Why Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Is My Favorite Movie: Adventure, Mythology, and Always Landing on Your Feet and the pursuit of Fortune and Glory (sharing a bit of my personal self for those who want to know)

I can hear the groans already. “Oh, he’s talking about movies again.” But this one is a bit different and I share some things here that people have been asking about. I have a lot of new people in my life, and they are asking. So, I’m addressing their questions in bulk. People ask me all the time what my favorite movie is. I get the question often enough that I finally decided to answer it properly here. My favorite is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A lot of people are surprised by that. Many consider it the weakest of the original trilogy. I disagree. For me, it is the one that stuck with me the most, and the reasons go well beyond the surface thrills.

I grew up on adventure. My grandfather was old enough to have lived through the era of the great serials. I saw Zorro with the whip long before I ever saw Indiana Jones crack one. Saturday-morning serial energy was already in my blood. When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, I thought it was wonderful—maybe the best pure adventure movie ever made. But Temple of Doom became personal.

Reading the Book Before the Movie in Hamilton, Ohio

When I was a kid, I used to go downtown to the shopping center in Hamilton, Ohio, with my mom and grandmother. On the bottom floor, there was a bookstore section. I went straight to the books every time. One day they got me the novelization of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I read it before I saw the movie. I read it the way I used to read the old adventure books—religiously, over and over. The character already lived in my head before the images did.

That early exposure mattered. George Lucas has always been steeped in mythology. The pursuit of the Grail, the knight who starts out chasing fortune and glory and ends up learning something harder—these patterns were in the water. I did not have the language for it at fourteen or fifteen, but I felt it.

The Night We Snuck Out in Morehead, Kentucky

The memory that sealed it for me happened the summer the movie was in theaters. I was fourteen or fifteen, part of a High Adventure Explorer Post. We were on a week-long trip heading toward whitewater rafting in West Virginia. We stopped to camp just outside Morehead, Kentucky. Hot summer night. The kind of heat that stays with you after dark.

We went into town for snacks, and I spotted the movie theater. Temple of Doom was playing. I grabbed a newspaper, checked the times, and saw the last show was at eleven. Back at camp, the plan was lights out early so we could get up for the next day’s adventure. Around eight or nine, everyone was settling in. Three of us waited, then slipped out.

We walked the two miles into town in the dark, hearts pounding, half-convinced we were going to get caught the whole way. We sat through the movie until about one in the morning. Then we walked the two miles back, still sweating, still listening for any sound that meant trouble. We snuck into our tents, drank some water from the canteen, ate a Slim Jim I had stashed, and tried to sleep. At seven, the camp woke up as if nothing had happened. Nobody said a word. We ate breakfast and headed out for the rafting and the rest of the week’s adventures. Later that summer I flew with my family to the Grand Canyon and all over California. The whole stretch felt like one long Indiana Jones sequence.

I have had many experiences since then. I am older now. I still cannot think of many moments that felt better than that night—walking back in the heat with the movie still running through my head, knowing we had gotten away with it, feeling completely alive. We had lived a small version of the thing we had just watched. Jump in. Trust yourself. Land on your feet.

Why Temple of Doom Hits Different

Raiders gives you the competent, almost invincible Indy. Temple of Doom puts him through the wringer. Poisoned, chased, plane crash, mountain landing, bugs, capture, the blood, the voodoo doll, the forced drinking, the near-sacrifice. They break him down further than in any of the other films. Then he comes out the other side, returns the stones, restores the village, and still walks away with the girl and the open road to the next adventure. “Fortune and glory” at the beginning. Something closer to responsibility and compassion by the end. He keeps the light touch the whole time. The movie never turns grim for its own sake. That balance is rare.

I raised my kids on it. I have raised grandkids on it. The soundtrack still gets played in the car. They know the cues. The film became a shared language in the family for the idea that you can take a beating and still come up swinging with a grin.

Mythology, Campbell, and Earned Freedom

Later I learned more about the deeper currents. Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey and the Grail legends shaped a generation of storytellers. George Lucas absorbed those patterns. The connection between the Indiana Jones films and older quest stories—Parzival, the wasteland, the knight who must learn before he can restore—is not forced. Temple of Doom functions as a modern version of the hero who starts selfish and ends up doing the right thing for people who cannot help themselves. The Last Crusade made the Grail explicit. Temple of Doom already had the emotional shape.

They also earned the right to make something this wild. After Raiders became a phenomenon, Lucas and Spielberg had the political capital in Hollywood to go darker, stranger, more unhinged—child slavery, Thuggee cult, heart-ripping, the whole fever-dream tone. A movie like that would have a much harder time getting made today. They used the freedom they had earned.

The Lesson That Stuck

For me, the core of it has always been simple. Indiana Jones trusts his ability to land on his feet no matter how bad the situation looks. Plane on fire. Poison. Traps. Brainwashing. Torture. He keeps moving. He keeps improvising. In the end, he is still the same man, only clearer. That attitude got into me early. Jump off the building if you have to. Figure out the landing on the way down. I have needed that more than once.

People who know me mostly through the political writing sometimes raise an eyebrow when I talk about movies. Movies are a shared language. Books are private. A film you both love gives you common ground in five minutes. When hundreds of new people start reading or listening and want to know a little more about the person behind the commentary, this is one of the cleaner ways to open the door. I do not normally spend this much time on personal stories. This one felt worth it.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is not the most polished film in the series. It is the one that feels most like actual life mixed with myth—messy, punishing, redemptive, and somehow still fun. I have carried its lessons through everything that came after that hot night in Morehead. Fortune and glory are great goals. Landing on your feet and doing the right thing when it counts is better.

Footnotes

1. The novelization of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was written by James Kahn and published by Ballantine Books in 1984, timed with the film’s release.

2. George Lucas has repeatedly acknowledged the influence of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and related mythological studies on his storytelling, particularly visible in the Star Wars films and carrying over into the adventure structures of the Indiana Jones series. The two later became acquainted; Campbell viewed the original Star Wars trilogy at Skywalker Ranch.

3. Scholarly and critical readings have linked the Indiana Jones trilogy to Arthurian and Grail-quest patterns (including Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival), with Temple of Doom often discussed as a wasteland/otherworld episode and The Last Crusade making the Grail motif explicit.

4. Howard Kazanjian served as executive producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and producer on Return of the Jedi, and held a key production role at Lucasfilm during the period.

5. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) was directed by Steven Spielberg from a story by George Lucas, screenplay by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. It is a prequel set in 1935.

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949 (and later editions).

Kahn, James. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (novelization). New York: Ballantine Books, 1984.

Lucas, George, and various collaborators. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures, 1984.

Aronstein, Susan. Critical essays on Arthurian narrative patterns in the Indiana Jones trilogy (various academic publications).

Additional reading: Bill Moyers’ interviews with Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth); production histories of the Indiana Jones films; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival for the classic Grail-knight arc that echoes in the franchise’s deeper structure.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal – Ayn Rand’s Moral Defense of the Only System Consistent with Human Nature, and Why It Still Matters in Ohio in 2026

I have been running a series on Ayn Rand because too many people who once understood her through the Tea Party years have let her slip out of memory, or worse, accepted the lazy smear that she was merely an atheist with nothing useful to say. That is a mistake. The radical left still hates her for the same reason they hate successful producers today. They understand, even if they will not admit it, that her arguments cut the moral legs out from under every scheme of redistribution, regulation, and class resentment.

I was reminded of this again after lunch with one of my favorite senators, George Lang. We talked about The Fountainhead, about the gold standard, and about how few people who claim to like Rand have actually read the full range of her nonfiction. That conversation pushed me to pick up the 1966 collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal again. It remains one of the clearest statements ever written of why pure capitalism is not just an economic preference but a moral necessity.

The book is not a dry economics text. Rand called it a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged. With contributions from Nathaniel Branden, a young Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen, it argues that the system we call capitalism today is a bastardized version of the real thing—an unknown ideal because it has never been allowed to exist in pure form. What we have instead is a mixed economy of freedom mixed with controls, and the controls always expand.

Capitalism as the Only Moral Social System

Rand’s central claim is simple and radical. Man is a rational being who must use his own mind to survive. Any social system that initiates force against that process is not merely inefficient; it is immoral. Capitalism, properly understood, is the only system that bans the initiation of physical force from human relationships and leaves individuals free to produce, trade, and keep what they create.

She defines it precisely: a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. The government’s sole legitimate function is to protect those rights by retaliating against those who initiate force. Everything else—regulation of production, redistribution of wealth, “industrial policy,” licensing of speech—is a violation.

This is why she rejected the conservative approach of her time. Conservatives often tried to defend capitalism on practical grounds or by appeal to tradition while accepting the moral premise of altruism—that the individual has a duty to live for others. Rand called that a fatal compromise. In “The Anatomy of Compromise,” she shows that when you try to mix a rational principle with an irrational one, the irrational always wins. You cannot have a little bit of socialism without eventually losing the foundation of freedom.

America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business

One of the most powerful essays in the collection is “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” Rand flips the usual narrative on its head. The productive genius is not the exploiter; he is the one being hamstrung by the looters and moochers who use the power of the state to seize what they did not create. Business people are treated as a scapegoat class in the same way other minorities have been treated under collectivist regimes. In Soviet Russia it was the bourgeoisie. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. In America it is the successful businessman.

I see this hatred every day in the attacks on Trump, on Vivek Ramaswamy, on any rich person who made money by creating value rather than extracting it through politics. The radical left’s outrage is not about fairness. It is pure Marxist class warfare dressed up in modern language. Rand saw it clearly because she lived it. Her father lost his pharmacy when the Bolsheviks nationalized private businesses. She never forgot.

Solving World Hunger: Production, Not Politics

People still talk about solving world hunger as if it were a distribution problem that requires more government. That is backward. Pigs, chickens, and rabbits reproduce rapidly. There is no physical shortage of the capacity to produce food. Shortages are created by politics—by governments that micromanage, confiscate, and regulate the very people who would otherwise raise the animals and grow the crops.

If you want to end hunger, get as close as possible to pure capitalism. Remove the artificial constraints. Let people own property, keep their profits, and trade freely. The poor in the United States, even under our imperfect capitalism, are rich compared to most of the world. A few American dollars can still be a fortune to someone living under the policies that Rand warned against. The guilt that drives redistribution often comes from people who helped create the barriers to opportunity and then want to ease their conscience by confiscating more from the productive.

Greenspan on Gold and the Hard Reality of Theory

One of the most quoted essays in the book is Alan Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom,” written years before he became Federal Reserve chairman. He argued that gold and economic freedom are inseparable. The gold standard protects property rights by limiting the government’s ability to inflate away wealth through deficit spending. Without it, the welfare state can confiscate savings silently.

Greenspan later operated in a system far from that ideal. Theory is cleaner than practice when you face political realities, activist judges, and entrenched interests. That does not make the original argument wrong. It shows how hard it is to implement principle once the mixed economy has taken hold. We are still living with the consequences of easy money, quantitative easing, and the revolving door between the Fed and large asset managers. The warnings in that 1966 essay hold up.

True Monopolies, Railroads, and the Industrial Revolution

The collection also dismantles the usual antitrust myths. Free-market monopolies can only be maintained by superior efficiency and better service. Coercive monopolies require government intervention—subsidies, franchises, or legal barriers to entry. The history of American railroads is a clear example. Most of the transcontinental lines were built with government land grants and ended in financial chaos. James J. Hill’s Great Northern was built without federal subsidies and remained the only one that did not go bankrupt.

Robert Hessen’s essay on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on women and children is equally important. Child labor was not created by capitalism; it was inherited from a world of grinding poverty. Factories gave children a way to earn a living and survive to adulthood. Rising wealth created by capitalism eventually made child labor unnecessary. The laws usually get the credit; the production gets the blame.

Airwaves, Speech, and the Nature of Government

Rand’s essay on the property status of the airwaves is still relevant. The early chaos in radio was not a failure of free enterprise but a failure of government to recognize and protect property rights in frequencies. Instead of allowing private ownership and trade, the government declared the airwaves public property and nationalized them through licensing. That opened the door to political control of speech—the same impulse we still see whenever independent voices become inconvenient.

Ohio’s Choice and the Fight Ahead

All of this is not abstract philosophy. It is the framework for understanding the hatred directed at successful people in our own state. Vivek Ramaswamy is a rich man who built companies. That alone is enough for the radical left and their media allies to paint him as untrustworthy. The same pattern appears in the attacks on Trump. They do not hate wealth. They hate the independence that wealth can buy when it is earned rather than granted.

I have watched this for decades. The people who want a governor who has never had to make a payroll or risk his own capital are the same people who will expand the very controls that create shortages and dependency. Michael Ryan understands these issues at the county level. Senators like George Lang still talk about gold-backed approaches and business-friendly policy. We need more of them.

Rand was not interested in being practical in the usual sense. She was interested in being right on principle. She knew that a culture that accepts altruism as its moral code will eventually sacrifice the producers. She also believed that the potential for human progress under pure capitalism is limitless. The nineteenth century, when America came closest to the ideal, proved it.

I have read her books many times, along with the work of those who analyzed her. I agree with her on the essentials of capitalism even while I am more of a man of faith than she was. The philosophy can be taken further. But the fight is now. The books are still on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. You can get them quickly. Read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Then look at the news with clearer eyes.

If you want to solve poverty and hunger, expand opportunity. More capitalism, not less. More people who understand how wealth is actually created. That is the only path that treats individuals as ends in themselves rather than means to someone else’s political vision.

Don’t give up the ship.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966; expanded 1967). Rand described the book as a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged.

2. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

3. Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

4. Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

5. Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” originally published in The Objectivist (1966) and reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

6. Robert Hessen, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

7. Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

8. On James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, see Burton W. Folsom Jr. and related free-market historical accounts; the railroad is frequently cited in Objectivist literature as the counter-example to subsidized lines.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. With additional articles by Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen. New York: New American Library, 1966 (hardcover); expanded Signet paperback, 1967.

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

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

Greenspan, Alan. “Gold and Economic Freedom.” The Objectivist, 1966.

Folsom, Burton W., Jr. Works on the “robber barons” myth and James J. Hill.

Additional recommended reading: Ayn Rand Lexicon entries on capitalism, business people, and the gold standard (aynrandlexicon.com); Ayn Rand Institute materials on laissez-faire.

Rich Hoffman

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The Columbus Dispatch’s Liberal Meltdown Over Bernie Moreno: Why Harsh Language Is the Only Justice Left Against Fauci’s COVID Catastrophe

I watched the clips. I read the outrage. And I am not embarrassed by Senator Bernie Moreno. I am proud of him.

When the Columbus Dispatch and its liberal opinion machinery clutched their pearls over Moreno dropping F-bombs on Dr. Anthony Fauci during that July 29, 2026 Senate hearing, they revealed exactly who they serve. They do not serve the Ohioans who lost jobs, businesses, childhoods, and years of life to policies Fauci championed. They serve the narrative that still treats Fauci as a secular saint who must never face real anger, even after he pleaded the Fifth more than one hundred times.

The Hearing That Triggered the Dispatch’s Righteous Indignation

Moreno did not whisper. He asked Fauci, “Who the f*** do you think you were for doing that?” He was talking about the mask mandates, the school closures, the arrests of ordinary people—including a mother at an Ohio middle school football game—and the broader lockdown culture that Fauci’s guidance helped justify. Moreno told the hearing that the arrest of that woman was the moment he decided to sell his businesses and run for the Senate. Six years later, he sat across from the man he holds most responsible and refused to play nice.

https://x.com/berniemoreno/status/2088972718649524720?s=46

He also asked whether Fauci felt he was “in deep s***” for showing up with a team of lawyers. Later, outside the hearing, when asked why Fauci took the Fifth so many times, Moreno answered without filter: because he’s a piece of s***.

The Columbus Dispatch opinion page, through Amelia Robinson, called this “deeper in the gutter than even Jim Jordan.” She compared it to childhood bullying, said it embarrassed Ohio, and wondered whether Senators Jon Husted, Sherrod Brown, Rob Portman, or Mike DeWine would ever sink so low. She defended Fauci’s record, framed the hearing as a “witch hunt,” and demanded apologies from the senators.

That is the liberal press in Ohio in miniature. They can lecture us about “decorum” while the economic and human wreckage of the policies they once cheered goes largely unexamined and unpunished.

The Real Bill: What COVID Lockdowns Cost Ohio and America

Are we supposed to be polite about this? Nationally, serious estimates of the total economic cost of COVID and the response range from roughly $14 trillion to $16 trillion and higher when you add lost output, premature deaths valued in economic terms, long-term health damage, mental health costs, and educational losses. One major analysis put the figure above $16 trillion—about 90 percent of a year’s U.S. GDP. Another put pure GDP losses on a path to $14 trillion over four years. A Heritage-linked commission later put the broader figure near $18 trillion.

In Ohio, the damage was concrete and brutal. The state’s unemployment rate exploded from the low single digits to a peak of 16.4 percent in April 2020—the highest on record in modern tracking. Ohio lost more than 800,000 jobs in that single month. Payroll employment collapsed by roughly 16 percent from February to April. Real GDP for the full year 2020 came in about 2.3 percent lower than 2019. The second-quarter contraction was far steeper—more than 10 percent on an annualized basis in some measures. Sectors like leisure and hospitality were gutted. Small businesses closed. Kids lost years of normal schooling and social development. Families were stressed to the breaking point.

I do not need a perfect spreadsheet to know the human cost in Butler County, across the Miami Valley, and throughout this state. People I know lost businesses. Kids I care about lost childhoods. The long-term damage to learning, mental health, and trust in institutions is still with us. And the same voices that now lecture Moreno about manners spent 2020 cheering the very policies that produced this wreckage.

Lab Origin, Gain-of-Function, and the Accountability Vacuum

We also know more than we did in 2020 about the likely origin. The virus almost certainly emerged from research-related activity in Wuhan. Gain-of-function work that made animal viruses more transmissible to humans was the context. Fauci and the public health establishment spent years downplaying or denying the lab-leak possibility while defending the research funding pathways. He has now repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and how the messaging was shaped.

In a healthier republic, that combination—policy catastrophe plus origin questions plus stonewalling—would produce serious consequences. In the actual America of 2026, the man most associated with the response gets to plead the Fifth a hundred times while the Columbus Dispatch frets about a senator’s language.

Why Moreno’s Anger Is Not a Bug—It Is the Point

I voted for disruptors. I did not vote for people who would sit politely while the architects of the damage smile and take the Fifth. Moreno is doing exactly what a large share of Ohio voters sent him to do: refuse the script. The liberal press and the Democratic establishment prefer senators who speak in carefully measured tones that never threaten the permanent administrative class. That is why they prefer the old style. That is why they are so offended by Moreno.

Jon Husted is a different kind of politician—more institutional, more measured. I would still rather see him hold the other Ohio Senate seat than watch Sherrod Brown claw his way back. But I am not looking for two of the same. Moreno’s willingness to use the language of ordinary frustrated Americans is a feature. When the system refuses to accept real accountability, harsh language at a hearing is one of the few remaining pressure points. Public executions are no longer on the table. Perjury prosecutions seem unlikely. So voters get a senator who will at least look the man in the eye and say the quiet part out loud.

The same media complex that now scolds Moreno spent years treating dissent on lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates as moral failure. They platformed the experts who got major things wrong and sidelined those who got them closer to right. Now they want the anger to stay within polite bounds. I reject that demand.

The Columbus Dispatch Is Not a Neutral Referee

Let’s drop the pretense. The Columbus Dispatch has long operated with a left-of-center editorial culture, even if its news pages sometimes maintain more balance. It broke a century-long pattern to endorse Hillary Clinton. Its opinion pages lean liberal on cultural and institutional questions. Amelia Robinson’s column is a piece of that tradition: defend the public-health establishment, pathologize Republican anger, and treat institutional “decorum” as the highest value even when the institutions failed spectacularly.

When the paper and its allies frame Moreno as the problem, they are protecting a status quo that inflicted real harm on Ohio and then largely escaped consequences. That is not neutrality. That is advocacy.

Looking Ahead in Ohio Politics

Amy Acton is the Democratic nominee for governor. She was the public face of Ohio’s early COVID response under DeWine. The same networks that once celebrated her now want to elevate her further while treating any residual anger at the policies of that era as vulgar. Meanwhile, Bernie Moreno sits in the Senate doing the opposite of playing patty-cake. I prefer the latter.

I want Jon Husted to hold his seat against Sherrod Brown’s comeback bid. Two strong Republicans in the Senate are better for Ohio than a return to the old Democratic hold. But I am under no illusion that measured institutionalists alone will deliver the accountability many of us still want. Moreno’s approach is the necessary corrective.

Final Word

I am not interested in lectures about Senate decorum from outlets that spent years amplifying the very policies that cost this country trillions and this state hundreds of thousands of jobs and years of normal life. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. The economic damage is measured in the tens of trillions nationally, and there is real suffering in every Ohio county. The origin questions remain serious. In that context, a senator who refuses to soft-pedal his contempt is representing the people who hired him.

I am proud of Bernie Moreno. Keep it up.

Footnotes

1. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, July 29, 2026; multiple contemporaneous reports of Moreno’s language and Fauci’s repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment.

2. Amelia Robinson, “Bernie Moreno mortified Ohio with profane attack on Fauci,” Columbus Dispatch, July 31, 2026.

3. Ohio Department of Job and Family Services / BLS data: Ohio unemployment rate peaked at approximately 16.4–16.8 percent in April 2020; job losses exceeded 800,000 in that month alone.

4. Ohio GDP: 2020 annual figure approximately 2.3 percent below 2019; sharp second-quarter contraction.

5. National cost estimates: Cutler & Summers (~$16 trillion total including health losses); USC/related GDP-loss projections approaching $14 trillion; Heritage Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (~$18 trillion broader estimate).

6. Lab-origin discussion and gain-of-function context: extensive public record from 2021–2026 congressional inquiries, intelligence assessments, and scientific literature.

7. Media bias assessments of the Columbus Dispatch: AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check ratings placing it Left-Center to Lean Left on editorial/opinion content; historical endorsement shift in 2016.

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

• Cutler, David M., and Lawrence H. Summers. “The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 Trillion Virus.” JAMA, 2020 (and subsequent updates/discussions).

• Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly employment and unemployment releases, 2020.

• Ohio Development Services Agency / BEA data on state GDP, 2019–2021.

• Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Report on economic and human costs (2024).

• Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Hearing record and transcripts, July 29, 2026.

• Robinson, Amelia. Opinion columns, Columbus Dispatch, July–August 2026.

• AllSides Media Bias ratings and Media Bias/Fact Check profiles of the Columbus Dispatch.

• Primary reporting from The Hill, Washington Examiner, Fox News, and local Ohio outlets on the Moreno-Fauci exchange.

• Additional reading on lab-origin hypotheses, gain-of-function research funding, and pandemic policy trade-offs available in the public congressional record and scientific literature from 2021 onward.

Rich Hoffman

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Objectivism and the American Experiment: Why Ayn Rand Still Matters in an Age of Collective Delusion, and Why Peter Thiel is a tremendous asset to any civlization

Ayn Rand remains one of the most polarizing figures in modern philosophy and literature for a reason, a very healthy reason. A refugee from the Soviet Union who watched her father’s business seized and her family’s life reduced to poverty under collectivist rule, she arrived in the United States in 1926 carrying a clear-eyed hatred of any system that subordinates the individual mind to the group. She built an entire philosophical system—Objectivism—around the primacy of objective reality, the sovereignty of reason, and the moral right of the individual to live for his own sake. In an era when official culture insists that feelings can rewrite biology, that the state may confiscate the product of one person’s effort for another’s benefit, and that the individual is merely a unit in larger identity categories, her work is no longer a historical curiosity. It is a live confrontation with the day’s dominant premises.

Her novels and nonfiction supply an on-ramp that mainstream institutions will not provide. Anthem stands as one of the cleanest anti-communist fables ever written—a short, devastating portrait of a society that has erased the word “I.” The Fountainhead dramatizes the creator who refuses to subordinate his vision to the demands of the collective. Atlas Shrugged takes the logic further: the men of the mind withdraw, and the parasites who lived off their productivity discover they cannot run the world without them. These books still circulate because they name a conflict that never went away—the individual versus the collective—and because the collectivist side is once again confident enough to drop the mask. For those wanting to understand the news cycles of our day, the work of Ayn Rand will help you get your mind around it.

Metaphysics: Reality Is Not Optional

Objectivism begins with a blunt metaphysical claim: existence exists. The universe is what it is independent of anyone’s wishes, prayers, social consensus, or emotional needs. Rand called this the primacy of existence. A rock is a rock whether or not someone finds the fact inconvenient. Facts are not created by consciousness; consciousness is the faculty that perceives them.

This sounds like common sense until one watches contemporary culture try to legislate it out of existence. A man cannot become a woman by declaration. A biological male does not acquire the capacity to menstruate or gestate simply because he “identifies” as female. The insistence that subjective feeling overrides observable reality is precisely the mentality Rand spent decades attacking. She was not writing about the more exotic claims of quantum measurement or observer effects in controlled laboratory settings; she was defending the four-dimensional world human beings actually inhabit and must act within. When that world is treated as infinitely malleable by will or decree, the result is not liberation. It is catastrophe dressed up as compassion.

Epistemology: Reason as Absolute

If reality is objective, then knowledge of it must be acquired by specific means. Rand held that the senses are the only source of information about the world and that reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates that material. There is no separate channel of “intuition,” mystical insight, or divine revelation that can override sensory evidence and logical processing. A concept that cannot be traced back to the evidence of the senses and the operation of logic is not merely mistaken; it is cognitively empty.

This is why she was merciless toward modern philosophy’s retreat from the world, particularly the influence of Immanuel Kant. If reason is limited or if “things-in-themselves” are forever inaccessible, then the door opens to every form of subjectivism and collectivist claim. Rand’s position is severe, and it leaves little room for the non-rational. One can grant that human sensory equipment is limited and that deeper layers of physical reality may require instruments and theories beyond the five senses; that does not license treating feelings or group consensus as substitutes for evidence. In the domain of ordinary human action—law, economics, medicine, education—her insistence on reason remains the only reliable check against those who would rewrite reality by force of declaration.

Ethics: The Virtue of Selfishness

The transition from facts to values is the most contentious part of her system. David Hume’s old problem—how one derives an “ought” from an “is”—is met head-on. Rand argued that the concept of value only arises for living organisms. A rock has no values because nothing can benefit or harm it as a rock. A living entity must act to maintain its life. For a human being, whose mode of survival is conceptual and productive rather than instinctual, the good is that which sustains and advances life according to the requirements of a rational being. The evil is that which destroys it.

From this, she derived rational egoism: one’s own life is the proper standard of value, and the moral purpose of each individual is to achieve their own happiness through productive work and voluntary trade. This is not a license for whim, predation, or short-term gratification. The man who drinks himself to death is not selfish; he is destroying the only value he possesses. Rational self-interest requires long-range thinking, integrity, and the refusal to live as a parasite or to treat others as sacrificial animals.

Altruism, in her usage, is not simple kindness or voluntary charity. It is the moral doctrine that the individual has a duty to sacrifice himself to others and that the needs of the collective create a claim on the productive. She rejected that doctrine root and branch. Charity is permissible and often admirable when it is voluntary and does not rest on the premise that the recipient has a moral mortgage on the giver. The moment it becomes a duty enforced by the state or by social pressure, it ceases to be benevolence and becomes predation with a halo.

Politics: Capitalism as the Only Moral System

If individuals have the right to their own lives and the products of their efforts, then the only political system consistent with that right bans the initiation of physical force. Government’s legitimate functions shrink to the police (to protect against domestic force), the military (to protect against foreign force), and the courts (to adjudicate disputes under objective law). Everything else—roads, schools, welfare, industrial policy—belongs in the realm of private voluntary action.

Capitalism, in this view, is not merely the most efficient system; it is the only moral one, because it is the only system that treats individuals as ends in themselves and organizes society based on trade rather than sacrifice. Any government seizure of wealth for redistribution is a violation of the producer’s right to the product of his mind. Rand did not arrive at this conclusion in a vacuum. She had watched the Bolsheviks liquidate private property and reduce her family to near-starvation. When she looked at the New Deal and the expanding administrative state in her adopted country, she saw a slower, softer version of the same principle: the subordination of the individual to the collective will.

The Novels as Philosophical Weapons

The Fountainhead gave the world Howard Roark, the architect who would rather see his building destroyed than allow it to be compromised by second-handers and taste-makers. He is the archetype of the man who lives by his own judgment. Atlas Shrugged escalated the drama: the inventors, industrialists, and thinkers who carry the world on their shoulders stop. The result is not utopia for the remaining population; it is collapse. The book’s influence on entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley founders, and a certain strain of American political thought is well documented. Peter Thiel has been open about its impact. Figures in the current administration’s orbit have circulated it for years. In Ohio, legislators have been known to hand out copies as a quiet statement of first principles. My good friend Senator George Lang is one of them. And the hatred of Peter Thiel largely, and specifically, comes from his support of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, which the political left despises.

Critics have always been harsh. Whittaker Chambers’s famous National Review attack treated Atlas Shrugged as if it issued from a totalitarian loudspeaker—an irony given Rand’s lifelong hatred of totalitarianism. Academic philosophers such as Robert Nozick argued that even if one accepts life as the standard of value, the leap to absolute property rights and the rejection of any enforceable duty of aid is not logically compelled. The Objectivist movement itself developed a reputation for rigidity and a personality cult, culminating in the public break with Nathaniel Branden. These criticisms are not trivial. A philosophy that demands near-perfect consistency will always struggle with the messy, interdependent realities of actual human lives, including disability, bad luck, and the genuine goods that arise from voluntary community.

Yet the core insight survives the objections. The productive genius of a relative handful of individuals—Edison, the Wrights, the modern equivalents like Elon Musk building reusable rockets and energy systems—creates the surplus that lifts entire societies. When those individuals are treated as cash cows for the collective or as moral suspects simply because they succeed, the long-term result is not justice. It is stagnation. The question is not whether Elon Musk or any particular innovator is personally likable. The question is whether a society that systematically handicaps its highest producers in the name of equity ends up better or worse for the average person. The historical record of systems that tried the latter experiment is not ambiguous.

America at the Crossroads of Two Traditions

Walk out of certain offices in the Ohio Statehouse and the architecture itself poses the question. Greek columns, vaulted ceilings, classical proportions—the visual language of a republican experiment that began on the other side of the Mediterranean. At the same time, the conversations that spontaneously arise among the people who work there often turn to Scripture, to the Book of Judges, to the warning that a people who demand a king “like all the nations” will discover what concentrated power does to both ruler and ruled. The American founding drew from both streams: classical political forms and a biblical anthropology that understood the corruption of the human heart and the danger of centralized authority.

Rand, an atheist, had little patience for the religious side of that inheritance. Yet her central political claim—that the smallest minority is the individual, and that any ideology which subordinates the individual to the group is already on the road to tyranny—converges with the older biblical suspicion of collective power. The scapegoat mechanism, the demand that someone be sacrificed for the sins or the needs of the many, is ancient. Objectivism names it without theological language and refuses to grant it moral legitimacy.

The same refusal applies to the newer forms of collectivism on offer: the racial and sexual identity politics that treat individuals as avatars of groups, the economic redistribution that treats productive achievement as a social resource to be reallocated, and the cultural insistence that biological reality itself is a social construct. These are not progressive refinements. They are regressions to the oldest political temptation—the belief that the group can rewrite the terms of its members’ existence.

The Continuing Argument

Objectivism is not the last word in philosophy. No system is. Human thought did not end with Aristotle, or with Rand, or with any other figure. Quantum theory, the limits of sensory apparatus, and the persistent human hunger for meaning beyond the strictly material remain open questions. One can accept the primacy of existence and the necessity of reason for navigating the world of action, while still acknowledging that the full picture of reality may lie beyond the current toolkit. The political core, however, does not require omniscience. It requires only the recognition that individuals are not raw material for someone else’s vision of the good, and that a society which protects the right of the mind to function is the only kind that has ever generated sustained prosperity and personal freedom.

That is why the books keep circulating and why the arguments keep returning. In a moment when collectivist premises dominate major institutions and when the productive minority is once again treated as a problem to be managed, Rand’s insistence on the individual as the irreducible unit of moral and political life is not nostalgia. It is a necessary corrective. The American experiment has always been an argument about how much room to give the person who refuses to live as a cog. Objectivism is one of the clearest modern statements of the side that says the person comes first. The debate is not academic. It is the daily substance of politics, culture, and the question of what kind of country this remains.

Further reading is straightforward. Start with the novels for the emotional and dramatic force, then move to the nonfiction for the systematic case. The rest is the ongoing work of testing those ideas against the evidence of history and the requirements of a free society.

Footnotes

1. For biographical context and the formative impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on Rand’s thought, see her own accounts in We the Living (semi-autobiographical) and the biographical material in Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Dutton, 1995).

2. Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982); also “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964).

3. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded 2nd ed., ed. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: NAL Books, 1990).

4. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness; the 1961 University of Wisconsin lecture is referenced in secondary literature and in Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991).

5. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” and related essays in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966).

6. On the novel’s reception and influence, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Whittaker Chambers’s review appeared in National Review, December 28, 1957. Robert Nozick’s critique is “On the Randian Argument,” The Personalist 52 (1971).

Bibliography

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

Chambers, Whittaker. “Big Sister Is Watching You.” National Review, December 28, 1957.

Nozick, Robert. “On the Randian Argument.” The Personalist 52 (1971): 282–304.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 1991.

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1953 (orig. 1938).

———. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

———. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966.

———. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

———. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd ed. Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. New York: NAL Books, 1990.

———. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982.

———. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

———. We the Living. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

Rich Hoffman

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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

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.

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

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.

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

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

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

I have been carrying these questions in the background of my thinking for decades. The frequency with which they demand attention has risen sharply since the recent UAP disclosures. When the best technology the Air Force possesses cannot keep pace with something that behaves more like a ghost than a craft, the old categories collapse. It is not enough to say a flying saucer is real. It is not enough to say a religious claim is real. I want to know what causes people to believe what they believe, what political order forms around those beliefs, and what self-interest drives the entire system. Once you understand the political motivation behind belief, you understand the kind of society people are actually building—and whether you should support it.

That is why the conversation around Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key landed with such force. The book is not merely another academic argument about ancient wine. It is a direct challenge to the sanitized version of early Christianity most of us inherited. And it raises a harder question: if the original Eucharist carried a pharmacological charge, what does that tell us about the entities people were trying to contact, and why did Christianity’s later institutional form deliberately move away from that charge?

The Immortality Key and the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis

Muraresku’s central claim is straightforward and explosive. The original Christian communion was not a symbolic sip of ordinary wine. It was a potent psychedelic sacrament inherited from the Greek mysteries, specifically the cult of Dionysus and the rites at Eleusis. For nearly two thousand years, the greatest minds of antiquity—Cicero among them—traveled to the sanctuary at Eleusis to drink the kykeon. They claimed the experience removed the fear of death. The recipe was a state secret punishable by death.

The chemistry focuses on ergot, the fungus that grows on barley and rye—the same fungus from which Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938. The theory is not new. It was proposed in 1978 by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck in The Road to Eleusis. Hofmann and Ruck’s academic careers suffered for it. The idea that the foundations of Western philosophy and early Christianity rested on controlled visionary pharmacology was too much for the scholarly stomach of the time. And when you think about that very obvious claim, and the way those names were ostracized, you can see the root cause of a much larger problem.

Muraresku spends years in the Vatican archives and archaeological sites looking for the transition. He notes that ancient wine was rarely plain fermented grape juice. It was routinely an infusion of herbs, roots, and potentially fungi—a pharmakon. The Gospel of John, the most Greek of the Gospels, uses language for the wine that suggests something more complex than table drink. Jesus’ miracle at Cana occurs in a cultural zone saturated with Dionysian imagery. In early Jesus centuries, Dionysus and Jesus were sometimes treated as interchangeable figures of death, rebirth, and ecstatic immortality.

The book’s most compelling social argument concerns women. For millennia, the preparation of these visionary beverages was women’s work. As Christianity became institutionalized and more patriarchal, particularly from the fourth century onward, those women and their spiked drinks became a threat to the emerging clerical monopoly on the divine. Muraresku reads the Inquisition’s language of pharmaka and sorcery not merely as superstition but as the systematic eradication of a competing technology of direct encounter with the sacred. The shift, in his framing, is from pharmacological Christianity to placebo Christianity.

I want Christianity to succeed. I do not read Muraresku as an enemy of the faith. He identifies as a Catholic who is trying to recover rather than destroy the Eucharist. Yet the implications cut in two directions at once. If the earliest layers of the tradition carried a visionary intensity later deliberately muted, then the institutional Church both preserved and constrained something powerful. And if that intensity was chemically mediated, we must ask what, exactly, the initiates were encountering.

Beer, Skulls, and the Long Continuity of Death Cults

The problem is larger than Greece. When I go back further—ten thousand years further—the pattern sharpens.

At Göbekli Tepe (the site that Muraresku and others still sometimes refer to by earlier or variant names in popular discussion), the evidence is no longer subtle. T-shaped pillars, snakes carved everywhere, a clear skull cult, and chemical traces consistent with beer brewing. People were not merely gathering to eat. They were preparing fermented beverages, removing soft tissue from human heads, drilling holes, and displaying the skulls in ritual contexts under carefully oriented architecture. The same complex appears, in different local forms, along the Jordan Valley in the dolmen fields that stretch from the Golan south toward the Dead Sea, and again in the megalithic “Wheel of Giants” (Rujm el-Hiri / Gilgal Refa’im) east of the Sea of Galilee—roughly 160 meters across, built of more than 40,000 tons of basalt, aligned with solar and stellar markers.

I have scoured the archaeological literature for a serious treatment of these Jordan Valley dolmens from roughly 10,000 to 3,000 BC. The silence is telling, just like any discussion dealing with the use of wine in Greek culture outside of mainstream opinion. Mainstream discussion prefers the safer Bronze Age and later. Yet the structures are there. The alignments are there. The continuity of ritual astronomy with later Hopewell earthworks in the Ohio Valley is difficult to ignore once you stop treating the Atlantic as an absolute barrier.

Pure native copper from the Lake Superior region was extracted for thousands of years. Isotopic and purity studies continue to raise questions about whether some of that copper moved farther than orthodoxy allows. The Windover bog people of central Florida preserve soft tissue and brain matter from the same deep time window. The Newberry Tablet and other Michigan finds remain controversial, but the pattern of megalithic and copper-working activity across the Great Lakes and the Upper Peninsula does not vanish because it is inconvenient.

Everywhere you look in this pre-biblical window, you find cultures oriented toward death, severed heads, fermented or psychoactive drink, and communication with something beyond the ordinary dead—the politics of that communication matter. Human beings do not casually cut off a neighbor’s head, scrape the flesh, hang the skull, and pour blood on an altar for sport. They do it because they believe the act buys favor, knowledge, rain, fertility, or protection from harm.

The Mouse and the Snake

I use a simple allegory. Watch a pet snake being fed. Drop a mouse into the glass enclosure. For the first few minutes, the mouse runs, freezes, and tests every corner. Eventually it realizes there is no exit. Then the behavior changes. It becomes still. It positions itself near the water dish or the food bowl as if stillness and proximity to ordinary life might persuade the snake to look elsewhere. The snake, of course, is not persuaded. It simply waits and then eats.

Humanity has lived for a very long time with the anxiety of that mouse. Non-human intelligences—call them Watchers, old gods, ultraterrestrials, or whatever the current UAP language prefers—appear in the record as entities that demand appeasement. Psychedelics, ritual sex, blood, and skull display are technologies of that appeasement. The mouse tries to make itself useful or invisible so the snake will not strike.

Christianity, in its mature form, broke that cycle. It did not deny the existence of the hostile powers. It declared them defeated in principle and offered a different posture: moral agency, individual responsibility, and direct relationship with a God who does not require the constant feeding of death. The result, imperfect as every human institution is, was the rise of a civilization that valued the living more than the skulls of the dead. Strip the Christian premise from a mass of people, and the older pattern reasserts itself with remarkable speed. I have watched it at a Jason Aldean concert from the VIP area—twenty thousand people, many drunk since morning, public sexual display, the old fertility and abandon patterns returning the moment the moral frame loosens. The same retreat appears wherever the teachings of Jesus are actively removed from a culture.

That is why I am not enthusiastic about the modern psychedelic renaissance framing itself as the recovery of a lost “religion with no name.” The experiences reported at Johns Hopkins and NYU—ego death, loss of fear of mortality—are real. The question is whether the entities contacted in those states are friends of the human project. My reading of the long archaeological record is that they are not. They have been competing for control of human attention and behavior for a very long time. Christianity was never their preferred outcome.

The Four Pillars That Still Need Digging

The gap between roughly 10,000 BC and the world of Abraham remains the least examined and most consequential stretch of the human story. Four clusters of evidence deserve far more serious, well-funded attention than they currently receive. I am committing myself to putting money and attention to these ideas:

1. The skull cult, beer residues, and snake iconography at Göbekli Tepe and related Anatolian sites.

2. The dolmen fields and the Wheel of Giants along the Jordan Valley and Golan.

3. The pure copper extraction systems of the Lake Superior region and their possible long-distance movement.

4. The Windover and related Archaic Florida populations with their extraordinary preservation of soft tissue and ritual practice.

These are not isolated curiosities. They form the deep background against which both the biblical narrative and the later Greek mysteries emerge. More excavation, more isotopic analysis, more open discussion of possible transoceanic contact, and less reflexive dismissal of “fringe” data would change the conversation. I am writing The Politics of Heaven in part to force that conversation into the open. The secular publishing world prefers books that treat Christianity as the problem rather than as a partial solution to an older and darker problem. That preference itself looks, from where I sit, like another form of the mouse’s stillness—keeping the larger questions safely inside the glass.

Conclusion: Do Not Be the Mouse

The original Eucharist may well have carried a pharmacological dimension inherited from older Mediterranean practice. The women who prepared the drinks may have been the last keepers of a technology the institutional Church found threatening. None of that requires us to return to the skull cults and the blood altars. The miracle of Christianity was not that it invented the sacred. It redirected the human drive for transcendence away from appeasement of predatory powers and toward a moral and spiritual posture that could build a durable civilization.

I want more money poured into the archaeology of the deep past—not the archaeology that already knows what it is allowed to find, but the kind willing to follow the copper, the alignments, the beer residues, and the severed heads wherever they lead. I want the conversation about non-human intelligence to stop treating the entities as either cartoon aliens or harmless spirit guides. They have a politics. Humanity needs a politics equal to theirs.

The Politics of Heaven is my effort to map that battlefield. The four pillars above are the places where the next decade of serious digging should concentrate. The rest is commentary, color, and the long memory of a man who has watched the same patterns repeat across continents and millennia.

Do not be the mouse. Learn the snake’s methods. The enemy is the one who puts the mouse in the cage with the snake. That is the answer to our many questions. And in the UAP disclosures, we are getting a hint of that world.

Footnotes

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

2. R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978; later editions).

3. On the ergot detoxification experiments and the University of Athens work referenced by Muraresku, see the discussion and citations in The Immortality Key, chapters on Eleusis and the chemistry of the kykeon.

4. Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press, 2003) and subsequent biomolecular archaeology papers on mixed fermented beverages.

5. For Göbekli Tepe skull cult and brewing evidence: Klaus Schmidt and subsequent publications of the German Archaeological Institute; recent chemical analyses of residues in stone vessels.

6. Rujm el-Hiri (Gilgal Refa’im / Wheel of Giants): surveys and interpretations in Israeli archaeology literature; see also popular and specialist treatments of its astronomical alignments.

7. Old Copper Culture / Lake Superior copper: standard Midwestern archaeology; purity and sourcing debates continue in archaeometallurgy literature.

8. Windover site, Florida: Glen H. Doran et al., publications on the Archaic wet-site cemetery and preserved soft tissue.

9. Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery, 1969) and later works on the continuity of non-human encounter narratives.

10. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking, 2009).

11. Biblical Archaeology Review, ongoing coverage of Jordan Valley and related megalithic sites; earlier issues treating dolmens remain limited relative to the density of the remains.

12. On Hopewell copper and ceremonial complexes: standard Ohio Valley archaeology; Newark Earthworks and related lunar alignments.

13. Dolores Cannon’s reported communications with Essene figures appear in her Conversations with Nostradamus series and related remote-viewing / past-life material; treated here as phenomenological data rather than conventional historiography.

14. Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and later works on Göbekli Tepe and catastrophic prehistory; useful for raising questions even where orthodoxy disagrees with conclusions.

Selected Bibliography

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

• Wasson, R. Gordon, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck. The Road to Eleusis. 1978 and later editions.

• MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2009.

• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969.

• McGovern, Patrick E. Ancient Wine. Princeton University Press, 2003.

• Schmidt, Klaus. Publications on Göbekli Tepe (German Archaeological Institute).

• Doran, Glen H., et al. Windover site monographs and papers.

• Hancock, Graham. Fingerprints of the Gods and subsequent titles.

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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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.

A new U.S. News & World Report ranking places Ohio among the lowest-ranked in multiple categories, including education and economy, for 2026. https://t.co/wYOJixiOTu pic.twitter.com/7RV1E6o5rE
— NBC4 Columbus (@nbc4i) August 11, 2026

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

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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.

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I am proud of Bernie Moreno. Keep it up.

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Cliffhanger’s Ten Rules

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