New Space Capitalism: The future everyone needs to understand

I recently finished Rainer Zitelmann’s New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, and I keep coming back to it the way you return to a tool that finally fits the job.¹ The book lays out, without apology, why private entrepreneurial energy is the only force capable of turning space from a government prestige project into an actual economy. It is timely in a way that feels almost engineered. SpaceX just put Starship Flight 13 into the Indian Ocean on July 24, soft splashdown, vehicle intact, heat shield looking better than anything we have seen before.² The ship floated. They got the data they needed. Flight 14 is already being talked about as the first attempt to catch the upper stage with the tower arms the same way they have been catching the boosters. That is not incremental progress. That is the difference between a science fair and an industrial process.

I have been telling people for years that you do not get rich having a job. You get a job so you can generate capital to invest. The job is the seed. The investment is the harvest. Space capitalism is simply that principle applied at planetary scale. The people still arguing for socialism or some managed industrial policy while this is happening are arguing from a world that no longer exists. China has spent years trying to close the gap by copying hardware and flooding the sector with state capital. They just managed their first controlled recovery of an orbital-class booster on a sea platform in July.³ That is real progress for them. It is also roughly where SpaceX was a decade ago. Meanwhile Falcon 9 boosters are routinely flying into the mid-thirties on the same airframe, with landing success rates above 98 percent across hundreds of attempts.⁴ SpaceX flew 165 orbital missions in 2025 alone and accounted for roughly half of all global launches and the overwhelming majority of mass to orbit.⁵ That is not a technology lead. That is a cultural lead.

The difference is not the Raptor engine or the stainless steel or the heat tiles. Those can be photographed, reverse-engineered, and eventually duplicated. The difference is the rate at which the organization turns failure into usable information and then into the next vehicle. SpaceX treats a destroyed Starship the way a good machine shop treats a bad casting: examine it, learn the exact failure mode, change the process, and build the next one faster. Legacy aerospace still largely operates on cost-plus contracts and risk-averse engineering cultures that treat every anomaly as a reason to add margin, add process, and add schedule. The result is that the customer pays more, the schedule slips, and the learning rate collapses. SpaceX inverted the incentive. They absorb the cost of the explosion so they can keep the learning curve steep. By Flight 13 the heat shield held, the engines relit for landing, and the vehicle came down where it was supposed to. That is what iterative capitalism looks like when the capital is allowed to take real risk.

I watch the documentaries SpaceX releases about the troubleshooting and I see the same pattern every time. A giant bicycle-chain style link on the tower fails to release. Someone drives through the night, pulls a spare from Cape Canaveral, hauls it to Boca Chica, and the schedule holds. That is not a process document. That is a producer culture. You cannot copy that with spies or with five-year plans. Communist systems excel at mass production of known designs once the design is frozen. They struggle when the design is still moving and the only people who can keep it moving are the ones who will crawl through broken glass at two in the morning because they own the outcome. Measure engagement by bodies in seats and you end up with four people bumping into each other for two days to produce what one highly engaged person finishes before lunch. SpaceX figured out how to recruit and keep the engaged ones. That is the real moat.

The same cultural gap explains why the space economy is going to generate most of its new wealth inside the United States rather than in China, Russia, or the European Union. Property rights, residual claimancy, and the ability to keep the upside of risk are not optional extras. They are the operating system. Zitelmann is clear on this point: without the ability to own, buy, sell, and profit from what is built off-world, private capital will never flood into the frontier the way it flooded into every previous frontier. Government programs can demonstrate capability. Only capitalism compounds it. That is why Starship production is being scaled toward rates that sound insane until you remember that the same people already turned Falcon 9 into a high-tempo airline. Musk has talked openly about the long-term goal of building ships at aircraft volumes. The Gigabay and the other production infrastructure at Starbase are not theater. They are the physical expression of a belief that the limiting factor is no longer physics but the rate at which you can turn steel and labor into reliable vehicles.⁶

I keep hearing the money managers on Wall Street talk as if they understand this because they read the same research notes everyone else reads. Most of them are still pricing SpaceX as if it is a conventional aerospace contractor with a flashy CEO. They are looking at the wrong variable. The variable that matters is the compounding of learning rate under a producer culture. Once the catch of both stages is routine and the vehicles are turning around in days rather than months, the cost curve drops into territory that changes every other industry that depends on mass to orbit. That is when the millionaires get made, and not just among the early employees. The people who understand that the real product is not the rocket but the industrial metabolism that builds and flies the rocket will do very well. The people who keep treating it as a government-adjacent science project will wonder why the returns never arrived.

Look back at why we stalled after Apollo and the pattern is obvious. Kennedy started it. Nixon finished the landings and then watched the program lose political oxygen. Reagan talked about the Strategic Defense Initiative and commercial space but never forced the institutional change. The Bushes treated it as a budget line. Obama treated it as a photo opportunity. Only under Trump did the commercial providers get the contracting environment that let fixed-price risk-sharing replace cost-plus stagnation. The conspiracy theories about why we never went back are mostly noise. The practical explanation is simpler and more damning: once the political class decided space was a discretionary prestige item rather than an industrial frontier, the producer culture was starved and the looter culture took over the process. Every time a new administration tried to restart the engine it discovered that the institutional memory of how to move fast had been replaced by the institutional memory of how to manage risk into paralysis.

That is the same dynamic we see today when people claim China will simply copy Starship and undercut the market. They can copy the geometry. They cannot copy the willingness to destroy vehicles in public so the next one is better. They cannot copy the high-engagement talent pool that treats a scrubbed launch as a personal failure rather than a bureaucratic delay. Two decades is an optimistic timeline for them to close that gap, and even then they will be chasing a target that is still accelerating. Sabotage through capital markets and media narratives is the more realistic short-term threat, which is why the ownership structures and the narrative discipline matter. The IPO that finally brought SpaceX public is not just a liquidity event. It is the moment the capital markets have to price a culture instead of a set of contracts. Get that price right and the rest of the space economy follows. Get it wrong and the same people who missed the internet will miss the orbital economy.⁷

I want more people to be capitalists rather than spectators. The path is not mysterious. Read the book. Watch the flight tests with the eyes of someone who understands that every successful landing is a data point on a learning curve that is still steep. Understand that the producers are the ones who stay late, drive the spare part across the state, and treat the schedule as a promise rather than a suggestion. The looters will always be waiting for someone else to finish the hard part so they can claim a share of the result. Space capitalism works because it keeps the residual claim with the people who actually do the work. That is why the wealth is going to concentrate where the culture of engagement is strongest. And that is why the next decade is going to look very different from the last one.

Footnotes:

¹ Rainer Zitelmann, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, with a contribution by Newt Gingrich (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2026). The book argues that secure property rights and entrepreneurial residual claimancy, not government programs, are the decisive conditions for turning space into a functioning economy.

² SpaceX, “Starship’s Thirteenth Flight Test,” July 24, 2026, https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-13. The vehicle executed a landing flip, landing burn, and soft splashdown, remaining intact in the Indian Ocean and providing the first clear views of an intact heat shield after reentry.

³ Reporting from CCTV, Reuters, and BBC, July 10, 2026. The Long March 10B first stage was recovered on an offshore platform using a net system, China’s first successful controlled recovery of an orbital-class booster.

⁴ Wikipedia, “List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches,” data current through July 30, 2026. Falcon family boosters recorded 639 successful landings in 652 attempts (98.01 percent). Individual boosters have reached 36 flights.

⁵ BryceTech 2025 Global Space Launch Report, summarized in Via Satellite, April 10, 2026. SpaceX completed 165 orbital launches in 2025, approximately 51 percent of the global total, and launched roughly 85 percent of all satellites that year. U.S. providers overall accounted for nearly 60 percent of global launches.

⁶ Elon Musk statements and SpaceX production disclosures regarding the Gigabay facility at Starbase and long-term Starship production targets measured in hundreds to thousands of vehicles per year. See also SpaceNews and Teslarati coverage of high-rate launch site and manufacturing infrastructure, 2025–2026.

⁷ SpaceX IPO filings and contemporaneous reporting from CNBC, Reuters, and Bloomberg, June 2026. The offering priced at approximately $135 per share for a valuation in the $1.75–1.8 trillion range, the largest IPO in history by capital raised.

Bibliography

BryceTech. 2025 Global Space Launch Report. April 2026.

Musk, Elon. Public statements on X regarding Starship Flight 14 tower-catch plans and production scaling, July 2026.

SpaceX. “Starship’s Thirteenth Flight Test.” Official mission summary, July 24, 2026. https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-13.

Wikipedia. “List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches.” Continuously updated launch and recovery statistics through July 2026.

Zitelmann, Rainer. New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars. Contribution by Newt Gingrich. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2026.

Additional reading that sharpens the same themes:

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (for the producer/looter distinction that maps directly onto the engagement cultures described here);

Walter A. McDougall, …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age;

John Logsdon’s multi-volume histories of the post-Apollo policy environment;

and Zitelmann’s earlier works on the power of capitalism.

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.

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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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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Why Young People Leave Their Parents Behind in Ohio: Amy Acton is the Jeff Spicoli of politics

I just got back from Put-in-Bay, and the whole time I kept looking at that big park and the yacht club thinking the same thing: this is exactly the kind of place a Republican governor candidate should plant a flag and talk about jobs. Not the usual Columbus or Cincinnati media circus. An island. Outside. Real people on vacation who still live in Ohio and want their kids to stay here. It would make great news precisely because it is not the typical stop. It signals strength. It tells the other side their strategy is already under pressure.

That same instinct applies east of Columbus in Amish country. Put an arm around the people who live with the paranormal side of Ohio—the Bigfoot reports that still come in, the stories that never make the official narrative. Those people vote. They know when somebody is listening and when somebody is talking down to them. A little color in the campaign does not hurt when the other side is running the same old progressive script.

Because that is what this race is really about. David Pepper is on the bottom of the Amy Acton ticket, the former Ohio Democratic Party chairman now serving as the institutional muscle. The person on the bottom of the ticket usually does the hard work of carrying the party machinery and the progressive money networks. They are connected into the larger Democrat operation that has treated Ohio as a prize in the long project of remaking the country. Mark Elias and that entire apparatus do not show up by accident. Ohio has been a target for years. Knock it off and the map changes.

Pepper has been loud about Vivek Ramaswamy moving Strive Asset Management out of Columbus to Texas. He acts like it is some personal betrayal. It is not. It is fiduciary duty. Companies exist to protect and grow capital, not to perform patriotism for politicians who create the conditions that drive capital away. Ramaswamy built brands. He understands that investors put money where the rules reward production instead of punishing it. Texas had better policy. Ohio is improving, and a lot of dedicated legislators have been grinding to make it friendlier, but the record under the last round of heavy-handed governance still hangs over the place. Aerospace manufacturing and advanced industry are coming whether the political class likes it or not. The only question is whether Ohio captures them or watches them locate somewhere else.

Amy Acton does not understand any of that. She resigned as health director in June 2020 after the COVID policies she helped drive produced real damage. Businesses closed. Ownership changed hands. Some never recovered. You can still feel it. Then there is the 2019 police call to her house over a domestic dispute where she had been drinking, took medication, shattered a mirror, and her husband had to keep her from driving. That is not abstract. It is part of the public record now. She never held a stable executive job that required building something that had to survive market discipline. She became popular with a certain type during the early COVID days because she made anxious people feel protected. That constituency is real, but it is not the majority that decides whether capital stays or leaves.

I have watched the type for decades. She reminds me of the girls who adopted the Fast Times at Ridgemont High beach-festival personality so they would not intimidate anyone by seeming too sharp. It worked in high school. It does not build a state. The Democrats seem to think they can turn that same soft, non-threatening persona into statewide votes. There are not enough of those voters left in Ohio to carry it. The people who still believe in opportunity look at a billionaire who actually ran companies and built an anti-woke asset manager because the existing ones had gone soft, and they see someone who knows how money moves.

Capitalism is voting with your feet. If the policy environment is hostile, you leave. That is not disloyalty. That is how free people protect what they have built. The Democrat instinct is closer to East Berlin. Stay. Wear the mask. Do not go to church. Be loyal to the state even when the rules are destroying the very conditions that let families raise the next generation here. They never understood why people climbed the wall. They still do not. North Korea makes the same calculation. Fear and guilt are cheaper than good policy.

That is why young people have been leaving their parents in Ohio for years. Mom and Dad stayed. Junior and the daughter looked around, saw limited opportunity, and moved. The traditional pattern—raise a family here, take the kids to Put-in-Bay or Hilton Head, keep the cycle going—breaks when the economic soil is thin. Ohio needs to be a premier destination again. That requires a governor who understands brand, investment, and the difference between real growth and political theater. Ramaswamy has lived that difference. He moved a company when the numbers said move. He will sign legislation that changes the numbers in Ohio’s favor. There is an army of legislators waiting for exactly that.

Pepper and the Acton operation are already showing the strain. The money is flowing in on their side, but the investment of belief is not. People remember who locked things down and who paid the price. They also notice who treats a corporate relocation as moral failure instead of economic signal. A few months out, the race is still competitive on paper, but the underlying dynamics favor the candidate who can talk about opportunity without apology. Seven or eight points is possible if the campaign stays aggressive and refuses to play on the other side’s chosen ground.

I would still take the Put-in-Bay stop and the Amish-country swing. Stretch the map. Force the media to cover something other than the scripted attacks. Show that the campaign is strong enough to go where the usual consultants say not to go. That is how you make the other side squirm. Ohio does not need another festival personality in the governor’s office ordering pizza and managing decline. It needs someone who knows how to build a brand people want to invest in and a state people want to raise families in. That is the choice. The rest is noise.

Notes

1. Amy Acton selected former Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper as her lieutenant governor running mate in January 2026.

2. Strive Asset Management, co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy as an anti-ESG/anti-woke firm, relocated its headquarters from Columbus, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas, with most staff expected to move by early 2025. Pepper and labor allies have repeatedly attacked the move as evidence of disloyalty to Ohio.

3. Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director from February 2019 until her resignation on June 11, 2020, amid intense controversy over COVID orders; she briefly continued as an advisor to Governor DeWine.

4. A 2019 Bexley police report described a domestic dispute at Acton’s home involving a verbal argument, alcohol, prescription medication, and a shattered mirror; no charges were filed. The report resurfaced during the 2026 campaign.

5. Multiple 2026 polls and the Cook Political Report have rated the Ramaswamy–Acton race a toss-up or extremely close as of mid-to-late July, after earlier lean-Republican ratings.

6. Ohio has long experienced net out-migration of young college-educated adults, a phenomenon repeatedly described as brain drain in academic and policy literature; recent data show some stabilization but the cultural memory of limited opportunity remains strong.

7. Ohio continues to record Bigfoot and other cryptid reports, including a notable 2026 uptick in Northeast Ohio, with cultural resonance in rural and Amish-adjacent communities.

Bibliography for Further Research

Acton, Amy, and related Ohio Department of Health records, 2019–2020.

Ballotpedia. “Ohio gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2026.”

Cook Political Report. Race ratings for Ohio governor, July 2026 updates.

DeWine, Mike. Public statements on Acton’s resignation, June 11, 2020.

Elias, Marc / Democracy Docket. Broader progressive legal and electoral infrastructure materials.

McGuire, Patrick, et al. “Brain Drain in Ohio: Observations and Summaries.” University of Toledo Urban Affairs Center, 2006 (and subsequent updates).

Ohio Capital Journal and Columbus Dispatch reporting on Acton job history and the 2019 police call, April–July 2026.

Pepper, David. Substack writings and campaign statements criticizing Ramaswamy and Strive relocation, 2025–2026.

Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. and public comments on fiduciary duty, capital allocation, and state competitiveness.

RealClearPolitics / 270toWin / Decision Desk HQ polling aggregates for Ohio governor, March–July 2026.

Strive Enterprises press materials and Dallas Morning News coverage of the headquarters relocation, late 2024–2025.

U.S. Census and Ohio Board of Regents historical analyses of college-graduate migration patterns.

Additional reading on East German border controls, capital flight under socialist policy regimes, and the political economy of state competition (Texas vs. Ohio business climate comparisons).

Rich Hoffman

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The Loveland Frogmen: Giants in Malta and Timothy Alberino on the Joe Rogan Podcast talking about the Kandahar Giant at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

I never set out one morning to rewrite history. History is already written, mostly by people who stop digging the moment the official story feels comfortable enough to protect careers and funding streams. The deeper problem is that the accepted version of the past is often assembled by those who never ask the next layer of “why.” In my professional life, I have spent decades sitting across tables from PhD-level experts who sandbag information to protect their own positions. You learn quickly that the only way to get at truth is to keep asking the next question after the comfortable answer has been delivered. I applied that same method to biblical studies, and the formation of American culture, and the rabbit hole opened wider than I expected.

What began as an effort to explain why the Constitution is a moral document rooted in biblical principles—work I first sketched in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business—grew into something larger. The Bible is not merely a religious text for Christians and Jews; it is a civilizational blueprint. Its commandments and narratives shape cultures that produce durable wealth, ordered liberty, and the capacity for self-government. Once you accept that premise, the next question becomes unavoidable: what was the actual historical environment in which those commandments were given, and what older currents were already flowing when Abraham stepped onto the stage? That question forced me to travel, read, and dig. Over several years, I spent roughly half a million dollars of my own money on research travel—museums, remote sites, late nights in hotels far from home, books read on airplanes and beside campfires. The resulting manuscript is The Politics of Heaven. It is not a polite academic summary. It is an attempt to connect dots that mainstream archaeology and history have preferred to leave disconnected.

In the middle of July 2026, Timothy Alberino sat with Joe Rogan for nearly three hours. I watched the episode while camped on South Bass Island in Lake Erie with family, RV parked among several campsites we had claimed for a week. My daughters were cooking breakfast. The ordinary noise of daily life—hardware-store conversations, Costco recognition, local political pressure—had been left behind on the mainland. That distance mattered. The conversation Alberino and Rogan had would have been confined to late-night AM radio or Coast to Coast a decade earlier. Now it was mainstream, carried by the largest podcast in the English-speaking world. Alberino spoke of giants, of the Book of Enoch, of non-human intelligences that have interacted with humanity across millennia. He recounted the long-circulating story of a Kandahar giant—an enormous humanoid encountered by American troops in a cave in Afghanistan, killed after it attacked, its body placed on a pallet and flown out. The remains, according to the account, were taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I live a short drive from that base. I have spoken over the years with men who held clearances there. They smile, lower their voices, and say that reverse-engineering of foreign technology has always been the cover story. Whether the technology is Russian, Chinese, or something that violates our airspace from farther afield is left for the listener to decide.

That interview did not surprise me so much as it confirmed a trajectory I had already been following. Alberino’s work and mine are not identical, but they occupy overlapping ground. He has spent more than a decade knocking on the door of the giant question and the Watcher tradition. I have been following the same scent through Ohio’s earthworks, Florida’s bogs, Malta’s temples, and the copper pits of Lake Superior. The difference is emphasis. I approach these matters as a political animal. Wealth creation, nation-building, and the commandments that make ordered liberty possible are never far from my mind. When non-human intelligences appear in the historical record—whether as the “sons of God” of Genesis 6, the entities contacted by shamans, or the craft recovered at crash sites—the political question is immediate: who holds sovereignty over the human race?

Consider the copper. Between roughly 5000 and 1200 BC, miners removed hundreds of thousands of tons of nearly pure native copper from the Lake Superior region—Isle Royale, the Keweenaw Peninsula, and surrounding shores. Thousands of ancient pit mines still scar the landscape. The purity of that copper exceeds 99 percent, a grade rarely achieved by Old World smelting of sulfide ores. Yet the archaeological inventory of North America accounts for only a tiny fraction of the extracted metal. The rest vanished. Mainstream accounts insist the copper stayed local, used by indigenous peoples for tools and ornaments. The volumes do not add up. Alternative researchers have long argued that the missing copper fueled the Bronze Age in the Near East and Europe. Timeline, purity, and scale align too neatly to dismiss out of hand. I have walked those Upper Peninsula sites. I have stood on Mackinac Island and looked across the water toward the old mining grounds. The place itself argues for industrial-scale extraction long before Columbus.

If copper moved from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean, then knowledge and people moved as well. The megalithic temples of Malta—Ġgantija, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Tarxien—were raised between 3600 and 2500 BC. Local folklore has always claimed giants built them; the very name Ġgantija means “Giant’s Tower.” These structures predate the pyramids and Stonehenge. Their alignments, their scale, and the ritual deposits inside them point to a sophisticated religious system concerned with ancestors, fertility, and entities larger than ordinary men. At the same period, Hopewell culture in the Ohio Valley was constructing earthworks of staggering geometric precision. The Newark Earthworks, now a UNESCO site, are aligned to the 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle with an accuracy that matches or exceeds Stonehenge. The same lunar mathematics appear at High Bank Works near Chillicothe and at Serpent Mound. Either distant cultures independently arrived at identical astronomical solutions, or they shared information. Boats can cross oceans when sea levels are lower, as they were before the final melt of the ice sheets. Dreams, trance states, and psychedelic plants can also transmit knowledge. Shamans in Ohio and priests on Malta may have been speaking to the same non-human interlocutors.

This is a video from my son in law taken during a recent family trip. For context.

I do not romanticize the indigenous cultures of North America. The 1619 Project and its political descendants treat pre-Columbian peoples as perpetual victims whose every tragedy must be laid at the feet of European settlement. That framing is propaganda, not history. Tribes displaced other tribes. The Cherokee themselves carry traditions of the “Moon-Eyed People”—pale, nocturnal, possibly albino inhabitants they drove from the mountains before European contact. Cahokia, the great Mississippian city near modern St. Louis, practiced large-scale human sacrifice. At Mound 72, archaeologists found mass graves of young women, some still alive when buried, arranged in ritual order. These were not peaceful gardeners living in harmony with nature. They were complex societies with elites, enslaved people, and blood rituals aimed at contacting powers beyond the visible world.

The same pattern appears in the Windover Bog site near Titusville, Florida. Roughly eight thousand years ago, a community buried its dead in a peat pond. The anaerobic conditions preserved soft tissues, including brains, in nearly 100 individuals. Early reports described unusually large skeletal remains. DNA work suggested an Asian origin that does not match living Native American tribes. Then NAGPRA intervened. The remains were reburied. Further study became politically toxic. We are left with photographs, fragmentary reports, and the knowledge that a population of large-boned people lived on a coastline that is now underwater, their shoreline having retreated miles eastward as seas rose after the Younger Dryas. The same story repeats along the Gulf Coast and the drowned continental shelves of the world: previous human worlds now lie beneath forty or more feet of water.

In my own backyard, the Loveland Frogmen still appear in local memory. Three well-documented sightings in 1955 and 1972 occurred along the Little Miami River, precisely where Hopewell ritual sites once stood before neighborhoods and schools covered them. Police officers described bipedal, leathery, four-foot-tall creatures that stood upright and then fled toward the water. I have walked those banks. I do not claim the Frogmen are biological animals in the ordinary sense. I suggest they are the same class of non-human intelligence that shamans once summoned at the earthworks—entities that move through dimensions where time does not behave as we experience it. A call issued two thousand years ago can be answered in 1972. The beings arrive, see streetlights and police cars, panic, and retreat to the familiar river corridor. Crop circles, mound alignments, and stone circles may function as temporal markers—breadcrumbs left so travelers from outside linear time can locate themselves.

Graham Hancock’s Supernatural opened this door for many readers by documenting the global use of psychedelics in the birth of religion. The next step is obvious. If the visions are consistent across continents and millennia—serpents, flying craft, shape-shifting beings, instructions for building, planting, and navigating—then the source is not merely the human subconscious. It is an external intelligence that has been seeding, guiding, and sometimes exploiting humanity for thousands of years. Eric von Däniken saw the same pattern and attributed it to ancient astronauts. I think the reality is closer and older. These entities have never left. They operate in the background of history the way certain political factions operate in the background of governments—rarely seen, always present, shaping outcomes.

Wright-Patterson has studied recovered materials and biological remains for decades. The Kandahar giant, if the accounts are true, is only one more specimen on the shelf. Trump-era disclosures and subsequent War Department releases have edged the conversation into daylight. We are being told, carefully and incompletely, that non-human intelligence has violated our airspace and our sovereignty for a very long time. Immigration debates that ignore this dimension are incomplete. Sovereignty that stops at the water’s edge or the edge of the atmosphere is not sovereignty at all.

The Politics of Heaven gathers these threads. It argues that the biblical tradition represents a successful civilizational path precisely because it names the competing powers and places humanity under a single transcendent authority rather than under the shifting demands of local spirits and giants. Pagan and occult systems—whether Hopewell shamanism, Maltese temple cults, or the Crowleyite rituals that still echo in certain California circles—produce different outcomes. They open doors. What walks through those doors is rarely benevolent. The copper trade that may have ignited the Bronze Age, the lunar mathematics shared across an ocean, the giant bones reported in mounds from Ohio to Florida to the Near East, the frog-men that still surface along rivers once lined with ritual earthworks—all of it points to a single, continuous story. Non-human intelligence has been a political actor longer than any human empire.

I finished the manuscript after that week on the island. The noise of ordinary life had been far enough away that the pattern could finally lock into place. Alberino’s conversation with Rogan was not the beginning of the revelation; it was a public confirmation that the conversation itself had moved from the fringe to the center. The next five or ten years will force a reckoning with these older layers of history. Archaeologists must keep digging. The rest of us must be willing to read what they find without the ideological filters that have already buried too much evidence. The politics of heaven are not abstract theology. They are the oldest and most consequential politics of all.

Notes

1. The Joe Rogan Experience episode featuring Timothy Alberino aired in mid-July 2026 and discussed the Kandahar giant narrative at length in its opening segment. The story has circulated in military and conspiracy circles since the mid-2000s; the Department of Defense has not released any official confirmation or physical evidence.

2. On the scale of ancient copper extraction in the Lake Superior basin, see Susan R. Martin, Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). Estimates of total copper removed range from hundreds of thousands to over a million tons; mainstream archaeology maintains local use, while alternative researchers point to the absence of corresponding artifacts as evidence of export.

3. For the lunar alignments of the Newark Earthworks, see Ray Hively and Robert Horn, “Geometry and Astronomy in Prehistoric Ohio,” Archaeoastronomy 4 (1982), and subsequent work by the same authors. The Octagon Earthworks track the 18.6-year major lunar standstill with high precision.

4. Maltese temple chronology and folklore: David H. Trump, Malta: Prehistory and Temples (Malta: Midsea Books, 2002); UNESCO documentation on the Megalithic Temples of Malta. The name Ġgantija derives directly from the Maltese word for giant.

5. Windover site: Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). DNA and morphological studies indicated that the population was not closely related to later Native American groups; NAGPRA repatriation limited further analysis.

6. Cahokia Mound 72 sacrifices: Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009); Melvin L. Fowler et al., The Mound 72 Area: Dedicated and Sacred Space in Early Cahokia (Illinois State Museum, 1999).

7. The Ohio History Connection holds the Wray Figurine (Hopewell Shaman of Newark). It depicts a figure in bear regalia holding a severed human head and is widely interpreted as a transforming shaman.

8. Cherokee traditions of the Moon-Eyed People appear in James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900) and later ethnographic collections.

9. Loveland Frogman primary accounts: police reports filed by Officers Ray Shockey and Mark Matthews, March 1972; earlier 1955 sighting reported in local newspapers and summarized in various cryptozoological compilations.

10. Graham Hancock, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (New York: Disinformation, 2006) remains the most accessible survey of the global psychedelic-shamanic complex.

Select Bibliography

Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth. Independently published, 2020.

Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Hancock, Graham. Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. New York: Disinformation, 2006.

Hively, Ray, and Robert Horn. “Geometry and Astronomy in Prehistoric Ohio.” Archaeoastronomy 4 (1982): S1–S20.

Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900.

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Future of Aerospace in Butler County: Joby, SpaceX and Volent are changing the world as we know it

A year ago, when I was talking about electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, many people still treated the concept as something futuristic—a technology demonstration looking for a market. Today, that conversation has changed dramatically. What was once confined to engineering conferences, venture capital presentations, and aerospace trade journals has become one of the most heavily discussed growth sectors in aviation. From Farnborough to Oshkosh, from Orlando to Ohio, advanced air mobility is no longer a theory. It is becoming an industry. And if the momentum continues, the second half of this decade may be remembered as the period when aviation quietly reinvented itself.

One of the most interesting developments is how quickly public awareness has changed. Companies such as Joby Aviation have gone from introducing unfamiliar concepts to demonstrating actual aircraft and discussing commercial operations. At the Farnborough International Airshow, Joby presented a full-scale version of its electric air taxi and highlighted aircraft capabilities designed to move passengers over congested urban areas using quiet electric propulsion. The company has repeatedly emphasized short-range transportation between airports and population centers, a model that seeks to reduce travel times that are currently measured in hours down to minutes. 1 2

What struck me most during the evolution of this industry is how rapidly attention has shifted. Not long ago, many of these companies were aggressively seeking supporters, partners, and local advocates. Today, the demand is reversed. The advanced air mobility industry has become crowded with airports, municipalities, economic development groups, airlines, infrastructure developers, and investors looking for a position in what could become an entirely new transportation ecosystem. Joby’s appearance at Farnborough in both 2024 and 2026 highlights that transition, with the company showcasing not merely an aircraft but an emerging transportation network integrating airports, ridesharing, and urban movement. 1 3

The most practical examples may emerge in places such as Florida. Orlando has become one of the leading laboratories for advanced air mobility planning. Airport authorities and transportation officials have publicly discussed integrating air taxis into the region’s transportation infrastructure. The vision is straightforward: instead of spending forty-five minutes navigating traffic between Orlando International Airport, resort destinations, and surrounding transportation hubs, travelers could board an electric air taxi and complete the same trip in a fraction of the time. Officials in Florida have discussed the possibility of early operational services beginning as infrastructure and regulatory approvals mature. 4 5

For tourists, the implications are obvious. A traveler landing at Orlando International Airport could eventually bypass rental car counters, shuttle buses, and congested highways. Instead, passengers might walk to an adjacent vertiport and travel directly to a Disney resort, Universal destination, or nearby transportation hub. Similar concepts are being discussed for airport-to-cruise-port transport throughout Florida. While widespread deployment still depends on FAA certification, infrastructure construction, and operational testing, the direction is becoming increasingly clear. 5 6

What excites me even more is that the future of vertical aviation extends beyond passenger transportation. Many people still think of eVTOL aircraft solely as flying taxis. That is far too narrow a view. The real opportunity may lie in logistics, cargo movement, infrastructure inspection, emergency response, surveillance, medical transport, utility support, and autonomous delivery services. A pilot is not always necessary. In many cases, there may not even be a passenger. The same technologies that enable urban air taxis also enable an entirely new class of commercial aviation capable of moving goods, collecting data, supporting public safety, and connecting communities more efficiently than traditional ground transportation.

This is where Butler County, Ohio, becomes particularly interesting. The region already possesses a strong manufacturing heritage, aviation history, and technical workforce. Local discussions concerning aviation growth are increasingly focused on advanced aerial mobility, drones, and associated technologies. The potential opportunity is not simply attracting operators—it is attracting manufacturers, suppliers, software developers, maintenance providers, and logistics companies that will support the industry’s expansion. Aerospace clusters rarely emerge overnight, but they often begin with small groups of innovators pursuing opportunities before the broader market recognizes their significance.

Oxford, Ohio, provides a fascinating example. Emerging drone and autonomous aviation initiatives are beginning to appear in places that historically would not have been considered aerospace centers. As autonomous systems become more capable and more affordable, communities that combine technical talent, university resources, entrepreneurial energy, and available infrastructure are finding themselves positioned to participate in a rapidly growing sector.

The lesson from aerospace history is that major industrial shifts rarely announce themselves with certainty. The internet seemed experimental before it became indispensable. Smartphones appeared unnecessary before they became universal. Commercial aviation itself was considered impractical by many early critics. Advanced air mobility may follow a similar path.

At the same time, another revolution is occurring above the atmosphere.

Recent developments involving SpaceX and Starship demonstrate why so many people continue to underestimate the pace of aerospace innovation. SpaceX’s thirteenth Starship test flight successfully deployed twenty Starlink V3 satellites, completed key orbital mission objectives, performed an in-space engine relight, gathered significant heat-shield data during reentry, and achieved what the company described as its first intact soft splashdown of a Starship vehicle in the Indian Ocean. Although the Super Heavy booster experienced a harder-than-planned water landing due to engine relight issues, the overall mission represented one of the strongest demonstrations of Starship capability to date. 7 8 9

Critics continue to focus on failures, delays, and explosions. Yet that criticism often misses the central philosophy driving SpaceX’s success. The company embraces rapid iteration. Instead of spending decades attempting to predict every possible problem, SpaceX frequently builds hardware, tests hardware, discovers failures, and immediately incorporates lessons into the next version. That approach is uncomfortable to traditional aerospace organizations because failures occur publicly. Nevertheless, it has repeatedly produced results. Falcon 9 reusability was once mocked. Today it is routine. Booster landings were once viewed as science fiction. Today they occur regularly.

Starship appears to be following a similar trajectory.

The significance extends beyond rockets. The ultimate objective is not simply launching spacecraft. The objective is lowering the cost of access to space through reusability. Aviation became common because airplanes could fly repeatedly. Space transportation becomes economically transformative when something similar occurs beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Every successful Starship test flight moves SpaceX closer to creating a transportation system rather than a disposable launch vehicle. 7 8

In parallel, Starlink continues demonstrating why a growing space economy matters. High-speed internet connectivity is increasingly available in locations where traditional infrastructure struggles to provide service. Rural communities, travelers, remote businesses, and outdoor enthusiasts already understand the benefits. The deployment of next-generation Starlink satellites aboard Starship demonstrates how launch capability and communication infrastructure are becoming tightly integrated. 7 9

When viewed together, the stories of Joby Aviation and SpaceX reveal a broader pattern. One company is attempting to redefine movement within Earth’s atmosphere. The other is attempting to redefine movement beyond it. Both depend on new engineering approaches, aggressive testing, and long-term thinking. Both have attracted criticism. Both have experienced setbacks. Yet both continue advancing.

That is why I remain optimistic about aerospace.

The industry is entering one of the most fascinating periods since the early jet age. Electric air taxis are moving toward commercial deployment. Autonomous drones are creating entirely new business models. Regional communities such as Butler County have opportunities to participate in emerging aerospace ecosystems. Meanwhile, Starship continues pushing toward full reusability, higher launch cadence, and a dramatically larger space economy.

The future rarely arrives all at once. It arrives in increments that seem unimpressive until suddenly they become normal. A year ago, many people viewed air taxis as speculative. Today, airports are preparing infrastructure. A few years ago, reusable heavy-lift rockets seemed impossible. Today, Starship is deploying payloads and returning intact after flight.

The next chapter of aerospace is no longer a concept. It is under construction.

—

Footnotes

Joby Aviation exhibit and aircraft presentation at Farnborough International Airshow 2024. 1 2

Farnborough International Airshow 2026 Joby Future of Flight Experience. 3
Orlando advanced air mobility planning and airport integration activities. 4 5
Joby commercial service plans and FAA certification progress. 6 10
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 mission summary and Starlink V3 deployment. 7 8
Flight 13 reentry, splashdown, and heat-shield testing results. 7 9 11

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

Farnborough International Airshow. Joby Future of Flight Experience, 2026. 3

Joby Aviation. Corporate website and investor materials. 12 10
Flying Magazine. “Why Joby Thinks Passenger Air Taxi Service Will Lift Off in 2026.” 6
HeliHub. “Joby Brings Full-Scale eVTOL to UK for Farnborough 2024.” 1
Aerospace Testing International. “Joby Exhibits eVTOL for First Time in Europe.” 2
Spectrum News Florida. “Flying Taxis Could Take Off This Year in Florida.” 4
Spectrum News Florida. “Orlando International Airport Working to Launch Flying Taxis.” 5
SpaceX. “Starship’s Thirteenth Flight Test.” 7
SpaceNews. “SpaceX Conducts 13th Starship Test Flight.” 8
Interesting Engineering. “Starship Launches Starlink Satellites, Achieves Most Successful Splashdown Yet.” 9
Space Launch Live Mission Archive, Starship Flight 13. 13
Florida Department of Transportation and Advanced Air Mobility planning coverage. 4 5

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

They Call Me Jonesy: The Night the Arena Roared and the Establishment Lost the Plot

I have been sitting with Sheriff Richard K. Jones’s book for about 24 hours now, turning the pages the way a man turns over an old photograph that still has the power to surprise him. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America is not a polished political memoir written by committee. It is the voice of a man who has spent a lifetime walking the same ground I have walked in Butler County, speaking the same language of family, order, and personal accountability that once held communities together before the experts decided those things were negotiable. Jones has always been the Sheriff who runs his office the way Andy Griffith ran Mayberry and Marshall Dillon ran Dodge City, with a healthy dose of Waffle House common sense thrown in for good measure. You show up, you tell the truth, you do the job, and you do not apologize for the results. That approach has kept Butler County safer than most places that spend three times the money and twice the consultants, and it is why so many of us who live here still call him simply Jones.

What kept pulling me back to the book was not the policy talk or the war stories about the jail, though those are solid enough. It was the cautionary tales about family and the slow corrosion of the values that once made a man accountable to his own house before he tried to run anyone else’s. Jones and I share a deep and permanent hatred of the drug culture that has hollowed out so many families in this county and across the country. We have both watched too many good people lose children, lose marriages, lose the simple ability to look their grandchildren in the eye without shame. He writes about those losses without the usual soft language of the therapeutic class. He writes like a man who has had to clean up the mess afterward. That kind of honesty is rare now, and it is the reason the book feels less like a campaign document and more like a dispatch from someone who has been on the wall for a long time and is finally willing to say what he has seen.

But the story that made me laugh out loud, the one that sent me straight back to October of 2016, is the one about the night he opened for Donald Trump at U.S. Bank Arena. I was there. Not in the sense that I was sitting in the same row or riding in the same car. I was backstage, working the edges of the same event, trying to find a quiet corner where I could take a conference call with people on the other side of the world while the whole building shook. And I watched the exchange Jones describes in the book unfold in real time.

It was Thursday, October 13, 2016. The Access Hollywood tape had dropped only six days earlier, on October 7, and the professional political class was still in full panic. Most of the Ohio Republican establishment had already decided Trump was finished. They had lined up behind Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or John Kasich, the local favorite who was still twisting arms for support even as the primary season was long over. Supporting Trump in those weeks was not the fashionable choice. It was the choice that got you labeled a crank, a risk, a man who did not understand how power actually worked. Senator George Lang, I, and a handful of others had been in that camp early. We had met Trump, sat with him, watched him operate before the primaries even heated up in Ohio. We knew the ground. Most of the smart people in the room did not.

Jones was one of the few who never flinched. By the time the campaign asked him to warm up the crowd at U.S. Bank Arena, the atmosphere was thick with the kind of nervous energy that only comes when the people in charge are not sure the candidate is going to survive the next news cycle. The director of the program that night wanted a script. He wanted to know exactly what the Sheriff was going to say. He wanted control. Jones looked at him the way he has looked at a thousand people who try to put a leash on him and said, essentially, that is not how I work. I talk from the hip. I have been talking all year. You tell me how long you need and I will fill the time. I do not need a teleprompter or your talking points.

I was standing close enough to hear the exchange while they were trying to get me upstairs to a box where I could take that overseas call. Giuliani was somewhere in the mix. The production people were frantic. Trump’s plane was still in the air. The arena was filling from the floor to the upper decks, and the noise was already starting to build. Jones went out there anyway. He did not have a prepared speech. He walked onto the stage and did the thing he has always done: he talked to the people the way a man talks to his neighbors when the subject is serious. Fifteen minutes turned into something closer to thirty. The crowd answered him the way Butler County has always answered him. They roared. From the high box where I finally closed the windows and tried to finish my call, Jones looked like a small figure on a distant stage, but the sound of that arena was impossible to shut out. I had the volume turned up on my headset and still could barely hear the people on the other end of the line. Part of me was irritated that my business meeting was being drowned out by a Sheriff who refused to stay on script. Most of me was very proud.

Trump claimed the crowd that night was 21,000, with thousands more outside who could not get in. Mike Pence put the number around 19,000 the next morning. The arena’s concert capacity sits somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,500, and some of the upper seats behind the stage were empty according to the reporters who were counting chairs instead of energy. The exact headcount is the kind of detail the media loves to argue about when they do not want to talk about what the crowd actually felt. What I saw from that box was a building packed tight enough that the noise had nowhere to go but up. People had not been paid to be there. They had not been bused in. They had decided that the Access Hollywood tape and the coordinated media effort to sink the candidate were not going to decide the election for them. Jones understood that before most of the professionals in the room did.

I have watched Jones make hard calls for more than twenty years. We have not always stood on the same side of every primary or every local fight. There have been nights when we were polite but cool because we were representing different candidates or different issues on the ballot. We have always found our way back to the common ground, because the common ground is larger than the temporary disagreements. Supporting Trump when it was still radioactive inside the Ohio Republican Party was one of those moments when the ground became visible. The same people who told us we were going to destroy our own political futures are now the ones who want their picture taken with the man. That is how these things usually go. The smart set picks the wrong horse for the wrong reasons, and then they rewrite the story after the race is over.

Jones has always had a gift for seeing through the fog. When Corey Lewandowski came through Ross’ Big Bull later, the first person he sought out was the same Sheriff who had refused to read from a script on a night when the campaign was still bleeding. That is the kind of quiet authority that does not show up on a résumé. It shows up when the building is full, and the professionals are nervous, and somebody still has to walk out there and speak without a net.

I recommend the book without reservation. Read the parts about family and the slow destruction of the old rules. Read the parts about the jail and the daily work of keeping order in a county that still believes order is possible. And read the part about that night at U.S. Bank Arena, because it captures something essential about the man. He is not a performer. He is not a consultant’s idea of a lawman. He is the product of a certain kind of American stubbornness that refuses to be managed, and on the nights when it matters most, that stubbornness turns out to be the smartest thing in the room.

I was proud of him that night. I am proud of him for putting the story down on paper without sanding off the edges. Some of us were right when it was expensive to be right. Ten years later, it is still a pleasure to remember it.

Footnotes

1. Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (publication details as available through standard retail channels, 2025–2026). The account of the U.S. Bank Arena appearance appears in the sections dealing with early Trump support and the political pressures of the 2016 general election campaign.

2. The Access Hollywood recording was published by The Washington Post on October 7, 2016. See “Donald Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005,” Washington Post, October 7, 2016.

3. Attendance estimates for the October 13, 2016, rally at U.S. Bank Arena (now Heritage Bank Center) varied. Trump publicly claimed 21,000 inside with additional thousands outside; Mike Pence cited approximately 19,000 the following day. Contemporary reporting noted the arena’s concert configuration capacity near 17,500 and observed some empty upper-level seats. See “How many people attended Trump’s Cincy rally? No one seems to agree,” WCPO, October 13–14, 2016; and arena capacity data from Heritage Bank Center / U.S. Bank Arena historical records.

4. Photographic and contemporaneous coverage confirming Sheriff Jones’s appearance as a speaker that evening can be found in the Cincinnati Enquirer photo gallery, “Trump supporters rally at U.S. Bank Arena,” October 13, 2016, and related local television reports from WCPO and WLWT.

5. On the broader context of early Ohio support for Trump amid establishment resistance, see contemporaneous reporting on the positions of figures such as then-Senator Rob Portman, Governor John Kasich, and local Republican organizational dynamics in the weeks following the Access Hollywood release.

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

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

Fahrenthold, David A. “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.” The Washington Post, October 7, 2016.

“How many people attended Trump’s Cincy rally?” WCPO 9 News, October 2016.

Heritage Bank Center (formerly U.S. Bank Arena) venue history and capacity documentation.

Rich Hoffman

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Sheriff Jones’ New Book: The Treasure of Butler County, Waffle House, Andy Griffith, and Gunsmoke all wrapped up into one person

I first learned that Sheriff Richard K. Jones had put a book out when a few people in the county mentioned it in passing, and the moment I heard the title I knew I would read it. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America arrived on the front porch the day my family and I returned from being out of town at Put-in-Bay, in Ohio. I had ordered it so it would be waiting, because I had already promised myself and others that I would get through it promptly. After more than two decades of knowing the man, shaking his hand at events, watching him work a room in that cowboy hat of his, and hearing him on WLW or in national spots talking immigration and law and order, I still carried questions about how he became who he is, what shaped the priorities he brings to the office every morning, and how a man decides day to day what matters most when the badge is on. The book answered more of those questions than casual conversation ever could.

What struck me first is that this is not merely a campaign volume or a greatest-hits collection of media appearances. It reads like a man who has spent a lifetime speaking into microphones and cameras finally realizing that the voice does not last forever. There is a quiet urgency underneath the stories. He talks about the burial plot, about the friend at the funeral home who will one day see him prepared for the last service. He is only a little more than a decade older than I am, yet the public job ages a person in ways private life does not. Six terms as sheriff of Butler County, with the possibility of more, still brings the knowledge that one day the hat comes off for the last time. Writing the book becomes a way of leaving the voice behind so that the things he believes still matter after the daily briefings and the press conferences stop.

I have always liked the Gunsmoke in him. He admits the debt openly. The old black-and-white shows, the clear line between the man who upholds the law and the men who break it, the sense that a sheriff walks the street and talks to people and puts things right when he can. Andy Griffith is there too, the Mayberry instinct to put an arm around the troubled soul and try to set him back on the path. Those two shows formed a generation of men who believed law enforcement could be both firm and decent. Jonesy lives that combination more than most. He is black-and-white on the big questions. Drugs destroy families and communities; illegal immigration brings more of the same; the jail is full of people who made choices that wrecked their own lives and the lives of others. Yet the book reveals a softer edge than the public persona sometimes allows. He is a compassionate conservative in the older sense of the term. He wants the county to feel more like the place he grew up, where most of the kids he knew had parents who stayed married twenty or thirty years and worked through their troubles instead of walking away at the first hard stretch.

That observation about divorce rates is one of the strongest passages. He watched the numbers climb across his adult lifetime and saw the downstream damage in the jail, in the overdose calls, in the children who never had a stable home to push against. Stable families produce the work ethic and the self-control that keep a community from tipping into chaos. When the marriages fracture as a matter of course, the sheriff’s office ends up dealing with the wreckage. He does not present himself as a sociologist, but the pattern is plain to anyone who has spent decades answering the same kinds of calls. The data back the instinct. The sharp rise in divorce after the introduction of no-fault laws, the parallel growth in single-parent households, and the measurable links to higher rates of juvenile trouble, drug use, and later criminality are not left-wing inventions or right-wing inventions. They are simply what happened.

I share the same cultural memory. I grew up with Gunsmoke playing in the background at my grandparents’ place near Oxford, rabbit ears and all, the same black-and-white morality on the screen while the adults talked about the real world. The shows did not prepare a man for the full depth of certain modern evils. Pornography addiction of the kind that turns a phone into a nonstop delivery system, and the further slide into the sexual exploitation of children, sit outside the frame of those old stories. Jonesy is of an era when a teenager might sneak a look at a dirty magazine on a high shelf in an old bookstore hoping that the cashier wouldn’t catch them. The scale and the numbness of what exists now are harder for that generation to metabolize, not because the men lack courage, but because the evil itself is newer in its accessibility and its intensity. He is devastatingly clear on drugs. On the deeper sexual corruptions that have grown in the last thirty years, the book leaves the impression of a man who sees the damage and still struggles to find language adequate to the thing itself. That is not a failing of character. It is the honest limit of a worldview formed before the internet made every darkness instantly available.

His record on the drug side is long and consistent. The seizures, the public messaging, the refusal to treat overdose deaths as inevitable background noise, all of it tracks with the same black-and-white view. He has been equally consistent on illegal immigration, which is why the national media found him useful for color and why the comparisons to Joe Arpaio sometimes surface. Arpaio paid a political and legal price for enforcing the same principles under a different administration; the pardon that followed was a recognition that the prosecution had been selective. Jonesy has not faced that level of federal hostility, and Butler County is not Maricopa. The local political climate has allowed him to keep doing the work. I expect him to keep winning as long as he wants the job, and I hope that is for a good while yet. The county is better for his presence.

There is a section on the COVID years that brought back the tension of those days. He kept the office functioning, kept the messaging straightforward, and refused to let the panic dictate every decision. Leadership under that kind of pressure reveals the man. The same instinct shows up in the smaller habits. He likes the Waffle House on Main Street in Hamilton enough that they named an omelet after him. I understand the attraction. Walk in, sit at the counter, talk to the cooks and the waitresses and whoever else is there about the country and the county and what needs fixing. It is the modern version of the saloon without the whiskey, a place where a sheriff can still be a citizen among citizens. I took my granddaughter to a Waffle House on a trip toward Columbus for the same reason. The American flags and the unapologetic patriotism on the walls feel like home. Jonesy belongs in that atmosphere the same way he belongs in the cowboy hat.

The book is full of the personal details that never surface in a sound bite. Garfield High School. The long marriage. The children and grandchildren. The zoo trips. The quiet pride in having built a life that looks something like the ones he saw around him as a boy. He is not trying to present himself as a sophisticated theorist. He is trying to say that the old model still works if enough people insist on it. Strong families, clear laws, a sheriff who shows up every day ready to lock up the people who refuse to live by them, and a willingness to put an arm around the ones who might still be pulled back. That combination is rarer than it should be.

I have found myself on the opposite side of primary fights from time to time, the normal friction of people who share a party but not always a candidate. None of that changed the basic respect. The man has brought real public relations value to the office and to the county. When national outlets need a sheriff who will speak plainly about the border or the drug crisis, they know where to find him. Locally he has kept the department visible and the standards high. The book makes plain that the visibility is not an end in itself. It is a tool for keeping the public on the side of the people who have to make the hard calls at three in the morning.

Some of my favorite people. And I never get tired of Sheriff Jones.

What lingers after the last page is the sense of a man measuring the distance between the county he inherited and the county he will leave. He wants the next generation of law enforcement and the next generation of citizens to remember that the job is still worth doing it the old way. The book is his attempt to make that memory portable. It is not perfect. No book written by a working sheriff in the middle of the job is going to be. It is honest in the places that matter. The love of the old shows, the sadness over the collapse of stable families, the daily refusal to treat drug dealers as unfortunate victims of circumstance, the recognition that the voice will one day go quiet, all of it lands cleanly.

If the goal is still to make the country better starting from the ground up, then more sheriffs who think like this would help. Fix the families and a large part of the downstream crime and addiction begins to shrink. Keep the border and the drug pipelines under pressure. Keep the local office present and accountable. Jonesy has practiced that combination for a long time in one midwestern county. The book lets the rest of the country see the method without the filter of a three-minute television hit. I finished it glad I had waited for the porch delivery, and gladder still that the man who wrote it is still on the job. Butler County has been better for it. The country would be better if more places had the same standard.

I will keep endorsing him for as many terms as he chooses to run. The hat still fits. The instincts are still sound. And the book ensures that even after the last term the voice remains available to anyone willing to listen. Which they should.

Notes

1. Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). Official description and author framing appear at theycallmejonesy.com and the Amazon listing for the title.

2. Biographical details drawn from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office official profile and contemporary reporting: born October 11, 1953, Hamilton, Ohio; military service 1973–1975; long career in Ohio corrections before becoming chief deputy and then sheriff in 2005; multiple reelections including the 2020 cycle that secured a fifth term.

3. Comparison to Joe Arpaio references the 2017 presidential pardon following the contempt conviction tied to immigration enforcement practices under the prior administration. See White House statement of August 25, 2017, and contemporaneous coverage.

4. Historical divorce and family-structure trends are well documented in Census and CDC data showing the post-1960s acceleration after no-fault divorce reforms, the rise in single-parent households, and correlated social outcomes. See also the long-term cultural commentary in works such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and the earlier observations of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

5. Jones’s public commentary on immigration, fentanyl, and COVID-era policy is extensively recorded in local outlets (Journal-News, Local 12), national appearances, and the sheriff’s own podcast In the Saddle.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Arpaio, Joe, and Tom Fitton. Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes On Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America. New York: AMACOM, 2008.

Murray, Charles. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965. (The original memorandum remains foundational for understanding family-structure effects on social outcomes.)

Putnam, Robert D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Sheriff Richard K. Jones. Official biography and news archive at butlersheriff.org.

They Call Me Jonesy official site: theycallmejonesy.com.

U.S. Census Bureau and National Center for Health Statistics historical tables on marriage, divorce, and household composition, 1950–present.

Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper, 2016. (Useful companion reading on the cultural and family pressures in the broader Ohio Valley region.)

Rich Hoffman

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Trump Put out the Evidence: How can media companies claim it’s all false before they actually read it?

I sat there the other day listening to the typical pre-speech coverage of President Trump’s primetime address on election security, and it was the same tired script I’ve heard for years now. The reporters and anchors could barely contain their eagerness to frame it as the desperate act of a man who cannot bring himself to abandon the most unpopular policies, no matter how toxic they may be for his own people running for reelection or for the party itself. They talked about his “gambit,” about how he was going to try to convince Republicans that the sky is falling on voting machines and foreign influence, and they already had the line ready: the president is expected to release declassified intelligence about China’s role, but of course it will all be false. How do they know it’s false before anyone has even looked at the documents? Because the network producers and the people who own those networks already decided it was false. That network of people is the real problem. They take bits and pieces, glue them together into a predetermined conclusion, and then run with it as if they have done any real analysis. One thing Donald Trump is not incapable of is putting actual evidence in front of the American people. That was the coverage before the speech even aired, right in the middle of July, while Trump was still out there logging the hours and trying to lock in the system’s security for the long haul. It is disconcerting, and it is exactly why I have spent more time than most going down the rabbit hole of what is really running our political order. When every talking head gets the same memo and says the same thing about elections, you start to wonder whether they are all that stupid or whether a lie can be denied until you die and everybody will play along.

We have known Democrats have been cheating for decades. It was not invented in 2020. I knew something was fishy in 2012. I knew it again in 2016 when Trump obviously won Florida. The panhandle results came in early, and they were overwhelmingly Republican, just as anyone who understands the state would expect. Then you had the usual delays out of the bigger Democrat-leaning counties, Brevard and the rest, where the reporting slowed to a crawl on election night. What they found was that Trump’s lead was too large to overcome with the remaining ballots, so they finally had to turn the results in. This was before COVID and the great expansion of mail-in ballots, signature verification theater, and the endless counting until the other side got what it needed. We just kept counting. That is the pattern. Now people are paying closer attention, and the same act is still necessary for Democrats and the media that cover for them. I heard the ABC reporter come straight out and say the President of the United States was going to give an address to the nation on Thursday night talking about the SAVE Act and election security, and the framing was already that he was pushing something false. Trump is not going to run again. He will be well into his eighties when he leaves office. He has done the job he set out to do and will ride off into the sunset. So why does he care so much? Because the midterms are lining up to be an overwhelming Republican year if the elections are actually secure. Democrats are going to have a hard time if everybody is watching the results carefully. I will say it again: if you are a Republican and you do not want to have to compete against another Democrat who should never have been on the ballot, you need to pay attention to making these elections as secure as possible. They cannot cheat if the system will not let them. How do you know they have been cheating? You can tell by the way the coverage is handled. They know something is there. The same ABC voice that said “President Trump falsely claims there was election fraud in 2020” did not wait to examine the evidence he was about to release. They just declared it false. Trump does not need a personal reason beyond the upcoming midterms and the simple fact that he does not want Democrats taking the House through the same methods they have used for years. The projections already lean Republican, but those projections assume a relatively clean process. Force voter ID. Make people show identification to vote. Why is that so controversial? Because Democrats cannot win if they cannot cheat, and that is a real problem that has been with us not just for a few years but for decades. That is how they have kept it close since Reagan was in office.

Both Bushes knew it was going on, and the Republican establishment did not stand up for itself. I am not a typical Republican in that sense. I knew Rob Portman pretty well before he became a senator, and I watched him drift. You get to Washington, and people start leaning on you. You start sympathizing with the other side a little. You eat lunch with them every day in the cafeteria. They have good hamburgers down there, by the way. You stand in line with the people you are supposed to be fighting, and they talk about the movies and their kids and where the kids are going to college. You develop a liking for them. Pretty soon you are voting more similarly than you ever intended, and you might even suspect that some of them only got into office through fraud, but you do not want to see them embarrassed. You do not want to expose it because friendships have formed. Fair enough. It happens in almost every industry. But that is not what voters are voting for. Voters want representative government. When you soft-pedal the problem, you are voting not to give it to them. The 2020 election was the clearest case yet of the system deciding that President Trump would not be allowed a second term, so they threw him out. They rigged it the way they do in other nations, the way Russia and much of Europe keep their people in power. Democrats have kept it close in the United States through election fraud for many decades, and reporters are being deliberately disingenuous when they refuse to admit it. They know it. When they come out and say “President Trump falsely claims” before they have even looked at the reports he just released, they are not doing journalism. They are taking the corporate byline and running with it. He put the evidence out there. No one analyzed it. They just declared the claim false.

I happen to know precisely where a lot of the theft took place, and there were a lot of crooks involved. Now that more people are open to looking at it, we have to talk about it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. That is what Trump’s national address was about: why we need secure elections, what we have learned, and what needs to happen going forward so the SAVE Act can finally pass. He went to the public and laid it out, and the criticism from the media types was extraordinary in its uniformity and its arrogance. How do they have the right to say he provided evidence of fraud involving China and then act as if they already know more than he does? They were given a line by the producers and the owners of their media companies: Trump is crazy, there was no election fraud in 2020, even though everybody who has looked at the data knows there was an abundance of it. Most Democrats currently in office should not be there because the elections that put them there were compromised. Look at Kentucky. The teachers’ unions and the college towns in Louisville, Lexington, and Frankfort were able to push a candidate over the top with enough votes collected without proper identification. Anywhere you have low election security, you are going to find Democrats excelling and winning even when the broader population is not actually voting for them. That is the problem. If you do not have secure elections, you do not have representative government. You have a system that has seized power and is using its influence to destroy the free will of the voters. That is not acceptable. Before you say “he falsely claims,” you should at least look at the evidence. Trump put it out. There is a lot of it.

The documents released with the speech show that over a period of years starting in the 2020 cycle, China carried out what is described as the largest compromise of election data in history, acquiring roughly 220 million U.S. voter files. Those files included names, home addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that could be used to register voters or engage in other forms of interference. Intelligence assessments indicated that China assigned a specific data-exploitation unit to the project. U.S. agencies began learning about the compromise of tens of millions of voters’ data across 18 states as early as 2020, yet the information was suppressed and downplayed. The same set of documents underscores long-known vulnerabilities in electronic voting and ballot-counting systems. Adversaries including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea can compromise election infrastructure, particularly centralized repositories such as voter registration databases, poll books, and official election websites. A DHS review of available state voter rolls and public records identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections, and the actual number is almost certainly higher because several Democrat-controlled states refused to share their full files. These are not fringe theories. These are the findings that the administration declassified and put before the country. The media response was to declare the claims false before the public had time to read a single page.

That is the conspiracy. The people who run the corporations that own the major media outlets want to reserve the right to insert Democrats into office and play kingmaker through illegal or insecure election means, whether through machines, mail-in ballots with no reliable chain of custody, or perpetual counting that continues until the desired margin appears. There is no voter ID on many of these ballots, so votes can be manufactured until the numbers work out. There is a great deal of evidence that this is exactly what has happened in multiple cycles, and it is a big story. A primetime address should have received far more serious treatment. Instead, you see how the media handled it, because they are part of the problem. Corporations want to control who gets into office, which is why so many policy outcomes look the way they do. It is not because we freely chose them. It is because the system has been captured by people who treat free elections as an obstacle rather than the foundation of self-government. Free and secure elections are how a people maintains its own government. They are taking that away, and that is why Trump went on primetime and talked about it. We had a hard lesson in 2020. We are still fiddling around with the facts when we should have taken decisive action years ago. He went to the airwaves because the matter is serious, and it will remain serious for every election going forward.

The media voices who dismiss all of this without examination are in bed with the same forces trying to rob people of their ability to maintain their own government through honest elections. That is supposed to stay here. Until we address it, we will keep having the same problems. The SAVE Act needs to pass. If you are serious about representative government, demand it. Call your representatives. Pay attention to the midterms. Make the process as hard to cheat as possible. That is the only way the people who actually show up and vote get the government they intend.

If you have ever read my book on business and the gunfighter approach to dealing with reality as it is rather than as the comfortable prefer it to be, you already know where I stand on these matters of discipline and clear-eyed assessment. The larger story of how power actually operates in this country, and the deeper forces that shape the political order, is something I have been exploring at length. Disclosure of the full picture requires understanding the politics of heaven itself. The evidence is there for anyone willing to look past the daily bylines.

Footnotes

1. Pre-speech and post-speech framing by ABC, NBC, and CNN treated Trump’s claims as predetermined falsehoods; networks declined to air the July 16, 2026, primetime address live on their main channels. See ABC News, “Key takeaways from Trump’s election speech,” July 17, 2026; The Hill, “James Carville criticizes networks for not airing Trump’s election security speech,” July 17, 2026.

2. On 2016 Florida reporting patterns, panhandle counties reported early and heavily for Trump while certain larger counties lagged; contemporaneous accounts noted the scale of the Republican margin forced earlier reporting. See Politico, “How Trump won Florida,” November 8, 2016.

3. The SAVE America Act (also referred to as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) mandates documentary proof of citizenship for registration, photo identification for voting in federal elections, and greater state sharing of voter-roll data. House passage occurred in February 2026; subsequent efforts attached provisions to other legislation amid Senate resistance. See Bipartisan Policy Center, “Six Things to Know About the SAVE America Act,” updated July 17, 2026; Congress.gov, H.R. 7296 and related measures.

4. White House release accompanying the July 16, 2026, address: “Over a period of years starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history—resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” Includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and party preferences; intelligence community assessments spanning 2020–2026 document adversary capabilities against election infrastructure. Official White House page, “Election Integrity,” July 2026, and linked declassified packages on China’s acquisition of American voter data and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

5. DHS review cited in the same release identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote based on available state rolls and public records; the administration noted the figure is incomplete because certain states declined full data sharing. White House, “Election Integrity,” July 2026.

6. Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database contains more than 1,400 documented, proven instances of election fraud across multiple categories (as of late 2025 updates exceeding 1,600 sampled cases). Heritage Foundation, Election Fraud Map and Database, electionfraud.heritage.org.

7. Kentucky races have repeatedly featured claims of irregularities concentrated in urban and university-adjacent counties with weaker identification practices; former Governor Matt Bevin and others publicly alleged absentee and machine issues after close contests. Courier-Journal, “What officials, experts say about Bevin’s voter fraud claims,” November 2019; ongoing Kentucky Attorney General election-integrity inquiries, 2026.

8. Intelligence Community assessments (January 2020 onward) state that U.S. adversaries including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea possess the capability to compromise election infrastructure, with centralized voter databases and poll books judged most vulnerable: declassified materials released July 16, 2026, White House Election Integrity portal.

Bibliography

ABC News. “Key takeaways from Trump’s elections speech.” July 17, 2026. https://abcnews.com/Politics/key-takeaways-trumps-elections-speech/story?id=134835191.

Bipartisan Policy Center. “Six Things to Know About the SAVE America Act

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The Frogman of Loveland: Down the Rabbit Hole to the Politics of Heaven and Magonia

I did not set out to become the UFO guy. I woke up asking practical questions about power, motivation, and politics—the same way I have solved engineering and organizational problems my entire career in aerospace and executive roles. Something was broken in our understanding of how the world actually works, and I wanted to fix it by following the evidence wherever it led. That path started with the Bible, the divine council, and the politics of heaven itself. It took me through anthropology, local Ohio archaeology along the Little Miami River valley I know so well, and straight into the work of Jacques Vallée. The synchronicity is very interesting.

When I began writing The Politics of Heaven, my goal was straightforward: to understand the motivations of the characters we pray to and interact with in scripture. The Bible is not a collection of moral fables; it is a chronicle of encounters with super-characters—angels, demons, principalities, powers, and the divine council. Job’s story alone shows Satan as a member of that council, maneuvering Yahweh into testing a loyal man. That is politics. Pure, raw politics. If we are going to engage with these forces through prayer, ritual, or culture, we had better know what they want. Human politics is not enough. We need to map the agendas of the non-human intelligences that have been shaping events from the beginning.

That line of inquiry naturally led me to anthropology. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough remains one of my favorite books after years of reading it. It opened the door to how cultures worldwide have interacted with the spirit world—the “great spirit,” ancestors, and other intelligences. Modern anthropology grew out of that comparative study, but it largely stopped at human societies. It cataloged myths, rituals, and shamans without seriously asking whether the beings on the other side of those rituals had their own coherent politics, territories, and long-term strategies. I propose we need a new branch: an anthropology of non-human intelligence and its impact on human history, culture, and current events.

Living here in the Cincinnati area, with deep roots in Butler County and the river valleys, the evidence was literally under my feet and in my backyard. The Little Miami River corridor is thick with Hopewell-era ceremonial earthworks. Fort Ancient sits on a plateau overlooking the river, just a short distance from Loveland and Milford—3.5 miles of precisely engineered earthen walls enclosing roughly 100 acres, with documented astronomical alignments with the solstices and lunar standstills. It was not a fort in the military sense; it was a monumental ritual and observational complex.

Further down the valley, in what is now Terrace Park, there once stood one of Hamilton County’s largest prehistoric earthworks—an enclosure of about 80 acres along the bluff above the Little Miami. In 1820, it was still visible, six feet high and twelve feet wide at the base. Today, homes, gardens, and part of a school sit atop it. Other mounds in the area were leveled for roads like Wooster Pike or disappeared under development. These were not random piles of dirt. They shared the same sophisticated geometry and mathematics seen at the great Newark Earthworks—precise circles, octagons, and alignments that encoded lunar cycles (the 18.6-year standstill), solar events, and what appears to be practical knowledge of π and equal-area constructions between squares and circles.

Newark itself is staggering. The Great Circle and Octagon complex once sprawled over several square miles. Researchers like Ray Hively, Robert Horn, Bradley Lepper, and William Romain have documented alignments of breathtaking precision—every major lunar standstill direction embedded in the architecture when viewed over the local horizon. These were not defensive works or casual gathering places. They were cosmic engines, ritual machines designed to connect heaven and earth, time and space. Shamans almost certainly used them in altered states—likely with psychedelics or other techniques—to communicate with the spirit world. The geometry stripped away ordinary filters and tuned the participants to frequencies where non-human intelligences could interact.

If we had not paved over so many of these sites with neighborhoods, roads, and golf courses, places like the Terrace Park earthwork and others around Milford would rank as world-heritage-level marvels alongside the pyramids or Stonehenge. The precision of their construction, the labor involved, and the astronomical knowledge encoded in them point to something far beyond ordinary tribal engineering. Either the Hopewell independently achieved mathematical and observational sophistication that rivals anything in the ancient world, or they were receiving information and instruction from intelligences that already understood these patterns.

That brings me to the frogman.

Just a few miles upstream and downstream from these lost or buried ceremonial centers along the Little Miami, people have been seeing something that does not fit ordinary biology. In 1955, a businessman near Loveland reported three or four humanoid figures, three to four feet tall, with leathery skin and frog- or lizard-like faces, gathered near a bridge or along the riverbank. One version mentions a wand-like object emitting sparks or light. In 1972, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey encountered a similar being on Riverside Drive near the old Totes boot factory and the river. It stood up in his headlights. His partner, Mark Mathews, later claimed to have shot one; decades afterward, he said it was a large tailless iguana that had escaped a pet owner and was living near warm factory pipes. The legend persisted anyway—scrape marks on guardrails, a creature climbing over or under them and vanishing into the water. In 2016, near Lake Isabella (right across from Indian Hill and close to the old Terrace Park area), Pokémon Go players reported seeing a large, frog-like figure standing on its hind legs.

My family has turned the Loveland Frogman into a running joke with the grandkids. “Let’s go catch a frogman tonight down by the river.” It is fifteen minutes from the house. We laugh, but the pattern is hard to ignore. These sightings cluster in the exact river corridor where major Hopewell ritual sites once stood—sites now largely erased by modern development. The beings show up looking for something that is no longer there: the shamans, the rituals, the precise geometric invitations that once opened doors between worlds. They arrive a couple of thousand years too late or too early, stepping over guardrails on Kemper Road or near Lake Isabella, still drawn to the old power spots along the Little Miami.

This is where Jacques Vallée enters the story through pure synchronicity. While sharing early drafts of The Politics of Heaven with agents, publishers, and consultants, multiple people independently told me the same thing: “You sound like Jacques Vallée. You need to read Passport to Magonia.” I had avoided deep dives into UFO literature because I did not want to be labeled the UFO guy. I knew Vallée had consulted on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I had not read his work. When the book arrived from Amazon the next day—waiting at a distribution center as if it had been pre-positioned—I opened it and immediately recognized the territory.

Vallée’s central argument in Passport to Magonia (1969) is that modern UFO occupants are not new. They are the fairies, elves, sylphs, demons, angels, and aerial beings of folklore repackaged for a technological age. He draws on medieval accounts of ships from Magonia—a legendary realm in the clouds whose sailors collected grain knocked down by storms—and shows the same encounter structure repeating across centuries: aerial craft, non-human entities, interaction (sometimes seductive or revelatory, sometimes disturbing), and departure. The beings adapt their appearance and story to the expectations of the witnesses. They leave physical traces but behave in ways that violate the physics implied by their appearance. They operate as a control system or an influence mechanism, interacting with human consciousness over time.

Magonia, in Vallée’s reading, functions like a rival sovereignty—a political order operating just outside or alongside our dimensional reality. That matched exactly what my research into the divine council and biblical politics had already led me to conclude independently. These are not simple visitors from another planet dropping in for disclosure or friendly ET chats. They are ultra-terrestrials or interdimensional intelligences with their own agendas, territories, and long game. They have been shaping human culture, religion, and politics for millennia—sometimes as gods or angels, sometimes as tricksters or tormentors. The Hopewell geometers and shamans were engaging them through precise ritual architecture. The frogman sightings suggest they still patrol the old contact zones.

I am not claiming every sighting is profound. Some are misidentifications or hoaxes. But the pattern—ancient ceremonial precision along the same rivers where cryptid activity persists, the synchronicity of arriving at Vallée’s conclusions through biblical and political inquiry, the consistent folklore structure across cultures—demands serious attention. Steven Spielberg captured a sanitized version in Close Encounters and E.T. The cute, friendly aliens who want to take us for a ride or phone home. The real record includes missing time, abductions, trauma, and manipulation. Vallée documented the disturbing side; mainstream disclosure narratives often soften it.

Understanding their politics matters. If these intelligences have motivations—territorial, informational, or influence-based—then treating them as either nonexistent or purely benevolent is a form of strategic blindness. Just as we map human political actors, we need to map theirs. The Bible already does some of that work. Anthropology and archaeology can do more if we stop pretending the “spirit world” was only a psychological projection. The evidence from Newark, Fort Ancient, the lost mounds of Terrace Park and Milford, the persistent frogman activity, and Vallée’s comparative folklore all point in the same direction: non-human intelligences have been here, interacting with us, and they have their own order.

I did not chase this rabbit hole for fame or money. There is little of either in the following evidence, this far outside the box. I followed it because the questions were honest and the evidence was insistent. The Politics of Heaven is the result—a treasure hunt through scripture, history, archaeology, and personal experience that refuses to stop at comfortable boundaries. The synchronicity with Vallée’s work was not a coincidence; it was confirmation that the evidence converges.

We are long past the point where we can afford to dismiss these patterns as mere folklore or swamp gas. The beings that built—or inspired—the precise geometries of the Hopewell earthworks, that still appear along the same rivers in forms adapted to our expectations, and that the Bible chronicles as members of a divine council with political agency, are operating with agendas. Mapping those agendas is not a conspiracy theory. It is the next necessary step in anthropology, political strategy, and honest theology.

The frogman is still out there, or something like him. The old sites are still under the neighborhoods. And the politics of heaven—and of Magonia—continue whether we pay attention or not.

Footnotes (selected key references; full bibliography follows):

1. Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969; various editions). Core thesis on continuity between UFO occupants and historical aerial beings/fairies from Magonia and similar traditions.

2. Reports on Loveland Frogman: Singular Fortean Society coverage of 1972 officer sightings (Shockey/Mathews); WCPO 2016 interview with Mathews identifying the shot creature as a large iguana; 1955 Stringfield report of businessman sighting near Loveland/Little Miami bridges; 2016 Pokémon Go sighting near Lake Isabella.

3. Terrace Park earthwork: Historical Society of Terrace Park records noting a large ~80-acre enclosure visible into the 19th/20th century, now largely covered by development, homes, and school grounds—other local mounds destroyed by road construction.

4. Fort Ancient: Descriptions of hilltop enclosure overlooking Little Miami River, ~3.5 miles of walls, astronomical alignments (solstice, lunar). See National Park Service and archaeological summaries.

5. Newark Earthworks geometry and astronomy: Foundational work by Ray Hively and Robert Horn (1982 onward) on lunar standstill alignments in the Octagon; Bradley Lepper and William Romain on geometry, “squaring the circle” relations, cosmic/ritual function, pilgrimage center aspects. UNESCO World Heritage designation for Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (2023) includes several Ohio sites.

6. Hopewell culture context: Widespread ceremonial earthworks across Ohio river valleys (Scioto, Little Miami, etc.), ~200 BCE–500 CE, advanced mathematics, astronomy, trade, likely shamanic ritual use of geometry and altered states. Many sites were lost to agriculture and urban development.

7. Biblical references: Job (divine council politics, Satan as a member testing Yahweh’s servant); broader Enochic and prophetic traditions on principalities, powers, and heavenly politics.

8. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough (various editions). Foundational comparative study of myth, ritual, and interaction with spirit/great spirit across cultures; inspiration for expanded anthropology.

Bibliography (selected; expands on footnotes for depth):

• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia.

• Hively, Ray, and Robert Horn. “Geometry and Astronomy in Prehistoric Ohio.” Journal for the History of Astronomy: Archaeoastronomy Supplement (1982 and subsequent papers).

• Lepper, Bradley T. Multiple works on Newark Earthworks as ceremonial landscape, pilgrimage center, and geometric/astronomical achievement.

• Romain, William F. Works on Hopewell geometry, astronomy, cosmology, and Fort Ancient.

• Squier, Ephraim George, and Edwin Hamilton Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848). Foundational survey including Ohio earthworks.

• Historical Society of Terrace Park records on local prehistoric earthworks.

• Singular Fortean Society, WCPO, and contemporary newspaper accounts of Loveland Frogman incidents (1955, 1972, 2016).

• National Park Service and Ohio History Connection materials on Fort Ancient and Hopewell sites.

• Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough.

• Biblical texts (Job, Enoch traditions, references to divine council and principalities).

Rich Hoffman

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