Category: The Delphi Technique

The Way to Beat Secret Societies: Hidden power gained through hidden rules to create the illusion of knowledge

Usually, when people talk about secret societies, there is a level of dread that is associated. Secret societies seem ominous because, as human beings, we think of the things we don’t know about as being powerful and godly, which is part of the appeal that drives people into secret society membership. And this is a problem when you are trying to run a transparent society where you understand the characters and their motives. In an honest world, there shouldn’t be any desire for secret societies. There shouldn’t be any secrets. But as we have learned over the last several years, many secret societies work in the background and are attached to many of the messes that are part of our modern problems. The quest for secret knowledge to leverage power over others is a strong aphrodisiac to the kind of personalities who want to rule over others. That has made secret society membership a menace to society because it keeps people from dealing squarely with one another. If so many secret societies ask for supernatural, occult aid, how should a straightforward, election-based culture operate? And that is where we currently find ourselves, especially in Europe and America–those who want to be like Europe. I know of many secret societies, and I know the kind of people who are members, and they aren’t very secret, especially in a society that has as much information access as we do these days. Secret societies aren’t so secret anymore because everyone knows where everyone else is and what they’re doing. Which leaves the question pending, why join one in the first place? What could they possibly do for anybody? 

Well, I have a very different take on secret societies that I have formed over a long period of time. And what helps that perspective is that I have never wanted to be in one. I tend to like to be in charge. I was like that as a little kid, so working my way up in a secret society, like the Masons, or some other group, was never for me. I never liked being told what to do, and I always required full autonomy for my independence. So, it was easy for me to say no to those kinds of membership offers. I once had quite a fight with an entire fraternity because I went there to see a friend of mine with my wife, which apparently there were all kinds of rules against. And on our way up to the fraternity house, she walked across the seal on the sidewalk for their membership. There were house rules on how to serve that seal best, and not knowing anything about those rules as a visitor, she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to walk over it. The entire house rallied to assault us, but I have an unyielding personality, so a stalemate ensued because they really didn’t want to fight. They were obligated by the fraternity charter to conduct themselves in such a way, but they were all wimps who really didn’t want to fight that they were forced to stew; as I visited my friend, he toured me around the house, and we left uneventfully. My friend was removed from the fraternity after we left, which is a common passive-aggressive action that low-conflict threshold people perform when faced with a challenge to their invisible authority. 

This is what the weakness of all secret societies have, whether it’s just a college fraternity or the Skull and Bones Society that the Bush and Kerry families were members of. The training for this way of thinking often starts early for people so that by the time they are fully functioning adults, they are largely governed by secret social rules that aren’t openly expressed, which then makes managing a stable society a challenge because you have people worshipping lots of rules that are not part of the ethics of a social construct. And I have found all such people to be weak and easy to beat in whatever the engagement is, whether it’s physical, legal, or purely social. People drawn to secret societies want secret rules and power to protect them from their insecurities, which is why they are attracted to such powers in the first place. The power is an illusion because other people can’t know what those powers are. And this little shift in social engagement gives the illusion of power. In some ancient cultures, a high priest might acquire such power by understanding when an eclipse would occur and might point at the sky and declare power over the heavens. And because the information about how eclipses occur was secret to the society, who did not have access to that information because of some tyrannical regime, the high priest appears to have a secret power over the heavens. But the whole gag is about a lack of knowledge, not in full disclosure. And this is what draws people into secret societies, invisible rules to create the illusion of secret power. 

There is also a strong desire for weak people to hide in the herd to not be independent. They fear being singled out in society, so they seek membership in groups to hide in the safety of the masses. Group membership tells the world that people value them enough to be associated with a secret handshake and an exchange of some fundamental shared values. One of the most insecure things for people is to grow up and away from their parents; most people never develop that ability. So to fill that void, they seek a brotherhood and create a new family out of secret society membership, such as the Masons. Companionship is one of human beings’ most primal needs, so group consensus associated with limited access is a very persuasive motivator. And that is all innocent enough until those mentalities are brought into elected politics, where you expect representatives to perform on a job based on a platform they were elected to. Not following some rules of the secret handshake in the Skull and Bones Society which dominates Beltway politics within the intelligence agencies and operates to social practices that the rest of society that pays for their government through taxes has no idea about, like my story about the fraternity seal. To the outside world, the seal meant nothing. But to the fraternity brothers, it was everything; it represented their secret fears glazed over by symbols and rules only they knew about, which gave them the illusion of security in a scary world. And that is the key to beating such groups. If they were secure people, they wouldn’t seek group membership. But they do because they aren’t powerful people. They depend on numbers to hide their timidity as individuals. Once that is known and exploited, they fall apart quickly. Just as the scam of the high priest predicting an eclipse. If other members of the society understand how to read star alignments and know the cause of eclipses, the phony power of the high priest will lose all its influence. Because the power is based on ignorance and group association to maintain that illusion, but once that curtain falls, the power of the secret society is gone, which is where we find ourselves in the modern world. Many high priests are making their livings off secret society membership to rules only they know about. But the public isn’t as ignorant as they once were, because of the vast amounts of available shared information. And because of that and the need for independence in people who are not timid, the powers that have ruled the world in secrecy are desperately vulnerable and not nearly as scary as they once were.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote Yes for Issue 1 in Ohio: Something that has finally brought people together in politics

If you are not a dope-smoking, baby-killing, overly sexed loser Democrat, you need to go out on August 8th and vote in Ohio in favor of Issue 1. Say yes to making it more difficult to amend the very great Ohio Constitution. Currently, it only takes a 50% vote from the legislature to amend the Constitution, and radical Democrats are targeting that threshold to impose many liberal amendments to erode away the value of our state in the years to come. Issue 1 makes it harder to amend the Constitution; it will take that threshold from 50% as it is now to 60%, which would quell tempers and prevent radicalism by essentially forcing a supermajority to change anything, which would then be much more reflective of the state, politically. So why now? Why August? Well, it’s been revealed that radical progressives, especially the Soros types of money activism, are headed for Ohio for the November election, and they are looking for some easy victories because Ohio has such a low threshold and that it’s a hard red state now entirely in Trump’s corner, and they want to chip away at that. Ohio is a very conservative state; the radical left needs headlines and is coming for upcoming elections. So that made Issue 1 much more of a priority than it might have been in other years. And it is undoubtedly needed going forward. Some hard years are coming, and the Ohio Constitution needs protecting. There have been amendments in past years, but they flew under the radar because Democrats weren’t thinking too much about that kind of activism, so until recently, there wasn’t as much of a concern. But the buzz is out, and radical progressive Democrats are frustrated and turning their attention to Ohio. And they must be stopped.

But why now, you might ask. Since the Trump time in the White House and the strengthening of the Supreme Court, the radical left has seen a number of reversals at the high court that they assumed would be off limits forever, such as Roe v. Wade. And most of the cases, not just the abortion cases, but marijuana laws and other progressive intrusions meant to either kill members of society or destroy their minds so they’ll be dumb enough to vote for Democrats, have been sent back to the states from the federal courts, the way they always should have been. That is, after all, what the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights asserts. Democrats, for most of their existence, have assumed that federal powers were ultimate powers, and if they could erode away the Federal Constitution with judicial activism, then they wouldn’t have to worry about state’s rights because federalism would overrule the states. As if the Executive Branch was a king who could rule by mandate. I don’t know that they didn’t understand the way the rules are in America, but it’s obvious they thought they could change them by threatening to kill or harm Supreme Court members in their homes so that they’d rule in their favor and create case law that would give the federal government more power than it really had. But years of this activism have stacked up, and now we have a Supreme Court, because of Trump, that is willing to give that power back to the states where it always belonged. That’s how we have found ourselves in this present situation in Ohio and why Issue 1 is suddenly needed. This level of judicial activism was always in the background, but nobody really wanted to admit to it, and Democrats wanted to focus their efforts on one state instead of attacking 50 states to create progressive policy. 

Now that the Supreme Court has established a clear precedent toward state’s rights, there is no turning back. And the Biden White House has overplayed its hand several times with Executive Orders trying to bypass the legislature only to be overturned in the courts, the desperation of progressives everywhere, and their money men are attacking states, and Ohio is a big target. If they could strike in Ohio, they could hurt the GOP on a national level, so suddenly, we are getting a lot of attention on the progressive battle map. They certainly want to put abortion in the Ohio Constitution, and they have legislation ready to go on legalizing marijuana. But it only gets worse from there, and if they can desecrate Ohio, a clear Trump state before he gets back in office, they will have achieved a victory that they haven’t been able to get at the federal level, and they are hoping that they’ll catch everyone asleep to pull it off. The best measure to protect ourselves from this kind of activism is to increase the minimum threshold for amendment changes to 60%. Democrats might get their numbers in surge elections, but maintaining that over 50% will be very hard, especially in Ohio. What Issue 1 will do will protect Ohio from short-term activism and protect the long-term interests of true voter representation.

I was proud to learn that many Republicans from my area of Butler County have shown support for Issue 1, and they gathered at the Butler County Board of Elections to make their opinions known. It takes guts for Don Dixon, TC Rogers, Nancy Nix, Mike McNamara, Dan Crank, Mary Swain, Rodney Creech, Sara Carruthers, Thomas Hall, Jennifer Gross, George Lang, Gary Cates, Debbie Lang, Mark Welch, Steve Schramm, Todd Minniear, Tom Farrell, Lisa Mannix, and Greg Wilkins to get behind Issue 1. Even Sheriff Jones and Bruce Jones showed up, which is pretty amazing. It’s hard to get that many people to agree on anything, so for them to put their names next to this issue says a lot about its importance. If you don’t protect the Constitution, then you don’t have any way to protect the values of society, and those are certainly under attack by the radical left. So, it shouldn’t be a hard decision. But that’s how important this topic is. August elections are low voter turnout results every time they are done. So, if you want to protect Ohio from George Soros money, make sure not to stay home that night, August 8th. I might say we should do as Democrats do: vote early and vote often, but Republicans tend to play fair. So that is always a disadvantage. That means every vote will matter, and there isn’t room to sit this one out. Take a friend, vote YES on Issue 1, and raise that threshold for amendment changes to Ohio’s Constitution. Because if there isn’t an increase in the threshold, then every progressive group in the world is going to target Ohio for progressive legislation that people won’t like. And the time to stop it would have long passed. But we aren’t there yet; a simple election can stop their plans. However, it will require people to go vote when there are lots of other “summer things” to do. But if you are a progressive diabolical menace to society who wants to kill babies, smoke pot all day, and live off the government like some pathetic leech, stay home on August 8th and watch something dumb on Netflix. The world will be a lot better off without you.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

In Politics Friends Come and Go: But why do political parties exist in the first place

When it comes to politics or anything in life, get a dog if you want a friend. Dogs are programmed to serve our human needs for friendship. But don’t expect friendships in politics ever to sustain some deep seeded need. There is only one purpose for politics, and that is the management of community resources. Finding meaning in it of some social value is a path in life that will obviously have many challenges, most of which will be unfulfilling. Even on the best day of political exchanges, there will be disappointments because it never works out how you might want it to. Yet one of the many traps that emerge in politics is when a person involved finds that they get to sit at the table with all the cool kids, which is how the lobby system works at the federal and state level. That appeal to be accepted by your peers can be very alluring. And all too often, it causes good people to go bad relative to what people think they voted for. This is how we end up with RINOs in the Republican Party. They may not start out that way, but they certainly turn out to be far off their original position over a number of years, and it’s at that point they have to figure out if they can still be useful to a voting public. But we are dealing with people here, and I can think of a few politicians that I have known for a long time and may personally like. But, due to life circumstances, they are not as conservative today as they were ten years ago or even five years ago. And when that happens, they have to figure out if they are in politics to serve some deep seeded need they have or if they are only doing it to gain some joy in social acceptance, presenting themselves one way, when ideologically, they have drifted into a more liberal view of the world. 

In politics, I still stand by former Speaker of the House Larry Householder, who was just sentenced to 20 years in prison over the FirstEnergy scandal. I found that case much like Sheriff Jones and Attorney General David Yost went after Roger Reynolds, the former Butler County Auditor. I feel sorry for the FirstEnergy people; they provide energy through a couple of nuclear power plants, and the political left is looking to destroy those companies and replace them with solar farms and wind power. I don’t think there was any justice in putting Householder in jail, I think its 100% politics, using rules to destroy your political rivals, and in that case, the FBI was weaponized just like it has been against Trump and the road to the start of the corruption leads to Mike DeWine’s door, the governor of Ohio who likely didn’t want a rival power in Columbus at the Speaker position. Look at the drama with the coup they had just this last year with the Speaker, so politics is a dirty game. People on the out go to jail, and millions of dollars get wasted in the name of acquiring power. I can say that as I just recently saw DeWine and his wife at a social event, and he’s turning back to his liberal ways again now that he’s in his last term and Trump hasn’t been in power for a while. And mentioning Sheriff Jones, you might remember all the drama between him and Representative Thomas Hall. They had been bitter enemies, but now they are getting along quite well. People move on positions all the time; the question always remains, can they actually do the public who votes for them any good, or is everything they show the public fake while what they do behind closed doors a different representation along the political spectrum? 

And that’s certainly the case of a few names within the Butler County Republican Party presently. Life happens, and people find that their political views of the world change, sometimes quite a lot. But when you hold leadership positions and hang on to those positions, why would they do it if they aren’t that conservative anymore? Politics is one thing, and it’s easy to have political opinions in a vacuum of reality, in an untested environment. But when you love your kids and the kids move in a direction that challenges those conservative beliefs, do you try to take the party to a hard left position, or do you give up the leadership roles to take care of your family? Loyalty isn’t the question, but it’s what is expected in public office that does matter. Because votes expect the brand of conservative opinion that reflects them, this is how the RINO problem began initially. I’ve been involved in many meetings where powerful politicians became upset with being called RINOs. Because they didn’t see that they had become more “liberal” in their political discourse. John Boehner, who lives in my neighborhood and is good friends with several people I know very well, comes to mind. He used to be Speaker of the House, but he had to resign due to heavy calls from people in the Tea Party who thought he was a RINO. It hurt him. I hurt for him, so I never really jumped all over him too much. The world wanted a more conservative representative, and he wasn’t it. So, he needed to step away. And that is certainly the case for other area Republicans who find themselves in a similar situation.

Doing the right thing is hard. But ultimately, politics isn’t for the representatives; it’s for the brand of the party, and the party exists for the people who vote. This fantasy that people have that Ron DeSantis might fill the void of Trump is ridiculous because the move toward Trump is because people have become frustrated with RINOs, and they are looking to purge them from their party. And the same thing will happen in the Butler County Republican Party if RINOs emerge and take leadership positions; the voters out there will work to get rid of them, just as they did John Boehner. There may be perfectly valid reasons that people become RINOs. John Boehner cries a lot, and once people learned that about him, it changed how they saw him. Voters want tough people, not compromised people who have lost their confidence socially, who have made mistakes that are embarrassing, and who seek to hide those things socially through party leadership. It ends up not helping anybody but worst of all; it weakens the voter impression of their Republican Party representation. The most important thing is to protect the brand, and forcing voters to accept more liberal leadership isn’t going to help engage voters in the polls. Telling Darbi Boddy to calm down and play nice with RINOs won’t help the party brand. It hurts it. Because people want more Darbi’s and fewer John Boehners. I’ve heard the complaints, and it’s a topic in need of perspective. Essentially, I do have friendships with people who have moved to the hard left. And I will still like them even if I disagree with them politically. But protecting the Republican brand should be something everyone can agree with. Sure, there will be political squabbles. But they come and go. In the end, what ultimately matters is whether voters have a party that represents them. And if they don’t, why does it exist in the first place?

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Trump/Kennedy Ticket: The Way to Beat the Deep State with an Election

As far as I’m concerned, the primaries have been over for months. Clearly, the Trump-hating Republicans who are in name only will do anything that stops Trump from getting back into the White House, which includes running a third-party candidate to help Joe Biden with all his diabolical problems. I know Kari Lake is working really hard to position herself as Trump’s VP, and she would be great. She’s certainly earned it and will undoubtedly cheerlead the MAGA message. But we are talking about general elections here, not the primary, and we are talking about global forces who have embedded themselves into our election process, where the Deep State is very much seeking to remain in control. And if these arrests of Trump don’t do the trick, don’t expect them just to shrug their shoulders and say, “Golly gee, we tried.” These are killers; they have killed people all over the world and continue to do so to acquire power. Rigging elections is a way of life for them, and there are trillions and trillions of looted money at stake. They will not let Trump get re-elected and walk back into the White House to dismantle them. I would go so far as to say that they will do anything to hold power, and yes, that means anything. The easiest thing for them to do would be to run a third-party candidate to bleed off 15% of the Republican vote, the Never Trumper types to keep them from unifying with Trump by the convention. I would remind people, Trump supporters especially, that we haven’t seen anything yet as far as maliciousness regarding the 2024 election. The very bad in the world literally view this as their version of the Alamo. If they lose control, there is no tomorrow. 

That’s why I like this idea of a Robert Kennedy ticket with Trump. Trump has been saying nice things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as a Democrat. And Kennedy has been saying nice things about Trump. I think what most represents America these days, which would genuinely bust up the international cabal that has taken over our government, is a “unity ticket” where there is a Republican and Democrat on it that could pull from both sides to completely overwhelm the rigged election system and the media apparatus that supports it. Kennedy is much more of a union supporter than I am, but that is a fight we can have another day. I like Kennedy in most other populist positions, especially from what I have read from him in his books on Covid. The story is very much populism against globalism, and when it comes to presidential candidates, Trump and Kennedy are the two biggest options on the world stage. And the Democrats aren’t going to let Robert Kennedy have a seat at the table. They want Biden not because he’s smart or is a great leader. The globalists want Biden because he’s compromised, and if you haven’t been paying attention, the cocaine story is great for them. The goal, after all, is to convince America that their means of government are ridiculous. Look at the monkey in the White House. And they hope that we will all turn to communism in the form of the parental China model out of frustration from all the negative news.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden leaves them alone and does what he’s told. The bad guys will not give that up, so if Biden is still alive, they want him. If he’s not, they want the next best stooge who can barely walk that will be utterly obedient to them. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not that guy. 

So rather than waste Robert F. Kennedy, he would do well to be on the Trump ticket. I’ve said it from the beginning; I would like to live in a world where President Trump is considered a liberal. Because to me, he is. He and Kennedy are both East Coast liberals, from my point of view. I’m well to the right of Ron DeSantis, who is getting a lot of criticism about his position on marijuana. I’m against marijuana even as a medicine, so the debate and pot lobby is not on the table for me personally, so I always have disappointments in all these people. When Trump was pressed hard during his time in office, he did become a big-spending Democrat by default. I will never say that Trump is ultra-conservative in any way. But he did show me that he was willing to govern as promised, as a conservative, which he certainly did, and will do again. For this 2024 election, I don’t get hung up on the Ds and the Rs so much as the fundamental objective is to stop globalism. We are not talking about an issues-based Fox News election on policy. So, we need a Republican ticket that genuinely represents what Americans really are if we want to maintain the hope of recapturing our ability to vote. That means the results have to be much larger than our intelligence agencies can rig elections, and that means drawing from Republicans and Democrats in the general because the third-party option will be put in place in 2024 to erode away independents. To stop that from happening, there needs to be a VP with Trump that represents American populism in a big way and get voter enthusiasm from frustrated Democrats out to vote as if their lives depended on it because, in many ways, it does. 

Supporting such a ticket would not mean a surrender of conservative values. I want a day when I can run against Trump, where Trump is considered the liberal in politics because, functionally, he is. But you must have a country even to have that debate, and we are fighting to stop the corrosive effects of globalism internationally. You can see it all over the world from the World Economic Forum types, this is a rigged game, and they control most of the board. I’ll be the first to say it, the World Economic Forum if it were a country we would be going to war with because of their stated intentions against Americans’ lives. But because they are a government without a country, they have presented themselves as a menace, unlike anything the world has ever seen. That is the corrosive effect of globalism: the threat does not come from one country and its government but the kind of people who run governments through finance behind the scenes. These factions have burned Trump, and he wants revenge for the election they stole from him. Kennedy had his father and his uncle killed by the Deep State, and he has a restoration of his family name in mind. I see only good things happening if they join together. It would split the ticket in ways that globalism is not prepared to deal with and would provide the results that would disrupt the rigged mechanisms that dominate politics at every level. We must remember that the fights between parties is part of the scam; it’s how globalism works everywhere in the world. They create the conflicts, then pick up the mess from all the loose change that falls out of everyone’s pockets during the fight. Then when both parties are exhausted, they come in and eliminate them both and rule from the easy conquest. It’s a bloodthirsty game that is far worse than most people want to admit to. But it’s what we’re up against.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Communism in our Culture: What we learned from the Darbi Boddy interview

The failure on all fronts is the breakdown of the logic of communist philosophy as it has been accepted and taught to us through our public education system. This question has been asked of me many times since I did the video interview with Darbi Boddy, the Lakota school board member that the institution itself wanted to eliminate before she ever had a chance to do anything in the job. This idea that the system is in charge and not the voters is obviously a problem that was witnessed with President Trump, as the Deep State worked aggressively to get rid of Trump before he even had a chance to get into the White House. On a more local level, the same approach came at Darbi Boddy; it’s baked into the assumptions we have as a culture, one that slowly, over many years, accepted a communist view of the world as opposed to the efforts of a meritocracy—talking to her and hearing her point of view it’s easy to hear where the problem is. When she was first a school board member in those opening days, the institution aggressively sought to romance her into friendship, and the goal was then to use that friendship toward the aims of group consensus. Actually, the entire education system, as Dewey designed it, is designed to break students down into their forever social compliance roles; whether they would be the popular kids, the scrappy worker bees, or the garbage heap bottom-of-the-barrel types, public education was meant to break kids down into their social roles, and the same application would, of course, be applied to the leadership to get the same results. We weren’t teaching kids or their teacher’s exceptionalism; we were teaching sameness and class structure. The goal was class and to put people in those classes so they’d be easy to control.

After that interview with Darbi, I had a number of people call me and warn me of the terrible thing that I had done; I had given her a platform to speak from. I had allowed her to function outside of the class structure they felt was necessary for the maintenance of a public school, and it was determined that she was going to be smoked out because she had resisted the compliance culture of sameness that was expected in public education, especially on the school board level. Of course, I answered that was precisely why I ran an alternative news and opinion site because I hated communism and wanted more people like Darbi to be able to get their word out and let people see who they were, not what some communist caricature of her interpreted for the audience. It was a good interview with her, and you can know how much by how many people were upset by it. It wasn’t anything she had said, but that she had the means to say it that they were so angry with. And within that sentiment was the solution and fix to the entire problem. The weakness of communism, of course, is a society that functions on merit. When people earn their reputations and aren’t controlled by the consensus builders based on behavior, that’s when the system breaks down quickly because communists never figured it out. They simply implemented it as Karl Marx designed it, then put it out for society to follow in every way that institutions had formed in relation to the communist position. But that’s what we are dealing with. That is the goal behind globalism in general and why they expect to run the world with China-style communism as the tool.

I’ve studied this topic for a long time, including tracing the footsteps of Karl Marx and his studies in the British Museum. I had to see it for myself where the most destructive philosophy ever introduced to the human race was created. It has only been recently that communism has lost some of the stigmas that it naturally had against it in American culture because now the cat is out of the bag, and the China model is not a well-kept secret anymore. I pointed this out to everyone when Lakota schools started an exchange program to send teachers to China to learn how the communist China model would work. I was against it, and many bellyached about my comments. After all, China was our friend. I’ve openly talked about communism in our culture for my entire adult life, and the mechanism it uses is this consensus-building method that you see on every school board, every board room meeting, and every approach that involves groups of people working out common problems. You especially see it in politics, where sameness is expected. The message is that people come and go. What we need is institutional stability by taking away the peaks and valleys of performance. It was the institution that mattered more than individual input. That was the communist message to America, and by now, almost everyone involved in group activity utilizes those methods to maintain control of the institutions they serve. 

Of course, people like Darbi were elected by people who expect a more free market approach to the social management problem, which is the same for Trump as well. The public has not accepted that communism maintained through social interactions (friendships) is as big of a problem as it really is. Because they believe in America as a merit-based society, they still believe that individuals can move mountains if allowed to utilize the best and brightest ideas among them. At the same time, communism seeks to protect the institution from those pesky fluctuations of individualized input. This is why the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s were so critical and criticized by those trying to bring communism to America. The reason communism is dangerous is that we have fought several wars trying to protect ourselves from removing social interactions with individual input into a compliance structure where inputs are interchangeable and worthless. Darbi was elected to bring her individual character to the school board to represent the voters who put her there. But the school board itself, from the OSBA and down to the president, which is a person I know personally, was to get control of her. And once they realized they would never have control of Darbi, the resolve was to use the institutional protections of communism to get rid of her, with group pressure. And so many people who call themselves conservatives fell in line with the communist way of thinking. They were so far gone they could no longer see the situation objectively. And that made them hate Darbi even more because she made them realize how anti-capitalist they were in their lives. The way that communism expects to command the world through centralized authority is by controlling the expectations of what institutionalism actually does. When individuals spend their time on institutional compliance rather than the contributions of individual merit to a group debate, the power structure has shifted to centralized authority rather than merit-based input, which is the root cause of many of the world’s problems presently. It’s easy enough to fix once people realize that’s what’s going on. And in my own school district, the reaction to the Darbi Boddy interview told the story clearly for all to see, which is why she has been so good as a school board member.   We are working to get communism out of our public life, and schools are the first place to start. And to do that, we need good school boards and many more people like Darbi to bring value to managing these public assets. 

Rich Hoffman

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They Aren’t in Charge, We Are: Violence is the only form of communication the political left has to express themselves, because their ideas are horrendous

Here’s all anybody needs to know about the present situation around the world, the desire for radical lefties to have a one-world government and the conflict of that imposition running up against a country with over 300 million guns owned by people with really short fuses.  Unlike in the past, where a benefit of doubt would have been applied to people in government management positions, in this post-Covid world, where this push for a one-world government crossed many lines, the skepticism that traditionally has been applied to government has switched into open hostility.  There is a broken trust now loose in the world that wasn’t there before, an assumption of guilt instead of forgiveness.  We have seen what the radical left wants to do, and now in the aftermath, the Saul Alinsky book doesn’t work quite the same way because that innocence that it required to exploit in people is gone forever.  Instead, in a world where information is open, and it has to be, the truth of what the radical communists of the world always intended is exploited, and now, because we are an information-based world that rejects centralized control of that information flow, the word is out, as it has been moving for many years.  The same trajectory that put President Trump in office in 2016 is the same one that is now much further along around the world in 2023, and now they have history at their backs instead of just suspicions.  And that grim reality for the communists who want the China model in every branch of government worldwide is that the political left always only had one playbook: to use force to impose compliance.  But if that doesn’t work, which it isn’t, then what?  What happens when you have a world where people have information and weapons to defend themselves with?  Well, the Liberal World Order falls apart, which is where we find ourselves presently in history.

I said it to someone yesterday who was asking me about it.  The political left is ruthless and violent.  Their entire political platform is built around fear and compliance.  They aren’t trying to win people over to their way of thinking.  They want to destroy your options, rob you of choice, and impose on you a life they control by removing all other alternatives.  And they expect to keep you in line with sheer fear.  That is why there is only one way to deal with them, with more ruthlessness.  They don’t deserve a fair shake, a turned cheek, and a sentiment toward coexisting.   They deserve what they have been giving to the rest of the world dished back at them and then some.  Don’t feel sorry for them; they will exploit it as a weakness.  Crush them politically, socially, and financially, and smash them into dust because they deserve it.  Their intentions for the world is one that cannot be forgiven now that we know.  These communist plots have been playing in the background since the mid-1850s, not that long ago, and they have spread around the globe as communications increased and made sharing information easier.  But what kept the world safe was distance from each other, so it was a slow burn over the next century.  Yet for all the same reasons, the stupidity of communism has been exploited and shared in real-time, and people have decided they don’t want that One World Government strategy and they are looking for elected representatives who will defend them from it, which is why Trump, even with all the lawfare that has been thrown in his direction, is only getting more popular, not less.

The trick was to create the illusion that a radical few could control the many with sheer intimidation, the way cows or sheep are herded with the sound of the crack of a whip.  The communists of the world thought people were that stupid.  The people that the media calls obligingly “the elite.”  The original aristocracy has been trying to stop a revolution against their existence for thousands of years.  But those revolutions failed because it was too slow to communicate with other countries.  The American Revolution happened because of that sweet spot in the world coming closer together but was yet still too far apart for mass communication.  Now information is instantaneous, and the communists thought that would work to their advantage.  If they controlled the internet to dumb people down with pornography and trivial nonsense, then we would all be easily corralled like simple-minded animals with every bio-lab-created virus they could unleash to shove the world into a Great Reset.  But instead, that compression of information and the rate of sharing it has worked against communism, which they should have seen coming.  Their plans were always going to fail, and the acceleration of that failure becomes very clear when it is realized that they are very few trying to control the many who do have the means to fight back, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because they still assume that they have free elections where they get to pick their representatives.  However, since 2020, when election fraud was blatant, the media’s complicity in election fraud was seen by all, and we were given Joe Biden almost as a slap in the face of our republic form of government to show us that we were not in charge, the assumption was the same as it is in all communist countries where the people have been conquered, such as Brazil, Venezuela, China, Iran, Europe and many other places where the words of Karl Marx have become their social foundation. 

Yet when those same communist ideas have tried to be implemented in America, the big difference has been the expectation of a Bill of Rights, of free speech to criticize the liberal effort, and guns to stop the only method the left has to communicate their message, through force and violence.  It’s one thing to host a demonstration with a bunch of pot-filled youth on a college campus or in a town that looks bigger than it is on television.  But spreading that force out across a vast country of 300 million people is a bit more complicated.  It’s like spreading butter on toast.  You can taste the butter well if you just eat the part where you applied it, but if you spread it across the whole piece of bread, it thins out rapidly.  And this fantasy of taking over the American military and going door to door to impose some leftist orgy of martial law is preposterous.  The truth is that there are a lot more of us than them, and they now know that we know that.  And we now know that their intentions for us have been hostile, and any presumption that we had previously had about playing nice together in the sandbox is gone.  With the tools of modern society, the message of freedom is much easier to sell, especially when the message of communism has failed so spectacularly, and people have realized that it’s relatively easy to stand up to.  The communist movement doesn’t have enough butter to spread across the bread, and they aren’t recruiting more to their cause.  The only grounds they have ever made were through force and manipulating things in the background.  Now that there is no longer a background, they have been exploited and are losing ground, recruits, and their message.  The old games will not work in the future, and those who have been caught deserve the hell they will have to pay because that is the trajectory of political sentiment, which will never go back to the polite society of the past.  They aren’t in charge; we are.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Hidden River Cave: One of the Great Treasures in the World

Looking up and out of Hidden River Cave

We happened to be in the Mammoth Cave area to show my grandchildren what caves were all about. I’ve always loved the Cave City exit off I-65 and have been to Mammoth Cave many times over the years. But I had not been back there in around ten years, certainly before Covid, so my wife and I were very surprised to find their new reservation system clunky. Granted, Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world and is quite a treasure in the United States. It’s a top-class national park, and if there is something I love, it’s National Parks. So the Mammoth Cave National Park is a busy one. But unlike in the past, where you could show up the same day you wanted to tour the cave, now you have to schedule your tour weeks and months in advance. And ahead of our trip with the grandkids and all their parents, we found out a week ahead of our visit that all the tours were booked up. However, during June and July, Mammoth Cave does offer self-guided tours, which is all I was interested in anyway. My kids were not interested in listening to someone talk for two hours. They wanted to go and explore things at their own pace. So we did that tour and gave the kids exposure to one of the greatest cave systems in the world, so they could say that they had been there and done it, essentially.

Sometimes the cave floods, but not in a dangerous way

Yet, many caves in the area extend outside the National Park borders. So I planned to take the kids to some of the privately owned caves, which I hoped would be much more customer friendly. And that’s precisely what happened. In addition to exploring Mammoth Cave, we went to Onyx Cave, which is right off the exit in Cave City. It was very nice, and the kids could get much more adventurous with the cave system itself. The tour guides were much looser than the stiff-necked Mammoth Cave guides, who have too many rules to have fun and are way too wrapped up in hippie conservation talk. Every time you breathe in a National Park cave, some government employee is crying about humans’ impact on the earth that might affect cave growth. But not at Onyx Cave. It was a very enjoyable experience, and the grandkids could learn a lot about caves and get adventurous without stepping into the actual category of “spelunking.” They were too little for rough cave exploring yet, complete with lights on helmets and crawling through passages on your belly. The trail at Onyx Cave was great; it had a lot of steps, and we could see many stalagmites and stalactites up close. And the tour was just long enough to be interesting without getting boring. After those two experiences, I wasn’t satisfied that the kids had explored caves sufficiently enough to be educational, not in the ways they needed to. So the whole trip required a climax, and I found it just a few miles up the road from our campsite in Cave City at Horse Cave. Horse Cave is the actual name of a town, and it’s two miles off I-65 and features a cave system that runs under the town called Hidden River Cave. I wasn’t sure what we were getting into, but it sounded promising. So on the last day of our visit, we arrived there in the pouring rain and had a fantastic little adventure.

My granddaughter enjoying an adventure

Hidden River Cave was everything I had been looking for regarding a cave experience. It was privately owned, but the investment was better than what we had just seen at Mammoth Cave. They had almost a whole city block of cave tourism that was very well organized, complete with a fantastic museum. And it was all right in the middle of town. It is so well hidden that most people coming to the Mammoth Cave site have no idea it’s even there. But after visiting, I would say anybody going to Mammoth Cave should make Hidden River Cave part of their journey. It’s so good that really I would say it’s better than going to Mammoth Cave. It’s much easier to deal with as a visitor, and the cave interaction is much more adventurous. The cave tour itself takes visitors back into the system as it runs directly under the town of Horse Cave, around ¾ of a mile. It’s not a long tour, but just long enough to be interesting. My kids weren’t bored at all; the cave isn’t as well lit up as Mammoth Cave which is a big plus because it allows you to get your own flashlights out and use them to see. But the path you walk on is fantastic, exceptionally well built and features the longest underground suspension bridge in the world that spans across a deep underground gorge where the Hidden River rages by underneath. Because it’s a river, it floods often and did flood over after all the heavy rain just a few days after we left the area. That is why the trail is so good because it’s built to withstand flooding. So, there was nothing rickety and unsafe about it. But it didn’t feel too touristy either; it was an adventurous experience without being uncomfortable or hazardous for little ones.

It’s a deep cave that runs right under the town. A literal secret passage way into the underworld

Three hundred million years ago, the Mammoth Cave region was the coastline of an inland ocean. The equator was in a different place, to the north, so the sea did its work to carve out all these cave features by working through the sandstone layers and getting down into some of the intense limestone, which is why there are over 400 miles to the Mammoth Cave system, and all these exciting pockets of private cave tours like Hidden River Cave that are so conveniently off the highway. Visitors can get up close and personal with adventurous tours without getting dirty and spending an entire day going spelunking, which are options offered at Hidden River Cave. They had a whole adventure course with zip lines and canopy ropework behind the tourist entrance. This cave experience was created by adventurers for the purpose of exploration, and it had the right vibe I was hoping for. But what was missing was that stiffness you get at the National Parks. We have been to many of them, including Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and the Badlands, and while those places are very nice, they have a kind of government bureaucracy to them that was completely gone at Hidden River Cave. In the context of some of the best places in the world to go, Hidden River Cave is one of the best, and it’s so easy to get to. I would highly recommend it. It’s worth a trip by itself. As I said, the cave does flood, so it’s very adventury down in it. But when it rains heavily, it fills up after a few days. It’s not like people would be caught down there in a flash flood. It takes a few days to fill and a few days longer for all the water to run out. But the result of the cave itself is that it’s just wild enough to experience caves in an adventurous way, without the dangers of exploring caves that this level of interaction actually entails. The Hidden River Cave experience is a wonderful option showing how private ownership often gets the best results, which is undoubtedly the case here.

There is nothing better than teaching young people the path to a good life

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business