Tag: Atlas Shrugged

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal – Ayn Rand’s Moral Defense of the Only System Consistent with Human Nature, and Why It Still Matters in Ohio in 2026

I have been running a series on Ayn Rand because too many people who once understood her through the Tea Party years have let her slip out of memory, or worse, accepted the lazy smear that she was merely an atheist with nothing useful to say. That is a mistake. The radical left still hates her for the same reason they hate successful producers today. They understand, even if they will not admit it, that her arguments cut the moral legs out from under every scheme of redistribution, regulation, and class resentment.

I was reminded of this again after lunch with one of my favorite senators, George Lang. We talked about The Fountainhead, about the gold standard, and about how few people who claim to like Rand have actually read the full range of her nonfiction. That conversation pushed me to pick up the 1966 collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal again. It remains one of the clearest statements ever written of why pure capitalism is not just an economic preference but a moral necessity.

The book is not a dry economics text. Rand called it a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged. With contributions from Nathaniel Branden, a young Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen, it argues that the system we call capitalism today is a bastardized version of the real thing—an unknown ideal because it has never been allowed to exist in pure form. What we have instead is a mixed economy of freedom mixed with controls, and the controls always expand. 

Capitalism as the Only Moral Social System

Rand’s central claim is simple and radical. Man is a rational being who must use his own mind to survive. Any social system that initiates force against that process is not merely inefficient; it is immoral. Capitalism, properly understood, is the only system that bans the initiation of physical force from human relationships and leaves individuals free to produce, trade, and keep what they create.

She defines it precisely: a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. The government’s sole legitimate function is to protect those rights by retaliating against those who initiate force. Everything else—regulation of production, redistribution of wealth, “industrial policy,” licensing of speech—is a violation. 

This is why she rejected the conservative approach of her time. Conservatives often tried to defend capitalism on practical grounds or by appeal to tradition while accepting the moral premise of altruism—that the individual has a duty to live for others. Rand called that a fatal compromise. In “The Anatomy of Compromise,” she shows that when you try to mix a rational principle with an irrational one, the irrational always wins. You cannot have a little bit of socialism without eventually losing the foundation of freedom. 

America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business

One of the most powerful essays in the collection is “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” Rand flips the usual narrative on its head. The productive genius is not the exploiter; he is the one being hamstrung by the looters and moochers who use the power of the state to seize what they did not create. Business people are treated as a scapegoat class in the same way other minorities have been treated under collectivist regimes. In Soviet Russia it was the bourgeoisie. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. In America it is the successful businessman. 

I see this hatred every day in the attacks on Trump, on Vivek Ramaswamy, on any rich person who made money by creating value rather than extracting it through politics. The radical left’s outrage is not about fairness. It is pure Marxist class warfare dressed up in modern language. Rand saw it clearly because she lived it. Her father lost his pharmacy when the Bolsheviks nationalized private businesses. She never forgot.

Solving World Hunger: Production, Not Politics

People still talk about solving world hunger as if it were a distribution problem that requires more government. That is backward. Pigs, chickens, and rabbits reproduce rapidly. There is no physical shortage of the capacity to produce food. Shortages are created by politics—by governments that micromanage, confiscate, and regulate the very people who would otherwise raise the animals and grow the crops.

If you want to end hunger, get as close as possible to pure capitalism. Remove the artificial constraints. Let people own property, keep their profits, and trade freely. The poor in the United States, even under our imperfect capitalism, are rich compared to most of the world. A few American dollars can still be a fortune to someone living under the policies that Rand warned against. The guilt that drives redistribution often comes from people who helped create the barriers to opportunity and then want to ease their conscience by confiscating more from the productive.

Greenspan on Gold and the Hard Reality of Theory

One of the most quoted essays in the book is Alan Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom,” written years before he became Federal Reserve chairman. He argued that gold and economic freedom are inseparable. The gold standard protects property rights by limiting the government’s ability to inflate away wealth through deficit spending. Without it, the welfare state can confiscate savings silently. 

Greenspan later operated in a system far from that ideal. Theory is cleaner than practice when you face political realities, activist judges, and entrenched interests. That does not make the original argument wrong. It shows how hard it is to implement principle once the mixed economy has taken hold. We are still living with the consequences of easy money, quantitative easing, and the revolving door between the Fed and large asset managers. The warnings in that 1966 essay hold up.

True Monopolies, Railroads, and the Industrial Revolution

The collection also dismantles the usual antitrust myths. Free-market monopolies can only be maintained by superior efficiency and better service. Coercive monopolies require government intervention—subsidies, franchises, or legal barriers to entry. The history of American railroads is a clear example. Most of the transcontinental lines were built with government land grants and ended in financial chaos. James J. Hill’s Great Northern was built without federal subsidies and remained the only one that did not go bankrupt. 

Robert Hessen’s essay on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on women and children is equally important. Child labor was not created by capitalism; it was inherited from a world of grinding poverty. Factories gave children a way to earn a living and survive to adulthood. Rising wealth created by capitalism eventually made child labor unnecessary. The laws usually get the credit; the production gets the blame. 

Airwaves, Speech, and the Nature of Government

Rand’s essay on the property status of the airwaves is still relevant. The early chaos in radio was not a failure of free enterprise but a failure of government to recognize and protect property rights in frequencies. Instead of allowing private ownership and trade, the government declared the airwaves public property and nationalized them through licensing. That opened the door to political control of speech—the same impulse we still see whenever independent voices become inconvenient. 

Ohio’s Choice and the Fight Ahead

All of this is not abstract philosophy. It is the framework for understanding the hatred directed at successful people in our own state. Vivek Ramaswamy is a rich man who built companies. That alone is enough for the radical left and their media allies to paint him as untrustworthy. The same pattern appears in the attacks on Trump. They do not hate wealth. They hate the independence that wealth can buy when it is earned rather than granted.

I have watched this for decades. The people who want a governor who has never had to make a payroll or risk his own capital are the same people who will expand the very controls that create shortages and dependency. Michael Ryan understands these issues at the county level. Senators like George Lang still talk about gold-backed approaches and business-friendly policy. We need more of them.

Rand was not interested in being practical in the usual sense. She was interested in being right on principle. She knew that a culture that accepts altruism as its moral code will eventually sacrifice the producers. She also believed that the potential for human progress under pure capitalism is limitless. The nineteenth century, when America came closest to the ideal, proved it.

I have read her books many times, along with the work of those who analyzed her. I agree with her on the essentials of capitalism even while I am more of a man of faith than she was. The philosophy can be taken further. But the fight is now. The books are still on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. You can get them quickly. Read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Then look at the news with clearer eyes.

If you want to solve poverty and hunger, expand opportunity. More capitalism, not less. More people who understand how wealth is actually created. That is the only path that treats individuals as ends in themselves rather than means to someone else’s political vision.

Don’t give up the ship.

Footnotes

1.  Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966; expanded 1967). Rand described the book as a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged.

2.  Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

3.  Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

4.  Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

5.  Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” originally published in The Objectivist (1966) and reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

6.  Robert Hessen, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

7.  Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

8.  On James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, see Burton W. Folsom Jr. and related free-market historical accounts; the railroad is frequently cited in Objectivist literature as the counter-example to subsidized lines.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. With additional articles by Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen. New York: New American Library, 1966 (hardcover); expanded Signet paperback, 1967.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Greenspan, Alan. “Gold and Economic Freedom.” The Objectivist, 1966.

Folsom, Burton W., Jr. Works on the “robber barons” myth and James J. Hill.

Additional recommended reading: Ayn Rand Lexicon entries on capitalism, business people, and the gold standard (aynrandlexicon.com); Ayn Rand Institute materials on laissez-faire.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

The Case of Jack Ma: China would never put up with a person like Elon Musk

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to push a civilization forward, and the more I dig into the mechanics of power, the clearer it becomes that the decisive factor is rarely the collective. It is the rare individual who refuses to accept the current ceiling. Rainer Zitelmann’s New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars is one of those books that lands at exactly the right moment because it forces the conversation back onto that hard truth. The foreword by Newt Gingrich sets the tone, but the real value is in how Zitelmann lays out the entrepreneurial path to the stars without the usual romantic fog. He understands that the technical pieces are largely in place; the missing ingredient has always been the institutional and cultural permission for individuals to own the risk and the reward. 

I have read a lot of books on strategy over the years. Robert Greene’s Power series is solid, particularly when you need to see the patterns that keep repeating across centuries. But the concepts only become useful when you translate them into the actual arena you are operating in—whether that is a small business, a national culture, or the emerging space economy. That is why I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business the way I did. I wanted to strip the abstraction away and show how leadership actually works when the consequences are real—the same principles scale. At every level, the decisive question is the same: does the system protect and amplify the person who is willing to impose a higher standard, or does it systematically cut that person down to the level of the committee?

That is the danger I keep returning to when I look at the post-colonial messaging that has saturated our universities and media over the last generation. The surface story is that colonialism was uniquely evil and must be endlessly atoned for. The stronger effect is to pathologize the very traits that built the most productive societies in history—individual agency, technological dominance, the willingness to claim and develop resources. A lot of money flows into that messaging, and not all of it is organic. Anyone who has watched the funding streams into American higher education over the last fifteen years knows that Chinese influence, both direct and through corporate intermediaries that depend on the Chinese market, has been substantial. The same pattern showed up in Hollywood a decade ago. The first weekend China box-office number became the make-or-break figure for big studio releases because a hundred-million-dollar Chinese gross was realistic for a major title. Studios adjusted content, softened political edges, and chased that market until the politics shifted and the arrangement began to sour. 

China does not need to kick the door in. The preferred method has always been to work the cultural and regulatory back doors until the target society starts policing its own exceptional people. That is the real war, and it is fought at the level of incentives and narrative long before any kinetic phase.

Zitelmann devotes time to the Chinese model and is careful not to caricature it. Roughly 60% of China’s economic activity is in the private sector. The catch, and it is the entire ballgame, is that private ownership does not equal private control. You may hold the equity, but the Party retains the right to manage the owners. The individuals who generate the wealth remain on a short leash. That arrangement can produce impressive aggregate numbers for a while. It cannot produce, and will not tolerate, an Elon Musk.

The clearest demonstration of the difference is the story of Jack Ma. In 2020, at the height of the COVID lockdowns in the West, Ma was still the richest man in China, with a fortune north of $50 billion. He had built Alibaba and Ant Group into engines that actually moved the Chinese economy. Then he made the mistake of publicly criticizing the financial regulators. Within days, the Ant Group IPO—the largest in history at the time—was suspended. Ma disappeared from public view for months. When he resurfaced, he was a chastened figure operating under much tighter constraints. The message was unambiguous: you can get rich, but you will not be allowed to become independently powerful. The state will let you own the assets only as long as you accept that the state ultimately owns you. 

That is the model. And it is the model that certain elements within the United States have been trying to import for years through regulatory pressure, board governance norms, and a cultural campaign that treats exceptional individuals as threats to the collective. Look at the pattern. Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985 by a board that preferred managerial predictability over the difficult personality who actually created the products. The company nearly died until they brought him back. Sam Altman was removed from OpenAI by the board in 2023 because he was insufficiently candid with them; employees and the market forced a reversal within days because everyone understood that the board lacked the vision Altman did. Travis Kalanick was forced out of Uber in 2017 after investors decided the founder’s edge had become a liability. Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos at various pressure points, Elon Musk himself more than once—every one of these people has faced the same institutional reflex. The committee always prefers the safer average over the dangerous high performer. 

I call the people who staff those boards Normies. They are not evil in the cartoon sense. They value belonging more than they value results. Their deepest instinct is to reduce variance, and high-agency individuals are the ultimate source of variance. When that instinct captures the governing institutions of a society, the society begins to select against the very people who generate its outsized economic output. Less than one percent of any population produces the breakthroughs that the other ninety-nine percent live off of. If you systematically attack that one percent—through regulation, through cultural stigma, through the soft coercion of “stakeholder” governance—you do not get a more equitable society. You get stagnation, then decline.

China understands this dynamic perfectly and has weaponized it. The goal is not to out-innovate the United States in a head-to-head contest of free individuals. The goal is to change the cultural and regulatory climate in the United States so that the next generation of American Elons Musks never has the room to operate. That is why the post-colonial curriculum, the DEI machinery, the reflexive hostility to “tech bros,” and the expanding regulatory state all point in the same direction. They are different instruments playing the same tune: exceptionalism is the problem, collective management is the solution.

SpaceX is the living counter-example, and that is why the recent IPO matters so much. Elon waited until the Starship factory was producing vehicles at a cadence that actually changes the economics of access to orbit. Only then did he open the capital floodgates. The risk of going public is real—once the ownership base expands, the pressure to behave as a normal public company intensifies. But the dual-class structure and the sheer scale of the opportunity give him a window. The capital will accelerate the cadence from monthly launches to weekly, and eventually to daily. That is how you open a multi-trillion-dollar space economy. It is also why the same forces that neutralized Jack Ma have been trying for years to neutralize Musk through every available regulatory and cultural lever. 

I supported Trump for the same reason Musk did. Both of them saw the pattern clearly. Another four years of the prior trajectory would have continued the slow strangulation of the independent centers of production. The Chinese model does not need to conquer America by force. It only needs America to adopt the habit of cutting its own high performers down to size. Once that habit is locked in, the GDP gap closes on its own.

The real debate almost nobody is willing to state plainly is this: China wants to destroy people like Elon Musk. America, at its best, wants to create the conditions that produce more of them and then get out of their way. Everything else—trade policy, university curricula, board governance norms, the cultural treatment of ambition—is downstream of that single civilizational choice. Zitelmann’s book is valuable because it keeps the focus where it belongs. The stars will not be reached by committees optimizing for consensus. They will be reached by the rare individuals who refuse to accept the current limits, and by the societies that still know how to protect them.

Footnotes

1.  Rainer Zitelmann, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars (Skyhorse Publishing, 2026), with foreword by Newt Gingrich.

2.  On the sixty-percent private-sector contribution figures and the limits of private control in China, see Zitelmann’s earlier analysis in “State Capitalism? No, The Private Sector Was And Is The Main Driver Of China’s Economic Growth,” Forbes, September 30, 2019, and the discussion of Chinese commercial space companies in his 2026 work.

3.  Jack Ma’s October 2020 speech criticizing Chinese financial regulators, the subsequent suspension of the Ant Group IPO, and his months-long disappearance from public view are documented in Bloomberg, “Jack Ma’s Empire in Crisis After China Halts Ant Group IPO,” December 22, 2020, and contemporaneous reporting from The Guardian and Wired.

4.  Steve Jobs’s 1985 ouster from Apple and 1997 return are standard corporate history; see, among many sources, the accounts in Walter Isaacson’s biography and contemporary board accounts.

5.  Sam Altman’s removal by the OpenAI board on November 17, 2023, and rapid reinstatement are detailed in OpenAI’s official announcement and subsequent reporting by The New York Times and CNBC.

6.  Travis Kalanick’s forced resignation as Uber CEO in June 2017 under pressure from major investors is covered in The New York Times, June 21, 2017.

7.  SpaceX’s June 12, 2026 IPO, the $135 share price, approximately $75 billion raised, and roughly $1.75 trillion valuation are confirmed in the company’s S-1 filings and contemporaneous Reuters and CNBC reporting.

8.  On Hollywood’s dependence on the Chinese box office in the 2010s and the resulting content adjustments, see the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report “Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China” (2015) and later analyses of the market’s decline after 2019.

Bibliography

Davenport, Christian. Various reporting on commercial space.

Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power and related works.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs.

Zitelmann, Rainer. New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars. Skyhorse Publishing, 2026.

Zitelmann, Rainer. “State Capitalism? No, The Private Sector Was And Is The Main Driver Of China’s Economic Growth.” Forbes, September 30, 2019.

U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China.” 2015.

Contemporary reporting from Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, The New York Times, and The Guardian on Jack Ma (2020), Sam Altman (2023), Travis Kalanick (2017), and the SpaceX IPO (2026).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Modern Piracy: How Private Equity Looters Are Killing American Enterprise

In the heart of America’s industrial backbone, a quiet but devastating transformation is underway. Private equity and hedge fund takeovers of privately owned businesses are reshaping the landscape of capitalism—not through innovation or value creation, but through extraction, manipulation, and short-term profiteering. Having spent a lifetime affiliated with private ownership, I’ve witnessed firsthand the strength of entrepreneurial risk-taking, long-term stewardship, and the pride that comes with building something meaningful. But now, I find myself on the front lines of a hostile shift—watching a company in West Chester, Ohio, where I’ve long been involved, fall prey to the very forces that threaten the integrity of American enterprise. These financial entities, often cloaked in the language of capitalism, are anything but capitalist in nature. Their methods—leasebacks, dividend recapitalizations, strategic bankruptcies, and forced partnerships—are not tools of growth but instruments of plunder. They are not builders; they are pirates in suits, looting the value created by others and leaving behind hollowed-out shells of once-thriving companies.  This isn’t capitalism—it’s cannibalism. Private equity firms have become modern-day pirates, looting companies and leaving wreckage in their wake. From my personal experience in dealing with what I would consider an industry full of really stupid people, I intend to expose their tactics, highlight real-world consequences, and draw parallels to Atlas Shrugged’s prophetic warnings.  While the honeymoon is over for significant political change, it’s now time to do the real work and be honest about what we see, and determine if, as a culture, we dare to do what we need to.

The tactics used by private equity firms are as predictable as they are destructive. Leasebacks strip companies of their real estate assets, forcing them into long-term leases that drain future earnings and profits. Dividend recaps saddle businesses with debt to pay out investors, often exceeding the original equity investment. Strategic bankruptcies are engineered not from mismanagement but from deliberate overleveraging, allowing firms to walk away with profits while workers and communities bear the cost. Forced partnerships and roll-ups dilute control and homogenize operations, eroding brand identity and operational efficiency. Tax avoidance schemes shift liabilities away from investors and onto the companies themselves, while layoffs, price hikes, and quality cuts are implemented to fund the looting behavior. These are not isolated incidents—they are systemic. Brands like Toys ‘ R ‘ Us, Friendly’s Ice Cream, RadioShack, and countless others have been gutted by these practices. The result is a managed decline, not a capitalist renaissance. It’s a form of economic socialism, where wealth is redistributed—not to people with low incomes, but to the politically connected elite who manipulate the system for personal gain.

This phenomenon is not just economic—it’s deeply cultural. The people behind these financial maneuvers often hail from urban centers like New York, where they assume superiority over the so-called flyover states that actually produce the goods, labor, and logistics that drive the economy. They view the Midwest as backward, failing to grasp the value of raw materials, highway interchanges, and the human capital that exists outside their echo chambers. Their arrogance is matched only by their ignorance. They are not deep thinkers, nor are they builders. They are short-sighted opportunists who measure success by the size of their boats, the exclusivity of their golf clubs, and the social currency of their wealth. This mindset is perfectly captured in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, where Lillian Rearden scoffs at the bracelet made from her husband’s revolutionary steel—not because it lacks beauty, but because it lacks social status. She is the embodiment of parasitic elitism, living off the efforts of others without appreciation. Today’s private equity managers are Lillian Reardons—dismissive of innovation, obsessed with optics, and blind to the value of creation. They destroy what they do not understand, and they do so with the full complicity of a political system that feeds off their donations and influence. 

The Rise of Private Equity

Private equity emerged in the 1980s during the leveraged buyout boom. Initially marketed as a way to unlock value, it quickly devolved into a system of extraction. Firms like KKR pioneered debt-fueled acquisitions, setting the stage for decades of corporate cannibalism.

The Playbook of Plunder

  • Sale-Leasebacks: Selling real estate to raise cash, then leasing it back at inflated rates.
  • Dividend Recaps: Loading companies with debt to pay investors massive dividends.
  • Strategic Bankruptcies: Using bankruptcy as a tool to shed obligations while owners profit.
  • Roll-Ups: Forcing mergers that destroy brand identity and operational efficiency.
  • Tax Schemes: Exploiting carried interest loopholes and offshore havens.

Mainstream Brand Casualties

  • Toys ‘R’ Us: Acquired by Bain Capital and KKR, saddled with $5B debt. Bankruptcy wiped out 33,000 jobs.
  • Sears & Kmart: Eddie Lampert’s hedge fund stripped assets, sold prime real estate, hollowed out iconic brands.
  • J.Crew: Leveraged to pay dividends, collapsed during COVID.
  • Payless ShoeSource: PE-backed buyout led to liquidation and 16,000 job losses.
  • Gymboree: Multiple bankruptcies under PE ownership.
  • RadioShack & Pier 1 Imports: Victims of debt-driven roll-ups.
  • Healthcare: Steward Health Care cut staff, and ER mortality rose 13.4%.

Atlas Shrugged Parallels

Hank Rearden represents builders—innovators who create value. James Taggart and Orren Boyle symbolize individuals who exploit systems for personal gain. Today’s private equity firms are Taggart incarnate: thriving on the virtue of producers while dismantling their creations. This is Lillian Rearden syndrome—obsession with optics over substance.

The Cultural Fallout

Communities hollowed out. Factories shuttered. Innovation stifled. From West Chester to Wichita, towns lose their lifeblood as PE firms chase short-term gains. Quality declines, prices rise, and workers bear the brunt of greed.

The Data Doesn’t Lie

  • 56% of large bankruptcies in 2024 were PE-backed despite only 6.5% of GDP.
  • $80.4B in dividend recaps in one year.
  • ER deaths up 13.4% post-acquisition.
  • Tens of thousands of layoffs annually.

Regional Devastation

Ohio’s manufacturing belt gutted by PE roll-ups. Texas hospitals closing under Cerberus Capital. California retail chains liquidated for real estate flips. Each region tells the same story: extraction over creation.

Solutions & Call to Action

  1. Tax Reform: End carried interest loopholes.
  2. Bankruptcy Oversight: Stop strategic bankruptcies.
  3. Ownership Incentives: Reward long-term stewardship.
  4. Transparency: Mandate disclosure of debt and payouts.
  5. Cultural Shift: Celebrate builders, shame looters.

Private equity is not capitalism—it’s piracy. Unless we act, America becomes a ghost ship. Builders must rise, looters must fall. Draw the line. Stop the plunder.  If we are serious about restoring economic integrity and making America great again, we must confront this modern piracy head-on. That means protecting private ownership, incentivizing long-term stewardship, and reforming the laws that allow financial looters to operate unchecked. We need tax reform that eliminates carried interest loopholes, bankruptcy oversight that prevents strategic exits, and transparency requirements that expose the true nature of these deals. We must elevate above-the-line thinking—solution-based, accountable, and proactive—over the victim-based, reactive mindset that dominates our administrative state. The Oz Principle teaches us that cultures thrive when they are led by people who ask, “What else can I do?” rather than “Who can I blame?” Private equity firms operate below the line, dragging down the businesses they acquire and the communities they affect. If we want a thriving economy, we must draw a line in the sand. We must stop the plunder, protect the creators, and reject the parasites. Only then can we preserve the legacy of American enterprise and ensure that the companies built by hard-working families are not sacrificed on the altar of short-term greed.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

The Arrest of President Trump: It’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ in real life, but with a better ending

It was eerily similar to the end of the great book Atlas Shrugged, where the arrest of John Galt resulted in the torture of the main character in similar ways as Jesus Christ was captured and tortured. The arrest of President Trump by a desperate, thieving government was almost a word-for-word script of the classic novel by Ayn Rand. Even though the book was always considered extremely over-the-top science fiction, we had now seen in 2023 the future so dystopian when that book was released in 1957 to be completely accurate. You could attribute the arrest and prosecution of President Trump to precisely the same reasons as John Galt was arrested. Or even Jesus Christ. It is beyond coincidence that all this is happening during the holy week, with Good Friday coming, where Jesus Christ was killed for his threat to the established order. It also reminded me of the killing of Socrates and many other names throughout history who have threatened the established order, which resulted in their arrest and torture to preserve their corruption from the eyes of the public. I’m sure objectivists will want to argue that President Trump is anything like the pure, Ayn Rand characters of flawless bravery, but it’s the only thing that came to my mind as I watched Trump fly on his big private plane to New York, to stay in his golden tower among the skyline, a lifetime of achievement building up to his remarkable life. And his life of individual achievement threatened this dystopian monstrosity of a corrupt government that wanted more than anything to destroy its rival. In this case, President Trump is the presidential frontrunner. You could almost place the villain of Atlas Shrugged, Mr. Thomson, who is the president of the United States, in that book with Joe Biden. But as bad as Atlas Shrugged is, as a story about how government abuses its power, the real world of this prosecution of President Trump is far worse and more sinister. Even Ayn Rand couldn’t imagine the evil we have witnessed in this obvious attempted destruction of Trump.

President Biden, like his fictional counterpart, Mr. Thompson from the book, knows what they have done. They acquired power through massive election fraud, and that evidence is clear for all. But this arrest of their political rival only confirms to the extreme extent the corruption we have seen on the surface. The fear they have shown toward Trump is something we have only established in the worst of our fictional explorations in movies and novels. A polite society does not even acknowledge this level of corruption, there are few mechanisms of psychology to acknowledge such a thing, yet there it was for us all to see. Trump being arrested by a phony legal premise and having his fingerprints taken and paraded around as a captive of tyrannical authority. It was the evil of a state-controlled government intent to suppress the ambitions of all people everywhere to the same sacrificial government as we have seen from the Aztecs, the practitioners of human sacrifice in the land of Canaan, or the cannibals of the South Pacific. These despots of tyranny only know one thing, which is governed by the dominant, the most power-hungry, and the most corrupt, and they seek to destroy any rivals to that understanding. Ayn Rand’s book about these forces has always been one of the best to put the finger on this very evil power and explain it to an audience as a work of philosophy that no human society had ever managed to capture. This tyranny was explored but not very well understood in the story of Christ. History has watched so many characters who take on an enormous persona for personal freedom emerge through history only to have the established order seek to preserve itself emphatically. But there hasn’t ever been a work of art that so intensely captured the nature of that evil than Atlas Shrugged. 

But where I have always thought that the end of Atlas Shrugged had John Galt compromised from the overall theme of the book, this arrest of President Trump was an awakening that I never thought I would ever see happen in the human race. Literally, the entire world watched; there was never a bigger stage, a more extensive example of abuse, of tyranny where all the stops of corruption were pulled out and laid naked on the stage for all to see. It almost had the theatrical impact of the play Equus, where the characters appear nude for the audience to tie their mind in knots from the morality of it all. Or the immorality of it instead. This arrest of President Trump is how the book Atlas Shrugged should have ended. Trump was bigger than the small-minded people seeking to arrest him. It had more of a Superman feel to it, where finally, a member of the human race had transcended the corruption and tyranny of thousands of years of small-minded abuse.   The same forces that used to burn members of the Protestant reformation at the stake were suddenly eclipsed by this massive figure that President Trump had become. The feeble government of Mr. Thomson only had corruption to blow into its sails as a shocked world saw them naked and afraid by the towering figure of Trump and the MAGA movement outgrowing their feeble attempts at control. This was a government that didn’t know what to do, so it did the unthinkable, and a moment in human history hatched a new kind of individualism. Trump had transcended their menace, the worst they could impose, and through it all, he looked bigger than the system itself.

The end of Atlas Shrugged resulted in the complete collapse of the government and its communist assumptions. The deal John Galt offered to the tyrannical government that imprisoned him was for the losers of existence to get out of the way of the producers who essentially were responsible for making everything. I’ve had a relationship with Atlas Shrugged for many years, and I have witnessed up close and very personally the extreme hatred the political left has for the book. It strips away an assumption made by Karl Marx and other leftist philosophers about how society is constructed. That teamwork is more important than individualism. But the truth is that the political left is slow, cumbersome, and bureaucratic, and they just get in the way of the fast-moving individuals who have all the answers and innovation at their fingertips. And the best thing in any society is to get out of the way of those people. Yet a government like Joe Biden’s can’t accept that reality, that they are just useless in the scheme of things, and that the power President Trump has is something no amount of government force could ever possess. And in their attempts to maintain that power over thousands of years of attempted government, they had never succeeded. Yet President Trump did something that history had never seen before; he transcended the state’s power in new ways. Characters like him in the past would have been burned at the stake, thrown to the lions, and killed a thousand other ways to prevent the reality from settling in that it is not the state that runs the world. It’s individuals. And probably no place else but America could such an ostentatious exhibition have ever been displayed. President Trump could have never even happened if not for our Constitution, free speech, and economic system. And because he did, he grew into something that even the most corrupt government in the world had lost control of. And that is a sequel to Atlas Shrugged that I have always wanted to see. It’s better than the book, and the future is much less bleak because of it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Want to Know Why We Aren’t Using Ivermectin to Treat Covid: Read Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’ to understand

More so than before Trump was in office, Ayn Rand’s work has absolute power in identifying who the enemy of our modern times is and what can be done to defeat them. Before Trump, there were many considerations, and nobody really knew whether or not the American Constitution would hold up under the Obama presidency. But now we know it will. Trump was a good, Constitutional president, and he showed the world just how powerful America could be if it followed its Constitution. It took him essentially just a few years, even under great fire, to fix many things that had been long paralyzing our country from the countless attacks that came from those unnamed enemies over the last century. Even with all their efforts, America could snap back into good effect quickly, and that is what we learned with Trump, historically. So now that we have seen the Constitution tested authentically, we can now turn our attention to the enemies and understand them and their motives so we can eradicate them from our lives. And to do that, I can’t think of a better writer, or creative person, in all human history that has put their hand on who that enemy to humanity is than Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand is the Holy Water to evil in the world. They hate her, and for great reason. But she is very much a product of American culture. Specifically, under this current Biden administration, the most significant authority of what is wrong with the kind of people who want to end America. And of all her works, I would say that her book Anthem, from 1938, is the best at showing who those enemies are and what they want to drive us all to, and I’d recommend everyone to read it now.

I read many books; it’s one of my favorite things to do. I’ve read Brave New World, Animal Farm,and 1984. I’ve spoken a lot about the novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward from 1888, which projected a socialist utopia across the world. These are all dystopian novels that many consider irrefutable classics in literature, and they have gone to a great measure to shape our modern world and our opinions about authority and government. But a better and more hopeful dystopian novel has never been written than Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I’ve read all her books many times, and I don’t think there is a better novel of this type out there. Anthem isn’t very long; you can easily read it in an afternoon. But its scope and story are undoubtedly influential and insightful. As a Russian immigrant who suffered greatly under communism and retreated to America for a safe haven, Ayn Rand took her unique perspective and passion and translated it into this magnificent masterpiece. And even though at this point it is nearly 100 years old, it is as relevant today as it was then, perhaps more so. I tend to think that everyone knows these books until I hear the constant complaints by many regarding Covid protocols and the lack of use of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin to treat the virus, and I say to them, “didn’t you read Anthem? That’s what the whole book was about?” Of course, the look I get back is mystification. “What’s Anthem?”

Essentially the point of the book is that a future society has regressed along the Vico Cycle back to a theocratic society that has retreated to a time before technological invention. A village council of wise people called the Council of Candlemakers spent 50 years inventing and getting it approved, the great new technology of making candles. The lead character, who has never known anything about the world like the rest of society, but social collectivism, doesn’t even have an understanding of the word “I” or “me.” Yet through a series of accidents, he discovers a lightbulb deep in a tunnel that has been hidden from the world hundreds of years in the past, perhaps even thousands. And upon discovering the light bulb (again), he takes it to the Council of Candlemakers, expecting them to be thankful. But what he finds instead are a bunch of threatened people who have spent their whole life inventing the candle and sharing it with the world. The lightbulb would destroy their power and prestige in their community which has far more power to them than the convenience of using lightbulbs over candles in that particular society. Many before Covid came along couldn’t understand such a reference. But now, they have seen it firsthand. Ivermectin is that modern lightbulb that the health authority class is threatened by. They want power and control, not a solution to Covid, and there you have it; we have the evidence of the villains in Anthem, except clearly now in real life in a way that people can understand. 

The book, as I said, is very easy to read. It’s short. But to make things even easier for new readers, or even old readers of Ayn Rand, The Atlas Society back in 2018 turned Anthem into a graphic novel, which was then turned into a series of videos that were easy to watch. Eighteen episodes will take viewers through the entire book. When The Atlas Society did this work, Trump was in the White House, so I guess the effort went unnoticed. People had an Ayn Rand character in the White House, and people dropped off interest a bit because of it in this kind of reading material. Ayn Rand was very popular during the Obama presidency. Now that Biden is in the White House, which continues that “enemy” of America perspective, Ayn Rand is making a comeback. I have had so many people talking to me about Ayn Rand and wanting to know more about her that I decided to do this to make it easier for people to get easy access to all her great works. The difference between now and the past obviously is that Constitutional element. In Ayn Rand’s day, she saw only a gradual erosion until the world would literally be destroyed in the way it was in Anthem. But a hundred years later, the American Constitution is still intact and is working. Of late, the Biden Vaccine mandates have been slapped down by the Supreme Court in a healthy way, so we have survived a lot of trouble since Anthem was written. But understanding the motives of the bad guys is another matter. They are still doing their work, and we now must know what they are after and stop them in the tracks. For that, Anthem will help a lot.

The villains of Ayn Rand’s novels are very much a real thing; we see them every one, in our communities, our national governments, our businesses, and even our families. It can be hard to see them because of the emotion that comes with our relationships with them that can cause us not to want to know the truth. Yet the truth is the truth, and if we really want to solve our modern problems, we must not turn away from it. Literature is a great refuge to get our thoughts together and to seek solutions, and to do that; you must know how to identify the problem. Nobody but Ayn Rand was better at articulating that problem, and Anthem is a masterwork of hers that everyone should read. And to make it as easy as possible, the graphic novel videos are fantastic introductions to her work or tenacious reminders of its relevancy. Yet whatever the case, Anthem is the only way to understand Covid-19 because all other reasons for rationality fall short otherwise.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Difference Between Me and Ayn Rand: To Strike or to Fight

Ayn Rand is a Good Place to Start, I like to Stand and Fight

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. I have read many books over the last four decades, but the author that is specifically American and deals specifically with the evils of our present time is Ayn Rand. Books like hers would not be produced by any other culture other than an American one, and the specific challenges we have now are addressed in those works, so it’s the quickest way to get people to what they need to know by referring them to her. I was delighted when President Trump was elected because, in many ways, I felt he was the main character from The Fountainhead and that America would prosper quite a lot by having an Ayn Rand type of hero in the White House. Ayn Rand fans have found my Gunfighter’s Guide blog site a safe place to think about big things for many years. The people I get along with most are people of the Objectivist philosophy, a branch of philosophy created by Ayn Rand, which I would say is a natural evolution of thought going back to well before Plato in Greece. It helped that Ayn Rand came from Russia, where communism ruined her life and the lives of everyone she knew. Fleeing to America, she had a platform to express those disappointments, and that became her great American novels. Most of all, Ayn Rand identified a very treacherous enemy, which I would simplify as the great fight between the lazy and the ambitious. Most of the world’s governments are in a fight to appease the lazy while profiting on the ambitious efforts, including parasites like the Davos crowd who want the same without the burden of even being in a government. But that’s not to say I agree with everything Ayn Rand said or did. For quite a long time, I have been doing my own thing that requires some explanation that many are having when they talk to me, as they have been lately very ambitiously, about Atlas Shrugged because it is so relevant to the world we see today.

I have several problems with Ayn Rand; first of all, she was an atheist. While that can bring a fresh perspective to a way of thinking, the lack of spiritual curiosity is too rigid for me. I have my own philosophy going on; I would never count myself an Objectivist or a disciple of Ayn Rand, which is why I’m not more involved in the various groups that evolved out of Ayn Rand. Too many people who call themselves Objectivists are just as religiously rigid in dedication to her as Christian people are to Jesus Christ. I have a problem with group behavior in general; all of them have the problem of insisting that their point of view of the world is the final nail in a coffin. Any challenge to their superiority results in conflict. In Ayn Rand’s case, her supporters tend to like to mimic the events of the book, to Strike against the world and deny it of their talents, hiding in some remote places in society and letting everything fall apart. That is my main problem with Atlas Shrugged; it’s built on the premise of Striking, which I am against in every way that you can imagine. I am a person who is against limits to my ambition, and I propose to fight those who get in my way instead of running away from them. I write my own books, and my latest, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is my argument that it is far better to be a Gunfighter than an Objectivist in society.   Ayn Rand came late to the American experiment while it was under attack by global socialism pushes. In history, America had done great things long before she came along, even though our educations have sought to remove that evidence from our eyes. Essentially, the gunfighter mentality of western expansion was an approach that worked and should further be projected to the world at large instead of all this “striking” business. It’s like some wife that is trying to convince her husband into something she wants him to do by denying him sex. Withdrawing work in our society is not a solution, I would say we need to fight for our right to be productive, not to yield to the forces that are trying to shut it all down.

There were characters in Ayn Rand’s books who refused to the very end to hide from the parasites of existence, but my view of the entire effort is that it’s a feminine one. Women look at conflict differently than men do, biologically. I see no reason to yield to the lazy just so they don’t rob my existence, and that is essentially the plot of Atlas Shrugged.   Deny the world of your great effort until they say uncle and beg you to return to society to save them. Because by themselves, they will choke and destroy their lives. Then there was the problem with Objectivists over the Trump Presidency. He was too compromising to be the uncompromising figures from The Fountainhead. Ultimately, Objectivists had a problem with him as a person. That is where I separated myself from them during 2015 and 2016. Instead, I found the game of Poker and the smell of gunpowder to be much more effective in doing the same, in protecting the integrity of the ambitious while knocking down the efforts of the lazy to loot off the productive. When dealing with people with all types of backgrounds, we can’t afford to be rigid. It’s like landing in some foreign country and expecting them to know your home language. You have to adjust your thought to the people capable of considering it, and by such measures, you can win over everyone. Ayn Rand’s run and hide suggestion don’t appeal to me. I prefer 100% of the time to stand and fight. And I’ll fight over anything and everything.   But to me, that fight is more like winning at Poker with all the skills needed to win each round than in surrendering integrity to the masses. 

With all that said, there isn’t a better story out there than Atlas Shrugged at identifying our times’ problems. Where I disagree with Ayn Rand and Objectivists in general, it’s really a matter of strategy. But to understand the issues we are dealing with, which is why we are talking about Ayn Rand again a year into the Biden administration, which is ripped essentially straight from the pages of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand is a great place to start.   I would blame her rigidity in thought, her either-or approach to things on being a European immigrant who never fully recovered from what the Soviet Union did to her family. She became a libertarian in America, supportive of loose sex and drugs, and had a rigid political view which formed her concept of Atlantis in the book. Many of her followers are looming out there, disconnected from the problems of our times as much as they can be. They will not help the Biden administration have success off their efforts. They will Strike and let him die on the vine. But for me, that is a boring way to approach this problem. I much more respect the attitude of Andrew Jackson, who would dual anybody in a gunfight at the slightest provocation, and in essence, brought our government under a proper kind of control for the first time since the creation of the Constitution. President Trump reminds me a lot of President Jackson; he’s just as combative, just not with guns. But it is in that attitude I see its best to eliminate the enemies from our lives. And it’s the position I have with my Gunfighter’s Guide. Playing Poker with the enemy and taking all their money and power is much better than running and hiding. But Ayn Rand is a great place to start for the person looking for answers about why things are the way they are.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Martin Luther King Jr., was a Communist: Getting on the same page by reading the same book, ‘Atlas Shrugged’

Atlas Shrugged is a Good Place to Start to Understand Today

I never needed to honor Martin Luther King, nor Nelson Mandela for that matter. Not because they were black leaders. I have never been a racist, nor will I ever be. I would have always treated Martin Luther King as a human being because I don’t see color in people. But I do see communists and other Marxists quite clearly, and King was two things that I can’t stand, he was an adulterer, and he was a communist. That makes him a piece of crap in my book, so there is a bit of slight at hand in honoring the Civil Rights leader with a day of his own, where it’s just one more excuse for people to take a day off work and not to be productive. It was Democrats who mistreated people of color. It was Republicans who freed the enslaved people and tried to empower blacks after the Civil War. It was Democrats who stood in the way of treating Blacks as equal people. So, Democrats don’t get to lecture all of us about how not to be “racist.” And they certainly don’t get to put a communist like Martin Luther King on a pedestal and lecture the rest of us about voter rights using Marxist ideas hidden behind a mask of equality to sell a federal takeover of our elections. To grapple with so many evil characters in our government and their nature, I would point to a portion of history where people were starting to get it, before Trump even entered the presidential race the first time, where thoughtful people were re-discovering Atlas Shrugged, the famous Ayn Rand novel, and seeing play out in reality what she proposed in 1957 about the descent of America into a collectivist nightmare. After all, she had seen it before, in her home country of Russia. And during the late Tea Party period that I’m referring to, around 2010 to 2013, I saw the same kind of resurgence of Atlas Shrugged that jumped on people’s minds as I am starting to see everywhere I go today, after just one year of Joe Biden. People see through the haze and are looking for answers, which Ayn Rand has provided in what I consider the great American novel. 

During that period I spoke about, 2010 through 2013, I did quite a lot of work to help sell the movie version of that book produced by Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro. It has been on my mind because it’s really been since then that I have seen the kind of interest in Atlas Shrugged that I am seeing today. Last week I had no less than 20 different people whisper to me as if they were going to be arrested for saying it, “this all reminds me of Atlas Shrugged.” Meaning, what has been going on with the Biden administration and the state of the world in general, especially with Covid, the Great Reset from the United Nations and World Economic Forum, and other elements of the daily news. As long-time readers here remember, I did quite a lot of work for those movies, to promote them, to talk them up on the radio, and to help sell Parts 1 through III door to door in a hostile media climate that wanted nothing more than to destroy the movies and everyone who made them, just for making them. Many people were shocked by how the media world treated Trump. Well, I wasn’t because I saw how the media and general establishment in unionized Hollywood treated the filmmakers of Atlas Shrugged for daring even to try to make those films. 

My History with Atlas Shrugged

The three movies were hard to make and cost John Aglialoro a lot of money. But he loved Ayn Rand’s book, and he was determined. Even though the three movies had the same general characters from the book, which I would say is about 10% of what’s actually in the book, there were different actors for all three. Hollywood was canceling culture the actors who worked on Atlas Shrugged, which was the first time I had seen this new corporate wokeness. Well, actually, I saw it for the first time when I was in Hollywood myself working on a project, and between takes, my politics naturally came out. I was the only hard-core Republican on set. Everyone got along fine, but I never got an invite to come back. I had a feeling at the time that would be the case, but that’s how it works in Hollywood these days. And by the time Atlas Shrugged the movies came out, it was even worse. From that perspective, the cancel culture of wokeness was written on the wall for a long time, many decades. We just saw more of it the more the villains of our day realized that they didn’t have control. 

There is a scene at the end of the book, and the movie, where they are torturing John Galt for not giving himself over to their looting nature, the villains of the story. Even though the characters are fictional, the situation is not. I have never read a book out of the many thousands I have that best articulated the problems of our current time more than Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. She lived it in Russia and came to America and put it in perspective for all history to identify. When Trump was in the White House, it was essentially an Ayn Rand character that we had there. People who understand Atlas Shrugged were happy about it. People who hate Atlas Shrugged hated it for the same reasons they despised Ayn Rand. There is a science to it which I’ll explain in further work. But for now, people are back to where they were during the Obama administration. They are looking for answers, and they know that Atlas Shrugged is a key to that understanding.

My thoughts on Ayn Rand have evolved over the years. I still like her a lot. I have been invited many times to be in the Objectivist movement, which is her philosophy essentially. The Ayn Rand Institute carries a lot of weight politically. But I’m not an Objectivist. I’m not much of a group player at all. I enjoy my freedom to think independently. Ayn Rand was too sexual for me. She also was much more libertarian than I am. For me, no drugs, no drinking, and no bad behavior. She was an atheist, and she loved to be naked. I’m neither of those things, so I have adopted my own kind of philosophy, which I see as a continuation of the debate she started with her books. I’ve read Atlas Shrugged nine times that I can remember. There may actually be a few more times included. There are a lot of really good ideas in the novel, and for readers today trying to understand what they see in the news, I would highly recommend it. And that is why people are starting to bring it up again, because it’s so relevant to what we are seeing today, especially coming from the Biden administration and the Biden crowd. They could easily be villains from Atlas Shrugged without any exaggeration. In that great novel, Ayn Rand put her finger on the problem and literally predicted the future, including our pains with Dr. Fauci. And with that realization, people are looking to reread the book so they can see how it ends, which to my mind, is a great idea. Because how it ends is literally how it ends in real life.

Reading Atlas Shrugged will help identify the new age villains that have leeched themselves onto new global commerce, the pacifying moocher who means to kill intellect rather than people. Destroy their minds, not their bodies, because the bodies are needed for labor upon the state and its controls. And this is most reflective in the grand scam that is Martin Luther King Jr, a cheater, a communist, and ultimately a mask to sell Marxist ideology behind the accusation of racism. And by accepting King as a great leader of the Black movement, it did two things, it sought to erase the Democrat Party’s complicity in racism that caused all the trouble, and it lowered our guard to the menace of communism that was seeking to destroy our country starting with our Constitution. Most everyone can agree that racism is terrible. But like the villains of Atlas Shrugged, we didn’t see the worst part of it, the looter nature of the movement itself and its design to make good people into villains while the villains ran the world one name-calling utterance at a time. When I was a kid, everyone worked on Martin Luther King Day. But these days, many people were home sitting around doing nothing productive, just as the villains of Atlas Shrugged would have planned all along. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Debt Attack: It starts with 1.9 Trillion in new spending, but the aim is much more dangerous

To understand the most recent Covid relief bill that our government used to perpetuate massive progressive spending, you must understand that the government behind governments, what some would call a “shadow government” is pushing for all this reckless debt so that they can get rich forever off the interest rates.  Just like the credit card company that is trying to get the latest 18-year-old teenager their first official card to max out and make it so they can forever barely make their minimum payments, the very rich who fancy themselves as the puppeteers of the world governments have sought to secure their financial holdings forever by making it so everyone owes them money borrowed at a high rate of interest for the rest of their lives.  This latest 1.9 trillion-dollar escapade used Covid as an excuse, just as they did when they used it to alter election law to put themselves in power, but its not the end.  The Biden administration is already looking at a multitrillion dollar infrastructure bill to add to it, placing our national debt well out of range to where normal GDP could ever hope to pay it off.  It’s a different kind of military strategy, this one not coming from the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor, or the London Blitz.  These battles aren’t fought with guns, troops, or even nations.  These are attacks from a wealthy class of financiers who want to rule the nations of the world through debt, and they have their people in place within the United States now by using Covid-19 as a power move to alter laws, suspend the constitution, and thus cripple our nation of any righteousness due to the now overwhelming debt that they pushed their politicians to enact to fulfill their global strategic goals. 

Now, I don’t say all that to panic anybody.  Strategically, I see a way out of all this.  It won’t be pleasant for the people who have done all this to us, but I can see a way out.  A path of future explosive growth and a complete collapse of the other world economies that should allow for a great reset of our own.  If the current push is to set the world economies under a great reset toward communist control, which the extremely wealthy shadow government wants, the way to defeat them is the opposite way, by wrestling away the management of our government from them and casting them aside while other new sectors of the economy function under a constitutional republic—the way its supposed to be.  By removing the villains from the process, first by identifying them, then undoing their antics, then cutting them off from future endeavors, there is a bloody path out of this mess, so its not the end of the world. 

However, with all that aside, the continued insults of the little checks they have been sending our way—the latest, this $1400 little thing per person who makes under $100k per year essentially, are a real problem.  They think so little of us that they believe these relief checks are enough to distract us away from all the other spending they are wasting our money on for causes that nobody supports.  This certainly isn’t what people voted for.  When they say elections have consequences that only holds true if the elections are a true representation of the people’s wishes, not a made-up election with fake ballots filled out with mail-ins and flimsy rules made up because of Covid-19 to alter state election laws.  To pass this 1.9 trillion-dollar mess, give most of us a little cheese, then go spend massive amounts of debt on blue state bailouts from poorly run Democrat regions is an abomination of all logic and a true insult.  The $1400 checks will be gone as fast as people get them, just like their tax returns and people will be back to barely scraping by as the government stifles our economic activity with even more micromanaged incompetence by them for the aims of their masters, certainly not the American people who vote. 

Then as I said in the video above, the government caused us to lose that money, $1400 doesn’t come close to covering the massive losses we have all experienced.  Just think of the sports teams who could have had people sitting 3 feet apart instead of 6 and could have filled their stadiums and sold lots of beer to cover their concession costs.  Think of the restaurant owners who have gone out of business trying to comply with fake Covid laws.  Think of all the companies that have folded because of all the stay-at-home orders and the loss of productivity from everyone suddenly “working from home.”  Think of the loss in sales of every company, the raises people didn’t get because companies were barely making it and couldn’t cover their basic business loans, let alone expanding payroll to give out raises.  There are literally trillions and trillions of lost dollars just from 2020 that are lost opportunity cost, stuff that will be gone forever because government tampered with our lives in such a destructive way.  Then they think they can make it right with a silly little $1400 check?  We need about 10 of those checks to get close to where we should be.  Likely 50.  For some companies, the losses are in the millions.  That’s a lot of $1400 checks.  The fact that the government thinks these little checks come close to making things right says they either have no idea how bad the situation is, or they do and just think we are that stupid.  

But it was never about fairness, or even protecting us from a virus.  It was always a corral of us like a flock of beef being ushered into a slaughterhouse by a bunch of ruffians using fear to steer us where they want us to go so they can make money off us by hanging debt around our necks for the foreseeable future.  The kind of debt that this government has signed us up for wasn’t by accident, it was an attack, an assault against us all.  It was the work of a shadow government of financiers who see our government as just one asset in their portfolio and they laugh as we point to the constitution and cite rules and regulations that are supposed to regulate their imposition into our lives.  They will say, those who have the gold rule, and they have stolen all our gold.  They think they own us, and they think these deals they’ve made with this trillion in extra spending will chain us to them for all our lives while they profit off our suffering.  Well, I see a collapse of that entire system that they aren’t prepared for.  And I would urge you to prepare your minds for that time, because its coming close.  They are doing what they are doing now because they don’t know any better, even the shadow government is not prepared for what they created.  When all that comes crashing down, as it is poised to do, there will be a great reset and we have to make sure when it does that, we know what we need to do.  I wouldn’t say its all doom and gloom.  But people will be impacted, so make sure that you aren’t one of them. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior
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Covid is Over: Ohio and Indiana are taking back their states from out of control government

I enjoyed the exchange, I thought it was healthy.   But I also thought it was a year too late.  We should have been having these discussions in the opening days of the lockdowns.  It was in fact Governor DeWine of Ohio who was one of the first to go too far, and started shutting down restaurants, changing elections, and behaving like a single point failure tyrant expressing every reason why we have constitutional law to begin with, to limit government power from people who show they can’t handle the pressure and get suckered into an international scam as coronavirus obviously was.  Now the masks and all the ridiculous rules are meant to give a cover story to the scandal, so that people believe everything was really just as serious as the government said it was to justify all the trillions and trillions and trillions of lost dollars that was sucked out of our economy in an effort to help the Chinese become the dominate financial power by 2028.  I’d rather have Rand Paul too late than not at all, but we needed him in April of last year instead of blasting Dr. Fauci in 2021, after all the damage has already been done.  What felt good about watching Paul grill Fauci was that it was really the first time in public any politician or media personality had scrutinized Fauci to his face, including Trump.  Everyone tried to play it both ways with Dr. Doom, and he used that reluctance to lie, cheat and scheme all of us right over a cliff.  He deserves everything he has coming as people realize slowly how suckered with Covid we have all been. 

Its not that Covid wasn’t a sickness we had to deal with.  I know lots of people who have had it, some of them many times.  But to project it as a killer, as it was sold to us where we needed to suspend our constitutional liberties, or else, was malicious.  Whether it was on purpose or accident, it happened because our entire society allowed themselves to move away from a constitutional republic and emerge into a dictatorship by governors.  Not exactly what Trump planned when he went along with Dr. Fauci initially, and Bill Gates who were already blaming Trump for every car accident, every sniffle, and every heart attack that suddenly fell under the category of a Covid death.  I think Trump thought he could outsmart these malicious characters who launched this against him during an election year, and once he gave in to it, and DeWine started a chain reaction that the rest of the country followed, election laws were changed which then put liberals in power with scandalous mail-in ballots.  And that was used to perform a coup against President Trump and give us the mess we are dealing with now politically, Democrats in power everywhere, even though we didn’t pick them at the ballot box.

But it took a lot to get people to wake up and start rebelling against this out-of-control government.  I knew it would come eventually, but I didn’t think it would take this long to get there.  People should have been protesting this government during the summer instead of waiting until things were irreparable socially and economically.  But since Dr. Fauci was put in his place with Rand Paul, suddenly people are feeling bolder in proclaiming their distain for Covid-19 protocols.  I suppose that people had to see just how far the government would take their mandates, and how they would refuse to give that power back well past the time to do so.  Its one thing to tell people something, its another to see it for themselves and its obvious that people needed to see the evidence.  Well, now they’ve seen it, they’ve heard how Joe Biden plans to drag all this out until the summer and it proved to be too much for Red State governors, starting with Texas, then Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma then Indiana.  Even with the case counts going way down, and Covid testing facilities trying with everything they can to squeeze more life out of all the testing they can get through their system to justify their existence, DeWine has still been holding on.  He even passed Stand Your Ground laws to make a deal with Republicans in the House and Senate to spare him from the wrath he has coming. 

However, its over.  Covid has been dead and buried for weeks, yet the government doesn’t want it to go away.  It was their biggest chance yet at grabbing total power over everyone and destroying our constitutional republic.  And this should be a lesson to everyone involved.  Government can never be allowed to have that much power, because when they get it, its like crack to them.  Highly addictive and justifies all the power grabs they sought to achieve by getting into politics to begin with.  These politicians need to be punished many times over far worse than what Rand Paul did to Dr. Fauci.  The media that propped up these tyrants need a lesson taught to them too, for the role they played in the mess.  For the way they idolized Governor DeWine for being far worse than any Democrat in Ohio we could have voted for, in taking over the state based on the superstitious whims of his tiny, incompetent mind.  At last, we are freeing ourselves from these terrible people, the latest being the governor of Indiana reacting to the inevitable.  People are sick of Covid and the new government rules pulled out of their ass to deal with it.  It was a hard and costly lesson, but at least finally, people are starting to fight back.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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