Category: Comic Books

There Will Never Be Peace with Hamas: Releasing hostages that should have never been captured in the first place

After Trump posted support for Douglas Murray’s book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, I bought it quickly and read it because I wanted to know what Trump’s position on these hostage negotiations was with Hamas.  There are 48 total, with only 20 still alive, but none of them are in good shape.  Trump was wise to point to that particular book as an example of his policy on the issue, because it can be confusing.  But here’s the thing: it’s nice to do everything you can to save those poor people who have been hostages to Hamas.  And to return those bodies to their families.  But the solution is a deep one that I think will require much worse than Israel wants to do to all these Palestinian neighbors.  There is no way to achieve peace, and a two-state solution will never be realized.  One side will have to eliminate the other, and that will be the end of it.  That is the only way at this point.  The foundations of the religions at play are meant to provoke each other into conflict, and this is serving a greater evil that is far at work beyond normal sentiment.  There is a real lust for the death of the people involved that looms in the background.  And just for the record, when people ask me about AI and if I use it.  The answer is no, there is no AI program in the world, and I don’t think there ever will be, that can write the way I do.  It can attempt to copy my style, but it can’t think in the way I approach writing my articles.  AI could not write this article from scratch because it would require it to exceed human capacity to do so. To answer the question, no, I don’t use AI.  I do it the old-fashioned way because that’s the only way it works. 

I say all that because I think there is only one solution, especially after you read Murray’s book.  I’m not particularly impressed with Murray as a person; he is way too progressive for me and way too accepting of drug use.  There was a lot of drug use going on at that Nova dance party in southern Israel when Hamas ruthlessly attacked them over their Gaza Strip war.  Gaza is one of those positions where Israel tried to play nice and let the Palestinians live in some co-existence.  However, the terrorist mindset in the region simply cannot and won’t do it.  And they never will.  The minds at play are poisoned with hate, and we have to deal with that before we do anything, which is a radical leftist issue that is global.  It plays out beyond the façade of religion in the Middle East, as a validation between indigenous people and their territorial captors, as is the issue over the creation of Israel to begin with.  The primary assumption is that the Jewish people should not exist.  And the creation of Western Civilization behind biblical history should never have happened.  I know a lot more about this issue because I am very interested in the archaeology of the region and the politics on dig sites. At the most fundamental level, the situation is irreparable.  Islam is determined never to admit that there was ever a First Temple period, and they work really hard to make sure that science can never find anything from that period, which predates Islam by almost 2000 years.  There is a significant amount of historical revisionism occurring to validate their current political stance, which is unacceptable. 

Israel itself is way too progressive; the drug use at that festival was not appropriate for the young people who were slaughtered for no reason.  And the way Bibi Netanyahu has been untrustworthy as a leader of Israeli politics, claiming power, reveals how fractured the government really is at the highest levels.  The solution to it all is a much more conservative government and people far less inclined to liberal ideas.  The raids into border towns like Nir Oz, which had Hamas raiders going door to door and ripping out people from their homes and killing them ruthlessly, would not have happened if Israel had more guns in the hands of private citizens.  To answer the question about why such a thing as this doesn’t happen in the United States, it is because of the mass gun ownership that we have.  The same terrorists, using different masks, attack, and they kill ruthlessly and often.  Consider the recent situation involving Charlie Kirk.  It’s the same kind of leftist evil that is corrupting so many young people; there isn’t much difference between Charlie Kirk’s killer and the young people of Hamas who ruthlessly killed so many at the music festival and raided the homes of innocent people at Nir Oz.  But the incident cannot be widespread in America because every home is so well armed with personal firearms.  Terrorist elements would love to go door to door, raping and killing people in the suburbs of America.  However, they can’t because people can retaliate if the government fails them.  And in Israel, the government failed the people.  They should have known an attack was coming.  It took them too long to respond.  And it all could have been solved with wider gun ownership.  So Israel and its way-too-democratic government are too liberal to start with, which has caused them many of the problems they do have.  Without the United States, Israel would not exist, and everyone knows it.

The solution to the problem is not at the level of government.  The United States can’t get drawn into fighting Israel’s battles for it.  If we are going to say Israel should exist because God wants it to and we want to serve God, then let’s get serious.  Send in private contractors to wipe out Hamas wherever they are, pay them $100k per head, and hunt them down like dogs.  The solution to the violence is a lot more violence by private citizens.  I would volunteer for that.  I’d be happy to go and be a private contractor by going door to door where Hamas lives in Gaza, and other places, and just getting rid of them.  Forget about the armies, those are too structured.  Just take the violence to the enemy with profit-minded contractors, and beat the political left with their own game of terror, and stop playing nice.  I think it’s commendable that Trump is trying to secure the release of those hostages.  It’s a reasonable effort to try to make peace.  But, to really solve the problem, Hamas has to be hunted down and destroyed where they sleep.  That is the only way.  All the Hezbollah activity in the region, and the funding support that comes from Qatar and Iran, are just too deep.  When books like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are as popularly sold in book stores in that region as they are, there is a much deeper evil at work for any logical negotiations.  And that evil wants the blood of humans for its personal consumption.  The only way to deal with it is to flood it with the blood of its own supporters.  Not the innocent.  And that is the only way.  I’m happy Trump is willing to try.  But the only solution is a lot of blood from the bad guys.  And the best definition of good in all human history has been defined by the Holy Bible.  And that’s the foundation of the entire fight.  You can’t make peace with that evil.  It has to be destroyed, and nothing else.

Rich Hoffman

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

‘Sketch’ is a Great Movie: Disney goes against Trump supporters

You would think that Disney would have learned some hard lessons about its role in the world and the financial problems it is finding itself in.  However, I don’t like discussing negatives all the time, because a fantastic movie called Sketch hit theaters a few weeks ago and is a sign of many good things to come from Angel Studios, showcasing a much different movie world on the horizon.  The Hollyweird crowd has lost all its influence and power and is on a dramatic downward trend.  Sketch was an excellent film that was on limited release, so it’s not a box office titan, unlike the way Disney distributes films. However, coming off the success of the fantastic Chosen series, Angel Studios, I think, is fair to say, is replacing the role Disney used to play with families.  I thought Sketch reminded me of a modern version of E.T., Goonies, or even Gremlins, movies produced by Steven Spielberg in his prime.  And it shows that markets determine success, not PR firms and lawyers who run these big studios these days.  The CEO of Disney came a bit unglued this past week, doubling down on his decision to release films that continue to fail to excite the public as they once did.  The recent movie, Fantastic Four, which I thought was pretty fantastic, has not performed well.  It will be fortunate to collect $500 million, half of what was expected to be made, and that is because Disney has lost the trust of the public. Bob Iger now sees the problem I have been pointing out for a long time, much more clearly.  It’s safe to say that his hopes for the upcoming movie Doomsday are in serious trouble because all the films building it up are not performing well at the movie theater.  

It just goes to show how little the entertainment industry knows about the psychology of the movie-going public.  And I love this topic because movies are something most everyone can relate to.  Most of us watch them whether on television, streaming services, or at the movie theater.  So, in many ways, buying a movie ticket, as I have always seen the experience, is like voting.  People vote for their values by spending money.  But there was a communist movement, as outlined by Cleon Skousen in the famous book, The Naked Communist, to take over the movie studios and the message that they broadcast to the world, and that has undoubtedly happened to Disney through the mask of woke culture.  Now that people have seen just how much Disney resembles the Democrat Party and how anti-Trump they have been, they have stopped spending money on Disney products and have turned toward other entertainment options, such as those provided by Angel Studios.  Currently, they are not financially comparable, even though they may show movies side by side.  I think the movie Sketch cost around $ 3 million to make, and it is considered very profitable, having doubled that amount in returns.  Whereas something like the latest Fantastic Four movie costs half a billion dollars by the time it’s made, and some media is created for it.  And it’s poised to break even, maybe.  So it’s not apples to apples, but more like apples and apple sauce.  However, the message is clear: people are leaving Disney and seeking alternatives, which is evident in their declining park attendance as well.  And in anger over their bad decisions to support woke agendas as an entertainment studio, Bob Iger and the stars of Fantastic Four, like Pedro Pascal, have been complaining about Trump supporters, which didn’t help their case.

Disney assumed that people would support whatever they put together because the public had to.  And that is not the case.  Trump supporters have taken themselves off the grid because they dislike the products that Disney has released, or even traditional cable.  I have been talking about emerging streaming services such as Truth Social, Trump’s personal social media platform, and they have good television that breaks the cycle of traditional cable services, leaving CNN, MSNBC, and all the networks struggling to maintain their audiences because they are all fleeing to outlets they trust more even if they are brand new.  Such as Angel Studios, which earned its audience with great projects like The Chosen.  And successful films at the theater, such as The Sound of Freedom.  However, it’s not just Disney; Warner Bros. has been more successful and less woke than Disney, as evidenced by its box office performance.  However, their recent update to Superman didn’t perform well at the theater, falling well short of expectations, which James Gunn was very dismissive about.  Superman is all about “truth, justice, and the American Way.”  Not the “human way.”  The world looks to America to be a beacon of hope, and that’s what the world wants out of American entertainment.  They don’t wish to communicate messages that put out the fires of hope.  And this Superman just wasn’t that “super.”  He was an all-too-human global citizen, and audiences rejected the premise.  It might have been a pretty good movie, just as Fantastic Four was.  However, the messaging was off-target for the intended audiences.  And when Bob Iger is mad, it’s because he thought he understood elements of market trends that he didn’t.  For all the same reasons people voted for Trump, they also vote with their market dollars on where to spend their money on amusement parks or movies. 

Bob Iger and many others believe that people go to see movies because they like the actors, such as in the upcoming Doomsday with Robert Downey Jr. They are investing massive amounts of money in these actors, thereby inflating the budgets.  There will be approximately 100 cameo actors in the upcoming big Marvel movie.  But the gamble on Pedro Pascal is scaring everyone at the Mouse House because it hasn’t turned out the way they planned.  I personally liked Pedro Pascal in The Fantastic Four.  I think he is good as The Mandalorian.  But he’s too woke to replace Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis as the new Hollywood leading man.  Because Hollywood thought it controlled the message, and that people loved the actors, but that is not turning out to be true.  A movie like Sketch features a cast of actors, none of whom are stars, and yet the movie still performed well for its small audience.  It will stream well, and people will remember it far longer than these Marvel movies.  And rather than learn their lesson, Disney is only digging deeper, indicating that they are going to double down on their woke agenda.  And that’s the problem.  Nobody cares about their product, and the more they push an openly gay agenda, which they did in The Eternals, people will drop them as an entertainment option, and that includes the $20k vacation to Disney World.  Eternals, with its openly gay scenes, was the dagger that halted Marvel’s successes at Disney.  The longer they avoid addressing that issue, the more financial damage they will incur.  When a studio and its actors go against the political trend of a nation like America, they can’t survive.  To fill the void of family entertainment left behind by Disney, there is the wonderful Angel Studios, which is producing great entertainment.  Sketch is just one example.  And for Bob Iger, a hard lesson that he will learn too late: the market is in charge.  Communist leaders are not.  And studios, if such assumptions capture them, will lose money in that marketplace because of free choice. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans: America’s newest sweetheart

When Steve Bannon is talking about the primal scream of a dying regime, this is what he’s talking about: the social reaction to the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle Jeans ad.  It has been astonishing, to say the least, to see just how much throwing water on this wicked witch has melted the political left.  Until a few days ago, I had no idea who Sydney Sweeney was.  From my perspective, even looking at her as a sexy American sweetheart is too much.  She’s a few years older than my grandkids are now, so I see a kid in her.  Not a sex object.  However, I have some experience in public relations and marketing. And I have known A-list celebrities and their agents up close and personal, and I have to say, ahead of this new movie release for ‘Americana’ which Sydney Sweeney is in and is a kind of Tarantino movie that I think I’m going to like quite a lot, this young lady made a power move that is going to make her the next Bo Derek and or, Brooke Shields.  Her timing on coming out as a Republican, and shooting guns on TikTok, couldn’t have been better, or more coordinated.  This is an intelligent young lady.  And American Eagle and her agent, manager, and personal advisors knew what they were doing to go as anti-woke as possible with the marketing of these blue jean ads that have so many diabolical leftists so upset.  I love it because, strategically, it exposes something that I have known for a long time and was ripe for someone to take advantage of.  But watching Sydney’s Saturday Night Live monologue from a year ago, this model for all things MAGA wasn’t so obvious.  Now that Trump has won the election and America is certainly headed in a much different direction than the Joe Biden administration anticipated, Sydney Sweeney is poised to become not just America’s sweetheart, but also a mega-explosive model and actress on a scale nobody has seen in a long time.  And I think she knows exactly what she is doing, and I admire her a lot for doing it.

Bo Derek comes to mind when I think of Sydney Sweeney. She gained fame from the movie ‘10’, which propelled her to Hollywood fame in ways that everyone from that period remembers.  But Sydney Sweeney is talented in ways that Bo Derek never could be.  And I make that comparison because both women have large breasts, and they don’t mind showing them off.  Sydney Sweeney has been known up to this point in her young career, at only 27 years old, to enjoy doing nude scenes.  So, she would seem very unlikely to become the spokesperson for the MAGA movement and have President Trump very excitedly endorse her from the White House.  And as long as she was showing her boobs in movies and having very provocative sex scenes in her acting profession, the political left didn’t mind at all.  They put their arm around her and were entirely ready to endorse her as just another actress who was willing to get naked to get film roles.  But like Bo Derek, Sydney Sweeney is a much deeper person that people fell in love with.  The sexiness gave a cover story to the real issue lingering beneath the surface that nobody wanted to see past their boobies, and that was that they were conservative women, and America loves women who are conservative and not afraid to show it.  And Sweeney has fully embraced that conservative appeal as a marketing move she is ready to stand behind, and exploit the woke agenda as one of the first wrecking balls to it in the entertainment industry.

To say that this American Eagle ad for Sydney features great jeans is an accident that coincided with the release of one of the most explosive films she happens to be in is not to understand the industry.  I would say there are hundreds of people behind the scenes who are in on the Sydney Sweeney decision-making process.  There are numerous agents, managers, producers, financiers, and business types who all have a few cents to add to what a fashion model does and when they do it, in an attempt to exploit a new market trend.  And American Eagle decided they wanted to be the anti-Bud Light commercial by putting a very hot and willing young woman into their ad campaign, and Sydney Sweeney just made the Americana movie that spins on its head a lot of social assumptions that we make for a movie set in South Dakota, one of my favorite states.  A lot is happening here that is a direct reaction to Trump’s win back in the White House, and it’s much bigger than just jean sales.  It’s a decision and a gamble that will pay off in a big way for Sweeney.  But it’s also a market indicator for where the entire entertainment industry is headed.  And the goal from the left was to destroy American ideas about beauty and exceptionalism.  And here was Sydney Sweeney making a power move to dominate the landscape at just the right time, and to do it boldly, to the point where she has everyone talking about her.  Like I said, this is a lot more complicated than bare breasts and sex scenes.  It’s about the conservative values under it all that men and women both find irresistibly attractive, and since she has been willing to put her arm around it, it exposes a significant weakness that the political left has always had, and they hate her for it.

Sydney’s parents went bankrupt trying to support her acting career, and they divorced.  And that looks to have had a significant impact on her, so she isn’t planning to waste her opportunity.  And an opportunity that was only given to her because she was gifted with big boobs and a pleasant personality.  But women can’t live very long on just looks, so she is looking to make a much bigger splash, and this move by her is a pretty smart move, that politically exploits something that leftists have tried to destroy in American culture.  And I’m saying that this new movie, Americana, is going to be for Sydney Sweeney what ‘10’ was for Bo Derek, and culture in general.  It is going to capture America’s hopes and dreams at a time when Trump is in the White House, and it will be used to significant effect.  And for Sydney Sweeney to stand firm amid all this criticism, she will see great things happen because of it.  We all will.  We’re not just talking about a young lady who looks good in American Eagle Jeans and the stock price of that company exploding in value.  We are discussing the values of the human race as a whole, as only American culture can display them.  And Sydney Sweeney has gone from an aspiring actress wanting to repay her family for believing in her desire to become an actress, to taking on a political movement and essentially changing the world in ways that few have ever accomplished.  In this case, it has always fallen a little short.  But with Sydney Sweeney, America’s new sweetheart, something much better has happened.  A spell of corruption and hate has been broken, and she was the one who first broke it.  And people are going to be in for quite a treat from her over the next decade.  What good timing, and tremendous guts on her part. 

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

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

Elon Musk Has Found His Szechuan Sauce: Turning a One to a Zero

Mar-a-Lago has been the center of American politics, as I said it would be on day one of removing Trump from office in 2021, since then.  And it has replaced the White House as the place to be and do business with America.  But what I never thought would happen would be that I would ever see Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world and poised to become the first trillionaire, sitting at the big kid’s table on Thanksgiving with the Trump family, President Trump, Barron, and Melania, dancing to the YMCA song.  I thought it was an extraordinary historical event, maybe one of the most significant events ever, and I have seen many things.  For context, this particular Thanksgiving event had been building all this time, since Trump left office, or was pushed out, and was now culminating into this fantastic celebration where so many improbable things emerged in that wonderful moment captured on video with Trump backslapping Musk like a little boy, or dear old friend and having essentially two of the most powerful men in the world be not rivals with each other, but soul mates, and deep friends who know their place in history, and are happy about it.  These kinds of things never go together, and if Trump had not taken that bullet to the face and lived, this Thanksgiving celebration never would have happened.  It only happens in cases such as when Jesus Christ was killed and came back to have dinner with his disciples, a kind of post-death celebration of eternal life.  This is the best Trump we could have hoped to have gotten, and it came with so many improbable resolutions that the world is uniting around Trump for all the reasons that they were all so wrong.  Suddenly, everything reversed course and swung in the other direction.

As I watched Elon Musk sitting there obviously enjoying his newly adopted father, which is what Trump has become to him over these last few months, I was thinking of a Rick and Morty episode that I like a lot where the character Rick Sanchez destroys the entire Federation Government by changing a 1 to a 0 in their galactic financial markets just because Rick wanted to get the dipping sauce from McDonald’s that was part of a Mulan promotion called Szechuan Sauce.  I don’t know if Elon Musk is the most intelligent person on earth, the way that the character Rick Sanchez is the most intelligent human being in the entire universe.  I have known people like Elon Musk regarding intelligence, and if they turned the mirror just a little bit, they could be just as wealthy.  Those kinds of social measures do not seem to matter to Elon Musk.  To him, money is just a tool so he can build and do extraordinary things.  And for the MAGA movement, he has become the replacement for George Soros, who used to fund all those left-leaning causes.  Elon Musk, after that assassination attempt, admired Trump so much that his brilliant mind was able to see something emerging that he needed in his life, and that was to overthrow the kind of government that was keeping his SpaceX company from doing what it needed to do, and that is to carry humanity to space.  This transformation with Elon Musk is something I pointed out almost two years ago when I saw his book recommendation for Johan Norberg called The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World.  I reviewed that book and pointed out at that time that something compelling was happening when a person like Elon Musk was stepping away from the World Economic Forum and stepping in to open support of global capitalism. 

Everyone disagreed with me, and they wanted to argue about why Trump would never be back in office and that Elon Musk was an asset to China because of his relationship with Tesla, making factories there, and having to dance to the strings of the communist government.  He was also the poster boy for Klaus Schwab at the WEF.  I saw this all happening when I was introduced to Vivek Ramaswamy at an event right before the release of his book, Woke Inc., by the wonderful Nancy Nix, Butler County’s fabulous auditor.  Maybe someday Vivek will tell a story about what we discussed, but even then, it was becoming clear to me where the world was heading, and people with their finger on it, like Trump, Vivek, Musk, and others, were crawling out into the light of day.  Books like Vivek’s and Norberg’s could not be written and not shatter an established order because the only reason that order had power was through deceit.  And now people were talking about these kinds of things.  You never know how little things end up becoming big things.  That’s why you do everything. 

And I was the only one saying that the polls were lying and that Kamala was never ahead.  Only Rasmussen was showing a contrary election that showed that Trump could win.  But I was even more aggressive than them because I looked at a more significant trend that nobody else seemed to see, not even Elon Musk.  But once he did see it, as Trump was nearly assassinated, everything from there just clicked into place, and perhaps the most improbable event in all human history happened on Thanksgiving down at Mar-a-Lago with Musk dancing to the famous YMCA song while sitting next to Trump for Thanksgiving Dinner, 2024.  Musk was happy that he found his Szechuan Sauce.

I know the world will catch up, but nobody will see what has hit them in a few years.  The way all this added up to this Thanksgiving event was a change for the entire human race, and it was so good that it almost made up for all the misery we have experienced over the last 8 years.  The first few years of Trump were great, but we learned many ugly truths about our world and its governments that moved out of conspiracy theory and into observable facts.  It happened fast and will continue to accelerate at a mind-bending pace.  And Musk knows it.  He had been trying to solve this engineering problem: how can you make the human race a space-fairing society?  Well, you have to build a political system that can accommodate it, and first, you have to start with world peace.  How can you do that, support the guy who they were trying to kill, and essentially change a 1 to a 0 and collapse their entire world order so that we can get a colony of over a million people on Mars within a few years?  Musk solved his engineering problem, and he found in Trump precisely what he needed, and he was so happy about it that he hadn’t left Mar-a-Lago since the election of 2024.  While everyone was celebrating, we saw just a glimpse of what the world could be, and it was very positive and happening in such a way that nobody saw it coming.  Except for me, nobody called it the way I did out of all the media markets.  And personally, because of all the grief that I took over everything I had been saying and continue to say, seeing Trump and Musk together on Thanksgiving was the best gift I could have received.  In this case, it’s a gift that keeps on being given.   Musk turned the world from a 1 to a 0.  And I love it!

Rich Hoffman

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

Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’: The kind of political philosophy that will take mankind into a space economy

I spend a lot of time thinking about the challenges of becoming an interplanetary civilization.  When people ask me why I do what I do, I tell them it’s not for money, it’s not for popularity, and it’s certainly not for a platform for politics.  I am interested in philosophy as Socrates exhibited it, specifically, the thinking it will take to move humanity off the Earth and become a multi-planetary species.  This past week, two things happened that reminded me of this task. The first was the Starship launch, which was very successful with SpaceX.  The second Dune movie did very well at the box office, showing continued interest, which I think is terrific because it gives people access to the old Frank Herbert books, which I think are masterpieces on a biblical scale, as opposed to just science fiction.  I have been thinking a lot about Frank and his books lately, the six he wrote, then the final two in the original series that his son continued to conclusion. 

If we want to be an interplanetary civilization, we must first solve some fundamental problems. One of those is the problem of power and why people crave it. One great example of exploring that problem is the novels by Frank Herbert in, Dune, the eight-book analysis introduced to the world through the latest movies, which are very good. But just the start of quite a journey.  More people would better understand our current circumstances if they read Frank Herbert’s books because he deals with a lot of serious stuff in that fantastic series.  Yes, as in the movies, they are dealing with the human race as they have colonized space, all over the universe space, not just a regional galaxy, 10,000 years in the future.  The politics are very similar to the concerns of the Old Testament, with bloodlines and kingdoms at the heart of the story.  Frank is very concerned with the nature of politics, so these Dune books are more about sociology and politics than they are about science or fiction. In the movies, the one from 1984 and now these recent ones, the lead character rises to greatness to become the new emperor, and that’s the end of the story.  That fits a typical narrative for a Hollywood movie.  But Dune is much more than these things, so these stories have been hard to make into movies.  The point in building up the lead story and characters is that the rest of the book rips them apart in a kind of libertarian study of the human race and how power corrupts, or does it?  One thing that Frank does that I am very interested in, that very few anybodies has ever touched, is how the spirit world influences the politics of humanity.  It’s an offering of the kind of Divine Council discussed in Psalms 82 and certainly reflects what Paul talked about in Ephesians.  Who rules us from beyond the grave, and how far down the rabbit hole does it go?  In those Dune books, Herbert even calls his work a prediction, not fiction, as he sets out to study ecology.  I think of our political life as just the surface reflections of much deeper forces at work, not all of them human as we think of the word.  And not just spiritual as we think of Casper the ghost or the Holy Spirit.  We must look at the spirit world as it strives to exist outside our known universe and expect that they are using self-interest to manipulate our lives to their advantage.  Frank Herbert deals with that level of political management, and it’s fantastic and can’t really be captured in the movies. 

As crazy as our political system is, I consider it a healthy necessity.  What America is going through is needed for global management of political systems that can then carry over into off-world colonies, which are coming at us much faster than people realize.  And we must solve some of these problems before we come to that impasse.  We must have a political system based on a healthy understanding of capitalism before we start moon colonies and cities on Mars.  Too much micromanagement of adventures into space will stop progress, and as Herbert assumes in his books, humanity reverts to the biblical necessity of royal bloodlines through the Vico Cycle.  I disagree with a lot about Herbert, especially regarding drug use.  But like the work of Graham Hancock that I have talked about in using ayahuasca to communicate with the spirit world, the spice in Dune is essentially the same kind of thing, and I think Herbert is on to something essential as far back as 1965.  Many of the Baal worshipers of Canaan also used psychedelics in their rituals, and in that context, it is likely the cause of the frequent turning away from God that is a majority of the narrative in the Bible.  Frank Herbert in Dune explores why this is the case and when drugs are used to speak to other spirit beings, who they are, and what they are motivated by.  And by coming to terms with that, you can then understand the kind of evil that is loose in the world now, and understand it with some perspective. 

Herbert goes so far as to place political motivations for spiritual influence in his many Dune books and migrates beyond universal influence, which is pretty impressive as a work of fiction.  I would put it on the level of Atlas Shrugged and other Ayn Rand works.  I don’t agree with everything she does either, but the thought process is beneficial.  Somewhere in these intellectual works are the answers we need to become an interplanetary species, so I don’t get too excited about transitory elections.  What we are all fighting against each other to achieve is the war of ideas that survive into the future, and I tend to think of these efforts in the most extensive picture possible. The trajectory of change will far exceed standard election cycles.  It’s why people win that matters, why certain people are attracted to power, and how power corrupts or is helpful to society.  And how a tyrant today might be a benefactor tomorrow.  Morality is often not so much determined by what we see but by what we are growing to understand and how that understanding is influential across over 22 dimensions.  And as we continue to build nations and colonies in space, what kind of political system should they have to accommodate with all considerations available, as we can know them, through science or fiction.  The Dune books have some magnificent things to say along those lines, and I think it is wonderful that the movies are doing well and that people are learning about the books for the first time.   One thing that space travel needs is a healthy appreciation of government systems that embrace capitalism.  Future religions must be joined at the hip; otherwise, their value will fall apart.  So, it’s not enough to build a Starship and start moving people into a new space economy.  We must work on the deep philosophical problems that have permeated the human race since the beginning.  And we have to solve them with something fresh, and America is the leader of that movement.  In the long run, it will make much more sense for people.

 

Rich Hoffman

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

Downfall of the Girl Boss: The Market serves the public, not the other way around

If anybody doubted the intention, history would never remember it better than in movies’ ridiculous concept of the “Girl Boss.”  One of the first things I did after the election results showed President Trump losing in 2020 to the dumb old man, Joe Biden, was to read to the public the 45 Planks of Communism from Cleon Skousen’s great book, The Naked Communist, where it was clearly stated, communists intended to infiltrate America and impose their view of the world through captured assets, such as both political parties, and the media.  The proof that had happened wasn’t just in the obvious election fraud that had put Joe Biden in office, but it has been in how foolish the entertainment industry had been with their “Girl Boss” concept, with feminism gone out of control without any market checks to keep it from making a fool of itself.  Once you understand the stupidity of the Girl Boss, a lot of things make sense, and the world becomes more accessible to explain.  It’s also why the pendulum is swinging so violently in the other direction now, and likely all the dumb ideas that the communists who infiltrated our American culture had, are being rejected so outrageously.  The Girl Boss was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  The entertainment industry, particularly film and television, thought that people loved their product so much that they’d consume anything given to them which is clearly not the case.  There are a lot of movie studios that will not survive this stupidity, particularly the big one in Disney.  But it goes to show just how radical, politically, the people running those companies were, and what a mistake it would become because they all had to learn an important lesson, which is unfolding now, and it really evolves into the power of capitalism over the dark forces of communism.  When other countries in the world complain about them being poor, it’s because they adopted too much socialism and communism into their cultures and not enough capitalism.   Being poor is a decision, and if people understood it better, they would have never come up with the dumb idea of the Girl Boss in movies, which is currently destroying Disney in spectacularly avoidable ways, yet they did it anyway. 

Much of this came to the surface due to the Elon Musk lawsuit he is supporting with Gina Carano against Disney for unlawful termination of her contract.  Gina was a famous actor in the Star Wars show on Disney+ called The Mandalorian and was part of the initiative to put more strong women into Star Wars, as outlined by Kathy Kennedy.  But humans are humans, and upon meeting Gina, the CEO of Lucasfilm immediately disliked Carano, likely because she was cute and imposing in person, as a former fighter in MMA.  Insecure women in positions of power are dangerous, as are men in the same state.  But with women, it’s a bit different because with them, their sexual roles in society are to be pollinated, not to pollinate, so there are always insecurities about the men in their lives finding them attractive enough to pollinate.  And when someone like Gina walks into a room, even though Lucasfilm under Disney wanted to promote women in the workplace, they didn’t have women like Gina in mind.  They wanted homely women who were not a threat to their households, women their husbands wouldn’t be looking at with ideas of pollination.  So things started badly for Gina Carano with the boss, Kathy Kennedy, right from the start, and it only got worse once the boss found out that Gina was a conservative. 

So, a conservative in Hollywood, especially a woman, was a big no, no so Disney proceeded to push Gina out of the marketplace and essentially ruin her as an actress to send a message to other actresses that if they wanted to work, they needed to be socialists and they should not look too attractive so to threaten all these insecure movie executives who were now suddenly in charge and directing all these movies and television shows.  The worst example of this in the Star Wars franchise was the character of Rose from The Last Jedi, a movie that was worse than even Barbarella as far as a science fiction movie that tried to put feminism as its central theme and drive the audience to accept it at all cost.  I used to make fun of the Rose character to my kids because I said that Star Wars as a market share would suffer because nobody would buy the Rose action figure.  She was cast as a chunky Asian girl who would certainly not be a threat to anybody’s husbands, and somehow, everyone thought this was a winning enterprise.  Instead, it killed the franchise, as seen spectacularly in the following years as the Target toy racks tried to sell Rose at a discount and couldn’t unload the merchandise.  And it wasn’t just Rose, but it was all Star Wars toys that suffered as a result, leaving the toy maker Hasbro with warehouses of merchandise they couldn’t ever hope to sell because of the bad decisions of the feminists to stick all these Girl Bosses in movies, killed the collector’s market, and Star Wars as a brand was destroyed.  That’s why they can’t make Star Wars movies anymore.

For more than 40 years, Star Wars managed to protect its marketplace brand until Disney came along and screwed it all up with political activism, essentially until that movie, The Last Jedi.  After that, the toy presence of Star Wars disappeared in Walmart and Target, which is a significant market indicator for other kinds of things, particularly along the lines of political sentiment.  As if it had been previously doubted, the entertainment industry would not survive as a propaganda arm for communism, which was the assumption.  Like all other market factors, the market had to serve the needs of the public, not the other way around.  Star Wars would not be used to convert people to feminist thoughts. Instead, people would reject the entire brand, just as they have with Bud Light and the Marvel movie franchise.  Men and women don’t want political propaganda; they’d rather have Superman fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, not some crybaby like Brie Larson in Captain Marvel throwing planets and beating up men nine times bigger than she is and standing over them like a Girl Boss.  The public, men, and women, want what they can relate to and think about favorably, and the Girl Boss was something neither one of them wanted.  And because Disney forced it on them, the public has rejected the product and moved on to other things.  And that doesn’t just hurt the film industry, but it hurts everything it touches, like the theater owners, toy makers, and even restaurants.  When people would sit at home and instead stream the latest episode of The Chosen rather than go to the movies and watch the latest Girl Boss movie, then even dining out is impacted by the decision.  That is the unsaid cost of communism when it is attempted to impose it on society rather than studying market fulfillment and how best to give the audience what it wants.  When it was assumed that the communists were in charge of the propaganda machine and that the public would be forced to obey them, the market reality was crushing for them.  And they have ruined the lives of many people in that assumption.  But the world has moved on.  What has failed are the fools who listened to them, to begin with.  Everyone tried to warn them, but they brought out the Girl Boss anyway, which history will still be laughing at thousands of years from now.

Rich Hoffman

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Zandaya at the ‘Dune II’ Premier: There is hope for the human race yet

With all that’s going on in the world, there are traces of some fascinating things, and one that certainly attracted my attention was the premier of Dune II in London.  It’s not just because it’s a great science fiction story from 1965 put exceptionally well into a movie format, which people have been trying to do for many years.  They have tried it before with David Lynch.   A lot of people didn’t like that earlier movie.  I did like it and thought it was an exciting interpretation of Frank Herbert’s original story.  The first movie came out a few years ago and did quite well, being recognized as a cinematic masterpiece, where even critics agreed with the fans that Dune was something special.  The buzz for Dune II of course has been looming in the background because it’s essentially Part II of the original first book.  Dune is a massive story that takes place across six original books by Herbert. Then, after his death, his sons completed the story with two additional books, which span across the entire universe and involve thousands of years, and the whole thing isn’t just about science fiction but about the problems with power and how living things have difficulty managing it.  It’s very sophisticated and it looks like the producers of Dune understand the content of the story very well, and finally digital set design has caught up to the ambitions of the film and something really special ended up on screen.  But that’s not what dazzled me as a fan of the books and Herbert himself.  Zandaya showed up in a stunning robot outfit that reminded me of many things I had been thinking about lately.  And she made a bold proclamation that certainly did set the world on fire in more ways than one. 

The outfit itself was ultra sexy with cutouts that exposed the sexual areas of a female body in ways that reminded me of a Heavy Metal magazine cover from when I was growing up that put high science fiction concepts into sex appeal to young adolescent boys.  But I had never seen a young woman on such a widespread scale as Zandaya do something like that before.  It wasn’t slutty like something Madonna would do, or even Lady Gaga.  It was bold, innovative, and classy yet very ambitious.  I follow the launch of every Starship from SpaceX very closely, and another launch is coming up, the third for actual flights into space. The first thing I thought of was that her outfit matched the ambitions of these civilian space flights, and I instantly thought of the beautiful statues from the great novel Fountainhead as the perfect embodiment of this current time, when corporate communism and global fascism from that sector of the economy was spreading terror all over the world, A.I. was making people weary with worry about being controlled by machines.  Space travel was displacing all the philosophies and religions of the world with the uncomfortable reality of life on other planets.  Politically, the world was in a populist revolt.  And there was Zandaya boldly managing it all with a very knowledgeable understanding of it all by showing up to that movie premiere dressed in that outfit, which is what I would have expected as a young 12-year-old looking into the future of 2024 and considering what life should have been like.   She certainly understands the director of the film Dune and what he’s trying to do.  And she clearly understands the author of the book, Frank Herbert.  He certainly was not a socialist like H.G. Wells and some of those early European writers.  He was a small government kind of guy who appreciated the founding fathers, and that went into the extensive work of his Dune project, with all the books being between 600 and 800 pages each.  It was a very ambitious work, so there was a lot going on. 

And there were a few times over the last few years when I thought nothing like this would ever happen again, especially a young woman like Zandaya openly expressing her femininity and sex appeal without being raunchy about it.  Not after the Covid lockdowns destroyed the movie industry, and a firm commitment to socialism pretty much provided the final nail in the coffin.  I never thought I would see something like that again or for the first time.  I had all the Heavy Metal magazines for several years, and I loved the ambitious art.  I also loved the animated movie when I was a kid.  This Dune premier was all those magazine covers coming to life.  I think Zandaya is a pretty good kid.  She is younger than my daughters.  I thought she was perfect in the latest Spiderman movies, and she showed up at the end of the first Dune movie.  She’s a singer and a high fashion model who grew up as a Disney talent.  Despite all her early success, I think she has a pretty good head on her shoulders, which came out in interviews with Tom Holland while promoting the Spiderman films.  Unlike other Hollywood types, she is a good entertainment representative for this upcoming generation.  At least so far.  She didn’t have to show up to that premier with that outfit.  But that she did shows she understands far more about the nature of our current reality than most people do, and she was bold about it. 

What a gift she provided to the director of Dune, Denis Villeneuve.  He should be ecstatic with excitement that one of his stars from the new film so openly embraced the overall vision of the Herbert books, which is not to spoil it for anybody, but that Zandaya’s look explores what Frank thought was the background of the entire universe.  But that fashion model of Zandaya knew how to look and express the totality of Frank Herbert’s work with just a few simple gazes, and I felt the entire human race had just leveled up a bit.  Because of the Dune movies, more people will understand the point of Dune, which is a very anti-tyrannical effort that questions the nature of all life and how power flows down to every form of it.  With all the bad news that has been going on in the world, I saw this premiere for this movie as a bold rebellion against those vile forces.  In much the way that I was surprised by the Godzilla Minus One movie.  With all the bits of tyranny that have emerged, these little bits of hope are emerging from the human race.  And sometimes, someone like Zandaya captures the effort with high art and fashion in ways that seem iniquitous, even unintentional.  But you can’t go into public dressed like that, yet face everything down with such boldness without the intent being purposeful and intelligent, without scrutiny being applied.  And with the production of Dune, the launch of the Starships, and the political landscape lashing out at fascism the way it is, many elements came together in human expression that refused to be a victim to it all, which was very encouraging and a sign of a lot of good things to come.  I would say there is hope for the human race yet!

Rich Hoffman

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

Signs of the Future: The duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk

In so many ways the duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk is indicative of the future warfare that is the key to everything.  Here are two CEOs at the top of their game representing two different directions, and one is distinctly on the wrong side while the other is thriving.  As I say all the time, don’t judge people based on what they say, but on what they do.  And Elon Musk has been evolving slowly for a long time.  This happens to a lot of people as they get more information.  I also say a lot that it’s nearly impossible for a person to have a lot of intelligence and to remain a Democrat.  People might be born into a certain region with specific parents and have certain beliefs.  But through living life and doing things, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and it’s natural to evolve feelings.  And for Elon Musk, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the kind of world he wants to live in, an interplanetary civilization cannot be anything less than a capitalist enterprise.  Centralized governments are too slow and sabotage their society to stay in power, which isn’t good for getting to space.  So Musk has moved in a MAGA direction without calling himself that out of pure necessity, and logic.  Then there is, of course, Bob Iger, Mr. Global Citizen, who has been the CEO of Disney, which has essentially committed suicide to accommodate woke World Economic Forum politics.  Musk has moved away from the World Economic Forum, and Bob Iger has fully embraced it, even giving it a deep French kiss to the doom of his company.  So, it was only a matter of time before these two public personalities would have a very obvious clash.

This new war that we are fighting is one where it’s easy to win against. But the way people are wired exploits them at a very personal level. It is essentially what everyone learned in public school, with the cool kids, the geeks, and the loser social groups and children knowing which one they would all be in, and how social pressure, the need to be liked, would control those behaviors into joining one of those three groups. Because Musk is one of the richest men in the world, of course, he has a lot of parasites looking to live off his efforts, so Disney thought it had leverage on him to pull advertising from the X platform to force Musk to embrace more World Economic Forum strategic goals. Musk responded with an “F You” to Bob Iger and others and made a decidedly sharp turn politically. It was a decided check mate in the chess game of these kinds of activities. Within a few days, Elon Musk facilitated a new show for Tucker Carlson and there was a massive interview with Alex Jones, which resulted in him being reinstated on X, where he had been deplatformed when it was Twitter and a series of events that would spell doom for the World Economic Forum types cascaded into irreversible damage for the big centralized global citizen types that Bob Iger represented. Musk was clearly on the side of tomorrow, whereas Iger was without question on the losing team. But the signs have been stacking up for a while now. The public results were just a matter of time. Disney used to be the center of innovation, but now it was SpaceX and what they have been doing on several technical fronts. Instead of warring with Musk, Disney should have sought to have a relationship with them. Instead, they chose politics, which, as a CEO, was a nail in the coffin for Disney that is quickly sinking the company.

Months before all this occurred, I had taken my family to Disney World for a very large vacation.  I was not crazy about the woke direction of the company, but as I have been saying for several years now, I don’t think that Disney is going to survive as a company, and I wanted my grandchildren and my kids to see it while it is still a great thing.  I love all four of their parks very much, but Epcot Center has always been something special, an optimistic city of tomorrow that showcased all the opportunities of tomorrow.  But tomorrow is today, and many of the things that are showcased at Epcot now look old and out of date.  Disney Parks have become too political; they have not adapted to the true frontier of human need and it shows.  Disney, mainly as Bob Iger has run it, is a looking-back company, not one that is embracing the future.  Bob was all about the World Economic Forum controls from centralized governments that looked to establish equity and inclusion through force and manipulation by those in charge, whereas Elon Musk was embracing the kind of technology that would free people of those methods, and he was looking at capitalism as the means to do it.  Elon Musk wasn’t precisely a Trump guy during his first term.  He wanted to give Joe Biden a chance.  But that quickly changed over the last three years, and now Musk has moved well away from the World Economic Forum view of the world, and that difference is dramatically apparent when you watch SpaceX work and perform a side-by-side analysis of their view of the world with the Epcot Center. 

The trip to Disney had the effect I wanted.  My crew had a really magnificent time at Epcot Center. We went there on two different occasions and used the monorail as our primary means of transportation to get there.  It was great for my family.  But I could see the ghost of a place I used to love, looking old and inward thinking.  It was essentially what the world was trying to do with authoritarian, centralized governments, such as China and the European Union.  That was not the future we were going to experience, and Bob Iger had gambled everything on it.  And when he went to call the bet against Musk, everything went in the opposite direction.  The result was it forced Musk to stop trying to put one foot in and one out on so many topics and go all in toward the future, which means the collapse of central government tyranny.  Putting Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson on X was the reason Musk bought Twitter in the first place.  For the same reason, Trump created his own social media platform, Truth Social.  The future requires a decentralized competition of ideas without the restraint of slow-minded authority figures.  And the results will be very similar to what happened between Musk and Bob Iger but on a truly global scale.  The peer pressure leverage Disney attempted to pull on X is the same kind of backfire that all corporations and political sentiments will experience in the years to come and on a much more ostentatious scale.  Like the Epcot Center, the World Economic Forum’s view of the future was dying and outdated.  It was SpaceX that represented all the opportunities that were coming from a future being designed by capitalism.  And now Elon Musk was fully committed.  Disney had lost that final battle toward forcing the world to become a global citizen at the cost of innovation and freedom.  And if there was any indicator of the things to come, it was that.

Rich Hoffman

‘Godzilla Minus One’: The best movie in the world

Simply stunning

Before you think to yourself, oh, there are so many things going on in the world, why do I care about a movie review for a new Godzilla movie? Well, this is something different, this Godzilla Minus One movie. It makes quite a statement, and it is currently destroying the rest of the films being produced in the world, from Bollywood to Hollywood, all places where the World Economic Forum financing has influenced movie content. I’ve been asked several times this year why I’m not out there producing and making movies, as I have wanted to most of my life. And my explanation was that the whole machine is messed up, it costs too much for unionized labor, so the budgets are wrecked. To get funding for the movies, you must have progressive messages in them. The entertainment media has been filled with more progressive political activists who set limits as to the kind of messages that get out to the public, and the theater owners’ associations are often too sensitive to all these politics to back releases. But then there are times when the market is desperate, theater owners are drowning for good content and Hollywood hasn’t given them the kind of movies that people want to see. Online streaming content is eroding the enthusiasm for in-theater distribution. So a foreign film like Godzilla Minus One gets made under the radar and gets into theaters with great passion and enthusiasm, and people get surprised. This is exactly what Godzilla Minus One is: a magnificent surprise, and what I think is the best movie in the world presently, and certainly one of the best to come along in recent memory. On a budget of only 15 million dollars, it’s everything a movie should be, and audiences are reacting to it in very positive ways, for good reason.

I wasn’t exactly planning to see the movie in theaters, I was going to catch it on Apple+ or whatever streaming service was carrying it around Christmas time.  But my grandchildren love Godzilla; it’s been a big part of their childhoods. They were talking to me about the new Godzilla/King Kong movie by Legendary Studios coming out in 2024, probably in March, and they were very excited about it.  That’s when I said, “Well, you know, kids, there is a Godzilla movie playing at Liberty Center right now.  Do you guys want to go see it?”  And I was surprised that my oldest grandson knew everything about it, and yes!  He wanted to see it right away.  So off we went to watch a movie that I thought might have some cool monsters in it.  But it would be filled with subtitles, and I didn’t know if they’d like it much.  But, being Godzilla fans, they could at least say they saw it.  Well………………what a surprise we were in for.  This wasn’t just a great movie, it was a masterpiece.  It reminded me of the many past films I have loved, particularly Yojimbo, the great Akira Kurasawa classic.  This wasn’t just a movie about Godzilla destroying Tokyo once again.  This was a very emotional film about the state of the world and the perseverance of human civilization to overcome the mistakes of governments and live their lives honorably, nobly, and without fear.  Godzilla served as the device that brought this out in people and it was Biblical in scope and magnificent in its execution.  When the movie ended, I just sat there, stunned by what I had just witnessed.  My grandchildren were thrilled, of course, but this was undoubtedly a benchmark in history that I fully realized.  Wow!

Now, I get to go to Japan, and I like to share as much of that experience with my family as possible.  I love Western culture for all its variety, but I love going to Japan because the Japanese are honorable people with self-confidence and a spirit of perseverance.  No matter how many different people I interact with from Japan, that is a foundation assumption about them.  When I need to go to the grocery store to get food and snacks while traveling, the people I deal with bow deeply when doing business and treat the meeting like it’s the most important thing they’ll ever do.  Even at the airports, everyone you deal with is highly respectful.  Walking around Tokyo or any big city, there is no crime, and everything is spotless.  The world could learn a lot from their culture, which I talk about occasionally.  Japan is a good country with good people who are persistent and honorable.  And I enjoy dealing with them on their turf.  Godzilla Minus One is a uniquely Japanese film about their culture and the value of honor as an individual.  The entire point of the movie was about living up to honorable expectations and being a good person, which has been missing so much from all modern movies filled with progressive political messages imposed by the influence of the World Economic Forum.  All that was removed entirely from Godzilla Minus One, and the film had a wonderful sense of freedom that was jaw-dropping in its relief.  I didn’t care that the entire movie was in subtitles.  It was delightful to watch. 

The main character is a Kamikaze pilot who lacked the killer instinct to fulfill his mission, so he ducked out of a fight just as the war ended.  He felt tremendous guilt about this, and it haunted him deeply.  In the aftermath of the war, he ends up moving in with a young lady and her adopted little girl, all war orphans.  None of them are related.  But the girl and the guy sleep in the same house but in separate beds.  And there is no sex.  They lived like this for over three years.  That’s not to say there wasn’t love; they grew to love each other deeply.  But no sex.  In a World Economic Forum-financed film, the girl would have left the guy after three months of no sex, which would have been the dumb plot of the entire movie.  Godzilla Minus One is about much more than sex and relationship problems.  It’s about overcoming self-doubt, becoming great, and earning the right to lead a family by conquering personal demons.  This was great stuff; people lost in the world are soaking up this message like a dry sponge.  And you know what’s best about the film?  The filmmakers had the guts to give it a happy ending, a real happy ending in every way that an audience could hope for.  The movie is undoubtedly about Godzilla, but he served almost like a godly figure, much like Job’s story from the Bible.  Without Godzilla, Job would have had no reference point.  But because of that reference, greatness had an opportunity to grow, and it brought people together as individuals to achieve beautiful things.  What a great message in a world filled with failure.  Along comes this little ray of light that is turning out to light the way for the world in ways nobody thought was possible.  Yet, there it is.  I can’t recommend it enough!

Rich Hoffman