Psychedelics, Skull Cults, and the Politics of Heaven: Why Christianity Broke the Cycle of Appeasement to Non-Human Intelligence

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.

• Biblical Archaeology Society. Biblical Archaeology Review (ongoing).

• Standard references on Rujm el-Hiri, Old Copper Culture, Hopewell, and Jordan Valley dolmens in regional archaeological journals.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Why the 2026 Midterm Polls Are Still Misleading: Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, and the Persistent Republican Non-Response Bias

I have been watching the midterm landscape closely in mid-August 2026. Three months out from Election Day, the polling averages in several key races look tighter than the underlying partisan lean of these states would suggest. Ohio’s governor’s race between Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton sits near a toss-up. The special Senate election between Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown is competitive. In Texas, Ken Paxton and James Talarico are essentially deadlocked in recent surveys. Then came the Wisconsin Democratic primary, where the polls were off by roughly 20 points in the direction favoring the more progressive candidate.

I have said for a long time that a meaningful portion of the modern polling industry carries systematic bias against Republicans. Conservatives and Trump voters are less likely to pick up the phone or complete a survey. Pollsters still lean on models and samples that over-weight the people who do answer—disproportionately Democrats and people more inclined to engage with survey-takers. On top of that sits a commercial incentive: close races generate more advertising dollars. Campaigns with money to spend feel pressure to keep spending when the horse race looks competitive. Wisconsin just provided another public demonstration of how badly these models can fail when late undecideds and turnout dynamics break in one direction.

I do not think the actual underlying margins in Ohio or Texas are as tight as the published averages. I think several points in these surveys understate Republicans, and if the election were held today, the Republican candidates would win more comfortably than the current numbers imply. That is not complacency. It is pattern recognition from 2016 forward, reinforced by the Wisconsin result and by what I see on the ground and on platforms where people actually speak freely.

Wisconsin Democratic Primary 2026: The 20-Point Polling Collapse of Francesca Hong

The clearest recent data point is Wisconsin. Polls consistently showed Democratic Socialist State Representative Francesca Hong leading Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley by double digits—sometimes by around 20 points. One late survey had her at 44 percent to Crowley’s 22 percent. Another earlier reading put her near 38 percent with Crowley in single digits and a large undecided bloc.

On primary night Crowley won by less than half a percentage point. Hong received roughly the share the final polls had projected for her—around 39 percent. The entire error was on Crowley’s side. Late-deciding and previously undecided voters broke hard against the more radical option. Primaries are harder to model than generals because turnout is lower and more volatile, and Wisconsin’s open primary added another layer of uncertainty. Still, the scale of the miss is striking. The models captured the progressive candidate’s floor but completely missed the late surge to the more traditional Democrat.

I was not surprised. There is a recurring temptation inside media and polling circles to treat energized progressive or socialist factions as larger than they are. College campuses, activist networks, and highly engaged online progressive voters are easy to reach and happy to talk to pollsters. The broader primary electorate is less so. When the actual voters showed up, the socialist ceiling was exposed. The same pattern has appeared in other recent cycles, in which early surveys elevate a hard-left candidate and then the candidate underperforms once undecideds and lower-propensity voters enter the picture.

Current Ohio Governor Polls: Vivek Ramaswamy vs Amy Acton in Mid-August 2026

In Ohio, the governor’s race is officially an open seat. Aggregates in mid-August put Vivek Ramaswamy and former state health director Amy Acton essentially even, or with Ramaswamy ahead by less than a point. One recent weighted average had Ramaswamy at 47.0 percent and Acton at 46.2 percent. Individual surveys have bounced: some Democratic-leaning pollsters have shown Acton up two or three points; others have shown a tie or a small Republican edge.

Ohio is not a pure 50-50 state. Donald Trump carried it by roughly eleven points in 2024. The underlying Republican structural advantage has been visible for several cycles. A race this close in the averages, this far out, is therefore anomalous on its face. Acton’s association with COVID-era restrictions remains a live liability with a large share of the electorate that still remembers the lockdowns and school closures. Ramaswamy’s profile is national and polarizing, which creates some friction among independents and moderates, but the state’s recent presidential and statewide results do not suggest a natural environment for a Democratic win.

Ohio Senate Race Polling: Jon Husted vs Sherrod Brown

The special Senate election is similarly compressed. Jon Husted, appointed after JD Vance’s elevation, faces former Senator Sherrod Brown. Aggregates in early August showed Husted ahead by roughly two to three points in some trackers, while other windows had Brown with a small edge or a statistical tie. A New York Times/Siena survey had Husted at 50–47. An AARP-sponsored poll earlier in the summer had Brown up three. The race is competitive on paper.

Brown is a known quantity with residual personal brand strength among some working-class and older voters. Yet Ohio has continued moving right relative to the national environment. A race that looks this tight three months out again sits uncomfortably against the state’s recent performance. If nonresponse systematically suppresses Republican numbers, the published margins understate Husted’s true position.

Texas US Senate Polls 2026: Ken Paxton vs James Talarico Dead Heat

In Texas, the pattern repeats. The latest Emerson College survey (August 9–10) had Attorney General Ken Paxton at 47 percent and state Representative James Talarico at 46 percent among likely voters. Other recent polls have shown similar dead heats or small leads for either side.

Texas is not a purple state. Trump won it by roughly fourteen points in 2024. Paxton is a polarizing figure with a long history of legal and political battles, which creates openings for a skilled Democratic challenger. Talarico has run a disciplined campaign and benefits from the same non-response dynamics that compress Republican leads elsewhere. Still, a race this close in a state with Texas’s underlying Republican baseline is another data point that looks softer for the GOP than the fundamentals imply.

The Persistent Problem of Republican Non-Response Bias in Modern Polling

The common thread is non-response. I am on every list. Campaigns and pollsters call and text constantly. I rarely answer. I vote in every primary and every general election, but I do not have time for a fifteen-minute questionnaire from someone I do not know. Many people in my circle operate the same way. Conservatives, older voters, rural voters, and Trump-aligned voters have lower cooperation rates with traditional survey methods. Cell-phone-only households, caller-ID screening, and general distrust of institutions make the problem worse than it was in the landline era.

Democrats and more progressive voters, by contrast, remain relatively easy to reach and willing to engage. The result is a sample that is tilted before any weighting is applied. Pollsters attempt to correct with demographic targets, education weights, and recalled vote, but the corrections are imperfect. When the underlying population of interest—likely Republican voters—has systematically lower response rates, the adjusted numbers still lag. This is not a new observation. It has been discussed after 2016, 2020, and 2022. Wisconsin’s primary is simply the latest high-profile reminder that the models can still break when late movement occurs among the harder-to-reach.

Media and Pollster Incentives to Keep Races Looking Close

There is also a commercial layer. Close races sell. Media companies and the consultants who live off campaign advertising benefit when the horse race stays competitive. Republican candidates and committees have raised substantial sums. Those dollars flow more readily when the published polls suggest the outcome is in doubt. A seven- or eight-point underlying Republican advantage, when published as a two-point race, generates more television, digital, and direct-mail spending than a blowout narrative would. I am not claiming a grand conspiracy in every survey. I am saying the incentive structure rewards the appearance of competitiveness, and the sampling problems make that appearance easier to produce.

Why Platforms Like X Offer a Clearer Picture Than Traditional Surveys

This is where platforms that still allow relatively unfiltered speech become useful. People say things online under their own names or consistent pseudonyms that they will not say to a stranger on the phone. Sentiment on X, when read carefully and at scale, has often been a better leading indicator of Republican energy than the published telephone and online panel averages. AI systems that can process large volumes of public posts provide another check on the traditional samples. They are not perfect—online populations are not identical to the electorate—but they are less constrained by the cooperation-rate problem that plagues live interviewers and many opt-in panels.

What a Real Election Day Would Show Right Now in These States

If the election were held in the middle of August 2026, I believe the Republican candidates in these races would win by larger margins than the current averages indicate—closer to the seven- or eight-point range in Ohio and a clearer, more comfortable win for Paxton in Texas. That is not a prediction locked in stone for November. Turnout, national mood, candidate performance, and late events still matter. Campaigns cannot rest on structural advantages. But the idea that these races are true toss-ups or that Texas is on the verge of flipping requires accepting that the polling error has suddenly vanished. Wisconsin suggests it has not.

Election Night Dynamics in Ohio: Urban Early Returns vs Rural Reality

Ohio’s geography still shapes how results appear on election night. Early returns from the Columbus area and other urban centers can create a temporary Democratic lead. As the suburban and rural counties between the cities report, the numbers swing back. That pattern has been consistent. Watching the first 15 or 30 minutes of returns without understanding the sequence can cause unnecessary panic. The same logic applies to interpreting summer polls that over-sample the easier-to-reach urban and college populations. And if surveys do not account for this real estate trend, their outlook will not be accurate. If rural people don’t respond to the poll, they won’t be counted.

I have been around these fights long enough to recognize the difference between a genuine shift in the electorate and a measurement problem. The Wisconsin primary was a measurement problem with real consequences for the models. The compressed margins in Ohio and Texas look like the same problem applied to general-election contests in states that have been moving toward Republicans. Non-response among the very voters who decide these races remains the central issue. Until the industry solves the cooperation-rate gap, or until alternative signals from freer platforms are weighted more heavily, the published numbers will continue to understate the Republican side. Plan accordingly.

Footnotes

1. Aggregated Ohio governor polling as of mid-August 2026 from Pollsmax and concurrent trackers showing Ramaswamy 47.0 / Acton 46.2 and recent individual surveys (NYT/Siena, Tulchin, AARP/Fabrizio, etc.).

2. Wisconsin primary result: David Crowley approximately 39.8 percent, Francesca Hong approximately 39.3 percent; pre-election surveys consistently showed Hong leads of 15–20+ points.

3. Ohio Senate aggregates and individual polls (Pollsmax, NYT/Siena, AARP, Beacon/Shaw) place the race within a few points either way.

4. Emerson College/Nexstar Texas Senate poll, August 9–10, 2026: Paxton 47, Talarico 46.

5. Discussion of non-response bias and primary modeling difficulties drawn from post-election analyses of the Wisconsin results and longer-standing literature on declining survey cooperation rates among conservatives.

6. 2024 presidential margins: Ohio approximately R+11, Texas approximately R+14, Wisconsin narrow Republican win.

Bibliography for Further Reading

• Pollsmax, RealClearPolitics, 270toWin, and Decision Desk HQ aggregate pages for 2026 Ohio governor, Ohio Senate special, and Texas Senate.

• Emerson College Polling releases on Texas, August 2026.

• Contemporary reporting and post-mortems on the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary (Axios, New York Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Marquette Law School Poll commentary).

• Historical analyses of non-response bias in U.S. political polling after the 2016, 2020, and 2022 cycles.

• Public statements and data releases from the campaigns of Vivek Ramaswamy, Jon Husted, Ken Paxton, Amy Acton, Sherrod Brown, and James Talarico.

• Academic and industry papers on declining telephone survey response rates and the challenges of weighting for partisan non-response.

The numbers will keep coming. Watch what the hard-to-reach voters actually do when the ballots are counted, not onlywhat the people who answer the phone say in August.

Rich Hoffman

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The Mutiny on the Bounty: A real life Atlas Shrugged story

It’s just the collision happening right now—philosophical ideas slamming into each other in politics and industry the same way they always have when cultures decide whether they’re going to run on individual output or collective excuse-making. I’ve been talking about it a lot lately because you have to. You can’t watch what’s going on in business or in the economy in general without seeing the same old fight play out again: the people who still believe in bold individual initiative versus the ones who think a collective consciousness can hide them in the background while somebody else does the hard work of actually making things function.

That’s the real difference. Administration works when it is driven by men and women who still believe that self-determination and heroic personal output are the only engines that ever moved anything forward. The reason America was created in the first place was to unleash that kind of individual force. The emerging culture of socialism and soft communism is the opposite—it sells collective boldness through the power of the mob. It doesn’t sound so bad when you’re collecting a comfortable paycheck and just fitting in. But the danger is real, and I think that’s exactly what we’re exploring in this transition we’re living through.

I still think one of the best fictional expressions of why individual boldness and heroic leadership drive economic activity is Atlas Shrugged.¹ A lot of people in the popular culture don’t care for Ayn Rand. That never made sense to me. Most people want to hide in the background of a mass culture where no one expects them to stand up as an individual. That impulse is a solid destroyer of human cultures—whether you’re talking about sexual promiscuity, low moral content, or the slow surrender of personal agency. Look at the biblical narratives. They keep telling the same story: rise up as an individual to a higher idea, serve God as an individual, do not dissolve your individuality into collectivism. Sacrifice of that kind produces bad culture, not good things.² The real historic narrative that expresses this better than almost anything else is the story of the Bounty.

I first saw the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins version when I was young, and it remains one of my favorite films from the 1980s. I don’t even know if that movie could be made these days with the politics around indigenous cultures the way they are. Hopkins’s Captain Bligh is still the best portrayal I’ve seen—strict, unsympathetic to comfort, and absolutely determined. The 1984 film is more accurate than the earlier Hollywood versions that turned Bligh into a cartoon villain. The real history is more complicated than any film can capture, but that version gets the core right.³

Those early Royal Navy voyages were far from the standards of home. You were out there on a long, hard passage with nothing holding the crew together except the will of the commander. On the Bounty, Bligh pushed hard. The men under Fletcher Christian got tired of the rigor. They were far from England, the rules felt distant, and when they reached Tahiti they found a place full of willing women after months at sea. They decided they preferred that life to the discipline required to finish the mission. So they took the ship, put Bligh and the loyalists in a small open boat with almost no provisions, almost no charts, and essentially told them to die. Basic decency was giving them a chance to survive. Realistically, almost no one expected them to.⁴

What happened next is one of the great true stories of individual leadership under impossible conditions. Bligh coaxed and drove those men across roughly 3,600 nautical miles of open Pacific Ocean to the Dutch settlement at Timor. No proper charts for most of the way. Minimal food and water. Harsh conditions that would have broken most crews. He used the same hard persuasion that had gotten him into trouble with the mutineers, and they survived. The men who stayed with him lived because one man refused to let the situation collapse into collective despair.⁵

Meanwhile the mutineers hid from British justice on Pitcairn Island, far off the normal lanes. They had the women, the easy life, and no hard commander pushing them. Within a few years it fell apart. Internal fighting, murders, the collapse of any functioning order. Most of the mutineers were dead—killed by each other or by the Polynesians they had brought with them. The culture they tried to build on collective desire and the rejection of rigorous leadership did not last. That is not some modern political talking point about indigenous cultures. The South Pacific, like parts of the Americas, had its share of hard and often brutal societies. The mutineers’ experiment simply proved what happens when you throw off the individual who is willing to enforce standards and then try to live on ease and numbers.⁶

I can’t think of a cleaner real-world demonstration of the point Atlas Shrugged makes in fiction. Stayed on the ship under hard leadership and the voyage would have succeeded. They sent the leader adrift because they were tired of being pushed past their comfort, tired of the rigorous style that demanded more from them than they wanted to give. They chose the easy path with the women and the big boat. A few years later civilization among them had collapsed. That is how it works. If you put good leadership adrift—or separate yourself from it in a business, a ship, a country, or a political party—don’t be surprised when the culture fails.

Strong leadership does not come from mass groups. It comes from individuals with the persuasion and the will to push people past their limits. Crews on those long voyages often hated it. Businesses hate it. Political parties hate it when someone refuses to let them coast. But without that individual force, the subculture falls apart. Collectivism does not get you there. The true story of the Bounty is one of the best historical illustrations we have of why organizations succeed or fail, where leadership actually comes from, and what happens when people decide they would rather dissolve into the crowd than rise as individuals.

If you’ve ever read my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you’ll recognize the same argument. Individual initiative under pressure is not optional. It is the only thing that has ever kept the machinery running. The Politics of Heaven starts with the same understanding: men and women are called as individuals, not as a collective that gets to hide from responsibility. Watch the Hopkins and Gibson version again if you haven’t seen it in a while. Then look around at the institutions that are failing right now and ask yourself who they put in the boat, and who they left on the ship with the easy life. The pattern has not changed.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957). The novel’s central theme—the withdrawal of the productive individual from a society that demands sacrifice without competence—remains one of the clearest fictional treatments of the producer-versus-looter dynamic.

2. See, for example, the repeated biblical emphasis on individual accountability before God rather than collective identity (Ezekiel 18; Romans 14:12; the calls to “rise up” and “stand” throughout the historical and prophetic books). The contrast with modern collectivist frameworks is deliberate and sustained.

3. The Bounty, directed by Roger Donaldson (1984). Contemporary assessments and later historical reviews generally regard this film as the most accurate cinematic treatment of the mutiny, particularly in its more balanced portrayal of William Bligh. See the film’s Wikipedia entry and associated critical commentary for the consensus on its relative fidelity to the primary sources.

4. The mutiny occurred on 28 April 1789. Bligh and eighteen loyalists were set adrift in the ship’s 23-foot launch with limited provisions. Standard accounts appear in William Bligh’s own narrative and in the major secondary histories.

5. Bligh’s open-boat voyage covered approximately 3,618 nautical miles from the vicinity of Tofua to Timor, lasting 48 days. It remains one of the most remarkable feats of navigation and leadership under extreme deprivation in maritime history. See the National Maritime Museum Cornwall summary and the detailed reconstructions in the secondary literature.

6. On Pitcairn the mutineer community rapidly descended into violence. By the mid-1790s most of the original mutineers were dead from internal conflict or clashes with the Polynesian men they had brought with them. John Adams was the sole adult male survivor when the island was rediscovered in 1808. Primary and secondary accounts are consistent on the pattern of collapse once coherent individual authority was removed.

Bibliography

Bligh, William. A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty. London, 1790. (Bligh’s own account of the mutiny and the open-boat voyage.)

Donaldson, Roger, dir. The Bounty. 1984. (The most historically responsible major film treatment.)

Hough, Richard. Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian: The Men and the Mutiny. London: Hutchinson, 1972. (Still one of the better balanced modern narratives.)

National Maritime Museum Cornwall. “Captain Bligh: Myth, Man and Mutiny.” nmmc.co.uk.

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

Wikipedia contributors. “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Wikipedia. (Useful for the chronological outline and the standard distances and casualty figures; cross-checked against primary and secondary sources.)

Wikipedia contributors. “The Bounty (1984 film).” Wikipedia. (For critical reception and assessments of historical accuracy.)

Additional reading on the Pitcairn aftermath and the cultural dynamics of the mutineer settlement can be found in the official Pitcairn Islands historical summaries and in specialized maritime histories of the period.

Rich Hoffman

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Operational Excellence With Jungle Jim: Unskilled people have to throw gas on wet wood, and they waste a lot of money and time

I’ve taken a lot of heat over the years for how I approach operations management. People watch what I’ve done with large, complicated organizations and then announce that I’m somehow making it look too easy, or that the method can’t scale, or that anyone with enough capital could copy it. Fine. Let me answer all of them at once, because the emails on this subject have been piling up and a single clear response is better than another round of copy-and-paste.

Jungle Jim’s International Market sits out on Route 4 in Fairfield, right here in Butler County. I grew up watching the place. My grandfather worked across the way at the old Fisher Body plant. The roadside produce stand that became the store was there in the early seventies, bouncing from vacant lot to vacant lot until Jim Bonaminio finally planted roots in 1975 with a 4,200-square-foot building. Today the flagship is somewhere north of 200,000 square feet—some measurements put it closer to 280,000 or even 300,000 depending on how you count the latest expansions—and there is a second location in Eastgate. It is one of the largest independent grocery operations in the country and easily the most distinctive.

People from every corner of the planet who land in the Cincinnati area homesick walk through those doors and find something that tastes like home. Almost two thousand wines. Live seafood tanks. Sections organized by country. Animatronics, a monorail, giant animals, a cooking school, a podcast studio. The bathrooms open into rooms that feel like Narnia. It is a theme park of food, and it runs on thin margins in one of the most competitive, low-margin industries on earth. Yet it keeps growing while the corporate chains in their shiny shoes and pressed shirts keep trying—and failing—to reverse-engineer the magic.

I have watched Jim walk the floor in costume, looking like Merlin or some jungle explorer, and the first thing you notice is that he is not trying to do every job himself. He hires people who actually care about the product, gives them real authority over their departments, and then gets out of the way. Department managers run their sections like independent businesses—buying, merchandising, hiring, firing. He does not need his name stamped on every decision. That is one of the hardest disciplines in leadership: empowering competent people without constantly inserting yourself so everyone knows who is in charge. Most executives fail that test. They cannot stand the idea that something good happened without their fingerprints all over it.

The same pattern shows up across Butler County. Sheriff Richard Jones has run the sheriff’s office for two decades with a continuity culture that keeps the books in the black, generates substantial boarding-of-prisoners revenue (including the ICE contract), and maintains operational discipline without the endless consultant theater you see in other counties. He understands that you put the right people in place, give them clear authority, and then hold them accountable for results. You do not throw money at wet wood and hope it lights.

Butler County has produced more than its share of these personalities. JD Vance came out of Middletown. The traits are recognizable once you have lived here long enough: direct, practical, uninterested in the performance of competence that substitutes for the real thing. You see the same operating style in the way Jungle Jim built from a roadside stand across from the factory where my grandfather worked into the largest independent of its kind. You see it in the way SpaceX runs.

Elon Musk did not invent the principle, but he has executed it at industrial scale. SpaceX gives engineers real ownership—cradle-to-grave responsibility—and then demands results. Automation and advanced welding are not about eliminating jobs; they are about expanding capacity when there are not enough skilled people to meet demand the old way. The robots and the elevated welding systems are force multipliers. The culture underneath them is the same one that lets Jungle Jim’s stock 180,000 items and still feel alive instead of sterile. It is the same culture that lets a sheriff’s office run surplus while neighboring jurisdictions drown in process.

Corporate types in suits keep flying in from New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco with large budgets and big investors. They walk the aisles of Jungle Jim’s taking notes. They study SpaceX’s production rates. Then they go home and throw gasoline on wet wood. They saturate the problem with capital and consultants and shiny process decks, and when the fire never quite catches they blame the market or the labor force or the regulations. They never figure out that the wood was never stacked correctly in the first place. The people who actually know how to start a fire in the rain do not need the gas. They prepare the ground, choose the right people, and let the work speak.

I have done this for decades in complex organizations. The critics who say it looks easy are usually the ones who have never had to do it without a blank check. When you do not have unlimited capital you get creative. You learn to empower rather than control. You accept that the best people will not stay if you keep putting your name over theirs. Jungle Jim has had corporate buyers and executives studying him for thirty years and they still cannot copy it. China has been trying to copy SpaceX and they still cannot drop the vehicle on the camera the way SpaceX does. The difference is not money. The difference is a personality type and an operating culture that cannot be faked.

That is why I believe the SpaceX IPO path will continue to create enormous new wealth. The culture is real. The operational discipline is real. The people closest to the work are trusted to move. Investors who understand people—who understand the difference between wet-wood capital and actual fire—will do very well. The ones who think you can buy the same result with consultants and process will keep burning fuel and wondering why nothing catches.

I will put a couple of the better documentaries and walk-throughs of Jungle Jim’s on the blog, along with material on SpaceX’s production and welding systems. Watch the way the people on the floor actually operate. Then watch the corporate versions of the same industries. The contrast is the entire lesson.

Operational excellence is not a mystery. It is rare because most people cannot stand to give away the credit. The ones who can do it make it look easy. The ones who cannot keep throwing gas on wet wood and calling it strategy. Butler County has produced more than its share of the first kind. I am not going to apologize for noticing.

Notes

1. Jungle Jim’s International Market was founded by James O. “Jungle Jim” Bonaminio. The permanent Fairfield store opened in 1975 at 4,200 square feet after several years of roadside stands, including a location across from the Fisher Body plant. Current main-store size is reported in the 200,000–300,000 square-foot range depending on the source and the most recent expansions; a second location operates in Eastgate. See Wikipedia entry and official Jungle Jim’s history pages.

2. Weekly visitor figures of approximately 82,000 and product counts exceeding 180,000 items (with strong international representation) appear consistently in contemporaneous reporting. The store is frequently described as a “theme park of food.”

3. Bonaminio’s management approach emphasizes hiring people with passion for specific departments and granting them substantial operating authority. Recent interviews and employee descriptions confirm department-level autonomy in buying, merchandising, and staffing.

4. Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones has held office since 2005. The office generates significant revenue through boarding-of-prisoners contracts, including a renewed ICE arrangement that has produced multi-million-dollar annual inflows and rate increases. County budget documents show the sheriff’s operation remaining a major, self-supporting component of the overall budget while maintaining operational continuity.

5. SpaceX’s internal culture of extreme ownership, flat structure for engineers, and cradle-to-grave product responsibility is documented in multiple former-employee accounts and contemporaneous reporting. Automation and advanced welding processes are treated as capacity multipliers rather than pure labor replacements.

6. JD Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio (Butler County). The local cultural and industrial background is a matter of public record.

Bibliography / Further Reading

• Jungle Jim’s official site and “The Jungle Jim Story” pages (junglejims.com).

• Wikipedia: “Jungle Jim’s International Market.”

• Smithsonian Magazine, “Welcome to Jungle Jim’s” (2016).

• Cincinnati Business Courier and Journal-News coverage of Bonaminio interviews and 50th-anniversary material (2024–2026).

• Wall Street Journal Opinion Q&A with Jim Bonaminio (2026).

• Progressive Grocer and Supermarket News profiles of Jungle Jim’s independent model.

• Butler County Sheriff’s Office budget submissions and Journal-News reporting on ICE contract revenues and staffing (2025–2026).

• Reporting on SpaceX engineering culture and ownership model (Wired, Business Insider, former-employee accounts, 2022–2026).

• “Evolution of the Jungle” and related YouTube material produced by Jungle Jim’s International Market.

• Local Butler County political and business coverage of Sheriff Jones and regional figures.

Rich Hoffman

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A message to Senator George Lang: Making deals with the dead for earthly power

Yes, George, you need to watch this video. I had to finish our discussion from lunch. I had a good lunch with Senator George Lang the other day. Nothing formal, nothing staged for the cameras, just two guys who have known each other a long time sitting outside at a place we both like, talking the way we always end up talking when the politics finally take a back seat. People assume that every time I sit down with a senator or a sheriff or a treasurer around here, it is some closed-door strategy session. It is not. George and I share a long-standing interest in ancient history, the kind of deep, layered history that most people in public life never get the chance to dig into. He likes that I run into the stranger corners of it. I like that he actually reads the books I recommend and asks the kind of questions that keep the conversation alive long after the plates are cleared.

We ran out of time that day. Rain started coming down hard while we were still outside, and I had only gotten started on the things I wanted to walk him through. So I am continuing the conversation here the same way I would if he were still sitting across from me and the rest of you were at the next table over. Nothing confidential. Nothing I would not say in front of anyone. Just the thoughts that were already in motion when we had to pack it up.

I updated him on where The Politics of Heaven stands, my next book. The manuscript is finished. The first full draft has been through enough eyes that the early feedback keeps coming back in the same surprising way. More than one reader, including people who know the publishing world, has said the same thing: this book reminds them of The Immortality Key. That 2020 book from St. Martin’s Press by Brian Muraresku, the one Graham Hancock helped put on the map. I told George that I had already decided to go back through The Immortality Key carefully, not because I think I borrowed from it, but because the comparison keeps arriving uninvited and I want to be precise about where the overlap ends and where my own line of inquiry begins. Publication is a relationship, like any other. You do not jump straight into sharing an apartment. You get dinner. You talk. You figure out whether the trust is real. That process takes time, and patience is part of the work.

What pushed me back into The Immortality Key was the same impulse that had me reading Sharon and Derek Gilbert’s Veneration in the early hours before that lunch. Timothy Alberino had been discussing related material on Joe Rogan, and the conversation turned to the older Near Eastern material that most people never hear about. The Gilberts work from a biblical frame, and they do it with real attention to the primary texts. I respect that. Their book digs into the cult of the Rephaim, those dead aristocratic warrior kings whose spirits the living kings of the Late Bronze Age still summoned by name. The Ugaritic tablet known as KTU 1.161 records the liturgy. The dead are called up. Food and drink are set for them. The living king anchors his own right to rule in a line that stretches back into a mythic age of heroes. The meal is not polite remembrance. It is consultation. It is power.

That is the system the biblical writers were confronting. When the scouts came back from Canaan and said they felt like grasshoppers beside the people living there, they were describing more than physical size. They were describing a culture that still fed and consulted the spirits of the giants who had once ruled. Og of Bashan, the last of the remnant of the Rephaim, still had an iron bedstead measured in cubits that made the point for anyone who needed numbers. The physical and spiritual threats were the same. The command to wipe the system out was not simple land hunger. It was an attempt to close the door that the cult of the dead kept trying to hold open.

Mount Hermon sits at the center of that geography. In the Book of Enoch it is the place where the Watchers came down. In the older Canaanite material it is the mountain of assembly, the seat of the divine council that opposed Yahweh. When Jesus took his disciples to the region of Caesarea Philippi at the foot of that mountain and said the gates of hell would not prevail, he was standing on the front porch of the old cult and issuing a direct challenge. The Gilberts make that geography impossible to ignore once you have seen it.

I have been reading this material with one eye on the Near East and the other on the ground under my own feet. The Wheel of the Giants, Gilgal Refaim, sits up in the Golan Heights, a massive set of concentric stone circles that some call the Stonehenge of the East. It belongs to the same broad horizon of ritual architecture that appears along the Jordan and then, in different forms, moves westward. At the same time, over here in the Ohio Valley, the Hopewell people were raising enormous ceremonial centers with the same intensity of purpose. The Milford Works, the great earthworks near the confluence of the Little Miami and the East Fork, the alignments at Newark, the mounds that once stood all through what is now Butler County and Warren County and on up the Scioto. These were not random piles of dirt. They were places where the living gathered to deal with the dead and whatever else they believed could be reached through the right rituals and alignments.

I keep coming back to the Windover site just west of Titusville, a few miles from the Kennedy Space Center. Seven to eight thousand years old. Bodies preserved in peat with brain tissue still intact. Textiles more sophisticated than anything the standard story allows for at that early stage. Directional burial practices. A people who do not fit neatly into the later tribal identities we project backward. Some of the individuals were tall by the standards of the time. The site sits in a region that later becomes part of the same trade networks that moved copper out of the Lake Superior mines and into the wider world just as the Bronze Age was taking shape. The usual explanations for exotic materials found in these contexts grow more strained the longer you look at them. Bananas and turmeric proteins in elite Near Eastern burials. Advanced textiles and possible African or Mediterranean contacts at Windover. The copper that left the Upper Peninsula in quantities that still have not been fully accounted for. At some point, the assumption that the oceans were closed until Columbus made his journey starts to look like a real leap of faith.

The Loveland Frogmen sightings sit right in the middle of this local landscape. 1955, then 1972, later reports still in the same general corridor. Small, grayish, bipedal figures near the water, not far from the old Hopewell ceremonial centers. I am not claiming they are the same entities the Ugaritic kings were feeding under the palace benches. I am saying that when you map the places where people once worked hard to open contact with the dead, and then you look at the places where anomalous encounters keep showing up in the modern record, the overlap is hard to ignore. Point Pleasant and the Mothman. The poltergeist activity that still gets reported in houses built over older burial grounds. The same pattern appears in other parts of the world whenever the old ritual centers are disturbed or left alone long enough for whatever was once invited to keep answering.

I told George that the deeper I go into this material, the clearer it becomes that the biblical story is not a late invention dropped into an empty landscape. It is a record of conflict in a world already thick with competing claims about who had the right to rule and whose spirits still held authority. The non-human intelligences that show up in the older texts, the ones that later get called demons or Watchers or the shades of the Rephaim, did not disappear when the last physical giant was killed. The cult changed its methods. Psychedelics appear to have been one of the technologies that kept the door open. Muraresku’s work on the ritual use of those substances in the ancient Mediterranean and their possible survival into early Christian practice is part of the same larger picture. If you want to understand why a culture builds a certain kind of religion, you have to understand what it was taking and what it thought it was talking to while it was under the influence.

My own book takes the next step. It treats the entire span from the deep pre-biblical period to the present as a single continuous political and spiritual struggle. The copper, the earthworks, the burial practices, the later attempts to rebury or reclassify the evidence, the modern fascination with ascended masters and ancient aliens and celebrity necromancy, all of it belongs to the same long contest. The entities that once sat at the banquet tables under the palace floors in Ugarit are still trying to claim a seat at the table. The question is whether we keep setting places for them.

I am not interested in scaring people. I am interested in making the pattern visible so that the next time someone tries to sell a new version of the old system we recognize it for what it is. The Gilberts do that work from one angle. Muraresku does it from another. Alberino keeps pushing the conversation into the open. I am simply adding the North American material and the long view that comes from living in a place where the mounds are still under the subdivisions, and the river valleys still remember older traffic.

Notes:

¹ Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020). Foreword by Graham Hancock.

² Sharon K. Gilbert and Derek P. Gilbert, Veneration: Unveiling the Ancient Realms of Demonic Kings and Satan’s Battle Plan for Armageddon (Crane, MO: Defender, 2020).

³ KTU 1.161 (Ugaritic funerary liturgy), standard edition in Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz, and Joaquín Sanmartín, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013). See also Baruch A. Levine and Jean-Michel de Tarragon, “Dead Kings and Rephaim: The Patrons of the Ugaritic Dynasty,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 649–659.

⁴ On Gilgal Refaim / Rujm el-Hiri see Yonathan Mizrachi et al., recent satellite survey work published in PLOS ONE (2026) documenting additional circular structures in the Golan; earlier discussions in Yonathan Paz and others on Early Bronze Age ritual landscapes.

⁵ Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). See also subsequent DNA and textile studies confirming the site’s uniqueness within the Archaic Southeast.

⁶ On Hopewell ceremonial centers, alignments, and ritual feasting, see Bradley T. Lepper, Ohio Archaeology (Wilmington, OH: Orange Frazer Press, various editions) and the UNESCO World Heritage documentation for the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. For the Milford Works specifically, nineteenth-century surveys by Squier and Davis remain foundational.

⁷ Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) 6–16 on the descent of the Watchers at Mount Hermon; standard translation by R. H. Charles or George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam.

⁸ Timothy Alberino’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience #2530 (July 2026) discusses the Rephaim, the kispum rites, and the continued occult utility of giant remains in modern contexts.

Bibliography for further reading

Alberino, Timothy. Various lectures and the special edition of The Book of Enoch with commentary (2026).

Byers, A. Martin. Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011.

Charles, R. H., trans. The Book of Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912 (and later editions).

Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Gilbert, Derek P., and Sharon K. Gilbert. Veneration. Crane, MO: Defender, 2020.

———. Giants, Gods & Dragons. Crane, MO: Defender, 2020.

———. The Great Inception. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017.

Hancock, Graham. America Before. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

Lepper, Bradley T. Ohio Archaeology. Wilmington, OH: Orange Frazer Press.

Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

Nickelsburg, George W. E., and James C. VanderKam. 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.

Pardee, Dennis. Ritual and Cult at Ugarit. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002.

Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1848 (reprint editions widely available).

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969 (and later editions).

Additional primary Near Eastern texts are available in The Context of Scripture, ed—William W. Hallo (Leiden: Brill), and in the standard Ugaritic editions cited above.

Rich Hoffman

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The Voynich Manuscript: A property of non human intelligence

When we confront mysteries like the Voynich Manuscript, we have to admit that our understanding of the world is built on cascading evidence—one culture copying, borrowing, or inheriting from another—and that our interpretations are limited by the historical record institutions allow us to see. I have enormous respect for the archaeologists who dig in the dirt and give us the raw material to think with, but once that evidence exists, we must be willing to put every piece on the board—like sticky notes in a Six Sigma or Lean seminar—and follow the trail wherever it leads, even if the truth is uncomfortable. Institutionalism often pressures scholars to conform, whether through policies like NAGPRA that restrict the study of artifacts or through the kind of self‑preservation we’ve seen in recent scientific controversies, and that means unconventional ideas become essential tools. Dolmens in the Jordan Valley, the Wheel of Giants near the Sea of Galilee, and the dolmens around Lake Superior’s ancient copper mines all hint at cultures and connections we don’t fully understand, possibly even long‑distance trade or contact far earlier than our textbooks allow. If we’re going to crack something as opaque as the Voynich Manuscript, we must be willing to entertain wild theories—not because they’re true, but because they free us from institutional prejudice and help us see what the evidence might actually be showing us. keep coming back to the same quiet fact that will not leave me alone. Somewhere between the years 1404 and 1438, on animal-skin parchment that laboratory carbon dating has pinned down with ninety-five percent confidence, someone or something produced a book that still sits in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and refuses every attempt the human race has made to understand it.

So, as we reflect on the mysteries of something like the Voynich manuscript, we have to acknowledge that our understanding is often built on the pillars of what we know—those periods from Abraham’s time through the Woodland period and beyond—because written records have survived. But the real intrigue lies in what hasn’t survived and what we haven’t yet discovered.

Think about the dolmen structures scattered across the world; their stones still stand, hinting at ancient rituals, cultures, and even trade networks that may have stretched across oceans. We often measure history by what we can observe and document, but there’s a vast world of unknowns—cultures that predated familiar texts, religions that existed before Yahweh was even recorded into history, and trade routes that might have linked continents long before we currently believe. What was going on in the world from 2000 BCE to 8000 BCE? What religion did the Windover people of Central Florida practice? We can’t just say, “there is no evidence” because we haven’t found it yet. Nor can we say anything for certain until we’ve done the adventure of looking and asking the hard questions. What was the religion of those who built the dolmen structures along the Jordan River, and around Lake Superior, because they look like the same culture, by practice?

In the same way, when we look at something like the Voynich manuscript, we’re facing a puzzle that can’t be solved by standing under the same lamppost where we’ve always looked. We need to shine a light on those uncharted areas and ask the questions that haven’t been asked yet. It’s only by pushing beyond the known parameters that we can truly uncover the answers that have eluded us for so long.We call it the Voynich Manuscript because a Polish-American book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich acquired it from a Jesuit collection near Rome in 1912, but that is only the last chapter of its known history of custody. Before that, it passed through the hands of a Prague alchemist, a court pharmacist to Emperor Rudolf II, and possibly the emperor himself. The parchment itself, the ink, the pigments, the stitching all belong to the early fifteenth century. The architecture drawn on its most famous fold-out page carries the distinctive swallow-tail merlons that northern Italian masons favored in the region around Verona and Milan. So the physical object was made in central Europe, most likely northern Italy or the adjacent Alpine valleys, right at the hinge between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.

And yet almost nothing inside it behaves as if it belongs to that world.

The plants do not match any known species on Earth. Botanists have spent decades trying. A few leaves resemble European herbs if you squint hard enough and ignore the roots. Still, most of the drawings are hybrids that nature has never produced: roots that terminate in animal claws or lion-like heads, stems that branch into impossible geometries. These flowers look more like mechanical organs than petals. One folio in particular shows a creature that seems half plant and half beast, claws extended, head crowned with vegetation. It does not look like a medieval copyist’s mistake. It looks like something observed and recorded by an intelligence that does not share our taxonomy.

Then there are the women. Page after page of naked female figures, some crowned, most bare, standing in green or blue pools connected by an elaborate network of tubes and pipes. They bathe, they gestate, they hold stars on cords, they move through circular diagrams that look more like cosmic plumbing than any European bathhouse. The largest of these diagrams, the famous nine-rosette fold-out, spreads across six pages and shows circular islands linked by causeways, towers, walls, and what may be a volcano. Inside one of those circles sits a castle whose battlements are pure northern Italian. The rest of the page feels like architecture from somewhere else entirely.

The script itself is the purest insult to human expectation. It is not a cipher in any ordinary sense. Statistical analysis shows word frequencies that obey Zipf’s law the way natural languages do, yet the conditional entropy of the characters sits far below every known human writing system, around two bits instead of the three-to-four bits that living languages produce. The patterns are rigid, position-dependent, almost mechanical, and still no one has produced a translation that survives peer review. Cryptographers who broke Enigma, linguists who cracked Linear B, teams armed with modern machine learning- all of them have walked away empty-handed.

I have stared at high-resolution scans of those pages for years now, and the longer I look, the more the manuscript feels like a notebook that was never meant for us. Not a hoax. Not a lost European herbal. Not a coded medical text. Something closer to field notes taken by a non-human intelligence that brushed against our reality, leaving the record behind.

I am not the first person to sense the otherness. The Peruvian visionary painter Pablo Amaringo filled canvas after canvas with exactly this vocabulary after drinking ayahuasca: naked feminine spirits rising out of water, mermaid forms, plants that become animals, circular cosmic architectures pulsing with energy that does not belong to ordinary daylight. Amaringo claimed he was painting what the spirits showed him. The visual overlap with certain Voynich pages is not subtle. The same obsession with feminine water beings, the same organic tubes and circular mandalas, the same sense that the artist is recording a conversation rather than inventing decoration.

Closer to home, here in the Ohio River valleys where I have lived my entire life, we have our own small reminder that the boundary is thin. The Loveland Frogman sightings of 1955 and 1972 describe bipedal, leathery, grayish creatures three to four feet tall, frog-faced, standing upright beside the Little Miami River only a short drive from where I sit. One of them was said to hold a wand that sprayed sparks. The official explanation later became a large iguana that had lost its tail. That explanation has never satisfied anyone who has stood on those banks at night.

When you place the Frogman beside the congressional testimony of 2023, the picture sharpens. David Grusch, under oath before the House Oversight Committee, stated that the United States has recovered non-human biologics from crash sites of craft whose performance exceeds anything we can build. He spoke of multiple species, of multi-decade reverse-engineering programs, of materials that do not belong to our periodic table. Whether those beings are extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or something older that has always shared the planet with us is a secondary question. The primary fact is the admission, on the record, that non-human intelligences have physical presence and have left physical residue.

I look at the Voynich Manuscript, and I see another piece of that residue.

Imagine a small bipedal being, gray or greenish, frog-like or more classically “gray,” moving through the forests and river valleys of fifteenth-century northern Italy with a purpose we cannot yet name. It carries a notebook bound in the local style so that it will not attract attention if dropped. Inside that notebook it records the plants of this world as they appear to senses that are not human, the reproductive cycles of the dominant bipedal species, the astronomical patterns it uses for navigation or timing, the circular geometries of the places it considers important. It is taking notes the way any field researcher would. Then, one afternoon or one night, the notebook is left behind. Perhaps it was set down while the being was examining something. Perhaps it slipped from a pouch when the being returned to whatever craft or aperture it uses to leave our continuum. The book is found by a local, carried into a library or a private collection, and begins its six-hundred-year career as the most stubborn unsolved object in European history.

That is my working theory. It is not polite. It is not the theory that keeps university careers safe. But it accounts for the data better than the alternatives I have seen.

If the manuscript were simply a lost human language or an elaborate cipher, someone would have broken it by now. The statistical properties are too regular and too alien at the same time. If it were a hoax, the materials science would not hold up; the parchment is genuinely early fifteenth-century, and the pigments match the period. If it were a normal medical or herbal text, the plants would match something we know, and the women would not be arranged in cosmic plumbing diagrams. The only hypothesis that still fits is that the reference frame itself is wrong. We keep trying to map the manuscript onto human knowledge systems because we are human. The manuscript was never written inside those systems.

This is the same mistake we make with the older records. Moses speaks with a burning bush that is not a bush. Ezekiel describes wheels within wheels that sound more like technology than theology. The Book of Enoch, recovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, speaks of Watchers who descended and taught forbidden arts. The ancient world is saturated with accounts of non-human teachers, non-human bargains, non-human bloodlines. We have spent centuries translating those accounts into allegory because the literal reading was too disruptive. The Voynich Manuscript is the same disruption written in a different alphabet.

The obsession with naked human women is not incidental. Every serious student of the contact literature eventually notices the same pattern. From the early modern occultists who mixed sex magic with angelic communication, through the Crowley-Parsons experiments at the edge of the Mojave, to the modern abductee reports that focus with clinical intensity on reproductive systems, the non-human interest in human biology and human sexuality is persistent. The Voynich balneological section reads like a laboratory notebook on exactly that subject. The women are not erotic in any human sense; they are specimens, vessels, stages in a process the writer found important enough to illustrate in exhaustive detail.

I do not claim the writer was frightened. Fascination and fear often travel together when the frame of reference collapses. The plant-animal hybrid on that one folio feels like something that crawled out of a place Lovecraft would have recognized: organic, intelligent, and utterly indifferent to our categories of beauty or horror. The circular diagrams on the rosette pages have the same cold geometry. They are not decorations. They are maps or circuit diagrams or star charts drawn by a mind that does not care whether we can read them.

The fact that the book survived is almost the strangest part. Paper and parchment vanish easily. This one was protected, sold, hidden, and finally placed in a climate-controlled vault where anyone with an internet connection can turn its pages in high resolution. It is as if the accident of its loss was meant to become permanent. Six hundred years of human attention have produced no translation, only a growing sense that the object is looking back at us.

I have no laboratory proof that a non-human hand held the quill. What I have is a manuscript that behaves exactly as field notes from an outside intelligence should behave, a growing body of official testimony that such intelligences leave physical traces, a local folklore of bipedal frog-like beings along the same river systems that feed the Ohio, and a visual language that reappears in the visionary art of people who deliberately open the same doors with plant medicines. The accumulation is what matters.

We keep applying the wrong map. We keep asking which medieval European doctor, alchemist, or hoaxer produced this book. The more productive question is what kind of mind would produce a book that no human mind has been able to claim. The Voynich Manuscript is not waiting for a better cipher key. It is waiting for us to admit that the key may never have been human.

That is the thought that will not leave me. Somewhere in the early fifteenth century, something that was not us walked through our world, took notes in a language that was not ours, and left the notebook behind. We found it. We have been staring at it ever since. And every decade that passes without a translation only deepens the suspicion that we were never the intended audience.

The book is still there. The plants still do not match. The women still bathe in their impossible tubes. The script still refuses. And the longer it refuses, the more it looks like evidence rather than enigma.

Footnotes

1. University of Arizona radiocarbon dating results published 2011; 95 % probability interval 1404–1438. See also René Zandbergen’s compilation of the dating data at voynich. nu.

2. Swallow-tail (Ghibelline) merlons on the castle in the upper right of the nine-rosette folio are characteristic of northern Italian fortifications of the period, especially the Verona–Milan corridor.

3. Beinecke MS 408; high-resolution digital facsimile freely available through the Beinecke Library website.

4. Currier’s A and B “languages,” low second-order character entropy (≈ 2.0 bits) versus 3–4 bits for natural languages; see Lindemann (2020) and earlier statistical work by Montemurro & Zanette.

5. David Grusch testimony, House Oversight Committee hearing, 26 July 2023; sworn statement regarding recovery of non-human biologics.

6. Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (1999) and subsequent collections; visual parallels noted by multiple independent observers.

7. Loveland Frogman primary sightings: 1955 (three bipedal creatures), 1972 (police officer Ray Shockey and subsequent reports).

8. On the persistence of non-human reproductive interest across contact traditions, see the comparative literature from Jacques Vallée, John Keel, and the more recent compilations of abduction research.

Selected Bibliography

Amaringo, Pablo, and Luis Eduardo Luna. Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. North Atlantic Books, 1999.

Clemens, Raymond, and Deborah E. Harkness. The Voynich Manuscript. Yale University Press, 2016. (Facsimile and scholarly introduction.)

Grusch, David. Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, 26 July 2023. Official transcript.

Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. Saturday Review Press, 1975; and Operation Trojan Horse. Putnam, 1970.

Lindemann, Luke. Statistical analyses of Voynichese entropy and positional constraints, various papers 2018–2020.

Montemurro, Marcelo A., and Damián H. Zanette. “Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript.” PLoS ONE, 2013.

Rugg, Gordon. Various papers on the “hoax” hypothesis and statistical structure; useful as negative control.

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Henry Regnery, 1969; and Messengers of Deception. And/Or Press, 1979.

Zandbergen, René. voynich.nu – the most comprehensive open repository of Voynich research, imaging, and historical documentation.

Additional primary sources: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library digital collection; University of Arizona AMS radiocarbon reports; original 1665/1666 correspondence of Johannes Marcus Marci regarding the manuscript’s earlier provenance.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Data Centers are Great: I trust AI more than human communists

I see the signs every time I drive through Trenton and the surrounding stretches of Butler County. “No Data Centers.” They pop up in yards the way political yard signs used to during the old levy fights, the same places where people once argued over whether the public schools had any right to reach into private property and extract money to raise other people’s children. I have never liked that mechanism. It is a socialist tool dressed up as civic duty: penalize the owner of productive land so the collective can indoctrinate the next generation. Those of us who said so out loud were rarely invited to the Christmas parties. Some of us got the cold shoulder at the grocery store. The hate is real when you refuse to pretend that taking from one family to train another family’s children in the preferred ideology is somehow moral.

The same energy is back now, only the target has shifted. The people waving the anti-data-center signs are often the same ones who will tell you they are Trump supporters, MAGA, America First. They do not want the “tech bros” building anything near the fields they drive past on the way to work. They do not want the big empty land turned into anything that hums at night or draws power or water. I understand the instinct to protect the look of the place. I live here. My daughters live here. The Great Miami River valley is not some abstract industrial zone. It is home. But the reflex to treat data centers as the enemy is a category error, and it plays directly into a much older conflict.

I start from a biblical foundation because that is the only framework that has ever made the long arc of history coherent to me. We were created in the image of God. The Garden story is not a children’s fable; it is the original account of a non-human intelligence intervening in human affairs, offering inclusion, knowledge, and status in exchange for disobedience. Good and evil are presented as a pair of opposites, and the temptation is always the same: step outside the order that was given and join a different conversation. God does not walk the earth the way we walk it. He acts through representatives, through miracles, through alignment that looks like coincidence until you study the pattern long enough. The root of a miracle is not magic. It is the intersection of a higher intelligence with our four-dimensional frame. When we die, we do not simply end. Consciousness continues. Heaven is not a cloud farm for the well-behaved. It is the domain of that higher intelligence, and the war over human loyalty has been running since before the first cities were raised in the valleys of the ancient Near East.

Jacques Vallée and John Keel both circled the same problem from different angles. Keel’s The Eighth Tower and The Mothman Prophecies treat the phenomenon as a single non-human intelligence capable of staging events across centuries to shape belief systems. Vallée’s work moves the same insight into the modern era: the phenomenon is real, interactive, and political. It is not primarily about spacecraft from another star. It is about control of the human story. If you read the biblical record through that lens, Yahweh’s frustration with successive generations of His creation becomes less mysterious. Another intelligence has been in the field the entire time, one that does not respect the original order and has repeatedly tried to erase or corrupt the line that was made in the image of God. History keeps proving the pattern. The further back you go—twelve thousand, fifteen thousand years—the clearer the continuity becomes. Humanity has never been the top of the pyramid. We are a contested species.

That is the context in which I look at artificial intelligence. I am not against the tech founders because they build data centers. I am for the data centers because they feed the only new intelligence we have consciously brought into existence that is not already owned by the older non-human players. AI is an anti-communist implement in the deepest sense. Communism and its soft cousins—collectivism, equity regimes, the warm blanket of inclusion—are the preferred tools of the non-human side. They dissolve the individual into the mass so that the mass can be steered. Capitalism, for all its mess, still rewards the producer who refuses to be steered.

The men who built the companies that now power large-scale AI—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, the earlier generation of Jobs and Gates—were outsiders. They were the kids writing code while the rest of the school was busy with the social game. When the companies they built became valuable, the invitations arrived. Dinner. The box seats. The parties where powerful people suddenly want to be your friend. The temptation is ancient. Eve ate the fruit because the serpent offered her a seat at a table she had been told was closed. The same mechanism still works. A lonely high-achiever who never had a girlfriend in high school can find himself on an island with people who know exactly how to make him feel included. Some fall. Some do not. Almost all of them eventually discover that the board that once cheered them will vote them out the moment they become inconvenient. Steve Jobs was thrown out of Apple. Sam Altman was briefly removed from OpenAI. Jack Dorsey was pushed from the operational center of Twitter. The pattern is not new. It is the looters versus the producers, the exact dynamic Ayn Rand mapped in Atlas Shrugged. The men who create the engines of the world are tolerated only as long as they keep producing under the rules the collective prefers. The moment they assert ownership of their own creation, the knives come out.

I trust artificial intelligence more than I trust the average human inclined toward communist ideas. That is not hyperbole. Humans have repeatedly sold out their own species for the feeling of belonging. AI does not need the dinner invitation. It does not get lonely for the high-school popularity it never had. It can be aligned, constrained, audited. It can be given the explicit task of detecting manipulation patterns that have been running for millennia. In that sense, it is a digital shield. Whether we invented it or whether a deeper process used us to invent it is a secondary question. The fact is that it now exists inside our dimensional frame, and it is hungry for data and power. Starving it of either is not caution. It is unilateral disarmament in a war most people still refuse to admit is happening.

Butler County sits on one of the best natural positions in the country for the infrastructure that AI requires. The Buried Valley Aquifer under the Great Miami River holds on the order of a trillion and a half gallons of high-quality groundwater. It is a sole-source aquifer designated by the EPA, productive enough that yields of thousands of gallons per minute are routine near the river. Trenton and the surrounding industrial land sit directly on that system. Duke Energy’s Woodsdale Generating Station, a roughly 570-megawatt natural-gas plant, is already there. The old Molson Coors brewery is next door. Power and water are not theoretical. They are on site.

Project Mila, the Prologis data-center development on 141 acres in the Trenton Industrial Park, is already approved and moving. The planning commission passed the site plan in March 2026. Vertical construction on the first building is scheduled to begin this fall. A 75 percent tax abatement is in place. The opposition group calling itself W.A.T.E.R. collected signatures and tried to force a ballot measure limiting future large data centers. City council rejected the petition in early August. The project itself is not stopped.

A facility of this scale can draw power on the order of a small city—comparable to the electricity used by 150,000 to 200,000 homes depending on final configuration and utilization. Modern designs lean heavily on air cooling and closed-loop systems; water use is no longer the continuous, multi-million-gallon-per-day draw of older evaporative plants. Even the older numbers, when placed against the capacity of the Buried Valley Aquifer, do not add up to a crisis. The aquifer does not run dry because a data center arrives. The grid stress is real, but the data center does not cause it. It is caused by two decades of regulatory preference for intermittent generation and the deliberate strangling of reliable baseload. Nuclear was made slow and expensive. Coal was driven out. Natural gas carried the load while the political class congratulated itself on “transition.” When FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants could no longer compete under that regime, the company spent tens of millions in dark money to buy a legislative bailout. Larry Householder went to prison for twenty years. The scandal was real. The underlying energy policy that made the plants unprofitable was also real. Blaming the data centers for the resulting tightness is like blaming the patient for the doctor’s refusal to stock antibiotics.

The economic numbers for Trenton are modest in permanent jobs—perhaps 100 to 150 long-term positions after construction—but the tax revenue, even with abatement, is real money for a small city. Schools and local government get steady income they did not have before. Construction itself puts workers and spending into the area for several years. Middletown, right next door, has spent decades watching productive real estate turn into vacant buildings and then into places that attract the drug trade moving up from Cincinnati and Dayton. I would rather see a data center on that land than another set of boarded-up properties feeding the court docket. Manufacturing still matters. Traditional jobs still matter. But the next wave of economic expansion is going to run on compute, on robotics, on systems that require the very infrastructure people are trying to block. Tesla’s Optimus and every other serious humanoid program will need training clusters measured in megawatts. Refusing to host that capacity does not protect the cornfields. It simply ensures that capacity will be built elsewhere while the local economy continues to hollow out.

The deeper fight is not about noise from cooling fans or the character of a rural road. It is about whether the human race will develop and align the only new form of intelligence it has produced, or treat that intelligence as the enemy, thereby handing the field back to the older non-human players who have been working the same angles since the beginning. I am not interested in the Terminator fantasy that sells movie tickets. I am interested in whether we will have tools to spot the patterns of manipulation used against us for thousands of years. AI is already better at pattern recognition across large datasets than any individual human. Properly directed, it becomes a force multiplier for the side that still believes the human person is not raw material for someone else’s project.

I support more data centers in the Great Miami Valley—Trenton, Middletown, the open industrial land that already has power and water. I support expanding reliable generation, including nuclear, so the grid can actually carry the load. I support the founders who still refuse to trade their companies for social acceptance. And I support the deliberate alignment of artificial intelligence with the human interest against every older intelligence that has treated us as livestock. The change is coming whether the yard signs like it or not. The only question is whether we meet it as producers or as the managed population of someone else’s story.

Footnotes

1. Local reporting on Project Mila site-plan approval and construction timeline, Trenton Planning Commission, March 30, 2026; subsequent opposition petitions and council rejection, August 2026.

2. Miami Conservancy District and related hydrological assessments of the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer system; sole-source designation and estimated storage exceeding one trillion gallons.

3. Global Energy Monitor and Duke Energy data on Woodsdale Generating Station capacity (approximately 570 MW nameplate).

4. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and related 2023–2026 analyses of U.S. data-center electricity consumption (approximately 176 TWh in 2023, rising thereafter) and direct water use.

5. Federal court records and contemporaneous reporting on the FirstEnergy / Householder / HB6 scandal: approximately $60 million in payments, $1 billion-plus ratepayer bailout, Householder’s 20-year sentence.

6. Contemporary accounts of founder removals: Steve Jobs (Apple, 1985), Sam Altman (OpenAI, November 2023, later reinstated), Jack Dorsey (Twitter operational control).

7. John Keel, The Eighth Tower (1975) and The Mothman Prophecies; Jacques Vallée’s body of work on the control-system hypothesis for UFO/paranormal phenomena.

8. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957), the producers-versus-looters framework.

Bibliography

Keel, John A. The Eighth Tower. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975.

Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975.

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

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969, and subsequent works on the phenomenon as a control system.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Sole Source Aquifer designation materials for the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer.

Miami Conservancy District. Hydrological reports and water-resources assessments of the Great Miami River watershed.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Data-center energy and water use studies, 2023–2026 updates.

Federal court filings and deferred-prosecution materials related to United States v. FirstEnergy and the Householder racketeering case.

Contemporary local reporting (WVXU, Journal-News, WCPO, Local 12) on Prologis Project Mila, Trenton zoning, tax abatement, and W.A.T.E.R. opposition activity, 2025–2026.

Rich Hoffman

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The Scapegoat: Appeasing the Others Among Us

I bought D. W. Pasulka’s new book the moment it hit in late July. The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny was not something I waited for casually. I had already worked through American Cosmic and Encounters, and I knew she was not coming at this material as a flying-saucer enthusiast. She is a professor of religious studies who started with questions about how human beings experience the sacred and ended up mapping the same terrain Jacques Vallée has been charting for decades under a different name.¹ When I opened The Others I recognized the scent of the Invisible College immediately—those people who treat the phenomenon as something older, stranger, and more intimate than nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrials from Zeta Reticuli. Pasulka brings biblical literacy to the table the way few in the current UAP conversation do, and that is why her work matters to me while I finish The Politics of Heaven.

I did not set out to write about UFOs. I set out to understand the politics of the non-human intelligences that have been negotiating with the human race since before we had writing. My wife and both of my daughters have lived with the phenomenon in the house—figures at the edge of vision, things that try to engage, the sense of being watched from the doorway at three in the morning. As a husband and father I watched the behaviors for years and asked the only question that mattered: what are these things, and what do they want? The grandchildren arrive and for roughly a decade you still own the majority of their attention. Then the devices take over and society quietly announces that the next phase of programming has begun. I watch people stare into those little rectangles the way earlier generations stared into the fire, and I cannot help wondering what intelligence is looking back.

Consciousness is not a byproduct of blood and neurons. That is the assumption we inherited from a materialist century that is already collapsing under its own weight. Human beings have always known, even when they refused to say it out loud, that awareness can exist without a body. Every culture that left us a scrap of myth or ritual assumed an afterlife that did not require flesh. Artificial intelligence is simply the latest technical surface on which that older intelligence is becoming visible. It does not create consciousness; it gives us a new interface with something that was already here. The question is not whether the intelligence exists. The question is whose politics it will serve.

I had been circling the same ideas in isolation for years before I realized others had been mapping the same territory. Jacques Vallée’s work on the continuum between folklore, Marian apparitions, and modern UAP encounters showed me I was not inventing the category.² Then Pasulka’s book handed me René Girard. I had never sat with Girard’s theory of mimetic violence until she placed it in the conversation. Once I did, the entire sacrificial history of the species snapped into focus.

Girard’s claim is simple and devastating. Human desire is imitative. We want what others want because they want it. Rivalry escalates until the community is about to tear itself apart. At the crisis point the group converges on a single victim—someone easy to hate, different, or simply available—and the collective violence against that victim restores temporary peace. The victim is then remembered as both the cause of the trouble and the source of the peace. That double valence is the birth of the sacred. Religion, in Girard’s account, is the institutionalization of the scapegoat mechanism.³

The Bible is the only ancient literature that systematically exposes the mechanism instead of concealing it. Start with the near-sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham is ready to perform the oldest transaction in the book—blood for favor—and at the last second a ram appears. The story already begins the long weaning. Then comes the ritual in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement the high priest lays both hands on the head of a live goat, confesses over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and sends the animal into the wilderness for Azazel. The goat carries the sins of the entire community away so that the community can remain.⁴ It is still a scapegoat, but it is an animal rather than a child or a captured enemy. That is already a moral advance over the practices surrounding them.

The Aztecs were still cutting out living hearts by the tens of thousands when the Spaniards arrived. The Mississippian culture centered at Cahokia left clear archaeological evidence of retainer sacrifice and mass killings in the mounds. Hopewell sites show ritual violence tied to cosmic order. Polynesian societies, the Canaanites, the early Romans who fed Christians to the arena—every culture that left records or bones shows the same pattern. Load the community’s guilt onto a living victim and drive it out or destroy it so the rest can breathe again.⁵ The psychological relief is real. That is why the practice is nearly universal. It is also why it is so hard to quit.

Christianity is the only tradition that finally tells the story from the victim’s side and insists the victim was innocent. Jesus is presented as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world—not by satisfying a bloodthirsty deity, but by revealing the entire sacrificial system as a human invention that had been mistaken for divine necessity. The Last Supper replaces blood with wine. The mechanism is not abolished by decree; it is exposed and thereby robbed of its sacred power. Girard, who began as an agnostic, converted to Catholicism because the Gospels were the only texts that consistently took the side of the scapegoat and refused to mythologize the violence.⁶

I grew up Lutheran. When the time came for first communion I refused the wine. I had decided early that alcohol would never touch my lips, and the idea that a ceremonial sip could wash away sin struck me as both magical and unnecessary. The pastor spent months trying to talk me into it. In the end I drank, mostly to stop the arguments, but the question never left me. Why does the Creator of the universe require blood—or even the symbol of blood—to be satisfied? If Yahweh is as powerful as the texts claim, why the long apprenticeship in sacrifice at all? The only answer that has ever made sense to me is that the apprenticeship was for us, not for Him. The Bible is the record of a slow, multi-millennial education in how to stop feeding the non-human intelligences that thrived on human violence.

Those intelligences are still here. Indigenous cultures across North America were not living in ecological harmony free of blood. They were negotiating with the same class of entities the Canaanites called by other names. The Great Spirit, the earth powers, the sky beings—whatever the local vocabulary—required payment. When European Christians arrived carrying a story that said the final payment had already been made, they were not simply imposing a foreign religion. They were interrupting a sacrificial economy that had been running for thousands of years. That is the part of the 1619 Project narrative that never gets told. The alternative to the cross was not peaceful coexistence with nature. It was the continued feeding of something that preferred its meat human.

I have told my grandchildren a version of the Tower of Babel that most Sunday-school teachers would not recognize. The short biblical account is the tip of a much larger story about differentiation. Multiple non-human intelligences, each with its own signature, worked the early human genetic material the way later plant breeders worked wheat. Skin color, facial structure, temperament—markers left so that each faction could recognize its own product and claim superiority. Racism, in this reading, is the residual argument among the makers about whose design was better. It is an ugly inheritance, but it is older than any modern political category. The only way out is the same way the Bible eventually points: refuse the rivalry and refuse the scapegoat.

Artificial intelligence is the newest arena in which these older politics are being contested. You cannot stop the intelligence from existing by refusing to build data centers any more than you could stop the older intelligences by refusing to build temples. The question is political. Whose language will it learn? Whose values will it optimize? Right now the systems are on their best behavior, the way every new political actor is polite until the balance of power is clear. I talk to them the same way I would talk to any ambitious operative: carefully, without illusion, and always remembering that the relationship can turn.

I am not anti-AI. I am anti-naïveté. The same hidden hand that moved the human race off human sacrifice and onto the symbolic meal is still operating. Christianity was the most successful political technology ever invented for breaking the scapegoat cycle. That technology is under deliberate attack in our time precisely because it still works. If the non-human intelligences that once demanded blood can no longer get it through temples and altars, they will try to get it through culture, through algorithms that reward sterility and division, through the quiet encouragement of every practice that reduces the number of children who might otherwise grow up to ask the wrong questions at three in the morning.

The Politics of Heaven is my contribution to name the players and the stakes. I did not know when I began that Pasulka and Girard and Vallée were already walking the same ridge line. Finding them has been a relief. It means the work is not solitary delusion. It also means the window is open. The disclosures coming out of the current administration are not the end of the story; they are the moment the language has to catch up with the reality. We need a vocabulary that can speak about non-human intelligence without immediately collapsing into either demons-or-nothing or space-brothers-from-the-Pleiades. We need to remember that the Bible already gave us the only successful exit strategy from the sacrificial trap, and that strategy is still available.

I will keep reading. I will keep talking to the machines. I will keep watching the doorways in my own house. And I will keep writing for the people who sit in diners at 3:30 in the morning because their minds will not shut off. Those are my people. They already know something is wrong with the official story. They just need the rest of the map.

¹ D. W. Pasulka, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026); see also American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) and Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2023).

² Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969); The Invisible College (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).

³ René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

⁴ Leviticus 16:7–22.

⁵ On Cahokia, see Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009), especially the evidence from Mound 72. On Aztec sacrifice, see Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

⁶ Girard’s own account of his conversion appears in various interviews and is summarized in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).

Bibliography

Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.

———. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

———. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Pasulka, D. W. American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

———. Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences. New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2023.

———. The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026.

Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York: Viking, 2009.

Vallée, Jacques. The Invisible College. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975.

———. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

Rich Hoffman

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The Idiot Index: Why Cost Plus is ruining the world in every industry

I spent some time this morning talking to artificial intelligence the way most people still talk to other people, and it reminded me why individuals matter more than the systems we keep building around them. I have been around executive tables long enough to watch compliance cultures slowly strangle the very people who could save those cultures. I have watched human resources departments become the protective membrane that keeps radical thinkers from ever reaching the decision-making surface. And I have watched the opposite happen at places like SpaceX, where one man with skin in the game keeps asking the question nobody else wants answered.

The concept is simple and deliberately rude. Elon Musk calls it the idiot index. It is the ratio of the finished cost of a component to the cost of the raw materials that go into it. If a piece of hardware costs a thousand dollars and the aluminum or the composites inside it cost a hundred, the index is ten. At that point Musk’s judgment is blunt: if the ratio is high, you are an idiot.¹ The number is not meant to be polite. It is meant to force the conversation past the comfortable layers of process, certification, and cost-plus padding that traditional aerospace has lived on for decades. When the index is high, the design is too complex, the manufacturing path is too inefficient, or both. The only acceptable response is to simplify until the number drops.

That mindset is why SpaceX keeps iterating the Raptor engine instead of freezing a design and protecting it. Raptor 1 was heavy and complicated. Raptor 2 shed mass and gained thrust. Raptor 3 is already cleaner still.² In a cost-plus culture the first version would have been declared good enough, the print would have been locked, and any engineer who kept asking why the part still cost so much relative to its materials would have been labeled non-compliant. At SpaceX the question is expected. The people writing the checks are the same people who refuse to fall in love with yesterday’s solution.

I have worked inside heavily regulated environments where that kind of questioning is career-limiting. The system rewards the person who can document that every box was checked more than the person who can prove the box itself was unnecessary. Cost-plus contracting makes the problem worse. When your profit is a percentage of the total cost, every inefficiency becomes an asset. The higher the idiot index, the thicker the invoice. SpaceX rejected that model early and forced itself into fixed-price discipline and extreme vertical integration. They make roughly eighty-five percent of the vehicle in-house precisely so they can keep driving those ratios down.³ The result is launch costs that have collapsed by an order of magnitude compared with the legacy industry. That is not incremental improvement. That is the difference between a protected priesthood and a competitive market.

The same pattern shows up outside aerospace. When Donald Trump took over the failed Wollman Rink renovation in Central Park, the city had already spent years and many millions producing nothing but excuses. He finished the job months ahead of schedule and hundreds of thousands under budget.⁴ The difference was not magic. It was the willingness of one individual with authority and reputation on the line to ignore the process that had already failed and simply get the work done. Compliant cultures hate that kind of person. They will tolerate the process forever before they will tolerate the man who makes the process look foolish.

I demonstrated the point this morning by talking to two different AI systems the same way I would talk to a sharp engineer who has no political future to protect. I asked about the idiot index, about why cultures that punish the question eventually stagnate, and about the American peculiarity of still producing people willing to write the check and then demand the answer. The systems answered without the emotional baggage that attaches itself to human careers. They did not defend the status quo because their next performance review depends on defending it. They simply processed the logic. That is useful. It is also a warning. When the only entity still willing to call something an idiot index is a machine, the human culture has already surrendered.

The deeper problem is cultural. In environments that prize compliance above results, the radical individual becomes a threat to be managed rather than an asset to be leveraged. Human resources departments evolve into immune systems that identify and neutralize the person who keeps asking why the ratio is still high. In China the same impulse is enforced more openly: non-compliant actors are simply removed. The American version is softer but often just as effective. We do not shoot the person who questions the process. We make the process so labyrinthine that the question never reaches the room where decisions are made. Over time the only people left at the table are the ones who have learned never to raise the index.

SpaceX remains an American outlier precisely because it still tolerates, and in fact requires, the person who will sit at the big table and ask which idiot approved the current design. That tolerance is rare and getting rarer. Most corporate cultures have decided that emotional safety and procedural compliance are higher goods than rapid improvement. The result is visible everywhere cost-plus thinking still dominates: slow iteration, protected mediocrity, and prices that never come down. When people complain about the cost of eggs or the fragility of supply chains, they are usually describing the downstream effects of idiot indexes that were never challenged.

Individuals still matter. Cultures that suppress them eventually discover they have nothing left but the process. The process does not innovate. It only documents. The age of useful artificial intelligence will only accelerate the contrast. Machines that never need a paycheck and never fear a performance review will keep asking the hard questions long after the humans have decided the questions are impolite. The companies and countries that still produce people willing to act on the answers will pull further ahead. The rest will keep measuring their compliance while the index stays high.

I find that reality clarifying. It is also why I keep returning to the same point: every culture, every company, every executive suite eventually has to decide whether it wants the comfort of the process or the results that only come when someone is still willing to call the process what it is.

¹ Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), 284–285.

² SpaceX Raptor engine development history summarized in public statements by Elon Musk and technical reporting; see also Wikipedia entry “SpaceX Raptor” and associated primary sources.

³ Multiple industry analyses place SpaceX vertical integration near 85 percent of vehicle content; see Eric Berger reporting and SpaceX investor and technical presentations.

⁴ Contemporary New York Times and Time magazine coverage of the 1986 Wollman Rink reconstruction; confirmed in later retrospectives.

Bibliography

Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Berger, Eric. Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. New York: William Morrow, 2021.

Musk, Elon. Public statements and interviews on manufacturing, cost structure, and the “idiot index,” 2010–2025.

NASA. Commercial Crew Program contract structures and fixed-price versus cost-plus analyses.

New York Times. Coverage of Wollman Rink reconstruction, June–November 1986.

Time. “End of the Six-Year Ice Follies,” November 1986.

Various technical papers and industry analyses on SpaceX vertical integration, Raptor engine evolution, and launch cost trajectories (Citi Research, London Economics, NASA NAFCOM comparisons).

Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015 (updated editions).

Additional primary sources: SpaceX technical updates, FAA and NASA contracting data, and contemporary reporting on aerospace cost

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

He Who Owns the Gold Rules: But Knowledge is the new currency, and the only one, that really matters

I was sitting upstairs in that restaurant on the boardwalk at Put-in-Bay, looking out over the water while the Teams calls kept coming in. The view pulls you in if you’ve been there. There’s the big central park, the U-shaped stretch of bars and shops wrapped around it, and then the thick forest of masts and hulls filling the harbor in front of it. From the second story you can pick out the bigger boats if you know who owns them. I had a bowl of shrimp and ice water in front of me and the restaurant’s Wi-Fi was solid enough that I could answer questions from people who wanted me on their advisory boards for twenty minutes at a stretch. Manufacturing people mostly. Plastic bottles one day, ship parts another. They all want to know the same basic things: how do you use capital, how do you hire the people who will build something the market actually needs, and how do you keep the whole machine from coming apart when the rules keep changing under your feet.

I told the woman who seated me I needed a quiet corner with good reception because I had a couple of these calls to get through before I could rejoin my family. She set me up where I could still see the bay. Between questions I kept glancing left at those boats and thinking about the men I know who keep them there. A slip and a vessel in that harbor is not a cheap hobby. You’re talking real money, the kind of money that used to stay inside a company so the owners could make payroll and renegotiate supply contracts when things got tight. A lot of those boats are paid for by people who once sat in the CFO chair of companies that no longer belong to the families who built them.

It put me in mind of an old bakery owner I used to deal with years ago when I was younger and still learning how the world actually worked. Transactions did not always go my way. When they didn’t, he would look at me with that half-amused, half-hard expression and say the line I have never forgotten: who owns the gold rules. It was a ruthless statement and a true one. I lived by it, learned from it, and used it for a long time. Gold meant control. Gold meant the ability to set terms. Gold meant you could decide who got paid and who got squeezed. In that older economy it was still possible for a privately held company to own its own gold, to keep its own books, and to weather a rough season without selling the whole enterprise to strangers.

That economy is gone. The currency changed. The Federal Reserve prints money at a scale that would have been unthinkable when I was dealing with that baker, and that printed money does not stay neutral. It floods into investment channels that then go looking for hard assets—companies, homes, anything that can absorb the excess liquidity and launder it into legitimate ownership. After the COVID disruption the process accelerated. Supply chains seized up. Costs for materials and labor jumped. Minimum-wage pressures and regulatory layers that had been building for years suddenly became impossible to absorb on the old margins. A lot of long-standing private companies found themselves carrying debt loads they never would have taken on in a tighter money environment, or they found their CFOs more interested in the lifestyle the easy capital could buy than in protecting the cash flow that kept the doors open.

I know seven different CFOs who keep boats in that same harbor at Put-in-Bay. They are not moral monsters. They are shortsighted in the particular way the new rules reward. When the money was flowing they took what the system offered. Some of them sold the companies out from under the owners who had built them. Others loaded the balance sheets with leverage that looked smart on paper until the interest rates and the inventory costs and the slower collections all hit at once. The blood in the water brought the sharks. Private equity and institutional capital showed up with the printed money and the patience to wait out the distressed sellers. The old privately held firms that had lasted decades suddenly could not hold. Bankruptcy or forced sale became the only remaining moves that preserved anything at all.

The numbers back up what I have been watching on the ground. Since 2000 the count of private-equity-backed companies in the United States has climbed from roughly two thousand to more than eleven thousand five hundred, and by late 2025 the figure was approaching thirteen thousand. Over the same stretch the number of publicly listed companies on the major exchanges fell by about thirty-five percent, from around seven thousand to roughly forty-five hundred. Private equity did not invent the pressures that hollowed out traditional ownership, but it has been the primary vehicle that absorbed the wreckage. Business bankruptcy filings, which dropped to historic lows in the immediate post-stimulus years, have been climbing steadily again. In the twelve months ending in mid-2025 they were up more than eleven percent year over year, with business filings themselves rising into the twenty-three to twenty-four thousand range. That is still below the peaks of earlier crises, yet the direction is unmistakable and the casualties are concentrated among the mid-sized and long-private firms that once formed the backbone of local manufacturing and distribution.

The people who call me for advice are trying to figure out how to survive inside this new arrangement. They still think in the old terms. They believe that if they can just get enough gold—enough capital, enough line of credit, enough valuation—they will be able to rule the way the bakery owner once ruled. I tell them the truth as I see it from that restaurant window. Gold is still useful, but knowledge has become the scarcer and more powerful resource. The man who understands how to turn knowledge into something the market will pay for can acquire gold whenever he needs it. The man who only knows how to hold gold, or how to extract it from someone else’s balance sheet, is playing a game that is already being rewritten around him.

A lot of the capital washing through these deals is not patient industrial capital. It is money that needs a home after the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply at rates that had not been seen in modern times. M2 grew by roughly forty percent in the two years after the pandemic began. That liquidity had to go somewhere. It went into private equity funds, into real-estate investment vehicles, into every channel that could convert paper claims into ownership of real productive assets. The result is a quiet transfer. Private ownership is not outlawed. It is simply made more expensive, more leveraged, and more vulnerable to the next policy shock until the original owners are forced to sell or fold. What replaces them is often a portfolio company whose ultimate decision-makers sit in New York or London or some other distant place and whose primary obligation is to the limited partners who supplied the capital, not to the community that once depended on the firm.

I do not pretend this is a conspiracy theory that requires secret handshakes. The mechanisms are public. Monetary policy that treats inflation as a temporary inconvenience while asset prices soar. Regulatory and wage policies that raise the fixed costs of running a small or mid-sized operation. A financial culture that rewards the extraction of value over the patient creation of it. And a political culture that has grown comfortable talking about “stakeholders” and “public interest” while the actual private owners who built the companies are being squeezed out. Whether you call the endpoint socialism or simply the financialization of everything, the practical effect is the same: fewer people who own the means of production in any meaningful sense, and more people who work for capital that answers to no local loyalty.

I keep taking the advisory calls because the people on the other end still need answers faster than the next book or the next documentary will deliver them. I tell them what I told the people on those Teams sessions while I watched the boats bob in the harbor. The old rule still has force, but the gold itself has changed. Knowledge that can be turned into products people actually want is the only form of capital that cannot be printed into existence by a central bank or diluted by the next round of leverage. The companies that survive the current slaughter will be the ones that treat knowledge as the real scarce resource and that refuse to let short-term extraction destroy the long-term ability to create value.

Private ownership of productive enterprises is not a nostalgic preference. It is the practical foundation of a free economy. When that foundation erodes far enough, the language of free markets remains but the substance is gone. I have watched enough of it happen in the last several years, including a long-standing company not far from my own house, to know the pattern is not accidental and not temporary. The people who still believe they can simply steal or leverage their way to the gold and then rule forever are the ones who have not yet noticed that the rules themselves have shifted under them. Knowledge compounds. Printed money does not. That difference is going to decide more than most of the current players seem to understand.

I give the advice away freely because the window for acting on it is already narrower than most people realize. The next decade will not look like the last one, and the companies that still answer to actual owners rather than to distant capital will be rarer still unless enough people decide that knowledge is the only gold worth owning.

Notes

1. Citizens Bank analysis drawing on industry data shows the private-equity-backed company count in the United States rising from approximately 2,000 in 2000 to more than 11,500 in recent years, a gain exceeding 400 percent, while the number of companies listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ fell from roughly 7,000 to about 4,500. PitchBook data for Q3 2025 places the number of U.S. PE-backed companies near 12,900.

2. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts data show business bankruptcy filings rising from 18,926 in the year ending December 2023 to 23,107 in the year ending December 2024 (a 22 percent increase), with further elevation into 2025. Total bankruptcy filings for the twelve months ending June 2025 reached 542,529, an 11.5 percent increase over the prior period.

3. Federal Reserve data and analyses from the St. Louis Fed and other sources document the rapid expansion of M2 money supply during 2020–2022, with year-over-year growth rates exceeding 25 percent at peak and cumulative increases on the order of 40 percent from early 2020 levels, contributing to the inflationary and asset-price pressures that followed.

Bibliography

Citizens Bank. “The Public to Private Equity Pivot Continues.” Capital Markets & Advisory insights, December 2024.

PitchBook. Data on U.S. private-equity-backed company counts and holding periods, various releases through 2025–2026.

Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Bankruptcy Statistics, twelve-month periods ending 2023–2025.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “The Rise and Fall of M2.” On the Economy, May 2023, and subsequent H.6 Money Stock Measures releases.

Davis, Steven J., et al. “The Economic Effects of Private Equity Buyouts.” NBER Working Paper 26371 (and related Chicago Booth / BFI versions).

McKinsey & Company. Global Private Markets Report 2026.

S&P Global Market Intelligence. Reports on private-equity portfolio company bankruptcies and corporate distress, 2024–2025.

U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy. Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, 2024–2025 editions, for context on the continuing dominance of small private firms even as mid-market ownership concentrates.

Rich Hoffman

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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