Category: Nature

Why Would Julie Shaffer Launch her Re-election Campaign in a Wine Bar: Bad Decisions, bad behavior, and bad politics hiding behind kids

You would think that a person running for re-election to the school board of Lakota would launch her campaign somewhere smart, like a library or even at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. But no, Julie Shaffer is running for her fourth term, and from all that vast experience, she picked a wine bar to launch her campaign, which was mentioned in a Journal News puff piece by her long-time associate in the media, Michael Clark. I have a long history with these people, so the irony could never be more obvious. Considering what everyone knows about Julie Shaffer, you’d think she would have known better. There was a National School Board Conference a few years ago where she and others got a lot crazy, and she ended up disgracing herself in many ways. I learned about it from people who were with her and tried to help her clean up after the event. But it goes much further than that. All the local politicians know about it and confirmed it in the aftermath. So, I was never much of a fan of Julie Shaffer, but I treated her fairly in the beginning until she showed herself to be quite a left-winged radical with vicious political intentions that, of course, like they all do, hide it behind the smiling faces of kids. However, the more I learned about her over the years, the more she showed herself to be one of the big problems at Lakota as she intends to bring progressive mindsets to the students. She was one of the first to support genderless bathrooms at Lakota before the alphabet sexual deviancies were announced on the news every day as they are now. 

Let’s just be polite about it: Julie’s condition at that National School Board Conference with other Lakota representatives was not pleasant. It involved severe intoxication and various states of undress, according to witnesses who were there and tried to help her. But there’s more, which came out during the latest drama with the former Lakota superintendent who apparently let people know that he had video of it all on his phone, and people were enjoying it. And knowing what everyone now knows about him; apparently, even he was embarrassed by the behavior of the Lakota leadership at that conference. I personally didn’t see the video; I had no desire to, even though it was an option from those close to the superintendent. We’re not talking about a “Girls Gone Wild” video in the sense that everyone was young and beautiful. These are middle-aged, beat-up potato sacks getting way too crazy when they should have been representing the Lakota district as proper education representatives. So just drinking too much would have been too much. Anything after that, which was a lot, was simply unforgivable. The whole video issue came up as many who had heard this story were wondering why Julie was so willing to give a free pass to what we learned about the former school superintendent. The belief was that she couldn’t afford to cast any opinions about his behavior because she had done equally disreputable acts. With all that in mind, it was baffling that she would launch her campaign at a wine bar to remind everyone of this embarrassing event. She’s a seasoned politician now, so she should have known better. But obviously not. 

This raises the real issue; deviant behavior is often more than what you see on the surface. Over the years, Julie has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for progressive changes while hiding the effort behind a non-partisan school board. School boards are very partisan, often filled with radical democrats with big government ideas about everything and an eye toward spending to match it. And we see how she arrives at these thoughts when you learn about her personal lifestyle. Like many progressive big government people, Julie is attracted to an extensive social safety net because she has problems controlling herself. If you want to be taken seriously as a leader of anything, you just never conduct yourself like she was caught doing at a National School Board Conference. When she says in that Michael Clark “puff piece” that “I believe that this is a fight for the heart and soul of a district that has been a destination district for many years but is being harmed by extremism, politics, and divisiveness.” She’s running in a very conservative district with people who care about things like drunkenness, overt sexual displays of disgrace, and lousy judgment. And like a lot of Democrats, she has been hiding her political tendencies behind the unspoken rules of bipartisanship. These public schools are not for the kids, as people like her claim; it’s for the adults to have free babysitting and to act like a bunch of teenagers when left alone in a hotel lobby while traveling out of town. In that article, she said that “this election will be a decision by our community about what they want Lakota to represent in the future.” 

And that’s why her behavior at school board conferences matters to the rest of us, although we may not want to disgust ourselves with the details. While Julie has worked to attack conservative voices in passive-aggressive ways for years, it’s evident that she has been fighting for the disgrace of children, not the preservation of them. And it shows up in her private actions. Then, like a lot of people who are so inclined to Democrat politics, they seek to hide their bad behavior behind big government mechanisms, which then shield them from reality. And there is a cost to all those big government ideas which Democrats use like a mask to hide what bad people they really are when they think nobody is looking. So, of course, they hate people who judge them for what they are. I wouldn’t call it “right-winged politics” as much as I would call it common sense. Anybody who wants to be a leader of anything should know that even at the late hours of the night when the alcohol with friends is flowing freely, it’s best not to participate and to lead by a higher example. I know many people who travel a lot, and they don’t end up in the compromised state that Julie was, where she had to be put back together by fellow school board members after disgrace had already chronicled the event for posterity. What’s even more stunning than all is that she would bring attention to it even during her campaign announcement. Talk about being tone-deaf. This will be a tough campaign for her, but she can only blame herself. She is offering herself as a leader of Lakota schools and is attempting to say that anybody who judges her behavior is a “right-winged radical.” But to the rest of the world, it’s just the rantings of people who can’t control themselves when they leave home. And the same can be said about her budget decisions as a school board member, where the same rationalization comes into play. And the track record is not a good one at all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Time Management and Friendships: Being productive is fun but not very socially accomidating

To answer the question all at once, because many people have been reaching out for friendship, and I give them quick one-sentence texts and very short emails, it’s not personal. I have many friendships, and I like that I do. But I don’t traditionally maintain them. In my life, there isn’t a lot of time to ask about how the dogs and cats are doing, and I certainly am not one who spends time standing around the grill in the backyard with friends sipping beer and talking about lawnmowers. There is nothing wrong with that; many people enjoy that kind of thing. I might if I didn’t otherwise have the type of life I enjoy. But it’s certainly not a rejection of friendship that I express to all those who have reached out, and it’s been happening so frequently that I do want to put things in context a bit. If I can avoid some hurt feelings, I care enough to at least do that. I try to answer all the emails I get from people. For instance, my Gmail account is so out of control that if anybody sends me an email there, it’s highly likely that I will not see it. There are over 500,000 emails there that I will never have time to open, so I have other email accounts that are much more manageable that I use for the needed correspondence. It’s an interesting problem to use technology to reach as many people as possible and not lose touch with the personal relationships that can quickly saturate life with too much interaction. As I came to think about it recently, it really is an astonishing number of correspondence, and managing them all might otherwise make each of them feel disenfranchised, which certainly isn’t the intention. 

Professionally, I apply about 70 hours per week toward those objectives, which by itself is a lot. Then beyond that, I put in about 30 hours a week, usually between the hours of 2 AM and 6 AM, toward political endeavors, which I view not as a networking opportunity but purely as community maintenance. I want to live in a good world, so I spend that kind of time each week to do so. Some people actually move into elected office, and many have asked me about doing so in many positions. But the truth is, I can do the most with the time I have available in the way that I do because I am interested in so many community functions. Even though I talk about it a lot in specific formats, education issues are less than 1% of what I spend my time on. There are actually many more topics that I am much more passionate about, but public education is a predecessor to them. So, you must do one thing before you can do the other thing kind of thing. So, if you are doing math, you can quickly see that there are only about 68 hours of sleep left for the week, which would be about 9 hours per day. But then there is spending time with family, which I do a lot. And I have a lot of interests and read many books. I read an average of 3 books per week. I manage that by utilizing reading time during meals. I answer emails usually while walking from one place to another. And there certainly isn’t much time to talk about lawnmowers and smoking meat in the backyard. 

The truth is, I love the pace of my life and all the things I do in it. It’s a hyperactive life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Many people believe that we are supposed to sit around meditating all the time, centering ourselves with quiet. To take time and find peace in our lives. I think that is a bunch of garbage. Life is meant to be productive. Quiet time is boring. I would go as far as to say that it’s lazy. And people who say such things are just trying to justify their own lack of ambition. If I had more hours in the day, I would quickly fill them with every possible opportunity to do something productive. They would not be filled with more sleep. I think only a few hours per night in the form of power naps is needed, and I’ve been doing this kind of pace for several decades, and it’s enjoyable. Not a burden the way many might think of it. There are occasions when hostile perpetrators came to my house at 2 AM hoping to find me asleep, only to be caught by me as I was walking around my yard at that hour with books in both hands and me reading them with a flashlight. Needless to say, they were quite surprised and frustrated by that reality. Being busy has its benefits, you might say it that way, depending on what a person values in life. And for me, it’s productivity. The more productive I am, the happier I am. But I do expect to accomplish things quickly. I don’t have much time for traffic or to get to things. I drive fast. I avoid crowds that might slow me down. And I expect to be doing multiple things all at the same time. My wife thinks it’s funny; we recently went to the grocery to get my mom some Mother’s Day flowers; I expected to be in and out in under 7 minutes. She wanted to look at the various breads and snacks, so she slowed us down and laughed at how fast I moved. She’s used to it, but she always manages to draw a joke when she has to experience my pace, which is so different from her. 

Usually, especially regarding family things, she coordinates where everything happens. I show up where she says and do what needs to be done. I love family stuff, but like the grocery visit, I usually have an hourglass I’m looking at before the next thing needs to happen. So, without a relationship with my wife, it’s pretty hard to get me to be somewhere unless she arranges it. I appreciate when frineds send me texts telling me about something important, even if I don’t answer right away. Those reminders keep me plugged in where I might otherwise miss it. Reminders of big events are very useful as news stories. I don’t waste much time on gossiping in the newspapers or the nightly news. But I do appreciate it when people point things out that are useful. From trusted friends, it helps me manage chaos better and still get to the essence of a problem. But taking time for small talk and smelling the roses that are just not for me. And I don’t intend for people who would like to spend more time to get frustrated with the lack of effort on my part. It’s certainly not intentional. It’s just clock management. You get just so much time per day, and I literally work to make every second of every minute of every hour matter to the most efficient utilization. And it’s fun. But certainly not normal. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

King Solomon’s Temple: The reason the enemy wants us to desecrate our own bodies

I’ll tell you if you promise to keep it a secret. It’s not something I talk about often, but I think now might be a good time. I have a secret love I think about a lot and have had for many years. An obsession, really. I love the Temple of King Solomon in Israel and have since I was very little. Its one of those stakes in the ground of human civilization that I think is a massive statement by any emerging culture and was the window into the world of how the world thought before the great Library of Alexandria was destroyed right around the time of the Roman Empire struggling to maintain its power, starting around 145 BC, then being demolished in 391 AD. And that is what the Holy Bible means to me, validated through archaeology, that enough of the contents are very ancient, going back to 1400 BC to 2000 BC, respectfully, with dates that are reliably coordinated, and I really find that window into the world valuable at that time, especially the specifics of temple life under the rule of Solomon. Why had a group of people gained so much power in a relatively short time after invading the pagans of Canaan and establishing themselves as a force in the world? Because understanding that story helps us understand our own story in America, where a very similar trajectory of action occurred, and the challenges of maintaining that success were very difficult. Solomon’s Temple continues to be one of the hottest pieces of real estate in the world, with the Muslims now occupying what’s left over of the remains, where the popularly known Dome of the Rock now sits over the exact spot where Abraham supposedly went to sacrifice Isaac. The Muslims believe it was the older son, Ishmael. And it’s where Muhammad journeyed into the heavens in what sounds like a UFO encounter to me.

King Solomon’s Temple

Without question, that exact spot is where King David, Solomon’s father, set up a location for building the Temple had an importance that peaks back into prehistory to the beginning of time. Many people literally believe that the stone where all this happened is the precise spot where the European continent, the African, and the Asian land masses join perfectly and is the spot for the beginning of the world, literally. What we do get in the Bible is fragments of fragments of information from those prehistory times, but it’s valuable what it is. Then to understand that all of Western Civilization essentially evolved from the building of the Temple and the loss of it to history is exceptionally significant. For instance, the east/west alignment where the high priests would make their sacrifices then carry the elements to where the Ark of the Covenant sat on the exact spot where the stone on top of Mount Moriah peaked into the floor of the very elegant Temple finished in 960 BC after eight intense years of construction. They would pour the blood of the sacrificed animals over the Ark to atone for the people’s sins to the God Yahweh, traveling east to west to mimic the actions of being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, which occurred from west to east. There is a lot of growing evidence that this casting from the Garden was more than a metaphor. The lost land of Edan looked to be in America, and it was the Middle East where all people had to make their way again, knowing that they had knowledge of Good and Evil, a world of pairs of opposites that would always be tainted by sin and appeased by sacrifice.

So the building of a massive Temple, respectful of all the other attempts in the world on such a grand scale, says something about the culture that created it, a kind of heaven-on-earth mentality. But as humans, it only represents the eventual efforts of every human being. And that is for people to experience the relevance of a temple individually, for their personalized needs. Because, in many ways, humans need to see themselves as their own version of King Solomon’s Temple. No matter where in the world they occurred, Temple construction needs to inspire in people the concept to usher such reverence into their own lives. And that is how I’ve always seen the human body, as a temple built by God for the purpose of living a good life. And that we are supposed to treat our bodies with that level of respect. A human body is not something to despise or cast aside as inferior but is in itself a temple for the human soul, and it should be treated as such. We should not desecrate our own bodies, and for me, that means not coloring our hair, getting tattoos, breast implants, body piercings, or abusing ourselves with alcohol and drugs. Like King Solomon’s Temple, we should care for our bodies like the sacred objects that they are. I’m now at an age where I have advised many young people on these things. The ones who listened have pretty good lives. But many didn’t listen; they have many problems, and it is painful to see. Because they were told, just as I would say to everyone even now, to treat your temples well, give them great respect, and you’ll find a much better life in the aftermath than if you allow your Temple to be desecrated.

Of course, Solomon’s Temple didn’t last long after his sons took over and started fighting among themselves. The surrounding kingdoms, especially in Mesopotamia at the city of Babylon, were very jealous and wanted to take out the people who built such a magnificent place. In 605 BC, Nebuchadnezzar invaded and plundered the Temple stealing the wealth and taking it to the temples of Babylon. By 586 BC, the entire Solomon Temple was destroyed, and there has been much effort in the world, including the current tensions in the Middle East presently that want to rebuild the Temple and restore the world to how it was before that invasion, including many secret societies as their sole purpose for existing and the political movements that spawn from them. And such a downfall started when the Kings of Israel began to allow the desecration of their Temple to false idols and impure beliefs, which culminated with King Manasseh failing massively and his grandson King Josiah attempting to restore the Temple of its lost function. I look at a lot of older people, and I see many who have allowed their temples to be desecrated by many bad decisions in life. Children are new, like the Temple of Solomon at first. But they become disasters as adults when they allow their temples to be desecrated by invading cultures with bad ideas. It’s a lesson in values that I find well described in the effort of civilization to build King Solomon’s Temple in the first place and how other jealous cultures would be inspired to ravage it with great hatred. And to suppress that culture with desecration. This is precisely what we see happening to America now by the jealous cultures of the world. They want to desecrate our country, starting with each and every one of us, through LGBT Pride flags, loose abortion cults, a society of too much drinking, too many drugs, horrendous social customs, and a terrible government-controlled public education system. Our temples are under attack, and we let the enemies desecrate them without a fight. And that is how a lot of evil starts in the world and brings so much misery with it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Achilles Heel of The Administrative State: Why to Pick Trump over DeSantis

Political theater aside, there are very declarative reasons to pick President Trump over Ron DeSantis in the upcoming election in 2024. And people are on to it. It’s rooted in the audacious statement by Trump about his former White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, when he called her out for not properly representing him on a Fox News segment, declaring her an asset of the globalists. It’s the Achilles Heel of the entire globalist movement and the politics of the Beltway, the thing they don’t want anybody ever to learn because they think we are all too dumb to see it. It’s the concept I talk about in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, where the gunslinger walks into a saloon in the pouring rain and drinks with his back to a room full of killers. But nobody makes a move because their first priority is to measure if they can use the stranger to their advantage before any other consideration, and the gunfighter uses that knowledge to destroy them all before they even realize what’s happening. Every great executive understands the concept, which, naturally, Trump does with his experience in private enterprise. People like Kayleigh McEnany, or Ron DeSantis, and the Beltway supporters hope to keep it a secret, but they need people like Trump. Trump doesn’t need them. And that is the true terror that is exploiting globalism all over the world presently. And in order to suppress that reality, if they lose control over election fraud and the media, they will find themselves in a world where they are not in charge, which is becoming glaringly obvious. People have always known these things in the back of their minds, but the promise of the Administrative State, the core of our education system from the beginning, was that communism would enter into the decision-making process, and group consensus would rule the day. Leadership by individuals would be replaced by consensus building. Which, of course, has turned out to be a disaster. And Trump knows it and exploits it to his political advantage.

The Fox News support of Ron DeSantis then becomes much more apparent. As a news organization, they cover the horse race of politics and are not interested in the solutions of political debate. They like the problems of politics and never anticipate that answers will ever come. That is how their business model is, to talk about the game, not the actual results of the game played. Fox News is all about providing color commentary in the days and hours leading up to a game, to use a sports metaphor, but once that game is over, they move on to the next big game, the next horse race. For them, it’s all about revenue generation, just like the Beltway culture is. They want people like Ron DeSantis, who need donors’ money and want to control what kind of color commentary Fox News will be discussing. And for them, it’s all security for their origins for making money because it provides a stable environment politically for their business interests, which have thrived under the illusion that consensus building by the Administrative State would be the method of the future, which they invested in. The big difference between Ron DeSantis is that he’s essentially broke. Without money in his pocket, it’s like going to a gunfight without a gun. He’s young and doesn’t have very much money. He has to make money for many years in his life, so that makes him much easier to control than someone like Trump, who makes it clear that if anybody betrays him, he will drop them like a rock into the ocean and never look back. 

Without Trump’s independent wealth, we would not have questions about the actual validity of the Administrative State and its controllers, the Deep State, which are globalists involved in finance. They built a rigged system, and they have a layer of bureaucracy that protects them from the impact of negative results. And that rigged system would have stayed intact if an independent person like Trump had never made themselves known to politics. Trump cannot be controlled because he is independently wealthy. Ron DeSantis might talk like Trump, but he can never act like Trump.   Someone will always control him because he needs someone to give him money in some way or another. Ron DeSantis could never walk into a room with his back to it and have people not trying to take him out because the rules of consensus building were never going to protect people from each other’s ambitions. But the good executive knows the value of leadership and can afford to alienate those who are ineffective, disloyal, or malicious. They know a million Kayleigh McEnanys are out there, people looking for a chance that only Trump could give them. But there’s only one Trump. And that is the source of the panic that is moving through politics with the new global populism that is reshaping the world currently. The political system was built to put money in the pockets of donors, lawyers, and consultants, with the eventual outcome producing something of a horse race for the media like Fox News to talk about but never to resolve. Because if the problems were resolved, then there would be nothing new to talk about in the media. A solution-based society does not help the social parasites fake that their Administrative State is effective. Only that the goal is to raise money to spend on the horse race, and that is the reality of the Deep State as they have been trying to hide it. 

Ron DeSantis ultimately made the same dumb mistake that most people do these days; they felt they were never going to get anywhere in life unless they sucked up into the Administrative State. Even Kayleigh McEnany fell for the bait. And the reason is that they don’t understand how executive leadership works. They understand the sentiments of the press. They know how to say the right things. But they don’t understand how the right things are determined because they are not independently wealthy and free to live on their own terms. But Trump is, which is why he’s such a terrifying prospect to the efforts of an Administrative State to continue selling themselves as useless solutions to a world that expects results. Nobody in the Beltway of politics or the media that reports on it is worried about Ron DeSantis. Without a Trump to hide behind, he’s all talk and can quickly be controlled by the forces who have always controlled politics. And those protections are built into the rules of polite society, that you don’t call people names, that you put up with deception by not discussing the real problems. But the only solution to the real problems is through directness, and that only comes from the independence of social interactions, where you don’t need others to validate your existence. And Trump doesn’t. People want to be near him because they want something from him. As a top executive, he knows that and can use that leverage in all his relationships, which ultimately is the essence of leadership. Aligning people with self-interest is the actual method of success. Consensus building is meant to hide the lack of results behind making everyone else feel important when they clearly aren’t. And that is ultimately what the entire election of 2024 is all about. Which only President Trump is an option for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Curse of Yahwah: New Discoveries at Mt Ebal and a Validation of the Bible that science has provided

If you study the attack vector, we see a repeat strategy that can be found in historical records, such as the Bible. So, I am very interested in studying the Bible and applying it to our current circumstances. Ignorance is the way to defeat; knowledge and understanding are the way to success. And if Americans understand that everything we have done was founded with the Bible, specifically our Constitution and other Founding documents, then the key to surviving what we are witnessing is clear. If people are not suckered into giving up their moral foundations, foundations that are traditionally positioned by Biblical study, then the modern bad guys will not be successful, and America will survive an attempted coup by globalist forces. This is a topic I’ve always been interested in. I love studying ancient history from all over the world. But now there is a strategy to study. People are lost and looking for answers, as is the goal of every war ever conducted, to pillage and create a menace against the innocent invoking their submission. But in this case, the keys to defeating the enemy are well documented in the Bible. I’ve studied these kinds of things all of my life, starting with Bible school as soon as I had reliable memories at 3 and 4 years old. However, when I was 11 and 12, I started getting the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review, which I continue to this day, and it’s my favorite publication. It’s never a bad day when I get one of those in the mailbox. And the news from May of 2023 was undoubtedly one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of my lifetime, which is significant to our subject here.

One of my favorite things in the world

One of the ways that evil works in the world is by undermining the belief system of its targets, whether individual or societal. So, knowing that America is a Biblical nation founded on rational Christian concepts and a reverence for the Ten Commandments, which then flow naturally into our Constitution and our Bill of Rights specifically, the way to bring down the nation is to attack its foundations and ridicule them into submission, which is precisely what we see happening. That is the strategy of the globalist insurgents pouring out of the Desecrators of Davos crowd, the (World Economic Forum) types. Being nice Christian people, of course, Americans offered the other cheek, and they slapped that too and kept slapping until we reached the point we’re at now. And one of the great arguments that evil has made in the modern context is to pick apart the Bible as an unreliable document rooted in fiction. And to argue that the God Yahweh isn’t real and that the Bible was written much later than we believe it was, which was the Council of Nicaea under Roman tutelage to unite their fracturing empire in 325 A.D. Yet the text, as proven by the Dead Sea Scrolls, shows that the books of the Bible had been around for many thousands of years. But the problem remained, were these stories actually fiction, like some Star Wars story from a different time? Were any of those characters actually real? And how would we know? There wasn’t much of a way to validate any of it. 

Around 2019 at a little alter on top of Mt. Ebal, roughly 40 miles north of Jerusalem, archaeologists were digging at the site when they found a small tablet made of lead about the size of a business card folded over on itself. On the card were written very specific statements that are being called the “Curse of Yahweh” because it invokes the Biblical God as an obvious statement toward someone the writer was very angry at. The actual tablet wasn’t identified until early 2022 because it had to be found among soil dumps that were found through wet sifting, and with the Associates for Biblical Research performing the task. Once the tablet had been found and translated, it went through a peer review process to provide academic scrutiny, and now then, in May of 2023, the results were confirmed. The inscription on the little tablet said, “God yhw curses you, cursed. You will die, cursed—cursed, you will surely die. Cursed you are by yhw—cursed.” Somebody was pretty mad, and they demanded that Yahweh kill the person they were mad at. I would say that’s a pretty typical action that people take, cursing someone they don’t like. But in this case, the dating is remarkable, around 1400 BC to 1200 B.C., which was 300 to 500 years before the building of the first Temple of Solomon. So we have physical evidence of King Solomon’s Temple, but we don’t have a lot of evidence as to whether or not there was a God Yahweh who actually existed, or that people from that time even knew about. The days of the Ark of the Covenant would be set up in a tent, a tabernacle nearby. So, to have Yahweh being used as an all-powerful god in the context of that tablet is quite astonishing. It puts the Biblical timeline more into a historical record as opposed to a work of fiction, which is very significant. 

A few other sites have begun to show evidence of the name of Yahweh—one in Egypt, which is consistent with Biblical stories of conquest and chronology. But nothing is as old as this tablet which gives a glimpse into life in that region and the kind of things that the people believed. Which then, of course, would have led to the creation of the Bible that we have today. Someone thought that Yahweh was powerful enough to fulfill a curse on somebody else, and the tablet was clearly asking for such interference toward some remote concept of justice. It’s not like Romans made up Yahweh two thousand years later to satisfy a narrative their empire needed. Instead, we see a glimpse into the past extending beyond the political needs of empires into the heart of human belief. This discovery then validates the roots of the Bible in ways that have been missing in a modern context. Biblical Archaeology doesn’t always look for a narrative’s validation as much as science uncovers the evidence that creates a narrative. And this tablet provides a narrative consistent with the Bible’s events and that Yahweh was a god of significance in a time when history wasn’t so well recorded. But that the Bible is our lost glimpse into that time, and the lessons of then, are the lessons of now. The evil they were fighting then is the evil we are fighting now. And if these discoveries can provide anything worthwhile, it’s that we know how the story ends, and it can provide a rallying cry for our present circumstances. That is, after all, why we should study history, to learn from it. And significant archaeological finds like this one at Mt. Ebal are clear windows into a remote period that validates the remarkable nature of the Holy Bible, in that we have what we do from it about an ancient people, their relationship with God, and the context of other gods entering the picture with evil blowing in their sails, and how society is destroyed under such actions. Here we could see ourselves cursing evil under the name of Yahweh. Only for us, it’s not too late.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Our Flag is Still There: Obama isn’t sleeping well these days

Much like during the War of 1812, our flag is still there, despite the domestic terrorist attempts to destroy it. After all, that is what we are dealing with, domestic terrorists who now run our government and have been working to destroy America from the inside out for many decades now. So it’s nice to hear that Barack Obama is not sleeping so well these days. He’s worried about the disjointed media, meaning that the government has been unable to control the media the way the communist movement intended. And Obama wants to see Australia-style gun confiscation in America because the writing is not going well on the wall where the opposite thing seems to be happening. As a community activist and drug user, Obama has been committed to this destruction of America for his entire life. And so far, it hasn’t happened yet, and it appears to become less of a possibility now that people are showing massive mistrust in the government as opposed to how it was when he was president for two terms. The common belief is that this current Biden administration is actually the third term of Obama. That it is Barack Obama who is whispering in the ear of Biden and that he is really in control. But I don’t think so. Obama himself was always a puppet. It’s the people who controlled him who are really controlling Biden now. And because of all their terrorist efforts, they have the world we are living in now, where Trump hasn’t gone away, and people are more dug in than ever against the causes of progressivism. And it has frustrated their movement. 

I never accepted that Barack Obama was President. But you didn’t see me attempting to host an insurrection against his administration. Instead, I worked to help get Romney elected. But he turned out to be a major RINO, and we ended up with another term of Obama, just barely. I never believed that the birth certificate that Obama produced way too late was real. Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona made a good case for the fraudulent nature of the document that was eventually released to the public. The problem was that it had digital elements at a time when birth certificates had no possibility of computer-generated images. So, there were a lot of problems with Obama. As I’ve said many times, and the media underreported the story severely, Obama’s political career was launched in the living room of a known Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers, a precursor to the modern-day Antifa terrorists that are certainly government-sponsored and saw a lot of activity during Trump’s administration. While January 6th, protestors of election fraud sit in jail; all the leaders of Antifa are free and waiting for their next government-sponsored terrorism campaign. So, hindsight makes it more evident that the Barack Obama presidency was a planned terrorist attack against the flag itself. They inserted a foreigner into our White House, hid his communist radicalism behind skin color; remember, we weren’t allowed to have judgments against Obama because we had to all prove we weren’t racists, even though it was Republicans who fought the Civil War to free slaves. Going through those years, people became very frustrated. Looking back on it, it’s all obvious what was happening. And people wanted a change, and that’s how we ended up voting for Trump. 

Barack Obama and his handlers of insurrection created the political climate we see now. You would have thought that they would have learned that communism doesn’t work; they never got control of the media in Cuba, Russia, Germany, or China, all the places where the communist model was being utilized. To think that it would work well in America, the place where all those places were fleeing communism to have an opportunity for freedom, the plan was to take that option away and that people were somehow magically going to accept authoritarian governments. Obama now has that same blank look that Bill Gates had when he realized that Covid wouldn’t work because states had rights the federal government couldn’t impose on. Oppps, just a small oversight in their plan to destroy the world with a One World Government. America has this crazy thing called the Constitution. And apparently, they didn’t study that in their maniacal schemes. These plans always sound great in the halls of academia, where Obama learned his radicalism at the University of Chicago, where Ayers the terrorist recruited him for an inside job that the Democrat party fully supported. Hide the communist radicalism behind a well-spoken person of color. And hope to guilt people into accepting authority rule of centralized government. The intentions of a communist coup are now apparent to everyone with eyes to see. During Obama’s years, people were reluctant to admit it to themselves. They wanted to give Obama a chance, to prove that they weren’t racist. But I knew it all along. One of my most popular articles to this day was one I did about nude pictures of Obama’s mom, who was a sleep around and had relationships with lots of communist men. It’s likely Obama has no idea who his father was because of his mother’s scandalous life. No wonder he was a druggy, a communist, and attracted to domestic terrorists. And for all those reasons, the people who hate America found a way to put him in the White House. And now they are so arrogant about their ability to rig elections and manipulate the media that they can put a brain-dead slug in office, and nobody even challenged them on it. It all started with Obama. 

Now they see that power slipping; they thought they controlled the corporate media. But now, the media has gone underground and is more independent than ever. And people aren’t afraid of the government because there are over 300 million guns in homes all across the country. The government just isn’t big enough to go door to door and impose authoritarian rule on everyone. They couldn’t do it during Covid, which was a test for a Great Reset. And now that people have been burnt trusting the government, it will be harder than ever to impose any government authority on anybody. Especially since the government does not control the media the way they hoped to by now. So yes, Obama isn’t sleeping very well.

The plans he has been involved in all his life are falling apart, and Trump is still the pick of the people. And Obama and his fellow government insurgents don’t understand why. Just as the English thought they were going to destroy the young country of America easily during the War of 1812. They found out that the war took too long, and people were too dug into this idea of being free to scare them over, back under the flag of England. Communism has been resisted in America, and now that people are awake, it’s hard for the progressive communists to do anything. And that’s why Obama isn’t sleeping well. This wasn’t how the plan was supposed to go. People were not supposed to run from Obama and into the arms of the ultimate flag-waving capitalist, Trump. This isn’t how the communist revolutions in other places went, so they had no idea that Trump would even be a possibility or that people would elect someone like him when the going got tough. But they did, and despite all the efforts at terrorism, our flag, and our country, is still around.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Debt Ceiling Debacle: Government needs to be cut by 75% or more

The values expressed by the June 1st made-up deadline for the debt ceiling talks were that it was a bi-partisan agreement, which prevents a first-ever default, protects Biden’s key priorities and accomplishments, and rejects extreme cuts to programs for veterans, seniors, and what families count on. It protects Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and keeps President Biden’s student loan relief program for 40 million hardworking borrowers. That is what the White House is saying about it, and it’s the kind of deal you will always get from a corrupt government with a serious spending problem. And the feeling is that Keven McCarthy got suckered even though members of Congress I like from my area; Jim Jordan and Warren Davidson were happy to push back a bit from the Republican perspective; ultimately, these budget fights are going to get messy and would have been better done now than later. Essentially, Republicans bit on the phony deadline for debt payments that Janet Yellen set from the Biden administration, and House Republicans didn’t want to be blamed for a default. We are dealing with radical employees here; it’s precisely the same argument we have been making for years in public schools where the government simply adds too much payroll, then expects taxpayers to pick up their massive expansion of government through job creation, then overpaying those employees. I tend to agree with Davidson and Jordan that McCarthy played a nice game, but in the end, there weren’t wins to justify the effort, and the Biden Democrats get to celebrate a win at taxpayer expense. 

We aren’t all on the same page with this one. The government needs to be radically shrunk, and it will put a lot of people out of work. The entire issue of these budget talks really comes down to whether we are a better nation with all the government workers we have who do so little for the nation in general. Most government workers make 30-40% above market value for jobs that aren’t needed in most cases. And we could likely afford to cut 75% of those and still get an operational government, much like Elon Musk did at Twitter. Real people who run real companies understand that budget impacts on the payroll are the biggest problem of inflated budgets. If employees get increased productivity with their staffing, and that productivity is valuable to the world, then a company could be said to be successful. But we’re not talking about that with this budget problem with our government. Government is a make-work enterprise where they fill positions we don’t need and pay people too much money to perform the job. I would say that the utilization rate of those employees is under 5%, where it should be somewhere between 70% to 90%. That’s the effective time employees are actually doing their jobs while being paid. What we are dealing with when it comes to government workers are lazy radicals who are hidden from job performance by government labor unions who continue to want to throw bodies at positions they create to expand government and take credit for it as politicians. And politicians are never going to give those jobs away without a major fight. And this debt ceiling talk of 2023 would have required people negotiating who actually want to fight. 

And the kryptonite for Republicans is always military spending, but even with that topic, do we really want to waste money on a woke military? In my view of this problem, everything is on the table. What does our military really do for us these days? It seems to only serve for wars that help globalism. It’s not preventing war with China. China has their guy in our White House. They are fighting wars through finance now; nobody is planning to fight a ground war now or in the future. So, Republicans need to be willing to go there. And they must be willing to take away the credit cards from big-spending Democrats and let them have their head-spinning moments. At some point, we are going to have to call the bluff of the big government types and stop wasting money on these massive government programs in every category. Lots of people need to lose their jobs, and a resizing of the real needs of our federal and state government needs to occur because, at the core of it, that is what we are talking about with these talks. Nobody wants to end well-paying jobs for a government that know-nothing politicians created for a job that society generally doesn’t want or need. We are going into debt to do jobs so that foreign interests can make money off the interest rate, and the only entities benefiting are the communist labor unions attached to the government workers. It’s a treadmill that goes nowhere, and we waste all our time and money on essentially nothing. Our nation has not improved because of all the money wasted on these jobs, and the economic value is a negative rather than a positive. We are paying a lot of money to get in the way of productivity, not to enhance it. 

And that’s where the really hard decisions come into play. We all have family members who work in government and did what they needed to to get a job with the government at that overpaid rate, with all the days off and work-from-home policies we have seen over the past several years. Government workers don’t think they owe any productivity to society. They believe that society owes them a job and that they’ll show up for it whenever they get around to it; that is the true cost to the productivity of our culture. We are paying a lot of money for a government that doesn’t do what we need it to. And unless Kevin McCarthy was willing to argue on those merits, the Democrats would own him in the negotiations. McCarthy made a good show of it, working himself over the Memorial Day Holiday, but Democrats knew from the beginning that all the mainstream Republicans could not fight the budget battle where it is really the costliest. Nobody wants to admit that their friends, family, and fellow union members are actually performing worthless tasks for a worthless government. Eventually, we will have to have this discussion because it is what makes deficit spending such a catastrophe. One that few, perhaps only the 20 or so freedom caucus members, are willing even to discuss. Government, in general, with all their labor unions attached at every level, is a bloated machine of communist corruption of no value, and to be a healthy country, those government jobs need to be private sector jobs at a much lower wage rate. And that would essentially destroy the inflated economy of the Beltway culture that entirely exists on debt, not the actual value of the jobs that fuel that economy. Then until we are willing to have that discussion, which is inevitable, we will continue to see debt ceiling discussions like this one with precisely these results. Kevin McCarthy never had a chance because he was making the wrong argument. The government positions that make up the bloated budget we are dealing with need to go away. People will have to be out of work. And the government will have to be significantly minimized, by 75% or more, because anything productive never happens. And we are a long way from that happening with these government politicians. A long way away from reality.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

BlackRock and the Kaaba Stone of Mecca: The politics of the ancient pagan gods of the spirit world and what they are doing now

What we’re dealing with in the early part of this 21st century is an ancient evil that has always existed. But for lots of reasons is more focused and more vicious than in other recorded attempts throughout history. I would say to everyone that religion is essential to human beings because people tend to fly apart without it. When we look at our governmental problems in America and we ask why it’s all screwed up, we can go back to Georg Washington’s inauguration and get a wise warning, a country that turns away from God will perish on itself, much like what happened to the Israelites in the past. To be a prosperous country, there must be an alignment with a positive spiritual nature. Christianity was the foundation of America and our laws, so the strategic goal of attackers wanting to undo our country has been to separate us from our foundations. And now, in hindsight, we have seen the anti-American forces using other religions, such as Islam, to blow on the winds of ancient conflicts to insight social change toward communism. And to understand that, a careful study of ancient religions’ foundation beliefs becomes necessary and essential. As we talk here, remember that during the 1980s, Osama bin Laden worked for the American CIA. And we never saw the body when he was killed for his role in 9/11. The troops who killed him killed someone watching pornography. But in this world and in that region, there are a lot of old people dressed in robes who have long beards in Pakistan. And we were told that Osama was dead by the same people who killed President Kennedy, ran President Nixon out of office, performed a coup against President Trump, tried to cover up that Covid came from China as a bioweapon, and also told us the election of 2020 was the most secure in history.

Obviously, we are seeing a military plot being performed by financial institutions like BlackRock, which most of us reading this have some connection to through a 401K plan. This plot is using our own money to buy up stock, propped up by our own Federal Reserve through quantitative easing, to become majority owners, and to drive all corporate management toward ESG, woke objectives. And it’s behind much of the ruin we see in 2023, from Disney to Bud Light and Target. But before Larry Fink was able to use BlackRock to acquire trillions of dollars of asset management, he needed an event to catapult his little company, oddly named to perform the task it would, in becoming the most significant money management firm in the world, which is now the first to operate within communist China. What you learn upon conducting a vast amount of research by asking the who, what, why, when, and where is that by studying a multitude of social categories carefully hidden behind the façade of religion, the kind of religious tension displayed every day at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, specifically between the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, we are seeing the politics of the spirit world unfolding in strategic ways, and suddenly things start to make a lot more sense. The gods of worship by the modern World Economic Forum, of which BlackRock is a member and tool of aggression, are not Christian concepts. And an ancient evil captured by gods from the past coming out of that same Mesopotamian region is obviously working in the background of our current culture. American intelligence, finance, most corporations, and many of our elected representatives have been caught up in this plot, which is older than the Bible by quite a lot and is the source material of much of our misery.

I don’t think it’s such a well-kept secret that BlackRock, the company, refers to the Kaaba Stone in Mecca, which is the heart of the Muslim religion. It’s where the original dispute for most of the trouble in the Middle East started, the argument between Muslims and the Jewish people about which son was the favorite of Abraham. The Quran says it was Ishmael. Abraham’s wife was barren, so she suggested Abraham have a child with the slave girl Hagar. Ishmael was born, and he and his father went to the shrine in Mecca and pushed away all the pagan idol worship, which would have been references to Baal and the pantheon of ancient gods featured as the Bible’s primary villains. I’ve read the Quran several times, including most recently looking for clues about our current political situation, and my thoughts on it were that the ancient Assyrian descendants wanted a way to stop the adoption of Christianity by the Romans as a unifying force, to provide leverage in the region to destroy them as a military power. Muhammad wrote the Quran, which took many of the characters from the Bible and put its own “Eastern” spin on them, and it was promoted as its own unifying force against the newly created effects of Western civilization. In the Quran, Ishmael is looking to finish the shrine but is missing a cornerstone, so he looks for one. That is when the angel Gabriel, the same one from the Bible, gives him the black stone that is now known as the Kaaba stone, which supposedly fell to earth and provided Adam, from the Biblical Adam and Eve story, wisdom for the creation of all civilization. And just for context, the Dome of the Rock sits on top of the very spot where the world was supposedly created, from God’s own hands, Allah in the case of the Quran. But Yahweh in the traditions of the people of Israel. Think of Gabriel as a kind of CIA agent of the spirit world who is likely still hiding behind the scenes of the masks of global religions. And things start making a lot more sense.  Is Gabriel a MAGA Republican?  Does he share political alignment to Yahweh?  Or is he working a deal with the ancient Baal, Ishtar, or Moloch?  These are the things we should be thinking about and not assuming that all the archangels are………. beneficial.

Also, the Dome of the Rock is the spot where God sent Abraham to kill his only true son, Isaac. After Ishmael was born, Abraham’s wife Sarah, at a very ripe old age, found herself pregnant, and she gave birth to Isaac, who was the son of the official marriage union. Not a slave girl. So, this is where the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims part ways. Isaac was spared from the sacrifice on Mount Moriah and went on to become the father of the entire line of the Jewish people. Ishmael went on to become the father of all Islam. And the reverence of the Kaaba Stone centers around the shrine Abraham built with his son there to push out pagan influences. But, the Kaaba Stone is the ultimate of pagan references, and we don’t know much about it, not even the Muslim people, other than it was given to Ishmael to place in the corner of the shrine in Mecca. There are a couple of passages from the Bible, Mathew 21:42 and Daniel 2:45, which refer to this black stone, so we are talking about something that has a connection to history in ways we don’t understand. And is clearly at work in the world now, if not literally through religious pilgrimage for the Muslim faith, but in the name of an anti-American continuation of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 where government expanded as a reaction, we had a massive financial collapse in the following years, starting in 2008 where the housing market tanked, Larry Fink worked with the Fed to buy up all the bad loans, then shielded BlackRock from the risk with quantitative easing printing trillions of dollars over the next decade, leading to BlackRock owning most of the wealth of America, and influencing most corporate structures. And we still have no body for the Muslim terrorist who launched the attack in the first place, the old CIA asset Osama bin Laden. And it only gets more menacing from there. So, what is the power of that Kaaba Stone, and what role did it play in the pagan beliefs of the region and the world? Where did it come from, and what influence does it have now over the politics of our day? Well, to say the least, it’s substantial. And regarding the CIA and the Muslim terrorist organizations, there is plenty of smoke to make rational conclusions, and for me, the giveaway happened when the FBI failed to contain the crime scene of the Christmas shooting in San Bernadino and allow the press to stamped through it just days after the violent attack. That’s when it was clear that we weren’t all playing on the same team or the same fundamental beliefs before Trump came along and forced everyone to show their cards in the light of day.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke Disney’s Glaring Problem: The negative impact of Showing the New Indiana Jones Movie at the Cannes Film Festival

I always get excited about new Indiana Jones movies, and I know enough about this upcoming one, the fifth movie in the series over a 40-year period of time, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, to say I think it’s going to be a pretty good movie, and that I’ll like it. Whenever I go to a bookstore, I see Indiana Jones’s impact on publishing. Most of the top ten books sold in publishing have some kind of Indiana Jones influence. That character was a wonderful creation of George Lucas, a guy who wanted to be either a drag racer or an anthropologist; instead, he became a filmmaker. And what he did was much better for many industries, especially history; he made it fun through the character of Indiana Jones. I see Indiana Jones all over each copy I receive of Biblical Archaeology Review, which I have been getting for over 40 years now. It’s undoubtedly my favorite topic. Because of my very popular blog that, I operate like a newspaper, many people think I am obsessed with politics. And I am very interested in politics. But mythology, comparative religion, and history, in general, are what I put most of my efforts into. I spend about 70 hours a week professionally. I spend about 30 hours a week on political “things.” And the rest of the time, I spend reading, exploring, and contemplating. It is not uncommon, as many people with hostile intent have learned, that I am up often at 2 AM walking around my yard or going up and down my street thinking about things I have read. I don’t sleep much because I love history topics so intensely, and I am always in some sort of study of those topics. Indiana Jones made history as an industry that made normally boring topics, fun, and I think this new film will do much as the previous films have done for the study of history, bring joy and adventure to it, and the human consciousness will grow in healthy ways. 

And because I’m interested in this subject, I watched the coverage of the Cannes Film Festival, which played in the middle part of May in France, where Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was shown to a large audience. The Disney people, especially Bob Iger, the CEO, think they have a good movie in the new Indiana Jones film, and they decided to rush it out to reviewers to get some positive buzz going on the film. And they need it; as I have been talking about, Disney is in big trouble on multiple fronts. They have invested too much in ESG scores, BlackRock political values, and their company’s commitments have been slowly destroying them. They are not the same company they were ten years ago, and ten years from now, I think we will perhaps not see them in entertainment as an influencer at all. It is that bad for Disney. And I’m not a fan of Bob Iger, a big-time liberal who has committed to the global citizen movement, gambling that globalism would be the new transition economic force, so he has steered his company in that direction. But globalism is failing across the world. People want American nationalism, and even in broken-up countries on the other side of the globe, people want to think about the idea of America, not a bunch of bureaucrats in the European Union who the Administrative State so paralyzes they can’t even tie their shoes or a China approach with centrally managed communism that completely steamrolls the individuals of society into mashed potatoes who serve corrupt oligarchs like some top-heavy aristocracy. 

But I don’t think Bob Iger is an idiot. I think he did a pretty good job as the Disney CEO over the previous decade. However, it was a house of cards that was eventually going to fall, so I think it was a horrendous idea for him to return to attempt to save Disney because he was just going to sink himself in the process. He knows he needed a hit with Indiana Jones, so he stepped in and encouraged the filmmakers to make a film that people would want to see, to take out some of the Kathy Kennedy from Lucasfilm’s wokeness that was showing itself to be very unpopular with Bud Light, Target, and essentially the rise of the MAGA movement in politics. Bob and the gang made a pretty good movie that they thought would serve fans enough and not compromise their commitment to ESG measures, and they were in a rush to show it to the public. And, of course, the results were devastating. It was the worst thing they could have done. It would have been better in this media climate to surprise everyone at the release date instead of trying to create positive buzz for the film a month early. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes out on June 30th, so that’s a lot of time to have people who now hate Disney because of its commitment to woke policies to criticize everything that they do, from The Little Mermaid to the destruction of Pixar, the ruin of Star Wars, and now another Indiana Jones film that many of the critics who saw the film are saying is worse than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. 

I personally liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It injected into publishing hundreds and hundreds of interesting books that I spent many thousands of hours reading over the last decade, so I was very happy with it. And I think that will certainly happen with this new movie, The Dial of Destiny, with the plot point being that of the Greek mathematician Archimedes. I think the concept for this film is much more interesting than a time travel movie like Back to the Future. This one deals with quantum entanglement, which people know is something I spend a lot of time considering and the nature of dimensional reality outside our four dimensions. But Disney underestimated the negative power of new media, so once their critics like Variety and the BBC came out negatively against the new Indiana Jones film, the new media types on YouTube, who have become the new influencers, pounced. It didn’t matter how good or bad the new Indiana Jones film was because it’s a Disney project, and as a company that has been committed to woke policies, they have made themselves open season for intense criticism, which will impact the opening of the new film. Iger should have held his cards and just let the film tell its own story when it was released. I’m sure I’ll find things I like about the new film, and I’m sure that the wokeisms will be there and I won’t like those. But I do think that Disney realized that Indiana Jones required some fan service and that they attempted to give that to this new film as a peace offering to their audiences. But it has had the opposite effect, and in some ways, I feel sorry for everyone involved in the film. They are feeling the pain of using their movies to sell political messages that the world doesn’t want. And when they thought they had surrendered to the fans a bit, they have only been slapped harder, which is the story coming out of the Cannes Film Festival. No matter how good the movie is, because of any connection to woke Disney, people are going to hate it because that is the political climate we are all in now. Globalism is the enemy; people know it and express themselves accordingly. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business