I know a lot of people who read and watch me. They get uncomfortable when I start talking about movies. After the way the 2026 election went, I’ve talked to plenty of people who still have no idea what actually happened or what people are thinking. If you want to understand the phenomenon, pay attention to the new Godzilla Minus Zero movie.
First, a note on the theater. My favorite in the Cincinnati area is at Liberty Center. New owners (B&B Theatres) took it over, put real money into renovations, and opened it back up. It looks and feels good. I hope they succeed and that local cinema comes back stronger for it. We took the grandkids. The whole family loves Godzilla. We had a great time.
For those who see me as a hard-core conservative and wonder how I can still talk to wishy-washy liberals and Democrats without losing my mind, here’s the short version: I don’t need the validation of peers. There is no leverage there. Friendship, neighborhood approval, or social standing cannot be used to steer me. I don’t lose sleep over other people’s political positions, and I don’t particularly care whether they like me. That indifference is useful.
We went into the freshly renovated theater and, in one of the bathroom stalls, someone had carved “capitalism” with a greater-than sign pointing to “communism.” Capitalism < communism. Fresh enough that it could have been recent. Somebody at that theater—almost certainly young—felt the need to make the point. I’ve been saying for years that this is where a lot of people under thirty are. Public education has spent decades teaching them, through peer pressure and institutional incentives, that collectivism is the higher good. If you care what your neighbors, friends, or classmates think, that care becomes a handle. People who want to control you will use it. That’s why I emphasize indifference. I care so little about what most people think that I don’t even bother trying to change their minds. I’ll just tell you the hard lessons.
Godzilla Minus Zero is a family-first film. It’s a horror movie about family, well photographed, well executed, with characters you care about and visual effects that put most current Hollywood work to shame. It was made in Japan by Japanese people, about Japanese concerns, on a budget that is a fraction of what the unions and overhead in Hollywood demand. I’ve known Hollywood types. I spent years around producers and projects before roughly 2008–2009. I watched the industry price itself out of making economically sensible, hungry, high-craft films. The people who made this one are still doing the old-fashioned work. It reminded me of the better Kurosawa films—direction with passion, seriousness about craft, and a cultural respect for value that shows up even in small Japanese transactions. I’ve been to Japan multiple times. I like the culture. They still largely treat men as men and women as women. They take the exchange of money and effort seriously. You don’t see progressive ideology dominating the frame the way it does here. That’s part of why the film works.
It is not, however, an American or Western-civilization advocacy piece. The Japanese were not clean in the lead-up to and during World War II—what they did to the Chinese and others is well documented. The Americans who ended the war with the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the villains of that story. Yet in this film the American occupation is treated with suspicion, Americans are part of the antagonistic machinery, and there is little reverence for Pearl Harbor or the reasons the war started. Godzilla itself emerged from Japanese postwar psychosis: the shock of going from imperial power to occupied nation, the nuclear trauma, the need to process defeat. The movie walks that line—cooperation with Americans on one hand, deep resentment and traditional suspicion on the other. A Hiroshima survivor character wants to turn Godzilla into a weapon against New York; American forces want to control the monster for their own arsenal. Critics in the trades praise it in part because of that anti-American tilt. Hollywood and its associated press have been captured by the same left-wing politics for a long time. An anti-American Japanese film gets the benefit of the doubt that a comparable American film would not.
None of that makes it a bad movie. It is a good movie—strong on family, craft, and visual power. Go see it. Support the new owners at Liberty Center and local theaters in general. They spent the money; it shows.
The larger point is what the film and the bathroom stall together reveal. Young people under thirty have been told they don’t need to work hard, don’t need to form families, don’t need to buy houses, and that the system is stacked against them. Housing is expensive in part because of deliberate market tampering—green-space mandates, zoning, and the same progressive policies that made ownership harder in places like England years ago. You cannot keep compounding residential real-estate values generation after generation and then build a tax model on permanent appreciation; the bubble was always going to meet reality. Property taxes function as a soft form of the social ownership of land. When people feel they are not personally benefiting from a free-market trajectory, they vote for the powerful government that promises to take from others and give to them. That is a large part of what the 2026 results reflected—not some pure rebuke of one man, but a demand for redistribution dressed up as fairness.
Those same young people are hungry for values. American popular culture stopped projecting coherent ones decades ago. Japanese art still does. So does Islam, which is not shy about stating what it believes. Christianity in the West largely learned to stay quiet about separation of church and state while the same voices that demand that silence advocate for radical Islam. People notice. They gravitate toward cultures that still take themselves seriously.
Godzilla Minus Zero is excellent entertainment for all the ordinary reasons art and spectacle work. Make no mistake about the worldview: it is apologetic toward Western types and more reverent of Eastern perspectives shaped by defeat, occupation, and nuclear memory. That tells you something about where a lot of the audience is. Political people who want to understand the under-thirty cohort would do well to watch it and listen.
Notes
1. Godzilla Minus Zero (2026), written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is the direct sequel to Godzilla Minus One (2023). Set in 1949 during the American occupation, it features returning characters from the prior film, King Ghidorah, and explicit engagement with Hiroshima trauma, including a survivor character who contemplates using Godzilla against the United States. Multiple reviews and director interviews note the heightened focus on nuclear aftermath and U.S.–Japan postwar tensions compared with the previous entry.
2. B&B Theatres assumed operation of the former CMX cinema at Liberty Center (Liberty Township, Ohio) in early 2026 and completed major renovations, including ScreenX, 4DX, and other premium formats, by late summer/fall 2026.
3. The original 1954 Godzilla is widely understood as a metaphor for Japan’s experience of nuclear weapons and defeat. Subsequent films have varied in how directly they address the American role; the 2026 sequel is among the more explicit.
4. On housing costs and generational expectations, the long-term unsustainability of perpetual real-estate appreciation compounded with property-tax systems that treat rising assessments as permanent revenue is a structural observation independent of any single election cycle.
Rich Hoffman
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About the Author: Rich Hoffman
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly by email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
