Category: Book Review

The Hard Costs of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill: Healthcare costs too much and does all the wrong things

As President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill passes through its steps, with budget hawks jumping rope with reality, it’s worth talking about some of our expectations on fixed cost maintenance, things that people have come to expect the government to provide, such as Social Security and Medicare.  I hate those programs; they were part of a growth of government that started essentially in the 1930s and has communist sweat dripping from them in horrible ways.  I’d rather have the money that goes into Social Security to invest myself because the government doesn’t do a good job of making money.  And the cost of health is horrendously out of control, so throwing more bad money at a bad system is just ridiculous, with Medicaid expansion as has been done over the years, especially in reaction to Obamacare, the takeover of a fifth of our national economy.  Unfortunately, healthcare is directly attached to big government, and it’s fair to say I despise it.  I have several family members who work in healthcare, and I try hard to keep my opinions to myself, for their sake.  But our meetings end with dramatic tension because I hate healthcare so much at its foundational principles.  Few things make me angrier than when someone gives me a doctor’s note for not attending their professional occupation, as if the doctor has some exclusive management rights over me.  In my family, the discussion of healthcare is a significant problem that sets me off like a bomb quickly.  And I try very hard to avoid confrontations for the sake of the people I care about.  But I think we should be performing regenerative medicine and not just maintaining declining conditions, which our entire healthcare costs are built around.  And ultimately, that’s where the costs are. 

I was reminded of just how much I hate the healthcare industry recently when one of my daughters was having her second baby, my fourth grandchild.  Of course, as she was having the baby, we gathered at the hospital to welcome the little girl into the world, and it was a generally happy occasion.  Most of the time, birthing is a happy time to go to the hospital, as opposed to all the other times, where someone you care about is stuck there over some physical health issue for which they seldom ever fully recover.  Our healthcare system is about maintaining declining conditions.  Where birth is about growth and opportunity.  So I hate hospitals.  I hate their parking lots.  I hate their receptionist desks, their elevators.  I hate their bathrooms.  I hate hospitals because they are primarily about declining conditions, where the authority over individual lives is surrendered to an administrative state.  So as we were parking to see our new grandchild, my eyes were wide awake to the massive costs associated with the social venture of a hospital culture.  It was a busy place full of people living off the healthcare industry.  And from where we are now, there is no good way to reform anything in healthcare because, in doing so, you would eliminate so many jobs where people serve some small, bureaucratic function in the managed decline of civilization.  What’s broken in our current model is our expectations of what healthcare is and what it should cost.  For our society, it’s one of the things we encourage our children to invest their lives in, like being lawyers, school teachers, and doctors.  We expect those are good, well-paying jobs, and deep down inside, we are committed to preserving them even if they aren’t the best way to approach the growth of a civilization.  So changing it would take a lot of time, gradually.  Not suddenly.

But the waste was evident to me everywhere as we visited our daughter, giving birth to a wonderful young grandchild with her whole life ahead of her.  I felt sorry, though, for all the people at the hospital stuck in that horrible system, either as employees or as victims of some health ailment that could easily be cured by regenerative medicine.  It was hard for me to listen to the conversations about the placenta disposal that were taking place as we welcomed a new baby into the world, because there are enough stem cells in that placenta to fix a lot of the people in the hospital of their health problems.  But fixing them would mean that many of the employees at the hospital would be out of a job, and essentially, a vast majority of our economy would be torpedoed.  So we are a long way away from fixing the horrible problem of healthcare, and Obamacare was never the answer.  But these days, even President Trump is taking credit for helping to keep the socialist approach to healthcare provided by the government somewhat functional, which means people have some medical coverage to throw at this ridiculously wasteful system of health maintenance.  It’s a two-problem condition, the system itself is built to keep people sick and employees employed.  And where the money comes from comes from sources outside of private insurance because the costs are so out of control that only the government can afford to sustain the ridiculous enterprise.  So our expectations of what medical care should be are at the heart of the problem, and we have come to look at the government as a way to keep us alive, which was the goal of communism all along.

President Trump has brought a lot of Democrats over into the GOP and made it a huge tent party.  So, to the budget hawks, trying to drive down the spending in this Big Beautiful Bill of Trump’s, this is a fight for another time.  We need to attack healthcare expectations before we can peel away funding for it, much like education debates.  We have to get the government out of education and healthcare before we can reform them and make these things better.  Because too many people are wrapped up in the system itself, they make their living off the decline of other people.  That’s why I don’t even bring it up to my family members who work in healthcare and its maintenance.  I’m at the scrap the whole thing level and don’t want to spend one cent on it.  Regenerative medicine is the way to go, nobody should ever die of cancer.  And people should be able to live into their hundreds, and keep working as long as possible.  So, all the Social Security processing and health insurance talk infuriates me at the basic level.  And seeing my new granddaughter, it was nice to welcome her into the world, but it reminded me of how much I hate hospitals.  The people there reminded me of hamsters running on the hamster wheel, pointlessly, aimlessly, and only to provide incomes to people for jobs they shouldn’t even have.  There are many better things to do besides health maintenance of declining conditions.  And the authority we have given doctors over our economy, which was most notable during Covid when they made a power grab through the World Health Organization to take over the global economy.  I am proud of Trump for standing up to those losers, but that’s where the fight is, in the social construction of the current healthcare system.  People aren’t ready to cut the funding to a failed model yet, because they work for that system with comfortable jobs that they like too much.  But the time for that discussion is coming, and I can’t wait for it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Joe Biden’s Presidency Was Illegal: They are using the cancer diagnosis to hide the crime behind sympathy

Just remember, when people say that my topics are too wild to be believed, because lately I have been talking a lot about Atlantis and the origins of ancient civilizations, remember that most of the time, if not every single time, I am right about the things I say.  There is a reason by choice that I do not write for significant publications and flaunt academic credentials as part of a byline.  That is because I don’t trust institutionalism because of what I understand psychologically about the people who make it up, and the limits it places on society.  And I sometimes pick some of those complex and wild topics to stretch my legs.  Because when the rubber hits the road, I am always there to say, “I told you so.”  And that was certainly the case when it came to the origins of COVID-19.  I would say I was the very first person out of all the media in the world to call it what we now know it was, which includes some of the wildest so-called “right-winged media” out there.  And I was among the first to call the election fraud of 2020 what it was, and I turned out to be right about everything.  I have covered many very controversial, far-reaching topics that seem insane at the time, but once the facts all come in, I turn out to be right.  So I am having a little fun with the Joe Biden topic after the tapes captured by Robert Hur made their way into the mainstream media.  I found it astonishing that news commentators like Laura Ingraham were shocked by what they heard, which was that Joe Biden was utterly unable to function in a mental capacity and was essentially a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency, propped up by handlers to appear to be in charge.  It was all a complete deception, and once those tapes hit the news cycle, they announced that he had a ten-year-old prostate cancer diagnosis, hoping to use compassion to get the former president off the front pages.  The Hur tapes bring up a much more catastrophic problem that few people can handle.  But I will.

She knew, among many who did

Joe Biden was illegally inserted and was never in command of the White House, leaving unelected personalities running his presidency completely in the background, and now many of those people have been caught.  Now, the good thing is that this break in trust is healthy for people to experience.  Society has been suckered by a group that we call “elites” who hold the power in our offices outside of elected representation.  And it’s a hard learned lesson that will forever change the Democrat Party.  I think they are destroyed forever, but we’ll see.  I don’t see them ever returning from the damage they have inflicted on themselves over these last five years, starting with the Covid cover-up, and ending with the truth about the Biden presidency.  They lied about everything, including his cancer diagnosis.  It’s possible they even lied to Biden himself to keep him smiling for the cameras and standing at a podium with a stick up his backside to keep him from falling over.  We are witnessing a grand deception on an epic scale that was massively illegal in the process, and people will never forget it.  So as we hear the stories of the media sacrificing themselves now hoping to win back trust, and the Jake Tapper’s of the world come out with their books and are getting raked over the coals for what they knew but didn’t say about the matter, and Jim Comey is getting embarrassed in public at book signings by an angry public, and he smiles and takes it, because he has no other option, remember who told you first about all these things……….I did. 

Trump may want to give Biden a pass, but the former president played right along with the plan, knowing the people behind it.

I run the blog because it gives me a chance to express trustworthy independent journalism, and because of how I live my life, it is free of outside influence.  I can afford to do things almost no other journalist in the world can do.  And that is a very valuable asset in a free speech environment.  And people ask me all the time why I do it.  Well, it’s for cases like this, the Joe Biden case, that I do what I do, even though many of the things I said were ridiculed extensively right out of the gate.  Just as the things I am speaking about, like Atlantis, might seem too wild to seriously consider.  When something is so far outside of a mainstream narrative, people have a hard time with it.  But when that state of disbelief is part of the crime, to use that nature against people to perpetuate a knowing deception on the world, we should all have a significant problem with that type of conduct.  And I certainly do, and that’s why I choose to produce the kind of media I do, in the form that I decided to do it.  And the sum of the whole Biden story is that everything Biden signed as president is invalidated because of this massive cover-up, which is the real reason that the cancer diagnosis came out when it did, to use sympathy to hide the crime.  These people have been caught in a major crime against the United States of America, which is all of us who are citizens of this country, and there is no forgiveness for that transgression.  All the people involved in the Biden cover-up committed a significant crime that must now be punished. 

I had to remind a few good friends I have in the media, who are very close to the White House, when the story broke over a mid-May weekend in 2025 that Biden’s cancer story was a ruse, and not to fall for it.  He’s an old man, and most men will eventually get prostate cancer of some kind.  There is no surprise by that diagnosis, so don’t go soft on Biden because he’s a dying man.  I’ve been warning for a long time that when the crapola hit the fan with Biden, they would try to use a funeral to take people’s minds away from the seriousness of the crime.  And that’s what they tried to do with the cancer diagnosis.  Don’t be a sucker and fall for it.  The real story is that everything Biden touched was illegal, including his nomination of a Supreme Court member in Ketanji Brown Jackson, the extremely liberal trainwreck that should be nowhere near a courtroom.  But it wasn’t Biden who picked her, but rather Barack Obama, and Alex Soros, along with his terrorist father, George Soros.  People we did not elect and had no legal right to the office of the Executive Branch. That means every bill signed was signed under illegal conditions and is invalid.  Everything that Biden had been doing for four years was unlawful.  And how do we know? We know they put him in place with election fraud.  And if that story is too wild for you, then now you have the proof that the people behind Biden lied about his health.  He had this cancer before he was elected president, and they lied about it to put him in office so they could essentially run him as a puppet in the background.  They rigged the entire process to get a compromised puppet in the White House so that they could steal that power away from voters.  Just let that sink in.  This is a bigger story than most anybody could wrap their minds around.  But there it is.  And the damage from this will never allow things to return to what they were before.  And a lot of people are in deep trouble for it.  Jake Tapper and Jim Comey are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.  And the Democrat Party has hit that iceberg, and is sinking very fast. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

My Committment to Atlantis and Its Technology: A problem we have to solve before we get to Mars

It’s only fair to take a minute from all the political coverage to make an official statement that I don’t think is new.  But that I intend to contribute a significant amount of my time to in the years to come, and that is to prove that the fabled civilization of Atlantis was real, and that the contents of it, the proof of its existence became the original Native Americans, settling in the Americas and what is left of them is what we have in the mound cultures of the world.  In Atlantis, as Plato described, they had fallen to sorcery and witchcraft and declined well before they were destroyed by catastrophe, and I think the proof of that technology is what we see in the mound-building culture, especially in the Ohio Valley along the Ohio River.  Mounds are worldwide, and I think they are evidence of a society thriving globally around 50,000 BC until around 9500 BC.  And it’s one of the greatest conspiracies ever to be perpetrated against the human race for all kinds of political reasons.  This isn’t something I just woke up thinking about, but something that has bothered me for decades.  I grew up around the mound cultures of southern Ohio, and it started for me when, as a young person, I was given some inadequate explanations about them being burial methods. Instead, as it looks to me after looking at a lot of evidence, which I’m putting together for a new book project called, The Politics of Heaven, I am ready to put a stake in the ground on Atlantis being represented on earth by the destruction of their survivors through the mound building culture and the revelation of their celestial technology which I attribute to occult utilization as a science to perpetuate their society forward, best represented to our historic eyes in Egypt and expressed in the conflict of God with Pharaoh when Moses came to free his people and there was a kind of dual with the magicians of Egypt, the Hermetic order that were the remains of the previous long standing civilization of Atlantis.

The most significant resistance to such a proposal is transportation; the current lazy science understanding about the Clovis culture, of how humans came into North America through a land bridge through Alaska, hasn’t held up under further scrutiny.  Now, with LiDAR technology, we can see under the canopy of the Amazon, for instance, and all over South America, formations of mound-building that are just like what we see popularly in North America.  And that Pythagorean geometry in a very occult way are consistently utilized everywhere, for the same reasons.  This very sophisticated culture used positive relief geometric shapes to communicate with spiritual planes of reality, for which they had full knowledge.  Some aspects of this technology are revealed to us through the Bible, so it doesn’t take much to expand that understanding to this broader conception.  Most eerily, we see the evidence of this kind of ritual technology at Portsmouth, Ohio, where, just like at Stonehenge, they have a series of mound structures that are intended to communicate beyond terrestrial concerns with an avenue that extends from Ohio across the river into Kentucky.  The purpose and location of this construction defy logic, for its location is a glimpse into a much deeper technology that spoke to the spirit world in much the same way that we use electrons to turn on a light.  There are many more of these mysterious sites all over, but the site at Portsmouth is bewilderingly overlooked for its relevance to a profound understanding of a specific astrological technology used as an everyday level of culture descended from great sophistication. Indeed, not primitive hunters and gatherers who could barely rub sticks together to make fire or catch food for the day.

The most obvious evidence of this global trade, which descended from Atlantis and Mu, a raised area in the Pacific Ocean, is the evidence in Egyptian mummies of tobacco and cocaine, which we know were only grown in the Americas.  So any traces of these things would have come from knowledge of trade with society in North America for tobacco and South America for the coca plant.  And specifically to those items, it also shows the obvious connection with drug stimulants to the creation and use of religion, and to communicate in a hyper mind state with assistance from the spirit world.  But it all started in America and not in other places.  That’s not to say that places like Antarctica were not once tropical paradises when the Earth’s poles were otherwise shifted, and those plants weren’t in other places, according to a record of known botany.  But as we understand the modern world, post Ice Age, those plants only came from North America and South America and when traces of them show up in mummies from around the world, you know they had contact with what we call the New World, many thousands and thousands of years before Christopher Columbus rediscovered for Europe, the concept of a new place.  We find more truth in this kind of global population in stories like the Tower of Babel that we think of as regionalized in the Mesopotamian Valley, but likely has roots in a much larger tapestry. 

So why is this important?  Well, institutionalism has been lying to us.  And new characters in the world seek to use this kind of Atlantean technology to have power over others.  Keeping people disjointed and on their heels as rulers keep challengers from attacking their power base through deception.  We see that happening in American politics, and when you study how institutionalism has processed information and used it to control mass populations, a much clearer story begins to emerge.  That is why I have recently been talking a lot about the book by David Price called Weaponizing Anthropology. Anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists, botanists, all the sciences have shown a delineation of logic in saying whatever they have to based on the source that is giving them money.  And by that method, a vast conspiracy has been concealing the truth of human origins, which we need to understand to plan our future.  And so far, we are finding ourselves victims of a power base of politics hiding the past so they can have power in the present.  So I see it as a significant, engaging, and technologically practical consideration.  The secrets of the Lost Continent of Atlantis are not buried under the Atlantic Ocean.  They are in the mounds of North America, at places like Portsmouth, Ohio, Serpent Mound, and hundreds of other places.  And their technology wasn’t mechanical the way we see it, but occult-driven, and completely different.  We see whispers of it everywhere, especially in astrology horoscope readings.  And that doesn’t make that technology superior to what we have today.  Just different, and a method of approaching problems working in the background that reflects our politics of the here and now.  Why do people believe what they do about things?  That is why studying these things is important and extends beyond psychology or history.  But the hows and whys of a culture long suppressed.  A current political order that uses hints of that technology to stay in power today can do so because people don’t even know it exists. After all, the evidence has been hidden.  Even though, as Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, “the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”  Jesus wasn’t talking about the tiny part of the Near East where he lived, but he meant the whole earth, as it was well known from a long and deep history at that time.  Well, we see it, and it’s time we have a serious discussion about it and take that power away from those who seek to abuse it at the expense of all civilization’s past, present, and future.  And we have to do it now before we find ourselves on Mars and facing a harsh reality about ourselves, that we find there archaeology of a past that existed long before Atlantis appeared on earth.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

A Wonderful Expereince: Playing the new Indiana Jones game on PS5

I wasn’t going to play the new Indiana Jones game on PlayStation 5, but after much encouragement from my wife, I did, and I’m glad.  Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was an excellent experience with a great story, and was a throwback to the kind of entertainment I think we need a lot more of.  I was skeptical of Lucasfilm doing anything with Indiana Jones these days under the ownership of Disney.  I like the character and the kind of science spawned from those movies over the years.  But I wasn’t sure if they could pull off a good story without George Lucas.  But my wife has been pressing me to play more video games with the grandchildren, because that’s what they like to do.  But my life is so busy, I don’t have time to hang out online like most video games require, with a very social experience.  These days, video games are a way for kids to interact socially.  Games like Fortnite and Call of Duty put you in contact with thousands of people daily.  Kids who play these games for hours will interact with thousands of people in real time, so video game playing these days is a very social experience, and I’m not at all crazy about that.  I talk to way too many people throughout the week to want to spend my downtime talking and playing with more people.  So I haven’t been playing video games very much, and my wife thinks I need to do more for stress management.   So I listened to her, wives can be good for many things, and when the new Indiana Jones game came out in April of 2025 on the PS5 console, I thought I’d try it. 

Because I’m a fan of the character and raised my kids on the optimism of those movies, as a baseline for other things, I bought the Collector’s Edition of the game, which came with all kinds of neat stuff.  But once I started playing the game, I enjoyed the story as it takes you through the character of Indiana Jones to Peru, the Vatican, Giza, the Himalayas, Thailand, Shanghai, and Iraq.  It’s not an online game, so you can play it without interacting with others and have a nice story-driven experience.  And much to my surprise, this game was very much in line with the Indiana Jones movies, and it had a tone similar to the most recent one, the Dial of Destiny.  So it was true to the original character and didn’t have the woke stuff, which is such a problem these days.  There were a few things, but not enough to tarnish the game.  It was a good adventure story that was much longer than a typical movie.  I spent 60 hours playing the game, with about 12 hours of that time just doing the story itself, so it turned out to be a long movie experience that took place for me during April 2025, which was a good break from all the other things I typically do.  And it was good for the grandkids to see me doing something besides reading books, as I’ve said before, I read 4 to 5 books a week.  Some weeks, more than that, so I cover a lot of content that is very personal.  You can’t share the content you read with your family very well because reading is such a private thing.  But ironically, there is a scholarly element to this Indiana Jones game that was very refreshing.  

The game itself is about the “giant” controversy, which I think is the most important in the world right now, the idea that an ancient race of giants who lived before Noah’s flood inhabited the earth and had a very advanced culture.  I read a lot about this evidence, and it was a surprise that the modern debate drove the game’s plot.  We live in a time when people ask tough questions, and authority figures in authority positions have been caught lying to us, right to our faces.  At the center of this Indiana Jones story are many problems that played out during the Second World War.  Playing the Indiana Jones character you get to deal with actual historic characters such as Bonito Mussolini and the obsession with the occult that the Nazis were investing in and when you put the biblical narrative of the Fallen Angels of God, the Nephilim at the heart of a massive modern conspiracy theory, you have all the contents of a fascinating story, and it was.  Because I read so much about many different topics, the story of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle felt like it was produced and made just for me, including all the items that came with the Collector’s Edition.  I spend a lot of time thinking about these things through books and online lectures.  So it was a pleasure to play a video game about that kind of storyline.  And to have the material compelling, educational, and entertaining.  The game makers really loved the story, and it showed.

They first announced this game in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis.  I wanted to like the news, but I was so down on Disney and Lucasfilm for what they had done to Star Wars that I would have rather they just left Indiana Jones alone.  As a literary character in our culture, Indiana Jones does so many good things that I figured Disney would only damage that character, as they have so many other things they’ve mishandled.  For instance, the pressure seen on a recent Joe Rogan Podcast with the Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass probably wouldn’t have happened without an Indiana Jones character in popular, mainstream literature and filmmaking laying the foundation to apply the pressure.  So many people have been inspired by the character that they have correctly challenged established norms in a very healthy, academic way.  And when a game like this comes out and a mainstream audience plays it in such a mass way, good things tend to happen, and you see that with the questioning of independent investigators, questioning the institutional narrative of things to evoke the truth, which is what we should all be concerned about.  Stories like this light intellectual fires and usually have great significance for those who experience them.  So a game format, as opposed to a movie or a book, was very appropriate.  And I had a lot of fun with the game.  I’m glad I listened to my wife.  I like playing video games, but don’t think I’ll play them often.  But I am so happy to have taken the time to play this one, and it ended up being a positive thing for my entire family.  And I wish it could have gone on forever in many ways.  But playing through the whole story was an enjoyable experience that was a nice break from my day-to-day.  And I look forward to similar experiences to come along that kind of storytelling frontier.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

A Teacher of the Year Getting 30 Years in Jail: Another cover-up case at Lakota Schools

It should be shocking, but it isn’t, as news of the San Diego Teacher of the Year Jacqueline Ma pleading guilty to sexually grooming two of her students, one 11 and the other 12 for an extended period, that Lakota schools had another incident, which was quietly wiped away from the news cycle.  Where is Karin Johnson from Channel 5?  And with that, San Diego teacher, what gave her away as a young 36-year-old prototype that was given their highest honor?  She was the kind of teacher they wanted to say to the world that she was the best, and that parents could feel safe sending their kids to her with all their trust.  Was it the nose rings?  At Lakota, about a month before Jacqueline Ma cried like a baby in front of the judge, throwing all her guilt on the table, Lakota schools had plain clothed police officers escorting out a male teacher from the East Freshman building because the mother of a young girl caught the guy watching porn with her daughter.  And previously, that same teacher had a series of complaints trying to get into the girls’ locker room, to the point that they had to move him somewhere else once people knew what he was up to.  But to keep the story out of the news and to protect the school’s image, especially with this recent lawsuit in Columbus, where Lakota, along with 300 other plaintiffs who have joined the EdChoice lawsuit, want to pretend that they are something they aren’t.  So they can keep the trust of tax-paying parents, instead of admitting what they really are, a breeding ground for Democrat politics with serious sexual deviancy issues.  The media never reports on the issue until there is a confession, which is rare.  And before action is ever taken, as in the case of the Lakota case and the San Diego case, it takes a nosy parent to ask questions and insist on an investigation, which then turns up diabolical behavior discovered too late.

It should be evident by now what is going on; these public schools only care about their reputations so they can continue to steal money from taxpayers to fund their monstrous meat factories of sexual molestation and disastrous grooming of innocent kids.  These cases are so common that, statistically speaking, if you look at those who aren’t getting caught, it’s an astonishingly high number, so much so that all students would be able to report some creepy teacher they have to interact with who has boundary problems.  The schools cannot detect it through their teacher union contracts because they don’t ask for or tell about concealment policies.  Jacqueline Ma was given everything and had an incredibly bright future if only she could keep her shirt on.  Yet she had such bad judgment that she was taking her clothes off in class to show the young boys her boobies and was sending them text messages with all kinds of incriminating content because when people, any people, get into authority positions, it is very difficult not to abuse that relationship.  Obviously, for teachers of the year like Jacqueline Ma, it was tough to keep her clothes on, and her mind out of the gutter when she had a class full of students under her power, not to abuse it.  And back to the EdChoice case in Ohio, or Trump’s position to strengthen School Choice and eliminate centralized education methods, favoring more competitive approaches, it’s because of these stories that no public schools in the country can say that they are efficiently teaching children. Instead, they are abusing them sexually and ruining them for the rest of their lives, in many cases. 

I pick on Karin Johnson because I have a history with her.  She’s always there too late and supports the public school experience with blinders on.  I know her from my WLW days, when she was friends with Scott Sloan, the radio host.  I talked a lot about public school problems on his show until Scott got in trouble with his wife, a real estate agent, and those segments on a big radio station were what she thought was damaging to the real estate value of the school districts where she was selling.  So things went south, and Karin Johnson showed herself as a former cheerleader using the news as a pro-school advocate.  Only when a story completely collapses does she do a story on these dangerous public schools.  Instead of digging up the problems, they turn their attention to the people trying to bring all this to the surface, to protect the public schools for many of the reasons that were behind WLW radio getting out of that business.  The advertisers want to think well of these schools, whether they are good or not.  And now people hear too many of these stories that they want to pull their kids out of the schools and send them somewhere private.  And they want choices in education because the public option is far from reform-worthy.  Many people who have pushed these terrible stories under the radar want the public option to work for one reason or another, psychological or financial, and it’s hard for them to face the facts.  However, parents are sick of having to do all the work, and if it were not for them, the school would never admit to these transgressions.  And everything would continue to be swept under the rug.

It’s a problem in every workplace: the abuse of power by those who have authority over others, whether students or employees.  You cannot have a system of efficient teaching when a school system in San Diego gives a teacher like Jacqueline Ma a Teacher of the Year award, because they are measuring all the wrong values.  I would have told them that the nose ring should have been a disqualifying attribute.  You can’t be Teacher of the Year with a nose ring.  And if you take your clothes off in front of your students and send them pictures of you in sexual conditions, you can’t work as an authority figure in the school.  Or like in Lakota, where these cases are pretty much daily, if you watch porn with your students, grooming them, you are fired.  And if this young girl’s mom didn’t stick her nose into the situation, that teacher would still be employed, even though the other teachers know all about the problems.  They don’t say anything because they care more about the school’s reputation.  Not in actually being good and performing well.  The public school experience is inefficient, expensive, and corrosive because it has bad teachers instructing students in vulnerable positions, doing all the wrong things.  And it’s out of control because the checks on that power are more interested in keeping the stories from the public to hide it, because of some financial or emotional interest, that they have made the problem far worse.  It’s so bad that whistleblowers, like that girl’s mom at Lakota, are viewed as troublemakers, instead of the teachers caught doing the dirty deeds.  The assumption from the public school supporters is that we should all keep in mind the greater good of public education, even if that good is only in bad teachers continuing to get a paycheck stolen from property owners for a service that is horrible in general to an entire generation of kids.  And when it comes down to it, nobody but a few parents who care are looking out for the kids.  Not the news, not our politicians, not our business world, nobody.  Not even our churches.  Nobody cares because the evil under the rug is so vast and horrible that people would rather not find out about it until some tenacious parent catches someone guilty, and they cry like a baby, hoping to get a plea deal to cut 30 years of jail down to a lesser sentence.  By that time, their lives are already ruined. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Public Schools Are Going To Lose on EdChoice: Free legal advice on how to beat this case in court

In early May of 2025, oral arguments for the joint lawsuit by over 300 affiliates attached to public education funding made their pitch for why school vouchers harmed them and needed to be made unconstitutional.  Lakota schools in my district have recently joined this lawsuit with some horrendous legal advice from their counsel, but here’s the deal, and it’s quite clear after listening to the plaintive side of the case.  I had friends who went to provide testimony for the defense, for the position of the state to continue with the expansion of the school voucher program, in this case specifically, EdChoice.  I don’t think there was any question going into it how it was going to evolve.  But the position of the presenters, the public school argument, was incredibly weak.  Pathetically weak, and I guess you would expect them to be better prepared.  Here’s the deal: Public schools have left people wanting something better because they have performed terribly over a long period.  And parents want choices for their kids.  We’re not talking about not having education here.  We are talking about better education made that way through competition.  These pathetic public schools run by these ridiculously lazy teacher unions have destroyed the public education prospect as it was initially conceived.  Because most parents need the free babysitting service, they hold their noses and just put up with it.  But increasingly, parents don’t want to send their kids to public schools, and they want access to private schools, so they look for options like EdChoice to do so.  For many parents who currently send their kids to private schools, the system is really unfair to them.  They already pay property taxes to a local school attached to their zip code, and the full tuition for the private alternative.  Now, more people want the same option; they only wish that the tax money they pour into the system would be used to help give them an option instead of wasting it on a poorly managed local school they have no choice in.  Other than picking up and moving somewhere else.  It’s an evil system that is in deep need of reform. 

This is a common occurrence in public education institutions, and is why in Ohio, they can’t meet the ‘efficiency’ standard. This is a recent case out of state, but shows the system itself is broken and Ohio has plenty of their own cases.

I’m happy to do it. I usually do it twenty times a week for somebody somewhere, and I’ll give everyone some free legal work in this case.  This is an easy case without much drama because of the wording in the Ohio Constitution, which I think is a remarkable document.  I love the Ohio Constitution.  For fun, I read it at least once a week.  But for the plaintiffs in this EdChoice case, they are way off the rails on their argument.  And for the defense, here is how you win this case with an end zone dance.  The Ohio Constitution from 1851 says, “the General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”  The problem with the teacher union-run public schools with an operating management system straight off the pages of the Democrat Party is that they have let their costs get away from them, and that nobody manages the efficiency of the product they produce, no matter how you manage “efficiency.”  We could measure efficiency by the output, student quality, and ability to navigate adult lives.  Or get jobs that they are well prepared for.  Or we can measure efficiency by the cost per pupil, how much money it takes to produce a good student, “efficiently.”  In all the cases, the public school presentation of their point of view falls short because of the wording, “efficiency.”  They want and expect an exclusive monopoly of state funds, which has caused them to be wildly inefficient.  And it is in this failure that there is a court case at all.  Public schools, six at this Columbus hearing, but a lot more in the background, are trying to stave off what they caused for themselves. 

People want choice from the public school system because it has proven itself to be incredibly inefficient in allocating funds to the proper education of Ohio students.  So the burden of proof in this case is on the plaintiffs to show how they have presented an efficient product worthy of state money, rather than their assumption that they are promised state money just for existing.  They have not met the minimum Constitutional threshold for their base argument.  That’s why the Supreme Court has found the Ohio school funding model unconstitutional up to this point and why it has lingered in indecision.  That word “efficiency” is a real problem for how public education evolved, and the writers were wise to put it there.  You could also say the same about the word “thorough.”  How can public schools say they provide a “thorough” education when the evidence shows that they do only what they have to do to get state money and use it to pay overpriced labor markets ridiculous amounts of money for perpetually poor performance?  The plaintiffs really sounded foolish in this constitutional regard at the Columbus oral arguments.  Even I was embarrassed for them.

I know it, the public school types claim that they are held to different standards than the private schools are not held to, and there is money in that compliance.  But that is again part of the problem of inefficiency, even if government standards have made the public school experience less efficient.  It contributes through their argument of the facts that the public school experience is unreasonably inefficient because of the standards the state has put on them to make the use of the money they get less effective.  Which only makes it worse for them.  This kind of back and forth is why more and more parents want an off-ramp to the public school experience.  Parents wish to choose whether it’s in a private school or to homeschool their kids so they don’t have to send their kids to a factory of Democrat politics, which is what modern education has evolved into.  Public schools are not teaching kids to grow up and become Republicans, which would make sense if it were fair both ways.  But they are actively trying to teach kids to grow up and become Democrats.  And what parent wants to pay for that if they don’t want to lose their kids to radical politics?  Which happens a lot in the public school experience.  And when you go to school board meetings to complain, and the school board cuts off the mic to shut everyone up, what do they expect to happen?  People will want to pull their kids out of those schools and will not want to waste their money on an inefficient school just because it happens to be in their zip code.  The public schools have shown that they waste the money and continue asking for more.  Because they are a bad product made that way through a monopoly status.  And the best thing for them, to make them Constitutionally viable, is to force them to be more efficient in a competitive marketplace, which is why EdChoice and many other voucher programs will increase in number in the years to come.  The teachers’ unions will not win this case, because they can’t show that they contribute an efficient and thorough product.  And with that, the case is over.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The United Nations is Going Bankrupt: They never should have been created

I’m thrilled to hear it.  I used to go to meetings with my congressional representative, John Boehner, where he would do meet-and-greets, before he was Speaker of the House in 2010, and ask him to get the United States out of the United Nations.  Most of the time, he wasn’t there, but had assistants who would take notes for him, but they’d giggle about the crazy right-wing lunatic who they were embarrassed to have as a neighbor.  But I was serious.  I didn’t see anything good coming out of the United Nations.  Americans never wanted to be in the United Nations, even though President Woodrow Wilson wanted America to lead the League of Nations.  Americans finally caved after World War II because nobody wanted to see another Hitler in the world, so we ended up with the ridiculous United Nations, and things have gone downhill for America since then.  Americans want to be left alone and free from world problems.  But we have all these nosey politicians who like to drink tea with their pinky out, and sip wine of specific vintages, and they want to be respected by Europeans, so they have been trying to drag America into a marriage with the rest of the world for generations.  I would even argue that if not for sinister forces working in the background, we would never have had any World Wars, so it can be argued that the wars themselves were constructs meant to create a global government.  Not to prevent hostile characters that might plunge the world into war.  Hitler was a creation of a lot of bad people.  And the United Nations was never the solution. Instead, the solution to many of the world’s evils was more Bible reading and independence from the world’s villains. 

But finally, we have a President who gets it, and a political class that can at least understand what that President is up to and why.  People aren’t laughing when they say they want to be separated from the United Nations like it used to be.  Living in Liberty Township, Ohio, specifically Butler County, I think about the United Nations whenever I see a roundabout.  Most people don’t know it, but many of the sustainable living implements introduced socially have come from the United Nations Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 flowdown plans, and our colleges accepted these communist traps hook, line, and sinker for years.  When our township politicians hired people out of these colleges as community developers they brought Agenda 21 sustainable living priorities with them and we ended up with a bunch of sidewalks and roundabouts to adopt more European ideas of community building and environmental impact with the ultimate goal of keeping people in their homes more and driving cars less.  And the whole thing has made me sick every time I go through a roundabout, which are almost as common in Butler County, Ohio, these days as they are in socialist run Europe.  People argue about their worth; they say they are better at keeping cars moving, and they prevent accidents, which make insurance companies happy, who lobby politicians for ways to make society safer so that people will buy insurance but not have accidents to force payouts.  So for all the tyrannical micromanagers out there, Agenda 21 would make them a lot of money, but the goal was to limit freedoms so that stuffy bureaucrats could have an easy time at managing society with a growing centralized government and encourage through policy fewer people to leave their homes, but rather to take a sidewalk everywhere, and to ride bicycles instead of cars.  The roundabouts keep you moving, but also slow you down to go around those stupid circles.  I like long straightaways that we used to have in America, where you could go fast, and even quicker if you could beat the yellow light at an intersection.  Sure, there were more accidents, but life in general was better. 

And never forget that COVID was the ultimate creation of the United Nations to implement their Agenda 21 projects and to set the world on the same page with 2030 priorities.  And yes, COVID was a created virus meant to kill people to force acceptance of these ridiculous stay-at-home policies and conformity to centralized government rules.  If people didn’t die, nobody would listen to an overstuffed government, so through the World Health Organization, a division of the United Nations, a virus was created that would set the world on a Great Reset, much of which still hasn’t recovered.  COVID was planned and implemented using the Chinese system.  The virus was leaked out of a lab in China under very nefarious circumstances.  And immediately, the United Nations had the world on lockdown, micromanaging the economy globally, including America, and they thought that people would fall in line better than they did.  Instead, we had significant pushback and a world angry at the policies of the United Nations, and now we have a President willing to push back against them.  And to cut the money confiscated from Americans and redistribute it to the United Nations, to work against the nature of Americans themselves. Finally, we have politicians willing to stand up to that global tyranny and not play the game, which is great. 

What’s better is the recent report that the United Nations is running out of money because, without the United States, that motley band of socialists, communists, and Marxists has no money.  They can only loot cash from the only capitalist country in the world, America, to sustain themselves.  And now, because we elected Trump, they have essentially been cut off.  And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.  So I’m pretty happy about their trajectory toward financial ruin.  I have never liked the United Nations.  I have never liked politicians who support them and wanted to join them.  And I would say that without their desire to be created in the first place, we never would have had a World War.  Those wars were created as a reaction to the globalist push that followed the Jekyll Island meetings that started the Federal Reserve, and if you trace all the money and influence to their sources, you will find that it all goes to centralized monetary policy, especially the banks of Europe.  So, there was never anything good about any of this, and what upset them the most was that even after all this time, they never found a way to get Americans to comply with the United Nations willingly.  Sure, we built some roundabouts and sidewalks.  However, people have never embraced the United Nations’ globalist priorities.  Instead, we elected people like President Trump to say no to the United Nations.  And now they struggle to survive because they have nothing without American money.  Because they are rotten, stinking, Marxist countries with bad leadership and horrible economic policies.  And micromanagers without a clue.  But they can name a wine from France in a dinner conversation.  And they will drink it with their pinky out.  I would say that the United Nations types and their supporters are worthless people in life, and I am glad to see them finally rejected for the losers they have always been.  And the more miserable they are, the happier I am. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Buying the Truth: Peer reviewers have made over a billion dollars from the top four medical outlets

I read a fascinating book this week that I thought was very revealing about the field of anthropology by a professor of that field called Weaponizing Anthropology, which is about how the CIA has infiltrated that science and the colleges that teach it to shape narratives to build a social narrative.  The book by David Price, I think, explains a lot about just how wrong it is that we establish what we think of as a fact.  And it reminded me of the problems revealed during Covid from the Lancet in England, a very respected medical publication, where Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci found ways to manipulate the important news of hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin to prevent and treat Covid-19.  And to take away that hope from millions of people suffering from the artificial virus, let loose from a lab in China to spread around the world, from gain-of-function research.  Regarding the field of anthropology and the related sciences, I have complained a lot about some of the ridiculous assumptions made about the mound building culture in the Ohio Valley for instance that steers concern more toward a hunter and gatherer mindset of gradual evolution when in fact we are looking at a Vico Cycle of continued decline and rebirth from cultures extending deep into the past, well beyond the Archaic Period.  And recently, we learned that peer reviewers for four of the top medical journals have received payments from drug and medical device manufacturers totaling around 1 billion dollars from 2020 to 2022.  This has opened the door to what big business it is to be in the peer review business.  People tend to trust information that is associated with an expert opinion.  But the deceit is that when that expert is paid to have an argument that the people writing the checks want them to have, the information is meaningless.  And in the context of the value of helpful information, we are finding that what we assume to be a reality is, in truth, only shaped by those paying for the definition of that reality, which endorses a need they have for mass public opinion to shade in their direction. 

This morning, I had 337,000 unread emails, and about a quarter of those are from people who offer peer review services and want me to pay them for their expert opinion to lend to the credibility of my material.  Or, they want me to review their material and are willing to pay for it.  It is an enormous business, and many people make a lot of money offering nothing more than an opinion, and the fee for being an expert in a field is very valuable.  But I don’t get into that money game for many reasons.  For a long time, I have not trusted peer-reviewed opinions for many reasons.  This recent information from the Weaponizing Anthropology book and this report on the peer review contributions to the top four medical journals has only solidified my opinion.  Which is sad because I would like to see the system work.  I read a lot of information, and I have my trusted sources.  I think the information is more credible when I see their name next to an article or a book.  But that’s how this whole racket got started in the first place.  Trust was for sale, and there were a lot of evil characters in the world willing to exploit it for all kinds of nefarious reasons.  That was indeed happening in the medical field.  And it was happening in large doses in anthropology and archaeology.  Those who pay for an opinion get to shape what that opinion is. 

I think we were a lot better off in the sciences when adventurers through discovery would publish wild finds in a search for fortune and glory.  The idea of profiting off finding a new treasure in the world and becoming rich in the process was more honest than what we have now, where experts are paid to shape an opinion and steer people as sponsored spokespeople toward some treatment that might not be good for them.  A good example is in the diagnosis of diabetes, for instance, where pancreatic health can be self-generated.  However, the medical approach shaped by paid experts wants to steer patients toward pharmaceutical treatments because that’s where the profit is.  The goal is not in saving lives with real and permanent treatment, it’s in keeping people sick so that pharma companies can profit off the demise of those patients.  The ability to purchase a peer-reviewed opinion then shapes reality, not toward the truth but toward the desire of profit seekers at the expense of honesty.  How often have I heard that the Clovis people migrated into North America across the frozen land bridge from Russia to Alaska 20,000 years ago?  When none of the expert opinions can begin to explain why there were such large skeletons found in Indian mounds all over North America from a people with very precise understandings of mathematics, and were certainly not hunters and gatherers, but sophisticated city dwellers, such as at the Cahokia site just outside of St. Louis that had cities larger than what was found in Europe at the time.  Most of that information has been suppressed by the peer review process, and only old-fashioned passion projects from seekers of fortune and glory have been able to shake that information loose from the world.

It has been a house of cards that was always going to fail, and that one billion dollars reported just for those four publications is just the tip of the iceberg.  This same practice is occurring in all our professional fields that produce experts.  Being an expert pays a lot of money once you establish yourself.  And as I said, I get a lot of offers, which I turn down because I don’t like the process, and would never take money for it.  Because I see it all as a huge problem.  These latest reports only confirm what I always suspected.  When you can pay cash to create a truth, can you say that a truth is real?  When opinion is for sale, I don’t see that it has any value.  An expert might work hard to build up credibility to put their name next to something, but the minute people discover that the opinion was purchased, all merit for the contents flies out the window.  That is what the CIA has been doing in the field of anthropology to shape social discourse by controlling the narrative with people on their staff, or with money paid to experts through black budgets not regulated by members of an elected body of government in Congress.  And since many people got caught over the Lancet issue regarding COVID, I don’t think the expert class will ever gain credibility back.  It will take more than time to get people to trust in the system again.  And the peer review process is now broken forever.  And that might lead to wild theories and speculations from a hungry public.  But honestly, that information is more valid than the opinions of people paid to shape a truth that might have no basis in reality.  But it might serve the plots of more scandalous people who do not have our best interests in mind. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Jesse Watters DOGE Interview: A change that will last

It was an excellent interview with Jesse Watters, DOGE, and Elon Musk.  I think we are seeing something here that will stick around, and I couldn’t be happier, reflecting over the years to the early part of the Tea Party movement, when fiscal responsibility was our main concern.  It seemed inconceivable at the time that something like a DOGE would ever happen.  But here we are in 2025 having serious discussions about the massive government waste that taxpayers are funding, and it’s not just a campaign issue that comes up every four years.  As Elon Musk has set it up, DOGE has emerged as something that can stick around long after he’s gone, which is what good CEOs do for their companies: you set the table and make it so that you build a culture that can run on its own.  And I’m sure Elon Musk will stick around and be a figurehead of DOGE for a long time.  But what he has created and what the members are doing will last and become a part of government oversight that will last even as the political tides might change.  The Jesse Watters interview captured well what DOGE really is, which I’m sure they had no idea it would be.  One thing that was certainly obvious was that the people doing DOGE are brilliant and well-intentioned, and what Elon Musk has done as the head of the effort is set a standard that can now cascade into a culture of scrutiny that should have been present from the beginning.  Whenever you have money involved, there will be people looking to exploit the system so they can steal some of it.  And when you have a government this big and powerful, that can confiscate so much wealth from people, abuse was a certainty.  But to what extent can people only imagine, until now?

I don’t think Elon Musk needs to be there every day to run DOGE.  It’s nice that he is still doing it even as the government’s activism against him has sought to ruin his car company, Tesla.  Elon Musk might be the wealthiest person in the world, but this commitment to DOGE has cost him dearly.  And I think from here on out, all that needs to be done is to empower people like the current DOGE members into doing the work and to let it take on a life of its own.  What they ended up with differs from what they set out to do in saving trillions of dollars off the top of the budget.  Most of the savings they have extracted aren’t the obvious things like entitlement payments and program-driven budgets, but the day-to-day abuses that get hidden behind all the chaos.  Most of the savings coming from DOGE are in saved opportunity cost, which is usually very hard to measure.  Elon Musk’s way of thinking when running his other companies was just what was needed.  The government has required this oversight since it started collecting taxes, and what Elon Musk has done in this very short time deserves great recognition and gratitude because he could have done what most everyone does, and just ignored the problem.  When you are as wealthy as he is, he could have easily turned his back on the issue and moved offshore to live a fun life.  But to sink his teeth into this project took guts, and because of it, we’ll be talking about DOGE, I think, permanently. 

People can’t be trusted to do the right things on their own, and one thing that came out of the DOGE interview on Fox News was how many people have been abusing the system dramatically.  I saw much of this firsthand when my wife and I traveled to Washington, D.C. for an extended period and lived in Fairfax County to see how most of those communities entirely existed off the waste scraped off the top of government.  Many of the programs that have so much waste in them were created with the best of intentions, but when you involve people who are always looking for the easiest way to do things, a scandal is bound to happen, and many people are professional con artists, even to themselves.  They can look in the mirror and even lie to what looks back and feel okay with it.  Those are the kind of people drawn to government work, and the many spoils come from a largely unregulated system.  The stories of abuse that DOGE is telling are just the tip of the iceberg.  And, astonishingly, we are talking about it now.  I thought from the Tea Party perspective that we’d have to have another Revolutionary War-type engagement to get control of government spending and waste.  I never thought that President Trump, one of the wealthiest men in the world, would be in the White House, which meant he was personally free of the typical social constraints that even keep the questions from being asked.  Or that the wealthiest and most innovative CEO in the world would personally create a department to oversee waste management and root out the perpetrators like a gunslinging sheriff in a wild and hostile old west town full of criminals. 

I think Elon Musk has done enough, and if he did nothing else with DOGE, he has given us something that will last well into the future.  I do not think that Democrats will be back in the White House anytime soon, if ever.  I do not see them retaking power in the House and Senate and gaining the ability to stop DOGE politically.  No, I think DOGE is here to stay and will run fine because it has good people in it, and it started because of Elon Musk.  But it has emerged into its own thing, and now there is a level of expectation for it to continue.  The public will never not want a DOGE to look out for waste on their behalf.  Going back to the system where looters were free to steal all they could from the government system will never be what it was.  In a lot of ways, creating DOGE is what people looked through all the smoke to elect Trump in the first place was all about.  This is precisely why we wanted Trump.  Elon Musk wouldn’t be able to participate in our government if not for how Trump runs things.  This kind of CEO management style has taken this government waste problem and brought it out of the box for us to fix, instead of the continued policies of hiding the issue from the world and hoping that nobody notices.  DOGE has been so successful that the expectation will be that it will always be a part of government and that its role will expand with time to unleash enterprising people to protect government systems from the parasitic nature of most human beings.  Only the threat of getting caught will keep people in line.  And without DOGE, there was nothing to give criminals pause.  But now there is, and we are far better off for it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

‘Revenge of the Sith’ Made 25 Million Dollars: Its all about the artist, not the product

My son-in-law said it best when we were on a family vacation in Florida and attending the Disney Parks, as we were at the Star Wars Land they have at Hollywood Studios, that Disney didn’t buy an entertainment franchise, they purchased a religion.  And they never understood it.  And you can see that with the new films compared to the ones that George Lucas directed himself, who created the franchise and sold it in 2012, with good intentions.  But honestly, and I hate to say it, Star Wars would have been better off if Lucas had never sold it to Disney.  I get why he did; he had many employees, wanted them to have something to do, and wanted to retire.  But Disney screwed up a lot with their woke politics and they significantly reduced the brand of Star Wars with their ownership.  And it has been a disaster.  Some good things happened, like their theme park presence.  But Bob Iger never understood what Star Wars was, the writers of the new movies had no idea what they were doing, and the films themselves were filled with woke ideas that modern audiences have soundly rejected.  And I have to say all that because we just recently had the now-famous holiday of May 4th, and I noticed a few things that were certainly interesting.  Primarily, the old movie Revenge of the Sith was re-released in theaters for a limited run to celebrate its 29th anniversary, and it made a really good 25 million dollars over the last weekend of April 2025.  It’s a movie that is free on television just about anytime that anybody wants to watch it, yet people were so hungry for Star Wars that they returned to the theater to see the movie one more time in actual movie theaters that says a whole lot about where people are and how valuable Star Wars is to our modern culture.

I wanted Disney’s ownership to succeed and Star Wars to be available to a new generation.  But Disney certainly screwed that up, what they have contributed to Star Wars was woke garbage that was astonishingly bad compared to what George Lucas directed.  And other people obviously feel the same way.  They aren’t rushing out to see the new Star Wars stuff that Disney produces. They rushed out to see the old movie and were quite celebratory over it.  I understand that there is real value in the old Star Wars movies. It is truly fascinating to see how corporate institutionalism, with all the money to work with, could not come close to duplicating that original magic.  But people didn’t let that stop them from celebrating the new Holiday, Star Wars Day, on May 4th, as in “May the 4th be with you.”  It was everywhere on May 4th 2025, from all kinds of surprising parts of society, especially at baseball games that now openly support the Star Wars Holiday, and people seem to really like it.  Even sports jocks like to brag about their Star Wars knowledge and are not afraid to geek out on May 4th dressing up as their favorite character.  And regarding Revenge of the Sith, it is stunning to hear how people today love that movie so much.  I remember when it came out and how people talked about it then, as well as the prequels of George Lucas in general, and I never would have thought that that movie would hold such a dear place in people’s hearts. 

But that is a testament to just how bad things are these days.  I knew it was bad when Disney got rid of the canon that George Lucas had built, leading up to the Disney merger by rewriting the history in novels, comic books, and then in the movies.  That was the biggest mistake that Disney could have made.  I said it at the time because my wife and I had personally read hundreds of Star Wars books, all of them ever produced at that time.  We tried to read some new ones under Disney ownership and couldn’t do it.  Disney was too woke to tell the story of Star Wars, a struggle for freedom from tyranny in deep space, a long time ago, and very far away.   Disney was incapable of getting it, and the story group at Lucasfilm was way too San Francisco progressive and anti-Trump to continue what George Lucas started.  That was obvious this year when Trump was back in the White House and stated how he wanted to make Hollywood great again.  Well, it starts by understanding what made it great to begin with, and clearly, people like what George Lucas did with Star Wars much more than what Disney was able to do with it.  And a sad wedge has now been introduced to the fanbase.  But this year, as opposed to the past, people are openly embracing the old Star Wars much more than just holding their nose to support the new stuff. And those very successful box office numbers for Revenge of the Sith are exciting.  People are hungry for good traditional values in the Star Wars movies.  But Disney never could get their arms around it. 

It hasn’t all been bad; a few Star Wars shows like Andor have been good.  Ahsoka is a pretty good show.  There have been a few movies there and there, like Solo and Rogue One, that were good.  But most of it has been garbage, including the most recent sequel movies.  You wonder how a bunch of people could sit in a room and, by committee, produce such garbage.  But George Lucas used to write stories in a notebook and with a pencil, a very anti-technology thing to do for one of the most technology-driven enterprises ever attempted.  It has been a lesson in arrogance, where institutionalism thinks it is superior to individual achievement.  However, with all that Disney had as resources, they could not do better than George Lucas did, all by himself.  Of course, thousands of employees made Star Wars great, but the vision started and ended with one guy.  And that’s what people wanted to see: the interpretation of an artist and their work.  Not some corporate collection of nonsense.  It’s like seeing a Picasso painting and thinking about the guy who made the art, as opposed to the same image produced by a museum committee trying to duplicate the genius of a Picasso painting.  People have voted; they love the old George Lucas stuff, but they don’t like the new stuff.  You don’t see people going crazy over the newly made Disney material.  But people will go to the movies dressed up to watch a free film that has been out for 20 years, because George Lucas, the artist, made it.  And they will spend time and money on that while rejecting the much more expensive new stuff.  And there is a lesson for the entire industry on May 4th, Star Wars Day.  Corporate collectivism does not beat individual merit, in any case.  Time in mass culture has proven that, overwhelmingly.  The artist is what people invest in, not the product or art itself.  And there can’t be any good Star Wars without the artist who created it, being the center of the conversation.  It was an experiment in entertainment that has shown a true trend that everyone should learn some hard lessons from.

Rich Hoffman

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