Tag: Bob Iger

Signs of the Future: The duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk

In so many ways the duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk is indicative of the future warfare that is the key to everything.  Here are two CEOs at the top of their game representing two different directions, and one is distinctly on the wrong side while the other is thriving.  As I say all the time, don’t judge people based on what they say, but on what they do.  And Elon Musk has been evolving slowly for a long time.  This happens to a lot of people as they get more information.  I also say a lot that it’s nearly impossible for a person to have a lot of intelligence and to remain a Democrat.  People might be born into a certain region with specific parents and have certain beliefs.  But through living life and doing things, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and it’s natural to evolve feelings.  And for Elon Musk, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the kind of world he wants to live in, an interplanetary civilization cannot be anything less than a capitalist enterprise.  Centralized governments are too slow and sabotage their society to stay in power, which isn’t good for getting to space.  So Musk has moved in a MAGA direction without calling himself that out of pure necessity, and logic.  Then there is, of course, Bob Iger, Mr. Global Citizen, who has been the CEO of Disney, which has essentially committed suicide to accommodate woke World Economic Forum politics.  Musk has moved away from the World Economic Forum, and Bob Iger has fully embraced it, even giving it a deep French kiss to the doom of his company.  So, it was only a matter of time before these two public personalities would have a very obvious clash.

This new war that we are fighting is one where it’s easy to win against. But the way people are wired exploits them at a very personal level. It is essentially what everyone learned in public school, with the cool kids, the geeks, and the loser social groups and children knowing which one they would all be in, and how social pressure, the need to be liked, would control those behaviors into joining one of those three groups. Because Musk is one of the richest men in the world, of course, he has a lot of parasites looking to live off his efforts, so Disney thought it had leverage on him to pull advertising from the X platform to force Musk to embrace more World Economic Forum strategic goals. Musk responded with an “F You” to Bob Iger and others and made a decidedly sharp turn politically. It was a decided check mate in the chess game of these kinds of activities. Within a few days, Elon Musk facilitated a new show for Tucker Carlson and there was a massive interview with Alex Jones, which resulted in him being reinstated on X, where he had been deplatformed when it was Twitter and a series of events that would spell doom for the World Economic Forum types cascaded into irreversible damage for the big centralized global citizen types that Bob Iger represented. Musk was clearly on the side of tomorrow, whereas Iger was without question on the losing team. But the signs have been stacking up for a while now. The public results were just a matter of time. Disney used to be the center of innovation, but now it was SpaceX and what they have been doing on several technical fronts. Instead of warring with Musk, Disney should have sought to have a relationship with them. Instead, they chose politics, which, as a CEO, was a nail in the coffin for Disney that is quickly sinking the company.

Months before all this occurred, I had taken my family to Disney World for a very large vacation.  I was not crazy about the woke direction of the company, but as I have been saying for several years now, I don’t think that Disney is going to survive as a company, and I wanted my grandchildren and my kids to see it while it is still a great thing.  I love all four of their parks very much, but Epcot Center has always been something special, an optimistic city of tomorrow that showcased all the opportunities of tomorrow.  But tomorrow is today, and many of the things that are showcased at Epcot now look old and out of date.  Disney Parks have become too political; they have not adapted to the true frontier of human need and it shows.  Disney, mainly as Bob Iger has run it, is a looking-back company, not one that is embracing the future.  Bob was all about the World Economic Forum controls from centralized governments that looked to establish equity and inclusion through force and manipulation by those in charge, whereas Elon Musk was embracing the kind of technology that would free people of those methods, and he was looking at capitalism as the means to do it.  Elon Musk wasn’t precisely a Trump guy during his first term.  He wanted to give Joe Biden a chance.  But that quickly changed over the last three years, and now Musk has moved well away from the World Economic Forum view of the world, and that difference is dramatically apparent when you watch SpaceX work and perform a side-by-side analysis of their view of the world with the Epcot Center. 

The trip to Disney had the effect I wanted.  My crew had a really magnificent time at Epcot Center. We went there on two different occasions and used the monorail as our primary means of transportation to get there.  It was great for my family.  But I could see the ghost of a place I used to love, looking old and inward thinking.  It was essentially what the world was trying to do with authoritarian, centralized governments, such as China and the European Union.  That was not the future we were going to experience, and Bob Iger had gambled everything on it.  And when he went to call the bet against Musk, everything went in the opposite direction.  The result was it forced Musk to stop trying to put one foot in and one out on so many topics and go all in toward the future, which means the collapse of central government tyranny.  Putting Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson on X was the reason Musk bought Twitter in the first place.  For the same reason, Trump created his own social media platform, Truth Social.  The future requires a decentralized competition of ideas without the restraint of slow-minded authority figures.  And the results will be very similar to what happened between Musk and Bob Iger but on a truly global scale.  The peer pressure leverage Disney attempted to pull on X is the same kind of backfire that all corporations and political sentiments will experience in the years to come and on a much more ostentatious scale.  Like the Epcot Center, the World Economic Forum’s view of the future was dying and outdated.  It was SpaceX that represented all the opportunities that were coming from a future being designed by capitalism.  And now Elon Musk was fully committed.  Disney had lost that final battle toward forcing the world to become a global citizen at the cost of innovation and freedom.  And if there was any indicator of the things to come, it was that.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke Politics is Killing Disney: We are not “global citizens” we are Americans–the world follows

You can’t kill Indiana Jones. But that is the word from test screenings or previews that are coming out of rough cuts of the movie. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they would try. In this new ESG world for which Disney is offering itself as a leader, killing off an 80s representative of toxic masculinity with a time travel story that ends with Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to the next generation female woke hero is consistent with everything that Kathleen Kennedy has done since she became president of Lucasfilm in 2013. I’m sure George Lucas had good intentions, but he never expected this from his former company and the brands he worked hard to build over many years. For all the reasons he hated corporate filmmaking while trying to finish his famous film, THX-1138, now he is seeing that, left in the hands of corporate control, they could screw up anything. Filmmaking is not a collaborative enterprise, even though that’s what they tell everyone in film school. It is a top-down driver of unique minds who tell other people what to do to obtain a strong vision that audiences can then enjoy. The previous Indiana Jones movies were all from the mind of George Lucas, and that’s what people wanted to see. And what will be interesting about Indiana Jones 5, which is getting some press with about six months until the release in June of 2023, is how different it will be without George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. You can put the same actors, music, and color pallets into a movie, but it won’t be Indiana Jones without George Lucas. And clearly, Kathy Kennedy didn’t understand anything; she thought these popular movies would be vehicles for woke politics and would hold up. But ultimately, audiences will reject them.

I thought the trailer preview looked pretty good, but the problem was it confirmed all the rumors that also indicate that Indiana Jones dies at the end. So like the ESG values of BlackRock have indicated, the way to give audiences a last look at an 80s icon of heroics and toxic masculinity is to erase him from history and to replace him with a woman. Without question, Kathy Kennedy would sign up for that. Whether they stick with that ending after the terrible online reaction is left to be determined. Are they that radical at Disney these days? Well, of course, they are! They are crazy, so I don’t have much hope for the new movie, just as I don’t for the new Avatar film coming up. People don’t want to go to the movies to see woke propaganda and gay rights messages. They want to be free of that, which is one of Indiana Jones’s appeals throughout movie history. But the ESG values of stakeholder capitalism are all about social governance, and Disney has dedicated itself to that leadership, and it is showing in their stock. They have brought back Bob Iger as the CEO to help them make the transition from value-driven content to the traditional way to make good movies; they earn a lot of money at the box office, and Disney is rewarded with a lot of cash. But over the last few years, those values have changed, at least on the corporate side. Driven by Larry Fink and the Klaus Schwab types at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder capitalism is the new value system and a global currency. And Disney expects Bob Iger to navigate that new world in a beneficial way to show other corporations how the stakeholder model will work. So there is much more going on here than Disney killing off one of the most beloved screen heroes of all time. It’s about replacing the value system that western civilization has for this new global view of the world.

But people are people, and what they value won’t change. As Disney has learned with its release of Strange World, which feature a gay plotline for the primary characters, and the weak showing for Black Panther II Wakanda Forever, wokness doesn’t excite people. There was a lot made of Bob Iger’s statements about taking politics out of Disney to repair the brand a bit, but what didn’t get talked about much was that he went on to say that he didn’t believe that Disney was very political. Rather, he saw much of what they were doing as the responsibilities of a “global citizen.” He said that Disney has been telling stories for over 100 years and takes its responsibility to be good global citizens very seriously. And to the ESG values of the World Economic Forum, gender-bending is much more important than box office votes. So Disney is deep into it now. They are off on their projections, and stockholders still measure value in dollars, not ESG scores. And that will continue as we move into 2023, and they find out Avatar won’t make the kind of money they are hoping because nobody wants to waste more than 2 hours on a climate change lecture about nature being more powerful than imagination and productivity. And if Disney sticks with the previews of Indiana Jones that have him being killed, that will kill Disney in ways they can’t even imagine right now. They thought Crystal Skull damaged the Indiana Jones brand. Killing Harrison Ford and replacing him with a woman just isn’t going to work. 

Oh, I wouldn’t mind a female type of Indiana Jones story. I loved Lara Croft until they gave her a stupid bow and arrow instead of the double guns she used to shoot. There is nothing wrong with strong female characters but much wrong with wokeness. And Lara Croft went woke years ago. And yes, the people who want to bring down western civilization and big media companies who have told lots of great stories selling western civilization to the world want to see it all come to an end. Disney these days is a woke company that has permanently damaged its brand. Of course, China and its partners at the World Economic Forum are happy to have that competition removed. But the world is truly at a loss. Yet, people will get over it and move on. They won’t care if there is never a Star Wars movie again. They can live without Indiana Jones. If this movie Indy 5 goes woke the way reports say it is, it will fail, and Disney will further slide down the ESG pit of doom. And Bob Iger won’t be able to save it. Disney was already slipping when he left as CEO just a few weeks before the Covid lockdowns hit in 2020. He knew all about it from the role-playing that went on at Event 201 at the end of 2019. Disney was always built on a house of cards of value that depended entirely on the public sentiment to enjoy the movies. And if Disney isn’t making movies people want to see and instead is committed to woke politics that nobody wants to see, then everything will dry up for them, and their stock will tank. And ESG isn’t going to catch, leaving Bob Iger and the gang holding all the losses for history to remember. People will paint this Indy 5 from their minds, just as many have Crystal Skull. And they’ll live their lives. But Disney will not survive, and Bob Iger looks like he’s going to dig in, much to his own demise. The preview confirmed the rumors, and that has already damaged the brand.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Mythic Realm: Understanding Elon Musk, Bob Iger shortcomings at Disney, the Build Back Better disaster, and why communism always fails

The Mythic Realm

I could actually write a book just about this topic of the Mythic Realm. Still, recently, an opportunity came up professionally where I had to talk to many political people and business people in the same Christmas setting.  I was near a whiteboard so I could tell the story of what I put on the video here contained.  The subject was a bunch of things that flow together to my eyes.  But to the groups of people, they understood some of it, but not all of it, because of the bubble concept that I explained in the video.  Most people all their lives never leave their bubbles of understanding, and I don’t look down on them for it.  I see it as a natural condition of the human race.  But when the topic of Elon Musk came up and all that he was up to, and understanding why Build Back Better is such a bad idea, or the vaccine mandates for Covid are so destructive, the answers to all those questions are often outside of the bubbles that people live in.  So I put together this little video to explain it to people who want to begin understanding some of these kinds of things, such as where economic power comes from.  It’s not the Political Realm or even the Business Realm.  All economic activity comes from the Mythic Realm, and it is there that we should always focus on creating more!

I also put in this article the WSJ interview with Elon Musk in its entirety where he said that the Build Back Better concept should be “deleated.” As I explained, Elon Musk is more shaman than industrialist, even living in a state of depravity to stay authentic to himself.  To my mind, our American society should be producing hundreds of Elon Musk types instead of a few here and there.  When I think of Elon Musk, aside from his tamperings with the political and business realm, I think of people like Thomas Edison, Tesla, the actual man, and Albert Einstein.  What people call genius, they say such things because, from their point of view in one of their social bubbles, the ideas from the realm of myth seem so extraordinary.  But really, it’s all point of view.  What always matters is the Mythic Realm because it is there where all ideas that generate all economic activity are created, which then cascades into all the organized elements of society.

I provided in the video an example about the aviation industry.  Where Prometheus came from stories about building fire or Indian legends about Thunderbirds who could fly, the idea for flight came from the human imagination in thinking what could be.  Then along came the Wright Brothers, who converted their bicycle profession into the first functioning plane.  From there, the political realm instantly saw the benefits, decided to utilize the airplane during World War I, and created rules and regulations for constructing airports, parts suppliers, and general aviation functions.  Then, of course, the Business Realm figures out what companies need to form to meet the world’s growing political need for airplanes.  And from there comes the Cultural Bubbles of all the individual companies that started making airplane parts and the workers who inhabit those cultures.  The exact trajectory of thought could be said to emerge from the auto industry, smartphones, everything that we consider economic value.  When I talk about intellectual currency, this is what I’m talking about.  Financial currency is needed to flow in the political, business, and cultural realms.  But intellectual currency is required to feed the Mythic Realm, and without that position, nothing new in economic energy is produced.  Therefore, the goal of our society or any society should always be to make more Elon Musk types, or even George Lucas, who created Star Wars.

I always talk about Star Wars because, as a kids product, it does a great job of creating ideas in the Mythic Realm among people in our society.  There was an excellent interview with Bob Iger from Disney, who is stepping down now as CEO.  I think he did a pretty good job stabilizing Disney as a company, but his problem was that he spent his entire time as CEO in the border between the Political Realm and the Business Realm, where most CEOs and CFOs think all the real value is.  But when it came time to make more Star Wars movies, he was lost, and what he made was a bunch of corporate woke garbage.  The fans became angry at Disney because the new films and books were made by a guy who was obsessed with the titles he held.  He made a mistake almost all corporate people make, putting their imprint on something that flows out of the Mythic Realm, but that they never understand the ideas. They end up smashing them into the bubbles of business culture, assuming that everything will just work out.  But it never does.  That is why Elon Musk tends to disparage titles in these companies and offices.  In the Mythic Realm, he likes to have all the executives close to where the action is.  As a modern company, Disney does OK if it sells the fantastic work created by people like Walt Disney.  But because they live in their corporate bubble, people like Bob Iger are paralyzed to do anything new, much like the Chinese suffer from their centralized communism. 

This is essentially why socialism and communism never work because they insist on an old aristocratic European view of the world that never figured out these things.  I feel I can talk about it because, really, for the first time in mass culture, we have a time where we can look at all these elements as an entire whole.  I read so much and from so many different sources that it is evident to me.  I don’t know that such an understanding of social constructs would have been possible 100 years ago.  But with the benefit of hindsight and great modern examples of success in the Mythic Realm, we can see these things clearly now.  When I shared these insights with that large group, they all seemed to have an “oh my gosh” moment, so it seemed like a practical thing to discuss.  When we want to understand the world around us, whether it’s Build Back Better, Star Wars success under Disney, Elon Musk and his quest for Mars colonization, or the intricacies of why capitalism works better than communism at managing society, understanding the Mythic Realm is the key. I’ve said for years that despite all my interests, I appreciate nothing more than mythology because what humans do better than any other known form of life is generate imagination, and therefore a change in circumstances directly derived from the mind.  No matter what someone thinks about God, it cannot be questioned that the purpose of human existence is to use the imagination to continue expanding what goes on in the universe.  We are not so insignificant as a species to assume that nature rules over the minds of humankind.  But that humankind is part of nature and the ever-evolving process of creation which the universe craves.  And once you understand that, everything else makes a lot more sense.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Communist Cult of Valerie Jarrett: China’s move to unite the world under a “progressive” flag

I suppose I hadn’t thought much of Valerie Jarrett until this recent controversy from Roseanne Barr where the television sit com star got into a lot of trouble for calling the former Obama advisor some names. I didn’t think the names were that bad considering how the other side treats conservatives—that’s the kind of world we are living in these days, so I didn’t think much of it until I saw how strangely swift the condemnation against Barr was from every corner of the media industry. It was almost strangely coordinated. Bob Iger from Disney was most stunning making a decision to cancel Barr’s number one hit show off ABC television in just a few hours coming to Jarrett’s defense in an alarming fashion. Then I heard how Jarrett referred to the whole incident as a “teaching moment,” during an interview and something was very fishy about the whole thing.

I didn’t pay much attention to Jarrett during the Obama years because her boss was much worst, and an obvious socialist sympathizer who was trying to spread Marxism anywhere and everywhere he could. Like Jarrett’s mysterious defense from so many media sectors for something that isn’t nearly as bad as other things that have been said about our current president by some of the same people condemning Roseanne Barr presently. But here we were a few years out of the Obama administration and Jarrett seems to turn up in the news quite often. As I was thinking this a friend of mine pointed me to Jarrett’s past and sure enough she has deep ties into the communist movement of Iran. A lot of people forget that the motivation of the terrorism behind the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t any real attempt to advance the Muslim religion or even a fairness between the races, it’s the spread of Marxism across the Middle East and down into Africa. Several family members of Valarie Jarrett were big participants into the spread of the communist movement especially her grandfather and her father-in-law Vernon Jarrett. After doing a little research into that claim this is what I came up with. More details are available at the links:

http://www.worldtribune.com/flashback-who-is-valerie-jarrett-top-obama-aide-is-daughter-daughter-in-law-of-communists/

According to the FBI documents, Vernon Jarrett’s job was to “write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would ‘disseminate the Communist Party line among … the middle class.”

“Faithful to her roots, [Valerie Jarrett] still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Judicial Watch. “Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshall Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file.”

Judicial Watch also reported that it obtained public records in 2014 that show Valerie Jarrett “was a key player in the effort to cover up that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about the Fast and Furious, a disastrous experiment in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/03/all_in_the_family_valerie_jarrett_and_the_chicago_communists.html

Now of course just because a bunch of family members are flaming communists from Iran that doesn’t mean Valarie followed in their footsteps. However, just a little research into her activities during her entire adult life point in that direction and all that gives a lot of insight into why the Obama administration was trying to make deals with Iran to give them money to support their terrorist activity even turning their eyes of justice away from the illegal drug trade in South America by Hezbollah an Iranian backed Shi’s terrorist organization that was getting its financing off illegally sold drugs destined for North America. I mean can we agree that it’s not a conspiracy to assume at this point that an American president was assisting in the poisoning of Americans by a terrorist organization intent to spread Marxism by destroying the minds of the youth with poison so that they couldn’t fight back? The evidence all points in that direction. And Valarie Jarrett was there to hold Obama’s hand on all these things, and it was a little creepy to have her almost lecture us on television after Roseanne Barr’s comments that all that had happened was a “teaching moment.”

Additionally, I have noticed, especially lately as I was watching the box office numbers of the new Star Wars film and compared them to what went on with The Black Panther in China, and the current Marvel movie Infinity War that the communists were still very hostile toward American business brands such as the GAP, Marriott, even American Express. Those companies are changing policy to bow to the rulers of China so that they can do business there assuming that the region was the next superpower. That’s not true of course, China has been a propped-up country on the world stage given power only because too many in the United States were willing to regulate American businesses to the point that they’d move to China—it was always part of the plan for which President Trump is now reversing, thankfully. The American left obviously has an intense desire to see China succeed on the world stage as an economic superpower because it fulfils their fantasy of a communist world. I thought recently it was very odd how the new Star Wars movies were being slammed by the American press for underperforming in China which is a major sore spot for Bob Iger at Disney because he has worked hard to cultivate a relationship with the communist party in that country for distribution opportunities. It doesn’t make much sense taken at face value because we’re only talking about an extra $50 to a $100 million in movie ticket sales per picture in the Chinese market. The domestic take is much more powerful. I mean its nice if you can get it, but China and the United States are totally different places ideologically, so Hollywood should never expect to mesh the two together seamlessly, unless of course they wish to destroy the American market and make them more like the Chinese, which apparently is the objective.

So what does all this have to do with Valarie Jarrett, well, China and Iran are part of the modern movement of spreading communism. They have all changed the name of the attempt to “progressivism” meaning they intend to “progress” beyond the economic philosophy of capitalism and the effort is quite audacious. I was stunned recently while visiting the very good Children’s Museum of Indianapolis to find there an entire exhibit dedicated to China. Other countries weren’t represented, there wasn’t an exhibit for Russia, or Brazil, just China. As I worked my way through it they were promoting China as the new ruling country in the world and emphasizing that if anybody wanted to be anything in this world, they needed to get used to China being the ruling country. This was simply astonishing, people needed to understand their history. While I love China, I really like Chinese food and I love some of their literature, philosophy, and history—China does not have it together. In World War II if not for America China would now be part of Japan because without us China would have been conquered into a Japanese territory easily. Oddly FDR seemed to use the American defense of China not to stop the Japanese, but to allow the communists coming out of the North to gain in power while the regime in power and friendly to the West weakened. Students of history know that FDR in America had a soft spot for socialism and communism as he had good relations with Hitler and Stalin prior to the start of World War II and looks to have been friendly in policy toward Mao Zedong’s communist takeover of China immediately after the war concluded. America had saved China from the Japanese and delivered it straight into the hands of the communists, which then spread in influence into Korea and Vietnam dragging America into two more wars. Only recently under Donald Trump is the one in Korea looking to be finally won. North Korea finally looks to be turning toward capitalism which China isn’t happy about, and neither is Russia. But long story short, China is on the decline, not the rise and the exhibit at Indianapolis designed to instruct school children that China will be their new overlords in the world already looks dated because of its lack of relevancy. Without question educators a few years ago thought that to be the case, but under the Trump White House China’s fortunes are turning. But don’t tell Hollywood that, or the rest of the American left, they are in denial about this change in tune and are fighting with everything they have to keep the train of the world on the tracks of Marxism, or else.

And that looks to be why Bob Iger was so quick to come to Valarie Jarrett’s defense while Donald Trump gets called much worse on Disney’s networks daily. It’s not racism and fairness that the political leftists want, they simply use that as a guilt trick to sustain their real objective, in spreading Marxist ideas of fairness and equality to prep the minds of our youth for the new name of communism–progressivism. But none of it is about “fairness,” it’s about obedience and following the dictates of the communist overlords—getting used to calling someone else master. That master the political left hopes and dreams of is their political class where they will serve as society’s educated elite much the way China rules over their people and many American businesses to this very day. China should consider themselves lucky to have American businesses in their country, and American films like Solo: A Star Wars Story. But they have been artificially propped up by the global progressives to believe that “China” would be the next superpower and they would achieve that because Marxism would become the global standard once America collapsed on itself. The footprints were already in the sand, you could see that at the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis and at just about any school board meeting in America. China was going to be the new standard we’d all have to live up to, and we had better start behaving ourselves, even if we tell an off-color joke that the “party” doesn’t like. It would be a teaching moment for everyone else to watch the life of the person telling the joke to be destroyed. That is what Valarie Jarrett meant as Bob Iger came to her defense so quickly. It’s not about fairness, it’s about learning to obey to the communist overlords. That is the role Iran plays on the world stage. China now plays the good cop, while Iran is the bad cop, but they all want the same thing—the spread of Marxism that destroys America and brings it to the knees of China, which will then unify the world from Africa to South America with one big happy government-run at Beijing instead of New York and London.

After looking at the situation more carefully, it looks like Roseanne was going too easy on Jarrett. We’re not talking about the thoughts and feelings of an individual, we are talking about a grand fight between ideologies that are in conflict to rule the world. I wouldn’t say that the Trump supporters want to rule the world in the way that the political left does. But a failure to make a clear decision about which side we are all on yields to the side that has made that decision. And the political left wants old school communism as it is being run in China, and they want it everywhere in the world. They have been teaching it to our kids in public education, they have taken over all of America’s media industries and they want to take over the minds of every last American individual. All Bob Iger needed was a way to explain to the stockholders why he had to dump a top-rated television show on ABC. He had to support it because it was making money for Disney’s shareholders—but ideologically Roseanne was dangerous because it was feeding Trump’s election base in a way that was perilous to the cause of global progressivism, (the new name for communism). And Valarie Jarrett is still very much at the center of all hope that the progressivism movement has of a global conquest.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I’m So Excited for Han Solo’s Movie: A brief history of cinema and the progressive attempts to control the messaging of American values


If you study any ancient society—or any society at all for that matter, scientists and historians always find a way to rationalize their successes or failures on a few key elements. They will proclaim a civilization may have been successful because of their proximity to water, or key trade routes. Or fertile soil, access to natural resources, abundance of food—those types of things. The truly great societies are often judged by the artists they produced and the literature they performed. In a lot of ways entire societies are judged based on the written works produced by their cultures, such as in England with William Shakespeare, or Ireland’s James Joyce. But we don’t really have enough history yet to properly understand how our modern age of great art and entertainment will recoil through the ages, because most of it is so new. American movies for instance are underplayed in their importance to how they shape world culture—because they essentially have only been around for a century, so the effects on people as a whole are still being determined. But I have a pretty good idea how those results will be determined as judged by time and it is for that reason that I am so excited when a new film comes out that I know will be a game changer in the way that art shapes society. That is why I am so excited for this new Solo: A Star Wars Story as it is being produced by Disney. Something very different is going on with this one and if it turns out the way I’m thinking, there will be shock waves percolating through the industry as a whole that will favor the political trajectory of the modern Donald Trump age—and that’s a really good thing.  To get a good idea of what I’m talking about read this fine movie review about Solo: A Star Wars Story in Forbes.  I don’t think I could have written a better one.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2018/05/18/review-solo-a-star-wars-story/#48a5365b7dd8

Over that same century that movies came to be as a form of new art and entertainment liberals under the umbrella of progressivism made their move to spread tyrannical socialism to every corner of the world. Movies didn’t always reflect this socialism because the cultures they were speaking to had emerged before the progressive move to take over the world essentially. Westerns specifically were a group of movies that told stories of Americans yearning for freedom at any cost and the values that could be inflicted on large tracts of unpopulated land with the barrel of a gun pointed at a bad guy, and on the backs of that concept, Hollywood was essentially born. It was westerns that propelled the film industry into being such an important artistic endeavor that became the envy of the world. Not only had America created this interesting artistic machine known as Hollywood that mass-produced art and entertainment in such an excessive capitalist fashion. But it could do so in seemingly infinite quantities quickly spreading the culture of a free North America to every part of the world that had electricity.

Progressives saw this power and sought to take it over starting before World War II but really beginning to succeed in the late 1960s. But some of the best films of that time still came from filmmakers who made movies in the traditional way of Hollywood before the liberal invasion and it was those films that carried Hollywood into the modern age financially. Star Wars is a great example of the type of America that used to show up in the movies of its culture—B movies made quickly and cheaply for Saturday Morning Matinee entertainment. George Lucas was often derided by his peers in the film industry for wanting to make such old-fashioned throwbacks to the old westerns and science fiction films of his own youth—yet the Hollywood liberals built and industry around the commercial success of those movies and the history of all that is well-known.

Fast forward to my excitement in 2012 when I found out that there were going to be more Star Wars movies because Disney had bought the franchise from George Lucas for $4 billion dollars and I had high hopes. I also had my concerns which I expressed to everyone who would listen, including the key people at Lucasfilm. I did not like The Force Awakens not just because they had killed the character of Han Solo, but because they had cheapened that very popular fan favorite into a much weaker progressive character as was reflective of the attempt by Hollywood to follow a more progressive political agenda for which they sought to take over the entertainment industry in the first place. But I kept my mind open because I knew they were planning to make a Han Solo movie in the future so I stayed on the ship awaiting the results of that to figure out if I would continue to support the artistic efforts of Star Wars in the future—or relegate that it had died with the Disney acquisition. Thankfully I am quite happy to say, the financial viability of Star Wars as a business has won out and the filmmakers at Lucasfilm and Disney have come to terms with what works and what doesn’t in that particular universe of storytelling—which is essentially the values of the traditional westerns in America, and they have unleashed all that into this new Han Solo movie.

That’s important because Solo: A Star Wars Story is not about social justice, or the mysticism of religions—its not about altruism and all that garbage—its much more of an Ayn Rand type of story which is what I have always said was the core value system of Star Wars. Han Solo has always been and will always be best when he reflects more a character that would be written by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged than from Les Misérables. Star Wars fails when it tries to be reflective of European literature more than American bravado and that lesson has been reluctantly unleashed in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is all about guns, getting rich and taking care of the character’s self-interests.

Of course, the liberal aspects of Hollywood are hoping that this Solo: A Star Wars Story will fail at the box office, and for that to happen the industry will pounce on any numbers that don’t reach a billion dollars globally, or under $600 million domestically. Anything short of that and this Solo movie will be destroyed in the press much the way Donald Trump’s presidency is under constant attack because it threatens the status quo. But as I have been saying for many, many years—Star Wars is best when it is about all the things I described this upcoming movie to be as opposed to the self-sacrifice and general altruism of the Jedi and the Skywalker portions of the saga. Without Han Solo, I’d say there is no Star Wars. So to their credit, they listened at Lucasfilm and Disney has not been shy with the money and has thrown their full weight behind this movie knowing that it goes against the general strategies of the progressive community. And they had to do it because economic necessity dictated that they protect the property of Star Wars from the politics of the modern age. The last time I saw Disney market this hard for something like a western was The Lone Ranger in 2013, which was financially successful, but was considered a big bomb at the box office. If I had to bet, I’d say that is why Bob Iger has been nowhere near the early previews of Solo: A Star Wars Story. He is keeping one foot in the world of deniability. But I don’t think he’ll have to throw anybody under the bus. I think this new Star Wars movie will make everyone happy at Disney, even if it does give them a political paradox to deal with.

Progressives would love to assume that they can shape culture—which is why they wanted to take over the movie business. Films were to reflect the cultures they came from and the values expressed which is what other nations wanted to see in American movies. People get excited to see things they can’t get at home or yearn to become themselves, so they enjoyed the lofty characters of the American westerns who shot first and asked questions later, who did whatever they had to do to get rich so they could live free of the rest of the tyrannical world. Thinking of the great Sergio Leone movies from the late 1960s, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and For A Few Dollars More, the filmmakers were from Italy making westerns as they interpreted them, as a way out of the fascism that their country had just emerged from and the character emphasis wasn’t on saving the world or even a damsel in distress, it was in using a gun to get rich and live happily ever after alone and disconnected from the rules of society. That was always the allure of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies, that is why the Fast and Furious movies make so much money, and that is the commitment behind Solo: A Star Wars Story.

With this being the fourth Star Wars story produced by Kathy Kennedy as the new head of Lucasfilm economic necessity has dictated a more traditional approach to their films. That is a great thing because it informs what the true values of our culture are which addresses at the most epistemological level values that are conducive to a successful modern culture reflective in movies, and not where Hollywood shapes culture. The values of people are inherit and they need to form their lives around those values—that is self-interest, acceptance of capitalism as the primary driver for success and improved lives. What could be a better message in Star Wars than a black character called Lando Calrissian who loves wealth and the fine things in life and became an extraordinarily successful businessman? Solo: A Star Wars Story may be the first movie in several decades that doesn’t demonize the acquisition of wealth. I doubt the movie will do well in China for that very reason, but that’s OK. Lucasfilm made this movie and hopefully people support it the way I’ve always said they would. I can say this, I am excited for it—for all these reasons and more. I think it’s a game changer that could very well alter the way Hollywood produces films, and that is not good for the progressive elements which have taken over. Like the presidency of Donald Trump, Star Wars is rooted in old-fashioned values, and that was something that Hollywood has wanted to destroy but find that they must reconcile with if they want to live into the future. I never honestly thought I’d ever see a Hollywood product like this movie, where guns are as much of the plot as the pursuit of personal wealth and freedom. But here it is, and my hope is that people show up and support it, because it took a lot of guts to make it—and for Lucasfilm and Disney—it’s a tremendous gamble that could pay off big for them—and the rest of us.

Rich Hoffman
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Observational Realities: What the premier of ‘Solo’ in Los Angeles tells us about the future

I am the type of person who could write a novel about the reason that a person might change the way they hold a fork. Observational changes in nonverbal communication are an obsession with me and are a constant companion. I would have to say that nothing happens that I don’t notice. I am always on the lookout for why someone might have changes to their eye movement, or the tip of a head as it’s positioned on the shoulders, does it drop more than usual, or is it cantered off to the left or right more than typical. Is there an unusual emphasis on words when somebody is speaking and if there is, what does it mean—those types of things. So I enjoy big pop culture events because of all the mass information available to the way I think. I love going to baseball games where there are lots of people, because it tells me so much about the temperature of our culture, and I love big entertainment movie premiers—especially for projects that I am excited about like this new Star Wars movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story because there are always important things that can be learned about the nature of our society. And the thing that I thought was most compelling at the Solo premier in Hollywood this past Thursday wasn’t the usual fanfare that comes from most Disney productions that they know going in will turn in big box office numbers—it was that Bob Iger wasn’t there. I would encourage you dear reader to watch the whole red-carpet coverage. It was quite impressive.

Going even further was the lack of VIP formality at the event, even after the premier. The after party mixed cosplayers and celebrity actors together in ways that were very unusual for Hollywood which is kind of a theme with this new Solo movie. Freedom from social pretension is the underlying message of this new Star Wars movie and the absence of authority figures in our lives is the goal of Han Solo, and Disney wisely embraced that during this premier. This Star Wars movie is quite different from any other in the past, and it reaches back to recapture that feeling so many people had in 1977 when the first film came out where a much younger George Lucas put out a very unusual movie he had made with his wife in what were some very happy days for the fledgling filmmaker. Not happy on the business side, or the marital side, but from the ideological position where observations made were translated into unique characters placed into the Star Wars movies, like Han Solo—maybe one of the most independent characters ever put into film. That revulsion for authority figures was actually quietly part of the Disney movie premier. There were no special speeches by anybody from Disney or Lucasfilm before the three theaters started playing Solo: A Star Wars Story—all that happened were that the lights dimmed, the movie started, people had a good time, and afterwards everyone mingled together no matter what their social standing was. If you were at the premier, you were someone and therefore welcome to interact with anybody, anywhere within the scope of the premier. It was all very unusual. The richest person in the world was at the premier, but nobody made much mention of it. At the after party mixing with fans dressed in their favorite Star Wars outfits was a bald guy introducing himself as, “HI, I’m Jeff.” No pretension what-so-ever.

What these movies about Han Solo do for the Disney franchise of what is coming in 2020 and thereafter is that they use the main character to open up the entire galaxy to new stories. Solo is the thread that is connecting the massive mythology that is being planned by Lucasfilm and that is important in many ways. Lately I have been talking a lot about the scientific changes that are coming to us in real society, like the Uber Elevate sky cars, the missions to Mars by NASA and Elon Musk’s Space X, and just yesterday The Boring Company finished digging a tunnel under Los Angeles meant to carry traffic under the busy city with car pods and Hyperloops. Currently there is a video from Boston Dynamics that is freaking people out displaying a robot running across a park and jumping over a log in much the way a human does, so we are seeing a competitive species of a living thing that humans have invented moving into our world and it is causing some anxiety. There are a lot of things changing and what I see in pop culture are ways to intellectually deal with them that are emerging in our art, like in these Star Wars movies. For many people they need science fiction and fantasy to open their minds to the explosion of new ideas that are coming to the human race in a very rapid fashion and companies like Disney are trying to embrace their role in the whole thing in a proactive way.

Humans need conceptual tools to help them navigate ideas—in much the way that Star Wars needs Han Solo to open up the context of future stories, the elements of the films—the space travel between planets, the way that space travel is conducted, the type of people who will do it, and even the tools that humans use while doing all these things—like robots, religion, and even the type of “can do” spirit that everything takes are part of movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story. The movie exists to make money for Disney and all the merchandise retailers, but of course there is a deeper meaning that people like Bob Iger may not be consciously aware of, but the greater purpose is certainly part of the overall strategy. I watched very carefully the interview with the two Kasdens who wrote this new Solo movie and just like Larry was when he wrote the great film Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, he knew what he was doing with his son on this latest film. It is just the kind of movie that people are looking for at this particular time in our lives where technology once again, as it was in 1977—is taking over and we are wondering what our place is in all of it. The original Star Wars movies told us it was OK to embrace the future and what we ended up with was the fabulous 1980s. I think the Donald Trump presidency had a lot to do with why the original Solo movie directors were fired, because Disney had planned a certain kind of Guardians of the Galaxy Star Wars film featuring Han Solo, but that wasn’t going to work in a post Donald Trump world and Kathy Kennedy wisely made the change to more of a traditional western as opposed to a color popping change that might have been a much more progressive film. I noticed that Disney has been very careful not to put Woody Harrelson on the red-carpet interviews, because he is a major pot supporter. He’s done a few interviews, but not much—he’s not even featured in the Denny’s cards from the promotional tour—and that says something.

Everything means something and there is a lot going on with Solo: A Star Wars Story. Disney is giving fans what they want in a Star Wars movie even if they don’t personally like the direction the franchise is going, because they have their eye on the bigger prize—the furtherment of human civilization as a whole, and the part they play in it as artists. While the company of Disney may not want to do a modern cowboy movie with hot rod spaceships, the fans want it, and that’s what drives merchandise sales and brings people into the parks where the real magic happens for Disney. That’s also where new technology gets its cutting-edge tests for public consumption, and directly leads to the world we are all stepping into. We are all going to space and our daily lives are changing with all this new technology. As humans we are looking for ways to process all this information into the context of stories, which is what we have always done when processing new observational realities. And it’s all very exciting!

Rich Hoffman

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