I enjoyed my visit with Zuri Hall and Nathalie Basha on the noon time program Living Dayton to promote my new book Tail of the Dragon. I was very impressed with the production quality and the executive producer handling of Rhonda Roberts to perform their brand of a daytime news/lifestyle program on Channel 2 in Dayton every weekday from noon to 1 PM. The show is a nice mixture of national and regional news mixed with lifestyle segments dotted throughout each episode. It had a living newspaper feel that Zuri and Nathalie are the heartbeats giving it life. I had been looking for a good television program to do the kind of interview that Zuri and I did on October 9th, 2012, that captured the mood and feel of the Great Smoky Mountains as shown in my new book. Living Dayton was the perfect forum with just the right mix of news—which is my background, and personality interaction that is so common with creative arts like book and movie promotion. To see the clip from the episode of Living Dayton click on the link below which goes to the Living Dayton website, or watch the clip that I took some creative liberty with to create a video advertising Tail of the Dragon.
As I was interviewing with Zuri I thought about the gradual transition that I had undergone in the last two years, from a political activist trying to make sense of an impossible situation centering on political theater that put me on TV often and gave me a lot of opportunity to do a lot of talk radio. But much to my frustration, no amount of logic injected into the debates would ever go anywhere. The political system at its core is essentially corrupt, and cannot be saved directly. Over the last couple of summers my long time friend Gery Deer had been trying to talk me into using my other creative talents to reach more people without getting pulled into the black hole of politics. And in many ways, the reason I wrote Tail of the Dragon was to take what I had learned in political activism and apply it in a story that articulated properly the very complicated news stories of our day, because out of all the interviews I had ever done, they end up lost to most people because taken as isolated issues, they are never portrayed correctly upon the tapestry of living that is quite involved, interconnected, and difficult to understand. The best vehicle for grappling with the kind of issues that I am interested in is a novel, and this is how Tail of the Dragon came to be.
Thanks to Zuri in a lot of ways, I can say that this interview was one of the most pleasant that I’ve ever had. I had several realizations during the interview that occurred at the point in discussion talking about the kind of road that the real Tail of the Dragon is, where I realized that I was stepping into a new door, professionally. Even though I had done dozens, maybe hundreds of interviews in the past on other projects and issues that I’ve attached my name to, this was the first interview that I had done over a body of work that I’ve produced designed to attack the big themes, where I could sit back and not be personally attached to the subject matter intimately. It was very nice to sit on a couch with a competent hostess and discuss themes without having to have my name on the line to succeed or fail a political issue like I experienced in my various levy campaigns—where it was my name alone that stood between antagonizing anger, and financial success. As I sat on that couch speaking with Zuri, I realized that I liked it—a lot.
I enjoyed the emotional distance being an author gives to the subject matter and this interview afforded me the proper distance I have been creatively craving for a very long time. Doing that interview with Zuri made me want to write more books so that I could give more such interviews, because the depth of the communication was so much more robust than what I’ve experienced in the past with more targeted, and more emotional issues. It was quite a pleasure to go through all the work it takes to write a novel, to get it published and go through all the production tasks, to have it culminate in an interview with Zuri Hall on a couch reflecting the past of Phil Donahue mixing with the future of these two hospitable hostesses. And when you come upon such doors, you turn the knob and go inside.
Rich Hoffman
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When many thought I had lost my mind months ago by publicly calling my political opponents latté sipping prostitutes with asses the size or car tires, I knew what I was doing. They thought I was playing by the old rules of politics that they had established. But I wasn’t. I was reflecting the front of the train mentally where people are beginning to realize that you cannot argue with some political ideologies, while others are out-right dangerous, and cannot be reasoned with. When those ideologies are confronted, they must be crushed without apology because no matter how nice you are to those types, or how much you attempt to cooperate with them, they have their agenda, and they will lie, steal, and manipulate anything it takes to destroy you. So compromise is not a definition compatible with the current war we are in. And at the front of this war of ideas are books of old and books of new along with movies competing with the entertainment that has captured generations. The battle is being fought there, for the hearts and minds of audiences in music, movies, television and books.
This is why Atlas Shrugged has been so important in fueling the Tea Party movement, because such burning movements need food for the thoughts, so that context can be placed on the argument. And the movie version of Atlas Shrugged increases book sales, which ultimately gets more people thinking seriously about free market economies and personal liberty. Communists have The Communist Manifesto and they have used it like a club to hammer America into the kind of mixed economy, mixed political ideology that America is enduring presently. So it is only fair that those of us who reject those ideas are using Atlas Shrugged as our own club to beat down the communists, who are virtually everywhere like a termite nest in a hollowed out tree. From the outside the tree looks healthy with leaves on the branches until a great storm comes and breaks the tree in half with a heavy wind to reveal how much damage the termites have done over a long period of time. So for me, and it appears the makers of Atlas Shrugged Part II–we are at war, and we are working toward common goals. We are at war against collectivism and the machine that was built-in the entertainment industry to advance communism through the college professor who taught young media students journalism, to the story editors who work for the major Hollywood studios, to the producers who associate with Communist Party USA directly or indirectly through the Democratic Party, to the film critics who work for the newspapers. It is time to challenge them with material that represents capitalism, and individual strength against the collective.
Playing such a game does not call for handshakes or tip-toeing around the issue. I can declare that I won’t do it anymore. Playing nice with those collective advocates isn’t going to happen on my end of the deal ever again. And I’m not alone in this stance. Increasingly over the last year it has been understood that collectivists do not deserve compassion, they do not deserve understanding, because they truly want to destroy the version of America that we love, so the gloves are coming off. To get a sense of this all one has to do is look at the way John Aglialoro has approached the release of Atlas Shrugged Part One as opposed to Atlas Shrugged Part Two. In Part One he had a big opening and invited Hollywood to view the film along with other media professionals and they did exactly what Ellsworth Toohey did in The Fountainhead, which was attempt to crush Atlas Shrugged Part One because they didn’t like the message, because they wanted to suppress it in favor of collectivist oriented entertainment, which has had a monopoly for a long time in America—too long. Aglialoro’s trust in the media business to treat him fairly cost him dearly, millions of dollars of lost box office receipts because the system shut down access to the film. Later, once Part One hit Netflix and came out on DVD, people rented it, and watched it, and enjoyed it, once the media hype had died down.
This time, for Part Two, it’s a whole different story. Aglialoro and his team prior to the October 12th release of Atlas Shrugged ‘Ether Or’ have had a premier in Washington D.C. and two screenings in Los Angeles, and not a single member of the traditional press was invited. Aglialoro said of the decision, “They won’t like it, so why give them the sword to cut off our own head.” His approach was to invite those they know are with them to see and write about the film leaving the media out of the loop. More or less, the Atlas Shrugged film group is by-passing the traditional media, the studio system, all the channels who control the flow of information, and they are well aware that it will ruffle feathers, which is the point when you’re at war. John Aglialoro, when talking about the media’s response to Part I said, “The movie critics en masse immaturely bullied Atlas Shrugged mercilessly. Not because the cast or producers made a technically or artistically inferior movie, but because of its philosophical message of individualism. That’s what’s unforgivable. The critics prostituted their profession for politics.” Ahhh, it’s so nice to hear someone else say that, to have the balls to put his personal fortune on the line to make a film the establishment will absolutely hate while he is hanging by a thread at great personal risk to himself, he tells the media that they “prostituted themselves.” That’s the measure of a man, and the new way that the battles will be fought for now on in this war of ideas.
So understand that we are at war, and what’s at stake is freedom over collectivism, and money is the ballot box. This is why I am so intent to see Atlas Shrugged Part II successful, because in this kind of war I am the media. So are you dear reader, because you can’t trust the traditional sources on this matter. They support only one kind of idea, and that is the one advocated by collectivism, which is a crime against truth. If the ideas of collectivism were so strong, they would not fear competition from the theories of individual liberty and laissez-faire capitalism over the crony capitalism of a mixed economy. But they do fear it, and wish with all their power to shut down the message. I plan to use the literature that gained traction in the past to pound my wishes into the future, and I plan also to add to it with new work for future generations. But surrendering life to the quicksand of the collective is simply not an option. Peace with the collectivist is not desired. Their way of life can only be cast away from the continent of The United States because they have proven a desire to rule with a dictatorship of the proletariat, and the damage they have done to millions of people and the human race in general has been, and is unforgivable. Much harsher language will come in the days that have not yet seen the sun. That is a promise.
In the meantime, prepare to see Atlas Shrugged Part 2 at a theater near you on the weekend of October 12th. Go see the movie for no other reason than to stick a fork in the eye of those who have embraced collectivism at the expense of personal freedom.
Rich Hoffman
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Altruism is one of the most sinister forms of human behavior ever to take hold on the human race, and it is so dangerous that like a parasitic organism disguising itself as part of one’s own body with full intention to continue feeding off that body, or else kill it, altruism allows bad negative behavior to be disguised as good. When people declare that they willingly gave to charity, or donated their money to the Boy Scouts, or made a great sacrifice for the good of everyone else, what is really being said is that there are fundamental lies in the life of the propagator that are being concealed. While it is genuinely nice to help others with whatever difficulties they are enduring, such action may not technically be good. It is the definition of “good” that is at fault, the measurement of “good” that is most at error and allows bad people to believe they are acting honorably, and with justice for the “greater well-being.”
When a school levy is proposed to a community, it is propagated on behalf of the “good of the children” when in fact it is a lie, it’s the good of the labor unions and teachers’ bank accounts. When a police or fire levy is proposed to a community it is for the “safety of the neighborhood” that is the mantra of destruction, for the levy does not go to helping make anyone safe, as the work is currently being hired out to complete. It is to protect the pay increases and pensions of the workers without having to increase their personal production to increase their revenue streams. The neighborhood is used as the cover story to hide the greed and evil of lazy public employees wanting to pay off their bass boats while believing to themselves that socially the action is for the “greater good.” Consider the Washington congressman who attends a charity dinner for a “needy cause” but the reality is that the congressman is there not for the cause but to network with lobbyists so that they can learn how they can enrich themselves through the money being funneled into their direction. There are millions of possible variations to these examples, but in short altruism is used as a mask to hide much evil—so much so that any good created from those enterprises is destroyed by the actions in reality.
Altruism is evil not because it occasionally, accidentally does good to a small few; it is evil because it seeks to hide evil behind the mask of goodness. If the trend of altruism were removed from human society, that mask would not be able to hide such evil, and the evil could then be dealt with in a straight forward way. For each person who heard of Burzynski’s cancer treatments who said, “oh, but what will happen to my job if people are cured of cancer,” each of them are committing a sinister evil in hoping for the continued death and decay that cancer creates just so they can continue to be employed making the stupid pink ribbons that are passed out at football games and other social events to project a belief in goodness. When someone proclaims that society should “sacrifice” their time and money to great causes—look out, there is a villain among you. The great causes are in most cases an artificially created crises designed to use emotional turmoil to bring about financial gain to the villain.
Think of the man who cheats on his wife Saturday night with a grotesque orgy of sin, drinking, gambling, and sexual forays in the bright lights of Vegas then catches the red-eye flight back home to attend church with the family on Sunday. The members of his congregation see in the pews with them a great man who loves his family. They think even higher of the man because he placed a $200 donation in the basket. The man’s wife, the children and the congregation from their vantage point believe the man to be virtuous because he gave a great sum of money to the church to help give the entire congregation a church to gather in to rejoice in the presence of God. What they don’t know, that behind the mask of altruism the man took the $200 from a prostitute who passed out in his Vegas bedroom and that he won over $5000 at the tables that his wife will never know about because he plans to spend that money else ware. The $200 is cover under the mask of altruism to hide his crimes and camouflage his intentions.
If altruism were frowned down upon in our society, ironically things would improve a great deal socially. The thieves who hide behind large charitable organizations, the pudgy socialites of community foundations, the school levy advocates, the fire chief who appears about to give birth crying for a new fire truck, the cancer awareness parasites, the Sunday morning do-gooder, they are all harboring evil by allowing goodness to be eaten away from the inside out through the social recognition of altruism. Unfortunately goodness has been captured in this way by bad people, who are allowed to believe they are good due to the definition of goodness being corrupted by evil, and we are not talking about isolated incidents—this is a widespread tragedy. In almost every case, if the tendency toward altruism is examined honestly, many evils will be seen just below the surface. For those who claim there is not enough altruism in the world, behold, there is your thief. Examine their lives carefully and you will find a villain seeking to hide their crimes behind the banality of altruism.
Rich Hoffman
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I have said it before; Epcot Center is my favorite place on planet earth. I am most happy, most comfortable, most excited about the future of mankind when I visit the Epcot Center. I fully believe that Disney desired to build the theme park to prevent the future that is at the beginning of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. It is becoming increasingly evident that the human race has had to reinvent itself not just once, not just twice, not just three times, but many, many, many times over millions of years and Ayn Rand was aware of this tragic trend. People who hate Ayn Rand’s work are the kind of people Rand as an author was trying to warn society about. And for those who want an easy way to understand Ayn Rand, and are mystified as to why her book Atlas Shrugged is so beloved, and why to this day The Fountainhead is quietly cherished, it is her book Anthem that grabs hold of the themes that would become her legacy, for it is aptly named. The last two chapters of Anthem are two of the most declarative, and profound statements in human literature by an author of any kind or time.
In 2012 communism has already corrupted much of society and the entire globe is marching backwards on a predictable path that was clear to Disney and Rand many years ago. Rand sets Anthem approximately 200 years into the future of the present and in that society the word “I” has been eradicated from all human knowledge. The time we presently live in was called The Unmentionable Times and the entire society assumes that communism has taken full hold, and is the governing world power. The result is that innovation has been eliminated and society has regressed back into a primitive form. In Anthem, there is much celebration when their future society has spent 50 years developing and gaining permits from the World Council to invent a candle. When the hero named Equality 7-2521 discovers evidence of our present civilization in a box of unused light bulbs he takes it to his masters thinking they will be very happy. They of course are not. In fact, they are furious, and desire to burn him in a public execution. While reading about these events I couldn’t help but think of all the executions done during The Dark Ages, and clearly this was what Rand was concerned with in her plot device. The theme is that collectivism socially by its very nature regresses backwards and to such an extent that the people in Equality 7-2521’s time are not even allowed to contemplate the events of “The Unmentionable Time.”
Modern readers may wish to snicker at Ayn Rand’s premise in Anthem. They may find it hard to believe that such a thing could ever happen which is understandable in a world of smart phones, air planes, and the Internet. But Rand had watched the process happen first hand before she fled the Soviet Union which was chronicled in her book We The Living. She watched the backwards social advancement of collectivism and she hated it. When she came to The United States she wrote about life in Russia under communism in We The Living that the publisher Cassell put in print. But they turned down Anthem saying that “the author does not understand socialism.” Rand was trying to publish Anthem during The Red Decade and few people today understand how powerful the communist influence was in America, because after the Cold War, our grandparents didn’t talk about it. Even Ronald Reagan gave communism a chance until he made a film and witness firsthand the destruction by socialism in the small tenements around Elstree Studios, in England. People today laugh at Ayn Rand and her anger at collectivism because they do not have the context of history in their understanding. Few people know today what life was like before FDR’s New Deal, which was a direct response to The Red Decade. They assume that labor unions always existed, that there was always Medicare, always Social Security, always a time when money wasn’t backed by gold, and that public education was always the center of every community. In reality, most of those things happened after Anthem’s publication because Rand saw it coming, and tried to warn Americans to not follow the demise of the country she had just ran from.
But Uncle Walt listened, and he corresponded with Rand, specifically about Anthem. And his answer to the crises exhibited in the novel that humanity might not forget the achievements it had so far gained was a new amusement park dedicated to the cause. It would appear that Disney wanted to fight collectivism through creating a place that would not allow technology to fall under the rule of proletariat dictatorships. Epcot Center was intended to stop the constant periods of invention, then regression that has impeded the human race for many beginnings over time. That is why even with all the controversy surrounding Ayn Rand, even with all the modern progressive types who run Disney World and the many youthful employees who have been raised under philosophies of collectivism, that Rand’s quote is prominently displayed at the American Heritage Pavilion. Disney was very concerned about making good family entertainment which they still are great at today, but Uncle Walt—the man behind the billions and billions of dollars generated by the Walt Disney Company is one of Ayn Rand’s “men of the mind” from Atlas Shrugged, and he knew it. A world without people like Walt Disney, or the modern day equivalent in George Lucas would be a desolate world already well on its way toward the beginning of Anthem.
I was pleasantly surprised that Rand didn’t stop in the dystopian arena that surrounded stories of the period like Soylent Green and Brave New World. Anthem goes beyond those grim visions and actually earns its title in a bold way that would later become The Fountainhead. Anthem is a bold declaration to the world of the human right to be an independent man. The book is awesome and if you’ve ever visited the Epcot Center and find that you love the place you will love Anthem. If you are the type of person who finds Epcot Center boring, you will probably hate Anthem, and Disney had people like you in mind, that’s why there is a Downtown Disney. Go shopping and eat some ice cream if you are that kind of person. But for the thinkers, the lovers of life, the energetic minds striving to see what is next for the human race fighting against collectivism to achieve those next steps against the tide of communism that is attempting to place us all in shackles, Anthem a book that you must read.
For the advocates of collectivism who are perplexed as to why John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow spent small fortunes against conventional Hollywood logic to make Atlas Shrugged Part 2, as fans show up to see the film in spite of the bad reviews and why Ayn Rand books are flying off of book shelves in perplexing quantities, all you need to do is read that plague from Ayn Rand displayed proudly at the Epcot Center to understand that Anthem is more than a warning on the direction of mankind. It also exhibits perfectly the two different directions of two different types of people functioning in America today and the battle that is presently being waged. The fight of our day is to avoid for the first time that human beings have breathed air into their lungs to revert into collectivism after having small tastes of freedom. If we ever did, the Epcot Center would be available to remind mankind of what it’s giving up in order to have a world of the inclusive “WE.” (collectivism)
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Stunning is the best way to describe Ayn Rand’s classic novel, We The Living. Absolutely stunning! I feel upon completing that novel similar to what I felt when I finished Allen Eckert’s novel The Frontiersman—by asking the question, “why hasn’t this book been read by every single eighth grader in America?” Because We The Living should be read by every single person who either calls themselves Americans, or wants to become one. The book is absolutely knock-your-socks-off—stunning. The entire time I was reading the book, I kept thinking back to my teenage years when the restaurant chain Wendy’s used to air commercials like the one shown below at the height of the Cold War during President Reagan’s time in the Oval Office.
I used to think that commercial was a gross exaggeration of what life in the Soviet Union was really like. I thought it was just propaganda designed to steer people away from communism and toward capitalism. But I now know because I read We The Living, that life in the Soviet Union was about 20 times worse than what was shown in that old Wendy’s commercial and I am literally stunned that academia in The United States embraced communism to the high level that they have, because We The Living takes readers on a very intimate journey into the lives of many characters who are struggling to live under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat brought about by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
I suppose I have to thank John Aglialoro who is the financial mind behind making Ayn Rand’s classic book Atlas Shrugged into a movie. It was because of the upcoming Atlas Shrugged Part II film that I picked up We The Living to enjoy while I waited for the movie to come out. I waited so I could celebrate Ayn Rand in the weeks leading up to the film’s release with a book that I hadn’t read by her. If not for the Atlas Shrugged movies I may never have picked up We The Living because honestly I have had no desire to read about life in Russia, even though I have always been curious about it. When I think of Russia I think of snow and communism, neither of which I am particularly fond of. I like snow a little bit, but I absolutely despise communism. Collectivism for me has always been a dirty word, well before I ever bumped into Ayn Rand’s work. I feel that way to such a degree that I don’t even let people call me, “brother,” including when I was a part of a large motorcycle group in Ohio. I withdrew as Vice-President of that group because I recognized the collectivism in the bikers as I was making a documentary of how motorcycle riders were, so “independent.” I abandoned the documentary when I acknowledged that most bikers were behaving with collectivism down to the simple process of riding in formation behind a pack leader on the highway which to me was unacceptable. As I delved into the Easy Rider Chillicothe Rodeo and learned that public displays of sexual intercourse and drunkenness were important parts of the culture, I felt so disenfranchised that along with college fraternities, athletic institutions, academic politics and labor unions determined collectivism was a rampant problem that threatened the sanctity of The United States by intending to crush individual identity.
Today Ayn Rand is so hated, so despised by all the members of groups like the ones mentioned because her opinions threaten their existence. Yet the truth is the truth. It cannot be escaped. The hatred for Ayn Rand will be on full display once again when John Aglialoro, Harmon Kaslow and the rest of the Atlas Shrugged film team release ‘Either Or,’ (Part II of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy) on October 12th. Fans will love the movie. Collectivists, democrats, progressives, communists, intelligentsia, hippies, welfare recipients, neurotic parents, bleeding heart liberals, tree hugging green tech advocates, most of the viewership of Comedy Central, MTV, and fans of daytime soap operas will hate the movie. In fact if forced to watch the film they will wither about as though Holy Water had been cast upon their foreheads during a Catholic exorcism ritual inciting demons to flee from their bodies when Atlas Shrugged Part II hits screens in spite of all their efforts to keep the world from reading Ayn Rand or seeing a movie adaptation of her literary work. The question then comes to pass, why is she so hated? If so many people think one way, and only a few think the way she did—in a democracy—aren’t the majority entitled to rule over the majority? The answer is———a resounding——NO!
To understand who Ayn Rand was and how she thought, reading her book We The Living is absolutely essential. I can understand why Rand’s later characters are so hated by collectivists. John Galt and Howard Roark were the way they were in Rand’s later literary work because it was revealed in We The Living the true relationship that Ayn Rand had with her very first love as a 17-year-old teenager in a man named Leo. Leo in the book We The Living was trying to live a good life under a Soviet system that absolutely would not allow for such people to exist, and all during the book I kept thinking that life in America is not very much different. The heroine of We The Living is Kira Argounov which is the literal antithesis of Ayn Rand herself living in Petrograd in the year of 1924 trying to start a life with the man she loved, which was impossible without allowing her personal identity to be smashed into collective soup.
We The Living was the first time I had ever gained intimate knowledge of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. This was my first realistic glance at what went on behind the Berlin Wall, and why people risked life and limb to climb over, to get away from the oppressive, Soviet dominated East Germany. We The Living takes readers on a journey into the bread lines at the co-operatives, into the minds of the communists ruling as Karl Marx’s proletariat, into the minds of the bourgeois, into their education system, into their economic engine, into their whole philosophy. The genius of the book is in how effectively the characters are developed so that their demise into having their individuality stripped away completely is revealed from the years of 1924 to 1926. In just a few years, once proud families were stripped down to nothing, forced to live like insects in public housing seized by the state, and begging for a job run by the state so they could receive a food ration card. The living conditions were absolutely appalling. The way the communists gained control of each and every person’s life in Russia was revealed in graphic detail and their motivations for doing so was also exposed. Many of those methods can be found in the modern United Nations Agenda 21 initiative, which was written by former fans of open communism, now calling themselves socialists and progressives.
For me the most heart-wrenching scene was when a young couple was thrown into Siberian jails because of their counter-revolutionary intentions against the great Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The couple simply wanted to eat, and because they didn’t belong to any of the trade unions, they couldn’t get a job, and therefore couldn’t get a food ration card. So they plotted to overthrow the government by passing out flyers in factories urging people to stand up against the communists. They were sentenced to 10 years in Siberia at different prisons which they both knew was a death sentence because nobody came back from Siberia. They typically died from suicide or consumption, there just wasn’t any food in that frozen land but what was brought in by train. The couple rode for most of the trip together in a train holding each other as long as they could. Then at a particular train stop the woman was ripped from the arms of her man and put on another train to head to a different prison and that was the last they would ever see of each other ever. It was a terrible scene beautifully written. I often thought of Steven Spielberg’s Schindlers’ List during these kinds of scenes where the content was just terrible, but the delivery was magnificent.
The book is filled with scenes like that; all of them absolutely catastrophic. It is no wonder that it took three years to get published in the United States in 1936 and was rejected by a dozen publishing houses before Macmillan finally considered it over the violent protests of Granville Hicks, who would later get revenge on Ayn Rand through the New York Times when he was sought out by them to review Atlas Shrugged twenty years later. The owner of Macmillan overruled Hicks by saying “I don’t know whether the book will make any money, but that it was important and ought to be published.” Hicks was revealed to be a card-carrying member of Communist Party USA as was many members of the media, academia, and labor unions in the period of the 1920’s to the 1950’s. They were later forced to go underground into hiding behind the Democratic Party disguised as political progressives. And it was clear that the Soviet Union Dictatorship of the Proletariat planned for the entire world to be converted to communism. They had extremely elaborate plans to move their utopia of misery to every nation on earth, and many in the United States were willing to help them do it, because they didn’t see the real conditions of what the people in the Soviet Union were undergoing. All they saw was the idealistic utterances broadcast from Moscow through the G.P.U, and later the K.G.B.
During my reading of We The Living I kept thinking of modern life in America and how much communism has shaped the way many people think. I thought of the green movement, particularly the smart meters that are going onto all of our homes for all the reasons that the government in 1920 Russia controlled the food supply, so that the citizens would have to follow instructions in order to eat, and if they stepped out of line, the card would be taken, and the people would starve. This control was not taken over night, but gradually, over a ten-year period. The same thing has been going on here in The United States over the last thirty years. Government, which leans toward communism by its very nature, is gaining control of the food supply, and is placing a particular emphasis on power supply. If the government can control how much electricity flows into a home, they can control the behavior of the people who live in that home and this is how so many people in Russia allowed themselves to be ruled by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, because their everyday lives were completely focused on just trying to eat. They didn’t have the time, or mind to question anything about freedom—because they were just trying to survive moment by moment, which was by design.
It would seem that a book written over 75 years ago would resemble very little of the modern world, but on virtually every page I read something that reminded me of what I read recently in my local newspaper, or heard from some politician declaring that the rich in America make too much money and that they should give some of it to the poor. That statement started in the Soviet Union in the opening days of communist rule chronicled so effectively in We The Living and we hear it today under labor unions, and politicians—particularly on the Democratic side. After reading We The Living it is not far-fetched at all to consider that communists would plot with great care to place a president into power like Obama. For those who have seen the movie Dreams of my Real Father, you know what I’m talking about. The communists have planned for such things as far back as the turn of the century. Progressives started in America what the communists did in Russia. The only difference was that America had a culture of independence that was difficult to overcome, and it would take a long time—but they were prepared to wait. In We The Living the communists spoke of Soviet education, which is alive and well in America right now. If you have a child in public school, they are getting that education right now. If you are going to college, or sending a child through college, then you already know the rest of the story. It is not by accident, it has all been on purpose. We The Living shows clearly what the plan has always been and we are living it today in 2012 what was planned with great detail in 1920 to implement.
If I hated communism before I read We The Living, I don’t think there are human words yet invented to describe the level I despise such a collective concept now. I liked Ayn Rand before I read We The Living, but now I think she may be the greatest author in the last 200 years. I think Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are two of the greatest books not only in American literature, but in world literature, and yes that includes the great classics. I would say that We The Living is more important than The Diary of Anne Frank, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, or The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. We The Living should be read by every single human being on planet earth.
We The Living is in its most simple form a skeleton key to understanding Ayn Rand. If only 50% of the book were true, which I think is closer to 80%, but even at fifty, Ayn Rand had great reason to hate communism and those who advocated it, which these days are a majority of the American population. Rand lost her first love to communism and she despises it for damn good reason. It destroyed everything she cared about. She was unique because she didn’t allow communism to crush her spirit the way it did so many of her friends and family. If she hadn’t gotten out of the country, she may have been crushed within a year or two of 1926 when a guest at a party she attended in Russia found out she was leaving The Soviet Union and asked her to get the message out of what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. “When you get there, tell them Russia is a huge cemetery and that we are all dying. Tell them We The Living told them.” Ayn Rand kept her promise and wrote We The Living which was criticized, and shut down in the United States for nearly 25 years. It was only after the success of Atlas Shrugged in 1957 that Random House finally re-released it to the public. Today We The Living is enjoying a renewed interest almost 80 years after its publication in large part because John Aglialoro, and Harmon Kaslow are making a modern movie of Ayn Rand’s work Atlas Shrugged and curious minds like mine are reading We The Living because we want more of what Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead offered. It is too bad that the new interest didn’t happen 60 years ago, otherwise America might avoid the pain and suffering it is about to go through. So when the bad reviews for Atlas Shrugged Part II come out, it is for all the reasons told above and more, not because the film is bad. Communist sympathizers, which extend from Barack Obama and Joe Biden all the way down to the local unionized firehouse and FOP station, do sympathize with communism. Anyone who preaches the message of the proletariat (middleclass) advocates communism and that message is no clearer upon the world stage than in the book We The Living.
We The Living is a must read. If you have not read it then you must do so as soon as possible. I would recommend closing this site right now and going over to Amazon.com and buying We The Living right now! Don’t rent any movies, don’t go to any public meetings, don’t watch any sporting events until you have read this book and understand that the communism of that book is as real today as it was then. IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW IN AMERICA FOR GOD’S SAKE, and Ayn Rand was trying to warn the world, and they didn’t listen, because the communists were already in place the way the party began to come into power in 1915 in Russia, when the world thought the Bolsheviks were “small potatoes.” It is not an overstatement to say that this is an emergency. It might have taken nearly 80 years to get the message out, but don’t let it become 81 or 82 years. Get the message today so you can act tomorrow, because you have to know who and what you’re fighting. In America we let the communists change the names of what they are without calling them on it, and we are paying for it dearly. 12 years of the Bush presidents, 8 years of Clinton, and now 4 years of Obama have delivered America to the doors of communism as it was established as a world revolution in Petrograd–1924 after the revolution of 1917. And it took one little woman out of the millions trapped in that country of collectivism to escape and report to the world what was happening, and that the wave was about to hit them too. That warning came in her book We The Living, but people didn’t listen. So she knew that she had to provide a blueprint for how to rebuild society after communism collapsed it. That is why she wrote The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, so people could see for themselves how things “should” be, since they were unable to act based on what “was” happening. We The Living is just a stunning portrayal of life in the Soviet Union and a vision of what intelligentsia has in mind for America, and provides the evidence to even the dullest minds what the intent has always been. It is a book that must be read, must be understood, and must be communicated to every friend, family member and loved one. It is in my mind the most crucial, historical novel of our time, not because its content is uplifting, but because it’s all too real.
Rich Hoffman
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When people point out that government is out of control, that it must be pulled back into reasonable levels of staffing and regulation, they are often viewed by mainstream society to be radical dissidents who are acting as counter-revolutionaries to the revolution of socialism that has infected America since Teddy Roosevelt used Presidential Executive Orders to bypass congress, and make rulings like a king over the legislative process in the House of Representatives, and the Senate. For many years this process has been abused to reflect the personal desires of American presidents, but other than FDR who had 11 Executive Orders over a 16 year period, most of the presidents up until Bush Jr. showed a tendency to not abuse their power.
However starting with Bush Jr., presidents began to run the Executive Branch as a dictatorship and it cannot be questioned that the national deficit has increased along the lines of presidential executive orders. When congress and the senate learns that a President is willing to bypass the entire legislative process with monarchy-like executive orders they tend to have shown an unwillingness to engage in the hard discussions of balancing a budget and going against a president who may be their party representative, even though they know full well that the president has overstepped their boundaries in a thirst for power.
It was an Executive Order from Kennedy that made public sector unions legal in the United States which has led directly to the chaos in government budgets now being experienced with serious union resistance to austerity measures on budget cut-backs. Yet that is only one of the many Executive Orders issued by American presidents, which a small sampling can be seen below. The frequency of the issued Executive Orders obviously has increased over the last decade and demand censorship by the people of America. Reeling in the power of these politicians is the obligation of all Americans, and without a willingness to do the difficult, and “unpopular” work of tongue lashing out-of-control politicians, more Executive Orders can be expected in the future.
Here are a few of the Presidential Executive Orders over just 100 years, which started the modern progressive era that has caused so much trouble. There may be some debate about the numbers. Different sources are given below for comparison. But the general idea is evident.
EXECUTIVE ORDERS ISSUED : —
T. Roosevelt 3
Others to FDR NONE
FDR 11 in 16 years
Truman 5 in 7 years
Ike 2 in 8 years
Kennedy 4 in 3 years
LBJ 4 in 5 years
Nixon 1 in 6 years
Ford 3 in 2 years
Carter 3 in 4 years
Reagan 5 in 8 years
Bush 3 in 4 years
Clinton 15 in 8 years
George W. Bush 62 in 8 years
Obama 139 in 3½ years!
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990
Allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995
Allows the government to seize and control the communication media.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997
Allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998
Allows the government to take over ALL FOOD resources and farms.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000
Allows the government to MOBILIZE CIVILIANS INTO WORK brigades under government supervision.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001
Allows the government to take over all health, EDUCATION and welfare functions.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002
Designates the registration of all persons. Postmaster General to operate a “National Registration”
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003
Allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004
Allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005
Allows the government to take over RAILROADS, inland waterways and public storage facilities.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049
Assigns emergency preparedness function to Federal departments and agencies,
CONSOLIDATING 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051
Specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international TENSIONS and economic or financial crisis.
There are many more but this certainly provides context of just how serious the problems over executive orders truly is. Executive Orders are too reminiscent of a dictatorship and they should be ended as a practice that is today all too common. Obama in just 4 years has entirely too many Executive Orders. The whole reason for the orders is Obama wished to by-pass the legislative branch which is the direct representatives of the American public, so in issuing Executive Orders, Obama has declared that he does not respect the wishes of the American people.
The people who are wrong in the manner of politics today are all those who wish to continue a government that spends money in a deficit toward promises that do not make American culture stronger, and has a tendency not to respect elections leaning instead on cleaver public relations and executive orders to do whatever they want, just for the sake of doing it. It is time to have the serious discussion that little of anything in our current government is good for the future of America, or the people who make it a great country. There is no compromise with the kind of people who would dare to issue Executive Orders by-passing the legislative process so that politicians who are merely public servants can pretend they are kings.
An American President is not a king, a god, or even a celebrity. Our modern public wishes to see them this way out of an immaturity that mankind has not yet grown out of, but in philosophic principal a president is a servant of the people who elect them. The legacy of a president which so many are concerned with is not in the best interest of the country, it is only in the interest of a leader. In America, we are supposed to be a people who don’t require “leaders” to hold our hands while we cross the street, or wish to start a new business. Leaders are for weaklings in other countries. Presidents are not American leaders, and therefore should not have a right to issue Executive Orders like a European monarch. Yet they do, and the public lets them because people don’t wish confrontation or even ridicule by those in power. So they smile and line up to shake the hand of a shriveling politician who disguises their bad breath with bucketfuls of mouthwash—for it is more than tooth decay that the mouthwash hides in a typical politician, especially presidents. It’s a lust for power that is most easily seen in the behavior of Presidential Executive Orders that decays the soul of the small minds who crave public approval and votes so they can sit in an old building called The White House.
Rich Hoffman
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Thankfully—slowly, political candidates are learning not to be so nice, and to stick to the facts when debating a progressive, emotional candidate. We have covered this topic in great detail here at this sight, especially in regard to public schools run by progressive labor unions. But on the big stage of the Presidency, politicians have regulated themselves to nice hand shakes and careful jabs marred in politeness since Ronald Reagan was president. That is, until October 3, 2012 when Mitt Romney decimated the hapless Barack Obama in a debate that clearly showed what a businessman with a successful background looks like next to a political activist raised on communism by his parents, grandparents, college professors, and community agitators in Chicago with no experience in even running a fast-food restaurant—let alone an entire country.
I am not a fan of machine politics, and I am not particularly excited about the kind of government that Mitt Romney wishes to bring to The United States. But as far as having an understanding of how the economy works, and business in general, he is clearly the better candidate over Barack Obama, and this was displayed vividly in the first Presidential debate of the 2012 elections. Credit for the victory belongs to Romney. If anyone watching the debates still wishes to vote for Barack Obama it is because they are simply too stupid to understand what was they were hearing.
The reason that Barack Obama lost the debate is because Romney forced Obama to answer factual questions and to stay out of economic theory based on emotion. Romney never let Obama even come close to an emotional argument, and this left Obama defenseless, and alone standing on a stage in front of millions of people utterly decimated. No progressive, not even Bill Clinton can win a debate if they are forced to stick to facts. All progressives require emotional decisions in order to advance their cause, which is why women tend to support Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, because they tend to vote with emotion as they are traditionally more emotionally motivated between the two sexes. In the political game of rock-paper-scissors, facts always smash emotion—100% of the time. The key to beating all progressive causes is to use facts to dismantle the opinions of emotion.
The Romney/Obama debate will forever be the skeleton key that reveals how logic can be used to win debates, and elections. I have used the very same method to beat down the aggressive levy advances of my local school district as the teachers union typically uses emotion to capture the argument without any facts to back their statements. When I forced the topic to logic, they could not win, and they continued after many attempts to maintain their emotional position even when the facts were grossly evident, and at that point the discussion evolved into ridiculousness. When the topic of why a public school was in financial trouble it was not because the state took away funding, it was not because the kids needed the money, it was not because the school needed to hire the best teachers–it was because the school board laid down at the feet of the teachers union and ate out of their hand, which caused the financial crises. There was no other reason which was revealed by sticking to the facts.
When men and women argue typically as husband and wife, the husband usually complains that he loses because he allows the argument to devolve into an emotional one. He loses because he does not stick to the facts, but allows his heart-strings to be yanked and pulled needlessly. This is notoriously prevalent in younger couples who are still immature in their thinking. Older couples tend to learn not to play such games which is what leads to a successful marriage. Progressives have for years used the same perilous tendency to advance socialist causes by using emotion to position their statements in much the same way that women use emotion to beat men in arguments.
But as men who do not allow such emotion to govern their actions, they learn that the best way to maintain their integrity is to stick with the facts of an argument without being pulled into the emotional fray of the women they argue with. They learn that their women actually respect them more for maintaining their integrity without emotion, and such men will learn that their sex life will increase proportionally.
The same rules apply to every facet of life. No business can succeed built of pure emotion. They only succeed with the facts of the matter, the bottom-line numbers. They do not succeed based on theory, they succeed based on fact. The same holds true in an argument between husband and a wife. Yes Aunt Millie will be upset if the wife and her husband do not attend the birthday party for Millie’s second child who lives on the other side of the country. No the couple cannot afford the plane trip at that stage in their marriage. The man should not cave into the crying wife stuck between loyalty to her sister and her husband by charging the plane fair just to keep his emotional wife happy. It might be the nice thing to do, but the couple could not afford it, and no level of emotion can change the fact. No argument can change the fact either. The goal of the argument on behalf of the wife is to convince her husband to let her have things both ways, peace with her sister, and peace with her husband who doesn’t want to fly across the country for a birthday party. The man might gain anger from his wife by stating that her sister should have not moved to L.A when the rest of the family lives in New York and still expect the family to be close, but the sex will be better later, because the wife will respect his honesty.
And the politician can learn an important lesson in that metaphor. Politicians would gain more respect if they were just honest, and didn’t try to pander to the emotions of the voters. Nothing ever gets done with emotional progressives, and the conversation is pointless because they are never rooted in any facts. Politicians who try to play nice and be the good guy either way will end up being crushed by the politician who uses the emotional argument because the opponent will surrender the facts to emotion, which is equivalent to giving up the strategic high ground in favor of kindness, to avoid the conflict. Romney won the debate because he did not allow emotion to dictate the conversation leaving Obama as defenseless as a sobbing woman who is stuck between loyalty to her sister and her husband. Obama is stuck between his communist instructors and the genuine expectations of his supporters. Because he could not fight the facts, because Obama has routinely ignored the facts, he was extremely vulnerable and he was defenseless to debate Romney and this will continue because so long as Obama does not face the facts of his presidency and the economic conditions that surround it, he cannot win a single one. Obama can only win if people chose to ignore the facts. And this is true for virtually every conflict.
Politics will improve dramatically when we are no longer impressed that a politician stuck with the facts and made a compelling argument. I yearn for a day when a politician like Romney and another politician also arguing the facts have a debate that actually is productive instead of a one-sided slaughter like what happened on October 3, 2012 with the emotional Barack Obama. Debates are intended to discover the truth by looking at the facts, not distorting them through the lens of emotion. If Romney continues to debate with facts on his side, the Presidency will clearly be his. This first debate is only the tip of the iceberg of the type of misery dictator Obama is in for between now and the election.
Rich Hoffman
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Obviously too many people took communism for granted during, and after the Cold War. Because it is shocking how many wrong thinking people have bought into the communist philosophy of collectivism. The more that President Obama speaks, and the closer to Atlas Shrugged Part II comes to opening in movie theaters all over The United States, it becomes more and more obvious that radical collectivists such as the writer of the below article at The Guardian in the United Kingdom are terrified that those of us who do not want or need collectivism desire to cancel our subscriptions which would leave them lost in an ocean of politics without a paddle or pot to piss in.
Collectivists have performed the ultimate scam, they being completely dependent upon our efforts; have positioned themselves to be our slave drivers by simply using the kindness of our natures against us. The reason that author of The Guardian newspaper hates Ayn Rand so much, and presumes that she is the darling of the right-winged political movement in America, is because such collectivists fear that writers like Ayn Rand will wake up people to the scam communist advocates like that Guardian writer supports. So here is a lesson to those collectivist types, The Guardian does not represent my beliefs in any way. Barack Obama represents nothing of my political affiliation. CNN, MSNBC and all the prime time news stations do not represent my philosophic principles. In most cases, Fox News is too liberal for me. Yet the fools like that Guardian reporter would have people like me believe that I am in the minority, that I am wrong because I am not on the side with the most democratic support. The communists believed that if they dominated democracy with mass numbers, then they would earn the right to rule over the bourgeois with a dictatorship of the preliterate. They call people like me evil for not wanting to spend my entire life sacrificing on their behalf. That is the meaning of The Guardian article, and all those who criticize with such fury the author Ayn Rand.
Those people do not represent me, those communist/progressive political advocates who hide themselves in the Labour Parties under seemingly legitimate politics, or in the media newsrooms taught by radical university professors with their pony tails and dandruff flakes fresh on their unwashed pot infested sweaters. What does represent my point of view, and millions who share my sentiments is stories like Atlas Shrugged, who just had their premier in Washington D.C. where the following clip was released to a hungry public. In the following clip, the message is the exact opposite of what the communists have been telling the world in their not so obvious attack on capitalism. But what those communists didn’t know was that people like me would take that attack personally. Some like me took it so personally that they have invested their life fortunes into the film version of Atlas Shrugged Part II in order to defend capitalism from the leeches of capitalism.
I would say that the most evil thing in the world–the least freedom oriented motive is the utterances from collectivists who have embedded their lives into mine. I resent deeply having to pay taxes toward organizations I find detestable. I find it appalling that I am forced to pay thousands of dollars each year off my property tax to keep a government school open that is run by a labor union I do not support, that teaches children values I don’t share. It is evil to compel my participation through force into such activity, because with collectivists’ attack on pure capitalism they have pulled my participation into their lives against my will. That is evil. If I do not pay my taxes, my property will be taken, which is forceful confiscation.
Collectivists have criticized Mitt Romney for evading his taxes by only giving 14% of what he made as a millionaire. What they fail to understand is that Romney’s 14% is a lot more than any village of workers if they contributed 100% of their entire paychecks for a year they still would not come close to the amount of money that Romney spent in taxes. Romney is called names for being a smart business man, for knowing how to avoid paying some of those looting taxes, because who says it’s good but the collectivist to pay taxes at the levels the collectivists set? The measure is created by collectivists. The implementation is done by collectivists. Only collectivists will call it evil for those who try to get a tax bargain, because it’s their system of communism that they wish for everyone else to be compelled to contribute. But if Romney doesn’t agree with the policies of welfare, the policies of big government, the way public education is taught, he is compelled by force to give money. The only defense he has is a “no” vote at the polls, or hiding his money in a tax shelter, because only a fool would pay their share of taxes deemed by looting politicians for mooching causes.
Out of all the entertainment that is available, not much of it reflects the viewpoints of people like me. Collectivist in their distorted mirror of viewing the world think that I am evil for not feeling compelled to provide a livelihood to the parasites of existence. But in my life, I do not ask others to live their lives on my behalf. I avoid such debts like any sane person would circumvent a deadly disease because to me, they are one in the same. I reject what collectivists determine is my “fair share” and I applaud anyone who avoids paying their taxes by $1. The person who avoids paying millions in taxes I consider a hero! Such a person has avoided the looting collectivists and put harm toward their parasitic ways and that makes them great. The collectivists who call people like me names for wanting nothing to do with their bloodsucking lives are not my friends and they do not share my values.
But authors like Ayn Rand do, along with film makers like Harmon Kaslow, John Aglialoro and Christopher Nolan. They do represent my values. And those values are not evil or even decadent because they are not widely accepted by a class of parasitic people who proclaim that they cannot live their lives without my assistance, compelling me to waste parts of my life on their lives because they don’t understand the value of living. Collectivists are like people caught in quicksand and they wiggle and move grabbing onto anything that’s stable determined to drag others under just so they can save themselves. They get themselves into all kinds of trouble all on their own yet they expect others to save their lives with our own, and call us evil for desiring to leave them stuck. Collectivists expect others to spend their lives helping them out of the quicksand of their own making, which to me is a deplorable evil.
It’s evil to me because every day of life is precious. I enjoy every single second of every single day, and I seldom ever waste my time. I could have 1 million years of life and I would never be bored for one single second of any single day in that entire span of time, because life is meant to be lived, and loved. And I resent when collectivists attempt to hold me up, or waste my time with their trivia, and expect to take my money when I worked hard to make it. It is evil because they stole away the time it took for me to earn my money with my time. The collectivist is evil because they willingly steal from me to serve their valueless needs that are infinite in their expectations. Atlas Shrugged is not a movie designed for collectivists. It is a movie intended to be enjoyed by individualists. Communists will hate it. Communists will call it names. Communists will attempt to keep people from seeing the film with the same vigor that they put up the Iron Curtain to keep their own people from seeing any hints of light from capitalist countries, so they could manage to keep their own people in the dark and loyal to their party rule. Communists who hate Ayn Rand are like an insecure husband who is ugly beyond belief but is married to a beautiful woman, desiring to keep the woman locked up in his bedroom so she cannot see what an ugly fool he truly is, because he knows his wife will leave him for something better if she sees it. Atlas Shrugged is the “other” choice, and collectivists know that if people see it for themselves, that they will eventually feel the way I do, and desire to be left along, to pay the fewest taxes possible and to live life separately from the masses who cast themselves recklessly into the quick sands of life. I am happy, and proud that finally a movie that speaks to people like me has found its way into movie theaters and I will go see Atlas Shrugged Part II multiple times just because I can, and because it angers people like Barack Obama and the writers at The Guardian.
Join me on October 12th to see Atlas Shrugged Part II. Click here to find a theater near you!
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I was thinking of Hong Kong, communism and China in general while my wife, daughter, son-in-law, and I spent the weekend at the Halloween Haunt at Kings Island. I love the Kings Island amusement park best during the cool October evenings, with the fog machines creating an eerie atmosphere as dressed up monsters roam around the park terrifying people. This year new to the park, is an attraction called Madame Fatale’s Cavern of Terror.As I stood in line I thought of how Lakota—my home school district could justify with a straight face sending public employees to China while opening the doors to that communist country in a mutual exchange. I had to remind myself that the public unions that run Lakota and every other school in the country are in love with the communism of China, and without question Lakota sees such outreach programs with communist China to be wonderful, and beneficial to children everywhere. As I looked around at the fantastic attraction at Kings Island I couldn’t help but think that China could not produce a Kings Island on their own. As a communist country, they didn’t even think of such leisure activity for their population until they took over the lease of Hong Kong from the British government in 1997.
Disney built an amusement park in Hong Kong and since then, China has been attempting to copy the idea of amusement parks slowly trying to accept little bits of capitalism. China didn’t have a choice. Hong Kong was a capitalist city in their homeland but run by the British government seized in the Opium War (1839-1842). England developed a flourishing economy while the rest of China stayed committed to communism 100 years later in 1949. This caused economic drudgery for the 1 billion people living in China except for the fortunate 5 million people living in and around Hong Kong benefiting from capitalism. Since 1997 China has been letting reluctantly the influence of capitalism expand their economy financially, but socially, they are in serious trouble leading them to a cliff of which their country will not avoid.
Wild economic creativity is a very specific benefit of capitalism, and America in general. The kind of ingenuity that was on grand display at Madame Fatale’s Cavern of Terror was easy for the capitalist producers working at Cedar Fair Amusements. Not so easy for amusement park workers in China who have to look at American websites to figure out what’s cool and what’s not. Of a particular note was a new trick used in a haunted house that I had never experienced before. One of the monsters in the maze said my name as I walked by, which did cause me to give the guy a double-take. I saw that he didn’t attempt to make eye contact with me and as I was going up the stairs out of the pit of catacombs I noticed that he made no further attempt to communicate with me. Instead I saw a woman speaking to the monster with a sheet of paper in her hand. I spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out if I knew the guy from somewhere and if I did how he could have recognized me so quickly in such poor light. As I reasoned through the events leading up to that particular confrontation I realized that the attraction which was entirely indoors had used some type of face recognition software similar to what the TSA are using to match my face with the records they have in the Kings Island season pass database. The woman would tell the monster the names of a particular person as she got them off her computer between groups passing through that zone. It was a neat trick that certainly got my attention.
But in China, doing such things takes great effort, whereas in The United States creativity is actually taken for granted. China is feared all over the world because of its land mass, and its vast numbers of population, but they are in serious trouble because of their communist, collectivist oriented society. After adopting communism from The Soviet Union the Chinese have imposed upon themselves the same kind of economic restrictions that crushed Russia two decades prior. Additionally their social engineering policy of only one child per family is having devastating consequences. Currently China is full of males looking for war with Japan over some territorial islands for the primary reason that there are not enough females to domesticate the males. The men do not have the ability to have their own woman to share a life with, and have sex. They have to share women like all communist societies advocate so strongly. But that doesn’t exactly work, so the male population in China is strung up very tight. Currently in China there are between 120 to 130 males for every 100 females. There are more than 35 million people missing in China according to birth records, and the logical belief is that those people were girls born into families who wanted a boy, so they killed the girl. One thing that the communists didn’t consider in their masterful social planning is that fathers would want a son to carry on their family name, and if the State only allowed them to have one child per family, they didn’t want to waste that on a girl. That kind of culture is what public schools like Lakota are promoting to young students learning the merits of communism.
Using the same reasoning ability to add up the facts as I did over the haunted house name identification incident, it is not difficult to see where China is headed. They have a heavily male population that must pay for sex in brothels, because not all men can have a woman, or they must become homosexual—which is another communist platform item. Homosexuality is advocated by communists because it destroys the traditional family and gives the state the authority role over young people. This has created some very unusual internal problems in China which can be explored more deeply in the article below.
When President Obama speaks of putting America to work building bridges and roads, and hiring more teachers, cops and firefighters, he has in essence copied what communist China has been doing for a number of years, especially since taking over Hong Kong. China to keep its citizens working has been building many “ghost cities” which are giant public works projects designed to keep the economy moving along. But the trouble is nobody lives in them. There are not companies to fill them, and no people to reside there. They are just constructed cities designed by master planners for people who will never arrive. They were built to cover up a serious economic problem that China is about to be crushed under—the failure of communism.
1.1 million workers in China work for Foxconn who probably makes your iPhone if you have one. Foxconn had to close one of its factories after major riots over oppressive working conditions broke out recently in Taiyuan, leaving 79,000 workers out of a job. The reason companies like Apple and other global electronics companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft use the Foxconn factories in China to make their products is because the union jobs in America would simply be too expensive. I don’t blame them as American companies one bit for seeking out the most competitive advantage to their profit matrix. I blame the communist government of China because they don’t give people a choice of economic options. Thorough China’s collectivism they have socially engineered themselves into destruction. They work where they’re assigned. End of story. The State controls virtually everything even down to the sex life of its citizens. When the pressure becomes too great, the citizens simply kill themselves or riot out of desperation. Read more about this terrible situation below:
Communism is failing China in a huge way and the media in The United States along with the President and other academic types are keeping the failures quite because they are in denial. Many of them have long advocated the utopia of communism in The United States and refuse to see the facts for the facts. I suspect many of them would go through Madame Fatale’s Cavern of Terror as I did and would be shocked when a monster called their name out of the fog infested darkness. But they would probably leave it at that, and not pursue the truth any further by adding up the facts to figure out how the monster knew their name. They would simply accept the act without figuring out why it happened, and this is what all communists are guilty of. This is why millions of people are dying in China right now—today! This is why the worst civil rights abuses in the entire world are happening in China with the killing of millions of young girls. If the crimes against women in China were added to the crimes against women in Islamic faith, women’s rights groups all over the earth would be in a deserved outrage. But they are not, because they are not advocates for individual rights of women, but collective rights of humanity, and they cannot turn their attention against collective based organizations like the Islamic religion or the political philosophy of communism. There is no place on earth where worker rights are so extremely oppressive as in China right now, today in that far away land where communism rules with an iron fist, accepting crony capitalism so long as their business partners outwardly support progressive causes—so everyone can sleep well at night.
That same night my family and I attended the Halloween Haunt at Kings Island we also went to Skyline Chili at Kings Mills, a delightful restaurant featuring Cincinnati’s world famous chili. From the dining room window I could see the Eiffel Tower of Kings Island and all along the circumference of the room a model train ran around the parameter. I enjoyed watching the train as we ate our dinner and I contemplated how wonderful capitalism is. Around the counter the employees waiting to serve a new customer talked casually. Their minds were not on riots like the conditions at the Foxconn plant in China instigated. They simply wanted to get off work in time to play World of Warcraft meeting up in cyberspace with their guild friends. For the young people working at Skyline Chili the world is open to them, and there are limitless options for them to fill their time. At the Foxconn plant in China where the riots took place, the workers live, work, and play all the same facility in service to the State, like all good communists must do without question.
I would support public education in America if they publicly denounced their affiliation with labor unions and disguised communism. I would feel better about my district of Lakota if they did not send employees on “goodwill” missions to a communist country that is currently killing millions of their current citizens behind smiling faces and letting American youth believe everything is alright. Nobody gives a damn so long as their iPhone works, and they have the latest addition. As I watched the train round the tracks at Skyline Chili I realized that what I hate most about labor unions—all labor unions—is that they use communism to erode the world of what’s good and wherever they gather they bring misery. Even where they don’t gather, they bring misery because it forces people to flee their collective wrath. In the case of companies like Apple seeking to offer a good product at a good price, they can deal with the communism of labor unions in The United States or they can deal with the communism of China and their forced work labor restrictions due to economic limitations. American companies have the upper hand in China because the communist country has no ingenuity on their own, so they rely on America to give them their jobs which can be produced cheaper in China than in the United States. But China with all its power or its population cannot make a haunted house like what was found at Kings Island in Madame Fatale’s Cavern of Terror. And for me, that is the most frightening thought I had all evening.
Rich Hoffman
If you like my work at this site then check out my books shown below, along with quotes, interviews, reviews, and ways to find them. Clicking the pictures below are your doors to even more adventure:
While it is true, I have less patients for the public education system in America now than I did when I first started fighting school levies, the reason for it is in the diagnosis that in its current form, schools as they function now cannot be saved. Government schools should be erased from the board of thought and reinvented without the influence of labor unions or any government involvement. If you send your child to a public school, you are destroying their minds. That is my opinion after much research. The evidence of my research has revealed without question that communist infiltration into the America public education system in the 1940’s and 1950’s has caused many of the social and economic problems we see today in 2012. The modern labor union’s social/political position and what they desire to teach students, and how they wish to erode away the value of private property through taxation—incentivizing non-ownership, apartment dwellers and other lease agreements as shelters of taxation–public housing like what Russia had in Petrograd are all too clear the strategic intentions when taken in historical context.
It is unlikely that a school district’s modern superintendents or their administrators know anything of the history I am about to unleash upon these pages in a two-part symposium focusing on why China wishes war with Japan, and the true modern cost of communism that China is currently experiencing. It is unlikely that they have thought too much about the communism they are advocating in their modern politics—the attempt to teach the American youth of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeois, the importance of “green technology” (modern communism) or the dangerous breakdown of family values advocated by intelligentsia in America and how this breakdown occurred through subtle communist propaganda. The participants probably know very little of what they are really doing, or why they do it. They have accepted collectivism as their social role so they only look at their responsibility in that collective, and do not consider the philosophic implications because such a thing would require thought, and they have surrendered that ability. The communists attacked America in the period after World War II not directly, but subtly and that attack can be felt to this very day in any child in any school in America. And every American who pays taxes off their property has been forced to accept that communism just a little each year with every increase in school levies gradually sapping off the wealth of property ownership by attacking the bourgeois and redistributing that wealth to the proletariat. Teachers are not paid so much money through their unions because those positions are socially important. They are paid so much to shut their mouths, not ask questions, and teach what the state tells them to teach. For me the final straw came during the Chicago Teacher’s Union Strike of 2012.
But to understand how this communism came to our communities in 2012 we have to study the events that led up to it, to the Russian Revolution, which was an event that the political left has salivated over for 100 years. By understanding how communism spread, and why it was appealing, one can then see how we found it in our own back yards and why. The history below is a bit dry and encyclopedic. But it is necessary in understanding the modern political landscape.
Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution, series of events in imperial Russia that culminated in 1917 with the establishment of the Soviet state that became known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The two successful revolutions of 1917 are referred to collectively as the Russian Revolution.
For centuries, autocratic and repressive czarist regimes ruled Russia, and most of the population lived under severe economic and social conditions. During the 19th century and early 20th century, various movements arose aimed at overthrowing the government. Russia’s unsuccessful involvement in World War I (1914-1918) added to popular discontent, and in 1917 these events resulted in revolutions in February and October.
The February Revolution
The immediate cause of the February Revolution was the collapse of the czarist regime under the strain of World War I. Russian industry lacked the capacity to arm, equip, and supply the millions of men who were sent into the war. Soldiers went hungry, and casualties were enormous. Goods became scarce, and by 1917 famine threatened the larger cities. The czar, Emperor Nicholas II, ignored warnings of social and political unrest, and in February 1917 workers occupied the streets of Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), demanding an end to the war and the removal of the czar. The troops of the Petrograd garrison were called out, but after violent clashes, the workers convinced the troops to let them pass their line of defense. Nicholas dissolved the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, but the deputies elected a provisional committee to act in its place. On February 27 the revolution triumphed. The Petrograd garrison joined the revolution, and the united workers and soldiers took control of the capital.
Two new bodies exercised effective political power. They were the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and a provisional government formed by a committee of the Duma. The Soviet tried to cope with the problem of food supply and issued its famous Order No. 1, which placed the military under its authority. The Soviet was composed primarily of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. Led by this moderate majority, it recognized the newly established provisional government as the legal authority in Russia.
The Provisional Government
After Nicholas II abdicated on March 2, the provisional government took power. The revolution then spread throughout the country, as soviets functioned with authorities in communication with the provisional government. The government was led primarily by Pavel Milyukov and generally favored an immediate constitutional monarchy and ultimately a republic. Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky, the minister of justice, was the only representative of moderate socialist opinion in the provisional government. The provisional government enjoyed widespread popularity at first as it disbanded the czarist police and repealed limitations on freedom of opinion, press, and association. Its power was limited, however, as it had no firm basis of authority.
The provisional government pledged itself to win the war, but the Petrograd Soviet called for peace. The antagonisms between the government and the Petrograd Soviet resulted in open conflict. The soviets throughout the country became an instrument for revolutionary socialism, as the government continued to postpone action on pressing problems and as the workers and peasants became increasingly convinced that their problems could be solved only by the soviets.
Growth of Bolshevik Influence
The revolution had surprised even the working-class parties that had been agitating for revolution, and only in April, after the return from Switzerland of their exiled leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, did the Bolshevik Party assert itself. Lenin advocated opposition to the war and proposed that the party establish a proletarian dictatorship. He declared that the Bolsheviks should issue propaganda to convince the workers of the soundness of Bolshevik policy before seizing power. Revolutionary Leon Trotsky agreed and joined the Bolshevik Party, which was in the minority in the Petrograd Soviet. Events favored the Bolshevik cause. Milyukov, by continuing to support the war, provoked armed demonstrations by workers and soldiers, and the Soviet ordered all troops to remain in their barracks during the protests. Milyukov resigned, and the government was reorganized to include representatives of the socialist parties.
The Bolshevik Party was still a minority at the first all-Russian Congress of Soviets in June. The government, like its predecessor, subordinated all problems to the prosecution of the war, leading to a massive demonstration in July by workers, soldiers, and sailors. The demonstrators converged on the Tauride Palace, where the Congress of Soviets was in session. Caught by surprise, the Bolshevik leadership at first attempted to restrain the masses, but then placed itself at the head of the movement. The Congress of Soviets denounced the Bolsheviks and summoned troops to disperse the demonstrators. The support from the troops in effect recognized the Soviet as the supreme governing authority in the country. Kerensky became prime minister, and a second coalition government was formed.
The July demonstration produced a wave of political reaction. Lenin was denounced and went into hiding in Finland; Trotsky and others were arrested. Because the Kerensky government took no steps to improve the economy, unrest continued, and Bolshevik influence again increased. After a failed attempt by the military to take the city, the Bolsheviks, supported by the soldiers and workers, secured a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, leaving the provisional government virtually powerless.
The October Revolution
On October 24 the Military Revolutionary Committee, under the direction of Trotsky, stormed the Winter Palace, headquarters of the provisional government. Kerensky escaped into exile. While the insurrection was in progress, the second Congress of Soviets, with a Bolshevik majority, began its deliberation. Most of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary delegates withdrew from the congress.
In November the Congress of Soviets took up the issues of peace, land, and a new government. First it proposed an immediate armistice. Then it abolished most private property. Finally, the congress, led by the Central Executive Committee, became the country’s supreme authority, with decisions to be carried out by the Soviet of People’s Commissars. Among the leading Bolsheviks elected to this council were Lenin, Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. The congress gained widespread support, and banks and industries were nationalized.
The new government ended Russia’s involvement in World War I by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918. The treaty, which surrendered the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Ukraine, infuriated many Russians. Opposition to the Bolshevik Party, by then called the Russian Communist Party, erupted into a civil war that lasted until late 1920. Lenin’s government, operating out of the new capital in Moscow, began a policy of crushing all opposition in the so-called Red terror campaign. Suspected anti-Communists, known as Whites, were arrested, tried, and executed.
After winning the civil war, the Russian Communist Party took strict control of the country, crushing all opposition. On December 30, 1921, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally established when the ethnic territories of the former Russian Empire were united with the Russian Federated Socialist Republic.
As communism spread across the largest landmass of the world in Russia Mao Ze•dong (mou¹ dze¹dòng¹) also Mao Tse-tung (tse¹-t¢ng¹) bought into the theories of Karl Marx and Lenin and started a revolution of his own. Mao was born in 1893 and died in1976 as the premier Chinese Communist leader and theorist. He founded the Chinese Communist Party (1921), he led the Long March (1934-1935) and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in 1949. As party chairman and the country’s first head of state (1949-1959) he initiated the Great Leap Forward and the founding of communes. He continued as party chairman after 1959 and was a leading figure in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969). In the 1970’s he consolidated his political power and established ties with the West. To see more on the history of China and the impact of this communist uprising, CLICK HERE.
In America while all this activity was going on in the Soviet Union and China spies and communist infiltrators into Hollywood, book publishing, the media, and government positions ushered in new concerns for the poor (Harrington’s Other America, 1963) helped lead to Pres. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs (Medicare, Water Quality Act, Higher Education Act, all 1965). Concern with the environment surged (Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962). Feminism revived as a cultural and political movement (Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, 1963; National Organization for Women founded 1966), and a movement for homosexual rights emerged (Stonewall riot in NYC, 1969). Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which liberalized Roman Catholic liturgy and some other aspects of Catholicism. All these movements were set off by insurgents working within The United States in the fashion that Ayn Rand warned about in 1947, in much the way that the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia.
Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, especially among university students (Moratorium protest, Nov. 1969), turned violent (Weatherman Chicago riots, Oct. 1969). New Left and Marxist theories became popular, and membership in radical groups (Students for a Democratic Society, Black Panthers) increased. Maoist groups, especially in Europe, called for total transformation of society. In France, students sparked a nationwide strike affecting 10 million workers in May-June 1968, but an electoral reaction barred revolutionary change.
The seeds for communism were planted by the time Ronald Reagan became president, the names were changed to protect the Cold War fears from the public, and were advocated in America by the Democratic Party funded by labor unions with money stolen from the property of tax payers to fund their own demise. The intention of communism under Lenin was always a worldwide conquest of the proletariat over the bourgeois. He managed in just a few short years to spread communism to almost the entire landmass of Asia and most of Europe disguised as socialism and mixed market capitalism to gain gradual acceptance over time. And yes, the communists came to America to plant their seeds and they started in Hollywood where they still work closely in relationships established closely with politicians to “shape” society into the beliefs of communism.
If you like my work at this site then check out my books shown below, along with quotes, interviews, reviews, and ways to find them. Clicking the pictures below are your doors to even more adventure:
I enjoyed my visit with Zuri Hall and Nathalie Basha on the noon time program Living Dayton to promote my new book Tail of the Dragon. I was very impressed with the production quality and the executive producer handling of Rhonda Roberts to perform their brand of a daytime news/lifestyle program on Channel 2 in Dayton every weekday from noon to 1 PM. The show is a nice mixture of national and regional news mixed with lifestyle segments dotted throughout each episode. It had a living newspaper feel that Zuri and Nathalie are the heartbeats giving it life. I had been looking for a good television program to do the kind of interview that Zuri and I did on October 9th, 2012, that captured the mood and feel of the Great Smoky Mountains as shown in my new book. Living Dayton was the perfect forum with just the right mix of news—which is my background, and personality interaction that is so common with creative arts like book and movie promotion. To see the clip from the episode of Living Dayton click on the link below which goes to the Living Dayton website, or watch the clip that I took some creative liberty with to create a video advertising Tail of the Dragon.
Gery told me that this was the same set that used to host the Phil Donahue Show prior to moving to Chicago in the 1970’s where the famous Ayn Rand interview took place that I have exhibited at this site. It was interesting to see the set where Donahue started in a day when he built himself into a national name from this same stage. Nathalie and Zuri are on track to do something similar with their new show. Nathalie joined WDTN in January of 2012 as host/producer of “Living Dayton” a one-of-a-kind, local lifestyle talk show. Prior to joining WDTN, Nathalie was working and living in her native Los Angeles as a multi-platform host. 
Nathalie hosted for E! Entertainment and The Insider, and worked as a red carpet correspondent for GBK Productions and Agenda Magazine’s online entertainment site. Zuri Hall joined WDTN in December of 2011. Prior to becoming producer/host of Living Dayton, Zuri beat out hundreds in the search for the next Face of MyINDY-TV. At WNDY-TV, she represented the station in commercials, PSAs, and public appearances; covered local events, games, and concerts; and interviewed celebrities, from Grammy-award nominated rapper B.o.B. to famed Hollywood director, Rob Reiner. Only one year after having graduated from The Ohio State University on academic scholarship, she won her first Emmy in the “Outstanding Host – Talent” category. So needless to say, I was impressed with the level of talent and quality of the production.
It was very nice to sit on a couch with a competent hostess and discuss themes without having to have my name on the line to succeed or fail a political issue like I experienced in my various levy campaigns—where it was my name alone that stood between antagonizing anger, and financial success. As I sat on that couch speaking with Zuri, I realized that I liked it—a lot.
Doing that interview with Zuri made me want to write more books so that I could give more such interviews, because the depth of the communication was so much more robust than what I’ve experienced in the past with more targeted, and more emotional issues. It was quite a pleasure to go through all the work it takes to write a novel, to get it published and go through all the production tasks, to have it culminate in an interview with Zuri Hall on a couch reflecting the past of Phil Donahue mixing with the future of these two hospitable hostesses. And when you come upon such doors, you turn the knob and go inside.
The Overmanwarrior 