Category: Disney

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

The Hidden Benefit of ‘Godzilla Minus One’: Understanding Budgets and Costs Imposed by organized labor and anti-capitalist Activities

There is another essential attribute of the new Godzilla film, Godzilla Minus One, at the heart of the global populist movement that is important to talk about.  Probably the most important thing in the world that has lingered always in the background and is now apparent for all to see.  In talking about how good Godzilla Minus One is, the obvious question everyone has is how could Japan produce a movie like this when the same kind of blockbuster produced by Disney in America would cost 300 million dollars.  The average moviegoer could watch Godzilla Minus One, Indiana Jones, and the Dial of Destiny and think they are of the same quality in every category: acting, special effects, music, writing, scale of production, everything.  So how was Godzilla Minus One so profitable, whereas all the current Hollywood productions or movies anywhere in the world these days, especially where the financial influence of the World Economic Forum has its hands in the production, are not able to compete?  Well, this is something I have been talking about for many decades and I said this was going to happen to the film industry for many years.  Unionized labor has destroyed the financial models of movie production, shown dramatically when a foreign film like Godzilla Minus One is shown in a movie theater along with the latest blockbusters produced by Hollywood and other markets.  Because of many market conditions unique to recovery from COVID lockdowns, theater owners are desperate to show anything that the public might want to see.  Just two or three years ago, a movie like Godzilla Minus One would not have played in a movie theater in the United States.  People would never see it, but in today’s market, where Hollywood products can’t keep up with demand, a movie like Godzilla Minus One gets a chance to be seen, which has burst down the door to an issue that can only be revealed by direct competition.   

Much of the way we are told about success in the world has been shaped by labor unions attached to the film industry, the mainstream media, and government reporting.  The ultimate solution to broken budgets and general performance everywhere in the world, no matter the product, is to make labor unions illegal, especially in government work and situations that prevent a competitive environment.  America has gone through just this sort of thing when it comes to the car industry, or most sectors of manufacturing that can’t compete with cheap foreign labor.  Well, it is not that the labor is cheap in foreign markets, but instead that the communist labor unions, all of which were formed out of elements of Marxism, have driven up the cost of labor not just in the increases in headcount but in how much each one actually costs.  When the government reports the numbers, as they do in American and European markets, of course, they will give a spin that suits them, not necessarily one that is reflected in reality.  Then, when the trade journals are either in unions themselves or are very sympathetic, the coverage has been how much studios spend on movies to make, not on their quality.  This has certainly been the case with Disney where to satisfy their radical employee base, all connected to labor unions, the approach has been to just outrun the costs, which have crippled them in 2023.  When it costs 500 million dollars to get a blockbuster out the door and into a theater, disaster is not far behind.  For a lot of these Hollywood productions, a movie budget to satisfy all the labor demands that you see at the end credits of every motion picture, 200-300 million on actually making the movie, then another 200 million in marketing to feed the machine, a film has to make a billion dollars at the box office to get into a profit category, and that just isn’t realistic, as Disney has discovered in 2023. 

Then, to make matters worse, these Disney movies have been loaded with content people don’t want to see.  The filmmaking has been lazy, and the product is lackluster when it gets to the screen.  It shows when all the people making the movie are only in it to get paid.  A film like Godzilla Minus One was created by hungry filmmakers full of passion, evident in what ended up on the screen, shocking many people.  But this is the exact reason why government reforms never happen and why budgets get wrecked in all production environments where Marxist labor unions have driven up costs and taken away the ambition of good merit from the products they produce, such as in public education in America that has become useless to most people for all the same reasons.  The labor costs too much and doesn’t do enough of what it’s supposed to.  When labor unions take over the management of an endeavor, they determine the pay rate and how many people need to be involved in the process, which then blows up all the financial attributes.  In a situation like this, where a side-by-side comparison isn’t usually available, the problem becomes apparent in the movie industry.  But this same rot is in just about every endeavor that involves money and financing, even in American intelligence agencies.  I will have some serious horror stories to provide about the CDC and how President Reagan was thinking of cutting the entire department, giving rise to Dr. Fauci’s radicalism.  Most bad things happen when lazy people seek funding not based on performance but emotion, such as fear of a new virus that can be manufactured in a lab and released from Wuhan, China.  That’s a topic all its own. 

The trick in hiding all this from the public has been to control the narrative, and the labor unions have been attached to most of the reporting.  But in 2023, because the declining Hollywood product has most abused theater owners, they have had to turn to direct competition to survive, which has set up this obvious matchup.  The same occurred when the Japanese entered the car market, and the Big Three in America found they could not compete in cost and quality because unionized labor took away competitive factors that could keep the costs down for the consumer.  Most of the problems in the world, including the CRs that Speaker Johnson is trying to work through Congress to keep the government open, are due to the outrageous costs of supporting all those expensive government employees.  Even the funding of Ukraine, which has been a topic, is to spend billions of dollars to pay for the massive administrative state government there to support this globalist employment structure.  All of them are failing under their weight; what they do for the world isn’t worth the money it costs to keep them.  Populism is rising everywhere because people would rather see Godzilla Minus One than the latest holiday offering by Disney and the other major studios.  The labor unions seek to destroy competition to justify their outrageous costs and sluggish performance.  But because of their actions, they have forced competition to overtake them to satisfy the market demands of a hungry public that wants to see a good movie, buy a nice car, or have a government that works for them and doesn’t get in the way of what society needs.  I know we are in a time when union supporters are moving toward Trump, and Trump is pro-union, and it’s not as much of a political issue for Republicans as it has been or should be.  But when you want to know why things are so expensive, why so many useless people perform the work, and how they keep their jobs underperforming constantly, the source is the Marxist labor unions that have embedded themselves in the process.  Where they aren’t, the quality and profit improve dramatically.  And if we are ever going to drain the swamp, the government unions will have to be made illegal.  And any future budget controls taken out of their hands, from the local public school to the control of the FBI and CIA.  Organized labor has destroyed them all. 

Rich Hoffman

What the 2023 Macy’s Parade Tells us About the Economy: It’s Back to the 80s

I watch the Macy’s Parade from New York on Thanksgiving Day as a measuring device for our public health every year.  I usually comment on the kind of balloons they have on the parade route and what type of music they feature creatively.  And also, what is the tone of the broadcasts, and the commercials?  There is usually a lot going on to report that provides a good indicator of other economic factors that say a lot about us as a culture.  And sure enough, the 2023 Macy’s Day Parade had a lot to say.  If I had to pick a theme that was decidedly a major part of the decision-making process in putting the parade on this year, it was “Remember the 80s.”  Because most of the musical acts and creative selections were attempting to rub off the magic and music of the 80s to bring happiness back to the consumer culture, in the past, it was always common to exhibit very progressive themes, like “gays teaching class,” “drag queens make a cake,” or some similar social intrusion.  But I’m telling you, and Disney is a great example of this; going woke has made a lot of corporations go broke.  And that’s more than a catchy tagline.  You can see in the behavior of most corporations that they are reeling from terrible advice from Larry Fink and the gang at BlackRock and, ultimately, the intruders at the World Economic Forum.  By this point in the global insurrection process, we were supposed to be on another currency controlled by the centralized banks, digitally, China was to have surpassed America as the dominant economy, and President Trump was supposed to be in jail, and have all his political capital removed.  So there is a lot of soul-searching going on that many people who thought they controlled the world are embarking on, and it’s not a pleasant experience for them.  And all that shows in the creative decisions at this year’s Macy’s Day Parade. 

I’ll go even further than that, this Taylor Swift lunacy with the NFL and the Kansas City Chiefs is part of the story.  It’s a constructed monstrosity from a corporate brand that needs something to spark interest in the product, and predictably, because Taylor Swift is suddenly at NFL games dating a famous player, women are watching football.  European soccer has been appealing to this younger generation, and the NFL had to do something, so there is nothing better than a romance between the most popular “anti-Trump” pop star on the planet now, where they play her music during NFL games abundantly, and one of the premier players in Travis Kelce.  I noticed that this romance didn’t start until shortly after Taylor Swift played her concert series in Cincinnati, which is a kind of melting pot of heartland sentiment.  It just so happens that Travis used to be a Cincinnati Bearcat football player, so there is something of a connection with Cincinnati that they both have, in some ways, they are wholesome products of one of America’s most wholesome cities.  Some people measure such things as obsessions.  I believe the matchmakers who put these two together, such as Erin Andrews, played a role in understanding corporate politics through such imaging.  “Hey, you guys should date, it would be great for the game and for your careers.”  Taylor Swift and Kelce go on a few dates, talk about how great Cincinnati is, and pretty soon, they are swapping spit in the shower and sharing a towel.  A new corporate romance is born, meant to carry public sentiment positively.

The musical selections at the Macy’s Parade were along the same lines.  They had Cher, references to Back to the Future, and many Broadway plays with people in cowboy hats, as if they were trying to appeal hard to mainstream America but weren’t sure they knew what it was.  What they didn’t talk a lot about was progressive politics, to the point where it was avoided by everyone involved in the presentation.  At the beginning of the parade, a bunch of Palestinian protestors were blocking the route, and they were disposed of quickly so as not to impact the show, which I thought was great.  The show must always go on.  And if you were watching it on television, you never would have known.  It was interesting to watch Cher perform because she is one of the biggest Never Trumpers out there and would generally be one who would throw support to Palestinian supporters, but here was a 70-year-old all dressed up singing sexy songs from the 80s.  Later that day, I might add, Dolly Parton dressed up like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader in her 70s, trying to show that age and sexiness were not lost during the Thanksgiving Day tradition of the Cowboys playing football during a halftime show.  The NFL could have picked thousands of other people.  Entertainment had millions of different options, but they decided on Cher, Dolly, and the safe music of Taylor Swift to sell their corporate image.  There were no Black Lives Matter references, no bending the knee at the National Anthem.  There was almost a desperate hope that these corporate images might politely be invited into the public trust again by giving audiences everything they sought and more. 

As I have been saying for a long time now, the BlackRock stakeholder capitalism idea was never going to work, all that goofy stuff they have been yacking about at Davos was never going to be accepted by the American public, and it is there that world cultures trend.  European rock bands and entertainment must export their art to America to make money.  Not China, as the entertainment industry used to think it was possible to sell to the public.  Not Africa, Russia, or Europe.  If you can’t tap into the greatest economy in the world, the one that every economist everywhere should be studying instead of trying to change into a socialist utopia, then there is no market.  And the ultimate feature of that art is the Mainstreet options seen in features like the Macy’s Day Parade.  This year, it was all about an olive branch to the MAGA voters.  Over the last three years of Biden, it’s evident that the public wasn’t seduced into the World Economic Forum monstrosities cooked up under their economic view.  And people wanted optimism in their art again, in their music, movies, and Broadway plays.  It wasn’t that long ago when Broadway was utterly shut down due to COVID-19.  Well, people moved on to other interests, and getting a ticket to a Broadway play isn’t so hard now, just like Disney Parks, where attendance is low.  People didn’t need the corporations.  They don’t need NFL football; all the progressive activism has hurt their brand.  They are turning to Taylor Swift to help them recapture the magic, but it looks like there is permanent damage to the NFL because of their anti-Trump activism that will never come back.  The Macy’s Parade of 2023 clearly states that significant changes were on the horizon, not the kind they politically support.  Yet that is the world of tomorrow, and they are trying to embrace it today.  Their actions are an admission of good things to come that they aren’t all that happy about, but if they want to be in business, they had better embrace it.

Rich Hoffman

Disney Has Failed due to Woke Politics: And its never coming back

I told everyone, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Disney stock is down, and it’s never coming back.  I have had many people who think they are competent to tell me that the company would bounce back and that all this political stuff was recoverable.  And my reply to them has been they were smoking crack.  Once a company like Disney loses the public’s confidence, it’s over for them.  This was the clear indication coming out of the Thanksgiving weekend of 2023, where their new film Wish was struggling to break 32 million when it should have been closer to 100 million.  It used to be that Disney would crank out movies like this that all made a billion dollars, but now, for the second week in a row, where Marvels also fell apart in a dismal way, the writing is on the wall for Disney and all those people who thought they should argue with me about the fate of the entertainment giant.  Like I have said now for years, “Go woke, go broke,” and Disney is.  What executive at Disney thought that by putting a bunch of girls in a movie and having them throw a bunch of magic around, people would show up and throw a billion dollars at it?  Because that’s what they thought when they put out Marvels.  If Bob Iger had listened, I would have told him that you can’t go out and buy up all these properties like Marvel, like Lucasfilm, then fire all the top minds, or isolate them from the industry because they were old white guys, replace them with female directors, get rid of all that toxic masculinity and replace it with a cast of women who don’t look like they could pick up a heavy box, let alone take on a universe of monstrous villains, and that it would all work out OK?  In the original Marvel movies, some characters appealed to young boys and even grown men, like Captain America, Thor, Hulk, and Iron Man; they had big muscles and were charismatic and funny.  But that Disney was going to get rid of all that and replace those tough guy characters with women, and people would love it?

Here’s a little secret, everyone: women don’t care about movies or stories in the same way that men do.  They want to find a boyfriend and snuggle up with him for two hours.  They don’t care what they are watching.  They certainly won’t be going out to buy tickets with their girlfriends to watch a superhero movie.  They want to buy pants and purses so they can go out and find a boyfriend, possibly a husband.  That is their biological inclination.  They want to see what kind of guys they are dating, and if they can respond to some admirable character in the Avengers, then maybe they might be worth a second date—maybe more.  However, Disney thought it had the power to restructure the nature of society and that their movies shaped society instead of reflecting it.  They bought the whole World Economic Forum view of the world to their detriment.  And here they are.  They put out a full slate of movies, such as the latest Indiana Jones film, which was a pretty good movie, that have all lost money.  But they have all fallen flat because people have lost their trust in Disney itself.  And once that happens, there is no way to get that trust back.  And it’s too late to start over.  It took 50 years to build that brand Disney had.  It only took a decade of commitment to Larry Fink and the gang at BlackRock to destroy it.  Nobody wants to see equity and inclusion in their movies.  They want to see bad guys get their butts kicked.  They certainly don’t want some girl power nonsense, boys or girls, women or men.  Disney aligned itself with the wrong view of the world, killing them.

I was pretty serious when I stated I wanted to take my kids to Disney World one last time.  I’m old enough to have watched several amusement parks come and go in my life.  LeSourdsville Lake, near my Liberty Township, Ohio home, was one of my favorites as a kid.  It’s a park now; the lake and all the rides are gone completely.  The same thing could quickly happen to Disney World, and I wanted to take my family there one last time before it all went away.  Many people think it’s too big to fail.  I would say that it’s too big to survive so many bad decisions.  They lost their focus on who their audience is and disrespected the public by feeding them this garbage and expecting to get paid for it.  Embracing radical political views of the communist orientation was a terrible business decision.  And it showed up in the parks.  When my family of 9 people were all riding Rise of the Resistance together, at the first ship you get into, they had a drag queen ushering everyone onto the ride.  It wasn’t very comfortable.  We had kids 7 through 11 with us, and they noticed the long black fingernails and the makeup on a man’s face and wondered what was going on.  I cracked a joke and told them that this was Star Wars.  It was a species of alien, which they were fine with.  But it was an uncomfortable diatribe for the adults with us, not just in our family.  A woman not from our family beside me inside the ship laughed when I said what I did to the kids, and she said, “I’m glad you said that.”  Her little girl looked up, smiling because it seemed like a reasonable consideration. 

The park attendance was noticeably down while we were there, which was OK with us.  Seeing so many fantastic creations on life support made me sad.  Disney cannot operate theme parks of that size without a revenue stream of movies making billions of dollars a year.  They have produced some good content on Disney+, but as I have said many times, like Ahsoka and the Andor Star Wars series, it was a little too late.  Trust is essential in any relationship between spouses, children, or families, but also with fans and the public.  When Disney committed to a Democrat view of the world and thought it had the power and audacity to shape society, they were misinformed.  They worked against the MAGA movement, which is more significant than Trump, and it has cost them now in ways that cannot be reversed.  And I didn’t want to see it happen.  I wanted Disney to survive.  I keep hoping to be wrong.  But I’m not.  I think it is very feasible that we will not know anything about the Disney entertainment company in the future.  It will only be a thing of our current time.  Future generations will not know them or care about them.  And there certainly won’t be a Disney World for them to visit.  Thank Larry Fink and the losers at the World Economic Forum for that.  They whispered into the ears of Bob Iger all this progressive nonsense, and now the destruction in their wake is more than measurable.  And it didn’t have to be that way, yet it is.

Rich Hoffman

When Jerusalem Was a Space Command Center: Why there are wars, to keep power in the hands who have seized it and use ignorance to suppress rivals

Examining the mysterious site of Ishi-no-Hoden in Japan

I find that science fiction and fantasy often contain more truths than what mainstream sources would ever admit to, such as television shows like Battlestar Galactica, where the concept of human seeding on earth was explored, or Lord of the Rings, where the nature of evil in some far ancient past, or future, is the dominating topic, or the Robert Jordan series, The Wheel of Time that was a very good book series that dealt with essentially the Vico Cycle that I talk about so much. And, of course, Star Wars has been a favorite of mine that was set a long time ago in a far-distant galaxy. Not even our own. Examining abstract concepts in science fiction certainly does help us deal with reality much more effectively and provokes the questions we should be asking. And when you start to do that, you can see truths lost to others, such as why there are so many global wars. Well, especially in the hot zone of the Old Silk Road, many of the conflicts we have these days, such as the war in Israel, and then of Ukraine and the whole Russian puzzle with China and other places that don’t have massive economies, but are perpetually in conflict for some mysterious reason. And I would offer that the best evidence indicates that these regions have very ancient pasts, far extending into what we today consider old. We think of a few thousand years as a lot, but the evidence from many sources, not the same idiots who tried to tell us not to take Ivermectin to deal with the lab-created virus, COVID-19, and that there was no election fraud in 2020, have tried to tell us about true history. But the result of decentralized media that is finally talking about real, substantive issues indicates that the wars of our modern times are purely created to conceal a deep and ancient past, allowing a corrupt global network to remain in power over the human race through sheer deceit.

The Millennium Falcon at the Black Spire Outpost

And that’s what I was thinking about when my family recently visited a very favorite place I have, the Star Wars land at Disney World, Galaxy’s Edge. I’ve always loved that particular science fiction story, and specifically the spaceship, the Millennium Falcon so to see a land where all these things were built and you can walk around and interact with them, was magnificent. So, I found that I was able to get my family to Disney World and to that specific place and we had one of the most marvelous days of our lives, together. But there had been something bothering me over these last few years since I had last visited what they call The Black Spire Outpost that I resolved while there with my family. I had a lot of time to think about it, and it all came together for me during this recent visit. The place reminds me of what Ancient Jerusalem would have looked like in a period of largely unrecorded history, around 8,000 BC, when that region of the world was said to have been a space command center for a landing corridor that was very important in the near east area, where many of our most significant religions were born, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. And the haunting passage from the Bible that I couldn’t get out of my head was that from Genesis 22:2, “and he said, take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” This action was in around the 2070s BC, long after any settlement of a spaceport in Jerusalem would have been located there. All Abraham would have seen of Mt. Moriah, where King Solomon, over a thousand years later, would build the great temple and place the Ark of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, upon that exact spot where Isaac was to be sacrificed, in that precise spot. In 3000 to 5000 years, most stone structures erode away into nothing, so anything that would have been in that region at that time would have long eroded from 8000 BC.

My kids

I’m a fan of Zecharia Sitchin’s books. Many people, especially mainstream scientists, have said that his books are purely science fiction and not based on accurate science. Even Graham Hancock has said such things. But I think those are not fair assessments, and I think time has proven that Zecharia Sitchin was very authentic. He has since died, but his work lives on in his students, who have done some exciting work on the activity on earth that may have occurred based on stories passed down through various cultures that are just as scientific as anything else over a roughly 450,000 year period, which paves the way not only for our current world religions but also the notion we have of kingships and even burial practices. After all the lies that the world’s governments have told us, more people are looking at things that used to be considered wild conspiracy theories and reexamining them with fresh eyes. When looked at with this updated perspective, it becomes evident that the power structures on Earth who desperately want to hold on to what they consider royal bloodlines given to them through heredity wish to maintain their right to rule Earth by controlling what we know of the past, so that is the real cause of all these ridiculous wars. If there are wars, actual science can’t do any research because those regions are too dangerous for that kind of activity. I’m also a fan and dedicated member of the Biblical Archaeology Review Society, and I understand and sympathize with their task of digging and gathering evidence in such a hostile part of the world, politically.

How things likely looked, a long time ago. But not so far away.

For me, uniquely, I had just stepped off a plane from Japan while I was with my family at the Black Spire Outpost and had visited the very ancient site of Ishi-no-Hoden and studied how the modern city of Osaka was built around the Kufan tombs that were built in the shape of keyholes, very mysterious.  Going to the Black Spire Outpost reminded me of what an ancient Jerusalem would have looked like well before there was Abraham, Isaac, or the Jewish people.  A mixture of high technology that could navigate the known galaxy, perhaps even the universe that has long since come and gone interlaced with primitive structures and building methods erected quickly to facilitate the need from a growing economy not rooted to travel on earth.  But what was left behind was some remote memory of these actions lost only to telling stories and an understanding of that truth within our subconscious brains, which most of us share.   And those memories are most effectively communicated through science fiction.  Yet, at the Black Spire Outpost, you can walk around and touch something that may well have been part of our far ancient past only manifested through storytelling.  But it is as accurate as anything else—perhaps more.  The wars in the world that dominate much of our political discussion these days are meant to hide the truth from us, which is why I am talking about them more than ever.  Because we have been lied to, we must have a culture that deals with the past to have an honest future.  The reason that Jerusalem is such a hot zone even to this day is that power is sought in concealing the truth and giving people controlled narratives through religion that keeps them in power and prevents people from learning their true history, which is buried under the streets of Jerusalem well past the typical periods that we have always thought of as ancient, but in reality, are just scratching the surface.

Rich Hoffman

The Covid Attack to Impose Marxism: Pull and Push systems imposed through health policy instead of politics

I’ve argued against it for over 30 years, this whole dumb idea of push/pull systems.  People in the world need to be pushed.  When you go to Europe and ask the waiter to hurry up, and they say, “Why, don’t be in such a hurry, take your time.  Make love not war, enjoy the smell of the roses, and drink some fine wine,” you are listening to the effects of a socialist from a country infused with Marxism.  Not someone trying to be their most productive self, and that is the heart of the argument between push systems of manufacturing and pull.  Pushing is where product flow goes downstream and puts pressure on the weakest links to pick up the pace.  Pull is where the lowest links send the demand signal upstream, and everything gets built around the identity of the constraints.  Push systems force your most honest understanding of what a true constraint is.  Pull systems yield to the weakest interpretation and build around that false assumption.  Pull systems work pretty well in places like Japan because they have a society that genuinely tries to do an excellent job at all levels.  But in Western cultures, for many reasons, people need to be motivated to do good things, and they certainly need to be pushed.  Because their default personality is to be lazy and do as little as possible, any culture that does not enjoy hard work is prone to this condition, so trusting them to define their constraints is a fool’s game.  It’s also why we know that Covid was a fake plot created by radical elements of the world’s economic manipulations to convert the world to Marxism hidden behind a health crisis manufactured in a Wuhan lab in China during a critical election year.  How do we know, well, by economic measures. 

I’ve been talking about a recent trip I took my family on to Disney World, which was a long time in the planning phase.  In 2019, my wife and I took a scouting trip there to plan for the larger group: our kids, grandkids, husbands, dogs, lodging, and various factors.   Of course, as soon as we returned, COVID-19 hit, and it has been nearly four years to get everything back on schedule.  Due to Covid rules at Disney, such as social distancing and mask mandates, they were very slow to return to normal, and we weren’t going to go until that happened.  Some of my kids are so anti-mask and anti-vaccine that anything close to those regulations at Disney World was a hard pass, no.  So we had to wait a while for Disney to get its act together, and this year of 2023 was the first year of that normalcy.  Disney is an excellent example because it’s a uniquely American economic experience, so it’s a good barometer for general economic behavior, and measuring from 2019 to 2023 was an excellent way to compare before-COVID and after-COVID realities.  And what I was able to see easily was obvious in supply chains across the world.  Hidden in the health policies of COVID was outright Marxism that is still permeating the employee marketplace.  What we ended up with in 2023 was a lot of the Democrat policies that were only talked about in 2019, such as wage rates.  After COVID-19, employers had to throw money at employees to get them to come to work because COVID-19 had destroyed the value system entirely for all employees.  Why go to work when the government would pay you to stay home?  And why work harder if the wage rates were artificially propped up for everyone?  Even now, too many employees still want to work from home because they fear they have Covid, leaving employers stuck trying to fill production gaps with new weak links in the supply chain, not knowing if people are going to show up for work, and what they could do about it.

It was clear Disney was suffering from this very problem: their lines were less productive, their employees were much less engaged, and many things were broken that wouldn’t have been damaged or long in 2019.  I went to several restaurants selling souvenir glasses, expecting to buy them, only to be told they were out of stock and they had no idea when they would be.  In 2019, that wouldn’t have been the answer.  Even for Disney they were having difficulty getting parts of their supply chain to perform reliably.  And, of course, they were dealing with the same staffing shortages the rest of the world was: people who didn’t show up for work, believing that COVID recommendations would still get them out of work as good as a doctor’s note.  And there was nothing they could say about it.  The new message from Disney, which wasn’t the case in 2019, was that it would be expensive to vacation there.  And we will do our best.  Instead of expecting the best, they’d at least try.  It was that old Marxism acceptance of yielding to constraints instead of pushing them through competition to solve those problems.  And Covid was the means of forcing mass society to accept those constraints.  Previously, the supply chain would be pushed to ensure the market’s satisfaction.  Now, the market would have to wait and be happy with it.

People have been slow to admit to themselves that COVID was a weapon of global Marxism to do what they couldn’t do politically through health policy.  Yet the proof is everywhere, and behind some blatant lies of Bidenomics trying to hide horrendous economic news is the imposed Marxism that has slid under the door to just about every part of the global economy.  I see it everywhere. I just traveled through the Toronto International Airport, where they were trying to rid themselves of any memory of Covid policy, yet their employees were still functioning from the call-off effects, the unstable management of their workforce, and knowing who was going to be at work, how long they’d be there, and whether or not they could even hire enough people to staff their positions.  The holes were evident, and everyone was supposed to look the other way and pretend everything was fine, just like at Disney, and not even ask the question.  The world had imposed on it during COVID this Marxist pull system where the constraints were artificially created to serve that radical economic theory.  It wasn’t voted for; it was built into the COVID policy from the beginning and was undoubtedly one of its goals, which nobody saw coming.  But because of that aspect alone, there should be massive prosecutions of everyone who played their part in this global insurrection.  The evidence has been left behind and is evident to those with the eyes to see it.  And it was never about health.  Marxism was always the motivation for COVID-19, and it still lingers economically until people wise up to it and scrap the entire footprint it has left behind.  That’s a hard admission for many, but the reality is that for a proper economy to work genuinely, Marxism must be pushed out of it.  And until that happens, we will be left with a less-than-optimal economy and a general state of unhappiness always associated with Marxism.

Rich Hoffman

Thinking of Steve Bannon: Pirates, values, and the foundation of American life

I decoded a long time ago what was on Walt Disney’s mind when he designed the Magic Kingdom, along with specific themes hidden behind the current culture of management that conceals it. And so I took an afternoon to really relish it; after all, it was my vacation and I was thinking about a lot of big stuff. And I was catching up on time with my daughters, one of whom had an obsessive need to ride Pirates of the Caribbean with me to fulfill a quest from her youth. It had been twenty years prior when I had taken all the kids, nieces, and nephews onto several late-night rides of that particular attraction and she had missed it due to a personal problem. And she is the one who grew up with a powerful love of pirates probably as a result of it, because she missed that opportunity. Both of my daughters have extreme reverence for piracy because a lot of what I taught them as little girls was respect for rebellion, leaving them obsessed with skulls. To this day, skulls are a massive part of their lives and mine, and much of that interest traces back to my love of pirate history, the ride at Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean, and many, many, many hours of me talking to them about the need for pirates in the world and what role they played in the formation of the United States. For instance, one of my favorite founding fathers is John Paul Jones, who is also the inspiration for Steve Bannon, the current popular podcaster and former strategist for President Trump—and many other things. And while one of my daughters was doing something extraordinary with her daughter, my granddaughter, I went off with my other daughter to put a bookend to that formally broken Pirates of the Caribbean experience. And I thought about Steve Bannon the entire time I was on that ride.

I have a lot of Steve Bannons in my life, several in my local neighborhood and I value them in the same way I do pirates. That doesn’t mean I support state-sponsored terrorism from which piracy was born, but I see them, as Walt Disney did, as critical to a free society because they are natural hedges against tyranny. Disney when he designed his park, put entirely on purpose the Pirate ride next to his Frontier Land and Liberty Square to remind people of these things for the sustenance of American life. And I had a chance to experience how Disney designed all this on this particular day with my daughter alone at the Magic Kingdom for the first time. The rest of our group, my wife, the rest of the kids, and my daughter’s husbands were back at our camp at Fort Wilderness preparing dinner and swimming to refresh themselves while we took my granddaughter to buy a dress so she could be photographed at the castle. For those who don’t know there is a famous dress store just behind the castle, and for little girls fortunate enough to attend that place with parental figures with deep pockets, you can buy a princess dress and wear it around the park, and the employees know to refer to her as a “princess” whenever they interact with her. And this was what we were up to, for her very young mind. She’s under ten, and this is the prime time of her life to set big goals for herself and create standards that would last a lifetime.

Standards are critical for young people, especially young girls. Women have tremendous power, primarily based on their sexual nature, so good decisions are massively important to their future, how they pick people in their lives, and the consequences of those decisions. So, to get it right, I encourage the young girls in my family to set very high standards in their lives, and this was a day my granddaughter would never forget. A day when she was an actual princess and treated that way by every employee at Disney World. I wanted her never to ignore it, so my daughter and I went out of our way to elevate that experience for her. So we let her buy a dress, put it on in the bathrooms between Frontier Land and Adventure Land, and had quite an excellent time soaking up the exotic environment while my granddaughter was gushing with pride and excitement. High standards—live a good life. While my granddaughter’s mother wanted to go and photograph this experience in front of the castle, a few feet away from all this, my other daughter wanted to catch up on that Pirates of the Caribbean ride. While all this was happening, I was in a texting frenzy with many of my pirate cells all over the country working on real projects that could only be described as rebellions against the established order, modern piracy perfectly and healthily. As we rode that ride, I was glad to think about Steve Bannon and his inspiration of John Paul Jones doing wonderful things that reminded me that after all this smoke cleared, America was going to be much better and so much healthier, not because of the rules and procedures of Washington D.C. but because of the pirate nature of the founding of the country itself and the continued actions of just such people.

It was a special day; we enjoyed the ride, and I had philosophy pouring through my mind, which is when I am happiest. I answered another 25 text messages from many pirates at many levels of society doing great work, and my daughter was elated to have had that personal, one-on-one experience with me, which was beyond her dreams. She had thought about that moment for two decades, and it came out better than she expected, so it was all great. We finished our business there and then left the Magic Kingdom to catch the monorail for the Epcot Center, where we met up with the rest of our group for an ambitious night in that park, which was a wonderful experience. For context, we had spent that entire morning at the Animal Kingdom, so that was our third park of the day, so everyone’s heads were spinning. And it is just such a pace that I am happiest. But the best part was seeing this whole cycle of value and defense of that value. First, you set in an individual’s mind a personal goal, a heightened awareness of expectation. Then, you create a political system that removes barriers to that heightened state. Pirates must constantly push against static methods to allow dynamic personalities to advance culture. And in that way, pirate activity was critical to the formation of America. And it is also crucial to keep exceptional people free to move society in productive ways, which is what Steve Bannon and the Warroom are doing on the national and international stage. And what other rag-tag patriots are doing in their local communities nationwide, which I am very proud to know of. The Pirates of the Caribbean is more than a ride to me and my daughter; it’s a temple. And on that day at that particular time, it was just the recharge I had been looking for.

Rich Hoffman

When Too Many Rules Destroy Happiness: Observations from a Disney World vacation experince

For most of September, I have been traveling. It has only been recently that travel restrictions regarding COVID-19 were lifted in places I needed to go professionally, like Canada, and Japan so these needed visits had been stacked up and a long time required. That was also the case for a family vacation to Disney World, which I had intended to do for the last three years while my grandchildren, mostly close in age, were prime for the experience. Covid restrictions and mask mandates ruined all those plans, so we waited for them to be removed before committing to anything. In September 2023, a slight window opened to do everything, so I stayed swamped catching everything up. By the end of September, I got off a flight from Tokyo, parked my car, hooked up our RV, and towed it to Florida for a week in Disney World to stay at their wonderful campground, Fort Wilderness. We almost canceled it again because of all the new policies at Disney, but we determined that this was the time if we were ever going to take the family to Disney World. Because as I have said many times over the last decade, I don’t think Disney will survive as a company. And after going there again and comparing the experience to just three years prior when my wife and I went there to see some of the new options they had, there is no question, that Disney is failing everywhere behind the veil of happiness, and I can see the entire thing completely falling apart for many reasons they will never tell you about in the media. But the Fort Wilderness Campground, an official resort for Disney was fantastic, at least from the façade of a vacation experience, and I was happy we went when we did.

From the area I walked around in my video of Fort Wilderness, we could take the boat over to Magic Kingdom and get to all the other parks, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot Center with the park hopper option. It was all costly, but I could show my children and grandchildren many exciting things over three days, and camping at the Fort Wilderness Campground was one of the best experiences I have ever had. It was comfortable, luxurious, convenient, and splendid in everything you expect from a lifetime vacation experience. When I think of Disney I think of a media empire built on family values, and of Fort Wilderness itself, I think of the Davy Crockett television show and Zorro. These days, Disney is more of a princess place, but there are still all the excellent references to Americana that I found very refreshing, such as the clear statement at the entrance to Liberty Square, “The hope for freedom for all. And the courage to fight for it at any cost.” Walt Disney never wanted people to forget what a miracle America was, and he dedicated several parts of his amusement parks to that very service. I wanted to take my family there while the parks were still in their heyday. As for what I wanted out of the trip, I am thrilled with the results. The children were happy even though we averaged about 6 miles of walking daily with the park hopper passes. We saw a lot, experienced a tremendous amount of information, and we had a great six days at Fort Wilderness Campground going to the pool, hanging around the restaurant and trading post, and enjoying camp in one of the best in the world. We purposely picked the 100 loop, which requires a lot of advanced planning so that we were a close walk from the boat dock which had us coming and going constantly.

Yet, to my eyes the mistakes were obvious. Disney, because it’s a giant corporation with many thousands of employees to maintain has destroyed itself by the weight of its own success, like many major corporations do, and this goes way beyond the recent woke policies from BlackRock that have seriously destroyed their business model for good. The current park attendance will soon be a thing of the past because of their killed market share worldwide. Bob Iger, the current CEO should have never returned, and I’m sure he’s realizing that now. Disney needs to constantly produce fresh content that makes a billion dollars each at the box office, and those days are mostly over for them because of the status of the current youth, YouTube options, and their alienation of conservative Americans. For instance, most of the vacationers are Trump supporters at the Fort Wilderness Campground. However, the employees are mostly Democrat-leaning and to offset this discrepancy, Disney has a lot of rules they impose on their workforce to keep everyone lined up correctly. But what they end up with is something much like their rides, everything is great so long as you stay on the rails. But the illusions fall apart quickly if you step out of the boat.

And that became most obvious when we were all exhausted one night. Nobody felt like cooking, so we went to Crockett’s Tavern and the Trail’s End Restaurant to get some pizza. On one of them, we asked for a half and half, one side being deluxe, the other completely cheese because none of the little ones like toppings yet. You’d think that we asked those Disney employees to commit murder, they had a meltdown that involved discussions of being fired and all kinds of drama. It was like being in West World where the robots suddenly started shooting the customers. It was odd, but that wasn’t the only time. What was clear to me was that the expensive façade of the Disney vacation experience was thinner than it had ever been and it wasn’t taking much for that illusion to be shattered for the consumer. Disney had adopted many rules to keep their radical workforce in line and on the message that they had destroyed that personal touch that happy individuals bring to work with them. I’ve been to Disney World many times, and this most recent time showed clear signs of stress behind a radicalized workforce that was coming out against the customers such as we saw over that simple pizza. The pizza was good, and we had a fantastic time with our family. But after some old timers still working at Disney are gone, the next generation is not there to pick up the task and carry it into the future. Disney could hide this from the world so long as they could throw money at the problems. But they can’t even do that anymore. In the news this week, right after we left, Disney had to raise their ticket prices to their parks and there are reports that the CEO is seeking a peace treaty with the Republicans of Florida. The woke battles have left Disney permanently damaged as most people inclined to spend a lot of money at Disney World are also MAGA supporters. Disney joined the wrong politics in a volatile economic environment, which has been costly to them. We enjoyed ourselves. I am glad we made the trip now for the historical value of such a Disney experience in American culture. But given many of the things I observed, it won’t be there forever. It’s failing even worse than I had thought it was.

Rich Hoffman

Stonehenge was a Clock: Understanding true history

One of my most treasured books is one by Francis Pryor, an archaeologist who has done much work at Stonehenge, where much evidence has been gathered to arrive at some conclusions about scientific discoveries.  And one of the books by Francis, Britain B.C. I was able to pick up at the actual Stonehenge site.  Over the years, I have been able to correspond with Francis, so I am sympathetic to the archaeologists who do all the hard work digging in the ground.  If you have yet to visit Stonehenge, it’s one of the excellent sites in the world, and they have turned it into a theme park for the consumer.  People who are curious help pay for continued science at the site, increasing our knowledge, which is always something we should be doing.  Just off to the side of the actual dig site of Stonehenge is a long line of tents and RVs that the working archeologists there live in while doing their work.  It is hard work that I respect tremendously. Warm showers are hard to come by as they dig in the dirt day in and day out, living well outside the social parameters of everyday society, and I feel privileged that the summation of that work can be read in books like the ones Francis has written.  Archaeology, like any science, starts with known assumptions, and those opinions can and should alter as more evidence comes in. At Stonehenge, like all other sites around the world, we have started with the idea that primitive hunters and gathers built it to pay reverence to celestial moments, like winter solstice and moon eclipses.  However, the collection of evidence says that primitive cultures made such sites their home after some previous cultures had already built them.  That brings us to the hard reality that we must admit to ourselves to avoid future scandals and an erosion of trust in our educational institutions. 

Stonehenge looks to have been built initially for a race of living creatures who visited the earth from outside our solar system; it’s a clock intended not to measure the movement of the world around the sun but celestial time according to the zodiac, an invention that was not meant to predict the future with advice in the Farmer’s Almanac, but to know when earth was in processional time according to the 25,900 years it takes to move through all the houses of the zodiac.  People visiting Earth would have to know when they were in time, not so much where they were.  So, all over the earth, we see these mounds and stone features that date back to the Ice Age in some places, all concerned with measuring celestial time, which has a very standard rhythm of 433,000 years, much longer than the observance of a single cycle could have utilized.  No matter how good a culture was at math, we are looking at a culture that could know the zodiac elements after a great history of determining its variations over an extremely long period.  Most likely, the evidence of these cultures is long gone, eroded by a very destructive earth.  So, our scale for discovering all this evidence is way off.  We tend to think of Mesopotamian culture and the Egyptians as being old.  But the truth is, they are all very young and share a relationship with people who have already been on earth for a long time.  Just like today, primitive people who didn’t have much technology were around, too, and tended to interact with such sites.  But they didn’t build them. 

That’s no small thing to admit to, but such evidence can even be found in Hamilton, Ohio, near my home at the site known as Fort Hill, which is at the Pyramid Hill preservation complex.  There, we see a giant boar mound in reverence to Aries’s zodiac sign as the earth moves from Taurus processionally.  Embedded in the tail is much information on the Pleiades star system, which would not be known to any primitive people.  This means everything we have assumed about the human race’s origins has been wrong.  The growing evidence found in such sites as Stonehenge does not indicate any evolutionary growth but relatively instant arrival and building things that lasted on the ground for a long time.  Traveling through space has its challenges.  A traveler may arrive instantly based on their internal clocks, but coming and going a lot relative to Earth, tens of thousands of years could have gone by because gravity and time are linked in ways that we are just beginning to unravel.  Gravity makes time work differently relative to its strength.  So, travelers coming to earth would need to know when they arrived, not so much in paying reverence to the gods as pagans viewed such activity.  Stonehenge looks to have been a practical invention to be a clock for celestial travelers.  They made sites like Stonehenge, Avebury, and Serpent Mound in Ohio easy to see from the air and made them out of materials that would withstand the erosion rate.  If you are going to leave a marker for when you get back, just like putting a ribbon on a tree in the forest so you don’t get lost, you want it to be there when you return.  And so it is that the earth is covered with all these markers.  Earth was a global community of visitors from outer space long before the Ice Age existed. 

That doesn’t mean that all the discoveries of arrowheads and bone fragments aren’t relevant.  Science works by putting what you know into a provable pile and building assumptions based on that evidence. But when it comes to unknowns, you put them into another pile.  And that other pile has now added up to the apparent conclusion that Earth was a global culture well before the times of the Bible.  And the people at the time understood that complex problem, even if they never had access to international travel.  They certainly heard the stories and created the mythology we can still study today.  Yet we allow current cultures to lie to us the way they do about fiscal budgets or even religion because they want, like all primitive people from the past, to be the latest versions of gods on earth, like the primitive hunters and gatherers have been for each generation that picked up a rock and threw it at a living thing to attempt to dominate it in some way.  We aren’t just talking about one species of interplanetary traveler, but many of them, and the markers they put on earth are varied but universal in their need to predict processional time celestially.  The need to tell time was the priority and nothing else.  But not time as determined on Earth by a people of the world, but as the planet moves through the galaxy of the Milky Way.  And before we can function from the truth of our ancient past, we must understand that it is far different from the infantile assumptions we have made.  Suppose we are to be a species insistent on the truth. In that case, we must stop diluting ourselves with previous assumptions about social diffusion that are outdated with new evidence beyond the scale of our typical measurements. 

Rich Hoffman

Yes, Alex Soros is a Degenerate: How new media is changing the impact the donor class has traditionally had

It’s a point of frustration that I have even noticed locally among the donor types, a shaken belief that always lingering in the background, they were in charge and had more control over our republic form of government than other people who just showed up and voted in elections.  Because they give political candidates thousands of dollars in local races or millions in national ones, there is an assumption that they are really in charge and that candidates win, lose, and do as they are told based on who gives them money.  In the past, this has hidden itself behind some other behavior, and so long as it wasn’t too noticeable, nobody asked too many questions.  That was the world that George Soros manipulated with his billions of dollars, and those like him, and essentially what has caused so much trouble in politics.  Again, I have watched this at the local level closely, and I know all the people involved, many of whom I like personally.  It’s a path paved to Hell with good intentions but always ends in disaster.  The media will lock itself to whoever has the money, and the political tide always flows to where the money is coming from, primarily left-wing causes.  The willingness to say to the world, I give more money to politics, so I’m much more in charge than everyone else, tends to fuel left-wing causes by default, even if the donors consider themselves Republicans.  Because such ways of thinking are authority-based, they align with Marxist sentiments, so all the money-class influencers tend to think the same way, that they are in charge, and everyone else needs to fall in line somewhere downstream.  That is the meaning behind the threat of Alex Soros, the young kid not yet 40 who inherited all his dad’s money for political activism to destroy the world according to what their money can buy with influence.  But times are different now, and Trump, the leading candidate for the next presidential election, called the kid a degenerate, and that is something new.  Something all those donor class types are going to have to get used to, especially young Alex.

The trend in the future of politics will not be toward more money invested; it will be in the creative use of marketing.  Of course, the machine wants to be oiled, and the entire political machine these days, as America formed, wants everyone to keep pouring money into it, including the whole Fox News business model.  The assumption is that influencers like Fox News or the New York Times could heavily influence the kind of politics that people voted for so that the more money spent, the better the results.  Of course, the people wanting that money to flow in their direction wish to maintain such a belief system.  But what is new is a collision of two things: the realization that playing such a game did not give us the results we wanted as a society.  And that with the decentralization of information, political candidates no longer needed the media to get their message out.  Trump is very much a creation of this new way of doing things, and the donor class moved to support DeSantis because they believed they had more control over the political process than they had, and they have been shocked by what they have witnessed in 2023.  No matter how much money or negative news coverage they created, it has not moved the needle away from Trump.  If anything, it has only solidified the base of those candidates more.  So what’s all that about?

Ironically, I had great clarity on this issue while traveling a lot lately, not just seeing different cultures around the world and how they do things but hanging out with my grandchildren while visiting Disney World.  Here, they had access to the best things that the media could buy with 100 years of being at the top of the pyramid, which is what Disney essentially is: a media empire that believes it is the ultimate donor-class investor.  And with people from roughly 30 to 70, Disney is all they know and the traditional news powerhouse for information.  But my grandkids could have cared less about any of those sentiments.  Disney hasn’t made any new great musicals for their generation, and they don’t care.  Instead, while we were in line for some magnificent rides, my grandkids were excited about the latest YouTube drop of Skibidi Toilet, a whole topic.  I was in line with them watching the video drop that jumped to 1 million views within 15 minutes of airing.  Disney can’t do that, as most media companies can’t even comprehend that level of engagement.  The future of politics will be who can best utilize new media, not throw money at the traditional form, which has been easy and gotten us all into so much trouble.  The Trump presidency is a new media endeavor that will change politics forever.  As they have classically thought of themselves, the donors are learning how little control they have over anything anymore.  And it’s painful for them.  But the world will not be the same for young Alex, the Marxist makeover of his dad George and their many billions invested to essentially buy whores in the media who will do anything and say anything for a little bit of easy money. 

With Trump calling Alex Soros a degenerate, he is essentially establishing his independence from the money machine which has traditionally ruined politics.  Alex thinks he inherited the ability to body-slam any political rival with sheer money from his dad.  But in this world of tomorrow, a person like Alex could spend billions of dollars in traditional media, and achieve nothing, not a move of the needle in the least.  And that isn’t just because it’s George Soros and his kid, but that’s the rule for everyone.  When people talk about how they want to drain the swamp, they also mean the money that flows into it, making the water as deep as it is.  People weren’t kidding; they are tired of not having representative government, and we are witnessing a reasonably peaceful rebellion against the donor class who have screwed up so much over a long period.  Alex Soros cannot do as his dad has because the media has lost its trust and power. Therefore, no amount of money can give them back their reputation.  There is no sucking up to Disney with millions of dollars in ad revenue because the next generation isn’t watching Disney; they are watching Skibidi Toilet episodes, which have replaced the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon programming.  And, for the first time in American history, political candidates are now free of the donor class, which is what Trump’s political investment has displayed with great fanfare.  He’s right to call Alex Soros a degenerate.  But so are a lot of them, and what they are learning entirely too late is that people are upset with how the donor class has tampered with their lives by simply outspending normal people to have more of a voice in politics than they should.  And it has been shocking, but is the state of the world of tomorrow and the politics that manage it.

 

Rich Hoffman