pretend he did not happen. He has also, over the years, become something closer to an evangelist of a certain American memory — Mount Rushmore more than permanent Washington. I have become a fan of Washington, D.C., in the years he has been back in the White House. The offices that represent this county have been worth visiting. The city is not the enemy. Drift is the enemy.
The next years will not be as easy as “were you for Trump after 2020.” Everybody had a simple test then. The tests now are messier: energy policy after the FirstEnergy mismanagement of the real message,[18] how statehouse fights land in a sheriff’s office, whether a township trustee race is a farm system or a grudge match, whether we run toward competent people or toward whoever promises to punish last year’s enemy.
A Personal Ledger I Had to Close
Latte Sipping Prostitutes, Lakota, and being left on the air
I am going to tell a story I almost left out, because good government requires that you put some things aside even when people wronged you.
Everybody around here remembers the meltdown on WLW when I called a class of Lakota levy politics what I thought it was. I said people were selling out children to a system that works like a taxpayer-funded babysitting service with a union attached. Democrats piled on. Some Republicans who had been with me went quiet or went woke on the spot. A donor-class press release landed on the Scott Sloan show while I was live. They confronted me on the air.
I got through the interview; it was very difficult. I did not fold. But a lot of people abandoned me when it would have cost them very little to stand there. Todd Hall was one of my people, and when it mattered most, he and many others left me hanging. It took years to get over that. I could have carried a grudge forever. I did not, because I wanted a Republican Party that could still win for the needs of the voters. I remember very well who stood with me and who didn’t, and when people wonder even now why I feel the way I do about certain people and not others, that memory usually gives an easy answer.
That is the whole method. You may feel one way in your chest. If the party is trying to build something voters can use, you park the personal file and work. You handle squabbles another way. You do not burn the machine to warm your pride.
I have a clean record on purpose
I sign my name to what I write. People have been looking me up for years trying to find dirt they could use against me. I have been married to the same person for a long time. I can say, as a man almost sixty, that there is not a woman who can step forward and say I bruised her or hurt her in some way that finds itself on a police report. If you don’t have a clean background, you can’t stand in front of a party and tell other people how to live. Even if you have your side of the story, just being in a story like that shows bad judgment, and it will cause people not to follow you as a leader. You have to be cleaner than clean if you want to hold big responsible seats.
If you want to be a Walmart greeter, you can often get a matter expunged and live a quiet life. If you want to be the head of a political party, or the person who starts busting heads and announcing that there is a new sheriff in town, you do not get that courtesy. Enemies come out. The past comes out. Paying someone to bury a file is not the same as righteousness. The internet keeps what the clerk seals.[19]
I am not interested in ruining people for sport. Plenty of men and women have made mistakes and then put out yard signs, joined a church, and tried to live a second chapter. Redemption is real. Leadership of a party is a different office. It has to be clean enough to survive daylight, because daylight will be applied.
Leadership, Todd Minniear, and the Problem of a Hidden Past
Todd Hall did a lot of unglamorous work in the background. Of course people complain about it, as they do everyone in a responsible seat, and they cling to the fantasy that they could do better if only they had more power. A lot of the people who have been running this thing are tired. They show up unpaid. They love the idea of good government even when the job does not love them back.
People have asked me about running for Liberty Township trustee and school board at Lakota; I get asked about it at least once a week for many years now. I like the trustees we have. I would not shove them aside for a title. People also asked Todd Minniear to step toward more leadership.[20] I have been a fan of that instinct. He has been a great trustee. He has the kind of energy a party uses when it needs a next chapter, and I was thinking of him as the Party Chairman once I knew that Todd Hall and others wanted a break. He and I had a good discussion not very long ago about Roger Reynolds; Todd was on one side of the discussion, and I was on the other. We didn’t argue about it, we instead put our focus on the things we shared in common.
If you are carrying material that political enemies can turn into a wrecking ball. I will not pretend that “nobody will notice” is a strategy. Democrats already collect this stuff and wait. Factional Republicans will use it too if the fight gets personal. That is not theory.
How to Have a Fight Without Becoming the Fight
A few rules:
1. Serve voters first. If a move does not make the ballot better, it is probably vanity.
2. Keep Sheriff Jones in the party. A Republican Party that exiles its own long-serving sheriff is not tough. It is insecure.
3. Treat Nancy Nix as a working model, not as a faction mascot. Rooms that light up when she enters are rooms that can still govern well, learn from her.
4. Recruit before you purge. Democrats who can live with limited government are more valuable than Republicans who only live to punish Republicans.
5. Do not use government, or party office, to even a private score. That is Edwards in one line.
6. If you want the chair, assume every sealed thing will be unsealed in public. Plan for that before you run, not after the first mailer.
7. Put grudges in a private drawer when the county needs a unified card. You can still be a man. You do not have to be a faction.
What Voters Actually Buy When They Buy a Party
Donors and church voters do not want the same conversation in the same hour. That is fine. The chairman’s job is to put them in enough of the same room that candidates can raise money without becoming a different species from the people who staff the polls. If you cannot do that, you do not have a party. You have a club.
I want GOP picnics that feel like a county still knows how to stand around a grill. I liked watching the energy when national operators came through Ross and people actually showed up. I want campfire competence. People do not have to agree on every shade of red. They can still agree that Sunday school is not a joke and that a sheriff’s office is not a think tank.
You can make a million dollars in a lot of businesses. You cannot easily build good government. It costs time, reputation, and the ability to absorb a newspaper hit without setting the headquarters on fire. People who pour themselves into this work deserve leaders who understand that cost.
Edwards lost Northampton and still did the next faithful job. That is available to anyone in this county who is about to lose a fight. It is also a warning to anyone who thinks winning a fight is the same thing as being right. We will all stand in a different dock than a central committee. That is the farewell sermon. It is a better political theory than most of what gets posted after a poorly run meeting.
The Need
Buy the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Read the government material. Read the farewell sermon. Then look at Butler County and ask a simple question: are we building a party voters can take pride in, or are we building a revenge path for people whose feelings got hurt?
I support Sheriff Richard Jones. I support a big-tent Republican Party that recruits instead of exiles. I support Nancy Nix as the working picture of countywide competence. I want new leadership that can stand daylight. I do not want scandals in the background of the people who hold the keys, and I do not want the keys used to punish rivals.
That is the Edwards form of Republican politics. It is also just adulthood. Butler County has given the country more than its share of serious people. We should act like it.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Jonathan Edwards and moral government
Edwards, Jonathan. A Farewell Sermon Preached at the First Precinct in Northampton. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1751. Reprinted in The Works of President Edwards and in modern sermon collections.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 22. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8, Ethical Writings. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Everhard, Matthew, ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.
Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. http://edwards.yale.edu.
Scripture
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Romans 13; 1 Timothy 2:1–2; 1 Peter 2:13–17; 2 Corinthians 1:14.
[2] Yale University’s Jonathan Edwards Center hosts The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online at http://edwards.yale.edu. Edwards himself was not president of Yale. He served as the third president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1758 and died shortly after taking office.
[3] The Reform Party presidential contest of 2000 included Patrick J. Buchanan and a brief exploratory effort by Donald J. Trump in 1999–2000. Trump later ran as a Republican and won the presidency in 2016 and 2024.
[4] Edwards’s most sustained treatment of government is not a single short “essay on human government” in the modern magazine sense. It is woven through his moral theology: God’s moral government of the world, the duty of magistrates, and the obligation of citizens. See especially “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners”; sermons on Romans 13; and the dissertation The Nature of True Virtue. The Study Bible gathers related notes and essays beside the biblical text. Page references in this piece follow the author’s personal copy.
[5] Romans 13:1–7; 1 Timothy 2:1–2; 1 Peter 2:13–17. Edwards read civil authority as part of God’s moral government, not as a substitute for the church and not as a theater for private vengeance.
[6] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. Standard text in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 22, Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742 (New Haven: Yale University Press).
[7] On June 22, 1750, after twenty-three years as pastor of the Northampton church, Edwards was dismissed following a congregational vote over qualifications for church membership (the “communion controversy”). He preached A Farewell Sermon on 2 Corinthians 1:14. He then served the Stockbridge mission among Native Americans before his Princeton appointment.
[8] Edwards, A Farewell Sermon (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1751). The sermon’s central claim is that pastor and people will meet again before Christ’s tribunal, where controversies and treatment of one another will be judged. That is the moral frame the author applies to party fights.
[9] Richard K. Jones, 45th Sheriff of Butler County, Ohio. Born Hamilton, Ohio, October 11, 1953. Elected sheriff in 2004; took office January 3, 2005; subsequently re-elected, including 2020 and 2024. Official biography: https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff.
[10] Ohio Senate Bill 5 (2011) restricted collective bargaining for public employees. It passed the General Assembly and was signed by Governor John Kasich, then repealed by statewide referendum (Issue 2) in November 2011. The fight split many Ohio Republicans from public-safety unions and local officials.
[11] WLW (700 AM), Cincinnati. Long-running talk hosts associated with this period include Doc Thompson and Willie. The Lakota schools controversy and on-air confrontations described here are from the author’s firsthand radio work, not from a single official transcript.
[12] Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter, and the early-eighteenth-century pirate history of the Carolina coast (including Edward Teach, “Blackbeard”) are standard public history. The comparison to Butler County is the author’s travel observation.
[13] Vivek Ramaswamy (Ohio) and J.D. Vance (Middletown, Butler County) are the two most nationally visible political figures to come out of the modern Ohio / Butler County conservative pipeline. Vance is Vice President of the United States as of 2025. Rep. Warren Davidson represents Ohio’s 8th Congressional District. Bernie Moreno was elected U.S. Senator from Ohio in 2024.
[14] Mary L. Swain, Butler County Clerk of Courts. Michael T. Gmoser, Butler County Prosecuting Attorney. Both Republicans holding countywide office as of 2024–2026. See Ballotpedia, Butler County, Ohio, elections, 2024.
[15] Ohio grand juries are convened under the Ohio Revised Code and local court practice. Foreman service is a civic appointment. Descriptions of jail tours and floor layout are from the author’s service and are not a disclosure of secret grand-jury deliberations or votes.
[16] Nancy Nix, CPA, Butler County Auditor. Appointed February 2023 by the Butler County Republican Party Central Committee after the felony conviction and removal of Auditor Roger Reynolds; sworn in February 13, 2023; elected November 2024. Previously Butler County Treasurer for nearly sixteen years. Office: https://auditor.bcohio.gov.
[17] Roger Reynolds, former Butler County Auditor, was convicted in December 2022 of a felony count of unlawful interest in a public contract related to Lakota Local Schools and a golf-training facility. He was removed from office. In 2024 he unsuccessfully sought to oust Auditor Nancy Nix through Ohio Supreme Court action and a Board of Elections protest. See Journal-News coverage, 2023–2024.
[18] FirstEnergy / House Bill 6 is the shorthand for Ohio’s 2019 nuclear-and-coal subsidy scandal, which produced federal prosecutions and years of state-level fallout. Democrats and Republicans both own pieces of the policy environment that made Ohio’s generation politics toxic. The point in this essay is party discipline after a scandal, not a legal brief.
[19] On public records, expungement, and political research: Ohio sealing and expungement statutes do not erase every trace of a matter from news archives, court indexes, or opposition research files. Leadership of a county party is a public role. That is a practical warning, not a legal opinion.
[20] Todd Hall has served as Executive Chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. See butlercountygop.org. Todd Minniear ran for Liberty Township Trustee (at-large) in 2025. References here to party leadership conversations are the author’s personal political judgment, not an official party endorsement.
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.
People have been asking me what I am doing. They have wondered about me. They have watched the episodes, read the blog, seen me in rooms around Butler County for years, and then I went quiet in the way a person goes quiet when they are changing the work under their feet and are not ready to turn it into content.
I am not looking for a safe job that pays well so I can run out the clock. I have had those offers. I appreciate them. I am affiliating myself with a team of very sharp engineers and builders at Volynt Aero, as a senior consultant, with a path toward the COO seat, and I am doing it because I am in a stage of life where I want to swing for the fences. Not out of desperation. Out of refusal. I have watched too many capable people spend their best remaining years hitting ground balls and calling it wisdom.[1][2]
On Monday, September 21, 2026, at 7:00 p.m., at 20 South Elm Street, Oxford, Ohio 45056, inside Fisher Innovation College@Elm on Miami University’s campus, we are going to talk in public about economic vitality and what I believe is an enormous opportunity for Butler County. The event is free. Nobody is asking you to bring a checkbook. Just eat some snacks, shake hands, and hear the plan. I told my wife to go to Costco and get Doritos, punch, and whatever else makes a room feel welcoming instead of processed. That is the tone—serious work. Easy room. If you have wanted a reason to see me after a decade of reading or listening, that is the date. My schedule jumps around a lot, but I will be there for this.[3][4]
Oxford. The university town on the west side of the county. The building is the renovated old food-service and workforce site at 20 S. Elm Street — College@Elm — not a lecture hall buried in the academic core. Volynt Aero lists that building as its home. Miami’s Advanced Air Mobility Hub lives in that same incubator. The door you want is on Elm.[1][2][3][5]
I still dislike the word consultant, even though I now wear it, because I spent years chained to a success I had already built, and I felt embarrassed standing next to men who had already swung and connected. And why I would rather strike out in public, in Butler County, in the aerospace market I have been talking about for years, than spend the rest of my working life protecting ground that other people were already trying to steal.
I am a job-creator kind of person. I want to make jobs. I do not want to get a job someone else already made. That distinction sounds like a slogan until you have lived both sides of it. Most of the professional class measures adulthood by getting a job. Making jobs is how a county stays alive. I am happiest when I create work for other people—hundreds, or thousands. If I can help build something that employs a thousand people or more, that is the scoreboard I care about. Upper mobility. Payrolls that put gas in cars. Families that can stay in Butler County instead of exporting their kids to Texas, North Carolina, or the coasts and then coming home at Christmas to tell us how much better the schools are somewhere else.
I have done versions of this before. I have hired. I have built programs. I have kept a business alive longer than I wanted to because I brought people into it and felt responsible for the lives attached to those paychecks. That loyalty was not branding. It cost me years. It also taught me the thing the consultant class never learns: once you make something valuable, you become a target. Pirates do not always arrive with hooks and flags. Sometimes they arrive with decks, retainers, and a vocabulary about “professionalizing the operation.”
Go back to 2019. We had a Trump rally at a place where I had spent much of my life building a business. The owner was my friend. I stayed with that business a long time because of that friendship and because I didn’t want to deal with the woke corporatism that evolved from 2015 through 2020. Then COVID. Then the years after COVID, when the work stopped being about building and started being about keeping the lights on for people I had hired. I felt chained to their ability to put gas in the car. In a lot of ways I felt like I was lashed to a white whale. From the outside, that can look like success. The people who still had jobs were glad the jobs existed. I was glad they still had them. Inside, I was resentful — not of the people, of the process. I had created jobs, and then I became the janitor of those jobs while other people bought in, layered in, and tried to change what I didn’t want changed.[6]
It felt like trying to stay married to someone who wanted to cheat. Every time you turned around, they were climbing out a window toward some new lover with a fancier spreadsheet and phony EBITA numbers propped up by a shell game. I poured my heart into a company I didn’t fully control. Other people wanted to change it. I didn’t like the changes or the people who came with them. I still liked the people I had encouraged to become part of it. So I stayed. I defended. I hit ground balls to advance other people already safely on base. I kept the lights on.
Over the last couple of years, I went through multiple cycles of consulting firms imposed on me by, come what may, financial institutions who thought they knew best, after the best was already placed in their lap and worked out for them. Three waves. Then a fourth. I will say it the way I say it when I am not dressing it up for a chamber breakfast: a lot of them are dumb as rocks, and I do not mean to insult rocks. They are paid like industry professionals while the world under their feet has already changed. They exist to maintain ground already taken. They do not create the ground. They arrive after value exists and explain to the people who made the value how the value should now be managed. That is not a free market. That is a priesthood of fools.[7][8]
I worked at the same place for many years because of loyalty to the owner and because I wanted his family to benefit from what had been built. I still want that. Friendship does not expire because a corporate process gets stupid. But I also wanted an excuse to get away from a machine that had stopped being a build and had become a defense. The first opening that would let me play where I actually wanted to play showed up in these guys at Miami, in vertical takeoff, in the new space-adjacent aerospace market I have been putting episodes on for a long time. I have been interested in vertical aerospace for years. I wanted into that market for all kinds of reasons. Then my life opened a gap; I met them, I liked them, I wanted them to succeed, and they started introducing me to people. That was the intention. That is why I said yes.
They have introduced me as the coming COO. Right now I am a consultant. A senior consultant. I have a path toward the COO role at the scale they are trying to reach. I was apprehensive about the word. I have been stunned by how many places want me to consult for them. I had personal reservations about putting my name on that label. I still have them. I am also proud to be affiliated with this particular team. The title is not the prize. The prize is whether we can turn a sharp technical package into manufacturing, customers, and jobs.
Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance were at that 2019 rally I hosted. Warren Davidson has been in the orbit. I have had conversations with Bernie Moreno. I had a good talk with Jim Renacci after an event at Jags in West Chester. I have watched a lot of people I know leave the safe lane, take a real risk, and come back with independent wealth—enough to enter politics, or to refuse to be owned by it.[9][10]
Vivek was already on a steep wealth curve then. He wasn’t quite in the billionaire club the way magazines like to print it, but he was headed that way, and since then he’s been in that conversation and has taken the political path back toward Ohio’s governorship. Years later the call came through other people: he wanted to announce a governor’s race at my place, because the place still represented a free-enterprise culture that had not gone fully woke, and because we were doing things that did not look like everybody else. I said yes. I meant yes. I also felt a private embarrassment I should admit here, because if I do not admit it, the rest of this sounds like a victory lap instead of a confession.
When you stand next to people who built or sold large enterprises and then used that capital to change the map, and you are the guy still defending last decade’s success against the fourth wave of consultants, you feel the difference in your chest. They look at you the way a hitting coach looks at a veteran who will not let the bat get through the zone. You are at this stage of life. Why are you hitting ground balls? Why are you taking the walk? Why are you protecting a single when the bases are loaded? You are a guy who could drive the ball with runners on. Why are you trying to beat out a roller to short?
The honest answer, for a long time, was loyalty. Loyalty to the owner who was my friend. Loyalty to the people I hired. I do not apologize for that. I also will not pretend it was the same thing as ambition. Ambition would have left earlier. Loyalty stayed. Then loyalty, after enough waves of professional stupidity, became a kind of self-betrayal. I felt like I was underperforming in front of people I respected. I felt like I was wasting a bat. When Vivek talked about using the place because it still stood for the free-enterprise system, I felt a flicker of pride and a bigger flicker of “I should have more to put on the table than a good venue and a good story about the past.”
I watched them swing. Some of the balls went over the fence. The crowd enjoyed it. The players enjoyed it. Everybody enjoys seeing a ball leave the yard, including the man who hit it. I wanted that feeling again — not the celebrity, the creation. I want to make other people wealthy. I want payrolls large enough that a community can even start talking about abolishing property taxes without gutting the services people actually like. That is a standard, not a slogan. If you are not trying to create billions in new market value, I am not sure the conversation is worth the evening. A few hundred million in annual revenue is what the coastal startup press calls a win. I do not think that is a win. Ten billion in new market growth is the starting point for a conversation about success. To me, success looks like a hundred billion. That is how you change a county instead of decorating it.
I haven’t built a job base that employed a thousand people or more in over a decade. I have been trying to hang on to the success I had already built. That work has its honor. It also became boring to me, and boredom in an operator is a warning light. When the fourth wave of consultants arrived with different ideas about how we should do the thing I had already done, I was happy to leave and not look back. They did not like me. I did not like their ideas. I did not want to be part of another cycle of ground balls. I took the off-ramp. I would rather hit the reset button and start over with people who want to build than spend another year arguing with people who think a slide deck is an airplane. I’m sure I’ll write a book about all this once I get some distance from the immediacy of it all. It will make a very interesting business book. But first, such books are only valuable to people once you are looking back from a position of success; otherwise, it’s just another story about a down-and-out situation. Success has to be attached to the narrative.
That is how I landed at Volynt.
The building matters, and I am going to stay on the building for a minute because “Miami University” is a large map, and people get lost on large maps. College@Elm is Miami’s innovation and workforce hub at 20 S. Elm Street. It used to sit vacant. The university, the City of Oxford, alumni, the state capital budget, and JobsOhio money turned it into a technology, entrepreneurship, and light-manufacturing incubator — office, design and testing, startup space, a workforce resource function, and room for real production instead of just posters about production. Miami alumni Lee and Rosemary Fisher put their name on it. Randi Thomas and the ASPIRE shop treated it as a way to drag Oxford out of an eight-month student economy and toward a twelve-month one. That is the room.[3][4][11][12]
Volynt Aero’s address is that building. Suite language has appeared in their capability materials as 20 S. Elm St., Suite 117. Miami has also stood up an Advanced Air Mobility Hub in the same incubator, aimed at autonomous, hybrid-electric, and eVTOL aircraft, in collaboration with Butler County and Middletown Regional Airports, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Butler Tech, and industry partners including Volynt.[1][2][5]
Volynt is not a passenger flying-taxi pitch dressed up for a TED talk. I need to say that because the popular press only knows one picture of this industry: a four-seat air taxi humming over a downtown skyline in a rendering that has never paid a supplier. The company is building large hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft for cargo logistics, disaster response, contested logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications—ugly work. Useful work. The work that can find a customer before the lifestyle brochure does. They call the aircraft line Vyper in their public materials. The founding team came out of UAS and eVTOL work dating to 2012, including AFWERX Agility Prime flight-test experience on a full-scale electric aircraft; University of Cincinnati aerospace engineering; Rose-Hulman and Illinois mechanical engineering; and FAA experimental airworthiness work. Together, they have forty-plus years of experience in electric vehicles, eVTOL, and manned and uncrewed aircraft. Jeffrey Bennett is the CEO. Justin Jantzen is the CTO. The rest of the technical bench is the kind of bench a county should want to keep.[2][5][13]
They have proposed a Hybrid Propulsion and Energy Lab — the HyPE Lab — at Miami University Airport in Oxford, a facility in the neighborhood of seven million dollars aimed at hybrid-electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and electric aviation development. They have already pulled Ohio Third Frontier / TVSF grant support in partnership with Miami and the Entrepreneurs’ Center. That is not a finished factory. That is a package with technology laid out, customer logic laid out, and a county sitting in the birthplace of powered flight, next to Wright-Patterson, next to a new Butler Tech aviation hangar beside Middletown Regional, next to Joby and BETA and Electra planting metal in the Miami Valley, in a state that has spent years trying to own advanced air mobility instead of applauding it from the stands.[14][15][16][17][18]
Ohio’s own AAM studies are not modest. DriveOhio and the NEXA work done for the state put the prize at roughly thirteen billion dollars in economic activity over twenty-five years, about fifteen thousand jobs, and about two and a half billion in tax revenue — if Ohio actually captures the market. Cargo, emergency services, and vehicle manufacturing are a large share of that stack. That is the lane Volynt is in. I do not treat a consultant forecast as destiny. I have spent too many years watching forecasts get used as incense. I treat the number as a fastball I can see. If the state leaves that stack on the table, California and Texas will take it and send us a newsletter about thought leadership.[19][20]
I want to give this some color, because “economic vitality” is a phrase chambers of commerce use until it means nothing.
Vitality is not a social-hour calendar. Vitality is surplus. It is when a county produces so much new value that young people do not have to leave, old industrial sites get reused, airports become more than weekend-pilot hobbies, and tax fights become less vicious because the base is growing faster than the government. I have spent a lot of my public life as the tax-killer in this county. I didn’t do that because I hate roads, sheriffs, and firehouses. I did it because a government that cannot stop growing will eat a private economy that has stopped growing. The only durable answer is not a clever levy. The durable answer is so much new payroll and new production that the argument changes temperature.
Butler County already has pieces of the machine. Miami’s Oxford campus and the regional campuses. Middletown’s steel and manufacturing memory, including the kind of heavy industry that still knows what a shift is. The I-75 corridor. Two relevant airports inside the conversation — Miami University Airport in Oxford and Middletown Regional — plus CVG as the big-hub partner on the AAM map. Butler Tech’s new aviation center, a roughly fifteen-million-dollar hangar and classroom pile next to the Middletown airport, with county, city, and JobsOhio money in it, training kids who can see an aerospace job without leaving home. And a university incubator on Elm Street, explicitly sold as a way to create year-round work in a town that used to hibernate when students left.[1][15][11]. And let’s not forget about the wonderful Butler County Regional, which has the prospect of enormous significance in a way that it has always been poised to bring forth.
Advanced air mobility is one of the few new industrial stacks that can still be built in the Midwest instead of being imported as a finished product from the coasts. Ohio has been recruiting it on purpose. Joby has been planting manufacturing near Dayton and talking about thousands of jobs and hundreds of aircraft a year if the production curve holds. Electra has committed a huge Ohio production bet out of an MIT classroom idea that turned into a short-takeoff hybrid aircraft and an $850 million manufacturing story in Springfield and Clark County, with job counts in the neighborhood of two thousand. BETA and the National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence in Springfield are part of the same weather system. JobsOhio has treated AAM as a super-sector and has been walking that story all the way to Paris. Hartzell in Piqua certified an electric-aircraft propeller. The FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program is on the 2026 calendar. Ohio entered that fight with a multi-state medical-logistics proposal.[16][17][18][21]
Most of the passenger eVTOL story is still a certification and capital-markets story. That is not an insult. It is a timeline. Certification is slow. Air-taxi unit economics are a sermon until the aircraft is legal, maintainable, and paid for by someone other than a vision fund. The cargo, disaster, defense-adjacent, and mobile-power story can move sooner because the customer is not waiting for a four-seat taxi to become socially fashionable. An uncrewed hybrid aircraft that can haul, generate, and communicate in ugly terrain is a product a government buyer and a logistics company can understand without a lifestyle brochure. That is why I like this package. It is closer to a truck than to a fashion object.
I have talked about the new space economy and vertical aerospace for years. All these things mentioned here are merging at a very unique time in Southern Ohio, and I’ve known it for a long time, and I had felt stuck, unable to participate because of my other commitments. I wanted into that market, not stuck to loyal obligations. Not as a fan. As an operator. I have walked the producer culture at SpaceX and looked at what happens when a company treats manufacturing as the product instead of treating the press release as the product. Reusability. Iteration. Catching the thing and flying it again. That is the version of aerospace I want in Ohio. I do not need Volynt to be SpaceX. I need Volynt to be as serious as SpaceX: close the gap between the drawing and the floor. California and Texas will take a lot of the gold rush. They should not take all of it. Ohio invented powered flight. It should not rent the sequel from the coasts and call the rental economic development.
There is a second vitality problem I will not dance around. A lot of American corporate culture imported a compliance religion that I believe tracks, in spirit if not in every memo, to the same managerial habits that made Wall Street comfortable with Communist China’s labor and governance model while lecturing American manufacturers about virtue. ESG-era asset managers scolded domestic firms and stayed hungry for China exposure. Larry Fink could write letters telling American CEOs that climate and stakeholders would reshape finance, and the same apparatus could treat Beijing as a growth market. That split personality cost real companies real billions in distracted leadership. It also trained a consultant class to speak fluent morality while missing the factory. I have watched it up close. I have watched financial institutions send in the next wave of advisors because they thought a firm that had not gone woke yet still had juice that could be squeezed if only the culture were more compliant. They do not like Elon Musk. They do not like being told the world will change through building instead of through postings. I have been a target of that instinct. I am done volunteering for it.[22][23][24]
I want to lead a very dramatic change that changes entire industry standards, around the world. I want to help build a company that makes money the old way: a customer pays for a machine that works. Easy money and financial engineering can look like vitality for a while. Then inflation shows up, and the community realizes the jobs were never as solid as the press release. I want the other kind. Output. Exports. Aircraft. Power systems. Maintenance hangars. Suppliers. Kids from Butler Tech and Miami who can stay home and get paid. I want so much money coming into this community that property taxes become a conversation you can have without destroying the services people like. That is where my mind is. Getting on base is not enough.
Swinging for the fences is a moral choice, not a motivational poster. Baseball metaphors get cheap. I am keeping this one because it is the cleanest picture of the decision.
Most people in operating roles at this stage of life take the safe route. Get on base. Take the walk. Protect the pension. Let someone else hit the homer. You have already done the hard thing once. Now you need to keep your place in the lineup. I understand that instinct. I rejected it.
Swinging for the fences can end in a strikeout. I know that. I am a realist in business. Success is not entirely up to me. Other people have to get on base. The pitcher has to leave a pitch you can actually hit. Certification, capital, customers, suppliers, and timing all have to arrive in something like the right order. I have said on the air that this is a poker game more than a guaranteed jackpot. The risk is real. I do not think the risk is stupid. They have a gap I think they can close. I know what I can do in an operating seat. That part is not in doubt in my mind. I have done versions of it many times. The barrier most early technical teams cannot cross is not the CAD model. It is the factory floor, the hiring machine, the customer close, and the culture that does not dissolve when the first institutional money arrives. In this case, I see all those coming together in very unique and profitable ways. It’s always about timing, and the timing for this is right now.
Even so, a strikeout while swinging for the fence feels more honest to me than a career of ground balls. I have wanted a window to build from the ground up again. I got one. Before the window closes, I want a grand slam for Butler County — or at least a swing that everybody in the stands can respect. Safety is not my default setting. Loyalty is. Those two traits fought each other for years. Loyalty won, until the fourth wave of consultants made it obvious that staying was no longer protecting the people I hired. It was protecting a process I did not believe in.
I enjoy risk. I enjoy my life most when there is real risk in it. People who have known me a long time know that. They also know I will hang onto a job base I created longer than a purely rational careerist would, because I do not like being the person who collected a check and left other people’s mortgages on the table. When the money showed up to go somewhere else, and I knew the new layer was going to take it in a direction I would not sign off on, I did not feel like I was letting anybody down by leaving. I felt like I was buying my freedom from a process that had already decided I was the problem.
I want to be a version, in Ohio, of what the serious aerospace builders are doing in Texas. I expect that of myself. I was embarrassed, in those conversations with people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Bernie Moreno who had already swung and connected in their own lives, because I could hear the unasked question from them: you love the free-enterprise system enough to host a speech, why aren’t you in the game at that scale? I hosted the speech. I meant it. I also needed a moment of my own — the kind where you roll the dice large enough that the win, if it comes, is visible from the rest of the world.
September 21 is not a fundraiser with a soft-ask after the punch. It is not the Rich Hoffman show. It is not a secret society. It is a public conversation about a plan for economic vitality in Butler County, hosted where the work is already living, on a Monday night, with the people doing the engineering in the room. If you come, you will not be listening to me invent a company out of a microphone. You will be listening to why I think this particular team, in this particular building, in this particular county, is a bat worth swinging.
Monday, September 21, 2026. Seven o’clock. Fisher Innovation College@Elm. 20 South Elm Street. Oxford, Ohio 45056. Free. Come as you are.
If the evening works, you will leave less interested in me and more interested in what a serious advanced-air-mobility build could do to the tax base, the talent pipeline, and the self-respect of a manufacturing region that has been told for twenty years that the future lives somewhere else. There is a lot of affiliation possible in this — Miami engineers, Butler Tech kids, airport boards, suppliers who already know composites and power electronics, people across Ohio who are tired of watching the next factory announcement land in another state. I want these guys among the names people mention when they talk about who actually built the upper-mobility market instead of posting about it on LinkedIn.
Let me stay in Butler County long enough that the vitality claim isn’t a vibe.
This county sits between Cincinnati and Dayton with a population now in the high 380,000s to about 400,000 depending on which vintage of the estimate you trust, employment in the neighborhood of 190,000 people, and a local GDP north of twenty billion dollars. Manufacturing is not the largest headcount sector—healthcare and retail usually win that race—but it is still the spine. County profile data puts manufacturing employment in the mid-teens of thousands, with hundreds of manufacturing establishments. That is the difference between a bedroom county and a producing county. Bedroom counties import paychecks and export children. Producing counties keep a reason to stay.[26][27]
I have lived in this county my whole adult life. I did not stay because it was fashionable. I stayed because this is the ground I know, and because I think a person who talks about job creation while quietly arranging his own exit to a coastal zip code is running a different play than the one they are selling. The future I want is not a TED talk in Austin about the Midwest. The future I want is a payroll in Oxford, Middletown, Hamilton, Trenton, West Chester, Fairfield, and the townships not named in the brochures.
Middletown still knows steel. Cleveland-Cliffs putting real capital into Middletown Works is the kind of story that should shame anyone who wrote this valley off as a twentieth-century museum. Hamilton is growing again, according to the latest Census slice of incorporated places. Oxford shrinks a little when the student count wobbles, which is exactly why College@Elm was sold as a twelve-month economy instead of an eight-month one. The I-75 corridor still moves freight. The airports are not theoretical. Miami University Airport is a tool if someone treats it as one. Middletown Regional now has a Butler Tech aviation hangar next door — roughly thirty thousand square feet and fifteen million dollars, with millions from the county commissioners, JobsOhio, and the city — so a kid can learn airframes and powerplants without buying a plane ticket to Dayton on the first day of class.[28][15][11]
That is the county I am talking about on the 21st. Not a fantasy county. This one.
I should talk about the industry itself, because vitality without an industry is just a mood.
The Wright brothers did not invent flight so Ohio could become a spectator. Huffman Prairie is a cow pasture with a better story than most nations ever get, and Wright-Patterson plus the Air Force Research Laboratory turned that story into a century of metal, propulsion, sensors, and people who know how to hold a tolerance. The National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence in Springfield gave the new stack a hangar and a test culture. Ohio was early on beyond-visual-line-of-sight work. JobsOhio has been walking AAM around the world as a super-sector. That is nothing. It is also not finished. A super-sector that does not produce aircraft, batteries, blades, software, and trained hands in this state is just a brand.[16][21]
Joby is the loudest nearby proof. In 2023, the state stood at Hawthorn Hill and announced a Dayton-area manufacturing bet aimed at two thousand jobs, hundreds of millions in investment, and a long-run rate described as up to five hundred aircraft a year if the curve holds. By late 2025 they were making propeller blades in Dayton — thirty blades per aircraft across six rotors, with talk of fifteen thousand blades a year at scale. In January 2026 they bought a 700,000-square-foot building in the Vandalia / Dayton orbit to support a doubling of production toward four aircraft a month in 2027, while California still does final assembly in Marina. That is what a real company looks like when it stops rendering and starts buying floor. I do not work for Joby. I am not pretending Volynt is Joby. I am saying the weather system is here, and a county that refuses to fly in that weather is choosing to stay on the ground for sport, and just hitting ground balls when they should be home runs.[18][29][30]
Electra is the other loud proof. An MIT classroom argument about short takeoff versus pure eVTOL turned into a hybrid-aircraft story, then into an $850 million Ohio manufacturing commitment in Springfield and Clark County, with job figures in the neighborhood of two thousand. That architecture differs from Volynt’s unmanned hybrid cargo and power mission, and that is the point. A healthy industrial stack is not one company. It is a density of companies that can share suppliers, schools, airports, and a labor pool that already knows composites, wiring harnesses, thermal problems, and shift work.[17]
BETA, Wisk, Archer, and the rest of the passenger field will keep eating capital and calendar until the FAA is satisfied. That is their fight. Ohio’s eIPP proposal — medical cargo, multi-state coordination, existing infrastructure north of a billion dollars already in the AAM pipeline by the state’s telling — is an attempt to make the fight operational instead of ceremonial.[21]
Volynt’s lane is the one I keep coming back to because it does not need a downtown skyline to make sense. Contested logistics. Disaster. Mobile power. Forward comms. Cargo that does not care whether the landing zone has a concourse. Hybrid propulsion because batteries alone still lose arguments with range, weather, and payload. Unmanned because the scarce resource in a bad place is often the trained crew, not the box. If you have listened to me talk about cargo drones, battlefield and hurricane power, and the difference between a toy and a truck, this is that conversation with a company attached to it.[2][5][13]
I have been drawing and talking through those vehicles for a long time — American-flag and camouflage workhorses, five-hundred-pound-class cargo, relief power after a storm, the ugly missions that do not photograph like an air taxi over a football stadium. The point of affiliation is not that I became a CAD operator. The point is that I know what it looks like when a technical team has the machine but doesn’t yet have the operating company around it. That gap is where COOs either earn their keep or become another slide.
What do I think I bring? I am not going to write myself a brochure. I will say this. I have hired at scale. I have built programs. I have kept operations alive under pressure. I have sat through the consultant priesthood, and I know which parts of their language are anesthesia. I have a public voice in this county, which is either an asset or a liability depending on whether you want the work known. I want the work known. I want suppliers to walk in. I want kids from Butler Tech to see a ladder. I want Miami engineers to have a reason to stay on Elm Street after graduation instead of taking the first offer that spells California correctly. I want political people who talk about jobs to have to look at an actual floor instead of a resolution.
I also want to be honest about scale. Volynt is early. Public profiles put the firm in the small-headcount startup band, founded in 2024, grant-supported, incubator-housed, airport-lab proposed. That is not a criticism. That is the inning. I am walking in at the inning where the bat still matters.
People will ask why a person who distrusts consultants became one. I have answered it, and I will answer it again because the contradiction is the point. I distrust consultants as a class because the class profits from ambiguity and from other people’s sunk costs. I accepted this particular affiliation because the team asked me to help them become a company, not to help them become a presentation about a company. If that changes — if the work becomes another layer of process laid on top of people who actually know how to build aircraft — I will not stay for the fee. I have already lived that movie. I did not like the ending.
The same is true of the COO language. A COO at this stage is not a parking place for a résumé. A COO at this stage is the person who turns a technical core into hiring, suppliers, quality, customers, cash discipline, and a culture that can survive the first serious outside money. Most startups die in that translation. They have smart founders and a concept that connects, and they cannot get distance. I think I can get them distance. That is the only reason to say the letters out loud. A COO has to be top notch and able to build at scale to achieve the kind of revenue I think is meaningful, and you won’t get that by playing it safe and hitting ground balls.
I want to address a risk that the safe people often overlook. Risk isn’t the same as recklessness. Recklessness is swinging at everything. Risk is knowing the count, knowing the pitcher, and still letting the bat go because a walk will not change the game. I have been offered safe work that paid well. I know what that work is. It is a ground ball with a 401(k). It is a walk with better catering. It is other people’s home runs. I have lost years to loyalty, and I am not going to lose the next window to comfort. Comfort is how a producing region becomes a commenting region.
A cultural fight runs beneath the industrial one, and I am not going to pretend I do not see it. LinkedIn-era corporate America learned a language that came into American firms through compliance, banking, and the HR stack, and a lot of that language treats production as a moral problem to be managed instead of a good to be multiplied. I have called that language anti-American in the sense that it distrusts the producer and trusts the administrator. I have called out the China contradiction because it is the tell. If your virtue system cannot survive contact with the actual labor and governance model of the country that ate so much of our manufacturing, your virtue system is a costume. I don’t want a company that puts on the costume to raise a round. I want a company that makes a machine a customer will pay for, then makes another one faster.[22][23][24]
That is why I talk about SpaceX the way I do. Not because I think every Ohio startup is going to catch a booster. Because the method is the method: iterate in public, treat the factory as the product, refuse the cost-plus fog, and accept that some days the thing blows up and you learn. The consultant class hates that method because it makes their timelines look like prayer. I like that method because it is the only one that has recently changed what a country can do in the air.
I also like it because it creates the thing I actually want to be judged by. Jobs. Not jobs as a press-release noun. Jobs as a person who can buy a house in this county, raise children who do not have to apologize for staying, and look at a factory or a hangar and know the work is real. I have not had a run at a thousand-plus job base in more than ten years. That sentence bothers me. It should. A person who knows how to do a thing and spends a decade defending a smaller version of the thing is not being humble. They are being delayed.
Vertical aerospace does not sit in a vacuum. The same decade that made reusable orbital machines ordinary made a lot of people rich and made a lot of other people angry that wealth could still be created without a committee. I have said that a few hundred million in revenue is not the definition of a serious company in this era. I meant it. The markets being built around launch, satellite constellations, lunar logistics, point-to-point cargo, and now advanced air mobility are not cottage markets. They are the next industrial revolution, and they still have an American accent if we keep it. If we treat them as branding exercises for cities that want to look modern, the accent moves to Shenzhen, to a Gulf sovereign fund, or to whatever coastal firm learned to speak Ohio long enough to take the incentive and leave the toolpath somewhere else.
Vertical takeoff is the part of that revolution that touches a county like mine first. You do not need a Cape to build a hybrid cargo aircraft. You need engineers, a hangar, a certification strategy, suppliers, and a customer with a problem a road cannot solve. Disaster is that customer. Defense logistics is that customer. A hospital network that cannot wait for a truck in snow is that customer. A grid that dies in a hurricane is that customer. I have watched too many AAM conversations start at the air-taxi rendering and stay there until the money gets bored. Start at the ugly mission. The ugly mission pays. The pretty mission might pay later.
I kept doing episodes on this because it would have been easier to do another week of political weather. Politics matters. I am not walking away from it. But politics without production is commentary. I got tired of being excellent at commentary while the production problem in my own working life was a whale I was feeding. That is the private engine under this public announcement. I wanted my workdays to match the thing I have been telling this audience is coming.
I also wanted my community to have a shot at the kind of wealth that does not arrive as a transfer payment. Transfer wealth makes clients. Produced wealth makes citizens. I have watched federal money, state money, levy money, and foundation money wash through this region and leave behind a professional class that knows how to apply for the next wash. I am not against a smart grant. Volynt has used Ohio Third Frontier support and I am not going to pretend that seed capital is sinful. I am against a culture that thinks the grant is the business. The business is an aircraft that flies, a customer who pays, a shop that can build the next one, and a payroll that does not vanish when the appropriation cycle turns.
Consultants love the grant cycle. They measure it in the way they understand measurement: hours, decks, compliance language, a ribbon, a quote in the paper. Builders love the second aircraft. The second aircraft is the only metric that means the first one was not a stunt. If you come on the 21st and you only want to hear about the first rendering, you will be in the wrong room. I want to hear about the second, the tenth, and the factory that makes the tenth boring.
Boring is the compliment. SpaceX became important when landing a booster stopped being a miracle and started being a Tuesday. Joby becomes important in Ohio when a blade is just a blade and an airframe is just an airframe and the third shift is staffed. Volynt becomes important in Butler County when a hybrid unmanned cargo aircraft is a product you can point at, not a paragraph in an incubator newsletter. I am here for the Tuesday. I am willing to live through the miracles to get there. I am not willing to live through another decade of process about the miracles.
People who have known me since the car lots and the plants and the courtrooms and the long years in aerospace programs know I do not have a clean corporate story. I have a Western story. I worked young. I learned in rooms that did not care about my feelings. I wrote a book that used a gunfighter as the American stand-in for Sun Tzu and Musashi because I thought this civilization had forgotten that speed plus competence is a moral achievement, not a personality defect. That book was not a merch play. It was meant to give operators a language that did not come from a consultancy or from a monastery. If you read it and then watch me take a safe COO job at a firm that wants to be liked by the same class the book was written against, you should reject the book and I would never want you to do that.[7]
The loyalty years complicate the legend, and I am leaving the complication in. I could tell this as a clean break: woke capital arrived, I left, I found the future. That is too clean. I stayed because of a friend. I stayed because of people I hired. That is a virtue until it becomes a cage. The cage ended when the fourth wave made it obvious that the fight was no longer about the work. It was about who got to narrate the work. I do not give that away anymore.
If you are a young engineer at Miami and you are reading this, I want you in the room. If you are a trades kid at Butler Tech who can hold a torque spec, I want you in the room. If you are a supplier who already sells to the Dayton aerospace pile and you are curious whether Oxford is serious, I want you in the room. If you are a mover and shaker, a trustee, a mayor, or a staffer who only knows this industry from a JobsOhio slide, I want you in the room. If you are a person who has listened to me for ten years and thought I would never come back to a build, I want you in the room so you can see that I meant what I said when it really mattered most. Not when the game was on the line and we were hitting ground balls just to get and stay on base. But to hit home runs and to win the game in ways that nobody ever forgets.
So come to Elm Street.
If you are coming from Middletown or Liberty Township, you are driving west toward Oxford, not south toward Cincinnati and not north toward Dayton unless you like extra highway. You want 20 South Elm Street. You want the College@Elm building. You want 7:00 p.m. on Monday the 21st. Park like a person who has been to Oxford before, the building has its own parking lot— the streets are tight, the students exist, the building is the old food-service site that does not look like a cathedral and should not. Walk in. Eat a Dorito. Shake a hand. Listen to engineers. Listen to why I think this is the fence we need to knock the ball over with the bases loaded.
If you have known me for a long time and you have been waiting for a reason that was not another levy fight or another school-board night, this is a different reason. I still care about taxes, because a county that cannot grow its base will keep reaching into the same pockets. I still care about schools, because a talent pipeline that hates production will not staff a hangar. I still care about the sheriff’s side of a functioning county, because none of this works in a place that cannot keep law and order. But the 21st is not a political rally. It is an economic conversation with a company in the room.
I have said I want wealth large enough that property tax abolition becomes thinkable without wrecking services. People hear that as a joke or as a campaign line. Hear it as a measuring stick. If the new stack in Ohio is really thirteen billion over twenty-five years and fifteen thousand jobs, and if Butler County captures even a serious slice of the cargo, power, training, and supplier work, the tax argument in this county changes. If we capture nothing, we will keep fighting over the same pie and calling the fight civic engagement.[19][20]
I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I thought America needed its own book of strategy — not another imported mystic manual, and not another consultant workbook that teaches people how to manage decline politely. Shooting from the hip, in that book, is not sloppiness. It is mastery under time pressure. I have made a lot of people money before. I have given a lot of people jobs they could live on. I am proud of that. I want to do it again, bigger than I have had a chance to do it in more than a decade. That is why I am standing where I am standing. That is why I stopped protecting the whale. That is why I am swinging.
If the ball goes over the fence, Butler County should feel it in the payrolls. If it does not, at least nobody will be able to say I spent the late innings bunting.
[2] Volynt Aero LinkedIn company page: Oxford headquarters; hybrid unmanned eVTOL mission; 20 S. Elm St. address; Ohio TVSF / Third Frontier grant with Miami University. https://www.linkedin.com/company/volynt-aero
[7] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021).
[8] Rich Hoffman, video commentary on consultants, pricing, and corporate process theater, including “Affordability and Pricing” (2025).
[9] C-SPAN, “Gubernatorial Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R-OH) Campaign in Middletown,” August 2026.
[10] Public biographies and campaign records of Vivek Ramaswamy, J.D. Vance, Warren Davidson, Bernie Moreno, and Jim Renacci, used only to locate the author’s personal encounters.
[11] “The new Fisher Innovation College@Elm center hopes to drive economic growth in the community,” The Miami Student, March 9, 2023.
[12] Miami University, “Miami, city of Oxford receive JobsOhio Vibrant Community Grant for visionary College@Elm project,” June 2021.
[20] Michael J. Dyment and Chase Leeby, Advanced Air Mobility Business Case Assessment: State of Ohio, NEXA Capital Partners / NEXA Advisors.
[21] JobsOhio, Ohio eIPP / AAM coalition materials, including the January 28, 2026 GlobeNewswire release on Ohio’s FAA eVTOL Integration Pilot Program proposal.
[22] “BlackRock’s China Hypocrisy Highlights ESG’s Shortcomings,” National Review, February 3, 2022.
[23] “China Has One Powerful Friend Left in the U.S.: Wall Street,” The Wall Street Journal.
[24] “‘Woke’ Capitalists Sell Out U.S. to China Behind a Mask of Virtue,” RealClearPolitics, June 4, 2020.
[25] Rich Hoffman, author bio and Politics of Heaven project description, The Overmanwarrior / richhoffmanbooks.com.
[26] St. Louis Fed (FRED), Employed Persons in Butler County, OH, 2025 annual: 189,920.
[27] Butler County / BCFA community profile: population near 388,000–399,000; manufacturing employment in the mid-teens of thousands; GDP reported above $22 billion in profile materials.
[28] Journal-News, May 26, 2026, Census estimates on Hamilton and other Butler County cities.
[29] JobsOhio, “Joby Aviation Doubles Down on Ohio,” 2026, and DeWine / Husted 2023 Dayton manufacturing announcement: 2,000 jobs targeted, up to 500 aircraft per year at full ambition.
[30] Dayton Daily News, June 15, 2026, Joby Dayton blade work and Vandalia 700,000-square-foot assembly building.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021. Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. CreateSpace, 2012. Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior (blog). https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/ Hoffman, Rich. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/ Volynt Aero. https://volynt.aero Volynt Aero. Capability Statement. 2024. Miami University ASPIRE. Advanced Air Mobility Hub. Miami University. Economic and Community Impact of College@Elm. DriveOhio. Advanced Air Mobility Economic Impact Study. Dyment, Michael J., and Leeby, Chase. Advanced Air Mobility Business Case Assessment: State of Ohio. JobsOhio eIPP and AAM super-sector materials, 2025–2026. Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal. Womack, Jones, and Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. 1990. Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma. 1997. Grove, Andrew S. Only the Paranoid Survive. 1996. Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup. 2011. Fink, Larry. Annual letters to CEOs, BlackRock, 2018–2025. Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. 2021. Ramaswamy, Vivek. Nation of Victims. 2022. Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy. 2016. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957. Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943. NASA / Booz Allen Hamilton urban air mobility market studies. FAA eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) announcements, 2026. AFWERX Agility Prime program overviews. Kahn, Roger. The Boys of Summer. 1972. Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have watched this movie before. In 2015 and 2016, and again in 2024, the same class of people tried to tell America that Donald Trump’s wealth was a character defect. They said a rich man could not be trusted, that success itself was the indictment, that gold, planes, and golf were proof he was “not like you.” Voters put him in the White House twice anyway, because they understood something the professional scolds never will: independence is an asset. A man who does not need the job is harder to own. That is the lesson Ohio Democrats and a handful of leftover Republican wreckers are now trying to unlearn with Vivek Ramaswamy, and it is why Amy Acton spent Labor Day weekend screaming that you cannot buy Ohio.
She needed a chant. What she got was a gaffe.
The Speech That Sounded Like a Person Running Out of Road
Watch the clip. Acton is at a union picnic with Pete Buttigieg in tow, doing the ritual of the lockdown years: I am a doctor, not a politician, becoming one right in front of your eyes. Then she starts barking that Vivek cannot buy the state, cannot buy Ohio, cannot buy us, cannot buy us, cannot buy us in Ohio, that is the end of this. It is the sort of thing a campaign writes on a whiteboard when the internals look ugly and the only remaining argument is envy. The crowd does not catch fire. She looks like she is trying to start a wave at a funeral.
This is the same Amy Acton Ohio already knows. She ran public health under Mike DeWine when the state was locked down, businesses were smashed, kids were sent home, and “follow the science” became a political religion. She collected awards for it. A lot of Ohioans collected unemployment, missed funerals, and watched their Main Streets die. You can call that public service if you like. I call it the record she has to run on, and it is why the “I’m just like you” routine lands like a lead pipe. She is not just like you. She is the woman who told you to stay home while the people who write the rules kept their salaries.
The wealth attack is even thinner. Vivek flew to watch tennis. He likes tennis. He used to be a ranked junior. He has a court. He went to the U.S. Open and he has been to Paris. Wealthy people do that. Trump never ran from Mar-a-Lago or the golf course; he wore the gold clip and the silk tie and said, yes, I did well, and if you vote for me I will try to make it so you can do well too. That is a producer’s message. Acton’s message is the opposite: he has money, therefore he is illegitimate, therefore hand the keys to the people who want to tax the successful and redistribute the proceeds to the discontented. That is not a governing philosophy. That is a ransom note.
Why Attacking Wealth Is a Loser’s Tell
I have been thinking lately about the Apostle Paul. He was effective in part because he had standing and independence. He was not a ward of the movement. He could travel, argue, and endure because he was not begging the crowd for his next meal. Politics is not the church, but the principle is the same. A candidate who has already won in the private economy does not need Columbus the way a career public-health administrator needs Columbus. Vivek does not need a government job. That is supposed to be a feature. The people yelling “you can’t buy Ohio” are announcing that they cannot raise comparable money and cannot compete on growth, so they will compete on resentment.
David Pepper and the rest of the chorus have been working this line for months: billionaire, private jet, not one of us. Fine. Then explain why Trump’s jets and clubs did not stop two national victories, and why Ohioans who want plants, capital, and jobs might prefer a man who has already built companies to a woman whose signature achievement was closing the state. You can dislike Vivek’s style. You can argue policy. What you cannot do, with a straight face, is pretend that enjoying a tennis match is a civic crime while the alternative is more of the administrative state that already had its turn.
The other half of this farce is intra-Republican sabotage. After a primary, Democrats lock arms around whoever they nominated, even when she sounds like a chalkboard dragged down a stairwell. A slice of the right still wants to pick the scab. Nick Fuentes types, leftover primary rivals, the professional “I told you so” circuit—anyone who would rather be right about a Republican’s flaws than win the state—keep feeding the same clip. They did it to Trump in 2016 and 2024. He won anyway because voters vote their interest when the noise dies down. A good economy and job creators in your state beat a sermon about how the other guy’s plane is too nice.
Then Came the Fair, and the Overnight Conversion of a Shove Into an Assassination Plot
The timing is the tell. After the Labor Day chant made her look unhinged, the campaign needed a new story. Sunday at the Canfield Fair, a 38-year-old local named Patrick Havas pushed through a tent crowd toward Acton with a phone up, as if he were recording or trying to get close enough to be seen. He knocked over older people. Security took him down. After the fact, deputies found two pistols and a Taser-style device on him. He did not draw the guns. He did not fire. He did not brandish. Ohio is a constitutional-carry state. Carrying is not the same thing as attempting murder. The charges reported were disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault for the people he knocked down. Acton was unhurt. The people who fell were assessed and, according to the sheriff, did not seek further treatment.
That is a bad scene at a fair. It is not a martyrdom. Campaign statements still said an “armed individual lunged” and injured multiple people. National copy followed the verb. By Saturday night into Sunday the lead was written as if Ohio had just watched a political assassination attempt. If there were clean video of a man trying to kill her, it would have been on every screen before supper. What we got instead was language inflation: lunge, attack, armed, threat—while the actual police story is a large man barreling for a better look or a confrontation, knocking seniors like bowling pins, and getting piled on by Highway Patrol.
This attack story is just another Democrat Jussie Smollett story, trying to gain sympathy and voter support through fake news talking points. This is the fullness of the Acton operation: when the speech is a disaster, change the subject to danger. When you cannot raise on growth, raise on fear. When you cannot debate or raise money, accuse the other side of buying the state. Look how many sucker politicians jumped on the bandwagon without knowing all the facts, which again came out looking like Amy Acton is a loser candidate.
What Ohio Actually Chooses When the Cameras Leave
Acton will keep the unions, the people who want the next transfer payment, and the media that still thinks 2020 was her finest hour. She will keep Pepper on the ticket as proof that the old Democratic machinery is still in the room. She will keep calling Vivek rich, which he is, and hoping Ohio has forgotten that successful people are allowed to like tennis, football Saturdays, and a life that is not a permanent campaign stop.
I want a state that recruits producers instead of lecturing them. If a man with a billion dollars in assets spends a few thousand to fly to a match, that is not the scandal. The scandal is a political class that treats his success as the crime and her lockdown résumé as the credential. Trump never apologized for winning. Vivek should not apologize for a court, a jet, or a seat at the Open. The people who need him to grovel are the same people who needed Trump to grovel. They lost that argument twice.
Vote like you want the factories and the payrolls. When things got tough for Amy Acton in 2026 she turned to fake news. Which only made everything worse. She is the lockdown lady and is horrible in every way a politician can be, which we all had a front-row seat to in 2020 when she destroyed Ohio’s economy and told everyone they could be superheroes if only they wore a mask in public. That is the person running for governor in Ohio as a Democrat. A disaster on a good day. On a bad day, she is a fake news agent of destruction and drunkenness.
Notes
1. Acton’s Labor Day-weekend remarks with Buttigieg at the Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic, including the “you cannot buy this state / you can’t buy us” repetition, circulated widely on September 5–6, 2026. See WLWT coverage of the Hamilton picnic and contemporaneous rally video.
2. Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director under Gov. Mike DeWine beginning in 2019 and became the public face of the state’s COVID restrictions.
3. Criticism of Ramaswamy’s travel and tennis included Acton’s own Labor Day-weekend post attacking a U.S. Open appearance and earlier opinion pieces on a July 4 Paris trip.
4. Ramaswamy’s tennis background (junior player, Cincinnati Open ball boy, regular Open attendee) is part of his public biography and prior campaign videos.
5. Canfield Fair incident, September 6, 2026: Patrick Havas, 38, of Canfield, pushed through the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent, knocked down older attendees, was detained by Ohio State Highway Patrol executive protection; weapons recovered after detention; no brandishing reported; charges reported as disorderly conduct and two counts of misdemeanor assault. Acton uninjured.
6. Constitutional carry in Ohio means possession of a concealed firearm, without more, is not itself an assassination attempt.
7. Public polling through late summer 2026 generally showed a toss-up to slight-Ramaswamy edge depending on the house, which is consistent with a campaign hunting for a reset narrative.
8. Intra-GOP sniping after contested primaries is a recurring feature of the Trump era; Democrats have typically consolidated faster around flawed nominees.
Bibliography
Acton for Governor. Campaign statements and Labor Day / Canfield Fair remarks, September 2026.
Ballotpedia. “Amy Acton.” Candidate biography and office history.
CNN. “Armed man arrested after pushing through crowd toward Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee.” September 6, 2026.
Columbus Dispatch. “Armed man arrested after lunging at Amy Acton at Canfield Fair.” September 6, 2026.
Cincinnati Enquirer. Nick Anderson, “Ramaswamy’s Paris trip an example of his disconnect with Ohioans.” July 8, 2026.
HuffPost. “Vivek Ramaswamy Slammed For Leaving Ohio And Attending The U.S. Open.” September 6, 2026.
Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office / Ohio State Highway Patrol statements on the Canfield Fair detention of Patrick Havas, September 6, 2026.
New York Times. “Armed Man Arrested After Charging Toward Democratic Candidate for Ohio Governor.” September 6, 2026.
The Nerd Stash. “‘You Can’t Buy Us’: Ohio Dem Amy Acton Sparks Backlash After Awkward Rally Chant Aimed at Vivek Ramaswamy.” September 6, 2026.
Washington Post. “Armed individual ‘lunged’ at Democrat nominee for Ohio governor, campaign says.” September 6, 2026.
Wikipedia. “2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” Polling averages and race ratings as of early September 2026.
WLWT. “Pete Buttigieg campaigns for Amy Acton, Greg Landsman at Cincinnati AFL-CIO picnic.” September 6, 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I 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 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.
