Category: Philosophy

Why Trump Won: Brand building is the key to establishing and maintaining relationships

So many important lessons can be learned from the Trump election of 2024.  But, the reason Trump won has yet to be talked about much.  The assumption is that Elon Musk came in at the last minute, after the assassination attempt in July, and put many millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign as the world’s richest man.  But to assume that, you would have to believe that money wins elections and that those who raise the most money and spend it will win the election.  Of course, the media, which sells ads and makes its money off politics during elections, wants everyone to think that.  But it wasn’t true.  Kamala Harris spent on her 2024 campaign 1.5 billion dollars and ended up, at the end of it, millions of dollars in debt.  She spent more than she had, which was a lot.  Who in their right mind gave her money who had that kind of money?  I could have told them they were wasting their time.  Wait, come to think of it, I did tell them.  But they didn’t listen.  Reports say that Trump spent much less than that, hovering around the 1 billion dollar mark, which is what many think it takes to run for president these days, but I’m not even sure that is the case.  But the bottom line is that Kamala spent a lot of money and didn’t move the needle in any kind of positive direction.  So why?  That’s the most critical question.  If Trump and Kamala spent even more money, why did the money spent work more for one, not the other?  So you can’t say that Elon Musk bought Trump the election, that would not be accurate. Instead, something much more important happened, and Trump did a masterful job at it, as we would all expect. 

A person’s brand is one of the most essential attributes of their personality; it’s how people come to know you and what they think of you when you aren’t around them anymore.  In everything you do in life, you must build your brand and use it to gain cooperation from your peers.  I have a very strong brand presence on many fronts.  For instance, I was having a fancy dinner with many people with strong opinions about my brand.  We were all ordering dessert, and the people with us at this dinner were from all over the world.  So I ordered a cake with many special effects to demonstrate how extraordinary the desserts were at this dinner and encourage our guests to be a little daring.  After all, I figured my brand was so good that I could handle a little wildness.  So I ordered a special cake, which came out with dry ice spewing everywhere. A tree made of cotton candy came out on top of it.  Those combinations of things made my dinner guests laugh because of the contrasts.  They were not very “manly” things to do and seemed like something they would never expect coming from me.  But that’s also why the Trump Dance works for Trump at rallies; it contrasts his tough guy image.  That image is his brand, and it’s how people learn the nature of the values of the advocate.  Without a brand image to maintain, my ordering the cake and the reaction to it would have just been about food.  But I made it into something else to advance why we were having the dinner together in the first place, as a team-building event that people would not soon forget. 

Trump has been one of the best in the world at building and applying brands.  His family name, Trump, is recognized worldwide and establishes quality and luxury for those who see it.  Trump built the brand over a long period and, about ten years ago, decided to use it to put America on its back and to Make America Great Again.  When people saw the Trump Brand anywhere in the 80s and 90s, they think of wealth and luxury, which is a way for Trump to take The Power of Positive Thinking and apply it to wealth generation.  So when Trump decided to run for office in 2015, he just brought his brand with him and beat Hillary Clinton based on the strength of his brand, as he spent a fraction of the money most campaigns would to win such a high office.  When he disrupted the system and everyone in the world came after him, Trump used his brand to rise above the critics in a way only his extensive, positive brand would have allowed.  Like my story about the cake, if you have a strong brand, you can provoke much action that either supports or contrasts it.  For my dinner guests, expecting an uncompromising gunslinger to shoot anybody who does injustice is a sharp contrast to sitting there eating a chocolate cake with pink cotton candy all over the top.  Showing such a moment of comparison within my brand earns trust because it contrasts my customary behavior.  But without the brand, there wouldn’t be any opinions or jokes to evolve a dialogue of trust that was needed for such a moment.  On a much larger scale, Trump used his brand to carry the lofty goal of Making America Great Again into a value system people felt they could invest in.  And they did.

One of my favorite campaign items from the 2024 election is a Trump 2024 switchblade.  I obtained it under unusual conditions, and it was undoubtedly one of the best souvenirs of Trump I had ever seen during the election.  Trump’s name was on everything, from knives to hats to shirts, flags, glasses, anything and everything.  And that was because Trump had built a brand that gave value to obtaining those items.  That Trump knife would be just another knife if it didn’t have Trump 2024 written on it.  On the other hand, Kamala spent a lot more money trying to create an impression, but her brand didn’t have roots in which people could invest.  So, as she tried to make an impression on voters, she did not have a brand that people could understand and invest in.  Nobody was rushing out to buy a Harris hat or shirt.  But people were flocking to buy a Trump hat.  They couldn’t make enough of them.  And in the end, that is what ended up mattering most.  Even though Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the MAGA movement and Trump himself, it was Trump who built a brand worth investing in.  Without the brand, the money was tossed to the wind like drunk gamblers in a casino late at night. The brand allows people to invest in the person who built it, for better or worse.  But once you have the brand, you can use it to sell ideas to people who have enough rooting to grab on and take action.  And the Democrats, they didn’t do any of that.  They tried to create impressions but had no substance behind their brand to sell an idea.  That caused them to toss much money at the effort only to have it wasted because there was no brand worth investing in.  So the ideas that Democrats had couldn’t be sold to a public so empty that they’d buy any impression.  When it came to Trump, people bought into a brand he had built for over 4 decades, and he put it all at risk to become president.  And as a result, the brand outlasted the attempts to destroy it.  Now, with that brand value, America can do as Trump’s brand indicates: to Make America Great Again.  When people see that term, they think of quality, wealth, and tenacity.  And the nation can rally to the cause because a brand can sell the idea and sustain the results.  Rather than just creating more false impressions that people have become long weary of.  And this will be the case for politics over the coming century.  It’s not enough to spend money. Instead, the money has to have a brand that people want to invest in and make it their own. 

Rich Hoffman

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

We Need More Kids: Birthrates need to increase dramatically

I haven’t let myself get too encouraged by Elon Musk’s “Occupy Mars” campaign.  He’s been excited about it for more than three decades now, and he has made himself a multi-billionaire, with the projection to become the first trillionaire not for the love of money and fame that comes with such enterprises but simply because he wants to bring science fiction, that he loved as a kid, to reality through engineering excellence.  I didn’t think he had much chance until this last election, and I’m glad he did what he had to do to see his vision through.  It wasn’t enough to be one of the world’s greatest inventors.  I remember the stories of Edison, who was incredibly late in life trying to solve the riddle of manufacturing rubber for the upcoming car industry, which was a real problem.  What Edison never solved was the politics of the matter.  And, of course, Edison’s employee, Tesla, had all kinds of great ideas about energy and how it could be distributed.  Edison’s method won out because it required infrastructure, the government could manage it, and unionized employees could stick themselves right in the middle of the whole thing and give us the uninventive mess we have today.  Seldom do good ideas break through to the kinds of frontiers that Elom Musk is about to enjoy because he moved his politics toward the winning Trump administration, which is about to unload on the world all the best that science fiction could give us.  A significant boom to the aerospace markets for which SpaceX will be able to do all it ever thought about and more.  Suddenly, going to Mars and colonizing it is very viable, with real economic value coming directly from it, and it will all be very exciting.  I’m officially a major supporter of the Occupy Mars movement.  It is the most exciting thing we can do as human beings.

But a math problem has been at the heart of all our politics for centuries now.  The responsibility for adventure or the sacrifice to higher powers is at the heart of earth worship.  So, our next technical objective to overcome is not the engineering feats of getting to Mars, colonizing it, and terraforming the planet to restore it to a vibrant place that was likely full of life.  The problem now is with human beings being able to wrap their minds around the whole effort, and for that, I have found myself obsessed with reexamining King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and studying all the vast tunnels under the city and understanding the importance of the most contested piece of real estate on planet earth.  Because I’m one of those people who think the evidence all adds up to Jerusalem being necessary to the seeding of Earth from a distant point in history, more than 10,000 years ago, and the cave under the Holy of Holies which is now concealed by the Dome of the Rock under Islam control was there long before Abraham went to that spot to kill his son Isaac in a sacrifice to God.  I think we are about to make a series of earth-shattering discoveries that date many of these things to much longer than we typically measure them, and the ramifications will indeed be jarring to all involved.  That’s all part of the adventure.  Because what’s important here is at the heart of most of the world’s problems, do you advance life through sacrifice, as they did at that Temple?  Or do you advance life through science and thought?  The new incoming Trump administration will rule through thought.  He, Trump, has been given a divine mandate to fight back against the forces of evil that have held back the human race for many thousands of years.  And it’s going to get untangled over this next Trump term. 

That leaves us to talk about birthrates.  We have needed them to increase for several years.  We have a culture that has openly sought to cheapen life, to kill their babies much the way the ancient Canaanites did to their Mesopotamian Gods, especially Baal, who is the real villain of the Bible.  Baal, the dominating god of nature, is in constant combat with Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew people and author of the Ten Commandments.  One group wanted to kill their kids to prop up the sentiment to their deity of choice, the nature-worshipping cultures of Baal or the self-fulfilling, creative cultures of Yahweh.  We need many more children on Earth to migrate human beings into space, and that is considering the massive amount of AI that will be required.  We are talking about the plot of the movie Blade Runner here, the morality of the nature of life itself, and whether or not robots will have human rights as a form of intelligence.  These are significant issues, but the bottom line is that if we want to put 1 million people on Mars by the very near date of 2050, which we do, just 25 years from now, then we have to change a lot of our life policies from what they have been to what they need to be.  We need many more families having many more kids than they have been, and they need to have fun doing it. 

We need to get back to the birthrates of the past, where families often had five or more kids all the time.  My grandparents lived during such a time.  My grandmother was a twin, and her mom had so many kids that they traded them like baseball cards.  “Hey, I have an extra one of these. Do you want one.”  A family member took her brother because my grandmother’s family had way more kids than they could afford to take care of themselves.  Some of these families had more than ten kids each.  This kind of Western expansion mentality is essential to human growth stages, and we need to exceed even that in the next few years to expand human life into space the way we need to.  Depressing that ambition is simply a held sentiment to the old Baal worship of the Canaanites and other sacrificial cultures around the world.  Our low birthrates of today are caused by social sentiment toward earth worship, to keep humans attached to their mother, and not to grow up healthy and independent as a culture of adventurers.  But to cleave close to mother in an unhealthy way that stifles us permanently, and ultimately destroys our species for the good of the planet, and views humans as a virus upon that mother which needs to be destroyed.  Ultimately, human growth into space is to settle that long-residing dispute in Jerusalem. Do we kill our kids to sever the jealous whims of a broken-minded deity, or do we have lots of kids and treasure them all as representatives of human consciousness and the perpetuation of the creative spirit of humanity into everlasting life born from the earth, but to settle the cosmos on a series of many adventures that was the point all along.  And to that, I say, “Occupy Mars!” 

Rich Hoffman

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

We Have Free Elections Because of Guns: Criminals know who has them, and who doesn’t

When on Meet the Press recently, President Trump was asked why Democrats didn’t steal this election, too, as they had the one in 2020, as if to insist that his statements about that previous election were a provoking conspiracy theory.  Trump said simply that he thought the election was too big to rig this time, which is a good, honest statement.  But it’s not the rest of the story.  It’s only part of the reason why Democrats were not able to steal this 2024 election the way they had 2020, and likely, many other elections leading up to Trump’s first term in the White House.  The truth is, it’s guns that make a free society possible.  Without the threat of guns, our government, especially this last one run by Joe Biden and his gangs of thugs and criminal-driven losers, would have taken over everything.  Without a society of guns, there would be no freedom.  The bad guys would move to take over all of society and rule from fear if given even an inch of opportunity.  So, to answer the rest of the question regarding Trump’s Meet the Press interview, why didn’t Democrats steal this last election, or that they tried but couldn’t get away with it this time?  Or, why was the election too big to rig?  What kept the election too small to overcome Trump?  And that answer is guns.  A society that has high gun ownership and is willing to use them at a moment’s notice.  Guns force the government to stay somewhat honest, not because they are inclined to do so, but because they fear a public that shoots and kills them the moment they get out of control.  We cannot have honest elections without the bad guys fearing an angry public that is willing to use guns to stop their evil intentions.

I had the opportunity to host many people this past week who are not from West Chester.  They came from all over the country, and guns were in the news.  One of the news stories was the UnitedHealthcare CEO, who was gunned down in the streets of New York.  That provoked a conversation about West Chester, Ohio, considered one of the safest areas in the nation.  But there was an attempted break-in and the resident shot the perpetrator just for standing on his balcony at an apartment complex.  And the comments were, “West Chester isn’t very safe because there was just a shooting.”  And speaking from much experience, I clarified that guns were critical in both cases.  There are many criminals who would love to break in and rob people blind in Butler County, Ohio, and Mason, places criminals know have much money and lots of things to steal and innocent lives to ruin.  But they don’t because they are respectful of the law, leaving everyone alone.  No, they are bad, vicious people who would rob, rape, and murder anybody, anywhere, anytime, if they could get away with it, just as there were plenty of people who would have stolen this 2024 election if they could have gotten away with it.  But the bad guys know that fundamentally, Americans have many guns, and if they do break the law, it’s not the prosecution of those crimes that is their most significant risk; it’s surviving the crime.  And that West Chester is safe because guns provide a deterrent.  I had just returned with my guests from downtown Cincinnati, and they were talking about the news stories they had noticed upon visiting. I had driven them through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city to show them the policy contrast.  Places where there was a lot of gun ownership.  And places that had policies against guns that had allowed, by default, crime to grow in the power void. 

The killing of the  UnitedHealthcare CEO was another example.  It is foolish, no matter how civil you think society is, to walk down any street, anywhere, without a gun.  Now, in the case of  Brian Thompson, the killed CEO, he was shot in the back deliberately, and it’s hard to defend against that kind of attack.  He was just walking along the sidewalk, and he was shot unexpectedly and without warning.  He should have been more aware of his surroundings.  But part of the scouting report on making a killing like that is whether the shooter believes they will get away with the crime if they perform the task.  The shooter was not concerned that Brian Thompson would have turned around and shot back if he missed or didn’t hit his target ruthlessly.  People are not honest; you cannot have a lawless society based on trust.  To have rules, you must be able to enforce them immediately at the point of occurrence.  The court system is not fast enough to deal with all the crimes, and the criminals know it.  Too many criminals work hard to be bad people and hope to take advantage of your trust to commit crimes and enrich themselves at your expense.  It isn’t brilliant to expect otherwise.  There should always be a preparedness for violence against you by anybody.  And the best way to stop it is by carrying deadly force everywhere.  And forcing the bad guys to stay honest and to leave you alone.  If Brian Thompson had been carrying a gun and were willing to use it, he would probably be alive right now.  When the target is armed, it is much harder to shoot them for many reasons. 

That goes back to our discussion about why one region is safer and why the ratio isn’t that one place has better laws than others.  It comes down to how much gun ownership is available and to what reach people have them.   Gun-free zones are hazardous places, statistically.  The more guns you have in society, the less violence you have.  And to my point, that story about the break-in in West Chester was good.  It reminds other criminals of what they already know but makes it fresh in their minds.  That if they are just standing on someone’s balcony at an apartment complex, they could be shot and killed.  Protection of private property is the key to a civil society, and the word gets out quickly.  Don’t abuse people’s property and their sense of self-preservation.  Or they can, and will, be shot and killed.  So that news story was helpful.  Occasionally, bad guys do need to get shot to remind the hoards of other criminals that they should not break into people’s homes or inflict violence upon them in any way.  Because without guns around under the care of private citizens, criminals get pretty bold.  And that is the same regarding honest elections.  Those who would seek to steal a vote and alter the nature of a free people to pick their government will try to steal elections if they do not fear people with guns preventing them from doing it.  And that this 2024 election was too big to rig because there were too many guns from angry people who were onto the scam.  So, Democrats couldn’t get enough votes to steal this election as they had others in the past.  The limits to their power were in gun ownership, and that kept the bad guys from stealing this last election, and why we finally have President Trump going back to the White House.  We have free elections because of guns. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Jill Biden Has Eyes For Trump: What could have been if only she had the courage

For good reason, there has been a lot of talk about that picture with Jill Biden and Trump at Notre Dame.  With her daughter, Ashley Biden, sitting next to her, the camera caught a moment that Jill revealed a lot in just a look.  And wonderfully, Trump turned it into a new body fragrance ad.  But there is a lot to talk about that is essential here.  Here was Jill Biden, an older woman now, with a daughter who had been sexually abused by her father, gazing at a man who was authentic and unlike anything they had ever met; even though, as First Lady, she had met some of the world’s most brilliant and influential people.  There was nobody in her life like Trump—a conqueror who had defeated her husband in the last election.  Being close to the same age, Biden seemed so much older, whereas Trump was almost childlike, and ambitious.  That look by Jill to Trump, who was sitting next to her at the re-opening of the Notre Dame cathedral, has the kind of flirty look that a 4th-grade girl might have before her first kiss.  Many wonder why that was and what she would see in Trump to provoke such a gaze.  And is it that rare in the world for political enemies to put aside their differences for just a minute and enjoy each other?  The answer is obviously “yes,” but it brings up something that is a long and desperate yearning in the human race, and that is the female quest for the best that they can get as a sexual partner based on the fantasies of attraction, which everyone is hard-wired for.  Yet life and its quality come down to a person’s choices, and women often find themselves victims of bad decisions.  And even after a lifetime of them, that innocent girlish smile of first experiences never gets old.

Like many women, Jill Biden had men come and go in her life.  It is entirely possible that she had never met a person like Trump.  There are other men like Trump in the world, very confident, self-assured people who are conquerors in their own right over their destinies, and women tend to love such men for all that they can be and to fulfill the fantasy of using sexual power to have a relationship with one.  But often, it takes personal courage to even entertain such an antisocial relationship, because the rules of society are meant to favor the losers of the world.  And for men, many of our social rules have come about with the expectation that it would allow them to be louses and perform poorly in the world.  So, when a woman meets a man who does not function from such rules, she is going to feel the joy of such elation even if she has been associating with the world’s top people from a social perspective and has acquired the highest social status that a human being could ever hope for.  And it’s highly likely, because of her terrible choices throughout her life, that she had never met a man like Trump.  Because it takes courage to do so, and most women turn away from those opportunities early in their life, yielding to the pressures of social acceptance.  As sad as it is, loser husbands like Joe Biden, who took inappropriate showers with his daughter, and permanently damaged her psychologically, are expected in this world.  Probably because of the kind of social circles that Jill Biden functioned in her entire life, she only met men who would do such a thing and think it okay.

Trump, on the other hand, has had to learn how to beat down all the female advances that come his way.  And it took most of his life to learn to do so.  But yes, when you are an unconquered spirit, you are the fantasy of almost every woman, and that is a power that must be managed carefully.  It can be very tempting to yield to every whim for the affections of a woman who wants to make a lasting impression for a night, a day, a week, or years.  It’s a primal passion that comes from more than just smelling good.  But Trump understands the power of a picture like that and has smartly had fun with it to take the edge off reality, “Buy my new cologne, Fight, Fight, and it will win over your enemies.”  But the truth is that Jill was thinking about all the losers in her life and was wondering if she could even taste such a man for a fleeting second with her husband gone in an exciting city at a place of history, even at her age.  Turn off the cameras.  Get a room someplace.  Could she have such a moment with an unconquered man?  A man who had the entire world try to destroy him, and he bravely brushed away all the danger to sit there next to her, a hero, the most admired man in the world.  And the most hated.  Yet he didn’t feel the pressure to yield to the hate.  Oh, what a look Jill Biden let loose in front of her sexually abused daughter, an abused country, and a world under the thumb of tyranny to think of stealing away a kiss while his wife was not with him. 

It’s not like this would be the first time with Jill.  She left her first husband after he wrote Joe Biden one of his first campaign checks for elected office.  Like most women who find they can use sex to gain power, she jumped from one man to another because Joe looked like he was going to be a winner.  He drove sports cars and was rising in politics, so she left her husband and ran off with Joe.  And likely, she has thought of doing the same thing with many other men over the years.  As a result, she has only known evil men her entire life and never met someone like Trump until that moment in Notre Dame.  And like the long-repressed school girl wondering if the guy she liked might kiss her and that her entire life might be changed at that moment, she joined the millions of other women who have made the same dumb mistakes, and that was to join with just another, average, loser man.  Joe Biden was President of the United States.  He was head of a crime family that sold influence with elected office, going back to selling his office as a senator and Vice President.  But to Jill, he was just another used-up, broken man falling asleep on the beach, waiting to die.  And there was Trump, full of life.  He had beautiful things around him and had the world dancing to his every move. Yeah, she wanted to kiss him. To run away with him.  To undo all her life’s missteps and throw them away for just a moment of impropriety with Trump.  And she couldn’t hide the thought from her face.   Many women secretly go through the same process.  They look on the couch and see their beat-up, lazy husbands hiding behind the feminist movement because they are too lazy to be good.  They become victims to the times and then declare that the day’s fashion is to yield to their women and do whatever they say.  But Trump is his own man, and a few others out there think the same way.  And most women, in some way, wish they could access one.  But most, especially Jill Biden, never had the courage to go on such an adventure in her youth.  And now, as an older woman with all the best things in her life behind her, she could only wonder what could have been.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Lion King Goes to Notre Dame: Deposing the global villians and restoring a king

I was very excited to see President Trump represent America at the re-opening of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.  I have a personal relationship with that cathedral, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to see it again.  When it was burnt down by what we now know were radical Islamic terrorists, not an electrical short as we had been told, I was furious because I had just gone on a trip there with my family to visit the historical site, and we witnessed up close and personal just how radicalized Paris had become as we walked the distance from the train station speed train from London through all the neighborhoods to the historic site.  We saw the radicalism up close, so it was no surprise that a year after we visited, Notre Dame, like several other catholic churches, was burnt to the ground over a holy war provoked by some of the world’s worst characters barely concealed behind polite society.  I had been following the restoration of the cathedral closely, and when Trump won the election and it was reported that he would be attending the re-opening, it was more than satisfying considering all that had happened.  But as I watched him arrive and take his seat, with all eyes upon him, spying a gaze upon the world’s most powerful person, I couldn’t help but think of a couple of popular Disney movies for the context of what we were seeing.  Usually, when he is thought about, Trump is considered a lion more than an elephant of the Republican party.  So Simba from The Lion King came to mind as the only proper reference.  Then, of course, there are the various Hunchback of Notre Dame movies that are so much a part of our entertainment culture.  But the way the world looked at Trump at that event was like a king returned very much following the plot of The Lion King, and suddenly Trump was there, as was a restored representation of Western civilization.  And it was very satisfying.

I had been very vocal when the cathedral was burnt down. I made my opinion public with written articles and told anybody who wanted to listen or interview me, what I thought.  My family visited in 2017, and we bonded with the place historically. I felt the attack was a personal affront to me and Western civilization as a whole.  And I got into a lot of trouble professionally over the Notre Dame incident.  Several people went for my jugular because they thought the world was going to become a progressive monstrosity and that they were going to cancel culture me out of existence for insisting that radical Islamic terrorists were responsible for the violence in Paris.  After all, we had seen it firsthand.  As a family, we walked over 15 miles all over Paris, so we weren’t reporting helicopter opinions about the place.  But those were the early stages of woke cancel culture, and it was stunning that I was made a target over saying the obvious, and that didn’t go over well.  My anger was further entrenched.  Of course, I survived it all, and the people who did all they did to me are no longer around, and I can only say they did it to themselves.  I tried to warn them, but they didn’t listen.  When you play hardball, the ball hurts when you get hit with it, and I threw it back with some juice.  However, like the Lion King movie and famous stage play, which I have seen many times, Trump was a character very similar to Simba and would soon be cast out as an exile.

Before we visited Notre Dame, back in London, there were protests against Trump outside of Parliament by Big Ben, and the world was seeking to overthrow President Trump’s American influence over globalism.  We would, of course, watch over the next few years as the American-lettered agencies working with scandalous characters on the world stage plotted the demise of President Trump and threw him out of office with the same kind of flair that Scar killed the father Mufasa in The Lion King to the now famous soundtrack of Hans Zimmer, to theatrical effect.  With one of the great symbols of Western civilization destroyed and an American president overthrown through massive election fraud, things were not looking good in the world.  And we all know the story of The Lion King, as Scar took over the tribe, represented here by Joe Biden and his band of globalist insurgents and Chinese connections, things went downhill quickly.  The world started drowning in inflation and terrifying woke policies.  And all look hopeless for a long time.  But like The Lion King, the castaway exile, Simba learned to be a king, and eventually, he would return and depose Scar and get revenge for what had happened to his tribe. And the return would be triumphant and celebrated, just as it was when Trump returned to the fully restored Notre Dame cathedral.  The cathedral and the American presidency had been targeted for attack and destruction as the enemies of the world plotting the doom of Western civilization itself with diabolical plots of evil and mayhem.  And like Scar, they thought they had won the throne forever.  But those dreams shattered once the king returned.

There were periods over the last few years when I thought we’d never see anything good again.  After the burning down of Notre Dame and the way many progressive elements, already significantly entrenched in the United States, were behaving towards a progressive plot over the demise of all Western civilization, I figured it was all coming to an end.  I remember thinking at a checkpoint during Covid, where I was fully ready for a shootout with authorities over an unconstitutional search and seizure event, that this was how it all ended.  Luckily, when I told the authorities that they were smoking crack if they thought what they were doing was legal, they didn’t push it because they knew they were in the wrong during the Covid lockdowns.  And nobody had to draw guns and fire at each other.  But it got close.  I was the only one on the roads for about three weeks in March of 2021, and I had decided I wouldn’t put up with Scar running the world I was living in.  Like Rafiki in The Lion King, I cheered on the king’s return as the best solution, and that is precisely what happened.  And Trump made a triumphant return to Notre Dame as the world who plotted the demise of him and all of us looked on with sudden admiration.  Trump was the celebrity the world wanted, even the bad guys, and it took all this for them to realize it.  And suddenly, the King returned from exile, and the great cathedral was restored. Then, the world looked a whole lot better.  Happy endings are real, and that Notre Dame event was proof of it. As scary as it was, we’ve seen it before in our fantasies, like the story of The Lion King.  We have all lived through it, being taken over by our version of Scar, the villain.  And the world suffered terribly while Simba was in exile.  But after a triumphant return, the world watched with happiness and gazed upon the king as he returned to lead Western civilization forward in ways nobody previously thought possible.  And the world was suddenly a much better place.

Rich Hoffman

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

Why D.O.G.E. Will Be Successful Where Others Have Failed: Vivek Ramaswamy and I share close personal friends, and everyone gets it–this time

Vivek Ramaswamy and I share close personal friends.  I happened to have had dinner with a few of them the other day, and we had an excellent talk about D.O.G.E., this new Department of Government Efficiency, and what it was that would make it successful as opposed to every other attempt in history to reign in government overreach and waste at the expense of taxpayer budgets.  We also talked about their appearance in Time Magazine, a special commemorative to President Trump.  From my own experience, I have been pointing out government waste for a few decades now.  To take on a job like this, you have to have independent wealth to a certain extent.  Suppose you are making money off the system. In that case, it is nearly impossible to reform the system, and most of the political figures that have come and gone through the Washington D.C. culture may have had a lot of money, but they aren’t independently wealthy.  To manage something or to reform it, you can’t be a desperate fool trying to rub two dimes together that you found in a couch to make a penny.  You need to be able to insulate yourself to have objective thought.  That is what makes Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk unique at this point in history; they are independently wealthy.  Trump is independently wealthy.  Most people joining Trump at the White House are independently wealthy, and Democrats have taken notice.  They have an unnatural hatred of wealth which is part of the problem.  At the heart of all government waste are these anti-capitalist, money-hating unions that have a side story of collapsing the entire economic system of the United States, and that is certainly the philosophy behind the labor movement, which is at the heart of the problem.  So I was talking about this issue at a nice, intimate dinner, and I can just tell everybody, this D.O.G.E. thing won’t be like anything else ever done or attempted before.  And, it could only happen because of the independent wealth of the leadership.  Because to do the job correctly, you have to have the objectivity to avoid the face up against the glass perspective that most in government always have.  And solve the problem for good.   I know from personal experience that Vivek Ramaswamy is one of the few who are qualified and able to perform the task.

Of course, I’ve been involved in the background many times to try something like this D.O.G.E., such as SB5 back in 2012, where there was an effort to make public sector unions illegal in Ohio.  This has been a problem for a long time; unions are attached to government labor because you can’t have any meaningful discussions about budget reform with radical left-winged unions running the budgets.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a public school or the FBI.  Too many government agencies are locked in place, and too many labor unions pay people too much to work too little.  So, taking that problem on involves many people who make money off the chaos, including many politicians who built that system.  Many became very rich from insider trading, so once everyone drinks from that cup of corruption, there is no going back, and things get out of control.  The SB5 effort failed for many reasons, but it came down to independent wealth.  Too many people involved in the reform were in their key income-making years and could not be objective about the necessity of government operations.  They feared not making their own money out of that process, so they were too weak to perform the task when the rubber hit the road.

The Tea Party effort tried to work with the system for many years, but the SWAMP was deep, and the alligators and pythons wanted to eat you every time you tried to pull the plug, so they were very vicious.  That means you can’t be a swamp creature and still drain that swamp so that we can make something much better.  I remember when I first met Vivek Ramaswamy through the friends mentioned and others, and we talked about where he was in life.  I understood, and he asked me if I wanted a picture with him while we were talking.  I felt strange about it; I’m not the kind who does that very much.  But looking back on it, it was one of those pinnacle moments.  A year later, I had him sign a copy of his book Woke Inc. because I felt he was on to something unique and special.  He wrote in front of my book, “Speak Freely,” because at that time, he didn’t know what he was going to do.  Maybe he would be a senator or the President, but he would use his independent wealth to try and give something back and fix this government waste problem.  He understood that the way to do that was not to attack the problem where it was most potent, but in other ways, such as through free speech, so he wrote what he did in my book.  Vivek Ramaswamy had earned the ability to criticize the system through his private wealth because he wasn’t dependent on it for his livelihood. 

Ironically, that is precisely where Elon Musk is in his life.  What good is being the wealthiest person in the world if the world is declining in value?  It’s not the stuff you can buy, but it’s what the stuff is worth that matters.  And how D.O.G.E. will work was outlined in Vivek’s books.  I saw this early on and have been very excited about that approach.   I knew it would work and that Vivek was on to something that could have only come from his unique perspective.  And that D.O.G.E. will be very effective, not in the way that the government unions are ready for.  They are not prepared to fight on this front but believe me, we have tried to give them all a fair shake, and they spit in our faces.  Don’t try to befriend people who spit in your face.  If they want to destroy themselves, then let them.  And that, ultimately, is what will happen with D.O.G.E. and why it will succeed while all other attempts have failed.  When we’ve had government shutdowns in the past, it was always what labor took away to extort resolution through pain and suffering, the typical radical labor union perspective.  People are tired of that type of management method and are ready for a barrage of free speech on the matter, which only people who are independently wealthy can afford to utter.  In that way, government reform won’t be done through the front door of legislative control, which Congress can hide behind by saying that the rules of government labor tie their hands.  But that the foundation that all the rules were built to protect the very lazy and corrupt from the merits of judgment reside that will be dealt with, for really, the first time in the history of the world.  And I am thrilled to see it and that Vivek Ramaswamy is at the heart of the reform.  I know it will be successful because he and many others are also involved in very healthy ways in front and behind the scenes.  And it’s about time!

Rich Hoffman

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

All Trump’s Picks Should Easily Get Confirmed: Democrats don’t have the political capital to take a stand

You must understand that this pushback against Trump’s cabinet picks is purely the swamp defending itself from change. Primarily driven by the same media that tried to insert Kamala Harris as a president.  The final results are that all of Trump’s picks will be approved, and the drama will die quickly in the coming weeks.  But we have to understand what kind of game is being played here; it’s the same high school game of popularity that Democrats and global communists try to apply to every social effort.  If you challenge their static order, you might be called a name.  Or they may not like you, and everyone likes to be liked.  So they use that trend against the incoming President Trump, in this case, to let him know that the Senate is in charge, which, in essence, is the desired belief of the media companies who are run by those financial globalists who want to think they are in charge of everything.  And that public sentiment can rule over their enemies with an iron fist.  This belief is that the Senate will be essentially 50/50 down the middle and that if only a few Republicans peel away as RINOs and stop Trump’s picks from being confirmed, such as Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, that they will be able to preserve their corrupt Beltway culture.  That notion is a fantasy because many other factors will go into the Senate confirmations, and it should be expected that all of Trump’s picks will quickly get confirmed without much controversy.  Because behind the defense mechanisms of the SWAMP itself is a grim reality: we are a Republic, not a flea-bitten democracy of social butterflies controlled by the popular kids in school.  Quickly, the tough-talking senators who desire to work against Trump will find that the real pressure on their votes will come from public disclosure, not a protection of the Beltway by those who have most corrupted it. 

For instance, let’s review the confirmation of the very corrupt and controversial Merrick Garland for Attorney General.  He won his confirmation easily with a 70-30 vote, meaning a lot of Republicans, many of the same names being mentioned now peeling away from Trump, voted with the Biden administration to give Democrats a fair shake of opinion under the “advise and consent” decree of Constitutional necessity.  And that is generally how it goes in all confirmations.  There aren’t many more controversial than that one, but there were around 20 senators who were willing to give Biden a fair shake, even if they disagreed with the President politically.  They wanted to show the incoming administration and other senators that they were willing to work with the other side to get things done for the American people.  At least by appearance.  They were the minority party essentially and did not feel they could dig in and take a stand against the presidential picks of a political change state.  So Merrick Garland sailed through without much of a hitch.  Most of these senators believe that it is their job to ask questions in public and provide an extra level of scrutiny that might otherwise go unnoticed.  However, they do not feel validated enough to stop a presidential administration from the start, but they feel it’s in their best interest to give the appearance to the public and the president of a willingness to work with everyone for the good of the Republic.  Most of them like being senators, and they don’t want to be thrown out at the next election because, ultimately, they must represent the general opinion of the public, not their personal desires. 

So the media is telling us that not one Democrat is going to vote for any of Trump’s picks and that a few RINO Republicans can completely derail President Trump’s incoming administration.  But the truth is, there are likely a lot of Democrats who will want to vote for Trump’s picks for all the same reasons that Republicans have done so in the past.  And by the time all the smoke clears, it won’t even be close.  And here’s why it is essential to understand this: because what’s been going on is a kind of Saul Alinsky control over the election process for far too long, and it has prevented us in the past from doing what needed to be done because we thought the media and other influencers had a lot more power than they actually had.  But they don’t have much power, really, in the end.  And once you buckle for one of these picks, like the blood in the water was with Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, then the bad guys will think they can character assassinate all the Trump picks and get away with it, such as with Robert Kennedy, who will be very controversial for Senators to consider.  But ultimately, they won’t have a choice.  Most of them have taken a lot of money from Big Pharma, and voting for Kennedy will be hard for them.  However, Republicans and Democrats know that there needs to be significant system reform and that only Kennedy can do it.  Otherwise, they will get wrapped up in all the bad COVID news that’s coming soon, including who knew what and when. And how much damage everyone up front knew the bioweapon of Covid was going to be as it was unleashed from China along a very purposeful trajectory.  Plenty of senators understood the situation and didn’t want to be on the wrong side of history, so they will vote for Kennedy so they wouldn’t be associated with stonewalling a criminal investigation that isn’t going away.  Especially after Brad Wenstrup’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Report that is coming out now.  (Don’t say I didn’t tell you all this years ago.  It’s all coming out and a lot of people are in a lot of trouble, as they should be) 

Trump was very popularly elected, and many Democrat Senators are trying to hold seats in states that Trump won.  So, while media leaks might try to show resistance to Trump popularity within their party politics when it comes time to put a vote on paper for the record, things tighten up considerably.  And none of the Trump picks are crazy like many of the Biden picks were, where cross-dressing freakshows were presented with more than a tongue in cheek, and the expectation to vote for them was hard pressed. Otherwise, those senators would be accused of standing in the way.  Many Republicans didn’t want that guilt by association, so they voted to confirm.  And there will be a lot of Democrats in the same boat, especially now that they are in the minority.  They don’t have the numbers to run an insurrection. Otherwise, their minority status will only increase in the negative direction.  The discussion we are having ahead of the confirmation hearings is just a hopeful fantasy of the Beltway SWAMP creatures hoping to stave off reform for as long as possible.  However, the Trump picks are all top of their field types and have a lot of media experience, so they won’t give any senators an easy way to vote no. However, the temptation to vote for confirmation will be pressure from the public to hold a seat on the record against a very popular president.  And nobody wants that.  Who thinks that John Fetterman won’t vote to confirm Trump’s picks?  He’s not the only Democrat Senator looking to survive the Trump presidency.  So, in the end, the few RINO Republicans who are left in the Senate are not going to be able to control the agenda.  It’s all too big for them, and that realization will hit everyone soon.  People are going to realize that we have been a Republic all along.  And being a representative is what matters most, not personal radicalism and ideology.

Rich Hoffman

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

Kash Patel is the Only Way to Save the FBI: Power hungry, corrupt, and pretentious, government employees need checks on their authority

The FBI was a wasted effort for me a long time ago.  When it was announced that Kash Patel would be Trump’s nominee to direct it, I thought only he could do anything to save the institution from destruction.  After what they did to Trump and many of us over the last decade, there is no forgiving them for their government activism, and really, a terrible job done.  And it’s a problem that goes far beyond the FBI.  I know people who have been in the FBI, and their mentality is very similar to the kind of nonsense we saw with Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe when he was grilled in front of Congress recently over the terrible coverage of Trump during an assassination attempt.  To avoid criticism, he went on the attack and cited his coverage of 9/11 and tried to play the “Hammer Time” card, “can’t touch this” because I’m a patriot angle.  It was embarrassing, but it revealed the same kind of arrogance we saw from former FBI directors, such as James Comey.  When Trump fired Comey for many good reasons, I was part of a panel that CNN called to talk about it, and I remember the attitude of the time.  Here was Jim Comey, who had just let Hillary Clinton off criminal conviction for her abuse of a public office with her email scandal and destruction of evidence, who was spying on Trump’s campaign and going on a personal crusade to destroy General Flynn, because Trump’s people were new and didn’t know all the rules of conduct.  Comey inspired the FBI to go on a witch hunt against Trump that would go on for eight more years and personally attempt to destroy Trump in every way possible.  Comey led a coup against an American-picked president by a civilian government, and his attitude was just like Ronald Rowe’s.  I’m important.  I work for the government.  Don’t ever question me, or I will yell at you. 

Trump fired Comey for his actions against him and Flynn, and he put in a swamp creature to appease his critics, Christopher Wray, and the FBI only got worse.  Trump tried to play the game fairly, and the FBI, from top to bottom, had no intention of being fair back.  They had government power, and they were hell-bent to use it.  And if you questioned them, you might be next for harassment.  And that’s what the CNN producers told me after we shot a spot for Anderson Cooper in the parking lot after I said what I said on the air about Comey after the first year of Trump’s first term.  It was apparent to me what was going on.  This was an out-of-control FBI, and Trump had just fired Comey, and the question at the time was whether Trump could have, or should have done so, based on the evidence at that time.  I used my usual velvet hammer response to talk about essentially a problematic subject matter when they asked me on the air if Comey had lied about his activism against Trump.  I also said that Comey was more like the fiction writer Ian Flemming, the creator of James Bond.  There was more about Comey that was fiction than was factual.  And for that, the CNN people told me the FBI would target me for talking against them on national television.  Of course, I told them I didn’t care; there wasn’t much they could do to me that they hadn’t tried to do up to that point.  I didn’t arrive at my conclusions about Trump recently, but I had a lot of experience with the FBI leading up to that point, and I thought I was being very nice about it.  All things considered.

But since then, the FBI has led the efforts to destroy Trump and his members of the former White House, especially Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navarro.  All of them were good men, and as I told everyone several years ago, Trump would put them back into his second term in the White House.  Fewer good people pursue justice than Rudy Giuliani, who was personally ruined by the Joe Biden White House.  Rudy had the now-famous laptop from Hell that had all the dirt on the Biden crime family, and the FBI tried to cover up that evidence with personal destruction against the guy who had the evidence.  I have watched the FBI many times over the years destroy evidence to drive a political narrative, and I have next to no trust in any of them at this point.  I always think of the Christmas shooting in San Bernadino by a radical Islamic couple as one of the worst examples in American history of an FBI coverup.  Right after the killings, and the couple who performed the acts of terrorism had just been killed, the FBI let the media into the couple’s apartment under cover of “full disclosure” and protecting the 1st Amendment.  But in reality, it was the purposeful destruction of a crime scene by letting the press ultimately contaminate the scene so nobody would learn anything about the terrorists.  I would say most of what the FBI does wrong is purposeful, such as not asking the following next layer questions when the terrorists of 9/11 wanted to learn how to fly planes from a Florida instructor, not to land them.  When you try to pin them down with criticism, they get all emotional and try to play a patriot card, just like that loser Ronald Rowe did.  They try to intimidate away criticism so nobody dares to question their lofty power in Washington, D.C. 

Kash Patel, who had the highest security clearance in government and was a great guy under Trump’s first administration, wrote the excellent book Government Gangsters and was all over the movie Police State.  I think the FBI, in its current form, is more dangerous than open terrorist organizations.  We would be better off without the CIA and FBI most of the time because they have become so corrupt and power-hungry.  Just reviewing the FISA warrant process that they abused against Trump shows the playbook they’d use against any of us to harass us over political disagreements.  Then, when they raided Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to knock off President Trump before he ever had a chance to return to the White House under a legitimate election, give me a break.  The FBI should be dismantled.   The only way to save it, and I mean the only way, is to put someone like Kash Patel in charge of it.  And the people who caused all this trouble don’t get a vote.  We aren’t going to be pushed around by losers like the Secret Service Director or James Comey, who was far more interested in wine tasting than rule of law ethics.  Comey showed himself to be a protector of Democrat Beltway politics at the expense of justice.  And those who came before and after him were no better.  So there isn’t anything to preserve.  Anybody who wants to try to make the FBI work properly would do well to get behind Kash Patel and support him without radicalism.  And be happy that he’s not as evil as most government employees are, self-centered, and corrupt beyond recognition.  I was always right about them, even when CNN pressed me in front of many people.  And I said it as politely as possible, but it doesn’t change the fact that we have never been able to trust the FBI with the kind of power they have had.  And it’s time for them to pay for the abuse of that power so the country can survive. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Why DEI Was Always a Dumb Idea: What we learned from the Swordsman Scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

I really loved the book about Howard Kazanjian called A Producer’s Life.  I’ve referenced it many times over the last several weeks because it was an enjoyable book.  It’s the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a while, and it is one that I promised myself I’d read if Trump was re-elected into the White House.  I wouldn’t let myself think about these kinds of things as what is in Howard’s book prior, even if I do love the topic.  For a large part of my life, I wanted to be a filmmaker, and Hollywood producers like Howard Kazanjian were the kind of people who inspired me.  He produced most of my favorite movies from a key period, when he was on top of the Hollywood pile with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and many others, with films from 1975 until 1982.   Howard was always good, but if you are trending good movies and who made them over the entire history of Hollywood, this specific period set the stage for what the industry would become, and mean to the world as a whole regarding entertainment.  So, I find it very interesting to study what went right and wrong during this period.  Ironically, learning these things is precisely why understanding DEI policies and why they failed is important.  Because currently, after the Trump election and his spectacular victory, the world is giving up on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, and rightfully so.  We’re not talking about a Republican versus Democrat position here; Howard Kazanjian, I would say, probably leans toward Hollywood liberalism and likely wanted Kamala Harris to win the election.  But with Trump back in office, the world is a lot better, and I have more tolerance for people who are not so bright on political matters.  Which is why I couldn’t let myself read a book like this before the election. 

In that book, I read a good illustrative example of why DEI failed and why companies needed to get rid of it for the sake of everyone.  Picking employees based on their skin color or assuming they are equal to other people and that they should be included in something just because they exist was always ridiculous.  Some people are better than others, and if you want something to be good, you have to find the best people and put them in place; that’s good management.  And in the movie business, good people are few and far between.  But Howard Kazanjian, during that period I mentioned, found a way to be around the best people in the business, and specifically, a conversation I had never heard about regarding the famous swordsman scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, being filmed in 1980 for a 1981 release.  Everyone, no matter who they are, knows the scene.  Indiana Jones is looking for his lost girlfriend, Marian, who the Nazis have captured on the streets of Cairo.  And he has to stop them with a glorious shootout with lots of explosions and good stuff.  Along the way, Indiana Jones is stopped by an Arab swordsman who wants to fight.  But the hero doesn’t have time for it.  What does he do?   People remember with great recollection that Indy pulls out his gun, shoots the villain on the spot with no fanfare, and gets back to looking for his girlfriend.  In all the documentaries of how that movie was made, we learned that Harrison Ford was sick that day and just did the scene as a joke because there was supposed to be a fight with bullwhips that was very elaborate, and the whole crew was sick of filming take after take.  When Spielberg saw what Harrison Ford did, he wanted to keep it as a new version and print it for the film.  But there was more to the story I heard in this book on Howard Kazanjian for the first time.

George Lucas still wanted his bullwhip fight scene.  One of the reasons he was making Raiders of the Lost Ark as the executive producer was to create a modern version of the kind of movies he liked as a kid, and he wanted a classic bullwhip fight like might have been in Don Q Son of Zorro, or Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  And he wasn’t convinced that just having Indiana Jones shoot the bad guy and get on with his business was the right thing to do.  So, here were the most talented filmmakers in movie-making history who disagreed with this famous scene.  So what were they going to do?  George Lucas decided to run two film versions by a test audience, one Spielberg’s way, the other with the bullwhip fight.  They were going to let market desire determine the film’s final version.  So they played George’s version first to a test audience.  People came out of the movie liking it, and Paramount Pictures felt they had a hit.  It was a good movie.  But when Spielberg’s version was seen, people applauded when Indiana Jones shot the swordsman.  And it became everyone’s favorite moment in the movie, even after all these years.  They made 5 Indiana Jones films over the next 40 years, but none would ever have a better moment than that one to mass audiences. 

Ultimately, even with all the talent of all these people involved, it was the marketplace that picked the scene. The filmmakers came up with ideas, but to determine the success of the enterprise, they tested the waters with market analysis. The audience clearly picked one version over the other, and the rest is filmmaking history.  Presently, they are test-screening the new Captain America movie for Disney, and it is going through all kinds of trouble because nothing is working.  The film is filled with a bunch of woke politics, and people don’t like it.  It’s going to bomb when it hits theaters in February.  Ultimately, that is why DEI programs destroyed market share and value for all companies, from cookie makers to high-tech offerings.  DEI was an imposed value put on the marketplace that would have been similar to George Lucas keeping his whip fight in the movie because he wanted it, to force the audience to like it because he did.  Instead of listening to them, which is what happened.  When companies try to impose themselves on the public and force values on them that they don’t have, failure is almost assured.  However, when products appeal to the audience’s sentiment, great success is possible.  It is rare because good ideas are complex, and companies often hang on to them even if the market pressure rejects them.  Only to plot an enterprise to its doom.  But when we say that getting rid of DEI suits all businesses everywhere, this is what we mean and why.  In capitalism, value serves the marketplace.  In authoritarian governments, values are imposed, and a monopoly status is sought that limits the viability of options.  And the world is far worse off because of it.  The best example of why some ideas work over other ideas can sometimes come from interesting places, which is undoubtedly the case with a movie most people agree has some value to them over time, and that is how Indiana Jones was created in that old classic movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Rejection of Freakshow Politics: Democrats had Joe Rogan, and they lost him because they had terrible messaging

There is a lot of talk by Democrats about what could have been in their messaging that could have caused them to win during this last election cycle.  And with Hunter Biden getting his pardon, one that everyone saw coming, there is a belief that he, or some other Democrat, could run a podcast to compete with Joe Rogan and that if only they had someone as popular on the left, they could sell their message.  Well, here’s the deal: Democrats lost because they made themselves the “Freakshow Party,” the political party of broken toys from Misfit Island, and their messaging was terrible.  When Biden was given power by a rigged election provoked by a manufactured Covid virus released from a lab in China to cause a coup in the United States, the first thing he did was put a gay guy like Major Pete on his cabinet and Ralph Levine for Assistant Secretary for Health and Head of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps as well as Health and Human Services, as a crossdresser right out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Biden’s people were caught having gay sex and filming it in public buildings, and they fully expected to shut down anybody’s negative opinions on the matter, forcing many to count down the days until these losers were voted out of office.  And a lot of people couldn’t wait to vote against the Biden administration because of the Freakshow they put on and expected everyone to accept.  No amount of any podcast could justify the audaciousness of how Democrats positioned themselves for the 2024 election.  They can’t sell something to people that they don’t want to buy, and that is apparently new news to them.  But they should have listened because I have been telling them that for a long time. 

As to Joe Rogan, they had him.  I’ve said about Joe Rogan that he was too liberal for me.  He voted for Biden and Obama and has only now been a Trump supporter.  The same with Elon Musk and many other Democrats who converted to the Republican Party in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump in July of 2024.  I didn’t listen to the Joe Rogan podcast because he was a devoted Democrat, and I don’t have time in my life for people like that.  I only paid attention to him because he was moving toward Trump in the closing days of the 2024 election. After all, the Democrats were so embarrassing.  So, if the Republican Party was going to go into a big tent party, I was happy to hold open the flap to that tent to fill it with as many people as possible.  But this notion that if only Democrats had their version of Joe Rogan is ridiculous.  Because they had him.  As well as owning most of the media culture that there is.  People turned away from Democrats because they became the party of the Freakshow; they abused their relationship with everyday people to such an extent that they pushed people away.  And that is something they didn’t think would happen.  When people like AOC in Congress seem normal and rational, the Democrats have a big problem, and people are going to turn away from them just by association.  Democrats thought they could abuse their relationship with people, just as most corporations these days also believe because they feel like communists who can live in a bubble without competitive ideas to challenge them and come to the conclusions within their little world that they are all there is. 

They should have seen the writing on the wall when they mistreated their people, like Musk and Joe Rogan, for being critical of the Democrat party when they should have been listening.   With Rogan, the political left tried to cancel culture him for doing a podcast where anti-vaxers were on to talk about COVID-19, and the left tried to damage Rogan’s deal with Spotify.  I can tell everyone here that I went through all kinds of problems, especially with Spotify and YouTube, so I can understand Rogan’s situation because he had real money at stake in the protests.  But it was essentially an anti-free speech message that Democrats had, their modern version of the Berlin Wall.  Communists cannot afford competition with capitalist markets, and ultimately, when you have the wealthiest guy in the world on your side, but you are attacking the kind of world that made him rich in the first place, you are setting yourself up for a significant loss.  Elon Musk pays more taxes than any person on planet Earth, and Democrats just kept asking for more.  It’s like a husband who continues to keep cheating on his wife, and she stays with him for as long as she can take it, then decides one day, no more.  And she finally leaves.  And she should go if he’s not respecting her.  That’s what the Democrats did to their people, like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and many others.  There were a lot of Democrats, especially union members, who voted for Trump in this last election because the message was better from Republicans.  Democrats took it for granted that their platform was so powerful that they could shame people into voting for a Freakshow, a bunch of sexual deviants, and crack addicts with an addiction to all kinds of problems.  And presenting those kinds of people to the world was a winning strategy.

Ultimately, this problem is one I have been pointing out for a long time.  I write on this site because I know who reads it and why.  I do not write here for the ordinary, everyday person but for the influencers on the frontier of independent journalism, which is where all the action will be in the future.  Traditional media is dying.  Modern media platforms like Truth Social, Gettr, and Elon Musk’s “X” are the future, and the kind of competitive content out there will destroy a weak message.  So, I see my efforts as being very important to that process and an investment on my part to a better world.  For all those who aren’t sure what they can or can’t talk about, I provide a new way of thinking about it in a media culture increasingly driven by artificial intelligence.  And the Democrats showed a complete lack of respect for other people’s opinions over these last eight years, essentially since Trump entered office the first time.  In their desperation, they ran wildly in the other direction toward “freakshow” politics, such as the bearded lady at a carnival or the man with two heads.  And they scared off any fringy supporters they did have who were straddling the fine line between left-of-center politics and the right.  So they lost support because of their strategy, and giving Hunter Biden his own podcast would only accelerate their problems.  And that’s the thing: it is a free world; Hunter Biden could start his podcast tomorrow, just as anybody could.  But would anybody listen or pay attention?  I do it because people do pay attention and listen.  And I see the impact.  But who wants to listen to Hunter Biden?  Who cares about one thing that he says or does?  And how could a person like that move a political party toward success?  The answer is that they can’t, and that’s why Democrats lost.  They embraced the wrong strategy, which probably cost them their party.  As I always say, Democrats can’t win if they don’t cheat.  And that was certainly the case in 2024.  Where it was too big to rig, Democrats couldn’t win because they couldn’t cheat.  And they had no other strategy for winning because their messaging never respected voter opinions.  Only the guilt they could generate from their freakshow politics, which would always fail.

Rich Hoffman

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