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.
I have been thinking about this for a long time, and the thoughts keep circling back like they always do when something important is trying to get out. American philosophy did not end with Ayn Rand. Human beings keep innovating. She was a powerful contributor to American thought and the American system of individual achievement, but philosophy is not a closed book. We keep going. What bothers me, what has always bothered me, is the character of the human spirit in her books and how that spirit keeps getting attacked in the real world. I look at the hatred directed at the creators, and I see something deeper than politics or economics. I see a pattern that stretches back before Abraham, before the Bible as we have it, into a world of giants, dolmens, fallen intelligences, and religions that look a lot like control systems.
Ayn Rand’s Heroes and the Rational Adult Mind That Still Misses the Eternal
I have always defended the producers in her stories. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, building according to his own vision. The men and women in Atlas Shrugged who refuse to apologize for creating value. John Galt. These are the characters who understand that achievement is moral. Yet something has always bothered me about the fully rational adult framework she used. She saw clearly the envy and the looters. She saw the morality of production. What she did not fully reach, in my view, is the layer underneath the learned adult mind.
Watch a toddler. I have done this with my own grandchildren. I try to meet them in their eternal aspect, not just as small physical packages that look like someone else in the family. The baby is learning by mimicry: the walk, the talk, the habits, the prejudices of the adults around them. Consciousness arrives already as something, then gets trained into the grooves of the culture. Children can still see outside the box. Adults often cannot. There is the old story from the war of the truck that would not fit under the bridge. All the officers and engineers were stuck until a kid suggested letting the air out of the tires. Simple. Outside the groove.
Psychedelics strip some of those learned limits. Ancient cultures knew this. The rituals around Göbekli Tepe and the Jordan Valley were not empty. The Teacher of Righteousness among the Essenes, a century or so before Jesus, was already working in a mystical stream that the later Christian story partly absorbed and redirected. Jesus emerging in the Galilee region is not an accident of geography. That land had already been thick with older practices. The Eucharist practices that closely resembled Greek mystery traditions north of Athens had been circulating for centuries. When you strip away adult prejudices, the question becomes obvious: is the body the consciousness, or is it a temporary vehicle for something that already exists?
I argue the latter. The older adult whose body is failing still carries the same eternal spirit behind the eyes. The physical form degrades. The consciousness does not. This is where I part company with pure Objectivism and with the hard materialist reading of consciousness that stops at the hardware. Elon Musk has read Rand. He has called Atlas Shrugged useful as a counterpoint to communism, though he says it needs to be tempered with kindness. He is not a hard-core Objectivist. His real drive is the expansion of consciousness across the universe, making humanity multi-planetary, and advancing AI so that intelligence itself can understand reality more fully. Curiosity is his guiding star. That is close to the creators’ spirit, but it is bigger than rational self-interest alone.
The Same Hatred That Hit Ayn Rand Now Targets Elon Musk and the Data Centers
Look at the pattern. The same kind of people who hated Rand’s uncompromising creators now hate Elon Musk. They hated him for Tesla. They hated him when he tried to cut wasteful spending. They show up on the National Mall to protest him. The hatred feels disconnected from ordinary disagreement. It has the flavor of something that reacts against any force that empowers the human race to become more than it currently is.
Data centers are the current flashpoint. I am strongly for them. They are the physical infrastructure of expanded human intelligence. They consume power and water. Local grids feel the strain. Bills can rise. Noise from cooling systems is real. In some polls, 71% of Americans express concern when one is proposed near them. The irony is thick. People who once carried copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead during the Tea Party years suddenly discover selective individualism when the factory of the mind appears in their backyard. It is easier to love the hero in a novel than when his power plant sits next door. The abstract principle is easy. The concrete implementation is hard. That does not make the principle wrong.
The deeper issue is philosophical. Data centers and AI force the question of what consciousness is. Is it locked inside the biological body forever, or can it be extended, preserved, transferred, and expanded through tools we build? Elon talks about brain-computer interfaces and spreading life to other planets. He stays close to the physical substrate. I go further. I think non-human intelligences have been manipulating the human story for a very long time, erasing footprints, using religions and cultural systems as control mechanisms. Anything that expands human capacity becomes a threat to that older order. The hatred of Musk and the hatred of Rand share that root.
Pre-Abrahamic World: Dolmens, Giants, Copper, and the Religions of the Fallen
Go back before the Hebrews. The Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians and never fully brought into the Western canon, records the story of the Watchers and the giants. That text should have been more central. People are discovering it now through popular channels, but the evidence was always there. The Jordan Valley is covered with dolmens from the Early Bronze Age. Large fields of them. Similar table-like megalithic tombs appear across Europe and into the British Isles. In North America there are stone constructions and earthworks that early observers compared to the Old World forms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, particularly in the Keweenaw, the Old Copper Culture was mining pure native copper on a large scale by 7000–5000 BCE, possibly earlier. Artifacts moved across the continent. Some researchers have argued for long-distance trade connections that mainstream archaeology still resists.
The same experts who misled the public on other matters now demand absolute trust in their claims about migration patterns and the impossibility of earlier contact. I am not required to give them that trust. Sea levels were lower twelve thousand years ago. Island-hopping routes across the Pacific were more available. The geometric and mathematical patterns that appear in distant places are not automatically a coincidence. The Wheel of the Giants near the Sea of Galilee sits in the same general region where later religious eruptions continued to occur. Jesus did not appear in a vacuum.
What was the religion of the people who built the dolmens and practiced in that landscape before the Hebrew arrival? What gods did they serve? The later duel between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel only makes sense if people already believed Baal could answer with fire. North American indigenous traditions contain figures and practices that echo Canaanite and broader Near Eastern patterns more closely than random parallel development would predict. The experts dismiss the connections. I keep looking at the ground.
The Black Stone, the Monolith, and Consciousness Transfer
The Black Stone in the eastern corner of the Kaaba is a physical object that Muslims circle and try to touch or kiss. The official explanation is clear: it is an act of following the Prophet’s example. One of the companions said he knew it was only a stone that could neither harm nor benefit, but he kissed it because he had seen the Messenger do so. Fair enough as far as it goes. The deeper history is older. The stone was already sacred in pre-Islamic Arabian pagan pilgrimage. Muhammad did not invent the reverence. He cleaned out the idols and redirected an existing sacred site. Circling seven times, the annual pilgrimage, the sacred enclosure—these were already in place among the tribes.
I look at that stone the way I look at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. An object that appears, catalyzes a leap in consciousness or culture, then continues to exert influence long after its origin is forgotten. Religions can function as programming languages for human groups. They can lock certain patterns of behavior and thought into place across generations. Some of those patterns serve the human race. Others appear designed to keep it fragmented, sacrificial, or subordinate. Islam’s historical expansion has often been framed as a victory and a display of dominance, built on conquered sites. That is not unique to one faith, but it collides hard with the American experiment, which was designed as a vehicle for individual consciousness to flourish rather than submit to collective religious or political control.
Christianity itself absorbed and redirected earlier practices. The Hebrew system still carried ritual elements that older powers could work with. The radical break that Jesus represented threatened those older arrangements. Non-human intelligence does not need to appear as little green men from space. It can operate through dreams, through psychedelic states, through recurring religious forms, through the static that certain people seem to hear and obey without understanding the source.
Collectivism, the Scapegoat, and the Continuing Attack on the Builder
The same people who once cheered when Elon stood near Trump now turn on him when the practical costs of building appear. Collectivism wears religious clothes or secular clothes. It always needs a scapegoat. The independent creator who refuses to apologize for winning becomes that scapegoat. Rand never fully cracked why the businessman-as-moral-hero failed to win over the culture. She stayed inside the rational adult frame. The hatred is older and deeper than economics. It is a hatred of the human spirit when that spirit refuses to stay small.
I see the data centers as the current concrete expression of the same fight. Expanding intelligence, expanding the reach of consciousness, giving ordinary people tools that were once reserved for the few—this is exactly what the older manipulative forces would want to slow or stop. The power and water arguments are real and must be handled honestly. Local communities deserve straight talk and real mitigation. That does not justify the deeper philosophical rejection of the very idea of scaled human intelligence.
I will keep arguing this. The body is the vehicle. Consciousness is older. The record in the ground, in the texts that almost made it into the canon, in the recurring sacred stones and geometric patterns, and in the irrational hatred directed at the builders of each new age all point in the same direction. American philosophy did not stop with Ayn Rand. Elon Musk is one of the living characters who force the question into the open. The rest of us get to decide whether we side with the creators or with the forces that have been trying to keep the human race in its place for a very long time.
Footnotes
1. On Elon Musk’s engagement with Atlas Shrugged as a counter to communism tempered by kindness, see contemporary reporting and his own public comments referencing Rand’s work alongside his broader curiosity-driven philosophy.
2. Jordan Valley and Levantine dolmens date primarily to the Early Bronze Age (roughly 3700–2000 BCE), with large fields documented east of the Jordan Rift; early European explorers noted formal similarities to Western European megaliths.
3. Old Copper Culture mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale began at least 7000–9500 years ago and produced extensive pure native copper artifacts traded across eastern North America.
4. The Newark Holy Stones (Decalogue Stone and Keystone) are regarded by the large majority of professional archaeologists and epigraphers as 19th-century forgeries.
5. The Black Stone of the Kaaba was already an object of pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage and veneration; Islamic tradition preserves the practice of touching or kissing it as emulation of the Prophet while explicitly denying that the stone itself possesses independent power.
6. The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) was preserved in the Ethiopian canon and contains the Watchers narrative; it influenced Second Temple Jewish thought and early Christian writers.
7. Local opposition to data centers frequently cites electricity demand comparable to small cities, water use for cooling, and noise; polling shows majority concern in many proposed locations while the long-term productivity and intelligence gains remain more abstract to nearby residents.
Bibliography for Further Reading
• Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943.
• Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957.
• 1 Enoch (various critical editions and translations, including those based on the Ethiopian manuscripts).
• Fraser, James A. Studies on Early Bronze Age dolmens of the Levant and Jordan Valley.
• Pompeani, David, et al. Research on the chronology of prehistoric copper mining in the Lake Superior region (Radiocarbon, The Holocene, Anthropocene).
• Steimer-Herbet, Tara. Work on dolmens and tower tombs in Jordan.
• Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968.
• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.
• Biblical Archaeology Review (long-running coverage of Near Eastern sites, copper production, and Second Temple period).
• Primary Islamic historical sources on the Kaaba and Black Stone (Ibn Ishaq, al-Azraqi, and related early chronicles).
• Contemporary reporting and polling on data-center siting conflicts in the United States (2023–2026).
• Materials on the Teacher of Righteousness and the Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.
This is the ground I keep walking. The creators keep building. The older forces keep reacting. I intend to keep looking.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior has thoughts on party unity, and they are not delivered quietly.
Mara: Rich Hoffman’s recent writing zeroes in on one question: when does a county GOP chair’s public posture stop building the team and start doing the opposition’s work for them? Let’s start with the wine metaphor — and why it matters eight weeks before a midterm.
Don’t Sour the Wine: Lectures, Loyalty, and the Midterm Math
Mara: The post opens with a genuine acknowledgment that chairing a county party is hard, thankless work — and then pivots to a specific warning about what happens when the chairman’s message lands in print.
Pip: The Journal-News ran the new Butler County GOP chair’s priorities, and the quote that crystallized everything is this one: “The Republicans that are in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, and I have not been seeing that happen, and it displeases me.”
Mara: That sentence is the spine of the argument. Once it’s in the paper, it belongs to every Democrat, every fence-sitter, and every volunteer quietly deciding whether this job is worth the abuse.
Pip: And the timing is the real problem. Democrats don’t have to beat Republicans if Republicans brand their own officeholders as failures eight weeks before Election Day. Kathy Wyenandt — cited here as the visible face of the Butler County Democratic Party — doesn’t need a majority tomorrow. She needs Republicans to do her turnout work for her.
Mara: The post draws a sharp distinction between the substance and the delivery. Cutting spending, reducing waste, watching the schools — those aren’t radical asks in a Republican county. The argument is tone, timing, venue, and target.
Pip: There’s a fast-food manager analogy in here that earns its keep. Barking works on teenagers folding boxes. It does not work on people you’re asking to put their name on a ballot, absorb the hate mail, and run again in two years.
Mara: The post also invokes David Kern — a Liberty Township trustee for 32 years who briefly chaired this same county party and, by the post’s account, discovered the hard way that herding quarreling Republicans is a different sport than fighting Democrats. That history, the argument goes, is sitting right there for anyone who wants to read it instead of repeating it.
Pip: And then there’s the Nicodemus point, which is doing real work. Nicodemus loved the message and still had to remain a functioning member of the priesthood. Serious politics is not a purity cult.
Mara: The post is direct about the arithmetic: the absolutist slice of the party is estimated well under 40 percent of Butler County Republicans, with the rest on the fence or transactional. Lecture the 60 percent as if they’re the problem, and you meet them later on the other side of the aisle — or at home on the couch.
Pip: The advice at the end is genuinely constructive. Bring the concerns to a closed session. Make the case. Help officeholders find the money and the coalition. Then go to the paper together.
Mara: The closing line lands the whole thing plainly: “Lecturing your own officeholders in the newspaper is how you do the Democrats’ work for them.”
Pip: Build the tent, inspect the team in private, cheer them in public. That’s the whole craft in one sentence.
Mara: The question of who gets to call themselves a team player — and who decides — isn’t going away before November. More on that next time.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
It is hard to be in a leadership position. I know that. I wanted to wish the new chair of the Butler County Republican Party well. Art Sauerwein stepped into a job that is mostly thankless, always public, and never as simple as it sounds when you are talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror.¹ I have worked with people in this orbit. We have agreed on more than we have fought about. I was not looking to pick a fight with a brand-new chairman. Bloodsport politics is already crowded with people who think volume is a substitute for skill.
But people are already getting sour on his wine. This is not the pleasant kind. This is the vintage you spit out when you realize the bottle lacks what it takes. Sauerwein literally means sour wine.² I did not invent the metaphor. The paper did him the courtesy of putting the raw vintage on the table.
I want the Republican Party in this county to succeed. I do not want the political disease that has been cultivated in parts of West Chester to migrate township by township until the rest of Butler County starts talking like a faculty lounge. I want more unification, not less. I want a bigger tent, not a Sunday-school classroom with a padlock on the door. That is why I am saying something now, at the start of September 2026, while the article is still warm and the Democrats are still salivating.
What Sounded Fine in the Shower Did Not Survive the Newspaper
Some lines sound terrific when you are singing in the shower. They still sound pretty good at a Sunday meeting among people who already agree with you. They do not survive contact with newsprint. Once they are in the Journal-News, they belong to every Democrat, every fence-sitter, every officeholder you still need next cycle, and every volunteer who is privately deciding whether this job is worth the abuse.
The chairman’s public message, as it landed, ran something like this: take back the schools and make them more conservative; put more Christian values in the community; and, most of all, the Republicans already in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, eliminate waste and fraud, and get in alignment with conservative values. Then the kicker: he has not been seeing that happen, and it displeases him.
I agree with a large percentage of the substance. Cutting spending, cutting taxes, reducing waste, and stopping fraud are not radical demands in a Republican county. I have been in the tax fight in this county for a long time, going back through names people still remember and some they would rather forget. I want conservative schools. I am not embarrassed by Christian values in a community that was built on them. That is not the argument.
The argument is tone, timing, venue, and target. You do not build a governing party by taking out the people you just spent years getting elected. You especially do not do it two months before a midterm when Democrats are hunting local gains and the only story they need is “Republicans are already eating their own.”
The Fast-Food Manager Problem in Bloodsport Politics
I have heard this voice before. It usually comes from people who have a hard time making a legitimate argument that requires sitting down, listening, and converting someone who does not already attend their Bible study to their way of thinking. Instead of doing that work, they reach for the lecture. I have seen it in entry-level managers at places that sell fast food. They get handed a shift. They have run something with five employees. They discover that barking feels like leadership.
You can talk that way to teenagers folding boxes. You cannot talk that way to people you are asking to put their name on a ballot, raise money, take votes, absorb the hate mail, and then run again in two years. Public office is already a faithless job. If word gets out that the chairman treats officeholders like children who missed curfew, the short list of people willing to do the work gets shorter. Then you will complain that nobody good will run, and you will be right, and you will have helped cause it.
The grandfather tone does not work on people who already moved out of their father’s house. Younger Republicans, the ones you claim you want to recruit so the party is not a retirement home, can smell a lecture from across the parking lot. Trump did not build a coalition by scolding his own team in the local paper. He built one by pointing the fire outward.
Good Old Boys, Street Vendors, and the Nicodemus Problem
I have heard the comments on Facebook. People send me this stuff all day. “Good old boys club.” It is always the boys club when you are not in it. When you are outside, you throw a rock and call it prophecy. You say you are Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers. You say you are honest and pure. Meanwhile the people you need are quietly updating their résumés for a private-sector job that pays better and does not include a chairman who inspects their homework in the newspaper.
You have to remember Nicodemus. He loved Jesus. He wanted the message to advance. He also had to remain a functioning member of the priesthood. He walked a fine line on purpose.³ That is the nature of serious politics. It should not be a purity cult. I have heard the purity speech for years: we should be clean, we should be absolute, we should never sit at a table with anyone who is only 80 percent of the way home. Meanwhile you bleed support. You try to build a big party and then you shove people toward the door with absolutism and call the ones who leave compromised.
Cheerleaders are useful. Rock throwers are useful too, in the right hour. Leadership is deciding which tool you are holding before you swing it at your own team.
David Kern Knew How to Throw a Rock and Still Keep the Township
I have known the Kern family since I was very little. I was friends with his son. I knew Katy. I remember David Kern as a man who could throw a rock with the best of them and still serve as a respected Liberty Township trustee for decades. He chaired this county party. He also discovered, the hard way, that herding quarreling Republicans is a different sport than fighting Democrats.⁴ He said as much when he walked away from the chairmanship. That history is sitting right there for anyone who wants to read it instead of repeating it.
You need people who will volunteer for the ugly jobs. The short list of adults willing to be lectured in public like children is very short. You do not want your officeholders saying, “I will take the private job. It pays. I do not have to run every two years. I do not have to take a sermon from a chairman who just discovered the budget.” Once they leave, you do not get them back by posting harder.
West Chester Is Not a Metaphor. It Is a Beachhead.
I know Kathy Wyenandt. I have watched her work. She is out there trying to hitch a truck and a horse to the same socialist push that is running through school boards, township halls, and every other local institution that used to be too boring for ideology. Call it progressivism if the word socialism makes the room cough. The destination is the same: more government, more cultural renovation, more migration of West Chester habits into townships that did not ask for them.⁵
She does not need a majority tomorrow. She needs Republicans to do her turnout work for her. A county party that announces, in the paper, that its own officeholders have disappointed the chairman is a gift. Democrats do not have to beat Republicans if Republicans will brand their own people as failures eight weeks before Election Day. I do not want a bunch of Democrats in offices that took a generation to flip. That is not a purity position. That is arithmetic.
The people pushing the chairman to talk like this represent a slice of the party, not the whole vineyard. I would put that slice well under 40 percent of Republicans in this county, with the rest on the fence, tired, transactional, or capable of being seduced by a smiling Democrat who promises to be less exhausting. If you lecture the 60 percent as if they were the problem, you will meet them later on the other side of the aisle, or at home on the couch.
You Cannot Shut Off a County Budget Like a Spigot
“The Republicans that are in office need to learn to cut spending and cut taxes, and I have not been seeing that happen, and it displeases me.” That sentence is the whole problem in one pour. You cannot just turn the spigot off on a dime. I have been in these tax fights my whole adult life. There were plenty of pizzas eaten over tables with Mike Fox and the old Liberty Township crowd. There were plenty of arguments. You still had to build a team.⁶
County government is not a lemonade stand. It is labor contracts, state mandates, jails, boards of developmental disabilities, roads, courts, and a sales-tax stream that moves with the economy. Butler County has rolled back millage, sat on windfalls, and still gets accused of betrayal because the cut was not theatrical enough for people who do their budgeting in comment threads. Results matter. Theater is cheaper. Voters, after two years of Republicans in power, vote results. If the chairman’s public line is “our people have not done a very good job,” do not be shocked when the other team puts that quote on a mailer.
This is the midterm problem in miniature. The buzzwords that pulled people to the polls the first time do not work the same way once you own the desks. Insurgents always arrive to take advantage of disappointment. Some of them only know how to throw rocks. They want Jesus in the temple every Tuesday. If you are not flipping tables, you are not holy enough. That energy can win a primary. It does not automatically win a county, and it does not automatically govern one.
Todd Hall, Thomas Hall, and the Unfashionable Work of Building a Team
Todd Hall was good at building a team. Thomas Hall has done the unglamorous work in the Statehouse. I have had disagreements with people in that circle. There were disputes. We worked them out over time. Nobody has to be attached at the hip. Leadership is the art of bringing people to your way of thinking without setting their chairs on fire.⁷
People who lack that skill often lecture because lecture is what you do when you cannot close. They talk themselves into a lather in the bathroom. It sounds like Churchill. Then they get into a meeting with actual officeholders, actual budgets, and actual voters, and the words come out like a substitute teacher on the last day of school. “It displeases me” is not a governing strategy. It is a report card written by someone who is not taking the test.
Sometimes a chairman will sound like the star quarterback at a pep rally. In the bleachers you will have a row of people who never liked football and came for the argument. The quarterback will look like a cardboard cutout of the good old boys club. Fine. People still like winning the game. They like being around a team that wins. They will tolerate a certain amount of jock energy if the scoreboard gives them what they want. They will not tolerate a coach who spends the pregame interview explaining that his own starters are a disappointment.
Unity Is Not Compromise. Isolation Is Not Courage.
I do not want a compromised party. I also do not want a minority party that congratulates itself for being pure while Kathy’s people take another township seat. Those are not the only two options, no matter how many Facebook theologians insist they are. Learning to communicate with people who are not as conservative as a Sunday-morning Sunday-school teacher is not the same thing as becoming one of them. It means you can share a sandbox without eating the sand.
People who cannot do that work are often insecure about their ability to win a conversation. So they push the other person away. Then they never have to experience the small death of losing the argument. They say, “We did our best. We stood on principle. We were outnumbered.” Being outnumbered is not a sacrament. I do not want the minority party in Butler County. I want the party that keeps winning and then governs like it intended to keep the job.
Compromise has a cost. Losing has a cost. Leadership is weighing those two costs in public without pretending one of them is free. Thanksgiving dinner is the annual clinic: you do not have to agree on the football game to keep the same people at the table. A smart network puts more than one game on. That is not cowardice. That is how you still have a family next year.
A Friendly Note to the New Chairman
I want Art Sauerwein to be a successful chairman. I want people to support him. I want the party to grow. I agree with him on most of the policy nouns in that article. Cut spending. Cut taxes. Watch the schools. Say the quiet part about values out loud. Do it in a room with the officeholders first. Bring the concerns to a meeting. Make the case. Count votes. Help them find the money, the language, and the coalition. Then go to the paper together.
If you push them away in August, you will not have them in November, and you will not have them when you need a candidate in 2028. Chairmen who listen only to the people who want them to tear the party down do not last. The job looks important from the outside. From the inside it is volunteer hours, bruised egos, and a phone that rings with problems nobody else wanted. You will not keep good people if the public posture is “Father Knows Best and the children have disappointed the table.”
Help them get elected. Help them get money. Help them get on the slate card. Show up for them when the Journal-News calls. Save the lecture for the closed session, and even then, make it a conversation. The people who are whispering that the only moral posture is table-flipping are not the ones who will still be in the room when the chairs are empty.
Tomorrow Can Still Be a Better Day
It is hard to be in leadership in all phases. It is hard when people will not come over to your way of seeing the field. You still have to try. You have to bring together people who would never choose the same dinner table if football were not on. You have to give people latitude without becoming a wet rag. That is the whole craft.
So here is the friendly advice, based on what I am seeing in the first weeks of this chairmanship: do not sour the wine. Do not sour the voters. Do not sour the big tent. Do not push away the people who are not as conservative as you wish they were on a Sunday morning. Sit down. Work it out. Inspect the team in private. Cheer the team in public. I want this chairman to prosper. I want this party to keep the county. Lecturing your own officeholders in the newspaper is how you do the Democrats’ work for them.
Notes
1. Art Sauerwein quoted in late-August 2026 Journal-News coverage of Butler County politics heading into the November 2026 midterms. The phrasing matches public circulation of the piece under titles such as “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.”
2. Sauerwein is a German occupational/descriptive surname meaning “sour wine,” historically attached to makers or sellers of tart wine. The pun writes itself; I did not invent the vintage.
3. John 3:1–21. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, came to Jesus by night. He later spoke for due process (John 7:50–51) and helped bury Jesus (John 19:39–40). He never became a street-corner prophet. That is the point.
4. David Kern served 32 years as a Liberty Township trustee, briefly chaired the Butler County Republican Party, and died in 2021. See Journal-News obituary coverage and the Congressional Record tribute by Rep. Warren Davidson, April 22, 2021.
5. Kathy D. Wyenandt of Liberty/Fairfield Township has been central committee chair and a visible public face of the Butler County Democratic Party, a Board of Elections member, and a candidate for Ohio House and Senate. She has written openly urging voters to consider Democrats in local cycles.
6. Butler County commissioners have repeatedly used inside-millage rollbacks and related tools in recent budget cycles; sales-tax receipts have also risen. Whether that pace satisfies every activist is a separate question from whether the county is “not cutting.” See Journal-News budget coverage 2024–2026.
7. Todd Hall served as Butler County GOP executive chairman through the 2024–2026 cycle and was frequently quoted on endorsements, including the 2026 commissioner primary. State Rep. Thomas Hall represents Ohio House District 46.
8. Richard K. Jones, Butler County sheriff, published They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). The book is a leadership memoir, not a novel about cartels; the shower version of the pitch always sounds punchier than the jacket copy.
Bibliography for Further Reading
A working shelf, not a complete library. I have included the books that actually change how you think about parties, persuasion, local government, and the temptation to confuse purity with power.
Local and Ohio Politics
Butler County Republican Party. Candidate and leadership materials, butlercountygop.org, 2024–2026.
Callahan, Denise G., and Journal-News staff. Budget, millage, sales-tax, and commissioner coverage, Hamilton Journal-News, 2018–2026.
Clark, Michael D. “Beloved Butler County icon, political leader David Kern dies after illness.” Journal-News, April 16, 2021.
Davidson, Warren. “Honoring the Life and Memory of David Kern.” Congressional Record, April 22, 2021.
Ohio Republican Party. County chair directory and State Central Committee materials, ohiogop.org.
Wyenandt, Kathy. “You may want to vote Democrat this election cycle.” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 15, 2022.
Journal-News. “Republicans defend Butler County Ohio stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall.” Late August 2026. (Article circulating with the Sauerwein quotations discussed here.)
Parties, Coalitions, and the Big Tent
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Still the best warning against people who love principles more than the society those principles have to live in.
Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper, 1957.
Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. Yale University Press, 1981.
Galston, William A., and Elaine C. Kamarck. “The Politics of Polarization.” Third Way / Brookings essays, various years.
Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Harper, 1946.
Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind. Regnery, 1953.
Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford University Press, 1990. Useful even for a two-party county: coalition is a skill.
Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. Yale University Press, 1962.
Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Truman, David B. The Governmental Process. Knopf, 1951.
Leadership, Management, and Why Lectures Fail
Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster, 1936. Mock it after you can do it.
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Politics is the continuation of coalition by other means.
Collins, Jim. Good to Great. HarperBusiness, 2001.
Drucker, Peter F. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row, 1967.
Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.
Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Overman Warrior Publications.
Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. 2026.
Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 1532. Read it as a warning about what happens when your own captains stop trusting you.
Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings. c. 1645.
Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. You cannot lecture a production system into existence.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Do not announce your disappointment with your own left flank.
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. The leader who needs to be seen lecturing is already losing.
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, 1946.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking, 1985.
Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Henry Regnery, 1953.
Scripture and the Fine Line
The Gospel of John, chapters 3, 7, and 19. Nicodemus.
Matthew 21:12–13 and parallels. The temple tables. Note the target: a corrupt marketplace inside the holy precinct, not your own disciples on the night before a fight.
Augustine. City of God. The two cities argument is older than any county central committee.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Scribner, 1932.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942. Especially the parts about factions inside the church.
American Party History and Populism
Gerring, John. Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. Knopf, 1955.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Knopf, 1965.
Phillips, Kevin. The Emerging Republican Majority. Arlington House, 1969.
Rauch, Jonathan. Political Realism. Brookings, 2015. Parties exist to tame factions. When the faction tames the party, you get what you are watching.
Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.
Sundquist, James L. Dynamics of the Party System. Brookings, 1983.
Local Government, Taxes, and the Spigot That Will Not Shut
Fisher, Ronald C. State and Local Public Finance. Various editions.
Oates, Wallace E. Fiscal Federalism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Tiebout, Charles M. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956).
Ohio Auditor of State and Butler County Auditor annual financial reports, 2022–2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been writing almost every day since about 2009.[1] That is nearly twenty years of putting the same argument on the table while people told me I was not supposed to say it out loud. The argument is simple. America works when people who make jobs are allowed to make them. America fails when the political class uses the power of government to confiscate what those people built and hand it out as a permanent constituency. In Ohio, a few weeks out from the November 3, 2026 election, that argument has a name on each side of the ballot.[2]
Vivek Ramaswamy is the unapologetic capitalist. Amy Acton is the candidate of the administrative state that shut down the economy in 2020 and never fully admitted what that was. I do not care how many sidebars the campaigns invent between now and Election Day. Skin color, private jets, drinking rumors, data-center talking points, Lake Ontario, the Gulf of America — they all collapse into one question: do you want a job creator in the governor’s office, or do you want a manager of other people’s money?
The Horse Race as of Late August 2026
I will give the numbers first, because the people who live on polls will not read anything else. The race is a dead heat inside the margin of error. Aggregators in mid-August had the two candidates essentially tied near 47 percent each. A Fox News poll taken August 6–10 among registered voters had Ramaswamy 50 to Acton’s 48. A Wedgewood survey of likely voters a few days later had Acton 47 to 46. Prediction markets on Polymarket and Kalshi flipped toward Acton late in the week of August 24 after sitting near a coin flip. Markets are not votes. They are bets. I treat them as weather, not gospel.[3]. In this governor’s race, you’d rather be Vivek Ramaswamy than Amy Acton.
Ohio is still a state Donald Trump won by more than ten points in 2024. That does not make the governor’s race automatic. Midterms punish the party in the White House. Democrats are trying to turn Acton’s bedside manner into a permission structure for the same governing philosophy that produced the lockdowns. Republicans are trying to turn Ramaswamy’s wealth into a character supplement. Both tactics tell you what each side fears.
Money, Jets, and the “Why Is He Even Running?” Attack
David Pepper, Acton’s running mate and the former Ohio Democratic Party chair, has been out on the circuit asking why a billionaire would want the governor’s mansion. He has made a meal of campaign reports showing roughly $700,000 in private-jet leasing. Ramaswamy has self-funded at a scale no normal Ohio candidate can touch and has outspent Acton several times over in 2026 filings.[4]
I find the question revealing in the exact way Pepper does not intend. Why would a man who already cashed out of companies he built take a pay cut, live in a government house, and spend two years being screamed at by people who think profit is a sin? I asked a version of that question years ago, when he was still a CEO who had not yet written the book that Fox News later discovered. The answer he gave me then is the answer his campaign is still giving now: he made money. He wants to spend the next chapter creating the conditions for other people to make money. That is not a job hunt. That is a mission.
A communist-minded person looks at a private jet and sees stolen bread. A capitalist looks at the same jet and asks whether the man inside it is flying toward a plant, a donor meeting, or a vacation after creating tremendous market value. Intent matters. Output matters more.
I will never apologize for preferring self-funded candidates. The moment a politician’s paycheck depends on a machine, the machine owns the mind. I have watched it up close. I know a patriotic couple who together make a few hundred thousand a year, keep the flags in the garage, and stay quiet at the corporate job because they do not want the HR department to discover they vote like Americans. Control the check, and you control the speech. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is how large organizations work in 2026.
Amy Acton and the Lockdown State
Acton was Ohio’s health director when the state closed schools and businesses in 2020. Critics call her Ohio’s Dr. Fauci. Democrats treat that as a slur. I treat it as a job description. She was the face of orders that treated the economy as a switch a bureaucrat could flip. I lived through it here. So did every shop owner who found out a signature in Columbus could erase a year’s work overnight.[5]
The Amy Acton Covid response was authoritarian in method and Marxist in assumption: the productive life of a free people could be suspended by experts, who would decide when life was allowed to resume. That is not public health as a limited tool. That is government as the owner of time.
Why I Call the Lockdowns Marxist
Marxism is not only red flags and five-year plans. It is the belief that the state is the rightful allocator of work, risk, and reward. When you shut the places where people create value and keep the administrative offices open, you have already chosen a side. You have decided that the badge-wearing clerk outranks the owner who makes payroll. Ohio Democrats gambled that voters would remember Acton’s tone of voice and forget the empty Main Streets. I did not forget.
DeWine appointed her. DeWine has now endorsed Ramaswamy. That fact alone should end the fairy tale that Acton was a nonpolitical healer floating above faction. She was a cabinet officer who used emergency power. Emergency power is the most addictive drug in American government. People who taste it rarely volunteer to put the bottle down.
Unions, Paychecks, and the Long March Through the Shop Floor
I have said for years that the modern political union is a child of the Marxist analysis of class, even when the guy in the union hall flies a flag, hunts on weekends, and would punch you for calling him a communist. The original theory was never a mystery. Labor was organized as a counter-power to private ownership. In practice, union leadership in this country has spent decades steering members toward the party that grows government, because government is the only force large enough to take ownership away from the people who built the plant.[6]
That is why so many red-white-and-blue households still vote for the party that talks about them as a class to be managed. The leadership is not confused. The membership is loyal to the paycheck and the hall. I do not hate the welder. I hate the theory that says the welder’s children should live under a political class that treats the owner as a villain and the agency as a parent.
The FirstEnergy Lesson I Have Deep Sympathy For
I have been around Ohio politics long enough to watch a struggling energy company buy itself a statute. House Bill 6 and the FirstEnergy dark-money case are the exhibit. Ratepayers paid. Executives and a speaker went to court. The regulatory environment became a marketplace for influence. I will not bless a “deal” in which a company that cannot survive honest rules writes a check to a campaign so the rules change.[7]
That is the fine line I have learned to walk. Politicians have to keep the confiscators out of the regulatory shop so builders can build. That is not an unholy alliance. That is the only way a mixed economy does not slide into a managed one. A President Trump saying to industry, “I want a regulatory environment in which you can hire,” is the opposite of a health director saying, “I want an environment in which you may not open.” One expands the field. The other sits on it.
Why a Billionaire Wants a Crummy Mansion
I hosted a gathering in 2019. Vivek was there. So was J.D. Vance. It was neither a bundling operation nor a corporate ask. It was capitalists in a room talking about whether the country still believed in itself. Later, I sat in the front row at a Middletown-area event and talked to Vivek before and after the event. He told me the earlier room had mattered. He had built companies, sold, and was deciding whether the next chapter was a quieter rich life or a public fight.[8]
He chose the fight. I understand the psychology because my own life is simpler than it used to be, and I still cannot leave the argument alone. You spend years making something. You cash out. Then you look at the country that made the cash-out possible and watch a political movement try to call the making itself immoral. At that point, money is not the point. Example is the point. He has young children. So do a lot of the people I know who are still trying to start shops in Butler County, Warren County, and along the I-75 corridor. They need a governor who thinks a payroll is a moral achievement.
What “Public Servant” Actually Means
Acton’s campaign asks why he needs a job. That sentence is the whole Democratic theory of government in eight words. They think office is a job you take because you need income and status. I think office is a temporary grant of power you take because you already know how to create value and you want the rules to stop punishing the next person who tries. She needs the apparatus. He does not. That difference is not a smear. It is the reason self-reliant candidates are harder to own.
Naming Lakes, Inventing Guilt, and the Attack on the Founding
I have been talking about early Bronze Age copper, Florida’s long human timeline, and the political use of the word “indigenous.” I am not an “indigenous peoples” activist because a university committee decided the founding of the United States was a crime scene. Lake Ontario had Iroquoian names before English maps. That is history. It is not a veto of Ohio’s existence. The campaign to treat every European place-name as an apology is a campaign to treat American creation as illegitimate. If the country was born in sin, then the wealth it produced is stolen, and the state may seize it with a clean conscience.[9]
That is why I do not roll my eyes when President Trump puts a new name on a body of water. Marketing people understand pressure points. Force the argument into the open. Mexico is not a capitalist peer. Canada is a softer social democracy with better manners. China runs a party-state that Western finance keeps trying to copy while calling itself “stakeholder capitalism.” If you import the constraint structure of a manifesto into a corporation, do not act shocked when the sales numbers coming out the door shrink.
China has more than a billion people and still does not outrun American output on the terms that matter most. People are not GDP. Property, energy, and permission to try are the components of GDP.[10]
Free Speech, Treason Talk, and Where I Draw the Line
I use a hard word on purpose. I view a political project that intends to undo the capitalist republic from inside its own universities, HR offices, and public schools as hostile to the country that protects the speech. That is my moral line, not a statute I am asking a prosecutor to file tomorrow. The left has been brilliant at wrapping the project in the First Amendment. They want the protection of the system they are trying to hollow out. I will not pretend those things are neutral.
Republicans have often been cowards about this. They recite “free speech” as if the phrase were a substitute for a spine. Speech is the method. The aim is still the aim. If the aim is to teach children that job creation is exploitation and that America should not have been founded, you are not hosting a seminar. You are running a treasonous succession operation.
What I Want from a Governor of Ohio
I want a political class that keeps the confiscators out of the permit office. I want data centers and plants and the power to run them, not a lecture about why the grid should be smaller. I want elections that are elections, then an executive who tells builders: the rules will be stable enough that you can risk a decade of your life. I want fewer people who take jobs from the tax base and more people who create jobs that build the tax base.
You can steal only so much before you run out of victims. Every society that tries to live on confiscation discovers that the makers leave, hide, or stop. Then the speeches about “the people” get louder and the shelves get emptier. That is not a metaphor from a paperback. That is the twentieth century.
The Quiet Majority in the Garage
I do not think Ohio has reached the saturation point at which the paycheck controllers can order a blue state into existence. The man with the flags in the garage is still voting. He will not wear the pin at work. Democrats had to come all the way out into open socialism because they could not out-Trump Trump on prosperity. Bernie always beat Hillary in the heart of the Democrat Party. The party followed the energy. Now they have Acton as the respectable face of that energy in Ohio.
How I Measure Morality
Money is a human construct. I do not worship it. I measure it the way I measure any tool: by what it lets a free person do for other free people. A 12- or 16-hour day that produces a payroll is a moral act. A political career that lives off the payroll someone else produced is, at best, a borrowed life. I am sympathetic to imperfect Republicans who still know which side of that line they live on. I am not sympathetic to a politics that calls the maker greedy and the taker compassionate.
My people, the ones who have stayed with this blog for years, tend to be biblical in the old sense. They think a man should work, keep promises, raise children, and not covet his neighbor’s possessions. I am with them. The copper trade of the early Bronze Age, the mound builders, the later Iroquois, the English, the Americans — all of that is a long argument about who gets to take risk and keep the result. I come down on the side that built the country I actually live in.
The Vote
Vote for the job creator. That is the whole essay. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be governor, so more people like him can exist. Amy Acton wants to be governor so the power that closed Ohio can be normalized as kindness. I was in the room when he was still deciding whether to step down from the CEO role. I have watched the last two years of his campaign confirm the pitch. I have watched her coalition confirm mine.
Ignore the sidebars if you can. The race is not about a jet. It is not about a lake. It is not about whether a rich man “needs a job.” It is about whether Ohio still believes that making something is better than administering something. I do. I have believed it since before this blog had a name. I will believe it after the returns come in.
Go vote. Keep the line. Make a job if you can. If you cannot, stand with the person who will.
Selected Sources for Readers Who Want the Record
Polling and market snapshots: RealClearPolitics; Decision Desk HQ; Fox News / Beacon Research / Shaw & Company (August 6–10, 2026); Wedgewood Polls (August 11–13, 2026); Newsweek reporting on Polymarket and Kalshi, August 28, 2026.
Campaign finance and travel: Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026; NBC4 Columbus, August 26, 2026; Ohio Secretary of State campaign-finance database.
Candidate backgrounds: Ballotpedia and Wikipedia entries for the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election and for Amy Acton; Politico Magazine profile, June 28, 2025; Cincinnati Enquirer coverage of COVID-era advertising, August 28, 2026.
HB 6 / FirstEnergy: U.S. Department of Justice deferred-prosecution materials; contemporaneous Ohio reporting summarized in footnote 6.
Personal context: author’s contemporaneous posts at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com; NBC News, October 4, 2023, on Ramaswamy’s 2019 Ohio political beginnings; C-SPAN, August 21, 2026, Middletown campaign event.
[1] Rich Hoffman, The Overmanwarrior (blog), published since approximately 2009–2010 at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com. Author of The Symposium of Justice (2004), Tail of the Dragon (2012), and The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Forthcoming: The Politics of Heaven (targeted 2027).
[2] Ohio gubernatorial election set for November 3, 2026. Incumbent Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is term-limited. Republican nominee: Vivek Ramaswamy (running mate: Ohio Senate President Rob McColley). Democratic nominee: Dr. Amy Acton (running mate: former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper). Libertarian: Don Kissick. See Ballotpedia, “Ohio gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2026.”
[3] RealClearPolitics aggregate through August 10, 2026: Acton 47.0%, Ramaswamy 46.8% (Acton +0.2). Decision Desk HQ through August 13: Acton 47.2%, Ramaswamy 46.8%. Fox News / Beacon / Shaw poll, August 6–10, 2026 (1,008 registered voters, ±3%): Ramaswamy 50%, Acton 48%. Wedgewood Polls, August 11–13, 2026 (800 likely voters, ±4%): Acton 47%, Ramaswamy 46%. Newsweek, August 28, 2026, reported Polymarket 54% Acton / 47% Ramaswamy and Kalshi 55% / 45% after a late-August shift.
[4] Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026: Ramaswamy campaign spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft, including payments to V Leasing LLC (address tied to a Ramaswamy-owned property) and TVPX Aircraft Solutions. NBC4, August 26, 2026: Ramaswamy spent about $21.2 million in 2026 campaign funds through early August filings; Acton spent over $5.5 million. Wikipedia / Ohio Secretary of State filings, summarized in mid-August 2026, show Ramaswamy with substantially higher receipts and cash on hand, including substantial self-funding.
[5] Amy Acton served as director of the Ohio Department of Health from 2019 into 2020 under Gov. Mike DeWine and was the public face of Ohio’s early COVID-19 orders, including school closures and stay-at-home rules. She resigned as director in June 2020 amid protests and lawsuits, remaining briefly as an adviser. See Wikipedia, “Amy Acton”; Politico Magazine, June 28, 2025, “Can ‘Ohio’s Anthony Fauci’ Beat Vivek Ramaswamy?”
[6] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), treat trade unions as instruments of class struggle within industrial capitalism. American labor history is more mixed: many U.S. unions were anti-communist during the Cold War. The author’s claim is interpretive—that union political machines often align with larger government and redistribution—not a claim that every rank-and-file member is a Marxist.
[7] House Bill 6 (2019) provided subsidies tied to FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants and other generation sources. Federal prosecutors described a roughly $60 million dark-money scheme around the bill. FirstEnergy entered a deferred prosecution agreement and paid a $230 million criminal penalty, admitting relevant facts. Former House Speaker Larry Householder was convicted. Related civil and regulatory costs to ratepayers have been widely reported. The author cites this episode as an example of captured regulation, not as a charge against any 2026 nominee.
[8] Author’s personal account of a 2019 gathering in the Cincinnati/Middletown area that included Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance, and of later attendance at a Ramaswamy event at a Middletown-area headquarters. NBC News, October 4, 2023, documented Ramaswamy’s 2019 return to Ohio and early political relationships, including with Vance and then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted. C-SPAN recorded an August 21, 2026 Middletown campaign event featuring Ramaswamy.
[9] President Trump’s 2025 executive action renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and related debates over naming (including Great Lakes/Iroquois toponyms such as Ontario) became a cultural flashpoint. The author argues that renaming fights are proxies for whether the United States is a legitimate capitalist republic or a moral error to be undone. Geographic names have layered indigenous, colonial, and American histories; Ontario is an Iroquoian-derived name adopted into English cartography.
[10] World Bank and IMF national accounts: the United States remains the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP; China is second with a much larger population. Productivity, capital formation, property rights, and energy abundance—not headcount—drive output. Figures fluctuate yearly; the comparative point is structural, not a single-year snapshot.
Rich Hoffman 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 was talking about this Fauci story for a long time, and there is a lot to break down. Anthony Fauci showed up on Capitol Hill, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times, and the whole performance confirmed what a lot of us had been saying for years. Good lawyers at two thousand dollars an hour told him not to answer questions about the color of his tie or the carpet. That is not strategy in the traditional sense. That is damage control after the diary came out and after Biden’s pardon language made every single answer a potential risk.¹
The hearing was theater, yes. But it was also a window into how power protects itself when the bill for bad decisions runs into the trillions. I said much of this in 2020, when people called it crazy. The diary, the celebrity capture, the origins knowledge, and the blanket Fifth all landed right on schedule. Now we get to talk about the real cost.
The Fifth Amendment Over 100 Times: Lazy Preparation or Calculated Silence
Fauci walked into that Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing chaired by Rand Paul and refused to answer. He invoked the Fifth more than one hundred times. Reports put the number at 111 in some counts. Senators asked the day of the week. They asked the color of his tie. They asked about the carpet. Fifth. Fifth. Fifth.²
I understand not wanting to get boxed into a dialogue that opens rabbit holes. Hard questions about gain-of-function funding, lab-leak timelines, and previous sworn statements carry real risk. But when the easy questions also get the Fifth, it stops looking like careful lawyering and starts looking like the lawyers decided the safest path was total silence. Paul has been clear he intends to pursue contempt. The committee already voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt and refer it. Democrats will not help in the full Senate, and the January 2025 pardon complicates federal options. Still, the optics of a man who cost the country so much refusing even the simplest answers is a form of accountability in itself.³
Bernie Moreno from Ohio asked the kind of direct questions that needed to be asked. He made me proud as a senator from this state. The frustration in the room was real because the public already knew the story’s outlines. The Fifth just made the admission louder.
The Diary Revelations: COVID Origins Knowledge and Falling in Love with Celebrity Status
The diary dropped right before the hearing—more than a thousand pages. Early entries show Fauci writing that the wet market was the amplifier, not the source. He recorded conversations in which most of the scientists on the call thought deliberate insertion or laboratory involvement was possible. Publicly, the story stayed different for a long time.⁴
At the same time, the diary shows a man falling in love with the celebrity scan. Magazine covers. Rock-star treatment. “Explosive and really unimaginable” fame. Petitions for Sexiest Man Alive. Celebrity phone calls and name-dropping. While the country was locked down and the economic damage was compounding, the private notes record the thrill of the attention. That contrast is damaging. It was already suspected. The diary made it concrete. The timing, right before the testimony, turned a public-relations disaster into something harder to spin.⁵
The Trillions Lost: Quantifying the Economic Catastrophe of the Lockdowns
This is the part that still matters most. Separating the damage caused by the virus itself from that caused by the policy response is tricky. Economists still argue about the exact split. What is not in serious dispute is the scale.
Federal relief spending alone ran about $4.65 trillion. GDP losses from the pandemic period have been estimated in the multiple trillions. One USC analysis put the four-year GDP hit near $14 trillion. A Heritage-linked commission put the total cost—deaths, chronic conditions, lost income, mental health, educational losses—around $18 trillion. School closures alone have been estimated to result in roughly $2 trillion in future earnings losses. Long COVID continues to impose ongoing productivity costs measured in the billions annually. Global output losses for 2020–2024 have been estimated at nearly $13.8 trillion, with the United States accounting for a large share.⁶
We are still living with the long-term effects. Inflation, labor-force scarring, learning loss that will depress lifetime earnings for a generation of kids, and the permanent expansion of federal debt all trace back in part to the choices made in 2020 and 2021. Someone who helped design and sell those choices, who enjoyed the magazine covers while the economy took the hit, does not get to walk away with only a pardon and a Fifth Amendment performance. Public embarrassment is part of the bill. Legal immunity does not erase the reputation ledger or the need for a full accounting.
Biden’s Pardon and Why the Lawyers Demanded Total Silence
The January 19, 2025, pardon from President Biden is the key. It covers “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”⁷
That language is broad. The lawyers treated every answer as a potential new statement that could create fresh exposure or complicate the protection already granted. Even questions about the color of a tie carry risk if the answer can be twisted into inconsistency or if it opens a door outside the pardoned window. That is why the advice was absolute: do not answer. The optics look terrible. The legal logic is coherent if the goal is preserving the pardon at all costs. States are still free to look at their own statutes. Florida has already moved. The federal shield does not cover everything.⁸
Why the Hearing Still Mattered and What Comes Next
We already knew the broad outline. The hearing put the Fifth on the record more than a hundred times and forced the diary into the center of the conversation. Rand Paul is pushing the contempt referral. Criminal prosecution at the federal level faces the prospect of pardon and partisan math. State investigations and the public record are not constrained the same way. The real next step is continued pressure for transparency on the origins, the funding decisions, and the true cost-benefit of the lockdowns. Reputational accountability is nothing. Strategy that relies on silence still has a price.
I remember saying all of this about Fauci when people thought it was crazy. Before some of the books were written, before the diaries were public, before the pardon. I got the usual pushback for not going along with the official line. Now the Fifth, the diary, and the economic numbers have caught up. I told you so. I will keep saying it because the next time something sounds wild and outside the approved explanations, people might listen a little sooner and save themselves some of the pain.
The hole we are still climbing out of six years later was not inevitable. Manufactured crisis or not, the policy choices had authors. Those authors should not get to treat the trillions as someone else’s problem.
Footnotes
1. CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic,” July 29, 2026; Axios, “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins,” July 29, 2026.
2. The New York Times, “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing,” July 29–30, 2026; USA Today, “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19,” July 29, 2026; Washington Times, “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress,” July 29, 2026.
3. Forbes, “Fauci Contempt of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines,” August 6, 2026; Politico, “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote,” August 6, 2026; Reuters, “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote,” August 6, 2026.
4. USA Today, “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame,” July 29, 2026; National Review, “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him,” July 27, 2026; The Telegraph, “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal,” July 27, 2026.
5. The Atlantic, “Anthony Fauci’s Embarrassing, Revealing Diary,” July 29, 2026; The New Yorker, “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves,” August 4, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing,” July 27, 2026; Wall Street Journal, “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci,” July 28–29, 2026.
6. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588), July 31, 2025; USC Price School, “Mandatory business closures drove the economic decline during COVID-19 pandemic,” reporting ~$14 trillion GDP impact; Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (via SCNR reporting), estimating ~$18 trillion total U.S. costs; University of Washington/Oxford analysis on school closures (~$2 trillion future losses); Center for Global Development estimates of global output losses ~$13.8 trillion (2020–2024).
7. Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, January 19, 2025 (full text via Wikisource and Department of Justice Pardon Attorney records); White House Statement from President Joe Biden, January 20, 2025.
8. CBS12 / Florida reporting on Attorney General James Uthmeier investigation announcement, July 30, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry,” July 30, 2026; Lawfare, “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?,” August 11, 2026.
Bibliography
Axios. “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins.” July 29, 2026.
Center for Global Development. Estimates of global COVID-19 output losses, 2020–2024 (~$13.8 trillion).
CNN. “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic.” July 29, 2026.
Forbes. “Fauci Contempt Of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines.” August 6, 2026.
Heritage Foundation / Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Cost estimates totaling approximately $18 trillion (deaths, chronic illness, lost income, mental health, education). Reported via SCNR, July 2024 (updated context 2026).
Hoover Institution. Various analyses of lockdown costs and learning losses (e.g., Hanushek et al. on the economic impact).
Lawfare. “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?” August 11, 2026; “Biden Grants Preemptive Pardons to Milley, Fauci, and Others.” January 20, 2025.
National Review. “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him.” July 27, 2026.
The New York Times. “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing.” July 29–30, 2026.
The New Yorker. “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves.” August 4, 2026.
Politico. “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote.” August 6, 2026.
Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Executive Grant of Clemency, January 19, 2025 (Wikisource / U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney).
Reuters. “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote.” August 6, 2026.
The Telegraph. “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal.” July 27, 2026.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588). July 31, 2025 (~$4.65 trillion federal relief).
USA Today. “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19.” July 29, 2026; “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame.” July 29, 2026.
USC Price School / Economic Modeling. Analyses projecting ~$14 trillion U.S. GDP losses from the pandemic period.
University of Washington / Oxford University. School-closure economic impact estimates (~$2 trillion future losses).
Wall Street Journal. “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci.” July 28–29, 2026.
Washington Examiner. “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing.” July 27, 2026; “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry.” July 30, 2026; “Fauci held in contempt by Rand Paul’s committee.” August 6, 2026.
Washington Times. “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress.” July 29, 2026.
White House. Statement from President Joe Biden on preemptive pardons. January 20, 2025.
Additional primary materials: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing transcript and video, July 29, 2026; Fauci personal diary excerpts released by Sen. Rand Paul, July 2026 (1,000+ pages covering late 2019–2022).
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior is back from a summer of traveling, and he has opinions about Butler County Republicans — which, honestly, tracks.
Mara: Rich Hoffman’s latest post is a deep dive into local party politics: why big-tent coalition building beats purity factions, and what revenge politics actually costs a majority party. Let’s start with the case he makes for keeping the team together.
Why Winning Requires a Big Tent, Not a Pure Faction
Pip: The core argument here is about what actually threatens a Republican stronghold like Butler County — and the answer isn’t Democrats. It’s Republicans who’d rather be righteous than win.
Mara: He sets it up directly, writing: “The opposite impulse — the desire to purge and purify until only the purest remain — is how majorities become minorities. Democrats understand this. Their only realistic path in Butler County is to encourage Republicans to fight each other, thereby opening up the general-election map.”
Pip: So the threat isn’t a strong opposing party. It’s internal score-settling dressed up as principle — and that framing is doing a lot of work in this piece.
Mara: It is. He traces the pattern: people who lost primaries or lost influence start feeding narratives to the Journal-News, labeling solid conservatives RINOs, and undermining officeholders who actually won their races. He calls it “revenge dressed up as principle.”
Pip: Which brings us to the people he’s actually defending. Nancy Nix is the headline — he credits her with fiscal discipline across two county offices, reducing staff sizes as both Treasurer and Auditor, running things in the black, and providing behind-the-scenes organizational infrastructure that he says runs through networks reaching the White House.
Mara: He’s equally direct about George Lang, describing decades of door-knocking and event work — and one very vivid moment at a 2015 Trump event at the Savannah Center where Lang physically removed a protester heading toward Trump. The point being: that’s not armchair commentary, that’s someone who showed up before it was popular.
Pip: Michael Ryan gets a mention too — he won the May 2026 Republican primary for county commissioner with roughly 72 percent of the vote, and the post treats that primary result as decisive and worth defending, not relitigating.
Mara: Sheriff Richard Jones rounds out the slate. He wants the Sheriff’s Office to carry what he calls a “Mayberry” standard — competent, present, community-rooted. The post draws a line between that standard and the intra-party court drama that’s been distracting from actual public safety work.
Pip: And the West Chester trustee and school board fights are the cautionary tale — Republicans fractured, Democrats and soft candidates benefited, and the lesson apparently hasn’t fully landed yet at the county level.
Mara: His bottom line is blunt: Butler County stays a Republican stronghold only if the party acts like one — which means defending the people voters already chose in the primary, sitting across the table from people you don’t fully agree with, and still leaving the room as a team.
Pip: The alternative, he says, is handing Democrats the only gift they actually need.
Mara: The through-line is pretty clear — coalition discipline isn’t compromise, it’s the mechanism that keeps a majority a majority.
Pip: And apparently that argument needs re-litigating every few years, which suggests the lesson is harder to hold than it is to learn.
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.
Traveling, Independent Media, and Coming Home to Butler County Politics
I’ve been traveling most of the summer, so I’ve been doing a lot of catching up. You can’t help but notice the difference when you step away and then come back. I’ve been a little behind on the local politics, and I want to refer to some changes in the Butler County Republican Party at the chair level.[1] When you’re in a leadership position, there’s always somebody who thinks they could do it better than you. There’s always a critic. I tell people that’s part of leadership. You’re always going to have armchair quarterbacks. They’re going to criticize and say stuff. Sitting down and talking to people who don’t agree with you is hard. Winning them over to your side is hard.
In Butler County we’ve had strong Republican support for a long time. When you’re the weak party—as Democrats are in Ohio and in Butler County—the only realistic path to power is splitting the majority party. Some Republicans, once they lose the eye of the tiger, start looking for ways to lose so they can feel relevant again. That’s Rocky III territory. The champion takes the top for granted and gets knocked down by someone hungrier. Strong leadership holds the party together so the majority stays a majority.
Todd Hall, Armchair Quarterbacks, and the Reality of Party Leadership
I always liked Todd Hall. I remember when people would complain about him. When you’re the chairman, you’re the lightning rod. Todd managed to keep things moving by focusing on something everybody could rally behind: electing Republicans and keeping the county on a conservative track.[2] You need a big tent to win. Pure factions feel righteous and then lose. I’ve said it for years—I’ll take people who will come to the table, grab a pizza, and argue philosophy all day long. We have more in common than not. The alternative is handing Democrats the only hope they have: a fractured Republican Party.
Big Tent Republicans vs. Purity Factions: Why Winning Requires Team Building
Trump himself was not a lifelong Republican in the traditional sense. Elon Musk came into the MAGA orbit from a different background. I take people who show up and want to win. The opposite impulse—the desire to purge and purify until only the purest remain—is how majorities become minorities. Democrats understand this. Their only realistic path in Butler County is to encourage Republicans to fight each other, thereby opening up the general-election map.[3]
I’ve watched it. People who could not win through the front door start working the back door—undermining officeholders who did win their primaries, feeding narratives to the Journal-News, and treating every establishment Republican as the enemy. That is not strategy. That is revenge dressed up as principle. And it is exactly what hands seats to Democrats.
Nancy Nix: Fiscal Discipline, Quiet Influence, and Why I Stand Behind Her
I love Nancy Nix, and I mean that genuinely. I can tell you that in their household, back when the Trump question was still unsettled for some people, her husband and I were already on the same page. Nancy came around eventually because she is logical and watches results; not everyone always agrees with everything all the time. As a fiscally responsible officeholder, she reduced staff sizes when she was Treasurer and again when she was Auditor. She has run things in the black for a long time. That is top-level conservative performance.[4]
A lot of the people you see in the White House and in state-level Republican success came through networks that include Nancy Nix. I know some of the behind-the-scenes. Nancy has been part of important scaffolding on all levels. When I was last at the White House, her fingerprints are on so many important things. She won’t claim credit, but I will give it. If Vivek is a few points up in the averages, a meaningful share of the organizational credit in this region runs through people like her.[5]
George Lang: Friendship, Door-Knocking, and the Night He Took Down a Protester
I’ve always been affiliated with George Lang. We’ve developed a real friendship. I’ve seen him, Debbie, and the girls work events, knock doors, and hold the party together behind the scenes for decades. I like his family. I like the way he carries himself under pressure.[6]
Here’s a story for context. At the Savannah Center Trump event in the primary season, I had a VIP pass. Todd Hall did not want to be seen sitting in the front row with Trump at that stage—he was still in the John Kasich lane as the Ohio guy. Fair enough. George was there as a state representative. A protester started coming down the aisle toward Trump. George had told me earlier he would handle it if it came to that. When the moment arrived, George grabbed the guy, put him on the ground, and bought the security detail the second and a half they needed. That is not armchair commentary. That is a man who showed up when it was not yet popular and did the physical work.[7]
I was with George during the difficult period around John Boehner. We did not always agree on every personnel fight, but I have seen him under real pressure, and I trust the man. When purity voices treat George as the problem, they are discarding decades of actual organizational labor.
Michael Ryan, Don Dixon, and the Commissioners Who Actually Govern
I really like Michael Ryan. I spoke with him just this morning about something positive on the Republican side. He is a good conservative and a good man. The party endorsement and the primary result were decisive.[8] Don Dixon and I go back a long way—I used to race soapbox with his son Brent. Don has been a solid commissioner. These are not theoretical conservatives. These are people who show up, manage budgets, and keep the county functioning.
Sheriff Richard Jones and the Mayberry Standard
I like Sheriff Jones. I want the Butler County Sheriff’s Office to carry a bit of Mayberry and a bit of Walnut Grove—competent, present, and rooted in the community. His book is worth reading. It makes me proud of the department. When personal and political conflicts involving Roger Reynolds spilled into court and public narrative, it became another example of how intra-party score-settling distracts from the actual work of public safety.[9][10]
Revenge Politics, Back-Door Insurrection, and the Journal-News Narrative
Here is the pattern I keep seeing. People who could not win their primaries, or who lost influence, start working to tear down those who did win. They feed stories. They call solid conservatives RINOs. They treat every successful officeholder as the establishment enemy. The recent Journal-News framing of the November races and the tone around party leadership fits the pattern: soft language toward Democratic opportunities, little enthusiasm for defending the Republican incumbents and nominees who actually earned their spots.[11]
That is not leadership. Leadership is hard. Leadership is sitting across the table from people you do not fully agree with and still building a winning team. Leadership is defending the people the voters already chose in the primary so the general election is about Republicans versus Democrats, not Republicans versus Republicans. When party leadership sounds happier to give Democrats a seat at the table than to fight for the Republican majority, the voters notice.
The West Chester Lesson and What Happens When You Play Nice with the Wrong Strategy
We already lived through a version of this in the West Chester trustee and school board fights. People who thought the pure strategy would deliver instead watched Democrats and soft candidates benefit from Republican disarray. Mark Welch and others paid the price of a fractured effort. The same dynamic is available at the county level if the new posture continues.[12]
A Longer View: From Ross Perot to Trump to the Present
I’ve been doing this a long time. Election night 1992, I was at Ross Perot’s place with his daughters after helping with the big Dallas rally. We drove hard back to Ohio so I could vote. I learned then what happens when the majority party fractures or when outsiders and insiders refuse to build anything durable.[13] Through the Tea Party years and the early Trump years, I watched the same purity-versus-majority argument play out. The people who told me Trump was going nowhere were often the same voices now calling Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, or George Lang the problem. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.
What Butler County Actually Needs from Republican Leadership
Butler County is still a Republican stronghold if the party acts like one.[14] That requires leadership that understands the difference between primary competition and general-election self-sabotage. It requires people who will defend Nancy Nix, Michael Ryan, George Lang, Sheriff Jones, and the other officeholders who have earned their places. It requires the discipline to sit down with people you do not fully agree with and still leave the room as a team.
I have stood by people when it was unpopular—Darbi Boddy when others told me to stay away, Roger Reynolds in earlier seasons, and the current slate of solid conservatives even when the purity voices are loud. I will continue to do so. The alternative is a party that defines itself only by what it is against, hands Democrats open seats, and then wonders why the majority slipped.
I love Nancy Nix. I respect George Lang, Michael Ryan, and Sheriff Jones. I want a big-tent Republican Party that wins. The people trying to burn it down to feel important again are not helping Butler County. They are helping the only people who benefit from Republican disunity: Democrats.
If you are mad at me over this, check back in a decade. I’ll still be right, and I won’t let you forget it. Have a good day.
Footnotes
[1] Journal-News (Butler County / Cox First Media), “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026. The piece surveys November 2026 county and judicial races and the competitive posture of both parties.
[2] Butler County Republican Party materials and contemporaneous reporting identify Todd Hall as long-serving Executive Chairman through at least the May 2026 primary cycle.
[3] The “big tent” versus purity debate is a long-standing tension within the Republican Party, both nationally and locally.
[4] Nancy Nix has served Butler County in fiscal offices (Treasurer and Auditor) with a consistent record of staff reductions, budget discipline, and low-tax philosophy.
[5] Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2026 Ohio gubernatorial campaign has drawn significant support from Butler County and statewide Republicans; local organizers, including Nancy Nix, have been credited with early and sustained organizational assistance.
[6] George Lang, Ohio State Senator, has been a consistent conservative voice and organizational workhorse in Butler County Republican politics for decades.
[7] The 2015 Trump campaign event at the Savannah Center took place during the Republican presidential primary, when many establishment figures remained cautious or opposed.
[8] Michael Ryan won the May 2026 Republican primary for Butler County Commissioner with approximately 72 percent of the vote over long-time incumbent Cindy Carpenter after receiving a strong party endorsement.
[9] Richard K. Jones has served as Butler County Sheriff for multiple terms and has published a memoir detailing the department’s culture and operational philosophy.
[10] Roger Reynolds previously served as Butler County Auditor. His later political and legal conflicts became a public episode in local Republican politics.
[11] Journal-News, “Republicans defend Butler County stronghold as Democrats seek local gains this fall,” late August 2026.
[12] West Chester Township trustee and school-board contests in recent cycles illustrated the cost of intra-party warfare.
[13] Ross Perot’s 1992 independent presidential campaign and the subsequent Reform Party activity formed an early training ground for many later organizers.
[14] Butler County has maintained a structural Republican registration and performance advantage for decades, making internal cohesion the primary variable between comfortable majorities and avoidable losses.
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Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I have been carrying these questions in the background of my thinking for decades. The frequency with which they demand attention has risen sharply since the recent UAP disclosures. When the best technology the Air Force possesses cannot keep pace with something that behaves more like a ghost than a craft, the old categories collapse. It is not enough to say a flying saucer is real. It is not enough to say a religious claim is real. I want to know what causes people to believe what they believe, what political order forms around those beliefs, and what self-interest drives the entire system. Once you understand the political motivation behind belief, you understand the kind of society people are actually building—and whether you should support it.
That is why the conversation around Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key landed with such force. The book is not merely another academic argument about ancient wine. It is a direct challenge to the sanitized version of early Christianity most of us inherited. And it raises a harder question: if the original Eucharist carried a pharmacological charge, what does that tell us about the entities people were trying to contact, and why did Christianity’s later institutional form deliberately move away from that charge?
The Immortality Key and the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis
Muraresku’s central claim is straightforward and explosive. The original Christian communion was not a symbolic sip of ordinary wine. It was a potent psychedelic sacrament inherited from the Greek mysteries, specifically the cult of Dionysus and the rites at Eleusis. For nearly two thousand years, the greatest minds of antiquity—Cicero among them—traveled to the sanctuary at Eleusis to drink the kykeon. They claimed the experience removed the fear of death. The recipe was a state secret punishable by death.
The chemistry focuses on ergot, the fungus that grows on barley and rye—the same fungus from which Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938. The theory is not new. It was proposed in 1978 by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck in The Road to Eleusis. Hofmann and Ruck’s academic careers suffered for it. The idea that the foundations of Western philosophy and early Christianity rested on controlled visionary pharmacology was too much for the scholarly stomach of the time. And when you think about that very obvious claim, and the way those names were ostracized, you can see the root cause of a much larger problem.
Muraresku spends years in the Vatican archives and archaeological sites looking for the transition. He notes that ancient wine was rarely plain fermented grape juice. It was routinely an infusion of herbs, roots, and potentially fungi—a pharmakon. The Gospel of John, the most Greek of the Gospels, uses language for the wine that suggests something more complex than table drink. Jesus’ miracle at Cana occurs in a cultural zone saturated with Dionysian imagery. In early Jesus centuries, Dionysus and Jesus were sometimes treated as interchangeable figures of death, rebirth, and ecstatic immortality.
The book’s most compelling social argument concerns women. For millennia, the preparation of these visionary beverages was women’s work. As Christianity became institutionalized and more patriarchal, particularly from the fourth century onward, those women and their spiked drinks became a threat to the emerging clerical monopoly on the divine. Muraresku reads the Inquisition’s language of pharmaka and sorcery not merely as superstition but as the systematic eradication of a competing technology of direct encounter with the sacred. The shift, in his framing, is from pharmacological Christianity to placebo Christianity.
I want Christianity to succeed. I do not read Muraresku as an enemy of the faith. He identifies as a Catholic who is trying to recover rather than destroy the Eucharist. Yet the implications cut in two directions at once. If the earliest layers of the tradition carried a visionary intensity later deliberately muted, then the institutional Church both preserved and constrained something powerful. And if that intensity was chemically mediated, we must ask what, exactly, the initiates were encountering.
Beer, Skulls, and the Long Continuity of Death Cults
The problem is larger than Greece. When I go back further—ten thousand years further—the pattern sharpens.
At Göbekli Tepe (the site that Muraresku and others still sometimes refer to by earlier or variant names in popular discussion), the evidence is no longer subtle. T-shaped pillars, snakes carved everywhere, a clear skull cult, and chemical traces consistent with beer brewing. People were not merely gathering to eat. They were preparing fermented beverages, removing soft tissue from human heads, drilling holes, and displaying the skulls in ritual contexts under carefully oriented architecture. The same complex appears, in different local forms, along the Jordan Valley in the dolmen fields that stretch from the Golan south toward the Dead Sea, and again in the megalithic “Wheel of Giants” (Rujm el-Hiri / Gilgal Refa’im) east of the Sea of Galilee—roughly 160 meters across, built of more than 40,000 tons of basalt, aligned with solar and stellar markers.
I have scoured the archaeological literature for a serious treatment of these Jordan Valley dolmens from roughly 10,000 to 3,000 BC. The silence is telling, just like any discussion dealing with the use of wine in Greek culture outside of mainstream opinion. Mainstream discussion prefers the safer Bronze Age and later. Yet the structures are there. The alignments are there. The continuity of ritual astronomy with later Hopewell earthworks in the Ohio Valley is difficult to ignore once you stop treating the Atlantic as an absolute barrier.
Pure native copper from the Lake Superior region was extracted for thousands of years. Isotopic and purity studies continue to raise questions about whether some of that copper moved farther than orthodoxy allows. The Windover bog people of central Florida preserve soft tissue and brain matter from the same deep time window. The Newberry Tablet and other Michigan finds remain controversial, but the pattern of megalithic and copper-working activity across the Great Lakes and the Upper Peninsula does not vanish because it is inconvenient.
Everywhere you look in this pre-biblical window, you find cultures oriented toward death, severed heads, fermented or psychoactive drink, and communication with something beyond the ordinary dead—the politics of that communication matter. Human beings do not casually cut off a neighbor’s head, scrape the flesh, hang the skull, and pour blood on an altar for sport. They do it because they believe the act buys favor, knowledge, rain, fertility, or protection from harm.
The Mouse and the Snake
I use a simple allegory. Watch a pet snake being fed. Drop a mouse into the glass enclosure. For the first few minutes, the mouse runs, freezes, and tests every corner. Eventually it realizes there is no exit. Then the behavior changes. It becomes still. It positions itself near the water dish or the food bowl as if stillness and proximity to ordinary life might persuade the snake to look elsewhere. The snake, of course, is not persuaded. It simply waits and then eats.
Humanity has lived for a very long time with the anxiety of that mouse. Non-human intelligences—call them Watchers, old gods, ultraterrestrials, or whatever the current UAP language prefers—appear in the record as entities that demand appeasement. Psychedelics, ritual sex, blood, and skull display are technologies of that appeasement. The mouse tries to make itself useful or invisible so the snake will not strike.
Christianity, in its mature form, broke that cycle. It did not deny the existence of the hostile powers. It declared them defeated in principle and offered a different posture: moral agency, individual responsibility, and direct relationship with a God who does not require the constant feeding of death. The result, imperfect as every human institution is, was the rise of a civilization that valued the living more than the skulls of the dead. Strip the Christian premise from a mass of people, and the older pattern reasserts itself with remarkable speed. I have watched it at a Jason Aldean concert from the VIP area—twenty thousand people, many drunk since morning, public sexual display, the old fertility and abandon patterns returning the moment the moral frame loosens. The same retreat appears wherever the teachings of Jesus are actively removed from a culture.
That is why I am not enthusiastic about the modern psychedelic renaissance framing itself as the recovery of a lost “religion with no name.” The experiences reported at Johns Hopkins and NYU—ego death, loss of fear of mortality—are real. The question is whether the entities contacted in those states are friends of the human project. My reading of the long archaeological record is that they are not. They have been competing for control of human attention and behavior for a very long time. Christianity was never their preferred outcome.
The Four Pillars That Still Need Digging
The gap between roughly 10,000 BC and the world of Abraham remains the least examined and most consequential stretch of the human story. Four clusters of evidence deserve far more serious, well-funded attention than they currently receive. I am committing myself to putting money and attention to these ideas:
1. The skull cult, beer residues, and snake iconography at Göbekli Tepe and related Anatolian sites.
2. The dolmen fields and the Wheel of Giants along the Jordan Valley and Golan.
3. The pure copper extraction systems of the Lake Superior region and their possible long-distance movement.
4. The Windover and related Archaic Florida populations with their extraordinary preservation of soft tissue and ritual practice.
These are not isolated curiosities. They form the deep background against which both the biblical narrative and the later Greek mysteries emerge. More excavation, more isotopic analysis, more open discussion of possible transoceanic contact, and less reflexive dismissal of “fringe” data would change the conversation. I am writing The Politics of Heaven in part to force that conversation into the open. The secular publishing world prefers books that treat Christianity as the problem rather than as a partial solution to an older and darker problem. That preference itself looks, from where I sit, like another form of the mouse’s stillness—keeping the larger questions safely inside the glass.
Conclusion: Do Not Be the Mouse
The original Eucharist may well have carried a pharmacological dimension inherited from older Mediterranean practice. The women who prepared the drinks may have been the last keepers of a technology the institutional Church found threatening. None of that requires us to return to the skull cults and the blood altars. The miracle of Christianity was not that it invented the sacred. It redirected the human drive for transcendence away from appeasement of predatory powers and toward a moral and spiritual posture that could build a durable civilization.
I want more money poured into the archaeology of the deep past—not the archaeology that already knows what it is allowed to find, but the kind willing to follow the copper, the alignments, the beer residues, and the severed heads wherever they lead. I want the conversation about non-human intelligence to stop treating the entities as either cartoon aliens or harmless spirit guides. They have a politics. Humanity needs a politics equal to theirs.
The Politics of Heaven is my effort to map that battlefield. The four pillars above are the places where the next decade of serious digging should concentrate. The rest is commentary, color, and the long memory of a man who has watched the same patterns repeat across continents and millennia.
Do not be the mouse. Learn the snake’s methods. The enemy is the one who puts the mouse in the cage with the snake. That is the answer to our many questions. And in the UAP disclosures, we are getting a hint of that world.
Footnotes
1. Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (St. Martin’s Press, 2020).
2. R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978; later editions).
3. On the ergot detoxification experiments and the University of Athens work referenced by Muraresku, see the discussion and citations in The Immortality Key, chapters on Eleusis and the chemistry of the kykeon.
4. Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press, 2003) and subsequent biomolecular archaeology papers on mixed fermented beverages.
5. For Göbekli Tepe skull cult and brewing evidence: Klaus Schmidt and subsequent publications of the German Archaeological Institute; recent chemical analyses of residues in stone vessels.
6. Rujm el-Hiri (Gilgal Refa’im / Wheel of Giants): surveys and interpretations in Israeli archaeology literature; see also popular and specialist treatments of its astronomical alignments.
7. Old Copper Culture / Lake Superior copper: standard Midwestern archaeology; purity and sourcing debates continue in archaeometallurgy literature.
8. Windover site, Florida: Glen H. Doran et al., publications on the Archaic wet-site cemetery and preserved soft tissue.
9. Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery, 1969) and later works on the continuity of non-human encounter narratives.
10. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking, 2009).
11. Biblical Archaeology Review, ongoing coverage of Jordan Valley and related megalithic sites; earlier issues treating dolmens remain limited relative to the density of the remains.
12. On Hopewell copper and ceremonial complexes: standard Ohio Valley archaeology; Newark Earthworks and related lunar alignments.
13. Dolores Cannon’s reported communications with Essene figures appear in her Conversations with Nostradamus series and related remote-viewing / past-life material; treated here as phenomenological data rather than conventional historiography.
14. Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and later works on Göbekli Tepe and catastrophic prehistory; useful for raising questions even where orthodoxy disagrees with conclusions.
Selected Bibliography
• Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key. St. Martin’s Press, 2020.
• Wasson, R. Gordon, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck. The Road to Eleusis. 1978 and later editions.
• MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2009.
• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969.
• McGovern, Patrick E. Ancient Wine. Princeton University Press, 2003.
• Schmidt, Klaus. Publications on Göbekli Tepe (German Archaeological Institute).
• Doran, Glen H., et al. Windover site monographs and papers.
• Hancock, Graham. Fingerprints of the Gods and subsequent titles.
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.
