Category: NRA

Why The Fountainhead Is Still the Most Important Novel in America:  Why so many Americans now treat the producer as the problem and the parasite as the moral authority

I sit down most days and watch the news panels the same way many people do. Fox News, the War Room, the usual circuit. Smart people, serious people, many of them I respect. Steve Bannon and his guests especially. And yet I keep hearing the same stunned tone when they talk about the sudden popularity of socialism, the rise of candidates who openly flirt with Marxist language, the young people who treat Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as prophets. They act as if this is some new weather system that just blew in.

I have been talking about the same weather for decades. The adverse effects of collectivism on a free human culture are not a mystery to me. They destroy the individual while pretending to help the group. I have committed a large portion of my working life to saying so, in writing, on the air, and in private conversation. So when the panels discover it late, I find myself less angry than simply tired. The diagnosis has been available the entire time. It sits on the shelf as a single novel that most of them will not touch.

That novel is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

It is, without qualification, my favorite book. Not one of my favorites. The favorite. I have read it more times than I can cleanly count. I talked about it for years. I have carried its central argument into boardrooms, courtrooms, and conversations with my own grandchildren. When people ask me what single work of fiction best explains why so many Americans now treat the producer as the problem and the parasite as the moral authority, I do not hesitate. Read The Fountainhead. Then read it again.

Ayn Rand’s Escape from Communism and the American Novel That Resulted

Ayn Rand was a Russian refugee who escaped the Soviet system and came to America precisely because she wanted the opposite of what she had left. She watched the early years of the Bolshevik experiment up close. She understood, in her bones, what happens when the collective claims the right to own a man’s mind and the products of his mind. She wrote The Fountainhead as an artist, not as a political pamphlet, and the result is one of the clearest, most sustained examinations of the creator versus the second-hander that American literature has ever produced. 

Howard Roark is an architect who will not compromise the integrity of his buildings. When the establishment forces mediocrity onto a housing project he designed, he dynamites the result rather than allow his work to stand as a diluted lie. That act is not teenage rebellion. It is the logical end of a man who treats his own mind as the final court of appeal. The courtroom speech that closes the book is, in my view, as powerful as John Galt’s radio address in Atlas Shrugged. It is pure intellectual dynamite. Roark explains, without apology, the difference between the man who lives by the work of his own mind and the man who lives by borrowing, begging, or looting the work of others.

Most people do not want to see themselves as second-handers. That is exactly why the book still stings.

Why Some Conservatives Keep Their Distance from Ayn Rand

I remain mystified that so many people on the right, including voices I otherwise admire, treat Rand as radioactive. Bannon and others have expressed open dislike. The explanation usually circles her atheism. She was an atheist. She never pretended otherwise. That fact has allowed generations of religious conservatives to dismiss the entire body of work rather than engage the actual argument about production, integrity, and the moral status of the individual.

I am a Bible guy. I read it constantly. I take Joshua seriously—the man who marches around Jericho because God said to, who trusts the order larger than himself even when the math looks insane. I also take the Grail quest seriously. Percival finds the castle only when he stops forcing the journey and rides with looser reins. Those stories are not in conflict with the best of what Rand saw. They deepen it.

The Tower of Babel story is often read as a simple warning against human pride. Rand would have celebrated the ambition itself. The real sin in that story is the unified collective that tries to storm heaven by consensus rather than by individual excellence. When a man’s personal vision actually lines up with the larger order—when he becomes the vehicle rather than a cog—the result looks a lot like Joshua’s conquest and a lot like Roark’s refusal to bend. The difference is the source of the certainty. One man says “God told me.” The other says “I will not pretend.” Both refuse the noise of the crowd.

I live closer to Joshua’s path in daily practice. I want the commitment of marriage, the long obedience in the same direction, the willingness to enjoy the life God actually gave me rather than treat every compromise as spiritual death. But I understand what Roark was protecting. The forces that tried to break him are the same forces the Bible warns about under different names—the ones that pull a man away from the work he was made to do. Uncompromising clarity in the face of that noise is a form of spiritual discipline, whether the author acknowledged it or not.

Creators Versus Parasites and Why We Have So Few Edisons

The central question of The Fountainhead is simple and uncomfortable: are you creating, or are you feeding off someone else’s creation? Most people never ask it of themselves. Committees do not invent the light bulb. Consensus does not produce the theory of relativity. Those things come from individuals who refuse to bend.

My daughter recently took my grandson to Thomas Edison’s boyhood home in Milan, Ohio, for exactly that reason. I am not trying to manufacture another Edison. I want him to see that there are alternatives to the box the culture keeps trying to sell. Edison woke up every day trying to be a fountainhead. He made mistakes—plenty of them—but the posture was unmistakable. The same posture explains why an Elon Musk can exist in America and why a Jack Ma eventually runs into the wall in a more collective system. The culture that still has room for the uncompromising creator is the culture that keeps producing them. The culture that treats that spirit as a threat eventually smothers it. 

Hollywood’s Long War Against the Fountainhead Spirit

The resistance is not abstract. Zack Snyder, the director of 300 and a string of visually ambitious films, has spent years trying to adapt The Fountainhead. Studios treat the material as radioactive. He has said publicly that the book is considered “taboo” among the people who green-light projects. The same pattern appeared with the low-budget Atlas Shrugged trilogy made between 2011 and 2014. Funding was scraped together in pieces. Actors who appeared in it paid a quiet professional price. The collective does not need to ban the book. It only needs to make sure no one with real resources is allowed to put the story on a large screen without punishment. 

Clint Eastwood understood the same energy. He carried versions of it through Dirty Harry, the preacher in Pale Rider, Frank Morris in Escape from Alcatraz, and the driven director in White Hunter Black Heart. In the 1980s, when he was still fighting for the kind of films he wanted to make, those characters walked through the frame like men who would rather dynamite the building than let the second-handers own the final cut. White Hunter Black Heart feels, to me, like Eastwood’s private reckoning with the cost of that stance. He played the uncompromising artist for most of the running time and then, at the end, allowed the character a moment of regret. After that film, the pure Roark energy largely left his work. Age and the system both take their toll. 

Even Walt Disney once understood. In the American Adventure pavilion at Epcot, there is a quote set into the wall: “Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.” It is Ayn Rand’s line. I have stood in front of it with my grandchildren and told them it is one of the most important things in the entire park. Modern operators tend to cover it with seasonal decorations or other displays. The plaque is still there. The spirit that put it there is harder to find. 

Trump, the Ballroom, and the Same Old Courtroom Drama

I recently walked through the construction site of the new White House ballroom with my wife. We were invited. What is rising out of that hole in the ground is a clear, large-scale vision. The resistance to it has been immediate and predictable: you did not get our approval, the process was not followed, the collective must control the final shape. It is the same drama Roark faced, only now the building is the people’s house and the second-handers wear different titles. Trump has said publicly that The Fountainhead relates to business, beauty, life, and inner emotions—that it relates to everything. The comparison is not perfect, and pure Objectivists often bristle at it, but the pattern of an uncompromising builder meeting institutional resistance is hard to miss. 

Robert Kincaid, the Bridges of Madison County, and the Quiet Hunger for the Fountainhead Life

Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County sold in enormous numbers for a reason that had very little to do with the affair itself. Robert Kincaid is a roaming photographer who lives by his own vision in a landscape that offers almost nothing to support it. Francesca sees, for a few days, what it looks like to be the vehicle rather than another wheel on someone else’s ride. Most people settle for the comfortable, arranged path—the prom-king marriage, the nice house, the pool—and then spend the rest of their lives wondering why the castle never appears. The book worked because American readers still recognize the difference even if they no longer have the language for it.

What I Tell My Grandchildren and Why Independent Media Matters

When I take the grandchildren to Epcot or to Edison’s house or talk to them at the kitchen table, I am not trying to turn them into little Objectivists. I am trying to show them that they do not have to be cogs. They can be the vehicle. That requires a certain rebelliousness against the noise of the culture. It requires the willingness to trust a larger order while still showing up with full intensity, the way Joshua did and the way Percival finally learned to do. The plaque on the wall, the boyhood home of an inventor, the courtroom speech at the end of a long novel—these are seeds. They may not bloom for years. When the world starts testing them, I want the memory of their grandfather getting excited about a simple line of text to be one of the things that makes them stop and think there might be another way to live.

Independent media is the slow trickle that keeps these ideas alive when the big networks and the entertainment unions will not touch them. I do this work for that reason. The Tea Party years showed that people will reach for Rand when they are hungry for an explanation of what is happening to them. The hunger has not gone away. It has only been driven underground by the same second-hand mechanisms the books describe.

Read the Book. Then Read It Again.

The Fountainhead is not a new religion. Treating it that way is one of the fastest ways to miss the point. It is a work of art that dramatizes a permanent conflict: the man who creates versus the man who lives second-hand. It is a big book. It is demanding. It does not flatter. That is precisely why it remains useful, even as television panels are still trying to figure out why socialist language keeps gaining ground among the young.

I have the advantage of having watched the cultural impact of these ideas across decades—what worked, what failed, where the atheism limited Rand’s own reach, and where the moral clarity she captured still cuts through every fashionable excuse. The Bible, the Grail stories, Edison’s stubbornness, Eastwood’s best characters, the quiet rebellion of a man who refuses to hand his voice to a committee—all of it belongs in the same conversation. Rand never fully arrived at the larger synthesis. That does not make the novel less valuable. It makes the rest of us responsible for finishing the thought.

If you have never read it, get it. If you read it once and bounced off the characters or the length, try again. The courtroom speech alone is worth the price of admission. Then look around at the news, at the schools, at the institutions that keep trying to turn creators into employees of the collective, and ask yourself the question Roark never stopped asking: are you the fountainhead, or are you content to be another wheel?

I know which side I am on. I have known it for a long time. The work continues.

Footnotes

1.  Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). The novel has sold more than ten million copies and remains in continuous print.

2.  For Rand’s early life and escape from Soviet Russia, see Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009).

3.  The quote appears in the rotunda of the American Adventure pavilion at Epcot. Multiple visitor accounts and Disney historians confirm its presence; seasonal overlays have at times obscured individual plaques.

4.  Zack Snyder has discussed his unproduced Fountainhead adaptation in interviews, including on the Joe Rogan Experience (2024), describing industry resistance to the material as “taboo.”

5.  The Atlas Shrugged film trilogy (2011–2014) was produced independently on limited budgets after repeated failures to secure traditional Hollywood financing.

6.  Clint Eastwood’s interest in Rand’s work and the Roark-like qualities of several of his characters are documented in contemporary profiles and in the production history of White Hunter Black Heart (1990).

7.  Donald Trump’s public comments on The Fountainhead appear in a 2016 interview with Kirsten Powers for USA Today.

8.  Thomas Edison Birthplace Museum, Milan, Ohio; National Historic Landmark.

9.  Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County (New York: Warner Books, 1992).

10.  On the broader cultural reception of Rand among conservatives and the persistent tension with her atheism, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Selected Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

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

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1966 (orig. 1938).

Heller, Anne C. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009.

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Holy Bible, various translations (particularly the Book of Joshua and accounts of the Tower of Babel).

Chrétien de Troyes and later Grail romances (Percival tradition).

Waller, Robert James. The Bridges of Madison County. New York: Warner Books, 1992.

Viertel, Peter. White Hunter, Black Heart. New York: Doubleday, 1953 (basis for the 1990 film).

Eastwood, Clint, dir. White Hunter Black Heart. Warner Bros., 1990.

Eastwood, Clint, dir. Pale Rider. Warner Bros., 1985.

Eastwood, Clint, dir. Escape from Alcatraz. Paramount, 1979.

Snyder, Zack (unproduced adaptation notes and public statements on The Fountainhead).

Edison Birthplace Museum archival materials, Milan, Ohio.

Disney historical accounts of the American Adventure pavilion, Epcot.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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.

Being More Than Human: The Lesson of Numbers 25


I wrote Symposium of Justice in 2004 under a pressure most people never carry for long, and the character I named Cliffhanger still sits with me whenever the talk turns to what it means to become more than human. The book was a modern Zorro story dressed in the clothes of a fast-food cook named Fletcher Finnegan, a man rich enough to sit in any boardroom yet who deliberately chose the lowest-status job in town so he could listen to the kids who actually knew where the crime lived. He put on an apron and flipped burgers because prestige is one of the oldest chains non-human intelligence uses to keep us in line. Once you no longer need the room’s approval, the bullets start to disappear. That was the part Hollywood never could grasp. They understood Superman from Krypton and Iron Man in a suit. They could not understand a man who had stopped asking the system for permission to exist.¹

The system in that book was never just corrupt cops or politicians. It was the machinery driven by intelligences that are neither human nor ever were. They feed on the human craving for status, for sexual conquest displayed in front of peers, for the lawn that is greener than the neighbor’s. Numbers 25 still haunts me because it shows the pattern in plain sight. Moses had already walked with God, already seen the bush burn, already split the sea, and still the people dragged Moabite women into the camp and had sex with them in open defiance right in front of their leader. Yahweh’s anger was not abstract. He kept Moses on the wrong side of the Jordan. Leadership that cannot enforce the line is not leadership; it is theater. The Overman is the one who refuses to play in that theater.²

Cliffhanger’s ten rules were never meant to replace the Ten Commandments. They were a working set of standards for a man who had already decided he would not live as spiritual livestock. I wrote them in my early thirties while the story was still hot in my hands, and I have lived by them since.

Rule one is to honor women as the pillars of society. That is not sentiment. A culture that treats women as disposable will collapse under its own weight, and non-human intelligences have always known how to use that collapse. Rule two demands that a man live as an example of the highest moral order he can conceive. Rule three is the refusal of mental depletion: no intoxication that dulls the edge, no cultivated ignorance. Pursue learning the way a man dying of thirst pursues water. Rule four is the quiet discipline of keeping the body and mind under the same command so that neither becomes a doorway for something else. Rule five insists that integrity is the alignment of stated values with actual behavior; anything less is performance for an audience that is not human. Rule six is to live the life you were given rather than the dream someone else sold you. Rule seven: in crisis, handle everything calmly and without confusion. Rule eight: be capable of firmness in the heart when firmness is required. Rule nine: sorrow is accepted with a smile. And the last rule, the one that still cuts deepest: resist hiding in numbers. Stand as an individual contributor.³

Cliffhanger’s Ten Rules

  1. Honor women as the pillars of society.

A culture that treats women as disposable will collapse under its own weight, and non‑human intelligences have always known how to use that collapse.

  • Live as an example of the highest moral order you can conceive.

A man’s life should reflect the standard he claims to uphold.

  • Refuse mental depletion.

No intoxication that dulls the edge, no cultivated ignorance. Pursue learning the way a man dying of thirst pursues water.

  • Keep the body and mind under the same command.

Quiet discipline prevents either from becoming a doorway for something else.

  • Align stated values with actual behavior.

Integrity is the congruence between what you claim and what you do; anything less is performance for an audience that is not human.

  • Live the life you were given, not the dream someone else sold you.

Authenticity is a form of sovereignty.

  • In a crisis, remain calm and free of confusion.

Clarity under pressure is a moral act.

  • Be capable of firmness in the heart when firmness is required.

Strength is not cruelty; it is resolve.

  • Accept sorrow with a smile.

Suffering is not an enemy — it is a teacher.

  1.  Resist hiding in numbers.

That still cuts deepest: resist hiding in numbers. Stand as an individual contributor.”

Those rules are what allowed Cliffhanger to walk through a house full of gunfire without taking a round. It was never magic. It was the disciplined refusal of the peer-pressure mechanisms that non-human intelligence has used since the garden. Once a man no longer needs the room to nod at him, the room loses its power to aim. Quantum observation is not a metaphor here. The man who has divorced himself from the need for status selects the reality in which the bullet misses, because he is no longer entangled with the fear that makes most men flinch. I explained that to studio people for years. They nodded, then asked if we could give him a suit or a radioactive spider. They wanted the power without the cost. The cost is that you will never again be fully approved by the herd. That is the price of the Overman.⁴

Quantum observation is the idea that at the smallest scales of reality, particles do not behave like solid objects but like probabilities—spreads of potential outcomes that only “collapse” into a definite state when they are measured. In quantum mechanics, observation isn’t passive; it changes the system. A particle’s position, momentum, or even existence as a wave or a point becomes real only when something interacts with it. Before that moment, reality is a cloud of possibilities. Quantum observation suggests that consciousness, measurement, or interaction plays a role in shaping what becomes actual, hinting that the universe is not a fixed machine but a responsive field where the act of looking helps determine what is seen.

I have watched the same pattern repeat from the tent in Numbers 25 to the sex parties that still happen in certain circles, the ones that echo the same Babylonian rituals Stanley Kubrick tried to show in Eyes Wide Shut and Conan the Barbarianbefore the films were softened. The bones of giants still change hands. The same intelligences still demand sacrifice and participation. Most people still trade their sovereignty for a place at the table. The Overman is the one who walks away from the table and still eats.⁵

Jesus was fully human and fully something else. The resurrection was not a metaphor for self-improvement. Ghosts came out of the tombs. The limits of flesh were broken in public. That is the direction, not the rejection of the body but the refusal to remain its prisoner. Moses failed because he could not hold the line. Joshua was given the land because someone had to. The cycle keeps repeating because most of us still prefer the approval of the camp to the hard work of becoming the being that non-human intelligence cannot herd.⁶

I am not interested in uploading consciousness into a machine so we can live forever as software. That is just another version of the same livestock arrangement, only with better climate control. The Overman I wrote about in 2004 is the man who stays in the body, stays in the fight, and refuses the spiritual cattle chute. He works the night shift at the restaurant so he can hear where the next crime is forming. He carries a bullwhip instead of a cape because the whip is honest about the cost of discipline. He selects the reality in which the bullets miss because he has already selected the reality in which he no longer needs the shooters’ respect.

That is the part I am still proud of. The rest of the culture is only now beginning to use words like ultra-human and non-human intelligence in public. I wrote the story twenty-two years ago because the pattern was already visible if you were willing to look past the need to be liked. The ten rules still stand. The bullets still miss when the man no longer flinches for applause. And the war with whatever has been herding us since the garden is still the only war that matters.

From Nietzsche to Teilhard de Chardin to Mircea Eliade and Jacques Vallée, a long intellectual thread has argued that the human being is not a completed creature but a transitional one. Nietzsche’s Übermensch was the first modern articulation of the “overman,” a figure who rises beyond inherited moral frameworks and becomes capable of shaping meaning rather than receiving it. Teilhard expanded the idea into the “Ultra-Human,” a being transformed by consciousness, complexity, and spiritual evolution. Eliade saw humanity as perpetually pulled toward the sacred, always reaching for a higher mode of existence through ritual, myth, and contact with the transcendent. Vallée reframed the question for the technological age, suggesting that encounters with non‑human intelligence may be part of a long‑running process that pushes humanity toward a more advanced form of awareness. Pasulka’s work in The Others brings this lineage into the present moment: she argues that extraordinary experiences, anomalous contact, and the emergence of non-human intelligences are forcing human beings to grow into something larger than the version of ourselves we inherited. In this view, the real struggle of the twenty-first century is not human versus artificial intelligence, but human versus the non-human intelligences that have always been present at the edges of our history — the same kind of character hinted at in recent disclosures and the strange figures emerging from the shadows of power. The question is whether humanity will rise to meet that challenge, or remain a species unaware of the evolutionary pressure being applied to it.

Numbers 25 is one of the clearest biblical moments where Yahweh sees Moses hesitate, and that hesitation is treated as weakness. The crisis at Baal‑Peor wasn’t just a moral failure — it was a collapse of sovereignty. The people aligned themselves with a rival deity, a rival ritual system, and a rival identity. In the lineage of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Teilhard de Chardin, Eliade, Vallée, and Pasulka, this moment reads like a test of whether humanity can rise to a higher form of discipline and consciousness or fall back into the gravitational pull of older, chaotic forces. Moses pauses, trying to manage the rebellion through judges and procedure, but Yahweh demands decisive action — the kind of firmness, clarity, and elevated moral strength associated with the “overman,” the “ultra‑human,” or the spiritually evolved human these writers describe. Phinehas, not Moses, embodies that higher threshold: he acts with total alignment, total conviction, and total sovereignty, restoring the boundary between human order and non-human influence. In this reading, Yahweh’s frustration with Moses is not about anger but about evolution — Moses hesitates at the very moment when the human being is supposed to rise. Numbers 25 becomes a story about whether humanity can grow into the being capable of resisting non‑human intelligences, chaotic ritual systems, and the collapse of moral order. Moses falters; Phinehas steps forward. The text preserves that contrast as a warning about what happens when leaders fail to evolve at the pace the crisis demands.

Numbers 25 opens with the Israelites camped at Shittim, where they begin engaging in Moabite rituals and festivals. The Moabite women invite the Israelite men to their sacrificial feasts, and the men join them — eating, bowing, and participating in the worship of Baal‑Peor, a local deity. This is treated in the text as a direct betrayal of Yahweh, a collapse of loyalty and identity.

As the people align themselves with Baal‑Peor, Yahweh’s anger is described as burning against Israel. He commands Moses to execute the leaders responsible for leading the rebellion. Moses instructs the judges to kill those who joined themselves to Baal‑Peor.

Right in the middle of this crisis, something shocking happens: an Israelite man named Zimri publicly brings a Midianite woman named Cozbi into the camp, in full view of Moses and the entire assembly. The text emphasizes that this act is deliberate, defiant, and visible — a symbolic gesture of rejecting Moses’s authority and Yahweh’s command.

While the people are weeping at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, sees what Zimri has done. He takes a spear, enters the chamber where Zimri and Cozbi are having sex together, and kills them both with a single thrust. The moment he does this, the plague that had broken out among the Israelites stops.

By the time the plague ends, 24,000 people have died.

Yahweh declares that Phinehas’s action has “turned away” divine anger and restored the covenant. Phinehas is given a “covenant of peace” and a “lasting priesthood” because he acted with zeal when the leadership hesitated. The chapter ends with Yahweh commanding Moses to treat the Midianites as enemies because they were the ones who enticed Israel into the rebellion at Baal Peor.  This is a fight on many levels that still carries over to this very day.  And Moses was too nice, too human.

“The System” in my book was never just corrupt cops or politicians. It was the machinery driven by intelligences that are neither human nor ever were. They feed on the human craving for status, for sexual conquest displayed in front of peers, for the lawn that is greener than the neighbor’s. Numbers 25 still haunts me because it shows the pattern in plain sight. Moses had already walked with God, already seen the bush burn, already split the sea, and still the people dragged Moabite women into the camp and had sex with them in open defiance right in front of their leader. Yahweh’s anger was not abstract. He kept Moses on the wrong side of the Jordan. Leadership that cannot enforce the line is not leadership; it is theater. The Overman is the one who refuses to play in that theater.²

Cliffhanger’s ten rules were never meant to replace the Ten Commandments. They were a working set of standards for a man who had already decided he would not live as spiritual livestock. I wrote them in my early thirties while the story was still hot in my hands, and I have lived by them since.

Notes:

¹ The character Fletcher Finnegan was deliberately modeled on the dual nature of Don Diego de la Vega in the original Zorro stories and the 1957–1959 Disney television series. The decision to place him in a fast-food kitchen rather than a mansion was an attempt to invert the usual social camouflage: instead of pretending to be idle and foppish, Cliffhanger pretends to be ordinary and low-status so that the system itself overlooks him.

² Numbers 25:1–9 records the incident at Peor. The text is unambiguous that the Israelites engaged in sexual relations with Moabite women and joined in the worship of Baal of Peor in full view of Moses and the congregation. Yahweh’s response was immediate and severe; Moses was later barred from entering the land (Deuteronomy 32:48–52; 34:1–5). The episode has long been read as much a failure of leadership as a failure of the people.

³ These ten rules appear in Symposium of Justice (2004) as the practical code Cliffhanger lives by. They were never presented as a replacement for the Decalogue but as a set of operational standards for a man determined not to be managed by the ordinary levers of social control.

⁴ The idea that focused intention can select among probable outcomes draws on the observer effect in quantum mechanics and on the older tradition of disciplined positive concentration found in certain esoteric and practical philosophies. In the novel, the effect is treated as a consequence of having first severed the psychological tethers that keep most people entangled with the expectations of the crowd.

⁵ Jacques Vallée and John Keel both documented the recurring pattern of non-human intelligences interacting with human societies through deception, sexual or sacrificial demand, and the exploitation of human psychological weaknesses. The novel’s “System” is an early fictional attempt to name that pattern without reducing it to either pure folklore or pure extraterrestrial visitation.

⁶ The resurrection accounts in the Gospels (especially Matthew 27:52–53) include the detail of the tombs opening and the bodies of the saints rising. Whatever else one makes of the event, it presents a public rupture of ordinary human limits. The contrast with Moses’ exclusion from the land remains one of the sharpest illustrations in Scripture of the difference between a leader who cannot hold the line and a figure who transcends the ordinary terms of human failure.

Bibliography

Hoffman, Rich. Symposium of Justice. 2004.

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

Keel, John A. Operation Trojan Horse. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.

Palka, E.W. The Others. [Publisher details as available].

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

Vallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988.

¹ The character Fletcher Finnegan was deliberately modeled on the dual nature of Don Diego de la Vega in the original Zorro stories and the 1957–1959 Disney television series. The decision to place him in a fast-food kitchen rather than a mansion was an attempt to invert the usual social camouflage: instead of pretending to be idle and foppish, Cliffhanger pretends to be ordinary and low-status so that the system itself overlooks him.

² Numbers 25:1–9 records the incident at Peor. The text is unambiguous that the Israelites engaged in sexual relations with Moabite women and joined in the worship of Baal of Peor in full view of Moses and the congregation. Yahweh’s response was immediate and severe; Moses was later barred from entering the land (Deuteronomy 32:48–52; 34:1–5). The episode has long been read as much a failure of leadership as of the people.

³ These ten rules appear in Symposium of Justice (2004) as the practical code Cliffhanger lives by. They were never presented as a replacement for the Decalogue but as a set of operational standards for a man determined not to be managed by the ordinary levers of social control.

⁴ The idea that focused intention can select among probable outcomes draws on the observer effect in quantum mechanics and on the older tradition of disciplined positive concentration found in certain esoteric and practical philosophies. In the novel, the effect is treated as a consequence of having first severed the psychological tethers that keep most people entangled with the expectations of the crowd.

⁵ Jacques Vallée and John Keel both documented the recurring pattern of non-human intelligences interacting with human societies through deception, sexual or sacrificial demand, and the exploitation of human psychological weaknesses. The novel’s “System” is an early fictional attempt to name that pattern without reducing it to either pure folklore or pure extraterrestrial visitation.

⁶ The resurrection accounts in the Gospels (especially Matthew 27:52–53) include the detail of the tombs opening and the bodies of the saints rising. Whatever else one makes of the event, it presents a public rupture of ordinary human limits. The contrast with Moses’ exclusion from the land remains one of the sharpest illustrations in Scripture of the difference between a leader who cannot hold the line and a figure who transcends the ordinary terms of human failure.

Bibliography

Hoffman, Rich. Symposium of Justice. 2004.

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

Keel, John A. Operation Trojan Horse. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.

Palka, E.W. The Others. [Publisher details as available].

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

Vallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988.

The Holy Bible. Numbers 25; Deuteronomy 32–34; Matthew 27.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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 Case of Jack Ma: China would never put up with a person like Elon Musk

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to push a civilization forward, and the more I dig into the mechanics of power, the clearer it becomes that the decisive factor is rarely the collective. It is the rare individual who refuses to accept the current ceiling. Rainer Zitelmann’s New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars is one of those books that lands at exactly the right moment because it forces the conversation back onto that hard truth. The foreword by Newt Gingrich sets the tone, but the real value is in how Zitelmann lays out the entrepreneurial path to the stars without the usual romantic fog. He understands that the technical pieces are largely in place; the missing ingredient has always been the institutional and cultural permission for individuals to own the risk and the reward. 

I have read a lot of books on strategy over the years. Robert Greene’s Power series is solid, particularly when you need to see the patterns that keep repeating across centuries. But the concepts only become useful when you translate them into the actual arena you are operating in—whether that is a small business, a national culture, or the emerging space economy. That is why I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business the way I did. I wanted to strip the abstraction away and show how leadership actually works when the consequences are real—the same principles scale. At every level, the decisive question is the same: does the system protect and amplify the person who is willing to impose a higher standard, or does it systematically cut that person down to the level of the committee?

That is the danger I keep returning to when I look at the post-colonial messaging that has saturated our universities and media over the last generation. The surface story is that colonialism was uniquely evil and must be endlessly atoned for. The stronger effect is to pathologize the very traits that built the most productive societies in history—individual agency, technological dominance, the willingness to claim and develop resources. A lot of money flows into that messaging, and not all of it is organic. Anyone who has watched the funding streams into American higher education over the last fifteen years knows that Chinese influence, both direct and through corporate intermediaries that depend on the Chinese market, has been substantial. The same pattern showed up in Hollywood a decade ago. The first weekend China box-office number became the make-or-break figure for big studio releases because a hundred-million-dollar Chinese gross was realistic for a major title. Studios adjusted content, softened political edges, and chased that market until the politics shifted and the arrangement began to sour. 

China does not need to kick the door in. The preferred method has always been to work the cultural and regulatory back doors until the target society starts policing its own exceptional people. That is the real war, and it is fought at the level of incentives and narrative long before any kinetic phase.

Zitelmann devotes time to the Chinese model and is careful not to caricature it. Roughly 60% of China’s economic activity is in the private sector. The catch, and it is the entire ballgame, is that private ownership does not equal private control. You may hold the equity, but the Party retains the right to manage the owners. The individuals who generate the wealth remain on a short leash. That arrangement can produce impressive aggregate numbers for a while. It cannot produce, and will not tolerate, an Elon Musk.

The clearest demonstration of the difference is the story of Jack Ma. In 2020, at the height of the COVID lockdowns in the West, Ma was still the richest man in China, with a fortune north of $50 billion. He had built Alibaba and Ant Group into engines that actually moved the Chinese economy. Then he made the mistake of publicly criticizing the financial regulators. Within days, the Ant Group IPO—the largest in history at the time—was suspended. Ma disappeared from public view for months. When he resurfaced, he was a chastened figure operating under much tighter constraints. The message was unambiguous: you can get rich, but you will not be allowed to become independently powerful. The state will let you own the assets only as long as you accept that the state ultimately owns you. 

That is the model. And it is the model that certain elements within the United States have been trying to import for years through regulatory pressure, board governance norms, and a cultural campaign that treats exceptional individuals as threats to the collective. Look at the pattern. Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985 by a board that preferred managerial predictability over the difficult personality who actually created the products. The company nearly died until they brought him back. Sam Altman was removed from OpenAI by the board in 2023 because he was insufficiently candid with them; employees and the market forced a reversal within days because everyone understood that the board lacked the vision Altman did. Travis Kalanick was forced out of Uber in 2017 after investors decided the founder’s edge had become a liability. Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos at various pressure points, Elon Musk himself more than once—every one of these people has faced the same institutional reflex. The committee always prefers the safer average over the dangerous high performer. 

I call the people who staff those boards Normies. They are not evil in the cartoon sense. They value belonging more than they value results. Their deepest instinct is to reduce variance, and high-agency individuals are the ultimate source of variance. When that instinct captures the governing institutions of a society, the society begins to select against the very people who generate its outsized economic output. Less than one percent of any population produces the breakthroughs that the other ninety-nine percent live off of. If you systematically attack that one percent—through regulation, through cultural stigma, through the soft coercion of “stakeholder” governance—you do not get a more equitable society. You get stagnation, then decline.

China understands this dynamic perfectly and has weaponized it. The goal is not to out-innovate the United States in a head-to-head contest of free individuals. The goal is to change the cultural and regulatory climate in the United States so that the next generation of American Elons Musks never has the room to operate. That is why the post-colonial curriculum, the DEI machinery, the reflexive hostility to “tech bros,” and the expanding regulatory state all point in the same direction. They are different instruments playing the same tune: exceptionalism is the problem, collective management is the solution.

SpaceX is the living counter-example, and that is why the recent IPO matters so much. Elon waited until the Starship factory was producing vehicles at a cadence that actually changes the economics of access to orbit. Only then did he open the capital floodgates. The risk of going public is real—once the ownership base expands, the pressure to behave as a normal public company intensifies. But the dual-class structure and the sheer scale of the opportunity give him a window. The capital will accelerate the cadence from monthly launches to weekly, and eventually to daily. That is how you open a multi-trillion-dollar space economy. It is also why the same forces that neutralized Jack Ma have been trying for years to neutralize Musk through every available regulatory and cultural lever. 

I supported Trump for the same reason Musk did. Both of them saw the pattern clearly. Another four years of the prior trajectory would have continued the slow strangulation of the independent centers of production. The Chinese model does not need to conquer America by force. It only needs America to adopt the habit of cutting its own high performers down to size. Once that habit is locked in, the GDP gap closes on its own.

The real debate almost nobody is willing to state plainly is this: China wants to destroy people like Elon Musk. America, at its best, wants to create the conditions that produce more of them and then get out of their way. Everything else—trade policy, university curricula, board governance norms, the cultural treatment of ambition—is downstream of that single civilizational choice. Zitelmann’s book is valuable because it keeps the focus where it belongs. The stars will not be reached by committees optimizing for consensus. They will be reached by the rare individuals who refuse to accept the current limits, and by the societies that still know how to protect them.

Footnotes

1.  Rainer Zitelmann, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars (Skyhorse Publishing, 2026), with foreword by Newt Gingrich.

2.  On the sixty-percent private-sector contribution figures and the limits of private control in China, see Zitelmann’s earlier analysis in “State Capitalism? No, The Private Sector Was And Is The Main Driver Of China’s Economic Growth,” Forbes, September 30, 2019, and the discussion of Chinese commercial space companies in his 2026 work.

3.  Jack Ma’s October 2020 speech criticizing Chinese financial regulators, the subsequent suspension of the Ant Group IPO, and his months-long disappearance from public view are documented in Bloomberg, “Jack Ma’s Empire in Crisis After China Halts Ant Group IPO,” December 22, 2020, and contemporaneous reporting from The Guardian and Wired.

4.  Steve Jobs’s 1985 ouster from Apple and 1997 return are standard corporate history; see, among many sources, the accounts in Walter Isaacson’s biography and contemporary board accounts.

5.  Sam Altman’s removal by the OpenAI board on November 17, 2023, and rapid reinstatement are detailed in OpenAI’s official announcement and subsequent reporting by The New York Times and CNBC.

6.  Travis Kalanick’s forced resignation as Uber CEO in June 2017 under pressure from major investors is covered in The New York Times, June 21, 2017.

7.  SpaceX’s June 12, 2026 IPO, the $135 share price, approximately $75 billion raised, and roughly $1.75 trillion valuation are confirmed in the company’s S-1 filings and contemporaneous Reuters and CNBC reporting.

8.  On Hollywood’s dependence on the Chinese box office in the 2010s and the resulting content adjustments, see the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report “Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China” (2015) and later analyses of the market’s decline after 2019.

Bibliography

Davenport, Christian. Various reporting on commercial space.

Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power and related works.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs.

Zitelmann, Rainer. New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars. Skyhorse Publishing, 2026.

Zitelmann, Rainer. “State Capitalism? No, The Private Sector Was And Is The Main Driver Of China’s Economic Growth.” Forbes, September 30, 2019.

U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China.” 2015.

Contemporary reporting from Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, The New York Times, and The Guardian on Jack Ma (2020), Sam Altman (2023), Travis Kalanick (2017), and the SpaceX IPO (2026).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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 Mutiny on the Bounty: A real life Atlas Shrugged story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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.

Ohio Needs more Republicans: Currently, the State is operating in the black–less Democrats means a better state

I saw the U.S. News & World Report rankings circulating on X this week, and they put Ohio at 42nd overall for 2026, which puts us in the bottom ten and marks a drop from 38th last year and 36th the year before.¹ The categories they measure are education, healthcare, economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, natural environment, and crime and corrections. Ohio’s weakest spots were natural environment at 43rd and economy at 38th, with healthcare at 36th, crime and corrections at 37th, infrastructure at 31st, and education at 29th. The brighter spots were opportunity at 18th and fiscal stability at 28th.² Utah sat at number one for the fourth straight year.

The timing is not lost on me. We are months out from a midterm cycle and a gubernatorial race, with Democrats trying to claw back ground in a state they have not controlled for a long time. Amy Acton is the Democratic nominee, and the narrative machine is looking for any data point that can be spun into evidence that Republican stewardship has failed. Ohio has had Republican governors and legislative majorities for the better part of two decades. When the ledgers are in the black, and the business climate is competitive, the opposition looks for rankings that penalize issues Republicans tend not to prioritize as much as progressive outlets do.

That is exactly what this ranking does. Education and healthcare carry the heaviest weights in the U.S. News methodology—roughly 15.8 percent and 15.5 percent, respectively—while natural environment and crime and corrections carry less weight.³ The metrics lean toward things like pre-K enrollment rates, higher-education access, college debt levels, and certain public-health indicators. States that invest more in expanding the existing system and in measuring inputs rather than outcomes tend to score higher on those axes. Ohio spends in the mid-to-high teens of thousands per pupil, right around or slightly below the national average depending on the data set, and we are not pretending that simply increasing the size of the bureaucracy automatically produces better results.⁴ The ranking rewards the model that has produced years of mediocre performance and cultural experimentation in many places, and it docked Ohio for not matching that model closely enough.

Meanwhile, two months earlier, CNBC released its America’s Top States for Business ranking and put Ohio at number one for the first time.⁵ That study uses a different set of 138 metrics weighted toward infrastructure, cost of doing business, workforce, economy, and access to capital—the things companies actually look at when they decide where to put plants, headquarters, and capital. Ohio ranked first in infrastructure and first in cost of doing business. We have no corporate income tax, a competitive commercial activity tax structure, shovel-ready sites, abundant power capacity, and more than 140 million people within a day’s drive. Governor DeWine correctly called that ranking proof that Ohio is a strong place for jobs and opportunity. The contrast is instructive. One ranking measures outcomes that matter to employers and taxpayers who have to meet payroll. The other measures a set of progressive priorities and then acts surprised when a state that has refused to adopt the full progressive playbook scores lower.

I prefer the CNBC approach. Rankings are never gospel, and methodology is everything. Mortimer Zuckerman owns U.S. News and has long reflected the worldview of coastal media institutions that view Republican governance as inherently suspect.⁶ When a ranking heavily weights healthcare access metrics and education-system expansion while Ohio is running consistent budget surpluses—nearly $1.8 billion above projections in fiscal year 2026—and is actively working on property-tax relief, the political incentive is obvious.⁷ Democrats cannot move the ball in Ohio the way they want, so the media environment supplies stories about how the state is “falling behind.” Ohio is operating in the black. We dug out of the deficits of earlier Democratic administrations and have maintained strong credit ratings and a healthy rainy-day fund. That is not failure. That is competence.

Amy Acton’s record is part of the same conversation. As Ohio’s health director in early 2020, she became the public face of some of the strictest early lockdowns in the country. Ohio was the first to close schools statewide and to impose broad business and gathering restrictions when case numbers were still low.⁸ The economic and educational damage from those months is still visible in workforce participation, learning loss, and small-business attrition. DeWine has said the ultimate responsibility was his, but Acton signed the orders and was the visible advocate. That history is fair game in a gubernatorial campaign. Voters who lived through the shutdowns remember who was on television telling them their livelihoods and their children’s schooling had to stop. Ramaswamy’s campaign has made that point repeatedly, and for good reason.

I met with Senator George Lang a few hours before looking at these rankings. We talk about a lot of things that are not pure politics—economy, history, the practical realities of running a state that has to stay competitive. Ohio’s fiscal position is one of the shared points of agreement among people who actually have to balance books. Democrats prefer that the state spend more aggressively on programs that score well in rankings like U.S. News. When the state declines to do that and still delivers opportunity rankings in the top 20 and a number-one business climate ranking from a major national outlet, the response is to declare the state a failure. That tells you more about the scorers than about Ohio.

I have watched this pattern for years. Rankings that punish limited-government outcomes and reward expansion of public systems are not neutral measuring sticks. They are arguments dressed up as data. Ohio under sustained Republican leadership has produced a competitive business environment, budget surpluses, and a refusal to treat every progressive education or healthcare priority as mandatory. CNBC noticed. U.S. News did not. That gap is not a problem for Ohio. It is a problem for the people who keep insisting the only acceptable path is the one that produces higher scores on their preferred scorecard.

If the goal is to elect candidates who will reverse the fiscal discipline and reopen the spending spigots that progressive media outlets reward, then yes, this ranking is useful propaganda. If the goal is a state that can attract capital, keep taxes competitive, and avoid the deficits that once plagued it, then the CNBC ranking is the more relevant document.

Subscribe if you want more of this. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is still out there if you have not read it. Have a good day.

Footnotes

1.  U.S. News & World Report, “Best States Rankings 2026,” released late July 2026; NBC4 Columbus coverage, August 10–11, 2026.

2.  Official U.S. News Ohio profile and category rankings for 2026.

3.  U.S. News Best States methodology page: Education 15.79%, Healthcare 15.51%, Economy 12.88%, Infrastructure 12.74%, Opportunity 12.20%, Fiscal Stability 12.19%, Natural Environment 9.69%, Crime & Corrections 9.01%. Weights derived from multi-year national surveys of what residents prioritize.

4.  Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Ohio Education by the Numbers 2026; U.S. Census and NCES per-pupil expenditure data placing Ohio near the national average (approximately $16,300–$17,300 depending on exact definition and year).

5.  CNBC, “America’s Top States for Business 2026,” July 9, 2026; Ohio ranked No. 1 overall, No. 1 infrastructure, No. 1 cost of doing business.

6.  Ownership history: Mortimer Zuckerman acquired U.S. News & World Report in 1984; company remains privately held under his control.

7.  Ohio Office of Budget and Management preliminary FY 2026 revenue report: General Revenue Fund tax receipts approximately $1.8 billion above estimates; multiple contemporaneous reports confirming surplus and ongoing property-tax relief measures.

8.  Contemporary 2020 reporting and later campaign coverage of Acton’s tenure as Ohio Department of Health director, including school and business closure orders signed in her name.

Bibliography / Further Reading

•  U.S. News & World Report Best States 2026 full rankings, methodology, and state profiles (usnews.com/news/best-states).

•  CNBC America’s Top States for Business 2026 complete rankings and category scores.

•  Ohio Office of Budget and Management FY 2026 revenue and budget documents.

•  Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Ohio Education by the Numbers (2026 edition).

•  Contemporary reporting on Amy Acton’s 2020 health orders and 2026 campaign (Associated Press, Columbus Dispatch, Ohio Capital Journal, and others).

•  Historical ownership and editorial background of U.S. News & World Report (Wikipedia and company histories).

•  Polling aggregates for the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial race (270toWin, Emerson, AARP, Fox, Siena, etc.).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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.

Beer at Göbekli Tepe and the Skull Cult of Doom: Fortune and glory drive all archaeology

I am sitting in a portable office far from home, looking out at a landscape that is not Butler County, and the books stacked around me keep circling the same problem. I have been shopping The Politics of Heaven to publishers and agents, and the recurring question is the simplest one: why another book? Why not keep writing the daily pieces and posting the videos? The answer is speed and depth simultaneously. The blog and the videos let me move fast. A book lets me put the full architecture on the table so the people who actually dig—the modern Calverts—have something coherent to work from.

Four threads run through the manuscript. The first is the continuation of what Brian Muraresku laid out in The Immortality Key: a long, hidden thread of psychedelic sacrament that runs from the Greek Mysteries through the early Christian centuries, a religion with no name that was too powerful, or too threatening, for the emerging institutional church to leave alone. The second is the Windover people in central Florida, one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas, where bodies were carefully placed in a pond between roughly eight and seven thousand years ago, wrapped in the oldest surviving textiles we have, oriented toward the setting sun, with brains still intact in dozens of skulls. The third is the dolmen landscapes—hundreds of them in the Jordan Valley and the broader Near East from the Early Bronze Age —and the parallel stone structures and copper-working culture around Lake Superior, which began as early as 9,500 years ago. The fourth is the chemical and osteological evidence from Göbekli Tepe itself, which has grown darker, not lighter, the more we learn.

Start with the troughs. At Göbekli Tepe, six large limestone vessels, some holding up to one hundred sixty liters, carry residues of calcium oxalate—the same marker that forms during the steeping, mashing, and fermenting of grain. The site sits in the heartland of wild cereals. There are thousands of grinding stones. There are massive bone piles from animals slaughtered for communal feasts. The 2012 analysis by Dietrich and colleagues was careful: the oxalate results were preliminary and not fully reproducible with the tests available at the time. Later integrated studies still treat the vessels as tools for processing large quantities of cereal liquids—porridges, gruels, and very possibly early beer. The point is not that every trough was a pure brewery. The point is that people were gathering in numbers large enough to require industrial-scale liquid preparation eleven to twelve thousand years ago, right at the edge of the Younger Dryas, in a place with almost no domestic architecture and every sign of ritual focus. https://gobekli-tepe.com/blog/beer-brewing-feasting-gobekli-tepe/

That is already enough to rewrite the old story that beer and agriculture arrived together in a neat package much later. But Göbekli Tepe is not a cheerful calendar temple where people held hands and watched the stars. Three human skulls recovered from the site show deliberate post-mortem modification never before documented in that form. Deep, straight grooves were cut with flint tools along the sagittal axis from forehead over the crown and, in one case, continuing onto the back of the skull and mandible. One skull has a drilled perforation near the top, consistent with suspension by cord. Traces of red ochre remain. The grooves appear to have been made after the soft tissue was removed. Roughly ten percent of all skull fragments from the site carry cut marks consistent with defleshing. Iconography on the pillars and sculptures—headless figures, a kneeling form holding a severed head—reinforces the emphasis. Selected skulls were cleaned, marked, and displayed. This is ancestor veneration, trophy display, or both, carried out in the same ceremonial enclosures where the large troughs once stood. The parties and the skulls belong to the same world. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/6/e1700564.full

I have walked the Upper Peninsula. I know the copper country around Lake Superior. The Old Copper Culture is real and impressive: people were hammering pure native copper into tools as early as ninety-five hundred years ago, earlier than many expected, with a peak later in the Archaic. That technology is indigenous and sophisticated. Claims that particular stones bear Baal marks or that certain megalithic features are exact architectural twins of Jordan Valley dolmens remain outside mainstream acceptance; many of the more dramatic inscribed relics unearthed in the nineteenth century have tool marks or other problems that render them unreliable. Yet the absence of accepted evidence is not proof that nothing crossed the ocean. Sea levels at the end of the last glacial period were substantially lower—on the order of two hundred feet or more around ten thousand years ago. Coastlines looked different. Island-hopping and coastal routes were easier. The Mediterranean is not an ocean, but skilled seafarers who already moved copper and ideas around the Near East and the Aegean would not have found the Atlantic an absolute barrier. We do not yet have the artifacts that would settle the question. Most of the coastal evidence from that era is underwater or has eroded. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.371.6536.1299

Windover sits in the middle of that same deep time. A peat pond in Florida served as a site for more than 1,000 years of continuous use. Bodies were wrapped in plant-fiber textiles, staked into the peat in fetal positions facing west, sometimes accompanied by tools and ornaments. Brains survived in ninety-one skulls because interment happened quickly. This is not a simple hunter-gatherer disposal ground. It is a sustained mortuary tradition that implies belief about the afterlife and the proper treatment of the dead. When I set that beside the Göbekli skull cult and the later Hopewell practices that also elevated heads and skulls in ritual contexts, the pattern is hard to ignore. Head veneration and altered-state ceremonies appear early and recur. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/windover-bog-bodies

Muraresku’s book did the useful work of dragging the psychedelic thread into public view and tying it to real archaeology and classical texts. The Eleusinian kykeon, the possibility of ergot or other additives in fermented drinks, the continuity into early Christian circles—these are not wild inventions. They are arguments built on existing scholarship that still make many academics uncomfortable. The same discomfort appears when the conversation turns to beer at Göbekli Tepe or to the possibility that copper from the Great Lakes moved farther than the conventional maps allow. The academic system is designed to protect itself from rapid disruption. Rules of evidence, peer review, funding cycles, and political overlays around indigenous remains all slow the rate at which new data can force a rewrite of the narrative. That is not always malice. It is institutional inertia. But inertia has a cost when the underlying record is already fragmentary.

Troy is the classic counter-example. Frank Calvert, a British consular official and amateur with skin in the game, identified Hisarlik, bought part of the mound, dug methodical trenches, and published his reasons for believing it was the real city. Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman with no formal archaeological training, obtained the permit, excavated on a dramatic scale, and made the discovery famous. Schliemann’s methods were rough; he destroyed strata he should have recorded. Yet without the outsider who was willing to dig where the consensus said there was nothing, the city might have remained a literary ghost for another generation. Academia needed the passion and the risk-taking. The same pattern repeats. The people who move the ball are often not waiting for the next grant cycle or the next committee vote.

That is why I am writing the book. I am not trying to replace careful excavation with speculation. I am trying to put the four threads—psychedelic continuity, Windover, the dolmen and copper landscapes, and the full ritual reality of Göbekli Tepe—into one readable architecture so that the next generation of independent investigators has a map. The skulls hanging in the enclosures, the large troughs that once held fermented grain liquids, the carefully staked bodies in a Florida pond, the copper tools hammered nine thousand years ago beside Lake Superior—these are not conspiracy theories. They are pieces of a deeper human story about how people once spoke with whatever intelligences they believed inhabited the world, how they marked their dead, and how they organized themselves long before the familiar kingdoms of the Near East or the classical Mediterranean. The academic pace is too slow for the volume of material still in the ground or underwater. We need more Calverts. We need people willing to dig, to ask the uncomfortable questions, and to publish what they find without waiting for permission.

The Politics of Heaven is written for those people. It carries the footnotes and the bibliography so the trail is clear. It does not pretend that every parallel is proven contact. It does insist that the parallels are real enough and the gaps in the record are large enough that we cannot keep pretending the official timeline is complete. Beer and skulls at the dawn of monumental architecture, complex burial rites in the Florida Archaic, early copper metallurgy in the Great Lakes, and a long sacramental tradition that institutional religion tried to suppress—these are not side issues. They are the foundation. Until we understand what people thought and practiced before Abraham, before the Pharaohs, before the classical gods were given their familiar names, every later assumption sits on soft ground.

I have no interest in burning down the university. I like the Greek ideal of higher learning and intellectual stamina. I refuse to wait another generation for the system to process evidence that is already in front of us. The book is one more tool for the people who will go out and dig the next Troy.

⭐ 1. Göbekli Tepe has a genuine “skull cult” — this is not fringe, and here is a list of the discoveries. Much darker than I had been thinking of the site.

Archaeologists have found:

  • human skull fragments
  • three skulls with deliberate carvings
  • deep incisions made after death
  • cut marks showing defleshing
  • holes drilled into skulls
  • possible suspension or display of skulls

This is not random violence.

It is ritual manipulation of human skulls.

The findings were published in Science Advances in 2017.

—

⭐ 2. The skulls were intentionally modified

The carvings include:

  • parallel deep grooves
  • V‑shaped incisions
  • cuts made with flint tools
  • drilled holes

These marks were made after death, but before the bone fully dried, meaning:

✔ The skulls were processed intentionally

✔ The cuts were ritual, not accidental

✔ The skulls were likely displayed or used ceremonially

This is consistent with ancestor veneration or shamanic ritual.

—

⭐ 3. The skulls were probably hung or mounted

One skull had a drilled hole, which strongly suggests:

  • suspension
  • display
  • ritual presentation
  • possibly use in ceremonies

This is similar to skull cults found in:

  • Jericho
  • Çayönü
  • Neolithic Levant
  • Natufian sites

Göbekli Tepe fits into a broader Near Eastern skull‑veneration tradition.

—

⭐ 4. Why skulls?

In early ritual cultures, skulls represent:

  • ancestral presence
  • ritual authority
  • shamanic power
  • death and rebirth
  • contact with the spirit world
  • boundary crossing

The skull is the seat of identity in many ancient symbolic systems.

Göbekli Tepe’s skull carvings are consistent with:

  • initiation rites
  • ancestor invocation
  • ritual feasting
  • altered‑state ceremonies
  • shamanic leadership

—

⭐ 5. The skulls appear in the same enclosures as the snakes

Enclosures with:

  • snakes
  • scorpions
  • composite beings
  • predatory animals
  • skull fragments

…suggest a symbolic system involving:

✔ death

✔ transformation

✔ altered consciousness

✔ initiation

✔ boundary crossing

Snakes + skulls = death‑rebirth symbolism, common in shamanic traditions worldwide.

—

⭐ 6. Were the skull rituals connected to intoxicants?

There is no direct evidence of psychedelic use.

But the ritual context strongly suggests:

  • communal feasting
  • beer consumption
  • trance states
  • shamanic performance
  • symbolic death‑rebirth experiences

If ergot‑infected barley was used (plausible), the beer could have produced:

  • mild visionary states
  • dreamlike consciousness
  • ritual trance

This would fit perfectly with skull‑based initiation symbolism.

—

⭐ 7. The deeper meaning

Göbekli Tepe’s skull culture shows:

✔ Ritual preceded agriculture

✔ Death symbolism preceded civilization

✔ Shamanic authority existed before cities

✔ Monumental architecture served ritual, not domestic life

✔ Early humans engaged in complex symbolic behavior long before farming

This is exactly the kind of deep‑time ritual consciousness your manuscript is built around.

—

⭐ Bottom Line

✔ Göbekli Tepe had a real skull cult.

✔ Skulls were carved, defleshed, and displayed.

✔ This was ritual, not violence.

✔ It fits into a broader Near Eastern skull‑veneration tradition.

✔ It aligns with shamanic death‑rebirth symbolism.

✔ It pairs meaningfully with the snake imagery.

✔ It supports the idea of altered‑state ritual, even without psychedelics.

⭐ How the Lost City of Troy Was Actually Discovered

For centuries, Troy lived in that strange space between myth and memory — a city everyone knew from Homer, but no one could actually find. The breakthrough came in stages. In 1822, Scottish journalist and geologist Charles Maclaren proposed that the mound at Hisarlık in northwestern Turkey was the true location of Homeric Troy, though most scholars dismissed the idea at the time. The next major step came from Frank Calvert, an English expatriate and amateur archaeologist who began exploratory digs at Hisarlık in the 1860s. Calvert owned part of the land and spent years collecting artifacts and studying the mound, eventually persuading the German businessman‑turned‑archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann to excavate there rather than at the more popular site at Pınarbaşı.

Schliemann arrived in Turkey in 1870, driven by a lifelong obsession with proving that Homer’s world was real. His excavations at Hisarlık between 1870 and 1890 uncovered the remains of multiple ancient cities stacked atop one another — nine Troys in total, each built over the ruins of the last. His methods were crude by modern standards: he carved a massive trench straight through the mound, destroying valuable layers in his rush to reach what he believed was the earliest, “Homeric” level. Still, his work exposed a fortified citadel, convincing scholars that Hisarlık was indeed the site of ancient Troy.

The most sensational moment came in 1873, when Schliemann uncovered a cache of gold, silver, and bronze artifacts near the citadel walls — the famous “Priam’s Treasure.” He claimed these belonged to the legendary King Priam, though modern dating shows the hoard actually came from Troy II, a city more than a thousand years older than the Troy of the Iliad. Despite the controversy, Schliemann’s discoveries electrified the world and permanently changed archaeology. Today, most scholars identify Troy VI or VII — not Schliemann’s Troy II — as the likely city of Homer’s Trojan War, but the credit for locating Troy belongs jointly to Calvert’s insight and Schliemann’s relentless drive.

Notes:

1.  Large limestone troughs at Göbekli Tepe (capacities up to ~160 L) and calcium oxalate residues consistent with cereal fermentation were reported by Dietrich et al. in Antiquity (2012). Subsequent use-wear and residue studies (Dietrich et al. 2020) support large-scale processing of cereal liquids, with beer remaining a plausible but not fully conclusive interpretation within a clear feasting context.

2.  Three intentionally modified human skulls from Göbekli Tepe—deep post-mortem sagittal grooves cut with stone tools, one drilled perforation, ochre traces—were published by Gresky, Haelm & Clare in Science Advances(2017). The modifications are unique in the regional record and indicate selected skulls were prepared for display or suspension. Broader defleshing cut marks appear on a significant percentage of cranial fragments.

3.  Windover Pond, Florida, is a peat cemetery used for more than a thousand years, centered on roughly 7000–6000 BCE. Exceptional preservation includes brain tissue in 91 individuals and plant-fiber textiles. Bodies were typically flexed, oriented west, and staked in place. The site is a National Historic Landmark and one of the most important Early Archaic mortuary complexes in North America.

4.  The Old Copper Culture of the Lake Superior region produced hammered native-copper tools beginning as early as ~9500 years ago, with a later Archaic peak. The metallurgy is firmly indigenous. Specific claims of Near Eastern inscriptions or exact architectural parallels with Jordan Valley dolmens have not been accepted by mainstream archaeology; many dramatic 19th-century “Michigan relics” are considered forgeries or misidentified.

5.  Frank Calvert identified and partially excavated Hisarlik before Heinrich Schliemann obtained the permit and conducted the large-scale digs that made Troy famous. The episode remains a standard illustration of the role of determined amateurs in major discoveries.

6.  Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (2020), synthesizes archaeological, classical, and chemical evidence for a continuous psychedelic-sacrament tradition. The core claims remain debated but rest on published scholarship rather than pure invention.

Bibliography

Dietrich, Oliver, et al. “The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities: New Evidence from Göbekli Tepe.” Antiquity 86 (2012).

Dietrich, Laura, et al. “Investigating the Function of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Stone Troughs from Göbekli Tepe: An Integrated Approach.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 34 (2020).

Gresky, Julia, Juliane Haelm, and Lee Clare. “Modified Human Crania from Göbekli Tepe Provide Evidence for a New Form of Neolithic Skull Cult.” Science Advances 3, no. 6 (2017).

Doran, Glen H., and related Windover excavation reports; Rachel Wentz, Life and Death at Windover (Florida Historical Society).

Pompeani, David P., et al., and subsequent Bayesian modeling papers on the chronology of Old Copper Culture (Radiocarbon, The Holocene).

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

Primary excavation reports and site summaries from the German Archaeological Institute Göbekli Tepe project; standard references on Jordan Valley dolmens and Early Bronze Age mortuary landscapes.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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 him 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 President Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know, and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography for further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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 Voynich Manuscript: A property of non human intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

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.

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

More about me

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

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

More about me

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

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.