Category: Disney

The Market Decides Success, Not Governments: Modern Monetary Theory’s attempt to inject Marxism into the world economy

The good news is that there is an obvious path to victory regarding all the scary intentions of the Deep State and their Administrative State terrorists.  It all comes down to the classic failures of Marxism and the incredible intelligence of capitalism, as expressed by Adam Smith and his fantastic book that every leader of every country should read, The Wealth of Nations.  Hidden behind this current corporate partnership with the government, which has become apparent during Covid, the long-established plans were set bare, and now we know what they were up to and for what reasons.  Governments want to avoid violating countries’ Constitutions by backdooring everything with corporate loopholes.  And those who lobby governments and put money in the pockets of politicians, who secretly want to control the world, use governments’ power to extort corporations into playing along for their own good. The fear of regulations by governments forces corporations to play in partnership with the government to give the government power that the Bill of Rights doesn’t allow.  And once these forces control the finance industry, you see the genuinely frightening tyranny we are presently in.  But, the entire concept, which is wrapped up in failed Marxism from the start, is the very foundation of the whole scheme, and yet the attackers do not understand the trajectory of failure, and that includes people like George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, and his family at Fox News, and all the major studio heads.  The plan was to fake the Marxist takeover of the world’s major corporations with this arraignment using phony made-up money using Modern Monetary Theory to buy off the depleted stock values, tricking CEOs into believing that the next excellent value system would be ESG, which is well underway now.  But in the end, the market is in charge, not the government or corporations, and once the smoke clears, all these characters will learn some hard lessons.  

It was embarrassing to see all the top people in the industry miss the market trends in the latest movies hitting during the summer.  For instance, the box office disappointment of the latest Mission Impossible is a good representation.  The belief was that because Top Gun: Maverick by Tom Cruise made over a billion dollars, his next film would do just as well because it’s another action picture.   When Mission Impossible started off slow, the industry panicked because the assumptions were all wrong.  Mission Impossible is a different kind of film than Top Gun, so the trend was concerning. At the same time, The Sound of Freedom was a surprise smash hit and has been very profitable for Angel Studios.  Now this is where it gets tricky because BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard as money managers are now the top stockholders for all these capitalist endeavors, from movies to fast food restaurants, and they have bought that stock and control with largely phony money, with Larry Fink’s relationship to the fed, Janet Yellen and the gang.  Yes, the same Janet Yellen who loves communists and was seen bowing to the ruler of China, President Xi Jinping.  By printing fake money at the Federal Reserve and dumping it into Wall Street, to Fink and the gang, this partnership has caused even these movie companies to stop making movies for actual stock value, driven by box office results, and instead to appease that new market of partnership with the government because the government can then print unlimited amounts of money.  But people still vote with real value for what they consume in the marketplace.  See where this is headed?

And Rupert Murdoch, in all his foreign arrogance, thought that Fox News had a lot more power than it did.  This is the same kind of stupidity that you will hear at dinner parties among the very wealthy, where they can’t smell their own bad breath, and nobody will tell them so because they like rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful.  They believe people are too stupid to think for themselves, so they will buy anything corporations put out because that’s what people do.  And I knew many people who believed that Ron DeSantis would be the guy because Fox News picked him to suppress Trump for the next presidential election.  I listened to people try and tell me last year that Trump had no chance because either Fox would sink him or the government would destroy him, so I needed to get over my support of Trump.  It was never going to happen again.  Then I would tell them, “Guys, the government is not in control.  Corporations are not in control.  The marketplace is in charge and will ultimately decide.”  People think Rupert Murdoch must know something special just because he is rich.  Sometimes people get lucky, and many rich people are in that condition.  Or, they are more ruthless than others and don’t have that valve of morality that tells them not to crush everyone around them needlessly.  Whatever it is, they aren’t that smart usually, and they have a false belief generally in the power their money can buy, fake or real.  Ultimately, as Adam Smith figured out in 1776, the invisible hand of markets is driven by desire.  Fulfillment of that desire is profitable.  Controlling that desire with market controls like disguised Marxism through Modern Monetary Theory still leaves people with resentment and anger, which is why things are these days as they are.

The attack of private investors into government, and government into corporations, to bring about economic philosophy that will change the world is just as stupid as the concept that Ron DeSantis would destroy Trump and ultimately put control of the populist movement into their hands.  The Deep State, which controls all these forces through various means, wants to think they can continue to put their people into the American government.  So far, they have been successful because they have stayed in secret. But now that pressure has forced them out in the open, it’s a different story.  They are learning that market value is real, whether it’s movies at the theater or presidential picks for the Executive Branch.  These people were never really in charge.  They only gained a political advantage through deceit.  But once that cover was blown, which it is, all their assumptions about how markets work, and any need, fell apart in front of their faces.  And that’s how all this will end as well.  The control of all the major corporations through stock buys built off Modern Monetary Theory by complete losers like Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, and Jerome Powell was always going to fail because it assumed that value could be controlled by printed money, not market need.  And now that they are all caught, and there are many tens of thousands of perpetrators, they should all be going to jail or punished in as severe a way as possible for messing with the money supply with an attempted Marxist takeover that essentially has wrecked the lives of millions of people.  And they have been caught, just as Rupert Murdoch has been seen, believing they had more power than they did and that people would serve the markets rather than the markets serving the people, as it would always be.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The World Economic Scam of Yuval Harari: A cult of Death and Sacrifice of little children as advertised on 60 Minutes

My target audience here is not the masses; however, they are welcome to participate.  Rather I see this all as battlefield recon to the influencers who actually make things happen.  I put these frequent articles out as often as I do and on the variety of subjects I do for media personalities who run popular shows and podcasts, along with traditional news programs to inspire them with original content.  My management style in life, and the reason my advice holds up under tremendous pressure, is that what I do is very valuable to a lot of people in the world, and I can afford not to make a living off this kind of dialogue, otherwise, these kinds of conversations don’t happen.  And often, things happen so fast and are so interconnected that there isn’t time to write a book on the topic because, by the time you do, the issue has already come and gone.  So, I write these articles to keep these topics as close to the front of the train as possible, using the metaphor on the Metaphysics of Quality from Robert Pirsig as an example.  There isn’t time for accolades or promotion because the goal is to fight the battle faster than the caboose where our news media lives and provides information to those masses.  To win this fight, we must be faster and wiser, and we are.  This is certainly the case regarding Yuval Harari, the little gay guy philosopher and personal advisor for the World Economic Forum, which many people consider to be one of the most intelligent people in the world; people like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and those types of influential people.  I don’t think he’s brilliant at all, and while doing my own research on him, I figured things out pretty fast. 

It’s not just because he’s a gay guy that Yuval Harari has not been someone I pay much attention to.  As a lot of Americans feel about him, Yuval is not my kind of guy, intellectually.  He’s a timid, fearful little fella.  But for the sake of understanding the mentality of the World Economic Forum types, I did read a few of Yuval’s books, especially Sapiens, and I quickly saw the same old scam perpetrated on the human race since the beginning of time.  And much of that scam was revealed in plain site when Anderson Cooper, another gay guy, this time from 60 Minutes, did a particular segment on Yuval Harari to prop him up as some great, wise master of history.  But in so doing, they filmed a significant portion of their interview at Tel Gezer, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which was the ancient Canaanite site of the mass sacrifice of children.  I covered a particular segment on Tel Gezer recently, specifically for reasons like this, where people need to connect the dots and understand what kind of religious order we are dealing with here regarding globalists and World Economic Forum types.  This is why the Bible is important, so that context to these ancient struggles can be understood and once they are, then the kind of evil we are dealing with involving these modern-day radicals are the identical precise elements that we have been fighting since the dawn of mankind, out of all the places that Yuval Harari, the progressive futurist, and professor from Israel, took Anderson Cooper to the ancient archaeological site that was dedicated to the deity Moloch, part of the pantheon of Baal worshipers that God was so mad at in the Old Testament.  It’s the spot where a young girl was found sacrificed after being cut in half, and further evidence of the mass sacrifice of children was haphazardly discovered in a pile all thrown together.  It’s a grisly site, and not precisely the kind of place anybody but anti-Christian forces would consider celebrating.

 And this is how the game works; on the 60 Minutes promotion of Yuval Harari and his utterances that a new god was in the world that needed to be worshipped were two gay guys, as if to normalize perverse sexual lifestyles while celebrating with a wink and a nod a place that sacrificed to the god Moloch, which was the devourer of children.  Canaanites used to sacrifice abundantly to Moloch, often their firstborn, because it meant more because of the value.  It was a common practice that we see very much in the efforts of the World Economic Forum, where they do believe the earth is overpopulated, and there are plans to kill off many people to preserve their pagan gods of the earth.  Worshiping the god Moloch isn’t some ancient thing; it’s very much the religion of the day for them and is behind the abortion movement.  And Covid, in many ways, is the desire to control mass civilization through medicine and to preserve the earth as if it were a deity of its own, connected to these ancient gods from historic times.  And that’s what is ultimately behind the transhumanist movement, which Yuval is trying to sell to the world, the idea that technology is the new Moloch in the world and that we must worship it with continued human sacrifice to fulfill the depopulation agenda.  When you wonder where the World Economic Forum gets a lot of its dumb ideas, many of them come from Yuval Harari and his obvious hatred for the human race, likely for lots of reasons.  He is far from a normal person, but he’s being sold to us so that we think he’s smart and should be listened to.  Yet essentially, he’s just like a high priest from Canaan who practices abundant child sacrifice to the ancient gods, which was essentially the plot of the Bible from beginning to end.  What is evil, and what do we do about it?  And who is God? Is it the old Canaanite pantheon or this new guy Yahweh who thought sacrificing children was a horrible idea?

Yuval Harari is a scam, a tool of the World Economic Forum to resurrect ancient gods and use them to take over the world, and yes, it is that crazy.  It’s every bit that crazy, and everything they touch, from arts and entertainment to finance, politics, ethics, and science, is bent toward this human-hating scam and desire to appease the spirit world of the ancient Canaanites, and other regional gods from the old world, specifically Egypt. They think, the Desecrators of Davos types, that the Bible is for idiots, that they know the old religions that predate the Christian view of the world, and that they are superior to that knowledge, which they parade in front of us with a wink and a nod.  But if you understand history well, and deal with a lot of interconnecting subjects, like I endeavor to do on this very fast-moving site, then you can catch them on it.  And then understand what they are up to and why they want to conquer the world.  But technology isn’t as scary as they’d like you to believe.  And it certainly isn’t the new god to worship with the sacrifice of little kids.  Yet that is their justification for what they do and why they do it.  And it’s what we must fight with that understanding to defeat.  Rationalizing with them will never work because they are evil and actually quite insane.  But knowing their motives is needed so that we can stop treating them and begin to see them for the enemy they are and the hostile assailants against all human activity at the core of their not-so-well-disguised religion.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The SAG Strike with the Writers in Hollywood is a Dumb Idea: But I predicted it years ago, and here it is, which will destroy them forever

The strike from the Screen Actors Guild is probably the dumbest thing we’ve seen in a long time. Many things are colliding simultaneously that will essentially kill the Hollywood industry. Yet, they seem brain-dead and numb to how the world sees them. As I always remind people, labor unions are all communist organizations, so the idea of stopping work through collective bargaining comes straight from Karl Marx. There is nothing “redeeming” or “American” about what they are doing. It’s essentially one set of radical lefties fighting against a bunch of New World Order studios who dance to the tune of BlackRock and the lefties of finance. One of the main reasons that Hollywood is so radically left is because that is what it takes to be one of the elites working in Hollywood. If you are a lefty, the studios might give you work if you are lucky. There are really very few actors and actresses who can make a living off acting in Hollywood. I know from personal experience and have seen this problem unusually close. And many years ago, I saw this collision coming, and here it is. Labor unions make motion pictures and television too expensive for a studio to produce. The residuals of production are too much of a pain in the neck, and essentially, we have arrived at a place where that cost just isn’t worth it to a studio. What it costs to make a movie and everyone involved just doesn’t justify the revenue stream. After Covid happened, this whole mess was exposed. Hollywood would need some kind of reset for their cost model. Yet the actors and writers who are now both on strike want things to be as they have been, which was never sustainable.

I’ve told some personal stories about Hollywood in other places, but not in this context. For most of my adult life, I wanted to be a film director, actor, writer, and producer. It was really the only thing I wanted to do from age ten to forty. And there were many times when I came really close to getting into that line of work. For years I had to pay fees to the Writers Guild and interact with that side of the business, which I didn’t like. Things were less political back then, so the politics of it was less of a concern. But there was one project with A-listers who were doing a project for RealD 3D that I met while at a film festival, as I was providing stunt work involving bullwhips as I was a member of the World Stunt Organization at the time. So they flew me out to Hollywood for a project involving some of the people from the Twilight movie series and Beverly Hills 90210. They gave me my own trailer, so I was being treated as the featured talent on the project with many veteran producers and actors, so I had a chance to see things behind the scenes. And what I learned, painfully, was that Hollywood was not for me. It was the union attitude that I had no tolerance for, and it was at that project in 2008 I realized that I was never going to work in Hollywood because of my disdain for unions. I couldn’t be in them and didn’t want to work with their rules. And the entire town was built on unionized labor. I had several conflicts on that particular project with unionized staff, and it became obvious to me that the unions had taken all the fun out of making movies. 

Ironically, I was there because of my hatred of unions because I was one of the only people in the world who had a very unique skill set that was willing to let RealD 3D screen capture my work, which would then go on to provide animation for films like Ironman 2 and the Immortals. The precise issue that the SAG members are striking on now is concerns over A.I. taking over acting and a loss of revenue regarding streaming services. Many people told me that if I did this project, I would never work in Hollywood again because once you gave the studios what they wanted, such as screen captures of me using firewhips, I would be done as a whip consultant for all future movies. After all, they wouldn’t need a person to perform that since they had all the footage from me that digital animators could then use for future projects. Well, my love was for telling stories, and if I could help make that easier, I was all for it. Many union members were on the set, but it was a nonunion enterprise because it was established as a pitch session. So I was nonunion showing what a potential pitch might do for a studio. The union people were there hoping to tag on to the project’s development. I was pro studio and certainly pro-RealD 3D. And as much as I liked the experience of being in Hollywood and working with people important in the industry, I grew very frustrated with the union mentality on that film set. So, when it was over, I made a decision that I would refocus my efforts. Barack Obama had just been elected; I joined my local Tea Parties in Cincinnati and put my efforts into those types of things. Largely because I witnessed the terrible burden that labor unions had placed on an industry I loved. But the problem had carried over into just about every element of politics in general.

When I saw the reasons for this latest strike of the SAG members being led by Fran Drescher, I knew it was the collapse of something that had been artificially propped up for many years. Movies cost too much because labor expected too many things, and studios had become too liberal over time because of their interaction with these communist unions and their liberal world order masters in finance. Conservative ideas weren’t even a consideration, and those are the people in the world buying tickets. So there was no way that the movie industry and television would last, and this strike would kill them. It will kill Hollywood, and it was a dumb thing to do. But it’s been brewing for a long time, and I have seen it from the other side and knew it would never last. Ultimately it is part of the collapse that is going on everywhere. People will not miss Hollywood. But Hollywood will miss the business. YouTube, in many ways, is far more influential. Some very serious people contacted me a few years ago about my life and wondered why I wasn’t making movies. And I explained to them that the entire industry needed to go through a reset period; this was before Covid. I told them that producing a movie wasn’t good business, and that I was doing other things that made much more sense. If you want to make a movie, you have to deal with unionized labor to get it into distribution, and that just wasn’t worth it to me. I told them that I’d see how things shaped up in the future. But under the union rules, it wasn’t fun, and I wanted no part of it. And now the industry is exactly where I said it would be. This is a sign of what will happen to the Liberal World Order and the Deep State in general. All these communist groups that have hidden in plain sight are falling apart. And the pain of it is their own doing.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Real Tim Ballard: Is it all just a CIA case of misdirection

It is lazy to just mindlessly trust anything, especially authority figures, and I was wondering while watching the new very good movie, The Sound of Freedom, how the real-life Tim Ballard did it, blending in with the cartels to act like one of them so that trust could be earned to break open the pedophile rings of modern slavery that are so much a modern problem.  You’re hanging around drug dealers and the scum of the earth, and you are trying to win them over.  There would be no way to pull it off being straight as an arrow; otherwise, they would never trust you.  You’d have to show an interest in kids and pretend to be attracted to them, which Tim Ballard had to do at the beginning of the film when he was trying to get into the mind of a significant pedophile consumer.  The movie lightly touched on that kind of life and focused excessively on the Christian side of reality.  It purposely made Tim Ballard into a hero and glorified his efforts almost to the point of a John Wayne movie.  I personally enjoyed the results.  I wanted to see a hero.  I wanted to see someone who was so firm in their convictions that it could make the tough subject matter of the movie go down easier.  But I’ll have to admit; I had doubts that Tim Ballard’s life was so heroic.  He’s likely had to see and do many things that are very embarrassing to gain the trust of the world’s scum bags.  And I’m sure those things didn’t feel very heroic to him.  But would we ever catch any of these people if he didn’t do those things? 

I gave Sound of Freedom a great review; I think it was a top-notch movie, and it’s worth seeing, for the subject matter was very serious.  But I’m also proud of many people who have let me know that there is a serious possibility that this entire movie has been a CIA operation to attempt to restore their tarnished brand with the targeted religious right.  And it would be a common trick by those types of intelligence agencies to hide much more serious crimes behind misdirection efforts.  After all, the criminals in Sound of Freedom are nobody, dime-a-dozen scum bags from Columbia and Mexico.  Nobody will miss them if they are arrested and thrown in jail forever or killed in a gun fight upon arrest.  The sex trafficking of children would continue, and life would continue as we know it.  And that was the entire point of the Tim Ballard true story, to show how deep undercover and into the danger zone he was willing to go to save a couple of kids from that terrible life.  But people have been quick to point out that the money trail does trace back to Clinton supporters and that when the CIA asked Tim Ballard to become part of Homeland Security to take on this human trafficking role because he was a person of faith and they felt that would give him a lifeline out, and back to reality without falling apart, its entirely possible this is the kind of chess game they had in mind all along.  That the story Sound of Freedom would give the religious right some red meat and hope it appeases them and makes them go back to sleep.  Because the actual crimes were in the Beltway among the rich and famous.  The Hollywood culture that likes to consume adrenochrome for its pursuits of immortal life, their own Epic of Gilgamesh in Beverly Hills.

In that regard, The Sound of Freedom played it very safe.  The bad guys were terrible, and everyone could agree on who they were.  And the entire movie was about chasing down a few of those types of people to the ends of the earth.  But it didn’t deal with John Podesta’s Pizzagate controversy and the high-end user debacles of Epstein Island that are undoubtedly major problems in the news, and to what role the CIA plays in feeding this criminal network, just as they have been caught doing with the illegal drug network.  The cartels have risen to fill a market need.  So why is there a market need?  Sound of Freedom points out the problem in a way that essentially says, “hey, look over there, at those bad people deep in the rebel-held territory of Columbia.  But don’t look at the safe house in Washington D.C. that is feeding these kids to consumers in Chevy Chase, Maryland, while dad sneaks away from the home, telling the family he’s working late.  But what he’s really trying to do is have sex with kids hoping to psychologically turn back the clock before he has made a bunch of unforgivable mistakes in life.”  And then how do intelligence agencies and corporations use such compromised people to gain power in the world through extortion?  Some huge questions in Sound of Freedom are deliberately pushed off to the side for narrative convenience.  If the movie did tackle those topics, it would likely be very depressing, and it would be hard to justify the price of a ticket. 

I personally think the CIA uses people like Tim for just these kinds of purposes.  And the role that Angel Studios plays in the distribution of this movie I think is sincere.  I love The Chosen and think the family who set up that studio are good people trying to do good things for all the right reasons.  But are they all being used to contain the message of child trafficking to acceptable limits determined by the CIA?  Well, probably.  This is a story that props up government efforts against sex trafficking and makes you want to cheer on the good guys punishing the bad guys.  But it’s pretty safe in the stereotypes.  The CIA has no problem throwing a few lowlifes under the bus for their own preservation.  And I’m glad people are talking about the Sound of Freedom in such an “awake” way.  It’s good to be skeptical.  And it’s good to question Tim Ballard’s and his wife’s integrity.  I want to believe there are people like him in the world and that we aren’t all being played for suckers.  But experience says that such people don’t exist.  Either way, The Sound of Freedom is a movie worth telling to an audience that needs to hear it.  But trust in government and government workers in Homeland Security and the CIA is a bridge too far.  There is a lot more evil going on in the world besides the terrible circumstances of this movie.  And when the CIA starts standing for good in the hard cases and busting the rich and famous on moral grounds of right and wrong, we can have a different conversation.  But as of now, we must scrutinize everyone because institutionalism tends to corrupt everything it touches, even the good people who work within it with an “ends justify the means” mentality.  Playing nice with the bad guys usually means doing bad things too.  And that’s not something to celebrate.  It’s something to punish. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

It’s Not the Fault of Indiana Jones: Disney listened to BlackRock and they’ll never recover

Indiana Jones is a great movie, but Disney mismanaged it by listening to the wrong people

One of the reasons I do these articles on this blog is because people are hungry for real information. Not the kind that the media has grown to give us, usually laced as propaganda to fulfill some NWO vision of centralized control using the China model of communism to determine reality. And there is something really menacing looming behind the various box office results that I say all the time are the ways that people vote for value in our culture. The Sound of Freedom movie is a category by itself, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s room for all these great movies that are suddenly coming out. But the way that the communist left has gained control of the marketplace is by placing the number 1 weekly horse race to movies, all in an effort to make or break their box office results. It’s a baked-in trick by the World Economic Forum types and their media apparatus to pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas with the illusion of industry reporting. And I say that as a guy who has read The Hollywood Reporter for three decades. I used to get the magazine version of that publication as an industry guide of great value. So I am quite aware of the switch to this new way of manipulating numbers to tell the kind of story that the financial controllers of communist activism want to tell. And a target early on was the new Indiana Jones movie, The Dial of Destiny. The WEF types wanted to see Disney kill off one of the great American heroes from the 1980s. Early screenings showed that the public didn’t like that. So Disney had to scramble to give the public the ending they wanted, which went against the desires of the BlackRocks of the world. And as a result, Bob Iger and the gang at Disney found themselves between a rock and a hard place with snakes and spikes in between to kill them with a thousand cuts.

See the problem. Even with inflation, this cost structure is ridiculous and not sustainable.

When I look at the box office numbers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I see a pretty good movie that performs well day to day, even on weekdays. It’s consistently good with the other movies that were done in the 1980s, back in a time when those movies stayed at the movie theater for most of a year. But these days, with movies barely staying in a movie theater for more than 60 days, a film has to have a lot of pop on the front, most of this due to failures of liberalism. The movies are controlled by labor unions who want inflated budgets with unlimited money spent. And if a studio complies, they are rewarded with good press that will take them close to a good box office score. Disney got caught trying to appease everyone, including BlackRock, and they made everyone mad with a movie that had its budget out of control. If George Lucas was producing this Indiana Jones film, he would have kept the budget under 100 million, or he wouldn’t have made the picture. Kathy Kennedy let the budget spike up to around 300 million before advertising. So the standard is the problem, and the controllers expect to rule the marketplace. And Disney has damaged their own brand, so anti-Disney people started campaigning against this Indiana Jones movie several years ago. Then there was the political agenda from BlackRock and Vanguard about replacing Indiana Jones with a woman and killing off the Western hero for global communism. Disney picked the fans for its own survival, and the industry pounced, writing many negative articles against Indiana Jones, hoping to sink the film and punish the studio for not complying with the globalism mandate. 

Ultimately, this Indiana Jones film will be well respected and could have been financially successful if Disney had managed the budget. But it got out of control, and they thought they could spin it into a billion-dollar grosser. But without the support of the industry analysts, who are communist in most of their approaches to everything, the World Economic Forum activists worked overtime to ensure that it would never get there. They would have talked the movie up if Disney had killed off Indiana Jones. But they resorted to punishing the movie because it was a good hero story with a classic character living to see a happy ending. That was a good move for Disney in the long run because Indiana Jones will be around longer than the World Economic Forum. I’m not sure that Disney will make it. I’m telling people to go to the parks now while they are still there because I don’t think Disney will survive what they’ve done to themselves, which they are now the Bud Light of entertainment. When people think of Disney, they no longer think of Mickey Mouse but woke monsters who want to groom children. And once you lose that brand, it’s gone forever in this climate. They played the game wrong, and now it’s going to cost them.   They fixed the Indiana Jones movie in time to save it. But they should have done the same to themselves several years ago instead of committing to the World Economic Forum’s woke agenda of gender desecration, which started to become evident with the killing of Han Solo and that terrible Buzz Lightyear movie. 

It’s not an Indiana Jones problem; over the coming year, most people will watch the movie and like it, whether at the theater or at home on a streaming service. It’s a good family movie, but it’s too late for a course correction by Disney to save it at the box office. Because Disney is having problems everywhere. People are rejecting them as a company. That doesn’t mean that they’ll never have another billion-dollar film again. But they have lost permanent market share because of their woke commitment. And now their woke bosses at BlackRock are punishing them in the trades if they don’t stay committed to the continued desecration of American heroes. So the news isn’t good for Indiana Jones, but it’s not because the movie is bad. But there are undoubtedly many bad characters who are politically motivated on both sides, and Disney mismanaged the whole thing to their detriment. The lesson for everyone is not to pick against the audience, not to feed the everlasting hunger of the trade unions with inflated budgets, and to never align yourself with global activism against good stories and heroes who stand against evil. This is why I said it was a bad idea for Bob Iger to come back. I don’t know what he was thinking about taking a job that was bound to be a loser. There was no way to fix this Disney problem. And instead of being viewed as a pretty good CEO over his years, he’ll be remembered as the guy who let it all fall apart. But the truth is, this started a long time ago when the board started listening to global activists for communism and bending their films toward the China market. All that was a mistake that is showing itself at the box office. And it has nothing to do with Indiana Jones as a movie. If anything, people are supporting the movie more than they otherwise would. The problem is Disney, and I’m afraid that it’s a condition that will never correct itself.  

Rich Hoffman

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A Review of ‘The Sound of Freedom’: God’s Children are not for sale

Boy, that was a good movie, the Sound of Freedom. I intended to see it on the 4th of July when Angel Studios released it, a bold move considering they were putting a critical box office movie in the middle of summer between the new Indiana Jones film and the latest Mission Impossible project. I like these Angel Studios guys; I’ve worked with independent studios in the past, namely the Atlas group for the Atlas Shrugged films, so I have an appreciation for how difficult it is to make a movie in the first place, especially one with a big message like the Sound of Freedom has. But that’s only half the battle. Getting a movie distributed through the theaters is the biggest hurdle, and it’s been in that way that finance has been able to take over the movie industry. Putting this movie out on the 4th of July was hard because it competed with other big studio films with big marketing budgets. I think we should see this kind of thing more often because people hunger for good movies. And it’s usually not an either-or kind of decision. There’s room for Indiana Jones. And there is room for Sound of Freedom. I honestly didn’t expect much from the Sound of Freedom. I thought the movie would have a good message and was important to support. So when I tried to buy tickets for the film on July 3rd and 4th when my wife and I had some free time to see it, I wasn’t too disappointed that I couldn’t find any theaters that weren’t sold out in my area, or if they did have open seats, that we couldn’t find two together. We weren’t going to go to the movies and not sit together; that was ridiculous. So I waited until the following weekend, and we had the same problem. But we did manage to find two open seats for a Saturday afternoon in the third row, which I usually wouldn’t do because it’s too close to the screen. But we bought the tickets, went to see the movie, and were both blown away by what we saw.

The Sound of Freedom was actually, technically, a great film. It reminded me of Schindler’s List, one of my all-time favorite films. But pacing-wise, it reminded me of the Clint Eastwood-directed American Sniper. The Sound of Freedom was of excellent quality, on the level of those kinds of movies, and at a different time, this would undoubtedly be the Best Picture of the Year for the Academy Awards. The director, Alejandro Monteverde, put a lot of love into this film, and it sure showed. It was more of an action-adventure picture, more like Taken, rather than a documentary on child sex trafficking. To be honest, after seeing lots of clips from Jim Caviezel, I thought this film would be more of an activist movie. It certainly was; this film was made by really good people for good reasons, from top to bottom. But it was a far better movie than what usually comes out of those intentions. The director Alejandro Monteverde made a great movie with Jim Caviezel and the cast based on the real-life exploits of the Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard without knowing how the movie would get to the public. The movie has been done for five years; it was first going to be distributed by Fox, then Disney owned the rights, and they sat on it for a long time. Eventually, this new studio, Angel Studios, came along and picked up the rights. They are the studio behind the very well-done television show, The Chosen. So they picked it up and brought it to movie theaters.

Since most of the film production was Mexican, it brought the life of the cartels into sharp focus in ways that I hadn’t seen before. It was a very gritty movie that put viewers into the world of sex trafficking without being oppressively difficult to deal with. The Sound of Freedom walked that very fine line between being tasteful and hopeful, with Jim Caviezel playing the real-life Tim Ballard with such optimism that it wasn’t hard to fall in love with these people. I say all the time about movies, one of the biggest problems is that the writers of these things often don’t have much life experience. You can see that in big studio pictures where the writers clearly hang out in Santa Monica, and their perspective is from that world. The Sound of Freedom was written and directed by people who know the world’s dark underbelly but have not become hopelessly lost in it. What ended up on the screen is really something stunningly special. A movie everyone can enjoy that is much more optimistic than I thought it would have been. And not to give away spoilers, but I think it’s important to note because I honestly wasn’t fighting too hard to see this movie because they are usually depressing. While you want to know about these problematic subject matters, who wants to experience a depressing story? But I can say this movie has a very happy ending. I will likely see it many more times because it really was inspirational, hopeful, and bold. 

At the end of the movie, Jim Caviezal came on and gave a little speech, which was very appropriate, during the credits. They also put up a QR code which I took a picture of for this blog site. They encouraged people in the audience to buy tickets for people who couldn’t afford to go to the movie with a Pay it Forward campaign, which I thought was pretty clever and smart marketing on behalf of Angel Studios. There is a lot to like about this entire enterprise that will undoubtedly give hope to anybody who goes and sees it. For those who feel pretty hopeless about the world’s condition, I would strongly recommend The Sound of Freedom as soon as you can get to a theater and see it. I would recommend buying tickets and sending them to someone who might be on the fence. Not only for the box office need for a film like this, because this is how these kinds of movies get made. If they do well at the box office, it impacts the rest of the industry, which is precisely what is needed now with the amount of genuinely sinister aspects of culture that are on our nightly news. This movie is a ray of hope and deserves all the credit that can be given to it. I would personally like to see a lot more out of Angel Studios because this project is a real treasure. And the world could use a lot more from them. But it takes money to tell these kinds of stories, and this is a movie that was done on a high level as a kind of leap of faith. And we are lucky to have it. The world is better because of it. And maybe people will become educated enough from this movie to do something about sex trafficking and the amount of it that is destroying the lives of the innocent before they ever have a chance to live life for themselves. 

Rich Hoffman

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‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ is Fantastic: The way they used to make movies, family-friendly, happy endings, and a real love for the audiance

The really good news is that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a wonderful movie. I have said it for years, and it’s certainly true here, one of the extraordinary measures of a society’s health is its box office because it tells the world what people are buying at the movie theater as an entertainment option. It accurately describes what kinds of things people really like in the world and provides a measure beyond political beliefs to the truth of public sentiment. It’s much more difficult to understand when you get into television ratings and streaming services. And I think what happened with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is something that we talked about last year with the release of Top Gun: Maverick, another movie that, like Indiana Jones, was delayed for many years in production before being released to the public. I’m sure that Steven Spielberg will deny it, along with the diversity crew at Disney, but clearly, what happened with Indiana Jones and the newly directed James Mangold Dial of Destiny is that they learned some important lessons with Top Gun, one of the first big hits coming out of Covid. And as a result, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a fantastic film that seeks to be more like Raiders of the Lost Ark than the more slapstick Last Crusade. If you understand Indiana Jones like I do, and many people who have been with this character for over four decades now, and have watched all the television shows, read all the books, read the comics, played the video games, this Indiana Jones movie does a great job of showing a very complete character in a way that Hollywood has never had to deal with. And the movie pulls it off spectacularly and very respectfully. As only Harrison Ford could play, this is a very complex character, more so than most reviewers could wrap their minds around, and the result is something extraordinary with a very happy, family-friendly ending. I don’t think there was a single curse word in the entire film, and it didn’t have anything woke in it. It was an offering from Disney that was begging for forgiveness from the movie-going public.

What was clear to me was that this new director, James Mangold, loves Indiana Jones as many of us do, and he understands the character and his significance to actual history. I’ve also said many times that Indiana Jones has done more for science than almost any other resource in the history of the world. The publishing industry has really flourished because of Indiana Jones, not by direct correlation, but the hunger for the kind of content that is often discussed in Indiana Jones films and in Dial of Destiny; a lot is going on, things that work at many different levels that were built around a movie with a true love for the world of Indiana Jones and the way that fiction carries over into fact. I would go so far as to call Dial of Destiny as brilliant and ambitious while being very safe in the continuation of the character. As many have discussed, Indiana Jones is an old man in this movie. Harrison Ford is 80 years old, so we aren’t talking about a swashbuckling Errol Flynn type mixed with Humphrey Bogart as Raiders of the Lost Ark was often characterized back when it was first released. This is something unique and entirely of its own making that now has its own history that everything is measured from. And some of the real Indiana Jones types that are out there in the world doing great work, clearly inspired by these movies over the years, like Graham Hancock, the Joe Rogan Show, and even the religious writer Jonathan Cahn have shown that most of the thrill of Indiana Jones isn’t a youthful man fighting bad guys and escaping under speeding trucks. Over the years, the greatest thrills in Indiana Jones movies are more intellectual than physical, and that’s why Dial of Destiny works so well with an old Indiana Jones doing what only he could.

Instead, I would have Disney not made this Indiana Jones movie before I saw it. I raised my children on these movies; now, my grandchildren are tremendous fans. I enjoyed Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an ambitious film that many didn’t like because it stepped out of the formula established in the first three films that were all released during Reagan-era politics in the 1980s. As much as people didn’t like the movie, and that Steven Spielberg didn’t seem to want to make it, there were a lot of positive things that came from that fourth film, such as the History Channel’s show Ancient Aliens, which culminated in the lives of great writers like Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Daniken. These Indiana Jones movies open the broader market for these kinds of unique adventures into history, such as The Gold of the Gods so wonderfully portrays. Indiana Jones may have started as an adventurous playboy grave robber in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But he evolved quickly into the pent-up frustrations of George Lucas himself, a very smart person who wanted to live the lifetimes of dozens of the most brilliant people in all of human history, that over the years was attempted to flush out in all forms of media available to tell these stories. This movie, Dial of Destiny, does all that while still managing to keep Indiana Jones the person we have always known. He shoots guns in this movie, which I thought Disney would avoid altogether. There are fistfights that are not unbelievable for an 80-year-old man. And the development of Helena Shaw was respectful, fun, and dashing. I would easily see a movie that featured her as a main character. Played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she was a fun character, and I could see a sequel to Dial of Destiny where she is the feature, and Indiana Jones makes a guest appearance to help the movie along. This might be the last Indiana Jones movie, but I don’t think it will be the last Indiana Jones appearance by Harrison Ford, based on how this movie ended. 

It will be interesting to see how much business this movie does for Disney. Disney has severe brand damage now with their commitment to woke politics. But this movie is a clear peace offering to the ticket-buying public to help repair that brand. To invite people to come back to the theme parks. This is Bob Iger attempting to get Disney back in the public’s good graces. At least this film deserves to be in the billion-dollar club. But the Disney brand has made some people very, very angry. Yet this movie is as good as movies can be made and does not destroy a character the world has fallen in love with. And it leaves the door open to a happy ending for him, given that Indiana Jones is old. And that John Williams, who does a fantastic job with the musical score, as usual, is now in his 90s. This happy movie gives fans what they are looking for, and I couldn’t recommend it more. This is the kind of film that movie theaters were made for, that we used to get all the time in the 80s and 90s, but are now very rare. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is something special, and it was wonderful to see that movies like this can still be made. 

Rich Hoffman

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What Happens When Your Little Sister Plays With Your ‘Star Wars’ Toys: The Fate of all woke corporations

There are likely fewer people in the world who wrote as much about Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars property in entertainment as I have, or the fate of a multibillion-dollar investment, the Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida.  I was excited about it.  I have been a Star Wars fan most of my life, which is reflected in my work.  But it’s not just Bud Light that woke policies have crushed that the global push for a certain kind of CEO to now run these corporate boards ran by BlackRock have destroyed.  Knowing Star Wars as an entertainment property and a work of modern mythology, I could see early on the impact and ultimate failure of Disney’s quest to appease BlackRock and the other elements of the Desecrators of Davos, the World Economic Forum’s view of the world.  And it was evident in 2015 when the first of the next generation Star Wars movies came out in The Force Awakens that the future destruction of globalism was making itself most apparent.  What we have now is a kind of stubborn tenacity of globalism to impose itself on reality.  Whereas I have been saying for a very long time, many decades now, in writing, that the trend was going to destroy itself.  That was never more clear in how Disney as a corporation handheld Star Wars as soon as it purchased George Lucas way back in 2012 and have now chased off their audiences, which, prior to, looked to be eternally loyal.  I warned early on to all those who owned Disney stock to sell because the brands they, as a company, were building would fall apart, and that’s precisely what is happening.  As Disney is falling apart, so is globalism everywhere in the world. 

As scary as a post-President Trump world has been with all the horrible revelations that have been revealed, we are actually better off because market forces are proving that wonders of capitalism envisioned by the great Adam Smith book The Wealth of Nations to be as reliable as anyone could hope it to be.  Out of all the presently trained economists with PhDs in the study of social behavior and the flow of money, it really all points back to that seminal work that was released to the world when America was founded that has turned out to be exclusively true.  Disney had the money and power to hire anybody they wanted to be successful.  Just ten years ago, they looked to be an unstoppable entertainment company, but like the world presently is in general, all members of the Bilderberg group, and the World Economic Forum, Disney is a dismal failure that literally can’t do anything correctly.  They can’t produce new content that anybody wants, and what they do put out from their entertainment classics is so burdened with woke politics that it has turned away half the nation from enjoying their products.  Disney bet on their brand and thought it was so great that no matter how much wokeness they proposed, they assumed, as they all did when they adopted this Chinese communist model of corporate rule of the world, that people would follow them as leaders of culture and that progressive politics would rule the day.  Yet what they found out has been completely the opposite.  Markets serve people; they don’t shape culture.  They represent culture. 

That was never more apparent than when Disney built the Galactic Star Cruiser Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida, connected to the Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios.  I was very excited about Disney’s attempts and wanted them to work.  I was a big fan of the Star Wars Land and went to it as soon as it opened with my wife, and we made a nice vacation out of it.  I thought it was a stunning experience for a kid who grew up loving Star Wars, so I wanted the experiment to work.  But I saw the trouble too and had been talking about it, at first, very politely.  I did several radio shows with various guests around the country talking about the danger of woke Disney, which at that time, nobody understood what “woke” was.  And sadly, everything I said as a warning sign for Disney turned out to be true.  Disney didn’t understand Star Wars.  It was being run by a woman, hand-picked by George Lucas, to continue what he had built.  But she got swept up into this New World Order of the global citizen movement and turned Star Wars into what a little sister would do to your Star Wars toys when everyone was kids.  Girls might take your Star Wars figures and put lipstick on them, and instead of them having epic battles, she would sit them at a table and have them drink tea.  Kathy Kennedy essentially did that to Star Wars, designed for 8- to 12-year-old boys, and started producing all the content for girls.  And she thought that the boys would stick around and that the market expansion would now be more inclusive of girls and empower women. 

So when the Star Wars hotel opened as a kind of cruise ship last year, right after the Covid lockdowns, after ten years of development and over a billion dollars in investment, fans were stunned to learn that the $6000 per room 2 day all immersive experience was essentially the little sister version of Star Wars.  Star Wars is about rebellion against tyranny.  Not singing songs and drinking drinks in a bar with aliens walking around.  But Disney didn’t listen to the fans; instead, it lectured them about what it would be like, and the results were devastating.  Just over the hotel opened to great fanfare, it is now projected to close in September of 2023 because it just never took off.  People rejected the idea, and it wasn’t so much the money; the lack of the Star Wars experience ultimately destroyed it, really, before it ever got off the ground.  It proved something that will eventually happen to all corporations who have embraced woke policies, from Ford and General Motors to Bud Light, Miller Light, and Target.  Corporations don’t and never will run the world.  They will always serve society in general.  Not the other way around.  I warned everyone.  Some people listened, and those that did are better off today than they were.  Just as I have warned about the climate that still wants to vote for President Trump as opposed to the corporate approach of Ron DeSantis, they don’t know what they are doing.  Professionals who make their living off these kinds of things have drunk the Kool-Aid and found out that there is a lot of bad stuff in there, and they’ve learned it too late.

In general, what happened to Disney and the Star Wars hotel and brand is a warning of what will happen to everyone in the future of corporate globalism.   People don’t want woke and corporations who assume that their products are so beloved by the public that people will follow anything.  Corporations who believe that have another thing coming.  And that was never more obvious than in the closure of the Star Wars hotel so soon after it opened.  The smartest people in the world with the most financial resources could not change the kind of reality that Adam Smith articulated in his economics studies.  And those rules apply in every market sector.  Entertainment just being one that is obvious.  Which is a fine indicator of things to come. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Truth Behind the Low Gas Prices: Government knows the real election results, and it terrifies them

Yes, gas prices have been low going into the 2023 year during Christmas of 2022, but it’s not because of the Joe Biden administration. It’s because of the last election. It’s not some miracle that suddenly, gas prices were driven down to under the three-dollar range during the Holiday Season. As I have been saying for a long time, the Biden economy is in a depression, technically. It is only propped up by the same phony public relations tricks that have hidden election fraud over the last couple of years and have attempted to paint the war in Ukraine as in America’s interests. Half a year ago, America was in a recession which the Biden administration denied because it would make them look bad during an election year. They wanted very much to curve off the impact of a massive red wave where they’d lose the Senate too, not just the House. So, they hid the realities of the economy from the public, and the media was, of course, complicit in that deceit. They are all wired as liberals, and that’s how they get away with it. They just didn’t cover the nasty news, much like they were complicit in the FTX meltdown, where even days before it was discovered that Sam Bankman-Fried had pulled off the most significant financial heist of wealth ever known, which his cryptocurrency scam that essentially contributed massively to the election of political Democrats. The money that was spent on Democrats was fake money from this scam, yet nobody will be able to take it back now. The media was complicit in building the kid up, and many people were scammed as a result, yet nobody found out about the fraud until after the election. 

I would propose that an even bigger scam has taken place than what occurred with the Fed, and that is the unholy relationship with Larry Fink at BlackRock that they had to print fake money and distribute it among the money managers of Wall Street to allow them to buy up boards of directors around the world, especially in America and highjack the biggest corporations politically. Vivek Ramaswamy has done some of the best work in exposing this, but I would recommend the book The Lords of Easy Money as well. Everything was exposed between those two books, and that crisis will prove to be much more significant as an intentional fraud of the American people over time. And the news is complicit there as well. So everyone knows by now that most of 2022 were a year of multiple quarters of the recession currently in depression territory. And the last thing Washington’s political machines can afford is a bad Christmas season where the numbers are bad on consumer goods. That would really put a dagger into things, so the gas prices are artificially lowered, well below the market value, which is exacerbating the market volatility. They want people to have the extra money to overcome the out-of-control inflation so that the cash flow numbers don’t look so bad in January. Because the year of 2023 is going to be very eye-opening for a lot of people who aren’t very political. And things are going to get nasty, as they should.

But the most significant part of the entire scam is the revelation to the political insiders about the election results. They know who really won the election, precinct by precinct. I’ve seen election maps of the entire country before in war room type of situations; believe me, political parties know exactly how many votes were obtained where and by how much. There is nothing that isn’t known. And where election fraud occurred, it’s always obvious because the spikes in the precincts where it occurred are always statistically above the average in trends where it wasn’t performed to the same extent. Democrats know that they lost the House by a lot more than was actually reported, and they realize they lost the Senate and several governor seats. The only way Democrats held power in the Senate and in governor races in places like Nevada and Arizona was because they cheated. They rigged the election, and the FBI and other intelligence agencies have been caught in their cheat strategies from the 2020 election with the revelations of their influence over Twitter, so there is no question that election fraud did happen. And in 2022, even though that same complicit media hid the election fraud as part of the operation, the Democrats know the real story from those precinct maps. They know there was really a massive red wave that did sweep the country in the last election. They tried to keep the House with election fraud, but the momentum was too great. That is why gas prices are down. People will vote with their wallets every single time, and dying on a hill over gas prices will for the Desecrators of Davos types destroy everything they have been working to do, so they are relenting just enough to close out the last quarter by flooding the retail markets with cash not wasted on high gas prices. That’s the real story. Not that gas prices are low, but as to why. They should have been low all year, but the desire to price people out of their current cars and jump into the EV market has been a plan for a long time. But the real election results show the cost of such a move, so to retain power, they are trying to throw a bone at the public just to get through the Christmas season. 

What they won’t tell you on the news is that the election of 2022 scared everyone in politics who want to hold on to their old order of globalism first and perpetuation of the Administrative State as they have been doing for most of the last couple of centuries. Before, when the United Nations showed an interest in global government, we giggled it off as ridiculous even though they clearly showed their cards ahead of time. But now we know what conspiracy theorists have been saying for years, and we voted accordingly. Even though the results have not been Trump Republicans taking over all government branches, people did vote that way. The intelligence agencies that have been stealing elections for decades now know how people voted, and it terrifies them. Even if the results don’t show in actual people in those seats, Democrats know that their policies are being rejected; it’s getting harder to cheat, as the lawsuit in Arizona clearly shows, and if big Democrat donors like FTX aren’t there for them in the future, what is going to happen to them. To kick the can down the road as most politicians do, they did the only thing they could do: artificially lower gas prices, hoping that everyone would just go back to sleep. They want to give everyone a Merry Christmas so that early into 2023, the news stories aren’t that we are technically in a Joe Biden-led recession that would translate into serious voting problems in 2024. With Trump announcing that he’s running again, they know they don’t have the cheat mechanisms in place to stop it the way they have been because there is now visibility on the matter, and they are in a panic. This is the best Christmas present of all for the rest of us.

Rich Hoffman

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Woke Politics is Killing Disney: We are not “global citizens” we are Americans–the world follows

You can’t kill Indiana Jones. But that is the word from test screenings or previews that are coming out of rough cuts of the movie. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they would try. In this new ESG world for which Disney is offering itself as a leader, killing off an 80s representative of toxic masculinity with a time travel story that ends with Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to the next generation female woke hero is consistent with everything that Kathleen Kennedy has done since she became president of Lucasfilm in 2013. I’m sure George Lucas had good intentions, but he never expected this from his former company and the brands he worked hard to build over many years. For all the reasons he hated corporate filmmaking while trying to finish his famous film, THX-1138, now he is seeing that, left in the hands of corporate control, they could screw up anything. Filmmaking is not a collaborative enterprise, even though that’s what they tell everyone in film school. It is a top-down driver of unique minds who tell other people what to do to obtain a strong vision that audiences can then enjoy. The previous Indiana Jones movies were all from the mind of George Lucas, and that’s what people wanted to see. And what will be interesting about Indiana Jones 5, which is getting some press with about six months until the release in June of 2023, is how different it will be without George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. You can put the same actors, music, and color pallets into a movie, but it won’t be Indiana Jones without George Lucas. And clearly, Kathy Kennedy didn’t understand anything; she thought these popular movies would be vehicles for woke politics and would hold up. But ultimately, audiences will reject them.

I thought the trailer preview looked pretty good, but the problem was it confirmed all the rumors that also indicate that Indiana Jones dies at the end. So like the ESG values of BlackRock have indicated, the way to give audiences a last look at an 80s icon of heroics and toxic masculinity is to erase him from history and to replace him with a woman. Without question, Kathy Kennedy would sign up for that. Whether they stick with that ending after the terrible online reaction is left to be determined. Are they that radical at Disney these days? Well, of course, they are! They are crazy, so I don’t have much hope for the new movie, just as I don’t for the new Avatar film coming up. People don’t want to go to the movies to see woke propaganda and gay rights messages. They want to be free of that, which is one of Indiana Jones’s appeals throughout movie history. But the ESG values of stakeholder capitalism are all about social governance, and Disney has dedicated itself to that leadership, and it is showing in their stock. They have brought back Bob Iger as the CEO to help them make the transition from value-driven content to the traditional way to make good movies; they earn a lot of money at the box office, and Disney is rewarded with a lot of cash. But over the last few years, those values have changed, at least on the corporate side. Driven by Larry Fink and the Klaus Schwab types at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder capitalism is the new value system and a global currency. And Disney expects Bob Iger to navigate that new world in a beneficial way to show other corporations how the stakeholder model will work. So there is much more going on here than Disney killing off one of the most beloved screen heroes of all time. It’s about replacing the value system that western civilization has for this new global view of the world.

But people are people, and what they value won’t change. As Disney has learned with its release of Strange World, which feature a gay plotline for the primary characters, and the weak showing for Black Panther II Wakanda Forever, wokness doesn’t excite people. There was a lot made of Bob Iger’s statements about taking politics out of Disney to repair the brand a bit, but what didn’t get talked about much was that he went on to say that he didn’t believe that Disney was very political. Rather, he saw much of what they were doing as the responsibilities of a “global citizen.” He said that Disney has been telling stories for over 100 years and takes its responsibility to be good global citizens very seriously. And to the ESG values of the World Economic Forum, gender-bending is much more important than box office votes. So Disney is deep into it now. They are off on their projections, and stockholders still measure value in dollars, not ESG scores. And that will continue as we move into 2023, and they find out Avatar won’t make the kind of money they are hoping because nobody wants to waste more than 2 hours on a climate change lecture about nature being more powerful than imagination and productivity. And if Disney sticks with the previews of Indiana Jones that have him being killed, that will kill Disney in ways they can’t even imagine right now. They thought Crystal Skull damaged the Indiana Jones brand. Killing Harrison Ford and replacing him with a woman just isn’t going to work. 

Oh, I wouldn’t mind a female type of Indiana Jones story. I loved Lara Croft until they gave her a stupid bow and arrow instead of the double guns she used to shoot. There is nothing wrong with strong female characters but much wrong with wokeness. And Lara Croft went woke years ago. And yes, the people who want to bring down western civilization and big media companies who have told lots of great stories selling western civilization to the world want to see it all come to an end. Disney these days is a woke company that has permanently damaged its brand. Of course, China and its partners at the World Economic Forum are happy to have that competition removed. But the world is truly at a loss. Yet, people will get over it and move on. They won’t care if there is never a Star Wars movie again. They can live without Indiana Jones. If this movie Indy 5 goes woke the way reports say it is, it will fail, and Disney will further slide down the ESG pit of doom. And Bob Iger won’t be able to save it. Disney was already slipping when he left as CEO just a few weeks before the Covid lockdowns hit in 2020. He knew all about it from the role-playing that went on at Event 201 at the end of 2019. Disney was always built on a house of cards of value that depended entirely on the public sentiment to enjoy the movies. And if Disney isn’t making movies people want to see and instead is committed to woke politics that nobody wants to see, then everything will dry up for them, and their stock will tank. And ESG isn’t going to catch, leaving Bob Iger and the gang holding all the losses for history to remember. People will paint this Indy 5 from their minds, just as many have Crystal Skull. And they’ll live their lives. But Disney will not survive, and Bob Iger looks like he’s going to dig in, much to his own demise. The preview confirmed the rumors, and that has already damaged the brand.

Rich Hoffman

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