Author: Rich Hoffman

Author of The Gunfighter's Guide to Business. Professional gunfighter.

‘Solo’: Making ‘Star Wars’ Great Again

A lot of my readers are millionaires and are people used to having net assets due to long time investment portfolios, so they are rather perplexed why I am making so much over this new Han Solo movie titled Solo: A Star Wars Story. I think it’s one of the most important things going on today in the world, not just because I love Star Wars, and the character of Han Solo—but because culturally it says a lot about our society in general. I think there are many things that are very important about this upcoming movie that are epic not just in the film itself but in the reaction to it that so many sectors of society have invested. With that said, the film is for children. It’s intended to inspire kids from the ages of 5 to 12 and make it so that their families can go see the movie with them. It’s a family film that expands generations, adults who loved these movies as kids can now take their own kids to see a movie that they can all relate to, and that is the miracle of Star Wars in its purest form. As of this writing I haven’t yet seen the picture, but I know what I’m getting in to. I am delighted that Kathy Kennedy and Bob Iger at Disney greenlit this movie and that all those San Francisco progressives that work at Lucasfilm went against their modern political instincts to make a movie about a white guy who is a strong alpha male who shoots guns, has no reverence for the law and likes to fly starships insanely fast. Han Solo is everything that progressive society is trying to eliminate culturally, so I think it says a lot that Lucasfilm and Disney decided to make this particular movie because it’s what the fans have always wanted—its what the story of Star Wars demands and they went with it, and it took a lot of guts. The fact that these filmmakers made this movie about this kind of character goes a long way to fixing problems I had with both Lucasfilm and Disney—and I admire them for extending that branch. I could easily think that based on what I know about the movie that they made it just for me. But that would be a bridge too far—they made it for kids—a new generation of fans that they want to appeal to the Star Wars brand, and they fully intend to make a lot of money while they do it—which is the name of the game. Personally, I am delighted about this movie in every way possible from the money it will make to the product it delivers.

But I warned about this a long time ago on a radio show I did for 1600 WAAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan when after The Force Awakens came out where I was concerned that Bob Iger and Kathy Kennedy were going to divide the Star Wars fan base by eliminating the extended universe, the many books and comics that had been made to continue the storyline over the last thirty years. Then there was the incident where Kathy Kennedy said she didn’t care about the male fans of the Star Wars fan base to a New York Times reporter, which didn’t go over well. Additionally, she allowed The Last Jedi to be a very progressive film that was bordering on Cloud Atlas in sentiment which was only saved by the score of John Williams and the great visual effects of Industrial Light and Magic. The fans were mad at Kathy Kennedy after The Last Jedi because she had betrayed them and now they are on a mission to destroy her at Lucasfilm, wanting to boycott this new Star Wars film, Solo: A Star Wars Story to force Disney to fire her.

I am rather shocked at the vitriol over this film—the activists are really the same type of people who make up the Antifa protestors in politics, they have hit the Rotten Tomatoes site trying very hard to put up bad scores to hurt the film financially at the box office. Right before the release of the film the “want to see it” score was hovering at around 40% which is really low for any film, especially a Star Wars movie. That says there are enough activists out there mad that their ideas for Star Wars have been destroyed and they are throwing a fit about it. They think if they hurt the Solo film financially that it will force Disney to listen and they will get the kind of movies they want. But of course, most of these people are idiots and they have no idea how business actually works. They forget that these movies are not made to make them happy intellectually or to provide them with the voids for religion that they are seeking. In some cases Star Wars does all those things, but only on an infantile level. Most of the complaints I have been hearing about not just for The Last Jedi but Solo: A Star Wars Story is that its fans want new material to carry them deeper into the mythology. However, that’s not what Disney needs, they require a new fan base to take this whole franchise into the future and if they piss off the long-time fans, they rationalize that they are willing to do that because they need to reach the children. If the adults don’t come along for the ride, then so be it.

You can tell that most of these protestors are of the millennial age because they say all those dumb things they learned in public schools—that money, or making money is some kind of evil enterprise and that Disney should be making these movies out of the kindness of their hearts—sacrificing profit for the greater good. No, that’s not how things work in the real-world people, Star Wars movies are and have always been about making money—lots of money. They sell ideas and images in exchange for profit which they then use to expand the reach of those things. If people want to see an art film, as many critics think they do, then go to Sundance and watch all those art movies. But Star Wars is a huge commercial enterprise designed to drive many other commercial enterprises and that’s part of the fun of it. Let me explain this to everyone, even though Disney leans to the political left these days, they are not evil. They are a company designed to make money and from what I have witnessed with them, they listen to what fans want and they try to give it to them—because they want to make money. They aren’t trying to make a bunch of 30-year-olds who still live with their parents happy because their mothers over coddled them all their lives and the people they talk to at GameStop agree with them. Money and the making of it is not “evil,” as they taught you in public school. Let’s get that straight right now.

As to the industry news, many of the critics out there and newspapers they work for are all into the kind of fake news that has led a campaign against the Donald Trump presidency. In many ways if Solo: A Star Wars Story breaks the $300 million mark globally over this Memorial Day weekend in spite of all the efforts the protestors have attempted to stop it, it will truly be a moment where the Star Wars franchise will be made great again, just as Donald Trump has made it his effort to “Make America Great Again.” On election night in 2016 people elected a person that all the industry analysts projected would lose terribly to Hillary Clinton. The labor unions in the entertainment industry have their hands in everything which is why movies these days have moved in such a progressive direction. If the fans are mad at Kathy Kennedy for screwing around politically with Star Wars, the labor unions are mad at her as an executive at Lucasfilm who fired the original two directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. There is a very interesting article in Indiewire linked below that goes into more detail, but the gist is this, labor unions don’t like to see people getting fired, and when Ron Howard was brought in to fix Solo, so that it would be a profitable film, and not some comic art piece, the battle lines were drawn and Kennedy couldn’t make anybody happy. But I give her credit for putting the effort into making a profitable film that would be loved for years instead of a film critics enjoy.

http://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/solo-a-star-wars-story-phil-lord-chris-miller-original-film-1201967484/

With hindsight being 20/20 it would have been smart for Kathy Kennedy to keep the fans to her back. I think the power of her position and her feminist nature got Star Wars off to a rough start through the first three films under her control, The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi. But I’ll give her credit, she put her finger to the wind and made adjustments and this movie Solo: A Star Wars Story is the result, and I think its going to be great. Like I said, I feel like she made the movie just for me. But I know better than that—she made it for lots of kids around the world that want to see and live through this character a very exciting life. And I think it will be so good that it will overcome all the protests and negative press that is highly politically motivated. I remember what it was like to see movies like this back in the late 70s and early 80s. There is a good reason that nobody makes movies like this anymore—because there are parasitic fan bases that want movies to mean more to them then they really do—and they are always disappointed. It’s hard for filmmakers to sit down in a concept meeting and quiet all that noise and to make a movie like Solo: A Star Wars Story—a fun movie that doesn’t deal with changing character arcs and relish in a bunch of progressive themes such as whether or not Lando is pansexual. This movie and all movies are about the joys of capitalism and the fun that can be found in a good character that takes everyone for a nice ride for a couple of hours—and that’s what Solo is. And that excitement sells toys, amusement park experiences, and an expansion into more mythology such as books, comics and even more movies. When people ask why anybody needed a movie about Han Solo the answer is because at the heart of all Star Wars movies is Han Solo. He’s the only character who ever really had his head on straight and if Lucasfilm wanted in their wildest fantasies to make Star Wars great again—they needed to turn to Han Solo—in his pure, overly optimistic form, even if it meant pissing off everyone so that it could win everyone’s hearts all over again much to their eventual benefit.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Join the NRA and Defend your Country: Looks like Oliver North will be a good president

It’s always a good day when I open my mail box and in it is a new magazine from the NRA’s American Rifleman. There are a lot of publications out there hostile to the Second Amendment and the kind of traditional life in America that I respect and cherish, ownership of private property, strong families, a capitalist economy with upward mobility for anyone willing to work for it—but there are few like the American Rifleman which represent my values so honestly. With each new addition, I cherish it and usually I read Wayne LaPierre’s commentary in the opening pages as I walk down my driveway and back into my house. The one he wrote for June is just another fine example of why the NRA is so important to our culture with all the incursions against America that have been lining up for years, LaPierre’s article expressed quite well why the Second Amendment is so important by featuring the efforts by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to encourage progressives to repeal the Second Amendment all together.

I haven’t been a big Oliver North fan over the years—to me he is too moderate, and military-minded for my liking, but I thought he did an excellent job on Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday show defending the NRA. That’s good because he’s set to become the new president of the NRA so I watched the interview carefully, knowing that Wallace would put the screws to North at every chance, and much to my surprise the upcoming NRA president was nicely aggressive and was pushing for even more members to join the organization. That was a very refreshing thing to see in a media environment that has assumed their trajectory of attack would put an end to the NRA forever. Considering that it wasn’t that long ago that Charlton Heston was the president of the NRA and that people like Clint Eastwood were open supporters, Hollywood has pushed all those types of actors out of their ranks leaving a tremendous void of charismatic personalities to advance the cause of the NRA to the next generation. I mean who would promote the NRA for the generation of millennials—Snoop Dog? He’s doing commercials on Fox News these days after all.

Governments are dangerous, probably the most dangerous aspects of any society. When they go bad, lots of people die and many more are left in conditions of existence that are less than respectable. Take a look at Venezuela for instance—a bus driver took over the government there and used socialism to enrich himself at the expense of the entire country, and now they have big problems. For certain kinds of aristocratic bureaucrats, it is their greatest fantasy to rule over other people from the power of government. They yearn for the kingdoms of Europe where gaining favor in the king’s courts would give power over the peasants and satisfy the egos of the corrupt. In those realms the rules were fairly easy to master—just learn whose ass you had to kiss and get to it. But America has rejected that entire premise and instead looked to self-rule to replace such a system where merit mattered more than the bloodline of your family. And that type of system unleashed the most powerful economies in the world by essentially cutting out the middleman of government.

But government is always a threat. It’s needed to some extent to organize the affairs of mankind, but they must always be watched over for impropriety which is all too tempting, and that is why we have the Second Amendment in America—as a protection against an out-of-control government as they typically evolve into threats against their own people. It doesn’t matter how educated the people of government become, the natural temptation to rule over other people and to abuse that relationship is all too powerful to resist for the types of people who are drawn to serve others. For instance, I’m the type of person who doesn’t care to know what my neighbors are doing, or even to know much about them. But people who tend to seek jobs in government are those types that are always looking out their windows and into what is going on with their neighbors, and they want to know every little bit of gossip that they can get to use in some fashion they can’t yet manage to their advantage to control the people around them. We call them “busy bodies” but the more technical term would be government bureaucrat and they come in all shapes, ages, sizes—and sexes.

We can now see quite clearly right under our noses that James Clapper, John Brennen and James Comey of the most top jobs of American intelligence were activists trying to tilt the nature of our 2016 election and when they were caught, tried to blame the Russians. They attempted to create the same kind of coup in America that the CIA might be blamed for in some third world country by deposing dictators or protecting them depending on the circumstances. They tampered with an American election and would have done much more if the lights of justice had not been shown on them after Donald Trump won the presidency. If not for that election it’s quite clear that America was on a path toward European progressivism for which we may never have been able to return from. Our American government obviously with the president of the United States looking over everything was trying to take over our nation away from the type of people who are current NRA members. While all that was going on Obama’s administration was sneaking money into Iran to prop up terrorist groups trying to advance Marxism across the world and was lying to the American people about all of it.

It is that very type of government that is now stating that the Second Amendment should be abolished, and that we should put our complete trust into them. No thanks. Right after the Chris Wallace interview on Fox News Sunday with Oliver North, Mark Kelley was up to provide a retort and it was he who shockingly stated that he was a gun owner but that he believed there should be legislation that directed all people owning guns to keep them in a safe locked up in their house. He called it common sense legislation, but it was obviously one step in the direction of complete Second Amendment repeal, because what he was proposing was that government further direct the behavior of its citizens within the four walls of their private property residence and keep their guns locked away or…………..else. The assumption is that if people violated the law their guns would be confiscated which is just another step in the direction of gun grabbers everywhere, to remove guns from society so that government can rule without concern of insurrections against it. That is the real issue behind all this talk of repeal.

Government is the problem, and ironically the public-school shootings are their fault as well for what they teach children and for keeping those areas gun free zones because of the government’s position on removing the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights. If they did the right thing and arm teachers in these schools so that someone could shoot back when a student snaps and tries to kill all their class mates, the Second Amendment would be strengthened, which is not the goal of government. So they’d rather exploit the deaths of innocent children rather than try to save them because of government’s arrogant desire to rule all human beings from a position of strength. To do that they must remove guns from existence—which isn’t going to happen, but it’s what governs their behavior.

It is in these times that I am so grateful that there is an NRA because it’s very existence is preventing so much destruction. The legal battles we are currently involved in through the election process are much better than actual armed insurrection. But should they fail and all there is between us and complete tyrannical rule by corrupt governments, such as what we were experiencing under the extreme progressive activism of John Brennen and many others—is the gun. And we’ll need those guns if such a day comes. So long as we have those guns, it keeps those tyrants in their offices scheming. But it keeps them somewhere that we can watch them. Our memberships in the NRA provides that extra barrier between bullets flying and actual spilled blood—and I’m very glad it’s there for the safety of all.

Rich Hoffman

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The Trump Campaign Spy Stefan Halper: America’s biggest scandal, so why is Jimmy Kimmel talking about gun control?

Jimmy Kimmel is in the minority in our American republic and he’s frustrated by it. There are more NRA members in America than Kimmel and his other late night comedy hosts have together for their television shows and they can’t understand why they can’t move the bar on gun control with truly disgusting emotional influences such as Kimmel displayed after the latest school shooting in Santa Fe. Look people, I have explained to everyone what creates school shootings, I’ve outlined the issue explicitly, and others have as well. I think my offering, not because its my own, but because it goes further than other people have, is the best and should be looked at by everyone concerned about school shootings. The solution is rather easy, but it will require people like Jimmy Kimmel to give up their liberal approaches to the problem so that the real complications can be addressed. I don’t think Kimmel really cares about the school shooting issue—I think he’s just a liberal man who says what he has to so he can impress liberal girls and Hollywood types who live in their ridiculous coastal bubble of intellectual stagnation. But if he really cares about stopping school shootings, then he needs to listen to what I’m saying. CLICK HERE for the real answer to school shootings. However, giving up our guns, or weakening the Second Amendment is not going to happen—and here’s why.

https://nypost.com/2018/05/19/cambridge-professor-outed-as-fbi-informant-inside-trump-campaign/’

The biggest scandal in American history just occurred over the last two years and people like Jimmy Kimmel are a part of it—because they have used their hatred of President Trump to justify the necessity of what happened which goes far beyond any rationalizations that were ever made about Watergate. This scandal is so big that all people no matter what party they came from should be worried about it. No matter what people think about Donald Trump, they will have to admit that if he didn’t run his presidential campaign the way he did—essentially as a one-man road show with his own airplane and money to fuel it, we would have never discovered just out deep the “Deep State” truly was. The FBI and the DOJ under President Obama put a spy into the campaign of a political rival for the purpose of undermining it. The name of the spy was Stefan Halper from Cambridge and was working on behalf of traditional institutionalism to subvert the efforts of change that were taking place under a presidential candidate whom had survived all the proper primaries and delegate acquisitions to eventually win the presidency fair and square.

The FBI on many levels was conducting illegal activities to support the reigning president, Obama at the time, and attempting to hand the election to the representative of a rival political party. Traditional conservatives for which Halper was were attempting to subvert the efforts at reform for the protection of Washington D.C. institutionalism as defined by the type of politics that has gotten America into so much trouble, ultimately creating the kind of climate that produced that Santa Fe shooter culturally. The FBI and the DOJ was using the powers of government to serve a sitting president for the benefit of a candidate that was running against Trump and the whole thing would have worked if Trump had been a traditional candidate that needed advisors, money, and media resources. Because Trump could give himself all those things there wasn’t anything that the institutionalists in the FBI could do—and Trump won anyway despite all those efforts.

All this didn’t happen overnight, it’s been going on for decades likely, going all the way back to World War II. We cannot trust our government and we sure as hell can’t trust the press. So under what line of insanity does anybody think that we should be giving up our guns and our Second Amendment? That would be insanely stupid. The Second Amendment does not exist so we can hunt rabbits or go target shooting—its there to keep our government in check from just these types of problems. Liberals like Jimmy Kimmel are so intellectually lazy that they want to believe that there are countries who are performing better than the United States in the realm of governing, and that their gun control laws should be followed as a guiding light to the school shooting problem, and that’s just ridiculously stupid. Nobody is doing things better than the United States in general, more layers of government are not a solution. Making the mess that we know of in current abuses of the FBI and DOJ more exacerbated with more rules, regulations and government personnel would be insane. The world Jimmy Kimmel and his fellow liberal gun grabbers wants does not exist and it never will because logic does not accompany reality.

Even with all the evidence right there in front of our faces our nation is locked in indecision as to what to do next. How do we prosecute this case, who goes to jail? Just about everyone in Washington D.C. is guilty, and several former presidents are guilty of the cover-up as well, because this has all been going on far longer than just the Trump campaign. It probably happened to John McCain and Mitt Romney while they were going around the nation telling the rest of us to be civil—because advisors like Halper advised them to run their campaigns based on the needs of the institutions, not the real needs of our republic. Remember when Romney changed his tune after that fierce debate where he tore up Obama and was rising in the polls? Who told him to change-up his game, who told him not to go on the night-time shows—Obama certainly did. This kind of internal campaign manipulation has probably been going on since before Bob Dole’s campaign. Remember when George Bush said “no new taxes,” then he raised taxes. Who told him to do that? Probably someone working from the Shadow Government like Halper who was working both sides of the political landscape for objectives that were wanted at the FBI thinking they were a fourth branch of government and not direct employees of the Executive Branch. This entire situation is as messy as anything our country has witnessed since the War of 1812.

There are no conditions that Americans should ever give up their guns. I would say that we should make public education illegal before there are ever any considerations against the Second Amendment. There is no evidence that we can trust the FBI. They are our employees, but they think they rule as elected representatives and have become drunk on the power we gave them to act on our behalf. Instead, they have acted on interests that don’t appear to be American in any way, but rather some other source not focused on domestic affairs, but more global ones. When celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel are more than willing to use children as hostages in the gun debate but fully support abortion, criminals like Hillary Clinton, and a trust in the Deep State when the evidence shows us clearly that we should never fully trust them under any circumstances, you must ask lots of questions. This spy in the Trump campaign story is the biggest scandal in American history and should be the lead in every newspaper, and on every late-night show. We know what causes school violence and we could fix everything tomorrow just by putting guns on teachers in schools stopping them from being gun free zones. But for Kimmel to use the sadness of the school shooting to mask the much bigger problem of corruption at the highest levels of our Republic indicates how much trouble we really are in. And if not for Trump and our guns, the situation would already be far out of our grasp and irredeemable without a violent revolution. Thankfully, because of guns, we can still have an election that takes power away from people who shouldn’t have it, and if not for Trump, we wouldn’t know any of this.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Glenn Beck Is Supporting Donald Trump: The nature of gangs and animals in America

It says a lot that Glenn Beck wore a “Make America Great Again” hat during his show on Friday, May 20th, 2018. He then went on to list the great accomplishments of Donald Trump shown below thus far in his presidency, which is really just getting started. If Donald Trump has won over Glenn Beck—which is probably more out of economic necessity than out of sentiment—then there are a lot more like him that are also coming over to the right side of things. Apparently for Beck it was the media reaction to the MS-13 issues where the president called the gang leaders in many American cities animals, that pushed him over the edge and into the Trump camp. Honestly after all that Beck has said about Donald Trump from the time of the primaries to the present, it caused me to no longer listen to Beck, let alone watch any of his programs. Prior to his hatred of Trump, and being one of the first Never Trumpers, I promoted Beck any way I could—especially his radio station, The Blaze. It was always on somewhere in my life, but I turned it off over two years ago now and dropped Beck in every way possible. So it was a little shocking to see him throw his support behind Donald Trump so honestly.

Welcome to the twisted world of liberalism where its like an Alice in Wonderland parody on everything. For instance, the May 17th 2018 Robin Hood event in New York City that tried to raise awareness for ways of fighting poverty, but in doing so it was largely liberals and progressives who were hosting the thing—which is to say that their solution to poverty is to use socialism to solve the problem. But logic says that socialism causes the problem. Socialism is what has put people on the streets and in need of homeless shelters. Some of those idiots who are poor were taught through socialism that somebody would always be there to give them something—and they were never taught that the path to success means you must work more than 40 hours a week at something—your whole life. Living in the lower middle class which we now call the working poor—according to the advocates for the Robin Hood charity in New York, the richest city in the world has it has 1.8 million people living in poverty. Yet if you talk to those people to discover why they are poor, it is because somewhere in their life they were taught they wouldn’t have to work more than 40 hours a week, or even less, to live—that someone would feed them, so thus, they are homeless or at the poverty level due to their beliefs. They could easily get out of poverty if they did as Oprah does—who is a big supporter of this Robin Hood group, and that is to work70 to 90 hours a week, like most successful people do.

The designation that members of MS-13 are not animals by the political left is just as perplexing. One thing that is hard for many people to admit is that left leaning monsters like the nice people at that Robin Hood event in New York dressed up with great opulence to convince people to donate money to the poor are really just another form of MS-13, a gang designed to muscle individuals towards the aims of a collective minority. Gangs and mobs are part of the liberal lifestyle and they are taught in school. That kid in Texas who shot up kids he didn’t like in his high school just a few weeks before graduation was a creation of the liberal left, where peer groups are formed to cast people into gangs—by design. MS-13 are made up of the leaders of the El Salvador revolution during the 1980s as they fled their country and hit the streets of Los Angeles as a bunch of marijuana users—literally. Over the years they spread to other American cities and began taking over as drug distributers and today they are into just about everything that crime syndicates are into. It doesn’t take much to learn that the liberal left wants these gangs terrorizing people in the poor communities they reside in, because it gives them an excuse to come up with more gangs to deal with the aftermath of the efforts.

The teacher’s unions are gangs who join together to extort the tax payers into giving them more money for doing a job that requires less than 40 hours a week of commitment if you average out their yearly investment into their professions. By massing together as a gang the government school teachers gain power and influence much the way MS-13 does and are the methods that the political left uses to stay in power over people. They use fear and anxiety to move people toward their needs, so it was a very personal thing to have Donald Trump call MS-13 gang members, animals—because people on the political left from the Robin Hood charity donors to school teachers all across America identify with those MS-13 animals intellectually. They all use the same methods of coercion to advance their liberal positions. So when a school shooting occurs like it did in Texas this past week at a small high school in Santa Fe the problem is the gun’s fault, not the person doing the shooting. In poverty, it is the fault of the United States for not giving more money to the poor, not the people who are too lazy to work more than 40 hours a week to pick themselves up and over the poverty line. And when it comes to gangs, they call them immigrants looking for opportunity in America when all they really are is considered dangerous terrorists who are killed on site in their native country of El Salvador, because they know the truth, that MS-13 members are dangerous animals who will kill innocent people as easily as most of us drink a glass of water. The political left wants all these gangs to spread fear through the weak and lazy so that they can have voters in fall elections—so that their gang can rule in Washington, as it has for so many years.

It was to leave that game in Washington D.C. that caused me to support Donald Trump from the beginning, and to turn off Glenn Beck. Beck was talking peace, and love when what was needed was to confront all these gangs directly and end the practice of mob rule in America in favor of America first policies that unite all people under the flag of the United States. Beck clearly didn’t see the potential behind Donald Trump, but now he does and like the rest of us has joined the correct fight. Many on Beck’s sentimental side of politics were willing to give the benefit of the doubt toward the realms of evil that we all deal with which breeds itself on the progressive side of politics. They didn’t understand that the key to beating all these gangs that have set up shop in the United States, from MS-13 to the teacher’s unions was to put a self-made billionaire in the Executive Branch who had lived the life of luxury for so long that he couldn’t be enamored by the power of gangs into making decisions which favored them in some way. Instead he calls them animals, which they are, and with that designation he is calling most on the political left the same, and they know it. So they distorted the truth to their favor and finally Glenn Beck had enough. The situation became clear as it is for so many others in America who had been willing to turn the other cheek so much that their heads were about to fall off from being slapped so many times. Enough is enough. It is good to see the good among us joining back together to fight the tyranny of group think—it has taken over out country for far too long and its about time to fight back to remove their influence from our lives—starting with the obvious, MS-13 and their animal behavior that is not conducive to a good life for anybody. From teacher unions to MS-13 all these gangs must go, and its about time for us all to admit that to ourselves.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

How to Stop Gun Violance in American Schools: The answer is in the roots of our basic philosophy

It was never a mystery as to why all these school shootings are occurring. It’s two things really, one is that they are government places which are gun free zones, and the second is that they are essentially liberal places filled with liberal people who think liberal things. The shooter in this case was Dimitrios Pagourtzis who killed 10 and wounded at least 10 more at Santa Fe High School who admittingly shot up people he didn’t like, based on his own statements. The kid wore a trench coat with leftist Soviet era propaganda on it and apparently, he wore it often, even when it was 90 degrees outside. It’s not a mystery that these kids are snapping as reality outside of these government schools are clashing with the leftist learning they get in those places. Dimitrios intended to kill himself after he used a shotgun and a revolver he stole from his dad and attacked people he didn’t like in an art class at that small high school around 7 AM Friday morning of May 18th, 2018.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/school-shooter-anti-trump-icon/

Yet it was perplexing as many news reporters covered the story and continued to ask—why are these school shootings happening and what can we do about it. Well, first you must arm the teachers and make those schools gun zones to discourage the kind of carnage that kids like this Dimitrios Pagourtzis was—troubled youth that have had their minds filled with leftist ideology that is not conducive to the world outside of their schools. If those kids don’t have strong peer groups, girlfriends, or goals in life that might otherwise keep their thoughts in check, then they will be prone to violence and will have to be destroyed once they initiate an attack. I would guess that there are hundreds of thousands of kids out there in America just like this Dimitrios kid and they aren’t going to go away soon. Even if we put together again all the broken homes, started teaching kids the correct things in those government schools, and managed to convince the entertainment industry to stop publishing such angry music, movies, television shows, and video games—it would take 50 years to begin to solve the problem. Gun violence and murderous kids are going to be a part of American schools for the foreseeable future. Why you might ask—well, it’s because those schools made those kids the way they are. Its their own fault, a fault of liberal sentiment aligned with improper philosophy that is collapsing against the merits of reality. It’s pretty simple.

Of course the political left is going to blame guns, because they can’t blame themselves. They can’t admit it is their failed policies and beliefs that are causing all these kids to become mass murderers. This actually is a global problem and is rooted in philosophy itself, the epistemological beliefs of society itself. Most places in the world are to the political left of even the liberals in America. While its true that we don’t hear much about mass murder violence in schools in France, or in China, the kind of trouble that Dimitrios Pagoutizis exhibited manifests in other ways, either in sexual depravity, body piercings and tattoos, and generally a somber existence that is quite typical of most Europeans and members of the Asian corridor. But because in the United States there is a Constitution that is rooted in a very independent philosophy of self-governance, the emphasis has always been on the individual with expectations that each would do their part to conduct themselves properly in context with the greater society. The right to own and use guns for self-defense were always intended to protect that individual sanctity from the kind of group think that is so persistent elsewhere in the world and has been failing for many centuries.

Yet the political left in the America which would be considered the far right in almost every other country in the world has brought these clashing ideas into North America and made them the basic platform of the tax payer funded schools that kids are learning in. Yet those ideas are not conducive to the capitalist society that those same kids find themselves in once their school days have concluded, leaving many to face a very fearful future filled with anxieties that their parents are becoming increasingly ill prepared to help them with. That is largely also the fault of the government schools which actively has sought to replace parents in the home with a parental authority figure within the school. That is an experiment that has not worked. It hasn’t worked in Europe, it certainly hasn’t worked in Mexico and all through South America and Canada—it doesn’t work in Australia, and New Zealand—it doesn’t work anywhere. It appears to work in communist countries like China because they hide all their domestic statistics from the world—the misery factor is obscured with state-controlled polling data that is not representative of the individualized lives of their citizens—because communist countries in Asia do not care about individuals. They are concerned with the affairs of the state as a whole—so analysis from those places cannot be trusted. Obviously, the American model should be studied by all people of the world since it is within North America that the most successful economies anywhere are found, and the quality of living for each person are extremely high. Even our poorest of the poor in America would be considered to live a great life if compared to the average villager in Africa or India. So in the context of who should learn from whom, it’s quite clear that America does enough things correctly to merit a philosophy shift that is conducive for success in other countries. Yet American schools do not respect or teach those values, so it’s really not practical to expect other countries to do what’s right for their people and make the necessary changes. Instead the political left has declared a civil war against the American right and they purposely have used our own youth against us as weapons. It is the American leftists who built the mind of Dimitrios Pagourtzis. You don’t see kids with strong mothers and fathers in the home that take their kids fishing every Saturday running around in black trench coats covered in Soviet propaganda trying to kill other kids. You certainly don’t see kids growing up in homes of NRA members entering adulthood with lots of crazy anxieties that prove to be self-destructive—where other people get hurt as a result. There is a reason that families that put God and guns at the front of their epistemological beliefs do better than families who turn to mother government for their basic necessities. Those two groups can’t be put together and expect everything to just work out.

The answer is easy in how we can stop this violence in our government schools—stop letting those places be run by liberals who teach liberal ideas to kids who don’t know any better and make them gun zones. Put guns on the teachers so they can do more than pull fire alarms and can engage a threat at the point of attack and end the misery quickly, before 10 people are slaughtered for no reason. This is not a problem that can be solved by politics or any legislation. Politics is born of philosophy, so if a philosophy is wrong, obviously the politics will fail as well. Gun ownership is not a political problem, it is part of a philosophy of self-reliance—and education comes out of that branch of thought. So to solve the problem you have to fix the philosophy that feeds the politics, and in this case left leaning philosophies are proven failures everywhere in the world they are utilized. That means that if we really want to fix these government schools, we must use American ideas to solve them, not the same old European failures and until that happens, there are many more Dimitrios Pagourtizis types waiting to snap and make a name for themselves at the expense of others before they kill themselves.  And those are facts we all must deal with.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I’m So Excited for Han Solo’s Movie: A brief history of cinema and the progressive attempts to control the messaging of American values


If you study any ancient society—or any society at all for that matter, scientists and historians always find a way to rationalize their successes or failures on a few key elements. They will proclaim a civilization may have been successful because of their proximity to water, or key trade routes. Or fertile soil, access to natural resources, abundance of food—those types of things. The truly great societies are often judged by the artists they produced and the literature they performed. In a lot of ways entire societies are judged based on the written works produced by their cultures, such as in England with William Shakespeare, or Ireland’s James Joyce. But we don’t really have enough history yet to properly understand how our modern age of great art and entertainment will recoil through the ages, because most of it is so new. American movies for instance are underplayed in their importance to how they shape world culture—because they essentially have only been around for a century, so the effects on people as a whole are still being determined. But I have a pretty good idea how those results will be determined as judged by time and it is for that reason that I am so excited when a new film comes out that I know will be a game changer in the way that art shapes society. That is why I am so excited for this new Solo: A Star Wars Story as it is being produced by Disney. Something very different is going on with this one and if it turns out the way I’m thinking, there will be shock waves percolating through the industry as a whole that will favor the political trajectory of the modern Donald Trump age—and that’s a really good thing.  To get a good idea of what I’m talking about read this fine movie review about Solo: A Star Wars Story in Forbes.  I don’t think I could have written a better one.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2018/05/18/review-solo-a-star-wars-story/#48a5365b7dd8

Over that same century that movies came to be as a form of new art and entertainment liberals under the umbrella of progressivism made their move to spread tyrannical socialism to every corner of the world. Movies didn’t always reflect this socialism because the cultures they were speaking to had emerged before the progressive move to take over the world essentially. Westerns specifically were a group of movies that told stories of Americans yearning for freedom at any cost and the values that could be inflicted on large tracts of unpopulated land with the barrel of a gun pointed at a bad guy, and on the backs of that concept, Hollywood was essentially born. It was westerns that propelled the film industry into being such an important artistic endeavor that became the envy of the world. Not only had America created this interesting artistic machine known as Hollywood that mass-produced art and entertainment in such an excessive capitalist fashion. But it could do so in seemingly infinite quantities quickly spreading the culture of a free North America to every part of the world that had electricity.

Progressives saw this power and sought to take it over starting before World War II but really beginning to succeed in the late 1960s. But some of the best films of that time still came from filmmakers who made movies in the traditional way of Hollywood before the liberal invasion and it was those films that carried Hollywood into the modern age financially. Star Wars is a great example of the type of America that used to show up in the movies of its culture—B movies made quickly and cheaply for Saturday Morning Matinee entertainment. George Lucas was often derided by his peers in the film industry for wanting to make such old-fashioned throwbacks to the old westerns and science fiction films of his own youth—yet the Hollywood liberals built and industry around the commercial success of those movies and the history of all that is well-known.

Fast forward to my excitement in 2012 when I found out that there were going to be more Star Wars movies because Disney had bought the franchise from George Lucas for $4 billion dollars and I had high hopes. I also had my concerns which I expressed to everyone who would listen, including the key people at Lucasfilm. I did not like The Force Awakens not just because they had killed the character of Han Solo, but because they had cheapened that very popular fan favorite into a much weaker progressive character as was reflective of the attempt by Hollywood to follow a more progressive political agenda for which they sought to take over the entertainment industry in the first place. But I kept my mind open because I knew they were planning to make a Han Solo movie in the future so I stayed on the ship awaiting the results of that to figure out if I would continue to support the artistic efforts of Star Wars in the future—or relegate that it had died with the Disney acquisition. Thankfully I am quite happy to say, the financial viability of Star Wars as a business has won out and the filmmakers at Lucasfilm and Disney have come to terms with what works and what doesn’t in that particular universe of storytelling—which is essentially the values of the traditional westerns in America, and they have unleashed all that into this new Han Solo movie.

That’s important because Solo: A Star Wars Story is not about social justice, or the mysticism of religions—its not about altruism and all that garbage—its much more of an Ayn Rand type of story which is what I have always said was the core value system of Star Wars. Han Solo has always been and will always be best when he reflects more a character that would be written by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged than from Les Misérables. Star Wars fails when it tries to be reflective of European literature more than American bravado and that lesson has been reluctantly unleashed in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is all about guns, getting rich and taking care of the character’s self-interests.

Of course, the liberal aspects of Hollywood are hoping that this Solo: A Star Wars Story will fail at the box office, and for that to happen the industry will pounce on any numbers that don’t reach a billion dollars globally, or under $600 million domestically. Anything short of that and this Solo movie will be destroyed in the press much the way Donald Trump’s presidency is under constant attack because it threatens the status quo. But as I have been saying for many, many years—Star Wars is best when it is about all the things I described this upcoming movie to be as opposed to the self-sacrifice and general altruism of the Jedi and the Skywalker portions of the saga. Without Han Solo, I’d say there is no Star Wars. So to their credit, they listened at Lucasfilm and Disney has not been shy with the money and has thrown their full weight behind this movie knowing that it goes against the general strategies of the progressive community. And they had to do it because economic necessity dictated that they protect the property of Star Wars from the politics of the modern age. The last time I saw Disney market this hard for something like a western was The Lone Ranger in 2013, which was financially successful, but was considered a big bomb at the box office. If I had to bet, I’d say that is why Bob Iger has been nowhere near the early previews of Solo: A Star Wars Story. He is keeping one foot in the world of deniability. But I don’t think he’ll have to throw anybody under the bus. I think this new Star Wars movie will make everyone happy at Disney, even if it does give them a political paradox to deal with.

Progressives would love to assume that they can shape culture—which is why they wanted to take over the movie business. Films were to reflect the cultures they came from and the values expressed which is what other nations wanted to see in American movies. People get excited to see things they can’t get at home or yearn to become themselves, so they enjoyed the lofty characters of the American westerns who shot first and asked questions later, who did whatever they had to do to get rich so they could live free of the rest of the tyrannical world. Thinking of the great Sergio Leone movies from the late 1960s, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and For A Few Dollars More, the filmmakers were from Italy making westerns as they interpreted them, as a way out of the fascism that their country had just emerged from and the character emphasis wasn’t on saving the world or even a damsel in distress, it was in using a gun to get rich and live happily ever after alone and disconnected from the rules of society. That was always the allure of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies, that is why the Fast and Furious movies make so much money, and that is the commitment behind Solo: A Star Wars Story.

With this being the fourth Star Wars story produced by Kathy Kennedy as the new head of Lucasfilm economic necessity has dictated a more traditional approach to their films. That is a great thing because it informs what the true values of our culture are which addresses at the most epistemological level values that are conducive to a successful modern culture reflective in movies, and not where Hollywood shapes culture. The values of people are inherit and they need to form their lives around those values—that is self-interest, acceptance of capitalism as the primary driver for success and improved lives. What could be a better message in Star Wars than a black character called Lando Calrissian who loves wealth and the fine things in life and became an extraordinarily successful businessman? Solo: A Star Wars Story may be the first movie in several decades that doesn’t demonize the acquisition of wealth. I doubt the movie will do well in China for that very reason, but that’s OK. Lucasfilm made this movie and hopefully people support it the way I’ve always said they would. I can say this, I am excited for it—for all these reasons and more. I think it’s a game changer that could very well alter the way Hollywood produces films, and that is not good for the progressive elements which have taken over. Like the presidency of Donald Trump, Star Wars is rooted in old-fashioned values, and that was something that Hollywood has wanted to destroy but find that they must reconcile with if they want to live into the future. I never honestly thought I’d ever see a Hollywood product like this movie, where guns are as much of the plot as the pursuit of personal wealth and freedom. But here it is, and my hope is that people show up and support it, because it took a lot of guts to make it—and for Lucasfilm and Disney—it’s a tremendous gamble that could pay off big for them—and the rest of us.

Rich Hoffman
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‘Solo’ Gets a Standing Ovation at Cannes: Mythology and culture are on expanding in a very positive way

I can’t emphasize enough what Star Wars means to our current society—and specifically how important this next film, Solo: A Star Wars Story is to the continuation of the great mythology that is now set to take on a life well beyond anything planet earth has ever seen. As I say often the most important topic to me out of all the things that I discuss is the realm of mythology and how it captures the minds of mankind and propels it forward at each juncture of history. I am specifically thinking right now about the great legends of King Arthur, or the early works of the Iliad where Odysseus propelled modern society to its current form to the point where our civilization has outgrown those great stories. Our modern society is very complex, and we know so much about so many things that were not known at the time that the great classics were written, and we are and have been in desperate need for stories that can take us all into the future—because that’s how human beings work. They need conceptual devices in story form to put into context their observed reality—and even though Star Wars is intended for kids, it works on so many levels to get the imaginations of the human race moving that I think it’s currently the most important thing in the world happening right now, and I understand very well what is happening from North Korea to the taxation of Amazon in Seattle—to the teacher union strikes, to the corruption of our own FBI becoming weaponized against us all. Even in that context I think this new Star Wars movie is a tremendous opportunity for mythmaking to expand dramatically into the lives of all thinking beings on planet earth for the better, and it would all come down to the presentation of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in France. It’s not just because I love the character of Han Solo, but it’s why the movie was made in the first place that I think it’s so important and I was very happy to see a standing ovation for the film after its screening. This is going to be a big one.

I read the critics opinions of the film and most of them were positive, many very positive with about 23% less than enthusiastic. What those lukewarm reviews had in common was that they missed the epic scale of life and death situations that have been present in Star Wars up to this point—the save the whole galaxy or else type of storylines. If Star Wars is going to work in future, they need to become much more individualized, personal stories which we all know culminate into the three trilogies of nine films we have mostly been familiar with. And once Lucasfilm accomplished that, mythology by way of the vehicle of Star Wars will be unleased in a very dramatic way and I don’t think those people trained into their institutional professions, and are making good livings in those comfortable places, are open to these big changes. Their comments about nobody asking for a movie about Han Solo and that the movie is just capitalizing off the Star Wars name and is an entirely different kind of film altogether are missing the point. This movie was always intended to expand the Star Wars mythology in ways that I would argue it always needed to go—since the Empire Strikes Back way back in 1980 and I think everyone watching this movie is going to be in for a surprise.

I know enough about this movie to be happy with the decisions that Kathy Kennedy has made over the last two years. A lot of people do not understand how hard it is to make a movie, and to negotiate contracts with expensive actors and to hold those contacts over many films. I continue to be amazed how the Marvel team does it with all their big-name actors now and how they can put them all in a film like Infinity War. That would be an astonishing payroll to put all those stars into one movie, but Marvel has figured it out and that Disney polish is now coming to Star Wars with these Han Solo movies serving as a test bed of creative entanglement. I will be the first to say I was not happy with the Lucasfilm abandonment of the original books which they now call legends, and I was not at all happy with The Force Awakens when they killed Han Solo in that movie. Long time readers here know very well how angry I was at the way they dealt with Han Solo’s character in that film and I did several radio shows discussing the issue in detail. However, and I know I wasn’t the only one, I think Lucasfilm to a reasonable extent has listened to the fans—and they have made some adjustments with this Solo movie which is why it needed to stay on schedule even after the previous directors were fired and Ron Howard was brought on to fix things. It’s also why I believe that the last movie of the modern trilogy, Episode 9 now directed by J.J. Abrams was pushed out into 2019—because Lucasflim needed to see how audiences reacted to new story elements in this new Solo movie.

I don’t think Kathy Kennedy or Bob Iger are all that happy with the direction of Solo: A Star Wars Story, I think they’d love to have a much more progressive film with less male characters acting so strongly. That’s a very educated guess on my part, but business is business. If you are running a movie company that makes Star Wars movies and you intend for them to transcend modern politics, then they need to be timeless stories, and this new Han Solo movie needed to be more of a classic western than a modern progressive version of Guardians of the Galaxy. I watched Kathy Kennedy at the Cannes press events and I think she is breathing a bit better now—she really needs to pull in at least a billion dollars off this Han Solo movie to justify everything they’ve done with Star Wars since Disney bought it in 2012. She made serious mistakes putting top-heavy female characters into Star Wars and making really stupid comments like she did to the New York Times where she said she didn’t care about male Stars Wars fans—which traditionally have been the primary support of the franchise for over four decades now. There was always room for women in Star Wars, but they couldn’t just take everything over and get away with it. The backlash against Kathy Kennedy in general has been harsh. And Bob Iger is an anti-gun liberal, so it’s probably tough for him to see all these posters of Han Solo pointing a gun out into the horizon, but that’s the character and that’s what people want to see in movies, and putting politics aside, Lucasfilm and Disney have given fans what they want—which is a very good thing.

I will likely give a very long and detailed review on the 24th of May which will articulate many, many things that I think are superb about this new kid’s movie which I think will capture the hearts of so many people in a very positive way. It’s not just the movie that I’m happy about, but what will come out of it creatively. Mythology has always been the center of any advanced culture and when a story works—it advances everything from arts and sciences, to politics and philosophy. And after watching that standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, I am quite sure that we are all about to see something very special.

Rich Hoffman
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The Socialists of Seattle: Jeff Bezos tried to feed red meat to the wolves, and they bit him

Way back in 2013 I told you dear reader about Kshama Sawant, the socialist who was recently elected to city council in Seattle. Remember that? Well, she and the rest of her socialist brethren have proven me more than 100% correct with their anti-American brand of socialism that is going after the rich at every turn these days. The budget of Seattle is a disaster and these idiots are seeking measures to pay homeless shelters and taxing their big businesses to cover the costs—which has already pushed Boeing to remove a lot of jobs from the city to avoid the high taxes. Now the Seattle City Council has voted a new “head tax on their large businesses with an 8 to 1 vote on any company that earns $20 million or more in annual sales, 14 cents per employee hour, in an effort to raise $50 million per year toward outreach efforts for the homeless, including affordable housing and emergency shelters. This is what happens when people who have no idea what the value of businesses are truly for their communities or lack the understanding of what makes people homeless in the first place. Throwing money at the problem by stealing it from valuable companies is not the way to solve the problem. But when people follow the failed philosophy of Karl Marx, this is what you get in human intellect—deficient people too stupid to help themselves.

It’s a little funny that the big time liberal Jeff Bezos tried to appease these socialists in Seattle with his war on Trump by using The Washington Post as his personal blog to create an impeachment of his billionaire rival. Bezos is now the richest man in the world and he gambled wrong in thinking that the socialists of Seattle would stay away from him because of their mutual hatred of Trump. Obviously, Bezos is a smart guy who runs a great business in Amazon. But like many in his position he got caught trying to feed the wolves red meat hoping they would go away. Instead they only became hungrier.

The thing with socialists is that they always are looking for people of value that they can steal money from in an effort to call it “social justice,” “equality for all” and one for all and all for one, and all that garbage. Socialists mask their parasitic tendencies behind altruistic intentions, but what they really are reveals itself in decisions like their Seattle Head Tax—theft granted by government for the sake of those who work and produce and those who simply are too lazy to exist on their own. Socialists are those who want to live off the efforts of others, its that simple. There isn’t anything morally just about their actions, they are thieves—pure and simple.

If Jeff Bezos didn’t build Amazon up bit by bit over the last several decades what would it be? Would Kshama Sawant create Amazon, would the city council? Would the homeless people they want to help make Amazon the great company that it is today? If Jeff Bezos didn’t have all those sleepless nights in the 1990s when he was building his empire of e-commerce with distribution warehouses all over the nation for a business that was on the cutting edge at best—where were the socialists of Seattle back then—playing video games, reading books about Karl Marx, protesting the breeding patters of fruit flies cut off from a thousand-year old hole in the ground where someone wanted to build a housing development? They certainly weren’t trying to create jobs like Jeff Bezos was.

In a capitalist society—in ANY society a job creator is one of the most important aspects of civilization. Without job creators there is no economic expansion. Government doesn’t create jobs unless you count useless bureaucratic positions equivalent to slow ass workers at the BMV or a Clerk of Courts. People like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump have far more value than a socialist looter trying to use the power of government to steal the hard work of those who take the big chances in business to create jobs from nothing. Yet where Bezos went wrong is that he tried to appease those progressive minded by tossing money at them hoping they’d go away—only they didn’t. Once they realized where the money was—after all Bezos is now known as the world’s richest man—and he lives in the neighborhood so to speak of people like Kshama Sawant—their target went to him. For a socialist it’s like a nice pile of shit for a fly to swoop on to take away all they could get while the gettin’ was good. Such lessons have come hard and now Amazon doesn’t have much choice in the matter, they’ll have to move their operations out of the Seattle area. Starbucks is in the same situation—Seattle is now notoriously unfriendly to business, and the word is out. Businesses will have to leave Seattle.

I was in Paris, France recently and the effects of their open socialism is grotesquely obvious. There are no big chain restaurants, no big factories—not like there should be for such a large city with so much history. The socialism of France has pushed away so much business investment because it’s a pain in the ass to do anything. It’s hard to even use the restroom in Paris, even near the tourist attractions the restrooms were dirty, and they charge you money to use them. I was stunned to see a toll turn style at the bathroom at Notre Dame with some Pakistani guy smoking a cigarette and collecting $2 a piss. I told him I’d just piss on the sidewalk outside which is what I dd. And so were about five other guys. No wonder Paris these days smells like piss everywhere you go. The city to deal with the exodus of their most productive turned to immigration to refill their empty apartments which has created their current crises—of mixing Muslims from the Middle East with the Christian Crusaders of old to extract revenge for the long conflict between religions that are left over from the Dark Ages. Instead of thinking of building new vehicles for space and colonizing Mars, the people of Paris are trying to keep piss off the sidewalks and nobody in their right mind is opening up a McDonald’s with free bathrooms across from the Eiffel Tower. Socialism has destroyed the opportunities for private investment to make a deal.

I’ve seen plenty of homeless people, I got to know them quite well in Canterbury, England where I’ve spent some time living in the city. Because of the social justice policies of that town ran by first the church, then by a much more socialist government in England after World War II homeless people have been incentivized into sleeping on the sidewalks. They are actually well fed and people befriend them letting them know that there is a safety net in case they fall from life. Knowing that, the weakest among us tend to throw in the towel too soon and retreat to a sleeping bag on the sidewalk rather than to shake a drug addiction, a family problem or whatever crises has come at them and destroyed their ambitions. When you give people free shelter, food and companionship—what reason do they have to keep fighting in life? Nothing, which is why when you start giving such people resources you get more of them, not less.

So Seattle has quite a problem now and there is no end in sight. I think it’s a good thing that the people of America can watch Kshama Sawant and her city council destroy their city, because it’s a good warning shot to the rest of the nation—socialism is dangerous, and it doesn’t work. And this is also a good lesson for people like Jeff Bezos. He should have never have tried to appease the socialists in the way that head hunters tried to appease their gods with human sacrifice, because it just makes the blood thirsty even thirstier. The only way out of all these messes is more capitalism and a defining stance against socialism before everyone can advance. Anybody who wants to help the homeless truly will learn these lessons quickly, the best way to keep people off the streets is to give them a job and let them earn their way through life. Giving things away for free while stealing from those who work hard and truly are people of value destroys opportunity for everyone. And that is something I think we can all agree is not what we want to see happening.

Rich Hoffman
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Donald Glover’s Brilliant Childish Gambino “This is America”: But it’s not the America the rest of us know

I couldn’t be happier for Donald Glover’s wonderful song and music video by his musical personality of Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” It is one of the most successful videos of all time pulling in nearly 120,000,000 million views on YouTube in just a week and I have to say that I think its one of the most interesting that I’ve ever seen. The music and the video are the work of a truly talented young person in Donald Glover who is playing Lando Calrissian in the new Star Wars movie Solo: A Star Wars Story. I am personally very impressed with young Donald Glover, he’s a smart person, genuinely very talented, and obviously has some things to say about the world around him and can express them both artistically and commercially, which is extremely rare. For his part, I hope the new Solo movie is a huge hit because it will continue to expose him to a larger audience and culturally, I think that’s great for our civilization. However, I disagree with the assumptions he has made in his music video. His America isn’t my America and that void is truly at the center of all our modern politics.

The video done with such fantastic choreography and pacing is obviously an anti-gun message that assumes that from the point of view of African descendants living in America that the deck is stacked against them by whites who are easily distracted and put gun rights over the rights of life. From the point of view of young people, especially people making a living in Los Angeles, this is a swallow well of thought that is common in liberal regions around the country. Even though the video is well done, and the music itself is excellent, the message is flawed because it doesn’t see the bigger picture of human existence as a context, but rather progressive politics as it exists in the mind of young people not yet in their 30s. They haven’t begun to live lives yet, in many cases they haven’t started raising families and living life, yet they think like all young people do that they know it all and can lecture the rest of us how things “ought” to be based on what they feel.

Value for life goes much deeper than just saying you want to let people live—the true value of human existence that sets us apart from all other living things is our ability to think. Obviously, the kind of culture that is displayed in Childish Gambino’s “America” is a black culture with beliefs and yearnings straight from their African continent—the manner of dance and values are clearly different from what might be considered from the aggressive white Wall Street crowd in the United States. It is one thing to believe that money is the root of all evil but it is quite another to complain that everyone in the black community is poor because they have either sacrificed themselves to a new plantation of Democratic politics, or they have chosen to bring the kind of Marxism that is common in the African continent to their voting patterns in America. In either case, it should not be surprising to anybody that people who do not embrace the capitalism of western civilization will be at a loss to live within those cultures without being left behind economically. It’s not that white America has left behind black America and suppressed them into the slums of inner cities—its that blacks generally as a race of people have been slow to accept capitalism in their lives and have philosophically at the most epistemological level adopted the wrong outlook toward life and have made themselves victims.

In the video Donald Glover appears to be smoking a joint, (a marijuana cigarette) as he dances on a bunch of older American cars. These are interesting images taken together—and marijuana is a particularly popular drug in black neighborhoods which I would argue are poison for their minds. Likely more dangerous for the black community than guns is the numbing of their minds by drugs, alcohol and poor educations. Even worse has been their acceptance of big daddy government to allow fathers to leave the home and government to raise the many children born to broken families. Gun violence is a symptom of the broken homes of many black families who are struggling to accept the rules of conduct that were always supposed to be part of the American experience and instead the young people have joined gangs for social acceptance and taken to mental destruction as a way to push away the reality of their many mistakes.

I thought the handling of the guns in the video was particularly powerful. Its true, America does handle the guns with great care because firearms represent an intellectual aptitude that they are meant to protect. Just because elements of our society fall short of the values that were always supposed to be part of the American experience, the guns are not the villains. To be lectured by a bunch of liberals who abort babies at a rate that would embarrass even the most ruthless mass murders in world history that guns are killing their young people is hypocrisy at its most telling. I don’t blame Donald Glover for his lack of seeing the big picture. I have had dinner with many people in the LA night scene over the years and I can report that they have a very limited understanding of life in the big picture. They are pinned into that little valley between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains and think that everyone around the country thinks the way they do about things, and they couldn’t be more wrong. The pace of our modern world driven by capitalism is fast-moving, it is driven by money, because money represents a form of value and is a good thing, not a bad thing. And guns are the centerpiece of American freedom, without guns politicians like John McCain would have turned America into Europe a long time ago—so the guns are an intellectual protection of the founding principles of our nation—and they are to be treated with great care—unfortunately only by the conservative parts of America at this moment.

The real dangers facing the black communities are in their ignorance—their desire to march in a mob together with Marxist philosophies which have imprisoned them to Democratic politics. Donald Glover’s caricatures of Jim Crow I thought were very interesting, but the suggestions of racism are misplaced in the context of history. America was founded by religious white people from Europe who had been thinking about freedom and self-governing ideas for many centuries—largely due to the failures of the church in places like England and France. A big part of that philosophical contemplation is what freed the slaves in America and gave opportunity to blacks that they certainly didn’t have in Africa, and for some they embraced these opportunities—Fredrick Douglas comes to my mind who was a very prominent Republican at the middle 19th century period. However, many whites were skeptical of people from black culture—their dancing and music were unusual, and they had ideas from a totally different region of the world that were unfamiliar—and it took some time to bring those two races together—and nothing else should have been expected. There are few places elsewhere in the world where people of totally different background have tried to unite in peace like they have in the United States. Rather than complaining about everything, black Americans should be happy that they can find an audience of acceptance in the United States. I can’t think of anybody I know who will refuse to see Solo: A Star Wars Story because Donald Glover is a black man—and I certainly don’t know anybody who loves sports who refuses to attend a professional team because the players are mostly black. The only people who really notice blacks and whites are those who profit off the divisions, like Democratic politicians who need to victimize black cultures to keep their vote counts high. That is the real victimization that is going on—and that kind of thing certainly wasn’t in Donald Glover’s video.

But take as a work of art from a young man who still has a lot to learn about life, I thought “This is America” was a brilliant piece of work. I may look at it and clap the way I would encourage a kid in the third grade to keep trying because someday they may get it—due to their raw talent. At my age these days a third grader and a 30-year-old are not that far apart in intellectual development, so I kind of see them the same way. Unquestionably, Donald Glover is a rare modern talent and I am excited to see more from him. It’s not wrong to have opinions, or to express them. But he’s not presenting the next monumental breakthrough in thought. He’s still a young kid trying to impress his LA cultural peers with his understanding of their politics—no matter how false that politics may be compared to the sentiment of the rest of the country. And that is the real trick, not just in making interesting art that a particular sector of political order enjoys as a reality, but that speaks to everyone. In that regard, “This is America” misses the mark as it only speaks truly to the self-oppressed, the ignorant, and the inexperienced.

The big misunderstanding that persists to this day is that merit and respect are given out in American society the way a village chief might have enjoyed in some other region of the world, and under capitalism, that isn’t the case. Respect is earned by those who work hard and pull themselves up. While it was true that white Americans were weary of black Americans because they feared that the newly freed slaves would not work to incorporate themselves into the Christian based society that was so newly created from European statism. But Donald Glover certainly has made good use of American opportunity, and many other black Americans have too, and that is where skin color truly does disappear. Americans like successful people, or people trying to be successful. They tend to look down their nose at lazy people no matter what their skin color is, or people who lack intellectual aptitude. Racism isn’t the biggest problem facing America—its stupidity—from all races and sexes, and that is what needs to be addressed if we are ever to truly solve the problems of our age. America is not the problem and never has been, the burden has always been and continues to be that not all people understand what it takes to live and be successful in America. As a person, Donald Glover gets it, but as the culture he is representing in his new music video, they don’t. All they can do is discuss the symptoms of the problems instead of the causes—and for that they must look at themselves.

Rich Hoffman
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The American Embassy in Jerusalem: Uncovering our true human roots as Palestinian radicals throw their bodies in front of an effort to keep it hidden

It usually comes down to either Marxism or capitalism in modern societies where ideological differences stand in the way of a peaceful exchange of social values. That is one of the reasons I find movie box office sales indicators so fascinating, because it informs us of the shared values of the average ticket buyer, where they enjoy a particular kind of movie enough to see in story form a set of idea at a movie theater with perfect strangers. In relation, regarding the unrest in the Middle East, nothing could be more fascinating than the problems between Israel and every other country in the region. Israel has been part of that region since well before the Islamic religion came to the Middle East, and even long before the Romans and Greeks had their empires which helped shape all the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. But after the Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 it was Marxist revolutionaries who channeled their anger at the western nations that were the victors of World War I and then those United Nations powers which formed up the borders of the Middle East further after World War II that took over the governments of Iran, Syria, Iraq, and everywhere else to exact revenge on the creation of Israel. The border between Palestine and Israel today is not much different from America and Mexico—on one side is a capitalist nation—on the other is a Marxist one choking on failed socialism. It really is that simple—economic opportunity versus economic limitations based completely on political ideology hiding behind masks of religion to sell it to their people.

That is why it was so significant that President Trump moved the United States Embassy to Jerusalem today—to proclaim to the world that America had made a choice in the matter where it has been fashionable to play the middle ground. I am a huge supporter of this move by Trump and would add further that there could have never been peace in the Middle East until this occurred. Now we can say that a move toward peace has been made by the United States and further advancements toward peaceful enterprise in the region, and an expansion of capitalism into the Middle East for the benefit of everyone is now about to take place. That is a wonderful thing.

Of course, there is more to the story, as there always is. One of the aspects of a peaceful Middle East that I am most excited for is the restoration of proper archaeological research into the cradle of civilization that is behind the wars in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, even down into Egypt, and Libya. The greatest tragedy of this past century has been that wars over religious beliefs and political ideology have made those regions unstable and prevented proper archaeological research I would argue is necessary to understanding our own history as a civilization. For those who want validation of the great Biblical stories which have driven the most popular religions the world has ever seen, proper archaeology of the great sites of the Middle East is absolutely necessary. But there are other religions which came before Christianity that are also there for all to see and the relics from those collections have been sold all over the world into private ownership and that evidence has been alarming to those who pay attention to those types of attributes, and its time that the rest of the world is let on to that evidence.

I say it often, wars are created by those who truly want to be in power and that is certainly the case in the Middle East. There are very wealthy people who have an eye on history who know what is to be uncovered in the Middle East—evidence that mankind is much older than the Biblical accounts can chronicle, and those parties do not want mankind to know that information—because so long as most of the world’s populations fall under one of the known present religions, then those same people can easily control those people under current political assumptions. By introducing two opposites to the Middle East, Marxist revolutionaries and the capitalists behind the Jewish faith the Middle East has had much of the evidence of its vast past destroyed by war, and very little archaeology has been able to transpire due to the perpetual conflicts.

As 52 Palestinians died in protest during the opening ceremonies of the new American Embassy in Jerusalem it served as a grim reminder of as to why that region has always been unstable, and why the other side is so desperate to keep it that way. The American Embassy is a stabilizing factor and the Palestinians know that if they don’t sacrifice themselves to some degree that their end is coming anyway, and nobody up until President Trump has been willing to make that move. But Trump has an advantage in understanding the real nature of the Palestinian conflict from the side of the wealthy collectors that most people never hear about—because they get all their news from the constructed media accounts which say that the entire conflict is one of religious differences—which couldn’t be further from the truth. On the political side of things, the Middle East conflicts are between capitalism and Marxism. But even deeper than that, it is of the origin stories of civilization as a whole, and to prevent those stories from getting out, war has been used as a cover to prevent proper scientific research into the world of the Middle East which has always had the secrets just a few feet under the sand.

Honestly anywhere in the world where there is great conflict you will find a similar situation—the current governments wish to keep their citizens in the dark to the realities of the world which came before them. That is certainly the case in North America where it is now well-known that the Indians were just another come-lately group of humans who migrated into a region that had a rather sophisticated empire that rose and fell long before Columbus ever sailed to the Americas. Mexico had an advanced culture that was destroyed by Spain. To cover up that past the Spanish built Mexico City on top of the ruins to hide it for all time. All over the Central and South American regions are countries drowning in Marxism making it nearly impossible to have western universities set up shop to conduct long archaeological surveillance to uncover the true nature of ancient civilizations. What policy and rules can’t limit, the economic conditions of the region frustrate real efforts at science. There are still tremendous opportunities for archaeological research to be conducted in the great continent of Africa, but almost every country there is a Marxist regime and westerners tend to end up dead in their tents deep in the back country of the “Dark Continent.” Then of course there is Russia and China, some of the largest land masses in the world yet they are as covered as anything ever could be anywhere, because under totalitarianism politics, science is run by the state—and the states don’t want people to know what came before them. They need to create the illusion among their people who all there ever was that illuminated power and influence were their regimes—not some culture that rose and fell centuries ago, or even tens of thousands of years ago. How many Göbekli Tepes are hiding out in the deserts of the Middle East? My guess would be hundreds, if not thousands—and what would they tell us about the world before Christianity? A lot. But modern politics doesn’t want that information known to the people they wish to rule.

I am all for peace, and in order to get it, the Marxism that is driving the anxiety of the Middle East has to be conquered and driven out of the region. For that to happen, the American Embassy in Jerusalem is a good place to start. There is a need to conduct archaeology in that great city immediately that cannot occur because of the unrest that the Muslims bring to the conflict which prevents it, and the politics behind that anxiety is happy to prevent that research as long as they can. But mankind cannot allow such a thing to continue, so moving the American Embassy has more meaning than in just supporting the Jewish people of the region—it truly is the first step in peace, and in the greater understanding of our own histories as revealed through proper science. The mysteries behind so many wars are waiting for us to uncover them, and its about time. After the Embassy opened, I can say that my enthusiasm for learning these facts over the upcoming century just became much more feasible, and was a tremendous effort on behalf of science, which demands thoughtful research to be conducted free of war and turmoil.

Yes, Israeli snipers killed scores of Palestinians and wounded 1,300 as 35,000 protesters rallied against the US Embassy opening in Jerusalem overseen by Trump’s Middle East envoy of Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka. It was the Palestinians who decided they wanted to dispute the territory of Jerusalem and follow the philosophy of Marxism into such a desperate strategic position. As I have said many times, he who has the gold, rules. And it determines who will win in this conflict, and why there will be peace in the Middle East. Because finally America picked a side, and that’s all it will take.

Rich Hoffman

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