Category: Education

The Roger Reynolds Story: Politcal Revenge is a target rich environment

I supported Roger Reynolds, the old Butler County Auditor, when it wasn’t cool to do so.  And I must remind everyone that the story initially broke when Fox 19 in Cincinnati, Ohio, was looking to do a hit piece against the Republican Party of Butler County that started the whole mess.  So don’t be so surprised that they carried Roger’s story about a bloody dispute with the very popular Sheriff Jones and State Attorney General David Yost.  I get where Roger is; he wants to clear his name of any wrongdoing.  He wants to be back in politics.  I get the hurt feelings.  Many people did terrible things to each other, and the abuse of power that was on display is embarrassing and gives politics a bad name.  When David Yost, with the help of Sheriff Jones, tried to put Roger in jail for an improper interest in a public contract, we all knew that there was a lot more going on, and Roger found himself outside of a political party looking to cut him out of it.  And I was there for Roger in the worst of that.  But he wants revenge; they almost put him in jail and cost him a fortune to defend himself in court.  But changing people for who they are just isn’t going to happen.  If you want to be in politics, then you have to beat your enemies in politics, and don’t turn toward the courts, which those in power control, to do your business.  Get back on the horse, ride it, and play politics the way the game is played. 

But as far as I’m concerned, this story ended when Roger was cleared of wrongdoing in the courts.  No political apparatus should be able to destroy other people with the court system, but we’ve seen several instances of that happening in Butler County over the last couple of years, and it wasn’t good on any measure.  But crying about its unfairness and hoping that public sentiment will restore your good fortune is not the way to solve these problems.  And spitting in the face of people who were most supportive of you along the way is a good way to make political enemies.  And by how things work, Roger Reynolds has made himself a political enemy to my way of thinking because of his actions in the wake of this mess, so he’s not doing himself any favors.  Regarding Butler County politics, from my perspective, if you get sideways with Nancy Nix, the new auditor, then I won’t have a lot of sympathy for you.  Nancy, I think, is what all politicians should aspire to be.  She’s a sincerely good person in a very cutthroat profession, and she manages to still be very good at her job.  And she is doing a great job in Butler County as she moved to fill in that auditor seat that Roger had to vacate due to the criminal prosecutions he had to endure.  Roger went immediately to try to get his old job back, which would have been damaging to Nancy Nix personally and the team she has built at the auditor’s office, to make Roger happy, and that’s not a good way to go about things.  And in the upcoming elections, Roger wants to either run against Nancy for his old job back, which puts him against the person who went to court for him in a supporting role and helped him get back on his feet during all this, and was a very loyal friend until he turned on her after these court proceedings.  Or he wants to run for Butler County Commissioner, which will put him against Michael Ryan, the person I have already endorsed, so that will make it so I have to campaign against Roger, which won’t be a good thing for anybody. 

But don’t think that the media of Fox 19 and Channel 5 with Karen Johnson are suddenly pro Roger Reynolds.  I was surprised they picked up his story where he did his article on what had happened to him.  I had done it before for him over the past couple of years and talked about who did what to whom.  But this was the mainstream media getting Roger’s story out from his own lips, which they caused to happen in the first place.  So they aren’t suddenly anybody’s friends.  They are the same malcontents that they always were.  But they see blood in the water of Butler County politics, and if they can use Roger to harm Sheriff Jones, or David Yost, they will undoubtedly do it, and they did during the first week of April of 2025.  I read Roger’s story about the political hit job against him, where he named names and got specific.  But to what end?  Sheriff Jones is getting up there in age and has been vulnerable, especially in this last election season, where he didn’t get a warm endorsement from the Central Committee, because of stories like this one.  He’s good with the immigration issue now that Trump is back in office, and I agree with him on many things.  But politically, if Roger wanted to be a tough guy, he’d go right for the horse and not turn on his once very good friend, Nancy Nix, for his political comeback. 

Then there is Attorney General David Yost.  He wants to run for Governor against Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-endorsed candidate.  Yost is very vulnerable to having his entire political career destroyed, especially after what he did to Roger.  If I wanted revenge by the game of politics, you attack where people most want to be, and that is where he should focus.  They are trying to get Roger back in the ring as opposition who wish to divide up whatever party unity has been built now that Trump has been re-elected.  He is only hurting himself by splitting the party into either supporting him over Nancy Nix, or attacking a good commissioner candidate, which would drain away votes for both of them, opening the door for a third-party Christian conservative to win with their typical 35 to 40%.  Meanwhile, these liberal media hacks, like Karen Johnson and Fox 19 in general, get what they want: a damaged Republican Party.  So that’s why I didn’t pick up the phone immediately when Roger called with his story.  I wasn’t ignoring him.  I like him still.  I’ve even met with him a few times to see if there was a way I could help him out.  But once he got sideways with Nancy Nix, that’s the line for me.  And that’s a shame, because if he wants to get tough in politics, we are dealing with a target-rich environment.  And if you wish to take revenge, there are many political ways to get it.  But we all know how politics works, you have to build teams.  You don’t destroy them.  And the media coverage of his story wasn’t for his benefit.  It was to harm the Republican Party using him as the vehicle to do it.  And if you don’t love the Party for what it can do for people, then why do anything?  And why destroy friendships that were very real?  Nancy Nix could only harm herself by going to court to support Roger during all this.  But she did it because she’s the real deal and didn’t want to see something terrible happen to her friend.  And that friend turned against her because he didn’t want to go after the bigger fish that brought him harm in the first place, which does not come out well in a primary consideration, that could become bloody for no good reason.  In these kinds of things, you have to fight the right fight, not the one that you think is easiest, and turning on friends isn’t very enduring.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio Needs Money: One of the great sites in the world has fallen into disrepair

The thing about the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is that it’s our version of Stonehenge, and that it has fallen into a state of ridiculous disrepair, and it shouldn’t be.  When you look at the great historic sites around the world, like the Pyramids, Göbekli Tepe, and Stonehenge, they all have significant commitments to tourism dollars that inspire people to visit, instead of trying to frustrate them from doing so.  I have talked about it before. I like what they did to Stonehenge to make it a positive visitor experience, and at least that level of investment should be applied to the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio because, in many ways, it’s more mysterious.  It may not be as technical in its construction, but the mathematical logic that went into the Great Serpent Mound, just an hour or so east of Cincinnati, is equally impressive.  Given what we do know about it, I would say that Serpent Mound is one of the most mysterious sites in the world, and Ohio should be showing it off a lot more than they do.   I recently made it part of a grand paranormal tour that I took with my family, and we made a point to stop by and see it.  It was good to see again, I’ve seen it a lot over the years.  But each time it has fallen into disrepair more and more, instead of anybody giving it a fresh coat of paint and advancing it.  The Great Serpent Mound has recently received much attention because of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse show on Netflix, which deserves a lot of respect.  Graham also discusses the site in the opening chapters of his popular and well-researched book, Before America.  I read it and think that Graham is onto something about ancient cultures in North America, way before dates proposed by modern archaeology.  And sadly, they have dug in on their previous assumptions because they don’t want to admit that what they put forth regarding the history of Serpent Mound was lazy and needed significant updates. 

There is a lot of mystery going on these days with archeoastronomy that dates Serpent Mound to the Draco constellation between 3000 and 5000 BC, similar to what we see with the Great Boar at Fortified Hill just outside of Hamilton, Ohio.  Or Fort Hill, just to the north of Serpent Mound.  As well as the many other ancient sites built all over Ohio.  None have survived as well as Serpent Mound, but they are much more complicated than we have assumed of Native American cultures.  We are looking at the remains of a very ancient and sophisticated culture and it is more likely that the Adena and Hopewell Indians lived in these locations more as squatters than as architects, following a well-known Vico Cycle that is inconvenient to historic knowledge that has already broadcast to the world a lazy explanation that is now very much refuted. Ross Hamilton has done a lot of good work at Serpent Mound that offers much older dates and sophistication for the building and use of the mound complex, and the archaeology community has only dug in deeper, almost wishing the site would just go away so they could stop answering questions.  There is now a policy that drones can’t be flown over the site because the caretakers of Serpent Mound don’t want their complex to be shown all over the world, as it has been, so they are frustrating efforts to do research in the area rather than embracing a continued understanding.  I understand why, but it’s not a good reason.   

My interest in these kinds of things is the next level of political discussion for me, which is the root cause behind many of the troubles in our world.  I am personally tired of the lazy approach to everything that has permeated all our institutions, this little shell game where it is said, “there is no evidence to support wild accusations,” but at the same time being too lazy to look for the evidence because you are afraid of what you’ll find.  To call such an approach a massive conspiracy is an understatement.  I do not hate archaeologists by any stretch of the imagination.  It takes a lot of hard work to dig in the dirt, discover things long buried, and figure out what they mean.  Serpent Mound is well known to have had reports of giant skeletons of people seven to eight feet tall coming out of the mounds at that site, and like the other sites I have pointed out, the reaction to this news has been to dig less. They excavated at the site when I was a kid to understand it better.   But over the years, like the Miamisburg Mound they have stopped looking for evidence so that they could then say that any proposal of giants in those burial mounds is not proof because they don’t want to find it and what they have discovered is shoved into the corners of museums and private collections, not released to the public for all kinds of political reasons.  If these are wild theories, well then, let’s prove it.  Let’s dig and learn the truth.  However, keeping away from the questions is not a good strategy.

I remember in 2003 when a crop circle of great sophistication was made into a soybean field across the street from the Serpent Mound complex.  It was far too complicated to be a hoax by some deranged teenage kids, and it was very similar to the kind of designs that are common outside of Stonehenge in England, which has many of the same types of sites there as well.  We are looking at a global culture of Mound Builders who were not just surviving hunters and gatherers.  I think that the growing understanding points to the remnants of the Atlantean culture that had migrants fleeing the well-known island that was overcome by water somewhere off the coast of Britain and north of the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.  Former island dwellers dedicated to the God Poseidon, who ruled Atlantis, took with them their knowledge of astronomy and duplicated it all over the earth, as well as many of the ancient sites we talk about today.  A lot was going on from the time of Göbekli Tepe to the proposed construction dates of the Great Serpent Mound, or the Great Pyramids and archaeologists, being a young science, got it wrong from the start and its time to revise our previous assumptions with the many new facts that have been discovered over recent years.  And why Poseidon?  Well, he had an attraction to Medusa and her hair of snakes, which makes a lot more sense for the snake worship of the constellation Draco than the explanations we have received so far.  And while that may sound wild and unbelievable, it makes more sense than saying that a bunch of hunters and gatherers had all this advanced mathematics and built all these mounds, but they struggled to catch a rabbit for food.  We need a lot more research and understanding, and all that starts with the preservation of that historic site with fresh funding, and I would even propose a tourist model to pay for it, similar to what they do at Stonehenge under the care of English Heritage.  We should be making Serpent Mound a big part of our state identity, because people worldwide fly to Ohio to visit Serpent Mound.  We need to treat it with that level of care because it is incredibly unique and requires much more research and debate.

I’m prepared to stake my claim with what I think is significant evidence, that a culture, like Atlantis, and even cultures older than that but have been lost because there wasn’t a Plato to record it in a way that survived, populated the entire world and that they were very tall people obsessed with worship of planets and their power, which still exists to this day in cults of magic and occult astrology attached to many secret societies who wish to rule mankind from the shadows gaining control of our political, educational, and financial institutions so they could set policies that would maintain their concealment.  And from 9000 BC to around 3000 AD, they ruled the world until a rebellion of ideas came along and toppled their empire, for which Yahweh played his part.  I propose that Serpent Mound is the remains of this very ancient cult that was preserved and restored by many generations of inhabitants, of which the Adena and Hopewell Indians did just as Egyptian society did and that was to build their empires around the structures that were already there for many thousands of years.  Not much remains of this ancient culture because time tends to wipe them all out if something is over 3000 years old.  But Göbekli Tepi and other sites around the world dating back to 10,000 years ago show that there were already very advanced cultures on Earth with a high understanding of mathematics.  And Ohio has a big piece of that puzzle, which should be preserved.  As I explained to my kids on this trip, there should be nice, paved trails, a nice restaurant, and an admission price to raise money for the preservation at the Serpent Mound complex.  But this whole native American sacred site stuff needs to go.  Science needs more evidence and a bigger picture to consider in the schemes of the universe as captured in sites like the Great Serpent Mound.  And I dare everyone who snickers at this claim to prove me wrong.  Because I don’t think they can.

Rich Hoffman

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

People Should Be Working More: At least 70 hours per week

It’s interesting. I put a video I did on YouTube about work ethic, which has received many opinions in the form of comments, which have stirred people.  But as I have always said, what better use of time do people have?  Why do people think it’s OK to rush home from work only to sit in front of a television and rot away?  Most people waste their free time thinking about really dumb things, and I would argue that the world would be a lot better off if people worked more, rather than less.  I think one of the dumbest things we have ever done as a society is to devise a 40-hour work week because it’s an artificial constraint that we have imposed on ourselves, and for what?  People are not better off for it.  Often when they don’t work enough in life, they don’t have the money they need to do everything, and having too much leisure time is the devil’s playground, and they end up doing dumb, unstructured things with their time.  Most people are better off working for a boss that knows how to do productive things in life, and if people would just work more, they would have much better lives.  This notion that people need to be away from work is a destructive one and was brought to us by the communist movement that came to America through labor unions.  So why is saying that people should work more so controversial?  Well, it hits a nerve because it challenges a previous assumption that a lot of people don’t realize they have adopted, that has been bad for them.  Too much free time for people who don’t know how to do good things with it is terrible for people, and making money is a good way to overcome personal problems and work toward goals.  And that most people would be much better off if they only worked a little more, around 70 hours per week.

I never celebrate Labor Day because it’s a union holiday, and they have brought society too many artificial constraints.  People were far better off when they worked more, especially on farms where they worked from sunup to sundown and sat around the kitchen table tired at the end of it.  And talking about their shared experiences together as a family.  I would add that people were even better off after all that when they shared Bible verses and fell asleep next to a roaring fire in the fireplace, never turning on the television, because they were too tired to do so.  What was attacked through the union movement was the American work ethic, which was an import from Europe and all their Marxism, and it never had any place in the American workplace.  The whole notion that the owners and industrialists are evil because they want to make money, and should be stopped by radicalizing the work force, was a weapon against American capitalism, and it was terrible from the start.  It never had a constructive place in our society and was always meant to destroy a foreign rival with an export of ideas that would cripple our industrial capacity, an artificial constraint on our manufacturing ability.  Especially after World War II, how we responded to the global war effort was terrifying to our enemy because of how Americans willingly approached their work.  Back then, America was fresh off the hard work of American expansionism. Many people who worked in the factories then were fresh off being raised on farms by good, structured families.  And the result was terrifying to the lazy of the world who didn’t have a very good work ethic. 

Many people these days rush home from work only to do what?  Sit in front of the television and waste their time.  It’s not like they are sitting at the dinner table with their families talking about their day.  They have adopted ideas that were bad for them by the very lazy Marxists in the labor movement who purposefully wanted to cripple American manufacturing with artificial constraints intent to limit American production capacity. I have never worked a 40-hour work week in my adult life.  I work on various things about 90 hours per week and still spend a lot of time with my family.  But I don’t waste much time doing things that aren’t productive.  And I find that is the way it is with most people who are successful in life.  They work a lot and don’t have much time to waste.  When Elon Musk says similar things, it’s not because he’s a billionaire looking to exploit labor.  He’s a billionaire because he doesn’t personally waste time—the same with Trump.  President Trump has always had a good work ethic.  That’s why he has been a successful person.  One of the keys to success is not to follow the time-wasting imposed on our culture by foreign adversaries, and to work more in life, instead of less.  And people who do are a lot happier.  Not only do they make more money, but they can also use it for private enterprises.  But they have a sense of purpose in life because they are doing good things with their life instead of wasting them.

This is important to think about because if we want to Make America Great Again, it comes from more than just bringing jobs back to America from foreign markets that they fled to in the first place.  We have to admit to ourselves one of the reasons those jobs left, and it was because Americans accepted stupid labor practices given to them by Marxist infiltrators in the labor movement that were destructive to a good, productive society.  And those jobs were left for places where people worked hard and were happy to do it.  Hard work is good for the mind, not bad.  Too much leisure time is destructive if not filled with other productive behaviors, unless you work hard to build family relationships.  Or working hard to build community improvement.  You are wasting your time if you aren’t being productive at something, and when the proposal for the 40-hour work week was presented, it assumed that work was something our society shouldn’t be doing, so they were looking to do the least amount of it possible.  And the results have not been good.  So, for my part, I think people should be thinking about doubling the amount of work they do in a week to keep their minds on positive activities and toward something instead of giving themselves artificial constraints.  If you are broke because you only work 40 hours per week, that’s on you.  You should be working more on other things and filling your life with productivity.  Not working at least 8 hours per day, rushing home to sit in front of the television, and eating things that make you sick anyway.  You should work longer and more days of the week and do positive things toward self-improvement, all hours of the day.  You will find a better family life and be a better person.  People have many problems because they don’t work hard enough at more things in their lives, and things tend to crumble around them.  And that was the intent of the enemy when they infiltrated our labor practices from the start.  And it’s up to us to correct it now.

Rich Hoffman

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

Its Great that the Sundance Film Festival Rejected Cincinnati: You don’t want people like that to think you are cool

I suppose I have done just about everything there is to do in life.  Along the way, I didn’t think about it; I just said yes to many adventures and jumped into many of them without ever worrying about how I’d get out.  And this came to my mind as I learned that the Sundance Film Festival had passed on Cincinnati as a host city, leaking to the media that the Midwest city didn’t have the right vibe, it wasn’t cool enough. Instead, they are seeking a mountain town in Colorado or Utah as a much more hip destination.  Well, there is a lot more to that story and I have some unique understanding of the contents leaving to reflect a bit on all these many experiences, which I don’t spend much time thinking about, but when I do slow down long enough to do so, it would be easy to wonder how I made it through life at all.  But this Sundance story has some meat to it that the media didn’t cover, other than reporting that the Sundance people didn’t like what Cincinnati had to offer.  Now I have experience with film festivals, as I have talked about my desire as a young person to be a film director and a writer of movies.  I have been to film festivals and received awards, and that was where my life was headed for a long time, until the Tea Party movement started in 2009.  My wife and I were in Cancun having a nice vacation and I decided to make a very controversial change in my life for the good of the country, and that I’d put my efforts in that direction because as we talked about at a nice dinner on the beach there, what good was telling stories in movies when heroics in real life were needed much more.  So I made a career change, and the rest is history. 

But when I was 19 and wanted to learn to direct people in front of the camera, I was a fashion model, as was my wife.  She was being groomed to be a New York model and hated all that came with it.  It was not a life for her; she was beautiful, everyone wanted to hire her, but she only wanted to find a nice man, settle down, and start raising kids.  On the other hand, I wanted to work in Hollywood, make movies, and I liked the modeling world because it was so interesting.  And I learned many valuable things during these years, but mainly I wanted to know how things were supposed to look in front of the camera so I could direct from behind it.  A lot of people thought I was a very attractive young man, and they wanted to hire me for all kinds of entertainment projects. So my wife and I did little projects for a while, with me wanting to go one way, and her wanting to get out of it.  But as a couple, we were invited to all kinds of things that taught me how the entertainment lefties think about things, so I learned firsthand what they were like.  And it wasn’t good.  When we would go to photo shoots around Cincinnati to do clothing advertisements for various department stores, the photographers would always poo poo Cincinnati for being such a conservative city.  If we were modeling jeans, for instance, they would want the models to unbutton the top of their jeans to evoke a provocative sexual tension.  But would be upset that the zipper couldn’t be lowered, otherwise the Cincinnati market would reject the photographs.  And they’d go on and on about how great the New York and Los Angeles markets were, and of Paris because you could get the models naked and the photos would get awards for the nudity, but not in Cincinnati. 

Because we were being groomed, my wife and I were invited by the director of the new play Equus to attend the premiere in Cincinnati, which was quite a scandal at the time.  It was a play at the Taft Theater that had full nudity and sex on stage and was an outright assault on the sensibilities of Cincinnati morality.  I knew this director well; she loved nudity.  I never saw her at her home where she wasn’t naked.  She only put on clothes when she had to go somewhere, and she was planning to use this play and assault on Cincinnati to launch her career in the more significant coastal and progressive markets.  Now when I say that she was always naked, that does not mean she was attractive.  Most people do not look good naked.  And she was one of them.  She would have looked better with clothes to hide her imperfections, to put it nicely.  I thought it was all bizarre, but we were young and beautiful, my wife and I, and all these people wanted a piece of us.  So we were given access to this play.  So we went and were stunned by what we saw.  Right in front of our faces was full nudity and sex on stage, and my wife wasn’t happy about it.  She didn’t like any of those people, and it became very clear to me that I couldn’t work in that business and be married to my wife.  Because the entertainment industry had so many liberal flakes in it, it took me another 20 years to finally give up on the idea because you couldn’t change what they were.  But the process for me started at that play.  We didn’t enjoy it, to say the least, and we stopped attending social events organized by people like that director. 

So when the entertainment crowd makes fun of Cincinnati, and with the Sundance people, it’s the Robert Redford crowd.  They are not good people and have all kinds of mental problems that they hide behind entertainment.  I learned a lot from those experiences, which gave me a unique perspective to this very day.  But when they reject you, consider it a badge of honor.  I learned to hate those people over the years, not because I wanted to be a filmmaker, but because I did not want to work with labor unions and crazy lefties who saturated the industry.  But because the business gave them a cover story for vast evil, they saw Cincinnati as something to destroy, not adapt to.  And that same mentality is what is behind the anti-Trump movement.  And why I got into the Tea Party when I could have done many incredible things if I had joined the Sundance types?  Every time I’d get the invitation, my wife and I would decline, though, because the people involved were all like that director of Equus.  And we’ve watched some of those people we knew from back then turn into disasters over time.  None of them are happy.  None of them knew what they were doing.  They are all living train wreck lives.  The arrogance of their social positions filled with sex and nudity took them over a cliff, and we all saw it coming even at 19 years old.  And I’m glad for the experience, it has given me the ability to speak with a lot of authority on these matters now.  But when you hear that Sundance moved on from Cincinnati, that’s great.  We don’t want people in our town who think desecration of all value is the only way to be calm and hip.  And that to have a good social vibe, you have to destroy value.

Rich Hoffman

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

Hansel and Gretel: The danger of the Oedipal Mother complex

We would do better to teach kids about fairy tales so they wouldn’t be so gullible in adult life.  People need to understand that all governments tend to become the famous Oedipal mother and that if we continue to feed it, it will seek, due to its unconscious directives, to become a destroyer of our very existence.  Government has to be managed and cannot be left alone.  Doesn’t everyone remember the story of Hansel and Gretel?  The story of the kids being taken into the woods and left there to die by a trusted caretaker?  Why are people so trusting?  Well, the answer to that one is that they are too lazy to scrutinize because action requires effort, and it is easier for the lazy person to trust everything will work out OK than to do the work of managing it.  When I see all this criticism of DOGE and Elon Musk, I hear people’s desire not to think about just how bad some government figures are.   When we used to tell fairy tales to children they were stories meant to help them see the truths of life, and to make them better people which is certainly the case of the Hansal and Gretal story of a couple of children living with their father, the woodcutter, deep in the woods with a second wife who was jealous of his children from another marriage.  Something that kids these days are undoubtedly worried about, since so many families have divorces in them and marriages to step-parents that are not as satisfying as their biological ones.  But this was a case where the woodcutter’s first wife died, and he married someone else, but they weren’t living so happily ever after.  The new wife wanted to erase the first wife’s memory, starting with the kids. 

So while the woodcutter was working in the woods, the stepmom took the children out into the forest disguised as helping their father, to lure them into her scheme, and left them there.  But the resourceful Hansel had put rocks in his pocket, knowing the stepmother was up to no good, and he left a trail back to his house in case they got lost.  And by following the trail of rocks, they could return to the house to their father.  The angry stepmom did the same thing the next day, and this time Hansel left breadcrumbs.  When the crazy woman left the children alone in the forest, the brother and sister thought they would return the way they had the previous time.  But this time, forest animals ate the bread, so the clever trail was gone.   Now the kids had a big problem.  They searched and searched but could not find their way home.  But they found a gingerbread house, and they were very hungry, so they endeavored to eat from it, which provoked from within its contents the classic Oedipal mother, who invited them inside to care for them with great kindness.  But the kindness wasn’t because she was a good woman; it was meant to hide her great evil desire to eat the children, because she was a psychopath.  Her gentle kindness was a lure to lower the defenses of the children and earn their trust so that she could bring their demise to her profit.  And many kind people like this evil woman who lived in the gingerbread house exist, everywhere.  The kids were hungry and distressed, missing the comfort of their strong father.  But what choice did they have? They were lost.  And when people are in such a condition, there is always someone trying to take advantage of them.

The Oedipal mother complex is a classic case of the overbearing mother who saturates a child with too much love, not because she loves the child, but because she wants to consume them for her own needs.  In this case, the crazy woman was very kind because she wanted to fatten up the children with too much food and coddled them so they wouldn’t want to run away from her.  But her intentions from the start were evil and exploitive.  There are many parents, especially women, who will try to give their kids everything not because they love them, but because they want to use them as a mask for their insecurities, so they hide their malice behind kindly motherhood to cripple the kids so they never want to move away from her and live their own lives like Norman Bates’ mom in Psycho.  Their goal, these evil mothers, is to create failure-to-launch kids, kids who hang around the house and can never leave.  Their intent is not to raise friendly, healthy kids who function well in life.  But to make dependents.  And from there, everyone knows how the story ends.  Thinking the kids are fat enough, the kind woman tries to put Hansel into an oven to cook him.  Gretal sticks up for her brother and pushes the woman into the oven instead.  And they kill the woman and escape with their lives.  Eventually, the father finds the kids, and they live happily ever after.  But not before the father gets rid of his problem, the other woman who has been plotting the demise of his children.  And once he does that, everyone lives happily ever after, but not before death and divorce. 

And that is what DOGE is uncovering with our government, and there isn’t any way not to avoid pushing her into the oven and killing this crippling Oedipal mother.  Our government has been trying to make us into dependents not to help us, but to cripple us.  And it certainly wasn’t for our own good.  To understand these things, we have to be willing to admit that everyone isn’t looking out for our best interests, and that the best thing to do would be to have healthy skepticism as Hansel and Gretel did, about the adults in their lives and to take precautions regarding their motives.  In the world of fairy tales, we have told stories designed to help children recognize deceit in their adult landscape, to teach them how to manage such a crisis when they see it.  But the government, wanting to exploit the world for its designs, wishes to conceal why it intends to make dependents from all its subservients.  Not to help people, but to harm them.  To eat them.  And as we uncover all the waste, fraud, and abuse that DOGE finds, we learn that we should have never trusted any of these people.  And that the over-coddling mother complex of government was not for any reason but to eat us and live off our carcasses.  This is how we should view taxation and the role of government in general.  Just because we have women in our lives as mothers, or wives, and they appear kindly, we can’t trust them.  They very well could be trying to eat us.  And often, at best, they are trying to lure us out into the woods to leave us for dead so they can replace us with a new man, a sturdy character who works all day chopping wood, and the women do not want to share the food earned with the children. So she plots to kill them so she can have the man all to herself.  Given what DOGE is uncovering, we would do well to return to fairy tales for guidance.  Because obviously, a lot of people need them. 

Rich Hoffman

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

If Trump or Any Politician Supports Pot Legalization: Smoke shops produce stringy haired losers and depreciated value

To answer a question that should be obvious at this point, but it needs an updated clarification, I am more than 100% against pot, or any marijuana support, and I will not endorse or support in any way a politician who is in support of marijuana legalization.  This came up in a recent discussion about political endorsements, and I had to explain to several people that just because pot was legal in Ohio, I did not recognize it as such and that I am more against pot sales and use than I ever was.  For me, it’s a Jesus in the temple against the money changers kind of thing.  I do not see marijuana as anything good for anybody, and it’s certainly not a free market right.  And to go to that next step, which evolved out of the question, would I feel the same about President Trump if he proved to be supportive of a federal policy on marijuana legalization?  The answer is that if Trump became pro-pot, that would be the day I work against him.  Everyone knows how supportive of Trump I have been over these last eight years, but the line in the sand would be pot legalization from his administration.  On that day, I would never be supportive of Trump again and would actively work against him.  That’s how serious I am about the matter, and life would go on if that turns out to be the case.  I know there are lots of discussions, especially from the Roger Stone crowd, to bend Trump’s ear to federal legalization.  If he did that, in my opinion, he would become the enemy, and I would actively look for his replacement.  That might be good news for people looking to drive a wedge between Trump and his base.  But because of all the talk in the background, I have to say it before it’s too late.

I don’t think Trump would do something so stupid.  He’s a states’ rights guy, and federal legalization would go against that position.  If states are that stupid to legalize pot, that’s their problem.  Now, Ohio just legalized pot, but not without some progressive gymnastics on constitutional technicalities that were very disingenuous.  There was a significant amount of outside money and influence that needed to be removed from the system, and I will certainly apply my efforts in that direction.  Just because radical leftist losers slid the issue under the door in Ohio, it does not mean I accept it.  And yes, there are a lot of Republicans who think that being pro-pot is being pro-business.  They tell me that the former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, supports the legalization of pot as a lobbyist.   My response is that I don’t like John Boehner; he cries too much and has smoked like a train chugging up a long hill for way too long.  Even though we share mutual friends, that does not mean I like what everyone does, nor do I endorse it.  I am not a libertarian.  I do not believe in the ‘live and let live’ philosophy, where you do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t impact me.  I believe in free markets, but I also think that we need rules in society that can make for a civilized nation, such as people shouldn’t have sex with kids under 18.  People shouldn’t drink until they are 21.  If I had it my way, people would never drink.  Kids shouldn’t drive a car until they are 16.  And people shouldn’t do drugs.  Any drugs.  I’m even against marijuana for medical use.  I hate the stuff and see it as the gateway drug to a weak society poised to collapse on itself.  Nothing good comes from pot legalization. 

As far as it being a pro-business stance, since pot was legalized in Ohio, we have all these embarrassing smoke shops everywhere.  They always have beat-up cars and stringy-haired losers coming and going from them.  Sure, plaza owners love them because they don’t want to see part of their buildings empty of a paying tenant. However, the quality of those tenants is detrimental to a community.  Smoke shops and dispensaries are no different than porn shops like the Hustler Store in Monroe are.  Nobody of any quality wants those reminders of human garbage around their homes.  They are bad businesses that lower the quality of our society; they certainly don’t enhance it.  To the short-sighted, smoke shops and pot sales might represent an expanding economy, but at the cost of other profitable aspects of society.  You might sell more pot to a bunch of losers, but those losers aren’t going to be inventing the next great thing, so in the long run, you cost business opportunities by having a pro-pot society of lazy slugs who adopt political socialism to feed their entitled personalities.  The billions of dollars of revenue that keep being passed around regarding the legalization of pot come at a cost of much more than that, primarily in the hard-to-define opportunity cost of a society that spends its recreational activity pursuing intoxication.  The same type of people pushing pot legalization are also advocates of a 40-hour work week, so they can stop work as soon as possible and hit the bottle or smoke more pot sooner, and the way I think about things, if they worked more and worked harder, they’d be intoxicated less.  And that is probably good for them, rather than giving them more leisure time that they will waste anyway. 

Would I throw away all that time I spent investing in Trump over just one issue of pot legalization?  Yes.  That’s how strongly I feel about it.  Pot is a nonstarter for me; there is nothing good to come out of it but short-sighted gains built on the backs of stupidity.  Strategically speaking, this is, of course, what the enemies want: to put Trump in a corner, make these tariffs a chopping block where he seeks an approval rating spike by pandering to the pot heads.  And if they can separate Trump from people like me, they would love it.  But it’s not too late, and I don’t think Trump will do it.  But there are politicians I like quite a lot who have embraced the legalization of pot in Ohio, and support a nationwide deregulation of it.  They compare it to the prohibition period against liquor and want to think that the two are the same, that if you have a society of alcohol abuse, then pot consumption is the next logical step.  But I say you have to draw a line somewhere, and for me, that is between alcohol and pot.  Ultimately, we shouldn’t have a society that embraces drug abuse no matter when or where.  That this is an issue at all says a great deal about our culture, which needs significant reform.  And there are a lot of people in the world that I have alienated just over the consumption of pot.  And I’ve always been this way, and I’ve no intention of ever changing my position on it.  I dislike the substance and the people who use it.  And in most cases, once I find out about it, I never speak to those people again.  So needless to say, when it comes to endorsements, if a politician, even if it’s Trump, supports the legalization of pot in any way, our relationship will literally go up in smoke. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Trump’s Tariffs are Great: China was built completely off stolen money, and that is coming to an end

It is stunning how stupid so many people are, especially regarding Trump’s tariffs.  People need economic lessons.  I majored in economics in college, which I hated.  I thought it was boring, that the professors were stupid, and that the students were even worse.  I probably read too many books before I ever stepped into a college classroom for my good because I couldn’t get into the going through the motions thing to endure so much stupidity.  But I knew, even thirty years ago, that they were teaching Marxism in all the economic schools, which was surprising, given that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations should have been the entry textbook.  Nobody in America should be studying economics without understanding Adam Smith and putting their arms entirely around capitalism.  We aren’t a communist, socialist, or Marxist nation with a parasitic economic system, and all those traders on Wall Street have fallen into the schools of Marxism as their reference point, and that’s on them.  I’ve known about the influence Marxism has had in our political and economic fields for a long time, but this stupidity even shocks me.  People should know better what Trump is doing.  And thank goodness he is doing it.  Our trade imbalances were put in place for one reason: to redistribute America’s wealth to other nations, to loot the only real capitalist country in the world and feed it to all the crazy lunatic communist and socialist countries of the far east and Europe.  Yes, China, to those who don’t know, which appears to be most people working in the finance industry, is a communist country that has made all of its money off stealing it from the United States.  China did not create wealth and become the powerhouse it is today because it did something better in the world than everyone else.  They did it because they were built off stolen money, and Trump’s trade tariffs are designed to take that money back, as it should have been all along.

Go ahead and mark it on your calendars, these renegotiated trade deals from Trump will immediately infuse the American economy with trillions of dollars of new revenue, which has been part of our exporting portfolio.  The price of oil is coming down.  We will soon be shipping energy all over the world again, which will be worth trillions more.  And on the frontier of DOGE, we are going to address many of the assumptions about the size and cost of government that will pave the way for the future, where running our economy in the black will become the norm.  This is how you get there, and everyone should understand that.  They should have known this all along.  This should be taught in our colleges.  It’s basic economics from the perspective of Adam Smith’s capitalism.  I have several copies of Smith’s Wealth of Nations that I have read through so many times that the pages are nearly falling out of all the copies.  I have one in my office that I recently purchased because it comes up so often that people want to see it, and those older copies weren’t in a condition to be looked through without falling apart in their hands.  So, why isn’t that the case with everyone? Because it should be, otherwise we can’t even have a foundation discussion on economics unless that essential reference point is understood.  All these traders who focused on stock value should have seen the signs; it’s not like we didn’t tell you what was happening.  What they have been dealing with was fake value.  What they will be dealing with is actual value, reset by these tariffs, which puts the power position back into the United States, where it should always have been.

I want to mention a couple of things as a reminder of how we arrived at this point.  They are conspiratorial, but certainly not untrue.  Not convenient for people who would rather not know.  But Covid was a bioweapon created and released in China, which was accelerated to the world stage to knock Trump out of office during an election year.  COVID-19 was released shortly after Trump implemented the tariffs against China in the first months of 2020.  The free money was coming to an end for them, and they conspired with a lot of forces, especially at the World Economic Forum, to release a pandemic in the world to allow for the desired Great Reset of the global economy into a fully micromanaged Marxist perspective where China would rule the world from that position.  If you don’t understand that, go back and review all the evidence, and you will see that it was clearly what happened.  The other thing that happened was the conspiracy of the Federal Reserve to prop up radical leftist losers like Larry Fink at BlackRock to essentially use him to artificially prop up the stock market with a balloon that was always going to burst.  But they thought that by the time it did, the dollar would be gone and we’d be on a digital currency, and they’d never get caught for what they’d done.  The Fed and Wall Street conspired to print phony money with no gold backing, using it to inflate the market with cash that would be laundered through the stock exchanges, thereby creating entirely fictitious value. 

That’s what we do in real estate all the time, where we built a house for $ 50,000 30 years ago.  The house is the best house it was ever going to be when it started.  As it ages, it starts to fall apart and requires frequent renovation.  But our expectation of that value increases.  Today, that house is worth 200K or 300K, that same house, because we expect a Ponzi scheme where the future will pay for the profits of the past, until, of course, you hit the brick wall of diminishing marginal returns, which is where a lot of young people are today.  They can’t afford to pay $300,000 for a house that is still only worth $50,000 in absolute value. That’s what the Fed and BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard did to the world’s money supply, and they thought they would get away with it because the world would switch to a digital currency before the balloon burst.  However, instead, we elected Trump, and he was intent on correcting this mess because he understood it from the inside out. He promised voters that he would do precisely what he is doing now: bring the value of the world’s economy home, which is what is happening now.  All those jobs shipped all over the globe because of horrendous economic policies will come home for their survival.  Prices in America will decrease due to increased competition.  And our economy will be awash in cash, lots of it.  And quickly.  The only people who will suffer are those who were betting on the demise of America, which includes many traders on Wall Street.  That is on them.  They were warned, and they placed their bets against America anyway; so, no amount of crying about it now will put the genie back in the bottle.  I am very proud of Trump.  But what he’s doing isn’t strange or unusual.  I’m just happy he had the guts to do it, and now everyone will see for themselves what they should have learned in school – how the economy works.  And Karl Marx was a slack-jawed loser that nobody should have listened to, ever.  And for all those colleges who taught all these young kids who are now grown adults Marxism, they should be giving back what those educations cost, because they crippled people, they didn’t help them, and now they are too stupid to function in the world. 

Rich Hoffman

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

What is Required for a New Lakota School Board Member: Its a system that needs to die

Coming up in the Lakota schools soon is an opportunity to elect three more conservative school board members, and to answer the question I have been asked regularly: am I running for one of them?  Because many people want me to.  Not to give a politically worthless answer, but in my opinion, people who genuinely appreciate the system should be the ones to run it.  I do not like the system, and I have no interest in working with people like that.  I view education as a reform effort, and I believe the amount of time required to fulfill a school board role exceeds 70 hours per week.   It’s not a helicopter position as it’s now for many people who are currently in it.  So I would advise people who want to help fix the system and are willing to do that level of work to let us know, and we’ll help you connect the dots.  But as far as one of those people being me, that wouldn’t be a good idea for those wanting to save the system in some regard.  I’m accustomed to being entirely in charge of the things I do; I’m not a very good consensus player.  I don’t even think the design of school boards in public education is correct; it needs a strong CEO-type to oversee these radical superintendents.  I don’t like the lawyers.  I don’t like the teacher’s unions.  I don’t like the way they are funded.  I don’t like what they teach.  I don’t think they work long enough hours, regardless of the level of employees, administrative, or the teachers themselves.  I support scrapping the whole thing and starting over.  However, there are many parents with school-age children who want to make the best of a difficult situation, and these are the types of individuals who should be leading the school. 

As far as holding on to the way things were in the past?  There is no chance of that.  I was watching the protests this weekend at the Statehouse against Trump and Elon Musk over their fears that Social Security will be cut, which isn’t even on the table.  However, the level of stupidity exhibited by some of those participants is genuinely overwhelming.  There is no talking to people like that with reason.  They can’t understand anything that needs to be changed, so, in my opinion, they should all be scrapped.  They are not prepared for what needs to be done.  I would argue that they aren’t even qualified to be parents.  I feel sorry for the children born into families with the kind of parents who go to these anti-Trump protests.  It’s not their fault their parents are idiots.  But I see no hope in any of those people; they are the result of a society that has experimented with Marxism, and they accepted those thoughts as a new reality.  And that is not the future of education.  There is only one way things are going, and no amount of crying like a baby is going to change anything.  The funding of public schools needs to change; it will change.  The government funding of schools, with unmanaged money moving from the federal government back to the local level, is not a future prospect.  It can’t be, and it never should have been.  People have seen what that system gave them, and they aren’t willing to continue with that method.  The per-pupil costs of educating students should be at least half what they currently are.  When I talk to people who are out there carrying signs in favor of preserving that system, they don’t understand it, and they never will.  Education has to be competitive; we need competition with other teachers, with other districts, and with other states.  The teacher’s union model of everyone getting a collective bargaining agreement for subpar work is over.

And as I say that, people will tell me tomorrow, and the day after that, and the week after that—that’s why I should be on the school board.  Consider what you’re saying and think about what you know about me.  Yes, I can speak very politically, and I work very well with people who hate me and plot against me with everything they can come up with.  My life is far more complicated than the most ostentatious Shakespeare play.  There isn’t any way for my life to be reflected in art because nobody would believe it, including the most conspiratorial of Shakespeare’s works.  My idea of the perfect school board member was and is Darbi Boddy.  She genuinely cared about making the school a great one, and she represented a sizeable demographic group within the Lakota school system.  And people from all political sides conspired to get rid of her.  Who in their right mind thinks I would put up with that?  Darby handled things very well and played by the rules, paying her legal fees to defend herself in ridiculous ways.  She never should have had to do that.  And I can say, I wouldn’t.  I would burn the whole system down from the inside out, along with all the people associated with it.  So be careful what you wish for.  I want what’s best for the people of my community.  However, what’s best for me is what people who deal with me receive, and I’m not sure people can see past the results they want, which are undoubtedly attainable.  But what would they do with the wreckage in the aftermath? That’s where the real trick is. 

I think there is a way to do it, but as I mentioned, I believe the job of a school board member at Lakota schools requires at least 70 hours a week.  It takes that long to read everything you need to read and speak with all the people you need to talk to.  The school board meetings need to be more prolonged, more frequent, and include more detailed information.  And the people working together need to build a team, not to resemble a Shakespearean drama.  And when I say that, we need three school board members who will work together, not against each other, and merge into the political faction of the teacher unions.  I have a very dominant personality in personal conduct, and I excel when I can give orders.  But consensus building is not my thing, and it never will be.  I’m the one you call to take the head shot.  Not the one who cleans up the mess.  And Lakota schools are a mess, and there is a lot to clean up.  And the people doing that need to like each other and to represent the community in the best way possible.  But there will be a lot of hard talks and times in the next two to three years.  Really, until Vivek Ramaswamy is governor of Ohio, we won’t be able to truly fix public education for good with competitive models and funding tied to the child, not the uncompetitive local school.  The property tax racket has to come to an end.  It has given us a garbage product taught by garbage people who are worthless in every category, and it’s time to put all that to an end.  As those protesters increasingly do in places like the Ohio Statehouse, they aren’t in the realm of reality, and that isn’t the fault of the rest of the world.  It is their social dysfunction to think that a school system can continue to get unlimited funds to sponsor a poor work ethic and to teach Marxism to the next generation isn’t even a consideration for the future.  I will not say everyone but me should do such a hard job.  But when it comes to delivery, be careful what you wish for.  My bedside manner on this topic does not come with any handholding.  I’ve been ready to pull the plug on the patient for a long time.  It’s a system that needs to die.

Rich Hoffman

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

The White House Called Me: What I said

Ahead of Liberation Day, on April 2nd, the White House called me to ask my thoughts on how Trump’s tariffs would be beneficial.  They were compiling a list of names for people to attend Liberation Day, and at that time, they were thinking more in terms of a town hall presentation. However, what they ended up doing was more traditional Trump.  In that process, they called me as they were setting up for the day, and I was more than happy to share my thoughts, as always.  I usually don’t discuss those kinds of things when they happen, but this was an excellent conversation that I think is a fitting follow-up to what they ended up doing at the White House for Liberation Day.  And that is the discussion about supply chains, which is the number one issue hidden behind the noise of personal investments.  It’s one thing to complain as a company that has invested in globalism to be afraid of Trump setting tariffs to defend our values from a world built on socialism.  So many countries have completely sustained themselves off American capitalism, then throw all that money into a dumpster fire of losses caused by Marxist politics.  Many investors, to their shame, have invested a lot of money in bad ideas and hoped that somehow it would all work out.  And they’d make up for it patriotically on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July by cooking an extra hot dog on the grill for the holiday to celebrate American independence.  But many financial firms have been looting our system for years and hiding their treachery behind an American flag, hoping nobody would notice.  But we have, and that is precisely why Trump had to liberate America from the terrorist implementation that has been quite ostentatious in the background. 

The main problem I conveyed to the White House was that, with all the transfer of wealth, the world has become complacent with its supply chains, taking too many vacations, and has lost its sense of providing a service to customers due to the accumulation of unearned merit.  What I said specifically was that the world was now filled with a bunch of slack jawed losers who have gotten used to easy money given to them for wealth redistribution, stolen from the value of capitalism and given to the looting nature of Marxism, and they no longer feel like they have to compete to earn the money, because governments have given it to them for nothing.  When you need something in the world, given all this global trade and the numerous time zones, what you get more than ever now are excuses.  In France, I think they are only working about 20 minutes a week now, and they are always on vacation. Most people have 6 weeks of vacation, it seems, and are rarely in the office.  There is no expectation to even pick up the phone while on vacation; the world is suddenly allergic to all forms of work, and it is a global crisis.  As a result, if you need something from Malaysia, what used to take four or five days to arrive is now six months or more.  And in many cases, if you think you need something for manufacturing, you have to order it more than a year in advance. Even then, the supplier is likely to push out their schedule multiple times, without even having any expectation of fulfilling their timeline targets.  As I told the White House, this is the biggest crisis in the world that nobody is talking about: subsidized laziness and the perpetuation of lazy people to profit off the demise of the world.  Trump’s tariffs would immediately help that condition, and it couldn’t happen sooner. 

Now I understand, and we discussed it on the phone, that this kind of thing takes longer to explain than a typical media snippet on tariff talk.  Our media is why the White House has shifted its focus away from the traditional establishment and toward alternative media to convey its message.  We have a lot of people in the same category as the global slack-jawed losers who are lazy and have an expectation of not working nearly enough.  Many of these types now work in traditional media.  So they can’t delve deeply into the tangible benefits of the Trump tariff necessity for a Liberation Day.  A liberation from lazy, slack-jawed losers who order their lunch for the business day at 9 AM and by noon are already checking out and getting ready to pick up their kid at day care and thinking about how they can call off for the rest of the week and still get paid.  If you’ve ever dealt with government, and this is the case with all of Washington D.C., they are very eager in the morning to get to work and park in their parking garages between the hours of 8 and 9 AM.  But by 1 PM, the parking garages are mostly cleared out.  Government workers, if they go to work at all and aren’t working from home, are only putting in 4 or 5 hours of work per day and expecting to get paid a king’s ransom in wages.  This is the hidden cost of globalism, and it is a real problem.

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ve certainly discussed it with the White House, but supply chains before COVID and after are entirely different.  If you needed a fuse or a new alternator for your car, it was always readily available on the shelf before COVID-19.  However, it has taken months to obtain it afterwards.  If you wanted to have a special Corvette built from a dealer, it was usually on the lot, or you’d get it in a few weeks.  Now, it might take a year, and everyone seems to be okay with that, as if that’s the new normal.  No, that is not acceptable, and it has been detrimental to all economies worldwide.  And it all starts with globalism, rather than competitive nationalism, and these tariffs had to happen to reset the world order established after World War II.  People all over the world need to work harder, longer, and much, much faster.  And when you call them, they need to pick up the phone because they need the money.  Not to have an arrogant attitude, as they know their socialist government will compensate them anyway with the proceeds from the trade imbalances.  That’s certainly a more profound discussion than just talking about the price of eggs.  It’s more of a psychological problem of wealth redistribution, which, to Trump’s point, we have been getting ripped off.  And it has to stop; Liberation Day is the moment in history when it did.  And the world will thank us later for forcing them not to be a bunch of slack-jawed, entitled losers short on ambition and full of excuses as to why our supply chains are too slow and inefficient.  And for the Trump people at the White House, it was nice speaking to everyone.  I’m happy to do it anytime.  Trump is doing great, and if he needs anything, don’t hesitate to call.  Liberation Day was great, and very much needed!

Rich Hoffman

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Why ‘The Chosen’ is Successful and ‘Snow White’ is Not: Understanding basic ecnomics

I am a little bit baffled by some of the fear surrounding the Trump tariffs. What did anybody expect to happen?   While this is a topic in its own right, economic understanding in general appears to be lost entirely on ordinary people; they don’t understand basic concepts, let alone complex ones.  The same mentality also applies to movies.  It’s a different business, but it’s all about generating revenue within an economic system that provides entertainment to people.  This Snow White Disney story is a microcosm of the general global trade understanding.  What was Disney thinking in making that stupid live-action remake?  And spending so much money on it.  You could say the same about trade imbalances that favored China over American imports and exports.  Why did the world make the dumb decisions to push international wealth redistribution, which is unmistakably present in financial transactions?  Incentives for foreign trade versus domestic production have been in place for a long time, and they were costly and detrimental; now someone has to pay for all that foolishness.  Why is that so stunning to people? Surely, they can’t be that stupid?  Yet they are, and in incredible ways.  In the first week of April 2025, the streaming show The Chosen Season 5 was released to theaters and did so well that it came in third at the box office, just behind Snow White.  That says a couple of things: that The Chosen is doing really well, and that Snow White is doing really badly, because these are not apples-to-apples movies.  Snow White has a budget of around $ 300 million, whereas The Chosen is designed to be a streaming show that plays in theaters as a dedication to Easter, giving fans a big-screen experience during the Holiday.  It will have three theatrical releases leading up to the Easter Holiday with a total budget of around $45 million.  The Chosen is monstrously successful on paper, whereas Snow White from Disney is a dismal failure on every measure.

My wife and I like The Chosen show. We’ve watched it on several streaming platforms over the years and look forward to every season, which I think is surprising.  It’s not as if people don’t know the story of Jesus; it’s very well-documented.  However, the director, Dallas Jenkins, and his wife, Amanda, have done a fantastic job with the show, telling the story of Jesus in a way that I have never seen or heard before.  They love the material, and they love each other, and it shows on screen, even on the big screen.  You can see The Chosen’s previous four seasons on Amazon Prime. I’ve also watched it on Roku.  And we liked it so much that we went to the theater to see Season 5, because we enjoy it that much.  There are planned 7 seasons in total, as this Season 5 is leading up to the crucifixion of Christ, and by Season 7, it will be the resurrection and an exploration of what happened in the years following Christ’s death.  The way they are presenting the material is well done.  I think it’s the best television in years, much better than anything else on the big screen or small.  It reminds me of Little House on the Prairie from the 1970s in many ways, with well-told stories that encompass all the things humans genuinely desire from the world, including goodness.  You would think that this would be obvious to more people and that more of these kinds of projects would have been made over the years, but Dallas Jenkins was pretty much ran out of Hollywood, as most faith based filmmakers have been forcing him to take his skills to the smallest venue possible, because he had been rejected from the business in Hollywood.

The Chosen began as a project for one of Dallas Jenkins’ friends, who wanted to create something for his church in St. Louis.  It was essentially a small film project that would be shown on a YouTube-like platform for a tiny audience.  And the project just grew from there, becoming the first season of The Chosen, which was produced on a minimal budget by a large group of people who were passionate about the project.  Nobody was getting rich off this material; they just did it because they loved it.  But ironically, even though everyone thinks they know everything about the life of Jesus and his disciples, The Chosen goes several steps further, and each season has grown in popularity and budget.  Season 5 was pretty big stuff, as much of it takes place on the Second Temple in Jerusalem and deals in great detail with all the politics behind the killing of Jesus in ways that have never been done before on such a scope.  Solomon’s Temple looks fantastic, as does everything else.  It is a stunningly good show with great acting.  A lot is happening with it that has tremendous social value, both politically and personally, and I am pleased with it.  I love seeing stories like this both in front of and behind the camera.  I want the world to have more people in it like Dallas Jenkins and his wife.  They are a good family who want to do good things and have the courage to do them without fear.  And if I had to put investment money behind something, those are the kind of people you want to invest in.  Those who took action early on are now seeing the benefits.

This Chosen project reminds me of the Atlas Shrugged movies from 2010.  People who have read me for a long time remember my involvement in that project.  I wanted to see John Aglialoro succeed in adapting that famous novel into a movie that Hollywood had rejected entirely.  The unions caused all kinds of problems, ensuring that each section of the movie’s releases never featured the same actors, which was brutal.  I thought the movies were pretty good and I talked them up as much as I could.  They tell the story quite well, based on the famous book.  The Chosen is similar in that it took a small budget approach that exceeded expectations in its delivery.  However, where Atlas Shrugged was unable to overcome production difficulties without being a bit resentful in the process, Dallas Jenkins gives viewers of his production no sense of trouble at all.  People can enjoy Jesus bringing the New Testament to life in all its glory on the screen, shot by shot.  Where John Aglialoro struggled to recover his massive investment in making the Atlas movies, The Chosen will likely turn out to be extremely profitable, a message that Hollywood cannot ignore, especially as Mel Gibson enters production on his Resurrection movie.  I tend to think that if Aglialoro had made the Atlas films more like Jenkins’ The Chosen, he would have been a lot more successful.  However, we’re dealing with the Trump years, as opposed to the Obama years, and things are pretty different now than they were then. People have a hunger for goodness that they didn’t have even back then, when they took a lot of things socially for granted.  But now with The Chosen, people are finding themselves again, almost as born-again Christians do.  And it’s showing up at the box office.  It’s not that the box office is failing because people aren’t going to see movies.  They don’t want the kind of movies Hollywood wants to show them, like woke adaptations of Snow White.  They want The Chosen, and those who provide that kind of content will be the ones who make the most money.  It’s not rocket science. 

Rich Hoffman

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