Why Michael Ryan Got There First, and Why America Still Tries to Jail the Next Tucker: Why Volynt in Butler County is the Next Great Thing

Full disclosure, this is a long one and it might be easier to watch the video. I have a lot to explain here, and this topic is much bigger than most surface-level discussions on politics and business and what role the two play in a happy society. I talk about abortion in a different way here, but it’s a mentality that is at the heart of Marxism, and many years of our civilization straining under a mixed economy that many of us never even thought about. But it’s the heart of what has been driving me for many years to this point. I am affiliated with Volynt Aero in Oxford. I am a consultant and, at this point, an advisor. I am proud of it. I do not normally attach my name to things. For years, I’ve handled much of the work in the background. People who have known me a long time know the method. You trade whatever you have—sometimes it was literally baseball cards when I was young—to get close enough to a problem to be useful. I come out of the school of hard knocks. I have seen what happens to people and to companies when the process is dirty, when the lawyers arrive late, when the regulators decide the idea should die in the permit office. I have helped a lot of people mine their way through improper methods without becoming the method.

That is the only reason this essay exists; there is a lot of interconnected tissue to consider in something as massive as this, and it takes a bit to discuss in context. Not because I needed another logo on a card. Because I watched a good idea be born in Oxford, in Butler County, Ohio, and I recognized the old American pattern: the builders are ready, the market is arriving whether the townships like the noise or not, and the political class is still deciding whether it wants to midwife the thing or abort it.

Why I Attach a Name at All

I have been a huge supporter of FirstEnergy. I was a supporter when Larry Householder was Speaker. When we talk about alliances between government and big business, I think FirstEnergy got a raw deal in the public square. I do not think they did a good job defending themselves. Real life in the background of a utility is lived inside regulatory compliance, rate cases, and a grid that still has to keep the lights on while somebody in Washington changes the religion of energy policy every four years.[1] What I saw was a company running a model that the Obama-era compliance environment made it almost impossible to operate profitably, then being treated as a morality play when it sought political relief.

I see a lot of Democrats trying to take ground in Ohio after years of Republican control of the House, the Senate, and the governor’s office. They cannot get a message through to people because the message, once you strip the focus-grouped nouns off it, is still a mixed-economy sermon with a communist destination. That is not what people in this county vote for. It is not what they vote for in 2026 either. But the fight does not end because you won a map. You are always overcoming Karl Marx. You can see it in the way a left-wing media personality in Columbus will work a hit job on a Republican until the man will not look you in the face in a hallway. I have watched politicians go quiet because they do not want to be called a communist, or worse. After all, they do not want to be trapped at a urinal in the Statehouse by somebody with a microphone asking why they voted for an “evil” bank or an “evil” energy company that was not kneeling hard enough toward the religion of wind and solar power.

There are a lot of safer ways to make money. There are not many ways to do it that still serve the two parts of the American condition I actually care about: job creation, and political representation honest enough to get out of the job creator’s way. I lend my name to enterprising people who take risks because I want to see them make jobs. I lend my name to political figures for the same reason. The Marxist type always attacks them, and it is a lonely business to be sabotaged out of a restroom at the Statehouse by a hostile media personality trying to put you in a horrible state of mind. Why did you vote for that? Why did you say this? Why do you support FirstEnergy? Why aren’t they for wind? All questions from a Marxist perspective, intended to root everything in a leftist point of view as a baseline.

I involve myself because I want to protect capitalism from the next adjustment to the breaker panel, the one that shows up on your electric bill whether or not you ever voted for the sermon that caused it.

John Galt Types, and the Movie That Taught Me the Pattern

At the beginning of this, I put the Volynt affiliation together because I like the guys. I like entrepreneurs. I like John Galt types. I like people who work. When I meet them, I want to help them. I want to help them avoid having to dynamite their own buildings at the end of the story, the way the book taught a generation of us to fear.

My favorite movie on this subject is still Tucker: The Man and His Dream, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, from the same mind that gave the country The Godfather and then turned around and made a hymn to the American crackpot who wanted to build a better car outside Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors.[2] Tucker put the engine in the back. He put seat belts in the car. Fuel injection in 1947. The Big Three knew they could not retool fast enough to compete. The pipeline was already poured. So the story goes that they used Senator Ferguson to try to throw Tucker in jail.[3] That is how the red decade moved into the American system: not always with a red flag in the street, but with a committee, a compliance file, and a prosecutor.

There is a speech Tucker gives at the end of that movie that I have never gotten over. It sounds like Howard Roark’s speech in The Fountainhead, stretched across a courtroom instead of granite.[4] He is wondering where his country went. Marx came in. Regulatory compliance came in. The power of government came in. Ferguson wanted donations from the Big Three, so he tried to eliminate the competition that would have made them better. Tucker assumed the American dream was still built around the man who builds something better. The country had changed on him in the thirties and forties, and he just then figured that out.

We had just won a war by manufacturing the Nazis and the Japanese into the ground. Then, mysteriously, we started sending consultants the other direction to learn how to manufacture from our former enemies; we let our enemies teach us how to mass-produce when it was that very trait which caused us to win World War II. People like Tucker got crushed in the interval.[5] He stayed out of jail. He built fifty cars. Some were wrecked in the process. The ones that remain are still Tucker cars, and you can look at them. The ideas did not die. The company did; it was murdered by a tyrannical government.[6]

I have always hated, in the background of my adult life, the long trend that followed: the creation of a permanent international management layer, the suppression of American ingenuity as if ingenuity were a pollutant, the habit of treating the founder as a defendant. We did something right in the teens, the twenties, even into the thirties. Then the red decade came over from Europe under the banner of free speech, and pretty soon you had a government trying to jail a man for building a safer car.

If it had been me in Householder’s chair, I would not have done the pinhead stuff a two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer could later dissect. I tend to have sympathy for the people who were trying to keep power flowing while the rules were written to euthanize the old plant in favor of a liberal sermon. I do not want to see the power of government illuminate ingenuity only long enough to book it.

What These Drones Actually Do

So why Volynt Aero? Yes, they have an unmanned hybrid VTOL—the Vyper—that can fly, carry a serious payload, and put a box where a truck cannot go. You have seen the animation. I was able to get close enough to the real work that the animation looks like a polite version of what I watched. I went to the facility in Oxford. I talked to a great bunch of guys. The intellectual property is not a napkin. It is already there. Public specs on the aircraft talk about carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to 150 nautical miles, then landing and offering plug-in power—110, 240, or 480 volts—off standard jet fuel, without waiting for a charging farm to be built in the mud.

The crowded market is last-mile photographs and Amazon-adjacent experiments. Everybody has a drone story now. Walmart has a drone story. Amazon has a drone story. Texas has companies. California has companies.[7] The middle-mile market alone is described as a ten-billion-dollar band within a much larger stack. I have been saying to anybody who will listen that the five-year systems market—vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, municipal integration—could run toward a trillion dollars if the country actually lets it hatch. Those are inside numbers, not a press release.

What makes Volynt different is not that they can hover. It is the combination. Cargo logistics and highly mobile power generation on the same airframe. They can come in, drop a payload, and leave. And they can do battlefield resource management, which in civilian clothes means disaster-zone logistics. Power recovery. Fly into a hurricane zone or an Ohio River floodplain, get past the trees that are lying across the only road the trucks can use, land, and put 110, 240, or 480 volts where a ventilator is still a life.[8]

The Hurricane, the Chainsaws, and the Road You Cannot See

Years ago, I was between jobs. I tend to get involved in crusades because they teach you things you cannot learn from a paycheck. One of the reasons I have been effective over the years is that I have done things other people never get to do, or never have the guts to do, because it means leaving the comfort of a W-2. A friend who ran a tree crew called. A storm had flattened a stretch of the Carolinas around the Raleigh-Durham universities. Trees older than the subdivisions they shaded were down across the highways.[9] He was paying cash crews a thousand dollars a day because people were pulling money out of safes rather than wait on insurance to cut the trees off their homes after the storm. A crew member—the kind of guy who couldn’t do anything else because he did not have many other options, because he was out of jail for killing people—had decided he wanted all of it and had started talking about killing my friend. My friend asked me to come down to help him with the guy. My wife did not want me to go. I did not want to leave her. A couple of weeks of that work could be a year’s income. I got on a plane to chase treasure and danger. And to that point, where there is danger, is usually where there is treasure.

As we were landing, they had just cleared the runway. From the air, you could not even see the highway. That is the image I have never forgotten. There is no way for the trucks to get the equipment to the poles if the trees own the asphalt. Before the utility can be a utility, somebody with a saw has to invent a road again. It took some of those people three or four weeks to get power back. Generators mattered. They still matter. A patriot generator in a garage is not a hobby. It is how you keep a freezer and a CPAP and a window into the world from dying on the same night.

When the Volynt team walked me through the demonstration, that memory came back to me. Every September, somewhere, a hurricane does a version of that story. Every late winter, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Great Miami find a floodplain and take a substation with them. Senior citizens do not have three weeks for power to return. A drone that can fly the downed corridor and restore a line, or drop the thing that lets a crew restore a line, is not a gadget. It is the difference between a shelter with lights and a shelter guessing.

Same grid logic as fifty years ago. The wires still have to carry the current. The new part is that you do not always have to wait for the infrastructure; you can fly the infrastructure into a distressed zone.

The Mixed Economy That Aborts the Company Before It Is Born

The hard problem is not the airframe technology. The hard problem is an unfriendly manufacturing and permitting environment. Unless you can throw Elon Musk money at it, the political monster can crush you before the second prototype.[10] Even Musk needed government contracts and, for a stretch, an alliance with China to get Tesla through the years when the same people who wanted electric cars also wanted to drown the factory in process. A lot of the operators I talk to do not want politics at all. They want the big animal to stay in its cage until the product exists. I get involved because I have watched companies get crushed before they build anything.

I was in Columbus a few years ago sitting next to very expensive lawyers who were selling solar the way people used to sell riverfront lots. There is a big solar farm near Piqua. There is another in Warren County. Fine. Generate what you can generate; I’m not against other ways of getting power. But if we aren’t talking about Thorium or nuclear, we aren’t being serious about acquiring real energy. What I will not do is pretend that a sermon about wind and panels is a substitute for a dispatchable grid when you are trying to host the next wave of computation and industry.[11] FirstEnergy was the legacy company being squeezed like a zit so that a younger lobby could inherit the moral high ground. That is an Obama-era move, and it is still the move. Euthanize the old method. Call it progress. Act shocked when people are upset about it.

Republicans have not defended capitalism very well. They have not defended FirstEnergy well. They have not defended the Householder disaster as a policy failure instead of a personality failure, which is what it was, and that has fed this Amy Acton narrative now. I listen to two-thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers miss the only point that matters: are you using the power of government to confiscate wealth, or are you using it to keep the builder from being hunted while he builds? A lot of people in the political class do not feel they have latitude to say that out loud because they do not want the Columbus media animals waiting for them at the urinal. I am not in public office, so I can say it.[12]

The metaphor I keep using, because Ohio taught it to me, is abortion as industrial policy. A certain kind of politics wants to abort the business before it attaches. Regulation becomes the instrument. You never have to out-compete the founder if you can keep him from being born. The same crowd will turn around and euthanize a legacy company they have decided is morally expired, which was what the FirstEnergy story was really about. Young ideas killed in the womb. Old plants killed in the bed. What they never want is a living competitor that was not pre-cleared by the donor list.

Fences, Data Centers, and Who Gets to Say No

In my neighborhood, an older, decent neighbor started a wooden fence in the front yard. Posts went in. It was their property. I would not have chosen the look. My wife and I were not going to say anything. Then came the hearing. Then the posts came back out of the ground. I had not called a trustee. I did not need to. I knew what happened. People who bought half-million and million-dollar houses, some of them new from the coasts, did not want to look at a tacky fence on the drive-by. No lumber in the front. Property rights, until the new people appeal to government to make your porch match their taste.

That is the data-center argument in miniature. I am pro data center. The new economy is an electricity story whether the township signs the petition or not. China is building data centers whether or not we do, and if people protest, they just disappear. That’s how it is in China, in America: communist terrorism hides behind free speech, which does not exist in a real communist country. People who do not want the noise still want the market cap that pays for a federal deficit that no longer fits on a bumper sticker. They want a trillion-dollar growth story and a quiet backyard. They want to keep up with Beijing and keep the transformers out of sight.[13] My daughter lives near Millikan Road in the Liberty Township development and does not want more congestion. I understand the feeling. I also drive through Middletown and remember what the place looked like when the work was here. You can still find houses in that city at prices that tell you how much vitality is left. Vance can talk about investment, but there’s a lot more. I want the investment to be real enough that Main Street is not a museum of what we used to make.

I love Liberty Center. I like Costco. I like the Monroe exits and the Millikin exchange along the 63 corridor as places where you can put large things without paving a township’s last pasture. Balance is a real problem for trustees. Pretending that every large thing is a moral injury is not balance. It is a lifestyle veto dressed up as conservation.[14]

Property taxes are the scream under all of this. There is a movement that wants them gone. Fine. Show me the replacement arithmetic. One honest way to change the math is to land in an industry that generates revenue on land that is already industrial. Vertical mobility—middle-mile drones, disaster logistics, the power-restore mission—is not a server farm humming behind a fence. It is a reason a site exists. Amazon, Walmart, the carriers, the hospitals, the utilities, the Guard: they all have the same problem. Get the box, or the tool, or the kilowatt, past the broken road.[15]. We’re talking about a lot of things here that are always under the tip of our tongues, but they are the center of all discussion.

Michael Ryan Was There Before It Was a Photo Opportunity

I was not going to drag a campaign into this. Michael Ryan put his visit on Facebook. He went to the Volynt facility. He talked about it at a fundraiser. I happened to be there with him. I know what he has been doing in the background for a couple of years while other people were still deciding whether drones were a toy, a nuisance, or a federal problem.[16]

By the time a lot of people read this, he may already be sitting as a Butler County commissioner, or he may be in the last stretch of proving it in November. Either way, I want it on the record. Michael Ryan has been acting like a commissioner of this county well before the title was his. He has been providing leadership in rooms that were not yet fashionable. Four years from now, when the project is a ribbon and a CNBC segment, and every officeholder in a fifty-mile radius is trying to stand in the photograph, I want it remembered that he was there when it was still a risk.

That is what good leadership looks like when it is not a press release. It is not waiting for the market to become safe and then claiming the harvest. Socialism, in the small-town version, is just that reflex: somebody else takes the risk, then the committee arrives to redistribute the credit. Ryan did the opposite. He showed up early. He has done a lot of unglamorous work that makes life in this county better. This is one of the visible ones.[17]

I like a lot of the Ohio names in the builder register. I have had the chance to talk to them one-on-one in informal settings. I think I know who they are. Bernie Moreno built businesses and then walked into the grinder of public service with enough money in the bank that a paycheck could not vote for him. Warren Davidson is in that same pattern. That is the opposite of the professional politician, who needs the mixed economy because it is his meal. Bernie Sanders is a communist. The late-life American version I respect is the man who made something and then spent the surplus defending the conditions that let other people make something.

Ryan is young enough to want still the county to have a next chapter. That matters. The people who have been in the chair too long start to treat every new idea as a zoning headache. The people who still think like founders treat it as a chance.

What I Want This to Become

I want Volynt featured on CNBC as one of the great global innovators, not as a local curiosity that got a grant and a ribbon. A proposed HyPE Lab at the Miami University Airport is the kind of physical bet a county should want next to an existing runway. Ohio Third Frontier money already touched the powertrain work. That is a start, not a finish. I want them to have a shot at being the next SpaceX in the only sense that phrase is useful: a company that made a hard physical thing at a scale the incumbents said was impossible, in a county that decided not to strangle it. That is a lofty goal. Lofty goals are how factories start. The constraint is not imagination. The constraint is whether Ohio and Butler County will keep the political animal on a leash long enough for scale.

Scale needs land that is already industrial, power that is actually on the bus, a workforce that can turn a wrench and read a print, and a waiver culture at the FAA that does not take a decade to admit a machine can fly past the pilot’s eyeballs.[18] Ohio is already in the drone-first-responder business through DriveOhio. Hamilton police are getting aircraft that beat a cruiser to the scene. That is a different mission from cargo and power restoration, but it is the same county learning the same sky.[19]

I have been accused of being part of the military-industrial complex because I have worked around aerospace companies for a long time and I know people in politics. The accusation is a category error. I want the opposite of what happened to Tucker. I want the opposite of what happened to Roark in the book. I want the man with the idea outside the approved pipeline to get to the market before the senator from the incumbent district files the paperwork. I have put my name on things when it was unpopular and could and have cost me. I will put it here.

Books do not usually make the kind of money people think they do. I am writing The Politics of Heaven anyway, because I think there is a spiritual war under the economic one, and because non-human intelligence—call it what your tradition requires—does not only show up in a sky story. It shows up in the institutional habit of killing the builder.[20] I volunteer a lot of time that isn’t invoiced. I want the human race better. Helping a company in my own county get off the ground is one of the ways that sentence becomes concrete.

The Record I Want Left

This is a long one. Context does not work in ten minutes. The video at the front of this would be useful to watch.

When people ask me what I am working on, this is the answer. I am helping a group of scrappy operators, with the IP already done and the demonstration already flown, get across a minefield that usually destroys the idea before it can pay a tax bill. I am proud of them. I want the state of Ohio to treat this as more than a local hobby. The upside is not a buzz in the background. The upside is a transportation and recovery layer that Amazon, Walmart, and every hospital system in a floodplain will need, whether the township board likes the look of the fence or not.

Watch Tucker’s speech. Read Roark’s. Then look at a county that still has room at the exits, a commissioner candidate who showed up before the cameras were easy to get, and a machine that can put power back on at a shelter while the trees are still on the road. That is the whole argument. I would like, for once, not to give the speech at the end of the movie. I want the cars—or, in this case, the aircraft—to be built.

Michael Ryan was ahead of it. The company is ahead of the market’s imagination. I am putting years of scar tissue behind both facts. The rest is execution, voltage, and whether we still believe a man with a better idea should be allowed to leave the ground.

https://www.facebook.com/RyanForButler

Bibliography and Further Reading

Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Paramount Pictures, 1988.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

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

American Rhetoric. “Movie Speech from Tucker: The Man and His Dream — Tucker Presents His Closing Argument.” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtucker.html.

Tucker Automobile Club of America. Historical notes on the Tucker 48 and the Coppola film. https://www.tuckerclub.org/.

Federal Aviation Administration. 14 C.F.R. Part 107 and UAS exemption / BVLOS waiver materials.

Ohio Revised Code §§ 4561.50–4561.53, as enacted by House Bill 77, 135th General Assembly (effective April 9, 2025).

Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio). “Michael Ryan nabs Butler County commissioner primary with 72% of the vote.” May 5–6, 2026.

Journal-News (Hamilton, Ohio). “Primary Election 2026: Republican primary for Butler County commission seat contentious.” April 20, 2026.

Ballotpedia. “Michael V. Ryan (Butler County Commission, Ohio, candidate 2026).”

WCPO. “Hamilton police are getting drones that beat officers to the scene.” DriveOhio / SkyfireAI statewide DFR pilot.

Journal-News. Coverage of Butler County data-center moratorium requests and commission action, June 2026.

United States v. Householder and related FirstEnergy reporting, Southern District of Ohio, 2020–2023.

Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. House Bill 6 aftermath dockets and subsequent electric security plan materials.

Mises, Ludwig von. Interventionism: An Economic Analysis. 1940; later editions.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, 2026.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business; Tail of the Dragon; The Symposium of Justice.

Volynt Aero, Inc. Company site and capability statement. Oxford, Ohio. https://volyntaero.com / https://volynt.aero.

Cincinnati Business Courier / Dayton Business Journal. Coverage of Volynt Aero’s proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport, January 2025.

LinkedIn, Volynt Aero company page. Oxford headquarters; Vyper aircraft described for emergency cargo logistics and autonomous power generation.

Workhorse Group and other Midwest cargo-UAS public materials, Sharonville / Mason, Ohio.

National Hurricane Center. Storm histories for Carolinas landfalls affecting the Research Triangle transportation grid.

Notes

[1] On Householder and FirstEnergy, see United States v. Householder, S.D. Ohio, and contemporaneous reporting in The Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2020–2023. The policy point here is not a brief for every transaction; it is that one administration’s rules can squeeze a regulated utility until the only remaining path appears to be politics.

[2] Francis Ford Coppola, dir., Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Paramount Pictures, 1988). The courtroom speech is transcribed at American Rhetoric, “Movie Speech from Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtucker.html.

[3] Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan chaired the Senate investigations that, in Coppola’s telling and in Tucker’s own defense, functioned as a political weapon for Detroit incumbents. Whether every cinematic beat is courtroom-accurate is less important than the pattern: government process used as a moat.

[4] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Howard Roark’s courtroom defense remains the clearest American statement that a creator does not exist to feed the parasites who arrive after the risk is taken.

[5] U.S. manufacturing after 1945 did send missions to study Japanese methods; the irony Tucker’s speech names is that the country that out-produced the Axis then imported process discipline from the countries it had just defeated. See postwar productivity literature and W. Edwards Deming’s later influence in Japan.

[6] Preston Tucker produced fifty Tucker 48 automobiles. Most survive. The Big Three later adopted seat belts, disc brakes, fuel injection, and aerodynamic safety ideas that Tucker had already put on the road. See Tucker Automobile Club of America histories.

[7] Amazon, Walmart, UPS, and the United States Postal Service have all published or piloted roadmaps for drone and middle-mile automation. Industry estimates for advanced air mobility and drone logistics through the early 2030s commonly range from tens of billions in the near term to well above $100 billion as last-mile and middle-mile use cases stack. The trillion-dollar figure in this essay is a five-year systems view that includes vehicles, energy, warehousing, insurance, and municipal infrastructure—not airframes alone.

[8] Volynt Aero, Inc., Oxford, Ohio (Butler County). Public materials describe the Vyper hybrid-electric unmanned eVTOL as carrying on the order of 500 pounds of cargo out to about 150 nautical miles, then landing and providing 110, 240, or 480 VAC plug-in power from JP-8 or Jet A without a high-voltage charging network. See Volynt Aero’s capability statement and company site at volyntaero.com. A proposed Hybrid Propulsion and Energy (HyPE) Lab at Miami University Airport was reported by the Cincinnati Business Courier and Dayton Business Journal in January 2025. The company received Ohio Third Frontier/TVSF support through the Entrepreneurs’ Center.

[9] Hurricane Fran (1996) and later storms that struck the Carolinas left large sections of the I-40 / Research Triangle corridor impassable from downed timber. The operational lesson is unchanged: you cannot restore a grid if you cannot reach the poles.

[10] Elon Musk’s public record on Tesla and SpaceX includes DOE loans, NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo contracts, and later criticism of the same regulatory state. The relevant point is not purity. It is that even a high-capacity founder needed both capital and political oxygen to keep the factory from being regulated out of existence before the product matured.

[11] On Ohio energy policy after House Bill 6, see Public Utilities Commission of Ohio dockets and legislative history of subsequent repeal and reform efforts. Nuclear and dispatchable baseload remain the quiet argument under every data-center fight.

[12] On mixed-economy control, see Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, and Rand’s distinction between the producer and the looter. The essay’s claim is practical: once incumbents learn they can buy a senator rather than retool a factory, innovation becomes a permit problem.

[13] On local data-center zoning fights, see Journal-News coverage of the Butler County commissioners’ 2026 moratorium discussion and township requests. The noise argument and the fiscal argument are not the same conversation, though they are treated as one at public meetings.

[14] Liberty Center, Monroe / I-75 corridor industrial sites, Middletown Regional Airport aviation investments, and the Spooky Nook complex on Hamilton’s west side are the visible pieces of a county trying to replace lost mill and auto-adjacent employment with logistics, aviation, sport, and advanced manufacturing.

[15] Property tax pressure in Ohio townships is the political surface of a deeper math problem: residential valuations rise while commercial and industrial bases either leave or get blocked. A new high-value industry that uses existing industrial land is one of the few honest answers that does not require another levy speech.

[16] Butler County Commission primary, May 5, 2026: Michael V. Ryan defeated incumbent Cindy Carpenter approximately 72 percent to 28 percent. See Journal-News (Hamilton), May 5–6, 2026. Ryan, a former Hamilton City Council member and vice-mayor, advanced to the November 2026 general election.

[17] Bernie Moreno and Warren Davidson have both operated in the Ohio builder-and-business register the essay prefers to the professional political class. Endorsement lists in the 2026 Butler County commission primary included both names on Ryan’s side.

[18] Federal Aviation Administration, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) regulations, 14 C.F.R. Part 107, and successive beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) waiver practice. Ohio House Bill 77 (effective April 9, 2025) added state-level UAV provisions at Ohio Revised Code §§ 4561.50–4561.53.

[19] Ohio Department of Transportation / DriveOhio statewide drone-first-responder pilot, announced for multiple agencies including Hamilton Police, 2025–2026. Public-safety drones and cargo drones are different machines; they share airspace, waiver culture, and a county that is already learning to fly.

[20] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (manuscript, 2026; targeted 2027 publication). The book treats non-human intelligence, spiritual warfare, and the political history of heaven as the long background to why human institutions keep aborting builders.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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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.

Trillions in Economic Damage from COVID Lockdowns and Over 100 Fifth Amendment Invocations: Fauci’s Capitol Hill Disaster

I was talking about this Fauci story for a long time, and there is a lot to break down. Anthony Fauci showed up on Capitol Hill, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times, and the whole performance confirmed what a lot of us had been saying for years. Good lawyers at two thousand dollars an hour told him not to answer questions about the color of his tie or the carpet. That is not strategy in the traditional sense. That is damage control after the diary came out and after Biden’s pardon language made every single answer a potential risk.¹

The hearing was theater, yes. But it was also a window into how power protects itself when the bill for bad decisions runs into the trillions. I said much of this in 2020, when people called it crazy. The diary, the celebrity capture, the origins knowledge, and the blanket Fifth all landed right on schedule. Now we get to talk about the real cost.

The Fifth Amendment Over 100 Times: Lazy Preparation or Calculated Silence

Fauci walked into that Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing chaired by Rand Paul and refused to answer. He invoked the Fifth more than one hundred times. Reports put the number at 111 in some counts. Senators asked the day of the week. They asked the color of his tie. They asked about the carpet. Fifth. Fifth. Fifth.²

I understand not wanting to get boxed into a dialogue that opens rabbit holes. Hard questions about gain-of-function funding, lab-leak timelines, and previous sworn statements carry real risk. But when the easy questions also get the Fifth, it stops looking like careful lawyering and starts looking like the lawyers decided the safest path was total silence. Paul has been clear he intends to pursue contempt. The committee already voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt and refer it. Democrats will not help in the full Senate, and the January 2025 pardon complicates federal options. Still, the optics of a man who cost the country so much refusing even the simplest answers is a form of accountability in itself.³

Bernie Moreno from Ohio asked the kind of direct questions that needed to be asked. He made me proud as a senator from this state. The frustration in the room was real because the public already knew the story’s outlines. The Fifth just made the admission louder.

The Diary Revelations: COVID Origins Knowledge and Falling in Love with Celebrity Status

The diary dropped right before the hearing—more than a thousand pages. Early entries show Fauci writing that the wet market was the amplifier, not the source. He recorded conversations in which most of the scientists on the call thought deliberate insertion or laboratory involvement was possible. Publicly, the story stayed different for a long time.⁴

At the same time, the diary shows a man falling in love with the celebrity scan. Magazine covers. Rock-star treatment. “Explosive and really unimaginable” fame. Petitions for Sexiest Man Alive. Celebrity phone calls and name-dropping. While the country was locked down and the economic damage was compounding, the private notes record the thrill of the attention. That contrast is damaging. It was already suspected. The diary made it concrete. The timing, right before the testimony, turned a public-relations disaster into something harder to spin.⁵

The Trillions Lost: Quantifying the Economic Catastrophe of the Lockdowns

This is the part that still matters most. Separating the damage caused by the virus itself from that caused by the policy response is tricky. Economists still argue about the exact split. What is not in serious dispute is the scale.

Federal relief spending alone ran about $4.65 trillion. GDP losses from the pandemic period have been estimated in the multiple trillions. One USC analysis put the four-year GDP hit near $14 trillion. A Heritage-linked commission put the total cost—deaths, chronic conditions, lost income, mental health, educational losses—around $18 trillion. School closures alone have been estimated to result in roughly $2 trillion in future earnings losses. Long COVID continues to impose ongoing productivity costs measured in the billions annually. Global output losses for 2020–2024 have been estimated at nearly $13.8 trillion, with the United States accounting for a large share.⁶

We are still living with the long-term effects. Inflation, labor-force scarring, learning loss that will depress lifetime earnings for a generation of kids, and the permanent expansion of federal debt all trace back in part to the choices made in 2020 and 2021. Someone who helped design and sell those choices, who enjoyed the magazine covers while the economy took the hit, does not get to walk away with only a pardon and a Fifth Amendment performance. Public embarrassment is part of the bill. Legal immunity does not erase the reputation ledger or the need for a full accounting.

Biden’s Pardon and Why the Lawyers Demanded Total Silence

The January 19, 2025, pardon from President Biden is the key. It covers “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”⁷

That language is broad. The lawyers treated every answer as a potential new statement that could create fresh exposure or complicate the protection already granted. Even questions about the color of a tie carry risk if the answer can be twisted into inconsistency or if it opens a door outside the pardoned window. That is why the advice was absolute: do not answer. The optics look terrible. The legal logic is coherent if the goal is preserving the pardon at all costs. States are still free to look at their own statutes. Florida has already moved. The federal shield does not cover everything.⁸

Why the Hearing Still Mattered and What Comes Next

We already knew the broad outline. The hearing put the Fifth on the record more than a hundred times and forced the diary into the center of the conversation. Rand Paul is pushing the contempt referral. Criminal prosecution at the federal level faces the prospect of pardon and partisan math. State investigations and the public record are not constrained the same way. The real next step is continued pressure for transparency on the origins, the funding decisions, and the true cost-benefit of the lockdowns. Reputational accountability is nothing. Strategy that relies on silence still has a price.

I remember saying all of this about Fauci when people thought it was crazy. Before some of the books were written, before the diaries were public, before the pardon. I got the usual pushback for not going along with the official line. Now the Fifth, the diary, and the economic numbers have caught up. I told you so. I will keep saying it because the next time something sounds wild and outside the approved explanations, people might listen a little sooner and save themselves some of the pain.

The hole we are still climbing out of six years later was not inevitable. Manufactured crisis or not, the policy choices had authors. Those authors should not get to treat the trillions as someone else’s problem.

Footnotes

1. CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic,” July 29, 2026; Axios, “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins,” July 29, 2026.

2. The New York Times, “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing,” July 29–30, 2026; USA Today, “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19,” July 29, 2026; Washington Times, “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress,” July 29, 2026.

3. Forbes, “Fauci Contempt of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines,” August 6, 2026; Politico, “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote,” August 6, 2026; Reuters, “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote,” August 6, 2026.

4. USA Today, “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame,” July 29, 2026; National Review, “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him,” July 27, 2026; The Telegraph, “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal,” July 27, 2026.

5. The Atlantic, “Anthony Fauci’s Embarrassing, Revealing Diary,” July 29, 2026; The New Yorker, “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves,” August 4, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing,” July 27, 2026; Wall Street Journal, “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci,” July 28–29, 2026.

6. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588), July 31, 2025; USC Price School, “Mandatory business closures drove the economic decline during COVID-19 pandemic,” reporting ~$14 trillion GDP impact; Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (via SCNR reporting), estimating ~$18 trillion total U.S. costs; University of Washington/Oxford analysis on school closures (~$2 trillion future losses); Center for Global Development estimates of global output losses ~$13.8 trillion (2020–2024).

7. Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, January 19, 2025 (full text via Wikisource and Department of Justice Pardon Attorney records); White House Statement from President Joe Biden, January 20, 2025.

8. CBS12 / Florida reporting on Attorney General James Uthmeier investigation announcement, July 30, 2026; Washington Examiner, “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry,” July 30, 2026; Lawfare, “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?,” August 11, 2026.

Bibliography

Axios. “The biggest clashes from Fauci’s Senate hearing on his diary, COVID origins.” July 29, 2026.

Center for Global Development. Estimates of global COVID-19 output losses, 2020–2024 (~$13.8 trillion).

CNN. “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about COVID pandemic.” July 29, 2026.

Forbes. “Fauci Contempt Of Congress Resolution Passes Along Party Lines.” August 6, 2026.

Heritage Foundation / Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Cost estimates totaling approximately $18 trillion (deaths, chronic illness, lost income, mental health, education). Reported via SCNR, July 2024 (updated context 2026).

Hoover Institution. Various analyses of lockdown costs and learning losses (e.g., Hanushek et al. on the economic impact).

Lawfare. “A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Now what?” August 11, 2026; “Biden Grants Preemptive Pardons to Milley, Fauci, and Others.” January 20, 2025.

National Review. “Fauci’s Diary: Even Fauci Was Shocked by How Much the Media Loved Him.” July 27, 2026.

The New York Times. “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times in bitter Senate hearing.” July 29–30, 2026.

The New Yorker. “Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves.” August 4, 2026.

Politico. “Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote.” August 6, 2026.

Presidential Pardon of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Executive Grant of Clemency, January 19, 2025 (Wikisource / U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney).

Reuters. “Republican US Senator Rand Paul asks Justice Department to prosecute Fauci after contempt vote.” August 6, 2026.

The Telegraph. “Fauci did not believe COVID originated from Wuhan market, his diaries reveal.” July 27, 2026.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. “COVID-19: Update on Key Indicators, the Federal Response, and Implementation of GAO Recommendations” (GAO-25-107588). July 31, 2025 (~$4.65 trillion federal relief).

USA Today. “Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to answer Senate questions about COVID-19.” July 29, 2026; “Fauci diary revelations: COVID origins, Trump and fame.” July 29, 2026.

USC Price School / Economic Modeling. Analyses projecting ~$14 trillion U.S. GDP losses from the pandemic period.

University of Washington / Oxford University. School-closure economic impact estimates (~$2 trillion future losses).

Wall Street Journal. “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci.” July 28–29, 2026.

Washington Examiner. “Six takeaways on Fauci’s private COVID-19 diaries ahead of Senate hearing.” July 27, 2026; “Rand Paul ‘happy’ to share information on Fauci to assist with Florida inquiry.” July 30, 2026; “Fauci held in contempt by Rand Paul’s committee.” August 6, 2026.

Washington Times. “Fauci pleads the Fifth, refuses to answer questions to Congress.” July 29, 2026.

White House. Statement from President Joe Biden on preemptive pardons. January 20, 2025.

Additional primary materials: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing transcript and video, July 29, 2026; Fauci personal diary excerpts released by Sen. Rand Paul, July 2026 (1,000+ pages covering late 2019–2022).

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and the War on Reason, Industry, and the Individual

Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive remains one of the sharpest diagnoses of the cultural forces that still shape the nightly news. Originally published in 1971 as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the essays were expanded in 1999 with additional material by Peter Schwartz. The core claim has not aged. Western civilization, Rand argued, was being deliberately dismantled from within by movements that presented themselves as progressive but were in fact a regression to the pre-industrial, pre-rational, tribal state. She called it the anti-industrial revolution because it targeted the very tools—technology, industry, capitalism, and the conceptual mind—that allow human beings to survive and flourish.

That diagnosis lands with greater force today than it did when the essays first appeared. The same patterns reappear under new labels: environmental absolutism, identity politics, multiculturalism framed as justice, and the steady erosion of objective standards in education and culture. The book is not a museum piece. It is a working map of the conflict between the individual mind and the collective demand to return to the primitive.

The Anti-Industrial Revolution: Attacking the Tools of Survival

Rand did not view the student rebellions, early environmental crusades, or hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as liberation. She saw them as a rejection of the mind. The hallmark of civilization is the application of reason to the material world. The ultimate historical expression of that faculty is the Industrial Revolution. By attacking industry, technology, and the profit system that sustains them, these movements were not reforming excesses. They were attempting to undo the progress of the Enlightenment and return humanity to a state of nature that Hobbes correctly described as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In the title essay, she paints a stark picture: a man in the mid-1970s wakes to find his electric toaster and automobile outlawed in the name of protecting the environment. There is no gradual, restrained retreat from technology. There is only the continued advance of the mind or the descent into helplessness and death. Technology is not optional decoration. It is the concrete product of conceptual thought applied to reality. To treat it as aggression against nature is to treat the human mind itself as the enemy.

Rand’s critique of the environmental movement of her day remains one of the most uncompromising sections of the book. She rejected the premise that “untouched nature” holds higher moral value than human life and human comfort. If one truly values human life, one must value the tools that extend and improve it. Elevating pristine wilderness above the needs of productive people, in her view, demonstrates a hatred of the human mind and its capacity to reshape the world.

The activists of the period, she observed, simultaneously attacked scientific progress as violence against the planet while advocating what she called universal slavery for men under expanding state control. The pattern has only grown more sophisticated. Modern environmental rhetoric still frames industrial civilization as the original sin while demanding political power to ration energy, restrict development, and manage the lives of ordinary people. The moral inversion remains the same: the creators are treated as aggressors and the non-producers as the rightful claimants on their output.

Environmentalism as Hatred of the Mind

Progressive Education and the Manufacture of Helplessness

Rand refused to blame only the students. She placed primary responsibility on the teachers and the educational theories that shaped them. In the essay “The Comprachicos,” she draws a grim historical analogy to the seventeenth-century criminals who kidnapped children and physically deformed them to sell as circus freaks. Progressive education, she argued, performs a parallel operation on the mind.

Drawing on the influence of John Dewey and pragmatism, the system shifted focus from teaching children to think conceptually and objectively toward social adjustment and group conformity. The purpose of education, in Rand’s view, should be to equip a student to deal with reality by means of reason. Instead, she saw classrooms that trained children to defer to the pack’s authority. The result is cognitive helplessness: young people who never learned to integrate perceptions into concepts, who remain driven by emotion and fear, and who therefore seek the protection of a tribe.

She drew a direct line from the nursery-school ideal of progressive education to the hippie movement. The hippies were not rebels against the system. They were its logical product—adults still functioning at the emotional level of the group-oriented child. The jump from classroom methods to countercultural behavior is large, yet the causal claim is consistent with her broader epistemology. Without training in conceptual thought, the mind remains primitive.

From Classroom to Tribe: The Roots of Modern Identity Politics

The expanded 1999 edition carries the analysis forward. Peter Schwartz’s additional essays on multiculturalism and what he terms gender tribalism treat these later movements as updated forms of the same collectivism Rand fought in the 1970s. Ethnicity, race, and sex are elevated as primary political categories. The individual disappears into the group.

Rand was unsparing on this point. Racism is the lowest and most primitive form of collectivism because it judges a person by unchosen bodily characteristics rather than by chosen values and achievements. Organizing society by ancestry or language is a sign that Western civilization is losing its grip on the concept of individual rights. A healthy culture judges individuals on their own merits. Tribalism judges them by the accidents of birth.

She argued that the United States was uniquely hostile to ethnicity precisely because it was the first nation founded on individual rights rather than tribal caste. The shift toward identity politics is therefore a betrayal of the American foundation. Schwartz extends the point: movements that frame people primarily as victims of forces beyond their control encourage entitlement and dependency. They replace the standard of individual achievement with subservience to the group. The result is the same psychological regression Rand identified decades earlier.

The Cashless Society and the Corruption of Value

One of the most relevant essays for the present moment is “The Cashless Society.” Rand was not primarily discussing credit cards or digital payments. She was diagnosing the moral foundation of trade itself. Money, she insisted, is the tool of men who have produced goods and can exchange them voluntarily. It cannot exist in a society that has abandoned the objective value of production and replaced it with political pull and loot.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue,” she wrote in Atlas Shrugged and reinforced in these essays. When production is no longer the source of wealth and political connections become the dominant currency, the society has already returned to a more primitive form of distribution—force and favor. The contemporary landscape of corporate-political entanglement, quantitative easing, and the elevation of access over output fits the pattern she described. Value is no longer determined by what a mind creates. It is determined by who one knows and which political faction holds power.

Montessori as the Rational Alternative

Against the progressive model, Rand pointed to Montessori education as a practical alternative. She admired the method because it focuses on developing the child’s cognitive faculties through independent, purposeful activity. The didactic materials require logical problem-solving. The child learns by doing, not by submitting to the group’s emotional authority. In her view, this was training for the next generation of creators—the Howard Roarks and John Galts who sustain a civilization of reason and industry.

The contrast remains instructive. Systems that emphasize conceptual independence produce different adults from systems that emphasize social adjustment and group identity. The long-term cultural consequences of those differences are evident in the quality of public discourse and in citizens’ capacity to reason about complex problems.

Prophetic Warnings and the Long Slow Decay

Looking back from the present, the essays appear strikingly prophetic to those who accept their premises and shrill to those who do not. Rand was not a detached observer. She was at war with the cultural direction she described. She sought to expose what she saw as intellectual bankruptcy rather than to suppress it by force. Whether one agrees with every judgment, she identified a fundamental shift: the movement of Western culture toward group identity and away from Enlightenment values of reason, individualism, and productive achievement.

The outer forms of the New Left have changed. The substance has endured in modern environmental absolutism, identity politics, and the steady institutional preference for collective categories over individual judgment. Rand left the choice binary. Either a society embraces the mind and the industrial civilization it makes possible, or it lets the fire of Prometheus go out and returns to the tribe. Collapse, in her account, is not sudden. It is a long, slow process of philosophical decay that can be watched in real time.

Expanding the Frame: Beyond Rand’s Atheism

The foundational work Rand performed on the conflict between individualism and collectivism remains indispensable. At the same time, the frame can be enlarged. Her strict reliance on the evidence of the senses and the operations of reason leaves little room for phenomena that exceed the ordinary five-sense toolkit. Contemporary discussions of quantum effects, non-human intelligence, and the unfolding UAP disclosures raise questions she did not fully address in her lifetime.

One can accept her central political insight—that the individual is the smallest and most important minority, and that any ideology subordinating the person to the group is already on the road to tyranny—while still recognizing that deeper layers of reality may involve intelligences and conflicts that operate through, and sometimes against, human perception. The ancient pattern of collective sacrifice, scapegoating, and the demand to return humanity to a more controllable, primitive state appears in both her secular analysis and in older religious and historical accounts of spiritual warfare. The value of her work is not diminished by the recognition that the conflict may have additional dimensions.

The Primitive Mindset as a Weapon of Control

A mind trained only in group adjustment and emotional reactivity is easier to manage. Tribal belonging supplies the security that conceptual independence would otherwise provide. When large numbers of people are left unequipped for rational thought, the appeal of the collective intensifies. Public education systems that systematically under-emphasize conceptual training contribute to the result. Adults who cannot sustain an intelligent conversation about first principles are not primarily the victims of low intelligence. They are often the products of an intellectual formation that never equipped them to deal with reality on its own terms.

The cultural preference for the primitive—visible in certain styles, rituals, and the romanticization of pre-industrial life—serves the same end. A population oriented toward tribal safety is more readily directed by those who control the narrative of belonging and threat. The industrial and technological achievements that demonstrate the power of the individual mind become suspect precisely because they disrupt that control.

Conclusion: Intellectual Weapons for the Present Conflict

Return of the Primitive is not light reading. It is a sustained argument that the movements celebrated as progress in the late twentieth century were in fact a rejection of the mind and a deliberate step backward. The same dynamics continue under updated names. Understanding the argument does not require total agreement with every premise Rand advanced. It does require taking seriously the claim that the conflict between the productive individual and the collectivist demand for regression is the central political and cultural contest of the era.

The book supplies intellectual weapons. It names the pattern, traces its educational and philosophical roots, and refuses the moral blackmail that treats any defense of industry, reason, or individual rights as heartless in a moment when nightly news routinely presents the primitive as enlightened and the industrial as sinful; the essays remain a necessary point of reference.

Those who want the fuller application of these themes to character, production, and the defense of the individual will find related discussion in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The Politics of Heaven, which extends the analysis into deeper historical and spiritual dimensions of the same conflict, is forthcoming. The conversation Rand began is not finished. It is the conversation the present moment still requires.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 1999). Originally published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1971).

2. Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” in The Return of the Primitive.

3. Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” in The Return of the Primitive.

4. Peter Schwartz, essays on multiculturalism and gender tribalism, in the 1999 expanded edition of The Return of the Primitive.

5. Ayn Rand, “Global Balkanization,” in The Return of the Primitive.

6. Ayn Rand, “The Cashless Society,” in The Return of the Primitive; see also the money speech in Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).

7. Ayn Rand’s comments on Montessori education appear in the educational essays collected in The Return of the Primitive and related nonfiction.

Bibliography

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

———. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971.

———. The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz. New York: Penguin, 1999.

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

Schwartz, Peter. Additional essays in The Return of the Primitive (1999 edition).

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

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Starship, Shrimp, and a Sky Full of Drones: One of the many reasons I support data centers and the efforts of job creators.

Keywords: SpaceX Starship Flight 14, Falcon 9 cadence, Port Canaveral economic vitality, drone delivery Walmart Amazon, data centers Butler County Trenton, Elon Musk job creators, vertical mobility air taxis, Overman Warrior Podcast, George Lang Michael Ryan.

Traveling Ohio, Independent Media, and Looking Forward to Starship Flight 14

I traveled all over Ohio this summer, and I heard everybody’s point of view. Right now I’m looking forward to Starship Flight 14.[1] I’ve been wearing the Mars shirt. A few months ago, I was at the Kennedy Space Center, touring the facilities, walking through the exhibits, looking at the Artemis hardware still on display after the scrubbed flight. The space economy is real. It is changing what I want to do with the next chapter of my life.

Independent media lets me say the things that need saying. Sometimes I’m with almost everybody. Sometimes I’m against people I usually agree with. I’ve written against certain marijuana-economy interests in Ohio even while knowing many of the people involved. The same independence lets me stand with Elon Musk and SpaceX when the purity voices and the fear voices turn against them.

The Best Day of 2026 So Far: Grills, Cruise Ships, and a Falcon Landing at Port Canaveral

My wife and I were down at the family condo after the Kennedy tour. A Falcon recovery was coming in. I made a point of it with everyone who was with us—I wanted to see the rocket. We ended up at that seafood place right by the cruise ships at Port Canaveral, the one where the doors stay open, and the air moves through.[2] February, eighty degrees, a big plate of shrimp in front of me, cruise ships loading, and then the booster coming back out of the ocean on the drone ship. Of Course I Still Love You—one of the best days I’ve had in 2026.

That is economic vitality in one frame: technical genius, tourism money, working people, snowbirds with full bank accounts, and a company that launches several times a week. SpaceX has already flown a record cadence of Falcon 9 missions in 2026.[3] I love watching it. I love the people who make it possible.

The Guy at Publix Who Hates Elon Musk

A couple of days later, we were in the fruit aisle at Publix. I had the Mars shirt on. A guy in his sixties with the stretched tattoos and the younger crew started in: Elon Musk is a bum, he’s with Trump, he’s taking our jobs, data centers, robots, the whole list. I looked at him and thought the same thing I always think. Some people create jobs, and others get jobs. Most people live in the second category. A few live in the first. Elon Musk lives in the first.[4]

The guy at Publix is not a villain. He is just afraid. He wants the world to stay still enough that his corner of it remains safe. Growth feels like a threat. That is the psychology of the job-getter when the job-makers start moving faster than the old arrangements can absorb. I have no patience for it when it turns into active opposition to the very companies that are expanding the frontier.

Data Centers, Dark Skies Full of Drones, and the Next Delivery System

I support data centers. I want more of them. Amazon is in talks for a large hyperscale campus near Trenton in Butler County—hundreds of acres, major private capital, long-term tax and infrastructure implications.[5] The same computational capacity that runs those centers will also run the autonomous systems that move packages.

Walmart has already crossed a million drone deliveries. Amazon is expanding Prime Air toward hundreds of cities and towns, including Ohio.[6] I have been talking about this market for fifteen years. Same-day, then same-hour, then the quiet electric traffic stacked over the highways—AI-managed corridors carrying 200- and 400-pound payloads between distribution centers and airports. The complaints will come exactly as they always do: the sky will be dark, the sunset will be ruined, a drone might fall on a dog. I find those objections small.

I sit in the RV office in the driveway and watch cars pull up three times in an afternoon dropping packages for my wife and the grandkids. She cannot always load every child into a vehicle and run to a store. The delivery system already changed the household. The next layer—autonomous aerial—will finish the job.

Job Makers Versus Job Getters: The Moral Line I Will Not Cross

I have spent decades working in manufacturing and logistics, and with the people who actually build conveyors and warehouses. I helped put systems into Amazon facilities when most people still thought the model was crazy. Twenty years later, a book I order at night is on the porch the next morning because infrastructure was built by people willing to take risks. That is the side of the line I stand on.[7]

Elon Musk works seven days a week. He barely sleeps. He pushes the schedule. He used to vote the other way, and then he learned. I respect anyone who gets better with time. The people burning Teslas, cursing data centers, or treating SpaceX as a threat are defending a static world that never actually existed. Growth is the only moral path that does not end in rationing and decline.

Why I Keep Coming Back to George Lang and Michael Ryan

Local politics matters because the permission structure for all of this sits with people who either understand job creators or do not. I talk with George Lang about economic questions. Michael Ryan understands the same distinction. You need officeholders who will slow-walk the parasites off the body of the economy instead of ripping the host apart or surrendering to the fear lobby.[8] That is the practical work. The romantic work is watching a Falcon come home and knowing the same spirit can fill the sky with useful machines.

The Condo Deck at Night and the Magic I Will Not Give Up

Later that same trip, we were back on the condo deck after Publix. Nine-thirty at night, ocean breeze, and another routine Starlink Falcon climbing out of the Cape and arcing over the water. The booster came back. The next day it would be under tow into Port Canaveral again. That is the magic. Technical competence, economic surplus, people with money in their pockets ordering shrimp and watching rockets, and a future that keeps expanding instead of contracting.

I want the dark sky full of quiet electric drones. I want thousands of Starships on a cadence that makes today’s Falcon schedule look leisurely. I want data centers humming in the river valley and vertical ports moving people and cargo. I want the job makers protected, and the job getters invited into the larger game, rather than being told the game is the enemy.

The guy at Publix can keep his fear. I will keep the plate of shrimp, the open doors at Grills in Port Canaveral, the rocket on the horizon, and the packages arriving while the grandchildren are still in the house. That is the side of history I intend to stand on.

Footnotes

[1] Starship Flight 14 was originally targeted for late August 2026 and later slipped toward mid-September. Statements from SpaceNews and NASA indicated that the flight remains a key step toward a higher cadence and orbital capability.

[2] Port Canaveral and the Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center economic zone combine cruise tourism, SpaceX recovery operations, and hospitality into a visible example of layered economic vitality.

[3] SpaceX Falcon 9 launch cadence reached record levels in 2026, with multiple doubleheader launches and more than 95 Falcon 9 missions already flown by mid-August. See SpaceX launch manifests and contemporaneous reporting.

[4] The distinction between job makers (entrepreneurs and capital builders) and job getters (those who primarily seek employment within existing structures) is a recurring theme in the author’s economic commentary.

[5] Amazon Web Services has been in active negotiations for a large hyperscale data-center campus on roughly 600 acres near Trenton in Butler County, Ohio, one of several major data-center projects reshaping the regional economy in 2026. See Cincinnati Enquirer and Journal-News reporting, August 2026.

[6] Walmart reported crossing one million drone deliveries by May 2026, with rapid expansion through its partnership with Wing. Amazon Prime Air announced plans in 2026 to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by year-end, with expansion into Ohio markets.

[7] The author’s long-standing support for SpaceX, data-center development, and job-creator policy is documented in prior essays and episodes of The Overman Warrior Podcast at hoffmanbooks.com.

[8] The author cites George Lang and Michael Ryan as local elected officials who understand the distinction between protecting job creators and merely managing the distribution of existing jobs.

Bibliography and Further Research

SpaceX and Launch Cadence

SpaceX launch manifests and public flight data, 2025–2026.

SpaceNews coverage of Starship Flight 14 schedule adjustments, August 2026.

Contemporary reporting on Falcon 9 doubleheader records and annual cadence (Space.com, Benzinga, and related outlets).

Drone Delivery and Logistics

Walmart / Wing drone delivery milestone reporting (1 million deliveries, expansion plans through 2027).

Amazon Prime Air expansion announcements, 2026, including Ohio markets.

Industry analyses of BVLOS regulation and commercial drone payload/range trends (DroneXL, Reuters, and related coverage).

Data Centers and Regional Economy

Cincinnati Enquirer / Journal-News reporting on Amazon hyperscale data-center negotiations near Trenton, Butler County, August 2026.

Ohio data-center economic impact analyses (capital investment, employment, GDP contribution), 2024–2025 interim reports.

Related coverage of construction employment and local fiscal agreements in Butler County and surrounding counties.

Author’s Related Work

Hoffman, Rich. Essays and podcast episodes at hoffmanbooks.com and The Overman Warrior Podcast on SpaceX, economic vitality, data centers, and job-creator policy.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming) and prior books on leadership and institutional combat.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

From the Portable Office on the Road: Butler County Republican Leadership Change and the Call for Unity in the Fight Against Socialist Inroads

I have been traveling a lot this summer of 2026. My portable office goes with me. It is a rolling command post with a good chair, a refrigerator stocked with my favorite drinks, and windows that change the view almost every day. One day, the Tetons. Another day, the high country in Colorado or the open stretches of Utah and New Mexico. Just before recording some thoughts, I watched the ferry reverse into its slip, filming through the glass as the water churned. That is the life right now. I can work, read for hours, and still stay connected to home while the scenery shifts.

From that distance, the picture in Butler County comes into sharper focus. Politics is a bloodsport. Transitions happen. I checked in with some of my closest people back home and learned that Todd Hall is no longer chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. Art Sauerwein has taken the role. I always liked Todd. The job is genuinely thankless. It wears people out. Running a business on top of it, managing personalities, herding volunteers, and keeping the central committee pointed in one direction takes a small army and constant energy. I hope Art has a good run at it. The party needs steady hands.

Perspective from Distance Makes the Stakes Clearer

When you are removed from the daily handshakes and the same faces at every event, the larger pattern stands out. We have minor philosophical differences among ourselves. That is normal. What is not normal is letting those differences become the main event while outright socialists and radical Democrats keep pushing into local offices. I have watched it happen in places like West Chester. It is the same impulse you see nationally with the more extreme progressive candidates. It does not matter if the fight is on Main Street or in the national headlines. The goal of those forces is the same: expand government, raise the cost of living through policy, and treat constitutional limits as optional.

I have said for years that we need a big tent. I mean it. That includes people who may lean a little softer on some issues as long as they will stand with us against tax increases, against socialist experiments in the schools, and for basic fiscal order. Sheriff Richard Jones has always struck me as a Gunsmoke Republican. That is the personality I want in the top law enforcement job. Even if he occasionally frustrates pure ideologues, I want him successful. The same goes for others I have known for decades.

Local Fiscal Reality Versus the Socialist Alternative

Butler County and much of Ohio under Republican stewardship have largely kept the books balanced. Surpluses have been more common than structural deficits. There has been resistance to the constant pressure to raise taxes. That is good government. It is the opposite of the model that turns every problem into a reason for bigger bureaucracy and higher burdens on working families. When I talk to people at campgrounds across the country, the pattern repeats. Many of them are Trump voters. They fly the flags. They are getting away from out-of-control local governments elsewhere. They recognize solid management when they see it. We have had a good run of it here. The job now is to protect it and expand it.

Personal Notes on the Players

I think highly of George Lang. I always have. Nancy Nix is often painted as a mainstreamer these days. I do not see her that way. I see her as a person who has done great work in the auditor’s office. Roger Reynolds has sympathizers, and I was one of them for a long time. I never understood the decision to go after Nancy Nix the way it happened. That kind of personal fight does not help the larger cause. When you are trying to win elections and keep socialists from taking seats, internal score-settling becomes a luxury we cannot afford.

The chairman’s role is not glamorous. Todd Hall held it for a long stretch after David Kern. He came in young and stayed through periods of real discord. Some people felt he did not have enough hours in the day. That is a fair observation about the demands of the job. Leadership at that level requires heavy delegation and constant recruitment of capable people. I hope Art Sauerwein understands that and builds the team accordingly. I wish him well. I will miss Todd in the role, but the work continues.

The Real Task Ahead

Trump observed years ago that people get so used to winning that they start losing to experience the thrill of winning again. That is a real danger. We cannot afford boredom or internal exhaustion. The fall elections and the offices that matter most require Republicans to lock arms. The goal is straightforward: more Republicans in office than Democrats, constitutional values protected, fiscal discipline maintained, and the Trump agenda advanced at the county level the same way it is being advanced nationally.

I will spend more time on the road this year and then settle in for the fourth quarter closer to home. The portable office has proven its value. I can read, think, write, and still stay plugged into Butler County. When I talk to people at those campgrounds, I get a clearer read on the national mood than I sometimes get in the middle of local factional fights. Most of them want government that works without constantly reaching into their pockets or experimenting with radical social theories on their children.

I hope everyone finds a way to shake hands at the picnics and fundraisers. Support the new chairman. Remember what we have in common is larger than what divides us. Keep the focus on winning. Do not get tired of it. The alternative is watching more socialists and their enablers take ground, one township and one school board at a time.

Footnotes

1. Conversations with longtime Butler County Republican contacts, summer 2026, regarding the transition from Todd Hall to Dan Ferguson as party chairman.

2. Public record of Todd Hall’s long tenure as Butler County Republican Party executive chairman, beginning in the mid-2010s following David Kern.

3. Local election results and coverage of West Chester Township trustee races and related contests showing shifts in local control.

4. Butler County and Ohio fiscal performance under Republican majorities: consistent emphasis on balanced budgets and resistance to routine tax increases, as reflected in county and state budget outcomes over recent cycles.

5. Public statements and reporting on Roger Reynolds’ legal history, his attempt to reclaim the auditor’s office from Nancy Nix, and his later involvement in the county commissioner primary before withdrawing.

6. Sheriff Richard K. Jones’ long record and public positioning as a traditional law-and-order Republican.

7. Observations from campground conversations across multiple western and mountain states during summer 2026 travel regarding voter sentiment and local government dissatisfaction.

8. C-SPAN and local reporting on 2026 Butler County Republican events, including candidate and leadership appearances.

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading

• Journal-News (Hamilton/Butler County) coverage of Butler County Republican Party leadership, endorsements, and primary contests, 2024–2026.

• Butler County Republican Party official materials and candidate endorsement lists.

• Ohio Republican Party statements and State Central Committee updates, 2026.

• Ballotpedia and Butler County Board of Elections records on local races, including West Chester Township trustees and county offices.

• Reporting on Roger Reynolds’ conviction, appellate reversal, and subsequent legal efforts regarding the auditor’s office.

• Public financial and budget summaries from Butler County and the State of Ohio illustrating fiscal trends under Republican control.

• Contemporary accounts of Sheriff Richard Jones’ tenure and local political positioning.

• Travel notes and personal observations compiled during summer 2026 from portable office locations across the western United States.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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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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 Lake Superior Copper Mines, Transatlantic Trade Before Columbus, and Why Orthodoxy Fears the Evidence

Never forget what’s possible

I have been thinking about group behavior again. There is a reason people are afraid of conspiracies, or more accurately, afraid of going against the grain. They fear being ostracized from the group. It is not abstract philosophy. It is survival. In academic, professional, and corporate fields, the pattern is the same. When a narrative hardens, stepping outside it carries real costs. Jobs disappear. Funding dries up. Colleagues suddenly see a friend across the room and need to talk to them. The conversation ends. I have watched it happen more times than I can count, and not only in archaeology.

This is why the copper of Lake Superior remains such a charged subject. It should not be. The evidence is physical, measurable, and increasingly hard to dismiss. Yet the moment the discussion turns toward possible contact between the Near East and North America in the Bronze Age or earlier, the temperature changes. People get skittish. They change the subject. I do not believe the copper trade from Lake Superior is a conspiracy theory. I believe it is an under-examined historical reality, and the resistance to it reveals more about institutional incentives than about the data.

Roger L. Jewell’s Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America remains one of the more level-headed treatments of the subject. Jewell does not rant. He lays out the scale of prehistoric mining on Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula, the volume of pure native copper removed, and the awkward fact that so much of it seems to have vanished from North America’s archaeological record. Estimates vary, but the lower end runs to tens of millions of pounds extracted over centuries beginning roughly 3000 BCE or earlier. The upper estimates are higher still. Native copper of that purity, occurring in large masses that could be worked cold, is geologically unusual. Lake Superior is the standout source.

I have been up there myself. The Upper Peninsula leaves an impression. The landscape, the isolation, the sheer number of ancient pits still visible in places, all of it sits in the mind differently once you have walked the ground. Mainstream accounts, such as Susan R. Martin’s Wonderful Power, document the Native mining and the extensive trade of copper artifacts across the Midwest and beyond. That part is not in dispute. The Hopewell and Adena cultures moved copper hundreds of miles. They moved Yellowstone obsidian even farther. Orthodoxy accepts long-distance foot and canoe trade within the continent. It balks at the idea that the same copper, or knowledge of the same source, could have reached the Mediterranean by sea.

I attended a lecture by John E. Hancock when his Smithsonian Books volume on the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks came out. The book is careful, well-illustrated, and frames the sites within the indigenous narrative that has become the required language for World Heritage and institutional publication. Hancock has done serious work on the geometry and lunar alignments of the Ohio earthworks. The conversation before and after the talk was civil. Then the subject of copper trade came up, and the tone shifted. Once it became clear I was not content to stop at the indigenous-only explanation, the interest cooled. That is the pattern. UNESCO recognition is valuable. The political framing that accompanies it is not optional if you want the institutional platform. I understand the pressure. I do not accept that it settles the historical question.

The Blue Pill Pays Well, but the Truth is in the Red Pill, Not a Popular Decision:

The same dynamic appears across fields. During COVID, expert consensus hardened rapidly around certain data interpretations from the CDC and related bodies. Dissent carried professional risk. Careers were damaged. People who had built comfortable lives inside the consensus had every incentive to stay inside it. The sociological pattern is not unique to public health. It operates in archaeology, history, and the soft sciences whenever a preferred narrative about origins, land, or cultural purity is at stake. A professor at Marquette or any similar institution who begins teaching that Mediterranean traders may have been active on Lake Superior risks the quiet professional death that follows from being labeled unreliable or politically tone-deaf. No one has to fire you formally. The invitations stop. The grants dry up. The department stops protecting you. Group behavior does the rest.

I do not romanticize the red-pill posture. It is often lonely, and it does not pay well. But the alternative is to pretend that evidence stops mattering once it threatens the story. Behind my interest in the copper is a long-standing rebellion against that academic etiquette. Truth is not a popularity contest.

Here are the primary reasons I find the case for significant transatlantic movement of Lake Superior copper, and associated cultural contact, between roughly 3000 BCE and 10000 BCE persuasive. The list is not exhaustive, and not every item is equally strong. Taken together, they form a pattern that orthodoxy has not adequately answered.

First, the sheer volume and purity of the copper. Prehistoric miners removed enormous quantities of nearly pure native copper from the Lake Superior region. Much of it is not accounted for in the surviving North American archaeological inventory. Bronze Age Mediterranean societies consumed copper at industrial scale. A source of cold-workable, high-purity copper would have been economically transformative. The Uluburun shipwreck, dated to around 1320 BCE, off the coast of Turkey, carried approximately 10 tons of copper ingots, along with tin and other luxury goods. The vessel was a substantial, sophisticated craft. If such ships were operating in the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, then the technological capacity for longer voyages in the northern Atlantic existed earlier.

Second, long-distance trade is already conceded inside North America. Hopewell people obtained copper from the Superior region and obsidian from the Yellowstone area. Distances of 900 miles or more, traveled on foot or by water, are accepted without controversy. Once that capacity is granted, the additional claim that no one ever continued the northern route via Hudson Bay, Greenland, Iceland, and the British Isles becomes an assumption rather than a demonstrated barrier. Sea levels were lower for long stretches of the relevant period. Coastal and island-hopping routes would have been more forgiving than they are today.

The Lesson of Captain Bligh:

Third, human capability for open-boat ocean travel is not theoretical. After the mutiny on the Bounty, Captain William Bligh and a small loyal crew covered roughly 3,618 nautical miles in a 23-foot open launch, navigating by memory, dead reckoning, and the stars, reaching Timor in about 45 to 47 days. They avoided hostile landings and stretched meager provisions across the Pacific. If a determined 18th-century British officer could do that without charts under survival conditions, then Bronze Age or earlier sailors, with purpose, better vessels, and knowledge of prevailing winds and currents, could have managed the northern Atlantic circuit. The Phoenicians and earlier Mediterranean seafarers were not less capable.

Fourth, certain artifacts refuse to fit neatly. The Newberry Tablet, recovered in 1896 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula after a storm toppled a tree and exposed objects entangled in the roots, carried inscriptions in 140 squares. Photographs survive; the original deteriorated after poor storage. Some researchers have argued the signs resemble Cypro-Minoan or related scripts. The discovery predates modern knowledge of Linear A and related systems. A tree of that size does not grow overnight over a planted modern fraud. The Michigan Relics as a broader category include clear forgeries, but the Newberry find has peculiarities that keep it from being dismissed with a wave of the hand. Similar problems attach to other contested pieces such as the Wilmington Tablet from the Adena context in Ohio. Orthodoxy prefers to label them all frauds aimed at dispossessing indigenous claims. That explanation is politically convenient. It is not always archaeologically decisive.

Cocaine in Egyptian Mummies:

Fifth, the botanical evidence from Egyptian mummies. In 1992, toxicologist Svetlana Balabanova and colleagues reported traces of nicotine and cocaine in tissues and hair of Egyptian mummies spanning a wide date range. Cocaine is derived from a New World plant. Nicotine is more complicated because other Old World plants contain it, yet the concentrations and the presence of cocaine raised the contact question immediately. Subsequent work has been contested, with contamination from modern handling or insecticides offered as explanations. Forensic-style testing, as used in criminal courts, produced the original results. The debate continues, but the data did not vanish simply because it was inconvenient.

Sixth, architectural and astronomical parallels. The lunar standstill alignments at Stonehenge have counterparts in the Hopewell earthworks of Ohio, particularly the Newark complex. Dolmens and related megalithic forms appear in the Jordan Valley, the British Isles, New England, and the Upper Great Lakes region. Mainstream geology attributes many of the American examples to glacial deposition. The formal similarities and the association of some of these landscapes with skull cults, beer brewing, and ritual architecture at sites like Göbekli Tepe (and related early Holocene complexes) invite comparison rather than automatic dismissal. A submerged stone alignment in Grand Traverse Bay, located in 2007 at a depth of roughly 40 feet by Mark Holley, dates to a period when lake levels were lower, and the area was dry land. Media called it a “Stonehenge.” Holley himself has been more cautious, describing a long linear arrangement rather than a classic henge. The date range, however, places human activity on that landscape thousands of years before the classical Hopewell.

Seventh, cultural and religious correspondences. Skull veneration, psychedelic or beer-based ritual, and communication with non-ordinary intelligences appear in early Near Eastern contexts, in Greek mystery practices that laced wine, and in ethnographic accounts of North American shamanism. The same pattern of entities contacted through altered states recurs. I do not treat this as proof of direct migration of priests. I treat it as evidence that the same spiritual technology and the same class of non-human intelligences were being engaged on both sides of the ocean. The Canaanite and broader Levantine world that produced the biblical accounts of Rephaim and related giant clans occupied the same landscape of dolmens and high places. Early newspaper reports of large skeletal remains in Ohio mounds were later suppressed or explained away, partly because they complicated the emerging political narrative that all significant pre-Columbian culture was indigenous and that European presence began with Columbus. The political utility of that narrative does not make it complete history.

Eighth, the northern route is geographically coherent. From the copper districts one can move by water and portage toward Hudson Bay, then by sea past Greenland and Iceland to the British Isles and down the Atlantic coast into the Mediterranean. The Odyssey, though a literary work, preserves descriptions of long days that fit higher latitudes better than the confined Mediterranean. Most classical literature of the period did not survive. What remains is a thin sample. Treating Homer’s poem as pure fantasy while ignoring the possibility that it encodes remembered routes is a choice, not a necessity. Troy was real. The ships of the period were real. The copper cargoes were real.

It’s All About the Bog People

Ninth, recent discoveries continue to complicate the closed story. Windover in Florida yielded remarkably well-preserved brains and evidence of a caring, structured society thousands of years ago, whose genetic profile does not map neatly onto later-known tribes. Poverty Point, the Adena and Hopewell sequences, and Cahokia (whose Monk’s Mound remains one of the largest earthen pyramids in the Americas) show complex, interconnected societies that moved materials and ideas across vast distances. Each new site that surfaces, whether under construction or by sonar, forces another quiet revision. The institutional response is usually to absorb the data into the existing indigenous-only model and move on. The model is stretched thinner with every decade.

I could continue. The point is not that every anomalous tablet is genuine or that every newspaper giant story from the 19th century is accurate. The point is that the cumulative weight of mining scale, missing metal, admitted intra-continental trade, demonstrated seafaring capacity, contested but persistent artifacts, botanical anomalies, architectural parallels, and ritual correspondences is more than noise. It is a signal. Orthodoxy’s refusal to engage it seriously is itself evidence of the group behavior problem I began with.

Jewell’s Book is a Good Start

I finished Jewell’s book and found it useful precisely because it stays relatively measured. I go further than he does in terms of chronological depth and the frequency of contact. Lower sea levels, better boats than we sometimes assume, and powerful economic and spiritual incentives make repeated voyages plausible across millennia. The same human ingenuity that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, that organized the copper trade of the eastern Mediterranean, and that produced the precise lunar geometry of the Ohio earthworks is not suddenly incompetent when the Atlantic intervenes.

The blue-pill life is comfortable. It comes with pensions, conference invitations, and the warm feeling of belonging. The red-pill alternative does not. I have watched capable people choose the paycheck. I understand the choice. I do not respect it when it requires pretending that inconvenient evidence does not exist. Whether the subject is COVID data, election integrity, or the copper of Lake Superior, the pattern is the same. Group survival is prioritized over truth-seeking. That is why the conversation keeps getting shut down. That is also why it will not stay shut down. Physical evidence has a longer half-life than institutional consensus.

The copper mines of Lake Superior are one of the largest archaeological stories still sitting in plain sight. They should be mainstream. Serious, multi-disciplinary work that follows the metal, the isotopes, the boat technology, and the ritual parallels wherever they lead is overdue. I will continue to say so. Popularity is not the measure. Evidence is.

I base my opinions about Lake Superior Copper Trade again on these factors:

My trip to the Upper Peninsula
The Newberry tablet.
The Dolmans of the Near East.
The admission that copper was traded by the Hopewell culture, 900 miles away.
That Captain Bligh traveled from Tonga to Timor — Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) 3,600 nautical miles over 36 days with only 1 week of food and water. It was a death sentence.
Cocaine and tobacco in Egypt, 1992: the material is in the hair shafts, not contamination.
The Uluburun shipwreck (1300 BCE) shows Egypt, Canaan, Cyprus, and the Aegean were part of a massive trade network. George Bass.
Stonehenge off Traverse City, 9000 years ago. Validates Newberry. It was first discovered in 2007 by sonar.
Of course, Windover.
Communication might have occurred through shamans rather than through evolutionary contact.
LiDAR in South America
Cahokia
The Odyssey path.
Poverty Point and Olmecs, my Wilmington Tablet

Notes

1. Roger L. Jewell, Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America (Jewell Histories, various editions). Summarizes the scale of prehistoric extraction and the Mediterranean trader hypothesis.

2. Susan R. Martin, Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin (Wayne State University Press, 1999). Mainstream archaeological synthesis of Native mining and trade.

3. On the Uluburun wreck and its copper cargo, see the Institute of Nautical Archaeology summaries and Cemal Pulak’s publications; roughly ten tons of copper ingots, late 14th century BCE.

4. Captain Bligh’s open-boat voyage: standard historical accounts place the distance at approximately 3,618 nautical miles in 45–47 days.

5. Newberry Tablet: contemporary newspaper reports from 1896; later discussions in epigraphic and alternative archaeology literature; original largely destroyed by poor storage.

6. Balabanova et al., early 1990s toxicological studies on Egyptian mummies; subsequent controversy over contamination versus genuine presence of New World alkaloids.

7. Grand Traverse Bay stone alignment: Mark Holley, 2007 discovery; media “Stonehenge” framing versus Holley’s more restrained description of a linear feature on a former shoreline.

8. John E. Hancock, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley (Smithsonian Books). Documents the UNESCO sites and indigenous framing.

9. On Hopewell long-distance trade networks, standard archaeological literature accepts Superior copper and Rocky Mountain obsidian among other materials.

Selected Bibliography

Bass, George F., et al. Publications on the Uluburun shipwreck (Institute of Nautical Archaeology).

Hancock, John E. Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley. Smithsonian Books.

Jewell, Roger L. Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America. Jewell Histories.

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

Pulak, Cemal. Various papers on the Uluburun cargo and Late Bronze Age maritime trade.

Additional primary reports on the Newberry find (1896 local Michigan newspapers), Balabanova toxicology papers (1992 onward), and Holley’s Grand Traverse Bay survey notes. Classical sources include Homer’s Odyssey (any standard translation) for the literary reflection of long-distance seafaring memory.

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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