Category: Taxes

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

If There Was So Much Election Fraud, Why Don’t Judges Rule On It: It takes courage to Enforce the law

The question that seems to be on most people’s minds these days is why, if there was so much election fraud in the 2020 election and others, haven’t the courts prosecuted the wrongdoers? Many people say President Trump was a sore loser, and if there was actual election fraud in 2020, then why would hundreds of judges and many thousands of possible court cases fail to find one incident of it to prosecute? Well, the answer is relatively easy. It takes courage to enforce the law, especially when it’s something like this because the implications of admission are monumental. The very foundations of society itself would be rocked to its core the moment such an admission was made. And many judges are terrified of that prospect, and not a single one of them wants to be the first to do it. Even if the evidence in front of their faces are overwhelming, I know many judges very personally, and I can report they are people with all the hopes, dreams, and fears most people have. Yet, this 2020 election has unraveled something horrendously terrible and uncovered a menace that takes a lot of courage to deal with, and so far, we have a society that is short on courage. But that is not to be confused with a lack of evidence. The fear now is to admit that what we see is real and do something about it. Then once that admission is made, then what? The implications are massive once that door is opened legally, politically, and historically. And so far, it has been preferred to ask for more evidence while hoping to run out the clock on the assumptions and hopes that some other judge will be the first to rule on the facts of the matter. 

It’s probably too late already for a peaceful end to all this. The numbers don’t work in favor of the election fraud perpetrators. And who are they? Well, it’s a lot of people who abandoned the idea of America a long time ago in favor of a global corporate model. Once those types of people decided that American sovereignty and its laws were getting in the way of the objectives of globalism, then the acceptance of election fraud among the political class to secure their investments began. And this goes back to the 90s. The globalist forces did not want to deal with another Ronald Reagan president. All the investments into globalism had been threatened, especially when Ross Perot received 19% of the vote in 1992 after four years of George Bush. Clinton did not win with a majority, but only through a three-way split of the vote, with Republicans splitting on Bush. The following Bush didn’t increase confidence. Things were just too close in 2000 between Gore and Bush that methods to better secure elections for political parties became more of a priority. By the time Barack Obama came around, the techniques for election fraud were being implemented, and American intelligence more overtly looked to assist in preserving the Deep State investments. Election fraud was well-known coming out of Chicago between Nixon and Kennedy in the early 1960s, but that was just one city. The idea of massive election fraud across the entire nation was a bit of a stretch without getting caught. But as technology came along to make it all too tempting to cheat, then a move in that direction started to be more apparent. 

And the experiment of Barack Obama was launched in 2008. John McCain was a kind of controlled opposition guy, followed by Mitt Romney. So experimenting with Obama, a guy without much of a past, something that intelligence agencies could make up and create for their own interests was established. Would Americans accept such a person as Obama using the mask of skin color to hide all the detrimental elements that many thought would harm political candidates, such as an open pot smoker? A person that looks not to have been born in America but in Kenya by a father nobody knew. And by communist advocates at that. Who had his political campaign launched by a known domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers from the Weather Underground. There was a lot wrong with Barack Obama, but when he got elected, the Deep Staters suddenly had a formula that worked. And they have been pushing the boundaries ever since, to the point that Hillary Clinton knew she was the “appointed one” for 2016. They had all learned with Benghazi, the IRS scandal of 2010, and the passage of Obamacare in 2010 as well that the political alignment of politics and the media could cover up just about any sin committed, which then unleashed a massive amount of audaciousness by the perpetrators. Trump was a variable they were not prepared for in 2016, and it was the first time since Ross Perot that the Deep Staters were stunned by rejection by a hostile public. So, in panic, they have shown too many of their cards and to hold their power position, they had to cheat massively in the 2020 election and were caught everywhere. Now that they have been caught, they are hoping to run out the clock on prosecution and the amount of power they hold they are using as a threat to anybody who might come out against them. It’s essentially the collision of the long history of organized crime migrating into our government that we are dealing with, and it’s daring us to take action. 

The judges of these cases all know that the moment election fraud is accepted in the courts, then everything our society is built on suddenly is in jeopardy, every elected office, all the laws on the books that politicians signed that the voting public might not have actually voted for. The foundations of our entire country could crumble to dust, which is why it’s such a delicate problem, as interpreted by the legal community. It’s also why election fraud occurred in the first place and by so many people.   This is a systemic failure that purposely painted the situation into a corner. We either accepted massive election fraud by globalist forces such as China, the World Economic Forum, the radicals in the Bilderberg meetings, the Jeffery Epstein blackmail candidates, the Intelligence agencies like the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA who are all committed to the global citizen movement as they were taught in the liberal colleges to accept through pot smoke and loose sexual practices, to adopt in order to cover their sins from the past. They are not interested in a John Wayne America, but more of a Cheech and Chong universe where everyone holds hands in brotherly love, love that is free, and the capitalist pigs who selfishly run all the companies would have to turn over all their assets to the state ran by globalism, or be destroyed. Of course, there was election fraud, and the judges feared the organized crime element like they feared going against Al Capone. Nobody wants to roll over in bed at night to a cut-off horse head, and yes, these brutal people kill people. So, judges have been short on courage over this issue because of the threats implied. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any election fraud, or that there hasn’t been for many decades now, and that many of our elected representatives never deserved to be in their positions in the first place. And that once we did catch it, our country would collapse upon the knowledge of such an imposition. But we must find the courage in ourselves as a country to admit such an error and correct it for the future, which has been slow. The cases showing election fraud are growing; eventually, there will be a judge with the courage to rule correctly. And once that happens, others will follow because they’ll have to. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The New Alamo in America Coming in 2024: It will be fun

The bizarre approach that Miller Light had in attacking their beer-drinking customers recently with a suddenly out-of-fashion feminist position was very revealing. On the one hand, it was a message to the public by the beer-making corporations that they were making a power move and saying, don’t think you will escape wokeism just because you left Bud Light for Miller Light. Woke policies are coming to a corporation near you brought to you by BlackRock and friends. We are taking over all your corporations to the point where you’ll have nowhere to go. So, get used to it. But then there was the more absurd notion that feminists were actually going to take the sex out of beer drinking and get away with it. As if they didn’t already know that many men drink beer, so the women in their lives look better, more like the girls in beer commercials, and that this latest attempt to ruin culture with a bunch of dumb rules and regulations pointing at social appeasement was actually going to work. I found the information interesting, actually quite revealing and encouraging even. At least now we knew how to get young people to stop smoking pot in our culture, put some of these woke ads out showing transvestites and angry potato-looking women using the product, and it was a sure bet that consumption would go down. Yet a bigger plot was unfolding, and it became obvious that the election of 2024 was presenting us with a unique opportunity. America was having a modern version of the Alamo, and it was unfolding on a global stage. 

The attack on American corporate culture in almost every category reveals much about what the enemy has been plotting and scheming behind closed doors for years. Suppose you want to listen in on the latest Bilderberg meetings that were held May 18th through May 21st  this year at Prestana Palace in Lisbon, Portugal. In that case, you can save yourself the plane ride because the Miller Light commercial reveals everything any secret society might want to contain. The strategy is clear from the globalist aggression against sovereign nations, especially America. And the pressure is something they are not holding up well to. The arrogance of the woke policies against companies that Americans thought were distinctly American, like Bud Light and Miller Light, like what Disney is going through, and they are doing it to their own detriment because the system put in place is that entrenched through the kind of CEOs our culture is making these days, is bringing to a collision a long-held belief in the powers of communism and what it could actually do as a means to global control of the world. The attack is on choice, slow conditioning toward sameness, and the assumption that people are so stupid that they will put up with it, as opposed to the market forces that brought all these various options to our minds in the first place. It’s a who-created-who kind of debate unfolding in many unique ways in the year 2023 and the election year of 2024. And this plot is unfolding even more dramatically as those same forces presented Ron DeSantis to the world as the next presidential candidate, as Elon Musk is part of the symphony of discontent attempting to sell him as an option to Donald Trump. 

I’m not a fatalist; I always think there is a chance for good things to happen. But even the Alamo, as history remembers, resulted in the massacre of American heroes. We are about to have our own kind of last stand in America with the 2024 election and the hostile forces against America, know it. And I see it as a unique opportunity to have a revolution against these globalist tyrants without bloodshed, which usually accompanies these kinds of military attacks. That is, after all, what BlackRock has been doing to American companies; it has been an attack designed by the forces at the World Economic Forum to change the world into their desire. Not the consumer sentiment measured by market value.   What is the real issue here? Who decides market value, the choice of market saturation in the pursuit of profits by corporate interests, or the arrogance of corporate interests to believe that they shape public objectives like some cow being provided to migrate itself straight into the slaughterhouse to be consumed as a sacrifice to the efforts of global collectivism. Even King Solomon’s Temple was aligned with the needs of sacrifice as its core tenant of design. The Temple was aligned with the east, where the sun would rise and settle in the west, where the Ark of the Covenant resided. A high priest would offer up a sacrifice, probably a sheep or a goat, on the east side of the Temple, then sprinkle the blood on the Ark in the Holy of Holies in the west part of the Temple, believing that it was necessary to appease God. And many of these crazy characters involved with globalism believe much the same thing, and sacrificing profit, sanity, logic, and political power are at the foundation of their actions. And we are seeing a kind of Alamo situation setting up for the 2024 election, with many ideas colliding for a final stand. 

It’s a good thing to have this kind of Alamo standoff; it means that our constitution works and that hostile forces that might plan against America can be fought without bloodshed. As ugly as everything is, the beauty is that our checks on such powers are keeping the forces of globalism from doing what they’d like to do without resistance. And it is great that someone like President Trump is making himself available to be the headliner of this modern Alamo fight. It has forced the attackers to reveal their positions too early and often. It has stirred up anger that politics usually don’t have the opportunity to express. When globalism feels it must attack beer brands, for a lot of people, that’s the final straw. And it suddenly has awakened even the most casual voter. So it will never get easier than this election of 2024 to defeat globalism and fight for our country’s preservation than this upcoming election. It may be the only time in history when such an opportunity to fix things would come from simply controlling an election. To ensure we have an honest election without all the American intelligence and tech billionaires contaminating the election process for their globalist candidates. In this election, all people have to do is show up and vote because it will never get easier than this. The 2024 election won’t require people to take up arms and fight in a bloody rebellion to take back their country and overthrow hostile intent. All people will have to do is show up and vote. And you can see that already becoming known to people as they have stood by President Trump through all the news headlines that have been thrown at him. The more the established order throws at him, the more people support him, leaving Ron DeSantis’s fantasy an option not even on the table, where the globalist forces thought it would sink Trump. The strategy is clear; the hostile characters are now well-known and have been exposed to their hiding places. And 2024 is shaping up to be a modern version of the Alamo in America, a final stand between capitalism and communism, between sacrifice and life, and good against evil. And I think it will be a lot of fun, and America will invent future patriotic songs to commemorate the terror of these times with ballads of heroics and tenacity.

Rich Hoffman

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I Disagree with the Bible on Wealth Creation: Money is a measure of good and evil

One of the problems I have always had with the Bible, going all the way back to bible school, which I had most Sundays from age 5 to the 8th grade, was this idea that a rich person was evil and working against God unless they gave away all their material items during their life and wholly dedicated their life to God, in every way. I have never read the Bible that way nor interpreted religion with such narrowmindedness. Making money and religion were always two separate things as defined by the old powers of Europe, and I really didn’t have a personal approach to it until recently, when I spent a considerable time in the deserts of New Mexico writing my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and specifically the chapter where I say, “Money is not the Root of all Evil.” There I argue that America has been a different kind of invention that couldn’t have been understood during the Biblical period, nor when the Romans decided what books of the Bible to include in the Council of Nicaea. Cultures have been hindering themselves with this problem for many thousands of years at this point, and it’s caused a lot of problems. But before you can come to a rational conclusion on the matter, you have to go against literally every pastor, minister, and biblical interpreter that has ever been known because I think they all got it wrong and that they have been holding civilization back, and creating many of the problems we see today politically, and have actually empowered evil to thrive behind the definitions as they have been interpreted by institutionalism, as the Roman Empire was undoubtedly inspired to do.

A few of the most controversial passages from the Bible regarding wealth come from the Book of James 2:6 “But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you and draw you before the judgment seats?”  Then again, with Jesus saying in Luke 18:25 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” There are many others, of course, littered throughout the Bible and I would argue not so much that they are wrong, but that they don’t capture the entirety of the morality of money. I have personally been able to forgive the Bible for these definitions, which run counter to the essence of a life well lived, but at the core of how the political left attacks conservatives is this deeply rooted guilt of making money and taking care of the poor. Because if a conservative has made a lot of money in their life, then by association, they will turn away from the Bible because it doesn’t fit their life experience with definitions like what the Bible provides. But with all other things, especially in the definitions of evil, which are well articulated throughout the Bible, then those get tossed away as well. My argument has been that the concept of American capitalism, as established by the wonderful book The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, is that in the times of Jesus, nobody had good definitions of money and how they were moral markers in a healthy society. And who would have expected the writers of the Bible to ever figure it out during that period of human history? Indeed, proper definitions of the value of money in a culture did not arrive upon the human race until Ayn Rand did it in her outstanding work, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. And such a definition would have only come from a culture like America, which was vastly different in its use of capitalism than any other place in the world.

America was created to answer an ancient problem: living life free of kings and regional governors. In such a society, the only way to get rich was to obtain permission to be so by schmoozing up to the powers that controlled the region people lived in. And this is undoubtedly the issue during the teachings of Jesus. To preach the ways of God that he was, away from Jewish institutionalism, was a severe rebellion in those times. It was an unheard-of menace, so they plotted to kill him. And, of course, the people who were protecting their wealth would have been the villains of what Jesus was preaching. But there wasn’t an America even conceived of at the time, and the writers of the Bible never could imagine anything like freedom being possible. So the problem persists for a nation like America that it was built around a religious connection to ancient documents that defined money before the concept of individual freedom had been worked out politically. And for the human race, that is a very recent development. It’s even more recent than the work of Karl Marx in Europe. There is a morality to money, as applied by the United States, that is quite a good measure that is fundamental to rooting out evil in a society that is very much the topic of our present politics and is the theme of our times. 

I benefit from knowing many people in my life who are very rich. In some cases, they are extremely rich, and I have been able to see up close how that wealth creation has benefited the world around them. Adding to that an extensive study of comparative religion and reverence specifically for biblical research, I can see how definitions working against the rich, or materialism in general, would cause people problems. But I would say the Bible is wrong about wealth creation and the “rich” in general while being “right” about the definitions of “evil” itself. We can’t just pick and choose what we like in the Bible and toss out that which we don’t, which most religions do, no matter what their source material is. Instead, I would say that wealth creation has benefited from inventions in politics over the years and that the criteria for rich people have changed with the creation of America. Money helps a healthy society measure the morality of a culture in ways that institutions have never achieved after many centuries of trying. In a free culture, those who make money do so because society values something they produce for that society. But we associate wealth creation such as the Biden family has achieved as a sell-out of his office to the rivals who would like to destroy the concept of capitalism to hide their evil actions behind the traditional definitions they can’t live up to. But for a person like President Trump, who has acquired all the material items and wealth that could be imagined in a single lifetime, then used that wealth to fight for the cause of truth and justice, then suddenly the Biblical definitions aren’t broad enough to encompass the morality of money as a representative of a life well lived. Then, in that case, all wealth creation is not equal; it is good and bad among the wealthy, and how they have made their money roots out their behavior in ways that benefit moral discourse. And in that way, the right kind of wealthy people are paramount to a healthy society, especially in contrast to those who were likely just as Jesus spoke about in his time with the metaphor of the camel and the eye of the needle. 

Rich Hoffman

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The 51 Agents That Committed Treason and Sedition: When a government investigates itself and doesn’t send itself to jail

Do people like John Brennen and James Clapper inspire any kind of confidence? Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence, and Brennan was the Director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Big jobs, yet they showed such recklessness in their activism against a sitting president that they could justifiably be called foolish. I mean, let’s get some ground rules established here. I despised Barack Obama. I thought, and still do, that he represented evil on earth and was the worst thing that could have happened to America. And he’s still bad for America. But I would have never committed treason and sedition to remove him from office, as Clapper and Brennan did. They and 51 other intelligence officers signed a letter dismissing the Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, which has now turned out to be a complete lie. We saw a bunch of highly paid people with access to our most classified information doing whatever they could to rig the election against President Trump because they didn’t like him. I figured with Obama; if people voted for him, then the game works that you make an argument against him. You don’t go out and plot a government-paid coup against who the voters pick for office. This is what those 51 intelligence agents did, particularly Clapper and Brennan, which indicates just how radical those agencies had become. They felt entitled to do whatever it took to remove Trump from office, so now we know what we do about their level of activism, we must look at everything people suspect was wrong and give it new merit. Because if they would lie about that, what else would they lie about? 

It’s not like I’m talking about this in a vacuum. About a year ago, when this story was being talked about heavily, about the 51 agents who had signed that letter right before the 2020 election hoping to suppress the information about the Hunter Biden laptop, which showed the president’s son doing very despicable things. It also showed the money trail to the Biden family from China and other places where Joe Biden had sold access to himself to hostile contributors who were known enemies of our country. I was able to talk to Mike Pompeo about it, which under Trump, he was in charge of the CIA. So he knows the kind of people who are in the CIA. Under someone like Pompeo, I think better of the CIA. But under John Brennan, it’s simply an interment of domestic terrorism because of his political positions, which he obviously abused under his direction. And, of course, Pompeo was embarrassed about the actions. He thinks a lot of the men and women in the CIA who worked under him and the information about the 51 agents who signed that letter was embarrassing for him, and he would have preferred that I didn’t bring it up. After all, we were at a festive event, and he wanted to keep it that way. Yet such a reference was embarrassing because we wanted to believe these were good people. But they aren’t; they committed vile acts of sedition against our country as they plotted the overthrow of our executive in the White House. Brennan knew what he was doing, as we learned recently from the Durham Report that he briefed President Obama and Vice President Biden on the matter in the White House. They all plotted to remove Trump from office or keep him from office by subverting the election process, and we only know about it because they were caught. Can you imagine what else they have done that they have not yet been caught for?

And we were told it was wrong to question the birth certificate of Obama, which turned out to have all kinds of problems with it. Or that it was wrong to examine why the CIA didn’t know about the attacks on 9/11 and didn’t share information with the FBI better, which facilitated the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. And I can tell you that right after the election, I had a chance to talk with Sidney Powell, who used to be on Fox News all the time until she said that there was election fraud in the last election. She was only the attorney for General Flynn, not exactly someone with a few screws loose. But as soon as she pushed a narrative that the election was stolen, in the open days after the 2020 election, along with Rudy Giuliani, she was dismissed from any public consideration. And what did she tell me, that the intelligence agencies stole the election. At the time, it seemed like fiction. But now we know from lots of evidence that has poured forth that they openly did lie in that letter. Russia wasn’t a factor in the election of President Trump. Our intelligence agencies had been caught, and the results of the Durham Report prove it. And what’s even worse is that the more anybody dug into the matter, the more radicalism from people like Clapper and Brennan came to the surface, and it all connected back to the Obama White House. 

If the crimes that the 51 intelligence officers committed were not treason and sedition, then what would they be? Treason is the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government. The CIA has done that in regard to Trump because he was in the government at the time. And we now know through released classified information that the CIA played a prominent role in the killing of President Kennedy in 1963. That’s not a conspiracy theory anymore. Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or insurrection against, established authority. Isn’t that what these intelligence agents did with the signing of that letter, to alter the outcome of an election, to lie to the American people to manipulate the sentiment of voters by using their trusted positions to do so? If these are not high crimes from these 51 agents, what are? The sad thing about this entire story is that the government investigated itself and decided not to send itself to jail. That is why the Durham Report says many very hard things but can’t recommend any prosecution because who would do the prosecution? Everyone is in on it, and from both political parties. They don’t fear punishment, have a rigged system, and dare anybody to come after them, which is why they committed the crimes against Trump and his voters in the first place. They have no respect for any of us or the Constitutional law they were sworn to protect. They are laughing at us for our naive reverence to such things as “borders” and “elections.” They think they are smarter than we are, they think they know better than we do, and they think they are in charge, ultimately. And they can do whatever they want to anybody, any time they want to. They are examples of abuse of power that was out of control long ago. And anybody who gets in their way they feel it’s their right to destroy. And they’ve been doing it essentially since they were made into existence in the last century. They haven’t been around very long, and perhaps based on these actions, they shouldn’t remain in any form. We’d be better off without such terrorists and their crimes of sedition and treason against the United States which are common, not unique.

Rich Hoffman

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Judgment Day: A review of ‘The Harbinger II–The Return’ and the vast evil that worked behind Government involvement with Covid

We are well into a diabolical scheme to ruin the world under the pressures of many ideologies coalescing under the banner of globalism for the ruin of all our lives. And any innocence the hostile insurgents played to is long gone. It’s ugly, but I don’t know that it’s uglier than at any other point in history when social collapse was imminent. I continue to tell people that the American Constitution, which was founded on Christian ideas, is the key to the future because it limits out-of-control governments that many of these hostile forces never thought would be possible. It certainly wasn’t in their plans, which was most extraordinarily exploited during Covid in people like Bill Gates, who had spent a lot of time thinking about how to take over the world only to find out that the President of the United States wasn’t a king, and that states rights had more power than the federal government. In America, regional government is most accountable to the people who ruled in court cases, and that was a perplexing development to the world domination schemers. In the end, the American Constitution was meant to do what it is doing: to fight off the evil intentions of vile agents of chaos and destruction. We are not promised a life of comfort without challenges. But we can have the freedom to fight for our continued independence from those globalist forces and the schemes they have been employing for thousands of years. 

I recently did something of a review of the great Jonathan Cahn book The Harbinger, and in it, I went even further than the book, published in 2011, in talking about how BlackRock was connected in several ways to the same hostile forces that were behind the 9/11 attack. If The Harbinger was about the scriptural warnings of a country that had fallen from God and that if they wanted to avoid Israel’s fate, that they would get right again with God, because the signs were everywhere. Further, it is my opinion, based on a vast amount of reading, that the religion of Islam is built off the hostile intentions of the old Baal worship from that same region. Once Christianity was put into a biblical form under the Roman Empire, the Arab forces put forth the Quran as an answer to the Bible, using many of the same characters but putting their own stamp on it. And within that context is the ancient Kaaba Stone in Mecca, where the same Abraham from the Bible rebuilt the temple, which is the focus of many pilgrimages for Muslims. And what was worshipped there before Abraham’s time, Baal. And that the purpose of the Quran was to put a mask on that ancient deity worship, give Allah a broad definition to seduce many to their religion, much the way the Israelites were convinced to step away from God in the first place, and that the religious squabbles of the Palestinians and the Jewish people was more of a military strategy hidden behind a spiritual crisis. And to further complicate things, the black stone of worship at Mecca is the same rock that the modern company of BlackRock references in their desire to take over all the boardrooms of America and implement woke policies as a new kind of terrorism. 

The Harbinger is a very popular book, so it should come as no surprise that its sequel, produced in 2020 during the Covid lockdowns, would also get a lot of attention, and it, of course, did. The Harbinger II—The Return is still one of the feature books in Christian books stores that is a best-seller, and it continues on with the Harbinger message, which is that biblical scripture is foretelling of events of our modern times that involve terrorist activity and the hostilities of governments not rooted to God, but have been seduced back into Baal worship behind the many masks of contemporary preponderance. What is so spectacularly interesting in this book is that it was written and published during the Covid lockdowns, for which it plays right into the narrative of the vast evil at work behind the politeness of modern culture. Where Jonathan Cahn, at the time, attributed Covid to a plague unleashed by God to punish a society that had turned away from him, the reality is that Covid was created in a Chinese lab by hostile forces as a kind of military attack. And that in that context, it was like the armies of Nebuchadnezzar attacking Israel and destroying the temple as an agent of God’s wrath. Whether scripture predicted human events or that people wanted prophecy to be truth and sought ways to fulfill them, the matter is beyond doubt that maniacal forces were at work to destroy the world, and the Bible is all about dealing with that problem in a past, present, and future tense. In the space of one year, with Covid and the realization that elections were not representative of the voting public with evidence of massive corruption being displayed right in front of our faces, it was a punishing revelation on part with the destruction of Israel from the Assyrian forces. And it all started with the 9/11 attacks and the events of the first Harbinger book. America was under attack, and people did not just feel death and misery. And the level of evil that we were dealing with on a global scale was hard to believe. The only way to comprehend it was to read about it in the context of scripture. 

In the end, that will fix many of our modern problems, and like Israel and other crises throughout history, we will come out of it. The American Constitution will play a significant role in that revival. But so again will Christian book sections and a reconnection with the Bible. American society was founded on Biblical concepts, and our rule of law was tethered to the idea of God from the beginning. And when I go to the bookstore, it is obvious that books like Jonathan Cahn’s continue to sell the most. One of my favorite bookstores is the Books A Million in Dayton at The Greene. There is an entire second floor of a very large store that is nearly dedicated to the Christian religion and the selling of various Bibles. So the warnings in the Harbinger books are well stated, but they do not come without solutions.

The evil of terrorism is a very real thing, not just with 9/11 but in what we saw in Covid, which was much worse. And when we see how God punished Israel for its worship of Baal and other Mesopotamian gods, we have modern context that is on par with that level of suffering. But we’ve also seen this story before. We know how it ends. We are living in the days of Judgement, which is OK. We are living history now, but when we made our Constitution, we built it with these days in mind and many others in the future. We may be unable to stop evil’s intentions and their schemes. But we can fight off their effects, which is the process we are going through now. It’s certainly not hopeless. There are harbingers of goodness as well, and you can find them in the resurgence of Christian bookstores that are safe harbors from woke policies intent on destroying our culture from the inside out. And they continue to be a handhold to sanity as the most diabolical menaces in human history make their moves right before our faces for a judgment day that isn’t far off in the future but is before us now, in our own lifetimes. 

Rich Hoffman

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Why Property Values in Butler County Could Go Up By 42%: And What Nancy Nix and many others are doing to Protect taxpayers

It was a very beautiful day looking out the windows of the Office of Nancy Nix as the Great Miami River gently rolled by as it has for many thousands of years. I looked down from the third-floor vantage point into the park that used to be the movie theater in Hamilton, where I first saw Sleeping Beauty and reflected on good memories from childhood. The weather outside was perfect for a day in May of 2023, so it was an excellent reflection of the long history of Butler County, Ohio, where the city of Hamilton had seen so much history, lots of good days and rough times to say the least and of course, the river flows by regardless of what human beings cause themselves by way of trouble. And the topic that Nancy and I were set to talk about, captured well in the video above, was historic trouble. The short story was that Butler County and nearby Clermont County were being penalized for being affluent areas that had recently enjoyed dramatic economic growth. It made an easy target for the new Ohio Tax Commissioner, Patricia Harris, in trying to correct the many sins of the past, where the government had kicked the can down the road over a long period of time. She had decided that there was nowhere left to kick it. So this wasn’t something that just happened well before Nancy Nix took over in Butler County in the very important auditor position, this crisis was brewing, and now it was splashed all over headlines from a recent I-Team report that indicated property values in Butler County were going to go up by a recommended 42%. That meant that property values for a $250,000 house were suddenly going to be at $355,000, an increase of $105,000. And people were not happy about it.

At Thanksgiving Dinner, such news might sound great; people might even open a bottle of wine at the success of their investments in real estate. Suddenly things on paper looked much better, and their homes were worth a lot more. But in Butler County, regarding 8 of the ten school districts, there would be tax increases proportional to that value increase which was going to impact homeowners negatively. For instance, the school district of Ross, right across the river from Nancy’s office, as we spoke about this matter and looked in that direction, they just had a vote to defeat a tax increase for that school. The levy had failed for the third time. But now, because of this news from the Ohio Department of Taxation, Ross is holding off on trying for another levy because they will gain a lot of new revenue from the new tax rates of these inflated property values. That’s the kind of thing that has people so upset, and for good reason. In a lot of ways, the recommendation from the state is taking away a fundamental right of property owners to manage their local governments by essentially taking extra tax money without a vote, with just a decision by the state to calculate these varying percentages based on sales data recorded during a very turbulent time that does not represent the norm.   According to the state, which then imposes the percentage rate onto auditors like Nancy Nix, they take a three-year sales reflection of what they think is market value during their state-mandated triennial update. But for this one, that analysis period was one of the worst in the history of the world. Looking at sales from 2019, where America had one of the best economies in human history, then the following year with Covid lockdowns, then the volatility of runaway interest rates resulting from the Biden presidency and the economic tampering of several government controls, the data collected is far from the norm, and has resulted in these crazy recommendations which Nancy Nix and other auditors are questioning, aggressively. 

And as bad as all that news was, it was still a good day from the vantage point of Nancy’s office as we talked about the many proactive measures that she and area legislators were doing to help solve the problem. Regarding that, a new Fox 19 article had hit, and I was talking to Senator George Lang about it, where he is proposing a way to change how Ohio’s property values are reassessed, which is obviously needed. Politics aside, Patricia Harris, the Ohio Tax Commissioner, had just been appointed in January of 2023 and obviously could use more time on the job before destroying everyone’s tax bills based on some bad data compiled during her first few months on the job. And George’s proposal as a legislative solution would definitely help her and the people connected to her decision. But the Ohio Department of Taxation itself, according to the spokesman Gary Gudmondson was already headed down the wrong road by digging in with obviously flawed data by saying, “We don’t change our recommendations in response to a county complaint.” What he means is that the Ohio Department of Taxation doesn’t listen to people like Nancy Nix, professionals who have been doing this kind of work for most of their adult lives. Instead, her job was to listen to what they recommended and live with it because they held all the cards. 

Yet, there is optimism on the legislative front; in addition to the good work that George Lang is leading, there have been further meetings involving Sara Carruthers, Rodney Creech, Jennifer Gross, and Thomas Hall. Treasurer Mike McNamara, Clerk of Courts Mary Swain, and Recorder Danny Crank are working aggressively to propose short-term and long-term solutions. Some of them are legislative, such as what George is working on. Some would involve amendments to the State Constitution, which are obviously long overdue. Others are things that Nancy Nix and the names mentioned can do as proactive measures. It’s not all bad news. But ultimately, these rate hikes are the result of years of government mismanagement from the state level imposed on regional government, where the most accountability to the voting public is supposed to be the key to all decision-making. But in this case, stuck against the cost of volatile bad decisions, especially during the Covid period, the impact of those decisions is not flowing into people’s property value assessments which are being penalized because they live in areas that were disproportionately well off in relation to other parts of the state that didn’t do so well. And now, we must sort it all out in a way that makes Ohio an attractive place to continue investing in. Otherwise, people might leave for destinations without these kinds of problems. The burden falls on the Ohio Tax Commissioner to develop better strategies for recovering costs from kicking the can down the road for so long and analyzing the market temperament correctly with a better sampling than what the last three years have shown, as they were the worst three years in the history of life on planet earth. And that isn’t the fault of innocent people who have lived in their homes for a long time and plan to stay in their homes. This is the task that I think Nancy Nix is doing a great job of representing Butler County under very turbulent times. But like the history of Hamilton itself and the Great Miami River that flows past her office, we are living history that will be remembered for a long time to come, and that history is made better by some of the great people who are tackling this problem aggressively in defense of the innocent who might otherwise be victims of bad government, such as we are seeing now with the Ohio Department of Taxation in its first few months of a new commissioner. 

Rich Hoffman

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